I still didn't know who Hal's teammates were, but as we walked, he jotted things down in his team notebook, and read from it as well. They were probably members of the Liberation's Call Syndicate, I'd wager.

"Do you have a team?" I asked the landlady.

"Yeah," she said simply, and did not elaborate.

Hours had passed since we left the house. Hal led us, and he made twists and turns through the neighborhood to throw off potential pursuers. Disappearing around a corner makes you much harder to track when the visibility is only a few street intersections, like it was in the dense fog here.

I spammed my gun's metal detector as often as I could. I never found anyone with it. Its 50 meter radius scan felt enormous when I first got the item, but now I was beginning to feel its limitations. Plenty of enemies could have engagement ranges much farther than that. I wondered if there was any way to get the range up a bit, maybe by adding on a satellite disk or something.

"You know how I wrote a book back in Silver, right?" I asked my companions. "Magic Engineering. Granted 5 Arcana Points."

"Oh yeah," Jack said. "How did you do it?"

I shrugged. "That's what I'm wondering. How does magic item creation work? Does it just…happen?" I turned to Hal and the landlord. They had been in Gold for a while longer than me, I supposed, and they've had chances to rub elbows with all the experienced Gold players.

"Do you know?" I asked them.

"Doesn't happen often enough to find a pattern," Hal said.

"I'm surprised people haven't experimented more," I said. "I mean, once you crack the code, you can basically make infinite magic items for yourself, right?"

"Doubt the game's exploitable like that," Hal said. "Would've happened long time ago if it was."

I shrugged. "I guess that's –"

"Shush," Hal interrupted. He stopped in his tracks, and barred us behind him with an outstretched arm. And with his other hand, he pointed at a spot in the mist.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

I scanned the surroundings. Nothing metallic seemed to be there.

But then I saw movement in the fog. Something tiny was closing in on us. Approaching.

I raised my gun at it. With my free hand, I clutched on to Saber's arm.

The new arrival turned out to be a little gray mouse.

Hal didn't waste a moment. A thick, barbed vine shot out of his wrist. He swung it overhead in a half-crescent, then whipped it down upon the critter. The mouse, unsurprisingly, splattered into a splotch of gore on the road.

"Get back!" he shouted at us. I shuffled a couple steps back, confused.

The remains of the mouse erupted into a crimson cloud of vapor. It engulfed Hal's vine whip. In seconds, the lengths of the vine touched by the vapor had already rotted into a dark green sludge.

The cloud continued to spread, expanding without diluting.

"To the left!" Hal shouted to me. I turned and saw another mouse. I took aim with my gun.

No, wait. It wasn't alone. I counted two…three.

I fired a Cold Grenade towards them, and the explosion of frigid air caught several. But even frozen, they all managed to burst into red clouds. I counted four bursts. There must've been a mouse I hadn't even seen.

"We're under fire from Bounty Hall Elite," Hal spat at us. "These are her bombs. Gotta scatter."

"They'll just pick us off!" I shouted back.

Hal whipped at something I couldn't see. But I knew his blow found purchase when a crimson eruption bloomed in the distance.

"No choice," Hal replied. He stepped back from the great, deathly clouds that now surrounded us. "Cluster together, and we all die."

"Surrender?!" Jack asked, eyes wild with desperation.

"Bounty Hall only pays for kills," Hal retorted curtly with a quick shake of his head. "Now go!"

I had no choice but to run off while holding on to Saber's hand. I headed straight ahead, in the same direction we had been traveling in. The others fanned out at the intersections. I heard the landlady's scream from behind me, but I dared not look back. I dared not slow down.

Please. Please, everyone. Just save yourselves. I'm sorry.

Saber, though blindfolded, kept pace with me even as I sprinted. The occasional stumble, the occasional stutter in her steps never led to her falling; she seemed to catch and rebalance herself mid-fall without slowing down.

"Hang in there," I pleaded with her.

We just had to keep our bearings, keep our pace. Hopefully, we'd be out of this mess soon –

From around the corner of a house, a mouse darted out and cut off the path ahead of us. It only let out the briefest squeak before exploding.

I tried to turn away. I tried to drag Saber along.

It was too late. The scarlet vapors smothered us both.