The first thing Flint had done after seeing the gangers scatter had been to reload. First his musket, the most tedious weapon for which to do so, then both his pistols. He’d just finished emptying a powder charge into the last firearm, wondering whether it would be worth carrying two or four more when Pyrhic spoke.

Her voice instantly pulled Flint’s attention, and a single look at her face utterly captured it. The woman’s careful inexpressiveness and calm had evaporated, replaced by the wide-eyed hysteria Flint recognised well from those who had witnessed combat for the first time.

“You killed them.” The assistant practically whispered, her voice seeming to slide over each word, as though she could scarcely bear to speak them.

“I did.” He answered. In Flint’s experience, the best way to begin talking to a battle-shocked conscript was to establish the basics. In this case, he had most certainly killed.

As he finished reloading the last pistol, then holstered it, Flint turned to fully look at the panicking woman. It was several seconds until she spoke again.

“You had no choice.”

Her voice was more steady now, coming back into focus. That was good.

“I didn’t,” Flint answered.

Looking at Pyrhic’s face, he saw she had not yet come close to fully calming down. If she were given too long to focus on what had happened, she would likely fall back into a tempest of self-doubt and hysteria.

His choice was obvious, then.

“We should keep moving,” he said, turning away from the woman even as the words left his mouth. There was only the slightest pause before she answered.

“Yes, you’re right. We still have work to complete.”

Flint noticed there was still no small measure of instability in the woman’s voice, the kind of shock that may give way to any number of emotions. At the same time, she sounded far more directional than earlier. With any luck, she’d remain that way.

They set off at a brisk pace, and Flint found himself unsure of whether it came from Pyrhic or his own haste. As they walked, he asked much of the assistant, eager to face any next assaults with more information as his weapon.

According to her, it had not been luck that the first group of skirmishers weren’t armed with guns in place of shivs. Any higher-ups in the area’s gangs would likely have decided, from a single look at Flint, that he and Pyrhic were not worth the trouble of targeting, or at the very least not the risk of angering whichever highly affluent benefactor had hired such a well-equipped bodyguard.

That didn’t mean that there would be no trouble, simply that the trouble would be manageable.

Flint found it hard to be genuinely annoyed at having yet another piece of vital information denied to him, but he managed to wreath himself in weak annoyance nonetheless.

Despite his irritation, Flint kept the woman talking. At first he asked basics, things he hadn’t thought to inquire about before having due diligence shocked into him by the attack. He’d been complacent before, and had he been attacked with musket and pistol it may well have gotten him killed.

His questions were directed at many areas. The number of different gang territories, the general hostility he could expect, and whether or not their ambush had been an outlier, safe to dismiss as far from the norm. However he soon ran out of useful information to glean from the woman.

Not wanting Pyrhic to descend into panic as her thoughts settled, he resigned himself to make things up. His questions turned to an entirely useless kind. The history of the slums through which they moved and relationships between different gangs were chief among them.

Despite himself, he did find some of the answers rather interesting, and if nothing else they helped pass the miles underfoot far more quickly. However he had to fight the urge to tell Pyrhic to stop when she came to the origins of the place.

Agricores were something he, as a Wrathman, was well familiar with. Areas of sectioned off plant growth, a unique, closed ecosystem treated with excessive use of magic to amplify fertility and food production. He couldn’t recall the specific spheres used, but he knew that no small amount of mystics were necessary to keep one functioning.

The food tasted like shit, that much he was sure of. On the other hand, such places were the exclusive reason Mirandis could sustain as many people as it did.

A quick look around him, at the skeletal buildings and festering streets, convinced Flint that it wasn’t worth it. What purpose was there in a great population if it served only to let the factories pay even less through competition?

His mood soured, he found himself less and less able to look at the ruinous structures around him. The only presence they held in his mind was that of unfamiliar territory, cover for potential threats.

The mechanical lapse into habit was comforting, if nothing else.

“That last man,” Pyrhic said, just as they were turning around the corpse of a great, towering building. “He was already helpless, he couldn’t have continued fighting even if he’d wanted to.”

She didn’t finish the question. She didn’t need to.

“I’d given him a gut wound,” Flint explained. “Men don’t recover from those, he’d have been dead within a half day if he was lucky.”

Poor luck with such a wound meant close to a week of continued, conscious agony as the body was seized from within by gangrene or other such infections. Flint had seen men go in such a manner, and he could remember it well. It wasn’t something he’d allow to happen to anyone.

“You don’t know that,” Pyrhic answered, a surprising certainty to her strength. Before Flint could reply, she added, “maybe in Wrath, maybe when men are sent to die by the thousand, but not here. For all you know his gang has a mystic healer, he may well have lived.”

Flint had considered that, and dismissed it. With how many officers he’d seen crippled by wounds too long-suffered to be magically rejuvenated, he doubted a pack of filthy killers in a back alley could access such a rare breed of mystic.

“Oh,” he said.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“That's all there is to say. Not much we can do about it now.”

The woman fell silent, and Flint wondered what she thought of him. A bastard, surely. What else could she have taken from such a response? She wasn’t a Wrathman, nor was she even a soldier.

And Flint didn’t have the effort left in him to try and make a civilian understand battlefield calculation.

The remainder of their walk was silent, save for the scraping of boots against grime, and the occasional cough one of them let out upon inhaling a particularly strong breath of the putrid air. The brief magic held within Flint’s vessel fizzled out early into it, having only been voluminous enough for a few minutes of action in the first place.

He had often tried to learn how to draw the power from himself and replace it into his arcstock crystals, to save their contents across longer campaigns. Gifted with the manipulation of antimagic though Flint was, it had always been beyond even his abilities.

When, finally, Pyrhic gave the gesture which identified their destination, Flint found the place oddly appropriate.

It was an agricore, or what was left of it. A great cylindrical structure sprawling at least a quarter-mile skyward, and at least half that considerable scale in its breadth. Even in the dying light of the evening, its exterior had a strange dullness to it, much akin to a dirtied bayonet, and Flint realised why quickly.

The entire thing was made from metal, steel by the looks of things. And that metal, pristine and stainless in its initial construction, had clearly been touched by the sulphuric atmosphere hanging over the slums. What should have been a glinting chrome was rendered dun and grey, bearing a closer resemblance to the moody clouds gathering near the horizon than anything else.

With the top open, and his angle some mile from the base, Flint could clearly see the remnants of the mirrors built into the interior. As Pyrhic had explained it, they were made in such a way as to be moved, through magic, depending on the time of day.

During the morning, the east side would lower and provide the west with an unobstructed view of Ara, the mirror angled to reflect the shine down into the building’s inner walls. Those walls, similarly mirror-coated, would then carry the nurturing rays to each lower level.

This would continue until the sun neared setting, at which point the west mirrors would fold in and allow their eastern sisters to begin bequeathing light unto the lower layers.

Flint rarely had any time to hear about the intricate creations of magic. To a pariah, such a topic had as much interest as art did to the blind. Nonetheless, he found himself awed at the sheer scale of the agricore. It shouldn’t have been surprising, something providing equal food to a square league of farmland would have been a thousand times as amazing were it any less gargantuan.

But it was one thing to hear of something’s scale, to understand it, and quite another to see it for oneself.

“How many did you say were needed to run something like this?” He asked Pyrhic, not bothering to even attempt the impossible task of keeping the awe from his voice. The woman responded quietly.

“Some fifteen thousand,” she almost whispered. “Thousands are needed to operate the top-mirrors alone.”

He looked again at the mirrors in question, studying the remnants of the giant sheets. They were fragmented things, numerous holes marring their surfaces and great jagged outlines at their edges where entire sections had broken off. Even in such disrepair, the size of them was something to behold.

Mystics could hurl lightning as a child might a toy, uproot trees and cripple a defensive line with but a few barrages of their magic. And yet Flint found himself wondering how even five thousand of such people could manage to maneuver the titanic constructs atop that building.

“We should keep moving,” Pyrhic said. Flint blinked away his awe, bringing himself back to the present and nodding quickly.

Though it was only a mile, the walk to the base of the agricore seemed to drag like a three-stoner. Flint reckoned it was the looming destination, suddenly so visible at the end of their path. Its constant presence leaving him keenly aware of each trudging step and passing moment.

Of course, extended in his mind as it was, a small journey was still a small journey, and Flint soon found the building’s distance had halved, then quartered. From his heightening proximity, it became clear that the state of disrepair was more severe than he had previously known.

Great bronze rust clung to sections of the metallic walls, and beams had, at parts, visibly warped from either battery by the elements or simply the weight of their own body. Another three hundred paces, and Flint realised why anyone would choose such a precipitous thing as base of operations.

Men stood outside the agricore, and yet more dotted the outsides of the building, clinging to jutting struts and other such vantage points. There was no doubt in his mind as to their purpose, sentries.

The entire thing was a fortress.

Upon hacking the distance down by another two thirds, Flint became certain of the clear musket-shaped outline in the clutch of several watchers. Most appeared unarmed, or at least not by any weapon large enough for him to see, but that mattered little.

From as far away as he was, it would be difficult to miss him even with a musket. A good shot could land two out of every five musketballs within five inches of one another, even from four times as far as Flint already was.

Even knowing that none of the men guarding the agricore were likely close to the clumsiest marksmen in Wrath, he found himself wondering whether flooding his vessel with all six of his remaining arcstock crystals would toughen his flesh enough to survive a direct hit.

By the time he’d decided he didn’t like the chances, they were close enough that he could see the hostile suspicion vaporously leaking from each one of the guards.

One of the men approached, gesturing for Flint and Pyrhic to halt as they came within five paces of him. Short, with beady eyes and a nasty curl to his lips, he seemed the spitting image of many a sadistic sergeant. It was a struggle for Flint to avoid shooting him long enough that Pyrhic could speak.

“Hello,” the woman began, “we are here to seek an audience with the leader of the Guillotines. Are we in the right place?”

The man’s eyes flickered from Pyrhic to Flint, then to his musket. Flint had kept it pointed away, angled just slightly in the air to keep the ball and powder from sliding free of the magically-lubricated barrel. An experienced soldier would know that it made him no less of a threat.

“Who exactly are you?” The man asked, his accent thick and unfamiliar to Flint. Pyrhic didn’t hesitate a moment before answering his question.

“We are here on behalf of the good Lady Alabaster.”

The man’s lips twisted into a mangled mess of a smile at that.

“Oh, and is there a reason her ladyship couldn’t come herself?”

“There is,” Pyrhic replied sweetly. “I don’t suppose you noticed the city was on fire?”

“I don’t remember nobles ever caring about such things,” the man growled in response, then glanced over to a woman standing nearby. It seemed a single nod was sufficient to convey his intention, as she turned and hurried into the agricore, disappearing around a corner.

She must have been a fast runner, or else the building wasn’t quite so labyrinthian as it looked from the outside, for they were kept waiting no more than a few minutes. The woman reemerged, folding and panting for a few seconds before breathily speaking.

“She says to let them through.”

The man seemed surprised, but didn’t even pause to think before obeying the order.

“Alright then,” he grumbled, turning back to Pyrhic. “Follow me, your ladyship.”

After the ragged state of the streets leading to the building, the agricore’s flooring was jarringly level. Made from tiles, it was flecked with dirt and grime tracked in from the streets outside, as well as cracked and, in several places, impaled from beneath by ambitious plantlife.

However, that was by far the worst of the place.

The panelled walls seemed nothing so damaged as those on the outside, nor did the ceiling, and Pyrhic murmured under her breath that the building’s lacquering must not entirely have worn away in the years since it was abandoned.

Flint knew only enough about lacquering to be sure that, were it not for the treatment, any place so damaged as the one he was stepping inside would likely crumble inwards. He tried not to think about that particular detail as they made their way further through the twisting corridors.

The scale of the place became tangible as they walked, expansive halls beginning to remind Flint of the sprawling trenches he’d spent so many hours hunched in at Wrath. Just as the building’s enormity began to feel uncanny, their guide came to a stop beside a doorway.

“In here,” he grunted, affixing Flint a gapped grin. “Don’t make any sudden moves if you want to keep your head, and be polite like.”

Without another word or glance at him, Pyrhic moved on through. Flint followed a step behind, and was glad, if nothing else, that the position hid his expression from the woman.

The chamber they stepped into was clearly one of the ones which had previously been used to produce the agricore’s bountiful harvests. The ceiling was four metres from the ground, and it took a moment for Flint to realise it was made from mirrored metal.

Stretching out from one end of the room to another was a great field of barren dirt, unbroken save for the occasional jutting, starved shoot or shard of broken-off ceiling embedded in the soil by gravity’s pull.

Men and women stood amidst the ravaged farmland, all staring pointedly at Flint and Pyrhic, and all clearly armed with either pistol or musket. No two of them were closer than a dozen feet, and yet the sheer size of the floor left room enough for a hundred and spare.

A paved path ran down the middle of the section, clearly placed after the abandonment of the structure, as Flint noted by its position atop the dirt. They walked across it in silence, following the stone walkway until it ran out just shy of a precipitous drop.

Glancing over the edge confirmed Flint’s suspicion, it stooped no farther than into the next level of the agricore. To his surprise, however, scrap metal appeared to have been bolted upwards to the sides of the pit, forming a box of it.

His pondering the query was interrupted, however, by the clearing of a throat. As Flint shifted his gaze to the source, he was met with a smiling woman. She was young, at most a half-decade his senior, with frightfully pale skin, and eyes so red they might have been blanketed in rose petals.

Brown hair was tied in a bun behind her head, likely to mimic the style Flint had seen among officer’s wives- mature women of power. She needn’t have bothered. That smile of hers did all the work for her. Something about the eagerness of it, the curling of the lips, certainly the serrated points of the canines, drew striking connections to a cat watching a mouse.

Just looking into her eyes flooded Flint with the urge to find a suitably large pile of sandbags and take cover behind it.

Either not cowed or uncaring that she was, Pyrhic spoke confidently and clearly.

“Greetings, I have come on the behalf of Lady Alabaster, I have a few questions for you.”

None of the waiting armsmen laughed at that, but Flint’s quick glance to and from a dozen of them revealed that most had superior grins on their faces. He didn’t like that at all. They were smiles he’d recognised, and back in Wrath one would rarely see their like, save for when a particularly irritating officer was about to fuck himself over doing something stupid.

Smile not leaving her face, the red eyed woman, who Flint assumed was leader of the Guillotines, answered.

“It is nice to meet you, errand girl. I am leader of the Guillotines, but you may call me Adeline. Might I ask what is so important that your employer considers it worthwhile to disturb the evening’s entertainment?”

Pyrhic paled slightly at this, and Flint found himself glad to have been allowed through without a search.

“My sincerest apologies for any disruption we may have caused,” Pyrhic answered, voice wavering only slightly. “We come on matters of Reginald Tamaias’ death, and the subsequent devastation to Bermuda.”

“I had gathered as much,” the vampire answered. It was only then that Flint noticed how much her accent differed from those of the subordinates with which she surrounded herself. “What would you like to know of me?”

“Did you have any involvement in the incident?”

Pyrhic asked so brazenly, so quickly, that Flint scarcely registered the question. By the time he realised what the woman had said, Adelina’s eyes had already begun to narrow with fury.

“That’s quite an impudent question, for a serving girl.”

“It isn’t my question.”

“And yet it came from your lips.”

“Do you have any intention of answering it?”

The red-eyed woman thought for several moments, then that disturbing smile of hers returned with a vengeance, her face seeming aglow with eagerness.

“You know what? I’ve decided I will,” she purred. “On only one condition, that is.”

Pyrhic remained silent, and the woman finished heedless of prompting.

“Since your abrupt visit has caused so much disruption in our recreational activities, what say you get your bodyguard to start it back up for us?”

The assistant turned to Flint, glancing between him and the pit. He understood quickly what she was asking, and replied with a light nod. He’d been paid to kill, after all.

Looking back to the red-eyed woman, Pyrhic called out her answer.

“We accept,” she declared. “Provided your entertainment does not require a death.”

The woman smiled wider at that.

“I assure you, he will have every opportunity to escape. Though not with that weapon, I’m afraid participants in our matches aren’t permitted to use tools outside the ones provided specifically for the games. More sporting that way, you understand.”

Flint seized every instinct in his body and held them at bay, clenching his jaw and gritting his teeth as one of the standing gangers approached him slowly, gripping his musket by the barrel and firmly tugging it from his grip.

Moving to enter the pit, he was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. As he turned to meet his eye, the man gestured to the pistols at Flint’s sides. He swore as he unholstered them and handed them over, then swore again as they made him unbuckle his satchel to join them.

“I’d better get these back,” he growled. It only seemed to make the woman smile wider.

Staring down into the corrugated pit, Flint became acutely aware of something that, trenchman he was, he’d scarcely noticed in his life in Wrath. He really didn’t like heights.

“I don’t suppose you have a ladde-”

His snippy joke was cut off as someone, likely the bastard who’d disarmed him, shoved Flint in the back. He topped forwards, dropping down into the lower level and crying out instinctively as his back slammed into the wooden floor.

What little breath remained in his lungs escaped on the coattails of that noise, and as Flint lay still, unable to bring himself to move for the unrelenting, exhaustive pain wracking his body, he heard sneering laughter from all around.

Spots danced before his vision, dark and minuscule, but enough to obscure what he saw enough. Once his sight cleared, and he gazed up into the eagerly watching faces of the men and women standing round the edges of the pit and peering in, his anger replaced his air.

Flint would not be a novelty at which men could jeer and derive amusement. He was a damned Wrathman. Groaning, he forced himself to inhale before rolling onto his stomach and climbing to his feet.

The pit looked different from where Flint stood now. It didn’t loom before him, not as it had. Rather, it seemed to suffocate him. Great walls threatening to close in, squeeze free what little breath he’d regained.

That, Flint supposed, was the difference between the perspective of a man observing a nasty fate from the outside, and one who had suddenly found himself subjected to it.

Shadows dotted the floor and walls, surprising him with their abrupt appearance, and Flint looked up to see a hail of objects dropping down to join him in the box. They clattered dully against the planking of the floor, sending visible tremors through the wood and bouncing from it erratically as they fell.

It took him a few seconds of study to identify all of them. Weapons. Shards of glass with cloth tied to the base in order to form grips, jagged chunks of metal that looked as though they’d been pried free of the agricore’s outer walls and even stones that looked suspiciously like road cobbles. Some five dozen of them, all lying at his feet.

“Take your pick, guard!” one of the watching gangers cackled from above.

Before Flint could register the words, one of the metal walls began screeching and groaning. He stared dumbly as it started to lift upwards.

As he watched the agonisingly slow ascension of the wall, it occurred to Flint that the watching crowd seemed far too confident in his death. He had no doubt that whichever man they expected him to fight would be a tough one, he’d need to be in order to inspire anything close to such confidence, but surely they realised Flint wasn’t simply a ganger.

Was their champion truly so skilled? Or was it simply that he would be far better equipped than Flint?

A thought came to him, and he found a smile sprouting on his lips. What if the champion was a mystic? It would certainly explain the zeal, and would certainly be a convenient opponent for Flint Locke.

His thoughts disappeared as the gate came to a stop, leaving an opening as high as a man’s shoulders, and twice as wide. Whichever room the other man would be coming from, it was a dark one. So dark that Flint, even straining his eyes, could make out no details of his appearance.

Seconds dragged by, and he heard the shuffling of feet against wood. Those seconds reached into a quarter-minute, and Flint was seized by a heart-stopping terror as he realised how foolish his presumptions had been.

There was just enough time for him to drop to his knees and grip the nearest weapon, a cobble, when the bear charged out.