Rain groaned.

Everything hurt. They weren’t quite sure what happened. But they knew they were lying prone on the ground somewhere. Which was a pretty vulnerable position to be in, especially when you were already injured and exhausted. Being vulnerable was bad. Therefore, it would be better to rally their strength and find a way to become less immediately vulnerable.

With quite a bit of effort, they sat up and opened their eyes.

They might as well not have bothered. It was just as dark with their eyes open as it had been with their eyes closed.

“Are you here to kill me?”

Rain jumped to their feet and spun around, automatically reaching for weapons that turned out not to be there. “Shit,” they muttered, taking a defensive stance.

The Saintess, the real Saintess, was standing in front of them. There was a soft glow of light around her, illuminating her in the dark void. The glow was her soul aura, which was filled with the highest concentration of divine magic Rain had ever seen.

She had no body aura, for obvious reasons, considering that another soul was currently occupying her body.

“It’s your job to kill me, isn’t it?” The Saintess tilted her head to the side, quizzically. Her tone was detached, slightly cheerful even. “Marshal paid you to kill me.”

Rain didn’t have any weapons, but neither did the Saintess. Rain could go for strangulation—the woman didn’t look very strong and probably couldn’t fight back well—but back in the lab she’d been incorporeal, and you couldn’t exactly strangle an incorporeal being. Would she be corporeal here, now, wherever here was? She was only a soul. Was it even possible for a soul to be corporeal? Was it worth trying to find out? Honestly, Rain was kind of sick of this whole contract. They should have charged the Duke way more for this.

Rain still hadn’t responded to anything the Saintess had said, but that didn’t seem to bother her at all. She simply sighed delicately before continuing to speak. “How many lives has Marshal loved me in? And now he’s sent an assassin after me. Of course, he never really did love me more than he loved power. And my replacement has been getting in his way a lot.” The Saintess smiled. “That was kind of fun to watch.”

“Where are we?” asked Rain, choosing to just ignore all the things they didn’t understand. It was important to gather useful, actionable information first and worry about everything else later.

The Saintess shrugged. “Some pocket dimension. I can’t keep track of them anymore. They’re each as miserable as the last. Hey, you have divine blood, don’t you? That’s probably why you can see me. That also might be what drew you here, specifically, when the magic didn’t know where you wanted to go.”

Rain tried to examine this statement for useful or actionable information and found nothing. Therefore, Rain decided to ignore whatever the Saintess was talking about in favor of pondering further on the strange place they found themself in.

This clearly was not whatever world the fake Saintess had come from, but it also wasn’t the world Rain had grown up in, either. Maybe that’s what the Saintess meant by “pocket dimension.” Just some empty space that’s neither here nor there.

In which case, the most pressing issue was getting out of this strange limbo as quickly as possible.

“How do I get back to my world?” asked Rain.

“Oh, the story will pull you back in, eventually,” said the Saintess. “You didn’t give it a substitute, and you still have a plot-important role to play. So no matter where you go, it will take you back.”

Rain began to feel a strange tingling in their feet and they looked down to make sure there weren’t any hidden wounds causing them to bleed out. But they stomped each foot up and down a few times and there didn’t seem to be anything wrong, other than the tingling. And the wounds they already knew about, of course, but none of those were in their feet.

“It’s already happening,” said the Saintess, squinting at Rain. “Look, are you sure you don’t want to try to kill me? This might be your only chance. And I was thinking about it and I think I might like to die, actually.”

Rain was actually taken aback. Not so much by the request (they’d had targets beg them for death before, although not usually unprompted), but by the tone of it. The Saintess didn’t sound desperate or even sad. She just sounded… tired.

Against their own best judgment, Rain found themself feeling curious about the mindset of this Saintess.

“Why?” they asked.

“Why?” The Saintess tilted her head to one side. “I just think nonexistence sounds kind of nice. And I’ve never really had the option to die before. Not really. Not permanently. That’s why I thought I’d try to escape instead. I worked so hard to find a place where the story wouldn’t be able to read me, but… it turns out this place is just its own sort of hell. I just want to rest.”

The tingling sensation had now made its way up Rain’s legs and past their waist, steadily continuing its climb upward.

“You’re running out of time,” said the Saintess, looking them up and down. “What do you say? Do you want to defy destiny, fulfill your contract, and kill me here and now? Or do you want to do nothing, return to your world, and continue to do the story’s bidding like a puppet in a show?”

“You keep talking about ‘the story,’” said Rain. “What do you mean by that? What’s ‘the story?’”

“The story is the true god of our world, and its truest devil. The story is the path you walk down and the knife that awaits you at the end of it. The story is all that there is and all that there will ever be, if no one ever fights back.”

The Saintess lifted her hand and a dagger appeared in it. There was no flash or explosion of lights, or even any movement of magic which Rain could see. One moment the Saintess’ hand was empty, and the next moment she was holding a dagger as if it had been there the whole time.

The Saintess held the dagger out to Rain. It looked just like one of Rain’s own daggers.

“What do you say, will you fight back?” asked the Saintess. “Will you strike a blow against god?”

Rain looked from the Saintess to the dagger and then to the Saintess again.

This was all too complicated.

Rain was used to life being simple. Ever since the Assassins’ Guild had taken them in as a small child, Rain’s life had been organized around contracts. Sign contract, kill target, get paid. And when not actively pursuing a target, study and train to hone your craft. Simple, easy, straightforward, repeatable.

But now Rain’s mind was spinning with thoughts like, would it be morally right to kill this specific person, in this specific instance? What kind of broad effects would killing this person have on the world? And what would it say about Rain, as a human being, if they killed this person right now?

None of these thought-patterns were useful to a career assassin.

Rain closed their eyes and took a deep breath. The tingling was up to their neck now, and had gone all down their arms. They could feel their fingers tingling.

Setting everything else aside and getting back to basics: What was the correct course of action for famous assassin, the Unseen Rain, to take here?

Rain opened their eyes and reached for the dagger.

And they disappeared.

The Saintess stayed still a moment longer, holding the dagger out towards the now empty darkness. Then she turned toward the audience and made an exaggerated sort of ‘Oh, well!’ expression. In a cheerful tone of voice she said, “I guess it’s back to the drawing board on this one!”

The laugh track played.