There was a moment of shock as the crossbow bolt pierced Pat’s back. At this close range his armor had kept the bolt from going all the way through him, but had failed to stop it from sticking. was so common, I’d half expected the shot would miss. Instead, he whirled to face me, surprise undercutting the clear pain written across his face.

“Who… are you?”

It only took a matter of seconds to rationalize what I was doing. I’d vaguely intuited that the suits might be here, but upon finding one had acted on instinct.

I fired off to buy time. Pat fought, harder than other targets that had managed to repel me, but the fear for his life—a frigid flame kindled long before I stepped into the room—won out.

Without a single hesitation, I descended on it, like a bug beneath my heel, unleashing everything I had.

Every doubt, every cruel intrusive thought, every negative impression you’ve ever had about yourself, about what you are, is true. You are a failure among failures. That’s why they sent you out here to die. You’ve always been a disappointment. You could see it in your mother’s face, that fateful day she set you down and never picked you up again. Your father’s ambivalence. In the smirking expressions of your peers. They never liked you either. Most of them abandoned you. And the only reason the ones that were left kept you around was because they enjoyed watching you fail. Your utter mediocrity made them feel better about themselves. Even now, some part of you is trying to blame this on luck. Because it's never your fault, is it? You were unlucky then, and you're unlucky now. But it has nothing to do with luck. Luck comes around, luck eventually turns. Yours never does. Because the only common denominator of all your "bad luck," all your incompetence, all your pathetic failures?

Is you.

Pat pressed himself back against the wall, eyes flitting from me, to the door behind me, and eventually the window.

Go ahead, try it.

I cast probability spiral on the window as Pat drove an elbow into the window.

It broke. Just not in the way he wanted. Three separate daggers of glass pinioned his arm in place at an awkward angle that was reminiscent of a frog on a dissection pad. He stared at it in shock as a small stream of blood began to descend the fogged glass.

Audrey wrapped herself around his legs, thorns biting into his thighs

“Wait—“

“No.” I grabbed him roughly by the back of the neck and shoulder and shoved him towards the fractured pane. The rest of the window shattered, leaving several shards embedded in his arm. Pat caught himself on the glass littered windowsill, eyes widening to saucers as I pushed his head down towards it. He pushed upwards, fighting the movement, struggling without leverage as Audrey held his legs still. I yanked the bolt free and his arms gave out. He managed to shift his head to the side to protect his eyes as his grip broke, and I shoved his head down towards the waiting shards. It impacted with a crunch that was drawn out as I dragged his head viciously along the side and pulled him back in.

Pat fell back into the room, a long, deep gash blossoming red across his cheek. He dragged himself backward slowly on his one good elbow, his expression terrified. His wheeze was the byproduct of a rapidly deflating lung, “Wait. Just wait. You want information, something. Anything. Selve, Lux, whatever you want, I can make it happen.”

Didn’t you tell Talia that revenge was a distraction?

It took every inch of self-control I had not to end him right there. I loomed overhead. “Address. For your headquarters.”

“Listen to me,” Pat said, his expression growing more frantic. “I have plenty of information. But we’re under a geas spell. All of us. If I open my mouth about anything relating to my guild to an outsider, I die.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him. It sounded like exactly the sort of thing their group would do. I just didn’t care. There was no weapon to focus my attention on, so I watched his eyes and waited.

Pat seemed to realize I wouldn’t back down. Then, there was the slightest twitch of an eyebrow.

I threw myself backward before sent me the warning. A bent crystal blade—vaguely in the shape of a kukri—appeared in his hand, carving through Audrey’s vines and sending a curved projectile directly towards me.

I sidestepped it barely, the scent of ozone hitting my nostrils as the spell impacted the wall beside me.

No, not a spell. picked up on an ability being used, but seemed to communicate that it wasn’t one I could copy. Because it wasn’t his ability. It was coming from the weapon itself.

Pat was back on his feet, in the process of throwing another curved projectile at me, before he diverted his attention to Audrey. A few of her mobility vines had been severed, which would have been a problem if she needed to cover a greater distance. But she didn’t.

Audrey grabbed at Pat, attacking his arms, trying to get the blade away from him. When he wasn’t being ambushed, the man was dexterous, faster on his feet. He managed to fend Audrey off, detangling himself and flinging her out the window. Audrey let out a pained noise.

Unfortunately for him, that also meant he wasn’t paying attention to me. I drove a knee into his stomach hard as he pivoted back, then drove a fist into his bloodied cheek hard enough that there was a cracking sound in my index finger. Pat rolled with the punch, stunned but still cognizant as he impacted the far wall. He was unnaturally winded due to his injury and reached down to retrieve a healing potion from his inventory.

My crossbow reappeared in my hand in a second with and I fired a bolt into the nerve cluster in his shoulder.

Pat screamed. The glass potion bottle shattered as he dropped it. He stared down at the fragments, then back up at me, his face hardening in determination.

went off again. This time the level of energy was entirely different. Pat was trying something, and whatever it was, it was big.

I charged him, withdrawing my dagger and sprinting forward.

A warning went off in the back of my mind. That this was wasteful. With a group as big as Daphne’s, you couldn’t chip away at them one at a time. You had to cut from the center outwards, hoping that once you did enough damage to the core, the remnants would scatter.

And that the only reason I was going for the knife, instead of the garrote, was that I wanted to.

Pat blinked out of existence.

I put my arms up at the last moment, barely managing to stop myself from running headfirst into the wall. A frustrated growl escaped my lips as I whirled, searching the room. He was gone.

Teleport?

My internal rage quieted immediately as I heard footsteps outside, sprinting towards the front of the building.

”Escaping!” Audrey shouted directly into my mind.

I vaulted through the window, skidding on broken glass and passed Audrey as I found myself back outside. I saw Pat sprinting towards the greater chaos, puzzling over his actions for just a moment before giving chase.

He’s not running up there to fight. He’s throwing in the towel completely. Abandoning the operation.

Pat downed a potion and risked a look over his shoulder. His expression twisted in desperation when he spotted me. He lowered his head and increased pace. The man was fast, but even with the potion, he was injured. Explosions boomed out as I sprinted after him, doing mental math. If he was going to avoid the chaos at the front, he’d need to climb the surrounding fence. It wasn’t particularly tall, but the iron slats were thin and slippery.

If I was in pristine condition, that would be it. I could use to shoot through the fence and end him. But the throbbing in my index finger—my trigger finger—was an incessant reminder that this wasn’t the case.

I’d have to catch up to him on foot. The question was how. There was a reason he was booking it to the street. He probably had a vehicle. Any way you cut it, climbing the fence after him would slow me down too much to catch him before he reached the road.

The wheels in my mind started to turn as I saw a path.

I toggled the on and ran directly at the gate, leaping up on a retaining wall and running along its length until I reached the end. Then, I jumped, air whipping across my face and neck as the pointed iron slats of the fence reached up towards me, ready for the smallest miscalculation.

Then I was past them, hitting the ground hard and keeping my momentum in a roll.

Pat was further ahead of me than I expected. But it was doable. I could catch him.

That was when I saw Astria on her hands and knees, pale as a ghost, as her sister threw projectile after projectile at the storage center. If I hadn’t seen it so recently, I might have mistaken it for cowardice, or exhaustion—rather than the way a person looks when they’re near the end.