The masked figures spread out around us, encircling Callie and I in preparation to attack. I chuckled a bit and reached out my hand, holding my palm up for her to take as if we were about to dance. "Follow my lead?" I had some ideas for how to do this, but Callie was the one in charge, so I left it up to her. If she wanted priority then I would give her first crack at them, she had more experience at this.

The only reason I offered to take the first shot was because Callie was set up to function as an assassin more than anything. Attack from the dark, hit them hard. My crowd control and concealment abilities would give her an edge against these guys. She smiled viciously as she took my hand. "Of course. But don't hold back. These guys are brainwashed assassins. We can't afford to give them an opening." Her voice was cold, and I knew she didn't say that lightly, but she was right. This wasn't a fight we could sandbag.

It was not heartening to know that there were this many G rankers in their organization. I'd assumed from Zeke's comments about them being bottom of the barrel to stay hidden that we would be dealing with H rankers. Once again I had failed to grasp the difference in perception between someone at his level and mine. To Zeke, I suspected people who were only G rank on a planet like this WERE the bottom of the barrel. He was the top of the food chain, and at that level everyone was a freakish genius just by virtue of still being around.

I triggered Mistwalking and Seek Hidden again, bringing myself down to nineteen charges remaining. After I did Callie pushed shadows into the fog again, creating that same impenetrable haze. There was annoyed shouts from the audience, clearly unhappy with having their view obstructed, but no one stopped the fight or anything. I reached for my DS mastery again and triggered Touch of Tears and Consecration of Flames in combination, and the black smoke prevented me from seeing the green fire crawling up the force pine of the one weapon I had drawn with my free hand.

I tugged Callie's hand and spun her out like a dancer and she whirled along the line of my arm, lashing out with whip of shadows that even a week ago would have been too fragile to be of any use. Those Might stats were really coming in handy already. I directed her where to go and she used my ability to see the hidden shapes to make attacks despite not being able to see properly.

For their part the masked sleepers seemed to be able to move around pretty well for people who shouldn't be able to see a thing. Sadly for them pretty well wasn't good enough to stop the bladed shadow whip from taking one of their arms off. There was a screech of metal and breaking glass as the whip was torn apart by it's own force when it disarmed the nearest masked fighter, but if anything the fragility mad it worse, with fragments being ejected and lodged into the victim.

I expected some kind of noise, a yell of pain, a cry of rage, but there was nothing. Aside from the darkness imposed by the abilities we'd used, the absolute silence in the pit aside from the roar of the crowd was unnerving. The sleepers moved in absolute silence, which I supposed explained the name at least. Still it was creepy. Not a single syllable uttered but they moved in perfect sync with each other. Some kind of side effect of whatever hypnosis they were under most likely.

I tried to keep an eye on them as they spread out, but being encircled meant I had to lose track of at least one or two, and despite turning in a circle to try to keep us covered I barely caught one of the smaller ones as they darted silently in with a pair of razor sharp knives. I lashed out with my glowing tonfa, and as it made contact there was a loud crack and the sleeper lost their grip on the knife in that hand. I felt the poison flame take hold in flesh and I was pretty sure that would be the end of that one.

To my surprise the other hand brought the second knife flashing down too fast for me to react. Luckily for us it was flashing down on the sleepers own arm, taking it off before the poison had time to spread. The limb dissolved into flaming muck before it even hit the ground and the bastard leapt away, presumably to join the other one in trying to patch their wounds.

Callie and I had both managed to take an arm, but despite that we still had seven enemies in our way and there was only two of us. Rather than rush I tried to focus on defending. I ran through my list of abilities, including several of the tier two skills I hadn't used yet, but I had nothing that would fit here. This fight was going to be rough no matter what, but if we finished too early we might get ambushed by the rest of the Heartrippers before we could escape.

What we needed was to stall them, drag this fight out until Benny and Jessie could get in touch with backup and get us some reinforcements. I had no idea who they would call honestly, maybe Zeke, they could always hire some contractors, but I trusted them both and I knew they would figure something out. No matter what though we needed to make this last, and killing them all wouldn't do that, but the normal stalling tactics didn't work on emotionless meat puppets.

Another one of the sleepers came in and this time met my tonfa blow with their own weapon, the loud crack of the shattering object clear as the sleeper hurled it away to prevent the poisoned shards from piercing him. Clearly the weapon had been lower ranked than mine. Given they seemed to be operating fairly well in the smoke I dismissed the stuff. Maybe if the audience could see the puppet master would react more favorably to dragging this out, assuming they could actually see what was happening, but given the communication and their seamless integration in tactics I was guessing that was definitely the case.

This fucking hypnosis ability was either broken as hell or the puppet master had a few supplemental powers, because the versatility here was insane. Communication, observation, complete anonymity, it was no wonder the Heartrippers stayed so damn secret despite being literal assassins. The bastards had complete control over their sleepers and obviously plenty of experience using that control. As the smoke dispersed they came in at us again. This time they attacked together, with even the two missing their arms trying to come in at us.

Far from making me upset, the immediate ambush actually filled me with delight. It meant that the puppet master WAS keeping the audience in mind. If we were lucky it meant that they wouldn't try too hard to end this quickly. Clearly this was a revenue stream for the local branch of the Heartripper Society and they didn't want to butcher the cash cow. It made my plan to hold off the attack for a while much more feasible.

We didn't need to keep them busy for an hour, I knew that Zeke had access to teleportation if he needed it, and presumable the Unity higher ups did too, since I knew the teleport circles were part of the local ecosystem and not something Zeke brought with him. Whoever we got help from could get down here fast. Even if Benny had to hire someone I knew that he would do it, and we did still have a few hundred chits left we could convert into G rank chits for payment.

I put my back to Callie's as the sleepers attacked, and I lashed out with my tonfa. I reached down and drew the other, the persistent enchantments affecting both weapons even if they weren't active until I drew. Then I swung. I activated the illusion enchantment on my weapons, creating a dozen blows with each swing, and combined with my Might my actual attack was lost in a storm of false images. The sleepers couldn't distinguish real from false and any attempts to block slipped by their guard, leaving blazing cracks of green noxious light burning on their flesh.

I aimed center mass this time, not wanting to deal with the nonsense limb removal again. After a few hits the puppet master seemed to just give up on them. He pushed them into a suicidal attack, and I hunkered down to defend. Callie did the same and we weathered the storm of attacks for about ten minutes. He kept switching the sleepers out when the poisoned flame got too bad, and I kept poisoning them, and eventually the fire became too much and they collapsed dead to the ground.

I turned to Callie as soon as they were down. "You ok? I know you have tons of experience at this, but if you got hurt at all I can cover you while you recover a bit. I somehow doubt this is over." I glanced up to the edges of the pit, and sure enough there was a crowd of about two dozen black masked figures appearing around us, encircling the arena to make sure we couldn't escape.

The smile on her face as she shook her head was wry but confident. "No. This was annoying, but I've been in worse spots. Though I will admit that fanatical brainwashed hypnosis soldiers who feel no pain or fear are not my ideal sparring partners."

An understatement if I'd ever heard one, I just snorted and turned to glance up at the one masked sleeper stepping forward. "You were supposed to let us go if we won. Are you telling me the clandestine child snatching assassin organization is going to betray it's word and stab us in the back? I'm shocked. Shocked I tell you." The sleeper didn't react. Obviously. I rolled my eyes, though they couldn't see it under my mask. "Alright, well if you're going to be trying to kill me with overwhelming numbers can you at least do me the favor of telling me what this heretic stuff is actually about? Because it still doesn't make sense to me."

The sleeper stood stock still for a second, before finally speaking just a few words. "You are a heretic, spawned by a heretic." Shit. So this WAS about my family. I was guessing dad had done some shit to the Black Sorrow Cult we didn't know about or something. It seemed pretty nuts for them to try to off a candidate specifically for being a candidate but if this was about something my dad had done it made a bit more sense. The sleeper surprised me out of my thoughts by speaking again. "You will be ended heretic. Prepare yourself."

I tensed. Yeah that sounded about right. Still, all hope wasn't lost. There were twenty four of them but Callie and I were strong and a hell of a team. There was a decent chance we would be able to beat them. As if reading my mind, the shadows around the edges of the pit began to twist and writhe, wrapping around the G rankers and biting into them, holding them still while drawing blood from all over their bodies as they formed into thorny vines. I turned to Callie. "I didn't know you had that much power. Why didn't you do that earlier?"

Her expression was complicated, part joy and part anger as she said quietly. "I can't. That isn't me." The shadows inside the pit congealed, forming another construct or at least something like one. A human body came into existence, and when the shadows fell away a familiar form was standing there glaring up the sleepers. Shadowthorn had gotten the message from Benny and Jessie and come to help. And boy did she look pissed.