“[Appraise Individual],” Allison cast as she plummeted to the earth. To her spell, the stranger may as well not have existed at all.

[Slow Fall]. [Absorb Force]. She hit the ground running, and a spring of kinetic energy wound up inside of her.

Marionette handed her a wand that she pointed to shoot a shrieking bolt of red light into the night sky.

Allison exchanged the wand for a quiver and turned in a half-circle to shoot three arrows. They traveled on arcs of gravity like paper boats down a stream, their destinations over twenty kilometers away.

Her query landed on the other side of the camp, one hand in his pocket, barely bending his knees nor making a sound when he touched down. He strolled at a leisurely pace for someone with his speed.

Did he toy with his victims?

Her pillow, the tea set, and her novels rained down like scattered debris on the campsite.

She had more time than she would have thought. “Call Watchtower.”

Marionette held the frog next to her face, and Allison extended her senses alongside a cloud of mana while she spoke into it, “Allison Reed, requesting immediate backup. An unidentified foreign entity has initiated an attempt on my life. See case file 77-22, designation ‘Moon Wraith.’ Confirmation—”

An invisible force swept through her campsite, and she paused, wary.

The stranger had lifted a hand and snagged her arcs of gravity as if they were strings. With a slight tug, the lines dipped and curved. And the arrows curved in the air back toward him.

“Confirmation requested,” she finished. “Over.” She held no hope that her messages would reach anyone. They left her cloud of mana already crumbling to pieces. She couldn’t detect any spell effects causing the deterioration. Had the Moon Wraith sabotaged the enchantment itself? If so, when? How?

The moment her arrows arrived, Allison opened fire.

He caught one of the returning arrows and danced around the others like a leaf on the wind, no matter how quickly she loosed and even when she made an arrow invisible.

Even sustained fire at close range proves ineffectual, Allison noted and signaled Marionette to ramp up the pressure while she retreated.

Beneath the light of the flare like a blood moon, he unfurled the letter attached to the arrow and smiled. “Calling for help already? Thirty-seven. Isn’t your number supposed to mean something?”

[Absorb Force]. Allison saw the subtle shift in his posture and unwound that spring. She darted back the moment he advanced and extended the energy of her movement into a line—[Vector of Motion].

As if she had been caught by an invisible river, Allison shot across the campsite, boots brushing over the grass.

The burst of speed was only just enough.

His jaws chomped down in front of her. His jagged teeth snapped her arrow like a twig, he touched down with polished dress shoes, and advanced.

Vastly superior speed. I might have had less time than I thought.

He swiped at her face—a brawler’s hook, not a slash. Her left arm shot up to block. She wasn’t quick enough to cover her head, but she made it as far as she needed to. Her wrist guard activated and a blue plane of force sprang into existence, coloring the man purple for the instant she peered through it.

It was an item meant to block a volley of arrows. His fist shattered it, rebounded, and he spat the arrowhead he’d bitten off back at her.

[Repel Missile—no! Allison resisted the reflex to use her Skill and flattened herself.

Her knee shot up toward his stomach— His left hand shoved it down and pushed her back upright again.

She craned her head back further as a blurry object shot over her eye. It cut a razor-thin line from her eyebrow across her forehead and through her hairline.

His tongue followed the attack, as quick as lightning, and this time she threw everything she had into the Skill.

[Repel Missile]. The tongue curved around her head and nearly cut itself on the still-spinning arrowhead.

Allison twisted into a kick at his skull.

His right arm covered his ear—

Marionette, a single floating pauldron, slammed into his jaw and his teeth snapped shut on his own tongue.

Except they didn’t. The last bit of his tongue that hadn’t retracted yet flashed silver and liquified into a gooey substance. It slipped through the gaps between his teeth, spraying shimmering droplets into the air as he grinned at her.

Transmutation or incorporeality?

Both?

An armored elbow cracked across his face and a sabaton kicked his knee in from the side. The Moon Wraith crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut.

Her [Vector of Motion] had continued to drag her backward throughout their exchange, and Allison let it. While he lashed out at the haunted armor battering him from all sides, her eyes tracked his every movement, drinking in the information.

She couldn’t fight on his level in close quarters for long. Even she couldn’t dodge her own arrows. Fighting him up close was a losing strategy. So she disengaged and eyed the cut that had spread across his cheekbone. His gray skin was already beginning to swell. A drop of red blood beaded on the wound.

Inferior defenses.

He had blocked her kick, and he didn’t dodge Marion’s strikes with nearly as much agility as he had her arrows.

Why?

Inferior judgment, perhaps, or inferior perception? Can he not track his surroundings? Are his senses restricted to missiles or small objects? Does my aura interfere?

One well-placed arrow could end this, Allison realized. The thought of it tempted her, and though it pained her, she shoved it down.

Follow the plan.

She had waited thirty years for this chance. She would not die like that guard captain.

“Poor abandoned pet,” the Moon Wraith spat after he batted a floating pauldron aside. The venom in his voice thickened into oozing sarcasm. He looked upon Marionette like a swarm of gnats. “Your owner had no use for you anymore, did she? So she tied you to a tree and drove away.”

Ahead, a gauntlet hesitated where it was untying the horses.

Marion! Allison hissed. We don’t have time for his theatrics. But she was no witch. The haunted armor could only receive her intent and weak impressions through their bond.

The swarm of metal limbs slowed for a heartbeat, then redoubled its efforts, striking in a single rush.

A moment was all the opportunity the Moon Wraith needed. He danced out of the charge like it was nothing more than a spear trap and plucked a pauldron from the air with two fingers. It tried to wiggle free underneath his jagged grin. His fingers pressed down and with a sickening screech, Marionette’s enchanted metal bent.

“Scrap metal.”

Allison tossed an arrow ahead, stepped onto the grass, and turned to loose three arrows.

[Curved Shot]. [Fallout Shot]. [Hammer Shot].

He dodged the first arrow and ignored the second, which missed him entirely, but he must have caught wind of her plan somehow—the second arrow caught up to the first, and Allison gave them a nudge so that, when they hit, it rebounded. [Fallout Shot] let her see the aftermath beforehand. The second arrow spun toward the back of his head.

He leaned away from it and caught the third arrow without looking.

His smile only lasted an instant before Marionette battered him over the head and freed its wounded pauldron, but they paid the price.

The Moon Wraith advanced.

His hand shot out and closed around her neck. A split second later, his form flickered when his real hand caught up to her [Predictive Imaging]. His posture was off but with what little data she had gathered, Allison had managed to roughly get the angle of attack right.

She side-stepped, slipping her bow over her shoulder, and stuck two fingers in her mouth to whistle a shrill note.

Behind her, her horses fled into the night and— The man paused with a nonplussed expression.

Marion, a floating gauntlet, jabbed an arrow at his eye and it bent away from his skin as if an invisible force had repelled it.

Allison began to see.

He slapped the gauntlet away and gave them an almost pitying look.

“Ah, but at least you have your loyalty. I commiserate. It’s so hard to find decent warhorses in this day and—” He reached for her neck again while speaking.

[Orbital Hunt].

Allison used the Skill that had earned her her title, Moonstrider. As if a lasso had been tied around her waist, she shot into the darkness.

The same way gravity tethered the moon to their world, [Orbital Hunt] tethered her to her target—this time, not her enemy but one of her horses, Baron. When he moved, so did she. And if she didn’t?

The Skill had stretched like a bowstring around her. Her horses could sprint up to sixty kilometers an hour without her help. The moment Allison had allowed the Skill to move her, it had slingshotted her sideways.

She vanished. Unhindered by the wind, she flew quicker than free fall until she caught up with its intended range.

The Skill felt like an armillary sphere around her, rings spinning and turning. She could manipulate her weight on her own but within its effect, she was unfettered by the gravity of their world. So she used small bursts of kinetic energy to reposition herself in the air.

“Rude!” the Moon Wraith yelled.

Marionette innately had a similar ability to her own. Its pieces could only spread out so far before the movement of one piece dragged the others along. It had hidden a tasset in a saddlebag, causing the rest of its body to drag along after the horses.

Allison touched it and helped reel the rest of its pieces in with another Skill.

The man’s voice faded in the distance. “We were having a conversation!” That tiny, distant figure rolled his eyes and tossed his hands up. Then he took up the chase.

Like stepping stones, invisible tiles of force held his dress shoes aloft so he wouldn’t have to run through the soft earth and untamed grass. He nearly loped on all fours at some points, and Allison watched his every move closely, committing his gait to memory while she had the chance.

When she shot arrows at him, it was only to see how he would react. But the moment she would have looked away, he raised a hand. She knew what was coming, but she was too slow to react.

Ah, shoot.

That same hand that had grabbed her arcs of gravity swatted her out of the sky.

She shot to the earth. The grass in a circle around Baron flattened and dropped in a twenty-meter radius. In an instant, a massive crater formed.

Her boots sunk up to her calves in the soft dirt. Her knees buckled, and Allison stifled a groan as she pressed up against the heaviest dumbbell she had ever lifted.

Her horses whined in distress at the sudden earthquake. Baron tripped and rolled on the incline. Marionette barely managed to keep Chestnut on his feet as its floating armor pieces gently supported him on all sides.

The moment she could, Allison dropped [Orbital Hunt]. There went her level 20 Skill. Useless in this fight.

It almost seemed to resist her for a moment as the Moon Wraith subverted her control, but it was her power maintaining the Skill. All she had to do was cut off her supply from within.

She panted, winded from the sudden exertion, and wiped her bloodied eye.

Damn. She hadn’t wanted to reveal it so soon, but she tapped her boots and cast [Haste]. The mud almost seemed to vibrate off them as the enchantment reinvigorated her.

She sprinted out of the crater and caught up until she ran side-by-side with Baron for a moment, then swung herself up into the saddle.

Marionette handed her a satchel from his saddlebag, and she retrieved a small bottle and a syringe from its chilled interior. A glance back showed the Moon Wraith was gaining on them. Rather than run through the crater, he cut across it on his stepping stones.

Allison carefully filled the syringe, leaned forward, and found the right spot to inject Baron in his neck.

He glared at her from the corner of his eye with barely-constrained murderous intent, but he allowed it.

After only two seconds, his pace picked up as the [Improved Fitness] potion designed specifically for horses took effect.

Allison stood up on her saddle and hopped over to Chestnut to repeat the injection. He looked more likely to bite her, so she rubbed his side and whispered soothing words into his ear, casting a minor illusion to cover up the needle.

“That man doesn’t know what he is talking about, hm? I have the best guard horses in the entire Tower League.”

It was over in a second, and she had secured her retreat … for now. But Allison only had so many doses of that potion and it was a long way to safety. Still, nobody had replied.

“He’s like me. He manipulates gravity, except it’s like he has twenty levels on me in the very same Class and he’s trained in counterspells …”

Allison bounced her thoughts off Marionette and her horses as they rode through the night.

She thought of the way he had climbed out of the moon like a porthole, the way his tongue had liquified, and added, “… and he’s trained in a few other things besides. Shit.”

It was obvious in hindsight that the monster who hunted people with moon-related Classes might have similar abilities to their own, but it was far less obvious that he would be able to subvert their control with such ease.

Allison rarely fought other people who specialized in gravity magic. She didn’t know how to do that; she preferred to upstage her competition through sheer combat superiority whenever she stepped into an arena.

“He can probably sense magic that is similar to his own. That’s how he dodged my arrows, even when you tried to stab him—I handed you that arrow.”

Thanks to [Moon-touched Quiver] any object she touched was imbued with a hint of her essence. It was one of her more powerful Skills. She could telekinetically nudge any object she had recently touched from afar, so she could use weaker versions of Skills like [Curved Shot] or [Illusion Shot] after the fact without having to rely on unique resources like the silver blessing.

But what it meant was that there was a good chance the Moon Wraith could sense any object she’d recently touched—her ammunition, her clothes, the ground she walked on, maybe even the air itself. If so, he could do that out to a range of a hundred meters at minimum … and he might have been able to manipulate those objects himself.

No wonder, then!

This wasn’t the first time she had fought an enemy with such acute magical senses, but those senses had never been tailored specifically to her before. She had other Skills to hide her presence, but would that be enough?

Allison considered it. She had put some distance between them already, and she wanted him to chase her—she was bait, after all—but if she wanted to survive this night, she would have to learn how to turn off the Skill. And soon.

“Marionette, I’ll have to meditate. Could you spread out and keep watch?”

The empty suit of armor ‘riding’ the other horse gave her a thumbs-up. It had been holding onto the reins while it levitated. At her request, it hid some of its pieces in the saddlebags. The rest burst outward like a planetary ring.

Allison didn’t meditate just yet. She needed a plan.

She had a bad feeling about Watchtower. The Moon Wraith had intercepted her attempts to contact them, yes, but then he had still toyed with her and hadn’t seemed concerned about the possibility of her escape. He … wasn’t putting in enough effort into killing her. It bothered her more than she liked to admit.

Yes, he had her outmatched—If she had to fight the Moon Wraith, the mass murderer who had haunted the Tower League since that first winter in the darkness and snow, without any of her gravity Skills? She might as well be level twenty again. But she was still among the top one hundred most dangerous people in the league. Allison had experience.

So why did she have such a bad feeling about this?

It felt like either of her Paths was trying to tell her she had missed something, but she didn’t know what.

Or maybe it was a premonition from her Class itself.

She would have to meditate on that, too.

Damn.

She didn’t want to get ambushed because she had let her guard down.

Maybe she could ambush him. One arrow. If she used her stealth Skills and prepared a trap …

Stick to the plan, Kostel’s voice chided her in her thoughts. She had learned this lesson countless times before.

Did you fight it on your own?

She remembered Professor Dornan’s voice that night, after she had found her beaten and bloodied in the wilderness. It had taken Allison years to notice that hint of concern in her voice, hidden beneath layers of callousness.

Did your mother drop you on your head as a child?

I killed it, didn’t I? I passed your secret test.

No. In fact, because you deigned to interact with the test in this manner, you just earned yourself a failing grade that will factor into your final grade—

What!? That’s bullshit!

—and a week’s detention for cursing at your teacher, Ms. Reed. Next time, call for backup.

Thirty-three years later, her whisper was lost on the wind, “I’m trying.”

Allison jumped off her horse and kicked a door down. It banged into the stone wall, but that was the only sound in the watchtower.

An unfinished game of cards lay spread out on the table in the common room to her left. The players’ own hands lay scattered on the chairs and floor.

Someone had dropped a glass of what was whiskey by the smell in the room. It had shattered on the ground, and the liquid had already begun to dissipate and stick to the floor. A book laying on the windowsill looked normal but she found its pages blank.

A pot of coffee in the kitchen had gone cold. The substance inside it smelled like coffee but tasted like water. A knife on the counter that she knew should have been enchanted was a dud. All of the drawers and cabinets were empty. Some wouldn’t even open. When she tore their doors off, she found wooden blocks.

The closed map room, the panic room, and the basement were all gone.

No blood. No signs of a struggle aside from the single broken glass. No signs of forced entry aside from her own.

And not a hint of the twenty or so people who should have been stationed here.

“[Appraise Individual],” Allison cast in the direction of the doorway.

“[Appraise Individual],” she hit the table and then the broken front door.

“[Appraise Individual].” Finally, she cast the spell on herself.

Nothing.

“My name is Allison Reed,” she spoke loudly and clearly. “I am a free agent of the noble house of Tor, currently volunteering as a border guard under the command of the Ostfeld military. I believe I may have been afflicted by a mind-altering spell effect that I cannot sense.

“If there is anyone in the room with me, I will stand still while I explain my situation. Please try to dispel any currently active spell effects on me. If this is not possible, please try to establish communications. Know however that I am being hunted by a dangerous foreign entity. See case file 77-22, designation ‘Moon Wraith.’ The target appears to be a male ocean troll in his forties …”

She explained her situation in detail while she stood in place, but there came no reply.

No illusions, no delusions, no compulsions. She was not in some mind or dreamscape. Rather, if she was under any kind of mind-altering effect, it was so thorough that she may as well be dead.

Allison stepped outside after she finished and secured the area again.

The situation in the rest of the fort was much the same.

Unhitched carts lay abandoned in the streets, their contents toppled over. The stables were empty. An entire building was missing where it had stood a month ago when she had last visited.

It was a ghost town.

“My mana isn’t recovering as quickly as it should,” Allison mumbled, “and the moon hasn’t moved in the sky. Have you found anything yet?”

Marionette tilted its gauntlet forward and turned left and right as if it were shaking its head ‘no.’

All over the fort, floating armor pieces searched the rooftops and alleyways, but Allison thought she knew the answer.

“I don’t believe we are in the Tower League anymore. I believe we may have been pulled to another plane of existence without noticing.” That would also explain why her messaging enchantment wasn’t working. It didn’t have a valid target to send its messages to.

To her surprise, Marionette wiggled its flat hand in a ‘sort of’ gesture.

“Do you know something?”

It wiggled again. Maybe?

Allison waited for its second gauntlet to join them and watched it stumble through the sign language they had tried to learn together.

They didn’t know many words, but they knew the alphabet. It spelled out letters and halfway through, Allison’s realization made her stomach drop.

‘B.’ ‘A.’ ‘S.’ ‘E.’ ‘M.’ ‘E.’ ‘N.’ ‘T.’

“Like the south pole?”

Another hesitant wiggle followed by a thumbs-up. Yes?

Not another plane of existence, then. They were trapped in a personal demiplane which could only belong to one person—the same man who was trying to kill them.

If they had been on another plane of existence entirely, they could have asked the locals for help and eventually returned. Enough people had done that throughout the years that it had become something of a trope in fiction—an intrepid adventurer stumbles into the plane of seasons and has to navigate across the sky islands to find a portal home.

That was not an option here. If the Moon Wraith had created this place, it was his domain to rule.

But it wasn’t all bad. Demiplanes were liminal spaces. They were usually anchored to other planes of existence in some way, if they didn’t intersect with them entirely.

This place looked like it intersected with their home plane. It was a snapshot of the world under moonlight.

Which meant Allison still had a chance to find backup and kill that thing.

“East, south, or west.” She climbed into her saddle on Chestnut’s back this time. Baron needed the rest.

“Ostfeld, Anevos, or Trest.”

She considered her options, the distance to each of the cities, the routes she would have to travel, and the people who were most likely to be nearby.

“Our own are concentrated in Anevos and they have empathic danger sense abilities, so they would look for us, but they wouldn’t necessarily know why we are in danger or where we are. And it’s the furthest away from us.

“Ostfeld has the highest chance of us stepping onto the Archdruid of Thorns’ radar if we get close enough to any of her hedges. It’s also the closest.

“Trest has the Archwitch of Celebrations …” she mused. “Ostfeld it is.”

Allison guided Chestnut westward, leaving the fort behind. The night was filled with the sound of hoof beats as behind her, two more horses carried a second Allison Reed and a Marionette eastward, and a third pair carried two more illusions southward.

She felt the eyes of the false moon hanging over all three of them.