Trest was gone. The city had been replaced by an unfamiliar mountain range. Its Tower still stood, but its entrances lay buried beneath the Rock.

Was this the scene the first generation had witnessed after the Dwarf had brought them here?

Allison could picture the tent villages and forest camps, [Miners] digging to find entrances into the Tower, [Bandits] fighting for control over the area.

King Lee was supposed to have been a [Warlord] before Project Kingmaker, wasn’t he?

He had been chosen because of his success in unifying the base camps. It would have been him or the Marchioness and the faction leaders had chosen him because she had refused to stop fighting.

Allison couldn’t say it had been the wrong decision. The Marchioness had been a living legend at the time. She and a few thousand stragglers had made life hell for Northern pioneers before the Five Cities had ever existed. She had bought them time to unify, and it was thanks to her that Ostfeld’s Tower had never been stolen from them.

Yet, in the end, she had shared the same flaw as their king: neither of them had nurtured an heir. Neither had looked far enough into the future to reject the crown and all that came with it.

Their circumstances had forged them into [Survivors].

Allison dismounted on a hill. She searched the area from a few kilometers away but couldn’t see any signs of life where the city should have stood.

Chestnut couldn’t go on. After traveling over three hundred kilometers in five hours, what he needed was a vacation. She had used up her fitness potion and cast spells to help, but she needed to conserve what little mana she had left—she knew she wouldn’t recover any resources she spent here.

End of the line.

It has to be here. Before he catches up, we have to make a stand on our terms.

[Closed Aura]. [Shadowed Sheen]. [Phase Shift: New Moon].

Her spirit turned pitch black, and her aura snapped shut like a cloak around her, leaving not a trace behind nor emitting a signal into the world. To most divination effects, she may as well not exist.

Allison surveyed the scene. Trest’s mountainous forests, seasonal fog, and many streams feeding into the Great River made for a good place to stage an ambush at least. If she had enough time to set up some traps … by hand …

Her current phase was suited to obfuscation, but she didn’t trust herself to use that to build traps if there was a chance the Moon Wraith could sense them. Which meant she would have to dig holes, remember her hunting knots, and sharpen sticks into spikes like she was back in scout camp, learning to repel invaders from adults who had just survived a war.

It also meant Chestnut had to leave. “Head south,” she told him, “wait in the nearest town for me. There’s a decent chance that when I kill him, we will be ejected from this place. If not, I will return for you.”

The guard horse balked. He was trained to remain by her side through fire and blood, to shield her body with his own if it came to that.

The Moon Wraith really hadn’t known what he was talking about when he had insulted them, which meant he couldn’t be keeping too close of an eye on the Tower League.

“You’ll be safe. He has no interest in you, but I can’t extend my Skills to you the same way I can Marionette. You’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

Chestnut snorted in her face.

“We’ll find Baron, too. Both of you will be pampered to no end once this is over.”

The horse reluctantly turned and tried to slap her with his tail. She allowed a glancing hit. Marionette waved while they saw the horses off, and the two of them headed up the mountains.

Curtains of moonlight fell through the trees and illuminated the landscape.

“If we head deeper into the woods, we might be able to find a place shadowed by the mountainside. Keep an eye out for fallen branches to build traps with. I don’t know how well he’ll be able to navigate the wilderness, but his comparable travel speed should give—”

A man stepped out of a ray of moonlight near the edge of the woods.

Why wasn’t Allison surprised?

She whistled. Behind her, the two horses forced their tired limbs into another sprint.

He snapped his fingers and Baron disappeared, the illusion dispelled. The real Baron was probably a third of the way to Anevos by now, where his [Grooms] had empathic hazard senses of their own. They would know— would have known something was off as soon as he made it within range.

Not that it would do her much good now.

“That’s enough riding for one night, wouldn’t you agree?” the Moon Wraith greeted them with a strained smile. He was winded, and she wondered if he had really teleported or somehow overtaken her and hidden within an illusion. Unless his method of teleportation itself was taxing?

“Six hours of flight? Really?” He shook his head and stepped toward her.

[Invisibility]. [Muffle]. In her current phase, Allison could cast the spells as easily as she could breathe.

She vanished, and the Moon Wraith let out an exasperated cry as he shot forward, “Enough already!”

Marionette stepped into his path, a wall of metal limbs, and Allison loosed two arrows at the same time. The Moon Wraith dodged the first with ease. The second one pierced his heart.

He came to a sudden halt, clutching the shaft a heartbeat later, and Allison thought that was a good benchmark for his reaction speed. Her third arrow shore off his ear as he dodged the fourth arrow, and the fifth caught him in the collar.

You really should have ambushed me when I let my guard down.

Allison was level thirty-seven. Full stop. Her Classes didn’t matter. Nobody reached that level in the modern age without learning some form of meditation.

It had taken her half an hour to learn how to turn off [Moon-touched Quiver] for good. It had taken her the rest of that hour to figure out how to use the Skill selectively.

So she fired invisible arrows in pairs of two: one to be noticed, and one to be felt.

The Moon Wraith clutched that first arrow as he tried to dodge their combined attack like a wounded animal. He didn’t bleed. Where one of her arrows nicked his arm, she saw his blood flowing through the open vein as if carried by an invisible force.

When he tore the arrow out of his chest, she caught a glimpse of silver—he had turned his punctured heart incorporeal and was magically pumping his own blood.

She had to destroy his brain, but even with [Predictive Imaging], she couldn’t land a perfect hit. He moved too quickly, and her current phase wasn’t suited to divination or even perception abilities—her window of attack was rapidly dwindling.

Would destroying his body even finish the job?

She had to destroy the spirit. Her magic arrows wouldn’t work against him, but the destructive magic she knew wasn’t suited to her current phase either.

She didn’t think the Moon Wraith could see her through her invisibility. He spun like a spooked animal whenever Allison chose a new angle of attack. But she was running low on arrows and the effect would persist for a while longer. She needed her other abilities more.

Allison stretched a hand out and used [Angler’s Line]. A web of threads flashed around her arm, extending to the decoy arrows that littered the road. She beckoned with two fingers and they snapped toward her—up.

She had taken to the sky the moment she’d turned invisible. Marionette's limbs held her aloft.

He ignored the arrows that zipped past him in reverse, even when they cut him a second time, and focused on the spot where they bundled in her hand.

Tiles of force carried him into the air, but Allison stripped the arrows of her essence and turned them invisible the instant they touched her.

Marionette repositioned, and she used [Phase Shift: Gibbous Moon] as she took aim. Her spirit lit up like a beacon and she cast, [Shooting Star].

A beam of white-hot light, tinged with hues of pink and blue, flashed through the darkness. It seared a hole through his eye socket and out the back of his skull. The Moon Wraith collapsed into a swarm of white moths.

Illusion.

“Finally!”

Allison whirled and fired again at the man where he stood on the ground, but her second [Shooting Star] hit a glossy gray shield that appeared in his hand. It reflected into the woods, and a distant tree erupted in pink and blue smoke like a sputtering flare.

The force of the hit still drove him back. His shield cracked and smoked, but the man only seemed excited.

“Finally, you show some teeth!”

He stared blindly into the night. He didn’t know where she was, but there was a light in his eyes and his jagged smile beamed.

For the first time, Allison hesitated. He must have known something was off.

“What, did you think you were the only one with ‘Skills’? I call this one ⟨Moonshield⟩.” He lifted the shield for her to see. It gleamed silver in the moonlight, and darker shades of gray resembled craters on its surface.

“And I call this one ⟨Starfinder’s Compass⟩.” His eyes flashed gold like honey and for a heartbeat, a halo of constellations on a nebulous impression of paper and wood appeared behind his head. Blue lines charted the connections between bright dots, and a compass rose, a tentacle-wrapped anchor, spun to find its balance.

His head turned with the spinning of the wheel until his eyes settled on her. And he smiled. “There you are.” He snapped his fingers and her [Invisibility] vanished.

Allison dashed through a maze of midnight blue and silver tree trunks. The Moon Wraith chased her in an ethereal dance. His graceful steps never quite touched down. He twirled around trees and walked through their branches. All the while, an invisible force carried him forward. It reminded her of her spell—⟨Vector of Motion⟩? He was gaining on her.

That was fine. Allison wasn’t running away. Her spirit revolved on a mad orbit, waxing and waning between the different phases of the moon.

The gibbous moon, full of potential. It empowered her magic and spun illusions which died in her stead. Beneath it, she loosed [Shooting Stars] that her enemy dodged or deflected. Trees burned like clouds of stardust in his stead.

The new moon, unseen. While her illusions distracted him, Allison slipped into the shadows and turned on a coin to sprint in another direction.

The crescent moon, a shifting tide. She slipped the chains of the air and earth, swooped Marionette up, and carried her away in a daring escape. Putting distance between them and the enemy.

And between each phase, after every distraction, every run, and exchange of blows, she switched to the full moon, the most powerful phase under her [Lunar Resonance], even under this false moon in the sky. It revealed that which strode in the dark.

She looked back and watched her enemy maneuver, feeding on the information. His body flickered less and less as her [Predictive Imaging] refined itself.

But it was still a dangerous game she was playing. And like a stone wheel, that cycle ground her down. The exertion was an almost unfamiliar ache after all these years.

Allison broke from the tree line and found a rocky scree that led south. One step carried her five meters from one boulder to the next. A [Moon Jaunt] toward the Great River and a distant road. The Moon Wraith seemed unable to subvert gravity effects that only targeted herself, though he may have only been unwilling.

Throughout their chase, he taunted her, “Must you rely on that bow? Why do you hide yourself so? Why do your spells feel sometimes different? Where did you get those eyes?”

When she reached the river, he said, “You should have stayed in the forest, Ms. [Moon Ranger].” He held onto a tree to peer down at her, standing on his tiptoes, and waved a hand. “⟨Spindrift Needles⟩.”

Allison crossed the wide river in a single step when she felt the flood of essence so similar to her own. The waters slowed beneath her, and dozens of tiny stalagmites formed from its surface, stretching thinner and thinner until they snapped off.

She twisted in mid-air to evade the first spray of needles but one struck her—barely. It tore a line through the side of her gambeson. Two layers of wool severed in an instant and billowed outward, and that was only one needle among a continuous shower of dozens.

Marionette was too slow to dodge them. Its armor pieces panged like a cast iron pot left out in a storm. The needles barely scratched its enchanted metal, but they sent its pieces careening through the air.

That wasn’t just a gravity spell. It was hydromancy on a level similar to her own, water moving with enough force to cut stone.

Allison tapped her scarf and a wall of wind pushed out from it, encasing her in a miniature storm sphere. It was meant to ward off the rare insect plagues that erupted from the Witch’s Forest. It wasn’t powerful enough to stop the needles entirely, but it weakened and deflected them.

She would have run, but the Moon Wraith touched down on the road with a chuckle. “Another item? How disappointing. Like this one, an anchor around your neck.” He reached out for one of Marion’s boots.

She used [Angler’s Line] to yank it closer to herself, but the action cost her. A needle punctured her arm, shooting out a spray of misty blood.

The Moon Wraith laughed. “Do you see?”

Allison did see. She sent an impression of a thought to Marion, and Marion replied in kind.

Do it.

She dropped her storm sphere and stepped onto the boot. Its metal parted like a liquid around her to accommodate her size and sealed shut. A pauldron slammed into her shoulder, liquified, and reformed around her. The rest of its scattered pieces followed. They slipped away from the Moon Wraith’s reaching hand and the needles like magnets repelling one another.

They didn’t repel Allison, though. Neither did she repel them. Their auras harmonized as their intents met:

Fulfill my mission.

Preserve my nation.

She shot forward, sprinting through a hovering gauntlet, and slammed a metal fist into the Moon Wraith’s face as the gauntlet reformed around her hand.

He didn’t dodge, and he only barely brought his ⟨Moonshield⟩ up in time. The conjured material cracked under the force and the Moon Wraith speared his tongue at her the moment he lowered the shield.

She dodged with ease, leaning into a gorget that flowed around her neck.

Alone, she was quick but not durable enough. Alone, Marionette was durable but not quick enough. Together? They could cover for each other’s weaknesses. More than that, they could combine each other’s strengths—their perception.

While Allison could see perfectly in the dark, see magic, and see kilometers into the distance, Marionette had a domain and perfect awareness of its surroundings.

And their abilities could synergize to produce an even greater result.

The Moon Wraith raised the Great River like a crashing wave. Hundreds of needles shot from it. Allison danced through them all.

Everything, from the titanic sun to the tiniest drop of water, had gravity—intangible spheres of influence that acted on the world around them as they were acted on themselves.

In that sea of spheres, they pushed and pulled. Repelling and attracting. The needles of water curved around them as they advanced. Then Allison activated her boots of [Haste].

The Moon Wraith retreated and split into illusory copies of himself, but they ignored the fakes the moment they appeared—those lacked gravity.

The Great River swept down and surrounded him like a cloak, blocking her advance, and she shot a [Shooting Star] into the mass of water at point-blank range. It exploded into a cloud of steam. Icy spears shot out from it, and the steam billowed and condensated.

She parried, leaped, and shot six more arrows into the mist. The Moon Wraith was laughing now but even if he hadn’t been, she would have known where he was.

When he stepped out of the side of the steam, there was only the tiniest flicker to his posture and expression as he looked up at her. [Predictive Imaging] had almost gotten it right.

I can do this, Allison thought, I can win. There was a chance.

And how selfish was that thought?

A shudder went through the space between the armor and her skin. The low sound of creaking metal filled the air, and Allison nearly fell to a knee as the armor briefly went limp around her.

Dissonance.

A single stray thought had caused their auras to reject one another. It hadn’t even been a conscious thing. No matter how much training she had undergone to steel herself, the spirit betrayed the heart.

As uncomfortable as it was to her, it had to be excruciating to Marionette. The armor trembled like a barely contained scream.

Still, within the same second, Allison threw herself back and opened fire. With narrowed eyes, the Moon Wraith had tried to capitalize on her weakness. He closed the distance and this time, when he punched, spheres of gravity surrounded his punches, large enough to engulf both of them.

She pushed back against that gravity, but he still had her outmatched and her control wavered in the aftershocks of the dissonance.

Marionette forced her right hand down to slap the outside of her leg. Metal snapped like a snare drum.

Keep it together.

She was trying! But the thing was … the Moon Wraith still wasn’t putting enough effort into killing them. He was beaming, his head still flickered from time to time, and she hadn’t been able to anticipate the trump card of his ⟨Moonshield⟩. What else was he hiding?

There was only a small chance that they could kill him. And if they didn’t?

If I die, all the information we gathered about him will have been for nothing. I would be consigning whichever successor they choose for me to the same fate.

… And Kostel would never know what happened, except that I failed, that I died alone, and that it was his decision that led to this.

Not his decision, Marionette rebuked her, and as always on the rare times that they did this, Allison almost thought she could hear a voice speaking to her. But the dissonance drowned it out and hit her like a heart attack. Your lack of conviction.

Allison glanced at the night sky as a hail of watery needles shot down from the river hanging over their heads.

Four different sets of constellations flashed in her vision, drawn by different peoples. She knew them well, but after five decades of her life, there wasn’t a single line among them that she had drawn herself.

Most of her friends lay scattered or buried. She spent her days defending a spot in the middle of nowhere as if she were a metal golem herself, like the haunted armor that had become her only companion.

Marionette stilled like a tensed muscle and the intent rang clear through their bond. I’ll take the lead.

In an instant, their roles switched. The armor around her led Allison through their duet.

Illusion, Marionette thought at her the same way Allison could unconsciously share where she intended to move with it. So she created an illusion to hide them for an instant.

Shooting star, it thought, and Allison wrapped the spell around the arrow they held. Rather than loose it, Marionette pressed down on the spell, holding it in place, and wielded the blazing white arrow like a knife.

They stepped through their illusory doubles and jammed it down at the Moon Wraith’s eye.

His smile widened into a feral grin at that moment. But, as they exchanged blows, his expression wavered as his eyed shot down and up again. Analyzing her fighting style? He must have realized something was off.

Darkness, Marionette thought and Allison created a wall of shadows between them.

Fisher. She tugged on an arrow sticking out of the road. It snapped to their hand. The gauntlet parted around it until it was hidden in their sleeve.

A wall of water broke through the shadows and they vaulted over it.

Head.

When Marionette next stabbed down, its gauntlet detached from her hand and their enemy raised his ⟨Moonshield⟩ to block as their [Predictive Imaging] showed them. Allison twisted in the air and thrust her gloved hand out, a shining arrow slipping into her grasp. The light burned larger and larger in his iris as it approached, dwarfing her reflection.

A blade parried it. It appeared, tip-first, as if cutting through a veil. Metallic gray with a green sheen. The Moon Wraith shimmered the same color as beads of metal flowed over his shoulders, detached themselves, and floated up to join the blade.

It happened in an instant. A tiny gateway between the planes had opened up behind him, hovering in the center between his shoulder blades, and a second gateway opened up just above her left shoulder.

The metal flowed from one into the other, forming the weapons for the briefest instant it was on this plane of existence.

And Allison recognized that metal. She was encased in it.

The passing of the blade carried the Moon Wraith forward. His shield pushed Marionette’s gauntlet up. It tried to rejoin her, but a bubble of force shoved it further away and shoved Allison toward the ground.

“No.” He hung in the air between them and snarled, “I do not wish to fight you. You have overstayed your welcome, servant. By centuries.” The pressure didn’t stop. If anything, it increased.

Allison felt the invisible link between Marionette’s pieces strain, a prisoner stretched on the rack.

Leave! she thought. He can’t have created a snapshot of the entire world. He can’t. If you run far enough— Head south and escape through the mountain pass! Marionette!

Gravity, the armor thought back at her. Stubborn to a fault.

Leave me. Tell Kostel. Next time, bring this bastard down for good.

Still, it refused.

So Allison chose for it. She weaponized that dissonance and rejected the armor. The metal slipped off from her like oil from water, and she shoved mana into the backlash—like a magnetic canon, the armor shot down the road. It moved faster than her arrows, shrinking toward the horizon, further than their bond could stretch.

The last thought Allison sent it was, Goodbye.

The Moon Wraith sighed and gave her an exhausted smile. “I do hope this means you will not run away from me ag—”

Her burning arrow cut through the bridge of his nose as he leaned back.

Centimeters.

She could still kill him. There was a chance. And even if not, she had half an hour left on her boots of haste. She would buy Marionette all the time it needed to—

No.

Their bond reformed. Marion was coming back for her. And it screamed at the top of its nonexistent lungs, not a word but an idea, Reinforcements.

Allison danced back when the Moon Wraith lunged at her. I don’t need your reinforcements.

Help!

She evaded a lance of ice that slammed into the ground. I don’t want your help!

Backup!

She glanced back, hesitating. Kostel …?

When she ran again, the Moon Wraith let out a string of curses and insults in six different languages, some of which even she didn’t know. He taunted her, promised her death, promised her the death of her pet armor. She still ran down that road.

And two strangers came upon her in the night.

“Do we have to have another conversation about what happened back there?”

“I said I was sorry! How was I supposed to know mana is combustible?”

“How many stories have you read about the Tower League? How often can people throw fireballs around in them? That’s not even the issue. Mana isn’t even combustible. Not on its own. You did something, didn’t you?”

“Did not! I told you, I got bored. I was flipping through the channels and—”

“Lisa, you nearly exploded that bar,” Garen cut her off and gave her a stern look. He didn’t look angry—he even looked a little amused—but he was exhausted.

“You’re just cranky because we have to travel at night,” Lisa countered. “Old man.” Personally, she didn’t mind. Lisa was walking! Slowly. But she was walking on two feet! She didn’t know why everyone had said this would be hard. She could totally do this ‘human’ thing.

Left foot forward. Right foot forward. Wobble the spine. Hands out! Don’t fall on your face! Don’t fall on your face!

“Lisa, I told you, we have to keep a low profile. Things won’t be like your stories, and I’m not an archmage who can keep you secret. You’ll probably have to attend some noname school at the edge of the city. There won’t be any parties. Definitely no slipping out of your meat suit to fly around town.

“If you can’t do that, we’ll have to move to Lighthouse to live with your aunt Zest.”

“Ugh.” Lisa made a face. Or at least, she thought she had made a face. She didn’t have a mirror to check if she had gotten it right … and she wasn’t quite sure what a face was supposed to look like anyway.

She dropped the expression just in case she had gotten it wrong. “What’s the point in running away from home if we can’t have fun?”

Garen glanced at her and back ahead. His voice was suddenly more subdued, “It’s not so bad. There won’t be any world-ending threats, or revolutions led by teenagers, or secret cabals seeking world domination, but you’ll get to experience what a normal life is like for a kid in Hadica. That’s fun …?”

He said it almost like a question.

“Uhm. Yeah. Sure,” she said and made herself stare ahead as well.

Garen kept walking in the awkward silence that followed, but Lisa came to a sudden halt when she spotted something on the road.

“Ghost.”

Oh no, Allison thought when she saw the two ghostly figures. A man who looked to be a little older than her and a teenager.

They didn’t carry any weapons on them, nor any magic items she could see. He was a little out of shape and wasn’t wearing armor. The girl barely had any wisps of the silver blessing on her. She couldn’t have even gotten her first Skill yet, which meant she had to be around thirteen years old.

No, Marionette, why?

They were civilians. And the armor had just led them to their deaths.

Allison didn’t even know why she could see them across planes. For an instant, she hoped that meant the Moon Wraith might not be able to see them either.

Then the girl stopped walking and said, “Yirel.” That … wasn’t Lilian. Why was she speaking New High Eonian? She had an accent, too.

The man kept walking until the girl stumbled forward and grabbed the sleeve of his travel coat. She pointed again and said, There’s a ghost!

Allison’s second thought was that the distance between the planes was thinner here, but the man squinted ahead and asked her, also in Eonian, What?

“Milya!”

Right in front of you!, she said and continued to talk about … putting Allison to rest? Then, were they haunted? Was this area haunted? Why had he never told her they had ghosts? Oh, had it escaped from the Tower? She thought monsters couldn’t do that! Oh, but what if it was a plot!? A secret cabal of necromancers trying to unleash an army of ghosts on Trest? They had to turn back and save the city!

She babbled on in an excited tone, though her expression barely moved, and Allion barely understood half the words she said in her thick bumpkin accent. She could infer.

When her guardian still wouldn’t respond, the girl turned her questions on her and waved frantically.

Who was she? Did Allison have a message to deliver to the living? A warning? A quest?

Allison almost said something, but any kind of reaction would have validated what the girl thought she had seen and only made the situation worse. She had to get out of here. Now, before the—

Marionette screamed a warning through their bond and Allison turned. Two figures flickered in the corner of her eyes.

Suddenly, the Moon Wraith was standing behind her, tongue out to pierce her heart. And the stranger stood next to her, gripping that tongue in a ghostly fist. His right eye shimmered for an instant.

“Is that your tongue?” He made a face when he realized what he was holding. “That’s disgusting, man! Do you fight with that?”

Despite being a plane away, the writhing tongue struggled to escape his grip. It flashed silver and sprayed droplets into the air as it retracted into the Moon Wraith’s mouth.

“Ugh.” The stranger shook his hand and took a step back.

Allison shot a [Shooting Star]. It tore a line through the street when her target flickered left. A shiver went through her body and her skull throbbed after the expenditure of mana as her reserves ran low, but no matter her reservations, she would not let civilians die for her mistake.

“Go!” she snapped and twisted her feet to dodge when the Moon Wraith came for her throat. “Run!”

Moving faster than her, the stranger ignored her words and decked him across the face. He struck hard enough to make the man stagger back and frowned. Standing in a boxer’s guard, he looked at his incorporeal fist as if he were dissatisfied with the results.

Then he took a step forward and his flesh trembled in a wave. As if pushing past some threshold, his body changed. His skin twisted and tore. His bones creaked, and he lost some of his hair and lips as he forced his way forward.

Groaning, bleeding, he stood next to her—fully corporeal.

“It’s been ages since I’ve had to plane shift. Ha! Still got all my digits this time. Lucky.” He rolled a shoulder and glanced her up and down. “So, who is this freak and why am I punching him?”

His wounds were already knitting themselves shut.

[Appraise Individual]. In silvered letters like cutouts in the night, the spell inscribed the answer over his head: [Dragonslayer].

“Serial killer,” Allison said in a clipped tone, “drags his victims into a demiplane. Uses illusions, hydromancy, conjured armaments, teleportation, incorporeality, and graviturgy alongside greater speed and strength.”

Garen Chandler gave her a blank look. “Uhh, okay. You’re a Tor, right? Do you need my help …?”

Allison glanced back at the girl stumbling toward them on shaky legs and chose her words carefully, “He isn’t known to leave witnesses.”

Garen Chandler followed her look and cursed under his breath. “Right. Okay. Let’s do this before the rest of your team catches up, then.”

What a curious statement, Allison thought, but she didn’t correct his misconception.

Marionette sent her another signal of alarm. It had spread itself into a defensive asteroid belt around them.

Now, the Moon Wraith was targeting the armor itself with the intent to break it.

Allison was low on arrows and low on mana, but she had backup now, and she would rather work with scraps of magic rather than no physical arrows to anchor it to.

She conjured an arrow, nocked it, and loosed.

The Moon Wraith gave her an unimpressed glance when it shot past him. “This night has been a disappointment.”

Chandler must have been reluctant to move far from the girl. He closed the distance, threw a single punch, and immediately danced back.

The girl, for her part, seemed unaware of the danger. She babbled on without pause like a kid in a candy store. Didn’t she have to breathe?

And the Moon Wraith wouldn’t shut up either. “You had a few surprises, but were they worth the trouble you put me through to unveil them!? It’s like pulling teeth with you!”

He shot forward, weaving through the armor pieces, and struck at the Dragonslayer, who took the blow on his forearms. He stifled a groan and shot back, boots skidding over the dirt.

The Moon Wraith dodged another arrow and tried to slip past him, too—it was clear he could sense the conjured arrows, then—but Chandler tackled him with one shoulder and in the split second he was in the air, Allison shot a [Shooting Star].

It bounced off his ⟨Moonshield⟩ and the Wraith slashed out with an olive blade that traveled from portal to portal in an instant.

A red gash slit open across both of Chandler’s forearms as he reflexively took the hit, and his blood splattered onto the road.

Allison used [Angler’s Line] and flicked the line out like a yo-yo. The deflected [Shooting Star] curved in mid-air on its way back and seared a blackened line across his shoulders, spirit and flesh—it was the first real hit she had landed, and her heart leaped.

He hurled an olive javelin at her. In the instant it shot past her, its metal rippled and erupted into thorns that slashed her neck. Again, he must have been anchored to the weapons he conjured, because the movement of the javelin hauled him forward.

Marionette intercepted him and traded a bloody nose for a dented greave.

Allison splashed a healing potion on her neck and retreated behind its limbs.

The Dragonslayer fought on with bleeding arms like a middling [Boxer]. Allison understood his hesitation, and she had seen his levels—he wasn’t even level thirty—but she had expected more from him. It couldn’t be that he’d slain one of those bestial drakes and gotten the Class, right?

Her eyes tracked him while he fought, reading his Skills, and they caught on one:

[Greater Resonance].

With a Skill like that, why wasn’t he armed?

The Moon Wraith put some gravity into his next punch and he shot past Allison, heels skidding in the dirt.

There was a soft thump and a squawk when the girl fell to the ground behind her. Had she tried to catch him?

“Garen!”

“Stay back.”

“But I can help!”

“So help me God, Lisa, if you— Your parents will kill me.” He sprinted forward and intercepted the Moon Wraith just before he could reach Allison.

The Moon Wraith punched him, an uppercut, and it was a dismissive gesture. He put a sphere of gravity into the strike again and Chandler shot into the sky.

He twisted, flailing helplessly. Marionette caught him and pushed down but it wasn’t enough.

Allison dropped [Closed Aura] and after being suppressed for so long, her aura shot out like a solar flare. She imbued every line of influence she had with her essence and pushed against the Moon Wraith’s control to drag him back down.

Garen kicked the Moon Wraith when he dropped and they tumbled in a heap.

The ocean troll made it onto all fours first and glared at her like an animal. He spoke with a hoarse voice full of anger past a lump in his throat like a jilted lover, “First you steal the moon from me, then you run—you don’t even defend your claim, harlot! You run and hide behind meat shields and scrap metal like a coward!”

“Oh,” Garen said as he pushed himself up. It was a sad, quiet note as if he’d just realized something. “You’re lost.”

“They’re going to die, all three of them, and it will have been your fault.”

“Try it!” the girl shouted from where she still lay on the ground, and Allison glanced at her to make sure she wasn’t wounded. Why hadn’t she stood up again? Her arms were limp and her eyes stared blindly up into the sky. “Touch me! I’ll fuse your mouth shut! I’ll turn your heart inside-out!”

“Lisa.”

Allison stared.

The girl’s shirt bulged like something was about to burst out of her chest. Her body convulsed and she flopped a foot closer to her like something had kicked her from the inside.

Allison took a cautious step back.

“What? He’s a not-yet-a-God. S’ not so scary.”

“Not yet a—” Allison translated to herself. “Does she mean demigod?”

“The kid seems to think so.” Chandler sounded ready to accept that as fact.

It made sense, too, Allison realized. If he was some mad demigod trying to ascend— No. Picking off a handful of contenders every seven years? Their population was increasing year by year. So did the number of people who picked up moon-related Classes. If he wanted to thin out the competition before his ascension …

But his Skills.

A [Tide Hydromancer] went missing in Esdoc two months ago, Kostel answered the question in her eyes, and a [Starmap Navigator] vanished off his ship bound for Lighthouse at the Sea.

“You don’t toy with your victims,” she voiced her horrible realization. “You test them. You drive them to the edge to make sure they do everything in their power to survive. That way, when you steal their Class, you know their Skills so you can use them yourself.”

The Moon Wraith stared at her with a blank expression. Slowly, ever so slowly, his lips twisted and his shoulders rose to his ear in a boyish smile with shark teeth. “Guilty.”

His expression crumpled and he stood. “In my defense, if East didn’t want a fox to get to her chickens, she should have put up a fence. I’ve never faced this much … resistance before.”

He looked past her, and Allison followed his gaze to the girl on the ground. “How did you know he was a demigod?”

“Yes.” Red and silver dots glimmered in the moonlight where his incorporeal organs and veins had been laid bare. His suit was torn and muddied, he was missing an ear, and his voice was full of curiosity. “I would love to know the answer to that question myself.”

Chandler appeared in front of him, striking at his head. The Moon Wraith leaned back, wove between his strikes, and speared his chest with his tongue, but the Dragonslayer took the hit and drove a fist into his chest.

The heavy thwump of his knuckles against his ribs drove the air out of his lungs and, for an instant, stilled the beating of his silver heart.

The Moon Wraith doubled over. Chandler kicked him and he tumbled down the road in a heap.

Allison loosed, but he twisted low to the ground and ducked behind the ⟨Moonshield⟩ he had stolen from one of his victims. She curved an arrow and he caught it. Marionette tried to choke him and he bent a metal finger back until it bent and flung the gauntlet aside.

“Don’t look at her,” Chandler said to the single silver eye peering past the rim of the shield. “Eyes on me. The next time you look at her may be the last time you do anything.”

“No need to threaten him,” Allison said. “We’re putting him down for good.”

That silver eye narrowed at their words, then glanced right at the girl in defiance.

Ba-dum.

Somewhere far away, a heavy heart beat once and the night grew warmer. A sickening miasma pulsed out from Chandler. It smelled like copper, ashes, and fruit. It carried voices on the wind that whispered in her ear and something roiled deep inside her—memories.

A monster wore the skin of a child. An arrow drew blood, and fearful eyes stared at her.

You didn’t even try to save me.

Disheveled soldiers ran through the woods under the blistering heat of the sun. They were young men, little more than children. One of them fell and only one of his comrades turned back. The imps caught up to those two first. Allison watched and did nothing—they were on the wrong side of the border.

She hadn’t heard their screams then, but she heard them now.

You can’t do this. I have rights. I— Someone stop them! A chained woman pleaded for a judge as she was hauled into a carriage, but the guards around her ignored her.

A famished family walked into the desert. A skeletal child looked at her as its parents carried it away. We only wanted to find a new home.

Dozens of memories. Dozens of voices. A servant staring at the stars, choking on his blood. She hadn’t even listened to his final words. She imagined they had been addressed to her: Monster.

Emotions, thoughts, doubts she had shoved deep down inside. They burned like acid and fire and the memories ignited.

You’re the monster, that child told her before she died.

The dead soldiers shambled onto their feet, bodies and uniforms torn to shreds. You’re the monster.

That woman screamed in her face, spittle flying from her lips. The family turned back around and protested. The Tors gave you a new home! Why won’t you give us one?

Monster. Monster. Monster.

Their voices became her own. An arrow flipped in her hand and pointed at her throat. It was her last arrow and the only one she needed.

You’re the monster.

I’m the—

Marionette slammed her hand into the dirt. Another gauntlet grabbed Chandler’s shirt in a fist and twisted to lift him up. All at once, the aura vanished. The miasma lifted. The man collapsed to his knees.

Even the Moon Wraith heaved on the ground. The sleeve of his suit had been torn where his arm twisted, dragged forward by an olive sword that hung in mid-air. The sword inched forward, straining as it pulled his arm further and further out of its socket.

The strain vanished, his arm fell limp to the ground, and the sword vanished into that portal.

The Moon Wraith turned his head and retched into the grass.

“Don’t stop!” Allison threw her arrow aside. “I’ll endure. Kill him!”

Garen looked over his shoulder at her with a look of such weariness that her words died on her lips. “No,” he mumbled. “No, I just need …”

“Korat,” the Moon Wraith hissed and shot forward, brandishing twin olive swords. A spray of blood shot into the air from Chandler’s neck. A sword stabbed through the palm of his hand as he shielded his chest.

Chandler kicked out and bought himself a second before the Moon Wraith continued his onslaught. “I need magic items.” There wasn’t as much panic in his voice as Allison would have expected. The cut through his neck was already beginning to heal. But his voice still cracked with urgency and he let out a shrill squeak, “Give me magic items!”

Allison bundled her scarf up and threw it at him.

He snatched it out of the air and punched. For an instant, his eyes shimmered and a series of unintelligible silver letters flashed in the air around him.

A storm wall slammed into the Moon Wraith. It spread far enough to toss the waters of the Great River and flattened the grassy hills around them. The force of the moving wind carried the girl forward until she tumbled next to Allison.

With a sonic boom, the Moon Wraith tumbled a hundred meters down the road. And her scarf crumbled to dust in Chandler’s fist.

Chandler startled and spun. “Something a little more durable than that?”

“I— What?”

Allison was still struggling to process what she had just seen, but what did he expect from her? She didn’t have many magic items. Those went to the border guards who needed them most, not someone like her. Her armguard was still recharging. Her scarf. Potions. Her boots? Did he expect her to— Argh. Screw it. This wasn’t the time to care about clothes.

Allison began to yank her boot off when Marionette sent her a vague impression through their bond. She didn’t understand until she saw a damaged gauntlet bumping into Chandler’s hand. He shooed it aside but it turned around and hovered in front of him.

“Wait, are you offering to …?” Chandler said and shook his head. “No. You will lose it.”

“Marion, don’t. I’ll give him my boots!”

“Uhh, Garen?” the girl spoke up. “He’s doing something!”

He was. Allison felt it, too. The Moon Wraith hadn’t landed. He floated in the air and held his hands together while something flickered and condensed there. A gravitational pull unlike anything she could ever hope to match.

He lifted a hand and presented a tiny black dot that warped the moonlight itself.

“Garen!?”

He still hesitated as his clothes fluttered in the vanishing wind. “Are you sure?”

Marionette made a fist and dipped it down in a nod.

“I’m so sorry.” Garen donned the gauntlet. His hand trembled like a repelled magnet, but the metal liquified and shrunk to fit him. And it kept shrinking, cutting into his flesh.

All around them, Marionette’s armor pieces dropped out of the sky, and Allison doubled over, clutching her left hand as a searing hot pain shot through their bond. It felt like someone had poured liquid fire into her veins.

There came another distant heartbeat carrying a mere whiff of that warm miasma.

Garen’s eyes burned. His irises had changed colors. Both of them—heterochromia. One was pink and pulsed like flexing strands of muscle, and the other glowed a deep blood red with specks of black like a crucible in a bed of coal.

His body rippled, fat transmuting to muscle, wounds sealing in an instant, and Marion’s metal rippled in waves of spikes alongside him like a ferrofluid.

She stifled her scream as the armor emitted a low whirring sound into the rushing wind that grew louder and louder in her ears. Her eyes were on the Dragonslayer as she watched his Skills tick in one after another.

[Of the Champion Path]

[Synergy of the Champion, Twin Patrons]

[Liferune Binding: Wrath]

[Living Weapon]

[Battle Rite: Blood Forge]

[Innovation Through Violence]

[Strive, Until—]

“Not that one,” Garen mumbled. His penultimate Skill flickered and faded, but he accepted the one that came after it: [Gauntlet of the World Titan].

It covered his forearm in segments like snakeskin, displacing his flesh. His actual skin hung from his elbow like a rolled-up sleeve, drooling strings of blood.

Garen curled his hand into a fist.

A trench cut into the fields around the Moon Wraith. One, then a second and third, and a fourth. A hundred meters across. A titanic hand reached down from the stars to mirror his own. It cut great grooves into the road that piled up lines of earth and stone.

The Moon Wraith met a wall of rising earth that curled up around him. He tried to drill his way through with that black dot. Mounds of dirt compacted into tiny rocks wherever he wove it, but when he tried to crawl through a tunnel he had made, he met the hand itself. Even when his entire body flashed silver and turned incorporeal, he couldn’t push through it.

With a muted snarl, his dot exploded outward. It hit the hand like a battering ram and showered the area in a pulse of dirt. The Moon Wraith funneled his magic into the implosion, another sphere pressing outward, this time a ⟨Vector of Motion⟩ of a far greater force.

But the hand continued to curl. Inch by inch, it pressed down on him. The demiplane itself shook and cracked. Ghostly fractures spread in the night and the fingers jerked another meter inward as his sphere rapidly shrunk.

The Moon Wraith shrunk in on himself with his arms and legs pressed out. She caught a glimpse of his face screaming in exertion before the gauntlet snapped shut, and Allison allowed the feeling of satisfaction.

A massive seashell shape hung in the silence then, like a fistful of damp sand. It cast a shadow over their feet where its spines cut into the moon.

The Moon Wraith had managed to lunge for the space between the fingers at the last moment and hung with one forearm and half of his head out from the floating island. The rest of his mangled body was trapped within.

He reached desperately for a ray of moonlight.

Allison scrambled for the arrow. Her left hand trembled and burned, but she loosed. She took off two of his fingers before he vanished, and the world flickered.

Suddenly, they stood on an undamaged road. That floating island was gone and the moon had wandered far in the brightening sky.

“Is he dead?” the girl asked.

“Do you see a body?” Allison replied in a dead voice and far better Eonian.

“Uh, no?”

“That’s your answer then.”

For all intents and purposes, they would have to proceed as if he had gotten away. Thirty-three years. Allison had failed her mission.

What did she have left?

“He’s not coming back, right?” the girl rolled onto her chest and pushed up on her knees, speaking at the road. “You roughed him up pretty bad …”

Garen chuckled heartily. His voice sounded deeper. Lighter. “No, damage like that, especially to a demiplane of his own making? We may have even damaged his soul if he used it as an anchor. Most people do. It’s easier. He’ll need more than just a little time to recover. If he can recover at all.”

“Uh, Garen?”

His eyes still blazed with twin colors as he examined his metal arm.

“So if he’s gone … you can probably take that off then, right?”

“Hm?”

“I said, you should probably take that off …?”

There was a note of concern in her voice, which put Allison on edge. She took a step back and, without taking her eyes off the man, yanked an arrow into her hand.

“Right,” he agreed but continued to turn his arm, curling his fingers back and watching the moonlight dance on the segments.

“Garen.”

“Huh!? Oh, right, right.” He snapped to attention and, with a final look of longing, reluctantly flicked his arm down.

The gauntlet slumped onto the road in a half-molten lump.

Allison caught a glimpse of his flayed arm, but his skin unrolled and he was already beginning to heal.

Marionette assembled its pieces and fell to its knees. It poked at its ruined gauntlet with its stump arm and touched the place where its helmet should have been. Its other wounds, it could fix, but Chandler had warned it … another piece lost.

It leaned back to stare at her. It had no eyes but Allison felt the accusation through their bond. Betrayal.

She nodded weakly to herself, accepted the feeling, and trained an arrow on the man.

He laughed. “I fought your battles for you and you want to arrest me? The world never changes, huh?”

“Ooh!” the girl perked up. “I want to be arrested!”

“No, you don’t.”

“We could stage a jailbreak, or work with criminals, or bring a criminal organization down from within. Or! Or! I could start my own crime family!”

“No you won’t, because if she tries to arrest us, you’re going straight back home, Lisa. And I can tell you, your parents won’t let you come back for another thirty years until this has all blown over. At that point, I’ll be dead so you’ll have to live with your aunt.”

“What? But we only just got here! Don’t arrest us, lady! We haven’t done anything wrong yet!”

“It depends,” Allison said.

There was a hopeful note in her voice that didn’t reach her eyes. “On?”

“On whether or not the answers you give me are to my satisfaction. For starters, who are you?”

“Come now, Reed.” Chandler held an annoyed hand out. “We’re practically coworkers. You know who I am.”

“Why don’t you confirm it for me? Just to be safe.”

“My name is Garen Chandler. I am a citizen of Hadica. I left my passport at home though. For obvious reasons.”

Allison nudged her chin at the girl. “And who, or what, is she?”

“Uh, hello,” the girl spoke up for herself and she said the words in heavily-accented Lilian, “my name is Lisa! I’m an, ah—”

She stumbled as she finally managed to climb to her feet. Although her expression barely changed, she placed her hands on her hips as she stood tall and proudly proclaimed, “I am a dragon. You may worship me.”