The inn they found after several hours of walking was about as low in quality as it was in its pricing, but it wasn’t like they needed luxury. Just one night to sleep and keep going.

Still, if Kat’s apartment was the size of a storage room, this room was the size of a bathroom. They barely fit.

She didn’t quite sit on the bed as much as she fell on it, her weak knees crumpling the second a hint of tension bled out of her.

She groaned in pleasure as her protesting muscles finally got to rest, feeling Katherine lethargically shrug the backpack off and flex her shoulders and back with a worryingly loud series of cracks.

As her body rested, her mind began to pick up the slack.

Most importantly, whatever the hell “we shall ask” meant. She hadn’t thought to ask at the time, but what the fuck did that even mean? Was she supposed to come back every once in a while and ask how the search was going? Or would they find her first?

Both options weren’t great, but the latter was both disquieting and downright creepy.

She’d go back there in a week or two and ask. It seemed reasonable, even if it made her oddly embarrassed.

“...Sorry for using you as a pack mule, by the way. Once I turn, I’m carrying everything for a month.” She grumbled, rubbing her burning thigh with her hand in the hopes it would relieve the incoming soreness.

“It’s a good workout.” Katherine replied, lightly shrugging, then fell onto the bed beside her, half-twisting so that she’d land with her head on the pillow diagonally, legs hanging off the side.

As the mattress’s springs creaked and groaned from their combined weight, she fished the ring out of her pocket, and paused.

“Hey, could you uh…” She trailed off, holding the ring up, and Kat raised her head to look at it for a moment before nodding, groaning as she raised her torso.

After grabbing the ring and hilting it onto her middle finger, Kat collapsed back into the bed.

She sent a slight prod of mana into her finger, and felt a small bundle of objects form in her mind.

She gasped so sharp and fast that she almost choked, jerking upright to gape at the ring.

“Em? Em, what’s wrong?” Katherine spoke hurriedly, and her jaw clicked shut.

“Dimensional ring.” She breathed out, in complete disbelief.

Katherine went silent for a moment, before hissing “What?” and scooting closer.

“It’s- It’s a dimensional storage ring.” She breathed out, dazed.

This- this was worth- what, ten gold coins? This wasn’t a fair deal, they basically robbed that man.

“Did he give us the wrong ring?” Katherine asked, brows high, and she briefly considered that possibility.

She focused on the items inside, and paused.

A bloodied knife, an… eye in a tiny jar?

And a folded piece of paper.

She focused on the paper alone, and it came to the forefront of her mind, a three dimensional object she could move around and position. She turned it, mentally placed it so it would drop onto her open palm, and yanked it out.

With a tiny puff of displaced air, a blood speckled paper dropped into her hand.

She shook it open, and just like she thought, it was a letter. A dreadfully short and concise one.

I caught a mouse sniffing around. It didn’t say much, but the clean air in its lungs and the state of its fur said enough. A nest grown fat is looking for the fledgling leech. It wants its blood back.

“What is this gibberish?” Katherine scoffed.

“It’s not gibberish. Give me a second.” She murmured, scowling at the letter.

She ran the words over and over again in her head for a solid minute, until she realized what it meant.

A deep breath rushed into her lungs, before leaving them, her shoulders drooping.

“Fuck.” She hissed, dropping the letter to bury her face in her hand. “I think Irythiel is looking for me.”

“Your mother…? Why now? How did you reach that conclusion?” Katherine carefully asked, picking the letter up off the floor and reading it with a confused frown.

“It’s not exactly complicated. Mice sniffing around. Like an assassin or a kidnapper, sneaking around, trying to find something. Someone caught him, likely tortured him. It says the clean air in its lungs and the state of its fur said enough. That means this was someone from outside the Dungeon, well-clothed, or at least well-equipped. A nest grown fat could also mean a rich nest, or rather, a wealthy family, if you think in terms of rodents who don’t have coin or land. ‘Grown fat’ also implies inaction, until now. Looking for the fledgling leech-”

“Means they’re looking for you. And ‘it wants it’s blood back’ could be taken several ways with the other things said in the letter, but with context…” Katherine trailed off, realization settling on her face.

“Great. Another thing to be paranoid about.” She growled, feeling a low, boiling fury coil in the bottom of her gut like a snake getting ready to strike.

If her family wanted her back all of a sudden, she wouldn’t be terribly surprised. Elves bred incredibly slowly. With the sudden unrest and uncertainty happening, it was obvious that her family would want her back to wipe her mind and start anew.

They’d tie her to a chair, empty her head of everything, pay some psychic a fortune to scrape out every inkling of personality or meaningful memory, and raise her up again, like a mentally disabled adult who just had to be ‘reset’.

It wasn’t unlikely that they’d force her father on her as well.

Combine the elven kind’s low birthrates with their incredibly stupid ‘pureblood’ mentality they adopted from the old human ruling class, and the lack of defects due to incest, and there was a recipe for some very disturbing scenarios. She wouldn’t put it above Irythiel to stoop that low.

Maybe a long time ago they hadn’t thought any such actions necessary. Maybe until now they hadn’t been able to find her, or maybe they just thought they’d make another child, only for this civil war business to make them realize they did not have such time on their hands.

This time, she doubted they’d take the risk, not after her defection and the general chaos around.

The mere thought of what would happen should she be caught made her sick.

Her breaths deepened, her nails digging into her palms.

“Okay. Adding to the list of potential future actions, ‘killing my parents’ goes to the top of the list. We’re also going to have to be even more paranoid and quiet, it seems.”

“Agreed. Do you think the man from the sewer wrote this?” Katherine asked, and she nodded.

Who else would do this?

She focused on the knife, and let it out, dropping it onto her palm with another puff of displaced air. It was rather strange, with a thin handle, a very small guard, and a vaguely triangular, four inch long blade. It also exhumed mana, just a little bit of it.

She couldn’t figure out what that enchantment did, but as she brought it right next to the golem’s eye at her neck, she could take a guess. Its blade was speckled with still-present blood and still looked sharp enough to cut glass.

Trying to shove mana into the blade did nothing, unfortunately, so it seemed to be a passive enchantment.

Then she paused, and brought the knife to her face, tugging the scarf up to run her tongue along its bloodied blade.

She sighed in satisfaction at the taste and snack, before realizing that Katherine looked vaguely disturbed, and stopping.

Right, what was she doing…?

Knife, ring, testing.

She focused on the knife as she pulled it away from her face, and mentally tried to… sort of shove it back into the ring, more of a test than anything.

It obeyed effortlessly, popping back in instantaneously.

She turned to the letter still loosely held in Kat’s hand, and tried to do the same.

Nothing happened.

She reached for it, brushing her fingers on its surface, and mentally shoved.

It went into the ring as well, half-folded and still lightly crumpled from where Kat’s thumb was pressing into its side, seemingly frozen in time. Trying to manipulate the paper and fold it with her mind did nothing.

Finally, she popped out the tiny jar with the eye still in it, and brought it closer to her sternum.

Eye to eye, so to speak…

She was still too upset and worried to snicker, but her lips did twitch up in amusement, for a sparse moment.

It was quite grotesque, its pupil shrunken to a pinprick of terror, little veins crawling over the few white parts that were still visible. Some of the nerves were still attached. It even looked wet, the blood at the bottom still fresh.

As she was struck with the sudden urge to take the eye out and lick it like a lollipop, she decided instead to just shove it back into the ring, mindful of Katherine’s presence. She didn’t want to gross her out even further.

Some background voice of alarm in the back of her head asked her why she herself wasn’t grossed out by the thought, and she firmly ignored it.

As far as she could tell, this eye was just proof of his claims. Or maybe a warning too, of what he was capable of.

“We need to go buy you a dagger tomorrow too. And find another mortician to buy some blood from. A couple healing potions too.” She mumbled, mind somewhat distracted with trying to figure out what this was all for.

This wasn’t something someone gave to an errand runner, nor a goon, nor an employee. A warning, a dimensional ring, an enchanted knife, a severed eye.

She could recognize that something about all this was off, and it wasn’t too difficult to guess what.

The man in the sewer was either trying to recruit her and her friends, or was trying to build some kind of favor with her, for some reason or another. He was trying to use her for something, she just couldn’t quite figure out what.

Was he hoping she had “tamed” the wolf and could order it around for him?

If so, he would be very disappointed. Her buddy was quite proud from what she remembered, as well as being a fucking wolf. She was sure that trying to control him in any way would only end up with her being ignored at best, torn to pieces at worst.

Men and women and legends, all far greater than her, have tried to tame wolves, and none succeeded.

“-istening?” Katherine asked, and she suddenly realized that the background noise she had been ignoring was her friend talking.

With a mild pang of guilt, she turned a little, slouching in shame.

“Sorry. Was just thinking about something. Could you repeat?”

Katherine put her hand on her shoulder, and suddenly began pushing her back with strength she couldn’t fight against.

As she flopped back onto the bed, Katherine began yanking her up so her head wouldn’t be smushed against the wall, and with some squirming and help from her weak legs, mostly to not tear her new shirt, they were lying parallel to each other.

“Is there something else we need to think or talk about, or can we go to sleep?” Katherine asked, and her tone made it quite clear which option she preferred.

“Let’s sleep.” She murmured.

Then she felt something move under the mattress, and stiffened, before sighing in exasperation.

“Scruffy’s under the bed.”

“Ignore her.”

“I-”

“Ignore her.”

“Okay.”

Katherine was saying something, and she knew she should be paying attention. If nothing else, simply to know exactly what their finances were like.

They were in a chop-shop, as the common folk called it. It was a strange mish-mash of standard medical equipment, alchemical potions, anything that could be used in necromancy or witchcraft, alchemical ingredients, basically just a shop geared towards the less violence-inclined Paths but also not the crafting oriented ones.

But there was a box with two rats right there, and they were squeaking and her blood was boiling because of them.

Their container was more like a small engine with half of it being observational one way glass and various little chutes meant for feeding and watering them built in.

It was only the small ventilation device glued onto the side of the box that kept them alive and breathing.

Her eyes itched and rolled, despite no longer being there, and her fingers twitched incessantly.

How could she break that? Was there a way to do it without the shop owner noticing?

The golem eye followed her commands, shifting to the side as much as it was able to on its holding device, just a couple inches, going from the top of the box to the bottom.

She couldn’t find one.

“How much?” Someone said, their voice colder than the barren north, and the conversation behind her abruptly paused.

It was only the click of her jaw closing that made her realize those were her own words, and a small pulse of mana revealed both the woman behind the counter and Katherine staring at her.

“How much for these?” She asked again.

“... Well, if you buy two bags of blood, I’ll toss that in for you for just three coppers.” The crone behind the counter cooly said, fiddling with her rings.

At the edge of her mana pulse, she felt Scruffy gently poking at a broken clock, open wonder in her expression.

“Scruffy?” She asked, and after a moment of no reaction, as if unused to responding to that name, the goblin’s head jerked towards her, hurriedly backing away from the clock, hiding her hands behind her back like a little kid caught with their fingers in the honey jar.

If she was slow to respond to Scruffy, what did her old owner call her? It certainly wasn’t a name. Nobody named goblins, as far as she knew, and nobody understood their gibbering either, so she wasn’t sure if they named themselves.

“Do you want the clock?” She asked, voice a little harder than she’d intended it to be, something she blamed on being amped up by the rodents’ presence.

Instead of wincing at her tone, Scruffy’s big eyes widened even further, confused. Then she nodded once, slowly, uncertainly, almost looking suspicious.

“Give us that clock too and it’s a deal.” She said, turning her head enough to make sure the shopkeeper knew that it was directed at her.

Scruffy’s surprised, gleeful look made the cold fury in her heart a little less biting.

He was fighting something.

Again.

He just didn’t stop. It had stopped being worrying by now, just making her wonder what the hell he was doing. If he fought this often, they were likely not large fights. Maybe he was just busy... stealing body parts from rats and insects or something. That was the optimistic perspective she’d decided to go with.

Besides the mild anxiety however, it was also immeasurably reassuring to know and feel that they were getting closer to him.

“Are you sure we’re heading the right way?” Katherine asked, and she paused, trying to reorient herself with the rough position she last felt him at. It took some mental remapping and a few seconds of silence before she continued walking.

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

Katherine nodded.

“So, why did you buy rats?”

She didn’t answer, walking on autopilot as she considered the question.

The main reason she bought them was to kill them. Some kind of… mindless catharsis, maybe. Revenge, as childish and meaningless as this particular flavor of it was. That wasn’t the sole reason though. She wanted to just… wash away that lingering fear.

She hated that even though they were encased in some glass-like material in an insulated box, six feet away in another person’s grip, her gut was still a tightly clenched knot of unease and dread.

“It’s… embarrassing.” She mumbled out, and kept walking.

Embarrassing wasn’t quite the right word. She was just scared Katherine would think less of her for it.

She just needed someplace that was a little abandoned, some spot she could just-

To her left between two rumbling smoke chutes, she spied a small rectangular area nestled into the backside of some storage houses, little more than a back alley for the workers to get a smoke break or eat whatever lunch they could get. Gray, sludgy mud covered the ground, a mixture of coal and dirt and overflowing sewage waters.

It smelled as horrid as she’d expect it to.

Perfect.

She turned on her heel, walking faster.

A barrel remained next to a pile of iron bars, fire still licking away at its insides, presumably from when the warehouse workers had cooked something up here. She sped up further, almost jogging, until she was standing right in front of it, Scruffy and Kat catching up as she stood there.

Her mind was blank for a moment, unsure of what she was intending to even do.

An idea quickly came.

“Could you… put them over the barrel?” She asked, throat dry.

She knew what she was doing was needlessly cruel and unethical. But as she turned to Katherine, her eyes flit to their squirming forms, the disgusting vermin squeaking and sniffing in their tight enclosure, and venomous hatred boiled in her veins.

She wanted them to boil. To burn and squeal.

Katherine paused, giving her a searching look.

“Don’t… don’t ask, please? Could you just…” She vaguely gestured to the barrel, and Katherine sighed before walking past her and depositing the large, rectangular box over the licking flames.

It couldn’t fit in the barrel, but half of it almost did, while the other half jutted outwards.

Which would leave the rats to scramble up a steep slope to escape the heated bottom, tiring them out. The fire would continue, their ventilation box sending in nothing but burning air, cooking them alive in their box.

A mixture between a sneer and a smile curled her lips beneath the scarf.

A cruel, vindictive pleasure bloomed inside her chest, feeling like a slight weight had been lifted, like an ever-present niggle had finally been soothed.

Katherine walked to stand by her side, and she basked in the moment.

She felt satisfied, vindicated, warm in a way.

Scruffy glanced at the barrel curiously, before losing interest and going back to poking at the clock in her hands with a little needle.

Katherine mutely watched the rodents panic alongside her.

It wouldn’t be a fast demise.

That was fine, they could use a moment to rest and… enjoy themselves.

As the minutes ticked by, the rodents began to try and bite and scratch through the glass and metal, the little cup of water in their enclosure having pooled at the bottom and steadily starting to boil, scalding their bleeding feet whenever they slid down.

Scruffy went to sit on the pile of metal bars to their right, tongue sticking out the side of her mouth in concentration as she wiggled the needle between the tiny gears.

Cute.

Her lips curled further, into something resembling a smile.

Another minute passed, and the rats were starting to hyperventilate, their whole bodies inflating and deflating rapidly from their deep breaths. They were too exhausted to keep trying to dig through the glass.

Good.

She imagined their panic, their hopeless despair, knowing she was the cause.

It felt like pure victory.

“Why?” Katherine eventually asked, as the rodents finally began to die, one collapsed and occasionally convulsing, and the other weakly scraping at the metal wall, blood pouring out of its nose.

“...Why what?” She murmured, feeling pleasurable shivers race up and down her chest up to her neck, to the back of her head. She struggled not to visibly shake from how good it felt.

Revenge was an ever-present allure, even before she’d come down into the Dungeon. She hated her parents with enough vitriol to fantasize about various painful ways of killing them, even if she never thought herself capable of committing to a single one of them.

But never had she thought revenge would feel so good, so easily. It was the most twisted kind of happiness she had ever felt.

She cussed and hissed and snarled and giggled at them with a voice that sounded like her own, all in the safety of her head, where nobody but her could see or hear. She pretended they could hear or understand her and her taunting, in her mind, and it only got sweeter, the fantasy all-too perfect.

Something touched her left shoulder, and she jerked away so quickly she felt a nerve pinch in her back. The eye whirred to see a surprised Katherine, arm half-raised, and they both stood there, half-turned, staring at each other.

“Sorry. I-”

“Sorry I just-”

They spoke at the same time, and stopped.

She spoke first, this time.

“Sorry. Just very… jittery right now.” She explained, and allowed a shiver to pass through her, the eye on her sternum twisting to the side a little to stare at the rats.

One down, one to go. Good, good, fucking die-

Katherine pursed her lips, eyes flicking to the box.

“ Can I hug you?”

The eye didn’t move from where its attention was focused, but she didn’t need it to feel the uncertainty in Katherine’s stance as she asked.

Instead of replying, she lifted her hand to shift the eye to the side as much as she could, and took two steps forward, throwing an arm around her friend’s shoulder, tugging her forward.

Two steely arms locked around her, and she rested her cheek onto Katherine’s shoulder.

“What I was going to ask, is why are we doing this with the rats? Why do you want to turn into a vampire? I won’t dissuade you, I’m just… curious. A Trait can be undone. This one seems a little more frustrating than most to get rid of, but I’m sure you could do it.” Katherine softly spoke, and she thought about it for a minute, a long, comfortable minute, with the wonderful view of the last rodent starting to convulse on top of its brother.

As its dying throes played for an audience of one, she began to speak, deciding to ignore the first question.

“I don’t want to get rid of the Trait. I like it. I really like it. Every meal is like a… a potion that strengthens everything. And turning… turning would give me power. Personal power, not financial nor social power, just… me. Which I will need, all of it I could possibly get.”

… It sounded too simple. Too easy, too empty without context.

“… Before I came into the Dungeon, you know, I had this… strange worldview. I thought the powerful were evil, and the weak were virtuous. A result of faulty pattern recognition caused by Irythiel, I’d say. I thought if one was poor or weak, they were nothing but a victim, and that if someone was powerful or wealthy, they were the abuser. Of course, I learned quickly that that was not how things worked at all.” She murmured, and Katherine made a noise of encouragement, nodding slightly into her neck.

“Power is… a tool. I thought it corrupted people back then, but I realize now that it simply brings out what is already there. Can someone who is weak really be a virtuous man because he hasn’t hurt someone, when the only reason he hasn’t done so is his inherent weakness? Power just… brings out the real person under all the inhibitions and restraints inherent to being weak. And I want that power. To be… unrestrained. To find out who I really am under all these… layers. To be able to run with the monster I call a friend, to be able to protect you and myself, if the need arises. The price of my humanity… well, I’m not human, so elven..ity? Elvenhood?” She fumbled, struggling to find a way to say what she meant in Carmeran.

There were some things she could only say in Elvish without having them sound like funny gibberish, and this was one of them.

Katherine chuckled.

She huffed, amused, by both the convulsing rodent and the turn the conversation had taken.

“Yeah, the price of my ‘elvenhood’ seems like an alright price to pay for that.” She said, and after a moment of silence, Katherine nodded.

“Alright. Thank you for telling me.”

If Kat noticed how she dodged the question about the rats, she didn’t say anything about it.

The second rodent died, eventually.

A few more minutes passed, calm and comfortable as they stood, not bothering to dissolve the embrace, the fading crackle of flame mixing with the clicking of clockwork and hum of smog chutes into a pleasant background tune.

“We should go.” She eventually said, feeling like their break had gone on long enough.

“You’re okay, right?” Katherine asked as they separated.

The eye turned to the side a little, glancing at the silent box.

“Yeah.”

Their funds were running out.

She had put the coin bag they had into the ring, and though that lightened the load on Katherine’s back, somewhat, it was soon to be the end of the second day of constantly walking and taking lift after lift.

[Pack Hunter]’s utterly ludicrous range was starting to sink in.

Having to walk and pass through most of the third floor, it was a little easier to put the sheer distance into perspective. Two days of taking lifts, free and not, of walking several hours a day until she couldn’t even feel her legs, and they were only just now getting to the top parts of the third floor.

It was somehow much worse than down below.

Their path used to be relatively straight until now.

Walk to a station, ask people for landmarks and directions or consult some shoddy maps, go there, take a lift or walk up the winding, endless staircases around the spires, come out onto another plate, and repeat.

Now, to make their way to a station or a landmark, they had to dodge roving bands of gangsters, citizen and Adventurer militia prowling the streets and looking for a fight with the uppersiders, or genuine conflict.

Judging by the incessant clanging of steel on steel, the shouting, the sounds of explosions and roaring fire, getting anywhere close to the actual fights was a bad, bad idea. So they had very meticulously avoided them.

The path there was… rough.

The Dungeon was full of deteriorating buildings, some crumbling, some rusting, some were just improvised boxes of sheet metal stuck onto I-beams, forming strange makeshift neighborhoods in the lowest ends of the third floor. So she was used to seeing abandoned, shoddy, and crumbling buildings.

She wasn’t used to smelling smoke in the air as they walked through the remnants of what once might have been a two-story storage building, half-collapsed onto its side, its brick walls scorched black and crumpled into piles around them as glass crunched under their feet, the wood little more than charcoal now, anything not nailed down already looted.

She certainly wasn’t used to seeing Guard’s corpses swinging from light posts, their entrails hanging down like ribbons, the miasma of rot and death so present in such blatant open space.

In the distance, she could see a makeshift clinic operating in the middle of the street, three people with white shirts darting between people laid out on the floor. She saw a stocky man bring another, put them on the floor, then run back out of sight. Another guarded them and the medical supplies, occasionally helping where needed.

There was a battle somewhere to their left.

It looked like the third floor was slowly being reclaimed.

They stalked through the tight underpass of a metal bridge, overlooking a cracked concrete slope that led into a gutter, and her eye lingered on the crumpled corpse half-slumped over the side of their path, just about ready to slide off.

Katherine stepped around it.

She would have too, had she not noticed the gang tattoo on his exposed forearm.

Instead, she hooked the tip of her boot under his ribs, and kicked him off the path, letting his decomposing body melt into the river or be feed for the rats below.

There was noise ahead, but then again, she’d gotten used to it by now. Shouting was nothing all that alarming, not anymore.

But maybe that corpse should have warned her that there were gang members around, even if their presence was less tolerated than ever.

It didn’t quite cross her mind, it seemed, because as they turned the corner, they saw a group of four men lounging around the street smoking and laughing, while a fifth pounded on a metal door.

Their steps paused simultaneously, Scruffy peeking between them to watch what stopped them.

Four men, one woman. They all wore the same clothes, some mixture between dark gray cloth coats and brown pants, and if that wasn’t enough to surmise some kind of uniform, she could see their gang symbol boldly, and shoddily, embroidered on the breast of their coat. A green, twin-headed snake forming a heart with its heads.

She had seen it before, but she couldn’t quite remember which gang they were.

She just knew it wasn’t a small one.

Weapons both concealed and obvious swayed from sheaths and bulged their clothes from within, yet they didn’t seem terribly concerned with harassing passersby. Maybe they could walk past…

“Open the fuck up, old man, before we bust the door down and fuck up everything you have! You didn’t pay up!” The man pounding on the door boomed, and her eye flicked to the side, watching for the people’s reactions.

There was a bakery across the street, where a single young, stocky man snuck glances at the gangsters with open hatred and contempt in his eyes. Two customers who were awkwardly sitting inside, unsure if it would be safer to stay or leave.

And there was a single unconcerned old man just casually walking down the street, a cigarette in his mouth. He stumbled into an alley, and disappeared.

They could just turn around and try to find another way to the station. But it would take ages, it would slow them down even further. Assuming they didn’t get lost.

And a smaller, less rational part of her simply decided it did not want to continue dodging conflict. She’d been doing that her whole life, and it never worked. They’d run into another gang, or another blockade, and lose even more time, more energy, more money. They were bleeding resources they couldn’t afford to be.

Better to slam her horns forward than try to keep her head away and simply reveal her neck for the knife.

“Act confident. Walk behind me. If they talk to us, treat me as a bodyguard, act diplomatic. Scruffy, just hide behind Katherine. We’re not fighting if we don’t have to.” She ordered quietly, and fished the ring out of her pocket, before popping it into her mouth.

Katherine did nothing but nod with a displeased, worried expression, despite being behind her, correctly guessing she would be flaring mana the entire walk through.

Which would drain on her mana a bit more than she’d like, but she couldn’t take chances.

As she began walking forward, she maneuvered the ring around using her tongue, until the thinner part was clenched between her teeth, and the small gemstone was pressed into the inside of her cheek.

She had tested the summoning range.

Not one single part of what she was trying to take out of the ring could be further than about seventeen inches, not even the tip, or else it wouldn’t come out.

More than enough range.

Muffled shouting and voices came from within the house, one rough and one high pitched. The guy at the door sighed, straightening his coat, glancing at his fellows. The group’s leader seemed to be a particularly large man with a scimitar at his waist, and he just scoffed, picking at his ear.

As they got closer, the voices became more intense, legible.

“No, no! Mother, please- stop! No!” A girl shrieked through the door, the metal distorting the sound into a wail, and her steps stuttered for a moment. Something in her mind slid apart, a platform without supports, tilting. Metal and glass walls turned to marble, pipes melting into trimmed bushes, the ground turning to chalk-white brick, color and light bleeding into the scene. The hanging wires above them turned into whips, dripping red. Katherine’s vague figure, crumpled onto the ground, bleeding, teased at the edge of her mind, somewhere to the left.

She turned the eye off, frozen, the sight crumbling into the void.

Someone moved through her mana, behind her, and she snapped back to the real world, resuming her steps just as Katherine’s brow began to furrow in confusion. It smoothed over quickly.

She kept walking, not turning her head nor eye towards the approaching gangsters.

“Please-!”

The door slammed open, and a small figure was thrown outside with a girlish shriek. Her eye snapped to the left, her steps stuttering once more. She recovered faster this time, barely noticeable. The gangsters certainly didn’t notice, all turning towards the girl and her mother.

A furious looking woman, barely dressed, with a botchy, twisted nose, stains covering her nightgown, staggered in place in the doorframe, a sneer on her face.

“She enough?” The woman rasped, her patchy, greasy hair and wrinkled skin making her look ghoulish in the dim light.

“Nononono please- mom, I’ll be good, please-!” The girl screamed as she scrambled off the floor, terrified, lunging with open arms towards the woman, who reared her leg back as if to kick her.

A gangster’s hand darted out to grab the girl by the arm, yanking her back with enough force to nearly dislocate her shoulder. She struggled for a moment, yelling, before he punched her in the stomach and she collapsed like a broken doll with a strangled gag, her knee length skirt tangling her legs.

Emhreeil’s teeth grit, pain shooting through her gums as her movements grew stiffer, anger and the creeping tingles of something horribly unpleasant pooling low in her gut. The bastards weren’t paying any attention to them, however. They would pass through without even being looked at.

The leader yanked the girl up by the arm with one hand, the other grabbing the girl by the chin and tilting her head back as she heaved, swaying and trembling as he appraised her.

They were just across the street now, a mere fifteen feet away. The distance made it so hard to detach, to mentally back away from the interaction.

One of the gangsters was staring at them quite blatantly, leaning on the wall, unconcerned but not stupid enough to ignore them either.

“Eh, she ain’t a beauty but she ain’t bad. She’ll do. You know where to go if you want your next dust hit, hag. Pleasure doin’ business with ya.” The leader said, and the girl let out a strangled, heartbreaking sound, trying to twist out of the man’s grip.

“Sto-ngblgh-!”

His knee slammed into the girl’s stomach, and with a guttural sound, her legs went limp as she vomited, the gangster sneering in disgust as he let go, letting her convulse on the floor.

“Eugh. Bitch. Aitel, grab her, I ain’t dirtying my new coat.”

Barbed wire scraped against her spine, her teeth grinding and gnashing and shivering, her fingers twitching. Her body rebelled against her mind. She ordered it forward, to keep walking.

They had enough fucking problems. They couldn’t act like they had any measure of power when they didn’t. They couldn’t afford to care for others as well as themselves.

What was special about this girl? Her wolven friend could have killed thirty of her and even if her heart would clench and her stomach would heave, she wouldn’t do anything to stop it.

They couldn’t afford to draw attention. Irythiel was prodding around for them. According to Katherine she was already known to a small neighborhood for being the first to kill a Guard down there.

There was a trail one could follow, and adding another footprint on that track would only bite her in the ass later.

But no matter how many sound, perfectly valid arguments she made, no matter how much she pointed out the moral dissonance of objecting to this girl’s fate because it wasn’t her friend’s fangs around her neck but a gangster’s fingers, her body kept getting stiffer, slower, tenser.

Her walk was now a struggling shuffle. She was barely moving.

The gangster woman was staring, eyes narrowing, her long, curly hair shifting on her shoulders as she tilted her head in open curiosity.

Emhreeil wasn’t looking at them, so maybe the bitch just thought she was weird. She could still walk away just fine.

Weren’t these the thoughts of everyone else who passively watched her suffer in Ghar’s clutches for almost two years? Wasn’t she the naive girl on the floor a while ago, wishing someone would spare her more than a glance, offer a helping hand?

A choked sob came from her left.

“Shut up and stop squirming or I’ll make you shit blood and cum you worthless cunt. Got it!?”

Her jaw cramped, and the pain anchored her to the real world.

The eye flicked to the side briefly, staring at the crumpled lump on the ground.

“Kat.” She breathed out, the sound a little awkward with the slowly deforming piece of silver in her mouth.

She wasn’t walking anymore.

Katherine’s expression was tight and twitching in suppressed discomfort, but at the tone of her voice, it all washed away, something like fearful determination replacing it.

Maybe they could negotiate. Maybe the bastards would trade the girl for her knife, even if its enchantment was minor.

Or maybe she’d reveal they had such things on them and the heartless scumbags would immediately try to kill them so they could take it all for themselves.

She knew better than to expect the best. Especially out of people.

“We’re killing all of them.” She breathed out. “Tell Scruffy to hide.”