Neither was she willing to risk approaching him, just in case, and there just wasn’t enough time to wait until he bled out and thus became a non-threat. The guards would, in a best-case scenario, want to drag him away for questioning.

So she made the judgment call to put down the wooden box in her left hand, took a copper coin from her coin purse, and breathed a lungful of Fog on it. So thick was the coating that its surface could no longer be seen.

She flipped the coin high into the air, waiting until it was overhead the dying man, waiting until it reached the apex of its flight and stopped for that briefest of moments.

Aim. Click. Clang.

A flash of light from above as the bullet bounced and the coin rang a death knell.

From on high the bullet was sent into his head, and like a lightning bolt it obliterated his head altogether, leaving a burst-open crater of meat where his neck once had been.

Closing the Philosopher’s Eye she holstered her gun, bent down to pick up the box, and looked herself over - a single droplet of blood now marred the bottom of her previously pristine sundress. A part of her wanted to be disgusted at the gore before her, the gore which she had caused, the ending of a young life likely forced into his lot by forces beyond his grasp.

In reality, though, she had seen worse. Done worse. The only lasting impression this incident would leave on Zefaris was the intention to inflict the same upon whoever was pulling the strings. The soldier that she was, Zefaris looked to the grizzled-looking older men who had surrounded the young man when he first pulled the talisman, and whose boots were now splattered by his blood. While much of the original crowd had dispersed by now an entirely new one had formed, but these few scarred veterans remained, every single one.

One of them spoke to her, in the short moments before the guards would finally arrive at the scene. A hook left hand, a peg left leg, and skin so covered in darkened scars that she had almost mistaken him for a Grekurian rather than the Ikesian she now saw him for. He had greasy, short hair black, and a bushy beard with no mustache.

“By the Dead Ones, we’d stopped here on our way home from work knowin’ the young’un would start trouble, but this… We never expected this,” he uttered grimly, averting his eyes from the display of gore before him. “One so young bearin’ one o’ those accursed talismans, n’ one of our own no less! Why, those westerner dogs… How? Why?!”

“Prisoner breeding, maybe abduction, grooming, enchantment…” one of the other men cut in, disgust filling his voice. “They do the same and worse to their own, I’m surprised he wasn’t stuffed full of poisonous insects. And they’ll still call us snow demons.”

“The more I deal with ‘em, the more I think they accuse us of the things they themselves are guilty of,” the first man sighed in return.

Moments later the guards arrived, in the form of three ill-equipped older men that seemed as disgusted at the scene as they seemed confused. All three had old military uniforms, battered chest-plates and all, with two wielding spears and one a knife and gun. The third one looked younger than the two others, exuding an aura of authority and experience, like he’d been doing this for a long time. He was the one who spoke, his eyes wandering from the corpse, the talisman fragments on the ground, to the blood splattered veterans, to Zefaris.

“Right, step away from the scene…” he recited, gesturing widely before he approached the corpse. “What happened here? We were told that this… Young man was doing some sort of speech, questioned a passerby, and when accused of being a Pateirian agent he… Pulled out a jade talisman? Is that what those fragments there are from?”

“Yes. I had pointed my gun at him out of caution, and reflexively shot his left arm when he pulled out the talisman. I then shot the talisman itself when he lunged for it and ran at me with it in hand, which shattered it, broke his fingers, and left a piece of it stuck in his hand. That one piece was what made his right arm just… Unravel like that,” Zef explained, intentionally simplifying things and leaving out details.

“Well it looks Pateirian, and I think the pants on the corpse have that Pateirian pattern on the sides…” he had said before he turned his attention once more to the witnesses. “So to go over the course of events again…”

A few minutes later...

Dealing with the guards was a surprisingly brief affair. They questioned Zefaris, the veterans, and presumably a few of the other pedestrians, but by then Zefaris had already gone. Matters were perhaps helped by the fact that the authoritative-looking guard took witness testimony at face value, as well as his recognition of the Emperor’s Mercy Talisman.

Zefaris was just about getting ready to leave, until the guardsmen asked if she had any last things to say, the garbage barricades that had led her into this mess well within line of sight.

“Look there,” she said, gesturing at the nearest blocked off back alley. “Has that always been there?”

“...No,” the authoritative guard furrowed his brow.

“I believe it important to point out these things completely surround this one spot. I hadn’t seen anything like them elsewhere in town, or even in this part of town the last few times I passed through here. I think someone put them up to maximize the number of people in the infiltrator’s vicinity.”

“Must’ve been someone on the inside to get something like that under our noses, though I find it hard to believe one of our honorable senators could be a traitor...” the guardsman said halfheartedly.

“Do you?” Zef asked.

“No, not really,” he sighed. “Bet it’s the rat-faced old man.”

On her way back to Riverside Remedies, the thought crossed her mind again that this sort of thing really should faze her more.