Assess the situation. Identify your goals and how you will get to them.

Well, the situation wasn’t terribly tough. Most of what these commoners had going for them was their volume. And their training, in some cases. On that note, though…

“I fought some of these commoners earlier,” I noted idly. “They were well trained enough that I could believe they were ex-military. Have you had no issues with this?”

“I have,” Orchid grimaced. “This safe house has more backup measures than you may believe, and I was forced to use near all of them.”

“I didn’t see any traps triggered in the hallways,” I said. “Hey, duck into this side room real quick?”

The footsteps were getting louder. They must have been making their way up the stairs now.

We stepped into a door in the same motion. There was a single unconscious body in here, a young man slumped against a bed, but otherwise it looked like a pretty normal bedroom, if a little more cramped than I might’ve expected out of a noble.

“I never said anything about traps,” Orchid said. He paused, gathering his breath.

In the span of that pause, I heard the footsteps growing closer. Two sets of them. Fewer people, this time. They’d entered maybe two minutes after us, and if what I had seen before was any indication, there were enough of them that they were going to be able to keep sending more for a while.

How fucking many of them were there? I knew Dakheng was a pretty big city, but it felt as if the entire civilian population had revealed themselves to suddenly be trained soldiers.

“What did you use, then?” I asked, pulling more on my oath.

“Amplifiers," Orchid said. “Experimental ones, sold to our family by House Karte. The Aedi oathholders.”

“More power, more pain?” I guessed.

“Just about.”

The footsteps were on our floor now. If I had to hazard a guess, they were already in the hallway.

I considered just stepping out and tossing a pair of ruin-imbued knives at them, but that would be a little much when I’d just resolved to not brutally kill Nek. I was a hypocrite, I knew that, but I wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.

I could also use both knives without any magic in them, but that risked missing when I didn’t know where my targets were.

“Cutting it close here, Lily,” Orchid said.

“Don’t need to tell me that, traitor,” I said, trying and not quite succeeding to inject some venom into my tone.

I’d taken down those three earlier because they hadn’t expected it at all. That might not work with a head-on conflict, especially if I was trying to go non-lethal for now.

Damn you, Jasmine, I thought. Pesky morals.

I thrust one hand out, forming a frame in my mind. Loose, yes, but still strong. More intact and put-together than my usual loose-frame shields were. Nishi had been right on the subject of communicating like divinity. There was no reason to doubt him when it came to the usage of spells in combat.

Fuel. That came easily as ever.

Spark. I uttered the phrase for the shield spell in the oathtongue, ensuring my pronunciation was perfect, and I gestured in a circle.

The shield felt different from other loose-frames. Not an immediately noticeably difference, but I felt like my control over it was better. I led the blossoming shield to the door to the bedroom, blocking it off entirely.

This probably wasn’t the best time to be experimenting with my oath, but it was what it was.

“Brace yourself,” I said. “How sturdy is your floor?”

“Sturdy enough,” Orchid replied. “This is a safe house.”

“Fine, be that way,” I sighed. “Brace yourself nonetheless.”

Shouts were coming from the hallway. They’d noticed the shield, and now they were attacking it. I felt impacts against the shield, almost as hard as some spells had been. Were those commoners outside oathholders? Or were they just hitting really fucking hard?

It didn’t matter. The shield would hold. I’d grown stronger over time, and this shield held truer than my loose-frames. I could feel that the impacts wouldn’t be enough to get rid of it in any reasonable amount of time.

The bedroom wall was nowhere near as large as any of the walls had been in the Alzaq manor, and it was nowhere near as grandiose. Rather than a floor-to-ceiling window, it was a nondescript wooden wall with a decoration or two hastily attached to it.

“Can you handle a drop to the first floor?” I asked. “I’m going to open your wall.”

“Not this again,” Orchid complained hoarsely. “Just… did this.”

Had his departure from the Alzaq manor been that dramatic? “Cast him out”, huh? An escape through the wall sounded less like a casting out and more like a retreat from certain death.

It earned him a point or two in the grand reckoning of who was at fault and who wasn’t, but that was shit I could deal with later.

“Sucks to suck,” I shrugged. Another impact hit the shield. “Unless you’ve got a better option.”

“The wall is made of the same material as the floor,” Orchid warned. “It’ll be equally as difficult to break.”

From the tone of his voice and his posture, he was resigned to my plan. Either that, or he was just tired enough that I couldn’t tell the difference. If his story was true, he’d been pursued for several hours by this point without any time to rest. That would do a number on anyone.

“Excellent,” I replied. “I was hoping we wouldn’t have to use a wall.”

I took the remaining magic and concentrated it into an area just in front of my fists. There was probably a spell that could handle this better, but I wasn’t well versed enough in the classic fireball to use it without risking it killing both of us and I didn’t know the steps to any other spell that might help us achieve the same thing.

Nishi’s right. I had to work on my spell repertoire. There was going to be a point where I wouldn’t be able to rely on my unstructured magic, and if I didn’t learn more by then I was proper fucked.

That point wasn’t today, though. I slammed my fists into the ground, condensing my magic into solid points. I motioned towards the ground, and Inome’s magic followed, black magic darker than midnight coursing through the air and into the ground.

Underneath the point of impact, the floor fell away. Wooden panelling crumpled, revealing support beams that also withered away in a matter of seconds under the force of my raw magic. Sawdust flew into the air, and it too was caught by my magic and vaporized.

My oath wasn’t feeling as strong as it had been last night. Had it truly been that feeling of loneliness and failure that had given me oath alignment and strengthened me? What a shitty condition that was.

Still, it was strong enough. I’d opened a hole in the floor, jagged and roughly circular and large enough to fit a human body through.

Underneath us lay a room that hadn’t been touched by the battle. A kitchen, it looked like, one of the bare-bones ones with nothing more than a stove and a set of cabinets. Small enough that I was pretty sure I was going to land on the stove if I fell down.

“Is there a way out from that room?” I asked. “Or is it, at the very least, is at least one of its walls an exterior one?”

“Yes,” Orchid replied. “To the latter.”

Not to the former, then. That could be an issue.

Fuck it. The impacts were increasing in frequency and intensity. Whatever they were doing out there, it was slowly but surely working, and it wouldn’t be more than a few minutes before they broke through the shield.

“Drop,” I said. “It’s not that far. Only two meters or so onto the stove, if you can hit that.”

Orchid winced. “Alright.”

I went first, hopping into the hole without so much as a moment’s hesitation. As predicted, I did land on the stove first, but thankfully it wasn’t on and I didn’t land awkwardly. I absorbed the momentum, rolling off the stove and standing to my feet on the ground in one smooth motion. Aside froma little shock in my legs, that had gone about as well as could be reasonably expected.

Orchid, on the other hand, did not have as good a landing. He was unpracticed, I could tell, and his jump was an awkward affair. He hit the stove clumsily, and his descent to the floor was an uncontrolled fall rather than a roll.

“Ow,” he muttered.

“Great, you made it,” I said. “Don’t die on me yet.”

The first shield I’d cast was still up and still being hit, which meant that they had likely been too engaged in attempting to destroy it to realize that we’d dropped through the floor.

“Exterior wall, right?” I asked. “No escape routes?”

“If I had a hidden escape route,” Orchid started, cutting himself off as his voice grew scratchier.

“You would’ve used it already, right,” I finished. “Alright. Which one goes outside?”

He pointed at the wall opposite the stove.

“Thank the gods,” I muttered. “You don’t know how irritated I would’ve been if it was the stove.”

My shield was breaking, slowly but surely. I still had some time left on it, but I decided against trying to keep it up. I knew well enough that overcasting a spell was strenuous on an oathholder’s supply of magic.

“They’re in the room,” I said mildly, and then I punched the wall.

The magic came to me easily, but it still felt slow. Gods damn it all, why couldn’t I have stronger powers after I had reconciled with Jasmine and had a night-long session of bonding over the shared traumas in our past? Wasn’t that how it always went in those copper store novels?

At least the hole formed quickly. It wasn’t a pretty one—nothing touched by ruin was—but it would do the job. Large enough to crawl through, at least.

On the other side was the outdoors. This side of the house was awfully close to another building, the space between small enough that no commoners were awaiting us. A stroke of luck. I had honestly thought that I was going to have to fight my way out of here no matter how esoteric the escape route.

“You first,” I told Orchid. There were people stomping around right above us now. It was only a matter of moments before they would find the hole.

Orchid didn’t need to be told twice. He crawled through it, looking for all the world like an oversized baby trying to figure out how to walk.

I would’ve laughed, but there were more important issues to address right now.

The footsteps grew much louder, and I cast a shitty loose-frame shield just in time. A pair of boots stood above the hole from which we’d come through, the commoner above me having already committed to falling through it.

I considered fighting them. With my oath, it would’ve been laughably easy, but without was a bit of a different story.

No. I had to pick my fights. Violence for the sake of violence was… not conducive to my ultimate goal.

I squeezed through the hole, splinters of broken wood tickling my sides as I made it through.

On the other side, Orchid awaited me. The area between buildings was a tight fit, barely wide enough to fit a single person walking through sideways.

“What now?” he asked.

“Working on that.”

We were out of the house itself, but we weren’t quite out of the woods yet. There were more impacts at my shield, and this one was far less sturdy than the previous one had been. The pair of people that had just entered the room we’d been in were going to catch up to us pretty soon. On top of that, if the pattern I’d seen earlier held, we’d still be getting a trickle of people coming towards us.

Not a hopeless situation, not by a long shot. I still had my ability to cast a [QUERY] in my back pocket, but that wouldn’t need to be deployed here. I hoped.

What do I need to accomplish, and how can I do that? Asking myself that question always helped orient my response to any given situation. Identify a win condition and a failure state.

The failure state was pretty obvious. Having either me or Orchard die or get captured before we could get to safety would be a critical failure.

As for a win state… saying “get to safety” was easy enough to say, but these goals needed to be specific.

I was reasonably sure that if we made it back to the noble sector in one piece, the commoners wouldn’t dare invade for fear of the guards there. I’d heard from Jasmine that the guards had been intentionally sabotaged during the night of the royal ball, so their true power was more than enough to hold a mob of commoners at bay.

That had a number of issues with it, though. For one, these commoners were scarily well-trained. For another, Orchid had apparently fled the Alzaq household, and I was a fucking Byron. The only family I could go to was Jasmine’s, but while I trusted Jasmine and thought her parents were generally decent people, there was less than zero guarantee that they would trust me enough to allow me to bring in a potentially hostile noble from a House that had just plotted treason.

There was only one real option left for the win condition, then. If we could get within a reasonable range of the area that Jasmine and the others had chosen to meet up, we would probably be safe from further civilian attack.

Alright. As to how to accomplish that… I knew where we had to go. Traversing Dakheng with Orchid’s very own adventuring team this past week had informed me of the layout of much of the city, including where we were to be meeting. It was a solid kilometer away from where we were on foot, which was going to be a bit of a pain if we were being actively chased.

Nothing to be done about it.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Follow me. You can still run, yes?”

“Can do,” he replied, wincing again.

I started running, my heading the opposite direction of the path I’d come in from with Nek and his little squad.

Orchid could keep up with me, at least. That was good to know. Given the state of his throat, though, he would probably be useless in a fight. He’d used amplifiers of some sort—I wasn’t fully aware of the current level of technology managed by Aedi oathholders, but it certainly sounded plausible—and yet he had still worn his voice and magic down to the point of near-death. That wasn’t someone that was going to be able to continue providing support.

Thankfully, his legs still served him well. I maintained a brisk pace, not quite a full sprint but faster than a casual jog as well, and he kept up with some effort.

When we’d gotten here, I’d had the impression that the entire house had been encircled. Thank the gods, that impression had been wrong at least in part. The back alley that we ran down, a little wider now that we’d gotten away from the immediate vicinity of the house, now was totally unpopulated, though it looked like some people had stepped foot in here. The house didn’t have an entrance on this end, which probably gave reason to that emptiness.

It wasn’t going to remain that way for long, though. My shield grew weaker as I drew away from it, and soon enough the thing shattered under the force of the blows.

We’d made it a solid hundred meters or so from the house, at least. Far enough away that we were going to be able to split off into side streets soon. Still, it was less of a buffer than I would have liked.

“We’re going to have company,” I said.

“Fantastic,” Orchid said.

No other words from him. I suspected it wasn’t for a lack of things to say.

“I have this really fucking annoying bout of morals going on,” I said, not talking to anyone in particular, “No thanks to a certain Rayes noble. That means I’m not going to be killing any of these fuckers, much as it would make our lives a lot easier.”

Orchid didn’t say anything, and I guessed I shouldn’t have been expecting anything.

“The point is,” I said, “We’re going to turn into that first side street ahead, but the people are going to start chasing us first. Use my shields, don’t do stupid shit."

“Yes,” Orchid said tersely. Limiting his words.

The street ahead of us split off at multiple points. It wasn’t a particularly large street, so the connections weren’t all that numerous, but I was fairly sure I knew that the first alley that split off to the left connected to a main street. I wasn’t familiar enough with Dakheng’s back roads to be comfortable with running around the alleyways the entire time, so that was where I was headed.

Unfortunately, the first pair of commoners had busted their way out of the household. We weren’t all too hard to find, given the gaping hole that led into the alleyway that led to us.

Fortuantely, I was pretty sure they had no ranged weapons, so they were being reduced to sprinting after us and trying to catch up.

The alleyway still wasn’t that wide, I noted. Wide enough across that both of us could sprint side by side, yes, but not much wider.

“Continue on to the first turn on your left,” I said. “I’m going to cast.”

“Yes,” Orchid acknowledged.

He continued onwards as I turned around.

I had, intentionally or not, stumbled into control of the situation. A long, narrow hallway against people without ranged weapons? It was a trivially easy fight. Like shooting fish in a barrel—no, no, I didn’t want to do that.

Fucking morals.

Still, I had control over the fight here, and that was what mattered.

I cast slowly and steadily, ensuring my control over the spell was perfect. I let the frame stay loose, but I kept that looseness organized, not the messy, uncontrolled chaos that had become my usual for loose-frames.

The spell expanded quickly after the spark, a dark wall of force that was wide enough to encompass the entirety of the alleyway. Just to ensure that it would block the path off, I angled the top of it ever so slightly towards our attackers, ensuring that there would be no attempt at using it like a ramp.

“We’re clear,” I told Orchid. “C’mon, let’s go.”

They wouldn’t be breaking through for a solid while now. Orchid and I would be travelling on foot, which brought the potential for more attacks, but I suspected their frequency would die down. The bulk of them had come to attack his safe house, and now that we’d evacuated there were any number of places we could be and any number of paths we were going to take.

“Where are we going?” Orchid asked as we made our way through the last dim alley. Ahead of us, I could see another main road. Largely deserted, thank the gods, and it would lead us to our final destination.

“A warehouse,” I said. “One that should be awfully familiar to you, given that you fucking attacked it yourself.”

Even with his voice as damaged as it was, he didn’t seem to want to take that one lying down. “That wasn’t—“

“Save it,” I snapped, smoothing down my clothes. There wasn’t anything I could do about Orchid’s bloodstains, but I could keep myself from being too unkempt. “Also, strip out of the bloody noble uniform.”

“Right,” he said, like he’d only just realized he was wearing it. Nobles.

At least he had an undershirt and pants underneath.

“So—“

“No,” I cut him off, my voice as frigid as ice. “I can’t take anything you’ve said at face value. Not with the limited social expertise I have.”

“Then—“

“We’re going to go meet with some, uh, friends of mine,” I said, my throat catching on the word friends. “Then judgment will be passed.”