Early in the morning, when the sun was still down, I awoke in my bed. I hadn’t been dreaming, nor did I hear anything, but something had set me on edge. Not a thought or a calculation from my rational mind, but a primal instinct from deep in the human body I resided in. For a few minutes, I sat and listened, hearing nothing but the regular noise of the street and the muffled sounds of someone working in the kitchen of the inn. A few spots along my belly were itchy, so I scratched them and then rolled over onto my other side. Soon enough, my body relaxed and began to sleep again, but it didn’t quite reach the depths of rest it had been experiencing before.

In the blink of an eye, time passed, then I awoke again. Someone is outside, I thought, fatigue vanishing in a moment. The sounds of whispers and muffled footsteps from outside my door might have been too quiet for a normal human to hear, but they were clear to me. Rolling out of bed slowly, I gently stepped down to the floor and grabbed my sword. Meanwhile, I heard metallic chittering, then saw the locking mechanism of my door slowly opening up. Taking up a position in the room where I would be obscured as the door opened, I waited until the door began to open.

Instead of a human walking in, a hand moved in the dark, tossing an object into the room, then slamming the door shut. Instincts, older ones than my human ones threw me to the floor into a defensive position as far from the object as possible, and at the last moment, I remembered to protect my head instead of my core. A deafening thunderclap rang out just seconds later, its pressure wave tearing the bed and furniture of the room to pieces. My eardrums ruptured at the same time that I felt small, sharp impacts along my left side, then the sting of rapid healing fixing the damage they inflicted.

I couldn’t hear much while my ears were fixing themselves, but a basic check of my limbs showed that I was fully functional. The bomb had blown out a section of the ceiling, letting moonlight and the smoky aftermath of the detonation mix together into a thick haze. I wasn’t sure if the attackers thought I was dead, and pieces of bedding were covering a fair portion of my body, so I remained still and waited for my hearing to come back. When it did, the first thing I heard was the door opening behind me, then falling off its hinges.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched two robed figures with scimitar-like weapons slowly walk into the room. Not experienced with breaching, I thought, noting that they weren’t covering each other’s sight lines at all, nor were they standing ready for combat. Closing my eyes and letting my body go slack, I held my breath and waited to see what they would do. After a few moments, one grunted, then I heard both walk up to me.

“What a fearsome jhaoyeyl,” one snorted. Male, possibly young due to higher vocal pitch, I noted.

“Check him,” the other replied. Female, deep but not raspy like Vaozey, I thought. Cold steel sunk into my back just under my right shoulder blade, then twisted around. Though I felt the urge to cough, it wasn’t bad enough to make me break my façade. The metal withdrew and my wounds began to close, though just as I was ready to spring into action something unexpected happened.

“He’s dead,” the man said. What? I wondered for a moment before realizing what was happening. He was expecting me to react to the pain, I thought, he can’t see my body well because I’m covered in dirt and debris.

“Take his head to be sure, then we return to the master,” the woman replied. With a grunt, I heard the male bend down, then felt hands trying to flip me over and move my arms away from my head. My lungs were burning from a lack of oxygen, but I held on until the man flipped me over before finally opening my eyes and inhaling again. The face I saw looking back at me, clean-shaven and barely older than an adolescent, froze in shock when our eyes met.

“He’s not-!” the man tried to yell before my fist crushed his right orbital bone. Grabbing him while he was stunned, I flipped him around to use his body as a human shield. The woman, who for some reason had been looking away initially, turned around with her weapon drawn while I cooked the man’s brain. She too froze in place, unsure of what to do, which allowed me to create an opportunity to get to my feet by throwing the man’s corpse at her.

My sword was in hand before I was even on my feet, swinging with full force in a horizontal line from left to right. The woman had no idea how to use a sword, and my blade entered her body just above her right hip, splitting flesh until it exited at the same height on her left. Because of the distance between us, the cut was shallower than usual and didn’t reach her spine, but it was still deep enough to spill her guts on the floor. Screaming in pain, she fell to the floor, trying to put everything back inside before her magic sealed the wounds. I lined up an overhead chop, then split her skull, spewing hot blood all over myself and the room, ending her life.

Inhaling a deep breath filled with the smell of blood and burning chemicals, I looked for more attackers, knowing the noise should have drawn their attention. When none came after a few seconds, my mind started to process the situation, thinking in words instead of impulses. Rehvite assassins, I thought, some kind of grenade, though not a very powerful or well-designed one. What is going on here? Moreover, who leaked my location? In a moment of rationality, I grabbed the man’s corpse and wrestled off his robe, then wrapped myself in it. While there was no way anyone would mistake me for him, even a second of enemy confusion was a valuable tactical advantage. Before exiting my room, I forced the blood out of my lungs, ensuring I wouldn’t cough at an inopportune time.

Behind the inn, there was a small courtyard arena, about twenty meters by twenty meters, lined on every side by buildings. Another building had likely occupied the area at some point, but it had been torn down leaving nothing but hard-packed dirt behind. When I poked my head out of the doorway to see what was going on outside, I saw that people were already gathering in the area, startled by the sound of the explosion, and possibly the screaming as well. At the sight of me in the assassin’s robes, a number of them pointed and began shouting, then the group started to run.

Wherever Vaozey was, she wasn’t visible, and before I could think to enter her room I saw a lone figure standing on the roof of the building directly across the courtyard from me. Though it was dark outside, I recognized the object in the figure’s hand, and I was already moving when it was launched at me, jumping over the railing in front of me and down into the courtyard. Another grenade exploded where I had been standing, tearing apart pieces of the walkway and showering me with wooden splinters.

Possibly because it was out of explosives, the figure didn’t make any other form of ranged attack. Instead, after a moment, it simply stepped over the edge of the building it was standing on and walked down the wall, as though gravity had shifted ninety degrees for a moment to allow it to stand upon the vertical surface. When it reached the ground, it stepped off the wall, nonchalantly touching the ground ten meters in front of where I now stood. I knew what it must have done to perform such a feat, but I had no idea how it managed to pull it off.

The figure, clearly a man from its build, wore a robe much like the other two assassins. On its face was a mask, the design a strange mix of technological and ornate. What appeared to be a single piece of dark stained metal, roughly shaped to fit a human face, was covered in strange silver line patterns that almost resembled primitive circuitry. Around the mouth was an apparatus that resembled scuba gear, with two tubes that extended out of the mouthpiece horizontally to either side of the face, connecting to two metal cylinders that sat along the jawline. Just above the forehead, I could see short-clipped dark hair poking out. Inside the eyeholes, two crimson irises met mine.

“Where did you get those grenades?” I demanded, throwing off the robe I was using for disguise and pointing my weapon. The assassin said nothing in response, instead removing its own robe with magic and allowing it to fall to the ground. Underneath, he wore no armor, instead being covered in soft leather clothing and what appeared to be over a dozen small sheaths along the arms and torso. All at once, the flaps on the sheaths popped open, and bladed ovoid shards of metal levitated out of them. I watched in awe as the metal tools hovered into position along the outside edge of the assassin’s arms, taking on an appearance not unlike a line of steel feathers on either side of his body.

Without moving his legs, the assassin flew towards me, kicking up dust behind him. The feathers around his right arm repositioned as he moved, then swung four parallel slashes at me as he made a punching motion. I moved to block, then was nearly thrown to the ground by the sheer force of the impact, which was twice or more what I was expecting. A follow-up strike quickly came from the left and though I had moved to evade the feathers cut deeply into my side, passing through my gambeson as though it wasn’t even there. The follow-up to that raked my left arm, and one after that tore into my right leg.

No matter how hard I tried to put distance between myself and the assassin, I couldn’t get away from him. It was as though he was standing on a frictionless surface and moving with jets, the motion of his feet only served to give him slight leverage to attack with and had nothing to do with his actual movement along the ground. Meanwhile, I was trapped by physics, being forced to scramble and twist to get out of the way of impossibly strong attacks, and being slowly torn to pieces as I failed to do so. The feathers could swing at any angle regardless of the assassin’s actual movements, often trying to pincer from three directions or more, making trying to block them a pointless task.

I need to get away from him or I’m going to die, I thought, he’s just playing with me, he could easily launch those feathers as projectiles, and from this range, I’d have no way to avoid them. Diving backwards through the air to save my neck from four simultaneous strikes, I flexed mentally to summon up light magic but kept it from manifesting right away. I need this to be as bright as possible, I said, not to myself but to the magic, if he can’t see me, he can’t hit me, and I can run away before he can recover. A tingling feeling ran down my left arm, changing into pinpricks of pain, and as my back hit the ground and the assassin slid up to me, I closed my eyes, turned my head, opened my hand, and manifested the effect.

Even through my eyelids, I was nearly blinded by the flash of light I produced. The first sound the assassin had made, a grunt of pain, indicated that it was hopefully as effective as I had hoped. I opened my eyes, barely able to see anything in the dark, and scrambled backwards just in time to avoid several launched feathers hitting my last location, then places along my retreat line. Blinking and willing my pupils to dilate faster, I saw the assassin standing in place, twitching his head from side to side. Slowly, I crouched down and grabbed some dirt from the ground, then tossed it to my left. Two feathers immediately flew from his right arm to the impact location, targeted at the perfect heights for a gut and heart shot on a human my size.

I can’t move, I realized, he only has maybe twenty of those feathers left, but he’s going to realize eventually that he didn’t get me with the initial throws, and that I’m just standing in place. No, I need to do something else to incapacitate him, and quickly, before his vision returns. A few seconds passed, agonizingly slow, as I tried to come up with a plan. I could hear the distant sounds of people in the streets, but I didn’t dare look away to see if anyone was coming to my aid. I could throw a knife at him, but it’s not going to do anything, I thought, if only I had a proper ranged electrosh-

As if suddenly downloaded into my mind, a plan emerged. Drawing a throwing knife, I changed it electrically, grounding the opposite charges safely. Then, I increased my hand’s resistance and levitated the knife above my palm. There’s no reason it shouldn’t keep the charge outside my range, I thought, air is a good insulator, I just need to not touch it and make sure it can’t shock me. He won’t see it coming, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t know what I was doing. I was reasonably sure the knife was as charged as my sword had been when I struck the steward, but I didn’t have time to confirm. I threw the knife, using force magic to ensure it flew like a dart, straight into the assassin’s chest.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected to happen, but it wasn’t what happened. The instant the knife pierced his clothing, the assassin burbled out a strange-sounding scream, and all of his metal feathers clattered to the ground. In one moment I had a choice of running away or attacking, and before I could think my brain chose to attack. The assassin stumbled on his feet, somehow still upright, as I rushed toward him. With all my might, I swung my sword to cut his head off, knowing he might have a force magic shield of some kind and hoping I could overcome it with raw power. Just before impact, our eyes met, and I saw his pupil twitch to focus on me.

Like I struck a piece of metal, my sword twisted in my hands, turning a lateral strike into one going upwards at forty-five degrees. Still, the assassin wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid the attack entirely, and my sword connected with the left side of his face, cutting into his mask, tearing off his ear, and knocking him back as it scraped along his skull. I tried to follow up by immediately forcing my momentum to reverse into a rough overhead chop, but surprisingly the assassin jumped back a few meters, grasping at the wound on his face.

Four more feathers levitated out of holsters on the assassin’s back, longer than the others and more curved, taking up places on either side of his hands. Then, the blades beside his right hand folded back, and he reached up to his face, pulling off the now-damaged mask and dropping it on the ground. A pale face, strangely familiar, stared back at me, blood oozing from its left eye and mouth. The wounds were superficial, but judging by his eye movements he still couldn’t see very well.

“I should have killed you when we first met,” the assassin growled, and after hearing his voice I finally remembered where I had seen him before. On Awsriyah Island, he was the Rehvite I shared a meal with in the woods, I realized.

“More people are coming, I can hear them,” I replied. “You’re out of grenades, you can’t see anything, you won’t be killing anyone.” The blades on the man’s right arm snapped back down into position menacingly in response.

“Your false miracle will not save you, jhaoyeyl,” he spat back. “Neither will your stolen knowledge of holy weapons. I can dispose of you at my leisure.”

“And yet, you haven’t,” I countered, kicking some of the metal feathers on the ground away so it would be harder for him to re-collect all of them. “Jhaoyeyl, I’ve heard that word a number of times now. What does it mean?” My left hand moved slowly, taking up position behind my back while I kept the assassin distracted.

“A thing like you believe it can make a request of a holy being like me?” the assassin scoffed. “Had Rehv’s command not been for me to treat you as a traveler when we met, I could have dissected you to sate my own curiosity as to how such a disgusting abomination can disguise itself as a human. You should value every word I speak to you as though it is made of gold, for all of them are worth infinitely more than your life.”

“The weakest dog has the loudest bark,” I said in English, remembering a very old saying. “You act like you have the advantage, yet you haven’t even moved from that spot. Could it be that you’re just buying time? Have your eyes recovered yet? Probably not.” As I spoke, I was charging up another throwing knife, dumping much more energy into it than I had with the previous one.

“For the sake of whatever you have in place of a soul, confess to me now: which god sent you to our world?” the assassin demanded.

“I wasn’t sent here by a god,” I replied, beads of sweat forming on my forehead from the effort of using so much magic power while speaking.

“There is no need to spin such obvious lies, even if they come naturally to you,” the assassin countered. “Do you fear what your master will do to you upon failure? Rehv can be merciful if you choose to serve him instead. We already know that you were sent here by a god, we simply need to know which god, and why.”

“I thought Rehv was supposed to control everything in this world,” I shot back. The charge in the knife was growing so large that I could feel the static all along the skin of my back and even my thighs. “Except, that isn’t right, is it? Owsahlk didn’t happen as your people expected it to, and if Rehv controlled everything as you say, I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

“Raev ngvaazseyyao!” the assassin swore.

“Ask Rehv if you want to know something,” I suggested. “After all, controlling everything necessitates knowing everything. You shouldn’t need to ask me anything, unless Rehv isn’t as powerful as you seem to think he is. In fact, why don’t we ask him together? You can show me how you talk to him.”

The assassin moved to attack me, and I moved to throw my knife. I watched as his eyes struggled, then found it in midair as he moved towards me. Using his blades, he tried to slap it out of the air, but the instant he made contact with it a small thunderclap rang out, and a bolt of electricity jumped from the curved blade to his arm. The sliding motion the assassin was making along the ground abruptly stopped, and he faceplanted, curved blades flying out of his reach. As I dashed up to him, he twitched ineffectually, unable to move his body to rise from the ground.

“You even twist the holiest of magics, despicable jhaoyeyl,” he slurred as I stood over him, lining up a strike to cut his head off. “The loss is mine for underestimating you due to my pride. Yet, you have won nothing. Your foolishness and desire for battle have been your undoing, and this world will once again be clean.” For some reason, the words made me pause and notice something in my peripheral. Standing on a nearby roof, there was another figure that I hadn’t seen before. Though it was too far to make out clearly, I could see that it appeared to be holding its hands near its chest, head bowed as though it was praying.

Before I could form another thought, or bring my sword down, there was a deep thunderclap and an explosion so powerful it threw me some distance through the air, though in what direction I couldn’t tell. The world spun and spun, and I couldn’t feel my body let alone make sense of my surroundings. Time started to feel slippery. A feeling, hands reaching into my gambeson and pulling something out, reached my consciousness. Then yelling, metal on metal, another explosion, and finally silence.

I couldn’t draw breath for some time, though exactly how long I wasn’t sure. Right arm hit, my own voice said in the background of my mind, pain minimal, light damage expected. Eardrums ruptured, eyes have sustained damage from pressure wave. High likelihood of death if I remain on the ground, retreat is best option, unit survival is currently required for completion of mission.

At last, my chest felt as though it could inflate, and I took a raggedy breath, choking on the fresh air. It seemed like I didn’t get as much air as I expected, and when I exhaled I had to hold on to consciousness to avoid slipping away. Brain damage? I wondered, before a gentle gust of night air chilled me to the bone, contrasting the boiling hot liquid I was laying in. Only then did the smell of it reach my nose, and only then did I realize that all of the blood was mine.