Rita wasn’t sure whether to feel elated or mortified.

On the one hand, she was stuck in a narrow alley with unnaturally and bizarrely smooth walls that she still didn’t know the cause of, but at the same time, she didn’t really have the attention to spare to figure it. In the mouth of the alley stood the Mitlan Inquisitor. And, presumably, he was here to kill her.

On the other, Alice was alive! Ixxy’s treatment had worked!

And she was back just in time to watch Rita get them both killed. Shit.

“Alice!” Rita muttered under her breath, a smile breaking out on her face despite the situation.

“What’s going on? Where are we? Who’s he?” Alice spoke in Rita’s mind. “And why are we starving??”

“We don’t have time, he’s trying to kill us,” Rita muttered again.

“Praying for whatever dark god you follow will not save you,” the Inquisitor spoke as he slowly approached, sword by his side.

“Stay back!” Rita snarled, taking a step back and brandishing her spear, tip pointed at his face.

His eyes flickered down to her spear and back up to her face without breaking stride. Clearly, he didn’t consider her or her weapon a threat. It was quite possible he was right. She’d seen him get blasted by a beam of light brighter than the sun, yet somehow, here he was, seemingly unharmed. Nothing she could do could compare to that.

It wasn’t fair. Gods were bullshit.

“Stop backing away! You’re just going to trap yourself against the back wall!” Alice shouted in her brain.

Rita stopped. Alice was right. She couldn’t just keep backing away, she was just letting him drive her deeper into the alley until she had the wall to her back and then she was going to have to fight anyway. Better to do it now while she still had some room to work with.

Rita lowered her spear, pointing it directly at his heart and planted her feet, taking the stance that she’d worked out together with Samual. Of course, she’d just seen this guy mop the floor with Samual, so she wasn’t holding out much hope.

The Inquisitor didn’t stop. He just kept walking forward, his sword coming up almost lazily.

Up until now, all of her training with her spear had been nothing but theory. A hypothetical thing that she’d never truly believed was going to come to pass, despite how dangerous the city was. Secretly, she’d figured that anything weak enough that she stood a chance of actually fighting it off, like ordinary muggers and such like, were going to be scared off by her monstrous, spidery ass and anything else was likely to be so overwhelming that trying to poke it with a spear would be a exercise in futility.

Yet here she was. Having to fight for her life against not just some random nobody, but against the very Inquisitor that had been hounding her since she’d left the Nightmare.

Why couldn’t he just leave her alone?

Her grip tightened on the spear.

The problem wasn’t so much the technique. Sure, there was some technique to stabbing someone with a spear, how you gripped the thing, how you moved, etcetera. But the basics could be picked up in an afternoon, she’d discovered, even if you didn’t have any particular natural talent.

No, the problem was a bit more significant.

During training, when she’d first started sparring with Samual, every time she’d strike out at him, despite only using a blunted stick, she’d pulled her blow up short, trying not to hurt him. It hadn’t even been intentional or anything, just a reflex. Mental conditioning from her memories of the before-time, back on Earth, better suited to living in safe, comfortable living conditions where personal protection was delegated to a combination of an iron-clad social contract and a professional force of enforcing police. Where it was more important for personal survival not to seriously injure a complete stranger by accident than it was to be able to defend yourself against said stranger trying to hurt you.

She’d picked up the fundamentals of spear-fighting in a few hours, but it had taken Samual days of drilling to break her of the habit of pulling her blows. To get her to actually try to hurt him.

That had been with a blunted practice-stick. Now she had her actual spear from inside the Nightmare, something sharp and dangerous and, if Samual was correct, carrying some kind of deadly poison. And in front of her, an older man, armed, but not armoured.

Threatening was one thing, but if it came down to it, could she do it? Could she stab another living creature? Another person?

She didn’t want to hurt the Inquisitor. He scared her, yes. Terrified her, even. But she didn’t actually hold any malice towards him. If he turned around right then, and she knew for a fact he wasn’t going to be coming back, she’d happily let him go, even going so far as to wish him well on his journey, despite what he’d put her through.

Heck, she’d swallow her fear and hug him goodbye if that was what was required, and she was certain that that wasn’t going to get her stabbed. It wasn’t as if he’d ever actually really hurt her, psychological damage aside.

Unfortunately, he did not seem interested in giving her an option, his determined steps echoing across the stone of the little alley she found herself in. It was clear he wasn’t going to simply stop and turn around.

This was going to be kill or be killed… and Rita wasn’t sure she had it in her to kill. She simply wasn’t a violent person.

As the Inquisitor stepped inside her reach, Rita grit her teeth, forced herself not to clench her eyes shut like she’d done the first few times she’d sparred with Samual, and stabbed out towards him.

Inquisitor Patrus casually slapped her thrust to the side and Rita was forced to skitter backwards to prevent him getting inside her reach.

“Why did you hesitate?” a voice inside her head screamed. “I don’t know why this old man has to die but if you’re going to do it, DO IT RIGHT!”

“I can’t do it…” Rita whimpered under her breath.

It wasn’t just hesitation in hurting another person. It was facing someone she knew was intent on killing her. It was knowing that fucking up meant this old man was going to cut off her head. That every move she made was literally the difference between life or death and she had no idea what she was doing!

“FOR FUCK SAKES RITA!”

Rita found herself thrusting forward again, fueled by panic, as the Inquisitor stepped inside her reach again.

This time, at the exact moment she wanted to hesitate, torn on whether to follow through or pull back out of range of some kind of counterattack, caught by uncertainty and indecision and fear, something else took hold of her and pushed her through.

Alice.

Again, the old Inquisitor deflected her attack, pushing it off to the side, but this time he didn’t make it look quite so effortless. And when he moved to slip past her spear, he found that Rita had rapidly repositioned it to block his path.

Twice more he tried to push closer and slip past her defences, each time finding himself stymied by Rita’s coiled metal spear-tip heading towards his chest or stomach or neck.

Alice had never trained under Samual, she’d never practiced with a spear or drilled thrusts or stances or positioning. She hadn’t developed any kind of instincts or muscle memory of how to do it, but she could pick up on it when Rita was trying to overthink things, when fear made her indecisive, and she could simply push her through it.

Rita herself was hardly an expert at spear-fighting, even as she felt her movements settle smoothly into the routines and forms that she’d spent days practicing with Samual, but he’d taught her the fundamentals really well. And for fighting a single, unarmoured opponent in a narrow space with a reach advantage, the fundamentals were all she really needed.

She didn’t need to beat the old man. She didn’t even need to push him back. All she had to do was hold out until Gora got back and, hopefully, splattered him all over the weirdly smooth stone of the alley.

“We got him on the ropes!” Alice exulted inside Rita’s head as the old inquisitor was forced to take a step back by a particularly aggressive, Alice-driven sequence of thrusts.

“Alice, slow down!” Rita mumbled. “We just need to hold him off!”

“We can beat him!” Alice replied. “All we have to do…”

“Enough of this!” Inquisitor Patrus huffed, taking two steps back, out of their strike range. “This defiance of yours is pointless. I wanted to give you a clean death, but Mitla’s will cannot be denied. You have brought this on yourself.”

With that, he held out his sword in front of him, tip pointed towards Rita, as he fished out a small, carved, wooden idol from one of his pockets and held it in his other hand.

“Mitla,” he intoned religiously, and Rita’s eyes widened as blazing fire ignited along the length of his blade.

This was it. The same stupidly ridiculous thing he’d done outside the city, where he’d nearly cooked their entire group from like a hundred meters away. She could feel the heat from where she was, at least two paces away. There was no way she could get close enough to interrupt whatever it was he was doing. The heat would cook her.

Rita glanced around in panic, looking for some other way out, but no sudden, hidden entrances had appeared in the few moments she’d been focused on her fight. There was no escape.

“May Your will be done,” the Mitlan Inquisitor intoned, the flames pulsing along his sword. “Send forth Your blazing holy fire!”

For one, brief, split-second, the fire seemed to roil and seethe along his blade, as if it was drawing itself up for some purpose before… it just went out. All of it. Every lick of fire along the length of his blade just died. Instantly.

Both Rita and Patrus stared in shocked surprise at the inert length of sword-blade Patrus was still pointing ineffectually towards Rita.

“What? I don’t… how is this possible?” Patrus asked, shell-shocked. He held up the small figurine in his hand and scrutinized it, a puzzled expression on his face.

Rita just watched him silently.

“What’s going on?” Alice prodded in her head. “What’s he doing?”

“I think he’s trying to roast us,” she whispered softly out of the corner of her mouth.

The Inquisitor held out the little carving as he tried again.

“Mitla, bring forth Your light, Your fire, show this doubter Your power and let Your will be done!”

This time, nothing happened at all. Seconds passed and both Rita and the Inquisitor awaited in tense anticipation of some sort of effect, but the sword didn’t even burst into a candle flame.

“Having some performance trouble there? Don’t worry, it’s very common among older men,” Rita vaguely heard herself quip before she could catch herself.

If she hadn’t needed both hands to hold her spear properly, she would have clamped them to her mouth. Whether that had been Alice bubbling up from inside or the result of her own frustration and repressed terror she had no idea.

The Inquisitor’s face settled into a deep scowl as he glared at her. “Mockery will not save you, Monster,” he said. “This is an unexpected setback, but Mitla’s power lies beyond such petty limitations. As you shall soon discover! Mitla…”

This time, the Inquisitor didn’t even get further than a single word into his prayer before a loud crack echoed through the alley as his little carved, wooden figurine split, a huge crack running through it.

For a few seconds, neither of them moved, just staring at it.

“Now, Rita! Now is the time! Stab him! Do it! He’s distracted!”

Rita glanced up at the old man, now just staring at the cracked figurine in his hand in wordless horror. She felt the muscles in her arms tense slightly. Noticing her starting to move, the Inquisitor looked up as well, his face twisting into an angry snarl.

“You did this!” he growled, glaring at her and making Rita tense up behind her spear. “I don’t know how, but, somehow, you did this!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you old f-“ Rita began, but yelped in surprise as the Inquisitor’s sword came flying right at her.

Instead of trying to push past her spear again, he’d simply thrown his sword.

It wasn’t a throw like you’d see in the movies, where it would move like it had been fired out of a speargun, tip first, and embed itself half a meter into solid rock for some reason.

This was a more realistic throw for a weapon that was never designed to be thrown. It tumbled through the air a bit, slowly spinning end over end. Despite that, it was still a weighty, flying piece of metal with a number of sharp edges. Not something you want to be hit by if you could help it.

Fighting in the alley had been a relatively close to what Rita had trained for. A single enemy, coming from the front. She’d even had the alley walls to hem in her opponent, so she hadn’t needed to worry about being outflanked.

But Samual had never trained her on what to do when your opponent simply threw his sword at you!

With no trained muscle memory to fall back on, Rita reacted instinctively to the long, sharp piece of steel flying straight at her at her face. She raised her spear to block it yelping as it struck the haft of her weapon before clanging off against the side of the alley.

She immediately realized her error as the Inquisitor dove forward. She tried to scramble backwards and drop her spear back down, to interpose the tip between herself and her attacker as Samual had taught her, but the old man caught her spear right behind the tip as it came down, pushing it off to the side even as he drove forward, right at her.

His shoulder struck her midriff, momentarily driving the air out of her lungs with a ‘oof’. Despite having eight legs and weighing a bit more than she had as a human, his momentum nevertheless lifted her off her feet, picking up her front half in a two-armed tackle, before tipping her over onto her back, falling on top of her.

As she went down, the back of her spear caught against the floor and their combined weight ripped it out of her hands, sending it clattering off to the side.

Rita was struggling to worm her way out from under the gray-haired inquisitor when she felt strong hands clasp around her neck, threatening to wring the life out of her.

She immediately began struggling and kicking at his back, her sharp toe-claws tearing ragged gouges in his shirt and the skin beneath, but the man was angry beyond caring, his eyes wide with fanaticism and rage.

“Now you die, Monster!” Inquisitor Patrus roared.

Rita fought desperately for breath, scratching at the hands around her throat and the angry face hovering right above her. She just couldn’t get her legs levered under him to kick him off!

No, it was going to be okay. At any moment Samual or Gora or somebody was going to come charging into the alley and stab this guy in the back.

Right?

Right?

“FIGHT, RITA! FIGHT!” Alice screamed from inside her mind. Rita could feel her trying to help, trying to make her struggle and fight and claw just a little bit harder, but it was barely helping. She was still just too weak.

It did remind Rita that she still had one trick up her sleeve, though. She used them so rarely, that she’d completely forgotten about her fangs.

Her mouth yawned open as wide as she could and two pink appendages unfurled from within, snaking out and trying to impale the Inquisitor’s wrist.

Unfortunately, the angle was a little awkward, slowing her bite just a bit. Before she managed to sink her teeth into the man’s arm, one of his hands shot out and grabbed both of them.

Rita managed to suck in a breath of fresh air as she managed to momentarily loosen his grip on her neck, but almost immediately screamed it out in pain as her head was wrenched painfully to the side by her fangs.

Goddammit! And she’d just started to finish healing up from the last time she’d dislocated those things!

“Your mask of humanity falls, Monster!” Patrus roared again, spittle striking Rita on the cheek.

Then he adjusted his hand around her throat and despite her pulling with all of her might, she felt her airway being cut off again, her throat slowly being crushed.

Fuck! This couldn’t be happening! This couldn’t be happening!

Rita’s hand slapped down to the side, scraping against the smooth stone of the alley, desperately feeling for his sword, or the haft of her spear, or a rock, or something she could use to hurt him with more than her tiny little toe claws even now ripping bloody furrows in his back, but nothing was in reach.

The world was starting to turn hazy. Was this how she was going to die?

As her legs flailed, one of her knees struck something round and hard lying against the side of the alley.

Her spear!

Her back legs could rotate backwards just a bit more than the others, allowing her to just barely reach it with her feet. Two toes carefully reached around the haft…

With a flick of her leg, the spear slid along the wall of the alley, rear first towards her head.

She caught it just behind the middle, raising it up above her head and stabbing down towards Patrus, catching him in the upper thigh where he was kneeling over her, making him grunt in pain.

The curved blades bent under the impact, absorbing the blow, the small tip barely breaking skin before Patrus reacted. He released her throat, grabbing the haft of her spear just behind the tip and holding it fast, preventing her from pushing it any deeper.

With both his hands now occupied, Rita gasped and sputtered, gulping down air into her lungs. It was the sweetest air she’d ever tasted.

Inquisitor Patrus bared his teeth. “You have quite the sting, Monster, but it will not…”

She didn’t even let him finish before she grabbed the haft of her spear with both hands and twisted. Slick with a combination of sweat and blood, the haft turned smoothly even inside his hand.

The transforming tip punched clean through his leg.

This time, Patrus did scream. A loud, curdling cry of pain that echoed through the alley as he stumbled backwards and off of Rita in shock. He nearly yanked the spear out of her grip, but she just barely managed to hold on as it came free of his leg with a disgusting, wet slurping sound.

Rita pulled back the spear, twisting it back into its original configuration as she tried to ready it for another stab if the crazy inquisitor came back, but he was already limping away as fast his remaining leg could carry him.

Clearly, he’d had enough.

For a moment, Rita considered going after him. Finishing him off while he was weakened, but instead she collapsed onto her back, staring up at the sky.

She couldn’t do it. Not for any moral reason, that ship had sailed when the fucker had tried to choke her out. No, it was just that without the immediate threat of death, the adrenaline that had kept her going was wearing off and she was simply too tired to move.

“Alice?” she muttered.

“Yeah, I’m still here.”

“Just wondering why you didn’t scream at me to go after him.”

“Because I can feel how tired we are. This alley feels nice.”

“Mmm,” Rita grunted. It did feel nice not to have to move while her heart rate settled down from what felt like the high two-hundreds.

She’d done it. She’d fought off the Inquisitor. On her own. She’d survived!

“But you owe me so much explanation.”

“Mmm.”

“Like, why is the sky shrinking?”

Rita blinked.

It was true. The thin band of sky between the two buildings to her side was growing smaller.

Painfully, Rita levered herself upright and looked at the alley mouth where she’d come in by.

It was also growing narrower, the stone flowing like ooze to seal the entrance. Even as she watched, the two sides of the stone touched at ground level and the space around her darkened as the gap between the buildings disappeared.

By the time she’d managed to roll over and climbed to shaky legs, it was as if someone had pulled up a zipper on the gap between the buildings, all the way to the back wall, leaving her in complete, pitch darkness with nothing but her spear in her hand.

Well, fuck.

Eldric patted the wall next to him happily. What had once been an alley was completely sealed up, exactly as he’d planned it.

In fact, everything had gone exactly to plan. The diabolic cult had distracted the Cambion Delver, the Mitlan had occupied the spider’s remaining layers of protection and flushed her from her hiding spot and she’d fled exactly as he’d predicted.

If there was anything for him to criticize about his planning, it was that he’d overestimated the Krutean Champion’s capability. He’d expected him to at least be able to slow the Inquisitor down, but luckily the spider herself had been sufficiently capable of dealing with him at the end.

All in all, an extremely successful endeavor.

Except for the property damage. But nobody had mentioned that as an important measurement for success to him so it didn’t count. He hadn’t even included it in his calculations.

He cast his senses through the stone under his hand, his magic reaching out until it touched the hollow he’d left in the rock.

Good. The spider-woman was still alive, and had finally given up on flailing against the walls or punching holes in them using that odd, piercing weapon of hers. Wonderful. He’d expected a certain amount of panic as he wrapped the walls of stone around her, but he’d bargained on eventual acquiescence once she realized she wasn’t about to be crushed. It seemed his prediction had borne out.

It would have been most unfortunate if he spent all this effort to capture her, only for her to die from a panic-induced heart attack or something right at the finish line. Master Henry would have been quite upset. He’d been most insistent on taking her alive.

All that was left now was the slow process of moving the little air bubble containing his newest project back home. To Krii Tower.