System Report:

  Knife

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  “Why didn’t you save me?”

  Her sister’s accusation came, like it had for every waking minute since she lost her, from a world away. A world she could no longer reach.

  She could see her there, at the end of the pier, where the sea rose into a wall of teeth. Cold, slithering tentacles that ran along the splintering wood, slowly enveloping Jodi’s legs, pulling her further, and further away no matter how fast Alana ran.

  Her sister’s voice, so small against the noise of the wind and teeth and a world that seemed to hate them:

  “I thought it was the duty of the older sister to—”

  As the maw slammed shut, Alana’s breath caught, and the rain resumed roaring down once more. A cold, dark church rose before her.

  Her fingers dug deeper into the raw place where that stupid priest had punched a hole through her side, making the pain more than imagined. Making the void feel all that more tangible.

  “It’s her fault,” she hissed under her breath, as if ghosts could hear her. “All her damned fault. She’s the one who didn’t want to save you…”

  Cold droplets tracked down Alana’s arms; the rain working its way into bone as if it had a grudge against warmth. Even here, away from the worst of the church’s maddening whispers, the sickly green Core lingered at the backs of her eyelids.

  “Probably wants all of you dead,” the ghosts seemed to answer. “Stop her… stop her before it’s too late…”

  Her eyes snapped open, and there she was: Yenna, alone in the rain, looking up at the church as if willpower alone could bring it down.

  “All her fault,” her sister repeated into her ears. “If only it weren’t for that bitch…”

  Her fingers found the knife, closing around the handle with the kind of certainty that comes only after every other choice has gone dull.

  ***

  Yenna was doing her level best not to be distracted by the escalating brawl inside the church. Which was difficult, because the escalating brawl inside the church was doing its level best to be noticed.

  Bellowing roars rattled what was left of the stained glass windows; hurried screams mixed with furious commandments, sounding like they came from all the wrong sort of holy book; and then there was the exploding masonry, crackling fire, and the sort of blood-drenched gargles that suggested something was either dying, or practicing very hard for the moment they would die.

  She closed her eyes, hoping to shut out the dancing shadows of the carnage ahead of her. It helped a little. She tried to focus on breathing, forcing it into something resembling a steady rhythm. That did… less.

  But there had to be some mana left somewhere—tucked away, overlooked, hiding somewhere she’d yet to look. Her arms tightened around her satchel, but it remained obstinately silent. Had she truly used up everything?

  Rain hammered down around her, like a million tiny reminders that the world didn’t care whether she found her strength again or not.

  Whether she noticed the shadow sliding up behind her.

  She didn’t hear the footsteps, only the faint rustle of movement as it was already behind her. Opening her eyes, Yenna turned, “Ala—”

  A sharp sting cut off her words. Something warm began gushing down her side.

  “—na?”

  Her breath snagged in her throat as the other woman yanked the knife free and drove it in again.

  “It’s all your fault,” Alana hissed, her face just inches away. Her eyes were hollow, distant, focused on a world Yenna clearly wasn’t invited to. “All of this is your fucking fault. You’re the one who made us come to Ashenmoor…”

  Yenna grabbed desperately at Alana’s wrist—anything to stop the knife from coming out and finding a new home in her ribs. Pain radiated up her side, sharp and insistent, making it hard to think, hard to breathe, hard to be anything other than a collection of regrets and stab wounds.

  Behind them, another deafening crash echoed through the pouring rain.

  Damn… it.

  Her promise. The church. She was supposed to bring the bloody thing down.

  Her vision began to bleed at the edges, like wet ink. Thoughts sloshed together into a senseless soup. She needed mana—just a spark, a thread, a something to pull on—

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  No. No, wait.

  She had just been stabbed.

  Alana had fucking stabbed her.

  The thought arrived late, panting and out of breath, as if it had been struggling to catch up with events. The pain was too much. Far too much.

  Her fingers dug deeper into Alana’s arm with desperate, animal strength.

  Mana—she needed mana, she needed to fight, to survive—

  Deep inside her chest, something gave a slow, ominous thrum.

  Soul Drain:

  Alana hissed. “Hey, what… what the fuck are you doing?” There was a crack of panic in her voice.

  Yenna could barely answer. She was losing her thoughts faster than the blood, and there was a lot of blood to compete with. The exhaustion was a physical thing now; an icy blanket settling over her shoulders.

  But the engine inside her chest—the thing she barely understood—was waking up.

  Activated

  “Hey, let… let me… go—”

  A sharp breath hissed between Yenna’s teeth.

  When her vision finally lurched back in ragged patches, Alana was already collapsed on the ground—pale, still, and terribly quiet. The world was a blur of motion and colour and pain. The knife, still buried in her side, made every breath a white-hot stab of agony.

  She grabbed it with trembling fingers and pulled. An unpleasant squelch, one she felt as much as she heard, and it came loose.

  The knife clattered to the street.

  Yenna gasped, swayed, the world tilting.

  Breathing became difficult. Thinking, even more so. Then—

  The sharp shatter of breaking glass.

  A shout cutting through the storm: “Now!”

  That one word hit her like a jolt of lightning.

  Yenna spun. Now. The one thing left to do before she stopped being capable of doing anything at all.

  The engine in her chest gave one final, furious roar.

  A crackling bloom of Spark Bolts flared into existence around her, snapping with electric fury. She didn’t so much aim as simply remember what needed destroying. Those smouldering beams high in the church ceiling—yes, those.

  The projectiles screamed through the rain like shrieking, vengeful fireworks.

  ***

  Lionel’s plan had been a simple one: distract, delay, conquer.

  A plan that, quite remarkably, worked almost too well when your partner happened to be a highly erratic Gremlin whose every next move seemed to defy not just expectation but basic laws of physics.

  Somewhere between watching her bounce between the legs of a roaring slug troll, narrowly dodging a particularly destructive blast of the High Priest’s sceptre, only to then have her hoodie caught by a violently swinging anchor, even Lionel gave up trying to figure out what, precisely, was going to happen next. He just witnessed Annabell get launched screaming into the air, narrowly avoiding the snapping Deep-ones that’d come swarming her way.

  His role, therefore, had been reduced to something resembling chaos management: milking the situation for all it was worth.

  A well-timed “Jump right!” left another pillar to meet its early end here; a daring taunt-sprint-vault caused a swarm of deep-sea monstrosities to slow the High Priest there; and just as Annabell sounded like a steam boiler on the verge of emotional meltdown—panting, shrieking, perhaps contemplating the meaning of life—he swooped in. Sliding under a rusted anchor and the boss-leg intent on skewering her to the floor, he yanked her along by her hood.

  There was, he reflected—mid spinning out of the way of two snapping shark-twins and narrowly darting past a lancing merthing—one definite perk to signing a Gremlin-sized Delver: surprisingly portable when the situation demanded it. The downside, naturally, was that the hissing, spitting, indignant bundle of fury he was hauling along did not, in fact, share his appreciation for logistics.

  Less so, admittedly, as Lionel launched her ahead of him—headfirst—through a stained-glass window and straight into the pelting, thoroughly judgmental rain.

  The distract and delay halves of his plan was over, and jumping after his Gremlin-shaped ram through the colourful shower of glass, all that was left was to put faith in the conquer half:

  “Now!” he yelled mid-air, only to feel a rare spark of relief as several shrieking Spark Bolts tore past them and into the rumbling church.

  Evidently, the waifish looking spellcaster packed rather more of a punch than he had anticipated.

  Lionel had barely caught himself in a slick roll across the cobble as a deafening explosion rattled through the building behind them, shaking it down to its very conscience.

  The church did not survive.

  To dust, to deafening cracks, to splintering stone, the towering, nightmare-behemoth that had haunted the seaside town since it came to be crashed down in spectacular, physics-defying ruin. It was the sort of collapse that would have, in most polite universes, instantly killed everything and anything unfortunate enough to be caught underneath it.

  Lionel, however, was not in the business of making assumptions. Already back on his feet, he asked, “Any notifications from the System if the thing is dead?”

  The young spellcaster he’d directed the question at looked like she might topple over from a stiff breeze. And with the rain still pelting down around them, he wasn’t even sure if she’d heard him.

  Her breathing was ragged, and an alarming amount of blood was sluicing between the fingers she clutched at her side.

  Even so, she managed a faint nod.

  “It… It tells us to get away from here. Quickly.”

  Lionel didn’t need to be told that twice. Even with the church having yet to fully settle into its new state of existence—heavy dust still clouding the air, and constant trickles of rubble coming loose—he could hear faint scrapes and gurgles escaping from between the stones. “Good job,” he said, entirely ignoring Annabell’s muffled:

  “What about me?”

  Unlike Lionel, who had landed with the grace of someone who practiced these sorts of thing, Annabell had greeted the street with the confidence of a suicidal belly-diver. She lay there, nose pressed into the rain-soaked cobbles, appearing to reconsider every single life choice that had brought her to this exact moment.

  Lionel stepped over, picked her up by the back of her sweater—she didn’t even bother fighting this time—and continued, “We better get moving then.”

  It wasn’t like he’d missed the growing puddle of blood at the spellcaster’s feet, forming faster than the rain could wash it away. He also saw the second woman lying lifeless nearby. But neither of them, at the moment, were his problem.

  Another figure was already racing through the cloud of dust stirred up by the crumbling church, iron candleholder at the ready. “You better take care of your friend and get moving,” he said to her in passing, already hauling Annabell down the street like a soggy sack of groceries—his pace steady and determined. “This isn’t over yet.”

  He didn’t know what, exactly, was coming, but when the System told you to move quickly: you moved quickly.

  This was, indeed, not over yet.