Chapter Eighteen

  (Nine Years Ago)

  Miranda eyed the rooftops as the city guard closed in on her.

  Tal'Rakkesh was a dense enough city that she could probably have traveled from one side to the other without ever touching the ground, and there was no way the guards would be able to keep up with her in their bulky armor and weapons. Five minutes of running, with some suitably impressive acrobatics thrown in for good measure, and she would be home free.

  But where was the fun in that?

  Grinning, she jumped down from the building she'd been perched on, landing directly in the middle of the growing crowd of onlookers. The ones closest to her tried to recoil, the scripts in their heads telling them it was time to act scared, but they were already packed so tightly together that the sudden movement caused them, guard and civilian alike, to start tripping over each other like human dominoes.

  Laughing in pure, almost childlike glee, Miranda took off down the street at a sprint. She could already hear even more guards tramping in her direction, and more voices soon joined the cries that were still ringing out behind her, quickly devolving into an incomprehensible cacophony of panic.

  “THIEF! HELP! GUARDS! SOMEBODY! GUARDS! SOMEBODY! THIEF! HELP! THIEF! HELP! GUARDS!”

  Miranda's heart beat in time with the slap of her slippers against the cobblestones. She didn’t need the Sable Troupe! She didn't need Sebastian or his so-called jokes. She didn't need anyone! As long as she was surrounded by fools with loose pockets, she had everything she needed to be happy.

  Sprinting down one of Tal'Rakkesh’s outdoor markets, she quickly wrapped half of her black scarf around her left wrist.

  “Grab!” she commanded it.

  The black length of cloth immediately sprang to life, rising up and drawing itself back like a snake waiting to strike. As soon as something came within reach, no matter what it was, the scarf would snap forward and snatch it away from its unlucky owner. A moment later, there would be a blue flash as it was thrown into her inventory with everything else.

  Grinning, she began lashing out in every direction with both hands, working with her scarf to lay claim to anything that was close enough to wrap her fingers around. She had no idea what she was stealing until after it had been stolen, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that she was a Thief in a city full of completely unprotected goodies!

  Notifications began to scroll through her vision like movie credits.

  SPOOL OF THREAD x1

  CABBAGE x1

  WICKER BASKET x1

  GOLD COINS x7

  LEFT SHOE x1

  UNCOOKED BEANS x46

  MANNEQUIN HEAD x1

  WOODEN LADLE x1

  With every item she took, more and more voices added themselves to the choir singing her praises. Forget Isandrel! Miranda Jackdaw was the only goddess in this city, and her victims were her faithful worshippers!

  She rounded the corner, reentering the bazaar proper, and immediately drove her knee into an oncoming guard’s gut. His armor kept him from losing any HP, but at level seven, her attacks were strong enough against a level zero NPC that she could force the System to pull some strings for her now and then. Even though he hadn’t really been hurt, the script in the guard’s head commanded him to fall to his knees and grasp his stomach in pain.

  Miranda barely paused, snatching the helmet from his head and continuing on her merry way. Up ahead, another group of guards were already spreading out to block the road with the speed and efficiency of a SWAT team.

  “Stop where you are, lawbreaking trash!” they all said in perfect, unnatural unison. “Nobody gets away with that in my—”

  She hurled the stolen helmet at them. In typical NPC fashion, the one in the lead didn’t so much as flinch as it came flying straight for him. It bounced off his forehead, metal ringing against metal, and he went staggering backwards as Miranda’s helmet—now sporting a dent the size of her fist—ricocheted back to her.

  The rest of the guards surged forward even as she grabbed the helmet out of the air. They came for her in a V-formation, the two guards in front moving to close the gap Miranda had created. Still running, Miranda drew her arm back and rolled the helmet toward them as if it were a bowling ball.

  “This is the part where you—” the new leader barked, only to abruptly swallow his words when his foot came down on top of the helmet.

  Like something out of a cartoon, his feet shot up into the air until he was almost parallel to the ground. He hit the ground with a clatter, and was soon joined by the men on his left and right as his spear and shield tripped them, who in turn tripped the guards to their left and right, until the once intimidating wall of men was nothing but a pile of metal and twitching limbs.

  Continuing to make her way across Tal'Rakkesh, it wasn’t long before even more guards were hot on her heels. Soon, Miranda found herself at a point where four roads intersected, and the telltale gleam of approaching armor came from all four directions.

  Miranda dug in her heels, skidding to a stop in the exact center of the intersection, and paused to take stock of her situation. The men closing in on her were still common city guards, but rather than charging at her with no regard for their own safety, they had actually gathered themselves up into a halfway decent formation.

  She didn't have time to count them all, but there had to be over a hundred of them. Standing side by side, they completely blocked each of the four roads, and stretched far enough backwards that even she couldn't have leaped over them.

  She glanced up at the rooftops. Too high to jump. Her scarf could have given her the extra reach she needed, but that wasn't going to help her here. The scarf was really flaming useful, but it was still just a length of fabric. It couldn't grip flat surfaces like a real hand could, which meant that if there wasn't something it could wrap itself around, activating it was just a waste of mana.

  Miranda grinned. It looked like the System had finally decided to take off the training gloves. If she wanted to get out of this with all her limbs still attached, she was going to need to be creative.

  Another glance around revealed an Oathchain bridging the gap between two of the buildings on her left. Without a moment's hesitation, she turned and dashed in that direction.

  “Stop where you are, lawbreaking trash!” the guards said in unison. “Nobody gets away with—”

  Miranda jumped! This street was narrow, with only about eight feet separating one side of the road from the other. Her foot struck the wall on her right, and she thrust off of it. The guards closest to her hastily thrust upwards with their spears, but she was already gone, flitting over the tops of their heads like a gnat.

  Her left foot connected with the opposite wall about four feet farther down the alley, and she launched herself off of it a second time.

  This was awkward, even to someone as dexterous as her. She had to focus most of her momentum into reaching the opposite wall, meaning she could only move a few feet down the alley at a time.

  She hit the wall a third time and thrust off again.

  Gravity wasn't going to tolerate her antics for a second longer than it had to, either. With each leap, her slippers had a harder time finding enough traction on the wall to push off of it again. There was no way she was going to get past the entire squad this way. She'd be lucky if she could manage one more jump before sliding down into the bristling nest of spears below.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  She looked up at the Oathchain again, time seeming to slow down as her brain kicked into high gear. Her eyes snapped downwards to the wall she was flying toward. If she hit there, then she would need to…

  Time sped back up. Her feet met the wall. Her knees bent. She thrust off, not going forward this time, but up. She was fighting gravity directly now, which meant she was going to get far less out of this jump than the others—and if she failed, there would be nothing to stop her from plunging straight down into the guards waiting below.

  If her grin got any wider, it would have split her face in half.

  The Oathchain glittered in the late morning sunlight, as if it were cheering her on during her dramatic escape. It sat suspended five feet above the rooftops, and twelve feet above Miranda's outstretched fingers.

  Come on, she urged herself. Just a little further!

  When the Oathchain was still eight feet above her, Miranda’s momentum ran out, and she felt herself begin to fall—

  “Grab!” she yelled.

  Her scarf came to life, instantly zeroing in on the chain and wrapping itself around the silver links. It went taut under her weight, and Miranda promptly kicked her legs out, swinging forward. She didn't need much momentum, just enough to put her above the house in front of her.

  “Release!” she said. The scarf did as commanded, and Miranda fell the few feet down toward the—

  Something appeared in her leg.

  It happened so fast that all she could feel was a distinct sense of wrongness. Something had made its way into her body that wasn’t supposed to be there. She looked down, and…

  Is that, she thought slowly, dumbfounded, an arrow?

  Before she could puzzle the situation out, the pain hit her all at once. A cry of pain welled up in her throat, only for it to be cut off when she landed on the roof. She had reflexively tried to put weight on her injured leg, and she collapsed onto the smooth clay shingles when the pain instantly became a hundred times worse.

  Then she began to slide.

  “No, no, no, no!” she screamed as she watched the ledge draw closer and closer—and the blank-faced guards that waited below.

  Pushing the pain from her mind as best she could, Miranda hurried to roll over onto her stomach. Her hand flashed blue as she summoned her iron dagger and wedged the iron blade between two of the shingles.

  She slowly came to a stop just a few scant inches from the edge of the roof.

  Gritting her teeth, she prepared for the grueling scramble back to the top of the roof, where she could buy herself a few seconds by sliding down the other—

  An arrow bounced off the tiles just a couple inches away from her hand. Another nearly struck her in the head half a second later, shattering and sending bits of wood and metal flying everywhere.

  “Ashes and flame!” she cursed.

  Bracing herself against the pain, she set her feet underneath her and scrambled up the side of the sloped roof with every ounce of strength she could muster.

  Her vision went white with agony, but she forced herself to think through it. Where was she? Not being able to see, she would have to rely on what she felt.

  Her fingertips told her when she had reached the top of the roof, and she instinctively grabbed hold of it. Then, with a grunt, she whipped herself up and over the peak—

  And began the even more painful trip back down the other side.

  There was nothing she could do except close her eyes and wait for it to end. After a few seconds—though it felt like an eternity—the clay shingles disappeared from underneath her, and were quickly replaced with the hard, sun-warmed cobblestones of the road below.

  “Nobody gets away with that in my city!”

  Breathing heavily, Miranda forced herself to sit up. Her vision was beginning to come back, but she was instantly returned to the white void when she grabbed hold of the arrow protruding from her ankle, and ripped it free. She was pretty sure she screamed louder at that moment than she ever had before, but she couldn’t be sure since her ears had suddenly stopped working as well.

  Move, move, move!

  Again, the world began to fade back into existence around her. The only thing she could hear was the pounding of her heart in her ears, but somehow she managed to force herself to her feet and limp into a nearby alleyway.

  Less than a second later, the street was flooded with guardsmen.

  “Ashes and flame,” she whispered, fighting the urge to throw up from the pain. “And things were going so well…”

  She opened her menu and began flipping through her inventory, looking for her health potions. She mentally kicked herself. How many times did she have to get into situations like this before she finally organized her stuff?

  Getting her leg healed was the obvious first step, but what about after that? There had to be at least four hundred guards searching for her, and that was just in this part of the city. Admittedly, they weren’t “searching” so much as they were “aimlessly pacing back and forth” but her chances of sneaking past every single one of them would be virtually zero even if she were in peak condition.

  Page after page of her inventory flashed past…and then she paused and scrolled back a page.

  The Avaricious Handmirror.

  A chill went down her spine. Could the solution to her problem really be that simple? All she had to do was shove that stupid mirror in someone’s face, steal their reflection, and waltz right out through the city gates—almost as if the System had planned this from the start.

  All it would cost was her pride as a Thief.

  Most people had no idea how thieving quests actually worked. They assumed that once the Thief managed to get away with their prize, the quest was over, and Miranda was happy to let them think that. No need to spoil the illusion by letting them know there was another, far less glamorous step in the process.

  Once the treasure was in their possession and they had thrown off any pursuit, the Thief would have a choice to make: keep it or sell it. If they decided to keep it, the treasure became theirs, along with whatever bonuses or skills that came with it, but they would lose the option to sell it—forever. They could give it away, or just drop it on the ground, but any merchant they tried to pawn it off on wouldn't even react to it.

  On the other hand, once they sold it, it was gone for good. Only Fences for the black market would buy stolen goods, and unlike every other living thing on Nyr, they didn’t have inventories. That meant that anything they took from you simply disappeared.

  Miranda assumed it was to keep Thieves from accumulating an endless supply of gold by selling the same treasure and then pickpocketing it back—not that she had tried it or anything.

  It was a system she had always been perfectly fine with. If the treasure could prove useful, she'd keep it. Pretty much her entire arsenal had been collected that way. If it wasn't something she could use, she'd pawn it off and then happily squander the money as quickly as possible so that she would have no choice but to go out and steal some more.

  But this…

  This was cheating.

  Using the Handmirror to escape would be too easy. What fun was there in simply walking past her enemies? Where was the excitement? The style? Wasn't the entire reason she'd caused a commotion in the Selenian Tower to avoid slipping away without any complications? Would she still be able to call herself the greatest Thief on Nyr if she had to resort to using such an obvious crutch?

  Would you rather be Nyr’s greatest corpse? she thought as her leg throbbed with pain again. She gritted her teeth, pushing back against the growing temptation with every ounce of her—

  “Stop where you are, lawbreaking trash!”

  Miranda spun around, wincing as she accidentally put weight on her injured leg again, and saw three guards sprinting down the alleyway toward her.

  “Ashes!”

  It looked like the decision had been made for her. With nowhere left to run, and no time to use the Handmirror, she only had one viable trick left up her sleeve. Moving quickly, she dove back into her inventory. A couple flicks of her wrist later, and she was holding the small cloth sack she had used back at the tower.

  AIRBURST BEADS x5

  Plucking one of the green glass beads from the bag, she raised her hand above her head and flung it to the ground at the same moment that all three guards thrust out with their spears.

  She gritted her teeth, refusing to cower or look away. If this was really where it all ended for her, she was going to face her final—

  The bead shattered against the ground, instantly spawning a tornado.

  It was wide enough that two Mirandas could have stood next to each other inside it, and so tall that it dwarfed the nearby buildings. Miranda only had a split second to admire her handiwork, though, before she was yanked inside the whirling cyclone.

  It happened so fast that even she, with her trained eyes, couldn't make out everything that was going on around her. She had no idea what became of the guardsmen who had just tried to attack her. All she knew was that they weren't inside the tornado with her as she was spun, flipped, and flung about like a ragdoll in a tumble dryer. Hopefully they were okay, but there wasn't much she could have done for them anyway, seeing how she was completely at the mercy of her own escape plan.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had all started, everything stopped. No, that wasn't accurate. The tornado was still going strong. She could see it in the distance, getting farther away by the second. She had just been ejected from it and sent flying across the—

  CRASH!

  Her back exploded with pain as she blasted through the window, shattering it into a thousand tiny pieces. She hit the ground half a second later, rolling and bouncing across the hard wooden floor in a tangle of limbs and agony, not stopping until she collided with the wall hard enough to knock a nearby painting off its hook.

  There, everything finally came to a stop, giving Miranda a chance to collect her thoughts…

  And realize just how much pain she was in.

  “Okay, not my best landing” she groaned weakly up to the ceiling. “But any landing you walk away from…”

  Sunlight streamed in through the window she'd just destroyed, illuminating the lumpy, straw-stuffed bed that sat below, covered in tiny shards of glass. A shoddy wooden wardrobe stood beside it.

  Miranda cocked her head, recognition dawning on her. This was one of the rooms at an inn called the Mythril Anvil. But for her to be here meant that the tornado must have flung her more than half a mile away…

  The floorboards behind her creaked.

  She wasn't alone.

  With adrenaline lighting up her veins, she spun around and found herself face to face with the room's occupant.

  TO BE CONTINUED 2/25/2026