The Enforcer fell apart.

  Not like a body collapsing under its own weight. Not like a man bleeding out on the cobblestones, twitching, gasping, grasping for the last dregs of life.

  Like a contract terminating.

  The cracks running through its smooth, faceless head deepened, jagged fault lines splitting outward with a dreadful, methodical precision, as if the very concept of its existence was being revoked, clause by clause. It did not bleed. It did not scream. It did not rage against its undoing.

  It simply broke.

  A silent, irreversible unraveling. No flesh, no bone—only curling wisps of blackened parchment, flaking away, dissolving into nothing before they could so much as touch the ground.

  Dante stood amidst the remnants of the battle, chest heaving, his right arm still shrouded in seething shadow, tendrils of darkness curling off his skin like embers from a dying fire. His knuckles throbbed with a dull, insistent ache. His bones felt wrong—as if they had been hollowed out, stretched like parchment pulled too thin, made brittle by forces he barely understood.

  But he’d won.

  He was alive.

  A shaky breath escaped his lips, and he forced himself upright, shaking off the lingering tremors of exertion. Around him, the Undermarket was silent, still, its denizens frozen in brief, wary observation. Then, as if responding to some unspoken signal, the moment passed.

  Business resumed.

  No applause. No gasps of awe or horror. No acknowledgment that, for a brief instant, something monstrous had come undone before their eyes.

  To them, it was just another transaction completed, another obligation fulfilled. The Enforcer’s collapse was no different from ink drying on a finalized deal—inevitable, unremarkable, and ultimately irrelevant to anyone not directly invested in the outcome. There was no reverence for what had just transpired, no moment of reflection for the thing that had ceased to be. If anything, a few of the Pactmakers barely spared a glance before returning to their haggling, their whispered negotiations, their quiet, ruthless exchanges of power. Life in the Undermarket did not pause for the vanquishing of a single, solitary enforcer of the old laws. It simply moved on.

  A hunched figure in a coat stitched from a dozen different fabrics idly scraped at the ground where the Enforcer had stood, collecting whatever scraps of parchment had resisted total disintegration. Another, cloaked in veils of shifting color, let out an irritated sigh and rolled their eyes before vanishing into the crowd. A pair of merchants, their scales glinting dully in the dim light, murmured to each other in some forgotten tongue, neither impressed nor disturbed—only mildly inconvenienced by the brief interruption to their dealings. The air smelled of ink, of burning wax, of promises sealed and debts extracted, all swirling together in a heady, oppressive mix.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  And Dante, standing there in the middle of it all, felt the weight of that indifference settle into his bones. He had fought. He had bled. He had felt his body strain under the weight of borrowed power, stretched to the brink of breaking. And yet, in the grand calculus of the Undermarket, he was nothing new. Another desperate fool, another debtor playing a game far older and crueler than he could possibly comprehend. The knowledge curdled in his gut, leaving behind something hollow, something heavy. He swallowed against it, wiping the sweat from his brow, and forced himself to move.

  Because to them, this wasn’t special.

  This was just another day.

  Dante’s shoulders sagged. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, glancing toward the Broker, his breath still uneven. He forced out a wry, half-exhausted chuckle. “So, uh. Guess I—”

  And then his contract burned.

  Not the slow, simmering pulse he had felt before.

  It struck without warning, a jagged, lurching sensation that wasn’t just pain but loss. A violent, unseen force reached inside him, bypassing muscle and bone, ignoring flesh entirely, and took. It was like a limb severed without the courtesy of a wound, like a vital thread of his being had been yanked loose, unraveling something fundamental. His breath hitched, his vision swam, and for a terrible second, the world felt wrong—tilted, unsteady, like reality itself had lurched to accommodate whatever had just been stolen from him.

  Dante staggered, his fingers clawing at his chest, desperate to hold onto something—anything—that would ground him. But there was nothing to grasp, no wound to staunch, no gaping hole to explain the gnawing emptiness gnashing at his insides. His pulse thundered in his ears, pounding against his skull in a frantic, disoriented rhythm. The burning spread, not outward, but inward, sinking into his bones, threading through his veins, as if whatever had been taken had left behind an echo of itself—an absence so profound it had weight.

  And then, just as suddenly as it began, the sensation ebbed—not fading, not healing, but settling into something cold and immutable. The damage was done. Whatever the contract had claimed, it was already gone. He sucked in a shaky breath, forcing himself to focus, but even as he did, something felt off. Subtle, insidious, impossible to pinpoint, like standing in a room where something had been removed but he couldn't quite remember what it was. And that was the worst part—he didn’t know what to miss.

  This was searing.

  A shockwave of pure, unrelenting agony ripped through his chest, a deep, visceral sensation of something vital being pulled away, extracted, claimed.

  His vision blurred. His knees almost buckled.

  It wasn’t just pain—it was absence. A sensation so fundamentally wrong that his mind couldn’t even begin to process it. His hands shot to his chest, fingers clutching at the fabric of his coat as if he could physically hold himself together.

  He barely registered the glow of the contract before his eyes, its text shifting, warping, bleeding fresh ink into existence.

  Clause Activated: Initial Pact Expenditure

  Payment Due: One (1) Personal Asset

  Payment Collected.

  Dante’s stomach dropped.

  His hands trembled as he frantically searched himself—his fingers, his limbs, his mind. Checking, double-checking, desperate to find what had changed.

  Nothing seemed wrong.

  No physical pain. No missing fingers. No sudden, gaping void in his memory.

  But something was gone.

  He swallowed hard, his voice hoarse and uneven. “What... what did it take?”

  The Broker’s expression didn’t change, but there was something in his gaze—something knowing. Something dangerously close to amusement.

  He gestured vaguely, the motion casual, almost dismissive.

  “That, Dante…” he said, lips curling into a hint of a smirk. “…is for you to find out.”

  Dante’s breath hitched.

  His pulse pounded in his ears, a sharp, staccato rhythm of impending dread.

  "Oh, shit."