Page 20

VS. Crescent Jezail

E utropia regarded Krahe with a questioning look that seemed to say,“Another fan?”

But as she approached, emerging into the pallid glow of a streetlamp, curiosity turned to recognition, and recognition turned to wide-eyed terror.

“Blackhand…” the girl muttered. She didn’t seem to even consider fleeing, merely backing up against the front door of her home.

“W-why’re you here? I… I’m not with Hashem anymore, I swear! I paid off my debt! I’m clean!”

. Oh, I’ve missed these reactions. Best thank Semzar for doing my PR.

Somewhat confused, Krahe asked, “Why do you think I’m here?”

“They say you used to run with the Hands of Purgation,” Eutropia said. She hastily shoved her keys into the door without ever turning around. She unlocked it, opened it, and slowly backed into her home. The whole time, she kept talking. “They say you’ve come back to take vengeance on the whole Hashem Family. But I—I swear, I’m not with them! I just… I just owed them and I did some work to repay it.”

She… wasn’t lying. At least, not as far as Krahe could tell. Though increasingly puzzled, she decided to play along, and followed her inside. This wasn’t a conversation to be had out in the open street if it could be helped, and Eutropia clearly understood that.

Krahe shut the door behind herself, leaning against it, leaving Barzai just outside to cover her blind spot—especially the rooftops.

“Did that work happen to include the killing of a Saurian street vendor? The one that blasted you with a reaper and set off Mistress Yao’s protection talisman?”

“How do you—”

“Answer the question.”

Krahe didn’t need to try to put an edge in her voice. Just interrupting Eutropia was enough to make her crumple. Well, she supposed it wasn’t too big a surprise. She was a hired killer, sure, but she had killed a civilian . Frankly, Krahe wasn’t sure why Yao had taken an interest in her or sold her that protective talisman.

“That…” Eutropia tensed up. “It was the last thing I did for him. I swear on my family name!”

“I don’t recall finding anything about a family name when I looked into you,” Krahe said plainly. Eutropia’s terror became tinged by shame.

“I… Well, I’m the eighth daughter of the Kartier Family’s Ulthar branch,” she admitted with a sad smile, averting her gaze. She didn’t seem to feel the need to elaborate, probably because there was none. The Kartiers were an ancient and absurdly wealthy family, with the core branch controlling all the businesses while the secondary branches specialized in a wide variety of research and development. It was such surface information that even a book on the general history of Afshan included it. They were, in every sense, old money.

Raising her eyes to look at Krahe again, she added, “I would swear that my family will reward you if you spare my life, but I would be lying to both of us. So, if you spare me, my family will not be able to use my death as an excuse if your interests ever conflict with theirs.”

“Point me to the one who hired you, and I’ll let you get away.”

“It was—”

“Shut up. I wasn’t finished. I’ll let you get away. Not let you go. You will vanish from Audunpoint and take only what you can carry. Make it look like someone made you disappear. Run off to Afshan or something, change your name, start another tribute band—Zavesh knows there’s a hundred of them just in this city. Someone wants you dead for that street merchant. So, Eutropia Kartier is dead starting today. Understand?”

Krahe had just guessed that part about tribute bands. She was sure Hot Legs would have no trouble finding another singer for their in-house band. Eutropia nodded along, both intimidated and relieved.

“I’m sure you can guess,” Eutropia said with a wry smile. “I can’t say who contacted me personally, but I’m deathly certain the man who gave the order was Semzar Hashem. The message was worded in an exceedingly him manner. Egotistical shit brat with less of a brain than the corpse he’s riding on any given month.”

As if on cue, Krahe saw a strange shape shimmering on a nearby rooftop through Barzai’s eyes—just the next street over and less than a hundred meters away. It was a human figure, one obscured somehow, and difficult to focus on. She noticed it due to the disturbance of the air around it; like overly aggressive active camo, standing out against a comparatively tranquil backdrop. There was a good chance she would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been actively scanning the rooftops, windows, and other such vantage points in Barzai’s field of view.

She would have warned Eutropia, if there had been time. The figure appeared on the roof one moment and the next, the cloak broke as the person underneath opened it to raise a long weapon into a crouched firing position. Through Barzai’s superior vision, Krahe was able to catch the shape of Crescent Jezail’s eponymous weapon.

There were all of four, perhaps five seconds between when Krahe initially spotted a weird shimmering shape on a rooftop and when a ray of arcane death tore the air apart on its warpath towards her back. Of these seconds, three were filled by what would come to be Eutropia’s final words.

Krahe skimmed straight upwards twice in rapid succession, placing herself on the balcony, and turned herself to see better. Her reason to abandon cover was the assumption that Jezail could see her through walls somehow, considering he had been able to target and shoot through a heavily warded safehouse window, let alone a stone brick wall.

???

A gulf skimmer.

That was a problem, but she couldn’t have more than three charges, and Jezail could compensate by predicting the likely direction she might skim next. That stunt had to have cost her one charge at least, and Jezail was willing to bet it had cost two, given the structure’s dimensions and typical skimmer ranges. It could be a longer-ranged technique, but then it would have a lengthier recharge time and likely only two charges. The third option was that she just had the brute attribute ratings to force a standard skimmer’s range that far, but he couldn’t very well do anything about that if it were the case, so he didn’t worry about it. Jezail was, of course, wrong. It was none of these. The characteristics of Krahe’s skimming ability were, in fact, objectively subpar. Its range was above average, but not long.

Four shots; Semzar had paid Jezail for four shots and impact confirmation. Or rather, three of his standard catalog, the Three Shot Special, plus the Full Custom. A shot tailored specifically to the target, and what a shot it was. Jezail honestly hoped she would dodge the next two just so he would get to use it.

The collateral damage was Semzar’s problem. Eutropia was a loose end whose death was included in the contract as a secondary objective, which he had now fulfilled, but his current ammo was rather destructive by nature. All of the buildings behind his target were at risk of unintended destruction, and given the area, some of those buildings were the homes of people Semzar couldn’t afford to anger.

That wasn’t Jezail’s problem.

You wanted me to use the Oblivion Flow, you get the Oblivion Flow…

In the same breath, he briefly considered waiving the fee for Eutropia and only charging for the shot that killed her, since information on her was, in the end, what allowed him to catch Blackhand like this. He banished the thought. For a better customer, maybe. For Damrus, even, perhaps. Not for Semzar.

Blackhand raised a wall of strange, black-green stone, as if it would shield her. It probably would against most attacks, but not against his.

He fired the second shot. It didn’t burst out of his staff, but rather poured out. It thereafter flowed through the air, an unearthly river of power in a color darker than black, creating a trail not through the violence of its passage, but mere incident. Bits of dust, errant feathers, even the air itself were all erased by the flow, sweeping up a light breeze and leaving shreds of impossible blackness in its wake.

It was nearly instantaneous. It traveled no slower than lightning itself with a fraction of the commotion and far more focused power than such a brutish bolt. Jezail had no particular talent, no particular elemental affinity, but he felt no need for it. The reassuring absoluteness of Arcane magic’s outcomes was one of the reasons he was Crescent Jezail, instead of some idiot with a cooked brain and too much love for literal beams of fire. The Oblivion Flow brought an altogether more elegant and literal kind of obliteration. Eutropia wasn’t torn apart, and neither were the walls caught in the Flow’s path; they were simply erased, directly destroyed by magic.

Given the lack of overpenetration, that wall had put up a significant amount of resistance, but not enough to stop the Flow from passing through.

Two shots. Half a million DDs without hit confirmation accounted for. The first shot had gotten hit confirmation on Eutropia, bringing it to 600,000. The second, too, had passed through a living target, raising his base payout to 700,000. Jezail didn’t relax, however. His method of hit confirmation wasn’t foolproof, as he had warned Semzar earlier, despite Semzar’s refusal to acknowledge that fact during the negotiations for this very job. Two shots left, and Semzar had in the end caved and paid for direct kill confirmation. Thus, Jezail would circle the target to get a line of sight and make damn sure she was dead.

He reloaded, securing a new talisman around his staff. An adjustment of his fingers on the haft, translating to subtle adjustments to the next shot’s properties. The air still crackled with remnant energy as Jezail regained sight and recalculated trajectories. Jezail’s mind ran far faster than any normal person’s, apropos of his heavy cerebral grafts and a cocktail of elixirs he had taken beforehand. He got up and stalked over the rooftops, eventually jumping across the street to the next roof over.

There he was met by a grinning face, sitting slumped against the stone slab. He raised his staff again, but she skimmed into the building before he could fire.

The game of cat and mouse which followed went on for three hours.

Jezail eventually managed to set up a decoy trap using his camouflage cloak, which seemed to be what she had used to detect him. At this moment, he was buried in a pile of trash on the flat-top roof of a three-story apartment building. He was waiting for Blackhand to cross a sightline from beyond a street corner where she would be out of his decoy’s sightline. She did, and he took the shot…

…Only for her to still be standing once the remnants cleared, grinning at him straight through his camouflage. How? Yes, he was blind for a few brief moments after firing, but her posture wasn’t changing at all, let alone enough to suggest any kind of evasive maneuver! The feedback he was receiving could only mean his attack wasn’t being blocked, as the arcane reverb of a barrier and the various feelings of ward impact were distinct from a true, direct hit on target. By every reasonable metric, Blackhand should be dead.

Something clicked in his head.

She must have taken and implanted Eutropia’s special voidkey at some point before he took the first shot. He wasn’t familiar with it or its strange mechanics, but he knew enough to lay the blame on it. That was the only reasonable explanation for this havoc that was being played with his magic, and it also explained why Eutropia died properly—she didn’t have the same defenses that had protected her from that street vendor’s Reaper. Jezail came to these conclusions in moments of real-time and decided to take a risk.

Barriers took time to raise. Skimming, too, had a recovery time. It stood to reason this esoteric means of attack avoidance had to also have limitations. So, he brought out Mistress Yao’s talisman, wrapped it around his staff, and took the shot.

???

Krahe had been screwing with Jezail all night, and she had to admit she enjoyed it. For all its lethality, there was no network layer to deal with, no hacking and counter-hacking, making the game an enjoyable balance of real danger versus relative safety. She’d guessed that he couldn’t see shit after firing right away. That black beam just left too much mess behind; it obscured him but also obscured his vision. It was possible he could see through it, as she could through her smokescreen, but her vision was still impaired somewhat. At this distance, even that slight level of cover was a big fucking problem.

Once she saw that dead-still decoy and that sightline straight out of a sniper’s wet dream, she knew she had the right bait for him.

He swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

A golden-yellow light flashed from the talisman, filling the many spiraling grooves that covered the staff’s surface. A burst of that same light erupted from the rod, sending the talisman itself flying at a velocity that rightly should have obliterated it. As it flew, it rapidly multiplied into dozens, at first flying as a swarm and eventually reaching such a density they flowed at their target.

Yet, something was wrong. Jezail had felt a sense of foreboding when he took aim, as if something was warning him not to take the shot, but he had encountered similar dissuasion magic before.

For this same reason, seeing his target turn into a green-eyed smoke demon didn’t intimidate him.

Jezail started reconsidering his odds only once he saw the swarm of talismans surround their target and begin orbiting. By now, they should have mummified and vaporized her.

???

Krahe didn’t trust Yao enough to just eat that talisman face-first unguarded, and there was no guarantee that this talisman was the one Yao had agreed to rig with a rebound trigger. For all she knew, Jezail might have acquired more offensive talismans from the mistress for general use.

Her distrust was once again proved wrong when, a split-second after being surrounded by that swarm, it suddenly went zipping back to sender, spewing beams of golden light at Jezail from all directions. It didn’t even look like he was supposed to get hit, but rather as though the swarm was corralling him, trying to chase him away. It worked, as the sniper-wizard fired off a scattered version of his earlier attack and vanished in the aftermath.

The last Krahe saw of Jezail for that night was his blurred silhouette as he leapt atop his staff and went blasting over the rooftops, using it as a hoverbike of some sort. It certainly didn’t look like real flight.

Despite his best efforts, however, Yao’s talismans chased after him. He had, after all, tied himself to them as the caster, and Yao had purposely altered their homing mechanism so it could go both ways. The tie between Jezail and Krahe was much like that of a curse, if shorter-lived. If anything, the rebound was even more powerful than the original attack; rather than homing in on an arbitrary target, it was following the chain of retribution to a perpetrator. At least, such was Krahe’s limited understanding of sympathetic magic.

Krahe wasted no time returning to Eutropia’s home, taking a moment to change her clothes in a back alley on the way there. Her caution was rewarded when she found a handful of curious eyes peering from the windows of nearby buildings. She extracted Eutropia’s souldregs and her voidkey, knowing that Garvesh would appreciate seeing hard proof of her death. The key snapped, with a sizable chunk of it just bursting apart and disintegrating, but she got most of it anyway. It felt familiar, somehow. Before anyone in the neighborhood could muster up the courage to investigate, and before the night-watchmen could reach the place, Krahe was gone.

???

That night, there was a brief light show in the sky just above the city. A swarm of glowing papers chasing after a deep-blue comet, each letting off a shining beam of light before disintegrating.

It ended with a dozen rays of light scattering into the sky all at once and the body of their target—a willowy, unassuming man—plummeting onto a rooftop. He rolled off the side, smashing into a balcony railing on his way down, leaving it bent. Nothing else broke his fall save for the hard stone, but that was fine. He wasn’t as fragile as most.

Emitting an entirely inhuman groan of pain and effort, Jezail dragged himself off the ground and propped himself up against a nearby wall. He let out a wheezing, strained laugh. Despite the discomfort of a punctured lung and numerous small wounds that riddled his whole body, that laugh was the only appropriate reaction to his predicament.

“Hazard pay… here I come,” he cackled to himself as he conjured an injector out of his quick-access storage. Relief flooded him when he pressed it against his neck; a Class 3 painkiller, able to take the bite out of any pain without impairing other senses while also providing a minor regenerative factor for several hours.

Once he was able to move again, Jezail simply returned to one of his hideouts in the city. He had done his job to the extent of the contract.

For the next hour, he sat there injecting himself, smoking, and slathering graft-paste on his wounds. Tens, hundreds of thousands of DDs in restoratives, spent without a second thought. After all, it was in his contract that his employer had to cover any expenses for injuries sustained on the job. Semzar wouldn’t willingly shell out for that policy; he knew that. But he also knew that Damrus would pay. The Hashems were already in dire straits. The patriarch was smart enough to not risk souring his relationship with Jezail, or Zavesh forbid, risk having the assassin come after him personally.

Jezail still wasn’t quite sure what had happened, and he was quite close to giving up on trying to figure it out. There had been no sign of the talisman being corrupt, and he had no way to discern how exactly Blackhand had turned it against him. A part of him wondered if she used some alternative to traditional barriers, and since he himself used a “Distortion Impulse Barrier,” that was where his mind wandered. While demanding a higher level of skill and active attention even for basic usage, a DI barrier conversely had a far higher performance ceiling. As per the words of his master, it was “the parry to an archetypal barrier’s simple block.”

He knocked the burnt waste out of his pipe and absent mindedly stuffed it with various mind-clearing herbs. He was so used to it the taste didn’t even register anymore. The initial kick was a flood of menthol, heat, and sour astringency, forcibly opening his airways and ensuring maximum absorption of the active ingredient, a specially cultivated Cassia strain of Jezail’s own creation.

However, now that he thought about it with a clearer mind, Blackhand using a DI barrier was unlikely. As a user of this unique defensive technique himself, Jezail was certain he would have been able to detect it. It was also exceedingly unlikely outside the DI barrier’s region of origin, which was on another continent. Looking back, he hadn’t even sensed the normal thaumic upsurge caused by raising a standard barrier. There had been an undeniable disturbance, but not one that felt like any kind of barrier. Moreover, his attacks weren’t deflected but seemed to merely pass through her space as if she was dodging them. But to where? She hadn’t moved. He saw it; she had stood in the same spot yet was unharmed.

“How? Is that smoke form simply invulnerable?” he questioned aloud. “No, that’s not how thaumaturgy works. It’s not omnipotent. If it was truly a self-transmutation into smoke, the Oblivion Flow would have erased it all the same. Then how?”

Crescent Jezail decided it was high time to broaden his horizons, starting with obscure defensive techniques. For all his fame, he was far from a true veteran. He saw this incident as a stark reminder to not get complacent just because he was in the top 10%. That still left a whole 9% that could put him in the ground. Just a few years of being the Crescent Jezail had nearly made him stop polishing his edge.

“Next time, Blackhand…” He chuckled to himself. “Hopefully there won’t be a next time. Best to prepare regardless.”