Manifesting atop the tallest building at the city’s center, I slipped into my elven form, a transfigured black dress draped over me like I’d arrived for a funeral, which, in a sense, I had. From up here, I finally got a proper look at the damage. I finally got a proper look at what this scale of attack had done. Which… was surprising. The massive, unplanned fireballs had done more damage than the Kovraths themselves. I scanned the sky just in time to catch another volley of those oversized mistakes forming again.
From my chat with the one Kovrath I’d bagged earlier, it was clear those fireballs weren’t even part of their ideal approach. They just… happened. A side effect, not a tactic. I’d figured that out, and I was certain the people here had too. They’d have to. These sneaky bastards built their whole approach on vanishing, with presence erased, senses fooled, even mine was reduced to decorative. So why announce themselves with a blazing spectacle big enough to wake the dead?
Because they couldn’t help it.
That was the only answer that held. Some baked-in quirk of this trial or this world. Something caught between fairness and a bad ironic joke, because those fireballs were very much destructive and very much killing people. The Kovraths, meanwhile, wore their scales like I wore mine in dragon form. Even when a blast caught them mid-fall, it only threw them around a bit instead of tearing them apart.
So yes, they sabotaged the most critical piece of their own strategy… and still came out ahead. I had to admit, that was almost elegant in a crooked sort of way. The kind of setup a dragon would design just to see what broke first.
I shook the thought off. Cute observations could wait. Containment first.
I’d stick to the earlier plan. Show just enough power to solve the problem, not enough to start a new one. These Kovraths were using Divinity. How was the main question. I’d get answers soon enough from my little prisoner.
Curious had already tightened that contract into something properly unpleasant. She had found fifty-eight exploitable points in his original draft, which said something about the gap between a competent practitioner and whatever Curious was when she decided to be thorough. On paper, it looked like I’d drawn the shorter end, I couldn’t attack them in retaliation or use what I learned against them unless they made the first move against me or any ‘Vrathi.’ Then Curious added another clause, “my people.” Broad and conveniently mine to interpret later. That Kovrath hadn’t exactly been negotiating by that point, so I took what I was given and made it worse.
It was the kind of agreement that let me become a problem. A persistent one. Push, prod, see where it cracked. If they broke it, all bets were off. I wasn’t the one with anything to lose.
The future had a habit of refusing to sit still anyway. And if these people were wielding Divinity, underestimating them would be a quick way to die stupid.
I would think about that properly once I had the space to do it without the city being on fire around me.
Their dark mana attacks were the other thing sitting in the back of my thoughts. Dark mana by its fundamental nature resisted lethality, that was the affinity's character, not a limitation to be engineered around but an inherent quality of what the mana was. And yet what the Kovrath had been throwing through walls and into people had performed with a lethality that outpaced lightning in some of the exchanges I had observed. That required either a combination I wasn't familiar with or something augmenting the mana beyond what the affinity should permit.
Divinity again, possibly. I would hold off deciding until I knew more.
No point guessing when I could just take it apart piece by piece.
For all their tricks, though, the people here had found a clean way to blunt them. Most Kovraths leaned on the same Dark Mana affinity, with a few odd mixes thrown in if the skirmishes around me were anything to go by.
The defenders answered with light.
Their barriers were largely light-based. I couldn’t say how they were built without pulling one apart, so I left that curiosity for later. What I could say was that those barriers didn’t crack. I hadn’t seen a single one take visible damage. Dark mana hit them and simply… stopped. Nullified was the word I was looking for. Irritatingly neat.
Fascinating. Also, practically speaking, the reason there was still a city to stand on top of.
The Kovrath had almost no variation in their affinity spread. Dark mana wall to wall, with a few mixed signatures visible among the ones who had dropped concealment to engage directly.
Every weapon, every attack construct, every lethal application they had, all of it running through the same channel that the light barriers were specifically built to shut down.
So the killing happened in the gaps.
The fireballs came down and the defenders split their attention. The barriers held against dark mana but nobody had built a barrier against a falling mass of fire catching someone at the wrong angle while they were focused somewhere else. The Kovrath waited in their perfect stealth for exactly that moment. Waited for that flinch, that half-second where someone's attention moved and they were through it before the person had finished reacting.
Annoyingly patient.
And this stalemate, I was increasingly certain, was not accidental. Too many of the interlocking factors had the texture of something placed rather than something grown. Both sides adapted and counter-adapted and arrived repeatedly at the same equilibrium, constrained by factors outside either of their control, pushed and pulled by the world or this trial own mechanics into a configuration that produced maximum sustained pressure without resolution.
Intentional design wearing the appearance of chaos.
I would think about that properly later. Right now I had a stalemate to break.
Curious arrived without announcing herself.
"The sniping approach," she said. It was not a question.
I nodded. At this point I had stopped being unsettled by it. We were the same mind divided into different fixations, of course she had arrived at the same conclusion without being told. The eerie part wasn't that it kept happening. The eerie part was how natural it felt, and how that naturalness sat in slightly uncomfortable territory the longer I thought about it.
So I stopped thinking about it, which was the correct response.
I summoned Terrorist and Lazy and started issuing assignments.
Lazy received the news of her role with the enthusiasm of someone being informed of a long journey on foot. Three converging glares and a promise of violence I intended to keep produced the necessary compliance.
The structure of the problem was simple enough.
The Kovrath in perfect stealth were undetectable. I had already tested the obvious approaches like checking for ripples in the shadow dimension, running my enhanced perception across the spaces that felt too empty, every trick that came to mind in the first thirty seconds of thinking about it. Nothing.
The stealth was not nearly perfect or functionally perfect or perfect within the limitations of conventional sensing. It was simply perfect. A sealed system with no observable seam.
Which meant sensing them was not the avenue. Taking the stealth away from them was.
They emerged from it whenever an opening appeared. The falling fireballs were their preferred mechanism. While the defenders absorbed the distraction and decided which threat to address first. The Kovrath read that moment with accuracy, and they came through it like water finding a crack.
The protection charms the defenders carried handled dark mana. They didn't handle fire catching someone mid-step with their attention divided.
So I was going to stop giving the Kovrath their openings.
Not everyone could run a hundred separate threads of sensation simultaneously without the whole thing collapsing into noise. Most people, even at red core, hit a ceiling on sustained mental parsing that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with the fundamental architecture of a single mind trying to be in too many places at once.
That was what the clones were for.
My Spatial Sense could detect the Kovrath at the precise edge of their transitions— the fraction of a second where they crossed the boundary between the shadow dimension and the material world, materializing or vanishing. That seam existed. It was small and it was fast and it was absolutely there. A brief disturbance in the spatial fabric that my sense caught like a splinter catches thread. The limitation was range. I could cover a useful area. I could not cover a city.
Lazy, Terrorist, and Curious could.
Spread across the city as moving loci, running the Observer's Mark in reverse as a shared broadcast rather than a one-way feed, they would effectively become extensions of my perception, each one a separate frontal sense that reported back into the same processing point. We had done something close to this during the leviathan hunt. The resonance between me and my clones was already bordering on something that deserved a more precise word than coordination. Four simultaneous sense fronts, parsed in real time.
The Kovrath were about to discover that their stealth had an edge case.
I cast the Observer's spells across all three of them and watched them scatter. Then I raised my hand and started working.
The rune sequence was extensive. I took my time with it because the construct I was building warranted the care, and because there was something quietly satisfying about assembling something this size above the rooftops of a city that had no idea what I was doing up here.
Dark mana poured through the runic framework and took shape in the air above me. My dark mana lacked the weaponized lethality the Kovrath had managed with theirs, that was a mystery for after, but dark mana in its natural character was extraordinarily cooperative when it came to structure and flexibility, and structure was what I needed.
The construct grew upward and outward, pulling itself into shape through the rune channels, until what hung above the city's one of the tallest building was a bow approximately the size of a building, which was exactly what I had intended and still… looked slightly absurd from below.
A barrier layer reinforced the frame. A whip of alchemical transfiguration through the draw string turned it from an impressive construction into something that would not be coming apart under load regardless of what I asked of it. The flexibility inherent to dark mana made the string something worth looking at, under other circumstances.
I reached into the shadow dimension through my tendrils and drew the energy out directly, feeding it into the arrows I formed as I pulled the string back with violet mana. The bow groaned. The arrow floated within the channel, wrong in the way that shadow dimension energy was always wrong when it crossed over— glitching at the edges and destabilizing the space immediately around it.
I held the draw.
Lazy's senses arrived first. Rightmost quadrant, alley running along the inside of the outer wall, a Kovrath materializing in the fraction-of-a-second window with its dark bastard sword already committed to a downward arc. Two targets in front of it, both completely unaware. A Waryn and what appeared to be a very large and very extra floofy companion, both with their backs turned, neither of them registering the disturbance behind them.
The Kovrath was grinning. I could feel the shape of its uneven nasty teeth even through the secondhand sense feed.
Oh, you absolute little shit.
I adjusted the angle, read the trajectory, and released.
The string snapped forward and the shot tore the air open on its way out.
The building shielding the alleyway didn't slow it as the arrow went through stone and mortar the way a blade goes through standing water, indifferent to the interruption, and found the grinning Kovrath mid-materialization.
The hit took it through the torso and kept going.
He didn't die immediately. I had already accounted for that. These creatures were resilient in a specific infuriating way, as even when bisected it tried to do the sensible thing, reaching for the shadow dimension, attempting the phase-out.
The shadow energy in the wound had opinions about that.
The transition backfired the moment it began, the destabilizing charge unraveling the very mechanism it tried to use, and what had been a disciplined Kovrath combatant became a screaming wretch on the alley floor, unable to vanish, unable to move correctly, the stealth that was its entire identity turned against it from the inside.
The Waryn standing five feet away, white-faced and shaking, stared at it for one long second.
Then finished it.
I was already grinning.
The bow was excessive, yes. I was aware of that. A smaller construct would have been quieter and marginally less architecturally destructive. The larger one was necessary for the penetration as almost every Kovrath in the city was operating from behind walls or inside structures, shielded from direct line of sight by stone that the light barriers didn't cover and the fireballs couldn't target precisely. Punching through that required force the smaller version couldn't reliably produce.
But that was the secondary reason.
The primary reason was the message. A support-type mage with a spatial affinity and an oversized bow made for a very specific picture, and I was painting it with some care. The Kovrath who survived today would report what they had seen. Something that could detect their transitions, could pin them in place with shadow energy, but required a construct the size of a building and left the actual killing to whoever was nearby. I was not a predator today. I was a disruptor.
Misconceptions were worth more than fear, sometimes.
Besides, I was perfectly capable of tearing them apart with my claws the moment they materialized. But I was very reasonably certain they had something that could threaten even me if I showed that hand too early, and a species whose entire nature was built around stealth would retreat the moment the odds looked wrong regardless. Better to look like the wrong odds than the end of the world.
Northern quadrant. Six streets up. The sense feed from Curious flagged the transition seam a fraction of a second before it completed.
The arrow whistled through the intervening architecture and caught the Kovrath slightly off-center, which I noted with mild annoyance. Still enough. The shadow energy did the rest of the work and a nearby Faerin with a very large sword handled the finish.
A third. A fourth. The bow had found its rhythm.
I was picking targets every other second, parsing four sense fronts simultaneously, adjusting angle and draw weight on the fly as the city's geography shifted between shots. Somewhere underneath all of it I could feel the distant hum of experience accumulating, the system registering kills as I managed to land some lethal hits myself.
I was close to evolution already, closer than I'd been before this started. If only my system wasn’t broken.
I needed to talk to Lotte about the system situation. Urgently. Once the universe extended me the basic courtesy of a pause longer than thirty seconds, I intended to insist on it.
Alexei was already moving toward me.
I had expected that the moment the first shot went through the building. He came riding the icy wind currents with the fog artefact manifested around him protectively, the silver leviathan expanded to something approaching the size of a small building, smaller by considerable margin than the original and yet absolutely sufficient to make a statement about what was currently in his vicinity.
Good instincts.
I locked onto the next target and let the string back as he closed the distance, the bow groaning its familiar complaint overhead.
The Kovrath below were starting to notice the pattern.
It wouldn't be long before they understood what was happening to them.
That was fine. The stalemate was already broken.
***
'How very annoying,' Alexei muttered, pale-faced, and downed another mana potion.
His seventh. He noted that with a detached sort of clarity. The mana poisoning would arrive on schedule and it would be the kind of pain that set a new personal record, but that was a problem that existed in the future, and the future required surviving the present first.
The Kovrath had gone somewhat feral the moment they registered the Key of Fog on him.
That was the only word for it. Feral. Dozens of them, drawn to him specifically out of everything happening in this city, abandoning whatever assigned targets they had come here for in favor of converging on the one man carrying the artifact that apparently represented something worse than a tactical loss to them.
The Key was the only reason he was still standing.
The cold it produced could pierce dimensions. Not deeply, but enough that the Kovrath in their perfect stealth had to account for it, had to stay cautious, had to respect the possibility that a blind wave sent in the wrong direction might find them anyway. He had been exploiting that hesitation continuously, sweeping frost across wide areas without knowing exactly what he was hitting, relying on the screams to tell him when he'd connected.
It was an expensive way to fight. His nature affinity filled the gaps, gigantic vines erupting from whatever surface would cooperate, building a layered defense that he had to maintain consciously while simultaneously managing the cold offensively and tracking the spaces around him for movement he couldn't actually see. The Key added a permanence effect to his own spells if he fed it enough mana, which made the vines rigid enough to be actually helpful defensively.
One man against at least a dozen of them. More than that, he still didn't know which Kovrath Elder was leading this assault, and that was the one that truly mattered. For once, Alexei was glad he wasn’t the one being targeted.
All he had wanted was a quiet week after the expedition. A single unremarkable week of sleeping past dawn and eating food that hadn't been rationed and not being actively hunted by something. That had apparently been too much to ask of this place, which had never once demonstrated any interest in what he wanted and showed no signs of developing one.
The depth dwellers sat at the back of his thoughts like something cold pressing against a door.
Of everything in this trial, of every threat he had catalogued and learned and built defenses against across eleven years, nothing frightened him the way those creatures did. The Kovrath's faces when they realized what key he was carrying had told him everything he needed to know about the timeline he was now operating inside. Not if. When. And when was going to be soon, and soon was going to require Markus knowing everything before it arrived.
At least the timing had given them some preparation window. At least they had understood the consequence of having the Key of Fog before the consequence showed up at the walls.
There was a chance.
He exhaled slowly, pulled the cold through the Key, and sent another blind wave of frost sweeping outward across the surrounding area, watching his mana gauge drop drastically.
Two screams answered him from directions he hadn't been looking.
The frost bloomed across two shapes that had been invisible a moment before, the stealth collapsing as their bodies locked up inside it, the cold making them visible and loud and suddenly very much material world problems rather than shadow dimension ones.
Alexei was already driving frost toward the closer one before the scream had finished.
He pulled spikes up from the ground, aimed at the bodies the cold had just made visible. They were gone before the spikes arrived. Pulled back into stealth by allies he hadn't seen, the rescue so fast it looked almost like a reflex than instinct.
He didn't have time to be frustrated about it.
A vine intercepted the scissor-sword attack from two Kovrath that had materialized directly behind him, the wood catching both blades before they finished the arc. He was already turning to press the advantage when one of the two simply ceased to exist from the torso down.
A pitch-black arrow had gone through it with the completeness of something that hadn't considered the possibility of resistance.
Alexei's eyes went wide.
The remaining Kovrath, along with what remained of its partner, tried to vanish immediately, their bodies already shifting toward that unnatural absence, but something resisted them. Their expressions twisted as the transition failed, as if the very act of slipping into stealth had turned against them, and that brief hesitation was all Alexei needed.
His vines surged forward without pause, wrapping around both of them and crushing them alive before they could attempt anything else.
Alexei looked toward where the arrow had come from.
She stood there above the chaos, golden hair moving in a way that felt less like wind and more like something flowing on its own terms, and above her hung a massive bow that dwarfed the surrounding structures, the string drawing and releasing in a steady rhythm. Around her, visible barriers stacked on visible barriers, layered with the kind of conspicuous and flashy abundance that no one genuinely relying on them would bother with.
Every second, somewhere in the city, a Kovrath died.
He had thought she'd been caught off guard. Had thought the spear through the chest was the end of it, had thought for one genuinely foolish moment that someone capable of killing the Fog Leviathan had been undone by a single Kovrath in a room. The evidence in front of him had now fully dismantled that assumption.
But something else was registering underneath the spectacle.
The barriers were wrong. Not in their construction, as he couldn't assess that from here, but in their purpose. Nobody who was actually that powerful wrapped themselves in that many visible defenses.
That was the look of a glass cannon buying itself time, something that could hit hard from distance but needed every layer of protection it could stack to survive contact. And she was making sure everyone present arrived at exactly that conclusion with all those flashy barriers.
A new variable had entered a chaotic situation and immediately started shaping what everyone around her believed about it.
Alexei exhaled slowly.
How… outstanding.
If that was the role she was taking, then he could reinforce it.
He released another broad wave of frost outward. He was moving toward her, the Key of Fog unfurling around him into the translucent sea serpent, fifteen meters of foggy half-presence riding the cold air as a platform. The frost swept the surrounding area and hit nothing, which told him something useful.
Either the Kovrath had broken off entirely out of genuine fear, or the bluff had landed and they had reoriented toward what looked like a softer target with an oversized weapon and too many visible barriers.
Either way, their attention had moved.
He rode the serpent through the cold air toward her position, the frost trailing behind him in long spiraling threads, and thought that whatever the Kovrath had decided about the woman with the enormous bow, they were going to find the reality of it extremely unpleasant.