AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Bonus chapter. There will still be another chapter tomorrow.
The final note of the whistle hung suspended in the air, then faded into silence.
Directly over Selara’s fallen body, the air buckled and folded. The distortion peeled back on itself like smoke running in reverse as a handsome man condensed out of the nothing. His posture was loose, almost idle. Tailored clothes, blue linen beneath a fitted grey coat. Neatly styled blond hair, not a strand displaced. Lean, athletic frame.
He held a dagger aloft in his right hand with Selara’s head skewered on its point. Then flicked his wrist.
Her head tumbled from the blade, falling at an angle to hit the moss-slicked face of a boulder. The cracking sound was something Cal knew would haunt him if he made it out of this alive, and the head bounced with a meaty thud to roll into a shadowed depression between two rocks.
The killer took in the group as he gave them a warm smile, while his blue eyes stayed flat and empty.
"Good afternoon," Cillian Drekcil said.
Kamari sucked in a hard breath. The veteran's sword was already drawn, had been drawn since Selara fell, but the hand holding it trembled out of his control.
"Hold," Kamari gasped. His shield shot out to the side, forestalling the team behind him. "Nobody moves."
Jorik had both axes up on the right, his stocky frame eager. Bryon stood at the crescent's left edge, spear leveled, his young face cycling through expressions too fast to catalog: shock, confusion, the first edge of horror as he tracked from the headless body on the stones to the smiling man above it. Behind them, Amina stood with an arrow knocked. Senna had gone rigid, her scarred face bloodless and shortsword drawn.
Cal could tell they were reading Kamari. They'd followed this man into danger a hundred times, and they knew the language of his body. To trust it without question. And what his body was saying now, in the rigid set of his shoulders and the tremor in his sword hand, was a word none of them had ever seen him speak.
Run.
But there was nowhere to run to.
"Master Drekcil." Kamari stated courteously, a quiver in his voice. "Your business in this clearing… is it concluded?"
Cillian tilted his head, seeming to weigh the question as though wine preferences had come up. He hopped to the next stone with an effortless motion, landing on the balls of his feet, and began walking toward them through the boulder field. His stride was easy, his shoulders loose. The dagger twirled once between his fingers and disappeared into a sheath at his hip.
"Kamari." The name rolled off his tongue like a greeting between old friends. "What a pleasant surprise. Truly. It's been, what, six years? Seven? You look well. A bit greyer, perhaps, but who among us isn't." He chuckled like a man enjoying an unexpected reunion.
He stopped twelve yards from the team of adventurers. The smile deepened, carving pleasant lines around his mouth, and he looked across the group, slowly cataloguing each face.
"As for my business..." He sighed theatrically, almost mournfully, and accompanied it with a slight shake of the head. "I'm afraid it's not quite finished. You understand how it is. Tidiness and all. Loose threads become tangles, tangles become problems."
Cillian fixed those dead blue eyes on Cal.
The dagger reappeared, and Cillian casually pointed it at him. "He's been a terrible nuisance."
The man's ever-present smile only deepened.
Every higher function Cal had was seized; the gears of his mind grinding against the impossible friction of this can't be happening, this can't be real, I just watched her kill a drake, she was invincible, she was safe, we were safe—
"Attack!"
Kamari roared, shattering the paralysis.
The veteran surged forward, his shield leading and longsword beginning a vicious overhead stab that had the force of his entire body behind it. Jorik moved half a heartbeat later, both axes sweeping in from the right in converging diagonals aimed at Cillian's neck and hip. Bryon lunged from the left, his spear driving forward in a committed thrust that targeted the center of the assassin's sternum.
There was no escape; the pincer attack closed from every angle.
Yet Cillian flowed.
There was no other way to describe it: the man was liquid grace. Each movement bled into the next without seam or hesitation, and the three-pronged assault passed through the space he'd occupied.
Cillian was beside Bryon now, having materialized there like a magician's trick. He laid his left hand on Bryon, almost companionable, palm resting just above the collar. His right flicked downward, and a thin red line opened on Bryon's thigh through his leather armor, just above the knee. The cut was surgical: shallow enough to avoid the artery, deep enough to sever the muscle. Bryon's leg buckled, and he went down to one knee with a gasp of surprise and pain, his spear clattering against stone.
Cillian was already gone. Jorik's axe whistled through the space where his head had been, and a silver blur licked across the back of the big man's knuckles. Three fingers opened to the bone. The axe tumbled from Jorik's grip, and the man snarled, an animal sound, as he lifted his remaining weapon and swung in a wild arc.
The assassin leaned back exactly enough to let the blade pass an inch from his nose, smiling amusedly.
Kamari furiously pressed the attack. His longsword came in fast and controlled: a lateral slash, a rising cut, a reversed pommel strike, each technique well-executed, the product of decades of professional combat. Cillian parried the first with a dagger that shouldn't have been able to stop a blade twice its length, sidestepped the second with a pivot so small it looked contemptuous, and caught the pommel strike on his forearm with a muted thud that didn't even make him flinch.
Then the ground moved.
A flash of green light blazed outward from Senna, and the earth beneath Cillian erupted. Thick thorned roots, each as wide as Cal's wrist, burst from the soil in a seeking tangle, wrapping around the assassin's ankles, calves, and knees. They cinched tight, thorns biting through the fabric of his trousers, and for one lurching instant, Cillian stumbled. He jerked his right foot against the binding and it resisted, his lethal fluency checked.
The three men moved as one. Kamari drove forward, his longsword aimed at the heart in a lunging thrust that committed every ounce of his E-tier strength and speed. Jorik, his injured fist tucked against his ribs, brought his remaining axe down in an overhead chop aimed at the crown of the skull. Bryon, who'd regained his feet, thrust his recovered spear at Cillian's lower back. Three converging lines of steel, timed to the instant, spaced to the inch, closing on a pinned target with nowhere to go.
Behind them, Amina's bow sang.
The power shot she had held at full draw tore across the space, the arrow a blur of black fletching and iron that split the air. It threaded between Kamari and Jorik on a trajectory that ended at Cillian's neck.
For one breathless, shining instant, it was an inescapable execution.
Hope surged in Cal's heart.
Cillian dropped the smile.
Cal couldn't follow what happened next without [Liminal Breath]. His brain, even augmented by [Savant of the Mind], caught only fragments: a strobe-light sequence of still-frame images spliced between stretches of impossible speed. The roots around Cillian's legs exploded, shredded by a flex of muscle that turned the thick fibers into kindling. His right hand blurred upward, the dagger meeting Kamari's lunging longsword and knocking it wide. The longsword's momentum, still carrying Kamari's full E-tier force behind it, curved off its original path and slammed into the descending edge of Jorik's axe.
Simultaneously, a second dagger appeared in the killer's left hand. It flicked out in a motion so small and fast it looked like a twitch, a gesture as casual as brushing away a fly. The tip of the blade kissed the broadhead of Amina's incoming arrow.
Clink.
The redirect sent it straight into Bryon's right eye.
He was dead instantly, arm locked mid-thrust. Then his muscles relaxed all at once, and he folded to the ground in a boneless heap, the black-fletched shaft protruding from his ruined eye socket, feathers still quivering.
From the archer came a choked noise.
Kamari bellowed.
A grief-stricken sound tore from him, ripping through professional discipline and decades of tactical composure. His face twisted, and he swung his longsword in a berserk arc meant to decapitate Cillian.
Cillian stepped inside the arc almost intimately, putting himself past the edge of the shield and inside the reach of the longsword, where his right-hand dagger drew a line across Kamari's jugular. The cut was shallow, opening the windpipe and the arteries in a horizontal stroke that bisected the roar mid-syllable. Kamari stared wide-eyed as his breath gurgled, trying desperately to readjust his swing before his strength failed.
The assassin was already beyond him, his left-hand dagger buried in Jorik's temple. The big man had been turning, trying to bring the weapon around only to lock rigid before toppling sideways.
A throwing knife appeared between Cillian's fingers. Cal didn't see him draw it. One moment his fingers were empty; the next, a sliver of steel zipped across the clearing in a flat line. It covered the distance in less than a second and caught Amina in the throat as she fumbled an arrow onto her bowstring. The impact drove her backward, and she sat down hard against the trunk of a tree, both hands rising to clutch at the blade in her neck, her mouth working silently.
Kamari fell. He went to his knees first, one hand pressed to the wound, blood pouring between his fingers in sheets. He found Cal and stared with an intensity born of desperation.
Then his hand fell away, and he pitched forward onto the stones.
The last ring of steel and shouting faded into the canopy, absorbed by the moss and the mist, but all Cal could hear was his own blood pounding in his head.
Cillian stood motionless in the center of the carnage, his head tilted slightly, listening. He looked perfectly relaxed. He swept the clearing in a slow arc, seeming to count the bodies. Satisfied, he reached into his coat with his left hand and produced a folded square of cream-colored silk. He dabbed at a fleck of blood on his right cheekbone.
Afterwards, he folded the handkerchief along its original creases and returned it to his pocket.
Only then did he turn to Senna.
She stood at the edge of the boulders, ten yards in front of Cal, her scarred face a mask of white terror. Her shortsword trembled in her right hand, blade wobbling. Her left was raised, fingers splayed, green light guttering and sparking at her fingertips as she tried to form another Spell. The light kept dying. Her concentration was gone, drowned in the flood of adrenaline and horror, and the magic wouldn't hold.
Cal started to advance.
Thought had nothing to do with it - he knew he had no chance. It came from somewhere beneath the fear and the pain and the awareness of his own powerlessness: some deep root of stubbornness or instinct or simple refusal to watch yet another person die while he stood by. He reached for the spear strapped across his back.
An argent flash crossed the clearing, resulting in a slender throwing knife embedded to the hilt in his right kneecap. The blade punched through leather and flesh and cartilage alike, driving straight through the joint to immobilize his leg.
Pain seized the rest of him.
It erupted from his knee and tore upward. Blinding agony rushed through him, and his thoughts briefly dissolved into useless noise. His leg gave way. He went down, his hands slamming into the dirt, elbows following, and he couldn't hold back the cry that ripped out of him.
Not once had Cillian looked at him.
Instead, he walked toward Senna. That same deliberate stride he'd used crossing the clearing, boots finding clean stone between the moss and blood. The daggers were held loosely at his sides, one still in each hand. He had the pleasant smile back on his face.
Senna raised her sword, arm shaking. She mouthed words that might have been a prayer or a plea, maybe a chant to help cast the Spell that refused to coalesce.
Cillian stopped two yards from her. He regarded the trembling blade with a gentle, almost fond expression. Then he shook his head sympathetically.
"There now." His voice was soft, like one might use to comfort a frightened child. "It'll be over soon."
He stepped past the sword as if it wasn't there and slipped his dagger into her heart.
Senna stared incredulously, mouth hanging open. The green light at her fingertips flared brilliantly and died, as her breath left her in a quiet gasp. Her hand, the one that had been trying to cast, settled against him, fingers curling into the fabric of his coat.
Then she slid off the blade and crumpled to the stones.
Cal watched from the ground, barely making it back up to his hands. Tears blurred the world into a smear of grey and red and the distant, impossibly calm gold of the blossom on its high stone.
Cillian crouched beside Senna's corpse to wipe his daggers on the shoulder of her cloak, then straightened. The whistled melody began again. He walked to Amina's body next, going through a similar ritual with his throwing knife.
Cal tried to reach for his power.
He sought inward, grasping for the banked heat of Stamina in his muscles, the deep reservoir of Mana in his core: anything, any energy he could pull together and shape into a weapon or a shield. His intent hit the stasis effect and was stopped cold. The elixir was doing exactly what it was designed to do: holding his spirit rigid, preventing any flux that might worsen the damage. The channels were sealed. His own medicine had become his prison.
Get up.
The command cut through the pain and panic.
I will not die on my knees.
Managing to get his good leg under him, he pressed down on his thigh with both hands and leaned forward, slowly trying to work his way to his feet. The world tilted and swam, and for a terrible moment his balance failed and he dropped back to the ground.
Get UP.
He pushed again. Harder. He ground his teeth until the enamel squealed. He dragged his right leg behind him, the knife scraping against a root, and the pain of that motion was so complete that it circled back around to something almost like calm: a place beyond agony where the body simply stopped processing and the mind floated free.
He stood.
He stood on one leg, managing to draw the shortsword at his waist. He stood soaked in mud and blood, trembling like a leaf in a gale, balanced on that single point of contact with the earth. His vision cleared just enough to find the haunting blue eyes a few yards away.
The whistling had stopped.
Cillian still regarded Cal pleasantly, but something new had entered his features: a gleam of interest, the brief spark of a man noticing something unexpected. He studied Cal for a long moment before he began to walk closer.
His stride carried him within a few feet of Cal.
"You know—"
With a guttural cry, Cal put every bit of his remaining strength into a wild slash. He pivoted on his good leg, the shortsword scything through the air.
Cillian hopped backward lightly, putting himself just outside the blade’s reach as he continued without interruption.
"—there have been times recently when I've regretted not killing you in that alley."
He twirled a cleaned dagger between his fingers absentmindedly.
"But I'm glad I didn't." His smile deepened. "All this trouble you've caused... your little apprenticeships, your inconvenient stint of being useful... it led me right to her."
He casually gestured with his chin toward the headless body on the stones.
"A fine piece of business." Cillian stopped playing with his blade and pulled it back to deliver a thrust. "Don't you worry. Her brother won't be far behind."
He began to step forward—
A sound like a rushing furnace erupted behind the man.
The entire clearing flooded with violent red, orange, and yellow hues; the light suddenly obliterating every shadow and burning away the winter chill through a surge of heat and radiance. Cillian became a dark silhouette against the inferno at his back, raised arm arrested mid-stroke.
The light blazed brighter.