I run.
No strategy. No plan. Just pure survival instinct overriding everything else.
My boots hammer against the wooden planks of the alley, each impact sending shockwaves of pain through my skull. The backlash from dropping the Veilshaper illusion is hitting me hard, my vision swims at the edges despite the Fearmonger's enhancement.
And I can feel something warm trickling from my nose.
I wipe at it without stopping, without slowing down. I know it's blood.
Fuck me sideways. I curse
Another arrow screams past my head, so close I feel the displacement of air ruffle my hair. It slams into the wooden building to my right, punching clean through three walls before the sound of splintering timber catches up to the impact.
Horse-sized. The thing is literally the size of a fucking horse, and this person is firing them like they weigh nothing.
I duck left, vaulting over a stack of crates, my enhanced reflexes barely giving me the split-second warning I need. Another arrow obliterates the spot where I was, reducing the crates to splinters and sending shards of wood spraying in all directions.
My Fearmonger is fully activated and it's the only reason I'm still alive. My senses are heightened to their absolute limit. My physical abilities pushed beyond even most awakened normal capabiliteis. My mental processing running at speeds that make the world seem to move in slow motion.
But it's still barely enough.
I can sense the arrows a fraction of a second before they arrive. Feel the disturbance in the air. Hear the whistle of their passage. But my margin for error is zero. One mistake, one moment of distraction, and I'm paste.
I need help. Need backup. Need Helix.
But there's no time to activate the communication amulet. No time to fish it out and wait for Caldera to respond. That archer is too fast and too gods damn accurate.
So I do something I've been avoiding. Something that's going to expose a secret to the rest of Helix I wasn't ready to share.
I reach for the bond.
The connection between Lucian and me flares to life, and suddenly I can feel him distant but present, aware of me reaching out.
Lucian! I project the thought with as much force as I can muster. I'm made! Helix needs to come NOW!
There's a moment of surprise from his end. Then his mental voice comes through.
What the fuck? How? What's happening??"
I don't know, the people here are fucked up and I was somehow made! I am in one the Market districts! And some fucker from the Midnight Rose is attacking! I dodge another arrow, this one so close it clips my cloak. Big fucking arrows! Get Caldera and Helix moving!
"Copy that! Hold on"
"I don't have time for a conversation! Another arrow. I throw myself into a roll, coming up running.
"Alright then just try to not die!
"No promises" I spit out
I feel acknowledgment from him, and then the connection dies as he presumably turns to alert the rest of Helix.
Which means they'll all know now. They will all know about the bond. Know that Lucian and I have a connection that goes beyond his healing and his swapping ability.
I burst out of the alley and back into the market district. The crowded platforms where I was making casual conversation just minutes ago. Vendors and customers going about their daily business, completely oblivious to the violence happening around them.
Except now they're not oblivious to me.
My sudden appearance running at full speed, blood streaming from my nose, causes immediate reaction. People gasp and jump back staring at me in shock.
A woman drops her basket of vegetables. A child points and starts to cry. A vendor opens his mouth to shout...
And then, after maybe three seconds, their faces go blank.
All of them. Simultaneously.
The shock drains away like water through a sieve. The woman bends to pick up her basket, humming softly. The child stops crying and goes back to playing with a toy. The vendor returns to arranging his goods.
Like I was never there. Like nothing unusual just happened.
The wrongness of it makes my skin crawl even through the Fearmonger's emotional suppression. This isn't normal forgetting. This is reality being rewritten in real-time, scrubbing away anything that doesn't fit the narrative of a peaceful city going about its day.
I don't have time to dwell on it.
I keep running, weaving between stalls, vaulting over merchandise, scattering crowds that forget me the moment I pass. My eyes scan constantly, looking for the best path trying to predict where the next attack will come from.
There's a bridge ahead—one of the larger ones, spanning across to a lower platform maybe twenty or so feet down. If I can get across, maybe lose myself down there...
Movement on the rooftop to my left. A flash of pink against black.
I dive forward just as an arrow the size of a fucking battering ram obliterates the bridge entrance I was running toward.
The entire structure thick timber beams, stone supports, metal reinforcements simply ceases to exist. One moment it's there. The next it's dust and splinters and a gaping hole leading into the canyon depths.
And people were on it. At least a dozen civilians crossing from one platform to another.
They just... vanish. Atomized by the impact. Gone so completely there's not even bodies left. Just a red mist that disperses in the wind.
People around me scream. Actually scream this time. The violence is too immediate, too catastrophic to be ignored.
For about five seconds.
Then the blank expressions return. The screaming stops. People turn away from the destroyed bridge, going back to their shopping, their conversations, their lives.
Like a dozen people didn't just die. Like a major piece of infrastructure wasn't just obliterated.
My eyes narrow, hyperfocus sharpening every detail into crystalline clarity. The ground where the bridge stood is cracked and scorched. Rock fragments spray outward in slowly settling arcs. A few people stand at the edge of the platform, looking down at the platforms beneath them, but their expressions are placid. Unconcerned.
What a sinister power that is affecting them.
My thoughts cut off as I spot the figure again.
Thirty feet away. Standing on a rooftop, bow lowered, that faceless obsidian mask turned toward me.
They're close enough now that I can make out more details. The black armor isn't solid plates—it's layered scales, each one overlapping the next, creating a surface that drinks light. I frown wondering where I have seen that before. The pink robe flows despite the lack of wind, the fabric seeming to move with a life of its own.
And that mask. That goddamn mask with its silver thorns and embossed rose, reflecting my angry violet eyes back at me.
The figure raises one hand slowly and deliberately and waves at me. A mocking little gesture. Fingers wiggling.
Then they bow. A formal, theatrical bow, like an actor acknowledging applause.
I sneer in disgust. The fucker is mocking me. Playing with me.
My hand tightens on my sword hilt, anger cutting through the Fearmonger's suppression. I'm about to activate the Veilshaper allowing my hate to carry the illusion, to weave something to give me cover, create an opening to—
The hum begins.
It's not a sound. Not really. It's a vibration that rattles my teeth in their sockets. Makes my bones ache. Like reality itself is resonating at a frequency just outside normal perception.
And then I hear it. All around me.
Hundreds of people. Everyone in the market district. Every vendor, every customer, every child, every guard and Inquisitor in the area.
They gasp.
All at once. A single, wet intake of air. Like they're all drowning simultaneously.
Their skin changes. In the space of a heartbeat, healthy color drains away, replaced by a sickly, translucent grey. Like they're being leached of something vital. Something fundamental.
I watch in frozen shock as Red-black mist erupts from their eyes the color vivid against my grayscale vision. From their pores. From every opening in their bodies. It streams upward like a reverse rainstorm, defying gravity, pulled by some invisible force toward the figure on the rooftop.
The screaming starts. High and terrible and brief.
Because their bodies don't fall. They simply unravel.
The crowd dissolves. Flesh becomes ash. Bone becomes dust. Hundreds of people reduced to heaps of boneless, evaporating silt in the span of seconds.
The market district becomes a graveyard. Piles of grey powder where living people stood moments ago. Clothes and personal effects collapsing into the remains. The smell hits me copper and iron and something else, something burnt and wrong.
I stand in the middle of the carnage, the only living thing for a hundred feet in any direction.
And above me still on the building, the Midnight Rose figure has their fist clenched. Raised toward the sky.
The red-black mist swirls around them in a vortex.
The mass screams. Actually screams, like the metals themselves remember being part of something alive and are protesting their new form. The elements shriek under the pressure of the figure's will, fusing and condensing and reshaping.
Within seconds, the cloud solidifies.
Twelve massive blades. Each one jagged and irregular, like they were grown rather than forged. Each one glowing with a faint, dying heat the residual warmth of the bodies they came from. Each one easily ten feet long and wickedly sharp.
They don't just hang in the air. They orient.
Their tips swivel like needles on a compass. Rotating. Searching.
And then, all at once, they lock onto my chest.
What the fuck just happened?
I replay the last thirty seconds. The hum. The synchronized gasp. The red-black mist erupting from bodies. The dissolution.
Not disintegration. Dissolution. There's a difference.
The bodies didn't explode or burn. They collapsed inward and lost structural integrity. Became ash and dust because something fundamental was removed.
And that mist—red-black, metallic, screaming as it fused into weapons.
Iron. I'm looking at iron extracted from blood.
But not just iron. Calcium too. I can see it in the way the blades formed—brittle white mixed with darker red-black. Calcium from bones. The structural framework that holds a skeleton together.
My eyes widen as understanding crashes over me.
This is Metal Manipulation.
But not the crude version Imperial Intelligence reported. Not just "controlling swords" or "bending armor." This is something far more sophisticated. Far more horrifying.
The human body is full of metals. Trace amounts, but essential. Iron in hemoglobin, the molecule that carries oxygen in blood. Calcium in bones, the mineral that gives them strength. Magnesium in cells. Zinc in enzymes. Copper in proteins.
Remove those metals, and the body can't function. Can't hold together.
The organic matter carbon-based molecules, proteins, fats, water all of that remains. But without the metallic framework holding it together, without the iron to carry oxygen, without the calcium scaffolding supporting bone structure, the body just... collapses.
Dissolves into organic sludge. Evaporates into ash as the water content disperses.
That's what I watched happen. Hundreds of people having every trace of metal ripped from their bodies at the molecular level. Leaving nothing but rapidly decomposing organic matter.
And this level of control the precision required to sense and extract metals from living tissue, to separate iron from hemoglobin without destroying the molecule entirely, to pull calcium from bone matrix that's not basic Metal Manipulation. This is someone who understand their power. Who has explored their soul sea and not just understands the potential they possess but has unlocked it.
Someone who's explored their mark power to its absolute limits and beyond.
Someone who's learned to manipulate metal not just as objects, but at the fundamental level. Atoms. Molecules. Individual metallic elements distributed throughout living systems.
My breath catches as my eyes lock onto the figure on the building.
This isn't some random Midnight Rose member.
This is Teleb himself.
And all of the swords he just created are all pointed directly at my heart.
My eyes widen. The Fearmonger's suppression can't quite contain my reaction to this.
"Fuck me sideways," I curse.
The figure tilts their head again. That same mocking gesture.
And then they spread their arms wide, like a conductor preparing for a symphony.
The blades begin to orbit around them. Slowly at first, then faster. Building momentum. Building speed.
A whirlwind of human-metal death, spinning faster and faster until individual blades blur together into a solid ring of jagged edges.
And then the ring expands. As the twelve massive blades split apart into smaller blades. The area around me seemingly grows wider as the swords in the air above me encompass more space. Until they spread out across the entire market district I am in.
Until I'm standing in the center of a slowly contracting circle of fifty blades, all of them perfectly spaced around me ready to launch. And I know that there is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Just a perfect kill zone.
The figure on the rooftop stands perfectly still. Arms still spread.
And despite my Fearmonger suppressing my emotions.
I feel fear.