Eddy's group picked their way across the pitted, uneven grass, the mood among them heavy and subdued — the high spirits from moments ago had vanished from every face.
Before long, they picked up the trail of their quarry.
A Moonlight Wolf crouched low, tail raised high, fangs bared, growling a deep, threatening warning at the intruders steadily closing in on its den. Its instincts told it clearly that it was no match for these five upright two-legged apes — but its helpless, mewling cubs were in the den behind it.
"Noisy thing."
Eddy raised his staff with a furrowed brow. As a string of rapid, cadenced incantations poured from his lips, mana surged and churned within him:
"Magicae sagitta."
Mana condensed into an arrow, dragging a blazing tail of fire through the air. It struck the wolf's skull with pinpoint precision and detonated in a crimson cloud of blood-mist — fragrant with the smell of cooked flesh.
The sheer force of it softened Eddy's expression slightly. He let out a cold snort. "Mindless beast. It had no idea what it was picking a fight with."
"A Sequence 9 creature... I doubt many people could just tank a hit like that..." Blackstone Tasha, the barrel-chested loudmouth, gave a small, involuntary shudder.
"Obviously not," Eddy said, a faint look of pride settling on his face. "In terms of raw power alone, Magic Arrow is arguably the finest Tier-1 spell in existence — present company excluded for that clumsy Fireball."
"Fireball? Only idiots die to a Fireball," Blackstone Tasha declared at full volume, puffing out his chest. "Any self-respecting 'Berserker' worth his salt can dodge that lumbering spell with nothing but quick feet and well-drilled footwork."
"Dodging a Fireball is too easy. I can dodge crossbow bolts." The short man in black, sensing the mood lift a little, jumped into the conversation. "And I'm not just bragging — last time some little punk tried to ambush me with a crossbow, I dodged every single bolt, then I walked up to him and with one slash I...I..."
The rest of his sentence never came.
A crossbow bolt screamed out of the darkness and punched clean through his throat. A jet of blood erupted from the wound and sprayed directly across Eddy's face.
Well. Didn't see that coming.
From her hiding spot in the shadows, Li Fei watched the one-shot kill land and allowed herself the smallest upturn of the lips. Her hands, however, never paused for a single instant. Two more bolts sang from the crossbow in rapid succession, aimed at the archer carrying the bow on his back.
The five-man team consisted of two warriors, one thief, one archer, and one mage.
Naturally, Li Fei's first priority targets were the thief and the archer — the two who posed the greatest threat to her.
Thwip. Thwip. Ah—!
The second bolt missed. The third buried itself deep in the target's thigh. Caught completely off guard, the archer let out a wretched cry and toppled to the ground.
"Watch out!"
Eddy let out a shout of furious alarm, not even pausing to wipe the blood from his face. He hauled the wounded archer behind the cover of a nearby tree. The two warriors instantly hit the dirt, scrabbling for anything they could hide behind.
"Who the hell is out there?!" Blackstone Tasha bellowed from behind an earthen rise.
"Who else could it be? That bitch from the Golden Kumquat Tavern! Kad — scout her position. Find out how many people she's brought with her."
Eddy's face had gone dark. No matter how many times he turned it over in his mind, he simply could not fathom it — that meek, easily-bullied foreign girl he remembered had actually dared to launch a direct offensive against his group.
Did she not understand the consequences if she failed?
And even if she succeeded — wasn't she afraid of retaliation?
They were House Mettis men, after all. Even if the family wouldn't pay an enormous price to avenge them personally, leaning on the city's enforcement teams to pressure the Golden Kumquat Tavern into handing her over was absolutely within their reach.
"It seems... she's alone."
Kad — the stocky, shaven-headed man with the flanged mace at his hip — produced a single-tube brass telescope and swept it methodically across the treeline. But no matter how carefully he looked, there was no one else to be found. Only the Eastern girl.
"That's impossible—"
Eddy opened his mouth to argue — and then stopped dead.
Yarman, who had been tying off his wound, suddenly convulsed from head to toe. A mouthful of blackened blood came surging up, carrying with it the antidote he'd just downed.
"The bolt was poisoned," Yarman rasped, his voice barely a sound. "It's strong. My antidote... didn't work."
He smiled a ghastly smile and sank onto his back, his eyes shot through with crimson. "Take care of..."
Eddy's mind snapped back to the blood that had just splattered across his own face. Cold sweat broke out across his skin in an instant. He scrabbled frantically through his pouches, found a vial of antidote, and threw it back without hesitation.
Yarman's final words were never spoken. He curled like a shrimp and rolled and writhed on the ground for more than half a minute before his eyes went glassy and he stopped breathing — a graceless, agonized end.
"I'll look after your family. I promise."
Eddy lowered his gaze and reached out, gently pressing his childhood friend's eyelids closed.
"What do we do now? That bitch is hiding behind the tree to the southeast," Kad said, urgency bleeding into his voice. "My scouting gear came straight from the Thieves' Guild — unless her backup has 'Basic Stealth' proficiency, there is absolutely no way they could slip past my detection!"
"Kill her. Disable her first if you can — I want her taken alive."
Eddy narrowed his eyes, his voice thick with grief and cold fury. "She had the nerve to ambush five Knowledge Sequence Transcendents with nothing but a poison-dipped crossbow and a bag of dirty tricks... I'm going to make her regret every last scrap of her arrogance and stupidity."
Then he drew a slow, deliberate breath and called out loudly:
"Li Fei! I know it's you! Can we talk?"
Li Fei said nothing.
Talk?
You must be joking.
The star courtesan was a woman of narrow patience and profound insecurity. Kenneth had made an enemy of her — and so, naturally, she intended to deal with Kenneth, every accomplice who had aided him, and every single person now standing between her and that reckoning. Thoroughly and without remainder. Leave even one loose thread, and she'd never sleep soundly again.
Without warning, a flare screamed upward into the sky, detonating beneath the clouds in a burst of interlocking light — forming the unmistakable shape of a unicorn: the sigil of House Mettis.
"I've already sent a distress signal," Eddy pressed on, doing his best to grind away at Li Fei's resolve. "Once Mettis reinforcements arrive with the enforcement teams, there will be no walking this back. Right now — if you put down your weapons and offer sufficient compensation to the deceased, Lady Gneia's name alone might just be enough to pull you back from the edge."
Eddy's tone was earnest, measured, utterly convincing — as though he meant every word.
Reinforcements would be a problem...
Li Fei ran through her intelligence on the remaining three targets alongside a mental inventory of her current equipment. Then she opened her System Panel, swept her eye over her remaining Potential Points and Wealth, and made a rapid series of decisions.
After a short silence, Li Fei finally spoke — her voice pitched in a perfect register of frightened, wavering uncertainty:
"Is it... really still possible to settle this peacefully?"
"It is! You must know how much weight the Golden Kumquat Tavern's name carries — even House Mettis has no desire to push things to an irreversible extreme unless they absolutely must!"
Eddy's brow lifted. His tone took on a patient, almost fatherly weight. "The enforcement team must already be on their way. It won't be long before they have this whole area surrounded. You're running out of time — stand down. Let's settle this like adults."
"Alright... alright..."
Li Fei tucked the freshly reloaded crossbow beneath her mage's robe, then produced her backup shortbow — the decoy — stepped out from behind cover, and set it on the ground in plain sight. Her eyes glistened with the suggestion of tears. She had the look of a girl who had done something wrong and had no idea what to do next. "I'm so sorry. I acted impulsively..."
Eddy silently raised his staff and began preparing to cast — but Li Fei suddenly flinched, pulling herself back like she might bolt at any moment, all the nervous energy of a startled rabbit. "You said you wanted to talk — so why aren't you coming out? You're not planning to ambush me, are you?"
Is this a trap?
Eddy weighed it briefly, and felt a flicker of hesitation.
Transcendents had a faint, instinctive awareness of one another's power. He could say with certainty: Li Fei had not crossed the Sequence 9 threshold.
Close the distance, and three Transcendents against one small girl — wasn't that slaughter at their leisure? She wouldn't have a prayer of reaching down, picking up that crossbow, and reloading it in time.
Unless she had another hidden weapon on her...
Eddy considered the possibility. He had very nearly ordered her to lift her robe to rule out any concealed threat — but looking at that wide-eyed, ready-to-flee expression on her face, he held back.
He knew exactly what a hidden weapon capable of reliably killing Sequence 9 targets cost — several times the price of a standard Firefly-rated weapon at minimum.
Li Fei was a newcomer who had only been at the Golden Kumquat Tavern for a month. Not even a senior girl, let alone the headliner. The fact that she could afford one such weapon was already staggering. A second one? On top of that?
Impossible.
Decision made. Eddy rose and stepped into the open, jerking his chin at Li Fei. "You're standing too close to the crossbow. Move forward a few steps."
"Alright..."
Li Fei gripped the hem of her mage's robe with one hand, trembling visibly, and took several small, tentative steps forward.
Eddy studied her with warm, sincere eyes — taking in every breathtaking detail of that impossibly beautiful face — while he closed the distance at a leisurely pace and quietly catalogued the ten thousand things he planned to do with her once she was in his hands.
The two warriors clambered out from behind their cover as well, and began advancing on Li Fei in a slow, steady pincer.
As far as they were concerned, the matter was settled. Li Fei was no Transcendent — she had no mana, no way to use a Spell Scroll. Her crossbow was lying on the ground. This lone, isolated girl, with every eye locked on her, had absolutely nothing left that could threaten them.
Neither warrior had anything close to Eddy's composure, of course. The ugly, anticipatory smiles were already creeping across their faces.
To ensure the precision of her ambush shot, Li Fei had opened fire at a range of just over fifty meters. Under the eager, quickening steps of three men who wanted very different things from her, that distance collapsed rapidly.
Forty meters. Thirty meters.
"You really are easy to fool, aren't you."
Li Fei's expression bloomed into a sudden, radiant smile — sultry and faintly unhinged in the dying amber light, like a vampire princess stepping out of an oil painting; a drop of blood on a flower petal, dangerous and achingly lovely all at once. Both warriors stumbled half a step without quite knowing why.
Before the words had fully left her lips, Li Fei threw open her mage's robe.
What it revealed was not only a pair of long, straight legs wrapped in fitted black trousers — but a crossbow, warm from being pressed against her body, loaded with bolts slathered in lethal poison.
Settle this peacefully?
Oh, I'm the one who doesn't want to settle this peacefully.
Li Fei pulled the trigger without a moment's hesitation, and opened the fight three against one.
This woman... what a terrifying smile.
That was Kad's last conscious thought. Li Fei's first bolt caught him in the forearm; the second punched straight between his eyes. At thirty meters, the bolt carried more than enough kinetic energy — it cored straight through his skull and exploded out the back of his head in a spray of dark blood.
Clang!
With a sharp, grinding crash, Blackstone Tasha wrenched his shield up and caught the third bolt dead-on.
As a Sequence 9 Berserker, Blackstone Tasha was more than just a mountain of strength and durability. He had the foundation of 'Introductory Combat' to his name — and with it, a level of reaction speed that hollow Sequence-holders like Kad simply could not match. The moment Li Fei loosed her first bolt, Blackstone Tasha had seized that razor-thin window of reaction time and snapped into a textbook defensive stance.
His thick legs drove into the earth like bedrock. The Damage Rank I impact hit him like a battering ram — and pushed him back exactly one step.
Then Blackstone Tasha let out a bellowing roar, and the whites of his eyes went red.
Tier-1 Combat Technique — Frenzy: grants a 20% surge in explosive power and mobility. The price: a partial loss of rational thought for the duration.
At the same moment, Eddy's face had gone to iron. Without a word, he tore open a yellowed leather scroll.
The mana sealed within the Spell Scroll detonated in an instant. Roiling, superheated fire bloomed and writhed across his open palm — then hurled itself at Li Fei with a sound like a cannon shot.
Spell Scrolls had no shortage of flaws — prohibitively expensive, their released magic stripped of every enhancement from equipment, class, Sequence level, and personal stats, leaving the output power significantly dulled; strict usage conditions to boot.
And yet countless nobles and mages treated them like treasures.
Because a Spell Scroll could be triggered in nearly an instant — and used zero mana.
In a moment of crisis, the right Spell Scroll could turn the tide of an entire battle.
Like right now.
Eddy genuinely could not understand why anyone would walk out of their front door carrying two crossbows.
He also couldn't know for certain how many bolts Li Fei's weapon could fire consecutively — or whether she might somehow produce a third one.
But it no longer mattered.
No matter how brilliant or cunning she was, in the face of a roaring Fireball, it all burned down to the same ash.
Eddy's lips curled into a cold smile, killing intent glittering in his eyes. He watched the screaming column of flame stretch toward that flawless, porcelain-skinned girl, and imagined it swallowing her, leaving nothing but a charred husk.
He planned, once the smoke cleared, to relieve himself on the spot. A small, satisfying tribute to his departed friend.
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