Matabar

Book II. Chapter 31 - The Long Night (Part 2)

Two of the accumulators in his rings crumbled to dust in an instant. The prototype for Ice Dolls was a hungry thing that demanded a truly immense amount of power. It needed seven red and nine green rays, to be exact, a sum that equaled Ardan’s own maximum reserve of energy. That was precisely why he had asked Dagdag for the extra accumulators in the first place.

As soon as the rings went dead, Ardan dropped a glove to the ice-slicked ground and hooked the fresh accumulators from his belt with his rings. His opponent froze for a second, stunned. Whether he was a mage, a Spider, one of the Puppeteers—it made no difference to Ardi right then. He simply wanted to be rid of the gnawing thing in his gut, the one chewing him up from the inside, bite by relentless bite.

That one second of hesitation was enough. With the next strike of his staff against the ground, he lit the second seal. The vortex of ice, which hadn’t yet settled, whipped up once more in flurries of snow that glittered in the light of the streetlamps. A spear of ice, two meters long and as thick as a man’s forearm, took shape, consuming two rays from his Red Star and four from his Green Star.

The air around the spear began to vibrate. Less than a moment later, it shot forward with unimaginable speed, tearing doors and window frames from their hinges as it went, and slammed into the shield his opponent had raised. The man hadn’t even had time to strike his own staff against the ground, but he didn’t need to.

The buckle on his belt flared, melting into liquid metal as it disgorged a seal of its own. It shimmered through all the colors of the rainbow before settling on a brilliant red. The Ice Spear, with one final shudder, was riddled with cracks and then exploded into a thousand tiny shards. Most of them vanished instantly, consumed by a vortex of fire that had taken the shape of a clover.

The mage finally slammed his staff down and a complex, multi-layered seal spun into existence beneath his feet. Ardi was clearly dealing with a Blue Mage; only from the third Star onward could a mage use seals composed of several constructs at once.

Ard had no idea what these seals were. He had never seen their like before. But Edward had been a good teacher to his temporary student. Ardan had enough time to spot several characteristic nodes, the ones that governed a few specific properties of the spell.

And so, by the time the petals tore themselves from the fiery flower and merged together, forming a lightning bolt shaped like a jagged fang, Ardan was already prepared. With another crack of his staff, the modified discs of Orlovsky’s Shield spun around him, and in his left hand, his grimoire fell open.

The lightning bolt zigzagged toward Ard, its trajectory constantly shifting. A mage that did not possess a spell in their arsenal that could react to a threat without their direct input would have been sent to the Eternal Angels or the Sleeping Spirits in an instant.

But Orlovsky’s discs, aligning in a row, threw themselves in the path of the enemy spell a breath before it would have pierced Ardan’s chest. And even though they could only protect him against a physical impact, the lightning… slowed. As it shattered the translucent discs one by one, it grew thinner, and a fine dust scattered in the air. It was the element of “stone” that Ardan had noticed in the structure of his opponent’s seal. The man had simply hidden his primary attack spell in the “costume” of the elemental seal his artifact had created.

“But you’re not a military mage!” His stunned foe cried out.

For a fleeting second, the thought that this last Spider must not have been in contact with his “superiors” for quite some time crossed Ardi’s mind. But he brushed the thought aside as useless and irrelevant.

When the last of Orlovsky’s discs finally shattered, the fiery glow of the weakened lightning bolt merely washed over Ardan’s cloak. He, in turn, had already let his gaze flick across one of his grimoire’s pages and struck his staff against the ground again.

This time, the seal at his feet widened from half a meter to seventy centimeters in diameter. And once again, just as with the spear, the snow and frost all around him were drawn into the sky, forming a block of ice above his opponent’s head. This was an inverted Ice Wall. It was nearly three meters long and two and a half meters wide, and it came crashing down on the mage’s head like a multiton fist from the heavens. The man, of course, had already raised a shield. This time, it was not elemental, but a complex, three-Star construct designed to redirect the energy released by the impact back at Ard in the form of a compressed air blast.

That was if Ardan had correctly interpreted the primary nodes of the seal glowing beneath his opponent’s feet. But the block of ice, when it was less than half a meter away from the mage’s head, cracked in half. Folding like a book, it struck his shield from two different sides at once—from the back and the front. As a result, his redirected blast of compressed air fired right inside the icy trap. It should have, by all rights, given the enemy mage decompression sickness, but another artifact flared on his opponent’s wrist in response.

A spectral bird spread its wings and, after gathering everything in an upward torrent of wind, vanished into the sky, taking with it chunks of the surrounding walls, shards of ice, and entire sheets of earth.

The mage was breathing hard. A sheen of sweat had appeared on his face, and almost no accumulators remained in the rings on his fingers. It was unlikely that he had any spares.

“You rewrote it… on the fly,” he said, dumbfounded.

His opponent most likely had little actual experience in magical combat, because rewriting spells on the fly was the very foundation of military magic. Ardan vividly remembered those long, seemingly endless hours of training when Edward had forced him to rewrite seals faster and faster, before they could even manifest in reality.

Sensing that his Stars had few rays left, and that he would have to close his grimoire in order to replace the accumulators on his rings, Ardan listened instead to the echo of the Ley that had spilled out all around them. He reached for it, gathered up what he had just spent, and struck his staff against the ground once more.

This seal, ignited by Resonance, gave birth to a dozen ice needles, each of which was the length of a palm and the thickness of a finger. A modified Ice Barrage. The essence of the modification was not in their number, but in the fact that the needles would strike from four different directions at once, their angles of attack and velocities varied enough to be a problem.

Once again, a complex, multi-layered seal gleamed beneath his opponent’s feet. His figure was soon hidden by what at first glance looked like a sphere of water, but upon closer inspection, it became clear that the light from the remaining lamps wasn’t refracting off the surface of some spherical lake, but something more like liquid metal. The construct was so complex, so unfamiliar, that Ard was now convinced that the chimerologist had found his true calling not in attacking, but in the art of defense.

The sphere of liquid metal devoured the hail of ice needles without any trouble, drowning them in its depths, and then stretched out to the side in long, writhing tendrils. They touched the walls of the houses and began to flow along them like steel snakes. Leaving fire in its wake, the molten metal raced down the street and stopped on either side of Ardan.

The mage, who was watching the crystals of the accumulators on the young man’s fingers crumble away, just shook his head sadly and struck his staff against the ground. In that same instant, a meter-wide seal beneath his feet caused the liquid metal to seep into the houses themselves. Screams echoed, and the smell of burning flesh filled the air, and a moment later, pieces of boards, bricks, and household items became part of the metal tendrils and reached for Ard. And he would have been impaled on the spot, his bones ground to dust, if not for one small detail.

All this time, hiding amidst the icy patterns of frost, along those same walls, and sometimes disappearing into the snow scattered across the ground or the glints of reflections, the creation of the Ice Dolls spell had been closing the distance.

Not quite a lynx, not quite a pike, the creature emerged from an icy protrusion stuck to the remains of a wall and, looming over the stunned mage, opened its maw. Its breath became a blizzard, and within that blizzard, ice flowers bloomed.

But this time, they did not freeze—they cut. Their petals tore from their stems like a thousand tiny knives, and the stems themselves stabbed like dozens of needles.

The mage screamed. His spell broke, never finishing what it had started. The steel tendrils froze a few meters away from Ardan. And the young man just watched as the Blue Star Mage convulsed on the ground. A crimson pool started spreading out beneath his body and the torn rags that were now his clothing. Severed fingers, scraps of skin, and whole heaps of flesh and internal organs were scattered about.

But he was still breathing. He was gasping raggedly, foam bubbling on what was left of his lips, but he was breathing.

Milar had been right.

Ardan was an officer of the Empire. He was not paid by the state to indulge his emotional impulses and patch up old, reopened wounds. Before him was a Spider, and perhaps a servant of the Puppeteers, which meant he needed to be interrogated.

This brief battle had cost him two accumulators for his Red and Green Stars, a fact that would probably drive Dagdag insane.

Ard walked over to the still-twitching remains of the man and crouched down beside them. It was amazing how persistent life was in its endless, tireless attempts not to cross the final threshold. Even now, when not even a quarter of the man he once was remained, the enemy’s mind and soul still clung to this reality.

Ardan looked into the dying man’s eyes and unleashed his Witch’s Gaze. If the Spider had been at his best, Ardan would have likely not been able to break through the mental defenses of a Blue Star Mage, but in this state… he still didn’t have time to learn anything.

“The Empire… will be… destroyed,” the mage rasped, and his pupils dilated. He had square pupils, by the Sleeping Spirits. “Duty and honor!”

And, with his last ounce of strength, the mage clenched his jaw. Ardan leapt back, fearing an alchemical poison cloud would be sprayed at him. And he was right to do so. A shimmering, greenish cloud of what looked like smoke, or maybe flower spores, rose from the dwarven half-blood’s mouth.

Ardi was seized by coughing fit. A suffocating, acrid aroma constricted his throat, smelling of both rotten meat and blood all at once. There was nothing poisonous in it, but the stench itself was enough to knock a man off his feet.

The youth covered his face with his hand and looked around. The street had fallen silent. So silent that he could hear the hissing of the oil in the lamps. The gloom swirled around him like a fog, hiding the alleys and neighboring intersections in its haze.

And it was at that moment that Ardi heard a squelching, shuffling gait.

Squish-squish.

Squish-squish.

Like the train of a wedding dress, two creatures were dragging the shreds of the darkness that swirled in the alley behind them, an alley that had fallen under the dominion of the stench. It was a sickeningly sweet smell that combined rotting flesh with the cloying reek of meltwater and mushrooms so worm-eaten they were no longer brown, but black. And it was these same mushrooms that grew from the creatures’ backs.

These were toadstools from which not mere skin, but bloody flesh was peeling away. They also had poisonous fungi that resembled the eyes of rats, or perhaps were that. And he spotted countless other growths that hung in squelching folds all the way to the ground, where the gravel was being scraped by… fingers. Not claws, but fingers.

The creatures looked like a combination of humans crawling on all fours and dogs… or rodents. Their ribcages were stretched downward, their skeletons bent and elongated, with a writhing, mangy tail added on. Their hind legs had been replaced by limbs with knees like a grasshopper’s—they faced the opposite direction from their front legs—and instead of feet, they had hooves turned outwards.

And then there were their faces.

They still retained a hint of humanity, but were a lot more like the visages of rats. The tops of their heads were round, they had long, perpetually twitching noses under which sat two narrow jaws studded with crooked, broken teeth pointing in different directions, and four incisors that were like knives. The smaller of the two had breasts that dragged along the ground, getting scratched by the gravel and ending up covered in blistering, white pustules from which a yellow substance was oozing.

Ardan was momentarily stunned by the unexpected sight, but the creatures paid him no mind. Gurgling thickly as they let out green, viscous saliva, and making sounds like the lustful coupling of cattle, they approached their creator. Sniffing at his body, the chimeras greedily tore into his remaining flesh. They ripped at his skin, scraped away strips of meat with their long tongues, and their incisors broke and cracked the pliant bones.

Shaking off his momentary shock, Ardan reloaded his accumulators (there was only one left for each of his Stars on his belt; Edward would have berated him for conducting such a wasteful and unimaginative duel, even against a Blue Star Mage) and struck his staff against the ground. The discs of Orlovsky’s Shield once again appeared around him. Despite the fact that, in the past six months, Ardan had made great strides not only in engineering, but also in the military arts, his arsenal still contained only a handful of spells and nothing more.

He had no idea what the chimeras were capable of and could only hope it was nothing beyond the realm of physical harm.

And the beasts, who’d left nothing of the mage but scraps of clothing and a few pieces of bone, licked their bloodied muzzles and… turned toward their new target. Their throats trembled, and their tongues, clicking wildly, let out a chittering sound. It might have even resembled the noises cicadas made if not for its unnatural, wet quality.

His first impulse was to turn and run as far as he could from the unknown monsters, but the female’s first movement made it clear that it would be foolish to try such a thing. She pressed her whole body to the ground and then leapt forward with the speed of a hungry flea. Her knees sprang her forward and up, helping her cover nearly five meters in a single bound. And she did it so quickly that Ardi had no time to react.

Her fingers, hardened to the consistency of bone, broke against the discs of the spell that stood in her way, and along with her broken bones, three of the twelve barriers shattered. This meant that the chimera’s blow was equal in force to a shot from a military rifle.

The chimera fell to the ground, but did not howl or groan. She merely licked her fingers, which had been crushed to a pulp, and right before his eyes, accompanied by dull clicks and squelches, they returned to their former state. Just like with Gostomor…

“So it wasn’t just Matabar they tortured here,” Ardan whispered, flipping through his grimoire. On Edward’s advice, he had recorded a few “heavy-hitter” spells in it, but he had never used or practiced them before, so he had no idea if he could even cast them.

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Life, it seemed, was hinting that he should apply himself more diligently to the military arts, but Ardan remained deaf to its suggestions.

The female, meanwhile, backed away, closer to her… whatever the male was to her. It was hard to say if they had been made from human were-creatures, or if the beasts that had become part of the chimera had taken on a human form. Not that Ardan had time for such reflections.

The male chimera shook his patchy fur, and with a bony crack, streams of what looked like pus or blood shot from the broken “stems” of the mushrooms across his body, launching fountains of spores into the sky. They covered the street in a stinking cloud. When they touched the lamps, they caused the metal to hiss and fall to the ground in molten drops. The ones that landed on the soil forced ugly plants to crawl out, their buds of translucent flesh pulsing with the rhythm of tiny hearts. And where the spores landed on the houses, the boards dried up right before his eyes, crumbling to dust, and in their place appeared vines bristling with sharp needles, from which the same thick substance dripped.

The female did not simply stand aside. As soon as the cloud of spores rose into the sky, she leapt forward again. The cloud burned her back and stained the gravel with murky bubbles of sloughing, boiling flesh. Where the female’s skin and muscles had burst, new flesh immediately grew back, only to melt away again.

She landed a meter from Ardan and attacked him from behind. The transparent discs instantly moved to cover the vulnerable area before the female managed to deliver two quick, precise strikes. First with her left hand, then with her right, both of which had ossified up to the elbow. She’d chosen the exact moment when the cloud of spores had almost reached Ardi to attack.

Just like before, the discs of Orlovsky’s Shield withstood the blows, but along with the broken bones of the chimeras’ hands, six more of them crumbled to dust, and by then, the deadly cloud had nearly reached its target. Ardan, just as he’d done in his fight against Lea Mortimer, struck his staff against the ground, and a simple seal flared up beneath his feet, creating a gust of wind. It swirled the cloud around and threw it back, right onto the male chimera.

The creature gurgled and wheezed, but, just as with the female, all his wounds, squelching with pus, instantly healed. Ardan, meanwhile, after catching a glimpse of the shaking vines on the neighboring houses out of the corner of his eye, flicked his gaze over his grimoire again. Another modification of the Ice Wall made the female, who was now literally licking her fractures, pause.

When four interconnected walls of ice (though not as high or thick as in the standard version) formed around Ardan, the chimeras leapt back. Then, with the same speed as before, one of them tried to attack him by jumping over his makeshift “fortification,” but its bony fingers only slid off the ice that had belatedly appeared over Ardan’s head. This was because he hadn’t practiced this spell as often, so he had misjudged the parameters, which, in this case, hadn’t significantly affected the outcome.

What did affect it was the presence of the walls themselves, because a moment later, the base of the thorns growing along the vines swelled, and with a spray of acid, long spikes rained down on their target. If not for the ice walls, the three remaining discs of Orlovsky’s Shield wouldn’t have been enough to handle even a fraction of the volley. The needles, after almost piercing the barrier, got stuck in the ice walls.

Ardan looked warily at the bony tips that hadn’t reached the inner area of his construct. A moment later, the holes filled with an acidic fog streaming out from the needles, which caused the ice to begin to hiss and evaporate.

“Ahgrat,” Ardan hissed, and the next strike of his staff sent cracks creeping along the ice walls, making them hum. Ardan had never figured out how to bind the recursion of spatial plasticity to the Ice Prison that now surrounded him, so instead of five massive blocks of ice flying in different directions, dozens of large ice shards fanned out across the street instead.

They pierced through the flimsy wooden walls, got stuck in the crumbling, sparse brickwork, tore up the ground, and scattered gravel in all directions. And the chimeras… they didn’t even seem to notice them. As their bones were broken, as the female’s spine was shattered and the male’s abdomen was slit open, spilling a mess of assorted entrails everywhere, they didn’t even squeak. And their wounds healed just a couple of seconds later.

Ardan had already raised his staff to create a field of Ice Flowers around himself, which would have bought him some time, when a shot rang out nearby. The night’s gloom was lit by a flash that was unnaturally bright for a normal bullet. And following that flash, a crimson ray cut through the air, finding its target precisely where a canine’s heart would be.

The female chimera let out a gurgling roar and, as quickly as she had appeared next to Ardan, scattering pus from her breasts and blood from the gunshot wound in her chest, she returned to the male in a single leap. She was limping slightly and whimpering like a beaten dog, and her companion diligently licked her bloody wound, which was healing far more slowly this time.

“What happened to you not being able to help?” Ardan asked without turning, his eyes fixed on the target.

A familiar lighter sounded nearby, and the air filled with an equally familiar smell of cigarettes. Considering the putrid stench currently pressing on his chest, Ardi was actually glad to smell Milar’s cigarettes for once.

“Magister, we could take offense to that and go off to collect what’s left of Gostomor’s brains in some vials, you know,” Milar said, holding a lit cigarette in one hand and a saber in the other. “Now, if you would be so kind as to let our operatives do their job.”

“With the greatest of pleasure,” Ardan answered sincerely and took a step back.

He didn’t need to be asked twice. He’d gladly get as far away as possible from chimeras that regenerated faster than he could reload his accumulators, of which he had almost none left. And the night was just beginning…

Alexander and Din stepped forward.

“Cute little doggies,” Din coughed. “What do you think, are they used to dry food or wet? You know, they say it’s popular to buy special dog food for your pet now. My Plamena wants to get a guard dog and-”

“Din.”

“What, Alexander?”

“Shut up,” Alexander growled.

“There you go again!”

They seemed completely unconcerned about the fact that the chimeras were licking their wounds. Or maybe they were actually waiting for the creatures to recover, to see what the creation of the Spiders and Puppeteers was capable of. Ardan had read something like that in the manual for Black House operatives, but he couldn’t remember it too well—it was extraneous information he didn’t need.

Alexander, leaving a trail of gravel behind him, practically flew across the ground. Ard could still follow the movements of his legs, but he doubted he could run that fast anywhere but his native Alcade.

And while running, he was squeezing the triggers of his revolvers with both hands. Shot after shot, along with the silvery flashes of strange gunpowder, even stranger bullets flew from his revolvers. They were of a caliber far greater than the wrists and shoulders of an ordinary man could withstand.

The chimeras hissed and new clouds of spores burst from their backs, within which the bullets, despite their “strangeness,” disappeared faster than they could reach their target. Only a few metal fragments gashed the creatures’ bodies, but Alexander seemed unconcerned by this.

Still shooting as he ran, he ended up right between the creatures. He kicked the female away, while the male’s back was met with a blow from his brass knuckles. Ardan could have sworn he saw circles of dust spreading out on the ground under the creature’s belly, as if Alexander’s strike had created so much pressure that it had passed right through and disturbed the air currents.

The female howled, and a cloud of acid erupted from her body, which only dripped down the cloak he had put up to block the attack. The male, meanwhile, had already bent his knees to spring into another attack. But he never got the chance. Din’s throwing knives flashed. Both of them plunged into the ground right in front of the monster’s muzzle. The seals on their wooden hilts flared, and then the knives shone with bright flashes of lightning, weaving themselves into the outline of a fishing net.

As a result, instead of jumping at Alexander, the male, burning his hands and body on the shining net, ran to the side. Din, who was moving no less nimbly than the chimera itself, leapt into the air from a running start and, while still in the air, threw another two knives. This time, the seals on the hilts flared in mid-air, and a gray, impenetrable smoke swirled around the male. And Din, pushing off a melted lamppost, which changed his direction, avoided the bone needles shot at him (it looked as if he’d known in advance that something would be coming his way) and threw his last blade into the smoke. The moment its blade touched the edge of the smokescreen, it instantly burst into bright flames, and a moment later, a deafening explosion shook the street.

“What about the bonus for capturing them?!” Shouted Milar, who was watching the scene with absolute calm.

“Better… a bonus for… liquidation…” Alexander growled, pausing to land another blow.

He was moving fast, very fast, but the chimera was faster. Time and again, it managed to dodge his brass-knuckled fists that were covered by protective gloves, and spit acid in return, from which Alexander hid behind his cloak. He would hold it out like a wing or a shield, and then, throwing the edge aside, he would go on the attack again.

Din, meanwhile, after landing back-to-back with his partner, drew his combat knives. He held the left one in a reverse grip, and the right one in a standard grip.

Both Din and Alexander acted in concert, quickly and precisely. I was as if they were reading each other’s minds. Ardan had never seen anything like it, not in Yonatan’s squad, nor anywhere else. Although, on second thought, apart from the chaotic skirmish with Lorlov, he had never really seen these two at work before.

Din and Alexander pressed their shoulder blades together and then, using each other as supports, shot off in different directions. Alexander, diving down, deceived the female, who had jumped up. Planting his right foot so firmly he buried it almost up to the ankle in the soft earth, Alexander stopped his run and, before the female could react, delivered an uppercut from below.

Sleeping Spirits… Ardi remembered Guta’s strength, and Alexander was clearly no match for a Guardian Spirit, but the way the air trembled around Alexander’s fist (like the air over a fire) spoke volumes. With a single blow, he completely tore the creature’s head from her neck. And with a second, which he threw out while moving to the right, he made the monster’s body bend along his forearm, after which she flew into the nearby wall with a loud thud. The carcass crashed into the brick and fell to the ground, lying motionless on the gravel.

Alexander was breathing heavily, and it seemed to Ardi, or maybe he was just imagining things, that the patterns of the tattoos on his bald head were stirring.

Din, on the other hand, was moving only slightly slower, but much more smoothly and gracefully. Like a blade of grass led in a dance by gusts of wind, Din made two elegant circles around the male, who was trying to reach the tracker with his fangs and bony fingers. But each time, he was just a few millimeters short of touching even the edges of the Black House operative’s cloak, while Din had no such problems.

His knives didn’t even gleam; they vibrated like the wings of a persistent mosquito. And each such vibration, each lunge and swing, invariably ended in a deep gash or a bloody hole in the creature’s body. Finally, another swing of the blade landed right between the monster’s vertebrae. Losing control of his body, the monster collapsed, but he did not suffer for long—a moment later, a knife was plunged into his skull up to the hilt. The creature twitched and went still.

“How much?” Alexander asked in his habitual, terse manner, breathing heavily and wiping his forehead.

Whatever the tattoos did to his body to endow their owner with far-from-human physical abilities, they clearly exacted an equally high price.

Din, wheezing as he stepped aside, pulled his blade from the creature’s head with a trembling hand. He was drenched in beads of sweat no smaller than Alexander’s own.

“Exes… nine… for each of them…” Din’s voice came out of his throat with a whistle and accompanied by some phlegm. “Or more, if… they find anything… useful… in them.”

No matter how skilled and strong the operatives of their department were, they were still human. Not mutants like Yonatan Kornosskiy, and not half-bloods of the Firstborn like Ardi. And that was precisely why he felt even more respect for them than before.

It was one thing to throw yourself into the crucible of battle when you could withstand its heat without much threat to yourself, and quite another when your every mistake, even the most insignificant one, could be your last.

“Come here, kids, daddy has some useful drinks for you,” Milar said, holding a cigarette with his lips and shaking two small flasks with alchemical potions at them.

Alexander looked at him with clear disapproval, while Din, scratching the back of his head (just like Ardi), silently walked toward his boss.

“I’d hit you,” Alexander seethed, looking gloomier than the street the four of them had just wrecked. “But I’m too tired.”

“And if you weren’t tired, I wouldn’t be joking like this,” Milar waved him off.

Alexander and Din had almost reached them when a guttural growl sounded. The female chimera’s head shot toward her body on bloody tendrils and simply reattached itself to the neck, leaving a ragged, whitish scar behind where it had been severed. Meanwhile, the male’s wound had completely healed, and he was the source of the growl, shaking his head as he recovered.

Obeying the guttural sound, before the tired Alexander and Din could even react, those disgusting flowers of flesh and beating hearts that had grown at the beginning of the fight… bloomed. Their buds burst, and not just a cloud, but a whole lake of volatile acid rose into the sky.

Ardan immediately struck his staff against the ground, and another gust of wind carried the acid away, but the chimeras didn’t care. They were already on their feet, licking their lips and growling deeply.

“What a tedious evening,” Milar hissed with anger.

Alexander and Din downed the contents of the flasks and turned to face the persistent and extremely resilient chimeras. They were no longer in a hurry to launch a frontal attack and, after splitting up, were circling their prey from different sides. Just like pack predators.

“Any ideas?” Alexander asked, holding his clenched, brass-knuckled fists in front of him.

“Only prayers,” Din, who was standing next to him, replied.

“Magister?” Milar drawled, throwing away his cigarette and drawing his revolver.

“Fire magic might help by completely burning their bodies,” Ardan said, closing their circle. They stood with their backs in, chests out, so no one could be attacked from behind. “But I don’t have a single suitable seal.”

Milar almost choked.

“Are you serious right now?! What, by the Eternal Angels, were you doing with Aversky?!”

“What, do I have forty hours in a day now?!” Ardan couldn’t hold back and shouted back.

“Alright, calm down,” Alexander growled. “Let’s not become Fatians first, and then-”

He never got to say what they were supposed to do next. To their left and right, it wasn’t the chimeras that rushed past, but the streams of a roaring, greedy flame instead. It turned the gravel into liquid drops of hissing lava. It made the lampposts disappear into its thundering depths. The flame clearly tried to avoid touching the shacks and houses, but its heat alone was enough to cause small fires to flicker in places.

And the sky… The sky, which was already light thanks to the summer twilight of the Metropolis, was suddenly painted in the colors of a golden dawn. When the flame died down, Ardan saw a silhouette walking down the street. The person was of medium height, with long gray hair tied back in a ponytail. They were dressed in a simple suit, high boots, and wore the same blue cloak as the four of them. Except their left sleeve was sewn into a stump at the elbow. In his right hand, Mshisty, a mage of the Pink Star, the fifth Star, which by no means made him weaker than some Grand Magisters of the Black, the sixth Star, held his staff raised above his head.

It was made of Ertalain alloy, and if you didn’t look too closely at it, it appeared to be a carved wooden staff. Although, if he remembered correctly, Mshisty had had a completely different staff on the train, but who said a mage could only have one? As far as Ardan could recall, Edward had also had several staves stored in a safe in his laboratory.

What interested Ardan far more was the spell itself. Above the head of Mshisty’s staff, wreathed in clouds of black smoke and orange flame, a fanged, monkey-like face stood frozen. Created from the fire itself, it had bared its fangs in a mad grin and its red, coal-like eyes shone.

The chimeras, which had taken the main brunt of the spell, could barely stand. Their bones and flesh tried to regenerate, but in vain. Time and again, they only crumbled into black, cracking ash.

Mshisty, meanwhile, walked right up to Milar and asked curtly:

“Just them or the whole area?”

And for some reason, Ardan had no doubt that Mshisty had not only the raw power required to burn down the entire Night Folk quarter at once, but also the moral fortitude for it. The Black House’s chief attack dog wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if he destroyed everyone who was hiding in their hovels right now, hoping to survive the night.

“Just the chimeras.”

“You sure?” The mage asked again. “This thing,” he nodded at the fiery monkey head, “cost me a yellow accumulator, and Dagdag put me on a diet a long time ago.”

Mshisty was speaking so calmly that it seemed like he wasn’t in the middle of an area filled with the most dangerous of creatures. And that wasn’t referring to just the chimeras.

“Oh, go to hell, Mshisty,” Milar couldn’t help himself. “We still have to go to the Mansionhills. And where are your subordinates?”

“I left them back at the entrance,” Mshisty shrugged and gave his staff a slight shake. “There’s not much work here anyway.”

A fiery haze seeped out from the monkey’s mouth. Swirling and foaming with soot, it swept down the street in twisting waves, not just clearing, but devouring everything in its path. There were no more lamps, no pebbles, no sparse benches; the shards of broken brick and splinters of wood disappeared, even the sand left behind under the evaporated lava turned into a dirty, gray glass.

And when the flame dissipated, all that remained of the chimeras were the black scorch marks in the shape of their silhouettes that now adorned the wall of a brick building. Apparently, they had tried to escape, but hadn’t made it in time.

Ardan, meanwhile… was looking at the monkey face, which hadn’t disappeared, despite the fact that it had just flooded the street with fiery doom. Twice. It was unlikely that a Blue Star spell was capable of such a thing, and probably not even a Yellow one, either. Mshisty had most likely drawn one or two rays from his Pink Star to create this… this… thing.

“A pity, of course, but what can you do,” Mshisty lowered his staff to the ground, and the fiery monkey’s maw dissipated into an acrid haze. “Let’s go, no point in standing around.”

And then, in his usual, detached manner, the Black House’s attack dog turned around and headed toward the edge of the Night Folk quarter.

“So much for your bonus, Alexander,” grumbled Din, trudging along after him.

“Din,” Alexander called out hoarsely.

“What? Shut up? Yes, yes, I know. Din, shut up. Din, be quiet… I can’t wait to get home to my Plamena. She promised to make Kargaam-style duck today. Do you know how delicious that is? Oh, wait, you were at our place when she made it last time and-”

“Your hair is on fire.”

“Damn it!”

Din patted the top of his head and then breathed on his hands. Milar and Ardi exchanged a look, shook their heads in unison, and trudged after the operatives.

Ardi wouldn’t have minded going home to Tess, but they still had to visit the estate of an ancient vampire, which he was not exactly thrilled about. And it wasn’t like they could delay that, either, because soon enough, the Puppeteers would find out that a hole had appeared in their plan, if they hadn’t already.