Scarlett's vision split clean down the middle. Two feeds, side by side — one Thea's, one Vera's. Her own was a black void.
It made her grip the longsword tighter, planted behind the door, coiled and ready.
Her own five senses were gone, surrendered to the ritual, but the hearing piped in from Vera's end carried a low scuffle of voices and bootsteps down the corridor — leather soles creaking on the floorboards.
"Boss Grew, can't we just... I, I'm honestly a little scared."
"Antonio's curse on that infant has already taken hold. The Foul Blood's spread through the whole place by now. They're a few dead bodies, nothing more. What's there to be scared of?"
"It's the Foul Blood I'm scared of—"
"What you should be scared of is failing to drag them back, and Antonio offering you up as the sacrifice instead. Move. Get the door."
Grew? Grew Lawrence? Scarlett was still turning the old man's remembered face over in her mind when Thea's voice came through her ear.
She and Vera had climbed the stairs from the ground floor in silence, then tucked themselves into the bend of the corridor where the angle blocked their feed. "Someone's about to open the door. 1.7 meters tall, no weapon drawn. Aim just below the shoulder. Drive the sword into him."
"Three more will be alerted right after. Roughly three meters from you. Don't panic. The instant you've killed the one at the door, pour every bullet you have into the front-left — keep it below shoulder height."
Scarlett recited it back and ran through it once in her head. Manageable. I can do that much.
Vera added, "At this range, you could try this — after you kill the door-opener, sprint to the middle of the corridor, pivot ninety degrees left, drop into a crouch, then fire in short bursts sweeping left to right across a twenty-degree arc, aimed shoulder-level. Factor in the recoil and I'm certain you'll hit every kill spot."
Scarlett's breath caught. “Miss Idiot — how did you calculate all that?"
The rough direction of attack she could eyeball, sure. But firing angles and recoil compensation — was this so-called Miss Idiot's math actually accurate?
Vera couldn't have said for certain either. Just now, the math humming somewhere in the back of her skull had inexplicably come to a boil — and from every scrap of information about the scene, a model had assembled itself in her head, spitting out the optimal firing solution in seconds. She'd used less than one percent of that strange, math-shaped knowledge the "witch" had handed her, and the firing problem had simply fallen apart in her hands.
Don't tell me... I'm actually a genius?
A little baffled by herself, Vera still relayed the instructions cleanly.
Thea weighed it for a moment, then said, "Do as she says."
—Creeak!
The door swung inward.
The trembling thug — terrified he'd catch the Foul Blood the instant he stepped through — had pulled on three layers of gloves before he'd dare touch the door at all.
He cracked it open, hooked his fingers gingerly into the gap, and eased it halfway, revealing the scene inside.
But.
Where were the people?
Where were the two witches?
Where was the plague-stricken infant?!
How was there only one—
Before he could even hold his breath, a flash of swordlight punched through his throat first.
A wet spit — a spray of blood blossomed.
The blood landed on Scarlett's hand, and Thea, linked, received the warm, viscous, slick-wet sensation secondhand, a rust-edged tang curling up at the tip of her nose.
At the door, the thug clutched his throat, unable to force out half a syllable, eyes blown wide, frothing red at the mouth as his life drained at a startling clip.
—Thump!
His legs buckled. The thug slumped to the floor, fingers closing around the blade to wrench it free — to no avail.
"Ngh, ngh ngh ngh—"
"What are you wailing about? Didn't I tell you to open the door? Why are you just standing there gawking like an idiot?"
Grew Lawrence's brow knotted. The little old runt's face was already a mass of wrinkles, and now it was uglier than words could say. He waved the other two thugs forward — and before he'd taken his next step, he heard a tight rush of footsteps, then gunfire.
Had Scarlett ever played a third-person shooter, her movements would've been smoother.
The first round came screaming for the thug on the left. The savage pain wrenched a shout out of him as he clutched his chest and pitched forward, curling up tight as a shrimp.
The second and third punched through the middle thug's throat and lungs. Before he could so much as moan, blood frothing with air burst from his windpipe, and he was face-down on the boards without a word out of him.
Shared vision or not, the loss of her own five senses still threw off Scarlett's feel for the shooting. But Miss Idiot's calculation had accounted for the recoil — the muzzle drifted up naturally, landing each shot dead on target.
—Now the fourth shot.
The instant Grew saw the muzzle swing his way. He froze for a heartbeat — and the next, agony tore through his shoulder blade.
He forced himself upright through the pain and, before the next report, cried out in a furious rush:
"I make my oath here: in this battle I face my foe with this face, and shall be wounded — my eyes shall not see the light within the fire!"
The words fell. He drew his fist up before him, thumb leveled at his own right eye.
Spit!
His thumb plunged straight into the eyeball. Blood burst free, slithering down his finger like an earthworm.
Bang! Bang-bang!
The fifth, sixth, and seventh rounds fired in sequence.
But these — these passed at a strange, subtle angle, grazing just over Grew Lawrence's scalp and away.
"Bullets nullified?" Vera reacted at once, snapping out the next order. "Scarlett — draw the sword, three steps forward, diagonal downward cut into the first quadrant."
A blessing that Scarlett had never once skipped math class. A coordinate plane seemed to swim up before her eyes, horizontal and vertical axes interlaced like a cross. Going on feel alone, she took three quick steps, settled her stance, and brought the blade down hard into the upper-right region.
Shing!
The edge fell, driving toward the target's heart — but Grew dodged again in that uncanny posture, his bullet-mangled left shoulder throwing off his balance. He sucked in a few ragged breaths and pushed back to his feet.
Clutching the shoulder, he finally made out the figure in the distance, and terror flooded his voice. "You're the one from the precinct — how could you possibly—"
"Agh!"
Pain ripped through his right shoulder — a pointed cleaver hurtled in from behind, burying itself in his right shoulder blade, warm blood spattering across Thea's face.
Thud!!
"Because she's here at my invitation." The muzzle of a silenced pistol pressed against the back of the old wretch's skull. Thea wore a radiant smile. "You must face your foe head-on, or the ritual takes no effect — Mr. Grew Lawrence, you can't dodge your way out of this one now, can you?"
Grew heard the voice and shuddered head to toe. He cut his eyes backward — and the moment he caught the girl's face, his pupils contracted to pinpricks.
"You're alive — you're actually alive?!"
"Oh? Mr. Lawrence seems quite shocked to see me breathing."
"You can't be alive — and that child's alive too?"
A burst of crying went up. He looked, and saw an infant bawling in Vera's arms, startled awake by the gunfire.
"Impossible!"
Grew remembered it with perfect clarity — the black-robed "Antonio" had sworn up and down that the infant was riddled with a severe case of the Foul Blood, and that "Daphne Salvia" and "Sophia Salvia" were both teetering on death's edge.
Yet here they were, not just whole — but fighting.
"Antonio... that bitch lied to us?!"
Thea put two rounds into the thug beside her who hadn't yet died. Task complete. Text bloomed in the air: 400 points awarded.
The innkeeper below, hearing the gunfire, came clambering up the stairs cursing.
But the moment he reached the second floor, Thea swung the muzzle around to his face.
The innkeeper took one look at the corpses on the floor and gave a full-body flinch, smiled awkwardly, raised both hands, and slowly backed away.
A sensible man.
Watching him go, Thea turned, drove a fist into Grew Lawrence and dropped him to the floor again, then planted her boot on his wounded shoulder blade. A truly harrowing wail tore loose.
"Who is Antonio? Speak plainly."
Grew hissed cold air through his teeth, but the disbelief still hadn't left his eyes. "Antonio," he ground out in pain, "is a cultist — a cultist they call the Black Crow! Sequence Six at the very least. He's the one who commissioned me to find you! He laid the curse on that child too, infected her with a severe case of the Foul Blood. And that officer — Antonio's the one who set us to hunting her down as well!"
"The Black Crow?"
The pressure on his shoulder blade eased a fraction. Thea thought back to when she'd first entered the Nightmare — the briefing had mentioned that her handoff contact, the White Dove, had been seized by the Church and hanged. And now a Black Crow surfaced too?
Grew bared his teeth in a grimace. "The Black Crow, Antonio. A Seer, Sequence Six at minimum. The rest you can ask all you like — it won't do you any good. I'm just a small fry myself."
A Sequence Six Transcendent, surfacing in a Sequence Nine advancement Nightmare...
"Fine. Now answer my last question. I'll give you a clean death."
She leveled the pistol at the Grew Lawrence sprawled on the floor. He seemed to have resigned himself, and gave a faint nod.
Thea asked, "Everything you know about Quickhand Pete. All of it."
Once she'd mined out the last scrap she needed, Grew had nothing left to offer.
—Bang!
A single report, and the bullet passed clean through the back of Grew Lawrence's skull.
Now four corpses lay arrayed down the upstairs corridor, blood pooling across the floor, while the innkeeper below — predictably — went straight to the constabulary.
The Church's patrol knights were scrambled at once. A three-man patrol was already on its way from the nearest street.
The infant, jolted awake, had been soothed by Vera this whole time; now it was Thea's turn.
The three of them gathered close. Scarlett ventured, timidly, "Barring anything unexpected, Church knights will arrive shortly. I'll vouch for you both as an official officer — that you killed four thugs in aiding my active self-defense."
"Quite the seasoned hand, aren't you, Officer Scarlett."
Thea rose and clapped Scarlett on the shoulder, pressing her lips into a smile. "Scarlett — Roman was saying the Nuremport Suppression Bureau is short on people. But the way I see it now, I can't agree with him. There's a finer recruit standing right here than we could ever ask for. I'll have a good word with Roman about your valor in the Nightmare."
Hearing this, Scarlett's cheeks went red as anything, and she couldn't help the goofy grin that spread across her face.
Then the officer-in-training snapped to attention and threw a crisp one-handed salute.
"Thank you, Commander!"
"Good — there's spirit in you yet! Now bottle that spirit up. We've got the templar-knights to handle in a moment."
Vera spoke up then. "If the templar-knights do come, doesn't that mean we'll get escorted to the Cathedral of Our Lady?"
"With Scarlett vouching for us," Thea said, "that's how it should play out, in theory."
Vera let out an instant cheer and threw her arms around Scarlett.
And that was another 300 points in the bank!
Vera still had a task to find Bishop Canthus — counting that, she was up to 500.
Six ritual participants, two already eliminated; their scores ought to be zero.
Thea had cleared the main objective, killed the hunters, kept all three of them alive — 1,000 points. Shelter little Vera on top of that, and she'd reach 1,300. Vera's side stood at 1,200.
And Scarlett, who hadn't made a peep this whole time, had somehow racked up the highest of the three — sitting pretty at 1,500.
For the three of them to hit eighty-five percent of the average was no tall order at all.
Scarlett straightened, all business. "Then I'll explain it to the templar-knights along those lines. Is there anything else you need me to do?"
Thea opened her mouth, hesitated, then smiled. "Keep yourself safe. You were ordered to protect me, and I can't have anything happening to you either. When the ritual's over, I'll treat you to a meal."
"Thank you!"
The tension in Scarlett's face loosened, and out came that goofy grin again.
Truth be told, Thea had just been considering whether to sweet-talk this guileless girl into helping her torch the freighter and trigger the great fire — but the event would burn upward of thirty thousand people to death, and the impact of that would likely be a touch too much for the girl to bear.
And if this King's-path chosen one got turned into a sheathless blade over it, Roman could probably come challenge her to a knight's duel.
So Thea decided she'd handle it herself.
"I'm going to step out for some air."
Thea made up an excuse and slipped out into the corridor, then fixed her gaze on the old Lawrence's corpse on the floor.
Set against torching the freighter, getting to the Cathedral of Our Lady, completing the advancement ritual — there was a bigger discovery to be had right here.
Because the moment Lawrence had truly died—
Her Inverted Sanctum had stirred.