"Let's see what fate has decided..."
The four men closed in.
The card's surface shimmered. The dead battlefield painted on it seemed to deepen, as if the grave soil had become an actual hole looking down into somewhere light did not belong. Skeletal hands tightened around their buried hilts. The conductor in the mourning coat raised his bone baton.
Lucien smiled without meaning to.
"Ah...Looks like death," he said. "A grim one too."
His thumb pressed against the word only he could see.
[Manifestation.]
The card vanished.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the alley groaned.
The four thieves looked up too late.
Above each of them, the darkness split open and gave birth to a sword made of bone.
Not blades like the old card had summoned in Lucien's first life. Not thin pale swords dancing in the air like clever tricks. These were massive things, each one the size of a pillar, forged from fused ribs, femurs, spines, and skull-white marrow. Their edges were jagged with teeth. Their hilts were wrapped in funeral cloth that fluttered despite the dead air. They hung over the thieves like judgment that had grown tired of waiting.
One man screamed.
That was all he had time for.
The bone swords fell.
The first came down on the saber wielder and drove him into the stones with a sound that made Lucien's teeth clench. The second punched through the butcher-blade man's shoulder and chest, tearing him backward into the wall hard enough to crack brick. The third pinned the dagger man through the street, the impact throwing blood in a hot arc across Lucien's coat. The fourth did not merely stab. It dragged. The blade landed, caught the last thief as he tried to turn, and carved him along the alley stones before grinding to a stop.
The violence was over before Lucien finished drawing his next breath.
For one full second, he did not move.
The alley had become a slaughterhouse.
Blood ran into the drainage channel in thick ropes. Broken weapons clattered late, as if sound itself had been too frightened to arrive on time. The massive bone swords remained planted where they had fallen, absurd in their scale, impossible in their presence. Each one was taller than a man even with half its length buried in stone and flesh. They were not elegant. They were not merciful. They looked like grave markers made by a god that hated subtlety.
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Lucien stared at them.
His hand tightened around his plain sword until his knuckles ached.
In his first life, Band of Swords had given him three pale blades. Useful. Brief. Desperate. They had cut ropes, distracted monsters, bought seconds from men stronger than him. He had respected the card because it had kept him alive when nothing else cared to.
This was not that.
This was obscene.
Four men had been alive. Then the card had answered, and the alley simply corrected that fact.
Lucien swallowed, but his throat had gone dry.
He had wanted power. Needed it. Chased it across death and backward through time. He had known the Black Arcana would be stronger than the pathetic scraps his old Tarot Draw had offered.
Knowing was different from seeing a man crushed beneath a sword made of bones wider than his torso.
The massive blades began to crumble.
Not quickly. They did not vanish like illusions. They decayed. The bone lost its color first, yellowing, cracking, flaking into ash at the edges. The funeral cloth burned without flame. The hilts collapsed inward. One by one, the swords dissolved into pale dust that scattered across the wet stones and mixed with the blood they had spilled.
The black card reappeared near Lucien's hand.
It looked unchanged, but he knew better. Something in its image had shifted. The skeletal hands on the card no longer struggled to pull the swords from the grave. They had succeeded. Behind them, four new blades stood planted in the painted battlefield, fresh and wet beneath a dead sky.
The card turned once, then slipped into the shadow beneath his palm.
Somewhere deeper inside him, he felt it settle beside Death Jester: The Last Laugh.
A blue window opened.
[Dirge of Blades: The Funeral March has joined your Black Arcana.]
[Current Black Arcana Cards.]
[Carrion Before the Snare.]
[Death Jester: The Last Laugh.]
[Dirge of Blades: The Funeral March.]
[You can draw another Black Arcana card past midnight.]
Lucien looked at the words.
Then at the bodies.
Then at his own sword, still wet from the first two men he had killed without the card.
Past midnight.
The system spoke as though this were ordinary. As though the day could simply end, the draw could return, and he could continue collecting death one card at a time. Perhaps for the Black Arcana, that was all this was. A hand played. A condition fulfilled. A new card seated at the table.
For Lucien, the alley smelled of opened throats, crushed bodies, and the first real proof that his second life would not be cleaner than the first.
He exhaled slowly.
There was no time to be horrified for long.
Prav would hear the noise. Someone would come. Guards, thieves, scavengers, or worse, men who saw four crushed corpses and understood that whatever caused them was worth hunting.
Lucien wiped his blade on the coat of the narrow-faced thief, then searched the bodies quickly with a steadiness that felt older than his skin. He took coin, two usable knives, and nothing sentimental. The satchel of poison was still secure. His purse remained where it should be. His new sword, though cheap, had already paid for itself.
Before leaving, he looked once more at the blood spreading through the drainage channel.
A noble boy would have vomited.
A better man might have prayed.
Lucien did neither.
He stepped over the dead, pulled his cloak tighter around himself, and vanished deeper into Prav before the alley could remember his name.