The mountain of dead rats lay between us like a grotesque barricade. Valerius and Livia stood in the flickering torchlight, looking at our battered, blood-soaked bodies with absolute amusement.
"Do you know how hard it is to capture a pregnant sewer rat without damaging it?" Valerius mused, stepping closer. He kicked a dead rodent aside, his dark-veined eyes gleaming with sadistic pride. "It took us days to find the right specimens, and nights of bleeding strays over them to trigger the affinity growth. But look at the results. Magnificent, aren’t they?"
"You bred them," I said, my voice hoarse, keeping my knife raised. My mind was racing, assessing their posture, their weapons, and the faint, corrupted heat radiating from their bodies. "Why? To kill us?"
"You?" Livia laughed softly. It was a cold, melodic sound that sent shivers down my spine. "Do not flatter yourselves. You are just an unexpected pest control test. The swarm was meant for the third and fourth rings. We were going to breach the main grates tomorrow night."
"Thousands of rats unleashed in the lower districts," Valerius grinned, his teeth showing. "Thousands of commoners bitten, bled, and torn apart in the dark. A river of human blood flowing down into the drainage system, right into our ritual circles. The Coalition uses beast blood to awaken the Ember, but human blood... the sheer volume of it will force our vessels to Ascend. We will break past the Dormant stage in a single night."
"You are insane," Elara spat, her chest heaving, her grip tightening on her sword. "You are going to slaughter half the city just to get your status back?"
"It is not slaughter, it is sensible use of resources," Livia replied calmly, her tone terrifyingly self-righteous. "The Empire consumes the lives of those peasants every day in the foundries and on the borders. We are merely taking our rightful share. Commander Erula threw us away because we were ’defective.’ We are going to return to the Upper District with an Ember so powerful she will have to kneel before us. It is the natural order."
"The natural order is that you are just two spoiled brats playing with things you don’t understand!" Elara screamed.
Before I could stop her—before I could grab her shoulder or shout an order—Elara snapped. The exhaustion, the trauma of the auction, and the arrogant, sociopathic entitlement of the two nobles pushed her over the edge. She let out a guttural roar and vaulted over the pile of dead rats, charging straight at Valerius with her sword raised high.
"Elara, no! Keep the formation!" I yelled.
But she was blinded by pure, unadulterated rage. She swung her steel with incredible speed, fueled by her awakened Ember. Valerius raised his left arm to block, vastly underestimating the strength of a fully ignited Dormant Bud. Elara’s blade sheared straight through his expensive cloak, through skin and bone, cleanly severing his left arm just below the elbow.
Blood erupted into the damp air. Valerius let out a piercing, inhuman shriek.
For a split second, I thought Elara had won. But she had swung too wide, leaving her core entirely exposed. Valerius, driven by the raw, corrupted instinct of the blood magic, didn’t retreat. With his remaining right hand, he drew a long, curved dagger from his belt and lunged forward.
He drove the blade directly into the side of Elara’s neck.
The world seemed to stop.
The sound of the roaring gears faded into a suffocating silence. Elara’s sword dropped from her hand, clattering against the stone. She stood there for a heartbeat, her eyes wide with shock, staring at Valerius. Then, a massive torrent of crimson spilled from her throat. She collapsed backward into the pile of dead rats, her body twitching once, twice, and then going completely still.
"Elara!" Myra screamed, a sound of pure, soul-tearing agony. She dropped to her knees, frozen in absolute shock, unable to look away from the lifeless eyes of her friend.
My mind slammed shut, locking away the horror and the grief in a dark box. I couldn’t mourn. If I mourned, Myra and I would die. I already saw many allies die in my previous life, friends torn to shreds by grenades, drones exploding on their backs, bullets passing through heads. I stepped forward, my Veriti knife gripped so tightly my knuckles turned white.
"You little bitch!" Valerius shrieked, falling to his knees and clutching his spurting stump, his aristocratic face twisted in agony.
Livia’s cold demeanour shattered. She drew a slender, wickedly sharp shortsword and stepped over Valerius, her dark-veined eyes locking onto me. "I will skin you alive for that, bastard."
She lunged at me. She was fast—unnaturally fast. The blood magic and her Ember pushed her speed beyond normal human limits. Her blade thrust toward my heart in a silver blur.
I didn’t try to match her speed. I used my experience. I sidestepped by a fraction of an inch, letting her blade spark against my boiled leather armor, and brought my knife up to parry her follow-up slash.
Clang!
The impact sent a shockwave up my arm, but I didn’t back down. Livia fought with the elegance of a trained fencer, utilizing precise footwork and rapid thrusts. But this wasn’t a fencing match in a pristine courtyard. This was a sewer, slick with guts and blood. She had power, but she had never fought a war.
I stepped into her guard, closing the distance to neutralize her longer blade. She panicked, trying to step back, but her expensive leather boot slipped on a crushed rat carcass.
It was the only opening I needed.
I drove my left elbow viciously into her face, hearing the satisfying crunch of her nose breaking. As her head snapped back, I plunged my Veriti knife deep into her abdomen. I didn’t stop there. With a grunt, I twisted the enchanted blade and jerked it sideways, brutally slashing through her intestines.
Livia gasped, a wet, gurgling sound escaping her lips. The arrogance vanished from her eyes, replaced by the mundane, terrifying realization of her own death. I ripped the knife out and shoved her backward. She collapsed onto the slick stone, clutching her spilled entrails, and didn’t move again.
I turned around, my chest heaving, the Ember burning like a furnace in my heart.
I barely registered the movement before it was on me. Valerius.
Insane with pain, blood loss, and the corrupted magic boiling in his veins, the one-armed noble launched himself at me from the ground like a rabid dog. I raised my arm to block, but I was a fraction of a second too late. His curved dagger slashed across my face, tearing a deep, burning line of agony across my right cheek.
The force of his tackle sent me crashing onto my back on the hard stone. Valerius scrambled on top of me, his remaining hand raising the dagger high to plunge it into my chest. His dark-veined eyes were wide with madness, blood pouring from his severed stump all over my tunic.
I struggled to bring my knife up to defend myself, but his weight pinned my arm. I braced for the lethal impact.
It never came.
A silver spearhead suddenly erupted through Valerius’s right eye, bursting out from the back of his skull in a shower of bone and brain matter.
His body instantly went rigid. The dagger slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the stone next to my ear. Slowly, the heavy, lifeless weight of the aristocrat slumped sideways, rolling off my chest.
I lay there, gasping for air, clutching my bleeding cheek.
Standing over his corpse was Myra. Her face was ashen, completely soaked in tears, her whole body shaking violently. She was still gripping the wooden shaft of her spear, having driven it through his head with everything she had.
She looked at Valerius, then at me, and finally at Elara’s lifeless body. The innocent, terrified girl who had curtsied to me in the temple was gone. This had finally broken her, and reforged her into something else.
"Is he dead?" Myra whispered, her voice completely hollow.
I slowly pushed myself up off the bloody stone, my cheek burning with sharp pain. I looked at the three corpses surrounding us.
"Yes," I said quietly, walking over to place a gentle, trembling hand on Myra’s shoulder. "They are all dead."