Pop!
CRACK-BOOM!
The broad-bladed executioner's cleaver struck the bone pile. The strike pulverized the ancient dragon ribcage into a cloud of white dust, shattering stone beneath it. Twenty feet away, Raileigh and Jamie materialized in a low crouch. Raileigh winced, rubbing his right shoulder where his silk coat had been singed.
"That," he gasped, "was too close."
The five Thanatologists turned slowly, their horned gas masks swiveling in unison. The sound of their breathing filled the air like a death rattle.
Hiss-ah... Hiss-ah...
Jamie was a bit disoriented.
"I tried to teleport us out," Raileigh muttered, rubbing his injured shoulder. "I can only jump anyway within a two-hundred-meter range but the seclusion—it's blocking me but it bounced us right back. There's nowhere to go but deeper in."
Jamie didn't answer. She summoned her axe—a heavy, brutal weapon that gleamed with a faint, icy light—and settled into a combat stance. Her blue eyes hardened, and she projected a color of pure, concentrated malice at the masked men.
The Thanatologists paused.
For a single heartbeat, they tilted their heads—slow, curious, almost animalistic. The malice washed over them like water over stone, and they simply... observed. As if Jamie were a fascinating specimen rather than a threat.
Then they lunged.
Raileigh threw up a bubble, expanding it into a barrier just as the first Thanatologist struck. The cleaver connected—
POP!
The bubble burst instantly, and the shockwave sent both Jamie and Raileigh flying backward. They crashed into a wall of bones, the skeletal remains clattering around them like macabre rain.
"Ow," Jamie groaned, pushing a skull off her chest. Raileigh coughed, quickly scrambling to his feet, his eyes wide as he attempted to use Flow Perception, trying to gauge their opponents' strength—
And saw nothing.
Where the Thanatologists should have been, there was only a black void. An absence. As if they didn't exist in the Flow at all. Meanwhile the energy swirled around them, making the emptiness even more apparent.
"Jamie—"
"Mmm." She grunted in affirmation, pushing herself up.
She thrust her hand forward, diminishing temperature at points in front of her and firing a dozen razor-sharp shards of ice. But the moment the ice was a few inches from them her Flow control shattered, and the shards clattered to the ground uselessly or struck the black leather robes harmlessly.
"Those robes must conceal Flow by it cancelling out from the ambient energy," Jamie muttered, her eyes narrowing.
"Fancy tools for a group of grave diggers."
Despite the situation, Raileigh felt a small, ridiculous flutter of satisfaction.
'She knew what I was thinking.'
He forced his mind back to survival and began to consider the situation. He glanced to the side, where the boundary was still shimmering.
'These men are unrelenting. West Cardinal Ljudevit Mlinar was a pawn all along. Well to be fair it was a given, given his position as the Proxy of the Sacred Orthodox Church. He's the only one with the authority to dispatch this kill-squad for the fragment—'
Suddenly, one of the Thanatologists attacked, Jamie rushed forward to meet him and he raised his cleaver, swinging down in a brutal arc.
Instinct took over. Jamie ducked beneath the whistling steel, slammed her hand onto his boot, and froze his leg onto the ground. She then aimed a Flow Reinforced punch at his chest.
Hiss-ah...
Two more appeared on either side, cleavers raised. Jamie was mid motion and the laws of inertia made it impossible to dodge, even if she diminished her own momentum or their attack speed.
'Would that even work?'
Raileigh acted on instinct. He pillaged the friction from the ground beneath Jamie's feet. She slipped, sliding out of the path of both blades, and he teleported her to his side with a pop.
She landed hard, gasping for breath. Blood dripped from a shallow cut on her temple.
The five Thanatologists came to stand in a semicircle, watching them.
Waiting.
Raileigh's mind raced.
'Should I try to use my authority as a prince? No—they've already seen my face. They know I'm royalty. And given their strength...Saints? No... to my knowledge the only Saints in the city are Captain Emma, Vice-Captain Pihla of the Enforcers seventh division, Lords Alaric Dukker, Heidi Dahl, Shirogane Genji, and Sir Damtse Okko the Aethelberg knight captain. The others are out of town due to various reasons. Hmm....'
"My theory is that these men are using some means to boost their base strength to at least, a high end Votary and at most to that of a pseudo-Saint." Raileigh said.
He looked back. The exit was closer than he'd thought.
He took a step forward. The Thanatologists tensed.
He took a step back. They relaxed.
"They're giving us a choice," Jamie said, her voice tight. "Fight and die, or run and live."
"It seems that way." Raileigh's jaw clenched.
"It doesn't matter who or what they are," Jamie gritted out, wiping blood from her temple.
"We're not leaving without the fragment."
Raileigh offered a grim, bloody smirk. "I figured you'd say that."
Jamie turned her sharp blue eyes onto him. "Do you trust me, Rai?"
"It depends on what trusting you entails."
She grinned—a flash of her usual tomboyish energy breaking through the pain.
"I can feel the fragment. But I can't get to it if these masked freaks are hunting me. If we both go, we'll both be hunted. But if one of us stays behind..."
"...The other one will make it," Raileigh finished her sentence with a heavy sigh.
"I just did the same thing to Elias and now karma's turning the tables on me."
He straightened, his golden eyes meeting hers.
"Be fast, Jamie. Really fast."
Dozens of squishy, buoyant bubbles exploded into the air, sucking the ambient light and noise from the room while trapping the Thanatologists in elastic, bouncing spheres. Simultaneously, Jamie flash-froze them solid, the ice encasing the bubbles, and threw containment talismans onto the surface.
The talismans flared—
CRACK!
The ice shattered. The bubbles burst. But Jamie was already through, sprinting into the dark maze of bones just as the ice and bubbles shattered into a shower of sparks behind her.
Hiss-ah... Hiss-ah...
Raileigh turned to face the five recovering executioners.
Hiss-ah... Hiss-ah...
They came at him from all sides.
He couldn't wound them through their flow-negating robes, but he didn't need to—he just needed to be a nightmare to catch.
Raileigh teleported—a short, sharp pop—and reappeared behind them. He pillaged the sound from the air, plunging the room into silence. The Thanatologists paused, their heads swiveling, their breathing the only thing audible in the void.
Hiss-ah...
Utilizing his bubbles like trampoline pads, he bounced off the walls, redirecting kinetic strikes, pillaging their momentum when they tried to attack, and using short-range teleportation like a frantic, spatial dance—constantly swapping positions with the Thanatologists and the nearest objects, forcing them to strike each other or try to come out of the walls in the dark ossuary . Anytime one tried to run past him after Jamie, He'd shoot a bubble like a projectile at him or manifest a bubble infront of them to bounce them back.
Hiss-ah... Hiss-ah...
He pillaged the friction from the floor beneath one of them. The man slipped, his cleaver carving a trench in the bone wall. Raileigh bounced a bubble off the ceiling, using its buoyancy to propel himself sideways, and kicked another in the back of the knee.
The Thanatologist didn't fall. He simply turned, slow and deliberate, and backhanded Raileigh across the room.
CRASH!
Raileigh hit a pile of skulls, the bones crunching beneath him. Blood filled his mouth. He spat it out and scrambled to his feet.
'They're too strong. My bubbles can only pillage so much—and their robes cancel most of my Flow attacks. I need to keep moving. Keep them distracted.'
He teleported again, swapping positions with one of the Thanatologists just as another swung his cleaver. The blade carved into the wrong target—the man's own comrade—but the leathery robes absorbed the blow with barely a scratch.
'They're even resistant to each other?'
Raileigh laughed—a wild, desperate sound.
"You guys are really something else!"
Hiss-ah...
Then he pillaged the heat, dropping the temperature to freezing. The Thanatologists' breath fogged in the cold.
But they kept coming.
Jamie ran.
The ossuary stretched before her like a labyrinth of bone. Walls of skulls, pillars of femurs, archways of ribs—the deeper she went, the more elaborate the architecture became. It wasn't just a resting place for the dead. It was a temple.
Her shoulder burned, the birthmark pulsing with each step. The fragment was close. She could feel it—a tugging in her chest, a whisper in her mind.
This way.
She rounded a corner— Her nostrils twitched. Amidst the stench of centuries-old decay, a sharp, chemical odor hit her senses: bleach and human rot. The same she smell they had...
Jamie ducked, rolling as—
Thwack!
A broad cleaver burst through a wall of beast skulls missing her throat by centimeters.
Hiss-ah...
A sixth Thanatologist stepped out from the shadows of a bone pillar.
"Of course there's a sixth," she muttered.
The Thanatologist lunged.
Jamie froze the ground beneath his feet, but he simply jumped over the ice, his cleaver swinging in a wide arc as he fell on her. She parried with her axe, the impact jarring her arms, and countered with a burst of fire.
The flames washed over his robes and dissipated but the raw kinetic force was enough to throw him a few feet back. It was then he slipped on the ice and broke through a wall into a hidden chamber of more bones.
Jamie ran without skipping a beat.
Hiss-ah...
It became a violent game of cat and mouse. Jamie maneuvered through the shifting temple corridors, amplifying her own agility while diminishing the killer's footing, throwing ice-slick traps behind her as she pushed deeper into the sanctuary. The Thanatologist pursuing with that same, unwavering patience.
Hiss-ah...
She could feel it in his intent—the cold, clinical amusement of a predator who knew his prey had nowhere to run.
The ossuary shifted around her. The walls of bone became more ornate, the ceilings higher, the architecture more deliberate.
She was getting closer.
A few more dodges and tricks and she reached the end. A vast chamber opened before her, its walls adorned with bones arranged in intricate patterns. At the far end, on an elevated platform, a mural stretched across the stone—a tree formed from twenty-two stars, each one a different color, connected by lines of light.
The Tree of Life.
And at the base of the mural, kneeling before it, was a corpse.
The corpse was kneeling facing the mural as if in prayer, it's hands were wrapped around a broken stone dagger—gleaming, pulsing, alive with a light that was not light.
The fragment.
"There..." Jamie breathed, taking a step forward.
SCHLICK!
A brutal, blinding pain exploded through her left calf.
"Gah!" Jamie screamed, collapsing hard onto the stone floor. She looked down in horror to see a deep, gushing cleaver slash. She tried to rise, but her leg wouldn't obey.
The Thanatologist loomed over her.
Hiss-ah...
She summoned her axe, swinging wildly, but the killer casually kicked the weapon from her grip. She summoned her short spear, thrusting upward, but the assassin caught the shaft mid-air, lifted her off the ground by her own weapon, and slammed her violently back onto the stone floor.
CRACK!
The air left her lungs. Stars danced in her vision.
He stepped heavily onto her left arm, pinning it, and brought the butt of his cleaver crashing down into her face. Blood burst from her nose and lips, her vision swimming even more in sickening white light.
Hiss-ah... Hiss-ah...
He raised the cleaver high above her neck for the killing blow.
"I refuse to die here!"
In a last-ditch, desperate instinct, Jamie's copper ring gleamed as she summoned the silver wand she found in the cemetery with the shadow crew to use as a weapon and the world went dark in a burst of black.
A ethereal, terrifying scream echoed through the chamber. An equine figure exploded from the wand.
It was made of smoke and shadow, its eyes burning crimson, its horn a spiral of silver light like a unicorn straight out of ones nightmares. It rammed into the Thanatologist with the force of a battering ram, sending him flying thirty feet across the room into the bone wall.
The Thanatologist crashed through, bones cascading around him.
Hiss-ah...
The killer pushed himself up, his cracked goggles locking onto the phantom horse as it landed between him and Jamie.
For the first time, a raspy, distorted voice echoed from beneath his gasmask.
"A Vengeful Spirit..."
The Thanatologist unclasped a small silver vial of glowing liquid from his robes, splashing it across his cleaver, entirely ignoring the fragment on the altar and Jamie entirely.
"As a priest of the Fourteenth Order, it is my sacred duty to ensure the tormented dead pass on."
He straightened and raised the weapon.
"I will exorcise you."
The spectral unicorn roared, charging the killer. The room shook violently as the two engaged in a brutal, bloody clash of steel and darkness.
Jamie turned to lie on her belly and coughed up blood. Dismissing her axe, she used her spear as a crutch, painfully dragging her bleeding body inch by inch toward the elevated altar.
Her leg screamed in protest. Blood trailed behind her. But the fragment was close. So close.
'Ellie wants this fragment, I have to get it no matter what.'
She reached the base of the platform, gazing up at the mural of the twenty-two colored stars forming a divine tree.
"Sephirot..." Jamie muttered instinctively, the ancient word slipping from her tongue without her knowing why.
BOOM!
A massive shockwave from the battle behind her detonated, catching Jamie in the flank and throwing her violently across the steps. She hit the floor dazed, her spear clattering away.
Through blurry,blood-filmed eyes, she watched as the smoky unicorn stomped the sixth Thanatologist's chest into a bloody pulp, mauling him until he stopped moving.
Jamie reached out, trying to crawl back to the altar—when a massive shadow fell over her.
She turned her head. The Vengeful Spirit horse was standing directly over her. Its crimson eyes burned and she could feel its intent.
Pure, unbridled, indiscriminate rage.
"Jamie!"
A voice screamed from the entrance. Raileigh came tumbling into the room, rolling wildly across the floor to dodge as a broad cleaver missed him and embedded itself deep into the stone ahead.
The remaining five Thanatologists burst into the chamber behind him, battered, and thoroughly enraged by Raileigh's mockery. Raileigh wasn't in a much better condition than Jamie either.
Seeing fresh targets, the smoky unicorn turned its burning red gaze toward them lunging at them with wild fury. The thanatologists instantly recognized it as a vengeful spirit and splashed their weapons with the same liquid the first did, , engaging the spectral beast.
"Jamie! The fragment!" Raileigh yelled, teleporting away as the beast tried to impale him, rather striking a nearby killer.
Jamie reached for the spear and dragged herself up the altar steps on her belly. Her fingers stretched out. Inch by inch. Her hand reached the skeletal corpse.
The Oblivion Fragment gleamed. A tiny, electric spark danced between her fingertips and the ancient stone dagger.
"Just... a little... bit..."
BOOM-CRASH!
The opposite wall of the chamber violently exploded inward in a colossal shower of stone, dust, and crushed bones. Everyone in the room was blown backward by the sheer concussive blast. Jamie was thrown into the wall a dozen feet away from the corpse which toppled over from the force.
From the opening in the wall, in came Nastrod.
He was wounded—bloody, ragged, his patchwork cloak torn—but he didn't slow. Ignoring everything else Nastrod lunged straight for the altar, his living weapon—Craving—snapping open like a ravenous jaw. He clamped the artifact around the skeletal corpse's hands , ripping the dagger and the Oblivion Fragment from its grip.
Emma and Pihla materialized behind him, their weapons raised—
Nastrod slammed Craving into the ground.
CRACK-BOOM!
The shockwave knocked everyone back. Jamie was buried under a cascade of bones, her vision swimming. She couldn't see. Couldn't move. Could barely breathe.
"Rai..." she choked out weakly, unable to see where the prince had gone.
Through the settling dust, the Vengeful Spirit horse lunged at Nastrod to rip his throat out.
And Nastrod's Arcane Eye flared.
The Celtic Five-Fold Knot burned with silver light. The spirit screamed, its form dissolving, flowing back into the wand.
Standing atop the ruined altar, clutching the Oblivion Fragment within Craving's teeth, Nastrod threw his head back and let out a booming, triumphant laugh.
"It's done, its mine now!"
Nastrod roared, his voice echoing through the falling ruins
"Now... I can finally save millions!"