I have been in a fight before.

I want to be honest about that, because it matters, because the kind of fight is going to matter for everything that happens in the next ten minutes — and lying to myself in the corridor outside my chambers, with a sword on my hip and a sixteen-year-old attendant walking three paces behind me, is not a thing I can afford.

I have been in a fight.

I have been in three. They happened in high school. I lost two and won the third by being lucky enough that the larger boy slipped on a wet floor before he could finish hitting me. The fights took a combined six minutes. I do not, in any meaningful sense of the word, know how to fight.

In the body I now occupied — Cedric Valdrake’s body, a body that had spent seventeen years being drilled in noble swordsmanship by tutors paid more per hour than most men in this empire earned in a month — the muscle memory was there. The instincts were there. The reflexes were there. The body knew how to hold a sword. The body knew how to read a stance. The body knew, in the way bodies knew the things they had been taught for a decade, what to do with a blade in its hand.

The body did not know how to do any of it on an F-rank Aether core.

I had been Cedric for two days.

I had reviewed the body’s swordwork in my head for perhaps an hour, in the dark, last night, while not sleeping.

I had not actually swung the sword.

The third bell rang as I reached the top of the main staircase.

I had ten minutes.

I had perhaps thirty seconds before that became eight.

—

"Young Master," Ren said behind me.

His voice had not finished puberty. The single word came out two octaves apart, and he flinched at the sound of it, and then he flinched at having flinched, and the second flinch was worse than the first.

"Quietly," I said.

I did not look at him.

I was reading the corridor — the candles, the air, the small thread of cold that had not been in the east wing four hours ago when I had returned from the vault. The cold did not belong here. The cold was the kind of cold that came in through a door someone had opened from the outside in winter. It was the middle of summer. The estate was warded. The cold should not have been here.

I made the calculation in my head.

Eastern courtyard. Courier with a Cult seal. Burning hand pressed into leather. The seal was a *summoning* sigil — the wiki had two paragraphs on the variant. The hand on fire was the Acolyte’s mark. The seal was used to *signal,* not to send messages. The courier was not carrying a letter. The courier was a marker. The marker would have been planted to anchor the *thing* the Cult was bringing into the estate.

Which meant the courier had already done his job.

Which meant the courier was either dead or fleeing.

Which meant the *thing* had already arrived.

I changed direction at the top of the stairs.

"This way," I said.

"The eastern courtyard is — "

"I know where the eastern courtyard is. We are not going there. Stay close. If I tell you to run, you run. If I tell you to drop, you drop. If you ask me a question while I am thinking, I will leave you in the corridor. Understood."

Ren nodded.

He did not say *yes*. He just nodded. His face had gone the color of unbleached linen. The wooden tray he had carried up to my room was clutched to his chest like a shield, and I noted with the cold detachment of a man cataloguing inadequate weapons that the tray was made of pine and would not stop a sharpened spoon.

I started down the servants’ staircase.

The servants’ staircase was narrow, unlit, the kind of architectural feature noble houses included so that the people who served the family did not have to inconvenience the family with the indignity of being seen. The wiki had not mentioned it. The dataminers had not mapped it. The corridor was off the game’s grid entirely.

It was the only place in the estate I could move in without being seen.

I descended.

Ren followed.

Halfway down, the cold got worse.

I stopped on the eighth step. I closed my eyes. I let the body — Cedric’s body, with seventeen years of instinct it had not chosen to develop — extend its attention into the dark below, and the body told me, in the language of fine hairs lifting along the back of the arms, that there were three people in the courtyard below.

Three.

I had expected the courier.

I had expected, possibly, the *thing* the courier had anchored.

Three was wrong. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

[The Villain’s Ledger]

[Hostile signatures detected in eastern courtyard.]

[Count: 3.]

[Classifications: 1 Acolyte (low E-rank), 1 unidentified mid-tier signature (estimated low D-rank), 1 — ]

[Note: The system is unable to classify the third signature.]

[Note: This is a problem.]

[Note: The system has been able to classify every signature it has encountered. The third signature is not in its database.]

[Recommendation: Reconsider running.]

I closed the panel.

I did not reconsider.

—

I reached the bottom of the servants’ staircase.

The door at the foot of the stairs opened onto a service corridor that ran along the back of the east wing. From the service corridor, two doors led to the kitchens. One door led to the laundry. One door led — and this was the door I cared about — to the eastern courtyard from a position behind a pillar that the courtyard’s central torch did not light directly.

I had memorized the estate’s floor plan in three hours this morning, while not sleeping.

The plan was, in this single moment, the only piece of preparation that had landed exactly on target.

I drew Nihil.

The blade came out of the belt-loop with the same small dry rasp it had made in my chambers, and the not-color in the crack pulsed once, hard, and then dimmed.

*Ah,* the sword said inside my head. *Are we doing this? Properly?*

*Quiet.*

*I will be quiet,* Nihil said, *the way a hungry dog is quiet at a wedding feast. Which is to say, audibly.*

*Quiet means quiet.*

A pause.

*Fine,* Nihil said, the way an old man said *fine* when an old man had been talked out of something he was going to do anyway. *I will narrate only the deaths.*

I did not respond.

I pushed open the service door an inch.

The eastern courtyard was a square of pale stone, perhaps fifteen paces across, ringed by the inner wall of the east wing on three sides and the gatehouse on the fourth. There was a single torch in a bracket above the gate. There was a horse, riderless, standing at the far edge of the cobblestones with its head down. There was a leather courier’s bag on the ground beside the horse.

There was a body beside the bag.

The body had been the courier.

I could tell because the body was wearing a courier’s tabard.

I could also tell because the body had been opened from sternum to hip and what was supposed to be inside the body was no longer inside the body.

In the center of the courtyard, between the body and the gate, three figures stood.

Two were human. Or had been, recently. A man in plain black, the Acolyte’s mark — a small burning hand — pinned at his throat, holding a curved blade that was not Imperial in design. A woman beside him in the same black, holding nothing in her hands and not needing to. The woman had the bearing of the wiki’s typical Deacon profile — composed, unhurried, eyes that had stopped registering surprise some years ago. Her hands rested at her sides. Her hands were what worried me. People who could afford to have empty hands in a fight were people who did not need their hands for the fight.

The third figure was not human.

I looked at it for one second.

I looked away.

I made myself look back.

The third figure was a shape that did not entirely commit to being a shape. It stood between the man and the woman like a third member of the conversation. It was roughly the height of a tall man. It was roughly the width of a tall man. Beyond that, the geometry of it did not quite resolve — edges that did not catch light the way edges caught light, a head that was a head only when I did not look at it directly, a darkness around it that was not shadow because the torch’s light passed through it without dimming.

The Ledger had failed to classify it.

I had four thousand hours of game knowledge.

I had not seen this thing before.

The wiki had not mentioned it.

The dataminers had not pulled it.

This was, in every sense of the word, off-script.

[The Villain’s Ledger]

[Note: The system is going to be honest with you.]

[The system does not know what that is.]

[Suggested response: Do not let it touch you.]

I closed the panel without looking down.

I let the door close to a sliver.

Behind me, Ren was breathing too fast. I did not look at him. I held my hand up, fingers spread, the universal gesture for *stop, do not speak,* and I felt him obey by the slight shift in the air at my back.

I ran the math.

One Acolyte. Low E. Beneath me in any honest fight — and above me at F-rank in a fight where I had not slept for thirty-eight hours and had used my Aether core for nothing more strenuous than a door lock and a sword binding. Beatable. Possibly. With surprise and a wall and a willingness to take a wound.

One Deacon. Low D. Three tiers above my actual rank, two tiers above the rank the world expected me to have. Not beatable. Not in a straight fight. Not with Nihil at one percent. Not in this body, not on this night, not without something the script had not given me.

One *thing.*

Unclassified.

I had two options.

The first option was to retreat through the service corridor, sound the household alarm, and let the estate guards — there were eleven of them on duty tonight, I had counted while walking up from the vault — handle the three intruders while I escorted Ren to the inner keep. This option was the one the Ledger had recommended. This option was the option a smart man took.

The second option was that the household guards would lose.

I knew this with a calmness that did not have any room in it for hope.

The household guards were good. The wiki had described them as "elite household troops, trained by the Valdrake martial tradition, average rank Warden among the captains and Adept among the line guards." The wiki had been writing about a normal night.

Tonight there were eleven guards. Tonight there was a Deacon. Tonight there was a *thing* the Ledger could not name.

The Deacon would kill the captain in the first thirty seconds. The thing would kill the rest in the next two minutes. By the time the alarm reached the inner keep, the estate would have eleven dead men in it and the Cult would have whatever it had come for. The Cult had come for the vault. The vault no longer contained what they had come for. The vault no longer contained Nihil.

Nihil was on my hip.

Which meant, when the Cult finished with the vault and found nothing in it, they would start asking the household *where their property had gone.*

I imagined Ren’s body opened from sternum to hip in the courtyard cobblestones in twenty minutes.

I did not allow the image to land.

I straightened.

I turned to Ren.

"Listen to me," I said. My voice was very quiet. "I am going to leave through this door. You are going to wait here. You are not going to follow. You are going to count to two hundred, slowly. At one hundred, you are going to start walking up the staircase we came down. At one hundred and fifty, you are going to be at the top. At two hundred, you are going to be in the kitchen on the second floor where the bell-cord for the inner keep alarm hangs in the alcove behind the spice cabinet."

He stared at me.

"You are going to pull the cord," I said. "Hard. Three times. Then twice. Then once. That is the Valdrake distress signal. Three-two-one. The captain of the inner keep guard will hear it. He will come."

"Young Master — "

"Do not interrupt."

He shut his mouth.

"If I am not back in the corridor when you reach the kitchen," I said, "you ring the bell anyway. You do not come looking for me. You do not wait. You ring the bell, and then you run for the cellars, and you do not come out of the cellars until you hear the voice of the Duke himself. Do you understand."

He nodded.

He nodded again.

"Say it."

"Two hundred," he whispered. "Three-two-one. Cellars. Wait for the Duke."

"Good."

I started to turn away.

"Young Master."

I stopped.

He was holding the wooden tray like a man saying his last prayers. His face was very white. His mouth was working on something he had not, when he opened it, fully decided to say.

"Why are you doing this," he said.

It was not the question I had expected.

I had expected *do not die,* or *be careful,* or any of the other things sixteen-year-olds said when they did not know how else to fill the space between a heartbeat and the next one. *Why are you doing this* was the question of someone smarter than I had given him credit for. *Why are you doing this* was the question of someone who, at sixteen, had served noble houses long enough to know that noble heirs did not, as a rule, throw themselves at things that frightened them in order to save attendants they had met an hour ago.

I almost answered honestly.

I almost said *because I have been a coward once already in my life and I am not going to be one a second time.*

I almost said *because you are the size of someone I knew.*

I did not.

I made my face do the Valdrake stare — the cold, slightly bored, slightly displeased expression I had spent the morning practicing — and I said the thing that was also true.

"Because if they kill the household," I said, "they will start asking the kitchen staff where my sword went. And the kitchen staff will tell them. And then they will come for me. And I would prefer to choose where that happens."

His eyes flickered.

I did not wait for him to decide whether to believe me.

I turned. I pulled the door open. I stepped through.

Behind me, very quietly, I heard Ren say:

"Yes, Young Master."

The door closed.

I walked out into the courtyard.

—

The Acolyte saw me first.

I had banked on that. The Acolyte was the lowest-ranked of the three, and low-ranked operatives in any organization were the ones who watched the perimeter while their superiors handled the work. He had been facing my direction since I had opened the service door an inch.

He had been faster than I had hoped to register the movement.

He was already turning.

His blade was already coming up.

I let the body — Cedric’s body, seventeen years of drilled instinct in the muscles, fed by an Aether core running on fumes — do what the body had been trained to do.

I moved.

Three steps. Diagonal. Not at him. Past him.

In every game I had ever played, the obvious move when you faced a low-ranked enemy in front of a high-ranked enemy was to kill the low one first. The wiki had a paragraph on this exact heuristic. *Aggro management,* the wiki called it. *Always clear the trash before the boss.*

The wiki had been written by people who had save points.

I did not.

I went past the Acolyte.

I let his curved blade swing through the air where I had been a half-second before. I felt the air of it on my coat. I felt, distantly, the moment his weight shifted forward to chase me — and that was the moment I had been buying with the three steps, the moment when his body was committed to forward motion and his back foot was off the cobblestones.

I planted.

I pivoted.

The body — *the body* — brought Nihil around in a clean horizontal cut at the height of the Acolyte’s hip.

I did not aim for the torso.

I aimed for the leading thigh.

The blade went through cloth, through skin, through muscle, and stopped against bone. It stopped *hard.* I felt the impact in my arm, my shoulder, my chest cavity where the cracked core was working harder than it had worked all day, and I felt — for one short, glorious second — Nihil *drink.*

The crack on the blade went bright.

The Acolyte made a noise that did not have a word in it.

He went down.

He did not get up.

I did not have time to watch him not get up. I was already moving — three steps the other way, putting the body of the Acolyte between me and the Deacon — and I was already counting, in the cold strategic part of the brain that had survived everything in two lives, the seconds the swing had cost me.

One full second.

I had perhaps four seconds before the Deacon was on me.

In four seconds, I needed to decide whether to fight the Deacon or whether to run, and the decision was complicated by the fact that the *thing* — the unclassified third figure, the shape that was not entirely a shape — had not moved.

It was still standing where it had been standing.

It was still looking at me.

I had its full attention.

[The Villain’s Ledger]

[Combat encounter logged.]

[Acolyte: down. Status: bleeding out. Time to death: under two minutes.]

[Villain Points: +20.]

[Reason: Decisive offensive action against an enemy who outranked you.]

[Note: The Deacon noticed. The Deacon is impressed. The Deacon is also extremely angry. Good luck.]

The Deacon raised her hand.

She had not moved her feet.

She raised her hand, palm out, fingers slightly spread, and the air in the courtyard — the cold, wrong, summer-night-that-should-not-be-cold air — gathered toward her palm. It gathered the way iron gathered toward a magnet. It gathered fast.

I had two seconds.

Behind me, beyond the service door I had closed, a sixteen-year-old boy was counting to two hundred in his head and had reached, by my best estimate, somewhere around twenty.

The thing that was not entirely a shape took one step forward.

The torch in the gatehouse went out.

The courtyard went dark.

In the dark, very quietly, Nihil said:

*Run.*

I did not run.

I had no time to run.

The Deacon’s hand released.

Something came at me out of the dark that I could not see and could only, in the half-second I had to react, *feel* — a pressure, a hunger, a piece of the wrongness in the air that the Deacon had gathered into a shape and thrown — and I did the only thing I could think of, the thing the body had not been trained for, the thing no swordsman in the empire would have done because no swordsman in the empire had ever had a reason to.

I caught it.

Not with the blade.

With my left hand.

The hand that was not holding Nihil. The hand that had been cut in the vault chamber and had healed into not-a-scar-yet by morning. The hand that had, four times in the last two days, spasmed once around objects when Cedric’s borrowed reflexes had moved through me and I had shut them down.

I closed my fingers around the wrongness.

It hurt.

It hurt in a way that did not have a word in it.

It also stopped.

The pressure in my palm went very still. The hunger in the air around the Deacon’s hand cut off, sudden, the way a sound cut off when a man pinched a string mid-vibration. The thing she had thrown at me — whatever it was, whatever shape it would have taken, whatever damage it had been designed to do — was held, now, in my left hand, and it was not moving.

I did not know how I was doing it.

I did not know how I was *still* doing it.

In the back of my head, in a tone I had not heard from him before, Nihil said one word, very softly.

*Oh.*

The Deacon’s expression changed.

For the first time since I had walked into the courtyard, the woman in black looked at me with something other than professional efficiency. She looked at me with the careful, considering attention of a senior operative who had just discovered that the seventeen-year-old in front of her was not, in fact, the prey she had budgeted for.

She lowered her hand.

She said the first thing she had said all night.

"Interesting."

The thing that was not entirely a shape took another step forward.

Behind me, somewhere in the inner keep, a bell began to ring.

Three.

Two.

One.

I had no idea how long I had been in the courtyard.

I had no idea what I was holding in my left hand.

I had no idea what the Deacon was going to do next.

I had, however, time for exactly one thought, and the thought was the kind of thought a man had when he discovered that the game he had been playing for two years had been holding out on him in ways he had not begun to imagine.

*This was not in the wiki.*