“We can’t let this slide," Mia said solemnly, glaring at the serpentine beastkin girl. She’d been worried they wouldn’t talk and that she’d have to make another moral compromise, sinking into an even darker grey area than before, but luckily, the snake-girl was left horrified by the swiftness with which Mia’s team dismantled hers. “This was just an attack of opportunity; that asshole will keep throwing expendable goons at us until something sticks.”

  Mia wouldn’t, couldn’t take that lying down. They had all survived this assassination attempt, but what about the next? What about the fifth? The tenth? Sooner or later, one of them would fuck up, or just get unlucky, and end up dead. No, they don’t just get to try to kill us and get away with it. That’s not how it works. It can’t be if we are to survive long-term.

  “I doubt they would have enough expendable troops to throw at us for another attack after today’s losses,” Brent stated calmly, too calmly, while giving Mia a concerned look.

  “They have the last Rift under their control,” Mia said, taking a deep breath while making a conscious decision to uncurl her fingers. Her nails had carved bloody crescents into her palm, leaving her fingers slick with blood, which in turn made Mia grimace. “They can make expendable goons like this lot en masse. Right, Nikki?”

  “If they are clearing the Rift back-to-back, that should keep it at a manageable level,” the girl said thoughtfully. “It would slowly starve the Rift of energy and force it to turn into a monster nest under any other circumstance, but with the density of the ambient mana on this planet, I doubt they can keep clearing it fast enough to fully reverse its growth. They are slowing it to a crawl at best … at worst, we will get a notification about another Raid sooner or later.”

  “Is that what they are doing, snake-girl?” Mark asked gruffly, trying his best to act the ‘bad-cop’ with his oversized mace resting on his shoulder.

  “Y-yesss,” the girl said in a stuttering hiss, her forked tongue slipping out between her lips. It made Mia wonder how she ate with that thing; it couldn’t be easy … but then again, she had bigger problems than that at the moment. “There are always a few instances of teams in the Rift. We have to give up the loot, but the levels are ours … and also anything we can use up before coming out.”

  Mia gave Brent a look, basically saying, ‘see? I told you so’. The way things were going, every last minion the Werewolf King had might end up being stuck at Level 10 before long, and then what? Zeigler’s forces were already having trouble; what would happen when the reserve beastkin forces currently busy grinding 24/7 were sent in to join the fray?

  “We are on a timer,” Mia said.

  “Zeigler still has that Rank 1 Starhaven agent to call upon,” Brent said, arms crossed. “And we already discussed why getting you and her in the same room might cause problems.”

  All fair points, but Mia was feeling rather done leaving problems for Zeigler and the soldiers to solve. They had failed at guarding this building, they had failed at keeping the beastkin in check while the Raid went on, and they also would have failed numerous times before that point without generous help from Mia’s group, other similar groups and the unionists.

  As for trusting the woman who very likely ordered a fucking hit on Mia not to also fuck them over somehow? What a joke. For all she knew, the bitch was in league with the beastkin and would betray them when it was most convenient for her purposes.

  Still, it would be good to make her bleed the beastkin forces. Or at least the monsters under their King’s command. Mia did rather like the idea of two of her enemies killing each other.

  “And I think none of those problems could be worth letting the beastkin try again without at least hitting back,” Mia said petulantly. “She’s supposed to be some super spy or something. I doubt the fact I survived the Raid escaped her notice. Hell, what if she knew of this attack beforehand and decided to keep silent on it, hoping it would kill me, or rather, us? What does she even want, an alliance? That offer would look much nicer if all of Zeigler’s most powerful alternatives suddenly wound up dead, wouldn’t it?”

  She was coming up with all that on the spot, speaking her thoughts the moment they occurred to her without really thinking them through. It made sense, though, at least to her. She sent Nikki a questioning look.

  The girl in question just raised her hands in surrender. “Don’t look at me. I was the daughter of a minor noble, not a member of the Shadows. I don’t know their operating procedures and protocols any better than you do. The picture you paint does indeed sound reasonable, however.”

  Mia felt her shoulders relax somewhat, then glanced at the rest of the group, her gaze flickering between each member one after the other. “So? Who’s in?”

  Her heart was pounding in her chest like a war drum. Even after everything, it took this much anger and, if she was being honest, fear — fear that the next assassination attempt would succeed and rob her of her life, or of a friend — to be so … confrontational. Mia knew, deep in her heart, that just a few weeks ago, she never would have had the guts to put people on the spot, to make them choose. She would have been too afraid that if pushed, they wouldn’t choose her, that they would abandon her.

  It was a stupid fear. Her rational mind knew Camie, Mark and her mother would stick with her no matter what … but what if they didn’t? What if? Stupid ‘what if’, stupid brain, stupid anxiety. Will, as an attribute, helped, but it didn’t miraculously dial up her self-confidence and ego to eleven.

  Brent sighed, then nodded and looked into her eyes with a wry grin on his face. “Perhaps you are right. It’s you who’s in most danger, so if you are willing to risk it, then who am I to not do the same?”

  Well, that promptly solved that, and saved the others from having to choose between Brent and Mia’s ‘plans’. If they could be called that. Mia let out a breath she wasn’t even aware she was holding in, her heart slowing its rhythm to something slightly more relaxed.

  Did he back out on purpose, seeing how uncomfortable it was for Mia? He really was too nice. Nicer than me. I guess I can see what Mom sees in him.

  The others gave nods quickly, Nikki and Lina looking most reluctant.

  “If that agent recognises me, we might be in even more trouble than if she only realises just what Mia and Carmilla are,” Nikki said. “I think it would be good if we continued to make all due effort to avoid being in the same room as her.”

  “Before that,” Mark grunted, turning back to the single unharmed beastkin in the hallway. “How did you lot get here? I was under the impression the military guys had a perimeter set up, keeping it under constant surveillance so they can’t get fucked in the ass by a group flanking around the front line to pincer them from behind. How did you sneak past them? For that matter, how did you sneak past the soldiers guarding this building? I’d have thought at least an alert would have been sent out if you fought your way up here, something those of us with pointier ears would have caught.”

  Mia wasn’t so sure about that last part. She’d been exhausted, still sleeping away some of the lingering fatigue from the raid and the preceding push towards it. She’d slept like a log and was about as conscious of the world around her while sleeping as a piece of wood too.

  “Tunnels,” the girl blurted out, clearly uncomfortable being on the receiving end of nearly a dozen rather unfriendly stares. “Sewers, mostly. B-but, they had, um-, I don’t know. A tamed monster or a mage, but we had tunnels prepared for us ahead of time. Went right under the front line, had to keep real quiet once we got out, but nobody got discovered, I guess.”

  “How many tunnels are there?” Brent asked.

  “I … three at least? Maybe more?” The girl said, staring at the floor before her. “Eva knows more. She’s the pack-leader.”

  “I’m going to assume that’s that bitch?” Mark asked, gesturing at the fallen canine beastkin that he’d fought, the sole Level 10 fighter of their group. The girl gave a jittery nod.

  “Why do this? Why attack us?” Henri asked calmly, arms crossed as he gave the girl a significant stare. “Did you truly let just a month of this chaos burn away all your human decency? There are monsters trying to destroy us, trying to upend our civilisation, trying to erase humanity from the face of the Earth. Almost everyone else in the city has come together to face the chaos, but you decided to join the one group working to undermine our efforts. Why?”

  “We heard the Call, all of us did,” the girl said, her voice cracking. “Beastkin belong together. You wouldn’t understand, you- none of you do. It was just noise for you. It- it was more, to us. A promise, a place to belong, a family to help weather whatever may come at us. Together. Us against the world. It’s … it was what I had to do, I didn’t choose it, it wasn’t a question. It never was.”

  “And yet there were beastkin who resisted,” Henri said, his voice cold. “There were beastkin who refused to prey on the weak. There were those beastkin who refused to stab their allies in the back. Those who went against that werewolf king of yours.”

  The girl didn’t answer, just buried her face in her knees as she huddled up. Henri turned away, letting out a huff through his nose, a frown still marring his face.

  “It’s like a cult, or a gang,” Henri said, shaking his head with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “But made much worse by the presence of magic. Impressionable young minds twisted and used by opportunistic maniacs. I hope that loathsome werewolf gets defeated soon, or we will lose a lot of people to this … war. I’ll assist you if you would fight for that goal. This senseless bloodshed must end if we are to survive. The city can’t handle this for long.”

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  A few minutes later, other people started streaming up from the lower floors, weapons bared and gazes focused on their task: making sure every attacker was taken care of.

  Mia had heard them coming, going door to door on each floor, working through the floors methodically until they were sure no infiltrators remained behind. Thankfully, they were mostly other teams from the raid, so they ceded to Brent’s demand that the captured beastkin be kept alive for further interrogation.

  Mia was thankful Konstantin’s people weren’t housed in the same building; she wasn’t sure they could have stopped the angry mob from lynching them. It was hard enough stopping them from killing their prisoners.

  Military jeeps started rolling up ten minutes later, though the soldiers streaming out of them looked like they’d barely slept in the last few days. They were all Level 10s, though, so they must have been pulled away from more ‘important’ tasks.

  After that, Mia had the beastkin girl lead them to the tunnel her ‘pack’ had used. Henri’s team followed along, as well as one of the military jeeps, which Mia more or less designated as their transport on account of the men inside being assigned as her team’s new guard platoon. The old ones were a bit too dead to fulfil the task, having been murdered by the beastkin who’d broken into their room.

  “This thing is held together by magic,” Mia said, frowning as she ran her gaze along the tunnel entrance. The snake-girl had led them down to the basement of an old bakery, and the tunnel ended right there, the damp brick wall on one side having been blown out to reveal the dirt tunnel. “I can feel the earth mana coursing through it, and it’s fading ever so slowly. Whatever made this would have to come back and do some maintenance, I’m guessing. A tunnel this wide would need support beams or something to keep it standing, right?”

  None of them had any real idea, but Mia doubted a random tunnel bored through the earth three metres wide and two tall would be able to remain standing without magic. She frowned, a part of her wanting to charge right through, emerge behind the enemy lines and strike down that werewolf asshole. Cut off the head of the snake, as it were. If this were a game or an action movie, she was sure the protagonists in her place would do just that.

  Alas, it wasn’t, and she had no assurance that the exit of the tunnel wouldn’t be watched on the other side. Hell, in the worst-case scenario, whoever made these tunnels could collapse them at will. She and her small team would be stuck then, behind enemy lines and boxed in from all sides. It would be a stupid way to die after all they had been through. If the harebrained plan to assassinate the werewolf king worked out somehow, they would still be almost certain to die afterwards from a bunch of furious beastkin and monsters falling upon them.

  And as angry as Mia was, she knew the end goal was not killing that one asshole; it was survival. Long-term survival. No, this plan was stupid and best left to rot.

  “Can we collapse this tunnel?” Mia mused. “My mana is supposed to be disruptive for maintained spells like this, right? Can’t I just shoot a few Arcane blasts at the walls to disrupt the magic keeping it standing?”

  “It’s worth a try,” Nikki said. “I’d aim at the ceiling.”

  “Let’s stand a bit further back,” Lina said. “I’d rather not get buried alive on top of all the shit we’d gone through these last few days, yeah?”

  Mia took a handful of steps back, standing near the staircase leading out of the basement, before the thought occurred to her to cast the spell through Sparkle.

  “We should get back to the surface,” Mia said. “I’ll do it through Sparkle.”

  ‘On it.’ Sparkle said, zipping into the tunnel as the group waddled out of the abandoned bakery. ‘There should be good. That spot feels important.’

  Mia looked through Sparkle’s eyes, but she only got faint echoes of what he could perceive through his Spirit Sense. She got the vague idea that the flow of earth mana was denser at that spot, though, with some luck, it would be the spell-core or the battery-equivalent of the magical effect.

  The Arcane Blast raced across the Bond and snapped forth from Sparkle’s extended hand, slamming into the targeted section of the ceiling with a crackle of energy. It exploded with a deep thrum, knocking away pieces of rock and dirt. Mia stood still, a smile curling on her lips as she felt the earth mana flowing through the tunnel’s walls stutter.

  ‘Hell yeah!’ Sparkle whooped in her mind, racing further into the tunnel. ‘Give me another one, that’ll only collapse the last section. There is another weak spot over there!’

  Mia complied with her Bond’s demands, smirking as she sent the next Arcane Blast zipping through the thread connecting her to Sparkle. There was a deep, reverberating thrum going through the earth beneath her feet as the disrupted earth mana went haywire. The second spot Sparkle pinpointed was beyond the range of her Spirit Sense, but she still saw the ceiling caving in through the sprite’s eyes.

  ‘That should be enough,’ Mia projected the thought through her Bond. ‘The snake-girl knows of two more tunnels. We should collapse those too, come back.’

  ‘Killjoy.’ Sparkle huffed, but did as she asked, phasing up through the earth and concrete to emerge inside a sewer. ‘Ewww.’

  Mia snorted, ignoring the weird looks she received for it as she watched Sparkle explode in a burst of arcane energy to blast away any last smidge of muck coating his form. Only after he was satisfied with his cleanliness did he emerge from a drainage hole.

  By the time they were done with all three tunnels, the first rays of the sun were starting to creep over the horizon. Mia was starting to run out of anger, which was a problem because it was what was fueling her after getting so rudely woken up after only three paltry hours of sleep.

  A part of her wanted to do nothing more than to get some action, demand to be let on the frontline and slaughter some of those Evergreen monsters. Another just wanted to lie down and get some sleep, even if she had to do it on the sidewalk.

  The first idea was silly. She’d only cause more problems and make mistakes if she tried fighting anything while this tired. Logically, she knew that. But every time she closed her eyes, even for just a second, she saw that first beastkin’s eyes, wide in terror and panic as life faded from them. Sleep wouldn’t be too restful, no matter how much she yearned for it. It was a miserable spot she’d found herself in, and she had no idea how to get out of it.

  She heaved a sigh. “Let’s get back to the hotel. We need to get some rest.”

  Even if she couldn’t sleep, maybe just lying down with her eyes closed would carry her through another day … then it would be future-Mia’s problem to survive without sleep. To her tired mind, that sounded like an absolutely splendid idea. Future-Mia could deal with whatever came her way, if for no other reason than because present-Mia refused to.

  Everyone agreed, though they switched up a few things. They took a room on the first floor now, and Mark spent a good half an hour making sure nobody would be getting through the windows or the door. He’d all but walled them up, so much so that whoever wanted to go through them might as well try going through the walls.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution, because as much as it kept most people out, it also boxed them in, but it was the best they could do. Mia set up her Alarm Wards, six in total, near all the walls enemies might come through. Everyone, aside from Brent — on account of him having that quirky Ki of his instead of mana — was keyed into them, so she put one in every bedroom and made Brent sleep on the sofa on account of it being in the centre of the suite and away from all possible avenues of attack.

  Aside from the ceiling. They could come in from above or below. Mia thought, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a deep frown on her face. She was being paranoid, but after that thought crept into her mind, she found herself wanting to put Alert Wards in the hotel rooms both above and below the one they were in. Damn it.

  Was it even paranoia if it was proved that there really were people out to get her? Mia didn’t think so; nonetheless, she felt paranoid. Which was just another annoyance on top of everything else.

  She wanted to growl, to hit something, maybe her head against the wall. Too tired to do anything useful, too restless to actually … well, rest.

  Mia found herself sitting in her room, lying awake in bed and glaring at the ceiling like she was trying to burn a hole through it. Carmilla was trying to help, lying next to her, her fingers gently running through Mia’s hair, but it could barely distract her. Here she was, keeping her girlfriend up when she got just as little sleep as her.

  “Sorry,” Mia said, breathing an aggrieved sigh, and Camie’s fingers came to a stop. “You can go to sleep, I’ll be … I’ll manage. You don’t have to stay up for my sake.”

  “I don’t mind,” Camie said easily. “I can function on three hours of sleep. Costs a bit more of my stored vitality, but nothing egregious.”

  “How are you so-“ Mia took a breath, making sure she didn’t sound accusatory. “Calm? You killed more people than me, and I’m-“

  Mia grimaced, not wanting to finish that sentence. She wasn’t even sure what word she’d have used. Miserable? Pathetic? … normal? Human?

  No, there was no good way to finish that sentence without either disparaging herself or her girlfriend, who was trying to make her feel better. Damn it.

  “When I’m in my dreams, the bloodline dreams, I’m … it’s not like I’m watching from the outside, I’m not some ghost following one of my ancestors,” Camie said. “I’m them. I feel what they felt, it’s- sometimes it takes me days to shake off the aftereffects of a particularly strong dream. I’ve been killing people in my dreams since I can remember … so many of them. At least these ones I won’t feel guilty about.”

  Mia wished she could say she didn’t feel guilty either.

  “You felt guilty about things your ancestors did?” Mia asked curiously, or maybe just subconsciously seeking a distraction.

  “It’s hard not to feel guilty about feeling gleeful as you slaughter an entire village of Englishmen,” Camie said with a grimace. “One of them, from the ones I dreamt about, whose skin I wore, was a Viking. I ... there are things he did that I won’t be able to ever forget. He enjoyed it, the slaughter, the pain and suffering he inflicted. And I was made to feel the same way in my dreams as I experienced his memories. I … it made just killing regular people in self-defence feel so small, so tiny in comparison. Even today, I caught myself thinking that it was a mercy that I killed them so quickly.”

  And there she goes, casually making my biggest problems feel … insignificant. Holy shit, how is this girl even able to function as a human being? Mia turned around and latched onto the redhead, pulling her in for a hug like her life depended on it.

  “I think,” Camie whispered, gingerly returning Mia’s hug. “You shouldn’t start worrying until you enjoy it. We were lucky to grow up in a world where violence was so rare, and it was seen as such a big, bad thing. It means it will take some time to get used to it … but at least you know people can exist without it. So many of my ancestors lived and breathed the law of the jungle, thinking they were right to do whatever they wished just because they could, just because they were stronger. We are better than them … and you are much better than me too. You’re a good person, Mia. I don’t think I have it in me to feel guilty about killing someone who wants to kill me, not anymore, maybe I never did.”

  “Thank you,” Mia murmured into Camie’s shoulder, burying her face in the other girl’s pyjama shirt. “ … can we stay like this for a bit?”

  Camie made an affirmative sound, squirming a bit to get more comfortable. With a warm, heavy blanket thrown over them and with Camie’s arms wrapped tightly around her, Mia finally started feeling safe. Her body slowly uncoiled, tense muscles all across her body letting up slightly as she melted into the embrace, focusing on the simple action of breathing in through the nose and out through her mouth. It was the most basic type of meditation, just a little exercise to get you into the right mindset. As it was, breathing in Carmilla’s calming scent and focusing on it as much as she could, it worked much better than it ever would have otherwise.

  Whenever one of her victims’ faces jumped to the fore of her mind, she stiffened, and Camie would hug her tighter, whispering calming words into her ears. It took her more than an hour to finally fall asleep, and she’d be jolted awake every hour by her dreams morphing into nightmares, but she did manage to get some rest. Enough to get some work done by the time noon came and went.