For NightSwallow, the healer was easy to spot, too bright for her own good.

  Amid the soot and shrapnel of the square, she stood out like a gem that hadn’t learned to hide its shine. Her robe was blue, threaded with silver that caught every flash of lightning; her staff was crowned with a hovering sigil pulsing fast.

  Around her, other healers orbited like satellites, hands glowing pale, voices strained with effort.

  “Channel through the barrier! Don’t overstack let mana deplete, rotate!” she shouted, voice clear enough. A leader’s tone; trained and annoyingly confident.

  Every time Rimebreak’s line shoved forward with just one desperate, blood-soaked push… she answered it. The healers dragged their wounded back by collars and cloaks; spells flared; health bars climbed like stubborn weeds.

  The frontline trembled but never broke, and Swallow, the Princess of Shadows, could see why.

  The girl wasn’t just healing; she was leading, her every movement timed, and despite Rimelion not being out for more than a month, she was capable.

  Meanwhile, Rimebreak’s own vanguard was paying the price for holding both sides. The rear pinned under traitor shields, the front bleeding under demon claws.

  NightSwallow didn’t answer, but she flicked her attention to one of her orbs.

  The image shimmered, disorienting, until it aligned with her angle. Through it, she saw the bigger picture: the demons hammering the front like children breaking a toy, Luminaria framed in her lightning again, shoulders tense, light dying down to sparks. She was buying time, burning herself to hold the tide, but it wasn’t enough.

  “Well, I’ll do my part,” Dark Lady of the Night whispered to herself with a suppressed giggle. Dark lady!

  The shadows hummed around NightSwallow as she moved, slipping from one soldier’s outline to the next. Her perception stretched thin, syncing with the rhythm of combat. She saw the pattern: how the demons pressed, how the Rimebreak line flexed, how the healer’s voice kept the front alive a little too long.

  This side’s lost, she thought. A simple truth, like noticing the rain. She sighed, a quiet, almost wistful exhale that steamed in the dark, and pushed closer.

  The healer’s face came into view again, sweat cutting rivers through the powder dust on her skin. Her eyes were unfazed by the surrounding ruin. When Dmitry’s fireball tore through the air, she didn’t even flinch. It hit close, too close; the shockwave knocked one of her acolytes down, and a warrior grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out of the blast’s path.

  She stumbled, turned, and smiled at him before snapping back to her work. “Rotate! Shields up! If you drop that ward, we all burn! He’s too strong!” Her voice carried authority, the sound that made people believe dying was impossible if they listened hard enough.

  From her shadowed perch, NightSwallow watched calmly. And a little jealous. “Pretty robe,” she murmured under her breath, the sound swallowed by the dark. Then she adjusted her grip on the daggers, and the night swallowed her back.

  She was waiting for her moment, when another fireball came.

  Dmitry.

  It hit the rear of the kneeling line with a sound like a bell snapping, a heat bloom that ate a handful of people and a stack of crates. Flesh screamed; canvas ignited; someone’s face went suddenly wrong. Healers doubled over bodies, hands frantic, mana sputtering into wards and bandages. No one looked in the shadows.

  Dmitry had asked for healers. Chaos had provided the smoke.

  She focused on the healer and read the tiny, precise movements; the way the girl’s shoulders dipped to siphon mana, the way her fingers threaded a rune, the snapped breath between orders. The healer was on her back foot but steady. The rest were trying to buy time with stitches and focus.

  Swallow let the shadow-skin of her class tighten around her like a second, colder uniform.

  She tasted the moment: a lull of attention, a hot seam where the healer’s focus had to be. She placed shadows on both daggers—thin black sleeves of nothing that sucked the light off metal—and stepped out of the deeper dark two measured steps behind the nearest fallen cart.

  She moved like a rumor. Two bounds of stitched shadow, a cross of space where the world briefly forgot to notice.

  Her daggers whispered through the air and found purchase in the places that stopped a body without flinging the square into theatrical gore: one blade under the jaw to the upper neck, the other through the base of the skull near the temple.

  The girl slumped against the kettle cart with the dignity of someone who’d never wanted an audience. No screams rose that mattered; the healers’ hands were full of other wounds.

  Swallow wiped a phantom mote of ash off the blade with the pad of a finger, then vanished before anyone could name the absence. Her footsteps were only a rumor.

  “Princess of Death claimed one more soul,” she murmured to herself, voice small and amused, the sound half-suppressed and almost a giggle.

  Professionalism first.

  The shadows took her like a door closing.

  NightSwallow folded into the dark, and the world simplified: edges, heat, the slow pulse of mana. The class didn’t just hide her; it carried her. With the shadow-skin wrapped tight, her stride shortened and her speed doubled; running felt like sliding along a knife’s bevel, every surface an advantage. She used the tight alleys like veins, the black between stalls a highway.

  Light snapped around her wrists and ankles and slid off; sound thinned until only the soft slap of her boots mattered.

  She eased out of the square’s chaos and left the front lines to their theatrics. Behind them, where victory still smelled like novelty, a handful of noobs milled about; bright banners, brighter hopes. Some were even lounging, eating the last of their confidence.

  “Awesome fight!” one chirped, eyes on a streamer’s camera. “Did you see the fireball? That’s what I am talking about; that bald guy must have at least epic class.”

  “For the Empire, hahaha!” another to his side guffawed at his camera, shaking a fist like a toddler. “I’m telling you, getting paid by Nathanco just for playing? Don’t mind if I do!”

  The first nodded and turned the camera off. “Yeah, they’re sponsoring this fight. Probably for us to make some noise on the holo-net.”

  “I’m hungry. Is there a bakery? I want a croissant,” third asked, while he lounged. “All this fighting made me hungry.”

  “All you did was kill one demon!” the first laughed. “Here, you get an apple!”

  NightSwallow slid past them like a shadowed rumor. They rearranged their words into laughter and didn’t notice the black that slipped between their knees.

  The alley where Lunaris ran smelled of old fruit.

  NightSwallow slid into a deeper shadow and watched her move: a bright, reckless arrow. Lunaris cut into the lane, and then froze as NightSwallow stepped out, pulling the hem of a sleeve to hide behind a stack of crates like some melodramatic film thief.

  The gesture was theatrically childish. “Juliette!” Lunaris grinned, all sun and sharp teeth.

  NightSwallow just narrowed her eyes. “No.”

  Lunaris’s grin flipped, curious. “Lady of the Eternal Night?” she teased, as if that title alone could bribe the darkness into affection.

  The name stung. NightSwallow had told Lunaris once, in a moment she regretted as soon as the words left her mouth. But in her defense, she felt bad about sending Ian to respawn.

  “I’ll kill you now, so you won’t lose your class,” she said flatly. The edge of her voice was careful, a professional warning more than a promise; she’d rather erase the risk than watch Lunaris throw herself away on a fight she couldn’t win. “Brian is at the center, so we can’t get near him. This is stupid. Don’t do it.”

  Lunaris blinked, then smirked like she always did at danger; part dare, part invitation. NightSwallow inhaled the shadow and tightened her grip on the daggers beneath her coat. She wasn’t pleased. “Luna…”

  Lunaris nodded once, that bright, reckless spark already in her eyes. “We lure him out. If I use Paradox Slash, he’ll see. He’ll come for me.”

  NightSwallow’s jaw tightened. “He’ll send people to kill you.”

  “No,” Lunaris said with the certainty only idiots and heroes owned. “He has to do it himself. And if I kill him first…” Her grin turned sweetly. “Doesn’t matter if they get me after. Don’t worry, Juliette, we can do it! I’m fast.”

  “Don’t—” NightSwallow began, but the girl was already moving, bolting from cover with both blades gleaming like arguments she refused to lose.

  NightSwallow melted back into the shadows, the instinct as natural as breathing. The darkness welcomed her; weightless, soundless, an old friend that didn’t ask questions.

  She sighed with a tired exhale that fogged even in the shade and ran after her. The shadows made her faster, thinner, less real.

  By the time she caught up, Lunaris had already found the noobs; the wandering leftovers from earlier, laughing and sitting cross-legged like they were waiting for the next patch.

  Three short arcs of steel answered them.

  Rapier, then longsword, then backhand draw; all one motion. Faster than Swallow could, and the players dropped before their confusion could harden into fear.

  Lunaris didn’t look back. She ran toward the main battle, boots slapping over cobblestone, her long silver hair catching the light like a spark. NightSwallow followed, her pace matched but unseen, her vision half in the orb she’d raised.

  When they reached the edge of the street, the square unfolded again. Rimebreak’s line was breaking. The banners drooped, colors dulled under soot and blood. Spells flickered and died halfway through casts. Too many fallen, too few standing.

  The air quivered with a shout: “Reinforcements!”

  NightSwallow blinked and shifted her orb’s focus to the northern approach. Damon was marching new troops straight into the chaos. Fresh shields, fresh spears, fresh arrogance. “It’s over,” she whispered for Lunaris to hear.

  But Lunaris was already climbing, boots scraping up a half-broken stall, face set in that same stupid, blazing conviction. “Brian!” she screamed across the square.

  NightSwallow’s orb refocused instantly, the lens tightening on a figure not far off. Brian turned, confusion flashing across his face for one moment, before Lunaris used her skill, and then recognition lit him like a fuse.

  He barked orders with a wide smile; his elite shifted formation like a single thought snapping into place.

  Lunaris dropped from the stall and landed in the dust, blades up, radiant in her own suicidal logic.

  NightSwallow stayed in the shadows, daggers drawn, every nerve wound tight. Nobody moved to stop Lunaris. No arrows, no spells.

  It was working.

  But it wouldn’t for long.

  Brian’s stride cut through the noise; confident movement that assumed victory. His elite closed around them in a neat, closing ring, steel tips pointed inward, exits vanishing one by one.

  NightSwallow exhaled once through her nose, the dark flexing around her like a cloak.

  Of course it worked, she thought. And now we’re both dead.