Cold night air clung to the hills of Mine Kormuhan, thin and sharp enough to sting Stonewraith’s nose. Leaning against a gnarled pine at the crest of a relatively tall hill, she didn’t look at the starry sky. She didn’t crane her ears at the trees whispering in the dark, and she didn’t pay any mind to the needled shadows quivering around the forest.

  Her eyes stayed fixed on the distant yawning mouth of the mine, several hundred meters before and below her.

  Smoke finally drifted faintly from the entrance, and not the kind made by fire. Soon, she saw what she dreaded the most: movement. A group of eight emerged from the mine in a thin line. Weak Manalight Lanterns flickered on their hips, but moonlight illuminated them well enough, so she straightened slightly, jaw tightening.

  Among the group of eight, one of them was rope-bound and being dragged along the road like a sack of potatoes. She knew the man. It was the same academic she’d approached a few weeks ago, right after reaching Braskir, so she could pawn off her mask, cloak, and brooch just in case the Defiler tracking her was somehow following their mana trails.

  It was a good thing she’d done what she did. She’d been camping out here for three weeks just waiting for her pursuer to show up, because she knew, without a shred of doubt, that they would’ve noticed the request in Braskir’s Seeker’s Guild. ‘Mysterious tamer in mask spotted in Mine Kormuhan’ was too similar to how she’d reactivated the golems in Granamere for her pursuer to not have noticed the pattern.

  So one of the seven must’ve defeated my tamer.

  Denkesh’s craggy black hair hung in a sweaty tangle, and his posture was utterly ruined. She didn’t need to see his face to know what’d happened, though the fact that she could see his face at all, despite her having given him her mask and cloak, meant only one thing: the Defiler who’d defeated him was strong.

  But who are you?

  Who’s my Defiler?

  She took in the seven adventurers. The three frontliners leading the line back to Braskir were an elf with two shortswords, a dwarf with oversized metal gauntlets, and a hawkkin with a serpentine blade. Their silhouettes told enough. They were well-trained, physically fit, somewhat coordinated, and not spooked by the dark. Not amateurs, but otherwise, they were normal adventurers who must’ve just tagged along for the request to eliminate Denkesh.

  Not her Defiler.

  Further back trailed three ladies: the porter in casualwear carried several large satchels on her back, the steward in a dress wielded a swordstaff, and the smaller lady wielding a crossbow too large and clunky for her. The steward aside, the other two didn’t seem the type to run a shadow down from Corvalenne to Granamere, then from Granamere to Braskir. They were too fair-skinned even for Obric ladies for that.

  By process of elimination, that left the last man in the party.

  He walked several paces behind the rest of his party, leaning heavily on a black metal cane. His steps were slightly heavy and uneven—strained, even—so it wouldn’t be wrong, exactly, to assume he was injured and barely clinging to consciousness.

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  But she narrowed her eyes and watched him closer.

  It was just her instincts from the war—the kind of instinct carved into her bones from years of being hunted across stone valleys and cities burnt to lantern chimneys—but something about him felt… off. His heavy and uneven gait was a trap. The fact that he had an eyepatch over his left eye didn’t mean he wasn’t looking around him carefully. The fact that he had a prosthetic right arm didn’t mean he’d been careless in a previous battle. The fact that his silver wingcloak seemed to be massaging his shoulders wasn’t her eyes playing tricks on her.

  She twitched an eye.

  He was, without a doubt, the weakest-looking man in the group—and the strongest man in the group.

  It’s you.

  You’re the Third Defiler.

  She was right to have been cautious. If she hadn’t lured him out by laying a trap, he would’ve caught her one way or another. Such was the innate ability of the Defilers. She couldn’t even imagine what kind of fight she’d have to put up if she had to defend herself from a Defiler she didn’t even know the face of…

  But now she knew his face, so she could prepare.

  I can’t let him live.

  If he keeps going like this, just like the other two, he’ll—

  The Defiler suddenly paused and his head turned towards the trees.

  Towards her.

  She immediately clenched her jaw, shifting her stance without rustling the branches at her feet. Her breath slowed. Her heartbeat didn’t.

  Far below, one of his party members turned around, asking him something. He didn’t answer. His head tilted, and his right eye glowed with two pupils lighting with violent purple. Then he raised his prosthetic arm as well, palm up, to open another eye in the center, and a deep violet cone of light shone from that eye..

  Three eyes swept the treeline, and the hill suddenly felt thinner beneath her feet.

  … Did he notice me?

  What kind of instinct is that?

  Is he a soldier of the Black Exhibit War as well?

  Fortunately for her, he eventually lowered his prosthetic and turned back to the others, smiling cordially. She read his lips and scanned his face for information. He seemed to have told the others ‘it was nothing’, and the others, while suspicious, didn’t question him any further. They all continued back towards Braskir along the main road—but of course, not without the Defiler giving a few more sweeping glances backwards as he did.

  She didn’t dare move until even the light from their lanterns dimmed into the trees, and only when the last mote of light disappeared into the thick of the dark did she finally allow herself to breathe again.

  So he’s aware he’s been lured into a trap, and that most likely, I already know his face.

  Even if I say I want to prepare for him, he’ll also be prepared for the fact that I’ll be prepared for him.

  … It wouldn’t be an easy battle at all, but with a bit of legwork, she could still kill him before he could grow into a larger threat.

  She had to kill him before he could follow her to Karatash.

  Looking over her shoulder, she counted her herd of magic beasts slumbering in the shadows between the trees. At a cursory glance… twenty to thirty mount-antler stags, and fifty more galehorn rams. Massive bodies. Thick bone plates across shoulders and hips. They were magic beasts born to trample, impale, and break all sorts of obstacles standing in the way of their stampede, so they were exactly what she needed for her plan.

  She hadn’t chosen Denkesh to be her bait at random. In exchange for her mask and relic, he’d given her a few cases of his frenzy serum that she’d used to tame this herd of stags and rams, but she could use a few more herds. She had to be more prepared than not.

  Stir the valley, and the lurking thing must show its teeth.

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