We got off at Napoli Centrale a little past one in the morning. The station was half-dead, but the air outside was hot, sticky, and vibrating with insect noise. We walked a few blocks to a hotel that Takezo booked for us.

  The desk clerk did his best to avoid us, tossing us the room key from the furthest practical distance. I understood him. We looked like trouble, and he needed none of that during the night shift.

  The room itself was the golden standard of a last-second hotel, with tile floors, lumpy beds, and a shower that dribbled orange water.

  I dumped my suitcase next to the bed and let myself collapse onto the mattress. “Want to go grab a drink?”

  Takezo checked his watch. “We should practice in the morning. Except that we don’t have where, so we should practice now, grab breakfast, and go to sleep after it.”

  Damn it. That made sense, especially since we were going to fight Kallisto at night, so we might as well go with a reverse day schedule from the get-go. “One drink, then we go practice.”

  “One drink won’t do anything to us, anyway. We have far too much resistance for that.”

  Well, he wasn’t wrong. That certainly was a disadvantage of the endurance build.

  I got up, and we headed out.

  We went outside to the alley behind the hotel. The cobbles were wet, and the only light came from a single sickly bulb above the back door. I put on my gauntlets and stretched. No windows shone into the alley, so we had a good chance to not be seen.

  Takezo knelt at the start of the alley. “I’ll summon my system agent. He is much more suitable for the training we need.”

  “How so?”

  “Both of our agents fight with extreme prescience. Yours, however, uses it for pre-emptive strikes, so he shuts down any attack we want to throw at him before we even get it going. It’s a great practice, but Kallisto doesn’t fight like that. My agent, on the other hand, should be a lot closer to her in terms of the fighting style she is likely to employ. He uses the prescience to set up a counter strike.”

  “What’s prescience?”

  “The ability to predict the opponent’s movements before they happen. It largely comes from experience. Talent plays a role, but mostly it’s experience. That’s why it’s crucial to spar our agents. They are exceedingly good at hiding their moves, so if we learn to predict them, we will be able to predict anyone.”

  I smiled. “Are they that good?”

  “Better. I don’t even have the frame of reference to understand how good they are.” He closed his eyes, and focused.

  The world around him rippled. A man appeared. He wore the traditional samurai outfit with four katanas by his belt, two long, two short. He stood tall, easily my height, build lean but athletic, hair tied into a ponytail just like Takezo wore it, except he had a much rougher stubble all over his face.

  Actually, he looked a lot like Takezo. “What’s your relationship to your agent?”

  Takezo shrugged. “Haven’t the faintest idea. I’ve never seen him or any image of him anywhere. He looks like me, but I’m a demon, so I don’t have any familial lineage or relations.”

  The man measured Takezo and me. He walked between us. In a ripple of air, a wooden staff appeared in his hand.

  Takezo stood up and drew his sword. “Anyway, our goal is to move him out of the circle using any means necessary.”

  The agent drew a circle into the mud around him. Quite a small one, barely two steps in diameter. He spun the staff in his hands and took a simple stance.

  Takezo and I moved in at the same time. Within the first few moments, I realized what Takezo meant. His shadow wasn’t striking us. He barely touched us. But we couldn’t touch him either.

  With light touches of his staff, he misdirected us while avoiding with his body whatever we managed to get close to him with.

  I wasn’t surprised that he could do it to me. But Takezo got shut down even worse. No matter how he swung the sword, how sharply its blade cleaved the air, he never hit anything but air, while his agent barely moved.

  Two hours later, we didn’t get even close to moving him from the small circle. Both of us were panting, drenched in sweat. His agent showed no hint of tiredness or discomfort. He simply stood there, focused, waiting for us to try again.

  “Who the fuck is that?” I asked, panting.

  “I haven’t got a clue,” Takezo answered, struggling to steady his own breath. “But I’ve never hit him.”

  Well, I never hit my agent either. But it wasn’t because he was cheating through the system. No, the gap in raw skill was simply that high.

  We want to look at it again.

  When the dawn started breaking above the horizon, we made no progress, except that we got increasingly more exhausted. Takezo said something in Japanese.

  The agent started lightly hitting us back in the next round. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as from Shadow, but he hit much more precisely, and with higher frequency. An hour later, we nearly collapsed.

  Takezo waved with his hand. His agent vanished.

  Demolished and exhausted, we went to the hotel for breakfast. There, we devoured portions for three, returned to our room, and collapsed into our beds.

  I woke up strangely refreshed. Drool pooled next to my face from my gaping mouth, and my whole body felt stiff.

  Damn, it was sure different to sleep without having my blood drained through the whole night… or whatever else Isabella was doing to me at night.

  Takezo sat on his bed by an open window. Undressed to just pants, he observed the city with an unreadable expression. I got up, took a shower, and dressed up.

  Meanwhile, I checked my level with Shadow. Still twenty-four. I had to hit twenty-five in the next three days. I had hoped that the training was going to be enough. I didn’t have much to back it up with though.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I also didn’t have an alternative. With angels floating around and no good targets, there was no way for me to level up in any other way than through training.

  Takezo also dressed up, this time taking a black tie himself.

  Right. This wasn’t going to be a fun experience. We were going to tell a man that his daughter was dead.

  My good mood vanished.

  We left the hotel, and Takezo summoned an Uber. He told the driver the address in Posillipo. The houses got nicer as we went, the views more expensive, and by the time we pulled up in front of the Amoretti house, I was convinced Francesca’s family was even richer than I’d imagined.

  The car took us to a gate to a massive garden, which concealed a mansion somewhere deep within. We waited for the driver to leave.

  I rang the bell. A man answered in Italian. “Sorry,” I said. “We only speak English.”

  “We are not interested in buying anything.”

  “We are here to speak with Marco Amoretti about his missing daughter, Francesca.”

  A silent moment passed. “Follow the road.” The man on the other side hung up.

  The gate buzzed, letting us through. We entered the mansion grounds.

  The garden looked pretty from the outside, but it had a really grim feel to it. Everything was just a little bit too unkempt. No flowers, no decorations, nothing other than bushes and trees.

  The weed also sprawled onto the street, invading its sides, nobody having cleaned it up in a long time.

  We approached the house.

  A black flag sagged down from the flagpole. All decorations from around the house had been removed, giving the house almost an abandoned feeling.

  My legs suddenly felt a lot heavier. Since I met Francesca as a drunk girl doomed to die in a post-apocalyptic hellhole, it was easy to forget that wherever she came from, she was a beloved daughter of her family.

  We walked to the door and knocked.

  A butler opened for us, an older man in a formal suit. He motioned us inside without a word.

  We entered. The insides betrayed wealth, but not opulence. The butler led us through towards a side wing.

  At this point, I realized the idea behind the suit Isabella had dressed me in. Everyone in secret societies wore suits. Thanks to that, everyone looked like they were the same rank.

  Sure, Takezo and I were grunts in our respective organizations. But outside of them, nobody knew that.

  To the people here, we were representatives of two of the largest secret societies and syndicates, dressed in the same unbranded suits everyone else from our organizations wore.

  The butler took us to a practically outfitted office. Marco Amoretti stood by the window, swirling a glass of wine with his hand. He wore a slightly disheveled suit, his hair gray, face covered in a mostly arranged beard, eyes haunted, face on the way to becoming gaunt.

  We entered, and the butler closed behind us.

  “To start,” Takezo said. “How familiar are you with secret societies?”

  Macro slightly nodded. “I’m an associate of the Vatican Inquisition.”

  That wasn’t a name anyone from outside the secret societies knew. “I’m Peter O’Connor of Lucielle Legal, and he’s Shinmen Takezo of the Yamato Syndicate. Your daughter, Francesca, has tripped her way into a separate, sealed dimension. We have met her there during a cooperative operation of our organizations. We have since lost the ability to re-enter that dimension, but we believe there is a way to get there, and to retrieve her.”

  His mouth gaped open, eyes watering.

  We gave him a minute. I didn’t even lie to him too much, and I hoped I presented it believably enough.

  Marco ran his hands through his hair. “What dimension? How did she get there?”

  “That’s classified information of our syndicates,” Takezo replied. “We are already disclosing more information than we are technically authorized to.”

  Marco tossed in the glass of wine. He grabbed the bottle, hand shaking, and refilled the glass. “That’s a lot to take in. And to believe. Can you prove anything of it?”

  For a second, I wondered what to tell him. Well, nothing that could be found on the internet. “She told me that you two resented each other, because you wanted a son, and she wasn’t one. But, at the same time, she regretted how petty she was about it. The night she disappeared, she was drinking herself unconscious in her grandmother’s attic, and went to take a walk.”

  Marco dropped the glass. It shattered, shards spraying around.

  Yeah, I could have probably led with something lighter. Then again, I needed to prove I met her, which this did. “We need to know the house’s address.”

  “Via la Monaca in Capua, number six.” His gaze dropped towards the floor. “Her grandparents don’t know that she’s missing.”

  They likely weren’t even in the secret societies. I nodded. “We will be back with her in three days.”

  “Or we’ll be dead,” Takezo added, and opened the door.

  We walked out, leaving Marco to his thoughts.

  The butler took us to the main door, through which we exited the mansion. On the path through the garden, I realized I was shaking.

  “You okay?” Takezo asked.

  “No. So far, everything that happened beyond the portal felt surreal. As if it wasn’t really happening. But this made it real.” With a shaking hand, I drew my phone. If Isabella had told me that my blood could get someone through the portal, I could have gotten Francesca through on day fucking one.

  But she didn’t tell me shit, and I found out only too late.

  My fingers trembled so much I couldn’t find her contact.

  Takezo gently put his hand on mine to take it away from the phone. “Don’t. You’ll only regret it.”

  “Why?”

  “You cannot change the past. Focus on the future, and nothing else.”

  Damn it. Damn him, damn her, damn everything else. I slammed my phone on the street. It didn’t even break apart, just jumped a few times, and was moderately cracked.

  What a sturdy piece of shit. I stomped on the phone with full strength.

  The battery, and thus the phone, exploded. Tiny pieces are scattered around me. The street itself cracked, asphalt bursting around, making a small crater around my boot.

  Fuck.

  I continued walking. “I need a drink.”

  Behind me, Takezo picked up the SIM card from the street and pocketed it. “Shame you’ve got no money.”

  “Shut up.”

  We took an Uber to Capua. I didn’t feel like talking at all, and thankfully, Takezo didn’t speak. Not that he was ever talkative before, but this time, it suited me.

  Capua turned out to be a tiny town with a few main streets, an old small colosseum, and a cluster of old houses on the edge of nothing. The driver took us to a two-story villa behind a stone wall, wildly overgrown with vines.

  We got out and waited for the driver to leave.

  Once he did, we circled the house and searched for the ravine Francesca told me about. That strangely combined a pleasant trip through the Italian countryside with work. Since the house stood at the town’s edge, the array of directions was pretty wide.

  I didn’t mind. Walking helped with clearing my head.

  We finally found the ravine. As a riven ran through the idyllic countryside, like a gash in the land, a ravine hid open next to the river. We walked to its edge.

  The ravine ran about twenty feet deep, stretched for a couple of hundred yards, and had no water in it, in spite of being next to the river. It seemed as if the ground collapsed into an underground cave. The cave got filled, and the ravine remained behind.

  One could barely see it unless one was close to it, but within the ravine shone the faint light of the portal. Not strong enough to shine out during the night, but I noticed it instantly.

  We jumped into the ravine.

  What the ground lacked in stability, it compensated for in sharp stones. It wasn’t nearly as bad as after-nukes Tokyo, though.

  We approached the portal. It looked a bit smaller than the ones we knew in Philly and Tokyo, but it was large enough to walk through.

  “I’ll look.” Takezo walked through the portal. The image in the orange light cleared up, showing Takezo entering an abandoned garage. He looked around and returned. “Nothing around the portal. It’s reasonably close to the duel spot as well, not more than an hour's walk.”

  Good. With that, we just had a couple of days to train.

  For that, we used the fields around the ravine. We slept and ate at the hotel and spent the nights training.

  We did so with Takezo’s system agent. After the first day, we started getting closer to zoning him out of the circle, so he started hitting us with the staff. That hurt, but I got the level up I needed later that day, so it wasn’t that bad.

  We had little else to do, so we only slept and trained. Though sleep started becoming increasingly more difficult.

  Whenever I wasn’t moving, my mind more and more slipped towards the upcoming fight against Kallisto. The ways I saw her kill others, the ways she could kill me, the absolute hopelessness in me trying to wound her in the past, it all wouldn’t leave my mind.

  The exhaustion from sleep helped overcome the feelings, but we trained less on the last day, so I couldn’t sleep.

  I spent most of the night lying on the moldy mattress, staring at the decaying ceiling. Tomorrow, we were going to fight Kallisto.