Everything but the rain [Closed to Breaker]

Thin clouds formed above the great city of Radasanth, lengthening the shadows. They had no breadth, as summer shadows had, as the low winter sun poured its light through the grey wisps and onto the streets below. Instead they seemed gaunt and mean and cold like the December frost. Only a variegated glow illuminated my mad rush forwards through the urban sprawl. The soles of my feet pounded the cobbles urgently, each kick off the stones helping me achieve a speed far greater than any normal human could reach. My body, augmented by the power of my unsealed Enpera Shinkotei, felt like a vessel of raw energy as I leapt from the road firstly to the pavement, and then pivoted hard right down a side road to vector myself to my target.

Today, I was bringing this hunt to an end, one way or another.

It was her, all right. The Hierophant. I had been tracking her for a few weeks now; her energy signal displaying on the cusp of my senses like an irritating itch. No matter how well she thought she was doing in trying to evade me, the magnitude of the Hierophant's power had always kept her just within my spirit sense range. It made her stand out like a sore thumb in places where there was a low number of magically astute people. At one point, in Scara Brae, her presence was so obvious she might as well have been stood on a stepladder smoking endless cigerettes through a luminous balaclava. Now, her life force throbbed like a beacon, represented by an ache in the pit of my stomach, as I closed the distance to about two miles.

As long as I kept pace, I had her tied on the end of a string, but it wasn't just my senses that gave me an edge today. Every couple of metres, I would be sure to drop small marbles of dark matter energy into the pavement below me. These "breadcrumbs" could only be detected by someone who knew to look for them, being small enough to not normally be noticed but unique enough to be identifiable to the right person. An ally, perhaps.

Joshua Cronen, specifically. After our last excursion, we had decided to create a covert system of communication and, as two beings able to sense power, magic and life, it made sense to restrict such a system to something that no-one else could find without knowing what to look for.

Hopefully, the Breaker would be tracking those magical crumbs behind me.

Another sharp right took me deeper into the concrete intestines of the city centre. Here, where the population was more dense, the alleyways and passages became narrower and more cluttered with bins, cats, people, boxes and carts. Usually they would have hindered me, but my reactions in this state were peaked and with the grace of a swallow I simply ghosted past all those trivial obstacles. It was just as well; Hierophant was only a little slower than me, and any unwanted collision could add critical time to the chase that could put her out of my sense's range.

There. A sudden fluctuation in her power told me that she had slowed significantly.

One and a half miles.

The cramped alleyway suddenly opened up into one of Radasanth's main roads; co-incidentally the same place that I had first encountered Storm Veritas and Rayse Valentino in the Lornius Corporation Challenge. That encounter had cost all of us far more than we'd liked, but as I flew over the spot where I had lay in a pool of my own blood, weaving through living traffic, I pushed the image to the back of my mind. The Hierophant was dead ahead, beyond the row of stores and houses lining the cobble street. She was my only concern.

One mile.

Half a mile.

Into another dark, cramped stone inlet. This time, the alley funnelled me left and I skidded over the moss covered slabs to meet the sharp turn. A pungeant odour hit my nose to signify proximity to the sewers. I hurdled a manhole, clicked my fngers and called forth Enpera Kurohitsugi. With a terrible tearing sound, realty ripped asunder behind me to the tune of a two metre diameter void containing all fifteen of my dark lances. The void followed behind me like a halo, a pocket of space-time, as I continued my sprint.

Quarter of a mile.

I was coming to the end of the alleyway. By now, I would have usually slowed to a crawl, putting into place whatever master plan I had devised to completely catch the Hierophant off guard, but today wasn't that kind of day. I was simply going to annihilate her; a single, brute force attack that would erase her miserable existence entirely. There was no room for subtlety or hesitation when dealing with the Hierophant, as both myself and Joshua Cronen had learned, and, in any case, either was more than she deserved. As I rounded a final corner, I could almost taste her power on the tip of my tongue. The alley opened up again. She was there, right there, but what now faced me forced me to dig my feels fast into the paving.

There was a small fucking army surrounding her, stretched out in a crescent across the square. A hundred pairs of eyes shifted their focus onto me. A hundred hands tightened their holds on the pommels of their swords and spears. A hundred men and women, dressed in scarlet red and gold, stood between me and the bitch.

Dammit...

I didn’t get to Radasanth often enough anymore. Being commander of the largest private militia in Corone tends to keep me sequestered in our base camp near Gisela. But an army needs funding, and the Faith United wasn’t quite at the point of self-sufficiency. I was still dumping boatloads of gold into the cause, and rather than empty the savings I had stashed away at a number of international banks and burial sites, I prefered to generate fresh revenue with my own time.

If I said how much I charge per hour for private security, you wouldn’t believe me. And you definitely wouldn’t believe me if I then told you that despite my astronomical rate, I have an endless list of potential clients begging for my services. In my years on Althanas I had built up a reputation that extended to every known continent and many, many households. It basically boiled down to two things I am extraordinarily good at; keeping blood inside of good people, and spilling the blood of those who cross me.

So I was in Radasanth, not teaching martial arts or visiting one of the clubs I invest in or tavern-crawling with friends, or any of the other things I enjoyed. I was working as a rich Aleraran merchant’s bodyguard.

The dark elf was definitely up to something shady. He was sitting in the corner of a nearly empty pub along Radasanth’s main drag, hood up and hunched forward, speaking quietly with the human he’d come to meet. The other man was the picture of innocent nonchalance, sipping his ale and scoping the common room from the corner of his eye.

I wondered if he had noticed me. He seemed sharp enough, probably an experienced go-between for a wealthy local client. Whatever the dark elf was selling, the price had started at twenty thousand gold pieces, but the human had already haggled his way down to fifteen. The dark elf must have been eager to sell. I didn’t much care what he was moving. It wasn’t wagonloads of gunpowder - I’d have noticed those. It wasn’t some deadly toxin or plague brought over from the Aleraran labs - my contacts in that country would have certainly alerted me of any missing samples. And it wasn’t slaves of any kind. My local contacts would have alerted me to significant movement in the market for sentient beings.

My curiosity wandered away as I scanned the room for threats, and then suddenly I detected something else. Something that sent a spark of adrenaline coursing through my veins.

Shinsou’s dark matter. I could think of only two reasons why he would be throwing up a flag for assistance; either his life was in danger, or he had found the Hierophant. Possibly both.

Without a second thought I stood and strode across the pub. I grabbed my client by the elbow and stood the dark elf up forcefully, quieting his protests with a serene stare.

“Your security may be compromised,” I whispered, “we need to get you somewhere safe. Either make the deal or don’t, but make sure you leave with me in the next five seconds.”

They made the deal, just like that, settling on fourteen thousand, and then I whisked the hooded drow out of the pub and down the street. We rounded several corners, ignoring the doxies who prowled the gutters and doorways of Radasanth by night, and arrived at my client’s inn. I ushered him inside.

“Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out until I return.” I told him.

“Where are you going?” He fretted, dry-washing his hands.

I tasted the arcana emanating from Shinsou’s dark matter like a hound sniffing the air.

“To work.”