Emily says goodbye to Agnes and her old friends before sending the mages who came to watch them back into the city with Virgil and returning to Elisime. She heads straight for her workshop and quickly throws together a tracker coded to the marks she has left on all her targets.

"Here," Emily says as she finishes, handing the small, glass-like tablet covered in runes to Pod. "I want you to take this and head back to The Dome with Mensacus. Keep an eye on everyone I marked. If you run into anyone else whose family is on our hit list, which I've uploaded to Elisime's Logic Core if you need a reminder, get Mensacus to mark them as well."

Pod nods enthusiastically, and Mensacus reluctantly agrees, dropping Silica onto Emily's lap.

"Take a single company of droids with you, armed with non-lethals only, and have them set up in the fog around The Dome. If any of our targets try to leave, capture them and send them back here for safekeeping. We'll work out who's brainwashed and who's fair game later, but dose them all with Mage Killer for now just to be safe."

"You're willing to use it all?" Pod questions as Emily transfers tens of vials of the nasty drug she produced to disable mages from her belt to his backpack. "I thought you said you had a limited supply of the ingredients."

"That was true in New Denntimo, but I'm going to fix that while you're watching our prey."

"Okay. Good luck." Pod nods and turns to leave, walking side-by-side with Mensacus as they head off to complete their task.

Emily leaves Silica in her workshop to nap, wrapping her in Juliana's scarf before she heads out of the ship. She pulls a simple black robe from her belt, wrapping it around herself to conceal her identity before entering the city again and taking to the ground-level streets.

She weaves through the lanes until she hits a part of the city she recognises, where she turns off into a narrow side alley, passing a shop selling cheap skewers of indiscernible meat. Emily approaches a heavy metal door set into the building beside the stand, raising a hand to rest on the metal without knocking.

"Open," she whispers with mana filling her throat as dozens of neutral blue runes form around her arm.

She hears a series of grinding clicks as the deadbolts and latches holding the door shut slide out of the way, and Emily pushes it open without any resistance. A small smile plays at her lips at her first successful full-arcanist spell, but it's gone by the time she slips through the door and catches the fist of the shocked guard waiting behind it.

She twists the bulky man's arm, forcing him to drop the knife caught between her fingers, and sends a jolt of electricity through him, discharging one of the batteries in her left arm and instantly knocking the man out cold. A quick check under his sleeve confirms he's not who she's looking for, so Emily shuts the door behind her and reverses her unlocking spell to seal it as she heads down into the black market.

She holds her mana in as she pulls her hood lower to cover her face, concealing the number of her circles but not their existence. The market appears the same as she last saw it, with tents and rickety buildings filling the hollow chamber beneath the city. No one spares Emily a second glance as she roams the stalls, inspecting them as she passes to search for anything that could be useful to her.

She finds several people selling materials from magical beasts, and even more selling items made from a blend of magical metals without realising it, and buys a few of the more interesting pieces, but when she's about halfway through the district, she feels someone following her.

Looks like they're still active.

She doesn't react, pretending not to notice anything as she picks up a small, ornate blade covered in carvings of twisting vines from a stall and turns it in her hands, ignoring the engravings and inspecting the metal closely, nodding when she confirms it contains trace amounts of mythril.

"How much?" she asks the man sitting behind the counter, before handing over a silver coin and nodding in satisfaction, as if she's found what she's looking for.

Emily turns and heads towards one of the quieter side streets squeezed between a seedy-looking bar and a new arms dealer that wasn't here last time she was. She spins her new blade between her metal fingers as the sounds of the bustling illegal market fade away, leaving only a faint set of footsteps that would be inaudible to a normal human.

Letting mana slip from her fingers, Emily charges the knife before whipping her arm backwards without looking, sending the crackling blade right into her tail's stomach. A wheeze and a thud follow as she turns around to see a man doubled over and twitching, unable to control his body as lightning runs through his muscles.

Emily walks over to him and turns him onto his back with a nudge of her foot, crouching down and grasping the handle of her blade with her left hand before channelling machina through it. She locates half a dozen suicide measures with her scan and removes them one by one, getting a good look at the tattoo of an impaled skull on the inside of his left forearm as she half strips the man before ripping one of his teeth straight out.

The moment she's satisfied he can't kill himself too easily, Emily retracts the machina immobilising him and begins scanning his mind with her mana as his twitching subsides, giving him a little time to recover.

Although she hasn't managed to manifest the mental element yet, Emily has had more experience than most messing with her own mind and watching Mensacus in action, so she isn't surprised when she discovers an odd twisting of mana buried deep inside the man's head. She reaches out to it with her own mana, slowly picking out a few of the runes blended into it, but before she can get too far, her test subject begins convulsing again, much more violently than when she was filling him with electricity, and the mental bind in his mind pulses, quickly spreading its violent influence and reducing his mind to mush.

"Tsk," Emily clicks her tongue as blood leaks from every orifice on the corpse's head, pulling her knife out and standing up, noting the time without looking at The Clock before she turns to continue her walk through the market as if nothing happened.

It doesn't take long for her to spot a familiar white tent with the mark of The Crystal Skull, so she slips inside, letting the entrance flap swing shut behind her as she comes face-to-face with an unfamiliar man. He's sitting behind a table holding a few family crests and two burning incense sticks, and his bulky build and the jagged scar running from one cheek to the other across his nose give him an intimidating air.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"Why hello," he says in a deep, commanding tone. "To what do I owe the pleasure of your presence? Are you here to purchase some of our trophies?"

Emily ignores his time wasting and steps forward, vaulting the table faster than the man can react in a smooth motion and landing with her foot on his chest, kicking him backwards off his chair and to the floor. Sparks leap from her boot as she channels Stunning Touch, immobilising the man so she can remove his suicide measures.

He tries to resist as Emily goes for his mouth, but she just increases the voltage flowing through his twitching muscles and presses down harder with her foot, ripping his tooth out before tossing it aside and retracting her charge. The second he's free, the muscular man grabs Emily's leg and tries to throw her off, but despite him being two heads taller and twice as wide, he can't make her budge, feeling as if a building was pressing down on his chest.

"Stay still," Emily says, clasping his face with her right hand as she raises her left to shoot a blade into the leg of the guard trying to silently slip out from the narrow space hidden in the folds of the tent. "Relax and let me in. It'll all be over soon."

The man only struggles more, scratching at her Claw and trying to rip her hand off as she shocks his companion through a wire extending from her left palm to the blade impaled in his thigh. Emily pushes her mana into his head, searching through his mind until she finds the spell binding him. She manages to uncover the ghost of two more runes forming it before her subject begins convulsing and blood leaks from his eyes.

Emily releases him the moment his mind shatters, moving on to the woman who was trying to protect him. She doesn't manage to recover from the shock like her friend and lies limp until Emily finishes poking around in her head, having set off the failsafe that kills her like the rest.

With nowhere near enough data to reverse engineer the spell binding them yet, Emily returns to wandering the market while broadcasting her presence to the mana detection crystals they're using. Unfortunately, even after several hours, she doesn't run into another member of The Crystal Skull.

Cutting her losses, Emily leaves the underground black market and returns to the surface, calling Mensacus to meet her back at the ship.

"One of your friends found us," Mensacus says as he walks into Emily's workshop. "Quiet man. We couldn't understand him, so I had to speak to his mind."

"Ivor?" Emily hums, immediately putting a name to the description. "What did he want?"

"To talk to you."

"Figures. I'll say hi when I collect Pod."

"You're going back?" Mensacus questions, curling the tentacles that form his legs and lowering himself down to sit beside Emily, glancing under the workbench to check on his sleeping sister.

"In a bit, yes." Emily nods. "But first, I'd like to pick your brain a bit."

***

After discussing the runes she has so far with her son, Emily waits for the hours to pass before activating The Clock and returning to the moment she ripped a tooth from the first member of The Crystal Skull. She dives into his mind again, collecting more data before he ends up fried and moving on to the others. It takes half a dozen resets for her to finally gather all the parts of the spell, so she calls on Mensacus again and meets him in her workshop so they can break it apart the spell together.

"Poison," he finally says after a few hours of putting the scattered runes Emily has gathered into a cohesive spell and analysing it.

"Really?"

"I can't see an obvious loophole in this spell's design, so unless you want to give me a few days to take control of a subject myself, that's your best option. You made a poison that targets a mage's mana, so make one that targets the mana in the spell."

"That's easier said than done. Mage Killer's toxic enough to straight up kill an unawakened human," Emily says, tapping her metal fingers against the workbench and silently running through the ingredients that could be used for what he's asking. "I'll have to make sure it targets the spell faster than the host. They'll both die, but as long as there's a time difference, I should be able to ask what I need to."

She nods and begins pulling ingredients from her belt, starting the prep work to create a new potion.

"If I start with Mage Killer as a base and integrate some elements from Dead Man's Breath… no, there are too many corrosive ingredients to mix… maybe if I remove the fangs and use liver extract instead? No, not quite, that imbalances the elemental equilibrium…"

Her muttered words come out faster than Mensacus can process, but he happily sits back, reaching out to caress Silica's head as she wakes up to watch their mother work.

***

After a few weeks of rewinding and returning to her ship to work, Emily finally completes her specialised poison. She resets back to capturing her first test subject and, instead of immediately probing his mind, she shocks him unconscious.

Confirming that the spell in his head hasn't activated, she rises back to her full height and begins weaving a spatial spell together. She connects it to an anchor in Elisime and opens a portal without encountering any resistance, thanks to the city's mist not reaching down into the market's chamber, before throwing her first prisoner through.

She shuts the portal after him and heads off to The Crystal Skull's tent. Immobilising the two waiting there is as easy as it was the last dozen times she's done it, and, after flooding the big man with a near-worrying amount of lightning to knock him unconscious, she opens a portal again to drag both of them through.

Emily leaves the three bodies in the corner of her workshop as she cooks up a cauldron full of her newest brew. She fills three syringes with the noxious red liquid after it cools, and conjures three chairs from metal, setting the prisoners into them before curling the armrests and legs around their limbs, locking them in place.

The big man begins to stir as she shifts him, and by the time his comrades are locked in beside him, his eyes are open, looking around for anything to help free himself.

"I've got to say, your resistance is quite impressive," Emily says without a hint of emotion in her tone, pulling her own seat over to drop down in front of her prisoners at a languid pace. "With the amount of charge I pushed through you, I'm surprised you're not dead, let alone being the first to wake up."

The man in question glares at her, gritting his teeth fruitlessly before spitting a mixture of saliva and blood towards her.

Emily catches his attack with a gust of wind and throws it back in his face, shaking her head as she leans forward and slowly pushes a syringe into his arm.

"Let's have none of that. I only want to ask you a few questions."

"AARRGH!" the man screams as his veins bulge from his skin, lighting up with an eerie red glow as the poison spreads.

"This won't be very pleasant, but I'll make it less painful if you agree to answer my questions."

She doesn't get a response, and the man writhes in his chair, trying to pull his hands from their restraints to no effect. After a few seconds, the poison reaches his eyes, and blood begins to leak from them as the man suddenly tries to swing his head back, as if trying to knock himself out on a wall that isn't there.

Emily watches him struggle, waiting for the poison to do its job, and after twenty seconds of suffering, the man finally slumps forward in his seat.

"Are you ready to speak?" Emily asks, reaching out and pressing a hand to the top of his head, checking his mind and finding the binding spell in tatters.

"No. Fuck. You," he pants between breaths.

"What's your name?"

The man turns his head up, glaring at her with rage burning in his bloodshot eyes. But when he opens his mouth to respond, his expression morphs into one of shock.

"Dominic Faust."

"Good," Emily says, nodding in satisfaction. "And what's your codename?"

"Bea-" Dominic starts to say before slamming his mouth shut as horror replaces the anger in his gaze.

"Clever," Emily praises, reaching forward to rest her left hand on his knee. "You can't lie, but I can't force you to answer me. Or can I?"

A blade extends from her palm, splitting the man's kneecap and forcing his mouth open to let out a scream of pain.

"Bear!" he shrieks, squirming in his chair as pain floods his mind. "It's fucking Bear!"

"Thank you, Bear," Emily says, retracting the blade from his leg and numbing the pain receptors around the wound with a precise current of machina. "Now, who do you work for?"

He looks up at her with his mouth screwed shut again and she sighs, removing her hand and watching his face twist as the pain rushes back.

"It seems like this is going to take a while…"

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.