He barely had time to draw a single breath before another barrage of knives came flying toward him. Each one whistled through the air with a screeching pitch that made his skin crawl. "... screaming blades!" the child in his arms, her voice lamented as she clung to his shoulder.

Lenko ducked low, his boots scraping against loose stones as he sprinted across the uneven ground. He shoved the small, scaled child tighter against his chest, shielding her with his body while his other hand fumbled to shove the heart into the hidden pouch at his waist.

The knives sliced through the air, several grazing his side and shoulder.The sting of each cut burned, but he refused to slow down. He'd been lucky once when Olga's arrow had stopped just short of his chest, he wasn't about to test his luck twice.

The Academy mage. Seventh.

He remembered the name because Muzio had told him to.

Every mage that graduated from the Academy took on a name, a number, tied to the land or settlement they were sworn to protect. Most of them were stationed in remote areas, guarding small villages from beasts that roamed near the edges of the kingdom. Places like Hinnom, a stronghold that stood between the living lands and the depths of Sheol.

The last mage who had served in Hinnom, the old man who sealed off the village and doomed them, met retribution by Muzio himself. Lenko doubted his young lord even cared to know that mage's number name.

But this one… this Seventh... she's different.

Even as Lenko ran, he could see her clearly when the flickering light caught her shape. The girl was limping badly, her cloak gone, her hair matted with soot.

She clutched the broken remnants of a lamp, flames sputtering from its cracked glass. Her eyes, however, were burning, not with pain, but with fury, and they were locked on him. Or rather, on the heart he had just stowed away.

He remembered that moment, Muzio's warning, before all of this chaos began.

"Watch the smaller one," Muzio had said, his tone light but sharp. "Not the one with the beard. The little one. She's the real danger."

Lenko had laughed it off at the time. The smaller mercenary looked barely out of her teens, a wisp of a thing next to her hulking partner, the man with the brown goatee and the long-handled lance who had followed Mr. Genevra everywhere.

Now, as blades whirled through the air, Lenko realized the truth of those words.

He remembered what happened just before all this. How he saw Tyron clutching the bloodied princess by the shoulders, horror etched on both their faces. And Olga, his sister's bow had been drawn, eyes locked on him, not in warning, but in a hunter's focus.

Then came Muzio, his appearance like a storm, his voice cutting through with a question he himself wanted to ask.

Lenko hadn't even had the time to process how it all fell apart.

Now, he was here, running through the shadows of the crater with a child in his arms, blood dripping from his cuts, knives screeching behind him, and Seventh, closing in with a glare that promised death.

The worst part was, Lenko couldn't tell which was more terrifying, the mage's quiet fury, or the thing burning in his bag, the 'heart' that the elven had forced into his hand with a grin that still made his stomach twist.

Now, as Lenko stumbled behind a fallen steel cages, panting, clutching the child and feeling the heat of the 'heart' even through the fabric of his pouch, he understood.

He was holding something everyone here would kill for, and he had no idea what it really was.

But there's something he knew.

He knew from the moment he saw the pattern of her throws, each blade grazing him by just enough to make him shift his steps, that she was manipulating him.

The limping mage wasn't trying to kill him outright. She was herding him, pushing him toward something. Every knife, every shriek of metal through the air, was a nudge in one direction, steering him.

He gritted his teeth as he ran, his arm tight around the red haired child whose small claws dug into his tunic. Between the two mana sources, the heart and the scaled child, the air around him felt thick, charged, alive. He knew the mage behind him could sense it too.

Then came the shift.

A new sound, whoosh, from his front, not behind.

It wasn't the mage's usual trajectory. It was deliberate. Coordinated.

And then, as if the thought finally caught up to the dread rising in his gut, Lenko remembered what he'd seen moments earlier from the edge of the crater... a group of figures moving like shadows through the smoke, not attacking but circling, following a single lead.

He hadn't recognized them then, too focused on his sister and Muzio's arrival. But now, now he understood. The mage wasn't alone. She'd been pushing him toward them.

A trap.

His body screamed at him to dodge, to twist away, to drop the child and run, but his instincts told him something worse would follow. The air before him crackled. The next knife wasn't one of her regular throws. He could feel the pressure of it, dense with mana, sharp enough to slice through stone.

If he tried to move, the knife might veer off and hit the girl. Or worse, the pouch.

So he didn't.

He turned his body deliberately, twisting his shoulder just enough that when the knife struck, it buried itself deep into the back of his shoulder.

The pain was immediate. Hot. Sharp. Like molten metal crawling under his skin.

He staggered forward, his breath catching as he bit back a groan. The blade hummed faintly where it stuck out from his back, the magic in it making his shoulder twitch uncontrollably. The sensation crawled down his arm, making his fingers spasm around the child.

Her wide green eyes looked up at him. Her lips parting in a small gasp.

Lenko forced a grin, crooked, trembling, but a grin nonetheless.

"I'm fine…" he rasped, his voice tight with pain.

It was a lie, and he knew it. His arm was going numb, and he could feel the warmth of blood soaking through. But seeing the child's small face staring up at him, he couldn't let her see him falter.

Not when he wasn't even sure what waited ahead of them, or if they'd survive long enough to find out.

The child stared at him, unblinking, eerily calm despite the chaos around them. Her pupils, narrow and feline, glimmered in the dim mana light as if assessing him. Then, without hesitation or warning, her small clawed hand gripped the hilt of the knife jutting out of his shoulder.

"Wait---!" Lenko hissed, but the words broke into a strangled cry as she yanked it free in one sharp motion.

White-hot pain burst through him, stealing his breath. He clutched his shoulder, staggering forward, his knees nearly buckling as the wound flared open. The world pulsed in and out of focus, but over the sound of his labored breathing, he could hear the child hum softly to herself.

"...screaming blade…" she murmured, holding the blood-slick weapon up to the light, her voice soft with an almost curious reverence.

Lenko barely had time to register her words when she suddenly jerked against his arm. Her tail, long, scaled, and deceptively strong, curled tightly around his forearm, the rough texture biting into his skin.

"Hey---!" he began, but the child's sudden pull sent him stumbling sideways, his boots skidding across the debris-littered ground.

A split second later, a blade whistled through the air where his head had just been.

It should have missed everything, but instead, it didn't. The knife veered, unnaturally, toward the figure running up behind them.

The mage.

Lenko's breath hitched as he turned in time to see it strike.

For a blink, the illusion shattered, like glass splintering in sunlight.

The mage's shape flickered, her young face stretching and warping before collapsing into something wrong. The robes melted into the figure of a man, one of the figures he'd seen in the crater before.

His gait, the limp, made horrible sense now... half his leg was gone, the flesh blackened and half-reformed by unstable mana. His arms twitched like broken marionette strings, his face twisted in a rictus of agony, frozen in an endless, silent scream.

Then he saw where blade hit.

It sank into his skull with a dull, wet thunk, and all at once the screaming stopped. His body went slack, limbs hanging lifelessly, as he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

"…oh, shit…" Lenko breathed, stumbling back. His voice barely carried over the sound of his own heartbeat hammering in his ears.

He didn't know if the knife killed him, or if whatever runes was keeping that thing alive finally failed. He didn't want to know.

Before he could even process it, he felt another hard tug, this time from the child's tail, curling tighter, insistent.

"Hey, easy!" he grunted, wincing as the scales scraped his skin raw.

But the child wasn't listening. She still held the bloodstained blade in her small hand, eyes wide and gleaming, not with fear, but with something else.

Fascination.

She turned the knife slowly in her grip, watching the way the dull mana shimmered across its edge. Her tail flicked behind her in restless arcs, her gaze fixed on the weapon.

Lenko, panting and still bleeding, swallowed hard.

"Yeah," he muttered under his breath, voice rough. "We're so screwed."

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.