The morning rose with vengeance, sunlight piercing Dina's eyes and aggravating her headache as the stun wore off. The boy, Percy, strange weapons left the strong imprint on her mind and forehead.

She thought of her sons and unconsciously compared them to the strange boy, mind rattling as she stood. Then she spun around, coming face to face with Viper, who had been standing there watching her.

Viper was a very plain man, someone who took his job as an assassin seriously. His honey-brown hair was cut short, complementing the harsh lines of his face and sharp eyes that tracked her slowly.

In his hand jade dagger—a widowmaker—one cut from that and she would fall to the ground foaming at the mouth.

"Why are you still alive?"

"I got shot by the kid. I begged for mercy," she said groggily. "He shot me but for some reason it didn't kill."

"I'm supposed to believe that?" He stepped closer, grip on the dagger tightening.

One of the men behind Viper let out a chuckle.

"The boy's magic tool is meant to have non-lethal options. I keep telling you, we should just kill the dad and kidnap the kid. He can make us some very useful weapons."

"If we could kill Thalos ourselves we would have already," Viper muttered. He still remembered the marketplace incident five years ago ago. They had the numbers, but House Amphene was individually stronger.

The most powerful members of the Whitemoon also worked in bigger markets like Nephelestia and Horea. If they wanted to hire more deadly people, they'd need to worry about the price and being backstabbed

Viper groaned and grabbed Dina off the ground, pushing her forward roughly as he spat out orders to his men.

"Find them. They can't have gotten too far. We'll track and kill them before they make it to Sonea. Take the bodies too—Frog and the other idiots. We'll burn them at Sonea and send them back to their homelands."

It was custom even among criminals to be buried where you were born, under the nearest tree, lest you have the spirits of your comrades haunting you.

Dina glanced at the bodies scattered around. Inside one of them Percy had hidden a magic tool that would help them track the assassins back to their base in Sonea. She didn't know which, but she was sure of that.

"You should check the bodies," she said. "I heard the boy say before I lost consciousness that they would hide something."

All the assassins froze. Viper gave them a simple look and they all started the grisly work of searching the bodies. He then turned to her and stepped away.

"Deer, come check her," Viper said. One of the lackeys ran over with a salacious smile on his face. Dina gritted her teeth and endured the disgusting experience, holding back the urge to bite off his ears.

The man didn't seem keen on ending the search until he found something, plastered against the back of her neck with a patch of skin-like material.

"There's something here," Deer cried out. "At the back of the neck."

Not long after, they were able to find those same patches on the necks of all the corpses. Viper stared at Dina for a long time as they waited for his decision.

"Everyone, place a layer of shielding around Deer, then he'll take it off."

Deer looked like he wanted to protest, but no one disagreed with Viper. At least, no one that liked being alive disagreed. He followed orders and waited for the shields to be placed.

The chants echoed like an eerie choir. They all used decent spells to shield him — some were even Rank 2. Once they were done, Deer placed his hand on the patch, sweating.

"Fuck my life," he whispered under his breath before pulling it off suddenly. Dina flinched as it ripped the hair on the back of her neck free.

The forest grew silent as they waited for something to explode or a poisonous cloud to be released.

Dina felt the tension melt from her bones. Viper shook his head; even he released a sigh of relief.

"What was it? Owl, check it," he said, snapping his fingers.

Owl, one of the Spiritmancers with experience in hermetics, stepped forward to analyse it. Dina watched his face go through varying degrees of shock and relief.

"This thing is designed to malfunction," Owl concluded.

"What the hell does that mean?" Viper asked, raising an eyebrow. "Don't magic tools form an—"

"An Evil Spirit, yes. This is made to malfunction on command and create an Evil Spirit."

"Don't know whether to call that amazing or horrifying," Deer murmured. "Can we use it?"

"I have no idea," Owl explained. "We'd need a second circle connected to this that triggers it. Even then, this work would be hard to reproduce. It's years ahead of anything we have."

Dina felt the shift in Viper's eyes, his opinion of her changing a little. She hadn't even known it was there after all. Half of her thought that Percy planned to kill her, but ingenious boy was the one who told her to inform them about something hidden in the bodies.

He didn't say he would be placing something on her neck, but it was obviously part of his plan to help absolve her of suspicion.

"They were going to wait for us to take these bodies, then trigger the magic," Viper concluded. "The magic tools must contain some way to track them. If we took these to Sonea without knowing, then the Evil Spirit would have killed us all."

"We have people that can deal with Evil Spirits, though," Owl offered. "It's not a bad plan, but some people would survive."

"It takes preparation to fight an Evil Spirit. You can't just meet one in the hallway and start fighting. And our hideout in Sonea would also be revealed."

They all held a grim silence as they contemplated the problems that would have been unleashed. The cost wouldn't just be lives; it would be money and trust. They could never work with the rest of the Whitemoon after such an incident.

"What are you thinking, boss?" Owl asked.

"I'm thinking that I should have thought about kidnapping the Amphene bastard myself," Viper said casually.

They all let out nervous chuckles, watching the bodies from more of a distance now.

"Take off the rest of the patches," Viper said finally, "but all at once, we don't know how they function."

This time it didn't take as long because they didn't need shields, but as soon as they laid them all on the ground for Owl to study, they sparked and caught fire.

Everyone jumped back, drawing their weapons. But Dina could see more people ready to run than fight though.

But no Evil Spirits came, and Viper's face grew increasingly bitter.

"Fuck, that bastard must have known we took off the patches."

"No, I think it's just a countermeasure to make sure we don't steal his work," Owl explained. "If he knew that we took off the patches, he would just summon the Evil Spirits now to kill us all here."

Viper clicked his tongue. He must have really wanted to get his hands on those patches.

"Get back into the forest. Find the kid. We need him on our side, it seems. Willingly or by force."

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