The platform groaned and wobbled beneath them as Gael and Maeve landed with a heavy slam.

They didn't lose their grip on the umbrella, though.

Gael's teeth started rattling as his fingers curled around the extended shaft of the umbrella, bracing himself behind her.

"... Fire!" he growled into her ear.

Maeve didn't hesitate. Her gloved hand slid down the shaft, disengaging all eight mechanical locks with sharp, satisfying click, and the umbrella immediately started whining in response, its inner springs and gears vibrating with a shrill electric tremor that bit into Gael's bones. Like a hymn sung through broken teeth. In turn, he activated his Art, sending his blood through their chain and into her veins, which was then sent into the umbrella by her.

His arms immediately went numb.

One of the Rustwights—a barrel-chested one with a furnace grate for a face—lurched forward through the sewage. Its plated joints hissed, and the water parted around its legs with oily slaps as it charged at them.

"Exorcist!" Gael snapped, forcing his half-dead fingers to keep the umbrella aimed. "Tell me it's ready!"

"Five more seconds!" she shouted back.

Five.

Four.

The Rustwight's shadow swallowed them.

Three.

Its shriek split the air.

Two.

Maeve yanked the lever on the shaft of the opened umbrella—

And a scream of pressure erupted from the umbrella's tip.

It wasn't a beam. It wasn't a bullet. It was a full-blown column of emerald fire: liquid destruction distilled from his and her poisonous blood. It cracked the air and tore across the gap in less than a blink—and the recoil nearly tore their arms from their sockets, too.

The platform shrieked beneath their boots. Air pressure cratered around them. The two of them bent backwards from the shock, heels skidding across iron, but the blood cannon found its mark.

It slammed into the Rustwight's chest with the wrath of a god long buried. Armor buckled. Screws tore loose. Steel warped. The blood cannon punched clean through the Rustwight's torso, erupting out its back with a jet of glowing vapor, and with that, the Rustwight staggered.

It screamed.

Gael barked out a joyful, giddy laugh.

"It fucking works!" he roared. "It works! Your armor-piercer fucking works! Look at it! Look at that hole!"

While Maeve reengaged the locks and began charging the umbrella's second shot—her slightly shining eyes betraying her inner joy—Gael snapped his head to the side.

Fergal and his five goons were still standing firm in front of Cara, flanking her in a loose semicircle.

"This isn't over!" he barked. "That blast won't kill a Myrmur outright, so catch, bitches!"

He didn't wait for a reply. His hands plunged into the folds of his coat and emerged with a fan of stitched leather satchels. There were twelve in total, all round, light, and packed with violence.

He flicked his wrist across the pond, and one by one, the satchels arced through the air like falling teeth.

Fergal and his goons caught them effortlessly. Reflexes honed from a hundred back-alley brawls. So, while they tore the satchels open immediately and squinted into the contents, Gael raised one free arm and jabbed a finger towards the wounded Rustwight, whose chest still hissed steam from the blood cannon.

"Those are prototype three!" he shouted. "Powdered symbiote elixir encapsulated in a powder bomb! Each of you throw one through the hole!"

That was all the explanation they needed.

Fergal gave one sharp nod. The others followed without a word.

Then they moved.

The platform buckled under their boots as they immediately skipped and hopped dashed across the half-sunk bridges, vaulting over gaps with feet as light as feathers.

One after another, Gael watched them leap into the air and—mid-flight—toss six glass spheres straight into the gaping cavity in the Rustwight's torso.

The moment they struck, the explosions were not thunder, but light.

Iridescent, powdered symbiote elixir burst forth in a cloud, shifting from violet to sea-green to blood-red in the blink of an eye. The Rustwight's scream this time was different. Agonized. Panicked. It reeled, convulsed, staggered back, and—with a final groan like a cathedral beam giving way—the metal plates armoring the rest of its body collapsed onto itself, making it topple backwards into the water.

Dead.

"... And this prototype fucking works, too!" He turned back to Maeve, his lips stretching in something between a grin and a grimace. "Prototype two—the pouch-powdered form we used on the trees in the Fogspire Forest—was fun, but too loose! Powder easily scatters in wind and sticks to wrong surfaces, but if you put them in bombs that you can easily aim and throw, then—"

He didn't finish his sentence, though, as the circular platform beneath them suddenly wobbled, and the two of them readjusted their footing as the five other Rustwights that'd fallen down here with them started moving.

All five circled the platform like wolves around a lit chapel, their gargantuan bodies casting long shadows in the mist—and then, together, they charged.

"Well," Gael mumbled, grinning as sweat stung his eyes, "this is gonna be fun."

While Maeve continued funneling blood into the umbrella's chamber, Gael reached back with one hand and found the horizontal canister strapped onto the back of his belt. His fingers fumbled once, then clenched around the lever, and he yanked it hard.

Click.

Both ends of the canister hissed and popped open, and in the space of a heartbeat, a storm of movement erupted. Thirty miniature constructs—each shaped like a jagged little raven—shot out of the canister in a spiraling burst.

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Whirring, shrieking, clicking, they exploded into the air like they'd been waiting to die. A flurry of wings each no larger than a child's hand. They spun wildly through the mist and slammed straight into the Rustwights from every angle, shrieking with tiny talons and snapping beaks. Sparks screamed off their armor as the ravens ricocheted and bit down again and again, digging in like metallic piranhas.

One of the Rustwights staggered. Another let out a muffled roar, flailing its arms. They couldn't track the ravens. Couldn't swat fast enough. Gael grinned wider, watching them stagger around in a staggered, clunky ballet. They looked ridiculous—monsters of rust and bone reduced to puppets swatting at flies.

"Must be irritating, right?" he drawled aloud, taunting the Rustwights.

The ravens didn't have targeting systems. They didn't need them. They were designed to be chaotic and violent, predictable only in their unpredictability.

He'd solved the glyph activation issue by arranging the ravens in a custom-built canister like bullets in a revolver. Each one had an incomplete glyph on its back, but when he pulled the lever, a stamp mechanism inside the canister would etch the final line of the glyph onto each of their backs, thus activating all thirty ravens at once.

What do I call this bioarcanic equipment, I wonder?

'Sorrow Nest'?

'Raven Party'?

He hummed in delight as he watched his ravens fly around, sparking flames wherever their wings screeched against Rustwight armor. This part was fun to watch. The retrieval, though? Probably not half as much. Unless he wanted to keep burning time and effort making new ravens, he'd have to hunt down each inactive raven after their muscle fibres ran out of strength and they stopped flying around, and he'd have to fix each of them manually if they suffered any structural damage.

All in all, it wasn't the most reusable or long-term bioarcanic equipment he could've made, but…

"That's future Gael's problem to solve!" he shouted, jerking his head left as he dodged a cut to his throat from one of his own ravens. "Exorcist! When's the next shot ready?"

"Now!" Maeve shouted back.

They fired.

The second shot cracked out of the umbrella like a banshee's shriek. Gael's boots skidded from the recoil as the entire platform buckled beneath them once again. Their arms screamed in protest, bones vibrating like tuning forks—but the blood cannon landed clean. It tore through the second Rustwight's chest, punching a fresh, jagged hole straight through the armor.

Steam burst from the wound, and molten metal hissed where the blood had burned through. No time to cheer. Fergal and his goons were already moving, leaping and vaulting until they surrounded the Rustwight on all sides, and then they tossed the elixir bombs all at once.

They found their winning rhythm.

Pierce, toss, detonate, and move. Round and round Gael spun with Maeve, half-laughing, half-swearing as they fired four more blood cannons, punching new holes into the Rustwights. Whenever Maeve looked like she was about to drop from blood loss, he'd send more into her and keep her standing. Whenever the ravens started slowing down, he'd reach into his coat to pull out a second, a third, a fourth canister, and then Fergal and his goons would deal the finishing blow.

One last roar. One last hole. One last bomb.

As the last Rustwight pitched backwards into the sewage, kicking up a geyser of black water, both of them dropped the umbrella with a loud clatter.

They hunched over, gasping for air, arms shaking violently. Gael's wrists throbbed. Maeve's breathing was shallow and tight.

Then she laughed softly, breathless. "Even with all those levels in strength… and the 'Basic Grip'... it's still that hard to handle the recoil, huh?"

Gael spat off to the side. "You didn't destroy the surgical chamber last night for nothing."

He straightened painfully, joints aching, and scanned the haze. A moment later, figures emerged from the mist: Fergal and his five goons, bounding lightly over the wreckage, and behind them, Cara.

Careful as ever, her braid swung behind her as she skipped over to their circular platform, and Gael's grin returned as he locked eyes with her.

It wasn't a smug smile, nor the sharp kind he gave his enemies.

He supposed he was just... relieved.

Cara smiled with her eyes as well. They didn't say anything. Didn't need to. He raised his fist, and just as she was about to lift hers to bump his—

Behind him, Maeve staggered.

The thud of her knees against the metal made Gael spin instantly, and she would've fallen flat on her face had he not dashed forward and caught her just in time, her body limp in his arms.

Her skin was clammy. Her breaths were shallow. The skin around her eyes were pale as porcelain, but her voice came out clearly, though faint and muffled by her mask.

"I'm okay," she mumbled. "Just… lost a bit too much blood, was all. How… the hell are you still up?"

Gael sent her a toothy grin. "You fight monsters for a living, I drink poison and curses for a living. We are not the same—"

The wet clang of something enormous dragging itself out from the water—slow, rattling, like a cathedral bell being unearthed—made all of them still on their feet spin.

From the bubbling sewage water, one of the Rustwights rose. Its left arm was torn off at the shoulder, and half its chest gaped open in a mangled spiral of melted metal, but it was alive. Barely. And it looked pissed.

Maeve cursed under her breath. Her knees buckled as she tried to stand, but she only managed to slump against Gael, unable to lift her umbrella. The weapon itself sat off to the side, leaking smoke and blood.

Tch.

It overheated?

Gael's gut twisted, but he kept her upright with one arm and drew his bladed cane with the other. All around them, Fergal and his goons raised their weapons—fists, axes, claws—but they wouldn't be enough.

Shit.

The Rustwight let out a screech like metal grinding down a throat.

Then, from somewhere above, a hiss cut through the air—and a plume of fire slammed into its neck.

The Rustwight reeled. Smoke billowed from the burn mark, and its shriek turned into a strangled gurgle.

Another plume of fire flew from above. Then another. Then six. Then ten. Each pierced through the mist and slammed into its frame from different angles. One seared clean through its gut. Another burned its head. The Rustwight screamed and thrashed, arms flailing, but when the last wave of fire melted through its chest like wax, it collapsed into a molten, twitching heap.

Then it stopped moving entirely, sinking slowly once again into the water.

Silence fell.

And it wasn't the good kind.

Gael looked up.

Dozens and hundreds of shapes stared down at the sewage pond from the pipes and ledges above. Draped in mismatched cloaks and oil-stained shawls, with pale gas masks and green lenses, the Gulchers watched in perfect stillness. Heads tilted. Hands dangling. They didn't speak. They didn't move.

Gael's eyes flicked from one mask to another. All of them were faceless, completely unrecognizable from one another, tut then—there.

A smaller one, kneeling by the edge of a pipe about twenty meters above with a crooked belt looped too high around their waist.

Recognition hit him like a pin to the spine.

It was the little one from the Black Bloom Bazaar. The one he'd saved from harassing gangsters a month ago.

...

The Gulchers didn't linger. One by one, they turned. Some crawled backward into vents. Others dropped into crawlspaces. Some just sank into the fog like ghosts. In less than a minute, they were all gone.

All of them.

Only the running sewage remained, and the blood-slick metal platform beneath their boots.

… A favor for a favor, huh?

Gael couldn't help but sigh. It was a closer call than he'd have liked, and there was definitely more work that needed to be done on both Maeve's umbrella and his ravens, but for now, they'd dealt with all the Rustwights.

Still, their troubles weren't over yet.

Gael and Fergal locked eyes for a second, and then footsteps echoed from the dark behind them. Not one. Not two. A good hundred pairs, at least, that dragged all of their attention around as they faced the next arrival group of gangsters.

From the yawning mouth of a giant pipe, Lorcawn emerged from the dark with his small army of Repossessors. They walked with hurry, but the Palm's amber eyes were lit with something cold. Not anger—not quite—but perhaps… disappointment.

Gael tensed. His fingers twitched at his side. Maeve leaned heavier into him, and even Cara shifted her weight subtly.

"What do all of you think you're doing?" Lorcawn said calmly, too peaceful and quiet for comfort. "I gave you your instructions, didn't I? How, exactly, am I supposed to deal with all of you now?"

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