The closer we got to the town hall in the centre of Fateswatch, the more people were out patrolling the streets. Nobody had thought to patrol the rooftops, though, which seemed like a glaring oversight to me. I took full advantage of that fact and ran from building to building towards the city centre.

Arriving at the edge of the building line, I peered from the roof into the courtyard around the town hall.

Around the building itself was a regiment of humans, half in full plate, a third in studded leather, and the remainder wearing robes. Not a single person was wearing a cloak. They all looked like fools without the wonder that was a cloak, comfy and warm, with a hood to block out the rain.

I pulled mine tighter around me in disgust at these cloak-less heathens.

Speaking of rain, it looked from the cloud cover like it was going to start pouring any moment now. The stars weren't visible under the cloud cover, and what I could see looked like a restless sea about to boil over.

My Strand wasn't a fan of that fact. I could tell that something about being wet would ruin my stealth functionality. And that was despite the cloak I wore over the dress Ellie made me.

Just a quick in and out, then I can ride the body of whoever Sam takes over out of there. No stress, no drama.

Activating [Winter's Step], I jumped off the building, stepped on two frozen patches of air to slow my descent and made it over the platoon of armed men and women gathered around the town hall.

I landed on the other side, right next to where someone in fancy armour was giving a speech, but outside the radius of a light spell that was illuminating the speaker. Nobody detected me as expected. It would be odd for anyone to have the ability to cut through Second Ascension level stealth in less than a minute.

Not wanting to take any chances, I took off running towards the building.

Sam wiggled in my arms, prompting me to look down at them.

"What?" I whispered.

They pointed an arrow made of Mana at the group of people I was running away from. I just shook my head, "Yeah, no, I'm not about to get into a brawl with three hundred people. Or at least, not without Ellie and my other body, and even then I'd only do it if I had to."

Sam flopped to the side and let out a whine that sounded like bells tinkling together in response.

"Oh, hush with the dramatics," I said, hurrying my pace towards the wall. Luckily, the bricks used to construct the town hall were fairly easy to climb for my size.

I only needed to freeze myself to the surface a few times during the whole climb. It seemed they hadn't even planned for the building to be resistant to intrusion by an infant-sized infiltrator.

Reaching a large stained glass window, I used a stream of Nature Mana to widen a hole in the frame.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish in time, and the first drops started landing on my hood as I worked. The endless night around me fell apart just as I crawled through an opening into an unlit room. The power going to my eyes automatically increased to account for the dark that I could no longer see through.

I shook off what water I could and took a look around where I had ended up.

It was some kind of meeting room, a large table stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by bookshelves that were likely entirely vanity. Popping open a book from one of the lower shelves I confirmed that it was completely blank.

Then I jumped onto the table.

There, I found something more interesting, it seemed to be some kind of map of the surrounding area with little flags placed on Zones. I imagined the whole thing as a circuit map to trick the memory System into saving it, then moved on.

I turned the wooden knob with Nature Mana and opened the door. Peeking into the hallway, there wasn't a soul in sight.

None of the doors were labelled, of course. That would have made finding an imp too easy.

Now, where would I be if I were one of those little buggers?

If they acted in a similar capacity to Ledger, then there should be a record keeper somewhere around here.

Scampering down the hall, I kept to the walls. My invisibility was disabled, but that didn't mean I didn't have other precautions. My footsteps were absolutely silent for one.

Skittering down the hallway, I tried to find a room with light visible underneath the doorway.

There were none on this floor, but there was a handy staircase right at the end that led down.

I shouldn't have been surprised that nobody was up at night working away in these halls, but I kind of was anyway. Where is everyone?

Just as the thought passed my mind, I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. With a hop, I launched myself into the corner, hidden underneath a step of the stairs above.

A pair of humans passed by underneath, and because I wasn't really paying attention, I only managed to glimpse a single word from their conversation.

"...Ellie…"

It was at that point that Ellie decided she absolutely needed my help for some reason. Right when I needed to figure out what was going on here. With a sigh, I split my mind and had part of it begin working out how I could extract her from the death sentence she'd inflicted on herself.

With the rest of my available mental faculties, I followed along behind the humans, listening in on what they were talking about. While climbing along the top of the staircase, I used Winter Mana to freeze myself to the surface with every movement I made. It was incredibly awkward, climbing the stairs in reverse upside down, but I made it work.

"I know, don't get me started on the supplies for the whole venture that will be wasted. Vice-Guildmaster Finn had me running around for days looking for an exact vintage of wine for one of those quests," a man wearing a hooded cloak said with a huff. "We turned the operation upside down just to do something related to a girl we don't even know the location of. Doesn't make any sense to me."

"We could always leave the Guild. Just because the Guildmaster is now the city lord doesn't mean we need to follow his whims," said a woman in full plate. I recognized her as the one who had mentioned Ellie.

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"And what? Join the cultists of Caelir th—" The man was interrupted when the woman slapped him.

"Don't call them fucking cultists. Unless you want one of them to remove your tongue, permanently," she hissed at him.

"This is what I mean. We have one bad option and a worse one. What would you prefer to do? Set out on our own? Not a single group that set out by itself is still alive. I know that for certain. If we stay, we're bound to the Guild now that Lord Wei has made participation mandatory for residents," he said as they got off at the landing above where I had entered. This hallway was lit with Light artifacts that burned my eyes—another side effect of my Strand.

"When did that happen?"

"He mentioned it during the speech less than a minute ago. Were you even paying attention?"

The woman went silent, and the leather-clad guy let out a chuckle.

That was when I soundlessly dropped from the ceiling, dunking Sam into the woman's head. Plate armour suited Sam's fighting style better than leather, so it was an obvious choice.

Then, before the other could react, I put a thorn through his skull.

Neither of them was very high-level. I didn't even gain a single level from their deaths.

"Hey Sam, you gain some of their memories when you take over a body, right? Do you know why they were talking about Ellie?" I asked, leaning in to speak directly in her ear. The imp plan was going to have to wait until later. I was really curious about what they knew, and getting Sam into one of their heads was very high on my priority list.

"Give me a minute, sorting through everything is always a hassle… Something relating to a Divine Quest to kill you, other than that, she wasn't sure." Sam said, then coughed and stretched their new body before freezing in place. "There's something weird happening between the armour and my body. It feels like there's some kind of attachment between me and it."

That wasn't good. Why the fuck did the humans want Ellie dead? What had she done to them to deserve this?

Other than allowing herself to succumb to the mental compulsion to harm beings of flesh, that is. And that isn't even that bad.

"What do you mean by attachment?" I asked, clambering down onto the corpse of the man and started digging through the leathers he was wearing, looking for Mana fumes leaking out of it anywhere.

"It's like there's a tether attached to the plate to my mind. I could detach the tether if I tried," Sam replied.

Tracing a stream of slightly denser than usual Mana, I found a bone clasp attached to the inside of the leather jerkin. There was a circuit inside the clasp made out of some kind of dried blood putty. Hazel's work, I knew her style from our talks. Or her talks with Ellie, I should say.

That we shared memories was becoming weird. I was clearly a separate person.

Just as I went to connect to it, a brief pulse of Mana was emitted for such a short time that I wouldn't have noticed it had I not installed an incredibly sensitive sensor in my body.

"Should I rip it out?" Sam asked, but I was too busy looking over what the circuit did to respond.

So all the artifact did was release a pulse of Mana when disconnected… which meant this was an alarm. Fuck, teaching Hazel the tricks I'd learned was coming back to bite me. Thank the gods she wasn't providing support to the humans anymore. She deserved better than they could offer anyway.

That was when a bell started going off somewhere in the building.

"It doesn't matter! We need to get the hell out of here!" I could hear footsteps resounding off the stone staircase.

I ran to a door on the side of the building with windows and forced it open with a burst of Mana.

Inside was an imp sitting on their desk, sorting through notes. It looked up in surprise at me.

Ignoring the imp, because it looked like it was only in its First Ascension, I ran to the window and shattered it with a spike of solid ice.

"Hey! That's fines for the window, the sill, and the recordkeeping you just interrupted!" the imp squeaked. I tuned it out after that.

A system prompt appeared, deducting currency I didn't even have, but I waved it away.

"Sam, you're good with this height, right?" I asked. It was only a fifty-metre drop, so I'd be fine.

"Ahhh, I don't know about that. This body is fairly fragile," she responded. Peering over the edge.

That was interesting. Were the bodies she took over not taking her Soul Refinement into account?

"Hmm, okay, well, I think we can fix that." It was unfortunate that I got her a whole set of plate armour with that body, but she was going to have to discard it immediately. I turned to the imp. "Freeze."

It froze in place. I could barely feel it exerting any resistance against my order. Whether that was because it was weak or because I was using Kaelzar's power against one of his own minions, I couldn't say.

"Get in there, it's small enough that I can carry you down," I said, pointing at the frozen imp. "And hurry, I don't know if it will survive the full body frostbite for long."

In retrospect, given my affinity for Winter, I should have chosen a different command word. I hadn't intended to freeze it in place literally.

While Sam was doing that, I peeked my head out of the door I'd opened earlier.

There were a dozen people armed to the teeth rushing down the hallway to their fallen comrade.

"Trip," I whispered, and those dozen tripped over an invisible barrier that hadn't existed a moment earlier.

I took a few potshots at the scrambling goons, then sealed the door shut with a wall of wood twenty-five centimetres thick.

"Done?" I asked.

Sam's old body was lying on the floor, dead. The imp was still frozen in place.

"Oops, unfreeze."

Sam fell to the table, gasping for breath, "That was the worst. Please don't make me take a body in that state again."

"Hopefully it won't come to that," I replied, grabbing them and hopping up onto the windowsill, peering out into the courtyard. I could see there were hundreds of people surrounding the building. The Asian man in the fancy armour who had been leading the rally was staring right up at me.

"Well, this is awkward. I didn't expect a procession to be prepared for me," I snarked in an attempt to hide the fact that I was panicking. At least I didn't see the lady who tasted of ash anywhere. I could tell she was bad news.

I sent a message to my other self telling her to hurry the fuck up alongside the memories of what had happened so far.

"You will surrender to Lord Wei and be placed on trial for your killings. If you surrender quietly, your death will be made swift and your body left whole," a crier next to the fancy robes next to the fancy dude yelled up at me.

Ah, going for wuxia novel terms, they certainly think I'm screwed.

Which I honestly might be.

I took a moment to genuinely consider the offer. They probably didn't know that this body could only be destroyed by breaking the artificial Core inside of it. But giving up right now would mean losing Sam. The whole reason I came here was to help them out and abandoning them halfway through felt wrong.

My other half rejoined me, and I let out a sigh of relief. Ellie was safe.

I might as well take a page from her book and choose the path that's practically suicide. It wasn't like losing this body would actually kill me.

And so I leapt from the window, Sam in arms.

Lord Wei was suddenly standing right where I was going to land, and I watched in slow motion as his sword unsheathed from its scabbard.

Activating [White Steps], I stepped on a frozen patch of air, moving out of range of him. Only to find he was right underneath me yet again, Mana leaking from his body in such a wasteful fashion.

That's some kind of Skill at work, then. Spatial perhaps? And he isn't even using it well, whatever it is.

With my last air step, I sent myself to the side instead of backwards. Now flying over the crowd so that he couldn't get a good position to teleport towards.

Summoning dozens of thorns, I launched them into the crowd to create a little bit of chaos.

Then the crowd was no longer there, and I was about to land in the midst of an encirclement.

What the fuck is this bullshit?

I noticed a thin bubble of Mana was surrounding me. That probably meant there was some kind of effect going on outside that I was being isolated from.

This could become a problem.

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