The heavy double doors of Strigoi’s mansion stood wide open. They didn't look like an entrance. In the gloom of the storm, they looked like a maw, unhinged and waiting for prey to wander down the throat. Rinerva stopped at the threshold. Rain dripped from her heavy overcoat, the only sound in the oppressive quiet of the Upper District.

  Strigoi had failed to answer her last three missives. To a civilian, that meant he was busy. To a tactician, that meant he was dead, or turned. She didn't call out. She didn't draw a weapon. She simply let the mana in her veins cycle from a low hum to a combat-ready thrum, her eyes igniting with a sharp, bioluminescent blue flare in the dark. Rinerva stepped inside.

  The mansion was dead silent.

  That was the wrong kind of silence. There were no signs of struggle—no overturned vases, no scorch marks, no blood spray on the expensive wallpaper. It wasn't a crime scene; it was a vacuum. The servants, the guards, the sniveling nobles who clung to Strigoi’s coattails—gone. It was an empty shell. The last vestige of Zylichor’s piddling nobility had been hollowed out and silenced. Rinerva pressed deeper into the manor. Her boots made no sound on the plush carpets. She walked with her hands folded behind her back, inspecting the rooms as she passed.

  The study: Empty. Papers stacked neatly. Ink still wet. The antechamber: Empty. A half-drunk glass of wine sitting on a side table.

  She moved toward the heart of the house.

  Clink.

  The sound was sharp, rhythmic, and civilized.

  Scrape. Clink.

  Silverware on fine porcelain.

  Rinerva didn't break stride. She followed the sound, the blue light of her eyes cutting through the shadows of the hallway until she reached the grand dining hall.

  The long table was set for a banquet, but the chairs were empty.

  Save one.

  At the far end of the table, sitting in Strigoi’s high-backed chair, was the Matriarch. Carmilla didn't look up immediately. She was busy slicing a piece of meat—rare, swimming in red juice—with delicate, precise motions. She lifted the fork to her mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and swallowed.

  Only then did she dab her lips with a napkin and turn her emerald eyes toward the intruder.

  The dream was insulting in its lack of effort.

  It was a world with no Mana. Just empty puppets moving to her subconscious’s whim, and of course, Carmilla’s.

  Like any Rethnian, Rinerva viewed the world through the lens of magic. She could see the threads of mana—natural or artificial—woven into every living being. Even the filthiest peasant in Spindlegrad possessed a faint, shimmering pulse of life. It was a tapestry of light that connected all existence, except for the Null who walked in her company like a corpse that hadn't realized it was excised from it's soul.

  But this ballroom was dead. The guests were static images cut from paper. The air was sterile. The lights were painted on.

  Rinerva let out a small, bored sigh. Her eyes traced the massive ballroom, watching a man with no soul deliver an empty proclamation of empty honor.

  “—and so, we announce the long-deserved return of Rinerva de Glace! The Prodigal Daughter returns to her rightful place as the High Lady of House Glace!”

  The people cheered. They roared their polite, noble approval. They clapped their hands in a perfect, synchronized rhythm that lacked the chaotic variation of humanity.

  “How utterly uninspired.” Rinerva swirled her glass of wine. The liquid didn't splash; it moved sluggishly, like thick oil paint trying to emulate water. “If you are going to bribe me, Director, at least get the physics right.”

  She squeezed her hand.

  Crunch.

  The crystal goblet shattered in her grip. The shards didn't fall; they froze in mid-air. The ballroom fractured like a broken mirror, the cheering faces splitting apart into jagged shards of darkness.

  Rinerva stepped through the cracks of the dream, waking up before the glass even hit the floor.

  Rinerva didn’t break stride. Her step didn’t stutter. She walked the length of the grand hall, the heels of her boots clicking a steady rhythm against the marble, until she reached the empty chair at the far end of the table.

  She pulled it out and sat, mirroring the Matriarch.

  “Any trueborn Rethnian would be hard-pressed to be fooled by your mud magic, Witch.” Carmilla didn’t react. She sawed another piece of steak free, and ate it with delicate manners. Rinerva paused. She glanced around the table, inspecting the empty setting before her with open disdain. “I must say, even your hospitality leaves much to be desired. I’ve not been greeted, announced, nor offered wine.”

  She looked back at the Director, her blue eyes flat and unimpressed.

  “Is this how the Nouveaux Riche treat their guests in Spindlegrad?”

  Carmilla set the knife down. It clicked sharply against the china. She leaned forward, her emerald eyes narrowing, head tilting curiously. Rinerva leaned back in her seat, resting her elbows on the armrests and steepling her fingers. She looked at the monster across the table, and her expression didn't waver. Yet, despite her best efforts…

  The temperature in the room plummeted. Frost flashed across the surface of the empty wine glass in front of Rinerva. The air grew thin and sharp.

  Carmilla smiled, her eyes gleaming with cruel delight. She picked up her knife again, inspecting the edge, before preparing to eat once more. The noble’s patience snapped. Rinerva let out a breath.

  It wasn't just air. It was a white cloud of absolute zero. Ice cracked across the surface of the mirrors. Frost raced along the glassware, climbing the walls, covering the opulence of the dining hall in a thin, suffocating layer of rime. Rinerva stood up. The chair behind her froze and shattered.

  “Unlike your magic, mine isn’t a parlor trick crafted from a poor imitation of reality.”

  She raised a hand, and the temperature in the room died. A shifting sound echoed from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling above her.

  Rinerva’s eyes snapped up.

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  Clinging to the chandeliers were two massive, over-mutated Bats. They were silent, hulking shapes of muscle and fur, dripping saliva onto the frozen table below. They had been there the entire time, their mana suppressed, waiting for the cue.

  Carmilla sighed, not even looking up at her pets. She leaned forward, spearing one last piece of steak. She ate it with a slow, deliberate chew, staring at the mage. She swallowed, dabbed her chin with the linen napkin, and stood up. She walked toward the heavy oak doors, turning her back on Rinerva as the bats unfurled their wings. Carmilla realized something was wrong too late. She paused, her hand resting on the brass handle of the door.

  But the door swung open before she could push it.

  Schlunk.

  Carmilla staggered back. Her eyes widening in a note of surprise. She looked down, as a fountain of bright red arterial blood sprayed across the front of her gown. Standing in the doorway was Nomi. She wore a strip of black cloth tied over her eyes. Her ears were swiveled forward, twitching at the sound of the Director’s heartbeat. She held her dagger in a loose grip, the blade dripping crimson.

  Nomi faded forward, intending to finish the job, but a massive shape slammed between them. One of the bats dropped from the ceiling, its bulk forcing the Fox back a step.

  Carmilla stumbled back, blood pooling on the floor, her face twisting from shock into pure, feral rage. Rinerva shifted back smoothly as the second massive shape slammed into the ground where she had been standing a second before. The floorboards splintered under the impact. Carmilla didn't wait to watch. Clutching her bleeding chest, the Matriarch stumbled away through the dark archway of the dining hall. Rinerva let out a small hiss of irritation. She couldn't chase. She had a wall of meat in front of her.

  The creature slowly rose from the crater in the floor.

  It was a horrific amalgam of anatomy. One human arm had been elongated and webbed into a massive, leathery wing that served as a foreleg. The other arm hung impotently from its chest, withered and useless, dangling in front of a second, fully formed wing that sprouted from its shoulder.

  Its face was a ruined crunch of cartilage, the nose pushed back into a snout, dominated by two massive, twitching ears that took up the better part of the skull.

  But it was the torso that made Rinerva’s stomach turn.

  The creature wore the tattered remnants of a velvet coat. The fine fabric was stretched to the breaking point over the bulging muscles, the gold buttons popping off one by one as it breathed. It clung desperately to its master—a sick, physical reminder of what had become of Lord Strigoi. Forced to overmutate by a matriarch he did everything to escape. The thing twitched, walking on the knuckles of its disfigured wings, dragging its body toward the Mage. Rinerva’s arms glowed blue beneath her sleeves. The mana sigils tattooed on her skin flared, dumping frost into the air.

  Crack.

  A massive spike of ice lanced up from the frost-covered floor, driving straight through the creature’s chest. It impaled the monster, lifting it off the ground.

  The bat screeched—a sound like tearing metal.

  But it didn't die.

  Rinerva watched with cold calculation as the flesh began to bubble around the ice.

  The wound knit itself back together in seconds. The bone fused around the spike, swallowing the foreign object whole. With a slow, sickening tear, the creature wrenched itself free, shattering the ice spear that was stuck inside its chest to continue the chase.

  Rinerva kept moving. She retreated across the dining hall, summoning spikes from the ground in a rhythmic barrage. She let her mana saturate the frost she’d already spread, turning the floor into a minefield.

  To her left, she could hear the sounds of crashing furniture as the Fox drew the second monster away.

  Good. Isolation I have all the space I need.

  Rinerva threw another spike. Then another.

  The creature didn't dodge. It was utterly mindless, driven only by the command to kill, but it was fast. And it was strong.

  It lunged.

  Rinerva threw up a wall of ice to buy a second of time.

  It wasn't enough. Not nearly.

  The massive, mutated wing sliced through the barrier like it was paper. The limb slammed into Rinerva’s side with the force of a battering ram. She went airborne. She spiraled across the room, slamming hard into the stone wall. Rinerva hit the floor in a heap. Her vision swam. She pushed herself up on trembling arms, wincing as a trail of warm blood seeped from her hairline, blinding her left eye. She wiped it away with a glove, her breathing ragged.

  Brute force isn't going to work.

  She had to kill the biology, not the body. She had to either drain it of the alchemical slurry keeping it moving—which would take too long—or she had to sever something it couldn’t regenerate. Its neck was thick, knotted with muscle and scar tissue. But the spine…

  If the signal cannot reach the limbs, the toy cannot move.

  The Strigoi-thing roared and charged again.

  Rinerva didn't run. She waited.

  At the last second, she slammed her palm onto the floor. A pillar of ice erupted beneath her feet, launching her forwards in a high arc, vaulting her over the creature and landing her safely behind the structures she had already built. The creature skidded, turning to chase. It stepped right into the kill box.

  She sprung the trap.

  Thwack.

  A sharp spike of ice erupted from the wall, pinning the creature's left wing.

  Rinerva didn’t wait. Two more lanced out from the floor and the opposite wall, impaling the creature through the gut and the right shoulder.

  It struggled and strained against the ice. Wet, tearing sounds filled the room as its muscles ripped and mended in a frantic cycle, the ice holding it in place starting to fracture under the insane strength of the mutant.

  It wasn't enough to hold it forever. She only needed a second.

  Rinerva raised her hand. High above the creature, along the side wall, the frost condensed. She poured her mana into the structure, making it dense. Heavy. She shaped it not into a spike, but into a massive, wide blade. A guillotine.

  “Die.”

  She hummed the word. A small, sadistic smile crossed her bloody lips as she closed her fist.

  Snap.

  The base of the ice blade shattered. Gravity took over.

  SHUNK.

  The massive blade dropped like a falling portcullis. It crunched through the thick muscle of the neck and slammed into the vertebrae with a sickening crack, burying itself halfway through the creature's throat.

  The howl cut off instantly.

  The body went limp. The thrashing wings fell still. The legs buckled.

  Only the head remained active. The creature screamed in agony, its eyes rolling wildly, mouth gnashing at the air. The healing potions would keep the brain alive for some time, pumping blood into a body that could no longer answer.

  But it wouldn’t move again.

  It wasn’t a Null. Its body could knit flesh, but it couldn’t repair a severed spinal cord, it didn't have the empty mana channels to support a repair that deep.

  Rinerva’s eyes turned to where the Fox was. The second mutant lay still. Unlike Rinerva’s victim—which was still gurgling and gnashing its teeth in paralyzed agony—this one was silent. Nomi sat idly on the monster’s back, legs crossed. She twirled the black blindfold around her finger like a ribbon. Three long, silver needles gleamed from the creature’s skull, sunk deep into the brain stem.

  “Happy you brought me along?”

  The Fox hummed the question, offering a little, sharp smile.

  “...I’m not unhappy,” Rinerva admitted, wiping blood from her eye.

  “Seems like we were right about the eyes. As long as I didn't look at her, she couldn't grab me.”

  “Some small blessing.”

  “Talos can’t fight blind, though.”

  “No. He can’t.”

  Nomi nodded. She tucked the blindfold into her pocket and hopped off the creature with a fluid grace.

  “Want me to keep shadowing you till we’re home?”

  “Seems wise—”

  Rinerva took a step and stumbled. The world tilted violently to the left. She caught herself on the edge of the dining table, her knuckles turning white as she fought to keep her knees from buckling. The combination of the head injury and expending nearly every scrap of her mana reserves hit her all at once.

  Nomi was there in an instant, hovering but not touching.

  “...Is your head alright?”

  “I’ll be fine,” Rinerva snapped, though the words lacked their usual venom. “We have matters to attend to.”

  She straightened, forcing her spine rigid through sheer willpower. There would be time for Lillik to check on her wounds later. There would be time to sleep later.

  But for now, she had confirmed her hypothesis. And she needed to return to the Inn.