Octavian blew out a weary breath. This was not how he’d seen this mission going. And that was saying quite a bit. He’d expected things to transform into a bit of a nightmare as the Tournament grew closer.

  Inviting a number of Obsidia’s most powerful and dangerous warriors to the same place was never going to be a simple task. Some damage was expected. He had been a much younger man when the previous Tournament had been held in the Empire of Man. Octavian hadn’t gone himself, but the rumors said that no fewer than six cities had been completely torched — and that had been considered an acceptable loss.

  I don’t think the Prophet would much like a similar result. She’s deployed as many preventative measures as possible, but there’s only so much that people like these can be controlled.

  Still…

  Octavian blew out another breath. It was his fifth one of the day. He suspected he’d be in the double digits fairly soon.

  Well, at least it wasn’t the entire town.

  He let his gaze travel along the interior of the quarantined tavern that he’d unfortunately found himself in. Everything looked largely intact. That was the scary part. There were no signs of a fight. No wholescale slaughter or bloody path of footprints.

  There were just a few dead men.

  That was a great thing for the people of the town. It was considerably worse for Octavian. The more death there was, the easier it was to track the perpetrator. Just because some damage was expected didn’t mean that it was permitted.

  Octavian knelt beside one of the corpses. It belonged to an absolute mountain of a man. The vast majority of his body had melted away into a pool of thickened sludge, and the smell was bad enough to make even him grimace.

  The frown carved into his features grew even deeper. Octavian repressed the urge to let out another sigh. He couldn’t let himself exceed the unspoken sighs-per-minute limitations. Not without sufficient reason. And though this was getting damn close to it, he wasn’t quite there yet.

  This was just such a bother.

  The dead man had been quite strong. It was exceedingly likely that he was here for the Tournament. Octavian could feel the remnants of his runes. He’d been around early Rank 6 before he’d died.

  Someone like this shouldn’t have gone down so easily. There should have been a fight. Destruction of at least some scale. But there was nothing.

  With one person, Octavian could have assumed that there was some manner of assassin at fault. Many of the people coming to the Tournament had grudges against each other. The entirety of the Coral Empire was a bubbling stew of political games just waiting to boil over. But this hadn’t been some political assassination.

  There were too many bodies for it to be a targeted kill, but too few for it to be some madman running around slaughtering at random.

  No. This had been intentional.

  And that made Octavian’s job considerably harder. He’d already spoken to everyone he could. Almost nobody had any useful information. The dead mages’ companions were long gone. They’d fled the city, and he couldn’t be bothered to track them all down.

  Tracking them down meant a proper investigation. It meant figuring out a motive. It meant figuring out how somebody had managed to kill multiple different mages without alerting a single person until they were already gone.

  And if Octavian was fully honest with himself, he couldn’t be bothered to do any of that. The Prophet had given him considerably more important tasks. All he could say for certain was that this wasn’t a serial killer. Something had motivated these kills.

  But nobody had been able to point him in the direction of any arguments or disagreements. Not one person from the tavern that he’d managed to track down could remember anything at all going wrong.

  People had simply started melting.

  Whoever this was had covered their tracks incredibly well. The only trace at all was the magic they’d used… and something told Octavian that he’d be seeing it again.

  What a bother.

  First there was the disappearing Death Mage. Now there was… whatever this was. The only saving grace was that they definitely weren’t connected. He’d gotten a good measure of the woman during their conversation.

  She wasn’t the type to do something like this. Her magic was different. If anything, she probably would have been affronted by the wretched rot that had filled the room. Octavian’s head tilted slightly as he sifted through his memories.

  Something about the woman’s magic had felt… fresh. It was death, of course. There had been no doubt about that. But it wasn’t the insidious death and destruction that had consumed the bodies around him.

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  The woman’s magic had smelled more like compost.

  Octavian sighed. He’d waited long enough. It had been earned. In most circumstances, his annoyance wouldn’t have mattered. Anyone killing so many mages this close to Aqua Terra would have to be investigated.

  But there was one more piece to the puzzle. A piece that was making everything quite a bit more bothersome. Aside from the large man, every single one of the victims hadn’t been humans.

  They’d been demons.

  There were a number of demons in Obsidia. They usually weren’t the most savory sorts. Demons tended to be a little too powerful for their own good — and they rarely liked obeying laws that didn’t suit their emotion.

  But they were usually smart enough to avoid stirring up too much trouble. They also tended to avoid congregating. Too many demons in one area usually meant conflict, and that usually meant more attention than they wanted.

  There were a lot of demons here. A lot of demons in plain clothes, with absolutely nothing on their body to mark any manner of affiliation to any organization or group. They were all completely blank slates.

  Nobody in their right mind walked around with nothing but the clothes on their back. Even the oddest mage had some manner of travel pack, rations, or a keepsake. It wasn’t like they’d been robbed. There were more than enough eyewitness accounts to confirm nobody had gone around looting the rotting bodies.

  This was a pattern.

  And the last time that Octavian had heard of this pattern…

  Octavian sighed.

  It was the second time that minute. But this time around, he was convinced he’d earned it. He could only think of one association that he could connect to this. There weren’t many other reasons as to why a bunch of demons would be sitting around, hiding in empty-pocketed dark robes.

  The Truthseekers were back.

  This report is going to be such a pain in the ass.

  ***

  “What about a Pickling Rune?” Lee called over the howl of the wind.

  Noah would have glanced back at her if turning his head wouldn’t have been so likely to send their flying sword careening in the wrong direction. He just raised his voice. “A Pickling Rune? What about that screams disaster to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee yelled back. “I feel like it would be pretty disastrous. Who wants to get pickled? Not me.”

  “Not everything bad that happens is a disaster,” Noah said with a chuckle. “And I don’t think pickling would fit in too well with my other runes at the moment.”

  He glanced at the ground and adjusted their path slightly. He’d gotten somewhat decent at orienting himself now. After using the map for a while, they weren’t lost nearly as often as they once had been. He was pretty sure they were getting close to Aqua Terra. Not sure enough to put money on it, but pretty sure.

  “Falling Anvil Rune?”

  “Where did you even hear that joke?” Noah asked. “That’s from Earth. Isn’t it? Have I made that joke before?”

  “No,” Lee said. “But I feel like a falling anvil would be pretty disastrous. I — oh. Wait. The scale is too small, right?”

  “Too small,” Noah confirmed. “You’re going to have to think a bit bigger than that. Something that I could work music into would certainly be a nice addition. Or maybe not music specifically. Just sound. I think it’ll help in the future as I work my pattern into more things.”

  Lee fell silent for several long seconds.

  Then she cleared her throat.

  “Rain of falling anvils,” Lee proclaimed.

  Noah coughed. The wind got into his throat. Then he coughed even harder. That nearly sent them spiraling off course, but he’d spent enough time on a flying sword that he managed to keep that from happening.

  Well, at least she’s thinking bigger scale now.

  “Closer, I guess,” Noah allowed once he got a hold of himself again. “I was actually thinking something in the opposite direction.”

  “What’s opposite to an anvil?”

  “Not an anvil,” Noah said. “From music, I meant. Well, it’s part of music. Everything in a song is part of a song.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lee said. “Could you say that again but in a way that isn’t weird?”

  “Silence,” Noah replied. “I’m—”

  “Sorry,” Lee said.

  “No,” Noah said, risking a crash to turn and glance back at Lee. “Not that! I didn’t mean you. I meant literal silence.”

  “Huh?” Her brow furrowed. Then she blinked. “Also, we’re heading toward a mountain.”

  Noah hurriedly turned back and adjusted their course before they could paint themselves against a rock wall. He probably should have been flying a bit higher up, but it was much easier to get lost when the clouds were in the way of the ground.

  “I meant a rune that had some aspect of silence in it,” Noah replied. “Think about like… a really quiet night. Silence is a part of music just as much as sound is. I think that would be a very good addition to have.”

  “How is silence a disaster?”

  “I don’t know,” Noah admitted. “I’m still working on that part. But I’ll let you know if I figure it out.”

  Lee let out a thoughtful noise. It was a short while before she said anything else.

  “I still think anvils are better.”

  Noah let out a small sigh. “Yeah. You might be right. I — oh, shit.”

  Lee’s head poked up under his arm. Then her eyes widened.

  “Whoa.”

  In the distance, just barely poking up over the horizon, was a city so large that Noah had confused it for a mountain.

  Walls easily ten times the size of those that Arbitage had been surrounded with rose in multiple layers, almost like a tiered wedding cake. The city rose up so high that its peak vanished well past the clouds.

  Huge turrets and battlements covered every surface of its heavily defended reach, and thousands upon thousands of tiny dots that must have been mages buzzed all around it. The sheer scale of the city was so massive that it took Noah several seconds to properly compute what it was he was seeing.

  They were so far from the city that he really shouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. It was still easily days of travel by foot away. Even on the flying sword, it would probably be a few more hours at the minimum.

  Calling this thing a city was an insult. Hell, a megalopolis wouldn’t have properly done it justice. This was a structure the likes of which Noah might have seen in the Damned Plains. It was practically its own ecosystem.

  “I think we found Aqua Terra,” Lee breathed.

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