To Linduin, this was all extremely confusing; he had come here expecting to find an unmasked mastermind, but instead had witnessed Cheis piss off and apparently enter into some kind of sorcerous murder-brawl with the rulers of the city, who were apparently some sort of wizard council instead of a merchant organization as he'd been previously informed. He pondered just slipping away, but decided that there was possibly some important information to be gleaned here. His camouflage enchantment was still active, and would be for another seventy-nine seconds according to his timer HUD; chances were very good that either no one knew he was here, or had forgotten his entry after Cheis's advent. Moving back a bit out of the prospective blast radius, he muttered his thoughtspeeding enchantment again and began scanning each of the attendees for anomalous data.

Cheis had originally come here hoping for answers, or at least more information regarding who had been responsible for what had happened prior to her rebooting; she hadn't been hoping for a fight, exactly, but it would be a lie to say she hadn't been ready for one. She noticed a vulnerability in Deputy Archmage Terrageuse's protections and reaped him outright, exploding his corpse as it fell for good measure; he'd tried to peek up her skirt once. The other members of the council, who had already been deeply resentful of Cheis to begin with and had been riled up quite thoroughly by Nyoque's manipulations, did not take this well; they levied clouds of killing vapors, banshee summonings, and esoteric soul-destroying attack vectors at her with no restraint. Cheis, to whom this sort of thing was beyond trivial, mostly ignored these attacks or tossed token-stealing exploits at them to send them back at their originators; in under a minute, two more members of the council were dead, another three were sufficiently badly wounded as to be out of the fight, and one was rather messily turning inside-out while screaming horrifically. Umbria threw up; Pellamin slumped against the wall, experiencing flashbacks and phantom pains in the stump of his missing leg.

Archmage Ulbert, by far the most accomplished of the council, quickly assessed the situation and found it displeasing; it was time to bring out the big guns. He'd been one of the biggest advocates for Cheis's invitation to the council the previous year, and had been rather badly stung by her insulting and dismissive rejection; channeling his angst and fury into an emopathic matrix, he visualized a twelve-dimensional hagiogram of divine symbols and unfolded it into a series of vector production engines, spinning up an arcane spiral of power that took shape in front of him as a glowing sphere of violet light. Spinning his entire body around, he thrust his hand into it with significant force as he let loose a tripled casting of Eloran's Meteor Swarm. Three searing motes of light, each representing a nine-dimensional fractal structure of destructive power, streaked towards Cheis nearly too quickly for the eye to follow.

Cheis laughed as the motes struck her; her power reserves jumped up to 12,848%. These fucking bumpkins, with their geometric constructs! It was like having a denial-of-service attack levied against you by written mail. She applied a tenfold power reducer to her kinetic buffer macro, threw on some astral vector flags, and activated it; a titanic blast of force, which would have been enough to destroy the whole building if she'd let it fire off at full power, rippled outward from her at the speed of sound. It smashed Pellamin backwards against the wall painfully, stripped off all the wards of every member of the council, and blasted two of the five witnesses out the windows of the room. They fell seven floors, screaming and bleeding from glass lacerations; Cheis didn't really think of bureaucrats as people.

Linduin, analyzing every microscopic scrap of information as the fight unfolded (and getting some really exciting logs to later peruse about many of the metaphysical phenomena taking place), noticed immediately that one person had not been affected by the blast other than by having their clothing ripple. As Pellamin scrambled to herd Umbria and the surviving witnesses out the door, Linduin followed, eyes narrowing. He really should have known all along.

***

The primary harbor of Ciel-Upon-The-Sea was, without peer, the busiest sea-port in the world; hundreds of ships carrying fortunes' worth of cargo loaded, unloaded, and were processed every day through its complex and efficient systems of logistics and merchantry. It was also very large, spanning nearly thirty miles of coastline around the Anjelia Bay; the sunsets were magnificent, the light off the water sublime. In the very center of the bay sat Apecis, a tiny island with the most exclusive real estate on the planet; it had been the site of an ancient temple in the dim past, but was now developed almost the point of saturation with grotesquely expensive mansions and villas. The temple itself, nearly forgotten in a small copse of trees at the island's center, had never actually been a site of religious significance, but rather a vanity project by a fabulously wealthy architect who had been so insanely rich that he had been able to afford his own network uplink for his private island. The only remaining evidence of this (sealed inside a stone sphere atop a pillar which the people of Celi'sa culture thought was a statue shaped like a phallus that presumably honored some ancient fertility god) was a small metal box containing a bundle of spidery gold thread. It was the last functioning teledemonics access point on the planet, and the igg was heading straight for it.

At first, people thought that the dimming of the light was triggered by a cloud passing in front of the sun; it took a while for them to recognize the actual state of affairs. Some people simply dismissed it, scoffing that their eyes must be playing tricks on them; others, much more sensibly, screamed and began scurrying for safety. But of course, such confusion was only to be expected; there is, after all, no appropriate etiquette for reaction when a thousand-foot-tall tentacled coral monstrosity looms up out of the sea and gazes upon the puny creatures before it with its vast, lidless yellow eye. One little girl, meeting its curious gaze, offered it a flower briefly before her screaming mother snatched her up and bore her away in a panic; the igg could not help feeling a little disappointed. It had been a pretty flower.

As it moved its massive bulk into the bay, a somewhat complex series of actions involving tentacles supporting other tentacles, internal bladders of fluid and air performing complicated pneumatic interactions, and a large series of squelchy sound effects, nobody noticed a small black boat sailing up behind it. Galar, readying himself for death, muttered his final prayers; Velinaer took as many photonic image captures as he could, because this was fucking crazy and nobody would ever believe him; and Meloria Athbel, flush with purpose and power, asked for the 7,846th time if she could eat Galar's brains. Some shit, as they say, was about to go down.

***

Nyoque gauged its current risk level as "moderate"; some events had gone according to plan, some had not, and some had turned out significantly more delightfully than it had ever dared hope. Its most recent trap to catch its adversary had either failed or exposed its adversary as Cheis, which it doubted; more likely its mysterious opponent had once again sidestepped defeat by its absence. But the fantastically splendid sight of Cheis of Veraleigh turning the Celi'sa council of archmages over her knee and giving them a good spanking had been worth a thousand failures; realistically, the greatest danger at this moment was that it would shriek with laughter and give itself away. As Pellamin herded it along with the other survivors out of the room and down the stairs, it went reluctantly but willingly; after all, it was time to execute the next steps.

As the guards pursing the killer of the previous guards charged up the stairs at the same time they were descending, both groups met in a crash and there was a considerable amount of yelling and confusion; Nyoque chose this moment to slip away, leaving Pellamin flustered and surrounded by pointy objects wielded by men screaming at him to remain still and stop resisting. It ducked into a hallway, stepped deftly into a side room, then opened a hidden trapdoor and climbed down another floor to an office; it failed to notice the trapdoor opening again, but Linduin was being fairly quiet and Nyoque had a lot of other things on its mind. As it entered the office and shifted into another form, there was a quiet cough behind it. It whirled around, shocked, as Linduin's camouflage enchantment finally expired and he became visible once more.

"You know," said Linduin, idly toying with a dagger, "I didn't really have any idea who was behind all of this. I still don't, honestly, because I don't know what you really are or if any of the people you replaced are still alive; but I do know two things. The first is that you are the person who's been doing all this, and the second is that a dagger through some part of your body will probably kill you. It might take me a few tries, but I don't have any other major plans for the evening."

Nyoque cackled. "So it was you all along! How on earth did a human like you manage to play the game so brilliantly? I must know. So many of your kind can barely tell the sun from the sky."

Linduin tapped his temple. "You don't have to play the game if you don't follow the rules." Muttering his combat analysis enchantment once more, he surged forward as Nyoque deftly stepped to meet him. As his vision dimmed and the instructions appeared, he noticed that the rakshasi's hands had transformed into claws and that its face had melted into a tiger's visage; he certainly hadn't expected that. He hoped this wouldn't go poorly; getting the existing bloodstains out of his cloak was already going to be enough trouble.

To Nyoque, this was deeply unfamiliar territory; it had occasionally been required to overpower humans personally, but it had never before been engaged in an actual contest of martial prowess. It relished the uniqueness of the new experience as it raked its claws towards Linduin, ducked his spinning elbow strike as he dodged, and spun on the ball of one foot as Linduin landed in a guarding position. They traded a few blows, each of them clearly having difficulty adapting to the other's fighting style; Linduin's combat algorithms had been configured for normal human strength and speed, and the rakshasi, while superhumanly powerful and quick, had no understanding of the fighting arts beyond the base instincts of a predator. Nyoque, in addition to its magic immunity, was also invulnerable to most normal weapons and wounds, but found itself reluctant to press its luck; it was definitely neither immortal nor invincible, and Linduin had already shown himself to be both unpredictable and acquainted with the magical arts. An enchanted weapon to the heart was one of the few ways it could definitely be destroyed, and it wasn't about to risk its life unnecessarily. The two circled each other, both of them scanning the room for exits and objects of potential use, but also watching for openings and sudden movements.

"Who are you?" muttered Linduin tensely. "You'll probably lie, but it's worth asking anyway."

Nyoque laughed, a hissing sound in its current form. "I am Nyoque, which means "the Laughing Dark" in one of your people's languages. I am a creature called a qori-jan, and I can only be slain by one who is pure of heart." Nyoque, now almost three entire weeks old, was adept at mixing truth and falsehood.

Linduin dashed forward, feinted, dodged a claw that would have torn out his throat, and made a diving slash for one of the tendons in Nyoque's legs followed by a spinning backwards stab that would have taken the collapsing rakshasi in the back of the head. Nyoque, leaping and rolling forward to escape the blow, sprang outwards against the wall and ran up it with eldritch agility before somersaulting backwards to dive into Linduin's face. Linduin, following through on his dagger blow, let himself drop to the floor and rolled sideways as he tucked his feet up under him, then exploded upwards, bringing the dagger up crosswise in an arcing slash which just barely missed Nyoque's wrist.

"You fight well, for a human," the rakshasi sneered as it flexed its claws. "I shall enjoy feasting on your soul."

"I thought qori-jans drank the blood of their victims," murmured Linduin, probing for an opening. This was a total bluff; he had no more heard of a qori-jan than he had a rakshasi, which was just as well because Nyoque had made them up. But Nyoque, who had no way of knowing that such a creature as a qori-jan did not exist in this world's cryptozoology, was thrown slightly off its stride by this information; its step stumbled the tiniest bit as its poise was shaken to the slighest degree, and Linduin pounced for the kill.

His dagger sliced down, past the rakshasi's guard, and parted its flesh as black ichor splashed out; Nyoque roared, pain being something of a new experience to it, and lost control of the combat situation completely as Linduin's combat analysis enchantment solidified the final moves in his vision. He stepped forward, ducking under Nyoque's wild swing, and came up directly in the rakshasi's face as the dagger plunged through its ribs and directly into its heart.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. Then, slowly, Nyoque's gaze rose up to meet Linduin's. "Not so pure of heart after all, it would seem."

Linduin gulped. This was probably going to suck.