So I realized my mistake as soon as I stepped out of the Galveston Wharf Dungeon. Or... not mistake, exactly. Misfortune was probably the correct term.

A very polite National Guard trooper escorted me towards a Priestess and an accountant who asked me in no uncertain terms to reveal my inventory so it could be assessed for tax purposes.

I'd had a bunch of things assessed previously, some higher level than the dungeon I came from, but I currently had two high-level items compared to everything else in my inventory, items I couldn't, or wouldn't sell, and I'd taken some of the garbage items and sacrificed them to experiment with my abilities. I wasn't entirely sure how the system for taxing Dungeoneers for their items worked; I'd communicated briefly with an accountant while in jail, but that was the first year I was there; I'd forgotten a lot of it, and probably some details had changed since then.

Anyway, yeah, the two items raised some eyebrows.

The Priestess's eyes were wide as saucers as she examined the display that I'd made spun around to show them. "Did you get these items in this Dungeon?"

"Not all of them. I used the Fairy Dungeon to travel to... other Dungeons." I probably shouldn't say exactly one dungeon, because some of the new items were too low and some too high. It would be clear I was being deceptive, but...

"The high-level items. Were they given to you by another Dungeoneer?"

"No." Were they trying to detect someone else's tax dodge?

"How did you come by them?"

I frowned. Was she suspicious of the items, or of me? "The usual? A monster tried to kill me. I killed it first."

She frowned, but left the questioning there. They recorded the whole of my inventory, and I stepped out of the Dungeon for the first time since... actually, I guess the last time was Armand Bayou, wasn't it? And the whole mess that I got into there.

I was just thinking about that, walking across the bridge that would bring me back to Pelican Island and the bazaar and parking lot where my car waited, when the assassin struck again. This time, I didn't have the good fortune to have already had a shield up, so the opening salvo--a remote operated rifle shot--ripped a giant fucking hole in my shoulder.

I mean, I've had worse, but I wasn't expecting it.

It took me a second or so to really come to grips with the fact that I'd been attacked, even as I had been thinking about Armand Bayou and... how I got attacked by an assassin there. But it had seemed academic at the time, since I neither felt the bullet nor had to be the one to put down the woman in black.

This time, I forced my Vampiric Cloak into action, and dived off of the bridge that connected the Dungeon platform to the mainland. As the effect field rippled out, as I kind of expected, the female figure covered in black cloth was above me, and falling rapidly, with two sabers poised to strike at me. This time, she wasn't alone; another figure was with her, also in black, except that she was hovering in midair, in the center of what appeared to be some kind of magic circle, or several.

Also, I realized, the woman in the circle was in a Stealth skill field, but that didn't help her one bit under the circumstances.

I felt my Skill smashing against the assassin before I hit the water, and it wasn't a particularly high bridge. As when facing the Slenderman, the Cloak tried to test her willpower, and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that it was a different beast to win against a living, prepared Dungeoneer than it was to win against even a high-level monster that wasn't made with the ability in mind.

The Slenderman noticed the field slip over him, but dismissed it. The assassin noticed it and was immediately paranoid. If I had gotten into the boss' head by accessing poorly locked doors, in this case, there was a person on the other side of the doors who did her best to hold them shut, even if she didn't know how to lock them.

Anyway, I hit the water, and it knocked the breath out of me, momentarily. I didn't quite lose control over the skill, but I did have to pause, and in the moment where I started to lose track of things, she came at me, swords held ready.

I slipped into Merry's new sensory skill and leveraged the telekinetic aspects of the Cloak to throw myself out of the way.

It goes without saying I hadn't tried the new senses in the real world yet. Part of what Merry had done involved the Dungeoneer system, showing me little threads of Dungeon stuff holding things together. Here, the water beneath me wasn't a Dungeon system thing. There were no Dungeon system things here, not except me, and her, and her friend, and like, a few dozen other people who were caught off guard by a fight going on and hadn't get gotten involved. The point was, it was clear where she and her friend were at all times, even though the skill hadn't gotten to her yet.

It didn't take long, though, once she hit the water.

Once she had something else to worry about, she couldn't keep me out of those unlocked doors, and the power latched on to her. I was also a bit distracted, but the Cloak having a strong telekinetic aspect helped me get to the surface of the water, and some part of the Cloak's dramatic filter made it deceptively easy to stand on the liquid. Beneath the water, the woman twisted, trusting in some kind of extra sense, and then stilled, as though concentrating.

Through my new connection with her, I caught a momentary fragment of telepathy to the woman above, and braced myself.

The assassin was picked up out of the water like a puppet with a strange form of telekinesis, and flung directly at me. I could sense her intent, but dimly, as she tried to keep a stoic, even keel. I could sense a trace of concern, a sense that she knew something was off, but had no time to look into it.

I tried to force the skill in between her and her partner, and I felt the system hitting her with a Strife debuff. I kept my face even and not put on a, you know, mastermind smirk, and instead brought out my Executioner Sword, and also my new Dracula's Cloak, the only item of the three rewards I'd been able to absorb. It hadn't come with any stats except for the boost to my newest skill, but it was a much fancier cloak than the old one I'd gotten back on my first trip through Pearland... and of course, I could throw whatever I wanted on it.

But mostly, the boost that it gave me to that one skill was pretty fucking high--high enough that all of a sudden, the little bit of telekinetic force that I'd been using to hold me to the surface of the water pushed the water up and away, spraying it in all directions. It felt... honestly way too anime for me not to grin as I brought the sword into position to block the two swords.

My first indication that she wasn't actually a push over was when one of her swords cut right through mine like butter.

It was luck that the sword that cut through was the one closer to the tip, so the other sword didn't also get through the block. Less luck-based was the fact that I'd intercepted the attacks a little bit away from my body, so it's not like the cut went right through me, especially given the other blocked sword had intercepted a fair portion of her momentum.

In the moment where I processed all of this, she recovered from the swing with her blade-breaking sword and tried to thrust into me, and I flung us mutually away from one another.

Merry had been quietly studying the surroundings with my new sense. Nobody else is paying attention. I think the woman up top is covering the whole fight.

I frowned, but only for a moment. Under the circumstances, that's good for us, right?

Assuming you don't want people to know much about your skill? Yeah, but you better make sure neither of them gets away, and the wizard is likely prepared to run. But as soon as you take her out...

No more stealth, right. I felt the wizard puppeting the assassin back into position, and I already could feel the Strife debuff adding some rough edges to their cooperation. Already, I could see the potential of the skill, and also could feel the creeping moral decay seeping into me, as I immediately wished I could use the skill on the assassin the same way I'd used it on the fairy Dungeon creatures, taking control with force of will, but... that was an unashamedly evil use for power.

There were things worth than death in life, and the very tool I was using was born from one. I wasn't eager to force that on someone else, especially not someone clearly just being used as a tool.

In the meantime, I discarded and rebuilt my Executioner's Sword, keeping my eye on the sword that had broken it, and blinked as Merry pushed forward a recommendation, silently--pointing me at an Enhancement I hadn't thought about in... well, I guess it hadn't been that long, had it? I'd used it on the Harpy boss.

Instead of throwing it on something quite yet, I focused on the assassin, trying to match her mental state with a fake that was slightly off. The skill booster somehow assisted, I think by enhancing the Stealth aspect to it, and I found that it was deceptively easy to convince her to place her next strike in a specific spot.

I knocked her sword away, the edge of my blade against the flat of hers, and I was surprised when even that contact with her sword-breaking sword damaged mine.

It has to be an anti-magic effect, argued Merry, who was still keeping her hands mostly off of my new skill, and instead focusing on the senses that she had put together. Since your swords are pure magic...

I dismissed the Executioner, and when it reappeared, I'd added the skill booster from way back when. It wasn't a particularly powerful booster, and I'd never yet gotten the skill associated with it, though I had to be close since I used it successfully in a fight. It allowed you to phase someone else's equipment through their body; Harry had originally given it to me as a whip that removed people's clothing. That was... around the time I first suspected he might be trying to tell me he was gay, way back when I was in prison.

The point was, this was a hell of a time to try to knock a piece of equipment away, but I still had to get to the piece of equipment. Honestly, if I hit her hand with my sword, it'd probably work just as well for disarming her, and by an astounding coincidence, she wasn't going to just let me do that. The difference was that she no longer had to let me.

Now that I had a way in, I had to let me do it. I found myself smirking, even as she swung at me again, and I sacrificed another copy of my sword to give myself space. It hardly mattered; there was a bit of excess power drain when it was damaged, but half of that was coming from her now anyway.

The more I adapted to her mindset and tried to better control her, the more I started to feel frustrated, angry. Something about the inside of her mind... as a telepath, it just...

She's hurt.

I blinked, and felt the woman starting to move in, sensing an advantage, but I pushed back on her instincts, and instead of leaping at me, she paused. Tell me.

I don't know. You know people better than me. But all the thoughts I hear over that link... it's like...

After a moment, the assassin fought off the pressure I'd put on her and moved in on me, and I let her. Instead, I started using the telekinetic part of the skill to subtly push and pull at her, and hoped that I could confuse her into thinking that was the effect of it. That left me in little danger of being hit, even as I tried to force my way further into the assassin's mind.

And I started to understand, as I sensed a current in her mind, a deep thought too powerful to deny. Of what would happen if she didn't do as she was commanded. It was a thick thought, and cold, like congealing blood. It was a certainty, that told her...

I flinched, since I was too deep, when the woman above forced the telekinetic link between her and the assassin open. Her voice, when it came, was, like, three times too loud, and abrasive as a rasp to my mind. WE ARE RETREATING.

I made the decision almost without thinking about it. I can't... honestly say whether I did what I did out of cruelty or kindness, though there's no way the assassin would have ever said it was the latter. But as the assassin was teleported up into the sky, next to the woman who had commanded her, I pushed as hard on her will as I could--perhaps, harder than I needed to. It wasn't... I felt something breaking, tearing inside of her, but she didn't... resist as much as she should have, even with her already being under the skill.

A moment later, the assassin turned and stabbed her aunt in the throat with a sword tailor-made to do a significant amount of damage when it struck a vital point. Though she, herself, was surprised by the action, some part of her, untouched by me, didn't regret it for an instant. Some part of her, locked deep within the seething current of depression and despair that had been beaten into her, that had wilted under the poison of decades of carefully chosen cruel words and actions, felt true and long-overdue catharsis.

It didn't kill the other woman in a single blow, but when she teleported away, she did it alone, leaving the assassin momentarily hanging in midair--but without a telekinesis skill of her own, she didn't hang for long.

I forced my Cloak out, using all of its powers--mind control, telekinesis, and stealth--to save her and get her under cover without anyone else recognizing what had just happened.

What I found myself with was a woman, whose mind had all but been shattered as I forced my will on her in that one moment of violence, a person who had been my enemy, and had been made to betray her only ally. Someone who, presumably, probably, actually had nowhere else to go right now, but who had also been trying to kill me.

Someone I felt pity for, but I wasn't sure I felt that much pity.

I ground my teeth together, the two of us stuck in a brace under the bridge where we shouldn't be noticed or in the way. I was still using my Skill to keep us concealed, and I hadn't quite dropped it from controlling her, either. I wasn't sure how to read the feelings I sensed on the other side, especially now that she wasn't really in control of herself; they were turbulent, and deep.

I sighed. Merry, what do you think?

I think she's, how can I say, fairy-puppet right now. Not currently human, but will be later. Here, let me see...

And then, suddenly, Merry's voice stopped, and she suddenly pushed something at me, an interface window for the assassin.

It said that the woman's name was Zoya Jalebi, but unlike any status window I'd ever seen, including my own, the window gave me the option to change that.

I felt a deep shiver and made up my mind then and there to figure out a way to fix what I'd just done.