Anna Horvath didn't think that she would enjoy the Duel game. Even though she was into martial arts, and actually practised a couple of them, Duel just looked silly to her. Just another fancy sorcerer thing. Waste of time and precious power. She wouldn't even watch the match if it wasn't for work, but her boss thought if they would post an article about the first woman Duelist then it would only be appropriate if a woman wrote it. Even if said woman had nothing to do with the sport column. She wasn't even a sorcerer, for God's sake! Well, not a real one, anyway.

All that aside, there was something very likeable about this Claire girl. Her style, the way she gave interviews; she was confident and humble at the same time. Also, that move against O'Brien… If there was a Duelist ever worth watching, it was her.

'That was incredible, ladies and gentlemen, incredible! I had my doubts, but I say it out loud now, we are gonna see Claire Penn a lot. Next, of course, in the final of this tournament when she is going to face Krisinki, who better watch out for this little girl.'

Anna had to agree with the commentator: Krisinski, whoever the hell he was, just got into serious trouble. She will have to see that match too, for sure, but after what she just saw, Anna was actually looking forward to it. One of her favourite things to do was to watch women beating up men anyway. Not to mention doing it by herself. Not like she was a huge feminist or something: she just loved the surprised faces when they realised that a tiny little girl just whooped their asses.

Okay, time to work, Anna thought. She already wrote the boring informative parts of the article, about how old Claire Penn was, where she was born, etcetera. Now came the important chunk: why she was the most exciting thing that happened with the Duel sport in the last thirty-odd years.

At the very moment when Anna fired up her laptop to get on with her work, the phone beeped. It wasn't her everyday phone and not even the one she kept for work-related things: it was a cheap, small smartphone with no family photos on the memory, no social media apps, and only a handful of numbers saved, all with code names.

9:27, 1 vampire, blond woman. loc on the link.

That was the whole message, but Anna didn't need any more. She checked the location linked. It was kinda close, even by feet, let alone flying, but it was already half-past eight. There was no time to waste.

Anna jumped out of her bed. She only wore a huge t-shirt, which she now took off and threw away. Her "suit" wasn't something a normal person couldn't own, so she kept it in her wardrobe.

A pair of black cargo pants (with the matching short chain for keys and pockets full of nasty surprises), a roomy but not too big black hoodie, sport bra (for obvious reasons), comfortable black sneakers (ideal for running, jumping and all kind of activity), a pair of black safety gloves (the special, knife-proof kind with metal inserts at the knuckles) and the half-long, black military coat.

The coat was magical and had the ability to blend in, making Anna if not exactly invisible, but really hard to notice. It also had some defending spells sewn into its lining, which was crucial: Anna couldn't do real magic, and she didn't want to wear armour, not even a light one. It would have limited her movements, which she couldn't allow.

After all of that, she put on the (naturally black) fanny pack full of small bearing balls, and she was almost ready to go.

Anna loved the way she looked in this ensemble. She was slightly taller than 170 cm and was also very thin with narrow hips and small breasts. She was the type of woman who got frequently asked if she was a model, or had an eating disorder. Or both. In all fairness, she did work hard to achieve the form she had, but not because she wanted to look good in a bathing suit.

Her face was symmetric and nice with a narrow, pointy nose and blue eyes, framed by short brown hair. Anna didn't think herself beautiful but she never wanted to be: when she was doing what she did the best, her face was covered by the mask anyway.

The mask… The simply most important and most amazing thing she ever owned. As far as she knew it was a part of a fea armour, left behind when those beasts disappeared. It was made out of some kind of very light, but somehow unbreachable steel or alloy, and when she put it on, the mask grew new layers after new layers until it became a helmet, reaching down and protecting her neck and part of her shoulders too. It was a perfect size which made the girl think that it was capable of adjusting to its owner. The helmet had big red round eyes and the power of intensifying the magic of its wearer.

Anna was a "halfling". That was a sobriquet, a mean nickname for those rare people who had some, mostly weak or useless magical ability, like being able to power a lightbulb or randomly dreaming of other people's past, but couldn't do actual magic. With the fea helmet on, Anna's connection to the little spark of magic she had allowed her to use the only Rune the mask had engraved in the inside: the Rune of Steel. She assumed the different pieces of the armour were linked to different Runes and fixed up their power, but she only ever saw the helmet.

That was still more than enough for her in every fight she had so far. She couldn't even imagine how it felt to have a working wand with all the spells and curses and whatnots available. And yet she was the one who went out at night to help people, while those spoiled little brats like that Montgomery guy only used their incredible potential to help when there was a chance to earn a front page in the news. And those were the good days: on the bad ones they all went crazy and beat up each other for God knows what reason, causing traffic jams, buildings to collide, or the freshest one, setting tourist centres on fire. Just another proof of how you can do anything and get off the hook nevertheless if you had money and a fancy name.

Anna had none of those things and was sure that the first time she got caught, she will face some time in prison. The Commissioner of London, alongside the Mayor, already made it very clear that they don't support, nor will tolerate any civilian who acts as a vigilante. Expect of course if they are called Carano or Montgomery, apparently. At least according to the news: only a couple of days after they burned down half of the Camden Market, they were assigned as official advisors of the Met. What a joke...

Not like there were a lot of vigilantes like Anna, anyway. Most of the self-appointed crime chasers were sorcerer kids, putting on a plastic mask ordered off of Amazon and crawling home crying after the first time they've got beaten up. For them, it was a game, something exciting to try, nothing more. For Anna, it was the thing she had to do, the thing what gave direction and meaning to her life. It was the only way she knew how to be more.

The mask was in the drawer of her writing-desk. Anna tied up her short hair in a small, tidy bun and put it on. The layers started to grow at the moment the cold metal touched her skin, hugging her head with quiet metallic clinking. She looked around just to make sure everything was all right. Her vision was slightly reddish now, but it was a small price to pay for everything else the helmet offered. She could see all the metals around whenever she wanted: the eyes of the mask gave them some glow, even if they were invisible to the naked eye.

Anna put on her hood and opened her window. When she was looking for a new room, she made sure it had a big enough window for her, and also its own bathroom. One cannot keep their vigilante-life a secret if they constantly leave bloodstains in the shared shower.

Of course, the ideal would have been a flat on her own, but there was a reason why a lot of superheroes in the comic books were millionaires. Anna had to choose between renting a small apartment and buying equipment, and she chose the latter. Her military coat alone was about 700 pounds (she wore the third one in two years, and it had to be fixed dozens of times already, naturally not for free), not to mention the weapons and the fact that she had to buy a new set of black clothes almost every week.

Bottom line: being an outlaw wasn't cheap.

Anna climbed on the windowsill. It was a chilly night. Ironically, while her coat looked really badass and was able to protect her from a stab or a medium-strength curse, it wasn't really useful against cold.

Anna knew by heart where the closest piece of metal big enough to get herself moving was, but checked it nevertheless. It was a roof a couple of houses down the road. She reached out with her mind and did the same with her arm too, and then just kind of pulled herself to the metal. Anna wasn't heavy, not even with all the equipment she carried, so moving her own body was easy. It wasn't that much of flying, more like doing really big jumps, but it was quick and effective, especially if the alternative would have been public transport.

She landed on the roof with a quiet thud, and jumped again, now aiming for the bell in the tower of the local church. Two long leaps and she was already hundreds of meters away from her room. She checked her phone to see where she needed to go exactly, then hopped on the edge of the little balcony around the bell and jumped again. Anna loved travelling like this. Sometimes she put on the helmet and went out for a joyride with no particular reason other than how exciting and cool it was.

But tonight she had to focus. According to the text she got, a vampire will attack a woman at 9:27, sharp, and she had to protect her. The man who sent the text had never been wrong before. He sent two or three of those every week in the last two years. It wasn't always vampires: sometimes Anna had to stop a mugging, a drunk idiot following random girls on the street or just an accident. The Seer (that was the only name he ever told Anna) couldn't control his visions. As he explained to the woman once, they weren't even real visions: he just blacked out and when he woke up details were written down on any surface in front of him.

Vampire attacks became more frequent though, Anna wondered as she sat down on a rooftop, putting her back against a warm chimney. In the last six months, there were three times more than usual. Vampires lived normal lives amongst humans, and they didn't need to hunt for food. They could buy donor blood in every pharmacy, pure one or mixed one (it was partly real blood, partly some kind of synthetic thing, Anna wasn't good enough at chemistry to understand the details). Or if they didn't have money for the good stuff, every butcher sold pig blood. As far as Anna knew, that wasn't nearly as good and they needed to drink much more of it than from human blood, but it was cheap and it worked.

And yet, there was a new attack every few weeks and that was just the ones the woman knew about. She was sure that the Seer gave jobs like this to other vigilantes too.

The weirdest thing was that the vampires didn't even try to drink from their victims, no: they were trying to turn them. Turning someone into a vampire without consent was illegal, and even if the human was on board, they needed to fill up a ton of paperwork and fulfil a lot of requirements. Anna did her homework years ago on this when she was considering becoming a vampire for the powers they had. That was before she got the helmet.

Anna believed that there was something behind the attacks, a plan perhaps. She didn't know whose plan was that, but every time she stumbled upon something dodgy and mysterious she automatically assumed that her fellow countryman, Attila Kovach had something to do with it. Most of the time she was right, although there was nothing she could do about it. Kovach was dangerous and very clever, and all Anna could ever achieve was to delay his plans. And even for that, she got on his list of people he would rather see dead than alive. Anna was particularly proud of that: people won't take her seriously until she acclaimed an infamous crime-boss as arch-nemesis.

It was 9:20 and the narrow little backstreet the Seer marked for her was empty. There was an Overground Service train station just some hundred meters away, and Anna assumed that the blond girl would come from there because that was the address she got. The girl jumped to the next roof to be closer to the entrance of the station, using a huge metal wood-burning stove on the top floor just under the roof to navigate herself.

Sure enough, at 9:22 a train arrived and five people got off. Two of them were blond women and that was a problem. There was no sign of the vampire yet, but those bastards were really good at hiding. Anna crouched on the edge of the roof, waiting. The two women got out of the station, down the stairs and out onto the street. They went into different directions, of course. It was 9:25. Anna had to decide in the next minute which one she will follow and however quick she could be, she won't be able to get there in time if she chose wrongly.

The older blond woman sat down at the bus stop, just after the curve of the road. She was with two other passengers from the train. The other blondie crossed the road, and went onto an even narrower little street, with dark single-family houses on both sides. She wasn't alone either: a young man walked with her, and they were talking.

9:26. Which one? Anna switched to thermal vision and what she saw made her jump immediately. She barely slowed her fall down and landed on the man the very second he grabbed and tried to bite the blond woman's forearm. They all fell on the ground, but both Anna and the vampire were on their feet at the next moment. The vampire leapt forward but Anna stepped aside and gave a hit on the back of the vampire's head with her elbow. She wanted to follow that up with another blow but couldn't because the terrified blondie, totally misreading the situation hit her in the stomach with her gigantic purse. It must have contained some bricks or maybe a smaller car because Anna doubled up and almost threw up her dinner. The vampire used that time to turn around and threw a big black rubbish bin at them.

Anna pushed the woman aside and got the bin in her face. The helmet protected her head but everything else above her knees exploded with pain. As she flew backwards with loose rubbish around from the bin she was sure that she heard something in her chest popping. In general, that wasn't a good sign.

A parking car stopped her from behind with a hit hard enough to squeeze out all of the air of her lungs and half a second later the rubbish container hit her again. The window behind her broke and the alarm went off. She dropped onto her knees on the littered ground but was up again in a second. There was no time to waste: the blondie tried to run, and the vampire was after her. She could count her bruises and other injuries later.

Anna zipped open her fanny pack and sent three bearing balls after the man. They all hit him in the back, and even though bullets couldn't really hurt him (not only three of them, not in the back anyway), let alone Anna's toys, he turned around. There was half a street of the distance between them now. The vampire took out a big knife, proving that he had no idea who she was, and started to run with inhuman speed.

Anna made the knife stop, and the vampire understood a moment too late what happened. He performed a beautiful fall as if his hand were tied to something and he tried to break it by running away. He landed on his back with a loud thud and an even louder groan, which made Anna smile behind her mask. The girl made the knife disappear in some shrubbery what someone used as a fence. The vampire climbed back onto his feet but wasn't nearly as enthusiastic as before. Unlike some other undead creatures, vampires were able to feel pain, and this one felt it all right.

In the meantime the blond woman reached the end of the street and went away, Anna didn't see where, but it was okay, the keyword being "away" in this case.

'So you wanna do this in the easy way or the hard one?' Anna asked the man. She loved to say clichés like this. Her voice was different from under the helmet but she still sounded like a girl, and it was enough to draw a surprised expression on the vampire's face. Anna loved that too. She raised one of her hands and above her palm three balls were circling in the air, ready to fly.

'Listen here lady, I don't want any trouble, okay? It was just a job. A dude came to me, he said he will give me two grand after everyone I bite, do you know how much is two grand for me? I figured they will live, okay? I got bitten too and turned out just fine. It's not like they were sorcerers or something…'

He was disappointingly talkative. Anna liked it when she had to work for the information, but hey, she could have an easy day sometimes, right?

Of course, the vampire didn't know who the mysterious man was or where to find him, and SRU's cars came with loud sirens so Anna had to call it a day. Taking on a lone vampire with a pathetic kitchen knife was one thing, but going up against a fully weaponized SRU squad was beyond stupid.

All things considered, it was a fun evening.