“Round two?” Nic asked, feeling a deadly confidence.

She grimaced. There wasn’t a scratch on her, while he was a ball of blood and glittered shreds of glass. And yet…

He’d won that first battle. He drew Peacekeeper forth from his bag, feeling the weight in his hands like an extension of his own two arms. He spun it easily across the back of his palm, feeling light-hearted, feeling joyous.

He was complete again.

But rather than running, the elven devil moved to block the entrance. She created a spear and a shield of luminescent glass, pouring her energy into them until they shone like weapons of starlight.

“Let me guess…” Nic began. “You think if you can delay me until that heinous bitch gets here, you can still win.”

“Something like that.” She snarled back.

“You can’t.”

He slid his Eight-Directions Ring back onto his finger and vanished. In a single leap, he was next to her, evading her shield. His blade carved down at her leg.

She vaulted up as glass formed underfoot and pushed her into the air, but not fast enough - his blade carved through her calf and crippled the limb. In the next instant he was on top of her again, teleporting up to catch her mid-air before she could land and regain the ability to escape.

She lifted her shield.

His blade cleaved through in an arc of flame, Peacemaker multiplying his strength with a surge of fire that shone around his skin, outlining him like a sun in eclipse.

Three of her fingers dropped to the floor. She hit the ground, gasping, swinging her spear at him with one clumsy hand. It struck out in a steady tempo like a snake trying to bite at his flesh, stabbing forward one, two, three, one, two, three…

Nic simply teleported around the salvo of spear-strikes and kicked her in the wounded leg.

In desperation she wrapped her entire body in glass. He was forced to retreat in the instant before the glass detonated, sending shards flying in all directions.

She pushed her hand to the floor and sent a layer of glass rushing across the ground, rising up into spikes and spines that shivered as they prepared to detonate. A minefield waiting for him to rush in.

Nic simply stabbed Peacemaker down into the ground and drew his bow, Hollowsong. Lifting an arrow to the string he fired at the crippled elf-devil, piecing her shoulder…

Her leg…

Her midsection…

“Stop!” She gasped out, lifting her one good arm. “I surrender…”

With a whisper of glass bells, the minefield collapsed into splinters, into glittering sand.

He held the last arrow aimed for her throat. Bristling out of her body, the talisman arrows he’d already sunk home waited to detonate and eviscerate her.

He could feel the terrible pressure approaching…

The storm of peril that Seoona sent shivering through his Eight-Eyed Mantle.

He held the shot steady, and waited. His eyes glancing in all directions, reading the room. There was a skylight above, letting in a rectangular beam of dust-drenched golden light from the desert beyond.

He waited…

Until she arrived in the doorway. Seoona in a rage was a terrible thing. Her black hair floated around her in wild tangles, her dark clawed finger-tips twitching with the barely restrained urge to strike at him. Her robe fluttered in an unseen wind, the edges dissolving into a fuzzy static of mist…

“So…” She said with deadly venom. “You decided not to take my offer.”

“I decided to make a counter-offer.” Nic said with a cheery grin. “Your lieutenant’s life for that nifty little map. And to sweeten things, I won’t wreck your palace on the way out.”

“I could crush you.” Seoona replied. “You are not so strong as to stand up to a hundred years of experience.” The golden half of her face was calm and poised, while the human half had its lips drawn back, teeth bared in fury.

“You probably could, if I sat around like a dumbass. But I ain’t and I won’t so that’s that. What’s gonna happen is this…” Nic was at his cockiest, not just because he felt genuinely exhilarated by his prison break, but because he knew it would irk them. “I’m going to kill your minion. Then I’m going to run, and you’re going to play catch-up as I wipe out as much of your base as I can.”

“My soldiers are not trash to be wiped away with a flick of your sleeves. They beat you once before.”

“They beat me with those nifty formations you made. And I’m guessing you don’t have many left, since you didn’t have one waiting for me when I broke out…” He could read her face easily, and see he was right. A hundred years of torture had stripped Seoona of any human reserve or coldness. Her emotions flared and burned bright on her features.

“Mistress…” The elf-devil began to speak, but Seoona silenced her with a dismissive wave.

“Your failure is conclusive. If you die, child, you die. Your resemblance to my race brings me some small pleasure, and for that I favored you, but that is clearly all the value you offer.” Seoona said, her tone icy.

Nic couldn’t help but smirk.

Oh, someone was in trouble.

And for once, it wasn’t him!

“Have a nice think about it.” He suggested. “You’re stupid as a brick if you don’t have that map memorized by now. It really won’t cost you anything, at this point- there’s no chance of allying with me, so the best you can hope for is to kill me, at the cost of half of your forces.”

“You underestimate how tempting it would be to see you dead, you insolent bug.”

“You know, a lot of people say that.” Nic replied breezily. “You should start a club. Get together every second week and glare at a big portrait of me…”

“Stop talking.” She commanded.

“Give me the map.” He said. “No more talking, just do or die.” Hollowsung’s string resonated in his hand, as if eager to make the kill.

She sighed, making a weak show of pretend-defeat, and held out the gleaming brass disk in her hand.

“Toss it over.” Nic said.

“If you don’t even have the courage to take it from my hand, you are more pitiful than I thought. How could such a coward ever hope to escape the System?”

It was the most obvious ploy in the books…

But Nic could only scowl, because it was going to work. He needed that map.

If this was how he died…

Well, he always knew it would be doing something reckless.

He stowed the bow away, lifted Peacemaker in one hand, and took a step forward. Seoona’s smile was small and triumphant.

Another step, half the distance gone now, his mind working furiously…

He drew on the power of the bronze plates, the Sun God’s Dictate, covering his body in a golden shield of sunlight. Whether that would be enough to stop her, Nic had his doubts…

She could likely ‘read’ his teleports like the dhampyr assassins could. That left him with few options for escape. He needed a distraction, a play…

One step more, and only one left before he was in her reach…

Nic swung about, grabbed the elf-devil by the hair, and flung her shrieking body at Seoona. His own form blazed with strength from the Internal-Sacrifice Cauldrons Technique, skin burning hot like a skillet. As the devil collided with her master, Nic detonated all three talisman arrows in a rain of viscera.

The explosion was brief and brutal and exact surprise he needed.

Seoona flinched-

And in that moment Nic kicked forward, snatched the talisman from her hand, and began to fade as his Eight-Directions Ring teleported him up and away, towards the skylight.

Not fast enough.

The split-second delay before he vanished was enough.

Seoona’s threw the mangled devil aside and struck out, her black hand lashing towards his throat. He turned and deflected it, but her claws dipped into his shoulder instead, neatly cutting through the flesh and plucking at the bone.

In one smooth motion she tore his arm off.

“Gwungo! Get the map!”

As he appeared at the skylight, clinging to the walls with his feet wrapped in adhesive, the portion of Gwungo stuck to his missing arm became a leaping missile of slime. It took the map from his open hand and shot upwards in a sticky line, rejoining with the whole of his armor. The map-talisman was secured against his heart, in a pocket of goo.

Nic shot up the skylight as Seoona screamed.

Up into the light…

And into the battalion of sand devils awaiting him, all of them Ascended. Nearly twenty of the creatures stood arrayed against the small entrance of the skylight, weapons poised, Shards readied.

Nic had to have known it was coming.

“FUCK!”

He drew on the protection of the Sun God’s Dictate to survive as he teleported again, escaping all but the quickest of the devils, the first to throw their volleys. Arrows of light and bolts of black energy clashed against his armored skin.

He flickered and was half a step away, more projectiles cleaving through the empty space where he had been.

His aura was spent. With the power of his Concept of Sacrifice, he burnt Essence now, flickering again. A sword slashed through his afterimage, left behind by the Mistwater Step.

He hit the wall of opposing soldiers with a wave of Primordial Mist, breaking through. Reaching into his bag he ripped out the Sandrider Blade and threw it to the ground, leaping atop the sword as the sand began to propel him forward, forward, pushing everything he had into a blinding burst of speed that kicked up dust behind him as he raced for the horizon, for the clear blue sky, for escape…

A beam of amber light shot up from the exposed spire of Seoona’s palace, and began to expand outwards across the sky, becoming a dome. A barrier.

A trap to hold him in.

He raced forward, but the curtain-wall of light was falling fast. At the last moment-

Nic veered aside.

He wasn’t going to make it. The wall would close before he reached the edge, and slamming into it would waste his moment, wipe him out, likely get him killed. Instead he sailed around the edge of the ring, trying to keep ahead of the sand devils who took off like locusts and flew through the air after him…

He had to know it was coming…

There was no way she wouldn’t have a barrier around her palace. No way there wouldn’t be a last barrier. No way he’d get out that easily.

He’d run a good race.

He’d gotten as far as he could on his own.

Now…

With a deep sigh, Nic took out a small, beautiful octagonal gemstone- the talisman the Ghost-Toll Legion had given him.

Now it was time for some reinforcements.