Without drawing any weapons, I stepped over the groaning heap of a boy on the ground in front of me. Both the boy and girl who were still standing took up a defensive position, holding their respective weapons out in front of them. It might be best to avoid killing them, I thought, warbreed get very upset about their children being killed, so I can only imagine how enraged these humans would be. In a gesture so quick she probably thought I didn’t see it, the girl glanced down to the boy below my feet, then back to me. In a split second, I realized my error, but I couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the prone boy’s hand closing around my right ankle.

The boy began to chant quietly, rapidly cycling waves of pain shot through my body, and I found myself unable to move or feel my entire right side. Independent of my will, my muscles were spasming and twitching vibrating the rest of my body. Even my left side was partially frozen, but I could still move my arm with effort. Wait, I can’t burn his hand, I realized as I tried to melt the boy’s grip off of me, why isn’t it working? Seeing that I was paralyzed, the two other adolescents rushed in for the kill.

I caught the boy’s knife with my left hand and managed to pull my body just far enough forward that the girl’s glowing metal brand missed me, causing her wrist to hit my shoulder instead. The boy below me let out a groan, and for a moment the waves of pain and numbness stopped. The quarter-second of reprieve was all I needed, and I pushed off of the two standing adolescents and jumped, landing a meter back and throwing them away from me. That was like an electroshock weapon, I thought, it feels so different to be hit by one in this body, like something else fighting me for control instead of just shutting me out.

The stumbling boy and girl corrected their footwork, and the boy on the ground started to get back to his feet as well. I can’t let any of them grab me, I thought, if one of them can do that, maybe all of them can. That technique is information I want, so there's another reason leave them alive. During the initial exchange their previous victim had run off, so it was just the four of us left in the alley. Alive doesn’t mean unharmed, however, I thought, drawing my sword from its sheath.

“Your weapon won’t save you, detested,” the girl hissed, and the boy with the knife jumped in my direction. In mid-air, he pushed off the alley wall beside him, gaining significant speed and shifting his parabolic direction into a straight one for my center of mass. Using the flat of my sword, I deflected his stab and sent his arms upwards. Even force magic isn’t going to make you strong enough to do that to me, I hissed, then I swung my right arm back inward and dug my blade into the boy’s belly, spilling out his guts in a pool of blood and half-digested food.

As the knife boy began screaming and trying to stuff his innards back inside before his wound sealed up, I deflected two more strikes from the girl’s brand with the back of my blade. She’s twice as strong as she looks, I thought, almost as strong as I am without force magic. Superheated sparks few from the brand and hissed against both of our faces as the girl flew into a flurry of strikes. Predictable, I thought, footwork gives her away. Seeing an opening, I grabbed the girl’s face with my left hand, hooking my thumb into her eye socket, then slammed her head into the wall beside us to knock her out.

“You’ll sit back down if you want to live,” I said to the electroshock magic boy, who looked at me fearfully. “Don’t even think of running,” I warned, pulling a throwing knife from my holster and levitating it menacingly. “I am very skilled with these, and you will not escape.”

“If you could do real magic, why wouldn’t you just show us!” the girl demanded once she awoke. I had torn strips from the knife boy’s shirt to tie the hands of each of the adolescents and sat them down against the alley wall to interrogate them. They could easily break out, I thought, but it’ll give me more warning if they do try it. I squatted down in front of them, getting close enough to make them uncomfortable.

“The brand, what is it?” I asked, showing the girl her weapon. The brand itself was a simple metal device with a wooden handle. The image it was intended to create looked abstract to me, a collection of shaped lines with no readily apparent meaning. A triangle, a circle, and five lines forming a separator, I thought, clearly symbolic. I think I've seen that triangle before actually-

“Let us go!” the knife boy demanded, interrupting my thoughts. I shifted my gaze to him, and he visibly flinched. In order to keep him alive I had helped him put his guts back inside his belly by cutting him open with his own knife and stuffing them in myself. What kind of idiot would need help with something like that? I wondered, These adolescents might have training, but I doubt they've seen real combat.

“Answer my questions,” I demanded back flatly. “If I like your answers, we can talk about what happens next.”

“Do you know who my father is?” the knife boy spat with an irksome amount of confidence. “I have been trained since childhood! You are dead, doymztoyl, the only choice you have is whether you do it quickly yourself or let yourself be captured and die slowly.” That was a decent threat, I thought, but a very unfortunate one to make to me.

“Who is his father?” I asked the other two. The girl just glared at me, and the electroshock boy looked away. “Some friend of the local ruler, perhaps? A wealthy man who owns some business?”

“Fool,” the electroshock boy muttered.

“Do you have a rich or powerful father as well?” I asked. When I got no response, I turned to the girl. “How about you?”

“You will get no ransom for us, foreign rat,” she said, then tried to spit in my face. Deciding to challenge myself, I intercepted the spit with force magic and shoved it back at her. That used more power than it should have, I thought as I quickly checked my bars, perhaps because I couldn’t grip it so much as just push everything around the spot away. “Disgusting noyw,” the girl muttered, wiping her cheek on her shoulder.

“It’s your spit,” I replied. “So tell me, boy over there, what was the magic you used to hold me in place?” The electroshock boy looked at me, then snorted.

“As if I would tell you,” he condescended. “Such magic is not fit for your kind.”

“I know what you did,” I continued, “I just don’t know how you did it. How did you move the electrons to create current? That magic moves extremely small particles to produce its effect, but I haven't been able to make it work.” The boy tried to stare at me to appear strong, but I could see his confusion. So he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, but can still do it, I intuited, my approach must have been wrong when I tried it. I’ll have to come back to this later. Flipping around the knife boy’s weapon, I examined it more closely. Quite ornate, I thought, the last knife I had like this was worth a fair amount of money.

“Just let us go,” the knife boy said, his tone settled from demanding to a more polite request. “I can talk to my father and have this declared a misunderstanding. You clearly know force magic, and have some understanding of gert’rehv even if you can’t perform it. You don’t deserve a mark, we were just being overzealous.”

“Pahz!” the girl cried, bumping the knife boy with her leg.

“You know it’s true,” Pahz, the knife boy, snapped back. “We were just out for a bit of fun, we can let this go.” I looked Pahz in his eyes, watching his every reaction.

“If I let you go, you will ensure that no harm, legal or otherwise, comes to me as a result of this,” I said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes, of course,” Pahz replied. His pupils twitched, his facial muscles flexed subtly, his lips tightened and the right side of his mouth moved a few millimeters outwards. Liar, I thought, you can’t even hide your contempt for me. Still, I was also lying, I guess I'll just have to hide the bodies well and get away from here without attracting attention.

“You know what? I think I’ll just kill you,” I shrugged. Before Pahz could react, I plunged his own knife through his right eye and into his brain, instantly making him go limp. The girl beside him screamed at the top of her lungs, and I backhanded her to shut her up. “You are dead, girl,” I told her. “The only choice you have is if you go quickly or very, very slowly.”

“You can’t do this!” the electroshock boy yelled. I went to reach for his forehead, then heard snapping behind his back and drew my hand back just in time to avoid a double-handed grab for my arm. As the boy lurched forward from the momentum of his movement, I grabbed his forehead and activated my heat magic inside his brain. After five seconds of spasms, his body went limp as well, oozing blood from its eyes.

“Now for you,” I said. The fear in the girl’s eyes was making her wild, and she began kicking at me with all her might. One lucky blow connected with my cheek, momentarily dazing me, and she used the opportunity to jump to her feet and start sprinting down the alley away from me. Growling, I pulled the same knife from my holster as I had used earlier to threaten the adolescents, then used my new throwing technique. With a whistle, my knife flew straight as an arrow and sunk to the hilt into the girl’s upper spine, sending her sprawling to the ground. She tried to crawl using just her arms, but was nowhere near fast enough to escape me. “Slow it is,” I said as I pulled her up from the ground by her hair. “Let’s see if you talk first.”

The girl didn’t talk, nor did she know the electroshock magic, and after cutting off each of her fingers and toes I decided to just kill her and leave before someone came by and saw what I was doing. This might be a poorer part of town, but that doesn’t mean there are no guards, I thought, it’s a minor miracle that one hasn’t come by already considering all the screaming. As I stood up, I happened to look down at my gambeson and sighed deeply. Its clean off-white was now spattered with blood and ash from the fight, and I had inadvertently spread some of the blood from my hands onto its sleeves. It was so clean too, I groaned, it’s going to take hours to get this out in a river, even with soap. Maybe I should just buy a new one again, I have the money to.

“You’re sure it was this alley?” I heard a voice ask from somewhere nearby. All my thoughts of cleanliness vanished as I looked for somewhere to hide.

“I got caught just over here,” a nervous-sounding voice replied, and a pair of humans rounded the corner before I could get out of sight. For an instant that felt like an age, I made eye contact with the larger of the two humans, then glanced down at the corpses beneath me. Well, what’s two more, really? I asked myself rhetorically.

The larger human reached out an arm and pushed the smaller one back behind themselves while drawing a mace from their belt. The individual, who I assumed was female due to their body shape, was covered nearly head to toe in metal armor. At first, it looked like a cohesive suit, but my eyes started to pick out inconsistencies within the next few seconds. The pauldrons aren’t the same size, that shin-guard is designed differently than the other one, I noticed, the whole suit looks like it was cobbled together out of spare parts. Even the chain mail underneath appears rusted. Even the woman’s face was covered, something unusual for the humans of Uwriy, with a metal mask that covered her whole jaw and stopped just below her gold-yellow eyes.

“You’re not running, so don’t even think about it,” her raspy voice warned me. The man behind her was looking at me as though he was staring death itself in the face, and I knew that any goodwill I may have gained from saving him was likely gone in the face of the murders I had committed.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied. “Were these your friends?” The woman’s eyes didn’t even twitch away from mine.

“You have some seytoydh layr to ask that,” the woman snarled. Yeah, I didn’t think so, I said silently.

“Then, perhaps do you know anything about this?” I asked, holding up the girls’ brand. Through the helm and mask, I could see the woman’s face boil over the instant she laid eyes on the brand. There was no worded reply to my question. Instead, the woman charged me, roaring, and put her full weight behind a mace strike aimed at my head.