Kestra Estalis wasn’t an especially talented assassin. In fact, she wasn’t really an assassin at all.

  Most of the contract work she did through the Ghostkiller Guild was more in the vein of breaking people’s kneecaps for failing to pay their debts, acting as muscle to guard people who needed discreet fighters, and occasionally crushing any gangs that showed up and refused to follow the rules set forth by the Avatar of Sin, Number One, the Kraken Liege, and some of the other major players in the global underground.

  But, money was money, and whoever was paying to see this poor fool dead was willing to spend a lot of it, finance her with several powerful potions, a gate crawler, automated wardbreaker, powerful escape enchantments, a ticket to place that would allow her to further her powers several times over, and a full dossier of the target’s abilities. She didn’t know why he’d paid for her, not when there were actually competent assassins out there who could have slipped a poison into his drink and had him dead immediately, but she wasn’t being paid to ask questions.

  Still, she couldn’t help it. She just… didn’t understand. The kid was normal enough, though several of the people who mentored him were deeply strange. The old woman, for example – Kestra hadn’t been able to find any records about her. The two middle aged men were strange too, though at least Orykson had a few records as an old Occultist that the Nightwatch worked with.

  His brother had been a pain, and a mistake that came from her amateurish assassination skills. If the anonymous buyer had paid an actual assassin, with knowledge and lunar mana, then the assassin could have determined that Malachi wasn’t at home, and wouldn’t have had to waste time breaking into a house that didn’t even contain the target, then need to spend months underground as one of her burner identities.

  She didn’t know why Malachi had randomly returned home after months of not being seen anywhere in the country, but when she’d gotten the message of where to find him, she was equal parts annoyed and relieved.

  At least she’d have the opportunity to finally collect her paycheck, but she’d also hoped that his vanishing act meant she could finally be done with this whole fiasco. It had been an ordeal.

  She’d attacked the healer, hoping to force them to flee, incapacitate, or kill them, following the age-old strategy of ‘take out the healer first’, but the healer brat had somehow managed to block her blow, and that weird fox-bird’s power had skyrocketed, allowing it to hold her off until Malachi arrived.

  The creature holding her off shouldn’t even have been possible, and yet, it had happened. She didn’t understand that either. She had refined herself beyond the limits of any normal mortal third gate. Her legacy allowed her to break down the latent power inside of the mana-gardens of those she killed, directly using it to burn mists, raise her walls, advance spells, dig stairs, or even directly swap out her garden with a compatible person’s she killed. The fact it made her ascensions much harder was more than a fair trade off.

  During the Idyll-Flume, she’d been able to take in the golden elixir, kill dozens of beasts and a few people who got in her way, acquire lightning-vines and other potent natural treasures to empower her magic. She’d blown through third gate with record ease, then gone on to expand her power beyond the ordinary limits of the stage.

  She wasn’t arrogant enough to think she was the strongest third gate mage in the world. There were real monsters out there, capable of trading blows with Arcanists.

  But she had more than enough power to crush some no-name baker’s son, trained by an Occultist or not.

  When Malachi had arrived to the battle, and his little spirit had gone on the offensive, she’d maintained her certainty, ripping through his pathetic restraining spells.

  As she battered apart his spirit’s spells and his power had grown increasingly chaotic, she put together a picture of what was happening – he’d broken his spirit with power. It was gushing random power, spiking with no coherent mana. Random flashes of telluric, solar, creation, desolation, time, all barely constrained. It was like trying to sense an entire forest at once.

  He was falling apart!

  It was almost enough to make her laugh.

  Then he unleashed a new attack, one melted her hammer, and she felt something she didn’t normally feel from Spellbinders anymore: danger.

  She started taking the fight a lot more seriously then.

  As they ripped through the forest, trading blows, she let her immense power swell up into the sky, forming one of the rare ritual combat spells: The True Storm Core.

  Even with her impossibly large quantity of third gate mana, the True Storm Core was draining to cast. A normal third gate mage would have to dedicate their entire gate to forming this ritual, and would need high walls to see it through.

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  With her reserves? She could cast it, and thanks to killing a tempest elemental with a mana-garden ten times the base size of a normal person’s, had the room to take meta spells that cut the casting down to fifteen seconds, rather than a full minute.

  Then he’d unleashed an absolute storm of plants before she could complete the ritual, and for the second time, danger spiked in her senses. It cane from every one of the trees, the very earth beneath her feet, from the man she was fighting.

  Her body began to shred itself to peices, and she knew she was going to die. She couldn’t get a healing potion in time. She was going to die in the middle of the forest, and she hadn’t even had a chance to properly say goodbye to her friends and brother.

  Until the idiot cut off his attack and tried to get her to surrender. She babbled at him until…

  There.

  The ritual completed, and the core of sustained power formed in the sky, like an anchor for the very storms themselves.

  She could unleash lightning, as powerful as a lightning bolt spell, anywhere she could sense, and the core of power lasted hours.

  She let out a cackle as she brought power down on his head. His shielding orbs flashed and burned away, but annoyingly, they bought him just enough time to use his weird version of Quickstep and get away.

  That was fine. She could sense him, his strange power washing through the forest, and she brought down another bolt of lightning.

  A crack in the air met the lightning halfway, and Kestra cursed as it arced the power off and to the side, allowing the target to wrestle his suicidally broken spirit back under control.

  She’d forgotten about that little spirit. How had it caught up to them so quickly?

  The spirit rushed at her, Malachi flying a second behind her, and Kestra clapped her hands together. Lightning bolts tore from the sky without end, and the spirit released shockwaves into the sky, matching her.

  Kestra grinned and waved her hand. More and more lightning streamed down, and the spirit’s mana began to gutter. Then lightning smashed down onto the pair, the light blinding.

  Kestra might not have been an amazing assassin, but she was a good fighter, and as dust rolled out, she knew better than to assume that Malachi had died, even when both his and his spirit’s mana vanished from her senses.

  She reached out to the core in the sky and brought down a hail of lightning. Around her, the forest began to burn as power thundered down, heavier and heavier. Trees snapped and exploded, and power flowed into her legacy. Most of it was thin, weak, coming from ordinary birds, squirrels, insects, and the like, who had only ever developed a spark of ungated mana, if that, but there were a few that had first gate mana, which she used to improve her power.

  When she finally released the power, she felt a spike of frustration, and conjured the gate crawler from her spatial ring. She slammed her hand into the air and felt its power begin to cycle…

  Only for the portal to tear open before the enchanted glove could finish its work. She conjured her sheild and brought lightning down on the portal as a massive hand, easily the size of her entire body, errupted outward. The lightning hit the loose earth and blasted it apart, but it reformed and released blows against her enchanted shield. She growled and pressed the core in the sky for more power.

  A pillar of a dozen lightning bolts shredded the earth of the hand, and on the other side of the portal, she could see the nature spirit. The spirit’s power seemed to be completely restored, and standing on the loose earth of the demiplane, she was the very image of confidence.

  For the third time since the fight began, she felt a sense of danger. If she entered that demiplane, she would be at the mercy of the spirit, one who had built its Dominion and woven it into this demiplane.

  Blows impacted her side, and she spun around, lashing out with a strengthened fist, only to find shards of bone recalling themselves into a star pattern. She brought down lightning in the same formation, and tore the bones to shreds.

  “Are you stupid?” Malachi asked, and he sounded… Angry. “Even if you kill me, this is still eco-terrorisim!”

  She wipped around and released a rapid sequence of lightning bolts at him, but he vanished, appearing elsewhere in the clearing. He clenched his fists, but managed to vanish into the demiplane as she brought more lightning down on him.

  When he didn’t re-emerge, she turned to the spirit’s portal and began releasing endless waves of lightning at it. The lightning stopped dead at the entry, so she cut off the assault.

  “If you don’t come out here and fight me, I’ll bring this force down on your little healer. Our flight was long, but not that long,” she called out. “I can be back in a minute or so.”

  “No need,” the healer called out from behind her. At their feet, the fox-bird yipped angrily at her, and at least fifty orbs zipped around their body.

  So that was where those had come from. They were more than a healer, it seemed.

  “Kene, no!” Malachi said, rushing out of the portal.

  She brought a deluge of lightning down on both of them.

  The healer’s orbs shot through the air on their own, almost like a summon or animated spell, and they morphed into a lattice of shielding over Malachi, while a pair of blue auras lit around the healer and the fox-bird.

  Malachi raised his hand toward her, and she felt his mana senses explode over the clearing, riding along the air somehow. His senses traced her spell, the thin tethers that tied her senses upwards and into the sky, where the core was sucking in power across acres of blasted forest and releasing lightning down on them.

  Well, ridiculous sensory abilities or not, it didn’t matter. As long as she could sense him and the healer, she could keep up this lightning. And he was down to less than a dozen orbs. She watched as, with every second, another orb overloaded, and grinned.

  “If you call off the orbs, I’ll let you and your familiar live,” she called to the healer.

  She was lying, of course, but they didn’t know that. Malachi had a point when he’d called out her eco-terrorisim before, and she would have to kill them, then use some historical distortion bombs to scramble the evidence. Those were absurdly expensive, but hey. She could afford it now, along with the bills for her brother, and still have enough to pay off her mortgage.

  Then her mana senses slammed into a wall, one that morphed around her and crushed into her form. The tethers up into the sky were cut off entirely, and her unstoppable force of nature began to dissipate.

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