Gael smashed through wainscot and plaster like a cannonball baptized in bad liquor. Then he went through the wall and hit the library floor shoulder-first, rolling across silk rugs and spilled tomes until he found enough purchase to drive his bladed cane down.

His spin bled off. He came up in a crouch, lenses glowing bright green, and he grimaced as he stared through the smoking hole he'd made in the wall.

The dust hadn't settled before a ten-armed shadow sluiced through it. Lorcawn dashed through the haze, and Gael swung.

His blade shrieked through empty dust. Lorcaw wasn't there anymore.

The old bastard moved like thunder. One instant to Gael's left, the next a smear across the shelves, then a rippling silhouette racing past the fireplace. He wasn't running, no. He was a spider. He jumped and vaulted and ricocheted around the walls of the library, cheating gravity on corners. Gael pivoted, blade and sheath trying to track the old man, but prediction was a polite fiction. There was no easy way to see where Lorcawn was going to dash to next.

Fucking piece of shit.

I should've expected as much from him.

[Identification Complete]

[Name: Lorcawn Dowrul]

[Grade: F-Rank Blight-Class]

[Advanced Class: Jumping Spider]

[Passive Mutation: Leapnode Araneaplex]

[Swarmblood Art: Saltic Burst]

[Aura: ~1,900 BeS]

[Strength: ~7, Speed: ~6, Toughness: ~5, Dexterity: ~8, Perception: ~7]

Not only did Lorcawn have the Advanced Jumping Spider Class like every other top-ranking Repossessor, his physical attributes were also all a fair bit higher than Gael's, and he had decades of fighting experience over probably everyone else in Blightmarch.

Frankly, Gael was surprised he wasn't dead yet.

Fine, then.

Show me your sums, old man!

Lorcawn answered by committing to attack—there, on Gael's right, where the air bent a fraction too cold. Gael brought blade and sheath up in a crossing guard. Two cleavers and two hooks crunched against his block, but the old man wielded eight weapons in ten hands, and Gael's eyes widened as the spinning sawblade staff screamed at him from overhead.

He hunched and took it on the Vile Canister. The sawblade hit the tank with a shower of sparks, biting, whining, chewing at the armored curve. Then something sharper sang toward his ribs: the scythe, cleaving and hungry for a waist.

This is bullshit!

As a last-ditch effort, he clicked his heels together. His cicada-plated heels screamed point-blank, releasing a physical shockwave that slapped Lorcawn back and sent him flying, too. He got the worse end of the deal. He went through a gilt frame, burst through another wall, and then flew into the grand stairwell hall where he thudded against the marble floor.

He rolled, came up on his knees, and sucked air through his mask that tasted like old pennies. Two walls in less than a minute. How un-painful it was.

As he stumbled onto his feet, Lorcawn trudged through the hole in the wall once more, voice thickened by his brass mask.

"This is all a Demonic Plagueplain Doctor has to offer?" he taunted. "Disappointing."

"You wound me," Gael muttered.

And then Lorcawn showed how literal that promise could be.

The old man dashed in with an orchestra of edges. Gael hopped onto the stairway's rail, and he surfed the spiral down with his coat flared. Lorcawn followed with a flurry of slashes of hooks, cleavers, saws, and scythe, reducing his own hall to sawdust as he chased.

Steel kissed steel. Gael batted away bites with blade and sheath, sparks leaping off in droves, but an edge slid past his coat; another nicked his thigh; the next he blocked, but caught so hard his elbow rang.

At the bottom of the stairs, Gael jumped at Lorcawn instead of away—and then he clicked his heels again.

The second shriek filled the hallway with white noise.

The shockwave sent Lorcawn into the far wall with a grunt. Marble webbed out. In that same beat, Gael flicked his wrist and chucked his blade forward, driving it through Lorcawn's left shoulder with a spray of blood.

"Eat!" he shouted, stabbing his right hand forward. His gauntlet split. The hungry flower he'd yet to give a name to grew gigantic, tooth-petals folding over Lorcawn's torso and biting down. The old man was too tough to be chewed into pieces, but once the flower had a grip on Lorcawn, he turned and jerked his arm, slinging Lorcawn over his shoulder before hammering the old man into the ground.

Once more, marble cracked in a spiderweb beneath the impact.

Gael would've happily flung Lorcawn a few more times around the hall for good measure if not for his flower suddenly screaming. Blades jabbed, hooks tore, and right before the old man could turn on his sawblade staff to rip the flower from the inside-out, Gael retracted the flower and yanked the little silver thread curled around his pinky in the same motion, pulling his bladed cane back into his hand.

He couldn't help the grin that broke across his face under the beak. It was lopsided and tired, but very, very pleased.

"Bet you didn't know I upgraded my toys, hm?" he taunted back. "I can click my heels twice a day now. Wanna see what else I upgraded?"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Then he slid his blade home into the sheath, thumbed a little switch—click, click, a bartender's trick—and unsheathed it again. The silver edge came out kissed with a thin dark green sheen, and as Lorcawn pushed himself up onto his feet, there was a new tightness around his dull golden eyes.

The old man's skin, pale as candle fat to begin with, learned another shade of pale.

Gael waggled his blade, resisting the urge to drink. "I should've done this ages ago. Right now, I have three blends in the sheath, and I can spin to whichever song the dance demands: there's a paralyzing toxin, a disorienting toxin, and a killing toxin." His chuckle had a hiccup in it. "Guess which one's coursing through your veins right now."

The old man snarled. A hook twitched. A cleaver trembled. The brass tubes of his mask hissed as he pulled breath through whatever tonic he'd rigged inside.

"A little poison won't kill me," Lorcawn growled. "I'm a true-born Bharnish. You'll need more than just a single stab to snuff me out."

Gael tilted his head. "I agree."

He sprang forward, boots slipping on marble, and as he closed the distance he reached behind him and yanked the lever on the smaller, horizontal canister.

The latch jumped, and the cylinder coughed.

Two dozen little metal ravens burst out screaming like kettle-locusts, swarming the hall in a cyclone of cutting, carving long bright gouges through stone and wood, skipping off banisters, ricocheting off columns. A framed portrait of some ancestral wife disintegrated into lace and dust. A chandelier sang and then fell in a spray of light and brass.

Lorcawn hunched instinctively and turtled his way into a defense, his two normal arms bracing his face. The rest swept their weapons back and forth to swat the ravens out of the air. He was fast. He caught three, split four, knocked five into the ground, but defense was defense—it kept his hands busy.

Gael took the invitation.

He ran up a pillar like a drunk spider, pivoted off a lamp, and then threw his entire body at the old man. The dropkick hit so sweetly he heard Lorcawn's breath leave him, and the old man shot back through the double doors, skidding along the carpet drenched with gangsters Gael had left on his way up.

"This ain't my style, and I am a doctor, but…"

Gael trudged down the hallway, kicked up a pistol from a dead man's hand, and let it talk: boom-boom-boom. He wasn't a great shot, and he didn't need to be. Lorcawn had to split his ten-armed guard between his ravens, his bullets, and even more bullets. When he ran out, he chucked the pistol at Lorcawn and kicked up another pistol, beginning another one-handed blast down the hallway.

As he suppressed Lorcawn, his free hand worked inside his coat, uncorking, measuring, and marrying liquids by touch alone.

"A third is plenty," he muttered to himself. "Just a kiss of toxin accelerant, a string of phosphorus, and… a tear of bloodbile, how 'bout that?"

He heard Lorcawn's breath change before his eyes caught the charge. The little lull between shots was all the old man needed. Ten arms flashed; boots tore at the carpet as Lorcawn dashed across fifteen meters in a single stride, eight blades coming around with murder.

"Catch," Gael said brightly.

He yanked the finished mix from his coat and crushed it between them.

White, toxic fire exploded in a blooming ring, shattering every glass pane in the hallway. Both of them took flame, but Gael was wearing his mask properly, and Lorcawn's upper face wasn't covered. The old man hissed as the fire scorched his eyes, making him stagger back.

Gael stepped forward again. The wild and blind sawblade slash missed, so he put his whole arm into the sheath and smashed sideways with every ounce of irritation he'd been nurturing for two weeks. The sheath slammed into the side of Lorcawn's head, pinwheeling him into the wall with a grunt.

One more time!

He ran three steps and launched a second dropkick, cackling all the way, and this one hammered Lorcawn through the wall. They burst into a dining room drowned in light from too many candelabras, and a long table stretched from one end of the room to the other. Lorcawn slid along the length of the table, taking a swathe of plates and cutlery with him until he came to a bruised stop at the end.

Gael wasn't sentimental. He leaped into the dining room and flicked his wrist mid-air, sending half a dozen silver nails down. They bit through meat and leather. Four of the old man's arms were instantly pinned to the table, while two more went into each of his legs, making him howl.

"Stay there, bitch!" Gael shouted. Then he came down and drove his bladed cane into Lorcawn's stomach. No flourish. No thesis. He would've went for the heart, but he missed because his hands didn't know anatomy as well as his head did.

Still, the blade punched through coat and chitin and muscle, and blood immediately welled up dark beneath the hissing old man.

He leaned down and snarled, breath fogging the old man's glass tubes. "Old pieces of shit like you should die early and get over life already. Your experience is nothing in the face of scientific progr—"

Lorcawn's knee jerked up despite the nail and caught Gael in the ribs. He went weightless—stupidly—for a second, and then he flew back, landing on the other end of the table.

Ow.

Shouldn't… have monologued.

By the time he stumbled onto his feet, the old man was already tearing himself loose. Lorcawn gritted his teeth and ripped his own limbs free of the nails pinning him. Flesh tore with wet cracks, and black blood smeared across the tablecloth like a grotesque feast.

Both of them staggered upright, breaths sawing through their masks, chest heaving. It was obvious every limb of theirs twitched with fatigue, and every tendon burned with overuse.

But the poison should be running its course now.

It nips at the nerves and chews the blood. Any ordinary man should already be stiff, twitching, and slipping face-first into the dark.

Even an Exorcist would be struggling to hold a weapon. By all accounts, Lorcawn should already be dead on the table—and yet there he stood, bleeding, pale, and shaking, but still alive.

Surely the Advanced Jumping Spider Class doesn't have some sort of poison resistance mutation?

But then Lorcawn chuckled. He straightened his back and let his weapons fall one by one, cleavers and hooks and saws clattering to the floorboards, and all ten hands opened and hung loose at his sides.

"... Well," he wheezed, his voice thick through brass and blood. "It's true that I am old, but you don't forget to fear the old man in a profession where men die young."

Gael's lips parted in a half-chuckle, half-cough. He would've sneered something back, but his vision lurched. The edges of the room suddenly pulsed crimson, and he winced, staggering one step back with his sheath planted into the table for balance.

And then Lorcawn did the unthinkable.

He drove one of his hands into the stab wound on his belly, fingers plunging deep until blood slicked his wrist. The pain wrung a scream from his lungs, a guttural howl that shook the candelabras. His shoulders shuddered, his mask rattled, and he snarled—not at Gael, but at something inside himself.

"Come out already!" he roared. "This is what I've hosted you for, isn't it?"

Gael's breath caught. He almost said 'stop', because a part of him knew what was about to happen, and another part wanted to watch out of morbid curiosity.

It began at the wound.

Flesh bubbled out of Lorcawn's stomach, wrong-colored, wrong-textured. A slick mass of pinkish-purple muscle and sinew foamed from the gash, writhing as if impatient, before curling over Lorcawn's ribs like a lover's hand. Then it spread upward, outward, wrapping across his entire body in living coils.

"Saintess…" Gael whispered.

Chitin followed. Dark plates pushed out of the bubbling meat, clapping into place one after another, forming armor where there'd been only flesh. The muscles pulsed, the plates locked, and Lorcawn swelled larger and bulkier, his ten arms flexing against their new sheathes of bone and shell.

Gael could only think one word, muttered beneath his mask like the fool he was.

… What.

His vision stuttered once more—and now the crimson filter over his eyes didn't fade.

His sight drowned in red.

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