Henry and his group ran into a few more batches of vampires, but not in any numbers he would consider threatening. That was the part that felt most off to him. Sure, there was the occasional lone watcher that would scamper off the moment they were spotted, but only two real skirmishes occurred after the first one.

The story kept playing out much as it had prior. Henry would spot a gaggle of vamps lurking in the distance, they'd notice and bunch up just out of sight, attack from a variety of annoying angles, and fall to the ground as a bunch of oily smears. It was getting so predictable, he'd been starting to find it more tiring than actually threatening, which… wasn't a good sign.

Funny how knowing the pattern was due to break didn't help him any in getting ahead of it. Even with his generally good intuition, a particularly clever trio actually did manage to get the drop on them. Just a few minutes after they'd thought the last of them had been cleared out, the surprise attack went into motion and caught them flat-footed.

It hadn't been enough.

The vampires had chosen their battleground well, using a road blockage to force them to detour through a narrow alleyway. Every advantage of the terrain lie in their favor when they finally made their move, and by all metrics had picked the exact right moment to deliver death from above.

All that high level strategic planning, and it immediately sunk down the drain the moment Dee panic-fired a whole storm of lightning in their general direction. The attempt was over before it had even really began.

"Hah… sorry about that guys…" he apologized, coughing slightly in the aftermath as the cloud of dust he'd kicked up overhead began to settle on them. "I might have overcooked it a bit…"

Considering that there wasn't a single trace of the bodies anywhere, Henry was inclined to agree.

"It's fine," he dismissed as half a brick chose that moment to break free from the wreckage above him. "We're all still alive, at least."

The falling chunk of rubble fell down on his head, bouncing off the reactive shield and causing him to wince.

"Alright, wellness check before we move on," he decided. "Anyone need a bandage? Doesn't matter how small, it's best we patch it up now so we don't make it any easier for us to track."

Giselle snorted. "They seem to be doing well enough without the bloodhounds."

"True. But I'd never forgive myself if the reason we got cornered by more vamps than we could handle was something preventable."

"Yeah, yeah, I get you… just giving a hard time, is all. Anyone want to be a guinea pig? I think I might be able to heal something simple, if I focused."

She dusted her costume off, a neon-red spark of magic dancing across the back of her palm for a brief moment. A classic hallmark of first-time mages. Complete control of her new abilities hadn't quite baked itself in yet, and that combined with everyone else getting a chance to cast magic already made for a pretty compelling case as to why she was itching to get a spell in edgewise.

When they'd shaken the Magic 8-Ball for her, it had ended up landing on Fauna Domain. It wasn't the most heavily explored Domain, but it was definitely one of the most coveted ones. In terms of rarity, it was second only to Law. The gulf between those two in terms of numbers was still the size of an ocean, sure, but at that point the rest of the Domains had to compete for second anyways.

Where something more common like Fire might need a whole city to house all the mages of that type in the world, Fauna could probably make do with a block of apartments, if one wasn't too picky on living space. Law would only need a duplex, tops.

At her request, the three of them gave themselves a quick once over, but despite the carnage wrought injuries among them were shockingly few. Claire was the only one in need of patching up, with a long shallow cut across the back of her forearm. Barely a scratch, but obvious enough to merit volunteering. Without a word, she stepped up, and their newest mage got to work.

"This might itch a little," Giselle told her patient.

"Itch? Don't you mean sting?"

"No, I used the word itch for a reason. Just hold still and take a look for yourself."

She held Claire's arm steady, with her finger hovering just above the fresh cut. Scanning over the entire length of it slowly, tiny beams of red light peppered the wound in small bursts, and where there was once fresh blood lazily dripping, a pretty sturdy-looking scab began taking form.

"I don't trust myself nearly well enough to start stitching things back together just yet, like they'd show on TV," Giselle explained. "But convincing a natural process to get to the point? Yeah, that's intuitive enough."

By the time the magic died down, the wound was properly covered as promised. Claire very nearly went and scratched it the moment it was done, but caught herself at the last minute.

"...I see what you mean," she admitted.

"You've got it easy. You know that spot on your back that is always just barely out of reach?"

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"...Yeah?"

Without a word, Giselle spun on her heels and pointed two thumbs at the cutout in the back of her dress. Smack in the middle, there was the angriest-looking scab that Henry had ever seen in his life.

"Only reason I was comfortable trying it was because it worked on me first," she explained. "Though I definitely made a few mistakes on mine that will have to sort themselves out."

When Dee saw the mark, he promptly realized that he was the most likely cause of her discomfort.

"…Sorry…" he just barely mustered, earning an unreadable look from Giselle.

"Oh, don't worry. I'm not mad. I'm just saving my petty revenge for when I have this Domain stuff more dialed in. Fair warning, I'm definitely going to get creative with it. So… get ready for that."

"Guys," Henry cut in before this became another full-blown session. "We should really be going if there's nothing left to sort out."

There wasn't, much to Giselle's disappointment and Dee's relief.

After the short sidetracking, the remaining distance proved to be a cakewalk. Either due to being too close to the webs for comfort or their successful rebuking of every previous attack, no more vampires pushed their luck as they made their way back out onto the streets. Once they rounded the next corner, they'd be in sight of the beachhead the Mad Prince had so thoughtfully left for them to smash up.

"Hate these bloody roads." Claire started grumbling out of nowhere, now that they were in spitting distance of their target. "Everywhere I look, it's the same sight as anywhere else. I turn my head to the left, and it's rubble. I look to the right, and it's the other half of the rubble. The night is always cold, the air is always damp, and no matter what, you have to expect something around every corner that wants to see you dead."

"So why go the extra distance, then?" he asked. "If all that bothers you."

She shrugged. "Two reasons, I think. First one is that every one that I run into is one less that someone else does. The second is more of a check than a justification."

Odd. She'd been pretty tight-lipped up until this point. Was she deciding to get all her talking in now, while she still had a chance? Henry hoped she had a little more faith in the upcoming encounter than that.

The clouds above parted ever so slightly, allowing a sliver more moonlight to land on top of them. Claire took a moment to piece together the right words to convey her point, and Henry patiently waited and listened.

"It's… it's always the question, isn't it. Every time I go looking for another monster to face, I think, 'maybe this one's the one where I'm ready.' And, every time, the moment I show up, expecting to find some sort of inner peace and acceptance, all those cluttering thoughts just… disappear. It ends with me feeling scared for my own life and realizing I want to live. Every. Single. Time."

"And, that always begs the question…" she finished. "Why do I still care about any of that? What's keeping me from following through? That's the part that always stumps me, no matter how many times I repeat this song and dance."

Hey, this sounds a bit familiar…

"You want to hear my answer to that?" Henry asked.

"Not really, but… sure, why not. Haven't got any better ideas, anyways."

"At great risk of sounding like a complete tool, I've been there too."

Claire gave him a thoroughly unamused expression, but he took it in stride and continued his line of reasoning. "I know, I know. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn't just a quick walk in the park. I'm talking months of going in circles like that."

"A lot of it sort of just blurred together in hindsight, but… every so often an important thought crystallized that I could hold onto. Only one really comes to mind that I think fits here. And that was the realization that circumstances might be flipping that question around in our heads while we're busy carrying burdens."

Claire opened her mouth to dismiss the argument. Then, stopped. Then actually considered it for a moment under the lens of her old vocation and found some solidity to it. Maybe not fully convinced, but enough that she was willing to play Devil's advocate.

"So then, what's the real question?" she questioned.

Henry let out a sad smile. "Probably something along the lines of 'Is this really how I want to leave everything behind?' It would make sense, because every time I fell into that mental spiral, there'd always end up being some excuse or another of something to try first before I jumped for that."

He sighed. "Never could leave well enough alone, could I…"

Claire said nothing. Her thoughts were elsewhere, for the time being.

He let her have time to ponder. He'd needed it too, so it would make no sense to take it away from her now. The last leg of the journey was carried out in silence, but not an unpleasant one.

Once they arrived at the wall of webbing, everyone immediately became a lot more cautious. Henry knew from personal experience that the visible strands were only the tip of the iceberg. Countless more hair thin, nearly invisible threads would be blowing around for at least another five meters around the obvious ones, each of them being more adhesive than the last. Just to be sure, he brought their group to a complete halt ten meters away from anything remotely resembling a cobweb.

"So… now what?" Dee asked the group. "Should I start getting the skeletons ready, or…?"

"Keep them in reserve for now," he advised. "But do summon them and hide them off out of sight somewhere. The rest of you should find somewhere to hide as well, at least until I look like I'm about to get myself killed. If it's just me, then he won't expect as many surprises, I'm thinking."

"Okay…" Giselle could see the logic in it, but was a bit unclear on some important points. "So how do you plan on actually bringing this guy here, then?"

"Oh, that's the easy part," he assured. "I've kicked in his door so many times by now that I managed to boil it down to a three point process. Go get some good hiding spots, you'll see what I mean."

They followed his advice, taking shelter in the busted up remnants of what appeared to have once been a clothing store. A few half destroyed mannequins were still visible in the windows, and judging by the power chords and sudden drastic increase in humanoid silhouettes inside the building, Henry guessed that Dee was using them to their fullest potential hiding his army.

Nothing left to do but bite the bullet, now. He reached for the crappy pipe shotgun he'd brought with him and thumbed the safety pin out of its housing.

"Step one: Get everything ready that you want to get ready for when the man shows up." A quick look over his person confirmed that everything worth using was within arm's reach. "Check."

"Step two: Open up with something flashy, but not quite the most powerful tool at your disposal."

With one hand, he raised the short-barrel shotgun towards the webbing and squeezed the trigger. Less noise than he was used to, but definitely more kick. Blazing orange motes sped through the night air, illuminating the ground in front of him and sending Fire Domain crystal shrapnel out in a rough cone ahead of him.

Like dry kindling, the secreted threads went up almost immediately in a giant conflagration. The heat was enough to feel on his face, even from this distance.

"Step three: Wait for him to show up. In the scenario where he doesn't arrive right away, repeat Step Two until you've cut a path deep enough to find him."

This far from Westminster, it was likely that conditional statement would be getting a workout tonight. He'd have to wait for the flames to die down a bit before he could move forward, but how quickly everything was charring he didn't see a situation where that would take all that long to happen. As he watched the smoke drift up into the dim night sky, he made himself busy with a quick reload and noticed in the blaze…

"...Huh. Those are new."

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