Ten Knuckles stood before them in a line, staring forward with faces free of any features as shadows rippled across their entire bodies. Each one a master assassin in their own right, and each one deadlier than any senior assassin Asher had ever encountered. As his eyes went down the line, he took in a handful of their weapon choices.

  Longsword… Flail… Whip… The Head seemed to enjoy variety, as no two Knuckles had weapons even remotely similar to one another.

  “What will it be, Reaper?” the Head called out, their voice having grown in intensity once again, as though the mere presence of their Knuckles empowered it. “Will you run away and hide, never knowing when my Knuckles will come for you? Or will you fight valiantly to your last breath here and now, throwing away your life in a futile attempt at survival? A surprising, painful death? Or a desperate, entertaining one? I’ll admit, I’m eager to see the choice you make.”

  “I have another suggestion I think you’ll find interesting,” Asher said, pulling an arrow out from his rift and handing it to Samantha. “Samantha, if you would be so kind?”

  “Plan B?” Samantha asked, looking surprised even as she took the arrow and nocked it without thinking.

  “Plan B,” he nodded, taking a deep breath to prepare himself. The idea he had was a massive risk, with no actual guarantee of success. But it was one he thought was worth trying. Recalling was undoubtedly the safer option, but like the Head said, living the rest of their lives waiting for the ten Knuckles to slip out of the shadows and gut them was no way to live.

  The only way out of this was to show the Head that they were strong enough to fight back against them and their powerful skill.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Samantha muttered. Without warning, she turned, took careful aim, and fired the arrow directly at the ten waiting Knuckles. The unenchanted arrow flew across the grass, the metal head shining in the light of the rising sun as it traveled, on target to hit Owl in the center of his chest. Yet as it flew, it quickly became apparent that Samantha had actually aimed just slightly lower than it first seemed. Rather than hitting Owl, the arrow lodged into the dirt a few feet shy of the Knuckle. Based on the silence from the Head, Asher figured they were most likely a tad confused as to what was going on.

  He had no doubt they were far more confused when Asher Recalled to the Eternal Mark he’d just placed on the arrow, teleporting directly into the center of the throng of master assassins. Before a single one of them could attack or move to reposition themselves, he threw out a large Spatial Lock, trapping them all inside with him.

  And then yanked the entire space into the astral realm.

  Just as he’d hoped, while pulling the ten Knuckles with him into the astral realm was strenuous, it wasn’t nearly as bad as attempting to drag an actual living being with him into the other realm. Bringing a single additional person along for the ride burned through nearly a quarter of his entire reserves in an instant, but all ten of the Knuckles didn’t even cost that much added together. As the space within his Spatial Lock was dragged into a new realm, Asher crossed his fingers and prayed that the interaction between skills would work as he thought it would.

  In the end, he was half right.

  He’d hoped that by yanking the Knuckles into the astral realm he’d sever whatever strange connection bound them to the Head, destroying all ten of them instantly and giving him an easy win.

  Naturally, he wasn’t that lucky.

  The moment the ten Knuckles were pulled into the astral, they all flinched as one, their rippling shadow forms churning more chaotically as though they’d lost some portion of their control. But instead of vanishing, they turned and attacked Asher all at the same time, as if intuitively knowing killing him would bring them back to the material realm and reconnect them with their master. The good news was that their flawless sense of teamwork and ability to move as one unit had definitely been disrupted.

  The bad news was that Asher still had ten master assassins coming for his head all at once.

  Cursing, Asher fought like never before, focusing purely on defense as he desperately tried to use his daggers to deflect the rapid barrage of attacks. He deflected a stab from a longsword aimed for his heart, only to get cut by a jagged dagger across the thigh. He blocked some sort of thrown shuriken of all things, only to cry out in pain at the sensation of a whip taking out one of his eyes. Something snapped in his wrist as he desperately knocked aside the swing of a hammer aimed at his head, and two-halves of a spear were rammed into his stomach during the opening, ripped straight back out and causing blood and bile to go everywhere. Even with the ten Knuckles scrambling all over themselves and blocking their own strikes twice as often as they actually managed to land on him, trying to win against so many skilled assassins at once was a lesson in futility. And a rather painful one at that. Of course, Asher didn’t need to win.

  All he needed to do was survive.

  As his body was punished for his recklessness and he fought desperately just to stay alive, he quickly realized that even if his hope of the Knuckles simply vanishing hadn’t panned out, his greater theory had been correct. If he’d tried this on the material realm, the ten Knuckles would have torn him to shreds in an instant. The fact that they were getting in one another’s way was certainly helping, and how they now fought with a rabid intensity rather than their usual collected, calculating strikes didn’t hurt either. But the biggest impact was the rules of the astral realm that he’d forced the Knuckles to follow simply by bringing them here alongside him. Even the slightest of movements while within the astral realm cost a person their tritessence.

  The Knuckles were made of tritessence.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Even now, with one eye destroyed and suffering more wounds than he’d had in a long time, Asher laughed as he witnessed his plan come to fruition. The Knuckles already had shadows rippling violently across their forms, and combined with their rapid barrage of attacks, it was clear the astral realm was taking its due. With each strike of their weapons, the Knuckles grew a bit thinner and weaker. With each step they took, each lunge in his direction, their shadowy forms grew paler and more erratic. Asher didn’t know just how much tritessence each one of the Knuckles had stored within their bodies. But however much it was, it wasn’t nearly enough to survive a battle within the astral realm.

  The Knuckle with the massive hammer that had nearly brained him three times now was the first one to go. Swinging around such a large weapon clearly took a toll on the Knuckle, and it wasn’t long before it was so thin that it looked like Asher was being attacked by some sort of shadow skeleton. As the Knuckle attempted to raise its hammer overhead one last time, the rippling shadows making up its body finally gave out, and the entire thing dispersed into a mist of black particles that vanished near instantly.

  By that point, Asher was barely still clinging to life. He was so focused on trying to keep the many weapons away from his vitals that he almost missed the hammer-wielding Knuckle vanish entirely. But seeing the first of them fade away gave him a renewed vigor, and he grinned as he shrugged off a large chunk of his forearm being torn off by a Knuckle wearing some sort of clawed-gloves, choosing instead to deflect a thin arrow aimed for his heart.

  The second and third Knuckles vanished practically together, removing the whip and spears from the equation as Wolf and his sibling ceased to exist. The fourth followed shortly after, which Asher was grateful for, as the flurry of shuriken were rather tricky to keep blocking amidst everything else.

  On the one hand, with each Knuckle that used up the last of its tritessence and fully dispersed into the astral realm, Asher had one less combatant and weapon he had to deal with. Yet on the other hand, it meant there were less bodies to clog up the assassins after his head, and the remaining ones were more easily able to land their attacks on him as they refused to let up.

  As he barely managed to block the flail aimed for his neck, Asher took an incredibly thin arrow that was practically the size of a long needle at this point to the gut. Attempting to actually strike back against the Knuckle with the claws cost him as the one with the jagged daggers drove them into his side, tearing them straight up and through him, no doubt shredding quite a number of rather important organs in the process. The pain and simple fatigue of fighting so desperately within the astral that was slowly draining his energy as well caused Asher to react too slowly to the Knuckle with twin shortswords who moved to drive the points of each into his heart. Yet just before the attack could land, the already-thin Knuckle became the fifth one to run out of tritessence. Swinging around two swords at once proved to be too energy intensive as its blades dispersed into harmless black motes of energy just before they could pierce his flesh, and Asher laughed as the ten Knuckles were now down to five.

  At this point, he was in pretty rough shape. He was bleeding from more wounds than he could count, he’d stopped trying to guess which of his organs had been destroyed, and he was running dangerously low on energy. But at the same time, the five remaining Knuckles looked horribly emaciated, as though they were at risk of dispersing into black motes any second. It was a battle of attrition. A question of if the remaining assassins could finish him off before they ran out of tritessence and ceased to exist.

  And while he might not be quite as skilled as any one of the ten Knuckles...

  Asher was very hard to put down.

  The one with the flail was next to go, dispersing before it could even get off another attack as it tried to push past the claw-wielder. Jagged daggers managed to stab into Asher’s leg one last time before that Knuckle vanished, quickly followed by the one with the claws as it tried to claw out Asher’s other eye. A practical wave of black particles washed over him as Knuckle after Knuckle dispersed in short order, leaving him standing on shaking feet in a sizable puddle of his own blood.

  There was only one Knuckle left.

  Asher tried to laugh as he took in the skeletal body of Owl standing across from him, but the laugh quickly turned into a cough, spraying even more blood across the bleached floor of the astral realm. One of the assassins had partially carved through the side of his neck at one point, narrowly missing his jugular and almost putting him down for good halfway through the fight. Seeing as he couldn’t laugh, he flashed Owl a wide grin instead.

  “Figures you’d be last,” he said, watching Owl as it stood there, unmoving. Seeing as Owl fought with a bow and arrow, it had been the only Knuckle to stay in one spot, not wasting energy moving around. Each arrow Owl had shot had been smaller and weaker than the last, and if Asher had to guess, he figured whatever tritessence had been allotted to form Owl’s arrows had finally run out. Without ammunition and cut off from its master, the poor construct didn’t even know what to do.

  Of course, unfortunately for it, its own body was built out of shifting shadows, constantly moving about without pause. The effect, which was more than a little unnerving on the material realm, was an actual death sentence for it here on the astral. With every movement of its flickering form, Owl grew just the tiniest bit weaker as the astral realm took its due. Realizing the battle was over, Asher sheathed his daggers, wincing at the pain moving his arms caused him.

  “I know you probably don’t really understand anything I’m saying, cut off from your master like this. But in the slim chance you do understand or remember what happened here when your master inevitably reforms you after all this, I want to make one thing quite clear.” Asher paused, wondering if this was even worth the slight energy moving his lips cost him. Then he remembered Wilma and Helpha, and he decided it couldn’t hurt.

  “Our fight? Our anger? It’s all with the Head. Not you guys. We know you’re just following the Heads orders. You’ve probably never been cut off from them before like this. Never been separated from their voice in your ear telling you what to do. Well… this is me explaining that you guys have another choice beyond being their servants until they finally croak. You don’t have to follow their orders if you don’t want to.”

  Trying to convince a skill to go against its master was almost certainly pointless, but Asher figured it couldn’t hurt to try. If they could separate even just one of the Knuckles from the Head’s control, it would make their inevitable battle against them that much easier in the future. Asher waited a moment to see if Owl would say anything in response to his claims, but the Knuckle remained frozen, its body little more than black wires now as it somehow held on for far longer than any of its siblings.

  “Maybe just think about it,” Asher finished with lamely, unable to put much more thought into his words. The darkness on the edge of his vision was beginning to grow a bit more distracting, and the way the world started slowly spinning a few seconds ago wasn’t doing him any favors. He’d died enough times now to realize what was rapidly approaching, but he held out as long as he could. Pulling a potion of Lesser Restoration from his rift while in the astral would burn through what little energy he had left, and he didn’t want to drop his skill until Owl was gone.

  The two of them stared at one another for a few long, final seconds. It might just have been the swimming of his vision as he began to lose consciousness, but Asher could have sworn he saw the faintest of nods from the Knuckle’s thin frame. He didn’t know if it was the shifting shadows of its form, or the nod that may or may not have been his imagination, but either way, Owl finally burned through the very last dregs of its energy. As the last Knuckle turned into a wave of black particles, quickly dissipating through the astral, Asher let out a sigh of relief before finally dropping his skills and collapsing to the ground.

  The last thing he saw before dying was Moxy and Samantha running toward him.

  Patreon

  Discord