She was holding a phone in one hand and a spiral-bound notebook in the other, her grip white-knuckled, her jaw set.

  I grabbed the Throwing Brick of Returning and threw it at her head.

  The brick hit Karen in the shoulder and bounced off with a sound like hitting stone. It rolled across the balcony and wedged under a bench. I tried to recall it. Nothing happened — the Return ability apparently needed line of sight or something. The brick was stuck, and I was empty-handed.

  Karen's head snapped toward her shoulder. Then toward me. Her eyes were wide, furious. She grabbed for her notebook with shaking hands.

  "I," she said, her voice rising, pen clicking like rapid gunfire, "am documenting that!"

  KAREN ABILITY: Written Record Current log: 1/4

  "She's writing down our attacks," Mira said from the railing.

  "Yeah. That's going to come back to bite us."

  Karen started walking again. Her heels slammed into the tiles. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.

  "Kitten Cowboy," I said.

  Kitten Cowboy went still, eyes locked on Karen, one paw on the holster—

  Karen didn't stop walking.

  She didn't even look at the cat.

  She raised the phone back to her ear, her hand trembling with barely contained rage.

  "Yes!" she snapped into the phone. "I need to speak with your supervisor immediately!"

  The phone made a sound. Not normal hold music. Every hold music that had ever existed, layered on top of each other into one chord of pure weaponized patience. It hit me in the chest and the head at the same time.

  COMPLAINT OVERWHELM: ACTIVE Presence: 4 → 2

  Cognition: 13 → 10 Effect: You are now acutely aware of every unresolved problem in your life. This is not helpful.

  It felt like being fifth in a line that never moved, watching the three people ahead of you each need increasingly complicated help.

  I shook it off. Mostly.

  Kitten Cowboy fired.

  The spectral round hit Karen in the chest. She absorbed it, her whole body jerking with the impact. The notebook flew open, the pen clicked frantically, and she scribbled something down with violent, jagged strokes.

  Written Record: 2/4

  "We need to stop attacking," Mira said.

  "I know—"

  Karen lowered the phone. Her voice cracked. "I have been waiting to speak to the manager of this facility for three years!"

  She pointed at me, her hand shaking.

  "You are going to be my manager!"

  The air around her did something wrong. The fluorescent lights flickered, died, came back on red. The notebook flew up from her hands, pages whipping open on their own.

  Then the notebook exploded.

  Pages ripped out and launched across the balcony — each one sharp-edged and glowing, the words on them made solid. The first page hit my forearm before I even saw it coming. Three-inch cut.

  "MOVE!" I shouted.

  Pages everywhere. Fast as thrown knives, moving like they were guided. The hare went flat on the floor instantly, Softstep Paw Wraps keeping it completely silent. The pages ignored it entirely.

  They were interested in me, Mira, and Kitten Cowboy.

  I grabbed a garbage bin lid. Three pages hit it with three sharp cracks that pushed me backward. My forearm was bleeding. Not badly, but it was real.

  Mira had gone up, above the barrage — the pages were moving in horizontal arcs. Kitten Cowboy rolled behind an overturned bench. One page caught the cat's ear on the way past.

  Karen hadn't moved. The notebook was still producing pages. She was breathing hard, eyes wild, hair coming loose.

  A page hit me in the side of the neck. Sharp edge, full force. My head snapped sideways, the lid went down, two more hit my chest before I got it back up.

  Bleeding from the neck now. Shallow, but painful.

  I had about four seconds between volleys to think.

  The lid was too small for a real shield. The brick was stuck. What I had on this balcony: the lid, a loose section of railing I'd felt shift when I leaned on it earlier, two knocked-over benches, some dead plants in square planters.

  I needed to get the notebook.

  "Mira," I said. "The notebook. Go."

  Mira was already moving. She came out of her altitude in a steep dive and hit the notebook with a Talon Slash — raking across its cover. The notebook recoiled like something with a survival instinct, and Karen's attention snapped completely onto Mira. The page barrage swung to track the imp.

  I ran straight at Karen.

  She saw me coming and turned, her eyes blazing. But I wasn't going for Karen. I grabbed the notebook out of the air with both hands and yanked.

  The notebook fought back. Actually fought — pulling against my grip, the pages snapping at my hands, edges cutting across my fingers. I yanked harder. It pulled harder. For two full seconds I was in a tug-of-war with a floating piece of stationery.

  Then I got it over the railing.

  I let go.

  The notebook fell into the atrium.

  Karen looked at me.

  I was breathing hard, bleeding from my hands now on top of everything else.

  This was, I realized, the exact moment Karen stopped trying to file a complaint and started trying to destroy me.

  Karen reached into her blazer pocket with shaking, frantic hands and produced a second pen. She uncapped it and wrote something in the air, the pen moving in sharp, angry slashes.

  Glowing blue-white letters appeared and hung there for half a second: POLICY VIOLATION.

  Then they detonated forward.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It hit me like a car door. I went off my feet and hit the balcony wall hard enough to knock the air out of me. My back screamed. The forearm cut tore wider. I slid down the wall and landed on one knee, and for a second the whole balcony tilted sideways.

  "Daniel!" Mira called.

  "Fine," I said. Which was objectively not true.

  Karen was already writing the next word, her breath coming in ragged gasps. UNACCEPTABLE formed in the air, letter by letter, glowing and building heat I could feel from six feet away.

  I grabbed the nearest thing—a dead potted plant—and threw it at the pen.

  The pot hit her hand. Not hard enough to knock the pen loose, but hard enough to jerk her aim. The word UNACCEPTABLE hung in the air half-formed for a second before the magic destabilized and the whole thing collapsed sideways into the wall with a crack that blew out the last working light fixture on the balcony.

  Darkness.

  Then the emergency lighting kicked in. Red, dim, from somewhere in the ceiling.

  Karen looked at her hand. Then at me. Then she rolled up her sleeves with jerky, violent movements.

  She came at me directly, crossing the balcony at a full sprint, face twisted in rage.

  "POCKET SAND!" I shouted, and picked up the second planter and swung it at her head with both hands.

  Karen took the hit. She clawed at her eyes, staggered one step, and let out a scream.

  I swung again. She went to one knee, gasping.

  Karen cleared her eyes. Her blazer was torn. Her shoulder pad was out of alignment and she didn't even notice. Her hair had come completely loose, wild around her face.

  I hit her a third time. The planter cracked in half.

  Karen went down to both hands on the floor.

  She stayed there for a moment. Breathing hard, uncontrolled. The ragged breathing of someone who has finally, finally broken.

  I stood over her. Holding half a planter. Bleeding from about four locations.

  Mira landed beside me. The hare appeared at my other side, ears flat. Kitten Cowboy was already there.

  She looked at me. Then at the half planter.

  Something in Karen's expression shifted. Just a small drop in temperature, the way a room changes when someone finally opens a window. Her breathing slowed slightly.

  Then she vanished.

  One moment she was there, sitting on the balcony floor, blazer torn and hair wild. The next moment — nothing.

  The air where she'd been sitting felt momentarily colder.

  ENCOUNTER: KAREN (Mini-Boss) — STATUS: CONCLUDED EXPERIENCE GAINED: 685 XP MALL SURVIVAL RATING: A- → S

  ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT CLOSED" Reward: 1

  LOOT DROPPED:

  "So You Want to Practice Witchcraft" — A Beginner's Guide to Spells and Incantations Quality: Uncommon | Auto-assigned: Mira Ashveil

  Price sticker history: $14.99 → $7.49 → $3.00 → handwritten: "Take it. It's free. I'm clearly not using it."

  The silence that followed Karen's disappearance was the kind of silence that follows an extremely loud thing suddenly stopping. The emergency lights continued their red pulsing, and somewhere in the mall's guts a ventilation system wheezed apologetically.

  I was still holding half a planter.

  "Did we win?" the hare asked tentatively.

  "I think so," I said, looking at where Karen had been.

  "That was terrifying," Mira said, landing on the railing. "She was terrifying. That woman had issues."

  "Yeah... she really fucked me up," I said.

  I tore up my tattered clothes—they'd been falling apart since I got to Hell anyway—and bandaged my wounds with the rags. Now I was fully nude except for my groin guards, my pink sash, and my destroyed boots.

  "YOU HIT HER WITH A PLANT," the hare said, with what might have been admiration.

  "Ha! She deserved it."

  "Oh! This is—" Mira said, examining the book.

  She flipped it open, her wings fluttering with excitement.

  "This is a spellbook," she said, her voice rising slightly. "An actual spellbook. I've been waiting for one of these since—Daniel, look at this!"

  She held it up. The cover was worn, the pages yellowed, but the text inside was clear. I could see diagrams, symbols, what looked like step-by-step instructions written in surprisingly straightforward language.

  "'So You Want to Practice Witchcraft,'" I read aloud. "Ah, very good. You wanted to use magic anyway. Learn something useful while you're at it."

  "It's perfect," Mira said, already flipping through the pages. "Look, there are sections on elemental thingies, defensive thingies, offensive thingies—oh, there's even a chapter on household cleaning magic."

  "That last one seems oddly specific."

  "It's comprehensive," Mira said without looking up. Her eyes scanned the pages rapidly, taking everything in. "This must have been someone's personal copy. There are notes in the margins. Oh, here's something useful—'Chapter Three: Your First Attack Spell.' This looks manageable."

  She settled onto the railing, the book open across her lap, and started reading with the kind of focus I'd only seen from her when she was organizing something or planning our next move. Her wings had gone still. Her tail flicked occasionally as she processed information.

  I sat down on the floor, my back against the wall, and let the adrenaline drain out of me. The cuts on my hands had stopped bleeding. The gash on my forearm was closing. Being human again came with the usual human problems.

  Kitten Cowboy walked over and sat next to me, its tiny body settling into a comfortable position. It looked up at me with those big golden eyes and made a soft "pew" sound that I interpreted as either sympathy or approval. Maybe both.

  "Thanks, buddy," I said, scratching behind its ears. The kitten leaned into the touch, purring.

  The hare hopped over and collapsed dramatically beside me. "I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO DIE."

  "Yeah yeah. Sure."

  Mira was muttering to herself now, her fingers tracing symbols in the air as she read. "'Circle clockwise, not counterclockwise. Common mistake. Results in spell casting backward into your own face.' Good to know."

  "How long is this going to take?" I asked.

  "Shh," Mira said, waving a hand at me without looking up. "I'm learning."

  I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. Just for a moment. Just to rest.

  I must have actually dozed off for a few minutes, because when I opened my eyes again, Mira was standing on the railing with the book closed beside her, her hands positioned in a very specific configuration in front of her chest.

  Her fingers were forming a triangle shape. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was steady, measured.

  "Mira?" I said.

  "Shh," she said again, more urgently this time. "I'm about to cast my first attack spell. Don't distract me."

  I shut up immediately.

  The hare had noticed too. It was sitting up, ears forward, watching with what I could only describe as intense curiosity mixed with preemptive concern.

  Mira's hands began to glow. Faintly at first—just a soft purple light emanating from her palms—then brighter. The light gathered between her fingers, condensing into a small sphere about the size of a marble.

  "Ignis minor," Mira said clearly, her voice steady. "Strike true."

  The purple sphere shot forward.

  It traveled about fifteen feet in a perfectly straight line, moving at roughly the speed of a thrown baseball, and hit the far wall with a small pop that echoed through the empty balcony.

  Where it hit, a scorch mark appeared. Small, maybe two inches across, but definitely a scorch mark.

  Mira opened her eyes and stared at the mark.

  Then she looked down at her hands.

  Then she let out a laugh—pure, delighted, slightly hysterical.

  "I did it!" she said, her voice cracking slightly. "I actually did it!”

  A notification appeared in my vision:

  PARTY MEMBER SKILL UNLOCK

  Mira Ashveil has learned: MINOR FLAME BOLT

  Type: Attack Spell (Ranged)

  Damage: Low

  Mana Cost: 10

  Effect: Fires a bolt of magical flame at a target. Can ignite flammable materials.

  Note: First spell learned. Additional spells can be learned through practice, study, or extremely stressful situations.

  "Congratulations," I said, standing up. "You're officially a witch now."

  "Well, I don't know about that," Mira corrected, but she was grinning. "But—what the hell. Okay. A witch." She looked down at the book. "There are twelve more spells in this book. Twelve. If I can learn even half of them—"

  "You'll be unstoppable," I finished.

  "No... useful," Mira said. "I can actually fight now."

  "You were already useful," I said.

  "I know. But now I'm more useful." She picked up the book and hugged it to her chest. "Thank you, Karen, for dropping this. Despite everything else."

  "ARE WE SERIOUSLY THANKING THE WOMAN WHO TRIED TO KILL US?" the hare asked. "I DON'T LIKE THIS MORAL AMBIGUITY."

  I checked the compass. It had updated again, the needle swinging decisively toward the far end of the second floor—past the management suite, past the shuttered cinema, toward what the original map had labeled as storage and employee areas.

  Kevin's Lair. The stockroom. The Crystal Chest.

  The thing we'd actually been hired to retrieve.

  "Right," I said, hefting the brick again. It had finally returned to my hand while I was resting, apparently having found its way out from under the bench. "One more boss. Then we get the chest, get out of here, get paid, and never speak of this mall again."

  "AGREED," the hare said emphatically.

  "Agreed," Mira echoed, though she was still smiling about her new spell.

  Kitten Cowboy holstered its revolver and walked ahead of us with the confident stride of someone who had been in worse situations and lived to tell about it. Which, considering everything we'd been through, was probably true.

  We followed the compass deeper into the second floor, past empty storefronts and collapsed ceiling tiles, past the management suite where Karen had first appeared, past the cinema with its dark marquee that still advertised movies from decades ago.

  The air was getting colder.

  At the end of the corridor was a door. It was metal, painted beige, with a small rectangular window at eye level and a sign that read: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY - STOCKROOM ACCESS.

  Below that, in marker: Kevin's in charge now. Don't bother him.

  The compass needle was pointing directly at the door, vibrating with what I chose to interpret as anticipation.

  "This is it," Mira said, landing on my shoulder.

  "This is it," I agreed.

  “THIS IS IT?!” the hare screamed.

  I reached for the door handle.

  "WAIT," the hare said. "SHOULDN'T WE HAVE A PLAN?"

  "The plan is: go in, fight Kevin, get the chest, leave."

  "THAT'S NOT A PLAN. THAT'S JUST A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS."

  "That's fair," I said, and opened the door.