Gaius was too deep in the pit of panic together with Esven to notice the table behind him overturning. He did hear Victor's savage battle cry as the northerner vaulted through the window with his axe at the ready.

  The alef, busy gnawing on a lamp post, didn't react to the huge man charging at it right until the axe cleaved it in half around the waist.

  Victor's victorious yell turned into a scream of pain when the alef's separated top half grabbed his leg. The creature's metal teeth chomped down on his flesh.

  That pain, while certainly unpleasant, was far from debilitating. It only served to make the northerner angrier. He started bringing his axe down again and again, scattering bits of alef all over the street.

  When he finally stopped, the creature was reduced to an unrecognizable silvery puddle. Only then did Victor limp back to the store.

  Inside, Alessia slapped Isabella's hand away and started to rub a salve into her husband's leg.

  "Now I got one too," Victor said to Gaius through gritted teeth as the salve was accelerating his recovery. It clearly wasn't a pleasant experience.

  "See? You couldn't do that with a sword," Gaius said. His attention was back with the window where he watched distant signs of heated battle disturbing the usual stillness of an alef night.

  Gaius felt Isabella's hand land on his shoulder.

  "I think it's safe to say that Shadow smuggled alefs inside the town. But other than their refusal to die, they don't seem that tough."

  "That's how they get you." Gaius made sure to raise his voice for everyone to hear. "One moment they don't even notice you, the next, they're inhumanly fast and want nothing other than to see you dead. They work in groups. And they have these jagged disks they like to throw. Make sure you avoid those."

  Healed and once again ready to go, Victor joined the two of them by the window. "What's the plan? We go out and don't stop until we drive them back?"

  "Simple and to the point. Sounds good to me," Isabella said.

  "If we have to." Esven was tinkering with his arbalest off to the side.

  For the first time in a bit, Gaius moved away from the window to get a good look at his companions.

  "Have you all gone mad all of a sudden?" he asked. "I didn't gather you here to go on an adventure. We're here to make sure that whatever happens tonight, my store sees the morning sun. Hopefully, with all of us still breathing. Shut the window and assume defensive positions, fools."

  Isabella kicked the nearest chair, overturning it. "Oh, come on. Not this again. Whatever is happening right now, it's big. We need to be out there. And among us all, you know most about alefs."

  "This town has its guardsmen. They've been dealing with alefs just fine until now. It's also packed to the point of tearing with adventurers. I'm sure they can handle a few metal zombies."

  "You're right about that, Guy," Esven said as he tested the aim on his arbalest. "The town has its guards. And you're looking at one of them. I must be out there with my men. So stop whining and let's go already."

  "Go, then." Gaius pointed at the exit.

  "I'm coming with him," Isabella said after finishing a quick prayer.

  "Really? You're just going to leave me here?"

  "I'd much prefer that you came along. But I'm not going to force you. The rest, we can discuss later."

  "If there even is later for any of us."

  "Exactly. Sticking together gives us our best chance of success." With others around, and a few more alefs gathering outside, Isabella abandoned her usual playful approach to persuasion. "Last chance, you coming or not?"

  "I don't want success. I'd rather stay alive. So, no," Gaius said.

  He spotted a slight twitch in Isabella's eye, like she was fighting hard against saying what she really wanted to. He had a pretty good idea what that was. His lack of enthusiasm for death-defying activities was a big point of contention between the two of them.

  "Come on, let's get upstairs and check our defenses," Gaius said to Victor.

  The northerner indicated no desire to follow that order. His axe already tasted the silvery alef blood, and the night was still young.

  "I think I'd rather help the constable," Victor said. And with that Gaius knew he didn't have enough money to convince the northerner otherwise.

  Alessia followed that up with a simple half-shrug that expressed quite a lot of things for such a simple gesture. She saw the merit in Gaius' plan, and even though the idea of working alongside Isabella was deeply unpleasant to her, where Victor went, she went. This wasn't a tough decision for her.

  "Fine, go. Get yourself killed. Like I care."

  That ended the discussion. Gaius watched the others dispatch the passive alefs outside, closed the window, and went upstairs.

  He toyed with the idea of rousing the imp and maybe spending the night in the relative safety of his lava pool. There was a patch of mostly solid hellstone that didn't have any lava on it, he remembered. But that was a momentary lapse in judgment. For a mortal to spend any time in hell without becoming an immediate target of all sorts of nasty things, said mortal had to be a mage of considerable power. And Gaius was no mage, as he so often insisted.

  Gaius planted himself on the stairs from where he observed the front door. It wasn't long until he felt a certain deep mournful chill emanating from both within and without. At first, he thought it was guilt, a feeling he wasn't too accustomed to, on account of it being detrimental to his profession.

  But then, he recognized that chill as something else entirely.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Gaius sprang up, his axe at the ready and coated with a warm flickering flame.

  A gust of wind came out of nowhere, putting the flame out.

  A familiar specter oozed through a wall and began floating within arm's reach from Gaius. Otherworldly whisper squeezed itself inside his skull.

  "You wound me. Gaius, is it?" the specter said. "I was under the impression the two of us had an understanding after our previous encounter. You had your little side-business of selling artifacts? I let it slide. We all need to eat, after all. You supplied Martinez with his happy mushrooms? That was worse, but you had no way of knowing I was making a play for the bishop. I let that one slide too. I'm not unreasonable, as you see. So why do you take every opportunity to spoil my plans? You ally yourself with the very people you should be staying away from. You ruin my big surprise, and then you hound my people all over town. Truly, there is no honor among thieves. Do tell me, why couldn't you just keep your head down and leave this town a rich man?"

  "I have no idea what you're talking about, ghost," Gaius said.

  This wasn't true. Shadow was missing some details, but he could see the picture perfectly fine. And that terrified Gaius. This specter, this Shadow of Mallia, knew all about who he was and what he was doing in Siembra. To say that complicated things would be the understatement of the century.

  "It doesn't matter if you want to keep playing games. Your fate is already sealed, thief. I just don't get you. And I hoped you would at least extend me the courtesy of explaining yourself, now that you so foolishly abandoned the one who would protect you from my ire."

  "You know, you're much too coherent for a ghost, Shadow, or whoever you really are. Seriously, you want to talk nonsensical, let's first discuss your name. How vain and self-aggrandizing do you have to be to call yourself Shadow?"

  If Gaius got a gold piece every time he got himself in a seemingly unwinnable situation, he wouldn't need the Caladonia job in the first place.

  Their probing back and forth allowed Gaius to conclude that regardless of who Shadow really was, his spectral qualities were undeniable. And specters had one thing they hated above all else. Bright light.

  Even as he was talking, Gaius conjured up a simple light spell. The thing refused to materialize at first, forcing Gaius to pour all of his reserves into this one simple cantrip.

  But once the light orb was ready, its brilliance could rival even Isabella's magics. It momentarily blinded Gaius, while the specter shrieked, his hands instinctively clawing for the orb in vain attempts to destroy it.

  Gaius knew he couldn't keep this radiant intensity for long. He booked it. First to his room, where he grabbed the tablets he'd stolen. The specter indicated that he knew about them. Gaius wasn't taking any chances there. With the two rectangles tucked under his shirt, he sighed, kicked the window shutters open, and jumped out.

  He cushioned his fall with a quick roll and when he regained the sense of up and down, looked around to try and figure out where his companions had gone.

  In the end, he followed the trail of alef remains, dodging the occasional straggler, right until he heard the unmistakable sounds of battle.

  Isabella and Victor were at the front, meeting the advance of a wave of alefs. These ones weren't all confused and docile. They were out for blood.

  The shield surrounding Isabella was clearly beyond the creatures' understanding. They kept throwing themselves at her, where they were promptly cut down by the knight's saber.

  Victor didn't have the luxury of an impenetrable divine bubble. The northerner had to rely on his leather armor, high tolerance for pain, and wide, sweeping swings of his oversized axe.

  Even when a swing wasn't enough to cleave an alef in two, there was at least enough power behind it to send the creature back and clear some room.

  Esven used this room to pierce alefs with his bolts and coat them in all sorts of volatile liquids that reacted violently with the contents of the glowing orbs he chucked right after. After his encounter with the assassins, he now had an excessive amount of those hanging off his belt.

  That left Alessia, who mostly made sure that Victor was always topped off and good to go. But on top of that, wherever she went, things were starting to go bad for alefs. Their mechanical parts refused to move or straight up went haywire, crashing into everything around them. The creatures stumbled and fell for seemingly no reason, while all the attacks directed at them were going straight past their defenses and finding their marks.

  As she moved through the fight, the alefs somehow paid the witch no attention, even though she was such an easy target without any armor or even a weapon.

  Despite their losses, the alefs weren't relenting. Gaius wasn't sure they knew how. They just kept coming and coming from all the side-streets and dark alleys.

  With how things ended back at the store, Gaius needed his arrival to leave a mark. He waited for the moment when Victor was about to get jabbed with a metal spike and Alessia was too far to intervene.

  Maybe the northerner could handle a stab like that, maybe he couldn't. Gaius didn't leave that up to chance. His arrival obscured by the night's darkness and the chaos of combat, he appeared seemingly out of nowhere at Victor's side. His handaxe was out, this time enchanted not with any element but with pure sharpness to the point where the usually rusty head was giving off a noticeable glow.

  The axe descended on the alef's extended limb, chopping it clear off. The second strike separated the creature's head, and only then, Victor's mighty backswing felled the disoriented body.

  "Changed your mind, eh? Good," Esven yelled out before he burst into laughter after exploding a cluster of alefs with a fiery orb.

  Having spotted Gaius, Isabella shifted the grip on her saber and imbued it with divine power.

  The blade turned the color of reflected moonlight. Isabella's movements went from simple yet competent sword fighting to that gracious flow with which she fought the assassins. Just like back then, each time the blade closed a full circle in the air, it left behind an afterimage that was just as sharp as the blade itself.

  Alefs paid no heed to these incorporeal images, running into them with no regard for their safety. Before long, Isabella's blade created a barrier around their group, allowing everyone a moment to catch their breath.

  "And you said swords were no good," Victor said, as alefs kept getting cut down by the spectral blades.

  "I meant no good for you, big guy," Gaius replied, watching Isabella approach the two of them.

  "What made you reconsider?" Isabella asked.

  She knew him too well to buy a line about a sense of duty, so Gaius simply said, "Don't really want to discuss it right now," postponing this unpleasant conversation.

  Lucky for him, Isabella's spectral blades weren't intended to last long and were already losing their glow.

  "What's the situation?" Gaius asked to change the subject.

  "We've run into a few of my men," Esven said. "The entire town is overrun, but we're holding for now. If there's one thing all those adventurers are good for, it's getting ambushed at night. They're tipping the scales in our favor, but as you see, these buggers are inexhaustible. They just keep coming, and Nova help us if we run out of firepower before their numbers start thinning."

  To illustrate his point, Esven took inventory of his remaining bombs and special bolts. He didn't have that many left after the initial clash.

  "So why exactly are you throwing yourselves at them?" Gaius asked.

  "My men tell me their source is somewhere down this street, just by the crags. That's where we're headed, but the blighters aren't making it easy."

  Gaius looked up ahead and saw the Siembran basin turn into the Gleamspire mountains in about a mile.

  "And you're not gathering every guard, every priest, and adventurer you can to storm the damn place why?"

  "Mallia's tits, if I did, I'd be feeding the town to those beasts."

  "I assured the captain, he had all the power he needed to bust through these creatures," Isabella said.

  "And what's your order's stance on dumb fucking ideas, dear?" Gaius asked. "Don't answer that."

  "I can do it, you just watch. Both me and your words."

  "I'm sure you can. And then when you have to deal with whatever is driving these things and you're all out of divine wrath, then what?"

  "Trust me, there's plenty of divine wrath to go around."

  "I'm thinking there's more going on here than a simple disagreement about tactics," Esven butted in. His eyes were fixed on the sea of alefs standing between them and the mountains. Behind Isabella's barrier, the creatures were only growing in numbers.

  "You're right, now's not the time," Gaius said. "Just save your strength and follow me," he added.

  Isabella, angry as she was, opted to not complicate matters further. Her nod indicated to the others that Gaius was in charge for now.

  Story Facts - Chapter 26