Chapter 114: Hard Light

Chapter 114: Chapter 114: Hard Light

The plaza in front of the Taeyang tower was empty, and so were the streets beyond it, where the new city ended and the low tiled roofs of the old city began.

"They turned off the lamps for us," Sylvia said quietly, as they crossed toward the bridge. "Every one between here and the river."

"Which means they know what you can do in the dark."

"Which means they’re stupid." She let her shadow spread a little around her feet, testing it. "Nobody fights me in the dark and wins."

"Then they aren’t planning to fight you in the dark," Donald said.

They had gone perhaps fifty meters into the first narrow street of the old city when he found out he was right.

Lights came on all at once on the rooftops on both sides of the street, a dozen of them, white and so bright that Donald had to throw his arm over his eyes. They were mana floodlights, the kind used at dig sites, mounted on tripods along the edges of the roofs and pointed straight down into the street, and in their glare every shadow around Sylvia’s feet shrank to nothing.

She swore and staggered, as if someone had pulled a rug out from under her.

[Warning: Shadow Sovereign suppressed. Ambient darkness: 3%.]

Men in black coats came out of the doorways at both ends of the street, eighteen of them, moving fast and in step. They carried short steel batons and bundles of paper tags in their free hands, and none of them carried a blade.

Donald opened [Valuation Eye] on the nearest of them, then on the one walking at the front.

[Target: Taeyang Enforcer]

[Rank: C-Rank. Level: 38.]

[Item: Binding Tags (x6). Effect: Suppresses mana flow on contact for 60 seconds.]

[Target: Choi Jin-ho, Enforcement Captain]

[Rank: B-Rank. Level: 49.]

[Class: Lamplighter.]

[Status: Oath-bound to Taeyang Guild. Orders: Take the woman alive. Do not kill the Investor.]

So that was the price, Donald thought. Paimon didn’t need him dead. He only needed something Donald would pay to get back.

"They want you," he said to Sylvia, "alive."

"Then they’re going to be disappointed."

"Not in this light." He moved so that his back was against hers. "Stay close to me, and watch the street, not the lights."

Choi raised one hand, and the enforcers rushed them from both ends.

Sylvia met the first two before they could touch her. Even without her shadow she was faster than any of them, and she slid under the first baton and put her knee into the man’s stomach, then spun and drove the hilt of her dagger into the second man’s temple so that he dropped without a sound. The third got a binding tag onto her sleeve. Before it could reach her skin, she cut the sleeve away and kicked him back into the men behind him.

Donald took the other end of the street. The Type-7 Pile Bunker on his left forearm hummed as he lifted it, and when the first enforcer swung at him, he caught the baton on the gauntlet and fired. The piston slammed out with a crack that echoed off the old stone walls, and the man flew backward into two of his friends and took all three of them down.

But there were too many of them, and they weren’t trying to win. They were trying to separate him from Sylvia, and every time Donald stepped forward to hit one, two more slid into the gap behind him.

He looked up at the floodlights, squinting, and then down at the street, and at last he saw it.

The lights were so bright that there were no soft shadows anywhere in the street, but they hadn’t taken all the shadows away. Under every object the light touched, there was a small, sharp, black one. There was one beneath each window ledge, one behind each rain barrel, and one at the feet of every enforcer in the street, cast straight down by the lights on the roofs above them.

The brighter the light, the darker those shadows were.

"Sylvia," he said. "Look at their feet."

She looked, and he heard her laugh under her breath.

Donald stepped forward into the shadow of the enforcer in front of him, and used it.

"[Shade Step]."

[Mana: 123 → 83.]

He came out of the shadow of a man on the far side of the street, behind three enforcers who were still turning toward the place where he had been, and he swept the legs from under the first one and hit the second with the gauntlet before either of them understood what had happened.

Behind him, Sylvia had dropped into the thin black shadow under a rain barrel. A moment later she came up out of the shadow of an enforcer twenty meters down the street, cut the strap of his tag bundle, and pulled the tags into her storage before he could throw them.

"Sixty meters," she called. "Even in this light, I still have sixty meters."

Choi saw what was happening and shouted an order, and the enforcers began moving away from the walls and into the middle of the street, where the lights hit them from every side and their shadows shrank to almost nothing.

That was clever, but it took time, and Donald didn’t give them any. The cooldown counted down in the corner of his eye, and when it reached zero he stepped again, into the shadow of a window ledge directly beneath one of the floodlights.

[Mana: 83 → 43.]

He came out on the roof, in the dark patch behind the floodlight where its own beam couldn’t reach, one meter from the tripod.

The enforcer guarding it had time to look surprised before Donald hit the floodlight with the back of his gauntlet. It burst in a shower of glass and white sparks, and half the street on that side dropped into darkness.

Below him, Sylvia’s shadow came back.

It didn’t creep back slowly. It poured out from under her all at once and ran up the walls on both sides of the street, and the enforcers caught in it were suddenly struggling as the dark wrapped around their ankles and held them fast.

[Shadow Sovereign: restored. Ambient darkness: 41%.]

"Lights," Choi shouted. "Bring the lantern!"

Two of his men came running out of a doorway with something between them, a heavy iron box with glass sides, and when they set it down in the street, Choi put his hand on top of it. Light came out of the box in every direction. It wasn’t white like the floodlights but a pale, cold gold, and wherever it touched Sylvia’s shadow, the shadow hissed and pulled back.

[Target: Shadow-Eater Lantern]

[Grade: A-Rank Artifact.]

[Effect: Destroys shadows within 25 meters. Powered by the bearer’s mana.]

Sylvia’s shadow shrank back to her feet. Donald stood on the roof with forty-three mana left, which was enough for one more jump, and looked down at the ring of cold light growing in the middle of the street.

That was when he summoned Nyx.

The black cat came out of the air beside him with her wings already spread, and she looked down at the street, at the lantern and at the man with his hand on it, and her eyes narrowed.

"The captain," Donald said. "Take his mana."

Nyx dropped off the roof.

She went straight through the edge of the gold light, and it didn’t touch her, because she wasn’t a shadow. She landed on Choi’s shoulder and sank her claws in, and the [Phantasmal Siphon] took hold.

[Phantasmal Siphon: Target Choi Jin-ho.]

[Mana drained: 60. Transferred to Investor.]

[Investor Mana: 43 → 103.]

Choi screamed and reached for the cat, but his other hand was still on the lantern, and the lantern was still drinking his mana too. The gold light flickered, then dimmed, and began to fail.

Donald stepped one last time.

"[Shade Step]."

[Mana: 103 → 63.]

He came out of the thin shadow under the lantern itself, directly at Choi’s feet, and drove the Pile Bunker up into the iron box with everything he had.

The lantern burst apart. Its glass sides blew outward, and the gold light went out, and the force of it threw Choi off his feet and onto his back on the stones.

Then the dark came back into the street for good.

Sylvia didn’t waste it. She moved through the shadows from man to man, faster than Donald could follow, and every time she came up out of the dark, another enforcer went down. Some she knocked unconscious, and the rest she wrapped in shadow and left on the ground, unable to move. It took her less than a minute.

When it was over, Donald walked to the middle of the street, where Choi was trying to sit up, and crouched beside him.

"You were told to take her alive," Donald said.

Choi looked up at him and didn’t answer. There was blood at the corner of his mouth.

"Who gave the order?"

"The Chairman," Choi said at last. His voice was rough. "Through the Chairman’s ring. The woman would be held in the tower until you sold." He coughed. "We were told you’d pay. Everybody always pays."

"Not this time," Donald said, and stood up.

[Combat Complete.]

[Enemies defeated: 18 Taeyang Enforcers, 1 Enforcement Captain.]

[EXP Gained: 9,400.]

[Level 27: 71% → 88%.]

Sylvia came back to his side, wiping her dagger on the coat of an unconscious enforcer before she put it away.

"The hotel is Taeyang’s," she said. "The banks won’t touch your money, and our airship can’t fly. Where exactly are we going to sleep tonight?"

Before Donald could answer, headlights turned into the end of the street.

It was a small gray car, old and plain, the kind nobody would look at twice, and it stopped beside them with the engine still running. The driver’s window rolled down.

Han Seo-yeon was behind the wheel. She had pulled a plain dark coat over her silk dress, and her hair had come loose on one side.

"Get in," she said. "Quickly, please. I only have about forty minutes before he notices I’m gone."