Chapter 156: The Debt Prison

Varek attacked before Damien’s last word finished leaving his mouth.

Headsman’s Reach tore the executioner’s blade through the ruined transport in a single stroke. Damien threw himself beneath the grey edge and felt the pull of it drag at his cloak. It sheared the upper half of the prison checkpoint clean away and kept going, straight through the outer barrier, as if the wall had never stood there at all.

➤[Varek Morn: Level 59]

➤[Designation: Murderer]

➤[Player Killer activated]

➤[All attributes increased by 10% against the designated Murderer]

This time Varek didn’t test Damien’s guard with the second cut. He’d learned that lesson already. He aimed instead for Grace, who stood with her back half-turned, shielding the rescue officers behind her.

Damien caught the blade on the flat of the First Blood Dagger. Nightglass Armour screamed under the impact, a sound like a saw biting stone, and his boots carved three metres through rubble before the grey edge stopped, trembling, a hand’s width from Grace’s throat.

"Prisoners," Damien said.

Grace understood immediately. Understanding it did not make her happy about it.

"Doctor Smoke, with me. Daria, open the cells. Hamari, take the contract anchors."

"And him?" Grace tipped her chin toward Varek.

"Mine."

The team scattered into the smoke.

Varek watched them go without moving to follow. "Again you send the others toward the real objective while you stay behind."

"You wanted me."

"I wanted to know if the first fight was luck."

"You killed Rook while he was protecting wounded people." Damien’s grip tightened on the dagger. "This isn’t a duel."

"Everything between two blades is a duel."

Damien used Shadow Dash.

He chose the wreck’s narrow shadow, appeared beneath Varek’s extended reach, and opened a line across the murderer’s thigh. Varek reversed the massive sword faster than something its size should have allowed. The pommel caught Damien’s temple and white light swallowed his vision whole.

They separated, breathing hard, the checkpoint burning quietly between them.

Beyond the checkpoint, Grace tore the first cell door from its frame with both hands. Red prisoner contracts flared to life along the corridor, one after another, like a string of warning lamps. Each door carried its own penalty stitched into the light: death on forced entry, memory loss on escape, Class extraction if the seal broke.

"Do not touch another one," Doctor Smoke said, and for once nobody argued with her.

Daria pressed her palm flat against the floor. Elemental rings spread out through the prison’s foundation, reading metal and heat and air and the damp that had crept into the stone over years of use. "The doors share a control spine. It runs under Level Five."

Hamari’s pistol reshaped itself into a long-barrelled mana rifle with a sound like knuckles cracking. Stillpoint Lenses picked the tiny anchor bolts out of the walls, one after another.

"I count nine. There are more."

"Nineteen," Damien said through the channel, his voice tight around something that might have been pain. "Eli marked Room Nineteen on Level Seven. Follow his route. Not the signs."

Neva had reversed every direction plate in the prison after taking him. The stair marked toward Level Five actually climbed toward Level Three. A service hatch labelled WASTE DISPOSAL led down instead.

Grace laughed under her breath. "Of course he found the ugly door and called it the interesting one."

Varek drove Damien through a concrete partition, and for a moment there was only dust and the taste of it in his mouth.

The gap between their Levels was not something Damien could argue away. Player Killer and the strength he kept hidden closed part of the distance, but Varek had years behind every motion, skills built around nothing but ending a single life with each swing, and Damien felt every one of those years in his teeth when their weapons met.

➤[Condemned Step]

A grey mark bloomed beneath Damien’s feet. Wherever he ran, Varek’s next attack would still find the mark.

So he didn’t run.

He waited, and let Varek believe the waiting meant fear.

Varek swung. At the last possible instant, Damien summoned Doppelganger. An identical Damien appeared standing on the mark, and the executioner’s blade passed clean through its chest. It held together long enough to catch the sword with both hands anyway, which was, Damien thought distantly, either very brave or exactly as stupid as a copy of himself deserved to be.

One minute of existence. A borrowed face. A fraction of his strength. It was enough confusion.

The real Damien came in from Varek’s blind side and drove the dagger into the old wound beneath his ribs.

Varek roared and let go of the trapped sword to swing a bare fist instead. Damien took the blow on Nightglass’s shoulder plate and heard something under it crack. He held on anyway, twisted the blade, and forced Varek backward step by grinding step.

"You brought a copy to fight for you," Varek spat through his teeth.

"It’s a skill."

"A coward’s skill."

"Useful, then."

The Doppelganger kicked the sword down the ramp before it dissolved, and Varek killed it with one backhand almost as an afterthought. Black fragments scattered and faded over the next twenty-eight seconds, and Damien used every one of them to put distance between himself and the rescue teams still moving somewhere above.

Varek followed exactly where he wanted him to.

On Level Seven, Daria found the control spine buried in the wall, hundreds of contract pages folded into metal like pressed flowers. Destroying it would trigger every one of them at once. Freezing it would only buy them less than a minute.

"I need the authority seal," she said.

Mina activated Vera’s copied seal from Central Command, and it crossed the link and touched the spine through Daria’s mana like a key finding its lock.

➤[Regional authority recognised]

➤[Scheduled review postponed]

Every execution timer on the level gained five minutes, all at once, a held breath released.

Hamari fired nineteen shots in quick succession, each one threading a bolt without so much as brushing the page beside it. The spine came loose from the doors with a sound like a held note finally breaking.

Grace tore open Room Nineteen.

Eli sat against the far wall with one eye swollen shut, both wrists bound, and a piece of charcoal worn down to a stub in his hand. He’d covered the floor around him in maps, dozens of them, scratched into stone and dust alike.

He looked up at Grace like she was late for something.

"You took the long way."

She hauled him up by the front of his prison shirt and hugged him hard enough to change the colour of his face.

"That’s less medically sound than the cell was," he managed.

Doctor Smoke pried them apart before Eli could turn any further shades of purple. His ribs were broken, his mana channels damaged, and part of his Pathfinder Class temporarily sealed. He was, by every measure that mattered, alive and fully capable of complaining about it.

"Where’s Damien?" he asked.

Somewhere three floors above them, a grey line of light cut through the ceiling and vanished.

"Being subtle," Hamari said, deadpan, and didn’t look up from her rifle.

Damien reached the lowest excavation chamber with Varek two steps behind him. Not a single prisoner waited there, only unfinished tunnels and the kind of dark that swallowed torchlight before it travelled three feet.

Varek entered without his sword. Grey energy folded itself into a shorter blade around his right hand instead, humming faintly at the edges.

"You can’t escape this level," he said.

"I’m not escaping."

That was the difference from their first fight, and Damien felt it settle into his chest like a decision already made. At the clearing site he’d carried civilians and officers and a collapsing route on his back. Here, everyone he cared about was moving away from this room under people he trusted completely. He didn’t need to prove anything to Varek. He only needed to make sure the man never followed them out.

Varek used Headsman’s Reach with the energy blade this time, faster and tighter than the sword had ever allowed.

Damien stepped inside the line rather than away from it. The edge caught Duskveil Mantle and opened his left side in a long, burning stripe, but he didn’t retreat from it. His shoulder drove into Varek’s chest and Hidden Strength threw the bigger man back into a support pillar hard enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling.

Varek tried to shape another blade around his wrist.

Damien pinned the casting hand to the pillar with his dagger before the light could finish forming.

Varek headbutted him once, twice, and blood ran into Damien’s eyes and turned the whole chamber the colour of rust. On the third attempt Damien shifted his weight half a step and let Varek’s skull find the concrete edge instead of his own face.

"Rook died because you ran," Varek said, breathing hard, blood on his teeth now too.

"Rook died because you killed him."

There wasn’t a better argument than that, and Damien didn’t go looking for one.

He pulled the dagger free and drove it through Varek’s heart in one motion.

Surprise crossed the man’s face and stayed there until nothing else came to replace it.

➤[Player Killer deactivated]

Damien stood over the first person he’d killed since Silas Vane, dagger still in his hand, the chamber gone quiet around him.

His stomach turned once, hard. His hands stayed steady.

Skinwalker, he thought, not because Varek had ever stopped being human, but because he’d only ever worn that humanity when it protected him. Left alive, he would have kept hunting people too weak to fight back, one after another, for as long as anyone let him.

Killing something like that and feeling nothing good about it were not the same thing. Damien held onto that difference the way he held onto most things now, quietly, and kept walking.

He cleaned the First Blood Dagger and went to find the others.

Eli was carried out between Grace and Doctor Smoke, one arm slung over each of their shoulders like he’d arranged it that way on purpose. When he saw Damien’s face, blood and all, he flipped an imaginary coin with his bound fingers and didn’t bother checking how it landed.

"Knew you’d find the door."

"You sent the directions."

"Leadership requires delegation." Eli winced as Doctor Smoke adjusted his arm. "Also I was tied to a chair."

Behind them, Reserve Nine’s final contract spine went still and silent.

Ahead of them, Vera’s copied seal had eleven minutes left on the clock.

The Ledger Citadel was still waiting.