Chapter 122: Two Sylvias

Chapter 122: Chapter 122: Two Sylvias

The Commonwealth Sky Authority restored TIG’s flight permit at eight in the morning, with a short letter of apology signed by a director who had clearly never heard of Paimon and never would.

Seo-yeon came to the landing platform to see them off. She wore a plain dark suit again, but her hair was down, and she stood at the bottom of the ramp with Kang beside her and the river wind pulling at her jacket.

"I can’t come with you," she said. "Not yet. My father-in-law needs me, and so does the Guild. Three hundred people work for Taeyang, and this morning every one of them found out the Chairman was a Demon King’s puppet for fifteen years." She almost smiled. "Someone has to explain it to them."

"TIG holds ten percent of Taeyang now," Donald said. "And I hold the lock under your city. You’re not doing this alone."

"I know." She stepped forward and kissed him once, quickly, on the mouth, in front of Kang and Sylvia and the pilot and anyone else who cared to look. "Come back soon, Investor. I’ve decided I like being asked what I want."

Donald watched her walk back across the platform as the ramp closed, and then opened the window that had been waiting for him since dawn.

[Daily Dividend: +450,000 Credits.]

[Escrow Seal Upkeep: -30,000 Credits.]

[Investment Complete: 10% of Taeyang Guild. -6,800,000 Credits.]

[Current Balance: 3,050,000 System Credits.]

[Free Points: 3.]

He put all three into Mana without thinking about it.

[Mana: 123 → 126.]

---

The airship had been flying west for six hours when Donald noticed the steward’s mana was wrong.

It was a small thing, the kind he would have missed a year ago. The steward was a quiet young man in a gray uniform who had brought them lunch and then tea, and every time he came into the cabin, Donald’s [Lesser Mana Perception] picked up a faint signature from him, the way it did from everyone. But the steward’s signature didn’t sit still. It shifted slightly every few seconds, as if it couldn’t decide what shape it wanted to be.

Donald didn’t look up from his tablet. He opened [Valuation Eye] instead.

[Target: Steward (Unnamed)]

[Status: Mimic. True form unreadable.]

[Class: Faceless of the Thousand Faces (A-Rank). Level: 66.]

[Effect: Copies the face and up to two skills of any person it touches. Duration: 10 minutes per copy.]

"Sylvia," he said quietly. "Don’t let the steward touch you."

Sylvia was sitting across from him with her boots up on the opposite seat. She didn’t move, but her eyes went to the cabin door.

"How many?" she asked.

Before Donald could answer, the airship tipped sharply nose-down, and every loose cup in the cabin slid off the table and smashed on the floor.

"The pilot," Donald said, already on his feet. "There’s a second one in the cockpit."

The steward came through the door in that moment, fast, with his hand outstretched toward Sylvia’s bare wrist. She was faster. She dropped into her own shadow and came up behind him, and he spun and caught nothing but air.

But he had brushed her boot on the way past.

His face began to change. The steward’s features slid and shifted, the nose narrowing, the jaw sharpening, dark hair pouring down over his shoulders, and two seconds later there were two Sylvias standing in the cabin of the falling airship, each with a tungsten dagger in her hand and the same violet eyes.

"Oh, I hate that," the real Sylvia said.

"Oh, I hate that," said the other one, in exactly the same voice.

Then both of them dropped into the shadows.

---

Donald had perhaps three seconds to think, and he used all of them.

The copy had taken Sylvia’s face and two of her skills, and he could guess which two. The cabin was long and dim, with shadows under every seat, along the floor, and in the corners of the ceiling. In a room like this, two people who could move through darkness would come out of anywhere, and he wouldn’t know which one he was looking at until a blade was already in him.

But he had learned something in the old city of Hanseong, standing in a narrow street under twelve floodlights.

Shadows needed light to make them, and too much light took them away.

"Sylvia," he called. "Get to the cockpit and stop the pilot. I’ll take yours."

He heard her laugh somewhere under the seats, and then the cockpit door banged open and shut at the front of the cabin.

The copy came up out of the shadow under the table directly in front of him, dagger first.

Donald raised his left arm and snapped [Aura of the Vanguard] across his forearm, and the blade skidded off the thin shield of light in a shower of sparks. In the same motion, he opened his right hand and called [Fireball], but he didn’t throw it. He held the sphere of compressed fire in his palm and fed it more mana, and more, until it was the size of a man’s head and so bright that the whole cabin turned white.

[Fireball: Charged. Mana: 126 → 86.]

Every shadow in the cabin vanished at once.

The copy, half out of the floor, jerked as if someone had grabbed her ankle. Her shadow had been the way she came in, and with the shadow gone, she was stuck halfway out of the floor and halfway into nothing, with the fake Sylvia face twisting into an expression the real Sylvia had never made.

[Target: Faceless (Mimic: Sylvia). Copied skill suppressed: Shadow Sovereign. Ambient darkness: 0%.]

Donald didn’t let the Fireball go. He held it high in his right hand and stepped forward and kicked her full in the face.

She tore free of the floor and flew backward down the aisle, and as she came up, he went after her with [Bull Rush].

The skill took him across the cabin in a straight line, too fast to stop, with his shoulder low and the Pile Bunker leading. The Faceless got her dagger up, but there was nothing she could do with it. Donald hit her at full speed and drove her straight through the thin aluminum door of the cargo hold, and the two of them crashed down onto the crates on the other side.

He came up first, with the Fireball still blazing in his right hand.

The Faceless lay on her back among the broken crates with Sylvia’s face still on her, but it was starting to slip. Under the jaw, and along the edge of the hairline, Donald could see something smooth and gray underneath, with no features on it.

"Who sent you?" he asked.

She smiled up at him with Sylvia’s mouth.

"You already know who," she said. "You just don’t know who else."

Then she lunged for his ankle with her bare hand.

Donald saw it coming, because Valuation Eye had told him exactly what she wanted. If she touched him, she would take his face and two of his skills, and she would walk off this airship as the Investor.

He brought the Pile Bunker down on her outstretched hand before it reached him and fired.

The piston drove her arm into the floor of the hold. She screamed, and the scream wasn’t Sylvia’s voice anymore. Her face slid off her completely, the hair and the eyes and the mouth all sliding off and fading, until there was nothing left on the front of her head but a smooth gray oval with no features at all.

Then the gray oval cracked across the middle, and she was still.

[Target Defeated: Faceless of the Thousand Faces (Level 66).]

[EXP Gained: 14,800.]

---

The airship leveled out with a long groan of straining cables, and Donald let the Fireball go out at last.

When he got back to the cockpit, the real Sylvia was sitting in the copilot’s seat with both hands on the controls and her feet braced against the console. The second Faceless lay on the floor behind her, face down, with its own smooth gray head cracked open. The real pilot, a middle-aged woman in the charter company’s uniform, lay in the corner with her hands tied and a strip of cloth over her mouth, unconscious but breathing.

"I found her in the storage locker," Sylvia said, without looking around. "Since Hanseong, I think. That thing was flying us home with her face on." She glanced at him. "How did you know which one was me?"

"I didn’t," Donald said. "I made it so it didn’t matter."

"You turned on a very large light."

"I learned it from Choi."

Sylvia snorted. Then she leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes for a moment, and her shoulders sagged.

"It said something to me," she said. "Before I put it down. It said, ’You’re the second one of us he’s had in his cabin, and he never noticed the first.’"

Donald stood very still in the cockpit doorway.

He thought of the TIG tower, and of everyone in it. Evelyn and Aris, Garrick and Helena, Damian, Leo, and the four hundred and twelve Awakeners of the Vanguard Barracks. Every one of them had faces he knew.

[Lesser Mana Perception: No anomalies within range.]

"Take us home," he said quietly. "As fast as this thing will go."