Chapter Text
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chapter one: DAMIAN I: I Play Tag With A Taxonomic Error
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Damian al Ghul was born a prince.
The heir to the Demon Throne; the prince of the League of Assassins. The prince that was promised to tame the world; a blade forged in the fires of discipline and brutality, to bend civilisations to his will. He was his grandfather’s successor, his mother’s pride.
Damian tried very hard not to think about the rest of it: that a prince was merely a promise of a lineage, a hope for the nebulous future, and that to be named one, meant somewhere, inevitably, there presently had to be a king.
✨✨✨
Despite the ugliness of life, the world is not without beauty, Damian idly thought.
The moon hung heavy in the sable sky, round and fair like a snow lotus bloom. Its glow spilled over Cairo in thin silver sheets, pale in comparison to the lambent tapestry of bright streams of lights of an urban landscape.
Automobiles and motorbikes crawled along the city streets like colonies of ants, streams of their headlights shining like luminous insect eyes. From this height, the traffic blurred into streaks of dragged trails, made indistinct like smeared watercolour—splashes of fulvous and smalt, coquelicot and heliotrope; they painted the city with vivid ribbons of light.
Beyond the rooftops to the west, Damian could glimpse the Nile. The river wound through the city like a serpent. Its surface was a blade of black glass reflecting the amber lights of passing boats, they shimmered across upon the water like scattered gold leaf. All life started in water, and all life eventually returned to water. And perhaps, nowhere was the sentiment more evident than in the heart of a desert, where an entire civilisation had risen from the banks of a single river.
Damian sat at the edge of a rooftop, one knee drawn up against his chest, his cheek resting lightly atop it. The night breeze carried the faint scent of hibiscus flowers and was refreshingly cool against his face.
Somewhere below, rushing people threaded through the streets in a restless current of humanity. Vendors shouted over one another from sidewalks, and blares of car horns blended with the evening call to night prayer that echoed between the crowded buildings.
The Egyptian Museum rose from the northern edge of the square—a heavy, solemn structure from another age. Damian had been casing it for two days; tracking the patterns of patrol routes, mapping personnel movements, and identifying weak points in the security. Tonight, he will complete his mission.
From his current vantage point, seven guards were visible: two on exterior patrol, one remained at the eastern access gate, another occupied the inside of the security kiosk near the vehicle entrance. Three more appeared intermittently through the windows whenever they crossed illuminated corridors, making the total of at least ten personnel.
Not terrible odds, all things considered.
Mother had given him an assignment, and Damian was going to complete it flawlessly. He was seven years old. He had been conducting solo international missions—completely on his own, without interference or assistance—for only less than a year. He had never faced a single failure, and he had no intention of allowing a simple artifact extraction mission to become the first exception.
Damian glanced at his watch: twenty-six minutes remained until the next shift change. All he had to do was wait. Patience was a weapon like any other. Mother had sneered that ordinary civilians often imagined assassins as creatures of explosive speed and intense violence, all brutal impact and noise. But the truly dangerous hunters knew how to remain so perfectly still that they neither drew breath nor let their heart beat. A predator spent far more time stalking than striking, after all.
A movement on the street caught his attention: a child had tripped.
The boy appeared to be nine, no older than ten. Certainly old enough to walk unassisted, in Damian’s opinion, yet the moment he had tumbled and scraped his knee against the pavement, he turned into a mewling infant, foolishly bleating for his parents, who had descended upon him as though he had been mortally wounded.
The father scooped him up immediately, settling him against his hip with practised ease. The mother crouched beside them, fussing over the tiny abrasion on the child’s knee. The boy’s torrent of howls weakened to a snivel at the attention, and before long, he had ceased the tantrum all together, easily smiling at something his mother had said.
Damian felt something flicker inside of him and his face twitched in response, the corners of his mouth drawing tight before he could stop them. He decided, firmly, that it had been disgust he felt.
Yet, for reasons he could not quite articulate, he continued watching. A memory surfaced, unbidden: Remember, ḥafīd. It is the prerogative of the strong to devour the weak. And what is more harmful than any vice? Sympathy for weakness*…
Damian tore his eyes away from the civilians, dismissing them from his mind, and let his gaze drift, surveying the constant current of passers-by in the busy city square. His attention got briefly snagged by an old woman standing further down the street, beneath the amber glow of a nearby streetlamp. In all fairness, she was impossible to miss. She was the sort of enormous that breached unhealthy and ensconced into palpably physically uncomfortable. She stood motionless and most of her face was hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat, but Damian got a distinct sense she was watching the crowd just as closely as he was.
Damian checked his watch again: nineteen minutes remaining.
He returned to observing the throng of people. It was simultaneously a useful training exercise and a pointless endeavour. It sharpened his observation skills, helped him put in practice his knowledge of body language and human behaviour, and improved pattern recognition—allowed him to hone his skills at identifying intentions, emotional states, relationships, and occupations.
At the same time, it was a fruitless passtime. Damian would glimpse tiny fragments of strangers’ lives from a distance and weave stories about their circumstances in his mind. These imaginings were fatuous and should have been beneath his capabilities, but it helped to pass the time. It made him think that other people possessed their own inner lives; perhaps simpler, humbler, certainly less consequential than his, but their own nonetheless, with their own struggles and desires, and small ambitions, beneath the tedium of mundanity.
A movement at the edge of the crowd caught his eye. An older teenager drifted through the foot traffic with the sort of artful aimlessness of practised ease. He slipped through the throng of the crowd with deliberate care, slowly converging on a harried woman pushing a stroller in a gradual arc, matching her pace. One hand emerged from his pocket.
Damian rolled his eyes. A pickpocket.
“Tt,” he clicked his tongue. He picked up a loose piece of gravel from the rooftop and flicked the stone with his thumb with uncanny precision, striking the thief square in the forehead, some forty-five meters away.
The teenager recoiled with a sharp curse, clutching his forehead, and spun in a circle wildly, searching for the source of the impact, but finding none.
Damian enjoyed the idea of balance; after all, that was the purpose of the League of Assassins—to maintain balance and keep world powers in check. He was about to steal artifacts from a museum. To balance the scales, he might as well extend the small grace of letting a tired mother keep her possessions. It was not like the effort cost him anything.
The thought had barely crossed his mind when a faint prickle ran down the back of his neck—he was being watched.
Slowly, Damian turned his head.
The old woman suddenly appeared far less elderly than she had moments ago. Her faded denim dress strained around her frame, and she leaned heavily upon a cane, but her face—previously pallid and sagging—looked strangely alert and vibrant. Her head tilted upwards, and she fixed her stare directly at him.
Damian tensed, one of his daggers sliding smoothly out of his tunic sleeve into his waiting palm. It should be impossible for her to spot him. He sat six storeys above street level, on a darkness cloaked rooftop, and there were no lights behind him to silhouette his position. For all intents and purposes, he was less visible than a shadow.
But there was no uncertainty in her strange, primrose-yellow eyes. Her lips slowly stretched into a sly smile, forked tongue flickering between her teeth. Then, she dipped her head, the wide-brimmed hat obscuring her features once more. She turned and limped slowly down the street before vanishing around the corner.
A cold feeling settled somewhere beneath Damian’s ribs, twisting unpleasantly like a live eel. Mother had taught him that his instincts were a useful tool—the body often noticed things before the mind observed them.
He glanced at his watch again: ten minutes until shift change.
The mission came first.
Whatever that woman had been, it could wait.
✨✨✨
Damian sprinted off the edge of the museum roof and launched himself into open air. He twisted midflight, using the rotation to propel his trajectory away from the wall, caught a low-hanging branch of a nearby tree with one hand, to bleed off his momentum, before releasing it. He dropped the remaining distance to the pavement without a sound.
He ran through Cairo’s streets at a swift, measured pace, weaving around clusters of night activity and slipping through pockets of darkness between pools of streetlight. A katana was strapped to his back and a small canvas satchel was slung across his shoulder. Inside of it, wrapped securely in layers of protective cloth, rested the recovered artifacts: two rings, a bronze dagger, and a set of golden coins.
The extraction itself proved to be laughably easy. It left him feeling vaguely dissatisfied. He preferred assignments that required effort and demanded something of him—that challenged his abilities.
Almost unconsciously and definitely against his better judgement, Damian slipped his hand inside the satchel, fingers brushing cool metal, and withdrew one of the rings. It felt far heavier than it should have been, for something so small. The smooth surface of it caught the light of the moon and glinted softly. It appeared to be made out of platinum, which alone was strange. Ancient Greece possessed gold, silver, copper, bronze, and iron; and while platinum had existed in other ancient contexts as a rare decorative metal, it was typically reserved for objects of status, not a simple signet ring like this.
Truly, Damian was not certain the metal was platinum—the ring glowed with a pale, luminous sheen; it was a translucent white, tinged with a faint light-green undertone. It was etched with faint, rippling patterns that seemed to shift when he tilted it, and on its flat, polished surface, a gryphon had been engraved—the fine, slender lines of feathers were individually worked into the metal, and even the eyes possessed an unsettling sense of life. Exquisite craftsmanship—far beyond what should have been expected for its supposed time of origin.
The crash of a toppled trashbin jolted Damian out of his reverie and he realised with a start that he had stopped moving. He stood still in the middle of an unlit alley, his breath fogging in the chilly night air, the ring a cold anchor locked in his fist.
His pulse remained steady, but a small knot of irritation twisted inside his chest. He had become distracted and, in turn, it made him careless. What was wrong with him?
But hadn’t he sensed… something?
As an assassin descended from the esteemed line of al Ghul, Damian had impeccable situational awareness. Years of relentless training had honed it into a borderline preternatural perception—an instinctive awareness of lifeforms around him, a constant recognition of when something in his environment had shifted. That keen sense saved his life, more than once.
Minutely, he tilted his head. His sharp ears picked up a faint scrape of movement from behind him.
Despite this, Damian feigned ignorance and did not pause in surprise to alert the enemy that he had heard them. Instead, he altered course without breaking his stride. At the next intersection, he changed direction. Then again. Then a third time.
Damian slipped into a narrow alley between two apartment buildings and scaled a fire escape. Three seconds later, he crossed a rooftop and leaped from the edge of it onto the adjacent building. He adjusted his route—extraction point lay further northeast, thus Damian doubled back and turned westwards. He crossed five more buildings by jumping roof to roof, before descending down a rickety maintenance ladder and emerging into an empty side street lined with unfinished buildings.
He was not shocked to hear a scraping movement behind him. Whatever was following him was not very subtle, even if it was quite fast. However, how was it tracking him?
A construction site sprawled across several unfinished blocks near the river. Tower cranes loomed above skeletal concrete structures, while half-installed steel beams cut across the skyline. Damian had taken note of the area earlier, during his surveillance of the museum. If confrontation became unavoidable, this was where he intended to carry out the battle. The site was isolated, provided ample space to manoeuvre, and, at this hour, stood completely devoid of civilians.
Damian vaulted a chain-link fence in a smooth motion and landed lightly inside the construction zone. The ring was still clenched in his fist, and it felt like a live wire. Heat pulsed from the metal into the flesh of his palm, a steady thrum that beat in time with his heartbeat, urging him to keep moving, to stay vigilant, to act.
Impulsively, as if compelled, Damian slid it onto the index finger of his left hand. It felt far too large for him, so he spun it once, and then it sat there comfortably—flush against his skin as if it was forged specifically for him. The moment it settled, a violent jolt tore through him, electric and wild—liquid lightning coursed through his veins, igniting every nerve in its wake. Heat erupted beneath his sternum and raced outward, a wildfire roaring to life in his chest, like something awoke inside of him.
Damian stumbled a step back; he felt dazed and disoriented. He looked down at his hand. The ring glowed faintly in the dark.
Curses and damnation. How could he be this stupid?
Compartmentalise for now. Fix the issue later. Think about how Mother would skin him alive, absolutely never.
Behind him, a low growl rumbled like thunder and, suddenly, the ground shook—a tremendous weight slammed into the concrete. The sound reminded Damian of a large cat dropping from a great height. An exceptionally large cat.
Ya kharāb baytī*.
Damian pivoted smoothly. For perhaps the first time in his life, he found himself temporarily unable to process what he was seeing.
The creature was twice as tall as Damian and possessed the head of a lion, although it was far larger than any lion had any right to be. Its mane hung in filthy, blood-clotted tangles, and from the top of its head, two massive, curving horns rose. Attached to that were the behooved legs and body which appeared to be vaguely caprine, though no goat in existence had ever reached such monstrous proportions. Extending from its hindquarters was a thick serpentine tail, stretching nearly ten feet in length, ending in the unmistakable head of a venomous diamondback snake.
Around the lion’s head, a rhinestone pet collar hung around its neck, and the plate-sized, bone-shaped tag read: CHIMERA—RABID, FIRE-BREATHING, POISONOUS—IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL TARTARUS—EXT.954
Damian’s first (embarrassing) thought was that he was hallucinating. Except, generally, hallucinations did not come with the stench of foul breath.
His second one was that he was acting like a halfwit—standing still and gaping—and Mother would be ashamed to have an imbecile for a son.
“Tt,” he clicked his tongue and drew his katana from its sheath across his back in a single fluid motion. The creature was most likely some scientist’s deranged experiment gone rogue. It had followed Damian across the city, clearly intending to kill him. That made the situation refreshingly straightforward.
Damian was a trained assassin and a warrior from the House of al Ghul. He was prodigiously skilled in combat. His limitations were inseparable from his advantages: he was only seven years old and barely four feet tall. He was exceptionally agile and quick-footed, able to slip beneath an opponent’s defenses, and he compensated for his limited reach by wielding a katana. He almost exclusively fought against opponents who were larger and stronger than he was. But they were not always faster than him.
Damian did not give the creature the opportunity to make the first move.
He shot forwards, coming in low and closing the distance in a straight burst of speed; katana slashing from his hip in a rising strike, cutting through the beast’s throat in a single, well-placed swipe. It should have been a clean kill.
Damian was much stronger than he looked, but the cut was far shallower than the force Damian put into should have produced. The beast reacted before Damian could strike at it again—snapping its massive lion head down with enough force to crack concrete where Damian had stood a fraction of a second earlier.
Damian pivoted to the beast’s flank and drove his blade into the shoulder joint of the goat body. The katana sank halfway to the hilt. The beast howled in pain and twisted violently, as Damian wrenched his sword free—it resisted, then gave with a sickening pop. Black blood welled immediately, thick and smelling of sulfur, but before Damian could try to sever the limb, the viperhead lashed towards him, fangs flashing.
Damian leapt backwards, somersaulting in the air, putting some distance between himself and the beast. Before he could attack again, the lion’s head wheeled to face him, it opened its mouth, the nauseating stench of rotting meat permeating from the bloody jaws. Behind long, curving teeth, sharp as daggers, a light simmered—warm and red, and full of threat. Like it was kin to some eldritch draconian creature, a torrent of crimson flames erupted from the beast’s maw, shooting at Damian at lightning speed.
He dropped under the river of fire and threw himself into a roll across the ground. Fire roared overhead, close enough that the heat clawed across his skin. Damian came up in a crouch several meters away, as the stream of flame carved across the construction site. The slab of concrete where he stood was scorched black and smoking. Far above, storm clouds gathered.
The serpent struck at him, shooting towards him like an arrow loosened from a quiver. Damian sprang upwards, rotating through the leap. As the jaws snapped beneath him, he drove a booted foot into the side of the serpent’s skull with a spinning kick, and smirked smugly when he heard the sharp crack of broken bone. The impact altered his trajectory enough to carry him over the tail entirely, and he caught a steel support beam overhead with his left arm. Using the momentum of the leap, he hauled himself upwards and vaulted onto the beam before the beast could strike again.
He sheathed his katana and slipped throwing daggers out of his boot, aiming them at the beast’s vital points. The blades struck the serpent’s scales and ricocheted harmlessly away, as ineffective as needles thrown against a sheet of steel. Two others found the lion’s scruff instead, burying themselves to the hilt in its thick hide, while another bounced off its collar. Unfortunately, that did not seem to slow the creature down whatsoever.
Oblivious to Damian’s irritation, the beast opened its massive maw again and released another torrent of flame in Damian’s direction, but Damian was already moving. He ran along the narrow length of steel as fire chased him from behind. Heat washed over his back and the beam vibrated from the onslaught of intense temperature. Below him, the beast thundered through a maze of scaffolding and concrete pillars, jaws tilted upwards as it continued spewing fire.
Damian surged forwards, increasing speed, and when the beam ran out, he launched upwards—planting a foot against a vertical support column, and then another in quick succession. He pivoted midair, redirecting his momentum, and landed atop a lattice of scaffolding that crisscrossed the unfinished structure.
The beast barrelled through the stacks of concrete forms: splintered timber and debris exploding outward, scattering across the construction site. It charged and drove its goat horns into the concrete supports beneath the scaffolding. Each impact sent a deep, resonant vibration through the metal grid under Damian’s feet. The whole structure flexed and swayed, steel groaning under the stress.
Damian steadied himself, adjusting his stance, one hand locked around the framework in a white-knuckled grip. Fear was for lesser men, therefore it must have been anger that made his muscles tense and his pulse kick unpleasantly against his throat. He sneered at the stupid beast below and exhaled once through his nose. “Tt. Annoying.”
The cold blade of nighttime air whipped at his hair and lashed at his face, breathing its life into Damian’s already hyper-alert mind. Distantly, he registered that it had begun to drizzle.
His eyes flickered upwards: a suspended L-beam hung several meters above the ground, held by a crane cable and stabilised by guide lines. It swayed—a slow, widening swing set off by the repeated impacts.
Damian tracked it for half a second, before ascending higher up the scaffolding, and dropping from it onto the beam in a controlled landing, boots striking steel with a dull thud. The beam jolted under his weight and swung wider.
Immediately, Damian began moving with it: he shifted his weight forwards at the apex of each pass, then back at the trough—feeding momentum into the swing and forcing the oscillation to grow. The beam carved a larger arc through the air, whining under the strain, and capable tension tightened overhead as load distribution changed. Another impact from below shook the pillars again and the beam’s angle steepened.
Damian reached the midpoint and drove his heel down once, hard and vicious, into the steel surface, destabilising it further, forcing a lateral shift in the swing path. The beam lurched, as a warning groan echoed through the rigging.
Damian did not hesitate. He sprinted again, reached the far end of the beam, and pushed off into open air just as the system gave way behind him and the beam dropped. It hurled towards the ground, pivoting as the cable slackened and the remaining tension released in a violent arc, whipping sideways.
Damian twisted midflight, caught a nearby crane cable with both hands, and slid down. The metal tore into his palms and he bit back a curse as pain flared sharply. The ground rushed up fast, even as his boots scraped against the cable in an attempt to slow his rapid descent.
The beam crashed across the beast’s shoulders with a thunderous impact and drove the monster into the concrete hard enough to crack the ground beneath it. Dust exploded outward and Damian could hardly see through its thick clouds. He let go of the cable, dropping the rest of the way down and landing in a roll, before coming up in a battle-ready crouch. His palms stung and when he drew his katana, its hilt grew slick with blood.
Pinned, half-buried beneath the weight of the beam, the beast’s massive form twitched violently. One of its goat legs was bent at an unnatural angle, joint clearly broken, while the front shoulder heaved unevenly, muscle straining under against crushed mass. It dragged itself free of the wreckage, muscles bunching beneath blood-matted fur, and let out a furious, pained roar.
Damian crossed the distance before the creature could fully regain its footing. He planted a foot on the fallen beam, vaulted upwards, and brought his katana down in a powerful, two-handed strike aimed directly at the junction between skull and spine. The blade narrowly brushed against the strange pet collar and steel bit the creature’s flesh, but the impact felt like he had struck solid stone. The shock sent reverberations up Damian’s arms and into his shoulders, rattling his bones and making his hands go numb for a heartbeat. If his body had not been strengthened by the power of Lazarus Pits, the blow would have probably shattered his wrists.
The strike landed true and it should have severed vertebrae. Instead, the blade had cut through layers of fat and muscle, and lodged there—not deep enough to be a mortal wound. Damian’s jaw clenched, his face twisting with frustration. The hairs at his nape stood up and he abandoned the sword immediately, planting both hands on the beast’s lion-skull and kicking off. His body flipped backwards, just as the viperhead snapped its jaws shut where his torso had been a fraction of a second earlier.
The rain was coming down in earnest now. Damian’s hair slicked to his skull with sweat and rainwater. His fingers closed around the hilt of a curved dagger concealed beneath his tunic and he drew it, tossing it in the air before catching it in reverse grip—all the while not taking his eyes from the damn serpent-headed-tail.
With its hind leg broken, the beast’s mobility was significantly crippled. However, its serpentine tail was still nearly ten feet of pure muscle and highly agile. Damian needed to deal with it first. Earlier, his throwing daggers had harmlessly ricocheted off the scales—thus, Damian must get closer to the cursed thing’s vitals, all while avoiding its venomous fangs.
Never let an enemy recover. Mother had drilled the lesson into him before he could walk.
Before he could second-guess his plan, Damian surged forwards again. With a burst of speed, he charged towards the lion’s head and immediately attacked again—two strikes, fast and vicious, aimed at the eyes. Neither landed cleanly, but the second carved a deep, weeping gash across the lion’s snout. It reeled, roaring in pain as it snapped its head back, giant maw open, but no flame was building.
To Damian’s left, the viperhead whipped around, a blur of scaled motion, and struck with dizzying speed. Damian dropped to the ground and threw himself sideways, the serpent sailing over him. Without hesitation, he sprung up and rushed the beast again, slipping under its defences, and then drove his dagger with all his might into the ruined joint of its broken leg. Once, twice, three times.
The beast bellowed in pain again, twisting hard to reach him, but Damian had already ducked and rolled out of the way. The lion’s head was more sluggish than before, likely from all of its injuries, but it was no less deadly.
Without giving him a second of reprieve, the serpent was upon him again: it bent in the air at a sharp angle, coming at him from above. Damian barely dodged, and the viperhead struck the ground where he had been an instant earlier, fangs punching into concrete. Before it could recoil, Damian slammed his dagger into its skull. The steel barely nicked the thing, skidding off the serpent’s scales, but it concussed the serpent for a brief moment.
Biting back a curse, Damian did the only thing he could think of: he seized the serpent’s neck just below the head and squeezed as hard as he could, trying to choke it.
It was an unexpectedly effective attack. The scales were slick beneath his grip, but he heard the grinding of bones. For all that its scales were imperviable to damage, snake vertebrae had weak resistance to bending stress. Without hesitating, he drove his dagger into the serpent’s eye, bursting it inside the socket like a popped grape. The serpent hissed and thrashed in a frenzy, and before it could break free, Damian blinded the viperhead’s second eye.
Heaven above, what he would not do for an explosive right now.
Damian twisted the dagger in the serpent’s socket and drove it deeper, forcing it to the hilt in a single, brutal motion, trying to reach the brain through bone and pressure. Unfortunately, whatever this creature was—it was exceedingly difficult to kill.
In his peripheral vision he caught a movement. Abandoning the dagger inside the viperhead, Damian snapped his second hand to the neck instead. He locked his grip beneath the skull and wrenched in opposite directions—one hand pulling, the other twisting—forcing torque through muscle, joint, and bone, and trying to break the serpent’s neck.
He must have done something to it, because the serpent’s body shuddered and it ceased its thrashings, even if it was not yet dead. Regardless, he abandoned the serpent-headed-tail and kicked off with all the strength in his legs, careening backwards in a clean retreat—
Just as a torrent of molten-red flames erupted through the space he had occupied only a moment prior.
The serpent writhed, engulfed in a blaze. There was the sound of scales cracking under heat, a wet hiss of searing, shriveling flesh, and a sputter of burning fat. When the fire attack finally ceased, the charred ruins of serpent-headed-tail lay crumpled across concrete: blackened and split open along the length of its body, with smoke curling upwards into the rain.
The remaining goat body and lion head of the beast shuddered, staggering. It made a high, wounded keening sound.
Damian did not press the advantage immediately. From his position a few meters away, he heaved hard and gulped air in short, controlled pulls. Fatigue was creeping in, turning his limbs heavy and slowing down his reaction time. If he did not end it soon, it was likely he would die.
He glanced back at the serpent’s remains. His dagger was in there… somewhere. Lost in the charred wreckage. His eyes darted to the lion’s head. His katana remained embedded in the creature’s nape.
Damian sprinted directly at the beast and leapt high. One foot struck the snout, the second planted between its eyes. Using its head as a platform, Damian pushed off hard, rising high with the motion, and ripped the katana free during the ascent—a spray of black blood burst forth from the wound.
Damian rotated in midair and came down, landing on the back of the creature as his katana crashed into the lion’s skull—slicing through flesh cleanly and hitting bone. The beast shrieked in pain and bucked, as much as it could with a broken hind leg. Damian adjusted his footing to keep balance, his position made all the more precarious by the sheet of rain and the blowing storm winds, but he managed to stay on.
He tore the sword free and struck again.
And again.
And again.
“Ayre billi bazzarak!*” Damian snarled in anger, hacking again at the beast’s skull with his katana with relentless force. Blood and gore sprayed everywhere, coating his hands and face. Lightning flashed overhead, followed by a roar of thunder. “Just die already! Die! Die! Die!”
The beast bucked hard. The sudden motion jostled Damian, catching him off-balance. His boots lost purchase on the rain-slick, shifting surface of its back. He shifted his weight, correcting his footing—
The goat’s body twisted violently and threw him.
Damian hit the ground flat on his back with enough force to drive the air from his lungs. The back of his head cracked against the concrete, sending his vision swimming. Momentarily, he was stunned by the impact. Before he could recover, a weight crashed down on top of him.
The beast had pinned him.
Damian reacted instantly. Both arms shot upwards, locking against its lower jaw as the massive skull descended. He jammed his katana horizontally, bracing it like a bar across the beast’s jaws.
The blade strained under pressure and Damian’s arms trembled as force steadily increased. The teeth were enormous up close—each one easily the length of Damian’s entire hand, from heel of palm to tip of finger. Ivory daggers that were wickedly sharp and slick with saliva, and pressing closer towards his face by the second.
The monster’s breath washed over him—hot and wet, reeking of rotting meat and sulfur. And deep in its gullet: a spark of orange flame was blooming.
Damian gritted his teeth, his grip tightening reflexively, but it was not enough. The weight above him felt unbearable, he could not push the beast off. There was nowhere for him to go, no angle to exploit, and no weakness to target. For the first time since the battle had begun, Damian found himself completely out of options.
He was going to die here. Burned alive.
Would the Lazarus Pits be able to restore him? Would Mother even know where to recover his body when he failed to appear at the extraction point? Or would this ugly creature consume his remains, further insulting his honour?
The thought of it made him overwhelmingly furious.
Something in him snapped and a painful scream tore out of him. At the same moment, a burning sensation registered on his left index finger. White light detonated across his vision and for an instant, the world ceased to exist in any recognisable form. Distantly, thunder rumbled.
Power surged through him—raw, violent, electric. It raced through his veins like liquid lightning, leaving a comet-tail of heat in its wake. When Damian opened his eyes, he found himself holding a glowing silver-white sword in his left hand, and—
The sword had pierced straight through the monster’s mouth, through throat and brain alike, the tip protruding from the back of its skull. Fire gathering in its gullet gutted out and it convulsed once, before a sudden bloom of golden dust exploded from its body, coating Damian in a sheen of gold.
Damian remained where he was, sprawled on the concrete, chest heaving. The glowing sword had vanished. The enormous body of the monster had dissolved before his eyes into thousands of glowing particles that scattered into the rain.
Didn’t you say you preferred assignments that required effort? Damian’s treacherous mind mocked him. How was this for a challenge?
Damian let his head fall back against the ground with a dull thud, as rain continued to pour down, threading into his vision and making him blink furiously against it. Slowly, he raised his left hand, where the pale-metal ring sat on his index finger, shining dimly.
“Al’ama*,” he groaned.
