Marissa
The night swallowed Marissa Lin whole.
The moment she cleared the outer paths of Crescent Hyr, the world changed. Stone corridors gave way to broken terraces and narrow goat trails carved into the mountain’s flank. Fog drifted low across the ground, heavy with moisture and the metallic tang of old mana. Every sound carried farther than it should have, boots scraping stone, distant roars, the faint echo of steel on steel far behind her.
She did not allow herself to look back.
Fear was useful only if it sharpened the senses. Panic was death.
Marissa moved the way she had been trained to move, not fast and not in a straight line. She moved with the terrain, correctly. She slipped between cover, altered her pace, and let shadows take her where light could not. When needed, she wrapped herself in the Lin family’s true art, not invisibility, but deception.
She wrapped herself in the Veil of Fractured Attention. A thin mantle of mana spread across her skin, so fine it barely registered as spellwork. It did not bend light outright. It reflected it, scattered it, returned it at angles that made the eye slide away. The edges of shapes, of people, softened. Depth lied. Where she stood, the world insisted there was nothing worth noticing.
The technique was incredibly powerful and equally dangerous. It drank mana at an alarming rate and could never be held for long. Worse, it could never be seen activating. To be caught using it meant dishonor that could never be lived down, and usually death for the offender. The Lin family had lost more than one promising daughter to that mistake.
So Marissa used it sparingly, brief breaths of distortion released before the world could question what it had missed.
The rest was misdirection. A misplaced footfall here. The throwing of a voice through mana and manual technique. A shadow allowed to linger, a pause where motion was expected and motion where stillness belonged.
Instead of vanishing, she merely convinced the world she had never mattered enough to notice.
She moved quietly through the trails and fog-obscured stones, letting the quiet and density of the situation settle around her. She stopped often, pausing to listen and consider. She felt them before she saw them.
Orcs.
In the growth, on the paths, sitting on rocks, chopping at trees. These were not the same as the massive Red Orcs battering themselves against Crescent Hyr. These were noticeably different, smaller and lighter. Scouts, hunters, or grunts pressed into service by the demon-touched warbands. Their silhouettes moved wrong against the terrain, too heavy for the paths they used, too careless with noise.
Marissa slowed her breathing and adjusted her steps, letting her footfalls fall between heartbeats.
Then she felt it again, the strange pressure behind her that reverberated through her very bones.
They carried black blades strapped to their backs, their eyes glowing with crimson and sin.
Sword Demons. At least two of them.
Were they tracking her? They had to be. Why else would they not be joining the assault?
The realization settled cold in her stomach, but she did not break stride. Instead, she reached into the pouch at her waist and closed her fingers around the small, angular device wrapped in cloth.
The mana displacer.
Emily and Elise had built it out of desperation, guided by intelligence and stubbornness. They had taken something their genius older brother once taught them, remembered it, and recreated just enough of it to use effectively in a moment of need. Marissa did not understand how or why it worked. She was not even certain this one would function the way she needed it to, but the last ones had worked, and that was enough.
The twins had built two more last night, despite it wreaking havoc on their mana. She had brought one because it was devastating to the wrong kind of enemy in ways she did not fully understand, and they needed every advantage.
Marissa continued to step lightly.
It had been clear for some time that the Murai and his demons knew about their little group. She did not know what details they had, which ones they considered important, or why. Only that the demons were attacking a fortified position with intent.
You did not do that unless you wanted inside, and there was only one reason to want inside that fortress.
Them. The women in her group.
Marissa also knew that if the demons were after them, they would not simply try to win the battle. They would try to prevent escape. Anyone leaving the field would become a priority target, at least anyone from their group.
Which meant there was even more riding on her flight.
She wondered if the people the Princess had sent out had made it. Probably not, since there was still no help in sight. They had failed.
She would not.
Something stirred, the faint tug at her awareness, as though an invisible hook were reaching out to catch her presence and follow the thread.
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Marissa slowed her pace, letting the terrain guide her. The path narrowed between two slabs of stone, the fog thickening just enough to blur distance and depth. She pressed herself into the shadowed seam and drew the device from its wrappings.
The displacer was ugly in a way only unfinished work could be.
Angular and asymmetrical, its casing bore the marks of hurried genius. The runes etched along its surface were precise but inelegant, more mathematical than artistic, each line carved for function rather than beauty. It hummed faintly in Marissa’s palm, a low, restless vibration that spoke of stored mana straining against imperfect containment.
It wanted to be used.
Marissa tightened her grip around the device as she pressed herself into the shelter of a broken stone outcrop. The fog curled low and heavy, muffling sound and blurring distance. Somewhere behind her, she felt the pull again, the faint, predatory tug of attention brushing against her awareness.
The Sword Demons were close.
Using the displacer would be simple. One twist of the core and the world would stutter just enough to tear loose whatever threads were being used to follow her. She knew the sensation from watching the twins test it, the lurch, the disorientation, the way reality slipped half a step out of alignment before snapping back into place.
It would buy her distance.
It would also tell them exactly what she was.
According to the Princess, demon-touched perception was crude unless fully integrated, but relentless. This pulse would not merely disrupt tracking. It would announce her presence, if not her intent. It would confirm that something valuable was moving through their territory and worth diverting resources to capture or destroy.
The logic settled cold and unavoidable.
If she used it now, they would not lose her.
They would hunt her harder.
Marissa exhaled slowly and forced her grip to relax. With care, she wrapped the device back in cloth and returned it to her pouch. The hum faded to a sullen murmur against her hip.
Not yet.
She needed them to misread what had happened, not understand it.
A shadow moved ahead on the path.
An orc, one of the scattered stragglers ranging farther from the main host. Small by orc standards, his armor mismatched and scarred, his posture loose with boredom rather than readiness. His attention was fixed outward, toward the distant glow and thunder of battle around Crescent Hyr.
He had not seen her.
Marissa adjusted her breathing and stepped forward.
She closed the distance without sound, her movement smooth and measured, every step placed where stone would not scrape or shift. When she reached him, she moved close, close enough to feel the heat of his body, close enough that her presence registered too late to matter.
The blade flashed once, the poison of the dagger making quick work of its victim.
He never made a sound.
She caught him as he fell, reinforcing her body with mana and guiding his weight down so it did not strike the ground or make noise. His body sagged heavily against her for a brief moment before she eased him into a shallow depression near the edge of the path, arranging him as if he had slipped and fallen on his own.
Her hands trembled only after she let go. She did not linger on that.
Instead, she reached into another pocket and drew out a small, folded strip of etched stone.
A fire stone inscribed with an activation glyph.
It was crude, dangerous, and never meant to be used like this. The Lin family did not favor such things, but Marissa understood its workings well enough. The trigger logic was brutally simple, sudden pressure, imbalance, and rapid shift.
Exactly the sort of thing an orc might blunder into while moving carelessly through unfamiliar terrain, mimicking some particularly nasty wards.
She knelt and etched the final lines quickly, fingers steady despite the hammering of her heart. The glyph anchored itself to the ground with a faint, hungry warmth. She pressed the orc’s body into place, twisting one leg unnaturally, scraping armor against stone to leave convincing marks of a misstep.
Then she fed the glyph a breath of mana.
It armed itself with a soft, unstable glow, easy to miss unless one knew precisely what to look for.
Marissa rose and stepped back.
She did not wait to watch.
She had taken no more than a dozen steps when the explosion came.
It was sharp and violent, a sudden bloom of heat and sound that echoed up the mountain path. Fire flared, stone cracked, and the smell of burned flesh rolled outward, thick and unmistakable.
To anyone following, it would look like the carelessness of an orc triggering an old trap, a patrol blundering into forgotten defenses.
Nothing overt. Nothing intentional.
Shouts rose behind her, angry and confused.
Marissa was already moving. She lengthened her stride, keeping low, letting the fog and broken terrain swallow her again. The mountain closed ranks behind her, shadows folding into place as though she had never been there at all.
The displacer remained untouched in her satchel. She had bought herself a window with the confusion the trap caused. They were probably wondering how they had missed it. And in this terrain, against this enemy, confusion was far deadlier than almost anything else.
She had to get where she was going. Get to the relay and get it to Ethan.
She was scared, so very scared, and so she thought of him. A habit she had developed years ago. When fear pressed too close, Ethan would come for her. She imagined him not as the distant genius surrounded by devices and diagrams, but as the man, or even the boy, who had once pulled her from a river and refused to let go.
Sometimes she thought of how he had changed over the years. The way his attention sharpened when something mattered. The quiet intensity in his eyes when he focused on a problem he refused to let defeat him.
Sometimes she imagined their life together if she ever found the courage to push the issue. The truth was, she was afraid. Afraid he would say no. Afraid he would not love her. Afraid there would be no place for her in a life that had grown so much larger than she had ever imagined.
She had thought she had time. Thought she would be his best option. Who was as beautiful as she was? Who loved him as much as she did? No one. So when he began spending time with Claire, she believed she could wait. She could take that place later.
Then he married Vivian Li, became so much more visible, and suddenly everyone wanted his attention.
Well, she wanted it too, and she loved him more than any of them.
Marissa made a decision right there.
She would force the issue.
She loved him, and she was not going to let it go. She would involve her parents, his parents, the Li parents. She did not care. She would be with him, and then she would demand children. Not one. Two. A boy with Ethan’s eyes and intelligence, and a girl, round-faced and stubborn, who looked like her. No, three children. Another little boy who would look up to his older brother and adore his mother.
Yes. She would bring his family together. She would be his foundation, the one who held everything in private.
Vivian could have the politics. The councils. The formal dinners of double-speak and confusion. The Princess could have the heirs, the legacy, and the weight of the Empire pressing forward.
Marissa would take the quiet moments. The kisses stolen in shadowed corridors. Bare feet on sand by the sea with children playing in the distance. Laughter pressed into skin where no one else could hear it. She would take the sweat, the passion, the gasps in the dark, and the flush of warm water after skinny-dipping in hot springs.
She would take his lust, his weakness, his darkness. She would take it all and keep it hidden. She would give him a place to retreat to, peace in the madness, dry warmth in the storm.
Yes, Marissa Lin would take it all.
So she would survive this and take what was rightfully hers.
She kept going, her resolve firmly in place.