TIME August 15th (continuing) LOCATION A Northside Crew tenement, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
A gang war between the Northside Crew and a mercenary outfit called the Blue Thumb had turned an apartment block into a slaughterhouse.
And the mercenaries still holding the building weren’t finished.
WHAT HAPPENED
A second body was waiting on the landing before they even reached the fighting.
Another Northside man, bolt-and-stab wounds, his own thumb gone and the same bluish dye smeared across his forehead.
The building beyond was dark, close, and badly kept, its walls thick with gang tags and worse.
Krusha went in first, alone, picking his way toward the sound of something wet and breathing further inside.
The ambush cost the Agents little in the end, though it didn’t feel that way going through it.
One of the ‘corpses’ on the balcony turned out to be very much alive, loosing a crossbow bolt into Raven the moment she and Krusha stepped into the open, and a locked, barred door cost them another volley before Ash forced it open and Raven closed the gap at a dead run.
Ash and Raven cornered and dropped the shooters one at a time, and the Northside boss, Carak, was taken alive along with a couple of badly wounded Blue Thumb mercenaries.
Carak himself was waiting at the far window when they reached him – pale, bloodied, and missing a thumb of his own.
Krusha offered him a battlefield cantrip rather than a blade to stop the bleeding; Carak took it with a muttered, grudging thanks, then turned straight around and laid into a downed rival with his boots anyway.
One of the wounded mercenaries, elven under the scarf and hood, carried a Valknut worked into his skin – three interlocked triangles, a mark Krusha recognised from Section 18’s own gang files as belonging to men who’d already made peace with dying on the job.
It was what happened next that unsettled everyone.
Raven manacled the survivors together.
Krusha found a fourth survivor while checking the dead – a boy hidden under his own father’s body on the balcony floor.
He came up snarling rather than grateful, blood-slicked and half-feral, lashing out before Krusha even registered movement.
The Agent put him down with the flat of his mace rather than the edge, filing the cut to his own arm as the cost of it.
Carak went for the same downed rival a second time in the confusion that followed.
Raven answered with a kick to the temple that cracked a tooth loose and put him down for good, then rolled the man he’d been trying to finish into the recovery position rather than let him bleed out on principle.
By the time the Agents regrouped, half their prisoners ended up manacled not to each other but to the dead – the quickest anchor to hand in a building that short on intact furniture.
And somewhere behind them, in the dark of the balcony, a mewling like cats started up, low at first, then closing in from the direction of the stairwell.
Neither Ash nor Krusha could find a single paw print in the blood to go with it.
Krusha caught sight of something invisible dragging a body across the balcony floor, and a dead cat – missing its head – dropped from the ceiling onto Ash a moment later.
Followed by a deluge of warm blood from somewhere above.
Many voices, layered over each other, whispered close in Krusha’s ear as it happened –
“They’d be alive, if it wasn’t for you”
repeating, fading, gone before he could place a direction to answer.
A dispel Krusha threw at the empty air on instinct caught something – the cat-sounds cut off dead the moment it landed, and didn’t start again.
Whatever was doing it left no footprints and answered nothing.
Though it did leave a fistful of torn-out blond hair in Ash’s hand when she finally got a grip on it.
Raven, choosing the faster route, simply jumped from the second-floor window rather than wait it out, landing hard enough to send a passer-by sprawling and herself limping off with a string of curses trailing behind her.
And spotted, from street level, a man calmly wiping down a shop door handle before letting himself in, in a manner that read less like a customer and more like someone erasing evidence.
She followed her instinct straight into the Scrapshell, an odd little curio shop of a proprietor – polite, unassuming, and very definitely lying – and demanded he drop the bloodied cloth in his hand.
Something struck her from behind before she got an answer.
Enough, Jaraba,
the shopkeeper said, calm as anything, before slipping through a door behind the counter and locking it as Raven’s blade missed him by inches.
Outside, Ash and Krusha found themselves explaining a blood-soaked comrade to a bewildered horse-cart couple, and then explaining her sudden absence when they turned to point at the Scrapshell’s now-closed door.
Somewhere inside, alone in the dark, a voice echoed back at Raven from two directions at once.
“A fear of the dark, Agent?”
unseen, from the shop
“Yes… Are you afraid of the dark?”
unseen, from the corridor beyond
EXTRAS.
