Chapter 475: No Way Out
(3rd Person POV)
Leonard had not even seen Arthur move. One moment he was standing there, and the next it was already done — both fingers taken before a single second had passed. No wind-up, no warning, nothing his eyes could follow.
He stood there for a moment, quietly coming to terms with what he had just witnessed.
A figure that fast, that precise, existed only in legends. SSS Rank — a classification so far beyond the normal scale that most people treated it as mythology. Even SS Rank was spoken of in rumour rather than fact. Principal Saza was rumoured to sit somewhere in that range, but nobody could say for certain. And SSS Rank, a figure said to rival the strength of a god — that was the kind of thing that appeared in old stories and nowhere else.
He glanced over at the unconscious Cael and felt something close to sympathy. The wizard had been taken down by Leonard during the fight. All things considered, that was probably the luckiest outcome available to him today. If he’d still been awake right now, he might be short a finger too.
"Arthur! I could hear the screaming from down the hall." Firfel stepped through the ruined doorway, taking in the scene with the calm of someone who had walked in on worse.
Leonard blinked. He had put up a sound barrier himself. He was almost certain of it. And yet she had heard it anyway, through the walls, from down the corridor.
He filed that away.
"It was a small matter," Arthur said, holding up both fingers between two knuckles as though presenting evidence. "I just took these. See?"
Firfel snatched them out of his hand. Then she turned to where Aldric and Brom lay and directed a quiet spell at the severed fingers. They lifted, drifted back, and reattached — flesh closing over flesh, clean and complete, as though nothing had ever been taken.
Leonard’s mouth fell open.
"Have some mercy," Firfel said, shaking her head at Arthur with an expression caught somewhere between exasperation and resignation.
"It can’t be helped," Arthur said, with the sheepish smile of a man who didn’t feel particularly guilty. "They didn’t learn the first time. So I taught them again."
"Oh — aren’t these the people from the inn?" Apollonia appeared in the doorway behind Firfel, eyes sweeping across the thoroughly defeated S-Rank party with open delight.
"Sister, that healing spell," Sylwen said, appearing beside her. "Could you teach it to me?"
Firfel nodded, then paused thoughtfully. "I can try. Though since Arthur and I are bound, some of what I can do may have changed. I’m not certain which of my spells are still purely mine and which have become something else."
The room, which had been deadly serious not five minutes ago, had somehow become entirely domestic.
"Leonard." Arthur turned to him. "Handle the aftermath with these six. Make sure the guild comes down on them properly. Don’t go easy." He was already moving toward the door. "I have something else to deal with. A rat slipped out while we were busy."
"Understood." Leonard straightened immediately.
He watched Arthur leave, then looked back at the scene around him — five members of the previously feared Six of Diamonds, unconscious or incapacitated on the floor of a ruined office — and quietly revised every assumption he had ever made about where he now stood in the world.
Whatever rank system this world used, Arthur and Firfel existed somewhere beyond the top of it. He was certain of that much.
---
Sable ran.
She had been running since the moment Arthur moved — since that fraction of a second when something in her chest screamed at her to get out before she fully understood why — and she hadn’t stopped since. The Eastern Theatre was already far behind her, shrinking to a distant shape, and she was still pushing.
’I knew it. From the very beginning, my «Assassin’s Heart» was screaming at me that something was wrong with this whole task,’ she thought, legs burning, breath ragged. ’Leonard beating the others — fine, that was a shock, but I could make sense of it. But that man Arthur — he moved so fast that he took their fingers before anyone in that room even registered that he’d moved. That’s not normal. That is not anywhere close to normal.’
She was still shaking slightly.
The «Assassin’s Heart» was a C-Rank Blessing — unimpressive on paper, unknown even to the rest of the party. It did one thing: it told her when something was dangerous. Not how dangerous. Not what the threat was. Just the fact of it, quiet and insistent, like a cold hand on the back of the neck. It had saved her more times than she could count growing up, in situations where she’d had no other warning to work with.
When it had gone off the moment she probed that office with her sensing magic, she had chosen not to push it.
She was glad she hadn’t.
She cut through side streets in a sharp zigzag pattern, doubling back twice, crossing through a crowded market lane before ducking into a narrow alley and pressing herself against the wall. She stayed still and listened.
Nothing following her. As far as she could tell.
She let out a long breath and slid down the wall until she hit the ground, legs giving out under her at last.
"...Damn." She stared up at the strip of sky between the rooftops. "I actually pushed myself to the limit running from a theatre."
She sat with that for a moment.
’That stupid Aldric. So desperate for coin that he dragged us straight into something like that.’ She thought about the months of declining hunts, the shared room, the dwindling funds, the way Aldric had looked at the Underground Guild job like a lifeline. ’And look where it got us.’
She thought about Leonard.
During the discussion about kicking him out, she had been the only one who hesitated. She hadn’t pushed back hard enough — Aldric’s certainty and the pressure of the group had worn her down — but something had sat wrong with her about it from the start. She had told herself it was just loyalty to a familiar face.
Now she knew better.
They had kicked out the strongest person in their party. The one who knew every one of their habits, every pattern, every opening. The one who had built the strategies that kept all six of them alive across years of dangerous hunts, and done it so quietly and consistently that none of them had ever stopped to notice.
’Who knew,’ she thought, ’that the person we threw away was the one holding everything together.’
"I gotta get out of this city. As far away as possible." Sable muttered to herself, staring at the strip of sky above the alley. "But first I need to change my face. Good thing I know someone at the «Dark Street» who sells «Disguise Masks». Been buying from him long enough that he’ll probably loan me one."
She was already running the numbers in her head.
"Reinhardt City. It’s bigger, more opportunities, easier to disappear into the crowd. I could join an A-Rank party there. Maybe S-Rank if I’m lucky and careful about it. Start fresh, keep my head down..."
She stroked her chin, working through the details with the focused calm of someone who had been in bad situations before and knew how to think their way out of them.
"Yeah. That’s a good plan."
"It really is," said a voice beside her.
"Thank you. But honestly, this is all I could come up with." She sighed. "Who knew I’d end up backed into a corner like this, like some dog—"
She stopped.
Every single thing inside her stopped.
Her heart. Her breath. Her ability to form a coherent thought. It all just — stopped.
Time itself felt like it had grabbed her by the collar and refused to move.
She turned her head. Very slowly. Trembling in a way she couldn’t control.
Arthur was crouched right beside her, nodding thoughtfully, as though he had been there the entire conversation and was simply waiting for her to notice.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. She wanted to do literally anything other than sit here, but her body had made its own decision about that, and the decision was nothing. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even pull in a full breath.
"What’s wrong?" Arthur asked, with genuine-looking concern. "We were just discussing your plan."
Several seconds passed. Sable’s back hit the alley wall as she inched away in the smallest steps her legs would allow. "Y-you — how — I didn’t sense you at all. I’m in an open alley. I would have — I should have—"
She was an expert in sensing. The open air was supposed to be her element. There was nothing here to block her perception. And yet Arthur had appeared right beside her without her picking up so much as a whisper of his presence.
"Nothing is impossible, dear." Arthur smiled warmly. "As long as you believe in yourself."
"G-get away from me!" The words came out in a rush. "I have nothing to do with the Six of Diamonds anymore, you hear me? Nothing! I’m not part of that party!"
"Hmm." Arthur tilted his head. "That’s interesting. Because I’m pretty sure I saw you with them about an hour ago."
Sable’s legs made the decision before her brain did. She bolted.
Arthur was already standing in front of her.
She skidded to a stop, heart hammering. "Wh-what do you want from me?"
"Relax." He held up a hand. "With your particular set of skills, I think you could actually be useful to me. And since I’m in a good mood today—" he shrugged, almost casually, "—how would you feel about working for Hellfire instead?"
Sable stared at him. "...What?"
"I could tell you weren’t really committed to that plan back there. You were the cautious one. The one who knew something was off from the beginning." He grinned. "I don’t hold that job against you. Besides, talent is talent."
He waved a hand. "Your sensing skills, your stealth work, your ability to move through a space without being noticed — there’s crew work in film production that those abilities suit perfectly. Location scouting, background coordination, keeping an eye on things during a shoot without disrupting it—"
"I have no idea what any of that means," Sable said flatly.
"Doesn’t matter. Are you in or not?"
Sable looked at him. Looked at the alley she’d run into. Looked back at him.
She didn’t need to think about it. "...I’m in."
---
What followed was quick and very public.
The five remaining members of the Six of Diamonds were handed over to the Adventurer Guild, and Guild Master Alun was not pleased. That people affiliated with his guild — people wearing S-Rank licenses issued by his institution — had gone to the Underground Guild and accepted a contract to capture or kill another registered member of the city’s merchant community was not something he was prepared to overlook.
He didn’t.
The licenses of all five were revoked on the spot. That alone would have been enough to make it the talk of the city.
But Alun went further.
In the central plaza, on the public platform where guild announcements were made, he presented all five of them and read out their crimes in front of whoever happened to be passing through. One year in the «Hell Dungeon Prison» — which sounded lenient until you knew what it actually meant. The dungeon ran cold at night and sweltering hot through the day, and the stone itself bled mana from anyone inside it, keeping prisoners weak and drained for the full duration of their sentence. Soft people didn’t survive a year there.
The Six of Diamonds weren’t soft. They’d probably make it through. Charlotte, unassuming as she looked, had always kept things up her sleeve that the rest of the party didn’t know about. But it wouldn’t be comfortable. Not even close.
Charlotte’s parents found Leonard shortly after the sentencing. They appeared in front of him looking every bit as distressed as the situation warranted, and they begged.
Leonard listened. Then he turned and walked away.
Alun found Arthur afterward and presented a small chest. "Forty gold — compensation from the guild for what was done to you, and our thanks for bringing this to us rather than handling it yourself." He paused on those last words in a way that suggested he had some awareness of what handling it yourself might have looked like. "I hope this is sufficient."
"Keep it," Arthur said simply. "It’s a small matter."
Alun looked at him for a long moment. He had already suspected Arthur wouldn’t take the gold. The kind of man who turned down forty gold as a small matter was the kind of man who wanted something more valuable than coin — and what he was building instead was a debt. A significant one, owed by the Adventurer Guild of Eisen City.
That was a considerably heavier thing to carry than forty gold.
"...I see," Alun said quietly.
