Tiffany landed on the inner side in a crouch, straightened up, looked at the grounds spread out in front of her, and felt a very specific kind of happiness settle into her chest. The kind that came from knowing exactly what she was here to do and being very, very good at it. The lights in the stone paths glowed their small patient light. Old trees. Quiet. The Star Clan estate at night was genuinely pretty.
She liked pretty things. But not as much as she liked Zoey!
She started with the outer residential wing because that was where the sleeping ones were, and sleeping ones were the easiest. She moved through the rooms like the professional magjistar assassin she was. The sword may have been big, but her sword could still slit their throats silently. She was a professional for a reason!
The third room had two people and one of them was already half-awake when she came through the door. He had fast instincts. He reached for the magji tool on his nightstand and got his hand around it before she cleared the distance.
"Shh…" The tip of her greatsword pierced through his throat. "It's okay, baby… Go back to sleep…" His eyes were wide as he looked into hers, his mouth releasing a silent scream that would never make noise again.
She left the wing after reaping it of several most likely innocent lives. It didn't bother her none. As a professional, emotions cannot get in the way of the mission! Not that she felt particularly bad about taking the lives of these people or anything. They dared to insult and discriminate against her Zoey! They should be grateful she was an assassin and not some sadistic freak that got off on torturing people.
She happily and silently skipped toward the main building. Behind her, the estate was still quiet. Still peaceful. The mahna lights still glowing.
…
The common room was lit.
Three of them were still up. Two sitting with tea, one standing near the bookshelf with a lamp on and a case file open on the table. They heard the door and looked up expecting a clansman and got Tiffany instead.
The one at the bookshelf moved first. He had a magji tool at his hip and drew it faster than she expected, a small rod that telescoped outward and discharged a burst of compressed mahna that nearly hit her in the shoulder before she'd fully crossed the room. She swayed out of the way of the sudden attack.
She was grinning at the man.
The two with tea had stood, tea forgotten, mahna already rising around them. One of them was channeling something through a ring on her middle finger, and as she channeled, Tiffany heard something crack. Like a dry branch. Like a bone.
"Doesn't that hurt? Not even a scream or cry from breaking your bone?" Tiffany curiously asked.
She watched the woman straighten up to her full height. The crackling sound continued, not one break but many, a series of them running up through her ribcage. And then she stopped crouching and stood completely upright and the mahna around her shifted into something denser, a kind of field that sat close to her skin.
Tiffany rushed her.
She swung and her sword connected and then the impact came back.
Not the woman going back but the force returning to Tiffany instead, a shockwave that hit her in the hands and traveled up through both arms and slammed into her chest like she'd swung her sword into a wall. She flew back, hit the far side of the common room, and slid down it leaving a dent in the plaster.
"Owie." Tiffany rubbed the back of her head, sitting there on the floor with her ears ringing and both arms numb from the elbows down. 'She bounces it back. This is why I usually scout out my targets beforehand, but this is for Zoey!'
She looked up. The ring woman was already moving toward her, hands out, the dense field around her body pulsing. The mahna-rod fighter was moving in from the other side. The third one was circling. Three at once. How exciting.
'Okay! Think! She bounces physical force. So physical attacks are out.'
She popped to her feet and bolted straight at the rod fighter instead, the one who'd shot her shoulder. He brought the rod up to fire again but Tiffany was already past the optimal range, inside it, where the compressed burst had less room to build. She expanded her hand.
Just her hand. Just the right one. Expanded it from normal size to roughly the size of a large cooking pot in the space of a breath. The rod fighter stared at it for approximately half a second. She slapped him with it. He went through the bookshelf a little less alive than he was before.
The ring woman was right behind her. She spun sideways instead of back, letting the woman's reach miss by inches, and landed on top of the common room table.
The third one had been waiting for her to be stationary. A burst of mahna from both palms, aimed at center mass. Tiffany jumped off the table backward. The mahna hit the table instead, blew it apart. She landed near the door. Breathed. Both arms were still buzzing from the reflected shockwave but the feeling was coming back.
'Okay. Ring woman is the threat. Can't hit her. Gotta do something she can't bounce.'
She looked at the broken table. Looked at her hands. Looked at the ring woman, who had reset to the center of the room and was watching her with a vicious smile when she realized she had the advantage. Tiffany raised her sword.
She expanded it.
What had been a fabulous human-sized greatsword had turned into something that wasn't meant to be wielded by regular human hands. The ring woman had approximately one second to understand what was happening before Tiffany slammed it down on top of her like a lid on a box.
The reflected shockwave came back. She brute forced it. Tiffany felt the rebound in her palms and continued smashing anyway, reinforcing the sword with her mahna. "Hahahaha! Bang! Bang! Bang! Why aren't you reflecting it anymore?!" The woman was unable to reflect this as she was crushed into a pile of broken bones and meat.
The third one ran.
"Hey, where ya going?" Tiffany giggled as she tossed her bloodied sword at the escaping magjistar.
Her sword tore the man in half. One side falling to the left and the other side falling to the right. With a string of mahna, Tiffany flicked her sword back at herself. Catching it by the handle as the sound of the man's death screams alerted the entire estate.
"I usually don't ever get discovered until the end of my contracts. I'm going to have to ask Zoey to train with me. I'm losing my touch!" Tiffany complained with a smile on her face, ecstatic at the thought of spending more time with Zoey.
A chain fighter found her in the open ground between the main building and the eastern outbuilding. Or maybe she found him. It was hard to say because he materialized out of the shadows moving already and she barely got her sword up in time.
He was fast. Super fast. Almost as fast as Zoey when she wasn't holding back! Well, before the incident with that super mean poison daemon. She got weaker after that. Tiffany wasn't exactly sure how strong Zoey was now…
Both forearms wrapped in a daemonic chain, coiled tight from wrist to elbow. When he swung it the chain uncoiled and the links bit into his skin on the way out. She could see the blood in the moonlight, the dark lines opening across his arms every time he committed to an attack.
And every time it happened he got faster.
"Oh that is so raw, dude!" Tiffany exclaimed, genuinely delighted, ducking under a swing that would have taken her head. "The more you bleed the faster you go. That's gross. I love it."
She expanded her sword and took a wide arc to cut off his movement angle. He was under it before she finished the swing. She felt the chain hit her ankle, the links biting, the momentum pulling. She flipped with it instead of against it and came down with her elbow expanded to about three times its normal size, driving it down where he'd been.
He wasn't there. He was already behind her.
The chain caught her across the back. Not the full force of it, she'd felt the swing starting and had turned enough that it was a glancing hit, but glancing from someone moving at that speed with a blade-chain was still like getting hit with a whip made of knives. She felt it open across her shoulder blade.
"Ow ow ow! That hurts and not even in a good way!" Tiffany spun around grinning.
He looked at her expression and his own confidence flickered for a moment.
She stopped trying to match his speed.
She expanded her sword and swung in a circle.
He jumped it. Barely.
But barely was enough. He was in the air, mid-jump, no footing. She titled the sword up and just... put it where he was going to land.
He tried blocking it in the air with the chains. Physics still worked the way they should have. The sword dragged through the air before she smashed him into the dirt. Blood shot out from his mouth as he was buried in the ground. Tiffany didn't hesitate to raise her sword once again and crush him again and again and again while laughing. This guy may have been as fast as Zoey, but he definitely wasn't anywhere near as strong or tough!
She reduced the sword back to normal size the moment her fun was over. This was a lot more fun than a normal job would be. Maybe she should take contracts with no info a bit more often. No wait! Zoey wouldn't like it if she continued working as an assassin. Zoey is really innocent despite how she acts. She doesn't like innocent people being hurt.
"Hahahaha! It's a good thing these bastards aren't innocent! Or Zoey might hate me!"
…
She found another fighter near the kitchen.
He was standing in the middle of the kitchen corridor and the air around him shimmered faintly, a sustained burn that came off his skin continuously. His palms were red. His neck was red. He looked like someone standing too close to a fire they were also generating from inside.
He watched her approach and didn't move.
She stopped about ten feet out.
"Hey, hot stuff! Are you just going to give me flirty eyes or are we gonna get down?" Tiffany did a promiscuous dance, running her hands down her waist.
The man looked utterly uninterested and Tiffany felt a little embarrassed. When she blinked, he moved, suddenly appearing in front of her face. His hand outstretched toward her face in the middle of her distraction tactic. Tiffany brought her fist back as her eyesight was covered by the man's hand. Just as it was about to burn her face alive, giving her third-degree burns no doubt, and ruining the cuteness and beauty she was genetically blessed with, Tiffany's fist shot out.
Expanding into a giant fist that sent the very hot man flying away with his entire ribcage shattered. Tiffany shrunk her hand while blowing on it repeatedly. "Hot, hot, hot! But not as hot as me, tee hee!" She performed a pose for absolutely no one.
…
Selena Star was waiting for her in the main hall.
Her sword was already out and already fed. It looked totally badass. A bunch of teeth, an eye in the blade tracking Tiffany with the attention she deserved. Tiffany blew a kiss at the eye which blinked in distaste. She held her heart in faux pain.
Selena Star saw a purple-haired girl with a greatsword with blood on it. She was reading the sword. Not the girl. Just the sword.
"Super-Duper Mega Slash!"
The sword expanded and Tiffany swung it in a massive arc aimed at Selena's center. Big! Obvious! Impossible to block!
Selena didn't try to block it. She stepped diagonally forward, inside the arc, and the expanded blade swung over her shoulder with an inch to spare. At the same time her daemonic sword came up in a tight diagonal cut aimed at Tiffany's wrist, trying to separate her from the weapon before the swing could complete.
Tiffany yanked her wrist back, reduced the sword mid-swing, and the daemonic blade missed by half an inch.
"You really are strong! You know, your name is even known in other branches of the OM? I thought all Star Clan members were just healers, but you guys really do know how to surprise a girl."
Selena didn't respond to that. She was already resetting, repositioning, giving Tiffany no time to recalibrate. She was going to stay aggressive. Stay inside the range where the big sword became a liability.
They clashed.
Tiffany pushed her sword back to normal size and came in heavy. Selena met it with the daemonic blade and actually held, her feet not moving, the force of it absorbed through her stance. Her bones were taking damage and healing it simultaneously, the impact feeding back into strength. She held and pushed back and Tiffany felt herself being pushed back.
"Wow you are actually really strong!"
Selena disengaged and stepped right and the daemonic sword came around, already adjusting for the direction Tiffany stepped. Tiffany went left instead. The blade grazed her forearm. She felt it open.
"Ow! Okay! You're quick too!"
She pressed forward with the sword reduced to close-range size, trying to use her reach advantage even at shorter extension. Selena read it and stepped into it, inside her guard again, and for a moment they were chest to chest with no room for either blade to work properly. Selena headbutted her.
Tiffany stumbled back. She touched her forehead. Looked at her fingers.
"You actually headbutted me! That is so messed up! I'm just trying to freaking kill you! Why are you trying so hard?!"
She was bleeding from the forearm. Her cheek was cut from somewhere she hadn't tracked. Her collarbone had a line across it that she was going to feel tomorrow.
Selena was better than her. That was just true. Significantly better, more experienced, an A-Grade magjistar who had been doing this for years with a healing ability that meant she could push herself further than anyone Tiffany had fought tonight. In a straight fight where skill was the deciding factor, Tiffany was losing this.
Good thing skill wasn't the only factor in a fight.
"You know out of everyone here, I definitely wanted to kill you the most for that crazy stuff you said to my Zoey." She retreated a step, let her guard drop just slightly, watched Selena's eyes track it. "In fact, the death of your clan could be said to be all your fault if you really look at it. Like why would you be mean to someone for no reason? Zoey doesn't deserve to be told her mom should die. Zoey deserves everything good and great in the world! Don't you think?"
"You're a nutcase," Selena said. She was advancing, reading the dropped guard, cataloguing the pattern. Two steps. "A psychopath. Not only will I kill you here, I'm going to get Zoey Winters and all her friends hunted down by the OM for your actions here."
"Oh jeez." Another step back, a little stumble, her foot catching just slightly. "I definitely can't let that happen. Zoey would never forgive me if I got her friends in trouble." One more small stumble, the retreat getting messier. "I guess I'll just have to kill you here!"
Selena saw the opening she'd been building toward. The stumble, the compromised footing, the guard too low and too slow to recover. Full commitment, the daemonic sword angled for the throat, the killing blow that the whole exchange had been working toward.
Tiffany's stumble stopped.
She grinned.
She expanded her hand.
Not just her hand, her whole arm, from shoulder to fingertips, expanded to a size that filled the corridor between them, fingers splayed wide. Selena was already inside the swing. Already committed. The gap between them closed and instead of a blade finding a throat it was Tiffany's enormous fingers closing around Selena's entire torso.
Selena tried to use the daemonic sword. In a closed fist there was nowhere to swing it.
She tried to heal. She was healing. But healing took concentration and the grip was compressing every rib simultaneously and there wasn't enough concentration left to heal fast enough.
Tiffany squeezed.
The sound of bones cracking was like music in Tiffany's ears. She squeezed like she was performing an orchestra. Each wheeze, each scream, each wet crunch of something that had been fixed became no longer fixed, all of it pure joy. She held the squeeze and let Selena's healing scramble against the power of it, mahna not remotely vast enough to close wounds this fast and this many at once. It took a bit longer than Tiffany expected, honestly. Selena was tough. So she just used that time to create more music using the sounds of broken bones and air being forced out of punctured lungs.
The daemonic sword dropped. The eye in the blade went dim.
It wasn't as if Tiffany was stronger than her or anything. She wasn't more skilled either. In fact Tiffany was significantly weaker and less experienced than Selena. The only advantage she had was that her connate magji gave her an absolute advantage in close combat if she could get there. And as an assassin, she dictated the terms of engagement usually.
Selena hadn't known what she was closing distance on.
Well, if they weren't Zoey anyway. Zoey was special. If she tried that against Zoey, Zoey would break out somehow or never find herself in that situation in the first place. She was just so amazing like that. Tiffany couldn't wait to finish up here and return to her house. She was going to watch her sleep through the window before she closed the blinds. And then attempting to sneak in and actually waking Zoey up by accident because Zoey had basically radar for her at this point, which Tiffany found extremely romantic.
She tossed Selena away like garbage.
"Bye!" she said cheerfully.
She walked toward the end of the hall.
…
The door was already open.
"You're one of the people who came with Zoey Winters today," Daniel Star said.
"Yep!"
"She sent you."
"She didn't." Tiffany stepped into the doorway. "She doesn't know I'm here. I'm not sure what she's going to think when she finds out I did it. If she finds out."
He looked at her. "A gully's associates do not make independent decisions of this magnitude. She ordered this."
"There you go again with that racist word!" Tiffany cutely glared at him. "It's because of that type of behavior that I had to kill you all. If you were just kind and nice to everyone, your family members wouldn't be dead out there right now."
"Zoey Winters will be held responsible for what happened here tonight." His voice was even. Still the clan elder voice, still the authority voice, even now. "Every person who came with her. Their families. Their connections. None of them will escape the consequences of this act."
Tiffany tilted her head. "I definitely can't let that happen then, don't you think Gramps?"
"It would be justice."
"Justice is whatever helps Zoey live happily." She corrected him. "Like her cute little non-magji friends. Her boxing family. Her real family. And all you had to do was at least try and figure out what was wrong with Zoey's mom. You couldn't even fake it! Now you must die!" Tiffany lowered her voice into an aggressive not intimidating growl.
She ran forward and immediately found out that Daniel Star had not gotten to white hair as a magjistar for no reason.
The first exchange she went in with her greatsword. He hit her with a punch of empowered by raw mahna that she felt in her bones. Not a technique. Not a tool. Just his own power, compressed and released, the kind that came from decades of building something past its natural ceiling. She hit the wall of his study and left a shape in it.
"Wowie zowie. So that's a real Grade-A Magjistar…"
She got up. He was already coming. She expanded her arm and used it as a shield and his fist hit her and the force transferred back up through her expanded arm into her shoulder and she heard something pop.
"Ow!" She rolled away, reduced her arm, began to reassess.
Selena had been fun. Daniel Star was a different level of fun. It looks like all those decades weren't for nothing. He was also healing himself mid-fight. She caught him taking a cut on his forearm and watched it fix in real time, the damaged tissue knitting back before it could set. He didn't flinch. He didn't slow. The healing was as automatic as breathing.
She threw herself at him again anyway, because she had to exterminate this clan no matter what.
He hit her twice more. Once across the shoulder, once across the ribs. She felt something crack on the second one. Tiffany was getting really upset as she continued to fight this guy. He clocked her across the face and sent her flying.
She bounced off the bookshelf with disgust building within her body. He fought really similarly to Zoey! This guy who hated Zoey so much he's willing to let her innocent mom die. Fights just like her! Or wait, would Zoey fight like him since he's older than her? Tiffany shook her head. Nope. He fights like Zoey. Zoey doesn't fight like him.
"Welp, I give up. I can't beat you. It's too hard." Tiffany stated.
Then she ran.
He followed. Of course he followed. He was furious.
"How dare you-"
She was already throwing things behind her. A piece of the broken corridor wall. A decorative urn. A chair from a side room. Each one she expanded mid-air as it left her hands, sudden and massive, filling the corridor.
He destroyed them all. Punch after kick, stone and ceramic and wood exploding into fragments, each one cleared in under a second. He was barely slowing down.
She reached into her jacket pocket.
She found, among various things, a piece of gum. Strawberry. She'd been saving it.
She popped it in her mouth, chewed it twice, spat it back out into her hand.
She tossed it over her shoulder without looking.
Expanded it.
The sound behind her changed. Not an explosion. Not the crack of stone. A wet, resistant, thoroughly stuck sound, the sound of something that didn't want to let go and was not letting go.
She stopped running. Turned around.
Daniel Star was encased from the thighs down in a bubble of expanded bubble gum approximately the size of a small vehicle. He was pulling. He was using mahna to try to compress it, to break it. Stone broke. Ceramic broke. Wood broke. Bubble gum stretched and contracted and pulled back and stretched again.
He looked up at her.
She was already overhead.
The sword was at full expansion. She'd pushed everything she had left into it, the last real reserves of mahna she could scrape together, and the blade was enormous and its edge was the sharp as hell.
His face was not afraid. It was furious. The frustration of a man who had lived a long life at the top of something and was being denied a meaningful end to it by a piece of chewed strawberry gum.
He brought his arms up. He poured every scrap of mahna he had into his forearms. He yelled and braced.
"BYE BYE GRAMPS!" Tiffany said.
She giggled.
She swung.
"BE NICER IN YOUR NEXT LIFE!"
…
She sat against the wall for a while.
Both arms were not fully working. Her ribs on the left side were doing something they weren't supposed to do when she breathed. Her mahna was at the bottom of empty, scraping. The sword was back to its regular size in her hand and it felt heavier than it should.
She sat there and let her body exist for a minute.
Through the window she could see the grounds. The lights in the stone paths were still on. Still glowing their patient small light. The old trees were still old. The Star Clan estate was still pretty.
"Hoo boy, I hope that was the last of the magjistars. As much as I want to finish this, I don't think I got enough in me for another." Tiffany giggled.
She thought about Zoey's face in the receiving room today. The way it had done nothing. Held everything inside while that man in his traditional robes with his kind eyes said things that should have burned the building down. That was its own kind of strength. Tiffany respected it.
She just didn't have it.
She got up.
There were still members of the Star Clan who had been in other rooms when the alarm went up, who had scattered or hidden or simply hadn't crossed her path yet. She could sense mahna still moving throughout the estate. She was near empty. Her ribs were broken. Her arms were both damaged in different ways.
She was still here.
She walked back inside.
Tiffany would be done soon.
Then she'd go see her.