Late at night, the lights in the office of the Gaderia Lord's Manor were still burning.
The Demon Race's constitution far surpassed that of Humans. So long as they had enough Mana, going several days without sleep or rest was nothing unusual.
Priority investigation target, codename "devil." Present during the era of the Ohaly War. True identity unknown. Suspected of driving the war forward. No trace whatsoever.
Priority investigation target, Anhadi III, codename "King of War." Human, royalty. Instigator of the Ohaly War. Currently missing. No trace whatsoever.
Priority investigation target, the Northern Empire's espionage and assassination units, codenames "Shadow Warriors" and "Commander." Suspected of having infiltrated many regions. No traces found to date.
Priority investigation target, Elf Mage, codename "Frieren the Slayer." Elven race. Should any intelligence arise that she intends to enter the Northern lands, report it at once.
Priority investigation target, Solitär, codename "Solitär." Demon Race. Unsuited to the ideal of Human-Demon coexistence. To be handled with care.
Priority investigation target, Grausam, codename "Miracle." Demon Race. Status: missing. Owing to his peculiar magic, suspected of overlapping with numerous unidentified targets on this list.
Newly added priority investigation target, codename "Whiskered Guard." Human? True identity unknown. Significance unknown. Determine whether it constitutes a threat.
Lugner studied the list in his hand and lifted the coffee at his elbow for a small sip. The cup scraped against its saucer, and the sound carried through the whole office, cutting across the faint ticking of the pendulum clock.
Leaning back in his padded chair, Lugner slowly closed his eyes, as though burning the revised list into memory.
After a moment, he let out a long breath.
And in the same instant that he opened his eyes again, the floor-to-ceiling window behind him, black with the night beyond it, burst apart.
The shriek of shattering glass swallowed the clock. It happened too suddenly, too fast. Time itself, which had been slipping steadily past, seemed to stop dead.
By the time Lugner understood what was happening, a hand had already reached in at the edge of his vision, all the way to his neck. A bright blade caught the lamplight and flashed across in one clean stroke.
"Ngh..."
No sound made it out of him. Blood was already spraying. The list slipped from his fingers and drifted to the floor. With a heavy thud Lugner dropped onto the desk and lay motionless.
Blood ran to the edge of the desk and began to drip. The documents stacked around him took on a scatter of crimson spots.
Boots crunched over broken glass. A killer in black, skintight from throat to ankle, face wrapped, stepped into the lamplight.
"That horn. So the rumors were right after all. A real Demon."
The assassin looked at the lord whose head lay knocked against the desktop and decided this job had been far too easy.
A lord's manor at midnight with no guards patrolling anywhere, an office glowing warm yellow. A perfect opening.
Even so, caution won out. He came around the desk with his short blade, meaning to put a few more cuts through Lugner's skull.
The Demon Race's bodies were built differently from a Human's. He had to be certain it was dead for good.
Just as he closed on the body slumped across the desk, the instincts of a man who had spent years walking the line between life and death shouted a single word at him. Danger.
The assassin sprang back to open the distance and hurled the short blade at Lugner's head.
The blood spreading over the desktop began to crawl. A whip of blood rose out of the pool and swatted the bloodstained knife aside with perfect precision.
Lugner's head twitched against the wood, then snapped up. The wound at his neck was still bleeding, his throat ruined, and yet a rasping voice came out of it.
"Who... sent you... Human."
An assassination. An assassination aimed at him, the lord of this territory. The killer had released no Mana at all and had walked right up to the manor unnoticed.
"Magic, is it? I suppose it was never going to be that simple."
The assassin's hands went behind his back and came out holding two more blades, one long, one short.
"An ordinary man would be beyond saving after that cut. Why are you still standing? What magic is this? Fine. Then let's see how you handle these two. Both coated in a lethal poison."
"In the past... I might have been arrogant enough... to tell you exactly what my magic does. But now... don't you think it's rather stupid, to fight and run your mouth at the same time... explaining your trump card to your enemy?"
Lugner was grateful now. He had been a step too slow, but he had still reacted, and for that he had Jane's and Qual's coaching in magic to thank.
His Blood Control Magic had made an enormous leap forward.
The Lugner of today could govern the blood inside his own body down to the finest detail. Draw it out, reshape it, congeal it, harden it.
His neck had been laid open nearly halfway through. He had used Blood Control Magic to congeal the blood around the wound and force the half-severed neck back together.
But Blood Control Magic was not Immortality Magic. It could not restore anything. Vessels rejoined by brute force were bound to clog, and his breathing had grown labored because of it.
His ruined vocal cords could not be restored either, at least not now, which meant he had lost any hope of shouting for help.
"You'll die by my hand. Just like every Demon who ever showed off his magic to me. The Demon Race. Every last one of you deserves to die."
The masked killer's answer came as a whip of blood that hardened into a bayonet point.
A hiss of air. A ringing clash.
The crossed blades caught the thrust aimed at his heart.
Beneath the face wrap his mouth curled into a cold smile. The assassin turned his body to shear the attack aside and, in the same motion, threw one of the short blades.
Lugner had been backing toward the window the killer had come through. He was forced to steer the blood pouring from his wound once more and knock the flying blade away.
His body no longer seemed to answer his brain. His steps went soft and weightless, as if his head really had been cut loose from the rest of him.
Poison. Whatever this toxin was, it worked on the Demon Race too. Or perhaps it had been brewed for the Demon Race in the first place.
"Die."
The assassin moved like a specter, crossing the space in a blink. Both hands on the long blade, he brought it down in a savage overhead cut.
The desk split in two. The wash of air off the blade lifted the documents into the room.
By the thinnest margin, Lugner tore his palm open on the fountain pen he carried, and the blood that gushed out shaped itself into a half-body shield.
Then he switched hands, gripping the pen in his bleeding palm and slicing open the other one.
A spike of blood tore from the fresh wound and closed on the assassin mid-swing with the speed of an arrow leaving the string.
It punched through the floorboards with a roar, and caught nothing but an afterimage.
Clean moonlight spilled through the gutted window into the room, and the glass strewn everywhere glittered with it.
Then, from nowhere, the crunch of a boot on broken glass.
The assassin had appeared in the path of Lugner's retreat, the long blade already lifted, driving toward his back.
This time the target was the heart.
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