Tobias walked down the steps and stood on the stone patio. His silk trousers clung to his frame like a second skin. He wiped a mixture of rainwater and congealing blood from his forehead.

"Spread out further!" he shrieked at the additional twenty-odd cultists who had swarmed from the lower glass door. "He’s only one man! Scour the hedges, check the trellises! If he breathes, I want to hear his lungs stop!"

He then pointed and called out to four of his brothers. "Wait, you four, stay. That sneaky rat likes to play in the dark. Gather around me. Now."

"""Yes, Father!""" They ran back to Tobias and formed a protective wall around him.

The search began as the cultists moved in pairs of two. The tension was thick enough to choke on. Every rustle of a wind-whipped rosebush, every splash of a heavy droplet against a leaf, made them jump. They were the hunters, yet they moved with the frantic, wide-eyed gait of prey.

Then, the first sound cut through the gale.

"ARGHH–!!"

A short, gurgling yell erupted from the far east corner of the garden, near the stone fountain. It was cut off abruptly, as if a hand had been clamped over a mouth.

"There!" Tobias pointed, his face twisting. "Go!"

A cultist and his partner sprinted through the mud. When they reached the fountain, Kurt wasn’t anywhere to be seen. There was only a black-robed body slumped over the marble rim, the water in the basin turning a dark, swirling purple. The man’s throat had been sliced clean open.

"He was just here!" one of the cultists whispered, cracking his voice. "How did he do it so fast?"

"HELP–!!!"

Another scream, this time from the west, near the hedge maze. Tobias spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs. The anxiety was beginning to mutate into a primal, paralyzing horror. The rain seemed to be getting louder, a deafening drumming that masked the sound of Kurt’s approach.

They ran again. Another body. This one was pinned to a tree by their signature dagger driven through his chest.

"He’s picking us off," a cultist stammered, his shield shaking in his hand. "F-Father, he’s not a man. He’s a demon. The Goddess has forsaken us!"

"Silence!" Tobias roared, though his own hands were trembling. "He’s just a trickster! Nothing more!"

But then came another yell. And another. Each one was a horrific cry that punctured the night, followed by the heavy silence of the grave. Every time Tobias heard a scream, the fear inside him grew. Kurt was a phantom, a wraith that existed only in the peripheral vision of his fallen brothers. The cultists were no longer searching; they were huddled in small groups, shaking in their boots, staring into the darkness, waiting for the cold steel to find them.

The psychological warfare was getting too much. The rain, the dark, and the ever-climbing tally of the dead were breaking them.

"Everyone back to the estate!" Tobias panicked. "Regroup at the side entrance! Secure the perimeter of the master wing! Fall back! Fall back now!"

Tobias and his four brothers bolted for the glass panel doors. They ran with a desperate, lung-burning speed, their boots splashing through the muck. As they reached the stone steps, Tobias skidded to a stop and looked back, expecting to see a frantic line of his brothers following him.

The garden was empty.

Then, a shape emerged from the shadows.

It was a lone man, walking with a slow pace that defied the chaos of the storm. Kurt moved with the heavy, inevitable momentum of a landslide. In his left hand, he dragged the corpse of a dead cultist by the collar, the body leaving a dark furrow in the mud behind him. His black sword hung loosely in his right hand, the blade dripping with a mixture of rain and blood.

The sight was a masterpiece of terror. Kurt’s singular eye glowed with a faint, predatory blue through the downpour, fixed unblinkingly on Tobias.

"K-Kill him!" Tobias shrieked, his face pale with a coward’s rage. He shoved his four remaining brothers forward, pushing them off the stairs and into the mud. "In the name of the Goddess, I order you! Kill that monster! I will go for reinforcements!"

"F-Father, wait–!"

But Tobias didn’t wait. He turned and scrambled inside, sliding the glass panels shut behind him.

Kurt didn’t stop walking. As the four guards raised their weapons, shaking with a mix of duty and dread, he effortlessly heaved the corpse he was dragging. He threw the dead weight with a mana-enhanced grunt. The body flew through the air like a bowling ball, slamming into the lead cultist and sending the two of them tumbling into the mud.

Tobias looked back through the narrow glass slit of the panel behind the curtain one last time before fleeing. He saw a blur of black steel and sapphire light. Kurt moved like a dancer as his sword cut through the remaining three cultists before they could even scream.

"Time for plan B." he muttered and turned, sprinting through the hallway toward his master chambers.

He didn’t care about his "brothers" anymore. He only cared about one. The remote. If this were truly the end of his work here, he would have his revenge. He would make the children’s heads bloom like crimson flowers and vanish into the night.

.

..

...

Miles away, at the edge of the dark forest, the rain drummed against the massive, unmoving carcass of the Great Weaver. The violet fluid from its wounds had pooled around its jagged legs and split open skull, a testament to the violence Kurt had unleashed.

Diana stood next to the monster as her eyes scanned the tracks in the mud.

"He killed a Greater Weaver." She remarked.

"And he did it while protecting a child." Emelie added when coming back from the hollow tree. "Doesn’t seem like they’re here. Let’s move. The estate looks to be just over that ridge."

Diana didn’t respond with words and simply vanished. A fissure of her afterimage appeared fifty feet down the path, then another, then another. She was teleport-jumping. A high-level spatial maneuver that allowed her to blink to any point within her line of sight.

"Fucking– Hey! Wait up!"

Emelie threw her hands back, using a massive telekinetic blast against the ground to launch herself forward like a rocket, her hair streaming behind her as she tried to keep pace with her principal.

They reached the side gate of the estate in record time. The gate was a ruin of twisted iron and broken chains. A sign that shows Kurt has been through here.

Diana scanned the area and readied herself for another jump, when Emelie lunged forward and caught her wrist.

"Stop!"

The principal stopped, her head tilting slowly to look at Emelie. The gaze was chilling. "Release me, Emelie. Rosie could be in trouble, and I’d rather not waste any mana teleporting us both."

"I know!" Emelie hissed a desperate whisper. "But you can’t just teleport in and start causing trouble! We don’t even know what Kurt’s situation is. Tobias is a rat. What if he starts panicking because of your presence? He’ll kill those kids before you can even draw your blade. We have to be quiet."

"What kids? Weren’t they all taken by Dominik?"

"There’s... There’s more. The children Dominik took; they told me."

Diana stared at the estate, her red eyes glowed as she narrowed them, focusing on something that only she could see.

"The rat has already been cornered," Diana said, her voice dropping into a register that made the hair on Emelie’s arm stand up. "He won’t even get the chance to blink once he notices me. I’m going."

"Principal, please—!"

But Diana was already gone by the time she loosened herself from Emelie’s grasp. A silent ripple of air was the only sign she had ever been there.

"Damn it!" Emelie punched the gate. "Stupid, arrogant, lovestruck... ugh!"

She didn’t follow with a loud blast. She knew the stakes. She flew over the gate and dropped low, her feet barely touching the grass as she used her telekinesis to dampen the sound of her own movement.

She made her way to the side wall of the estate where she found a dead body with a split open skull.

"Is this your doing, Kurt? *Tsk!* Why’d you have to disappear like that? Haaa, I hope you’ve got a hell of a hiding spot, because a new storm has just arrived."

.

..

...

Inside the estate, Tobias reached the master chambers where everything was a complete wreck. But he didn’t look at any of it. He dove toward the nightstand, his fingers frantically searching through the debris of the shattered vanity.

"Where is it? Where is it?!"

He found it. The small, silver box with the ornate engravings. It had been knocked to the floor during the struggle. He grabbed and opened it, his thumb hovering over the recessed red button. A manic, jagged laugh bubbled up in his throat.

"You lose, Rossana," Tobias spat, looking toward the door.

BAM!

The door to the chambers bashed opened, breaking on its hinges.

Kurt stood in the doorway, his chest heaving, his clothes were tattered, soaked in rain and the blood of twenty men.

"Oh hey, I was looking for that." Kurt let out a terrifying growl. "Drop it. Or I’ll make sure your death takes as long as the lives you’ve stolen."

"Hahaha! You’re too late!" Tobias’s thumb descended toward the red button with a twitch of ecstatic malice. "NOW DIE!"