Wasting no time, Lowe moved deeper into the Vault, the strange darkness wrapping around him like damp wool. His footsteps echoed on the floor, swallowed almost immediately by the cavernous silence. Behind him, the heavy iron door sealed shut with a hollow boom, cutting him completely off from the other officers outside.

  The air around him tasted stale and tinged with something. Expelled mana? It smelt like someone had let loose an insane amount of energy in here.

  Something was epically wrong here.

  Soar Vault was not a ‘bank’ in the normal sense of the word. It was a place where fortunes were not simply stored but cultivated, and all shielded behind layers of security measures that could make even the most battle-hardened criminal think twice before testing them. Or at least, it should have done so.

  The last time he’d been here - it was a perk for the Security Services that they were provided with an account here and no one had thought to close it when he was fired the first time - it had been buzzing with life. And not in the way a marketplace bustled with chaotic energy, but in the way an engine hummed with quiet power. Every surface had gleamed with polish and shine. The walls had been smooth black stone, cut exquisitely and inlaid with gold filigree, the runic wards forming an intricate lattice of security enchantments.

  Well, it wasn’t much like that now.

  Whenever he’d popped in to deposit his meagre loot, there had been hundreds of wealthy patrons, finely dressed, moving with the slow, deliberate confidence of those who had never once needed to consider the weight of an empty purse. Behind the counters, Clerks attended to their ledgers with an almost religious devotion that made them look more like Priests at mass than employees. And he remembered there had been at least ten Security Mages, stationed at key checkpoints.

  But now?

  Now, it was dead.

  Not empty.

  Dead.

  The walls had, somehow, been drained of their lustre. The golden filigree that had traced elegant warding sigils across every surface was blackened, as though something had reached into the heart of the Vault and sucked the mana right out of the stone. The marble staircase that had dominated the centre of the room, leading up to the upper offices, was cracked down the middle, its edges flaking away like old bone. Above it, the great crystal mana-lamps that had cast everything in a warm, golden glow were completely dark.

  Lowe had never seen anything like it.

  The enormous wrought-iron cages that had separated the bank tellers from their patrons stood eerily open, their bars warped, bent outward as if something inside had pushed its way free. Behind them, the Clerks' desks were abandoned, papers scattered haphazardly across their surfaces, quills snapped mid-sentence, inkpots spilled and dried in thick, congealed smears.

  The vault doors, giant slabs of reinforced metal inscribed with more security glyphs than a royal treasury, were ajar.

  Not shattered. Not blasted apart in some dramatic robbery.

  Just… open.

  Like someone had walked in and turned the locks with a whisper. Oh, and they were empty. Someone had a pretty full inventory right now.

  Lowe took another step, feeling the wrongness of it settle deep into his bones.

  This wasn’t just a robbery, was it? This wasn’t some desperate criminals forcing their way in for a payday.

  Something had hollowed out the Vault.

  Drained it.

  More had been stolen here than just gold.

  Where the fuck was everyone?

  The Clerks. The customers. The guards.

  The hostages.

  There should have been people here. Scared. Tied up. Wounded. Dead.

  Something!

  But the vast, cavernous halls of the Vault were completely and utterly empty.

  It was as if the building itself had digested its occupants. Considering his most recent investigation in Soar Museum, he had quite a lot of experience with that sort of thing. But this felt . . . different.

  Lowe swallowed, trying to push back the creeping unease slithering up his spine. He checked his mana levels - all good - and spooled up Slugger. With his stats the way they were, he was pretty confident he could handle a common-or-garden bank robbery. But was this what it was?

  He wasn’t sure. This didn’t feel normal. The way this place looked wasn’t something that just happened when you were gathering up piles of cash.

  Something was very wrong.

  A muffled whimper broke the silence.

  Lowe’s head snapped toward the sound. Apparently, he was not alone.

  The whimper had come from behind one of the massive teller cages. They’d been built to keep clerks safe from the riffraff. It should’ve been a barrier, not a hiding place.

  He didn’t move. Something about the place felt watched. Not in the obvious, sniper-on-a-rooftop sense - but, of course, this place had that going on too - but in that deep, primal way a man gets when walking alone in the dark and knows something is out there. His Grid View was recording everything, running through layers of heat signatures, mana traces, movement indicators—but there was nothing that obviously grabbed his notice.

  Just him and the—

  Another ragged breath.

  Lowe rounded the counter, fist glowing gold in preparation.

  A man cowered there, a heap of bruises and torn fabric, his hands bound behind his back with a length of expensive silk that had once been a merchant’s cravat. A Junior Clerk, by the looks of him. Young. Pale. Probably still green enough to think his career in the Vault would lead to a quiet, respectable life counting other people’s fortunes.

  Instead, he was on the floor of a dead bank, his left eye swollen shut, dried blood crusted against his temple.

  Lowe let Slugger fade and held his hands up to show they were empty. He didn't move too close. He made no sudden moves.

  The man still flinched anyway. But then his eyes focused on Lowe and he smiled. “Oh, thank the gods… I thought… I thought you were—”

  Lowe didn’t like that smile. It didn’t look . . . normal. “Who did this to you?”

  The Clerk swallowed. His throat worked like it was trying to strangle the words before they could get out. And still he smiled. The grin growing wider. And wider.

  “The… the man in black.” His lips cracked at the edge on the last word. Blood welling at the edge. “He took the others upstairs. Said he was waiting for you.”

  He gave the Clerk a once-over, scanning with Medic! for anything fatal. No broken limbs, no immediate risk of bleeding out, but the kid was rattled. Rattled bad. And that fucking smile . . . Lowe had seen men like this before—hostages who’d lived through the start of something horrific but hadn’t yet processed the worst of it.

  “Okay,” Lowe said.“Listen to me. Can you walk?”

  The Clerk nodded. Hesitated. “I—I think so.”

  “Good. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get up, you’re going to head for the main doors, and you’re not going to stop until you’re clear of the building.” Lowe’s eyes flicked to the shattered windows. “And you’re going to do it fast, before I find out what the hell is waiting upstairs.”

  The Clerk didn’t move.

  Lowe’s patience thinned.

  “Kid. I need you to move!”

  The Clerk blinked rapidly, his working eye darting around the ruined Vault like he expected something to lunge out from the darkness and drag him back.

  “They—” His breath hitched again. “They didn’t scream.” The Clerk’s hands were trembling now, the silk restraints slipping down his wrists. “When he took them. The others. They—they didn’t scream. I—” He swallowed. “I think he did something to them. I don’t know what. But they just… they went quiet.”

  “Right,” Lowe said, standing. “You really need to go.”

  But the Clerk didn’t move. His gaze was locked past Lowe now, wide and unfocused.

  Lowe turned sharply, Grid View flickering back to life. He checked it. Still nothing. No movement, no heat signatures, no mana fluctuations—

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  But the feeling of being watched?

  Stronger than ever.

  Something was here.

  And it was waiting.

  “Get out of here,” Lowe said, turning toward the stairwell. He started to leave, then paused. “Does he have a name?”

  “He... he said to tell you he was your next reminder.”

  Lowe barely had time to process the words before the Clerk’s mouth twisted, his lips stretching even wider, the smile becoming grotesque. It stretched across his face like a wound, his teeth bared in a rictus of something that most certainly wasn’t amusement. The Clerk’s jaw creaked, strained beyond what was natural, the skin at the corners of his mouth splitting open in thin, weeping cracks.

  And still the grin got wider.

  And wider.

  Lowe tried to trigger Medic! but it didn’t seem to have anything to latch onto. This wasn’t an injury in any way that his Skill recognised. Then a wet pop sounded as something inside his jaw dislocated, his cheeks tearing further, the exposed gums glistening, pink and raw.

  Lowe took a step back as the Clerk’s breath turned into a thick, gurgling wheeze. Blood trickled from his nostrils, thin lines of red sliding over his upper lip and into his too-wide grin. His fingers twitched, his spine curving inward as though his entire body was revolting against whatever was happening to him.

  Lowe had seen some bad ways to die. He’d caused a few himself. But this?

  Fucking hell. And he couldn’t even heal him.

  The Clerk’s whole body jerked once—violently—like something had just pulled hard on his nerves. A fresh crack echoed from his jaw, and his already-widened smile stretched even further, the flesh at his cheeks finally giving way in a wet, meaty tear.

  And then his head exploded.

  No fanfare. No slow crescendo. Just boom.

  A spray of blood, bone, and shredded meat splattered across the floor, a thick, wet noise accompanying the sudden and catastrophic disintegration of the Clerk’s skull. The force sent fragments of his teeth skittering across the ground, chunks of grey sliding down the counter in lazy trails.

  Lowe flinched, his coat catching the worst of the arterial mess as the Clerk’s body slumped sideways, his twitching hands smearing streaks of blood over the counter’s surface before finally going still.

  The Vault went silent once again.

  Then, with an effort, Lowe stepped forward.

  Not too close.

  His boots were already speckled red, and he had no intention of making things worse.

  Lowe crouched just enough to look at the Clerk’s head—if you could even call it that. There wasn’t much left. Just an open ruin of flesh and shattered skull, the mess fanned out like someone had taken a hammer to a ripe melon.

  Then he straightened, turned, and looked toward the stairwell.

  Upstairs.

  At the top of the staircase, the corridor branched off in two directions, one on the right leading toward the main vault chamber, the other to the offices. Both were draped in darkness. Both felt wrong.

  He remembered something Latham had told him when they’d been doing those bloody awful Dungeon runs. If in doubt, always take the left.

  And all Lowe had right now was doubt.

  The hallway was lined with doorways, all of them ajar, revealing shadowed offices and storerooms littered with broken furniture and discarded papers. Lowe’s fingers twitched, instinct urging him to resummon Slugger. But he resisted. There was something about the air, something about the way it pressed against his skin, that made him think some sort of . . . Skill was waiting for him to do just that.

  His Mental Fortress wasn’t flaring, so it wasn’t anything psychic . . .

  He reached the door and placed his hand on it, feeling the faint tingle of an enchantment—old, weary, but still functional. With a firm push, he opened the door and stepped inside.

  The room was a charnel house. An absolute abattoir.

  Lowe stepped over a body—another one of the Vault’s Clerks, slumped forward over the body of one of the Security Mages. Both of their heads were gone, the mess fanned out in two halos across the polished wood. The stench was unbearable, thick with the iron tang of blood and the sour stink of something burned.

  The others were the same.

  Tellers. Guards. Customers. The people who should have been downstairs, shuffling papers and weighing gold, were instead strewn across the floor like discarded carcasses, each of them missing the top half of their faces.

  The sheer scale of it made Lowe’s stomach twist.

  This wasn’t just a slaughter. It was . . . Lowe didn’t have the words.

  And at the centre of it all sat a man behind the grand mahogany desk of the bank manager’s office.

  But not the bank manager himself, Lowe thought. There was something about him he thought he recognised . . .

  The man’s fingers twitched where they rested on the wood, his shoulders shaking. He looked like he was on the verge of flying apart at the seams. His hair—matted and damp with sweat—hung in greasy clumps over his forehead.

  Lowe tried to get his brain firing. He needed to make sense of this. Now. The Vault had been drained. Of gold. Of people. Of something far deeper than that.

  Had this man been the one to do it? And if so why?

  Lowe took a slow step forward.

  The man jerked violently, his chair scraping against the bloodstained floor. His lips moved, forming half-words, aborted syllables, but nothing made it past the tremble of his mouth.

  Lowe’s eyes flicked to the man’s hands.

  Calloused fingertips. Ink-stained.

  Far too many years of doing this told him that those weren’t a killer’s hands. Then even as he thought it, he knew that was a bullshit bit of reasoning. If he had a silver piece for every time he’d caught a killerswho’d been fucking children’s entertainers . . . well, he’d have two pieces of silver. But it was still fucking terrible it had happened twice.

  Hands didn’t tell you jack. But he was right on this. He knew he was. Wasn’t he?

  Lowe looked above the man’s head and concentrated. The words ‘Accountant. Level 16’ momentarily appeared and then faded away. This nonentity had killed an entire bank’s worth of people? And held the Security Services at bay from the window? Nah. Not so much.

  Something was very wrong here.

  “What’s your name, mate?” Lowe couldn’t have done much more to keep his voice soothing. Even to his own ears, it sounded like he was coaxing a scared dog out from under a table.

  The Accountant licked his lips, eyes darting to the bodies slumped across the room as if they might save him. “W-what?”

  “Your name,” Lowe said. “What would you like me to call you? Right now, you’re just a guy in a room full of corpses. That’s a bad place to be, so I thought it’d be worth us starting with something easy. Nothing wrong with telling me your name is there?”

  A flicker of confusion crossed the man’s face, and for a second, Lowe thought he might shut down entirely. But then his eyes focused intently on Lowe. “Elias,” he rasped. “Elias Sten.”

  Lowe nodded. “Okay, Elias. Good. Nice to meet you. You can call me Jana. Now, I need you to understand something.” He gestured at the bloodied office. “You seem to be the only person left alive in here. Which is pretty odd, isn’t it? You want to tell me what happened? I could be wrong, but I’m not seeing an Accountant as the architect of . . . well, of this.”

  Elias swallowed hard, his hands gripping the arms of the chair so tightly his knuckles went bone-white. His breath was coming in fast, uneven gasps and Lowe could see his pulse hammering visibly in his throat.

  “Did someone do this and leave you behind to carry the can?” Lowe gave the room a slow, measured glance. “Did someone hurt you? Are you okay?”

  Elias trembled. He didn’t answer any of those questions. Not right away. He just sat there, shoulders hunched, his whole body vibrating with tension. Then, finally, in a thin, dry whisper: “No.”

  Lowe narrowed his eyes. He wasn’t sure that was true. The man looked like he’d been wrung out. Every drop of colour had been completely drained from his skin. And his pupils were too wide, almost swallowing the brown of his irises.

  Shock could do that, Lowe knew. Fear could do that. But this was wrong. There was something else coiling just below the surface. Lowe took another step closer, but didn’t break eye contact. “Okay. Talk to me, Elias. Did someone put you up to this?”

  The Accountant’s breath hitched, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a thing drowning. It was like he was physically forcing himself not to move.

  “Don’t make me ask twice, mate. You need to work with me if I’m going to try to fix things.”

  Elias made a sound—thin, high-pitched. Not quite a laugh, not quite a sob. His entire body twitched and he opened his mouth, but at first, nothing came out. Then, in a voice like spider silk stretched too thin: “The Black Knight.”

  Lowe gave him a slow nod. Trying to show no reaction. No flicker of horrified recognition. Just business.

  “Okay,” Lowe said. “That’s a name. So I need some details. How did he contact you? Did he meet you in person? Did he send a message? When did this start? Could you recognise him?”

  Elias was breathing too fast now, eyes wild. His pulse was a visible hammering in his throat.

  Lowe took out his Sending Stone and set it to record. “Look, tell you what. Here’s the deal. You give me something useful—something I can act on—and I’ll do my best to make sure you live through this. I can’t say further than that.”

  That got Elias’ attention. His gaze snapped to Lowe’s face. “Live through this?” he echoed.

  “Yes. Here’s my reading of things. You don’t seem like a killer, Elias. But something terrible has happened here. Something that killed every single person except you. The best way we can both get out of this and get on with our lives is for you to tell me how.”

  Elias shuddered. “It was my Skill.”

  “Okay. It was your Skill. Explain how in Soar that happens,” Lowe said, keeping his voice steady.

  Elias made a noise somewhere between a sob and a laugh. “I—I’m an Accountant! I have Skills for money! Not for this! But he—he made me do it!”

  “Made you do what?”

  Elias was shaking now. “I have a Skill—Liquidate. It drains assets, collapses accounts, pulls resources from failing institutions. I’ve used it a thousand times. But never—never on a building. On people!”

  Lowe’s blood ran cold.

  “He did something to me,” Elias went on, voice cracking. “Gave me something to drink. Made me sick. Told me it would work. Then he gathered everyone up here and told me to— to activate it at them. And I—I did.”

  Lowe felt something sick crawl up his throat. He could see it now. A perfectly normal financial Skill, one meant for numbers, spreadsheets, and failing banks—twisted into something monstrous. He needed to know what could do that.

  “Then he said I had to sit here and wait for someone to come in. He said he’d rigged it so that only one person would be stupid enough to try to come in. That this was the first payment on account for someone called Jana Lowe.” Elias’ eyes opened. “You said your name was Jana. Was this all for you?”

  Lowe shook off the question. “Where is he now? Where did he go?”

  Elias gave a strangled laugh. “I don’t know!”

  “Elias, think very carefully before you lie to me.”

  “I—I swear. I don’t know! He just—appeared. He forced everyone up here and gave me the instructions, told me to follow them. Told me I didn’t have a choice. And then—” His breath hitched. “When it was done, he left.”

  Lowe stared at him.

  And then he saw it.

  The twitch. The strain at the corners of Elias’ mouth.

  His lips were starting to curl.

  Lowe’s pulse spiked.

  No. Not again.

  “Elias. Stay with me!”

  The Accountant whimpered. His lips peeled back further.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Lowe moved, fast, grabbing Elias’ shoulders and trying to link Medic! Up with him. It wouldn’t take. “Don’t listen to it. Whatever’s happening, fight it!”

  Elias was trembling violently now, his whole body spasming against the chair. His mouth was opening wider. Too wide. His skin was splitting at the corners of his lips. Blood welled up in bright red streaks.

  And then Elias’ skull detonated.

  Lowe stumbled back, his face and coat splattered red.

  The corpse twitched once.

  Then, from somewhere deep in the Vault, a voice laughed.