Riding in silence, the bike pulled up to the stronghold’s driveway, coming to a skidding stop. Sliding off the seat, Nakta hung his head low, heading to the entrance with a limp. He rapped his knuckles against the front door, exhaling a sigh.

  On cue, Lilith opened the door, with her hand on her hip. She shifted her gaze back and forth between him and his ride.

  “How’d it go?” she asked, dryly.

  “Fuckin’ terribly,” pouted Nakta. “The imbecile was nothin’ but a liability from start till finish. What were you thinkin’? Stickin’ him with me on a mission!?” He gestured at his ride, shaking a fist.

  “Apart from a change of clothes, Azrael looks no different.”

  The raven-haired male quaked with simmering rage, averting his gaze from Lilith. “Oi, get your arse over here and tell her what you did!”

  “I’m not sure what I did,” said Azrael. Holding his hands up, he stared at his palms, clenching and unclenching his fingers. “Maybe, it was all just a dream.”

  “Absolute bollocks! I can’t chalk off my biggest failure as some dream!”

  “Step aside.” Lilith brushed past Nakta, walking towards the bike. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “I might’ve figured out what my miasma is,” said Azrael, sheepishly. “Is regeneration a common one amongst demons?”

  Without warning, a cerise flash brushed past the redhead, felling an elbow past the joint. The flopping limb rolled over, dribbling red, like a scampering mouse.

  In a blink, a visceral howl escaped his lips, agony drenching him in a cold sweat. He clutched his bloodied stump for a hand, liquid crimson trickling past his fingers.

  “Fuck! What did you do that for!?” Azrael leapt off the bike. Curling his lips in a snarl, he relinquished his hold over the remnants of his limb and reached for his shorter blade.

  “I suppose, you do possess miasma after all,” grinned Lilith. “And what do you plan to do with that unsheathed blade? Go up against me? Aren’t you ballsy?”

  Heaving a sigh, he shifted his gaze to his arm, noticing a trail of smoky wisps emanating from pink, puckered flesh. He could see his bones and vessels being sheathed by skin, mending his mangled flesh for a hand into a limb.

  He steadied his breath, billowing out a kindling flame. “Haven’t I fulfilled your condition for becoming an assassin? Didn’t you say I could do as I pleased once I survived the fucking mission!?”

  “By all means.” Lilith took a step back, gesturing towards the gate leading out her stronghold. “You’ve got first-hand experience with the Abyzz now. If you can survive on your own, you’re free to go. But know that if I, or anyone else gets hired to take you out in your sloppiness, you’ll be back to square one.”

  “Back to being a corpse, huh?” Azrael scoffed, sheathing his drawn blade. “Freedom is hard to come by. No matter the price I pay, I keep piling up shackles upon shackles binding me, breath after breath. It’s a darn pain to keep evading a grey line of existence.”

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  “Oi, what’re the lot of you on about?” interrupted Nakta. “What about the mission?”

  “We’ll discuss it later.” Lilith dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “I take it you have valuable information you could make use of, crumpling under your tensed grip.”

  Nakta paused, unfurling his fist. He noticed a thoroughly crumpled length of parchment on the verge of tearing, nestled in his palm.

  “Decipher the contents of the message and pass on the information to Marr and Juke. They’ll take it from here.”

  “But shouldn’t I clean up–”

  “If you feel responsible, you should’ve taught Azrael how to unlock his miasma, just as the others had trained him!” Lilith narrowed her gaze at Nakta, dropping the temperature to freezing. “You’ll have a chance at redemption. Just as usual, hop onto a solo mission and nurse your aching ego.”

  Taking Azrael’s hand, she led him past a motionless Nakta. A muffled thump followed, knuckles clanging against cracking plaster. “Nothin’s been right since he got here!”

  She squeezed the redhead’s hand, leading him up the stairs.

  *

  Frozen in the midst of a kerosene dowsed inferno, every ounce of his corporeal form was continually devoured. Faint pinpricks of pain smarted through his torso and abdomen, spears skewering him and dropping him on his knees.

  In the distance, nearly hundreds of leagues away, he could hear the cackle of a goblin, accompanied by the oinks of a hog.

  The agony from an unbearable pain melted into a pleasurable lull, drying his throat through a deafening burst of feeble screeches. His consciousness began to fade, slipping into a hushing slumber. His limbs turned leaden, dragging his body under the weight of a million sins. Darkness fell during a brief eternity that could pass for shorter than a half-span.

  The restless whir of a droning insect stirred his restful reprieve, awakening the seared male from his brief nap, transmuting insect drones to the agonizing screams of smouldering demons.

  “Where am I?” managed Azrael, past a parched throat. A bloodied hose hung loosely off his hands, slipping through his feeble fingers. The severed demon head clattered against the edge of the stairs, the sound of tumbling metal ringing with vibrance, before fading into the background.

  In a daze, his hand closed in around a familiar hilt, sliding a cool steel edge, over his burning right shoulder. In a gasp, icy metal touched skin, cleaving a haphazard portion of head and heart off torso.

  What am I doing? he thought, his world darkening, reeled in by gravity’s pull.

  Past a flicker of nightfall, light flooded in through bloodied pupils. His head convulsed off the ground, moulding and weaving flesh and bone, encasing his innards. The searing agony from earlier, vanished with the last of his headless corpse, smouldering beneath the weight of kerosene clad flames, while he steadied his balance.

  “What the hell was that!?” roared Nakta, grabbing Azrael by his bare throat.

  “What just happened?” asked the bewildered redhead, groaning and gagging. His attention was nabbed by a faint gleam amongst the charred humanoid remains.

  “Focus,” said Nakta, spattering spittle over his freshly baked visage. “We need to get out of here, before I raze you, alongside those plebs climbin’ up the stairs.”

  On cue, a demon appeared behind the duo, felling his axe in a wide arc. Instinctively, Nakta caught the blow off the flat of his katana, drawing and running a second single-edged blade through the demon.

  “I’ll give you a single fuckin’ span to put on some clothes! Don’t you dare stain my ride with your filthy bareness!” He forcefully shoved the headless demon into Azrael’s uncertain hands.

  “…After that we leapt off the roof and hauled ourselves over to Nakta’s bike. Once the adrenaline wore off, he was in that state.”

  “You did all of that unconsciously?” asked Lilith, raising an eyebrow.

  “You could confirm the happenings with the remnants of Yang or Nakta,” said Azrael.

  She rubbed her chin, leaning in close. “You should stay away from fights in the middle of blackouts, considering your history.” Mulling over the notion, she paused, momentarily. “Or maybe, catching a couple of z’s are just what you need to pull off the impossible.”

  The redhead couldn’t help but loosen a wire thin grin, averting his gaze from Lilith.

  “Look who can smile again.” She stifled a chuckle with the back of her hand. “Your journey has just begun. Discovering your miasma was simply the first step. There is much for you to learn along the path of life.” She winked at Azrael, signalling the end of their conversation, dismissing him with a wave of her hand.

  A hand she had no issues firing off cerise beams from, and cleaving off arms with, on a whim.