A part of her wanted to speak, or even to fight them, just to see if she could take them. But there were five of them, and they weren’t worthless gangsters. Even if they weren’t exactly well-suited to subtly trailing a target, they had real skills. She decided against initiating a conversation, but her pursuers did it for her.

  “Somehow I do not expect that you will come quietly,” said the bald one.

  “Would you buy it if I told you that you capturing me would have consequences more severe than the raid?” Krahe asked.

  “...She isn’t lying,” said another one of them, a man with not three, not four, but five eyes — two normal and three extra on his forehead, forming a semicircle of eyes.

  “An anathemist has delusions of grandeur? Next you’ll tell me boss’s hair isn’t her own,” the man with glowing eyes hissed. “Of all things you pick to imitate it’s the most useless part of a banisher.”

  Krahe couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t actually bickering. Their attention remained staunchly fixed on her. They were trying to make it seem like they were distracted so that she would let her guard down, just a bit. She, in turn, glanced between them, trying to make it appear as if she was falling for it as she gradually backed up closer and closer to the wall that held her escape route. Seeing this as her backing herself into a corner, they didn’t try to stop her.

  “After all the fun we’ve had, I take it you won’t take a final offer to go back and say I got away,” Krahe offered, trying to fill the time with things someone else would believably say in this situation. She didn’t actually expect it to work.

  “I am here to ensure that doesn’t happen,” the man with glowing eyes interjected, glancing at the other contractors. Now that he had said that, Krahe noticed that he stood a bit further away from the others, and had stepped behind them, almost as if he wanted to be able to shoot them in the back if it came to that.

  “That’s too bad,” Krahe said. She summoned the detonator into her hand, keeping it out of sight through simple sleight-of-hand — she had picked this cheap trash detonator specifically for its concealability.

  Click.

  Several detonations rang out. The stairway caved in, dust filling the basement as the building above them shook. Multiple types of magic flared up, but it was all too late.

  Click. Krahe immediately skimmed backwards, just in time to hear the next series of detonations and feel the shockwaves that followed. There was a real chance that one or more of them might survive both the detonation and the cave-in, but that wasn’t her problem any more than Brizogia surviving their encounter. Her main objective had been eliminating the threat and establishing herself as someone whom it was a bad idea to come after — and she had achieved that.

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  Krahe didn’t linger a moment longer than she needed to — she was gone long before the commotion could attract any attention, emerging out of sight, in the next subdistrict over.

  Though she remained more on-guard than usual over the next two days, nothing came of it. She encountered no further interference in the course of establishing her own agency, and uncreatively named it “Crow and Raven.” The agency as it stood existed only on paper — as she wanted it. The office required much securing before she was ready to paste a signboard over the door, and there was still the matter of advertising to consider. She needed to spread the word, but not too quickly, not too widely, and only to particular types of people if at all possible. The choice was obvious — Garvesh, and Razem. Yao was an option, but Krahe didn’t expect her to be a consistent channel for customers to reach her. Nozar also came to mind, but she didn’t trust that greasy fly-man as far as she could throw him, at least not when it came to handing over this type of information.

  Luckily, producing promotional materials by hand was trivial compared to the laborious process of drawing actual, serious talismans. Something that could project some fixed text and a simple image when supplied with thauma was the absolute bottom level of talisman-making, it was one of the most rudimentary training exercises, recommended for children barely old enough to hold a brush and write properly. Producing such calling-cards was a great warmup exercise for the second vital part of prepping to open for business — securing the office. Krahe lost herself in this endeavor, slipping into the cycle like an old, well-worn glove — building up her defenses, inspecting the perimeter from inside and outside, noticing flaws, patching them, rinse and repeat. Her understanding of talisman-crafting and of the tricks outlined in Yao’s scroll grew by a greater amount during this several-day-long bout of hyperfocus than it had throughout her many days of intentionally studying the text, as she finally had a direct frame of reference for all the information and could directly apply it to real situations.

  Among the many things she came to understand was the concept of leverage — a phenomenon at once ill-understood due to its esoteric, almost sapiently-capricious nature, and extremely widely used in all forms of magic. In simple terms, it meant using limitations to strengthen magic. Many times, this occurred naturally, but it was the easiest to directly choose the leverage point and leverage ratio when constructing a talisman or a network of them. One of the most impactful forms of leverage was “possibility” or “the future” — a network of five traps could be set up so that any one trap was leveraged against the possibility of all the others going off, meaning that one could have any one of those five traps go off to far greater effect in exchange for the whole thing collapsing after that trap was triggered, destroying the possibility of the other four ever going off. Apparently, highly advanced practitioners in Tiengenzhen would often set up artificial Hazard Zones, with their Archon Cores leveraged such that if someone passed the trials, they would always receive a suitable reward, in exchange for the trial realm collapsing right afterwards. She wasn’t sure if there was something lost in translation here, but it somewhat made sense, even if she couldn’t help but feel a painful lack of knowledge on Hazard Zones and Archon Cores beyond the surface-level.

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