The system offered nothing.
No quest window. No reward prompt. No threat assessment notification of any kind.
Not even a popup. Marcus kept his eyes on the skull mask. Either the criteria to unlock one doesn’t exist or whatever this is sits outside what the system considers a manageable scenario.
Different thoughts raced through his mind but they all pointed to the same conclusion.
First I survive. Everything else after.
"Liz." He kept his voice steady. "Step aside."
"Marcus—"
"You can feel it too." He didn’t look at her.
"Whatever that is, it’s not something your Threadreading is going to give you answers on. Step aside and let me handle my business."
A pause. When she spoke her voice was softer than he expected, carrying something underneath it that she didn’t fully release.
"I can’t just leave you like this."
"You’re not leaving me. You’re giving me room." He finally glanced at her. "Trust me."
She held his gaze for one second. Then stepped back with the expression of someone making a decision they weren’t fully comfortable with.
The crowd around them had thickened, people pressing in from both sides of the street with the collective inability to leave that public danger always produced. Voices overlapping. Someone near the back asking what was happening.
Someone closer saying they didn’t know but weren’t leaving yet.
The skull masked man raised his staff.
"Show me," he said quietly. "How far you have actually come."
Then his free hand moved.
A summoning circle erupted from the ground at his feet, identical in structure to the ones Marcus produced but different in color and temperature, a deep red field trimmed with fire that burned without consuming the stone beneath it. The air above it compressed and then split and something came through it that was not subtle about its arrival.
"Vorrath the Unbound".
Two heads on a single body, both black scaled and razor jawed, each one moving independently like they had separate opinions about everything in the street. Five feet at the shoulder, not the towering size the word dragon usually suggested but compact and dense in a way that made the air around it feel heavier.
The scales were deep black, the kind that didn’t reflect light but absorbed it, with faint dark red lines running between them like cracks in cooling stone. Each neck was thick and muscular, built to carry the full force of whatever the head at the end of it decided to do. Four legs planted wide, claws pressing into the cobblestone like the stone wasn’t entirely sure it wanted to hold the weight. No wings. Just body and mass and two sets of eyes that were already scanning the street in different directions simultaneously, cataloguing everything with the particular intelligence of something that had been contained for a very long time and was making up for it.
Both mouths opened simultaneously.
Fire erupted outward in a two meter radius.
The sound the crowd made was not screaming exactly. It was the sound of a crowd becoming individuals very quickly, each person making their own immediate decision about direction and speed.
Marcus was already moving before the fire landed.
Soul Reading had given him the tick a half second before the mouths opened, enough to grab Liz by the arm and pull her clear of the radius, the heat passing close enough that he felt it across the back of his coat.
They came up twenty meters back.
Behind them the section of street where they had been standing was scorched black.
"Sooner or later you were going to die," the man said from behind the skull mask. The tone of someone stating a schedule rather than a threat.
Marcus looked at the dragon. At the man. At the burning street between them.
"This journey doesn’t end here." He said it quietly, mostly to himself. "Not when I haven’t finished what I came back for." His jaw tightened. "Lukas and his conspirators are going to pay for what they did. Every single one of them."
"Lukas?" Liz said softly from beside him.
He didn’t answer. Kept his eyes peeled forward.
Then he walked toward the man and his summon.
"I don’t know what your problem is with me," Marcus said, covering the distance with the particular cold calm he wore when everything in him had narrowed to a single point. "But I can’t let someone who threatens my life or someone I care about walk away from it."
The man tilted his head.
Then laughed. Short and genuine.
"Have you ever killed a person before?" The skull mask looked at him with its empty eye sockets.
"And you think you have what it takes to kill me?"
’In my previous life I have killed beasts. The thought sat there honestly. Whether that counts as killing I genuinely don’t know’.
"I won’t hesitate," Marcus said. Which was the truest answer available.
""Let me tell you something before I end this." The man’s voice dropped to something that carried weight behind it. "Your death will be nourishment to my power." A brief pause. "This is not from hate. It is for future betterment."
Marcus looked at him.
"Future betterment," he repeated flatly. "You came to kill me for Nourishment?." He asked in utter confusion.
The skull mask brushed off he’s questions by ordering voldrath to engage.
Vorrath moved.
Both heads launched simultaneous fire streams, converging on Marcus’s position from two angles, and the man came in behind them immediately, staff already swinging in a combination that used the dragon’s attack as cover for his own approach.
Marcus moved.
He dodged the first fire stream by a step, felt the second clip his shoulder and spin him sideways, came up already repositioning. The staff found him across the ribs before he finished the redirect, the impact sending him back three meters and dropping him to one knee.
He got up.
The man came again. Faster. The staff working in short precise combinations that left almost no window between them, each strike designed to push Marcus somewhere that the next one was already waiting. Marcus took two more hits, deflected a third with Dagon at the cost of his grip loosening, and acknowledged the calculation clearly.
Even with Malachar this is a bad situation. He knows what I am. He’s prepared for this.
He blocked. Absorbed. Kept moving. Bought time with footwork because offense wasn’t an option yet.