Pride plucked the Divine Treasure from his hands. “I don’t need this, so I’ll hold on to it. Mercy wouldn’t forgive you if you gave into temptation.”

Lindon thought it was strange how much Pride brought up his sister’s opinion, especially related to Lindon. But he wasn’t wrong; Mercy wouldn’t approve of him using resources on himself instead of the team.

“Yes,” Lindon said. “Gratitude.” His hands itched to take it back, but he cleared his mind and focused on the mission at hand. “You have your gatestone?”

Pride lowered the cloudship, of which he and Lindon were the only two passengers. “Worry about yourself.”

“I have mine.” It was one of the expenses that Lindon had resented. Gatestones were far cheaper than any other device that allowed for spatial transport, and common enough that the Akura clan would supply them for contribution points, but buying some for the entire team had set them back almost two hundred points.

They were worthwhile as life-saving measures, he knew, but Pride and Maten Teia had both used one and needed to have it replaced. Every time, that was another step further from a real prize.

Today, Pride and Lindon were going after a small Abyssal Palace tower erected in a crossroads of two canyons. They had settled into a routine: go in, destroy the tower, take masks from anyone who fought, and leave.

Usually, few of the cultists fought. They just fled.

In fact, it was rare that any of the combat teams reported killing a member of Abyssal Palace, and there had been very few casualties among the Akura as well.

The danger was minimal, and time was short. So Lindon had finally decided to try completing an assignment using the people on his team least likely to be killed in action: Pride and himself.

They set down the cloudship well beyond the reach of anyone’s spiritual sense in the canyon, hiking over the land overhead. They walked through clouds of dust, as this stretch of terrain was almost a desert.

Lindon wasn’t sure why Abyssal Palace even wanted an intersection of two crossed canyons, besides the heavy earth aura here, but Fury paid in points for destroyed towers and stolen masks.

There was one other reason why he and Pride were perfect for this assignment: their veils were hard to penetrate. Shadow and pure madra were both difficult to detect, so they had the best chance of reaching the tower undetected.

Still, they would have been caught if not for Dross. Lindon’s perception was restricted under a veil, but Dross used the little information they had more efficiently.

He spotted a line of script covered by dust, allowing Lindon and Pride to quietly disable it and move on. They dodged a flying construct, and before long they were lying at the edge of a canyon, looking down.

Sure enough, at the crossroads of two ravines was a classic Abyssal Palace tower: a squat brown cylinder of packed dirt and stone, ringed with scripts that blocked intrusion and hid them from spiritual perception. Three acolytes in their simple masks huddled outside, hunched up against the cold wind.

Lindon told Dross to relay the plan to Pride.

[Here’s what we—oh look, he knows the plan already!]

Pride had leaped down into the canyon.

Two Gold acolytes went flying into the distance before the third reacted, swinging a massive club into Pride’s side.

Pride, of course, caught the weapon easily in one hand, then flipped it around and knocked the cultist onto the roof of the tower.

Lindon jumped down after him, irritated. There was an alarm blaring now, which meant they were on a time limit.

Sure, this group wasn’t a threat. But they could summon more.

Lindon landed next to Pride as three more Abyssal Palace members emerged from the short, scripted tower. Two acolytes stood on the roof with madra gathering in their hands, and a priestess came out of the doorway. One of the eyes in her mask blazed yellow.

“Your masks or your lives,” Lindon said. At first, he had included a short speech about sparing their lives and being unwilling to shed blood, because he felt like a bandit extorting them for their masks.

Now, he just cut to the chase. There was no point in drawing it out. They had never run into an enemy that was a match for him or Pride.

The priestess surveyed them, and Lindon scanned her spirit. She wasn’t even an Underlady. Most priests were, so the Truegolds that made it to that rank were considered real monsters, but Lindon wasn’t too concerned.

“You’re the Monarch’s son,” she said quietly, and Lindon felt the first tingle of alarm.

Pride drew himself up to his full unimpressive height. “I am Akura Pride.”

“Use your gatestone. We would rather not hurt you.”

He barked a humorless laugh. “It would be to your credit if you could.”

The priestess stepped aside, revealing someone standing in the tower behind her. Both of his eyes glowed yellow.

A high priest.

Lindon’s gatestone, like a lump of sparkling blue chalk, was already in his hand, but Pride was too slow.

He shouldn’t have been. He was a master of Enforcer techniques; he should have been faster than Lindon.

But he had hesitated to retreat in front of the enemy, so the high priest was already out of the doorway and holding a dagger to his throat.

The two yellow eyes turned to Lindon. “Not you. Drop it, or we will kill him.”

[Perfect!] Dross said. [Let’s leave him.]

It was Pride’s own fault that he was in this situation, and Abyssal Palace likely wouldn’t kill him. Both sides of this conflict had been tiptoeing around each other, afraid of drawing too much blood, and knowingly killing the son of a Monarch would surely count as “too much.” If Malice intervened, the entire balance would tip.

But leaving would mean abandoning a member of his team to the mercy of Dreadgod cultists.

He extended his spiritual sense delicately, trying to avoid upsetting anyone, and he got a sense of the pressure emanating from the high priest’s spirit. When he did, the knot in his stomach loosened slightly.

He wasn’t an Overlord. Like the priestess with him, he had earned his rank earlier than his advancement, which spoke greatly to his achievements.

But that meant Lindon faced one experienced Underlord and three Golds.

It wasn’t impossible.

Slowly, the Soul Cloak built around him. The dagger pushed into Pride’s neck, drawing a trickle of blood.

“Drop the technique!” the high priest snapped. “Gatestone down!”

Dross couldn’t give Lindon an accurate prediction of the enemy’s movements without a model, but he fueled Lindon’s senses so that the world appeared to slow down.

Lindon whipped the blue ball at Pride.

He had hoped the cultist would stay close enough that he would be included in the transportation, but he had no such luck. The high priest pushed his way apart as blue light surrounded Pride and space crackled.

He disappeared, leaving behind a spray of blood.

The cultist had drawn his dagger across Pride’s throat on the way out.

Everything had happened suddenly, but Lindon took a moment to think. He could fight to escape, or he could try to truly defeat his opponents.

He was in real danger here…but nothing he hadn’t seen before. There were points to be earned. He didn’t have Little Blue out to power his new techniques, but he had fought this far without them.

He may not have been one of the Uncrowned, but that didn’t mean he was helpless.