Slit jerked to the side, his blade inches away from Moone's throat, and fell to the black tiled level a few feet below, landing perfectly on his feet. He stumbled back, as if made of magnets and repulsed physically by the iron particles, into the hall-like antechamber to the inner vault. The particles didn't affect Moone at all; there really was something inherently magical about these assassins.
The dust swirled around quickly in the warm air, spreading out to cover the whole room.Moone could only watch as Slit was pushed into the bottleneck leading into the room, avoiding the cold iron cloud. Slit may have been cornered, but now he was cornered with Moone's teammates, and without Moone there to help them.
unwin pov
Unwin looked down as the assassin Slit turned his head sharply, away from the advancing cloud of cold iron death, and stalked toward the group, who up to this point had been helpless to act, but now had no choice to. Slit carried himself so powerfully, so lithely, advancing toward them like an unstoppable force. Or like the Terminator. He moved exactly like the Terminator.
Slit skulked up the steps from the lower floor, into the doorway of the antechamber where the team huddled. He locked eyes with Unwin. The reason that his partner had left him, instead of them having gone at it together.
Unwin backed against a wall, against a vault. Made of human teeth, and holding the money that would be used to pay for more teeth. The vault door bumped open, the door unlocked after the security shutdown, and some of the money trickled to the floor. So pretty and glittery, a child's idea of wealth.
Unwin's thoughts raced, realizing something as the assassin grew closer. It wasn't so much money, actually, as the raw material of the idea of the money. The idea of the work required, the skill and the chance and the perseverance. The fortune.
The fortunes were so near, here in this room. He looked down at his clew. The Tooth Fairy's boon had been stripped from him at the end of the tournament, what seemed now like an eternity ago, but there was still a metaphysical connection to the bowels of these catacombs, to the coffers and the fortunes, and the literal fortunes, slivers of space-time.
There were a lot of fortunes here, not just in the walls but in the chamber itself, a lot of auras huddled together, attempting to back away from the assassin, each with their own boons and banes. Normally such things would radiate outward, but instead bounced back, repulsed by the still-magic antimagic of the walls and halls. Creating a sort of echo chamber.
The Pontifex's boon may now have been fully placed onto the Cloud figure, but his bane was still intact. And the echo chamber nature of the room, especially now that the echoes were bouncing closer together with the magic powers being repulsed by the cloud of cold iron, pushing back magic like a force field into the only place it could go which was its place of origin... That was sort of like the Pontifex's boon, right?
Unwin had defeated the last assassin by twisting his own boons around. He now planned on doing something similar.
"Sorry, Mr Spring-heel; I'm gonna have to kill your buddy now, hope we can still be friends..."
He pressed the clew to the assassin. Like pressing a phylactery to a demon, which is how they'd wrangled the services of Kissifer. The clew, connected to and channeling all of the fortune around it. Unwin pressed his psychic power into the clew, Gifted the soul jar-like vessel with the connection to all the fortunes around.
The assassin frowned, and the man's soul exploded into a thousand glistening shards, as if he was being pulled into a thousand different dimensions, torn apart into all the slivers of time and space that made up the money here, that made up the time travel physics, that made up the metaphysics of the idea of this plane.
Maybe the assassin wouldn't be able to enter into a Judeo-Christian afterlife.
But he would be able to enter into a Buddhist one.
A shout, a moment of entropy, a flash of quicksilver-like implosion and rainbow-like explosion... and Jack O'Lantern became one with the universe.
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