1 A Date Gone Wrong

When life seems to be going well, calm and uneventful, a little TOO well, that's when disaster tends to strike. Lai took this rather pessimistic philosophy to heart, what with how his life had been and how every night for the better part of a month now he'd been having nightmares.

Strange nightmares.

The murky type where you woke up knee deep in the mud of fear and anxiety but without the faintest clue what you'd dreamt of. If that wasn't a bad omen, then Lai didn't know what was. Every day, he'd had this sinking gut feeling that something in his orderly life as a Sentry would go wrong.

Though, he didn't quite know what could go wrong. Being a Sentry for the Court of the Key, the premier authority that governed most of the sorcerers in the Western world, sounded intimidating at first: as a sentry, Lai was responsible for bringing justice to any sorcerer in his area that dabbled in dark, chaotic magics and threatened the general secrecy of magic or public order. And for the Court, justice was a nice and proper way of saying a good old assassination. A normal sentry was battle-hardened, the toughest of the toughest magi, men or women whose fists went through heads just as much as their spells.

But Lai lived in a city, and a city was about as peaceful as it got. A huge density of people meant there were always tons of witnesses. The police were always around the corner. Even a tiny bit of misused magic would put a sorcerer up on the headlines – and then the Court of the Key would be right on their asses. No sorcerer, crazy or not, would risk this. Even the crazies had some self-survival instinct.

And, maybe most importantly, cities didn't have much magical value to them. Modern buildings and construction had rolled over all the ancient and mystical sites that could potentially have power for sorcerers to tap into. The sheer population density meant that mana was spread so thin among everyone that a sorcerer trying to power some huge dark ritual would find themselves essentially running a marathon on a few drops of water.

The end result was that the magic-minded folk of the city weren't generally serious about their craft. Retired researchers, book worms, part-timers, novices, and the like. Occasionally, though, an actual sorcerer would stop by, probably to take a break from the mind-numbing boredom of practicing magic in an isolated wood or mountainside and have some fun in the city.

And, as the woman in front of him attested to, these traditional sorcerer types really did not strike up the best vibe with Lai.

"So, what do you research?" she asked, leaning forward, long red locks swaying.

"Nothing."

Lai held in a sigh. He'd tried to pretty up his flat, modest as it was, for this date. He'd met this girl at the Crystal Ball, a bar catered towards the magical underground, and thought with how pretty she was, she deserved something more than the mess his place usually was.

A Sentry's salary was decent, but the sky-high living costs of the city weren't kind to his pocket. His flat was a homely little thing, one bedroom, one livingroom, one kitchen that served double duty for both food prep and potion prep. He'd cleaned out the dust and potion stains that had settled on the hardwood, sprayed some Febreze to air out the stink of processed herbs, and put up a few scented candles on the dining table.

All for nothing. The woman, Haley was her name, her family name five times longer, leaned back in her seat in disappointment, wine glass still full at her side.

"Research just isn't my style," said Lai. "Sitting down and doing nothing – now that's boring."

"But you're a sentry!" Haley countered, as if that title guaranteed he had some long family history, some incredible research in magical theory.

All it meant was that he was good at killing sorcerers.

Lai remembered rather painfully why he didn't like taking sorcerers out for dinner. They didn't see him as a person to love or even a one-night hookup. They assessed his family line, his research, his natural capacity to hold mana, and all that. All technical details. Like he was breeding stock. And honestly, that creeped him out – took all the emotion out of love, to the point where he couldn't even tell if any of these sorcerers married happy or not.

"Look, it's sort of a misconception, but it doesn't take much to be a sentry," said Lai. He took a sip of his wine. Red, a little fruity, easily chuggable – just what he needed to make it through this night. "Me, for example. I became a sentry after I started using real magic for fake magic shows to make a quick buck. The Key got whiff of me pretty quick, sent a sentry after me. The old fella told me either I could sit in their prison for magical loonies, or he could take me in and teach me how to be a sentry. All luck, really, no five hundred years of family history required."

"Well…" Haley cocked her head, slender finger at her lip. "That's kind of boring. You sentries are so mysterious. I thought you had something more, how should I say it, special?"

"Special in that we know how to track, pin down, and kill sorcerers. And let me tell you right now – you don't get that type of knowledge by reading books."

Haley leaned forward with a sort of morbid curiosity, obviously undaunted by the fact that Lai was skilled in the very particular art of massacring her peers.

"Oh, so you're more like those policemen," she said, pausing to think for a second. "The ones dressed in black."

"Those aren't policemen, and it's better if you stay out of their business."

She was talking about the Suits. Killers that really put in the cutting part of cutting-edge. They were a purely non-magical organization, but they dominated the criminal and political underworld of modern-day society. A near global network of contract killers and professional hitmen whose mastery of firearms, explosives, and other modern trinkets made them easily as deadly, if not more so than the average sorcerer who spent all day sitting around and fiddling with potion ingredients.

"I'm just curious," Haley pouted. She cocked her head and stared straight at Lai, a sly smile at her lips. "And about you, too."

"About what I do as a sentry?"

She rolled her eyes.

"That's work stuff. I meant how you are as a person. You've been pretty guarded this whole night."

Maybe there was something Lai could work with here, and if she was up to bat, he was most definitely up to catch.

"Oh? You want to know something? Then shoot – I'd be more than happy to keep you interested."

"Good. I hear you're good friends with Roshana."

Lai internally groaned. Roshana was the Court of Key's herald, someone who they sent to his city and general area every so often to investigate and make sure nothing was wrong. That no sorcerers with screws loose weren't sacrificing innocent people to summon demons and all that. If she found something wrong, she'd send a report to the court and then they'd file orders to Lai, giving him a warrant for Decimatio, a fancy term for saying he'd have to go out and kill the poor sod.

The last and only Decimatio Lai had received was six years ago, when he first took up the mantle of Sentry, and he'd worked closely with Roshana to solve the case. Since then, they'd kept in touch a bit, but it was hard considering she traveled so often. Still didn't stop most sorcerers from asking about her anytime they met Lai. It felt like every single sorcerer wanted to meet her, famous as she apparently was. Lai didn't keep abreast of what happened among the main sorcerer's community, so he had no clue why she got so much attention.

"We keep in touch a little I guess," said Lai. "But what about it?"

Haley's eyes lit up, her curiosity a fire as bright as her hair. "They say she's unlocked one of the primal mysteries. Nobody's done that in hundreds of years! I'd love to talk to her and learn all about it."

Ah yes, the primal mysteries. Things like immortality, time travel, dimensional travel, and whatnot. What science fiction is like to science except for magic. Something so great and awesome that Haley would accept a date from a nobody sorcerer with no good research or established family name just in the hopes of getting a connection to it.

Lai forced himself to keep smiling. "Actually, you're in luck. Roshana's here on one of her routine investigations. Let me just step outside and make a call to her."

"My goodness, thank you so much!" sealed Haley, like she was a teenager about to meet her Rockstar idol.

Lai closed his flat door behind him and rolled his shoulders, stretching out tonight's failure. He really didn't belong among these sorcerers. They lived in such a different culture from him. So focused on magic, all its tiny little secrets, and he didn't have a place here. In short: he was an outcast

.

Lai went to the hallway window by his flat and drummed his fingers against the windowsill, watching the deep night outside. His flat was on the tenth floor and he rather liked the night view here, with the many vibrant lights of cars and streetlights blinking like bejeweled fireflies in the dark - a good breather.

Not that he minded being removed from sorcerer culture. Okay, maybe he did mind a little, considering he couldn't well get along with regular folk knowing about all the amazing things going down below in the world of magic, but he considered himself a self-sufficient type, always ready to perk his head up and meet a new day by his good old lonesome self. Or that's what he told himself. He couldn't quite tell yet.

Absent-mindedly, he opened his phone and punched in Roshana's number. She'd been in this exact situation before and knew what to do. Meet up with Haley, feed her some vague mumbo jumbo, send her off all deluded into thinking she'd gotten a step closer to unraveling the secrets of magic and all that.

He heard the ringtone buzz past three times. Odd. She was a punctual person, always ready to answer and make calls. When the call went to her very seldom used voicemail, he put the phone away with some unease.

He'd check up on her tomorrow.

A sudden thunderous crash from within his flat told him that maybe he'd be needing that checkup instead.

With a start, Lai swung open his door and peered in, body tensed like a spring and ready to move forwards to battle. Or backwards in retreat: a very useful move in life or death battles that many sorcerers didn't have the pride to resort to.

And well, Lai gave an apathetic nod at what he saw.

At the center of his room was a hole in the hardwood, large and gaping, dust rising from its circumference, clouding the room. Halsey had backed herself in the far corner, fear struck across her face but like all sorcerers, she'd been trained enough to keep some semblance of her composure and not to scream mindlessly.

Lai did have to give her massive props for that. Because holding onto the ceiling with fat, grubby arms, was a grotesque beast he'd never once seen before. Looked like a morbidly obese man, its massive gut sprawling out and drooping towards the floor, making it hard to tell whether it even had legs. Its two flabby limbs latched onto the ceiling with monstrous strength, the thick-boned digits actually gouging into the wood to form a grip. It didn't have a head, and instead a large, gluttonous mouth about the size of a child ringed its belly, razor sharp teeth clinking together as it slobbered for blood.

Lai juggled the option of running here. He didn't know what this beast was, but it most definitely did not come here for a three-way date. Someone had summoned this thing to attack him at his home, and attacking a sorcerer at their home was akin to trying to assault a soldier entrenched in a fortified bunker. A sorcerer's home was their territory – someone more competent than Lai would have had traps and failsafes lining every wall, every corridor.

The fact that someone had sent this beast so confidently either meant this creature was ridiculously powerful, strong enough to overpower most sorcerers even with a homefield advantage, or this certain somebody knew who Lai was and what he was capable of. In either case, Lai was at a disadvantage. The natural thing to do here was to run, maybe take in a few ranged pot shots to see what it was capable of.

But Lai knew Haley wasn't up for this. She came from a good family, sure, had lots of mana, but she didn't have the knowledge to refine it. Maybe she could toss out a basic fireball, but that definitely wouldn't be enough for a demon capable of taking physical form like this. Demons that managed to sprawl out of the realm of intangible nightmares were big deals – heavy hitters that ate up fireballs for breakfast and snapped spines with their pinkies.

Lai had brought her here – she was his responsibility, and he'd be damned if he'd let her die on his watch.