Clarissa jumped back and took off her overcoat.

  Given how much it was raining, it was more than likely that by doing that she would end up getting sick, but it was better than dying against whatever that was. She needed to boost her speed and that was the best way, and she really needed because as far as she could tell, the thing that had claimed to be Cresata had gone berserk.

  Her heart was beating so hard that it was deafening the rain. She closed her eyes for just a fraction of a second, breathing, and commanded it to shut up. It obeyed. She hadn’t trained for so long under the Desert Master alongside her sister to just to lose in her first real fight after refusing to accept the family’s business like her and ending up in the opposite side of the law; and how that had changed things, Clare had always been so much worse at her than fighting; she had been so mad when she made her decision regarding what she really wanted to be.

  Clarissa breathed again. Her eyes acquired a blue glow as she easily dodged the coming swings of its blade.

  Once, twice, thrice. Jump back, force it to follow you. One, two, three and repeat.

  Casting the spell that made her faster while accelerating her mind was the only thing she needed to concentrate on, being unable to hit was bad in any opponent. Although after a couple of minutes engaging in that way, Clarissa was beginning to think that the creature, by virtue of probably not being exactly alive, was unlikely to get tired, neither physically nor mentally, so she would have to try a different strategy.

  Learning how to do parallel thinking had been a nightmare back in the day, and since she rarely had the need to use it; or the want given how mentally draining it is; she was quite rusty with it, but she still switched on the mental controls to do it and began recapping all the information she knew, which, regrettably, wasn’t much.

  “I’m going to guess that right now you’re not one to talk much, are you?” She asked, sarcastically.

  The only response was a low growl. Every moment that passed, the creature seemed to be acting in a more animalistic way and Clarissa didn’t know if that could be potentially good or not, because it wasn’t letting go of its blade and the attacks were becoming more aggressive with each swing. She realized that not only she was to change the strategy, but that her method of stalling until she came up with one was not sustainable at all to a dangerous degree.

  She smiled, as the master told her that she was to do in any important fight.

  The creature’s eyes began to glow too. It began as purple but it gradually darkened without, paradoxically, losing the glow itself. In a few blinks, they looked like pulsating pits of a black that wasn’t so much the absence of any other color, not like a starless night sky, but more of a strong blackness. Something impossible, but it was far from being the only thing recently that she could ascribe that adjective to.

  “Woman.” It spoke. Its voice wasn’t like it had been before when it was pretending to be a human being. In fact, arguably, it wasn’t a voice at all. It sounded not like a sound modulated to say the word, but more like many sounds that, together, gave the impression that it was what was being said. There were clicks and heavy breathing coming from it as it stood in a position that was impossible for a person, impossibly twisted.

  And it suddenly wasn’t moving.

  Clarissa knew better than trying her luck, so she took one step back and answered. “Do you mean me?”

  It nodded, a bit too hard, as if its head wasn’t quite attached to a neck. She assumed that was probably the case. “Yes. You. Woman.”

  The voice gave her the chills, even more than the rain itself.

  “You. Who. Are. You.” It asked.

  Clarissa tilted her head a bit to a side, still very much having all of her defenses up. She was reluctant to tell it, having listened to many stories back during her time in the desert, about being that can steal people by having them tell their name. It was unlikely that it was anything like that and had somehow stolen Cresata’s personhood, but she wasn’t willing to ignore the memories of her childhood nightmares.

  “Lisa.” She lied. It didn’t react for a moment.

  “Lisa. You. Are. Familiar. You. Will. Come. With. Us.” It said, in the same unnerving attempt at speaking.

  “My apologies, sir, but I’m not too in the mind of going out with weird thinks that don’t know how to speak in things that are not just, whatever that was supposed to be.” She answered back, her sarcasm masking the terror that she was feeling more and more with every single word that creature said.

  “You. Refuse.” It said.

  “Well, duh.” She mocked it back, her tongue leaving her mouth just a little in a sign of mockery. Probably not her wisest decision, but she needed to kick back the fear if she was to fight the monster.

  It took a single step towards her, its whole body wobbling as if the thing suddenly was no longer accustomed to walking. She gulped, taking two steps back in return and cursed how dark it was that night. She couldn’t get too far without losing sight of it and as far as she could assume, that was the most dangerous thing for her to do. She observed it move in response to her and how strange were its movements.

  Clarissa remembered reading about the slimes that live in the jungles beyond the Green Sea, and tales written by scholars of the nameless empire that lies beyond the Golden Walls, in which they claimed that some times, under the influence of dark priests, those very slimes can pretend to be human for a while until someone finds out about their true identity, which breaks the lie that the dark magic uses to justify its existence.

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  “You. Can. Not. Refuse.” It said, its voice a fair bit louder.

  “Oh? And how are you going to make me do it? By beating me despite having been unable to do it in saint’s know how long we’ve been fighting?” She responded, mockingly. She may have been challenging her luck way too much for her own taste, but the thing seemed to not register it at all. “Or are you going to get stronger like the bad guys in those cheap pulps?”

  Just as she said it, the fake Cresata’s blade touched her hair. She jumped to a side and grunted. For some reason she had only been able to dodge that one through sheer luck. She blinked. Her parallel thought was no longer working. A sludge of exhaustion washed over her.

  She was rusty at it indeed.

  “You slimy fucker!” Clarissa cursed, out loud. It hadn’t just been the fact that her technique had failed, but just as she had said, it was moving even faster now. Screw the idea not being sustainable, she needed a new strategy right then and there.

  Her brain attempted to race and break through the mental fatigue to no avail. She only had the time to dodge once more before she began to feel a stinging pain in her legs that pointed to her tiredness being no longer just mental. She breathed, it was beginning to be difficult to inhale and exhale. Her chest was hurting. She didn’t know exactly how long their fight had been, it felt like an hour, but she knew it was much lower, perhaps three minutes, or maybe five.

  She shouldn’t have been that tired in such a small period of time. It was another impossibility. Something was horribly wrong, beyond the obvious, of course.

  “Fight. Over.” It declared. Clarissa didn’t know if the mental fatigue was making its sounds more difficult to hear, or that it was pronouncing them wrong. She gritted her teeth, getting up from her knees, and pointed her sword at the creature.

  “For you?” She joked. “How nice.”

  It stopped moving, falling into complete silence for a moment. She took advantage of it to regain her breath, but it was very little time.

  “We. Do not like. Your manner of. Speech.” She tilted her head, the sounds seemed to be slowly becoming not just more articulate, but slightly more human-sounding. “You have. Lost. Surrender or. Else.”

  Was that supposed to be some kind of ultimatum?

  No, absolutely not. She could still fight, and she very much could win against the monster, she just needed more time to regain her strength, and a new strategy, that would have been very nice. And fortunately for her, she had just the idea.

  “So, you horrible shambling thing, could you tell me what the winning conditions for this fight are?” She asked, loudly. “Because, to be entirely honest, I don’t get it. You seem far worse for wear than I am. A neck is not supposed to bend like that, and your left arm doesn’t even look like an arm anymore. On the other hand, I’m just a bit tired.”

  Clarissa waited for a few seconds of silence. She was sure that if that thing didn’t have the paradoxical darkness where its eyes ought to be, she could have seen it blinking and visibly thinking.

  “You have lost.” It repeated. “Surrender.”

  “Beat me.” Once again challenging her terrible luck. It came out automatically, and she was already regretting it. However, “I can’t surrender if I don’t know how is it that I’ve lost.”

  The creature’s blade suddenly flew across the space between it and her. Missing her head by a hairbreadth. She felt a bit of blood coming out of the top of her right ear. She sword fell on the floor of the wall at not too far a distance with an abnormally loud metallic noise. Her new wound was bound to be very painful in a matter of time, but she was quickly sure that the adrenaline was taking care of it for the moment.

  “Lost.” It repeated, again. “You lost when you. When you can not fight.”

  One of her eyebrows suddenly arched. Something at the back of her mind had noticed a little thing.

  “And pray tell, when can’t I fight?” She asked.

  “You can not fight. When you are tired. You are tired, very tired. If we attacked, you would be crushed.” It said. Once again, its speech seemed to be becoming a bit more human, even if it still had the previous quirks, and unnervingly enough sounded nothing like the voice the false Cresata had earlier. But it also confirmed what Clarissa’s mind had noticed.

  It was using the noble’s fancy dialect.

  Now, she heavily doubted that the monster itself was a noble, but she was pretty sure that it didn’t fit the theory of the enchanted slime either, by virtue that according to the stories, the slimes actually pretended to be the person they were impersonating, and while the guard had been deniably surprised during the confrontation, she heavily doubted that the creature would have a different personality when caught. Slimes were not sentient beings, after all, much less sapient enough to be able to talk while handling a sword that well.

  No, that was something else that she had no idea about. But one thing was clear, whatever was talking then wasn’t the one who had been talking earlier.

  Her mental fatigue was beginning to dissipate as she regained her breath. And it suddenly occurred to her. It could follow the principles of a golem. Although it would be extremely unlikely and she had no idea of how much spellpaper had to take to have it have a false personality and now have it be, most likely, under the direct control of whatever alchemist had created it.

  “So, that’s what you are then.” She said, bringing her right hand to her ear and noticing that there was a full cut, probably nothing that could not heal, but she would be in need of medical attention the moment she managed to beat the fight.

  It seemed to stagger and Clarissa chuckled. It wasn’t much of a bluff, but if it had worked, she wasn’t going to mess it up and reveal it by saying anything more. She was betting on the asshole behind it to panic for enough time that she could get back to the fight.

  Then it moved its head towards its left, towards the palace. She screamed at it, suddenly getting the terrible worry that it may very well try to jump there and assault the party. Something she had to put a stop to before it happened. She gripped her sword tighter even as the rain was making the handle slippery.

  And then realized that it wasn’t so much looking that the palace but at something that had come from it.

  A white blur suddenly manifested in front of her. A glowing sword illuminating the scene and making the monster take two full steps back.

  A near bestial growl escaped not from it, but from the new being that was to fight it.