30
Masanori
Lacotl’s black robes billowed around him on purple ripples of corruption, revealing dark, matted fur along his arms and legs. He stood with his staff extended, and the blood leaking from the eyeball thickened into tendrils that dangled a woman from her ankles. Her gold-rimmed glasses fell from her nose, lost in the pile of broken furniture. She ripped her hands free long enough to summon jade-coloured ki between her fingertips, only for an oppressive lilac fog to heave around her, silencing her and her spell in an instant.
This couldn’t be happening again, not so soon after Torra. Masanori gripped Jouten’s hilt, reassuring himself that this time, he was ready.
Over the past few days, he’d prepared to face Lacotl again. Masanori wasn’t the master he needed to be, but he had
