In the dead of night on Knight Street, the bloody battle continued. The Hunters were relentlessly attacked by the numerous flying bone blades. Already injured from their earlier skirmish with the thugs, the Hunters had almost no power to resist these airborne blades, forced to defend passively, with several already cut down.
However, there was a silver lining. Due to Gregor’s command to retreat indoors, the bone blades, aiming to keep the Hunters in the street, shifted from a full-on assault to mainly blocking their retreat. This lessened the pressure on the Hunters, allowing them to hold their ground even if they couldn’t enter the buildings.
Gregor himself became the main force resisting the attacks, deflecting more than half of the incoming blades. Though managing to withstand the pressure for now, he was seething internally.
“Damn it... Where is the bastard controlling these things hiding? I want to cut him down!”
Gregor had realized that these bone blades were clearly being controlled by someone hidden in the shadows, slowly closing in on them. If Gregor’s stamina ran out and he couldn’t effectively block the blades anymore, they would all die in the street.
Frustrated at the unseen enemy, Gregor was powerless to change the situation. Equally anxious was Elena, positioned on the balcony with her rifle. She wanted to relieve the pressure on her teammates but found no target for her sniper skills. The small, darting bone blades were far beyond her range of accuracy.
Elena scanned her surroundings, desperate to find the controller’s location. But the dark and chaotic environment rendered her efforts useless, deepening her sense of helplessness and anxiety.
“What on earth am I supposed to do…?”
While the Hunters were frantic and disordered, Goffrey, hidden in a darkened room, remained calm. He watched the trapped Hunters below, calculating how long the shadowy one could last and when their defense would collapse.
“Not bad for a Black Dog squad, but this is where it ends…”Goffrey was satisfied with how things were going, except for one thing. Earlier, he had sent a bone blade to kill a marionette that moved like a nimble monkey. Despite his efforts, the marionette had slipped out of his line of sight and escaped.
But that didn’t matter now. The marionette’s controller wasn’t his main target, and its escape didn’t affect the overall battle.
Just as Goffrey thought this, he suddenly spotted a familiar figure under a nearby streetlight—the very same marionette he had chased away earlier!
Rather than fleeing as he had expected, the marionette stood boldly in the light... dancing?
Yes, the marionette was dancing!
Amidst the blood-soaked battlefield, it was performing an impeccably executed tap dance.
The lively footwork echoed against the cobblestone street, and the young dancer’s face beamed with joy, as if performing on a grand stage. Watching this, Goffrey clenched his fists.
“That bastard… How dare they provoke me?”
Seeing the dancing marionette, Goffrey muttered through gritted teeth. This was clearly a provocation, a challenge from the marionette’s controller to him.
The marionette’s smiling face seemed to taunt him, as if saying, "Come on, cut me down if you can!"
“Trying to make me spread my bone blades thin to rescue those Black Dogs, huh? Dream on. Four blades are enough to handle the Black Dogs, and I only need one to take care of you!”
Determined, Goffrey directed the bone blade that had been chasing the marionette to once again strike at it. He would not let such provocation go unanswered.
As the bone blade whizzed toward it, the thief-marionette immediately halted its dance and sprinted away, dodging the attacks as it had done before.
Thanks to Dorothy’s overhead view of the battlefield, she could see the trajectory of the bone blade. The marionette didn’t need to constantly watch and react, it simply had to keep running. With Dorothy’s vantage point, evading the bone blade was much easier than for an ordinary person.
Dorothy directed the thief-marionette to weave through the streets, while the relentless bone blade chased closely behind.
This time, however, the marionette didn’t run out of Goffrey’s line of sight. Instead, it moved around various obstacles—fences, trash cans, streetlights, and advertisement boards—like a parkour artist. Goffrey’s view was intermittently blocked, causing his bone blade’s pursuit to falter. This only fueled Goffrey’s growing frustration.
Meanwhile, atop a darkened rooftop, Dorothy observed the scene with a faint smile.
“Just like that... Take it slow. Let me see where you can see and where you can’t...”
As she controlled the marionette, Dorothy was not making it run randomly. She was using the obstacles to determine the spirit controller’s blind spots, gradually identifying the direction from which he was observing.
If the marionette hid behind a billboard’s left side and the bone blade paused, it indicated the controller was viewing from the right. If the marionette ducked behind the south side of a parked vehicle and the blade attacked unhindered, the controller wasn’t watching from the north. To monitor the entire scene, his viewpoint had to be elevated—likely from a building.
By maneuvering the marionette around various obstacles, Dorothy could glean bits of information about the enemy’s line of sight. Once enough data was collected, she could pinpoint his location.
Soon enough, Dorothy deduced that the spirit controller was likely in one of the upper floors of a building on the southern side of Knight Street, the left side of the battlefield. She sent two bird marionettes to the designated location for reconnaissance. Shortly thereafter, one of them spotted a figure on the fourth-floor window, gazing intently at the battlefield below.
“Finally found you…”
Surveying the building, Dorothy noted its sealed doors and windows, making infiltration difficult. She then had the bird marionettes perch on a stone ledge above the window, leaving behind a box of matches.
The birds opened the matchbox, grabbed a long matchstick, and with one holding down the box, the other struck the match along the box’s side, igniting a small flame in the darkness.
At that moment, Elena, still on the balcony of House No. 26, noticed the faint light flickering in a previously dark window of the opposite building.
“What is that…?”
Curious, Elena activated her Lantern abilities and focused her gaze. In the dim moonlight, she saw a shadowy figure at the fourth-floor window—someone looking down at the battlefield.
Recognizing the threat, Elena didn’t hesitate. She raised her rifle, took aim, and fired directly at the figure.
Bang!
The gunshot shattered the night, the bullet flying straight through the window. Goffrey, orchestrating the battle below, was struck in the chest by the incoming round.