#murderplay

Nico groans from his seat on the couch and sinks lower, hiding his face behind his hands. Julius sighs and takes refuge in the couch. “Staying a viscorp is hard, Sig,” he defends. “We need focus and calm, unlike you and your anger—”

“BULL. SHIT!” Sig explodes. “You’re an actor, man! It’s basically your job to viscorp on demand!”

“Student actor,” Julius corrects from the couch.

“No excuses!” Sig snaps.

“Hey, Sig?” Dawn interrupts meekly.

Sig blinks and rounds on her. “What?”

“Did we do okay?” Dawn asks, looking troubled. Evelyn, beside her, flickers nervously.

“Y-yeah,” Sean tells her, dazed.

“You’re sure?” Evelyn adds. Her brows are furrowed.

“Of course!” Greyson exclaims. “Dev is perfect!”

“Oh, good,” Dawn says, glowing happily. “That means Nico and Julius have another few seconds before you realize they’re gone.”

“He complained that we didn’t buy him enough time last time,” Evelyn adds serenely.

“I’m a little surprised no one else felt it,” Nico tells Julius, ignoring Greyson’s shouts bouncing around the walls behind them.

“They’re not trained for it,” Julius reminds his corpus. “It was very intense, though—” He cuts himself off, and then says, voice strained, “It’s coming.”

They snap together, summoning Nicholas’s hunting spear as the manifestation of hatred streaks toward them. Nicholas raises his spear to defend himself, but the apparition passes with barely a second glance.

The spear disappears, and the viscorp dissolves into two.

“That wasn’t a mortus,” Julius says after a moment of stunned silence.

“I know,” Nico says numbly.

“But… that hatred?”

“I know.”

“It has to be a mortus, doesn’t it?”

“It should have been.”

They stand in bewildered silence for a little longer, then— “What are we doing what if it’s attacking the others?”

“Are you okay?!” Nicholas shouts, bursting into the room spear-butt first.

“Back already, shithead?” Greyson growls petulantly.

“Where’s Dev?” Nicholas demands.

“She went looking for you—”

“She’s alone?!”

“Why are you so worked up? Calm down and let’s get back to— hey, don’t just run off again, you jackass!”

Nicholas skids around a corner and spots familiar golden hair. “Dev!” he calls, pelting toward the viscorp pair.

They start, rounding on him defensively and unifying automatically. “Wh— Nicholas? Why do you have a hunting— are you a hunter?”

“You’re okay,” Nicholas sighs, relieved, but he tightens his grip on his spear and looks anxiously around. Come to think of it, he can’t sense the maybe-mortus anymore…

“Are you a hunter,” Dev states more than asks, her face stony.

“Yeah, what about it—”

“You saw it. The Severed.”

The hairs on Nicholas’s neck raise and tingle. He backs away from her. “What if I di—”

She’s a blur, a sharp snap of wood, and he’s slammed against the nearest wall staring bewildered at Dev. His spear clatters to the floor. An open fan, each spine metal and pointed, presses against his neck. “Come with me or die,” she hisses in Nico’s ear as Julius falls away, collapsing to the floor.

“Get the feeling I’m going to die anyway,” Nico says faintly.

“Forsake your license.”

“We spent years getting that,” Julius protests weakly, batting at Dev’s leg.

She narrows her eyes at Nico.

“You’re not going to kill us either way,” Nico realizes.

“That’s worse,” Julius groans. “What if a Severed comes after us?”

“Hey, even if that was a Severed, we don’t know if there are more.”

“There might not be, but there also very well could be.”

“And the license has something to do with that,” Nico says slowly. “Tracking, maybe?”

“Choose,” Dev says flatly. “Choose wrong and I may put you out of your misery now.”

“That means go with you,” Julius says, rising slowly from the floor to hover beside Dev and Nico.

Dev nods sharply and separates, her fan vanishing. “Forsake your license now,” Dawn tells Nico, releasing him.

“We’ll update you on the way,” Evelyn says to Julius, tugging at him.

“Where are we going?” Nico asks as he summons his license.

Julius calls up the counterpart license. “Far, far away,” he answers, half jesting.