“DIE!” a man screamed, jumping at the married couple, only to disappear into thin air a moment later.

“You know, honey,” Mabirl sighed, “these things are tiresome. No matter how often we get through them.”

“Quite,” Magoi agreed as they stepped out of the barrier and right into the next one.

They were trying to reach the restaurant they had booked for today. Having to juggle Scarlett’s and John’s war and the resulting short-term confinement to the Guild Hall with his own schedule of expensive dinners, golf clubs and other frivolous activities had been difficult. Luckily, Magoi was mostly done with his involvement in this line of activities.

At least if the enemy would stop trying to assassinate him.

“MOTHERFUCKER, I SAID DIE!” the, doubtlessly hired by Bearings, assassin screamed after pulling Magoi into another trap barrier.

Without even waving his hand, Magoi made the barrier disappear again.

“What say you, honey, should we change out of these clothes?” the High Fateweaver asked his wife as they walked a large circle around a bunch of children playing on the street. In their butler and maid outfits, not to mention skull masks, the two of them would have attracted all of the attention if it hadn’t been for the enchantments.

Being protected from the eyes of the mundane didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be consequences if they ran into someone though. It wasn’t a thing that made Gaia particularly pissed, often enough people simply thought they had tripped over a stone or something, but there was no reason to challenge the supreme deity of reality. Especially since she did keep track of repeat offenders.

“I would indeed say so, don’t want to head into the crowd wearing this,” Mabirl agreed, and so Magoi opened a barrier himself.

By simply tapping his cane on the walkway, he created this new space. Being as skilled as he was, he wasn’t bound to the need of raising his hand. The normally required gesture, a sort of prayer to Gaia to open an Illusion Barrier, was something Magoi had exceeded. It was a bit of a vanity skill that came along with being a High Fateweaver, even the upper ranks of his profession usually had to execute the simple gesture.

There was one great advantage that came along with having that kind of power.

“HAHA!” the hired knife shouted out as he successfully invaded Magoi’s barrier, finding himself at a perfect position to grab his victim’s hands. It was common knowledge in the Abyss that restricting one’s captive’s hands to below the shoulders was a must. Otherwise, they could just flee by leaving the barrier. This was doubly true for Fateweavers, who regularly had the control over the barrier they were inside on.

As mentioned, Magoi wasn’t bound by that rule anymore. The assassin vanished again as the raptor-faced man collapsed and immediately remade the barrier. “Can’t you lock him up?” Mabirl asked, reaching into her pocket space to pull out a dress. “Also, could you put us inside?”

“My dearest wife, have you not gotten used to changing outside yet?” Magoi wondered. He had reversed the winter cold inside the barrier into a nice late-spring warmth and there was no one who could watch unless he wanted them to, so he didn’t really see the need to erect a whole building.

“Don’t be like that, Magoi, you know I like my walls,” his wife scolded. “Also, I need to sit down to change my shoes. Unless you don’t want me to wear my sexy high-heels and stockings.”

“Mhm,” Magoi hummed as if he was actually weighing his decisions. Giving him a gentle ‘tock’ on the side of his mask with the grip of her cane, Mabirl hurried him along in his decision. “Ah, well then,” he let go of his cane, which miraculously kept standing on its own, and clapped his hands. One, two, three, four times, each time materializing a wall. They had a nice, creamy colour with white decorations, small pictures hanging from the walls and a cushioned armchair, on which his wife immediately sat, appearing on one wall. Himself, he took seat on the sofa right next to it after clapping one more time for the roof. “Feet up,” he warned, him and Mabirl stretching out their legs as he clapped a sixth and final time to materialize the floor. Dimensional material melding was an unlikely and harmless but highly unwanted phenomenon. The alternative were boot-shaped holes in the temporary carpet, which would have annoyed his wife more than him.

Magoi wasn’t just thinking up this structure, not anymore at least. Like an artist who had produced the same strokes hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of times, these walls were ingrained into his memory. He had trained months and years to be able to erect certain structures. Being able to just will matter into existence was the main reason why he had even begun his apprenticeship as a Protected Space engineer.

These were the walls of his first own house, the same furniture, as fleeting as it was; Magoi felt a bit nostalgic and gently rested his arm on the rest. In turbulent times like these, it felt good to remember where he came from. Nothing.

“I WILL GET YOU, YOU RAPTORFACED SHI-“ the assassin tried to get in a stab again but was ported out immediately.

“To answer your earlier question, seems like he has a Barrier Break belt,” Magoi told his wife. It was a rare enchantment that allowed its wielder to bypass basic protection measures. The variety that could break through advanced measures, such as a Fateweaver actively fending off invaders, were incredibly rare, so rare that even the Blood of the Proletariat had owned only four of them, but Magoi wasn’t employing such measures right now. Purely because it was a strain on his mind to do so and he didn’t feel like doing that. “The battery on it should run out after a few more attempts, then he won’t be able to invade again.”

“Changing my clothes will be-“

“I WILL GOUGE OUT YOUR INSIDES!” the violent scream of the man came and went just as he did.

“Very rude, but I wanted to say that I cannot change under these conditions.”

“Of course, the only man who gets to leer at your body shall be me,” Magoi nodded; he didn’t share John Newman’s idea about showing off his wife (or lovers in the case of the ever erotically involved Gamer), even if she was a refined lady of exquisite exterior. Then again, he was several hundred years old and John was not even twenty. Even if the young man was an administrative, combat and tactical genius, an unfair list acquired by his equally unfair ability, he was still just that, a young man. “Right, did John ever leer at you, might give him a stern talking if he did.”

“He seemed mighty tempted, but after giving me the once over, he kept his eyes to himself… or his myriad of available girls,” Mabirl sighed in deep disappointment. “I would have really liked for him to have a more conservative understanding of life. Speaking of conservative, do we want to join the Republican party?”

“I don’t really feel like getting involved with real politics,” Magoi truthfully answered, “although we will pay taxes, so I guess we should get our representation. Just don’t get too involved, I don’t want to hear your ceaseless complaints about bad-mannered oranges or food stamps.”

“Last I knew, I got to decide what I get worked up about,” Mabirl joked, “or do you want me to become the kind of housewife that reads Fifty Shades of Grey instead of informing myself about things that actually matter?”

“To be fair, you wouldn’t need to read that low-quality trash,” Magoi was quite convinced that their bedroom activities left his wife with nothing wanting.

“True, but I was making a point,” she agreed. “Also, I need to hang the motto on our bedroom wall again. I forgot the poster back in our last house.”

“What was it again? ‘Keep your husband’s stomach full and his balls empty’?”

“That is correct,” Mabirl took off her mask and winked at him.

Her long black hair fell out of the confines, rolled out in curls, some of them greyed, and stopped at the shoulders. With eyes of a dark brown and healthily tan skin, she had a mysterious charm to her; the wrinkles around eyes and mouth gave away her progressed age, but she was a looker nonetheless.

“I thought you weren’t going to change,” Magoi asked, taking off his own mask. Of him it couldn’t be said that he looked particularly handsome or even good. If he had once been a good-looking young man, his past and age had slowly whittled that away from him.

The High Fateweaver was bald down to the eyebrows, not a single speck of hair remaining on his head. The only decorations that broke up his skin, showing the first signs of age spots, were three enormous scars.

One ran diagonally from his right ear to his forehead. He could hear the roaring of the earth drake that gave it to him to this day. A desperate measure, a Fateweaver acting as bait for a monster of the calamity categorization so the young hero could strike at the beast’s already hurt neck and save his home village from becoming the centre of an unnatural earthquake.

The second ran from above his right eye, splitting where his eyebrow should be, thankfully skipping over the eyeball itself, then continuing further and even splitting his lip. This one made Magoi especially nostalgic, he remembered getting it in a fight where he together with Gehnigm and a third strong and young Fateweaver defended their position to allow the rebels to cross over the Russian-Polish border.

Rebels that, as he recently found out, would partially go on to form an organization called the Bloodfallen. ‘So many things went wrong with that one,’ he thought, having doomed a girl he now knew to years of pain, and Gehnigm would go on to betray them all to the very same force he fought that day. It was ironic how the strings of fate sometimes weaved back together.

He would leave the complete story of that one in his biography. John and Eliza would learn of it before then, but he didn’t beat himself up over it. Ultimately, his acts had allowed the two of them to meet and he was pretty certain that was the best outcome for everyone involved, considering what was inside that girl.

At least the third scar, covering his left cheek, was somewhat entertaining. A burn had caused that one, him drunkenly falling into a campfire to be exact. The campfire had been on a forgotten island in the middle of nowhere Oceania and the rum the last thing that he and his friends still had in rations. Still, they had survived, so it was a fun memory, all things considered.

There were many more tales engraved on his body. All of which he remembered. In most of which he was the only actor still playing their role in this world.

“I had a very long life, didn’t I?” Magoi asked in a tired tone.

His wife looked at him with a raised eyebrow for a moment, before noticing her husband’s sudden heavy mood. She stood up and sat down next to him, gently kissing him on the left cheek. “Yes, honey, you did,” she told him. “And to me it always sounds like it was one well-lived.”

“Must have been, I get to spent the last parts of it with you,” Magoi smirked like a young lad and leaned in to kiss his beloved.

“FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” the assassin screamed as he jumped back in.

“Although these are certainly unpleasant consequences of the same life,” the High Fateweaver groaned, about to throw the man out again.

A black blade cut him up from head to toe but separated no flesh whatsoever. Instead, once the blade exited his body at the crotch, he simply collapsed like a robot that had suddenly lost all energy. Where he had been now stood a girl with blonde hair, partially flowing back like a field of ripe wheat under a gust of wind and the rest bound into a clear ponytail, and in a colourless white dress.

Nia dismissed her weapon. “He seemed like a nuisance,” she stated in her emotionless tone.

Magoi was more than mildly creeped out by the blank, but he knew that was just by her nature. He had worked with her kind before but never been particularly great friends with any. The way they could invade barriers without being felt whatsoever made him thankful that they were about as common as finding a diamond on a beach. “He was,” he just answered. “… Did you kill him?”

She looked at the man now lying sprawled out on the floor, eyes wide open. “No,” came the answer after an unnerving delay. “Can I leave him there?”

“Sure,” Magoi agreed just to have the blank leave; he didn’t have anything against her but he really disliked the way the hairs on his arms were on edge whenever she was too close to him.

Nia just nodded and disappeared out of the barrier.