The Ashen Bazaar was only the beginning.
By daytime to nightfall of the second day, panic had completely overtaken the outer territories of The Root. The syndicate members who operated above ground in the suburban safe houses, the industrial shipping yards, and the smuggling routes had heard the terrifying reports. A thousand men were dead, leaving behind no bullet casings and no signs of a struggle.
They did exactly what any cornered rat would do. They tried to run.
But Rina did not need to chase them. Her mental map was absolute. The remaining blue beacons of her Tattoo Finder spell were scattered across the city limits, and she moved between them with the cold precision of a ticking clock.
On a deserted stretch of the southern highway, a convoy of three bulletproof SUVs sped through the rain, desperate to cross the state border. Inside, two dozen armed Root smugglers checked their weapons, nervously watching the dark road ahead.
They never saw her. Rina was standing perfectly still on a concrete overpass above them.
She did not conjure a fireball or blow up the bridge. She simply stepped off the concrete ledge and dropped like a stone through the freezing rain.
A deafening thud echoed through the lead SUV. The heavy reinforced roof dented violently inward under her boots.
"Someone is on the roof!" a syndicate member screamed.
Panic instantly overtook the cabin. Three men raised their assault rifles and fired blindly upward, shredding their own ceiling in a desperate frenzy. The deafening roar of gunfire filled the small space, choking the cabin with thick grey smoke.
As the smoke cleared, the men froze. Peering down at them through the jagged bullet holes were two glowing, ethereal blue eyes.
A mix of absolute terror and insulted rage washed over the syndicate members. They knew they were fighting a ghost, but cornered rats always bite back.
"Die, you Fang!" one of them roared, reaching for a fresh magazine.
Before he could load his weapon, the steel roof violently buckled. Rina drove her fist straight through the bulletproof armor plating, her arm plunging directly into the cabin.
"Do you know what the most basic spell is without the need of a chant?" Rina asked. Her voice echoed clearly over the howling wind, completely detached and calm.
No one dared to reply. In a blind panic, a massive thug grabbed her forearm with both hands, trying to drag her down into the vehicle. He pulled with all his might, but Rina's arm did not even budge a single millimeter.
"Wrong answer," she said softly. "It is Mana Burst."
Her fist began to glow with a blinding, terrifying light. Every ounce of ambient mana rushed directly into her palm.
Then, it detonated.
It was not a normal fire. It was a localized, devastating wave of pure kinetic energy. The SUV instantly ruptured outward, blowing the doors, windows, and syndicate members into a million twisted pieces across the wet asphalt.
The sheer force of the blast caused the second and third vehicles to violently swerve, crashing into the concrete median in a tangled wreck of burning metal.
Rina landed silently on the wet highway amidst the flaming wreckage. She did not break her stride. She casually pointed her fingers at the crawling, bleeding survivors from the other vehicles. Invisible, hyper-compressed needles of mana pierced through their skulls in rapid succession.
She left the burning convoy behind and vanished back into the night.
Hours later, at a commercial shipping dock on the eastern harbor, sixty syndicate enforcers were hurriedly loading weapons and cash into a cargo freighter.
Rina walked right through the main gate. When the perimeter guards opened fire, the bullets froze in midair, caught in a dense wall of spatial pressure inches from her face. She dropped the useless lead to the ground and snapped her fingers.
The atmospheric pressure inside the massive shipping warehouse violently shifted. The air was sucked out of the room in a fraction of a second. The sixty men dropped their crates, clutching their throats and gasping for oxygen that was no longer there. Their eardrums ruptured instantly, and they suffocated in complete, agonizing silence, slumping over their own smuggled cargo.
By midnight, Rina sat on the edge of a towering crane overlooking the harbor, completely untouched by the violence.
She closed her eyes, pulling up the digitalized map in her mind. The sprawling web of blue lights that had covered the country yesterday was now incredibly sparse. She ran the calculations.
One thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight, she tallied silently.
She had successfully erased exactly seventy percent of The Root.
The remaining grunts were entirely wiped out. Her spatial radar now highlighted only five distinct, massive clusters of mana scattered across the vast expanse of Russia. These were the high-ranking executives. The true roots of the organization. They were not hiding together in a single bunker. They were deeply entrenched in the highest levels of the country's political system, hiding in plain sight.
Rina opened her eyes. The brilliant blue glow illuminated the dark harbor.
"Time to prune the top," she whispered to the wind.
Thousands of miles away, in a sprawling metropolis in the far east of Russia, a freezing wind howled through the shattered windows of an abandoned high-rise building.
Rina lay perfectly prone on the dusty concrete floor.
She raised her left hand. The dark leather glove adorning her fingers faintly glowed with a hum of energy. This was her only true spatial artifact, a dimensional inventory bound directly to the fabric. With a subtle pulse of mana, she reached into the invisible rift and slowly pulled out a massive, heavily customized anti-materiel sniper rifle.
It was a physical weapon forged from cold, black steel, but it operated entirely on her spatial mastery. Modified conduits and reinforced wiring ran from the chamber of the rifle directly into the glowing mana circuits tracing up her arms. She did not rely on standard gunpowder. Instead, she used the heavy steel barrel to channel hyper-compressed kinetic mana, perfectly guiding the immense pressure to accelerate a solid armor-piercing round to hypersonic speeds using raw energy as the propellant.
Down below, framed perfectly by the brightly lit, floor-to-ceiling windows of the Governor's private office, stood the secretary. She was currently deep in conversation with the Governor himself. To the public, she was a highly respected political figure. To Rina's glowing blue eyes, she was just another target bearing the twisted tree tattoo.
Rina peered through the highly calibrated optical scope. The distance was exactly two point four kilometers. An ordinary sniper would have to adjust for wind resistance, bullet drop, and the rotation of the earth.
Rina simply commanded the space between them. She locked the exact spatial coordinates of the secretary's skull directly into her mana core.
She rested her finger on the heavy steel trigger and steadied her breathing.
Down in the luxurious office, the woman in the pristine white trench coat suddenly stopped talking.
The Governor paused mid-sentence, looking at his secretary in confusion. The secretary did not look back at him. She did not look at the state police guarding the heavy wooden doors.
Slowly, she tilted her head upward, staring directly out the window and into the dark, freezing night sky.
Through the highly magnified lens of the optical scope, Rina watched the woman's face shift. The secretary's eyes cut straight through two point four kilometers of darkness, rain, and howling wind. They bypassed the physical distance entirely, locking perfectly onto Rina's glowing blue eyes hiding in the pitch-black window of the abandoned high-rise.
Then, the secretary grinned.
Rina's eyes widened. There was not a single light shining in the abandoned building, yet this woman was staring directly into her soul. Her finger hesitated on the heavy steel trigger for a fraction of a second. She felt something terribly amiss. Her spatial stealth barrier was absolute, yet it was completely useless against the executive's perception.
Down in the luxurious office, the Governor took a step back. "Madam Secretary?" he asked nervously. "Is something wrong?"
The secretary did not look at him. Her eyes remained locked on the dark skyline. Her wide, psychotic grin stretched further as an oppressive, suffocating weight suddenly descended upon the room. The thick, bulletproof glass windows began to spiderweb under the immense pressure of her rising aura.
Two point four kilometers away, Rina kept her gaze interlocked with the executive through the crosshairs of the scope. She watched the woman's lips move, perfectly translating the silent, mocking words from across the city.
Tonight, a fang is going to be extracted.
Rina's breath caught. She felt a massive surge of foreign mana building in the atmosphere. Something was coming, and it was coming impossibly fast.
Down in the office, the secretary raised her hand, resting her manicured fingers against the fracturing glass. Her joyous, bloodthirsty excitement could no longer be contained.
"The ghost has finally appeared," she declared aloud, her voice echoing unnaturally through the room. "So, you are the ghost. Rina. The Morozov's Fang."