It was as if no one had even been here that night.

The attacker was gone without a trace.

22

Max waited on the couch for Sakura to get home.

The B-ranked climber woman got back to the apartment just after one-thirty in the morning.

“What are you doing up—?”

She stopped. Her face went from surprised to concerned.

“Is everything okay? Did something happen?”

Max nodded his head.

“Someone came into the apartment and tried to kill me,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

Sakura quickly looked around the apartment. “Are you serious? You’re not tricking me in some elaborate way to come out on next month’s monster wave?”

Max shook his head. His skin was pale.

“Okay,” she said. “I don’t see any blood. I don’t see any signs of an attacker.”

“He was here,” Max gulped, shivering. “He came through the window.”

“The window!?” balked Sakura, heading towards the balcony. “That shouldn’t be possible with the defense runes—”

She stopped and looked horrified. Her finger pressed on the window to conjure the defense rune. Nothing came up.

“Someone must’ve disabled it,” she gasped.

“He climbed up the side of the apartment building,” said Max. “I was watching the monster wave so I saw him approach the building. That’s when I hid. He came into my room and stabbed my blankets, thinking I was there. If you didn’t give me your slice ability before you left—I would’ve been screwed.”

Sakura headed to the kitchen and grabbed a can of beer, cracking it open.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked.

Max gulped. He felt surprisingly fine. In fact, it was his lack of panic or guilt that was concerning him more than anything else.

He looked down to the floor where the assassin had been before he’d vanished into black dust. That wasn’t a teleport spell; that was a suicide. To protect the man from giving up any information.

He’d been learning quite quickly that not all climbers were good people. Some of them were as bad as the monsters they claimed to protect ordinary citizens from. Some of them were even worse than that.

He didn’t like the idea of being a killer, but the world of climbers was filled with them.

Would he have hesitated to stop someone from harming his sister or anyone else he loved for that matter?

No.

He’d try his best to live up to the ideals of a good person.

But who gave a shit if you were a good person if your sister and everyone else was dead?

Only an idiot would see upholding such ideals as honorable.

He decided there and then.

The world could have his honor.

He wanted to find and save his sister.

And to achieve that, he would do anything necessary.

23

Sakura woke Max extra early the following day.