Normally, Catherine would have spent her afternoon in a comfortable, well-soundproofed office, with thick carpets underfoot and the aroma of freshly ground coffee in the air.
She would have sat in an ergonomic leather chair before a broad mahogany desk, neatly laid out with financial statements awaiting her review and signature, draft business contracts, and encrypted communications from branches across the continent.
That was her battlefield, a chessboard of numbers and clauses, and her weapons were precise calculations and insight into human nature.
Watching the figures representing the Roman Merchant Guild's interests steadily grow on a screen or a sheet of paper, watching its networks expand-that was the field she excelled in and enjoyed. It was also where she should have been at that very moment.
Reality, however, was-
All around her lay impenetrable gray-white fog, carrying a bone-chilling cold. Visibility was less than ten meters.
The air reeked of a nauseating, sickly-sweet stench that mingled rotting earth, decaying corpses, and some kind of magical residue.
Whoosh!
A rotten severed limb, its original place on a human body impossible to identify, flew past Catherine's carefully groomed golden hair with a teeth-grating whistle, propelled by someone's magical blast up ahead. It struck a broken gravestone a short distance behind her with a splat, scattering rotten flesh and black fluid.
Catherine stood still. Her blue eyes had lost their usual calm calculation, leaving only an almost numb sense of absurdity and a visceral disgust at the filthy surroundings.
Her expensive, perfectly tailored hunting outfit was already spattered with mud and suspicious stains.
This is absolutely not how things were supposed to go.
She repeated those words in her mind for the hundredth time.
She had devised a meticulous script for their chance encounter and prepared an appropriate opening line.
And yet...
Somehow,