18 June 2051

Daniel stood in a dark alleyway, eating a bacon sandwich he had managed to get his hands on earlier. He was about to take a second bite when he suddenly stopped, making no further movements. Without moving, he mentally manipulated the magic in the air, creating a field of magic invisible to the human eye. This was his "domain"; any minor movement displaced magic, alerting him to threats.

There!

He whipped around, the sandwich long forgotten on the dirt-ridden floor; small whip-like ropes appeared out of thin air and wrapped around the thing that dared to-

What… it's a…

A tiny, fearful meow pierced the air, barely audible but still heart-wrenching. Daniel immediately placed the kitten down on the ground and muttered an apology; then, looking at what once could have been called a bacon sandwich, he sighed in exasperation,

"Looks like fate didn't feel like letting me eat… again," 

He looked up to the sky and yelled,

"That's perfectly fine; I wasn't hungry anyway!"

Daniel wasn't lying; he wasn't hungry. He had long since theorised that magic could sustain him perpetually, but he knew the cost was that the longer it had to, the weaker he would become, something he couldn't afford to do.

Daniel picked up the scraps and threw them into a nearby bin, he muttered to himself as he mentally retracted his field of magic. "Took me ages to find that sandwich; now I got to get another one-,"

Daniel cut himself off and chuckled a bit more crazily than usual. He turned around and faced a shadow, his hands drifting to his trusty knives by his hip. His emerald green eyes bore into this dark alley corner, and a smile tinted his lips.

"You going to show yourself, or do I need to drag you out myself?" Daniel called out, his words seeming jokingly but his tone telling a different story;

"... Welp, if you ain't gonna come out, guess I'll do it myself then."

He dashed forward, seemingly teleporting, but it was just Daniel moving extremely fast. His hand shot out and seemed to grab a neck, but Daniel had grabbed air, his fingers touching a fabric for a split second before it disappeared.

What the-

"Hello there, Daniel~"

The voice echoed from behind him, muted by a mask, but its feminine nature was still precise to Daniel's ears. But what confused him was that she sounded…

…Like a kid?

There was a tone to her voice that was childish and playful, but the way she dodged showed she was anything but. Daniel whips around, his knives in his hands, and looks up. There, on a ledge, crouched a tiny human; half her face was covered with a purple mask, leaving her grey eyes in the open and her black hair flowing in the wind. The eyes were filled with cautious curiosity, similar to how one would look at a lion or tiger; the rest of her body was covered in pure black clothing, explaining how she could hide so easily in the shadows, at least visibly.

"Who the fuck are you?" Daniel called towards this masked girl; his posture slipped into a defensive position, abandoning all semblance of laziness. His knives had a subtle rainbow sheen to their blades, betraying their magical nature.

"Just a Person who's been hired to kill you, of course!" She said in an overly cheerful voice, and Daniel, despite the hood hiding his face in the darkness, grimanced.

"Let me guess, Johnson sent you?" Daniel said as he took a not-so-wild guess.

"Bingo! Congratulations on successfully guessing my contracto-" She was cut off as a bullet-sized orb flew at incredible speeds towards her. Still, once it got within feet of her, it suddenly fizzled out of existence.

"What the-"

"It looks like you found a little Christmas present. Johnson knew that if I went against you without any defence against your Magic, I'd die immediately, so he made this little device." 

She moved her black sweatshirt slightly to show a small grey box with multiple lights.

"This little device nullifies any magic you send at me. So, I am practically safe. Now, how about you not making my job harder than it should be and die?"

"Thanks for the offer; I'll not so respectfully deny."

Daniel jumps high into the air until he's eye to eye with this girl and throws a knife directly at her throat, and two things happen in quick succession; one is that the knife lost its sheen when it entered the anti-magic field, but Daniel could still feel the now nearly non-existent connection to it. The second thing Daniel froze at the sight of was that she caught the knife.

The girl flips the knife in her hand and looks at Daniel, all signs of her playfulness gone, and says in a deathly serious tone, "Oh, the name's Mei, by the way; it's going to be the last name you hear." Mei's hand blurs and the knife flies toward Daniel at the same speed.

"Oh, for fucks sake."

…