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Vin springs away from the first volley and lands in a crouch on the wet Luthadel cobbles, sending OreSeur for the alley. The mist closes and clears enough for her to count what she is facing: eight men, not the Watcher — four Thugs at the front, two Coinshots working up the flanks, a Lurcher behind a wooden shield, and a single Smoker standing quietly beside him. A team assembled for one specific job. Assassins do not waste eight Mistings on a bodyguard; she understands at once that they have come for Elend and have sent this through her on the way.

She tears her coin pouch off her own belt before an enemy Coinshot can rip it away — without coins of her own she cannot shoot herself out of the corridor, but she would rather lose the pouch than the leverage. She also chooses not to return the favour and Push their pouches free; she may need to steal them later. She feints to set the Thugs back, then makes the Coinshots eat a few of her tricks: she Pulls one of their own shot coins back to her hand, kicks loose, and rides a Coinshot's own Push into the air. The two of them shove against each other through the coins they share, and both end up on the ground; she rolls back to her feet, marks the fallen Coinshot, and puts a dagger through his chest. First of the eight.

A blue line darts into her vision before she can reach the next man — and a coin from above kicks the remaining Coinshot hard enough that he has to Push it away. The shot did not come from her, did not come from OreSeur. She glances up, flares tin, and finds the Watcher standing in plain silhouette on a rooftop nearby. He is not interfering on the assassins' side. The next coin he fires takes the Smoker directly in the forehead — a man who, by any sane reading of the fight, was no longer a threat. She does not understand why, dodges through another wave of Thugs, drops her copper, and lets her bronze sweep the street.

Someone else is burning copper out there. Someone the Smoker had been hiding. The team has stuffed a Mistborn in among them, and the Watcher shot the Smoker so that she would see him. She calls a prearranged code to OreSeur — "Go for the palace!" — and her kandra flips a metal vial out from his belt across the cobbles to her hand. She catches it on iron and drinks it without breaking stride. One bead. The hidden assassin who had played Coinshot earlier — and lain there pretending to be dead — gets up with a glass dagger in hand, and as he comes at her she burns the last atium she has in the world.

The street erupts in the layered atium shadows of a Mistborn versus Mistborn, both moves cancelling into infinity, but the four Thugs still rushing her have no atium shadows of their own. She kicks the Smoker's noisemaking soundsticks off the cobbles, snatches them out of the air, and breaks them across two skulls in a single fluid motion; she trips the remaining two with a captured staff and finishes them with two strikes. The hidden Mistborn hangs back, uncertain — power without competence — until he Pushes coins at OreSeur to draw her eye. She ignores OreSeur's cry of pain and throws her staff at the man's head; the moment of his dodge is all she needs. His own atium runs out as she closes; her instincts read his last block around it, and she puts his glass dagger through his neck.

She stands alone in the street with eight dead men around her and realises her atium is gone too. With it has gone the only edge she has had against an opposing full Mistborn. The Watcher is still on his rooftop. He saved her — she would have died if she had closed with the hidden burner without realising what he was — and then, when she does not chase, he turns and is gone into the dark. She lets him.

OreSeur is propped against the alley wall with a dozen coins lodged in him, bleeding. She had not expected him to bleed; she had not, in fact, ever thought about it. He notes the omission flatly and reminds her that Master Kelsier charged him with her protection and that, as always, he serves the Contract. He needs a new body — one of the assassins, perhaps. The thought of the kandra eating someone she has just killed turns her stomach. He answers that the Contract forbids him from being made to kill, but it does not save him from her squeamishness; she refuses him an assassin and tells him she will find him a body some other way. He will have to limp back to the palace on the cracked one he has. She stays in the street with the corpses she has made, knowing tonight has changed the Central Dominance — and that the next Mistborn who comes for her will likely kill her as easily as she has killed this one.