41 - Hotline Audunpoint Pt. 3 [Cherno]

Despite everything else, his eyes were what grabbed her attention the most, being bright burningly orange with streaks of yellow. His pupils, cross-shaped at first, had now expanded into four-pointed stars.

His alien outward appearance contrasted with his foppish mode of dress; a white, satin shirt, tight leather trousers with lacing up the sides, and a bright white snakeskin belt with a golden belt buckle in the form of the Igarian Seven-spoked Wheel insignia. Strange dress shoes in the same white snakeskin as his belt adorned his feet, with sabaton-like segmented armor on their front halves. They even had bright-red soles, if his fashion sense wasn’t already outrageous enough.

“You…” he squinted, confusion audible in his voice. “Are not Favonia.”

“Casus Aristedes, I presume?” she raised an eyebrow.

“Yes, that would be me. I appreciate the rescue, stranger. However… Please do not say the church sent you,” he said lethargically. He seemed badly exhausted, or perhaps sedated, and it was clear that he had questions pertaining to Krahe’s identity.

“They didn’t, Garvesh did,” she said, squatting down in front of him, palming a cigarette into her mouth. In the same motion she lit it and outstretched her hand to him, conjuring another and offering it up.

“It’ll wake you up. It’s just Arrha."

The Banisher regarded it for a moment; a blue glow pulsed in his eyes before he muttered in affirmation and took it from her, to which she lit it for him. A long drag and a sighed exhalation later, the sleepless fatigue began to recede from him as he straightened out, stretching. His right hand was not his own flesh, but rather a skeletal scaffold of brass-like metal with bundles of bare muscle winding around it, black tubes visible within the mass at points.

“I- I can fight, but… My belt, they took it. I will not be much use without it. It’s…”

He kicked his head back. The vertical slit on his face spread open, revealing itself to be a third, particularly large eye, pale blue in colour; it sat in its socket such that half of it protruded outward, the muscles which held it in plainly visible in the socket as concave triangles of flesh to its top and bottom. Its star-shaped pupil expanded out to nearly the shape of a diamond as the eye rolled wildly in its socket, the Banisher’s human eyes looking around as if he were searching for something in a pile of strewn-about clothing.

A half-distraught, half-resigned expression furrowed his brow.

“...Not here. Far to the north-west. Somewhere in the city, underground, they must’ve taken it elsewhere. I must retrieve it, else it will surely be broken apart and used for evil.”

“Alright, fine, I’ll help you retrieve it,” she said, not even bothering to put on the facade of reluctance. “But you’ll owe me big time.”

“I already do.”

“No, that’s on Garvesh. This one is one you. Can you use another belt in the meanwhile?” she said, offering the canister-driven belt. “If not, just pull a voidkey out of the many corpses in our immediate vicinity, you look like you can fight even with an unfamiliar weapon.”

His eyes lit up when she drew attention to the belt.

“A Dregsteam Coupler will work, yes,” he nodded, taking it from her and effortlessly whipping it around his waist. He gave the lever a few tentative cranks, the belt complaining about “NO FUEL CELL PRESENT” with each one. “First of the Fourth-generation mass-production models, this must be the Mark Six or Seven going by the improved strap and slimmed-down coupler chassis. It strains the body and burns a DD-based compressed fuel rather than using a traditional Catalyst, but it is easy to use compared to my Silberblut. Its biggest disadvantages are the lack of inbuilt weapons, relatively weak armor, and the forced detransformation when you use a Coupler Charge. These things are built for the consumer market, and it shows. You have a fuel cell?”

Krahe summoned it into her hand and tossed it over to him.

“There’s another down in the stairwell, used. Not sure if these work more than once.”

“The Mark Ones through Fours would burn a cell every time you transformed no matter what, so they only used cells one-third this size. With these it’s five minutes…” he trailed off as he turned the cell over to get at a serial number. “Yeah, five minutes of operational time, losing fifteen seconds when you transform or use a Coupler Charge.”

He slipped the canister into his pants pocket.

“If your belt is so much better, how’d you get captured?” she grinned, even though she already knew the likely answer.

“They caught me off-guard,” he shrugged. “I know how to protect myself with Wards, but as a Mamon Knight I cannot use a Voidkey to strengthen them; having one implanted and trying to transform would be the same as trying to implant two keys at once. As Mamon Knight Silberblut, I could pound Semzar Hashem into paste. Without the coupler, though… I wager I could have broken out of here, but I wanted to wait and see if Favonia would come.”

That last sentence was half truth, half vainglory. Krahe wasn’t entirely sure which half was which, though. A part of Casus certainly wanted to believe that he could’ve broken himself out, but she wagered that lacking his personal power armor didn’t do his confidence any favors. Even in Megacity Gamma, some power armor specialists had a habit of developing vaguely knightly aspirations. With each passing second she felt the banisher’s curious gaze crawling all over her and exuding a strong questioning energy, so rather than wait for the other shoe to drop, she decided to try and figure out where the three-eyes’ belt had been sent.

She went over to and opened the ice-user’s cell, the man shrinking back from her as she approached, with Casus following in tow.

The ice-user stared up at her wild-eyed, barely paying attention to the banisher by her side.