akasoindustries

314 - Clash of Wills Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

He tried to move, to simply evade these clumsy thoughtforms rather than waste effort and precious real-time milliseconds subduing them, but found his legs ensnared, monstrous serpents made of iron sand wrapped around them, biting his thighs.

At that moment, he felt her presence, and the next moment, saw her thoughtform. It was identical to her real appearance, lacking even an iota of self-perception-induced changes. That alone was proof in Third's mind that he was dealing with an equal.

He tried to speak, but found himself choking out a voiceless wheeze. The very air was forming a maw and clamping down on his neck. With a mental effort he willed sound to come out of his mouth regardless: "I am impressed-"

His voice was carried away on a blast of pressure that accompanied Her words as she interrupted him: "I CAN'T SAY THE SAME. HARVESTING MORTALS - SERIOUSLY? IS THAT THE LOWNESS OF THOSE WHO CAME BEFORE US?"

Another presence loomed. Third knew this one, too. The Primordial Self. He grinned, thinking that she must have been drawing on it for power and that her control must have slipped when she reacted to his intrusion.

Then, it appeared, right behind the Thinking Self; not a monstrosity, but a primitive, naked, skull-masked version of the Newman Elder's physical body. An uncanny intelligence burned in its eyes, one that absolutely did not belong there.

"YOU DARE TO INTRUDE? WHAT A FOOL," came a booming voice full of amusement and derision, pressing down on him from all directions. "WATCH. WATCH THE ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY WITH WHICH I REIGN OVER THE VAST EMPIRE THAT IS I. SHOULD I WILL IT, YOUR AVATAR IN THIS PLACE WILL SIMPLY CEASE TO BE; I CAN ERASE YOU WITH A WORD."

The thoughtform of Zelsys Newman's Thinking Self spread her arms, and at once, the desert became a vast plain of bronze and iron. Rivers of molten magma flowed through it, and spires of glass stretched to the storm-cast heavens. With a snap of her fingers, the mindscape shifted once again, this time to a bitterly cold plain of glacierglass with no discernible landmarks in sight. Another snap, and it was back to the desert. The entire time, Third exerted every iota of mental power he could in an effort to reach something, anything in Newman's mind, but no matter how he tried, it was like running in place. This was impossible, he couldn't have fallen into a mental trap like some amateur. There had to be some secret technique at play.

His shock, in a lapse of self-control, showed through on his thoughtform. Third instantly regained his composure, but Newman had already noticed.

"You think there's a trick. I will disappoint you, and you will think that I am lying: There is none. Every muscle, every memory, every cell, every thought, I rule myself in full. You doomed yourself the moment you stepped into my domain," she said, this time speaking through her Thinking Self's thoughtform.

Despite no longer bellowing at him, her words still pressed down on him, carrying an overpowering sense of superiority.

In an instant, Third saw before him a tower, vast and monumental. Its heights stretched beyond the clouds, and it stood within a bottomless pit. Its surface of black iron looked to be wrought of countless fragments, and glyphs of inlaid bronze sprawled over each of its facets, shifting in perpetuity. They described everything from surface thoughts to personality impulses. He knew what the obelisk was; the metaphysical spindle around which one's mind and very soul were wound. A thoughtform representation of one's spiritual and mental core, the Seat of the Self.

Violence. All of it was tinged with violence. If he didn't know any better, he would have feared that the obelisk would upturn itself and run him through. This... This wasn't a Pseudo-Truth. It was just a Truth, in full. This monstrous woman had attained a Truth of Violence. No... Not quite. There was something more, something animalistic and primal, but Third couldn't comprehend it, in no small part because he focus wasn't on trying to comprehend his foe's Truth. He already had his own, it was a fool's errand.

She had willingly brought him here, arrogantly meaning to mock him by placing her greatest vulnerability within sight but out of reach, but he didn't need to be able to move to attack. He just needed to see it with his mind's eye, to find a fault, and Third had learned to find faults in even the most monolithic of selves.

Only... Wherever Third looked, the monolith's surface turned to a perfect smoothness with neither a crack nor a scratch. Before he could find a weakness, certainly in the last second before his victory, it was snatched away from him and Third found himself brought back to where he started. He raised his arms, forming a glyph using them as well as his fingers, intending to carry out a suicide attack to at least ensure that his foe would end up in a worse state that he would. Newman's Thinking Self raised an eyebrow. Suddenly, Third's arms turned into serpents. He knew this feeling, this was the nature of her aura acting on his thoughtform. Beyond the bizarre effects, Third couldn't understand how exactly she could just impose it upon him. He didn't feel it pushing against him, his defences never once clashed with it, there was no conflict at all. It made no sense.

Yet more thoughtforms made themselves manifest in rapid succession. The dunes behind Zelsys Newman shifted and out of them arose a giant snake with a body of sand and a skull of gleaming iron. It lashed out at him, only to freeze in time at the raising of Newman's hand. She brought out her blade, seemingly summoning it out of nowhere, only to let it go. It twisted into a monstrous, long-tailed woman made of metal. In the same manner, she pointed her left hand up and pulled the lever on that ridiculous gun of hers, firing a bolt of lightning into the heavens. A bolt descended in response, and a man made of exquisitely carved armour took form, the only flesh upon his countenance being the upper half of his head. A stern, hard face, with steely, green eyes  and slicked-back blonde hair. A long coat and peaked cap made of lightning took form around him.

146 - Visored Man [Cherno]

The whole room gave off a markedly more refined feeling than the rest of the gambling house, from the dark wood floor to the walls and furniture. It was… Still nothing much compared to a church safehouse.

There was only one man at the table, whom Casus presumed to be his contact. He appraised him, and it stuck without an iota of resistance. The man was a Lv. 17 Occultist. His attribute scores were nothing special, and he didn’t bother trying to dig further. What grabbed his attention were not the man’s system readouts, but his appearance; more specifically, it was his head. A heavy-duty optical apparatus was affixed to his head, a type that had been neither made nor sold in this region in the last twenty years at least. Its  design was emblematic of certain Samstani manufacturers aligned with strongly synthetic-leaning grafters. Even more eye-catching was the swelling and scabbing, both proof of recent installation and subpar-at-best aftercare.

“Ah, Mister…”

“Ahmed.”

“Mister Ahmed, thank you for coming on such short notice regarding my inquiry into that Samstani one-armed bandit you offered for sale. I am Cassius, as of recently also know as The Seer, and I am the proprietor of this humble establishment. As you can surely understand from seeing the front of the house, the machine’s self-adjusting mechanism would do wonders for my business…”

While the visored man went on and on with an undeniably sleazy smoothness of speech. As his words shifted over to the contract of sale, he brought out a paper, but curiously went out of his way to not look at it. It was typed, and had quite a number of mistakes. Considering its contents, Casus assumed the man had typed it quickly and without looking at neither the paper nor the keyboard:

DO NTO SHOW THIS TEXT TO ME. MY OCULAR GRAFT MAY BE COPMROMISED.

I can find Semzar Hashem for you. I’ll make this same claim befoer an Inquisitro if I have to.

The terms of my coopreatoin:

Firstly: Protection until Sezmar is gone.

Secondly: A total wipe of my bounty record.

Thirdyl: Full legal permit to operate my estabilshment as-is. It’s alreafy nine-tenths of the way above-boar, I jsut need the papers.

LAST: I demnad that an orthrodonx grafter examins this thing onmy head and removes any and all malicious modificatnios, icnluding trakcers, kill switches, etc.

answer as if you are answernig to my offer for the slto mahcine

After looking over the paper and folding it away inside his coat, Casus answered: “Yes, I do believe we could work out something along your suggested terms of purchase. The matter comes down to the manner, time, and method of delivery, as well as any potential issues you believe may arise. I am not familiar with this region, you see; how much danger, do you think, would such a delivery face? Additional insurance is, as always, available. I would hate to see the machine meet an untimely end, far too often we have seen them stolen before they could reach their destination and dismantled for parts when the thieves realized the machine wouldn’t open for anyone not designated by the rightful owner…”

“It er… Would be best to see it delivered as soon as possible, and as securely as possible. Such is life in the Free Cities, the cost of true freedom is caution, as they say…” he trailed off, clearing his throat. With a joking tone that would’ve convinced any normal person, he added: “Why, if you had it right here, I would take it on the spot!”

They sat in tense silence for a few seconds.

“Are you certain?” Casus asked.

“Of course. My employees already know to look out for a courier and not cause them any trouble. You know how security personnel can be, and they have been even more on edge these past months, first with the evoy moving in and then that Blackhand woman coming around…”

“Alright. Regarding the first stipulation of the contract - the additional security equipment - would you prefer to have the delivery made here, or pick it up in person?”

“In-person pickup would be preferable…”

Seer went on talking in circles for a short time, and Casus played along until he managed to steer things in the right direction in a way that wouldn’t sound suspicious to any possible listeners-in. He wasn’t worried about Seer’s graft - it was a purely ocular piece, and he hadn’t noticed any signs of auditory grafts. It was a matter of possible unwelcome ears in the immediate vicinity; too often did people assume a room having outside-in sound insulation also meant the opposite.

The two men made their way out of the back room, and exited through the front to keep up the facade of a friendly business relationship, talking about a whole lot of nothing as they went. If they did it so openly, then there was no reason to be suspicious. Unfortunately, someone took suspicion all the same. Casus realized this quite quickly, as, being a Banisher, he did have an eye on his back, and could thus easily see the large evoy following them.

At this point in the story, Krahe mentioned that she had encountered the large evoy, naming him “Tsetse” after a kind of giant stinging fly from her world. The name took root in Casus’ mind, because he hadn’t had a particular name for that man until now.

Tsetse’s gaze, despite being ever-pointed in their direction, never focused on them, and he turned into a different street quite quickly. At this point, Casus wasn’t too worried about the evoy, he was merely paying attention to his surroundings. However, before they could get anywhere close to the nearest branch temple, Tsetse just so happened to be there right past a bend, waiting for them. He was leaning on a wall, his giant form making even this otherwise casual stance seem aggressive.

This up close, Casus was sure there was something off about his body. He couldn’t quite place it, but an alarm went off in his mind that even an evoy this built shouldn’t look like this. Only war-morphs were ever this bulky, but they were bulky in ways different to Tsetse.

313 - Clash of Wills [Sturmblitz]

Without a moment’s wait, she anchored herself in place and prepared to fire. She instantly felt an immense pressure fall upon her, Third's fiery gaze piercing her. Just as with the Hemomancer, it felt as if her blood was being pulled from her body. Zelsys flooded her blood with metallum, reinforcing her veins to the extreme, raising her blood pressure to explosive levels. Veins, like overpressurized pipes, bulged out under her skin, showing even on her right arm. With a mighty flex of muscle and aura both, Third's grip on her blood was broken. A wave of backlash came rippling through the blood-maelstrom, tearing a short canal in front of Zelsys and kicking up a fountain of blood from the rapidly-growing lake in the square's center. A number of flesh-cables were severed, but the *meat* quickly squirmed back together. Zel wished she had Victor here to subvert the flesh construct, but she also knew he couldn't withstand this environment for long, and Third's retaliation would at best incapacitate him.

Another ring of the bell. More screaming from the sacrifices. The maelstrom grew to envelop her. It felt, at once, like a vortex of boiling blood filled with invisible clawing *things* that desperately wanted to rip the life out of her. She pulled Carnifex out of the ground, and with a single swing, carved a swath into the maelstrom. Choosing the trust her other means of anchoring herself, she dedicated Carnifex to the duty of simultaneously shielding her from the maelstrom and disrupting its flow. At the point where the flow rejoined to her left, it crashed together and caused violent implosions, sending destabilizing ripples all throughout the flow.

Third once more focused his gaze on her. She felt the briefest, faintest urge to just throw down her arms and kneel, but it was snuffed out so swiftly and violently that it only served to galvanize her resolve. A far less subtle intrusion followed. The mental clash which followed lasted barely two seconds in reality.

________________________________________________________________________

Third couldn't believe this. That the enemy elder could withstand his aura pressure was one thing; it only proved that she was, in fact, worthy of being called a sect elder. Everything else, however... It just didn't add up.

To start with, Third couldn't figure out how or why the Severing Fangs could cut through the ritual's aura vortex. A weapon imbued with sacrificial power could achieve a similar effect, but it would demand a specific technique, or a profound strength and purity of aura... But the aura around the blade was no more intense than that which swirled around That Woman. It was a surpassingly intense display of spiritual strength, that was true, but it didn't feel like the right answer. The blade just glided through as if it was going through water, rather than the sum life and suffering of thousands.

And that gun on her arm. Something about it felt foreboding, but he couldn't tell what it was. It felt as if the dragon-head on its muzzle was alive, but surely, that was just the weapon spirit manifesting itself.

He formed a servitor and sent it out on an infinitesimally thin thread of aura in an attempt to mount a subtle mental attack, expecting it to at least momentarily disrupt her, to buy him time. He felt the backlash of his servitor's destruction the instant it made contact.

With engaging the Newman Elder in direct combat being out of the question, Third portioned off a section of himself to maintain the ritual's stability while he mounted a direct assault on her mind and spirit from within. He counted himself lucky that she didn't know not to directly meet his gaze, but couldn't shake the feeling of staring into the shining eyes of a predator waiting to tear his throat out. Truly, whatever unorthodox version of Storm-soul Cultivation she practiced was profoundly in-tune with the bestial side of mankind. Third decided to use this to his advantage, intending to use the Newman Elder's inner beast as a weapon against her. There was a risk to this technique, as to any, but thanks to using it countless times to break down the minds of future living puppets, Third had reached a point where even the maximal backlash wouldn't cause him any permanent damage. In the worst-case scenario, his attacking mental partition would fracture into countless pieces, minimizing the backlash and destroying all but the tiniest, subtlest cognitohazards, which would be easily stamped out when, mere seconds later, his mind reformed without so much as a mental scar to show for it. Thousands of test subjects and dozens of gruelling brain operations, carried out by his own hand, had been the cost for this: The Fluid Mind.

Such a scenario was, of course, absurd; the technique's sole flaw was that its superb characteristics demanded a majority share of his mental faculties.

With but a glance, Third infiltrated the deepest reaches of his foe's mindscape.

LIVING PUPPET SUTRA: EGO KILLER

He found himself within a desolate desert spreading out into infinity in all directions, with jagged mountains on the horizon. A gigantic blade of glass split the thoughtscape, lodged into the skull of some three-headed abomination of equally prodigious size. His own thoughtscape, too, was littered with subdued heart demons... Albeit none of this magnitude.

From far above, seven serpents of lightning descended, six of them already giant, with the seventh - or perhaps the first - dwarfing all the six nonetheless. From beneath the sand, twin monstrosities that blocked out the stars emerged:

To the east, a form of bleached-white bone and writhing flesh in the vaguest form of a bear.

To the west, an equally titanic monster in quasi-human figure, with gangly, clawed limbs and sodden hair hanging down over bloody antlers.

Third had seen this before. The Cultivation Identity Defense; a means by which some cultivators, usually unknowingly, transformed aspects of their cultivation and martial arts into mental constructs in the case of a cognitive attack. He'd seen it... But never like this. Never this refined. The mental focus required for thoughtforms of this magnitude and this number had to be inconceivable. Bit by bit, Third's respect for his sadly doomed opponent grew.

312 - Apotheosis in the Garden of Flesh Pt. 3 [Sturmblitz]

As lightning surged through Zero’s cabling, the tank’s engine howled and its pile bunkers took on a white glow. With an exertion of his will, Strake made yet another lever work itself. Thruster-vents opened up along Zero’s chassis; four on the backs of its legs, and a giant twin-chamber one straight out of the engine. A recent upgrade owing to a collaboration between Willowdale’s Iron Riders branch office and a certain unnamed wizard.

In a great burst of blue-white flame, the multi-ton war machine exploded upward and went flying on a meteoric trajectory towards Cathedral Square. In his wake was left a molten crater full of boiling meat.

This jump wouldn’t get him all the way there, but it would be enough. He prayed that it would be enough. As if in answer, Zero’s thrust abruptly jumped, and Strake realized it would be just enough to land him right at the edge of the giant ritual circle, just outside the square.

From his vantage point well above the city’s buildings, Strake saw not just the rapidly-growing maelstrom of crimson energy, he also saw the epicenter of it: The Cathedral. Fleshy tendrils covered much of its surface like cancerous ivy, spreading out to connect huge mounds of quivering flesh spread out all over the square. He knew they contained people, not because they were even remotely recognizable, but because of the constant, ceaseless screaming. With another ring of the bell, pulses of light ran down the flesh-tendrils' length. Another wave of screams erupted when the pulse reached the flesh-mounds. With it, both blood and that crimson energy burst out, as if being squeezed out of a fruit. Before long, the entire square would be flooded.

The belfry crumbled apart under the maelstrom, shingles and stones torn away until only the bell remained, tethered down by fleshy ropes that attached it to the cathedral, alongside the figure of whom he presumed to be "Lord Third".

With the burning brass brand encased in glyph-glass that was Zero’s single cycloptic eye, he also caught sight of his allies on the ground.

Zefaris and Victor were both to the east, working on a pylon of bone and black ice shod with those ominous purple glyphs. A number of similar pylons stood along the whole ritual circle’s perimeter, and by his estimate, only two were left to go before the circle was complete. Something was strange about that staff of Victor's; the veins along its handle shone bright white, and a burning red sphere was suspended within its ring. A bright white core burned in the sphere’s center, whereas its exterior was enveloped in pitch-black flame. It felt almost like the tainted energy used by the Order, but… Purified, somehow, and infinitely more concentrated.

As for Zelsys, she stood on the ground well inside the ritual circle, just on the outskirts of the Cathedral Square. With her arm cannon aimed at twhat was likely  “Lord Third”, she seemed to be anchoring herself. Not merely taking a wide stance, she stuck her cleaver into the ground and did much the same with her lightning-serpents as if her braids were anchor-cables. Strake could swear he even saw the stone under her feet rising up to wrap around her legs.

The Third Truthseeker, alongside the bell, floated further and further above the belfry, the sacrificial maelstrom simultaneously expanding and flowing back into him. Strake's flight came to an end as he reached the apex of his trajectory and, like the multi-ton mass of metal it was, Zero crashed to the ground.

Then, there was light.

________________________________________________________________________

On the ground, Zefaris and Victor toiled away, not even knowing for certain that their plan would work. The further along the ritual circle's perimeter they progressed, the less and less fragile it seemed, a chimeric monstrosity that concealed its resilience beneath a haphazard surface. It was a patchworked-together tapestry just as Victor had guessed, but that patchwork nature meant that unravelling one section wouldn't affect another section in the same way, or even at all. A swarm of Flesh Unions stalked the streets in their immediate vicinity, ruthlessly warring with the Order's survivors; their strength was replenished and their wounds healed by the ritual just the same, despite their changed allegiances. It seemed counter-intuitive, at first, but unlike the Flesh Beasts, the Unions weren't mere puppets. They were living curses driven by furious, unrestrained will to take revenge for the humans they had once been.

What she had hoped to complete long before the rite could begin was now still two steps from completion while the rite was in progress. The only hope of seeing this plan through was to have Zelsys slow the maelstrom's expansion somehow. It would be ideal if the Third Truthseeker's concentration was also disturbed when the counter-array came into effect, but that was just Zefaris *hoping*.

It didn't help that Victor had grown markedly less helpful since the ritual had begun; rather, he wasn't any less useful, but his staff was reacting in a strange manner, greedily sucking up every bit of sacrificial aura while refusing to function in its intended role as an arcane amplifier. The redhead was working under his own strength alone while trying to wrangle the Itrian artifact back under control, chanting strange mantras under his breath all along.

She felt it. Something unearthly shimmering around that staff, just like before, when he turned the Flesh Beasts against their masters.

________________________________________________________________________

Not more than half a minute earlier, Zelsys sent out a wide-area aetherwave comms burst to warn all of Willowdale's forces to stay away, be they tankmen or lower-ranked cultivators. She rushed past Frierich's petrified corpse and jumped three stories straight up to reach the top of an apartment building, and immediately went flying over the roofs at breakneck speeds, reaching Cathedral Square in no time. The few enemies who managed to even try striking at her were left throwing needles and firing bolts at nothing. The even smaller few who managed to, by some miracle, intercept her in her path, were torn apart by Carnifex with just a twitch of her wrist.

311 - Apotheosis in the Garden of Flesh Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

The boy looked out through the shattered, half-barricaded windows, and saw corpses in robes of various colours - from black, to blue, and a few red. Hatred and anger bubbled up within him, and he knew that he wished to be like these Hellhounds, or perhaps to join the Newman Sect, if it meant he would be able to ensure scum like this would not walk free again.

The child had died, for all intents and purposes. His breath and heartbeat had halted. The churn of chemistry and spirit joining body to soul, sustaining both, had ground to a half. His spiritual core had departed, and his soul had begun fraying apart just the same as Friedrich. And yet, here he was, alive and well, returned from death’s door. His soul, barely scarred, now revolved around a spiritual core an order of magnitude stronger than that of any normal adult. The memories of his childhood up to this point were more vivid and clear in his mind than they ever could have been, but there were others there, too, buried deep by the same hand that had buried Friedrich’s spiritual core into the boy. A new understanding burned within him. He simply knew what the Order of Six Truths stood for, and it only served to fuel his newfound hatred for them.

By the Skinless One’s hand, he had been remade. Was the child the same being that had died? Some would argue he was an entirely new being. Others would say that if the spiritual core could be replaced, then doing so would no more make the child a new entity than replacing a failing heart or lung, yet others still would consider the spirit core a spiritual equivalent of the brain rather than the heart.

No such scholars were present in this place, and neither the boy, nor his parents, nor even the Skinless One particularly cared what the truth was… Even if the Dead God knew. It knew well that neither the spirit core, nor the soul itself, nor the brain nor heart actually made up all of a person. Any change would alter the identity. The child was now cosmologically a reincarnation of Friedrich, but he was not Friedrich any more than the Walking Tribulation was the Charred Judge.

Such was the unfortunate truth of things: Many conflicting answers to the matter of an individual existence were correct, but each only partly. That was why this particular shard of the Skinless One didn’t particularly care. Nuance was boring, it was lunar. Nuance didn’t drive great men to do great things, it didn’t drive throngs of faithful to carry out great acts of willing sacrifice.

With the sacrificial shockwave’s approach, even this place of brief respite was not spared. The tankmen sprung into motion, both those in human shape and the giants outside, stomping and mutilating the corpses of the Order’s members. The reason for such actions clarified itself in the chatter: All of the Order’s dogs besides those utterly, irrecoverably dead were rising back up.

________________________________________________________________________

Strake felt the shockwave as much as anyone else. Zero shuddered around him, and he felt the machine’s bloodthirst rage. He knew well that whatever had caused it would be a big fucking problem very soon, but there was no stopping it; despite the fact it was tantamount to being completely doused in blood in terms of stimulating Zero’s self-repair, the machine was absolutely furious. Or rather, the machine felt all the pain, sorrow, and resentment in the shockwave, and in turn Strake did too, arousing an abiding fury within him. This, in turn, aroused the same emotions within Zero’s spirit.

For all his mental training, going so far as to look into those ridiculous wishy-washy cultivator books, he still found it all too easy to mix up his own thoughts and those coming from Zero. This wasn’t helped by the fact Strake’s and Zero’s thoughts often coincided, even more so since the dragon nerve upgrade.

Driving hard down Eberheim’s streets, he found himself tearing through gruesome abominations of twisted flesh. From masses of Black Robes merged together with Flesh Beasts, to individuals with huge chunks of their bodies replaced by meat, it grew increasingly obvious that the wave had brought back a number of the enemy’s forces. Many were still laying dead without their head or with holes blown in their chests, and some were strewn about in pieces, so Strake wagered there was some limit as to what the effect could achieve.

As he neared the inner city, he felt an unignorable sense of foreboding. Like another wave was coming, but it never did. Instead, above the Cathedral Square, he saw it. A gathering of crimson clouds far too low above the ground with wisps of blood-red swirling about, gathering and multiplying. Before long, a bloody vortex enveloped the whole square. Ghostly screams carried through the air.

Despite his best judgment, he pushed onward alone, knowing full well that dragging even those in Third-model tank suits would just be condemning them to death. He wouldn’t be much use as a commander once the fighting got tough anyway.

Finding himself faced by an enemy force that would definitely bog him down and probably cause some damage to Zero, he made the judgment call. Fourth gear. Fifth gear. Heat rising. He downed another dose of Witch’s Brew, feeling it absorb into his stomach the instant it got there. In the midst of smashing, stomping, and punching through a barely-coherent aura construct the size of a house, Strake reached for an overhead lever that was bound in place by a layer of talisman papers.

Before the upgrade, this system’s limitation was mere seconds before most of the metallic surfaces inside the cockpit got hot enough to burn him, in an instant and the air became near-unbreathable. As he was now, he was sure he could use it for at least a minute… But who knew how quickly it would deplete Zero’s fuel.

No. His hand snapped from the lever to a small glass capsule to his right, lightning writhing inside around a tangle of crystal tubes. He shoved it into a slot to the side and pushed the adjacent slider forward; it was an upgraded, custom Thundercharger module that properly interfaced with the rest of Zero’s systems rather than something ripped off of a Blitzgandr.

145 - Black Magnum [Cherno]

Casus hadn’t visited this area of Audunpoint before. Besides the fact it was obviously infested by a far-above-average ratio of gangsters, he also couldn’t help but notice that building. The one with blocked-out windows and evoy lingering about the entrance. It screamed trouble.

He knew he was all but begging for trouble by coming here. That was, after all, why he had gone so far as to don a disguise that concealed his nature as a Banisher.  However, a man in subtle full-body armor and a long coat drew attention all the same. At least he’d had the good judgment to avoid using anything identifiable as Church equipment. That was a mistake he had only made once, and it had nearly cost him his life. As he was, he looked like someone who absolutely didn’t want to be seen in this part of town, but also wanted the ability to protect himself, which meant he had a bare minimum level of plausible deniability; the local gangsters couldn’t reasonably walk up and start trouble right from the start. That was his current belt: The Black Magnum Coupler. A unique urban stealth model designed to make the wearer forgettable, emitting a weak sensory deterrence enchantment. Adding onto its stealth design, it emitted a minimal magical aura mimicking a normal person, and no two Black Magnum suits looked the same. Its combat capabilities were slightly superior to a Dregsteamer Coupler with the High Velocity cartridge, but its cost was over twenty times of that unit. It also had the unique feature of a self-contained, ultra-low-interference design, meaning he was able to wear the Silberblut Coupler under the Black Magnum suit without issues. Rather than a belt, the coupler was a lower face mask that expanded out to form the helmet and then the rest of the suit, and it was a monolithic black box unit, without a typical catalyst or voidkey-adjacent power source. It was not a well-known or widely-produced model, certainly not enough to be known to some random gangsters; it was just one out of Casus’ collection of couplers, which he had began during the time he was not yet able to handle Silberblut. It also hadn’t been produced in over a century since the introduction of the Black Magnum G, the improved model, but Casus personally far preferred the original’s aesthetics.

At the moment, his greatest concern was that evoy building, particularly one of the evoy out front, a huge, spiky specimen with thick chitin. Casus nearly double-took when he saw him, briefly thinking it was a war-morph. Simultaneously to his relief and concern, the giant evoy lacked most of the signs of a war-morph. It was just a freakishly large and powerful individual… But considering his demeanor when interacting with his two lackeys, he would likely pick a fight for any reason, or even no reason at all, if Casus grabbed his attention. He felt the giant evoy’s gaze pass over him, lingering for a moment, only to leave a moment later.  One of the Black Magnum’s chief advantages was the sensory suite, featuring strong visual amplification, B- piercing appraisal capabilities, and even an audio telescope.

As he made his way to the building that had been stated as the meeting place, Casus kept an eye on the giant evoy to ensure he didn’t stand up or do anything else to suggest he intended to attack him. It even had built-in triggers to reduce sound and darken the field of vision to counter bright flashes and deafening noises. Moreover, it had its own small voicebox, which he would use to speak instead of his own voice so that he would not be recognized by that means.

On the approach, he immediately saw something that grabbed his attention: A row of wanted posters with surprisingly accurate portraits of Lady Blackhand, at least in terms of appearance. He was sure the depiction of her was exaggerated, just like it was on the previous, even less accurate posters. She was depicted with a malicious grin on her face, her left arm  glowing orange with fanged maws opened along its surface, running its fingers through her hair. Her gun was raised to the side of her face, drawn to the exact specifications of a true Pattner rather than the reproduction it likely was. Rather than bearing the designs or watermarks of any agency, they bore a serpentine design, openly claiming:

WANTED: Dead or Alive

“BLACKHAND”

500,000 DD

There was no delivery address, but then, they probably assumed anyone who did the job would already know where to take her, or would be able to find out. Right below the row of posters for Lady Blackhand, similar ones for himself were found:

WANTED: Dead or Alive

Casus Aristedes

“Mamon Knight Silberblut”

500,000 DD

He didn’t give much thought to the bounty payment; it was clearly just an amount that Hashem thought would suffice to get the target killed through sheer volume of attempts - whichever of the father-son duo was responsible for these posters. No doubt they would figure out some way to shave the cost down if someone actually delivered. When he entered the building, Casus immediately knew it was a gambling house. Many pairs of eyes lingered on him as he slowly walked across the floor, meeting the barman: “I am here in regards to the owner’s inquiry into a refurbished Samstani slot machine for sale.”

A thumb pointed to a recessed door in the back of the room. Hammerforged black iron. Tougher than anything in this building. These doors were one of the Heavy Ironworks’ best products, as they came with a door frame and were thus highly breach-resistant relative to their price. Such was the Ironworks’ business model: Advanced manufacturing applied to achieve above-average quality/price ratio. He didn’t think he could break the door down in a reasonable time unless he transformed into Silberblut.

The peephole slid shut, and the door opened for him. The guard, an Inax woman in a pinstripe suit, slipped out and shut the door behind him when he entered. External sounds fell silent, and Casus made his way through the short hallway to a well-lit, but windowless room. There was a  table with quite a few chairs.

144 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tracking Down the Suspect's Residence [Cherno]

For the next few days, Krahe dedicated a portion of her time to stalking Sorayah. Barzai made it a trivial matter, as she could be quite far removed from her target for limited periods of time… And Sorayah became somewhat careless when Krahe stopped coming to the Society after the attack.

It didn’t take long to track down where she lived, and somewhat to Krahe’s disappointment in her quarry, there seemed to be no third or fourth locations. On the third day, at a time when she knew Sorayah was out, she tried skimming into the basement through the locked outside door, but found herself ejected.

Frustrated at her own carelessness, Krahe let out a heavy sigh.

“She probably conducts human charcoal experiments in there, of course it’s warded. Just hope my skimming attempt didn’t leave a mark.”

Rather than try again, she hit the door with a simple appraisal attempt. The Prospector’s Eyes detected magic from the door, but, being what they were, they didn’t give her much info beyond that. Upon examination, there were the remnants of an inbuilt lock and turning handle core, but it was now held shut by an external padlock with a familiar stamp; the same stamp as a Dregsteamer belt. She squatted down, looking into the keyhole, and though it was sealed on the other side, she still managed to shove her pinkie into it. A grin took hold on her face when she felt it; Isotope. The tiniest bit, like a draft going into a door hidden behind a bookcase, but undeniably there.

Before she left, Krahe took another moment to get a close look at the lock. Thick, heavy, sturdy, but seemingly mundane, with a wide keyway. The Prospector's Eyes detected no magic coming off of it. There was a good chance something on the other side would prevent her from opening the door, but there was no harm in picking the lock and trying to get in this way either.

This plan to pick the lock went out the window when she returned to the safehouse and, finding that Casus was sleeping there, brought it up with him once he woke up. A curious, respirator-like mask sat on the coffee table alongside an empty coffee cup and some pill bottles. Krahe only recognized the Purge Pills. The banisher’s pallid countenance betrayed the fact he had made heavy use of the Silberblut Coupler recently.

"Sounds like a Kristoffen lock. Their locks are notorious for being some of the best you can find for a reasonable price. If you need to get into a building with one, perhaps consider skimming inside instead. Assuming it's not warded against such intrusion, of course."

"That's my problem, it is warded. I don't know to what degree, but I couldn't just skim inside. Not through that door, at least."

"Hrm... Why exactly do you require entry into this building? Assuming, that is, you are willing to share that information."

Given the fact this was a secondary investigation, and the fact the church would inevitably be involved when she resolved it, she saw no reason to keep it from Casus: "I'm fairly sure someone at the Lost Sun Society is practicing the arts detailed in the Human Charcoal Letters; manipulating people into undergoing Adustocorpus, then using their bodies as fuel for artifacts that allow them to use anathema without risk to themselves. Not certain of the motive. Could be power, eliminating competition, simple curiosity."

"...The Human Charcoal Letters?" the Banisher asked with a serious tone. "I see, they are why you required elevated access. Is this matter related to Hashem and his Benefactors?"

"No. I just happened to come across a lead while I was trying to get in contact with Yao," Krahe said, summoning a cigarette and flicking it into the corner of her mouth. She lit it with just a touch of her thumb.

"I could-" Casus started.

"Don't even think about it," Krahe interrupted. Exhaling a long puff of smoke, she gave him a chiding look over the top of her glasses: "Yesterday was the third day in a row I found you slumped down by the door with your coupler still on. I ought to report you to Firminus for doing the same shit he told you to stop, bet you haven't even been properly oiling your arm. Besides, you would be overkill. I need to break into an apartment building, not demolish it."

Casus shrank back somewhat, furrowing his eyebrows in a look of befuddled surprise.

With an amused grin, Krahe took another puff of her cigarette and asked: "What? Did you think I wouldn't take graft maintenance seriously? Forget that I used to be more graft than original flesh? I bet you haven't even realized why your arm is getting slower. The A-Three Tricep Bundle is fucked."

At that, Casus raised his arm, twisting it well beyond a normal range of motion.

"How did you..."

"Come on, I'm not an all-knowing genius. Firminus guessed that would be the issue when I last visited him," Krahe said. "When I went for my final post-graft checkup, he wouldn't stop bitching about how you ran out on him before he could even start with the maintenance."

"I could not help it, an urgent alert came in from the Central Temple. I will take care to visit him tomorrow."

"An urgent alert, huh? What was it?"

Casus smiled, leaning forward: "I know where Semzar Hashem will be not too long from now. The alert was a trustworthy source from his inner circle asking for a secure evacuation into Seven Spokes custody, and thanks to requesting priority on any matters pertaining to the Hashem heir, I was alerted first. The man wanted protection until Hashem was dealt with, erasure of his bounty record, permission to legally operate his gambling business, and to have his grafts looked at by a sanctioned grafter. This, in exchange for giving his testimony and leading us to Semzar. He even offered to have us bring in an Inquisitor to prove he was telling the truth.”

“How does our man know where to find the brat?”

“I will get to that part soon…” he said, standing up and stretching to the sound of popping joints. “…Once my throat is not dry as a desert.”

A few minutes later, two cups of coffee steaming on the table, Casus began recounting the incident.

IRL Bullshit Arc: 2.5 Day Internet Outage

Fuckery continues

There was scheduled powerline maintenance on Wed that was supposed to go for a few hours, but they fucked up the internet line and further repairs had to be conducted yesterday and today. Since I couldn't expect it I had no way to get mobile data ahead of time to compensate. Internet JUST NOW came back on.

By God, normal posting continues TODAY or I will have an aneurysm

310 - Apotheosis in the Garden of Flesh [Sturmblitz]

The tormented cries of thousands, a unified scream, blasted out from the city center, and Zelsys didn’t just hear them, she felt them. Both Carnifex and her own right arm resonated at the sound, in the same exact tones given off by the Skinless One’s Token when she had used it as a hammer.

A wave of crimson light washed over the whole city. Each and every survivor counted among the enemy’s number suddenly sprung up with renewed vigor, their auras blazing thrice as brightly as they had at their previous peaks. Even those among them who had been mutilated beyond recognition, yet within whom some spark of life still dwelt, were dragged back from the brink, twisted into new forms by the careless hand of this unholy energy.

As for Zelsys and all those affiliated with the Newman Sect, its passing was like a wave of boiling blood that left neither burns nor filth in its wake, but still created an all-encompassing sense of impurity. Zelsys, Zefaris, and Victor all felt an uncanny familiarity in it: It reminded all three of them of the rubedo lake they had encountered on their journey to the north. Comparing this revolting outburst to that place, however ,was like comparing a tsunami to a small stagnant pool.

Friedrich was dead.

He had stopped moving just before the outburst, and now that the wave had passed, he was stone-still, his body frozen in the resolute stance immediately preceding the Dambreaker Cannon technique. His skin was like baked red clay, and he stood, inexorably baked to the bridge.

________________________________________________________________________

A short time earlier, atop the Eberheim Cathedral…

The Third Truthseeker, fully aware of Friedrich’s sacrifice, rushed through the final preparations, driven half by urgency and half by grief for the loss of one of the few individuals he considered trustworthy. Entirely absorbed by the complex mental rituals necessary, he was shut off from the outside world, a half-step from total blindness as far as anything outside the belfry was concerned; such was the singular focus the preparations demanded. It was an inherent vulnerability that came with this rite… But there were still things he could sense, so bright and distinct they pierced into his awareness.

One among these was the flaring beacon of Friedrich’s Blood Implosion Holocaust technique. Third had been, after all, the one to adapt it so that it would work for Friedrich, he had been the one to work out the eldritch formulae behind it, he had created the mutagens that altered Friedrich’s blood and cardiovascular system to form his entire body into a living sacrificial circle… But he also knew of a possible method by which his life could be saved. His body would die, that much was certain, and his spirit core would pass onto  but a part of Friedrich would live on as part of Third’s cultivation.

He would come out with a smaller gain, but as far as he was concerned, a loss of efficiency in the ritual was a worthwhile sacrifice.

The Third Truthseeker rang the bell, chanting a call to the Skinless One, offering up the unworthy lives of the mortals within the sacrificial circle. In truth, however, it was a double-sided incantation. Using ancient Ankhezian, the incantation gave lip service to the god while using euphemism and double-speak to effectively tell the Dead God to do what was needed, but not an iota more, to not interfere in the rite. It was the Order’s own meticulous work that powered the ritual, a fractured and restored version of the Creation of a Great Man ritual circle. Third considered it a blessing that they had not discovered a complete version, as the Order’s version, the Order’s rite, had a distinct advantage: The beneficiary would remain fully himself, and the subjects did not need to be even slightly willing. The Creation of a Great Man ritual, by contrast, remade the beneficiary into a new being, and the sacrifices had to be willing to offer up their lives. Sure, the efficiency was a fraction of the original with fewer than several hundred sacrifices, but mortal lives were not hard to come by.

With a final strike upon the bell, Third felt the shockwave travel down the many fleshy tendrils connected to it. He smiled as he heard the screams. Without hesitation, he plunged the sacrificial blade into his own heart and began a complex dance, twisting his body in impossible ways, joints popping and bending in ways impossible for any mortal. As he danced, so too did he sing, mimicking the Skinless One’s throaty, warbling tone.

It was this method which would let him take control of the rising spiritual tsunami via the glyph in whose middle he stood.

SIGN OF MASS SACRIFICE

WHEN MADE PART OF AN IMMORTAL BEING

THE LIVES OF MAYFLIES ARE GIVEN WORTH

APOTHEOSIS IN THE GARDEN OF FLESH

________________________________________________________________________

Meanwhile, at the city outskirts, several hundred survivors had been gathered in safe buildings, guarded by a number of tankmen while most of Willowdale’s mechanized soldiers continued to push deeper into the city. Their core objective was, after all, not to reach and take the cathedral, but to rescue civilians and exterminate any members of the Order who had slipped past notice.

Clad in ominous black armour, the armored men wore the faces of wolves rendered in iron. Shimmering, white Fog poured from their snouts, lending further life to the beastly image. In their hands were giant guns, with twin barrels side-by-side and twin enclosed tubes out to the sides.

Hellhounds, they called themselves, claiming to be the warriors of Willowdale and the Free Cities Alliance, here to rescue them while the mighty cultivators of the Newman Sect slew the monsters who had taken over the city.

A young boy, having passed over the precipice of death, suddenly awakened in his mother’s arms, much to her relief and belation. He looked upon the beastly countenances of the Hellhounds’ helmets, and saw the human faces of the few who had doffed the gas masks, and knew them to be saviors. Within the helmet’s muzzle, a canister was seated.

309 - Chrome Skull Viper [Sturmblitz]

A/N: Expanded the first third of the chapter, specifically the third paragraph.
__________________________________________________________________

The aura-beast came in and out of existence the way a territorial viper came in and out of hiding. It snapped at one of the Knifedancer’s blades, only to vanish and instantaneously appear at the other side of Zelsys to do the same against blades from that same pincer attack. Even less than a Thundergod, it was not truly a being in any sense of the word, but a pure manifestation of the the Truth of Fangs, writ large in Fulgur and Metallum. The first issue Zelsys could discern was the fact it ate up much of the spare Fulgur output she had been using to pepper her enemies with lightning-beads, but she felt it a small price to pay. No, it was the fairly substantial draw on her aura that was the real problem… One to be solved later. It was just another tool to use as needed in most circumstances, and to employ liberally when the situation called for the full, widely varied repertoire of violence at her disposition.

She took advantage of the storm-snake’s behavior right away. Feinting a mighty strike against Friedrich, she managed to get ahold of the Hemomancer and dragged him in.

The serpent entwined its victim and tore out his throat, returning with the prize of a hunk of flesh, still suffused by aura. In a single bite, the lightning-beast made both vanish, and in turn, Zel’s aura grew by a small increment. The Viper then bit off its victim's head, leaving behind only the Hemomancer's charred robes. Zelsys felt an influx of replenishment as his aura was subsumed into her own, flares of crimson light rushing through the Viper as it broke down and transmuted the Hemomancer's aura into her own. She immediately felt excited for the prospect of what this aspect of the aura-beast could achieve; even without other expenditure-reducing factors, she could devour the aura of her opponents to bolster her own. At first she had thought it to be no more than a manifestation of the “Territorial Aggression” aspect of the Truth of Fangs, but she saw that it also included the aspect of “Consumption”.

Given the beast’s serpentine form and metallic skull, there was only one appropriate name for it.

WITHOUT THOUGHT OR MERCY

STRIKING WITH THE SPEED OF FURY

SAVAGE SERPENT, LASHING TYRANT

CHROME SKULL VIPER

It was not merely the lightning which had been changed. Being her own it reacted the most readily and so gave the most impressive result, but the Chrome Skull Viper was not the sole deterrent in this newborn defensive perimeter.

Wherever the Viper wasn’t, savage maws of myriad variations struck out from empty air, the stone underfoot and the metal of the lamps. The world itself acknowledged her territorial claim and moved to enforce it.

ABSOLUTE VIOLENCE SIGN

DEVOURING ANY AND ALL INVADERS

FORMLESS DESTROYER SCRIPTURE: VOLUME ONE

GEHEIMNIS: TERRITORIAL EXCLUSION ZONE

Friedrich rushed right back in without hesitation. Why he chose this tactic in the stead of his shockwave attack, Zelsys couldn’t tell. His aura had been gradually waning the whole time since he stabbed himself, so she guessed it might be a matter of wanting to make what he has left last as long as possible.

Zelsys, with the intention to get him away from herself, struck out at him with a low, forward-step left punch, due to her right hand being presently occupied with countering the Knifedancer’s incessant, admittedly impressive assaults. It could be accurately said that the sky above Zelsys and Friedrich was swarming with blades, Carnifex lashing back and forth like a great serpent, stirred into these giant motions by a combination of Zel’s arm movements and pure intent. By comparison, the Knifedancer’s wild gesturing appeared downright wasteful, but where his motions were light and near-effortless, bursts of light erupted from Zel’s back and shoulder muscles with every swing, and her arm’s metallized surface creaked under the strain.

In the brief moment this bought her, she worked Thundercannon’s bolt with one of her braids. Dense white fog erupted forth from its vent, the shell tumbling out, only to bounce off the ground and fly to her back, where it vanished. Another shell took its place, marked with warning seals. It was noticeably heavier than all her other shells - nearly twice as heavy, in fact. With the force of destiny, Zelsys slammed Thundercannon’s breech forward and locked it into battery. At the moment it was sealed, so was Friedrich’s fate.

Before she could brace herself, let alone fire, something happened. A familiar reverberation flowed out from the great cathedral’s belfry. It was the bell being struck, of course, but there was something else in its sound. An unearthly, divine frequency. She clearly wasn’t the only one to feel it, because both Freidrich and the Knifedancer turned to look at it, as if unable to stop themselves, a purely reflexive reaction. Neither of them actually stopped fighting her, but there was nonetheless a disturbance in their focus, and Zelsys exploited it by shredding the Knifedancer apart with one of the Fang Rippers she had been using to counter his flying knives. It merely happened to be the closest to him, and so she had it suicide-charge into him, exploding into shrapnel just as it went through him. There wasn’t a corpse so much as there was a light shower of faintly iridescent gore and bone fragments.

The swarm of flying knives continued blindly attacking despite their master’s death… But with him gone, defending against them became an order of magnitude easier, and Zelsys guessed they wouldn’t continue on like this for long. She was right, though not in the way she thought.

Friedrich, a hole through his stomach, retreated closer to the Cathedral Square, and Zelsys followed. She pushed forward until he moved to stop her, noticing him reaching for the knife in his heart, twisting it in deeper. Then, as he performed the preparatory motions of his Dambreaker Cannon, his aura flared up once again. He’d done this before. The time between how often he could perform this technique had been widening after each use. Despite this, and despite the fact he had been continuously growing weaker in all areas, Friedrich was still a real opponent. At this point she was certain she could win, but who knew how much time she still had to finish out the fight? She couldn't afford to waste another minute.

At that moment she flared her aura, smashing Carnifex into the ground. As she raised her arm to aim Thundercannon at Friedrich, all six of her braids came awake, whipping forward - not to bind Friedrich, but to embed themselves into the ground as anchors.

Before she could fire, however, another ring echoed out from the cathedral belfry. The frequency was even stronger, and Friedrich froze in place.

A third ring of the bell came right after.

308 - Blood Implosion Holocaust Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

Zelsys could scarcely believe the deluge of power suddenly pouring out of her opponent… But she felt the Skinless One’s presence, and thus knew this to be a high-level sacrificial technique.

So it was that they clashed, and in their conflict shook the earth below and set the air ablaze. For the first time in this city, she met one who could meet the full brunt of her violence head-on.

Thunderclaps and explosions rang out, a maelstrom of lightning and flame. Friedrich set forth one explosive shockwave after the next, noticably weaker than the first, but so close together that it didn’t matter.

And with each clash, Zelsys unraveled him.

To say he was now a mindless berserk beast was inaccurate, but a certain nuance had been lost, replaced with an unwavering resolve. He was trying to kill her, but it right away became evident that was a secondary objective to preventing her from reaching the Cathedral Square.

More importantly, he had stopped learning. Before, it had been a fight as much as it had been a contest of who could be faster to analyze the other’s tactics and devise countermeasures. Friedrich had completely lost that. It was… Somewhat familiar to Von Wickten’s Entomodragon transformation, albeit far less revolting. Others soon joined in, swarming in as if called to this place all at once, several Blue and Red Robes, setting upon her with a sense of urgency that betrayed their panic. It was this same urgency that allowed her to slaughter them to a man within moments, slaying no less than four Blue Robes with a single lash of Carnifex. Smashing into a narrow apartment, the return-pull sent her fangs tearing through it, two more Blue Robes falling with its collapse. Fang Rippers cut them down before they could regain their bearings, and she turned one Red Robe into a fine mist with a shotshell. Despite not invoking Thundercannon, its effect was comparable to the very first time she had ever invoked that technique. With the same ease as throwing a punch, she called forth all six Thundergods and tore to shreds a pair of Red Robes that had gone around to flank her. Neither did they have time to attack nor to scream; the savage storm-gods struck with all the savagery of true lightning, and tore through their victims just as savagely - entering and exiting their bodies only once each. A liquid, boiling slurry of viscera burst out of the Red Robes’ wounds when Zel called them back, their smoking, convulsing forms toppling over.

Only two of Friedrich’s reinforcements stood out. Another Hemomancer, even stronger than the first, as well as an individual whom she could not identify, because they were completely surrounded by a swarm of knives. She mentally labeled him as the Knifedancer.

Friedrich completely ignored them, maintaining a single-minded focus on Zelsys. In turn, she had to focus on him whilst also defending from the pair. The Hemomancer’s attempts at directly affecting her, fortunately, lashed back before they could even take hold, but the Knifedancer’s blades did, in fact, dance, outmaneuvering her Fang Rippers. A small fraction of them - perhaps one-tenth, no more than three or four - would occasionally blaze with brilliant, azure flame, accelerating to a degree hard to keep track of even for her. If she could focus just on the Knifedancer, Zel was sure she would have no issue keeping up, but as she was, she was splitting herself two ways… And the Hemomancer continued to pile stones onto her back by shifting to a defensive role, somehow manipulating Friedrich’s blood-aura into shields.

For a short time, they got her on the defensive. Zelsys found it necessary to re-evaluate how she defended herself, growing increasingly aware of the fact she wasn’t properly incorporating all her new tools. Instead, she was merely using what she was already familiar with, merely adding Predator Aura on top. Her sense of urgency rose with each passing moment, keenly aware that she didn’t have time for a prolonged engagement, and with it, so did her anger. It bubbled and seethed, like water in a great steam engine’s boiler, empowering her with its explosive drive. Nonetheless, she retained her full faculties.

Absolute anger, yet absolute calm.

Absolute violence, directed with a scalpel’s precision.

Absolute control over her own movements and minimal dodges, motion enough only to make a strike miss, or to otherwise disarm the attack through deflection.

These were the foundations of her defense.

Skin as hard as metal, yet one which causes strikes to slip off or bounce away.

An aura of lightning that strikes at the enemy.

Fulgurmagnetism to twist foes’ blades aside.

Thundergods to act as extra limbs, whose loss would not harm her.

These were the floors, but when she had only possessed Rebound Pulse, that had been her ultimate defense, and had she not acquired all these other tools, she would have instead developed Rebound Pulse and her own physical defensive skills more than they were right now.

This was how she had explained it to the Newman Sect’s disciples, for their own sakes, so that they would understand how a layered defense compared to a monolithic one built on the total mastery of a few defensive tools.

It was just an analogy, of course.

Zelsys found the analogy of an ever-changing chimera to be more appropriate to her own martial arts, and it was high time for another metamorphosis into something yet greater and more terrible. There was a shift in the air. Her aura took hold of her immediate surroundings, reaching out, staking claim, insisting upon its supremacy. Its expansion ceased, for now, at the border of her fulguric sensory field.

Lightning struck out at anything entering it, yet did not merely impact as it had before, instead turning to a beast of serpentine form, a form of shimmering aura and lightning, made a touch more real by a gleaming skull of silvery metal. It was something akin to her Thundergods, yet quantifiably different, fleeting and without a consistent form, forced into shape by aura alone.

143 - BLACK HAND OF DESOLATION: DAEMON CORE [Cherno]

Krahe pushed and pushed, closing up the shell, until, at last, it wouldn’t enclose any further. She briefly thought Barzai was refusing again for some petulant reason, but the next moment, alien words pushed into her mind’s eye. Indistinct and formless, exuding not a linguistic meaning, but an altogether more primordial sort of truth. In that instant, she knew that they were the incantation necessary to make the Daemon Core function, just as the talisman was necessary for Wandrei Faust. Despite Barzai serving as the power source, it had to be her who triggered the theurgy.

But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t speak them. They just hung in her mind, three burning keys awaiting a hand to grasp them. The saurian duo’s dragon head reared back, its form becoming more concrete, and Krahe knew she had only moments before it would drown her in burning acid. She wagered, at best, a fifty-fifty chance that she would manage to get out of the zone of death, given her rapidly-rising entropy level and the initial burst of Hard Entropy she suffered whenever diving. Such was the cost of this theurgy; a high price in entropy to give the shell the necessary properties.

The only option she could think of, besides pushing harder, was to attempt, somehow, someway, using the Wound-like Grin. After all, it manifested itself readily upon her left arm when she wished to access her Kenoma Pocket or to conjure a Tar tendril. She mentally envisioned a black tendril wrapping around the first word, channeling it into her arm.

A fanged maw yawned open, and Krahe spoke from it. Despite speaking it, she couldn’t hear it. As far as she could tell, no sound came out at all. Beak and Raptor stumbled, clutching their heads. Nonetheless, they persevered in their effort.

The second word came out all the same as the first, opening a second mouth on her forearm. At this point, it felt as if time came to a standstill. Nonetheless, with the mouth in the palm of her hand, she spoke the third, and time resumed.

THREE KEYS TO SWING WIDE THE GATES OF BLACKEST BLACKNESS

THREE WORDS SO MIGHTY NO MORTAL MIND CAN HOLD THEM

THREE BREATHLESS MOUTHS WITH WHICH TO SPEAK THEM

In the palm of her hand, a gordian knot of blackest pitch now hovered. An ominous, rising hum emitted from it, and every once in a while, arcs of black lightning jumped off of it, almost as if the flares of a black sun.

With only a thought and a gesture, she impelled it forward. This, too, was an advantage of using a True Eidolon; it solved the delivery issue.

Panicking now, Beak and Raptor exchanged glances and began feverishly gesturing, taking more direct control of their dragon head construct to try and shoot down the projectile. The Daemon Core simply dodged passed the ghost dragon’s snapping jaws, coming to a halt in mid-air right above the two saurians.

Krahe engaged a dive and pulled the mental trigger. The Daemon Core’s exterior shifted.

The last thing Beak or Raptor ever saw was that ominous spheroid and a green-eyed demon of billowing smoke.

With a flash of impossibly-vivid scarlet and thunderous burst of buzzing noise, they were erased. Neither flesh, nor bones, not any of their possessions remained; only shadows scorched into the red-hot stones. Only a seething ember was left behind, and it, too, popped out of existence a moment later.

AN EYE OF CRIMSON IMPRISONED IN BLACKNESS

ITS GAZE ERUPTS FORTH TO SCOUR AWAY THE UNWORTHY

BLACK HAND OF DESOLATION: DAEMON CORE

She felt sick.

Not due to her surroundings or what she’d just done, but some strange, non-physical exhaustion. It felt, for lack of a better description, as if the muscle involved in theurgy had been strained to the point of exhaustion. Just thinking about using Wandrei Faust again made feelings of exhaustion and sickliness bubble up… And the Words were gone. She decided to try asking Barzai later. For now, she pulled the souldregs out of Blondie’s corpse, taking her dregsteamer belt and moving on to try and find what was left of Weasel. She managed to find his mangled head, which was good enough for the souldreg extractor. His dregsteamer had also outlived him, it would just need a replacement belt.

Knowing that she wouldn’t have a great deal of time before someone came to investigate the commotion, Krahe dragged Blondie to the wall and rifled through her pockets, managing to find a wallet with some ring-cash, a DD gem, and a contractor ID card.

An hour, a shower, and a cursory investigation at a church branch later, Krahe had learned that Weasel had a bounty on his head for several crimes, though it was slashed for bringing in only his souldregs. Blondie turned out to have been a completely unassuming independent contractor with no particular negative or positive marks on her record.

When she had the time to herself, she queried Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom regarding those Words. No knowledge came. So, back to theurgic texts she turned, and found nothing. Not a word in any of the books she owned. Barzai, however, gave the answer she sought, once he woke up. He simply pulled up her memory of the first time she drew the Wandrei Faust medallion, specifically the final strokes, and sent her the sentiment that speaking those Words was somewhat equivalent to that. He also, as if to placate her, made her aware that she would not need to repeat the feat each time she wished to invoke the Daemon Core.

Meanwhile, Zachariah was in a huff, as were several of his acquaintances, as they had all felt it: The creation of a new High Theurgy. It wasn’t necessarily a once-in-a-lifetime event, but the fact it was so detectable meant that the feat had been performed by someone who either didn’t know or didn’t care enough to take concealing precautions.

142 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Hand is Shown Pt. 2 [Cherno]

That smoke had to be some anathemist trick, but what fool would resort to the risks of anathemism to enhance a mere obscuring thaumaturgy? Then again, it clearly worked wonders. And those summoned walls were far too durable to be simple constructs. That had to be an artifact of some kind. That was what Beak told himself, hoping and praying they weren’t up against some insanely strong mid-ranker with a bottomless entropy tolerance. His cousin certainly hadn’t made it sound like that when she called in a favour to have her dealt with.

Both of them being practitioners of the same thaumaturgic style, Beak and Raptor joined forces in trying to salvage their original plan of attack: The Basilisk Dive, a combination thaumaturgy drawing on both of their thinned-out drasaurian genes. While Beak showed some of the signs, Raptor’s only proof of his drasaurian lineage was his shitty blowtorch breath and his ability to invoke draconic powers via thaumaturgy.

Out from the smoke, a monstrous, flying forearm came, dragging Weasel and Blondie over the stone, with Weasel screaming while Blondie grunted and struggled to free herself. She slipped out thanks to the fact she had merely been caught in its trajectors and wasn’t actually in the construct’s grasp, but Weasel wasn’t so fortunate; the black arm made an unsteady 180° turn, smashing him into the left-hand wall and dragging him back into the smoke. A bright yellow flash followed, and a horrific sound that neither of the saurians could describe. They had never heard a man in mamon armor explode from the pressure of his own boiling blood. Blondie had circled around from the right by this point, and the smoke had dissipated enough to see at least silhouettes. What Beak and Raptor beheld were alien shapes erupting from the anathemist’s body, striking at Blondie without regard for the Omniphage armor’s caustic properties. Their sightline was broken by a pair of ominous, blackened jade obelisks, and further disrupted by the fact Weasel had been turned into a  shadow on the wall and a puddle spreading over the cobbles below.

________________________________________________________________________

Krahe knew better than to fight a mostly-fresh Mamon Knight in a melee while her entropy was pushing eighty percent, doubly so when her two other foes were using this time to build a ghostly dragon head.

So, she dived, sprinting to the back wall with the intent to skim through it. As she ran, mere steps away, she felt a wave of searing heat was over her, and blinding light filled her vision. She passed unto the other side, emerging and instantly beginning a purge, but as she spun around as to not have her back turned towards the trio, she saw that the thin wall was melting. Unsure of whether those lizards could pull this trick again, she raised her third jade wall today just in case.

By the sound of their shouting, the three weren’t dumb enough to assume she was gone altogether. That was fine. She just needed time to purge. Enveloped in an aura of grey-black smoke, she watched and prepared, cycling her gun to eject the current thaumshot-core cartridge and chamber the next Wandrei Faust. A plan took form in her head.

A second attack came just moments before her purge finished, and this time she saw some of it take place. The ghostly dragon head flew upward and came diving down, spewing some kind of boiling, burning liquid. It was most easily described as acid napalm. The original wall was broken down by now, and the burning acid was eating away at her jade slab. She was pretty sure Goldie was helping it along with the Omniphage armor’s abilities, but she hadn’t heard a Coupler Charge callout, so her caustic output had to be limited.

Meanwhile, Krahe formed a Wandrei Faust, forming a tar-tendril from her upper arm and wrapping it around the construct. She steadied her feet, aimed her arm upwards, visualized Beak in her mind’s eye… And shot herself. She felt the construct detaching to fly after its target, and willed the tendril to extend, giving her around a meter and a half of standoff from the missile. Once it looked long enough, she launched herself in the same direction using a diagonally-rising pillar of jade. Soaring over the wall, Krahe fusion-formed and fired a weak Smoke Eruption grenade into the saurian brothers’ midst, herself letting go of the Wandrei Faust as she came barreling downward.

She had to stop herself from grinning when she saw Blondie moving to eagerly play into her hand, trying to swat her out of the air. For once, she made use of her Barrier, wanting to preserve her access to diving as a safety net. Her downward approach was punctuated by the ominous cracking of the Cinder Strobe, smashing down on Blondie like a cruel sun, visibly deforming her armor. Just before she came into Blondie’s melee range, Krahe executed her premediated plan: She using one of the secondary features of Astro Skimming to reorient herself, ensuring that Blondie got closely acquainted with the stone underfoot for the second time today.

As Krahe slid that short distance, she wasted no time in giving Blondie a full-tilt Cinder Flash at near-point-blank. The woman, previously struggling, boiled inside her suit before it could even fall apart, blood and fluids gushing out of the joint seams, the undersuit peeling cracking and peeling apart. A visible charred outlined formed around her on the ground, but it was washed away by the continuous leakage from her corpse. As Krahe turned to finish dealing with the saurian pair, Blondie’s armor emitted a kettle-like whistle for a few moments before it utterly crumbled. The residual omniphage would leave no corpse behind.

Despite the smoke, Krahe saw the two still valiantly maintaining the ghostly dragon.

“Well, since you’re pulling out the big guns…” she thought, holding out her left arm, still glowing an ominous anathemic red. Without an explicit prompt, Barzai erupted from her chest and perched atop her palm, imploding into a seething ball of crimson as Krahe already began forming his tendrilous casement.

Raptor and Beak’s ghostly, somewhat bird-like dragon head turned to glare at her, alarm gripping the two of them at the sight of her.

141 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Hand is Shown [Cherno]

They eventually “got her” in the loading/unloading area of a small warehouse, insofar as she led them to this place because the layout was advantageous to her and the warehouse, being out of use, would be an easy way to split them up or lose them if things went badly. It was an apparent dead end, but she had been around this area before, and knew that the “dead end” wall was just a thin divider separating this unloading area from one of the main roads.

Krahe waited for a short time with her back turned, making it look like she was looking into the warehouse as she lit up a cigarette. Meanwhile, Barzai perched on a nearby railing, covering her blind spot.

“I figured I was being tailed,” she said aloud when the group of five entered after her. No other entrance, no way for them to surround her.

No response. From what Barzai saw, they looked… Marginally professional, with masked faces and some armor. Two Mamon Knights with dregsteamers, three thaumaturges, none exuding a particularly impressive aura. The apparent leader was a large, bird-like Saurian with a hooked beak for a mouth; thus, Beak. To his right, an unsettlingly humanlike saurian with a long beard of feathers and a second, weasely-looking one; Beardo and Weasel, with Weasel having a dregsteamer belt. To his left, a second Saurian with a lighter, raptor-like build, and a blonde woman who had the second dregsteamer; Raptor and Blondie. Now that she looked at him, she was sure Raptor was the one she saw earlier. They clearly weren’t true pros, but hired muscle that knew the basic opsec practice of “shut the fuck up”.

Turning on her boot heel, hand already on her gun, Krahe asked: “Let me guess: Sorayah?”

“The identity of our employer is not yours to guess at,” the left-hand man hissed, but the speed and manner of his reaction betrayed that she was right.

“C’mon, oldest trick in the book,” she thought, giving the weasely-looking man an amused look. His compatriots stared daggers through him. He squinted, glaring at her, as if he recognized her.

Not one to give up the first mover’s advantage, Krahe dragged down the rest of her cigarette. Simultaneously, she fusion-formed a high-pressure burster that would be weak, but loud and messy, erupting into a short-lived burst of smoke and ash. A prototype Concussion Burster by any other name.

With a spark of intent she willed Barzai to reveal himself and set upon the five, and in the split-second when he pulled their attention, she fired the concussion burster into their midst by way of Six Trees Killer. The bullet itself struck one of the Mamon Knights, throwing him off and delaying his transformation by two seconds compared to his counterpart.

The strobe-bursts of Barzai’s eyes briefly preceded bursts of small explosions, springing out of nowhere right on the bodies of Blondie and Beardo. They weren’t enough to break or even seriously damage their Wards, but that wasn’t their purpose. Krahe exhaled, shrouding her surroundings in a Smoke Eruption. The rancid taste of Isotope burned her mouth. Despite this onslaught, three of them regained their bearings, firing into the smoke. Krahe felt a mixture of wildly varied projectiles zip by her as she raised a wall from the ground.

Rapid footsteps combined with a dregsteamer’s synthesized voice betrayed one of the Mamon Knights trying to close in: “WARNING: High velocity. Explosive pressure. Stand free.”

Beginning to form the Faust Construct, Krahe met the freshly-transformed Mamon Knight in battle. Not a fair, straightforward fight, of course. She skimmed twice in a row around him and dived to further improve her own mobility, emerging only once the construct’s formation had finished while she was submerged… And Weasel was facing away from her, around six meters away. A single shot was all it took to send it his way, but true to his armor, he reacted to the gunshot with blistering speed and whipped around to come at her. At this rate, she had maybe a second and a half before he punched her lights out. In this moment of adrenaline, she realized the suppressive fire from before had stopped; the only reason Weasel’s allies stopped shooting, she wagered, had to be that they didn’t want to hit him.

Krahe took the risk and ran ahead to meet him, unable to dive for a few more seconds. With her rather limited control over the missile, she willed Wandrei Faust to slow down, pulling ahead. Another transformation announcement, this time for Omniphage, sounded, and Blondie’s armored feet approached as well. In the absence of better options, Krahe changed plans from a pincer attack on Weasel to splitting up her resources. She smashed into Weasel with a tendril-extended straight punch, pushing dangerously close to meltdown to keep him at bay long enough to regain a skimming charge. Afterwards, she skimmed straight through him, using the opportunity to turn herself around. With every bit of what little entropy she had, she swung again and send him flying into her Wandrei Faust. At the moment that punch connected, her tendrils rotted away. At that same moment, right as she punched Wesel with her left hand, she gestured up with her right to impel the Forming Toroid into raising another wall. Her smoke was dispersing by now due to the battle going on inside it, so despite her best judgment she spent the time to refresh her Smoke Eruption. Barzai, upon Krahe’s command, dive-bombed into Blondie, momentarily keeping her at bay. The attack was enough to exhaust his astral form, and so she bid him to return as she exhaled the next blast of smoke. Her mouth and throat were burning and raw from the Isotope.

Meanwhile, outside the smoke, Beardo fled. He simply turned tail and ran, much to Beak’s and Raptor's vocal chagrin. The two men gathered their wits, unused to such unreasonable combat conditions. The smoke clearly wasn’t normal; both their eyes were sharp enough to pierce most obscuring thaumaturgies.

140 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Human Charcoal Letters [Cherno]

“How much do you want for it?”

“Just take the damn thing. I couldn’t source a Gulf Key no matter what strings I pulled in any reasonable amount of time, so consider this the replacement. I still have people looking for one, they’re just a bitch to find. So long as the belt’s wick gets burnt in the process of getting revenge for my cousin, I’ll consider us even.”

“...How specific is that criteria? Should Viridaimon grind the assassin into paste, or is it alright if I just off her without the suit and then use it to come after her employers?”

“Ah, I don’t care,” the lizard huffed. “Keep it and try to reverse-engineer it for all I care, so long as the assassin- Wait, her? Was that a slip of the tongue or do you already know who did it?”

“I have my sources.”

“Better than mine, it seems. Y’mind sharing? Could look into her some more. Promise I won’t do anything stupid, I’m not some hot-blooded whelp… I’d want to do it myself anyhow, and I’m not much stronger than Imraal in my state.”

A melancholic resignation came over him as he said that. Krahe weighed the risks, and deemed them minimal: “She’s with the Silversword Agency. A young human by the name of Eutropia.”

“I will attempt to look into her, though I expect that I will not find more than you already know.”

“Do so discreetly. It would not do for her to be on guard when I come to collect.”

“Come now. You think too little of me,” Garvesh chuckled wryly. “Take the diagnostic kit as well. If possible, run the full battery of checks before using the coupler.”

Detransforming left her feeling strange and her head thrumming with a dull ache, but grinding a couple Tabryxas between her teeth helped set her back in line. After doffing the extra support armor and packing everything up, she tried to waste no time in leaving Garvesh in peace. Her departure was delayed by an offer she couldn’t refuse: “Y’want some Machine Crab Juice? I was making some just as you arrived.”

Casus waited for her back at the safehouse. His expectant, excited reaction to the Black Sun Coupler proved that he had known about it in advance. Despite feeling distrustful voices niggling in the back of her head when he took to fiddling with the diagnostic equipment, she didn’t say anything.

It wasn’t long before this short time of peace came to an end.

At the end of each investigative thread, more often than not, violence awaited.

Getting access to the necessary restricted section in the Temple of Records only confirmed what she had already assumed, and built upon her suspicions beyond what she had dared to theorize.

The texts she found were more a collection of notes and letters than actual books, leading her to believe these were the originals which the Lost Sun Society’s books were based on, or at least copies of the originals. The text was recorded as “The Human Charcoal Letters”. They were dated in the time window of 4127AB to 4183AB. Over a millennium ago.

They spoke of a fate supposedly worse than death. An exceedingly rare condition wherein, over the course of an extended period, an anathemist could somehow self-mummify into a state akin to a living ember, not quite truly alive, but not quite truly dead; so-called Adustocorpus. The bodies of such anathemists could, supposedly, be split up and harnessed as power sources or for the creation of anathemic relics. The rarity of this occurring naturally was such that information was scarce prior to 4127, but cases had spiked to the extreme during the writing of the Human Charcoal Letters, and so had knowledge on the condition.

In particular, the Human Charcoal Letters spoke at length on several occult practices that all boiled down to variations of the same thing: Methods of manipulation and occult rituals designed to aid in driving someone to the point of Adustocorpus, so that they may be harvested for the practitioner’s own use. Uncensored, surviving excerpts from retrieved ritual books described the subject as “human charcoal”, hence the name of these documents. These practices were described simply as “charring”, obviously dehumanizing the victims for the practitioner’s own conscience.

The same chamber also contained extensive documentation on the Twin Churches’ joint effort in stamping out the individuals and occult groups which had created and used these methods. Krahe only skimmed through these records, finding not much more of use for the Lost Sun Killer Myth case. Regardless, she had gotten what she was looking for.

Upon next visiting the Lost Sun Society, she found that, curiously enough, the texts she had touched were now no longer missing any pages, and had been replaced into their proper places. When Krahe asked about it in a roundabout way, the librarian claimed to be unaware of any repairs being done to any of the texts recently.

On her way out, she ever so briefly glimpsed a lithe lizard. She assumed it to be Sorayah, since all the other saurians in the Society were on the heavy, crocodilian side. One of them, a man revered as a god-like miniature painter, resembled a humanoid komodo dragon, and smelled the part too, despite his efforts.

Krahe didn’t think much of it as she randomly chose a direction away from the Society, remaining no more and no less on-guard than she normally was. Of course, by any normal person’s standards her baseline was a schizophrenic level of constant vigilance. She wouldn’t have survived Crescent Jezail otherwise.

So it was to her surprise, and, admittedly, excitement, when she realized she was not only being tailed by several people, but surrounded by them at that. They… Weren’t great. They were good, yes, but not great. About the best one could expect from amateurs. Their outfits were too homogenous, and at least two of them wore openly-visible Lost Sun jewelry. Krahe had to give them credit; they didn’t know that she could see through Barzai, or that Barzai was even there. Really, a flying, camouflaged pair of extra eyes and ears was an immensely powerful tool.

307 - Blood Implosion Holocaust [Sturmblitz]

Despite being acclimated to the presence of such a cultivator, despite having been trained to withstand such a person’s directed killing intent, Friedrich briefly locked gazes with that being and nearly fell to his knees.

He instantaneously realized why she had withstood the Dambreaker Cannon, and in that same realization, he also became aware of the fact he could not conceivably halt her without putting up his life.

Thus far, he had kept up with her thanks to the Heuristic Truth. By this Pseudo-Truth, he could learn from any foe, and devise how to defeat them within fewer moves than he could count on one hand. He had thought, at first, that she practiced a similar Pseudo-Truth, but it wasn’t so. In this moment, when he locked his gaze to the pools of burning light that her eyes had become, Friedrich felt her Truth wash over him.

Violence.

Pure and brilliant, simple even.

That singular obelisk of Truth, however, stood upon a foundation so vast and complex he could not comprehend it. It was not a simple, reductionist vision of the world, no. It was a vast network of beliefs and insights weaving together into an apex of Truth, exactly matching Lord Fourth’s own description of an ideal pseudo-truth. It could be as simple or as complex as she wanted it to be. By comparison, the Heuristic Truth felt as shallow as a stream, despite being regarded as the second most comprehensive of the Order’s Pseudo-Truths.

Friedrich snapped out of his trance after only moments had passed in reality. He could see no path to victory… But there was a path that would take him distinctly closer than others.

He brought out a bronze knife wrought in the image of Lord Third’s own sacrificial blade and enchanted in the self-same way. How many had this blade felled? How many times had he heard the Skinless One smugly commenting on the dark works in which he partook? He couldn’t recall… But he had learned something from that capricious god.

Its warbling speech echoed in his skull, almost like it was right here, whispering to him at this very moment. Indeed, Friedrich felt as if the skinless one’s ever-bloodied hands rested on his shoulders right now. It felt so very real that he wanted to look around to see, but he knew better than that. It was a truth that contradicted everything the Order stood for; a truth exalting willing sacrifice.

From that grain of enlightenment, Friedrich had wrought a technique of self-sacrifice, with help from both Lord Third and Lord Fourth. It had taken several weeks of grueling mutagen treatments to prime his body and alter his blood composition on the off-chance he ever needed to do this.

At that moment, as he held the blade and plunged it into his own heart, he saw the Skinless One’s form appear before him, floating over to whisper in his ear: “The First Truthseeker awakened to the Truth of Sacrifice, and the others slew him for it. That is the legacy of your Order: Delusion and conceit.”

With a cruel, mocking laughter, the Dead God floated away, vanishing feet-first as if it was unraveled, first into muscle fibres, then into nothing. Soon only its head remained, encased in a fully-enclosed helmet with numerous blades running through it. Even it began to vanish soon enough. Friedrich, meanwhile, set his own blood and spirit ablaze. It nearly felt as though time stopped for him, slowing to an absolute crawl. Unable to speak properly, he thought the incantation:  “For the Order, I shall give all that I am, all that I was, all that I would be. For the order… I shall render up even my future incarnations, so that I cannot be reborn for a thousand years as anything but a cripple!”

Suddenly, the Skinless One’s nearly-gone body reformed, and plunged its arm into Friedrich’s body. It gripped something deep inside him, and pulled. An inconceivable pain shot through Friedrich’s spirit as if the God’s fleshy hand were made of white-hot iron, dipped in poison, and wrapped in razorwire. It was such a terrible ache that it ought to have killed him in shock, but he remained agonizingly aware, awake, and clear-headed all throughout. His perception of time came to a dead stop, only the Skinless One being excepted. It painstakingly pulled and pulled, tearing out something even more vital and essential than the heart or the brain.

“YOUR FUTURE SELVES ARE NOT YOURS TO SACRIFICE, FOOL.”

When it finally removed its clawed hand, Friedrich felt a yawning hollowness, his sense of self diminished. Something inside him became vividly aware of the fact he would be a mindless vegetable within mere hours, a problem he would not have to deal with, since he expected to die within minutes. A glistening, iridescent orb about twice the size of an eyeball rested in its hand.

“I SHALL, INSTEAD, TAKE THINE TRUE SOUL AND INCARNATE IT INTO A DYING CHILD IN THIS VERY CITY. YOUR NEXT SELF SHALL GROW TO REVILE YOUR ORDER AND ALL IT STANDS FOR. TAKE SOLACE. THERE ARE SHARDS OF MYSELF WHICH WOULD NOT BE THIS MERCIFUL.”

The Dead God, with Friedrich’s spiritual core in hand, once more began to vanish, leaving him to face the resumption of time with these words: “LIVE OUT YOUR REMAINING MOMENTS AS A FLESH-AUTOMATON ANIMATED BY THE EMBERS OF THIS SACRIFICE.”

His heart collapsed, consumed into a growing bolus of compressed blood that seethed, like a brown dwarf, with untold power. Soon there was not an iota of liquid blood left within him. In seconds, his body withered into a mummy-likestate. By contrast, he felt the strongest he had ever been, the strongest he could conceivably be. In fact, no part of him cared for anything besides his objective: Halt Zelsys Newman. What shreds still remained of Friedrich’s personality were irrevocably swept away in the growing maelstrom of power bursting out of his withered form.

SIGN OF SELF-SACRIFICE

HEURISTIC ART: BLOOD IMPLOSION HOLOCAUST

306 - Conqueror's Mantle Superseded: Kugelblitz Incarnation! [Sturmblitz][+Artwork]

“We are sacrificing mortals,” Friedrich corrected.

“Ah, I see. That does change things.”

“Yes, it does,” Friedrich agreed, a relieved smile creeping into his face. It was fake, of course. A mere courtesy.

“Don’t misunderstand. It makes your crimes that much worse. Even if I were to give you a pass on using human sacrifice to begin with, you are effectively sacrificing children because they won’t fight back.”

“I must disappoint you if you expect me to repent or beg for forgiveness. This is simply how we, the Order of Six Truths, have done things for as long as we have existed. It is not my place to speak on the morality of it.”

“That’s not disappointing at all!” she laughed. “I’ve already decided to wipe out the lot of you; first in this city, then wherever the rest of your sect is hidden. It will be a refreshing change of pace to see filthy beasts in human skin die with a modicum of honour.”

As they spoke, Zelsys still circulated Fulgur within herself in rapidly-alternating patterns, all based on the Hammerforged Heart’s structure, all stimulating the organ in different ways. It was close. So. Damn. Close.

“Ah. There it is.”

The moment it fit was unlike any other. To compare it to being struck by the Living Storm was an insult to the flame which had just ignited within her, whose spark she had merely tasted before. It was no wonder that the Truth of Fangs was required. The absolute violence of this reaction was something beyond even a fulgur-igneic reactor.

Friedrich responded right away. His aura shifted in a subtle way, flowing within him as he drew in a breath. There was barely any tell, yet the effect was undeniable. Almost as if mirroring her own techniques, Friedrich’s body whipped forward into a double-fisted punch, and from it erupted an invisible shockwave of truly terrible power.

________________________________________________________________________________

Friedrich didn’t see it.

He didn’t see much of anything; the light was blinding.

One moment, he was stalling her with the classical tactic of interspersing combat with conversation. He’d felt her doing something, some kind of strange internal technique, a nonsensical one with no apparent pattern. It seemed almost as if she had lost control over her own lightning and was trying to recapture it, though the way she employed it with wild abandon certainly spoke to the opposite of such a possibility. Just what was she trying to do? Confuse him? Was this some elaborate method of covering up her real internal martial arts? She wasn’t using any breathing technique that he recognized, that was for sure. The glow from inside her chest resembled the appearance of someone drawing power from a pseudo-core that was beyond what they could handle.

All of Friedrich’s theories went out the window when it clicked. Even he felt it. The woman’s aura collapsed completely; not just that strange Pseudo-Beast Aura, but also the field of Fulgur that extended out in every direction around her. He couldn’t even feel her spiritual presence for a moment.

All he could sense was blinding light. An utterly, seethingly, brilliant outpour of light, and heat, and noise, a lightning bolt howling from the ground towards the heavens. Despite lasting all of a split-second, the intensity of it had made it feel far longer. Friedrich reacted without thinking, harnessing the only technique of his own that he imagined could possibly counteract or disrupt that energy. It burned away years and years of his lifespan with the strain of its usage, and it would regress his cultivation by months of seclusion training, but what had to be done had to be done.

DELUGE SIGN

A DAM IS BROKEN

A STREAM BECOMES A FLOOD

ALL ARE SWEPT AWAY IN THE DELUGE

HEURISTIC ART: DAMBREAKER CANNON

___________________________________________________________________________________

A small part of Zelsys felt bad about what she was about to do. A very tiny part, one which empathized with who she saw in Friedrich; a man who could have been a respected ally, even a friend, under different circumstances. That is to say, if he wasn’t an active member of an extinction-worthy organization like the Order of Six Truths.

She simply brought out Carnifex, and just as she had done against Red, used it to form an umbrella-like shield, this time shrouding it in Predator Aura in addition to Fulgur. A shield of whirling blades accompanied by claws and maws of lightning took shape, its bluish hue almost creating the appearance of water swarming with horrifying monsters.

The impact of Friedrich’s Dambreaker Cannon would not be denied, however. Whatever was behind it, it created a truly terrible power, one sufficient to send Zelsys flying. In the process of clashing with her own defense, the blast of force scattered so violently that it separated Carnifex’ many segments and, for lack of a better term, carried them off into the surrounding environment.

Zel righted herself as she flew, effortlessly pulling her scattered Fangs back together before she landed, sliding a short distance before she managed to halt herself using her left hand as a brake.

Friedrich stood, wavering, staring at her. He gathered himself, and as he did, so did she.

He had rudely interrupted her, denying her the opportunity to name the frightful power beating in her heart, this terrible thing which she had created within herself. All along, this was what Conqueror’s Mantle had been imitating. All along, she had been reaching for this, like a blind man trying to paint the sun, and only now did she have eyes to see.

Only now did she have everything needed. To call this a “Mantle” would be incorrect. She wasn’t playing at a storm, or taking on the aspect of a Thundergod. This was hers and hers alone.

ABSOLUTE VIOLENCE SIGN

A STAR OF LIGHTNING WITHIN ONE’S HEART

FORMLESS DESTROYER SCRIPTURE: VOLUME ONE

GEHEIMNIS: KUGELBLITZ INCARNATION

___________________________________________________________________________

Friedrich beheld a human, a beast, and even a creature possessing such a presence as to warp the world merely by being… And yet, it was alien. By all accounts she gave off a presence alike to Lord Fourth in magnitude, yet she was unfamiliar, unorthodox, abnormal. The woman’s aura did not spill out, and she did not burn with such spiritual pressure as to destroy her surroundings.

Metal. Lightning. Flesh. Fury. Clarity. Evolution.

Ego and Violence.

Yazata Heptaxia, Inquisitor of the Inner Wheel [Cherno] [Artwork]

305 - Evolving on the Spot is Not Easy [Sturmblitz]

The Third Truthseeker stood atop the Eberheim Cathedral’s belfry, in his hand a brass sacrificial knife. He looked over the macabre implement, feeling its arcane power thrum in his hand. It had originally belonged to the previous Third Truthseeker, who had once forged it from a piece of some dead god of sacrifice. Third’s Predecessor had tried to hold it over his head that the blade, the Order’s strongest sacrificial implement, would shatter if he were to ever die. It was this that had led Third down the path which he trod, and which had ensured the Predecessor would never be allowed to die, now a slumbering mass of undying flesh sealed away under the Order’s compound.

He was torn away from reminiscing by two things.

First, a disturbance. It was just as abrupt as that which came when Rosa met her end.

The Triplets were gone. Extinguished all at once. The only possible cause had to be a wide-area attack of sufficient intensity to overwhelm them. If that was the case, it was masterfully contained, because Third didn’t sense something to suggest such a destructive power in that area.

Seconds later, his trusted right hand arrived to confirm what he already knew.

“Lord Third, it appears that the Triplets have fallen as well,” said the outwardly-older man matter-of-factly.

“And after using the Three Kings Astral Coinjoining, at that,” the Third Truthseeker replied in a conflicted tone. He was at once impressed and furious at the intruder, while also being disappointed in the Triplets and regretting their deaths. Losing Rosa had already been bad enough.

He wanted to go out there and put the intruders down himself, but that was no longer an option. Fleshy, crimson tendrils snaked up through the belfry and around the bell, conjoining the thousands of sacrifices. Third was a half-step from his apotheosis; he could initiate it at any moment, but he was hesitant, as it would force him to wholly focus on taming the vortex of sacrificial energy.

“Friedrich, do something for me,” said the Third Truthseeker.

“Yes, sir.”

“Ensure that our intruder doesn’t reach this place before I am in a state to dispose of her. You are not to put up your life lest it is absolutely unavoidable, do I make myself clear?”

“Any other specifications, sire?”

“No. Do what needs to be done.”

“As you wish.”

______________________________________________________________________________

Zelsys felt him coming before she saw him.

An unassuming, older man. His aura wasn’t oppressive or seething with sacrificial taint, though it was undeniably tainted and amplified just like the others. He didn’t come soaring in on a flying sword, instead jumping along at a velocity entirely unfitting for his leisurely stance, hands clasped behind his back.

He met her no more than fifty meters from the Cathedral Square. She would’ve already breached it if she had focused wholly on hurrying along, but she would be that much further from grasping It. The next iteration of Conqueror’s Mantle.

“It’s one after the next with you lot. You would’ve done better if you had thought to come all at once,” she said to the man. Despite her enhanced breathing technique and its superior output, she somehow didn’t feel certain in being able to defeat him quickly. Something about him just didn’t feel right. He was… Familiar. Yet at the same time, foreign.

“I am afraid I was otherwise preoccupied,” the man said. “The Core Disciples of our esteemed sect were deemed sufficient to deal with the threat you posed. I see now that we had overestimated them… And underestimated you.”

Zel mentally glossed over most of what he said, readily using the time he gave her to take the vital steps. There was no need to create a Pseudo-Core or compress vast quantities of Fulgur into it, but there was a process all its own. Much like the original iteration, this one, too, caused her to sprout antlers of bronze and iron. These, however, were smaller in mass, appearing swept back over the top of her head, and they were not accompanied by the skull-like manifestation from before.

It was abundantly obvious that she was doing something. Zel made no attempt to hide it, and Friedrich simply observed her as he talked Only once he shifted his stance and held up his hands did she finally realize what it was that felt odd about him.

His eyes. Always observing. Always picking at the smallest shifts in her posture, at the subdermal muscle twitches. He was like her. And he had a real chance at winning if she didn’t work out the successor to Conqueror’s Mantle very quickly. If only it were so easy as simply pushing huge amounts of Fulgur into the Hammerforged Heart. There was a pattern, an indisputably correct pattern. If only she could work it out.

For now, she would have to make-do, and make-do she did.

She made-do so very hard that her first clash with Friedrich obliterated everything in a thirty-meter radius. Neither of them was wounded by the brief clash. Friedrich’s martial arts, though plain at a glance, were refined to such a degree that he seemed to have no apparent issue redirecting a Thunderclap Sting. From there, it became a more cordial conversation. As they fought, they spoke, probing at one another’s defenses. These were cordial introductions, a prelude to the real fight, which would be far shorter and incomparably more violent.

“I shall see to it that such mistakes are not repeated in the future. I take it that you are the elder of this Newman Sect, yes? Zelsys Newman, correct? I am Friedrich, a Direct Disciple of the Fourth Truthseeker overseeing the deployment of my master’s arrays in this city, as he is otherwise preoccupied. I wish to apologize on the behalf of those disciples which failed to show the proper respect you are due, and if you were to simply leave, I would see to it that no grudge is held…”

“I’ll have to interrupt you here. I came to this city on behalf of the Free Cities Alliance to break its isolation, suppress whoever was responsible, and take whatever actions appropriate to the reason for the city’s isolation; that is to say, I have come to judge your sect and to thereafter enact the punishment with my own hands. Feel free to state your case, but… I’ll simplify it for both of us. You’re sacrificing people, are you not?”

304 - Evolution [Sturmblitz]

Rather than use a pseudo-core formed in her second stomach, this reaction was rooted within the Hammerforged Heart. With each heartbeat, she felt her insides shifting. The Primordial Self wished to do something drastic. The Thinking Self let it. Red-black sludge rushed out of her lungs with a single hacking cough, only to be consumed and digested the moment they reached her stomach. Her reserves of vitae, previously abundant and vast, dwindled to a puddle as her body tore itself apart and remade itself in the span it would take anyone else to carry out a basic technique. Zel’s lightning, a blinding deluge mere moments ago, suddenly flickered out, only for a dense, flesh-pink aura to begin wafting from her. Unable to bring herself into greater movement at this moment, she walked forward, preparing to defend herself from newly-emboldened enemies who falsely assumed this to be the sign of her exhaustion. Her engine was only halfway through upgrading itself; the spiritual side was done, the flesh had to follow. The Primordial Self had deemed it of utmost importance, beyond her own safety.

As if appearing out of nowhere, a small band of Black, Blue, and Red Robes emerged. She recognized them. Some by the subtle damage to their robes, others by their eyes or stances. They were the small few who had survived her initial incursion.

“You fools were here all along, waiting for your deaths…” she chuckled, her lungs no more than air-sacs at the moment.

One of them, for once, responded in a way that didn’t make her want to roll her eyes out of their sockets. With grim conviction, a Blue Robe flared his aura, took a pair of unfolding mechanized crossbows out of holsters on his legs, and proclaimed: “I will admit that you are still a monster, even with your lightning gone, and you shall most likely strike down the greater portion of us yet, but it is not our place to finish off a wounded beast. It is only our place to harry it and usher it into the hunters’ waiting spears!”

“I assure you, this little breather is just the eye of my storm!” Zel bellowed, even as oxygen deprivation began creeping into awareness. She would be fine for some time, but the more she exerted herself, the more she would burn the rather short wick. They fell upon her, and she struck them down with lightning wrought of the Fulgur which she constantly produced even without breathing. She shored up this lackluster fount of power with her newfound spiritual fangs, minimizing physical movement with tight, efficient motions. A pair of Fang Rippers remained operational. They proved vital tools, her passive Fulgur supply sufficient to puppet them and slow their inexorable march towards failure. Fortunately, exerting one’s aura did not demand pneuma… And Zel had a terribly, terribly large reserve to draw on. As her Thundergods flickered out of being for the moment, the surviving Red Robe alongside a pair of Blue Robes thought to take the opportunity.

Mustering every bit of strength she had, directing focus towards her spirit just as she would towards her body when lifting something at her limit, Zelsys dug in. The Blue Robes, one got foolishly close and was dispatched by Fang Rippers. The other met his end when she snared him using several serpentine maws formed from a pile of rubble and put a high-velocity round through him. The fact that it only went into the building behind him rather than all the way through was testament to the Blue Robe’s durability.

Meanwhile, she directed the full brunt of her Predator Aura at the Red Robe. Roderick Von Burgghusen’s last surviving puppet body.

The Red Robe’s body contorted. His own clothes and skin rose up against him; the puppet body’s aura, anemic as it was, crumpled like an empty can at ten thousand leagues beneath the sea. A panicked flare of his aura didn’t save him so much as it ensured that rather than his own clothes, he was torn limb from limb by invisible maws wrought of thin air. Their gruesome shapes were briefly outlined by the splattering of his blood and the strange poisons that filled his guts, only to dissipate the moment the body died. It clattered to the ground like a sack of tools, and exploded into shrapnel as countless mechanisms inside the meatsack went off.

Still, Zelsys didn’t feel entirely herself. Breath returned to her, but trying to Fog-breathe had her faltering. It wouldn’t work without the Truth of Fangs. Zel tried again, this time flexing her spirit and her aura in concert with her body. She reached out the same way she normally did when Fog-breathing, just… Further, using all of her faculties rather than the leftovers of ancient evolution that all humans possessed. At first it felt like liquid rushing into her lungs. An ethereal, immaterial liquid. Fuel. Fuel the likes of which she had only gotten a taste of. It felt like she’d been running on fumes all this time, until this very moment.

At the apex of each slow, deliberate breath, lightning exploded within her chest, a blue glow shining out between her ribs. No more Fog. No more painstakingly dragging the essentia out of the air. With each inhalation, she drank from the Sea of Fog as a thirst-wracked lion would from an oasis. With each breath it became easier, and she gained a greater grasp of her lungs’ altered structure. They weren’t merely flooding with the Fog-sea’s ethereal liquid, but taking in a small portion and dispersing it into a vapour before breaking it down with a combination of Predator Aura and Metabolic Alkahest. The Primordial Self, in its animalistic genius, had redesigned her lungs to well and truly match the technique name “Engine Breathing”.

EVOLUTION SIGN

GEHEIMNIS: ENGINE BREATHING -LIQUID FUEL RETUNE-

It was finally all in place. The missing piece, the Truth of Fangs, had opened her eyes to the method by which she would make Conqueror’s Mantle grow into its full potential. She just had to grasp the process. To restructure the technique on the spot, in the middle of warzone, in the time it took the Order’s next assault to catch up with her. On the whole, not too bad. Zel moved ahead with her incursion into the inner city as she invoked the Despot of Self and took active full control of her insides to better work it out.

“If the Hammerforged Heart is to be the core, it may be simpler than anticipated…”

“Second stomach. Ballast chamber.”

“Will that work?”

“With reinforcement. New lungs will not endure full output for long; flesh constructs. Used Eternal Beast to force the change. Will require some time to grow in permanently after this is over.”

“How long will they last?”

“Long enough.”

The business with my elderly relative ended up going for a day longer than expected. Normal posting should resume from now on.

303 - Anything Can Be My Fangs [Sturmblitz]

A/N: The business with my relative ended up going a day longer than anticipated. Posting should resume as normal from now on.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Some among Roderick’s forces yet lived, having avoided the attack or simply not having been among its targets… For a few seconds. The undulating lightning-bound chain of blades had retracted to its mistress to defend her once again, but by the time it did so, Roderick bore witness to three dozen more of his subordinates being torn limb from limb by invisible force. It wasn’t just them, but their surroundings as well, stones and shingles torn from buildings, gashes and tears made by nothing.

In utter stillness, after the undulating mass of blades that was her weapon returned into a solid form, the woman stood… And nothing could touch her. Even as his forces redoubled their assault, their weapons were torn to shreds by invisible forces. Those who strayed too close - which was much further away from Her than one would expect - were, just the same, torn limb from limb. Neither the ground, nor the buildings and lamp posts were spared. She was utterly calm, yet her aura struck out with the violence of someone who had succumbed to berserk.

He had seen something like this before.

A Sword Saint’s first epiphany, the rampaging Sword Aura slashing anything in the immediate vicinity. It was just like that. But… The range of such a side effect was normally far more limited, and a Sword Cultivator typically had their first epiphany at a point just after one could qualify to be an inner disciple. Not to mention, this wasn’t Sword Aura. It was far more akin to Beast Aura, yet at the same time, it had a wholly different degree of focus. If he were forced to describe it on the spot, he would say it had the brutality of Beast Aura with the precision of Sword Aura.

“Such strength, you possess, and yet only now you’ve had the epiphany necessary to exert your aura directly upon the world! What are you, some humanoid cultivator-beast?!” he exclaimed, throwing his voice, half in disbelief and half trying to confirm a hypothesis. He’d met cultivator-beasts with more convincing human disguises than this one… And this situation was frankly too absurd for him to believe any other possibility. The only other reasonable option was that this woman had cultivated her aura to this advanced degree without ever learning any external techniques, even the most basic expression of it. The absurdity of such an idea was doubled by the fact that the two publicly-known Survivor Sects were both fairly aura-focused due to deriving their manuals from fragments of the Severing Scripture.

“I’m afraid not. I have merely been focused wholly on other facets of my cultivation up until now, you may consider me a truly unorthodox cultivator. Why, I fought against a remnant of one of the Divine Generals without being aware of what aura even was!” she laughed in response.

Roderick felt a sharp stabbing pain in his liver and bile rising in his throat at that ridiculous proclamation. The Divine Generals must’ve truly fallen far if that was the case, yes, that had to be it.

__________________________________________________________________________

It didn’t feel like some great breakthrough to Zelsys. Rather, she felt as though she had managed to figure out how to directly control a particularly obstinate, well-hidden muscle… And now that she knew, she put it to task right away. She had only studied some rudimentary Armament Aura techniques out of curiosity, but combined with this newfound deeper grasp of Predator Aura…

“Anything can be my fangs. Even the air.”

With just a stare, she ripped out a man’s throat. Not only that, with a mere glance, she made another freeze dead where he stood, like a rabbit desperately freezing in the face of a wolf. It was inefficient. Wasted effort, like glamour lifting, better put to task in a more practical application, but she would have been a filthy liar if she pretended for a second that she didn’t immensely enjoy this transcendent sense of power.

Now that she knew how to do it, it was simple. So, so very simple, by comparison to wrangling lightning. And yet, she knew that the skill to externalize her Predator Aura would find its greatest strength in reinforcing her existing abilities, building upon her existing combat style. Anything could be her fangs, that was true. However, just as a Sword Saint preferred his own sword over all others despite being able to use anything as a sword, there were no fangs greater than those which were truly her own.

She pulled her aura back in, wanting to attempt at least a semblance of efficiency.

At that moment, she felt that with her epiphany something had changed, deep within.

The world came to a dead halt, at the peak of what felt like a deep breath of the soul. Zelsys felt an all-encompassing shiver pass through her; muscles, tendons, veins and nerves, the very cells of her being shifted and settled, and the self-same thing occurred within her spirit. Her connection with the Primordial Self suddenly felt an order of magnitude stronger. If before it had been a small window, it now became a doorway, roughly carved open by savage claws. This was the least of the ensuing changes.

In some way, somehow, beyond her understanding of essentia mechanics, the fulguric reaction within her second stomach collapsed. A pang of ache came from her heart; not the organ, but the orb which floated within it, her wellspring of Metallum, the Hammerforged Heart. It drank up every last ounce of Fulgur she could give, drained her of all she had, and it strained her spirit as if it were spitting out enough Metallum to form a tidal wave of swords. Like a starveling beast, the ravenous spark that had just been born within Zelsys consumed all it could… And in the very next instant, it erupted with a fulguric outpour of magnitude and intensity she could scarcely believe. The world returned to its normal flow, and she realized what had changed.

Taking care of an elderly relative again, until Tuesday (including Tuesday). Will try to post normally, but no guarantees.

139 - Mamon Knight Viridaimon [Cherno]

Garvesh was right in that removing her own voidkey wasn’t difficult, but it was an order of magnitude harder than Krahe had expected. It was a sickly, ticklish sensation, one which sent waves of shivers down her back with every centimeter. Once it was out, she felt a yawning emptiness that slowly closed up like biorepair gel rushing in to fill a wound. The Black Sun Coupler took in the key without issue, and the stamped readout around the slot shifted to form a dial with a handful of increments, the head of her voidkey becoming the selector. Donning the belt, it was somewhat loose until she buckled it in the back, at which point it shrunk to fit.

Pulling the dossier out of its box, Garvesh flipped through it, muttering: “Insert fuel cell… Release the safety switch… Connect contactor… Ah, here it is. Rotate the dial forward until it clicks once - from the first position into the second position.”

Krahe gave him an incredulous look at the wannabe-idiotproof instructions. She still did as he said. There was some initial resistance, but once it was overcome the dial spun freely until it snapped into the second position. The belt awakened, several connections clicking into place as it emitted a rising tone. It reminded her of a fusion bomb being armed.

“Now turn the dial forward until it circles back around to the first position. This should initiate the transformation since the prototype doesn’t have a cognitive trigger safety. Fair word of warning, it comes with an arm-mounted hardpoint catalyst. Like a gun that spits out a basic offensive thaumaturgy at a rapid rate of fire.”

“So that’s what it was. Should’ve said so sooner,” she sighed as she started undoing the straps of her bracers so she could swap them around. Once both bracers and shoulder-guards had been switched, she finally completed the sequence. The gaped-open serpent maw that was her voidkey’s head spun around and came to a halt.

For all her effort, she found herself briefly losing awareness of her surroundings. A typical symptom of momentary nervous overload caused by abrupt integration of new hardware; a type of benign seizure. It was all too much like getting into fancy power armor and quick-booting the unit. Her spine felt like it was buzzing for a few seconds after the fact, but it soon settled down.

When she returned to awareness, she saw two things - a gobsmacked Garvesh and the diagnostic unit spewing lines of data with a distinct absence of errors. A homely HUD partly filled her sight. It even had an ultra-retro searcher reticle! Looking herself over, Krahe raised her hand to see that her bracers had not only grown, but bulked up significantly and changed in shape, including armored gloves and upper-arm guards. The undersuit, visible on the palms and in the elbows, was innocuous dark-grey, almost matte-black, looking like a dense ballistic weave. Reaching up, she raised her hand into her field of vision, and couldn’t help but notice the short-barreled machine gun bolted to her forearm. It had something resembling an action but devoid of the mechanics of such a thing, with a cable shaped like an ammo conveyor snaking up her arm and under the shield-like shoulder plate. The HUD pointed out where the “gun” was aiming with a separate crosshair.

“Mirror?” she asked.

“Uh…” was the reply.

Garvesh looked around, and after manhandling some very heavy-looking boxes, he hauled out an antique full-body mirror in a frame of precious metals, or at least one made to look the part.

Krahe almost laughed when she saw herself in full. On her head was a helmet whose shape was only a half-step from the infamous stahlhelm, and her face was concealed by a plague doctor-esq beaked gas mask with green-glowing eye ports. Not even an iota of humanity shone through that ominous guise. The pattern of stark, aggressive shape language rendered in dark metal continued with the rest of the armor, though nothing quite matched the helmet’s ominous impact. The upper body had a full chest-plate, while the lower was covered by segmented, interlocked plates to preserve mobility. Her right arm’s forearm and shoulder plates were big and thick enough to act as quite impressive shields.

A skirt of plates hung down over her upper legs, her normal pants still there, seemingly unaltered, though with some focus she could feel the undersuit beneath them. Much like her pants, the Black Sun armor had incorporated her boots into itself as well. The armor’s boots were half her own, and half the Black Sun shin-guards, merged and amplified into the platonic ideal of death squad headkickers.

“I look like some activist’s rendition of a tyrannical regime’s enforcer,” she said, barely suppressing an amused chuckle.

Garvesh, caught up in checking and re-checking the diagnostic readouts, ignored the remark and said: “Do some squats.”

When she fulfilled his request, he continued: “Alright, now hop in place.”

This banal game of simon-says continued for a few minutes before he finally, mercifully, brought out an unreasonably handsome bust of some guy and set it on a crate.

“Last test. Shoot. No need to worry about the noise, I’ve got this place warded.”

Cracks of ionized air ripped through the storeroom, and rays of seething death tore through the air. Flashes of deep orange coloured everything. The burst lasted a number of seconds that could be counted on one hand, but half of the bust was gone by the time she was done.

The lizard looked at Krahe, then at the bust, then back at Krahe. With a somewhat accusatory tone, he said: “...You know I’ve tried to smash that thing with hammers before.”

“So we can call the test a success, then.”

“The system’s throwing alerts about anathema contamination, but otherwise, yeah. I’ll turn off the safeguards for when you take it out for a ride for real. Don’t expect it to survive. Right now it’s the diagnostic unit powering it, but that cell will melt down once it’s out of juice and it’ll be a coin toss if it takes the whole belt with it. On the optimistic side, you might get five minutes out of the thing if you pace yourself.”

“Five minutes of this kind of performance are all I’ll need. Just need a Mamon Knight name, now.”

“Seriously? For five minutes.”

“You never know. I might get myself one of these once all the kinks get ironed out. I’m thinking ‘Viridaimon’.”

“Please do not explain the wordplay behind it.”

“Casus told you, huh.”

“Of course he told me.”

Liminal Coil Pinup [Cherno][Artwork]

138 - Garvesh's Ace of Spades [Cherno]

“You know I’ve never used one, right? I’m open to the idea of using one, but I won’t bet my life on something I can’t use properly.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m not stupid. I have a good reason, let me get to it.”

After fiddling with the two cases’ holeless locks, he flipped the both of them open. The cases’ interiors were molded and velvet-lined to contain their contents and their contents alone, and were so densely warded it was tangible. It was not by way of paper talismans, but through protective glyphs embroidered directly into the lining, and that was just the visible layer.

Besides the audible hiss of air rushing in, Krahe also felt a more esoteric form of the same phenomenon, like the stuff inside had just come into existence the moment the seal was broken. Within the larger one was a set of partial body armor. Front and back plates for the upper chest, bracers and shin-guards with quarter-spheroid extensions to partly protect the middle joints, and sizable flat plates that she guessed had to be shoulder guards. It looked like extra plating that would be issued to some corpo death squad to wear over their standard armor. All of it was a dark, matte metal.

As for the smaller case, it contained a belt in the same starkly utilitarian design. Some of its curves, tubes, and exposed mechanics gave off the impression of an overgrown dregsteamer belt. It had two distinct slots; one contained something already, a metal cell of some kind with a readout marked as “Full”, while the other, on the belt’s left-hand side, was a clearly-marked slot for a voidkey. Well, to call it a slot was generous. It was a circular recess about ten centimeters across and no more than a centimeter deep, its interior filled by twisting, etched patterns, while its perimeter was outlined by the word VOIDKEY repeating over and over, stamped straight into the metal. On the inside of the smaller case, she noticed a thin, plain-looking dossier. The only text on its exterior was smack dab in the middle. Three words.

PROJECT BLACK SUN

The combination of roughshod construction and razor-sharp design had already set off alarm bells in her head. The ominous classified dossier only made her certain that she was right.

“It’s…” Garvesh began.

“A prototype?” Krahe interrupted.

“Yeah. A real, bleedin’-edge prototype. Not like that Silver Slip Key I’ve got on display. Straight from Kristoffen Heavy Ironworks. Y’know, the folks that make the dregsteamers. The “Black Sun Project” is their answer to the lucrative mid-ranker market. Idea is you start off with a dregsteamer and then buy one of these when you “make it”. They want their special catalyst to adapt to the user at first coupling, and then have it re-adapt to any new souldregs the user decides to introduce. Ambitious if nothing else.”

“And the armor?”

“Part of the coupler system. It’s a support framework for the suit to form around, supposed to make the end result more resilient… They also haven’t been able to make the coupler work with a full-construct framework. It was either compatibility grafts for the user, or this framework. You’re supposed to be able to customize the supports in the final version, y’know, get your own custom armor fitted to it and shit, ‘least that’s how they plan to advertise it so they can upsell the users on overpriced premium supports.”

“Not my problem,” Krahe shrugged. “What is my problem, though, is that using a dregsteamer is bad enough. I’ve seen the state Casus ended up in. What’s the catch with this one? Is it the same side effects as a dregsteamer, but even worse? I can cope, but I’d rather know that the crash is coming.”

“High cognitive strain factor and Throughput requirements for the performance, the catalyst doesn’t even respond to eight out of ten testers, the prototypes have a habit of just burning out within a handful of uses, or even if you push them too hard. This one uh… Let’s say it “had some quality control issues and got sent off for inspection”. If it responds to you, I’ll make the call and my friend will have an “accident that destroys the unit”. Hold on, I’ll plug it into the diagnostic unit.”

The unit was a chunky box twice the belt’s size with a projection eye and black cables coming out of it, one of which was connected to a similarly cubular unit with a small thaumine fuel cell - a power source. The others, Garvesh cautiously plugged into an out-of-place port on the prototype coupler’s belt, connected to the main unit with a thin cable.

As he did so, he continued speaking in a surprisingly enthusiastic manner: “I figured it would work for you, since you’ve got that funky new spine. You’ll be fine if it doesn’t, it’s not like… Uch, this one really doesn’t want to go in… There we go. As I was saying, it’s not like the Silberblut Coupler, at worst you’ll get a splitting headache and detransform. They worked out the aneurysm problem three iterations ago. Put on the framework armor for while I set this up.”

Krahe did as was asked of her, finding that besides belts, the armor also had quite complex internal frames that automatically shifted to fit her. She couldn't help but smile. This - all this, from Garvesh’s spiel to the bleeding-edge prototype - was bringing back a slew of memories. She couldn’t help but notice the asymmetry in the bracers and the shoulder-plates. The right bracer had lighter plating in exchange for a socket of some kind, while the left bracer and shoulder plate were both substantially chunkier, with the left bracer almost forming a small shield.

“Alright… Just a few more…” Garvesh rumbled under his breath. The lizard finally managed to get the diagnostic unit to flicker from a continuous downpour of readouts to a single floating message:

AWAITING TEST USER

“Now pull your key and slot it into the belt. You haven’t had it in for long so it shouldn’t be difficult to extract.”

137 - Re: Lost Sun Killer Myth [Cherno]

“Gashward?” the banisher questioned, setting down his book and following in her stead. “You truly did find a hole, I don’t actually know where that is. And yes, I would like stir-fry. Same as last time?”

“Spicier, but more or less the same. Found these mushrooms that have a texture and flavor sort of like pork, but also contain hot pepper oils,” she said, half-mindedly setting the burner to full blast. White flame erupted from the ring, and a small bubble gurgled up through the stove’s fuel tank, shimmering white liquid swirling behind a translucent gauge.

“Are overly spiced foods another one of those foldover things for you? A matter of nostalgia?”

“You could say that,” she said with a slightly somber tone. “Everything was either spiced all to hell with synthetic filth or full of sweet corn syrup. Or both…”

A few moments and mouthfuls of the colorful dish passed.

“...But stir-fry just doesn’t taste right if it’s not spicy, at least to me. Is it too much? I expected you to have a high tolerance for heat.”

Casus curiously scooping rice and individual pieces of vegetables, roots, and meat-mushrooms, replied: “I do, but I cannot help but notice the glaring discrepancy between foods I eat in restaurants or at the temple, versus your cooking. I also cannot help but find it strange that you cook at all. I expected you to take full advantage of the city’s street vendors.”

“Who says I don’t?”

“Fair point.”

___________________________________________________________________________________

More investigation. Another direction. Another lead. It was an awkward hour, early in the morning, when the place was all but deserted save for a small group of diehards in the lobby, trudging onward through a more than twelve-hour session of wargames. Krahe wagered that her arrha paled in comparison to the stuff they were hopped up on; she’d seen them drinking and smoking various things, as well as chewing roots of some kind.

A pile of ash and cigarette butts began to occupy some of her Kenoma Pocket as she searched through the Lost Sun society’s library. Despite its comparatively small size, it took her far longer to go through any single row of books due to their greater substance. In a public library, she skimmed all but one out of seven or eight books, and only read into one out of fifteen, but here, every third and sometimes every other book had some thread of promise begging for Krahe to pull and unravel.

Inevitably, however, she found what she was searching for. The library’s contents were all clustered together by topic if applicable, except for one: Anathemism. These books and scrolls were conveniently scattered in weird places, places in some of the few spots with dust and cobwebs. They were even covered in fake coats of these things, distinguishable only by how they differed from the library’s own, natural dust and webs. She referenced everything she found against the index of the library’s volumes. It seemed as if none were missing, but a few volumes had pages that were… Wrong. They were there, very much so, but they weren’t the original pages.

She checked the index again.

The downright demonic-looking book in her hand - Anathemia Oscura - had been repaired recently. Pages had been found missing. The dust cover also concealed a slip with the same information, as well as a bounty offer from the librarian for whoever found the culprit. It wasn’t much.

This, alone, was just a grain atop a pile of golden sand that Krahe would melt down to later use for joining the shards of this case together. There weren’t very many. Her study of Anathemia Oscura yielded little headway in the case; the removed pages pertained to various obscure methods by which someone could protect herself against anathema, as well as how one could prepare and mitigate the deleterious effects of using anathemism.

Krahe felt the mounting weight of exhaustion crawling up her back as she rolled open another scroll, and found that it was a fragment. What little of it was intact detailed the gruesome fate of some anathemists, and the similarly gruesome things that had been done to harness their unrotting corpses. It only barely began to describe the anatomical effects of bone-deep anathema burns before it cut off. She recorded everything she could about the partial scroll, put everything back where it had been, and left like a ghost, stepping out straight into the side alley rather than leave out through the door.

She was sure that she would find what she needed in the Temple of Records, and upon visiting that place, that hunch turned out true. Speaking with the librarian went as such:

“I came upon a partial scroll pertaining to the ultimate fates of certain extreme anathemists, titled Burning Torment Wrought in Black. Does the Temple of Records carry a complete copy?”

“That is the case, yes. However, it is in a restricted section that appears to be beyond your clearance.”

“Figures. Someone should have already put in an elevated access request on my behalf, what is the status of that?”

“...Still processing. I expect that it will be no more than two or three days, so I will have the text prepared and held in reserve. If the request is approved, you may bring the proof and pick up your scroll the same day.”

Two to three days was a fair bit sooner than her next checkup with Firminus, but she supposed it was an acceptable problem to have. She banished bureaucracy from her mind for now. Garvesh was waiting.

And he was, indeed, waiting, not just in the figurative sense.

“You’re an hour fuckin’ late!” he chided her when she arrived. It was a lie. She was only half an hour late, and it was only because she had to shake someone she was sure had begun following her. “Egh, fuckin’ whatever. Come into the back, this isn’t something for the front end.”

He led her into the storeroom, where, atop a heavy metal crate, a truly heavy-duty, secure-looking box sat, alongside several pieces of chunky, yet computer-like hardware. More than anything, it felt like corporate prototype hardware… And her hunch turned out to be right when she asked: “What is it?”

“A Mamon Coupler. For when you have a go at Hashem.”

302 - Formless Destroyer Sutra One: Everything is Violence [Sturmblitz]

The Golden Brother’s killing technique was, most of all, very interesting. Zelsys had seen a move like that; one of Halxian’s. Regardless of whether there was a real connection or if it was simple coincidence, that move was an awe-inspiring display that would serve to grow Halxian’s techniques.

In that same sentiment, the triplets were monstrous. Stronger than anyone she had fought before Ubul, perhaps among the strongest in the country… And they were doomed. Doomed to be consumed, to have their meticulous arts dissected and incorporated into the growing behemoth of Sturmblitz Kunst.

It was undeniable.

And yet, the Triplets didn’t seem like they were even considering giving up. They exchanged uneasy, yet determined glances, and Zelsys felt excitement rise, knowing that they were going to pull out some final ace. A few hand signs followed, and something changed, so quickly it could be a blink and you’ll miss it moment to anyone without a substantially superhuman mental processing speed. Before, their formation had served to empower just one of them. Whatever they had just done gave all three of them that same feeling of magnitude, and they moved to fall upon her like one mind in three bodies, rather than three individuals in near-perfect sync.

PINNACLE FORMATION

ABSOLUTE UNION OF SPIRIT

THREE KINGS ASTRAL CONJOINING

_________________________________________________________________________

Roderick had seen them practicing the formation through the Three Kings False Conjoining, a lesser version, and he was also among the few to see the real thing, exactly once. The formation, though named after the Three Kings of yore, had little to do with them; the Triplets’ family just so happened to be descendants of nobles from that era. In combat, it had no weaknesses. The problems came after the fact. Separating could be charitably described as traumatic; the last time they had done it, the time Roderick had seen, the Triplets were out of commission for months, and they were never quite the same afterward. That was the second major flaw - the separation wasn’t perfect. The triplets’ personalities and memories bled into one another. Since they were already near-copies of one another it wasn’t a major issue psychologically, but rather due to the fact it disrupted their martial arts and forced them to undergo remedial training after each use.

Taking this opportunity, Roderick clandestinely ordered all his surviving subordinates to coordinate attacks with the Triplets.

At first, it looked to be working.

It looked like she had been consumed by the combination assault.

That hope of Roderick’s was dashed when he caught a glimpse, and beheld a swirling dome of blades and lightning, enclosing the Living Tribulation. It refused to budge against any attack and moved with such terrible violence that it seemed to be creating a dome of force, but Roderick sensed no energies that would suggest such a defensive formation. Terrifyingly, rather than a spiritual or magical method, the defensive technique was repelling attacks through incredibly potent magnetic fields… And sonic booms. A constant tsunami of thundercracks in all directions. What few attacks managed to penetrate these outer layers were either simply bounced off or torn to shreds like paper.

_______________________________________________________________________________

If there was any appropriate moment to pull out the stops, it was this. Zelsys felt herself on the precipice of grasping another thread of enlightenment… No, that wasn’t it. She was grasping in an effort to spin her own thread from thin air, forming a new truth rather than trying to comprehend someone else’s. Combat elixirs of her own body’s making flooded into her veins. In a near-instant motion she summoned a bottle of Witch’s Brew, melted a tiny hole in its bottom by wreathing her thumb in lightning, and effectively inhaled its contents.

MYRIAD BLADES DANCE IN UNISON

GEHEIMNIS: THOUSAND-FANG FLAMENCO -ENLIGHTENMENT REPRISE-

Suddenly, she stilled. From an implacable blur of motion, blades, and lightning, the Walking Tribulation suddenly came to a halt in the middle of the open street, amidst carnage and desolation.

With her head tilted back and eyes cast skyward, she was smiling. Not grinning, madly, consumed by violence, as she had been this whole time, but smiling. Her smile widened, and with it, her ominous, invisible aura flared, and then seemed to retract into her. That whole time, a deluge of strikes and magicks rained down upon her, mighty techniques smashing against the whirling wall of blades that was her weapon. Thousands, tens of thousands of needles and daggers swarmed towards her from the Order’s hidden weapon specialists, yet the only purpose they seemed to serve was to become more mass in her metallic aegis.

“I get it now! Everything is violence! Everything is predator and prey! All of existence can be interpreted as nothing more than an unending dance of predation and violence! The sun, yes, the sun, too, is a warrior, a predator, guarding its territory!”

A deep, roar-like laughter thundered out from her, and then, utter tranquility came over her as she tilted her head forwards, sweeping her gaze over those before her, and then the ground. Her next utterance, though clear, was far quieter, meant for herself. Nonetheless, he heard it, and knew that his death was nigh.

“...anything can be my fangs, and anything can be my prey. It feels like I’ve always known, but only now has it truly fallen into place.”

In a flick of her arm, defense became offense. An inconceivable upsurge of lightning poured out from her, as if she’d just been hiding the power of a storm within her all this time. It was, of course, the Retributive Battery, fed so generously by the battle up until this point, but Roderick had no way to know that. In an instant, her blade’s dozens of segments lashed out. There was a roar-like, prolonged thunderclap. A hundred heads fell to the ground, their bodies riddled with their own throwing daggers and needles.

With the return lash that drew back the blade, the Triplets also met their ends. Given the positioning, Roderick estimated that it had been intended to behead them. It was more accurate to say their necks were simply gone, shredded out of being. Their bodies suddenly became ravaged with wounds that hadn’t been there before, as if caused by the claws of some invisible beast.

STEEL FLOWS AS LIGHTNING

LEAVING NONE TO HEAR THE THUNDER

BUTCHERING ART: BEHEADING SCOLOPENDRA

301 - 77-Tailed Death God [Sturmblitz]

Carnifex writhed and darted about at her command, its many-segmented mass encircling the enemy. It seamlessly formed into differing numbers of Fang Rippers between each lash, changing its length in awkward ways that forced the three siblings on the defensive. The opportunities began all but offering themselves to her, but Zelsys pulled back, allowing the Silver Sister just enough room to do something. She didn’t disappoint, gathering armament aura around her shield and forming a giant, ghostly version of it. Then, she threw the actual shield, spinning towards Zelsys, attached to her arm by an aura thread.

The technique inevitably shattered under the relentless buzzsaw ripping of multiple Fang Rippers bearing down on it at once.

The actual shield soon followed that fate.

The Silver Sister seemed wounded as if she herself had lost a limb, despite the visible absence of backlash. She shook it off quite quickly, choosing to rotate out with the Silver Brother.

He was… Notably more impressive. He managed to hold his own against her onslaught for some time, deftly deflecting her strikes with parries that, physically, could not possibly have achieved what they did. It was kineticism, no doubt about it.

Zelsys relished in purposely letting a riposte “slip”. It was a huge, mighty thrust, empowered by armament aura and surpassing the speed of sound several times over. It was brought to an anticlimactic halt when it “struck”, penetrating no more than a centimeter into Zel’s skin, robbed of its momentum by Siphoning Pulse. The smug look of self-satisfaction on her face was more than enough to spark a realization in Silver’s mind: “I can do that too.”

Before he could draw his blade back, she had already grabbed it in hand and forced one of her Thundergods into it. The beast emerged near the hilt and savagely bit into Silver Brother’s wrist, forcing him to let go of his weapon. His eyes jumped between his weapon and her face, and he gave her a furiously indignant look that almost made her feel bad for taking the sword from him. It really was a very nice sword.

“Don’t worry, I won’t use your own weapon against you. See, my cultivation method has a crippling flaw…” Zel explained, letting the rapier slide through her grasp so she could take it by the handle. Meanwhile, Carnifex retracted, its many segments connecting into an absurdly long shape before quickly collapsing down into its normal length. Several Fang Rippers also returned to her side, coated in gore from slaughtered fodder who had tried to sneak around back. As this all took place, the three siblings rotated once more, the Golden Brother taking the helm. The Silver Brother’s blade cracked in Zel’s grasp, and the blade snapped off halfway down its length. She dropped it, completing the sentence: “...It tends to place terrible strain upon any weapon other than those bound to me. However, I find that it has become more of a neat trick than a problem.”

Rather than try to strike out at her again, the Golden Brother prioritized fending off Zel’s ceaseless barrage of probing attacks. Long-range strikes with Carnifex, similar attacks using some Thundergods while others threw Fang Spears, shots from her arm-cannon of all sorts, from high-velocity to shotshell to pure lightning. At any given time, no fewer than three Fang Rippers constantly tried to surround the siblings and eviscerate them. Sometimes, she just had one spend all its energy on launching one of its Fangs as a spear, recovering the idle construct once it was within her soul’s reach. All throughout, bolts and beads of lightning wrought from her own aura were peppered in.

Out of anyone on the battlefield, Zelsys was the most keenly aware of how ridiculous it was to call this onslaught “casual”. Yet, that was the truth. Compared to the heights of violence her current self was capable of, this was casual, this was toned-down. And, the triplets, to their credit, not only weathered it, but managed to strike back with an intensity that very nearly matched hers. In the wake of their battle, a swath of utter desolation was left. Neither Zel’s nor the Golden Brother’s strikes spared anything they happened to strike, passing seemingly unimpeded through buildings and the solid ground. Every once in a while - or, by mortal perception, every other second - one of the Golden Brother’s ribbon-bound blades managed to not just graze her, but to strike well-enough that it caused damage. They were precise, frighteningly so, striking at the exact points to paralyze, to cause wracking pain, to turn a vein into a gushing fountain or to inflict catastrophic organ failure with tiny injury.

It brought Zelsys to a truly hideous, cackling grimace. Her body had weak points such as these, for they could not be eradicated, but they were both few in number and well removed from their places on a normal human. The Golden Brother quickly noticed, but not quickly enough, not quickly enough to avoid over-investing. His aura blazed up like a human pyre in his latest, valiant effort, a flurry of blows creating innumerable phantom blades to accompany the seven. Despite having the power to tear apart solid stone and simply go through grown men as if they were not even there, Zel’s defenses caused less than one in twenty attacks to land, and all these managed to do was riddle her body with small, shallow wounds, cutting some veins and nerves here and there by virtue of chance.

77-TAILED DEATH GOD SIGN

CERTAIN DEATH BY A THOUSAND LASHES

The chase briefly came to a halt at the precipice of the inner city, as the siblings landed on a roof to recenter themselves. Zel did much the same, recovering from the effort she had spent on defense, though it was more of a light breather for her compared to the Golden Brother’s heart-scrambling, buckled-knees struggle to stay upright. The triplets stared at her with disbelieving eyes as she not only didn’t explode on the spot from having all her weak points struck over and over again, but also healed from her injuries right there on the spot. There was an insidious aspect to them; with each strike, the Golden Brother had injected some of his own aura into her. It would’ve been an issue, had her own Predator Aura not torn it to shreds; after all, she wasn’t spending it on constructs or spilling it out willy-nilly, so it was that much stronger within her body and immediately around it.

300 - Meanwhile, the Elder is Having Fun [Sturmblitz]

“I thought they would try to hide the weak points instead of so openly defending them,” Victor said.

“I do not think they had a choice with this one. Look - they were trying to shore it up when we interrupted them,” Zefaris said, pointing to a shredded corpse with what looked vaguely like the remains of painting supplies. A bottle of crimson-red paint spilled out across the cobbles, the puddle somehow remaining separate from the actual array pattern. “Come, help me break the barrier.”

That process entailed Victor forming a large devilbone blade around his spear, its surface covered in an upscaled version of the same pattern as the Terminal Fangs. The vortex split open around it, and while he held a section of it wrenched-open in this manner, Zefaris fired several small Black Nails into spots around the barrier glyph’s perimeter to further weaken the vortex.

All this, in an effort to possibly save the man being used to power it. The moment Victor came into the cocooned man’s vicinity, though, he knew. It was fairly obvious just from the fact he seemed to go comatose the moment the barrier dispersed, but Victor knew for certain.

“He’s doomed. Whatever they did to him caused similar internal and spiritual deformations as the flesh beasts. They turned him into little more than a… Living battery.”

He looked up at Zefaris, whose attention seemed to be on the pillar of ice which her eye was carving from thin air at this very moment, though he knew she was listening.

“Do you mind?”

“Hm?”

“I can do the same thing I did to the flesh beasts. Remove the spiritual restraints and turn what’s left of him against the Order.”

“Go ahead,” she deadpanned with a grim detachment.

Compared to the flesh beasts, a living battery was trivial. The energy within it, though seething and resentful just like the flesh beasts, didn’t lash out at him. Instead, the moment he undid the Order’s security enchantments, the battery’s energy eagerly reshaped itself to his intent. Its return into the body induced a violent transformation into a hulking, musclebound biped with three-segmented arms. Bony plates formed over its skin, spurs erupting from its elbows, knees and heels. The ape-like Flesh Soldier began feverishly patrolling around them, only to catch sight of two Flesh Unions engaged in battle with a Blue Robe. Screaming in mindless rage, the beast went bounding towards them.

Victor didn’t have time to observe, as he immediately had to focus on helping Zefaris construct the array disruption pylon. While they worked, Victor recalled his servitors to guard them, while Zefaris recalled all of her Phantoms to dedicate every iota of spiritual strength to this task.

_____________________________________________________________________

Meanwhile, a short time earlier across the city…

_____________________________________________________________________

Zelsys hadn’t enjoyed herself this much since Borea. Sure, this bunch wasn’t anywhere near able to truly push her, but what did that matter? They were good enough to stretch her wings, to really get a good feel for how Carnifex worked against a near-peer enemy. The hardest part of piercing deeply into the city had nothing to do with keeping herself safe, and everything to do with safekeeping the tankmen and her fellow sect members.

A handful of unique foes made a clear effort to halt her advance as she neared the inner city, but none of them managed to do more than slow her down. None of them were Red. Well, quite a few of them were red in terms of clothing, but none of them were Karmesin.

Streaks of draconic flame tore through the sky, the thunder of cannons in the distance, Zero’s absurdly loud speakers screaming derision at whatever poor fool tried to argue his way into a few extra seconds of life. Zel found herself faced with a trio of Red Robes, all clad in a unique version of the garment. Two men and a woman; one man and woman had cloudy, flowing patterns in silver thread embroidered into their robes, while the third, apparently the leader, had a more complex version of those same patterns in gold. All three were Ikesian, resembled one another as siblings would, and looked as youthful as one could, but Zelsys could see the decades behind their eyes, no less than fifty or sixty for each of them. She mentally nicknamed them Silver Sister, Silver Brother, and Gold Brother.

Refreshingly, they didn’t try to talk down to her, or to do the whole outraged cultivators gimmick. The only thing she got was a question: “One, two, or three?”

“Three,” she answered out of curiosity.

A faint nod and a series of gestures later, and the trio’s auras flared in unison as they floated into a triangular formation with the Silver Sister in front. Something was different about them; though still tainted and tinged crimson, their aura didn’t come off nearly as revolting as the others. Perhaps a different cultivation method, or a different sub-faction of the same sect. Of course, none of the still-lingering trash on the periphery stopped circling her and trying to take pot shots, but that was fine. They put on a rather impressive show, revolving about one another only to end up with the woman in silver facing Zelsys, with the other two’s aura seemingly pouring into her. Veins bulged under her skin and her eyes blanked out with a bright glow, drawing out a bayonet-like stabbing sword and a small buckler with razor-like edges. Powerful aura blasted out from the woman, only to implode back into her and enshroud her armaments. Meanwhile, the brothers brought out their own weapons. Silver had a long, slender basket hilt sword in one hand and a crossguard dagger of the same slender countenance in the other. Gold, meanwhile, brought out seven heavy knives attached to long, glyph-embroidered ribbons that moved as if alive. It would’ve impressed anyone other than Zelsys.

The trio set upon Zelsys with an utterly perfect synchronicity, the Silver Sister unleashing attacks of impressive power and accuracy. For once, she actually had to pay attention and take some care not to get hit. A part of her wanted to just use every opportunity available to break the three of them as quickly as possible, but she felt something there.

So, she played with them just as she had done with those before them, pushing the fight further and further into the city.