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271 - Favonia Pt. 5 [Cherno]

Given the size of the ejection port and the grip, the gun fell squarely into the territory of handcannons. Krahe wagered this thing could load the sizable thaumshot projectiles of reapers and have some room leftover, which was strange, because those were the largest-diameter bullets she’d encountered besides those used in ridiculous intimidation pieces. There was a maker’s mark on the receiver’s underside, formed by silver inlay that sharply contrasted against the dark, blued metal. It was the outline of a clawed forearm, strikingly similar to the Wandrei Faust’s core symbol, but clearly based on Favonia’s left arm. Working the slide a few times, Krahe had no issue grasping the action’s mechanics, putting aside the slightly out-of-place sheen she glimpsed inside the chamber and barrel. The rifling seemed strange, with a somewhat aggressive “hills and valleys” profile that sat somewhere between standard cut rifling and polygonal rifling — that is to say, the rifling, too, was an organic shape.

“Striker-fired, tilting barrel. Recoil-operated, I think. Think there might be an omniphage inside, or something else organic. The only thing that doesn’t really make sense to me is the barrel diameter. Too big even for reapers. My horizons must be too narrow to know what makes this diameter the right one.”

“Yours uses the standard necked-down six-point-three by twenty-five millimeter cartridges, right? Go on, load one of yours into the chamber.”

Krahe did as asked, and, conforming to her expectations, the chamber constricted around the bullet. It even went so far as to constrict the barrel to the diameter of the bullet, rather than the cartridge.

“Impressive, very much so considering how underdeveloped Ashametan’s firearms are due to the system. Guess it’s more fitting to say Audunpoint’s firearms, since I haven’t exactly traveled far. I hope it’s not a disappointment that I can’t say that I’m shocked this is possible, after all I’ve seen,” Krahe admitted. “Omniphage?”

“Omniphage indeed,” Favonia confirmed with a nod. “So widespread, but so few know what it is.”

Now that Krahe thought of it, she didn’t know what omniphage was. She knew that in some way her biosuit was similar to omniphage, that omniphage was amorphous, and that it could take on a wide variety of properties, but that was about it. “What is it? Living metal? Slime mold? Amoeba? A swarm of machines too tiny to be seen by the naked eye?” she asked.

“Yes. All of the above. We don’t know, but we have good guesses,” Favonia said. “Do you want the long version?”

“Feel free,” Krahe agreed.

Dragging from her cigar, Favonia began speaking, letting the smoke slowly spill out of her mouth as she did, forming many smaller tendrils that almost resembled writhing tongues of fire. “Some are sapient, some barely react at all, some are truly formless, others form a distinct mass around a core. Some live eating ore in the ground, others exist only as cultures in grafting labs, and others still dwell deep within the Wheel, devouring or capturing intruders. There are, indeed, even fully artificial omniphages composed of minuscule automata, such as those employed in Dregsteam Couplers. Every single one can be considered a soulbeast of a sort, only they have no True Soul, thus they cannot die any more than a mundane fungus can — yes, a fungus can become a soulbeast and thus form a True Soul. Of course, automaton-omniphages merely imitate a natural omniphage’s properties, usually by burning thaumine fuel. If you are sufficiently skilled, sufficiently powerful, you could even take a vat of liquid-metal alloy and simply turn it into an omniphage without any of the complex inbetween steps.”

Favonia took another drag, then gestured with her cigar at the slab of living iron that was the handcannon.

“The one within that gun is, mentally, very much on the animal side. It can sit dormant for years without issue, but it wants to be used, because then it can feed and develop, which in turn makes the gun stronger. And… In truth, I would feel remiss if it went unused for much longer than it already has. Thus, I will give it to you — so long as you swear to use it, or failing that, pass it onto another you think worthy just as I have passed it unto you.”

While Favonia spoke, Krahe took the time to appraise the firearm. Besides Favonia’s silver left hand, there were no markings, no serial number. She didn’t learn much of anything from the system appraisal, as it merely repeated what she already knew. What she did learn was the firearm’s true name - Nu-Vasara.

“There is wordplay to the name, isn’t there?” Krahe asked.

“Casus mentioned that you also do this,” Favonia smiled. “Vasara means something that is at once indestructible and unstoppable, but it can also just mean an implement for smashing things. Nu as in new, but it also the first syllable of my left arm's original owner. We do not know his actual name, as he was an Unlettered Saint.”

Krahe worked the slide again, with the bullet dropping out of the ejection port. A few more racks and a few dry trigger pulls later, she had decided that she liked how the gun felt, with the exception of the grip, shaped to Favonia’s hand as it was. The grip suddenly gave way in her grasp, and its shape shifted to one nearly perfectly suited for her hand.

“It looks like the decision has been made in your place,” Favonia chuckled. She stubbed out her cigar, tucking it into the roiling-red mass of her hair as she stood up, once more reminding Krahe of just how massive she was. “As I said, we best make full use of what time I do have.. We can make our way to the nearest shrine with a seclusion-gym, you can put a few dozen rounds through the Nu-Vasara to get a feel for it, and then you can run yourself ragged trying to make me move in order to dodge one of your attacks. I’ll find out in what areas you lack before Casus finishes scraping the gore from the seams of his skin.”

Besides the instinctive irritation that she felt at being spoken to in this way, Krahe also felt an uncanny familiarity. In some way, she could almost see Sauer speaking like this, if he had been thirty years younger when she had found him. Krahe also took a long pull of her cigar, stubbed it out, stored it away, and stood up.

“You decided to do this sooner than you had intended because you can tell I really want to shoot you,” she said, already making her way towards the door.

“That, and because I’ve decided that you are more interesting than I had anticipated,” the giant banisher added, catching up in a single step. She wrapped one arm around Krahe’s shoulders. “I want to see what you can do just as much as you want to try and break my nose.”

270 - Favonia Pt. 4 (The Other Gun) [Cherno]

In the meanwhile, while Favonia fussed over her gun, Krahe finally took a moment to appraise the black-gold cigar.

[SEVEN-SIDED SPIRE RELIC CIGAR NO. 31]

[Status:]

Unparallelled Quality

Impeccable

[Details:]

Mental Clarification C1

Thought Ordering C1

Thought Control D2

Enhance Recall D3

Stress Release C3

Soul Furnace Repair D3

Gradual Soul Furnace Reinforcement D2

Persistent Entropy Cleansing D3

Persistent Toxin Cleansing D2

When lit, this cigar will never fully burn down. Upon being snuffed out, this cigar will begin restoring itself, and may be used again upon its full restoration.

Current time to restoration: N/A

“So the cigar’s a long-term investment, is it?” Krahe asked even as she cut the end off of her cigar and lit it with a flick of her thumb. The flavour was already unique, but so was the texture — the smoke was viscous, in a way. Krahe really wasn’t sure what exactly she was tasting, the only thing she could make out was a sort of cold warmth and bitter sweetness. Much like the colors of Kenoma weren’t properly describable in words, the same went for the first-time experience of smoking the Seven-sided Spire Cigar.

“Only forty-eight of them in the world, consider it a collector’s item. Don’t expect any miracles. No matter the rating, an infinitely reusable cigar can only do so much all at once. Still, it helps smooth things out, makes my regimen much easier. The restoration usually takes two, three days maybe, it varies.”

Exhaling, Krahe took a second, much longer drag, this time actually inhaling the smoke. It wasn’t what you usually did with mundane cigars, but she’d seen Favonia do it, so she figured she would follow her lead in this matter. There was a burning, but more akin to the burning of menthol than that of fire. She also noticed the hot-cold viscosity seeping past the physical, reaching far inward, presumably into her Soul Furnace. After observing Krahe with a slight measure of amusement, Favonia’s attention had quickly returned to the gun.

“Been cleaning it as the manual says, good. Ever shoot theurgic bullets from another gun?” Favonia asked as she worked the Pattner’s mechanism.

Krahe nodded, “They foul like crazy.”

Leaning forward, peering down the barrel through the chamber, Favonia commented: “If you don’t clean the Pattner, it’ll start fouling, too, after a while. It’s leveraged in reverse. Because you’ve cleaned it, it can’t be filthy. That’s the only part of the design I’ve been able to figure out in all the years I’ve had mine. I hate that old bastard. Makes a handful of masterpieces and just dies without passing on the know-how.”

Finally, she reassembled the gun and set it down on the table. “It’s truly remarkable. To say it’s enchanted would be wrong, yet it’s the most powerful firearm on the face of Zastreon. No matter what corrosive unguents, what power you channel through it, the Pattner doesn’t care. I’ve put things through mine that would burst a cannon at the seams if it wasn’t specifically built for the purpose. I’m sure you know all this, it just doesn’t really sink in until you’re blowing up buildings with one shot. A sword that never dulls, never becomes dirty, that withstands any dragon’s flame and boiling blood, so long as you merely polish and sharpen it.”

“It’s easy to forget,” Krahe admitted. “Even for me. If anyone knows the pains of maintenance, it’s me.”

It was now, at this moment, exhorting the virtues of a gun, that she felt the strongest kinship with Favonia. This was the moment when Krahe first felt that Favonia was an actual person, despite having met, spoken with, and killed individuals of greater stature. The entire point of her obsession with the Blackhand Radiation Emitters had been a desire for the ability to take down any cyborg no matter the size in one shot, after all. She wasn’t sure they could down Favonia even in three or four shots.

“I’ve seen and heard enough. I have a suitable way to put right the remainder of my debt,” Favonia said, resolutely. It almost sounded like she had decided to kill someone, but she merely reached into her hair and pulled out another gun… And Krahe immediately felt her attention magnetize to it. This was perhaps the first self-loader of good pedigree that she had encountered since her arrival. There had been some pieces here and there, some wielded by gangsters and others on display at gun stores, but they had been all, for lack of a better term, mundane. Most of the self-loaders she’d encountered had been fairly cheap, and the few that weren’t were instead gaudy craft-pieces marketed as permitting strong magical firepower to any wielder. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that her Pattner gave off a distinct magical aura, to the contrary in fact — it seemed to be completely devoid of it, even the subtle traces that could sometimes stick to things. Magic of any kind other than its own subtle enchantments just slid off of it. This gun felt similar, albeit not quite to the same extent. In terms of design, it was like nothing she’d encountered on Zastreon. It thrummed with a subtle power quite unlike the Pattner, but still infinitely more similar to the feeling the Pattner gave her than the feeling of any other enchanted object.

“Want to take a closer look,” Krahe stated plainly.

“Of course,” Favonia agreed, readily handing the beastly firearm over to her.

To begin with, the gun was massive. Not just because it was sized for Favonia’s hands, but also by virtue of its design. Unlike the Pattner, this one’s upper half was a monolith, with the receiver being a single solid piece of metal, sloping down towards the muzzle, which was placed extremely low. The gun had a slide, half of which was walled-in by the receiver, with a triangular section of it protruding overtop the receiver’s sloping shape. At the back, there was a charging handle, similar to that of an armalite-type rifle, which moved the entire slide. By comparison to the firearm’s brutal, mace-like body, its grip had an elegantly contoured shape that at once evoked the curved handles of flintlocks while still having ergonomics that would properly make use of the gun’s absurdly low bore-axis, which, Krahe surmised, was the key aspect of its design, allowing it to load high-powered ammunition without suffering too much in terms of recoil, or alternatively allowing it to have extraordinarily easy-to-handle recoil and short adjustment times between shots. This was all assuming a wielder of proportionate strength, of course. The trigger matched the grip, being two-step, and while at first pull it seemed heavy, it suddenly became exactly as light as Krahe preferred on the second pull. There was a manual safety near the trigger-guard that would simply block the trigger, and was clearly designed to be much easier to disengage than to engage.

269 - Favonia Pt. 3 [Cherno]

A simple upgrade for the Prospector’s Eyes was one thing. It was entirely believable that Casus may have mentioned Krahe’s use of the artifact and its, by now, severely subpar specifications. Krahe had, after all, not mentioned her commissioning of upgraded lenses, and she had not met with Casus since she had picked up her order from the craftsman, meaning he had no way to know. Therefore, if their mentality really was as similar as Casus and Favonia both seemed to think, Favonia could have easily deduced that Krahe would appreciate such an upgrade. Even the possibility of the artifact having additional features beyond visual info-gathering wasn’t that much of a stretch — a face-concealment function especially fit her like a glove. The thing that gave her pause was, well, everything else. It wasn’t just the Oculae were a high-grade artifact. They were, at this point, easily the most powerful magical item in her possession, surpassing even the Atomica, if not in future potential, then at least in terms of how much power she could extract from wielding them right here and now. The ability to halt anyone, no matter what, with the caveat of meeting their gaze, was monstrously powerful, especially if she kept that condition to herself and made sure to kill any enemy who figured it out. Salting the Wounds would permit her to be less lethal in her approach without necessitating a major change in tactics, and would be very useful as a method of disruption against nearly any opponent, especially if its method of imposing “pain” was truly as esoteric and conceptual as the spec readout claimed. Imposing evere pain on an individual that wasn’t properly acquainted with it, for instance due to relying on magical defenses all their life, or perhaps due to being a monster that lacked traditional pain receptors, could prove to be terribly effective. As she went over the system readout and allowed herself to engage in the theoretical scenario of Favonia thinking similarly to herself, Krahe decided that the Oculae were most likely repayment for a perceived debt.

Finally, she gave voice to that train of thought.

“I understand that the gap between us is enormous, but something tells me this isn’t something as simple as a hand-me-down. These are for Casus, aren’t they?” she asked, tapping the Oculae’s frame with a finger.

Favonia drew from her cigar, weighing her words, not necessarily what to say, but how to say it. “I cannot truthfully say that the Oculae are my repayment for saving Casus’ life. The efforts I made and resources I spent to have them made are not equal to the losses his death would incur… Both as a graft-apostle and as a brother. The scales are not yet even between us. I’ve put Casus through the wringer in the effort to harden his hands enough to wield Eisenretter, and soon, it will be your turn. Unfinished thaumaturgies, flawed martial arts, anything. I strongly doubt that there is no bottleneck, no blockage in your advancement that I cannot help break down in the short time I have left in Audunpoint.”

“Return late, leave early. Chasing someone across the continent?” Krahe asked, not expecting a straight answer. She wouldn’t give one, anyway.

Favonia answered as Krahe expected, at least in terms of what she said. 

“Can’t say why. Well, that’s a lie. I can, I just don’t want to explain the who, what, when, where, why. You don’t need to know, so I won’t tell you, simple. I only have a few more days in the city, and since I don’t have much time, I’d at least like to make it quality time.”

“Wouldn’t happen to do with the Wheel coming to a halt in around two weeks, would it? Now that I think of it, that’s probably why the glasses have those features. They’re insurance so I don’t get eaten by some interdimensional monstrosity, aren’t they?”

Favonia leaned forward in her seat, at least so far as her bust would allow, and gave Krahe a somewhat thoughtful look, just barely squinting her eyes. She exhaled a serpentine river of glowing-red smoke from her nostrils, as thick as one of Krahe’s arms.

“Yeah, that too. But they’re mostly for Casus. Otherwise I would’ve just give you a talisman or something,” the gigantic banisher eventually acquiesced. “So two weeks, huh? Thought we had more time than that. At least three or four. Why do you think so?”

“A wizard told me,” Krahe said, somewhat incredulous at her own words.

“A wizard or the wizard? Black staff, slit mouth, cloudy eyes. If it was him, we best take him at his word.”

“...That was him, yes. Two weeks and three days. Two days, now. Do you know-” Krahe began. And again, that damn woman interrupted her.

“I’ve only met him a few times. Usually says something that doesn’t seem to quite make sense, laughs, and then disappears. The first time he gave me an elixir, said I was ‘not quite right, but interesting’ and that I should watch out for an ambush from one of my allies. With that timeline, I have even less time than I’d previously thought. Your gun, mind if I take a look? I can tell it’s a real series-one Pattner, I have number forty-six. I just want to confirm something.”

Krahe was a bit cagey about fulfilling the request, but she had shown her Pattner to Casus before. The only thing she had to do was remove the side plate before handing it over, since it had the serial number and dedication to Audun Sorun on the inside.

“It’s Sorun’s, right? Serial number one of seventy-two,” Favonia pointed out just as Krahe pulled the gun from its holster. “Don’t overthink it. Casus spilled that you’re a Greater Pilgrim, everything else fell into place — Jas’raba, the supermassive Archon Flash, Sorun’s disappearance. Hope he likes wherever he ended up, has to be better than the state he was in last I saw him.”

Krahe stopped. Her eye twitched.

“I really want to shoot you right now,” she said to Favonia.

Favonia chuckled.

“That’s fair. I must sound patronizing, don’t I? Can’t help it,” she shrugged. “I’m just trying to be friendly and go over everything that needs going over. It’s much easier to deal with monsters than people. Don’t have to play nice, then. Most folk prefer the way I act usually to the crusader. Just show me the gun, you can shoot me after.”

As Favonia spoke, she pulled a gun out of her hair, similar to Krahe’s Pattner, but a fair bit larger and with darker wood for its furniture. Finding herself feeling the same way she had felt during her encounter with the Wizard, Krahe let out a deeply frustrated sigh and handed over her gun. The banisher proceeded to inspect it in meticulous detail, stripping it down and reassembling it in the process.

268 - Favonia Pt. 2 (Vinculae Peregrinus) [Cherno]

“What is it?” Krahe questioned, turning the strange cigar over in her hand. It was much heavier than one might expect. Its scent reminded her of metal shavings, gunpowder, fusion reactor coolant. Heavy and industrial, yet it also had aromatic notes of perhaps some kind of incense or aromatic resin.

Rather than answer, Favonia smirked, and, reaching into her hair again, took out a pair of glasses. Silver frame, circular lenses. At a glance the same type of design as the Prospector’s Eyes, yet comparing the two almost seemed ridiculous. Though doubtful, Krahe took them in hand, taking hers off. She didn’t go so far as to place them fully on her head, but just looking through these glasses was already a bit much. Without any supply of thauma, they drew a distinct outline of everything in sight. It faded out of view in an instant, but a mere thought would highlight an object within her field of vision, raising its level of visual detail such that it stood out without necessarily drawing attention from anything else.

Favonia bit the end off of her cigar and just ate it outright, then lit it off of the gemstone on the back of her left hand. It came alight in bright red flame, giving off glowing-red smoke.

“The cigar is for answering my question forthrightly despite the fact I haven’t proven that I am trustworthy, based solely on the fact Casus believes I am trustworthy. The glasses are a gift, because I know better than anyone how many times my sight has saved me from poisoning or a curse. I wasn’t sure what type you might prefer, so I had a friend make a pair with the full suite of features that I figured would be useful. They’re not imprinted yet, you need to smear some blood on them before they’ll work for you.”

“Blood?” Krahe asked, still focused on the glasses. The lenses were neither glass nor any kind of polymer, and the metal definitely wasn’t silver. She could see a shifting pattern on the inside of the frame where it joined to the lenses, as well as the sides of the lenses themselves. “Microscopic runes, maybe?” she thougtht.

“I don’t like thaumic imprints," Favonia answered. "Convenient, but too fallible. A one-way blood binding, if someone gets ahold of them and tries to use the link to get at you, it’ll set off an embedded curse and send the glasses back to your Kenoma Sack, at the cost of the thief. Their problem if the strain kills them.”

Pulling the glasses away from her face, Krahe glanced down at the cigar, then up at Favonia.

“What’s the-”

Favonia interrupted, “No catch. I have only gotten as far as I have because I have been aided by others. To offer aid to another crusader, just as I have been aided in the past, is the bare minimum. Consider them a gift for rescuing Casus.”

Upon giving it some thought, Krahe figured she might as well. She made a tiny incision on her forearm, dipping one of the arm-ends of the spectacles in it. It instantly seeped into the metal, filling countless microscopic grooves, only to be completely absorbed. Right then and there, the glasses became her property in a manner that could not be subverted by any method other than her death. She put them on in place of the Prospector’s Eyes, and a mere thought brought up a readout of their characteristics. Favonia, with pride audible in her voice, began bragging about the features.

“Some fundamental vision-enhancement features, a multi-layered adjustable-intensity face-obscuring shroud, and two ‘big’ enchantments, one for each lens since they have to be all in one piece. One’s a set of sturdy chains and the other, a handful of salt for your scourge. With the first, if you meet someone’s gaze, you can make them freeze up for a moment. Two charges, recharge time depends on you. The second one makes thaumaturgies hurt as if they’d struck flesh even if you hit wards, slightly less through a barrier or a particularly thick Mamon Armor. It costs more to cast them that way, of course, but nothing’s free.”

When Krahe attempted to call up the glasses’ specifications, she found that they offered up two choices: A “pure system-generated” readout, and a file titled “spec readout edited - draft 4”. After going over the first, she opened the second and found it preferable, as its wording was clearer and less repetitive, and it had additional notes attached. Krahe couldn’t think of any features they could possibly be missing, it was almost as if she had designed these specifically as a direct upgrade for the Prospector’s Eyes as they were now. If anything was evidence of similar mentality between them, it was this.

NOTE: System-generated appraisal readout adjusted for readability and reduced repetition. This artifact. This artifact. This artifact. This artifact. Remove this when final readout draft complete. DON’T FORGET AGAIN. DRAFT 4

[OCULAE PEREGRINUS]

[Tags:]

Pure

Sacred

Fourth-order

Artifact

Eyewear

Active

Bloodbound

[Charge:]

2/2

[Details:]

Environmental Analysis (Selective Highlight)

Vision Zoom (At-Will, x10 Maximum)

Self-Adjusting Flash Protection

Appraise Object B3 (At-Will)

Anti-Appraisal Penetration B3

Extended Highlight Magic Object B1

Detect Baneworm C3

Detect Evoy B1

Detect Life C2 (At-Will, Range 10m, Universal Penetration B3)

This Artifact: 

Cannot be removed from its bearer by force.

Bestows its wearer with the boon “Salting the Wounds”

Possesses the unique function “Salt Mountain’s Visage”

Possesses the unique function “Vinculae Peregrinus”

Salt Mountain’s Visage

When supplied with thauma, this artifact can produce a “Mask of Salt”.

Depending on the bearer's intent, the mask can operate subtly by way of refracting and deflecting attention from the holder’s face, or may entirely obscure it with an impenetrable perception-barrier.

ATTACHED NOTE (REFORMAT TO SYS. FORMAT BEFORE FINAL DRAFT): Original system description too verbose. Actual description: Besides making it hard to look at your face, it can also make people see something else in its place, but the nature of the material won’t permit it to be used for impersonating others. At the absolute maximum setting it makes your head look like a billowing mass of salt and anyone who looks at it directly has their eyes crust over with salt for moment. Thauma-hungry at higher settings, but the cost is “fair” no matter your entropy tolerance.

Vinculae Peregrinus

At-will, when meeting the eyes (or closest equivalent) of another, the holder may expend one charge to impose the properties of “salt” upon the both target’s Physical and Astral Body. Thauma-burning, channeling, etc. will be interrupted, and the physical body, including all clothing, will be temporarily transmuted into solid salt crystal. The full effect is equivalent to completely halting a target for a short time.

Current minimum duration: 0.19s

Current maximum duration: 0.59s

All duration metrics simulated under baseline reality conditions.

ATTACHED NOTE: This operates through brute conceptual override. For that reason, the system cannot fully predict how exactly it will manifest, but the fundamental features will be consistent. Always leaves behind salt remnants in the form of Hard Entropy equivalent to 10% of your maximum tolerance. The purifying aspect of salt means that this, too, has long-term benefits, but they are minor.

It only lasts for as short a time as it does because the world-law snaps back quickly. You can make it stick better by pre-salting the target. It will also last much longer under compromised reality conditions, e.g. inside a Hazard Zone. The same applies for entities that compromise reality by their nature, e.g. kenomaic beings intruding into our world. Being hit with this is unpleasant to somewhat painful for most humanoids, but extremely painful for anything or anyone carrying a significant amount of impurity, unless it has already been purified in some way (you will likely not encounter such individuals outside the service of the Twin Churches).

[SALTING THE WOUNDS]

[Tags:]

Pure

Sacred

Elemental Affinity

Thaumaturgy Enhancement

Construct Enhancement

[Details:]

Grants Second-order Elemental Affinity: Salt

The bearer may imbue the power of this Boon - the “Pain of Salted Wounds” - into her thaumaturgies and constructs. Thusly-imbued, such thaumaturgies will inflict pain as if they had struck bare flesh even if they strike Wards, Barriers, or any other manner of magical defense. This effect permeates even through physical defenses, albeit to a lesser degree.

ATTACHED NOTE: Conceptual operation, subtler than the Vinculae.

“Salt, huh?” Krahe questioned. She had no way to know that what this system readout described was anywhere outside the Seven Spokes System’s standard purview, but her gut told her it was the case. There “salt” described within the readoud gave her an indescribable, almost imperceptible sense of the profound. It was a mere whisper of what she sense inside an actual temple or shrine, but it was still undeniably there.

Favonia puffed from her cigar. It hadn’t become any shorter since she’d started smoking it. “To say it safely, those lenses aren’t made of actual salt any more than alarite is a type of bronze. What actually lies behind it, gives it power, is one of the greater mysteries of the Grafting Church. It’s best if you don’t comprehend it yet, you would likely turn into a pillar of salt.”

“An infohazard for the unenlightened, got it,” Krahe nodded before returning to the readout, just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

267 - Favonia [Cherno]

The next several hours of her time came down to more productive pursuits — refining the Schwarzfaust’s theurgic pattern, interspersed with short sessions of reading and absent-mindedly inspecting parts of the room to see if she could notice the concealment formation poking through anywhere else. Eventually, having laid a number of Schwarzfaust and Wandrei Faust talismans across the table, both for reference, Krahe finally arrived at a more refined design, eliminating several extraneous elements whilst enhancing striking power and maneuverability. It wasn’t much, but incremental improvement inevitably stacked up.

It was then, in the midst of loading a handful of bullets with this adjusted Schwarzfaust pattern, that she heard footsteps. Two pairs, one particularly heavy. The safehouse’s outer door opened, shut, and the newcomers entered. The first was Casus, his face, his hands, and his iridescent-silver hair were all caked in blood and bits of gore. Behind him, however, stood a towering form whose nonchalant posture was nothing more than a hair-thin membrane stretched taut overtop unending wellspring of violence.

“Ah, it has been too long,” Casus remarked at the sight of Krahe. He then gestured to the monstrous figure just behind him. “Lady Blackhand, as you have likely already guessed, this is Favonia. Favonia, this is Lady Blackhand. I shall allow you the space to acquaint yourselves, I frankly cannot bear to be this filthy a second more than I must.”

Casus walked off towards the bathroom, trailing blood as he went. Meanwhile, Krahe scanned the monolith before her and finally parsed who — what — she was looking at. Favonia was, for lack of a better term, a WOMAN. Easily two meters tall, and simultaneously the most feminine and masculine individual in the district — if not the city. Her silhouette alone spoke volumes, drawing the sort of exaggerated hourglass one would expect from a pinup artwork. She wore the same style of clothing as Casus, the lacing of her trousers barely able to encompass her legs, creating long windows running down her thighs. A pair of alarite buttons heroically held back her immense bust — each of which had to be the size of Krahe’s head. The lower half of her satin shirt contoured itself around her defined, but not overtly muscular abdomen. The garment was impossible in mundane terms, but it was also easily in the Top 5 of most potently enchanted objects Krahe had encountered. The top spot had been just now usurped by Favonia’s left hand, a clawed limb of gleaming silver that bore a blood-red gem in the back of its palm. A subtle blade ran down the underside of the limb’s forearm, which more likely than not could expand into a full weapon at a moment’s notice. Her left arm was, after a fashion, a direct counterpart to Casus’ right arm. 

What Krahe had at first mistaken for a hooded cape was in fact Favonia’s hair. It was an unnatural shade of red, exuding a faint glow, and the sclera of her eyes were matte-black, contrasting with the golden glow of her irises. Her skin was very dark purple, transitioning to lilac at the seams, of which only a few were visible — the most noticeable was a horizontal split across her face, running over the bridge of her nose.

“Don’t hold the honorifics against him. Took him a few years before he stopped using them with me,” Favonia said. Her voice was deep and husky, perhaps deeper than those of many men, yet still unmistakably the voice of a woman. With what appeared to be a single stride, Favonia traversed the living room. She loomed over Krahe like some sort of resurrected megafauna.

A tangible pressure descended, and Krahe felt herself sink a little deeper into the sofa. She stared up at Favonia, and Favonia, in turn, stared down at her. Her expression hadn’t changed an iota from half-lidded detachment, and it seemed as if she was not even breathing. Her mind was, more than anything else, preoccupied with trying to discern what exactly Casus found so similar about the two of them. In some ways, she could understand his point of view. Personally, she didn’t really get the resemblance.

Favonia briefly opened her third eye, little more than a reverse blink, but that was enough to induce a sensation akin to the wall of scorching heat from a plasma torch igniting in front of her face.

“I see. The similarity really is uncanny,” the giant woman remarked. She took a seat, her presence explaining why one of the couches was noticeably bigger than the others. After a moment of thought, she spoke again. “No pleasantries, then. How long has it been, since you began your crusade?”

Unsure on how to respond, Krahe raised an eyebrow.

“Casus has said much of you. Now that I have seen for myself how similar your astral body’s patterns are to mine, it’s a safe guess that you are also a crusader. One possessed by a compulsion to slaughter demons and uphold righteousness. Come on, I can tell you’re not frozen with fear. You’ve been trying to estimate how likely I am to kill you if you answer honestly, how to escape if it comes to that, and how to fight me if you can’t. I can tell because that’s what I would think were I placed in your situation.”

“Twenty years give or take. The elder of my home town had been working to cure its inhabitants of inherited diseases, make us more capable of surviving in the ravaged environment. My world’s nobility dropped a weapon that creates a miniature sun on the place because the old man had been too successful.”

Krahe had no intention to simply divulge every bit of information relevant to Favonia’s questions, but she also got the impression that, if anyone would keep this stuff to themselves, it would be this walking superweapon in the shape of a woman.

“So that’s why you don’t feel like a baseline human. Your pressure points are all over the place. You have, hm…” Favonia trailed off, sniffing the air as she rubbed her chin in thought. “Three? Several additional hormones not found in humans. Only one of them can be attributed to grafted organs. I admit that I would greatly enjoy speaking at length on the matter of your heritage and grafting, but we are not nearly well-acquainted enough for that just yet. I have my answer. I can tell you when my crusade began, if you so wish. Smoke?”

“Feel free. And depends on what it is,” Krahe answered. “You can’t actually smell hormones.”

“Not physically, that is true,” Favonia admitted. She pulled two thin, black cigars from the mass of her hair, each with a thin stripe of metallic silver running down its length in a spiral, and placed one on the table for Krahe. Well, it was relatively thin. It was still twice the diameter of one of Krahe’s cigarettes. The Prospector’s Eyes failed to appraise it, not due to anti-appraisal measures, but because the gold-black cigar surpassed their capacity for appraisal.

266 - Re: Safehouse [Cherno]

As she made her way out of Garvesh’s pawnshop, walking through the back alley in the other direction than she had entered, she noticed two new things. The first was the presence of a stranger approaching from the direction she was headed. The second was that, amidst the posters and ads, old and new, she could make out Yao’s talisman patterns, ever so briefly before her eyes slipped off them. Only by “glancing over them” could see actually get a good look, something made possible only by the modifications to her eyes. Without knowing they were there, without knowing how they looked or how they subtly deflected one’s perception, and without her specific type of ocular enhancement, they were undetectable. She didn’t stop to inspect any particular talisman, lest the stranger happen to enter the alley and notice — it just so happened she was curious as to how many there were. For each one that could be seen, there were dozens more completely concealed, clusters of protective talismans leveraged against the potential of one being detected. The stranger finally passed into the alleyway as she neared the exit. It was a tall, narrow figure, wearing loose trousers bound down at the calves and a loose jacket, with their hands wrapped in bandages. They wore a a turban and a scarf, leaving only a slit of their face exposed. Eyes with black sclera and white irises stared back at her, subtly refracted through a thin protective shell. What at first seemed to be the pure-white of Inax skin around the stranger’s eyes was, at second glance, chitin. Krahe didn’t get the sense of an evoy from the stranger, but the shape was far too lithe to be a herculean, so she figured it was a mothman or some other, fourth type of insectoid. Despite this, she couldn’t help but feel an unsettling sense of familiarity when their gazes met, even for just a brief moment. She stopped after their paths crossed, turning around to see the stranger had done the same.

“Have we met?” Krahe asked.

“I thought the same. It appears I was mistaken,” the stranger replied in a polite, but deadpan and clipped manner. A man, by the sound of it.

“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Cabral, would it?” she raised an eyebrow, inwardly readying herself for a confrontation.

After what may have perhaps been an attempt to remember if he knew someone by that name, or perhaps a consideration whether to even answer, the stranger shook his head.

“Afraid not. Sorry.”

No signs of lying. No tenseness. Nothing. Krahe moved on, lighting a cigarette. The thread of arrha smoke trailed in her path, and, by pure coincidence, a gust of wind blew it into the alley, right under the nose of the white-chitined stranger. To most, it was a sweetish, mint-like aroma. To evoy, it burned like the seven hellss. Just as he was about to step into the stairwell, the scent struck him. He shuddered for a moment, but moved on. It wasn’t unpleasant to him, but just a whiff struck him as a deep breath from a jar of menthol cream might strike a human. This was all unknown to Krahe, of course — she might have perhaps spied on him if she had Barzai on hand, but she didn’t care enough to double-check if a random stranger was a weird-looking evoy based on his reaction to arrha smoke.

_________________________________________________________________________________

As was her habit, Krahe didn’t make directly for her destination, this being the safehouse where she’d been shot. She meandered for a short time beforehand, and upon her arrival, she found the safehouse to be empty. There was an unfamiliar scent, but besides that, the place was immaculate, nearly identical to how she remembered it. Even the window was the same. Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t just the same. Even the scratches matched. Inspecting yet closer still, Krahe realized that, somehow, the scratches on the window were parts of a grand overarching warding system, and that one of its leverage points laid in that window — it was “otherwise perfect concealment” leveraged against “someone can just look through the window.” She decided against tugging on that thread, lest she drive herself mad by trying to figure out how you would even start with such an abstract design, and why you would think it a good idea.

Deciding to wait until evening to see if Casus showed up, she went over the collection of memslates Garvesh had functionally given her. They were of a distinct make, unlike the memslates she had been using and encountering — besides being made of a black-blue alloy, they were also slightly rectangular so they stuck out a bit out of her square-slotted eyebox. Mass-produced, to be sure.

The first and second memslates were straightforward action films. One was in an urban setting, while the other was more of a western. There was honestly nothing notable to these. They were entertaining and well made, with convincing combat effects and good choreography, but that was where it ended. The third one stood out for its fixation on environmental destruction and firearms. A single gunshot would send wood splinters exploding out of the wall. There was a scene where the protagonist rode a gurney down a stairway while firing off atropals left and right, throwing away three pairs of four-barreled guns in the process. This was the only place where the film’s effects faltered — the atropals were far too weak.

Then, came the fourth. It was more of a series, with episodes being about thirty-five minutes long each. At first, it seemed like no more than a simple toy-commercial — giant mechs piloted by teenagers to fight equally giant monsters. The action then gave way to insufferable teenage melodrama that kept going in circles to the extent she became convinced she could subtly hear, behind the soundtrack, the sound of the director bending over backwards to huff the farts straight out of his own asshole. Krahe groaned when the realization dawned on her that there was a reason this felt familiar. It was, for all intents and purposes, Zastreon’s version of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Krahe had been, without her consent, made thoroughly familiar with the series due to its persistent prevalence as a cultural touchstone in certain online circles, even centuries after its official completion. She considered destroying the memslate out of petty spite, but left it be.

265 - Astrowave Pt. 2 [Cherno]

“This one’s pretty old, but it’s pretty good,” Garvesh said as he plucked a memslate from somewhere under the counter. Its edges were worn. After skipping well past the halfway point, he let it play. The clashing of swords and din of gunshots spilled out as a meticulously choreographed battle between two thaumaturges ensued, one a saurian and the other an Inax. They seemed to be fighting atop a great spire, in the middle of a gigantic metropolis that almost seemed like something plucked straight from the world she was familiar with. They both stood there, just watching the film for some time. It was a straightforward action thriller, set in a fictitious Inax moving island, one that had been brought online before its full completion out of necessity due to the Twin Churches’ sinking of another island-ship. The plot centered around a means that could permanently reset the island’s racial lockouts, with the saurian protagonist on the side of the Inax monarchy while the two-eyed, Falseborn Inax antagonist sought to set himself as the island’s ruler and use it to wage war against Inax society. The camera kept switching between them until they eventually crossed paths and fought, with the briefcase that contained the macguffin switching hands at least four times throughout the nearly two-hour runtime.

There was, of course, nearly as much violence as there was drama, with the Inax and the Saurian dishing out and weathering absurd amounts of punishment, seemingly invincible to all but one another. Most of the fights between the two main characters were both physical and vocal, with the two of them constantly arguing about ideology and the ramifications of one another’s actions as they pummeled one another and spat out thaumaturgy after thaumaturgy, demolishing multiple buildings with floor counts in the two digits in the process.

In the end, the two of them joined forces against the Saurian’s employer, a Trueborn Inax, who attempted to betray the Saurian at the last moment. Afterwards, they agreed to modify the island’s control lockouts to be tied to specific markers that could be passed down either through blood or intentionally, and to simply make of the city a sort of wandering, truly independent city-state. The film ended with a sequelbait timeskip of the two protagonists looking over the now-thriving metropolis, while a deep-voiced narrator spoke over the scene: “...such a place, affiliated with neither the Inax nor any mainland polity, would always have to fight for its existence.“

The camera panned to a fleet of hovering ships on the horizon, and then the credits rolled. By that point, Garvesh was nodding approvingly. She could imagine him muttering “Now that’s cinema.” under his breath. He popped the memslate out of the eyebox, stowing it away as he offered: “Tell you what, I’ll sell you some of my collection for cheap. I think I have some copies of the full trilogy somewhere.”

“How much?” she asked.

Murmuring to himself, Garvesh picked out eleven memslates.

“Hundred-fifty apiece. New ones usually go for twice that much. Y’know what, just give me a thousand for the whole lot, it’s not like these will sell otherwise. I’ll go through the rest once I got the time.”

“Do you just spend all day watching dramas down here?” she prodded as she handed over a solid-state DD vessel.

The old lizard huffed, “Long as there’s nothin’ better to do.”

While Garvesh processed the transaction, Krahe collected her memslates, then placed the lidless box of pills on the counter.

“Ah. Business, then. This from Yao?” he gestured with her dreg vessel before he slid it across the counter.

“You met?”

He nodded.

“She do the corpse puppet ambush?”

Another nod.

“You can tell she makes ‘em flimsy on purpose,” he said.

“And? How’d it go? I assume fine at worst, given the pills.”

“We have… Some things in common,” he said, clearly weighing his words so as to not give away too much, even by association with Yao. After some thought, he added, ”Biggest tits I’ve ever seen on a human. Grafting aside.”

“Seen bigger,” Krahe remarked. “Not natural, but seen ‘em. Grotesque past a certain point. Speaking of grafting—”

“Yeah yeah, I was gettin’ to it. Here. The tracker wants to meet you soon. How ‘bout tomorrow? I can send him to your office or have him come here.”

“Think it’s safe to have him come to my office?”

“For the best. He gets distracted by the stuff I’ve got on display. Keeps remembering he’s short on this or that.”

“Have him come sometime in the evening. Eight or nine. You see Casus around?”

“Not much, but I have,” Garvesh nodded. “He figured you’d look for him. Told me to tell you that, if he isn’t knee-deep in some hazard zone, then he’ll be at the duplex you got shot at. Not exactly in those words, but more or less what he said. Lotsa of crusade this crusade that. Odds’re you’ll meet Favonia there, too. She’s been putting him through the wringer since she came back, tryin’ to get him in shape to use that evolved mamon knight form of his. Eisenretter, I think.”

“Favonia’s finally back?” Krahe asked.

“Not too soon,” he said with some distaste. “He’s told you what she’s like, hasn’t he? Brick shithouse, taller and heavier than me. All piety and magnanimity ‘til she decides to go apeshit. Miracle she hasn’t had an aneurysm by now with all the screaming. Hell, she could fight me to a standstill in my prime, even if not for long…”

Garvesh almost froze at the last sentence, once more catching himself a step too deep into revealing his past. But that was as far as it went. Krahe pretended to not have heard it.

“So I’ve been told, so I’ve been told. That all makes sense to me, to be honest. More than Casus does, that’s for sure,” Krahe nodded. “I still don’t understand in what way the Red Hoods are hers.”

“She created ‘em. Simple as,” he shrugged. “It was a big hubbub ‘cause she made ‘em independent enough to pass for people sometimes. Casus used to pass on her rants every once in a while — nobody knows how to build more, but she won’t take an apprentice. Church doesn’t like it, but they just keep asking every once in a while. And so the wheel keeps turnin’, same as it ever was. Might stop for a bit, but it always starts back up again.”

Furrowing her brows, Krahe gave Garvesh a squinted look.

“I might be finding patterns in the place of coincidence, but you’re the second person who has recently mentioned the wheel stopping to me.”

“Yeah, it stops sometimes. Maintenance or somesuch. Always a big lightshow ‘cause the church mobilizes to shore up the banishment veil and kill any critters that come through. I figure it’s time for another one someday soon, just a gut feeling.”

“It’s random?” she asked.

“More or less. I’ve never taken interest, so I can’t tell you much, but you’ll hear about it a week or so before it happens. Now ‘less you’re gonna buy something, shoo. I’ve gotta figure out this stupid box.”

It was abundantly clear that Garvesh was once again intentionally withholding information, not because he didn’t want her to know, but because he was afraid that he would divulge too much. He knew that she knew, and she knew that he wouldn’t budge, so she dropped the matter and left him be.

264 - The Wizard Pt. 2/Astrowave [Cherno]

“I’m the Wizard, I’m twelve thousand years old, of course I know everything,” the young man smirked. She noticed seams in his skin, starting at the corners of his mouth. “I was turning tower-dwelling savages inside-out before Igaria built the first spoke. This-”

He gestured about himself, perhaps at the Lost Sun Society, or perhaps at the world at large.

“-is nothing to me. I’ve seen the Banishing, I’ve seen Zavesh shoving random organs into his torso, I’ve seen the Tannhauser- no, wait, that’s… That’s not one of my memories. The point is, you wouldn’t believe the things I have seen, little god-eater. Tell me, how did Chernobog taste? Make that question a trade offer, too — answer it, and you may ask me one in turn.”

Krahe felt… Dazed, more than anything. She took a deep breath and answered as best she could.

“I wasn’t conscious. Woke up here, so to speak.”

“Ah. From a weak-tide world then. Unfortunate. Or fortunate, I suppose. You likely would not survive with your sanity intact had you been conscious. I admit, you are new after a fashion — you are the first of my kind I have met in this world. The difference between those they call Greater Pilgrims and us god-eaters — it’s strange that they haven’t noticed the pattern yet.”

“Pick one. Are you young, or are you twelve thousand years old?” Krahe sighed. She had already accepted that this was an encounter similar to the six-eyed dream serpent.

“I said what I said. This body has held up well thus far, all things considered. Grafting truly has come a long way, you can scarcely see the traces of the Old Ways anymore if you take refined grafts for what they are. As I am, in this flesh, in this life, I am… Sixty-eight, I believe. I am also twelve-thousand, six-hundred and eight. I was there for the razing of the Towers and the raising of the Spokes, I was there for the Interdimensional Summit… Indeed, I even met the Thousand-in-One before he went mad with his eternal crusade. Your system readout states two ages, does it not? It’s the same. Mine says sixty-eight slash twelve-thousand six-hundred and eight.”

A grin spread over the Wizard’s face, his cheeks splitting apart fully, revealing his teeth. They were pointed, far moreso than normal, but not quite like those of a shark. It was almost as if he had two premolars where each molar should be.

“Heh… The hollow comfort of forgetting — you will never receive it again. When your flesh next meets its end, you will slumber for however long it takes your True Soul and Astral Body to return into equilibrium. What was the saying? I can sleep when I am dead? Welcome to that reality. You will find many coping with their own mutability by calling eternity a curse, just as one who cannot reach the grapevine says they must be sour. What we are is what you make of it, no more or less.”

“Alright, show me the artifact.”

Holding his smug, split-cheeked grin, the wizard held out his left hand, revealing a small stone shard. Eldritch symbols crawled over its surface like the grasping tendrils of an octopus waiting for a fish.

“There is some matter of ritual when it comes to attuning with it. I will share the ritual secrets after you hand over the Schwarzfaust.”

Krahe did as was asked of her, and after stowing away the talisman paper, the Wizard added a memslate with the same petrified-wood texture as his staff.

“If you choose to accept my full offer, make your way to the coral tree and focus on calling me to that place. It will at once permit me to contact you and prove that you are qualified for the task at hand.”

Once they had made the exchange, the Wizard glanced down at Mistress Yao’s isolation talisman, which gave no indication that its power was waning.

“Looks like our time is just about up. I’ve got a nasty old drunk to drag back into the catacombs before he makes a scene. Don’t leave me waiting. Or do, chances are I will forget this exchange if you don’t remind me.”

The Wizard grabbed the talisman from the air, and its eight copies burned up into nothing in an instant. He then simply walked away, and Krahe realized the shooting range was now completely deserted. The moment after that, she realized she had completely lost track of the young man, despite her best efforts. She got the distinct impression that the harder she tried to look for him, the less likely she would be to find him, much as one would lose grasp of an eel by trying to get a grip on it. Deciding that it would be best to let this bizarre and disconcerting exchange sink in for some time, and craving a dose of normalcy, she made her way to the nearest cafe. After a cup of coffee and a cigarette, she finally returned to her office and turned in for the night, making for Garvesh’s pawn shop in the morning.

Far too late into her stay in this world, Krahe learned that Zastreon did after all have what was functionally radio. In fact, she had been offered the opportunity to have one in her pocket and had refused it. It was during a visit with Garvesh that she saw the lizard tinkering with an eyebox a little larger and much newer than hers, and after some manipulation, he had it spitting out what was unmistakably a radio drama. A soundscape of astonishing fidelity spilled out of it, the fray of battle that, somehow, painted an immaculate mental image of metal smashing into metal. With a bit more manipulation, he even made the eyebox project an image — an illustration of two gigantic machines facing off against one another in the midst of a desolate city.

“That shape! It’s… Is that him? That steel beast that humiliated me a century years ago?!”

The moment Garvesh noticed her, he shut off the eyebox, nodding at her in acknowledgment. Krahe put aside all pretences, and openly asked: “What was that, just now?”

“This? Don’t tell me you don’t know,” he answered casually.

Through this somewhat humiliating interaction with the old lizard, Krahe came to learn of this keystone technology, which she had avoided until this point by the virtue — or in this case, by the vice — of her own overcautious behavior. Garvesh mentioned how the churches didn’t like using “the ol’ astrowave” because “they don’t want to risk having the tides cause interference,” as if wanting to console her in some small way.

“...Ah,” Krahe deadpanned as the realization dawned on her. For much of her time here, she had lived in church safehouses, which obviously chose the most secure option for entertainment. She had also only interacted in any significant capacity with… Casus. Casus Aristedes. A man who, even had he lived in Megacity Gamma, Krahe still would have expected him to somehow get his hands on a physical bible. And if the most common option for astrowave reception was a personal eyebox, then she had a pile of them stashed away, left to rot because she had tried their basic functions and found them lacking compared to her ultra-heavy-duty prospector-grade eyebox.

Realizing that this hadn’t come up beforehand, that she somehow never found out about this ubiquitous thing, and realizing that she wouldn’t stop him from speaking, Garvesh proceeded to go on at length about the local media landscape. She had already encountered Zastreon’s cinema, of course — at Nozar’s place. But it hadn’t been until now that she really learned of its state as compared to Megacity Gamma’s hyper-intrusive media landscape. Screaming at you from every corner, demanding your attention often in the literal sense. As far as she could tell, there was no such thing as a perpetually-active broadcasting network. Not for visual media, anyway.

In this roundabout way, Krahe learned that Audunpoint’s surface society, that part of it which she had interacted with so little, had a widely varied selection of entertainment to choose from. It just didn’t come in the formats or by the avenues she was used to, so she hadn’t noticed them. In place of streaming, screens, ocular implants, headsets, or direct netscape plugs, there were instead these astrowave radio broadcasts and a vast world of… Memslate-based home video. In this world, it had been of all things books and home video that came to dominate the civilian entertainment market.

263 - The Wizard [Cherno]

Krahe allowed herself to give into the theatre of her involvement with the Lost Sun Society, making her way to the very firing range where she had demonstrated her ability as a theurge in order to gain entry. The giant, Moloch-esq target statue loomed behind a scene of smaller, much more reasonable targets, including human figures, steel plates, and even forms of viscous gel, retreating into mechanized canisters to reshape themselves after being shot. There were even a few barrier generators, protected by heavy-duty barricades, painted in bright yellow and plastered in warnings. A handful of the Society’s members were already present there, some plinking away with guns while others tested out their own respective theurgies. The red and yellow of reapers and atropals pervaded the space, and Krahe realized that even if each of her Chthonian Eels could provide more shots than most other Lesser Eidolons, her reserves just didn’t compare to the sheer stockpile that a fully dedicated theurge would inevitably build up.

Even as she put on a show of sorts, demonstrating the Schwarzfaust’s maneuverability and striking power for a small group of enthusiastic onlookers, she couldn’t help but notice that one of the theurges who had been here before her had thrown out at a fifteen-strong barrage of atropals at the giant target demon in the back, and he wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. By the look of his atropals, they had to be an older pattern, as they had a more zigzaggy flight path and resembled scaled serpents rather than tendrils. He was somewhat dissheveled, with long black hair, a pair of glasses with one lens cracked near the corner, short stubble and bags under his eyes. His face was young, that of a man in his 20s or at most early 30s. The means by which he cast his theurgy was a staff of black stone, hewn into a shape that looked like a branch with twisted fibers, the top being the point where it had connected to the tree. Whether it really was worked stone or some sort of petrified wood, Krahe couldn’t tell. She couldn’t actually see any kind of secondary element to his theurgy, no talismans or bullets, just the staff.

She didn’t spend very long at the firing range at all, using the excuse that she had shown them what the Schwarzfaust could do, and that it would now be up to them to make it perform. At some poing during her demonstration, the incessant yellow flashes had stopped, as Krahe made her way out of the shooting range, she could see the dissheveled theurge looking her way. He spoke up when she neared him, his voice throaty, almost phlegmy. She knew that sound — someone who hadn’t physically spoken in a few days, at least.

“Blackhand, a moment. Your theurgy. May I have a copy?” he asked. He looked up at her with a sullen, dissociative stare, as if the world his eyes saw was not the one in which he was truly present.

“What do you offer in exchange?” she asked.

He met Krahe's gaze, and the blue-grayish haze that obscured his irises suddenly clarified, exposing deep-blue, becoming so dark as to almost become black near the center, yet also emitting a slight glow. The Wizard's eyes were best compared to bottomless maelstroms. Unflinchingly maintaining eye contact, he pulled out a yellow talisman. Unmistakably one of Yao Fu’s products. With a flare of yellow light, eight copies flew out from it, surrounding the two of them. A sense of isolation crept in, but Krahe could clearly hear sound from outside the circle. Of the five others still at the range, only two reacted in the expected fashion of hushed murmurs. She could make out mentions of “the Wizard.”

“Chthonian Eels, a damascened Astral Body, and a True Eidolon… Or rather, something that willingly took on the guise of one,” the Wizard listed off, leaning on his staff. “You have been there, haven’t you? The coral-tree that grows atop the spire-chimney-that-is-a-well?”

His words seemed to run together, overlapping in an unsettling manner. It reminded her of the eldritch, unearthly colours she had seen, pulling at the ears in the same way those sights pulled at the eyes. He knew. Somehow, he knew. So Krahe just decided not to bluff.

“I have been there. What of it? I can reach that place again by my own means, if you mean to offer me a way back there as your part of our exchange,” she said.

“No, no such thing. You have seen what I am capable of. In the last twenty-three minutes, I have released… Eighty-three Yellow Atropals, model of fifty-five sixteen. I am far too young to have amassed such a reserve solely through direct archetype leveling. I can sense within you the potential to attain the next step of true theurgy — were I to guess, if you continue walking the path of theurgy, your next boon will confer a Lesser Eidolon Vault and Greater Eidolon Vault each. I can help you take that step, if only you share that theurgy of yours. If you wish to walk the path of thaumaturgy instead… Well, there is nothing stopping you, but I am not a skilled thaumaturge, and so cannot discern what boon you might receive from advancement along that path. ”

“The gulf is at rest. In two weeks, three days, and six hours, the Wheel will come to a halt and the waters will be thrown into disorder. The world of man will be, too, but that is none of my concern. There is a place, deep within the gulf, the path to which I have charted just in time, but now I require the aid of one such as yourself to reach it and retrieve what I require. I know much of angle-webs and of the paths through the waters… But I lack the time to make my preparations — my diving-bell was damaged during my last expedition, and I suffered an injury which would take too long to heal. You, whose Astral Body is in pristine condition, can reach that place even with a damaged diving-bell. Venture to that place for me, return, and I will freely share all I know, as well as a relic of my own making, a graft of sorts. All my cards are on the table. A simple transaction. You are doubtful, I can see that, so I will add another offer: An artifact that can house a Lesser Eidolon. I already possess one of its type, so this one is of no use to me. Hand over a copy of your Schwarzfaust, and you may have it, no strings attached, even if you choose not to take me up on my main offer.”

“How do you know all this?”

The Wizard cackled.

262 - Schwarzfaust Pt. 2 [Cherno]

A/N: Edit: Truncated some of the dialogue that kind of just repeated earlier information. Chapter ends up being shorter than normal but next one will be longer to compensate.

__________________________________________________________________

“Basic, in the sense of avoiding overdesign. A direct equivalent to this land’s Yellow Atropal…?” Yao murmured as she turned the talisman paper back and forth, looking back and forth between them. Somehow, the Schwarzfaust puzzled her far more than the Wandrei Faust had. After deliberating for a short while and glancing Krahe’s way once or twice, Yao said: “Oh, I understand now.”

She turned to Krahe, holding up the mass-production variant.

“I have no reason to take issue with these being distributed. Your personal version seems, to me, as a decoy first and offensive theurgy second. The simplified version, without its role within your own arsenal, will be fairly unremarkable, but it will spread. I suspect you will enjoy watching it backfire when someone inevitably tries to use it against you. You used a clever, but simple way to hide the contingency — most won’t notice. Among those who do, most won’t know how to defuse it without rendering the pattern inert.”

"As intended, then. I'll leave a few copies with you, feel free give them to anyone you think might do something interesting with them. Before I go, has a man named Garvesh contacted you?”

“So he has, so he has. You’ve come at an opportune time, in fact, I have something to give him that ought to be delivered by trustworthy hands.”

She brought out a simple package — a wooden, cylindrical container about five centimeters across and twice as long, and with a very thin talisman wrapped around all the way around it lengthwise. There was no visible cap or lid. Were it not for its light weight and the rattling sound it made Krahe would have thought it a solid chunk of wood.

“It’ll open for him. Instructions are inside. As we agreed.”

Krahe didn’t think anything of it, and simply left the talisman mistress to her work. She didn’t feel the matter was urgent enough to rouse the old lizard and incur his wrath, so she left it for the morning and decided to visit the Lost Sun Society, knowing that someone would be there no matter the time of day. She was fairly certain at least two of the members did nothing but play tabletop and paint miniatures, day in and day out, even sleeping at the compound.

The Society hosted exchange events every one in a while, but that didn’t mean one couldn’t do such things outside of those events. Krahe relied on this, offering up samples of her new, unique theurgic pattern in exchange for know-how that one might not find or even just interesting information. Her reputation sufficed to drum up the level of interest she was looking for. While she hadn’t come upon any single revolutionary revelation by the time she ran out of people to peddle her wares to, she didn’t mind. Before she left, she hid a number of leftover copies in various texts within the library, including three inside a copy of Secrets of the Atropal. She supposed that, after a fashion, the somewhat childish form of occultism that the Society partook in was infectious at times... Even if she couldn’t stomach it for long without getting the urge to lambast their theatrics.

From the perspective of the Society members to whom Krahe had sold copies of this novel theurgic pattern, it seemed nothing short of bizarre. You didn’t just do that, not without a secondary reason at least. About one-fifth of the recipients took the exchange at face value. Two-fifths assumed that the pattern obviously had to contain a puzzle of some kind. The remaining two fifths came closest to the truth, assuming that Krahe wanted to gather performance metrics and observe how it would spread — because this was how they themselves thought of their own unique theurgies.

If one looked at the pure, objective metrics, the Schwarzfaust Zwei wasn’t particularly remarkable. As a craft-produced theurgic pattern, it could be considered solidly above-average, but not amazing. The theurgy shone in its utility, rather than raw power. If its carrier-construct was formed with digits, the theurgic pattern could facilitate grappling action. That alone was a standout feature. The projectile behaved in a manner combining the Wandrei Faust’s chase-and-kill pattern of first finding the target, then engaging the attack, followed by the Yellow Atropal’s direct strike with light homing. It would chase the target until it got to a set standoff range, then lash out with a kinetic strike. However, it could also engage in surprisingly effective evasive action, with maneuverability almost unrivaled for its tier, and its different “modes” were tied to simple triggers that any enterprising theurge could freely modify or connect to his own control methods to manipulate the projectile after launch.

With all of these properties, plus the simple and direct novelty of a demonic arm rather than the bog-stadard and played-out yellow tendril, the theurgic pattern was doomed for local success, but spared from spreading outside Audunpoint.

All of these were the facts.

But there was something terrible about the pattern, and it wasn’t the killswitch that would turn it against the user if it were ever cast against Blackhand herself. Objective facts aside, all those who used the Schwarzfaust, and even moreso those who tried to make copies, would find it to be savage and foreboding in ways no mass-produced theurgic pattern was. There was no empirical basis, but the theurgy would quickly develop a reputation for having “something more” than others, a strange, almost lifelike savagery at times, yet at others, it would alsoe refuse to go off properly for reasons other than the killswitch. A gang member — one of two muggers — witnessed as his partner’s own theurgy flew in a u-turn, grabbed his head, and smashed it into the cobbles. In this manner, Blackhand's grip would come to strangle the city's violently criminal elements even without the need for her direct presence.

261 - Schwarzfaust [Cherno]

Krahe deciced to undertake an exercise in creating a theurgic pattern usable by others. Yao’s scroll insisted that even if one didn’t plan to do so, it was a useful skill to have, and understanding the principles behind it was vital to having a solid foundation as both a theurge and a talisman-maker. It quickly became evident why — it just wasn’t the same. First, one had to create the root pattern, then adapt it to universalize the instructions. The wider the intended userbase, the harder it would be to adapt, not unlike how one had to have a truly profound grasp of a subject in order to simplify it enough for someone particularly dim-witted to understand. For this same reason, customizing a mass-produced theurgic pattern for your own use was naturally likely to make it unusable for others, in the sense of empowering it with their own eidolons. Personally, Krahe thought of it as high-performance combat walkers and their mass-production counterparts. You couldn’t expect every soldier to bear with a full-embodiment neural connection, to consistently react in 24 milliseconds or to eat 10 Gs of acceleration like nothing.

The prerequisite for this exercise would be, of course, completing the Wandrei Faust’s sibling-theurgy. First, strip away all elements of energetic offense. Then tear out the core of murderous intent and, in its place, channel the michievous impulse for deception that had served her so well throughout her many cat-and-mouse games in both her past and present lives. To say she had simplified the Wandrei Faust to the bare minimum was not quite accurate. It was better compared to the butchery carried out in the process of creating the very same pilots who could stand 10G acceleration — by the time she was done removing elements there was barely a third of the original pattern left. This was not a literal removal, of course, but rather, Krahe mentally went over her own knowledge of the Wandrei Faust and only replicated the parts that would be necessary for its sibling theurgy. A major portion of its pattern constituted its energetic offense and the “control systems” that enabled its bimodal operation, parts of which she kept so that the new theurgy could remain at a standoff distance if needed, or rush in to grapple or strike the target. In fact, much of the space that had been cleared out would be filled in by a vastly more advanced maneuvering suite. Whereas the Wandrei Faust was a simple hunt-lock-kill missile, this sibling would have an action-chain that would be genuinely obnoxious to write out in text.

The occult procedures of getting her Chthonian Eels to interpret her intent into the correct theurgic instructions were still as tricky as ever, but she had developed a workable workflow that at least made it feel far less like gambling for barely acceptable results with a dogshit generative neural network.

Krahe kept the construct very similar to the Wandrei Faust, in order to ensure its appearance was as similar as possible. On the inside, it was of course much simpler, but the cost and level of effort required to create it would be identical, as the theurgy would still need to have similar durability to the Wandrei Faust, for two reasons — so that it could withstand its own maneuvering jets, and so it wouldn’t break apart on impact when used for attack. Given the simpler design, she didn’t need a special target to test it — she simply used the basement of Sorayah’s house, which she had by now cleared out piecemeal of any materiel relating to human charcoal. Most of it had been useless to her, but she had made copies of many of the texts just in case. Testing didn’t take long, given that no matter how drastic a modification, it was still a modification of an existing theurgy.

Schwarzfaust. That’s what she would call this one. This version could get as many as six shots out of a single Chthonian Eel, and struck with kinetic force comparable to a Red Reaper. The fact she didn’t find this yield impressive was something of a reminder of how far she had come. She found the whole process to have been somewhat underwhelming, both in terms of the difficulty and the sense of accomplishment. While the Wandrei Faust had been momentous, the Schwarzfaust felt more akin to another tool in the box — one she didn’t expect to use very often until she got her hands on a third eidolon, because six Wandrei Fausts were just enough as far as she was concerned. Enough to kill anything that moves, and failing that, wear it down enough for the Daemon Core to come into play.

As she went over the sixth or perhaps seventh practice copy, she realized the part that was missing, somewhat aghast at her own desire for attention, however momentary it had been. Indeed, the thing missing was Casus’ presence to react to her advancements. She decided it had been a while regardless, so it would be a good idea to seek him out later, and to perhaps meet with Favonia, if she was indeed back in the city.

With the Schwarzfaust’s first iteration complete and consistently reproducible, Krahe turned towards the main meat of this exercise — simplification. This stage was, in itself, another partial redesign. The elements that made Schwarzfaust uniquely suited to her had to be translated into simpler, more specific instructions that almost any eidolon could parse, meaning that not only would the end product have simpler evasion patterns and thruster network, it would also be weaker and more fragile overall. She had somewhat expected to encounter a gordian knot when came time to disentangle the theurgy’s direct connection to her own elemental affinity, only to find it… Not really present. She wouldn’t know until she got someone else to test it, but as far as she could tell, the Schwarzfaust was compatible with any affinity that could produce solid constructs, perhaps because the thrust was generated by means not bound by elemental causality. She still didn’t quite understand how theurgy compared to thaumaturgy, and wasn’t sure if it was simply not practically necessary knowledge or if it was a high-level secret that could change one’s outlook on the discipline.

Once she had simplified the Schwarzfaust to a degree she was satisfied with, a degree at which point she deemed it not much better than the mass-production standard fare of Audunpoint’s everyman theurge, Krahe swallowed her pride and took her work to Yao. Firstly, she didn’t want to cause pointless conflict with the Talisman Mistress, and secondly, she genuinely wanted Yao’s opinion on both her personal and universalized designs for the Schwarzfaust.

260 - Case Four Closed, More or Less [Cherno]

Krahe stared at the mutilated form that laid across the room from her, hooked up to tubes and cables, hollow eye sockets covered by fresh gauze. She felt herself sink in place, her sight growing detached, merely pointed in that direction, but not truly focused. A strange grinding noise came from her mouth. Teeth on teeth. She could feel something wet run down her face. Strange. She didn’t recall Firminus’s ambulance having leakage issues anywhere.

“One of them I mentioned… Aldritch. She said she wanted to take his eyes out. Completely calm. Surely, you’ve noticed?”

Firminus glanced between Krahe and Juno. The grafter sighed, drawing two cigarettes from inside his apron. He lit both and tossed one to Krahe, took a long draw, sighed, and dropped his full weight onto a chair to the sound of many tools clattering. Krahe sniffed the smoke. Bitter, but not astringent. Cloves. Tea. A weird smell only describable as “clean.” It was the same on the inhalation. Bitter and clarifying. Even if she held it in, it dissipated on its own, leaking from her nostrils as if the smoke didn’t want to stay inside.

“Of course I noticed. When I put her new eyes in, she’ll look at me the way you do — the same way a handful of my other patients do. Through the grace of Zavesh, all fleshly harm can be mended, but… I can’t undo the rest. The identity that was ‘Juno Oldfield’ is, for all intents and purposes, dead. After rehab, she could appear to lead a normal life. But the girl you were asked to find is functionally dead. The church will keep an eye on her to ensure she doesn’t end up a spree killer or some such. Direct that living revenant in a good direction if we can help it.”

As he spoke, Krahe became a bit less certain that he was speaking of Juno specifically. There was something more there, between the words, that he wasn’t mentioning. It galled her, somehow — the way he flatly observed the death of Juno’s previous identity as if it was a mere fact, a mere switch-flip, as abrupt as switching a domestic robot’s personality chip. The fact she could tell he didn’t actually mean his callous words, that she could hear him coping with the cruel and revolting truth as he spoke, that only made it worse, more bitter, far more bitter than his cigarettes or sip of rancid Mind’s Dawn. She restrained herself from giving voice to that bitterness, and instead latched onto the first other thing that stood out, if not out of curiosity, then to distract herself, in some way, any way.

“Living revenant, huh? That just an expression, or a piece of jargon?”

“The official term is ‘Wrathful Martyr.’ Immune to rejection from using forcibly-taken graft material, ‘cause they’re already so suffused with ‘impurity’ that nothing in a graft could compare. This is all on a purely on a need-to-know basis, of course. The higher-ups don’t want anyone trying to create the poor things intentionally.”

“Of course.”

They sat in silence for a while, smoking, exchanging cigarettes. Each of them had smoked three arrha and three of Firminus’ blue incense cigarettes by the point Krahe decided it was her time to go.

“Mind writing up an official letter? Something to give her parents for the time being.”

“Aye, I should,” the grafter sighed.

With the letter in hand — writ in immaculate calligraphy and stamped with a complex sigil — Krahe traversed the city, searching for that bar. That ethereal place whose owner kept a six-eyed snake for a pet. It was nowhere to be found, and, frankly, Krahe didn’t actually want to get drunk. She had hoped to find that bar specifically. Failing that, she decided to visit the Lost Sun Society, and there she spent the better part of fourteen hours, seven of which was made up of learning and playing wargames. The remainder was taken up by the library and her efforts to research eidolon evolution rituals. Thanks to Yao’s influence on Zachariah, Krahe was given access even to otherwise restricted texts. They truly were tremendously helpful, but even these felt as though they were missing some pieces. She was completely drained by this point, and with no force of will left for the first time in a while, she returned to a random church safehouse, where she slept until the sun crested the horizon and painted the heavens blood-red.

Krahe awoke with the previous day’s thoughts still fresh in her mind. She spent the first minutes of her morning smoking out the window.

“What the fuck am I doing? One girl? That’s all it takes to rattle me now?” she muttered. Later that morning, she delivered the letter to the Oldfield household. Despite its grave tone and the fact it made it clear she had suffered extensive injuries, Firminus, through his mastery of prose, had softened the blow enough that Juno’s parents were far more glad for her rescue than they were distraught. Mr. Oldfield immediately brought her payment, wasting no time. It was somewhat bitter, and not all that much all things considered, but she accepted it with a professional thanks. At her office, she cleared the pegboard, and stowed all material directly related to the case in a small box, and stowed that box in one of among a great number of drawers. In this manner, she mentally severed herself from this case as best she could. Once she witnessed the Four’s execution, she would be able to leave this case in the drawer for good.

Until then… Well, she had more than enough things to do. Continued research into eidolon evolution was the obvious choice, especially given the fact Sorayah had some materials pertaining to the matter in her collection, but there was only so much Krahe could do before it came time to actually undertake the ritual, only so many theoretical angle-web diagrams and incantations she could draft before her eyes glazed over.

259 - Another Junko Furuta Pt. Final [Cherno]

The strongest piece of evidence in favour of Aldritch’s humanity, distorted and rotten though it may be, was Barzai — the eidolon awoke within Krahe, twisting and turning in his formless state, not unlike a dog might do upon the leash when presented with fresh meat. Could a truly hollow psychopath be so tormented by the knowledge of his impending punishment as to entice the palate of an astral beast with a taste for the suffering of evildoers? In the end, the content of his character and whether he was or was not a psychopath didn’t matter. What he had done was undeniable. He was a corpse awaiting its burial — as were his co-conspirators.

When it came to the interrogation of Radanov and Calvus, they proved themselves significantly less useful than Aldritch. They readily spilled the morbid details of their deeds, but unlike Aldritch, they lacked any knowledge whatsoever in regards to the aforementioned Helmeted Man or the comic artist. Unlike Aldritch, they had very much shut down, complying at every step of the way.

Once all was said and done, Yazata wrapped each of their heads in her Black Bindings, causing them to fall unconscious. At that point, the witch-inquisitor glanced about the room, and it felt as though the outermost layer of her untouchable personage peeled off. Her aura of enigmatic untouchability remained, it just seemed as if she was no longer actively trying to exude it in order to intimidate the subjects of her interrogation. She quickly found what she was looking for — Aldritch’s surviving arm — and picked it up from across the room, once more using those black wraps of hers.

“This is no graft I am familiar with. Certainly non-standard. May or may not be heretical, and may or may not contain further contingencies. I believe it would be best to send this to a forensic grafter for inspection. Do you take any issue with this suggestion, Blackhand?”

Her instinct was to suggest having Firminus investigate it, but she was well aware that she couldn’t just default to him for thinggs he was likely not well-suited to.

“So long as the grafter can be readily contacted and you give me the means to contact them,” Krahe agreed.

“Acceptable,” Yazata said. With a few gestures, she mummified the arm in the same manner as she had done to the perpetrators’ heads.

“I am curious. Why did you answer so quickly?”

“Because you called, and because it sounded as though you had a good reason to do so. That is all. I presume you intend to take the girl to a grafter you trust, yes? I shall take these miscreants into custody for the time being, unless you had other plans.”

“She wanted to take his eyes out herself,” Krahe said, gesturing towards Aldritch.

A complicated expression came over Yazata.

“I cannot say it would be better if she simply became a traumatized wreck… But this is not a good outcome either,” she said.

“There is no good outcome to what took place here,” Krahe added.

“A phrase far too true in regards to far too many incidents,” the Inquisitor sighed. “When you take her to your grafter, inform her that her request can be arranged as part of the executions. If she so wishes, she may even be the one to carry out the sentence. We can’t entirely undo what she has suffered, but this much — this much is within our power. I could sentence them right here and right now, but I believe if nothing else, she ought to be given the satisfaction of seeing them punished properly.”

________________________________________________________________________________

They left the Herebor household under the watchful eyes of the Red Hoods, taking the three unconscious perpetrators to be held in the short term at the nearby Seven Spokes shrine while Krahe carried Juno on her back, having commandeered one of the Red Hoods’ motorbikes. Yazata also provided Juno with a more proper article of clothing, a simple red robe emblazoned with the Seven Spokes sigil in white across the back and over the left breast. It was rather similar to the one Casus provided some time ago, but quite a bit larger and far more powerful, although Krahe didn’t dare push it to any significant speed for Juno’s sake. They then visited Ogura, subjecting him to Yazata’s method of interrogation. He unsurprisingly didn’t know any more than Krahe had already extracted from him. Having handed off all four perpetrators to the witch-inquisitor, Krahe and Juno finally made for Firminus’ clinic.

The ever-stressed grafter was waiting for her.

“You could’ve just come for a normal checkup, you know,” he said accusingly.

His anger only grew when Krahe handed Juno over into his care, but he didn’t voice it, knowing that though blind, the girl’s hearing was intact. He began manipulating the blue smoke of his cigarettes, entrapping it within cages of azure light to form words, carrying on a silent conversation with Krahe whilst reassuring Juno that she’d be alright all throughout the battery of examinations which he subjected her to. The girl cooperated with an unsettling degree of calm collectedness. Her physical state aside, anyone would find it difficult to believe why she was in that state.

Finally, after around an hour and a half, after having given the girl a shower, the grafter had her drink a sedative tea. It was then that he and Krahe properly got to talking, with Firminus interrogating her on the details of the case while also performing the checkup which he had earlier accused her of avoiding.

“This was the first case of the Crow and Raven agency? If I didn’t know any better, I would suspect you were cursed to only encounter the worst of the worst. Now harden your fist. Open. Keep it hardened. Close. Good, good flexibility… Alright release. Very good. What is your transmutation rate?”

Krahe checked, and relayed the pertinent information.

Current blood transmutation ratio: 100%

Current tissue reinforcement ratio: 79%

Current Black Blood reservoir: 318/340ml

Current lymphocyte reservoir: 30/30%

“Good, good. Even faster than I had hoped. I have a new batch of beetle-fruit for you to take home after this. The girl… I’ve seen worse, but that is not saying much given the state you were in. I can’t fix her all on my own, but rest assured that she will be well taken care of.”

258 - Another Junko Furuta Pt. 8 [Cherno]

Yazata followed Krahe’s lead, with one of the Red Hoods taking up a guard post at the front door. The inquisitor seemed somewhat perturbed by Juno, but Krahe got the impression that it wasn’t because of her physical state. Yazata quickly gave Krahe’s more refined report a once-over as the two made their way upstairs. Krahe then spent a few moments to defuse some of her wards, and when she finally cracked open the door, the sound of Aldritch’s dismayed struggling rushed out like a gust of grave-stench air.

The interrogation proceeded far faster than Krahe had expected, in no small part due to Yazata’s ready employment of her own unique magic. It was the simplest thing — the witch made a ream of the same black wrappings that covered her skin to spring out of her sleeve, wrapping it around Aldritch’s forehead. The runes upon it came alive. Within a few seconds his wards faltered, and the binding tightened to the utmost degree, vacuum-sealing around the chain that Krahe had bound him with earlier. Staring him in the eyes, Yazata began to question him about the basic facts of the situatio such as why Juno was here and what he and his collaborators had been doing. Though at first he seemed to cooperate, the glyphs that covered the Black Binding soon came alive with haze-like distortion spilling from the fabric. The distortion began crawling under his skin and leaving glyph-trails of blackened flesh in its wake, much to his audible agony.

Yazata smirked.

“Every lie, every willful omission, begets a curse. Cooperate and I may lift some of them,” the witch said.

“Wgh… What if I don’t know, what then?!” the armless sadist lashed out.

More curses. More screaming. Yazata glanced Krahe’s way.

“This is your quarry. I can only get so complete a picture from reading a short report, it would be best if you asked the questions,” she said, holding out her other hand, and from it, another length of Black Binding extended towards Krahe.

After a moment of scrutiny, Krahe took hold of it, only to find it wrapping around her wrist. A fierce burning sensation spread through her arm, and Yazata gave her a strange look. Then, the burning abated.

“What a hostile appraisal ward,” she remarked. “The connection holds, for now. Ask, he will answer, one way or another. If I must unravel his mind, then so be it. The filth in this one…”

“How about an easy one. Any particular reason you picked her?” Krahe asked.

“Why do you pick a particular cut of meat from the butcher’s rack? It’s the same. This is the best way I can explain it.”

A faint distortion flickered around his forehead, but then faded.

With a faint tone of irritation, Yazata remarked: “...Neither a lie nor willful omission.”

“Now for the one that might actually buy you a bit more life — your disposal method. Who do you send them to?”

Aldritch stared at her. She could see the cogs turning behind his eyes. The binding flared, but before it could dig its talons into him, he spoke up.

“I don’t know his name. We leave them at dead drops in a section of the ruined underground. The dead drops have the directions to the location of our payment for the last time, and that place is also the next dead drop location. I haven’t met him since the first time.”

The binding flared again. The glyph-trails spidered down his face, veins bulging out around them.

“Not a lie. Therefore, an intentional omission,” Yazata said. “A heretical grafter, perhaps?”

Aldritch ground his teeth together.

“I can’t say. Can’t tell you his name, don’t know where he is right now,” he uttered. He jerked his head in place, as if suppressing a tic. “A ah, let’s call him a body artist. Heret- Ngh… Fuck!”

He started the word heretic or perhaps heretical, but that tic returned, cutting him short.

“Independent. He’s independent. You know what I mean. Moves around a lot. Did all my work the first time. All at once…”

Aldritch stared into empty space for a moment, only snapped out of it by the binding’s flaring.

“Shit, right, there’s a, what do you call it, artist, a comic artist, yeah. Lives at the very south of the city, can’t say exactly where but you should be able to find him. The comic’s about kids exploding a place like sorta like Jas’raba, only deeper and much worse. It’s serialized in an adult comic magazine, but mostly sold on memslates and in collected volumes. The comic artist, he knows where to find the Helmeted Man, he can tell you.”

Never once did the binding flare up while he spoke, and neither did it do so in the pregnant silence that hung over the room for several seconds afterwards. Only Aldritch’s heavy breathing could be heard, as if he had just undertaken a feat of enormous exertion.

“I see. I believe I understand the situation,” Yazata said. “It would be best to forgo this line of questioning for now.”

They continued to interrogate him for some time, and perhaps more frustratingly than if he had completely refused to cooperate, it turned out Aldritch really didn’t know much else. The matter of what he and his compatriots had done, both to Juno and to the girls who had come before her, was one thing — with Yazata’s cursed binding, extracting the exact details of their misdeeds was the easiest thing in the world. Krahe didn’t even really process Aldritch’s strained speech or its vile contents, just jotting down the words as he spoke.

With lies and verbal gymnastics made untenable, his mask quickly fell apart and revealed the wretched, tiny creature that he really was — not in the literal sense, although Krahe had almost expected him to reveal himself as a baneworm at some point, given his hollow-faced bearing and not-quite-sufficient attachment to his own body. It had become abundantly clear by now that Aldritch Herebor was not really a person. An entity, something illusory, a creature who had long lost his humanity, if he had ever possessed any to begin with. Had he been born in Megacity Gamma, Aldritch would have found tremendous success in the corporate sector, doing no actual work yet appearing at all times to be psychotically overworked, busying himself by politicking and ruining the days if not lives of corporate pawns for his own sadistic amusement.

Perhaps this judgment was mere projection. Perhaps Krahe was merely drawing conclusions based on a tenuous pattern, based on brief and not exactly personal interactions with this man, but this was, nonetheless, the conclusion at which she arrived. 

[Announcement] Cherno Caster Vol. 2 Now Available on Amazon!

Currently only on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, but the audiobook is in production and paperbacks will also come soon. We were aiming for a simultaneous release with the audiobook, but unfortunately our VA was struck by the California fires.

Cherno Caster Vol. 2 on Amazon

257 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 7 [Cherno]

“...can you… can you carry me? Take me…” Juno spoke up, insomuch as the wheezing whisper she emitted could be considered speech. She stopped short of saying something, the start of the word “home” almost audible in its absence.

“I can take you to a grafter. Get you fixed up,” Krahe suggested.

Juno turned towards Krahe. “That… Would be better,” she said with an unsettling clarity. A strained, stiff smile. “My parents mustn’t see me like this.”

Krahe looked the girl over, taking note of her numerous small injuries, of the small cuts and countless bruises, the cigarette burns, and of injuries that are best not detailed. Both of her legs had been severed — one above the knee, the other below it. The same was the case for her left arm, gone below the elbow. All done in a surgically precise, yet also crude manner, clearly intentionally. There were also the missing teeth, of which Krahe was sure there were more than could be seen at a glance, and her earlobes had been cut off as well. All in all, Krahe came to the conclusion that Juno could be moved safely. She brought a large coat out of her Kenoma Sack, draped it over Juno, and soon enough had the girl on her back, barely noticing the weight.

It was a matter of some effort to walk through the other room — not to carry the girl, but to stop herself from burning the skin off of Aldritch’s body right then and there. The odds of him dying from it were too great.

“You three stay put or the formation collapses — I made sure it won’t kill you, and that you’ll wish it had. I’ll be gone ten, twenty minutes at most, good luck trying to defuse it without arms in that time,” she said, throwing a truly hateful smile Aldritch’s way as she walked out into the hallway.

“Wait…” came a choked sound from the girl on her back. Krahe considered if it had been a bad idea to pick her up after all, freezing in place, but she didn’t feel anything amiss. Juno’s heartbeat and breathing seemed stable. The girl shifted in place, leaning forward to rest her chin on Krahe’s head. She drew in a long, ragged breath, and spoke in a voice turned to a whisper from screaming, yet still managed to give it enough volume that it echoed through the silent house. “Later… I want to put his eyes out. Could I…?”

It was flat, barely a voice, more of an articulated wheeze, but Krahe felt the malice radiating from it. She was entirely willing to put it up to mere projection, to assume she was placing meaning into the void of a mentally broken woman simply looking to lash out at her violator, but as she walked down the stairs and Juno voicelessly chuckled on her back, Krahe couldn’t help but feel an unsettling sensation from her — a kinship of sorts.

The reception she got at the Seven Spokes shrine wasn’t the warmest, but she couldn’t hold it against the priest. He was aghast at the sight of her, recognizing her by her grave reputation. She didn’t bother with pleasantries until he led her into the inner sanctum, and kept it simple even then.

“I require direct communion with the Central Temple, specifically Razem. If at all possible, I also wish to request Inquisitor Yazata Heptaxia’s services as an interrogator. I act as the representative of the Crow and Raven Agency. Tell them I’ve encountered a case that is highly likely to have direct relevance to the matter from last time. They will understand. I also need to contact Grafter Firminus — you can guess why. As you can see, it’s urgent. I will prepare my messages now, please return in fifteen minutes.”

“Ah- Yes, of course. I understand,” the priest nodded. He seemed a touch too eager to leave her presence, or perhaps he was preturbed by Juno’s state. She was sure he would report that detail when he opened the connection, but that was, if anything, desirable — it would more naturally convey the urgency of the situation.

Krahe wrote the most extensive request for Razem, and used one of her eyebox’s more obscure features to directly “burn” an abbreviated transcript of her findings onto a separate sheet of paper. It was a simple power surge into the projector lens, intended for specially treated paper, but it worked on any paper with the minor downside that it caused some slight charring. Besides the general specifics of the crime scene, the perpetrators, the victim and the crime, Krahe also included some notes on Aldritch’s grafts. She made three copies in this manner, one for Razem, one for Yazata, and one for Firminus. She also included the location of Aldritch’s house and that she would be waiting for them there. While she didn’t want to take Juno back to that place, tradeoffs had to be made for the sake of keeping an eye on everyone that needed watching.

The priest brought a large, bronze basin into the sanctum, full of black sand and with three long incense sticks burning within it. The smoke they gave off formed the names of their destinations. Krahe just had to place the letters into the smoke, and in an instant, the incense stick burned all the way to the base and the letter vanished in a cloud of embers. One after the other, Krahe sent off her letters, and then made her way back to Aldritch’s family home, carrying Juno on her back. Krahe had prepared herself to explain, even to calm the girl down in case she panicked, but she remained completely calm the whole way to and from the Seven Spokes shrine.

Around forty minutes passed. In that time, Krahe had retrieved her cogen from her Kenoma Sack, used it to write a cleaner version of her report, and produce several copies. Juno seemed to enjoy the white noise, dozing off.

Three Red Hoods riding upon silver motorcycles surrounded the house, and a black-haired witch upon a fourth vehicle of the same make pulled up in front of the building. The click-clacking of metal feet on cobblestones preceded an unsettlingly rhythmic series of knocks on the door. Krahe had expected an agent of the church, not for Yazata Heptaxia to show up as if she had been called.

She opened the door. Yazata’s owl-like countenance stared straight through her.

“Blackhand. It’s good to see that you have recovered,” Yazata said. The witch-inquisitor’s burning-purple eyes shifted to peer over Krahe’s shoulder at Juno, and with them, so too did the eye-like symbols seemingly bleached into her hair. “I presume that is the victim. And the perpetrators?”

“Upstairs.”

256 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 6 [Cherno]

Krahe didn’t bother with any elaborate torments. Instead, she simply dragged Aldritch off the wall, and before he could realize what she was doing, she dislocated his shoulder. He cried out, but… It wasn’t convincing. The pain was real, but the reaction wasn’t how it should’ve been. That alone was enough to tip her off — despite being dislocated, his left arm writhed and wrapped itself around Krahe’s arms, while something writhed inside his good arm, and in a flash, the limb split open three-ways at the wrist, revealing a concealed stinger. Aldritch twisted unnaturally in place in the effort to bury his stinger under Krahe’s ribcage. She couldn’t dodge, not entangled with him as she was, and she wasn’t certain that her biosuit could stop the stinger’s strangely metallic point. His sudden burst of speed was also great enough that her barrier couldn’t form quickly enough. There was only one thing to do — do as the Nemean Lion did and simply refuse to be pierced.

Aldritch’s stinger dug into the matter of her biosuit, slowing but continuing on. A brief look of triumph flashed over his face, only to be replaced with uncertainty, and then, alarm. The stinger’s razor point had halted against her skin, uselessly scraping against it. Krahe tore her left arm free, and, grasping his right wrist, pulled it away from herself. For a moment, before the biosuit closed the hole, one could see the dark-grey, stone-like skin beneath it. With every iota of strength, Krahe crushed Aldritch’s arm, snapping the stinger, the bones of his modified forearm, and bursting every muscle and vein that held it together. The only reason he didn’t begin fountaining blood was the scorching heat she poured freely from her palm until only a charred, blackened stump remained beneath the screaming man-thing’s right elbow.

His eyes were bloodshot, he screeched in pain, and yet his heartbeat and breathing were both steady.

A malicious smile made its way onto Krahe’s face.

“Any other hidden weapons?” she asked with a patronizing smugness.

“N-no,” Aldritch said, pitifully.

“Too insistent, not buying it,” Krahe disagreed, dragging a single, long lasher from her left thumb. Simultaneously pushing her leg against his side and pulling his left arm away from his body, she swung her arm. With that single lash, his left arm was separated from his body, and Krahe closed the wound shut with a mass of tar.

“It’ll hold,” she nodded, glancing at Aldritch. “Long as I maintain it. It’ll also fall apart on its own if you get more than a few meters away from me.”

Krahe was fairly sure he could deduce this, but she wanted to make it absolutely clear that it was intentional on her part. The fear in his eyes, previously an instinctive, but otherwise hollow reaction, now seemed much more genuine. She had wanted to make him walk to his doom, but in the end, she decided it was too much of a risk. She severed his achilles tendons and his hamstrings, dragging him to the wall and then tossing his arm, under one of the recliners, not wanting to destroy it but wanting to keep it away from him in case it had a self-reattachment feature. Using the chain and cuffs that were readily found within the room, she shackled Aldritch tightly to the radiator — not by his neck, but by his mouth, akin to a bridle, so that he couldn’t easily kill himself by choking.

From paying attention to his accomplices, Krahe came to the conclusion that they weren’t nearly as strong-willed as Aldritch was. Their wills to fight had been thoroughly broken by her initial assault.

Upon looking over Aldritch’s severed left arm, Krahe felt vindicated in learning that her gut judgment had been correct — this one was also weaponized. It contained a short blade attached to a flexible tendril. Its bones also had a unique structure and were composed of a remarkable memory-alloy that bent easily, but snapped back into its original shape once it was able. His shoulder joint was the only part of the limb that actually followed standard human anatomy. The blade was dark and engraved with runes — it reminded her of Semzar’s jambiya. A relative of that blade, or an imitation based on it perhaps. She could only guess what it did.

With the threats eliminated and the victim apparently stable for now, she started taking pictures.

One after another, she recorded the state of the scene as it was, simultaneously recording a straightforward, matter-of-fact commentary, while Aldritch writhed in the corner and Juno sat silently, motionlessly in place. Listening back to a short portion of it, Krahe could hear the disgust and anger in her own voice, but she didn’t bother re-doing it. As she undertook this grisly yet also tedious work, it dawned on her that she could’ve just astro dived or skimmed out of his grasp when he grabbed, rather than tanking the hit head-on. That out of anything proved that she was angry — she had allowed herself to get sloppy, to forget, ever so briefly, two of her most powerful defensive tools.

Once she was done with the documentation, Krahe once more applied her newfound know-how and began modifying Aldritch’s warding network, much to his vocal dismay. He didn’t sound upset that she was doing it as he was upset that she was doing it so apparently effortlessly — but this was no virtue of her own skill. It was a direct result of the fact Aldritch had made no attempt to obfuscate anything, it was all written directly on the walls for anyone to see. Even the key anchoring nodes weren’t really hidden, they were just clusters of coins or rings placed in various locked drawers, whose locks were neither warded nor made with picking resistance in mind. Right then and there, Krahe brought out her brush and some papers, and started modifying Aldritch’s warding formation to simply turn it inside-out. Afterwards, she laid out a caging formation around the three degenerates — one around Aldritch and one around Youssef and Hegio together, after she manhandled their seats to place them back-to-back together in one corner.

“Ugh… Why all this?” Hegio asked, more as an outlet for his pain from behing jostled about than as an actual question. She ignored him, finishing her work before moving on to the room Juno was being kept in. Like she had done many times in the past, Krahe shut out the extensive implications of the environment and the victim’s state, taking pictures as she considered what to do with her.

255 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 5 [Cherno]

The moment Krahe broke through the door, Aldritch had already prepared himself, having already raised his barrier and letting loose several thaumaturgic blades aimed exactly at Krahe’s head the moment she was in his sight. He was already pointing a gun off to the side, and the moment it became clear his first salvo had not struck its target, he began screaming how he had a reaper and how he would use it if Krahe made another move. His gun was double-action, and his finger wasn’t seated on the trigger. Krahe shot it out of his hand just as he began the triggerpull, sending a reaper flying well over Juno’s head. The moment after, she smashed him into the wall with her second modified Wandrei Faust. It wasn’t until then, until she had him neutralized, that she bothered taking in this other room.

By rights, Krahe should have been sick to her stomach, just about ready to vomit, even. She kept her glare fixed on the handsome, blonde-haired man before her, whose eyes were devoid of understanding. On the surface, his gaze was filled with the fear of a child who had been caught dismembering toads, but she had learned to see through far higher-functioning monsters’ masks. He was blonde, with greenish-grey eyes, and well-dressed, preppy even, in contrast with the relatively dissheveled state of his house and the filthy state of these two chambers of sodom.

“P-please, you don’t understand, I’ve done nothing to her! You’ve got to believe me, they’ve been making me care for her so that her death-flag graft doesn’t go off-” Aldritch pled. He was lying, in an exceptionally unconvincing manner at that. Krahe raised her arm to his groin and blasted him with a Cinder Strobe until his wards failed and the heat set his trousers alight. It didn’t take long, but far longer than it should have.

“Shut up, and keep your fucking hands up. You need to understand that you’re not fooling me. Give me your voidkey or I’m shooting your cock off, and then putting one in your head. Do anything that looks like you’re trying to free yourself, or fight back, and I’m shooting your cock off and then killing you. You don’t have a way out of this, if you try something your best ending is that I will fucking kill you, and if you manage to pull something, I will just track you down and make you wish I had done to you what you did to her. Do you understand, you subhuman sack of shit?”

He nodded.

“Say it. Say that you understand,” she demanded.

“I underst-” he began.

Krahe spit in his face. His wards flared against it, the tar-laden mass of mucus caustic enough to eat through a man’s skull if unprotected.

“Your key. Now. Three. Two. One-”

The metaphorical beast that resided behind Aldritch’s eyes understood. He finally dropped his barrier and craned his neck, willing his voidkey to emerge from just below his ear. A Silver Slip Key. That explained why his wards had held up so strongly. Question was how he got it, but it was possible a sleazy, preppy little psychopath like this shitsucker could have wormed his way into a lower position at the Silversword Agency. No matter the surrounding circumstances, he was far too weak to have gotten this key the intended way, by completing contracts until he made the agency enough money to “buy” it from them. Krahe stowed the key away with a swiftly-conjured, thin tendril, not taking her gun or her left arm off of Aldritch for one single second.

“I’m sorry, I really am-” he tried again. Krahe gave him a Cinder Flash in the face, not enough to breach his wards, but enough to shut him up. She would’ve fried his face a bit, but she wasn’t certain that she would be willing to pull away once she started to hear that creature’s skin sizzling.

“I can believe that you might really feel sorry right now, but it has nothing to do with some sudden realization of your own wrong-doings. If you’d never suffered the misfortune of catching my attention, if you could just keep doing this, one victim after the next, without ever being caught — you would. The regret you feel is born from fear, because you’re just smart enough to realize that what you’ve been doing is the reason I’m here to break your fucking arms, cut your shriveled little cock off and drag you off to a hole so deep even the rats won’t come to eat you. You’re fucked. Do you understand? Your brightest hope right now is to prolong your miserable existence by playing along and selling out whatever degenerate heretic you’ve been wheeling your victims off to once you’re done with them. A heretic grafter? Some vedesian cultist? An unrelated rich degenerate, just a older, more experienced, even worse you? I don’t know, I don’t care. That will be for the Inquisitor to find out. I hear she brought a mind-lathe. I’d pay to be there when she straps you in.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Krahe oh so vividly saw Juno’s dismembered, filthy form, with a bloody rag tied over the craters that had once been her eyes. She had tally marks carved into her thighs and numerous smaller cuts all over her body, as well as a number of missing teeth, made visible by her grinning expression. Out of everything, this was the only thing that actually threw Krahe off-kilter. This reaction, that grin beaming with pure, primordial joy, head turned towards Krahe. Ragged sounds, almost like half-suppressed chuckling, came out of the girl’s throat.

Aldritch stared down his nose at her, grimacing, grinding his teeth. He wanted to talk back, he wanted to talk back, so, so terribly, but he was smart enough not to. Krahe could almost feel Barzai writhing in her stomach at the sight. She didn’t want to spent here a single minute more than she had to, and the construct-fist that was keeping Aldritch bound to the wall was starting to decay.

254 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 4 [Cherno]

A/N: Fairly severe content. One more chapter to come as promised.

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Within another fifteen minutes, she had arrived at the second location — in total, between following Ogura into his house and now, twenty-seven minutes had passed. Not so much as a squeak escaped the building. After skimming through the fence from a side opposite any of the active windows, Krahe raised a narrow pillar of smoky jade from the ground, jumping off just as it reached the apex of its rise and letting off a small burst from her left hand. Altogether, this gave her enough height to reach the second floor, at which point she skimmed through the wall and into the hallway. Krahe waited for a moment, listening and taking in the surroundings. Old house, old furnishings — the owners, likely Aldritch Herebor’s parents, were clearly well-off. Given the coat of dust covering the few paintings and decorative tchatchkes on shelves, as well as the sorry state of the two plants in one of the hallway’s corners, this place was lived-in, but not cleaned to a standard beyond the minimum. There were two doors to her left, a trapdoor on the ceiling, and a stairway to the lower floor at the other end of the corridor. The walls of the two rooms to her left were covered in a scrawl of maroon glyphs painted directly onto the wall, exuding a vague sense of rejection and impassability.

After some consideration, she formed a high-pressure smoke burster, but took some care to reduce the smoke’s aggressiveness somewhat, so that it wouldn’t suffocate anyone. She also altered the shell’s composition so that it would disintegrate upon detonation, rather than fragmenting, in this case out of consideration for the girl, given the fact she likely didn’t have a voidkey or wards. As she worked on this with her right hand, she formed the first Wandrei Faust shell around her left arm, giving it some extra bulk to make up for the lack of energetic firepower.

Between the two rooms, both were sound-insulated, and both of their windows had the curtains shut, so there was no taking guesses there. They also didn’t have large keyholes she could peer through. She would have just skimmed through the wall like she had done to Ogura, if she could, since skimming didn’t make noise, meaning that if she guessed wrong the first time she could just try again. Unfortunately, she couldn’t do that. As she observed the scrawl and mentally parsed the parts that she understood, it became clear this wasn’t simple reinforcement against physical intrusion. Herebor had gone to the extent of securing at least this part of his home against astro skimming and even scrying, that was what the maroon scrawl was all about.

After a few tense moments, Krahe decided that she was overthinking.

It was true that she couldn’t just skim through the wall, and it was true that the walls and door were both reinforced well enough that she couldn’t simply punch her way through. But that wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle by any means. Drawing on all the power and focus available to her, Krahe dedicated a full one-third of her entropy capacity to preparing another proto-Solomon Howitzer, aiming it diagonally upwards.

With a scream of red and the lashing of obsidian thread, the door’s entire upper half simply vanished, having been transformed into a mix of charcoal and molten globs, then embedded into the ceiling. Instantly, Krahe skimmed in that direction and got a grip on the situation. Her guess had been, at once, right and wrong. The room was filthy in a manner similar to Ogura’s, with an added layer of derangement rooted in the more crude and openly visible soundproofing glyphs painted on the walls. A triangle of blood trailed between the thoroughly soiled bed, the door to the other room, and the radiator beneath the window. Krahe also saw two of the suspects, sprawled out in one recliner chair each at side of the door she had just busted through, sitting and drinking. Neither Juno Oldfield nor Aldritch Herebor were to be found here, however. Not in this room, anyway. 

As she landed, her burster also filled the space with smoke. Wasting no time, she lit the talisman paper and fired off the theurgy without a single word. The glistening fist of onyx-black stone smashed into Hegio’s midsection, pinning him against the wall as yellow light spilled out, his wards flaring blue against it. Youssef instinctively moved to transform into his Mamon Knight form, but Krahe shot the catalyst out of his hand. She scorched the wards, clothes, and skin off his leg with a low-powered Cinder Flash, then put a bullet in his knee.

He screamed, but it didn’t matter. He was on the ground. Krahe crippled his other leg in the same manner, then did the same Hegio before her Wandrei Faust could begin disintegrating. The two men never saw who had done it. They never even realized what was going on.

Youssef’s coupler was destroyed, but Hegio still had his voidkey. And so, Krahe pressed her gun to his forehead. 

“Your voidkey or your life.”

The delinquent didn’t put up a fight. It was an unremarkable voidkey with no special features, but one beyond what someone of his low station should have been able to obtain, even if he had the stolen money to pay for it. In terms of raw performance it was about a step below Shiva’s Warding Chain.

_______________________________________________________________

For the last several days, Juno Oldfield’s world had been one of senseless torment. When the light was torn from her skull, it was, at first, almost a mercy, but this vague sightless nothing soon became a hell of its own, unique kind. Eventually, time began melting together into a vague morass of pain and anguish, the only variation being the degree and kind of these two things that she was in at any given time. There were brief, merciful moments when she no longer had any thoughts, when she simply went away to another place somewhere within memory, but they were few and far between.

The vague morass of torment immediately preceding this moment had been one occupied by the voice, the touch, and the violation that Aldritch dished out. She could tell from his voice and his atrocious cologne, but chiefly from the fact that the instant that door creaked open, before he said anything or came close enough for her to smell him, he cut another tally mark into her thigh, just above where her knee had once been.

But this time, things were different. Raucous noise came from the other room. A strange, high-pitched buzzing, almost a screaming sound, combined with the cracking of whips. An explosion. A loud impact, another buzzing noise, a gunshot, then screaming. The gunshots and screaming intensified. Aldritch pulled away from her, sending his vile implements clattering to the ground. Another thunderous buzz, and then a woman’s voice, but Juno couldn’t comprehend the words. Aldritch barked a threat, but a gunshot rung out, followed by a second, closer one, and a searing heat passed just over her head.

Again, that loud impact, and the shudders of something heavy. A snort, filled with derision. Another loud buzz and a wave of heat, followed by yet another gunshot. Screaming. This time, it was Aldritch. Juno hadn’t known anything could sound so heavenly. Aldritch whimpered something. The woman spat, then began speaking. Juno vaguely comprehended the meaning, but couldn’t actually parse the words. Her mind was in no state to do so. Nonetheless, she unconsciously turned her head in the direction of the sound, and, unbeknownst to her, a grin took form on her face.

253 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 3 [Cherno]

A/N: One more chapter is ready for tonight. I might be able to get out a third.

_______________________________________________________

After taking a moment to observe the aftermath of her unfinished creation, Krahe once more turned her attention to the miscreant before her, and any sense of satisfaction was washed away by the returning tide of disdain.

“Youssef and Aldritch, is it? And they never involved you in the disposal?”

A feverish head-shake.

“They had me stuff one of them into an old chest, but that was it. Youssef dragged it off on his own,” Ogura insisted.

“Interesting. Any of you use a Mamon Coupler?”

“...Youssef does. The bug kind. Aldritch can do theurgy and a buncha other stuff, he did all the quietening on my house.”

“Good, very good. Keep in mind, if you lie to me, I will find out, and then you’ll wish I had just killed you. Which I won’t do, if you just answer my questions truthfully. If you don’t know, you don’t know, don’t try to pull an answer out of your ass, it’ll just annoy me. Understood?” Krahe asked, smiling.

Ogura nodded feverishly.

“Good. So as I was asking, where are you keeping the girl?”

“Aldritch’s house, it’s not far from here… The upper floor. Sometimes one room, sometimes the other.”

“Where in the room?”

“I don’t-”

“Compared to the doors and windows, where do you keep her?”

Understanding lit up Ogura’s eyes for a moment.

“As far from the doors and windows as possible. There are beds.”

Krahe knew where the house was. It was, after all, her second prime target. After a few more questions, it quickly became obvious that Ogura didn’t know much at all. She managed to get him to confirm that, at the bare minimum, Juno Oldfield was likely not in immediate fatal danger. This was, however, barely any consolation, because the last valuable pieces of information she managed to dig out of his bald head were numbers – the first number was three. Besides Juno Oldfield, their gang had kidnapped, raped, and disposed of three women on and off over the course of about a year, in addition to simply robbing at least half a dozen others. Juno, based on Ogura’s fearful answers, had already been violated several times, but was still “mostly intact” by his reckoning. The second important number was twenty-one — the number of days the previous victim had lasted. Knowing full well that it would look better and probably end up more useful if she brought in all four of them alive, Krahe decided to put her newly-picked-up security skills to the test. She already had a fair number of leftover materials from securing her office, so she used up some of them by setting up a simple perimeter around Ogura’s bed. To the naked eye, it looked like a single line of ink with a few offshoots connecting to a handful of talismans around the exterior and interior — which is exactly what it was.

“Be a good boy and stay put while I bag your friends. You try to leave, you explode. You try to defuse it, you explode. It’s set to recognize my presence as the defuse key, so you better hope I come back.”

That last part was a lie, but it didn’t really matter.

As she left, Ogura spoke up again. His voice was flat — bewildered, but not disturbed by what he was saying, like reminiscing on a particularly strange animal encounter.

“Y’know, it never really hit me how fucked up it all was. By the end, you couldn’t even tell it used to be a person…”

The urge to kill him right then and there flared within Krahe, but she left it for later. She decided to make her way to the second house, but not before took a moment to prepare. She brought out her calligraphy tools and some pre-prepared ink, working up a “less-than-lethal” Wandrei Faust as quickly as she could — using knowledge gleaned from developing its decoy-sibling, she was able to modify an existing talisman, thus further reducing the amount of time required, and she sped it up even more by simply making it rougher than she normally would, not taking any great care for the purposes of efficiency and making no effort to preserve the offensive beam aspects of the pattern. The resulting theurgy would be a grabber with a terribly foreboding lightshow attached. Instead of taking the time to pack it into cartridges, she just smeared some blood-glue — the Unguent of Nug-soth — on her left bicep, then measured out the requisite amount of thaumine powder, crushed a dregshot bullet, and worked the resulting powder into the sticky surface before applying the talisman itself. It was ugly, but it would work the same once she ignited it. Then, she repeated this process once more. The modified Wandrei Faust would have a limited range, and she would only get two casts of it out of one Chthonian Eel, compared to the usual three. It would suffice — she didn’t expect more than three hostiles, and even if there were more, taking two of them out of the fight without killing them would be better than nothing. A small voice in Krahe had wanted to rush to the other house as soon as possible, but she knew better than anyone how important being properly prepared was. As she saw it, a few minutes wouldn’t magically un-rape or un-mutilate the girl, but if she went in unprepared, those subhumans might get away on way or another, be it by escaping or by making her resort to lethal means rather than capture, and the girl might end up dead as well.

As she left, she pasted a simple locking talisman on the inside of the lock, powered by a 50DD ring. It was weak, but it would be enough to slow down anyone who could try to enter the building while she was away, on the off-chance Ogura somehow called for help.

388 - Fear of Perfection Pt. 3 [Sturmblitz]

Giving it a few moments for the sight of the Boar’s Head Insignia to sink in, Strake then began reciting none other than the oath of the Knights of the Boar, or at least a modified version of it. Graham didn’t know that it deviated from recorded versions, he only vaguely recognized it to begin with.

“By the might of the Boar, whose sign I bear upon me, by the white of the cloth about my body bound. By this brand upon my back, I do swear upon my honor, to uphold the Knightly Virtues ‘til I lay beneath the ground…”

The brand on Strake’s back came alive, as a bed of coals would when blasted with air from a bellows. With each word, his voice seemed to grow at once more distant yet also louder, and before Graham knew it, Strake was speaking with the voices of six men, his own one among a choir. His hair seemed to billow in invisible wind, and though no spectres came forth as one might expect, Graham still felt an unearthly presence looking down at him.

“I have followed into battle, warriors of legend, with my war-kin at my side. My mind grew calm, all their mettle coursing through me, ten-thousand devils shan’t undo me with these masters as my guide.”

Strake rolled his shoulders, flexed his back, and put his shirt back on. All at once, the world snapped back into place, like the sense of the supernatural had never been there at all. He shook a cigarette out of a small, sheet-metal box, and, lighting it off his own beard, took a long drag.

“I’m still a dog of war. I’m just not filthy and ragged anymore. And this… This right here is my teeth. All the better to rip out the throats of the wolves who would eat my sheep. A knight on an iron horse or an old dog with new, polished claws — it makes no difference what you see. I am what I am.”

Then, he looked away, craning his neck up at the beast made of steel that was Zero. Its bloody colour remained, but it wasn’t paint anymore, and its shade was neither bright red, nor was it the rusty-brown of dried blood. The very metal of its armor had taken on a maroon hue, and over the weeks since Eberheim, had reshaped itself. Gone were the brutal, simple angles. The living machine now struck a more rounded, knightly silhouette, and even its internal skeleton had shifted to a small extent. In place of previously minimal joint-covers, it now possessed massive pauldrons that still struggled to encase its enormous shoulder joints, and had three circular vents each. Similar vents could be seen all across the steel beast’s body. The armor of its upper arms was split into interlocking, horizontal segments, and eldritch, purplish flesh showed through the gaps. The savage spears on its forearms barely resembled the simple pilebunkers a normal tank suit was equipped with. The machine’s head resembled something between a knight’s and a soldier’s helmet — it was rather low and squat to the body, with a flared shroud at the sides and back, similar to a typical soldier’s helm, and a curved, blade-like antenna resembling a horn. Within its horizontal visor, the glowing ember of its single eye sat, mounted on a rail.

Unprompted, seeing as Graham clearly wasn’t about to leave, Strake continued talking.

“Tankmen, you can get tankmen. If anyone can find the survivors it’s you. Tank suits, you can get tank suits. Hell, I bet you lot at the Bureau are the only people that Estoras is willing to sell third-models to. But me and Zero, we’re staying here. We have a good thing going. And sure, let’s say you somehow convince me, the dead ones know I’ve been convinced to make worse choices by less persuasive men than you.”

Slowly, the monstrous machine’s mono-eyed head turned to face him, but the burning, purplish light of its eye wasn’t on Sodan. It was on Graham.

”How do you convince him? How do you convince the revenants wailing in his engine?”

__________________________________________________

“Von Wickten? You finally found him?” Zelsys asked.

Strolvath nodded. “It’s… Well, both better and worse than it could be. Better, because he indeed has not been active since your last encounter with him. Worse, because he has spent that time cultivating — not just that, but preparing to undergo some sort of advancement ritual meant to elevate him to the level and seat of a Divine General.”

“How’d you find out? You have a man on the inside, I presume.”

“Remember the incident with the Pateirian senators? There was this kid you spared, Zhuo. He decided to take Estoras up on his offer to join up with us as a double-agent after all. Kid’s been one hell of an asset. Thanks to him, we’ve been able to do more damage to Pateiria’s occupation efforts than any direct attack ever could.”

“So what next? Von Wickten finishes his advancement ritual and makes a beeline for me? Or do we interrupt him while he’s vulnerable?”

“We don’t even know where he is,” Strolvath shrugged. “Zhuo hasn’t seen him more than twice, and the advancement ritual is so closely guarded we don’t even know for sure that it is specifically a cultivation advancement ritual and not something more obscure, that part’s conjecture. Most of our intel on the matter is second hand, even if we know that it can be trusted. What we do know is what he plans to do after his breakthrough: Collude with the Black Horse Sect’s Root Branch. They plan to invite you to negotiate with them, then try to get you to agree to a duel any which way they can — not planning to win, but to get you away from the sect for long enough for one of their elite disciples to challenge the sect to a duel he can win, all so that they can get favorable negotiation terms for… Some purpose that eludes me. If you ask me, my guess is they just want any excuse to get out of the Northern Capital, and this is the only way they can justify doing it to themselves. Regardless, Von Wickten independently found out about the plan, likely through the Empire’s own intelligence network, and plans to use it as a way to get his fight with you. Being an independent third party with a personal grievance against you, and given the fact they don’t actually care about winning the duel, the Black Horses will have no reason to deny him his request.”

Zel took a sip of her drink, and considered her options. Fighting Von Wickten wasn’t a matter of “if” in her mind, it was a matter of “when” and “where.” He knew where she was, so at best, she could delay the fight by running away, but he would certainly cause a great deal of collateral damage — first it would be just because, and then once he realized she was stalling, his motive would change to drawing her out. Therefore, the most reasonable conclusion would be to stack the deck as much as she could by preparing to the best of her ability, just like Von Wickten was doing possibly at this very moment.

252 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Krahe closed out day 2 of the investigation into this particular case with initial preparations for Barzai’s evolution ritual, followed by working out the beginnings of Wandrei Faust’s sibling theurgy. As she leaned back in her chair, crushing beetle-like beans between her molars and fiddling with her cigarette-roller, she inwardly questioned why the reagent for Barzai’s evolution ritual was Semzar’s souldregs. For the first time since the raid, Barzai responded — inside her own head, he repeated Krahe’s words back to her: "This is what I do. This is what I am. I don't know how to do anything else.”

He then continued with a bassy, somewhat distorted male voice, choppy and cobbled together: “A creation — wrought in the maker’s image. A mirror — reflecting the self. I shall sup. Upon the ruin of the wretched. The anguish of evil, thwarted. Sinners, punished. A despair most pure. Most delectable.”

Once again he fell silent, and one last time his voice returned, this time mimicking a calm, older man, a documentarian perhaps: “Even with their stores for the winter secured, if prey offers itself, they will swallow it whole…”

The sound of a magnetic tape skipping.

“…and from the scorching heat of the surface, they return to their home in the water to undergo metamorphosis.”

With that, Barzai fell silent again. The message couldn’t have been more obvious — Semzar’s souldregs were the main reagent. But that didn’t mean there could only be one.

On day 3, enough of the moving parts fell into place that Krahe didn’t feel any reservations about forcing the rest of it to fit. She had been able to observe the suspects thoroughly enough to establish a clear pattern, and perhaps more damningly, she had discovered clear evidence of soundproofing of both the mundane and arcane kinds on two of their houses - Joe Ogura’s and Aldritch Herebor’s houses, specifically. Having caught Joe Ogura on his way home from work, she trailed him, waiting for him to go in and walk up the stairs before she broke in. The front door’s lock gave way with a half-hearted raking. She wasted no time making her way up the stairs, fully expecting that Ogura’s soundproofing didn’t shut out sounds from outside — this assumption proved itself correct when she found the door not just locked, but also barred from the other side, despite the fact it had a bracket for a heavy bar on the outside.

Skimming through, she immediately felt the outside world’s sounds become a bit more distant while remaining clearly audible. More importantly, however, Ogura’s bald head gleamed in the moonlight as he tried to stuff his sizable frame through the window, doing so with a speed and agility that made it clear he’d done it before. In his left hand, which was still inside, he gripped a revolver, popping one shot after the next at Krahe. All three missed — two struck the door, while the third came a bit closer, piercing the wall as Ogura adjusted his aim towards her actual location. The smell of the room finally hit Krahe’s nostrils. Urine, sweat, semen, acetone, in that order. To say there wasn’t much of a fight would’ve been giving Ogura too much credit. The man, even if he knew how to fight, had hobbled himself in the attempt to escape, and Krahe had liberated his left shoulder of its socket within the span of a few breaths. It hadn’t even been intentional — Krahe had simply grabbed his arm to drag him back into the room, and the joint just gave way when she pulled.

While Ogura groaned in pain, he hadn’t crumpled, and there was nothing to suggest he questioned why this was happening. Not wanting to waste time, Krahe just dragged him to his bed, shoved him onto the soiled mattress, and bound him by the shackles still attached to the bedposts. Given the general filth covering the rest of this den, she didn’t find the bed all that questionable.

Reaching out with a tendril of tar, she pulled the chair from under the doorhandle and sat down before Ogura. They stared at eachother for a good twenty seconds without a word spoken, Ogura breathing heavily as the pain of his shoulder settled in.

“I’m curious. Why do you think I’m here?” Krahe asked.

“The-” he began, only to bite his tongue as his thoughts caught up to his mouth.

“You know, your teeth have flesh inside them. Have you ever seen a kernel pop in the pan? Ever wonder what that feels like? I can show you. Or you can make things easy for me and answer by questions. I’ll ask you again: Why do you think I’m here?”

Joe weighed his options. He weighed them hard, so hard Krahe could almost see the reflection of his sweaty dome shifting as the cogs inside turned and turned.

“The Oldfield girl? It’s gotta be her. Nobody before her tried-”

Again, Ogura bit his tongue.

“Of course there were others before her,” Krahe remarked, writing it down. “Are you keeping her in Herebor’s house? Somewhere else? Or did you send her off?”

She was shooting blind, and Ogura didn’t speak right away. However, based on his reactions, she still got a good idea of things.

“So you do send them off once you’re done with them? Know where? Or is it a dead-drop in more ways than one?”

Again, he kept quiet. Krahe raised her arm. A rising hum began to sound as scarlet light flooded the twilit room. Slowly building, bit by bit, adjusting things here and there without any great deal of thought. Ogura had begun babbling to wait, but he didn’t say anything interesting or substantial enough to make her stop.

“I don’t fuckin’ dispose of them, alright?! Youssef does! He talks about his guy with Aldritch sometimes, some grafter or whatever. I never pay attention to him.”

She still let the thaumaturgy rip, only adjusted her aim upward a bit. With a sound of steel wire snapping combined with the ominous bass of a high-wattage electric arc, the brickwork of Ogura’s wall became melted slag, carved like wet clay with an ominous, five-pronged spiral pattern. Krahe was pleasantly surprised by the degree of power retention at this range, yet annoyed at herself for not paying attention.

251 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta [Cherno]

As for actual customers, thankfully, her methods had worked as intended by filtering out, those she wished to avoid — for instance, a husband who just wanted someone to go stalk his wife to see if she was cheating.

It was somewhat disappointing that her first real customer under the Crow and Raven Agency didn’t walk into her front door bearing a suitcase full of cash and a troubled stare. In fact, she found them. Four days after opening her agency, while getting breakfast, Krahe did her usual schtick of asking about local news, something this establishment’s proprietor had come to know her for. Pointing to the corkboard next to the counter, he told her of a recent missing-persons case: Juno Oldfield, age 17. A full-time student, employed part-time at a small factory that, by the sounds of it, did something roughly equivalent to plastic injection-molding or perhaps resin-based 3D printing. The case was, at a glance, mundane — Krahe almost dismissed it at first. A girl who had run away to live with her delinquent boyfriend, typical story. Problem was, her parents didn’t buy that, and, after learning the details, neither did Krahe. She had vanished about a week prior after one of four local delinquents, named Aldrich Herebor, had kicked her off her bicycle. Him and his friends had spent several hours prior to the incident harassing the local young women. That was all she got at first. Even once she tracked down the Oldfield family home, even once she spoke with Juno’s parents, she didn’t get a clear sense of motive. Even so, even with a vague mist surrounding the case, Krahe couldn’t help but feel there was something more to it — and if there wasn’t, then she would be perfectly content resolving it as a simple missing persons case. In fact, it would have been nice to for once have something tie up with a nice bow, even if she didn’t expect such an outcome.

The girl’s mother, with shuddering eyes, was beside herself, and though her father exuded a quiet worry as he comforted his wife, there was a cold anger in his eyes. It was from him that she got most of the info, with the mother being in no state to say much of anything coherent, spending most of Krahe’s visit looking off into the distance and quietly sobbing. They had actually put up an official contract a mere two days after her disappearance, and, not expecting contractors to take interest, they had even directly submitted a plea with the city watch. The city watch agreed to investigate and even put out an public statement regarding the matter, requesting information on her whereabouts, but this, too, ran into a dead end. That dead end? Three voice messages, recorded on cheap memslates, dropped off in the small hours at the family’s home over the course of three days. This was the origin of the claims that she had run away and didn’t want to come back. At her wits’ end, Ms. Oldfield submitted the memslates to the city-watch, hoping that the background noise might help them find where the recording was made. This act functionally killed the city watch investigation into the matter, as, under the law, Juno was well within her rights to leave home. Her father then made his way around the neighborhood, questioning people in a desperate effort to find someone who knew something, anything, focusing his investigation on the four delinquents.

As Juno’s father continued talking, Krahe changed how she viewed the case once again. It wasn’t a mystery. The suspects were the most obvious perpetrators imaginable. If things truly were as described, the “who” would be a foregone conclusion, the “why” and “where” were the questions.

The four delinquents were low-level gang members, the lowest of the low, bottom-tier members of a minor gang. Chimpira in a manner of speaking. Even so, they were infamous and somewhat feared in the area, throwing around their gang affiliation at any opportunity to threaten someone. Since they only harassed and at times stole from civilians, it worked for them. In addition to Aldritch Herebor, Joseph “Joe” Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus. All humans. Juno’s father also suspected two others, whom he had seen in tow with the four aforementioned young men, but he had only ever seen them twice, and didn’t know their names. 

Krahe immersed herself into the case to the fullest extent, biting into it as a starveling beast would bite into its first prey in weeks. The pegboard in her office rapidly became populated with images, notes, and multicolored lines of thread. It wasn’t the most practical for actually categorizing information — the cogen, her personal computer, served that purpose best, especially when it came to organizing the substantial amount of sound recordings and notes she had made just as part of this short case, such as the interview with the victim’s parents. But when she was stuck, when she couldn’t quite work something out and her fingers hovered listlessly over the keys, putting thought into a physical form and pinning it to the pegboard had a strange, almost supernatural ability to recontextualize things and help the cogs get moving again. 

Were it an option, she would have spent everything she had — time and effort both — solving the case, not necessarily to save the girl faster, but because a singular focus was refreshing compared to juggling a hundred matters at once. That wasn’t an option, however. Between finding the people she needed to find, keeping track of the suspects and waiting for them to lead her where she wanted them to lead her, throughout the span of three days, Krahe still found many hours of free time. And as those hours passed, just like the case came together, so too did the theurgic pattern of Wandrei Faust’s sibling. On day 2, she even resolved one of the Solomon Howitzer’s main issues, that of guiding-line breakage, coming another step closer to truly making it work. During these few days, Krahe also received word of Favonia’s much-delayed return from the Stormsalt Jungle, and some of the pieces required to facilitate the soulbeast hunt also fell into place, these being that Garvesh made contact with an able and willing tracker, and that the tracker in question knew of a soulbeast who fit the criteria.

But this piece of good news, as significant as it was, didn’t bring her peace. It was like hearing that she would be able to eat in the evening, when right now, it was noon. Still, it was something. 

387 - Fear of Perfection Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

It had been her tutelage of Lucian, as well as the desire to be more capable to teach the other disciples, that had inspired her to push Carnifex as far as it could go in terms of shape variation. The young man’s growth had been incredibly promising. Time and time again, in defiance of his own glaringly lacking intelligence, he gleaned insight from someplace or another and advanced. Unceasingly, at times slowly, and at many times painfully, he kept on advancing, and as part of that, he kept on eating swords, going from a living sheath to a living arsenal of sorts. She had never seen a person turn into a swords-hedgehog and walk it off before. 

Mata’s growth had been similarly remarkable since she had experienced the World of Fangs, though Zelsys didn’t get to interact with her all that often. As for the others who had entered the illusory world, it varied. Two of them, who had been ejected immediately, exhibited some minor benefits, but not much else. The eagle-man was still recovering, not just because of his injuries, but because he had been molting continuously since the incident, growing not just more and larger feathers, but also scales and a great deal of muscle. He was very promising. And then, there were the four. Four Ikesian youths, those who had avoided her so vehemently, and who now acted with an unsettling degree of synchronicity, and who had somehow each tamed a different variety of giant serpent. They somewhat reminded her of the triplets she fought back in Eberheim. Despite the slightly usettling element, they, too, were highly promising, even if they still avoided her to some extent, and even if she couldn’t really think of a way to help them with direct coaching.

With this conundrum in mind, the events of the immediate future felt, to her, like the heavens themselves conspiring to help her out of this rut, as brief as it had been.

First came the guidestone, that gift from Estoras and his mysterious, stone-masked benefactor, whose identity Zelsys didn’t dare to guess, knowing it would probably end up somehow being the most outlandish possibility of them all. Why guess “rogue cultivator elder” or “one of the Twin Sages in disguise” when it could easily be something like “somehow both the Sage of Fog and one of the two remaining Three Kings resurrected in one body”? It was simply pointless to guess with this little information.

Second, there was the news — the news of the Black Horse Sect’s Stillwind Branch, and therefore, of their schemes in Willowdale’s surrounding lands. This wasn’t a surprise as much as it was an unexpected confirmation of her assumptions about the Black Horse Sect. She still wanted to meet with the Sangers, having never interacted with them in any meaningful manner due to the fact the Survivor Sects’ territories didn’t overlap.

And third, or, perhaps, number two and a half: The call for help from Arkaley.

This one… This one was the best.

Between these news, however, were also news that were far more relevant for others than herself. To begin with, Strake’s treatment had finally succeeded, allowing him full independence from Zero with the minor side effect of cosmetic mutations — scales, to be specific. Makhus couldn’t quite describe the nature of what had worked, because it wasn’t quite a Dragonheart Bolus in the sense of those described in the original scripture fragments, but it was based on the same principles. Perhaps far more momentously for Makhus, Strolvath had found out about the need for his blood and sent a man ahead bearing that vital reagent, so that the True Dragonheart Bolus would be ready by the time he arrived. He also requested to meet with Zelsys in person, claiming that it had to do with the goings-on in Arkaley, somewhat to her chagrin.

And arrive, he did, and so did three other Bureau agents who entered by different means and scattered throughout the city. But Zelsys knew them, she could feel their slippery presence on her territory.

Zel made it a point to make Strolvath come to her, in a perhaps petty show of annoyance. At the moment, she lacked the patience to make him wait outside her chambers’ doors, so she called him in after ten minutes. The moment the door was shut, she spoke up.

“I delayed myself for your sake. I hope you have a good reason.”

Strolvath smiled.

“Do you not want to know your opponent’s moves before he makes them?”

_________________________

Meanwhile…

Graham liked to think of himself as an experienced man. He had served the Bureau before the war, he had played soldier during it to keep an eye on targets of interest, and he had evaded capture many a time in his service since the war’s official end.

“You? The Dog of War, a knight? What happened? That steel coffin cook your brain or something?”

Strake glared at him. Hard. And… It burned. Somehow, his stare burned. Graham could feel the skin between his eyes blistering and smelled burning hair. 

“You say you know me. Hell, maybe you do. But you don’t know me enough to know why I called myself that, why I deserted,” Sodan said.

A part of Graham found it asinine that someone would refer to himself as a Tactical Supremacy Asset, even if he was designated as such. But he didn’t need to say that. He knew Strake could tell.

Taking a bet that the machine might not understand it, Graham signed to Strake: “Even if you wanted to come back, it wouldn’t let you, would it?”

The burned man laughed.

“Yeah, let’s put it that way. It’s as good an excuse as any. I can’t put it into words — but I can show you. I owe you that much. After this, we’re even. I’m done being an active agent, the Bureau will have to do with an independent Tactical Supremacy Asset. You tell Strolvath that.”

Reaching down, Strake pulled up his shirt and turned around. Beyond the widespread patterns of pitch-black skin, he also had patches of glistening scales surrounding scars at spots that, to Graham, seemed arbitrary, but that was not what Srake intended to show him, nor was it what pushed itself into Graham’s face. No, it was the Boar’s Head Insignia, emblazoned across the whole of Strake’s back, pulsating with the colours of a dull ember. It was not the insignia of Eberheim itself, but of its once-great knightly order. Graham had heard the rumours, but he hadn’t really believed them. A one-off event, a contingency left behind by the Knights of the Boar, that was one thing, but that it truly left a permanent mark upon him was something else.

250 - Solomon Howitzer [Cherno]

Everything Krahe learned from securing her new office would also inevitably carry over to everything else that involved talisman-drawing, especially Theurgy. Besides just being able to produce working Wandrei Faust talismans faster and more consistently, the standard Wandrei Faust would inevitably be improved as well, as her improved understanding would allow her to incorporate more complex maneuvering thrusters based on her own left arm, allowing it to be uncannily maneuverable for its size. She was also certain she could create a lighter, faster variant that could harry an enemy for a longer time. Concocting such a variant wasn’t at the top of her priorities list, however, since she didn’t want to split up her two eidolons.

By the time she was done securing the place, she had spent nearly twice as much on the security as she had on the property itself. The walls, ceilings, and floors ended up plastered in three total layers of talismans: The first, most expansive, was the general security layer. It included passive structural reinforcement, active warding in case of high-powered direct attack, detection of any would-be intruders, prohibition of Astro Skimming, and a number of weaker traps that could immobilize and be reset. The second layer was the more potent, containing multiple networks of high-powered precision traps leveraged against one another, able to be triggered manually if necessary through Krahe’s specific thaumic signature, made nearly impossible to imitate due to the Astral Implosion Furnace. The active features of these two layers were powered by a great number of CRC rings scattered all throughout, with a larger “power bank” embedded inside the floor. She also placed a few “signature-mimic” talismans at other points, which would directly mimic the power bank’s energy signature while themselves requiring only a miniscule amount of energy to do so.

The third layer was purely diagnostic. It traced and interlaced with the other two layers while remaining separate, and its main feature was visual projection, meaning that Krahe could easily diagnose if there were any issues and where they were.

While Krahe took care to make her defensive perimeter not obvious from the outside, she decided that the performance hit wasn’t worth it when it came to the interior. The exterior door was one thing — it was hammered, black iron, an Ironworks slab of metal, but these were not too rare to see. The strangeness only came in past that door, in the stairwell. Up and up it went, and the closer to the top, the more densely the paint gave way to the red-and-black-on-yellow of paper talismans.

Finally, when it was at last done, there came no flood of clients, not even once Krahe began distributing her contact talismans. Over the coming days, she settled back into some measure of a routine, now spending a significant portion of her time at her office. Of the people who contacted her, one was a letter, an offer from the Ironworks to become a tester for the Black Sun Project. That they knew she was Viridaimon didn’t surprise her, but she didn’t feel like walking that path. She didn’t hold any particular dislike for them either, knowing little of the company, so she filed the offer away. Another was, at first alarmingly, one of Brizogia’s men, one of the few who stayed behind rather than chase after her. He was just as on-edge as Krahe, but, it seemed, he only brought an olive branch of sorts. Entirely unofficially, he claimed that he was certain his employer had completely dropped the subject of Krahe, which made him believe she wanted to move past the incident and save as much face as possible. It was an awkward, tense exchange, but in the end, no violence came of it. Krahe wasn’t sure if he was right, but she was fairly certain he at least believed his own words.

In the meanwhile, she returned to her research on eidolon evolution rituals, continuing to draw upon the Lost Sun Society’s libraries for this purpose, and also made some attempts at elaborating her thaumaturgies’ designs to better take advantage of the properties conferred by Implosion-Burning. Tracers could benefit from improved guidance, but she couldn’t maintain a good connection just by line-of-sight. Extruding long, thin threads by way of Tar to achieve a wire-guided effect was a sound solution, but she couldn’t quite get it to work yet. The threads either broke within the span of a few meters, or they ate up too much entropy to be worthwhile. She just needed to work it out through trial and error before it worked properly, she was sure of it. Then, there was Lasher. It was still new, and it was great on its own, but Krahe couldn’t help but feel that its use-case crossed over with Cinder Flash a bit too much, and more importantly, that the two could be made to compliment one another. Perhaps something excessively potent for a Thaumaturgy, straying well into the realm of Theurgy, designed to rip apart wards and bodies in one shot. A real, true, undeniable, howitzer. That was when the thought sparked, a memory of a certain nuclear plasma weapon used in space combat. The problem with Lasher was that its threads relied on the physical motion of her fingers for extrusion, and it was propelled forward directly by her thaumaturgy, without any chain of causality. She knew well that she had a natural lack of affinity for makings things go fast in this method, perhaps as a form of naturally-ocurring leverage. While her Tracers had simply become more missile-like to solve this problem, another solution was needed. This was where the concepts behind the aforementioned nuclear plasma weapon came into play — Krahe intended to modify Cinder Flash so that its burst-beam would simultaneously extrude and propel Lasher’s threads, whilst also conferring an anti-armor element to the thaumaturgy, softening the target before the cutting element hit. After countless adjustments, she was able to consistently recreate a prototypical form of her intended thaumaturgy. It was absurdly inefficient and required several seconds of charge-up time, but its power was like a siren’s song. Her left arm aglow with scarlet light, it poured out more like a sudden gust of wind than an instantaneous snap, and brought with it a five-pronged net of superheated black glass. It wasn’t complete, not combat-usable by any other means, but Krahe had already christened it the Solomon Howitzer.

249 - Give Me An Excuse Pt. Final/Crow and Raven[Cherno]

A part of her wanted to speak, or even to fight them, just to see if she could take them. But there were five of them, and they weren’t worthless gangsters. Even if they weren’t exactly well-suited to subtly trailing a target, they had real skills. She decided against initiating a conversation, but her pursuers did it for her.

“Somehow I do not expect that you will come quietly,” said the bald one.

“Would you buy it if I told you that you capturing me would have consequences more severe than the raid?” Krahe asked.

“...She isn’t lying,” said another one of them, a man with not three, not four, but five eyes — two normal and three extra on his forehead, forming a semicircle of eyes.

“An anathemist has delusions of grandeur? Next you’ll tell me boss’s hair isn’t her own,” the man with glowing eyes hissed. “Of all things you pick to imitate it’s the most useless part of a banisher.”

Krahe couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t actually bickering. Their attention remained staunchly fixed on her. They were trying to make it seem like they were distracted so that she would let her guard down, just a bit. She, in turn, glanced between them, trying to make it appear as if she was falling for it as she gradually backed up closer and closer to the wall that held her escape route. Seeing this as her backing herself into a corner, they didn’t try to stop her.

“After all the fun we’ve had, I take it you won’t take a final offer to go back and say I got away,” Krahe offered, trying to fill the time with things someone else would believably say in this situation. She didn’t actually expect it to work.

“I am here to ensure that doesn’t happen,” the man with glowing eyes interjected, glancing at the other contractors. Now that he had said that, Krahe noticed that he stood a bit further away from the others, and had stepped behind them, almost as if he wanted to be able to shoot them in the back if it came to that.

“That’s too bad,” Krahe said. She summoned the detonator into her hand, keeping it out of sight through simple sleight-of-hand — she had picked this cheap trash detonator specifically for its concealability.

Click.

Several detonations rung out. The stairway caved in, dust filling the basement as the building above them shook. Multiple types of magic flared up, but it was all too late.

Click. Krahe immediately skimmed backwards, just in time to hear the next series of detonations and feel the shockwaves that followed. There was a real chance that one or more of them might survive both the detonation and the cave-in, but that wasn’t her problem any more than Brizogia surviving their encounter. Her main objective had been eliminating the threat and establishing herself as someone whom it was a bad idea to come after — and she had achieved that.

Krahe didn’t linger a moment longer than she needed to — she was gone long before the commotion could attract any attention, emerging out of sight, in the next subdistrict over. 

Though she remained more on-guard than usual over the next two days, nothing came of it. She encountered no further interference in the course of establishing her own agency, and uncreatively named it “Crow and Raven.” The agency as it stood existed only on paper — as she wanted it. The office required much securing before she was ready to paste a signboard over the door, and there was still the matter of advertising to consider. She needed to spread the word, but not too quickly, not too widely, and only to particular types of people if at all possible. The choice was obvious — Garvesh, and Razem. Yao was an option, but Krahe didn’t expect her to be a consistent channel for customers to reach her. Nozar also came to mind, but she didn’t trust that greasy fly-man as far as she could throw him, at least not when it came to handing over this type of information.

Luckily, producing promotional materials by hand was trivial compared to the laborious process of drawing actual, serious talismans. Something that could project some fixed text and a simple image when supplied with thauma was the absolute bottom level of talisman-making, it was one of the most rudimentary training exercises, recommended for children barely old enough to hold a brush and write properly. Producing such calling-cards was a great warmup exercise for the second vital part of prepping to open for business — securing the office. Krahe lost herself in this endeavor, slipping into the cycle like an old, well-worn glove — building up her defenses, inspecting the perimeter from inside and outside, noticing flaws, patching them, rinse and repeat. Her understanding of talisman-crafting and of the tricks outlined in Yao’s scroll grew by a greater amount during this several-day-long bout of hyperfocus than it had throughout her many days of intentionally studying the text, as she finally had a direct frame of reference for all the information and could directly apply it to real situations.

Among the many things she came to understand was the concept of leverage — a phenomenon at once ill-understood due to its esoteric, almost sapiently-capricious nature, and extremely widely used in all forms of magic. In simple terms, it meant using limitations to strengthen magic. Many times, this occurred naturally, but it was the easiest to directly choose the leverage point and leverage ratio when constructing a talisman or a network of them. The most impactful and advanced form of leverage was “possibility” or “the future” — a network of five traps could be set up so that any one trap was leveraged against the possibility of all the others going off, meaning that one could have any one of those five traps go off to far greater effect in exchange for the whole thing collapsing after that trap was triggered, destroying the possibility of the other four ever going off. Apparently, highly advanced practitioners in Tiengenzhen would often set up artificial Hazard Zones, with their Archon Cores leveraged such that if someone passed the trials, they would always receive a suitable reward, in exchange for the trial realm collapsing right afterwards. She wasn’t sure if there was something lost in translation here, but it somewhat made sense, even if she couldn’t help but feel a painful lack of knowledge on Hazard Zones and Archon Cores beyond the surface-level.

386 - The First Two Guidestones Pt. 2/Fear of Perfection Pt. 1 [Sturmblitz]

The Estoras Family’s Seven Calamity Armaments were unique in being a truly independently-developed art, but to say they were entirely unrooted from Grekurian cultivation and martial arts would have been a lie. And these… Crovacus couldn’t articulate what a treasure this was if he tried. Despite only totaling three or perhaps four volumes across all the fragments, Crovacus knew that with these as his reference material, he could refine and evolve the Calamity Armaments to a level never before seen. He also knew in his heart of hearts that he simply didn’t have enough time to achieve it on his own, and that he would inevitably require the aid of the Newman Sect in one way or another — and he didn’t care.

The weapons, then, put the Estoras family treasures to shame completely and undeniably. It was one thing when it was the Walking Tribulation with her monstrous, shapeshifting cleaver — there was no such thing as that among the Seven Calamity Armaments. But these ran the full gamut. There were two examples of each of the seven, except for swords and spears, of which there were four each. With blades of singing steel and stone as black as the night sky, with jewels like stars gleaming down their lengths and handles of wood that could scarcely even be considered mere wood, shod with metals no living man knew how to produce. Half of them were worthless to him, carrying mighty imbuements of elements counter to flame, but Crovacus didn’t care, he was completely willing to trust that someone, some day, would somehow develop a variant of the Calamity Armaments 

“With this…” he uttered under his breath. A few stray thoughts sailed past — with this, forget a single noble family, a single city. With this, he could sail to the far lands of the eagle-men, he could found an entire sect with this as its foundation, he could be a god-king in a far-off land.

All those thoughts crumpled under the weight of reality, of the impending future that Crovacus forsaw for Willowdale, his people, his family, here in this land.

“With this, I no longer hold any doubt that I shall carve the Estoras name into history for all time. Halxian!”

He took in hand a mighty spear of pure blackstone, with seven gemstones down its shaft connected by channels inlaid with silver, and held out its surprisingly weighty form to his son.

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With countless eyes upon the Newman Sect Founder’s every public move, within only days of her doing something, rumors quickly began to spread.

Whether it was recently-awakened cultivator-beasts or the possibility of unwelcome cultivators from the Survivor Sects or the Order of Six Truths, she had been going out under the slightest excuse, bringing lower-ranked sect members along as part of training. They, in turn, acted as witnesses and disseminated these rumors. She knew of this, and it didn’t bother her at all.

The most recent rumor was, to the unenlightened, merely interesting, but to those with eyes to see, it was unprecedentedly audacious: She had begun wielding a wild variety of weapons.

To those who had even basic knowledge of Storm-soul Cultivation and its characteristics, it was like saying water had become dry. This method, whose greatest flaw was that it shackled the practitioner to one or at most two weapons — how could someone so dedicated to it, whose cultivation had taken her through the deepest abyss of having your living weapon shattered, now disregard that same restriction out of hand?

It was a key detail that contained the answer — every single weapon Zelsys brought to bear possessed the monstrous features of Carnifex Fulguris. Short cleavers, kriegsmessers, longswords, spears, battleaxes, halberds, great lances, tiny daggers, maces and hammers, even bladed fans and rope darts. Then, there were the claws, and the biting. The claws were one thing — she already had them, and simply built upon them by adding False Fangs on top. But the teeth, the teeth stuck with people. It wasn’t just the fact she bit her prey, or even that she bit chunks out of her prey while it was still alive. No, it was how far she took it. She would open her mouth, and keep opening it, willing her cheeks to split open so she could open it wider, and then she would form an oversized set of external teeth out of a dozen False Fangs, creating the appearance of a chittering lower-face-mask when her mouth was closed. With this, she was seen to directly bite off the top half of a beast’s head, swallow it, and digest it within seconds. One moment, the bulge could be seen traveling down her throat, and the next, in a flash of lightning and enormous exhalation of steam, it was gone, flesh, bones and all, and she spat up the Azoth Stone unharmed afterwards, having stowed it in her second stomach.

All of these widely varied armaments were still Carnifex Fulguris.

In the absence of a challenge suitable to Carnifex’ true form, Zelsys had intentionally restrained herself in this manner, not only to entertain herself, but also to gain a better understanding of other weapons.

“Carnifex Fulguris is the only blade allowed to Zelsys Newman.”

But Carnifex Fulguris could become whatever she required of it.

In this manner, not only could she refine her skill with changing Carnifex’ shape, she could also handle any melee weapon she could think of, explore its martial arts, and take from them whatever she wanted.

But it still wasn’t what she wanted.

By any reasonable metric, it could be said that she had been advancing with meteoric speed.

But Zelsys felt that, despite still moving forward by momentum, she had lost some propulsive force of advancement — that everything since the Blue Moon War until now had been a continuous path of advancement, which she had only just now finished walking. Kugelblitz Incarnation, the Truth of Fangs, the reforming of her flesh to fit to the utmost extent — it all came together to a sense of “completeness.” And that was a problem. Perfection meant the inability to improve further. She couldn’t let herself become “perfected,” not at this stage, not ever.

385 - The First Two Guidestones Pt. 1 [Sturmblitz]

A/N: I'm not dead. Just wished I had been for the first half of december or so. And then christmas.

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A clandestine expeditionary force made its way through the countryside — six figures in dark cloaks, all riding steel beasts faster than any animal, closely followed by a similarly-disguised humanoid tank — a UOT-314-01 Steelwing, the fastest mass-production third-model tank suit, if a run of nine total units could be considered “mass-production.” Chained to the Steelwing and to the tankmen’s blitzgandr bikes was a hovering cargo transport, dragged along like a great chariot at a speed far beyond the machine’s own capabilities.

Crovacus Estoras counted among their number. He didn’t dare to withhold something a powerful cultivator had explicitly instructed him to give to the Newman Sect. He had in fact handed over the guidestone to Zelsys Newman personally, mere hours before departing for this very expedition.

However, he had prioritized acquiring his own share of the spoils as quickly as possible, to the point of mustering a squad of Hellhounds to accompany him. This was not out of greed or some desire to get ahead of others — in fact, it was simple curiosity, perhaps even a sense of adventure that refused to be stifled any longer. What could that mysterious, masked man intend for his line, and what dangers could lurk in such a place? As far as he knew, this man could be a survivor of the Three Kings Era, or someone who had stumbled upon the Nameless King’s inheritance. His knowledge wasn’t particularly deep, but it was deep enough to know that the Nameless King had been the foremost master of blackstone among the triarchy.

What the guidestone “for the soldiers” pointed towards was an exceedingly well-hidden bunker. The guidestone acted as a navigational tool, and, when triggered in the correct location, it dissolved into black sand, opening a hidden gate.

It was revolutionary. This technology was unprecedented… And impossible to manufacture. The astronomical demand for cold-iron could be fulfilled thanks fo recent advances in materials science that allowed direct, reactor-assisted refinement of mundane ore into low-grade cold-iron, but that was just the start. Willowdale, even after its rapid industrialization, even with its current ability to manufacture new tank-suits and their underlying technologies, lacked the ability to fabricate more than perhaps 20 to 30% of what was described here.

Even now, having made great technological strides, after having unified a great deal of disparate research, after receiving much counseling from the Kargarian Iron Brotherhood and even several independent mechanical experts, Willowdale could not manufacture what was described here. The technological base was present, but fabricating even the fundamentals would demand entirely new tooling, and new factories would need to be built just to accommodate the advanced manufacturing techniques.

In fact, these technical specification documents blurred the line between “technology” and “artifacts,” to an even greater extent than the Bloody Zero had at the time of its original production — to compare any technology with that machine as it was now would be unfair, it was clearly a living artifact at this point. The individual components required not just highly advanced assembly machines, they even had to be assembled under ritualistic conditions. There were no full tank-suit designs to be found here, but that didn’t matter. Crovacus had learned a great deal during his tenure, as he personally oversaw all development of that crucial technology. And based on these specifications, he knew one thing: No human could pilot something built using this technology. Only a cultivator could withstand the forces exerted upon the body, and only a cultivator specifically trained on this technology could fully draw out the potential of a machine using it.

This was a true treasure trove, the only problem being that to properly make use of all this, new cultivators would have to be raised. The Hellhound Corps and the newly-formed chivalric Order of the Steel Serpent would surely more than suffce — Crovacus would just have to accelerate the projected development timeline a little. He didn’t doubt that the Walking Tribulation, who had time and time again secured his position, would support the formation of a second fully-fledged sect in Willowdale, even if it was unorthodox. The difficulty would arise in establishing and maintaining a sense of equal footing between the Newman Sect and the Serpent Knights… Especially if the other sects protested this defiance of tradition. If Crovacus needed to form the Serpent Knights as subservient to the Newman Sect, it would be a problem — not because of any of the current higher-ups in either organization, but because of the disciples on either side.

Perhaps even more impactful was the fact that, once the manufacturing base was in place, much of this could be applied on a lower levels. The common militiaman could be armed an armored to a standard unprecedented throughout history, save for perhaps the golden ages of the Ankhezians and the Three Kings. The civilian sector would also inevitably benefit.

Only an empty cavern was left by the time they were done with the place — Crovacus stowed much of the most vital items in his personal tablet, while the larger items, or those too unstable to be stored in this manner, were loaded onto the hover-transport. The entrance sealed itself behind them as they left, its surface eroding within moments to a state that could barely be distinguished from the surrounding rock even by the eye of one who knew it had been there.

Crovacus undertook the same journey not much later, this time eschewing the full escort in favour of two Hellhounds and his own son, Halxian. Half of his reason was that the journey was much longer, spanning past the historical Grekurian border, to a place just barely within the Blackwall’s borders, a journey that took multiple days even on blitzgandrs. The second half was that he knew they wouldn’t need nearly as much cargo capacity thanks to the guidestone’s hints. What they discoverd was no vault of technology… But a trove of ancient Grekurian blades and cultivation method fragments.

248 - Give Me An Excuse Pt. 2 [Cherno]

A/N: I'm not dead. Just wished I had been for the first half of december or so. And then christmas.

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Brizogia’s head twitched upon her neck in a manner that a human’s head absolutely shouldn’t, and it seemed that her anger had spilled over into confusion.

“Are you just… Are you just mad? Do you have soot on the brain?”

“Perhaps it would be easier to say that than to explain why I think the way I do. But, alright. I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll put aside everything I’ve heard on the street, I’ll even put aside the bad first impression your helpers have made on me,” Krahe acquiesced, glancing around to the spots where she was absolutely certain Brizogia had stationed her men, even if she couldn’t see them, before resting her gaze back on the Silversword administrator. She almost seemed hopeful, in a “wow, she’s actually falling for it” kind of way.

“And even still, I don’t see myself working for or with you. Because…”

Krahe leaned across the table and blew arrha smoke in Brizogia’s face.

“...I know what you are.”

Before anything could take place, Krahe skimmed twice, away from the table. It was in pieces a half-second later, and the lower half of Brizogia’s face had sprung open like a malfunctioning full-mouth prosthetic. She lashed out with her hand, and one of the rings upon her fingers came alive — a dozen silver blades sprung into existence, firing off in Krahe’s direction with the velocity and supersonic cracks of high-caliber bullets. Seven missed. The remainder passed through her now-immaterial form.

Krahe didn’t flee. Not yet. She had seen the silver swords take shape, and she had seen how they flew, how they shot out immediately, with perfect consistency at the same exact moment, with the same timing between shots. Brizogia’s second barrage, more considered, had greater variety of timing between shots, but it only revealed the fact they couldn’t stick around after formation, or at least this wasn’t their default mode of function. Were she asked, Krahe couldn’t say why she was certain of this, she just knew based on what she saw and what she felt through her spiritual sense. 

Another aspect of the swords’ fundamental design that became a flaw against Krahe was their very shape — as they took form, they subtly aligned themselves towards their future trajectory, giving the slightest tell. Not long ago, Krahe would not have been able to notice this, but now, between this tell and pure visual reaction speed, she could reasonably well predict where each sword would go — and apply that knowledge to weave between them without the need to dive. Krahe went whipping back and forth like a bamboo in a windstorm, bending every-which-way in an unnatural and counterintuitive manner, sharp jets of flame bursting from her left arm and threads of thick smoke building up a haze around her, obscuring her shape.

Three salvos. Less than ten seconds. Her entropy was getting up there. But she wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t feel like ending this yet, even if Brizogia was already showing signs of wanting to pull out another card, of becoming frustrated enough to do something seriously dangerous.

Krahe hardened her left hand and, dialing in on a particular sword’s trajectory, she punched it out of the air — an uppercut that struck the flat of its blade where it met the somewhat superfluous handle. With the force of the impact still reverberating up her arm, as the blade it spun and glistened in the sun, she grabbed it, and, gripping it with a tar-tendril, she whipped it at Brizogia’s head. The latter shot the sword out of mid-air with another of her own, despite the fact Krahe’s stolen sword had already begun fraying out of existence rather than risk harming its owner.

She circled around, closing the distance, leaping upon one of the unbroken tables, and from it, she dive-kicked towards Brizogia, holding out her hand as far as it would go. Brizogia moved with an alacrity unpermitted to mere men, but she was too late. Krahe emerged from her dive after another salvo of silver swords passed through her. As the Scarlet Star jewel drank of her thauma, a subtle change took place, the slightest shifting of its hue. The flash of its activation was, to Brizogia, akin to the glare of some third presence, filled with gleeful cruelty. That phantom sensation vanished in an instant, giving way to the very real, tyrannical presence of the one upon whose finger the ring sat. The irresistible force-wave threw Brizogia to the ground, crumpled the furniture like nothing, and, over the course of a few seconds, mercilessly pressed her into the cobbles.

It was just a moment. But in that moment, the Silversword administrator’s sense of authority crumpled, even as her wards protected her from all harm. She was unharmed, but unquestionably subjugated. Krahe didn’t hang around, instead moving with the shockwave’s expansion, tauntingly sweeping her gaze across various windows, alcoves, and doors. It was a half-step from openly shouting: “Well? Aren’t you gonna chase me?!"

And oh, did they chase her. They knew this part of the city, but so did she, and she knew their habits. This was not so different from the cat-and-mouse games they had played in the preceding days. And just like during those days, this day, too, Krahe led Brizogia’s lackeys by the nose. Certainly, it was significantly more difficult to keep ahead of them when they didn’t care about subtlety and fully leveraged their own enhanced mobility tools, but at the end of the day, a group of five still chased her into the killing house.

One by one, they rushed into the basement — all but one, who remained outside as a lookout. In the twilit basement, normal sight could just about make out the silhouettes of objects. In terms of low-light vision. As an Inheritor, Krahe’s natural low-light vision had always been marginally superior, and with her recent enhancements, she could make out most detail and colour in the basement’s conditions. She knew that she was not unique in this matter — of the five individuals who had followed her down here, one had eyes that glowed in an unnatural manner. He actively scanned the room, clearly checking for anything hidden by the darkness. This man had followed her a few times in the night, and she had noticed his modified eyes back then. Besides glowing eyes, he also wore a Silversword Agency pendant on his neck and his natural hair was dyed silver — he had concealed both of these traits when he had been tailing her.

Krahe was not so sloppy as to rely on the dark. It was a red herring.

384.5 - Nameless Interlude [Sturmblitz]

Cut in half.

Burned and scattered.

Frozen and shattered.

Disassembled cell by cell, molecule by molecule.

Countless years passed, and I met with countless deaths, beneath countless skies. Each time, forgetting. Each time, coming to remember just as my next death approached.

But there, in the depths of Hedan’s Wall, I approached my death, I met with my death, countless more times, only to be pulled back. The first time, it was simply raising it. I awakened, a crippled husk, but alive. Even stripped of my cultivation, however, I still could not find it within me to sit down and die. So long as I lived, the knowledge that I had failed my people would not allow me that peace of mind. When I awoke, I found a foreign thought, burning at the back of my mind like a splinter: “Find the core chamber, find the answers, find the way out.”

Stripped of all arcane might as I was, I still knew all that I had known when I entered the wall. Though it was a near-nonexistent chance, I could attempt to recultivate from scratch. And so, crippled, I began my long journey into the fathomless depths of Hedan’s Wall.

From then on, no matter what challenge the wall put before me, I always found that someone had placed a contingency that offered me a way out, or saved me from death outright, and each time, I saw it coming. It was as if I was following a trail I had set out for myself.

Even so, I lost much throughout those years. A finger, a hand, a foot, a leg. I also learned just as much. By inspecting the contingencies my other-self left behind, I learned how to bend blackstone, learned how to make it move. Through supping from the ichor-basins my other-self left behind for me, I learned how to directly draw life from the wall itself. For reasons I would not come to understand for some time, all but its highest-level functions bent before me, so long as the local subcore didn’t actively override my efforts — thus, each chamber became a battle of wills between them, myself, and I. They always gave in, eventually, and when they did, I had free reign of the sector for some time. I made good use of that time, more often than not.

When at last, I arrived in the true heart of Hedan’s Wall, in the space-out-of-space where I had not been permitted when I first tore out my own cultivation and threw it into the furnace of this place, to buy my people just a few years’ time, I was no longer truly myself. After countless years, after living through lifetimes of illusory trials and traversing labyrinths conjured from the mind of Hedan himself, I had hollowed myself out and filled myself back in a hundred times over. I now walked astride legs of blackstone, manipulated the wall’s arcane magicks with a right arm of its substance, and two-thirds of my torso comprised it, mended to my flesh along the line where I had been cleft in twain by a final trap: From above my right shoulder, to above my left hip.

There, in the depths, I found it.

I found myself.

A smiling, unrotting corpse, fingers clasped around a staff of blackstone.

Shriveled skin met with indomitable, gleaming blackstone, lilac trigrams pulsing beneath the surface. Crystalline orbs sat within his — within my — cavernous eye sockets. Iridescent blood still stained the staff’s pointed bottom end, and, in the same manner, two holes gaped within the corpse’s flesh, arcane sigils of two kinds still raging and crackling against one another, eroding and repairing, in perpetual equilibrium, marble-green against royal purple. One stab through the heart, one through the head.

Unable to die, yet also unable to live, I had chosen to flee the prison of my flesh to be reborn later.

My name… I remembered it, yes. I remembered a thousand names. And I remembered when I gave up on them. It was all too much, too many differences across too many languages and cultures. Nobody. Nameless. Nikto. Anon. Yes, that name was universal, it could always be translated.

Right. Left. Up. Down. Royalist. Populist. Leftist. Rightist. Liberal. Conservative. Too many ideologies. Too many names. Throughout my many lives, I had come to believe in nothing and everything at once, I had witnessed the extremes of all beliefs. I also knew better than to fall into the pitfall of utopian thinking, of the “If everyone would just do X” delusion.

Whomever Ikesia needed, I would become… And I would have my vengeance, one way or another. For throughout my many lives, I had learned that forgoing vengeance against a foe that yet actively seeks your eradication is no different from tying your own noose.

I took up the staff, and began my journey back out. With the staff in hand, not even the subcores could oppose my authority, for it predated them — it predated Ankhezia itself. It was not a thousand or even ten thousand years old — its creation could not be permitted by the world’s laws as they were now. No, this relic was as old as the rods that pierced the sun itself.

I could not tell you how long my journey out of the wall was. By comparison to my odyssey to the core chamber, it was a short hike.

But… As I neared my escape, eventually, I could no longer recognize the man in my reflection. The emaciated, gangly wretch, with hollow eyes and matted hair. So just like blackstone, I changed myself. But even then, I could not recognize the man reflected in the stone. An expression of bitter anguish sat frozen upon my face, no matter how I tried. It would not do.

I thumped my staff, and with a thought formed a statue of myself. I took the statue’s head, crowned by laurels of gilded leaves, and I hollowed it out, moulding it to mine, fusing it not to my skin, but to my very flesh and bone.

Invincible, ageless blackstone would be my face, the face of my reconquista.

In the time to come, preceding my return, the wall’s faculties would be as my own. Its vast sensor-networks would be as my eyes, its aetherwave arrays my voice. No matter how Hedan meddled to subvert my sacrifice, I would subvert him in turn. I would even guide Ikesia from within my prison, should it come to that. 

And so it came to pass that I laid treasure maps of untold import at the feet of a Grekurian nobleman, who, to my great disgrace, had come to be a greater Ikesian patriot than any of the treasonous dogs who still remained in my own capital.

They would get what was coming to them. 

Each and every one of them.

By my own hands.