akasoindustries

48 - Impurities

There was no place for an Exclusion Zone scavenger’s instincts alongside her own, she wasn’t a subsistence survivalist.

The pressure, the heat, the tension, it all grew to what felt like what would be a breaking point, like a colossal full-body cramp, until… It vanished, leaving behind a sentiment she knew to not be her own.

It was the idea of defying death through becoming a vital part of something far greater than oneself, and the acceptance of it.

Her perception of ...

47 - Necrobeast Elixir

His brow furrowed, he looked up at the homunculus in the jar, then at the homunculus that stood before him. Zel bent down to get a close look at the liquid, tracing the individual strands of blackness within the elixir. Transferring it from container to container had severed a great many of them, yet the pieces were shifting within the solution, reconnecting into elaborate patterns.

“But how’d it recognize…” murmured the alchemist.

“Maybe it inherited some sensory trait ...

46 - Re: Opus

The sun rose over a pale morning.

A knock at the door yanked her from the haze of sleep. Her senses flooded in one by one - the warmth of the sun on a small portion of her face. Zef’s back pressed against her chest. Something soft gripped in the palm of her hand.

The lingering scent of poppy flowers on the markswoman’s hair. The pleasantly cold morning air that would soon be replaced by sweltering heat. It all mixed and swirled together with the remnant mental images from some...

45 - Dawn of Another Fateful Day

“Bullshit,” accused Sodan.

“Straight, just like I said,” the governor reassured.

Sodan looked aside again, taking a drag of the cigar, “I’ll think about it.”

“No time,” Crovacus pushed him. “I need an answer.”

Sodan looked back at him and spat: “Get a new tank engineer.”

“You and I both know the war’s only over on paper, Sodan,” Estoras said. “We need him alive.”

“I don’t give a fuck about your war,” lashed out the ...

44 - Call me Strake

The guards nodded and eagerly retreated, closing the door behind themselves, leaving the two men facing one another. Despite the perfect lighting of his office, the Prisoner’s wild hair cast an impenetrable shadow over his face, only a pair of predatory eyes shining through. Like those of a wild animal stalking its prey at night.

Without being prompted, the Prisoner ambled over to Crovacus’s desk and took a seat. He raised his hands above the table in a wordless request to be unshac...

43 - Breath of Change/Prisoner

It would be the third Renegade Inquisitor in the history of the order, and facilitating the process would either burn many bridges for him or help him cut the scaffolds out from under his political rivals back home if they tried to twist the Inquisitor’s renegadeship into a traitor-revealed story. The coming days would only grow more stressful and meticulous, but as long as the alchemist which produced his Philter remained meticulous in his work, so could Crovacus.

That night, three o...

42 - Proof of a Craftsman

With those parting words she walked upstairs and finally dropped off the groceries she had bought, mulling over her brief conversation with Sigmund. Makhus really wasn’t good in a fight with anything other than a sword. She had had more than enough time to notice that even if he didn’t use it, just having something like a war-knife made him a more capable fighter by degrees of magnitude. But then… Zefaris didn’t have a leg to stand on in that area. She, too, was far more confident in ...

41 - Accustomed to Violence

It was one thing to adapt to killing in circumstances like an active warzone or a targeted extermination expedition, it was a whole nother matter to do so during an errand run and remain largely unmoved.

Though a small part of her wanted to be shaken by the incident, she just… Couldn’t. Just as a blacksmith’s calloused hands were unburned by the fires of the forge, she had grown desensitized to violence and gore. Perhaps in a way, she too was a horror of war.

On her way back...

40 - Just an Errand

Neither was she willing to risk approaching him, just in case, and there just wasn’t enough time to wait until he bled out and thus became a non-threat. The guards would, in a best-case scenario, want to drag him away for questioning.

So she made the judgment call to put down the wooden box in her left hand, took a copper coin from her coin purse, and breathed a lungful of Fog on it. So thick was the coating that its surface could no longer be seen.

She flipped the coin high int...

39 - Emperor's Mercy

...All with a heavy Pateirian accent and an utter lack of genuinity, as if he’d phonetically rehearsed everything he’d said up until now. Just to be careful, out of pure instinct, Zefaris took a breath of Fog and willed her Homunculus Eye to dilate. A fifth of a second before it happened she saw it, something slipping into his hand from inside his sleeve, a jade-green rectangular something.

“Heretics, be granted he Emperor’s Grac-” hollered the would-be riot-inciter, raising t...

38 - Soapboxing

On her way back, Zefaris continued to think on what it was that made her feel uneasy. Perhaps it was the people in the street? Perhaps the distinct absence of zipperheads every couple hundred meters resentfully observing the pedestrians, aggressively haggling with a merchant, or accusing people of being war criminals or domestic terrorists over the slightest sideways glance. It wasn’t that there were no openly hostile Pateirians in sight - there were none. Not a single one, where before the...

37 - Bherad

They were foreign and unexpected, but it was perfectly on-brand for nomads like them. The street-vendor even had that little hole in the temple of his skull plugged by a silver coin, answering how he could’ve conceivably gotten here. A lone Fog-sailor, for whatever reason. Perhaps he’d been jumping between cities since the war, maybe waiting until one of the bigger caravans came around to give him safe passage out of here. Wouldn’t be the first time she’d encountered something of the ...

36 - Re:Cogs in Motion

At first, it was the loss of contact - a missed daily check-in over the aether wave. Then, a second one, and a third one. What had happened? Surely the dungeon couldn’t have stamped them out, and it certainly hadn’t sunk - if it had, His Divinity would now walk the conquered streets of this demon’s den.

If something had indeed happened, even if only the Queen had died, what would happen? With the soul-binding contract broken, the Red Judge would come after him. He’d get gutted a...

35 - Make it So

“I signed your employment contract, cherry boy,” she said before urging him on. “Now c’mon, what is my mother paying you for?”

Reluctantly, the young bodyguard came over and helped her wrangle the couch through the doorway, getting it in place on the topmost portion of the top deck just in time. It was utterly deserted, even the few crewmen that normally worked the rigging and kept watch had retreated below deck. So it was that Ezaryl had to, with Theris’s help, manipulate s...

34 - Serpent's Head

It had been twice now, that she hadn’t recognized someone until she heard their voice. Twice that one of her peers had foolishly allowed the essence of a beast run rampant on their forms, thinking that just because some alchemist had purged its most severe effects the beast’s essence would let itself be wielded by one unworthy - that it wouldn’t prod for resistance, and finding none, that it wouldn’t twist its new host into a more fitting form.

Indeed, it had been twice now - th...

33 - Resentment for Complacency

It wasn’t until years later that Ezaryl had learned the truth of the One-week War, of the automaton that she now knew would come to be known as a tankman. The one used in the exhibition was an unfinished prototype, scarcely able to move under its own strength, let alone shatter a boulder with a punch. It had been an exhibition of strength, that much was true - it was merely the Sage’s own strength disguised as the machine’s.

Ezaryl kept strumming away, going through the motion of ...

32 - The One-week War

There had been precisely one time when a foreign power plunged into the heart of the steppe and touched its heart. It had been that man, the one who called himself the Sage of Fog, one who spoke of lands afar greatly similar to those regaled as home by the First Fog-sailor. He, who had led naught but a caravan of a few dozen men, who convened with the merchant clans and asked for naught but peaceful cooperation, for exchange of knowledge and technology.

Yet, the traditions of her cultur...

31 - Karga

Zel looked around and guessed, “It’s either the owner or the kid in noble’s clothes up on stage.”

“Bingo, it’s the guitarist,” the singer grinned. “He’s older than me n’ drinks like a carp, but homunculus organs take damn good care of you. It’s not just the artificial organs that keep him pretty, though - it’s a lil’ thing called Fivefold Philter. The guy blew what was left of his fortune on getting a huge vat of the stuff made and, well… That baby-face speak...

Training Arc Complete Artwork (very minor spoiler)

30 - Homunculus

A brief silence, wherein he sipped of his ale and furrowed his brow in remembrance before continuing, “That was some… Three millennia ago I think? Two? Don’t remember. Anyway, things were pretty good fer a while, until folks realized they couldn’t have kids no more, n’ the pot boiled over into full-blown fracturing n’ civil war. That’s why we call a country breaking inta itty bitty warring states Ankhezination…”

He just kept going. And going. And going. For minutes upo...

29 - Drunken Folklore

Festivities of decadence such as the one which would inevitably come in the next few weeks were the best time to resupply, to get some interesting new trinkets and go unnoticed all along.

That was not to mention the child-like curiosity that the implication of Kargarian merchants reignited in him. He’d seen the weapons of this era, he had scavenged a few of them from skirmishes that had taken place in his forest. Skirmishes that had resulted in single-handed Ikesian victory, even when...

28 - Mine's Bigger

“Ooh, lemme guess. It’s somethin’ real personal ain’t it. Like a lover’s body odor or somesuch,” he replied with a knowingly facetious tone right after downing a big gulp of his liquor.

She knew that he knew, and that was that. Zel didn’t even bother replying, instead just leaning back in her seat and taking a long sip of her own drink. It was… Cider. No more, no less - just good, hard cider. So it was that she slowly chipped away at the tankard, idly observing and takin...

27 - Speakeasy

The speakeasy was a single large room perhaps three or four times as long as it was wide, with the entrance being on the narrow end. The height of the ceiling, the positively chilly ambience, and the presence of old wine barrels betrayed this place’s former identity as a wine cellar.

Alongside the right wall there was a long bar, taking up some two-thirds of the wall’s length, with a small gap between its farthest edge and the simple stage all the way at the back. Curiously, the bar...

26 - Old Quarter

Eventually, after nearly half an hour of following Strolvath’s unwavering lead through the city’s tangled veins, he stopped at a steep staircase from the bottom of which loud music and hollering echoed. At the top of the staircase, around some sort of board game, sat three men who looked as grizzled as they looked old, their snow-white skins tanned to waxy hides and their bodies covered in scars. They wore a mixture of modern mass-produced clothing and articles from military uniforms as a...

0.5 - Codex

For the sake of new  readers (and at the suggestion of a reviewer), I’ve decided to put  together a basic codex for in-universe terms/concepts. This list isn’t  comprehensive and only covers basic explanations. I'll update it over  time... If I remember to.

>Ikesia/Ikesians  -  Ikesia is a united state formed from a group of independent city-states  by an individual known as the Sage of Fog. The country was severely  damage...

25 - Strolvath's Caution

The older man let out a barking, coughing laugh, like gravel in a cement mixer, followed by the clattering of coins against the counter. Once the last coin left his hand, he grabbed a seal-bottle.

“I would, werghck- Were it not that ev’ry Vict’ry Demon is different,” he slurred, having pulled the cork with his teeth. A long glug. “It’s an inconveniently psychological condition, ain’t helpin’ it with standardized methods. Now… The main reason I’m here - need to talk t...

24 - Citronade

A/N: Sorry for the break in posting. Someone suggested that I put together a codex/glossary for the sake of new readers, and I kinda annihilated my time management while I did exactly that. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

It all felt like a fever dream. Zel’s absolute lack of care for the existential implications of her being a homunculus, Zef’s outwardly amused stand-off observation of the conversation, the incessant ru...

23 - Understatement

“That’s…” he trailed off, having stopped himself from even beginning to say the word “impossible”. A deep sigh. There was as much point to questioning Zel’s inhuman capabilities as there was to questioning why old folk rituals actually worked. Perhaps he might find out the how, but not today. Today he only needed to know what she had so he could take it into account. “Right, what else? Get covered in any goop? Any bug try to climb in your nose?”

Silence. She furrowed h...

22 - Traits

She’d chosen to cover her top half with a completely unfitting dark greyish-blue dress shirt, clearly one of Zef’s pieces of clothing. It was honestly impressive that she’d managed to make it even remotely fit - the usually loose sleeves were rolled up and wrapped tightly around her arms, and being unable to button it up, she’d just tied it together at the bottom in a manner that functionally made it conceal even less skin than her usual chest-wraps. It had the exact opposite effect t...

21 - March to Opus

Yes, soon enough the pieces would be in place and he could - wait. If the Philter’s current stage had already finished, it must’ve been at least an hour and a half since those two were down here last. Indeed, a glance at the clock confirmed his suspicions - it had been damn-near two hours, the clock’s brass hand slowly but steadily advancing towards the end of the store’s open hours.

Despite his confused frustration, the thought of going upstairs to ask what was the matter didn�...