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384 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. Final [Sturmblitz]

Compared to harvesting errant vestiges, claiming the vestige of someone she had slain in single combat was a touch more involved. She brought out the Sword Phantom Scripture, its pages unsheathing at a mere thought, encircling Leopold’s vestige, gradually separating a distinct “chain” connecting him to an unseen something inside the corpse — his actual soul, which had yet to pass on.

She recited the appropriate incantation, word for stilted, antiquated word.

“In accordance with the agreement of blood, you, whom I have bested in single combat, relinquish your warrior’s will to me and pass on to the tides of rebirth, so that we may meet in battle again in another life.”

With each word, the scripture’s bladed pages closed in on the chain, threatening to sever it. But they never did. A few seconds after Zefaris had made her demand, the chain simply cracked and fell to pieces. Without another moment’s hesitation, Zefaris initiated the completion ritual, drawing on her formation circle’s secondary purpose. Her Inner Phantom, ragged and riddled with death-scars, took shape, and with this hand she reached out, and took Leopold’s vestige unto herself. This vestige, which alone could form a mighty phantom, more than sufficed for her purpose.

All those with the eyes to see instantly knew what had just transpired. Even the lowliest of disciples, those children-of-farmers conscripted for labour under the guise of martial training, instantly knew, and a chill came over them. The instinct to submit, to retreat in the face of this reaper-in-human-skin, weighed heavy over all of them. Merely being within her general vicinity felt like an ice-cold gun held one’s temple.

And above her right shoulder, a skeletal, third arm hovered, in its grasp a great revolver, a ghostly reflection of the mirror-sheen deathbringer in her hand.

Zefaris felt the frost upon her lips, and pervasive cold stiffness all throughout her body. She was certain that she could summon every single phantom in her contingent at this moment, but she was also certain that it would lead to her death. But spiritual exhaustion was an inevitability, and not an issue as long as she managed to get out of here. The foundation had been laid. She was thankful for the foresight of the scripture’s author — the process had been set up so that the individual steps could be prepared for ahead of time and then finished quickly, specifically to account for the possibility of needing to do so after killing someone in a duel.

She glanced all around, calling back the twisting spear’s dragonsteel core as she spoke, projecting her voice as best as she could.

“You all stand as witnesses to what took place here today. Let you be bound by the word of your elder, and leave. The Newman Sect will return to this place in time. If you are not gone by then, you will be removed. At this moment, I plead with all of you: Heed my word. Don’t throw away what might be centuries of life for the sake of a sect that staked your lives on a glorified outpost. Go and cultivate somewhere else.”

She swept her gaze across the remaining disciples of the Stillwind Black Horse Sect, even as those who had observed from the balconies now emerged from within the sect building.

“If you don’t, I will personally kill you all. No glory. No clashing of swords. Just a bullet in the head.”

None dared to impede her on her way out of the sect compound, and none dared follow her as she made her way out of Stillwind.

The Newman Sect learned of what had transpired before the hour was out.

And, rather than return to the sect right away, Zefaris continued on her journey. This diversion was not reason enough to change her plans. From stillwind, she passed two other mountain towns, resting at Fir-grove and ignoring Stonefist. The former was known for the quality and straightness of its wood, which the inhabitants used to produce a kind of gigantic flute as tall as a grown man, with piercing sound that carried incredibly far. As for Stonefist, it was called that for a monument of a giant, stone fist at the roadside, formed from a solid boulder as a threat by a cultivator who had once wandered this land, stealing from the local lord’s taxmen to reimburse the poor. Such was the local mythology of the post-collapse dark ages.

Eventually, she reached her destination — a south-north pass through the Artat Mountains. Once a vital trading route, it now only served the occasional pilgrim.

Over a kilometer above sea level at its highest point, it was a road carved into solid bedrock, the walls lined with a mixture of reinforcing glyphs and travelers’ etchings.

In the middle of that road, just past the highest point, facing down the northward descent, there stood a man of stone in black armour. 

The Knight of Stone. A knight from the Three Kings Era, who, according to legend, had simply happened to overhear a rumor, leading him to intercept an invading army from the north by pure coincidence. 

All around him, the natural rock gave way to the unmistakable shade of blackstone, great spikes of the material protruding from every possible surface. To this day, the armour and bones of those he had slain still littered the mountain pass. The destruction wrought here made it seem as if this one man could have very well fought on even ground with Ubul.

As Zefaris made her way further in, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of unease. Despite all signs pointing to the pass being completely unused, she somehow felt a pervasive sense of unease.

The instant Zefaris came within his vicinity, with the sound of grinding stone, he turned to face her. As he moved, Zefaris noticed a stretch to his skin. He was not petrified at all, his body had simply been refined to such a degree that it surpassed even actual stone in durability, and simply refused to yield to the petty forces of decay even in the absence of life. The Knight of Stone had died guarding the pass, his armour holding him together far beyond the point of death.

She carved a formation circle in the air so that she could see the knight’s remnant without provoking him, and saw something she had a hard time believing — the chain. In one way or another, he was still inside his own corpse, as if he had only died minutes ago. Zefaris wasn’t sure how this could have happened, considering that the body was undeniably dead. This was unlike a draugr, it clearly did not involve the Revenant King’s immortal blood, yet it was also very similar in the end result. Nothing in the Phantom Scripture even remotely suggested this could be possible, meaning the author had either never encountered such a case or had intentionally not mentioned it.

Zefaris decided to proceed as she had planned. She had prepared a special scroll — one that was not a formation or a combat artifact of any sort. It was a scroll of bone slips, shaped by Victor’s hand, bearing his seal — a simple profile of Dawnwolf’s helmet. As she unrolled it, the words within it blazed with bonefire, which sprung out to create a massive projection in the air.

Exerting herself, Zefaris summoned her full phantom contingent into view behind herself.

“By the authority of Victor Khestun, Heir of Koschei the Undying, Second of the Triarchy, I release you of your charge and bestow upon you the highest of honours. Your flesh and bones shall be immortalized among his servitors, and your undying warrior’s spirit will forever safeguard Ikesia.”

She rolled up the scroll, and saluted the strange, undead knight.

“Rest, eternal warrior. Let the next in line carry your burden.”

For several seconds, the Knight of Stone embodied his name in stillness. Then, ever so slowly, he raised a hand in matching salute. And he came to a final halt at last, as Zefaris witnessed the knight’s soul depart.

Finally, a sense of peaceful stillness descended.

And even in true death, the Knight of Stone remained standing.

In painstakingly combining the Knight’s remnant with those of the soldiers he had slain, Zefaris completed her Inner Phantom’s Second Armament.

And though her journey was still far from done, at last, she returned to the sect.

383 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. 6 [Sturmblitz]

Leopold suddenly found himself skewered through the chest to the sect’s main doors. It was a pillar of black ice, accursed glyphs thrumming beneath its surface, sapping the strength from his sword-arm. The moment he realized what they were, boiling blood burst from his eyes.

He blinked once more, and he realized he was back in the arena, and his technique was still in motion… For another half-second. The thunderous roar and the flash of black came all the same, tearing through his swordlight. Leopold succeeded in parrying the spear insofar as his sword met its tip, but then he heard his sword’s cry, its metal creaking before it broke. His sword-arm followed with it, and the arena’s barrier shattered like so much glass — and it was Leopold’s sword-arm that ended up pinned to the sect building’s main door.

The only difference between Leopold’s premonition and reality was that he had been spared a certain death, and she had gone out of her way to let him know that. The premonitions, from the sound of his own sword breaking to his own death, had all been the result of his foe’s aura conveying her killing intent to him.

MONUMENT REFUTATION

WALKING WITH DEATH DAY BY DAY

LIVE FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

SKEWER THE SUN WITH AN ICICLE

HALT A FALLING MOON WITH A CLOUD

WALKING WAY OF THE ETERNAL SOLDIER

HEADPIERCER ARTS: TWISTING SPEAR OF LOST HYPERBOREA

The courtyard fell silent. Out of the disciples surrounding the arena, only one was still conscious, the others having succumbed to the backlash from the barrier.

Zefaris and Leopold stared one another down as the gory geyser that was the Stillwind Branch Elder’s shoulder died down, his body plugging the hole long before he could bleed out. Her form flickered as she skipped forward in time once again, reloading her weapon.

“Concede,” she demanded, raising her gun to her bleeding, disarmed opponent. She knew better than to assume he couldn’t fight anymore. “You saw it. I know you did. I could’ve killed you just as easily as I can kill you right now. Concede, or die.”

A hideous grimace gripped his face.

“My name is Leopold Ritter Branstein the Third…” he said, raising his remaining arm to his chest, pointing at his heard with his thumb. Imperceptibly, he marshalled a thread of armament aura inside it, and pierced his own heart. Leopold’s aura rampaged out of control, shredding his body and the ground around him all the same. His clothing exploded off of him, and his skin became as tattered rags. The blood which he had already bled instantly returned to his side, formed into the shape of an enormous, floating sword by the sheer force of his presence. In the same manner, the blood now gushing from his flayed flesh armored him in a new skin of scarlet blades — even his hair formed itself into this form. Zefaris knew that he was already dead — she saw the life flee his eyes the moment that sword took shape by his side.

“...AND I SHALL NEVER KNOW SURRENDER!”

SIGN OF SELF-SACRIFICE

UNRIVALED IN THE SWORD

EVEN IN THE FACE OF DEATH

SEVERING SCRIPTURE FRAGMENT

LIFE SEVERANCE AVATAR INCARNATION

He charged headlong at Zefaris, thunder roaring in his wake as he broke the sound barrier. Bullets flew past him as he skidded left and right, dodging attacks he had no way to see or hear. Shots from Pentacle’s weapon-spirit tore into his soul, but he still continued on in his suicidal charge. 

Out of the blue, from the base of one of the arena’s pillars, from the gun of a nameless, forgotten phantom, there came a ghostly bullet, and it smashed straight into the side of Leopold’s head. And he crumpled. His eyes glazed over, and he fell forward face-first, skidding along the ground like a ragdoll, his blood-sword smearing along the way. Were his body not reinforced through long decades of cultivation, he would have no longer had a face by the time his corpse stopped at Zefaris’ feet.

Zefaris did not holster her gun and walk away.

She drew forth more and more of her deathly strength, pouring it out through her eye as the full breadth of her phantom contingent once more manifested, encircling her. The arena’s barrier, compromised as it was, became as a wall of ice.

Among the Stillwind Black Horse Sect’s members, few could find it within themselves to even move after what they had witnessed, and a number of them looked to flee, assuming the worst. Before all else, Zefaris drew back to herself the dragonsteel core 

One by one, Zefaris carved ritual glyphs around Leopold’s corpse, and with each glyph, a shape came into view above the spot where he had died. It was not the flayed form he had in his death, but it was also not the form he had held in life — Leopold’s vestige bore a gaping hole through his right shoulder, and a pinpoint of light burned in the crater of his left eye. Amplified and clarified in this manner, like a lost aetherwave signal, she could almost feel as if he was alive again — so razor-like had the man’s aura been that all presence as a living thing had been eradicated from him, even in life. Now that Zefaris could think on it, if only for just a moment, it was truly remarkable. One could reasonably mistake his presence for the presence of a legendary sword.

There was no sword in his hand.

And yet, somehow, he felt no less armed than when he had lived.

Zefaris understood. His skill had been so pure that the sword in his hand meant little. If he had a sword, he could fight. If he didn’t have a sword, he could simply will one into existence. It was not particularly different from the phenomena she could bring about, even if her method was less direct.

The formation circle was finished, having taken longer due to being far more complex than necessary for this purpose. At this point, the arena’s barrier failed completely, the pillars falling back into place, flush with the ground. This was of no consequence — the small army of phantoms that surrounded Zefaris was more than enough deterrent for those who could get past the passive effects of her mere presence.

"Nameless Sage" Artwork

382 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. 5 [Sturmblitz]

Much like the real wall, Leopold’s defensive formation could be impenetrable or selectively allow things through. Leopold’s mastery of it, though imperfect, would more than suffice to cut down this upstart.

There was no use to it on its own. It could buy time.

But the wall was wrought of his own rampaging swordlight. It could, as easily as a guard became a lunge, change from a defense to an offense. And, if the Blackwall was the Ankhezian Empire’s supreme defensive monument, then what equaled it in offense, if not the Suncage Grid?

WALKING WAY OF THE SOVEREIGN SWORD

QUASI-TRUTH ART: SUNCAGE ERUPTION

_______________________________________

The silver lining around the black cloud that now hung over her head was the fact that Leopold’s technique, whatever it was, clearly took time — and when it came to time, Zefaris was always at an advantage.

Whether he was doing this as a stalling tactic, or preparing a bigger offense, it would make no difference.

Compared to Eberheim, this was the whirlpool in a draining bathtub.

“Manual release.”

A burning thrum instantly flooded into her skull as the single burning dot acting as the pupil of her left eye expanded out into a many-pronged spiral. She could see it — the flow of aura that comprised Leopold’s defensive wall, even the shadow of his sword moving inside it.

The pragmatic part of her wanted to just throw a coin high up and try to bring a bullet smashing down on top of his head, but she knew it wouldn’t work. It was too easy, too obvious. Dracofulminate didn’t even cross her mind as an option.

In an instant, she carved a series of glyph circles into the air, and the root, the one closest to her, was an array of smaller circles with four terminals around its outer perimeter and one in the middle — for five bullets.

They were half-complete, as they were. Filled with power and meaning, but with yawning gaps, waiting to be filled by antediluvian glyphs. She could sense Leopold’s wall of aura stirring, collapsing into itself earlier than she had anticipated, but that was fine.

Since the beginning of her journey, already, her phantom contingent had grown, and so had her ability to call them forth.

From two Gun Phantoms, to five.

From two Sword Phantoms, to four.

An additional Inquisitor Phantom had also joined her ranks, now numbering three in total.

As for the Formless Phantoms, those wrought of remnants with no particular affinity and made to wield handguns in the skull-faced image of Death’s Lieutenant, they now numbered a full thirteen, whence they had once been five.

Those unique phantoms which were her trump cards had not been joined by a new equal, for the same reason the numbers of the lesser phantoms had not grown as much as they could have — Zefaris had focused on reinforcing her Inner Phantom above all else.

And the fruit of that focus was this.

“Form ranks!”

Two rows of nine phantoms — all Formless and Gun Phantoms — took shape, and to the sides and in the middle, one Inquisitor Phantom each took a place. All the while, Leopold’s technique continued to transform, twisting in on itself as a tower grew around him, sprouting from the hilt of his sword. She instantly recognized what it was intended to represent — a Suncage Grid receiver tower. With an instant motion, Leopold transitioned into a thrust, and the tower became a destructive ray, a flood of shredding force surging towards her.

“Fire!”

A curtain of ghostly fire spilled out. They scattered the flood of death for a brief moment, but that was enough, and whence the firing squad faltered, Phantom Manus and the Tankman Phantom sprung forth to hold the line. The spectre of Inquisitor Manus simply held up his sword and walked at Leopold, the Tankman Phantom’s twin cannons thundering over his head.

Manus held up his sword, and, though long dead, though a mere phantom, he still invoked the name of Omniudex as he raised his sword and bid it to blaze aflame, and it did, and with a herculean swing he carved a molten line into the arena’s stone ground, and flame blazed forth from it. The cost to support this single action, the strain upon Zefaris, was immense, but she weathered it, and the flood of black razors was halted once again.

By the time the line of flames was extinguished and Phantom Manus and the Tankman Phantom were both swept away, Zefaris had already done what was needed. The ominous apparatus hung in the air before her, symbols burning purple in the air, the disturbed cries of Black Horse disciples carrying on the wind, for they had seen the sigils and felt their souls shudder just like Zefaris had back then.

Five dragonsteel bullets, possessed by their own ghostly counterparts from Pentacle’s weapon-spirit, all fed into this array, to be wound together into a spear and enveloped in black ice — a core of dragonsteel, a body of black ice, and the Antediluvian Glyphs to unravel her opponent’s strength. The same feat that had required the cooperation of herself, Fryg, and Red back in Borea, Zefaris would now carry out herself. 

________________________________________

Leopold shrank back, the flow of his technique visibly deteriorating, splitting into multiple disparate flows. Something felt wrong. The backlash… No. No, that couldn’t be.

He never saw it coming — not through the raging storm of swordlight he had stirred up — but that made no difference. He sensed it in his bones. Somehow, he instantly knew that his Suncage Eruption would be broken, no matter what he did. He could hear the sound of cold-iron creaking and snapping, despite the fact his sword was completely fine. For a moment, he saw his coat and hands drenched in blood that didn’t belong to his opponent, and when he blinked, it was gone.

Then he heard it. The sound of those infernal coins.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

A thunderous roar echoed inside his head, a shudder beyond sound, and in an instant, all five of those coins shone with blinding light. Baleful stars cutting through the black of his technique, they perfectly formed the constellation Corvus. Death. Death upon black wings. Above it, a spiral whirlpool that, all too late, he realized to be the gunwoman’s left eye.

He would’ve at least liked a struggle, even if it would have meant torturously having his ultimate offense carved apart, like a needle being pushed under one’s nail.

But no such honor befell him.

In the instant when he met her gaze, it was over.

381 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. 4 [Sturmblitz]

No matter how quick the aura-blades were, however, she saw them coming, and saw their faults. They were infinitesimally thin, so thin as to be almost invisible head-on — the efficiency of Leopold’s technique was unparalleled, allowing him to spit out this blender possibly indefinitely. If not indefinitely, then the thing to give out would be his body, not his aura. But Zefaris could still shatter them from the side, or else throw them off-course, so long as her bullet had even the slightest angle. Even a direct beam from her eye was enough. Two each of Sword and Inquisitor Phantoms sprung forth to counter Leopold’s opening salvo. Zefaris met him head-to-head, matching phantoms and dragonsteel against his pure martial prowess. Like tempered glass, his Blackrazors shattered into countless pieces under the furious comets that Pentacle spewed forth, and in the same manner. For each black blade a phantom parried or shot down, one struck true — a single was enough to cut down a Sword Phantom, and the Inquisitor Phantoms lost limbs to them as easily as Zefaris herself would have were she struck. Leopold barely moved from his spot, but the fact he still stood a few seconds into their first clash was proof positive that he was dodging, just using minimal movement to do so. Her bullets clanged off the flat of his sword, each tearing away a chunk of its aura, only for said aura to recover the instant Leopold shifted to the next stance.

With the throw of a single coin, she threw him off-guard. Her bullet ricocheted off its surface and should have struck him clean, but, somehow, it was cut in half, its hemispheres sailing past him. They rejoined and returned to her all the same, but this was another factor to consider. She smiled.

Zefaris had, in some way, expected this fight to be easy, in the disappointing sense. This was a promise of the contrary.

One by one, coin after coin went flying from her grasp in every-which direction, sailing through the air as they waited for her. She shot them, but not in the order she released them, and one, she intentionally allowed to fall after noticing Leopold paying attention to it. In the same manner, she carved kinetic mirror glyphs all throughout the arena, some with the intention to never use them, and made full use of these not just through Pentacle, but also through her phantoms. All throughout, she could be said to be abusing flicker-step — one couldn’t realistically read what she was doing by looking at her, so disjointed her actions appeared. By the time one could see where she was shooting, the bullet had already left the barrel.

It wasn’t long before the flow of the battle shifted, before Leopold began being pushed back.

_________________________________________

There was not a single aspect in which this woman’s strength surpassed Leopold.

His aura was denser, heavier, older, sharper.

With each breath, he drew forth five if not six times as much Pneuma as she did even with the assistance of that mask.

His arms moved faster than hers. His technique had both the roots of the Severing Scripture and several centuries of improvement for its crown, surpassing the vast majority of the Black Horse Sect. Only the elders and strongest disciples of the Root Branch rivaled him. It was, after all, fear and envy that had caused them to send him here.

Then why…

Why was he being pushed back?

His swordlight scattered another gasmasked soldier, only for two others to erupt from the mist. A ray of white cut past his head, and he just barely moved in time to dodge the bullet that followed with it. It bounced towards the ground, and again flew past Leopold and took off a fingernail-sized piece of his ear. He had predicted the trajectory, but the bullet changed direction as it flew.

Two-dozen bullets in the span of a second, half of them steel and half ghostly, and all of them unquestionably lethal.

Leopold felt not as though he were fighting a single other cultivator, or even a puppetmaster — puppetmasters had to directly control their puppets, they were still, after a fashion, extensions of the user. This wasn’t so. Even as he stared face-to-face with that bale-eyed reaperess, the phantoms he had struck down ten times over kept coming at him with ever-increasing ferocity. They threw themselves upon his sword just to slow him down, to give the others a better chance.

This didn’t feel like fighting another cultivator at all. For a moment, he forgot where he was. For a moment, he was back there, on the battlefield, the air choked with gunsmoke and misted gore, artillery thundering in the distance. An Inquisitor met his blade with a flaming sword, its gas masked countenance devoid of any humanity. With a parry, he moved its sword out of the way, and with a thrust from the Key Guard skewered the figure through the head. A turn of his blade blended his enemy into a hundred pieces in a flash of black light. When the ghost of an Ikesian soldier charged him from the side, he snapped out of it — Leopold had fought for Ikesia… even if it had been out of obligation, even if he hadn’t seen more than two battles, and even if he had readily complied with the occupation orders.

It was clear by now that, as much as he would’ve preferred to end this purely through his most basic techniques, they wouldn’t suffice.

First, he had to create an opening, to give himself time to set up. Spinning his blade in hand, he stabbed it into the ground, releasing his grip from it, but retaining a visible line of aura between his hand and its handle. This technique was one among few circumstances in which he willingly employed sword-puppetry — not because he lacked talent for it, but because he had always seen it as a tactic of the weak, just like using guns. With a gesture, his sword rose up and began circling him, leaving afterimages in its wake and cutting gashes into the air itself. Phantoms or bullets, it instantly cast aside any intruders, and in moments, the blade’s weapon-spirit combined with Leopold’s own aura to create a solid wall of swordlight.

No matter what it was, any intruding force would be cut to shreds. This was, after all, the core of Leopold’s understanding — the simple and exquisite idea that, no matter what, sufficient skill could surpass anything.

MONUMENT SIGN

I GIVE YOU THIS ANCIENT INSIGHT

WHICH IS AT ONCE A ROAD AND A WALL

HE WHO IS OF THE RIGHT STATURE

MAY PIERCE A MOUNTAIN WITH A NEEDLE

AND HALT A FLOODING RIVER WITH A LEAF

WALKING WAY OF THE SOVEREIGN SWORD

QUASI-TRUTH ART: GUARD OF THE BLACKWALL

Some young fools found the technique’s inspiration and legacy distasteful, but Leopold knew better. This war and the Sage’s use of it was a speck in the blackwall’s ancient history.

380 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. 3 [Sturmblitz]

Leopold snorted derisively, “Cloak and dagger? You flatter yourself. My knowledge of our arts is unrivaled, and I have thoroughly reviewed not only your sect’s “Sturmblitz Kunst 0,” but also detailed reports of your personal battle arts. I am well aware of your devilish necromancy.”

Zefaris allowed her confusion to show through a raised eyebrow, and she was certain that Leopold took it the wrong way. The fact someone had surface knowledge of the Sword Phantom Scripture made no difference since she didn’t treat the whole thing as an ace-in-the-hole, and she couldn’t see how having read through the Sturmblitz Kunst 0 pamphlet would turn the tide of battle against a cultivator who abided by its tenets, unless that person had completely missed the point and just imitated the examples given in the pamphlet.

“You will be severely disappointed if you expect me to throw overhand punches and side kicks,” Zefaris said. Not eager to continue a pointless trash-talking match, she nodded sharply in the direction of the sect compound, drawing an invisible line just to Leopold’s left. “Now go, clear the courtyard. If you want to speak, we can speak, but if you want to fight, we fight now. Pick one.”

Leopold’s eye twitched, but he acquiesced with a “So be it.” He then spun around on his heel and stomped off, yelling orders at the disciples, who scattered like flies to prepare the courtyard. With a glance, Zefaris carved a protective formation in the ground around the Blitzgandr and followed after the sect elder. The Nameless Phantom followed in lockstep behind her, becoming visible when he passed through the sect’s bubble barrier. He quickly began fading out again, but she decided to capitalize on the barrier’s revealing element. Releasing her aura, she willed all of her Phantoms to fade into view one after another, producing the illusion that they were all being revealed by the barrier as they passed through the sect gate. Being barely summoned in this manner, her phantoms’ forms lacked definition, wavering and flickering in a properly ghostly manner, which only lended to the image that she was intentionally trying to project — that of a small army of ghosts, constantly following her around.

Across the courtyard, some fifty meters out, Leopold waited for her, inside a hexagon of black stone around fifty meters across. It was composed of smaller hexagons each around a meter across, and while the material was clearly designed to look like blackstone, Zefaris could see that it was in fact some sort of arcanely processed basalt. The sect’s disciples were scattered around the courtyard’s edge, with several individuals in differently-coloured robes kneeling around the hexagon’s points.

“Stillwind Black Horse Sect Elder Leopold Ritter Branstein the Third welcomes Newman Sect Second Founding Elder Zefaris Newman and requests a match!” Leopold called out. 

Zefaris made her way to the arena at a brisk pace, flicker-stepping as she went — to all outside observers, it seemed as if each step crossed the span of three, leaving hoarfrost in her wake. The experience of doing this would have been somewhat disorienting a year ago, but now, she was used to it. 

That she so casually did such a thing visibly shook the Black Horse disciples, and even Leopold.

Leopold drew his sword, holding it upward as he recited the ruleset, followed by his demand. Zefaris followed suit, and as she raised Pentacle, so too did her phantoms raise their blades and guns. Even the Tankman Phantom raised one arm and tilted its shoulder-mounted cannons upward.

The six disciples surrounding the arena responded with hand signs, causing a pillar to rise at each of the hexagon’s points, a barrier flickering to life between them. Imitation dungeontech, just like at the Willowdale compound, with the difference that the Willowdale compound used actual physicalised blackstone. The number 10 appeared on the raised pillars’ inward-facing sides, beginning a countdown.

9.

8.

Leopold immediately began fog-breathing, exhaling black Fog that formed a long, continuous thread, cutting through the air as it rose and dissipated. Gradually, his sword became shrouded in the same blackness, falling out of sight.

7.

Seeing no need to restrain herself in a manner that her host didn’t, Zefaris took her mask from her belt and fixed it to her face, then pulled out a handful of dragonsteel coins.

“Praise gun, our savior!” she called out. She sent no direct command, these were truly just the words of a commander calling on her soldiers.

6.

“Hail Death, the Master!” her phantoms bellowed in response, their voices those of hundreds, echoing with unearthly remoteness. A few instances of the phrase spoken in Pateirian or Grekurian were mixed in. Even her three Inquisitor Phantoms — two Inquisitors bearing Aquila Caliburs and Pepperboxes alongside Phantom Manus in ghostly full-plate — furiously signed the same words. Then, they vanished, as she dismissed them, holding out her left hand and rolling Pentacle’s cylinder across it.

5.

A coin flicked upwards, turning, turning, turning. Her unleashed aura rolled across the ground as a thick coat of mist. Ice began climbing the pillars and even the barrier.

4.

Something caught the coin, a figure that stepped out from behind Zefaris. In the absence of Tempesta, there could be no Death’s Lieutenant. Pentacle’s weapon-spirit took the form of a grinning skull, wearing a footsoldier’s uniform with numerous civilian additions. A deserter through and through, a bandit, a desperado. Somehow, the metallic bones of its face exuded a sense of contemptuous amusement.

3.

Zefaris opened her left eye and began tossing coins in the air, using her eye to empower each in turn with an instantaneous beam of light.

2.

1.

A gong rung out, and an avalanche of black swordlight fell upon her. Leopold began cycling through a complex, non-repeating pattern of fencing guards, often fitting multiple sword swings into each transition. Zefaris… Recognized them. These were the same guards Lydia made use of, which, looking back, made perfect sense — Lydia was, after all, a former Black Horse Sect disciple.

Zefaris knew, in an instant, that just a grazing hit from Leopold’s swordlight would easily take off a limb, and she read the name of the technique from the lips of a disciple across the courtyard.

BLACKRAZOR

247 - Give Me An Excuse [Cherno]

Brizogia took an obnoxiously long sip from her drink. It was barely coffee — a cup of hot milk with a shot of espresso and four spoonfuls of sugar. 

“Putting all pleasantries aside, I believe I’ve made myself abundantly clear in our past communications — as limited as they have been. To my knowledge, you have been an independent for the full duration of your short, if rather eventful stay in my city. You stand only to gain by working for the Silversword Agency…” Brizogia said. She intoned the word independent with the same tone one would use for a venereal disease, and made no effort to conceal her own sense of superiority. This wasn’t a conversation between equals in her eyes.

As she listened, Krahe tossed beetle-like bean into her mouth and crushed it between her molars. She waited for a few seconds after Brizogia was done speaking, letting the silence settle. She conjured a cigarette, but didn’t light it, testing Brizogia’s reaction to its presence.

“I’ve heard a great deal of nothing. Unless you have a concrete offer — hell, an example contract — we can end our dealings here and now,” Krahe said.

With a smug look on her face, Brizogia reached under her coat and brought out exactly what Krahe had described — a paper contract.

“Feel free to take your time reading through it. I trust that you will find the terms satisfactory,” Brizogia said.

And, at a glance, the terms did seem good. Great, even. But as it always was, the actual body of the text was filled with particular legalese designed to open up holes and enable one side to screw the other in every way conceivable. In fact, the contract barely even described what it was about, just vaguely denoting the signee as being an independent contractor and that having signed the contract was a condition for being employed by Brizogia. Not even the Silversword Agency proper — Brizogia specifically. Moreover, the paper was enchanted in multiple ways.

“People fall for this?” Krahe asked, allowing herself to express a measure of disdain as she looked at Brizogia over the paper’s edge.

Brizogia, being in the middle of another obnoxiously long sip, didn’t respond verbally. She sputtered, putting on one hell of a show of a faked spit-take, glaring daggers at Krahe.

“How dare-” she began an offended spiel. Krahe sighed, and lit her cigarette. That, for some reason, disturbed Brizogia enough that she fell silent, now paying attention to the smoke tha trailed from its glowing ember. 

“Alright, look. It’s been fun making your hirelings look like morons, it really has been,” she said, drawing half the cigarette down in one go. With her free hand, she tossed Brizogia’s contract into the air and shredded it to bits with three consecutive, weak casts of Lasher. “But I don’t have time to play this game. Not with you. I know this is about the raid, you’d have to take me for a braindead moron to expect otherwise. I don’t care why, if it’s just the principle of it, the property damage, or because you’re involved with the same people Semzar was involved with. Right now, it doesn’t matter. You want to take a swing, take your swing. But you better not miss. You better kill me in one shot.”

Krahe stared the Silversword administrator down for a good ten seconds, the ember of her cigarette slowly climbing up. The whole time, she had her mental trigger tensed and ready to go, but no attack came. Not yet. She could see the sparks in Brizogia’s eyes, the cogs turning behind them. The woman twitched, like she was suppressing an errant wave of shivers.

“No? Don’t want to move past politics to any other means? Then back off. I didn’t have to be as polite as I was when you set stalkers against me and I magnanimously chose not to smear them across the fucking cobbles. I even went so far as to simply counteract your meddling with my paperwork, rather than find you and drag you out of your house by that stapled-on wig of yours. I will be upfront with you: Get the fuck out of my way, or you’ll be next. I am being exceptionally reasonable here.”

In a huff, Brizogia got out of her seat, smashing her half-empty cup on the ground.

“I- I will ruin you. You will never work in this city again! I will have your bank accounts frozen, your funds confiscated, you will be found guilty of every form of fraud under the sun. No agency will take you,” she seethed.

“And?” Krahe raised an eyebrow.

“And…” Brizogia started, but didn’t get to continue.

Krahe chortled. She stuck her mind’s hands into the tar bubbling in her gut and started digging, allowing herself to speak whatever felt the best on her tongue, regardless of how true it was.

“Really. Freezing my nonexistent bank accounts? Getting me refused by what agencies, the ones I haven’t so much as glanced in the direction of since I’ve come here? I’ve been living with the full expectation of going up against the whole system, and I get some literal-who she-worm with too much money and not one tenth the sense to wield it properly. What a disappointment, you are. Nothing you can do hasn’t been tried against me before. You could bring the church down on my head and they wouldn’t catch me. You saw what I did to the Hashems and you thought you could dance with me? Please.”

Brizogia wrung her hands together, anger flickering in her eyes.

“You think yourself untouchable? I’ve dealt with jumped-up outlaws such as you. You will never know peace in my city! If you know what is good for you, you will…”

“...Kill yourself,” Krahe interrupted with a completely serious tone.

“Wh- huh?” Brizogia stuttered, caught off-guard.

“If you know what is good for you, you will either leave me in peace and drop this matter permanently, or you will kill yourself. You’ll find it preferable to the alternative. You think a simple raid was the breadth of what I can do? I’d say I can dig up a mountain of dirt on anyone, but with you and your agency, I just need to walk around and the filth of your practices sticks to my shoes like dogshit. Killing you would be the easy way out. I’m pleading with you here: Fuck with me, and I’ll burn the whole Silversword Agency down around you.”

It was all rumors. Overheard conversations and complaints, a bad reputation kept barely under the surface by wide-reaching PR and damage-control programs. Half-baked and hair-thin as coverups went, but there was one key aspect of the Silverswords that made everyone turn a blind eye: They did their jobs.

246 - Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat [Cherno]

Actually getting access to the killing-house and getting the people working there to look the other way turned out to be easier than she had expected. Some rings to grease the foreman’s palms and a few hand-rolled cigarettes to fill his mouth with smoke was all it took. Krahe placed two arrays of explosives — one within and around the stairway, and the other inside the basement, painstakingly carving away sections of wall to properly hide them from sight. She then concealed a trigger-receiver within a light sconce on the wall. The way this house was built and the amount of explosive she used, there was a good chance the detonation would topple the whole thing.

Thanks to being designed to be set in advance, the explosives would endure for a good long while if left alone. Thus, Krahe was able to leave the killing house as it was for now — the time limit was how long the foreman was willing and able to blow smoke up his boss’s ass, if anything. While she waited for an excuse to spring the trap, Krahe also picked out the location that would be her office. She had already narrowed it down to a handful of candidates while searching for the killing house, and now she was just working out the final choice. She only visited any of the locations when she was decently sure that she wasn’t being followed. In the end, she settled on a place that was neither too likely for someone to just stumble upon, but also not so far out of the way as to make it overly hard to find for customers. Rather than meet with the owner personally, she paid Garvesh to send a courier with her offer on the property, spending the remainder of her time until her scheduled meeting with Brizogia more or less in seclusion, reading and preparing talismans. Yao’s “Basic Security” scroll was similarly obtuse to her “General Tips and Tricks” scroll, but the moon-logic required to parse one translated to the other, meaning Krahe made quick headway into the basics.

The safehouse in which she resided became her testing ground, as, thankfully, Yao’s basic talismans were designed to be as minimally intrusive as possible, specifically so they could be used to set up safe zones even inside hostile strongholds. Krahe felt that she had developed a sufficient understanding of the principles quickly enough, as many of them carried over from both local network security and the logic of setting physical boobytraps.

Nonetheless, as with many of the other things she was focusing on, she would have to leave actually paying this effort off for later. The time had nearly come to meet with the silver serpent. Before their meeting, however, Krahe had gone to the effort of asking a few knowledgeable people a very important question: “How bad of an idea would it be to offend Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat?”

The answers she received, when put altogether, painted a promising picture.

It would, undeniably, be a bad idea, but she was significantly less powerful than she wanted people to think. There was a reason why her feud with the church hadn’t gone anywhere. Had the agency’s true heads wanted to make trouble, they could have done so, even if it would be a doomed effort and just waste the agency’s resources. But they hadn’t — everything following the church’s demand for proof had been done at Brizogia’s personal expense.

She was, in the end, an administrator. There was no doubt that she had to be fantastically rich — rich enough to own a mansion built by the head of the Silverswords’ former main competitor.

But Krahe could tell.

From her manner of conduct, the way she tried to leverage her assets, even the lack of caution in her communications directly to Krahe.

Brizogia was a face. A front. A fall-guy. Perhaps she was acting out of her own volition, or perhaps whomever stood behind her was using her ownership of the mansion as an excuse to act through her. More likely than not, this other had been acting through her to use the mansion and its associated tunnels to begin with, and this was just a natural continuation of that puppetry.

Whatever the case, Krahe had decided that dealing with Brizogia wouldn’t necessitate true caution. Even if killing her outright was out of the question, she could still cow the woman and break her resolve to pursue this matter further.

The Scarlet Star Ring tightened reassuringly around her finger.

______________________________________________

They met at the cafe as agreed-upon. Krahe immediately noticed that the place had been cleared out in an unsubtle manner, surrounded by a perimeter out to around twenty meters. It didn’t go to the extent of outright setting up blockades or posting guards in the open, but it was close.

Krahe was happy to engage in a hollow conversation of pleasantries for a few minutes, even for a half-hour if that was what it took, and, so it seemed, her foe was of the same mind. They spent this time probing one another, during which Krahe readily offered up a true side of herself, the side that was a straightforward mercenary, the side that happily engaged in ultraviolence for just enough money to pay off the costs and buy some drugs for the afterparty. Even if it was just one facet of many, it was no less real than the others — Krahe just had to turn the metaphorical polyhedron of herself so that Brizogia’s probing always struck that particular face.

Brizogia was a woman with blonde hair, pale skin, and a sharp face. She wore an off-white pantsuit of sorts, with a vest, dark-red tie, and a large coat draped about her shoulders. At a glance, she looked perfect. Too perfect, even, in a way some people strove to project intentionally. But to Krahe’s experienced eyes, she gave off the air of a past-her-prime celebrity with a face made of plastic, or perhaps a brainfried coomer who had decided that they preferred the aesthetics of gonzo internet porno to even the already-exaggerated reality of Megacity Gamma. Even though her hair was undeniably natural, even though her skin was real and her face moved normally, there was something wrong, just beneath the surface. It just wasn’t quite right, a sort of hyperreality in the movements, endemic to people who made a living pumping out short-form brainrot videos. Brizogia came across as fake because she was emulating a falsity, an exaggerated idea. She wasn’t the person sitting across from Krahe, the well-off attractive businesswoman, she was someone, something else, role-playing as that person.

245 - Snare Set [Cherno]

She left the dead-drop point alone for now, knowing full well that they would be paying attention to it. The possibility of being attacked at that cafe didn’t particularly concern her — it was one of, if not the most public place she visited, not far from the central square. No, she just wanted to let them stew for a bit, and to give herself time to take other actions and observe whether the stalkers reacted to them, thus proving their employer was connected.

Razem welcomed her with open arms, asking her to recount her experience during the raid in the same tone one would ask a friend to recount an amusing bar-crawl story. She readily did as much, keeping some key details to herself out of instinct.

“I truly appreciate you keeping this old man company, but surely, you haven’t come just to give me a first-hand account,” he said, swirling the blue liquid that filled his glass. He smirked. “I hear you’ve been trying to register an agency. How’s that going for you? Find a new appreciation for the church’s bureaucracy yet?”

“Yeah. I’m appalled at myself,” Krahe replied, jokingly. “I’m sure someone is stopping up the cogs. Figured you might be able to grease them.”

“Don’t you know the secular government operates separately from the church?” Razem asked, facetiously.

“I’m not asking you to act as a clergyman. I’m asking you to use your personal connections to ensure that the process of government are carried out properly and without undue interruptions from other third parties… And to ideally find out the source of those interruptions, if possible. Is that too much to ask? I’ve already got a gaggle of morons trying to tail me, I’m sure if I tear down enough puppets I’ll yank the puppeteer’s hand down by the strings eventually.”

Razem looked at her for a few seconds. He took a sip, and for a moment, he stopped being a clergyman. For a moment, Krahe was sat across from a bloodstained creature with murder behind the eyes, one of her own kind. Then, it was over.

“Of course I can clear it up for you. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding,” he said with a genial smile.

_______________________________________________________________

A few days passed.

Conveniently, as if by pure coincidence, the moment Razem had involved himself, Krahe’s paperwork was no longer an issue, and the only thing left to do was to secure a public office location. However, surely also by pure coincidence, her stalkers only grew more aggressive, attempting to cut her off multiple times in the span of a single day. Outmaneouvering them was a matter of some effort without Barzai, but outmaneouver them she did. It had become abundantly obvious that, the moment they saw her arm, they tunnel-visioned on it to a deleterious degree, and Krahe exploited this fact along with some basic quick-change. Not only did she lose her stalkers through this method, she also managed to get up-close and get a good look at a few of them. In the middle of the night, she stopped by the cafe dead-drop. Even now, one of them was stationed there, but he was fast asleep. She retrieved the memslate in the dead-drop and vanished like so much smoke. The memslate was of shockingly high quality, wrought of unblemished, perfectly homogenous material and with sigils so tiny they were just lines. Using a separate, disposable eyebox, she played it, and found herself disappointed by the carelessness her opponent displayed — she had thought this was chess, but instead, it was checkers.

An older woman’s voice filled with an insufferable sense of entitlement spilled out of the device, and a handwritten transcript scrolled alongside it.

“This is Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat, of the Silversword Agency. You have surely heard of me by now. Meet me at the agency’s office in the Orguss District. Do right by me, and you will have your personal micro-agency before the week is out. Refuse, and you will never find work in my city again. End recording.”

Going off of the timestamp at the transcript’s bottom, this had been recorded before Krahe got Razem involved. If she had to guess, Krahe imagined Brizogia to be seething in her office at the moment the news reached her. Deciding to add salt onto the wound, Krahe recorded a curt response. She then made her way to the cafe and placed it right there, on the table, in front of the sleeping lookout.

The message was simple: “Meet me at this cafe, or we don’t meet at all. I hope you make a better offer next time, for your own good. I will be here next Saturday at noon.”

Krahe intentionally set the meeting time so that there would be a good number of people around. Even if Brizogia pulled strings to get the area cleared out and locked down, that would still achieve Krahe’s intended effect of drawing attention. The point was to make it as painful for Brizogia to try anything shady as possible. If she tried to kill Krahe in broad daylight, it would look bad, and when Krahe inevitably humiliated her by thwarting such an attempt, it would look even worse. The only way for Brizogia to come out of this with a net gain would be to play nice. This was so abundantly obvious that there was no doubt in Krahe’s mind Brizogia would realize it, which in itself was another sort of torment, if Brizogia’s temperament matched Krahe’s first impression of her.

In the meanwhile, accounting for the possibility of Brizogia’s people actively coming after her, Krahe picked out a suitable killing ground: An old, poorly-maintained house, scheduled for demolition as part merging it with its neighboring property. Its basement had a single entrance, and shared a wall with the neighboring basement. These two things made this place in particular perfect as a trap — Krahe could cave in the entrance, light the fuse of the actual killing apparatus, and simply skim out of danger, reaching the surface before the bombs went off. It would be like a magic trick. She would keep her tools out of sight and mind, directing their attention as was necessary until the key moment. The explosives she intended to use were of the same type employed in soulbeast hunting, designed to be hidden from creatures who could naturally sense thaumic fluctuations. The only downside was the setup time, making it impractical if you couldn’t get the quarry where you needed it.

This was all an elaborate way of getting around the fact she couldn’t bring Barzai to bear. Were he an option, she would have had a much easier time disposing of these halfassed stalkers, but such was life. One couldn’t always expect to have the full extent of one’s arsenal on-hand.

244 - Catching Up Pt. 4/Actual Real Gangstalking [Cherno]

After only a few days’ wait, Krahe could count among her possessions a somewhat portable sort-of-computer, customized for security and equipped with what was functionally an aftermarket firmware and operating system. It came inside an unbranded, reinforced, and warded suitcase, which had extra space for a spare thaumine canister and several memslates. The cogen’s internals resembled a mechanical ribcage filled by countless armatures, the spine being a series of interlocking “memslates,” creating a modular operating system. It had nearly a dozen cable ports of varying shapes and sizes, as well as a port for a solid-state DD battery and a thaumine tank.

The cogen’s controls were best described as “cyberdeck meets typewriter.” Besides the unmistakably typewriter-esq keyboard, it offered a hovering trackball in place of a mouse and an outright direct-to-skull — or rather, direct-to-soul — plug cable, utilising the same quasi-voidkey connection methods that Krahe had up until now only experienced under the knife.

Bit by bit, Krahe began digging into the archive. An entire subculture unfolded before her through Nozar’s intel, with its own social conventions and ideals, even an idea vaguely akin to chivalry. Unsurprisingly, those who worked within the soulbeast-hunting sphere tended to have a disproportionate amount of soulbeast grafts, and vastly superior equipment overall for their rank, both by sheer virtue of access to materials. There was an undeniable degree of survivorship bias, of course — few stuck around for long, and of those who did, not many lived long enough to gather a substantial equipment. If working as a contractor was akin to becoming a pre-industrial sailor, then joining a soulbeast-hunting caravan or becoming a tracker was akin to joining up with a whaling vessel in that era.

The sheer volume of information she had to digest proved to be daunting even with the Decoction of Mind’s Dawn aiding her, and before long, day turned to night. Having run up against the decoction’s dosage limit, Krahe took a break… And as she sat there, smoking, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding in the air. Something was wrong. She scoured her surroundings, double and triple-checked all her safety-measures, and, finding nothing wrong, became even more deeply disconcerted. A strange static licked her skin. Before long, however, the feeling passed.

Several days later, Krahe was stuck — not by any fault of her own, and not in any matter of the arcane. It was, instead, bureaucracy. In her effort to start her own small agency, she had to go through the secular government, and somehow, by some terribly convenient coincidence, it seemed that everything was going wrong with her paperwork, despite having made absolutely sure it was bulletproof. The first reason she didn’t bend her full efforts to resolving the impasse by any means necessary was that everything was still within the official timeframe for the paperwork to be processed. The second reason was that she was already busy setting up everything for the soulbeast hunt and going through the Lost Sun Society’s records on eidolon evolution rituals. In short, she was stretching herself very thin, and her paperwork getting delayed wasn’t at the top of her priority list.

As the days passed, becoming a week, and then a second, Krahe noticed something. The same people, coincidentally showing up at public places she frequented. They weren’t always the same in the same place, and didn’t always show up simultaneously, and sometimes, they even went through the effort of changing how they looked, but they faltered in key ways. A whole new outfit or a wig wouldn’t do anything if you wore the same very recognizable rings, or didn’t cover up a unique tattoo. They were like agents provocateurs trying to blend into a protest while still wearing their company-issue smartglasses and using ultra-generic — thusly suspicious — network IDs. Stooges never learned. It wasn’t long before she caught a glance of something that confirmed who they were with. The Silversword Agency. It was a pendant one of them wore, and the mark of a Silver Slip Key on the side of another one’s shaved head. The question was: Why? The obvious answer was that someone contracted the agency, as it was, after all, the single largest agency in Audunpoint. However, a second possibility remained. Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat, the woman who owned the mansio on Mirzaii 2, who had gone to every possible legal avenue of lashing out at the church. Were this Megacity Gamma, Krahe was certain she would have seen a number of random news outlets taking Brizogia’s side, using suspiciously consistent verbiage. It was Nozar’s intel dossier regarding Krahe that made her lean strongly towards the second possibility, as it detailed a number of efforts to find out who she was, where she lived, and how to contact her — and Brizogia had gone to the greatest lengths of all. The Kristoffen Heavy Ironworks were a close second, because they wanted her to promote the Black Sun Coupler for them, offering various monetary compensation and full access to the system and all its successors. In short, they wanted to get her as a test pilot, doubtlessly because of the system’s teething problems and lack of testers. She was certain the Ironworks would happily publicize what she did using the Black Sun Coupler, using it as marketing for the prototype. In fact, she didn’t doubt that they had already done just that to some extent, considering enough information leaked that they even knew of the Black Sun’s use during the raid. Such was the cost of leaving survivors. The dossier mentioned quite a few others who had tried to get information on her, of course, but these two were the most notable instances. The Dead Night Tiger Agency seemed interested in her, but, true to their enigmatic reputation, that was as far as Nozar’s dossier went.

For the time being, her stalkers were the problem that needed to be dealt with. She decided to use them. After having her breakfast at a bakery, she purposely stared at the bald-headed stalker until he noticed. Then, just as he became alarmed, she looked down at a memslate she had left on the table, and covered it with her empty coffee cup. Looking back up at him, she saw a degree of understanding in his eyes. He didn’t make a move until after she had left. Not smart enough to blend in properly, but at least he understood this much. Upon that memslate was a message, establishing an alleyway across the street as a dead-drop point for communications — specifically, a gap in the mortar below a brick that Krahe had scraped an unassuming symbol into.

243 - Catching Up Pt. 3 [Cherno]

“One dose of Class-3 rejection suppressant,” Krahe offered.

“Oh, that’s good, but I can’t ‘member where exactly I filed last month’s report. Hope not that memslate that snapped in half before I made a backup…” he continued haggling as they reached his computer and he hopped up into his chair.

“Final offer: One dose of Class-3 painkiller, two doses of rejection suppressant, and I won’t accidentally torch your smut collection,” Krahe offered, raising her hand to a nearby rack of memslates. She already felt that these upgraded appraisal lenses were paying for themselves. Everything in Nozar’s data-hoard had anti-appraisal measures, but his collection being so vast, those protections varied in strength based on importance. This seemingly random rack of memslates was abnormally well-protected amidst a pile of other entertainment media. It also bore not a speck of dust, and was within arm’s length of Nozar’s workstation.

He narrowed his eyes, and, chittering with indignant fury, grabbed one of the memslates, gingerly slotting it into his terminal. With the press of a button, one of the screens flickered to the intro of what could be best described as late-20th-century special-effects action cinema — tokusatsu. Mamon Knights and Thaumaturges battling monstrous enemies.

“It’s not smut. It’s art. High-resolution master copies. Lost media,” he hissed.

“I’ll still torch it if you try to fuck me,” she shrugged.

“Fine, now get your greasy ape fingers away from my collection. Just… Just don’t fuckin’ touch it,” Nozar complained, rapidly tapping commands into the terminal. Krahe could hear mechanical armatures come to life somewhere out of sight, and slight vibrations spread through the floor.

“Want to use your own memslates or no?” he asked.

“How many do you need?”

“Three,” he gestured with three raised fingers.

Krahe handed them over, keeping a sliver of attention on the show he had so reverently described as lost media. She still wasn’t entirely sure that it wouldn’t transition into pornography, given the supremely corny quality of the dialogue and the female heroine’s outfit, one that stood out not because of the low coverage, but because Krahe had surmised that it was supposed to be a Mamon Armor. Like the outfits of Eutropia’s band, only higher quality.

“Really? You can afford to come to me for information but not to bring quality memslates? Or are you that cheap?” Nozar piped up, disgust audible in his voice.

“They have an indefinite shelf life and no maximum read limit, that’s all I need,” she said.

“Disgusting. Keep them,” he refused, pushing them back towards her. He reached under the table, pulling out a sheet-metal canister stamped with the brand of the Ironworks.

KRISTOFFEN

IWPS-4-005
ANTM-VRL-R-2O

Seeing Krahe’s brow furrowed in a mix of distrust and mild displeasure, he set it down in front of her. “Paranoid. Here. Sealed, see?”

“My experiences have taught me that, if anything, I am not paranoid enough,” Krahe remarked, taking the canister in hand. Under its lid, she found a pull-tab can lid, marked as fully sealed and warded against all radiation up to a certain rating.

“You offered this. I’m not paying extra,” she said.

The evoy somehow managed to convey an eye-roll despite his eyes not being capable of such a motion.

“The time you’ve wasted me up ‘til now is worth more than that canister. Just check it in whatever way you want and get this over with, your order is almost done buffering.”

With the hiss of an airtight seal being broken, she beheld the memslates — two rows of six. Unlike the clay or metal she was used to, they were greenish jadeite and their reflective surfaces gleamed in shades of purple. The individual symbols were tiny, approaching the limit of her naked eye. Going over each of them, she gave Nozar the go-ahead.

“Four copies,” she said, pointedly keeping her hand on the canister even after counting out four memslates. If she could walk out of here with this, she would.

“Payment. I wanna see it first,” he replied.

Only once each agreed-upon item sat in front of him did the evoy actually slot the memslates into their rightful place. From then on, they didn’t exchange any further words. Krahe, somehow, managed to make her way out of that building and out of Seer’s territory without any further incident. Putting aside the fact Nozar’s jadeite memslates were, as he had claimed, undeniably superior in all ways to what she had been content to use so far, the density and volume of information he had dumped on her was beyond her ability to parse on the spot. There was spite in it, in how immaculately organized it was, as if Nozar was smugly reigning his data-hoarder proclivities and his ability to navigate this complex schema over her. There was a file system in here, though her eyebox couldn’t do more than scroll through it and tell her that there was information it couldn’t handle properly. She would need an actual terminal to properly go through it all. This, in the end, turned out easier than getting clothes.

Garvesh readily wheeled out a consumer model for her to look over and fiddle with, and ordering a nonstandard, security-focused unit was much easier than she had expected. It was painfully expensive, that much was true, but Krahe was just as painfully aware of how important quality hardware was. Memslates were one thing, she had used them for disposable ends and thus hadn’t needed anything quality so far, but this was different. Garvesh referred to the machine as a “cogen,” short for “cognition engine,” and the manual also mentioned “c-engine” or “c-en” as colloquial terms. After spending some time reading a generalized manual for these machines and listening to the pawnbroker explain the most important aspects of use, Krahe felt confident enough that she wouldn’t have major issues adapting. There were major differences in fundamental design, but it was still a personal data-processing terminal designed by humans for humans, it fundamentally couldn’t be too alien for Krahe to understand.

242 - Catching Up Pt. 2 [Cherno]

“Any experience with evolving an eidolon?” Krahe asked.

“Yes and no. What I know will not be helpful to you. Your methods are simply more refined in all ways that matter. You are a Lost Sun Society member, no?” Yao deadpanned.

“How convenient of you to bring it up,” Krahe said, facetiously. “I mean to ask Zachariah for access to the Society’s restricted materials. Could you pressure him to accept my request without questioning it?”

Yao’s annoyance was growing by the moment, now plainly displayed in her expression and posture. She sighed, narrowing her eye. “Fine, just get on with it. I hope whatever you’re holding off on is worth the irritation you’ve caused me thus far.”

With a smile, Krahe brought out a full copy of Firminus’ soulbeast memslate, tossing it to Yao.

“It’s been much longer than I had hoped, but I believe we will finally have that soulbeast hunt you suggested very soon. Just need to find the particular soulbeast and get a tracker willing and able to go after it. Not quite there, but we’re getting closer. I can’t think of a better way to stretch my legs after a long absence than to go after an extremely dangerous, sapient monstrosity in an alien region renowned for its danger.”

“This is just a roundabout way of asking me to look into this for you,” Yao said, but no longer sounded nearly as annoyed.

“Do or do not, it makes no difference to my course of action. I still have a few more threads to tug on before I need to beg,” Krahe retorted, taking the scroll off the table. “Before I leave you in peace, I take it you don’t have anything to tell me that would make your other scroll less torturous to comprehend?”

“That which can be conveyed through words alone is not truly profound,” the old monster repeated with cruel amusement. “The process is vital in attaining true comprehension.”

______________________________________________________________________________

Krahe’s next goal was to visit Nozar and extract whatever he knew of Audunpoint’s soulbeast hunting world and of the soulbeasts currently active within a reasonable distance of the city.

The payment would not be a problem.

No, the problem was actually getting to the skeezy fuck, given where he lived.

At least, so she had thought.

The moment she was spotted on that street, Seer was there to greet her — and not with a gun, but with a retinue. They clearly weren’t comfortable with her being there, that much was clear, but when she stated her purpose to be here, Seer immediately delegated three of his subordinates to accompany her into the evoy apartment building. One of them was human, one was a squat Herculean — a beetle-man — and the last was… Familiar. It was the Croupier she had spared before, a pure-white Inax woman. There was no hate in her eyes, somewhat surprisingly.

“Make no mistake. I want you out of here as soon as possible, without any corpses this time,” she said, picking up on Krahe’s surprise.

“Let’s hope there are no giant quasi-war morphs with violent tendencies this time around, then,” Krahe replied, wasting no time in moving on. The possibility that she might get ambushed, that these three could jump on her at any moment, hung over her thoughts.

To her surprise, in fact almost to her disappointment, it didn’t happen. She didn’t even receive the satisfaction of verbal antagonism from any of the apartment building’s inhabitants, and after she had gone to so much effort to painstakingly pick out a colorful bevy of slurs.

She understood why she was able to reach her goal unimpeded — after all, she had spent nearly half her previous lifetime reaping both the positive and negative consequences of notoriety. It just so happened that, much like last time she had come here, she was itching to test her new toys on someone. As she saw it, Semzar barely counted, given the entirely extraordinary circumstances surrounding her battle against him. No, Krahe very much wanted to come across some shitheel mugger that didn’t know what he was getting himself into. She added places where she might find such convenient live targets to her list of questions for Nozar. Sure, it might cut further into her reserves of Class-3 painkillers, but such was the cost of supremely accurate and supremely convenient information.

“Wonder if he’ll take rejection suppressants as payment,” she thought. At this point, Krahe was fairly certain she would receive a sufficient supply of both painkillers and rejection suppressants for every specific operation she underwent as part of Firminus and Fidelia’s blatantly obvious experiment. As she saw it, they had severely oversupplied her due to the high-risk nature of the Liminal Coil’s implantation. Was she playing with their goodwill? Perhaps. But she also knew how to discern her own perceived value in another’s eyes. Favonia wouldn’t kick up a fuss if she found out Krahe had used the painkillers as currency, especially since it was ultimately in pursuit of the church’s own goals.

It took a good two minutes of knocking before Nozar came to the door.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here, you can fuckin’ stop now. What’d you-” he began, only to freeze for a moment and move to slam the door. It was, however, too little too late, and Krahe skimmed through the gap.

“Agh, fuck yaself!” he cried out, startled. After uttering a few more expletives, he turned to walk back into the depths of his hoarder’s lair, grumbling all the way. “Can’t wait for that barrier generator. Alright, what’d’you want? You better have payment.”

“I want a list of all known active soulbeasts within the regions surrounding Audunpoint, including their characteristics, a list of all independent soulbeast trackers, and generalized intel on the current soulbeast hunting season, especially active caravans into the Beyond Frontier. And while I’m here, any intel you have regarding me – no need for deep cuts unless it’s something along the lines of another contract out on my head.”

He looked over his shoulder, giving her a dubious look. Then, he shrugged and continued on.

“Alright, but remember, y’get what you pay for — that means my effort, not just the information. Might get sloppy without proper incentive.”

241 - Catching Up [Cherno]

Rather than actually beeline straight to Yao’s paper-walled fortress, Krahe bumbled around the city for a short time and eventually made her way to Gashward Road. There, she found nothing. No deliveries waiting for her at the nearby shrine, and no signs of break-in. Everything was exactly as she had left it, if dusty.

And so, she waited, passing the time in any way she could, making for Yao’s only when the time felt right. The talisman mistress, unlike Garvesh, expressed not an iota of worry for Krahe’s life.

“Two months or two years, I don’t care,” the old monster shrugged. “I saw that you yet lived, and that you would return in time. That was enough. The changes you have undergone, on the other hand, I cannot ignore. You seem to have failed to mention anything regarding your cultivation.”

Krahe genuinely wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

“What cultivation? Remember, I am not familiar with your terminology.”

“Your soul furnace. It has been altered. Multiple times. You have clearly undergone a forced advancement, but the path… Have you omitted your possession of a cultivation manual tied to the Hexkey? But it does not seem to be anything of Shang’s design, how strange.”

“It was part of the Atomica’s implantation-quenching. You didn’t expect this?”

“Why would I? The odds were miniscule, and, I admit, I foolishly expected you to know what to expect from a voidkey of this level — and thus, to know what was abnormal. Come. Tell me precisely what took place, for all I know you run the risk of bursting your soul furnace each time you cast thaumaturgy, if not exploding altogether. It is not my place to stop a stranger from committing suicide, but I will not have my escape route collapse itself.”

Krahe half-wanted to simply mention that there had been issues and that they had been resolved, but she managed to convince herself to show a greater degree of trust than that by elaborating to greater detail on the Atomica, the Fourfold Astral Implosion Furnace, and the issues that resulted from her foolhardy decision during the raid.

“Well, your decision was not as foolish as you might think, at least. I have seen far uglier examples of forced advancement in my time. Without your friends in the church, assuming you came to me, I could have had you using the Atomica with minimal side effects within a year at most. I suspect you will say that you do not have such time.”

“I wanted to say that about the two months the church asked of me, but I had no choice in the matter, and would not have a choice were your theoretical course of events to take place either.”

“You mentioned four of these… Control rods, was it? Was that the limit of your method?”

“Six. The number isn’t fixed, as far as I know.”

“A unique thauma-burning method that evolves the user’s thaumaturgy, improves efficiency, and allows for gradual advancement, at this early a stage. The world truly is vast beyond reckoning,” the talisman mistress remarked, chuckling to herself with clear disbelief in her voice. “Perhaps, without a curse to fuel, the remnant will Shang left within the Hexkey helped condense some profound knowledge of yours into that thauma-burning method. Does it seem to have any relation to the words you uttered during the transmutation ritual?”

Krahe looked at Yao for a few seconds, considering what to say, whether to even bother trying to explain or to just say yes and move on. She considered explaining the Solomon atomic transmutation reactor, the mysticism and ritualism involved its design, and how it was an early example of psychokinetics being applied on a large scale. In the end, she decided to simplify things.

“Yes. My Astral Implosion Furnace mimics the operation of a great machine that transmuted pure materials into other materials through physical phenomena and harnessed a subtle kind of magic that allowed pure force of will to manifest as physical force. I don’t yet understand the transmutation machine or this world’s magic well enough to translate it in a way you would understand.”

“That which can be conveyed through words alone is not truly profound. What you’ve said has already answered the question I had, that being the reason you decided on that particular incantation. The fact it so directly paralelled the ritual explains why it worked so well. Now, I believe you had a reason to come to me, yes? I didn’t take you for one to commit an unannounced visit for company’s sake.”

“Where to start, where to start…” Krahe hemmed and hawed, summoning a cigarette. She lit it, took a drag, and let out a smoky sigh, looking around the room, sweeping her eyes over the many talismans plastered inconspicuously over the walls. While many were camouflaged into the stone, just as many were plainly visible, if one had the eye to look at them. And yet, they refused to be noticed. Krahe had to fight to keep her eyes from slipping off them, and even then, they bled together. Finally, she looked at Yao.

“Some of those,” she nodded in the general direction she had just been looking. “I mean to open up a detective agency with a public-facing office. I’ll need proper security. If I am to open myself up for attack like that, I’ll need to turn the place into a paper fortress of my own.”

“Alright, I can help you set up security — only the basics,” Yao said. With a gesture, a scroll flew off of a shelf and onto the coffee table. “The rest, you’ll have to do yourself. I’m not a charity, and I don’t expect that my preferred security measures would suit you. You can cook up your own traps. Come back to me when you have the location. What else?”

She sounded impatient, almost disinterested, clearly expecting something more interesting. Krahe figured she shouldn’t be surprised — securing a location must come as second nature to this old monster.

Zelsys next artwork WIP

the boots are not final and the impelling arm will be reverted to the previous design

240 - Back Into the Saddle [Cherno]

Krahe wasted no more time, making her way to baneworm-run tailoring shop which Garvesh first referred her to. Even if they couldn’t produce the more complex of her choices, she was certain they could furnish her with more variations for her wardrobe. Somewhat irritatingly, they made a fuss about her arrival, closing down the shop just for her. Apparently, as she learned from them, Garvesh had reached out to everyone he knew in an attempt to find out whether she was alive, and even after receiving confirmation, he made great efforts to find out where had disappeared to. They insisted that she visit him as soon as possible, and she readily agreed, seeing as this was well within her plans.

As she laid out what exactly she wanted to have made, she also made an effort to find out just how hot Audunpoint got throughout the year. Apparently, the city strayed into the mid-30s for large portions of the year, and neared the 40° Celsius mark during the summer once every few years. The winters were some two months of single-digit sub-zero temperatures out of the year, with no snow and extremely dry air.

When it came to garments with magical properties, the proprietors rather apologetically stated that they were not that sort of tailoring shop, that such work was done to-order by particular craftsmen of renown. Krahe departed with a substantial quantity of clothing in her Kenoma Sack and a similarly sizable order penned in for the next month. She made for Garvesh’s right away, albeit by a roundabout route, and found the same events repeating themselves — he made a fuss and locked his pawnshop’s door behind her.

“Thought you were dead for a few days,” he said with an accusatory tone.

“Almost was. How’d you find out I wasn’t?” Krahe asked.

“I knew the church was involved. Pulled some strings. The higher-ups know of my affiliations with Casus, and they’ve gotten more cooperative ever since you came into the picture. My guess is Casus spilled the how and why of his rescue, no surprise. Speaking of, any clue where he’s gone off to?”

“Some kind of special training to properly handle an evolved form of his Mamon Armor. Mamon Knight Eisenretter, I think,” she answered. Her knowledge of Tarnished Silberblut and Mamon Knight Eisenretter was incomplete, and she wasn’t sure whether they were even separate or different names for the same thing.

“He made the Silberblut Coupler manifest something other than the Silberblut Armor? How?” Garvesh asked with a confused tone, as if she had just told him Casus had walked through a wall by simply willing himself to do so.

“I don’t know much more than you,” she shrugged. “I know that he somehow changed his Knight of Shining Silver boon into one that makes any coupler he uses compatible with him, instead of making him more compatible with the coupler. If I had to guess, probably something to do with that. I think it was called ‘Knight of Black and Gold’ or something.”

At that, Garvesh sunk into deep thought. Krahe wasn’t sure whether he was merely thoughtful or spiraling into worry, so she decided to pull him out.

“What, weren’t you fussing over me just a moment ago? Where’s my attention, you old lizard? When’re you gonna tell me who you were before you got crippled, huh? I’ve already got one crippled old monster I need to fix, might as well get you two together, see if you can help eachother and make my job easier.”

Garvesh was so stunned by that he didn’t even remember to get angry, processing all Krahe had said.

“Ur- You watch your fuckin’ mouth, I can still cut your ass off,” he growled, unconvincingly. “What do you expect me to do, spill my tragic backstory? Go digging at scars from a lifetime ago just so you have a better picture of why this withered old fuck sits on his ass on the edge of civilization? And what’d you mean by another crippled old monster, is Razem trying to get back in the saddle?”

Krahe just looked at him, waiting for the cogs in his head to turn.

“...Yao Fu? You’re telling me she’s crippled?”

A slow nod.

“Busted soul furnace, partially repaired. I heard from a birdie your condition is also a soul furnace issue, some kind of poison,” she said.

“Ergh, close enough,” he grumbled, clearly wanting to correct her but also not wanting to divulge more information. “I’ll think about it. I doubt you’re actually here for this.”

“I’m here because your baneworm tailor friends told me you were trying to figure out where I was,” she said.

“Well it’s clear you’re fine, so you can fuck off again. I was finally getting around to doing inventory when you barged in, now I’ll have to double-check everything. Unless you have an actual reason-” Garvesh grumbled, making a show of looking through his stock.

Krahe sighed.

“I need an independent soulbeast tracker. Figured you might know one.”

“I’ll ask, but no promises. Doesn’t owe me anything and wouldn’t give a shit even if he did. Any clue what you’re hunting?”

“Smooth fur, highly aggressive, highly mobile, likely more intelligent than most soulbeasts. Likely terrestrial or arboreal, and possessing superior sensory capabilities. Here,” she explained, handing over a memslate with most of the soulbeasts, some info on the type of organ she was looking for, and additional specifics beyond that. The ideal target was a soulbeast that not only had the right organ and temperament, but also had abilities that would support at least one aspect of Krahe’s theoretical composite voidkey. A beast that could naturally astro dive would be a nightmare to hunt, so Krahe would be content if material from it could facilitate the combination of her voidkeys at all. Thus, she listed astro diving/skimming as one of several optional abilities that would be nice, but not required. Among these, she also listed a unique barrier alternative.

Whether or not she would target a second soulbeast soon after the first would hinge upon how many of her conditions the first one fulfilled.

After slotting it into his eyebox, the pawnbroker took a few minutes to go through the memslate’s contents.

“Alright, I’ll look into it, this might interest the guy. As I said though, no promises. You should keep looking into other options in the meanwhile — but you know that.”

“Yeah, of course,” Krahe nodded along. “Before I go, give me a bottle of purge pills and some Tabryxa.”

“Still getting pains even after the church dragged you off? Just how busted up did you get in that raid?”

“It’s nothing like that. Just some headaches, had them do some sight enhancements while I was away.”

“That so? And what else?” Garvesh asked conversationally as he took her ordered items off the shelf, clearly not expecting a serious answer. His movements slowed and his eyes settled in a stare into Krahe’s own when he turned back around and immediately read the way she was looking at him.

“How much work? Two grafts? Three?”

Krahe kept looking at him, conjuring the rings to pay for her order.

“C’mon. It’s only been two months,” he insisted. He thought she was screwing with him, at first. But then a faint smirk crept into her face, and, since something was off, the saurian instinctively honed in on his senses in the same manner one would check the rear-view mirror. He realized that he couldn’t see her chest rising, and in the brief moments when her hand touched his, he noticed that her heartbeat was wrong. She left without telling him, and he couldn’t help but wonder.

239 - The Demon's Return (Goes Unnoticed) Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Despite the rumors, Krahe’s re-emergence into the city went unnoticed. She simply appeared from a particularly well-hidden door in a random basement safehouse, one of over a dozen possible exit points for the tramline. From there, she wasted no time in putting her affairs in order. When she went to pick up her order of upgraded lenses for the Prospector’s Eyes, the craftsman remarked that she was late. He hadn’t sold them — if anything, he grabbed them from right under the counter, as if he had been waiting for her all this time, and just as quickly accepted her second half of the payment, without even bothering to count the money. It was clear he wanted her out of his shop as quickly as possible. She didn’t mind.

She didn’t return to Gashward Road, instead spending a few days at Sorayah’s home as she considered how to proceed next. The fact of the matter was, Firminus had wanted her to stay at the compound for another week. It had been her own choice to return to civilization before she was back to full fighting form. Even if her capabilities right now were in fact greater than during the raid, she was still only at 70% at best. The Adamas Organ had yet to fully settle in, and the various aftereffects of her numerous surgeries still made themselves known often enough to interfere.

Seeing as she had no intention to join up with an agency, Krahe had decided to create her own. A detective agency, that is, a simple front-office, a public face. Not only was this possible within the legal framework, it was fairly easy. From what she had learned, Audunpoint had a decent number of smaller agencies, it was just that they usually ended up as subcontractors — glorified proxies — for one of the big five or the church. The existence of such a front agency, inevitably, presented an issue by its very nature. A public office, one where she would be with some frequency, would inevitably become a target. In the end, Krahe intended to turn that problem into a benefit by turning her office into a trap for those foolish enough to wander in with hostile intentions.

The true problem, then was that she didn’t have the skills or resources needed to turn a civilian building into a fortified death trap without making it obvious.

For this purpose, none other than Yao Fu came to mind.

Then, there was the matter of the hunt. She now had more specific details regarding what beast she would need, and that she would likely need to hire a trustworthy tracker. For this, she expected to need to pry some intel out of Nozar… And once she did find a possible target, she would need to consult with Yao Fu to confirm that it would be suitable, given that woman’s involvement. She decided to make partial copies of the soulbeast intel memslate, total out to around half a dozen memslates with varying amounts of information, each of which she made three copies of.

As she went down her mental checklist, grinding a beetle-like bean between her molars, Krahe arrived to her need to rectify her lack of barriers and wards. Astro Diving, Astro Skimming, her biosuit, the Adamas Organ, all these were potent defensive measures, but Krahe had already grown used to wards. Barriers, she could do without if need be, but she wouldn’t feel comfortable without wards.

The answer, once more, led to Yao Fu.

The Atomica. The Shardkey of Heshmad Abbasi. The fragments of Eutropia’s Gulf Key.

All in all, Krahe had all the parts necessary to assemble something extraordinary — perhaps the only missing ingredient would be a voidkey with exceptional barrier characteristics. Perhaps something entropy-light, fulfilling the role of a supplementary defense than a typical barrier. She was certain there would be another catch, that she would need to get some extra special material to allow for the unification of all these voidkeys as one, but that was a problem for the future.

Almost without thinking, Krahe glanced inwards, towards Barzai, and saw that the eidolon remained dormant. There had been a change, however. He was no longer “gestating” — instead, his system readout simply stated that he was ready for the evolution ritual. The problem, of course, was that she didn’t know what that entailed. This… Also pointed towards Yao Fu. In this case, it was because she had a great deal of influence over Zachariah Ahmadi, the Speaker of the Lost Sun Society. With each path of least resistance that turned out to have that old monster sitting at the crossroad, Krahe grew more and more uneasy. Not because she distrusted Yao Fu — if anything, out of all her acquaintances in this world, she was the most comfortable with their relationship, as she knew it to be simply transactional in a manner that neither side could afford to break. The number of threads leading back to that woman just made Krahe keenly aware of how lackluster her network of connections was.

Last in order of how heavily it weighed on her thoughts was the matter of her clothes, and especially of the biosuit. Upon her departure from the compound, Firminus had handed over the first fruits of his experimental labour — a specimen of newly-cultured biosuit material, of a sort. It was different from that which made up her biosuit somehow, the reason for which she wasn’t sure of. She wagered it to be somewhere between the circumstances of her rebirth and whatever Firminus had done with her sample, as he had mentioned having made efforts to improve it in some vague manner. Regardless, she had a fairly significant amount, and after going through a few options, Krahe simply used the extra mass to directly expand her biosuit. Despite this intention, the original biosuit retained clear lines of separation, with the system recognizing the new mass as “Type-38 Firminus-pattern Recultured Biogel”. Its properties were generally the same as the Type-37 had been upon her initial transmigration, but slightly inferior in all aspects, with an armor protection rating of E2. By comparison, the Type-37 Biosuit’s armor protection rating had grown by two increments — E3, to D2.

When it came to the issue of rising temperatures, thankfully, her biosuit and Firminus’ copy both helped mitigate it to an extent. As part of its core functionality, the biogel absorbed her sweat and used this excess moisture for its own form of evaporative cooling, effectively amplifying Krahe’s ability to naturally cool herself down — it truly fulfilled the descriptor of “second skin” in all aspects. Furthermore, the gel’s structural makeup meant that its surface, despite being black, absorbed very little heat from the sun. This property also caused it to glisten a purplish shade when the light hit it just right.

"Blackhand" Artwork [Cherno]

238 - The Demon's Return (Goes Unnoticed) [Cherno]

“I fear I cannot do exactly what you wish, but… There is an option. It will entail not just a graft, but also further brain surgery, and it likely will not allow you to simply enter that state at will. If I were to guess, it will make it easier to enter and maintain it,” the grafter said.

“There’s a catch. What is it?” Krahe asked.

Firminus smiled.

“We don’t have the parts,” he shrugged. “The truth is, I was not able to conceive of a manner to directly trigger your combat trance. I only compared it with past graft-saints who had similar abilities and looked at the grafts they had. What you want will likely have to be sourced from a particular soulbeast, and will likely be something like an adrenal gland. Finding and killing the right beast is the first step, and there is no guarantee that it will have the exact organ you need based on its known abilities. You will need an individual with strong soulbeast appraisal abilities, both of the system and non-system sort. Once you do have the organ, it will be up to me to somehow cut it down to size and fashion the necessary control unit. At least you have an easy and clear goal now, no?”

He tossed her a memslate. Krahe loaded it up and looked through it. There was no single type of soulbeast. It, in fact, recorded numerous distinct soulbeasts, all sharing some similarities, especially the fact they had been slain and used for parts by a graft-saint some time in the last 400 or so years. It also contained the exact locations where those beasts had been found and a collection of intel on how exactly one would go about tracking down a soulbeast and the procedures of a hunt. Option A entailed paying a rancher to track down a beast within the rancher’s territory, which was expensive and would often involve forfeiting most of the materials to the rancher as part of the payment. However, it guaranteed that you would only have to fight the beast, and would thus be in peak condition when it came down to the fight. The alternative was to go directly to the Beyond Frontier. In the case of the Beyond Frontier, it was undeveloped wilderness, and tracking a soulbeast was a matter of one’s own skills, hiring a tracker, joining a hunting caravan, or any of many other options.

On the twenty-fourth day of the second month, her Tsetse-pattern conduit lines arrived, and the operation proceeded without any further delay. They resembled an organic version of typical synthetic nerve fibre replacements, with central conduits and sub-conduits branching off. Only her left arm was left unmodified.

Finally, finally, she could harness the Atomica’s full output without it tearing her apart from the inside. And the moment she did, the moment she unleashed that power, the moment Lasher’s gossamer-threads ripped into a target dummy, she felt it click. The Atomica’s immense output surged through her, spiraling through her conduits. A single cast left a five-pronged spiral embedded in the supernaturally resilient wood making up the dummy. For the first time in actual reality, she went through the full kata she had watched engram-Sauer perform so many times, that she had herself replicated in the dream. Until now, Afterburner had been out of her grasp — Anathema’s unique properties simply couldn’t facilitate it. But now that she had full reign of the Atomica, it came to her like second nature. Without Razormind it was demanding, that was true, but it didn’t matter in Krahe’s head.

Three days later, the green-eyed demon would descend upon Audunpoint once again.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Blackhand.

That name, once a newly-spreading myth, had grown into a true urban legend over the last two months.

It was known that, following the Slaughterhouse 9 Incident, Semzar Hashem had made a great effort to hunt her down, placing a substantal bounty on her head and even hiring none other than Crescent Jezail, twice.

And then, before the month was out, Semzar was dead. Slaughtered in the middle of a banquet, right in the middle of the Mirzaii Subdistrict. The survivors of that incident told the tale openly, throwing gasoline-soaked logs onto the fire with their exaggerated accounts.

The church readily spread rumors about the direct involvement of an inquisitor, whose activity in the city following the raid spun the rumor mill even faster.

And if that were not sufficient, Brizogia Rasug al-Imuzat, an administrator of the Silversword Agency and the owner of Mirzaii 2, lodged a formal complaint with the church for damage to the property, demanding restitution. The church, in return, demanded proof that whomever rented the mansion didn’t know it was being rented to Semzar Hashem, which smothered the case in the crib.

One survivor in particular, a man with a pretentious mustache and yellow graft-eyes too small for their sockets, built upon the urban legend yet further. He insistently claimed that Blackhand just had to be some veteran upper-mid-ranker, if not higher, merely using lower-order equipment for some unknown reason — in his own words, “Nothing else can explain how she fought.”

The fact this didn’t truly line up with reality didn’t matter. Audunpoint, like any other city, loved urban legends. Blackhand was just one more among the ranks of many. One more spectre that many knew of, but only few knew to be real.

__________________________________________________________________________

Krahe’s return to the city took place by way of a high-speed subterranean tramline, the tunnel possessing several enormous bulkheads and lined by statues that she was certain were disguised automata — even the tram car was built like a tank, and was operated by an automaton. From the journey, she surmised two things: First, the compound was at least thirty kilometers outside Audunpoint. Second, it wasn’t the only one connected to this tunnel. As much as she would have liked to simply continue where she had left off in her investigation, her absence meant that things had changed, and she had to catch up — despite her allies’ best efforts to keep her up to date on goings-on during her stay at the compound. Allies. That word still felt like it didn’t quite fit. Like the grip of someone else’s gun.

237 - Nemea [Cherno]

Over the coming days, the Adamas Organ settled in, and Krahe began noticing the changes. They were subtle, at first, only for her skin to rapidly begin turning black and growing stiff, starting on her side right where the organ had been implanted. Over the course of around half a day, the affected area would return to normal, shedding in a manner resembling forgescale. It progressed outward in waves, leaving behind subtly firmer flesh. Firminus described this as a normal part of the process, noting only that it was progressing even faster than he had expected. Apparently, it normally took months for an Adamas Organ to settle in, and upwards of one to two years to become effective. The Firminus-Valerian Pattern was intended to be much faster, but, in the grafter’s own words, “Not this much faster.”

Though uncomfortable, it was just a nuisance. At worst, it temporarily limited her range of motion, but that was all. Her only concern was whether the gradual tissue reinforcement would cause issues with the following operations, but she assumed that the grafters had planned for this, and Firminus said just the same when she brought it up during her next checkup. She could also feel the transformation spreading through her organs, but it was slower, gradual.

Krahe waited until the change had passed over her entire torso and reached her limbs before she actually tested the adamas function. She set a training automaton for low-powered straight punches to the midsection, peeling the biosuit away from her stomach. Already knowing these wouldn’t hurt her, she braced herself, and using the trigger artifact, weathered two strikes from the gleaming machine. With a mustering of will, she, at first, attempted to harden her flesh directly. To say it was hard would have been an overstatement, but it wasn’t easy, either. Reaching for the right mental trigger, she felt a dull thrumming, almost churning sensation coming on, as if the blood itself was rioting. Veins bulged under her skin, blackness spread from them, and within a few seconds, her stomach had become as if living granite, and only the dull thrumming remained to notify her of this fact. There was bleedover — it spread further than she had wanted — but it had worked on the first attempt without the command word, and that was enough.

The training automaton’s punches barely even registered, now. Knowing she was on a time limit, she dialled the automaton’s strength higher and higher, repeating until its strikes started hurting again. The force was such that it sent her sliding backwards over the training area’s sand-covered floor. Krahe released the hardening, seeing the bruise already taking shape, as black as pitch. There was one more thing to test.

“Adamas,” she incanted, visualizing the exact area she wanted to harden. This time, it was nearly instant, with far less bleedover. Dismissing it again, she considered what to change the trigger word to. Adamas was three syllables, and it would give away what she was doing. Until she could harden any area faster and more precisely than with the trigger word, she would keep that crutch in her back pocket. After some thought, she eventually settled on “Nemea,” the home of the Nemean Lion of Greek myth. Zastreon had no Greece, let alone a myth of the 12 Labours of Hercules, but the word still had the inherent mental association necessary to make it function as the trigger.

She continued passing the time in any way she could. When she found out Audunpoint’s already warm climate wasn’t even the hottest it would get this year, Krahe arrived at the realization that she hadn’t actually built up her wardrobe all that much. Even with her disguises in mind, it wasn’t much. This realization resulted in a lengthy order list for tailored clothing, from completely normal to an armored, self-repair capable short jacket with a back patch directly based on the Wandrei Faust talisman. Given the absence of a surveillance state or an ever-present network that could allow someone to identify her identity digitally, Krahe had the idea of intentionally cultivating a distinct appearance, so that people would more easily dismiss her as being someone else when wearing a disguise. She’d never intended to keep wearing those same green pants to begin with. For the time being, she filed it away, seeing as she wasn’t exactly in walking distance of a tailor.

By the time she had her ocular modifications done, it had been a month since the raid. She hated low-intrusion ocular operations like this. Had it been an option, she would have chosen to have her eyes replaced wholesale, but the grafters simply considered this the safer option, considering the other grafts she was also having done within this short timeframe.

Zaveshian neurosurgery was, in its own way, just as advanced as that of Megacity Gamma. On Krahe’s part, it involved nothing more than having her head in a vice and responding to prompts every couple minutes. In this case, most of them included Fidelia waving one or more of her tendrils in front of Krahe’s face at varying speeds — over the course of the operation, she was able to observe a rapid improvement in her own ability to track fast-moving objects even with interference. From listening to the two grafters speaking during the procedure, Krahe surmised that it involved a mixture of cultured tissue and “patterns” of some sort that both needed to be adjusted to fit her ocular cortex specifically. She couldn’t quite tell how much of this procedure relied on feel, but then, she had never considered neurosurgery to be an exact science.

Satisfying as it was to be closer to her former peak, it didn’t help with the splitting headache she got from constantly overshooting things. She couldn’t even read properly for the time being — and so, she decided to turn her attention towards something she had been putting of for some time: Razormind. Lucky for her, Firminus was, if anything, eager to observe her attempts.

Of the two months she spent at Fidelia’s compound, it would take Krahe two and a half weeks to achieve Razormind a sufficient number of times for Firminus to discern exactly what the mental state entailed. She made it clear that a real fight would make it easier, but she also came to learn that the monitoring equipment they had on-site wasn’t suited to that purpose. So, it was left up to Krahe to push her visualization as far as it would take her. Eventually, she started going through various katas from Sector 7 Style while visualizing fictitious opponents, and this, in the end proved to be the key.

It truly was akin to walking along the blade of a razor. Even the tiniest moment of hesitation, the smallest stray thought would throw her out of it. But time and time again, she managed to stay in that zone for a bit longer, and eventually, Firminus announced that he had a plan.

236 - Adamas Organ [Cherno]

“I think I remember,” Firminus said, looking off into space for a few moments. “Something about needing a reagent and a custom ritual. The eidolon should tell you what reagent you need through the system. It uh… I think it needs to gestate for some time before the ritual? You are not asking the right person here, you know.”

“Not many options at the moment,” she remarked, observing the grafter’s blade split her skin as if it were paper. The Adamas Organ appeared no less alien than the Heart Scarab, resembling no human organ. It was an oblong mass of spongy, black tissue, with a web of darkly metallic connective tissue running throughout it as a scaffold. Hair-like fibres of the same metallic substance came off in all directions, but especially from the ends of its connective tubes. Which ones were veins and which ones had different purposes was beyond Krahe’s ability to recognize at a glance.

While he worked, Krahe idly looked around the room. Her eyes landed upon that table from before. He had a section of Type-37 Biogel, the substance of her biosuit, stretched out on a rack. Next to it, two wet-storage capsules were plugged into the wall, clumps of the same biogel growing within them, floating about somewhat like the wax inside a lava lamp. She wondered how long it would take to grow into something large enough to make a new article of clothing. As a result, she also briefly considered how the church would deal with Firminus being absent from his usual post. She figured his patients would get redirected to another grafter.

Once the Adamas Organ was in place and her three lower left ribs were back where they belonged, Firminus shot her up with a serum of painkillers and rejection suppressants, and just like that, she was out of the grafting chair, carefully stretching her stiffened neck.

“One more thing,” Firminus said, getting out of his seat. He made his way over to a cabinet, from which he retrieved a standard church-branded medicinal box. “In order for your Adamas Organ to settle in properly, you will need to eat six of these twice a day for about a month. Chew them up if you can. If they taste bad, swallow them whole right after a meal.”

Krahe opened the box, and found that it contained two paper bags of dark, oblong beans. The scent was sort of woody, but also with a strong note of coffee and some cocoa. They had a star-like pattern on the underside, and she couldn’t help but see an uncanny resemblance to a curled-up beetle. There was also an inevitable resemblance to coffee beans, given the scent.

“Are these insects?” Krahe asked.

“Used to be,” Firminus said, as if it was the smallest thing. “My collaborator developed a plant that produces these fruits instead. If you keep eating them, your Adamas Organ might perform better than most. Can’t make promises, but they’re safe to eat, just in general.”

Thinking no more of it, Krahe tossed one in her mouth and bit down. The shell was more fragile than she had expected, while the interior was softer, somewhat like a cashew nut. They tasted just as they smelled, a cross between coffee beans and cocoa.

“So have Adamas Organ users been eating beetles for four thousand years or is this part of your improvement?” she asked.

“Mine. I believe we were using the beetles for ah… Twenty-four years, was it?” the grafter thought, looking back at her as he washed his hands. “How is the flavour, not too offensive I take it?”

“Tastes pretty good to me. Might eat these instead of coffee beans as a drinking snack,” she said, eating another.

“Coffee beans?” he asked, pausing for a moment. “Oh. Right. Pilgrim. Zastreon’s coffee comes from the roots of a kind of water lily. I think they pulp and ferment it or something of the sort. Funny thing, Casus remembers coffee being made from the nuts of a small, coniferous tree.”

“Huh. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Krahe shrugged. She raised the paper bag she’d opened, changing the subject. “I take it I can only get more of these from you, yeah?”

“Fear not, I will provide. It wouldn’t do to sabotage my own case study, would it? Before you bring it up, yes, yes, full anonymity and redaction. My own ethics aside, this is also part of standard procedure with unlettered apostles,” Firminus said.

Krahe returned to the library, checking the Adamas Organ’s system readout as she went.

[FIRMINUS-VALERIAN PATTERN ADAMAS ORGAN]

[Tags:]

Firminus-Valerian Pattern

Living Item

[Details:]

This graft expresses amplified performance metrics based upon the holder’s attributes and archetype level.

This graft fulfills all the functions of a spleen to an elevated degree, and supports the functions of the liver and kidneys. It can, to a limited extent, substitute the functionality of either.

This graft enhances the holder’s blood quality, immune system, and alters blood composition into “Black Blood.” Black Blood possesses enhanced properties in all aspects, excelling in oxygen carrying capacity and gradually reinforcing all bodily tissues over time. As part of this process, the holder’s bone marrow will be restructured to this graft’s standard. Once this process is complete, performance will increase further. Grafted bone marrow compatibility with this feature may vary and depends on graft hierarchy.

When agitated through a mental command, select reinforced tissues will enter a hardened state. If experiencing difficulties with activation, use the vocal command. In addition to a generalized increase in resilience, the affected tissues will become resistant to all damage categories other than Arcane (est. 50% resistance). Please exercise caution when using this feature — overuse may lead to soft tissue and vascular damage.

Current blood transmutation ratio: 1%

Current tissue reinforcement ratio: 0.2%

Current Black Blood reservoir: 6/340ml

Current lymphocyte reservoir: 0/30%

Current vocal command: adamas

Graft Synergy: Liminal Coil

This graft has been synchronized with the Liminal Coil’s “Sunken One Marrow,” resulting in improved overall performance. Black Blood will exhibit beneficially modified properties.

235 - Tuning Complete [Cherno]

A/N: Longer than usual because I really don't want to have a chapter be half system readouts but I want to include them as a refresher.

_______________________________________________________________________

As the grafters progressed, so too did Krahe gradually notice improvements. Less resonance at first, and thus, less pain. From thereon, however, the resonance returned, but this time, it was cold, almost comforting. After Fidelia finished a thirteen-hour session of meticulously adjusting tiny details on the interior of Krahe’s Soul Furnace, the high grafter had deemed that all that could be done, had been done. Now, when Krahe ran through the usual tests, she noticed the greatest changes. While diving, the world was slower than before, just a bit, and she could dive again after emerging sooner than before. Similarly, she could skim further, and could skim more often. But perhaps the thing that stood out most was the moment. That instant after skimming, when the world nearly halted around her — it had grown in length by about half. It was a simultaneously tiny, yet also impactful change. All of these changes were also reflected upon the system readouts, and first among them was that the dive recovery time and skim recharge time had both shortened. Her Astro Dive time dilation factor had also grown by 0.2x, and, somewhat vaguely, one line in the description for Astro Skimming had changed by a single word: from “upon arrival, the holder experiences a brief moment of extreme cognitive time dilation,” to “upon arrival, the holder experiences a moment of extreme cognitive time dilation.” Besides these changes, Krahe had an inkling that the resonance had magnified the Liminal Coil’s passive benefits, even if only slightly.

[LIMINAL COIL]

[Status:]

Sacred

[Details:]

This graft bestows the “Silver Key of Kadath” Boon.

This graft brings the holder’s Astral Body (Material Soul) and Physical Body into resonance. All of its attribute-modifying effects are at least partially resultant from this fact.

This graft reduces the risk and severity of graft rejection and accelerates the integration of grafts.

This graft accelerates recovery of blood, improves blood quality, and strengthens the immune system.

This graft significantly reinforces the holder’s base Control attribute.

This graft reinforces the holder’s base Durability attribute.

This graft reinforces all of the holder’s base Thaumic attributes and improves the efficiency of Thauma-burning as well as Thaumic Fusion to a minor degree.

This graft’s full characteristics will become available when the holder fulfills the requirements to make use of them.

[SILVER KEY OF KADATH]

[Tags:]

Graft Source (Liminal Coil)

Astro Diving

Astro Skimming

[Details:]

The holder is capable of Astro Skimming and Astro Diving unassisted at a reduced efficiency. The holder’s capabilities for Astro Diving/Skimming will improve significantly if the holder implants a voidkey with the Astro Diving and/or Astro Skimming Tags.

Astro Skimming

Astro Skimming entails entering a semi-astral state and skimming the realspace-adjacent region of Kenoma (the Astral Gulf) for an infinitesimally short period of time. In practice, this allows the holder to near-instantaneously transport herself a limited distance in any direction. The holder has limited control over her relative facing and retention of momentum upon arrival.

Upon arrival, the holder experiences a moment of extreme cognitive time dilation.

One cannot Skim to a location where one’s body would intersect with concrete matter; in such a case, the holder will be rebounded to her starting location and her relative momentum will be inverted.

Current Skim charges: 2

Current Skim recharge: 4 seconds per charge

Current Skim range: 4.3m

[Next Page]

Astro Diving

Astro Diving enables the holder to wholly transition into an astral state of being and dive into the Astral Gulf. Unassisted, without special preparations, only a Partial Dive is possible, wherein the diver is partially present both in realspace and the Astral Gulf; a Full Dive, allowing Kenomaic exploration, may be achieved with appropriate preparatory measures. Unless specified otherwise, all references to Astro Diving within this Boon description are in relation to Partial Diving.

Sustaining a dive continuously builds up Hard Entropy.

While Astro Diving, the holder becomes partially disentangled from realspace, effectively becoming semi-intangible. Most Thaumaturgies will have no effect in realspace, most artifacts cannot be activated, and most other means of directly affecting realspace will have no effect. The diver’s subjective flow of time accelerates in relation to realspace while diving.

Upon emerging from a dive, the diver will not be able to dive again for a short time.

Current time dilation factor: 1.7x

Current dive recovery time: 4s

While originally, the plan had been to select and implant the reinforced conduit lines right after the tuning, Firminus argued for a delay, based on the supposedly-impending viability of an operational prototype for an improved conduit line model. He asked Krahe, almost as an aside, whether she would be willing to use a prototype graft. After asking a few questions regarding the graft’s properties and level of development, she felt no reason to refuse — even with the knowledge the conduit lines were directly based on Abara Morph Tsetse. Thus, with more paperwork that they burned immediately after filling it out, the delay was agreed upon, and for a while, Krahe was left to her own devices within the compound.

Besides recovery, she spent this time reading, exercising, and, as ever, attempting to crack into Yao Fu’s scroll, in the subterranean compound’s surprisingly expansive library. Her progress remained as incremental as ever, but progress it was, and from her improved understanding, she whittled a breakthrough — an improved Wandrei Faust talisman pattern. The improvements were small, but altogether, they added up. Remove some extraneous strokes here, shorten a stroke there, alter the angle from which a certain stroke was executed, and before long, the difficulty and thus time requirement of each talisman had been reduced. In the same manner, the actual theurgy was now more efficient, allowing for more offensive power and higher mobility. Not by much, but enough to be noticeable.

Whenever she grew frustrated with this pursuit, or simply couldn’t draw anymore, she immediately redirected her focus towards something else. Whether it was poring over her texts on the history and construction of wards or simple physical exercise in the compound’s entirely far too well-equipped gym, Krahe couldn’t bear being idle. Not here. Not now. If she couldn’t be on the surface, actively eroding what remained of Hashem’s foundations so she could get to whomever was holding them up, then she would channel that energy into preparations.

Casus just showed up at one point, walking into the gymnasium while Krahe was there. The musculature of his right arm was darker, but besides that, he looked the same. Though they didn’t speak at length, the banisher made it clear he was relieved to see her recovering so quickly. He also mentioned that he would likely not be around much during their time at Fidelia’s compound, as he was undergoing some kind of combination physical and spiritual training to help him handle his new Mamon Knight form.

Throughout it all, Barzai slept. Less than even refusing to answer, the eidolon didn’t react in any way to her call. She could feel from him no sense of exhaustion, no sense of hunger, nothing. She couldn’t even observe him within the vault of her soul. She knew, for certain, that this was no injury — no tests suggested anything of the sort, and her Chthonian Eels heeded her command as readily as ever.

When she checked her Eidolon Vaults, she saw Barzai was, apparently, undergoing some kind of evolution.

[TRUE EIDOLON VAULT NO. 1]

[Astral Morphology:]

Raven of Ruinous Eyes “Barzai”

Developed via retroactive cogniphagy of the host upon bonding.

[Morphological Archetype:]

Scout/Skirmisher

[Eidolon Status:]

Boon Symbiosis: Deathsmoke Blessing

When manifested in its natural form, this eidolon is difficult to notice for those not intended to notice it, and may appear as a mundane raven.

Boon Symbiosis: Phase of Earthen Jade

This eidolon benefits from the reinforcing properties of this boon.
Boon Symbiosis: Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom

This eidolon is capable of becoming a daemon core.

Gestating Morphology Evolution

Evolution Ritual Reagent: Souldregs of Semzar Hashem

Fully Nourished

Unbound

“It’s one thing after the next,” Krahe thought. She decided to look into it when she could, going through whatever texts she thought might be relevant, as well as mentioning the matter to both Casus and Firminus. Casus’ surface-level knowledge only affirmed the fact eidolons could and did evolve, but that was all. Firminus, on the other hand, knew enough to be helpful — but not an iota more than that. She questioned him on the matter while he was getting everything in order for her Adamas Organ implantation. It took place in chamber that Firminus had clearly gone to great effort to arrange in a manner matching his own home turf. The contrast between the absolute cleanliness of this place and the organized mess in Firminus’ shrine-workshop was almost comical.

379 - Phantom Winds of Fate Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

Zefaris saw them first, from where she was — the lookouts in the spire. There came no cry of warning, but she knew that they had seen her, as the sounds of exertion fell as silent as the grave, and the gate swung open. Within, the sect’s disciples had lined up, facing outward in preparation to defend their sect. A middle-aged Ikesian man, covered in scars and exuding a razor-like aura, leapt down from the spire’s second-lowest balcony, gliding through the air as if he weighed less than a feather. He landed right at the gate’s precipice, staring at Zefaris with an arrogant sense of derision in his eyes. He wore a meticulously-groomed mustache, and a monocle was seated inside the starburst-scarred, scorched pit of his left eye. He wore the colors of the Black Horse Sect, and bore their crest upon his breast, but otherwise his clothing was luxurious in the extreme, plainly speaking of his noble roots.

“I cannot guess as to how you learned of our branch, Reaper’s Bride, but now that you are here, you will not be leaving. To think that abomination was foolish enough to think some jumped-up barracks bunny would be a sufficient challenger…” he uttered, and just by his accent, she instantly knew him to be of high birth. That he was here, at a remote, small sect branch, spoke volumes to why he had that attitude about him. She could almost see him tipping over from the gigantic chip resting on his shoulder.

At that moment, a battle took place inside her head. One voice wanted to play along, see what happened, and try to de-escalate if possible. This could, plausibly, be a misunderstanding. These people might just be on-edge, having been fed incorrect or exaggerated information about the Newman Sect and its elders.

A second voice wanted to exterminate this branch sect altogether, to tear it out by the roots, or at bare minimum to kill that arrogant sack of shit where he stood.

Barely, Zefaris subdued the second voice. Barely. She got off the blitzgandr, and hoarfrost sprung forth wherever she stepped.

“If I may be so bold, who exactly are you? My intel is not perfect, as you surely understand,” she said, laying on the politeness so thick that one would be a fool to not expect a gun behind her words.

The presumable sect elder’s eyebrow twitched at the lack of recognition. “I am Sir Leopold Ritter Branstein the Third, and you shall address me as such.”

Zefaris nodded. “Then, Leopold, let us say that, possibly, I happened upon your branch sect by pure coincidence. That, perhaps, I was on my way through Stillwind on a journey to seek out some rare cultivation resource. Let us say that, in this purely theoretical scenario, I had no hostile intentions whatsoever. What, then, would be your course of action? I advise you to tread wisely, sect elder. Regardless of the Root Branch thinks, of what they have attempted against our Founder, our sects do not have a feud. I do not expect that your superiors would want you to start anything prematurely.”

As she spoke, Leopold’s anger visibly grew, and the more it did, the more of his aura he released. Zefaris did no more or less than release an equal amount of her own aura to match, and before long, the ambient temperature had dropped below zero. A scant few townsfolk had been attracted, observing from afar, and both they and the lower members of the Stillwind Branch could sense the two elders clashing. It was as if an invisible sword, so thin as to almost be two-dimensional, was descending towards the head of Zefaris, only to freeze mid-descent. Some would even say they could plainly see the sword of aura pressure, gripped by a ghostly, skeletal hand. One thing could not be denied: As the clash went on, the Stillwind Branch’s members grew increasingly less eager to face down the intruder. To most of them, Leopold was a higher sort of existence, and to all but the higher-ranking disciples, he was the peak of cultivation as they understood it. They knew that stronger cultivators existed, but many of them had never seen one, and even if they had, it was for vanishingly short periods of time and from afar.

“I would challenge you to exchange pointers, for even without a feud, we are from rival sects, and you have arrived to our territory. Such has ever been tradition between the Black Horses and the Sangers, and even rival branches within our greater sect. Are you familiar with the rules of Black Horse Family Hard Sparring?” he asked, clearly expecting a “no”.

“Weapons, armor, techniques, and magic are permitted, so long as they are not intended to cause lingering damage or to harm the opponent’s cultivation. Whomever concedes or becomes unable to fight first loses. The question is, why would I bother? You’ve made it abundantly clear that you think of myself and of the Newman Sect as less than dirt. There is no face in it. If I win, and you happen to be graceful in defeat, I will gain the respect of one elder at a glorified forward outpost, set up with little care or investment, just to be there when the Root Branch decides to make a move on our territory. I doubt you have anything to bet that I would value.”

“You propose a bet of actions, then,” Leopold hissed through gritted teeth.

Zefaris nodded, listing out her demands: “If I win, you leave. Pack up and go somewhere else, outside the Newman Sect’s territory. You know its boundaries, and you know that your branch resides within them. I will give you time to carry out such a relocation, but until that time comes, you are not to initiate contact with any other Black Horse branch in any manner, including responding to remote communications.”

“Very well. Should I emerge victorious, you shall travel with me to the capital and become a hostage. I shall be so graceful as to send news of your incarceration to the Newman Sect, of course,” Leopold countered, smugness and ill intent dripping from each word.

“I accept, on the condition that we fight here and now. No delays, no set day-of. No time for cloak-and-dagger.”

378 - Phantom Winds of Fate [Sturmblitz]

Ikesia, the country, was new.

Ikesia, the culture, was ancient.

But the land, the land was even more ancient still.

And upon it, countless battles had been fought. Within its soil, a greater number of warriors rested than could be said for any other land upon the central continent, second only to Ankhezia.

And through this land, this unconquerable graveyard of empires, a woman travelled.

From one battlefield to the next, from the recent to the ancient, she made her way, gathering the vestiges left behind by warriors who fell yet harboring the will to fight.

And, in the span of only a few weeks, rumor already grew — for how could it not? As numerous and as devastating as the battles of the War of Fog had been, a great many of them had been over villages and towns and cities, or else over places valuable to people.

Where she ventured through a dense forest to reach the site of a long forgotten battle one day, another, she spent on gaining access to a site where the fallen of another battle were actively being honored. And thus, it quickly became known that the Reaper’s Bride, the Second Elder of the Newman Sect, was venturing throughout the land, seemingly banishing the restless spirits of the fallen. She, of course, saw no reason to contradict such rumor — it wasn’t harmful, if anything, if helped her while harming none.

Gradually, bit by bit, new Phantoms joined her ghost contingent — but it was not for lack of Remnants. She refined only those most suited for this purpose. All the rest… She devoured.

Hundreds and thousands, all purified through the Sword Phantom Scripture’s mantras and added onto her own Inner Phantom, for that was the greatest limiting factor of her strength. Whenever she turned inward, to that place where it resided, she also saw every single Phantom she had created.

And with each Remnant, the Inner Phantom grew.

That scarred, wrecked possibility of herself, the conglomerate manifestation of every consideration she had ever given to her own death, of every close brush with that old friend which had accompanied her for all these years. It was, at the same time, also her. The Inner Phantom was a reflection, not some separate entity — it was even more closely tied with her own soul than the Thundergods, Blazegods, or Galegods harnessed by traditional daemon cultivation methods. With each Remnant she joined to it, a hazy aura of something developed at its back, in accordance with the Sword Phantom Scripture. The Inner Phantom was complete, as it was — it would be the foundation. Now, she had to build upon it, so that, through it, she might better serve as the metaphorical commander for her army of phantoms. And with each dozen, it gained a vague shape. Every hundred, it became more of a skeletal arm. Eventually, its fingers closed around the handle of a spectral sparklock, and then, it stopped, not yet quite concrete, still wavering. The first of many bottlenecks. Until now, any Remnant of sufficient quality had sufficed. In order to complete it, to truly grow the Inner Phantom to the next stage, she would need to find a truly exceptional Remnant. Until then, she had to hold the First Armament in shape through her own aura, reducing her ability to call forth the power of Phantoms. She still, nonetheless, maintained the Nameless Phantom at all times — he rode alongside her, on the blitzgandr’s back. Even if it was much smaller, the bike was still plenty for two, and the phantom wasn’t exactly heavy.

Unfortunately, there was no such convenience afforded to her as the sudden appearance of a powerful cultivator who had heard of her travels and decided to make an ill-fated attempt on her life. But that is not to say none tried at all.

Indeed, when she arrived at the gates of a misty town at the south-western base of the Artat Mountains, she immediately noticed something was off. Zefaris had come here not for the town itself, but because it happened to be on the way to a forgotten and unused mountain pass that had once been a path to the north side of the mountain range. There was no reason to stop here, but she found herself halted, not by the presence of figures in the road blocking her path, but by a feeling. A sense of off-ness, a disturbance in the town’s eponymous stillness.

The town, Stillwind, was aptly named, as thanks to its unique location, it felt as still as the grave, and almost no wind blew here all year. It had also been roughly the same size for its entire centuries-long existence — neither having the resources to grow, nor being unimportant enough to shrivel up and die. In these two manners, the town itself embodied “Stillness”. Or at least… It should have. But she saw new buildings here and there, signs of expansion. Where was that money coming from? Stillwind had no trading connections to speak of, the records clearly showed it to be a borderline subsistence-economy, so someone was bringing in new money. That was not the problem. The problem was that Willowdale didn’t know, meaning someone was also suppressing the information of this new growth. The new source of money couldn’t be that new, looking at the wear on the new buildings and the number of them.

As she rode down the main thoroughfare, Zefaris couldn’t help but notice a quietening of everything. Doors and windows slammed shut, and what few people were outside hurried along to get out of her way. The people of this town knew who she was, and feared her.

“But why?”

This question lingered on her mind for some time, until the sight of a new structure, one that stood out like a sore thumb, answered it for her. Not one building, but an entire compound, by making up a full one-sixth of Stillwind. Tall, stone walls surrounded it, and a barrier shimmered from them. Within, a multi-tiered spire reached skyward, built in a style that closely echoed the style of the sect compound back in Willowdale. From inside the walls, she could hear sounds of exertion — at least two dozen people, going through martial katas in unison.

The gate sign above the gate made things as plain as they could be.

BLACK HORSE SECT

STILLWIND BRANCH

234 - Dead Man's Root [Cherno]

Over the coming days, Krahe underwent yet another battery of tests, and went over nearly a dozen possible lung replacements all with their own advantages and downsides. One purely mechanical model in particular stood out, having an outer shell of articulated metal. These so-called “C-Infuser Mod. 5018s” had incredible performance characteristics, given the listed price — it was clear they were meant for someone with a significant proportion of high-demand musculature, and thus, Krahe would never have to worry about running out of breath were she to choose them. There were, however, two catches that made her dismiss them as an option. First came the requirement for Thaumine to actually power the eponymous “C-Infuser” — a literal fuel tank that would have to be refilled through a port between the ribs. This was, apparently, much less of a problem than it seemed, and was thus readily tolerated by the users — in part because the lungs could still operate independently, but would do so at around 80% capacity compared to normal, healthy lungs. The second catch was revealed by Firminus: They had a serious problem with certain parts wearing out quickly, and replacement parts were not exactly easily available in Audunpoint — that is to say, they would take time to arrive and would cost a premium. The problem was not with the manufacturer price-gouging, but with supply lines. And even despite these issues, this model apparently had a staunchly loyal userbase among Audunpoint’s mid-rankers.

Two other models were similar in that they each had enormous advantages but came with a catch of some kind. The prices all varied quite a bit, as did their characteristics — the models Firminus had picked out ran the full gamut all the way up to the higher end and even into more obscure models, such as the aforementioned C-Infuser lungs.

“How many variants of purpose-made lung grafts are there on the open market?” Krahe asked off-handedly.

“How many stars are in the sky?” Firminus retorted. “Explosions, daggers, bullets, simple direct impacts… After livers and kidneys, lungs are the most commonly-grafted major organ.”

After some further thought, Krahe made a request: “I’d like to see some other models, if you don’t mind. Keep these three.”

After going through the second batch, she had gathered a roster of seven promising candidates. This roster, however, was doomed when she made yet another off-handed remark: “Don’t you have something that specifically requires a grafted or otherwise reinforced ribcage? Something that can keep working if my diaphragm gets fucked, but doesn’t need an external power source.”

Furrowing his brow, Firminus thought for some time. He left, returned with a memory-slab, and spent the next several minutes going through it with a sense of tunnel-visioned purpose. Krahe knew better than to disturb him. She’d seen network-dredgers kill for lesser disturbances when they were in the zone.

“Let’s see… Ah, here it is! Continuous-flow model WSU-5101-63-854, the “Dead Man’s Root!” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of them at first. But then, lungs are not my specialty. Looking at the documentation, the Dead Man’s Root is one of the few grafts with documentation going back all the way to Zavesh’s own prototypes. Says there’s a whole vault just for specimens of this specific lung graft going back to a handful of originals.”

“I would hope that the design has improved since six thousand years ago,” Krahe said.

“Tradition is the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes. It would be heresy to slavishly stick to an old design. I will bring them over right away,” Firminus replied.

He brought in the same type of wet-storage capsule as all the other organic lung grafts. Within the capsule floated two tangles of greyish, almost wooden-seeming flesh, with many delicate muscle bundles wispily trailing off of them in all directions. More than self-contained sacs in the manner of typical lungs, they resembled intestines or perhaps tree roots, their tubular structures spiraling and winding back on themselves. A faint, purplish glow radiated throughout their many creases. Though Krahe took care to compare their characteristics to those of her other options, she had already settled on her choice. Besides their continuous-flow feature, they also had toxin-filters and a self-cleaning feature specifically tailored to heavy smokers. Lastly, they had a degree of redundancy nearly unparalleled on the free market. All these factors combined to justify the name “Dead Man’s Root” — they could help one survive grievous wounds while appearing dead, at least without close inspection.

When the time came to go under the knife, it was, if anything, easier than the last. By this point, anesthetics worked on her once again. Within the span of just two short hours, her lungs had been replaced and flesh mended, the scar-riddled sacs that had kept her alive thus far now interred into a capsule like any other relic. Fidelia had insisted upon examining them before she would dispose of them.

The following two months were a blur of surgery, recovery, and exercise — both of the physical and spiritual kind. The amount of work she was having done necessitated such a lengthy recovery period to observe for any rejection signs — thus, indirectly creating plenty of time for her to become more properly acquainted with the Atomica. The facility turned out to be a subterranean complex owned wholly by High Grafter Fidelia, and understandably, she wasn’t told where exactly it was located.

The Dead Man’s Root and Heart Scarab alone sufficed to intoxicate her with the new endurance they afforded her, even if it paled in comparison to what she had been able to do in her old body. When it came to the scarab, its implantation was as quick as it was unsettling, in no small part due to the graft’s design. It was, true to its name, an insectile, thing. Segments of dark, matte-grey metal protected the back of its central mass and its legs, which resembled abnormally long, clawed fingers. Its central mass was that of lively, red tissue, with its two chambers openly visible and a head of grabbing tendrils. Several rib sections had been simply removed for the implantation, flesh and veins pushed aside with no cuts made beyond those that split her skin. The Heart Scarab squeezed through a miniscule opening, and, with uncomfortable sensations of flesh shifting about, wrapped itself around her heart. Within twenty minutes, it was over, her ribs back in place and skin sealed up. Beyond the Scarab's main purpose, she now also had a layer of physical armor around her heart.

The key series of operations came after — all at once, everything that needed to be done to allow her full use of the Atomica.

This… This took time. Over five days of constant tuning and re-tuning, with Krahe intermittently burning thauma in various ways and attempting to skim or dive. At least a third of this time was taken up by her recovery from the backlash. Over and over again — tune, skim, backlash, recover. Tune, skim, backlash, recover. During this time, Firminus and Fidelia wasted no time, administering the flesh-transformation elixirs bit by bit, as this process wouldn’t interfere with the tuning. They, themselves, had their own struggle, as working with the Liminal Coil proved to be a hellish challenge for the two grafters — well, mainly for Firminus, who swore in multiple languages and would have doubtlessly piled up a mountain of cigarette butts if his cigarettes didn’t just disintegrate into the ether. The time-consuming nature of working with alarite was one thing, but the Liminal Coil had not been designed for this type of adjustment, meaning any changes had knock-on effects down the line. Gradually, painstakingly, they dialed it in.

233 - Full Course of Treatment [Cherno]

“Alright, I’ll trust you on this one,” Krahe said. She didn’t quite believe that she had actually said that. “I have two personal requests. First, there’s a certain technique I can use to fight well above my baseline with no physical side effects — but I can’t do it on-demand. Not anymore. When I fought Semzar, that was the first time I entered that state since I came to Zastreon. If I were to reach that state of mind through meditation for you to observe, could you produce a graft that would allow me to do it at a moment’s notice?”

“And… What would the nature of this state of mind happen to be?” Firminus asked, making no effort to hide his curiosity.

“Near-death focus. Some called it nil-thought, but I think that’s wrong. It’s not that I stop thinking, but more that I can act with zero delay and think perfectly clearly no matter what is going on around me. As far as I know, various martial arts sects developed their own ways of reaching that mental state for short bursts. My world’s grafters learned of a way to trigger it in-demand and made it into a bare-minimum, low-footprint graft that anyone worth their salt would have. I can, of course, share my understanding of that graft, but it might be useless to you.”

“It surely won’t be completely useless. Even if it’s not applicable, we can still learn from your world’s grafting arts through comparison. And your second request?”

“Make my eyes better. Motion vision, in particular. I started noticing myself pushing up against the edge a few times, things blurring around me.”

Firminus almost deflated at that, but Krahe wasn’t sure if it was relief or disappointment.

“Ah. The flicker fusion threshold. We can address that issue as part of a generalized ocular combat enhancement course of the close-quarters type. It’s a fairly standard mid-ranker choice. Just some minimally invasive modifications to the eyes, ocular nerves, and visual cortex, nothing too major. A word of warning, your eyes will become physically stiffer, and it will take a few days to adjust to your new ocular muscles — you may overshoot when trying to look at things at first, but it will improve quickly and any inconsistencies should vanish within two or three days. In terms of visual quality, it may take some time to become acclimated to the absence of motion blur — thus, the visual cortex modifications include a mental switch for this enhanced visual processing. Ah… Ms. Krahe? Are you alright?”

Shaking her head, Krahe blinked a few times and snapped back to the present. “Yeah, sorry. I’m fine. I just zoned out. The way you described it sent me twenty years back.”

“Alright, well, now it’s my turn to make a request. To be clear, this really is just a personal request, no pressure. I wish to take samples of your… What did you call it? Biosuit? I wish to take samples so that I may study it and attempt to grow more, if it truly is alive. You would have first pick of the results, of course.”

After thinking it over for a moment, Krahe replied: “I also want veto on who gets to have it.”

“Deal,” Firminus agreed without hesitation. “I will return to take the sample after we finish with this paperwork.”

“Why?” Krahe asked, already reaching behind her back. She hooked a finger under one of the suit’s edges, and with some stretching, she cut a large rectangle out of her back. It briefly wrapped around her forearm, but immediately lost shape and turned into an amorphous mass when she willed it to do so. She uncouthly placed it at the edge of his desk, taking a small measure of amusement in how the mass settled down. “There’s your sample. It needs water and simple nutrients. Probably minerals too, but you’ll figure it out.”

“Alright, well, let’s go over things all at once to be certain…” Firminus said once he recovered from the slight shock of seeing her do what she had just done. They went over the full list of modifications.

In summary, the full list of treatments included: Lung replacement with a heretofore undecided graft, replacement of the spleen with the Adamas Organ, implantation of reinforced conduit lines, implantation of a Jas’raban Heart Scarab, retuning of the Liminal Coil, a course of flesh-transformation elixirs to address her vascular tissue elasticity issue, eye and ocular cortex modifications, and lastly, a possibly entirely new graft to allow Krahe to achieve the state of Razormind on-demand, or at least to make entering that state and staying in it easier.

It all brought to mind a reality that Krahe had been aware of, but had ignored until now.

“Tell me, for how long will I be out of play?” she asked. “What we did at Mirzaii Two won’t mean anything if the Hashems and their Benefactors can just freely regroup and adjust over the course of weeks or months.”

“Aristedes raised the same concern. High Grafter Fidelia has accounted for it — key operatives of the Inner Wheel have been briefed on the situation to the extent necessary for their involvement, and Yazata Heptaxia will remain active within Audunpoint for the immediate future. Moreover, a high-ranking graft-saint by the name of Favonia Aristedes has finally contacted the church and confirmed her impending return. You may be familiar with her — knowing Casus, he has likely told you about her already. The Inner Wheel has disseminated rumors of her return to create further pressure. In short, we are doing all that we can to ensure that your work does not go to waste without involving the greater church. Thus far, your modus operandi has worked. Let us hope it continues to do so, yes?”

Krahe released a sigh of relief.

“It’s not ideal, but it can’t be helped. Let’s get this paperwork done and over with.”

And so, they did — over the course of the next several hours. During those several hours, Firminus pulled one thing after the next out of his ass, and even brought in an entirely new, larger projector alongside several memslates the size of her head. There were stretches of time during which no input was required of her, so she requested some light reading that could help her pass the time without requiring too much attention, so she could still observe what Firminus was doing. What she received was a treatise on the political landscape of the Inax moving islands seven centuries ago, which turned out to in fact be a sort of quasi-biographical novel in disguise, detailing the adventures of a certain saint.

Just as Firminus had said he would do, once the paperwork was done, he brought in a kind of brass bowl and three different bottles of dark glass. As he mixed them in the vessel, they bubbled and hissed, and he then stacked in the papers, one by one. He then brought out a thin, silver wand, its tip alight with a small, blue flame.

He wordlessly offered her the wand, and Krahe took him up on it. 

With a mental command, the mote of flame jumped from the wand, and at the instant it landed in the bowl, a vortex of blue fire erupted towards the ceiling. Without so much as an iota of smoke, and strangely devoid of heat, it rendered the stack of papers into white ash before her very eyes.

232 - The Adamas Organ [Cherno]

Taking a long puff and ashing his cigarette, Firminus continued, exhaling that strange blue smoke all the while.

“In the short term, we can implant reinforced conduit lines — it’s a permanent version of what many Mamon Armors employ for the same reason, to protect the user from their amplified power output. When it comes to these, the options are differentiated mainly between synthetic and organic. Synthetic conduit lines are physically tougher and generally can withstand more abuse, while organic lines can self-adjust to a greater extent and heal from damage without special design considerations. Regardless of your choice, they won’t hold up long-term, but it’s a direct, fast, and low-impact fix that can be reversed easily.”

“Elaborate. Won’t hold up as in they’ll wear out quickly? Require regular maintenance? Clog up with entropy residue? What am I looking at here?”

Firminus shook his head.

“They need to be tuned precisely before implantation, anything too far above or below your current Throughput will not work correctly. Afterwards, they can, in theory, hold out indefinitely, but they won’t develop to match any attribute growth beyond what they were tuned for — if your power output remains the same, they will hold. But eventually, at the rate you’re going, they’ll fail. If I were to guess, yours will probably burst. Gruesome, painful, but a minor injury, and it won’t cripple you right then and there. As I said, organic lines will more readily accommodate any growth in throughput, but even then, there is a hard limit, and their performance characteristics will degrade the more you stray from the level of throughput they were tuned for.”

“Sounds reasonable. What else? Somehow I doubt reinforced conduit lines and some adjustments to the Liminal Coil will suffice. Fixing these types of problems always ends up being a seven-step pain in the ass that can create twenty new problems if you fuck up even once along the way.”

Firminus laughed at that. A laugh of understanding and agreement.

“How right you are. Next up, cardiovascular system. You felt it, yeah? The burns? We pumped you full of blood softeners and clot-targeted omniphage, and still had to damn near replace all your blood, you were that full of clots. A side effect of the Molting Tonic, and of Semzar’s thaumaturgy I wager. Silver lining, since you had no brain damage, no clots formed in there. We would’ve had to quite literally wash your brain if that were the case.”

“Sounds like you fixed the major problem. What, do I need to have all my veins replaced?” Krahe asked facetiously. She couldn’t believe that the church lacked the technology to non-invasively repair what damage had been done.

“No, no. Your veins are fine. Your heart, too. Your vascular tissue has been permanently made more elastic and highly regenerative, one of the Molting Tonic's few positive side effects. This elasticity itself can cause some issues, so we’ll introduce something to reinforce it further and stiffen it up a bit. Moreover, as part of your preemptive care, I want to give you a Jas’raban Heart Scarab. It’s a type of self-implanting graft — we cut you open and stick it in, the scarab does the rest. It attaches to your heart and melds to it over the course of a few weeks. The result is generalized structural reinforcement and redundancy.”

“Well, putting aside the fact it sounds like a parasitic insect, I’m somewhat concerned about the Jas’raban part, considering what I know of the baneworm civilization and their grafting practices.”

“It’s true, the Heart Scarab is in fact an originally Jas’raban design. Old man Sorun reconstructed the design in the early years of Audunpoint’s existence as a glorified archeology outpost. Not sure why he shared it with the church, but he did. Of course, we made significant adjustments to bring it in line with Zaveshian grafting standards. I would never recommend a dangerous graft or procedure — not without informing you of the dangers at least. Speaking of, regarding that liminal coil tuning, we can either target nullifying the resonance issues, or attempt to harness the resonance for beneficial ends. The risk is mainly that we might make it worse, requiring corrective re-tuning.”

“What are the odds?”

“I am not High Grafter Fidelia, I cannot predict things to that extent. The choice will remain until immediately before the procedure, I only wished to make you aware of it.”

“My skin. Can you make my skin tougher? Put armor under it, maybe? The voidkey has no wards or barriers, so I will need to make-do until I can address that.”

“Ah, a good question. This in fact relates directly to what I mentioned earlier regarding your veins. Even once we correct the resonance issues causing the thaumic turbulence, your new voidkey will still cause internal damage until your body adjusts. Direct surgical modification on such a wide scale is not an option at the moment, so our next best choices are flesh-transformation compounds, and Black Blood. The former entails a mixture of elixirs and nutrients that will induce specific, limited modifications to certain tissues, much like the Molting Tonic did. The latter entails the replacement of the spleen with an organ connected to the heart and the liver, simply called the Adamas Organ after its creator and first user. Some also call it the Black Spleen. I cannot explain exactly how it functions, but in simplified terms, it takes on the same function as your spleen whilst also acting like additional bone marrow. In this manner, it modifies the composition of your blood, which results in the reinforcement of all your tissues. Lastly, for short periods, the organ can be used to achieve greatly increased durability with an accompanying increase in strength, at the cost of cardiovascular stress and general tissue damage after a certain period of use. This act manifests as bulging veins and blackened skin, hence the name. As you may have guessed, the Adamas Organ’s operating principle is, in fact, a direct precursor to the Dregsteam-type Mamon Coupler.”

Firminus seemed to take a great degree of pride in the Adamas Organ. It almost sounded like he was bragging.

“Firminus… You wouldn’t happen to have a personal investment in this “Adamas Organ,” would you?”

“I plead guilty to all charges! I was, in fact, Adamas all along, returned from four millennia ago!” the grafter exclaimed. “Yes, I admit, I have some personal bias. I have worked with the graft for a long time, and have made improvements to its design. My understanding of its operating principles, advantages, and disadvantages is what led me to recommend it.”

231 - Debriefing [Cherno]

A/N: Added more detail to the items Firminus brought last chapter, including a pitcher of fruit juice.

____________________________________________________________________________

Before she was even halfway done reading, she had already slipped the ring onto her right index finger.

“I will put it down as claimed, then,” Firminus said. “I cannot say I do not understand. Given your apparent habit of punching up, it’s a perfect fit. Next, I believe this is yours.”

He took a box from the table, opening it for her to see. Within laid the burned-out shell of the prototype Black Sun Coupler, with the Shardkey of Heshmad Abbasi laid atop it.

“Given that you are in no state to switch voidkeys, I can either leave it in storage for the time being or have it sent directly to a safehouse, or perhaps a shrine, or my clinic. We can discuss that later.”

Returning the box, Firminus got up and made the table move so that he could properly sit behind it, across from Krahe. He got out an inkstone, brush, and began grinding an inkstick.

“Now, for my favourite part: Paperwork.”

“Spare me,” she groaned.

“Oh, but I am serious,” he said, facetiously. “The wheels of the ecclesiarchy may not turn as swiftly as we would like, but turn they do, and we’ve had six millennia to ensure the clockwork’s smooth operation! Come now, it won’t take long.”

A spark of anger flared in Krahe’s chest as her still somewhat groggy thoughts caught up to the ramifications of such paperwork.

“Wait, I thought I was an unlettered apostle. No records. Did you fuck me? Are you fucking me right now? Was I right all along?!” she demanded, baring her teeth in a manner entirely too much like a furious animal, veins popping on her forehead, down her neck, and even her right arm.

“No, no, calm down. There will be no records,” Firminus assured her, clearly having anticipated this reaction. “We will go through the paperwork, and then I will burn it right in front of you. The purpose is to go through the appropriate procedure, so that, if it ever becomes necessary, either of us may truthfully say that we did in fact do so — that at some point, the appropriate paperwork existed, and was then summarily destroyed to protect the identity of an unlettered apostle. I apologize for not making myself clearer. Now, let us begin with an unabridged full account of the raid. As much as you remember. We can take a break at any time.”

And so, Krahe got to talking, and a fair bit of time passed. Firminus didn’t write a word of it down. She made no attempt to embellish anything, presenting her experience of the raid as dryly and matter-of-factly as possible. A pained grin made itself known upon the grafter’s face when she got around to describing her experience with the Molting Tonic. Finally, once she was done, silence fell over the room for some time. She reached for her glass, having been refilled twice over already, and lifted up her mask so she could drain it. If nothing else, at least ekarone juice still tasted the same. Firminus, meanwhile, took one of the forms off the top of his stack and began writing.

“All things considered, it would be an understatement to only say that you suffered injuries in the line of service to the church," he said. "Obviously, it will be seen to that you receive appropriate care as part of compensation for service — beyond the care you have already received, that is. That was all the High Grafter’s personal resources. This entire facility is hers. Any official, church-provided care will come out of your monetary compensation, but it will also be significantly cheaper than if you had gone to a grafter yourself, and cheaper still factoring in hazard compensation — this especially refers to the unavoidable replacement of your lungs. Moreover, given the circumstances, there is justification for preventative care, that is to say, grafts specifically tailored to help prevent similar injuries in the future.”

“Why? I understand that I’m an unlettered apostle, but why the extra layers of special treatment?” Krahe questioned, already knowing the answer.

“It’s not,” Firminus shrugged. “The degrees of special treatment afforded to you are, thus far, well within the bounds of existing precedent. High Grafter Fidelia has decided that you are likely to be a valuable asset to the church in the future. I happen to agree. Therefore, all allowances that can be made, will be made. I have done the same for Aristedes, and others. You could, possibly, get all these allowances yourself, if you filed the appropriate paperwork. It would take significantly longer, and you would likely need to hire the services of an assistant clerk, but you could.”

“Alright, I get it. You’re just greasing the wheels for me. Though... I could swear you weren’t this talkative before.”

“It helps to distract the patient from the pain,” Firminus remarked, flatly. “There’s anesthetics coming into your mask, but as you can tell, they don’t do much. The Molting Tonic is still in your system. Won’t be for long, Zavesh be praised.”

With that, the grafter cheered up again, moving on: “Alright, let me give you shit for what you did with that voidkey. There’s good reason voidkeys of Fourth-order and higher are heavily restricted — a legitimate one, beyond just power control. Your current state is that reason. Even Third-orders have some of these issues to a limited extent, but the higher you go, the harder it gets to use one safely. And this one in particular… By Zavesh, the leverage ratio and cognitive strain factor, not to mention the extent of soul furnace modification. It’s a miracle you survived initial implantation, let alone that you held up long enough to use it in a fight. To start with, the implosive ignition creates resonant waves that react with the Liminal Coil — in the bad way. We can do some minor work on your Soul Furnace and adjust the Coil to fix that, possibly even harness the reaction to empower the Coil’s capabilities, but that’s not your biggest problem. See, normally, it takes a period of specialized training to acclimate to a higher-order voidkey, whereas you just shoved it in and started blasting full send. Your Astral Body will be fine — since you’re a greater pilgrim, you’ll acclimate well before too much spiritual damage can accumulate. Where you lack is the physical side.”

230 - The Crimson Star of Autumn [Cherno]

She ate, slowly, cautiously, but she ate. Then, before she even knew it, she was asleep again, her mind echoing with that pipe organ, and into her sight, burned the countenance of human perfection that at the center of the organ’s assembly. That visage of Zavesh, entangled amidst the pipes. Somehow, she couldn’t help but feel a something looking down upon her through the golden orbs that were its eyes. Even as the blackest pitch of a blank, dreamless sleep took hold of her, Krahe couldn’t help but feel a sense of the profound, like threads of gold melting into the murk.

When next she awoke, it was to the sound of that pipe organ, and to the feeling of cables being pulled out of her arm.

“Told you the sedatives wouldn’t work. Let’s just get this done over with,” Firminus said, before turning to Krahe. “Hey, hey. I’m disconnecting you, so try to keep still. Blink twice if you understand.”

Krahe did as was asked of her, and within a few minutes, she had been divested of her connection to the machinery that had sustained her life for the last few days, the holes sealed with flesh-paste as if they had never been there. Before her breathing could become an issue, Firminus handed her a silver-and-brass lower-face mask with a tube connected to its right side. 

“Here, breathe,” he said.

Even this simple item was decorated with a figure of Zavesh on the front, and a paper strip densely-packed with scripture was wax-sealed to the left side. Though absent of a strap, the moment she pressed it to her face, the mask sealed itself in place. Her head cleared the moment she took a breath.

Before she knew it, Firminus ran her through a cranial nerve test and asked a number of mundane questions to ascertain whether she had her full faculties about her. Once he seemed satisfied with the results, he nodded. "I'll be back in a moment," he said, and walked off.

The grafter returned with a table astride six insectile legs in tow, upon which sat a stack of paperwork and several familiar items. Those which drew her eye most were not her possessions, but rather objects of interest from the mansion raid: Chiefly, Semzar’s ring and dagger. There was also a sizable box, as well as a platter with a pitcher of ekarone juice and two glasses. These, too, were decorated with Zaveshian iconography, glass melded seamlessly to polished metal.

“Let’s get started with the easy parts. First, the dagger. As you killed Semzar, and Aristedes refused to make a claim, it is yours,” he said, handing it over. The moment Krahe’s hand touched the artifact, she felt a foreboding sense of wild power, like a plasma cannon with woefully insufficient capacitors. It was a heavily bejeweled Jambiya. Firminus continued: “Based on what we’ve been able to discern, it requires a relatively long charge-up period. The discharge is an arcane-aspected cutting projection with a range of several dozen meters and potency sufficient to go through a heavily warded building. It severed Aristedes’ right arm with no apparent resistance and no signs of struggle in the cut — lucky for us, as this made the break easier to repair. Unfortunately, the blade is the only original component. In its complete state, assuming it was ever completed to begin with, Fidelia predicted that this blade could be a peak Fourth-order, if not borderline Fifth-order artifact. Merely Fourth-order, if you seek a more conservative estimate. In short, we don’t actually know what it is yet, where or when it came from, et cetera. You may keep it, but the church would like to buy it from you, or at least buy research rights and lease the dagger for the necessary duration. We may be able to offer recompense based on the results of any research involving the dagger. By Fidelia’s measure, the blade’s design is astonishingly complex, to the point where fabricating an entirely new artifact of the same level would be easier than reverse-engineering the original.”

“Is it safe to unsheath?” Krahe asked.

Firminus waved his hand. “Sure. It won’t do anything until it’s charged, and you can’t charge it without it being sheathed. Without thauma, it’s just an indestructible knife. More or less. We don’t know. We can’t appraise it — not me, not Aristedes, not Fidelia. For all we know it may predate even the Seven Towers System Accord. Or it might be from another world, or perhaps the future. It’s nearly unheard of, but we know it has happened before. As I said, we don’t know.”

The black blade slid free of its sheath as if the two repelled one another, its surface gleaming like a mirror, iridescent-black runes revealing themselves just beneath the surface with even the slightest tilt. Its colours were wrong, not real. Krahe went to sheathe it again, but the blade turned in her grip, the force of repulsion still present — its edge struck the sheath’s lip, and the blade began vibrating like a tuning fork. A little voice in her head said that she could take control of it, to wield its unstoppable force, were she willing to sheathe it inside her own flesh and quench it with her own blood. That little voice wasn’t Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom. She wasn’t even sure if it was real, or just her mind playing tricks. Perhaps she wasn’t really fully in her right mind yet. Regardless, she decided that she had enough troublesome artifacts to deal with for now. With some effort, she forced the jambiya back into its bejewelled prison.

“You can have it, something about the thing seems off — beyond just the fact it’s unfinished. The right-to-research arrangement you suggested works just fine for me,” she said, her eyes wandering to one of the other items. Silver and red. Then, she looked Firminus in the eyes. ”I’m not giving you the ring, though.”

Firminus seemed to handle the jambiya with more care than before as he put it away.

“It’s your right, but do you even know what the ring does?” he asked.

“It releases a shockwave that affects physical matter, thaumaturgy, theurgy, and even carries into the astral gulf. I smashed face first into it when I tried to skim through. Didn’t exactly have the time to appraise it for specifics,” Krahe explained her understanding of the artifact.

“More or less right,” he nodded, pulling out his eyebox again and slotting in another memslate. “Here. The appraisal results.”

[CRIMSON STAR OF AUTUMN]

[Tags:]

Artifact

Jewelry

Active

Archonforged

[Charge:]

6/6

[Details:]

This artifact cannot be removed from its bearer by force.

This artifact holds 6 charges. At-will, the bearer may expend a charge to emit a twin-layered shockwave with a range of 8m from the bearer (layers further referred to as physical and magical). This shockwave travels at a rate of 4m/s.

The physical layer exerts direct physical force and deflects all intruding physical forces regardless of magnitude. Incoming physical projectiles will be deflected in a semi-random direction at a slightly elevated velocity. Material entities (including life-forms) that come into contact with the shockwave will similarly receive a kinetic jolt. The intensity of this kinetic jolt scales with the user’s Force attribute and the entity’s velocity at time of contact.

The magical layer deflects all thaumaturgic, theurgic, anathemic, and other magical forces, objects, attacks, etc. regardless of their special characteristics or magnitude. It extends into the Astral Gulf, and prevents the passage of objects, entities, or attacks traveling through in this manner. It also passes through thin physical objects, with the thickness depending on the object’s physical and energetic density, especially warding enchantments.

This artifact continuously recovers charges at a rate of 1 charge per 6 hours. Recharge time may be affected by environmental factors and accelerated through the supply of thauma directly to the artifact.

This artifact may not be activated more often than once every 27s. Cooldown scales with the user’s Control attribute.

This artifact’s characteristics may evolve autonomously based on further exposure to Archon Core emissions.

229 - Awake [Cherno]

Organ music again. Footsteps on stone. The sounds of machinery. Wheezing, thrumming, flowing, an alien mixture of sounds that, nonetheless, evoked the mental image of a vast computational engine.

A computational engine that, with her awakening, wound down to a near-halt. 

Everything ached. Every heartbeat sent pain flowing through her, akin to a full-body headache, as if the insides of her veins had first-degree burns. Breathing was markedly less painful, but refused to give proper feedback. There was a sense of numbness, and even a full breath failed to satisfy. The answer was obvious: Her lungs were permanently damaged. This was a symptom of widespread internal scarring.

Her eyes were covered, and when she tried to move, she realized she couldn’t. It was like back then, during the operation — she was weightlessly suspended in mid-air. Even so, she felt the need to try moving at least her hand, just to affirm that she could. That she wasn’t paralyzed. The music continued, but gradually grew softer and simpler, becoming just relaxing, ambient noise. An alarm broke that, splitting Krahe’s focus with its clarion call, like a red hot poker being shoved into her frontal lobe.

“Ah. I see. You are awake. Please, if you would, stop trying to move,” came the voice of High Grafter Fidelia. “We had to lock away your motor control so that you would not harm yourself as a result of your actions within the dream.”

Approaching footsteps. The music persisted. Hands on her head, fingers in her hair. Cold and metallic.

“I will now remove several quasi-voidkey connectors,” Fidelia said.

An unpleasant, tickling heat overtook the headache as something was pulled out of her skull, leaving behind a hollow feeling. Then again, and again, five in total, from the back of her head and down the length of her spine. Again with the red-hot poker inside her head as sight returned and light flooded in. Squinting as she sluggishly looked around, Krahe made sense of her surroundings. It was some kind of Zaveshian facility, that much was obvious, based on the mix of alien technology and religious iconography. Countless tubes and cables entangled her body, connected to various points, simply sinking into her skin as if it wasn’t even there. More interestingly, she still had her biosuit on. 

“They didn’t want to destroy it in the process of trying to get it off of me, so they just pierced through it,” she thought.

Slowly, she regained control over her extremities, floating down to just a few centimeters above the suspension-table that held her. It was nearly identical to the operating table they had used to replace her spine. Despite being attached to all that machinery, she felt little discomfort from it, and when she thought to sit up, the suspension-table’s invisible force fields adjusted to assist her. Several more beds were to be seen to her left, with great arrays of machinery standing behind them. Cables stretched from them to the machine behind Krahe’s bed.

Fidelia loomed over her, observing all the while, while two of her tendrils stretched across the room to continue playing an enormous organ.

“How do you feel?” the high grafter asked.

“Alive, but also cooked from the inside-out. My lungs are probably fucked,” she said, and even this was enough to leave her feeling out of breath.

“An astute self-assessment. We will go over your options all in due time. For now, however, your condition is stable. I expect that you will wish to know what took place following your loss of consciousness, yes?”

After Krahe gave a simple nod, Fidelia continued, recounting the course of events. Krahe had, moments before she lost consciousness, used the Liminal Coil to send Fidelia a locational ping. As a direct result of this, combined with instructions Casus had given Yazata before the raid, both of them were brought into the high grafter’s care without the awareness of anyone not directly involved with the raid.

“That’s… Good. How long has it been? What of the mansion?” Krahe asked.

“Two days. We locked down the mansion for investigation,” Fidelia began, only for Firminus to walk in, interrupting her. “-despite the Silverswords’ bitching and moaning. Bad news: By the time you raided them, any trafficking victims were already gone.”

He grabbed a chair, sitting down next to Krahe’s bed with an eyebox in hand. With a click, he awakened the device and turned it around for Krahe to see, various news articles scrolling past as he spoke, his cigarette holding on for dear life. Even now, he kept smoking.

“Good news: The traffickers were sloppy, and left us plenty of trails to follow. Damn-near every living soul we caught sang like a bird the moment we brought Ms. Witch-inquisitor into the interrogation room. The ones that didn’t keeled over from some sorta curse. As it stands, it’s being covered up. Far as the city knows, we just took the opportunity to off Semzar and grab as many of his people as possible. I won’t get into all the shit we found out from your Abara Morph, but to make it simple, we’ll be able to make major improvements to our organic-type Mamon Armors for the first time in a couple hundred years.”

“Firminus, she has just come-to. Can this not wait for later?” Fidelia chided.

“Too late, already done,” Firminus shrugged. “The Hashem Family’s activity has already cratered, just these past two days. Whether they stay careful for a while or return back to business as normal once they think it’s blown over, we’ll see. You can get the details yourself. In short, it’s pretty obvious this goes well beyond regular mafia shit.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see… How’s Casus?” Krahe asked.

“Aristedes is undergoing repairs. The damage he sustained — much of it self-inflicted — surpasses even your injuries. Fortunately, banishers have the advantage of intelligent design — that is to say, we simply placed him in a maintenance-trance and disassembled him to carry out the necessary repairs. It will take some time, but he will recover, as will his coupler,” said Fidelia.

“That’s… Good…” Krahe said, her eyes glazing over all of a sudden. Before she knew it, she lost consciousness again. She slept so deeply that, to her, it seemed as if no time had passed at all. A similar sequence of events played out, with Fidelia noticing that she was awake and checking her state. She had slept for 18 hours.

377 - After the Tribulation [Sturmblitz]

While Zel sipped from her cup, a Thundergod took the scroll in its jaws and brought it over to her side of the table. She considered how long it would have taken her to obtain such a technique under different circumstances — from an optimistic perspective, she could expect to find it within the last elder’s Eternal Vault, the same place she had obtained the Walking Way of the Despot of Self. It would just be a matter of rebuilding the Fog Gate, something she planned to do when the Krishorn Caravan next came around. She stowed the scroll away for now, meeting Kanbu’s gaze. She decided to address things straightforwardly.

“Between what you did for Victor and this, I’m sure there’s something you’d like in return. What is it? Dragon meat? A Dragonheart Bolus?” Zel asked.

“Two things. You guessed one correctly — dragon meat. The limiting factor is my inability to draw out my full strength, not the absence of that strength. As I said, I’m rusty. As for my second request, I will not hold anything against you should you not deliver: I want to be there. When you go down into the Ziggurat. In my memories of it, there’s this… Hole. This gnawing abyss in the middle, like something’s been ripped out. It’s the same for all of us fourteen, but only I and the Woodsman seem to care. You are going down there, I know it. The curiosity won’t let you have peace until you do. Your predecessor was the same, before he sealed himself in.”

“You read me like an open book,” Zel admitted. She glanced at Victor. “After this endeavor, I wager he’ll be able to complete the artifact we need to embark on an excursion.”

“I look forward to it,” Kanbu said, raising his cup.

By the Dead Ones, that tea was so incredibly bitter. Zel could swear the old man took some impish pleasure in watching her drink this paragon of acquired tastes.

__________________________________________________________________

After moving Victor back to the sect, Zel left him to rest and notified Makhus that he would need to be examined. While she waited, she went over the Leyline-riding Scroll, and found it to be insufferably straightforward. The fundamental theory was simple, to the point it bordered on “just do it, dumbass”. The problem, inevitably, came from actually trying to do it. It was tantamount to a manual on how to draw a hawk instructing one to “begin with some circles in the vague shape of the bird, then draw the feathers, the beak, eyes, and talons”. Several poems and seemingly unrelated snippets of prose were scattered throughout, including diagrams that varied from the wing motion of birds in flight to abstract geometric functions. In short, it was the most insufferable type of scripture: The type that required the practitioner to independently undergo enlightenment, and only provided some nudges in the right direction.

Soon enough, she was able to take a break from this inscrutable thing when Makhus came calling. She brought Victor to the alchemist’s personal laboratory and awakened him with a dose of concentrated Tengri’s Tears so that he could dismiss Daywolf. After an examination, Makhus readily confirmed Zel’s gut feeling.

“Severe physical and spiritual exhaustion, borderline starvation, but otherwise fine. Skin… Abnormally smooth. The Antediluvian Gem’s presence in his heart isn’t causing any visible issues, but I’m not familiar enough to make a judgment. I would consult Koschei if possible on the matter.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. While I’m here, how is the True Dragonheart Bolus looking?”

With a pained expression, Makhus raised his hand, pressing his thumb and index fingers together.

“This close to being finished,” Makhus seethed.

“Your fingers are touching,” Zel observed flatly.

“And yet the Bolus isn’t finished,” he said, grinding his teeth. “You see, we missed something. It needs the intended user’s blood to finish. So we’re stuck trying to keep it stable until Strolvath gets here.”

“Well, I’d love to help, but I can only leave you to it,” she shrugged. This was not a matter for her to get involved in.

_____________________________________________________

Victor would intermittently wake up, consume a great deal of food and water, and then fall asleep again. Even now, more bone plates kept growing, eventually covering 30% of his body, and about as much of his face, including a a small horned crown just below his hairline. During this period, he consistently gave off reddish steam that smelt of blood and swirled about him, bound together by revenant aura. The water therein condensed and rained back down with the pinkish appearance of liquid Vitae, but did not stain anything, instead immediately evaporating to rejoin the scarlet cloud. Wherever it fell upon Victor, the growth of his new bone plates accelerated. Combined with the fact he looked better and acted more wakeful each time he came-to, she felt no need to raise an alarm over this. While her protegé slept, Zelsys continued her struggle to comprehend the Leyline-riding Scripture. In her frustration, she began feeling the gnawing urge to go kill something that could put up more of a fight than the Wildfire Kite. She half-considered just going to Arches and challenging Red right then and there.

Eventually, he awoke again, and with a great inhalation as if he’d just surfaced from a long dive, he drew the cloud of aura back into himself. Instead of groaning for food, he looked himself over before ascertaining his surroundings. He seemed especially concerned about his heart, holding two fingers to his jugular for some time as he squinted in concentration.

Finally, when he ascertained what Zelsys already knew, the redhead looked up at her. A grimace twisted his face, tears welled up in his eyes, and he lurched towards her. After some time, when he finally pulled away, the tears were gone, and the expression he wore was one of resolution.

“Finally, finally…” he said, turning towards the shrine of Bishamonten. “Finally I can finish it.”

He raised his hands, conjuring motes of bonefire in his palms. Zel felt an aura similar to Kanbu’s ignite within him, and in moments, his bonefire changed. It became denser, flowing in a manner entirely unlike mundane fire, and its blackness took on a deep-green tinge, nearly overtaking the white.

“Catch,” Zel said, tossing the dragonhide scroll at him. One of Daywolf’s constituent centipede-servitors burst into flame, leaping up to catch the scroll. Victor extinguished his bonefire and took the scroll in hand, unfurling it. He laughed at himself when he realized its contents.

“Oh. Oh, right. I got ahead of myself,” he said.

“Come back to the surface before the day is out, understood? And don’t do anything serious until your foundation has stabilized, it’s supposed to take a few days.”

“Yes, of course.”