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200 - The Ripping Spear in the Corridor of Gehenna [Cherno]

Chaos usurped the reins and any semblance of the enemy’s team cohesion shattered. They all started acting according to their own plans, following whatever plan they had agreed to in only the vaguest sense.

Wooden arms exploded from the walls, grabbing at a silhouette that was not the green-eyed demon, but one of the stillborns. Flammable liquid sprayed all throughout the hallway, soon blazing forth with green fire. The shapes of three canine beasts rose up from a carpet, only to instantly succumb to the fire.

Of the group, the small-eyed man reacted the fastest, barking an attack order to the stillborns as he manifested a spear and shield of cyan-glowing, glassy arcane force. He thrust it forth and a beam of force erupted from it, and wherever it touched, the hardwood floor exploded as if it was being ripped open, subject to enormous tearing force. It even managed to nick Krahe’s leg, yanking her forwards into a wide, low stance.

The small-eyed man let out a sound of triumph as if he could feel that he had gotten a hit, and bashed with his shield, sending an explosion of reflective shards tumbling through the smoke cloud. Krahe was already out of the way by that point, having closed the distance. Another beam came from the spear, reflecting and multiplying, bouncing around in the field of shards and diffusing through Krahe’s smoke cloud, illuminating it in its entirety. The beams converged at a seemingly arbitrary point and tore out the chest of the panicking gangster, whom Krahe had shoved into the same spot where she had stood when she was hit. Just from looking at it, she could tell diffusion in her smoke had robbed around a third of the beam’s strength. It was less than she had predicted, but then, it was pure magic, not light.

Despite the wide range of different abilities presented by her foe, the borged-out abominations were her main concern. A person she could suppress, and that’s what she did, firing roughly down the hallway. But these things, they had no self-preservation, and had the wherewithal to make that actually mean something. Their implanted ward generators were far stronger than the inax surgeon’s version, and their pure physicality easily surpassed that of someone wearing a dregsteamer belt. Combined with their inbuilt weapons and the fact pain or shock wouldn’t stop them from fighting, they were the real threat here.

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A force composed specifically to forestall intruders fell apart into panic and incidental infighting, while the one trained professional struggled to stay alive. Siavash set off two more refracted beams from his spear before a mass of sparks and smoke ripped into his wards and sent him stumbling back a step, falling to one knee. At that point, he instinctively called his shield back, the shards reverting to one whole.

Decision paralysis took hold. Vague silhouettes whirled through the smoke, intermingling and briefly becoming illuminated by bursts of orange and green. The intruder’s footsteps mixed with thunderous thumping and the incessant, obnoxious calls of that raven. Siavash glimpsed the intruder’s form as it tackled one of his men against a wall, burying its fist into his stomach. Thump. Thump. Two flashes of orange, two gusts of dense ash and smoke racing out of the otherwise stagnant smoke cloud. His lower body slid down, and the upper half soon followed with it, tumbling down. The small-eyed man took a shot, but it just flew forward unimpeded, the armored juggernaut gone like a ghost. Just as it seemed like the smoke was thinning out, a black sphere rolled out of the cloud and transformed the world into a choking limbo all over again.

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Before long, just Krahe and the small-eyed man were left. He was breathing heavily, leaning against the wall with his shield held up, looking Krahe’s way as she kicked the head of a stillborn against the wall. Thump. Thump. Thump. Crack. They both pointed their weapons at one another in an uneasy standoff, both waiting for their own reinforcements.

“You… Are too good for your readings. What are you doing, skinwalking as a low mid-ranker? Somehow lost your real gear, hm?”

Krahe didn’t answer. The stillborn’s wards finally gave under her boot, and the lower half of its head followed soon after. She turned her gaze towards the small-eyed man, causing him to shrink back a bit, the grip on his spear tightening as a flare of power built at the weapon’s point.

“Look, I don’t much feel like dying here,” he said, trying to speak to her again. ”That’s way above my paygrade. I’m not with the Hashems, I’m just one of the contractors they brought in for today. What’d you say I just get out of your path and we go our separate ways?”

“Your voidkey. Pull it. Then you can go.”

She could see the reluctance in his gaze, but that resistance suddenly gave way when she took a step towards him. His eyes flickered back and forth, and then, a ray of death screamed forth from his spear, flying right by Krahe’s head, passing left-to-right in front of her eyes. It had never been intended to hit her, but to obscure her vision as the small-eyed man fled — even if only for a split-second. Despite instinctively letting rip a prolonged burst of tracers in his direction, he disappeared beyond the corner.

Krahe gave chase, not in order to kill him, but to pass the chokepoint. From there, she picked out a room, cleared it, and set up shop inside, waiting while Barzai sat on a wall sconce just outside. She had never planned to push particularly deeply into the mansion on her own, and this seemed a good point to wait for Casus. This was also a good opportunity to give the Black Sun Coupler a rest, as Krahe had felt it straining during that last fight. She didn’t expect it to hold out much longer.

A small group ran through the corridor just outside, but none checked inside — their attention was pointed entirely outward, at the things besieging the mansion.

NOTICE: Removal of $1 and $3 tiers.

Basically nobody uses them and it's an enormous pain in the ass to keep up with unlocking chapters for these lower tiers due to Patreon's DOGSHIT interface changes. I'm also fairly sure what few members are still in them have just forgotten they're even subbed. For this reason, I am deleting these tiers.

199 - Two-pronged Attack [Cherno]

Yazata very nearly raised her eyebrows at the man’s temerity, but she let it go. It was not her problem. She led the Red Hoods into the Mirzaii Subdistrict, quickly approaching the mansion. They encountered no great resistance on the approach, easily subduing enemy patrols before they could use their glorified consumer-grade communication artifacts. Yazata continually observed the maidens and learned of their behavior as they followed her commands, noting that, unlike most automata, their adaptability was just as good as the technical documents suggested. With each encounter the Red Hoods grew less stiff, requiring fewer direct instructions.

Before the final approach she took a moment to look over each of them, adjusting the Black Bindings she had attached underneath their shells.

“No erosion, good… Sympathetic transfer efficiency will be quite bad, but I will accept what is given freely,” she thought.

It was time. The Red Hoods encircled the mansion, forming an enormous heptagram. At this point, the mansion’s windows swung open and its protective barrier flared, being tightly contoured to its walls. A deluge of hostile magic and gunfire poured out, but at this range, it posed little danger. Yazata captured the occasional would-be hits with her Black Bindings and sent them flying right back at the source.

The ritual proceeded without delay. She uttered a word, and it rang with the sound of a hollow, bronze bell.

The eye-like glyphs covering her hair vanished in a burst of purple light, reappearing suspended before the face of each Red Hood.

A second word, outstretching her arms. Black Bindings once more sprang forth from her sleeves, joining her with the Red Hoods and surrounding the mansion.

A third word, and the Red Hoods mimicked it, her bindings flaring with power and strain as these unliving things conducted such a profound force.

“The strain is too great, it shan’t work at this rate.”

The base cost was already enormous. With the added resistance of using these dolls as the other participants, Yazata had no way to power the ritual under her own strength.

With some remorse, she sent out several more Black Bindings, connecting them back to fourteen restrained foot-soldiers in the general vicinity. Onerous though it was, she crossed one of her many lines and used them to power the ritual, hijacking their Soul Furnaces for the moment. Like the supplicants of an unkind god, the small crowd rose up and came stumbling towards her, but she had gotten what she needed long before they could reach her.

The final, fourth word rang out, and the world ruptured. There came a cealess scream of unearthly pitch. The Red Hoods were consumed by Black Bindings, growing out from inside their shells, liquid distortion spilling out as their silhouettes distorted, overlaid by something else, yet undeniably under their control. At the same moment, all of her extended Black Bindings were drawn back towards Yazata, gathering into a sphere before her. The sphere of empowered bindings exploded, instantaneously filled by the shape of a chthonic monstrosity visible to the naked eye only as distortion.

HIGH THAUMATURGY

SIGN OF THE PRETENDER-ARCHON

WITCHCRAFT HEPTAGRAM: DREDGING THE DEEP GULF

The screaming ceased. From beneath Yazata’s stoic mask, a cackling laugh escaped.

Seven seals undone, seven beasts from the deep astral called forth and bound to the material, dragged along like caught fish just beneath the surface.

“In accordance with the Third Tower’s ancient accords, heed my shining words, o children of the fathomless deep! Go forth and eat your fill, o hounds of the Nameless Roaring One!” she invoked, still cackling as she drew the Black Trapezohedron.

This was Yazata’s personal definition of witchcraft. Understanding and wielding the truly esoteric and forgotten in order to gain strength far beyond one’s raw talent, using knowledge and craft to subvert the limits of nature. The method had a dozen restrictions, and all of them, she had solved.

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The mansion shook and the shouts of men carried through its halls. An enormous force struck against its barriers, hammering on without reproach. The outside world laid out of sight, shutters having long slammed into place over the windows.

Thus, Krahe made her way into enemy territory, checking corners and pushing deeper.

Unfortunately, the building was designed with several chokepoints, and, it seemed, the defenders had expected an intrusion from below. Perhaps they had even learned of her invasion somehow; she hadn’t had the time to count the corpses.

A phalanx of three gun-armed stillborns blocked the hall, and behind them, four  men stood. Three looked fairly typical for gangsters --- of these three, two appeared on-edge, while one was downright panicked and wildly looking around. The fourth seemed to have his wits about him, and, by Krahe’s guess, looked to be the controller of the three stillborns. His eyesockets were like bottomless pits, the skin around them coloured black, and yellow-glowing gemstones sat within them, far too small for his face. A pretentious, curled mustache sat beneath his swollen, bloodshot nose. They swiveled Krahe’s way the moment she came into view, and she felt appraisal wash over her, seeping into the Viridaimon Armor.

“Ah. Blackhand’s older brother, is it? You’ve made a real mess of things, you know. No matter how good you are, you can’t beat the odds. I know what you are. “

Older brother, is it? she thought for a moment. The man’s eyes flared. Something vaguely akin to appraisal washed over Krahe, but it didn’t try to intrude the way direct appraisal did.

“A fourth-order voidkey! Fourth!” the small-eyed man exclaimed, as if that would save him. Distant footsteps signaled the approach of enemy reinforcements, so she had to act quickly, but she also needed to buy time before she could break through decisively. And so, she willed the Black Sun Coupler to ready another Coupler Charge.

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“Odds? You want to talk about the odds?!” the green-eyed demon scoffed through its mask. It waved its left hand about, gesturing with its catalyst like a conductor’s wand while its right hand remained clenched tightly to its chest, hidden by the shield on its forearm. The raven on the shape’s shoulder emitted a cackling laugh. Someone threw a chair. The raven’s eyes flashed, and the chair exploded into a hundred pieces mid-flight.

“I’ve seen a full squad of armored killers get wiped out by a myopic car nerd and an overweight alcoholic armed with two-shot pipe guns. These… These are downright great odds!”

It threw something.

The hallway turned into a cloud of choking smoke and razor-sharp glass glitter.

346 - Dragonslayer Baptism [Sturmblitz]

As if having predicted exactly how she would feel upon reading the notes, the very next page noted the reason for her unannounced use of this procedure. Zelsys described herself as feeling like she was inside a too-tight glove, like her own skin was too small, as if every iota of her body itched like a healing wound. There was also the matter of her lungs.

Who would’ve thought that rapid mutations had consequences. Rather than wrestle with it for months on end, I’ve come to an agreement with my Primordial Self. I will simply solve the issue of my lungs all at once. Riding the end of that epiphany ought to make things easier.

Given these circumstances, it made complete sense to go forward with it earlier than planned. After all, the bath was an extremified body cultivation procedure. A mutant chimera grafted together from similar recipes recorded in the sect’s own texts as well as those provided by Strolvath, specifically the Burning Man Manuscript fragment and the Blazing-black Destruction Scripture. Zefaris wasn’t familiar with the specifics, but she knew it had involved a combination of Ozmir’s expertise and the work of the sect’s most skilled alchemists.

Now that she read it over, she understood why it seemed so disproportionately simple: Because it was. It was the opposite of a recipe that tried to achieve a great effect with a complex blend of wildly variable ingredients. This one just sought to get the most out of the blood of a Dragon Descendant in the most direct way possible, without instilling any draconic traits into the subject or exciting ones that might already be present. Several working names were written out, from the simple to the extravagant:

DRAGON’S BLOOD BODY TRANSFORMATION BATH

TRUE BODY TRANSFORMATION BATH

HYBRID METHOD FLESH REBIRTH

ANTEDILUVIAN BLOOD ORIGIN REFINEMENT

DRAGONSLAYER BAPTISM

The last one was underlined. 

Zefaris sat down, reading further. The bath’s possible effects and issues were extensive, gathered from both source texts and the alchemists’ opinions. The projected strain on the subject was of course immense, as would be inevitable when it came to subsuming the vitality of a much greater existence. The solution was corrosive enough to dissolve someone alive in minutes, the paralytic shock of contact with Eisengeist’s blood dooming anyone without the requisite tolerance. She balked at the quantity of alkasnail alkahest involved, far beyond what would be necessary to dissolve and bind the components, clearly intended to help break down the body on some level. The herbal component wasn’t any gentler. Just one of the herbs was potent enough to kill with a slight overdose, let alone all together. Even with Zel’s absurd toxicity tolerance, Zefaris really hoped the dosages had been dialed in for Zelsys specifically ahead of time. The rational part of her knew this to be the case, but it was not wholly in control at this moment.

Inevitably, she had no choice but to trust Zel’s judgment and wait until things had run their course.

And so, days passed.

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Floating in warm, dark nothingness.

Or so it went.

In the boundless realm of mind, Zelsys found no oblivion.

Fight. Modify. Repeat. Fight. Modify. Repeat. Fight. Modify. Repeat.

A constant cycle of simulation and adjustment, vast tracts of dream-time passing with each real-time hour.

An army of dragon-beasts besieged her mental realm, and with each iteration, both they and her thought-form grew stronger. Were it only so easy as expelling the Third Truthseeker’s incursion. These were real, a representation of the actual bodily struggle taking place each time she subsumed a plume of Eisengeist’s essence.

It was the only way she could distract herself. The physical pain was nothing, but the spiritual strain was a whole other matter. The Primordial Self had turned her aura inward, wielding it as a tool of self-modification in concert with the bath, which she had allowed to flood into her lungs and both stomachs. With every passing hour, Zelsys broke down and rebuilt something of herself, incorporating the vitality of a Sapdragon, a being that was part dragon descendant, part cultivator-beast, and part immortal tree. With each reconstruction, the Primordial Self took the opportunity to instill even further change, dredging up the elements of ancient man that had faded away in the absence of the pressures which demanded them.

Bit by bit, Zelsys remade herself in her own image, pushing a bit closer to the ever-ascending ideal which she hoped never to reach.

Slowly, her nerves and silver conduits began drifting together, intertwining at points.

Her skin split open as she grew, instantaneously healing into tiger-like stripes of untanned, light brown. Even her right arm was not spared this fate, lines of shiny bronze showing through.

In the dream-desert, cornered by an enormous draconic manifestation, the Thinking Self merged with Fulguris and together tore the great beast to pieces. One by one, her nails fell off, extremities reforming to accommodate hooked, retractable claws. Not merely the ends of her digits, but her hands and feet both took a half-step towards ancient man, becoming more suited to her already animalistic tendencies in combat.

Both sculptor and the clay, Zelsys continued to change for as long as her aura and the bath solution held out.

She emerged one day prior to the planned date of emergence. Her eyes shot open, and with a single continuous motion, she rose out of the water. A waterfall of tarry liquid poured forth from her mouth into an empty alkahest jar, expelled by force of aura alone.

The day passed without a word to the outside world.

Zelsys spent it doing two things.

The first entailed becoming accustomed to her own skin all over again. It was one thing to wear it in the realm of mind, and another to do so in physical reality. As the hours passed, she came to the conclusion that just one day would not be enough. Even still, she had never felt better. It felt, somehow, as if the gap separating her sense of self from her physical body had thinned out into translucent gossamer. Her Thundergods felt exceedingly easy to manifest, so much so that she quickly forgot she was even doing it.

The second was reading what she had written during her epiphany. She remembered most of it, but nonetheless wanted to go back to inspect her work with a clear head.

345 - Seclusion [Sturmblitz]

“I want to say this is a formation, but… It does not follow common formation-building rules. You said the spire contains countless formations, and as far as I can tell that is the truth, but the flow of power inside the walls has not been significantly altered. How is this ‘formation’ not interfering with the others?” Zefaris questioned.

“It is more akin to the natural formations created by certain cultivator-beasts than a man-made formation…” Nesgon uttered.

They stared at one another in silence as the realization sunk in; the Newman Sect’s central spire had been, in effect, directly claimed as the elder’s innermost territory, with this same territorial claim extending to the sect as a whole, fundamentally altering the behavior of the compound’s barrier. Of course, the disciples were not told it in these terms. The Founder had harnessed her enlightenment towards reinforcing the sect’s defenses with a formation array born from a pure Truth, too profound to be expressed with rudimentary formation rules, and that was that. This was not a lie, merely an expression of the truth that did not expose the fact she had claimed the sect as a territory the same way a cultivator-beast would.

Days went by as Zefaris and Nesgon continued documenting the territorial formation array, intermittently joined by various other sect members, most often Sigmund and eventually Victor. By this point, the Dragonheart Bolus had been completed - or rather, a lesser version of it. A half-failure by Makhus’ own account, and a stunning success by the accounts of all those who assisted him in the grueling synthesis. Nonetheless, even at its significantly reduced potency, it sufficed to stabilize Strake’s state enough to temporarily disconnect him from Zero. A backpack was fashioned for him, with much longer cables, allowing him a mostly-functional range of movement in the tank’s general vicinity.

Makhus, after being forced to rest, immediately returned to alchemy, and the days continued to pass on like they were hours. Lucian’s grasp on the Bayonet-eater’s Creed and swordsmanship in general skyrocketed in this intervening time, even to Lydia’s astonishment, who had entered an impromptu master-disciple relationship with the young man, largely out of frustration and astonishment at his combination of dullness and talent.

Even still, Zelsys did not come out. At one point she requested another supply package, as well as a visit with Ozmir and Makhus simultaneously, but that was where her communications ended. The package included several dozen liters of Viriditas and Rubedo, separately, as well as large amounts of various herbs. Neither Makhus nor Ozmir would share what they spoke of with the founder, but they assured everyone that she was just consolidating her foundation. Ozmir was quick to point out that her seclusion could go on for a full year and it would still be short.

Before long the overflowing aura of bestial violence that still leaked out of the elder’s quarters receded, at which point Zefaris finally went in to check on Zelsys once more.

In the main room, she found many of the materials Zel had been provided, scattered around. Sharp pieces of metal were everywhere, cut perfectly with no deformation, and others to the contrary, seemingly torn apart with claws or bitten in half. Similarly, empty meal containers were stacked up next to the writing desk, far more than Zelsys would have actually needed, beyond her already superhuman dietary habits.

There, on the table, stood a cylinder of faintly iridescent steel, its surface bearing an elaborate pattern of glyphs arranged in rings and lines. The pattern was tribal, pure and simple, akin to what one might find at the sites of ancient ruins. As for the glyphs, they seemed a refinement, or perhaps purposeful alteration, of the pure and primal glyphs that made up the main spire formation array.

Shivers ran down the back of her neck as she approached it without thinking. The aura of implied violence only grew thicker the closer to the object she got, but it was nothing compared to what she had experienced in the past few weeks. She dared not touch it, but merely looking was enough. It was a pair of dragonsteel Thundercannon shells, reshaped into a two-part sleeve. Zefaris wagered the contents were likely no less dangerous than the usual filling of atrine-enriched powder and hardened cold-iron shot.

She continued past the writing desk into the bedroom, finding it empty. The same was the case for the library.

“The bath?” she wondered as she made her way there.

A wall of amber-coloured steam spilled out as the door opened before her, an eclectic mix of scents assaulting her nose.

Indeed, there she was, in the bath.

Curled up, near the bottom of the pool, barely visible as a silhouette. The reason was that the water could barely be considered as such at this point. Swirling with nebulous colours and emitting a faint glow, it resembled a truly arcane elixir such as the Fivefold Philter. The scent was organic, undertones of alchemy barely present beneath a thick blanket of life. Cautiously, she reached for an empty mixing bowl and scooped up a small bit of the liquid. It burned when she dipped her finger in it, such that she was certain she wouldn’t want to submerge herself. The small patch of redness quickly faded when she cleaned it off, leaving instead a patch of skin even smoother than the rest.

A few bubbles rose up from below, releasing bursts of Fog and crackling sparks when they popped.

Zefaris took account of the countless things outside the pool, trying to make sense of what all Zelsys had added in. It ran the gamut from Eisengeist’s blood, distilled Primary Spring water from the Aase clan, enormous quantities of Viriditas, and a number of reagents Zefaris didn’t recognize. She also found a notebook, left out in plain sight. Inside was Zel’s handwriting.

Date of immersion. Planned duration of immersion and date of emergence.

Right below, a simple descriptor of what exactly was going on here. Frustration flared in her gut. Zelsys had told her of this, but Zefaris had not thought it would come around so soon. Certainly not now. Not yet.

198 - Re: Yazata Heptaxia [Cherno] [+Artwork]

Initially, Yazata wasn’t particularly fond of these “Red Hoods”. Battle-automata that they were, they mimicked human behavior far too closely without the cognitive capacity to be held accountable. They lacked the token animalism of graft-beasts, and bore no esoteric spark to imply the presence of an eidolon intelligence; they were animated wholly by artifice, and were just as unsettlingly cold as that implied. Faceless things they were, yet at once their steel-silver bodies had the shapes of young girls, and each possessed hair of a subtly different colour, hidden under the titular hooded cloak of scarlet fabric.

On the way to the Mirzaii Subdistrict, Yazata and her force of freakish silver maidens encountered some to-be-expected resistance. Even spread out as they were, Yazata was still obviously an inquisitor, and the Red Hoods were an even more immediate bogeyman to the city’s miscreants than her. As they moved towards their goal, they identified and subdued nearly twenty patrolling Hashem Family foot soldiers.

And so, it came to be that she found herself bombarded with a rapid-fire barrage of Red Reapers from a first-floor window. It was inevitable, fully expected. This was no ambush - it was the path of least resistance.

She simply stepped to the side of one red comet, drawing her bar-mace with her right hand and holding out her left. Her eyes burned with purple light as she poured power into both the bar-mace and the Black Bindings that enveloped her body. Instantaneously, reams of Black Binding sprung forth from her sleeve, capturing an encroaching reaper, and with a simple gesture, she sent it flying back. She hopped between two further reapers that had reached her in the intervening second, which appeared to be pushed away from her onto wildly divergent trajectories, debris and crimson energy colouring the space behind her as she simply walked at her adversaries.

All it took was a glance; she merely had to meet their eyes to get them in her snare. Sheer mental focus honed to a razor point, set loose as a torpedo just beneath the skin of reality. A petty hex, but enough to make the trio freeze up on the spot. It lasted all of a second and a half, but that was more than enough.

Finally, she felt her mace come alive, and she chanted under her breath: “Oh, Black Trapezohedron, sound forth from the spires of Zor’Aguhastra…”

The black metal of its blade began thrumming with an unearthly sound, a thick distortion dripping from it, only upwards; it was like a heat-haze, if a heat-haze was as thick as pouring blood, and if it twisted the world itself rather than the air.

With a simple horizontal swing, an invisible force carved a gash across the wall, its existence only betrayed by a wake of the same distortion that enveloped Yazata’s bar mace. The windows exploded out of their frames and the brickwork crumbled. One of the men had his skull cleaved open, while the two others were sent flying back like ragdolls.

Two steps forward and a moment later, the light finally reached the ends of Yazata’s black bindings. They shot out as if alive and mercilessly dragged the trio out of the building, slamming the one with a cleft-open face into the cobbles while restraining the other two. Yazata let out a sigh through her nose as she willed her bindings to restrain the two survivors, detaching the rest once it was done. They were not physical restraints; the survivors’ heads were entirely wrapped up, their awareness sealed for the duration, rendering them vegetables for the next several hours. Yazata honestly wished it were always this easy to place mental restraints.

Following this negligible obstacle Yazata regrouped with her contingent of Red Hoods, directly approached the Gate of Mirzaii, the main entrance to the gated slice of decadence that included the target building. The address numbers only went up to 5, yet it took up an enormous swath of land, with anything and everything the owners could want on their properties. It made perfect sense; Audunpoint had never lacked for space, and according to intel, this place had been well outside the living city’s bounds at the time of its original construction. In short, the city’s expansion had only caught up to here in recent years. The walls were like those of a small fortress, ten meters tall and shimmering with reinforcing runes, with translucent barriers extending further upwards. The Mirzaii Subdistrict was, by all means, excessively well-defended. Yazata decided to look into the owners of these properties after this was over and done with.

Gathering in front of the Gate of Mirzaii, they found it closed, and a guard in well-wrought silver Mamon Armor stood in front, in defiance of intel. It was clear he had been stationed here specifically as another layer of defense.

Covered in fluting and elaborate inlays head-to-toe, the wide-shouldered man possessed a truly baroque countenance befitting of the place he guarded. A large sword of equally complex design simply floated behind him. He lacked a typical belt; instead, to his left arm was attached an enormous tower shield which incorporated the Mamon Coupler into itself, constantly projecting a barrier and its surface shimmering with the implication of warding. Despite the thickly-layered imagery, Yazata could identify no outward sign of the guard’s affiliation to an agency.

“Halt. What is your purpose here?” he asked in a stern monotone.

Yazata simply poured a wisp of thauma into her pendant. The golden, seven-spoked wheel floated a hand’s length from her chest, shining with golden flame. The wheel then shrunk inward, transforming the symbol into a spiky, seven-pointed star with the wheel in the innermost third.

“I am Yazata Heptaxia, Inquisitor of the Inner Wheel. By the authority vested in me by the Seven Spokes, I demand you allow my contingent and I to pass unimpeded. Our purpose in the Mirzaii Subdistrict is the detainment of Semzar Hashem, son of the mafioso Damrus Hashem, whom I have good reason to believe currently resides within the mansion on Mirzaii 2.”

The gate guardian stared her down, motionless, faceless, for a solid five seconds.

“Unfortunate. I was not aware,” he stated, retrieving a large key and touching it to the gate. As its enormous wings swung open, the guard walked off to the side, continuing: “I will see to it that my handler conveys my contract to the church. I would request that I be compensated for the loss of income from any goods confiscated as a result of your investigation. I am sure the Seven Spokes will understand.”

197 - They Just Vanished [Cherno]

By the time the ritual was over, the boy had come out, just in time to witness the shrine guardian lurch upward. Its mouth creaked open, and it drew in every iota of incense smoke in the vicinity. The guardian thumped its staff against its altar, and a seven-spoked wheel of golden flame blazed alight behind it. Another thump, and the wheel turned by a full revolution. The shrine was enveloped in golden light, and the doors slammed shut.

Another thump. Another revolution. Reams of blessed paper erupted from the guardian’s sleeves, flying upward into the rafters and out of sight, circling the shrine. Thereafter, the guardian went silent, the wheel projection behind it fading until it was barely visible. The next morning, four known Hashem Family members would be found in the vicinity, bound by these same reams of sacred paper.

Meanwhile, Casus shot through the city streets even faster than before, his maximum speed no longer bounded by the presence of a small, fragile passenger. He took sharp alleyway turns one after the next without slowing, sometimes running along walls and other times tilting his own body as if he himself were a high-speed motorbike, tearing into the pavement with his arm-blade to help steer. He only stopped at the hidden door, and then it was back to full speed from a standstill.

Even the small loss of maneuverability really stung, but somehow, Casus liked this better. A man-shaped battering ram.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Mirzaii 2. The ballroom. A chamber of refined luxury stained by ongoing debauchery. The air inside was thick with a miasma of smoke, alcohol, and a rainbow of fumes from drugs of all kinds, covering the full spectrum from the natural to the synthetic. The number of guests was nearly equal to the number of entertainers, and in turn, to the number of guards. A band of nervous musicians played an eclectic set of their greatest hits, songs that hadn’t done well, and hastily-prepared covers, all picked out by their employer. They had, of course, not known ahead of time that this employer was Semzar Hashem, but the enormous paycheck and equally generous tips had sufficed to encourage them. It wasn’t as if they could run at this point.

At the other side of the ballroom, a woman clad in naught but translucent silks and jewelry danced on a hexagonal stage that was slick with blood and viscera. The intermingling of human and saurian blood colored her bare feet a strange shade of purplish scarlet, readily concealing the talismans that safeguarded her from slipping.

“The patrols are gone, sir. All of them. The same is the case for the men we sent out to assess what happened to the patrols.”

The man speaking was a baneworm hidden inside a mountain of muscle, which in turn was hidden by a mountain of fat; such bodies made it easier to hide his possession of them, and his preference had named him: Strongman, Big Guy, Fatman, on and on. He, the baneworm, didn’t actually have a personal name, simply making one up each time he took a new body. Even as he was, riding in a 2m meat mountain, he was in the submissive position here. He looked up from where he knelt, the disdainful facade of Semzar Hashem, the heir’s irritation distorting his meatsuit’s handsome features.

“Gone? The fuck you mean gone?!” Semzar barked, throwing a glass full of atrociously expensive liquor. Instantaneously, a nearby manservant cleaned it up, tendrils of azure magic extending from the jewels on his glove’s knuckles to lift the mess into a trash chute.

Semzar proceeded on a multi-minute rant which involved drinking and spilling three more glassfuls of that liquor. While this went on, Strongman tuned out most of the heir’s inane rant and carefully took in his surroundings.

To Semzar’s left and right, a small harem of women was gathered. In Strongman’s experience, such groups were usually made up of the ambitious, self-employed women of the night, and those who had no choice in the matter, illegally owned or otherwise coerced by a third party. He wondered what the ratios were in this case. They didn’t seem particularly dead in the eyes, at least.

Behind Semzar’s opulent seat, there towered an enormous, two-and-a-half meter tall evoy. He exuded a stoic threat of violence at any perceived aggression, his compound eyes perpetually twitching in place as he observed his surroundings. He looked unlike any other evoy, unlike even the rare war-morphs; in short, he looked wrong. His left arm particularly stood out, being so engorged that its chitin plates bulged apart and showed the musculature underneath. Its base shape even diverged from the evoy’s other arm. To the giant’s sides, four further guards were posted. Their forms were mostly evoy-like, but twisted and misshapen, each more heavily grafted than the next. These so- graft-beast abominations were scattered all throughout the mansion.

Finally, after calming down somewhat, Semzar leaned forward and asked: “Explain what you mean by ‘gone’. As I recall, I spent a great deal on communications specifically to prevent this.”

With each word, the mask of calm cracked, tendrils and veins showing through as anger crept into his voice again.

“We ah… We haven’t received any calls, good or bad, in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, all of them seem to have just disappeared into the astral. The same thing happened to those we sent to check, and…” Strongman said, partially repeating himself.

Before Semzar could speak again, explosions sounded in the distance.

A wave of tension swept over the ballroom. Even that giant evoy turned his head in that direction, ever so subtly. He leaned down to Semzar, uttering something in his ear. The heir listened with rapt attention, then barked out a series of commands that included ones which pertained to Strongman himself. In effect, he was calling for the mansion’s security contingent to go on high alert. It made sense, but Strongman instinctively filtered out the brat’s actual words, coming away only with the general meaning.

However, before Strongman could actually get to doing his job, one of the ballroom’s doors swung open, a shell of a man stumbling through. His hair was burnt off in places, one of his eyes had burst open, and fist-sized chunks were missing from his left side.

“T-the basement, it’s… It’s Blackhand’s big brother…”

196 - Tarnished Silberblut [Cherno]

Over and over again, Krahe shamelessly threw filthy, Isotope-laced smoke grenades, skimmed through walls, and simply rendered herself untouchable when the enemy’s numbers and knowledge of their home turf proved superior to her tactical planning.

The slaughter went on like this for several minutes.

There were survivors, ones who reached the ground level before she did. One was in shock, and couldn’t utter anything other than the words: “smoke”, “black armor”, “ghost”.

The other swore up and down that it had to be “Blackhand’s Big Brother”.

______________________________________________________________

Casus carried the boy a short distance from the underpass before setting him down. He understood that Blackhand wanted to prevent the child from witnessing the gruesome reality of things, and he was in agreement. Right afterwards, he pressed in the eye of his belt, initiating the transformation. His body was consumed by a surge of golden flame from the belt, a projection of its star-shaped pupil emerging, rising to Casus’ head-height. A silhouette wrought of silver flame followed with it, and the full phantom simply stepped back into his frame, silver flame momentarily overtaking gold, only to be consumed. In that instant all the light and flame vanished, leaving behind only his armored shape. Despite its increased complexity, the transformation only took moments; it was so quick it almost felt wrong, sped up, incomplete. That last part was true.

The Silberblut Coupler spoke, its tone resolute and melancholy at once: “Divine crusader, hero of justice, reforged in flame.”

This “Tarnished Silberblut” was not the new armor which Casus had manifested at the end of his training. Instead, it was born from the “Crusader of Black and Gold” boon as Heroic Subjugation’s effect on the Silberblut Armor in its base state, forcing the armor to better suit Casus’ own preferences instead of making Casus automatically adjust his fighting style. He found it to be somewhat more resilient and physically stronger, but a bit less agile; not for lack of agility or speed, but because of its increased bulk. He also found that the strain on his body was vastly reduced, as he was not undergoing excess change with each transformation to compensate for lack of compatibility.

He scooped up the child as if he weighed nothing, put him on his back, and took off running. Faster than his motorbike, he shot through the streets like a matte-black bullet, the child holding on for dear life.

___________________________________________

The sound of rapid, heavy footfalls approached the shrine. A dark silhouette sprinted through the entrance, golden light spilling from every crevice of the stranger’s form like flame from a ramshackle furnace. Lucia froze mid-turn as she beheld the tall man set a run-ragged child before her. He said something about keeping the boy safe and that he had been rescued from a human trafficker, but only the vague contents of his words and the tone of his voice registered to her in her shocked state.

At first, she had not recognized him, but… This was definitely him. The belt, the voice, the armor. All wrong in some way, yet all too familiar. In an agonizing few seconds, Lucia unthinkingly took the child into her arms as she took in the familiar mamon knight’s armor.

A single, stone eye stared down at her, an azure abyss overlaid by a four-spoked star of burning orange, and this self-same pattern now reigned within his belt’s eye.

The Silberblut Armor’s previously gleaming silver had tarnished to a matte-black shade, and the armor now bore significantly bulkier armor on the forelimbs. The golden crown upon his brow had grown substantially, forming horizontal, quarter-circular horns to either side alongside a third, dull-ended vertical horn, which ever so faintly resembled that of a stag beetle. Four peculiar motes of golden flame circled above his head.

In place of a closed vertical eye, his chest now bore two horizontal ones. To go with the eyes, the lower torso plates were shaped to imply the presence of a face’s lower half just below the surface.

The left gauntlet was even bulkier than the right, possessing an additional closed eye. His arm-blade was the largest change, being clearly attached to his arm as a separate weapon rather than seamlessly incorporated into the armor. It was the shape of a four-pointed star with one of the points “stretched out” to form the blade.

His aura of cold, steely imposition was gone, replaced by a numinous warmth spilling out of him like he was the sun. It was not physical heat; the shrine’s interior was as cold as it always was at night, and yet it was real all the same.

“Casus Aristedes? What happened to you? Need I report your state to the Inner Wheel?” she blurted out without thinking.

“There is no need. Safeguard the child… And perhaps prime the shrine guardian for tonight. I must go. Once tonight is over, you will know why.”

With that, he was gone, not a phantom, but a matte-black bullet leaving a trail of golden flame.

Some time later, after making sure the boy was uninjured and settling him in the back of the shrine, Lucia acted on Casus’ advice. Behind the shrine’s altar, a shape of gleaming metal sat, shrouded in a heavy robe, sitting on its pedestal in a relaxed pose with its head bowed too far for anyone to more than glimpse its face. It was a statue to all but the most well-read adherents, but to the shrine and others who knew, it was a far more immediate promise of safety than the Banishment Veil. It was also a far more immediate threat of violence to those who would foolishly think this small shrine was unguarded.

Lucia carried out a ritual of offering up sacrificial liquor, burning incense, and elaborate dancing whilst chanting a specific sutra. It was not a sutra from any scripture, but one written particularly for this idol, embedded within its body.

344 - Manifestation [Sturmblitz]

And so, many of those disciples who had gathered here did leave. Many others remained, observing from beyond the boundary. A small handful walked into the boundary, and disappeared. Two were expelled immediately, one covered in deep wounds and the other seemingly having gone feral.

“Fools. I said those to whom this Truth speaks, but no, they never listen…” Nesgon grumbled as he single handedly overpowered the duo, paralyzing them by striking their pressure points. His shriveled fingers pierced the first disciple’s flesh as if it was cardboard, eliciting an apologetic hiss of sympathy and causing him to be more gentle with the second man. After examining them, Nesgon let out a relieved chuckle.

“Normally, the backlash would’ve damaged or even destroyed large swathes of their cultivation… But these morons had none to begin with. They will recover.”

He then dragged them off to be treated, purposely leaving out the fact there was a miniscule chance that this experience might end up benefiting the two in the future.

Over the next several days, most of those who had gone in returned, covered in bites and scratches. A few of them now had an animalistic shine in their eyes, including the scorchlander Mata Gano, two of the eagle-men who were named Ehecatle and Toltecatl, and four Ikesian outer disciples who had not exhibited any particular inborn talent besides an incredible dedication to the fundamentals of Sturmblitz Kunst 0. Seven in total. They inevitably gathered, sparring together with heretofore unseen savagery.

The illusory world manifested by the Truth of Fangs continued growing upwards until it reached the top of the central spire, at first seeping into the sect’s barrier. Not long after this, long tendrils of blurriness, like a heat-haze, began leaking from the spire’s top, and were soon joined by silvery Fog. They formed the apparition of an enormous, toothy snake skull, with backward-pointing antlers protruding above its prominent brow ridges. It appeared as if the apparition was a direct expansion of the sect’s transformed, opaque barrier.

Despite being the skull of a serpent, it was a strongly-built, wide thing, with two rows of gigantic teeth, huge fangs folded between the rows, and protruding anchor points for powerful jaw muscles on the outside of the skull. Gradually, this enormous serpent skull grew backwards to form itself a body, growing into a muscular snake hundreds of meters long with armor-like scales. Its burning eyes, like searchlights, swept over the city, and it silently watched over its domain. Strangely, this caused very little panic, with the apparition exuding a strange sense of safety; there was fear, but somehow, being aware of the giant snake also meant being aware of the fact it posed no threat to Willowdale or its people. Those few in the city who were familiar with arcane wildlife recognized the basis for the snake, despite the fact the real animal didn’t have antlers and had not been documented in over two centuries. In modernity, it was simply named the Ikesian Giant Viper, but had been referred to by myriad names in the past. One among them was “River Carver Serpent”, as it was believed to carve rivers with its body due to the channels it left behind. In the same vein was the “Sculptor Snake” due to their nesting habit of carving nests straight into solid rock with their enormous physical strength and iron-hard scales. Last and perhaps most self-explanatory, was "Bear-eater Snake". 

Perhaps the most profound effect of this manifestation was on animals. Pets and livestock were the first to be affected; as if possessed, they all attempted to approach the Newman Sect, gazing up towards the antlered snake. Even those who couldn’t come still looked in that direction.

Wild beasts soon emerged from the forests surrounding the city.

From the smallest to the greatest. Hares, foxes, wildcats, wolves, bears, snakes big and small, and countless strange animals that were alien to the common folk and were oft unseen due to their eclectic or dangerous habitats. A small army of beasts gathered, just close enough to be within view, and as the illusory serpent swept its gaze over them, they returned to the forest all the same. On that day’s evening, the gigantic serpent descended with the sun, coiling down the central spire’s length and then across the rest of the sect’s roof. The manifestation vanished soon after, leaving behind a winding, serpentine glyph-pattern that looked as if it had always been a part of the roof tiles.

The illusory world within the spire had also receded. As the sect members inevitably filed back in, with many running to retrieve some possession or other from their quarters, they found things to have changed. The founder’s Truth had left its mark upon the spire’s interior as well, warping all animal iconography. Horses changed into predatory beasts, regardless of whether they were whole statues or small details on water faucets. Some were sneering and angry, while others appeared calm and regal, depending largely on the original. Lions, tigers, snakes, wolves, false drakes and dragons, bears, all these visages were to be found, but so were the countenances of alien monsters born purely from the Truth of Fangs. The wood, too, had been affected, with strange glyphs seemingly scraped into it with ragged claws, yet also possessing precision worthy of a skilled craftsman.

Zefaris received an aetherwave message soon after, disappearing into the elder’s quarters. She emerged soon after with two messages: The first was a message of reassurance, confirming that Zelsys was still consolidating her foundation. The second was a request for several things.

“Elder Zelsys will require double food portions for the next three weeks, five liters each of sect-formulation Liquid Vigor and Witch’s Brew, half a liter of Eisengeist’s blood, blades which have been used for violence regardless of their metal grade, a stylus made of Eisengeist’s bone, and bones from the Wildfire Kite.”

There were no questions. People scattered, gathering the relevant resources. Meanwhile, Nesgon, being the only individual in the sect to understand the central spire’s function, meticulously went up and down cataloguing the strange markings. Seeing his plight, and eager to focus on something other than Zel’s predicament, Zefaris began assisting him, using her left eye to scan sections of wall and replicating them on paper.

Soon, they both came to a realization.

195 - Sewer Wars Pt. 4 [Cherno]

As she looked down at the two, Krahe decided that she didn’t care to kill them. They barely looked like adults, their eyes lacked any sort of hardened shine. They didn’t belong here… And they reminded her of stupid kids back in Megacity Gamma. Stupid kids that joined gangs, thinking it was a glamorous lifestyle, only to get shot like dogs to protect bastards that actually deserved those bullets.

With a gesture, she raised a slab of smoky jade so that it would entrap the two of them in the corner, but only pushed it to chest-height so she could easily peer over it. The Viridaimon Armor made her a head taller, granting her a truly towering presence at over 200cm. Fully exploiting the ominous size and stillness of motion granted by the armor, Krahe leaned forward slightly to look down at the pair.

“You won’t be this lucky next time,” she said, her voice distorted and deepened by the mask. “Get your shit together. Perhaps go to one of the churches or join a proper agency. You don’t have what it takes to traffic children for man-eating fly-men.”

The boy had gathered his wits, standing as tall as he could, staring back at Krahe with a defiant, but fearful gaze. She leaned in further until she could see the boy eye to eye from only centimeters away, then willed Viridaimon to uncloud the lenses as she conjured a handful of CRC Rings into her hand. They totaled 5000 DDs in value, including four of a 1000 DD and two of a 500 DD denomination so they could be split evenly.

Sprinkling them onto the moron’s head, she added: “That’s a good thing. Stay still and be quiet. The panels last an hour…”

At that moment, Barzai alerted her to an approaching person. She was surprised it had taken them this long to build up enough guts to try and suss her out. Turning on a bootheel, she raised her left hand and formed yet another smoke grenade in her right. Before she moved on, she added: “...And avoid the Silversword Agency.”

She had barely interacted with them whatsoever, but those interactions combined with what she had heard and read about them had sowed the seeds of distrust and dislike. Out of every group in Audunpoint, they reeked the most like a typical black company.

Krahe approached the storeroom’s entryway, raising a few more barriers as she went to prepare the field, leaving the Forming Toroid at roughly half charge. That default 2mx1mx30cm, 10-charge slab was really too much for most uses.

In these close quarters, using Tracers was not the ideal choice. She directed the belt’s output to the catalyst, building up a charge while embedding it with the mental pattern of Deathsmoke Spray.

As the first man stepped into the storeroom, Krahe already waited for him. At that instant, she released the smoke burster, letting it burst at her feet. She released the charge, and instead of a stream, the casting catalyst expelled a burst of black and red that smashed through the man’s wards and sent him flying like a ragdoll. He trailed blood as he flew, crashing into the edge of a crate and smashing his head against it, both of which his wards soaked up. He was left there wheezing in shock with a fist-sized chunk of meat missing from his stomach, and growing larger with each passing moment as the deathsmoke ate away at his flesh like a smoldering flame spreading through steel wool.

This was the exact “shotgun” effect she had been looking for when she first conceived of Deathsmoke Spray. It was just a shame it was locked away behind a high-performance prototype Mamon Coupler. Knowing how these things went, even if she eventually bought a production model it wouldn’t come close to this.

She let a few more of them come for her, but didn’t just hole up in the storeroom expecting to win using that position. They were on the defensive here, and could just call in more reinforcements from above. Time was key. And so, Krahe formed a monstrously powerful burster with a long fuse, having Barzai carry it near the doorway. Meanwhile, she crossed the storeroom, stepping over a mangled corpse and a whimpering soon-to-be corse on her way to a solid wall. This particular spot was perfect, as when she skimmed to the other side, she ended up covered on two sides.

What she couldn’t have perfectly foreseen was that the two Stillborns were still sniffing around the blocked off door, as if even their own allies didn’t want to interact with them. The one that lacked visible eyes emitted a loud click, then whipped around to face Krahe.

And so, she was forced into a melee with this monstrous thing, and Sector 7 Style’s close-quarters methodology kicked in once more. That is to say, Krahe tackled the creature, shoved her left fist into its chest, and blasted its Ward generator apart with two shots. Once it was on the ground, a downward punch with her right hand half-severed its weapon-arm, leaving the joint ruined and black veins whipping about, gushing oily hemolymph.

The next abomination was already upon her before the first died, and so she rose up, stomping on the first one’s neck as she threw the second like it was a ragdoll. While far heavier than its frame would suggest, the thing was still skeletal, and the Left Arm was already strong enough to lift a hundred kilos without issue. With the Viridaimon Armor’s extra strength and weight, this feral borg-zombie was more dangerous at range than up close… And she had just given it that range. That was a problem; it started firing on her before it even landed, its sonic weapon pounding her armor like a jackhammer. Thankfully, the problem was easily solved with a prolonged burst of Tracers, shattering the bioweapon’s wards, tearing off its arm, and continuing through the hole into its chest cavity thanks to Krahe circling the thing. True, this exposed her to direct fire from the actual people, but she just pulled her arm upwards a bit and tossed her smoke grenade.

343 - Eberheim Aftermath [Sturmblitz]

As for the Hellhounds, they were split. Some were too wounded to partake in “active rest”, while others were not of a cultivator-like inclination, treating their work as just that. Nonetheless, elite soldiers that they were, they had plentiful resources to help them deal with their wounds and their exhaustion.

As for Strake Sodan, he remained interred within his war machine the entire way back and for weeks after, flickering to a fully lucid state for only a few hours each day. It was not so because the machine refused to release him, but because it was keeping him alive. Each day, buckets of animal blood were brought to him and poured over the tank, while recordings of books played to keep his mind occupied and somewhat anchored to reality.

The alchemists and craftsmen of the Newman Sect worked tirelessly, preparing elixirs and tools to separate the man and the living machine without killing either, at the governor’s official request, but it was known that the man was a friend of the sect and would not have been left to his fate either way.

Meanwhile, a tale spread of the Newman Sect’s Elder, of her grievous enlightenment in the Truth of Violence, and of the madness that knowledge brought her. She hadn’t been seen in public since the Eberheim Incident, building up a plentiful pyre of logs. To add CP-T as the accelerant, even the doors of the elder’s quarters couldn’t contain her enormous intent, to the point that many disciples collapsed from terror merely walking up the stairs to the upper floor. As such, the decision was made to temporarily relocate accommodations to other areas of the sect compound. Barely a fraction of the enormous building’s true capacity had been used until now, after all.

Lastly, to toss a hand-grenade into the pyre, the Second Elder entered and exited the elder’s quarters only once every few days, and often came out bearing numerous bites, scratches, and bruises. She insisted that nothing was wrong, and it was not far from the truth; such petty injuries healed quickly and were no different from those sustained in normal sparring.

The Elder’s direct disciple, Victor Khestun, was in a similar state. He, alongside the sect’s chef, Ozmir, had retreated far underground, to the subterranean garden in the Tree of Life Leyline Well. Ozmir returned after a few days, but Victor was nowhere to be seen. The reason was simple; as a living deity created by humans, Bishamonten required a vessel to house him, and the Oculus could not serve that purpose in the long-term. And so, after explaining himself to Ozmir, whose pet project the garden was, Victor received permission to construct the shrine in the Leyline Well. So he feverishly worked, cutting down a single of the centuries-old trees and building in accordance with the righteous god’s instruction. Afterwards, he continued working, forming a statue of Bishamonten out of wood, bone, and dragonbone. He did not try to replicate the form of Vaisravana Bishamonten of Itrian myth, despite the fact his scroll contained accurate descriptions of all Eight Guardian Deities.

The change of design was, in fact, at Bishamonten’s own request. The deity’s enormous voice, thundering with the sadness of a hundred thousand grieving widows, reverberated inside Victor’s skull: “THE ORIGINAL ‘ME’ PERISHED ALONGSIDE MY WORSHIPERS AND SHRINE GUARDIANS. IT IS ONLY RIGHT FOR THIS IDOL TO MIRROR THE FORM I TOOK AT EBERHEIM, THAT WHICH SHALL BECOME KNOWN TO THIS LAND’S MORTALS. ALREADY, I FEEL THEIR REVERENCE, FEW THOUGH THEY ARE.”

Rather than bearing a spear in one hand and khakkhara staff in the other, the statue in the Leyline Well took the shape of Kishin-Shura-Bishamonten, wielding a combination of both implements with two hands. Four more, six-segmented arms protruded from its back, having two elbows each.

And so, he worked, for days and weeks, caught in a trance of sorts.

Away from the eyes of the world, the Founder remained irrevocably engrossed in an enlightenment-induced trance, meditating and writing in a mad cycle, seeking to put into words a Truth beyond such mortal expression. Eventually, even Zefaris stopped coming and going, at Zelsys’ request. And as days passed, the sense of a ferocious beast continued to intensify. Ghostly-white serpents of Fog manifested outside her door, spontaneously from ambient Pneuma, vanishing as quickly as they appeared, as if glimmers of a theoretical world entirely composed of predatory monsters down to the most fundamental level, a world where even the specks of dirt and tiniest monads had fangs. Slowly this unearthly territory spread, filling the whole room outside the elders’ chambers and climbing up the sect’s central spire, guided upward by its special inner structure. The illusory visions within the field were all of an incredibly violent nature, but they were not exclusively of combat. It was a world of violence, where “violence” was as fundamental a law as gravity. The boundary between the sect’s grand hall and the central spire’s ground floor became increasingly more opaque. More and more, vision of the room beyond vanished and transformed into an eldritch realm of swirling fog and ferocious beasts.

Numerous disciples gathered in the great hall in front of the boundary, drawn here by this truly unearthly phenomenon.

Despite the alarm caused by this phenomenon, the sect’s most senior members vetoed any implications that something was going wrong. It was not Zefaris or anyone who had joined the sect recently, but in fact the seniors grandfathered in from the Black Horses - Ozmir and Nesgon.

For the first time since the Newman Sect’s founding, Nesgon, the Immortal Groundskeeper, in his mummy-like countenance, became visibly angry. He became angry at the mere suggestion of disturbing the elder at this moment, “just to check on her”.

“Blind fools, you have eyes but somehow I doubt you would be able to see the skeleton at Titan’s Bane…” he grumbled angrily, shaking his head. With a sigh, he visibly stifled his desire to lecture his juniors.

“Count yourselves fortunate!” Nesgon proclaimed. “In all my years, I have witnessed three epiphanies, one from each grand elder under whom I have served. Despite appearances, this is the least volatile of them all. What you witness here… Is the unfolding of our founder’s personal Truth. This is the true purpose of the central spire: to contain the manifestation without stifling it. Those of you who have eyes to see, stay here and observe. Those of you to whom this Truth speaks, allow yourselves to enter this illusory world if you dare, but know that you may die or go mad when faced with the founder’s Truth. The rest of you…”

Nesgon stomped his foot, and a tremor spread out through the air, casting many disciples to their knees.

“...Return to your training.”

194 - Sewer Wars Pt. 3 [Cherno]

As the cloud of dust and mist started to clear, Achmed saw it. Utterly unharmed, in fact it looked like the shape had completely bypassed the killzone before the charges had even gone off. An unearthly aura of pitch-black smoke rose from the invader’s armour, as if it was some cursed ghost that had just walked straight through solid stone. Achmed raised his Wing Barrier without even thinking.

Some thirty meters downrange from him, it stopped. Somehow, he felt that it knew that firing would be pointless, it knew that he could effectively defend against its missiles while retreating too quickly for it to catch him before he got back to the mansion.

But then, the green-eyed demon adjusted its stance, turning side-on and leaning forward on the right leg to the extreme with the left leg outstretched backwards. It tucked in its right arm; a tackling stance, resting the left hand on its belt. With the turn of a dial, an ominous aura of dense smoke and embers enveloped the figure, and it pointed its left arm’s casting catalyst… Backwards.

For a moment, Achmed was confused. To add to his confusion, that raven spirit from before appeared once more, simply coming into his awareness as if it had been invisible until now. It just flew above him, strangely not attacking, only to stop dead-still, hovering near a wall while looking further down the tunnel.

This moment of confusion was, inevitably, broken. With an enormous rumbling noise, the green-eyed demon went flying down the tunnel straight at him, seemingly riding a pillar of smoke and flame like some sort of giant firework.

COUPLER CHARGE

BLACK SUN COMET

Achmed quickly ran up the wall, hoping to simply avoid the charge to save his life. This job was just that, a job, so he would not offer up his life for the mafia. The demon glared at him, but passed him by as it went tearing down the tunnel. The raven, however, was different. It suddenly spoke to him with a demonic voice full of accusation: “Filth.”

Achmed turned just in time to hear the spirit speak again: “None can save your soul. None escape the wrath. Repent.”

And just like that, the bird vanished in a puff of smoke.

_____________________________________________________________

Krahe had fully intended to turn that wall-walker into a greasy smear, but she had severely underestimated the difficulty of controlling the coupler charge. Though the strain of harnessing the Black Sun Coupler’s full power was substantially reduced by her strengthened body and the Viridaimon Armor’s unique design, it was nonetheless sufficiently severe that she had no choice but to entirely focus solely on maneuvering through the tunnel’s curves. She didn’t feel any particular regret about leaving the gangster alive; Casus would get to him.

The rocket-charge didn’t last nearly long enough to cover the full distance to the mansion’s basements, but that was a mercy; immediately following the coupler charge’s end, the Viridaimon Armor lost power. Without proper training and lacking typical safeguards, the coupler charge had dumped every iota of power output. The light in the armor’s eyes sputtered out, and its full weight bore down on her. It was so suffocatingly heavy she could only walk, stumbling over to the wall. Over the course of a few seconds, the armor returned to life and the burden eased, but the belt had not been spared. It was still functional, but drawing on it for combat-level power output, let alone further coupler charges, would inevitably destroy the belt’s internals. She wanted to make it last, given the enormous power and durability it afforded her, but she knew better than to rely on a self-destructive prototype, let alone to assume that it would last the full length of a combat operation.

Krahe checked if the wall-walker wasn’t following her, feeling a pang of disappointment when she found that he wasn’t. She then continued onward, and reached the entrance to the mansion’s basement complex before long. It was a whole cargo loading dock, with three branches spreading out. The frames of great bulkheads yawned empty, and the loading area was deserted… At first glance. In reality, there were indeed people here; she learned that the hard way from a multicolored hail of magic and bullets, erupting from several spots. Behind pillars, another on an elevated walkway, a pair beyond a corner, inside a storeroom filled with a maze of containers. A quartet of those borged-out things dropped down from the ceiling where they had been hanging, screeching and weeping as they charged headlong towards her on all fours.

And so, the first true battle began. Even as she was, armored and armed to a degree sufficient to take on mid-rankers, Krahe was still at a disadvantage here. A direct battle was a foolish idea even with the Viridaimon Armor.

Striding sideways through the awkward layout of the loading dock, Krahe immediately began forming a smoke grenade before Astro Diving. Just this act was enough to damage the enemy’s morale, with screams of possessed ancient armor abounding, while the few who retained their full composure screamed orders at the so-called “Stillborns”. Meanwhile, Krahe circled them like the ghost she appeared to be, ducking into the storage room before surfacing and tossing the smoke grenade. As she entered, she raised a jade wall to block off the entrance, leaving only one other. She sent Barzai to watch over that entryway as she cleared the rest of the storeroom. There were only two people here, huddled together in the corner; a man and woman, or more appropriately, a boy and a girl. Cowards with no killing instinct and auras about as strong as Mohawk, and dressed in a similarly threatening biker-esque style. Given the situation, it made them appear even less threatening. She openly walked between the rows of crates towards them, and whimpering, one of them fired off a purplish buzzsaw crackling with electricity.

The electric saw flew by Krahe’s head, not for lack of accuracy, but because the boy’s intended aim was so obvious. As such, Krahe just tilted her head out of the way. The saw bit into the ceiling and traveled some distance before it sputtered out.

193 - Sewer Wars Pt. 2 [Cherno]

The Stillborn, 82, surged forward, sprinting past the corner, its buzzing rising to a scream-like fever pitch as it raised its left arm and began firing. With a repeating sequence of whirring charge-up and thumping release, its weapon’s focused shockwaves tore up the water surface with their mere passage.

But the distant footsteps only became quicker, and a sound unsettlingly like the caw of a raven resounded, followed by a sequence of cannon-like, thumping explosions, sound not quite like gunshots, but close. What came from beyond the corner were not bullets, however. Achmed barely got a glimpse as he was busy retreating and preparing the detonator; they were comets of swirling blackness, zipping through the air like swift arrows, their trajectories bending to all strike 82. A greenish glow lit up inside the Stillborn’s chest as glassy wards of the same colour revealed themselves around it, and these defenses held for a moment, only to be torn apart soon after. The creature continued firing back for a moment longer while its body held up. Soon, 82 was shaking in place as countless explosions tore open the Stillborn’s exoskeleton, spilling its oily inner fluids into the water and painting the walls with the iridescent rainbow of their puke-like hues. A pretentious sort might interpret those stains as a veritable work of abstract art commenting on the traces left by those who are consumed by an opposing force’s overwhelming violence.

Without needing to be commanded, 143 quickly prepared itself to face the enemy ducking to the wall as its left arm split open to expose the emitter nodules. A black blur zipped past the corner, trailing with black smoke and red light as it flew. It was a raven, or at least something in the shape of one. Opening its beak, the thing screamed with the banshee tone of a woman being murdered, its eyes flashed, and the section of wall Achmed was hanging from exploded. Though not enough to make him fall, his right foot was left hanging onto a chunk of loosened stone, forcing him to release it and right himself, moving even further up the wall to the point he was nearly hanging upside-down.

Just as he got his bearings, Achmed saw it; a human shape in black armor, with an unfamiliar device on its waist. It didn’t even cross his mind that it was a Mamon Coupler; he was not particularly familiar with those devices, and only had passing knowledge of common models that his fellow gang members used.

The shape’s face was concealed by a beaked mask. Its eyes were two impassive, circular lenses within which green fire burned, trailing light in a near perfect line as it moved. Its left arm bore a heavy, gun-like catalyst, spewing smoke and flames from its muzzle, while the right was concealed by a shield-like bracer and pauldron combination.

It walked as quickly as any normal person would run, gliding through the ankle-deep water with an unsettling, mechanical smoothness. Even its arms remained unnaturally stable as it leveled its weapon at him. In Achmed’s mind, that thing had to be some kind of graft-beast, maybe meant to compete with or replace the Red Hoods. Its mask certainly looked Zaveshian.

A swarm of smoke-missiles spewed forth in Achmed’s direction, and the shape threw a reflective, black sphere towards 143. Neither fighting back nor setting off the charges crossed his mind, only escape, and escape he did, raising his unique Barrier. A pair of ghostly-green wings formed on his back, contorting to cover him as he jumped from the ceiling to the ground.

Meanwhile, the smoke-missiles’ trajectories curved in an effort to strike him, but they only ended up drawing a line of holes along the wall in front of where he landed, passing through the water and kicking up a cloud of nasty mist. A spark of hope; their homing was limited.

Achmed spun around, continuing to run backwards as he watched and waited. That black sphere exploded, throwing 143 across the tunnel and into a wall, blowing off the Stillborn’s legs below the knees, and leaving ominous black smoke eating away at the stumps, almost like a smoldering alchemical flame. Achmed continued retreating, dodging, and blocking the missiles that managed to reach him with his Wing Barrier. Each one struck with terrifying force, making it no wonder why the stillborns didn’t hold up so well against the intruder. Their firepower was truly monstrous.

Even wounded, 143 fought back, raising its arm to the intruder. A barrage of pinpoint-focused shockwaves bombarded the invader, each punctuated by a high-pitched sound, but the shape neither slowed in its march nor showed any other signs of being affected. There was only one sign that the weapon was even hitting; the deformations in the armor. With each shot, a dent the size of a coin formed on the green-eyed demon’s monolithic chestplate, but each time, the armor’s eldritch runes pulsed with light and the metal simply buckled back into shape. Without slowing down or even turning its head, the matte-black monstrosity turned its left arm to 143 and recorded the end of the stillborn’s struggle in oily splatters upon the wall.

Feverishly clicking the detonator, Achmed cursed the fact that after playing with it, he had forgotten to make sure it was set to detonate all paired charges at once. With each click one of the charges came alive, its respective rod slamming into the wall as the surrounding spikes grew out at odd angles, creating obstacles and preceding the true detonation.

Somehow, someway, the shape simply stepped out of the way of the spikes, as if it knew exactly where they would go just by looking at them before they grew. In a rapid sequence, numerous such stone spikes grew, dense enough to skewer or entrap the invader. The main charges were then consumed by forceful vibrations, their tetrahedral shells resonating. They were not mere pyramids full of gunpowder; instead, they sequentially released enormously powerful shockwaves with a range precisely confined to the tunnel’s inner volume. The first shockwave traveled down the tunnel, and Achmed had to stop moving and cover his ears.

“No collateral damage, fucking bullshit…” he seethed inwardly. Each shockwave that came made his bones and tendrils shake, immobilizing him and disrupting his focus. The tunnel was indeed untouched, however.

When the shaking stopped and Achmed looked the way of the killzone, he saw nothing; just a brownish cloud formed from the powderized stone spikes and vaporized water.

192 - Sewer Wars Pt. 1 [Cherno]

With her exhalation, Viridaimon’s crow-like gas mask released long threads of smoke. Krahe raised her left arm, holding it straight to get a feel for the suit’s stabilization. Then, she dived, just to dial-in any impact Viridaimon might have had upon the Liminal Coil’s functions. The relative time distortion felt a bit weaker, but the dive worked fine otherwise. She began forming a burster in her right hand as she continued further, sending Barzai up ahead.

_____________________________________________________________

Achmed smoked a cigarette, lazily ambling out of the subterranean loading bay and into the flooded tunnel that led into it. He balanced atop one of the cart rails to avoid wading through water. His tendrils writhed inside his lungs as the smoke spread through them. But then, something felt off; one of his tendrils was caught, and he stopped dead, leaning a bit as he mentally commanded the tendril, dragging up a clump of tarry mucus before he spat it out and put the tendril back in place.

Meanwhile, the two hideous things assigned to him waded along through the water, oily patches spreading out around their legs.

They were insectile, evoy-like things, but wrong in countless ways.

To start with, their morphs were malformed, with emaciated, human-like torsos and lanky limbs, almost looking like a dried out corpse with chitin plates haphazardly stuck to it willy-nilly. Black tubes and cables snaked in and out of them, and fully artificial organ enclosures bulged their stomachs or protruded out of them in various ways. Heavy-duty, helmet-like sensor array grafts covered their heads. The one to his right had several large, circular graft-eyes set into its head graft in a scattershot pattern, and as a result it had a habit of constantly looking around. A decal was sloppily airbrushed onto the side of its head. It read: “SB-55C-143”. The other one had no visible eyes, but it constantly emitted a low buzzing and it seemed to “see” just fine. This one’s decal read “SB-55C-82”.

Both of them had one functional arm, with clawed, knobby, dysgenic fingers, and one weaponized arm. One-four-three’s leftie was a muscular limb with a bulbous, mace-like head, sectioned off into five petal-like parts that could open to reveal an array of six silver membranes, one at the center and five around it. As for 82, its left arm retained a hand, but it was distorted and partially split down the middle to fit a weapon graft onto the underside of its forearm. It looked like one of the Blasting Arrays that had been mounted on the Foreman’s Hounds, but smaller, clearly accommodating for the unit’s more limited power output and weaker build. A primitive, cheap, but effective “shotgun”.

“Lotta good the operation at Slaughterhouse 9 did to those rich fucks if you lot’re all that came out of it…” he muttered derisively, taking another toke. Less human than even stitched-together hobo corpses, these things were supposedly failed evoy molts that had been “recycled”. Little more than corpses reanimated with heavy grafting; never even alive to begin with, in the same realm as the artificial bodies offered by the church. Suitable vessels only for the Gor’ah in their heads that gave them motion; they certainly took to these shells better than natural humanoid meatsuits. It was obvious something about these “Stillborns” were explicitly designed to accommodate Gor’ah and thus compensate for their sorely lacking intellect. The nature of that compensation was far beyond Achmed’s station, but he was sure it was something extremely fucking heretical given the Benefactors’ involvement.

Slowly, lazily, taking his sweet time, he continued his patrol. Being only one of many guarding the mansion, he didn’t actually have a great deal of responsibility. His purpose here was threefold. The first task was to act as a minder for the Stillborns, and the second was to receive a delivery that was to come through here. Some kid. He didn’t think twice about the purpose or origin of that delivery, having long numbed himself to far worse cruelties than human trafficking. If it wasn’t happening in front of his face, he could easily act as if it didn’t exist at all. The third and perhaps most crucial task was to keep an eye on blasting charges planted along a section of the tunnel, and to set them off if any intruder came through and managed to reach the area where they were planted. The Stillborns were there to keep the trafficker honest and to act as a barrier between any would-be intruders and Achmed for long enough to set off the charges.

He soon got to the section with the charges. They were nothing like any explosives he had seen. Occult-looking tetrahedrons made of brass, with long, three-sided black rods emerging from their apexes, ominous symbols glowing orange down the rods’ sides. He couldn’t read it, but it didn’t look like any human alphabet, and Achmed was abnormally well-read for his current career path. Tetrahedral spikes emerged from the tunnel wall around each charge, seemingly “growing” out of the bricks. Achmed guessed at some sort of geomancy. Feeling no need to hurry, Achmed took his time checking them over, eventually stepping onto the tunnel wall and walking up it. A petty trick learned from a saurian he had inhabited in the past, but terribly useful. Sure, he had a fancy detonator obviously built specifically for these things, but it was never bad to be double, triple certain that explosives wouldn’t misfire.

Footsteps approached from afar, sloshing in the grimy water. Achmed perked up, anticipating the trafficker. He finished his checks and retreated a short distance, outside the remote charges’ blast zone. It was at a turn in the tunnel, this spot chosen specifically to allow him to look down the other side or to take cover.

It wasn’t the trafficker. He knew that the moment 82 became agitated, both in body language and sound. Its quiet buzzing took on a deeper tone and became far louder, its inaudible frequencies sending ripples through the water underfoot and within Achmed’s body alike.

WALKING TRIBULATION

Commissioned from ValnikR

342 - Slay the Dragon Pt. 2/The Governor Gets a Call [Sturmblitz]

Plates all across the armor slid out of the way, revealing a mixture of vents, heatsinks, and thrusters on the back and legs, inspired by Zero’s G-3 refit. A deluge of bloody Fog erupted from the suit, trailing behind it as Makhus shattered the ground and went soaring skyward.

The taste of blood and the burn of gastric acid filled his mouth.

He didn’t care.

This was the only way he could be good enough.

Pinning the dragon the way Lydia had done was one thing; it was a well-documented weakness, but one that could not be used to deliver a lethal blow. The beast’s braincase was far too resilient, absurdly thick and impervious to concussion. The only way was beheading, and due to the beast’s interlocked vertebrae, that was a feat comparable to severing a solid beam of high-grade cold-iron.

A matte-black bullet crashed down upon the beast, possessing a white tail formed from Fog and a burning blade of white light. In a single cut, the Wildfire Kite’s head was parted from its body, and the slash carried forward into the forest, splitting trees and boulders and wounding the earth; not as a ponderous shockwave, but an instantaneous flash of killing light.

SEVERING SCRIPTURE FRAGMENT

CLAD IN IRON WITHOUT

AND FIRE COURSING WITHIN

WITH TOTAL CLARITY OF MIND

SURPASS THE LIMITS EARTHLY

BREAK THEM

A DESCENDANT OF DRAGONS

BEHEADED WITH ONE CUT

THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

PARTED BY A STUBBORN FOOL

SOUL-SWORD-SINGLE-STRIKE

HURRICANE THUNDERCLAP GUILLOTINE

All fell silent and still.

As the Wildfire Kite's body froze solid in the moment of its death and its lifeblood fountained out of the stump of its neck, the three-eyed figure of Elder Makhus stood just as motionless. It appeared as if he was challenging the dragon-descendant's body to make an attempt at reunion with its head, or vice versa.

It didn't matter what Makhus was actually thinking.

It didn't matter how he felt, or how he saw himself, or the mixture of elation, surprise, and pain coursing through him.

At that moment, he had taken another step away from the shores of humanity.

Makhus Newman, the Dragon-beheading Sword.

Dazed and confused, for more reasons than the enormous G-forces and the cocktail of elixirs coursing through him, Makhus dropped his sword, muttering into his helmet: “Helmet, off.”

Kept upright only by his armour, Makhus ambled over to the great beast’s gushing neck-stump and slotted a storage tablet into his belt. From his palm erupted a vortex of Fog, manifesting a giant tub of rune-inscribed copper to catch the blood.

He pinged Lydia asking for help, while he half-mindedly pulled items out of storage tablets and observed his surroundings.

The possibility of the dragon feigning death remained, and they could not afford to damage its vital organs to the degree that would be required to ensure a true death no matter what.

Thus, they had to guard the corpse until the sect’s harvesters came, tending to their wounds as they did so. Having access to tens of liters in fresh dragon blood certainly helped.

______________________________________________________________________________

The sound of ringing ripped Crovacus Estoras from his peaceful slumber. He instantly shot up in his chair, his mind already racing - he had fallen asleep at his desk, and had even dreamt of the matters at hand. The moment he was awake, he was ready. Without a moment’s thought, he downed the contents of his mug, this being about a deciliter and a half of faintly-glowing blue liquid. Tengri’s Tears; a fancy liquid vigor spiked with daytime dust.

He turned off the alarm clock, poured himself another cup of Tengri’s Tears, and returned to his paperwork.

But no more than twenty minutes later, he heard that ringing again. For a few moments he wondered if he was trapped in a multi-layered dream, but then he realized it was the aetherwave receiver. He stared into empty space for a moment, sipping his drink before setting it back down. Then, he got up and made his way to the receiver.

Several minutes passed as Crovacus listened to the voice at the other end, during which he quickly went from standing at the machine to pacing nervously like a tiger, dragging the handset’s serpentlike cable behind himself. He took out a terribly expensive imported cigar and began smoking it.

“...Less than a thousand civilian survivors? What of-”

Silence reigned for minutes more as Crovacus listened with bated breath to a very rough and only mostly accurate account of the incident.

“Demonic cultivators? Iusticia spare us. Rigport is as good as lost, then… I suppose it solves the issue of housing the displaced, assuming the city’s infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed beyond use. Contact the others in the Free Cities Alliance. Yes, even the Red Lady. We must ensure whatever is left of the city comes under our control, even if that means shipping a gaggle of war veterans there - you know as well as I the value of such a trade hub just by virtue of its location. I hope we can at least leverage the incident’s potential damage to obtain some relief. You seem awfully hesitant to speak of her. Do we have another Blue Moon War situation at hand?”

In his mind, if the threat was resolved, it wasn’t even a question whether Zelsys Newman was alive or not. He had learned that her relationship with death was a purely cordial one the year prior, after all. Whether she would be in any state to fight again in the next six months, however… That was anyone’s guess.

The voice at the other end spoke up again.

“...Her lungs? Coughed them up, you say?”

In the end, that turned out to be an immense overstatement, but the Newman Sect’s founder was nonetheless incapacitated for some time. It was no wonder; all individuals involved in the incident were, at best, utterly drained and severely rattled by the incident.

And so, as the aftermath of the Eberheim Incident rang out through the country and news of it carried across the continent, those involved in that historical event spent their days resting in a manner that would seem psychotic to any normal mortal. Elixirs, medicinal baths, meditative trances deep in the sect’s Leyline Well, numerous small tournaments, all of this and more fell under the umbrella of “rest and recovery” for the Newman Sect’s brave heroes.

341 - Slay the Dragon Pt. 1 [Sturmblitz]

Lucian couldn’t use the Bearstopper Guard here; the force of the Wildfire Kite’s tail was something altogether different from the mere membrane of its wing. Out of desperate resolve, he took up a stance and harnessed a technique his master had gone to great lengths to hammer into him. Knifetongue had also gone to great lengths to hammer into him that he was not to use it unless the alternative was certain death until his training reached the volume where it was written down.

Despite the obvious reasons not to, Lucian shoved his war-knife into his wrist, pushing it up his arm as far as it would go, between his forearm bones, but without severing any major veins. It was infernally tricky, especially since he had not been able to practice it directly. The saving grace was that he could harden his arm partially to reduce the odds of an accident. The pain was… Lesser than he had anticipated. Blood gushed out of the wound, but none of the arteries had been cut.

He slipped closer towards the Kite, biding his time. A painstaking, eternal second and a half, tilting his body back, holding his arms in a painful and awkward position to align his blade with the beast’s tail and ensure he could swing it high enough to sever it before it whipped around to grasp and pulverize him.

SIGN OF DESPERATE VALOR

SHEATHED WITHIN MY FLESH

SHARPENED ON MY BONES

OILED WITH MY BLOOD

THIS BLADE IS MY LIFE

MY LIFE IS THIS BLADE

BAYONET-EATER’S CREED

LIVING SHEATH CROSSCUT

Following the motion of his slash, a deluge of blood flowed out of his arm, trailing the tip of his blade. More and more flowed, until, well before blade met scale, the kriegsmesser had grown twice and half again in length.

In an instant, the dragon’s tail was parted from its body, and a great shockwave of crimson sent it flying whilst also coating everything in the vicinity with Lucian’s blood. The hemomantic construct had exploded the instant its purpose was fulfilled, for every bit of power holding it together had been spent, and then some. The dragon's roar shook the air and the earth underfoot, filled with anger and disbelief rather than pain.

Lucian continued forward, desperately pushing his body even further beyond its limits to get out of harm’s way before the ground rose up to meet his face. 

Makhus hopped to the side despite having an opening for an attack, trying to get Lucian in his sightline. Acala had shown him a far worse future than the one which had come to pass. Out of sixteen possibilities, there were only four in which Lucian’s self-sacrificial technique worked correctly. Out of these four, there were only two in which he carried it out without severing his veins and immediately collapsing. At least, such was the armour’s prediction.

Whether it was luck, fate, skill, or sheer grit carrying him through, the young man had managed to sever the dragon descendant’s tail before jumping just far enough to avoid the barrage of fiery arrows that instantaneously rained down in his wake. His movements immediately grew sluggish, and he stumbled a few more meters before collapsing, barely keeping himself semi-upright with his sword. Rivulets of blood trickled from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears, his gaze hazy and unfocused, his body wracked by convulsive spasms; the backlash of his overexertion. Even still, he somehow mustered the inhuman force of will to bring out his tablet, pulling out a bottle of Witch’s Brew and a canister of Borean wound-sealant, “Fryg’s Salve”. He didn't smear the salve onto the wound so much as he slathered his fingers in it and shoved them into the hole that was his wrist.

The blade was not in much better shape than its wielder; the edge was completely stripped, and the fact it had not snapped was even more of a miracle. It seemed to melt into Lucian’s hand at the grip; the same blood that had overpowered the sword was now holding it together.

Sending out a wordless aetherwave ping, Lydia signaled that now was the right time to finish the beast. She sprung into action, catapulting Vysaga to a spot far above the dragon’s head. The sword already burned with a redoubled charge, more a black blur shrouded in cherry-pink lightning than a distinct blade. A moment passed as Vysaga hung there, only for the lightning to coalesce around it, forced into a shape vaguely resemblant of a blade.

With an exertion of will so great it made tears of blood burst from Lydia’s right eye, she howled: “GO TO PERUN!”

PERUN'S ARROW

LOOSED FROM ON HIGH

ATOP THE STORMBLOOM

MAN’S OWN DIVINE JUDGMENT

WRESTED FROM THE GODS OF OLD

STORMBLOOM ARTS

FULGURITE PILEDRIVER

Vysaga came crashing down from above with the force of a lightning strike, and the Kite's advance was halted. The blade flowed along an erratic trajectory, adjusting its course from one split-second to the next as it sought the path of least resistance to the ground.

That path was through the dragon’s nostril, through its mouth, and into the forest floor, slamming it shut. Great gusts of flame erupted out the sides of the beast’s maw, and it emitted a muted roar of pain as the trapped flame built up past its tolerance, scorching its gums. The discharge of thunderous power into the ground was such that the carbonized soil came alive once more, lichtenberg figures spreading out in all directions, baking the subsurface clay in a few spots into fulgurite - the reason for the technique’s name.

Wasting no time, Makhus had already triggered his suit’s injectors and switched the mask valve. The modified helmet contained two fogging canisters: A normal one, and a special one containing a compound that didn’t work as an injectable. Rather it worked, but it reacted in his blood with the others, causing internal bleeding. Thus, this alternate delivery vector was needed. His heart pounded in his ears, the breath burned in his lungs and the blood boiled in his

veins.

“Full… Release! If I can be good enough for just a second, that will suffice!”

“Alert. Alert. Heart arrhythmia detected. Minor internal bleeding- Blood toxicity- Spiritual overstrain- Cognitive overload detected!” Acala’s stern monotone sounded inside his head, warning him of his aberrant biometrics, but he mentally dismissed them all right away. He pressed the override button, forcing the belt to resonate its core with his soul whilst also disabling all of the armour’s limiters.

191 - Guilt Repaid in Cold Blood [Cherno]

Originally, she had planned to immobilize and interrogate the woman, then maybe give her a chance at survival by turning her over to the church. It would have depended on how she came across during the interrogation, whether she was just a broken person in a bad situation and so on. There was no longer space for such nuance; not with the trafficker obviously lunging for the child in an attempt to take a human shield. A simple skim forward, followed by a left straight punch into the trafficker’s stomach - or rather, given how she was turned, her liver. The force of that punch alone was enough to send the fifty-something kilo woman to the ground. Despite having made an effort to avoid subjecting the boy to needless trauma, Krahe’s anger got the better of her, and she held out her hand.

Furious redness illuminated the underpass.

An equally furious electric buzz followed. It waned, then began again, doing so a total of three times. The child tried to look at first, but Krahe blocked off his sight with a thin sheet of jade. Only a steaming, greasy silhouette remained upon the flagstones.

Krahe killed the fusion reaction for the final time, holding up her hand to her face, somewhat dumbfounded. While the Shardkey didn’t strengthen her Tolerance much more than the Twin Serpent key, the dissipation rate was a total gamechanger.

“I did not know that Barzai could detect lies,” Casus remarked as he approached, having emerged from hiding moments earlier.

“He can’t, it was just a distraction,” she shrugged. “I could just tell, both that she was a trafficker and that she was lying.”

The boy, confused and terrified in equal measure, had walked out from under the underpass, bawling his eyes out. The child’s panic and terror mingled with a sense of awe as he noticed Casus, craning his neck to look up at the two-meter-tall living holy relic.

“Get the kid out of here. I’ll go on ahead. Don’t worry, I’ll leave a few of them for you.”

Despite wanting to save the child, Krahe also strongly disliked dealing with them, because she didn’t know how.

“Are you certain?” Casus asked, but the question rang hollow. He was already kneeling over the child as he asked. Looking back, Krahe reached up to her head and started pulling on her voidkey.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. ”There’s a shrine not too far from here, just take him there and come back.”

Visibly conflicted, Casus sighed, picking up the child while keeping him from looking at the corpse.

“Five minutes. I shall return in five minutes,” he uttered before sprinting off. The boy remained silent, too shaken to scream.

Before long, she had the key out of her head and slotted into the Black Sun Coupler. It was just her and Barzai now.

The underpass fell silent.

As for the hidden passage, there were a few loose bricks throughout the underpass, but only one that hid an actual lever. The others were supposedly a mix of duds and fakes that would send an alarm when removed. Casus had also noted that Seer said the alarms were always ignored because of how often they were tripped on accident. The section of wall seamlessly swung open, revealing a heavy vault door behind the stone facade. She closed it behind herself, since Casus knew how to open it.

Inside, it really was just a tunnel. She continued deeper, keeping her senses open and her hand on the transformation dial. On and on, through the empty tunnel, twisting and turning, the only sound being her footsteps. There were basic lights, strung up along the left wall. The air was dry, but not stale, and gradually even that dryness was replaced by an unpleasant, stale dampness. As she walked, she glimpsed a few side rooms, most being either empty or filled with random trash, boxes, and so on. A few were caved in, and several more contained recognizable items. Within one particular room an articulated chair stood, bolted to the ground in the middle, next to it a table, a bucket, and a tub, everything stained a crusty, dark brown. Several teeth littered the ground.

A second chamber of the same type waited a few steps further, entirely missing a door, with deep gashes in the stone and the chair clearly having been ripped out of the ground and thrown against the wall with inhuman force. This room too was stained. Continued signs of carnage followed through the tunnel for some time, until at some point, they stopped at a repaired section, where the tunnel had clearly been severely damaged by something, likely an explosion.

A handful of makeshift jail cells followed, clean save for a thick layer of dust, with three being clean enough to suggest recent use, but empty, with the exception of mattresses and shit-filled buckets. She couldn’t tell in the dark, but the mattresses looked stained in spots that did not suggest an adult source, nor any sort of natural incontinence. She knew what it meant, and fostered the ember of rage as she continued onward.

The sound of footsteps, splashing through the ankle-deep water, could be heard.

Without much thought, she turned the dial and gave herself over to the Black Sun Coupler. The suit had slightly changed from its previous form, incorporating the Trinity Composite into its armour, creating an even larger, more ominous silhouette than before. Its plating, though still matte and utilitarian, was shaped subtly differently, influenced by the Shardkey’s fragmentary memory of its original form as the armor of a legendary warlord. The plates now bore additional minute details, as well as cuneiform inscriptions along the edges. Some were words of protection, others were proclamations of rebuke. The Forming Toroid was incorporated seamlessly into the right arm’s gauntlet, and the same went for her gun holster.

As her swift metamorphosis completed and her senses returned, the bird flew over to her and perched on her shoulder. He opened his beak, replaying a horribly garbled mess of noise that vaguely resembled a snippet out of a doom metal song. Monumental, ominous guitars and gigantic drums underlined demonic, bassy vocals, spoken more than they were sung. They surely contained what Barzai wanted to express: “None can save your souls, none escape the wrath. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No life is spared, renounce the cries for help!”

190 - Trafficker [Cherno]

“Do we get Red Hood support, or are they all needed for the frontal assault?” she asked as she locked the gun-like catalyst to her left arm’s bracer.

“Unfortunately, we shall be on our own in the subterrain,” Casus said.

And so, they were off, riding through the city until they reached a somewhat nearby nook to stash the motorbike in. As they approached their goal, Krahe sent Barzai further and further ahead. Even if it was secret, given its nature, it was not unlikely for Semzar or one of his subordinates to station guards or at least lookouts nearby.

There were no guards standing outside the secret entrance, and it was walled up just as Seer had described, but Barzai did see something. A woman, walking down the street with a boy in tow. He couldn’t be more than seven or eight, dressed in brand new, generic clothes. The woman’s manner of dress was the same, generic to the point of being suspicious, and imperfect at points. Her fingers bore numerous rings, some of which were Calbian currency, and tattoos peeked out from the insides of her sleeves. Something about the two of them, about that boy’s demeanor and the way he seemed to be dragged along, set Krahe off. She had seen human trafficking countless times; in fact, she had personally depopulated entire sub-sectors that had been used for that revolting practice. Seeing that woman all but dragging the child along was dubious enough, but the fact she looked utterly unlike the boy was another nail in her coffin. In fact, she didn’t look much like a real person at all. It wasn’t obvious at a glance, not something a normal person would easily notice; no baneworm tendrils visible under her skin, no evidence of heavy cosmetic grafting, nothing so surface-level. It was her entire being, particularly her face and the manner in which she moved. Krahe had seen it countless times; gangsters, merchants of death, loan sharks, corporate ladder-climbers, politicians.

If Krahe’s measure of her was right, the fundamental thread of humanity inside that woman was too severely corroded for her to mask it at all times - and as far as she knew, there was nobody looking right now.

“There’s someone approaching the entrance. Stay out of sight if you can,” she said to Casus. She rushed along, sending Barzai to the underpass, where she left him hovering in a manner impossible for a living bird. Hidden from sight, the eidolon hung there, flapping his wings without disturbing the air. Closer and closer. Krahe timed her approach so she would entrap the woman, while Casus hung back, ducking into an alleyway.

From this up close, she would be able to be sure. She just needed the woman to face her, and she did. At first she turned slightly to face the hidden entrance, glimpsing Krahe in the periphery, after which she whipped around to face her, reaching for something on her hip.

“It’s… It’s you… The one from the posters!” came an alarmed utterance. The woman raised her barrier, forming a translucent shield of greenish-blue hexagons. It was about a meter tall, a bit less wide, and flat rather than domed. Meanwhile, she raised one hand, forming octahedral spikes in front of each finger. With her other, she held onto the boy. There was a feral kind of fear in her eyes.

“Oh? You know me? Then this’ll be easier. Just answer me one question. Just one. Easy, right? Where are you taking the kid? Tell the truth for once in your wretched life, and I won’t kill you, or maim you.”

Krahe genuinely meant that. If the woman spoke truthfully, she would choke her out, tie her up, and get Casus to drag her off to be detained by the church. She also knew that was astronomically unlikely to come to pass.

“H-huh? Him? I- He’s my cousin’s little brother. I’m taking him home, yeah, taking him home.”

Even without the kid’s eyes screaming that it was a lie, it would’ve been obvious. Slowly approaching, raising her own Barrier just in case, Krahe reiterated: “That’s a lie. One more chance, c’mon. I won’t pretend to be an Inquisitor, but I have my own means of getting the truth when I want it. If you lie, or even try to avoid the question, may the spirit of a raven peck out your eyes. Well?”

Obviously, a human trafficker wouldn’t openly admit that she was a human trafficker.

She opened her mouth to speak, and the moment the beginnings of a word came out, Krahe willed Barzai to set upon her. He revealed himself, screeching with the voice of some bird that definitely wasn’t a raven, and indeed set upon the trafficker-woman’s face, tearing into her Wards with his beak, reddish flame spilling out. She wildly fired off her thaumaturgy, but Krahe had already dived, and before the boy could be hurt, Krahe had the woman in a simplistic grapple. She had surfaced and simply wrapped her left arm around the trafficker from behind, pinning her arms to her body.

The trafficker-woman’s strength faltered utterly against hers, despite the fact she was stronger than a civilian man. Thanks to consistent physical training, Krahe’s Force had grown to E2, but that alone would not have produced this result. The Left Arm of Chernobog grew in strength alongside all of her attributes, including even the Shardkey’s benefits. This all coalesced into a crushingly powerful bearhug that squeezed the air out of the trafficker-woman’s lungs and forced her to let go of the boy. Despite all this, the trafficker got her bearings and fought back, summoning up ghostly hands that snatched Barzai, grabbed at Krahe’s hair, and attempted to grab at any possible point to get her off the trafficker. Quickly realizing that it wasn’t working, the trafficker gathered all but one at Krahe’s arm and simply tried to pry it free - the one leftover fighting with Barzai. These ghostly limbs were all just as strong as the trafficker, four of them managing to weaken Krahe’s grasp enough for the woman to slip free. Krahe couldn’t help but wonder whether she was a trafficker because of this ability, or vice versa.

Either way, it didn’t matter. She was a corpse that didn’t know it was dead yet.

189 - Trinity Composite (Also Frustration) [Cherno]

As Krahe made her way from Garvesh’s place and turned the corner, she heard a man’s footsteps nearby, just entering the same alleyway from the other end. Rapid, but decisive, not agitated. They were accompanied by a whistled melody. Though she never once glimpsed that stranger, she felt an unsettling sensation wash over her. She walked aimlessly for a short time, looking out for signs of  someone following her or laying in ambush, but found no evidence of such a thing, and so continued on her way back to Gashward 94. Her intention was to replace her voidkey and reuse the miniature sarcophagus for Atomica. However, she still had quite a bit of built-up Isotope stored in her arm, so she decided to dissipate most of it first before she carried out a voidkey change. She had, after all, plenty of time to burn.

In the blink of an eye, several hours passed.

If only that were the case. In truth, Krahe could feel the blood pounding in her head and her eyes glazing over as she read the same strip of Yao’s scroll over and over. It was one of the few outright mystical sections, and was presented as such, with the scroll openly stating it was a riddle, a way of preparing the reader for other texts that were likely to be this obtuse in their entirety. She pulled the last dregs of Isotope into herself, lit up a cigarette, and decided to just wait it out, laying back on the sofa as she turned the shardkey over in her hand. She could have taken more purge pills to speed up the process, but besides being unpleasant at best, they were also caustic enough to threaten stomach lining damage with repeat dosage. This was not a problem when they were used as intended - to help purge minor curses.

As she felt the last of her Isotope scatter and fade, Krahe sat up, mentally glancing at her arm’s Isotope capacity - 20% full. Enough to do something with, not enough to be a problem. She conjured a talisman into her hand. One among the insights she had managed to glean from Yao’s scroll was a truly rudimentary talisman for easing the extraction of a “set” voidkey. It required no external power, only good ink and a steady hand to draw its symbol, a winding “spiral” of straight lines and right angles.

Extracting the Twin Serpent Key felt just as sickly-ticklish and unpleasant as it had been when she did it for the Black Sun Coupler’s test run. If she had to assume the talisman had done anything, she would guess it might have reduced the stress on the voidkey itself, or it might have sped up the fading of that sickly, wound-like sensation of absence. The Shardkey went in easily, but the moment it was seated, Krahe felt a faint wrongness. After mentally feeling around in the dark, a subtle mental pull clued her in on the culprit: her Wards were wrong. Or rather, they didn’t match the key’s embedded Ward design.

As she dispersed and began reconstructing her Wards, Krahe found that the Shardkey was guiding her. At first, she couldn’t help but feel as if her Wards were forming far too quickly, twice or thrice faster than normal, but it turned out to be only the first layer. Bit by bit, Krahe built up the multi-layered structure, and the reason for the term “Trinity Composite” became clear. A “padding” underlayer of homogenous, compressed pyroclast. A “flexible armor” layer of interlocking segments, serving as a smooth transition into the outermost, “articulated plates” layer, resembling obsidian in colour and reflectiveness. The Trinity Composite design was somewhere between antique full-plate and modern hardsuit armor… And Krahe still couldn’t quite tell why this worked, unlike most of her previous attempts. She well and truly hoped it was up to her own lacking understanding of how Wards functioned, rather than some glaring flaw in her thinking that she couldn’t perceive. After all, she had no clue how they didn’t get in the way, why they only showed themselves to protect their user, how they determined what was an attack. If she could grasp the fundamental nature of Wards, the ability to reshape her own as she saw fit would follow.

Frustrated, she finished reworking her wards, before placing Atomica in the stone box and storing it away. She immediately left for the Temple of Records, leveraging her access to restricted texts on Wards. She left with a total of three books, two being publicly available foundational texts while the third contained records of nontraditional Ward compositions, as well as various methods for embedding and extracting the ward composition of a voidkey. Their titles and authors read as such:

Armour of the Spirit

by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi

The Wizard’s Aegis:

A comprehensive history of personal wards.

by Audun Sorun

Record of Transcending Human Resilience: Chapter of Wards

translation by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi

original by Unknown

The Record of Transcending Human Resilience was the restricted text. While the others were typical leather bound tomes, this text was a scroll, with the translator explaining that he disliked scrolls and only used this form factor because the record didn’t work within a book format.

Krahe got as far as learning the most prevalent theory of Ward invention. This theory was based on countless historical accounts corroborating it, and itself stated that they were most likely invented as a defense against melee attackers, originally intended to buy a magic user enough time to create distance. At that point, as she was getting into the historical usage of personal Wards, Casus came into the safehouse.

A simple phrase followed with his entrance: “Ah. You are here. Good. We know where Semzar is and how to get to him.”

Those words were all it took for Krahe to stick a blank talisman paper into her book and jump to her feet. Just like that, a switch was flipped in her head, and she took the Black Sun Coupler from its spot in a hidden compartment under the kitchen stove. She strapped it to her waist, donned the supporting armor, and covered it all with a long coat - one of her articles of disguise. They spoke briefly as she did this, exchanging basic operational info and the plan of attack. It was a straightforward plan, but it made sense.

340 - Petals of Spring [Sturmblitz]

And so, when he glimpsed the writhing mass of pink lightning that was Senior Lydia’s sword, Lucian ripped both his sword and fingers free, pushing off of the Kite’s wing with his feet. The dragon instinctively tried to toss him off at the sensation of pain, and in so doing, sent him flying right into a tree… And through it. The charred, stone-tough body of an old fir tree was cut in half by the young man’s body, as if his entire body was a blade. Having seen that tree as he flew, Lucian had instinctively marshaled the brunt of his aura to this purpose. He curled up to protect himself as he flew, and in the moments before impact, his entire body indeed turned into a blade. Crude bayonet-spurs even erupted from his joints and vertebrae. He half cut, half smashed through that tree, only to carve a channel into the ground with his head, completely losing that state of focused self-transmutation. With it, the majority of his strength was spent, and he barely managed to get himself far enough off the ground to witness Senior Lydia fire off her technique at the Kite’s left wing.

STORMBLOOM SIGN

ART OF KILLING BLOSSOMS: PETALS OF SPRING -HOWLING GALE-

A vast pressure erupted from Lydia, scattering the countless petals that had swirled around her.

She performed a horizontal cutting motion with her left hand, raising her right to the heavens.

Then, with a thunderous sound, the inferno of lightning around Vysaga went careening forward. Despite its chaotic nature, somehow, it created a perfectly distinct blade. As if caught in the aftershock, all the lightning-petals Lydia had scattered came rushing back in, following in the blade’s wake. It smashed into the Kite’s wing, cutting through the outermost digit and the membrane, only stopped by the middle digit. The deluge of petals that followed served to shred apart the wing’s membrane and scales, and even the main-body armor scales beyond it, and before it could dissipate, the lightning blade severed the second and third digits, leaving the limb a mangled stump useless for flight. All around its shoulder the dragon’s hide sat exposed and unprotected, and worse for the beast still, its own scales were now breaking and getting caught on tattered skin.

Perfectly synchronized with Senior Lydia, Elder Makhus hopped to a particular spot, predicting even the manner in which the dragon would reel from the pain. He dropped into a wide stance, somehow manipulating his belt in a way Lucian couldn’t make out. White light flowed up the right side of his chest and down his sword arm, and after a split-second of wait, he exploded from a standstill. With a movement faster than sight and sound, accompanied by a thunderclap, he outright severed the two outer digits of the right wing, bones, membrane and all. The only part of the technique Lucian could clearly make out was the blindingly bright flash of white light, spilling out around his sword’s blade for the length of the swing and not a moment longer.

IRON PHILOSOPHY: OPUS TWO

As torrents of boiling blood gushed freely from the Wildfire Kite’s crippled wings, the beast seemed to reach a critical point. It suddenly became far more aggressive in its usage of flame, as if it only now realized that its life was truly at risk here, that they were more than mere pests. Its singular eye blazed with a furious light, and its aura surged such that Lucian found himself cast down to the ground, barely able to breathe at all, let alone maintain a breathing technique.

Its wrath turned on the nearest reachable target: Makhus.

Fire poured wildly from the dragon’s maw and turned into countless different forms as it strived to strike him down, from spears to swords and whips, even to serpents and a whole extra neck and head made solely of flame. That second head existed for only long enough to lash out and turn into a shotgun-burst of spears. But the Prescient Swordsman, the Mad Alchemist, the Mediocre Genius, the man who had come to be known as the Evil-cleaving Sword for his acts in the Blue Moon War, was unharmed. Shielded from the heat by his divine armor, he danced amidst the flames, cutting them apart with his white-burning sword as if they were mere weeds.

Despite the appearance of a decisive, crippling blow, the loss of its wing membranes didn’t do much to impede the Kite’s ability to use its wings as bludgeoning implements, and its freakish vitality sealed its wounds long before the blood loss could catch up to it. Lydia, having swapped the fuel gem of her sword, closed the distance somewhat, maneuvering Vysaga around the dragon and harassing it while keeping her distance. She made no attempt to hide the fact that she was simply conserving her strength and building it back up for another major technique, and the Kite was too blinded by rage to think so far ahead. Makhus was nothing if not good at keeping its attention. Even when Lydia was targeted, Makhus simply brought out a bundle of modified stick grenades and threw it at the beast’s feet, causing a chain of blinding flashes and concussive blasts. They weren’t remotely sufficient to actually injure the creature, but they more than sufficed to confuse it and get its attention back onto Makhus.

The battle went on like this for several minutes, with both sides whittling eachother down and neither able to make significant progress towards the other’s demise. Lucian eventually managed to drag himself back to his feet, drinking half a bottle of Witch’s Brew in the process. He approached the dragon with caution, trying not to get in his seniors’ way, but the beast, for some accursed reason, immediately focused its attention on him the moment he got even slightly close. The kite, in its fury, threw its entire body mass into a hip check, using the motion to whip its tail Lucian’s way… And at this distance, given this speed, he didn’t know how to dodge. Even if he got out of the tail-club’s path, he would still be swept away by the tail itself, possibly even wrapped up in it or smashed anyway by the tail curling inward to hit him. In his mind, there was no avoiding this attack - only stopping it.

339 - Flesh Becomes a Blade [Sturmblitz]

As Lucian hopped back out of the way of the Wildfire Kite’s tail, an opportunistic Kiteling leapt down at him from a tree branch. Lucian had been aware of its presence, but his conscious focus at that moment was squarely on not getting turned into a leaky sack of charred mincemeat by the Kite’s spiked, fiery tail. He defended himself from the Kiteling on pure instinct, feeling the movement of the air and hearing the juvenile dragon. Lucian struck at the creature with a spear-hand uppercut; it was not the ideal strike in this situation by any means, but that was the one that came out. As his mind caught up to his reflexes, Lucian noticed the strange lack of resistance in place of the usual shock from hitting something hard with a spear-hand strike. He then noticed how stiff his hand and wrist felt, and how warm the Kiteling’s blood felt as it ran down his arm.

With a whipping motion, he threw the creature to the ground and brought his hand into view. The world felt as if it came to a halt. He recognized what he saw, having seen this before, but it still felt a bit unreal. His hand had become dark grey, changed into the shape of a bayonet’s point, three grooves visible in place of the gaps between his fingers. His middle finger as the stabbing point, a sharp, polished edge ran from the tip of his index finger, down the fronts of his fingers, and further down the bottom ridge of his hand all the way to his wrist. His thumb, which he had held mostly but not-quite flush with his palm, had taken the shape of a barb at the top.

BAYONET-EATER’S CREED: FLESH BECOMES A BLADE

He felt the Wildfire Kite whipping its tail his way again, and the moment his focus shifted to dodging, his hand turned back to flesh. Everything felt… Sharper, for lack of a better term. Lucian found that he had an easier time reading the path of the Kite’s tail-club, and he could even remain aware of Lydia and Makhus to a degree that laid out of his reach before. The dragon spun in a quarter-circle as part of a wide breath spray combined with a sweeping claw strike, its aura brushing up against his. In that same motion, the Kite stretched out its left wing in an attempt to catch Lucian with it.

He stood his ground, dug his feet in, and raised both his arms; his kriegsmesser in front, with his left arm bracing behind it, fingers held straight. This was one of the few techniques that required the first major breakthrough to function, with this basic version relying on defensive instinct as a trigger to merge the user’s arm with an external weapon to form a stronger defense. It was explicitly designed to counter the strikes of larger, stronger opponents, such as monsters. Nothing happened until the Kite’s wing was dangerously close to toppling Lucian and breaking his arms in the process, but at that last second, he felt his arm stiffen, and even felt the kriegsmesser’s blade, including the sensation of digging into the beast’s unreasonably tough flesh. The Kite raised its wing high enough to avoid taking a deeper cut, but it was done. Lucian had wounded it, he had forced this descendant of ancient god-killers to acknowledge him as more than a bug - a dangerous bug with pointy limbs and a sharpened nail grasped in its jaws.

BAYONET-EATER’S CREED: BEARSTOPPER GUARD

He suddenly felt more than just adrenalin, he felt excited, violent impulses going off in his head, demanding him to act now, while there was still an opening, to jump onto that overgrown bat’s wing and shred the membrane to pieces. Without waiting another moment, he split his arm from his kriegsmesser, and then split his fingers apart too, the singular blade of his palm becoming five bayonets. With a herculean exertion of willpower and the sound of straining metal, he forced his left hand into a gripping, claw-like configuration. His fingers didn’t articulate as much as they snapped from one position to another, and it was just as difficult to do as it looked. His kriegsmesser had not visibly merged with his hand, but the connection was undeniably there; the sabre truly felt like an extension of him, in the literal sense; he felt the air whipping across the blade’s surface, and the lingering vibrations of its movement.

Focusing every bit of his strength in his legs and burning his full lung capacity, Lucian leapt upward, turning in mid-air and grabbing for the edge of the Kite’s wing-membrane. The momentum made his fingers cut a few centimeters into the beast’s flesh, boiling-hot blood gushing out, but Lucian was unharmed; the heat simply seeped into him, but could not burn his transmuted hand. Already the Kite began purposely whipping its wing, opening and closing it in an effort to force Lucian off, but he stubbornly held on, tearing away at the beast’s flesh and stabbing away. The way the wing closed caused him to be struck on either side each time, and each time, the beast’s immense aura pressed down on him, only to be cut apart by the fundamental blade-like nature of his own aura. Lucian simultaneously elbowed to the side while dragging his war-knife through the wing-membrane, only for a bayonet-blade to erupt from his elbow and stab between the Kite’s pinecone-like scales.

Lucian was inevitably forced to let go not by the Kite’s violence overpowering his stubbornness, but by a message from Senior Lydia: “Look in my direction. Let go of the wing once you see me. I will strike it with a ranged attack before the dragon can adjust for the absence of your weight.”

Without even thinking, he did exactly as was asked of him. While he waited for the right moment, twisting his neck to see, he held on tightly, allowing the dragon’s own motion to do the hard work of cutting. All Lucian had to do was keep his breathing steady and his focus honed in on reinforcing his war-knife and his fingers, even as his head pounded from the strain.

188 - Shardkey of Heshmad Abbasi [Cherno]

The malformed corpse of Imraal’s cart was still out front, now joined by a trail of dried blood going inside the building. Krahe half-jokingly muttered a prayer to the deceased machine, then went inside, following the blood trail up the stairs to Garvesh’s apartment. From the direction, it was clear a corpse had been dragged out - obviously the baneworm. This guess was confirmed when Krahe entered the bathroom, finding Garvesh still in his pool-sized tub, with the corpse gone.

“Couldn’t they clean the blood after they took the corpse away?” she asked.

“Hrrm?” Garvesh grumbled, the sound more akin to the deep rumble of a cyber-gator than the vocalization of a person. He looked up at her, a predatory glow in his eyes, pupils constricted. Then, it suddenly melted away and he returned to his normal self. “Oh, it’s you, thought it was the cleaner. You just came in after he left to dispose of the meat. He will clean the blood too, if he knows what’s good for him. Well? How’d it go?”

“The snake guy I met with didn’t sound too happy when I brought up the Spire of Glass. Gave me this box that looks like a miniature sarcophagus…” she said, holding out her arm as she began the process of opening the Kenoma Sack.

Garvesh simply watched in silence while continuing to repair another of his ward-scales, this one two rows down and three to the right of the previous. A glint of recognition lit up his eyes at the sight of the box alone, but in the next moment, his gaze became distant. The Thousand-yard Stare; it was unmistakable. Coming closer and kneeling in a spot free of blood next to the tub, she set it on the edge and finally opened it. Immediately, a strong, dense aura spilled out, like a wall of smell hitting her in the face, only it didn’t smell like anything.

For the first time, she took the voidkey out of its container. It was a comet-like shape formed by a three-pronged bronze spiral, suspending in its center a shard of jagged black metal that thrummed with a mysterious and ominous aura. Cuneiform symbols were etched down the length of each of the voidkey’s prongs, as well as on one facet of the shard, though in the shard’s case they were fragmented. Something further inside the box grabbed her eye - a rectangular piece of the bottom, as wide as a memory slate and twice as long, could be pried out. It even had a cutout for a finger on one side.

“Oh, it’s one of these…” the lizard muttered at the sight of the key. Krahe pinged the rectangular stone, and received confirmation that it was, indeed, a memslate, and even that it contained the voidkey’s specifications. Setting the key down, she brought out her eyebox and finagled it to get the too-long memslate into its slot. It only went in halfway, leaving the springloaded cover open, but the eyebox read it just fine. She wondered if this was an old, outdated design, or perhaps just an alternate style of memslate that was still in use.

[SHARDKEY OF HESHMAD ABBASI, No. 7624]

[Tags:]

Third-order

Voidkey

Ancient

Series 7/8

[Details:]

Thaumic Throughput +D1

Entropy Tolerance +D1

Entropy Dissipation +D1

Barrier Catalyst (Hardened, Form-fitting, Shatter-type Anti-Meltdown Safety)

Barrier Hardening +D2

Barrier Formation Rate +E1

Barrier Upkeep Reduction +D1

Ward Catalyst (Hardened, Interlaced, Trinity Composite)

Ward Hardening +C1

This voidkey was wrought of the 7624th fragment of the armour of Heshmad Abbasi. May each among the 8888 Immortals of his great army forever bear a piece of his unfaltering strength.

“A shardkey. Bastard thinks he’s funny throwing it back in my face…” Garvesh said, anger in his words. He shook his head, asking with a calmer tone: “What number is it?”

“Seven-thousand six-hundred twenty-four, Series 7/8. Whoever made it seemed to be under the delusion that it was for some truly elite army.”

“The 8888 Immortals were one of the most elite armies of their time. You just got the second weakest kind of shardkey, the kind used by those of them who didn’t see combat or were not important enough to worry about assassins,” he quickly corrected, seeming as insulted as if she had described a high-caliber revolver as “primitive” to the average droid-wrangler. He held out his free hand to grab the key, and still seeing the dissociation in his eyes, Krahe handed it over. As he examined it, he continued speaking. His accent thinned out, as if he was forgetting to use it: “Each series of 1111 delineates a jump in the voidkey’s power based on the size and quality of the armor shards they’re built around. I’d even say that one of these is the epitome of a low mid-ranker voidkey, solid allrounder with exceptional defensive characteristics. They’re even designed to be compatible with upgrades and are highly collectible, so either way if you keep it or sell it later on you can’t go wrong.”

“How much would it have cost me in DDs?”  Krahe asked in the same tone she used when haggling. That pulled him back.

“Who’s to say?” the old lizard grinned, his accent returning in full force.

“I’m sure you’ll call in that favour I owe you for a tenfold profit,” she grinned back, taking the shardkey out of his hand.

“We’ll see when that time comes. Now go, I…”

Garvesh plainly struggled to finish repairing the scale, his eyes constricting, steam erupting from his nostrils, followed by a trickle of blood. With superhuman effort he did it, and stumbled to his feet, staring ahead like a warrior on the precipice of death. A rumbling noise could be heard from his stomach, and he turned to look at Krahe.

“...I really hope this is yesterday’s dinner instead of the alternative.”

He coughed, and another trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Again he glanced her way, nodding for her to go, and so she did, trying to ignore the gruesome sounds coming from the bathroom as she left. By the rancid stench that reached her just before she got out of the apartment, it seemed the lizard had gotten his preferred outcome.

187 - Plan of Attack Pt. 2 [Cherno]

”I expected you to outright object to the plan. I even prepared two alternatives,” Casus admitted.

“I am an Inquisitor, even if my direct combat capabilities are on the lower end. If I could not stand against odds like these, I would not qualify for my title. I must admit that I am curious - what were these alternatives of yours?”

“The first one… I shan’t say, it is neither relevant nor interesting. As for the second, I intended to enlist the aid of a particular independent contractor by leveraging personal connections as well as dipping into mine and my sister’s money.”

“Who?”

“An… Unpleasant individual, one I would rather not deal with if I can help it. He recently purged a Hazard Zone and lost the entire payout on collateral damage, including any claims on Archonforged items. His combat capabilities are some of the best out of anyone within my reach, but the strings are wrought of razorwire dipped in corrosive venom…” Casus trailed off for a moment as the mental image of that madman floated up from memory. He banished it, and refocused on Yazata: “Fortunately, you didn’t veto my plan. Thus, there is no need to involve him.”

The part he didn’t mention was that he was afraid of that man. Trying to rope in the man known as "The Cleaner Krait" was about as extreme as trying to get official help from the public-facing church, while posing far greater personal danger for Casus. The one upside was that doing so would allow him to bypass the church bureaucracy. In short, an absolute last resort.

“Speaking of combat capabilities…” Yazata looked sidelong at Casus while zooming in the clay model. “Are you certain this ‘Lady Blackhand’ is qualified? I admit that her track record, assuming it is accurate, would be impressive for a low-ranker, but this is not a matter that can be resolved by a handful of low-rankers, even if you yourself are borderline. Semzar Hashem alone is known to possess a near-cap archetype and a high Third-order voidkey, and we do not know who will be with him. His father’s presence would all but guarantee the failure of this endeavor.”

“Semzar is a fool who lacks the skill to properly make use of the power he has stolen from his hosts. He is no different from some grafted-to-the-gills Kartier brat,” Casus responded, also shifting the clay model. “...Moreover, he fears his father as much as he hates him, doubly so given the current circumstances - you yourself confirmed the truthfulness of Seer’s testimony regarding the Hashem Mafia’s internal political state. Between us and Semzar, Semzar has the greatest personal investment in staying apart from Damrus.”

After a shallow nod of acknowledgement, Yazata interrupted: “But he is likely to be accompanied by individuals who could be a real threat. A threat to you or I, let alone a relatively unknown low-ranker. Make no mistake; I trust your judgment, Aristedes, but I would prefer more than a single man’s testimony.”

Casus didn’t like deception. It went against his nature. But nonetheless, he opened his mouth and spoke: “With all due respect, Inquisitor, I would not bet against Blackhand even if she were stripped of all wards and surrounded by gunmen.”

And Yazata didn’t sense a lie, because there wasn’t one. The feat of deception which took place was not one of spoken words, but of mind; Casus wrenched his own consciousness away from everything Yazata didn’t know that she had a right to know. He forced himself to not think about Blackhand’s status as an unlettered apostle, from the fact he had leveraged his status to secure the option of access to a voidkey beyond her qualifications should she require it. Casus did not have the power or the guile to keep such a requisition quiet should it go through, so he kept it to a possibility rooted in the truth of his recent training. His plan, at this moment, was to bring it up with Blackhand and let her decide, hoping she would make the wise choice. Some part of him genuinely believed that she would somehow manage to secure a Third-order voidkey before then, just to avoid having to put her trust in the church.

They separated after going over the details, with Casus loading the map and the plan of approach onto a memslate before leaving to join up with Blackhand. Yazata would, in the meanwhile, continue interrogating Seer until the time came to rendezvous at the staging point: A randomly-selected safehouse that was close enough to be practical but not the single closest, on the off-chance it was being watched.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city…

_____________________________________________________________________________

The first thing Krahe did, once she was a safe distance from the ferry, was to check that there was in fact a voidkey in the box, and to ping it with an appraisal attempt. The key was in there, but her appraisal washed off it in a manner that suggested her glasses couldn’t appraise it properly for reasons other than anti-appraisal measures, meaning it was most likely Third-order.

Rather than heading straight back to Gashward 94 or any other place she normally frequented, Krahe stopped by a small Zaveshian shrine which she had scoped out beforehand without visiting. It was really more of a church-owned gymnasium with a small shrine as part of the front end. After paying for an hour of use and receiving a disposable timer-talisman, she ducked into one of the showers, taking the time to store the voidkey-sarcophagus in her Kenoma Sack. The container seemed to be designed for such storage, as it came alive when she brought it into the storage rift’s vicinity with the intent to put it in. Some of the symbols lit up with purple light, and the lid shifted slightly, becoming firmly fixed. It even took up far less capacity than it rightly should have, just based on knowing the key was Third-order.

With that out of the way, Krahe did actually make use of the gymnasium, showering once she was done. Only then did she make her way to Garvesh’s, taking a detour to a food cart that she liked on the way there. She wished to let him know that all had gone well, and to confirm that the voidkey was of a standard he had expected from his contact.

186 - Plan of Attack [Cherno]

“Just a moment,” Yazata said into the mouthpiece before hanging it up and once more turning the window to a one-way mirror.

“Was that enough information for you to decide on a plan of attack, Aristedes?” she asked, an undercurrent of annoyance in her voice. He couldn’t blame her. He was withholding information from an Inquisitor. That was to be expected from civilians and even witnesses, but not from coworkers, even less so from apostles, and absolutely not from pilgrim banisher apostles. Casus fully understood where she was coming from, because he hated it too, but he couldn’t reconcile his own sense of right with betraying Lady Blackhand’s trust.

Casus got up, walking to the table that took up a third of the room’s floor space. It was a “Strategic Planning Unit SPR-4735-C”. It was an enormous and highly advanced piece of machinery, combining a massive memory bank called a Memory Obelisk, countless memslate slots, a cognition engine the size of a small building, and a combination of projector lenses and a geomantic mapping module. The module was a mass of thaumetically treated “clay” that could work as an erasable writing surface, form a 3D map, and perform several other fancy functions that rarely if ever got used. Unsurprisingly these things were rare due to their impracticality compared to simpler and more modular solutions.

He exerted quite a bit of strength pressing one of the large buttons on the side, a loud CLACK betraying the fact it set a great clockwork mechanism into motion. The SPU whirred to life, the scribe-automata underfoot coming alive and literally reading off of the Memory Obelisk as the boot sequence.

“I need to ask a few more questions. Patch him through and keep it open, just let him see,” he said. Yazata did as asked, and stepped to the side, walking around the room’s perimeter to reach Casus’ side without breaking his sightline with Seer.

“I’ll ask this simply: Do you know of any means of entry into the mansion that wouldn’t be on official maps or blueprints?” Casus questioned. “Secret entrances or passages through the mansion, illegal tunnels for trafficking contraband…”

“...or people,” Seer finished, his reluctant tone betraying the fact he did know. He sighed, leaning forward in his chair, grasping his head. He ran his hands over his visor, then emitted a noise of annoyance as his vision was overtaken by smudges. While cleaning the outer shell with his shirt, he began talking again.

“When Semzar ‘invited’ me to that mansion, I was led through one of those tunnels. The ones that nobody but its builders and their victims know about. It was connected to the mansion’s underground supply line. I can point out where it was on a map, it was this underpass somewhere near… I think it was somewhere near Jafarnejad Gardens, with the big tree.”

“That’s nearly ten kilometers by air from the mansion…” Casus thought aloud, operating the PSU. The lenses set around its outer edge came alive, projecting a map of that section of the city. With the adjustment of a slider, he turned it so that Seer could see it from a bird's eye view. Immediately, he pointed out the spot.

“There. Some stones on the left side look out of place. Not sure how it opens; I couldn’t see. Probably a combination illusion and deterrence field.”

“You let us deal with that. How much did you see inside the tunnel?”

“I already told you. The tunnel goes on for a while, twisting left and right, loads of sealed off side passages from the looks of the walls. Some of ‘em are just locked doors, and some of ‘em are see-through, like the rusty barred ones off of old elevators. Saw some nasty shit behind those, but it all looked to have been abandoned for a while. As for the subterrain, it looked like a private tram line or something, way too nice to not be on maps.”

Casus shifted the map. Both the projection and the clay model shifted, showing a sprawling, vein-like tangle of tunnels and vents.

“Looks like it connects the mansion to several other buildings, they even come under the same deed as the mansion. A butchershop, a grocer, library, anything you would need without having to interact with the ‘common rabble’...” Casus thought aloud as he inspected the map.

“One more thing about the tramline - it was flooded. Wasn’t much, about two, three finger-widths of old rainwater. Won’t stop you, but they’ll hear you coming.”

Casus nodded: “Very well, you’ve been helpful.”

He glanced at Yazata, and without him needing to say a word, she once more separated them from Seer. With that, Casus got to work, operating the giant machine with gusto. It wasn’t the most practical, it didn’t conform to more common standards of design, learning it had been a nightmare, but Casus couldn’t help but love the PSU. It was as much a holy relic of the Inner Wheel as it was a machine, possessing a sense of the sublime not found in its mass-production counterparts. In a few minutes, he had a plan of attack worked out - not because he could think that quickly, but because he had considered this possibility before. Audunpoint’s subterrain layer wasn’t quite as vast as those of capital cities, but there were so many ancient and forgotten passages from the city’s time as a Jas’raban metropolis that there was no chance in hell to keep track of them all.

The subterrain was on the clay layer, while the surface level was projected above.

“You want me to lead a contingent of ‘Red Hood’ semi-autonomous graft-beasts and mount an encirclement assault on the mansion? Truly?” Yazata questioned for the third time.

Nodding, Casus reaffirmed his intent: ”I will join up with Lady Blackhand to infiltrate through the subterrain while the security force is distracted, eliminate Semzar and his officers, and we mop up the rest from within and without.”

Sighing, the witch-inquisitor agreed: “Very well.”

338 - Flowering Fulgarrow [Sturmblitz]

While Makhus was approaching the dragon, so was she, but rather than charging straight at it, she merely closed the distance while telekinetically drawing Vysaga out of its sheath. As the sword rose out of its sheath on Lydia’s back, its golden dragon-wing crossguard unfurled, previously wrapped closely to the blade. The reason for such an accommodation was made plain by the span of those golden wings, as wide as Lydia’s shoulders, the golden colour of its majority contrasted by silver talons. In the crossguard’s center, on each side, a diamond-shaped sapphire was set. In a motion that was at once swift yet agonizingly slow, the gigantic sword floated to a spot in front of Lydia, connected to her fingers by hair-thin arcs of pink lightning, petal-like sparks fluttering around it. The grip, far too thick for any normal hand to hold, was wrapped in criss-crossed strips of False Drake leather, and the pommel took the form of a golden dragon-claw gripping a spherical battery-gem, another sapphire in this case. The pommel-claw had four identical digits, ending in silver talons. Contrasting the elaborately decorated handle, Vysaga’s blade was a monolithic slab of matte-black metal with a shallow, decorative fuller and incredibly aggressive, wedgelike blades. This reconditioned surface concealed lichtenberg figures that ran all throughout the sword’s inner structure, the scars of wounds that had healed since it was wielded by Zelys Newman.

Then, with the slightest flick of her wrist, the blade flipped from a vertical to a horizontal alignment. Pink light shone within its pommel, and in an instant, the blade was enveloped by an outpour of lightning. While it appeared as if Lydia was merely standing with her free hand behind her back, she was in fact running through a series of hand signs, this stance being a concealment tactic. For the briefest moment, it appeared as if a pink serpent wrought of lightning, having the appearance of wood rather than scales, manifested along the sword’s blade. At that moment, Vysaga shot out with the velocity of a cannonball, its course just as erratic and unstable as the path of a lightning bolt, an arc of which it traced between itself and Lydia’s hand. Around the two-thirds point in its flight, two copies of the sword entirely made of lightning suddenly split away from it, forming a truly branch-like trail. Vysaga itself followed one of these branching paths, whereas a copy continued forward, and was thus the one which the dragon was able to shoot down. At the same exact moment, Vysaga and one of its copies struck the Wildfire Kite’s armored hide, and a flood of stormbloom petals followed with them, shredding away at its bared flesh. The great beast’s purple blood gushed out of its wounds, and its scream of pain and rage shook the forest.

STORMBLOOM SIGN

THE GOD-TREE’S JUDGMENT

LOOSED FROM A BOW OF CHERRY WOOD

ART OF KILLING BLOSSOMS: FLOWERING FULGARROW -TRIFECTA-

Both Vysaga and its copy discharged bursts of power into the dragon, scales bursting out of its skin like rivets. The phantom sword faded out of being, whereas the real Vysaga was pulled out of the beast, a pink arc reigniting between it and Lydia as she threw herself into a mighty pulling motion. Despite the Kite’s attempt to disconnect the arc by spreading out its wing in its path, the sword tore itself free regardless, turning mid-flight so that it cut through the membrane as it returned back to Lydia. Lydia repositioned and stabbed Vysaga into the ground, beginning the casting of a technique that widn’t place so much strain on her aura. The sword erupted with lightning once more, a maelstrom of lightning petals spilling out and flowing around Lydia, shredding a pair of Kitelings that had been hiding in the trees. She outstretched her right hand towards Vysaga with fingers held apart, while placing her left forearm across it perpendicularly, the leftmost three fingers held straight while the index and thumb touched to form a somewhat triangular shape. While much of the energy for this technique came from Vysaga itself, Lydia was purposely drawing it into herself and passing it back into the sword through her right eye, rather than letting it flow directly from the battery gem into the blade. For reasons she could not yet fully understand, this made the technique both more potent and more focused. Moreover, she had been able to learn an improved breathing technique from the Newman Sect, but performing it was so focus-intensive that she only switched to it for short periods when casting techniques such as this one. It was none other than Engine Breathing.

Meanwhile, Makhus continued facing down the great beast face to face, sword to claw, constantly threatening it sufficiently to force the bulk of its offensive power - and its aura - on himself. Lucian, meanwhile, was fighting for his life at the beast’s rear, occupying its tail in the process. Lydia had no issue withstanding the Wildfire Kite’s passive aura, even if it wasn’t exactly pleasant, but Lucian was visibly impacted by the beast’s presence alone… But he was also hardening. The young man had gone from dodging for dear life and mostly keeping his distance to actively trying to annoy the giant beast. Lydia continued honing the furious blade of lightning, building up the technique.

As for Lucian…

____________________________________________________________________________

Lucian was having a very, very bad time, not just because of the physical fight. His spirit and aura, shaped with the truth of “Blades”, already possessed a hardened nature. His was not Armament Aura; it possessed the toughness of a blade, but none of its sharpness. But with each passing moment, each shift of the dragon’s massive body, each barely-dodged swing of its sabre-like claws, Lucian felt its immense aura as well, grazing him, grinding away at him. Lucian came to a realization. There was no wonder he hadn’t been able to reach the first milestone; his cultivation until this point had been a matter of refining himself into suitable stock, into the vague form of a blade. What he had needed was something to grind him and hone him to a sharp edge. It was just as Lydia had said.

337 - Dharmapala [Sturmblitz]

A/N: I'll catch back up to 20 advance chaps on this, don't worry

___________________________________________________________________

Makhus instinctively rested the Fragment Sabre on his shoulder, striding towards the Wildfire Kite alongside his companions as they plugged their ears. He had obtained the blade from a traveling Ankhezian merchant, as it was unique and happened to fit his requirements at the time. Or, more accurately, he had tried to trade for it, but Ezaryl had decided to throw around her clan's stupidly massive fortune by buying it for the merchant's eye-watering stated price. That was not to say he didn’t appreciate it. His reason to desire such a blade was not the simple want for a larger or fancier weapon, but a twofold need. Firstly, he needed a blade that retained the same relative scale to Acala Nova that a kriegsmesser had to Makhus when he was out of the suit. Secondly, he needed a blade that wouldn't be whittled away to nothing by Acala's ability; what he had learned to be Armament Aura amplification. This Fragment Sabre happened to, suspiciously conveniently, also possess the ability to separate into pieces and reshape itself into smaller blades. Unlike Carnifex Fulguris, the change was quite a bit slower and only covered three fixed forms - the full-sized grossemesser, a kriegsmesser plus a small knife, and two short messers.

A never-dulling, shapeshifting blade. Fit to be a heirloom. Makhus felt bad for not appreciating it more.

The Wildfire Kite roared. A blast of wind whipped past the three of them, the ground shuddered, and dry leaves rained down. Lydia winced, while Lucian visibly grit his teeth, pressed his hands over his ears, and froze in place. The shockwaves put him off-balance despite the earplugs. Makhus was unaffected; not only because of Acala, but because he had become tolerant of far worse vibrations surging through his body.

A small, cowardly voice deep inside Makhus cried out in protest of the fact he was the vanguard.

“Focus,” Makhus sent over aetherwave. “Lydia, support my initial attack and proceed as you deem appropriate. Lucian, get around the back and try to occupy its tail without getting yourself killed. Watch out for the Kitelings.”

The only response he received was a pair of affirmative pings. Makhus placed his foot on a rock and pushed off it, sending himself flying forward. He didn’t bother zigzagging until he was already within ten meters of the dragon’s nest, at which point he leapt straight up to avoid an eruption of flame from the beast’s gaped maw. With a pulse of light from the beast’s eye, the flames flowed back and twisted into spears trying to skewer him out of the air, but Makhus had foreseen something like this. Not exactly this; Acala’s prediction was that the Kite would most likely pull its head up, but that was enough.

His Armament Aura, amplified by resonance with the belt, enshrouded his blade in the form of white, brightly glowing mist. With only two cuts, Makhus shattered the dragon’s spears of flame, the backlash forcing the creature to blink. This particular technique was specifically suited to disrupting the arcane, and despite the dragon descendant’s greater power, it paled in comparison to Ubul… And Makhus had grown by leaps and bounds since he had cut Ubul in half in a moment of death’s-doorstep clarity.

DHARMIC SWORD OF WISDOM

POSSESSING TRUE CLARITY OF MIND

THERE IS NOTHING ONE CANNOT CUT

PURGATION ARTS: DISPELLING BLADE

Landing atop the Kite’s head, Makhus attempted to drive his sword right into its eye. To no surprise on his part, it swatted at him with its tail, forcing him to jump down. He proceeded to engage the beast to the fullest extent of his abilities, evading its attacks and nipping away at it at every opportunity. The beast moved faster than any animal of its size had any right to. It spewed flame at every opportunity, manipulating it into twisting flows that resembled a striking serpent, trying to encircle and cut off escapes. It snapped at him faster than any spring-loaded bear trap and with enough force to cut a boulder in half, and its long neck allowed it to maneuver its head at angles utterly unreasonable. Even the Kite’s wings, which were not its premier offensive tool by far, were far nimbler than they should be. Folded up as they were, the Kite didn’t swipe or scratch with its wings - it punched, and each strike shook the earth underfoot, punching holes in the ground with the thick spike protruding from that section of either wing.

Makhus gave himself over to the flow, letting his thoughts drift away as instinct, reflex, and muscle memory took over. For the years he had wasted trying to comprehend the fundamental secrets of the Sanger Sect, in retrospect it all seemed so obvious now that he knew the true meaning of the mystical bullshit. Each second sprawled out before him as if an hour, and each minute snap-movement went through with the smoothness of something performed at a leisurely pace. Yet, at the same time, the moments passed him by at a breakneck pace. The Fragment Sabre clashed against the Kite’s wing-spikes, at times even shaving bits off them or scraping them. Acala Nova constantly bombarded him with possibilities, and in this manner, sealed inside the suit, he mentally floated away from reality, gaining the clarity of an outside observer. He wasn’t fighting for his life, he was playing a game of tactics using himself as a piece. Then, at the moment of a clash, his awareness momentarily snapped back into the here and now, only to once more pull back out when he broke off and hopped out of the dragon’s immediate melee range.

An opening wide enough to fit a more impactful strike would eventually present itself, but Makhus was, for all intents and purposes, a tank in this situation; meant to draw enemy fire while dishing out punishment. He fully expected Lydia to deal the lion’s share of damage to the beast, and she fully lived up to those expectations without a moment’s wait.

185 - Miniature Sarcophagus/Yazata Heptaxia [Cherno]

And so, Krahe set off for that place; the ship was not nestled quietly in the corner, but was in fact the largest one. Garvesh’s debtor plied his trade from deep within its bowels, and given the fact none of the crew stopped her as she walked into areas obviously not meant for normal passengers, she wagered that they had been paid off. She arrived at a modified bulkhead with a small vault door embedded in it at roughly chest height, and an intercom to the side. Well, not quite an intercom. It was an antique-looking telephone handset bolted to the wall. Below it was a keyboard from a Dregstrider, requiring her to dial the six-digit number Garvesh had given her to even speak to the proprietor.

“Who…” a hissing, snake-like voice came from past the bulkhead.

“Garvesh sent me regarding his recently called-in favour.”

“I don’t know who…” came the voice again, uncertain.

“I wasn’t finished,” Krahe interrupted. “He wants you to know that he hopes you haven’t forgotten what he did at the Spire of Glass.”

An agitated hiss burst from the earpiece, and the sound cut out, the other side having hung up. Before she could grow uneasy, the vault door slowly opened inward, the scarred face of a serpent-man staring at her from the other side; he was no mythical gorgon, but a lanky humanoid with a neck that curved in a question-mark shape to allow his diamond-shaped head a forward orientation. An eyepatch-like prosthetic supplanted his left eye, and numerous scars broke up his venomous-looking, red-yellow scale pattern. He set a small, sandstone box on the counter, slid it over to her side, and shut the window forcefully enough to blow a gust of wind in her face. It smelled astonishingly similar to Firminus’ office, only more herbal. As for the box, it had no hinges, only a rectangular lid, which bore cuneiform symbols on its surface. Krahe wasted no time in bringing it back, as awkward as transporting it was.

______________________________________________________________________________

“Aristedes! Wake up!” came a stern woman’s voice. Casus faded back to consciousness, having fallen asleep in his seat a few hours prior. A set of ominous, purple-glowing eyes stared down at him from a pale, narrow face framed by black hair at the sides, blunt bangs tracing the woman’s browline in a dull V-shape, intensifying her already owl-like countenance. The glossy blackness of her hair was broken up by eye-like sigils in white, defiantly remaining congruent even as her hair shifted about, creating an unsettling appearance. Casus was used to the idea of having eyes in the back, and he was slowly growing used to Lady Blackhand’s detached second set of eyes, but this woman felt more all-seeing than the two of them combined, exuding an aura of constant, unwavering vigilance.

The Witch Inquisitor, Yazata Heptaxia.

She wore a partially unbuttoned satin shirt and tight black pants with cutouts on the outer sides of the thighs. It was a mode of dress similar to Casus’ own, but the similarities between the two of them ended there. Of the countless differences between the two of them, the most obvious were the “Black Bindings” visibly crisscrossing Yazata’s skin, visible upon her thighs, over the very top of her chest, and going all the way up her neck, even peeking out of the bottoms of her sleeves. Eldritch symbols shone upon them in hues of purple the same as the glow of the inquisitor’s eyes. A rapier-hilted bar mace hung from her belt, held by steel rings rather than a scabbard. It was a weapon of countless diamond-shaped, razor-sharp facets.

She walked away from him the moment she saw he was awake, turning to the one-way observation window. A minimalistic control console rose from the ground in front of the window, a handful of black cables leading down from it to beneath the floor. Yazata’s footsteps were punctuated with sharp click-clacking sounds, not because she wore heels, but because her feet were metal, as were her legs all the way up to the knees. Her trousers were bound down to her prosthetics with those Black Bindings of hers, leaving them exposed halfway up the calves. The craftsmanship was of a standard equalled by few - they were Inner Relics, after all, made by the church for Yazata specifically. Rather than mimicking human anatomy to the fullest extent, her prosthetics traded biomimicry for improved functionality and resilience, with a simpler, more heavy-duty foot and ankle design.

There was no need for her to speak of the situation; Seer was doing all the talking that was necessary.

“I’ve got him! The little shit’s fuckin’ pinging me! Can you hear me, inquisitor?! I know where Semzar Hashem is RIGHT NOW!” Seer yelled in desperation, doubtlessly because he worried there was not much time.

Yazata reached for the console, and with the flick of a switch, the observation window shifted to go both ways. Depressing an adjacent button, she took a mouthpiece in hand and spoke: “You may now give your testimony, we are recording.”

Seer continued without the need for any further prompting: “He’s been intermittently pinging me for the last hour or so, I didn’t speak up until I was sure he was in one place and not just passing through. It’s the mansion on Mirzaii 2.”

“Old Ishmail Two-snakes’ mansion… Isn’t it owned by a Silversword administrator?” Casus thought aloud. He didn’t know who exactly owned Mirzaii 2, but he knew her position due to the controversy surrounding her acquisition of the property. Ishmail had been a once-famous ex-contractor who pioneered the Twin Serpent Voidkey design as standard equipment for his agency’s full-member contractors. The so-called Iron Adder Agency competed fiercely with the Silversword Agency for dominance in Audunpoint’s early years, but collapsed after Ishmail’s disappearance under dubious circumstances.

“I wouldn’t know about that. I just know that Semzar likes to host his degenerate parties there. It’s where this happened to me, so I won’t weep if you send a saint to level the place,” Seer replied with a gesture to his visor, hatred seeping from every word.

184 - Calling in a Favour [Cherno]

A/N: Expanded the sequence before cutting to the next scene

____________________________________________________________________
Another staccato of thought-flashes followed, far more rapid, showing similar scenes of growth, but no corruption this time. Saints arrived all the same, but passed through without incident after solving small problems. It was obvious what it meant; a juxtaposition of some kind, perhaps even a vision sent from on-high, seeing as she was an apostle after all. Krahe didn’t understand what exactly it all meant, lacking the mental bandwidth to properly process so quickly, but the visions all burned themselves into her memory with unnatural clarity.

When she next blinked, she was at that bar, in the exact moment after she had swallowed the shot, and the aftertaste was just starting to set in. She found her gaze slowly wandering over to the snake as she regained full awareness, not unlike waking up from a dream.

The barman - and his snake - both gave her an amused look, with the former remarking: “I would advise you to not get addicted. You’ll have a near-immunity to the positive effects for… Oh, I would say a few years at least given the dose. It would require a blood sample to be sure.”

“What, did you have to get an apothecary license to sell snake venom as a drink?” Krahe slurred, still not quite mentally back together. Some echoes of psychedelia still lingered, and her mind was busy parsing the visions. Before the barman could respond, the ground shuddered. Noticing the difficulty of keeping her balance, Krahe decided that it was high time to head back to the safehouse. She left, having paid for each drink individually so she could keep track of her tab. It totaled an irresponsible sum, but she somehow didn’t regret it. More than half her total was the Six-eyed Dream Serpent Venom. The safehouse was empty when she got there, but a note on the coffee table clued her into the state of things. The Inquisitor had finally gotten around to dealing with Seer, and Casus was, at this very moment, one of the participants in the interrogation. The note also near enough begged her to just wait and not try to take action on her own.

Krahe smoked a cigarette of Adefron Incense, only to wake up to the sun high well above the horizon.

“Five hours…” she thought. From what she knew of Adefron, this meant she would have likely slept around twenty hours had she not used it. In the absence of any particular goal besides waiting - which she hated - she took Atomica back to Gashward Road. Two days passed without any events of note, which was utterly agonizing. Krahe tried to find that bar again, but she couldn’t find it. The location was burned into her mind, but it was as if the place had just up and disappeared. There was a bar there, yes, and it was even the same building, but it wasn’t that bar. The floor plan was the same, but everything from the floorboards to the counter, the furniture and staff, nearly everything was different. So as not to seem suspicious or otherwise stand out, she spent a few minutes there and bought a shot of cheap, nasty, funky rum before leaving.

After this excursion, she busied herself by attempting to recall and reconstruct the kata she saw Sauer performing in her vision. When that turned out to be a dead end, she turned to Yao’s scroll, and after that, to improving the design of her wards.

In the end, she ran up against a dead end with all three of these endeavors.

She was already struggling to mentally digest her thoughts, trying to comprehend Yao’s ultra-dense writing style only made it worse. Sure, it was clear and largely devoid of pointless obfuscation, but it was still written in a quasi-Cantonese equivalent to renaissance-era scholarly writing.

Improving her wards was theoretically plausible, but she simply lacked whatever made it practical, and she didn’t even understand Wards well enough to know what she didn’t know. No matter what she did, her wards always settled into a homogenous ablative layer of compacted ash. At best she could add some resilience by incorporating obsidian, which did help, but it was just applying the benefits of the Forming Toroid rather than improving the fundamental design or technique.

The trial-and-error process was only made worse by the limitations of her voidkey, which gnawed ever more keenly when it came to something so thauma-intensive as reconstructing her Wards over and over again. Moreover, it was a reminder that the Twin Serpent Voidkey was merely at the borderline between Second-order and Third-order.

It took every bit of strength she had, but Krahe went to Garvesh and, without a bit of pretense, simply asked for help.

“Can’t help with your Wards, not the same as mine. And as I said already, the Twin Serpent Key really was my best. But… I have been looking for one ever since you first asked, and a guy who owes me a couple favours just recently got one for me. Only reason I haven’t picked it up yet or sent you a message is, well…”

The old lizard looked around. He was still in the tub, in the exact same pose.

“Been otherwise preoccupied, let’s say. So, here’s how you get to his place…”

It wasn’t a particular building, but an even more obscure shop than Garvesh’s, one that shifted locations periodically and required an invitation to get in even if you found it. For this reason, he went on for a few minutes and had to repeat himself so that Krahe could write it down. Well outside the city, it was a particular ship ferrying people and goods across the river.

“You’ll have to dial the number, it’s 583791. Remember that - you got it? Good. The code word… I don’t remember. Just tell him Garvesh sent you, and that this is about that favour I called in recently. If he doubts you, just say I hope he hasn’t forgotten what I did for him at the Spire of Glass.”

“What did you do?” Krahe asked, not expecting an answer.

“I’m not telling you,” Garvesh grinned. “Just mention it. He will know. As for payment… We can work that out later. Call it a favor for now.”

183 - Six-eyed Dream Serpent [Cherno]

The snake, after all, was right inside the terrarium behind the bar; it was just hiding, and slithered into view when Krahe expressed her interest in its venom. Its head shape was similar to a horned desert viper, but it had six blue-glowing eyes with hairpin pupils, including three pairs of horns - one for each eye. Its scales were varying shades of creamy and sandy off-white, but they glistened with an eldritch pearlescence that reminded her of the Astral Gulf.

“I’m curious, is the snake actually called a Six-eyed Dream Serpent, or is that just the menu name?” Krahe prodded.

“That is the most common name for them. It is… Arguably a soulbeast, arguably not,” the barman said with a practiced cadence that betrayed the fact he was both used to and fond of talking about his pet. “There is a tribe of snake mystics out west who think they come about when a lost soul accidentally incarnates into a snake egg.”

“Interesting. Does the venom have any truly mystical properties, then? Or is it just a particularly potent drug? In other words, will I see things based purely on my own psyche, or do its effects veer into the realm of true clairvoyance?”

“It depends on the snake,” he shrugged. “I can guarantee nothing… But I do not believe you will be disappointed. Nobody ever is, at least when it glows like that.”

The barman put on a truly amusing show of handling the snake, which, itself, pretended to be furious, lashing out and snapping mere millimeters from the barman’s face before he grasped it by the base of the head and pressed its head into a tiny shot glass such that its fangs hooked just over the edge. A spray of opaque, glowing, blue-coloured venom filled the glass three-quarters of the way, before the snake’s eyes glistened as if it was taking her measure, and another spurt filled the shot glass the rest of the way. In a flurry of motion, the barman placed the serpent back in its terrarium whilst also dumping the glass into the half-filled glass. The venom spread out through the liquor, bubbling in a violent reaction as the barman poured in a salt of some kind while stirring the mixture. After several seconds, the reaction ended, letting it all coalesce into a slightly thick, blue-glowing liquid with streaks of light pulsing within it as if it was lit by an unseen, fluttering candle.

“I suggest you try to get it down all at once,” the barman recommended.

Krahe had drunk far worse, so it was no issue; the shot was fine, taste-wise, sour-sweet with a slight burning heat. Its aftertaste was one of buzzing numbness. The effects that followed were akin to a DMT-induced vision of a dream-like alternate reality, but rather than seeing angels or devils Krahe found herself momentarily spirited away to a particularly filthy alley in a particularly filthy part of Megacity Gamma’s Sector 5. In this back alley, a local gang dumped the bodies of their victims, because the local cleanup drones were faulty and just mulched the corpses alongside the trash. A man with no arms crawled out of the trash container, muttering. It was… Something about Chernobog, and Jas’raba. And it was in the continental tongue of Ashametan. His eyes met Krahe’s, and the next moment, she was elsewhere, at another time.

On the coast of a dark lake, with an ancient city at her back, with the alien stars of Zastreon overhead and the Banishment Wheel in the far distance. There came a deep, sonorous sound; Krahe heard and felt it in equal measure. It rumbled up from underfoot, resonating with her ribcage and her spine - resonating the Liminal Coil. There was a question in that frequency, a question and a sense of advice, but she could not comprehend it.

Sector 7. That old bastard’s… Sauer’s hut. He was out in front, going through a form Krahe had never seen, using an arm cybernetic he had never worn before. Its outer shell closely mirrored naturalistic muscle curves in shining chrome, following old-style aesthetics. It bristled with plasma nozzles from palm to shoulder, and with each of Sauer’s motions, they erupted with greenish flame to amplify the movement. The old man was a whirling dervish one moment, then stone-still the next, his face hard and coldly angry in a way she had never seen while she studied with him. Krahe watched for what had to be several minutes, but from this distance, with these eyes, she could only follow the general gist of it at best; even then, it was because she recognized parts. As the mutant art that Sector 7 Style was, even this advanced form of it incorporated elements from other parts. The occasional thunderclaps and accompanying shockwaves from Sauer’s more violent movements, however, made it no easier to comprehend. Her next impulse was to look closer, but the old man froze and stared through her. Then, she was once more spirited away.

In a staccato of flashes, Krahe beheld the same scene playing out in wildly different settings. The founding of a small town on the frontier of civilization, frequently in an effort to reclaim or unearth ancient ruins. Growth, both of the town and its church. Then, corruption. Even the declaration of a splinter faith. The people suffer. Conveniently, as if by divine providence, a Saint arrives and tears out the corruption by the roots. Again. And again. And again. Thousands of iterations with wild and great variation, yet the same overall arc.

The vision lingered on a particularly egregious case, wherein the church presence in an entirely isolated town degenerated to the point of being little more than a bandit band extorting the townsfolk. A skull-faced saint, covered head to toe in exposed, root-like musculature, arrived, annihilated them, and took over, rebuilding the town only to disappear once things settled for the better. It lingered on that skull-masked face, with lilac flame burning in its sockets and the sigil of the Seven Spokes emblazoned on his forehead.