akasoindustries

182 - Mirroring [Cherno]

Yao walked downstairs, with Krahe following.

“This seal will have the secondary benefit of further compressing the voidkey’s energies,” Yao said on the way down. She proceeded to collapse onto a sofa, and, in a manner strangely similar to Razem, any sense of transcendence vanished from her. It even felt as if she had aged by decades in an instant.  “It may slow the stabilization process, however. Now… Please go. I am exhausted, and if you and the voidkey were to remain here, the energy signature would linger.”

Krahe did as was asked of her without hesitation, placing Atomica into the book-box, giving a simple nod as goodbye, and walking out. The Talisman Mistress’ fortifications fell into line right behind her, one after the next. This was the first time she got a close look at them. Graft-beasts, walls of talismans, traps, dozens of layers. Despite the appearance of normal alleyways and the open sky, this whole section of Audunpoint was a fortress meant to withstand direct assault from a small army, if not perhaps individuals such as the three comets still waging fierce battle in the sky.

After Lady Blackhand’s departure, the domicile of Talisman Mistress Yao Fu was filled by an exhilarated, yet also exasperated laughter. The crippled old monster had predicted a potent result, but what had come out was a full order of magnitude above what she had expected. Perhaps Shang had carried out the suicide ritual in a far better state than she had assumed, or perhaps Lady Blackhand held some profound insight that altered the transmutation rite’s course. It had to be both to some degree. The voidkey’s new name was beyond Yao’s understanding, but she perfectly grasped the magnitude of difference between what it had become, its past incarnation, and what it had been intended to become. There was one thing for certain: Shang had not intended the transmutation to yield this result. The voidkey’s fundamental nature was altered by the concepts carried in Lady Blackhand’s prolonged incantation. Atomica Refulgent was not even remotely suitable for the Onyx-black Hall’s practices; if anything, it was ideal for the type of person that would go against them, a natural anathemist - in other words, it was ideal for Blackhand.

Yes, Yao laughed, bringing out an ensorcelled bottle-gourd that she had brought with her all the way from Tiengenzhen. She took a long swig from it in celebration; it was filled with a small lake’s worth of quality baijiu. If things proceeded at this rate, she might be fully mended before the decade was out. That was the uttermost extremity of everything going as well as the transmutation rite, but even a few decades or a century were an outstanding time frame for undoing the mutilation that had been perpetrated upon her Soul Furnace.

In the end, she had done less than half of the work she had been ready to do. In the time Lady Blackhand took to retrieve the Hexkey, Yao had made preparations, she had taken things out of storage, readied herself to deal with the consequences of carrying out a strenuous ritual that she didn’t fully understand… And while she was exhausted, it was an exhaustion that would be gone before the end of this new day, rather than demanding several days of active rest. In short, Yao was pleasantly surprised by how this whole thing had gone.

_______________________________________________________________

Krahe was pleasantly surprised by how the transmutation ritual had gone. Compared to her deep-dive excursion into the Astral Gulf, it had been simplicity itself. Nonetheless, she felt utterly drained. Not physically, but mentally; she had felt this before, especially after Slaughterhouse 9, but it had been masked by far more vivid feelings of tiredness back then. She cut a jagged path through the city, stopping at a small bar. Rather than being seedy, like she was used to, this establishment gave off the feeling of a decent place purposely located out of the way to filter out those who didn’t do their research, tourists, and the like. There was a substantial entry fee, enough to pay for a week’s food. It was nearly deserted, with most of the patrons entranced by the light show overhead, meaning that Krahe got all the privacy she could want.

She spent this half-hour simply drinking and smoking, permitting herself to truly relax for once, without trying to find something to do, without thinking about what she should be doing, without constantly thinking over the possibilities of who was working for whom or what groups could possibly get involved. Keeping local political webs in mind was enough of a pain when one had lived in an area for years, but Krahe was simultaneously learning Audunpoint and causing changes in the process.

It was nice to retreat to a tiny world populated by four people total, including the barman. Some of the drinks were familiar - the typical grain alcohols and fruit mash distillates - but others were… More in-line with crab juice. Shots of mild hallucinogens and psychedelics that took effect and wore off equally quickly were exceedingly common on the menu. It was obvious why; most of them tasted tolerable at worst, and they universally provided an enjoyable experience. One could zone out for a few minutes without such consequences as a hangover or withdrawals. Various mixed cocktails included not only the blending of flavors and fragrances, but also the alchemical blending of different psychoactives for altered effects. A cluster of beverages warned away anyone with oral sores or stomach ulcers, and listed comparatively high prices for antidotes. Yes, even the venoms of various creatures were drunk for fun. Krahe tested out a few, noting with some amusement that the barman insisted that one particular venom was from a ‘properly fed’ specimen of some kind of giant spider, stating that it had no aphrodisiac qualities whatsoever.

One offer in particular advertised the fact it came from a live snake and supposedly could bring about epiphany if one consumed it. Krahe saw it as literal snake oil, but she decided to bite the hook anyway, out of curiosity.

181 - ATOMICA REFULGENT [Cherno]

Krahe continued:

“Capacitor charge at 80% projected capacity. 90%. 100%. 110%. 120%. Capacitor charge stable at 124% of projected capacity. Preparing laser pump array for connection. Connection successful. Initiating ignition. Capacitor discharge… Successful.”

The revolutions intensified, as did the reaction. Anathema began leaking out, coalescing around the shell’s exterior, granting it the appearance of a blood-red star. The room was bathed in red light. It even occasionally erupted with flare-like tongues, these soon being pacified when the talisman mistress adjusted her containment array.

“Capacitors 87 through 143 sending alerts, replacement in progress. Fusion reaction initiating. Activating TK Containment Field Emitters. TK Field operators injecting Psi-Amp fluid. Plasma field contained successfully. Fusion proceeding. Exotic particle emission within projected boundaries. Transmutation in progress.”

As Krahe recited the NHI reactor operator’s test report, the containment array’s revolutions grew to a fever pitch, as did the tangible tension within the room. It felt as if, at any moment, the whole thing might fly apart, but it never did. It went on for a span of time that Krahe could not discern; it felt simultaneously like mere seconds and hours, so wholly focused was she on the process itself. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it. The building pressure within the shell, the Hexkey’s gradual transmutation, the spindown of the reaction before the final surge. Yao gave a signal to say the final lines, but Krahe didn’t see it as her mind was wholly consumed by the star-like patterns of crimson light. She was, however, already speaking to begin with:

“Finalizing. Maximizing TK Field output. Venting remnant plasma. Test No. 66 complete. Estimated final transmutation ratio: 98.7348%. TK Field operators, inject Psi-Suppressant. Dispatching drones to extract reaction material… Rapid spectrometry has just confirmed: We have elemental platinum. King Solomon lives.”

The array abruptly came to a halt, as if frozen in time. A momentous and undeniable sense of change washed over them as the shell began cracking, blinding light shining through the cracks and piercing the layer of red. Yao’s eyes went wide and it seemed as if she wanted to call out in alarm, but she didn’t get the opportunity. With a thunderous, roar-like sound, the reflector shell flew apart in a hundred pieces, and a deluge of anathema poured out , only to be quickly drawn back in. Though abrupt and forceful, the blast was delayed and sapped from most of its force by Yao’s precautions, rendering it little more than a messy and noisy firework.

There, between the two of them, floated the Hexkey, the Astrocite Hand still grasping it. In the next moment, the hand crumbled to dust. The key’s shape had not changed, but all else was different. Its composition was neither stone nor coal nor anthrocite, but a perfectly homogenous mass of red, opaque crystal. A constant outpour of anathema flowed from the artifact, possessed of an equal purity and furious brilliance, a beacon of power. Yao instinctively threw up her barrier, taking the shape of nine talismans with a golden lattice of symbols between them. Krahe, meanwhile, bathed in the baleful brilliance, for as long as it lasted. It only took the talisman mistress moments to isolate the artifact, for good reason. With the voidkey enveloped in a spherical barrier, Yao sent it over to Krahe, barrier and all. It stopped in front of her, facing her with one of the papers which was positioned out of step with the pattern. The specific paper’s symbols slowly filled in as it soaked in the voidkey’s emanations, and once complete, it projected an appraisal readout. Krahe couldn’t help but notice that it was as detailed as her system readouts, unlike the shallower appraisals given by her glasses.

[ATOMICA REFULGENT, FRACTURED SOLOMONIC KEY]

[Tags:]

Fourth-order

Voidkey

Incomplete

Unstable (Temporary)

Imprinted (Brunhilde “Blackhand” Krahe)

[Details:]

Thaumic Throughput +C1

Entropy Tolerance +D3

Entropy Dissipation +D3

Thaumic Fusion Efficiency +15%

Isotope Tolerance +D1

Isotope Dissipation +D2

First-time implantation of this voidkey will reshape the holder’s Soul Furnace, permanently conferring the following Boon: “Astral Implosion Furnace”

This voidkey may be safely implanted only by the Imprinted individual. Implantation by any other individual will result in catastrophic Soul Furnace rupture (as with simultaneous implantation of two voidkeys).

[ASTRAL IMPLOSION FURNACE]

[Tags:]

External Source (Voidkey)

[Details:]

The holder’s natural Thauma-burning will take on some of the properties of Thaumic Fusion: Increased efficiency and heightened intensity of output energy. Lesser Thauma-burning methods will remain possible.

The holder’s natural ability to initiate and carry out Thaumic Fusion will grow in efficiency. This efficiency increase will compound with the voidkey’s direct fusion efficiency improvement.

The holder’s natural arcane attributes will be improved to a variable degree, with possible secondary physical effects.

“It’s as you said. No defenses whatsoever,” Krahe remarked, looking to Yao. “Do you think you would be able to complete it? If you were to have a suitable voidkey, could you simply graft its defensive capabilities onto the Atomica?”

“Were higher-order voidkey crafting so straightforward,” Yao grimaced, turning away and stepping to the writing desk. She sent a talisman paper downstairs, and moments later it flew back up, carrying a partly-filled inkstone. She began drawing another series of talisman papers, continuing to speak as she did: “The voidkey is in a state of flux, highly unstable. If you implanted it right now, it could very well tear you apart, or worse, injure you such that it can never be removed. It must be left to sit for some time, then quenched via first implantation - you will know when it is stable enough, it is not a subtle change. Such a quenching implantation tends to be… Energetic at the best of times. I suggest implanting it at a time and in a place where collateral damage will not be an issue. After that, I will require a suitable donor key and a suitable binder, such as material from a soulbeast, possibly other materials as needed. Depending on the voidkey’s stabilized form, it may even be better to avoid using another voidkey altogether. We can only guess at such things for the moment. Here.”

With a gesture, the papers containing the voidkey flew back to Yao, replaced by a swarm of no less than twelve others that plastered themselves all over the item, creating two or possibly even three layers. Their symbols quickly began to exude the same glow as Atomica itself, but much weaker. The voidkey’s presence lessened to a degree where it felt only slightly more significant than the Twin Serpent key.

180 - Transmutation [Cherno]

Yao proceeded to carry out a feverish series of hand-signs and gestures that incorporated her whole body, taking a few methodical steps, each ringing out with a loud CLACK. With each sign, the rotational speed of the talisman rings grew, each at a different rate, as did the intensity of their glow. Soon the room was bathed in blinding light and a loud thrumming sound. It lasted, by Krahe’s reckoning, for nine seconds, at which point it flickered out and died in an instant. When her sight returned to her, the Hexkey floated over Yao’s left hand. Between two fingers of her right hand, she grasped a hair-thin, cylindrical piece of the Hexkey; about a centimeter wide and twice as long. A complex cluster of glyphs shone both on and beneath its surface, the faint reddish glow fading with each passing moment.

“Done,” Yao breathed. Her good eye was twitching, sweat trickled down her forehead, and her chest heaved with laboured breaths. She held out the cylinder of removed material. “Here. You might be able to find Shang’s tomb one day. He is bound to have left treasures for himself.”

Krahe took it, knowing all too well that Yao would be involved in such an endeavor more likely than not. This was a simple show of trust.

“Now…” Yao began again, taking a moment to catch her breath. “...We can move on to the simpler, yet more laborious part. I shall begin preparing the ritual circle whilst describing its properties, feel free to interject at any point. It is not a delicate operation, so modifications can be as crude as we need them to be.”

They spent the next half-hour or so preparing the ritual, while the battle in the sky raged on. Krahe learned more about ritual circles and ritualism in general in that half-hour than she had from most of her reading combined, but she also spent most of that half-hour kneeling on the ground, building. An icosahedral framework, entwined through and through by tendrils of Tar impregnated with anathema-reflective particulate to form a sphere; it was a larger, sturdier version of the Daemon Core’s reflector shell. The most obvious issue was maintaining the construct-matter, but Yao wasted no time in lightening this burden; in moments, she created six new talismans and bound them to the sample chunk of human charcoal with spectral threads of golden light. Tehreafter, she suspended the coal chunk above the dome and placed the talismans on the inside of its perimeter. With each one placed, Krahe felt the burden lift and saw the coal chunk flaring more brightly with crimson flame. It shrunk moment by moment. By the end, only a small hole was left in the shell, large enough to insert the hand and hexkey.

“It will hold for a few minutes. Long enough,” Yao said, regarding the shell with a critical, yet satisfied eye before glancing Krahe’s way. “Once it begins, the ritual’s own energies will feed my stabilization talismans. I could have achieved the same effect with lesser ink, but better to waste it than to have the shell burst open. I shall take hold of the shell for a moment, it must be you who inserts the material.”

And so, Krahe did. After emplacing the Hexkey into the Astrocite Hand’s grasp, she wrapped its wrist with a tendril and carefully inserted both into the shell’s center, wherein it became weightlessly suspended. Thereafter, she sealed the shell, and the both of them examined the whole assembly with a final pass, both inspecting their own parts.

“Is there anything we are waiting for?” Krahe asked.

“No, I do not suppose there is. We do require an incantation, however. I have my own, but you are the primary ritemaster in the end. I am only here to ensure everything proceeds correctly. The incantation can be anything phrase; grasping for it should be no more difficult than grasping for a theurgic sigil. It must have an initiating and a finishing component; I can signal for the latter when the time comes, but I do not expect you to need it.”

An incantation to set off a ritual such as this; the complete transmutation of a voidkey via what was effectively a crude reactor. Krahe chuckled to herself as a memory floated up. In her time, she had seen many things she was not supposed to. Technologies that were said to be vaporware for decades after their invention, because someone powerful didn’t want them in the open. For this reason, she had just the speech to parrot as an incantation. She took a few moments to mentally shift gears, calling back the words and muttering a Japanese tongue-twister to get her mouth used to speaking that language again.

Meanwhile, Krahe mentally returned to a time and a place far removed from here and now. Her eyes saw what was before her and her body was fully present, remaining aware of her surroundings, but the majority of her attention turned inward. Megacity Gamma. Sector 8. The observation deck of a hidden, highly illegal research facility. She had infiltrated the place as part of an investigation, and though it ended up being a dead end, it at least gave her this precious memory. Once she felt that she wouldn’t stumble over her own words, she held out her hand to the ritual circle, with Yao doing the same in response. Krahe began reciting: “Neptunius Heavy Industries experimental atomic transmutation reactor ‘Solomon’ v7.9.108 Test No. 66, ready to proceed. Reaction mass in place. Estimated transmutation ratio: 87%. Preliminary computations loaded. Biocomputer array reads as operational. Hypercomposite capacitor arrays operational.”

Blending with her intent, a thread of Thauma flowed out to connect with the ritual circle. It was the simplest thing: She just had to build up enough pressure to set off the reaction, keeping in mind the general intended course of the ritual. No more and no less than the consumption of the Astrocite Hand for the transmutation of the Hexkey into its final form. Floating about a meter off the ground, the reflector shell began rotating clockwise. A quartet of talismans from Yao followed after it, followed by another, and a third, each forming another ring that, in turn, revolved at different speeds and in different directions, once more like an armillary.

336 - Once More, Into the Mouth of Hell [Sturmblitz]

"You have been visibly improving week over week, so you cannot be called a failure in general terms. If you feel you are stuck in your specific cultivation method, given how unorthodox it is, we would first need to determine if it is a problem with you or the method," Makhus proposed.

"He's soft," Lydia piped up.

"Hm? What do you mean?" Makhus asked.

"The boy is practicing a cultivation method invented by and for hardened killers. Soldiers. What have you killed? Some infant dragons. Have you ever killed a man?"

"I've fought bandits a fair few times."

"Not my question. Have you killed a man?"

"Well, it felt a touch too far for retaliation against some roadside muggers, so I suppose not."

"I met a few bayonet-eaters while I was at Fort 57. Iron-hard men to a soul. Each of them had an aura sharp as a knife, hard as steel. However, instead of being refined and fragile like the aura of some 'grandmaster' that has never been in a life-or-death fight, they had the resilience, the killing intent, of someone who had survived on a battlefield for a long while. Like our own Elder Zefaris, but knives instead of guns."

"Perhaps I should have gone to Eberheim with the others, then..." Lucian mused.

"The dragon will suffice," Makhus interjected. "A mature Wildfire Kite is roughly as intelligent as a human. Therefore, fighting the beast will not be too different to fighting a strong mutagen cultivator. Myself and Lydia will suffice to slay the beast if it comes to that, but you should attempt to join in the battle as much as possible if you wish to advance your cultivation. Speaking of..."

Makhus retrieved something from his backpack; a dark, metal tablet. From the storage inside, he took two pairs of rubber earplugs, held together by string. He tossed one pair each to Lydia and Lucian respectively.

"The Kite will try to use its voice as a weapon before it ever pulls out the flame breath. The Kitelings are already bad enough, the mother will be worse. Just put them around your neck for now. Moreover, while its eyesight is not likely to be great, its hearing will still be nearly as good as that of its young. It will likely not be vulnerable to high-pitched sounds, but..."

He pulled six stick grenades out of his tablet next.

"...Low-frequency shockwaves should still work. These are modified concussion grenades, they should be strong enough to damage the Kite's hearing for some time."

Around twenty minutes later, the trio continued on their hunt. Makhus continued without his suit, finding the forest to be too dense and the branches too low in this area. In such circumstances, 70cm of height made all the difference.

They found one of the marked Kitelings far off from the goal, chasing a rabbit. Adjusting their course they continued onward, and eventually arrived at a peculiar section of the mountain slope, a cauldron-like shape. A smaller crater formed by a smaller impact that came after that which formed the Cauldron of Willows, but nonetheless unimaginably far in the ancient, perhaps even antediluvian past. It was around two kilometers across, and the air within it reached truly desert-like temperatures.

There, in the deepest section of the second crater, they came upon the Wildfire Kite’s nesting area. It was a roughly circular area of burned ground, separated clearly from the rest of the forest. The trees were charred, but most of them still stood, seemingly alive. In the very middle, there was a clearing, and in the middle of that clearing was a nest of charred logs. As the trio approached, readying themselves, a swarm of Kitelings scuttled out, followed by the raising of a wedge-shaped head at the end of a long neck. It was armored in overlaying, somewhat pinecone-like scales the colour of fallen leaves. Four backswept horns curved out of the sides of its head where the eyes ought to be. From the Kite’s forehead, a vertical eye stared at them. It was an unsettling, sky-like azure colour, with the emblematic cornerless triangle pattern in black, and in the middle was a small, round pupil with ragged edges that granted the beast a furious stare.

It was an image straight out of a legend about brave knights, but some of its luster was dulled by the knowledge that this was the lowest order of dragon descendants. Sure, Wildfire Kites were among the stronger of the One-eyed Dragons, but they were nowhere near the strongest. Compared to the weakest Three-eyed Dragon, this creature was little more than an animal. That was also the reason they were after it; it presented itself as a convenient alternative to trying to dilute Eisengeist’s draconic essence for the Dragonheart Bolus.

Makhus rested his left hand on his belt. All the main controls were nicely accessible like this, contained to a modified blitzgandr handle. A throttle, brake lever, a button on the handle's end, and one additional button carried over from the original belt chassis.

He revved the belt, pushing his intent into it as he did, and the eldritch crystal in its core responded. As he pressed down the lever a vortex of Fog surrounded him, and in an instant he ceased to be just Makhus Newman; he was Acala Nova, the Evil Cleaving Sword.

Acala Nova, not quite yet a full embodiment of his vision, but close. So damnably close. With the addition of Eisengeist tissue to shore up the spots where mechanical components couldn’t cut it, it was no longer the suit that fell short - it was Makhus himself. Still, what he could do would suffice. It had to suffice.

Makhus saw the possible paths his allies could take, subtle variations, but he foresaw no impending attack - not in the next five seconds, which was more than enough.

He revved his belt and pressed the lever again, and in another eruption of Fog, his blade appeared in his hand. Countless pieces of black cold-iron joined by glistening-gold lines of auric amalgam. The so-called "Ebony-Gold Fragment Sabre".

Lydia Artwork [Sturmblitz]

179 - Charcoal Games Pt. 4 [Cherno]

Krahe’s brief bout of reminiscence was broken by Yao’s voice.

“This is… Not ‘anthrocite’,” the talisman mistress said without looking away from the hand for so much as a second. The tone of her voice and the expression on her face spoke of a mixture of surprise, mild confusion, concern, and slight excitement. In short, she knew what the hand really was made of, and it was probably above anthrocite in value.

“Any clue what it is?” Krahe prodded.

Yao gave a slow nod, her focus remaining on the hand.

“I can not be entirely certain, as it does not exactly match the signs, but I can make a guess,” the older woman said. Finally, she tore her gaze away from the relic, shutting the book-box.

“Where to start… I suppose the beginning would be easiest. The myth of human charcoal containing the ritual subject’s soul as part of its material is not entirely without basis. It came about from suicide rituals, carried out by the elders of the Onyx-black Puppet Hall to pass down some of their cultivation to their students before they departed for the wheel of reincarnation. The practice died out early in the Onyx-black Hall’s history, as the ritual is, for lack of a better term, a spiritual suicide by a thousand cuts. The master would gradually break down his astral body, while compressing it into as small a region as possible, creating something much like this. It’s… Well, I suppose the continental term would be something like ‘astrocite’.”

“And you believe your ‘acquaintance’ carried out that ritual with the intention of creating an inheritance?”

“Not quite the same, but something similar. He must have been crippled and near-dead at the time, but I can sense it. He condensed his remaining cultivation into this. It would be useless to me even if I stole it from you - your anathema signature is imprinted upon the astrocite. It likely took place when you opened the keyless lock,” Yao said.

A wry smile came onto her face, and she added: “Shang was ever the cautious one.”

“How much longer?” Krahe nodded towards the Hexkey.

“Twenty minutes, assuming no further disruptions,” Yao said, rising from her seat. She approached the ritual circle, performing various gestures that caused the talisman rings to speed up in their rotation.

And so, Krahe waited.

Two cigarettes and twenty minutes later, it was finished. The talisman rings came to a halt, returning to the mass of Yao’s left arm the moment she plucked the Hexkey from their midst. In the same manner, the papers making up the sound and light suppression barrier rejoined her right leg when she stepped outside the barrier.

Clack. Clack. Clack. The sound of her sandals echoed through the room, the commotion outside having quieted for the moment.

“That scoundrel,” she uttered as she took a seat at the table, turning the Hexkey back and forth in her hand. “He buried a trap array into the key’s structure. It’s not active at the moment, but there is a switch keyed specifically to Shang’s cultivation. Using his hand to complete the key would activate the array. I cannot guess the specifics, but I recognize the pattern. A curse, guidelines to remove it partially, which would likely include steps to make you a suitable vessel, then a guiding impulse to lead you somewhere for the ‘full cure’, most likely a tomb with Shang’s True Soul and facilities for its transplantation into your body. An insidious body-theft scheme, but I cannot say I am surprised.”

By the sound of it, the trap array would bypass her direct immunity to mental manipulation through indirect coercion. Even if it was direct mind control, Krahe just didn’t want to take the unnecessary risk.

“Can you remove the array?” she asked. “If not, would it be a better idea to simply use human charcoal in bulk? I have access to… I would guess at best two adult humans worth.”

Yao shook her head.

“Not good enough. Anthrocite is the bare minimum, and it would require at least six more humans who have been put through the Five Torments Blast Furnace Refinement. Sorayah also most likely used an inferior version of the ritual, reducing the anthrocite ratio, thus raising the likely minimum to eight or nine rather than six.”

“Her offensive artifact likely went through seventeen people’s worth of fuel in its lifespan, and she had a nearly intact victim in her ritual chamber. The numbers line up, but I doubt she was behind all eighteen…” Krahe thought aloud.

Yao connected to the line of thought: “It is entirely possible she found the artifact and the box together with an already partially-complete Hexkey, subsequently continuing the work of one or more individuals who attempted its completion before her. Regardless, deactivating the array is not possible, Shang was the superior array master between the two of us by far.”

There was a “however” hidden in those words, and with a self-satisfied tone, Yao spoke it soon enough, looking up at Krahe from her work.

“He was, however, not my equal in artifact crafting. I can remove the array altogether. I have determined that the voidkey’s fundamental functions will not be harmed by this, but it will lose all defensive qualities, as Shang purposely embedded the array within as precarious a section as possible - I suspect to prevent exactly what I am about to do.”

“And his True Soul will be left to rot in some tomb, probably for a thousand years until the vessel fails,” Krahe guessed.

“A thousand years of dreamless slumber means little compared to the chance at a fresh start without the downsides of starting from nothing,” Yao shrugged.

“How long will it take to remove the trap array?”

The noise outside picked up again. Wasting no time with a verbal answer, Yao waved her hand over the voidkey and towards the ritual circle in the room’s center. A swarm of talismans from her arm carried it there, forming an armillary-like structure yet again, now enveloped in a spherical barrier of seething golden symbols.

178 - Charcoal Games Pt. 3 [Cherno]

As quickly as it had begun, it ceased. With a sound somewhere between a wheezing inhalation, the scraping of glass, and the creak of a bone being slowly bent to breaking, the unlight was drawn back into Yao’s left eye socket, once more sealed away.

“It certainly matches your description, for better or for worse. I cannot guess what form it will take upon its evolution, but I shall gain a deeper understanding given some time to examine it more thoroughly,” Yao said. She turned to Krahe, who had by now hopped down from the window. “Have you brought the hand as well?”

Krahe shook her head.

“It would have left a trail.”

“And you did not wish to bring both items, just in case,” Yao added the quiet part, walking over to the table. She set the Hexkey upon it, and brought out six talisman papers. “How large is the container?”

She conjured the book closest in size, stating: “Same height, slightly wider, two and a half times as thick. The internal volume suffices to fit a man’s severed hand in a loosely curled-up position without much free space.”

Manipulating the papers in mid-air, Yao added several more, going well past the point where they could cover the whole thing. Then, she arrayed them in mid-air and got to work. Grinding up a red ink stick into a small puddle of scarlet liquid with a few meticulous motions, Yao pulled droplets into the air and using mere gestures manipulated them into forming complex symbols upon the paper. She turned the talismans into indistinguishable copies of one another, with complex patterns that exuded a powerful, pure meaning. Krahe’s instincts told her to avoid getting them on herself, that they would cripple her ability to dissipate Isotope and expel Anathema in any form, even if temporarily.

With a wave of her hand, Yao collected the papers into a bundle and set them at the side of the table where Krahe had sat.

“I would ask that you bring the hand,” she said. “I would like to keep the Hexkey in the meanwhile so that I may examine it, but I shall not stop you if you wish to take it with you for safety.”

Krahe suppressed the part of her which intensely distrusted the unsettlingly familiar stranger that Yao was, and just took the papers while leaving the Hexkey where it stood.

She left Yao’s home without a word, with the talisman mistress turning her attention to examining the relic in greater depth. Yao wasn’t at all offended or put off by her guest’s behavior; they had interacted a grand total of once before now, and even then, Yao had offered up admittance of her position in relation to Krahe as a token to buy some trust with. Despite it being the purest truth, Yao had taken Krahe’s measure, and she was not surprised that it had curried her only tentative level of trust. It would take substantive shows of trustworthiness from both sides before they truly trusted one another.  Building trust was, in fact, Yao’s main reason to suggest hunting a soulbeast for materials. Such an outing would be the most expedient way to increase trust and bond with her new, fate-ordained allies.

Even still, in the here and now, Krahe showed more trust than Yao had expected. She nearly double-took when the anathemist took off and she realized the Hexkey was still there, on the table. Yao made her way upstairs, where she took to carrying out a deeper, more conventional examination of this voidkey, forgoing the use of her Left Eye in favour of the skills she had developed over centuries prior.

_____________________________________________________________

As she made her way through the city back to Gashward 94, Krahe quickly came to understand what exactly Yao had meant when she spoke of the battle whipping up arcane winds that would scour away any signs of their anthrocite transmutation ritual.

The air was thick, an almost oppressive, dense feeling pervading every breath. Her heretofore unnamed sense for magic was completely dulled, much like the sense of smell would be prevented from detecting subtle, weaker scents in a place consumed by some overpowering stench. She even felt the waxing and waning of the “winds”; it was a nonphysical pressure that, with its stronger gusts, sanded away bits of her wards.

Yao’s sealing papers demanded some finesse to use properly, and Krahe spent a few minutes meticulously activating each one before plastering it onto the fake book-box. Despite expecting something to go wrong, nothing did; Krahe reached Yao’s residence without incident, though she took a roundabout path. Several streets away from Yao’s place, Krahe noticed one of Yao’s talismans stuck to a wall amidst old posters and charms. As she neared the place, carefully observing just how far and wide Yao’s talismans were spread out, Krahe came to the conclusion that Yao likely had an area larger than Slaughterhouse 9 locked down as her personal fortress without most, if any, of her neighbors being aware of this fact.

Upon her return, Krahe found that Yao had left her main defenses inactive. Instead, there was a fake wall. It looked convincing from a distance, and it nudged one’s gaze away from itself, but, perhaps due to being a welcome guest, Krahe had no issue discerning that it was an illusion. She walked through, feeling a brief bout of confusion as she entered the next section, somewhat like walking into a room and forgetting the reason. This also passed quickly.

Yao called her up when she entered her home, and Krahe heard the monstrous defender puppets stirring back to motion as the door closed behind her.

“I expected the confusion array to slow you down more,” the talisman mistress stated plainly, glancing up to meet Krahe’s eyes, then down at the box in her hand. Krahe placed the box on the table, and with a snap of her fingers, Yao made the talisman papers go up in golden flames. Krahe then unlocked and opened the box, leaving Yao to examine the hand while her own attention was drawn to the Hexkey. It was suspended in mid-air in the center of the room, revolving clockwise while six rings of faintly-glowing talismans revolved around it, themselves also spinning at various rates, much like an armillary. The whole array was contained inside a pillar of floating talismans, emitting a deep, yet noticeably muted hum. The light, much in the same way, was also muted such that one could look straight at it without issue. It reminded Krahe of an innovative 3D printer design that was bought out and subsequently permanently shelved by the dominant 3D printer manufacturer, Vishvakarma Manufacturing.

335 - Interlude Pt. 3 - Bayonet-eater [Sturmblitz]

Overpowering the creature was easier said than done - they were monstrously strong for their small size, and belched flame at every opportunity. Their scales raised from their bodies to make them seem larger, and to make them spiky, thus unpleasant to eat. However, this scale-raising behavior also caused them to tangle themselves even more once caught in a net, and opened plenty of gaps for Lucian to shove the tracker-spike into. Once it was done, Makhus drew his sword and joined Lydia in the slaughter. Whereas she elegantly manoeuvred her sword through the air, accounting for its momentum as she smoothly gestured it through its motions, Makhus just dashed towards the edge of the clearing. He jumped ten metres straight up, spinning on the way up, before cutting down four of the creatures in an explosion of light and movement alongside the branches they were sitting on.

"Still too slow..." he muttered in dissatisfaction as he sheathed his blade. He turned towards Lucian and Lydia, commanding: "We'll take the marked ones around half a kilometer to the north-east. In the meanwhile, set up a proper camp and mark the trees, do not forget that we’ll need to get the Kite’s corpse down the mountain eventually, even if we butcher it where it dies. We will ping the spikes and track them to their nest in a few hours."

A few hours later, the party of three had traveled a fair distance up the mountain slope. Makhus had sent out two tracking pings at this point, and with the direction consistent, the only thing left to do was to continue following the signal direction while looking out for any environmental signs. Many of the typical signs were, however, conspicuously absent.

The further into the mountain-slope woods they pushed, the warmer and dryer the air became. Not nearly as gentle as this temperature gradient, however, was the physical transition, or rather the lack of one. There were no real early warning signs, in fact even the mundane birds and animals didn't seem too worried - the three cultivators were what caused the greatest commotion among them, including the smaller not-so-mundane beasts. In short, the newly-awakened Wildfire Kite was not severely disrupting the local ecosystem. Yet.

They set down at the side of a small creek to take a short break and to reorient themselves. Makhus doffed his armor for this short time.

"I've noticed the total absence of burn areas, or even scorch marks. Usually they space them out, but not this much," Lucian remarked.

"Maybe territorial instincts kicking in early. Maybe they further from the nest they go the healthier they are. Who knows," Makhus thought aloud. "The author of 'Bestias Arcanorum Addendum Ikesia 3621' didn't much seem to care for the child-rearing behaviours of dragon-descendants unless it was directly relevant to how they threatened human settlements. Wildfire Kites manage their territories rather than deplete them, and they are one of the youngest dragon descendant species, so it was not documented during the Late Ankhezian Era."

"I always found the volume number to be absurd. How many volumes can there be? Just ours is hundreds of pages, and it's not even a complete copy..." Lucian muttered to himself, scraping a bayonet with his teeth. Its edge gleamed like a razor, and several grooves had been scraped into its flat, yet Lucian didn't have a single visible cut.

Makhus couldn't help but chuckle at that remark, while Lydia couldn't help but correct the younger man: "3621 is the year it was published, sword-brain."

He wasn't entirely wrong. The Newman Sect's copy of the ancient bestiary detailed several types of dragon-descendants, with better-known species such as Ankylosaurs getting a short book's worth of detail. As far as other beasts went, Makhus guessed the sect's copy covered around thirty species in total. It was clearly written for and by cultivators, detailing how the beasts could endanger mortals and sects, how they should be hunted, and how their bodies were best used.

"Dragon descendants, monsters, cultivators waking up or coming out of hiding, ancient ruins awakening, whole sects revealing themselves to the world. One struggles to comprehend how the Emperor was able to force the world to change so severely."

"He wasn't. Not truly. I'm sure Tian Feng would be satisfied to know that you think this was his direct doing. The truth, as we understand it, is at once far more mundane and far more complex. Beasts, cultivators, and entire sects went into hiding due to his catastrophic war with the Three Kings, both during the war and after it as a result of the Cultivation Suppression Edict. It's easy to decide that you'll just hide for a few centuries when age cannot claim you and you can spend those untold centuries slowly growing stronger. And now... It's all waking up again. Not because he gave his permission by revoking the edict, that was just him seeing the writing on the wall. I don't think it's all because of Ubul's death, either. I think the world of cultivation would've woken up regardless. The Blue Moon War just accelerated it."

Makhus looked at Lucian.

"You're living proof. How many cultivation methods were created or accidentally rediscovered as a result of the war? Victory Demons. Rudimentary Fog-breathing. Simple Armament Aura cultivation. It goes on and on."

"I don't follow. What does it have to do with me? I mean... A soldier taught me, yes, but-"

"Bayonet-eaters. That's what they call people like him - and you. We didn't bring it up because we thought you simply didn't wish to speak of the matter, but we still structured your training to push you along, at least as well as possible for that unorthodox method. Don't tell me you haven't caught on."

As he met Lucian's iron-clad stare in kind, the swordsman glimpsed the cogs slowly beginning to turn behind his eyes. Lucian's eyes went wide, and he exclaimed: "Oh, bayonet-eater, because I eat bayonets! Yeah, that's a good name!"

Makhus' lip twitched. He then erupted into laughter. Unbothered, Lucian hemmed and hawed as the cogs in his head spun and spun and eventually settled.

"But... Hm... If my training schedule all this time has been laid out to help me advance, am I not a failure? I have not yet been able to move past the initial stages."

177 - Charcoal Games Pt. 2 [Cherno]

"Alright, fine, enough games," Krahe sighed, and decided to just spill everything about the Hexkey. As it was, both it and the anthrocite hand were utterly useless to her. "To start with, I know the superior counterpart to human charcoal under the name 'anthrocite'. Secondly, I found what I believe to be an inheritance from the Human Charcoal Cults. The first part is a cursed voidkey that promises it will evolve at some ill-defined point, claiming that it will 'evolve once Anthrocite Transmutation reaches 100%.' It currently sits at around 66%. The second part is a full hand made of anthrocite, found in a purposely poorly-sealed box disguised as a book. It was locked with a holeless lock that demanded painstakingly precise anathema manipulation to open. The box also contained a message that directly stated the hand should somehow be sufficient to 'finish' the cursed voidkey."

“I see why you would be cautious about disclosing this to anyone you do not fully trust,” Yao nodded. “Do you know the nature of the curse, or is the voidkey warded against appraisal?”

Krahe had no qualms about explaining the nature of the Flame’s Collapse Hexkey, since there was no reason to withhold this information after what she had already disclosed. The mistress listened with interest, concluding: “Clearly intended to hook a prospective disciple and encourage commitment. I would not be surprised if there was at least one more link in the chain that could somehow override the Hexkey. Did you bring either the key or the anthrocite hand? While I cannot be certain until I can examine both relics, I believe I may be able to aid you in completing the Hexkey.”

She turned, glancing out the window. Despite the ground-level windows not facing the open street in any direction, the light of the battle in the sky still reached them every once in a while.

“And if we are to carry out such a rite it would be best to do it tonight, if at all possible. We are not likely to receive such a convenient cover for some time,” Yao added.

“You expect the process to create a large energy signature, and you think that the battle will be a sufficient distraction,” Krahe stated.

Turning back to face her again, Yao nodded: “In more ways than one. The protections I already have in place, combined with the protections I will create for the rite, will do most of the work, but I am not an anathema specialist.”

She got up and walked to the window, leaning on its edge. Outside the window was a narrow alleyway, with the walls and the roof of the next building over being plastered in talismans, included as part of Yao’s defensive perimeter. A shimmering wall of scrolling symbols, rising from the wall of the building across the alley, became visible when Yao came into its vicinity. Staring up at the sky, face lit up by intermittent flashes from above, she continued to speak.

“At best, assuming you contribute your expertise, I would estimate that at least one tenth of the ritual’s waste energies will leak into the environment. The arcane winds swept up by the heavenly battle will suffice to sweep it away, and the battle itself will provide us with plausible deniability. I do not expect individuals of that level to disclose their trump cards to dispel accusations of anathema usage, given the fact that anathema seems to be regarded as a force that can only be safely wielded by high-level practitioners. Perhaps one of the participants made use of an anathemic technique in desperation. It would make perfect sense for one of them to use it, perhaps the red one…”

Yao became drawn into her own words, a sense of melancholy, nostalgia even, creeping into her speech.

“I must admit that I am curious: How does that display compare to your own experiences?” Krahe asked. It was, indeed, somewhat familiar to her. She had seen power-armored superhumans soaring through the sky on jets of plasma, firing off rays of death and hypersonic slugs, forming wings made of nanomachines as protection. Krahe had seen it, but despite a degree of familiarity, it was still different and new in some ways.

“Feels the same as looking at the stars here. Familiar but different,” the talisman mistress croaked, taking another drag of her pipe. It was a perfect description for how Krahe felt about it, too. She watched in silence. Krahe walked up to the window as well and hopped up on the ledge, sitting down with her legs hanging out. It was wide enough to still leave about a meter of empty space between the two of them. Without a thought, Krahe conjured an arrha cigarette and joined Yao in smoking. The smoke mixed together into a medicinal, incense-like compound, and a cloud formed around them as it dissipated slower than new smoke was added. The talisman mistress spoke up again some ten minutes later: “They want someone in the city to see them fight, yet they also fear the consequences of causing collateral damage. I was observing them before you came; even with my impaired senses, I noticed six instances where an opening was not taken advantage of for fear of the possibility it might strike a building. At my peak, I would have mocked them for not having the person above the city lord in their pockets, or for not being able to quickly set up precautions so that an all-out battle would not ever threaten the city, even as close to its perimeter as this.”

They watched for a few more minutes, and Krahe eventually just brought out the Hexkey and set it down on the windowsill between them. After sparing it not much more than a glance, Yao took it in hand and stepped back from the window, turning away from it. Resting her pipe in the corner of her mouth, she brought the key to her left eye and pulled back the talisman that plastered over its socket. An ominous, invasive feeling filled the room as a floodlight of eldritch darkness flooded out, shimmering wisps of indescribable colour whirling in the black.

176 - Charcoal Games [Cherno]

Reaching out with her left hand, several papers split off from Yao's arm and wrapped around the chunk, bringing it closer to her. She silently inspected it for a few moments, subjecting it to four separate talisman-based tests. Twice, the paper's patterns changed colour, and twice more, it burned on contact with the stone - the first time was instant, like flash paper, and the second slowly blackened the paper as if the charcoal piece was just a hot ember. After contemplating for a further minute, Yao simply asked: "Are you yourself aware of what this is?"

"Yes," Krahe nodded. "I'll make this simpler for the both of us: I will not reveal how much I know - and from what perspective that information comes - until you do the same. I believe we can both benefit from an exchange of knowledge."

After a few more moments of contemplation, Yao took the chunk in hand and began speaking.

"This is... Well, there is no direct equivalent word that comes to mind."

"Charcoal?" Krahe suggested. It looked like charcoal, so she wasn't giving up much by suggesting that word.

With a nod, Yao continued: "It is charcoal made from a human, body and soul both. In Tiengenzhen, this is the 'waste', or perhaps more accurately 'side product' of the Onyx-black Puppet Hall's human refinement arts. Even this 'waste' is considered immensely valuable to all artifact cultivators, as it is the cheapest fuel for certain artifacts and tools. Its value is such that inferior versions of the Onyx-black Puppet Hall's rites have spread throughout the land, only capable of producing this. The strongest battle puppets devour a hundred convicts' worth of this in a day of operation, but they are still used by the mortal kingdoms because the number of lives they save far surpasses the price. Even so, it is..."

Turning the chunk around in her hand, Yao's expression shifted from one of consideration to disgust, and she put it back on the table.

"Wretched. Human refinement is, by its very nature. The victim's suffering is part of the process, it does not work without it. I believe the Onyx-black Puppet Hall's method is called the Five Torments Blast Furnace Refinement, involving a specially constructed 'furnace' chamber that deprives the victim of all senses, keeps them alive, and allows for the introduction of hallucinogenic poisons throughout the process. Only reincarnation ends the victim's suffering, despite the rumours of the uneducated that claim the victim's soul is imprisoned in the coal. That is my understanding of this substance, its origins, and its uses. Now, I believe, it would be your turn."

Digesting the information, Krahe started with an easy one: "This Onyx-black Puppet Hall. Are they related to the Thousand Puppets Hall?"

"I am surprised that you are aware of them. Yes, they are related. The Onyx-black Puppet Hall was formed by a group of demonic artifact cultivators who left the Thousand Puppet Hall rather than let themselves be judged for their crimes. I must ask, if you do not mind, how do you know of the Thousand Puppet Hall?"

"I saw a man with strange-looking arms, looked into the matter, and learned that they were of Tiengenzhen origin. Not much else, unfortunately. Now, regarding what I know of this stone..."

Krahe went on to recount some of her knowledge regarding human charcoal and the Human Charcoal Cults, taking care not to stray or to go too deep, so that the knowledge she shared would not surpass what Yao had shared, or otherwise reveal what she wanted to keep concealed. The talisman mistress gradually became more visibly interested, particularly at the mention of the Human Charcoal Cults.

"You would not happen to be aware of when these cults were active, would you?" Yao asked.

"At least a century, starting in the late 4120s. Presumably before that, but I don't know enough to make any guesses."

A smirk took hold on Yao's face.

"What a curious coincidence," she chuckled. "An acquaintance of mine made off with copies of the Onyx-black Puppet Hall's ritual scrolls only thirteen years prior to that time, and vanished from Tiengenzhen in... Oh, I think it was 4112. But he would've left inheritances, that bastard was not the sort to put all his eggs in one basket. Perhaps the church was just very thorough."

"And perhaps they still take such great care specifically to curtail cases like Sorayah. Even what she found was enough to sow the seeds of a serious issue for the city, given how well they paid me for rooting her out."

Knowledge of Sorayah and the fact Krahe had dealt with her was the smallest thing here. It was convenient to use as a framing device for how she had obtained human charcoal and knowledge of it, and she hadn't spoken so much as a word regarding the Hexkey or the Anthrocite Hand.

Nonetheless... This game was still frustrating. After some further circular conversation, Krahe decided to just ask the question outright: "Considering everything, do you think human charcoal would be of any use to either of us?"

"No," Yao said without hesitation, shaking her head. "Too volatile for ink, or any other artifact crafting. Its only use is as fuel for artifacts and certain demonic rituals, of which I know a few, but none of which would be useful. There is a good reason it is considered a borderline waste product. The energy output by its burning is far too unstable to use in the manner I desire, and besides sheer burst output, your own natural abilities are superior to the burning of human charcoal. Its greater counterpart, however, is another matter."

"What if I happen to come upon it?" Krahe asked, allowing her tone of voice and expression to make it clear she had anthrocite or knew where to find it. "You wouldn't happen to know and be willing to share methods of distinguishing it from the chaff and making use of it?"

"That depends on the quantity, quality, and use case. I do not own any written texts, but I am certain I could aid in preparing and performing any channeling rituals."

Krahe weighed her options. There was the chance that the Hexkey's evolution would turn out not so useful, and either way, Yao was still one of a vanishingly small minority with reason to not screw her over and the skills to craft a higher-order voidkey. If she kept this course, she would have to eventually disclose the Hexkey's existence to Yao regardless.

175 - A Reminder of Scale [Cherno]

The only thing left to do was to write a message and send Yao's communication talisman back to its owner. It was a relatively simple process, if laborious due to the talisman's ravenous appetite for thauma. The message was simple, informing the talisman mistress of Krahe's intent to visit and requesting confirmation that she could do so without taking as much of a risk as Casus had done. Half an hour later, when she walked out back to check, she found a camouflaged talisman hovering in the exact same spot as last time.

Not too long after that, she made her way to Yao's home. It was without incident, insofar as her own journey went. However, around the one-third point, the ground shuddered. A huge impact, akin to a thunderclap, sounded in the distance, past the horizon. It had to be a few kilometers outside the city. Then came another, and third for good measure. A few seconds later she saw it: A burning yellow comet screaming into the heavens. Two more followed it, one blue and one purple. The blue one resembled an actual comet, violently tearing through the air with a rocket-like tail, whereas the purple one was smooth, its flight seeming nearly effortless save for the huge arcs of lightning it gave off. A swarm of smaller lights separated from the yellow comet, swarming the others, turning a swath of the sky into a field of explosions, only for blue and purple to emerge seemingly unscathed. The sky was lit up by a dance of lights as these three chased one another and unleashed arcane death upon one another. Distant sonic booms and explosions filled the night, and the conflict of nameless demigods illuminated the city like a wild thunderstorm. Krahe almost felt at home for the span of her walk across the city. It drew out a great number of curious civilians, with a surprising number of people climbing out onto the rooves of their homes and apartment buildings. Despite the number of eyes, Krahe felt even safer from notice - the attention was in the exact opposite direction of where she was, after all. The three comets were still fighting by the time she reached Yao's place.

The two of them walked through Yao's death-gauntlet of trapped alleyways and corridors. Not a word was exchanged until they entered her home.

"First him, now you. I am flattered by such trust," the mistress remarked with a decidedly hag-like, facetious smugness. She spun around on a heel, conjured a slender pipe from between her left arm's talismans, lit it, and took a long drag of it, all in a single motion lasting no more than three seconds.

"In exchange, I trust that you are not here for help with a crisis of ideology," she added.

"Of course not. I have two things that I believe will interest you," Krahe replied, sitting down as she began the process of opening her Kenoma Sack. She found it increasingly more easy to do if she gave it a bodily medium rather than just using the black tablet directly. So, with a yawning maw splitting her forearm down the middle, she brought out two items of interest: Soryah's broken key came first.

"I need to have this appraised. It... Well it sings, for lack of a better term. My gut tells me it has something to do with Astro Diving- Spirit Walking, as you call it."

With a long exhalation of smoke, the talisman mistress near-enough stalked over to the table. The interest couldn't be more evident in her eyes as she sat down, crossed her legs, and leaned forward to get a better look at the broken voidkey's pieces.

"Yes, I recall a scripture which described it as a certain inaudible song that, once heard, one cannot help but keep noticing..." Yao trailed off, curiously picking up the key's pieces with either hand, the pipe sticking to the corner of her mouth in a gravity-defying manner. "It is a typical post-mortem extraction strain fracture. The voidkey is still mostly intact - you could implant it, and it *might* function as-is, albeit to a fraction of its original specifications. That unfortunately means the bloodline lock is also mostly intact. The lock doesn't appear to be particularly profound. I will be able to subvert it, perhaps even maintain the functionality and merely alter it to recognize you as the rightful host. The craftsmanship speaks of a highly skilled craftsman purposely working to a lower standard than he is used to. Nonetheless, it is still better than anything you can readily find on the open market."

Yao put the key's pieces back down, leaning back in her seat.

"I will contact you with any relevant information once I have had the time to carry out the necessary rites. While the key *is* relevant, I suspect it is the less important of the two, seeing as you left the other matter for second," Yao said, glancing down at Krahe's split-open forearm.

Giving a nod of affirmation, Krahe kept pushing in her effort to extract the human charcoal piece from storage. Slowly, painstakingly, a black tendril lifted it out of her forearm-maw and placed it right next to her arm. The moment it was out, Krahe snapped the maw shut and began purging, letting out a deep sigh of relief. For reasons that escaped her, this time the purge remnants manifested as as scentless smoke spilling out of her mouth and nose without cease for the whole duration of the purge. Human charcoal was truly infernally impractical to store in Kenoma storage, taking up many times more space in storage than its actual physical mass. The same phenomenon applied to other magical items, but human charcoal was the most extreme example she had encountered by far.

Yao hadn't said anything at the sight of the human charcoal, tilting her head back and forth, inspecting it from a distance. It was as if she was trying to judge whether it would be a good idea to even touch it, or perhaps waiting for Krahe to explain what it was.

"It’s an anathema radiation source, but not actively hazardous. I won’t say any more until you inspect it for yourself. ”

174 - Your Turn [Cherno]

There, in the depths of struggle and pain, he found an abiding and invincible will to move forward. For the briefest moment, he could swear someone was pulling him back to his feet and speaking encouragement in his ear. He couldn't make out most of the words, only an immense sense of pride, as well as agreement with the idea that he had no choice but to move forward as something new.

For a few moments, he was able to claw back true clarity of mind. As he leaned on the wall, drawing in sharp, ragged breaths, he felt and saw something truly strange: The Right Arm of Silberblut, moving of its own accord. It took him a few moments to realize it was using one-handed sign language to spell out individual letters.

Y O U R

T U R N

He felt his mind being pulled inward, into his system, towards the Shining Knight of Silver. The Boon changed right there before his mind's eye, the letters themselves torturously shifting in a manner unlike anything Casus had seen from the system. His boons had changed in the past, but it was never like this. It almost looked as though the Boon was being melted and forced into a new shape.

[CRUSADER OF BLACK AND GOLD]

[Tags:]

Imposition of One's Will

Mamon Coupler Compatibility

[Details:]

This boon forcibly maximizes any Mamon Coupler's and/or Catalyst's compatibility with the holder through "Heroic Subjugation".

Carrying out Heroic Subjugation incurs backlash, the nature and severity of which is highly variable. Severity of backlash can be mitigated in various ways depending on its nature. The holder may suffer astral injury due to subjugation backlash.

The effects of Heroic Subjugation are permanent for Couplers and Catalysts with which the holder has a strong bond of possession. In other cases, the effects last until the item is used by someone other than the holder.

Casus, without thinking, transformed. None beheld the form he took, and even he was in no state to maintain or remember it. He could do it, and that was enough for his utterly drained self, so he detransformed and collapsed on the spot.

When he returned to his senses, the pain was gone. Or rather, he was still wracked by ache as if he had just been fed through a rock-crusher, but he didn't feel as though his Soul Furnace might burst at any moment. He glanced down, and saw that the Silberblut Coupler's outer frame was, for the lack of a better term, shedding. It was now covered in dark, brittle slag. Casus unbuckled the belt, and as he took it off, the mere motion was enough to shake the slag off.

Underneath was alarite. Pure alarite, flickering as if it was reflecting a dancing flame. As for the belt's eye, it now bore a new pattern; in the stead of Silberblut's four-pointed star, over the blue abyss in the eye's depths now shone a cross mimicking the pattern of Casus' own eyes. It also seemed unsettlingly alive. Whereas it had been stony and motionless before this endeavour, frozen in a forward stare, it now shone with a not-quite-human awareness. It was as if the Silberblut Coupler had been asleep until now, carrying out its duties by simple instinct, and only now had it been roused and made to acknowledge its new master.

The banisher, utterly drained, spent the better part of the next day resting.

Meanwhile, Krahe burned away the daytime hours in seclusion, occupying herself with a mixture of reading, physical training, and calligraphy practice. The Decoction of Mind's Dawn felt miraculous at first, too good to be true, even, allowing her to compile several different Human Charcoal Cult scriptures, using them to fill in one another's gaps. It grew increasingly obvious that the individual texts were purposely left with gaping holes, a fairly typical infosec tactic. In several cases, strange phrases or even weirdly written words served as indexing marks for where a section of text should be replaced with another, changing the meaning of a passage. Disappointingly, the information that came together entailed superior, more complete versions of the rites and manipulation methods detailed within each scripture, with an implied anthrocite yield of around 3-4% of the victim's body mass.

Krahe didn't doubt that informing the church of these hidden rites would mean a good payday, but she wanted to know more about the uses of anthrocite and the Hexkey. The Decoction's side effects showed themselves some time after she set aside the cultist texts and began making headway into Yao's scroll. The flavour suddenly became violently acidic and astringent, her body rejecting the liquid altogether, and a thumping pressure made itself known inside her head, threatening to turn into a splitting headache if she took another sip. It was fortunate that she had followed Razem's guidelines, and had made only one day's dose of the liquid. The preparation guide also warned that it was volatile, losing potency in mere hours.

Despite that limitation, the Decoction of Mind's Dawn nonetheless pushed her past the edge of comprehension, and as the sun dipped past the horizon, she grasped Yao's brush in hand with a new understanding of its previously awkward weight distribution. The Chimera-hair Brush, as her glasses identified it, demanded a grip that felt like it would fall from her grasp at any moment, but it didn't. Once she got it moving, she finished the back side of a Wandrei Faust talisman in less than half her previous fastest time, and the same went for the front side. The limitation was no longer the brush, but her own skill, manual dexterity, and ability to mentally parse the patterns she was imbuing in the paper.

She found that, with this new brush, the patterns felt even more angry than before, the theurgic pattern felt almost alive. The claw almost seemed to twitch on the paper, waiting for a neck to grab. Krahe took the time to load three fresh cartridges with these improved papers, marking each with a painted ring midway down the length of the case. She stored these, alongside three of their earlier counterparts, in her Kenoma Pocket. Thereafter she loaded a clip full of six mescalt bullets into the Pattner, and a seventh straight into the chamber before she sealed the gun.

334 - Interlude Pt. 2 - Going Kite-hunting[Sturmblitz]

When he finally walked out into the courtyard, Lucian realized he hadn't even been told the most basic information in the rush. One moment he had been asleep, the next he was awake; Elder Makhus had waved some kind of smelling salts under his nose. Hell, he had barely been able to wash himself, and the sun wasn't even up yet.

"So what exactly was the cause for such a sudden expedition? And why am I to be a part of it?" he questioned as he walked up. It was just him, Elder Makhus, and... Martial Sister Lydia? Senior Lydia? He wasn't sure.

"What have you been doing since midwinter? Assignment-wise," asked Elder Makhus.

"Tracking and reducing the population of Wildfire Kitelings in the forest on the north-western crater mountain slopes," Lucian answered. "I don't recall the actual map name for those woods, they all run together in my head."

"Doesn't matter," the alchemist disregarded. "The reason you're coming along is that this is the next logical step up from what you've been doing. You didn't think there was no reason for it, right? We were keeping an eye on the things ever since the Blue Moon War. What traits do the Kitelings display that separate them from other beasts?"

Thinking, Lucian recounted: "No eyes. Navigation by sound and scent. Weak but precise flame breath, formed through rudimentary monadic magic rather than internal alchemy. They hunt by setting forest fires to herd or kill small animals. Sometimes they grab fish out of the water and kill them with heat shock."

"All correct!" Makhus affirmed. "Now where do you think they keep coming from if you keep killing them? That source is what we're after. Think, sword brain."

Lucian wanted to complain about being treated like an idiot, but he also hadn't realized until now that there was probably a Wildfire Kite somewhere popping out the Kitelings. Despite being good at bushcraft and a well above-average swordsman with brawn to spare, Lucian was not the shiniest sword in the armory.

"Well don't just stand there, get on. We're leaving."

The blitzgandr ride was relatively short, bumpy, and hellishly fast as always. Lucian spent the hike that came afterwards chewing on a bayonet that still tasted of blood. Yes, while he had kept the nature of his unorthodox cultivation to himself, anyone with eyes to see would be able to deduce its fundamental nature from his habits. When they set down deep in the mountains, shortly after noon, Lucian was told to to start a campfire, while his betters looked around to secure the site. He gathered some tinder and wood, got down low to the ground, bit down on a spark-rod, and yanked it out of his mouth to get the sparks he needed. This was how he had been doing it since he lost the striker, and he hadn't realized it looked quite strange until Lydia gave him a look that suggested as much.

He tossed a bait-bundle on the fire, and they waited. A column of smoke rose into the sky, smelling of burning fur, meat, tree resin, and a few other things that attracted Kitelings for unknown reasons. The mixture was something Lucian held great pride in, as he had come up with the idea. It wasn't long before the head-splittingly high-pitched screeching of those accursed creatures reached them, carrying on the wind.

Lydia unsheathed her giant sword with only a gesture, willing it to float near her hand, while Makhus lowered himself into a wide stance, but didn't draw his weapon. In fact, be brought out a storage tablet and dumped several weighted nets onto the ground, tossing several to Lucian while he himself took the rest in hand.

"We want to catch one one or two alive, understand?" the elder instructed, manipulating that weird belt of his as he spoke. Tiny storage tablets slotted in, buttons pressed, a lever pulled, and he invoked: "Armor, on..."

Makhus was enveloped by tendrils of white fog, which were then dispersed by a burst of light that seemingly originated from his body. A giant enveloped in mechanical armor now stood in the elder's place, 2.5m tall and with the face of a sneering demon on his chest. A kriegsmesser better fit to be called a grossemesser rested on his hip.

Eventually - after nearly ten minutes - they started gathering in the trees surrounding the site. That was when the killing started. It was at once a mercy and a curse that these things didn't know to avoid humans. They resembled stereotypical dragons of myth, with wedge-shaped heads, leathery bat-like wings, and feet with hooked claws akin to birds of prey. Their wings, too, had grabby, clawed fingers that allowed them to be used for climbing, and their structure was such that they could easily fold up as to not get in the way. The Kitelings' mottled, orange and brownish camouflage pattern could charitably be described as reddish, their bellies being pale beige and at times greyish-blue. Their heads were shaped as if they had two pairs of eyes on the sides, but hardened horns grew where eyes ought to be, leaving a wide, flat surface at the top, broken only by a dip where their single real eye would eventually grow in. The Kitelings' screeching, the wooshing of Lydia's blade flying around her, the whirring and hissing of Elder Makhus' suit - a deluge of noise filled Lucian's ears. Lucian, after three fruitless attempts and few new charred spots on his chestplate, managed to get one of the damnable things entangled in a net.

It would have been a sweet, merciful delusion to hope that it would end in a flash. Lucian had one bagged, and Elder Makhus had two, while the corpses of five more littered the campsite. The problem was, around a dozen more were already gathering and Makhus was pulling out short, barbed spikes with the dull ends wrapped in talismans. Lydia continued cutting down those which swooped down, but, following the lead of one clever specimen, five of the twelve stayed in the trees and started spitting fireballs. They didn't do much on their own, as most didn't hit, but eventually they would hit one of them in an unlucky spot or start a wildfire. Makhus quickly shoved one barbed spike each under the wing of both his catches, tossing a third spike to the ground at Lucian's feet.

"Just stick it somewhere that won't kill the thing and leave it in the net. We can track them back to the nest with these."

333 - Interlude - Life at the Newman Sect [Sturmblitz]

A/N: This one's a bit shorter. Next one will be a bit longer. Dialogue flow reasons.

________________________________________________________________
"What's the point of demanding us to register separately? The Slayer's Guild and the Newman Sect might as well be the same entity. Same people, anyhow," a heavily-muscled young man complained as he strapped on a beaten-up, refurbished chest plate. A fresh decal on the left breast marked him as a trainee, not yet proven enough to have a permanent license with the guild. The rest of his equipment was much the same; used and abused, mostly salvaged, but more than usable.

An older man, wearing a bulky belt on his waist, rebuffed him: "You only think that because you're from the sect. Who do you think does the jobs we don't take? You ever see a sect member pick up a pest extermination contract?"

"But why not just fold slayer qualification under sect membership?" he asked, letting his thoughts spill out while he mind was mostly focused on getting his gear strapped on properly. The room - one of the sect's armories - was slightly chilly, despite the warm weather outside. All of the sect's underground compound had been like this lately. Approaching footsteps echoed down the hallway just outside, and the monolithic metal door swung out of the way without so much as a sound.

"It's politics, as I understand it," came a third, female voice from the newcomer. She turned to the older of the two men, stating: "Elder Makhus, the blitzgandrs will be ready in fifteen minutes."

She sounded more rugged than both men combined, and looked the part as well. Everything visible of her right side was covered by burn scars, and in place of a right eye she had a pitch-black stone that glowed with a horizontal slit of light. In her hands she carried a sword as long as she was tall sheathed in a scabbard the length of a quarterstaff, and twice as thick. Most of her form was concealed at all times by a ragged-looking cloak.

"Ah, Lydia. Good. Help Lucian with his armour while I double-check that we have everything we need for the hunt. Don't forget your own, either," Makhus instructed, turning to walk off. 

The woman impassively did as was asked of her, looking Lucian over and tugging on the straps of his gear to ensure it was all correctly in place. Lucian, meanwhile, mustered every bit of his extremely limited aura pressure training to keep his shit together. Her presence was well-contained, but she seemed either unable or unwilling to suppress its intensity even a bit. Even the slightest grazing touch felt like being shocked and cut simultaneously, mercifully without any real pain. There was no wonder why she had been invited to join the sect by the founder herself; that monstrous woman knew when she saw one of her own kind.

After those agonizingly long few seconds, she walked up to a particular spot next to the wall and simply placed her hand on it. With a pulse of white light, the stone panel fell away, revealing a walk-in closet behind it. Lydia emerged moments later, the only apparent change to her attire being the replacement of her ever-present cloak with a different, sturdier-looking one.

"If you uh, don't mind me asking, what did you mean by politics?" he asked in an effort to lighten what he perceived as an awkward atmosphere.

"You've been in the sect far longer than I. Should you not know?" she questioned in a deadpan tone. Nonetheless, rather than let him stew in his own ignorance, she explained: "The sect which resided here before us used their position to control the guild. I would guess that keeping the sect and the guild as separate entities controlled by different people is intended to prevent it from happening again. Come, don't leave the alchemist elder waiting."

Lucian didn't quite understand the sect's hierarchy. In fact, nobody did. Being submerged within it granted a sort of instinctive understanding, but besides the obvious like the two elders at the very top and their inner circle, the Newman Sect's internal politics were at once murky and flexible. Theoretically it lined up with the view of the Sanger and Black Horse sects, but in reality, it felt different. For one, Lucian didn't fear that he would punished or expelled just for asking questions without the express permission to do so.

He got up, taking his sword in hand, strapping it to his waist. A simple kriegsmesser, left to him by a crippled defector who had come to his home village in the midst of the war.

It had been a man with iron talons in place of feet.

A man with a hooked hand.

A man with iron teeth and a bladed tongue.

It was that man who had taught Lucian the fundamentals... And a bit more. A bit of something special. That something was the reason he had come here, rather than to either the Sangers or the Black Horses, knowing he would be rejected as a heretic. That something was, paradoxically, also something he had been keeping to himself since before he had come here. Not out of fear of rejection, but because he couldn't make it work yet. Indeed, he had been passed a unique body cultivation method and he had only gotten as far as the very first step: Iron-blackened, abnormally sharp teeth. However, he couldn't actually do anything with his cultivation yet. Lucian didn't worry, keeping in mind the cripple's words. Results would show eventually, he just had to keep at it. Part of that included comprehending the true nature of any given blade and becoming like it in some aspects; Lucian was fairly certain this was the part that was keeping him from advancing. He just wasn’t good with metaphors.

173 - The Daughters of Hope [Cherno]

"Beef," the raven demanded in a large black man's voice.

"I'll give you some if you give me that quote."

"Beef, twelve ounces," he reiterated.

"We have tortoise. You liked it better than beef."

The whole time, Casus watched on, his stoic visage admirably masking his mild bewilderment at the scene. That thing really wasn't a normal eidolon; not only did it eat, it even made demands of its master.

Nonetheless, the offer of tortoise steak convinced the crow. It opened and closed its beak a few times, snippets of various sounds and voices coming out as if it was scrolling through radio stations. Eventually, after a solid two minutes, Barzai opened his beak one final time. A scratchy voice came out, like that of a man who yelled a lot, made even grainier by the hiss of a low-quality speaker.

"Hope has two equally glorious and terrible daughters, for they drive men to action like none other; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the world's wrongs, and Courage to see that these wrongs might be righted. Or something like that, I'm kinda stupid..."

At that point, Krahe recalled the raven.

"Alright, that's enough. You'll get your meat in a bit."

She couldn't help but notice that Casus had gotten a profound look on his face as he left, but she didn't give it much thought. It felt like the Banisher had a profound expression more often than not.

_______________________________________________________________

Underground, in the privacy of a Zaveshian indoor gymnasium, Casus Aristedes engaged in an ill-conceived exercise in self-abuse. His hair was draped in front of his face as he stood, leaning on a wall, the Silberblut Coupler clasped about his waist. He was emitting sounds of struggle utterly unbefitting of his image - be it as Silberblut, or as Casus Aristedes.

The belt's eye, vacant of its four-pronged star, whipped back and forth like the eye of a panicked animal. Bursts of golden flame issued from the coupler as it tried to transform its user into Silberblut, only to find itself rejected, only to find an unimpeachable will demanding its subjugation to ideals that clashed with what it was used to. The half-sentient artifact didn't understand. It had, up until this point, been fooled into thinking its user had never changed at all.

Casus, meanwhile, struggled to stand, even with support. He hadn't experienced struggle like this since his first attempts to use the Silberblut coupler. The sole, singular saving grace of this torturous power struggle was the fact he didn't need to worry about Isotope poisoning. Each exposure was so brief and minimal, even dozens of attempts didn't match to the full suit operating at combat output levels.

That didn't make this any less pleasant. His head and soul threatened to split open as he tried to assert himself over the belt's tendencies rather than letting the transformation go through. Casus was well aware that what he was trying to do was the labour or months and years, but he had never been the patient, slow-going type. Becoming a suitable user for the Silberblut Coupler was the work of decades, they had told him, and he had achieved it in less than two years.

[SHINING KNIGHT OF SILVER]

[Tags:]

Self-Adaptation

Mamon Coupler Compatibility

[Details:]

This boon forcibly maximizes the holder's compatibility with any Mamon Coupler. The nature and severity of side effects is variable. Severity of side effects can be mitigated in various ways depending on their nature.

That Boon. The pride and great achievement of Casus' hard work... Was now a shackle. He now understood that it was fundamentally flawed.

He continued his struggle with the belt until he lost consciousness from exhaustion. After the attendants from the shrine above helped him recover, he continued on without delay, prompting reactions of mixed respect and concern. They were familiar.

"He's doing it again, what could possibly lead one to such horrific training?” the shrine maidens thought. Nonetheless, he was a Banisher, and so they didn't question his choices.

They weren't wrong to fear for him. The more he pushed, the more a fear grew inside him, a fear he would cripple or kill himself.

In the end, he began to feel the coupler's confused panic. Through the pain and the constant immolation with sacred flame of transformation, the sacred relic eventually reached out to him, and he readily grasped its metaphorical hand.

It didn't communicate in words, or even clear thoughts, but vague sentiments. From what little Casus understood, it had finally realized that he wasn't Silberblut, but rather a successor... And now it wanted to know why he was doing this. In effect, it was asking him the same question he himself had sought an answer to: "Why refuse the transformation? Why would you want to be anything other than a shadow of Him?"

Casus, however, had a pure, burning determination in his chest, a flame born from his own ruminations, from the Masked Saint's guidance, and from his conversation with Lady Blackhand. She, in particular, had been the one to pour the accelerant onto the pile and set it alight, with her straightforwardness of expression.

The sentiment which he poured into the Silberblut Coupler in response was as pure and brilliant as the pain that scorched his being: "I am not Magnus Aristedes. I will never be Magnus Aristedes. To pretend is a dishonor upon his name. I am the next in line, the successor. Walk with me out of His shadow, or join me in the void."

At that moment, something broke. Casus wasn't sure if he had finally burst his Soul Furnace or given himself some other crippling astral injury in his bullheaded efforts, or if it was the belt's stubbornness that broke, but something undeniably did break.

The pain that came after would have sent any human into the bliss of shock-induced unconsciousness, but, grinding his teeth, Casus persevered. At that moment, as the man of faith he was, Casus prayed. He prayed with a fervor worthy of any saint, crumbling to his knees as he thoughtlessly repeated an advanced, seventy-seven lines long prayer to Zavesh.

172 - Spiritual Guidance [Cherno]

Ambrosius simply led Casus into the basement, where a miniature urban landscape of astonishing detail stretched across a table. In the span of a few minutes, he brought out boxes of miniatures and re-set the battle state as it was nearly a year ago when they had last spoken like this. The saint didn't say a word, simply playing his turn. Two of his thaumaturge units got a lucky strike in and cut down Casus' graft-beast. So it went for around three hours, finishing out that battle and beginning another before Casus managed to order his thoughts enough to put some of them into words: "I have lived my life with the unwavering belief that I was to be the next Silberblut. If that is not my role, then why... What..."

Three turns - about half an hour - passed before Ambrosius answered.

"Tell me, young one. Is a man no more than a flesh-automaton? Is a son no more than the sum of his parents? Is a fullgraft no more than the sum of the saints from whose parts their body was crafted?"

"No," Casus answered without hesitation.

"And what, pray tell, is the reason? What differentiates you from your unthinking brethren, who tirelessly maintain the Wheel?"

"The indomitable spirit of divinity which burns within all mankind."

"Straight from the scriptures," said the saint, smiling.

They continued to play in silence for some time, and spoke for far longer than that, into the night and unto dawn. Eventually, Casus reached a conclusion: "I believe I shall be able to move past this, but I will require time in the Chamber of Reflection."

"Are you certain? You know the risks," Ambrosius asked, but didn't try to dissuade him.

"I know them better than most. I believe a day will be enough."

"Very well. Besides Favonia, Firminus, and Fidelia, is there anyone who should be informed regarding your status should complications occur?"

"Yeah," Casus nodded.

Several hours later, he was floating in a tank of fluid deep beneath the Central Temple, in a chamber whose walls held two dozen such tanks. It was not a dreamless, peaceful slumber, but a journey into his own psyche induced through elixirs and absolute sensory deprivation. He'd done this before, once. It wasn't fun then. It wasn't fun now. The fluid was, in fact, a vast colony of engineered bacteria that at once drew out bodily waste and supplied the body with nutrients. The risks were many; mental damage, delusions, even permanent catatonia.

Nonetheless, he found at least part of the answer he had been searching for.

__________________________________________

Krahe, as much as she disliked it, understood why Casus decided to send that message back to the safehouse. If she was understanding it correctly, he was taking a significant risk, comparable to her own choice to dive into the Astral Gulf not long ago.

He returned seemingly no better or worse off, but there was something different about him.

When he started asking about how she saw the matters of legacy and inheritance, she knew he'd chanced upon something in that glorified sensory deprivation tank. She gave it some thought, and, at first, she decided to just parrot the words of someone who had given this matter far more though than she.

"A great philosopher from my world's ancient past once said that tradition is the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes. But... That's not what you need to hear. What you need to hear is that you will never be the Silberblut of legend. The only thing you'll achieve by mirroring your predecessor is to become a distorted echo of him in our era."

"Then... How would you see it if someone did for you as I have been doing for Silberblut?"

"Honestly?"

"Lady Blackhand, my convictions are not so fragile as to break this easily," said the Banisher, not entirely certain of his own words. "I have come to learn that you are more honest than most when it comes to giving your unfiltered thoughts. Of course I want your honesty."

"If I learned of someone trying to embody the idea of me five centuries after my death, let alone five millennia, I would be confused at best. Most likely, I would be a bit disturbed. It would be an imitator, not a successor. But if someone were to, let's say, discover some of my old grafts and use them to unearth a conspiracy and bring down the masterminds in their own time, I might consider such a person a worthwhile successor. I don't know what Silberblut was like when he still lived, but if I was him, I would prefer for a would-be successor to use my coupler for his own ideals, not for slavish imitation of mine."

Krahe took a long swig of ekarone juice as she watched her words sink into Casus.

She then added: "That being said, I think I prefer your idealism to Silberblut's cold judgment. I mean, 'guilt repaid with cold blood, each and every guilty man'? A bit harsh. Even I wouldn't chop off a petty thief's hands."

"I admit that some of my predecessor's recorded judgments gave me pause as well. It is why I worked so hard to ensure I had full control of myself before I used the belt..." Casus trailed off, his gaze shifting across the table to the Silberblut Coupler's vacant eye. His features hardened, and newfound determination crept into the banisher's voice: "I suppose now it is time to take full control of the belt itself. Tell me another, Lady Blackhand, before I go."

"Another what?"

"Another quote from one of your world's saints."

"Hmm, I never did study ancient history much, I usually read these whenever one extremist or another used them on a poster," Krahe shrugged, but nonetheless furrowed her brow as she went rooting around in her memory. "I think I recall that Saint Augustine once said... What was it he said? Barzai, help me here. The one about anger and courage."

She held out her arm, splitting it open lengthwise to let the eidolon manifest itself. Barzai popped out and took up a perch on her open palm, tilting his head back and forth. He looked at Krahe.

171 - A Crisis of Faith [Cherno]

After dealing with the delivery and stashing most of her money away in the vent duct, she made her way to Sorayah's place, for multiple reasons. The main one - breaching her bedroom - turned out to be a bust. The ward-breaker, a Pilgrim Banisher with his horizontal eyes still closed, did his job and left right away like the meat-robot he was for the time being. Sorayah's bedroom was utterly normal. Yes, there were occult materials scattered about, but Krahe found nothing that stood out - certainly nothing like the Hexkey or the anthrocite hand.

Disappointed, Krahe continued digging around the house. While reading the various occult texts, she spent time polishing her chamber-loading technique. The fact she needed two hands to do it gnawed at her, because an errant thought had come to her and stuck; a memory of what she had dismissed as a stupid gimmick when she saw it in her past life. A tiny appendage that would pop out of her forearm and shove a round into the chamber or a whole new clip into the magwell. The reason was obvious - she needed her left hand free to cast Wandrei Faust, and to carry out thaumaturgy in general. Eventually, after several hours and several infuriatingly similar manuscripts, it clicked. Why settle for a graft when she could achieve the same effect with thaumaturgy? She could simply conjure a bullet or a whole clip just like she did cigarettes. While any large tendrils were beyond her as far as manifestation from uncharred skin went, something this small was not an issue. Still, it added an Entropy cost to reloading, so simple manual dexterity would remain king. Another option in the arsenal.

Krahe gradually gathered Sorayah's texts in the writing room, keeping several open in the hopes of coming upon something, anything. Occasionally she would come to the ritual room in the basement to clear her head and look around the scene in the vain hope she would magically find something new.

Mistress Yao came to mind again. How would she even contact the woman?

"It's not as if she gave me..."

She conjured the talisman that Yao gave to her. It held a captured trace of Eutropia's thauma, but it was still one of Yao's communication talismans, in theory.

"Well, might as well try."

______________________________________________________________________

Yao had expected many things. That the self-styled hero of justice would come to her of his own volition, alone, and unannounced was not among them. She had assumed Blackhand would either figure out that the eye talisman she had given to her had a communication theurgy on the back, or that she would find the one hidden inside the scroll's spindle. She sent out a flesh-puppet to greet him and ask him to wait before disarming her defences to let him in.

"I've come to claim what you owe," he said to her.

"Sounds to me like you're sick with a heart devil, after all," the woman smirked.

Casus wanted to argue, but she silenced him with a mere glance, turning and gesturing for him to follow. She brought him upstairs and examined him, carrying out various strange rites, some of which tangentially reminded him of Zaveshian and Igarian practices. Others, though, were utterly unorthodox. It all involved a great number of talismans and needles that he barely felt. Moreover, with each round of tests Yao's confidence in her prognosis waned and her confusion grew.

"As it appears, it truly is not a heart devil. There's no corruption, no psychosis, no astral instability... How strange. The only alternative is the opposite, then. You've gleaned a piece of enlightenment recently and you haven't fully processed it yet. Perhaps it runs counter to your pre-existing beliefs, and you have yet to reconcile the dissonance. How troublesome. I have many ways of dealing with heart devils, but nothing for this. I am afraid that I cannot help you with such a thing... But I am not so callous as to pretend as if this cursory examination makes us even."

Nearly every part of Casus wanted to reject that, but he knew it was true. He had just hoped for the infinitesimal possibility that the issue was something easier to fix, such as internal bodily damage.

In the end, Casus left the woman, and found himself wandering the city without any particular aim. He fell into a strange stupor, and only came to his senses when he found himself in a particularly nasty part of town, tangling with random nameless scum from the gutter. Trash on legs, making a bid for Hashem's bounty. Two baneworms in saurian bodies and four humans. There were six of them, and three brought out belts - two Dregsteamers and some homemade piece of shit with a motorbike throttle and a cracked, cloudy Locust Stone catalyst. This was a point where he would usually transform, but he just... Couldn't. It wasn't that the Silberblut Coupler wouldn't respond, he couldn't even flip the mental switch that would initiate the transformation.

So, he fought as Casus Aristedes. He came out at the other end with several new bruises both to his body and his ego. A fight like this ought to have been trivial, but had it not been for his arm, he wasn't sure he would have walked out of that back alley. Even the bounty money for the baneworms had a bitter taste somehow.

For lack of direction, he turned to faith. Not directly asking Zavesh or Igaria for an answer, that just wasn't how things worked. No, he went to a man who had guided him on his path to taming the Silberblut Coupler to begin with. A man who quietly lived within the city's Central Temple, volunteering as one of the gymnasium trainers between his excursions, all in pursuit of cultivating a perfect body and mind. His hair was white, and the centuries showed on his face the way a few decades past 20 showed on any other man, but his gaze burned like fire and he held in one finger more strength than Casus held in his entire right arm.

Ambrosius, the Saint Ungrafted.

The saint lived in a small house about half an hour's walk from the Central Temple. It was downright ascetic compared to a church safehouse; the only luxury to be found was in the exercise equipment, books, and war games that filled much of the dwelling. Ambrosius was, as always, busy training when Casus found him, and as always, he found time to speak without uttering a word of complaint.

170 - Taking Care of Business [Cherno]

A/N: The gunporn section was unnecessarily long but I wanted to keep it unaltered so slightly longer chapter

_____________________________________________________________

Opening a box full of cash never got old. The paper wraps disintegrated the moment she tore them off, revealing a dark, wooden surface. Despite being wood, it was just as cold, just as firm and reflective as solid marble.

A brass insignia of the Seven Spokes stared back at her from the lid, which she lifted. Not the faintest sound issued forth when the lid swung back and knocked against itself. Rows of rings, set into a tray, awaited within, set with gems and engraved with glowing runes. For a shining moment, Krahe felt a child-like joy, grinning ear-to-ear. She could swear the rings glowed with purplish light, and a tangible wave of power washed over her. It was stony, impassive, utterly homogenous and unlike the aura of a person, but the quantity of arcane currency contained within this suitcase was such that it could match the intensity of Casus' presence when he became Silberblut.

Lifting the tray, she found two more beneath it, decreasing in denomination, with the bottom-most one holding densely-packed cylinders of plain bronze bands. Krahe appreciated that she wouldn't have to bother exchanging the rings. Beneath the bottom-most tray, she found a second, much simpler box, which she took out but left alone for now.

Moving onto the letter, it contained two papers. One was a talisman, and the other was the actual letter. It detailed her payout, specifying a hefty deduction for the suitcase with the options of keeping or returning it. It also mentioned that this payout was for Sorayah and that any further progress in the investigation would merit further compensation, specifically any information pertaining to potential Human Charcoal Cult cells and the recovery of relevant items such as further relics and human charcoal itself. A substantial portion of the payout was, in fact, for Sorayah's lantern and the human charcoal Krahe brought along. A second, smaller sum came directly from Razem himself, the reason unexplained beyond the word 'Bonus'. The total money in the box fell shy of even half the posted bounty on her head, but it was still in the six digits. If she was being optimistic, even if Sorayah's case didn't lead to a greater cult, just the occult materiel in her home could furnish her with quite a bit of money. How much of that stuff she would turn in depended on whether she found a use for it. The post-script clarified that the talisman was for the ward-breaker; once activated, it would resonate with its twin in the ward-breaker's possession and call him to its location as pre-arranged by Razem. He would supposedly arrive within an hour if it was anywhere in the city.

As for the smaller box, it contained several paper bags and had another note from Razem on the inside. It was the herbal mixture for the Decoction of Mind's Dawn, with the note being instructions for brewing and drinking it, especially dosage and for how long it would be good after brewing.

"You will surely find it to be of use."

To start with, she wanted to visit Yao again to see if the woman could answer some questions for her. There was the Hexkey, Eutropia's broken voidkey, as well as human charcoal in general. As for the anthrocite hand, she wanted to keep its existence to herself until she knew its potential value, so she decided to bring up anthrocite if Yao turned out to know about the base substance. She had not mentioned it to Razem out of caution.

There was the matter of her gunmanship, which was... Acceptable. She didn't consider the ability to hit a still target at a given distance to be the peak priority, especially since it was so contingent on the gun, the ammo, and the environmental factors. Target tracking and acquisition could be improved beyond just training and real combat, but those improvements were likely be grafts or combat drugs. As she saw it right now, her most pressing shortfalls were to do with getting the right ammo in the chamber at the right time. Alternating-load clips were a start, but awkward, and since the Pattner wasn't tube-fed, she couldn't do something like add a second tube magazine and a selector for which one was feeding. Without modifying the gun, the two options that came to mind were manually placing a bullet onto the bolt face while it was cycled forward, or pushing the round into the top of the clip, assuming the clip was one bullet short. The second option was a bit problematic due to the fact the clips were held inside the gun only by friction and the same spring that pushed cartridges up through the clip.

There was no choice left but to see for herself. Simply pushing a bullet into a partially-empty clip turned out to be the easiest solution. Sliding a bullet into the chamber directly also worked, counter to reason. The clip itself shifted downward slightly when a bullet was chambered, as if the follower spring was pulling it down in response. Krahe brought out the manual and went into the section with the blueprints. The magazine retainer - which was also the clip release lever - was the culprit. It was a single part that gripped a lip on the back of the clip, stopping the follower spring from sending the whole clip out the top of the breech. By disengaging it with one's thumb, it also allowed a non-empty clip to be ejected. The blueprint noted that it was enchanted to shorten subtly when a bullet was in the chamber specifically to let the user load a bullet directly into the chamber.

Now that she gave it deeper thought, she remembered reading the manual only so far as it was relevant to maintaining it and loading the ammo. That left a good 1/5 of the book, which turned out to hold the answers to her questions, including the reason for the gun's specific design. This late section was absent from the table of contents, and its nonstandard nature was evidence by the fact it was hand-written and not truly ordered. It stood to reason Pattner had made this one-off edition of the manual for Audun Sorun specifically, or possibly early adopters in general.

"The revolving cylinder design, albeit convenient, is limited in capacity. My design can be modified to accommodate alternate and/or expanded magazine designs at any time; I have included example blueprints for two types on the next page. Any craftsman of mediocre skill can manufacture the modification. The same cannot be said for a revolving cylinder design. I shall not speak of contemporary revolvers' countless issues with structural integrity, sealing, reloading, etc."

The first modification was a weird apparatus that would turn the Pattner into a belt-fed pistol, with designs for a disintegrating sheet-metal belt included.

The second one was, effectively, a Mauser C96-style self-contained integral magazine, including a design for a stripper clip. Its design even accounted for the possibility of the user wanting to convert the gun back to en-bloc clips.

These options were nice for the future, but useless in the now. Krahe went through the rest of the manual just in case, finding a great deal of interesting technical details and various modifications or features that just didn't make it into the production version for one reason or another. Better sights. A rounded barrel. A different grip. A different trigger. A wooden stock that doubled as a holster. A rimless cartridge and a bolt to match it. So on and so forth. She spent enough time committing it to memory that she was confident it would float to the surface if it was ever directly relevant.

332 - EBERHEIM ARC PT. FINAL [Sturmblitz]

For three days and three nights, Zelsys watched over the Third Truthseeker as golden lightning hammered down on him.

For three days and three nights, she watched the man thrash against his restraints, screaming, ranting, monologuing.

She sat, only meters from the man, for she was the only only who could do so without being scoured out of existence by the occasional errant bolt. The first time she was struck, it felt like she was back atop the roof of that cabin again. Something that had been out of place snapped back, and it was just as painful as resetting a dislocated limb. Third seemed amused and pleased by the sight of her in pain, but it quickly turned to disbelief and resentment when he realized that his execution was benefitting her cultivation. The bolt thrummed with power, doubtlessly the divine aura of Bishamonten, but its elemental composition was pure Fulgur. It flowed through her just the same as any other lightning bolt would, burning away impurities, and in the process growing even brighter.

As Third's stolen vitality was torn from him, the air grew thick with arcane essences, from pneuma, to sovereignless aura and vitae alike. It was a tiny fraction of the energies involved in the rite, and even what was released into the air by one strike would be inevitably consumed by the next. Even still, it was more than sufficient to sustain her, with the Essentia Crucible serving as a makeshift third lung. Zelsys shamelessly drew in what vitae she could to speed along the healing of her lungs, feeling not an iota of corruption in it. The constant hammering of thunder soon became background noise. Before long, a gnawing hunger made itself known. She could have ignored it, but she saw no reason to. And so, as an added indignity to the Third Truthseeker's excruciatingly thorough demise, the only direct witness devoured slabs of dragon meat and hundreds of metres in crab noodles to nourish her body, while devouring whatever lightning graced her with a strike to nourish her soul.

Day in, day out, she watched him. With each strike, the Third Truthseeker came closer to final, absolute, irreversible death, and with each strike, Zelsys ascended, not merely returning to her previous prime state, but inexorably marching towards a greater one. Each strike after the first became no less intense, but just like any extreme exercise, Zelsys grew to enjoy it. In the absence of major, glaring problems with her cultivation, the heavenly lightning could only correct the countless smaller spiritual imbalances built up over the course of her short, yet extremely eventful life thus far, starting with the most recent ones.

By the end of the first day, she had regained enough use of her lungs to sustain herself. Not remotely enough to facilitate any significant exertion, but enough to not worry about it.

Time had not stopped outside the ritual circle.

The moment the rite began, Victor descended to ground level in a manner only very slightly more graceful than a free fall, and thereafter made his way to join the Newman Sect's forces in a not-so-nearby building. He didn't have the strength to run or even walk, and so he relied on Dawnwolf's remaining energy, making the suit carry him. It was an astonishingly intact high-end restaurant that stood well within sight of the ritual site, but still several hundred meters away. Any insights to be gleaned from communion with Bishamonten had to wait, as did the implication of what the deity said to him before the rite had begun.

The youth lost consciousness soon after, fatigue overtaking him.

Strake Sodan was in perhaps the most severe state of them all. His condition improved rapidly following the battle, but he remained interred within Zero's cockpit out of his own will, deciding not to take the risk of disconnection under field conditions.

Victor slept through most of the three days, awaking every few hours, usually to the sound of distant thunder, its noise dulled thanks to a formation set up by Lady Zefaris. Both his body and spirit were utterly drained of energy, to the point that all he could do during his short stints awake was watch.

Neither a speck of sun nor moonlight pierced the clouds. So dense and black they were that they resembled a ceiling.

And yet, the city was alight, half thanks to the golden glow that issued from the clouds themselves, and half thanks to the ritual site. With each strike, the Avatar of Bishamonten and its staff were stripped of aura, and with each strike, they gradually turned to white stone. If Victor looked carefully, he could glimpse bursts of energy and spectres of the dead flowing across the fulguric channel that connected the heavens and the earth.

Rarely, terribly rarely, the golden lightning struck, only to arc from the Third Truthseeker to Elder Zelsys. On such occasions, a surge of blue-white light exploded at ground level, and a terrifyingly huge bolt of the same colour returned into the heavens on the backstroke, flowing like a giant serpent rather than a bolt of lightning and painting similarly bestial images within the clouds. So bright were these flares that they cast Eberheim into stark daylight for a few moments each time they occurred..

He couldn't help but think back on Borea, and he was not alone.

"A flame that burns so bright, to lighten the darkest night sky."

These words echoed through the building every once in a while.

__________________________________________________________________

On the first day, upon learning of what had transpired in Eberheim, Crovacus Estoras could swear that his liver would explode.

On the second, he dispatched a relief force to the devastated city, and requested the same from Rigport.

On the third, he received confirmation of the operation's success, and a strange immortal turned up at his door.

_______________________________________________________________________

She would never admit it, she didn't think of it that way, and Third's final words would never escape to the wider world, but when he spoke them, moments before his death, she knew them to be true.

"In the end, all this still served the breakthrough of a real monster."

With herculean effort, Third raised his head. With broken teeth, the dead man grinned, and with empty eye sockets, he stared at Zelsys Newman.

"It just wasn't me.”

Another, bitter chuckle came out of him, and with it, a spurt of blood ran down his chin.

“ I leave you with this, as my final retort: Upon my death, my True Soul will ignite and obliterate everything within several kilometers. You have… Perhaps ten seconds.”

Zelsys felt, in her gut, that he was lying. Third seemed to realize this, as he slumped over with a cackling laugh. The next strike of lightning obliterated him, not leaving even a skeleton or a speck of dust. Nothing of his body remained.

The barrier fell, the rest of the world rushed in, and a deluge of golden rain fell from the clouds. It rained for eight seconds, causing plants to sprout and bloom amidst the desolation, and at the moment the rain stopped, the clouds dispersed.

On the dawn of the fourth day, the sun rose in Eberheim once more. The scarlet hues of dawn’s light coloured the stoic, stone-wrought visage of a statue that would soon come to be known as Eber-Bishamonten.

Zelsys Newman stood up and stretched to the sounds of metallic creaking and popping. She called back the Fang Spears which had held the Third Truthseeker in place, and in the same act, brought out six swords whose only distinguishing characteristics were their similar size and decent quality of their cold-iron. She took them in hand, filled them with Metallum, and one by one twisted them into approximations of her Fang Spears. One by one she replaced them, welding them in place. Finally, she clapped her hands together in imitation of Bishamonten and bowed before the statue. Only then did she return to her comrades, using a Thundergod to grab the Oculus from atop the northward pillar as she went. The previously silver conduits within the holy implement now ran golden, and an eye-sized golden star burned in the center of its ring. It gave off a momentary feeling of indignation when it first fell into her hand, just for a moment, as if it took it a split-second to realize it was her.

Zel found, to her relief, that in the time she was preoccupied, help from outside had arrived. The city and its people were devastated, but despite everything, Eberheim would live.

A new holy site had been formed, and the face of the continent had been reshaped once again. In the midst of eight pillars, two imprints had been melted into the ground. One was a scorched-black, uneven crater, filled with jagged shards by its creator’s thrashing and struggle. The other was a simple imprint of someone sitting, legs crossed, its interior coloured with metallic sheen.

331 - EXPUNGEMENT PT. 2 [Sturmblitz]

Out of nowhere and unprompted, Bishamonten spoke: "WHAT HAS TRANSPIRED HERE SHALL LEAVE THIS LAND SEVERELY OUT OF BALANCE. THE LEYLINES SWELL WITH UNBIDDEN POWER. THE RESTLESS DEAD WAIT FOR AN OPPORTUNITY TO COALESCE. UNTIL THIS IMBALANCE IS REDRESSED, THE WEATHER SHALL BE RUINOUSLY EXTREME, AND THE EARTH SHALL BEAR NO FRUIT. EVEN THIS AVATAR, AND THIS SPEAR, SHALL BECOME SOURCES OF RUIN, IF THEY ARE SIMPLY LEFT TO BE. THIS CANNOT STAND."

A heavy silence hung over them as the avatar shifted in place, turning towards the ruined remains of the Cathedral. Small sections of it had survived by pure chance, including a number of its giant support pillars.

"...THESE ARE SACRED. THEY SHALL DO."

The deity's faceless head turned, and it knelt down. One by one, it pressed holes into the ground with its index finger and widened them just enough to fit the pillars. There were eight in total, spaced equally just outside the outer containment ring's perimeter. Bishamonten proceeded to walk towards the ruins of the church. The avatar proceeded to form additional aura arms until it had eight in total, removing the same number of pillars to bring them back. One by one they were set into their respective recesses in the ground, and forming a hammer and chisel of aura, the god levelled each pillar's top to be the same height. Despite the meticulous and procedural manner in which Bishamonten carried out all these tasks, it actually did them astonishingly quickly, moving with a swiftness unreasonable even for a human, let alone a titan of its size.

With a single stroke of each of its hands, Bishamonten drew a grandiose, immensely complex glyph in mid-air right above itself, ending with the right hand pointing skyward. It seethed with a profound meaning that couldn't be discerned in a mere glance, but one facet was clear and simple enough to instantly brand itself into the minds of all who beheld it.

NORTH

With a downward gesture, Bishamonten stamped the glyph onto the top of the northward pillar, and with a sound like thunder, a circle of ground out to around one meter around the pillar was smashed down. The ancient stone suddenly took on a faint, yet undeniable golden glow.

In this manner, it continued for seven more directions, taking no more than a handful of seconds each.

NORTH-EAST

EAST

SOUTH-EAST

SOUTH

While this took place, Third continued attempting to free himself or simply lashing out in any way he could, and Zelsys continued exerting what little stamina she had left to keep him down. She wasn't alone by any means, for the demonic elder was hammered by everything from spiritual bullets, to sword-beams, fists of stone and aura, beams of flame, and gusts of concentrated liquid flame. A few of the strongest-willed, or perhaps most foolhardy of allied tankmen even struck him with mortars and cannon-shells. None of this managed to inflict permanent damage upon him, and seemed to only make him angrier, more desperate, and less subtle in his attempts to free himself. Zel called back her Fang Rippers at this point, finding them to be no longer needed to subdue the demonic elder.

And yet, each time a pillar was sanctified, even the mortals hundreds of meters away felt a tangible change. What fight the Third Truthseeker had left in him was being suppressed, yet the invisible pressure they felt didn't lessen even a bit. The already-severe tension in the air only grew, the divine merely replaced the demonic, and a fair few gave into reverent impulses and began praying to whatever divinities they were familiar with. The sky only grew more overcast, yet rays of golden light began to shine down upon the city.

"ERE YOU ARE PERMITTED THE PRIVILEGE OF REBIRTH, THE STAIN OF YOUR DEEDS IN THIS LIFE NEEDST BE BURNED AWAY BY EMPYREAN FLAME AND WASHED AWAY BY THE FOG-SEA'S MERCURIAL WATERS."

SOUTH-WEST

WEST

Bishamonten stepped into the octagon before completing it, forming the final glyph before dismissing its six aura hands. Holding the glyph in place with its upward-pointing right hand, the avatar gripped the giant spear-staff with its left. Then, it cast its gaze down upon the brave souls arrayed around the circle's perimeter.

"ALL BUT ONE OF YOU WOULD DO WELL TO RETREAT FROM THIS PLACE AT LEAST FIVE HUNDRED STEPS, FOR HEAVENLY LIGHTNING SHALL RAIN DOWN TO REDRESS THE IMBALANCES OF THIS LAND AND TO SCOUR AWAY THIS DEMON'S EXISTENCE."

The deity stopped at Zelsys.

"YOU SHALL WANT TO STAY, FOR SEVERAL REASONS. I BID THEE TO ENTER THE RITUAL CIRCLE..."

Two voices rang out after that; one Bishamonten's, and one Victor's.

"WALKING TRIBULATION."

"Mistress Zelsys."

Without wasting a moment, Zelsys did just that, and Bishamonten sealed the perimeter the moment she crossed over.

NORTH-WEST

At that moment, the world outside became indistinct. Zel could see shapes moving about outside, but everything was blurry and the sound was muted. With each passing second, the divine pressure inside the octagon grew, as did the tension in the air. Golden sparks flashed in and out of existence with increasing frequency. The god gripped its staff-spear with its other hand, still looking down at her.

"YOU HAVE QUESTIONS. THE ANSWERS ARE SIMPLER THAN YOU THINK. FIRSTLY, YOUR PRESENCE BENEFITS THE RITUAL, JUST AS A FIRE CULTIVATOR'S PRESENCE BENEFITS A RITUAL RELIANT OUPON FLAME. MOREOVER, YOU SHALL BENEFIT FROM PARTICIPATING IN THE RITE IN WAYS BEYOND THAT WHICH IS OBVIOUS."

"I ASK OF YOU, IN RETURN, TWO ACTS IN SERVICE OF THE RITE, FOR I SHALL DEPART THIS VESSEL ONCE IT BEGINS. BRING OUT THE FANGS WHICH BEAR THE MARK OF KEIKI-AMATSUMARA, THE FORGEMOTHER, AND SKEWER THIS DEMON WITH THEM. THEREAFTER, WATCH OVER HIM UNTIL HE IS DESTROYED. THAT IS ALL I ASK OF YOU."

"Very well," Zelsys agreed, calling forth Carnifex right away. She formed each of its True Fangs into a Fang Spear and, in one gesture, impaled the Third Truthseeker such that he was forced to remain in that same kneeling position. The man's eyes, despite his loss of the ability to resist, still burned with defiant will and hatred. Zel had to admire his tenacity if nothing else.

She sat down across from him, and waited. Victor pulled the Oculus out of the avatar's head, and leapt to the top of the northward pillar, where he placed the staff in the same upright position as its giant counterpart. The ritual was initiated by Victor chanting a single line in concert with the Avatar of Bishamonten.

At that moment, golden lightning illuminated Eberheim. The Third Truthseeker screamed out in a combination of pain and terror.

169 - I've Eaten Worse [Cherno]

"What do you plan to do with him?" she gestured to the prisoner.

"I'll turn the body into the church, it should get back to any relatives he might have. The wormy fuck didn't even bother to change the face, and kept the original contractor ID. As for the worm... I'll debeak and swallow him whole. You've got an acid bath to look forward to, my friend."

The fear gripping the baneworm-host seemed to get to be too much, as his tendrils began writhing wildly. The body's eyes rolled into the back of its head, with tendrils bursting out of their sockets. The worm exploded out of the host's mouth, trying to jump for Krahe. Before it could reach her, Barzai erupted out of her chest, catching the worm in his beak as he darted across the room. The eidolon proceeded to tear into the worm, seemingly killing it instantly, and continued eating it from there on, piece by piece.

"Sorry. Looks like my pet eldritch monstrosity stole your dinner," Krahe said, genuinely unsure whether Garvesh would be angry. The old saurian finally finished repairing the one ward-scale, and erupted with guttural laughter.

"You didn't really think I'd eat that nasty fuck, did you?" he cackled, slapping his thigh. It sounded nearly like a gunshot.

"I've eaten worse," she shrugged. "Was that a total lie, or some niche delicacy?"

"It's a niche delicacy even among saurians," Garvesh nodded. "Baneworm meat's nasty and stringy, and you must be very careful to remove the venom glands without rupturing them. We used to do it as a ritual execution for any baneworms we caught."

The hatred dripping from each of his words made it abundantly clear how much he reviled baneworms as a whole, not just this particular individual. He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts, sighed, and glanced down at his chest, running his hand over it. The ward-scales revealed themselves beneath his fingers in a truly draconic suit of armour, though many of its scales were chipped or even broken.

"Fuckin'... They're getting more brittle by the year. Unless you've got more to tell me, you should go. I'll be here for a while."

Krahe glanced at Barzai, then replied: "I figure I'll be stuck here for at least fifteen minutes. Got any crab juice?"

Garvesh's face lit up, and nodding, he gestured vaguely towards his kitchen.

"Yeah, in the fridge, pour yourself a glass... And bring me the whole jar after that."

Ignoring Garvesh's incident and the resulting tragic death of Imraal's food cart, things were going quite well. While she was still there, she showed him both Eutropia's souldregs and her broken voidkey, hoping he might be able to appraise it where her glasses failed. When she had attempted to appraise the key, it did give a reading, but the reading in question was garbled and illegible.

Unfortunately, appraising the original effects of a broken key was apparently far more complex than a functioning one. Garvesh, audibly pleased with himself, explained it thus: "Think about it. Think a rando on the street could look at the pile of scrap out front and tell that it used to be a food cart, let alone the specific kind of burners it had or what kinda food it used to make? It's... Alright, it's not actually like that with broken artifacts, but the analogy still works. Takes specialized knowledge or equipment to make sense of it. If you want..."

"No, you don't need to find someone who can appraise it for me. I'll let you know if I run out of my own options. You just... Fix yourself. You'll be useless to me if you get whittled down and killed."

She spoke as if her motivations were entirely selfish, but in truth, she had grown at least enough of an attachment to Garvesh to not want him to die simply because she liked him. Krahe, of course, was not fully aware of this fact, or even willing to admit it to herself, let alone to someone else.

Returning to the safehouse, she found it empty, and spent further time studying Yao's scroll in the absence of anything urgent to do. Having jumped ahead a few times, she found that the later sections were exceptionally dense and frequently referred back to earlier parts of the text, so she stuck to going through it from the start for now. The parts she had managed to digest so far mostly covered small tips and optimizations for the basic act of drawing a talisman. Rather than cosmic secrets, the scroll's early parts contained the wisdom of countless hours spent doing a repetitious, yet also precision-demanding task. Krahe couldn't draw a Wandrei Faust with the new brush yet, but she found it to be far more pleasant and better-balanced in the hand. It would only take time and practice to get used to it.

The reason she went straight to Yao's scroll was simply the fact that Yao was on her mind as she left Garvesh to his work. The Talisman Mistress was, after all, the first person who came to mind when it came to appraising the broken key.

Once she had built up a pile of wastepaper, her grip on the brush was noticeably unsteady, and she saw occult symbols when she closed her eyes, Krahe decided it was enough for now. She spent the rest of the day resting and casually reading, occasionally making mostly-futile attempts to pierce deeper into the dense mass of Yao's scroll.

The next day, she visited the shrine on Gashward Road as a stop along her way to her house on that street. A young, nervous-looking woman manned the shrine. She couldn't be more than sixteen, yet Krahe felt a tangible degree of strength from her, both physical and magical. Despite being visibly nervous at the sight of Krahe, clearly knowing who she was, the shrine maiden moved with trained grace and her arms had well-defined muscles from what was visible of them.

"Would you happen to be Lady Blackhand?" the girl asked, as if guessing.

"That would be me, yes. I suspect I'll be visiting your shrine in the future."

"Ah, my name is Eliana. There are packages here for you, if you could come with me."

One of these aforementioned packages was heavy and the size of a small suitcase, while the other was about the size of a letter and half a centimeter thick. Both were wrapped in narrow reams of paper, with a central, stamped-on sigil with lines of smaller ones spreading out across the package in a chain-like pattern.

"A pulse of your thauma, please," Eliana prompted, and Krahe did as asked. The central seals pulsed with golden light, and the sigil-chains gradually disappeared as if it was burning them away. With all the sigils gone, the packages looked a bit strange, but not particularly church-y, so she just carried them to house No. 94 the normal way.

168 - Case Three Closed [Cherno]

Despite her deep and profound sorrow, she mustered the will to enter the building. The old lizard was in his home, and readily opened the door after she banged on it while announcing herself: "Open up, it's me!"

The lock turned and the door swung open, but Garvesh was nowhere near it.

"Close and lock the door. I'm in the bathroom. Come in, it's fine."

"Something happened," Krahe deadpanned as she did as he asked.

"You saw Imraal's cart out front. I took it out on the street, didn't want to disappoint his customers, y'know. Some overly ambitious assclown just came up and blasted me point-blank with a Red Reaper, can you believe that?"

There was effort in his voice, strain even, but the way he spoke about being shot with a Red Reaper carried a tone of disbelief and ridicule more than anything. Krahe was somewhat confused, but it wasn't because of that. It was the aura. Like some giant monster, unable to act in any way befitting its size yet still nearly inconceivable in its immensity.

Garvesh was, indeed, in the bathroom. The old lizard turned his eyes up to meet Krahe's as she walked in. He was sprawled out in the small pool he called a bath tub, leaning on one hand while his other was twisted into a stiff gesture - thumb, index, and ring fingers forming an eye, while the middle and pinkie were held straight. He hovered his hand over his stomach, a thin stream of blue-glowing magic pouring out through the eye to join a large, metallic scale of a blue shade so dark it was nearly black. Slowly, tiny bit by bit, the scale grew. Others around it were also visible, transitioning from solid metallic to ghostly and to nothing. Krahe immediately knew what was happening. Wards. He was repairing his wards.

Across the room, chained up to the radiator, was a gagged man that may have been handsome at some point before the front of his body had been shredded and burned. A baneworm's bulging tendrils could be seen beneath his skin, and some even dangled out of his burst-open stomach, tangled amongst his intestines.

"I'm not moving until this one is finished, so you may as well speak now," he remarked, refocusing his eyes on his stomach. They momentarily flicked upwards at Krahe as he added: "Please tell me you came to tell me Imraal's killer is dead. I need some good news after this shitshow."

Krahe gave a slow nod, still processing the scene.

"...Yeah. I have her souldregs if you want them."

"You said she's dead, so she's dead. You can show me the dregs later," he shrugged. A short time passed in heavy silence as Krahe just looked on, captivated by the complex internal pattern of Garvesh's wards.

"I thought wards were at least partly tied to your attributes."

"They are. I wouldn't be able to form one of these from scratch in my state, and I've got a couple thin spots in places I won't tell you. But as long as one these scales doesn't break, I can fix it. It's bitch and a half, tell you what. The damage this wormy fuck did will be at least a week's work to repair. Just maintaining my wards is hard enough..."

An aura of pure anger and hatred spilled out of Garvesh as he spoke, doubtlessly fuelled by awareness of the meticulous, yet also strenuous work he had ahead of him. Krahe knew it all too well; for several years, she used a type of armor that, despite its high defensive performance, was no longer being manufactured. Manufacturing replacement graph-fullerene without the original machinery was perhaps among her least favourite memories. The inside of Garvesh's ward-scales didn't quite look as complex as a graphene mesh with fullerene balls instead of single carbon atoms, but it probably felt just as complex given that he was rebuilding it by hand. Krahe continued to watch for some time, drawing closer, and Garvesh let her.

"Feel free to try an' copy me, so long as you let me know when you fail so I can laugh at you. You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen someone try."

"I'm sure I'll figure something out. I've been using the same ward design far too long..." she admitted. They had worked well-enough when she needed them, and with the Liminal Coil, simply not getting hit had become her go-to defensive tactic.

"Think Semzar's going crazy and trying to have anyone who dealt with me killed?" she asked, assuming the worst.

"No, he's stupid, but not insane," Garvesh shook his head. "I know why dumbfuck here shot at me, he spilled his guts the moment *I* spilled his guts. One of the side effects of my crippled state is that so long as I do not burn Thauma, I come off exactly as weak as I feel. This fool, turns out, was the one who hired the assassin on Semzar's behalf. He saw me, saw Imraal's cart, and, puttin' two and two together, got five. He thought Imraal had somehow survived and faked his death, so he panicked and shot me."

Garvesh emitted a rumbling, engine-like chuckle.

"He saw a drasaurian and thought a single Red Reaper would kill me. Even without wards that wouldn't be enough, not for me. Ey, you hear me?! Y'forget why yer filthy kind love to steal our bodies so much?!"

The noise didn't wake the baneworm, but what Garvesh did right after his outburst served that purpose. He gathered spit in his mouth, and spat out a piece of the same bluish metal as his ward-scales, enveloped in a thick layer of mucus and spit. It landed right in the would-be assassin's spilled-out intestines, and quickly became enveloped in spitting, angry, blue flame. It looked like white phosphorous, just prettier and without the poisonous smoke.

The baneworm-host awoke and, eyes flashing with panic, tendrils bulging under his skin, began screaming into his gag.

“Shut up or the next one is going in your mouth,” Garvesh threatened, gesturing at the burning mass currently eating its way into the prisoner’s guts, somehow going deeper rather than following gravity.

Outright screaming tuned down to sounds of pain, until the worm’s tendrils retracted from that area of his stolen body, and he fell silent. His gaze almost immediately became an analyzing one, darting back and forth, shamelessly looking for an opportunity to escape.

167 - Abara Morph [Cherno]

As the flyman performed a simple grafting operation on himself out in the open, he spoke: "I almost pity you. You must think highly of Silberblut. It must be difficult to know you will never live up to what he was. To know you tarnish his legacy with this deluded impersonation. Perhaps I was wrong to fear you after all, if such a pale imitation is all you can manage."

His apathetic tone of voice was tinged by a smug sense of superiority, but also true, genuine pity.

"You like the sound of your own voice far too much for that man-of-a-few-words affectation," Cornelius seethed.

"I am no such thing, and this is no affectation. This is just how I speak. "I understand why you accuse me, however, if such poor pretenders as Casus Aristedes are the norm within the church," Tsetse retorted, pulling out the last of several pins around the base of his mechanical forearm. They had been previously hidden under a ring-shaped protective shroud that also served as an adapter for the power cables. Crude design, but effective, and also entirely defiant of common design principles. The prosthetic was either a one-off or the work of someone unknown. Alongside itself, it pulled out a bone of some description, leaving a hollow cavity inside the upper arm, which now dangled uselessly.

The moment Tsetse pressed his original forearm to the stump, however, tendrils of flesh whipped forth to join the two together. There was the sound of flowing fluid, accompanied by the hissing of air being forced out of the limb's internal cavity. With a final shift that weirdly resembled someone shoving his arm into a sleeve from the inside of a zipped-up jacket, Tsetse's arm sprung back into motion as if it had never been detached.

Wrapping the cables of his detached replacement around his wrist, the flyman took his machine forearm, got up, and walked away. Casus vividly felt both his own and the Silberblut coupler's desire to come after him, but he was aware of his own inability to do so just as vividly. Over the next twenty minutes Cornelius fashioned a temporary plug for his wound, being a grafter after all, and the two men painstakingly made their way to the nearest safe place that could treat their injuries properly. It was a small temple-clinic. One of the resident grafters, a red-haired woman, gave them both an earful about how the clinic wasn't equipped to treat serious injuries. Nonetheless, their injuries were treated to an admirable standard. It turned out that out of the clinic's four resident grafters, three were sisters who looked just different enough to be distinguished, but still unsettlingly similar.

Afterwards, the two men retreated to the shrine's inner sanctum for some rest and privacy.

"How did he find you?" Casus asked eventually.

Cornelius looked up at Casus with tired eyes, giving a weary smile.

"How did you find your belt?" he shrugged, as if the answer was as obvious as the colour of the sky. "Direct sympathetic resonance. The arm reacted when he focused on it, so I had some forewarning... But not enough. Not nearly enough. Shame. I was halfway to unraveling the Abara Morph."

Casus hated that habit of his; dropping jargon and waiting for him to ask what it meant. So he just sat, and stared, and Cornelius broke. His desire to share the fruits of his research was stronger than his desire to be asked questions about it.

"You're joyless sometimes, you know that? You sure the coupler isn't giving you personality shift?" Cornelius complained. "Alright, fine. You saw how he looks, right? Sort of like a war morph, but not quite. And the insides of his arms. Those aren't just hemolymph cavities."

Shifting in place, Cornelius began listing off on his hands: "Additional internal reinforcement, improved muscular design, body segment detachment musculature, latticed chitin structure for extra hardness without loss of flexibility. Casus, the arm contained dedicated, physicalised Thauma channels. A new subtype of them at that, with a superior delivery rate and pressurization to the closest equivalent I am aware of. If I can replicate just these 'Tsetse-type' channels, adapted for a Mamon Armor design, I could create a full-organic unit that would- urhk!"

Cornelius grew more and more excited, until his gesturing became too violent and the irritation of his wound made him crumple up into himself in pain, clutching his side. After a minute or so of silence, he continued to speak: "You know what all of these things have in common, and you know that I know how a War Morph is built. War Morphs are the extremification of evoy biology for the purposes of warfare, but Tsetse defies baseline evoy biology without clear evidence of grafting. Whatever your Tsetse is, he isn't a War Morph."

"He is an Abara Morph, you've made that much clear. Now explain what the term means. I am sure you feel terribly proud of inventing it."

Cornelius gave Casus the kind of stare that only fell half a step of openly asking if he really hadn't figured it out yet, or if he was just trying to make him say it out loud. It Casus took some effort to prevent a smirk from pushing its way onto his face.

"He's an Evoy-specific version, or rather a counterpart, for the Mamon Knight. You know, funny thing is, I don't think I could've learned much more from that arm than I did. The last thing I did was a simple saturation test. Positive. The ratio was all wrong, but there was a distinct host and catalyst signature. Can't expect our tests to work perfectly on their technology, I suppose."

"You know what this means."

"Of course. Whether we like it or not, this must be reported to the church."

__________________________________________________________________________

Krahe wasted no time in taking the proof of Eutropia's death back to Garvesh. Right next to the door in that back alley, right next to one of the cobbles that was still stained with evoy hemolymph, she found a pile of scrap. After taking a closer look, she recognized a few parts. A rack, a mangled burner, a burst-open thaumine tank. Her stomach wrenched when she realized it was none other than Imraal's food cart, mangled by what was likely an explosion.

330 - EXPUNGEMENT PT. 1 [Sturmblitz]

She knew why he hadn't moved yet. He couldn't. His body could, but his soul wouldn't let him. The presence of the giant Oculus only meters from him, Bishamonten looming not far off, and Victor, somehow, still chanting. All together, Third couldn't exert his aura in any meaningful way, lest it be suppressed or altogether torn away from him.

Each time she struck him, it was her aura against his, her Truth against his, the weight of her existence against his. Zelsys was vividly aware that, under normal circumstances, she would not be able to do what she was doing, and for that reason, she relished it all the more. But here, now, under these circumstances, the resistance Third put up against her was token at best. He was a wretched monstrosity with each limb in a snare, claws torn out, and teeth shattered, yet he still thrashed and writhed in an effort to avoid having his spikes and armored scales torn from his hide.

A part of Zelsys wanted to just continue like this for as long as she needed, but a much larger part of her was aware that she didn't have the stamina to destroy Third's cultivation completely. If she was in her peak state, perhaps, but as she was now, there was no chance.

"The last time I came across an existence as vile as you, I made the mistake of giving him an infinitesimal chance of survival," she spat. "I won't make that mistake again."

She needed to only glance in Bishamonten's direction. Victor's chant changed, and therefore, so did the deity's. It became more rapid, angrier. The avatar gripped the spear-staff with both hands, and, exhaling a huge plume of aura, formed four more floating forearms just to grip it in more places.

It thereafter raised the implement and drove the spearhead down upon the Third Truthseeker.

At first, he resisted. He even managed to stand up, pushing the spearpoint back. Zelsys whipped his legs out from under him and left the blade there, willing it to form a pair of Three True Fang Rippers around his stumps to ensure he couldn't reconnect them. Keeping those two going, at this moment, took every bit of Fulgur she could spare, and it still wasn't enough to keep the bastard's legs from gradually joining back together. She summoned a Thundercharger capsule, cracked it open with her teeth, and swallowed it - glass and all. The pain that flared up her gut and shot through her body told her that wasn't a good idea, but it soon gave way to a reassuring inflow of strength as her body adjusted. It would tide her over. For fifteen seconds, maybe.

Great bursts of Third’s aura raced up the aura-spear’s blade, still trying to corrupt the sanctified implement even as it was forcibly ripped from its master. There was something different, however. While the aura was being purified, it was at a far slower pace than before, and it was gradually spreading up the spear’s length.

Even now, after all he had weathered, the Third Truthseeker defiantly stood to his feet, his wavering hands snapping into unsettlingly perfect hand signs as he murmured an incantation through the fountain of iridescent blood pouring out of his mouth. His aura, pitiful as it was, flexed, and his blood began to bubble as he burned it in some form of blood magic.

Zelsys glared at him. He grinned with jagged teeth at first, but then fell to his knees as the weight of her aura took effect. The maws of invisible drakes tore him towards the ground, and the foot of an invisible mammoth stepped on his back. Only traces of their forms could be seen in flickers amidst the lingering dust and smoke. Even now, forced into a sort of kowtow, Third forced himself to keep signing and to look up at her, twisting his neck to an unnatural degree.

"Your aura... Lacks the weight of time," he choked out.

Zel flexed her aching soul and twisted Third's own hands into jagged claws with which she tore his throat out. It didn't kill him by far, and his arteries remained intact, glowing with energy as if they were now cables rather than veins. It did, however, stop his hand-signs. In concert with directly exerting her aura on him through eye contact, it sufficed to break his concentration. In an instant, Third’s progress was erased, and the point of Bishamonten’s spear was driven through his chest, severing the right third of his body from the collarbone down to his waist.

With another exertion and a gesture, Zel forced her aura into his left arm, forming it into the exoskeleton for an aura-beast. Its incarnation reshaped its vessel to fit, forcefully rearranging his fingers into a jaw-like form. With popping and cracking, it dislocated his joints and snapped the bones into little pieces, and in moments, what was once an arm resembled a gruesome snake. A second gesture, and Third's mangled left arm grabbed the right just below the shoulder. The fangs of the aura-beast possessing the limb cracked his skin like it was the surface of dried lava, red light showing through. Finally, Zelsys overlaid her own hand over Third's right shoulder, grasping the air. In an agonizingly-long thirty seconds, she forced him to watch as his body pulled at his arm, grinding it against the edge of Bishamonten’s spear until it detached before throwing it into the avatar’s waiting maw.

The moment she released her control, Third's remaining arm popped back into place, bones fusing back together with insulting ease. Perhaps even more insultingly, Third was grinning at her as writhing, crimson worms crawled around his stump, already growing his arm back at a rate that would have the limb wholly restored in less than ten minutes. The gaping hole where his throat had been was also closing up in the same manner. If the spear were removed, his flesh would doubtlessly fuse right back together.

"I'll admit, that hurt," he wheezed. "Not the way you intended it to, but it did. Still, if you mean to play a game of endurance with me, know that I have more than enough vitality to outlast you."

329 - PURIFICATION [Sturmblitz]

The containment formation’s outermost ring finally gave out, but by then, the vast majority of Third's would-be suicide technique was spent. The burst of power that escaped was so small that Bishamonten's avatar drew it in without any apparent effort, leaving only a pitch-black, elongated corpse on the ground. Next to it, the giant Oculus formed of aura also stood, the bulk of its constituent aura now golden, with the veins in the shaft and the metallic components made of silvery-white, while the smaller, jade rings were still gold. Despite its beauty, the power it radiated was humbling even to the Witch and the Wizard who were still watching.

Over the next several minutes, he was surrounded by the Newman Sect's other members, as well as a pair of supremely brave Hellhounds. Strake joined them last, with Zero approaching at a pace more befitting of a human than a walking tank. The machine looked more like a moving wreck than the screaming, devouring iron demon from before, with its bright red paint completely overtaken by thick layers of dark, crusted something. When it reached the partial circle, its diameter being a little over fifty meters, it opened its frontal plating, with Strake leaning forward, hanging by the cables that were still stuck into him.

"If anyone has any Witch's Brew, or even just water..." he began with a weak, chainsmoker-like voice. Zero replayed his words a moment later, amplified and clarified. Once a few eyes were on him, he gestured to the Third Truthseeker's body, which most of all resembled a mass of coal.

"Please. I feel how he looks."

"You don't look much different, either," Zel said. She held out a hand to Zefaris, who was still aiming Pentacle at Third’s lifeless form. Without missing a beat, the blonde used her free hand to pass her tablet. Zel decided to split the Witch's Brew between herself and Strake at a 1:2 ratio. She wasn't worried about asphyxiating, since she could, if need be, break down water in her stomach to get oxygen in a roundabout way, but she still hated the feeling of not being able to breathe.

Zelsys had been the first to dare approach. She saw him draw no breath, felt not heartbeat from him, and, indeed, he had no aura either. And yet, her gut wouldn’t let her be. There was another thrice-damned trick, there had to be.

“DO NOT REST YET, RIGHTEOUS ONES,” Bishamonten’s thunderous voice echoed inside all their heads. “I YET REMAIN HERE BECAUSE THE DEMON IS NOT YET EXPUNGED. A SIMPLE TRICK. FALSE DEATH.”

As if on cue red light pulsed within the not-quite-dead man's chest, and the Third Truthseeker stood up, emitting a cackling, hateful laugh.

"Fine! You got-"

He didn't get to speak the next word, as a ghostly, green anti-cultivator round smashed into the side of his head. A burst of aura sprayed out the other side, giving the appearance of blood. He froze in place for a few seconds, seemingly dead, only to shake his head as if he'd just been slapped.

"Oh, I hate that," he uttered, the gravity of his situation seemingly not having sunk in yet.

______________________________________________________

Only minutes earlier, Zefaris was genuinely considering whether the Third Truthseeker could even be touched, let alone killed, whether it would be better to retreat.

Looking at him now, even as he defied death, the Third Truthseeker didn't feel so untouchable.

Suddenly, he was just a man.

An overwhelmingly powerful man.

A man who could, even now, cast down a small army of mortals with a thought.

A man who could annihilate a city on his own.

When he rose up to his feet, he was cast back down in an instant. An unexpected cannon-shot from an unexpected angle. The Nameless Revenant. It smashed into the side of his head and sprayed burning-red aura into thin air. Bishamonten drew it into its waiting maw and expelled a stream of white flame in return, melting the stone around Third but leaving him untouched; not for lack of effect. The pure aura-flame and Third's own personal aura obliterated one another on contact as one attempted to purify the other and the other attempted to corrupt the first, forcing him to flare it to protect himself.

The Third Truthseeker was an incredibly, nearly transcendently powerful and resilient man. He was also man who lost his limbs to a simultaneous barrage of ten dragonshot bullets; three each for his legs, two for his arms.

He was a man whose soul was torn open by two more comets fired from Death's Lieutenant, deathly skulls of ghastly green with gold burning in their eyes.

Indeed, the Third Truthseeker was terribly, overwhelmingly powerful. Zefaris held no doubt in her mind that, given the sliver of a chance, he could still turn things around on them or escape.

For that reason, he couldn't be given the honour of a fair fight, of a warrior's death.

He didn't deserve what Ubul had earned.

Before he could recover, he was knocked down once again by a whip-strike so forceful its impact produced not just shockwave, but a flash of light. Again. And again. And again. The Newman Sect's elder, still in the process of coughing up her own lungs, continued striking the Third Truthseeker, and with each strike, she tore away a piece of his cultivation as a starveling beast would tear away the flesh from still-living prey.

With each strike, the sacrifices of Eberheim were ripped from him, purified by the Avatar of Bishamonten, and consumed to fuel her onslaught. By orthodox standards, it was downright demonic; a type of aura that could tear away someone else's cultivation. But then, she was sure she could find things a hundred times worse the Sangers and Black Horses were guilty of. Her predecessor's archives promised that much.

Zel approached him without fear or malice, feeling only pure, caustic revulsion for this creature. Even now, Third's presence was immense, but it couldn't spread out as aura, it couldn't weigh down on her as it wanted. She felt him trying. Physically he was motionless, but his soul was thrashing and howling in effort, murderous fire burning behind his gaze.

328 - KISHIN-SHURA-BISHAMONTEN [Sturmblitz]

"I AM THE GUARDIAN OF HEAVENLY TREASURES, THE PATRON OF RIGHTEOUS WARRIORS AND PUNISHER OF THOSE WITHOUT HONOR!" the Avatar continued to speak. It seemed as if, with each utterance, its presence became more real and less ethereal, as if introducing itself in this manner was part of the incarnation ritual.

The Avatar raised its right hand. Countless revenants were expelled from the mouth on its chest, forming into a spear at first. In its second hand, a khakkhara staff began to form. However, as both implements reached halfway completion, the avatar brought them together and they merged to become a gigantic, red-glowing copy of the Oculus.

It was just in time, as the Truthseeking Revenant began expelling from its eyes a deluge of what appeared to be boiling, burning blood. Its destructive power, however, far surpassed the source of its form, setting the air ablaze with its passing. Before it could reach the Avatar, it slammed its staff into the ground, its rings producing a sound akin to several church bells ringing at once. The Revenant’s fire was consumed into the staff’s eye.

"REJOICE, RIGHTEOUS ONES! YOU HAVE STRUGGLED GREATLY TO CALL ME FORTH, AND HERE I STAND!"

From the avatar’s head a mighty mane grew, wrought not of hair nor fur, but the vengeful energy of Eberheim’s dead. It burned with the crimson-red of wrath, transitioning to orange at points.

"HALLOWED BE MY NAME:"

"KISHIN-SHURA-BISHAMONTEN!"

With only the utterance of its name, the ground around the Avatar of Bishamonten collapsed by several meters within a thirty-meter-wide circle around the construct. The Truthseeking Revenant stumbled back as if it had been struck, widening its stance to counteract the immense weight pressing down on it. An emblem bearing a sigil in the Itrian language embossed itself onto the Avatar's chest, just above the eyes of the wrathful face. It thrummed with power and truth, such that all who looked upon it would know what it meant.

PURIFICATION

The Avatar of Bishamonten raised up its staff-spear, thrusting it down upon the Revenant. It graped the spear, halting it dead, but the moment Third mobilized the power of his construct, it was torn away, drawn into the Avatar's maw. The more the Revenant struggled, the more of its power was ripped away.

The two giants exchanged several blows that went nowhere, being either dodged or blocked. Even these few exchanges, however, sent out immensely violent shockwaves that shook the earth.

Eventually, however, Bishamonten skewered the Sacrificial Revenant, stepping forward and forcing it down to its knees. With each passing moment the aura visibly drained out of Third's construct, gathering in the eye of Bishamonten's staff. Bit by nigh-imperceptible bit, the Revenant shrunk, and bit by bit, Bishamonten pushed the spear deeper, closer to Third himself. Even still the Revenant struggled, grasping at the spear.

Somehow, some way, Third managed to wrest control of the spear-staff from Victor and Bishamonten, evidenced by a shift in its colour. With an immense heave, replicating Third's feat against Zelsys, the Revenant tore the spear out of itself, mere metres from reaching Third's true body. Bishamonten stumbled, thrown off-balance, and, taking the opening, the scarlet titan sprung backwards. It landed unsteadily, stumbling backwards before eventually stabilizing itself against a mostly-intact building in a wide, low-down stance. It threw its head back, and power surged within it, as if it was about to use another ranged attack. Bishamonten braced himself, prepared to devour and purify, but no attack emerged. The flows within the Revenant were not stirring power for expulsion, but seemingly trying to compress as much as possible. It shrank even more, down to less than two-thirds Bishamonten's height.

Third's voice, coloured by simple desperation, echoed across the desolate city centre: “GREAT ARMAGEDDON, CLAIM NOW MY HEART!”

A light came to life inside the Revenant, spreading through it like a flame, its form distorting and stretching. For a moment it seemed like the Revenant would explode, but Bishamonten leapt through the air with an explosion of force and buried the spear into the Revenant's chest once more.

The emblem of purification shone with blindingly-bright light, and the giant's mouth chanted a mantra in lockstep with Victor, who still desperately clung to the avatar's back. Boom. Boom. Boom. Bishamonten's already immense presence multiplied, just for a moment, and once more circles were blasted into the ground beneath its feet. Bishamonten pushed, kicking out the Revenant's feet to force it onto its back. The avatar then stepped back out of the trio of circles, leaving the Revenant skewered, the flame-like reaction inside it slowed, but not halted.

Bishamonten clapped its hands together with a thunderclap.

The explosion came; there was no distinct combustion, one moment the Revenant was, and the next, it became a pillar of red light shooting into the sky. Even now, it was purified the moment it exited Third's grasp, fleshy scarlet turning to brilliant, pure red and then golden-white as it pierced the gathering clouds.

In mere moments, it seemed as though Bishamonten had formed a three-layered containment formation. Those with eyes to see, however, knew better. Glyphs of power burned around each circle's perimeter, but they were not quite those contained within the scrolls, bearing modifications based on Victor's fragmentary understanding of Antediluvian Glyphs. Indeed, the reason for this was the same behind the merging of the staff and spear which Bishamonten normally wielded separately, and it was the reason for the alteration of its combat style to include certain techniques the warrior-god was not known to use. The Avatar was controlled neither by Bishamonten, nor by Victor, but by both of them in unison.

At first, the pillar of flame was contained within the innermost ring, then the second, and the third. The clouds changed colour from a reddish-grey, and soon enough, a rain of golden ichor fell upon Eberheim; the purified remnants of but a few of its dead, returning to their home. All those upon whom the golden rain fell suddenly felt their pains melting away and their wounds knitting back together. Well, there was one exception. A survivor of the Order, who found out the hard way that the hate Eberheim’s fallen held for his kind was still very present even in this purified ichor. His swift, yet excruciating death left behind only an empty, suspiciously greasy black robe.

166 - Something Wrong Pt. 3 [Cherno]

As he ripped himself free, he caught a glimpse of the source of that second attack. Just a flash, but it was unmistakable. A damascened membrane in the palm of Tsetse's hand. That was the reason for the weird fist, to cover it up. His thoughts ran rampage; had Tsetse devised that specifically to counter the Second Eye?

Tsetse, however, seemed amused, remarking: "Impressive. Very well. I am certain the question has been gnawing at you: Am I a war morph? An overgrafter? A simple freak of nature?"

He stepped towards Casus, lunging at him with an absurdly long kick. It looked like a straight side kick, then like a hook kick, only to become a question-mark kick instead, all in the span of moments. The sonic blast sent stones and dust flying as it tore into the wall; Casus had ducked and rushed in, the obvious answer to all three of the possible kicks. He also anticipated a mixup afterwards, but Tsetse just engaged him in an exchange of punches and kicks. Each of them checked or blocked the other, and both of them threw in a few truly lethal surprises; Casus with his blade, and Tsetse with his sonic emitters. He wasn't using the one on his left arm at all, but the limb itself was monstrously strong. It didn't match up to the Right Arm of Silberblut in its current state, but it didn't need to. At this moment, Casus was painfully aware of the fact Tsetse was simply stronger than him. His only chance to tip the scales was to push himself as far as he could, to use and abuse the Second Eye, and to steal Tsetse's own strength to use it against him. Tsetse also knew this, given how he took care to not use his sonic blasts when Casus was likely to devour them.

It was obvious he was just playing, just using this fight as the stage to his continued monologue: "The answer is neither of those three above, yet also all of them. I am something new. This form... It is my body, yet I can shed it and survive. In this manner and beyond, we are alike. Think on that, pretender Mamon Knight."

Out of nowhere, with no apparent breath in, Tsetse exhaled... And he kept exhaling. In one immense exhalation, he flooded the whole room with mist. At first Casus thought it to be a poorly-conceived smoke screen, but then he felt it gnawing at him. It wasn't mist. It was omniphage, the same ruinous substance that made the Omniphage Dregsteam cartridge so potent. This single breath contained as much omniphage as two or perhaps three cartridges, and it was of a higher order than the breed used in those. Rather than clumping together like living mercury, it seemed to be the opposite.

Casus stood strong, continuing to fight and weathering the onslaught as the silver of his armour tarnished and soon turned black. He wasn't under threat here - Cornelius was. His barrier would hold, but everything around it wouldn't. Even if Cornelius had the nerve to banish and reform his barrier anew without the hemomantic catalyst, his barrier didn't have full-dome coverage. He had to get him out of the room.

So, he burned what power he had stocked up on empowering a coupler charge. Not an attack, but movement. The Silberblut armor wasn't suited to it, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He timed it to the moment he noticed Cornelius' barrier faltering due to the destruction of its catalyst.

At first, it seemed to work. With flame erupting from his back and propelling him, Casus dropped to the ground, sliding between Tsetse's legs. There there was a burst high-pitched noise, pain, and the realization that Cornelius had a chunk missing out of his side all of a sudden. It wasn't much, just surface tissue, but it meant his Wards had been breached. The grafter, perhaps thanks to shock, immediately drew a circle around the wound using his suddenly abundant blood and formed a temporary plug of metal over it, then layered a barrier over that.

At first, Casus didn't even realize that the force of the blast had embedded his outstretched limbs into the walls and floor. His attention was wholly fixed on Cornelius. He had to get him out of the omniphage mist. There was no time. Casus shook off the pain and swiftly freed himself, spinning on his heel to face down the flyman. Unsteady, a hair's breadth from detransforming, and bleeding internally, his resolve was no less ironclad than at the beginning of this fight.

"The arm, Silberblut. Give me the arm and you may go," Tsetse said, already approaching. Casus, without a moment's hesitation, grabbed a brick and pulled it out of place. Behind it was a handle, a pull on which opened the masterfully disguised panel. Behind that panel was a yawning recess and a keyboard He punched in the code and waited as the mechanism stirred into motion.

"Why? Why the mercy, I mean," came a hushed, strained voice from below.

"Not mercy," Tsetse scoffed, approaching yet closer, looming over them with amused apathy. "I want my arm back. I do not want a fight with whomever your deaths would alert."

His eyed shifted to Casus, and he added: "Not yet. I can't beat a real Mamon Knight yet."

At that moment, the container popped up in the recess, and Tsetse grabbed it right away. Not only did he not try to stop them, he simply walked away with the container in hand. It seemed at first as though he would leave them in peace, but he met them outside. Casus had to drag an inconsolable Cornelius out of his own laboratory as the most delicate of his equipment was rendered into scrap. There, well outside the lab, he found Tsetse. The flyman was just sitting there, legs crossed, pulling the cables out of his right arm. Casus stopped some distance short of passing him, because he was simply exhausted. At some point between the lab and here, he had fallen out of his transformation without even noticing it.

165 - Something Wrong Pt. 2 [Cherno]

He smelled it long before he reached the lab. The sweet smell of rotting meat, but not quite like the real thing, tinged with musky pungency and the sting of pheromones not intended for his nostrils. The stench only led him to rush even more, driving him to transform into Silberblut pre-emptively.

His fears were only further affirmed by the sounds of commotion as he sprinted through subterranean corridors lit only by old, flickering lamps. Three layers of black-iron doors had separated the lab from the corridor, but now, there was just a tunnel of torn-up stone. The doors were embedded into a wall inside the lab one atop the other, having been blasted from their hinges and smashed into a monolith of abused metal by immense concussive force.

The unmistakable voice of Tsetse echoed from within: "...possess something that was stolen from me. Return it, and I will let you live. Lucky you."

"I- I don't know what you mean, truly!" Cornelius insisted unconvincingly. His eyes jumped to Casus when he passed through the door. Scanning the situation before him, the first thing that hit him was the state of the lab; surprisingly, not wrecked. There was damage, yes, and quite a few pieces of equipment had been destroyed, but it looked plausibly collateral. As for Tsetse, he had cornered the swarthy grafter, who was keeping the flyman at bay thanks to a quarter-circle of blood drawn on the floor. Using it as a catalyst, Cornelius generated an immensely potent barrier. Its weakness against Tsetse's Kinetic attacks was offset by the fact it lashed back at him, as evidenced by the still-smoking Seven Spokes insignias that had been mercilessly branded onto Tsetse's body.

Indeed, Cornelius was truly exceptional when it came to purely defensive thaumaturgy, and not just in terms of barriers. His wards, too, were downright excessively thick, interlayered and compound, unreasonably complex for his distinct lack of combative tendency. That was, after all, why he was so defensive; he utterly lacked the nerve to even fight back. He was the one worm who would sooner grow a spiked shell on the spot rather than turn and strike back. No matter his talent, however, Cornelius couldn't hold that barrier up for long. He knew this, and Tsetse knew this, and Casus knew that Tsetse knew.

For that reason, a flash of hope lit up in the grafter's eyes when he saw Casus, and he immediately called out to him: "Ah, thank Zavesh you're here! A-as you can see there has been a bit of a misunderstanding, please explain to my friend here that I don't know anything about his arm!"

As mentioned earlier, Cornelius didn't have the nerve to fight. For that same reason, he also couldn't lie to save his skin.

Tsetse turned to meet his gaze, and, despite the flyman's stoic visage, the noise he emitted was very much that of a chuckle.

"Ah. Lucky me. Silberblut," he said, sounding genuinely glad to see Casus. "I must thank you, the data from our fight led to quite a few improvements to my morph, as you can see, and as you will soon feel for yourself. Worry not; I can feel your confusion. If you survive a head-on strike from me, I will freely divulge the nature of my existence."

While he spoke, Casus used these precious moments to inspect Tsetse's altered form. The sonic emitter bulges over his ankles had been joined by another pair just above the knees, and both pairs were now more elegantly melded into the curvature of his plating, with eye-like slits in the chitin. His arms were completely different from before. The right still missed its lower half, with a crude-looking machine prosthetic in its place, cables winding up the limb to a compact power unit embedded in his back. As for his left arm, it had bulked up as if to compensate, individual plates now spread apart by bulging muscle. Any trace of sonic emitters was gone from the limb.

"I presume you know where it is. Please, disappoint me by disclosing its location without a fight."

Casus knew, of course. The arm was beneath them, its container one among dozens within a mechanized storage system. The access panel was in fact right behind Cornelius.

Rather than respond verbally, he simply dropped into his fighting stance. Having been transformed for a short time already, he felt mostly confident that he could pull out a coupler charge right on the spot. It wasn't a good idea as he risked backlash, and even if successful it would cut into his stamina quite severely. However, given the state of those doors and Tsetse's confidence, Casus wagered it was his best bet.

Tsetse raised his left arm to waist height, hand clenched into a downright weird fist. The exposed muscles of his torso flexed, and plates snapped out of place to reveal an array of three large and nine small sonic emitter lenses. Their placement was awkward, spaced out widely near the sides to make space for Tsetse's powerful core musculature. That explained the thick plates on his sides - their purpose was to protect the emitters.

Tsetse followed with a short punch, like something one would use in tight quarters into an opponent's stomach. Casus, reading it as the trigger gesture for the greater emitter cluster, opened the Second Eye. Just as a wall of force came bearing down on him he devoured it, skidding back just a bit. However, another blast of force came just as the Second Eye's window of effectiveness petered out. Viciously focused, it wasn't just enough to throw him against the wall - it embedded him into the brickwork and continued on through him, carving a hole into the stone. The Silberblut armor's internal structure as a relic of the highest order was the only thing that prevented it from turning his insides into mush. Nothing could severely harm him until the armor's durability was depleted, no matter how focused the attack was. Unfortunately, after weathering that, there really wasn't much durability left. He wagered he could take maybe one more hit like that, and perhaps one or two regular strikes after that before he was forced out of his transformation.

164 - Something Wrong [Cherno]

That night, there was a brief light show in the sky just above the city. A swarm of glowing papers chasing after a deep-blue comet, each letting off a shining beam of light before disintegrating.

It ended with a dozen rays of light scattering into the sky all at once, and the body of their target - a willowy, unassuming man - plummeting onto a rooftop. He rolled off the side, smashing into a balcony railing on his way down, leaving it bent. Nothing else broke his fall save for the hard stone, but that was fine. He wasn't as fragile as most.

Emitting an entirely inhuman groan of pain and effort, Jezail dragged himself off the ground and propped himself up against a nearby wall. He let out a wheezing, strained laugh. Despite the discomfort of a punctured lung and numerous small wounds that riddled his whole body, that laugh was the only appropriate reaction to his predicament.

"Hazard pay... Here I come," he cackled to himself as he conjured an injector out of his quick-access storage. Relief flooded him when he pressed it against his neck; a Class 3 painkiller, able to take the bite out of any pain without impairing other senses, while also providing a minor regenerative factor for several hours.

Once he was able to move again, Jezail simply returned to one of his hideouts in the city. He had done his job to the extent of the contract.

For the next hour, he sat there injecting himself, smoking, and slathering graft-paste on his wounds. Tens, hundreds of thousands of DDs in restoratives, spent without a second thought. After all, it was in his contract that his employer had to cover any expenses for injuries sustained on the job. Semzar wouldn't willingly shell out for that policy, he knew that. But he also knew that Damrus would pay. The Hashems were already in dire straits. The patriarch was smart enough to not risk souring his relationship with Jezail, or Zavesh forbid, risk having the assassin come after him personally.

Jezail still wasn't quite sure what had happened, and he was quite close to giving up on trying to figure it out. There had been no sign of the talisman being corrupt, and he had no way to discern how exactly Blackhand had turned it against him. A part of him wondered if she used some alternative to traditional barriers, and, since he himself used a "Distortion Impulse Barrier", that was where his mind wandered. While demanding a higher level of skill and active attention even for basic usage, a DI barrier conversely had a far higher performance ceiling. As per the words of his master, it was "the parry to an archetypal barrier's simple block."

He knocked the burnt waste out of his pipe and absent-mindedly stuffed it with various mind-clearing herbs. The taste didn't even register anymore, he was so used to it. The initial kick was a flood of menthol, heat, and sour astringency, forcibly opening his airways and ensuring maximum absorption of the active ingredient, a specially cultivated type of Cassia of Jezail's own creation.

However, now that he thought on it with a clearer mind, Blackhand using a DI barrier was unlikely; as a user of this unique defensive technique, Jezail was certain he would have been able to detect it. It was also statistically exceedingly unlikely outside the DI barrier's region of origin, which was on another continent. Looking back, he hadn't even sensed the normal thaumic upsurge caused by the raising of a standard barrier. There had been an undeniable disturbance, but not one that felt like any kind of barrier. Moreover, his attacks weren't deflected, but seemed to merely pass through her space as if she was dodging them... To where? She hadn't moved. He saw it, she had stood in the same spot, yet was unharmed.

"How? Is that smoke form simply invulnerable?" he thought aloud. "No, that's not how thaumaturgy works. It's not omnipotent. If it was truly a self-transmutation into smoke, the Oblivion Flow would have erased it all the same. Then how?"

Crescent Jezail decided that it was high time to broaden his horizons, starting with obscure defensive techniques. For all his fame, he was far from a true veteran. He saw this incident as a stark reminder to not get complacent just because he was in the top 10%. That still left a whole 9% that could put him in the ground. Just a few years of being the Crescent Jezail had nearly made him stop polishing his edge.

"Next time, Blackhand..." he started, only to chuckle to himself. "Hopefully there won't be a next time. Best to prepare regardless."

____________________________________________________________

Something was wrong. Casus felt it in his gut.

Cornelius, the man to whom he had entrusted Tsetse's arm, was supposed to have contacted him by now. They had no official agreement of a particular time or method, but Cornelius was an exceedingly scrupulous and consistent man, despite his veneer of a quasi-rogue grafter. For this reason, Casus had developed a strong sense for when Cornelius would contact him. Even if his tests on the arm hadn't progressed by a millimetre, Cornelius would have still sent a message to update Casus on his efforts.

Therefore, Casus decided to check up on him. He hoped that Cornelius had made a breakthrough and had been too engrossed in his work to report back, or that he had worked himself into an exhaustion coma, because the alternative was just too unpleasant to consider.

An unsettling sense of urgency began to grow in his chest as he went. Eventually, he ended up riding a motorbike as fast as it would go through the city and even down into the underground, abusing its generous suspension by forcing it to go down stairways. He simply left it at the furthest possible spot it could take him.

Something was wrong. He could feel it in his gut. Cornelius wasn't the type to not check in just because of a breakthrough or just because he was tired. He wasn't that irresponsible. Something had to be wrong.

163 - VS. Crescent Jezail Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Reload; a new talisman wrapped around his staff. An adjustment of his fingers on the haft, translating to subtle adjustments to the next shot's properties. The air still crackled with remnant energy as Jezail regained sight and recalculated trajectories. Jezail's mind ran far faster than any Normal's, apropos of his heavy cerebral grafts and a cocktail of elixirs he had taken beforehand. He got up and stalked over the rooftops, eventually jumping across the street to the next roof over.

There he was met by a grinning face, sitting slumped against the stone slab. He raised his staff again, but she skimmed into the building before he could fire.

The game of cat and mouse which followed went on for three hours.

Jezail eventually managed to set up a decoy trap using his camouflage cloak, which seemed to be what she had used to detect him. At this moment, he was buried in a pile of trash on the flat-top roof of a three-story apartment building. He was waiting for Blackhand to cross a sightline from beyond a street corner to get out of his decoy's sightline. She did, and he took the shot...

...Only for her to still be standing once the remnants cleared, grinning at him straight through his camouflage. How? Yes, he was blind for a few brief moments after firing, but her posture wasn't changing at all, let alone enough to suggest any kind of dodge! The feedback he was receiving could only mean his attack wasn't being blocked, as the arcane reverb of a Barrier and the various feelings of Ward impact were distinct from a true, direct hit on target. By every reasonable metric, Blackhand should be dead.

Something clicked in his head.

She must have taken and implanted Eutropia's special voidkey at some point before he took the first shot. He wasn't familiar with it or its strange mechanics, but he knew enough to lay the blame on it. That was the only reasonable explanation for this havoc that was being played with his magic, and it also explained why Eutropia died properly - she didn't have the same defences that had protected her from that street vendor's Reaper. Jezail came to these conclusions in moments of real-time, and decided to take a risk.

Barriers took time to raise. Skimming, too, had a recovery time. It stood to reason this esoteric means of attack avoidance had to also have limitations. So, he brought out Mistress Yao's talisman, wrapped it around his staff, and took the shot.

_____________________________________

Krahe had been screwing with Jezail all night, and she had to admit she had enjoyed it. For all its lethality, there was no network layer to deal with, no hacking and counter-hacking, making the game an enjoyable balance of real danger versus relative safety. She'd guessed that he couldn't see shit after firing right away. That black beam just left too much mess behind, it obscured him, but also obscured his vision. It was possible he could see through it, like she could through her smokescreen, but her vision was still impaired by it somewhat. At this distance, even that level of sight impairment was a big fucking problem.

Once she saw that dead-still decoy and that sightline straight out of a sniper's wet dream, she knew she had the right bait for him.

He swallowed it hook line and sinker.

A golden-yellow light flashed from the talisman, filling the many spiraling grooves that covered the staff's surface. A burst of that same light erupted from the rod, sending the talisman itself flying at a velocity that rightly should have obliterated it. As it flew, it rapidly multiplied into dozens, at first flying as a swarm, and eventually reaching such a density they *flowed* at their target.

Yet, something was wrong. Jezail had felt a sense of foreboding when he took aim, as if something was warning him not to take the shot, but he had encountered similar dissuasion magic before.

For this same reason, seeing his target turn into a green-eyed smoke demon didn't intimidate him.

Jezail started reconsidering his odds only once he saw the swarm of talismans surround their target and begin orbiting. By now, they should have mummified and vaporized her.

___________________________________________________

Krahe didn't trust Yao enough to just eat that talisman face-first unguarded, and there was no guarantee that this talisman was the one Yao had agreed to rig with a rebound trigger. For all she knew, Jezail might have acquired more offensive talismans from the mistress for general use.

Her distrust was once again been proved wrong when, a split-second after being surrounded by that swarm, it suddenly went zipping back to sender, spewing beams of golden light at Jezail from all directions. It didn't even look like he was supposed to get hit, but rather as though the swarm was corralling him, trying to chase him away. It worked, as the sniper-wizard fired off a scattered version of his earlier attack and vanished in the aftermath.

The last Krahe saw of Jezail for that night was his blurred silhouette as he leapt atop his staff and went blasting over the rooftops, using it as a hoverbike of a sort. It certainly didn't look like real flight.

Despite his best efforts, however, Yao's talismans knew where he was, and chased after him. He had, after all, tied himself to them as the caster, and Yao had purposely altered their homing mechanism so it could go both ways. The tie between Jezail and Krahe was much like that of a curse, if shorter-lived. If anything, the rebound was even more powerful than the original attack; rather than homing in on an arbitrary target, it was following the chain of retribution to a perpetrator. At least, such was Krahe's limited understanding of sympathetic magic.

Krahe wasted no time in returning to Eutropia's home, taking a moment to change her clothes in a back alley on the way there. Her caution was rewarded when she found a handful of curious eyes peering from the windows of nearby buildings. She extracted Eutropia's souldregs and her voidkey, knowing that Garvesh would appreciate seeing hard proof of her death. The key snapped, with a sizable chunk of it just bursting apart and disintegrating, but she got most of it anyway. It felt familiar, somehow. Before anyone in the neighbourhood could muster up the courage to investigate, and before the night-watchmen could reach the place, Krahe was gone.