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162 - VS. Crescent Jezail Pt. 1 [Cherno]

A/N: This will NOT be a long fight, or even a direct fight at all. It will be resolved in the first half of the next chapter.

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"I'm sure you can guess," Eutropia said with a wry smile. "I can't say who contacted me personally, but I'm deathly certain the man who gave the order was Semzar Hashem. The message was... It was worded in an exceedingly him manner. Egotistical shit brat with less of a brain than the corpse he's riding on any given month."

As if on cue, Krahe saw a strange shape shimmering on a nearby rooftop through Barzai's eyes - just the next street over, less than a hundred meters away. It was a human figure, one obscured somehow, and difficult to focus on. She noticed it due to the disturbance of the air around it; like overly aggressive active camo, standing out against a comparatively tranquil backdrop. There was a good chance she would've missed it if she hadn't been actively scanning the rooftops, windows, and other such vantage points in Barzai's field of view.

She would had warned Eutropia, if there had been time. The figure appeared one moment as if it had clambered onto the roof just then. The next moment, the cloak broke as the person under the cloak opened it to raise a long weapon into a crouched firing position. Through Barzai's superior vision, Krahe was able to catch the shape of Crescent Jezail's eponymous weapon.

There were all of four, perhaps five seconds between when Krahe initially spotted a weird shimmering shape a rooftop and when a ray of arcane death tore the air apart on its warpath towards her back. Of these seconds, three were filled by what would come to be Eutropia's final words.

Krahe skimmed straight upwards twice in rapid succession, placing herself on the balcony. She had turned herself to see better. Her reason to abandon cover was the assumption that Jezail could see her through walls somehow, considering he had been able to target and shoot through heavily a warded safehouse window, let alone a mostly-mundane stone brick wall.

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A gulf skimmer.

That was a problem... But she couldn't have more than three charges, and Jezail could compensate by predicting the likely direction she might skim next. That stunt had to have cost her one charge at least, and Jezail was willing to bet it had cost two, given the structure's dimensions and typical skimmer ranges. It could be a longer-ranged technique, but then it would have a longer recharge time and likely only two charges. The third option was that she just had the brute attribute ratings to force a standard skimmer's range that far, but he couldn't very well do anything about that if it were the case, so he didn't worry about it. Jezail was, of course, wrong. It was none of these. The characteristics of Krahe's skimming ability were, in fact, objectively subpar. Its range was above-average, but not "long".

Four shots; Semzar had paid Jezail for four shots and impact confirmation. Or rather, three of his standard catalogue, and one Full Custom. A shot tailored specifically to the target, and what a shot it was. Jezail honestly hoped she would dodge the next two just so he would get to use it.

The collateral damage was Semzar's problem. Eutropia was a loose end whose death was included in the contract as a secondary objective, which he had now fulfilled, but his current ammo was rather destructive by nature. All of the buildings behind his target were potential collateral damage, and given the area, some of those buildings were the homes of people Semzar couldn't afford to anger.

That wasn't Jezail's problem.

"You wanted me to use the Oblivion Flow, you get the Oblivion Flow..." he thought. In the same breath, he briefly considered waiving the fee for Eutropia and only charging for the shot that killed her, since information on her was, in the end, what allowed him to catch Blackhand like this. He banished the thought. For a better customer, for Damrus, even, perhaps. Not for Semzar.

Blackhand raised a wall of strange, black-green stone, as if it would shield her. It probably would, against most attacks. Not against his.

He fired the second shot. It didn't burst out of his staff, but rather poured out. It thereafter flowed through the air, an unearthly river of power in a colour darker than than black, creating a trail not through the violence of its passage, but mere incident. Bits of dust, errant feathers, even the air itself were all erased by the flow, sweeping up a light breeze and leaving shreds of impossible blackness in its wake.

It was nearly instantaneous, traveling no slower than lightning itself with a fraction of the commotion and far more focused power than such a brutish bolt. Jezail had no particular talent, no particular elemental affinity, but he felt no need for it. The reassuring absoluteness of Arcane magic's outcomes was one of the reasons he was Crescent Jezail, instead of some idiot with a cooked brain and too much love for literal beams of fire. The Oblivion Flow brought an altogether more elegant and literal kind of obliteration. Eutropia wasn't torn apart, and neither were the walls unfortunately caught in the Flow's path; they were erased, directly destroyed by magic.

Given the lack of overpenetration, that wall had put up a significant amount of resistance, but not enough to stop the Flow from passing through.

Two shots. Half a million DDs without hit confirmation accounted for. The first shot had gotten hit confirmation on Eutropia, bringing it to 600,000. The second, too, had passed through a living target, raising his base payout to 700,000. Jezail didn't relax, however. His method of hit confirmation wasn't foolproof, as he had warned Semzar earlier, despite Semzar's refusal to acknowledge that fact during the negotiations for this very job. Two shots left, and Semzar had in the end caved and paid for direct kill confirmation. Thus, Jezail would circle the target to get a line of sight and make damn sure she was dead.

161 - Re: The Case of the Talisman Assassin Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Eutropia was a minor celebrity, a performer in one of the city's lesser-known, yet still reputable establishments. Despite the marginally sleazy name "Hot Legs", everything else about the venue gave the impression of an upstanding establishment. Eutropia, alongside the establishment's in-house band, wore costumes styled after the Mamon Armors worn by an all-female group of independent contractors from the Samstani capital. Eutropia's stage getup was far from a real Mamon Armor, of course - it was an all-too-tight black body glove with sections of blue-painted armor fitted around it, with a chestplate that only covered the top half of her torso and was shaped to exaggerate her curves. The rest of the suit was much the same, with "metal bikini" type bottoms and chunky, high-heeled knee-high boots, with gauntlets that matched their rounded shape. Sizable pauldrons that swung about freely during the performance rounded out the whole thing. As for the performance, it was fun. It brought back memories of attending underground concerts, both for fun and to discuss things that were best covered up by the eardrum-rupturing noise. Krahe also learned that this world had equivalents to some modern instruments, including distorted guitars and synthesizers. Unsurprisingly, all powered by souldregs. Musically, the songs were familiar, being similar to the New Wave of Synth-Rock which had swept through Megacity Gamma's Sectors 7, 8 and 9 in her lifetime. As for lyrical subjects, they were typical stuff. Love, sorrow, living in the big city, tearing down the road as fast as your machine would go, et cetera et cetera. Timeless subjects, really. A song including the words "tonight, there's a hurricane" in the refrain stood out among the others, being the opener and also being repeated once more after the audience demanded an encore.

The question was whether Eutropia moonlighted as a Silversword Agency Contractor, or the other way around; the bar's advertising used her contractor status as a selling point.

Tracking her back to her home wasn't difficult. In fact, Krahe wasn't the only one to do it that night. A pair of drunk fans, out of an audience of about a hundred, had followed their idol back to an apartment building in one of the city's more affluent residential areas. Given her reaction - shooing them off and throwing spare pieces of her costume - this seemed to be a regular occurence. Like feral raccoons who had been given leftovers, the two obsessives scurried off with their prize.

Krahe was well out of sight, but with Barzai as her eyes, she got a good look at the building and at Eutropia herself.

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Eutropia regarded Krahe with a questioning look. The question was: "Another fan?"

But as she approached, emerging into the pallid glow of a street lamp, curiosity turned to recognition, and recognition turned to wide-eyed terror.

"Blackhand..." the girl muttered. She didn't seem to even consider fleeing, merely backing up against the front door of her home.

"W-why're you here? I... I'm not with Hashem anymore, I swear! I paid off my debt, I'm clean!"

"Oh, I've missed these reactions. Best thank Semzar for doing my PR," she thought.

Somewhat confused, Krahe asked: "Why do you think I'm here?"

"They say you used to run with the Hands of Purgation," Eutropia said. She hastily shoved her keys into the door without ever turning around, unlocked it, and opened it, slowly backing up into her home. The whole time, she kept talking: "That you've come back to take vengeance on the whole Hashem Family. But I- I swear, I'm not with them. I just... I just owed them and I did some work to repay it."

She... Wasn't lying. At least, not as far as Krahe could tell. Her confusion grew, but she decided to play along. Krahe followed her in; this wasn't a conversation to be had out in the open street if it could be helped, and Eutropia clearly understood that.

Krahe shut the door behind herself, leaning against it, leaving Barzai just outside to cover her blind spot - especially the rooftops.

"Did that work happen to include the killing of a saurian street vendor? The one that blasted you with a reaper and set off Mistress Yao's protection talisman."

"How do you-"

"Answer the question."

Krahe didn't need to try to put an edge in her voice. Just interrupting Eutropia was enough to make her crumple. Well, she supposed it wasn't too big a surprise. She was a hired killer, sure, but she had killed a civilian. Frankly, Krahe wasn't sure why Yao had taken an interest in her, or sold her that protective talisman.

"That..." Eutropia tensed up. "It was the last thing I did for him, I swear on my family name!"

"I don't recall finding anything about a family name when I looked into you," Krahe said plainly. Eutropia's terror became tinged by shame.

"I, well, I'm... I'm the eighth daughter of the Kartir Family's Ulthar branch," she admitted with a sad smile, averting her gaze. She didn't feel the need to elaborate, because there was none. The Kartirs were an ancient and absurdly wealthy family, with the core branch controlling all the businesses while the secondary branches specialized in a wide variety of research and development. It was such surface information that even a book on the general history of Afshan included it. They were, in every sense, old money.

Raising her eyes to look at Krahe again, she added: "I would swear that my family will reward you if you spare my life, but I would be lying to both of us. So, if you spare me, my family will not be able to use my death as an excuse if your interests ever conflict with theirs."

"Point me to the one who hired you, and I'll let you get away."

"It was-"

"Shut up. I wasn't finished. I'll let you get. Away. Not let you go. You will vanish from Audunpoint and take only what you can carry. Make it look like someone made you disappear. Run off to Afshan or something, change your name, start another tribute band, Zavesh knows there's a hundred of them just in this city. Someone wants you dead for that street merchant. So, Eutropia Kartier is dead, starting today. Understand?"

Krahe had just guessed that part about tribute bands. She was sure Hot Legs would have no trouble finding another singer for their in-house band. Eutropia nodded along, both intimidated and relieved.

327 - Mightiest of the Eight Guardian Deities [Sturmblitz]

Zel genuinely wasn't quite sure how to proceed. In terms of pure physical endurance, she could keep going. Red had pushed her much further than this. Her lungs, however, wouldn't hold. She could already feel them breaking down. A swig of Witch's Brew forestalled the decay, but only for so long. She knew why, deep in her gut. The Primordial Self had used a distinctly limited duration as leverage to achieve the great performance they had exhibited thus far. Third's demonic construct floated in the midst of devastation, continuing its impression of a lighthouse.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the Truthseeking Revenant came to a halt, staring at the giant puppet. The cyclone of cast-off, loose aura had by now calmed to a relatively slow, outward spiral. It was now just very dangerous rather than guaranteed death to any mortal who came in contact with it.

She wasn't sure of anything about the tense stare-down. Not the reason for the puppet, nor the reason it seemed to perturb Third more than her continued existence.

Both of those questions were answered for her in the next few moments.

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The giant servitor was motionless, unmoving, and Victor felt what needed to be done. He felt the vast, unknowable power that flowed through the Oculus, and knew that it would be the ignition key for this titan just the same as his Black Sun Keys were the lifeblood of his individual servitors.

It was all so clear, now. Despite the crushing pressure acting on him, Victor knew what had to be done. He felt his armor cracking and its musculature tearing as he, through sheer will, forced it to move him and blast him up to the vessel’s head. A passage from the Itrian Scroll replayed in his mind, and he spoke it aloud as he flew towards the giant’s head and reared back his hand to bury the Oculus into the back of it. There was only one option. Victor felt his thrusters sputter out from under him halfway up the giant’s back, so he grabbed on with his third arm for dear life, climbing up to the giant’s shoulders with his right and third hands. Once there, he righted himself and reared back to embed the Oculus into the vessel's head.

“By this holy implement, I offer up this vessel, that the works of evil might be turned against their makers!”

The Oculus' spear-end sunk in, and Victor grasped its ring, turning the staff as if it were a key while chanting a sutra. Its words could not be understood, but the meaning within it was as clear as could be; a call to something, or perhaps someone, to inhabit the vessel. The rift within the Oculus’ eye flared and a burst of iridescent light ran down the staff's length, into the vessel's head.

In an instant, the vessel began exuding a truly vast presence and stirred into motion. It clapped its hands with a thunderous noise, and the mouths littering its chest began repeating Victor's sutra. In moments, every shred of stray sacrificial aura was drawn towards the giant, swirling around it. A storm of weeping revenants continuously flooded towards the Oculus, and Victor knew it was his duty to purify them. Each. And. Every. One.

Victor could do naught but keep chanting for dear life, shifting to a purifying sutra right away, and by some miracle, it was enough. By rights the strain should've torn his soul in two, but the same presence that had been roaring inside his head also took away the fear of that happening. For the briefest moment, Victor found himself spirited away from reality, into the depths of his thoughtscape.

There, his Thinking Self beheld a vast and incomprehensible presence of pure valor, a figure wielding a giant spear in one hand and a purifying khakkhara staff in the other. Four more, six-segmented arms erupted from its back. It stood tall, and with its four arms, it held up a gigantic meteor of congealed, weeping souls, preventing it from crushing Victor.

The giant faltered. One of his hands slipped. The meteor moved closer. Victor instinctively reached out, and he was suddenly standing atop the beastly form of his Primordial Self. The thoughtform was utterly gigantic, hundreds of meters tall. Its clawed tail whipped forward, taking on some of the weight. Together with the nameless divinity, they could bear even the weight of thousands of sacrificed souls.

The shining giant looked down upon him, with a boisterous grin upon its otherwise indistinct face, and bellowed: "CHANT, INHERITOR OF THE SECOND! MY STRENGTH MAY BE A SHADOW OF WHAT IT ONCE WAS, BUT THIS MUCH AID, I CAN RENDER. CHANT, NOW! WITH EACH REVENANT PURIFIED, THE NEXT SHALL BECOME EASIER AND MY STRENGTH SHALL GROW!"

Suddenly, he was back in reality, chanting the sutras of purification he had memorized from the Itrian Shrine Guardian Scroll... And the vessel was moving of its own accord. It rose up from the ground, fully embodying that divine presence from before. Thousands of revenants swirled around it, solidifying into armour. The countless weeping faces which had gathered on the giant's chest also swirled together into one, forming a sneering, demonic visage with red-black fire in its eyes and fanged maw. It contrasted sharply with the faceless, helmet-like appearance of its head. It was no longer a mere vessel, but the avatar of a fallen god.

"I AM THE MIGHTIEST OF THE EIGHT GUARDIAN DEITIES!" the Avatar proclaimed. Its body, previously just humanoid, suddenly shifted, becoming powerfully muscular and perfectly proportional in a single monumental flex. The sickly, fleshy colour became as white as mutton-fat jade. In that single instant of transubstantiation, a hodgepodge of mangled mortal bodies became the temporary home of a deity.

The Truthseeking Revenant lashed out, its arm extending with explosive force. The Avatar, despite its incomplete state, weathered the assault, grabbing the Revenant’s arm before it could retract. As if its very touch were poison, the Revenant emitted an unearthly scream and separated its arm just above where the Avatar had grabbed it, reforming the limb right away.

326 - Momentary Quiet Before the Final Bout [Sturmblitz]

The Third Truthseeker, in his rage, reached out and grasped every shred of aura he could. This was of course the aura that was the closest to him, as he had already begun refining it in preparation to take it into himself. It amounted to a little less than half of the rapidly-decaying maelstrom's volume.

In an instant, the maelstrom's slowly scattering mass was turned into two distinct masses. The inner mass, under Third's control, imploded into him, surrounding him in a spherical bubble. The shockwave of this act, conversely, caused the remainder to scatter even more violently, a spiraling flood of weeping, directionless revenants.

Zero had, at this point, spun down. Its movements had grown slower, less violent, and it walked the earth once more. The machine, for lack of a better term, was tired. It wasn't out of fuel yet, but it couldn't sustain its peak level of output, dropping to about 50% above the normal combat baseline while retaining the quasi-transcendent abilities of its Delimit Pilot Fusion state. Strake was part of the reason for this drop. He, as the core organic component and sole source of Zero's aura, was a limiting factor to how long peak output could be sustained.

Zelsys and Zefaris weren't much better for wear. Zefaris had finally caved by closing her eye, and Zelsys could feel the crash rapidly approaching. Her construct-lungs wouldn't hold out much longer. Maybe not even a minute. But that would be enough. It had to be enough.

As for what to do next... Zelsys didn't know. She gathered her True Fangs back together and reformed Carnifex into its proper shape, but she wasn't sure how to proceed with dealing with whatever Third's ball formation was. It looked dense. Surpassingly so. A solid ball of crimson with Third's elongated figure as the only dark spot in its centre. Her first guess had been that it might be a bomb, but it didn't feel that way to her gut instinct. It felt more like an egg. Its surface rippled and writhed as the disruptor array adjusted its beams towards the ball, but one after the next, the pylons shattered and their rubble came raining from on high.

For the moment, she was busy protecting herself and Zefaris from the few loose revenants that were mad or feral enough to try attacking them. Carnifex ripped them apart without issue, and, after summoning Chrome Skull Viper, the territorial construct greedily devoured any that got near. The aura was filthy, and Zelsys was utterly certain that she would have to painstakingly rid herself of its impurity later, but it was necessary replenishment. She really didn't look forward to puking up congealed impurity like that time with the Necrobeast Serum. Perhaps Metabolic Alkahest and the Truth of Fangs would suffice to obliterate it altogether. Hopefully.

From where she stood, Zel clearly saw Victor doing something, something she didn't fully understand. He was building a giant servitor, that much was clear, and he was also, somehow, purifying stray sacrificial aura. It was obviously something to do with Itrian Shrine Guardian arts, but what, she couldn't hazard a guess. She was familiar with his cultivation and his techniques, but this wasn't anything he had ever practiced or talked about in the past. It vaguely resembled his ill-fated attempts at combining his servitors, sure, but the scale of it was far beyond that. If she didn't know better, she would think he was trying to build a miniature Teutobochus.

In short, the redhead was the least drained between the four of them. Zelsys decided to send out an aetherwave pulse; a call to anyone who would listen, and anyone who would dare. Only a few tense moments passed, and she already heard the thumping steps of Third and Second-model tank suits. They weren't anywhere near the totality of the Newman Sect's forces, of course. No, these Hellhounds were the brave, or perhaps suicidal, souls who had pushed deep into the city and then decided to stick around after the ritual had begun.

Among them, utterly unsurprisingly, were also most of the Newman Sect's members who had come along. Mata Gano, Old One-arm, and Vaceran. One-arm looked to be doing substantially better than the younger two, and somehow, his dungeontech arm had become twice as large and now had an under-arm nozzle dripping liquid flame. She supposed it was to be expected of blackstone with the limiters removed. It was inevitable that the construct would adjust itself to best suit the user.

The reinforcements didn't ask any questions; there wasn't time for such things. Zel's call had included the basic situation briefing, and she frankly didn't think she could explain much more in a reasonable timespan. The command was simple: Suppress the Third Truthseeker when he showed any sign vulnerability, but don't try to go against him directly. Several Gundream Third-models had hunkered down and anchored their feet, their twin cannons settling on their shoulders. The Hellhounds took mortars from the Gundreams' backs, setting them up in an encirclement around the cathedral's wrecked remnants, above which Third hovered.  They had slug rounds for their shotguns, but Zel frankly didn't think they would do much of anything at these ranged. The barrels on those things weren't more than thirty centimeters, and they weren't engineered for at-range precision like Tempesta. A tiny, tiny handful set down man-portable Type-Z rifles - three in total. The Hellhounds were terrified. Zelsys could feel it from them. But they did what they thought was necessary nonetheless, and did it with resolve. That was what made them worthy of their tank suits.

Zel understood their worry.

It wasn't every day you witnessed a congealed ball of unholy power suddenly turn into a fifteen-meter-tall ghostly suit of screaming armour. There was no transformation, no gradual change. It was a violent, instantaneous snap, and with it came a shockwave that sent even Zelsys stumbling back slightly. It threw the Hellhounds off their feet altogether. A few of them were, for some unknown reason, thrown back into nearby walls. The reason behind the uneven spread of force escaped her. Thankfully the mortars were easily put back into the upright positions.

Third was still visible inside the aura construct as a dark silhouette. A pair of burning-white eyes opened upon its faceless countenance. They immediately fell upon Zelsys, and from within them burned Third's own hatred. She readily met his gaze, and smugly found him averting his eyes, trying to mask the sign of weakness by turning the giant construct and sweeping its stare across the desolate surroundings. It briefly lingered on Victor's giant puppet, but continued its circle soon thereafter.

325 - Contact With a Deity [Sturmblitz]

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

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Moments earlier...

With each pylon, Victor had felt a quasi-divine pressure building, but he had thought it was just a side effect of the disruption array. It wasn't. It was the Oculus. Like a hungry abyss, it drew long ribbons of fleshy-red aura into its ring, which was now completely filled by a seething star. It seemed like the ring would burst at any moment if Victor didn't marshal every iota of his remaining strength to compress it, and so he did. The Oculus' jade secondary rings began violently jumping back and forth in a rhythmic, clacking ruckus, and the bloody star collapsed with the same ease as compressing bonefire to prepare a cast of Fight the Night. When it became the size of a marble there came a thunderous sound, and he found himself sinking. Boom.

The Oculus' aura suction redoubled, and Victor decided to move the two servitors in front of him out of the way. A geyser of dislodged aura erupted as if to sweep him away, only to be consumed in its entirety, with the Oculus' star once more growing to fill the ring.

Victor repeated the compression process. Again, and again, and again. Each cycle took only two seconds, but he felt his entire soul straining with effort. Inevitably, blood began dripping from his nose, but he kept going. He didn't know why, but he knew he had to do this. It wasn't a matter of whether he could do it - he would do it, because there was no other choice.

Boom. Boom. Concentric, circular impressions were blasted into the ground where he stood. One after the next, moving outward, the one wherein he stood growing deeper with each blast. With each one, it felt as if something was coming closer, as if something was reaching out.

He remained keenly aware of the goings-on, and it took truly superhuman willpower to remain fully focused and ignore Mistress Zelsys' incredible combination technique which shook the earth, the heavens, and the air in between. This was not an overstatement; unnatural, pitch-black clouds gathered overhead just after the Dragonslayer Thundercannon went off. His awareness collapsed into the task at hand, and remained so until the moment the Third Truthseeker howled in rage and defiance:

"Then I shall burn it all, and you shall perish in the flames!"

The Third Truthseeker tore the Dragonslayer Spear out of his chest, and with it, a mass of flesh that would have killed any mortal. The moment it was out, however, his flesh returned to its rightful place in reverse-motion, the injury undone rather than healed. He tried to throw the spear at Zelsys, only for its constituent metal to unfold into a pair of inward-facing Three True Fang Rippers that shredded away at Third's arm. With a howl of anger, he lashed out in a random direction. Thousands of tendril-arms made of burning-red aura exploded out of him in that direction, scattering the Fang Rippers and flattening everything in a twenty-meter diameter.

Well, everything except for the red-haired wizard whose presence was comparatively so diminutive that Third didn't even acknowledge him. He was a threat, yes, but not nearly as much of one as Zelsys, Zefaris, or Strake. For this reason, he didn't notice that the portion of his attack that would've obliterated Victor was seemingly erased out of existence.

Just as it seemed like the power of the Third Truthseeker's outburst had vanished for no reason, an iridescent tear opened in the staff’s eye. It was nearly identical to the strange spatial tunnels down in Agartha, but shimmering and unstable, and leading to… A destitute ruin. There was nothing there to be found, only the feet of a wrecked statue overgrown by grasses. And yet, a mighty voice thundered forth from the spatial tear, a voice that rang out like a giant iron bell struck by a battering ram, echoing inside Victor’s head.

“YOU KNEW THIS DAY WOULD COME, BEARER OF THE ONBASHIRA, SUCCESSOR TO HE WHOM TIAN FENG, THE DESTROYER OF MY SHRINE, SO HATED. YOUR PUPPETS. GATHER THEM. ALL OF THEM. EVEN THOSE OF FLESH. I REQUIRE A VESSEL."

“They are not mine to command.”

This was true. The Flesh Unions were on his side, but he couldn't control them. At best he could try to steer them in their vengeful anger.

“CALL TO THEM WITH MY VOICE. THEY SHALL LISTEN. I REQUIRE A VESSEL.”

Victor had designed his Servitors so they could combine and interlock in order to take larger forms and fulfill a wide variety of roles, but he hadn’t been able to get them to cooperate properly in anything larger than a two-servitor combination for the complex, full-animal designs. But now, they were all coming together. Every single one, gathering at his call, their embedded servitor-spirits being overridden by something altogether greater.

And it wasn’t just his servitors.

The Unions, too.

All driven towards a single point, merging together seamlessly with only some effort on Victor’s part. All he had to do was guide it, and guide it, he did, forming his servitors into the composite giant’s helmet-like head, while the faces of the many people who constituted the giant all gathered on its chest. The vessel's form, in the end, would be a twenty-meter humanoid of merged flesh, with Victor's servitors forming the head and some reinforcing plates. Its size was simply too great to armor in full.

As he worked, and as fear once more built within his chest, he once more heard that voice. It suddenly felt as though an inconceivably large presence was staring at him through the spatial bridge within his staff's ring, but there was nothing there. Just the vast, trunkless legs of an ancient idol.

"DO NOT FALTER NOW, YOU HAVE COME THIS FAR. FOCUS."

With that command, his focus snapped back into place.

160 - Re: The Case of the Talisman Assassin [Cherno]

First thing upon returning to the safehouse, Krahe questioned Casus on the matter of Seer.

"I had expected you to ask sooner. We had him checked over, as promised. The grafter found widespread modifications to the ocular module, as well as extraordinarily precise repairs carried out to mitigate damage to his brain and material soul. According to Seer, all of his grafting work was carried out by an apostate grafter in the Hashems' employ. An extremist who, by his own admittance, lives and works with baneworms to better devise ways to exterminate them without triggering a polyphemic reaction. He also claims that he can track Semzar thanks to the modifications made by this grafter, supposedly as a way of subverting his own employer out of spite."

As he spoke, a mirthful tone bled into Casus' words, and a faint smirk formed on his lips.

"And?" Krahe asked.

"We have to wait," he shrugged. "His description lined up with certain restricted records of apostate grafters, so they're calling in an inquisitor who happens to be operating in this region to confirm his testimony."

Rather than dwell on the matter, Krahe raised her legs and hopped out of her seat, walking to the kitchen. She decided to finish off a tortoise steak she had leftover. No complicated cookery, just salt and "Powder No. 7", a spice mix that she had learned was preferred over ground peppercorn for meat. Its flavour and complexity put white and black pepper to shame. She seared the marbled slab of meat on both sides using an iron pan with clarified butter, and then sautéd a chopped up vegetable as a side. It was an alien root vegetable, but its culinary role was adjacent to broccoli.

With her sole proper meal for the day, she returned to the living room and decided to regale Casus with a description of the muscle-woman's Mamon Coupler sabre.

This topic naturally led into the matter of Tsetse's torn-off arm... And Casus' excitement grew serious.

"My acquaintance says he thought it was a construct at first, due to how rapidly it decayed, but placing it into a preservation tank halted any decay. Regenerative agents also functioned normally. However... It is not true flesh."

At Krahe's raised eyebrows, he continued: "It appears to exist within the same grey area as Mamon Armor. Not quite a full construct, but not quite permanent matter. The difference is that Tsetse's arm is much closer to permanence than anything generated by a Mamon Armor, except for the sonic blaster array, which is within normal Mamon Armor parameters..."

He trailed off, waiting for her to guess the reason. It was obvious, but she a mouth full of turtle meat, and she absolutely wouldn't choke down this ambrosia of the gods unchewed. It was at once incredibly rich and filling, yet light enough that she could eat a monolithic hunk of the stuff without it feeling like a heavy meal. Beef didn't even compete.

Weathering the banisher's patient gaze, Krahe savoured chewing the meat properly and flushing it down with a sip of ekarone juice.

Then, she stated her hypothesis: "So Tsetse's body is some sort of imitation war-morph, perhaps an evoy innovation on the principles behind Mamon Armor."

"Exactly!" Casus exclaimed with a snap of his fingers. It was as loud as a firecracker.

"Show me your hand for a moment," she asked, and Casus eagerly obliged. It was as she had suspected. The shade of his muscles was much lighter, and the layout had been altered. The blackveins didn't protrude anymore, and he now had alarite studs as knuckles and fingertips.

"L-Sixes for the full arm and alarite joint reinforcement, huh?" she muttered with a half-full mouth.

"A full alarite secondary endoskeleton, in fact. I was intended to receive it to begin with, but it has special anchors that only interface correctly with the L-Six cultured fibres. They double as blackvein connections, meaning that my arm is truly monolithic now. Anything powerful enough to render it inoperable will also kill me in one hit."

"So it was an all or nothing high-spec package," Krahe thought aloud, marvelling over the arm.

"Precisely," Casus agreed. Letting his vanity take over, he more than happily displayed the graft-limb from every possible angle, even doffing his shirt just to show how it was joined to the rest of him. It truly was a work of art. Neither of them thought any more of this, despite how it may have looked to a purely theoretical third party observer.

Compared to everything surrounding Sorayah, dealing with Eutropia was a fresh change of pace.

To begin with, Krahe had managed to dig up some more information on the woman by paying Nozar another visit. She was conspicuously left alone this go round, with the evoy building's inhabitants peeking out curiously only to slam their doors shut at the sight of her. Nozar didn't have much on her, but he did have some interesting info, such as the fact she was a disfavoured eighth daughter of some Afshani merchant clan. She was an E1-rank contractor, but Nozar noted that there was something fishy about her CQF record.

"Gut feeling - I'd say she's more of an F3," the flyman guessed. This info wasn't nearly so expensive as what he had on Yao, but it was still pricy. At least she was able to pay him in cash this go 'round.

Killing Eutropia wasn't her primary goal, despite Garvesh's request, and despite the fact Eutropia had wronged her personally by killing a street vendor she liked. The reason was the same as the reason she didn't go after Jezail: Eutropia was just the hand that held the knife. If she wanted to get proper revenge, she would have to extract the identity of Eutropia's employer and come after them. Her anger was, in the same way, directed in Eutropia's direction because she happened to be a stepping stone between Krahe and whomever had paid to have Imraal killed. She had her own guesses, of course - it was more likely than not Semzar - but she wanted to be sure.

Krahe didn't know what made hired killers less guilty in her eyes than normal murderers, and she frankly didn't dwell on it, because she knew that, like many other avenues of introspection, it would only lead her to the conclusion that Megacity Gamma had left her sense of morality irrevocably distorted.

159 - Funny Little Man in a Jar [Cherno]

Krahe appraised the drink.

[Decoction of Mind's Dawn]

[Status:]

Exceptional (High Quality, Low Concentration)

[Details:]

Perfect Recall A1

Memory Formation Amp C2

Mental Energy Amp C2

Mental Clarity Amp C1

Sleep Replacement D3

She was, much to Razem's amusement, taken aback by the litany of effects.

"It's my personal blend, what do you think? Sorun used to pester me for the recipe whenever he came by to get a refill. Wonder why he hasn't come by lately, hope his overgrafting hasn't finally caught up with him..." he trailed off, swirling his one-third full glass. He grew somber, before taking another sip and perking up again. "Anyhow, let us get back on track. "

"Right, right. It's not really surprising that there are remnants floating around. The church is too big and ponderous to effectively exterminate such an elusive enemy, and the Inquisition, despite being the Inner Wheel's dedicated scalpel, suffers to some degree from the same issues. It doesn't help that they're eternally stretched hair-thin. One inquisitor is really good. Two? Great. Outstanding. Three? Nearly guaranteed that it will get solved, and solved quickly."

Razem took a sip. His expression soured, as if the flavour had suddenly caught up to him. With a sigh, he placed the glass back on the table and continued speaking:

"But that never happens. One is usually good enough, and they're spread hair thin as it is. They put me on the case because they hoped I was the right man for the job, being the only anathemist inquisitor in a while. I was, but not for the reasons they thought. Turns out someone who dives into anathemism for his own reasons is much worse as material for the human charcoal process than a normal person. The curse struggles to take hold due to built-up tolerance, and the resulting charcoal is laden with Bane Soot. Knowing how widespread and how slippery those bastards were back in their heyday, I'm not surprised that people are still finding remnants. Did you find anything as significant as the lantern? Another relic or tool?"

"I haven't combed through all of the perpetrator's home yet. I was thinking of trying to summon the contents of her personal Kenoma storage, if she had one."

"Well, I can give you a one-use kit for that, but don't expect much. You're placing yourself at the mercy of the gulf's tides, and given the circumstances of her death, her storage will have likely dispersed even more rapidly than normal. Oh, and uh... Don't open the kit until you're ready to use it."

"One of the rooms is also ward-locked."

"I... Cannot give you ward-breaking equipment, as it's fairly delicate work with oft-lethal consequences for failure, but I can assign someone to your case with the skills and qualifications to break the local warding. Come, let us handle the rest of the paperwork so that you may be rid of this old man."

With that, Razem got up and packed up his things, and suddenly, the aura of regal detachment returned to him. He led Krahe back to the surface - an office decorated similarly to the one in which he had examined and treated her. The report had already been written; Razem now updated Krahe's contractor ID. Then, came the question:

"How would you prefer to be paid? Solid-state? Coinage? Thaumine?"

"Rings."

Utterly unsurprised, the old man smiled and gave a nod: "Very well, but I'll have to account for the market exchange rate, I'm sure you understand. It will take a day or two to turn the cogs of bureaucracy given the magnitude of this case - do you have an address where you would prefer to have the reward delivered, or would you rather pick it up at the temple?"

She honestly wanted to say Gashward Road 94, but she wasn't there often enough and for long enough periods of time to not worry about the package being stolen.

"Send it to the Seven Spokes shrine on Gashward Road," she said. There was only one on that street, well away from no. 94.

"Of course - I shall have the ward-breaker contact you using that address as well. Ah, not to forget, wait here for a moment."

Razem left, returning with an elongated box of dark wood, taped shut lengthwise with fabric covered in holy symbols."

"I must reiterate, do not open it until you intend to use it... And do not place it in Kenoma storage under any circumstances."

_______________________________________________________________

Inside the box was a clump of flesh with a face. No skin, no hair, just purplish meat and a face.

It was tiny, just a bit larger than her fist, and contained in a sealed jar. Various equipment filled the remaining space, including instructions for what looked suspiciously close to Barzai's angle-web, the reagents to draw it, and a sheet of vellum with an intensely herbal, nose-stinging scent. She was to draw the sigil on the vellum, place it as close to the site of death as possible, then set the "gulfcaller" in the middle and supply thauma.

The purpose of the weird homunculus revealed itself when Krahe did as instructed, and the gulfcaller began reciting a complex incantation whilst also throat-singing in a second voice. It grew arms and legs, immediately doubled over and began dry-heaving. It stopped half a minute later and, looking up at krahe, turned side-to-side as if it was shaking its head. The weird little creature then climbed back into the jar, fell limp, and shriveled up to barely half of its original size. Disappointed, she left everything as it was, locked the place up, and left, her end goal being to just return to the safehouse before she went out to look into Eutropia in the evening.

Krahe meandered through the city for longer than she needed, visiting a craftsman's workshop whose repertoire included both eyeglasses and low-level artifacts. The place was deserted and run by a shriveled little man with a large mustache and eyebrows just as prominent as it. She queried him on how much it would cost to have her glasses upgraded and how long it would take.

This was, in fact, the sixth craftsman who did this kind of work that she was visiting. As such, she confidently requested a specific upgrade: "I'll need at-will Appraise Object of C-Three or B-One grade, Extended Highlight Magic Object Plus C-One, Detect Baneworm D-Three, Detect Life D-Three."

"These... Quite right, these seem like something one would take to Jas'raba. Typical construction, notably the frame is much better than the lenses. Since the lens shape is standard round stock, I can pencil your order in for... Next month on the twentieth. Is that good?"

She nodded, "Sure."

"Good, good. The down payment will be fifty percent; if you don't show up, I won't be able to easily sell the lenses to someone else. Pick them up within another month of the agreed-upon date."

"With my hard requirements out of the way, I would also like Anti-Appraisal Penetration of C-One or better. Can you do that?"

The craftsman stopped at that request, regarding her with a dubious gaze. It was a bit more than usual - but within norms. She couldn't ask a random craftsman to give her glasses that could see through anything truly good, but she wanted at least something that could reliably defeat low-mid level shielding.

"I understand that such things are desirable for many people, but you must understand that I cannot risk the guilt of equipping a thief or perhaps a scoundrel..."

They looked at each other for a few seconds. He was waiting for a response.

"Well? Do I seem like a thief or perhaps a scoundrel?"

The old man laughed. It was a fake laugh.

"I'm kidding. I don't give a shit what you do with my work. It's not as if I'm selling anything truly valuable like high-grade voidkeys..."

From the way he awkwardly transitioned from one sentence to the next, it felt like she had failed to provide a keyword. Then, Krahe noticed the spark of recognition in his eye, and the way he glanced at her arm, which was fully covered by both her jacket and a glove. She didn’t bring it up, but she did give him a lowball counter-offer when he quoted her his price. He didn’t fight her on it.

158 - Razem Revealed [Cherno]

The letter was then folded and sealed with a large, rectangular stamp that burned a complex sigil onto the paper, holding it shut without wax or any other physical glue. She silently nodded, took the letter, and went on her way.

It almost seemed like Razem was waiting for her. In fact, the front end of the Igarian temple was conspicuously deserted; not entirely, but the number of people was significantly lower than she would have expected.

He stood at the precipice between the chapel and the temple's halls, and simply met her gaze with a nod.

"I did not expect to see you so soon. Certainly not in these circumstances. You look well," he said, gesturing for her to follow as he turned to walk down the hall. He led her deeper and deeper, eventually into the earth, but only perhaps two floors underground. As they walked, he explained: "The letter you hold in your hand - it's little more than an identifying token, I already know what it says."

He brought out a second letter, identical to the first, but not sealed. When the two letters touched, they merged together and burned up into nothing. The room he was leading her to was a reliquary, but the security was not nearly as stringent. There were the giant doors with the complex opening sequence, sure, but that was it. Within was a large room with walls of reflective black stone. Razem snapped his fingers. A pulse of Thauma radiated out of him, blanketing the whole room, and several sections of the wall became transparent, revealing artifacts previously concealed within. All of them shared various design elements with Sorayah's lantern, and some of them, Krahe recognized based on having read their descriptions.

"Hoh? I thought you would be more impressed," the ex-inquisitor remarked. "New church contractors always like the polarized quartz trick."

Seeing her apprehensive glance at those words, Razem acquiesced: "You said you had a matter related to these relics to report, yes?"

With those words, he held his hand out to another section of the wall, causing it to recede and slide to the side, revealing a far less impressive, but far more practical room. A small archive of texts and scrolls, with a few tables against the walls, but otherwise blank. He led her into that other room and seamlessly conjured several items onto the table. This conjuring manifested as reams of paper unwinding from inside his robe's sleeve to wrap around a nonexistent item. Once finished, the layer of paper burned away to reveal the item inside, now very real and present. In the span of a few seconds, he summoned a typewriter, a memslate recorder/player deck that looked far too much like his hands to not be custom, and, weirdly, a full pitcher of azure-coloured liquid, plus two tall glasses.

Krahe had no reason to be taken aback, it was a perfectly sensible application of Kenoma storage.

And yet, she was - just a little.

"This may take a short while, but I am sure you already knew that. Please, give your full and unabridged account of your findings."

And so, Krahe did. Mostly, anyway. The fairly amount of information she withheld didn't factor into Sorayah's case specifically, and she simply didn't drink any of the azure liquid on the off-chance it was perhaps a truth serum of some kind.

Razem, however, didn't express doubt as to her words. He did ask her to restate a few things while holding a band of seals that he conjured, and Krahe did feel like she physically couldn't lie while holding it. Deception, however, didn't necessitate lies, and she didn't need to do a great deal of deception to begin with.

Eventually, she brought out the lantern, and Razem, openly displaying his interest in the thing, took several similar artifacts from their displays to compare. He told her some things she already knew, and others she didn't.

“We did a great deal in the effort to wipe these out, but, as you can see, the knowledge of their creation yet persists. The problem with these devices, besides the manner of their creation, is the occult corruption their use inflicts on the user and the fact they demand “human charcoal” to operate. Some versions of the device even demand that the fuel comes from someone who trusted the user. It will be a challenge to discern how many based on the residue inside the mechanism, but if I were to guess… Seventeen, or perhaps eighteen people must have been turned into charcoal to power this thing over the years. How many of them can be blamed on Sorayah, I cannot guess."

He looked up from the lantern, adding: “That’s a small number, to be clear. You caught her early. Most of the specimens in our collection have burned through volumes of human charcoal equivalent to several hundred people. At their heights, the Human Charcoal Cults were powerful enough to make an entire town disappear overnight...”

They spoke on the matter of the Human Charcoal Cults and their occult practices for about another hour, and Krahe came to the conclusion that Razem seemed almost like Casus. A genuinely, truly good person. But he wasn't. Not entirely. The difference hit her quite quickly: Effort. Casus didn't try to be what he was. He just was. Razem was trying terribly, terribly hard, at all times. He didn't come across like he was faking it, but Krahe sensed that he had to try to be like this.

So, she took a risk.

"You don't have to put on appearances in front of me, you know. I can tell."

He didn't suddenly transform or completely change his demeanor, but he did let out a breath and sink into his chair. It wasn't his personality that fell away. It was the faintly regal, detached aura that he had been giving off until now. Suddenly, that vanished. He was just an old man with a fire in his eyes and an aura that felt like the surface of a vast ocean, tranquil yet prepared to churn into a storm at a moment's notice. A former killer who had become a man of the law, and then a priest. A walking, talking narrative stereotype.

"Ah, you've detected my dark secret! Razem, High Priest of the Seven Spokes Audunpoint Branch Central Temple, is just an unenlightened old coot," he said with a faintly mischievous smirk. He reached out and a band of paper whipped towards one of the glasses. He downed half of it in one swig. "It's not truth serum, if that's what you thought. The glassware doesn't have anti-appraisal enchantments either."

He knew. Not exactly, but he guessed basically what she had been thinking. She hesitantly took the other glass and sipped from it. It smelled great, a soft herbal scent. It tasted atrocious. Bitter and sour. And yet, once it went down, it felt like she'd just shot up a cocktail of nootropics; her thoughts ran a hundred miles an hour and her mind felt clearer than ever.

"The taste, however... Is an acquired one," the priest added after the fact, sipping from his glass with a malicious grin.

324 - DRAGONSLAYER THUNDERCANNON Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

Meanwhile, Third stared. He didn't scream, or lash out, or even ask if she dared. He stared down at Zelsys, as she floated lower to the ground so she could spend that energy on replenishing herself for a potential continuation of their fight. Then, he flared his aura, and rid himself of the lingering constructs hanging onto him. Only the spear, or rather, its core of True Fangs and the bullet etched with Antediluvian Glyphs, remained, embedded right next to his heart. Brightly-glowing, silver blood seeped out of the wound, and Zef's glyphs encroached onto Third's reddish skin like a plague, but he raised his left hand, and by gripping the spear he halted the infestation of glyphs from advancing any further. He didn't seem able to make them retreat, or to pull the spear out, however.

He raised his other hand, and did a simple revolving gesture with his finger. Despite everything, the maelstrom lurched, as if to try and right itself. The opening narrowed, and in places, the maelstrom seemed like it wanted to return to its normal revolving motion.

It seemed as though even this would not be enough, as if Third would retain his focus in spite of this, only for a ghostly Type-ZZ Anti-cultivator Cannon shell to follow immediately in the Dragonslayer's wake. It struck Third's stomach, and what little order  the maelstrom still retained was now erased altogether. A barrage of bullets and swordbeams followed, by some miracle striking exactly the right spots. Despite the lack of physical impact, the spiritual impact was undeniable; great cavities in the maelstrom exploded out of Third's body right across from where each spiritual projectile struck him.

BELLADONNA SIGN

RECOLLECTION OF IKESIA'S FALLEN

PHANTOM SCRIPTURE: GHOST PLATOON

Indeed, Zefaris hadn't just stood by idly recuperating. she, too, had prepared, pushing herself - not just to prepare to summon as many of her phantoms as possible when the time came, but to prepare a barrage ahead of time.

And now, it was time to make use of it.

Previously frozen in time at the moment of contact with one another, dozens of bullets bounced off of dragonsteel coins and hammered into Third in rapid sequence.

Thereafter, five simultaneous dragonshot bullets followed, compressed into the space of a single shot through flagrant defiance of the laws of time. Tears of blood ran freely from the socket of the blonde's blackstone eye and the veins around it bulged out of her skin, but even now, it burned glyphs into thin air with a machine-gun cadence.

BELLADONNA SIGN

ILLUSORY TRIBUTE TO IKESIA'S FALLEN

HEADPIERCER ARTS: GHOST BATTALION -PHANTOM REPRISE-

"You. Shall. Cease!" came an earth-shaking proclamation from Third's lips. He was barely opening his mouth, barely whispering, and yet his words blasted out from him and were echoed by most of the maelstrom even as the rest of it gradually, irreversibly slipped out of his grasp. Bit. By. Bit. His focus wavered. Thousands of revenants, twisted echoes of sacrificed souls, spilled out and began swarming, fearfully avoiding those with substantial presence.

Zefaris stumbled. The pressure had become too much, and Third's wrath cast her to her knees.

Then lightning struck him.

And again.

And again.

And again.

A rapid-fire cadence of lightning strikes, every single one powerful enough to rip apart a tree, each greedily drank up by the Dragonslayer Rod. With each strike, the plague of antediluvian glyphs spread further over Third's body, the divine glow within him becoming just as unstable and uneven as the maelstrom around him. His previously perfect posture suddenly shriveled, as if his entire being was gripped by a horrific cramp.

The cause was none other than Zelsys.

Walking forward through the rubble, her hands held up, her weapons still merged into one. To her left stood the armored figure of Thundercannon, and to her right Fulguris. Behind her, the imperious brute that was the Primordial Self had also manifested, its arms crossed as it strode ahead.

Between each step, lightning exploded inside her chest several times. With each explosion, a furious tendril of blue-white death shot out from her gun and unerringly joined to the spear in Third's chest.

"How does it feel? To meet a tribulation worthy of your transgressions, filth?! I suppose that, in the end, I cannot expect the heavens to do all the hard work!"

"You..." the Third Truthseeker struggled out, but he couldn't finish it. He didn't have the strength to express his incredulity.

Of course she dared.

She considered - she knew - herself to be his superior. In morality. In cultivation. In Truth.

And the worst part was, something inside the Third Truthseeker agreed. Something wretched inside him wanted to acquiesce. It was something that he crushed down and pulverized.

Third decided that enough was enough. Even as he was, having refined only somewhere between three and four tenths of the sacrificial aura, he was already stronger than Fourth. Not by much... But by enough.

"Fine. If you would rob me of that which is rightly mine..."

He held out his right hand and drew in as much of the maelstrom as he could reach. As much as would obey him at this instant. A few hundred souls' worth of sacrificial aura filled and enveloped his hand, then his arm, all the way to a small section of his torso. Thusly protected, he grasped that accursed spear and leveraged the sacrifices of hundreds against those accursed glyphs.

They made the glyphs retreat, if only partly, but they did not suffice to make the spear budge. So, he repeated the feat with his other hand. All the while, that accursed woman kept hammering him with lightning, each strike erasing dozens of lives worth of energy. It was absurd; he knew of single mortals who survived lightning strikes.

"Then I shall burn it all, and you shall perish in the flames!"

323 - DRAGONSLAYER THUNDERCANNON [Sturmblitz]

The Third Truthseeker felt many things.

The intoxicating sense of power and growth came first; a perpetually-intensifying ecstasy that only redoubled each time he thought it was at its peak. The wailing and screeching which surrounded him felt as though the most exquisite music to his ears. It put the greatest of his works to shame, no orchestra of living instruments could compare to the sound of countless, worthless mortals being rendered into the fuel of Third's apotheosis.

He also felt anger and regret, knowing that he was being robbed of that which was rightfully his with every passing moment. Despite his efforts, the self-righteous frogs hell bent on dragging him down the well of mediocrity continued their work in subverting the ritual. It would have surely collapsed and devoured him had he not taken such great pains to reinforce it and to ensure there was no single point of failure.

Third couldn't sense anything besides himself, and the maelstrom of sacrificial energy. Even then, he couldn't see any further into the maelstrom than those outsiders - a precious few metres from where he floated. The means of reading the maelstrom's status were, however, built into the ritual circle's control arrays as a necessity.

All this time, he had been interpreting fluctuations in the maelstrom's outermost layers to guide his decisions. Even the Revenant constructs were fire-and-forget, as any information they could try to relay back would be lost within the maelstrom.

So then, why did a sense of impending doom fester in the back of his mind?

He ignored it.

No, more than that, he crushed it down and relegated it to the darkest oubliette of his mind, to be dealt with later. Preferably never.

He wasn't given a choice.

Slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, that feeling of impending doom grew.

Bit by bit, he felt an intense tension building in his vicinity, like invisible hands pulling at him in all directions. All of his faculties being occupied with controlling the ritual, Third had no choice but believe that the maelstrom's sheer intensity and his own passive defences would protect him against any attempt to reach him with an attack.

The Third Truthseeker's hopes were, however, dashed.

One instant, he was fine.

The next, he had been struck by lightning, run through by a spear, and torn into by countless razor-fanged maws.

And through the gap that had been torn into his ritual, he saw it.

Not a person, not a war machine, not a weapon nor a spirit. He saw a dragon made of lightning, its maw agape as it breathed golden flame, its wings of lightning stone-still, yet keeping it aloft in brazen defiance of nature.

Then he blinked, and realized that it was far worse than a dragon.

It. Was. Her.

______________________________________________________________________________

As for Zelsys, she felt nothing besides release. For a few moments, as she pulled the trigger, she feared that the already gigantic magnetic forces acting on her body would tear her apart.

But once she uttered the invocation and the striker slammed the ignition glyph, all those worries were gone. Her lightning and aura both poured out of her like a breath released after being held for far too long.

"Thunder... cannon."

The flame of a dragon's gullet ignited within a cage of metal. It would have simply torn it asunder, were it not also wrought of a dragon's metal flesh.

It was not a gout, or burst, or explosion.

It came out of the barrel as a mighty golden pillar, propelling a tower of steel, both through pressure and through direct manipulation of natural law. The world bent under the will of a human empowered by the seemingly boundless might of a dragon.

One by one, the bullet passed through gates within a tunnel made of steel and lightning. One by one, it was forced to accelerate even faster, and each gate it passed collapsed behind the bullet, its constituent matter and energy becoming part of the greater, gestalt projectile.

A FLAME THAT BURNS SO BRIGHT

TO LIGHTEN THE DARKEST NIGHT SKY

EIGHTFOLD PATH TO DEVASTATION

DRAGONSLAYER THUNDERCANNON

In an instant, a beam of light tore through the maelstrom, and a deluge of constructs followed with it. Countless lightning serpents, the Thundergods, the Chrome Skull Viper biting the Third Truthseeker's head and winding around his body in an attempt to crush his red-glowing body. He floated in place, glowing like some sort of god, and he exuded an aura worthy of that descriptor. The humanity was gone from his eyes, and his body was illuminated from within such that it could not possibly be just a singular source of intense power. His proportions were a bit too long, yet perfectly chiseled, and a long mane of scarlet, shining hair billowed about him. His face was sharp, his jaw square, his chin pointy, his nose prominent yet elegant, his burning eyes narrow and slightly tilted - all unlike his soft, quasi-ikesian-aristocrat features from before. He was the image of a living god. The man had not wasted a moment, he had been harnessing the souls of the sacrificed to reforge himself in every sense of the word.

And as all that took place, the maelstrom was cast into disarray. The gap which the Dragonslayer had carved wasn't just hesitant to close, it refused. Golden flame burned at its perimeter, forcing it to remain open.

157 - A Brief Jaunt to the "Surface" [Cherno]

She was still suspicious of it, of course, and so she closed the book and locked it up again. The lock now obeyed as easily as her glasses. It would be a convenient little trinket in the future, especially once she put it on a more resilient box or at least had the book reinforced. For all its craftsmanship, the shielding inside the book was leaky. But then, perhaps it was by design, if whoever had put it where Sorayah found it wanted it to be found. For now, she tucked it away behind a rack of weight plates.

She spent a short time experimenting with Sorayah's Lantern, and learned that it rejected her - she could neither control nor appraise it. Thus, she placed it into her Kenoma Sack. The human charcal still loaded in it made this a laborious process.

While she had the sack open, she retrieved a change of clothes - a darker, closer-fit pair of trousers, as well as the ice-user's jacket and a pair of gloves to conceal her arm. To finish, she swept her hair forward over her left shoulder such that it would hide the charred section of her face. It wasn't much, but it would be enough in a crowd. With that, Krahe made her way to the Zaveshian Central Temple. She wasn't entirely certain which church's jurisdiction the Lost Sun Killer fell under, since it was not only a severe form of body theft and desecration, but it also pertained to heretical magic, which was generally the purview of the Seven Spokes. In the end, however, the Twin Churches were called that for a reason. Their operations, faiths, and jurisdictions bled into one another in many places; they were effectively joined at the hip. Her decision was influenced, more than anything, by her status as a graft-apostle and the lower average number of people at Zaveshian temples. In reality, Zaveshian temples got more visitors than Igarian ones - many of the faithful were just out of sight, either being treated, having grafts done, or exercising as a form of worship.

Despite her hopes, the number of people milling about surpassed her expectations.

There was a line of seven at the main counter, with a different banisher manning the counter than before. However, the same banisher receptionist Krahe had met when she first arrived was manning the counter to the right, with a warning sign that it was for urgent matters only and that one should not come there unless they had a bounty to turn in. While Krahe waited, she people-watched, though she didn't bring out Barzai lest someone somehow spot him.

Near the contract board, a group of five had gathered around that muscular contractor from before. She was even more muscular, apparently having had grafting work done going by the slightly swelled lines going down her arms and the noticeable increase in their size. She had an even bigger blade than before - a huge sabre with two cutouts on the back, wrapped to serve as extra grips. Its handle was excessively bulky... And contained a small engine. The guard was two-layered, with a solid piece guarding a motorbike throttle, while the handle itself had a brake-like lever. Two dark grey, barely-purplish lines of crystal ran down the blade on each side where the fuller grooves would normally go. Krahe didn't even need to try to listen in to learn what the weapon was - the contractor was currently in the process of loudly boasting about how she had paid some famous craftsman half a million to have it put together, despite providing all the materials herself. She claimed she now could cut through a building when transformed. Krahe didn't even doubt the veracity of that claim. If anything, she was thankful to the loudmouth for drawing all the attention.

Krahe committed the loudmouth and her weapon to memory, knowing full well that Casus would be terribly interested... And feeling somewhat bad for snapping at him earlier. Her reaction wasn't even extreme, but it felt like scolding a cat for killing mice. This was also a reason Krahe hated dealing with genuinely good people. It was much easier to justify her own prickly personality when everyone else was just as bad or worse.

The original receptionist recognized Krahe when she turned to glance that way, and called her over.

"Ah, I was wondering when I would see you again, Lady Blackhand," the receptionist said in a low, yet bubbly tone. "You might be disappointed to learn that we do not have another kidnapped Pilgrim for you to rescue..."

"He talked," Krahe deadpanned. She suddenly felt a less bad for snapping at him.

"Of course he did!" the receptionist beamed. "But he didn't need to. The Slaughterhouse Nine Incident left both witnesses and survivors... And people were more than eager to talk and ask questions about the commotion. I heard that one of the graftbeasts was even intact enough to pull a visual recording. Ah, apologies. What can I do for you today?"

Taking a deep breath to calm herself, Krahe moved on from the matter of her failure to keep a low profile. She had decided that it would be fine to get a reputation after all! But not every part of her had realized that yet. The paranoid schizo part that saw a camera on every corner and behind every civvie's eyes still wanted to be invisible.

"I have a case to report," she said. "There was no contract set beforehand, I uncovered it myself. It pertains to restricted material in the Temple of Records. Section fifty-three."

The receptionist sat still for a moment, thinking. Her cheerful demeanour fell away in an instant, and she regarded Krahe with a hard gaze, her eyes running up her arm before they met her own. Her third eye opened, its cruciform pupil burning in a pool of radiant green-blue.

"Are you absolutely certain?"

Krahe just nodded.

"Very well..." she trailed off, taking a piece of off-white, watermarked paper and writing on it by hand in immaculate calligraphy. "It so happens that an ex-inquisitor who worked on the case is present in the city, I will refer you to him. Go to the Seven Spokes Central Temple and ask for Razem."

322 - A Mere Inheritance [Sturmblitz]

Sensory overload. That was the only appropriate description for Victor's current situation that came to his mind. There was the maelstrom, the disruptor pylons, the Dawnwolf armor, his Servitors and Flesh Unions fighting against the Order's gruesomely-revived survivors, not to mention his staff's strange state and the threads of divine energy that were becoming increasingly more visible. The flying statue knights forming a barrier that was already nearly gone, then the giant aura monster coming out around the barrier's remnants, only for a barely-recognizable, flying Zero to intercept it.

Despite having the raw mental processing power to parse it, his actual senses couldn't keep up - anything he didn't actively focus on kept blending together into noise. He missed Borea. Piloting Teutobochus against Eisengeist and later raining death on the Conspirator Clans' forces was relaxing compared to this.

"Focus. First pylon, now!" his second inner voice commanded in an effort to keep it together.

Thrusting his hands out towards the pylon, fingers locked into painful gestures by his armour, Victor awakened it. The eldritch runes flared to life, painful to glimpse even from the corner of his vision. It leapt up into the air and turned so that its sharp bottom end pointed into the vortex at an angle, against its rotation. Then, it began revolving like a drill, and a ray of lilac light erupted out of its point, while a jet of monochrome flame came out of its other end, slowly pushing it towards the vortex. On its own, the one beam had barely any effect, blasting a small, shallow cavity into the maelstrom and only slightly disrupting it. By the time the first pylon had begun firing, Victor had already awakened two more pylons. One by one, they rose up and began forming the disruption array.

One by one, turbulence built up.

When Victor hit the array's halfway point, the maelstrom's previously near-perfect spin had already destabilized into a wobbling mess. Masses of wailing spirits began tearing away from it, flying outward and smashing into the surrounding buildings. Some of them just dispersed, while others possessed statues and corpses in an effort to blindly lash out.

Zero, like a hungry beast, began to consume them. Now, however, there was a duty to it, not just hunger. They were, after all, not souls - they were resentful, tormented aura constructs born from the ritual. The true souls of the sacrificed had already passed on, and these resentful spectres would linger and plague the living if they were not purified. Indeed, Zero's enlightenment had actually caused it to be even more thorough in its consumption, driving the machine to draw into itself even the tiny scraps that it had left behind previously. Zero was, however, only one machine, and it could only consume so much, even when it was just burning it all to get rid of it. Besides Zero, Victor's staff sucked in utterly disproportionate quantities of sacrificial aura. He didn't even notice it, as it was held in his third arm while his focus was trained completely on activating the disruptor pylons.

By the time he awoke the last one, the maelstrom didn't even look coherent. It wasn't a vortex, but a roiling mass of contradicting currents, listlessly thrashing in place while geysers and meteors of sacrificial aura tore away from it. Victor landed inelegantly near his starting point, his boots tearing a gash into the ground, with a pair of his servitors catching him while two more gathered in front to shield him from any ejected aura. He lurched forward as he tried to get his bearings, whipping his third arm forward and stabbing the Oculus into the ground as a support, grasping the staff in both hands. A strange trance had come over him.

As for the disruption array, even its already-impressive effect was like redirecting part of a river into a local creek. The vast majority of the maelstrom still remained well within the ritual circle and mostly within Third's grasp. At this rate, it wouldn't lose even one-fifth of its total mass by the time the ritual was complete.

The reason for the disruption array's lack of effect was simple: Third was fighting it the whole way. He was even starting to slowly take back control, contending against the array's disruption, even though the disruption itself continually shifted specifically to counter any attempts at mitigation. In short, Third was just that much more skilled and experienced at this.

But it wouldn't save him.

Zelsys herself struggled to comprehend the magnitude of power she had built to tear through the Third Truthseeker's defenses - it was such that her body could not contain it. Zefaris had retreated to the next building over. The air in Zel's vicinity had become lightning. She was no longer kneeling on the rooftop, but floating in mid-air, suspended effortlessly with the sheer power of fulgurmagnetism. Giant flares of lightning leapt from the bottoms of her feet and from her horns, joining together behind her into wings of lightning tens of metres tall. In order to exert a hold over all that energy, she had to stretch out her aura, and the sheer intensity of energy surrounding her had given form to Chrome Skull Viper and countless lesser auraic manifestations - as a mere side effect. A swarm of chthonic horrors wrought from screaming-blue plasma swirled around her, waiting to be given a command, themselves screeching and growling in the eardrum-rupturing frequencies of thunderbolts.

This whole time, what Third said had been stewing in the back of Zel's mind; specifically what he had called Carnifex: Inheritance. That's how the Third Truthseeker saw it: Something passed down from her betters, from some ancient cultivator who had locked it away for a worthy successor to find. Mere indignation had become true, seething anger, and it wasn't just her own. Where her right hand grasped her blade’s blackstone handle, it began to thrum with an intensity unfelt since her early months - so insulted, Fulguris was. She could’ve simply controlled it, kept her calm, but she didn’t want to. There was no reason to. No matter how furious, she wouldn’t lose control of herself. This was the comfort afforded to her by the Walking Way of the Despot of Self.

“Inheritance? There was no inheritance. Carnifex has never been wielded by another! I turned Borea upside down for the means to forge it! I awoke the Revenant King, excised the heart of a Fallen Star, harnessed a living god! YOU DARE call Carnifex Fulguris a MERE INHERITANCE?!”

321 - Watchers [Sturmblitz]

A/N: Shorter one. Next chap focus goes back to Zel and co.

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Agents of both the Black Horse and the Sanger sects resided in the city, and had successfully hidden themselves during the Order's initial takeover. Afterwards, they had quietly worked to undermine the Order and rescue civilians, contributing over 20% of the current survivor numbers gathered at the outskirts.

Despite it looking otherwise, Ikesia's world of cultivation had its eyes on Eberheim, and word of what happened in the city wouldn't spread like a wild fire - because it already was spreading. It had started the moment Third broke the isolation dome.

Meanwhile, the Witch and Wizard stood atop a building right next to the westernmost of the Five Churches, using its vast divine presence in concert with a double-layered concealment array to hide themselves. Well, the Wizard stood. The Witch was in a low squat, looking over the city with frog-like eyes. Hiding on a battlefield where one was not a participant was, somewhat counter-intuitively, exceptionally easy, at least for masters of Lunar-aligned arts such as these two.

"This might end up more trouble than benefit, if Fourth manages to rally the rest of the Order beneath himself. Not only could the Order become an unstable weight upon the scales, they might throw things out of balance by funnelling even more resources into the Land of Lingering Smoke in the effort to replenish their ranks," said the Witch.

"Somehow, I am not too worried," the Wizard answered. His attention, at this moment, was wholly fixed on the scene unfolding in the city center. So many powers colliding, such seamless application of techniques in support of one's allies, and that wasn't even getting into the conceptual implications of the clash.

Despite how troublesome it might be, the Wizard could not help but be excited. This... This was what a real cultivator battle looked like. It was downright nostalgic. He hadn’t seen one in a long, long while. That War of Fog… It had been far too barbaric for the Wizard’s tastes. The vast majority of it had been cultivators slaughtering mortals and, in turn, mortals using their sheer numbers to butcher cultivators the same way cultivators butchered great beasts. It was nice to see a return to honour and glory, even if it was tainted by something as barbaric as the Third Truthseeker’s desperate bid for a brute-force breakthrough.

"I must admit, I did not expect the Manufactured Paragon’s power to jump so aggressively after her epiphany. Manifesting an Egregore solely through one's pure understanding of a Truth, and a defensive one at that..." the Witch remarked after some time.

"Your info’s out of date. They’re calling her the Walking Tribulation now.”

“Feh,” the Witch dismissed.

“Far more than a mere upstart, don't you think?” the Wizard asked.

The Witch scoffed derisively: “Leave it up to those conceited fools in the sword sects to see someone achieve more in a year than they have in half a century, and then dare to call that person a mere upstart. On top of all else, a Son of Fate as her disciple! Come on. Old Yaga already decided that the only explanation for her apparent lack of any destiny is that she herself is a hand of fate, brought into the world to guide it back onto the proper path. Preposterous. It’s clear that she is the result of a revolutionary improvement upon the Creation of a Great Man Ritual. If only I could find her birthplace…”

They watched for a while longer, observing the deployment of the Five Knights and the events that transpired thereafter.

At the moment of Zero’s re-emergence from the vortex, the Witch commented: “Huh. I didn’t think Armor Spirit Union would work with a machine.”

She spoke with the same level of interest as one would have for an oddly-coloured animal.

“It’s not so different from golem armour,” the Wizard said.

“I suppose not,” the Witch shrugged. “I suppose his spectacle is wasted on our eyes - do you think we should give that tank-man an epithet? This is the second major cultivator battle he has been in within one year.”

“Three. Rigport, Ubul’s Tomb, and here,” the Wizard corrected.

The Witch countered: “I don’t count Rigport. The Charred Judge and Lady in Red are the only ones who actually fought the Curse-eating General.”

“True…” the Wizard thought aloud. “How about Red Emperor?”

“The word Emperor is tainted. Will be for a while,” the Witch croaked.

“Well he’s got fire, and there’s that paintjob and the vitaphage enchantment on the armor… Blazeblood Kaiser?” the Wizard suggested.

“That one’s good,” the Witch agreed. “How about the blonde? Oh, right, she’s Reaper’s Bride. That one’s good enough. The redhead?”

“I don’t know. His abilities seem eerily similar to the Second King, but then there’s the flame and the fact he somehow got his hands on one of the Onbashira, and he seems to know Itrian Shringe Guardian Arts as well… I must admit that I regret not finding that child before the Walking Tribulation did, but it seems that methods leaning towards the Solar suit him better than ours.”

“Gestalt Magus,” the Witch deadpanned. “That’s what he calls his servitor-armor - Magus Gestalt Dawnwolf. It’ll catch on, I think.”

“I don’t like it.”

The Witch turned her head, smugly looking up at her older brother: “It’s certainly better than the Swampweed Lord.”

156 - The Mystery of the Flame's Collapse Hexkey [Cherno]

After a few seconds of focus and unsettling undulations going down the cable, he disconnected himself and popped the memslates out, handing one over: "The appraisal readings. I would strongly suggest that you report the case to the Grafting Church - besides being properly rewarded for resolving it, you would be able to easily levy support, such as access to restricted information relevant to the case."

"Yeah, I know, I know..." Krahe snapped offhandedly as she popped the memslate into her eyebox. Logically, she knew she would likely only benefit from reporting the case, but she didn't want to. The same part of her that fundamentally distrusted large organizations also made her overthink the consequences of involving the church. Would the church ride her ass for killing Sorayah? What would they confiscate besides just the human charcoal? Krahe figured she could keep the house untouched for some time under the guise of investigating the scene, but that wouldn't last forever. Her eyebox took a moment to project the appraisal readout. It was garbled and barely legible, an issue fixed by replacing the DD battery.

While she looked over the record, she got started on placing the voidkey into storage, not wanting to have it sitting out and about where it could be seen or Zavesh-forbid scried for. As far as she was concerned, it was safer inside her Kenoma Sack, shrouded by the Deathsmoke Blessing.

The characteristics of Sorayah's voidkey explained why she didn't wield thaumaturgy in self-defense: It wasn't for thaumaturgy. The "Flame's Collapse Hexkey" was a cursed relic that, upon implantation, would grant the user the "Collapsing Flame" Boon. This boon would make it easier for the user to carry out Thaumic Fusion while severely worsening their ability to burn thauma normally. The curse part came into play in two ways:

Firstly, the boon wouldn't go away even if the key was removed, but it would degenerate into "Collapsed Flame", a version without the positive effect, until the key was reimplanted.

Secondly, it contained a unique theurgic pattern. By applying this pattern, the user could brand others with a cursed mark that would confer a version of the Collapsing Flame boon, tying it back to the curse-layer, so at any point the user could pull out the key to cripple everyone they had cursed in exchange for also crippling themselves. The Hexbrand Curse made the victim constantly aware of these facts, but it also concealed another: That it artificially induced the beginning stages of adustocorpus, starting from the spot where the curse mark was branded onto the victim. The key specified that the curse mark would vanish and remain invisible unless in the near vicinity of the curse-layer, and that removing the flesh it was on would just cause it to move.

Moreover, it granted a second boon, this one exclusive to the user: “Pyremaster." This boon would enable the user to easily carry out the rites that would initiate and accelerate a victim's adustocorpus, as well as the rites to finish the full transmutation into human charcoal.

It had the usual features as a normal voidkey, sure, but despite being classed as Fourth-order it was barely better than Shiva's Warding Chain in attribute reinforcement. As a Ward and Barrier catalyst, it was basic, with only low-level hardening. Its best feature was how it affected the user's powers as a theurge, granting three additional Lesser Eidolon Vaults and strengthening all theurgies. This was obviously intended to make its features usable even for someone without their own natural eidolon vaults.

Despite everything, despite the Hexkey’s foreboding nature and the implications of its creation, the most alarming was the last line in the [Details] section:

"This voidkey’s characteristics will evolve when Anthrocite Transmutation reaches 100%.”

The [Anthrocite Transmutation] gauge was right below, sitting at 63.71%.

“An evolving voidkey, huh?”

“I have never heard of such a thing, but I can see how it would explain its classification - it must be in relation to its potential. I would guess that key’s fulfilled potential would likely be on the higher end of Fourth-order, else I cannot see how it would be worthwhile. The question is-”

Krahe interrupted him: “-how does the transmutation progress? My first guess would be feeding it human charcoal, perhaps through a ritual or a specialized tool. I did not find any such thing in Sorayah’s home, but she may have had it in personal storage… Speaking of, what happens to the contents-”

This time, Casus interrupted: “-of someone’s Kenoma storage after death? It drifts away, just like their True Soul. Sometimes the items return naturally, and sometimes the Wheel catches them, outfitting its Banishers with them or using them as rewards. They might get caught by an Archon Flash and return as archonforged versions of themselves. Your bracelet was likely one of those. There are rites for detecting and summoning a Kenoma storage stash, but it must be very soon after someone’s death. The church-”

For the third and final time, Krahe interrupted: “-can help me with it, I get it, you want me to report the case. Fine. I needed to look something up in the Temple of Records anyway.”

With that, she took the Hexkey and left. Why did she feel so irritated? She genuinely couldn't tell.

She had also not told him the whole truth; before heading to the Temple of Records, she went to her second home on Gashward Road 94. At this point, she had managed to outfit it with some ultra-basic furniture on top of the exercise equipment, but it wasn’t much. Frankly, if it was an option, she would be willing to take Sorayah’s home for herself. That was assuming someone else didn’t lay a claim to the property, but even then, Krahe was sure she could take most of the furniture as “evidence” to furnish Gashward Road 94.

After secreting herself away in the basement gym, she brought out the locked book to inspect it in detail. Immediately, she noticed a detail: The twitching hand clasped an additional piece of anthracite-like stone, worked into the shape of a narrow rectangle.

155 - And yet, loose ends remain. [Cherno]

A/N: Re-edited the second half of the chapter.
____________________________________________________________
A flaw of the Daemon Core had already become apparent, emergent from its overwhelming firepower: Krahe didn't know how to get souldregs out of a nuclear shadow. Being a problem that she could only try to avoid moving forward, she left the scene as it was. Undisturbed. Her chest briefly split open down the middle as Barzai, now a formless mass of smouldering smoke, returned into the confines of her soul.

She returned to the lab, and there read through Sorayah's notes. Much of the material pertained to translations of the code used in her source texts, as well as to attempts at improving the ritual. Clinical descriptions, one after another, described the macabre failures of her efforts. After four subjects that died after only partial transmutation, Sorayah had given up and returned to the original method.

Mentions of a particular item stood out: The locked book. That was how it was referred to, as it had no external identifying markings besides the fact it was locked. Sorayah seemed to be completely stumped by what it was or how to open it, describing several unlocking experiments that had led her to believe somehow exposing it to anathema could be the key, but that was as far as she had gotten. From these notes, Krahe also learned that the book had been found in the same place as the hexagonal voidkey, but the specific place was referred to only as "The Dig Site.”

Krahe took care to minimize how much she disturbed Sorayah's work space, as she had not yet decided whether to keep the case of the Lost Sun Killer Myth to herself, whether to fully report it to the church, or to do something between these two extremes. One of the considerations in her mind, despite the wretchedness of it, was the potential usefulness of Human Charcoal. Sorayah's stock of the substance was already made, and even the church's disposal method involved burning it down to ash after a fashion - so if it turned out to be useful to her, simply handing it over would be wasteful and pointless.

In the course of going through Sorayah's home more thoroughly, things turned out to be inconveniently nuanced.

Everything that Krahe was able to find - from texts in the lab to those in the library - pertained to the process of turning someone into human charcoal and to artifacts that directly burned human charcoal as fuel. The problem came in with the mention of a substance described as "Black-flesh Jewel" in the older, more mystical texts. Meanwhile, newer fragments in Sorayah's possession referred to the same substance in more grounded terms: "Anthrocite" or "astral rock coal". Over the course of a few hours, Krahe arrived at two undeniable conclusions: Whomever invented and developed these occult arts had clearly gone much further than just human charcoal, and the Human Charcoal Letters didn't reveal the full scope and severity of the goings-on during the century they spoke of. To say she was surprised would have been a bold-faced lie.

Krahe honestly wasn't sure what course of action to take, but she had the small comfort of knowing that Sorayah wasn't likely to have visitors any time soon - at least speaking on the time scale of weeks. With that in mind, Krahe took the keyring Sorayah had left inside the ritual chamber's doors, as well as the one with the house keys. After placing Sorayah's lantern, the locked book, and several samples of human charcoal into her Kenoma Sack, he left the place behind for now. The key, after closer inspection, was not entirely homogenous in shape - the side of it which would be inserted had a narrow hexagonal hole about a centimeter across and of an indeterminate depth.

After spending the rest of the day looking into the Human Charcoal Letters at the Temple of Records, she reconvened with Casus at the safehouse and, since she needed his assistance in this matter, let him know of what had transpired.

"As Mamon Knight Silberblut, I would say she met a fate rightly deserved... Though I would likely put it less politely. Out of the armor, however, I cannot help but feel she would have been more useful if she had been interrogated in an official setting," Casus remarked on the situation, drinking his coffee and reading a book as he always did - this time, he had borrowed Krahe's copy of De Re Theurgia. He turned his gaze up from the book in his hands, nodding towards the hexagonal voidkey standing upright on the coffee table. "You mentioned that you managed to coax her into giving over her voidkey and needed help identifying it, is that right?"

"I wouldn't say there was much convincing on my part, she tried to use it as bait to make me approach within range of her last-ditch theurgy attack... But yes, I do need it identified."

Unsurprisingly, Sorayah's voidkey had robust anti-appraisal enchantments. Casus managed to break them after trying for a few minutes, describing them as "fortress walls built to hide an ancient mausoleum".

"They're new. I would guess they were made by Sorayah herself or by someone on her behalf," he clarified afterwards. "Rather than being incorporated into the key's construction, they were merely layered around it. Moreover, there are traces of anathema- er, isotope suppression glyphs, never activated. Whatever radiation the key gives off, it is merely *very close* to anathema. Give me a moment..."

Casus got up, returning with an Oculon-branded device and a handful of bronze memslates. Its design language was the same as the eyebox Krahe had taken from the dead prospector, but it was thrice as large and far more complex. It very slightly resembled a 20th-century tape recorder in shape. It had sockets for four memslates, a more expansive keyboard, and a row of cable sockets on one side. A vial of thaumine sloshed around on the other side.

Casus popped in a pair of memslates and plugged a black cable into the device, nerve-like endings surging to life from the cable to complete the connection when brought near one of the sockets. With a hiss and the turn of a locking ring, the cable was connected. At its other end was flat, key-like plug, and much like a voidkey, Casus inserted it into his temple.

154 - The Death of the Lost Sun Killer [Cherno]

A/N: Changed the design of Sorayah's voidkey to a more appropriate one for its origins and narrative purpose.

________________________________________________________________________
"You're mad,” said a wide-eyed Sorayah in a hushed tone. “So what, you mean to just keep killing until the world is 'rid of evil'?!"

"Come now," Krahe sneered. "The world is much too large for one woman to personally fry every shitbag businessman into his office chair. A gardener never runs out of weeds to pluck. I only need to make sure I never get the wrong man! Easy enough."

At this point, Krahe was just messing with Sorayah, purposely using extreme rhetoric while remaining quasi-accurate to her real beliefs. Alas, nuance didn't make for a good monologue.

"What of the churches, then?! You don't mean to claim-"

"What makes you think I won't come after a corrupt priest? By rights, I ought to root out corruption within the church with absolute prejudice. It would be a disservice to the divine not to do so. It's almost time now - there won't be much left of you after this, just a shadow on the wall. I'm sure the higher-ups would prefer if I just pulled out your voidkey and had you taken in for questioning, but I did promise to show you real anathemism..."

"No, wait- wait wait wait, please! I don't need to see it, and my key, it's-"

Sorayah desperately thrashed against her restraints. Krahe genuinely didn't understand why she hadn't tried to fight back or free herself; surely, she wasn't so reliant on that lantern device as to be incapable of normal thaumaturgy. Or perhaps she was smart, and rightly thought that fighting back would only serve to worsen her situation.

"-it's here. Take it, just don't kill me," she said, twisting her head. A sigil on her neck began to glow - it was a triangle with small circles at its corners, each circle containing an eldritch sigil. They were some of the same sigils as those which filled the ritual circle. Sorayah gritted her teeth, hissing, and a hexagonal rod bearing that triangular mark slowly emerged from her scales. It was an extraordinarily simple design in physical shape, this simplicity offset by the fact its body was covered with countless more angular patterns with sigils in circles at the angles. Krahe's mind immediately jumped to circuitry.

It looked to be a stony, reddish material at first, only to seamlessly transition to the anthracite-like, glowing material one-third of the way down its length.

"The church will reward you more for bringing me in alive, you should know that."

Krahe manifested a tar tendril, using it to reach over and begin pulling on the key. Though it took quite a bit of effort, it came out without incident. It was around 20cm in length, with its lower 2/3 made from that anthracite-like matter. She didn't bother to appraise it yet, slipping it into her pocket, because her attention was solely on Sorayah. The saurian looked disappointed and frustrated; despite trying to hide it, Krahe noticed the shift in her demeanor and the rumbling in her throat. For this reason, Krahe kept her hand in her pocket, fusion-forming a smoke burster packed with as much isotope as she could fit. Out of sight and beyond her notice, concealed by clothing, reams of eldritch symbology pulsed across Sorayah's back, eidolons swimming beneath her skin like predatory fish waiting leap out of the water.

"Disappointed that I didn't come up right next to you so you could set off a contingency or something of the sort? Come on," Krahe scoffed. "What kind of fool did you take me for? Every member of the Society is a theurge, and you were a high-ranking one. Of course you would have contingencies."

Raising her left hand just above her head, she willed Barzai to collapse into the Daemon Core. Despite the lack of need for an incantation, Krahe nonetheless recited one, to see if Sorayah would try to interrupt it.

"Lei-Amul, Thelder, Wandrei, great sages of the Astral Gulf, hold fast the Three Keys and uncoil the chains that bind-"

As expected, Sorayah's pupils became hair-thin lines and she emitted a shrill, ear-splitting screech. Her entire body was enveloped in pulsating strings of runes, and, on reflex, Krahe decided to dive while she finished casting. She had seen these runes displayed earlier during their confrontation at the Society, but this time, they were far denser and brighter, and they leapt off of Sorayah's skin, lashing her surroundings.

The saurian freed herself and carved deep gashes into everything around her in an instant; the human charcoal fell apart into pieces. Krahe honestly wasn't sure why she hadn't done this sooner, but the reason revealed itself when she got a look at Sorayah and saw that she hadn't been entirely spared, either. There were deep gashes covering her whole body, all the way into meat. Moreover, she seemed to have become feral, based on her hunched stance, bestially heavy breathing, and glazed-over eyes.

"Where..." Sorayah growled, looking around. Her eyes locked onto Krahe, and she lunged, leaping across the room. With that leap, yet more reams of script exploded out of her, shredding the ceiling and floor, but passing through Krahe unimpeded. Being able to see it up-close and while partly submerged in the Gulf, Krahe got a first-row seat to serpent-like creatures covered in those runes tearing their way out of their master's body before transforming fully into their theurgic forms.

It was done.

Krahe emerged from her dive, raising her hand.

Sorayah leapt right at her without a moment wasted, but by the time she or her absurdly lethal, self-destructive theurgy could reach Krahe, she had already burned both her skim charges to get out of the way.

Desperation - and with it, sapience - flashed over Sorayah's contorted features. With a swing of her arm, arabesque runes flashed down its length. A deep gash along the same spiral appeared on the limb as the runes tore themselves free, lashing towards the Daemon Core rather than Krahe herself. A last-ditch effort to try and shoot down the theurgic vessel before it could carry out its function.

It was too late.

The spear of eldritch script did pierce the shell, but all it achieved was to hasten Sorayah's demise.

A narrow flashlight of red light shot out, accompanied by a thunderous buzzing sound. It obliterated both Sorayah's theurgy and her arm, and before she could even scream in pain, it expanded to consume her entirely.

Then, just as quickly as it had begun, the deluge was over, and a disjointed shadow had been burned into the reinforced metal that covered the ritual chamber's interior.

320 - Panzermensch Sanctus Dominus [Sturmblitz]

A/N: Added more to the first half of the chapter.

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A ghostly tank skidded into Zero's space, perfectly matching its posture and seamlessly merging with the machine. His soul's fingers were no less broken and the metaphorical control stick was no less stuck, but, somehow, Strake suddenly felt like a dozen other tankmen were helping him wrench back control over Zero. In fact, he could swear he saw the faces of strangers and comrades surrounding him, ghostly-green phantoms of the dead. Not just that, but for some strange reason, five knightly figures in boar-head helmets joined them, embodied in pure-white flame.

Voices echoed from everywhere and nowhere at once. They were not the voices of fallen tankmen, but five voices carrying a thunderous timbre and a noble presence. In perfect unison, they boomed inside Strake’s head:

“OUR FIGHT IS LONG DONE. OUR STRENGTH IS SPENT.”

“YOU, BEARER OF THE SPIRIT OF STEEL, SHALL CARRY ON IN OUR STEAD.”

“CARRY FORTH THE BANNER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, STRAKE SODAN OF WILLOWDALE.”

“FROM THIS DAY FORTH, THOU ART A KNIGHT TRUE: THUS SAITH WE, THE KNIGHTS OF THE BOAR.”

“WE DO NOT ASK YOU TO QUEST ACROSS THE LAND AS A KNIGHT-ERRANT SLAYING DEVILS.”

“SO LONG AS YOU CARRY ON AS YOU HAVE THUS FAR AND REMEMBER THAT WE ONCE EXISTED…”

“IT SHALL SUFFICE.”

“IT SHALL SUFFICE.”

“IT SHALL SUFFICE.”

“IT SHALL SUFFICE.”

“IT SHALL SUFFICE.”

As for Zero, Zero didn't fully understand. It had only known hunger and anger until now. It had only heard the wailing cries of torment and smelt the dense, tantalizing scent of lifeblood, the self-same nourishing force that made the flesh and blood of its foes perfect repair material. Yet now, it suddenly knew all these... New things, heard new things. Those strange statues, that white flame, all so alien. Zero felt a disease spreading with each rev of its engine, an infestation, inexorably and irreversibly burrowing into everything the machine was. Knowledge that could not be unlearned.

Zero heard the cries for salvation of the sacrificed, the prayers of the living, and its anger not only grew, but changed. From raw, animal impulse, to a heretofore alien blend of disgust and wrath. Zero didn’t want to eat the man called Third because it was hungry. It wanted to eat him so it could burn him up in its engine and leave not a trace of him in this world.

Zero also heard the voice of Strake and a dozen others, all giving it the same exact command... And although it could have fought back, Zero now understood why the command was being given, and it obeyed.

Out of the swiftly-collapsing white-flame path came a burning tank, a machine painted in crimson-red, its thrusters erupting with golden-red flame, its speaker blaring a heroic march of drums and trumpets. An outer layer of sacrificial aura trailed from over the machine, bleached white of corruption, almost like sacrificed souls were clinging onto it as a vessel of salvation. A strange sapience now burned within the tank's cycloptic eye - a black dot in the center of the glowing sensor, surrounded by three black lines forming a cornerless triangle.

A MAD MACHINE BECOMES HOLY ARMOUR

A DOG OF WAR BECOMES A KNIGHT

JUDGED BY THE RIGHTEOUS DEAD, YE BE WORTHY

PANZERMENSCH SANCTUS DOMINUS

Halfway across the continent, Zero's sibling, V-2, stomped at the head of a sacred procession on its way to subdue a newly-awakened monstrosity. Suddenly, its pilot, Chalybes Pontifex halted his war-engine, and for the first time in months, emerged into the sun. He looked westward, feeling a strange sense of the sublime.

But that was there, and Strake and Zero now hovered at the ritual circle's edge. Then, with a thunderclap, it zipped elsewhere just outside the circle, circling its outer perimeter.

"What is that?!" came a distressed aetherwave transmission from Victor, garbled by interference.

A series of impacts sent tremors through the ground, Zero's comet-like form dragging another Revenant into the air. White-red flame enveloped the monstrosity, visibly burning away its aura's corrupt, fleshy colours.

A followup soon came: "False alarm. Just... Zero. I think. Hard to tell under the holy flames and phantom armour. It intercepted some kind of aura construct just as the construct emerged from the vortex. I think the window to start the disruption sequence is closing, please advise."

These messages were not voice, but thoughts encapsulated in verbal form, transmitted and received near-instantaneously.

Zel and Zef exchanged glances. The remaining two shields shattered. Zel sent the go-ahead, not even bothering with words, just sending the very idea of "yes" and "begin". She could hardly manage more in her current state. As she sat there, on the roof, the tiles baked beneath her feet and phenomenal elemental power raged barely contained within her grasp. Neither the Fang Rippers nor Thundercannon itself could be recognized as individual parts any longer. Everything else was drowned out by blinding light and ear-splitting snapping and buzzing of thunder. Screamingly loud and bright rings of pure light now drifted away from her, expanding in diameter as the terrifying power coursing through them demanded more space. To mortal eyes, even the rings could no longer be distinguished; the countless arcs leaping between them would blend together into a cylinder.

And indeed, mortal eyes did see. A scant few survivors, holed up in hidden attics and tall towers, bore witness, and they beheld a kneeling figure with hands outstretched, grasping a gigantic bolt of lightning. Next to her could be made out, just barely, the vague silhouette of a woman whose long hair billowed in the gale force winds, somehow giving off the feeling of death itself even across this vast distance.

Mortal eyes were not the only ones who saw. Immortal brothers, drawn here by the isolation array, had been watching the Newman Sect's efforts all along, neither able nor willing to intervene in any substantial way. If they revealed themselves, after all, it would be an infernally slippery effort to put that genie back in the bottle. Despite their disagreements and self-limitation, however, the immortal brothers did intervene, and would do so in the future. By apparent coincidence, not a single one of the Order's members would escape the city. The small number of those who slipped by would be found mysteriously dead, as if their hearts had decided to stop beating.

The immortal brothers were not the only ones whose attention had been drawn to this place, however. The Order of Six Truths was, after all, not the only sect which had survived the Cultivation Suppression Edict by going into seclusion, and one of those other sects just so happened to have eyes in Eberheim: Enki’s Tower, a circle of wizards that had never engaged in sect culture any further than they had to. They held the high esteem of being able to claim their founder had invented the mental exercises that would later be simplified into the “arcane mathematics” used by some noble cultivator families.

A Wizard of Enki’s Tower, alongside a rogue practitioner of the same type of mental cultivation - a Hedge Witch - had been drawn here by the isolation array. They had entered the dome undetected through their own, much subtler method of incursion.

These two watched from the rooftops, not for lack of ability to fly like the Immortal Brothers, but out of a desire to go undetected. They weren't the only other observers, either.

Casus Aristedes Artwork

319 - Knights of the Boar [Sturmblitz]

Now, stirred into action by the prayers of the faithful, the Five Abbots spoke and their voices resounded through the city:

"HARK, RIGHTEOUS ONES. HEAR THEM. HEAR THE SLAUGHTERED CHILDREN OF EBERHEIM CRY OUT FOR VENGEANCE. HEAR THE PRAYERS OF THOSE WHO YET LIVE. KNIGHTS OF THE BOAR, ARISE! ARISE FROM YOUR HALF-MILLENNIUM SLUMBER!"

From five directions, five five-meter statues of knights in Eberheim's livery came flying out of their respective churches. Faster than statues had any right to move, soaring through the air, they collectively stopped dead just outside the ritual circle's perimeter, floating a hundred meters up in mid-air. An immense pressure descended, and Zelsys felt that strange, sublime sensation grow into a tangible, divine pressure; it was akin to what she had felt before the Revenant King and the Forgemother, albeit significantly less intense.

"RAISE UP THY SHIELDS AND BLADES, O KNIGHTS OF THE BOAR! GRANT SUCCOR TO THE HOUND-FACED KNIGHTS OF THE WILLOW IN THEIR TIME OF NEED!"

The Five Abbots had not seen a single one of the Newman Sect's members. They had, however, seen the Hellhounds who had gone into their churches to clear them. They had also recognized the ancient crest of Willowdale upon the Hellhounds' armour, the same crest worn by her warriors in centuries past.

The Knights of the Boar, their helms fittingly styled to resemble the heads of boars, were much like Willowdale's own statue guardians, stone plated in metal. Their armaments were giant swords, as long as they were tall, and monolithic tower shields of the same height, wrought of stone and densely scribed with presumably holy words. All at once, with wordless yells of exertion that sounded like stone grinding together, the Five thrust forth their shields. The ground and air alike quaked with power, and a five-sided barrier sprung up around the sacrificial vortex, keeping it at bay. Zel instantaneously knew it wouldn't last long; for one, it wasn't strong enough to sever the Revenants' umbilical cords. Moreover, after only seconds had passed cracks were already showing upon the barrier, reflected physically on the Knights' shields. She was certain that they were mighty, perhaps mighty enough to break a siege from within or to repel any plausible attack on the city. The Third Truthseeker's wretched ritual, however, had created a spiritual phenomenon the likes of which the Knights' builders couldn't have reasonably foreseen. Its intensity was beyond a natural disaster - it was somewhere between the Living Storm and Eisengeist's rampage, and a thousand times more evil than Ubul.

Yet another thrice-damned Revenant made itself known, smashing into the barrier from the inside. It was at least twice as big as the other two, with reverse-jointed legs, a chest-maw just like the Six-legged and thick, bony, three-fingered arms that reached all the way to the ground. Numerous eyes littered its torso around the maw's exterior, and in place of a head it had a mass of writhing, whipping arm-tendrils. Its assault threatened to shatter the barrier, with many cracks spreading across it and its respective knight's shield.

Like a starveling beast that just smelled its next prey, Zero smashed headlong through the weakened barrier and subsequently into the Revenant. One Knight's shield shattered into pieces, and with it, so did that segment of the barrier, with the maelstrom spilling out, beginning to eat away at both adjacent panels. Zero, smashing apart the new Revenant faster than the maelstrom could repair it, was going berserk. With each step into the vortex of souls, Zero distorted. Plates and panels were crushed and pulled away from its body, a meteor-like corona formed around it, and... It just kept going. Somehow, some way, Zero's self-repair abilities nearly matched the damage being done to it. Nearly. It was doomed, nonetheless. Zero managed to sever the new Revenant's umbilicus and consume part of it before its constituent aura could be taken back by the maelstrom. The rabid iron beast that it was, it tried to delve deeper into the vortex to reach Third, like a moth to a flame. Both Strake and Zero were marching to their deaths. The background noise of wailing had risen to such a fever pitch that it drowned out all other sounds. Another panel of the barrier was gone by this point, another shield shattered.

While this went on, Zel and Zef received an aetherwave message from Victor: "How much longer? There are monsters banging on the barrier on my side, and I don't think I will be able to usurp them and activate the pylons."

Zefaris, having finished carving the shell and enchanting her coin, conjured the Tankman Phantom, speaking as she handed the shell to Zelsys: "I can try to clear Strake's mind or at least drag him out of the vortex, but... It's a fifty-fifty that my Phantom will reach him at all."

Zelsys, loading Thundercannon and seething over the fact she couldn't just get up and do something right now, called out to the Knights: "Well?! Surely you can do more than a fragile barrier! COME NOW, IS THIS THE STRENGTH OF FAITH?! CLEAR A PATH! DO SOMETHING, ANYTHING!"

A third panel, gone. Only the two on Victor's side remained.

The Five Knights' heads snapped to meet her gaze. She knew it, even though she could only see three of them. Then, they nodded. They fell out of the sky, or more accurately, flew down, smashing down right next to one another just at the edge of the once-more expanding vortex. All five were without shields; the two whose barrier segments were still in place had simply left theirs floating in place.

The Knights' blades and bodies both came ablaze like holy torches and they waded into the mass of aggrieved spirits. Somehow, someway, they formed a clear path through. The ground and even air itself burned brilliant white, repelling the unholy energies of Third's ritual.

Wasting not a moment, Zefaris sent the Tankman Phantom in after them.

Without speaking a single word, the Five Knights reached Zero and laid their eyes upon the maddened machine, and somehow made it halt its doomed advance. Their white flame spread over Zero's armour in moments, not suppressing its own crimson flame but enveloping it. The constant, distorted screaming blasting out of the tank's speakers became less so, and suddenly, Strake realized that he didn't actually want to die here.

Dying here wasn't his mission, his mission was to lead the tankmen and support Newman in her battle with the Order's elder.

But... He didn't know where he was, and Zero wouldn't obey him. It wasn't actively fighting him anymore, as if the infernal beast had suddenly ceased to be rabid, but he didn't have the strength of will to command it. Trying to reassert full control over the machine felt like pulling on a stuck control stick with broken fingers.

318 - Gore-drinking Victory Demon [Sturmblitz]

Zelsys continued to prepare, pouring the overwhelming majority of her power output into Thundercannon and the assembly of Fang Rippers revolving in front of it. They had been merely spinning before as they normally would, but the more power she poured in, the more violent their revolutions became. They were no longer recognizable as collections of blades, but as shining rings of white-blue death, each having a number of notches equal to its number of Fangs.

The Six-legged Revenant had regenerated by now, and was once more coming after Zero. The machine reached out, and its arms, in defiance of mechanical limitations, extended out to grasp the two Fang Spears Zel had sent over. With the motion of their return to normal, Zero's arms also subsumed both Fang Spears, replacing the old pilebunker rods. Zero vanished from its place with a sonic boom, smashing into the Six-legged Revenant. Shockwaves erupted from their clash, only for Zero to fire its pilebunkers and obliterate two of the Six-legged Revenant's arms. The machine proceeded to vanish yet again, blasting itself to the side and behind the Six-legged Revenant. Floating right behind the Revenant even as it tried to turn to face Zero, Zero blew apart the Six-legged Revenant's torso with a rapid sequence of pilebunker strikes. While this took place, Zero also resumed firing on the Sacrificial Revenant.  Zero's aura-wreathed slugs now tore into their target with full force, ripping chunks off of the aura construct with each shot. It was no longer just annoying enough to get its attention; instead, Zero was harming the Sacrificial Revenant badly enough to force it to go on the defensive.

EVOLVED PROTOTYPE

GORE-DRINKING VICTORY DEMON

ULTRA-HIGH-PERFORMANCE ONE-MAN TANK

UOT-014-02 BLOODY ZERO G-3 REFIT -DELIMIT PILOT FUSION-

By only a hair's breadth, Strake managed to distinguish what was himself, and what was Zero... But that line had grown so thin and blurry it may as well not be there. Any sense of pain was gone, there was only heat, drive, and Zero's endless fury, growing in intensity just as quickly as the engine's power output.

Strake had already thought of himself as a dead man walking. This was as good a place to die as any. Were his head clear, he would've scoffed at that idea. It wasn't. He thought it was, but it wasn't.

_____________________________________________________________________________

A screaming, flaming wrecking ball, zipping around at speeds that would kill any pilot. Zero had already been monstrous, barely fitting the description of "war machine", but that term couldn't even partly apply to it at this point. In every sense of the word, Strake and Zero had collectively merged to reach the transcendent point where an entity could no longer be impeded by mortal strength. Zelsys had noticed it many times throughout her short life, and though she wasn't quite sure where the demarcation line laid, she knew it when she saw it. It was one thing to be stronger and tougher than any single normal human, to wield a giant slab of metal like it was a sword - normal field cannons could still put someone like that down. Someone like that was still human.

Strake had just taken the final step on the tenuous path between man and something more - something beyond human, or perhaps inhuman, just like Zel's invocation of the Living Storm at Ubul's Tomb. The question was whether he could come back from his tribulation.

Wasting not a single moment after dispatching the Six-legged, Zero blasted up into the air, rocketing towards the Sacrificial Revenant while still firing its cannon. The weapon ran out of ammunition halfway through the flight. Zero's arms shot out, growing countless additional forearm segments to reach their prey, swinging the Revenant around as Zero flew. With thunderous force, the two collided, and a gale-force shockwave washed over the rooftops. Like a python, Zero squeezed and squeezed, but the Revenant wouldn't budge, so the machine instead unwound its arms and swung the aura monstrosity into the ground before flying down towards it. While Zero's left arm remained lengthened to that absurd degree its right snapped back to normal with a thunderclap. Even the left began rapidly shortening as Zero closed the distance, remaining always just long enough to keep the Revenant pinned in the crater which its impact had created.

Zero's landing was an explosion of gore, flames, rubble and aura.

Nothing remained of the Revenant, besides the hyperdense sacrificial aura which had given it form. It scattered through the cloud, wailing wraiths flying out, only to be sucked in. The dust cleared, revealing Zero standing, legs wide, arms dangling from snapped joints... With its frontal armor gaping like an open maw. It was wrong - mechanically impossible, even. Not only were there no joints there, that area had been reinforced with experimental compound plating made from damasite cold-iron alloy, adamant bronze, and azoth-auric amalgam.

Regardless of what engineers through possible, the machine had opened its cockpit as if it were a mouth. Within it, Strake sat, pierced through the back by thick cables. Barely recognizable as human, he was enveloped in furious, blood-red flame, his eyes blank, his body charred black. His clothing had long burned away, and his shoulders were shrouded by a commander's coat made of flame. It was unsettlingly similar to Strolvath's Hellfire Mantle, yet it surpassed that form by order of magnitude in intensity.

As the machine drew in the wailing souls and shreds of aura that had once made up the Revenant, not only did its arms snap back into proper position - pulses of red light flowed through the cables into Strake. Once the Six-legged had been devoured, Zero's frontal armor closed shut.

Then, there came the ring of a bell.

Not the Cathedral Bell, but one from a church elsewhere in the city. Then, another, and another, five in sequence from all different directions. In total, there were five churches across Eberheim, and despite having been swept by the Order's men, they hadn't been emptied. Entombed within the bell towers, long-dead men carried out a timeless duty, ringing the bells and presiding over the faithful in silent vigil, watching through statues of themselves. Watching. Waiting. And now, acting.

153 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends Pt. 4 [Cherno]

As Sorayah carried out the same unlocking and ward-opening procedure as before, Krahe added: "If you've only gotten so far with the resources available to you, it means I caught you early."

She was just blowing smoke, of course, speaking from extremely fragmentary evidence and wild assumptions. But it had its effect nonetheless, and Sorayah, with shaking hands, opened the door. Entering it simultaneously just as before, Krahe was struck by a grim sight.

The walls, floor, and ceiling were all reinforced by metal sheets, crudely riveted into the walls and glimmering with enchanted runes, with the exception of a 2m wide circle in the middle of the room. In it knelt a man with his arms chained to the ceiling, or rather, what used to be a man. He had turned completely into glowing charcoal, radiating heat and anathema, the burnt scraps of good-quality clothes still hanging off of him. His posture was arched and tense, knees wide, face contorted in a voiceless grimace of utter agony. Not screaming, but rather with gritted teeth. Around him, filling the circle, was a layered, extraordinarily complex glyph carved into the stone. Dried blood filled its grooves. Krahe tried to discern whether the man had been cut, but with the number of straight, narrow cracks covering him, she couldn't tell whether any - or perhaps all - of them were cuts.

Walking around, dragging Sorayah along, she noticed a hammer and chisel on the ground just outside the circle. The man's right leg had been chipped off halfway up the calf. She'd seen worse - much worse - but Krahe was nonetheless disgusted at the scene. Even if it wouldn't haunt her, even if it couldn't unsettle her to the point of tremors, that grimace of torment still sparked a visceral blend of disgust and anger, somewhere deep inside. It would've died out, buried under decades of growing numb, but she stoked it, gladly taking the ember of righteous fury into her mind's hand.

"In the corner. Now," Krahe said, pointing at the far end of the room with one hand and shoving Sorayah with the other.

"Really? It gets to you that much? I've seen the posters. You must've done far worse than I if the Hashems want you dead so badly," Sorayah scoffed, but she nonetheless did as she was told.

"To feel disgust and anger at the sight of evil is no sin, and to tolerate it is no virtue."

"There is no such thing in the scriptures of the Twin Churches."

"I didn't say it was. I also didn't say I was an apostle," Krahe said, approaching within the Forming Toroid's range. Raising her hand, she pointed her gun at Sorayah.

"Don't move, I won't shoot you..." she trailed off. The Forming Toroid began to glow and Krahe flicked her wrist, using the gun as a pointer. In moments, Sorayah was restrained by a series of smoky jade rods.

"Wgh- What is that? Archonforged?" Sorayah questioned, audibly struggling to keep herself together. The panic was starting to overtake her voice. Krahe didn't care much. Oh, she was sure that Sorayah was sorry - sorry that she got caught, that she encountered a fish too big for her.

"Correct. I get it, you're clever. It won't save you."

Krahe conjured and lit a cigarette, taking a drag as she observed the man-turned-coal.

"That phrase about evil - a philosopher in a faraway land said it, once, thousands of years ago. You know what happens now, don't you? I promised to show you real anathemism, did I not? Barzai, come."

She outstretched her left hand. The eidolon simply stopped hiding and flew into her palm.

"Why?" Sorayah questioned.

"You came after me. I warned you. You persevered. Actions, consequences," Krahe deadpanned. Slowly, tendrils began to grow out of her arm, forming a hemispherical nest in which Barzai stood.

"No. Not me. Why?!" Sorayah demanded, growing audibly frustrated. "The Society, the Talisman Mistress, everything. You're a saint, don't pretend otherwise. Only the Temple of Records holds texts listed as the Human Charcoal Letters, and only a saint would have such high-level access. I know. I tried, through an apostle who owed me. What I don't understand is why you would come after me. I am of no consequence. The Grafting Church doesn't send saints after small-fries like me, they're too busy dealing with things like rogue grafters and body theft. Am I just... A diversion? A convenient notch to pad your record with?! That's all my hard work to unearth these ancient arts will amount to?!"

By the end, Sorayah was nearly screaming.

Krahe turned to look at her.

"You put yourself in my sights at a time when I was looking for a target to test this on," she glanced at her left hand. "Just bad luck. Is that what you want to hear? It's half of the truth. The other half is that, in truth, I would have come for you sooner or later. Surely, you can't have deluded yourself into thinking what you are doing is permissible."

"You still haven't answered me. Why?!" Sorayah demanded, wild-eyed, ignoring what was happening in Krahe's left hand in favour of locking eyes with her. To faciliate their conversation, Krahe kept Barzai as he was, simply building the shell around him, fully aware that she could will him to transform into the core at any moment.

After staring into those wild eyes for a few moments, Krahe explained herself: "This is what I do. This is what I am. I don't know how to do anything else. After you, it will be Semzar Hashem. After him, his father. After him, whomever is pulling his strings. I mean to follow the roots of infestation spreading through this land all the way to the source, because evil has a name. A face. Perhaps a mansion and a family. Many of society's ills do not spring up from nothing, there are oft-powerful men proliferating them, perhaps for their own gain, or out of ideology. And just as evil has a face, so does the hand that will strangle the puppet master with his own strings; you're looking at it. That is what I am."

152 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends Pt. 3 [Cherno]

Five seconds passed. Sorayah, wild-eyed, raised the lantern again. The charge-up was even shorter this time, but Krahe reacted based on the tensing of Sorayah's arm and avoided the vast majority of the blast with another dive. Nonetheless, she  only avoided most of the blast, and what little she had to block still filled up over two-thirds of her entropy tolerance. Even then, it felt like being sprayed with acid in the way the Isotope-filled blast corroded her wards and wormed into her. One more blast like that would fill her arm’s ability to contain, and it wouldn’t take much more after that to make her get sick.

"I don't know what you expected. I can just keep doing that, y'know. While I admit that there is some effort to doing it, your attacks can't affect me once I've transformed... And I'd wager you can't fire that thing faster than I can disperse what little entropy nullifying its effects costs me," Krahe lied again, omitting the five-second dive recovery time. She took a step forward, prompting Sorayah to take a step back, grasping the lantern with her other arm much like someone whose giant penis-metaphor revolver just bounced off of a cyborg's subdermal armor. She started manipulating something in the lantern's rear for the third time, and the beam began narrowing for the third time, but Krahe interrupted her:

"I wouldn't. I gave you one, two chances, and there won't be at third. Next time I'll dislocate your arms instead of just standing here. Now be smart and take me to your basement."

"You can't expect me to believe that you can break my wards that quickly. Mine are especially resilient."

Krahe stepped forward as if starting a sprint, skimmed towards Sorayah, and mid-skim adjusted her exit position and facing so she would come out into a ground slide... Or as close as she could with her current Control attribute. It was rough at best, she slammed onto the ground in a somewhat awkward slide-kick position, but her momentum carried her through and the smooth rug provided some assistance. She was able to get behind Sorayah in the commotion. The saurian exerted a level of strength and grapple resistance well beyond what her size suggested, but Krahe had three things that allowed her to come on top:

Firstly, knowledge of real grappling arts. This included bits from various martial arts learned over the course of her life, followed by the mnemonic imprints for the Whitestone and Bergmann Security Grappling Manual V.3 burned into her memory, all culminating with Sector 7 Style's brutal joint-locks designed to counter an opponent's superior strength and exploit the common joint weak-points of most cyborgs.

Secondly, the Left Arm of Chernobog. Specifically, it was the unique property that had allowed her to lift a man weighing more than a hundred kilos back in Cassius's - or rather, Seer's - gambling house. The Left Arm's physical attributes grew not just based on her own pure strength, but also her arcane attributes. At this point, it was far stronger than her right arm.

Thirdly, Tar; she could throw the full weight of her magic into a grapple through tar tendrils.

By exploiting all three of these factors to the fullest, Krahe managed to get Sorayah into an arm-lock. In the process, the Saurian had fired two more blasts from her artifact, imprinting reams of purple-smoldering eldritch script into the walls and carpet.

"I won't need to break them, unless you've got some truly special wards that protect against grappling," she hissed into Sorayah's ear. "Now drop the artifact or I'll make you drop it."

"I cannot. It's volatile. Who knows what will happen if I let go."

With a smirk, Krahe extended the tendril she had winding down Sorayah's arm, wrapping it around the lantern.

"No excuses. Let go."

Sorayah didn't, so Krahe wrenched her arm a bit. Not enough to dislocate the shoulder, but enough to make it abundantly clear that she could and would. It was out of mercy, but because Krahe didn't want to risk the possibility of the basement's wards requiring both hands to open. Once she had the lantern grasped in a tar tendril, Krahe skimmed backwards, raising her arms into the firing configuration of Wandrei Faust.

"Basement. Now."

A few uneasy minutes later, Sorayah unlocked the door and proceeded to move her hands over its surface. Her palms, held in stiff gestures, snapped through a sequence of three specific positions while Sorayah uttered a sequence of three inaudible keywords.

When it finally swung open, Krahe ensured that the two of them stepped in at the same time so that Sorayah couldn't try to slam the door shut in her face. Beyond was a short stairway into the earth, leading into the basement proper. It was fairly spacious, a single large rectangular room, mostly plain, smoothed stone. It resembled a laboratory of a sort, with bookshelves and a large L-shaped table that included a sink in its design. A mixture of glassware and occult implements, made from a mixture of brass and strange dark stone, was strewn across its surface. Shards of coal-like material pulsing with red light were suspended in clamps, contained in flasks, and so on. A few of them could be recognized as human parts - mostly fingers, toes, and other such small pieces. None of them moved like the hand in the book; in fact, none of them quite looked like it either, truly resembling charcoal. Krahe realized what the hand reminded her of: high-grade rock coal, anthracite.

One the left of the room, Krahe saw the other side of that door she had tried to break through, barely visible behind a large device the shape of a vending machine, clearly placed there as a barricade. Going off the tank with Thaumine sloshing about inside and the black cabled hanging from it and snaking to the various devices through the room, it was a power supply unit.

"Are these your best results?" Krahe asked, glancing towards the table. She decided to pretend she knew more than she truly did, making the assumption that Sorayah hadn't gotten far in her research.

"Yes. My materials have been sub-par. Perhaps we could work together-"

"Very compelling offer, I'll consider it," Krahe interrupted facetiously. "Move, open the next door."

151 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Around two-thirds of the way through the first chapter, the front door opened. Krahe continued waiting, listening to Sorayah walk around for a few minutes, watching her through Barzai's eyes. Then, abruptly, her footsteps stopped in the hallway outside the writing room. She had realized that something was amiss; the door was ajar.

Barzai saw her conjure a brass apparatus, presumably from her own Kenoma Pocket, resembling a bullseye lantern. Soon enough, Krahe was staring her in the face. She conjured a cigarette, raising it to her lips as Sorayah stared at her with a mixture of bewilderment and *pure, seething hate.* An angry, red spotlight spilled out of her lantern, containing a continuous stream of faint anathema. The way it scattered strangely looked like two beams converged into one.

"You..." she hissed.

"What me?" Krahe laughed. "Did you assume I was dead just because I stopped showing up at the Society? Did you really think the *amateurs* you sent actually succeeded? I admit I didn't leave much in the way of survivors that could report back, or even identifiable corpses, but c'mon. You didn't hear back from them, and it didn't seem suspicious? Even a little bit?"

"I assumed they taught you a lesson and you took it to heart."

"My, so intimidating. Let me guess, that lantern has Human Charcoal in it and you intend to blast me with anathema, is that right?"

Sorayah didn't answer, but her grip on the lantern tightened, and her eyes narrowed.

"Well? Hit me. Better turn me into a shadow fried into your carpet all at once. *Better make sure it kills me in one hit.* Y'know what? Let's make it easier for you to pull the trigger. Let's go to your basement, shall we? That's where you carry out the final step to turn your victims into Human Charcoal, isn't it? I'm sure you won't be so hesitant when your interspecies porno isn't at risk of getting incinerated alongside me. Y'know, I've seen my share, and I'm fairly certain human penises don't actually have bones in them, and they certainly don't have knots."

A noise somewhere between an angry snake's hiss and an angry crocodile's rumble began to issue from Sorayah, her throat visibly reverberating. Her teeth grinded together, and she gripped the lantern ever tighter. Even the beam grew in intensity as something mechanical inside the device moved, now starting to lightly burn away at Krahe's wards. Nonetheless, Sorayah backed out of the door, slowly, keeping both her eyes and the lantern pointed at Krahe. To her surprise, that offhanded suggestion had worked. She had fully expected to be breaking into a dead woman's basement ten minutes from now, but it seemed the reason - or perhaps love for her book collection - within Sorayah won out.

Krahe, not yet trying to stand up, casually picked up the Hollow Book.

Sorayah instantly snapped: "Leave it."

"Get up. If you want to see the basement before you die, I can give you that much," she added, her voice far too angry and not nearly confident enough to make it sound convincing. Krahe couldn't help but derive great amusement from this classical scenario; Sorayah's demeanor reeked of a serial killer caught metaphorically with her pants down, thrown far off-kilter, struggling to convince herself she was still in control.

Her original intention was to split her forearm open lengthwise in the process of putting the item into her Kenoma Pocket, but she decided against it. Actually considering that course of action set off a feeling similar to the consideration of eating something far beyond one's ability. So, she did leave it. A puzzled expression came over Sorayah when she saw that the lock was undone, but she maintained her focus on Krahe wile backing out into the hallway. Krahe followed, openly raising her Barrier as she went. It had changed quite noticeably. The swirling umbrella of greyish ash and smoke had grown darker, and glistening, obsidian-like chips were now included within it.

Sorayah stopped a ways down the hallway, once Krahe had fully exited the writing room. Her features tensed, and she raised the lantern. Something inside it moved, the beam narrowed down to a diameter even smaller than Krahe's Barrier, shifting in hue towards purple. Then, in a near-instant, a deluge of strange sigils burst out, crackling with an eldritch energy that was neither lightning, nor fire, nor any single definable force. The charge-up was far faster than she had expected, and since she hadn't seen the minimal telegraphing before, she had no way to predict when the artifact would fire. Despite Astro Diving on reflex right when the beam hit, even the quarter-second of blocking it it had built up an intimidating amount of Hard Entropy. The beam had to be anywhere from two and a half to five times stronger than Krahe's strongest Cinder Flash, based on whether it was Energetic or Arcane in nature. If it was Energetic, it would completely obliterate her Wards and fry the living hell out of her if she got hit straight on. If it was Arcane... She wagered she might be able to weather one hit and be fine. Two hits would definitely be very fucking bad, but maybe survivable if it hit a particularly resilient area like her left arm or anywhere armored by her Biosuit. These were all worst-case scenarios, of course, Krahe wouldn't take the risk of eating another hit head-on.

Seeing Sorayah's eyes go wide and her stance falter at the sight of her astral form, Krahe surfaced once again.

“The flame of a candle,” she lied.

But Sorayah didn’t know that. She was too busy reeling from the backlash of Krahe's barrier. Angry serpents made of smoke and ash manifested in her vicinity and spewed outbursts of burning cinders at the lizard-woman with unerring accuracy, their flame reddened by Isotope and smoke a rich, sooty black from the abundance of Hard Entropy. It was burning filth in the purest sense.

150 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends [Cherno]

Krahe questioned Casus on Tsetse's combat characteristics for some time afterward, going so far as to draw out a surprisingly accurate diagram. Her rendering of Tsetse's forearm got astonishingly close after a few rounds of edits.

"Still, the absence of either Wards or Barriers is worrying... Combined with everything else, I almost want to guess he might have been some evoy version of Mamon Armor. If not that, maybe he was grafted to be as close to a war-morph as he could get. Despite the absence of orthodox wards, his armor did hold up against Silberblut, and he did keep up with you in that form..."

_____________________________________________________________________________

Days passed. Krahe couldn't find an easy route of ingress into Sorayah's home, until she tested the route that was often forgotten: From above. Climbing a nearby building, Krahe got onto the roof of Sorayah's home and skimmed down. Hot, stale air assaulted her and the darkness of a disused attic choked her senses. After getting some light by pouring Thauma into her arm she saw that the attic was completely empty, and had clearly not been used in a long while. She took a moment to bring a small DD-fuelled light out of storage. She used a small tendril to affix it to her shoulder. Krahe didn't even try skimming down, assuming the presence of wards; she simply looked around and found the door. It was old, dusty, and didn't even have a lock, but it didn't open, suggesting a latch at the other side. Its hinges were on this side, however.

Krahe left, deciding to prepare before committing. She sourced a tubular lockpick from Garvesh, and learned that, apparently, artifacts and talismans capable of breaking local wards were fairly difficult to come by. And so... Krahe just gave up on subtlety. If she had the time, she would've tried to source such an item or even develop a Theurgy capable of it, but as she saw it, she didn't have that much time. Sorayah's case was a loose end that needed tying up. It didn't need to be a perfect, cleanly executed ghost operation.

She returned the next day around two hours before Sorayah usually came home, once more skimming into the attic. Ten minutes and a few usages of the Forming Toroid later, Krahe had knocked the hingepins out and propped the door against the wall. A narrow stairway led directly to a hallway on the floor below. The house was quite small, with one bedroom, a reading room, kitchen, and basement. Rugs, wood, bronze, and semiprecious stones made up the decorations, with simple glowing stones set into the walls as lights. It was, just like much of Audunpoint, an ancient building that had been renovated. The bedroom was locked and warded, as was the basement, but the same couldn't be said for the kitchen or the reading room. She picked the locks on both, taking a few minutes for each; this was quite slow, given the fact the locks weren't particularly strong and didn't have any particular anti-picking measures. There was nothing suspicious in the kitchen, unsurprisingly. Going through the reading room, Krahe found a variety of books, including several interesting books on the interactions between Theurgy and Anathemism, none of which were to be found in the Society’s library. There was also a complete copy of Burning Torment Wrought in Black, and fragmentary copies of several Human Charcoal Letters. Besides occult texts, a surprising volume of Sorayah's personal collection was made up of human-saurian interspecies smut.

Unfortunately, Krahe didn’t find any spare keys inside a book, even after searching the writing desk and finding three different hidden drawers. One of these contained a smut manuscript involving a painfully obvious self-insert being taken advantage of by men whose appearances lined up a bit too closely with members of the Society. It also got human sexual anatomy comically wrong, ascribing them with what Krahe assumed to be saurian traits.

What she did find, however, was a book that lit up as an anathema hazard on the Prospector's Eyes, far up on a shelf well out of reach. After getting it down with a Tar tendril, Krahe found it to be locked with a padlock that had no keyhole. Trying to get into Sorayah's mindset under the assumption this was one of her locks and not just something she had found, the first thing she thought to try was to simply pour some anathema into it. At first, it didn't work. The lock lit up with runes, only for a snapping sound to sound from inside. Gradually, after a number of attempts, Krahe got it open by pouring in as little anathema as she could. It was a tiny amount, the smallest she had ever produced at one time, and it felt horrid. Just barely starting the fusion reaction only to snuff it out felt wrong.

While Krahe shuddered in place at the unpleasant feeling, lines of eldritch runes pulsed over the lock's surface and it popped open. The book was indeed hollow, containing a (poorly) shielded box within which the shape of a human hand sat. It didn't really look like charcoal - its surface had a gleaming lustre, with a red glow coming out of a few thin cracks and the cross-section of the wrist. It constantly radiated anathema, twitching in a claw-like rigor as if it was still attached, and as if its owner was in the throes of terrible pain.

"Ohoho, there's exhibit A..." she uttered as she smiled to herself. Truthfully, Krahe wasn't even slightly opposed to making use of anything she found for herself. If Human Charcoal could be used to somehow boost her own capabilities, she would use it. However, given its documented uses, she didn't expect this to be the case. Every application seemed to be some variation of allowing the user to control Thaumic Fusion and/or to shield herself from exposure.

Krahe closed the Hollow Book, set it down on the writing desk, and sat down with the chair turned to the door, gun in hand. While she waited, she read through Sorayah's manuscript. She couldn't take it seriously in any sense of the word, and ended up turning her attention to the other texts, such as a book on theurgy titled "Dreaming of Hyperion Shore".

317 - Total Limiter Release [Sturmblitz]

Despite mostly passing through the Revenant unimpeded in the physical plane, the passage of Zero's shots still seemed to impact the Revenant, tearing away pieces of its form as they passed. Though the damage was only around a third of what the Nameless Phantom's shot had caused, Zero's suppressing fire still disturbed the construct such that its focus shifted towards the screaming machine for a second with each shot before returning to its real targets. It was, perhaps, made more effective by the fact Strake screamed out a tirade of admonishments against the Revenant and the Order in general. A second, smaller Revenant emerged at the ground level, possessing two giant arms and sprinting forward on six legs, with a skull covered in eyes. Writhing, boiling flesh spilled out of a maw that split its chest down the middle, interlocking rib-teeth stretching down its full length.

Without waiting a moment, Zel sent an aetherwave message:

"If you have any aces left up your sleeve, use them now. Keep it away from us. It will not be long."

This was in the middle of Zero exchanging blows with the Six-legged Revenant whilst also firing on the Sacrificial Revenant.

After just a few clashes with the Six-legged Revenant, Zero's pilebunkers were completely mangled, with fleshy webbing growing up its arms. The machine's heat, however, kept the growths at bay, causing them to shrivel, while the Six-legged Revenant regenerated. Zelsys, knowing the stakes at hand, dug deeper to form a pair of False Fang Spears, flinging them over to Zero by sheer force of will.

The machine didn't pick them up. The militaristic, brass-and-drums music which had been blasting out of its speaker suddenly grew distorted, cutting in and out. In a literal sense, Zero was screaming.

__________________________________________________________________

Strake laughed at the suggestion. Aces up his sleeve, she said. He glanced at that sealed-up lever. Pulling his hands out of the control sleeves, he forced his fingers through the seals and grasped the lever. With his free hand, he reached for a pill bottle in the emergency kit, dropping three of them into his canteen, still 1/3 full of Witch's Brew. They were part alchemically activated iron, part stabilized Ignis crystal, part Rubedo dust. He didn't know what to call them, but he knew he really hadn't expected to take them this soon.

"Listen to me, you rabid dog... Just this once, do whatever you need to do."

He didn't know if he was talking to himself or to Zero. Strake kicked back his canteen, downing every bit of Witch's Brew alongside the three pills as he forced the lever forward. It didn't slide smoothly, or click forward; there was a tremendous, immovable resistance, a solid steel pin stopping it from moving. The pin snapped, and with it, the lever locked forward.

STEEL COMMAND: TOTAL LIMITER RELEASE

Maintenance and emergency access panels started bursting open around him, and for a moment, Strake thought Zero was breaking apart. There was the hissing of cable locks coming undone. A hive of black serpents set upon him, over a dozen connectors piercing his back. By some cruel miracle, none punctured his lungs, but his heart wasn't spared; the Main Governor Cable, overgrown with draconic nervous tissue, embedded itself there. Another, the Main Control Cable, pierced the back of his skull.

Zero's entire chassis shifted, vents and thrusters extending, built just as heavily as the unit's primary armour. Jets of flame, like welding torches, blazed out of them, shifting in hue from orange-blue to a furious red. Explosive bolts and physical locks snapped away, a layer of metal purging from the tank in an instant. Two sets of three heat sinks extended from its back, glowing orange, lightning arcing between them. A perfect, circular impression was blasted into the ground right beneath Zero as it floated into the air by only a few centimeters, no higher than the usual height for its kinetic skates. A second circle followed, deeper, but with a smaller diameter, and a last, third one. Boom. Boom. Boom. Three concentric circles in total. At this point, Zero appeared nearly weightless, just hovering there, screaming. In this timespan, the Sacrificial Revenant was able to refocus on attacking Zelsys, and Zefaris was still busy engraving the Dragonfire Shell. Phantom Manus manifested to meet the monstrosity in combat, and soon, so did the Tankman Phantom. The twin phantoms did mighty battle against the combined abomination, the Tankman Phantom's twin cannons thumping out a steady twice-per-second beat while it grappled with the Revenant. Manus, meanwhile, continuously fought against the tendril-arms that the Revenant constantly spawned, each just as powerful as Third's own version of that attack. The only difference was the vastly reduced frequency. The brave phantom's flaming sword scythed through this accursed flesh and struck back with blazing rays of holy light between each swing, but even this wasn't enough. The duo barely sufficed to keep the Revenant at bay, and the strain of fuelling them showed; the final stretch of engraving the Dragonfire Shell, the fourth antediluvian glyph, had taken Zefaris nearly as long as everything leading up to it.

Both Zelsys and Zefaris knew that, if the vortex kept advancing at this rate, the ritual would move ahead before they could intervene. They pushed ahead anyway, as this was the only plan they had that could conceivably work. Nonetheless, Zelsys couldn't help but remember a prayer - one of the many otherwise vestigial memories she had inherited from her progenitors. She had never prayed, but in retrospect, that was itself somewhat illogical. The existence of divinity was undeniable - even more so here and now. She couldn't see the presence of the divine, but she felt a sense of the sublime. Just as there was an inconceivably grief, wrath, and suffering, she felt the opposite of that coming from the few survivors, far off at the edge of the city. It hung in the air, swam in it, passively suppressing the wretchedness of the Order's techniques and strengthening her own. She also felt the vague energy gathering, not to her, but to six places through the city: Five churches, visible even from here, and a sixth, at the other side of the vortex.

316 - Thrashing Scolopendra [Sturmblitz]

Chrome Skull Viper itself took form, its skull gleaming gold and fire exploding from its mouth as it lashed out at the flowing souls in perfect concert with Carnifex. Zel began multiplying Carnifex, forming countless False Fangs only to merge them together. The ground beneath her feet turned to iron as she strained the reactor of her heart to create Fangs as close to True as possible.

Before she could put her solution into action, however, Third struck back at her, directly manipulating the maelstrom to focus its wrath specifically on her. Hundreds of mangled human shapes within the aura merged into one, crashing against Chrome Skull Viper's golden form. The sacrificial monstrosity pried open the aura-beast's jaw, only for the viper to vanish altogether and strike from the side. The monstrosity dissolved, reforming in the viper's blind spot. In this manner, the two constructs became locked in battle. Meanwhile, Third cut himself again and unleashed another deluge of flesh and boiling blood. His right arm inflated, then burst into a deluge of  tentacular, clawed appendages, swimming entirely unimpeded through the maelstrom. Even the sonic booms of their acceleration somehow didn't disturb the flow. They moved as to encircle Zelsys, those on the outside purposely going faster.

The Uncoiling Scolopendra was far from ideal here. A more focused technique was necessary; an intermediate between it and the Beheading Scolopendra. Already having expanded to dozens of segments in length, Carnifex coiled up into a hemisphere in front of Zelsys. Lightning and aura both surged through it. Without a single stray thought, she conceived the variant technique and put it into motion, swinging her entire body on one foot, setting Carnifex into a purposely chaotic flight path that resembled a centipede thrashing about after it has grasped its prey. The spiritual exertion made her feel as though her head might split at any moment, but she pushed on. She still had aura to spare, this pain would pass. The new technique variant solidified in her mind just as a shower of high-velocity gore came raining down on her, only to be devoured by her aura. It was densely packed with Third's aura, after all, and she had just torn it away from him. So long as she took care to weigh the aura gain from destroying others' techniques, she could stretch what she had very far.

BUTCHERING ART: THRASHING SCOLOPENDRA

“Very impressive! I can see why you were the one to claim that inheritance in the far north. I cannot imagine using such a weapon. However, your struggle is at an end now!” Third gloated, striking the bell for a final time. The maelstrom intensified such that Zelsys felt that she couldn't withstand it even using Carnifex as a defense, and Chrome Skull Viper expended far more aura than it gave back, forcing her to dissipate it.

Regretfully, she leapt backwards, dragging herself out of the maelstrom before it could consume her. From where she stood, she could clearly see that the vortex of sacrificial energy would full the ritual circle's boundaries very soon. She suddenly received an aetherwave message:

"Am I coming through? Please respond."

Zel responded with an affirmative ping. She managed to pick out Zefaris, and closed the distance in moments, leaving broken rooves in her wake.

"Good, finally. The disruption array is ready, but I don't think it will have much effect unless his grip on the ritual is broken, even momentarily. Any ideas?"

Before she responded, she reformed the Crown Fang to add a handle and whipped it down towards Zefaris. The blonde grabbed on the moment she realized what it was, and soon stood beside Zelsys. The upper-right quarter of her face was covered in bulged-out veins, but she didn't seem in any hurry to close her eye.

"You've seen the first dragonfire shell firing. Do you think one of your coins can reflect something even stronger?"

"...I think so, since they're dragonsteel. I will take special measures with the enchantment to be sure."

"Good, then do that, but first-" Zel started, pulling the dragonfire shell out of Thundercannon, tilting it bullet-first at Zefaris. "You know what it needs."

With a nod, Zef's eye expanded out and she began carving. Only four symbols; one on the front of the bullet, and three around the neck of the shell. While she worked, Zelsys did much the same, also preparing. She knelt down, gathering all of Carnifex into Fang Rippers. The Root Fang was the first, and she willed it to temporarily distort into a tubular shape, an extension for Thundercannon, melding it near-seamlessly with the firearm. A Two False Fang Ripper came next, then three, four, and five, ending with a Six True Fang Ripper at the very end. Rather than set them as anchors, Zel wrapped her six Thundergods around her left arm, all the way down Thundercannon's length.

"Where's Victor, by the way?" Zel asked as they prepared.

"On the other side. The array needs someone to set off each of the resonators, and besides you, he is the most mobile. I've set mirrors in case he can't get to them."

Third, of course, didn't just leave them be. Though the vast majority of his focus was on the ritual, in the process of pushing it toward its next stage, his grasp on the maelstrom grew such that he could send a construct of sacrificial energy out of its boundaries. It took the form of a distorted human upper body, wrought from hundreds of skeletons and draped in tattered flesh. Four monstrous arms extended from its torso, and an umbilicus of bone and flesh extended from its spine deeper into the maelstrom, seething with dense aura. The Sacrificial Revenant moved faster than it had any right to, flagrantly defying gravity by darting back and forth in a zigzagging pattern as it closed in on the duo.

Before it could reach them, however, a ghostly bullet smashed into its head from the side, tearing out a piece. Zelsys didn't wait a moment and usurped the piece, momentarily freeing one of her Thundergods to drag it in for Chrome Skull Viper to devour. A very physical followup shot followed from below, and another, and another - Zero.

315 - Empire of Self/Dragonfire [Sturmblitz]

The mindscape shifted. The rolling dunes fell away, becoming a level plain of sand.

A small army rose up behind the twin thoughtforms of Zelsys Newman and her weapon spirits.

Hundreds and hundreds of humanoid thoughtforms, differing wildly in build. At first they seemed vague and formless, poorly put together, but he soon realized that was not the case. Despite the fact most of them were merely shapes, they were sharp and solid. A fair few were recognizable, but only perhaps fifty in the very front were clear and distinct, fully defined. In the very front, Third saw two individuals: The first was a short-haired woman in Grekurian Inquisitorial Full Plate, with a face unsettlingly similar to Newman's. The second was an unassuming, thin Ikesian man in glasses, messy black hair hanging down into his forehead.

"I am an army unto myself in more ways than one. What you seek to achieve in this city - this pathetic endeavor of yours - is an insult to the arcane science from which I was born. Knowing that you care not for morality, consider this my reason to erase you: Your continued existence offends me."

After the first few hundred, countless more thoughtforms spawned, these being truly just humanoid silhouettes without faces or distinguishing features. An endless sea of bodies suddenly sprawled out in every direction. Not thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, but billions of them. They felt different from the first few hundred, somehow.

The Primordial Self and Thinking Self spoke at once, and Third felt an overwhelming killing intent. He had never felt a pressure so intense even in his days as a mere disciple when he had angered the previous Third Truthseeker.

"UNDYING WORM. EATER OF CHILDREN. CONCEITED WEAKLING. SUB-HU-MAN. BE GONE FROM MY DOMAIN."

All at once, in a singular instant in time, the mental energy of every thoughtform Zelsys Newman had conjured came crashing down on Third. Were he anyone else, the mental backlash would have struck him dead. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and bloody tears burst out of them, but he was alive, and his half-broken mind was already gathering back together.

Zel's awareness seamlessly returned to reality just in time to see the shockwave of backlash blast out from the line of eye contact between herself and the Third Truthseeker. It closed up in an instant, but Third now floated frozen in place, seemingly maintaining the ritual, but not doing anything to advance it. A small part of her was equal parts disappointed and unsurprised that obliterating his thoughtform hadn't killed him, but she wasted not a second longer, bearing Thundercannon to bear.

At the instant just before the trigger lever clicked for the third time, Zelsys pulled Carnifex back to herself, leaving an umbrella-shaped swarm of False Fangs to fend off the maelstrom's flow while she used the cleaver itself as a recoil anchor. She felt Thundercannon twisting, its maw opening wide and its eyes blazing with light. The gun roared in Eisengeist's voice as a torrent of golden flame came pouring out. It pushed her back as it burst forth, her Thundergods tearing out of the ground as the stone failed. Carnifex dragged for meters through the ground despite having dulled itself to better act as an anchor. For the first time in over a year, the recoil impulse was outright painful.

The flame, it felt… Right. As it poured out of the maw that was her left arm, Zelsys felt it arouse the faint vestiges of draconic heritage she had inherited from the Monk-nobles of the far south. Despite the terrible violence with which it poured forth, never for a moment did she fear being burned or blinded by it.

It wasn’t enough.

Such empyrean power, and it wasn’t enough.

The maelstrom swept away much of the golden comet's flame, the screeching spirits of the sacrificed clashing with quasi-draconic serpents that manifested from the stolen flame. The bullet itself, however, reached the Third Truthseeker. With force enough to tear through numerous buildings or to directly overpower Ubul's defenses, it seemed to trigger Third's self-preservation instincts. Even with his conscious mind out of commission, he still raised his free hand in a twisting gesture, whilst using his sacrificial knife to perform a long, shallow drag cut through his robes. His own aura flared to an intensity that, compared to the soul-maelstrom, was as a raging inferno compared to a campfire. His hand suddenly erupted in blood and flesh, exploding out of his skin as a deluge of gruesome, bladed tendrils. The Dragonfire Bullet, violently drilling through vast masses of conjured flesh, eventually broke through... But it had lost so much power by then that it merely ripped through Third's clavicle. All that power, for a bullet-sized hole. Even so, this was enough to strike him dumbfounded his eyes going wide as the soul-maelstrom began to destabilize and flow in discordant directions. Panic - and awareness - flashed over Third's face, and he redoubled his efforts in finishing the ritual, once more returning to gestures, chants, and strikes upon the bell.

She pulled Carnifex back out and began defending herself with it once again, the maelstrom's pressure and viciousness having grown nearly thrice over. Her focus shifted solely towards devising a means of penetrating Third's defenses, and she felt a cold hand gripping her own. In the swirling maelstrom of aura and essentia that surrounded her, the spirit of Thundercannon had willed himself into being. Tinged golden by what remained of the dragonfire shell’s firing, the iron soldier’s stern gaze met her own.

The next moment, she felt another presence to her right. It was Fulguris, manifested of her own will just the same as Thundercannon.

Zelsys instantly realized the solution, working Thundercannon’s bolt and loading her second dragonfire shell right away. The eruption of golden, fiery Fog was such that it utterly consumed her surroundings, and would have doubtlessly spread for at least twenty meters if it hadn't come to clash with the maelstrom. Even the Impelling Arm’s concepts of “Purification” and “Concealment” had been empowered by dragonfire. In turn, the golden fog responded readily to her aura and took on the appearance of numerous mawed serpents writhing about within it, waiting to strike at any invaders. Waves of crimson death crashed against it, but the higher-order energy of dragonkind carved a swath into the expanding vortex.

149 - Unlucky Pt. 3 [Cherno]

Silberblut got halfway up his arm before the giant evoy twisted his arm free and used its blast to propel himself backwards, wings exploding out of his back at the same time. Despite the catastrophic damage to his limb, Tsetse looked fine for the most part. That didn't add up. Evoy didn't have compartmentalized bodies like that... And it looked like there was a cavity in the center of that upper arm.

For a few moments, they stood some ten meters across from one another in a standoff. Tsetse retracted his sonic emitters, only for several plates on his chest to slide out of the way and expose a dinnerplate-sized emitter lens. A rising whirr began to issue out of it as the surrounding membranes shuddered, the blood vessels within them bulging out... And then it died down, and its covers slid back into place.

"No point. You're prepared. You would just turn it against me," he said, his apathetic tone now tinged by resignation and mild disappointment. His wings began beating, gradually speeding up as he turned his head to Seer: "Lucky."

Though he attempted to close the distance before Tsetse could flee, driven by the righteous will to exact the full extent of his deserved punishment upon Tsetse, Silberblut found himself thwarted. The fly-man simply caught his blade by skewering his good hand upon it and leapt away into full flight a moment later, leaving the entirety of his forelimb, seamlessly detached at the elbow. Silberblut exerted a herculean force of will to draw back the flame of his arm-blade, instantly dropping out of his transformation and stumbling to the ground. He hadn't quite realized just how mighty all of Tsetse's blows had actually been; the immediate surroundings had been demolished by their fight, with several civilians worriedly peeking out through broken windows. It was, in part, due to the Silberblut Coupler's eponymous Silver Blood, which invasively reinforced his body from the inside; were his compatibility with the coupler sub-ideal, he would risk massive rejection each time he transformed. Even if he didn't take a single hit, transforming still left him sore all over for several hours; a painful side effect he was entirely willing to bear. A few bloody coughs came up, their violent contraction making him distinctly aware he had some cracked ribs.

"Nothing broken, that's good..." he uttered as he got back up to his feet. He glanced around, and saw that Seer was gone. After reassuring the local civilians that the Seven Spokes would foot the repair bill and then some, he questioned them to see if someone had seen where Seer had gone. The three testimonies he got all lined up to suggest he had run off towards their original destination: The nearest branch-temple. Casus ended up finding him just there, hunched over before the statue of Igaria muttering a generic prayer for protection that betrayed his lack of familiarity with real scripture.

"I hope you kept an eye on my mask."

Saying that made Seer jump up like a Reaper had just whizzed past his head. Once he realized it was Casus, however, he deflated with relief and gestured to one of the pews. After this, Seer was moved via a daisy chain of underground passages to a secure holding place beneath another Seven Spokes branch temple. Casus left him there for now, himself visiting an ordained grafter in one of the city's shrine-clinics. Based on questioning the man, he brought Tsetse's forearm to a church-affiliated independent grafter known for his research into insectoid biology - whose clinic happened to be halfway across the city, deep in the bowels of the unfinished tram line. He had gotten to the safehouse only two hours before Krahe.

_________________________________________________________

It had become abundantly clear that Krahe had something to say about the incident the moment Casus mentioned the location combination of a gambling house and the evoy apartment building. She nonetheless waited to bring it up until he was done, bearing an unsettling smirk on her face all throughout.

“Well well well, half a million each? How convenient, if “Seer” can point the finger for us, we ought to go collect the bounty in person. Just hope he's reliable.”

“What exactly would you have in mind for ‘collecting the bounty in person’?”

“An anonymous individual makes contact with Semzar, offering to have us both brought before him at a given date. Semzar prepares the money, and, quite likely, some sort of spectacle for Audunpoint’s underworld, if he is as much of an idiot as I think he is. We show up and make Slaughterhouse Nine look like a fucking joke, possibly with church support depending on projected enemy forces. His father may even be involved in an attempt to redeem himself for getting me involved in the first place. He just talked about your capture in the open in a smokery, can you believe that?”

"We shall know for sure in a few days, once Seer has been properly interrogated and any leads he provides have been checked. I doubt that his case is anywhere near high-profile enough to grab the attention of the Inquisition, but..."

"Hold, hold, stop. You mentioned inquisitors earlier. Explain."

"They are an arm of the Inner Wheel specializing in investigation and... Severe edge cases. For instance, if you had not gotten involved with my kidnapping, and if one of the Hashems took my body for himself, an inquisitor could have investigated the case and carried out judgment. I've only met inquisitors a handful of times. Severe people. Scarily competent. Not well-known besides the fact their powers of truth-extraction are nearly unmatched."

"Secret church police, outstanding."

"Comparing inquisitors to night-watchmen is a severe insult. An Inquisitor's work is not so far from yours, they are nothing less than specialist investigators for the Inner Wheel."

"I'll be sure to be more respectful if I ever meet an inquisitor. Wouldn't want to be accused of heresy and burned at the stake."

Seeing the confused look which she received for that statement, Krahe sighed: "The Inquisition had extremely negative connotations in my world. Let's move onto Tsetse, give me more specific details. I've got an uneasy feeling that one of us will run into him again. Start with those sonic emitters."

148 - Unlucky Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Silberblut took stock of the situation; Seer was feverishly trying to reload his howdah pistol while backing away, while Tsetse calmly approached. A shallow crater had been melted into the flyman's exoskeleton by Seer's attack, with rivulets of yellow hemolymph seeping out, but he seemed mostly fine. More than that, the wound was healing right then and there, the chitin melding back together and buckling outward. The scar was plain to see, and it would be a weak point until it healed properly, but such resilience was still astonishing. It was also extremely suspicious. Evoy could form Barriers and Wards just the same as anyone else, so why was he this unprotected? A consideration passed Silberblut's mind, but he dismissed it. This couldn't be an Evoy version of Mamon Armor. Surely not.

Dashing in, Tsetse unleashed a barrage of side kicks against Silberblut, using the length of his legs to control the range. Despite using his arm-blade to defend himself, it couldn't get a good cut on the chitin of Tsetse's calves. It bulged outward strangely in the lower half, and its surface was extremely slick. It felt like trying to cut glass, and Tsetse's technique didn't make it any easier either. It was clear he was highly skilled in whatever bizarre martial art this was. Then, the punches came in. Without dropping his focus on kicks, Tsetse flexed his arms, causing the segments of his forearms to raise up, exposing fleshy a membrane with three glassy orbs on each arm. With short punches, the orbs emitted a high-pitched noise and Silberblut felt as if he had been struck. The force was comparable to a Yellow Atropal. A sound-based concussive blaster of some kind. Minimal charge-up, great power output, so the flaw had to be range... And those membranes sure looked fragile.

This exchange went on for some time, high-pitched whirrs and thunderous impacts reverberating through the street. At one point, Silberblut got his fingers into an exoskeletal crease on Tsetse's upper foreleg, taking this opportunity to put his other arm to work as well by grabbing his foot. Tsetse blasted him in the chest twice in a row in an attempt to stop this, but by then Silberblut had already moved him enough that only one of the sonic blasts struck, and even this was a glancing blow. With a mighty heave, he swung Tsetse overhead and smashed him into the pavement. The man bounced; his chitin buckled and cracked in a few places with yellow bursting out, but its flexible nature absorbed much of the impact. Grunting with anger and exertion, Tsetse punched the ground and blasted himself into a quasi-upright position. Silberblut let go as to not get dragged along, and Tsetse now spun on his free foot while using the one Silberblut had grabbed to now try to deliver a spinning kick. Silberblut let his knees fall out from under himself, bending backwards just in time. The strange bulge on Tsetse's lower leg had slid down and over the top of his foot, revealing a single large sonic lens. As the kick followed through, Silberblut heard a high-pitched whirr. A deep gash was torn across the facade of the building to his left.

He followed through on the momentum, delivering a downward spinning left hook. Silberblut had seen through it, and opened the Second Eye. In a bright flash, the force of Tsetse's blow was absorbed, and Silberblut was able to handspring backwards, onto his feet and into a safer range. Seer, at this point, fired two more Pale-Reds in quick succession, which Tsetse dodged, followed by a slow, deep-red missile. It was obviously positioned to try and catch Tsetse after dodging, but the flyman rushed towards it, closing within only a few steps of Seer... And punched the Reaper back the way it came. Rather than detonate, it imploded and fizzled out.

"Unlucky," Tsetse repeated for the Nth time, turning his attention back towards Silberblut, even as he continued talking. "You put a safety primer on them. They don't detonate if it would hit you too. Heard you mention it once. Don't try to remember. I had a different face."

In the meanwhile, Silberblut had been looking for an opening, circling around, but even as he spoke, Tsetse meticulously kept up his guarded stance, adjusting to counter Silberblut's own changes in posture. Not wasting another moment, Tsetse once more closed the distance with a barrage of side kicks, but this time, every once in a while, he would fire one of the sonic emitters on his legs. There was no way to predict when it would come besides trying to find a pattern, and Silberblut did find several patterns: Firstly, Tsetse favoured his forward leg, maximizing range, while also using his opposite arm to attack. Secondly, he couldn't fire two of his sonic emitters at once, and there was a clear cooldown period for each of them. Thirdly, there wasn't a particular pattern to when he used the emitters, but there was a tell: The membrane shuddered a split-second before the equally split-second audible charge-up, giving him one third, perhaps four-tenths of a second to react to the tell. Silberblut hit the center of his belt to prime a coupler charge, feeling anathema pressure build within the device, waiting to be directed. A subtle aura of silver-gold flame built up around him.

Just after dodging a sonic blast punch He slipped under Tsetse's leg and delivered an overhand casting punch, lodging his arm-blade right between two of the sonic lenses. Bringing up his left arm to meet Tsetse's right, perpendicularly to invalidate the sonic emitter, Silberblut released his coupler charge and the power he had captured with the Second Eye: A mere three of Tsetse's sonic punches, but it added up, especially with Tsetse. Something about him drove the Silberblut Coupler into a frenzy. It wasn't mere guilt; the belt reacted to anything and everything from someone's inner evil nature to the wretchedness of an existence, like the Tindalos graft-beast.

An outpouring of Anathema rushed into his arm; silver flame came pouring out around his blade, and a jet of it erupted out of his elbow, pushing it further in. Tsetse's flesh came apart like wet paper, the flame tearing and shredding more than it burned.

147 - Unlucky [Cherno]

“Unlucky,” he said, craning his armored neck towards the duo. His empty, composite eyes shifted, focusing on Seer. “Someone wanted an eye on you, skinbag. Didn’t want you doing something stupid. And you…”

“...Unlucky. Too close. Nice suit. Look-away field. Looks expensive.”

His manner of speech was different, that much Krahe made clear when Casus recounted this part, but it wasn’t just that. Everything about his demeanor had changed. There was no more uncontrolled, bubbling anger, he didn’t spout slurs and diatribes willy-nilly. The posturing of a big bully had been replaced by cold professionalism.

“Feel free to remind me when trying to buy a new slot machine for my gambling-house became something stupid to do,” Seer retorted, masterfully hiding the fear in his voice with irritation, leveling the flyman with the unflinching, stone-faced glare of his visor.

Tsetse shrugged: “It never did. I will come along. See for myself. Maybe I was wrong. I doubt it.”

"Fine, go on," Seer gestured.

With a tinge of smugness, Tsetse refused: "No, I walk behind."

"Very well," Casus said, walking ahead. He tapped Seer on the back to signal him to move, and as they approached, Tsetse tensed in place, obviously expecting an attack. Casus, however, just walked on by. Once they had passed, he leaned over to Seer and said just loudly enough to be overheard: "I do not expect that even seeing the slot machine in person will suffice to satisfy our insectile friend."

The true purpose was to get his hand on his helmet, twisting the dial on its side once. A quasi-liquid, shadow-like substance began spilling out of his respirator, so dark that it appeared like a hole in the world. A waterfall of the same followed from under his coat, racing across the pavement. Despite Tsetse's blindingly-fast reactions given his size, the moment he came into the substance's vicinity he was enveloped in a whirlpool of cosmic blackness. It quickly coalesced into sticky threads and restrained the evoy, covering his eyes and mouth as well as binding his arms to his body. As this took place, dragging Seer along, Casus quickly made his escape. The reason he used the low-output coupler charge was that the full-power version was designed for the wearer’s escape; it would tremendously enhance his mobility and stealth, but Seer would be left behind.

Tsetse unfortunately turned out to possess far greater capabilities than previously expected. He not only broke free of the Black Magnum's restraints quite quickly, but also caught up with the duo only one street over. His arrival was heralded by deep, thunderously-loud buzzing, and he flew overtop the apartment buildings with a strange grace that belied his experience with mitigating his own non-aerodynamic build. Casus didn't recall seeing anything on Tsetse's back to suggest that he had wings; he thus concluded they had to be constructs. This was supported further by the fact his wings were covered in hemolymph and began rotting away the moment he handed, sending up a spray dust and pebbles as his armored feet broke several cobblestones.

While the slight tremor threw Seer off his feet, Casus regained his bearings and faced Tsetse properly this time. Taking into account Tsetse's intense killing intent, his previously-observed speed, his build, and the fact he had freed himself so quickly, Casus arrived at the conclusion that if he tried to win this using the Black Magnum would just be pointlessly endangering both himself and Seer.

______________________________________________________________________________

“That strong? He didn’t feel that way when I met him,” Krahe remarked.

“You fought him?”

“No, but I can feel it if someone is a real threat.”

“A killer recognizes a killer, I suppose. Perhaps you didn’t sense any killing intent when you met him because he had none towards you when you met.”

“Guess so. The moment he saw me, he went on a tirade about how all non-evoy were animals and how the Vedesian Swarm would inevitably rule the world.”

“Fairly typical Vedesian talking points. I must admit I am curious how you avoided escalating into a fight.”

Krahe went on to briefly summarize her encounter with Tsetse and his two lackeys, including a few choice highlights from the deluge of insults, slurs and threats she had leveled against him. It left Casus with a ghastly expression, and, after a sip of coffee to recenter himself, the Banisher said: “Well, I suppose I have no right to be surprised by your continued use of shock and intimidation tactics. Right, where was I...”

______________________________________________________________________________

"Unlucky," rumbled the insectile giant of a man. Chunks of chitin, flesh, and wing membrane sloughed off his back. A pair of pale-red bolts shot past Casus before he could do anything; one struck Tsetse dead-on, while the other missed, both detonating in a burst of light and dust. They felt like Red Reapers, only much faster and weaker. Casus, not one to waste an opportunity given to him, hopped back and pulled the Black Magnum Coupler off of his face, throwing it to Seer.

"Don't even think of stealing it," he warned, smacking his fist against the Silberblut Coupler's eye.

His body was enveloped in a burst of gold-and-silver flame, the undersuit forming just as both Seer and Tsetse recognized him. Nearly simultaneously, both of them said: "Silberblut?!"

Tsetse knew better than to attack him mid-transformation; many modern low-mid grade couplers lacked the iconic Transformation Burst feature, but Tsetse, it seemed, either knew what it was or just had the good judgment to stay away from a man enveloped in golden fire. As his armor's numerous plates clicked into place and his arm-blade emerged, the Silberblut Coupler's stern voice echoed through the street: “BLIND JUSTICE, THE LAWMAKER!”