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“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.”

“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 react. 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 somewhat 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 silver-gold flame, the undersuit forming just as both Seer and Tsetse recognized him. Simultaneously, they 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!”

Silberblut took stock of the situation; Seer was backing away and feverishly trying to reload his howdah pistol, 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 relatively unharmed. 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 so poorly protected? 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 spacing. 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 rise, exposing a fleshy 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 continued 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 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 yet again, 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 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, which Silberblut did find several of. Firstly, Tsetse favored 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. Silberblut then raised his left arm to intercept Tsetse's right, positioning it perpendicularly to invalidate the sonic emitter, then 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 with the flame tearing and shredding more than it burned.

Silberblut got halfway up his arm before the giant Evoy twisted 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 appeared mostly unharmed. That didn’t add up. Evoy didn’t have compartmentalized bodies like that, and it seemed there was a cavity in the center of the 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 dinner plate sized emitter lens. A rising whirr began to issue out of it as the surrounding membranes shuddered. The blood vessels within them bulged out, and then it died down as the 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 flyman 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 without taking a single hit, transforming left him sore all over for several hours—a painful side effect he fully prepared to bear. A few bloody coughs came up, their violent contractions 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, which was 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 the time being while he went to visit 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. His clinic happened to be halfway across the city, deep in the bowels of the unfinished tram line. Afterwards, he returned to the safehouse, arriving only two hours before Krahe.

***

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

“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 exhaled and said, “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.”

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…”