Page 21

Something Wrong

S omething was wrong. Casus felt it in his gut.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not only did he lack the nerve to fight, he also couldn’t lie to save his skin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tsetse followed with a short punch, the kind one might use in tight quarters to hit an opponent's stomach. Casus, reading it as the trigger gesture for the greater emitter cluster, opened the Second Eye. Just as a wall of force came bearing down on him, he devoured it, skidding back just a bit. However, another blast of force came just as the Second Eye’s window of effectiveness petered out. Viciously focused, it wasn’t just enough to throw him against the wall, it embedded him into the brickwork and continued on through him, carving a hole into the stone.

The Silberblut armor’s internal structure was a relic of the highest order, and the only thing that prevented it from turning his insides into mush. Nothing could severely harm him until the armor’s durability was depleted, no matter how focused the attack was. Unfortunately, after weathering that , there really wasn’t much durability left. He wagered he could take maybe one more of those hits, and perhaps one or two regular strikes after that before he was forced out of his transformation.

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

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

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

It was obvious he was just playing, just using this fight as the stage for his continued monologue. “The answer is neither of those three above, yet also all of them. I am something new. This form… it is my body, yet I can shed it and survive. In this manner and beyond, we are alike.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His eyes shifted to Casus, and he added, “Not yet. I can’t beat a real Mamon Knight yet.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did he find you?” Casus asked eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You know what this means.”

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