Page 24

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

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

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

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

[SHINING KNIGHT OF SILVER]

Tags

Self-Adaptation

Mamon Coupler Compatibility

Details

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

That Boon—the pride and great achievement of Casus’ hard work—was now a shackle. He now understood that it was fundamentally flawed.

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

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

Their fear for him wasn’t unfounded. The more he pushed, the more a fear grew inside him—a fear he would cripple or kill himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Y O U R

T U R N

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

[CRUSADER OF BLACK AND GOLD]

Tags

Imposition of One’s Will

Mamon Coupler Compatibility

Details

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

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

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

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

When he returned to his senses, the pain was gone. Or rather, he was still wracked with an ache as if he’d been fed through a rock crusher, but he no longer felt as though his Soul Furnace might burst at any moment. Glancing down, he saw that the Silberblut Coupler’s outer frame was, for the lack of a better term, shedding. It was now covered in dark, brittle slag. Casus unbuckled the belt, and as he took it off, the mere motion was enough to shake the slag off.

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

The Banisher, completely drained, spent the better part of the next day resting.

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

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

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

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

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

Not too long after, she made her way to Yao’s home. It was without incident, insofar as her own journey went. However, about a third of the way there, the ground shuddered. A huge impact, akin to a thunderclap, sounded in the distance, past the horizon—likely several kilometers outside the city. Then came another, and a third for good measure. A few seconds later she saw a burning yellow comet screaming into the heavens. Two more followed it; one blue and one purple. The blue one resembled an actual comet, violently tearing through the air with a rocket-like tail, whereas the purple one was smooth, its flight seeming nearly effortless save for the huge arcs of lightning it gave off.

A swarm of smaller lights separated from the yellow comet, surrounding the others, turning a swath of the sky into a field of explosions, only for blue and purple to emerge seemingly unscathed. The sky was lit up by a dance of lights as these three chased one another, unleashing arcane death upon each other. Distant sonic booms and explosions filled the night, and the conflict of nameless demigods illuminated the city like a wild thunderstorm.

Krahe almost felt at home for the span of her walk across the city. It drew out a great number of curious civilians, with a surprising number of people climbing out onto the roofs of their homes and apartment buildings. Despite the number of eyes, Krahe felt even safer from notice. Attention was being directed in the exact opposite direction of where she was, after all. The three comets were still fighting by the time she reached Yao’s place.

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

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

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

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

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

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