Page 29

The first thing Krahe did, once she was a safe distance from the ferry, was to verify that there was, in fact, a voidkey in the box, and to ping it with an appraisal attempt. The key was in there, but her appraisal washed off it in a manner that suggested her glasses couldn’t appraise it properly for reasons other than anti-appraisal measures. That most likely meant it was third-order.

Rather than heading straight back to Gashward 94 or any other place she normally frequented, Krahe stopped by a small Zaveshian shrine which she had scoped out beforehand without visiting. It was more of a church-owned gymnasium with a small shrine at the front end. After paying for an hour of use and receiving a disposable timer-talisman, she ducked into one of the showers, taking the time to store the voidkey-sarcophagus in her Kenoma Sack. The container seemed to be designed for such storage, as it came alive when she brought it into the storage rift’s vicinity with the intent to put it in. Some of the symbols lit up with purple light, and the lid shifted slightly, becoming firmly fixed. It even took up far less capacity than it rightly should have, just based on knowing the key was third-order.

With that out of the way, Krahe decided to make use of the gymnasium, showering once she was done. Only then did she make her way to Garvesh’s, taking a detour to a food cart that she liked on the way there. She wanted to let him know that all had gone well, and to confirm that the voidkey was of a standard he had expected from his contact.

The malformed corpse of Imraal’s cart was still out front, now joined by a trail of dried blood leading inside the building. Krahe half-jokingly muttered a prayer to the deceased machine, then went inside, following the blood trail up the stairs to Garvesh’s apartment. From the direction, it was clear a corpse had been dragged out—obviously the baneworm. This guess was confirmed when Krahe entered the bathroom, finding Garvesh still in his pool-sized tub, with the corpse gone.

“Couldn’t they clean the blood after they took the corpse away?” she asked.

“Hrrm?” Garvesh grumbled, the sound more akin to the deep rumble of a cyber-gator than the vocalization of a person. He looked up at her, a predatory glow in his eyes, pupils constricted. Then, it suddenly melted away, and he returned to his normal self. “Oh, it’s you. Thought it was the cleaner. You just came in after he left to dispose of the meat. He will clean the blood too, if he knows what’s good for him. Well? How’d it go?”

“The snake guy I met with didn’t sound too happy when I brought up the Spire of Glass. Gave me this box that looks like a miniature sarcophagus,” she said, holding out her arm as she began the process of opening the Kenoma Sack.

Garvesh simply watched in silence while continuing to repair another of his ward-scales, this one two rows down and three to the right of the previous. A glint of recognition lit up his eyes at the sight of the box alone, but in the next moment, his gaze became distant. The Thousand-yard Stare—it was unmistakable. Coming closer and kneeling in a spot free of blood next to the tub, she set it on the edge and finally opened it. Immediately, a strong, dense aura spilled out, like a wall of smell hitting her in the face, only it didn’t smell like anything.

For the first time, she took the voidkey out of its container. It was a comet-like shape formed by a three-pronged bronze spiral, suspending in its center a shard of jagged black metal that thrummed with a mysterious and ominous aura. Cuneiform symbols were etched down the length of each of the voidkey’s prongs, as well as on one facet of the shard. Though, in the shard’s case, they were fragmented.

Something further inside the box grabbed her eye. It was a rectangular piece of the bottom, as wide as a memory slate and twice as long, with a cutout for a finger on one side so it could be easily pried out.

“Oh, it’s one of these… ” the lizard muttered at the sight of the key. Krahe pinged the rectangular stone, and received confirmation that it was, indeed, a memslate, and even that it contained the voidkey’s specifications. Setting the key down, she brought out her eyebox and finagled it to get the too-long memslate into its slot. It only went in halfway, leaving the spring loaded cover open, but the eyebox read it just fine. She wondered if this was an old, outdated design, or perhaps just an alternate style of memslate that was still in use.

[SHARDKEY OF HESHMAD ABBASI, No. 7624]

Tags

Third-order

Voidkey

Ancient

Series 7/8

Details

Thaumic Throughput +D1

Entropy Tolerance +D1

Entropy Dissipation +D1

Barrier Catalyst (Hardened, Form-fitting, Shatter-type Anti-Meltdown Safety)

Barrier Hardening +D2

Barrier Formation Rate +E1

Barrier Upkeep Reduction +D1

Ward Catalyst (Hardened, Interlaced, Trinity Composite)

Ward Hardening +C1

This voidkey was wrought of the 7624th fragment of the armor of Heshmad Abbasi. May each among the 8888 Immortals of his great army forever bear a piece of his unfaltering strength.

“A shardkey. Bastard thinks he’s funny throwing it back in my face,” Garvesh muttered, his words laced with anger. He shook his head, asking with a calmer tone, “What number is it?”

“Seven-thousand six-hundred twenty-four, Series 7/8. Whoever made it seemed to be under the delusion that it was for some truly elite army.”

“The 8888 Immortals were one of the most elite armies of their time. You just got the second weakest kind of shardkey, the kind used by those of them who didn’t see combat or were not important enough to worry about assassins,” he quickly corrected, seeming as insulted as if she had described a high-caliber revolver as “primitive” to the average droid-wrangler. He held out his free hand to grab the key. Krahe, seeing the dissociation in his eyes, handed it over. As he examined it, he continued speaking. His accent thinned out, as if he were forgetting to use it. “Each series of 1111 delineates a jump in the voidkey’s power based on the size and quality of the armor shards they’re built around. I’d even say that one of these is the epitome of a low mid-ranker voidkey; solid allrounder with exceptional defensive characteristics. They’re even designed to be compatible with upgrades and are highly collectible, so either way if you keep it or sell it later on you can’t go wrong.”

“How much would it have cost me in DDs?” Krahe asked in the same tone she used when haggling. That pulled him back.

“Who’s to say?” the old lizard grinned, his accent returning in full force.

“I’m sure you’ll call in that favor I owe you for a tenfold profit.” She grinned back, taking the shardkey out of his hand.

“We’ll see when that time comes. Now go, I—”

Garvesh plainly struggled to finish repairing the scale, his eyes constricting as steam erupted from his nostrils, followed by a trickle of blood. With superhuman effort he completed the task, and stumbled to his feet, staring ahead like a warrior on the precipice of death. A rumbling noise could be heard from his stomach, and he turned to look at Krahe.

“I really hope this is yesterday’s dinner instead of the alternative.”

He coughed, and another trickle of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. Again he glanced her way, nodding for her to leave, and so she did, trying to ignore the gruesome sounds coming from the bathroom as she left. By the rancid stench that reached her just before she exited the apartment, it seemed the lizard had gotten his preferred outcome.

As Krahe made her way from Garvesh’s place and turned the corner, she heard footsteps nearby, entering the same alleyway but from the other end. Rapid, but decisive or agitated. They were accompanied by a whistled melody. Though she never once glimpsed that stranger, a sense of unease washed over her. She walked aimlessly for a short time, looking out for signs of someone following her or laying in ambush, but found no evidence of such a thing, and so continued on her way back to Gashward 94. Her intention was to replace her voidkey and reuse the miniature sarcophagus for Atomica. However, she still had quite a bit of built-up Isotope stored in her arm, so she decided to dissipate most of it first before she carried out a voidkey change. She had, after all, plenty of time to burn.

In the blink of an eye, several hours passed.

If only that were the case. In truth, Krahe could feel the blood pounding in her head and her eyes glazing over as she read the same strip of Yao’s scroll over and over. It was one of the few outright mystical sections, and was presented as such, with the scroll openly stating it was a riddle, a way of preparing the reader for other texts that were likely to be this obtuse in their entirety. She pulled the last dregs of Isotope into herself, lit a cigarette, and decided to just wait it out, laying back on the sofa as she turned the shardkey over in her hand. She could have taken more purge pills to speed up the process, but besides being unpleasant at best, they were also caustic enough to threaten stomach lining damage with repeat dosage. This was not a problem when they were used as intended—to help purge minor curses.

As she felt the last of her Isotope scatter and fade, Krahe sat up, mentally glancing at her arm’s Isotope capacity—20% full. Enough to do something with but not enough to be a problem. She conjured a talisman into her hand. One among the insights she had managed to glean from Yao’s scroll was a truly rudimentary talisman for easing the extraction of a “set” voidkey. It required no external power, only good ink and a steady hand to draw its symbol, a winding “spiral” of straight lines and right angles.

Extracting the Twin Serpent Key felt just as sickly ticklish and unpleasant as it had been when she did it for the Black Sun Coupler’s test run. If she had to assume the talisman had done anything, she would guess it might have reduced the stress on the voidkey itself, or it might have sped up the fading of that sickly, wound-like sensation of absence. The Shardkey went in easily, but the moment it was seated, Krahe felt a faint wrongness. After mentally feeling around in the dark, a subtle mental pull clued her in on the culprit: her wards were wrong. Or rather, they didn’t match the key’s embedded ward design.

After she dispersed and began reconstructing her wards, Krahe found that the shardkey was guiding her. At first, she couldn’t help but feel as if her wards were forming far too quickly, twice or thrice faster than normal, but it turned out to be only the first layer. Bit by bit, Krahe built up the multi-layered structure, and the reason for the term “Trinity Composite” became clear. A “padding” underlayer of homogenous, compressed pyroclast. A “flexible armor” layer of interlocking segments, serving as a smooth transition into the outermost, “articulated plates” layer, resembling obsidian in color and reflectiveness. The Trinity Composite design was somewhere between antique full-plate and modern hardsuit armor. Krahe still couldn’t quite tell why this worked, unlike most of her previous attempts. She well and truly hoped it was up to her own lacking understanding of how wards functioned, rather than some glaring flaw in her thinking that she couldn’t perceive. After all, she had no clue how they didn’t get in the way, why they only showed themselves to protect their user, or how they determined what was an attack. If she could grasp the fundamental nature of wards, the ability to reshape her own as she saw fit would follow.

Frustrated, she finished reworking her wards, before placing Atomica in the stone box and storing it away. She immediately left for the Temple of Records, leveraging her access to restricted texts on wards. She left with a total of three books, two being publicly available foundational texts while the third contained records of nontraditional ward compositions, as well as various methods for embedding and extracting the ward composition of a voidkey. Their titles and authors read as such:

Armor of the Spirit

by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi

The Wizard’s Aegis:

A comprehensive history of personal wards.

by Audun Sorun

Record of Transcending Human Resilience: Chapter of Wards

translation by Hashmail Ibn-Abbasi

original by Unknown

The Record of Transcending Human Resilience was the restricted text. While the others were typical leather-bound tomes, this text was a scroll, with the translator explaining that he disliked scrolls and only used this form factor because the record didn’t work within a book format.

Krahe got as far as learning the most prevalent theory of ward invention. This theory was based on countless historical accounts corroborating it, and it stated itself that they were most likely invented as a defense against melee attackers, originally intended to buy a magic user enough time to create distance. At that point, as she was getting into the historical usage of personal wards, Casus came into the safe house.

A simple phrase followed with his entrance. “Ah. You are here. Good. We know where Semzar is and how to get to him.”

Those words were all it took for Krahe to stick a blank talisman paper into her book and jump to her feet. Just like that, a switch flipped in her head, and she took the Black Sun Coupler from its spot in a hidden compartment under the kitchen stove. She strapped it to her waist, donned the supporting armor, and covered it all with a long coat she used to disguise herself. They spoke briefly as she did this, exchanging basic operational info and the plan of attack. It was a straightforward plan, but it made sense.

“Do we get Red Hood support, or are they all needed for the frontal assault?” she asked as she locked the gun-like catalyst to her left arm’s bracer.

“Unfortunately, we shall be on our own in the subterrain,” Casus said.

And so, they were off, riding through the city until they reached a nearby nook to stash the motorbike in. As they approached their goal, Krahe sent Barzai further and further ahead. Even if it was secret, given its nature, it was not unlikely for Semzar or one of his subordinates to station guards or at least lookouts nearby.

There were no guards stationed outside the secret entrance, and it was walled up just as Seer had described, but Barzai did see something. A woman, walking down the street with a boy in tow. He couldn’t be more than seven or eight, dressed in brand new, generic clothes. The woman’s manner of dress was the same, generic to the point of being suspicious, and imperfect at points. Her fingers bore numerous rings, some of which were Calbian currency, and tattoos peeked out from the insides of her sleeves. Something about the two of them, about that boy’s demeanor and the way he seemed to be dragged along, set Krahe off.

She had seen human trafficking countless times; in fact, she had personally depopulated entire sub-sectors that had been used for that revolting practice. Seeing that woman all but dragging the child along was dubious enough, but the fact that she shared no resemblance with the boy was another nail in her coffin. In fact, she didn’t look much like a real person at all. It wasn’t obvious at a glance, not something a normal person would easily notice; no baneworm tendrils visible under her skin, no evidence of heavy cosmetic grafting, or any other surface-level give-aways. It was her entire being, particularly her face and the manner in which she moved. Krahe had seen it countless times in gangsters, merchants of death, loan sharks, corporate ladder-climbers, and politicians.

If Krahe’s measure of her was right, the fundamental thread of humanity inside that woman was too severely corroded for her to mask it at all times, and as far as she knew, there was nobody looking right now.

“There’s someone approaching the entrance. Stay out of sight if you can,” she said to Casus. She rushed forward, sending Barzai to the underpass, where she left him hovering in a manner impossible for a living bird. Hidden from sight, the eidolon hung there, flapping his wings without disturbing the air. Closer and closer. Krahe timed her approach so she would entrap the woman, while Casus hung back, ducking into an alleyway.

From this close, she could be sure. She just needed the woman to face her. Eventually, she did. At first she turned slightly to face the hidden entrance, glimpsing Krahe in the periphery, after which she whipped around and reached for something on her hip.

“It’s… it’s you… The one from the posters!” came an alarmed utterance. The woman raised her barrier, forming a translucent shield of greenish-blue hexagons. It was about a meter tall, a bit less wide, and flat rather than domed. Meanwhile, she raised one hand, forming octahedral spikes in front of each finger. With her other hand, she held onto the boy. There was a feral kind of fear in her eyes.

“Oh? You know me? Then this’ll be easier. Just answer me one question. Just one. Easy, right? Where are you taking the kid? Tell the truth for once in your wretched life, and I won’t kill or maim you.”

Krahe genuinely meant that. If the woman spoke truthfully, she would choke her out, tie her up, and have Casus drag her off to be detained by the church. She also knew that was astronomically unlikely to come to pass.

“H-huh? Him? I—He’s my cousin’s little brother! I’m taking him home! Yeah! Taking him home!”

Even without the kid’s eyes screaming that it was a lie, it would’ve been obvious. Slowly approaching, raising her own barrier just in case, Krahe reiterated, “That’s a lie. One more chance, c’mon. I won’t pretend to be an Inquisitor, but I have my own means of getting the truth when I want it. If you lie, or even try to avoid the question, may the spirit of a raven peck out your eyes. Well?”

Obviously, a human trafficker wouldn’t openly admit to being one.

She opened her mouth to speak, and the moment the beginnings of a word formed, Krahe willed Barzai to set upon her. He revealed himself, screeching with the voice of some bird that definitely wasn’t a raven, and attacked the trafficker-woman’s face, tearing into her wards with his beak, reddish flame spilling out. She wildly fired off her thaumaturgy, but Krahe had already preformed a dive, and before the boy could be hurt, she had the woman in a simplistic grapple. She had surfaced and simply wrapped her left arm around the trafficker from behind, pinning her arms to her body.

The trafficker-woman’s strength faltered against hers, despite the fact she was stronger than a civilian man. Thanks to consistent physical training, Krahe’s Force had grown to E2, but that alone would not have produced this result. The Left Arm of Chernobog grew in strength alongside all of her attributes, including even the Shardkey’s benefits. This all coalesced into a crushingly powerful bearhug that squeezed the air out of the trafficker-woman’s lungs and forced her to let go of the boy. Despite all this, the trafficker regained her bearings and fought back, summoning up ghostly hands that snatched Barzai, grabbed at Krahe’s hair, and attempted to fight her off in any possible way to break free. Quickly realizing that it wasn’t working, the trafficker gathered all but one at Krahe’s arm and attempted to pry it loose while her only free arm continued fighting with Barzai. These ghostly limbs were all just as strong as the trafficker, four of them managing to weaken Krahe’s grasp enough for the woman to slip out. Krahe couldn’t help but wonder whether she was a trafficker because of this ability, or vice versa.

Either way, it didn’t matter. She was a corpse that didn’t know it was dead yet.

Originally, Krahe had planned to immobilize and interrogate the woman, then maybe give her a chance at survival by turning her over to the church. It would have depended on how she came across during the interrogation—whether she was just a broken person in a bad situation who was capable of redemption, and so on. There was no longer space for such nuance; not with the trafficker lunging for the child in an attempt to take a human shield. A simple skim forward, followed by a left straight punch into the trafficker’s stomach, or rather—given how she was turned—her liver. The force of that punch alone was enough to send the fifty-something kilo woman to the ground. Despite having made an effort to avoid subjecting the boy to needless trauma, Krahe’s anger got the better of her, and she held out her hand.

Furious redness illuminated the underpass.

An equally furious electric buzz accompanied the glow. It waned, then began again, doing so a total of three times. The child tried to look at first, but Krahe blocked his sight with a thin sheet of jade. Only a steaming, greasy silhouette remained upon the flagstones.

Krahe killed the fusion reaction for the final time, holding her hand to her face, somewhat dumbfounded. While the shardkey didn’t strengthen her tolerance much more than the Twin Serpent Key, the dissipation rate was a total game changer.

“I did not know that Barzai could detect lies,” Casus remarked as he approached, having emerged from hiding moments earlier.

“He can’t; it was just a distraction.” She shrugged. “I could just tell, both that she was a trafficker and that she was lying.”

The boy, confused and terrified in equal measure, had walked out from under the underpass, bawling his eyes out. The child’s panic and terror mingled with a sense of awe as he noticed Casus. He craned his neck to look up at the two-meter-tall living holy relic.

“Get the kid out of here. I’ll go on ahead. Don’t worry, I’ll leave a few of them for you.”

Despite her desire to save the child, Krahe strongly disliked dealing with kids, because she didn’t know how.

“Are you certain?” Casus asked, though the question rang hollow. He was already kneeling over the child as he spoke. Looking back, Krahe reached up to her head and started pulling on her voidkey.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “There’s a shrine not too far from here, just take him there and come back.”

Visibly conflicted, Casus sighed, picking up the child while keeping him from looking at the corpse.

“Five minutes. I shall return in five minutes,” he uttered before sprinting off. The boy remained silent, too shaken to scream.

Before long, she had the key out of her head and slotted into the Black Sun Coupler. It was just her and Barzai now.

The underpass fell silent.

As for the hidden passage, there were a few loose bricks throughout the underpass, but only one that hid an actual lever. The others were supposedly a mix of duds and fakes that would send an alarm when removed. Casus had also noted Seer’s claim that the alarms were usually ignored because of how often they were tripped on accident. The section of wall seamlessly swung open, revealing a heavy vault door behind the stone facade. She closed it behind herself, since Casus knew how to open it.

Inside, it really was just a tunnel. She continued deeper, keeping her senses sharp and her hand on the transformation dial. On and on, through the empty tunnel, twisting and turning with the only sound being her footsteps. Basic lights were strung up along the left wall. The air was dry, but not stale, but gradually, an unpleasant, dampness crept in. As she walked, she glimpsed a few side rooms, most being either empty or filled with random trash, boxes, and so on. A few were caved in, and several more contained recognizable items. Within one particular room, an articulated chair stood, bolted to the ground in the middle; next to it, a table, a bucket, and a tub. Everything was stained a crusty, dark brown. Then she noted several teeth littering the ground.

A second chamber of the same type waited a few steps further, entirely missing a door, with deep gashes in the stone and the chair clearly having been ripped out of the ground and thrown against the wall with inhuman force. This room too was stained. Further signs of carnage continued through the tunnel for some time, until at some point, they stopped at a repaired section, where the tunnel had clearly been severely damaged, likely by an explosion.

A handful of makeshift jail cells followed, clean save for a thick layer of dust, with three being clean enough to suggest recent use. They were empty with the exception of mattresses and shit-filled buckets. She couldn’t tell in the dark, but the mattresses looked stained in spots that did not suggest an adult source, nor any sort of natural incontinence. She knew what it meant, and fostered the ember of rage as she continued onward.

The sound of footsteps splashing through the ankle-deep water could be heard.

Without much thought, she turned the dial and gave herself over to the Black Sun Coupler. The suit had slightly changed from its previous form, incorporating the Trinity Composite into its armor, creating an even larger, more ominous silhouette than before. Its plating, though still matte and utilitarian, was shaped subtly differently, influenced by the shardkey’s fragmentary memory of its original form as the armor of a legendary warlord. The plates now bore additional minute details, as well as cuneiform inscriptions along the edges. Some were words of protection, others were proclamations of rebuke. The Forming Toroid incorporated seamlessly into the right arm’s gauntlet, and the same went for her gun holster.

As her swift metamorphosis completed and her senses returned, the bird flew over to her and perched on her shoulder. He opened his beak, replaying a horribly garbled mess of noise that vaguely resembled a snippet out of a doom metal song. Monumental, ominous guitars and gigantic drums underlined demonic, bassy vocals, spoken more than they were sung. They surely conveyed what Barzai wanted to express.

“None can save your souls, none escape the wrath. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No life is spared, renounce the cries for help!”

With her exhalation, Viridaimon’s crow-like gas mask released long threads of smoke. Krahe raised her left arm, holding it straight to get a feel for the suit’s stabilization. Then, she dived, just to dial-in any impact Viridaimon might have had upon the Liminal Coil’s functions. The relative time distortion felt a bit weaker, but the dive worked fine otherwise. She began forming a burster in her right hand as she continued further, sending Barzai ahead.