Page 3

It's a Research and Development Montage

A short time later, as she sat in the window, smoking Arrha and looking out over the docks, she found that she couldn’t call Barzai out. Looking at its system readout, the spirit’s status had gone from “Fully Nourished,” to, “Exhausted—Cogniphagic Metamorphosis in Progress.”

Barzai became available again the next day, making itself known to Krahe as she was cooking lunch while casually reading through Secrets of the Atropal. When she looked inward towards the raven spirit, its natural form shifted to a poorly defined image of how she had imagined the Daemon Core. It then sent her a mental demand to be fed, and so, she did.

Time continued to pass. Krahe furthered her investigation by day while studying and practicing theurgy by night. It quickly became a habit of Casus’ to stop by for dinner. The man often returned exhausted and covered in blood, and as it turned out, it was due to the fact he was going out of his way to hunt down Hashem Family members—a direct investigation style that by its very nature often turned violent.

“Many of them have done nothing to deserve death, but I shan’t spare traffickers and drug pushers. Not in a million turns of the Wheel,” he said.

Meanwhile, in her own investigations, Barzai became a second pair of eyes for Krahe. It gradually built up an understanding of the Daemon Core, and only when she was already four days into the process did Krahe read deeply enough to learn that this was a common practice for allowing a True Eidolon to manifest in more than its natural form. It seemed that the longer a True Eidolon was attached to someone, the stronger it grew and the more forms it could take. While Barzai’s growth was merely a matter of time, conceiving of her own Theurgy was something wholly contingent on active effort.

At first, she experimented with simply attempting to translate her keystone thaumaturgies directly to an eidolon level of power output and found that it just didn’t work that way. All the disparate actions of carrying out the thaumaturgy were muscle memory by now; by comparison, finagling an eidolon into carrying out the task was as difficult as programming a robot to do a summersault versus simply doing a one herself. Krahe had done something of the sort before, and she could do so again, given enough time. Theurgy wasn’t by any means analogous to programming, but that was just her closest point of comparison.

Several more days passed, and Krahe gained a stronger grasp on the intricacies of Theurgy, allowing her to translate some of her own skills. She reached ever closer to achieving what she had said she would do back in the underground gymnasium. Eidolons, as it turned out, very much liked to act through vessels rather than directly. Instead of an absurdly powerful beam, a short-lived construct would be given form to deliver that power. The power of an Eidolon was produced neither by thauma burning nor thaumic fusion, but by some vaguely understood third process; the only part that mattered, however, was that Anathemists were known for achieving eidolon-like levels of output, and that, in turn, occultists were known for replicating the feats of Anathemists in a safe manner using eidolons. From these writings, combined with various well known theurgies, Krahe concluded that what she wanted to do was perfectly achievable.

After yet more days of effort, she arrived at a hybrid application that would benefit from her left arm’s unique properties as a living casting conduit as well as the advantages of dregshot. This meant that she had to source dregshot bullets, that was true, but Garvesh made that a non-issue and even gave her a discount in his vengeance-stricken state. Her delivery method would be a construct-missile partially formed through her own power, adding an entropy and effort cost to the theurgy in exchange for allowing it to be even more powerful and efficient. It would be purposely less powerful than a Bloody Reaper, due to the single-target design, allowing her to get more shots out of one eidolon. She wasn't sure how many, but she hoped for three per Chthonian Eel, so that she could have a full six-round clip.

With her nascent understanding of occultism, Krahe ended up using a crude method of refining her dregshot, embedding the occult pattern in writing. She would roll up the talisman so it rested against the walls of the casing and partly protruded outward around the bullet, crimping it inward and gluing it in place with an occult glue made of her own blood, the so-called “Unguent of Nug-Soth.” Leaving a baking dish full of the stuff overnight in the moonlight had the whole safe house filled with its stench, but such was the procedure laid out by Ibn Ghazi Barzai. She filled all the remaining free space inside the bullet with thaumine powder that she had ground down into ultra-fine grains.

Out of this whole process, the talisman would be the hardest part. She started with a stack of talisman papers and began the rite for embedding eidolon instructions into writing, focusing her mind on particular aspects of what the eidolon was to do as she meditated according to the guidelines, trying to commune with one of her eidolons. A hard-to-perceive visual element would float by the edge of her awareness, ephemeral like the memory of a dream, and she would try to replicate it on the paper before it vanished from thought. Sometimes, even when she successfully drew the sigil, looking at it made her realize that the eidolon had misunderstood her, and so she would have to try again. She dug deep not only into her own objective understanding, but, according to the guidelines of the texts, she also dug up emotions to better communicate with the spirit.

As Krahe understood it, it was infinitely easier to make an eidolon understand hatred and murderous intent for an individual than to convey how a guided missile found its target through trigonometry. It was equally unsurprising and inconvenient that occult spirits worked on occult rules.

And so, with the glassing of Oasis being fresh in her mind, she dug into that hatred and found the guidance portion coming out with remarkable ease.

There were supposedly more direct, faster methods, but they were, unsurprisingly, both advanced and kept closely guarded by those who knew them.

It took several hours, dozens of talisman papers, and an eye-watering sum in magical ink to work out the full pattern, but it was done. Casus returned as Krahe was finishing the third copy, with the first and second framed up above the writing desk for reference, one for each side.

???

It was done, and it made Casus grimace in apprehension when he first saw it.

He’d seen grisly talisman designs before, sure, but there was something malicious about this one. The central image was a disembodied forearm, clawed and with gnarled skin-like cooling magma—a more monstrous version of Krahe’s own arm, clearly—with smoke billowing from its back and rays of crimson killing light shooting from its palm. Around it swirled ominous patterns that dragged the eyes, resembling at once the legs of a centipede and the bones of a ribcage, but the back of the talisman paper gave him pause. In the center, a three-cornered eye with three pupils fused into one shape, and around it, letters which he could not read, alongside the typical occult patterns seen on all talismans.

Killing intent. Malice. Hate. Hate beyond hate. Hate so virulent, so vitriolic, that it alone could teach an eidolon, a thoughtless spirit that knew neither death nor emotion, what it was to deeply desire another’s demise.

Casus had read that the exposed theurgic patterns of a Reaper exuded a ceaseless, furious forward drive, and those of an Atropal did the same with the impression of a coiled snake, locked onto prey, ready to pounce. He had even examined archival examples of old scrolls just to get a feeling for it, part out of curiosity and part out of a desire to understand Lady Blackhand’s capabilities, thinking it only fair since she had shown an interest in the workings of Mamon Couplers. This was, nonetheless, fundamentally different compared to a mass-manufactured pattern; not merely more intense, but more profound, in the same way that the feeling of transforming into Silberblut was more profound than transforming into Omniphage.

Keeping quiet, stilling himself utterly, the Banisher looked on as Lady Blackhand completed the third talisman and began on a fourth. Horrible, murderous malice poured out of her, smoke of blackest pitch, filling the room with the smell of sulfur and stinging fumes, only to gather at the tip of her brush as she raised it from the inkwell. She rendered the clawed hand’s outline with a small handful of strokes and filled it in.

“How long do you intend to wait?” came a deadpan statement as she dipped her brush. From the windowsill, a horrible noise followed. Once more, that distorted section of music, like alarm trumpets coming out of a speaker made of scrap metal reading off of a broken and glued-together memslate. He hadn’t noticed it at all, but now, he could see that infernal crow perched next to the window as clear as day.

“I merely did not wish to disturb you, and at the same time, I was curious.”

“If you want to watch, just watch. It disturbs me more if I know you’re trying to avoid my notice.”

As if to punctuate her point, she clicked her tongue and tossed the talisman paper into a nearby baking pan of odorous liquid. Coming closer, Casus saw half a dozen more similar papers floating in the dish in various stages of having the ink leached from them. He wanted to comment on how Blackhand would have saved a great deal of money if she had learned of this solution earlier, but she had already started over.

For a solid half hour, Casus looked on, watching three of the malicious talismans being completed and a fourth started, only for his stomach to rumble and cause Lady Blackhand to make the tiniest of errors. It was a deviation he himself with his vastly superior vision barely noticed, but she nonetheless tossed the paper—and shot him in the head. A single beam of burning wrath, searing away at his wards and briefly glaring his vision like a bright flash of light. It was much weaker than he had expected.

“Next time, it will be a real one. There’s some leftover stew in the fridge. Heat up the whole pot, and don’t call me over.”

“Very well,” he acquiesced, already starting to mend his wards as he left Blackhand to her devices.

Later that day, Krahe tested her prototype dregshot. Well out of sight, in a subterranean gymnasium of the Grafting Church. She also sicced Barzai upon several dummies to ascertain the eidolon’s natural combative abilities. She found herself satisfied with learning that it could ram into foes as a potent kinetic attack, as well as create seemingly instantaneous explosions with flashes of its eyes. The range of this “Blast Flash” was limited to only around ten meters within Barzai, required line of sight of the bird, and, from testing against artificial wards and barriers, Krahe ascertained that it was of an arcane nature.

Nonetheless, both Barzai’s natural capabilities and the performance of her new theurgy were anything but disappointing. Casus had expressed that he wished to come along but couldn’t due to apostolic duties.

Yet later, they met again, and as was his nature, the Banisher immediately opened with, “By your demeanor, I presume that you are not dissatisfied with the fruits of your work. What do you intend to call the theurgy? Another alien play on words?”

“Of course,” she said. Then, purposely speaking actual German, she intoned: “Wandrei Faust.”

“That must be in a language from your world, I presume. What a strange sound. It will eat at me if I do not know what absurdly stretched play on words this one is.”

Krahe chuckled.

“Nothing so far-fetched as Six Trees Killer. Wandrei is the surname of an author who wrote of creatures called Fire Vampires. Thus the connection to my element, and it sounds somewhat like the word for wandering. Faust was the name of a fictitious man who made a deal with an otherworldly entity. It also translates to fist, and there was a long line of directed-blast missile weapons with that same word in the name. Though it’s not the exact same operating principle. My Wandrei Faust is inspired by the descendants of those weapons.”

“Am I right to assume that you intend to test it against a live target sometime soon?”

“I’m not in the mood to go looking for trouble, but trouble has a habit of finding me nonetheless. All my leads go straight into Hashem territory, so I’ve got a good feeling that I’ll get to give it a test run sooner rather than later…”

In preparation, Krahe loaded six dregshot bullets into two clips; in the first, they alternated with thaumstone-core lead bullets, while in the second, three dregshots came first, followed by three Mescalt solid-cast bullets. Unfortunately, she had found that Mescalt’s superior properties didn’t function correctly with a core of thaumstone; on impact, the same material reaction that would normally produce a spear of semiliquid metal would crush the thaumstone core and scatter it with the pathetic power of a low-caliber snake shot round. Barely enough to kill small vermin.

She did, indeed, not actively go about antagonizing random Hashem Family members, despite being able to identify them by the quirks of their dress and the tattoos which the more dedicated of them displayed. They weren’t nearly so crassly overt as the gang tattoos she was used to, but they were identifiers nonetheless, though subtle enough for deniability.

However, it just so happened that when she went out to investigate at a place known to be under Hashem control, she did so without any disguise whatsoever, wearing the same exact outfit she had when she depopulated the Old Street Butchershop—biosuit, loose green trousers, and Shiva’s boots.