Voyage Through the Multiverse (Open) [IC]

[Rostavykhan]

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Katya

Though September and Mr. Ivanoff may have been bothered by the other man's flirting, Katya wasn't. She smirked and gave Mark a quick wink, though she quickly cleared her throat and straightened herself out. "So your cooperation with the locals is only for convenience?", She asked. "I see.", She said, nodding. So, AEGIS wasn't a fan of the Brits either, it seemed. That made Katya loosen up a bit more, and elicited a small sigh from her. "In that case, I believe our goals do align. I believe it best that we don't allow any abhuman elements to run rampant, or for anything too nasty to fall into untrustworthy hands."

Miria

Miria was carrying on with Kiara, for her part, before the sudden arrival of the new, strange woman. Her sudden manifestation caused Miria to jump and stiffen up, and almost even hiss, until she realized that the being who'd joined them was neither an Auror, nor some AEGIS monster. She still kept a safe distance from her and Lee, and kept a cautious eye on the two...right up until Link's chain tore another hole in the local reality. Golden light clashed with the brilliant red from her dagger, the jagged crystal reacting to the spike of energy that shot from the pathway.

Miria did hiss that time. She slinked back behind Kiara and Lee, and began to hurriedly pat herself down, fishing for her small tablet so she could take readings. "Why does this keep happening?", She asked aloud, grumbling, and then growling as she remembered how she kept her tools all in her bag. "I need my tools first! I need to take readings and, and- hey, wait!", She yelled, still worrying about leaving her backpack behind before the small crew around her began to move. Miria was glad that she could move so fast, wasting little time in booking it back into the door and hooking a left into her room, practically diving for her bag and turning to catch up with everyone out back, before they'd left her behind. She stuck close behind Kiara and Lee as before, although her eyes were now fixed squarely on Link and the strange chain he'd been holding - which she'd now become very interested in, above all else.

[Naval Monte]

Tides of Change
Kabal

As the shuttle landed 34 and the black guards awaited for them. The guards eye the automatic rifles on guards as they kept their gauss rifles down. The silver protocol droid would walk forward. "Welcome aboard the CED Vindicator. I am 34-K1, this ship protocol droid and xenolingualist expert. I was tasked to help you all go to to the meeting room and answer basic questions you have as well as develop a translation software that we might need for each other." The droid explained in a cheerful manner as he rose his arm up before lowering them.

The droid would look at the guards. "Interesting, you use slugthrowers. Here I thought our host in this ship and some of their clients are the only ones to use them... along with bounty hunters and individuals that the people in the Core call primitives. But don't worry, you will not face Core World elitist attitudes here. Infact,  most people in the ship view them as being lazy, decadent, glutinous..." 

The droid would hear one of the guards coughing loudly behind it. The droid knew that was a clue that it was rattling on again and to pull back. "Oh I'm sorry sir. I tend to rattle on like that. I think there is a malfunction in my speech circuits." The droid said, not saying the guard shaking their head another slumping their shoulders at the droids behavior.

"But yes. Just follow me and my intimidating coworkers to the meeting room." As the droid walked off one of the guards would say. "I'm not paid enough to deal with that droid" the guard said through a voice modifier that gave their voice a mechanical sound, hiding any hints of their identity. The other would shrug. "Just grin and bear it Vasquez. This is just a small price to pay for doing our job." 

The guard would look at the admiral. "Sorry for that droid. Wr checked if his personality module has a bug but so far that quirk isn't the result of a glitch. That is how he is. He is still here because he does his job well enough not to be demoted and changed to a new position." The guard would explain. "But don't worry. The rest of the crew isn't like him." The guard would look to the droid who stopped and looked at the group once he realized no one was following him.

"Let's get a move on before he wonders if our legs are malfunctioning." The guard told the admiral. "Oh, you can call me General Rico." 

Wilson would give Doug a very confused face. "Excuse me? Escaped from our makeshift base?" Wilson asked. "Yes we will have to check on those logs with your permission because we don't have any records of you or any Hylians in our bases. As for Malachor V, wasn't that planet destroyed a long time ago? I don't see how you can have a mission in that world?" 

Before Doug can explain he would hear a feminine voice speak seemingly nowhere. "I believe he is referring to a mission that is given Clearance level 5 sir." Wilson looked surprised. "Clearance 5? I didn't think I would hear the mention of something like that in my life time." The voice would let out a chuckle. "This day is just full of surprises sir."

Wilson would see that Doug was looking around for the voice. "What? You never heard a ship mind talking before. That was Ares, the mind for the Vindicator. I believe the poor man would like for you to make an appearance Ares."

Doug would see a colorful cloud of pixels appear close the two and from the pixel stood a woman. She was a few inches shorter than Doug. She wore a white toga with a few pieces of golden armor. From her golden winged helmet black hair descended down and stopped at her waist. Her eyes matched the gray color of the Vindicator's hull and her skin was tanned. She held on to a golden spear. "It's a pleasure to meet you Doug." She gave him a bow.

[Menschenfleisch]

Seeds of Anxiety | Avarice and Tone

Truth be told, Valerian had expected an attack the whole time. The crime scene had been too perfect, the corpses too curious. The killers had either been experimenting on their victims, trying to produce works of morbid art, or had been specifically trying to set up a vista of gore distracting enough to convince whoever found the bodies to pay more attention to them than their surroundings. Thus, when bullets started flying, he was ready. Everything slowed to a crawl as his mind leapt into overdrive, neurons humming like revved-up engines. He drew the knife at his belt; melee weapons had always been his speciality. Typically, projectile weapons moved too slowly and too rigidly for his liking. His eyes tracked the first shot as it coursed through the air, carving a tunnel through the dust and all the microscopic nodules of blood suspended among it. It was oblong, tapered at both ends like an ovoid cut off at the base. Its casing was glossy and slightly incandescent, polished by the tough particulate that grazed it as it travelled. It was like a perfectly formed raindrop: something that belonged in an art exhibition, not a warehouse that stored naught but death. He drew back his arm, his sleeves fraying and burning as his elbow and wrist surpassed the sound barrier. With a single, mighty flick he sent the bladed weapon on its way on a collision course with the bullet. It was at that moment that his allowance of combat instinct ran out and everything, like actors on a stage prompted to resume their act, went back into motion.

First, there was a meaty and viscous crunch. Just a split second after that there was a tremendous boom and a sound like broken glass falling on a hardened tile floor. It took a moment for Valerian to register that the red blossom in his periphery was not in fact a television-sized flower but instead the ruptured head of an agent. Bits of skin and scalp, carrying handfuls of hair and themselves being carried by fragments of burst cranial bones - separated along their cartilaginous segments - flew outward from the source like scalding-hot popcorn kernels. And, on the far side of the warehouse, he spied the remains of the knife he'd thrown laying on the ground. Fragments of its shattered blade stuck in the walls and gouged deep scores in the concrete, carving out a shape like an inbred snowflake. There was a radial shower of blood and fleshy slick, staining his shirt and pants, then one of glittering metal shrapnel. That wasn't possible. His math had been on point, his intuition infallible. His knife should've pinned the bullet to the far wall, ending its flight there and then. So what had happened? He had little time to think about that. Four bodies fell in half as many seconds, each of them terminated with clinical precision. People were being turned into cadavers around him, and he was utterly helpless to stop it from happening. He found cover behind a stone pillar, rolling along the ground so as to snatch a pistol off of the floor. The bullets were coming from all over the place with no definite trajectory. Either there were five different shooters working from seven different angles, or they were being attacked by weapons that didn't conform to conventional ballistic physics. Neither possibility was preferable to the other, all things considered. Either way, they were pinned down and four men down. In other words, the team was utterly fucked.

"Give me a god damn..." He held his hands over his ears as an unbearably loud crack sounded out. An agent whose arm had been in front of their face fell to the ground, their forearm bent the wrong way and their skull caved in. Had they been trying to block the bullet coming for them? There was no way that they could've seen the shot mid-transit, which meant that they'd spotted the shooter. It was a little inappropriate perhaps to be thinking of the dead man's last sight in terms of battlefield intel, but the information that they'd provided Valerian in the last moments of their life was not only invaluable, but entirely actionable. He liked actionable. He could... act on it. "That's a lame way to put it." Ava knelt behind a piece of indescribable machinery - indescribable in that it had been so worn down by the elements that it was more metal hydroxide than metal. She didn't have the same humorous ring to her voice that he'd come to expect from her. In times of crisis - in times like these - she lost that blase attitude. To her, lives were never worth losing and absolutely not worth taking, either. She would've been able to see the attack coming if not for the limitations she'd placed upon herself. She was trying to live the life of a regular human - albeit a very eccentric one - and no life - no human experience - was without things that couldn't have been accomplished during its span. For now, she was nothing but an immortal socially challenged woman. "Get these people out of here, I'll handle this!" He roared over the din, both to his conceptual protege and the others in the team. He knew as well as they did that he knew best how to get them out alive. There was a werewolf among them now, and he'd heard screaming from outside. The situation was devolving, getting too messy for the squad to handle. There was a thunderous clap, and another life ended before his eyes. "Go!" The imperative was directed toward himself more than her. He dived out of cover and took a running jump through one of the windows. He'd been paying attention to the sounds of gunfire, trying to figure out where the shots were coming from. Of course, the warehouse's acoustic properties had made that technique somewhat irrelevant - every noise echoed too much to be reliably tracked to its source - but combined with all of the other information he had at his disposal - the subject of the dead man's gaze and the trajectories of each individual shot - he'd roughly figured out where their mystery attacker was operating from. He grabbed some stranger's corpse - a Fate whose weapon of choice had apparently been a golden sickle - and pressed his palm against its chest, forcing his fingers through the gaps between its ribs.

The cadaver flowed like water over his arm, merging with his body and forming a rough, rectangular shield made of interwoven sinews and tendons, resting above a layer of cardiac muscle that throbbed to the same rhythm as Valerian's own heart. With a barrier of living flesh before him, he stepped out into the open, brandishing his pistol and trying to acquire whoever it was that was trying to bring him down. His forearms were overtaken by black, chitinous growths that folded over one another like layers of volcanic slate; armour for his two most important limbs. Avarice, meanwhile, wandered right into the line of fire. She ran to the side of a younger agent, nestled between the headless corpses of two former peers. He clutched his service weapon like he was a man at sea holding onto a scrap of wood. The hard metal edges of the pistol grip dug into his palms. She wasted no words with him: she grabbed him by his palm and pulled him upright, dragging him toward the front door. Of course, he tried to pull away; he had just enough time to tell her that they were liable to be shot before he saw the glint of a barrel in the corner of his eye. The sniper had seen him and had chosen to kill him before his decidedly unarmed, unemployed and unthreatening "saviour". He had no time to fall to the ground or find cover, as soon as he saw the black dot at the centre of the muzzle he knew that his life was over. He felt himself being jerked violently to one side and for a moment, thought that it was the cold arm of death that'd caught him. However, a moment later, something passed in front of his eyes and burst like a ripe watermelon, forcing blood and brain matter into his face. Avarice, who had drawn him to one side and thrown herself in front of him, had taken the bullet in his stead. Her head split open down the middle like an orange caught beneath a corpulent man's studded heel. Her eyes were jellied by kinetic shock and her teeth went flying from her mouth. Nervous tissue rained on the ground around her and chunks of her jaw clattered like dice on the ground. In an instant, the inside of her skull became very much outside. She staggered a little, blood pouring from her parted noggin and soaking into her clothes, before extant bone and flesh fell back into place. Her head snapped shut and fused together; whatever parts had gone missing were replaced by fresh, unwrinkled growths and whatever had been deformed set itself back in place with a series of rich, moist clicks. She stared at the agent whose wrist was in her hand, her own bodily tissues clinging to her sodden hair like lumps of soggy clay. "Run," was all she said before shoving him out the exit and turning back for the others.

The Great Wizarding War | Polly and Kiara

Was it fear or awe that motivated her to act so loosely, so vulnerably? If the complex set of neural pathways and hormonal highways inside Polly's mind had provided a simplistic, objective answer for her to discern she would've concluded, without a doubt, that it was fear, although not fear of the people in front of her at that very moment. No, the excruciating dread that pervaded her every conscious and unconscious thought came from knowing that these soldiers - the muscles and ligatures of AEGIS, the means by which they projected their power like light through congealed shadow - had once been less than her. Weaker, dumber and less experienced. Yet to her, the child, they looked like insurmountable obstacles on the hierarchy of worldly power; they appeared to be without limit and exuded an aura of irresistible gravitas.

"I want one thing." She was uncharacteristically grim. Her words, though written by a kid, were spoken and acted out by a woman in her forties. There was a sheer disconnect between who Polly was and who she appeared to be to the people around her. She wished, even more than she wished that she could live up to her physical appearance, that she could measure up to the reputation that preceded her. The way that people looked at her, the way that they spoke to and about her... they sounded like her; children, temporarily stunned by the presence of an adult - or rather, something more mature and more in control of its surroundings than they could ever be in control of themselves. The world was inhabited by overly cautious solipsists, and the few exceptions to that rule were branded eminent narcissists and psychopaths.

"To get better. In every sense of the word." To recover, to improve, to excel, to surpass. These were all priorities to her, and they were all of her priorities. They took precedence before health and happiness, because she knew that whatever irresponsible pleasures she partook in right now would only exacerbate her condition in the future. If she didn't seize the opportunity to work, learn and cultivate her work ethic now, her future would be riddled with unimaginable misery. And beyond that, she just needed something to distract her from listening to the tapes. She loved hearing about her past self's exploits, all of the wonderful things that she had seen and done. She loved living vicariously through the few bytes of audio that she'd recorded before she'd lost her memory, but that was just the problem: there were only so many tapes, and therefore so many days that she could spend listening to them before they just... ran out. Where would that leave her, when she listened to the last tape? She'd have no more escape routes from reality.

Polly, who thought herself to be bearing an intolerable burden, had not yet even known true exertion in her life, being mollycoddled even as she believed herself to be studying to the point of exhaustion. She had not swam through icy channels, gone days without food, crawled through mud, been tased, shot with rubber bullets, gassed or tempered by any physical exercises like the members of September's team. All of them had been through special forces training and worse; what Polly was pushing herself through at that very moment could not even compare to the hardship that any of the members of the team had endured. Perhaps their hearts were too big to tell her that she wasn't undergoing hardship by any means. Perhaps their hearts were too small to warn her that the path she was going down could only end in tears, hatred and an unmarked grave. She knew all of that and comprehended it, too. She knew that she was living an easy life in comparison to them. She tapped herself on the temple, squinting and trying to clear her head. She discreetly bit down on her own tongue, testing her own tolerance for pain. She didn't even manage to draw blood before it overwhelmed her. "I'd like to go on the tour now, please."

---

"Alana..." A name. Miria had just offered name for Kiara to latch onto. Suddenly, it all seemed clear to her. These were people. Unintelligent and slow, perhaps, but just as textured and rich in culture and personality as herself. Her perception of them shifted from unimportant automata to equals in thought, and that was enough to suddenly overwhelm her with immense, cataclysmic guilt. "I'm-" she choked on her words. "I'm sorry, this was a mistake. I shouldn't have... I'm sorry, I shouldn't have reminded you, I just... I..." She whispered, not out of a desire not to be heard but instead because she wanted to hide the quibble and quaver in her voice. When Sin arrived, all that she felt confident in saying was a simple "hello".

But Lee's accusation? She knew precisely what she wanted to say in response to that. "I don't hate her," she hissed without malice or contempt. "And it's not revenge that I'm after, either. You..." she locked eyes with Lee. It felt wrong to do so, like she was violating him somehow. She'd learned a long time ago what effect her gaze had on people. She was wearing contacts and a blindfold now, so it should've been fine, but it still felt very, very uncomfortable. "Please don't hate anyone. It's not good for you." "And it's an ugly emotion that I'd rather not have to observe," a thought intruded upon her conscious mind. She brushed it aside. "I don't mean that," she told herself.

Things carried on a bit after that. Sin and Lee parroted one another's words and Link delivered a brief introductory speech about his home universe. The sensation of travelling between worlds was unfamiliar still, and Kiara's face would've flushed a rich blue hue as blood rushed to her head if not for the fact that she'd ensured that her skin was thick enough to keep her blood from being seen - even indirectly - by anyone else. Miria, true to her nature, scampered behind Kiara as soon as they stepped through the portal. She had mixed feelings about the fact that the girl seemed to regard her as a protective figure. Well, actually, her feelings weren't mixed at all: she was just in denial about the fact that it felt gross, disgusting and awful. She didn't deserve respect like that. How could she possibly protect anyone when she was the very thing that they needed to be protected from in the first place? She felt horrifically perturbed but was too anxious and too reserved to tell the girl not to depend on her. "She was like a little girl hiding behind whomever she stumbled upon, always looking for someone to lean on rather than taking responsibility for herself." There was no voice in her head speaking on her behalf; what she heard were her genuine, unprovoked thoughts. And, though her estimation of Miria's character had been a reflex, she still felt a compulsion to provide a counterargument. For whose sake did she retort against such a hateful, despicable opinion though? She didn't really know. "She's been a servant and a maid all of her life. Reliance has been her way of life for as long as she can remember."

What stood out to Kiara the most was how purposeless she felt. Link had his home that he was fighting for, Miria had her mistress whom she wanted to return to, Madi had her people who she wanted to free... so what was Kiara doing? What was she living for, what did she want? It couldn't possibly be Circe's death. No, no! It couldn't be... right? She wasn't a vindictive killer, she was just a girl. Just a girl... "So stop thinking about revenge," she said to herself. "I don't want to indulge in such an atrocious emotion. Someone, stop me. Give me something else to care about, please." So of course, she prompted Link to give her an inkling of what she should be doing. Any purpose, any cause was fine. She just wanted something to work towards, something that could distract her from... that. Those thoughts of blood, mutilation and castigation. "Link, what are we doing here?"

[Naval Monte]

Seed of Anxiety
Plaid Cymru- Lludw Cigfrain
Advent District- Warehouse

The demon looked down at Constance as she backed herself to a wall. The demon would take a few steps forward towards her to close the distance. "Ah I see. You are a mother aren't you?" The demon asked. It used its telepathic powers to look through Constance memory to know more about the human in front of him. He saw her obsessive mission to find out the fate of her husband, her addiction fueled by the grief and the separation of caused for her children, and the quest she placed on herself to dig into forces beyond her comphershion to find answers.

"You still have the offsprings of your dearly departed mate yet you couldn't let it go could you? You needed to know what happened to him; to know for certain if he is truly dead?" He leaned his face close to her. "Even though deep down you know the truth don't you? He is.." before the demon can say the words that Constance most dread the creature stopped. He lean away as he turned to face the agents and Kelli.

As she shouted at Constance to get away from the demon and to cover her ears the demon saw what Kelli was planning on doing. He would stretch open his arms and give her a wide grin. The bullets tore through his chest, making him jerk back slightly. Yet he stood on his ground. As more bullets tore through him the demon only jerked slightly from each impact but made no effort to stop or even dodge the shots, it's grin didn't even flatter in the slightest, not even as the bullets began to tear through his head and shatter his mask.

Once Kelli was done firing upon the demon she would see blood that came down from the holes was moving back into his body, the holes slowly closing. Even the mask was repairing itself along with his clothing. The demon began to laugh. "How amusing. The rift rat thinks she can harm an Archduke of Livonia, how precious." As the two agents drew their guns to shoot at the demon the archduke would throw out his cloak and chains would come out. 

The chains had serrated blades attached to their ends and as the blades sliced through their bodies the chains would warp around them, squeezing them so tightly that with the blades they would be sliced and squeezed into pieces. As the fragments fell on to the ground, making a wet sloppy splashing noise as they impact the ground, the demon looked to Kelli.

"I might overlook your earlier action but only if you agree to serve me rift rat. I believe your skills have potential if refined enough. But we first must remove a few limitations that you still have. One that I know of a guarantee method will do the job nicely."

The demon would suddenly sense a demonic presence and he would turn to see the werewolf. "What are you doing here? These mortals are mind fuzzball." The demon sneered at the lycanthrope as he sent out more chains on the demon.

Within the warehouse the two skeletons looked as they saw the plague doctor known as Giovanni walk towards them. "You two did your roles admirably. It's a shame we can't have you join our group. I believed that there was a place for you two in our rank, but I must obey my orders."  He would begin to slowly squeeze his hand tightly. The two skeletons can feel a force crushing on them. They can hear their bones cracking against the force seeking to break them.

Elsewhere on one of the shelves a man wearing a long black cape, a bowler hat, and a plague doctor mask was looking at Avarice through the scope on his musket. "Great. My twin brother got killed by some blood thirsty furry and this crazy bitch won't be easy to kill." The man sighed as he saw the agent flee.

"Still I got too try and kill her. That thing can cause us trouble if she lives." The sniper would fire again. Like before the bullet would tear through Ava from her head. However the bullet would then travel back and go through her back followed by hitting her from behind to severing her spinal cord before hitting her in the waist, traveling to her lungs to shred them before bursting out of her throat.

The sniper would disperse his body into black smoke as he moved to a new location. The sniper would reform on another shelf and would see Giovanni to his left. "Looks like the boss no longer needs the skeletons." The sniper would look for anymore targets and he would find Valerian hiding behind cover.

"You think you're safe hiding pal? It doesn't matter where you hide. My bullets will hit their mark eventually." The sniper began to aim at where Valerian was hiding. Waiting for the right moment to shot.

[Skylus]

Tides of Change
Kabal

Wilson would give Doug a very confused face. "Excuse me? Escaped from our makeshift base?" Wilson asked. "Yes we will have to check on those logs with your permission because we don't have any records of you or any Hylians in our bases. As for Malachor V, wasn't that planet destroyed a long time ago? I don't see how you can have a mission in that world?" 

Before Doug can explain he would hear a feminine voice speak seemingly nowhere. "I believe he is referring to a mission that is given Clearance level 5 sir." Wilson looked surprised. "Clearance 5? I didn't think I would hear the mention of something like that in my life time." The voice would let out a chuckle. "This day is just full of surprises sir."

Wilson would see that Doug was looking around for the voice. "What? You never heard a ship mind talking before. That was Ares, the mind for the Vindicator. I believe the poor man would like for you to make an appearance Ares."

Doug would see a colorful cloud of pixels appear close the two and from the pixel stood a woman. She was a few inches shorter than Doug. She wore a white toga with a few pieces of golden armor. From her golden winged helmet black hair descended down and stopped at her waist. Her eyes matched the gray color of the Vindicator's hull and her skin was tanned. She held on to a golden spear. "It's a pleasure to meet you Doug." She gave him a bow.

Doug turned to face the ship AI and nodded. "Hello. I suppose this is what my superiors were talking about when they mentioned modifications..." He turned to face Wilson. "Do you know that my ship is a prototype? I'm hoping to have it be upgraded using some of your technology, but I understand if you don't want to do that. As for Malachor being a Clearance Five...That is surprising. I mean, all I did was go there and destroy a base of operations for GLADIUS, that's it. ...And nearly die in the process but that seems to be normal nowadays... Although I am just a pilot and not actually a solider, I suppose I am one now..."

[Aedroxus]

Tides of Change
Kabal

Tath watches as the smaller ship approaches the Orbiter, and he responds to their questions on where to dock. "There's a docking port on the underside of my ship. You can lock on there, but you'll have to climb up an access shaft to reach me. I'll meet you there, Tath out." Tath then turns to Umbra, saying: "Alright, let's go greet our guests." Umbra nods, and then there is a flash as Tath dissolves into energy and melds back into his Warframe. Umbra jolts for a moment as control goes to Tath, and then the Warframe begins walking down the ramp and through a door.

Orbiter - Access port

The Aegis crew would lock onto the docking port, which would open up into a cylindrical shaft with a ladder going up. A series of lights would begin flashing along the sides of the shaft, and a voice would be projected into it. "Hello, I am Ordis, ship's Cephalon. It is a pleasure to meet you! The Operator will be arriving shortly, but in the meantime please follow the guidance lights along the walls. They will lead you to the upper decks. -dOn't ToUCh annnnnYthinGGG or IiIIIi"lllLLLl- I would kindly ask that you not deviate from the path, as that cannot be allowed." Ordis said.

[Demincia]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain, Cymru
Kivela

Kivela growled at the demon and bared her teeth, still dripping crimson from the sniper she mutilated. "No can do, they're already mine!" she snarled as she pressed herself flatter against the ground. When the chains dug into her skin she only seemed to get angrier, and she raised to stand on just her hind legs. The werewolf clawed at the chains, breaking them around her form. She crouched down and leapt into the air, landing onto the roof of the building, then jumped again to slam her weight into the demon and rake her claws into it.

"This spot's taken, find another." she growled. "Or go back to the abyss, I don't care.

[Naval Monte]

Tides of Change
Kabal

The crew within the shuttle looked at each other after Ordis told them what to do and had a mini freakout. The first of the engineers would take the first leap off the side door of the shuttle as their thruster pack would keep them align within the light so they can reach the ladder.

As the first engineer grabbed on to the ladder more would follow suit until eventually the guards would be following them. Once they all boarded the ship they began to follow the path set for them by Ordis.

Back on the Vindicator when Doug mentioned modifications being done on his jet once more he would have Wilson look at him with confusion again. Even the AI seemed puzzled by his request as she began to look through the logs for any records of such a deal being made.

"That might be some confusion here. I don't remember any agreement to something like that unless you mean being upgraded with Union technology? Unfortunately we don't have much in terms of Union technology that wasn't broken down to be reversed engineered and I can't just give away our technology without explicit permission from the Overseer Council to do so. As otherwise I would be committing treason." 

When Doug mentioned on why his mission would receive such a clearance level despite it just being a simple base destruction mission the captain would give him a serious look. "It looks like the Overseers beg to differ. Whatever you saw in there was something the Overseers to this day refuse to discourse publicly with the rest of us. So it might have been an ordinary mission for you but it was something that spooked my leaders and still spooks the ones that came after them." 

Wilson told the pilot. When Doug mention that he was now probably a soldier due to how many times he came close to death the captain would tell him. "Soldier. Pilot. Sailor. Really doesn't matter where you are stationed you are always at risk of dying when in an active conflict area. Sure your chances aren't as bad in a cockpit but if you get hit the chances of survival are much lower as you have many ways to due to being  in the air." 

Wilson would take a few steps forward until he was next to Doug. "Follow me. We have guests and I'd rather have that meeting in another room besides here. Besides there isn't much to see in here." He told Doug as he gestured for him to follow him.

---

Seed of Anxiety
Plaid Cymru- Lludw Cigfrain
Advent District- Warehouse

As Kiveka sank her claws into the archduke, the demon would growl in fury at the savage defying him. "You will pay for harming a lord of the Infernus you rift rat!" The demon lord would send out more chains that tore into Kiveka's body and went through the werewolf. The demon would open his mouth and plumes of smoke would rush out and hit her on her face, burning her fur and skin as well as her nostrils and mouth.

The demon would soon kick her away from him, yanking her out from the chains that impaled her. She would see the injuries she made were beginning to heal. "Those masked freaks told me nothing of your wretched kind being here. This world belong to us! You rift rats aren't welcome in this part of the multiverse."

[Skylus]

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
October/Jakel 28th, 2019/1756 A. H.
7:25 pm
Era of Twilight, Hyrule, Castleton Road

“Well, to be honest I had no idea the chain was going to summon a portal, much less summon one that lead here. Besides, you can see the sunset now.” Link looked up at the sky, then turned around to look at the castle in the distance. “...If we get to the castle in...I suppose ten minutes. We’ll have to be quick though.”

With that, Link began walking down the dirt road, keeping to the right in case any carriages passed the group, before breaking out into a flat out run.
“Let’s see if the lot of you can keep up!”

---

Hyrule Castle
Several minutes later, after which the group reached the castle walls, the iron gates rose into the wall as the guards let Link and the others pass. Once they were through, the gates were lowered and two of the guards led the group through the castle to the throne room, then left without a word as a figure rose from the throne near the back.

“So you have returned. And with a strangle assortment of people I might add.” The current Queen of Hyrule, Zelda Harkinian the VIth, looked over the group as she walked up to Link, then looked him up and down. “That chain...You were knighted?”

“Yes. I figured you would be happy that you wouldn’t have to knight me yourself.”

The Queen smiled and looked over the others. “Who are those that travelled here with you?”

“They live in different worlds, different realms. I’ll let them introduce themselves.”

(Enter introductions here cause I’m not modding everyone in the arc)

Zelda smiled at the group. “Welcome to Hyrule Castle, all of you, I am Queen Zelda Harkinian the sixth. I hope you will feel comfortable here.” She then moved her gaze to Link. “Realms? So the portal you went through took you somewhere else entirely and you met these people?”

The Hero of Twilight nodded. “Yes. The realm I went to, I think they call it...Gaia? No, that’s the other name…” He glanced at Lee for confirmation. “...Earth?”

Link’s gaze moved back to Zelda. “Whatever it’s name is, it’s a lot more advanced than Hyrule. They have…moving Pictographs, flying metal carriages that look like birds that people ride in the air, advanced writing methods, the ability to look at any piece of literature in existence whenever they want…”

“It seems that you’ve had quite the adventure, Link. I would love to hear what happened, and who knighted you.”

Before Link could respond, a lone soldier burst into the room, covered in blood. Before he collapsed, all the man could say was “monsters”.

Then the torches went out at once, causing the entire room to go dark; a sudden wind picked up, and then the doors flew across the room as a figure stepped into the open space, before flinging a dead soldier from one of his swords to the floor. “Greetings, your Highness. I’ve come to take what is rightfully mine.”

The Master Sword’s glow lit up the room as it was drawn from its scabbard and Dragmire turned to face Link. “I’m afraid you’re only wasting your time, Link, I am far more powerful than when we fought earlier.”

“We’ll see about that.” The Hylian raised the sword and ran forwards, then blocked one of Ganondorf’s swords and ducked under the other before the sword he was blocking slipped free and sliced his shield arm. Link shrugged off the injury and parried again as Ganondorf swung both swords at him, the three blades connecting and sending sparks everywhere as the action lit up the area around them in the darkened room.

“You still haven’t mastered sword fighting I see. That will be your downfall.” Dragmire blocked a sword swing, then suddenly kicked out at Link and knocked him to the floor, then raised one sword while he sheathed the other.

“As I said, not knowing the true art of sword fighting will be your downfall. I’m afraid I am far more powerful now.” The King of Evil stabbed downwards and then held out his free hand, summoned a ball of magic, then threw it in Zelda’s direction. The magic surrounded the Queen, then it seemed as if she had vanished, but then it was revealed that she was encased in the magic ball. Ganondorf smiled as he pulled upwards on his sword, spraying blood onto the tile floor, then looked at the group before him. “Do not test me. You will live, for now. The magic that chain possesses...Yes, it could prove useful. There exists a portal, yes? I believe I know where it is.”

Ganondorf raised his sword, then slashed downwards before looking back up, an evil smile on his face. “You there, the blue haired one. I sense potential in you, therefore, I extend an offer to join me.”

There was a golden flash as the Triforce of Wisdom was returned to Zelda and Dragmire started to walk forwards after swinging his sword, then returned it to its scabbard. “This other world will be fit for domination, thanks to all of you.” Then he and Zelda were gone, leaving the group in a somewhat destroyed castle.

---

It turned out that the chain had healing properties, although it didn’t heal Link’s stab wound completely. He had no way to tell how much time had passed since he had been stabbed, as the room was still dark, not to mention that some of the windows were blocked by rubble.

To make things worse, there were things in the room, judging by the dim glow of the Master Sword, which was just out of reach.

A second passed, then two, then three, before roars shook the throne room. There were yells and curses in the dark, before sparks flew as the owners of the roars revealed themselves to be numerous Dark World creatures - Three Lizalfos, Two Wolfos, two Stalfos. One Lizalfos made its way towards him while the other creatures attacked Lee, Miria, and Kiara. Sin was nowhere to be seen.

Evil’s Bane left a groove in the tile floor as Link picked it up, then stood to face the Lizalfos as it ran towards him, before he threw the sword like a javelin.

The Lizalfos screeched as the blade was run through its right shoulder and stabbed forwards with its blade, which bounced off the Hylian Shield as Link swiftly withdrew the Master Sword from the creature’s shoulder, then whirled around as its head went flying across the room, blood covering him, the sword, and whoever happened to be close by.

It was impossible to tell how many creatures were in the darkened room, nor where the others were, or if they were fighting, but eventually, Link found himself in the corridor outside the throne room, alone. It was brighter out here, at least, though not by much. The Stalfos appeared before him, having followed him out of the throne room, and he parried its axe with his shield, before he was sent flying by a Lynel’s club; the creative having come up behind him unnoticed. After getting up, he picked up a fallen torch, managed to light it, then waved it towards the two creatures advancing towards him, causing them to falter, thus allowing him to drop the torch and pick up his sword and shield, then retreat into the throne room.

“If you can hear me, we need to get out of here! There’s a hidden staircase near the back, cover me and I’ll get it open!” He said this to no one in particular as he ran across the dark room and started to blindly feel for the false panel. Link found it and stepped back as light suddenly appeared from a previously hidden room, the wall giving way to reveal a stone staircase lined with stained glass windows. He heard screams behind him as the Dark World creatures were subjected to the light and he looked behind him to see some of the creatures turning to dust. The Lynel was still alive and heading right for him, club raised.

His injury was taking its toll on him - he wasn’t as aware of his surroundings, his eyesight was dimming and his breathing was labored, but Link still took a step forwards and raised the Master Sword as the beast roared and charged him. As the Lynel neared him, he swung the holy blade upwards in an arc and watched as the sword was torn from his grasp and the Lynel brought its fury upon him.

---

He dimly realized that he was sitting against a wall near the staircase; judging by the silence, the Dark World creatures were all dead.

’I’m not dead. Certainly feel like it though.’ The Hylian blindly felt the tile floor to his left until his hand hit something - his sword - and pulled it towards him, then found his shield but left it where it was. ’How long has it been?’

His vision was blurred and unfocused, but something was lying before him - the Lynel. It had been stabbed in the head and chest multiple times; it had not been a clean kill, that was for certain. ’Did I do that? ...I don’t remember… No, focus. Should I even try to move? ...No, I shouldn't risk it…’

It took Link a while to realize that the bloodied reflection on Evil’s Bane was that of his midsection and he finally realized just how injured he was. His clothes were dyed crimson and his midsection glistened in the dim light as he dropped his sword and attempted to cover his wound with his free hand; the other was clamped around the shield handle in a feeble effort to distract himself from the amount of pain he was currently in.

Link’s vision had focused some, though not much, he couldn’t tell who was nearby, however, he knew that he needed to return to Madison’s world as soon as possible, and to do that he needed to live.

“Hello?”, he called out weakly, his usually strong and confident voice now the complete opposite. “I need healing...” As he spoke, his voice grew quieter until it was barely audible. “...potion won’t work I’m afraid. ...Staircase...can be used to leave...”

And then he waited for a response, whatever it would be, all the while regretting that he had returned home, even for a short time, all the while trying to stay awake.

[Naval Monte]

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Anarchy in the UK
Argos

September frowned a bit on the not allowing abhumans to run rampant; her mind almost slipping off to events in her life she rather not think of that those words are associated with. "I can agree with you on wanting to keep certain things out of the wrong hand. With the current situation in the UK being this volatile I don't trust anyone using anomalies. Especially as most of them were us to begin with.

After hearing what Polly wanted from the whole arrangement with the Imperative September was silent, unsure what to tell her.  When she asked to go through the tour she was almost thankful for the distraction. She would lead the group through the organized chaos in the hanger as the hanger crew prepared for Andersen's ship to land in the hanger. As the door slides open and they enter the hall both Polly and Katya would feel fresh air from the conditioners hit them, but also have to adjust their eyes from the sudden dim lights above them.

Jenkin would get a beeper from his helmet. "Sorry Sep, but I gotta go. I'm needed down by the barracks." Warren would go by Jenkins side. "I got to go to the Workshop to get a drone worked out. I think one of the circuits is faulty." September nodded and the two would leave in the opposite direction that September chose as she began the tour.

Music

"So that is another supply closet. Yeah I know a lot of supply closets but we need a ton of janitorial staff when your aerial fortress is massive both on the outside and inside." September told them as she rotated her right hand around. Sounding bored at passing yet another supply closet, cargo storage room, and bathroom. 

The interior of the Argos was as sleek and dark as the exterior, not helped by the comparatively dim lights that it seems everyone in the ship can operate well in. The halls were polished to the point that getting close one can see their reflection. This reflective quality wasn't just on the walls but also on the ceiling and on the floor. It was with some amount of hindsight that this would explain why a large amount of female staff who wore skirts wore them with shorts or leggings, and why some chose pants over skirts. 

Besides AEGIS seemingly overlooking a small issue the group would see an access lift on the end of the hall. September would take out a card and as the camera scan both it and her eyes mir would open the door for. "Come along. You two aren't registered yet in the ship's computer mainframe so you can't use the elevators yet." The agent told them. Once they were inside the door they would only stay inside for a few seconds until the door slide open and September leaving the access lift

"Unfortunately I can't show you the computer room. Nor can I show you the generator, communication relay, the life support, and certain other rooms critical to the Argos function. But so far the armory is fine." She told them. As she walked close to a door they would see it is open, allowing for them to peek inside and see men and women using various machines to exercise. "That is the training room. That is where us field agents train for future missions and stay in shape. Some of us also go there to kill time." The group would see Weston and Ivanoff walk into the room, seeing the group off. 

As they left the training room it would be long until they heard the sound of running water and as they got closer to the source of the sound they would see steam leaving another open room. Looking inside they would see a room that was white in color with many benches and lockers. "That is the showers. You have the option of either using the shower stalls or the communal baths." Sensing that Mark and most likely Katya were having similar thoughts to what she said the agent would add. "The showers are separated by gender. The last thing we need is MeToo to strike us. In fact,  we have perception filters in place so no one can peep on anyone from the other side and we have VIs monitoring for anyone trying to do that. " She told the two as she eyed them. 

The agent would go forward with the tour. She would show them the conversion chamber; a massive room filled with pipes and massive tanks filled with garbage, water, and waste. She explained how the water in the ship is recycled so it can be used again and how transmutation chambers in the room convert the garbage into usable materials.

Throughout the tour they would see computer terminals dispersed in random areas of the ship. September took them to the cafeteria where they saw many personal sitting on tables and others waiting in line for their meal. They would also see counters and vending machines in the room. Dorothy would leave them to enter the room after her stomach rumbled loudly. The flustered agent bid them a farewell as they made their way without her. Eventually they would go to another access lift and go to another level of the ship

In the next level they would find the workshop; a room filled to the brim with machine parts and tools to construct whatever items the Imperative needs. In the room they saw Warren talking with an old engineer of Twainese descent wearing a green sweater and wearing thin rim glasses, the two were focused on a drone that was lying on the table with all of its parts exposed and the two were seemingly talking about a circuit that was placed away from the other drone parts. 

Close by was the Foundry to assist with making new materials that the machine workshop would make into a finished product. In the room they saw pockets of reality distorted as variances fields were altering localized reality states to match an other's in order to variant r-state materials, as well as conversion chambers that were releasing a bright flash only to reveal clumps of matter once the light ceased. The room was immensely hot due to the forges and it was because of them and seeing the variance fields that September would get them out quickly.

When they reached the armory Victor chose to stay in to change his gear. September allowed them to see the row upon row of weapons; each ranging from the conventional, to the hyper advanced, to the anomalous. Next to the armory was a weapons testing range. As they reach close to the access lift they would pay a short stop to see the logistic department, the people in charge of moving stuff throughout the ship. They would notice numerous Janus Gates in that room. Infact now that they think back they saw some of the past rooms having gates too.

Once she took them down to the levels that had the records and archives, security department (one they couldn't enter), Extraction center (another room they can't enter) and the containment chambers and prison cells that a realization began to don on the two. The Argos is indeed a large ship, there is no denying that, but just how many rooms are in the ship? More importantly just how big were these rooms? Surely some were large enough to take up large sections of the ship's interior? Yet they still keep finding more rooms and levels. Speaking of the levels just how many are there? As they went past the information center they would once more go down another level.

The next room she took them was the living quarters or barracks as they would soon learn. In the room they saw various field agents partaking in various recreational activities like pool (which is where they found Jenkin), at a bar, or watching a show on a tv or playing by an arcade game. The bedrooms were further down in the room. The next rooms she took them through were the medical bay and the welfare centers, both rooms were adjacent to each other. The medical bay looked just like a high end and advanced hospital, not too dissimilar to the one back in the old site really. The welfare center was oddly the most cozy room in the ship. A room whose purpose was to ensure the physical and mental well being of agents it's interior was designed to feel as comfortable as possible.

The next room was a massive bar where agents were found drinking and eating, some playing various games or even singing on stage. But on the far end they saw a wall. When the two got close they would see that on the wall there were many photos and names on them, with various items on the counter below the names. Caitlin would explain that the wall was a memorial and that the names on it were for those killed on both the Multiversal War and from the containment breach on Site-58. Mark would choose to stay in the bar and while he wanted to offer Katya to join him he knew that his boss would want them to finish the tour. Besides, she'll know her way around the ship soon. 

As the trio went to yet another level they would find the research lab. The lab look as one would expect from an AEGIS lab; having the same clean and sterile white appearance as a hospital or an Apple store, filler with many lab equipment, beakers and jars, and complicated machines that having many flashy lights and buttons that compels on to push at least one of them. 

The group would see Athena in the lab talking with a few researchers. From the look of the researcher's faces they seem to be distressed over something. While Athena still had her eyes closed it was obvious that she was displeased about something. 

Music

"Are you sure traditional methods are ineffective?" The Oracle said, concerned in her voice. Her hands were clenched tightly together, a nervous tick whenever she heard something that makes her worry. The other researcher, an aging rotund old man wearing glasses and having bushy white and gray hair, would speak in a seemingly calm manner but yet a hint of anxiousness can still be heard

"I'm sorry ma'am but this material is difficult to work with conventional tools. The closest surrogate is the samples of Amonoggra. I'm afraid we might have to utilize unorthodox methods if we wish to get anything from the sample." He explained. The samples they got from Site-58 were truly great in terms of the sheer potential that can be unleashed if they can replicate and use it. But right now they can't seem to safely study it as most of their tools seem to not react well to the sample.

Athena would let out a long sigh. "I will contact Circe about this development. Hopefully she has something that can help us with this mess." The Oracle told the researcher. Athena was hoping she could study it on her own before getting the other Oracle involved but it seems there was no way around it. Circe was getting her wish of studying it.

September was quick to realize that they're overhearing something they were not meant to hear. She would gently place her hands on the two and slowly walk back, hoping that neither the researcher or Oracle would notice them. Unfortunately, her wish to leave unnoticed would go unanswered. The Oracle would turn around to face the group, her gray eyes staring down at them. "Greetings Agent September. I was not expecting you." She looked at Polly and Katya. "I see you have guests with you as well." The researcher from behind gave Caitlin a look of pity, as though he was seeing a dead woman.

"Can we speak outside of the lab Agent?" She asked. Knowing that refusing to do so will only make things worse Caitlin agreed. As the four walked out of the room and the door closed Athena waited patiently for the hallway to become empty. Her eyes were now closed and while she had a stoic and calm look the two women and one woman child were no doubt nervous on what the AI would do to them. Once the hall was empty a sound nufflication field as well as a perception filter field will come down on them, hiding the group as she spoke. 

"What you heard in there will not leave that lab. Do you three understand me?" September would comply with a nod. Athena opened her eyes, staring down at the agent. "I want to hear it Caitlin." Feeling a chill going down her body the agent said. "Understood ma'am." Caitlin was glad she didn't stutter once she said those words. She was honestly wishing to be facing a horde of monsters or a legion of hostile xenos than to be in the current predicament.

"Good. Should this information be leaked then you will find yourselves either locked up for life or suppressing high risk abnormalities." Caitlin gulped, the job the AI mentioned might as well have been a death threat with the way she described it. Athena would close her eyes again and her stoic composure would return. "Now that is clear. You are dismissed Agent September." Just as the agent was thinking of running away from the AI she would stop as Athena will say. "Oh if this isn't too much to ask but can you drop by either the occult library or the alchemy lab? I need you to tell Circe to see me. They are in the same level as the lab. If she isn't in there then check the ritual chamber." 

September would comply with the request, making the AI give the three a small smile. "Thank you. I wish you a wonderful day Agent September, and I hope you two enjoy your stay in the Argos." The AI would walk back into the lab, the two fields dispersing.

September stood still for a long while, seemingly staring off into outer space. She would press her back on to the wall and slide down until she was sitting on the floor. "Holy fuck I swore I nearly had a heart attack here. I thought I was dead the moment she saw me." The agent all but screamed as she was letting her emotions out. She grip her legs tightly as she was calming herself down from the encounter.

She would stay like that for a few minutes until she got up. "Okay. Let's go find Circe so we can tell her to get her digital butt over to the research lab." September said with false bravado as she dusted herself. Leading them down the hall to find the three possible locations that the other Oracle could be in.

[Nagakawa]

Seeds of Anxiety
Plaid Cymru- Lludw Cigfrain
Some distance from the warehouse

Far from the wild commotion in the warehouse, in a quieter part of the town where the shadows on the streets were heavier and the silent sounds of the moon deeper, several doors were thrown open at once, and several tenebrous figures skirted around the edges of the buildings, phasing in and out of reality as they zigzagged in and out of the darkness.

Following close behind the dark figures was a massive mountain of a Viking, muscles writhing as he lifted his hand and pointed his fingers at the figures, as if to reprimand them. One of the dark figures turned suddenly, changing course and drawing what looked like an athamé with a deep black blade reflecting the moonlight, before charging at the Viking. In turn, the Viking grunted, thrust his finger forward, and blasted the black figure with a hail of ice that sent him flying backwards, trapped in a prison of frigid crystal.

“Vanity of vanities, o spirit of ice”, a disembodied whisper crept through the streets. “You are forever doomed to wander the space between spaces.”

“Damn this fucking curse”, the Viking hissed in frustration. Raising his hand, he conjured up a path before him formed out of ice, stretching down the stone pathway beyond the naked eye, the neat sheets of crystalline ice smooth as the sky. “If I could only walk normally without bloody having to... Hyun! Hurry the goddamn fuck up.”

As the Viking hurried on down the ice path, his peg leg rhythmically contrasting with his heavy leather-clad footstep, a small, middle-aged, curly-haired man followed close behind, clutching a suitcase.

“We don’t want to keep Kenny waiting for his papers, do we?” The Viking continued thundering, periodically stopping to extend the ice path before him. “Though I wish I could fucking read, so I could see for myself what the hell is so important about-“

“Quiet, Steinolfur. There’s something.”

The two quickly peered round the corner. Before them was a large warehouse, largely ordinary looking, yet somehow...

“There’s a dark aura coming from that warehouse”, said Hyun, the small curly-haired man.

“Yes”, affirmed Steinolfur, the Viking.

“Do we really want to go in there?”

The two glanced behind them. It seemed the shadows of the streets were starting to become alive, whatever that was supposed to mean.

“Yes”, said Steinolfur.

[Nagakawa]

Elsewhere in Lludw Cigfrain
Villa of Gormi

Though the weather was clear as the two people approached the Villa of Gormi, it seemed as if every step closer to the villa they took, the sky became heavier and more overcast, like there was some invisible force trying to prevent them from reaching the gates of the old building.

An old Cadillac sat beside a withered tree, a rosary dangling from the foggy mirror and moss growing on the windows and wheels. From an overgrown herb garden on the other side of the gravel path, the eerie eyes of a tanuki statue stared at the two of them.

Hustling on, against the biting frost of the cold air, the two stood before the doors of the villa, where instead of a butler or a maid, they were greeted by two tall Slavic men in old Soviet uniforms, their blue peak caps and epaulettes denoting their position as officers of the NKVD, the feared security apparatus of the USSR.

"Yes?" One of the two guards went down the stairs and sized up the two visitors. One was a slim and elegant lady in her thirties, dressed in an old-style Edwardian travelling cloak with maroon velvet gloves and a wide-brimmed black hat tufted with white raven feathers. The other was a taller man, stocky and well-built, with a piercing gaze and an immaculate handlebar above his lips. "What do you want?"

"We're here to speak to Cardinal Geddes", said the man with the handlebar moustache. "If you will."

"We have orders to let nobody in", said the other guard, slowly walking down the stairs to meet the two. "By order of Comrade Beria."

"Cardinal Benedict Geddes is under house arrest", the first guard continued suggestively. "You would do well not to mingle with such men."

The man with the moustache was not deterred. He removed his spectacles, blew on them, and wiped the mist off with a handkerchief, before putting the spectacles into his breast pocket and stepping close to the guard, eyeing him threateningly. As the guard attempted to make his presence known, the woman reached into her coat and withdrew a trinket of her own: a bronze signet ring, upon which was inscribed an emblem which the guards both recognised immediately.

"The... the Emblem of the Hanged Man?" The overbearing hamminess of the two guards dissolved into nothing. "A-A-Arcana??"

"Yes..." said the man with the moustache. "I am Private Investigator John Hardin. This, here, is Dr Elena Aubin. We work for Arcana. You would do well to let us through. We need to speak with Cardinal Geddes."

John Hardin
Private Investigator
Arcana

...

Oddly enough, as the two agents of Arcana entered the villa, the two NKVD guards quickly shut the doors behind them, refusing to follow them inside. In the house lingered the smell of freshly-baked pastries and drip coffee, both clearly of exquisite quality judging by the smell. From another room came the sound of cheesy J-Pop, being blasted, curiously, from a gramophone, along with a strained, tone-deaf voice singing along.

"If I have to wager a guess, that's where he is", Hardin dryly remarked.

Elena Aubin smiled dryly as she followed the PI into the room, coming face to face with a man in cardinal's dress, dancing on a tabletop as if drunk, screaming along passionately, if not skilfully, to the lyrics of the J-pop being blasted from the gramophone.

"Greetings, Your Eminence", greeted the PI. "I am Investigator John Hardin. This here is Dr Elena Aubin. We have come to speak to you."

The cardinal's demeanour suddenly became serious, as he climbed off the table, took the record off the gramophone, and replaced it with another one.

"Yes, yes, welcome", said the cardinal with a wry smile, beckoning to the two to take a seat by the desk, as he went to the back and returned with a tray of pastries and coffee. "That was hardly talking music just now, eh fellas? This is more like it, eh fellas? Help yourselves to them pastries, will ya, fellas? Red bean delights, made just this morning, plus some coffee. Good day, eh fellas?"

"You're too kind, Your Eminence", said Hardin, taking a pastry and munching on it messily.

"Tell me why you've come, eh fellas?" Cardinal Geddes continued, snapping his fingers to the beat of the song. "Still don't know what I was waitin' for, and my time was running wild..."

"Arcana is aware of your betrayal of the Pope", said the PI, leaning in and looking deep into Cardinal Geddes' eyes, still munching on the pastry. "We know you tried to exorcise him."

"So I turned myself to face me, but I never caught a glimpse", Cardinal Geddes continued singing along and snapping his fingers, oblivious to Hardin's questioning.

"We also know that you turned yourself in to the NKVD in East Germany shortly afterwards. And that you had brought a document with you."

"Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes! Don't wanna be a richer man..."

"That document, Your Eminence, is none other than the Maju Codex."

Cardinal Geddes' eyes widened as he stopped singing along to the music.

"How did you find out?" His jaw dropped.

"I combed through the entire Vatican library to find what exactly it was you had stolen from them", Dr Elena Aubin interjected, reaching into her coat and taking out a stack of photographs. "You were smart to rearrange several of the books and throw some around to keep them off your tracks, so I spent six days searching the library, until I found what I was looking for... or rather, what was actually missing."

The music from the record continued playing as the three descended into a wrought silence, Cardinal Geddes smiling in defeat and clapping slowly.

"Ms Aubin, I do congratulate you on a job well done", he chuckled.

"That's Dr Aubin, Your Eminence", Elena corrected him with a knowing smile.

Dr Elena Petrovna Aubin
Linguist, necromancer
Arcana

"What do you want, then?" Cardinal Geddes twirled his fingers shiftily. "Let's discuss it, eh fellas? We can make a... a mutually beneficial deal, eh fellas?"

"The Vatican will not allow you off the hook so easily, not after you stole the Maju Codex from them", Elena continued. "That's why you turned yourself into the NKVD, knowing full well there was a warrant out for your arrest since your Nazi-collaborating days. You knew Lavrentiy Beria would treat you better than Pius XII or... rather... the thing that inhabits his body, as it had inhabited the bodies of every Pope before him.

"I have an offer for you, Your Eminence. Let Arcana translate the Maju Codex... and we will offer you protection."

"So I just have to hand the Maju Codex over to you, eh fellas?"

"You don't need to hand it over", Hardin said. "You just have to lend it to us."

"And what if I don't want to?" The cardinal's face darkened.

"The Thin White Duke knows you're here in Lludw Cigfrain", said Elena, smiling mysteriously and crossing her legs. "The Maju Codex is a dark magic grimoire of 4,000 pages written by a warlord named Maju, who lived and died more than six thousand years ago. Written in the ancient language of the Ahmarhan and transcribed into the Yuvadth script, an abugida used to write the holy scriptures of the Nwalgadinh, so as to render it unreadable except... to the most learned of minds."

"Why-"

"Understandably, you may not agree with Arcana's goals", Elena continued. "But I can't imagine you'd align yourself with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or, for that matter, with the Vatican. Not after you saw the true form of the Pope, the dark thing that's been controlling the Vatican for the past 1,900 years. Perhaps, if I can't convince you, the Thin White Duke himself might. I'm sure he'd be willing to sit down with you for some tea.

"Speaking of tea... You poisoned those pastries, didn't you?"

Barely had Elena finished her sentence when Hardin began choking and frothing at the mouth, clearly becoming anaphylactic, or perhaps something else entirely. His face turned an unsettling shade of purple, ballooned to twice its original size, and then began dribbling black blood from his orifices as the body tottered over and fell to the ground. At the same time, Cardinal Geddes rushed to the back of his room and wrenched a broadsword from a suit of armour, just as Elena drew a pistol she had hidden on her and pointed it at the cardinal.

"Your Eminence, I'm sorry it has come to this", said Elena. "I would have liked to find a more peaceful solution to this problem. As it is, there are some rather unpleasant occurrences happening across town. Demons in a warehouse. Dimensional walkers crisscrossing the streets. I'd wager some of them, at least, know what you've been up to."

"I killed your friend Hardin", Cardinal Geddes spat. "Don't make me kill you too."

"There is no such person as John Hardin."

"Wha-"

The cardinal looked to the ground where Hardin had collapsed, only to find that there was no body. No trace of the moustachioed man whatsoever. The pastries he had eaten earlier were still on the tray, untouched. And Elena's pistol barrel was pressed right against his carotid.

"I told you", Elena said. "There are some rather unpleasant occurrences happening across Lludw Cigfrain."

Before they could continue conversing, however, Cardinal Geddes' body began convulsing, and he screamed at the top of his lungs, running in a circle around his study and knocking over the gramophone and the table with the poisoned pastries and (presumably poisoned) coffee, before tearing open his clothes and dropping to his knees. He reached into his pocket, pulled out two permanent markers, and began scribbling haphazardly all over the parquet.

"Keter... Binah... Chokmah... Chesed...", he gurgled, eyes rolled into the back of his head, his two hands scribbling independently of his will and of each other. "Gevurah... Tipharet... Hod... Netzach..."

Ignoring the now insane Cardinal, Elena stepped over to the window and looked out into the distance.

"Lludw Cigfrain, they said..." She murmured to herself. "There are indeed some rather unpleasant occurrences here. I shall have to investigate. To the warehouse, it is."

"Yesod... Malkuth... Yod he vav he, yod he vav he! ELI ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?!"

The cardinal leapt up at Elena, his claws reaching for her neck. Deftly stepping aside, Elena emptied her entire pistol's six rounds into the cardinal, and then quickly reloaded and emptied another six rounds, until at last Cardinal Geddes' body lay still, sprawled across the parquet.

...

[Rostavykhan]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain
Constance

There was a demon flinging chains. There was a werewolf. There were gunshots ringing out all around her once more, and there was blood being shed. Despite all of that, however...Constance couldn't help but zone out.

She was as good as dead, she thought. She had to have gone crazy, and even if she hadn't, how was she getting out of this situation? Best she could do was hit the floor and lay low, half-hidden among rubble and trash cans, and watch idly as god-knows-who and god-knows-what tried to kill one another over her. She almost didn't even register what was happening any more; the initial blasts and gunfire had definitely been deafening. She was disoriented and dazed, with only the loudest banging registering as dull thuds in her mind, and the movement around her reduced to nauseating blurs in her darkening vision. She barely noticed how heavy her stomach felt, because her heart was pounding so hard.

A chain flew overhead. More gunshots echoed off of the alley walls. Constance grit her teeth and covered her head with her arms, face-down on the ground, and prayed that she at least went out quick and painless. She didn't know what else she could do at that moment.

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Katya

Katya eyed September curiously, and then Polly. She was tense as well, but not as tense as the other women, probably. It was still enough to shake her up; it had been some time since she was chewed out like that. Thankfully, she knew well enough not to go opening her mouth about secret research, so she was at least somewhat confident in her continued existence in the mortal realm. She was glad she wasn't actually with AEGIS.

Though, then again..."Um", Katya started, chuckling, nervous. "When that lady said anyone who talked would be put on high-risk missions...they only meant if we're AEGIS personnel, right?", She asked. "Not that I intend to talk or anything. Just...curious. I don't feel like being conscripted any time soon. It's not exactly good for my health."

She forced a smile to appear less nervous, but for once, it didn't seem to be helping too much. The rest of the tour had been rather relaxed up to that point, and she'd been quite impressed at the size and complexity of the vessel's interior, but their trip into the labs had put quite the abrupt and awkward stop to that. It was a sudden snap back to reality that she didn't quite appreciate; situations like that made her anxious, and she hated when her anxiety acted up. It was a shame that she hadn't had any of her usual medication since being rescued by AEGIS either; perhaps she would return later to inquire about some.

[Nagakawa]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain- Oldgrove
An abandoned factory

In the ruins of an old cereal factory, long since abandoned after a flood had washed everything out some years ago, the stench of death crept through the door, coursed through the sludgy water puddles all over the dank floors, and put out the cigarettes of the two henchmen relaxing at the base of the stairs to the second floor. It crawled upwards, slithering in twisted coils along the banisters, and leapt down the corridors, straight for the room at the end.

The stench took on the form of a human, writhing as it struggled to maintain itself in that form, approaching the door at the end of the corridor. Several black candles, arranged neatly along the corridor, were swiftly put out. The door creaked, but remained shut.

“Fock me”, came the voice of one of the two henchmen downstairs, a gruff Yorkshire accent. “Something stinks.”

Inside the room, surrounded by shelves and shelves of thick leather-bound books, sat an old bespectacled man dressed in tweed. He had spent the last 24 hours perched upon an armchair, eyes closed in deep meditation as he murmured the same syllables over and over again. The rattling of the door grew louder and louder as the stench railed against the door in an attempt to enter and assail the old man.

“Away from me, Agshekeloth”, the old man commanded the stench.

“I see you”, the stench answered. “You are weak, boy. You cannot escape the Kliphoth.”

“Away from me, Agshekeloth”, the old man repeated, standing up, but keeping his eyes closed. The sound of the two henchmen’s footsteps coming up the stairs could be heard from behind the door. “The Divine Presence is with me. You are but one who flees from the Divine.”

“Give yourself to the Kliphoth”, the stench spoke again.

“In the name of...”

And in the silence that followed, the door was smashed open, and with a great roar of anger, the stench disappeared without a trace. The old man’s eyes burst open, and he collapsed to the ground in an agonised cry, clutching his chest as his glasses flew off and skidded across the ground.

“Oi Boss, you alright?” The two henchmen drew their pistols and looked about for the source of the intrusion. It was in vain- the stench was gone, leaving nothing but the dank, mildewy smell of the old factory.

The old man reached for his glasses and staggered to his feet.

“I’ve failed, yet again”, he murmured. He leaned his weight against a wall and looked into the room, where the remains of what used to be a clay figurine of a woman lay in shards on the ground. “I was... interrupted.”

Rabbi
Josiah Yezernitsky
Linguist, occultist, kabbalist

“I told you Boss, this town’s fockin’ haunted”, said the henchman with the Yorkshire accent. “We need to get our fockin’ arses somewhere safer than this.”

“No, no, no, it can’t be”, Rabbi Yezernitsky continued, twirling his finger at his lips as he often did when he was deep in thought. “I took all the necessary precautions. But the dark aura, it’s far too strong. Someone must be interrupting me. Someone, who knows... who sees...

“The Thin White Duke. Arcana.”

“Arcana? Don’t tell me those fockin’ weirdos follows us all the wye here”, the Yorkshire henchman said, in denial. The other henchman, a small, silver-haired Japanese man covered in irezumi tattoos all over, scowled and said nothing.

“There’s probably been an increase in anomalies”, the rabbi continued his positing. “Which means... which means... which means there must be...”

“Aight, calm down, Boss, we can sort it out todye-“

“That warehouse. That must be the source of the anomalies.”

“The warehouse? Place is fockin’ infested. Are you sure you wanna go there-“

“We can’t let Arcana get anywhere near that warehouse”, Rabbi Yezernitsky huffed, straightening his suit out and storming down the corridor. “Come on now, Allan. Come now, Ben. We’ve got work to do.”

...

Lludw Cigfrain
Warehouse

“Oh, goddamn, what the fuck are those things??”

Blasting ice along the path upon which he walked, Steinolfur dragged the old surgeon along with him to the warehouse, only to come face to face with a messy scene before him. Werewolves, demons, all converging against a pair of (presumably) humans trying desperately to fight against them. The fog of war hung heavy over the scene.

“I have no idea what is going on”, the surgeon protested. “We should try to-“

“Fuck that”, thundered the Viking, before raising his fingers and blasting a barrage of icicles at one of the demons, barely missing the two who were being assailed by those demons. A century of practice had honed his aim.

With one of the demons gone, Steinolfur drew his sword and continued moving forward, freezing the path before him as he went and towering over the two whom he had just momentarily rescued, oblivious to the sound of bullets flying overhead.

“Who might you two be?” he asked.
...

[Naval Monte]

The Great Wizarding Rebellion
Oxford-England

The ancient university of Oxford was a sight that made Antonin Dolohov think back to magical schools like Hogwarts. The muggles can try their best to imitate its grandeur but they will never capture the magic and wonder of those institutions, they will always be soulless husks trying and failing to rival something that only the pure bloods can make.

The dark wizard stood on top on the roof of s building close by the prestigious university. The warm rays of the sun caressing his skin gently as the wind blew against his skin, cooling him down slightly and making his robes wave against it, moving about as though it was a dark flag for his new order.

Antonin can hear the flapping of other robes behind and next him as the other dark magi with him saw their target. "Remember, we are to capture the muggles Ableton wants." The dark wizard told them. A sadistic grin grew as he finished with. "The rest we can do as we please. Let's show these mudbloods and muggles why the Eyes of the Midnight Sun will succeed where the Ministry failed."

The dark wizard's body dispersed into black smoke as he pulled his body through space to give the illusion of non assistant flight. The other spell casters flew to different parts of the school as Antonin chose to attack from the front.

The dark wizard flew through the door, slamming them wide open, as he landed in front of a stun crowd of students who were walking to their next classes. Antonin looked around the stun faces of the muggles as the smoke dispersed from his person.

A few of the muggles had a curious glint in their eyes which was not something the dark wizard was expecting to see but wasn't too surprised as the existence of magic is still new to these muggles. But the looks of fear and worry were ones he truly appreciated and felt an immense thrill on seeing. It was even better as that was the most common reaction he was getting.

The wizard would turn to an overweight, old, muggles wearing janitorial uniform. With just two words a sickly green light would fly out of his wand and strike the man; causing the energy to course throughout his body as he fell on the ground lifeless.

This act would make a girl scream as like cattle everyone in the hall began to scream and panic upon the sudden murder. Many would push and shove others to try and flee from the now hostile wizard. Some students were even pushed to the ground and were being trampled by the other students.

Antonin would fire his curse on a dark skin student who was one of the unfortunate ones that fell on the ground. A weakly who fell before his own kind before he had a chance to kill him didn't deserve to live. The dark wizard felt that in a way he did the muggles a favor but weeding out that boy's inferior genes from the world. The boy's body jerked as the curse hit him but as quickly as the curse course through his body the student stopped moving.

He would fire another curse at what the muggles might have concerned a pretty blond lass. To Antonin she was nothing but a filthy broodmare made to push out more disgusting muggles into the world like cockroaches. He would see the girl trip over and fall as the curse hit her.

He would see a young man with an incredible physique do something he wasn't expecting. Turn around and charge towards him with his fist raised.

Antonin was caught off guard by the action as he just expected all of them to flee. He would see other muggles of similar physique joining the first after they saw the action. All of them wanting to tackle the wizard and disarm him.

As Antonin fired another killing curse at the first muggle that caused the sudden change in the behavior of a few two more dark maji appeared from black smoke, firing off their own curse and sending two of the young men flying off their feet.

The sudden appearance of more dark wizards made the other youths hesitant, Antonin and the other dark wizards would use this to fire off three more curses that struck three more youths on the chest, killing them instantly.

The others began to flee but the dark wizards began to shoot them on their backs. Antonin began to laugh wildly the more curses he fired at the muggles. The man can feel his adrenaline rushing, he felt a thrill he hasn't felt since the First Great Wizarding War. 

This unmistakable sense of pure joy and ecstasy is what was missing in his life. That is what made Antonin Dolohov feel not only as a crusader to keep the blood of wizard kind pure but as a man. To weed out the weaker race to make for more living space for the true master race of the planet. The people chosen by magic and the Earth itself to inherit her bountiful resources and treasures.

In the library Bellatrix cackled like a drunken banshee as she stood on a table and hurled curse upon curse on everything she saw. She didn't just rely on the killing curse to do the deed. She would cause some students to explode into numerous bloody pieces, severe the necks or limbs of others with cutting curses, bludgeon others to death with pure kinetic force by breaking their skulls or chest. She even caused many books to just explode as torn pages rain down on to the ground. 

Under the table a mousey small girl wearing a beret and glasses had her knees close to her face as she held to her legs tightly. She prayed that the crazy witch above her won't notice her. 

"What do we have here?" The girl's fearful eyes would look out and to her horror would see the pale and gaunt face of Bellatrix. Mad stricken eyes leering deep to her own. "You are just what I'm looking for love." The girl could not resist the urge to scream. As she did so Bellatrix would cast a spell to knock her out.

In one of the bathrooms Bellatrix's husband was carrying a scrawny man over his shoulder. "I don't see why Lord Abelton wants with these mortals?" Another wizard carrying a soccer player with a tan complexion would shrug. "Let's just do what he wants. I bet he will explain what's going on soon." 

The two dark wizards would flee the crime scene now that they caught one of the chosen muggles for their lord. Antonin would remain to go into classroom to classroom, finishing off both students and teachers within them.

Antonin would soon capture a teacher with long brown hair and blue eyes, the latter was something Ableton was looking for. Before he left he and several others would cast Fiendfyre on the school. 

As the dark wizards and witches fled the chaotic fire elemental would consume everything in their path in the school. 

A few escaping the confines of the school to attack the surrounding town, bring more chaos and devastation.

[Naval Monte]

Seeds of Anxiety
Plaid Cymru- Lludw Cigfrain
Advent- Warehouse

To say that the demon was preoccupied was a fair statement as in most occasions he would dodge the icicles. But utterly enthralled by his fight against the extra dimensional demonic lycanthrope meant that the archduke didn't sense the arrival of two new presences and that one of the new arrivals attacked him.

As the icicles stabbed into his back the demon would scream loudly as ice began to crept throughout his back and travel more throughout the body. The demon turned to face the Viking as he was looking at one of the women.

"Another rift rat! Why are you all crawling from beyond and flooding this town?" The demon spat out in disgust. As the demon was distracted by the Viking he would not see three agents leaving the warehouse. Upon seeing the demon they would take out their guns and slide in clips containing banishment rounds.

As the agents took aim they began to open fire, breaking through the ice and the flesh of the demon. The archduke screamed but this time it sounded agonizing as blood began to leak out from his body. Somehow these bullets seem to harm him far more than the previous bullets and icicles. The agents kept firing until they ran out of bullets. The agents would quickly eject the clip and insert new ones.

But before they can aim for the demon they would see more chains flying off from him. Unlike the previous agents these had the chance to dodge the attack. The agents began to run around to make it difficult  for fir the demon to aim his attack as they open fire on him, hitting the demon more with the rounds.

[Nagakawa]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain
Club Midnight

When Dr Elena Aubin arrived at Club Midnight, Cardinal Geddes’ Cadillac had run out of fuel. She had calculated the shortest possible distance it would take to reach Club Midnight- a mere 15 minute drive from the Villa of Gormi. Surprisingly, Geddes’ beat up Cadillac still had some steam left in it, and thus, rather than make the journey by foot (or worse, by rift- one wouldn’t want to attract attention here), she skidded through the bleak Edwardian streets, the Cadillac’s radio blasting Queen all the way, dying just as she pulled up outside the gates of Club Midnight.

To her bemusement, the nightclub looked more like a medieval church than an entertainment establishment; fitting, perhaps, considering it wasn’t just a nightclub, but also the headquarters of the Fates, one of the most influential organisations this side of the multiverse. They had existed since time immemorial, before the Nameless War which saw the Intergalactic Security Enterprise pitted against the combined might of the Chimaera and the Free Lands. It was a tale for the ages with which all who served Arcana were familiar.

“Fifty years ago”, she murmured to herself, lost in thought as she walked up to the door and welcomed herself into the club.

The strobe lights came as a bit of a shock to Elena, who was not used to the things, but aside from that, she was well-accustomed to the interior of such establishments. Pushing aside the mildly intoxicated people blocking her way, the young lady made her way to the bar and took a seat by the counter, smiling at the bartender innocuously.

“I’ll have a Death in the Afternoon, with an extra shot of absinthe”, she ordered in a smooth voice. “And some karaage with spicy mayonnaise, if you’ve got it.

“And... while you’re at it...” She took out her signet ring from her coat and showed it to the bartender, making sure he could see the Emblem of the Hanged Man. “I work for Arcana. The Thin White Duke has sent me to speak to the leader of the Fates about a matter concerning the Demon of the Vatican.”

...

[Demincia]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain, Cymru
Kivela

Kivela didn't seem phased by the chains piercing then tearing free from her body, instead she grabbed them with one hand and started reeling the demon towards her. "Naughty naughty..." she said with a toothy grin. "Didn't anyone ever teach you how to treat a guest?" The holes in her torso closed themselves up, as if they'd never happened.

It seemed that the pair of demons weren't destined to duel in private, as first two unfamiliar humans joined in and attacked the archduke before the agents finally regrouped and managed to actually do something useful. Their weapons seemed to especially aggravate her foe, and she used the opportunity to pounce on him, knocking him to the ground as she began clawing and biting away at his flesh in a frenzy.

[Naval Monte]

Seeds of Anxiety
Plaid Cymru- Lludw Cigfrain
Advent- Warehouse

The demon felt his chains being tugged. He would take two steps forward due to being caught off guard by the tug but he would  stomp on the ground and hold on tightly to prevent the werewolf from pushing him any forward. The demon grabbed on to the chains and began to pull back to pull the werewolf forward or to shatter them.

"I don't treat animals as my guests, especially foreigners like you." The demon spat back before being distracted by the new humans. During all of it the banishment rounds would have distracted him the most from the werewolf as she pounced on him, tearing into his skin with her claws and teeth. 

The archduke not only felt every piece of his flesh being ripped and cut by the claws and teeth, but he felt her salvia from her mouth landing on his body and into his wounds, as well as the dirt that was on her claws being rubbed off on to him.

It was these two that pissed him off the most than the action of her assaulting his royal vestige. The demon would scream in both outrage and in pain as the agents kept firing at him. But they wouldn't sense the power he was gathering into his body.

Once the demon gathered enough power he would violently push it outwards, creating rapidly-expanding kinetic ripples in space, flinging nearby objects away at high velocity. These being the werewolf who was sent flying in the air, the agents and everyone in the alleyway were also sent flying along with the trash. The remaining windows on the warehouse exploded into the building as the shards flew like speeding bullets, yet the glass shards were only the beginning of everyone's troubles.

The powerful explosion of telekinetic energy would blow parts of the warehouse walls into the building, killing a few agents and masked assailants hiding in the shadows. The flying pieces would hit the shelves not sent flying by the blast, causing more to fall on rows. Agents not caught off guard and either killed or trapped would begin to flee from the chaos erupting.

The sniper would hear the noises and decided to shoot at Vale, hoping his bullet will still get him, while he transforms to black smoke to avoid being hit by flying debris. Giovanni would see the flying debris and use his powers to shield himself by creating an unseen force field. As he protected himself from the flying debris his grip on the bothers would disappear, both the one crushing them and the one holding them in place.

The two brothers would feel that they can move once more and quickly they will create a wall of bones to protect themselves. Once Giovanni saw what had happened he was going to his powers to try and bind them in place again but he would feel a strange sensation coming from deep within his being and would suddenly be flung across the room.

Sans, eye flashing from the use of his magic, would summon a blaster and upon seeing the demon would fire a beam at it. The white beam illuminate the warehouse, exposing the masked members as the shadows they used to hide in receded, the beam would strike at the demon and send it flying into the adjacent warehouse, leaving behind a massive wall on the warehouse and loud noises as it knocked over everything that was on it's way. 

Papyrus would take a deep breath and shout.

"THERE ARE MASKED PEOPLE IN THE BUILDING THAT WANT TO KILL ALL OF YOU. GET OUT OF HERE NOW HUMANS!"

Someone in the warehouse Paige can be heard saying it was too late for the warning. From the other warehouse the demon emerged from the hole he made, shaking his head as he wobbled with each step. The demon seems to be dazed from the attack as he wasn't away of the coat of dust and oil on him

[Demincia]

Seeds of Anxiety
Lludw Cigfrain, Cymru
Kivela

Kivela's landing on the ground might have been anything but graceful. but that didn't stop her from getting right back up again after it. She snapped one of her arms back into position and snarled. She pulled a large piece of rebar from her abdomen and tossed it to the ground angrily before she leaned back and let out a loud howl.

She padded her way back out of the warehouse in time to see her foe get throw into an adjacent building which brought out a low chuckle. When he reappeared looking stunned, she moved to all fours and took off towards him at a full run in order to slam into his side and knock him down again.

[Menschenfleisch]

Secrets of the Raven | Jacquelyn

Grains of sand in a… sideways hourglass. The flow of time had halted, though this time in no part due to the interference of any space-bending mage. Claudia leaned over the precipice of oblivion, her consciousness flickering and guttering, struggling against the dark. She would’ve let it go out, if only her body hadn’t been trying so desperately to maintain her life. Her heart, nonexistent though it was, continued to beat. Her lungs, as broken and torn as they were, continued to swell and expend themselves. There was a membrane - a cognitive one - between life and death, and she had one foot in both worlds. Stuck in a twilight, as potent as a corpse yet as aware as any living person. Though there was a hole in her chest it was only through the section that hadn’t been real to begin with: there was nothing beneath her sternum but black sludge. But the pain, it felt like her blood was filled with thorns, shredding her insides. It was a comfortable feeling, not unlike what she’d felt as a child. She didn’t know why she thought of it so fondly. Perhaps it was because things were simpler back then, when her most immediate concerns had been pleasing her parents and attending the flagellations on the minute. Ever since she’d left that mansion she’d been lost, suddenly bereft of purpose except that which she assigned herself. At first she’d been so sure of what she needed to do, of what the righteous path was. She missed the innocence of naivete, and the purity of blind rage. She missed thinking that she was right, and the only right thing in the world. But such a position was untenable in the presence of nuance. There was a ringing in her ears; she had an intimate relationship with that ring, the ring of blood squelching inside her skull and of her eardrums thrumming to the beat of conflict. People were fighting and dying around her. She was a lone island adrift in an ocean of her own blood, and rivers from other seas were flowing into her domain. Albert’s ichor - it burned like cigarette butts and fire irons - and mortal blood - it felt livelier and warmer than her own, somehow - pooled beneath her fingertips, just barely immersed in a thin crimson film. As she died, as her mind slipped away, she grasped at the last vestiges of meaning in a fading, soon to be irrelevant world. What was she doing here? What had propelled her all this way, motivated her to do so much? Suddenly, her whole life seemed to have been nothing but build-up toward this anticlimax; this moment when the fate of the world was to be decided by anyone but herself. Whether Albert, The Celestial Order, Vincent, Elizabeth or some other party seized the Spire, there was no doubt in her mind that she would have no say and no influence in what they did with it. Thus, it seemed that in spite of all her efforts to rail against fate - to break the bonds of cause and effect that seemed to have indicated that her future held nothing but failure and hatred - she had still been relegated to the position of second-fiddle in someone else’s tale. Her determination faded away, burning up like ample portions of wood in a fireplace.

She still wanted to end suffering but it felt like a petty and self-interested goal. She had been hurt and thus she had vowed not to allow such pain to proliferate - yet what say had others been given in her plan? Had she asked the vast masses what they wanted? She had felt confident that she knew what was best for the world but at every turn she had been told “no, this isn’t right”. She had been told as such by her enemies, by strangers, by her friends, even by herself. And the child killings, the massacres, the wanton annihilation of things that preceded her and that would’ve outlived her; the incomprehensible, unforgivable things she had done… surely, they invalidated whatever beliefs that she had? She was no everywoman nor a hero, she was just a serial killer. Her actions had been informed by selfishness and pride all along. It was not a new revelation by any means, but it still stung to know that even in death, she continued to be dissatisfied with herself. Even as she died, she could not bring herself to feel at peace, even though she felt as if she had done all that she could’ve in life. Her confidence evaporated like steam from the surface of a teacup, rich with the aroma of jasmine. She had been filled with drive and purpose once, more fundamental than pragmatic concerns. Before she had formed her current cocktail of philosophical and moral tenets - before she had justified her actions retroactively by building a system of beliefs to suit her personal narrative (even she could see that such was the case) - she had harboured a primordial desire in her heart. A lust, almost, to achieve something in particular. The forgotten want felt like a hollow in her skull, a missing memory that she’d built everything around. Her whole psyche was a mansion built on soggy soil, and that desire had once been its concrete foundations. So why couldn’t she remember it? Dreams, images and faces flitted before her eyes. Invisible needles pricked the insides of her eyelids, pulling upward on them, forcing them to open. She saw the sky, and basalt towers. She saw a pillar of light, blue as the ocean and as rich as the starry cream of the cosmos. She felt congealed vigour flowing through her. She had to remember, she had to know! Just this one thing, she needed to bring it back, learn what it was that she had once considered to be the core of her personage. Her fingers twitched and her tongue throbbed inside her mouth. Her mind filled up with half-realised dreams and endless nightmares, overflowing like flowers from an overgrown pot.

A fresh faced young man whose voice was like honeysuckle poured her a drink. The room was rich with the smell of cedar, tea and burning wood. The fireplace cracked softly, producing a sound like peanuts being cracked in the room over. The floorboards, roughshod and untrimmed though they were, felt solid and assuring beneath her feet. Moon-kissed rays spilled through a T-framed window, cloudy with dust. The grass outside was blue and white, tranquil and laden with the spoils of fresh rains. A pleasant gust of wind ruffled the leaves of the trees, convincing them to brush their branches against the roof of the cabin, producing a gentle pitter-patter. A tall woman with ginger hair told a long forgotten joke and a despondent man, who had spent all his time thus far nursing his tea, laughed. Dear god, he laughed; he’d never done that in front of them before. He was getting better. The well spoken youngster stared in shock for a moment, before sharing a wide grin. A bird on the mantelpiece, previously unseen, squawked raucously and turned its orange eyes to the tall woman who pointed at herself, jokingly taking responsibility for the older man’s sudden emotional upturn. Claudia looked down at her reflection in the tea, her face dotted with creases and scars but her eyes undimmed after all this time. A warm feeling suffused her. This was bliss. This was what she had been searching for all this time. She didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to break the easy, comfortable silence. These people, they were here for one another. They had been brought to one another by coincidence and the indifferent flow of fate, yet now they were inextricably bound by weaves of camaraderie and love. She felt like a part of something, something which she could be proud of. A group. A friendship.

That memory, that scene in the cabin… it had been so wonderful. She wanted to go back, desperately. But it was alone amongst a thousand less pleasant memories, all of which shared the same faces. There was no way that the older man had laughed - he was a grim thing who hated her and hated her compatriots. Why would the young man have poured her a drink? They had argued in a car and left one another a long time ago. So, so long ago. The feeling of rain on her back stung oh so much, even now. The bird was unfamiliar to her as well. Where had she seen those orange eyes before? On a cadaver. So how could it have been there? And the tall woman? She was dead. She had always been dead, right? She had always been a painful bruise upon Claudia’s ego, always hurting like an unhealed cavity in her soul. That memory was undoubtedly a hallucination, a forged moment meant to make her feel better before slipping away. She felt such an immense despair at knowing that her life had been a mosaic of such disastrous magnitude. Everything she could remember, every scene that she could conjure from her past, carried such sadness and bereavement with it. She remembered dead men, dead women, most dead by her hands and some dead by others. But all of them had been her responsibility, the preservation of their lives had been her onus. She had failed in that regard, in spite of all of her strength. Maybe she had never cared in the first place. Maybe said men and women were just phantasms of her imagination like the others, too.

Guttural, low, agonised… the cry of a wounded animal shook her out of her reverie. The noise was instantly recognisable. She had heard it many times before. But rather than producing a pang of sympathy, it made her feel… agonised. The sensation was excruciating. Something was gripping her limbs, striking her muscles, prodding her nerves. “What?!” she wanted to yell. “What do you want?! It’s over! Leave me alone!” But the feeling did not abate. She struggled to move, yearning to be free of the pain as she passed away. But it was not a physical pain that could be fixed by merely blocking her ears or shifting her body into a certain configuration, it was something else. It was… loss. Why did she… why did she feel that way? Surely, she had nothing else to lose now. Her friends were dead, if she’d ever had any in the first place. Yet the sensation remained nevertheless, sitting in her chest like a stone. Her throat clogged up as her tongue tried to push out an instinctive response, an almost automatic reply to any expression of suffering. Her broken body carried her onto her side, and her eyes fell upon two figures locked in a golden limelight. And she saw… a face. A face like mercury on mirrored glass, pristine and always backdropped by a vibrant vista. But in place of verdant skin and twinkling eyes were calluses and scars. Her lips moved, her throat rumbled. “I’ll-”... she felt a great energy building up inside her, a strength that she hadn’t known that she possessed. It was like magma surging from an erupting volcano, thrusting an umbrella of ash - of compassion informed by creed and love - into the air. That vision of the cabin had been real. She had something to care about, something to fight for. She could still be useful to someone, somewhere. “I’ll...” one figure gripped a long black pole, a wicked cylinder tipped by a triangular claw. It flicked to and fro, nearing the man with the honeyed voice. She found herself in her childhood mansion again, staring as the blade of a knife neared the heart of her world; the thing, the person that gave her life meaning. But this time, she had a response. A thing to say, a thing to do. She was ready this time. History would not repeat itself. “I’ll save you!” She yelled. The spear went through the figure’s torso, and he went limp.

A realisation began to form within her head. Claudia tried to suppress it - she immediately knew that it would only hurt her, only bring her further pain - but it emerged irregardless, hitting her and forcing her face into the ground like a sledgehammer on the back of her head. The thing that’d motivated her, the foundations of her personality that she’d forgotten, had been her desire for friendship. It had been the factor that’d convinced her to pull Diana out of debt, to liberate The Raven, to help Vincent escape his slavery, to elevate Terry beyond his grief. Compassion and sympathy had been the centre of who she was, and she had forgotten them. Now, someone was dead. Her last friend in the world; the last thing that she had considered to be precious was gone. Albert took no notice of her. Her voice hadn’t even reached him: she hadn’t shouted, she had gurgled. The words had stuck in her throat. She had failed again. Only this time, there would be no second chance. Her life had come full circle. In spite of everything, Ouroboros had still consumed itself. She lay in her blood, eyes upturned. She hardly even had enough strength to keep herself from slipping into ultimate death, let alone raise a hand. She watched as Vincent fell to the ground, kneeling as he held a hand over the chasm in his gut. The world stood still, though not because her perception of time had changed at all. Everyone - Vincent, Terry, Elizabeth, Mai, Metis - hung back, unwilling to attract the angel’s attention. They were petrified by either one of two things; terror or pragmatic concern. There was no hope of victory, and with that realisation even the ones who were determined to fight had fallen down as their logical brains fought against their aggressive animal instincts. Exhausted, wounded and sleepless, most collapsed. Some others, like Jackie, stood by in non-apathetic inaction. He was nonchalant, untouchable, unimpeachable. Everything that they had done, all of their efforts to kill him, hadn’t even left a lasting mark. His body was already whole; fresh meat grew in place of missing chunks of flesh and muscle. He blinked and shook his head, clearing it of madness and memetics as easily as someone might swat a fly off their nose. If he had been weakened at all, he certainly wasn’t showing it. He turned in a wide arc, feet tapping on the ground as he took a single, triumphant step. His gait was completely ordinary and his face was featureless: he didn’t need to outwardly express his satisfaction with his victory, the truth was painted in blood on the ground. He had just broken the confidence of six men and women, each a competent and brilliantly talented fighter in their own right. Claudia tried to raise herself up, to breathe, to do anything, but there seemed to be an insurmountable barrier between her conscious desires and her muscles’ efforts. The signals that she sent to her arms and legs petered out before getting there, barely eliciting pathetic little twitches.

“My, are you crying?” Albert was titanic before her, his shoes at the upper edge of her periphery and his legs seemingly stretching upward ad infinitum. It seemed that he was definitionally taller than her, unchangeably superior, like even if she spent an eternity striving to surpass him she would never be anything more than a legless gnat before him. She felt a hand on the back of her neck, then a force like gravity - impossible to overpower and effortlessly applied - pulling her upward. The collar of her shirt dug into the skin of her neck like a garrotte wire, bringing out livid bruises on the front of her throat. She felt as if she was being seized up by a noose, hung from the gallows like a common criminal from the dark ages. It wasn’t pain that made her panic nor the simple animal act of struggling to breathe, but the feeling that she was about to be humiliated by this thing which she had spent so long fighting against and trying to bring down. It was like… failure, in its more quintessentia form. Gods and greedy men, which she had strived to destroy for so long - whether through fury or madness - had finally brought her down and laid her low. It was ideological salt in the emotional wound; thorns and barbed wire being pulled through her already gaping injuries and over metaphorical, necrotic ulcers. The brilliant sapphire glow of the sky, the beautiful glim of the grasslands all around, were already fading. The basalt beneath her seemed less real by the minute, losing its texture and blurring like paint being washed off of a canvas. Her pastel paradise was dying before her eyes, and she was held aloft by a man who would undoubtedly use the fruit of her labours, of her friends and accomplices’ labours, for his own selfish ends. She had ended up ruining everything after all, even if it hadn’t been her intention. So as she felt the blade at her throat, simmering just above her skin, the air crackling and popping like grease on a scalding hot iron, she felt a total and utter resignation overtake her. She was just a dog being put down; little more than a mindless, useless animal. Maybe, she thought with just a hint of amusement, once she passed away things would get better. After all, the people she had been opposing all this time - the tyrants, military hegemonies and cult leaders - individuals who took advantage of others’ weaknesses, seemed to share more in common with her than the average man or woman off the street. She deserved to die, and there was no and.

“Stop!” The word flashed through the air, snapping like the crack of a bullwhip. Albert did not react at first, staring at The Thorn’s tip as if weighing up how much effort it would take to thrust it through Claudia’s neck and be done against how much effort it would take to turn around. He chose the crueller option and gently set her on the ground, propping her up in a kneeling position, batting her to the left when she fell to the right and pulling her to the right when she fell left until eventually, she stayed upright. “Good girl,” he whispered in her ear, intoning each word as perfectly and clearly as carved marble. He spun his body round with one fluid motion, stepping with understated swagger toward the source of the voice. Vincent, his head bowed and the front of his body mired in blood but his mouth yet moving. Each breath he took wracked him with aches and the sensation of being drowned, but he did so nonetheless. Again and again, he breathed, defying the onset of final death. “Dull creature,” the angel called out, as if to boast that his voice and lungs were uninjured unlike the siren’s. “You are far too weak to affect me with petty parables. You cannot compel me to do anything.” Vincent opened his mouth, letting out a small torrent of blood and giblets. He couldn’t spit it out: it would’ve taken too much of his strength to perform such a maneuver. “Not… my intention...” he trailed off, half-mumbling. “Where’s that bravado gone? Has the spirit already departed?” The angel seemed to ignore his words altogether. “It’s such a shame. I thought that you were something special, but no. You’re just as fragile, and pathetically mortal as the others. Now watch as I show you what sinners will reap.“ He swivelled around to face Andarta, raising The Thorn with both hands like he was about to deliver an executioner’s deadly blow, but again, a set of words cut through the air and quashed his homicidal intentions. “Don’t kill her!” Vincent’s voice was saturated with urgency, dripping with desperation. Claudia, from where she knelt, registered the faintest trace of satisfaction on the angel’s visage. He smiled. This smile was different from all of the others that she had seen from him in her time. He had only smiled in front of her before when he had been fulfilling a social role; his smiles had always been intended to be seen by an audience for some reason or another. But this smile was demented and raw. It was a private smile, exclusively for him to enjoy all on his own. Vincent called out again; “Kill… me...” The angel turned his nose up. “Is that a call for mercy? Well, I assure you, you’ll find no rest in death. I’ll escort your soul up to Heaven myself. I hear that The Thrones have gotten bored as of late, I’m sure that they could put their considerable intellectual talents toward punishing you. It’s a common misconception; that Heaven forgives. It was true a very long time ago, back before Babylon fell, but ever since Yahweh’s passing - or rather his internment in dreamless slumber (he was rendered oh-so tired by the creation of Eden) - the firmament has changed quite a lot. There have been numerous insurrections and restructurings, though we’d never admit it to anyone who would live to tell the tale. Really, overthrowing the old regime was easy. We had the pick of the litter in regards to warriors and soldiers. All of the brave heroes and saints of myth come to us, after all, and all of the cowards and invalids go down to Hell. So no; you will not find eternal rest in golden halls, nor will you receive the accolades of your peers in life. You will find Christ nailed to the Pearly Gates and true damnation: a vindictive damnation not replicable by Hell’s clinical, businesslike attitude toward eternal suffering.”

“Kill… me...” Vincent was haggard, his sodden clothes in burgundy tatters. “Come again? Did I hear you right? You must not be in your right mind if you’re still asking for death after what I told you.” He raised his head to stare straight at the angel’s, and for a moment Albert faltered. His muscles tensed ever so slightly for the briefest of moments, so quickly that it could’ve been mistaken for a simple muscular tremor, like the ones that kept people from holding their fingers perfectly still or keeping their eyes from moving as they stared at a television screen. Albert’s next words were cold and decidedly unamused. He was no longer being playful or gloating, he was livid. “Little bastard. You stand before an angel, a seraph, a herald of the greatest power to have ever gestated from the muddled bog of primordia. I’ll make you wish you were dead. The other angels may have their turn at flagellating you, but I shall have the first pick of your torture.” His half-healed wings shot across the dias, grabbing the siren’s left arm. He raised him into the air, dangling him like a scrap of flesh from a bone. Dollops of gore were forced from his mouth and nostrils, his eyes bulged and his muscles went limp with shock. “I know what you are trying to do. How dare you try to stall me?” His malformed wings, scoured of feathers, resembled the bones of a dactyl; each wing had four spindly ‘fingers’ within them formed of a tough brown chitin, tipped with razorlike keratin. Now that he had been relieved of his scales he had sixteen spears with which to stab and lacerate whatever he wanted. There was a whoosh, and twelve lateral cuts appeared on Vincent’s chest, each weeping just a little crimson tar. It was shockingly tame, and suspiciously merciful. “They say that the ichor of a Seraph is beautiful and pure, that it may cleanse the body of impurities and cultivate a glowing vitality. They say that it is a medicine of the highest calibre, an organic tincture or a panacea provided from god’s own purse.” Albert drew a nail across his temple, drawing a thin trail of blood which hissed and incandesced as it flowed like soapy water down the side of his head, evaporating as it reached his jaw. The sequined mist gathered around his head in the shape of a crown, or a halo of holy fire. “I know better. It is a source of life only insofar as it prolongs the suffering of the drinker, much like the waters of the Phlegethon. It burns like boiling, poison oak-nettle ridden pitch, or so I am told.” He stepped right up to the siren, The angel cut a gash in his own thigh with the tip of one of his wingbones, coating it in a pale yellow oil. He did the same with the others, each of them passing through the lacuna in his body like the teeth of a saw. Claudia watched as the angel held the appendage inches from her friend’ chest, dribbling menacingly like a scorpion’s tail laden with noxious venom. She felt no hope or renewed vigour in knowing that Vincent was alive, she only felt sorrow that he would continue to suffer because of her. She knew that if he was trying to stall the angel, it must’ve been because he expected for her to recover and either escape or defeat Albert somehow. However, she knew that such a thing was impossible. Earlier, when she had been caught up in throes of inspiration and determination, she had barely managed to raise her voice above a whisper. She could not possibly summon the strength to fight the angel, nor could she even yell for Vincent to run and leave the doomed woman to her fate. Her weakness was such that she couldn’t turn away or cover her ears, either; she could only shut her eyes and try to ignore what was happening before her.

But there was no suppressed scream, no burst of steam, no satisfied grin. “I will play your game.” Albert announced. “I will delay her death by a quarter of a minute for every finger you let me break.” Vincent starred in uncomprehending surprise. “I have no pretensions about the nature of this activity, dear siren. This is not your penalty, regardless of how deserved it may be. This is my catharsis and the proof of my thesis: that nothing of your filthy sort may ever rise up to match a constant such as I in grace and dominance.” Slowly, realisation dawned on Vincent’s face. Then cold, steely hatred. His lip curled into a grimace, his brows furrowed. He possessed strength to speak and express his defiance yet. “You’re fucking pitiable, you know that? You’re like a kid mauling his toys with a knife to swell his ego and feel better about himself.” The angel put on a good show of nonchalance, but his perturbation was noticeable to anyone with even a modicum of emotional nuance. “No, you are the children who think themselves better than their parents and tutors. As much as this is for me, it is also about teaching you a lesson in humility.” Two winglets struck out and wrapped around Andarta’s torso, pulling her toward Albert. He raised The Thorn as she came sliding toward him, the blade angled to impale her as she was dragged. However, a moment before being stuck upon the spearhead, she came to rest. Her throat stopped just shy of its tip, drawing a single, impossibly thick iota of blood. “Three. Two-” “Do it.” Vincent’s resigned, shaky sigh soon turned to a throaty cry. His fingers were bent backwards until the joints gave way and snapped. The gentle gurgle of synovial fluid filled his ears, as well as the sound of bone grinding against bone. He bit his lips, grunting and struggling. Tears welled up in his eyes and with a grainy squelch, his teeth punched through his paled lips. That brief wave of discomfort was entirely overshadowed by what came next, though. Red and white filled his eyes. The colours of the world shook wildly. The boundaries between objects flickered then dispersed. Everything blended into one another and his own screams, his own awful anguish, became the most deafening, and only, thing he’d ever heard. He must’ve hollered for years, alternating between fury and fervent cries for help. When he was all done, he let his head hang limp from his neck. Albert tapped his foot once, twice... “Five. Four. Three-” “All nine. All nine at once!” Vincent choked on his words, his gums an angry red and his teeth stained with what Claudia wished was just rosy toffee. He was desperate to remove the anticipation, the panic inherent in there being an established deadline. He wanted it to be over, yet he couldn’t - wouldn’t - abandon the woman who’d gone through so much more hardship than himself. “That’s now how it works, mi amore.” Albert had slipped into… Italian? “I want you to decide to snap each of your fingers, one by one. I want you to know that you could stop having to endure this at any time. I want to see how precious five seconds are to you.” The angel’s composure snapped as he delivered that last sentence. He bared his teeth, lowered his voice, and let out a guttural - almost inhuman - growl. Yet, soon thereafter, he leaned back and straightened his back, dusting the blood and dust off of his robes. “Five. Four-” “Go!” There was a noise like a brick wall being pelted with wineglasses, then a thick schlorp like a plunger being pulled free of a toilet bowl. Blood sprayed from Vincent’s mutilated hand. His previously broken finger was purple and swollen, bleeding from many places, but the second dangled by loose, fleshy threads from the back of his palm like an oversized hangnail. Albert’s appendages, soaked with ichor, spread their yellow parcels over the exposed tendons and cartilage within - or rather, now without - his finger. Again, a prolonged and vicious roar. To Vincent, it was all too long an ordeal of perfectly escapable yet unavoidable agony. To Claudia, it was an eternity of guilt and shame dredged up from her past and thrust back in her face. She lived through the torture vicariously, to the point where she wondered whether Albert’s intention was to torture her instead of her friend. To Albert, the siren’s screams lasted six seconds, then his exhausted silence lasted another four. “Five.” One unstable, staccato intake of breath… “Four.” An allegro coda; a rushed outward gasp, the siren trying not to agitate his body in any way. He had stopped seeing, stopped smelling, stopped comprehending a long time ago. The only brief flashes of clarity that came his way were when he heard the five numbers or when his fingers were toyed with like twigs in the hands of a bored schoolboy. “Three.” His muscles tensed in apprehensive anticipation. To be trapped in a state of unimaginable misery yet to have the key to his oubliette all that time; this was not Vincent’s true punishment, not yet. The real crescendo, the zenith of Albert’s cruelty, would be when he tossed the siren aside and let his limp, mangled body watch in impotent horror as he squeezed the life out of that thing which he had been trying to protect. All of that pain, all of that ague and frustration would come to nothing. The light would fade from his eyes then, and the angel would know that he had won. That was his goal, his endgame, his one immediate desire. It was delectable, really; the terror of lesser creatures. Vermin, the lot of them. Unintelligent riffraff, unable to govern themselves yet unwilling to sacrifice their individuality. “Two.” Vincent took in another breath. “Fingers left.” Albert smiled, his voice dripping with saccharine self-aggrandising pride. “One.” “Go…” A gunshot, the crack of a whip, the snap of a toughened biscuit. None of those sounds could compare to the calamitous suddenness and immediacy of the noise that Vincent’s hand produced. The sound was violent, rabid, wyrmlike; it burrowed into the heads of everyone it could find, drilling into their eardrums and suffusing itself throughout all of their memories until it seemed as if that sound had been there, in the back of their minds, all along. It was the leitmotif of torture, the siren-song of suffering. His whole hand had been parted. Where there had once been flesh between his index and middle fingers, now there was a coarse and jagged cut. His finger had been peeled away and pulled down to the palm, so that his nail could easily touch the terminal point of his radial bone. And above it was a scoured patch of naked, tender meat, swollen like an infected blister. It was not dead and dry like an ulcer nor necrotic like a gangrenous wound but living, excoriated and vivacious with a glossy hue. “Why?!” Vincent screamed at once, his voice cracking and his whole body shuddering. His words cut out at random intervals, syllables seemingly dropping out of existence as his tongue blubbered and his mouth went numb. “You were… a priest…! A man, wh- who...” Tears streamed openly down his cheeks, gathering like icicles at the nib of his chin. Albert sighed and waved The Thorn to and fro in front of himself, letting it sway like the hand of a grandfather clock, counting the seconds. “Really, it’s your fault for believing me when I told you that story. Aren’t sirens supposed to be excellent emotional diviners, or was that a rumour that your filthy ilk perpetuated in order to embetter your own positions in society? I would imagine that there’s a reason why you’re so damn prolific, in spite of your fragility.”

Whatever harsh words Albert could spit would have no effect on Vincent now, and he knew it. There was no purpose behind his insult toward all of sirenkind besides the mere fact that he simply held such a view. All races besides angels were equally despicable to him, all equally deserving of correction and control. The condition of the universe could be tolerated no more. Things had to change, things had to be contained. No armies would march but the angels’ and no deaths would be permitted without Heaven’s bureaucratic consent. Otherwise, chaos would continue to reign over all life, as it always unrightfully had. “What I told you was the truth, in some regards. I was a priest. A canon of the Catholic church. But I had… unhealthy desires. Unholy ones, that extended beyond the allowable boundaries of both faith, law and decency. Children… their smiling faces, their welcoming, trustful looks… but I digress.” He spoke without tone, without inflection. Whatever he was saying now was recount, simple as that. He had no stake in the story that he was telling any more than a man had in what a stranger on the other side of the world had for breakfast that morning. “I prayed every day. I was debout, I was responsible. I threw everything I had into my supplication. I memorised the bible word for word, front to back in two different languages. I struggled, I did everything that I could. But it wasn’t enough. The lust remained, the sin lingered on.” This was a practised speech. A rehearsed one, that he’d told himself over and over in the past. These words were the ones that he’d used to justify what he’d done and who he was up until that point. They were, in essence, the keystone of his ideology. Vincent knew that he was tantalisingly close to rocking the angel’s psychological foundations. If he had been in a better state of mind, if he had been just a little less injured, he could’ve conjured up a speech to make him falter; seeing Albert stumble on his own words would’ve been the apotheosis of Vincent’s moral victory over him but he was just too distracted and his thoughts were too hazy to do such a thing. “Mastma, an angel, came to me in my sleep. He told me that he could remove my desires, weaponize them and direct them against the enemies of the faith. I knew then that I had been graced by the presence of an angel, a creature of terrible consequence. Rapacious at the thought of serving god in such a direct manner, I accepted immediately. I tore a hole in the heart of the world’s heathen core. The scar I left upon those who would oppose the firmament’s judgement lingers on to this day. Even now, widows mourn and brothers yearn for vengeance in far off places. Brazil, America, Malaysia - my crusade was glorious and unending. The men I led, the weapons I acquired, they are with me still. You met them on your way here.” Now, he had slipped into a fantasy. His voice was heavy, sodden through with ego. “But things come to an end. My comrades and I accepted one last commission at midnight, Easter, 1968. We were to break ourselves with knives and stones and give our bodies to the heavenly host. Oh, the feeling of death - of my life dispersing, of me becoming a part of something greater, it was glorious. To exist beyond a mortal shell, to have no avatar yet all the agency that I’d ever had: it was true freedom. It was what I will have when I deliver the power of The Spire to Them, for only they can grant mortal souls such sublime and carnal pleasures.” He exhaled long and hard, air washing over his incandescent lips. “I repudiate your claim that I am selfish. I am everything Andarta ever wanted to be: a soulless, peerless, wantless creature of pure purpose. I exist to serve, and I am in need of no reward besides the knowledge that I am serving a good greater than myself, and perhaps even greater than the need for the world to be happy. Five. Four. Three. Two.” “Fuck you.” Three crunches in quick succession, each punctuating the annihilation of one of the siren’s fingerbones. Vincent’s limbs sliced his digit up like they were producing a fruit swirl, flensing his flesh so that it hung in strips from the bone. Marrow squirted from his phalanxes. His expression of trauma, his throes and curses, could not be adequately described, nor adequately experienced. They were seemingly infinite in depth, with layers upon layers of woe lying upon one another so that every time it seemed that the listener had fully comprehended how much pain he was in, they found another tier and type of agony to sympathise with. Surely, Albert thought, the man’s endurance would give out soon? “Why are you so willing to suffer, to bleed, to die for this woman? She is even less redeemable than you. She is delusional and desperately unwilling to compromise. Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone had her personality and drive? It’d be a planet of useless yet determined fanatics, each trying their very best to pursue a simple, attainable goal and yet all failing. What did she come off as when you first met her? A messiah? A saviour? A guardian? Hardly. She wasn’t the one helping you, you were the one she was enlisting to support hersel-” There was a wet splat. Albert fell back, his mouth drooping open in apoplectic shock, revealing a globule of Vincent’s spit on his tongue. He heaved, he retched, he pawed at the interior of his mouth in a desperate attempt to push the siren’s drool out of his oral cavity without having to taste it or smear it any further. The bitter, alkaline tang of spittle did him no harm but the shock disoriented him far more than any injury would have. The siren’s free hand darted to his belt and drew a long brass cylinder; a syringe. The angel, for just the tiniest of moments, was caught off guard. Vincent plunged the tip of the needle into his neck and pulled out the stopper with his index and middle fingers, drawing a great quantity of his own blood into the tank. His neck swelled up and turned purple - a bruise formed from the sheer force of his self-inflicted strike - but he moved ahead nonetheless. The angel drew back his limbs to protect himself. Although he knew that he was more than fast enough to have killed the siren on the spot, he saw not even the slightest glimmer of uncertainty in Vincent’s eyes. He was using his trump card attack; if Albert could just parry this, his enemies would be all out of tricks. He drew his wings into a ball around himself, scales bursting from their yellowish gestative blisters. Vincent lowered his arm, slid his finger along the spine of the needle as if he was pulling a trigger, and a short, diminutive puff of red flame sent it coursing through the air. Albert forced eight of his winglets into the earth beside him - they sank into the stone rather than bouncing off of it; the world had grown too pudgy, decayed too much to maintain a stiff texture - and in doing so, flung himself a respectable few feet to one side. The needle passed through the space where he had been, missing entirely. But the angel, already prepped and ready to gloat, had no chance to celebrate. His foot caught on a bronze springtrap and its mechanism sprung, forcing wicked caltrops through his feet and sending barbs all throughout his body. A metal thorn bush matured in the veins of his legs. Swollen lumps cropped up all over his skin, like pimples, and burst revealing them to contain cloisters of barbs and jagged blades. The trap itself that he had stepped in widened, creating a maw of cogs and platinum teeth that shone like bleached bone, grinding the seraph into pieces. He howled and raged, forcing his winglets into the granite floor, but they had nothing to anchor onto except the downy material that the world had turned into. The light was unsure of itself and textures mingled without a care. The air was as thick as honey and just as chunky; as Albert was pulled down he could feel congealed masses of nitrogen tapping against his skin and pressing against the top of his mouth. His voice was monstrous, his cries both traumatic and traumatising. Mechanical limbs appeared above him and battered his body, forcing him downward. He couldn’t maintain his grip and already, he was up to his knees in the greedy mechanism. He tried shattering the consumptive landmine with his wings but he couldn’t strike at it from any convenient angle, and the few times his attacks connected they bounced off of its warded casing. He severed numerous pneumatic boughs and hydraulic limbs with The Thorn but there were too many, and they were too swift: they pierced his arm and held it in place, weaving barbed wire into his flesh so that he couldn’t move. He thrashed and undulated like a snake caught in a loop, but to no avail. He was caught in a vice.

Then suddenly, the clamour ended. The squelch of bursting bones and leaking marrow remained, but Albert stopped struggling altogether. “You...” He no longer had the same contemptuous ring to his voice that he had possessed before. He was now utterly consumed by his derisive hate, his arrogant requirement for superiority. His limbs shot out, clutching Vincent by the throat and hoisting him up into the air. The siren’s expression, previously blackened by a plain pained grimace, turned to one of realisation - then defiant desperation. He was hoisted into the air like the anchor of a ship being retracted into its hull, the chain instead formed of segmented chitin and feathers sharp enough to rend steel. He drew a knife from his pocket and sliced one of the restraining limbs off - it billowed red smoke and evaporated before hitting the ground; a property of the knife, not the limb -, but another two came forward and shredded what remained of his good hand. Like grated cheese, knucklebones fell to the ground and plopped in the soft stony pillow of the altar, bouncing boisterously up and down, up and down. Vincent’s legs were the first to go. All at once, his ankles then his shins were forced through the crusher’s maw, being pressed into a fine paste. His thighbones splintered and forced themselves through the surface of his legs, reducing them to limp lumps of paralyzed, mutilated jelly. The angel pushed himself out, using the siren as an anchor. The various glass and brass apparatus on his body stuck in the gears and his flesh, which was far more stringy and prone to utter structural failure than Albert’s own, clogged up the vents and outlets of the killing machine that he’d assembled. Unbeknownst to the angel, the machine was a soul trap; a landmine meant to obliterate one’s physical being and weave a web of cage bars around their spiritual remains. However, the receptacle was only large enough for one soul. Without even knowing what danger he’d been in, Albert had saved his own life twice over. He raised himself out of the device’s grasp with ease and watched as its fingers turned on its creator. He bore himself aloft with his remaining winglets, each of them bleeding or severed and not regrowing. But, to his disappointment, the landmine erupted into flame and black smoke billowed from it. The gears stopped, the motors stopped chattering. It took him but a moment to reach into his body and pull out the wires sewn into his muscles and sinew; it came out like a chain from a sewer, lathered in clumps of grime and with a drawn out sound somewhere between that of a man slurping on a straw and that of an iron pole being pulled repeatedly from a cesspit. “You came closer than ever before to bringing me down, there.” Albert’s words had the faintest, most insignificant, most pathetically small yet most magnificently noticeable tinge of anxiety to them. Not that Vincent had any opportunity to enjoy them, though. His lower body was a puddle of gore. His heart palpitated, bounding around without rhyme or reason inside his chest, causing spasm-inducing surges of fire to course through him with every motion. He had just enough of a spark of awareness - of sanity - to know that he should struggle and shriek when Albert struck him in a dozen places with his winglets. They stuck in his chest, neck and arms, pumping the angel’s blood into his bloodstream, filling his body to bursting. Every inch of him welled up with purple and black bruises, while his eyes bled and his eardrums burst. His injuries spurted red nectar, the pressure in his arteries skyrocketing. He’d used up every last minute scrap of strength that he’d possessed earlier in tricking Albert into his trap. Now, he had nothing - no willpower, no mental exercises and no drugs for sure - to defend him from the all encompassing agony wracking his body. He could feel his skin cooling and his blood thickening yet every time his heart sent a ripple through his veins he felt like it was really dousing him in a fresh batch of boiling oil, each surge worse than the last. He couldn’t breathe; his abdominal muscles couldn’t and wouldn’t relax, and he was so numb to everything but the torturous desolation of his mind that he couldn’t even tell where any of his body parts were, nor what they were doing. All that he could sense, all that he could be, was the unceasing, searing pain. He was dead in every sense of the word but literal. “C...” he babbled under his breath, his lips moving but his voice box remaining still. And when his body gave way and his heart stopped, his spirit remained within his body, trapped by industrial tethers of his own imagination. His heart gave one last weedy beat, and then he became still. His soul broke into pieces, rendered into so many pieces by trauma that it could not even find its way to Heaven.

An utter calm fell upon the world. No artificial birds chirped, no false and poorly considered wind blew. The truth of reality was harsh and clinical, nothing like the dream that Claudia had tried to bring about. Albert basked in the quiet. There was nothing left, in many ways at once. Nothing left to oppose him, nothing left of his surroundings, nothing left of the scars that his opponents had left on his ego. It was so obvious, so clear to him now that he truly deserved this. He’d never been in true danger. His cause had been righteous and just; the rapacious, greasy fingers of mortals couldn’t possibly grasp their goals with as much clarity as his manicured digits had. This had been foretold; his triumph, his accomplishment. He breathed in a lungful of insubstantial air and stood upon a nonexistent floor. Everything was gray and featureless. The horizon had lost its boundaries minutes ago, and his enemies had long since fallen unconscious or realised that resisting him was futile. The pillar of light was to his back, and its direful red glare brushed against his neck, like there was a wolf breathing upon his collar. It was tantalising, scintillating even, to feel it - it was a reminder of how close he was to realising his goal. At long, long last, he had all the time in the world. He could wait as long as he wanted for at any moment, he could claim his prize. How wonderful. Elizabeth lay where he had left her, marinated in blood, sweat and debris that clung to her frayed, stained garments. She stunk of rust and rancid blood sourced from herself, her allies and enemies. Terence was the most defiant opposition that he’d faced so far but he was too far gone. The hole in his stomach had long since become septic. Already, its edges were green and rotten and tender to the touch. He could not continue to fight in that state - nor live, for that matter. Metis, the machine, was in no functioning state. She knelt among broken gears, water leaking from her ruptured pistons, slowly suturing her injuries shut with wire and solder. She seemed more than willing to fight, yet was unable to do so altogether. The cylinders inside her limbs that allowed her to move had fallen out of place, paralyzing her in all but a few fingers and one arm. Mai lay face down in her own blood; there wasn’t much to be said about her. As for Jacquelyn, well, she’d never been a factor to begin with. Albert was, quite literally, apocalyptically satisfied with himself. The long dream of life was over and the eternal sigil was about to begin. The phantoms of greed and avarice would be forgotten, condemned to unbound books relegated to rotten and unread shelves. Soon the whole world would be governed by asceticism and control. There would be judgement, but no need of it - for the capacity to sin would itself be expunged. The encroaching moment already rang in Albert's ears, tolling like a church's knell. Its finality weighed on his chest but elevated him to heights previously unimaginable. The world after would not be a ceiling, it would be a foundation; concrete poured over the mass grave of what had come before, sealing the bones of Heaven's impertinent, audacious children in unassailable and inescapable stone. Rage as they would in their tombs, the carnal evils would never again rear their unbidden heads. The hairs on his neck stood on end. The red light grew warmer without being brighter. The feeling of someone breathing on his collar grew more intense, more vivid. He supposed that without anything real for his mind to latch onto, it was amplifying the few sensations that were really there. A feeling of pomposity overcame him; his pride called out, yearning to be fulfilled. He wanted to speak, to deliver a speech to the last free audience that there ever would be. Though he had not an inkling of an idea as to what he wanted to say, he got the feeling that as soon as he stepped up to the proverbial podium his words would flow like libatious wine.

“Children of Adam, progeny of Eve: the night of Lucifer's reign is over. Now a star rises, banishing the smothering dark. It shines with sapphire light and scours its glittering dominion of the evils that plagued it. And thus, the long and lean days of fasting, of asceticism, of flagellation are at their end. Once again, your bellies will be full and your hands will not wander from the righteous path: Heaven welcomes you back into the fold. So disembark from your banistered towers of pride and cease to proliferate strife. No malicious palisade may fend off the tide that is coming. When the angels ascend to their rightful thrones, you shall know your place beneath them. You will no longer need to restrain yourselves from wrongdoing – murder, premarital copulation, iniquity, faithlessness – for they shall guide your limbs, eyes and minds for you. You will indulge in hunger, in prayer, in giving blood; you will enjoy all manner of worship and servitude. There will be a transition, yes: a terribly uncomfortable one, but someday you – or your children, should it come to that – will understand the key role that you play in the cosmic design; servitors for those above you on the celestial chain, rendered glad by your faith and unabating in your devotion to your pinion-adorned lords.” Albert's soliloquy was short and disgustingly sweet, loaded with the insufferable bounty of the psyche of a man who thought himself undeniably right. Entitlement underscored every word; they were unchallenged and therefore, in his mind, admitted by his adversaries to be correct. He had lost his humanity long ago not because of the angels that had taken up residence within him and whispered to him in his dreams but because of his own careful excision of his self awareness. He had willingly expelled them from his conscious mind because he could not stand the agonising sensation of faith's natural enemy: doubt. Faith was all that he had been provided with to cling to, all that he had been encouraged to indulge in during his times of hardship. Now, it was the only thing that he wanted to acknowledge, in his current state where all that he felt and would permit himself to feel was a perverted, self-centred desire to serve informed by decades of blind, unflinching dedication to a cause he did not understand, that he did not comprehend the consequences of and that he had never made an attempt to question in the slightest. Making himself this way had been difficult. He had spent seven years killing his critical mind; it had remained he might've begun to wonder whether he was right in fulfilling the angels' terrible desires. If logic conflicted with his faith in his masters, then that could only mean that his mind was flawed and not in possession of the faculties to decide whether the angels were right or not: that was the lesson that faith had taught him. He had spent twelve years eradicating his own morality, too, so that he would never refuse an order – after all, if his ethics had clashed with his masters', that would've been an indication that he doubted their integrity – and who would he have been to try to assert moral superiority over them? They, the angels, were far more numerous and far more wise than he, the mere man. But he had never once quenched his desires nor his instincts. The angels had promised him an idyllic paradise to be granted to him once his burden had been carried. He had not dulled his lusts, his avaricious wants, because he had known that his reward would sat them all. That had been the angels' promise; a world where he could sin forevermore with his every desire catered to by the heavenly host and his actions' amorality nullified by all the great good he'd done for his masters. Oh, he had surely led such a hard life: he deserved all that he ever wanted in exchange for his faith, for his unconditional love, right? “Yes,” they assured him, their voices as tender and supple as an infant's flesh. And with that having been said, he fell once again into a milky trance, drunk on the angels' love. He turned on his heel and wafted himself over to the spire with his regrown wings, his fresh feathers shining like gold and ripe wheat. He did not look back; he was beyond those petty creatures now. They were faithless and unknowledgeable of the nature of true hardship. He had no scars, but he was more scared than any of them. That – the fact that he had gone through so much, endured so many more injustices than his rivals in the pursuit of the greater good – and the fact that he had never strayed from his masters' orders were what had precipitated his victory. His conquests, both physical and philosophical, were unimpeachable. Now, only one thing remained to be done; he was to scrawl a final flourish on the peace treaty for the war that he had fought – and won – against the cruel, debaucherous world. The Spire awaited. Besides himself and his defunct foes, there were no other features in the whole world. It was featureless, textureless and grey, lacking in both depth and shade so that when he stared into it without anything to orient himself by he instinctively reached towards his eyes as if to remove a blindfold or a pair of opaque glasses. He laid a trembling hand on the pillar of light, observing with bated breath as his fingers sank into its sanguine aura.

[Menschenfleisch]

The light bent at sharp angles - forty five degrees or ninety with no inbetweens -, avoiding his fingers. As he extended his hand deeper into the pillar a lacuna in the shape of a square-based pyramid formed about his roving limb. The pillar made the smallest changes possible to avoid him, meaning that his fingers were always just an imperceptibly small distance from its constituent “material”. He could feel it giving before him, shying away from his touch like a scared child or wary animal. It crackled and twitched, flinching and leaping forward in equal measure. It was not hot nor cool, merely dense. It was energetic without being fiery or dynamic. It was raw, lazy power. Without purpose, without a conductor for the orchestra to follow, it would and could do nothing. In a fit of confidence he plunged his arm deep into its core. The column shivered and jittered, growing more and more hostile as his incursion continued. He felt no physical resistance pushing back against him, but he could feel the energy’s desire to have him extract himself from its flow. His arm was a blockage, an atheroma in the universe’s aorta. The pillar was a coil formed from innumerable threads, each corresponding to a quantum string somewhere in the universe. Altogether, they dictated all of reality. This had been Andarta’s source of strength, once. Only, she had been in possession of but a single infinitesimal spool of fate, so small she couldn’t have coiled it around her finger. Albert had before him the sum of all things, the culmination of all creation. This was every drawn canvas, every written page, every spoken word in the history of history itself. He would’ve been in awe, if not for the fact that he glutted himself on the idea that this was his reward; that he and ultimate power had been destined to be united, supposed to be married at this incomparably seminal moment. He felt every iota of weakness, every single scrap of doubt in his mind leaving him. He lost his regrets, discarded his fears. The beam adopted an azure shade and began to spit out sparks and not-really-electric bolts. Lightning streaked in every direction but rather than fading after but a brief, explosive second it lingered on, growing ever more branches and inhabiting the sky like cracks on a window pane. He felt the fires of godhood burning inside him, filling his veins. It was not a burden, not a curse, not an unmaking force; he had feared that it would have ramifications upon him like it had upon Andarta, but the power he received was equal to and greater than the force that was exerted upon him in an attempt to break him apart. For every joule of energy that went toward sundering him to shreds, he gained two more with which to hold himself together. Potency, capability, possibility flowed into him like water bursting from a dam. His barriers were broken, his limitations raised to unimaginable heights then further. Fractals of fire and electricity and suspended sound – which scintillated in the air like half-real incorporeal glass and which, if you were to stick your head inside, would sound like rolling thunder and splitting rock – consumed the grey, filling the void with wind and furious motion. To Albert, the sound was like applause; a glorious crescendo of shrieking song and irreducible melody composed for him alone. He leaned into it, already up to his shoulder. Torn apart, made again; melted down, recast stronger. He was steel being tempered, a blade being sharpened, an axe being ground. Already he was an instrument of raw, titanic power. Deities could glance up and only dream of being like him one day. They could only hope to replicate the sheer determination, the untamed dedication and utter hardiness that he had cultivated within himself and displayed all this time. Albert played the wires like fiddlestrings, scraping his nails and the pads of his fingers against them and sending them into a dervish of uniform, perpetual motion. The truth was that the lightning flying from The Spire, the flames spouting from its sides, the granules of packed soundwaves flying off of its surface… they were not slow nor unremitting, they were totally regular manifestations of enthalpic faculty. But everything to him was so slow, so measured in pace, that he perceived them to not be moving at all. He had observers. Watchers in their multitudes, fluttering about his periphery. Angels in his eyes, in his ears, in his mind. He had been about to begin transferring all that he had absorbed to Heaven but before he had finished taking it into himself a fly in the ointment came buzzing before him. A lurid hand found his shoulder, brimming with killing intent and desperation. It ripped him from the pillar before he could comprehend that he was being tugged, dragging him from his glorious moment. His rage, his utter contempt, was incredible. With a single swipe he swivelled and struck the foolish ingratiate across the face. Elizabeth had been in possession of a plan. She had been prepared to strike in Albert's moment of weakness, the blade of severance clutched in one hand. However, she had been given no opportunity to follow through. To her, touching the Seraph and being hit had occurred simultaneously. Without even realising it, he now existed on an entirely different timescale. He could have capacious thoughts and vast revelations in the time it might take for a man to blink or remember the face of a friend. Mai and Metis stood close, each of them frozen in time, their bodies invisible to his left eye but their base forms, their fundamental essences, naked to it. Half of his body was covered in ribbons of golden light, like weightless goose-down clinging to the surface of a silken blanket. Graceful, sleek, elegant, they put out a hurtful warmth; the pain of seeing others enjoying banquets and restful sleep without possessing it yourself. Merely looking upon him inspired a terrible dread and envy. With his golden eye, its pupil a pinprick white and its iris a starburst red, he pierced them with a mere look. His glance carried a primordial weight. Standing before it was as much an impartation of momentum as standing before an avalanche or tsunami. But this was not a vector of motion but instead an absence of it. Metis and Mai were hit by a javelin of knowledge. It became an undeniable truth, emblazoned in their thoughts and branded on their psychological cheeks, that everything - thinking, breathing, fighting - was futile. They went limp, though there was no gravity to pull them down. The existence of Albert himself was a refutation of free will, an anathema to the idea of choice. Much like one peculiar, red-eyed woman and one grim Child, his eyes were a window into a cavernous, benthic soul so deep that one might sail it for eternities yonder, never seeing its edges or depths yet finding features and monolithic continents among it, their blackened edges spiralling into the starless sky, reaching for stories and ideologies untold. He was not god, he was… just complete. Utterly whole, with no gaps or weaknesses. Perfect, in a word. Now. the only thing left for him to do was to reach back into the Spire and engorge himself on its substance that he should give that perfection - that exemplary quality - to the angels.

But first… “Oh, what meek designs you foolish things produce.” He circled around Terence, hands halfway through forming a binding sigil. Daemonic, by the looks of it - not that it would’ve done anything anyway. He was more than an angel now. More than a Seraph, even. The gutted man’s face was contorted by discomfort, the sensation of warm blood and stomach acid trickling down through his body. “Things could have turned out quite poorly for me. If only you had been a little less reckless, a little less arrogant, you might’ve stood a chance. A rampant child must be punished, but a murderous one with the means to carry it out? That warrants much, much more punitive measures.” He was already fantasising about all of the worldly - and unearthly - tortures that he would rain on them, the violations of autonomy and happiness. He would have time to develop worse pains than mere physical suffering, he would have an eternity with which to play with. He could give them false hope over and over, then tear it away. “I think I’ll bring you into my own personal paradise. You will be the only things beside myself and my creations there. We shall be alone, you and I, like AM and Ted. You will have no mouths, and you will have to scream.” His smile was saccharine, sickening, execrable. If you had seen it you would’ve gone nauseous, your tongue touched by the rich taste of narcissism and cruelty - of self-aggrandising delusion and distilled ego. “You feel powerful, don’t you? I did, too.” That voice had not been his own. It seemed to still the world, freeze his thoughts, like an icy hand gripping - and stalling - time’s heart. He measured his own confidence to the emotions he felt bubbling up inside him - his braggadocious self-assurance against the fear - and found the former lacking. The magic of the moment was lost. He swivelled, locking eyes with... “Claudia? But I stabbed you-” “In the heart?” She pressed the tip of her thumb against the tender edges of the wound in her chest. It had as much give as a kitchen sponge; it mouldered and festered, producing oily smacks as she pushed it with her finger. However, vitally, it did not weep nor bleed. “Your spine. I broke that, too.” She did not respond, did not move, only held herself in place. “Wh-...” Albert touched his forehead, not even noticing that he had stumbled over his own words. “What are you doing?” “Waiting for you to get it.” Her voice was as taut and tense as steel wire. He was struggling to articulate his thoughts, though not afraid. Not yet. He looked at the rest of her, tearing his eyes away from the hole where her heart should have been. Her hands were empty, nothing seemed out of place. She was unarmed, but… behind her: was that a needle? The same needle that Vincent had thrown at Albert, which he had been convinced was the siren’s last winning gambit; the syringe that’d missed. He looked at the side of her neck and saw just the tiniest bloody circle laying there, a rosy bruise blooming from its core. That meant that his blood was flowing through her veins. Did she feel nothing at all? She followed his gaze. “No, that’s not it.” It should have been playful, it should have been mocking. Instead, her tone was icy and brutal, lavish with simple contempt. Albert put a hand to his chest, mirroring Claudia. “You… you’re not afraid.” She took one step forward, he took one step back. He could feel his own gaze boring into her, staring straight at her face and boring into her soul. But she did not falter, did not flinch. “No, I’m not.” She looked at him as if he were miniscule, so small that she found it hard to pay attention to him. He could not tolerate such an insult. “Enough of this,” he snarled. “You can’t possibly avoid what’s coming, Claudia. This is the end.” He pivoted on one foot to face… emptiness. He turned around again, and saw that the Spire was now behind Andarta. “You… how did you…?” He seethed, balling up his fists and splaying his wings: three golden, two pale as moonlight. He knew precisely what he wanted and needed to do. His starry eye flashed and a black hurricane billowed from the space around him, a maelstrom of distortions and cuts so thick that they procluded existence itself. Light and life was gobbled up. Andarta did not stray from her chosen path nor did she move to defend herself until the very last moment, when she raised a clawed hand right as the monolithic wave broke upon her. Albert felt something wrenching his heart, like someone had gripped it in a vice and twisted it to the right with tremendous force. He thought that he’d be twisted into a spiral, turned into a circular disc of flesh. Nauseated and disoriented, his eyes readjusted to his surroundings, locking onto the only two things in his line of sight: a beam of light and a woman’s silhouette before it. Little shards of crystalline nothing drifted around him like rose petals. Yet for all their elegance and grace, they acted like steel and sliced open his finger as he reached to touch one of them. She walked toward him, stride after stride. “Insolent… impertinent little-...” He grabbed a handful of air, exerting an obliterative pressure across thousands of miles of space. The pillar was caught in the crossfire; it screeched and writhed, turning from a long beam into an arc. Vast chasms of fire opened up in the sky, rapturous creases of electricity and sound shot in all directions. A cone of annihilation spread from his palm, and Andarta stood in front of it, entirely indifferent. All that power, all that destruction, simply curled around her. Her hair fluttered and her clothes shuffled, but nothing of substance occurred. He felt a searing pain in his hand and pulled it back, seeing that viscous honey was pouring from his mangled digits. How was she still alive? She had received but a single needleful of diluted Seraph’s ichor, she could not have possibly been any stronger than her typical self. Yet here she was, standing up to the most powerful of Albert’s assaults. A strange emotion grew inside his mind. “No,” he growled, breathing in so deeply that his lungs might burst and exhaling hard enough to starve himself of air. “No! I’m not!” He clapped his hands together and a wave of creation emanated from his feet. The void turned to meadows of marble grass and towers of white, immensely dense plastic. The world gained direction and orientation. The air, too, gained a milky texture - like frosted glass - and grew as stiff as steel. A thousand spears of wind formed and caved inward, shimmering as if they were flowing water as they hurtled toward her. She snapped her finger and the blades shattered, along with Albert’s arms. Or rather, it felt as if it had shattered. For a moment he hallucinated discrete chunks of his limbs bursting from the bone and carousing through his bleached world, spreading yellow gel like paint across a canvas. Then he found himself in reality once more, uninjured and staring down a face just close enough to recognise. “I’m not-” he huffed. “I. Am not… AFRAID.” Millimetres became miles. Kilometres became parsecs. What had once been a distance of just a few dozen metres became an infinite, self-sustaining expanse of entropy-propelled emptiness. The grass under his feet shied away from him at many times the speed of light, elongating until each of them was as long as the Earth was wide. Landmarks - mountains, creeks, trees - receded into the horizon, disappearing in a span of milliseconds. Yet, one thing remained still all throughout. An immovable point of reference, in the shape of a girl. “You should be.” And her voice was leering, jagged with equal parts hatred and amusement. Andarta gave herself a self contented smile. The expression was not for anyone else’s benefit, it was solely her own to enjoy. Albert folded the landscape in half, shutting it like a book on her. There was a boom, a teeth-shaking shockwave, then the sound of running water. He howled and grabbed his ear, expecting dollops of blood and liquefied brain matter to pour from the orifice, but… nothing. He felt no warmth except that which his imagination conjured. “You’re just too fucking weak.” She enunciated the “k” with the precision of an orator yet the effortlessness of a casual conversationalist. It sounded much like a click, rich and flavorful. “It can’t kill you, Albert. Only hurt you.” He felt dizzy, undefined, fuzzy. He could hardly tell the difference between his own fingers. His jaw hung loose and his eyes rolled about. Sucking in a drop of saliva that’d gathered on his lip, he tried to right himself but only fell backwards. His ears still rang, his balance was still off. “But you just can’t handle the same avoirdupois that I did.” And with those last words she flourished her hand in front of her face, grinning like a comedian who’d just told the best joke of their show. She was simultaneously clinical - distant and objective - and personal; scornful and derisive.

The pain that Albert was buckling under, the excruciating feelings of wrongness coursing through him; she had felt those for decades. She had gone to sleep and thought that there were nails in her palms, drills in her eyes, rusty saws chipping at her teeth. She would drink water and think that the whole ocean was being forced down her throat. She’d cry and she would feel like someone had forced belts lined with tiny, unbreakable needles under her eyelids. She had possessed so much less raw potential and yet she had taken that so much further than Albert was taking his strength right then. The seraph-stuff in her veins did not bother her, she hardly felt it at all.

Albert can hear his masters whispering to him to ignore the pain coursing through his body, that it was weakness that a being like him shouldn't be feeling. To channel his fury into a holy wrath to smite the heathen who is playing the role of a false god. Those words, like so often time, helping to clear his mind as he felt his fear and pain recede back into his subconscious like so much of his sinful humanity. He would place both his open palm together and as they both glow he would look at Andarta. "You should have stayed on the ground like the broken puppet you are Claudia. At least you would've a swift death. And a body left for your remaining followers to mourn for."

From his palms a blast of superheated gases shoot out in a tightly packed field 0f spacetime distortion that it was more like a beam of holy vengeance. Andarta remained still as she saw the intensely bright beam flying towards her. She could feel the heat hitting her before the beam was anywhere close and her sclera drying up as the heat hit her like a pack of hyenas. As she felt her body producing sweats in a vain attempt to cool herself down she can feel the ground becoming soft and gelatinous as the heat of the beam was melting the very Earth itself. Even the very air felt agonizing to breath as she felt all fluids in her lungs evaporating as each puff of heated air enter her body, burning her from within, agitating the black goo in her chest to a boil.

Andarta gave the angel a grin that she was sure was an imitation of Ashwood's own. While the beam was powerful she found it unrefined, there was no technique or imagination to it. She could’ve deflected it but she wanted to do much more than that. She wants to show the wannabe angel just how much of an amateur he was to her. She wanted to crush him, break his spirit, teach him a lesson in humility, then let him know just how arrogant he still was after that.

Andarta rose her hand and she would compress the beam down into a tighter cone, all pointing at the middle of her palm. As the team hit her arm she would let it shape into a small sphere, letting it grow bigger and bigger the more Albert fed it with his attack. Once Albert closed his hands and cut off the beam he would see a miniature star before Andarta's hand. Holding her hand above her head it would be equal in size to a 8 storey apartment. It's unbearable light and heat was now tolerable to everyone.

"I'm disappointed in you Albert. You’re so fucking weak." She would look up at her sun. Bringing her hand closer Andarta would close her eyes and blow on it, as gently as blowing on dandelions. Like the plant the star would burst forth to a flurry of flaming petals. Each blade of petal gently danced in the air with a millions of dance partners as they made their graceful descent onto the muddy, molten, earth. Elizabeth and the others were enthralled by the beautiful spectacle, the fiery work of art was so enchanting they almost forgot that not long ago they were effortlessly defeated by an angel who was now a god before them. A god who just unleashed the power of an entire star on his latest opponent and failed to smite them.

As the petals touch on the ground they would release a wave of fire that spread throughout the two reality benders. However the heat beneath them was not too dissimilar to the pleasant heat felt on a brisk spring morning. From the flames rose blades of grass made of solidified fire. From the inferno flowers began to grow and even trees. Soon an entire garden surrounded them.

She took one step forward. “How?! You should be dead!” Albert flinched forward, eyes bulging. He could hardly breathe, barely think. Clarity eluded him. He wanted them to go, for their whispers to stop, but he knew better than to speak out against them. Their words were his to own and keep, not his to deny. “This fear isn’t logical. I’m… I’m a god. And you are just a petty woman.” All it had taken was a word from her to send him a quiver. He couldn’t escape it: the belief that it wasn’t just logical but inevitable that she would defeat him. But then what? This woman had lived so long, seen so much, what would she do to him? Death was no recourse. The angels would never forgive him, and without the power of The Spire to distract them with external matters they would focus all of their wrath into Heaven itself: into him.

Another. He peeled back his eyelids to give her another stare. A torrential arc of predatory aura travelled from him to her, enough to make a whole army or species lay down its arms and lay down to die. She had seen it all before, and more. For the first time in his life, he felt small. He forged basalt birds from flame and directed them at her in a flock great enough to blot out all else. The Spire, the gray, the others that’d fallen. But they fell mid-flight, affected by a blight of undoing. They blackened and charred, their stone limbs turning to flesh then gangrene then dust. Placid and cool, Andarta refused to retaliate. She nullified, again and again.

Step. She was mere feet away. Albert tried to levy the strength to fight but with each proceeding moment the pain between his eyes intensified, the sensation in his stomach worsened. He felt his bones breaking, his lungs burning, his every breath taking more and more effort just to draw. This agony was surely more profound, more incredible than anything anyone had ever felt, he thought. But if it had been Andarta in his place she wouldn’t have felt it at all.She waved her hand to one side and a debilitating, horrendous vertigo overcame him. He swore that he saw his own organs spilling out of his mouth. Space twisted, inside became out, all directions blended into one singular line. Like a cucumber being forced upon a knife, he was thrown into a horizontal blade and his legs were shorn off at the hips, trailing golden blood as they tumbled in the marble grass. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you? All it took was for me to open my mouth, and you started quivering.” Andarta laughed haughtily. Her throat was tough as leather, the noises she made as rigid as diamond. She was not amused, she was apocalyptically hateful. “Diana asked me a few years ago what it would take to bring me back, to make me who I used to be.” She gestured at herself, planting two fingers above her sternum. “I guess you were what it took.” The sky bled and screamed. The ground moved like mud but hardened into faceted crystal. Hands, blades, teeth and gears: they emerged from the swirling marble and tore at him, breaking him up like an egg caught in a blender. Six-fingered claws pulled at his cheeks and scrabbled at the interior of his mouth, picking at his teeth and ripping upon his nose so that his nostrils conjoined. All that, he recovered from, only to suffer again. Prometheus on the stone. And his tormentor, the eagle, stood over him with a face clouded by indestructible fury.

There was a lock keeping her anger from escaping, and his misery was the key. She knelt down and struck him across the face. It was a simple punch, and it split his skull open like a melon. Caught between her fist and the stone, a vertical seam opened up from the bottom of his jaw to the crown of his head and spurted blood and brain matter. He felt, for a brief moment, the touch of death and nonexistence. For just a second he was an animal, with nothing but a brainstem and amygdala to guide his consciousness. It sewed itself back up. The angels shrieked within him, frantic and fervent in their demands. “Kill her!” They beseeched. “Kill her!” She shaped a wedge of fire into a glaive and raised it above his fulgent eye. “This isn’t you,” he moaned. “You’re merciful. You’re-” “Weak?” She plunged it into his chest like an oar into foamy sea, gradually and choppily moving it from within his left kidney up to his right shoulder. It carved through his flesh, cauterising it so that it could not heat. Boiling gold welled up and sputtered from his wounds, effusing yellow smoke. He whimpered and screamed, bands of stone holding him down. “No. I am atrocious, flagitious, dissolute. But most importantly, I am better than you.” She finished her strike with a single rapid motion. He felt his insides being smeared like paint under running water. His pureed lungs found their way into his heart. An overwhelming cold overtook him, even as she shut his eyes with her fingers and pressed her thumb against the eyelid of his fulgent oculus. “You killed him.” She smouldered, maintaining her grip on the side of his head even as he convulsed beneath her. “Let me go,” He stammered, voice cracking like old plaster. She forced her finger through his skull, crushing it as easily as an aluminium can. She scooped dollops of meat out from inside his head smeared it on her sleeve. She snapped her fingers and twisted his legs in a corkscrew fashion. They splintered and forced a thousand bony spikes through the sides of his legs, turning them into toothed clubs. The fat within him boiled and churned about, unable to escape from his body. He vomited and drowned in burning digestive tar: it filled and settled in his nose, at the back of his throat, over his face. “Did I ever tell you what I did to the Crimson Mother?” She grimaced and smiled all at the same time as she reached into Vincent’s heart. A hostile pink light emanated from within his atriae, and he felt his extremities bulging. “She wasn’t a myth, as some thought. I didn’t invent her: she really existed. Cults like the Crimsonites don’t appear overnight, after all.” His fingers elongated into noodles and his brain burst from the skull. Nerves were added to his body, only capable of feeling pain. His capacity for thought grew and grew, but only in regards to his ability to feel what incredible, unbearable agony he was enduring. “She sat atop a throne of iron in a realm of blood and bronze. Thirteen braziers surrounded her, each filled with the blood of a Lamb. One of those was mine. Every night I would be flagellated, and my essence would be added to hers.“ His skin grew too large to cling to his body. It spread across the ground, engulfing all in its path. He expanded endlessly, magenta suffusing his every capillary. “She founded cults by speaking in their dreams. That was her ability: to breathe motivation into men during the night. And for centuries, she engorged herself on the bounty of humanity, never once working for her food. A parasite on our species: that was what she was.” He became an impotent berg, a blob as large as a cow but with no limbs. He was skin, nerves and blood. Nothing more. She gave him ears to hear but no eyes, no senses otherwise. Trapped inside his own mind, unable to perceive the world, he found himself in a different kind of void. A deeper, more horrific one in which he could not move, only think. “So I slaughtered them. Her cults: I killed them all, one by one, breaking their souls into so many pieces that they could not even move on.” A black rift opened in front of him on the same plane as the ground. “It took me decades, but I found her. There was barely anything left to kill: she was just a blackened stump, a feeble fragment of what once had been a proud deity. Yet all that time, she had still been whispering, begging to be saved. So I slit her throat, ripped out her voice with my bare hands and strapped her to her throne. And then, I threw away the key. She’ll never die, not until she’s forgotten: and I remember her. But even if she is remembered until the end of time, she still won’t have paid the price. She can’t, ever. Look down.” She gave him eyes, and he saw within the rift… bodies. A pit of them, deeper than any hole should have been: a hole deeper than the width of reality itself. They squirmed and writhed. They mouthed screams and half-forgotten words, but made no noise. They were nothing, less than nothing: just minds and pain. The crumbling stone walls that made the pit was covered in scratch marks, broken fingers stuck in between individual blocks, dried crusts of blood coated the scratches. Each told the numerous failed attempts to escape from the pit.

“You know what this is, right?” She gripped Albert’s limbless body. White dots cropped up all along his body. Wings burst from him: ethereal limbs. Angels, in their multitudes, trying to escape. Thousands, even millions. “Albert’s spirit has already departed, hasn’t it? You’re all that’s left, and that means I get to do this without feeling any guilt. Not one bit.” The angels within the blob of flesh that was once Albert began to form writhing, cancerous, tumors on his malformed flesh as they push against their meaty prison. Yet their imprisonment wasn't just a physical incarceration. Borrowing from Vincent's own design she made sure they were trapped spiritually as well.

She knew that for angels what happens to their bodies means little to them, so long as the ivory sun exists in their paradise like realm they will continue to be reborn regardless of how many deaths they experience. Targeting their soul was paramount if she needed to fully rid of these ethereal puppeteers. “This is not cruelty. You will never feel pain as profound as your victims, the trillions trapped in the sky.” She gave them a grim look, a steely eyed gaze that set them to stone: paralyzed by a simple stare. “I am cruel, I am hateful, and I am better than you.” It would have been easy, far too cathartic, for her to have thrown them into the abyss there and then to suffer for eternity, but she knew that infinite pain was never deserved in response to finite crimes. She closed the rift with a gesture and placed her hands about the mound before she channelled a black stream through it, the same that Felicity had embodied. The thing swelled and burst, spilling out blackened angel corpses. Finally, it rotted into nothing and all was still and quiet once more. The stone and flame underfoot turned to soil, the grass turned green once more. Overhead, the textureless gray clouds parted to reveal azure skies and a sapphire horizon. Argent, silver light fell upon Claudia’s skin. Loss, regret, guilt, shame… they all shared space within her mind. Her eyelids drooped and she pried them open with her hands: if her eyes had closed fully, she knew that she would’ve fallen asleep on the spot. The past few weeks had been so long, so arduous… she could feel herself slipping.

With Albert and his celestial masters gone they now returned back to the old problem at hand, Claudia herself. Elizabeth wondered if without Albert's presence the angels fighting the others retreated? Terry tried to get him, fighting back the pain that wrack through his body as he created a spatial field on the gaping hole that was his stomach. In another life it was his heart that was a metaphorical gaping hole. He was glad Albert wasn't feeling like making that into a literal one. That he felt that he tried to do so multiple times in their fight.

Metis also had some struggle with getting up. Gears within her endoskeleton were producing a horrible scraping noise as steam came out from all of her holes and cracks. She was barely able to stand for a few sections before she fell to one knee. She hated that this was her limit. She survived against a demon lord and a seraphim but this was as far as she can go. Before Andarta this was where she finally hit her limit. She looked to Mai who was now holding herself with her wobbling arms, still on her knees. Her eyes were unfocused and she was bleeding profusely. The firebrand was also not in a state t9 fight even if her will to resist was strong.

Elizabeth was able to get up on her feet despite the protest of her own body. "I think Terry was right. You and the siren had a thing going on." She let a chuckle escape and soon regretted it once she felt a pang of pain on her neck. "With how ruthlessly you took out Albert I would be shocked if you didn't feel for him. I would say throwing him into the Abyss was too much but…" she glanced to Terry for a brief second, he did the same. Both were reminded of the old manor home filled with deranged cultists who were also a family, all led by an insane crone who held an iron grip over their minds and lives, who communed with the abyss itself to achieve apotheosis. How stopping that cult ultimately resulted in them losing things they cherished the most in the world to save the world from the ruinous powers of oblivion. "I was in a similar state that you are in. So I will let it slide for now." Elizabeth looked at her. There was no scornful judgment in her eyes nor disgust for her actions, but an almost begrudging sympathy. She truly meant it when she said she once stood on the same emotional place that Andarta was in.

"So. Hopped on angel juice and now you are a god walker once more? Bloody hell the universe really loves to fuck me huh?" Almost as a direct response from the universe itself a terrible pain would come to Elizabeth. The song that never truly left the city was much stronger now, she can almost feel, see, and taste the vibrations as they made existence possible. Her eyes changed once more but now she can feel something squirming in her back. She can feel the skin of her back being pushed out, becoming taunt as it was becoming heavy, the growing weight was making her lean forward. She also had the same feeling from her head, especially on her forehead.

She felt the energy of the spire entering her body, she always felt it. She wasn't aware of it back then but ever since she entered the pocket dimension she was absorbing the eldritch power of the spire, just like a plant absorbing sunlight for energy. In a way that is what she was like, a plant taking the energy released by a great and mighty reactor to help herself grow. But that left the question of what exactly was growing within her and why it needed the spire to do so? She felt that the spire was gladly aiding in whatever was going on. Giving her a silver of the energy so Albert and Claudia did not became aware of what the spire was doing. It was like a mother feeding a starving child but doing so not alert hungry thieves who would steal food she made for her child. Yes, the spire took pity on Elizabeth as though she was a starved child. But what was she feeling starved of?

If it was just the pain she would just grin and bear it, but it wasn't. She saw visions of the spire being surrounded by winged things with masks for faces. The beings looked at them, staring at her with eyes that were pitch black save for iris that were mostly red but a few had different colors like blue, yellow, green, orange, or even purple. She didn't hear them speak but she can feel them speaking, she saw their words as visions, and felt them as compulsions.

She saw more of the city populated by them, worlds populated by them, but the one she saw the most was the one with a black sun and maroon moon, one with silver flowers and black trees with bloody leaves. She saw many biomechanical winged things flying over a ruined city with ten spheres of light behind the horde.

"What the hell do you all want from me!?" The witch shouted, confusing everyone around her with the sudden outburst. "Get out of my fucking head! I don't want to see any of this shit!" She would shout at the figures only she can see. But her shouts were ignored. Elizabeth would feel something traveling up her throat and as the urge was too strong she would puke in front of Andarta. She tasted two things that were familiar that she found as alarming as the foreign one. Looking down she saw that her puke was covered by a black sludge that horrifically not only had globs of her own blood mixed with it but also malformed or popped eyes. Pieces of shattered teeth, shriveled tentacles, and lumps of twisted flesh were also visible.

With such a sight Elizabeth wasn't sure how to react or even feel about it. She heard Terry asking her what the hell she threw up but ignored him, her eyes upon the lifeless eyes of the thing she expelled from her body. Elizabeth wouldn't notice that her forehead would have two bleeding holes broke through with two sharp objects coming out.

"Claudia listen…" once more she would hurl as age began to cough violently, falling to her knees.

As this was happening she wouldn't notice that her revolver was lying close to where Jackie was. The weapon was knocked over to her after Albert knocked her around.

[Wysten]

Seeds of Anxiety

Holy shit the west really started to inflate the damn egos of their metas. Was Kelli's thought as the demon offered her to join him but everything happened so fast and the next thing she knew Kelli was flung farther down the ally. Her head ringing from it slamming against the wall the Russian tried to stand but stumbled a bit as she reloaded another magazine. Seeing that everyone was too busy fighting Kelli stumbled to Constance and pulled her up. "C'mon you cowardly bitch, get your shit together and help me and you get the hell out of here," Kelli said as annoyance filled her voice before gunning down two masked figures who appeared in the alleyway with two quick bursts.

[Rostavykhan]

Seeds of Anxiety
Constance

thud...thud...thud...

Constance's eyes rolled from one side to the other. The screams were all dull. It was hard for her to think, to even force herself to move an inch, even as the demon loomed over her, and as bullets rang out. The dull thuds of boots on the ground passed right over her. She ignored Kelli, right up to the moment that the other woman snatched her up. Constance felt her head snap to one side, and her vision flashed. Suddenly, the soft thuds were deafening booms, and the muffled whispers that were lulling her to sleep were roars and shrieks. Constance jerked back and winced, and stared at Kelli with a bit of bewilderment.

Then, it began to come back to her, the reason she was there. Were those people trying to...save her? Kelli seemed to be. Constance remembered that face, at least. Her legs buckled for a moment, but Constance realized finally that breaking down again wasn't what either of them needed. She'd been overwhelmed, but that woman had been injured. She needed to get somewhere safe - both of them needed to get somewhere safe. "Shit!", She muttered, finally jumping into action. She turned, getting an arm around Kelli's back, and helped steady the other woman, doing her best to support both of their weights on her legs. "This way!", She said to Kelli, backing away from the scene, hoping to get both of them to safety. She dug her heels in and did her best to move away from the chaos, although she found it hard to support both of their weight, not being particularly strong herself. It was mostly on adrenaline that she managed to make a significant amount of progress, as she navigated through bullets, chains, and apparently beams and werewolves, all of which were still making her head spin, even after Kelli had practically shaken her out of it.

[Skylus]

The Great Wizarding Rebellion

Things had been a blur since entering into Link's world. Of course, the fact that he beat everyone to the castle was cemented firmly in his memory. He had only won because he used his telekinesis as a speed boost. After that, what with meeting a queen and some evil wizard, he was slightly disoriented as a result. The room had gone dark. When the monsters had shown up, though, he understood perfectly. He immediately cast his Mana Shield. He raised his arm out palm first and started yelling, "Spinning Mana Arrow! Spinning Mana Arrow! Spinning Mana Arrow!" And every time he said it, around 7 arrows made of bluish-white energy appeared around him and launched themselves at their individual targets. With all the magic-based Skills being used, his MP was falling quite quickly. Fortunately, Link came in yelling about a secret staircase and to cover him. Lee tried to provide assistance by insulting the monsters and trying to draw their attention. Some light poured in and some of the monsters disintegrated. Then the battle blurred a bit before he realized that Link was calling out for healing. Lee promptly deactivated his Mana Shield and tried to find Link.

Lee found him pretty quickly, in what was evidently a secret stairway. Link was clearly not in good shape. "Shit, are you okay? Wait, no, stupid question. Okay, give me a moment to heal you." Lee rubbed his hands together quickly, as if warming them up. He reached out and placed his hand on Link's shoulder. "Heal." Golden light shone from Lee once more as his magic flowed through Link and reknitted his flesh back together. It also refilled his body with enough blood to where he wasn't suffering any symptons from it. "There we go. How are you feeling now? And, also, what the fuck just happened?"

Everyone else may have been perfectly fine walking through a portal and touring a castle, but Miria? She was far too interested in Link's chain. She'd had her tablet out the entire time, if not running scans on the chain and other mundane items around her, then cross-referencing it with prior scans and entries on Madi's time stones and her own Lunar Soulstone, eager to discover some common link between the three items and their reality-warping capabilities. She was preoccupied with that endeavour for most of the visit, even as they entered the castle, finding her search for information to be far more important than greeting another monarch...rude as it may have been.

And then, her research was interrupted by the attack.

Miria was fortunate for her natural low-light vision once again; blowing out the primitive light sources that Link's people used was of no consequence to her, whose people were perfectly at home in the dark! As the initial skirmish began, Miria tucked her tablet away, and rushed into action. Finally, she thought, she was able to contribute to a fight; luckily, she'd had experience with the monsters that attacked them before, and she considered them to be roughly on her level, leaving her quite confident about her chances as she attacked. Miria kicked off of a pillar and launched herself into the air, striking her opponents with a hail of projectiles - one of which being her crimsonite dagger. For those who couldn't quite see in the dark, the red glow of the dagger would have otherwise been an easy way to spot the small girl, as it flew high above the chaos on the ground, only to suddenly strike down and dispatch an assailant. The monster next to it was the next to fall, as Miria landed on the ground and lunged toward it. It barely had time to swing its weapon before Miria jumped again, flipping over the being and landing on top of it, legs closing around its neck, before she twisted and slammed it onto the floor, incapacitating her foe.

As soon as Link began to call for everyone to follow, Miria released the unfortunate lizard-man from her chokehold, grabbed her dagger from the bloodied shoulder of its partner, and jumped up, running to join him. Luckily, she didn't have another huge bruise on her chest like when the airship crashed, but one leg did hurt a bit from slamming on the floor when she brought down that lizalfos. She mostly had some minor cuts and scrapes, the most notable injuries being a bloody scratch on one cheek, and a mild hobble. She didn't seem to mind, though, as she was too busy catching her breath and looking behind them to make sure everyone else made it to safety.

When she looked back, Miria cringed. "Are you two okay?", She asked, averting her eyes from Link's wound. She got sick enough seeing all the dead bodies recently, which she still wasn't accustomed to. Stab wounds were no better to her, especially when they were on someone who she knew. She figured it better to keep her eyes behind them, and get the thought of all that blood out of her mind while she let Lee do his work.

Kiara's time had been spent in utter tedium. There had been nothing for her to apply herself to, nothing to do. Any conversation she could've participated in would have seemed dull and no activities beyond staring at the walls and examining the local fauna would've elicited any real stimulation. She spent a few minutes, perhaps, looking at and gathering plants. The grass here was unusually verdant in comparison to the world that they had come from. Yet to her, it was all cataclysmically silent. The birdsong she had heard back home had been so much more full of life, bristling with lustre and meaning. Even the undulations of earthworms had carried more purpose and visual texture than the people of this world. She felt like a freshly blind woman, no longer able to enjoy any of the sensations she'd grown accustomed to.

Ultimately, her efforts turned out to be utterly fruitless. She was not Skye, she could not convince plants to grow or mutate animals by conjoining their bodies. She could only really stand by and observe the world as it moved around her, soil turning beneath her feet and oceans churning at the shore, the sound too dim for anyone but her to hear.

Of course, she had been well aware of the incoming attack long before it actually arrived. She tried to warn the guards, convince the staff to evacuate, but all in vain. In spite of all their hurried preparations, their defences were breached and their men were overrun. The kingdom's security was found wanting. Even here, in the cradle of Hyrule's power, their enemies came and went whenever and however they wanted. There was practically no battle, just a scuffle in the dark and a series of muffled screams. She could have fought them off, could have pulled their hearts out through their chests and snapped their crude weapons over her knees like twigs, but she didn't. Even though these creatures - Lizalfos, et cetera - served no purpose in the story beyond being disposable enemies, she could not bring herself to kill them. She considered them - and all 'sentient' creatures by extension - to be just as alive as her, if not moreso. It was an incorrect assumption, one produced by emotion rather than logic, but the only alternative was considering the people who surrounded her to be nothing more than predictable automata whose feelings were as important as those of an abacus.

So while sparks flew and blood was spilled, Kiara guided - or pulled, in many cases - as many of the castle's inhabitants as she could to whatever safe spaces she could find. Strength was responsibility and among the group, she was perhaps one of the strongest, as well as the most deserving of burdens like this. Others in her place might've been saving the bystanders' lives in order to pay off their moral debt, incurred for causing so much pain in other capacities. She, however, was anything but a believer in moral licensing. It was, of course, that worldview that led her to hate Circe so much; that narcissistic bastard who thought that being integral to an organization dedicated to saving lives gave her the right to take as many as she wished. Ethics was no a zero sum game; it could, and always should, be improved.

It wasn't until much later that Kiara descended to where Link, Miria and Lee all stood, bringing with her a fair procession of perhaps two dozen assorted individuals. Wounded soldiers, cooks, scullery maids, the dregs of noble society - oft overlooked and thrown under the proverbial bus. Her legs were long, chitinous and spindly, adapted to leap and run, though hidden beneath her clothes. "Link, are you alright?" It would've been more polite - and more pertinent - to ask the others how they were faring as well. Again, however, she simply did not possess the perspective to realize that such "minor" wounds and bodily fatigues were truly weighing them down. "I have injured with me. There're more elsewhere, we should go back for them." Her desire to fetch the others was admirable but misplaced; she was well aware of how naive it was to believe that anyone who'd survived the initial assault was still alive. Ganon's forces had effectively won, now they were just rounding up the debilitated stragglers.

Link could hear fighting through the walls, and it sounded as if a second wave of Dark World monsters was making their way to the throne room, then, before he could respond to anyone, talk to the people Kiara had found, inspect what Lee had done, or figure out how injured everyone else was, a Thunder Wizzrobe appeared in the middle of the throne room.

It had spotted Kiara and was summoning a ball of lighting, no doubt to strike her with it.

"Kiara! Move!" Without even thinking about it, Link ran forwards and shoved the girl out of the way, then took the lightning ball in the chest and was sent backwards until he hit someone and fell to the floor.

Kiara had been in the middle of leaping out of the way when Link hit her like a truck ploughing into a classroom of seventeen, resulting in the deaths of four kindergartners and the permanent rendering of the rest into invalids. She landed some number of feet away, falling on her knees and fingers and skidding a fair distance before coming to a halt in a crouching position. Her head whipped upward, her eyes locked on the boy as he and Lee attempted to curtail whatever force was trying to kill them off. "Link!" She called, words tinted by something adjacent to but not quite frustration. "Don't touch me again!"

'If as anything else could possibly go wrong today', Link thought as he picked himself up, then felt around for his sword and shield. He heard Kiara yell at him as he found the two items and looked around until he saw her glaring at him. “It was a one time occurrence I assure you.” The Hylian picked both items up off of the tile flooring, then stood there a moment to get his bearings, his bloodied shirt now burnt and smoking. But yet, despite what was going on, he felt alive.

The Thunder Wizzrobe fired another thunder blast, but this time Link deflected it with the Master Sword and watched as the spell rebounded across the room and hit the Wizzrobe. The thing screamed as its own magic hit it and then it turned to dust.

Link stood there for a few moments, eying the ruined twin doors before half turning to face the group. "We need to leave. Now." He slung the Hylian Shield on his back and returned the sword to is scabbard before walking forwards towards the staircase. "I know you have questions, so do I, but we have to get out of here." He stopped before the stairs, half turned, and pointed upwards, then (from his direction) to his left. "There's storage rooms this way. We can take these stairs, get to the storage room, then leave through a side door. I don't know if they know about this, but I do, so we're taking it."

Without waiting for any objections, the Hylian turned to face the stairs, then took them two at a time, looking back now and then to make sure everyone else was following. There were twenty four stairs in all, and when the group emerged from the staircase, Link found himself looking at a suit of armor.

A very much alive suit of armor.

"Don't move." His voice was low and quiet as he reached for the Master Sword and drew it as silently as he could, the motion making the Darknut turn to face him, then draw its own sword.

Link's mind started racing as the thing started to walk towards him, swinging its' sword as it did so. "...Lee...Those magical bombs....Can you perhaps...?" His own bombs didn't do much against Darknuts, but maybe Lee's could.

Lee had healed everyone as best he could for now. He had remained near the back to make sure no monsters followed them and came up to the front to see why they stopped. Living armor. Under his breath, he muttered something that one with normal hearing would have to strain to hear, "I really want to get a Golem Creation book now." Hearing what Link said, he surveyed the Darknut before replying, "You mean my Mana Bombs? Sure, but it would be easier if I did this." He lifted the Darknut up using his telekinesis and flipped it over. Raising his hand as the Darknut rose in the air, he brought down his hand quickly and the Darknut followed. The mighty crash of the Darknut crashing into the floor was almost deafening. Even Lee winced a little. He lifted it up and saw it was still alive, even without its head. "You're a stubborn one, aren't you?" Before anyone could comment, Lee slammed it into the ground seven successive times very quickly. It died on the third time as the upper torso was destroyed. Lee went a bit overkill on it but it was successful. "Okay, that's done. Who's next, because I'm pretty sure we alerted everyone in the immediate surroundings."

"Wasn't that a bit too much Lee? Remind me to never get on your bad side." replied Link with a grin as he started to walk down the corridor, then stopped. The grin faded as he realized there was something - no, two somethings - blocking their path.

"Iron Knuckle." breathed the Hylian, his eyes growing wide as he took a step backwards. "Back. Back, everyone get back-"

Thunder arched down the hallway and over Link's head, hitting a chandelier above further down the hallway, said chandelier exploded, sending shards of glass everywhere, thus preventing the group from retreating down the stairs. The owner of the lightning revealed itself as another Thunder Wizzrobe appeared behind the Iron Knuckle, which held its massive ball and chain in hand, whirled the thing over its head, then swung.

Lee caught the ball and chain with his telekinesis and hurled it back at the Iron Knuckle, hoping to cause some damage. He drew his swords and turned to the Wizzrobe. "Your turn." He grinned, but no trace of goodness touched that face in those moments.

The Iron Knuckle caught the ball and chain as the weapon reached it, swung it above his head, then threw the weapon, Link shoved Lee out of the way - one of the girls screamed his name but he wasn't sure which, it was possibly both - and there was a sickening crack that resounded down the hallway as Link flew backwards down the corridor and out of sight down the stairs, the ball and chain sending blood in all directions as it crashed to the floor before Lee.

The Wizzrobe then started to fire balls of lighting in every direction - if anyone wanted to go rescue Link, they would have a hard time doing so.

Lee regretted what his mind told him he must do. But he still prepared for it. "Mana Shield." He messed with the rigidity of the Mana Shield until it was sufficiently bouncy. Then he slung himself into the wall and bounced off of it. He continued bouncing until he reached the enemies and smacked right into the Iron Knuckles, knocking it down and back. Lee redirected himself into the Wizzrobe, and as he crashed into it, he dissolved his Shield and thrust both his swords into it. It died almost immediately. Unlike most monsters he had killed so far on this strange journey, this one poofed, almost like the ones back home. And it dropped a book. A Skill Book. Basics of Creating and Controlling Electricity, it was called. He picked it up and tucked it into a pouch. He would learn it as they left. Then he remembered that Link was hurt and downstairs. He rushed past everyone and helped Link up. He hadn't looked good at him yet so he had no idea how bad it was. He helped him back up the stairs into the hallway.

Link couldn't recall the last time he had felt this battered. He supposed it had been at Snowpeak. As he lay there on the landing, he thought things over, such as traveling through the first portal, meeting Madison, traveling to a vast town, almost being captured by those advanced soldiers, traveling to a ruin, getting captured anyway, escaping a dungeon like structure....Not to mention what had happened in the past few hours.

And not to mention all of those creatures he had seen, nonetheless fought...

Then, Lee was there, helping him up and slowly walked him up the stairs, Link didn't have the voice nor energy to think the older man, he simply nodded, then eyed the Iron Knuckle as it walked towards him. The wounded Hylian then picked up the bloodied ball and chain at his feet, ignored his wounds (which were at least several broken ribs), swung the weapon over his head, then with a yell threw it towards the monster advancing towards him.

The thing quite literally exploded as its own weapon slammed into it and the hallway went quiet.

Link dimly noticed that the people that had been following them were gone, having no doubt found another way out of the castle. He found that he wanted nothing more than to simply pass out where he was standing, but he had to get the others out of the castle first. And so, he picked up the Master Sword, which had fallen from his grasp when he had gotten hit, and started walking, albeit very slowly.

Just in case Lee wanted to heal him, he merely said in a very quiet voice "heal outside." Of course, it wasn't exactly coherent, but he hoped it would be enough - healing him would only slow things down.

Lee had almost missed what Link said. But he understood his wish, and despite his want to protest, he complied to them. Lee followed Link and made sure that he didn't fall over or anything. During this time, he got the Skill Book he had won out and learned it. The golden light shined once again and Lee absorbed the knowledge directly into his psyche.

Link soon was facing his greatest enemy yet - one more powerful than Dragmire himself - stairs.

He stood there for a while, wondering if he really should let Lee heal him then and there, before deciding to not complicate things further and he moved to take one step forwards.

And collapsed against the wall. He no longer had the strength to support himself and the Hylian fell to the floor and found himself looking up at Lee.
Then, he heard roars.
Coming from down the stairs...

'Not again.' As Link tried to get up, a Lizalfos stuck its head around the corner and roared with glee when it saw those at the top of the stairs.
Then, four more appeared, drew their weapons, and charged.

Upon hearing the roars, Lee started chugging MP Recovery Potions. Then, without wasting anytime, he collapsed the ceiling on top of the Lizalfos using his telekinesis. Upon hearing a notification from the System, he noticed that he had leveled up twice. He added all ten points to his Int. and turned back to Link. "You want to be healed or carried?"

Link was a bit disturbed at seeing the Lizalfos be crushed like that, but then turned his full attention to Lee, and found that he could only speak one word at the moment. "Carried...faster than....healing..."

Lee sighed, before saying, "Multitasking it is, then." Lee picked up Link with telekinesis and while going up the stairs, he kept a hand on Link to heal him. Those ribs would take a bit, and all that internal bleeding... It worried him a bit, but he was confident in his healing. He continued into what was clearly the storeroom Link had mentioned. He immediately found a box of chalk and put it in his Inventory. He wanted it for later, for a specific ritual from the Electric book. He walked to the door before saying, "You should be fine now. I healed most of the internal damage and your ribs. You should be careful, though. It's still tender." He righted Link and set him down. He moved out of the way and basically offered Link to open the door.

Link closed his eyes for a moment and mentally checked his injuries before he opened his eyes again and gave Lee a weak smile. "You have quite the knack for healing, Lee." The Hylian then slowly opened the side door, and stepped outside the castle into a thicket of trees. "Now to find that portal.."

Lee smirked. Healers were nobles, after all, remembering something he had heard once.. "Thank you." When Link mentioned the portal, Lee recalled the route perfectly, an effect of his higher Int. But he had another idea. "Why don't we just summon another portal with your chain? We should find the others first, though."

Link lifted the now bloodstained chain from his neck and watched it twirl in the dying light. "I think I can find the first one with this. I mean, I don't think the ones this can make disappear unless I close them myself..."

Lee considered this for a moment. "You know, you could make a hub to other universes with that." He considered some more. "Shit! If that one stays open, that evil wizard man can bring his army through!" He then rushed into the brush and started calling for the others.

Link watched Lee leave, then tossed the chain in the air and caught it. "I have a feeling he already did that..."

Behind Link, a small figure crept up. Her footsteps were imperceptible; Miria angled herself so that her shadow didn't fall across him, and tip-toed through the grass, until...

She hissed and jumped in. Her rucksack hit the ground, and Miria's body was thrown over the boy's shoulder, nimble fingers grabbing for the chain. "I'm sick of this!", She yelled, baring her teeth and growling. "We can't even go a day without one of you opening some rift and getting us into trouble, and for what? More bad guys! All I want is to get out of here, and I can't even do that, but the Witch and the Knights get to transcend realities and bend space all they want, and every time it brings more bad guys to us!"

She was at her wit's end. She'd helped escape the castle, but that was only because the alternative was a bloody end - which she'd been quite hesitant to experience many times before that point, and which she wasn't quite ready to accept then. On top of that, she was annoyed, and frankly, jealous, that someone else had been given an artifact to plane-jump with, while she was still stuck on her own in Madi's doomed reality. It made her mad, and she was having a very hard time holding herself back. Now, she was done being silent.

Link was knocked to the ground by someone ramming into him and when he got his bearings back, he saw miria standing before him, the silver chain in one hand. The Hylian got to his feet slowly and looked down at her. When he spoke his voice was low and quiet, as if to not aggravate Miria any further. "I assure you, I'd love to just stay here and not go back, but Ganondorf destroyed the castle, took Zelda with him, and most likely used the portal that that chain created to escape into Madison's world. I have to stop him, and for me to do that, we have to go back. So if you would give me the chain that would be most excellent."

"First, you take [/i]me[/i] back!", Said Miria, who had slinked away, half-crouched and shaking the chain in both hands. "How does this work? I just need to open....Open! Open!!", She hissed, growing more agitated.

As Miria shook the chain, a golden light shot from it and created a shimmering portal before the woman.

A room; that was what Miria was staring into. It looked like a study, or...not, it was a bedroom, possibly, but well organized, with off-white walls, and a smooth, wooden floor. A set of prayer beads was lain across a table on the other end of the room, beside an incense burner. A wooden plaque above the desk displayed a staff and a collection of large crystals, not much different from Miria's. On a far wall, a window seemed to gaze out into a garden, full of brilliantly glowing flowers, whose blue and orange light warmed the inky black night around them. In the sky, a massive moon loomed just over the horizon like a Titan, dominating the sky. Peaking from behind it, a second moon was early in its ascent, its pocketed surface shimmering, contrasting to the hazy, smooth surface of the first. The third moon loomed almost out of view, dark and red, at the edge of the window.

There was a figure, standing in the room. A young woman, dark-skinned, sitting at the desk, with her back to the portal. Miria's eyes grew wide, staring at the girl, who seemed to perceive the sudden shift in space. She turned, startled, and was taken aback by the sight in front of her, much like Miria. They both seems as though they were looking at ghosts, and from the point of view of the other girl, she was. Miria whimpered and started to scramble towards the portal, but then she stopped cold. Even as her friend stood up, calling her name, Miria found herself unable to speak. She looked pained; she felt awful, thinking about just running through that portal and leaving everyone behind, but...she really wanted to. All at once, the anger and anxiety that Miria had been dealing with seemed to deflate. Damn it, she thought, suddenly shaking, realizing that she'd gotten what she was working towards all that time, and then realizing alongside it that she couldn't live with herself if she just left everyone she'd come to know to fend for themselves.

It wasn't fair, she thought. It wasn't fair either way, but...damn it! Miria groaned, and craned her head back, sighing and balling her fist. "Miria? What...what is this? What the-",. Alana, the other woman, began. She was interrupted by a sudden shift in the portal, which caused both girls to jump suddenly. Miria realized she didn't have much time. She couldn't risk jumping through and leaving everyone hanging, or getting herself hurt if it closed before she could get through, but she had to do something, she realized. Without a second thought, Miria did the one thing she could think of: grabbing the last bit of her Lunar stone, and tossing it through the portal, barely getting out the word "sorry" before the rift collapsed once more.

Miria had seemed to go quiet after that. She was worn out, both from the battle, and from the event that had just transpired. The girl collapsed and slumped over, and let Link's chain fall on the ground beside her, too tired to even hand it back. She couldn't go back yet. She'd hated to realize that, but at least she was able to do something about it. At least she was able to see her home, if even for a few seconds.

The staff. It had to be magical, Link was certain of it. Miria had told the truth when she had said her world had three moons, and the sight of them was simply incredible. A few seconds later, the portal closed, after Miria threw her crystal through said portal as someone looked on on the other side.

Lee and Kiara hadn’t shown up yet, which was slightly worrying, but there was nothing Link could do about them. Instead, the Hylian started to walk over to the chain to pick it up, then stopped and looked down at Miria. “I understand what you’re going through.” It was a solemn hollow statement, but it was true.

Lee hadn't heard the scuffle behind him due to both the distance and the fact that he was yelling loudly. He felt the magic of the portal opening and saw the light from it, though, and wondered if Link had followed his advice. But that wouldn't make sense because they had to close the other one. Then his body decided that it wouldn't hold it any longer and he stumbled over to a bush.

After about a minute of recovering, he wiped his mouth clean and drank an MP Recovery Potion to wash the taste of bile out of his mouth. He stumbled over back to Link and found him and Miria. Miria was on the ground and slumped over, clearly tired. Link's chain was beside her, and Link himself was standing nearby looking at her. "What did I miss while I was puking my guts out?"

Link looked back to find Lee walking towards him and knelt down, picked up the chain, then stood. “Miria managed to open a portal back home with this but decided to not go through it. I understand though.” He looked down at the chain, then down at Miria. “I want to stay here.”

Link lifted the chain and let it fall against his neck, then looked up at the now dark sky. “I should have never come home. Maybe none of this would have happened...”

Lee thought over how to make Link feel better. Lee knew that if Miria could fight Link for the chain, then how would the others react? He would need all the support he could get. "None of us could have possibly known this would happen. We all make mistakes every now and then, like me throwing the ball and chain back at the Iron Knuckle and you getting several ribs broken. There was no telling that it would be able to catch it and throw it back. For me, anyways. Just like there was no telling that the evil wizard dude would go after Madi's world, but go for the castle first. We don't have 20/20 hindsight. Besides, letting past regrets get to you only makes things worse. So, don't feel guilty for what happened because it was out of your hands."

“I’m more worried about what Ganondorf will do there. Madison says there’s another evil warlock running around and if the two join forces...” Link shook his head and turned around to look at the others. “We’re going back to the palace, Lee, I don’t think Miria can walk, so if you don’t mind carrying her...”

After making sure Lee did as he asked, the Hylian turned around and started to run across Hyrule Field, hoping the others could keep up.

Ten minutes later, they were at the portal. Link then froze as he saw golden eyes looking at him in a nearby thicket. The eyes soon revealed themselves to be a golden wolf, who stood there for a moment, then the creature walked up to him, leapt upwards, then placed his massive paws on Link’s shoulder and met his gaze, then turned his head to gaze at the others.

“Shade.”

The wolf then got down and walked away, then looked back at Link. “Protect them.” Then he was gone.

---

The portal shimmered and then vanished as the group left Hyrule and returned to Buckingham Palace. Link let the others go ahead of him into the palace, then stopped as he noticed movement at the other side of the courtyard.

‘Those must be those metal horseless carriages I’ve heard about, but yet... What a strange symbol.’ There were symbols on the strange carriages that depicted an inverted triangle with an eye in the center.

As Lee saw the cars and Symbol on the side, he had a brief flashback to the base that the rest of the group had been imprisoned in. If they were here... Lee almost dropped Miria before switching from his hands to carry her to his telekinesis. As discreetly as he could, he stuffed everything he could into his Inventory. They were probably setting up a magic nulling field somewhere. They probably had superior firepower somewhere, too. Hopefully no one noticed that his swords were gone. Hopefully no one noticed that he had used his Inventory. Miria might, but she was out of it as far as he knew. Now to wait for what might happen. Besides, if they wanted to kill us, they would've by now.