It wasn’t long before the sun was on its way towards setting and Zanma had ceased cutting. He had spent the last half-hour sorting the plunder whilst intermittently picking through the gutted, half-hollow corpses, scything off a muscle bundle here or a ligant there. There was no speaking with him, Krahe knew the look of one entranced, and he had been in that state since he had gotten into his groove hours earlier. There was an unsettling singularity about him, familiar, similar to the bearing of those who had been reared from an early age by the gacorps for a specific career path, and yet, he didn’t have the depersonalized emptiness. It was a bit similar to Casus, now that she thought — the Banisher’s entire personality revolved around the lynchpin of being a warrior of justice, a worthy successor to Silberblut, and yet he was still a complete person. This “puppetmaster” was not so different.
Krahe blew out a cloud of arrha smoke.
“What are you smoking? Is it expensive? It can’t be, unless you are wealthy enough to not care,” a question rang out.
“It’s not expensive. It’s not cheap, either. Not the grade I smoke, at least. Why? You don’t seem the type to smoke,” she said, ashing her cigarette.
“Not for my own amusent, perhaps. As part of a stage play or if it happens to be the most effective thod of delivery for a dicinal substance, then sure,” he explained, bringing out a few canisters of viscous fluid. Through what appeared blatantly to be an alternate version of alchemy, he combined it with fluids he had extracted from the corpses and a small number of reagents luckily pulled from his own storage, and presented the now-fluorescent potions to krahe by floating them to her. “I can’t do much given the circumstances. This should suffice in exchange for so of your herbs. We both benefit from alien resources.”
A part of her, the sa part that reacted to many of Casus’ behaviors with irritation, flared up, but it was instead an uneasy sentint rising up again. She never did like psions, how they unconsciously picked up on others’ broadcast thoughts. They couldn’t help it, not any more than one could stop subconsciously noticing body language or microexpressions, but it was still creepy to one without the additional sense. Krahe was well aware of the fact she was also this type of alien existence to the redhead. She took out a bundle of her arrha stock for the expedition and handed it off to him using a tar tendril, much to his puzzlent and slight concern at the black limb erging from a mouth in the palm of her hand.
Giving them each a once-over, Krahe found the canisters to each hold a liquid with different effects. They were tagged, but Krahe couldn’t read Zanma’s language, so resorting to the Oculae was her only choice. One, a luminous sea-blue, was a cognitive accelerant, sothing similar to the Decoction of Mind’s Dawn, only stronger and with no side effects listed. The second, a paradoxically bright maroon colour, was also a ntal enhancer, but focusing on calmness, with secondary effects of motor control stabilization.
Picking through the spoils and making a few more such small exchanges, they wound down for the day.
____________________________________________________________________
They’d found their quarry. It was a small miracle, but they had found her. Hunched in place, wheezing with each breath that passed through the lamprey-fanged opening of his mouth, Agmon the Seer traced the fingers of his lengthy arm through the sand. His robe, cocoon-like, layered with countless relics and sigils within its folds, concealed much of his distorted form, but the mass of spider-like legs that carried him was impossible to hide. His body extended upward from his feet and bent forwards, hanging in mid-air, his four, lengthy arms descending from the trunk, between the folds of his robe. His contingent of a dozen stood arrayed behind him astride greatly varied graft-beast steeds. Battle-thaumaturges, Stillborn Handlers, and Dreadmorphs, all pure evoy, trueborn adherents of Vedesis. So among them resembled humans and saurians so closely as to fool the unknowing eye, having supped richly upon the cattle-races in their grubhood; several of them had gone so far as to make themselves all but indistinguishable from fleshlings through grafting. These evoy were no re branded, no re fly-n, they were of noble descent, chosen specifically move amongst the cattle-races undetected and liquidate those of the cattle-races who made of themselves thorns in the side of the Vedesian Swarm. Agmon had learned that the Dreadmorphs were nad “Abara Morphs” by the skinbags, and he held their naming in contempt.
He’d been a man once; or at least, he had once walked in the shape of a man. This form — all this, twisting and grafting, was his own work, in honor of his god, in spite for the two-legged cattle-races he reviled. It was a privilege of his rare and extensive skills, that he could afford to live in this form, which he saw as more natural for his kind, without fearing recognition. What did he care? He needn’t fear recognition if none would ever see him save perhaps from a distance prior to their deaths. Not because he was a killer; no, that was below him.
His na spoke to his nature and his profession. There was no face upon his head any longer; only an array of widely varied eyes, to see light, to see heat and magnetism, to see thaumaturgy and theurgy.
With a second hand, he swung a censer to-and-fro; a skull, smoke pouring from empty sockets and gaping mouth, swirling about in tendrilous fashion. The skull still bore the remnants of gilding and reinforcent, of Zaveshian consecration grafts, now long defaced and overrun by the thrumming sigils of Vedesis. In his third hand, he gripped a shard of alloy, scorched and pock-marked, perpetually covered in irremovable soot. It seethed even now, eating away at his wards as it burned away. Only this destructive divination thod, which burned up fetish objects like kindling, had the potency to track the target at all, and forget about accuracy. What was worse, it rapidly lost effectiveness even with new fetish objects. If this attempt were to fail, Agmon doubted this specific divination tracking technique would ever work on her again.
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