Corpses laid strewn all around. Wherever one looked, one could spot a grisly death scene and perhaps even deduce how the poor fools had t their ends. An enormous crow the size of a vulture hopped to-and-fro pecking at the corpses, crooning in grisly laughter, and all around the battlefield, there wandered a contingent of a dozen humanoid shapes, skeletal automatons devoid of cogs or engines, dragging great sacks along the ground. With blades and drills and pliers they took to the corpses that the raven had passed by, as well as those it was already finished with. There in the middle, amidst a tangled web of yellow paper and steel wire, atop a great white boulder with arms, there nested the chief perpetrator, looking out over her handiwork, smoking. Across, upon the humanoid edifice’s other shoulder, sat a red-haired young man, absently staring into space.
“Proven right once again,” she uttered, tone dissatisfied. She had been expecting this type of retaliation in force for so ti, it only irritated her that it had co here and now, after she had already picked up this stray, even if he could fend for himself. It was plain to see on his face that, though accustod to violence, he wasn’t fully comfortable with the type of ultraviolence Krahe had employed, and the sheer scale of it by the necessity of how large the vedesian force had been. She had not entirely expected a force this large either, but found it lionizing to now sit in the midst of perfect evidence for her growth as a battlemage.
In the waning monts of the battle, her chief concern had shifted from its completion, from the total eradication of the enemy, towards handling their remains. To utterly remove any trace, that was impossible — but she had considered whether to even bother with scavenging beyond the bare minimum. But now, those concerns were put aside. Picking through the fallen proved far faster with over a dozen spare bodies to go around. More notably, the local warding had a tir. It would be easier and safer to just wait it out than to bother dismantling it. With Zanma having simply floated his puppets outside the periter, Krahe made a ntal note to account for aerial assaults. How would stationary wardings handle anti-air capacities? Their range was already so limited, she would need to consider this matter at length. Surely, the masters of ancient and recent tis both had dealt with this issue.
She felt a faint tug inward. Not an explicit pull, just a vague awareness. A hanging notification rather than a blaring alarm, so to speak. It was the Binding Obelisk, that executioner’s sword. With just a thought she was there, before it, looking up at the etchings of baroque grotesquery that sprawled over its surface. A light tilt of the head, and it changed. A new refraction of the sa; a rendition of the current, real mont, that of herself upon the White Serpent in the midst of the defeated, destroyed, disemboweled, dismbered, and thoroughly devastated task force.
Ashing her cigarette, she looked to the redhead.
“It’s a touch early, but it would probably be for the best if we part ways after this,” she said, broadly gesturing to the general surroundings with her cigarette. “If these lot found out here, in the middle of nowhere, after the asures I’ve taken, they likely can and will find again. So chaff are one thing, but I’d feel remiss to drag you into my crusade.”
“You… Ugh,” Zanma began, eyes twitching towards Krahe. He sat up. Two of his puppets collapsed as he diverted so attention back to his own body. “You speak of this slaughter as if you expect it to repeat, ti and again. As I understood the… Let us call it the sentint of the enemy, they had anticipated this to be a decisive, overwhelming strike. Are you a pessimistic person, Miss Blackhand?”
She laughed. “Yeah, you could put it that way. Regardless of that, I do think it will be better if you just go off on your own. The only serious threats you’re likely to encounter are well into the Beyond Frontier, past the point we would have split regardless. I’m going south-west, you’re going south-east.”
A long drag. The stub vanished in her hand, obliterated in a puff of dense black smoke entirely unlike the cigarette’s own.
“We’ll just part ways a little earlier than planned, that’s all. Take whatever you want from among these corpses. The bodies, I an. Any possessions, rings, small square tablets, firearms, so on and so forth, probably won’t be of any use to you. You’ve seen the keys popping out of their skulls. Pull them out carefully. If they break, that’s not your fault, so just do that.”
“Only a handful seem to possess such things,” he said. Krahe, having nothing to do but wait, waited.
“To put it simply, the devices are called voidkeys. They’re amplifiers, if you will. You need a soul to use one. Those-” she gestured towards a pile-up of dead Stillborn, “-are not people. They never were people. Reanimated corpses. Less than animals. So might have artificial voidkey housings in their chests, devices to repurpose them to artificially generate magical protection otherwise exclusive to living people.”
The corpse-picking proceeded for so ti. Gradually, the puppetmaster picked through the fallen, often taking monts to cut out an implant or sever a limb whole cloth. Voidkeys and other loot gathered within the puppets’ sacks, stacked up into a growing pile. Krahe knew well the waste taking place. All these Abara Morphs, but neither the ti nor the implents to properly dissect them. At most, two or three specins could be put into storage capsules in pieces and saved in Kenoma Storage. But alas, such was life.
Of the recovered voidkeys, several were more than rely promising — they were good enough that Krahe would have implanted one right then and there, were it not for the Atomica. Perhaps they would serve as material for the Atomica’s completion, or as alternative currency. It was never bad to have more valuables on hand. As for Zanma, he took his share, and took it in the fullest extent. With the hands of his skeletal proxies, he butchered and carved and pulled apart, halted only by the constant ticking of ti. Indeed, as he revealed, he had ntally tallied the corpses and calculated how much ti he could afford to give them considering the rough tifra Krahe had laid out for him. The reason for her lack of direct involvent in the scavenging was a simple lack of necessity. Considering the puppets and Barzai, it was more useful for her to just act as a sentry, in case this force proved to be only the first wave, or if there turned out to be survivors.
No such thing as a second wave ca to pass. By the end, as the structures of Krahe’s wardings were beginning to falter and she began dismantling what could be salvaged, Zanma’s puppets had gathered the remains into five piles surrounding the campsite.
And, from his own storage, he brought out great canisters. At Krahe’s questioning gaze, he grinned and answered. “I possess a puppet mounted with a flathrower. That, I cannot bring out. But the fuel, the fuel cos out without issue.”
And so the corpse-piles blazed up into the night, and, in repaynt, albeit of a symbolic nature, Krahe shared of the best alcohol she could find within her stores, an ekarone brandy she had bought and had not found ti to crack open until now. The two drank amidst the burning corpses, and a final detail joined the new layer upon the flat of the executioner’s sword that was Krahe’s Binding Obelisk. Barzai, beyond overfed from the souldregs of every single person in the task force, didn’t refuse to answer so much as couldn’t. Departing from that grisly place, where future travelers would find themselves aghast at what appeared to be the site of a dark ritual, the Murderer of Murderers parted with the Young Puppetmaster, each heading off into the unknown to continue in their respective struggles against the raging waves of death and fate.
User Comments
0 comments from readers