NOVEL NEXT 110 – Shura
Krahe conjured a capsule of Class 3 Painkiller and threw it at him. One of his hands caught it.
“...Pristine. Original capsule. Unbroken seal. Where’d you get this, I wonder? I won’t ask. I know better. The deal’s made. Come with me.”
Several minutes later, Krahe realized that most of this side of the first floor and the basements below was all Nozar’s property. All the piled-up stuff wasn’t just trash, but strangely-organized piles of records, towers of memslates and scrolls and books. They arrived to a room with a huge terminal, two rows of three projected screens over an organ-like layered keyboard, with four mechanical arms hanging down from the ceiling. Nozar plugged a pair of black cables with key-like spikes on the ends into his backpack, and the hanging armatures came to life, tapping away.
A portrait drawing came up on one screen; a vaguely south-east-asian looking woman’s face with one eye plastered over by talisman paper, and slicked-back black hair. A map of a strange continent came up on another.
“Name: Yao Fu. Likely a pseudonym. Place of origin: The Tiengenzhen Region. Status: Unaffiliated. As I said earlier, she came in and completely fucked the market. Single-use and reusable artifacts, eidolon vessels, charms, weird-ass voidkeys, you name it, she’s sold it to someone. They’re all variations of paper-charm designs, and they’re all way the fuck up there. I’m talkin’ the sorta thing you’d expect the Grafters or Wheelers to outfit one a’ their saints with. If I was a bettin’ man - and I am, if I can be sure I’ll win - I’d bet a pretty sum that she’s some big shot tryin’ to lay low as far away from her homeland as possible… And not doin’ too hot at it. The woman’s turned Audunpoint’s underbelly upside down with her supply, and anyone who gets their hands on her product shoots way the hell up on the ladder.”
“That doesn’t help me find her,” Krahe hissed.
“Fuckin’ hold on, I’m getting to it. So there’s this place…”
Cassius had dared to hope that he would get out of this easy. That, come the next day, he would have reported the incident and reaped the rewards without breaking the long streak of no violent incidents within or around his gambling house.
That hope, like a wayward ship, was dashed upon the spiky boulders of reality when That Woman swaggered into the building less than two hours after her initial passage. She seated herself, once more gambling in an entirely inconspicuous manner, though the atmosphere of tension within the room was palpable. The keen-eared among the patrons were on-edge, aware of what was to come, and, by proxy, so were the others.
Nonetheless, an uneasy illusion of normal goings-on was maintained for the next twenty minutes, during which That Woman played dice at one of the tables while Cassius strained to clandestinely move his men into place for a coup-de-grace. Then, fool that he was, one among them misinterpreted a gesture he made, a gesture which was particularly forceful by accident. The man, tall and strong and not very bright, approached That Woman, looming over her. Cassius knew what was to come; that man, Habib, combined preternatural strength with thaumaturgy to punch with the force of an Atropal. The way he held himself, the tunnel-vision look in his eyes, the clenching of his fists and calves, these were all tells that he intended to take Her head off right then and there.
“I wouldn’t come that close if I were you,” That Woman said, not taking her eye off of her opponents’ dice, idly swirling her own back and forth.
“There is a high price on your head in these parts,” Habib said. His Thaumaturgy waxed strong, invisibly at first, then visibly, five golden lines spiraling down his arm. It was subtle, nearly unnoticeable if you didn’t know what to look for. The way he stood, even the five lines were hidden from his prey. When they reached his fist, he would kill. That moment never came.
That Woman stopped swirling her dice, and raised the cup, revealing they had been stacked into a tower, the topmost one showing a snake-eye.
“I know.”
She vanished in a burst of smoke, leaving the cup clattering on the table. Then, Habib lurched forward, and Cassius realized she was somehow behind him. He knew what it was; teleportation, even the extremely short-range kind, was a well-known and coveted ability.
Before anyone could act, she had already lifted the man off his feet, and a crimson-red light flooded down her arm. His Barrier took shape between him and her, but the golden light couldn’t remove something that had already bypassed it. Then, came the noise, something between electric snapping and buzzing.
It was only seconds before Habib gruesomely slid down onto the anathemist’s blackened arm, his boiling blood and viscera trickling onto the ground and fountaining out every orifice of his frozen-stiff face. The cursed light, redder than blood, burst forth from the man’s mouth and eyes, obliterating the latter in an instant, casting a projection of his rapidly-disintegrating insides over the ceiling. One of the croupiers, a pure-white Inax, had risen up with the intent to take action, but froze when the green-eyed demon pulled her gun.
“Don’t. I can still leave just one corpse in my wake. Don’t give me an excuse to change that to a double-digit number.”
She cast him to the ground with some effort, her stance wide, a section of his scorched-black spine still in her hand. Letting it fall to the ground, she turned as if to walk out, only to turn into a shape of smoke and burning light as she rushed out the door. Thrown knives and thaumaturgies flew her way, and a few seemed to strike, yet passed through her unimpeded.
Cassius felt a struggle within himself. Every fiber of his being told him to leave it be, but he couldn’t. One of his men lay dead, and the mistake was his. There was no other choice than to pursue, and that was just what he did.
