Chapter 42 : Tempus Fugit - They're protecting the humans
Kiba was looking intently at the scene in front of him, his brows furrowed.
A nondescript, slightly rank and dimly lit alleyway, a garbage disposal unit overflowing to the side -probably from the nearby restaurant- crawling with insects skittering in and out of it -the sweltering heat of early september drawing them in like, well, flies- the sent of old, dry urine wafting lightly in his nostrils from somewhere deeper-
-oh, and the beheaded cadaver in front of him, whose blood, bones and brain matter was now generously redecorating the vicinity, of course.
"It's them, Buchou." He ends up saying as he crouches down, tilting his head this way and that, observing the relatively uniform projection.
"Are you certain, Yuto-kun?" His King frets next to him, squirming a little as her eyes dart away from the scene.
She could be ridiculously skittish at times around the bloodiest truth of their existence, it was kind of funny like that.
Kiba supposed it was par for the course when your main weapon tended to erase things from existence.
A 'cleaner' sort of kill, if you will, one which left your hands surprisingly clean afterwards, so unlike one of his swords.
"Positive." He answers with a quick nod, "It's still our mysterious magus."
Which was weird in itself, because there hadn't been another accident in months, even when they got other Stray Devils to corral and either capture or kill in the meantime.
Kuoh was, after all, one of those places: effectively a border between a territory owned by one the Abrahamic factions -and loosely frequented by the two others on occasion- and another pantheon.
Which made it a 'weak point' through which Stray Devils tended to try to run away from their masters from, since it meant that they -the Devils in general- would get swamped in paperwork if they went hot on the escapee's tail and, at worst, create a diplomatic incident.
And so, lots of strays flowed through Kuoh in an attempt to get lost in Japan afterwards, which made the place a hotspot of magical activity and a relatively important territory to tightly control.
It also meant that his King's and his fellow peerage members had to get their hands dirty on multiple occasions since they started living here.
Yet, they still didn't know anything about the rogue magus apparently lurking around who was, for some reason, contributing to their effort.
His brows furrowing a notch more and a hand coming to rub at his chin, eyeing the cadaver dispassionately -female, in her twenties if her skin was anything to go by, a few bruises still visible on her frame and chafing marks at her wrist- Kiba ponders on the events.
All three 'victims' were rumored, according to their intel, to have shown a degradation of their mental faculties.
All three had been chasing someone when they triggered the wards on the town, meaning that his King and them had been in a reactive position instead of setting up an ambush.
Which meant…
"They're protecting the humans." He mumbles aloud, as the answer dawns on him.
"What did you say, Yuto-kun?" His King asks, prompting him to look back at her.
"They're not hunting strays." He answers, gesturing to the scene, before pointing toward the other end of the alleyway, "They're protecting what would've been the future victims. Each time, we didn't get the intel until it was nearly too late and the wards were triggered. Each time, it was with strays whose King had activated the destabilization process and who were losing grasp on reality as a consequence.
"Had we arrived first on the scene, they probably would've been in the process of feeding themselves.
"Ergo, our mysterious rogue magician isn't hunting strays. He stops them from killing other humans."
Silence falls between the two of them for a beat, and Kiba raises himself up, nodding to himself.
"So, what you're saying is that we've got a wannabe hero on our hands, one who apparently hasn't left the premises after all this time?" The Gremory heiress formulates aloud while frowning.
"That's the only logical explanation I can come up with." The Knight answers easily, "It'd be easy to double-check, we'd only need to ask a few questions to today's potential victim to have a clearer picture."
A beat passes as the two look at each other, Kiba smiling placidly at his King as she mulls over his words.
"On one hand, I'm annoyed that someone is still blatantly ignoring Sona and I's rule over this territory," She slowly starts, one of her hands coming to rub at her temple, "But, on the other, and if what you just hypothesized is correct, I can't really get mad at someone who goes out of their way to shield the mundane and coincidentally spare us a lot of paperwork."
"We still have to report it to Sitri-san, my King." The Knight mildly remarks, carefully not commenting as his King deflates.
"Urgh, don't remind me." She whines, stomping her foot cutely, "I had hoped that this situation was behind us after this long, but I guess it wasn't meant to be!"
A few minutes ago.
I exhale a sigh of relief as my right hand unclenches and falls to my side, having confirmed that the dot of yellow-tainted red-black Rage and Hunger has gone silent, before correcting my posture against the headboard, the moonlight peaking through my window and mixing with the more artificial lighting of the street lamps outside projecting long and ominous shadows over my room.
I still didn't really get why the Voices were this insistent about 'saving' those people in particular. Like the first two times, I had been, once again, pulled out of my meditation -which had been rather dangerous, considering I was pseudo-cultivating- by their clamor because what I can only assume was a Stray Devil was doing its best attempt at eating a normie's face.
So, I was -begrudgingly- saving randoms at the Whispers' behest, but I didn't know why.
Were they important in the grand scheme of things? Will one of them discover a new energy source in a couple decades and the Empyrean wanted me to preserve the 'golden timeline' or something?
I had no idea.
And, to be perfectly honest, I just understood right now that I was only 'guided' to intervene because the local supernatural law enforcers wouldn't make it in time.
Humming in thought, I distractedly look at the multitude of drawings now decorating my walls, alien vistas sharing the -admittedly rather cluttered- space next to faceless and featureless figures, only a few details made clearly visible.
The Warp…
The Warp was telling me something, multiple things, and I wasn't getting the message, most of it lost in translation as I attempted to interpret it to my best capabilities.
Thing is, I could only interpret the intent of the sea of souls and thoughts through my own means, the pseudo-kinesthesia showing me colors and their associated feelings, nonsensical dreams and letting myself get used as its medium when I was drawing.
I was living in four, no, five dimensions, while I suspected the primordial soup I was tapping into was far from being as limited.
I knew, intellectually, that the Immaterium was omnipresent, acausal and atemporal. That was the reason why I was persuaded that the gods traipsing around didn't actually get to create this universe and its accompanying earth as the locals knew it, because the atemporal nature of the Empyrean made it possible for their existence to influence humanity retroactively, like a certain Prince of Excess did in the original setting.
However, knowing and wrapping your head around it were two wildy different things.
I was reasonably certain that the Warp was showing me glimpses of possibilities, visions of futures yet to come into being-
-but the really scary thing about it was that it could be more than prescience.
Because, when you take into account the ever present and atemporal nature of the Immaterium, it can possibly mean that what you see through it is already set in stone, and I didn't have a Farseer on hand to discuss what all this meant, so I could only throw myself into a tizzy trying to understand what the fuck all of this was supposed to mean!
I sigh heavily, before pulling my cover higher on my body.
That was why I was mainly ignoring those augurs, because I had no means to identify if they were right or wrong, and every story I've ever read about people struggling against destiny showed a rather bleak picture.
Mostly the fact that they weren't able to avoid what they were prophesied to do, even when they tried their hardest to throw their fate off the rail.
In a way, I was glad that I couldn't understand what the multi-hued realm attempted to tell me, because I didn't know how I'd react once I finally got it if it wasn't to my liking.
Would I rage against it, struggle with all my might, or grimly accept my fate?
I didn't know, I couldn't know, not for certain, and, in the end, I could only influence the now.
After all, if the corpse on his golden throne wasn't able to correct the past after ten thousand years, I sure as fuck wouldn't with my extremely limited understanding of my possibilities.
Well, limited right now, who knew in a few years?
Nevertheless, I'd rather err on the side of caution and keep putting down the would-be killers the Susurrus showed me, just in case their death would cost humankind something in the future.
It absolutely wasn't like humans weren't already at the bottom of the barrel in this clusterfuck of a world, after all, so I'd rather avoid letting those I can save from supernatural predators die on my watch than sit on my ass and do nothing about it.
I wasn't about to don a cape and start to fight crime like a comic book hero, not really my jam, but lending a hand on occasion from within the safety of my home, that I could do.
Putting the whole thing behind me, I close my eyes once more, and let myself slip into the depths of the Lower Stratum.
ENTRY: Alpha-149
ANNO:0 - LOCAL:2009
LOCAL DATE: SEPTEMBER, 7TH
BEGINNING RECORD
"Further testing of my 'cultivation technique' indicated so far that I'm not able to alter the previous process.
"And by that, I mean that I can only take a little bit of the Warp in me with each iteration, not even more than a couple millimeters of the secondary tether, before I have to halt the process and do my internalization-cum-evolution routine.
"Progress is slow going, since I haven't been able to repeat the process more than three times, four times at best, in a row before my focus gets so frayed that I have to settle for the night.
"Skully's scans show that my body seems to adapt nicely to the Empyrean-juju intake, though, so there's that, even if I still haven't exceeded a full percent 'warpiness'.
"Though, I did notice some changes during my telekinesis training today, changes that would indicate that I'm, indeed, growing more powerful.
"Not in the way I expected, but I'll take it all the same.
"To put it in layman's terms, it gets easier to 'tank' the influence of the Voices as my 'warpiness' grows on. I'm not having as hard a time at shifting into the proper mindset needed, the one where I 'close the door', to start my exercises, and it is notably less strenuous mentally to maintain.
"My current theory is that those results are a consequence of reaching a more harmonious entente with the sea of souls and thoughts. As my mind expands, it grows closer to the Immaterium's nature, so the two 'conflict' less and less.
"I thought I had a perfect replica of my Darktide's character body, but I'm starting to think that it was in fact not the case.
"See, my genome, beyond the Psyker mutation, was completely free of other alterations. For all intents and purposes, I used to be as close to a baseline human as I could be.
"Except, that's not really how Psykers work in-setting, and the more powerful need really good bodies to tank the relentless assault of the Immaterium.
"Or, I 'spawned', for lack of a better word, without any biomantic or mechanical augments, my body completely pristine and un-altered.
"I think that all the troubles I have encountered so far stem from this fact: I just wasn't 'built' to share this close a connection with the sea of souls and thoughts, and it made everything way harder than it should be as a consequence.
"And I'm willing to bet that those troubles are going to go away as my body gets warpier.
"Who knows, maybe I'll be able to freeform telekinesis in a few months without having to take a few seconds to focus beforehand?"
ENTRY: Alpha-149
ENDING RECORD
[AN: Kinda fought me all the way, but I won in the end!
Hope you enjoy, xoxo
PS: over 1.1k likes on the previous chappy, I'm so giddy I'm gonna die. UwU]