The setting sun cast long shadows over the forest clearing, the evening air filled with a palpable tension that settled like a heavy blanket. The two guns in Federico's hands, one black and the other white, hummed with a subtle, yet discernible vibration.
Two shots rang out, a solemn lament to the fallen. The fleeing man fell to the ground, all the wounds he had sustained over the fight tearing wider unnaturally.
This was the end.
The man, whose life ebbed away with each laboured breath, managed to roll onto his back, his eyes searching the sky as if seeking an absolution that would not come from above. Instead, his gaze landed on the silhouette of the executor from the Laterano Notarial Hall, a figure both judge and deliverer in this twilight of life and death.
"Hey, Mister, what am I supposed to call you?" he rasped, the effort of speech painting his lips with fresh blood.
"Executor," came the reply, as detached as the shadows that grew around them. "If you must call me something."
The dying man chuckled—a wet, gurgling sound that was more pitiful than humourous. "Thank you for accepting my request."
"It was the Notarial Hall's decision," Federico responded mechanically, his voice devoid of warmth. "I am merely executing my duties."
"Hah, sure enough." The man's laughter turned into a coughing fit, each spasm shaking his frame. "And while you're looking for Vermeil, I have another little request."
"Depending on the nature of the request, I may reject your verbal appeal. I would prefer you submit it in written form to the Notarial Hall," Federico stated, his tone unbending as the guns he wielded.
The man spat out a clot of blood, his smile tinged with irony. "You're a real hardass, huh? Doesn't matter. It's just a little thing. Don't tell her anything about my past, if you can. Make up some story. Tell her I died on the operating table."
"I do not understand the need for this request. Nor does it fit with the truth," Federico said, his brow furrowing slightly. "You fled the Notarial Hall's justice for many years, and you shot dead—"
"Enough." The man's interruption was firm, his eyes now piercing despite the dim light. "What if I told you doing it this way would save you a lot of trouble in getting your job done?"
"If in my judgment I agree with your assessment, I will consider your request." Federico's voice was cool, calculated, even as he assessed the dying man's sincerity.
The air around them thickened with the impending finality of their encounter. Federico could feel the guns urging him, their desire for closure palpable in his grip. The weapons had a will of their own, and they were eager to conclude the fate of the fallen man at his feet. Yet, his discipline held firm—he was master of his actions, not servant to his tools.
He gazed down at the man, whose life was flickering like the last flames of a dying fire. "Why protect her from the truth?" he asked, not out of personal curiosity but to gauge the weight of the man's final wishes.
The man's lips curled into a pained smile. "Because she still has a chance to live untainted by my sins. She deserves a fresh start, away from all this."
Federico nodded slightly, acknowledging the gravity of the man's request.
"I will do as you ask," he finally said, the decision settling within him like a stone in still water. "Your secrets will die with you today."
"Thank you," the man whispered, his voice fading as the life ebbed from his eyes. "Tell Vermeil... tell her to find her own path."
With a solemn nod, Federico raised the black gun. The final shot was a whispered lament, a somber note that echoed softly in the encroaching darkness. As the man's body lay still, the echo of the shot lingered in the air, a solitary testimony to a life extinguished and a secret kept.
Turning away, Executor holstered his weapons and walked away, his figure slowly swallowed by the shadows. His path would lead him onwards, to find Vermeil, to deliver the news of a fabricated end, and then to continue hus hunt.
Arturia Giallo will be bought to justice.
The rain fell heavily upon the streets. A figure in black stood before a group of fixers in blue overcoats.
"Zwei, what are you shielding?" the pale-haired woman demanded.
Their leader looked uneasy, afraid. "We cannot allow you to pass ma'am, by order of our clients this area is off limits."
"I don't care, stand aside." the woman's eyes were hard, her pose tense.
Perhaps it was strange for an entire section of an association to be wary of a lone fixer. But this was the Black Silence. The Zwei officer gulped, his voice was surprisingly steady. "Negative Ma'am. If you want to take it up with our director-"
Angelica continued onwards. She was three paces away when the fixer spoke again "I'm warning y-"
A head fell to the ground, followed by the body. She did not allow the element of surprise to go to waste, in the span of half a second, four bodies were made into corpses.
The Zwei Association's acclaimed defensive discipline meant nothing before a Colour Fixer. Their fixers, which had seemed so plentiful, ran out of men as the butchery continued. The rain made the blood seem like streaks of paint drawn haphazardly against the ground.
She went on, running towards the thing looming in the distance, though it was hard not to see it given that most buildings near it were utterly destroyed. The corpse was massive, the piano moreso.
It had six arms, all of which were damaged in some manner. One was obviously broken, one had been chopped off at the shoulder, another crushed and torn to shreds. The piano was so overbuilt that it looked like an organ with multiple sets of keyboards. It was surrounded by a number of tents and other temporary structures, and more fixers.
Angelica torn through those that tried to stop her with the same ease as before. Their brutalised corpses laid in various ways on the ground. Older corpses were also there, each horribly mangled, even worse than what Angelica did to those around her. Form warped, compressed and mashed into grotesque parodies of musical notes. For each of them a string of red grew from their bodies and tied into the piano. Not even the rain cleansed their bodies of blood.
Angelica pressed on.
There was one last body, still clinging to a sword buried in the corpse of the Pianist. Angelica's eyes widened and she ran forward. The upper half of the body was suspended in the air, kept from falling by the strings of its own viscera connecting it to the piano.
Angelica severed the strings, and caught the corpse before he could touch the ground. She held him close to her breast. His organs, his blood soiled her clothes but she didn't care.
Later, she would recall this moment as a turning point. That's that, and this is this? Accept the pain rather than suffer trying to shake it off? Bullshit. She put up a brave face for Roland, but the truth was that she was never able to embrace the agony of her life and that of the City, but had only been able to shut herself out from it.
...
"Damn it, Angelica, did you know what you just did? You murdered an entire Section of the Zwei Association!"
"Quiet, Astolfo," Angelica interjected, her voice cold and unwavering. "They wouldn't return him when I asked. I had every right for his-"
"Listen to yourself!" Olivier's voice trembled with a mix of anger and desperation. "You've just ruined all that Roland worked for! The life he struggled for you two to share, and your daughter! Did you think about her?"
"Shut up, Olivier," Angelica spat, her eyes narrowing. "I killed them and I would kill them again! Those wretches denied me even what was left of him. They... They..." Her voice broke, and she turned her gaze to her brother, standing apologetically beside the other two. "Forget it, I don't know why I came here."
Astolfo's fists clenched at his sides, his knuckles white with the strain. "Angelica, this isn't the way. Revenge won't bring Roland back. It won't heal the pain."
Angelica's eyes glinted with a fierce, unyielding light. "You think I don't know that? You think I don't feel that sorrow every single day? But those bastards took everything from me. From us. And they had to pay."
Argalia stepped forward, his expression one of sorrow and resignation. "Angelica, please. There has to be another way. Think about Alda. She needs her mother, not what you are right now."
Angelica's resolve wavered for a moment, her gaze dropping to the floor. "I... I don't know what else to do. Every day without him feels like a knife in my heart. I can't just let them get away with it."
Argalia reached out, pulling her into a tight embrace. "We'll get through this together. I promise. We'll find a way."
For a moment, the room was filled with a fragile, tentative hope. But as Angelica pulled away, her eyes hardened once more. "No. I can't just stand by and do nothing. I won't."
She turned and walked out of the room, leaving behind a trail of silence and despair.
...
A whirlwind of blood as she searched for a culprit, someone to blame. Countless deaths, each one a futile attempt to fill the void left by that one death. Then the Purple Tear appeared, with an offer she couldn't refuse.
Angelica had taken Alda with her to another world. Working for The Maylander Foundation, and jumping from world to world to help Iori find her son. Years of killing, and waiting. Each life taken was another step closer to the chance of seeing Roland again, to undo that profound sorrow that gnawed at her soul.
...
Angelica's eyes fluttered open to darkness and the oppressive weight of rubble pressing down on her. Her body ached with the telltale signs of having been crushed beneath debris, and her head throbbed with a disorienting pain.
"Tch, and it looked just like me."
She moved, hands brushed against cold, metallic objects—a broken pair of pliers, a shattered syringe, and other debris. Dislodging a chunk of concrete that had pinned her leg, she stood up and looked around.
The room around her was a chaotic mess of broken equipment and shattered glass. The tools for sensory deprivation, waterboarding, and other forms of torture lay scattered like the remnants of a twisted nightmare. The walls, once sterile and clinical, were now smeared with dirt and blood, the pristine white tiles cracked and stained.
Angelica's mind raced, piecing together fragments of her memory. The Columbian government's experiments into inducing and harnessing distortions. Something had gone wrong, catastrophically wrong. The facility had gone dark, plunging into chaos. The Department of Defense, overwhelmed, had appealed to Maylander to clean up the mess.
The air was thick with dust, and the only light came from a flickering overhead bulb that cast eerie shadows on the walls. She could hear echoes of moans, cries and other sounds, getting louder. She rushed towards them, gloves brandishing steel.
Monstrosities unlike the distortions she had put down earlier. Now, these were castoffs, those who failed and collapsed into lumps of sin.
Peccatulum filled the corridors of the facility, enough to cause her some trouble. She'll finish off these quickly, then deal with the one that copied her appearence.
One glove gripped a chunk of melted springs and gears. Angelica focused on the moments she cherished with Roland, on the life they could have-should have shared together. The uncertainty, whether she should have been a better and more attentive mother, to let her sorrow go and move on. Ah, if only these happy moments were everlasting.
A hand plunged into her own chest, and the whirring of gears screamed to a fever pitch.
The clockwork sword, the EGO was drawn forth.
Time was drained from the monsters with each strike, leaving them frozen and vulnerable to be grinded down to bits by gears. Lust, Wrath, Pride, Greed, Gloom, Sloth, she cut them all down, plastering strangely coloured blood and chunks of flesh and bone across the floor and walls.
Sword met sword as Envy surged.
Another Angelica joined the battle, using the same EGO derived from Time Duck against her. Strength, equipment, skill, they were equal. But not creativity.
Her other gloved hand suddenly held a pistol, and she shot at the other's head. It dodged to the right, just as the clockwork sword was replaced by a spear. Angelica lunged in a burst of speed, piercing the mimic. A hammer to the shoulder slammed it to the ground, and a mace punched into its head.
The Wheels Industry greatsword slammed done, cratering the ground as the Peccatulum dissolved into a pile of fleshy eyes and spikes.
She had to admit, killing herself was a rather novel experience.
...
The backroom of the restaurant was dimly lit, with a single flickering bulb casting shadows across the worn wooden walls. The scent of simmering stews and freshly baked bread wafted in from the kitchen, mingling with the smoke from a pipe perched in an ashtray on the table. Seated across from Angelica was Tin Man. The metal plates that made up his face faintly reflected the dim light.
"Congratulations on the mission, Angelica," Tin Man said, his voice carrying a mechanical timbre. "Clean execution as always."
Angelica leaned back in her chair, weariness evident in her posture. She ran a hand through her hair, brushing away the last remnants of dust and grit from the facility. "Thank you, Tin Man. It wasn't easy, but we managed."
Tin Man nodded, his expression inscrutable. "It's not often we get operatives who can keep their heads in situations like that."
A brief silence settled between them, broken only by the distant clatter of dishes and the murmur of voices from the restaurant's main room. Angelica took a deep breath, steeling herself for the question that had been burning in her mind. "How's my daughter doing at Blacksteel?"
A faint smile creased Tin Man's metallic features. "Cliff's keeping an eye on her. She's doing well, all things considered. Her unit's been assigned to relatively lower risk missions. He's making sure she stays out of the worst of it."
Relief washed over Angelica, and she closed her eyes for a moment, savoring the feeling. "Thank you. It's good to know she's safe."
Tin Man's gaze softened. "I know how much she means to you. We all do."
Angelica nodded, her thoughts drifting to memories of her daughter, the bright-eyed girl who had grown up amidst the chaos of their lives. "She's strong. She'll make it."
"She has a good role model," Tin Man said, his voice gentle. "Now, about your next assignment."
Angelica straightened, her focus returning to the present. "What do you have for me?"
Tin Man leaned forward, his metallic fingers tapping on the table with a soft, rhythmic clang. "You'll be joining a Rhine Labs polar expedition. It's set to take place two months from now."
Angelica's brow furrowed, "Polar expedition? What's the objective?"
"The official cover is scientific research," Tin Man explained, his tone growing more serious. "But our real interest lies in monitoring Ursus movements and gathering intelligence on any potential threats. Ursus military activity has intensified in the far north, and the DoD is becoming concerned. We need someone with your skill set to ensure the safety of the team and to handle any... unexpected situations."
Angelica nodded slowly, absorbing the information. "Sounds straightforward enough. What's the team composition?"
"A mix of Rhine Labs scientists and a few military personnel for protection. You'll be the only operative from our side," Tin Man replied. "It's a small team, meant to keep a low profile. The scientists think they're studying climate patterns and flora, but you and I both know there's more at stake."
"Any leads on what Ursus might be up to?"
Tin Man shook his head. "Nothing concrete, just whispers and shadows. But where there's smoke, there's usually fire. We need eyes on the ground to verify and act if necessary."
"Understood. I'll be ready."
Tin Man reached into his jacket and pulled out a small, black notebook, sliding it across the table to her. "Here's everything you need to know for now. The rest will come in briefing sessions closer to the departure date."
Angelica took the notebook, her fingers brushing against the cool leather cover. "Thanks, Tin Man. I'll study this and prepare accordingly."
The wind-swept dunes of the frontier whispered of imminent violence as Sand Soldier, the man once called Elliot Glover, observed the advancing forces of Lord Ameer of Ibut. The horizon was thick with dust kicked up by marching feet, the clamor of heavy art-infused machinery, and the chilling cries of the controlled infected animals. It was a formidable sight, enough to unsettle even the most seasoned warriors. Yet, the woman beside him, Binah, remained as serene as the surface of her tea.
Elliot glanced at her, his brows furrowing with concern and skepticism. "You know, when the Library promised support, I was expecting a bit more than one person," he said, trying to keep his voice even despite the growing worry. "Are you sure you didn't renege on our agreement?"
Binah, still cradling her teacup, turned her gaze towards the approaching army, then back to an unoccupied space beside her. "One person is quite sufficient for this battle," she stated calmly, her voice as soothing as the breeze. "Would you care for a cup of tea?" she asked, addressing the empty air beside her.
Elliot followed her gaze. Suddenly, the outline of a figure shimmered into visibility, its form briefly outlined by the desert heat—a Manticore, its invisibility arts failing under Binah's perceptive stare. How easily you see through such deceptions.
At that moment, a figure in crimson armor descended from the opposite dune, moving with a purpose that seemed to stir the sands themselves. The eyes embedded in the flesh of her greatsword blinked open, casting an eerie blue glow across the sands.
As the Lord Ameer's forces closed in, the warrior did not hesitate. Geburah's approach was not graceful nor intricate. It was raw, brutal force; a storm of red mist erupted around her as sword met flesh. Soldiers, once men of ambition and duty, were reduced to nothingness before the onrush. Her movements were simple yet devastatingly effective—horizontal slashes cleaving through ranks, vertical cuts splitting armors and bodies alike, each swing leaving a trail of bloody mist in its wake.
Sand Soldier watched, transfixed by the display of sheer power. "Is this the power of the Library?" he asked, his voice a mix of awe and fear. "Of this 'Light' that Angela, your director, spoke of?"
Binah finally took a sip of her tea, her eyes never leaving the battlefield. "Yes, this is the essence of the Light. It is not just power—it's an embodiment of will and purpose," she replied, her tone as steady as her gaze.
Elliot clenched his fists, his resolve hardening. He understood then that the power he witnessed was not just necessary but essential for his own goals. I must gain this power myself, or ally myself closely with those who wield it. My revenge against Lord Ameer of Ibut seems closer than ever.
"Tın, tın-tın, hmm- tap, tap-" Arturia hummed along the vibration only she could hear. It wasn't the tune of anything in particular. People vibrated and their hearts sang their own tunes, and thanks to the Voice, she could hear and understand them clearer than ever. There was that other voice, which argued for restraint, but the Voice told her to tune him out.
She watched from her perch as people are ripped apart, turning into musical notes, joining a grand symphony. The violinist was so insecure, so she freed his heart, allowed him to express his truest desires and put on an excellent performance. The sound of screaming, flesh exploding, bones breaking, and organs being pulled apart. Ah, it was delightful! Though all of that's a cacophony, it turns into a melody when played together.
This was but the prelude. The Voice spoke of a grand finale, one that would resonate with all Leithania, nay, the world!
And Arturia would be the one to conduct that grand symphony.
Baral, Executioner of the Claw, watched the portal at the end of the icefield flicker from scene to scene. Each image was a glimpse into different realities: some mundane and peaceful, others horrific and scarred by conflict, and a few lifeless and desolate. The sarcophagus they had taken from Chernobog lay open nearby, its ancient mechanisms intertwined with F Corp's Singularity.
Zena's eyes were sharp as she studied the portal. "It's still not precise enough," she murmured. "Tuning it to open directly to the City is proving more difficult than anticipated."
The portal flickered again, showing a scene of a bustling marketplace, vibrant and alive. The next moment, it shifted to a battlefield, the air thick with smoke and the cries of the wounded. Baral's gaze hardened. "We need to understand the underlying patterns. Every shift, every fluctuation, holds a clue."
"The Collapsal attacks have also been intensifying," Luda remarked, voice carrying a note of concern. "If we can't stabilise the portal soon, we risk exposing ourselves to even greater threats."
Zena nodded thoughtfully. "We'll ensure to banish any Collapsals to the outskirts once Terra is brought under the governance of the Head," she said, her tone resolute. Her eyes flicked to the sarcophagus, then back to the portal. "Originium, though. It's fascinating. Clearly man-made, yet so potent. It could even be classified as a new Singularity."
Baral turned to face her, his expression thoughtful. "Repurposing Originium could give us an edge. But its origins are still a mystery."
Zena's eyes glinted with determination."Then we will understand it. We will master it. And we will use it to bring Terra under the Head's control."