Ken was clearly no ordinary vampire chimera. The way he had moved so naturally made that clear as day. Predatory nonhumans always knew how to hunt and fight at an instinctual level, but Ken had displayed a degree of power and ferocity greater than that of even a pureblooded vampire. A common ghoul simply stood no chance when faced with a natural born killer like that.

  "They're going to die!" Ken exclaimed with worry in his eyes.

  There was really no need to worry though. Ghouls were hardy creatures and there was little that could put them down short of decapitation or complete incineration. Like most powerful monstrosities their bodies were not only hardy, but they also possessed great regeneratory abilities that exceeded even those of many other near immortals.

  "You did paralyze them but their spinal chord will most likely repair itself within just a day or two," he said as he gave the helpless ghoul a light slap across its jackal like face.

  Had they been a chimera and not a full blooded ghoul they might have been in trouble. But luckily for Ken there was just no way they were going to die from something so minor as the partial destruction of their spine. Even if Ken possessed power equivalent to a pure blooded vampire he was still a chimera, which meant he had a near human mind that was susceptible to weaknesses such as guilt or remorse. A very exploitable quality that other monstrosities might take advantage of in the future.

  "The moment I'm healed I'm going to hunt you down, mage," the ghoul spat as it glared at him with defiance in its eyes.

  "See normally I would be terrified, but currently you're about as threatening as a goldfish," he chuckled, "Now how about you answer my questions before I tell him to crush your heart?"

  Its eyes went wide in an instant. Every creature no matter how powerful would most likely succumb if their heart was destroyed or their head was removed from their shoulders. Even near immortals weren't indestructible despite the fact they liked to think of themselves as such.

  "Now tell me, have you encountered or heard of any venomous or poisonous monstrosities as of late?" he asked the ghoul as he pulled out a small pocket watch.

  The chaos time taker was an ingenious little bit of sorcery on his part. Like most interrogation aids it wasn't ever completely accurate, but it at least gave him some clue as to how useful their answers were. It told him if their answers would expediate his current task or slow him down, which when used alongside his predictive spells allowed him to figure out how useful their statements were to him in particular. Something far more useful than actually being able to separate lies from truths.

  "I'm not telling you anything, overseer dog!"

  A poor response, but not an unexpected one. They would have to be reminded of how fragile they were in their current position. Slowly he retrieved the switchblade in his pocket and flipped the blade out before pushing the tip of the blade against the bottom of their eyelid.

  "I may not particularly like most humans, but I hate watching them suffer far more than I could ever dislike them," he said as he pushed blade into their left eyesocket.

  "I don't know of any, I swear!" the ghoul howled as the blade sank deeper into their eye socket.

  "Harry, what the fuck!" Ken exclaimed in horror as he watched him dislodge the ghoul's eye from its socket with a quick flick of the blade.

  The ocular organs of near immortal monstrosities recovered at a prodigious rate. Most likely due to the fact they needed all their senses to function as predators. However their ability to regrow their eyes didn't make the process of losing one any less painful though. Torture was a potent motivator albeit not a particularly accurate form of interrogation.

  "It seems you were telling the truth even if it wasn't all that useful," he said as he looked at the hands moving on the chaos time taker, "But do you know anything about any recently emerged monstrosities of the predatory sort?"

  "No, the undercity has been quiet and no chimera is coming of age until next year!" they shouted hurriedly as panic and fear drove them to blurt out anything that came to mind.

  A ghoul on a feeding frenzy was a possibility, but their nature drove them to store their kills to feed the others of their kind. Even a rogue ghoul would still be bringing their kills to whatever powerful female they sought to build a favorable rapport with. Ghouls were matriarchal by nature and even independent ones would seek the protection of a powerful woman of some sort. Male ghouls were far weaker than the ghula and were hard pressed to survive without protection.

  Even if ghouls were known to be proficient with poisons and such. It was still quite unlikely that their killer was one considering their unique social psychology. Ghouls never acted alone, which meant if the killer was a ghoul they would be killing on the behalf of someone else.

  "One last thing," he said as he wiped the blood off the switchblade, "Tell me everything you know about the recent killings in town."

  Sweat was forming on their brow. They knew something and something had managed to scare them enough to shut them up. Either they knew something about the killer or they knew something else so bad they didn't want to reveal even under threat of torture. An interesting dilemma to be in and one he was thankful he didn't have to deal with.

  "You have given me about an hour, but I could have gotten that much from a walk in the park," he hummed to himself whilst observing the fluctuations of the chaos time taker, "Do you have anything more to add or do you want me to give you a predestination?"

  Ken threw him a confused expression, "What the hell is a predestination, Harry?"

  "Please just kill me and be done with it!" the ghoul screamed as he began channeling his power.

  Prophecy was nasty business. Once someone heard their future they would be doomed to make it come true as they helplessly struggled to prevent it. Predestination wasn't simple prediction, it was a foul misfortune one forced upon their victim's shoulders. It was a curse to know your future without being able to do anything about it. Complete loss of agency was a profoundly terrifying thing after all.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  "Foretell most probable line," he whispered as he invoked the spell.

  His own method of predestination was really just a twisted form of temporal entrapment. Countless of the ghoul's many possible futures flashed before his eyes in an instant. Now that he had seen their futures it was just a matter of picking the one that was the most likely to come true regardless of outside intervention. Once he had made his choice he just had to reveal enough of it for it to become a self fulfilling prophecy.

  "I've already seen your future, so either you tell me what I want to know or I tell you what your life will look like in the coming days," he laughed as the crippled ghoul shrank beneath his gaze.

  "You're no diviner! I don't need to say shit!" they hissed, but his smile only widened at that.

  "So tomorrow..."

  "Fuck! Just shut up and I'll tell you what I know, mage!"

  "Now that's more like it my corpse eating friend."

  The ghoul let out a sigh of relief before they spoke up, "I didn't see it, but I could feel it and whatever it is there's no doubt in my mind that it's ancient..."

  Harry fiddled with the switchblade as he listened to their words, "Details, friend, I need workable information not gut feelings."

  "I'm getting to it!" they exclaimed, "I could feel that it was very old and incredibly powerful so I hid, but when I listened in from the sewer I was hiding in I heard it speaking to someone!"

  "This person it was speaking to, did they seem like they were one of us?"

  "That's the strangest part," they said in a low whisper, "It sounded like it was taunting an ordinaire, and it spoke to them about the time before the curse!"

  The curse predated recorded human history. It had been laid on mankind to prevent them from being born emerged and was the entire reason for the relative rarity of mages throughout recorded history. If it knew of the time before the curse then it had to be prehistoric. Like finding a dinosaur hiding amongst the wildlife of modern day. An ancient relic from a time when titans walked the earth.

  "If that's true then there's simply no way that it didn't sense you, there has to be another explanation!"

  "It could sense me, but it most likely saw me as so beneath it that it simply chose to leave me be forever dreading its wrath..."

  The hands of the chaos time taker were spinning faster than he had ever seen before while more and more of the ghoul's probable futures went black. It was bad. If his intuition wasn't trying to spook him, then they were actually dealing with a prehistoric monstrosity and the last time one awoke from their slumber it had taken hundreds of mages to put it down.

  "Your spinal chord has regenerated hasn't it?" he asked the ghoul as he stood up.

  "Yes, but I imagine you won't let me just walk away will you?"

  "Quite the opposite actually!" he shouted to them as he grabbed Ken by the arm and began dragging him away, "There's no future for you on Avalon so start swimming, ghoul!"

  There weren't a lot of options left to him at this point. If overseer discovered that a mythical monstrosity was walking the streets of the city they would go nuclear. It would be spells of mass destruction first and ask questions later. The methods they would employ to kill it would make the Tunguska event look like a joke.

  "Harry, what the hell is it we're looking for?!"

  He sighed as he pulled Ken inside the nightclub and rushed towards the bar. Right now Bernard's faction was the only sensible group to approach, but he couldn't let them take their sweet time granting him an audience. Next to the door he saw the little red box that was the fire alarm, which he pulled without hesitation.

  "Everybody get to the nearest exit and go home!" he shouted as the alarm rang, "Run for your lives you fools!"

  "Harry, what the fuck are you doing?!"

  Gabriella looked shocked and confused as she ran towards them with hurried steps, but there was no time to explain. He just grabbed her arm with his other hand and started dragging them both towards the secret stairwell behind the wall panel. It was do or die and he wasn't planning to live out the rest of his life in a crater.

  Only once all three of them were seated in the tacky couches of the eighties themed vip bar on the second floor could he finally let out the breath that he had been holding. Bernard would be furious with him for disturbing the operations of their business, but it was for the best that the audience came sooner rather than later.

  "Harry," came a hiss from the darkness as the fire alarm stopped blaring and Bernard appeared before him as if out of thin air, "Explain yourself, now!"

  Gabriella let out a terrified squeal as she laid eyes on Bernard's horrifying visage. While the man was horrifying on the outside, he was about as good as a vampire could be on the inside. Not that it was particularly high bar to clear to be fair.

  "You know that time I thought I had predicted the end of the world and tried to kill the members of parliament with a targeted predestination attack to prevent global disaster?" he blurted out hastily while Bernard glared at him furiously.

  "I remember..."

  "Well this time I'm right except it's overseer that's about to screw all of us!"

  Bernard looked deep in thought for a few moments before reaching for his phone. Harry already knew Bernard would be cancelling all of his current appointments. One of the countless benefits vampires had was an incredible ability to read emotions and Bernard had sensed his honesty. Now he just had to convince Bernard that he wasn't just losing it.

  "You discovered something from one of the people you questioned didn't you?"

  "Yes! There's more than likely an awakened ancient just walking the streets and if overseer so much as thinks there's one on Avalon they'll go friggin nuclear!" he exclaimed, "Excuse my language, but this is a crappy situation and we're all darned if we don't do something!"

  "What the hell do you want us to do about it, Harry, we're on bad enough terms with overseer as it is!"

  "Keep them occupied and make sure they don't realize there's a monstrosity from the age of myth walking the streets!" he shouted frantically, "Try to suppress all information channels and throw a Molotov cocktail at the diviners at their headquarters or something!"

  Bernard sighed as he rolled his fingers, "Molotov might be a step too far, but suppress information that we can do."

  "Look, Bernard, we're screwed either way but I've got a hunch that there may be a way out of this mess if we can just stall overseer for long enough."

  The supposed ancient had been taunting an ordinaire, but the ghoul never said it had killed them. Somewhere in the city there was a person that knew what that thing was and could tell him more. The only problem was that he had no idea who it was and there were millions of people roaming the city.

  "Harry, what's the hunch?" Ken asked him nervously.

  "Every ancient on record hates humanity with a passion and almost nothing has been able to restrain their hatred before," he mumbled as he sorted his thoughts, "There's a very real chance that the ordinaire the ghoul spoke of is somehow preventing that old relic from going on a massive rampage and toppling some skyscrapers."

  "You think it may be possible to reason with them?" Bernard asked him slowly.

  "Probably not, but I doubt an ordinaire is walking around with magic powerful enough to control one so it's probably attached to them for some reason," he said as an idea formed within his head, "If we just find that person we might be able to bargain with it."

  "You do realize overseer might mark you as a fugitive when they realize you're working against their investigation, right?"

  Bernard was right. It was incredibly risky and he would probably end up having to run from the law until it all resolved itself, but putting his own life in danger was far better than letting overseer raze the city just to kill one person. Even if he succeeded they would most likely discredit him and declare him persona non grata. It was unfortunate, but someone had to do the right thing or no one would win.

  "I'll get my people on suppressing information and obstructing their investigation, but know that I won't be able to protect you when they realize you're behind it, Harry," Bernard said gravely.

  "It's fine really," he chuckled, "They'll be playing chess while I'm playing checkers."

  "It's the other way around, Harry..."

  He broke into a wide grin as he started planning his next move, "Not to me it isn't!"