Krahe jured a capsule of Css 3 Painkiller and threw it at him. One of his hands caught it.
“...Pristine. inal capsule. Unbroken seal. Where’d you get this, I wonder? I won’t ask. I know better. The deal’s made. e with me.”
Several mier, 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-anized piles of records, towers of memstes and scrolls and books. They arrived to a room with a huge terminal, two rows of three projected ss over an an-like yered keyboard, with four meical arms hanging down from the ceiling. Nozar plugged a pair of bck 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 s; a vaguely south-east-asian looking woman’s face with one eye pstered over by talisman paper, and slicked-back bck hair. A map of a strange ti came up on another.
“Name: Yao Fu. Likely a pseudonym. Pce in: The Tiengenzhen Region. Status: Unaffiliated. As I said earlier, she came in and pletely fucked the market. Single-use and reusable artifacts, eidolon vessels, charms, weird-ass voidkeys, you , she’s sold it to someohey’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 be sure I’ll win - I’d bet a pretty sum that she’s some big shot tryin’ to y low as far away from her homend 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 dder.”
“That doesn’t help me find her,” Krahe hissed.
“Fu’ hold on, I’m getting to it. So there’s this pce…”
Cassius had dared to hope that he would get out of this easy. That, e the day, he would have reported the i and reaped the rewards without breaking the long streak of no violent is 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 buildihan two hours after her initial passage. She seated herself, once mambling in airely inspiahough the atmosphere of tension within the room alpable. The keen-eared among the patrons were on-edge, aware of what was to e, and, by proxy, so were the others.
heless, an uneasy illusion of normal goings-on was maintained for the wenty minutes, during which That yed dice at one of the tables while Cassius straio destinely move his men into pce for a coup-de-grace. Then, fool that he was, one among them misinterpreted a gesture he made, a gesture which articurly forceful by act. The man, tall and strong and not very bright, approached That Woman, looming over her. Cassius knew what was to e; that man, Habib, bined 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 g of his fists and calves, these were all tells that he inteo take Her head ht then and there.
“I wouldn’t e that close if I were you,” That Woman said, not taking her eye off of her oppos’ dice, idly swirling her own bad forth.
“There is a high pri 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 cttering oable. Then, Habib lurched forward, and Cassius realized she was somehow behind him. He knew what it was; teleportation, everemely she 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, somethiweeriapping and buzzing.
It was only seds before Habib gruesomely slid down onto the a’s bed arm, his boiling blood and viscera trig 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 tter in an instant, casting a proje of his rapidly-disiing insides over the ceiling. One of the croupiers, a pure-white Inax, had risen up with the io take a, but froze when the green-eyed demon pulled her gun.
“Don’t. I still leave just one corpse in my wake. Don’t give me an excuse to ge that to a double-digit number.”
She cast him to the ground with some effort, her stance wide, a se of his scorched-bck spiill 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 y dead, and the mistake was his. There was no other choice than to pursue, and that was just what he did.
Akaso
