LIGHTNOVELONLINE 113 – The Lost Sun Society
Krahe didn’t feel cowardice from the man, but he wasn’t brave. He lacked the bravado, the ego, that drove others to smash themselves against a wall; the bravado that had driven her to such an end.
“How much is it?”
“A- quarter mil. A-and another quarter mil for the gun, if it turns out to be a legit Pattner.”
She felt no particular need to kill Cassius, or bring down his gambling operation. It didn’t seem particularly predatory, and she didn’t see gambling as a symptom of societal decline or subversion; in her eyes, given what she knew of history, it was a completely natural part of society that couldn’t be curtailed any more than recreational sex and intoxication. Krahe was completely certain that, if she toppled the Hashems, Cassius would go on running his gambling house all the same.
Before she could leave, though, the two others arrived, busting down the iron gate. Krahe was fully prepared to defend herself, but Cassius defused the situation: “Ey, ey, put ya dicks away alright? We’re done. She’s leaving. The money ain’t worth this.”
They didn’t need even that much convincing; the gore of their comrades splattered around was more than enough. While the two new arrivals inspected their boss and slowly-waking-up coworker, Krahe got out her souldreg extractor and started pulling Cleavers’ dregs.
“Ey. Can’t you make this shit go away? It’s a construct, no?!” Cassius hissed at her from above while one of his thugs hacked away at one of the bars holding him in place.
“I’m not the one keeping it together. It’ll go away after an hour,” she said, yanking the syringes out of the dead Mamon Knight, who was a sickly looking bald man under the rapidly-decaying suit. She didn’t feel like digging through the gunk and chitin, so she moved onto the evoy, taking some money and a dregstone from inside his suit. The whole time, she heard Cassius instructing his subordinates that they were not to follow her inbetween poor advice on how they ought to best break apart her black jade.
Before any of them could even think about the very real option of ganging up on her, Krahe took her spoils and got out of dodge.
It would be another three days before she managed to follow up on Nozar’s lead, in part due to pursuing other leads to break up the pattern of her own activity to any possible observers. Besides “that one place”, her other leads went… Straight to the Dead Night Tigers.
This made it a very easy choice to pursue Nozar’s lead, in no small part because she really didn’t feel like marching into the agency’s front door and asking for information on one of their members with the only connection being that she had been a target and that she intended to return the favour to his employer. Oh, Krahe was sure that the Dead Night Tigers were professional enough to handle things reasonably, but that was part of the reason she went for the alternative. Getting ambushed during a simple investigative stint at a bar was a problem easily solved, and potentially a nice bit of practical exercise with profits on the side. An agency filled with actual, professional bounty hunters and contract killers? It would take caution and a light hand, it would take subtler negotiations, it would take adherence to the agency’s rules and very possibly one or more duels against individuals beyond her current level, if what she had read of the DNTs was true.
By comparison, following an annoying cryptographic puzzle to find a secret club for pretentious up-their-own-asses theurgists in a run-down part of town was… Preferable.
There were numerous possible qualifiers for entry into the so-called Lost Sun Society; Nozar had referred her to someone who could sponsor her, but, not wanting the loose strings, she decided to go the more direct way: Showcasing an original theurgy, as proof of one’s skill in the discipline. There was no fortunate coincidence to be found here; it was just one method of entry out of four that Nozar had suggested, and possibly more. Most of them included somehow currying favour with an existing member, or proving one’s ability in specific disciplines, from theurgy to artifact-crafting and so on.
When she arrived at the door and plainly stated that she intended to join on the grounds of being a theurge, they made a great deal of fuss and played up the ritual of everything to an asinine degree. She was let in and led to a firing range, observed by a procession in ominous robes, and the whole thing was officiated by a man in bright-yellow robes with a heavy turban over his whole head, who spoke in pointlessly flowery language. In short, it felt like a crass and shallow attempt to capture the sense of the sublime that the Twin Churches legitimately exuded.
The target was a six-headed chimera whose features Krahe honestly didn’t bother discerning. It just looked like a mashup of various predatory beasts on a chunky body with a lizard-like tail and an insect-minotaur lower half, six bug legs and all. The target was its chest, and there, she aimed.
She gave them a Standoff shot. With a pull of the trigger, the talisman struck her arm and burned up. Her previously-formed forearm-carapace was brought to life with the bursting of that weird blood-like fluid upon its detachment, and the missile sprinted across the fifteen-meter gap before stopping. Bright, gold-orange light poured out from its palm, at first a wide cone, only to narrow down and hone in on its target. A burst of light and sound, a bright scream, causing four of the chimera’s heads to blast flame from their mouths. The arm simply turned to dust and tar, and the spirit animating it returned to her in an instant.
“Fourth-order… Fourth-order… It’s Fourth-order… A Chthonian Eel…” came murmurs from the crowd. It seemed that the Deathsmoke Blessing’s obfuscation either didn’t extend to her constructs, or there was no relation between Chthonian Eels and Chernobog.
At that moment, all the onlookers flipped up their hoods. Krahe's feeling that this was an initiation into a group of posers desperately LARPing as occultists only grew.
