191 - Guilt Repaid in Cold Blood [Cherno] (Patreon)

Originally, she had planned to immobilize and interrogate the woman, then maybe give her a chance at survival by turning her over to the church. It would have depended on how she came across during the interrogation, whether she was just a broken person in a bad situation and so on. There was no longer space for such nuance; not with the trafficker obviously lunging for the child in an attempt to take a human shield. A simple skim forward, followed by a left straight punch into the trafficker’s stomach - or rather, given how she was turned, her liver. The force of that punch alone was enough to send the fifty-something kilo woman to the ground. Despite having made an effort to avoid subjecting the boy to needless trauma, Krahe’s anger got the better of her, and she held out her hand.

Furious redness illuminated the underpass.

An equally furious electric buzz followed. It waned, then began again, doing so a total of three times. The child tried to look at first, but Krahe blocked off his sight with a thin sheet of jade. Only a steaming, greasy silhouette remained upon the flagstones.

Krahe killed the fusion reaction for the final time, holding up her hand to her face, somewhat dumbfounded. While the Shardkey didn’t strengthen her Tolerance much more than the Twin Serpent key, the dissipation rate was a total gamechanger.

“I did not know that Barzai could detect lies,” Casus remarked as he approached, having emerged from hiding moments earlier.

“He can’t, it was just a distraction,” she shrugged. “I could just tell, both that she was a trafficker and that she was lying.”

The boy, confused and terrified in equal measure, had walked out from under the underpass, bawling his eyes out. The child’s panic and terror mingled with a sense of awe as he noticed Casus, craning his neck to look up at the two-meter-tall living holy relic.

“Get the kid out of here. I’ll go on ahead. Don’t worry, I’ll leave a few of them for you.”

Despite wanting to save the child, Krahe also strongly disliked dealing with them, because she didn’t know how.

“Are you certain?” Casus asked, but the question rang hollow. He was already kneeling over the child as he asked. Looking back, Krahe reached up to her head and started pulling on her voidkey.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. ”There’s a shrine not too far from here, just take him there and come back.”

Visibly conflicted, Casus sighed, picking up the child while keeping him from looking at the corpse.

“Five minutes. I shall return in five minutes,” he uttered before sprinting off. The boy remained silent, too shaken to scream.

Before long, she had the key out of her head and slotted into the Black Sun Coupler. It was just her and Barzai now.

The underpass fell silent.

As for the hidden passage, there were a few loose bricks throughout the underpass, but only one that hid an actual lever. The others were supposedly a mix of duds and fakes that would send an alarm when removed. Casus had also noted that Seer said the alarms were always ignored because of how often they were tripped on accident. The section of wall seamlessly swung open, revealing a heavy vault door behind the stone facade. She closed it behind herself, since Casus knew how to open it.

Inside, it really was just a tunnel. She continued deeper, keeping her senses open and her hand on the transformation dial. On and on, through the empty tunnel, twisting and turning, the only sound being her footsteps. There were basic lights, strung up along the left wall. The air was dry, but not stale, and gradually even that dryness was replaced by an unpleasant, stale dampness. As she walked, she glimpsed a few side rooms, most being either empty or filled with random trash, boxes, and so on. A few were caved in, and several more contained recognizable items. Within one particular room an articulated chair stood, bolted to the ground in the middle, next to it a table, a bucket, and a tub, everything stained a crusty, dark brown. Several teeth littered the ground.

A second chamber of the same type waited a few steps further, entirely missing a door, with deep gashes in the stone and the chair clearly having been ripped out of the ground and thrown against the wall with inhuman force. This room too was stained. Continued signs of carnage followed through the tunnel for some time, until at some point, they stopped at a repaired section, where the tunnel had clearly been severely damaged by something, likely an explosion.

A handful of makeshift jail cells followed, clean save for a thick layer of dust, with three being clean enough to suggest recent use, but empty, with the exception of mattresses and shit-filled buckets. She couldn’t tell in the dark, but the mattresses looked stained in spots that did not suggest an adult source, nor any sort of natural incontinence. She knew what it meant, and fostered the ember of rage as she continued onward.

The sound of footsteps, splashing through the ankle-deep water, could be heard.

Without much thought, she turned the dial and gave herself over to the Black Sun Coupler. The suit had slightly changed from its previous form, incorporating the Trinity Composite into its armour, creating an even larger, more ominous silhouette than before. Its plating, though still matte and utilitarian, was shaped subtly differently, influenced by the Shardkey’s fragmentary memory of its original form as the armor of a legendary warlord. The plates now bore additional minute details, as well as cuneiform inscriptions along the edges. Some were words of protection, others were proclamations of rebuke. The Forming Toroid was incorporated seamlessly into the right arm’s gauntlet, and the same went for her gun holster.

As her swift metamorphosis completed and her senses returned, the bird flew over to her and perched on her shoulder. He opened his beak, replaying a horribly garbled mess of noise that vaguely resembled a snippet out of a doom metal song. Monumental, ominous guitars and gigantic drums underlined demonic, bassy vocals, spoken more than they were sung. They surely contained what Barzai wanted to express: “None can save your souls, none escape the wrath. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. No life is spared, renounce the cries for help!”