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Chapter Text

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“There is only one true master of all living beings in this and all forsaken worlds that tether reality...and he is not a god, but a man..”

º...Axiom of the Black Legion...º

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In the academy of war, they did not teach you how to deal with fear

They did not show you how to bury it underneath your beating heart and work the best way that could at anygiven situation

They did not bother to grant the necessary tools and advice in order to ease the minds and hearts of the recruits.

No

They just pulled it out of you..

A crude, raw, harsh process that lasted for several decades that felt like centuries on those afflicted with the merciless blessing that such “wisdom” take form. Of the meticulous procession of incision like techniques born and harnessed for millennia to perfection with the sole purpose in crafting the right tools to throw at a never ending wave of horrors that would defy either comprehension or belief.

Locating, picking and blasting such meaningless things like dread or fear to pieces, pulverizing it into powder, beating it into dust through hellish training or torture that seared flesh and rendered bones useless as if the emotions themselves were corporeal and not the product of a brain .

They purged such feeling from their bodies not because it would make them stronger, not in some sort of thought that it would protect their mind from such taint or because they were meant to fight against terrible horrors that defied comprehension and would shake the foundations of any of their beliefs with just a look...

No, the reason was far more simple.

They did it because fear was the death of will, the chip on the armour that could lead to a fatal demise to an entire world if given the chance. And so...they could not afford the luxury to feel it against their beating hearts as the darkness clawed at them.

Zazsharia knew no fear.

She had not felt its sting in a very long time in fact since the blood of her own mother had been used to mark her initiation into what would be her lifelong duty as another blade for the “First Ancestor” and his vision.

However, what she felt right now..., what was at play underneath her skin and poking at each and every pore was something more than just the restlessness of a soldier been told too little to know yet enough to let her imagination wander free in the encompasses of her mind.

And given her fatalistic view of things her mind projected similar outcomes time and time again of all the things that could and would go wrong if allowed. Bringing forth a mild sense of distaste that would not be so hardly found in a superior loathing the incompetence of their subordinates as it was not born from what one knew, but of what one didn't.

Something that had been done INTENTIONALLY at that.

For what end? She did not know...

Silvery brows furrowed at that passing thought..but they would not remain for long. However that would not stop her to carry on what she assumed were orders, be them whatever they may be or what they could entail in the immediate future for her. Even though, as a soldier that did not stop her reservations about the nature of this….. “meeting” when that letter had arrived at her sleeping bag back at the base.

A small message.., tucked outside of sight from most..but just placed with a scent that one of her kin would pick up immediately and locate without problem. Clearly showing that it was something only meant for her and only her to know.

A message brief...as it was ominous.

Black envelops..

Black words..

Her only problem was mostly related at the need for secrecy rather than where it was going to take place exactly.

Using her clawed gloves she slid down into a small blackened mountain pass slow enough to not fall over the other end of the thin passage and the obviously endless drop that would occur in that grim case. Her footsteps lithe and quick, yet always measured. Glowing lilac eyes glared with suspicion at her surrounding shrouded in darkness, waiting for anything to happen or come across some of the more nasty denizens of this realm

What little light was shed upon the seemingly volcanic rocky ground her boots were treading upon were nothing but the visages of stars long gone, their light which had been swallowed by one reason or another around this place devoid of logic before her kin had learned to eve draw their breath.

As she took another breath of the thick, stale air around her, she made her way through the thin layout, holding herself carefully against the wall rock at her left as her eyes tried to both scan any loose handles or rocks in her way forward.

The shade was the world between the material real and the immaterial one, a bridge of sorts between the two realms of existence, a representation distorted of what the world the shade was situated underneath tried to imitate in its primal form but with none of the things that made it.

The energy flowing through it never ending..., never stopping, seeping into every aspect of this place without light.

Always changing…

Always growing or decaying…

Sometimes life grew in this desolated wasteland, but more often than not it was as twisted as this world was dark.

The tremors she could feel reverberating in the ground told that this shade she was standing on would die in a matter of weeks before it was replaced by another, long enough for whatever needed to happen here to go as expected and no one to be any-wiser about it.

Purple slit eyes over a sea of black sclera peered through the darkness before her. The path grew wider as she arrived into crater that made for a valley, the rocky cliffs that led to a never ending fall towards the deeper ends of the shade curving upwards instead from here on out, like fangs of a creature...or its ribs

Her wandering finally came to an end as she soon found the entrance that she sought, a crack on the ragged stone wall to her side.

Stepping in she descended onto the dark, cavernous area, wider than the thin gorge she had been moments ago, the air sterile and humid while at the same time bringing forth a stench of rot from somewhere in its depths.. Shaking her head she pressed on.

Her steps silent as she descended through cold stone and crude made looking steps carved directly into the rock by some primitive hand as she marched lower and lower to what could have been considered by others the very depths of the shade, her eyes always scanning the ample and other times narrow spaces that opened at each and every side around her in her quest..for who knew what creatures lurked within this place

Their shapes hiding in the shadows, crawling through cracks and holes in the ground, sliding through rough, sharp stone and greasy slim floor, the colours of their thick hides mimicking the darkness they had been born within almost to perfection, yet the rows and rows of teeth that could easily punch through stone and flesh exposed their true appearances from a distance when what little light remained within this hallowed halls reflected on them.

However, it was only after she walked past a certain threshold that she stopped in her tracks. Not voluntarily though as she found her body tensing on the spot as something washed over her that made her skin crawl with a cold shudder, it almost felt that she had walked over a very thin film of jelly….even though there was nothing of the sort.

Almost by instinct alone she clenched her jaws behind her mouth mask as she jumped several feet back while her pupils shrank into pin size dots in her face, predatory slits glanced back and forth for any targets on sight as she landed on the ground, blades out and poised to strike at anything that would dare face her.

But..

Nothing happened..

She could hear sense her ears tingle in frustration as they tried to catch every glimpse of sound, vibration and echo that did not came from the steady sound of her own hear beat or the way the pebbles underneath her iron heels creaked ever so slightly.

However, no matter how much her senses peered through the darkness...she heard nothing approaching her.

No blade surging through the air..

No claws of a beast ready to pounce on her for a quick meal..

Not even the faintest of breaths that could indicate the presence of another soul.

What she did notice was that the dim, barely non existent light that the cavern had to provide had vanished, no.., it wasn't just that, the air around her felt….stale. Not in a scent sort of way...but stuck in time...and along with it the magic that should have naturally flowed in this place. The specks of magical energy stuck like limelights that could not be spotted by the naked eye.

Regaining her composure she straightened her posture, but did not let her guard down as she resumed the steps she had retreated from in her haste. Questions ran in her mind, hypothesis of what was going on, filed out and shelved into neat spots of discussion and analysis. However, even though she did not have the full picture of the situation...there could only be one reason to explain what she had felt..and the way she had felt it ran through her body.

Magic

Someone had cast magic on her…

Who or what she did not know, not even from where it had come from...but she guessed that it could have been a defensive mechanism that she had activated once she passed through a certain path. Sceptical as she was, she considered it a sign that she was in the right track and so turned around to continue her path...it of course had nothing to do with the nagging feeling that the way the magic spots that remained stuck in the air had the feeble shape of an arrow if you stared at them from a particular angle.

With a sigh she slowly moved forward.

“This better be worth it...”

However, it was in that moment that she knew she had stumbled on something far more complicated that just a summon when a new malady started to take root inside of her.

It started when a sense of dizziness hit her right after she passed the threshold

Her legs almost wobbled when her boot landed on the hard floor, making her almost lose her balance. It was like a faint strike at her lungs. Like wrapping herself in spiderwebs that slowed her down, a swift sting at the back of her head that made her thoughts a little more cumbersome.

She bit her lip, fangs clawing at the tender flesh as alarms rang in her mind at recognizing what she felt just then, a draining barrier meant to weaken those who enter within its boundaries.

[Damn my luck...]

She cursed inwardly, both her inability to keep herself from following the indications that had led her into this trap in the Shade and to those who had wasted her time like this, though a small part of her did held a small modicum of respect of hiding a far more dangerous trap within a noticeable, yet inoffensive barrier.

As if the first one had been meant to draw and then disperse the distrust of those who like her had made their way this deep with a false sense of confidence...before robbing it away with one swell strike. However just as she was about to dash out from the room as fast as she could in order to ran away from whatever creatures could hide within the boundaries of this darkness her eyes had trouble peering through….a light burst through.

The change in illumination hurt…

Like someone had pushed a torch right in-front of her face without warning or previous notice, still...it did not took her long before she regained her sight again. However when she did she realized that her surroundings had changed….quite a bit

The cave like area had disappeared, the rough edges of blackened rock and grim like soil replaced by a smooth void, a darkness so deep and thick that did not allow her to see whether it had an end. In fact, no matter where she looked at there was nothing that reminded her of her previous surroundings.

No walls to get a grasp of things

No ceilings or loose pebbles to step on...

Or even a floor to stare at.

It was as if she was floating in the air even though she knew very well she could feel the pressure of her boots grinding against theground, a dichotomy that defied comprehension at first glance...clearly showing that she had been teleported somewhere far away from the cavern.

However whatever reasons were behind this situation were pushed at the back burner as she focused on the matter at hand, knowing full well that useless thoughts like that would only lead her astray from her duty. This one being the new individuals that were alongside her in this place.

A few meters away from her…at what appeared to be the centre of this dark void was a spot of bright light…and in it was a woman. Not standing with a mocking grin, not sitting with an arrogant gait...but hanging like a piece of meat.

Her visage could have been once considered beautiful for what appeared to be a “human” at one time given the shape of her ears if she was not wrong, with those dark streaks of black raven hair that seemed to flawlessly fall down behind her back onto her pearly white skin as-well as a body that seemed perfectly shaped in all the right ways.

Almost...too much.

It would not have been wrong to consider her either a member of the nobility...or a high class prostitute give or not your take, none of those lines of thought explained why such a character would find herself here in the shade. No, however what she knew was that she was bereft of any clothing, leaving her with nothing to safeguard whatever modesty the individual ever had.

Not that it mattered.

Corpses had nothing to hide.

Her body hung in the air by invisible ropes, her body torn apart by the works of hundreds of blades that had carved the soft flesh from all directions…...yet never quite slicing off the flesh away. Always leaving overextended tendons to be the only lingering link between the crushed and mutilated sections of her limbs.

Her body was creamed with her own blood, the arterial red that still oozed slowly from the myriad of cuts that marred her body, red tainted the paleness of her skin alongside droplets of sweat that filled one drop at a time a pool of stark bright red blood underneath her hanging form. The brightness of the colour between the brightness of the light above the body and the darkness that shrouded everything else making it feel like she was staring at an open wound in this particular void.

The woman's back was open, flailed by a sharp knife….a blade that had once exposed the flesh and bone underneath them,and if one were to look further they would notice the runes written into the insides of her already flailed skin, the words glimmering with power that was surely for something as sinister as it was damning. Several hooks keeping the flesh tense enough for that sight to happen as it was.

Her face trapped in a silent scream of agony that even now...seemed to scream in earnest even though no one was there to hear her plight as now it was clear to her that the girls tongue had been cut out while her eyes remained punctured by small sharp needless alongside other sections of her skull.

A macabre show to say the least...

However the sight of the oversized green bracelets encased around the victims body and thin yet colossal like pillars jabbed into several sections of the woman's body spoke to her that perhaps such treatment was rather warranted...and not an overreaction like one would foolishly assume at first

For no one used magic drainers of such quality and in such numbers for no reason.

Their presence alone been one of the many reasons this entire area felt drained, if not down devoid of any magic.

Their potency even making her feel a wave of nausea only by looking at them.

Away from the bleeding light that hurt her eyes she let her gaze trail onto the darkness encroaching the centre of the room, a frown settling on her features behind the cowl of her hood as her hand slowly trailed towards the blades on her hips. Not yet caressing the rough, cold pommels….yet allowing for the thought to be entertained in her mind. The reason behind such desire being the fact that the presence of several dozen men making an arc all around her.

Their presence almost hidden from her senses as their dark clad robbed forms were shrouded in the dark alongside her, standing tall, silently as they gazed without stop or regard of presence at the centre of the room their faces hidden from view behind faceless white masks that hid what emotions or thoughts lingered behind them.

Their hands crossed below their hips, holding blood stained tools….

[The torturers….] She thought with a small sense of acknowledgement, however her attention had not moved away from the one presence that seemed to draw the very power in the room like a burning candle would in a room shrouded in an endless abyss.

One of her hands clenched tightly, slowly, barely rising from their brief rest at the sides of her hips to a breath away from the pommels of her blades.

A presence that felt wrong..

Tall yet lanky, she could see nothing of its shape but the black robbed cloth she wore with him that so much resembled hers..and yet felt to glitch and pulse at times with a life of its own, like someone had managed to seal within a piece of clothing a small patch of the darkness of the night..before brutally reaping apart each and every star in its depths.

However where her own was more designated for practical purposes, his was more ostentatious as threads of gold and silver seemed to hang and wrap themselves around his slender, not for any practical decision or thought...but more likely as a foolish attempt at vanity. He also wore a massive emblem at its back that glowed with a metallic hue under the spectral light of the room.

The Legions emblem...

“You are late…..”

Her frown deepened at the obvious power-play, however she decided to focus on the voice. The words were raspy, guttural even...like a blade scratching a chalk board in some sort of crude attempt to emulate speech. However what caught her attention more than anything was how casually the man spoke such blatant lie.

As far as she was aware she had made it on time and with even some to spare.

She had made sure of it

Fighting back the urge to scoff she took a step forward.

“Captain Zazsharia Velzabent reporting for duty. Why am I here….?”

“You wonder that too….don't you..?”

The figure spoke slowly without turning to face her, its sole attention still on the bleeding woman before him as if it was some sort of twisted mockery of an altar...the words dragging one after the other as if been worn down by unimaginable heavy weights.

The voice felt...callous.., wrong..like someone was spilling hot rotting miasma from their throats into the ground underneath their feet...or from a non working throat trying to trick a fine ear that it was merely muffled by something else.

Zazsharia said nothing.

She did nothing..

She remained there, waiting...silently as the individual continue to drone on on his own..as it was clear that he did not seem to care for her lack of replies.

“Why you...? Isn't it..? Why you of all people was called here..that..is what you are thinking..”

He rose a gloved hand up as if to caress its defenceless captive, yet stopped just enough before he could actually do that..nor that he intended to go through it as she observed that very hand held the bloodied shape of a curved knife. The edge covered in a black thin layer of darkness that oozed from it like thick smoke.

Until it met the tender touch of flesh…

The cold edge scratching the skin at first..before a hint of more pressure was put into it as the blade slowly sank into the supple flesh, the echo of skin-cell by skin cell breaking down as they were punctured reaching her ears as the steel kiss and twisted within the flesh underneath the woman's left breast. The blood seeping from the wound joining the already half dry streaks from all the other carving cuts…

“Or perhaps that was what this very…..god thought before she found this ill fated end. Ain't that the truth...Phobos...?”

Confusion downed on Zazsharia.

Phobos?

God?

He could not be referring to the woman hanging from the threads, could he..?

“I have already identified myself sir…., if you are the one that called me here I would very much like to know your rank and designation before anything else takes place..”

“Ah...so direct, so….painfully strict to doctrine..”

The voice croaked, pulling the knife away from the woman's body, or at least he would have had not a different hand picked the knife and sheath it from whenever it came. A hand that had come from his back….and not the sides of his body.

What was he hiding underneath those robes..?

“That are some of the bothersome traits that all of your kin carries with them..”

“Sir...if you have called me here to exchange jabs, I will very much like to leave..”

“That would be a shame…”

“You will live..”

“For you..”

The warning hang in the air heavily, crisping the mood in this place even further. The silvery brows on her face creased as suspicion and doubt reared their heads behind the shadow of her thoughts, muscles silently clenching to readiness...even though she knew no fighting would break out.

She was about to tell the man to get it over with and tell her what he had brought her here to do in no uncertain manners for one final time, however what happened next gave pause to such thoughts as the man...turned and finally revealed his face to her gaze.

What she found was not what she had expected.

Her lilac eyes widened if only for a fraction of a second as they studied on each an every detail that she could spot. The left side of his face was perfectly hidden from view thanks to the half piece of mask cut in a clean vertical cut. It was black, yet the amount of decorations and details carved into it with literal gold gave it an opulent feel to it.

The other side did not have such things to obscure the face underneath, however...there was no face to stare at, no face at all as her eyes gazed on the immaculate bone of his skull peeled off of any flesh and muscles that should have ever been there in the first place, his empty socket filled with a glowing burning dot of blue fire.

She knew what he was in that instant.

A Lich…

One of remarkable ability at that if it was only his voice that set her off of his true nature, or perhaps..that was the dampeners at work in this place. No matter what it was though, she had not expect this turn of events..especially since she doubted Liches would waste their time as tortures when they had better uses of their skills.

However the surprise of this revelation paled in comparison when her eyes caught the glimpse of a metallic glint in his right hand. An unnatural glint that came from a ring stuck on the naked bone of one of his elongated, crooked digits, one that could have been attributed to the ever shifting nature of his black hooded form.

However, when she spied the details of a red eye in a sea of black and three blades intertwined over its surface she understood that it had nothing to do with that.

A watcher..

He was a watcher

One of the few chosen to speak with the voice of the Lord Harbingers...

Zazsharia knelt before another word could be conceived, let alone shared between the two of them as her heart skipped a beat from its usual cold rhythm, her plated knee landing hard on the smooth ground by the sheer speed of her motion while a hand remained crossed and placed against her chest.

“How may I serve, sir...”

Suspicion had gave way to zeal, annoyance and curt politeness to a mild sense of devotion and respect. Whatever her problems or thoughts on the creature had previously been, they were washed away by the more pressing realization of the power he held over her as a superior officer.

Because even if the watchers were not part of the tradition chain of command..they were the Harbingers pets.

They spoke with their voice..

They carried their will…

Sometimes, in the most literal and metaphorical of cases.

“Tell me….Captain..” The Lich uttered her tittle with both barely concealed amusement...and a taunting smugness. “What its your duty..?”

“My duty its my fate..” She replied without hesitation or pause, remembering well the start of the litany.

He then started to float closer to her, his empty socket gazing at her direction unblinking, unperturbed, the skull that made for his face stuck in a never ending grin.

“What its your fear...?”

His voice cracked like a whip through her sensitive ears..yet she did not let herself even blink as her fists clenched ever more tightly, the metal of her talons creaking ever so slightly against the palm of her hand.

“My fear its to fail..”

She said, yet the pressure of the room growing even more unbearable than ever before.

His form hid fro view, yet she could hear each and every vertebrae of his body creak as it tilted and contorted on its own axis, the scent of rot washing all over her, the touch of his ebony digits tapping like a spider’s legs against her metallic pauldrons telling her of how close the Lich was.

“What its your reward..?”

She stared at the woman, the black esclera of her eyes making the lilac colours glint predatory as they stared down at the mostly-dead-teary gaze of the woman before her.

“My salvation its my reward..”

“Good…., good….you may still be useful..” It mused to itself more than anything as he warped once again back in front of her, the very air shifting and cracking to make the effort to accommodate his presence. “I have a mission for you..one that will be treacherous and dangerous for most if not any soul in our ranks..”

[So this is it..?]

Whatever it was, she would brace it like she had always done. With courage and zeal..

She gave a soft, yet still loud hit at her chest-plate with her hand. “No darkness will shake my will or scare me from doing my duty sir...point me at the target and I and my unit will see it done. I take that we are finally invading Rakia...?” She tried to inquire at the end.

She had hear the rumours.., the hushed voices among the troops of where they as a whole would land the hammer of their ancient vengeance first and teach this heathen, treacherous races the price of selling their souls to the gods. Rakia had been just the most heard of all options.

Surprisingly the Lich dissuaded her of those thoughts

“Don't be so quick to run to your death, Captain.., your life its a coin that shall be spent wisely and not in a whim, lucky for you….that day is not today.” He chastised her with the very same tone you would hear an adult lecture an unruly child. “And no Captain, the invasion of Rakia will not happen...yet”

While it was not an answer that pleased her, it was one that served its purpose to satiate her curiosity.

A blade does not like to be ignored and forgotten for its purpose was to be brandished and used against its wearers foes. Of course, it could accept the needed wait once placed within its sheath...but only at the untold promise of further use. To know that such endeavours had been merely delayed...and not denied was a satisfying thing to hear. Specially at the prospect of humbling a nation that considered itself the “Mightiest” in this dirt ball they called Tenkai.

And yet..

She would not lie that the delight of such prospect was only second at the desire of be set free to hunt the “wretches” in their forests once she and every of her kin had found out of the presence of their arch-enemies living in the ignorance of their trees.

“The Lord Harbinger has plans, lofty goals...some of which we are furthering our grasp on the surrounding nations a lot faster than we anticipated, the weakness of their minds and their inexperience with this approach has shown to much results to dismiss, too many weaknesses to not exploit right away..”

Ah..

Of course...it made sense.

When your enemy made a mistake, you did not correct him...not if that correction was to further your own goals. Nodding slightly she rose her head.

“I see…infiltration its the name of the game”

“Correct, you are been redeployed, your unit will not accompany you in your next assignment.”

“Sir..?”

“You will march alone….to the city of Orario...”

The ghost of a frown warped around her features, but thankfully both the hood and the mask she wore covered most of the puzzled look in her eyes. Not at the name of the city she had heard so many times in the reports, but at something else.

[Alone...?]

Her lips curled down to a thin slit in her face.

She was to go there….alone..?

To that place..?

“Am I... been sent to eliminate one of those abominations..?”

“Darkness no, you are not geared for something like that and it would destroy the purpose of what we intent in a rather catastrophic way. No, this is not a search and destroy mission…, your role will pivot to a far more simple but still useful endeavour..”

“Sir?”

“You are been sent as a scout...”

Her? A scout..? It was not something that she was unfamiliar with….but sending a captain alone for such task..? She was glad that she was not sent to a suicide mission in order to kill a god, but surely there had to be something to it that he was not telling her.

“The Lord Harbinger wants to get a good grasp of the power of the so called “Gods” of this land before anything of substance its done against the bulk of them. You and the others sent will be our vanguard to decipher whatever schemes those bloody beasts are conjuring in that place of sin…”

Others..?

So she was not going alone..

However, the fact that he had barren her from using her squad told her that it was different than from what she expected, perhaps they had picked certain individuals from different squadrons or groups and put them in a formation together..? But..why the secrecy then..?

So many question..

So few answers...

“Any weakness, strengths, powers, anything you can witness with your own eyes. We need to know why so many reside there, there must be a reason beyond the ludicrous things we have heard...”

Ah..

She knew what he meant by that.

Gods descending from the heavens to play doll-house with mortals because they were bored..? Something like that was beyond reason or logic which could only mean that they had been the words from drunkards without a grasp on reality or they were just that stupid that they believed whatever lie those “things” spilled

Even though she agreed that gods were selfish and whimsical entities, it was beyond insane to think two could coexist in a seclude space without killing each other, let alone dozens or hundreds of them. Only a great one could exert such level of control over its lesser kin, and the reasons behind it had never been good for anyone else. History had proven as much

Either way one could not trust any source of information that came from vagrants and rumours

However..

At this moment in time nothing of that mattered.

“It will be done..sir, I wont fail….For the ashen crown!” She exclaimed with fervour ass she stood up to her full height once more.

“For the ashen crown..” He parroted back

However, just as she was already walking away from there, she managed to catch the last partings words of the Lich, and with them, a cryptic yet no less grim future that may loom closer than she would have liked.

“Remember Captain...if they catch you, there are worse things than death…”

Hmmpf….

Ain't that the truth..

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A/N

This story takes place several years before the main story with Bell Cranell, during rise and fall of Evilus. I hope you enjoy the story, please forgive me for any grammar mistakes you may find and I hope you leave a review ^^, have a good day and see you soon~

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Bonus image of the character

Chapter Text

Speech = “…...”

Thoughts = […….]

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Consider all options

Trust none

{...Rule Book of engagement of the Black Legion...}

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Zazsharia’s boots crunched silently across the cracked earth, the moonlight casting a silver sheen over the barren wasteland behind her, and even then its glimmer was dim and weak as clouds swarmed the skies above her head and more often than not covered the sole moon of this world and her pale companions in the forms of stars, shrouding the soil beneath in a greater darkness.

Which….suited her just fine.

She slid down another jagged slope of dust and rock and jumped with silent grace over a thin yet deep ravine on the ground, a crack like many others that filled the desolated wasteland she now had found herself travelling through, wounds carved into the ground from long..long ago, the dust trying to cling to everything, as though desperate not to be left behind, and the wind carried the dry stench of regret.

Of tears shed yet never eased..

Of blood long ran dry...and forgotten.

Her kin had always been able to glimpse at the threads of magic…, to peer into the ghastly threads that only those sensible to their craft could try to mimic such senses. However, were they would mostly only see the dying, glimmering lights of mana in the air dissipate like smoke in sky, her people could picture the stories those brief windows to the past offered.

Like memories ingrained in the ground itself, slowly eroding away...when no more new memories could be made when no one else was around to give them. Though it was not hard to know why or what had been the cause of this disaster.

It had been the same as it always is...

Gods

She bit her lip, fangs chewing at the soft flesh of her lips as she pulled away from the bitter sting of apprehension that acme from both within...and from the touch of those memories.

“Gah...I should have known better to peer to much into them...” She half bemoaned half chastised herself for such a rookie mistake. Raising her head up, she could not help but sense the air around her and sigh with both pity and distaste.

It was stale, shallow...and dry.

A sensation of dim dread and heart-aching melancholy drenching every ounce of it that she could breath, even through the filters of the mask covering her mouth.

It disgusted her...

The moon shined wrong too, weak...yes, but too weak for it to be natural. If she had been far more pretentious she would have considered that the object in question refused to shed its light on this land that had long died to the relentless passing of time...and the mistakes of man.

But did it matter..?

No

Not really...

As far as she was concerned, the fate of this place and its now long dead inhabitants was meaningless to her as she continued this night just like any other night she had past through in this place.

Just another stretch of endless rock, sand, and wind that blew past and right through her lithe black clad form, making the helms of her hood flick and fold, her long ears been the only thing keeping the thing on the top of her head while her cape howled in the air behind her.

Her steps were methodical, each placement of her foot careful, calculated.

The dull, steady thump pf her armour touching the soft bodysuit underneath and the motion of her arrows in her quiver behind her back barely shift from left to rights with each step had long since become a part of her routine since she set forth to her task.

A full week

It had been an entire week since she had received her new instructions from the Watcher.

And for a full weak she had been traversing the land from the very point she had left the shade, it only happened to be in this god forsake wasteland. The one that was tragically at the other end of the continent from where she was supposed to go.

True

It could have been possible to use another waypoint to teleport herself closer...but the task at hand was too important to leave even the most faint of traces of her presence. Gods after all were made of magic...they would surely felt the leftovers of her teleportating and be on their guard. The fact taht she had not made a mount just to speed things up was just to be safe rather than sorry

And so, she was left with the old fashion way.

To go on foot.

Even if that meant turning a few days travel in a month like endeavour...

Zazsharia huffed with a mild pang of annoyance at such delay, but she resigned herself that there was nothing she could about it. Now, the only thing she could do was to be careful not to draw anny unwanted attention that could delay her any further, which was why she had chosen to march only in the dark.

Something strange perhaps you could say...but even as a wasteland...she had soon found that it was not truly unpopulated.

The living and whoever remained within the confines of this destroyed kingdom, be it bandits or vagrants would surely not bother her if they could not even notice her mingle in the shadows of this place in the first place, nor they would be so enthusiastic as to chase after her if they did no matter how improbable that was when at night the monsters came out from most of their holes and wandered for a meal.

It also helped that she could see better in the dark as if it was daylight, in fact, even for a night it still felt a bit bright if only dull in its colouring.

She wondered why..?

Perhaps that atypical bother was what prompted her to move faster each night in the rare case someone could see just as good as she did, and so, she moved with ghostlike precision, draped in a torn black cloak that masked her silhouette. Her weapon were always close, wrapped tightly to her back beneath a canvas of muted cloth. Not a single glint of steel was allowed to betray her.

Of course, marching at night did mean that daylight could prove to be a problem to her desire to be unseen. However that matter was already fixed..albeit in a very roundabout way for when the day surged up from the hinges of the mountain passes to her side...she hid in whatever ruins and the dry roots of dead trees she could find.

If not…she carved a hole in the ground and covered herself completely by the sand and soil, leaving only a small, empty stick to give her the air she would need as she remained deadly still for hours and hours on end until the hours of twilight grew near once more.

With only the wind to whisper its hollow caress over her hideout and the steady throb of her heartbeat underneath her armour as the only source of sound she could hear.

Just like she had been taught..

However, if she was honest with herself...it was a dull thing to do, a more boring process to repeat time and time gain without change or stop, but even so, she would do it no matter how may times it took her to reach the end of this wasteland...for this was just another aspect of war.

Survival was her responsibility

No one else's…

One, of the many lessons the Legion taught their initiates even before they could be tested and bloodied for their first time in the fires of war. One which one could not just forget.

.

..

...

“Still, that….was a long time ago...wasn't it…?” She muttered to no one in particular as her gaze became lost in the horizon before her, the words coming out softly, almost ghastly through the vents of her mask.

Four hundred years may not be much in her people life-spam…

Even less for a military career path like she and all of her fellow kin had taken on..would always taken..., but it felt peculiarly ancient that moment, as if she had past a certain thresholds she would be able to go back and relive like she had then.

Shaking her head Zazsharia decided to put those silly notions about the past to rest as she crested a low ridge beneath the pale sky, however something else gave her pause. The wind, ever-present and bone dry, carried a different scent in its arms...

Not of dust.

Not the poignant sting of rot.

And clearly not the stench of shit and dried blood from either monster or man...

No, it was none of those things. It was in fact something fresh…..or at the very least more alive than this place by a few ounces of magnitude. Even though she did not need to, she knelt instinctively, her training kicking in at the presence of new developments of her situation as she zoned out to locate the source of that aroma.

It did not took much for her lilac eyes to narrow down beneath her hood as they scanned the distance….and there it was, a few dozen miles from her position the source of this fresh air that was surely so unwanted in this dead place. Far away still…..but it was undeniable that the jagged bones of the wasteland were starting to give way to what would have assumed were once soft hills speckled with grass, now dry and yellowish.

Raising her gaze further still from where she was looking at she could notice the way the foliage seemed to grow from been located sparsely in sections to become more tightly knitted in bushes to trees while the dry ground became greener the closer it neared the dark shadows of the forest beyond.

A forest that now appeared like a dark green stain at the very edge of the horizon.

She hummed in deep thought as her eyes continued lock in the target of their interest, as if they alone could peer through the distance and see what laid underneath the condensed layers of tree trunks and their lustful cups.

Her fingers twitched with a barely perceptible tremor as they drew in closer to caress the pommel of the sword in her hip, clawed fingers gracing the cloth wrapped end of her blade almost with a tentative touch.

Waiting.

Wanting..

Calculating...

And it was not hard to know why.

Against popular belief….forest were not any safer than deserts, they were just a little more humid and noisy with all the local critter howling around.

Sickness and decease ridden parasites..

Poisonous plants...

The reverberating echo of the fauna within or the wind rustling the myriad of branches that could distract her from the perils she could find there..

Shadows that could hide predators…and foes alike.

.

..

..

“And then there is them...” She muttered slowly through her teeth, what little could be glimpsed of her features between the mask and the hood obscuring them frowning even more deeper as a particular shadow passed by in her mind.

Her hand clenched tightly around the handle of her sword, creaking the black leather wrapped around it to hide the steel underneath from glinting under the light of day or night.

She hope she would not have to deal with the cursed tree fuckers yet…even if no small part of her relished at the thought of fighting the cursed, damned enemy of her kin. Especially after all the stories and lessons of their fallen kin and their cruelty that had been ingrained into her brain since she could hold a blade.

She almost tempted to walk away and circle around the entire thing...however cold logic and pragmatism gave pause to such line of thought just as quickly as it had come. For better or for worse, it would be to wasteful, to slow to warrant such decision, spending more time than it was absolutely necessary.

Time that was not hers to spent in such a frivolous manner.

Huffing with a grunt of annoyance at her current situation she once again loathed the fact that she had decided not to think twice to walk back into the shade and hope to find another exit closer to her target.

“Dammit….there is only one way to go at this, isn't it...?”

No matter..

It was pointless to cry over spilled milk.

She would have to just toughen up and go through it. She had played safe until now...it was time to take some risks.

At the very least, this time around she would not have to sleep under the ground, how that would pan out in the end would be something she was looking forward to though....

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º….A few hours later….º

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By the time she arrived the sun was already creasing through the edges the desert, the light of a new day slowly trying to make way through the thick canopy of leafs and branches, peppering the humid soil underneath with its still distant warmth.

The flowers were blooming and the birds were singing from the safety of their nests. The sound of their cheerful chirping and the gentle aroma of fresh leafs and other flowers a playful, vibrant change of pace from the dry silence of the wasteland.

After walking for an entire week under the cover of the night through such desolated ground, it would surely be a beautiful expectable to witness at first thing in the morning. Sadly..., she had more pressing matters to attend than mere sightseeing as her iron heels dug on the soft ground.

Like find a useful source of water among other things.

There were just that many times you could use a canteen before it ran out of its content..

And so she continue on, the long folds of her battle-worn cloak rustling gently behind her as she did, the dark fabric speckled with green where stray leaves had clung in her march. Her lilac eyes flicked upward, watching as shafts of light broke through the gaps in the trees, catching a flurry of dust motes mid-air.

Leafs flew and hovered lightly above her head... and when not? Then it was butterflies of peculiar shades of blue and green that flapped around with their tiny wings. If she concentrated hard enough she could see the wings move in slow motion, the soft membranes glinting under the faint light that slid over them.

They were nothing special to write about…

But they seemed...cute

.

..

..

When she realized what kind of thought had crossed her mind she hastily shook her head, as if that would soothed the embarrassment she felt for such slip in her duty.

[ Focus, y ou can admire the colours when you are done with your task..]

Sighing to herself with one last pang of resignation she crouched low, pressing one gloved hand into the ground. She was not surprised when the soil gave easily to her intrusion. Raising the dirt up close her eyes closed to a half lid.

It was moist.

Not too much to be adjacent to what she was looking for...but not dry enough to make her think she was off her mark.

A spring in the middle of the woods...

Perhaps a downwards stream coming from the mountains.?

Or maybe….a small pond.

Whatever it was...it was close, she could sense it. Discarding the soil from the palm of her hands she stood up, zoning her attention at the direction she was sure she would find what she was looking for.

Through low brush and hanging moss, she weaved between twisted trunks. The forest thickened in some places, narrowing into damp little corridors carved by time and animal paths. Thorned vines tugged at her cloak, and the buzz of insects buzzed loud enough for her ears to feel the sound echo as close as if the it was inside of her.

She ignored them all.

It wasn’t long before she heard it anyway as she pushed to the side a set of branches from a crooked tree, bent down to one side by the sheer disparity in the weight of its branches. Faint at first, then clearer. The rhythmic gurgle of moving water. Gentle. Steady. Not the violent roar of a fast current or the stillness of a swamp.

It was just a shallow trail of water that could barely made it to the word of stream, a foot deep to the point you could see with clear accuracy what laid underneath it.

Zazsharia descended, her pace still cautious, eyes sweeping the edges of the bank. No tracks. No disturbed vegetation. She reached the edge, knelt down, and pulled her canteen free. With careful hands, she filled it and drank deeply through the filter, savouring each drop as it washed away the dryness clinging to her throat.

She exhaled slowly.

The sting of thirst easing down as she did.

With her most immediate task done, she allowed herself to linger there for a brief moment.., crouched beside the shallow stream, letting her eyes roam across its winding path as the water glittered like glass over smooth stone.

Zazsharia just….. closed her eyes.

Listening…

Though not to the water, or the birds singing so cheerfully, or the sighing wind that whispered through the trees. No, she was listening for what wasn’t there as her ears move ever so slighly at the sides of her head like the antennas of an insect would

.

But nothing would come

No movement in the deeper brush.
No broken twigs or displaced branches.
No predator’s breath clinging to the back of her neck.

Only after she was certain, t ruly certain that she was alone did she allow herself to sit back, just slightly, on the heels of her boots. Not enough to relax, but enough to ease the tension from her limbs. Her hand moved again, drawing a thin canvas wrap from beneath her cloak, folding it open across the grass. A ration strip. Compressed and tasteless, but it would keep her going. The edge of her mask parted with a soft hiss , exposing just enough of her jaw to chew as she watched the forest remain still.

Chewing on it she could not help but...think of what she was going to do, of what she had been told to do.

How would she do it..?

How would she managed to get inside the city without been noticed or stopped..?

Would there be creatures summoned by those gods to guard the area? Would there be hordes of lunatics preaching whatever lies they had been told to repeat or would it be something more down right horrific..?

Spirits...?

Demons..?

Other cursed beasts...?

But... most important of all...how would she manage to contact the others..?

It was clear by the Lich’s words that others had been sent. Individually of course in case they were caught before reaching their destination and such information was extracted from them....but they had been sent nonetheless

Sadly...the more she thought about it...the more she realized that she did not know where to start looking for them. If they were smart they would be hiding anything that could draw attention to them-…

A thought popped up in her mind.

[Of course...if they are going to hide...then the only I need to do its think where I would hide my presence..]

It was a simple idea..

And perhaps she was wrong..

But it was a good base to work her way up to the answer she sought.

With that problem settled for later Zazsharia decided to focus on another thing, mostly related to the city of her destination. And to be honest, though it embarrassed her to admit it, she knew little about it but her location in the map she had at her disposal to orient herself with.

No doubt thanks to all those silly rumours and the like that came from the local populace...

Pinching the bridge of her nose she could not help but lean her head back, and stare at the glinting lights peering through the foliage of the trees.

[Ah, there is not going to be a way to squirt this mess...the first order of business should be to get at least a grasp of the city social infrastructure..]

No matter….how silly it may sound.

After all, faulty information was better than no information at all...

With a self appreciate nod she she finished the ration, drank one last mouthful from the now-full canteen, and tucked everything away with neat, practised precision. The moment of reprieve was over. She still had a long path ahead before Orario, if she intended to reach the city before the next moonrise cycle, she would need to make good use too of the daylight she so often avoided, the roads too…

But that was a problem she would deal with it when it came to it later.

[Still… a few hours of rest wouldn’t hurt..] She considered to herself, not that she needed to rest right now...but it would not do her ill to consider it if only to maintain peak eficienc-

Crack…!

The unmistakable sound of a thin tree branch breaking under something weight drew her attention away from the stream...and to the other side of it.

Distant..

But growing louder..

Closer..

She did not need her ears to twitch at the tremors and steps from heavy paws that neared her location from the shifting of bushes and the rustling of leaves to know the number and the decreasing distance that separated her from those .. “ things ” coming at her was less than the fingers she had in one hand.

She rose smoothly, wordlessly as her hands neared in and drew slowly the cold steel of the long sword in her back, its metal as dark as obsidian, catching no light, reflecting no image. Its presence seemed to swallow the shadows around it as she poised its length in readiness for what was to come .

And come they did...for i t was just a moment later that three creatures made their way to the clearing.

Wolf-like in their appearance if one could forget the crooked, malformed spikes coming from the top of their heads and backs like ill placed nails, the glint of yellow slitted irises cloaked in coarse black-silvery matted fur.

Their paws were more akin to the arms of a primate with the way their shoulders were too wide and their clawed paws lacked the usual bone structure one would find in a canine, however their long, sharp fangs and the shape of their snot did seem to match.

Mutants..? Failed experiments...? Or maybe just one of the common fauna of this place...? It was hard to tell as the magic she felt from it….was lacking to say the least. It was there..yes, but incredibly reduced to the speck of its former glory if she was allowed to speculate.

Which meant that they had nothing else but what she could see from them.

As she considered these things, they circled her slowly, their snarls rising like a fevered chant while droll slid down their maws.

Zazsharia just stood motionless.

Waiting..

She would not have to do so for long though when the one closest to her lunged forward, one of its grotesque arms stretched forward in what she assumed was its attempt to pin her down under its entire weight in order for the others to strike at her fallen form. Sadly for it...she moved faster.

In a single, fluid pivot, she sidestepped the beast and let her blade arc across its flank in a clean, sweeping motion. There was no resistance, no haste in the endeavour as steel hissed through the air and kissed the creatures meaty vessel right on the spot and deep enough to pierce its heart.

Howling in pain amidst a choked, gurgling yelp the creature crashed into a tree, twitching once before going still.

The others hesitated.

A terrible mistake in their part as it was in that moment that Zazsharia surged forward, the ground where she had standing cracking underneath her feel as she speed through the air in an invisible blurr of black, her blade slamming and punching through the second monster’s chest before it could even react at all like a knife would do so through butter.

Against someone like her, such a result was to be expected. However, what she did not expected was for it to blow up in her face, for never in her years she had come across something that bursts out like a popped balloon.

However instead of guts and blood covering either her and her surrounding’s...nothing of the sort happened as it just...turned into black smoke..? Puzzled she could do nothing but stare at where the creature should have been impaled in her blade that now was caressing the empty air.

Such an abrupt ending would have made her panic on the spot as to what greater horrors were about to pop out around her as only a creature like a demon and their warp made ilk would ever vanish in such manner when slain

But…it was not such thing. She was sure of it! Since the very first moment she sense their approach she did not sense or feel anything remarkable or off that could be related to the mark that said darkness always left in those touched or corrupted by it its its veins.

At most...it was just a strange creature. So…how did it do that...?

[How-….]

“Interesting..” She finished her thought with a brief, faint whisper as she pulled back to a more proper fighting stance, still trying to understand what had just happened. Turning around she looked at the last remaining creature, an inquisitive look in her eyes.

Almost as if by looking at its eyes she could see its very soul

Well..

In case of doubt….repetition was in order. Brandishing her sword up at the creatures direction she tilted her head to the side.

“Tell me….will you do the same..?”

It charged almost as if the words were an insult it could acknowledge.

Which...suited her just fine.

This time, she didn’t dodge nor “dashed” like she had the previous two. She met it. Full force. Her boot slammed into its chest mid-leap, sending it stumbling back in dazzled shock. In the same motion, she fell atop it, plunged her blade down its skull, cold steel plunging through bone with the sound one would smash a ripe fruit open.

She felt its body tense first..and then go limp when she twisted the blade alongside whatever it had for brains. However.., much to her disappointment there was no sudden explosion to be seeing like the other one of his kin had done.

Could it have been a problem with the location of the wound?

The timing?

The question continue to raise one after the other as she could not come to the conclusion of what was different this time. She exhaled her nagging away with a sigh as her eyes gazed down at the blood dripping from her blade. With a nod she wiped it clean without ceremony and returned it to its sheath.

Huh...it seemed that she had yet a lot to learn from this world.

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A/N

Here is another chapter, hope you enjoy it. Review or share your ideas if you like, the more the merrier.

Chapter Text

Speech = “…...”

Thoughts = […….]

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Temper your resolve with hate yet land the strike with cold precision

A mind caged by its own emotion’s is not built to last.

{...Rule Book of engagement of the Black Legion...}

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(…..Zazsharia point of view…..)

º

This world…

This world was strange

Not in the way that the laws of nature were turned over on its axis as a by product of some sort of cataclysmic event that had made this world be breached by the immaterial realm and had its foul energies bathe every patch of land in horrors beyond a mortals imagination or howling abyssal storms warped the skies and cracked the earth, leaving the soil scarred for millennia to come…. but more so for the way it did not fall into what she had previously expected it to be.

She of course was not as arrogant as to believe that one´s own beliefs and stances on a certain matter could not be challenged or proven wrong when given more data…, especially with the fact that neither she nor her unit had been allowed to infiltrate this world in earnest like other units had. Their knowledge of this world was nothing but a collection of fragmented data, a patchwork of reports, sketches, and whispers.

And yet...it was a feeling that Zazsharia felt more vindicated about, gnawing at the back of her mind like an itch that she could feel yet could not quite place with each passing day that passed.

What was that feeling…?

It was mostly related to the nagging thought that had been perched at the back of her head and had tried time and time again to press itself forward that...for a world that was infested by the so called divine in such a massive, astonishing manner.., everything that she had seen so far was painfully normal.

She felt her eyes close for a moment as a silent sigh slipped through her lips..yet was muffled by the mask over her mouth.

Where to begin..?

Where to begin indeed...

The trees that surrounded her in this forest she now traversed were not trying to sap her life-force from her body in order to store it within themselves. The grass did not claw at her and tried to pierce her armour with leafs that were sharper than steel and poisonous to boot, nor was it trying to hide any nasty surprises waiting to spring up from the wet soil in the form of man eating insects or house sized carnivorous plants that so easily blended with the surroundings.

Aspects that would have made exploration a far more tricky thing than it should be

There were also no parasites or poisonous vermin hanging from branches of trees or underneath the shallow waters of the small sources of water she had come across….and whatever creatures she did find lurking around were painfully weak and utterly below the rank of nuisance.

And when she tried to sense the presence of spirits or the like that could be tied to this land she felt nothing. If there had been, it was a long time ago, now though nothing more than the whispers of their presence remained in the land.

All in….it was pretty normal.

She had steeled herself for a land brimming with horrors, twisted to its roots by the meddling of gods..and yet all that she was met with was the equivalent of a walk in the park even with how quiet, simple and uneventful all of it was.

Which...most would prefer than to the hectic, life threatening situations she had listed just now, but she honestly did not like this sense of calm and peaceful surrounding that threatened to bleed all over the place like some sort of cancerous malady. At the very least, when you knew that the world around you was trying to kill you..you did not lower guard.

Calm bred complacency.

Complacency bred death.

It wasn't paranoia if they were really out there to get you.

Though...it was shard to imagine if the predators she had killed were anything to go by what this world that offer. Looking back at the memory of the carcases she had left behind she went over everything she had noticed.

Mutated..? Yes. Magical nature or origin? More than likely, but dangerous? No. They were dumb, pack animal mentality at its best...and that wasn't something they well, they were more like stumbling around and pushing one another in an uncoordinated mess. A pack that attacked anything that wasn't like them...but did it in a manner so painfully wrong that made one pause at the fact that they had not yet been exterminated if they were a danger to the citizens of this world.

There was something amiss….as if the creatures had been part of a hive-mind yet had suffered for decades if not longer the effects of been disconnected from it. Maybe that could explain why they were made of soft, revolting flesh and not the resistant, carapace hardened skin and muscles that most of the creatures she had faced before.

However..there was a peculiarity to them, and that was the fact that when she killed one it blew up into smoke instead of guts and blood. A fickle detail that had brewed no small sense of alarm to spawn in her guts like a cold weight that had been left hanging and was trying to drag her to some sort of pit.

Tainted creatures did not do that, only the never-born did when they were slain or banished from the realms of men. Were these filth...demons? Were they spawns..directly or indirectly made by the presence of the abominations that inhabited this world? There could be a thousand reasons ads to why such eerily similarity with the fiends of the dark these animals shared but…, as she investigated she found that..it wasn't that they were not truly of the immaterial realm, but were made artificially by something touched by it...or at least, familiar with it

For there was a stone.

Small.

Rugged.

Dirty looking stone was at the core of their being.

Furthermore testing showed that destroying it meant the obliteration of the creature, but there were other ways to kill the beasts without touching it..so instead of giving them a boost, it only made another weakness for them, for they died just as easily as any other living being, target the head, the lungs or the guts...and they would die just as quickly.

There was a moment where she had tried to eat it in order to find out more of its uses….but she end up spitting the shards from her fangs as a look of grimacing distaste crooked her face. It was tasteless filth, worse than swallowing sand and glass in a mug. Whatever magic powered it, it was so degraded that she would find better luck eating rocks than whatever those cores were.

Still..as a small detail as it was, it was a good thing to keep track of. As far as she knew, no one had said anything about this..but maybe it was an unlucky result to obliterating the creatures they came across too quickly to inspect them properly, or just the line commanders establishing a control of the information in order to know how to operate better in this world.

Beyond that..?

There was nothing worth mention….yet

After that, she slowly rose her gaze towards the skies above. Her lilac eyes peering through the thick foliage of the forest towards the blue hued horizon and the light of the sun that with difficulty, still managed to bathe sections of the soil below with a dimmed, yet golden touch. The sound of her footsteps barely a whisper as she stepped over overgrown roots that punched up the earth and the trail of flowers that were seemingly blooming at this time of the year.

The scent of magic dragged by the wind that blew through the foliage from time to time was pale and lacklustre, but it didn't bother her as much. She had slowly started to get used to the fact that the mana in the air was not as great as the one she was used to. It would not hamper her abilities perse…, but she did wonder what those of the Legion more focused on the arcane would have to say about it.

After all, the less mana in the air, the longer it would take them to recharge naturally without the need of tools. Still…not really her problem to manage. Amidst this thoughts she finally found a dirt path, the trail was faint..but it was at least clear that more than just the wildlife had made use of it some time in the past. Would she come across someone..? Not likely….but the probability was never zero.

[It would still be good to have someone to question where the closest settlements of the area are located though..]

A map at the very least would be helpful.

.

.

.

.

However, with the lack of threats directed at her person...and with the lack of the necessary stimuli...it left room to far more complicated thoughts. Her expression darkened slightly under the cover that her hood offered, a deep frown marking the edges of what was visible.

Her assignment was anything but simple.

A great honour to be honest...one many would kill for or die long before been able to ever heard the words of such assignment..., but it was also a noose waiting to tighten around her throat.

No matter how many years under the Legion she had went through, how many battlefields she had witnessed, she wasn't really that confident she would pull it without a hitch. Such arrogance would better befit the greenhorns of the cadres in their youthful naivety as they trained under their weapon-masters than a proper blade of the Legion.

She knew what she could do..and what she couldn't. That was one of the axioms that kept a man from overcommitting to a fools errand while also given them a goal to strife for in due time…..but that did not change the situation she found herself in.

No speeches, no words, nothing did.

A city filled with gods

Such a dreadful sentence that she never thought would ever cross her mind, one that by itself could bring the end to entire worlds and fear into the most stoic of hearts. And she was walking there, alone, on foot...to what was possibly be the dangerous place in the planet….to spy on them.

A part of her wanted to say it was madness..

But such thoughts were heresy

Clenching her jaw she forced those thoughts of her head. [Focus on the current operation directives, ensure the completion of the mission..personal feelings are unnecessary..]

Yes..

That was it..

As long as he had a goal and a mission to throw herself up.., as long as there were directives and goals she had to reach she could push aside the weakness of mortality and weakness inherent in it.

Although...she would be lying that she missed her old squad.

It was then, that she heard something blared aloud ahead of her, first the echo of several feet stomping the ground before a guttural and rage filled roar followed.

“GRUAAAAAH...!”

Slowly, almost lazily she started lowering her gaze from the cups of the trees, Zazsharia followed the sound to its origin, a source that she had long picked up and catalogue as something else than the bulky wolf like creatures from before...yet to small to be proper humanoids like elves or men.

As expected...it wasn't neither as something familiar yet different stood a few acres of distance from her.

A bunch of small, chubby, ugly little green skinned creatures, with their bizarre, gross looking faces that would have been quite the stretch for nature to create. They were bald, with the exception of one or a few small sized horns protruding from their foreheads and sharp, crude ears to the sides. Their eyes nothing more than a waste of yellow ink that someone had blurred with their fingers to the point that they felt more as parodies of the goblins that came to mind than whatever they were meant to mimic.

And...their small sizes clearly indicating that what she had sensed ahead of time wasn't just a bunch of lost children in a forest...but just more fiends that somehow had stumbled on her route. And now that they had spotted her...were charging at her, with small rocks in their hands..or just going barehanded.

She sighed again at what appeared to be an inevitable clash. “What a waste of time...” She mused, hands already drawing the two swords from the sheaths on her hips, hands gripping tightly the pommels as she took one more muffled breath.

Still...new foes meant more information to be collected.

New information meant better decisions could be taken in the future to gauge the enemies abilities.

Better decisions and battle information meant that quicker engagements could be taken.

Quicker engagements meant that more information would be provided.

It was a beautiful endless cycle that would suit her needs just fine. Perhaps she could make good sport of them for the nearby future, after all, there wasn't really a dead-mark on when she was meant to arrive at Orario even though not that long ago nothing but sprinting through the entire world to reach that damned place had filled her mind.

She took one step forward.

And... she would not deny it but she was also a bit curious if these creatures had rocks inside of them as-well. Forty new miniatured green-skins will probably do nicely for that.

By the second step she was no longer where she had been standing just a moment ago.

To mortal eyes that were not perceptive enough to witness the entire ordeal of a blur of a body encased in black she had all but vanish, her form gone like a puff of air in a sealed tight room without a trace.

To her, it was merely a dash, a flicker of motion that led A to B. But it was understandable…, speed was one of her kins fortes, to the likes of these creatures she may as-well be walking at a different speed of time as she reappeared in the heart of the mob without warning.

An instant later, an entire score of bodies fell down to the ground in pieces, cleaved apart mid-motion, their heads and torsos tumbling to the dirt in loud, wet thuds. Blood and gore misted the air in those few moments when once beating hearts finally ceased their loud throbs, spattering the leaves of the trees around them before the grass underneath their bodies became tainted with the red ichor of their arterial blood. The difference in their respective sizes had meant that her blade instead of harming from the chest down, it had cleaved the most through their necks, skulls or reaping out chunks of their torsos alongside their heads.

Some of them started dissipating with that same eerie smoke that she had seen the Wolf-beasts do on the spot.

The majority however remained where they had taken their last breath.

However, those that she had left untouched at both the vanguard and the rearguard of this measly made mob gawked in confusion or halted on the spot, their glowing eyes staring at her with what could only be a ghost of incredulity.

Was it fear..?

Shock..?

Could they feel those emotions...? Or were they unable to process them in their primitive minds..?

Whatever it was, it hardly mattered...yet she made sure to remember those seconds of hesitation the drew on the creatures bodies. However, what piked her interest the most was another thing entirely as wiped the blood from the swing from her blade.

“It seems you cannot perceive my speed… nor possess the reflexes to react..”

Of course, it could be that these lot were nothing more than the lowest of the food chain when it came to the monsters of these lands.

But she wasn't going as fast as she could either.

At her words two of the goblin like creatures lunged forward at her make-shifts spears in the form of sharpened sticks, yet she met them in the same unhurried motion. One blade carving from shoulder to hip to the one coming from her right, the other slicing cleanly through the wood and skull alike on the one on the left.

“The ability to fashion tools speaks of intelligence… greater than those wolf-beasts..” She muttered with a deadpan-tone. “Fighting as a group rather than individually also speaks of a clan-pack strategy...”

The remaining group of goblins started hurling rocks at her, pitiful pebbles if nothing else by the size of the things, though to be expected by their small sizes. She didn't doge though, her sword gently moving as she merely started cutting each and rock that came her way into harmless fragments that pattered against her cloak and armour.

“But the fact that you don't run away and instead pounce more and more in the face of a greater force….” She spoke as she approached them, unhurried. “Either speaks of your inability to perceive how impossible your task is..”

She dashed forward again, right into their midst once more, a heel crushing down onto the skull of one of the goblin like creatures before she started swinging her blade. Slicing off arms, hands, fingers and heads alike onto the grass. She spotted one of the goblins drag itself at her, its lower half sliced off...yet even as its guts started to spill out from the large gash that had been its waist, the creature did not seem to stop in its slow advance.

“Or you simply cant..”

There was the possibility that maybe they were too stupid to understand that though

Now while it was true that animals would cower in fear in the presence of greater predators and run away as the survival instincts kicked in or they chose to fight, not all living beings seemed to posses them. Perhaps given the fact that the turned into smoke upon death after a while, no matter whether you destroyed their core or not they lacked elements that were otherwise normal in more common beasts.

After slicing four more of the creature sin half she stomped onto the skull of the crippled goblin, turning it into mush on the spot.

“Such persistence…...hmm, reminds me to a bunch of hounds of prey”

She wondered if this creatures had been fused or mixed with more mundane beings. It could explain certain fixations...or why their yellowish eyes had then turned red.

“So many questions….so much time to answer them...” She mused to herself as her lips started to curl ever so slightly with the ghost of a smile. Finding in this strange moment a source of amusement and joy at this puzzle that begged to be answered.

However, a moment after, at the back of her head she noticed that a certain group of wolfish creatures that she had become acquainted from before were starting to lurk around their improvised battlefield. Perhaps they could smell blood in the air quicker than their natural counterparts. So interesting, using goblins as bait for these fiends could prove a way to hunt them quicker than going at it the old way

Hmm….it would be good to put it to the test when she had time

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º...Five minutes later...º

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The last creature gurgled as it slid off her blade, collapsing with a wet thump on the grass. Zazsharia exhaled softly, not from exertion but from the faint irritation at how little resistance these so-called creatures offered her, even with the new addition of targets in the form of the wolf-like creatures they had not increased the difficulty of the encounter. With a sigh, the woman flicked her wrist, letting crimson droplets scatter from the edge of her swords before sheathed them back with a practised motion.

“Pathetic lot...” She muttered under her breath as she scanned the fallen bodies, those that at least had not dissipated into puffs of dark smoke. “If you are the only thing standing betweem me and Orario then I have nothing to worry about..”

Perhaps and exaggeration on her part…but so far she had not seen anything that was actually worth her worry, not as she took a brief look around the mass of bodies she had left behind, her nose flaring a little at the way the clearing reeked now of iron, all thanks to the sixty five creatures she had killed.

Taking a step forward...and with knife in hand she decided to focus on the body of a goblin nearby.

The cold blade made short work of its soft flesh, carving with ease into its belly as she slowly skinned the creature. Soon everything that had not been destroyed before was revealed to her. Its muscles, the veins and its bones a bit more hidden underneath its bleeding flesh. Carving deeper into its guts she took a long look at its digestive system, at the size of its organs that still were in one piece.

Nicking at the centre of its chest though she found something...familiar, yet something that she had not expected to find. Zazsharia eyes narrowed slightly, then...she urged her hand forward, the claws of her gauntlet clawing at the soft tissue, smearing its blood and other liquids into her armoured wrist before she pulled out a small looking rock.

Smaller even than the one she had found in the wolfs by a large margin...yet it was the same kind of crystal. The act though, as expected made the body of the skinned goblin turned into mist and disappear.

Still, that was not what confused her.

The presence of the very same rock in the chest of a creature that had nothing to do with the wolf-fiends was as troubling as it was perplexing. Wanting to test a growing theory in her mind, she decided to pick another body...and another, and another. All goblins, all that had yet to vanish from her sight. However, she would soon find herself picking up quite a sum of rocks into her hands.

All the same..all of their bodies giving her the same exact reaction once she pulled the stone from their bodies. A pang of frustration rang true at the back of her head.

[Again…? These stones…? Why do they have the same stones..?]

The question lingered in her mind for a while, wanting to know the answer...but not quite finding the inspiration to get to it just now. She turned it over, testing its weight. For something so important to their existence, it was disarmingly fragile. With a squeeze of her gauntlet, it crumbled into shards. No resistance. No lingering essence. Just dust.

She frowned deeper beneath her mask.

There could be one reason for such

“…Unnatural.”

The wolves she had slain earlier had them as well, albeit lodged deeper in their chests. Now these goblins carried the same curse. Different shapes, different bodies, yet the same stone cores at their hearts. As if every beast in this land was cut from a single cloth, stitched together from the same false pattern.

It was… wrong.

Tainted creatures she understood. Aberrations from the immaterial realm, she had faced and burned them before, even more simply to picture. But these things? They felt artificial. Too... ordered in their chaos, too unified in their weakness. Someone...or something had seeded them before letting them loose.

But why..?

Was this world so bereft of natural creatures that it needed man made vermin..? No, that sounded stupid. Such idea could only be sensible enough if a group of individuals wanted to poach and hunt the creatures at their leisure, but such thing was only done in controlled, closed environments. The thought of someone thinking that it was a good idea to let monsters, no matter how weak loose upon the earth was beyond comprehension.

Especially with the fact that they could breed and multiply, creating a plague. Indeed, there had to be another explanation as to what created these creatures.

She glanced at the piles of smoke dissipating into nothingness.

No corpses to hide, no remains for scavengers…... that in itself was both troubling and useful: Useful in the way that you could eliminate a number of them without drawing the attention of more or having to bury them or something if you could just make them disappear like this...but also troublesome if someone ever tried to either eat them...or pick up body parts to craft armour or weapons.

How the people of this world managed to avoid such annoyance eluded her.

However..just before she was about to leave that place, her eyes caught on the sight of something truly strange, because for some bloody reason a body of a goblin that she knew had completely evaporated into the air...had left behind a claw.

..

[Wait..what?]

Weren't the bodies meant to vanish without a trace..? Gone..? Why was a claw left this time..? And why looked bigger than the small looking hands the goblins had..? What kind of strange, derange system or event was taking place that could pop up into thin air something like that..? Picking the claw with both mild curiosity and distrust she could not help but mutter to herself as she tried to understand what had just happened.

“What on the First Progenitor is this..?”

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º...Bonus image...º

Chapter Text

Speech = “…...”

Thoughts = […….]

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...The enemies of the Legion are as evil as they are craven...

...Strike silently, strike hard but strike true and they will shatter before us...

{...Rule Book of engagement of the Black Legion...}

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(…..Zazsharia point of view…..)

º

It appeared….that Monsters could leave body parts behind after death.

..

Yes..that was a thing.

And she wasn't talking about some sort of magical residue, the usual left overs from a battle or spell that had become encrusted in one of their shattered limbs or clung unnaturally to the spikes that had been cut off and left behind on the ground or as a result of having the magic of their essence flare up and then crystallize under certain circumstances into something actually tangible.

But no

This was not exactly such case...

It appeared that these monsters were capable of leaving behind a part of their bodies..EVEN when said bodies were clearly meant to evaporate like the morning dew once their cores were taking of their dead carcases or destroyed, just like they had each and every other time before. This peculiar change of what she had assumed was an unwritten law did not shake her resolve, but it did trouble her a bit.

Though mostly her unnerve was tied to not understanding “why” exactly it had happened.

She preferred when things were packed in neat, tidy boxes established through logic and rationality that could be poked and judged from the safety of experience, perhaps a flaw of her kins nature, no matter how ironic would that be considering their point of origin, but she clung to it all the same.

Chaos was… distasteful.

Still, while this element of randomness was not exactly her cup of tea, there was however a precedent..for Zazsharia had heard from other units before that sometimes, when eliminating beings that oozed from every pore of their bodies the chaotic energies of the immaterial realm, as their vessels that where tied to this realm were breaking apart in death they could leave behind trinkets that were in some way tied to themselves.

Whether it was true or not was debatable..but she was sure she had heard enough barracks banter to at least give it an ounce of trust. The soldiers, in their humour, had dubbed such things “loot”. The very word made her lip curl..though she did not know whether it was because of a grimace or a chuckle, honestly, to treat warped remnants of demonic tools as if they were prizes from a game…? Who did that? Still, it was not her duty to question the minds of others….at least those tales had internal logic.

This..?

This was nonsense.

First, because this goblins were not creatures of the dark nether, and secondly, the green skins held no magic whatsoever in their little bodies, so they could not be sorcerers or mutants or any sort of magical battery capable of pulling something like that no matter what heathen method had been employed to craft them into existence. True, she had spotted some who were older and more tough looking than their younger brethren..but apart from the scars and from having a more darker shade of colour they were exactly the same old goblin.

Still...for some reason they only left claws.

Nothing else.

No fangs or other bones.

So...puzzling.

In the other hand...not everything was as annoying or confusing as this Mystery Claw business was showing itself to be...for it seemed that this world Monster flesh was actually edible for consumption. A surprise to be sure if nothing else...but one that she welcome nonetheless

Seem how most if not all the creatures she had slain tended to disappear once the core was removed or if it was lightly damaged during the battles, she had started to think that their flesh would share the same fate. However, if you did not remove the core after killing them, the body remained on the ground like any other dead body would.

Which made things easier to feed.

Imagine the horror that it would to eat a body only to have it vanish from your stomach a few minutes after you had gone through the trouble of cooking it or just down right swallowing it. At least this way she could find a useful and stable supply of willing meat to reach her as she made her voyage towards Orario without the fear of having it vanish before her eyes.

Still, a bit of caution had been warranted, who knew what kind of deceases or “things” could be inside of their wretched bodies. However, no inspection or carving had shown anything that could warrant the need of burning...and even if there was her iron stomach would deal with it quite handily.

That at the very least answered the matter of food acquisition in order to avoid starvation.

In that line of thought though, she really did not know if it was ok to think this...but Goblin flesh actually tasted like lizard. Dry, tasteless lizard...but better than the disgusting dust-like taste she had suffered when she had tried to eat these monster’s cores. Not great...but it really did not took much to beat such a disappointment.

The wolf-beast tasted a little better though, like dog mixed with some sort of chicken.

Putting those thoughts in the back burner though, another matter to take into consideration was the fact that all monster share the same defective stones.

All of them..

Without exceptions.

They could be wolf-beasts, goblins or some of those horned rabbits she had come across from time to time that seemed really stubborn on running her through with their miniature spikes. They all had the same cores inside of them..and they all vanished if they were damaged or yanked out.

There was a pattern here.

One which gave another point to the theory that they were made from the same source, especially with how deliberate the clues were slapping her face.

And how insidious it was.

After all, it was clear to her that these monsters had been fabricated to supply certain roles. The wolfs were trackers to locate and hunt humans, while the goblins were clearly cannon fodder, meant to tire out their foes with their sheer numbers while the rabbits were clearly meant to use their small sizes to slip past gaps in walls and use their cute appearance to kill the foolish or...children.

Targetting the morale of an army and that of the civilian populace was more dangerous than having one’s forces forced to flight. Still...the fact that she had not come across plant-life monsters made her think that perhaps there was no such kind of creatures in these lands.

A small mercy

She wasn't exactly an expert in Pyro spells after all and her command over them was...rudimentary at best.

Shaking her mind from such thoughts, she decided to focus her attention on something more...interesting than going again and again over each and every little detail that she was compiling in her mind that she will in due time write a report about to command. And it was not the fact that it had started to rain a while ago, turning the soil into mud that clung to her boots and cape while droplets of water peppered her armour, making it echo with that low “clink” like sound...but the fact that there was a caravan of men that stood in-front of her a few bushes away on a dirt path down a slope.

Now..while a carriage in a forest was not unheard of, it wasn't exactly normal either, especially when it was a singular vehicle instead of a number of them.

There was safety in numbers, more often than not, especially when you intruded in areas like these where monsters still lurked around. The more caravans the more merchandise, and the more they had then more guards and bodyguards would watch over the product. The presence of only one such thing either meant that this was not a merchant...and it fit was, then they were poor and a bit insane.

The foliage of the forest had also decreased ever so slightly as she moved in the direction she was meant to take, the skies becoming a little less blue while the grass had started to adopt a more yellowish, brown tune, but it was the now more scarce number of trees that probably made it easier for the cumbersome wooden boxes the people of this world used to traverse to be used in this part of the woods.

She crouched low as she neared the edge.

“What are you waiting for old man!? For super?” One of the men grunted, his bald head glistening under the rain.

“Shut your trap boy, I am busy..” The elder snapped back.

“Busy trying to not bust a hip?” Another jeered from the side.

“Stop babbling your mouth and help me if you have so much haste then, asshole.”

“Why would I when you made this mess in the first place..?”

Their bickering was nearly as loud as the rainfall, which would have been a feat on its own. Still, from what she could see from her advantageous point of view, they had come to an abrupt halt when one of the wheels of their carriage sunk into the mud, the wet, feeble ground unable to hold the things weight and now were trying to pull the thing up from where it had sunk. Failing it for a while though as the rain made their grip slippery and their stance on the already muddy ground unstable at best.

However, they would have gotten out sooner if they had at least tried to push it out all together...instead of having the old man do it alone.

[A slave perhaps and his masters..?]

The thought made her heart burn with the ghost of anger as her hands started to ball into fists...but she soon diminished such notion just as quickly as it came. No..he wasn't wearing a collar or any chains, so it had to be something else.

But what it was..?

A difference in position of power..?

Were they letting the man feel the Karma for getting the carriage stuck in the first place..?

The options felt possible, but it was too soon to say. There were four men in total, three service aged ones and one senior citizen. All dressed in plain, crude and simple sleeveless leather vest and pants that showed their bodies, offering nothing for protection to any blade or weapon, let alone the inclemencies of the weather. All lightly armed, mostly with knives, while only one had a bastard sword to protect himself. They had rugged faces and bodies, yet not enough muscle to state that they trained or exercise, no armour or any symbols that could denote they belonged to a clan or a band of knights….and by their appearances and behaviour clearly not merchants.

There was not an ounce of magic in their bodies, so no..they were not professionals of any kind.

The elder cursed under his breath, straining against the wheel. “Argh, you bastards….in my times the youth would help their-”

“Yadayada I have already heard that before.., cant you pull that wheel from there or not..?”

“A bit hard when I can barely see anything with all these bloody rain..”

“And whose fault is that wanted to go back the base this way?” The bald one shot back, throwing his hands up.

“Sod off..!”

“Ah..fuckin’ hell..and here I thought that these elven forest were supposed to have all nice and good weather, where this dompour came from?”

“The fuck I know..?”

Zazsharia slid down the slope quietly before she approached them. The wet sound of her footsteps on the mud muffled as the rain slowly seemed to become into a storm or it just liked to rain this much in such a small amount of time in this area. They didn’t notice her at first, their attention was mostly locked on the trapped wheel and the failing attempts to pull it out of the old man, their voices rising in frustration.

It wasn’t until she was literally in their midst at arms reach that they rose their heads up.

“A-ah! W-what the fuck!?” One stammered, stumbling back, his hand going instinctively to his belt where a blade hang in waiting..only to stumble on his footing and end up on his back against the slippery muddy ground.

“...Oi. You seein’ this?” Another muttered under his breath.

The others, spurned by the reactions of their fellows looked up, their expressions shifting quickly once they laid their eyes on her..first with surprise, then uncertainty as they had to tilt their heads up in order to try meet her gaze under the cowl. The old man’s throat bobbed as he swallowed hard, his eyes squinting as the water of the rain slid down his aged face.

“...Ah... evening, traveller” He croaked as he tried to sound cheerful, his voice cracking as if he was chewing his own lip before he gestured with one hand at the sky itself. “Miserable weather, eh..?”

“You are stuck..” She said with a deadpan tone.

Honestly..she did not understood why they were trying to sugar-coat it.

It was right there.

The youngest of the group, a wiry lad with too much bravado for his own good, scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Tch, no kidding. Got eyes, don’t you...?”

The old man smacked the thugs shoulder sharply. “Quiet you..!” He hissed, then, forcing a brittle smile as he turned back to her. “Beggin’ your pardon, miss. We didn’t mean disrespect. Just a bit of trouble with the wheel, that’s all-..by the gods you are a tall one..!”

The old man muttered with shock when he finally got a good look at her. Though it was hidden from them thanks to the cowl she wore those words made her expression shift into a crossed scowl. In the bliss of such ignorance the old man continue on its rambling as she said nothing.

“Ergh….pardon my rambling, but are you and adventurer, girl...?”

“Adventurer..?” She asked, tilting her head a bit.

The term confusing her a bit.

“Y-yeah? I mean...your gear looks top-notch..and you look...rather imposing”

For a moment she considered his words. Her armour was standard issue, and though she had added some touches to it through tinkering and crafting at the furnace just as a token of her kins touch on the art of war there was nothing more. Yet compared to their rags, perhaps it seemed exceptional.

[Hmm..perhaps the tittle of adventurer was one locally known for soldiers?] She mused for a moment...but it did not quite fit, did it? [No, surely they would have used that term instead without any fuss or buzz of this kind. No, perhaps they were talking about...mercenaries..]

Not a pleasing term...but it would do for now.

“Something like that...” She answered vaguely with a weak nod.

If the men noticed the evasion, they gave no sign.

“Still...strange to see one so up here instead of been in Orario..”

The mention of the name of the city her targets resided struck her interest almost instantly. “All adventurers reside there..?” She asked curious, though thanks to it she earned the elder to give her a look as if the question were absurd. Sadly, it would be one of the thugs to speak up first...

“Duh? Where else they are going to Dungeon dive..?”

She blinked, both curious and perplexed. Dungeon...dive..? A strange term if there was any...and what did it mean anyway? Did the adventurers go underground to do..what? Plunder…? Plunder what exactly?

The way the man had phrased that sentence did not seem like that was the place they sent their criminals.

“Hey...what Familia are you in..?”

“Do you think she is a Hermes..?”

“Nah, she is to big and that armour looks scary as hell….maybe Freya..?”

Were those the names of Gangs..?

No...what if they were cults...?

The thought of these men asking any person they caught their fancy what kind of cult they were in with such familiarity as one would asking what hobbies one preferred unnerve her. However, it was good that her face was barely visible from sight or they would have notice something was wrong with her.

“I would rather not say..” She answered in the end.

The old man nodded as if that was sensible “Ah..right, it wouldn't be smart to tell such information to strangers, now, ain't it? Specially with the times we live..”

However, not everyone shared that line of thought

“I would say that is suspicious..” One of the men grunted, the bald one at that...

“Though...” Another interjected slyly “If you are from Evilus...maybe we could strike a deal..”

Zazsharia’s eyes sharpened.

Evilus…? The name was… laughably childish. An epithet more fitting for reckless brats than a feared faction that thought calling themselves Evil in broad daylight was going to make everyone fear them. She almost found herself laughing at such petty need for respect...yet the shift in the group’s mood was unmistakable. The elder, especially, straightened with newfound boldness, his tone almost hopeful...as if her supposed affiliation explained everything.

It felt..wrong

She could not help herself but stare at the group with a look of incredulity as she tried to make heads and tails of the facts around him. There were a lot of suppositions going on and she wasn't sure she had caught them all.

[Do they believe me part of this… Evilus?]

Perhaps its members wore black, stalked the shadows, and carried themselves with the same aura she now did. A mask she could don, if useful. Or… a snare waiting to snap, but first, she needed to know what bound their suspicion.

“And what makes you think that..?”

The elder held her gaze. His eyes flickered with something between wariness and respect “You feel different than the usual adventurer..miss. You…....have killed, people I mean..”

She stared at him as if her eyes could pierce his very soul…..yet, after a few tense seconds she answered with nothing more than a shallow nod.

No denial.

No elaboration.

Just enough to make the man think he was right.

The man’s mouth split into a grin, yellowed teeth showing “Ha, I knew it….what a relief, I have some folks back in there. Bunch of bastards if you get what I mean.., but they do know how make business-..”

“I take that you have a map...” She interrupted the man before he got into another tangent. The sudden interruption caught all of them by surprise as they stared at her with confusion.

“Huh..?”

“Map. I am in need of a map...this storm...ruined the last one I had..” She repeated again, putting a strong emphasis on the word, wanting to cut off whatever unnecessary banter the old man was about to force her through towards something that was more practical for her.

A map of this world or the area would be a good start, no matter how incomplete it could be

Though of course...they could deny her request.

The man scratched the back of his head..but he nodded a few moments later. “Ah...right, there is one we have..I guess I could show you it..”

“Seriously old man?” One of the younger men groaned.

“We lose nothing from doing so..” The elder muttered

“That would be….appreciated” Zazsharia replied back, stepping forward as she did. The old man instinctively shuffled aside as her imposing frame brushed past him, her boots sinking slightly into the muck as she approached the wagon.

“Still, if… if you’re passin’ through, might you lend a hand..?”

Her gaze drifted to the wagon itself. A plain wooden construct, its boards swollen from rain and from years of lack of proper maintenance, its iron nails rusted at the edges. The mud held the wheel fast, but not impossibly so. A push from her, properly angled, would free it easily.

“What do you carry?” She asked.

Though it wasn't really her intention the question landed heavily on the group, killing whatever mood had brew among them. None of them answered immediately, instead looking at each other with furtive glances stained by frowns and shrugs.

“J-just trade some goods,” The old man said at last after he shared a look with the men around him. “Cloth, tools, foodstuffs for the next village. Nothing worth bothering’ yourself over...”

She really didn't need to look too deep to know that he was lying. After all...cloth did not share a heartbeat. Kicking a rock down the road she slowly sent a look at the man while she let one of her hands slowly slid down to her hip...yet it slowly grew nearer the drenched rough patch of fabric that covered the back-side entrance of the carriage. There was a smell of copper coming out from it, as-well as...something else.

The rain by all its faults dulling the senses as the water cleaned the air around her.

“A village you say…?”

“Yeah..boring place, I don't suggest you go there though..”

“They would probably not take kindly to strangers..”

“Or adventurers..”

She almost bristled at the way they tried to sent the message. They were not even trying to conceal the fact that they didn't want to go to that place. More likely their base of operations...or it didn't exist at all and they were been vague at it to throw her off.

She felt it was the latter in this case.

Not that it mattered as her hand finally found the rough cloth of the carriage and push it away, revealing a small window into the backside of the carriage...and into the broken visage of a humanoid creature curling down inside a cage.

Small…

Frail..

Tattered clothes barely clinging to a body that had cuts and bruises all over its pale skin. The curls of blond hair were dirty with dirt that had entangled with her mane, and dried blood that had now clustered around patches of her hair with a dark red hue. However, what caught her attention the most was not the fact that there was a white liquid now mostly dry over the girls back and face from some coital process that had taken place previously..or the wounds that had been left untreated and unmourned, but the ears.

Sharp

Long..

Inhuman…

[And elf…]

As if that the realization of that very word came into view inside of her mind a burning rage both her own..and one ingrained into her very blood started to flare up inside her veins. Her jaw clenched ever more tightly underneath her mask, a tension building in her stance as her hands clenched even more tightly

She almost could not hear the annoyed, angry shouts from the men around.

“Ah dammit, why did you do that for? Never heard to not snoop into some else's stuff..!?”

“Well, the cat is out the bag..”

“Damn hell, now what?”

Slavery.

They were slavers…

She should have known that in places bereft of the guiding light of the First Progenitor they would still be practising this horrendous practise just as easily as they drew another breath, it was a sin committed all to easily . Even though she almost felt a bitter sense of satisfaction to witness one of the hated “foe” put in the very same place they had put her kin so long ago, in bondage and used like a toy.

Still…

The nature of their cargo did not change the fact that this scum were slavers. Her hands slid down to the pommel of her swords, caressing the sweet, sweet touch of the hardened steel with her fingers, her cape obscuring that sight from anyone around her.

“What are you going to do with her..?” The words left her lips low, flat even...

“What..?”

“What are you going to do with her..” She pressed again yet her voice become more of a feral grunt, not even bothering to look away from the slave, dark thoughts crossing her mind.

The bald man spat into the mud. “Selling her, what else is there to it..? Elves sell pretty well these days..”

[That was to be expected…] Her jaw tightened behind her mask, though her eyes never shifted. “Any buyers in particular..”

Another man crossed his arms with a shrug. “Erh...a few? I still think we should just give her to Evilus...”

[…?]

“Yeah.., but don't you think it will be harder to smuggle her into Orario when we its just easier to unload her somewhere else...?”

[So there is a slave trade back to that city...why I am not surprised..]

The old man chimed in, voice eager, too eager “Well, that’s true...but the original idea was to send her to the Gods of Evilus.., I am sure they would pay good for any toy they can get their hands on..Gods pay very well for any gifts you give them after all..”

If there was a moment in time that she felt her blood ran cold, when the iron grasp of a cold hand clutching her heart in its grip and the sensation of her breath halted on her throat as if the very air was threatening to strangle her...it it was now. It was a sensation so horrifying, so bitterly alien that it left her utterly flabbergasted.

But once the confusion started to weaken...it was replaced by denial and...something worse.

.

No.

No..

Nonononono...

They just didn't just said that…

They just didn't just tell her that with a smile on their faces..

It couldn't be..

They couldn't be that stupid...!

The absurdity of i-“You were going to sell her to a god..?” She asked, her voice a whisper that barely managed to escape the confines of her mouth-mask as she tried to understand the grave sin they had committed with such casual tone, her body literally shaking as it was trying, trying yet barely managing to keep out the storm that threatened to spill out.

“Well, yes..that is what we just sa-”

The old man would never finish his sentence as she slammed her fist into his face, the black metal gauntlet burying itself into his stupid looking face the same way one would through dough before he sent him flying, blood and teeth flying scarcely behind.

“What the fu-!”

The shout died in a gurgle as her blade swept through the next man’s neck in a clean, merciless stroke. His head hit the earth before his body did. The third barely had time to raise his weapon before she tore him open from shoulder to hip, her strike carving a diagonal crimson line that left him collapsing in halves.

Blood and gore spilling out from the broken body once both parts fell to the muddy ground.

The last tried to run.

A sensible choice..

A futile choice..

He made it two steps before Zazsharia hurled her off-hand blade like a javelin through the air with unexpected fury. It punched through his soft, fleshy back, bursting out his chest like one would step over some rotten fruit before he pinned him to a tree with a wet, brutal crack of a body been slammed like a doll against a far harder structure.

The body twitched once..., then sagged lifelessly.

Silence returned to the forest, broken only by the rain and the fading patter of blood dripping into the mud

But she was for from finished.

“P-please….mercy..m-mercy...” The old man, the one she had struck first. Somehow he had survived, dragging himself through muck like the filth that he was, leaving a trail of blood as he whimpered like a beaten dog. His words barely carried through the rain, but she heard them.

She always heard the pathetic..

As if possessed, she strode toward him. Her blade dragged across the ground, leaving a jagged scar in the mud. She seized his head in one clawed hand, wrenching it backward until his spine arched in protest, forcing his tear-streaked face to the sky.

“I-I...we are..we are on the same s-sside” He babbled, spittle mixing with the blood that leaked from his broken jaw. “….please-ARGH!”

His plea dissolved into a shriek as Zazsharia drove her blade down through his thigh. Bone cracked. Muscle tore. The steel pinned him into the mud as crimson gushed freely from the ruined limb.

“Heretical filth..” She spat, her voice low and shaking with barely controlled fury that threatened to consume her, a few seconds later she ripped her blade free and kicked him onto his back. The rain fell mercilessly upon his face, blinding him as he scrabbled in the muck, his hands trembling as he tried to shield himself from the inevitable

Zazsharia levelled her weapon at his throat. The edge hovered a breath away from cutting into the trembling cords of his neck. His wide eyes met the cold gleam of her violet eyes underneath the cowl. Eyes that showed her true nature to this lamb for slaughter.

“I..I..they forced me...I couldn't do anything t-to stop those mad-lads…! I-I didn't touch her!”

“Map..”

The man froze at her words....then, trembling, he fumbled his shaking fingers inside his vest and produced a crumpled, stained envelope. He extended it with both shaking hands, his lips quivering in desperate hope. Zazsharia snatched it away without hesitation. One glance confirmed it was indeed a map….aged, but serviceable.

At the very least there were drawings of the cities and towns around...as-well a red circle of where she assumed they were right now.

[It will do..] She thought, sliding the map inside the gorget of her armour where it would not be lost.

“S-see? I-I can..-I can be of u-us-se..so..so please….let me li-”

Her blade punched through his throat before the words finished leaving him. The man jerked once, a look of utter surprise plastered in his face as he tried to breath his last breaths through the hole her sword had made, hands clawing uselessly at the steel buried in his neck, before collapsing into the mud. His lifeblood spilled out in dark rivulets that the rain carried away in silence.

“A fitting end for trash like you...” She grunted as she ripped the blade free before she started wiping the blood away from the blade against his drenched body. Their deaths had been quick, quicker than they deserved a thousand times over...but between her fury and the sheer wrongness of what she had heard demanded nothing less. However...there was still one last loose end she thought as her gaze returned to the elf still trapped on the cage.

º

º

º

(…..Aeri point of view…..)

º

It had been days since her world had turned into a nightmare without end, the voices of her tormentors echoing in her mind each and every time she closed her eyes, but even when she was awake she was not spared from the shame gripping her tightly from what they had done to her.

The look of evil in their eyes as they laughed.

As they hit her..

As they took her away from her home…

As they used her..

She did not know how long this would last, how long she would suffer through this hell, each and every day that passed in this cage sapped any hope that still lingered in her heart...but then something…. changed.

Aeri did not know what had happened, she had been balling in a ball and crying herself to sleep.

She did not know why..nor how.

Only that those that had tormented her and taken her from her home were...dead, their cries gone to fast for her to understand or begin to comprehend how something like that could be done in so little time. But she did not feel any reassurance from such news, not as she felt those purple eyes stare back at hers with an unseen wave of animosity on them.

Then the shadow took a step forward.

And then another.

Its shadow growing larger by the moment as it seemed this thing brought the storm closer to her.

The elf did not move, she couldn't even if she wanted thanks to the pain ruining her legs and the chains that kept her her limbs bound to make such attempt to much effort than it was worthy it. Instead She sat slumped against the bars, her face pale beneath the streaks of mud and blood, wide eyes staring back at the large shadowy figure that hoped inside the carriage, making the entire thing creak and wobble for a moment.

For a long moment, neither spoke. The storm filled the silence, rain hammering against steel and earth alike….but when the monster spoke..it did not so with a voice akin to a cruel whip.

“You are a wretched creature...your kin never deserve the chances you were given..”

The elf flinched at her words, the anger and loathing so virulent and thick that she almost could feel it brush against her marred face, it made her shrink back as far as the cage allowed. There was a pause then, brief...before the strange hooded “thing” spoke again, this time the tone becoming softer, almost apologetic...but it may have been her mind playing tricks on her.

“But even the likes of you do not deserve the horror of been sold out to the abominations..past slights or not..”

The hooded thing brought forward a long black blade, its sharpness making her eyes hurt as it slowly entered the bars of her prison. Glistening with the wetness of the rain and something...red, angled just enough for the elf to understand.

“That small mercy...I can grant you at least..”

That was the last thing Aeri heard before she felt a painful sting in her chest and a strange warmth spreading all over the place before her body fell forward on its and the world turned black.

A/N

Here is another chapter, hope you enjoy it. Review or share your ideas if you like, the more the merrier.