The air in Deacon Reverie Noire's office was cool and still, smelling of lemon oil and ozone. Sunlight, filtered through the cathedral's stained glass, cast colored lozenges of light across the polished floor. It was a stark contrast to the tension thrumming between the three people in the room.
Matthias Brenner stood before the Deacon's expansive, uncluttered desk, his hands clasped tightly behind his back. His usually neat appearance was frayed at the edges, his eyes shadowed by lack of sleep. Captain Signeil Krieg stood beside him, his posture ramrod straight.
"Deacon," Brenner began, his voice tight with a mixture of excitement and dread. "The intelligence has solidified. It's no longer just a whisper. It's a chorus. The source is multiple, independent, and all pointing to the same event."
Reverie Noire, seated with her impeccable posture, her wine-dark red hair a stark contrast to the pale walls, steepled her fingers. "The subject, Assistant Inspector?"
"The Baron, Deacon," Brenner said, leaning forward slightly. "The rumor is that he is preparing to perform an ascension ritual. Tonight. Inside the fortified warehouse."
Noire's amethyst eyes remained impassive, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop a degree. "An ascension ritual," she repeated, her resonant voice flat. "Are you certain of this? This is not more of the phantom's disinformation?"
"It has a different character, Deacon," Krieg interjected, his voice a dry rasp. He stepped forward slightly. "Brenner and his team have cross-referenced it. The initial leaks were tactical, operational. This is... strategic, almost mythological. And it fits a missing piece. The Ocean Snake's Bane was suspected of carrying a secret, highly expensive mystical article. Our customs agents in Intis confirmed it, though the manifest was doctored. We've since confirmed the Harbor Vipers were the ones who looted the wreck."
Brenner nodded vigorously, pulling a folded report from his jacket. "It was a container marked for a private collector in Loen. The description was vague, but the insurance valuation was astronomical. It lines up perfectly with the rumors of a powerful artifact."
Krieg picked up the thread, his green eyes intense. "Deacon, this is urgent. We already suspect the Baron is a Mid-sequence Beyonder. If he successfully uses this artifact to ascend further..." He let the implication hang. "It would explain their drastic retreat. They aren't just hiding. They're creating a sanctum. A defended space where he can undergo this transformation without interruption. It's the only scenario that makes complete sense of their actions."
Deacon Noire was silent for a long moment, her gaze turning inward as she processed the data. The logic was indeed sound. Too sound. It was a perfect, terrifying equation.
"The phantom," she said, her eyes flicking back to them. "This is a significant escalation from his previous tactics. Why provide this?"
"Perhaps he sees this as the final move," Brenner offered. "He has given us everything we need to dismantle their outer organization. Now he gives us the motivation and the timing for the killing blow. He wants us to destroy them, and he is ensuring we do not hesitate."
"Or," Krieg countered, a slight frown on his face, "he is ensuring we attack with overwhelming force at a specific time because he has his own agenda for that chaos. But regardless of his motives, the threat is real. We cannot allow Gunther Vogler to advance."
Reverie Noire gave a slow, deliberate nod. "Agreed. The risk is unacceptable." She stood, her movements fluid and precise. "We will strike tonight. The moment the sun falls and full darkness provides cover. We will not give them the entire night to prepare."
She walked to a large map of the Salt-Weep district pinned to the wall, the Viper warehouse circled in red ink.
She turned back to them, her gaze settling on Krieg. "Captain, you are operationally ready?"
Krieg's jaw tightened. He was not at one hundred percent, but he was functional. "I am, Deacon."
"Good. Then here is the plan," she stated, her voice leaving no room for debate. "I will lead the primary assault team. We will breach the main entrance. The Baron and his inner circle are our primary targets. Their capture or elimination is the priority."
Her finger moved on the map to a secondary point. "You, Captain Krieg, will lead a secondary team. You will enter here, through the side storage entrance. Your objective is to secure the perimeter of the main hall, neutralize any secondary threats, and prevent any escape or flanking maneuvers. We will crush them in a pincer."
Krieg absorbed the orders. It was a solid, aggressive plan. "Understood, Deacon. I will have the teams ready and briefed by afternoon."
"See that you do," Noire said, her tone final. "This ends tonight. We will purge this corruption from Indaw Harbor."
Both men snapped a sharp salute. "By your command, Deacon," Krieg said.
Brenner turned and hurried from the office, already mentally compiling the personnel and equipment lists. Krieg followed at a slower pace, his mind racing.
As he stepped out of the office and into the cathedral's echoing hallway, the heavy oak door closing behind him, the formal posture of the soldier eased slightly. He walked, his boots clicking on the stone floor, but his thoughts were far away, in the barricaded warehouse.
'The plan is set. The logic is sound. The Baron, a ritual, a final stand.' He replayed the conversation in his head. 'But the butcher... where does he stand in all this?'
The thought was a persistent itch. This "Harbor Butcher," this "Henrik Moss," had been the architect of the Vipers' downfall. He had fed them to the Church piece by piece with chilling precision. And now, he delivers the final, decisive piece of intelligence: the time, place, and reason for the Vipers' annihilation.
'He has to know we're coming. He has to know this will be a bloodbath. Is he just a fanatic, so consumed by his hatred for the Vipers that he's willing to die in the crossfire to see them destroyed?'
That didn't fit the profile of the cunning, self-preserving manipulator who had used a Church Captain as a shield against a Rose Bishop.
'Or has he been taken care of?' Krieg wondered, a cold possibility forming. 'Did the Vipers discover his betrayal? Is that screaming Brenner's informants reported from the warehouse this morning... was it his?'
The idea was plausible. The Baron was not a fool. A leak of this magnitude and consistency would eventually be traced. Perhaps the phantom's game had finally ended, and the Baron had silenced him. It would explain why the final intelligence felt different—less like a calculated leak and more like a desperate, posthumous message from a network he had left behind.
But Krieg's instincts rebelled against the neatness of that conclusion. Something felt wrong. The phantom had been too smart, too many steps ahead. To be caught so close to the finish line felt... convenient.
He reached the end of the hall and pushed open the doors to the muster yard, where the sounds of preparation were already beginning. He pushed the doubts down. They were a luxury he couldn't afford. The Deacon had given the order. The machine of the Church was in motion.
Yet, as he began barking commands to his sergeants, a single, unsettling question remained, lodged in his mind like a splinter:
If the butcher is still alive in there, what is he really sharpening his knives for?
8:23 PM
In the sky, hung a full, bloody moon.
The air in the warehouse was thick and heavy, a potent cocktail of lamp oil, sweat, and the metallic tang of fear. The bloody light of the full crimson moon seeped through the high, grimy windows, painting the grim faces of the gathered Vipers in shades of violence. They were a tense, coiled spring of a crowd, packed into the main hall, their eyes fixed on the figure of Baron Gunther Vogler, who stood atop a crate, a dark silhouette against the hellish glow.
Lutz stood at the periphery, near the shadowed entrance to the corridor leading to the barracks and the Baron's office. He was a statue of calm, his hands resting lightly on the worn leather of his integrated harness. To anyone watching, he was just another loyal Viper, awaiting his Baron's word. Internally, his mind was a cold, ticking clock, every second counting down to the inevitable.
"My Vipers!" the Baron's voice cut through the murmurs, cold and sharp as a shard of glass. "For weeks, we have been hunted. Our men have been taken by the so-called 'Church of Steam'." He spat the name like a curse. "They believe their cogs and brass can grind us into dust. They believe their 'order' is inevitable."
He paused, letting the silence build, a predator toying with its prey. Lutz's senses tingled, not at the Baron's words, but at the environment, at the force that was calling him, it came from the direction the treasury was in. He remembered the locations of the Degeneration traps he'd placed, like spiritual poison ivy waiting for a brush.
"They believe we are cornered. They believe we are rats in a cage, waiting for the end." A cold, cruel smile touched the Baron's lips. "They are wrong."
A ripple went through the crowd. This was the moment Lutz had orchestrated through Peter. The hope, brittle and desperate, began to bloom.
"We are not the prey," the Baron declared, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that somehow carried to every ear. "We are the trap. They come for a broken gang. They will find a fortress. They come expecting fear. They will find our teeth."
He gestured around the oil-drenched hall, at the barricaded windows and reinforced doors. "Let them come. Let them bleed themselves dry against our walls. And when they are tired, when they are bruised and broken..." His eyes, like chips of flint, scanned the room, and for a terrifying moment, Lutz felt they lingered on him. "...we will show them the true meaning of corruption. We will show them that some structures, once flawed, cannot be fixed. They can only be demolished."
A low growl of agreement rose from the men. It was the aggressive hope Lutz had predicted, a fool's courage built on a lie. Karl stood slightly behind his brother, his expression grim, his gaze constantly moving, assessing, the banked coals of his eyes glowing in the crimson light. He was the realist, the soldier who knew a rousing speech didn't stop bullets or Beyonder powers.
Lutz's own senses were stretched taut, a spider at the center of its web. He was acutely aware of two voids in the room. One was the heavy, locked door to the Baron's office, behind which lay the treasury—his ultimate prize. The other was the absence of Peter.
Lutz returned to his cot.
Any moment now, Lutz thought, his fingers twitching. He had checked his gear a dozen times. Creed rested in its spring-loaded sheath, a promise of violence. He felt the cold of Henrik's pendant against his chest beneath his shirt. The Pyre in his room was ready. The only piece missing from his arsenal was Umbra. It was in its respective pouch, but it was unusable. There was a dazzling Blood Moon outside, according to Lorelei, wearing the ring now would be suicide. The whispers would be a screaming torrent, enough to shatter his mind. He was blind on that front, and he hated it. He had to rely on his mundane senses and his Marauder's intuition to spot any threat emerging from the darkness.
The Baron was still speaking, weaving his web of defiance, but Lutz was no longer listening. He was counting heartbeats. He was running through the sequence one last time: the breach, the chaos, the diversion, the lock, the theft, the escape.
The silence from outside was the most unnerving part. Finnigan, a Viper with a permanent squint earned from years of staring at the horizon from crow's nests, pressed his face against the cold, grimy glass of the western watch post. The Blood Moon painted the scrapyards and fog-choked alleys in shades of dried gore, but it revealed nothing. No shadows that moved wrong, no glint of brass buttons, no tell-tale plume of steam from a pressurized rifle.
"Nothing," he muttered, his breath fogging the pane. "Not a damn thing. It's like the whole city's holding its breath."
Across the warehouse, in the cramped loft overlooking the main entrance, Ricciard felt the same oppressive stillness. He scanned the approach to the heavy, iron-banded doors. Empty. The fog swirled in lazy, crimson-tinted eddies, undisturbed by human passage. "It's too quiet," he whispered to the man next to him, who just grunted in agreement, his knuckles white on the stock of his musket. "They're out there. I can feel it."
And then, as if a stage manager had given a cue, the illusion shattered.
It wasn't a gradual materialization. One heartbeat, the space before the main entrance was a void of blood-lit fog. The next, it was filled with a perfectly formed phalanx of figures, as if a giant, invisible blanket made of stardust had been ripped away.
This was one of the abilities of a Sequence 5 Constellations Master, Star concealment.
They stood in disciplined ranks, a sudden, terrifying apparition. Their beige greatcoats, trimmed in polished brass, seemed to drink the strange light, making them look like ghosts stepped from a machine. Every one of them was armed. Revolvers were held in steady, gloved hands. Among them, a few carried the bulkier, more menacing shapes of steam-powered rifles, their copper coils and pressure gauges faintly gleaming.
But the true focus, the undeniable center of this sudden storm, was the woman who stood at their forefront.
She was tall and she commanded the space around her with an aura of absolute mystery. Her hair was the deep, dark red of old wine, a stark, living contrast to the dead crimson of the moon. And her eyes… even from this distance, Ricciard felt the weight of them. They were a deep, obscure purple, like twilight amethysts, and they held a cold, analytical glow that promised no mercy.
Deacon Reverie Noire.
Time seemed to stutter, to freeze in a crystal of pure shock.
Ricciard's jaw dropped. Finnigan, from his western post, let out a strangled cry that was lost in the vastness of the warehouse. The Viper stationed directly behind the main entrance, a young man named Jorgen, fumbled for the alarm bell rope, his mind screaming, his muscles turning to water.
They were too late.
Before Jorgen's fingers could touch the rough hemp, before Ricciard could even draw breath to shout a warning, Deacon Noire moved.
Her action was fluid, precise, devoid of wasted motion. She lifted her open palm, with the surgical precision of a master artisan pointing to a flaw in her material. She pointed directly at the massive, barricaded main entrance—a structure of thick oak and wrought iron that had withstood sieges and riots.
Then, she curled her fingers inward, as if crumpling a piece of parchment.
Her voice rang out, clear and resonant, cutting through the muffling fog and the thick walls. It was not a shout, but a command spoken in a language that was not meant for human throats. Hermes, the tongue of rituals and nature.
"Storm."
The air in front of her palm rippled.
It wasn't a gathering of clouds or a howling wind. It was a violent, localized violation of physics. A miniature, perfect storm instantly materialized in the space between her hand and the door. It was a maelstrom no larger than a carriage, a furious knot of howling winds, condensing moisture, and raw, unleashed lightning.
With a deafening sound that shook the very foundations of the warehouse, bolts of searing white lightning lanced from the micro-storm. They struck the door's hinges, the lock, the central crossbeam, destroying them.
The iron bands glowed white-hot and warped. The thick oak planks didn't just splinter; they vaporized into a cloud of superheated splinters and sawdust. The massive lock and its internal mechanisms melted into a shower of molten brass. The Viper, Jorgen, who had been standing guard behind it, was lifted off his feet and hurled backwards like a discarded ragdoll. He flew a good ten feet through the air, his clothes smoldering, his skin blackened where the concussive force and electrical backlash had struck him, before he landed in a broken, unmoving heap.
Where a formidable barrier had stood a second before, there was now a gaping, smoking maw, a wound in the side of the building. The fog, now mixed with dust and the ozone scent of lightning, billowed into the main hall.
Through this newly made entrance, Deacon Reverie Noire stepped, her polished boots crunching on the smoldering debris. Her amethyst eyes swept across the stunned, horrified faces of the Vipers who were only now beginning to react, their weapons half-raised, their shouts of alarm dying in their throats.
Her voice came again, calm, clear, and utterly pitiless, carrying the force of an imperial decree.
"Subdue all subjects," she commanded her squad, who flowed in behind her with lethal grace, their guns raised. "Use lethal force against those that are armed."