Captain Krieg stood before the reinforced side entrance, the cold night air biting at his neck. In his gloved hand, the brass-and-blue crystal of his Seafarer's Compass glimmered, its needle holding steady. He didn't need it for navigation here; its true utility lay in channeling his affinity for water and wind. With a sharp, twisting motion of his wrist, he summoned two concentrated projectiles of dark, churning seawater from the damp harbor air. They shot forward with the force of a cannon blast, striking the heavy lock dead-center. Metal screamed, wood splintered, and the door swung inward on broken hinges.
"Let's go," he rasped, stepping over the wreckage into the gloom beyond.
The moment his boot touched the warehouse floor, a familiar, resonant voice echoed directly in his mind, a product of Deacon Noire's Secret Voice. "Be careful! There is a ritualistic trap in your position!"
His slightly enhanced reflexes were already kicking in, his body moving before his conscious mind fully processed the warning. His gaze snapped to the right, where the wall was scarred with a grotesque, hastily-drawn circle filled with jagged, esoteric symbols. As he and his men crossed the threshold, the center of the diagram began to pulse with a blasphemous, crimson light.
He threw himself backward, a single, sharp shout tearing from his throat. "Back!"
It was too late for the five men following him. They were a step inside, their momentum carrying them forward into the trap's activation radius. The crimson light erupted from the circle not as a beam, but as a wave of visible decay. It washed over them in an instant.
There were no screams. The sound was a wet, tearing sigh, like rotten canvas ripping. The men didn't even have time to register shock. Their bodies simply… unraveled. Flesh sloughed from bone, uniforms disintegrated into mulch, and the bones themselves blackened and crumbled into a fine, greasy ash. In less than three seconds, where five trained soldiers of the Church of Steam had stood, there was only a spreading stain on the floorboards and a smell like an opened grave.
Krieg caught himself against the shattered doorframe, his breath hissing between his teeth. His green eyes, sharp and perceptive, scanned the empty space where his team had been, then flicked to the degenerating symbol on the wall. Its glow was already fading, its purpose spent.
"Report," Noire's voice was calm in his mind, a stark contrast to the horror before him.
"Trap triggered," Krieg subvocalized, the mental communication feeling alien. "The side team is lost. It was a degeneration ritual. Professional work." He pushed off from the doorframe, his Seafarer's Compass held ready. He was alone now. The main hall was a cacophony of gunfire and shouted spells to his left. His original orders—to secure the perimeter and prevent flanking maneuvers—were moot. His new objective was clear: find the source of this chaos and end it.
He moved forward, his senses stretched to their limits. The trap confirmed it. This wasn't just a gang making a last stand; this was a prepared defense, one that anticipated their tactics and entry points. And in his mind, one name was etched behind his eyes, clearer than the fading symbols on the wall: The Butcher. The Marauder. The architect who had laid this entire battlefield, and who was undoubtedly still here, pulling the strings.
The hallway ahead was dark, leading deeper into the Viper's nest. Krieg advanced, a solitary figure in a beige coat, stepping over the ashes of his men.
Krieg moved through the skeletal underbelly of the warehouse, his boots silent on the grimy floor. The cacophony from the main hall was a distant storm of shouts, gunfire, and the sizzle of aberrant powers. His path was one of storage rooms and abandoned machinery, a shortcut to flank the Vipers' main defensive line. In his left hand, the small, brass Judge's Balancer felt impossibly heavy, a promise of power and a sentence of death coiled together. He could not afford to lean on it, not like last time. A single overexertion would not just incapacitate him; it would unmake him.
It was the silence that warned him first. A pocket of absolute stillness in the chaotic warehouse, where the very air grew cold and the shadows seemed to thicken, congealing into something solid and watchful. He stopped, his senses screaming. He looked behind him.
The shadows at the end of the corridor were not just dark. They were alive. They crept forward like spilled ink, swallowing the scant light from the blood moon filtering through a high window. They moved with purpose, with hunger.
There was no time for thought, only ingrained reaction. Krieg spun, the Balancer in his left hand, his right hand slashing through the air as he uttered a single, guttural word in Hermes.
"Exile."
A wave of pure, forceful spiritual energy, visible as a shimmering distortion in the air, erupted from his gesture. It struck the creeping darkness not as a blow, but as a command. The law of this space was rewritten for an instant: You do not belong here.
The shadows recoiled as if scalded. From their midst, a figure was violently expelled, stumbling into a patch of murky crimson light. It was Sett. His fine clothes were torn and stained. But it was his eyes that held Krieg—twin pools of utter, deranged malice.
"Aha…" Sett giggled, the sound a dry rustle of leaves. "The little Captain. The Church's hound. You behaved wrongly last time" He gestured vaguely to his ruined cheek. "But a hound is just an animal. And animals can be put down."
Krieg's face was a mask of grim focus. "So we meet again." There was no pleasure in the statement, only the weary acknowledgment of an inevitable, ugly task.
Sett's grin widened, showing too many teeth. "I wasn't expecting to find you here, but I found you anyway. I'm going to delight this. I'll peel the skin from your bones and use it for—"
Krieg didn't let him finish. He already knew Sett's weakness—his reliance on a fluid, corrupting spirit body to empower his physical form. The Balancer in his hand glowed with a soft, ethereal light. He didn't need a complex judgment; he needed a specific, targeted interrogation of the soul.
"Whip of Pain," Krieg intoned, his voice resonating with the authority of an Interrogator while he held the Balancer.
The air cracked. An invisible lash, woven from pure spiritual torment, snapped across the space between them. It did not strike Sett's body. It struck his spirit.
Sett's deranged grin vanished, replaced by a rictus of shock and agony. A raw, choked scream was torn from his throat. The effect on his physical form was immediate and horrific. The connection between his spirit and body, momentarily severed by the psychic assault, caused his flesh to rebel. It lost its cohesion, bubbling and shifting like heated wax. A blob of twisting, undefined tissue swelled on his shoulder, another on his cheek, a third pushing out from his abdomen beneath his coat. They pulsed and quivered, sickening protrusions of malformed muscle and skin, threatening to rupture. For a moment, he was less a man and more a sculpture of flesh made by a madman.
In the main hall, Lutz heard it. The scream was unlike any other sound of the battle—not a cry of fear or a shout of anger, but a sound of pure, metaphysical agony that cut through the din. It came from the direction of the side storage rooms.
"Has he come?" Lutz muttered, his grip tightening on the Sun charm. The Rose Bishop was here, and he was already engaged. This was the moment of maximum distraction. But a new, cold calculation entered his mind. "Is someone else here as well? Could it be Krieg? Are they fighting again? If the Captain and the Bishop killed each other, it was the best possible outcome. But if one emerged victorious, especially a wounded but enraged Sett, he would come for Lutz next. Letting them fight unchecked was too great a risk.
Without a second thought, abandoning his post in the hallway, Lutz moved. He didn't run; he flitted from shadow to shadow, his Marauder's agility making him a ghost. He had to see. He had to control the outcome.
He reached a broken section of wall that overlooked a larger storage area—a space filled with forgotten crates and rusted machinery.
Krieg stood, breathing heavily, the Judge's Balancer still glowing faintly in his hand. Sett was on one knee, his body slowly re-knitting itself, the blobs of flesh receding with audible, wet sounds. The Rose Bishop looked up, his face a contorted mask of pain and limitless hatred.
"You… you insect!" Sett spat, his voice a ragged tear
Krieg staggered for a moment. Using the Balancer, even for a lower-sequence ability, was a drain. He could feel the spiritual toll, a leaden fatigue seeping into his bones.
Lutz arrived at the broken section of wall just in time to see Sett's form dissolve into the encroaching darkness, vanishing from the material world entirely. The storage area felt instantly colder, the shadows deepening into pools of absolute black that seemed to drink the bloody moonlight.
Krieg stood his ground, his expression granite. He could feel the oppressive, watching presence from all around him. He slashed his hand through the air, the word "Exile" tearing from his lips once more. The wave of spiritual force shot out, rippling through the shadows where Sett had vanished. But it hit nothing. The shadows swallowed the energy and remained, inert and menacing. Sett was gone, or rather, he had moved, navigating the treacherous currents of the shadow world.
A cold dread, entirely separate from fear, trickled down Krieg's spine. He was a hunter, a tracker of the tangible. This phasing between realms was a vulnerability he couldn't directly counter. He couldn't afford another grand prohibition like last time—to forbid shadows themselves in this area would demand a price in spiritual backlash that would leave him a hollowed-out shell. He stood perfectly still, every sense screaming, trying to pinpoint the location of the threat he could no longer see.
Then he felt it: a subtle, icy pull at his feet. A faint tendril of darkness was creeping from a nearby shadow, stretching toward his own, as if to merge with it. The intent was clear, a violation of the most fundamental kind—the theft of one's very silhouette, one's anchor to the light.
There was no more time for calculation, only survival. Krieg's voice boomed, layered with the authority of the Judge's Balancer he clutched like a lifeline.
"Lurking in the shadows is prohibited here!"
This was not a prohibition on the existence of shadows. This was a narrower, more precise edict: the act of hiding within them was now declared unlawful in this confined space.
The effect was immediate and violent. The darkness to his right convulsed and spat out a figure. Sett tumbled onto the concrete floor, not with grace, but with the jarring suddenness of something violently evicted. He landed in a crouch, his hand outstretched, mere inches from Krieg's own shadow on the wall. So close.
Krieg didn't hesitate. He threw himself backward in a desperate leap, putting distance between himself and the Rose Bishop, his back hitting a stack of crates with a solid thud.
Sett rose slowly, a low, guttural laugh escaping his lips. The failed attempt seemed to have enraged him more than injured him. "Fucking hound," he hissed. "You'll taste true horror"
He then began to chant, his voice dropping into a register that was not meant for human ears. The words were evil and sinister, syllables that twisted in the air like serpents, pulling at the fabric of reality. The shadows in the room began to coalesce, swirling into a vortex of pure blackness in front of him.
From this vortex, something pulled itself free. It was a humanoid figure, but grotesquely deformed—all elongated limbs, a distended torso, and a featureless head that was little more than a smudge of deeper darkness. It had no discernible eyes, but its presence was a physical weight of malice and hunger. A shadow creature, summoned from the shadow world. It was a reckless gamble; such beings were chaotic and their allegiance was never certain.
The creature stood for a moment, swaying. Then, with a guttural growl that seemed to originate from the shadows themselves, it lunged—not at Krieg, but at its summoner.
Sett's eyes widened slightly, but he was already moving. His body lost all solidity, melting like a candle left in a furnace into a puddle of viscous, red-black bloody mush. This puddle flowed across the floor, slipping directly beneath the shadow creature's grasping limbs and oozing to the other side of the room where it swiftly reformed into the Rose Bishop once more.
As he solidified, he was met with Krieg's counter-attack. The Captain, having used the brief respite to channel his power through the Seafarer's Compass, hurled two projectiles of compressed, high-pressure seawater. They shot across the room with a sound like tearing silk, sharp as monomolecular blades.
They struck true, slashing through Sett's newly formed torso and upper arms, carving his body into four separate, bloody chunks.
Lutz, watching from afar, held his breath. Was it over?
It was not. For a Sequence 6 Rose Bishop, mere physical dismemberment was an inconvenience. The chunks of flesh did not fall. They hung in the air for a split second, connected by thin, glistening threads of blackish-red fluid, before snapping back together with a wet, sucking sound. The wounds sealed over, leaving only angry red lines that faded even as Lutz watched. Sett stood whole, a smirk playing on his lips. He flexed his newly reassembled fingers.
"Flesh is but clay," he mocked, his voice echoing slightly as if coming from multiple throats.
Krieg's face was ashen now. He was breathing heavily, his grip on the compass white-knuckled. He was running out of options, and out of time.
From his vantage point, Lutz analyzed the scene with cold clarity. Krieg was on the defensive, his powerful but costly abilities only serving to stall the seemingly immortal Bishop. The summoned shadow creature, now confused and enraged, was turning its attention back to Krieg, its form shifting menacingly. The stalemate was breaking, and it was breaking in Sett's favor.