28^th Cancer, 1645

When Isra bint-Nasim al-Qarai was a young girl, growing up in a hamlet so small as to go beneath the notice of mapmakers and kings, she had a chance encounter with the local baron. As you may be aware, chance encounters with nobility almost never go favorably for the commonfolk involved in them, and Isra’s experience was no different. For the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting the slightest amount of mud on the illustrious Norbert Worthing, the baron sicced his hunting hounds on her, killing her own pet dog and leaving her in rather a savaged condition.

This is how she got her scars.

That experience, as one might imagine, left numerous and significant marks upon her psyche as well as her countenance; Among them a fierce protectiveness of anyone she sees being abused by some motherfucker with a superiority complex.

So the moment she sees the gauntleted stranger in the laboratorial heart of Ossan with the arm of the girl she met not an hour and a half ago laying in shards at his feet, she surreptitiously pulls a particularly vicious pre-carved sigil out from the folds of her clothing, teetering on the very edge of violence.

“Who are you?” Andromeda demands, shield already slung onto her forearm, other hand brandishing Weapon at the ready.

“Now that hardly concerns you at all,” the man says in his sickeningly-smooth, calm voice, punctuating his answer by nonchalantly slugging Faye in the gut as a discouragement to her squirming.

“You’re choking my co-worker a foot off the ground,” Andromeda says.

“…So?” the man says, probably intentionally ignoring the “so I think it concerns me plenty, jackass” Andromeda had left unsaid.

“So I think it concerns me plenty, jackass.”

“…Hm,” the man grunts and pretends to consider this as he drives his hand into Faye’s stomach again. Her already ragged breathing grows hard enough that Isra can hear it from meters away – nines, she imagines she practically can feel the labor of the other woman’s diaphragm in sympathy. “Well, I disagree, but it seems you won’t leave me to my business without persuasion. Let me assure you: these two may look like innocent… enough young women, but they are not. I have been hunting them for quite some time, and I cannot allow anything to interfere with burning away their stain.”

“I’ll burn away your dick, you corpse-fucking bitchmaggot!” Faye snarls with surprising volume, earning another hit.

“…What the fuck,” Andromeda and Isra say in unison, which Andromeda alone follows up with “Okay I dunno what disturbed fascist cult you’re with but you’re not hurting those girls any more. Stand down or die.”

“Do you have even the slightest inkling what abomination lurks beneath their veneer of humanity? You would protect them, against holy judgement, though you met them not two hours past?”

“Perhaps if you offered a real explanation, stranger, we might consider your position more seriously,” Da Chief calls from the other side of the room. Isra wonders if she’s taken leave of her senses.

“I need not explain myself to you.”

“You are well outnumbered. Rethink this.”

The man chuckles as he drives a hand into Faye’s stomach, carrying her with the momentum of the swing and using it to fling her away. She’s barely clear of his personal space before Zhuan fires a screaming streak of electricity towards him – that he blocks easily with the bulkier of his two gauntlets, the same one he just slammed into the girl. The attack disperses through the metal, wreathing around the man’s arm, gathering around the intervalent sigils and fizzling out a little pitifully.

Isra almost follows up with a spell of her own, except that Andromeda is rushing the man with Weapon.

A moment to describe the man’s arms, if you please: The larger gauntlet, the one he blocked Zhuan’s opening with, is thick and wide, almost like a tower shield made into armor, with intervalent warding sigils carved into the metal. It is barely jointed, less mobile than its sibling, but Isra can tell even with her limited knowledge of weaponry that its defensive functionality would make up for its unwieldy nature; at least in the hands of a competent user, a category the stranger clearly, unfortunately falls under. The other gauntlet clings contrastingly close to the man’s arm with a sharp multitude of segmentation, its termini razor-clawed and glistening slightly like some spiteful carapace.

It is a with a languid sort of – not exactly grace, but far from clumsy and brutish – motion that he keeps his heavier right arm still against his side, instead maneuvering himself so that it sits between his body and Andromeda’s strikes. Clang after clang after clang when metal meets metal, each accompanied by sparks, as he at some moments quite literally shrugs off the woman’s assault; Isra and Da Chief watch closely, trying to get a bead on the man’s fighting style, a process complicated by an apparent dilatoriness to strike back.

Eventually, though, he does move from the passive to the active voice. With the claw-clad hand he almost languidly catches the pointy end of Weapon, grins a grin at Andromeda that oozes a hungry sort of mockery, and with one quick squeeze shatters the sword entirely in his grasp. Andromeda backpedals, still holding onto the hilt from which the shattered, slightly-sad-looking blade protrudes.

“You should have kept to yourselves,” says the man. He advances, unhurried, rolling out his shoulder, “This business needn’t have concerned you – but at least it won’t for much longer anyway.”

Andromeda swings Weapon again, the blade reforming perfectly as it arcs towards her foe, and his eyes widen in shock even as he brings the sharp arm up to deflect it off to the side. It shatters again on impact only to again reform, far quicker, but this time he is ready and retreats momentarily.

"...An intriguing bit of magic. It will make a fine prize off your corpse."

He engages again. When she stabs at him, the point slams into his palm, only instead of breaking it almost seems to smush like putty, before rounding out into the studded head of a mace. This only barely catches the assassin off guard - he tries to crush it, squeezing at it with visibly more effort than it took to break Weapon when it was a sword. As it starts to crack, Andromeda just socks him in the face, and he goes reeling. 

When he blocks her next strike with the heavy arm, Isra is only a little surprised that the mace head doesn't utterly crumple the limb, given plate's famous susceptibility to blunt force.

He reprises with a kick that sends Andromeda tumbling backwards, accompanied by a loud crack.

Isra rolls the carven sigil she'd been holding across the ground and it bursts from within, spraying up into a cloud of spore-like material pulled from one of the spaces between Nearth and Somewhere Else. It's meant to claw its way inside his lungs, reducing them to withered up shreds of so much worthless meat, but Isra doesn’t trust this asshole to die that easy: and so, in one smooth motion does she drop her bow from its place up her sleeve, unfold it, pull and nock an arrow just as the sigils carved into the ends bring the string into existence between them. She draws and fires: again: again: again: again, her expression calm and silent all the while even in the face of the raw, animal rage wrapping its way around her jaw.

The cloud dissipates quicker than it ought, revealing a dishearteningly un-fucked-up cult assassin with one heavily gauntleted arm shining, for a moment, with all the luminosity of a beacon tower. Two of the arrows Isra fired sit in the assassin’s hand, which he promptly snaps in half and casts aside – the others embedded somewhere in the wall behind him.

“That was unwise, wretch,” the man spits, and rushes Isra.

He is intercepted, at Isra’s command, by Alani, liquid static pouring from her eye sockets in great flowing gasps of ichorous noise. The space around the man and the hound aberrates, fizzling and twisting in over and around itself as Alani howls with the clarion might of The Bull Queen’s own lyre-horns, the only clear thing coming from where the two grapple.

All the worse, then, that the assassin throws Alani away from himself moments later; would that they had at least seen how he managed it, to at least learn something from the sortie.

As he’s about to continue his advance on his assailant, Vetr drops completely out of fucking nowhere trying to stick the blades of Frostbite and Stormcutter into the assassin… only for him to dodge, not quite as effortlessly as before but still with apparent ease, out of her way.

“Ah, Vetr! What a surprise to see you with this filthy lot,” he says while the pale rogue pulls her swords out of the ground.

“hetterdan” comes the simple, toneless response before she charges.

Now, Hoyden is not the sort of woman who is prone to exaggeration, and being that they have lived and worked together for some years now Isra knows this about her. If Hoyden says that something – or, in this case, someone – is “Faster than anything I’ve ever seen, fuck me,” then Isra is well inclined to believe her. Even so, nothing Hoyden said could have properly prepared her for the positively un-nearthly speed with which Vetr moves. Isra has trouble following her movements at all, even trained as her eyes are on watching the movements of birds and rodents and other small, swift animals.

Vetr’s strikes hit like unusually loud raindrops, one after another after another in impossibly rapid succession, against the man’s gauntlets – or rather, against the heavier one. Vetr seems familiar with the man and his armaments, judging from the fact he almost catches one of her swords in his clawed grip, only for her to last-second let go of the hilt and spike it down to the ground to keep it from being shattered. She follows up with a donkey-kick that actually manages to get through his guard, and then a second which he catches and uses to throw her away like a scarecrow-ass-ragdoll. Somehow, as he did that, she picked the sword back up, giving him not even the slimmest chance to break it in the instant before she crosses the distance again.

In any case, Vetr goes out of her way to try and attack where he’ll have to parry it with the shield-arm. Isra wouldn’t be surprised if that’s slowing her down somewhat, and she shudders a bit at the thought of Vetr moving even faster.

She manages to tear her gaze away from the spectacle of the fight, glancing about for either of the Lafayette girls. Da Chief, evidently, had the same idea, as she and Yusuf are both by the prone form of Iris; she kneeling at her side, he hovering terrified nearby. Surprisingly, Faye is nowhere to be seen. Isra goes to join the group.

“-can’t risk it, anything that might be strong enough to punch through his wards would cause too much collateral damage,” Da Chief is saying as Isra makes it over.

“But-“

“Unless you want me to fuck up your lab even more,” she cuts off his protest with steel in her voice, “our best option is to run and hope we can make it somewhere the town watch can help.”

“No,” Iris coughs, pushing herself with difficulty, thanks to currently being minus-one-arm, up to a sitting position, “Hetterdan caused all this to get to us. If we run there’s no telling what he’d do to what’s left of the lab.”

Da Chief glances over to Vetr and Hetterdan, still locked in a flurry of violence, “Can you tell us anything about him? A weakness?”

The girl shakes her head, “Not that we know, and believe me we’ve tried.”

“Well then what are we supposed to do?”

Isra glances over at the melee just in time to see Hetterdan land a heavy blow against Vetr’s face, sure to leave a black-eye if they survive the encounter. He takes advantage of her staggered state to charge towards the group, and Isra feels nothing but an angry determination, cold like coals, settle in the pit of her stomach as she folds her bow back to a baton; might as well die fighting.

Andromeda catches him with her shield before he can reach them, and Vetr swings her swords like a disconnected set of scissors from his other side, half a moment later. He is too fast for either blade to connect, but he does at least back up, a new wariness in his eyes as he regards the two women standing shoulder to shoulder between him and his prey. Now, at least, he is breathing harder, but not by much.

“…Consternation upon consternation,” he says to Andromeda, “I’m amazed you can even stand. Why subject yourself to even more pain in defense of the little abomination behind you?”

Something clicks in Isra’s head. “…I have an idea. Vetr, Andromeda,” her eyes remain fixed on their foe as she speaks, voice dripping through her bared teeth and simmering with fury, “Keep this bastard busy for a minute.”

Hetterdan laughs heartily, with a twisted mixture of mirth and scorn “Really? You already know you can’t beat me. This doesn’t have to end poorly for you lot, just let me kill the abominations and I’ll be on my way.”

“You don’t need to beat him,” Isra tells her compatriots, staunchly ignoring his words and dropping to the ground to start drawing an array in charcoal, “I just need a little time. Andi: catch these hands.”

Andromeda looks over her shoulder at her, momentarily questioning, before realization dawns and she nods.

As they engage Hetterdan once more, Isra does her best to tune out the sounds of attempted murder. Mostly, she is successful: at the very least she does not jump at the occasional sound of a swallowed thunderclap when Stormcutter makes contact with the shield-gauntlet, and as Weapon breaks and reforms and breaks and reforms who-even-knows how many times it almost seems to make a kind of rhythm that oddly helps with her focus.

The first step in Isra's plan is the ground array, a simple projector that will allow her to draw a second, more complicated sigil in the air. The second step is - and you may have guessed this - that self-same second sigil, the one that will actually allow her to hopefully hurt him. Working with projected sigils is tough, a slow process requiring greater care and steadiness of hand than inscribing onto a surface; fortunately, Isra is really goddamn good at this.

She does keep an eye on the melee, just in case she needs to suddenly dodge something. It's hard to say for certain, but Isra almost imagines she can make out the barest bit of worry on the hunter's features. She hopes she's wrong: this next part will be much more satisfying if he has absolutely no expectation they'll be able to hurt him, but, well, it's not the worst thing on Nearth to frighten a cultist.

She is surprised, once again, by Vetr. Not by her speed this time, though that is certainly no less impressive, but by how well she works with Andromeda to suppress Hetterdan. Please understand, dear reader, that this is not to say they have any great synergy - they aren't pulling off wicked sick combos or fluid team attacks alternating strikes between them. It's just that Vetr is actually managing not to get in Andromeda’s way, which is better than Isra expected of her.

Even so, Hetterdan holds his own. He fights intelligently, taking every opportunity to try and put his opponents in each other’s way, and indeed it is only by virtue of Vetr’s inhuman reflex that she avoids being stabbed by - or stabbing in turn - her compatriot. Eventually, she overextends such that even she cannot avoid the counterattack he throws at her, kicking her feet out from under her and sprinting straight towards Isra before either her or Andromeda can stop him.

A chain wraps its way around his leg, impeding his advance as Faye yanks on the other end, twisting and leveraging it with her foot expertly. Isra hadn’t even seen her throw it, the chain and the girl alike seemingly popping into sight from nowhere despite that she stands right out in the open. She throws a dagger at him, which he catches easily with the heavy arm, and with one mighty heave on the chain yanks her towards him. He slashes towards her throat, only for her to disappear as the blade makes contact, shimmering out of sight and seemingly reappearing back where she started. Andromeda takes the place of the illusion a moment later, stabbing her arm into the knife, grabbing his shoulder as she turns to put her back to Isra. He tries to pull away only to discover that the wound has already healed over, leaving the blade firmly embedded in her flush, stuck.

“Do it!” Andromeda cries, and he doesn’t have time to process and release before Isra puts her plan into motion.

An enormous tentacle bursts forth from the portal Isra carved into the air, thick as a man and thrice as long - longer, really, but the rest remains on the other side of the sigil, elsewhere in reality. It wraps over Andromeda’s shoulder first, spiraling along, around her arm, up the hunter’s and curling at his rotator cuff. His armor lights up again, trying to repel the new threat to no avail, and even as he tries to claw at it with his other hand, Andromeda places her other hand against his ribs and starts to push.

“Got you,” Isra snarls, and the tentacle tears the bastard’s arm off.

It takes several seconds for it to fully perform its grisly task, during which Andromeda and Hetterdan both let out long, loud screams. Iris shrieks too, a short, sharp expression of horrified shock, but through her rage and bloodlust Isra doesn’t notice it, not really. Tendon and ligament peel apart, blood spurts, bones in the soon-to-be useless limbs crack under crushing strength, until finally everything comes apart and the two interlocked combatants stumble backwards away from each other clutching their respective stumps.

Hetterdan's breath comes heavy, punctuated with soft, guttural growls. He swallows hard, steadying himself, when Andromeda picks up Weapon and levels it at him, ignoring her own wounds.

"You can still survive this, if you surrender."

The hatred and fury that flare in the man's eyes and bared teeth at this extension of grace are palpable, symptoms of a very particular arrogance which Isra is all too familiar with. Without really meaning to, she holds her breath for a long moment, waiting to see if his sense of superiority wins out over his sense of self-preservation. She can't say if she'll respect his potential surrender, should he accept it, Andromeda be damned. She so badly wants to kill him herself, before he has the chance to finish bleeding out.

It doesn't matter. Before anyone else can act, he produces a handful of firebombs - who can say from where - and tosses them around the room one after the other with an astounding degree of control and finesse, considering his rapidly depleting stores of internal blood. Their ignition is met with a wail of despair from Doctor Yusuf and the room-filling groan of magically enhanced foliage in pain. It spreads far quicker than it ought, the entire enormous edifice engulfed extraordinarily expediently, and between one glance and the next Hetterdan is gone.

Zhuan strikes the wolf's head of her cane across the ground in a long sweep that ends with it held aloft, chanting a spell in her mother-tongue. A luminous bubble expands outward, and when it touches the flames their consumption slows to a crawl.

"Yusuf," she huffs, voice strained as she maintains it, "Countermeasures?"

"Ah- Um!" He looks around in panic, "There's fire suppression sigils at a few points along the walls, but they're only meant to buy time for municipal pyromancers to arrive, and they're covered up anyway! I don't -"

He cuts off upon being buffeted by wind as Vetr rushes past him, directly towards one of the vines that conquered the room. Her momentum through the curve where the thick, olive appendage bridges between floor and wall carries her a good ways up the nearly-sheer surface. Once it runs out she shifts to a climb, scuttling across the chaotic surface of the network and seeming to completely ignore the flames threatening to claim her. When she reaches a seemingly-random spot she stops, pulls out one of her swords, and stabs it into the vine.

Almost immediately, great volumes of steam start to hiss forward from the area around Vetr, blocking her from sight, and then more and more fills the room as whatever she did spreads rapidly across the vines, subsuming and replacing the magical flames. Infuriatingly, Isra’s glasses go opaque, adding further obfuscation to the room, and with a growl she whips them off her face; not that it helps much, mind, she won’t be able to see past her nose until after whatever Vetr did resolves itself. Each breath fills her lungs with moist air as she waits, heart hammering with the weight of wondering whether haven or wastage awaits beyond the wall of water vapor.

The first sign of safety is the cessation of the strident sound of steam seeping into the surroundings: the second when the air eventually starts to de-saturate, and Isra can make out vague shapes at least: and before long she can see clearly see Vetr, dangling by one hand from her sword still lodged in the vine, like a ragdoll someone forgot to stitch an expression onto. She looks down to the rest of the group and gives an emotionless thumbs up.

Isra has to hand it to her: she did actually stop the fire. Every inch of vine throughout the room is frozen over, covered in a thick layer of rime that steams slightly even now in the residual heat of the room. Isra quietly notes that she vastly underestimated the power of the enchantments on Vetr’s swords - and how big of a threat Vetr is.

Dr. Yusuf gives an awed swear in Tryptegerian, “How did you…?”

“saw a bit in the middle of all the vines” Vetr explains, dislodging her sword with a little whole-body bounce and landing on all fours amidst a shower of icy shards. “took a second to spot it”

“God DAMN… that guy kicked like a truck,” Andromeda gasps out as Weapon clatters from her fingers a moment before she finally pitches over from the blood loss.

“Oh gods! Miss Andromeda!” Iris shouts, scrambling to the now-prone woman’s side. She slides on her knees the last part of the distance, to access her gushing wound even just the tiniest bit sooner, pressing her own singular trembling hand to try and stem the flow with a frightful desperation. When no one comes to help her she looks up, baffled, at the other Unioknights!.

 “What are you doing?! Please, someone help me!”

“Eh, she’ll be fine,” Isra gives a dismissive, casually limp-wristed wave.

“WHAT?” Iris is horrified by the apparent nonchalance of Andromeda’s companions, then jumps when Andromeda gently removes her hand from her shoulder.

“She’s right, kid, it’ll grow back. You don’t gotta worry.”

Iris looks between those gathered as though they’ve taken leave of their senses. “But- th- what are you talking about?”

“Blessing from- urp,” she pushes herself up to her knees, cheeks bulging a little as she tries not to barf, “from one of the Children of The Ancient Child.” She loses her battle with nausea, expelling some of her typical starry-black liquid from her esophagus as more of the same oozes from the already-healing remnant of her arm.

“I’m real hard to kill, or even really hurt long-term like.”

“You should be more worried about yourself,” Isra notes, though she doesn’t really care since she already knows the answer to her next question, “What about your arm?”

“It’s… replaceable.”

“Mm, good,” Isra deadpans, then: “Speaking of which: Why was Hetterdan after you?”

“Isra!” Andromeda chides, much to her annoyance, as Iris hesitates.

“I… we do not know.”

After the searing white rage Isra felt at the Lafayettes’ pursuer earlier, the annoyance and indignation she feels at Iris lying to her, and so poorly, barely even registers. But she does still feel it, and for a moment she considers laying into her, unleashing a litany of all her pent-up rage for the day against the nerve this little girl has to spin a falsehood to someone just trying to help. She almost does. But the greater, reasoning part of her mind reins the impulse in, as it does most of the time, and she merely rolls her eyes.

“Fine. I can’t make you tell me, I’d just think you’d be in a sharing mood, all things considered,” Faye takes an aggressive step towards her, a snarling retort clenched between her ragged lips, but Iris stops her with a firm hand on her shoulder. Isra ignores this. “Andi, you good if I go check on Da Chief and her Doctor friend?”

“Go ahead, I’ve got Vetr here,” Isra shoots the rogue in question a dubious glance, but ultimately accepts this answer.

She finds Chief Zhuan and Doctor Yusuf upstairs, the former comforting the latter as he weeps over the broken bodies of his coworkers – his friends. She hangs back at what she feels to be a respectful distance, though truthfully it is a bit further than most people would have. Later, as she, the Doctor, Da Chief and Iris work together to bring Ossan’s flora into something resembling stability, Isra will offer her condolences; for now, she watches, silently, and adds Hetterdan to the list she keeps in her head.

6th Leo, 1645

“Oh, Ava…” Kotone gasps breathily as her lover nibbles at her neck, ever more tempted with each passing second to leave indecent marks. They really shouldn’t be doing this, and they both know it, but the thrill of their hot bodies flush with one another, in defiance of all the high-society protocol that has kept them distant all these many months, is-

“Miss Isra!” the urgency in Veracity’s voice snaps her out of her focus immediately, and she sits bolt upright as she practically flings her book to the other end of the couch. Alani yelps in A# as the legs she was resting her head on shift so suddenly.

“What? What is it?!”

“I have a very urgent matter to attend to, I need you to take these,” Veracity shoves three manila folders at Isra, who accepts them with a small measure of bewilderment, “into the Chief’s office and put them with the other personnel files. It’s quite simple, they go in the black shelf of the big wooden bear, sorted alphabetically by last name, except Vetr’s, just put hers at the end.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you, it’s – I really have to run, I lost track of time and I was supposed to meet a business contact ten minutes ago about-“

“Veracity. I don’t care.”

“Hngggrmrg,” she says, punctuated with the rapid little click-clack of her heels on the hallway out of headquarters.

Despite her professed apathy, Isra does actually start sauntering her way to Da Chief’s office immediately. She flips through the folders with an idle curiosity as she walks.

“Wait… why is Vetr only now getting a personnel file…?” Isra mutters to herself. She looks a little more intently at hers (nine pounds?? Surely not…) but the file itself provides no clues about the delay. She shrugs it off.

Isra hasn't been in Da Chief's office before, and if she weren't so eager to get back to her reading she might be more inclined to nose around. As it is, she only takes notice of a few things: Da Chief's desk, which might seem excessive in size were not every inch of it so obviously in use as workspace, a framed collection of old and shattered ritual daggers in various states of rust, a packed-full liquor cabinet only halfway used for alcohol, and - yes, an enormous cabinet carved in the shape of an upright bear (a sloth bear, Isra notes, which makes the whole thing a good bit bigger than would be accurate) with a number of different-colored shelves set into the stomach.

When she goes to open the black shelf, she drops a folder, its contents scattering across the floor. She huffs, annoyed, puts the other two away before bending to gather the mess and - sees an odd addition to the expected forms. A tiny crumpled-up note, written in surprisingly neat script.

Iris may have decided she trusts you, but that just means I have to stay wary for both of us. If I decide things are too dangerous, if I think that our chances are better out there than with you lot – I take her with me. We’ll be gone before you even have the chance to realize what’s happened.

Isra scoffs and shoves it back into the folder.

“Well at least she gave us a heads-up."

She slams the drawer shut.

“Asshole.”