ENTRY 015//TO THE VICTOR//GO THE SPOILS

> Legion-origin—daemonic origin, and thus nature, is dependent upon the Legion or “grouping” to which they belong. Sefirot-class and polarity interact with Legion-origin wildly; Legion is graphed on a zxy-axis where sefirot-class is “x” and polarity is “y”. Sefirot class has a tendency to increase linearly while polarity is symmetrical in opposite directions of either pole. Beyond this, there is a healthy amount of fluctuation in its properties; Decarabia, for example, does not go below sol-class. There are no Decarabian daemons that cannot produce a halo subroutine.

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> Daemonic Legions are conceptual spawning grounds, thus being both paradoxically descriptive and prescriptive. Object and subject made one; platonic ideals made tangible.

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> Think of each Legion as an amalgamation of different themes bound to a central creed or ethos; in this metaphor, the mercury that binds the disparate manifestations of a Legion together is paramount to its identity. An amalgam, afterall, is only possible through the syncretic property of quicksilver. All things can be conjoined so long as there is a pillar to chain them upon.

—Post-Lexical//Pre-Pandaemonium orthodox excerpt, Berestiah Professor of Applied Lexicology and Daemonics of the Academy of Withershins Metaphysica: On Engrams and Designations.

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Her name was Regiana and she knew she was about to die.

The woman saw a figure coated and armored in viscera; one he had donned from those broken few around her and the other he came with—a daemonic armament of some sort; an environmental suit, perhaps? One used to brave the Desolation beyond the walls of a Principality.

When he got closer, she stood in mute shock as he shrugged off the lead-ridden armament. Though his skin was pale as an old-world corpse and his eyes like that of the seraphim from Decarabia, the woman recognized him all the same.

He had the same face structure of Joseph “the Mulligan” Basker. Hard-set eyes, an aquiline nose scrunched up in disgust, a squared jaw and a mouth forever set in a frown.

“[Send me the mainframe’s access-token; you have until your buddy turns into clay.]”

She rooted around her soul frantically, the lattice-grimoire’s codex functionalities at full tilt. Along with minor entertainment engrams and reflex tuners, Regina found the access-token; she’d hidden it amongst the dead-code to stave-off any shamans from robbing her in her sleep. Whole lotta good that did.

Regina sent probes along the ether, graspers of lexical code that latched onto any nearby ego sig. When she found the prodigal son’s, she practically threw the access-token across the connection.

His call sign was [Titanomachia]. If Regiana hadn’t taken the nine dead bodies as a hint towards usurpment, now she didn’t have any excuse for ignorance.

With a nod, Levi ‘Killjoy‘ Basker turned on his heel and walked towards the pillar. He had his back to her; it was covered in spines, quills and feathers.

A pulse of neon and a spike of lexical mass was all the forewarning Regiana got before she was skewered by twelve keratinous spears; they were bloodied on both ends, having been ejected through the combustion of plasma into plasma.

Regiana watched on dispassionately as an eidolon—a disembodied spirit, a wayward soul—the prodigal son turning around to see her dead body with hellish, xanthene-yellow eyes.

His shadow loomed over her corpse and it was not in the form of a man but instead a beast; a cherubic hound opened its vulture wings and howled silently, stirring the waters of the ether.

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Levi picked up the Chthonian [White-Jackal], feeling comforted by its weight in both hand and soul. It was good to have a ranged option again; [Glasya-Labolas]’ spine-burst invocation exsanguinated the user and could only be launched from their eponymous spine. Kinda awkward to aim at someone like that.

By compulsion, Killjoy prodded at his cicatrix, [Sin-of-Census] like a Davidian mouth ulcer. He checked it every waking hour, the habit burnt into his very being.

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Homicides: [57 Eidolons] {Deaths wrought by the bearer's own hand or indirectly through premeditated means and orders as an extension of the self.}

Apathies: [10346 Eidolons] {Deaths that could have been prevented or were brought to bear through inaction.}

Ego-deaths: [2737 Iterations//3 Husk-fruit maturation cycles.] {Deaths of the self.}

Prolixity: [13,140 Characters] {All deaths weigh the same. Those dead by the bearer’s hand, those dead by the bearer’s inaction, and that of the bearer itself; each death of an ensouled entity reaps a single character.}

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This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

A prolixity increase of eleven felt like nothing, weightless against the tartar of a near thirteen-thousand deaths. They weighed on Levi’s conscience less now that they had rendered into a tally; the shock of the cicatrix wore off and now what was left in its place was so much worse.

Apathy towards death. Of others, of those by his own hand, of himself.

“[To the victor, go the spoils.]”

Levi limped to the central pillar and materialized the access token in his hand—it was a pulsing neon construct. He slotted it in the physical receptacle; striations lit up along the device before blossoming apart into a human-shaped cavity.

Lexical ligature set in place between Levi and the engrams powering the pillar.

Killjoy walked in and strapped himself into the chariot and sent the command through the connection. The accompanying chittering of antimatter unraveling his form so that he could be cast through the ether was nostalgic.

He hadn’t been on a chariot in years.

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In a flash of schema, Levi materialized inside a room dedicated to war; every weapon known to Man lined the walls. He felt like a soulspark on Mammon’s day, waiting to wake up and open the silver-wrapped presents.

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With enough arms to outfit an army resting inside his soul, Levi tugged on the ligature between him and the cache’s mainframe. Its overseer daemon obeyed, teleporting Levi to the front door. He walked out leisurely. It was when Killjoy got out of the megastructure that he scurried away like a rat with cheese in its mouth.

Hyraia-daemon suckers helped him brave the ceranoplastic walls.

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Levi rented out a couple of different hideouts this time around. Places he left stocked with weapons and resources that his family had just graciously donated. Some of the blood was a tad hard to clean off—the liquid only stained daemonic armaments as it turned to clay on its own. Daemons exerted a stabilizing effect on otherwise ephemeral substances, letting others embed their existence into their own.

In a dingy catacomb-room, Levi sorted through his spoils.

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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]

Pseudonym: [White-Jackal]

True-name: [B-Y-L-E-T-H]

Sefirot-class: [Netzach]

Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]

Legion-origin: [Chthonia]

Designation: [Polarization] - [Variables 0//2]

Principle-substrate: [Salt]

True-form: [A white jackal tyger howls mutely at the Parabola of the moon. Its mouth is sewn shut with strands of its asbestos fur, and from between the stitched-together slit, tongues of copper chloride fire exhaust. Its bowels are that of the earth and they are inflamed with cypric vitriol.]

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The muzzle flash of the [White-Jackal] was the same color as a fire fed with copper salts—the azure blue of the aforementioned metal’s oxidation; its rust. The daemonic gun was in the format of a pistol, an off-white all over. Like most armaments, it was the physicalized body of a daemon and so took after a dessicated, fleshy motif. Its barrel was covered in a filter wrought of asbestos that would envenom a bolt of plasma with ionized particulates of fiberglass. They’d enter a wound and spread out like the slivers of the broken moon, ensuring death by excruciation.

There wasn’t a Geneva convention in the new world.

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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]

Pseudonym: [Iron-Judas]

True-name: [K-Y-R-Y-O-T]

Sefirot-class: [Netzach]

Polarity-tabula: [Qabbalah]

Legion-origin: [Bypochthonia]

Designation: [Convergence] - [Sequence 0//8]

Principle-substrate: [Mercury]

True-form: [A ferric mosaic breaks apart to orbit a false sun. It is a crucifix ordained by eight lamentations. Apsides of unseen spheres align in conjunction.]

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The shield looked like a bracer of crude ferrum while inert. It broke apart into eight jagged ferromagnetic shards when fed neon, orbiting around the bearer in wide arcs. These shards would converge on any physical projectile up to a maximum of eight. Beyond eight, the efficiency would be suboptimal as the minor targeting engram built into the armament was overwhelmed. There just wasn’t a need to give an [Iron-Judas] a better autonomous targeting system as its archonic datum reached an exponent of eight; best to prioritize the daemon’s strengths rather than shore up its weaknesses.

As with all mercury-derived armaments, the [Iron-Judas] could be fed a wad of any constituent metal and some neon and it’d repair itself into working condition. Useful after being riddled with lead—the bullets were assimilated into its body of matter.

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Engram: [Daemon//Armament]

Pseudonym: [Narcissus]

True-name: [S-Y-T-R-Y]

Sefirot-class: [Netzach]

Polarity-tabula: [Qabalah]

Legion-origin: [Hyraia]

Designation: [Reflection] - [Token 0//1]

Principle-substrate: [Sulfur]

True-form: [A myrrh flower of asphodel blooms on spring’s virgin tears. It steals the beauty from the eye of its beholder to add to its own. Sulfate pollen first burns the nostrils before it blinds the soul insensate.]

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The last armament was a soul-breacher—it could be used in lexical surgery of the lesser variety, ether-diving, or true-name decryption. It had an interpreter-engram built in that Levi wasn’t going to use as his own grimoire-lattice worked well enough to parse through lexical code.

[Narcissus] had an ego-reflection function that allowed it to temporarily copy an ego-sig; that would be useful to keep the element of surprise. Beyond this, it had a scarily-strong disorientation subroutine that could make a man experience the worst trip of their lives. It was comparable only to dysphoric-class ego-drugs.

A person could only bind a single armament to each of their principle-substrates—salt//id, mercury//ego and sulfur//imago—and Levi had filled all three slots. You could still use an armament so long as you had its access-token, but it was overall a weaker manifestation of the daemon’s true-form qualities without a matrix to embed itself in and vulnerable to true-name decryption to boot. A shaman could run a few brute-force algorithms and shoot you in the face with your own gun.

Levi would rather not add such an ignoble death to his growing tally.

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