The monotony of train voyages was something Ikue truly appreciated; many landscapes though there may be that drew attention, the axles’ regular vibration pulled one into the fading of wakefulness, a perfect entrance to meditation. They’d taken an overnight train for this exact reason, in truth. None of them truly needed to sleep, and amongst the three of them Ikue was the only one who still even could find true slumber. She did not often seek it, though. The loss of consciousness brought about by bodily sleeping was frankly jarring to any cultivator in the Oniric realm, lacking the spiritual awareness mantled by entering a state of aura dreaming. It was akin to drowning into a choking sarcophagus of blackness and absence, without perception or proprioception, experiencing dreams risen from the deep, turmoil-wracked sea of the subconscious instead of the guided ocean of conscious will.
When the first explosion rocked the train and jostled Ikue out of her meditation, she felt the leaden weight of sleep descend on her. She choked on drowsiness that was like cold water, swallowing her mind and pricking at her fluttering eyes; at the edge of perceptibility, the tenuous buzz of blood in her limbs disappeared from her senses as her muscles loosened and she slumped into her mattress. She may have let out a grunt, or a moan of discomfort - she couldn’t tell a vibration from another across her skin anymore. She was going dark.
Then something seized her by the shoulders and shook. Ikue startled wide awake.
“GAAAAH !”
Looking down towards her with a concerned expression, was a familiar devilish face.
“White Owl ! White Owl, copy !?”
Nasser looked at her worriedly, prompting Ikue to nod shakily. For such a mountain of a, well, not-man that he was, he always had an air of caution about him, as if he ceaselessly worried that a careless gesture would tear something apart. Unless he was moving with the purpose of tearing things apart, of course.
After a brief moment he let go of her shoulders, and Ikue took a heartbeat to compose her thoughts and bring out her aura as close as she could to the boundary of her body from the depths of her dreaming soul. On the other side of the compartment, Nasser was pulling gear out of their assembled luggage; some things Ikue recognized as devil-made trinkets and talismans, and other things of various shapes that nonetheless left no doubt as to what hurt-inflicting purpose they were put to.
“What’s happening ?” she asked anxiously, fingers clenched tight around the shamanic staff she’d reflexively called to hand a second before.
Nasser grumbled, activating a handful of trinkets that wrapped him in liminal images of armour scales and worn-out band wraps. “Haven’t the foggiest”, he said tersely. “Thinking attack, so I’m shielding up. Ward the room and wake up the Boss, I’m going recon.”
In most other circumstances Ikue would’ve taken umbrage to being ordered around, but this wasn’t a time for quibbling. She nodded quietly and locked the door behind him as Nasser left the compartment, then quickly and adroitly drew protective glyphs on the door, the window and the floor before setting to wake up the leader of their little group.
Blake was deep in meditation, lying inert on her own bunk. That her hands were joined on her torso and the utter stillness of her face gave her the impression of a porcelain corpse; Ikue shuddered in revulsion at the unpleasant image. She did not want to think about the possibility of Blake dying. Not now, not ever.
Sighing, Ikue brushed an errant lock of hair away from her lover’s face and laid two fingers on her forehead, before calming her own breath to match its pace with Blake’s. She nonetheless winced as she initiated the contact. Blake’s inner world was starkly unpleasant to traverse and uncaring of closeness or intimacy - biting hoarfrost from her wife’s aura was creeping up Ikue’s fingers already.
The shaman took a deep breath and closed her eyes, sinking into the trance. When she opened them, she was walking on snow.
------
Violence was an ugly thing and he was very good at it, Eanasser Ghoroth Lugalband mused as he dove behind a rock to dodge a bullet. He half-mindedly wondered what it said about him that despite disliking the principle he still found himself enjoying the act. Well, it wasn’t like there were many options, or so theologians would have it. Some would call him a sinner for revelling in the moment - others would call him flawed, for only the aspects of God were devoid of imperfections. The rest would say that it was in his nature as a devil to enjoy torment, and wash their hands of the whole thing.
Another shot cracked against the stone, eliciting a grunt from him. He’d not been hurt, but it was always annoying to be shot at. Peeking from the side of the boulder, he flexed his fist and poured his aura into the brass gauntlet he wore, causing a rumbling stream of flames to erupt from his knuckles, blanketing a lengthy but narrow area of the cragside with fiery orange. Not that he could keep it up for long; the draw on his aura was functionally negligible, but a full-fist shot had been beyond the possible throughput of the attunement “gem”, causing the little bead of red glass slotted on the metacarpal joint of the gauntlet’s thumb to crack and crumble into dust, halting the flow of fire.
No matter, really. He’d taken a full equipment set with him on the trip, and so he had a dozen or two more attunement “gems” in a belt pouch, waiting to be used. Admittedly, they were gems in name only, which was why Nasser’s inner monologue stuck on the quotation marks. The technicians of the Blackbird Bureau had found out that tinted glass worked just as well as actual stones of the same colour when it came to elemental attunement - for low-power weapons, at least - and government agencies being what they were, the brass had jumped on the occasion to give their agents the same capabilities for a fraction of the cost. It’d also helped that operatives were no longer afraid to actually use their equipment and risk inadvertently spending a fortune in ammunition.
While his fingers unerringly plucked another bead from his pouch, Nasser cast a glance around to assess the situation. It was fucked, as always. On the upside, this was an official train with a fund transport wagon, which meant armoured chassis and hulls, and extra guards; also on the upside, the presence of his Boss on the train (albeit for reasons unrelated to the funds being moved around), and by extension the Boss’ wife and himself were also here.
He socketed the glass marble - black and ochre - into his gauntlet, sending a spray of clumpy resin over the lingering flames. It all caught together and erupted into a rush of foul, viscous smoke. Not only was it sticky and irritating but the resin smoke was also still on fire, and Nasser was treated to the very satisfying sight of several bandits flailing around and screaming as they were splattered with aerosolized burning pitch.
On the other hand the geography of the place greatly favoured the assailants; the train was caught between the feet of two hills right before a tunnel entrance. The outlaws had both the height advantage and control of all potential exits. They were also outnumbering the train’s defenders - by about three to one, if Nasser’s hearing was telling him the truth - and while none of them seemed particularly threatening by themselves, quantity was a quality of its own especially when paired with other tactical advantages.
Thank the Princes the transport guards were trained for situations like that. It was by their training alone that they kept the battle a messy gunfight and prevented it from descending into an irreparably fucked debacle. From what Nasser could see from his cover, they’d turned the money wagon into a steel box-fortress, thanks to it being more heavily armoured than the rest of the train. With iron nerves and unfailing marksmanship, they’d kept the enemy from closing in on them.
Sadly, the same could not be said of the rest of the train. Three cars were already overrun and another destroyed, and two more were currently embroiled in brutal close-quarters melee fights. Nasser only hoped White Owl had warded their room as he’d told her; short as she may be, the woman was rather prickly about her pride and disinclined to take orders from anyone but the Boss.
In the next instant, a blur of grey whistled just past his horns and tore into the hillside stone behind him with a loud crash. Nasser threw himself down, quick enough to avoid the blast but too slowly to dodge the shrapnel. He hissed in pain as it stung him in the back, leering angrily in the approximate direction of whoever had tried to nail him with a kill-rod.
Grabbing a lighter, he pulled a short wooden tube capped with a ball of sulphur from one of his pouches, and kindled the fuse that came out from the bottom. Quickly, Nasser drew from one of his longcoat’s pockets a trinket in the form of a crab claw on a bronze chain and clasped it around the tube, before spinning the makeshift sling with both muscle and aura. On the third spin, the trinket’s claw released its charge, flinging the tube upwards much faster and farther than Nasser would’ve managed on his own.
Seconds passed, and then a dull thump rippled from midair as the tube exploded to release a small orb of sulphurous yellow fire that cast its light across the valley. It wouldn’t last long, it was useless to non-devils, and it was a very paltry imitation of a hell-torch that gave maybe an eighth of the intensity of the real thing’s glare; it would have to be enough. Nasser carefully peered out from behind his rock, aura cycling through his eyes as he scanned through the hellish yellow-ochre haze in search of his target. The train itself as well as near-every weapon on the field was highlighted in red while beings of flesh and soul had a deep blue tint to them. And… there, near the hilltop all the way across the valley from Nasser’s position, was the bastard he was looking for.
A mirthless smile crawled on Nasser’s face.
“Let’s exchange courtesies, little man.”
Thanks to the glow of his “hell-torch”, he could see more clearly what exactly it was that he’d been shot with. In the outlaw’s arms was something that blurred the distinction between “very large gun” and “very small siege weapon”. Nasser even recognized that model. PB-2 H “Workout”-series kinetic 1.5in calibre piston-armed hand ballista. Standard ammunition, 10in length fullmetal cast iron kill-rods. Higher string-to-shot force transmission efficiency but lower shot trajectory stability than PB-2 K or PB-2 X models.
He’d take it off the hands of the bandit’s corpse after the battle, if only so it could be used by someone who had the proper, healthy respect for the high-velocity implement of demise that it was. Assuming it wouldn’t get too badly damaged by what Nasser was about to do to its current owner.
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Oh well. Small sacrifices and all that.
Nasser had great physical strength, and a remarkable amount of pouches, pockets and bandolier cases on his person that allowed him to bring what he called a comfortable amount (and what others called “overkill writ in black powder”) of trinkets, ammo and talismans to any potential fight. He did however not have the space to carry all the bladed utensils in his possession in a way that would allow him to manoeuvre comfortably. What he did have, though, was an enchanted knife sheath that acted as a storage space for cold weapons; it had the small idiosyncrasy of only absorbing sharp and/or pointed tools of murder, but Nasser had never found that to be an issue and today was not the day it would begin to be one.
Reaching with two fingers into the seemingly-empty leather strap, he pulled out a crude metallic javelin that had two slots on the side with a small “hup” and a content nod. Worthless and expendable as it was (it’d been cobbled together from factory refuse in the span of fifteen minutes and he had something like two dozen left in the sheath), it was perfect for what Nasser intended to do.
Quickly, he socketed two bright yellow marbles into the javelin and aimed towards the hilltop facing him. Overloaded with lightning, the spear had turned a glowing yellow-white and was crackling in his hand - no time to lose or it’d blow up on him. The last seconds of the “hell-torch” passed, just long enough for Nasser to cycle his aura into his steadied arm and throw with all his strength towards the fading blue silhouette on the hilltop.
“Give my greetings to Grimalkin”, he smiled with bared teeth.
The javelin shot forward like a rabid hound tearing off its leash, strongly enough that Nasser stumbled back with a dull pain in the shoulder, and severed through the nocturnal sky like a true storm-borne thunderbolt. For less than a third of a second, there was between Nasser’s position and the other side of the valley a hand-wide flashing beam of actinic yellow. Then it faded, and the hilltop across exploded in a shower of gravel, dirt and electricity as the javelin embedded itself in the soil and disintegrated, its payload of lightning erupting outwards and bouncing off the hill’s bedrock.
All the sundered material crumbled backwards into the next valley in a rumbling landslide that sent tremors through the battlefield. Nasser snorted satisfiedly. That had turned out to be a bit of a show-off, though in his defence lightning was the first highly volatile element that’d come to his mind in the spur of the action. A small part of him regretted trashing the outlaw’s ballista, but the rest of himself was content enough that he was dead - and there was no doubt that he was dead. Nasser was a cultivator in the middle steps of the Oniric realm while the ballista bastard hadn’t registered at all to his senses. Poor dipshit hadn’t even been awakened at all.
Nasser shrugged mentally. Violence was an ugly thing and all that - and most importantly, the consequences of choosing to be a criminal were on the outlaw’s head, not his. Besides, when one worked in the Blackbird Bureau “overkill” was more like a starting point.
Then, down in the valley, the locomotive exploded.
For half a heartbeat, Nasser saw nothing but white, his eyes stinging with pain. He shook his head, as much to wash that away as to dispel the ringing in his ears. He looked down into the valley, and saw that everything was well and truly fucked now. He guessed that someone must’ve hit the locomotive’s boiler with fire or something similar - the scorched crater and the mangled metallic carcass of the engine made it seem as though it had overheated and released all its heat and pressure outwards.
Good news… Yeah, no. He couldn’t come up with any. Bad news on the other hand, had come in packs. The armoured wagon had been very close to the blast and was now badly damaged - no massive fractures that Nasser could see, but the structural integrity of almost the entire thing had been greatly reduced. Some of the guards had died in the shockwave, and the survivors were still reeling. To add to the havoc, the tender had burst open in the explosion and its alighted contents sprayed along the sides of the train, meaning that anyone still inside the train who didn’t have some sort of protection against fire was trapped inside a fairly heat-conductive metal box surrounded by a growing inferno.
Nasser winced. White Owl did not do well against fire. Of all the times for the Boss to be deep in meditation… Nothing he could do but hope the shaman’s wards would hold and she’d manage to bring the Boss back from her own dreams. Or, well. Technically he could also go about attempting to turn nuisances into corpses.
That did sound like an enticing idea, and besides, the outlaws - who apparently had wards against flame - were storming the train. Someone had to stop them, and he just so happened to be there.
With a flicker of aura, he activated his protective trinkets, replacing his standard-issue long coat and three-piece suit with body armour made of several layers of latticed linen wraps (treated and enchanted to withstand fire, of course; heat-proofing was the first thing reasonable craftsmen of the Machine Hell learned to do) and a suit of burnt-orange metallic plate, fitted together by a film of slate-grey slime that flowed according to Nasser’s will to dampen impacts. The Bureau-issued gear was of perfectly appreciable craftsmanship in his eyes, but it was designed for short altercations, not this kind of intense drawn-out battle. Besides, only a fool relied on cloth - however enchanted it may be - when closing the distance. Except as padding, maybe.
He charged downhill towards the attackers, and with a snap of his wrist, the copper bracelet on his right arm deployed into a gauntlet matching its sibling on the left hand. A pulse of his aura set the right-hand gauntlet into “Pull” mode while he picked out a dark ochre attunement “gem” for the other hand, still in “Push” mode.
Running through the inferno, he pumped his aura through his arms - one that drew the flames to his fist, the other that left a rain of sand in his wake to smother the fires - and prayed to the Princes that four hundred pounds of angry muscle devil clad in half that weight of hellsteel would be enough to hold back the tide of seventy-odd whoresons until the Boss stirred from meditation.
With a bellow, he jumped out of the brazier and in front of the bandits that were currently attempting to breach the armoured wagon. Around his right hand, a roiling red star of flame; around his left, a rippling orb of abrading sand. He slammed his wrists together, palms open towards the outlaws, and with a mental command switched both gauntlets to “Fuse”, before pushing with his aura.
[Iron Hand Arts - Thousand Mirror Cannon]
The sound was that of a roaring volcano as fire and sand united into glass, and a substantial mass of razor-sharp fragments heaved out like a titan’s snarl. For nearly two hundred feet before Nasser, every living being lived no more on account of having been torn to shreds with overwhelming force, and the soil had been churned and dug out with extreme violence.
A lull passed over the battlefield as nearly everyone present was either stunned or shocked by the display, before one of the wagon guards cheered and broke the spell. Nasser dove to find cover behind a broken piece of the tender’s carcass as the attackers opened fire again, peppering him with bullets and buckshot. Granted he had his armour on, but he found that not being shot at all was better than withstanding shots you could avoid taking in the first place.
Nasser slunk out to the side of the wreck and pointed his fists towards the enemy gunmen, but the gauntlets only vented aura residue. Cursing, he pulled back into cover and checked his gear, then realised that the attunement “gems” had broken under the strain of his technique and he hadn’t noticed because of the channelling high. He mentally admonished himself and reloaded his weapons with deep green beads. Acid was the most lethal element he had on hand that would neither spread too far nor cause inordinate destruction.
Before he could try to look out and aim, the steel wreck around him was rocked by a resounding impact. He huddled down as best he could and lobbed a pair of acid globs over the carcass to probe out whatever that had been. It apparently did nothing as another impact followed, this time accompanied by a massive barbed pincer ripping through the side of the wreck. That alone was bad enough on its own to make Nasser wince, but what made it worse was that the pincer (and presumably the rest of the monster it was attached to) was made of ethereal black and grey aura, pale smoke wafting off of it, and dripping with some dark ichor that burbled and spread like cracks in stone whenever it hit the ground.
Shit.
Before the thing could strike again, he pulled out a standard-issue emergency talisman, activated it and started screaming into it.
“SHOGGOTH PROTOCOL ! I REPEAT, SHOGGOTH PROTOCOL ! DEATH-ASPECT ENTITY ! I REPEAT, DEATH-ASPECT ENTITY !”
The third impact threw him off-balance and he tumbled off under the locomotive’s ruined form. Swearing, he poured as much aura as he could into the talisman and threw it into the sky, where it turned into a dot of light and shot off towards the nearest government office that had an emergency beacon. That was taken care of, at least.
Returning to more imminent concerns, he started spraying continuous streams of acid over the corrupting stains left by the shoggoth’s ichor, hoping that aura-empowered acid would be strong enough to dismantle it. Unluckily enough, death was one of the worst elements to try and counteract; by its nature it had an easy time simply… stopping whatever was thrown at it - be it snuffing out fire, dimming out light, or in this particular case exhausting the acid’s reactants until the corrosion ceased on its own.
Luckily enough, the acid Nasser was pouring out had his constant will and power behind it, while the shoggoth’s taint was inert matter akin to a particularly noxious snail-trail. It remained difficult to overpower, but once the power balance had tipped over it gave way with almost no resistance. Nasser was pushing his attunement “gems” to the limit, stressing their throughput as much as he could without reaching the point they’d start breaking down.
Very unfortunately for him, he had to halt his cleansing efforts when another pincer joined the first to pry open the calcined iron shell that lay just above him. In a heartbeat, he slammed his fists together to release a pulse of acid in a sphere around him then flicked the trinkets adorning his ears, making his helmet appear in a snap over his head.
It turned out to have been a very good instinct, as the next instant the locomotive’s ruin came apart and he found himself face to face with the shoggoth. It resembled a giant lobster, if giant lobsters existed first of all, and second had a shuddering mass of hair-like feelers instead of legs, amongst other deeply unnatural features. Nasser was very thankful to have his helmet as a barrier between himself and the thing - the enchantments in the hellsteel dissipated much of the shoggoth’s propagating madness. Instead of his mind reeling and breaking under the pressure of wrongly-shaped chitinous plates and inky dancing patterns of otherworldly symbols over its carapace, all he saw through his visor were blurs shimmering across the shoggoth’s surface.
For six very tense seconds, nothing happened; then, a voice hailed him.
“Your resistance is impressive, Hell-kin. As futile as it may be, it is still laudable.”
It was a heavy, lifeless thing, and it crawled under his skin and through his ears to worm its way into his brain. It spoke of silence and ruin, of darkness and death and the hunger of oblivion. He hated it.
Nasser turned his head towards the voice, keeping the rest of his body in a braced stance. “And you are… ?”
On the cragside above the tunnel stood a skeleton; or, a man dressed as one, at least. The voice came from him, and he appeared to be clad in bones - all of them human, Nasser noticed with disgust - nailed through some sort of deep blue fabric and covering a traditional frontier habit.
Nasser did a double-take. No, he wasn’t dreaming. The bastard was in fact wearing tattered cultist robes over a pair of jeans and a western shirt, and capped it all off with a black cattleman hat and a skull mask. That was uncanny.
“I am not one who matters”, the cultist said in the same cleaver-like worm-like voice, echoing with deathliness and pelagic depth.
“All that matters is that I enact the will of God.”
In spite of himself, Nasser snorted. “Your god tells you to rob a money train ? I thought deities were beyond material needs and all that.”
“Hn. The money will certainly be a boon, but no”, the cultist chuckled. “We have come for power. Before we began our assault, I installed a great formation that was bestowed upon me by our Lord Mictlanteh over this valley. The souls of the perished have been captured and ensnared within the heart of the array. You will soon join them, Spawn of Mecharduk.”
Nasser straightened himself up, staring down the cultist through the visor of his helm. “We’ll see about that.”
“You’ve got one thing pegged right about me. I was born a scion of the Machine. Do you know what mortals call us ?”
Silence answered him, and he smiled. A sizzling haze of acid formed around his fists.
“We scions of Mecharduk are dubbed the Watchmen of Eternity, for thus is our creed - So long as we live, we stay awake; so long as we go awake, we remain alive. I will not sleep today.”
Nasser roared, raising his gauntleted hands into a combat stance. The shoggoth hissed, the noise like a ragged edge raking on glass.
Snow began to fall.