It was a sound he had never heard before. Heartbreak, outrage, and the sound of tearing stone. Of shattered glass and shattered people. It went on and on, how long he couldn’t say because he was still lost in the horror of the sound long after it had stopped. Something terrible had happened. Harban was screaming.

The Ghul didn’t like the light, so they didn’t press up against the window. Lots of room for Truth. He looked out, but all he could see were other slum highrises, all clustered together. Drowning the world in shadow. The sky hadn’t changed. He could still feel cosmic energy. It wasn’t a magical void or overpressure. So what made that noise?

On the one hand, it wasn’t his business. Once, he might even have said it was a good thing. Distracting the enemy, pulling their forces away. Now? Now it was just meaningless noise. He rubbed the back of his neck. His eyes seemed to be pulled irresistibly back to the statue. That wild arrogance. The contempt in the lion's face.

There was a soft shuffling sound. He looked around. All the Ghul had turned to look at him. Even with everything, it was damn eerie.

“At this point, you cannot possibly have a moral opinion about my going and taking a look.”

They were, as always, silent. Just looking at him.

“It really is none of my business. At all. It would be downright counterproductive to go check it out.”

They just looked at him. The Ghul had never bothered with words. Famously. Particularly words like “No!” or “Please!” or “Stop, for the love of God, Stop!” They didn’t care about who you were, how old you were, what you thought you were worth. Other than making more Ghul and worshiping their eerie statues, it would be hard to say what they actually cared about. Apparently, it wasn’t all about worship. But they still didn’t give a damn about what you had to say.

“Fine, yes, I admit it. I’m going to go. I should at least see what’s happening out there. Are you going to stop me?”

His breath was the loudest noise in the building.

Truth turned and left. The Ghul watched him go.

Truth made his way towards whatever had happened. It was easy to find. He just had to run towards all the people running away. The city flashed past as he ran. So many of the old familiar stores were closed, metal shutters rolled down, flashing brilliant signs gone dark. The brilliant colors of Harban were going out. Without their blinding lights, the ugly reality of the city was laid plain. Harban was a grim place, full of hard people. And those hard people were running scared as Hell of whatever was behind them.

When he found the edges of the thing, he agreed with the good sense of his fellow Harbanintes. Some necrotic wave was rushing up the street. Like someone had poured tint into the air, making the twilight even darker. It swept through buildings, vehicles and people with equal contempt. The buildings it ignored. The people… the people melted.

The people melted, shattered or exploded. Liquified, boiled, deboned, gutted and fileted. The parts flowed into new shapes, the liquid became etchings and arcane formulas. The bones were rebuilt as structures holding the infernal geometry of organs and arteries. Unspeakable algorithms of mutilation and horror replicated and multiplied, generating more and more of that black wind, expanding outward.

It was a machine of negation, unmaking humanity. Truth could see buildings and carriages slowly collapsing deeper in the shadowed interior of the mutilation wave. Not unmade the way people were. They just collapsed in on themselves.

The Anti-Theists. Truth vividly remembered investigating the dead apartment building in Xandre. The machine of meat and bone that tried to permanently carve a piece of the world away from God. But why? The apocalypse is doing that for them?

<>

Truth cast Obliteration, in some faint hope that two negatives would make a positive. It vanished into the darkness like a pebble into a tornado-whipped pond. He darted in and hacked at the shadowed air with the Tongue of One Who Speaks for God. Seems that God had nothing to say on the matter. He wasn’t even getting feedback from the bane spell in the sword. It was vibrating with hate, but the angelic blade didn’t have any more answers for this than he did.

Truth fell back two blocks, trying to regroup. Order his thoughts. The more complicated a problem, the more simple the solution should be. How the Hell did we break this back in Siphios?

He couldn’t immediately remember. Hell with it. He hacked a fist sized wedge of concrete out of a corner of a building and threw it at a chunk of bone scaffolding. The crackle and shatter noises were very satisfying. Less satisfying was the impact it had on the spreading shadow. If it did anything, it was tiny. He threw more stuff, shattering more bones and tearing apart more garlands of enchanted organs. The spread of shadows was slowing, at least in his immediate area. Not very much. But a tiny bit. Enough to be noticeable.

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So he kept throwing. It felt like bailing out the ocean with a thimble. Still. Better than nothing. The darkness kept spreading anyway.

This isn’t working. I’m trying to put out a forest fire by pissing on it. Truth looked around, desperate for something that… There were sirens. Of course cops would come swarming in. Army too. Truth ran towards the noise. A situation like this, there would be a field command.

It took minutes. He had to ask for directions. Eventually he found a blacked out wagon practically coated in wards and communication talismans. Stairs running up the back. Mobile command center if he had ever seen one. Which he hadn’t actually, but it seemed like a safe bet. People were coming in and out so often, he could just walk in behind them.

There were cops working comms altars, tracking things on maps- he didn’t bother to look closely. He found the local commander. Her mouth was a grim line as she tracked the spread and listened to reports coming in. Truth waited his turn, then stepped forward, saluted, and made his report.

“Mam! Report from the front line- destroying the bones from outside the effect seems to slow the spread locally. Confirmed that heavy needlers firing Graeme’s Arrow at range are effective, as are remote extra massive munition delivery-”

“They threw rocks at it, Sergeant?”

“Mam! Cement, Mam!”

“Speak Jeongo, Sergeant!”

“Yes Mam! Sorry Mam!”

“Confirmed?”

“Yes Mam! It’s not a big effect per bone, but it does add up, according to the report.”

She grunted. “Who knew being a professional leg breaker would come in handy now? Alright, back to your station.” She shot a look over at a communication station. “Relay the new information to the front- break the bones, any way you can.”

“Yes Mam!”

“Good job, Sergeant?” She looked around. The messenger had vanished. Well, she had dismissed him. She shook her head and got back to work.

Truth rushed out into the swirling chaotic mass. The cops were working to clear the area, to set a firm line they could defend. The spell, or whatever it was, wasn’t letting them. It was obviously self-sustaining, relying on what it ‘ate’ to grow. Unless they could evacuate faster than it spread, it would keep growing. Harban wasn’t built to be evacuated in a hurry. All those tall towers, for one thing. Those incredibly dense blocks of people. Even if everyone was in an orderly queue and steadily walking out of the danger zone, it would be too slow.

And by no means was everyone in an orderly queue. Panic, raw, naked panic. People shoving at each other. Dragging suitcases. Blocking stairways and clogging the streets. Carriages plowed into each other and formed barricades, blocking the emergency vehicles trying to race to the danger. Blocking the other carriages trying to run from the danger. Truth watched it all in horror, watched as the first building fell.

Then the second. Then the third. All those structural reinforcement spells were suddenly gone. All those fire suppression spells. Materials suddenly warping and twisting as they lost their magical foundations. Then they fell in on themselves, or toppled over onto other nearby buildings, or onto the streets.

For one fragile moment, Truth prayed it was a dream. That this was all a terrible nightmare, and he would wake again to see that Harban was the same awful place it had always been.

Then he watched a few hundred people get torn apart by the spell. It wasn’t a dream. He didn’t dream. Not really.

One cop had apparently not run fast enough. At least, the vehicle was unattended. Good enough. Now… did the cops actually do what the other guys in the PMC had accused them of?

Truth popped the lock on the trunk with a sharp jab of the finger, then whistled. Three extremely lethal fetishes, all aimed at maximum crowd control, mounted on the inside of the hatch. One of them was an old familiar friend. The Crabbe and Crabbe saw blade launcher might lack the versatility and portability of the needler, or the ease of use of a fire bolter, but it did make up for it by launching up to five ten-centimeter-wide circular saw blades up to two hundred meters and at ten thousand RPM.

Accuracy? Do you need accuracy? Or are you just a whiner?

And you could load spells onto it. And, hypothetically, you could launch more saw blades if you pumped more power into it.

He tried not to think about what he was aiming at. About how much damage had already been done. He just picked a spot with a lot of bones and guts, and fired. Then aimed and fired again. Over and over and over. Jumping up on rooftops for better angles. Kicking his feet into the sides of buildings and making a perch if there weren't convenient roofs. Anything. Whatever it took. Just move and shoot and move and shoot.

The cops were doing the same thing. The bubble of destruction was slowing its spread, but it was already so huge, thousands, tens of thousands, must be dead already. Incalculable harm. Move and shoot, move and shoot. Try to pare it back. Save at least a few who would die otherwise.

There was a sense of pressure, heavy pressure, coming from above. Incisive screamed, and he kicked off the side of the wall, hard. Smashed through the window of an apartment on the other side of the street. Ran through the interior walls. Jumped out and across again, then through, then dove at a manhole cover on the street and sliced it open as he passed through. All in less than two seconds. He was still falling into the sewer when the impacts started hitting.

Deep thuds, ripping through the dirt, liquifying the concrete and soil. The noise and pressure beat on him, punching him into the walls then down into the muck and filth below. It wasn’t explosions, exactly. He had heard a lot of those. It was impacts, so heavy and loud that the difference between them and bombs would be academic.

Someone had made a call. Someone had checked what he said, figured it was right, figured everything was lost inside the affected area. Someone figured that if you can’t hit it with magic directly, launching big rocks or iron bars at it from high up or at high speeds would smash everything up just as well. Someone figured that anyone caught in the blast was dead, or soon would be worse than dead.

Someone made a call. Maybe it was the right one. Right now, buried in the sewer, Truth just wanted the beating to stop.