The moment Krahe broke through the door, Aldritch had already prepared himself, having already raised his barrier and letting loose several thaumaturgic blades aimed exactly at Krahe’s head the moment she was in his sight. He was already pointing a gun off to the side, and the moment it became clear his first salvo had not struck its target, he began screaming how he had a reaper and how he would use it if Krahe made another move. His gun was double-action, and his finger wasn’t seated on the trigger. Krahe shot it out of his hand just as he began the triggerpull, sending a reaper flying well over Juno’s head. The moment after, she smashed him into the wall with her second modified Wandrei Faust. It wasn’t until then, until she had him neutralized, that she bothered taking in this other room.
By rights, Krahe should have been sick to her stomach, just about ready to vomit, even. She kept her glare fixed on the handsome, blonde-haired man before her, whose eyes were devoid of understanding. On the surface, his gaze was filled with the fear of a child who had been caught dismembering toads, but she had learned to see through far higher-functioning monsters’ masks. He was blonde, with greenish-grey eyes, and well-dressed, preppy even, in contrast with the relatively dissheveled state of his house and the filthy state of these two chambers of sodom.
“P-please, you don’t understand, I’ve done nothing to her! You’ve got to believe me, they’ve been making me care for her so that her death-flag graft doesn’t go off-” Aldritch pled. He was lying, in an exceptionally unconvincing manner at that. Krahe raised her arm to his groin and blasted him with a Cinder Strobe until his wards failed and the heat set his trousers alight. It didn’t take long, but far longer than it should have.
“Shut up, and keep your fucking hands up. You need to understand that you’re not fooling me. Give me your voidkey or I’m shooting your cock off, and then putting one in your head. Do anything that looks like you’re trying to free yourself, or fight back, and I’m shooting your cock off and then killing you. You don’t have a way out of this, if you try something your best ending is that I will fucking kill you, and if you manage to pull something, I will just track you down and make you wish I had done to you what you did to her. Do you understand, you subhuman sack of shit?”
He nodded.
“Say it. Say that you understand,” she demanded.
“I underst-” he began.
Krahe spit in his face. His wards flared against it, the tar-laden mass of mucus caustic enough to eat through a man’s skull if unprotected.
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“Your key. Now. Three. Two. One-”
The metaphorical beast that resided behind Aldritch’s eyes understood. He finally dropped his barrier and craned his neck, willing his voidkey to emerge from just below his ear. A Silver Slip Key. That explained why his wards had held up so strongly. Question was how he got it, but it was possible a sleazy, preppy little psychopath like this shitsucker could have wormed his way into a lower position at the Silversword Agency. No matter the surrounding circumstances, he was far too weak to have gotten this key the intended way, by completing contracts until he made the agency enough money to “buy” it from them. Krahe stowed the key away with a swiftly-conjured, thin tendril, not taking her gun or her left arm off of Aldritch for one single second.
“I’m sorry, I really am-” he tried again. Krahe gave him a Cinder Flash in the face, not enough to breach his wards, but enough to shut him up. She would’ve fried his face a bit, but she wasn’t certain that she would be willing to pull away once she started to hear that creature’s skin sizzling.
“I can believe that you might really feel sorry right now, but it has nothing to do with some sudden realization of your own wrong-doings. If you’d never suffered the misfortune of catching my attention, if you could just keep doing this, one victim after the next, without ever being caught — you would. The regret you feel is born from fear, because you’re just smart enough to realize that what you’ve been doing is the reason I’m here to break your fucking arms, cut your shriveled little cock off and drag you off to a hole so deep even the rats won’t come to eat you. You’re fucked. Do you understand? Your brightest hope right now is to prolong your miserable existence by playing along and selling out whatever degenerate heretic you’ve been wheeling your victims off to once you’re done with them. A heretic grafter? Some vedesian cultist? An unrelated rich degenerate, just a older, more experienced, even worse you? I don’t know, I don’t care. That will be for the Inquisitor to find out. I hear she brought a mind-lathe. I’d pay to be there when she straps you in.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Krahe oh so vividly saw Juno’s dismembered, filthy form, with a bloody rag tied over the craters that had once been her eyes. She had tally marks carved into her thighs and numerous smaller cuts all over her body, as well as a number of missing teeth, made visible by her grinning expression. Out of everything, this was the only thing that actually threw Krahe off-kilter. This reaction, that grin beaming with pure, primordial joy, head turned towards Krahe. Ragged sounds, almost like half-suppressed chuckling, came out of the girl’s throat.
Aldritch stared down his nose at her, grimacing, grinding his teeth. He wanted to talk back, he wanted to talk back, so, so terribly, but he was smart enough not to. Krahe could almost feel Barzai writhing in her stomach at the sight. She didn’t want to spent here a single minute more than she had to, and the construct-fist that was keeping Aldritch bound to the wall was starting to decay.
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