The creation of life through artificial means had long since been a fixation of all who studied Umbra magic, the dark art of permanently altering biological beings with arcane forces. The lifetimes of countless geniuses were sacrificed in the name of achieving this purportedly godlike ability. For if mystics of great power could be replicated rather than merely bred in the hopes that, however unlikely, some of their offspring would inherit their talents, the global balance of power across all of Mirandis would immediately shift in the favour of whoever possessed such means first.

Despite the ridiculous amount of resources put into the pursuit, all attempts at magically producing an artificial person resulted in failure. The results were deformed, not even close enough to life in the first place that they could be said to have died. Until some two thousand years ago, when a group managed to create an artificial by the name of Deluva Serun. She was missing half her internal organs, retarded and died before her heart had the chance to beat for a week. She was considered a great leap in progress. Nevermind that her every waking moment was spent in agony, her body riddled with unspeakable pain while her mind remained too simple to understand why. Never mind that she was so decrepit that a strong wind would have killed her had she not been kept inside. She lived, therefore she was worthy of celebration.

Time passed and progress continued. Serun was merely the first in a long chain of failed artificials. Over the years they grew better. More intelligent, less sickly, more physically stable. Of course there were other measured setbacks, a rather disturbing propensity for narcissism and moral apathy was chief among them, but the scientists did as scientists would and chalked it all up to valuable failures. It was not until fourteen years ago that a “perfect” artificial came into being. Showing no health or psychological concerns, and wielding all the magical talent of the most powerful Mystic in recording history. Unity Eden was not this artificial, if he had been he imagined his frail body would have handled being smashed against the fucking wall slightly better. It would also have had a vagina, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d feel about that.

Though he had recovered slightly from his thrashing at the hands of that weird tentacle beast, Unity was still not in great shape. It was all he’d been able to do to grab hold of the invisible thing and rip it apart with his magic, even if he could walk on his own now doing so still racked him with pain. His sides throbbed, his chest ached- possibly from damage to his lungs- and his vision was ever so slightly blurred at the centre, making it annoyingly difficult to pick up on the expressions of his teammates. He could still hear their voices though, which let him know that after about fifteen minutes of walking they had stopped being so grumpy about his ingenious strategy of using them as bait.

Unfortunately it also meant he could still hear their inane prattle.

“You know what this reminds me of?” Crow suddenly asked no one in particular. Before he received an answer he answered his own question. “The fourteen hunters.”

Unity’s chest hurt too much for him to bother snapping back with a retort, and when Ethi replied her own voice was riddled with pain.

“The what?”, she half-grimaced.

"The fourteen hunters." Crow repeated.

"Never heard of them."

Unity hadn’t heard of whatever Crow was talking about, and as much as it pained him both mentally and physically to admit it, letting it go unexplained would bug him more.

“Neither have I,” he cut in- hurrying through the words.

Unity could hear a mix of realisation and confusion in Crow’s tone as he answered them.

“Oh yeah, I guess you’re from Takamagahara right?” He asked Ethi, to which she answered with a nod. He continued. “I should’ve figured you didn’t have the story there. Though Unity, aren’t you from Pangaea?”

"Yeah. So?" Unity could make out Crow’s deep green eyes even with his blurred vision, he assumed they were shaped into perplexion. He didn’t like that, he wasn’t supposed to need people to tell him things.

"Eh it's just that nearly every kid knows it...my mum and dad first told me it even." The blonde said.

"Ah well do me the honour of telling me it then." Unity said, rolling his eyes and avoiding delving any deeper into that path of the conversation. He had enough on his mind already without pulling the pin on that emotional hand grenade, what with his agonising wounds.

"Alright then." Crow replied, thankfully dropping the topic of parents.

"Well the story starts a century or so after the first faction war ended, when the Factions were both weakened from fighting each other. This weakness caused a bunch of Immortals, known as the fourteen hunters, to get it into their heads that they could pressure the Faction leaders into giving them a bit more influence and power within the Factions.”

Unity had to suppress a chuckle. The previous Faction leaders, Xia and Zora, were both Deities- the highest scale of Mystic in existence. A Deity was not the kind of creature one tried to strong arm, and he had a feeling he knew where this story would end.

Regardless Crow seemed quite engrossed in his own story now, and he had a nostalgic smile tweaking his lips as he carried on with it.

"Well as the story goes, the founders issued a challenge. They spread word of the 'Selator', a device capable of finding anyone in the world. They said it had once been among their most prized relics, before it was lost in the prison it had been placed into for safe keeping. Whoever found it and brought it to them would be given an enormous vassal nation of the Factions to rule over.

Unity cut in."Hold on, kept in a prison? You’re talking about the Butchery aren’t you?”."

Ethi visibly, and rather pathetically, blanched at the very mention of the name. Crow simply grinned and nodded.

“Yep, the very same.”

It seemed Unity had been right. The Butchery was, by some reckonings, the most dangerous place in the world. If one believed the rumours it was home to a mass of savage demons known rather uncreatively as “Butchers”, the most mundane of which wielding the power of ten mystics. The most powerful of which was a creature which struck fear into leaders the world over. A Deity named Jack Danielz, the Butcher of Balisphore. So named because fifteen years ago he had ended the Faction War himself by single handedly slaughtering a city with no less than a million Mystic soldiers in it.

He was technically a subordinate to the Factions, acting as a jailor for those few mystics who were too powerful to realistically imprison but too important to kill. Of course after his slaughter in Balisphore many questioned the Factions ability to control him, which Unity, as a particularly clever boy, knew was completely intentional. He was a living threat, something they could not control- only unleash. It was no coincidence his joining them had strengthened their weakening hold on the world all those centuries ago.

And of course, now that he knew a mere fourteen retarded Immortals were going on a quest into the home of said Butcher, Crow’s little fairy tale had just become even more predictable.

“Oh I see now”, Unity cut in. “The reason I’ve never heard this story is because it’s incredibly boring, so no reasonable person would try and inflict it on me!” Ethi shushed him, the bitch, and when he turned to her his cheerful smile was met with an irritated glare- something he realised she did a lot. Before he could continue poking her nerves, Crow spoke once more.

"Calm down I'm getting to the good part." He chuckled. "There were multiple Immortals who wanted a nation to run for themselves, fourteen to be exact and those were who we called our fourteen hunters."

The green eyed boy stumbled slightly, the cascade of pain his body had gone through seeping more and more into his demeanor. To his credit he quickly recovered.

"They’d all only just become Fables, though even the weakest Immortals are powerful enough to rip mountains out of the ground and hurl the-”

Unity cut him off.

“Wrong.”

Crow frowned. “Excuse me?”

Unity rolled his eyes, among all the stupid misconceptions he heard people spit out- this one was by far the most annoying.

“Fables can’t hurl mountains, neither can Avatars, Demigods or even Deities for that matter. Immortals are powerful but they aren’t unstoppable, why else do you think the world’s armies bother with normie mystics?”

The blonde seemed somewhat put out by this, but he continued nonetheless.

“Well anyway, even if they weren’t unstoppable they were certainly nothing to scoff at. Any one of them could kill all three of us with a flick of their wrist,” he looked nervously at Unity, only continuing once he received a nod of confirmation that he wasn’t still exaggerating, “and there were fourteen working together on this task. For them, the impossible was merely a worthy challenge.”

The blonde paused rather obnoxiously long. Long enough, in fact, that Ethi spoke before he continued.

"And then what happened?" She asked, voice quiet as she seemingly drowned in the allure of a fairly mediocre story.

He turned to her and spoke,"Well none of the hunters were ever seen after then." Crow's smile faded into a bittersweet one.

"What?" Unity cocked his head slightly, sadly fast enough to send a sharp pain through his neck. "That was the most anticlimactic thing I have ever heard."

He’d been expecting a heroic overcoming of impossible odds and trivialities like logic, of course things playing out exactly as they would have in the real world was hardly much better.

"Well it is... because that's where the story ends when you're a child. When you're older you get told the rest of it by an adult." Crow looked to Unity, he opened his mouth then hesitantly shut it.

Unity huffed. "Well tell me the rest."

"Well it's just that...it's pretty sad and I kinda wish I hadn't been told the whole thing myself." He sighed.

"Oh shut up it's not like I'm going to break down crying."

Crow grinned as if he knew the simple concept of not getting to know the end was getting to Unity "I mean...you said it was stupid so…"

"So tell me the rest of it, or get ready to spend however long we're stuck here listening to me whine about how stupid and boring it is and how much of a tragedy it was that there was nothing to make me change my opinion." The two of them stared at each other for a moment, then both broke out into grins at the same time. For her part, Ethi lightly shook her head and muttered something which sounded suspiciously like “boys”.

Crow straightened his face and cleared his throat before finishing the tale.

"Well there was no Selator, and there was never going to be any kind of reward- nevermind one as big as an entire nation. The Faction Founders sent fourteen power hungry mystics to their deaths at the hands of an unstoppable force, and it was all because they allowed themselves to be manipulated by a lust for wealth and political influence rather than working hard and earning power the long, and honest, way. Magic."

Unity paused for a moment then shrugged. "Ah."

There was an almost petulant frown in Crow’s voice. "Ah?' I just told you a story that expresses so much about mystic kind and you go 'ah'?"

"I mean...it's just not very interesting you see?" He shrugged, then feigned genuine disappointment just because he loved the way Crow turned red at it.

"No, no I don't see, Unity, you just have poor taste." He looked to Ethi, somewhat desperately searching for agreement in her face. The Oni just shrugged, then quickly spoke up at Crow’s dismayed look.

"Sorry, it's just that we have a similar story at home." She patted the fuming boy's golden hair. "Don't worry, it must be pretty good for like...five year olds." That seemed to make matters worse, highlighted by the fact that Crow sped up his walking pace and left her and Unity behind.

Ethi looked at the hand she was using to pat him like it was a foreign object before awkwardly tucking it into her pocket.

Unity tried. He really, honestly did, but the utter hilarity of the display got to him within moments- forcing him into a bout of laughter which made his injured sides feel as though his lungs were trying to escape through them.

Ethi turned on Unity with a face like thunder.

“You know what-”

Whatever it was that Unity did or didn’t know, he never found out. The no doubt exceedingly banal rant died on the girl’s lips as she was interrupted by Crow calling over his shoulder from ahead of them.

"Guys, we're here." The boy came to a stop and turned left.

Unity and Ethi quickened their pace to follow, swiftly coming upon the turn Crow spoke from and following in his direction. At the end of this new corridor was a great metal door, perhaps ten feet high just as wide. Unity looked from Crow to Ethi, then back to Crow. He realised neither of them had the slightest intention of actually doing anything to investigate their intriguing new discovery, and so he made his way over to it and rapped his knuckles against its surface- eliciting a dull thunk and slightly sharper pain at the point of contact.

Unity glanced from one part of the door to the other, immediately noticing a key already in place. He turned to his teammates, who he noticed had now put quite some distance between themselves and him- the bastards- before arching an eyebrow questioningly.

Crow gestured to the key as if to say “after you”, and Unity sighed before gripping the handle and turning it. The key was at great odds with the door, glimmering gold compared to dark iron- a perfect sheen compared to worn sturdiness. In fact they seemed so different that Unity was almost surprised when it actually worked, moving the unseen mechanisms inside the slot and causing it to slide open a centimetre. Determined not to let his nerves show to his watching associates, Unity pushed the door open.

And then he pushed more, and more. And then he realised that he was attempting to push what was probably a six inch thick chunk of metal weighing ten times as much as a horse open without using magic. He glanced back and saw Ethi already approaching, probably with an annoying smirk on her face. He stepped aside for her as she sprouted an orange aura, then forced the slab open with a nerve-racking screech.

Light spilled through into the hallway as the door cleared the way completely, Unity still saw the world poorly through his unfocussed eyes- and so it was only Crow’s exclamation which let him know there was anything unusual across the doorway.

"What the hell?" The blonde gasped as he stared ahead.

Unity's sight slowly became less hazy until it was no more imperfect than it had been when not stung by the sudden light, he could now see that just beyond the corridor was a great beach. Like an ocean of white, almost seeming to glow as the glaring sun bounced off it. Unity estimated it was about a mile across in both directions, and three of its sides were lined by a great wall at least a tenth as tall as it was wide. The fourth ran into another ocean, however this one was an actual ocean made of actual water.

He frowned in confusion at Crow’s amazement before realising that the boy had probably never seen a shore in his life, what an amusingly sheltered authentic he was.

The group stepped out onto the sand, the sensation of the tiny grains sliding under foot made quite a jarring change from the firm stone floor they’d spent half an hour walking through in the tunnels. Unity studied the area around them and began to think. By his count there were about sixty more doors like the one they came out of. All were just as big and thick, all made from heavy black iron. However less than a quarter were open, he supposed that meant that not many people made it as far as they had. Of course they didn’t, not many people had the supremely helpful Unity Eden to assist them.

Of course a great deal of that help had been memorising all the little details in the architecture they’d walked past thus far, and seeing as how they were now in an entirely different area- that door was likely a portal- there was a good chance he’d been wasting his time in doing so. Fuck.

Still, he wasn't one for fear. Even when he tried, Unity found it incredibly difficult to feel things like that- he was almost envious of the authentics for their ability to pussy out of things, he imagined if he shared it he’d end up being injured far less frequently. No matter, right now Unity needed information more than he needed caution. He glanced at his Gauger, not at all surprised to see it had updated.

'Objective: Enter the doorway

Condition: Must be holding a Golden Key'

Unity grit his teeth. “Must be holding a Golden Key”. They only had one Golden Key, did that mean only one of them could enter? Unity thought for a moment. It was possible they could get through as a team of three, if they all held it at once. But what if they couldn’t? If they failed to exit through this doorway while all clutching the key, they would be finding out while in arms reach of each other. Unity was injured, and more frail than most even when he wasn’t.

He glanced at Crow, the blonde boy was simply staring around him- Unity couldn’t quite tell but he was fairly sure his eyes were focussed on the walls. The key was held incredibly limply in his left hand, so limply in fact that it almost looked like it was the grip of a sleeping man…

There was a flash, a little glint of light. Metal catching the sun. Unity couldn’t see what it was at all, but he could figure it out. Even as it darted through the space separating Ethi from Crow, heading straight for the unsuspecting boy’s back, Unity realised it could be nothing other than the Oni’s spear.

She’d figured it out, clever girl.

The spear met flesh with a spray of blood, gliding through muscle and biting into bone as hot claws of pain arced outwards from the point where metal met meat.