For the surface dwellers, cremation was a ceremony, a religious duty of those who followed the Six-Winged Dove. To assist the soul in escaping its fleshy vessel, and hurry it along to the afterlife, whatever that may be.

The unspoken implication that they didn’t wish for anyone from the Six-Eyed Crow’s church to get their hands on a corpse was a strong, if paranoid, concern of the upper capital Carmerans. Stigma did wonders for stocking fears of something that wasn’t all that bad, once someone got over the shock factor.

He’d worked in the ‘borderland’ between the upper capital and the Dungeon, a long time ago, when the entrance wasn’t utterly dominated by trading companies, merchant families, and noblemen-backed businesses that would resell the goods of the Dungeon to the upper cityfolk for ridiculous prices.

A century, he believes, but he’d long since lost count of the years and his age. Being a half-troll, he aged… not like an Elf, but close enough. It wasn’t all that uncommon for trolls to survive to a four-digit year, and he got the privilege of having around half that lifespan, or so he anticipated.

Shaking his head to rid himself of those useless thoughts, he focused back on the comparison he was pondering as he absent-mindedly took a cleaver to an old man’s corpse, cutting him up into efficient, clean-cut chunks that could fit more comfortably in a bag.

Right, the Dungeon and the surface city.

For them, a part of the capital that was, for the most part, dominated by the Dove’s church, cremation was a duty, a revered ceremonious process.

For the people of the dungeon, cremation was either a necessity to prevent diseases…

Or a waste.

Cutting off the man’s ankle with one last, clean chop, he quickly slotted his cleaver into the sharpening tool, pressing the button on the table to start its whirring, before he swept his arm through the chunks of meat on his table to funnel them into a thigh-high bin of parts at his side.

Well, his thigh. It would probably be waist-high for anyone else.

Regardless, he still had about two more people to go for the order. Thinking of said order however… It was one of the few times he couldn’t help but question if this way of treating the dead was perhaps just a tad… wrong.

Maybe at one point in his life, he would consider this job a lot more appalling and immoral, but time and reading the religious texts of the Crow’s church served well to acclimate him to how the dead were treated down here. Not just acclimate, understand, even.

And it made sense, even to a rather sentimental guy like himself.

Why would you burn organs when they had so many uses, despite their owner’s expiration? An unfortunate young man’s lung could, for an appropriate price and by someone with appropriate expertise, be transplanted into someone else and give them decades more to live. His heart could be sold to witches and those who conducted rituals for one thing or another.

His brain could be sold to the men of… ill repute, like the doctors of the Santhin Clinic, for studying. His eyes could be given the same treatment as his lungs, giving some random unfortunate his sight back for a price and time investment that was costly, but barely a drop in the bucket compared to what the Dove’s church would have someone pay to get their vision back.

And why stop at his organs? His body would be of much use to a young, budding necromancer, who wished to practise such craft without falling to the stereotype of being a grave-robbing, murderous psychopath. Perhaps with enough time and societal change, Carmera would stop using slaves in the mines and sewers, instead having unthinking corpses do such dirty, unsafe work.

It was an efficient system. The local authorities would pay a decent fee to take fresh corpses depending on their ‘quality’, then give the corpses to semi-independent companies like his own, then the corpses’ contents would be processed and sold, the authorities take a cut of their earnings for providing them with material to work with, and mostly everyone was happy. Those who weren’t took their loved ones to the crematoriums, something not everyone could afford to do.

So yes, he could understand and even list off the reasons he had no problem doing this grisly work, treating the dead as another resource.

But even so, as he carefully cracked open a thin young woman’s chest cavity with his cleaver, her body wrapped in the usual enchanted preservation bags until now, and delicately started removing her organs with a thin knife to place in containers on the rack to his left, he felt a slight prickle of discomfort at cutting people up for some freak to eat.

It was just… not necessary whatsoever. It did nobody any real good.

He could justify his work by telling himself that with every organ sold, more was understood about the various biological quirks and differences of the humanoid races, another man, woman or child regained something, or at least that some witch used them to empower either herself or another. The latter wasn’t exactly necessary, but it still did some good to the world, while providing him and his wife with a decent living.

Selling people’s bodies for that freak to eat… it just somehow felt like a step too far. It was far from wasteful, but it just wasn’t necessary.

Most people could feed themselves just fine for a fraction of the cost that it took to eat human flesh.

There were colossal factories that were dedicated to nothing but cultivating and supplying the people with ‘super-mushrooms’, some magical, rapid-growth fungi species found in the Dungeon centuries ago, then there were enclosed, industrial slaughterhouses all over the second floor, a certain factory that used a Dungeon artifact to endlessly grow tough, stringy flesh to sell for cheap to whoever needed some meat in their diet, there were even some newfangled ‘greenhouses’ made by some particularly creative half-dryad mage on the first floor a… few years ago? He didn’t keep up with outside life much.

He thought the lad was a wealthy merchant now, actually. Selling ‘home-trees’, another interesting concept that was sweeping through the Dungeon according to his ever-gossiping wife. Or rather, it was sweeping through the Dungeon for those who could afford such things. Which… he was a part of actually. It would be a good anniversary gift. Hm… He did miss the green of the forest, honestly.

He was getting distracted again.

Point was, things rarely, if ever, got so bad that anyone above the third floor would have to resort to cannibalism to keep oneself fed. It felt wrong to sell human meat like livestock to be eaten, without some underlying reason or result.

He sighed as he expertly cracked open the woman’s skull, cut through the meninges, and cut off the brainstem, before delicately placing the brain into an enchanted metal container, swiftly closing the lid. He’d wipe the blood off later, and then sell the remains of the scalp with the other waste of the corpses to the mushroom factories. They could always use more organic material, and he could always use more crowns in his pocket, even if it was barely worth the hassle.

Before he knew it, he was just one chop away from finishing the order, paying attention to the elbow joint to not mutilate the flesh too much. It was just a point of pride for him to have his work seem clean despite its brutal nature.

He jumped slightly when a tinny ringing sound filled his work room without warning. Were his skin not made of stone, he’d have cut his wrist open. He quickly dumped the cleaver next to the last limb on his work table, took off his bloodied apron and rushed over to the sink, turning on the tap to clean his arms.

The door opened, and he twisted around to see his wife poke her brown-haired head in, lightly grimacing at the grisly sight of his work space.

“Honey? The uh… client is here.”

He smiled and nodded at her before quickly turning to scrub off the scent and feel of blood from his hands.

“I’ll be right there.”

He could never quite get it to leave, no matter how hard he scrubbed and lathered his fists and forearms in soap, but he didn’t want to greet his clients stinking of gore.

Though, knowing this guy he’d probably find it appetizing.

The door gently shut behind him, and he hurriedly grabbed one of his largest cloth bags, a black one to mask the blood, settling it over the cart.

Then with a cautious heave, he turned the cart onto its side, his fingers keeping the bag on top of the cart. Then he turned the cart over upside down to pour its contents into the bag, bracing the cart’s bottom against his gut.

It might drip a little, but the guy liked his food ‘fresh and wet’, so he’d just have to suck it up.

Damn creep.

He quickly set the cart back onto its original spot and tied the giant bag closed, making sure to keep his hands as clean as possible.

With a confidence he didn’t feel, he took the bag and opened the door, briskly walking across the small corridor separating the workspace from the front. It wasn’t exactly a store per say, as they handled most of their business through couriers and cable-mail, but it was roughly styled like an office, a haphazard one with a single unused desk in the corner and too many metal chairs to ever realistically be used.

Very ‘hole-in-the-wall’ kind of place, but again, businesses like his own didn’t require visibility, they just needed accessibility.

As the walls retreated to his sides, he stepped out of the corridor and cast his gaze to the left, where his client was sitting still as a statue, his head hanging limply to stare at the floor through his creepy metal faceplate.

He might be eight feet tall, but the bastard just made his everything crawl in discomfort. Still, he paid really well, so he sucked it up and walked forward with a forced businessman’s smile, until they were just a half dozen feet apart.

The …man finally looked up, then stared at the bag, his head tilting just a bit.

Damn creep.

About six feet tall and covered in a twisted, tattered mess of cloths and cloaks on his upper body, with a torn pair of pants and no shoes, anyone with half a mind would dismiss him as some random vagrant or another homeless drunk with a weird helmet.

Until they looked closer and saw the grayish skin, the rippling muscle barely concealed by his scrappy clothes, then noted how the metal was bolted to his skull and face, a smooth surface that covered his head from just above his lips to the back of his head, with three metallic protrusions equally spaced along the top of his metallic scalp, diagonally tilted backwards and seemingly melted at the tops.

His jaw was inordinately squared, and his mouth looked like someone simply cut up his cheeks until they met the jawbone and gave up, a normal mouth that continued into a creepy, endless line that almost touched his goddamn neck.

And just to complete the creepy look, his faceplate proudly showed the numbers “762” in white industrial lettering on the front, where his eyes and nose and face should be.

He really disliked his guy. So much so that he still couldn’t muster the curiosity to want to ask how the fuck he could see and hear him without eyes or ears in sight.

After a few more seconds of awkwardly standing across each other, his client jutted his scarred chin at the bag.

“Are you going to give it to me or not?” He asked quietly, his voice uncomfortably average. Not gruff nor gravely, nor light and girly. Just… normal. Like any other random guy on the street.

Somehow, that was a little more unsettling than if he’d spoken like a raspy wraith.

Despite his discomfort, with a fake smile still on his face, whether the man could see it or not, he simply extended his hand. The man took the bag, his black, slightly-too-long fingernails grazing Gaphit’s skin, then quickly untied it with surprisingly dexterous fingers, before opening it and fishing out a hand.

After observing it and turning it over this way and that, as if a merchant inspecting the goods, he opened his mouth, and Gaphit learned what a human shark would look like, were they a cannibalistic creep with only one row of metal teeth that reached back to their jaw.

He crunched off a finger with casual ease, not even chewing before swallowing as Gaphit fought to keep the appalled disgust off his face, his smile straining.

His client tossed the hand back into the bag and re-tied it, putting the bag on the ground for a moment as he fished out a leather pouch from the mish-mash chaos that were his upper garments, starting to leisurely count coins, seemingly satisfied with his order.

Then a loud, but muffled ringing came from the man, and he let go of the pouch instantly, sending a mess of silver, bronze, and copper crowns clinking on the floor as he fished some strange, glowing necklace that looked equal parts machinery and jewelry out of his clothes, taking a short second to stare at it.

Then he blurred into motion, darting back, wrenching the door open hard enough to have it thrown into the wall, dropping to a crouch just outside his shop front, and jumping up with enough force to dent the floor with a deafening bang, a quickly receding chorus of distant thumps and clangs indicating just how fast he was retreating from the area.

Gaphit stared blankly at the mess on his business’ entrance, then took a deep, deep breath to cool his anger.

He was never dealing with this guy’s bullshit again.

What the fuck was that about?

His eyes wandered to the coins littering his floor. At least he paid three times as much as his order actually cost. And he didn’t even take it.

He could only hope he wouldn’t be an unreasonable jackass and come back here with an entitled attitude to demand his money back. He hadn’t used combat Skills in years and he doubted he could even pin down the speedy bastard for long enough to rip him in twain.

With a tired sigh, he got to cleaning up the mess.

She idly observed the gaudy open building composed of glass and latticework bronze, two colorful Carmeran flags proudly sitting above its gargantuan main entrance.

Then she made her way forth, still just… watching, firelight eyes darting from spot to spot from behind her gas mask’s confines at a frantic pace.

She couldn’t remember much from before, but some token, barely caring part of her still wished to observe and mull over all she saw, just in case some random scene would trigger some scraped out memory to be dug out from the mess left behind.

Maybe that rotund man smiling down at his prissy daughter would make her remember some scene from her childhood. Maybe the main teleporting station of the upper capital would allow her mind to recall how it was she even ended up in the Dungeon in the first place. Was she born there, or did she come through here? Was she some merchant’s daughter, or just some morbidly curious tourist? A child worker or a gutter rat?

But the structure didn’t have that… haunting, uneasy flicker of familiarity. She doubted she’d achieve anything here besides satisfy some of her curiosity to the outside world.

Tempted as she was to explore the upper city, see all the things that she’d heard whispered about it, from the moving clockwork sculptures of Lakerci that dotted all the major squares, to the airships that casually swam through clean, open air, to taste untainted meat and vegetables, she couldn’t quite muster the will to survey the surface more than she already had by coming here.

Every step further from the Dungeon felt like another step into a place she simply did not belong in.

The air was too thin. Her mask filter was barely even picking anything up. The people were well-fed, well cared for, and with such colorful clothes and welcoming demeanors that she paradoxically felt unwelcome.

She stood out like a sore, mangled thumb. And she wouldn’t care about that normally, but the more people stared at her, the more uneasy she became. Just instincts. She’d rather go hang out with Ghoul and Mirena. She’d seen enough. A rather lousy way to ‘celebrate’, but Ghoul usually knew best, and this was his suggestion, a shitty one, for once.

She continued into the station, eager to return to what she knew, to the safety of omnipresent danger, craning her neck to take everything in.

Two hundred feet tall, more than a thousand feet on each of its four sides. It was difficult to even consider it a building rather than just four gargantuan metal and glass walls with a latticework domed roof thrown on top.

She passed through the dozen guards peppering each entrance, staring at the sunny insides of the building. Too many holes.

Fire up here would be so dull, when bathed in all this sunlight.

Too much light. Too much glass.

All around, all above. It would be so satisfying to just…

She imagined the scene, eyes turning into hazy orbs of flame as her mind wandered far away, hands sitting still at her sides as she stared through the roof into a blue sky.

A large explosion, a shockwave that would shatter all the glass. A thousand thousand little fragments of glittering crystal, reflecting the lights of the midday sun like a shattered kaleidoscope, their beauty tempered, refined, by the simple fact that they would only last a few moments before they’d break themselves upon the unforgiving ground. All the more precious for how quick that moment of perfect beauty would pass.

She imagined a thousand thousand little shards of sharp crystal break themselves upon the ground, in one final explosion of beauty, their innards and limbs flying in every which way as they broke themselves upon something that they could never best.

As the daydream faded, she sighed, turning her gaze to level with the people around her.

She continued, a couple people occasionally turning to stare at her pitch black garments and the enchantments covering them as she took in her surroundings.

Entire roads seemed to veer off their path to curve into the open building, those who tread them being separated and given tickets by various blocky little buildings speckled throughout the massive station, corralled around by station workers, and whether they rode upon a wagon, a lizard, a horse, or simply walked their way to the teleportation pads, there were only a few hiccups in the flow of movement.

It was chaotic, yet oddly organized.

Seats were peppered everywhere for travellers who didn’t come with a wagon or a caravan, and a few wandering shopkeepers covered in trinkets and minor Dungeon artifacts wandered through the crowds, trying to entice the upper city civilians into getting some worthless bauble.

She collided shoulders with people multiple times, but she continued, uncaring, eyes following the crowds, the signs, the random little bits of human interaction all around her that were so close yet paradoxically so far away from her grasp.

Up here in the light, it was all too easy to notice all the differences, the colors.

Corfids with their bright-colored plumes of feathers dotting their head and forearms, corvids with their raven-black feathers and pitch black eyes, reminiscient of the birds they had a connection to, there was the occasional slave following their master, either a humanoid or a goblin, vast throngs of regular humans, and for a moment, she thought she even spotted a lizardman awkwardly ambling through the crowd before she lost his red-scaled head in the chaos.

And in the distance, these paths, crowds, and vehicles, all eventually converged on certain points at the other end of the cubic building, the entrances to the teleporting pads, most placed on the ground floor with a few smaller ones placed on a second level made of metal.

She’d gone to The Factory with a portal many times, but never anywhere else, usually just using The Great Tower and the cable lifts to go up and around the floors. She wondered how teleportation would differ in sensation from a portal.

Curiosity drove her forth, mechanically following the crowds in a fugue as she continued looking at a thousand and one tiny little social interactions that happened all around her, until she came face to face with a middle aged woman after a lengthy wait in a crowded queue.

“Dungeon. Third Floor.” She uttered after a lengthy, awkward pause as her brain caught up to where she was and what she was doing, twitchy fingers digging into her pocket to grab her coin pouch, only for the middle-aged woman to give her a confused look, before speaking, her words muted and indistinct, as if underwater.

Oh, right.

She lifted a finger and activated the speaker system with a tiny spark of mana, flinching slightly at the utter cacophony of sound that suddenly flooded into her mask from her surroundings. She hadn’t realized just how loud the teleport stations were until now.

She wondered how long it would take to make the only sound in the station be the crackling of fire.

“-ould you repeat that, dear?” The woman repeated, and so she did, her mask turning her voice into a tinny hiss rather than a mumbled series of indistinct sounds.

She quickly paid the absurd fee and grabbed a hold of her ticket. A strangely resilient piece of paper.

“Now, just look for a teleport pad with a plate that says ‘DF3’ over the entrance, they’ll check your belongings to make sure you don’t have anything that could overtax the mana batteries like dimensional storage items, and you’ll be back in no time.” The woman said, and she nodded before walking off, opting not to think too much on the ‘back in no time’ comment. It was pretty obvious she was a Dungeon resident.

She eventually came to a stop, slowly swivelling her head around to try and locate the teleport pad with… what was it, a ‘DF3’ sign hanging over it?

There was a ‘DF1’, a ‘DF1-A’, and almost a dozen other variations of that labeling pattern, but she’d almost walked across the entire station before she finally found the one she was told to go to.

It was, unsurprisingly, empty, both inside and outside. She walked through where the queue would be if there was one, past the singular guard staring at the ceiling, and headed straight to an extremely bored looking man that was basically lying across his chair, idly flipping through a book while sitting next to a bunch of magical devices on his absurdly long metal desk.

They looked expensive.

But then again, so did everything up here, by comparison.

She was getting rather impatient, so instead of talking, she walked up and simply kicked the metal separating them, getting a startled squawk from the man on the chair, his book flying out of his hands as he jumped, comically fumbling with the spinning book to stop it from hitting the floor before managing to stabilize it. He clutched it to his chest in relief, before shooting her a venomous glare.

A small smile of amusement stretched across what remained of her lips.

That was fun.

Some remnant of her humanity idly noted that he was cute, and the smile disappeared at the surge of bitterness that followed that thought.

“Item check.” She simply said as she put her ticket down on his desk, and the man huffed as he gently put the book on an unused corner of the desk, moving until he was directly across from her to quickly check and pocket the ticket, then smoothing down his well-used green uniform right after as if to salvage some sense of professionalism.

“Right, just put everything you have on top of here, I can activate an illusion if you don’t want someone to peek at your belongings, but it costs two silvers. Then I’ll just check them over with some craftsman’s goggles, do a body-check, and you’ll be free to go. Please remember that dimensional storage items tend to cause unexpected problems during teleportation, many of which could easily prove lethal to even the most powerful of mages, so please do not withhold such items on your person.” He said, his voice gradually switching to a mechanical monologue as he continued.

She simply nodded as she lifted her right leg and unsheathed the mage dagger from her calf to reveal a bronze textured handle that led up to a seven inch long silver blade, covered with inert red runes, and threw it on the desk, before doing the same with her coin pouch.

The man stared at her with an unamused air about him.

“The mask and necklace too.”

“No.” She said firmly, flexing her fingers at her side.

His brow furrowed in annoyance for a moment, then he just sighed, before reaching behind him to bring out some absurd-looking goggles, almost as large as his head and with twelve different lenses sitting on spinning mechanical arms.

That thing was basically covered with a dozen different-feeling enchantments, and for a moment, she could only stare with a blank sense of disbelief at how someone managed to even make that thing without making it melt or implode from the mana load.

“Fine, just sit still so I can look at them at least.” He said, swiftly tying the goggles onto his head and flipping down a set of lenses to observe her, one of his fingers touching some odd switches on the side of his head.

Less than a second later, he let out a sudden yelp as he jerked back and yanked the device off, one hand fumbling for a spot to put the device down while the other frantically rubbed at his eyes.

“Holy… what the fuck is your Level?” He hissed out, finally managing to find some empty spot on his desk to let the goggles down.

She simply blinked at him, her mind slowly realizing someone had somehow made goggles with [Mana Sight], and gave them to a teleport station employee. Were these things common up here? That was akin to a minor artifact in the Dungeon.

“Okay, check is cancelled, I’m pretty sure I burnt my cornea, and you’re the only passenger anyway so feel free to die if you have dimensional items you haven’t told me about. So just… go, I’ll turn the lever once the doors close.” He made a vague shooing motion before he fumbled back for his chair with that arm, his other hand still rubbing at his eyes while hissing in pain, occasionally lifting his hand to blink rapidly at his desk, struggling to focus on anything.

She simply observed him for a couple seconds, finding the sight oddly amusing until she got bored and grabbed her dagger, sliding it back into its sheath and turning towards the teleport pad, a rather plain, massive circular room at the end of a short, enclosed corridor.

Behind her, masked behind the idle chatter between the security guard and the station employee, a set of hurried steps approached, and she turned her head around to casually check, mana gathering at her fingertips just in case.

She grew much more tense when she realized the approaching pair were looking right at her, jogging to catch up with her, almost two dozen feet behind her. She quite appreciated the Perception points now, even if they were usually a pain in the ass outside of fights.

Body and core tense, she came to a stop, turning to stare at the two men behind the one-way glass of her mask.

Two brown haired men, with features she didn’t care to even note, mediocre physiques and wearing two identical sets of vests and slacks.

Her [Mana Perception] was not so low that she didn’t note how suspiciously empty they were of mana. Either masking it through some hidden item, consciously suppressing it, or useless thugs dressed in better clothes than they deserved. The chance of two random people looking for her while being this magically weak was too low for this to not look suspicious. Some attempt to put her at ease before striking, maybe?

Suspicious man number one smiled at her as he and his companion slowed to a fast walk, a fake smile just a tad too tense for her to not notice.

“Hello, Miss. Are you-”

He stopped himself when she took a step back as he took one forward, the air swiftly growing hotter around her as her fingers eagerly curled and uncurled, a giddy feeling coiling at her gut, forcibly suppressed.

“Don’t get too close. What do you want?” She hissed out of the mask, eyes narrowed to a glare as her eyes frenetically danced around her environment, checking for traps, suspicious people and details out of place, always keeping the duo at the edge of her vision.

The way the security guard seemed more concerned with scrutinizing her, rather than the duo, was worrying. The way his foot shifted towards her showed that he was getting ready to spring to action, as if already certain of who he would side with.

Definitely bribed. The guy with the goggles just looked confused and unsure, while still rubbing at his eyes. He was likely unrelated.

A couple people in the distant crowd stared at them, likely out of curiosity, nobody that drew attention besides a man in artificially dirtied and rumpled clothes that was doing a bad job of pretending he was just looking for his pad.

Four versus one wasn’t a terrible situation to be in, especially considering how much leverage she had in the way of multiple thousands of innocent people all around her. Assuming they cared about collateral damage, or knew what she could do.

The men looked a bit awkward for a moment, glancing at each other in a way that gave away some sort of long-term familiarity.

Good at teamwork, not good.

The man who took the lead in the conversation turned back to her, hands placatingly spread open at his sides.

“We’re here to offer a lucrative job for the Adventurer that goes by the name ‘Carnage’. Would that happen to be you, miss?” He asked, seemingly more out of courtesy than being genuinely uncertain.

“How did you know I would be here? Or who I am?” She demanded instead of answering the useless question, fingers slowly stiffening.

“Our employer didn’t disclose that, Miss. We know that you’ve made a name for yourself in the Dungeon, so our employer wished to buy your services. We’re just here to offer you the job, the details of which we can’t easily discuss in public, and the reward of which will be whatever price or favor you set, within relative reason.” The man explained.

She took a short moment to think about her reply.

“...Why not my team and just me? Could’ve contacted us through the Guild. I also don’t work with people who refuse simple questions. Tell me how they found me, or I’m leaving.” She dryly said, the tinny hiss of her voice rendering the men to become visibly indecisive as she felt her patience fray. She hated speaking, and she hated when people beat around the bush and meandered in their speaking.

After a moment of seemingly psyching himself up, the first man shrugged, not convincing her in the slightest with his awkward smile.

“Fine, feel free to go. Rather unfortunate that you’ll never know who you were, or about where your family is, but since you won’t cooperate, we can’t do much more. It ain’t no skin off our employer’s back. Make sure to have fun scraping bits of Ghoul off the wall back at your quaint little hideout.” He said, so casually, that for a moment, she simply stood stock still in shock, her brain struggling to comprehend what he just said.

“My- My what?” She hissed, fire wreathing her uncovered arms and gloved hands as she stomped forward, the man in front of her suddenly far more nervous than before as he hurriedly backtracked to the left, his hip coming up to scrape against the table full of gadgets. Her nostrils flared as a phantom burning settled in her chest, the familiar heat of anger.

She didn’t have a family. They didn’t exist. She didn’t have a family, and if she did, she’d fucking vaporize them in an instant.

No, fuck that, she didn’t care about that part anymore.

“What the fuck did you just say about Ghoul? Where is he?” She snarled, a throaty, mechanical rumble filtering out of her gas mask as her eyes glowed through the darkened glass like two soulless suns. The fire spread throughout her body in an instant, wreathing her in angry twirls of heat and plasma as the men hurriedly backed away, the first man sending a desperate glance to-

The security guard?

Just as she turned her eyes to glance at him, a tide of drowsiness and exhaustion suddenly slammed through her mind and body, making her stumble and her flames flicker, her [Mental Resistance] straining under the foreign spell as her legs wobbled, her vision momentarily blurring as her eyes closed on their own before being wrenched open through sheer will.

She flared her mana, hoping the straining of her circuits would help her struggle to stay awake as her [Mental Resistance] slowly started to crumble. Her mind whirled in confusion at the suddenness of everything. The two men had backed off entirely to melt into the confused crowd behind them in the span of a single sluggish blink.

She stumbled in a circle, eyes searching for a man that wasn’t there anymore, her breaths speeding up as panic, glee and fury set in in equal measures. She refused to be caught. She refused to be chained again. She refused to let this chance for release slip between her fingers.

The crowds melted into swathes of black coats and faceless heads, the gadgets at the table twisted, their limbs ending in scalpels and rune seals, her blood running thick with sedatives that weren’t there. A half-blind man stumbled away in panic, and she didn’t hesitate to throw an [Ignite] spell at his clothes, his agonized screeching filling her ears as chaos erupted from the crowd.

The security guard was nowhere to be found, heavily armed entrance guards rushing at her through the parting swathes of kindling.

Her hand flew to the necklace at her throat, a manic smile splitting her face in half, a frozen, gaping rictus that none could yet see. A surge of unfathomable glee flooded her entire being, pure euphoria at the thought, at the confrontation, shivers of pleasure keeping her awake as a stuttered, wheezing giggle escaped her throat, her mind growing fuzzy.

Why was she angry or scared? None of them could touch her. None of them could chain her.

It’s been so long since she could just let go.

It's been so long since she had so many people to burn.

So many little embers that would break themselves upon her, in one final explosion of beauty, their innards and limbs flying in every which way as they broke themselves upon something that they could never best.

Her thumb pressed the button on the necklace before clutching it in a fist that glowed white-blue, split by orange cracks, melting it, vaporizing the metal and dismantling the enchantments in the blink of an eye.

The guards continued moving towards her, encircling her, slowly, so slowly.

Her head pounded with agony, struggling to put her to sleep.

The metal around her started glowing, screeching and screaming in protest as the temperature jumped from neutral to the insides of an inferno, turning to luminescent slag that quickly lost cohesion as her core dumped every ounce of mana she had into her body, the air wavering and wriggling all around her from the overpowering heat, bending her sight.

Her feet dug into the molten metal. A raging sun boiled her insides, scorched her heart black, filled her vision with dancing wisps of blue-orange flame, twirling and dancing for her, a mesmerizing sight that blurred as the spell fought to make her submit.

She crushed her mana in an infernal fist, her pupils dilating into two black circles surrounded by a flaming sclera.

A guard threw a metal spear with a deafening crack, and she idly watched as it turned to slag mere feet from her, before uselessly splattering against her stomach.

Her clothes writhed before bursting into flames and evaporating, her mask cracked and constricted, the enchantments unable to protect her belongings as they turned to toxic vapors, melting off her face and shoulders and hips.

Through the chaos, she felt another familiar surge of mana from somewhere within the crowd, and she spun, blue flame escaping from the bottom of her foot to propel her twist, barely managing to keep herself upright through the dizziness. Her head lolled limply to the side as she nailed her gaze upon the bribed security guard, her shoulders quivering from excitement before going slack once more.

She only caught a glimpse of the man, his expression determined and composed, uncaring as to what was about to happen, or simply unaware of it.

Of course they didn’t know. Even with this display, nobody knew how much she’d grown from being the little runt that killed Tillenhall. Nobody knew how fire begged for her to control it, to let it rage and devour, how it had a mind and soul of its own that screamed at her to help it cover everything in sight.

Before another one of his sleep spells could hit her, she felt the skin at the corners of her mouth split open, her cheek muscles tearing and spasming as her gaping smile fought to represent the pure ecstasy she felt, the world turning into nothing but scorching euphoria as she poured every single bit of mana she had into a single spell.

A single moment of hesitation.

“[Raging Conflagration.]”

A single phrase, reverently whispered through a flame-scarred throat, and Carmera watched her earn her name.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad.com, you are reading stolen content from a free site that runs no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google "RoyalRoad Fleabag" and you'll get to my story on the site it was meant to be hosted on.)