“Investigating a local discourse in the Western block currently.”

One of the Valkyrie with short red hair said through her communication Cast before she knelt down beside one of the stall owners who laid with her back on the ground and groaned in pain, “Are you okay, ma’am?”

“Ye…yes…The thief…she ran into the blocks that way! Catch her!” Another short girl with twin tails and silver hairs said as she swung her short arms in a frenzy, “Please catch her!”

The Valkyrie nodded before she paced down the streets, covering tens of meters in a matter of seconds with her light steps as the dark red crack over her forehead started transferring more power to her body. She caught onto the sounds of rapid footsteps before changing direction sharply, rebounding off a bulging street tile before darting straight into the darkness.

However, a strange tension suddenly filled her mind right as the skies above darkened, and suddenly sharp pains emanated from around her akin to pins and needles pressing into her entire body.

“Welcome to my domain, sister.” The voice of Shadow came from around the Valkyrie, when a regular-looking man with black hair and deep eyebrows suddenly landed in front of her and tapped his finger against her forehead, knocking her out.

“We’ve got her.” Wu said, catching onto the body of the Valkyrie before he blasted off from the ground.

“Great.” Ita said, retreating from the stalls before nodding towards the fellow Leodora girl that’s pretending to be the stall owner from across the street.

Back at the safe house, Lera then held the Valkyrie in suspension before Wu helped her create a stationary Void domain shield layer, effectively isolating the bubble from the outside world. In the meanwhile, Lera hovered over her with the microscope focusing directly at the red crack over her forehead.

“Gosh…this certainly isn’t up to human subject research ethics standards…” Wu rubbed his temples to relax before rubbing the temples of the Valkyrie to keep her subdued with bouts of Void Domain overloading the Wave in her mind. However, from the heat from the tattoo Casts over his skin, he knew that her resistance to external influence through the Wave was strong.

For some reason, he thought that this was better than straight drugging the Valkyrie, but who knows if it is really, “You sure you don’t have things like…pain killer plants and stuff on this world? What about when you have a major surgery, or…when you give birth?”

“I am not sure how birth giving works on your earth, but I am pretty sure it’s not how it works.” Lera said, glancing at Wu with an amused smile on her face.

“Yeah…probably not how it works on my world either…I suppose the history of science certainly enjoyed undermining the more important half of the world...” Wu murmured, “The Dwellers had some sort of a blend that worked on…you, I guess, but tropical booze isn’t exactly something you bring with you on a top-secret mission like this.”

"Seeing how things are turning out here, maybe we should have." Lera joked, “I am not seeing…too much with the microscope.“Beyond the fact that there are creepy crawling arms within the cracks that are kind of like…”

“Little hairs? We refer to them as cilia.” Wu followed, “Argh…this is not exactly something you could just remove…Let’s try the new Cast then.”

“You sure?” Lera asked, when Wu returned a shrug of "might as well".

There were certain waypoints in science that were essentially inevitable as technology progressed. Technology eventually became more and more complicated, driven by principles that layered upon one another. The newer, fine-tuned and minute the newer principles are, the more precise those instruments need to be to capture those finer details over smaller scales.

In short, the microscopes were fine and dandy for investigating Casts of the same scale, but Wu and Lera needed actual imaging equipment to truly study the integration of Casts with the body at this scale. However, it would be ridiculous to think one can create a fully functioning imaging machine during that time frame, with the bits and bobs left over by Shadow, even with the fore knowledge of how the common imaging techniques were done on his world and Lera's brilliant pair of hands.

This was his best bet.

Imaging works by detecting changes in specific signals, spotting out contrasts that then hint towards the behaviors of basic underlying structures. On this world, those underlying structures are the outcomes of interactions between biology and the Wave. Any imaging thus needed to capture both biology and Wave to paint the full picture.

That would simply be impractical on this current time line. However, knowing that the partial demonic transformation was performed as a procedure driven by a mix of Casts and chemicals, a imaging technique that detects the internal Wave fields of an individual is certainly a lot more realistic. This won't provide any insight into how the body behaves under the influence of the Cast, but it will inform what sort of Cast were being performed here. A far more accurate, fine-grained and creative Wave sensing Cast, if you may.

“Activating the uniform wave field…” Lera said, pressing her finger and turning one of the dials that started running a simple uniform Wavefield through the head of the girl. Then, a receiver on the other end starts to pick up the altered signals before projecting the two-dimensional scan in the air in front of them.

Then, they moved the scanner around the Valkyrie girl’s head in all directions, creating a three dimenional construct of the Cast structure within her head.

“Woah.” Ita covered her mouth, “That’s really fucking cool.”

“A tangled mess for now.” Wu murmured, “Let’s reduce the cluttering.”

Due to the nature of stacking two dimensional images to create three dimensional projections, there were quite a bit of overlap, or crosstalk as signals interfere with one another. However, it was a simple logic Cast coupled with the pinpoint application of Void Domain that reduces the intensity of light in the projections whenever there was an overlap.

And then, there is a full brain scan of all of the Wave in the Valkyrie’s head. If they then compare it with the representative brain scans that account for variabilities across individual, as collected from Ita, the Leodora girls, Lera, and Shadow, then they may be able to figure out what parts were changed in the process of partial demonic transformation.

“So…what do you see?” Lera asked as Wu subtracted the average projections from what the Valkyries head.

“As much as I would like to pretend I know…I am not a brain person…” Wu sighed, pointing to what remained of the projections that looked like the roots of a tree that extended from the floating projections all the way down to the ground level.

“Shit.” Wu said, letting out a grunt of frustration, “Those bastards…”

“How deep is it…?” Lera asked.

“Way too deep.” Wu said, sitting back against a chair before grabbing onto his head, “We made sure to scale everything correctly…and right now, we just don’t have anything that will…do remotely the kind of work that needs to be done…not even the best surgeons on our world can go that deep on a brain…”

“Transformations take root in the deepest parts of one’s existences.” Shadow said, placing a hand over Wu’s shoulders before her cool fingers lightly massaged his slouched shoulders, “That’s how they tried to break us all. By changing every ounce of who we think we were, they can then rebuild what remained to whatever’s needed for the task.”

“As far as I know…We can’t reverse this. Or at the very least, I don't know how without leading to...catastrophic failure...” Wu looked up at Lera with despair as he bit into his lips, “We…must stop them from converting anybody else. If what I had read about the third war is true, then anything that deals with demons is way above our pay grade.”

“We are not getting paid to do any of this.” Ita tilted her head with confusion, and Wu slapped himself on the forehead before standing up.

“D-don’t worry about it.” Wu said as Lera held onto his arm with concern.

“You going to be okay?” Lera asked.

“I…there are so many things I needed to create here.” Wu said, “But with everything going on, I just don’t know if we could do it…all of it.”

“We will. Together.” Lera shook Wu’s arms with every word as her shiny grey eyes forced him to focus towards her, “One step at a time. We need to stop the Descendant’s of Winter first.”

“Well, that just reduces our objectives.” Shadow said, turning around and raising a blade towards the neck of the Valkyrie when Ita jumped to stop her, “Kill the demons, kill the Descendant’s, and kill Caligo. Easy peasy!”

“HEY?! Weren’t they your sisters?” Ita asked, yanking onto Shadow’s wrist, “Don’t you feel anything for them?!”

“I don’t feel anything at all, which is great.” Shadow said, yanking the blade down when a dark beam sliced through the air in front of her, dispelling the blade. She growled angrily towards Wu, who fixed up his gauntlet and started walking towards her.

“Place a tracking Cast on her.” Wu said, “We'll see what the patrolling patterns are."

“And...we will let her go out into the wild to face her fate, whatever it may be~.” Shadow chuckled lightly before breaking apart of her remaining dark blade and sliding into the pocket of the Valkyries, “That’s rather cold of you.”

“Don't make this any harder than it is.” Wu walked past Shadow as Ita helped her carry the body of the Valkyrie out.

It was only another few days until the date of the general assembly. Although this wasn’t an event that was publicly advertised, the general trends of the Fang city crowds had started to slowly shift over time as more and more believers of Descendants of Winter started to congregate within the city bounds.

It was certainly easy fetching a believer’s uniform from fellow believers and opportunistic merchants, and with their outfits fully fashioned to hide their tools and weapons, Wu, Lera, Ita, Shadow, and the remainder of the sons and daughters of Leodora headed out from their scattering of safe houses.

The streets were filled with white-clothed believers, and capital city guards were stationed at every second street corner to ensure order.

“I am in position.” Lera murmured, “The Cast Array will be expanded to cover three blocks around the Fang city hall.”

“We are in position.” Wu glanced to Ita beside him who happily acted like his partner for this particular mission. Shadow’s doing what she does best by hiding in the shadows of the crowds.

“Aw, dear husband. You look exceedingly handsome today~” Ita said with great exaggeration before she pressed her face into Wu’s shoulder, making his heart skip a beat.

“Please don’t tease me like that…” Wu swallowed hard as Lera cleared her throat through the communication Cast, “We…need to focus.”

“With this many people around, there isn’t much we can do right now.” Ita whispered.

“We shall see.” Wu looked up as the architecture of the hall emerged from behind the rows of buildings. The gates were swung wide open, and the guards were ushering people in an orderly fashion, “If things went completely off the rails, we need to secure our exit first before worrying about other things.”

This reminded Wu of going to concerts or sporting events, and he didn’t even want to think about the toilet situation here.

Let’s just hope the morning sweet soup wasn’t too much on his stomach.

As the sunshine overhead and the bitter Talonia chill became replaced with a damp warmth, Wu and Ita found themselves standing in the second level of the main hall that overlooked an elevated stage hidden behind a wall of ice.

“Icy.” Wu murmured as Ita nodded.

It was another hour or so until there was finally movement behind the wall of ice. The crowd’s excited chatter slowly started to die down as gentle rhythmic chimes from a traditional instrument filled the air.

And with a single thundering crack, the ice wall split open, and the grand priest stepped forward into the limelight as the crowd erupted in applause.

Right beside her was Icy with her blue hair now brushed down regularly, and her light blue skin smoothened and whitened with makeup.

Then, even further behind them stood a figure with his face hidden behind a blank white veil, and a tall white-haired woman stood silently behind him with a hood covering her face.

“No shot.”