Lost Shards Of Heaven

He took a deep breath, standing just outside the pool of sickly grey light spilling from around a corner. He knew of only one substance that produced such a lifeless light, and that meant his goal was close at hand. Of course, it was only when faced with the unmoving light that he remembered his uniform was damaged, exposing his bare skin to the tainted light.

He sighed heavily, cracking his wrist several times as he psyched himself up to do something his master would batter him around the ears for even contemplating. With as weak a vector as the radiance of aetherium is and as small as the contact areas were, it was possible his demonically tainted flesh and soul might be able to resist long enough to purge the source.

He cracked his neck, sending a prayer to Frotzenglu for the endurance to survive this. He could feel the Iron Lord’s burning gaze settle upon him for a moment, a mere fraction of the ancient warrior’s attention splintered off to assess him, He let out a breath of relieve when he felt the faintest twinge of approval before the Lord Of Grinding War’s attention left him and their minor boon settled over him. He felt his flesh stiffen, growing vastly tougher to damage even as moving his joints felt like grinding overwound gears together in ways they didn’t want to, making every movement take some effort to achieve.

He sighed, feeling his lungs expand as he rotated his clicking joints; he was just as flexible as before, but every movement required more force to achieve and suddenly formerly unconscious movements needed conscious thought to perform. He could still breathe subconsciously, but little things like shifting his balance, turning his head, and even blinking now required active thought and effort. Still, considering the potential danger of asking for more than one Demon Lord’s boon, even when they are ostensibly allies, it was a better than expected outcome; perhaps the Lord Of Long War saw something he liked?

He shook his head, he knew better than to waste time wondering at the whims of demons; wiser men than he had gone mad trying to figure them out and he had more pressing concerns.

He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with as much oxygen as possible before releasing it slowly. As soon as he took his next breath, he threw himself around the corner and sprinted forward as fast as he could. It was only when he felt the lifeless light seep through the cracks in his armour and touch his skin did he realize he probably could have coated himself in hellfire to help block out the pestilent light.

He could almost feel the thought fly from his head the moment he laid eyes on what exactly was around that corner. Twelve foot tall even hunched over until its knuckles settled on the floor, covered in obscenely bulging muscles beneath almost liquid looking skin coloured like the most boring shade of grey imaginable, dressed loosely in silken rags absolutely dripping with symbols that may once have been holy but now pulsed with sickly grey light, and watching him with emotionless grey eyes and a wolf-toothed grin that nearly wrapped around their enlarged head. He recognized those traits on sight, even though he had never actually seen a Blighthulk for himself before; his master had been very thorough in ensuring he could recognize one of the greatest and most wretched of the Great Plague’s tools. To make things just a touch worse, he could see the malignant shine of what he instantly recognized as a cruelly curved dagger made of aetherium held in a backwards grip; of course what was a “dagger” in the hands of such a monster was closer to a good sized falchion to a normal man.

Hellfire sparked in his hand, blooming into a wildfire before him as he threw any hint of caution to the wind. He barely managed to throw himself out of the way as the wall of infernal flames was effortlessly pierced by a fist bigger around than his head. He rolled along the Blighted ground, seeing the floor shatter beneath the behemoth’s punch, shards of infested stone flying up as a crater formed around them. The watery grey light nearly hid it, but he could see shards of grey stone melting into the creature where they landed on it, healing it even as the red flames dancing along its arm burned away at its flesh and whatever passed for its soul. Its bare feet were partially sunken into the Blighted earth below it, absorbing the vile sickness in it faster than the flames burned it away for the brief moment before a wave of its arm sent its burning skin flying across the room.

The creature grinned at him, grey teeth reflecting the light beneath eyes like chips of barren stone. None of the joy on its face was reflected in those empty eyes.

He wanted to run, wanted to flee in the face of near certain death and just wait for his more qualified and healthy backup to show up and deal with this. He wasn’t prepared to fight something like this, his training had barely touched upon how to deal with these things! He wasn’t supposed to be dealing with a full blown Blight infestation like this for three more years!

But to run… to return to his master with his tail between his legs and let the soul breaker fester in the very heart of the mainland? He would rather die.

He clenched what remained of his fist, spitting worryingly pink saliva through a crack in his mask as he stood up. Staring into the soulless eyes of the antithesis of everything he believes in, he couldn’t help but smile sarcastically.

So much for this being a relatively safe mission.

I sighed, laying back in my borrowed bed. It felt good to be able to lay down on my back again, just one more of the little things you don’t think about until you find yourself unable to do them. I tried to actually get some proper sleep, but like always when I had an idea in my head that didn’t correlate well to dreaming about, I struggled to actually slip into slumber. Eventually, my mind wandered to analyzing the events of the last few… hours? I didn’t know how long it had truly been, but I supposed it didn’t matter much either.

The thing that stood out the most, demonic ritual aside, was that Markus had a fucking gun. It wasn’t any model I recognized, but it was most definitely a revolver of some sort despite every piece of architecture and cultural affectation I saw screaming that I was in a medieval fantasy land. I hadn’t seen anyone else using guns, hadn’t heard any gunshots during the outbreak and subsequent fire, and I hadn’t seen any real evidence of modern or even eighteen hundreds level tech anywhere else.

My mind ran through the possibilities, trying to get a better grip on the situation. Number one, it’s possible guns are very rare and possibly still handcrafted with preindustrial means, though that wouldn’t explain why some backwater gang leader had one. Considering this was a world were magic and personal metamorphosis were very real things, I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the majority of people just didn’t consider the effort of developing firearms technology worth it when a guy with a sword or wand (or whatever mages use here) and lots of training could achieve similar results for less money; bows had suffered a similar fate historically, being abandoned before reaching their peak because new tech that was better at the baseline came around, after all. If a mage can cast a fireball that can take out a house after training for the same amount of time it takes to make a cannon that can do similar but also requires ammunition, transport, and maintenance, it wouldn’t surprise me if most nations wouldn’t bother despite my knowledge of just how far such technology can go. I also couldn’t ignore the possibility I was just in a really shitty part of the world that had little to no access to technological developments, there were places back home that wouldn’t have looked out of place centuries earlier after all. It could also be -and likely was- some combination of factors, I just didn’t have enough data to come to a reasonably certain conclusion yet.

When my ideas started looping, I decided to move on to considering something else until I could actually confirm any of these theories. I hummed over the buzzing in my neck as I contemplated what exactly it meant that I was now in a street gang. Most importantly, it means that I’ve automatically made an enemy of any of the other gangs operating in the area and any law enforcement this city may have. Not a big change, all things considered, I was probably going to make enemies of them anyway. On the plus side, I now have access to the benefits of a gang; backup, weaponry, a safe and consistent place to sleep, so on and so forth. None of it reliable, but still present. I didn’t know enough about the enemies I’ve made or the gang I’d joined to say whether it was the best option, but it was the only one I had.

I hate that, hate it with every fiber of my being. It’s not even that I necessarily wouldn’t have joined this band of hooligans (though I probably wouldn’t have), it’s the sheer fact that I didn’t have a choice. I hated being forced to do anything, hated being under anyone else’s command. I silently railed against my circumstances, vowing once more to see all that Markus had built reduced to ashes in his mouth.

It was with those thoughts of festering indignation and hate in my mind, that I finally drifted off to sleep. I dreamed of fire and screams, of laughter and tears under grey skies. I dreamed of vengeance, and power. I dreamed of weeping wounds, and the buzzing of hungry flies.