Sadea’s brain throbbed painfully in her skull. Her augmentations had filtered most of the alcohol out of her system, but they’d also accelerated the onset of the most dreaded consequence of drinking too much: the hangover.

She sat on a stack of wooden pallets, her legs dangling over the side, and held her temples in her hands. The mercenaries’ voices rang painfully in her ears, their inane babble punctuated by the occasional one-word responses from Raksha.

He was sitting next to her, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, and doing his best to ignore the Stammerers, who were piling them with compliments that were equal parts many congratulatory or appreciative and backhanded or sarcastic.

Only the martial scientist named Mingyu hung back, leaning against a permacrete pillar. She glared at Raksha, a murderous expression on her face.

There must be a really juicy story there. I’m going to dig it out of the dummy, one way or the other.

As always, the martial scientist wore a mask of sullen stoniness on his face, but his eyes seemed unnaturally bright, and his seemingly stoic demeanor didn’t quite hide the underlying impatience and excitement that bubbled beneath its surface.

“You’re enjoying this,” Sadea accused, wincing at the sound of her own voice. Raksha gave her a sidelong glance and scoffed.

“What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“Everything.” Sadea groaned, covering her eyes to shield them from the glare of the lamps scattered throughout the warehouse. “You’re so simple-minded I can read you like a book.”

Raksha grunted and turned away, but Sadea could tell she’d struck a nerve in him, which meant that her guess had hit the mark. What was it about this entire fiasco that he found so pleasing? The rabid, murderous mutants? The conniving nobles and their schemes? The megapolis’s stifling, polluted air? The fact that Leona would have already executed them if they hadn’t agreed to do her bidding? She wanted another drink.

“Great Lady Leona wants a word with the two of you,” Rini said, pushing her way through the mercenaries clustered around them.

“Leave me alone. Tell her to go kill herself,” Sadea moaned. “You should kill yourself, too.”

Something not too unlike a steel cable wrapped around her waist and picked her up. Sadea opened her eyes and let her head hang limply. Raksha was carrying her under his arm as if she were a rolled-up rug. He brought her toward the scrying mirror that she’d caught a glimpse of before the haunter’s attack.

That’s expensive stuff. Nothing but the best for our Great Lady Leona, after all.

“Come no closer,” the Stammerers’ sorcerer said, holding up his hand and halting Raksha’s advance nearly ten feet away from the mirror.

“I see it now. You’re wreathed in some kind of psychic nullification field,” he continued and pointed at Sadea. “But it’s somehow not affecting her. How is that even poss... whatever. That’s not important. Stand right there. Don’t get too close to my scrying mirror. God knows what disaster that might cause.”

Raksha shrugged and put Sadea down on the floor, where she gratefully did her best to resemble a formless heap, a posture in which her head seemed to hurt the least.

The mirror hummed, and Leona’s image appeared in its glassy face. The Hegemonic Lady was sitting atop a simple wooden stool. Behind her, maps and charts adorned the canvas interior of what appeared to be a military tent. She wore dark combat fatigues, with golden braids dripping from her shoulder epaulettes and rank pins sitting above her left breast pocket.

A pale, longhaired man stood beside her. He was clad in plain robes of a charcoal-black hue, and his hands were covered in gloves of a similar color. Sadea noticed that his feet were bare and hovering an inch above the floor. A sorcerer, then.

Leona smiled her cold, cruel smile. When she spoke, her voice sounded tinny and distant, an effect of farseeing psy-comms. “I see the two of you have had the pleasure of meeting Antonius, then? Pleasant fellow, isn’t he?”

“Needs to be put down and flushed like the shit he is,” Raksha said.

The Hegemonic Lady chuckled. “In that we agree. Now tell me, what do you make of the entire situation?”

“Neo-Mizuru is plagued by a serf-uprising incited by Antonius’s oppressive policies and inflamed by a heretical cult of mutants.” Sadea raised her head and looked Leona’s psychic image in the eye. “Why didn’t you just kill the bastard? Uh, Great Lady.”

“Then we will have to hunt down every noble and their Households in the megapolis as well, something we’re not in a position to do, since most of our troops are engaged on the frontline,” Rini explained. “You saw how loyal they all are to him.”

“And with him as their rallying point, they’ll be less likely to scatter from your regard, going to ground their resources and continuing to be a thorn in your side,” Sadea reasoned.

The same principle was present in hunting heretics. Slaying a cult’s leader was usually the most efficient way to wipe it out, but more often than not, a replacement would emerge to rally the scattered remnants, and sooner rather than later, the entire cycle of raiding, human sacrifices, and prayers to demons would start anew. Sometimes, it was better to leave the heretic leader alive, have all the cultist flock to him, her, or it, and then burn the whole lot, preferably alive.

“Antonius’s nobles are on the hunt right now, and they’re going to be prowling around Neo-Mizuru’s bowels, trying to dig up whatever heretics got caught in the psychic markers at the palace. Conveniently enough, they also won’t be in their fortress-mansions, surrounded by the full force of their Household soldiery,” she continued.

“I’m not your assassin,” Raksha snarled. “I’m here to kill whatever came out of those fruit-things.”

“I know.” The smile dropped from Leona’s face. It was replaced by an ominous glower, the Hegemonic Lady obviously not appreciating Raksha’s tone. “And that’s what you’ll do, alongside the Slayer-Class Living Weapon. Antonius’s court is not your concern.”

“Yeah, I figured. That’s what these clowns are here for.” Sadea swept her war-staff around in an arc that encompassed the Stammerers and Rini. “Well, good luck hunting down nobles through mutant-infested hydroponic corridors.”

The pale sorcerer beside Leona suddenly lurched forward, his robed form blocking the mirror’s view of the Hegemonic Lady. He peered beyond Raksha and Sadea, looking to the scorched and scarred where the planar haunter had emerged.“Wait. What happened to my Shadow Tunnel?”

“We collapsed it,” Sadea told him. “Oops.”

“What?” he shrieked. “Do you know how difficult and expensive it was to establish?”

So Leona has a shadow sorcerer at her disposal? Interesting. Sadea grinned and stuck her middle finger up at him. “Don’t know. Don’t care. Your tunnel was worthless garbage. A goddamned planar haunter followed us through it.”

“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you both!” the sorcerer raved, foaming at the mouth. “Then I will defile your corpses for a year!”

“Going to be difficult to do that while screaming yourself to death with your guts spilled, you little shit,” Raksha said, putting his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“You—!”

“Yukio!” Leona snapped. “Shut up and get out of my way!”

Muttering under his breath, the sorcerer complied. Leona came into view once more as Yukio returned to his post by her side. She was pinching the bridge of her nose, as if she were trying to massage a migraine away.

“...surrounded by idiots,” Leona grumbled, before reopening her eyes and fixing Raksha and Sadea with her imperious glare. “Rini told me you’ve also encountered the leader of the heretics. Judging from that, can you determine if the Tree of Hearts is a factor here?”

“She mentioned the Hunter. He grew the Tree of Hearts,” Raksha said. “If he’s involved, then the Tree’s fruits are involved.”

“The mutants accompanying the heretic leader bear a similar, though non-identical, psychic signature to the chimera and the mortuary demon,” Sadea added. “Also, the stigmata of mutation on their flesh is recent. All these point to the presence of some external corrupting influence, such as one of those damned fruits.”

“Spoken like a true hunter of heretics.” Leona nodded. “Very well. Go, then. Kill them all. Leave nothing impure alive.”