Strolvath and the Inquisitor stepped through that Fog Gate expecting immediate resistance, so it was a welcome if brief moment of preparation when they saw the locust hive that awaited them. It utterly consumed their vision, sure, but there was only one entryway whose doorman didn’t seem to be alarmed at the slightest. After the first couple swings of that blue-flaming Aquilla Calibur, the Doorman’s immovable silence quickly turned to panicked squealing and scrambling of the creature’s undersized feet.

Dozens more skittering feet soon followed as the hive came awake, at which point Strolvath saw fit to begin playing. Without any guarantee that sonic assault would be effective, he simply played an Ignis-aligned flamenco whilst he peppered in wordless vocalizations. He intended to let the Inquisitor’s sword blaze a path, and its blue flames did indeed burst forth yet more viciously with every chord he played.

She just kept hacking away, but he noticed the subtle turn of her head and slight nod of acknowledgment. When the Doorman finally collapsed under its own weight, all hell broke loose. The gas-masked, plate-armored operative methodically and calmly cut a path into the hive, and Strol gladly followed in her wake.

It was a relatively small hive, just a glorified blockade really, but the extermination was still a mess. Focusing mostly on covering the Inquisitor’s advance, he had to keep an eye on her and make sure nothing got into her blind spots. The wordless exclamations of his song quickly became the ever-familiar word that accompanied his right-legged kicks: “BUNKER!”

He could see the stake momentarily heating to molten-orange whenever it came out, feeling its heat spreading out through his leg. The fact that this interaction existed shouldn’t have surprised him, yet it briefly did, as Strolvath hadn’t had his prosthetic for long enough to use it whilst also performing essentia amplification. Whilst he wouldn’t need to use it more often than once every couple seconds, he still ended up killing over a dozen drones and three warriors, not to mention another Sage-damned stained-glass Locust Noble. This one went right for him, swiping with huge, stupid-looking claws - not because they were made of chitin, but because they weren’t blades. Just… Oversized, pointy fingers, only dangerous if the bug managed to get a solid grip on him.

The Locust Noble was granted deliverance via pilebunker to the skull, all the while the Inquisitor kept slashing away. Only, something seemed a little off about how she fought. Strolvath noticed the subtle hesitation, the double-takes, the moments where she stopped dead to decide. The gaps were small enough to not be an issue in a situation like this, but against a more substantial foe they could spell their death. Why didn’t she use any of the Inquisitors’ myriad other techniques, or just pull one of her guns?

When the hive was finally purged of locust life and they had a moment to breathe, Strol shook as much viscera out of his boot as he could, still closely observing the gas-masked woman, thinking over her apparent self-restraint. With the finally sparks of her sword as she sheathed it, it dawned on him, and he called her out on it without hesitation.

“Hey, I’ve got somethin’ I’ve gotta tell you,” he said, beckoning her over. She shot him an annoyed glare and approached with an equal degree of irritation and guarded caution, tilting her head in a wordless question.

Strolvath grinned at her and spilled everything, “Just so you know, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t hold off on using things that could save the mission, or our lives for that matter. I know ‘bout the Stars of Calamity, I know that you can do things like boil people alive from the inside out. I also know that, as of the end of the war, you lot are pretty much the biggest surviving group of Grekurian cultivators. You ain’t got a whole lot to hide from me besides how ugly your mug is under that gas mask.”

With each mention of things she could do, the Inquisitor grew ever so slightly less composed, until at the very end, anger visibly flashed through her eyes. She raised her hands to angrily gesture something, only to change what was obviously going to be an expletive into a more mundane, if curt question.

“Why would you let me know that you know?” she questioned without trying to hide her distrust.

“See, you’re going off the misinformed assumption that your capabilities are more sensitive information than the fact that I have a glyphic cold-iron pilebunker in my fuckin’ leg,” Strolvath explained, raising his right leg, shaking it to make the stake fall out before stomping it back into place to illustrate his point.

“And yet, I didn’t hesitate so much as a second to use it. Y’know why? ‘Cause it doesn’t matter if you know,” he continued, staring down that blank-faced gas mask. “We’re under the same employer now, n’ somethin’ tells me you’re not particularly keen on working for the cunts across the wall that want to put Ikesians in “re-education” gulags. So don’t you go trying to hide things I already know of.”

Strolvath had gone off a little more than he’d initially intended to, though the effect was indisputable. For a moment the Inquisitor stared him down, motionless. Then, she undid her coat and pulled a four-barreled masterwork pepperbox from within. Without even acknowledging the verbal reaming, she simply moved ahead towards the hive’s surviving doorman. After pulling a fuel gem out of her coat pocket and gripping it in her free hand, a wisp of Fog vented from her mask and a crimson-orange corona surrounded her right arm.

There was very visible anger behind the way she delivered the Ignis-enhanced punch to the helpless living door’s back, to which its back split open and steam gushed from its breathing tubes as it was cooked alive.

“Musta yanked a string, huh?” the singer thought to himself, catching up to the Inquisitor whilst she carved a path through the carcass with her flaming sword.

Their conversation over lunch over and done with, Makhus and Sigmund each turned to their duties in the store. Sig had naturally slipped into the role of the shopkeeper, in large part due to his ironclad calm demeanor. The rest of the reason was that Makhus simply didn’t have the time, spending most of the day down in the lab flitting between three or four different glass tangles, so as to produce basic medical elixirs. They could sell Liquid Vigor and undercut any local competition, but that wouldn’t exactly be smart business, since the aforementioned competition only sold elixirs as part of a larger repertoire.

Thus, the lone alchemist had come up with a reliable workflow for himself, a means of consistently finishing a batch of multiple completely different alchemic products. It took him three hours and seventeen minutes per batch, with which in mind he had already gotten through four full runs of the process before the deal with the governor.

Four batches of all-purpose skin cream, local anesthetic, sleeping pills, and most importantly, nootropic powder. The powder was a screamingly bright fluorescent yellow, as fine as the finest flour, and tartly sour in taste. It was named “Daytime Dust” for the sunstreaks that its pure form left on damn-near anything it touched. The other name - “Yellow Snow” - was a low-brow term insinuating the Citrinitas used in its production was extracted from urine, even though urine contained only trace amounts of the aforementioned essentia.

It was popular with scholars and alchemists in the North, but rarely issued to soldiers due to the fact doses beyond the functional minimum caused semi-euphoric effects that certain higher-ups feared would have soldiers abusing it for fun. Such things very much happened in parts of the country before, during, and after the war, even without the yellow powder. After all, those who wished to be intoxicated could easily do so with more mundane substances, like opium, coca leaves, or plain old alcohol.

Makhus knew better than to even think of playing drug dealer - he would further refine the raw powder into tonics that he would fortify with mundane substances like fish oil and small concentrations of Viriditas. He would play the snake-oil salesman that delivers on what he advertises. However, formulating the product and coming up with a name was a job that he would leave for later. Perhaps let Sigmund handle some of it, seeing as the historian’s education in mundane matters was, frankly, well beyond Makhus’ own.

For now Makhus spiked his own tea with Daytime Dust and Viriditas, turning his reinforced mental fortitude towards getting the Philosopher’s Heart set up and ready for production. Digging up the former owner’s books, gathering the glassware, moving tables and things to make space for the assembly… Just the prep work ended up costing him a good hour of time, and another half-hour before he had the damn thing put together. It was rudimentary, it took up more space that it needed to, but it was robust and he would be able to simply swap out parts when he inevitably wanted to use the Heart for something other than Fivefold Philter.

The thought of refining the Necrobeast Infusion kept on gnawing at the back of his head, but he knew it would be foolish to try anything now. No, he would get the three doses of Fivefold Philter done, and then take his sweet time working out the impurities of his personal work.

So it was that Makhus took a sip of his tea and removed the glass phials of salt-suspended essentia from their case.

Next came the brass scale with its myriad tiny weights, combined with an array of tiny phials to hold the measured-out portions. He began the mind-numbing process of measuring out the ingredients and grouping the portions together by which step of the process he would use them in. It made him slip into a stygian mental state wherein he needed to be just focused enough to feel the minutes crawling by, and by the time it was all measured he’d spent thirty-seven minutes as well as drunk another cup of spiked tea.

So many incremental additions, so many checks and balances… Only for him to toss them aside in the process itself.

Makhus knew to follow proper procedure, that much was true, but he also had an eye for these things. He knew when to add a little bit more here, a little less there, when to crank the heat or adjust a tube. It was a skill he’d cultivated throughout his career as a self-taught alchemist, an application of what he’d learned in his short time with the Sanger Family.

Much like a slight turn of the wrist could turn a whiffed slash into the killing stroke in a swordfight, a slight adjustment of the apparatus or ingredient portioning could vastly improve the quality of an elixir.

Or, perhaps, Makhus just couldn’t help himself, driven to experimentation even in spite of the fact he knew exactly how to make Fivefold Philter correctly.

First, he had to dissolve a phial of the governor’s semi-congealed blood in a solution of ethanol, infused with but a single drop of liquid Aether. It was done in a simple reaction flask placed over an Ignis burner, the top plugged with a quartz stopper for most of the process. The sample dissolved into the faintly glowing solution quickly, becoming a vague, nearly translucent cloud of pale red.

“Oh, he really is as fucked up as he looks…” Makhus muttered to himself, squinting at the anemic solution. This wasn’t supposed to, or rather, wasn’t known to happen with any but the most thin-blooded or deficient patients. The sample was meant to fully incorporate and turn the solution completely blood-red. He hadn’t learned enough about the process to know what to do in this case, but his first instinct was to just add enough pure Rubedo to make up for the deficiency.

As his instincts told him, he did, retrieving the special seal-bottle and unsealing it. He filled a smaller flask halfway, plugging it with a very narrow dropper nozzle that was angled off to the side. He had raised the flask and almost undid the stopper, but… The change could occur instantly and suddenly, or it could be something small and subtle.

He’d need to be able to see it happen, and he wasn’t going to burn his Rubedo reserves the way the Governor had done to himself. It made no difference that the governor had done it the way it usually happens to people whilst Makhus was outright burning his reserve to fuel a sensory enhancement technique.

So, Makhus just took a swig of liquid Rubedo right out of the seal-bottle, a much bigger one than he’d intended to. The smokey, bloody smell slammed his sinuses with all the force of an artillery cannon. Red Fog poured from his nose and it burned horrendously on the way down, not to mention the sudden flood of primal instinct balanced on the razor edge between absolute rage and absolute lust. For a moment, it felt like he was back in the trenches.

“Hnrgh… S-storage Glyph, come the fuck on!” he growled under his breath, forcefully corking the bottle whilst he fought for self-control. Then, the worst of it passed whilst his tattoos turned blood-red a third of the way from his wrists to his elbows. He was still far, far more heated than he would’ve liked to be, but there was no turning back now. In his current headspace, Makhus was absolutely certain it would be better to just use Sensory Enhancement at its full potency to burn the excess Rubedo rather than try to perform Rubedo Purgation on himself.

“S.S.S.S. Arts: Sensory Enhancement!” he murmured, blinking a few times as his pupils dilated and even the slighted of ambient noises filled his ears. The alchemist could feel the slightest brush of his clothes against his skin, even the air escaping his nostrils as it moved his facial hair.

He took a deep breath, steadying himself as much as his pounding heart would let him, and pulled the stopper out of the bubbling, cloudy solution. With his right, he grasped the dropper-topped flask of Rubedo and cautiously started dropping the liquid in, watching the solution so cautiously he forgot to blink. Even as he felt his eyes drying out and growing achy, he unconsciously didn’t blink.

Drip… Drop… Drip…

Drop… Drip… Drop…

Drip…

Droplet after droplet, until the cloudy solution slowly began reacting properly and turning a uniform blood-red. His eyes felt full of sand by the time it was done, but it was fine. He just willed his pupils to constrict and took care to blink more often than usual, allowing the effects of Sensory Enhancement to run their course on the rest of his senses.

Finally, he could get to working with the Heart. Of its four necks, one had nothing more than a black quartz stopper, held in place by a silver clasp. Out came the stopper and into the heart the blood-red liquid went, sloshing about as it surrounded the rings and the black core. Somehow, he could see both the core and the rings through the opaque liquid with perfect clarity.

Next, came the meticulous process of adding ingredients and adjusting the tangle of glassware until it was just right. When he was certain it was light, when he had triple-checked everything, that was when Makhus finally started the burner and opened the valves. Brass rings turning, churning the solution, their glyphs glowing. At first slowly, then faster and faster. And within the core, a spark of light. Outlandish refractions of the liquid’s real colour, which tickled behind the eyes when gazed upon. It sparked with each revolution of the rings, faster and faster as the fluid separated out into black and green liquid, climbing the Heart’s crystalline walls through two of its necks into the rest of the alchemic apparatus.

Each revolution of the brass rings was a flash of light from the black core, and Makhus knew it would soon be time for the next step.

Step by step, minute by minute, hour by hour, Makhus immersed himself in the steady progression through the numerous steps of this opus. To think that, centuries ago, this liquid was considered the elixir of immortality, yet here he was, a self-taught fraud of an alchemist, making it to help some politician cope with overwork.

The rest of the process wasn’t as difficult as it was meticulous. Perform a step, watch for the reaction, adjust the array as necessary. Over. And over. And over again. The liquid held concentrations of essentia well beyond the saturation point of water and ethanol, forced into a stable solution by the Heart’s machinations.

Before he even noticed time pass in this windowless workplace, he peered at a clock and saw that it was getting close to evening, just as his work on the first dose was reaching the halfway point. Even knowing how time-consuming this was did nothing to alleviate that feeling of vanished time. How many cups of spiked tea had he downed? Six? Seven? Enough that, were he using Daytime Dust on its own, his mouth or nose would’ve been dyed yellow by now.

At this point in the process, it was stable enough that he could afford to take a break, to turn off the burner and actually eat something. In fact, if he wanted to, he could just leave the Heart sitting for days and resume the process as if nothing had happened. Thus, Makhus made his way out of the lab and up the stairs, hearing the muffled sound of Sigmund speaking to some customer or another on his way to the upper floor.

Another piece of chicken, a pear, some bread. Simple, but good, even if the fruit was almost sickly-sweet. Then it was back to the lab. Back to work.

Some two-thirds into the process, he had to take another swig of liquid Rubedo to make absolutely positively sure he wouldn’t make a mistake during a crucial step. He could put up with the unpleasantness of drinking more Rubedo far more easily than he could deal with a ruined first batch.

With Sensory Enhancement at its full capacity, he could hear not just everything in the lab, but even a good deal of what was going on upstairs. If he really listened, he could make out the weird noises that Sigmund was making in the backyard. Sounded like he was doing some sort of exercise, even this late after they’d closed. A little while later, he could make out the beardo’s stomping footsteps as he went upstairs.

When at last the alchemic apparatus fell silent, when the Philosopher’s Heart grew calm and motionless, that was when Makhus finally took it and poured its contents into a separate containment flask. The Philter ran the entire spectrum of colours before the colour faded and it became transparent. Barely-visible iridescent threads swirled about and glistened within it as the sign that the final stage had been successful. It didn’t look like much, but its appearance fit its purpose - to force a body into balance, to bold-facedly rip someone from the downward spiral of constant stress with no rest.

Putting it away securely in a cabinet he let out a sigh of relief, yet calm didn’t come. His containment glyph tattoo was still red, ever so slightly.

“No choice but to ride it out, I guess,” he sighed inwardly, internal tension building in the absence of something to focus it towards. For a while he did his best to calm down, even considered going through the extra hassle of doing Rubedo Purgation on himself, but… He couldn’t stop himself wanting to fiddle with the Philosopher’s Heart, and so took it to the sink to wash it out in preparation for a personal experiment. There was no residue within the flask and this was mostly just good operational procedures, but he never got past the point of listlessly cleaning what was already clean.

There was a strange noise from the storefront.

“A customer trying to come in after closing?” the high-strung alchemist wondered, setting down the Heart and making his way over to the lab door out of paranoid curiosity. No, he hoped it was a customer trying to come in after closing, even if his instincts screamed otherwise. What he heard wasn’t someone banging on the door to see if someone’s inside, but subtle fiddling. Yanks and pushes, followed by silence.

Opening the door of the lab as quietly as he could, the sound came flooding in, and he was certain it was no customer. From all the way down there, he could hear them fiddling with the door, even muffled speech. There were certainly multiple voices, but he wasn’t sure how many. It was whispered, too muddled to make out single words, but it wasn’t the hard-edged utilitarian speech of Ikesia or Grekuria.

It sounded sing-songy.

Tonal.

Pateirian.

His left eye twitching and with Makhus still strung out on Daytime Dust and Rubedo, the soldier instincts in the back of his mind took over. He looked around for where he’d dropped his war-knife when he came down here, finding it in the corner behind the door, sheath and all.

Getting his hands on it and pulling it free took only a couple seconds, but in that short span he heard the front door opening to the sound of hushed words, now very recognizably Pateirian. There were four voices, one of which he remembered from earlier that day.

“That sleazebag…” he seethed, quietly slipping through the lab’s door and ascending the stairs, blade at the ready in his off-hand. He wasn’t exactly ambidextrous, but he wasn’t going to risk ripping his wound open with sudden movements.

Just as he reached the top and decisively stepped out into the hallway that ran from the storefront to the yard, he heard the intruders curiously walking about in the storefront. The sounds of click-clacking as one of them picked up a seal-bottle, mechanical clacking as another tried fruitlessly to work the cash register.

It would’ve been smart to get Sigmund and deal with the intruders together, but Makhus wasn’t in that type of mental state. No, instead he sucked in a deep breath and strode through the door to the storefront, Fog trailing from the corners of his mouth.

“You fuckers wanna die?!” he barked, and the four men froze in place at the sight of him. In the near-darkness, he could still see them clearly enough when he adjusted Sensory Enhancement to dilate his pupils. All four of them wore old-model gas masks that covered up the lower halves of their faces, though only one had a filter canister. That one being, of course, the sleazy asshole he’d met earlier that day, who stood smack-dab in the middle of the store with a cane in hand and a sparklock pistol on his hip.

To the sleazebag’s left was a towering mass of meat and muscle, perfectly bald and almost two meters tall by Makhus’s estimation. Baggy trousers, heavy build, dark skin. Probably a Grekurian immigrant. His left hand gripped a big, chunky knife, bordering on a cleaver.

He didn’t take note of the remaining two yet, besides their general silhouettes. The one that had gotten behind the register was small and lanky, possibly an adolescent, whilst the third one - off to the right of the sleazebag - looked so normal and unassuming that it made him stand out even more, especially with the lockpicks sticking out of his pants pocket. No visible weapons, but Makhus suspected that the bulge in the other pocket was a pocket pistol.

Makhus took a step towards the sleazy one, shifting his stance to ready himself for combat. An unsettling focus shone behind the man’s eyes with such intensity as to rival Makhus’s Rubedo-amplified fury, to the point that it momentarily snapped him out of it. Just long enough that, instead of lunging and breaking the standoff, he considered trying to talk it out. Well, at least for as long as it would take Sigmund to come down to even the numbers a little. He could hear his compatriot moving upstairs, but going by the lack of reaction from the intruders, they couldn’t.

“Seriously? Breakin’ in on the same fuckin’ day?” he laughed indignantly. “At least wait a couple days, idiot.”

Instead of responding, the sleazebag’s eyes shifted to his right, briefly stopping on the stairs to the basement before snapping to the larger man. He barked something in Pateirian, but it was drowned out by a sudden commotion from upstairs.

Sigmund came running within seconds, shirtless and draped with loose, burning bandages. Both his beard and his eyes smoldered with an infernal glow, as did the charred portions of his skin, pulsating to the rhythm of a slow heartbeat. The historian looked like he was wrapped in flaming tentacles. His eyes instantly locked to the largest thug, whose free hand still gripped a seal-bottle of Liquid Vigor.

Propelled by inhuman, explosive movements, he leapt down the stairs and into the storefront feet-first at the target of his ire. Sig’s legs clamped around the large man’s head like a vice, and with a twist of his torso he flipped the lumbering mass of muscle into an unwilling forward somersault, ending up with the man face-down and Sigmund on top of him. The bottle slipped from his grip and came spinning through the air, to which Makhus responded by catching it with his free hand. He pulled the cork with his teeth and took a swig, maintaining eye contact with the intruders’ sleazy leader all along.

The mass of muscle thrashed and struggled, even as Sig grabbed his arms and pulled them back so forcefully one could see the shoulder joints stretching, threatening to dislocate. Sigmund even kicked the knife away, well out of reach. Makhus recognized that choke, that arm hold, both things taught to physically able soldiers in “CQC Basics 101”. But that headscissor takedown, that was something else.

It was the sleazy one and the unassuming one that were the real threats here, with the big man out of commission. The figure behind the counter wasn’t even moving, just curled up into a ball in the corner, having given up on trying to get the register open.

Makhus reveled in watching the sleazy one’s eyes frantically flick between Sigmund, him, and the unassuming man. The realization that he wasn’t fucking with crippled, mangled veterans was sinking in. Sigmund rose to his feet when he was sure the big guy wasn’t getting up anytime soon, staring down the two remaining intruders with utter calm, even as his bandages went up in flames.

A hysterical laugh echoed from the sleazebag. A scared one, a panicked one. The laugh of a man who knew he might very well die in the next minute. He took a breath, then attacked… The unassuming man to his left.

He slipped behind him and choked him out with practiced precision, before the man could react. A small sparklock pistol fell from his pocket as he slid to the floor, unconscious but alive. The sleazebag quickly straightened his jacket and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, surprising both Sig and Makhus.

“Fuck me, I didn’t expect a Victory Demon in the flesh. Don’t go burning yourself out, I’m not a threat,” he remarked at the smoldering historian setting his eyes to Makhus.

Though the last of his Rubedo intoxication was finally starting to fade, the alchemist was absolutely still far from calm.

He stepped forward ready to kill, growling at the man, “Explain. Now.”

With an innocent smile that only a career charlatan could pull off, the sleazebag spilled his lot, “I am an independent investigator under the employ of a broker, who is under the employ a mole in Willowdale’s senate, who is under the direct employ of Pateiria’s Ministry of State Security. My broker said you lot were just some random foot soldiers that slipped by. I was to check on you, make sure you weren’t stockpiling guns or somesuch, so I hired some help after our little talk. Figured we’d case the joint, make sure you didn’t have anything more that that tarnished steel you say you’d kill or die for.”

“...Yer a fuckin’ Pateirian spy, and you’re just spillin’ the beans like that?” Sigmund cut in, his voice reverberating with a fervent mixture of disbelief and hatred. “Bullshit.”

The sleazebag looked over, and conceded the point with a nod. “Other agents would sooner die than admit anything besides their allegiance to the Emperor, yes. I, however, hold no such loyalty. This whole affair is as irritating to me as it is to you. They’ve got me by the short and curlies, so I gotta play along at least a little bit.”

“What about the accent?” Makhus questioned, prompting the sleazebag to turn his head again.

He replied dryly, with an absolutely perfect Grekurian accent, “It’s called playing a role. I couldn’t just up and split, so I played up the shady agent act to let folks like you know to be careful around me.”

Before either of the two soldiers could question him further the man continued speaking, holding that Grekurian accent with no apparent effort.

“Frankly? I don’t give a shit. Keep the war-knife, and the surplus sparklocks you probably have upstairs,” he said. “But they get suspicious unless I send something back, and if they don’t hear from me at all they’ll keep sending agents less willing to cooperate with “the enemy” than I am. Surely you have something surplus I could use to placate them.”

Sigmund and Makhus exchanged looks, a wordless debate as to whether they would rather risk letting the home invaders live or deal with the fallout of killing. The law was on their side in this case, thanks to Willowdale’s deeply entrenched castle doctrine. That being said, Makhus wasn’t exactly eager to kill without reason, and the sleazebag clearly wasn’t trying to fight. Not to mention, blood in the storefront would drive away customers and be a huge pain to clean.

He sighed, and lowered his blade.

“Fine,” he said, “I’ll get you an old bayonet. Sig, choke him out if he so much as moves a muscle.”

Sigmund gave a slow nod, grumbling an affirmative, “Mhrrm.”

“This is fuckin’ bullshit…” the alchemist murmured to himself, rifling through the kitchen drawers. It didn’t take him long to find the bayonet he’d put there when they first arrived, looking it over. The old thing was still decently sharp, with only a few chinks to its edge, since he’d used it mostly to cut food back in the E.Z.

Makhus wasn’t even sure if the thing had ever drawn the blood of a human. It didn’t matter, now. Shutting the drawer and going back down the stairs, he noticed that the lanky figure that had been behind the counter was now standing next to the unassuming man’s unconscious body, still trying to blend in. It was either a very small-framed adult, or an adolescent, and going by those big ol’ eyes he wagered the latter.

“Here’s your surplus,” he said to the sleazebag, tossing the knife over handle-first, preparing himself to fight if the man tried to use it. No such thing happened, though. It clattered to the ground near his feet, and the man slowly bent down to pick it up, stowing it away under his belt.

Flashing a smile so sweet it was unpleasant, the man backed up towards the door, hands still held up, “I’ll tell them you’re shellshock-ridden conscripts.”

“Uh-huh. Don’t bother calling a guardsman, too much attention,” the alchemist said, to which the sleazy one just quietly opened the door and slipped out.

“A-are you going to...?” the smaller one asked with the voice of a young girl, clearly fearing for her life.

“Kick you lot out of my fuckin’ store, yeah,” he admonished, not particularly eager to beat a child. “Get out, and don’t do this kind of shit ever again. Next time you won’t get off this easy, kid.”

The youth said nothing, instead just panickedly scrambling to get out. Once she was gone, Sigmund let out a long, deep sigh, the infernal glow fading out. Almost right afterward, a thunderous grumble sounded from his stomach.

“Let’s get these idiots out of here,” the historian sighed, bending down to grab the larger man’s arms, pulling him along the ground towards the door. Makhus did the same, grabbing the inconspicuous man’s arms and dragging him out front, making sure to do most of the work with his good arm.

They dragged the two men into a nearby back alley and just left them sitting propped up against the wall As quickly and as quietly as they could, the two men returned to their store and locked it up as tightly as they could, leaving the key in the door and even placing a wooden wedge under it.

When they were certain the door was secure they simply returned to business as usual, retreating upstairs to decide what they’d do next over dinner.

“You sure we don’t want to call the guardsmen?” Sigmund questioned. He deftly cut up the remnants of the chicken whilst Makhus cleaned vegetables, the historian’s stomach gurgling almost constantly.

Makhus shook his head, arguing that, “If he was telling the truth and there really is a Pateirian mole in the senate, we’d just bring unwanted attention to ourselves.”

To normal civilians, such a home invasion would’ve been a harrowing experience.

To the two veterans, it was an annoyance at most.

Not because it was any less stressful, but because they were numb to it.