...All with a heavy Pateirian accent and an utter lack of genuinity, as if he’d phonetically rehearsed everything he’d said up until now. Just to be careful, out of pure instinct, Zefaris took a breath of Fog and willed her Homunculus Eye to dilate. A fifth of a second before it happened she saw it, something slipping into his hand from inside his sleeve, a jade-green rectangular something.

“Heretics, be granted he Emperor’s Grac-” hollered the would-be riot-inciter, raising the jade talisman up as it flashed with bright light and crackled with unknown energies. Zefaris wondered whether it was meant to help him escape or merely blow up to kill as many people as possible, but she would never know.

She would never know - neither the talisman’s shape nor the colour suggested anything specific, but Zef’s own experiences seeing these things made her react on pure reflex, tilting her wrist and pulling Pentacle’s trigger. Like the hammer of a wrathful god, the thunderous clang of its gunshot reverberated all around and those in the crowd instinctively ducked and shielded their ears, even if briefly. The lead-tipped spear of smoke and fire which issued forth completely annihilated the boy’s elbow and sent the lower half of his left arm tumbling to the ground as he clutched his blood-geysering stump and screamed indiscernible curses and litanies in his true native language.

The crowd slowly began to disperse, or at least those at the edges got scared off. Of those who remained some shouted accusations of meaningless violence, others surrounded the young man- the former were mostly young, while most of the latter were old and scarred. A grizzled-looking man bent down to pick up the jade talisman, and another still squatted next to the severed arm to take a closer look. Before the first man’s hand could touch the talisman, the young man’s eyes locked onto it and he lunged to grab it with his good hand, lurching up to his feet with a maddened expression and using his bare stump to push through the men surrounding him. He broke into an uneven, bestial sprint towards Zefaris, screaming something in Pateirian as the talisman began to shine again. The bystanders shouted after him or at Zefaris in warning, some even tried to grab him or took off in pursuit, but none could catch up.

Zefaris couldn’t just shoot him down now, she knew the bullet would overpenetrate or ricochet off the cobbles, and she was certain that he was betting on it. The Philosopher’s Eye thrummed in her eye socket with each breath, just as it had done in the dungeon. In turn, just as she had done in the dungeon, she opened it and willed the Aether in her lungs to pour out through it.

There came a sudden flowing sensation through her head, an immense pressure that built behind the eye. A flash of bright white blinded her for a split-second, and the pressure was gone. Her sight returned to her just in time to see the infiltrator stumble as most of the talisman’s mass was blown away, the impact having blown his arm back with such force that it now dangled limply from his shoulder. His ring and little finger were bent backwards at odd angles, while his remaining three fingers were crumpled up around the jagged jade shard that was left of the talisman. A jagged jade shard that still glowed, crackling and seething, burning up its holder’s flesh.

It didn’t explode as she feared, but what it did nevertheless confirmed her assumption as to its nature. Zefaris had seen this happen before, and just like all those times she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the grotesqueness of it.

There was a cracking noise, and the unstable shard erupted into a thousand pieces. For a moment there was nothing, and the young man stared at his arm with horror even as the stump of his other arm still gushed carmine.

A visible shockwave pulsed through the young man’s arm from the wrist, pas the shoulder, and halfway up the collarbone.

In the next heartbeat came another one, and many tiny jets of blood spurted forth from the limb’s surface.

With the third one, his skin ripped apart and sloughed off the muscle in long, dangling strips. He uttered not so much as a peep as if paralyzed, all he could muster was a guttural choking noise as he slumped to his knees in a pool of his own blood.

“What-” someone called out, and was silenced when the next pulse came. Blood vessels erupted from muscle tissue, whipping about and spraying blood like the tendrils of some eldritch abomination, soon followed by the unraveling of the limb’s musculature into myriad individual strands as the bones just fell to the ground an shattered like rotten wood.

The young man’s eyes had long flooded with his own blood, rivulets of the vital fluid streaming from the corners of his mouth. He managed to direct his half-blinded stare at Zefaris, and she saw that there was nothing behind them.

“Ckh- Can’t even kill myself right,” he said weakly, drawing in a ragged breath. Accent or not, she understood what he said, and knew that it truly was genuine. “Failure of failures, am I. Please… Please end me. Destroy my head. I don’t want to go back to the camkh- ckrrghrrgh- the School for Talented Young Boys. Else they will make a beast of me, vastly more wretched than those whose death-stench clings to you.”

“Who?” was the first question that came to mind, and one that instantly slipped from Zel’s mouth.f

“L- Lghuughrrrgh…” he began, only to double over as blood and chunks of tissue poured from his mouth. Most of the crowd had dispersed by now, and she could see some of them returning with guardsmen in tow.

“Cannot… Say the name. Geas prevents me. It’s… It’s a senator, one of the Pat- Patei- one of the glorious divine patriots. Please, kill me already...”

Zefaris was both willing and able, but she was not willing to risk having the bullet hit an unintended target.