171 - A Crisis of Faith [Cherno] (Patreon)

After dealing with the delivery and stashing most of her money away in the vent duct, she made her way to Sorayah's place, for multiple reasons. The main one - breaching her bedroom - turned out to be a bust. The ward-breaker, a Pilgrim Banisher with his horizontal eyes still closed, did his job and left right away like the meat-robot he was for the time being. Sorayah's bedroom was utterly normal. Yes, there were occult materials scattered about, but Krahe found nothing that stood out - certainly nothing like the Hexkey or the anthrocite hand.

Disappointed, Krahe continued digging around the house. While reading the various occult texts, she spent time polishing her chamber-loading technique. The fact she needed two hands to do it gnawed at her, because an errant thought had come to her and stuck; a memory of what she had dismissed as a stupid gimmick when she saw it in her past life. A tiny appendage that would pop out of her forearm and shove a round into the chamber or a whole new clip into the magwell. The reason was obvious - she needed her left hand free to cast Wandrei Faust, and to carry out thaumaturgy in general. Eventually, after several hours and several infuriatingly similar manuscripts, it clicked. Why settle for a graft when she could achieve the same effect with thaumaturgy? She could simply conjure a bullet or a whole clip just like she did cigarettes. While any large tendrils were beyond her as far as manifestation from uncharred skin went, something this small was not an issue. Still, it added an Entropy cost to reloading, so simple manual dexterity would remain king. Another option in the arsenal.

Krahe gradually gathered Sorayah's texts in the writing room, keeping several open in the hopes of coming upon something, anything. Occasionally she would come to the ritual room in the basement to clear her head and look around the scene in the vain hope she would magically find something new.

Mistress Yao came to mind again. How would she even contact the woman?

"It's not as if she gave me..."

She conjured the talisman that Yao gave to her. It held a captured trace of Eutropia's thauma, but it was still one of Yao's communication talismans, in theory.

"Well, might as well try."

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Yao had expected many things. That the self-styled hero of justice would come to her of his own volition, alone, and unannounced was not among them. She had assumed Blackhand would either figure out that the eye talisman she had given to her had a communication theurgy on the back, or that she would find the one hidden inside the scroll's spindle. She sent out a flesh-puppet to greet him and ask him to wait before disarming her defences to let him in.

"I've come to claim what you owe," he said to her.

"Sounds to me like you're sick with a heart devil, after all," the woman smirked.

Casus wanted to argue, but she silenced him with a mere glance, turning and gesturing for him to follow. She brought him upstairs and examined him, carrying out various strange rites, some of which tangentially reminded him of Zaveshian and Igarian practices. Others, though, were utterly unorthodox. It all involved a great number of talismans and needles that he barely felt. Moreover, with each round of tests Yao's confidence in her prognosis waned and her confusion grew.

"As it appears, it truly is not a heart devil. There's no corruption, no psychosis, no astral instability... How strange. The only alternative is the opposite, then. You've gleaned a piece of enlightenment recently and you haven't fully processed it yet. Perhaps it runs counter to your pre-existing beliefs, and you have yet to reconcile the dissonance. How troublesome. I have many ways of dealing with heart devils, but nothing for this. I am afraid that I cannot help you with such a thing... But I am not so callous as to pretend as if this cursory examination makes us even."

Nearly every part of Casus wanted to reject that, but he knew it was true. He had just hoped for the infinitesimal possibility that the issue was something easier to fix, such as internal bodily damage.

In the end, Casus left the woman, and found himself wandering the city without any particular aim. He fell into a strange stupor, and only came to his senses when he found himself in a particularly nasty part of town, tangling with random nameless scum from the gutter. Trash on legs, making a bid for Hashem's bounty. Two baneworms in saurian bodies and four humans. There were six of them, and three brought out belts - two Dregsteamers and some homemade piece of shit with a motorbike throttle and a cracked, cloudy Locust Stone catalyst. This was a point where he would usually transform, but he just... Couldn't. It wasn't that the Silberblut Coupler wouldn't respond, he couldn't even flip the mental switch that would initiate the transformation.

So, he fought as Casus Aristedes. He came out at the other end with several new bruises both to his body and his ego. A fight like this ought to have been trivial, but had it not been for his arm, he wasn't sure he would have walked out of that back alley. Even the bounty money for the baneworms had a bitter taste somehow.

For lack of direction, he turned to faith. Not directly asking Zavesh or Igaria for an answer, that just wasn't how things worked. No, he went to a man who had guided him on his path to taming the Silberblut Coupler to begin with. A man who quietly lived within the city's Central Temple, volunteering as one of the gymnasium trainers between his excursions, all in pursuit of cultivating a perfect body and mind. His hair was white, and the centuries showed on his face the way a few decades past 20 showed on any other man, but his gaze burned like fire and he held in one finger more strength than Casus held in his entire right arm.

Ambrosius, the Saint Ungrafted.

The saint lived in a small house about half an hour's walk from the Central Temple. It was downright ascetic compared to a church safehouse; the only luxury to be found was in the exercise equipment, books, and war games that filled much of the dwelling. Ambrosius was, as always, busy training when Casus found him, and as always, he found time to speak without uttering a word of complaint.