197 - They Just Vanished [Cherno] (Patreon)

By the time the ritual was over, the boy had come out, just in time to witness the shrine guardian lurch upward. Its mouth creaked open, and it drew in every iota of incense smoke in the vicinity. The guardian thumped its staff against its altar, and a seven-spoked wheel of golden flame blazed alight behind it. Another thump, and the wheel turned by a full revolution. The shrine was enveloped in golden light, and the doors slammed shut.

Another thump. Another revolution. Reams of blessed paper erupted from the guardian’s sleeves, flying upward into the rafters and out of sight, circling the shrine. Thereafter, the guardian went silent, the wheel projection behind it fading until it was barely visible. The next morning, four known Hashem Family members would be found in the vicinity, bound by these same reams of sacred paper.

Meanwhile, Casus shot through the city streets even faster than before, his maximum speed no longer bounded by the presence of a small, fragile passenger. He took sharp alleyway turns one after the next without slowing, sometimes running along walls and other times tilting his own body as if he himself were a high-speed motorbike, tearing into the pavement with his arm-blade to help steer. He only stopped at the hidden door, and then it was back to full speed from a standstill.

Even the small loss of maneuverability really stung, but somehow, Casus liked this better. A man-shaped battering ram.

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Mirzaii 2. The ballroom. A chamber of refined luxury stained by ongoing debauchery. The air inside was thick with a miasma of smoke, alcohol, and a rainbow of fumes from drugs of all kinds, covering the full spectrum from the natural to the synthetic. The number of guests was nearly equal to the number of entertainers, and in turn, to the number of guards. A band of nervous musicians played an eclectic set of their greatest hits, songs that hadn’t done well, and hastily-prepared covers, all picked out by their employer. They had, of course, not known ahead of time that this employer was Semzar Hashem, but the enormous paycheck and equally generous tips had sufficed to encourage them. It wasn’t as if they could run at this point.

At the other side of the ballroom, a woman clad in naught but translucent silks and jewelry danced on a hexagonal stage that was slick with blood and viscera. The intermingling of human and saurian blood colored her bare feet a strange shade of purplish scarlet, readily concealing the talismans that safeguarded her from slipping.

“The patrols are gone, sir. All of them. The same is the case for the men we sent out to assess what happened to the patrols.”

The man speaking was a baneworm hidden inside a mountain of muscle, which in turn was hidden by a mountain of fat; such bodies made it easier to hide his possession of them, and his preference had named him: Strongman, Big Guy, Fatman, on and on. He, the baneworm, didn’t actually have a personal name, simply making one up each time he took a new body. Even as he was, riding in a 2m meat mountain, he was in the submissive position here. He looked up from where he knelt, the disdainful facade of Semzar Hashem, the heir’s irritation distorting his meatsuit’s handsome features.

“Gone? The fuck you mean gone?!” Semzar barked, throwing a glass full of atrociously expensive liquor. Instantaneously, a nearby manservant cleaned it up, tendrils of azure magic extending from the jewels on his glove’s knuckles to lift the mess into a trash chute.

Semzar proceeded on a multi-minute rant which involved drinking and spilling three more glassfuls of that liquor. While this went on, Strongman tuned out most of the heir’s inane rant and carefully took in his surroundings.

To Semzar’s left and right, a small harem of women was gathered. In Strongman’s experience, such groups were usually made up of the ambitious, self-employed women of the night, and those who had no choice in the matter, illegally owned or otherwise coerced by a third party. He wondered what the ratios were in this case. They didn’t seem particularly dead in the eyes, at least.

Behind Semzar’s opulent seat, there towered an enormous, two-and-a-half meter tall evoy. He exuded a stoic threat of violence at any perceived aggression, his compound eyes perpetually twitching in place as he observed his surroundings. He looked unlike any other evoy, unlike even the rare war-morphs; in short, he looked wrong. His left arm particularly stood out, being so engorged that its chitin plates bulged apart and showed the musculature underneath. Its base shape even diverged from the evoy’s other arm. To the giant’s sides, four further guards were posted. Their forms were mostly evoy-like, but twisted and misshapen, each more heavily grafted than the next. These so- graft-beast abominations were scattered all throughout the mansion.

Finally, after calming down somewhat, Semzar leaned forward and asked: “Explain what you mean by ‘gone’. As I recall, I spent a great deal on communications specifically to prevent this.”

With each word, the mask of calm cracked, tendrils and veins showing through as anger crept into his voice again.

“We ah… We haven’t received any calls, good or bad, in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, all of them seem to have just disappeared into the astral. The same thing happened to those we sent to check, and…” Strongman said, partially repeating himself.

Before Semzar could speak again, explosions sounded in the distance.

A wave of tension swept over the ballroom. Even that giant evoy turned his head in that direction, ever so subtly. He leaned down to Semzar, uttering something in his ear. The heir listened with rapt attention, then barked out a series of commands that included ones which pertained to Strongman himself. In effect, he was calling for the mansion’s security contingent to go on high alert. It made sense, but Strongman instinctively filtered out the brat’s actual words, coming away only with the general meaning.

However, before Strongman could actually get to doing his job, one of the ballroom’s doors swung open, a shell of a man stumbling through. His hair was burnt off in places, one of his eyes had burst open, and fist-sized chunks were missing from his left side.

“T-the basement, it’s… It’s Blackhand’s big brother…”