Lutz's Marauder reflexes took over. His hand shot out, snatching the shotgun from the air with one hand, the cartridges with the other. His fingers, agile and moving with a life of their own, broke the breech, shoved two cartridges into the twin barrels, and snapped it shut. The entire motion took less than two seconds, a seamless flow of lethal intent.
He didn't aim. He pointed. He was 3 meters from the writhing, shrieking thing.
He pulled the first trigger.
The sound was not a boom, but a roar. A fist of fire and lead erupted from the barrel. The blast caught Rudel full in the chest. It didn't just pierce; it erased. A crater the size of a dinner plate exploded open in the blue flesh, sending chunks of tumorous meat and splinters of bone flying across the room. The force of the blast slammed the creature back against the shattered wall.
A guttural, wet roar of pain and rage replaced the shrieking. The single eye, though bleeding profusely, fixed on Lutz again, burning with a new, more profound hatred.
Lutz didn't hesitate. He adjusted his point of aim slightly and pulled the second trigger.
BOOM.
The second blast took Rudel in the abdomen, eviscerating what was left of his midsection. More chunks of his body were torn away, landing with wet, heavy thuds on the stone floor. The thing that was Rudel seemed to deflate, its legs buckling. It slumped against the wall, a ruined, twitching mockery of a man, the massive eye flickering, its light dimming.
A fragile, desperate hope surged in Lutz's chest. It was working. The sheer, brute force of the shotgun was doing what knives and fists could not. It was dismantling him.
The shotgun was empty. The brief, deafening silence that followed the second blast was a vacuum, sucking all sound from the world. Lutz's ears rang. His hands moved automatically, breaking the breech, the two smoking, spent cartridges ejecting and clattering to the floor. He fumbled for two fresh ones from the handful Henrik had thrown him, his fingers suddenly clumsy with adrenaline and relief.
It was that moment of vulnerability, that single second spent reloading, that cost them everything.
The abomination against the wall was not dead.
With a sound of tearing ligaments and cracking bone, Rudel surged forward. It was not the charge of a wounded animal; it was the final, explosive detonation of its last vestiges of life and madness. It ignored Gerhart's continued revolver fire, the bullets punching into its back like raindrops. Its star-pupiled eye was locked solely on Lutz, the source of its greatest pain.
It covered the distance between them in a horrifying, loping bound. A massive stone pillar, already stressed from its earlier impact, stood in its path. Rudel didn't dodge it. He didn't slow.
He punched through it.
His fist, a wrecking ball of bone and corrupted flesh, connected with the pillar. The sound was a deafening, catastrophic crack that dwarfed the shotgun blasts. The pillar exploded inward in a shower of stone dust and fractured brick. The structural integrity of the warehouse, already hanging by a thread, finally gave way.
With a groaning, shrieking roar of protesting timber and metal, a large section of the roof directly above Lutz collapsed.
Massive wooden beams, slate tiles, chains, and decades of accumulated grime and pigeon nests plummeted downward. Lutz looked up, his world shrinking to the descending mountain of debris. There was no time to think, only to react. He threw himself sideways in a desperate dive, his body contorting to slip through a narrowing gap of safety.
He hit the ground hard, the impact driving the air from his lungs. A rain of smaller debris pelted his back, and a cloud of choking dust enveloped him. He coughed, spitting out grit, his vision blurred. He was alive. He had dodged the main crush. But he was disoriented, unbalanced, lying on his side amidst a new landscape of rubble.
As the dust began to settle, a shadow fell over him.
He looked up.
Rudel stood there, looming like a cliff face of death. The lower half of his body was a mangled ruin from the shotgun blasts, trailing viscera and blue-tainted blood, but his upper body, powered by some final, insane will, was still functional. The single, ruined eye was a mess of black fluid, but it saw him. One massive, broken hand reached for him, fingers like petrified tree roots, ready to crush, to tear, to unmake.
Lutz's mind went blank. The shotgun was empty in his hands. His knives were useless. There was no space to roll away, no purchase to push himself back. He saw the hand descending, a final, inescapable verdict. This was it. The calculation was over. He had run out of variables.
A lifetime of memories didn't flash before his eyes. There was only the descending hand, and a cold, simple thought: So this is how it ends.
That was when he heard the shout. It wasn't a scream of fear, but a raw, guttural cry of defiance, a sound that tore through the ringing in his ears and the groaning of the settling wreckage.
"BOY!"
It was Henrik.
The old man, seeing Lutz pinned and helpless, had done the only thing he could. He didn't have a weapon. He didn't have a plan. He had only his own frail body. He lunged from the side, a desperate, stumbling charge, and threw himself into Lutz, shoving him sideways across the rubble-strewn floor.
The relief that flooded Lutz was instantaneous and overwhelming. He was saved. The old man had...
"Ugh!"
The relief lasted less than a heartbeat.
The grasping hand that was meant for Lutz's head closed instead around Henrik's torso. There was a sickening, wet crunch of ribs. Rudel, enraged by the interference, didn't just squeeze. With a final, monstrous surge of strength, he pulled.
Lutz, scrambling to his knees, saw it happen in horrifying, slow-motion detail.
A sound like tearing canvas mixed with the snap of green wood. Henrik's scream was not one of pain, but of sheer, utter biological shock, a sound a man makes when his body is being systematically taken apart. Rudel, his face a mask of mindless fury, wrenched his arms in opposite directions.
Henrik came apart.
His arms were torn from their sockets with brutal, casual force, spinning away through the air to land with two separate, sickening thuds in the dust. Blood, shocking and red against the grey and blue horror of the scene, fountained from the terrible wounds. Henrik's body, now a broken, sputtering thing, collapsed to the floor, his single good eye wide with an expression beyond pain, a final, silent communication of stunned betrayal at what his body had become.
"OLD MAN!" Lutz's scream was ripped from a place deeper than his lungs, a raw, primordial sound of grief and rage so profound it felt like his own soul was being dismembered. The cold calculator inside him shattered. The cautious survivor vanished. All that was left was a white-hot forge of vengeance.
He saw nothing but the monster. He heard nothing but the blood roaring in his ears. His hands, moving with a speed born of pure, undiluted fury, were already in motion. He snatched the two red cartridges from where they had fallen in the rubble. The shotgun breech snapped open and shut. The sound was the cocking of a final judgment.
Rudel, having discarded the ruined thing that was Henrik, turned his gaze back to Lutz. The star-pupiled eye, swimming in its own black ichor, focused once more on its original target.
It was the last thing it ever saw.
Lutz was already on his feet. He didn't brace. He didn't aim. He sprinted forward, the shotgun rising as if drawn by an invisible string to the center of that blasphemous face.
He pressed the twin muzzles against the great, staring eye.
He pulled both triggers at once.
The world dissolved into sound and light and flesh.
The double-barreled blast at point-blank range was apocalyptic. Rudel's head did not just explode; it vanished. It was atomized in a storm of fire, lead, bone, and brain matter. What was left of his neck was a scorched, shredded stump. The massive body, its central command utterly erased, finally, definitively, went limp. It swayed for a moment, a headless colossus, before crashing to the ground with a final, earth-shaking thud that sent a plume of dust billowing outward.
Silence.
The only sound was the faint crackle of settling embers from the shotgun breech and the drip of water from a broken pipe. The ringing in Lutz's ears was a high-pitched whine that sealed him in a bubble of awful quiet. It was a silence that felt heavier than the collapsed roof, a vacuum left in the wake of the twin blasts that had just erased a monster and the shattering reality of what it had cost.
He didn't look at the headless ruin of Rudel. His eyes, wide and unblinking, were locked on the other body. The one that was still, impossibly, moving.
Henrik.
Lutz scrambled forward, his boots slipping in the slick of blood and viscera that was not the old man's. He fell to his knees, the impact jarring up his spine, but he felt nothing. His hands hovered over Henrik's ruined form, unsure where to touch, where there wasn't a horrific injury. The old man lay on his back, the stumps of his shoulders a brutal, red ruin, his chest rising and falling in shallow, wet hitches. The light in his single good eye was guttering, a candle flame in a storm, but it was still there. It found Lutz's face.
"Henrik," Lutz breathed, his voice a cracked, broken thing. "Henrik, stay with me."
The old man's eye focused, the pupil contracting with a monumental effort. A ghost of a smile, a mere twitch of his bloodless lips, touched his mouth. His voice was a whisper, thin as parchment, half-dreamy and distant, as if he were already speaking from another shore.
"Boy… Lutz…" he rasped. Each word was a battle, a bubble of blood forming at the corner of his lip. "Listen… my workshop… the loose floorboard under the tool chest… my stash…"
Lutz shook his head violently, his hands finally closing around Henrik's remaining, intact shoulder, as if he could physically anchor him to this world. "I don't care about that. Don't talk. Save your strength." His vision began to blur, a hot pressure building behind his eyes, a dam of emotion he had thought long since cemented over. But no tears fell. Not yet.
"No… you listen," Henrik insisted, his voice gaining a sliver of strength, a final surge of will. "Things there… will help you. Don't… don't tell anyone. Not Karl. Not anyone." A fit of wet coughing wracked his broken body, and he winced, a spasm of pure agony contorting his features. When it passed, he was even paler, the light in his eye dimmer. He looked at Lutz, and his gaze was suddenly clear, piercing, the last lesson of a dying mentor. "Choose your path… carefully, boy. A path… you can look back on… without regrets." A single, clear tear escaped the corner of his good eye and traced a clean path through the grime on his temple. "Because I… I am full of them."
The confession was a knife in Lutz's heart. This strong, weathered, resilient man, who had endured slavery and loss, was dying awash in the pain of paths not taken, of words not spoken. The dam inside Lutz trembled. He could feel the hot sting of imminent tears, his throat constricting into a knot of unbearable grief. He was shaking his head, a silent, desperate denial of the inevitable.
Then, something shifted in Henrik's face. The sharp focus of his final advice softened, blurred. The pain and regret seemed to melt away, replaced by a look of wondrous, heart-breaking confusion. His eye, losing its anchor to the present, drifted over Lutz's face, and saw something else, someone else from a lifetime ago.
His breathing softened. A true, gentle smile, devoid of pain, finally graced his lips. It was a smile from a summer long past, meant for another.
"Annelise…" he breathed, the name a sigh of relief, a homecoming.
The light in his eye went out.
The breath left his body in one long, final exhalation, and Henrik was gone.
Lutz stared, frozen. The name, hung in the air, a testament to a love and a life that felt a universe away from the blood-soaked warehouse floor. The disbelief was a physical weight on his chest. He could feel the sob building, a seismic wave of grief ready to shatter him. His shoulders hunched, his face crumpled—
"Alright, cut it out already."
Gerhart's voice was like a bucket of freezing water. It was flat, utilitarian, utterly devoid of emotion. He had holstered his revolver and was now standing over Rudel's corpse, prodding it with his boot as if inspecting a side of rotten meat. "The old man's days were counted anyways. Useless in a real fight. Let's start cleaning up this mess before the Baron gets back."
The seismic wave of grief didn't just recede; it was instantly, violently transmuted.
The hot pressure behind Lutz's eyes didn't leak out as tears; it flash-forged into a cold, hard diamond of pure, incandescent rage. The sorrow, the vulnerability, the shattered dam—all of it was consumed in an instant by a fire so intense it felt like his blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen. His head snapped up, his gray-blue eyes, now chips of glacial ice, fixing on Gerhart's broad back.
The anger was directed at the brutish enforcer, yes, for his callousness, for reducing Henrik's life and sacrifice to a logistical problem. It was directed at the Vipers, this entire rotten organization that saw people as tools and debts. But most of all, it turned inward, with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
The thought struck him with the force of one of Rudel's punches, leaving him mentally winded.
This is my fault.
The chain of causality unspooled in his mind with terrifying clarity. He had been ambushed by the assassins. He had killed them. He had taken their Beyonder characteristics. He had hidden them from Karl, hoarding them for his own power, his own gain. He had lied, creating the fiction of a mundane rival ambush. Because of that lie, Karl and the Baron remained ignorant of the true, mystical nature of the threat. They saw Rudel's coma as the result of a physical wound, not a festering spiritual poison. They left him here, untreated, a ticking bomb.
And the bomb had detonated in the face of the one person who had shown him a shred of decency.
Henrik wasn't just dead. He had been torn apart. And it was because Lutz Fischer, the Marauder, had been greedy. He had seen the characteristics not as dangerous, unstable power, but as acquisitions. He had embodied his pathway's nature perfectly—he had taken what was not offered, he had hoarded the spoils. And the cost had been delivered in blood and bone, paid by the only man who didn't deserve it.
The Marauder pathway wasn't just about stealing objects; it was a vortex of selfishness that consumed everything around it. It had made him its instrument, and Henrik was the collateral damage.
He looked down at Henrik's peaceful, lifeless face, the smile for Annelise still etched there. He looked at the bloody stumps of his arms. He saw the old man's final tear.
And in that moment, on his knees in the carnage, Lutz Fischer made a vow. It was not spoken aloud, but it was etched into his soul with more permanence than any magical contract.
I will destroy this business. This viper's nest, this corruption. He would burn it all to the ground. Not just for revenge against the Baron, but for Henrik. For the man who deserved to die old in his bed, thinking of his wife, not in a pool of his own blood on a cold stone floor.
And he swore to himself, with a ferocity that would define every breath he took from this moment forward, that he would never again let this happen. He would not succumb to the evil. He would not let the greed of the Marauder dictate his actions. He would use the power, yes. He would become sharper, harder, deadlier. He would need to, to see his vow through.
But he would not become it.
He would learn its rules, its principles, but he would impose his own upon it. Theft would not be for personal gain, but for a greater purpose. Acquisition would not be for hoarding, but for arming himself for the war to come.
He would become the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he would be the one holding the handle.
Slowly, deliberately, Lutz rose to his feet. The cold rage had settled into a core of absolute, frozen resolve. He looked at Gerhart, who was now trying to heave a piece of fallen timber off a crate.
"Gerhart," Lutz said, his voice flat, calm, and devoid of anything resembling human feeling.
Gerhart grunted, not looking up. "What?"
"Help me move him," Lutz said, his gaze falling back to Henrik. "He doesn't belong in this mess."
He wouldn't let the old man's final resting place be this charnel house. It was the first act of his new path. A small, mending thing in a world of broken ones. A choice. The first of many that would, he swore, leave him with no regrets.