Gerhart didn't even look up from the splintered timber he was trying to shift. "You're still hung up on that?" he grunted, the words muffled by effort. "He's meat, Fischer. Cold meat. You're not a rookie anymore. Saw you put down Rudel. Saw you make the hard call. So get a grip. We've got a warehouse to put back together before the Baron sees this."
The words were not meant to be cruel, merely efficient. In the economy of the Vipers, it was simple logic. A spent tool was discarded. A sentimental attachment was a liability. But to Lutz, each word was a spark on the tinder-dry pyre of his rage.
The dam of his control, already fractured by Henrik's death and Gerhart's initial callousness, finally shattered.
"HE WAS A MAN!"
The scream tore from Lutz's throat, raw and ragged, echoing in the cavernous, wrecked space. It wasn't a shout of defiance; it was a guttural roar of pure, unadulterated pain and fury, a sound that seemed to startle even the settling dust.
Gerhart froze, his hands still on the timber. He slowly straightened up, turning to face Lutz. His expression, usually a flat mask of bored brutality, was now one of genuine, stunned surprise. He saw Lutz standing over Henrik's body, his fists clenched so tightly his knuckles were bone-white, his entire frame trembling with the force of his emotion. The boy's gray-blue eyes, usually so calculating, were wild, burning with a light Gerhart had never seen in them before. It wasn't the hot rage of a brawler; it was the cold, absolute zero of a vow being forged in a crucible of grief.
For a long moment, they just stared at each other, the enforcer and the Marauder, the pragmatist and the avenger.
Lutz's chest heaved. "We are not leaving him here for the rats," he said, his voice dropping to a deadly, controlled whisper that was far more terrifying than his scream. "We are going to wrap him up. We are going to put him somewhere decent. And you are going to help me. Now."
Gerhart's first instinct was to refuse, to backhand this upstart into remembering his place. But the look in Lutz's eyes gave him pause. This wasn't the clever, climbing young thief anymore. This was something else. Something that had just stared into the abyss of its own making and had decided to arm itself with the darkness. He saw the shotgun lying nearby, remembered the cold precision with which Lutz had reloaded and fired it into Rudel's face. A fight with him now wouldn't be a scuffle; it would be a fight to the death, and Gerhart, for the first time, wasn't entirely sure of the outcome.
He let out a long, exasperated sigh, a sound of a man capitulating to an irrational but unavoidable demand. "Fine. Have it your way. But make it fast."
They worked in a stiff, hostile silence. Lutz found a roll of heavy, stained canvas used for wrapping sensitive cargo. His movements were jerky, violent, as he unrolled it next to Henrik's body. He couldn't bring himself to look at the old man's face, at the peaceful smile that felt like an accusation. He focused on the task, on the brutal, physical necessity of it.
Gerhart, with obvious reluctance, helped him lift the body. It was a grim, awkward process. Lutz took the weight of the torso, his hands gripping under Henrik's shoulders, avoiding the terrible wounds as best he could. Gerhart took the legs. They laid him on the canvas. The silence was broken only by their grunts of effort and the rustle of thick fabric.
As Lutz began to wrap the canvas, folding it over the still form, he felt a fresh wave of nausea. This was a finality worse than the moment of death. This was the packaging of a life, the reduction of a man with memories and regrets into a parcel to be stored. He worked with a furious, focused intensity, as if he could outrun the grief by moving faster.
Gerhart watched, his arms crossed, his impatience a palpable force. "The box over there," he said, jerking his thumb towards a stack of long, narrow crates used for shipping rifles. "That one's empty."
They maneuvered the canvas-shrouded bundle into the wooden crate. It was a tight fit. The finality of the lid closing over Henrik was a sound that would haunt Lutz forever—a dull, hollow thud that sealed away the last vestiges of decency in this place.
With the grim task done, the atmosphere shifted. The reason for Gerhart's urgency reasserted itself. The Baron would be back. This mess, this evidence of a catastrophic internal failure, could not stand.
The next few hours were a descent into a special kind of hell. The battle against the physical mess was a war against the memory of the fight itself. Every splintered beam Lutz and Gerhart hauled away was a reminder of the punch that had nearly killed him. Every bucket of water and rough scrubbing brush used to sluice Rudel's blood and viscera across the stones was a blasphemy against Henrik's final moments.
They worked without speaking, a dysfunctional partnership bound by mutual necessity. Gerhart focused on the heavy structural debris, his brute strength useful for moving the larger pieces of the collapsed roof and the shattered pillar. Lutz, with his Marauder's agility and precision, took on the more meticulous tasks. He gathered the scattered, gore-slicked throwing knives, cleaning and sheathing them with methodical care. He located the spent shotgun, breaking it down to clean the barrels before hiding it back in Henrik's workshop. His senses, heightened and raw, could still pick out the faint, coppery scent of Henrik's blood beneath the overwhelming stench of Rudel's corruption.
It was while he was scrubbing a particularly stubborn stain—a dark, Rorschach-like blotch where Henrik had fallen—that Gerhart broke the silence.
"You know," the enforcer said, wiping sweat from his brow with a filthy forearm, "getting soft gets you killed. The old man was soft. In the head. Talking about mending things, sharpening knives… this life isn't about mending. It's about breaking. Breaking your enemies, breaking anyone who gets in your way." He gestured at the now mostly-clean floor. "Today, Rudel was the thing that got broken. Tomorrow, it'll be someone else. Maybe you. Maybe me. Sentiment just makes the landing harder."
Lutz didn't look up from the stain. He scrubbed harder, the coarse bristles of the brush scraping against the stone.
"It wasn't sentiment," Lutz said, his voice low and flat. "It was a debt."
Gerhart snorted. "Debts are paid in coin. Or blood. You don't pay them with a burial."
"This one was," Lutz replied, and said no more.
He finally gave up on the stain. No amount of scrubbing would erase it. It had seeped into the porous stone, a permanent, dark scar on the warehouse floor. A testament. He dropped the brush into the bucket of now-pink water, the splash echoing in the quiet.
The main mess was cleared. The headless body of Rudel had been wrapped and stuffed into a crate identical to Henrik's, a grotesque parody of a funeral procession. The two boxes sat side-by-side against a far wall, one containing a monster, the other containing a man who had tried to teach a monster how to be human.
This wasn't about getting soft or hard. It was about choosing what you broke, and what you built. The Vipers only knew how to break. Henrik had tried to show him how to build, even in small, desperate ways.
Looking at the two crates, Lutz made his choice. He would break this organization, this system, this entire rotten structure. He would break it so completely that nothing like this could ever happen again.
And he would start by breaking the man who had started it all. But he was not ready yet.
The cleanup was a hollow, brutal pantomime. Every swept pile of dust, every relocated crate that now stood where blood had pooled, felt like a layer of lies being shoveled over the truth. Lutz worked with a mechanical efficiency, his body moving while his mind churned in a cold, dark sea of grief and fury. The two long crates stood against the far wall, a silent, accusatory monument. One held the physical remains of the catastrophe; the other held the corpse of his conscience.
The heavy main doors of the warehouse groaned open, shattering the fragile silence. The Vipers had returned. The air, once thick with the ghosts of gunpowder and rot, was now flooded with the boisterous, chaotic energy of the gang. Men filed in, their voices loud with the crude humor and swagger of a successful show of force. They carried the scent of the sea, cheap tobacco, and a palpable sense of triumph.
The noise died an abrupt death as they took in the scene.
The splintered pillar was a jagged scar in the wall, hastily patched with planks from a broken crate. A large section of the roof was open to the grey sky, a gaping wound strung with a makeshift tarpaulin. The floor, though scrubbed, was darkened in patches where water and blood had seeped deeply into the stone. And the air, beneath the new smells, still carried the faint, sweet-rotten taint of what had transpired.
Karl and the Baron entered last. Karl's sharp eyes took in everything in a single, sweeping glance—the patched roof, the scarred pillar, the two long crates, the way Gerhart leaned heavily on a broom, and the way Lutz stood perfectly still, his hands hanging at his sides, his face a mask of grim exhaustion. The Baron, Gunther Vogler, simply observed, his flint-like eyes calculating the cost of the damage, his presence an oppressive weight that seemed to make the very dust settle faster.
Karl strode forward, his focus pinpointing Lutz. The warmth in his eyes was gone, replaced by the cold, analytical gleam of a strategist assessing a breach in his defenses.
"Fischer," Karl's voice cut through the murmuring crowd. "Report. What in the name of corrupted gears happened here?"
All eyes turned to Lutz. He took a half-step forward, his posture slumping slightly, playing the part of a man shaken to his core. He let a tremor enter his voice, a carefully measured dose of shock.
"It was Rudel," Lutz began, his gaze dropping to the stained floor between them. "He… he woke up. Or something did. He wasn't himself, Karl. His body was… blue. Swollen. There was a… an eye. In the middle of his forehead." He looked up, meeting Karl's gaze, letting his own confusion and horror show. "I didn't know… I didn't know someone could lose control like that.
He delivered the lines with the perfect blend of truth and feigned ignorance. The horror was real, but its source was a lie. He was a novice shocked by the dangers of the path, not a co-conspirator in the disaster.
Karl's expression didn't change, but his stillness was more pronounced. "Go on."
Lutz described the fight, sticking to the broad strokes. The charging, the mindless strength, the destruction. He mentioned his and Henrik's futile attempts to stop it with thrown knives. He glossed over Henrik's death with a pained grimace. "Henrik tried to help… he didn't make it." He left the manner of his death mercifully vague. He then described, with more detail, the desperate decision to use the shotgun, the two blasts that finally, thank the forgotten gods, put the thing that was Rudel down.
He sold the story with the sweat on his brow and the lingering shock in his eyes. He was the loyal soldier reporting a catastrophic, unforeseen event.
Then came the question he had been waiting for, the one his entire story hinged upon.
"The ambush," Karl said, his voice dropping, becoming dangerously quiet. "The five men you and Rudel fought. You're certain they were all normal? No tricks? No… abilities you didn't recognize?"
This was the moment. The fulcrum upon which Karl's suspicion would either be levered open or sealed shut. Lutz met his gaze, his own gray-blue eyes wide with a convincing mixture of earnestness and dawning, belated realization.
"They were trained. Good with their weapons, knew how to set a trap," Lutz said, shaking his head slowly. "But they moved like normal men. Fast, but… human." He paused, frowning as if searching his memory. Then, he let his eyes widen slightly, a man connecting dots he hadn't known existed. "But… the alley. The floor. There were… paintings. Strange lines and symbols, drawn in the dust and grime. I thought it was just a trick of the light, or some street urchin's nonsense. I didn't think… I didn't know things like that existed."
He sold the lie with the perfect bait of a partial, insignificant truth. The ritual had been real. By admitting to seeing it but dismissing it as unimportant, he painted himself as ignorant, not complicit. A mundane thug wouldn't understand a mystical ritual. It was the most believable lie of all.
Karl stared at him. Lutz could feel the weight of that gaze, dissecting him, probing for a flaw, a flicker of deception. The silence stretched, thick and heavy. Lutz didn't look away. He let the image of the glowing sigils burn in his mind, let the remembered fear of Rudel's transformation show in his eyes. He was a novice who had just had the true, horrifying nature of the world revealed to him.
Finally, Karl gave a slow, single nod. The suspicion in his eyes didn't vanish, but it was compartmentalized, filed away for later consideration. He had no evidence to contradict the story, and it fit the facts as he understood them: a powerful, low-sequence Beyonder like Rudel, weakened by a physical wound, could have been pushed over the edge by a delayed-acting mystical curse.
"A ritual," Karl murmured, more to himself than to Lutz. "Professionals. Not a random ambush." He looked back at Lutz, his assessment complete. "You did well, Fischer. Taking down a Lost one, even a freshly turned Sequence 9, is no small feat. It's a messy, ugly business. You kept your head. You used the tools available. That's what matters."
The praise was like ashes in Lutz's mouth. You did well. The words echoed in the hollow space where his heart used to be. He had done well. He had lied, he had concealed, he had caused a man's horrific death, and he had murdered the only friend he had in the process. And he was being commended for it.
Karl turned to the assembled, silent Vipers. "You heard him! Rudel's gone. Turned Lost. A curse from that ambush. It's been handled. Now, stop gawking and get this place properly secured! I want that roof temporary-braced before nightfall! Move!"
The spell was broken. The gang erupted into motion, the shock of the news channeled into the familiar, mindless labor of reconstruction. Hammers began to ring out, new timber was hauled in, and the warehouse filled with the sounds of industry burying catastrophe.
Lutz stood amidst the chaos, an island of stillness. He had passed the test. His value had been reaffirmed. He was deeper in the viper's nest than ever, trusted, promoted, and now, a killer of his own comrades.
He watched as two burly Vipers, under Gerhart's direction, picked up the crate containing Rudel's body and carried it out towards the scrapyard for disposal. Then, they picked up the second crate. Henrik's crate. They handled it with the same impersonal efficiency.