"Ugh..."
Lewis Wien tried to speak, his mouth working uselessly. Only a hoarse, dry rasp came out.
The world had gone stiff and sluggish before his eyes.
The terrifying figure across from him slowed his advance, closing in step by halting step. His face was gaunt and cold, and the revolver in his hand was black iron, its barrel long and narrow.
This feeling... Marionettist...?
Lewis's skull felt packed with mud, his thoughts crawling, refusing to move.
No good. I have to save myself.
He fought to control the spirituality inside him, tracing complex symbols and patterns, trying to build a "Traveler's Door" in front of him.
If he could Travel in an instant and put distance between them, he could still turn this around.
But right then, a strange image flashed across his eyes:
a worn tricorn hat, deep-set eye sockets, a face drained of all color, and two tufts of black mustache.
The "Admiral of Blood," Senor!
A bone-deep chill flooded through him, seizing his spirituality and his muscles both. Lewis lost control of his own body instantly, and the half-formed pattern in his mind was ripped apart before he could finish it.
Wraith Possession!
The ability alone carried a brutal control effect, and paired with the equally terrifying Marionettization of the Marionettist, the two together left Lewis with no way to fight back at all.
In those few seconds, Klein had already stepped in front of him, slowly raising the strangely shaped revolver.
No. Lord, save me.
The fear of death washed over his mind.
Mr. X poured every last scrap of spirituality into his fingers, trying to trigger the ring on his hand. If he could use its Flesh and Blood Magic at this range, it might be enough to break the other man's hold.
But he was too late.
Click.
Through his blurred vision, Lewis saw the black hole of the muzzle, and behind it, Klein's cold eyes.
Bang!
Like an overripe watermelon smashing apart, everything above Mr. X's neck burst open.
Blood, brain matter, bone fragments, all of it sprayed outward at once, trailing steam into the cold air, like fireworks blooming in the dark.
But even as the "fireworks" bloomed, an invisible force caught the scattered fragments and dragged them back together, reassembling them into a hideous, twisted skull: covered in blood-red cracks, its expression frozen in despair and horror.
Thud. Thud.
Mr. X's headless body and the reassembled skull dropped to the ground together.
Thanks to his Wraith ability, not a drop of blood had touched Klein even at point-blank range.
He holstered the gun and turned his open palm toward the corpse. On his palm, a thin glove of human skin peeled open, its ghostly mouth gaping.
Creeping Hunger. Grazing!
Whoosh.
A bone-chilling gust of wind tore through the air, ripping Lewis's soul and Beyonder characteristic free and dragging them into the glove.
Klein pulled his hand back, closed his eyes, and felt it out carefully. A look of real delight spread across his face.
He had actually drawn the Travel ability!
Unlike Silas, who could choose deliberately, whatever Creeping Hunger pulled was random, so landing on Travel was a genuine stroke of luck.
Worth every minute I spent lying in wait, Klein thought.
But his satisfaction didn't last. A layered, ghostly murmur of prayer started drifting into his ears.
Someone was praying to the Fool?
By the banks of the Tussock River.
The scene there defied easy explanation.
A huge chunk of the riverbank had been torn away, leaving behind a strange, perfectly regular gap, as if something completely transparent and square had simply swapped places with whatever used to be there.
The first layer of the jewelry box Botis, the Saint of Secrets, was holding had already opened all the way, and inside it sat a miniature landscape: a stretch of riverbank covered in damp soil and gravel, scattered here and there with lush green water plants.
Everything that had been on that stretch of riverbank had been pulled bodily into the box.
Almost everything.
A stunningly beautiful woman in a black gown stood in the middle of the crater, and around her, a small patch of ground hadn't been swallowed up, as if she'd used some strange power to block the effect by force.
So it really is Mr. Temperance's envoy!
The thought lit up in Fors's mind.
And indeed, it was Antia Trois. After being hit by the Grade 0 sealed artifact, the ship spirit had finally been forced to show her true form.
"Damn it!"
Where Fors felt nothing but delight, Botis, the Saint of Secrets, was furious and desperate, his last gambit having failed.
Just as Dorian had said, the three-layered jewelry box in Botis's hand was a Grade 0 sealed artifact belonging to the Abraham family, the Box of the Great Old Ones.
All three layers could be opened, and each one did something different.
Opening the first layer swapped the space inside the box with a target area, shrinking that scene down to fit.
Any living creature caught in the target area would be turned into a toy and placed inside the box's space.
If they weren't released within twenty-four hours, the transformation became permanent, and not even their souls would find peace after that.
The second layer held records of other places entirely, places like the Abyss and the Starry Sky. Once opened, it could pull the holder and anyone nearby directly into the target location.
But the transfer was random. Most of the time it wouldn't land where you actually wanted, and there was always a chance something went horribly wrong along the way.
As for the third layer, that one was an absolute taboo. It was never meant to be opened.
Botis's plan had been to use the first layer of the Box of the Great Old Ones to trap the presence hiding in the shadows.
And still, he'd underestimated her. In the end, all a powerful Grade 0 sealed artifact could manage was to force her to show her true form?
If that was all it did, then she, no, he, had to be at least a Sequence 2 Angel.
He was already as good as dead.
Antia's face had gone slightly pale, and anger flickered in her eyes as she looked at Botis.
Resisting a Grade 0 sealed artifact was no small thing. The Anchor had already left her condition unstable.
She had partly controlled Botis from the shadows to leave the mess for Silas to handle, but she'd also wanted to conserve her spiritual strength.
She hadn't expected Botis to be sitting on something this dangerous the whole time.
She needed to seize control of him and take that box, right now.
Antia was just about to move when her body trembled and turned faintly translucent. The strain from a moment ago had left her with a split second of sluggishness.
And in that instant, Botis's hand had already closed around the third layer of the jewelry box.
His eyes were consumed now, nothing left in them but despair and madness.
If the first layer hadn't worked, then opening the second would be just as pointless.
Death was the only thing waiting for him now. And if that was how it had to end, he might as well take everyone else down with him.
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