The air was thick and tasted of aged iron and coal smoke, a familiar, acrid blend that was stronger in the lower parts of Smear Lisle.
Lieutenant Anthony Laroque, tall and lean, burst through the mahogany doors marked 'FIFTH MARINE COMPANY: LIEUTENANT LAROQUE,' his breath coming in ragged, panting gaspsnas he limped into the room.
He still wore the insignia of his rank, the crisp white shirt bearing the Navy logo under a wrinkled red overcoat, each side of the collar pinned with a single, golden star.
His brown hair was mussed, and the monocle usually fixed neatly over his green eye was missing, leaving him far from his normally composed features.
"Lieutenant! What in God's name happened?"
Midori Honda, skinny and sporting a shockingly pink wig that seemed wildly out of place next to her regulation blue trousers and white shirt, hurried after him.
She stopped dead just inside the doorway, her question trailing off as her eyes adjusted to the dimness of the office.
The curtains had been drawn tight, letting in only thin, dusty yellow daggers of sunlight.
The wall was a terrifying collage.
Maps of entire continents; Roma, the Icy North, Vinland were pinned up, crisscrossed by tangled knots of red string that led to newspaper clippings and handwritten notes.
Midori could barely make out the headlines: reports of violent, inexplicable murders and sudden, complete disappearances.
Most of the victims, she realized with a growing horror, were noticed to be hosts.
The scrawled notes were worse;
"Host killers,"
"targeting influential,"
"the Church,"
"cult or organization?".
"what happened to the eccentric cult of Dagonet?"
"Anthony, what is all this?" Midori asked, her voice small. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"
Anthony didn't look up. His distant green eyes were focused on the inner depths of his cabinet, where he was frantically shoving clothes, documents, and heavy glass bottles into a large, battered leather suitcase.
He cursed, the word a rasping sound under his breath, then spun back to the wall.
With a savage yank, he tore every single piece of paper, every map, and every red string from the plaster, wadding the entire conspiracy board into a massive, crinkling bundle.
He smashed the bundle into the suitcase, which already looked overstuffed.
Midori tried again. "The Captain is asking about the patrol rosters…."
He didn't wait for her to finish. The suitcase snapped shut with a violent click. He shoved past her with raw, careless force.
His shoulder slammed into her, rocking her back against the door frame. His face, glimpsed briefly, was a mask of primal fear.
He abruptly turned to her.
"Pretend I was never here, Midori," he hissed, the words devoid of warmth or command. "If anyone asks,tell them I went to Aztec."
Then he was gone,dragging his suitcase and accelerating down the hallway and out of the Marine company base, leaving his subordinate dumbstruck at the door.
Anthony moved through the upper city streets with an urgency that ignored the sharp, jolting pain in his left leg.
His eyes, normally focused on the distant horizon, darted nervously over his shoulder, checking every shadowed doorway and grimy window of the tall, close-set buildings.
For a moment, he thought he saw a figure observing him from a rooftop, but it was just a large black raven, sitting eerily still.
The bird tilted its head, its dark eyes meeting his for a long, unsettling second, before it silently took flight.
He descended quickly into the lower parts of Smear Lisle. The cobbled streets, slick with industrial effluent and refuse.
As he rounded a corner, a desperate, filthy beggar darted out from the mouth of a narrow alley and seized Anthony's coat and hand.
"Alms, Dear sir! For the love of the gods, I'm starving!"
Anthony reacted on pure instinct, a deep, inhuman panic overriding his trained composure.
He didn't just push the beggar aside; he shoved him with a force more than he meant to.
The beggar flew backward across the narrow street, smashing clean through a weak section of a brick wall with a sickening crunch.
People shrieked in shock, dropping baskets and scattering like pigeons.
"My apologies! I'm so sorry!" Anthony called back, already running, the limp an angry, jarring obstacle in his pace.
He didn't slow until he reached the tight, winding maze of tenements bordering the docks.
He stopped, checking the heavy gold watch on his wrist.
07:45.
"The foolish boatman should already be there," He whispered silently
He turned the corner into a dark, cobblestone alleyway that promised a shortcut to the water.
His breath hitched. A flash of a black, gothic gown and a thick, blood-stained green cloak disappearing at the far end.
No! no! no! no! no!
Anthony spun back, his mind screaming in denial. He took a single, panicked step in the opposite direction before reversing course, sprinting directly into the alley.
He was barely halfway down the narrow passage when his instincts screamed a deafening alert.
A high-pitched, metallic ringing sound, sharp and clear, pierced the foul air.
He dove sideways, throwing himself against the wall just as the entire world dissolved into a blinding white roar.
The explosion was colossal. It ripped through the block like a physical hammer blow.
Buildings groaned and crumpled, and the cobblestone ground beneath Anthony's feet fractured and vaporized.
Where he had stood a second earlier, a deep, smoking crater ringed by shattered stone and twisted metal.
The shockwave was indiscriminate.
A young child, playing near the alley mouth, was instantly vaporized, their upper torso blown clean off.
Bodies lay strewn among the rubble, their silence a profound contrast to the sudden, screaming panic that erupted in the surviving streets.
Anthony, though battered and bleeding from a dozen cuts,had managed to shake off the worst of the impact.
He looked up, his ears ringing, to see a figure descend from the air and settle lightly on the lip of the crater directly in front of him.
Anthony groaned as he hissed the name with venom.
"Sept."
The long green cloak billowed around them,the figure a mystery beneath the black hood and the silver mask split by seven thin cracks.
Sept reached down and effortlessly pulled a long golden spear from the spot where Anthony had dodged, the blade incredibly bright even through the dust.
Sept swung the weapon casually, cleaning it of dust.
A symbol of the two silver, crossed swords above the Latin inscription, "Exsurge Domine et iudica causam tuam" was embroidered against the back of the cloak.
"Ah, the regrettable collateral," Sept's voice was a soft, almost melodic hum that nonetheless carried perfectly over the chaotic shrieks. "Such a pity. You could have been a hero, Lieutenant. Taken the full blast and saved these innocents. Is that not the entire purpose of the Wessex Navy, to make martyrs of its soldiers?"
Anthony's suitcase lay forgotten and shredded at the edge of the blast zone. He shook with a white-hot, consuming anger.
"Oh, darling. Sept is being mean again," a new voice sniggered, laced with bitter, manic amusement.
A woman emerged from the dense dust cloud behind Anthony. She was small, dirty, her gothic gown and corset streaked with grime and dried blood.
Her gray, bulging eyes were terrifyingly empty. She tightly clutched a heavy, tarnished silver locket at her breast.
"They only care for their own survival, Sept. All hosts are scum," She spat, her voice mournful but laced with an incredible, barely-contained rage.
Anthony turned, his gaze flickering between the two figures.
"What do you think Sierra, is he a lead, perhaps, or a tin?" Sept mused, stepping closer.
Sierra laughed, a harsh, loud sound. "He might be an Iron, but he's far too stupid to be a Copper. Coppers are demigods, remember? They wouldn't be so carelesd as this one. "
"Why are you doing this?" Anthony rasped, tasting dust and blood in his mouth.
Sept's soft demeanor vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp edge that seemed to lower the temperature in the air.
Sept did not walk; they launched, leaping off the remaining wall structures with impossible, shattering speed, muttering, "All those who host gods deserve nothing but death."
The gold spear whistled, a sound that blasted the air itself and sent fresh cracks running through the surviving buildings.
Anthony barely dodged, the sheer force of the near-miss whipping his coat around him. He grunted, trying to assess the damage caused by the swing.
Once he blinked, Sierra was there, impossibly close, a wide, terrifying smile splitting across her face.
She was small, but her silver hair seemed to crackle with insanity.
She brought a stiff-legged axe kick down onto his left shoulder.
The impact wasn't just physical; it felt like a hammer striking an anvil.
Anthony's already-injured leg buckled, his body weight shifted down, and the ground beneath his boots shattered, creating a crater.
He coughed, fighting the pressure, and snarled, "How? Hosts are this strong, and you…you're not a host. I don't sense anything as such on you."
"Even humans have ways of rivaling you gods, Anthony," Sept said, stopping just behind Sierra, their spear held ready.
Anthony's eyes flitted rapidly. Sept's spear. Sierra's locket.
He looked from one to the other. He chuckled lightly. Sept and Sierra looked confused.
He then threw his head back and laughed…a long, wheezing, breathless sound of sudden, manic amusement.
Sierra dashed forward in a blur of black cloth, aiming for his head.
Anthony's smile, however, was sharper, colder.
His green eyes glinted, not with reflected light, but with raw power.
Electric currents, faint at first, danced across his brown hair.
Sierra's eyes widened instantly; she tried to recoil, sensing a sudden, profound shift in the very atmosphere.
It was too late. Anthony's hand shot out, impossibly fast, and grabbed her by the throat.
"You lot," Anthony spat, his voice now a booming crackle of static, "might have overpowered weakling Tins with your little artifacts, but I will show you the true power of those who host gods."
He slammed her into the fractured ground.
The sound of her bones creaking and the earth shattering beneath her were simultaneous.
Suddenly, with a surge of strength equal to his own, Sierra's hand grabbed his head, using the downward momentum to smash his skull against a protruding chunk of broken stone.
Anthony staggered backward, dazed.
He touched his nose. His fingers came away wet.
He stared in genuine surprise, then yelled in fury. "What did you do?"
The blood that dripped from his nostrils was not the dark, mundane crimson of a human.
It glittered like gold as soon as it touched the dust.
Furious, Anthony straightened, his body now humming with energy.
Bigger electric currents generated from his core, lashing out and beginning to gather in his right hand like a solid, captive thunderbolt of lightning.
The air became instantly, unnaturally dry.
Above the alley, the sky turned an angry, impossible dark, as if a storm had been summoned.
"RAIJIN VERDICT!"
He jumped impossibly high, a human lightning rod, and hurled the bolt at Sierra.
The air screamed as the thunderbolt whistled towards her with a deafening, crackling speed.
The bolt hit Sierra in full force.
The resulting blast was exponentially greater than the first, a wave of pure kinetic energy that wiped clean everything within a half-mile radius.
The men, dressed in the dark uniform Smear Lisle police, who had just rounded the corner disintegrated instantly.
Sept, however, was already airborne, propelled by the same furious vertical leap, their gold spear lifted high to deflect the extreme edges of the shockwave.
The dust cloud that followed was massive, choking out the weak sunlight entirely.
Anthony landed heavily back into the deeper, wider crater.
He could feel himself getting exhausted. He had to end this quickly.
The dust began to settle.
Through the swirling grit, he saw her.
Sierra was standing where the bolt had hit, crackling, but not dead.
Lightning danced across her skin, which was already healing the minor wounds.
She drew a long, slow breath, opening her bulging, manic eyes to glare at him.
She blitzed. She was a silver-haired blur, her hand lunging for his throat.
Anthony was already moving, his depleted reserves forcing him to move at pure speed.
He blitzed sideways, his own foot shooting out, catching her precisely in the knee.
Sierra stumbled, momentarily losing her impossibly fast momentum.
He was about to grab her when his instincts shrieked danger again.
He glanced back, seeing Sept, high above the dust cloud, aiming the golden spear for a perfect, final throw.
Anthony sneered, despite the exhaustion. "I'll just simply dodge it like before, you pathetic…"
He never finished the thought. Sierra's free hand had darted out and seized him in a rear body lock, squeezing with impossible, desperate strength.
Anthony jerked in anger, uselessly blasting residual electric currents outward in huge, pulsing arcs.
"Why the hell won't you die, you stupid bitch!" he screamed, the static in his voice peaking one last time.
Then he heard it…..the faint, high-pitched whistle of the spear, and the thunk as it landed.
It had gone clean through his heart, the bright golden blade pinning him firmly to the earth, his body lifted slightly off the ground, a gruesome, crucified sight.
Anthony Laroque coughed.
Glittering blood, fading rapidly into a mundane dark red, poured from his lips.
Sept approached. Sierra released her death grip, staring at the diminishing light in his eyes with cold satisfaction.
Sept bent low, their masked face inches from his.
They reached out and, with an unsettling tenderness, hugged his pierced body tight, caressing his blood-soaked hair.
"You won't find it," Anthony croaked, the last strength leaving him. "You can't win this war. There are far more powerful hosts than me."
Sept released the hug.
"We're working on it."
There was a wet snap, and the Lieutenant Laroque's head lolled to the side, his monocle-less green eyes fixed forever on the smoky sky.
************
Somewhere in another universe, a man named Aquila Totti awoke with a jolt.