Vincard's lips parted, not to speak, but to taste the copper-thick air between them. His tongue felt like lead. "Experiments," he managed, the word scraping up his throat. "Funny. Last man who suggested that... dissolved halfway through the procedure." His fingers twitched near Mater Doloros, but the blade might as well have been miles away.
The stranger chuckled, a sound like rats scurrying in walls. "Oh, but I'm already dissolved," he whispered, raising his hands.
Vincard seized the opportunity, pulled himself together, and swung his blade. It severed the raised hand with one cut. The hand hit the ground with a wet slap, but no blood spilled. Instead, the stump of the stranger's wrist pulsed with thick, dark filaments, writhing like worms in sunlight.
The severed hand twitched once on the cobblestones before the fingers curled inward like a dying spider's legs. The stranger tilted his head, hat brim shadowing his reaction, but the chuckle that followed was dry, amused, as if Vincard had just performed a particularly clever parlor trick.
"Stubbornness," the stranger mused, wiggling his stump where violet threads now wove themselves into a crude new hand. The tendons popped audibly as they reknit. "How predictable. Like dogs barking at thunder." His voice fractured mid-sentence, slipping from a professor's lecturing cadence to a child's petulant whine. "Do you think pain matters here?"
Vincard didn't answer. He drew Aetheris faster than expected and raised the barrel in a silver flash.
*Bang* *Bang*
He shot the stranger twice in the face. The shots sounded like breaking bones and shattered the stranger's head.
Vincard didn't wait for the body to collapse. The moment the pressure vanished, that invisible force pinning him in place, he was already moving. His boots hit the wet cobbles at a sprint, bandolier slapping against his ribs as he threw himself behind a rusted hydraulic press. The body should have hit the ground by now. He hadn't heard it.
Vincard twisted mid-step, but it was too late. The hydraulic press exploded outward in a screech of warped metal as something enormous barreled through it like paper. A fist the size of a gravestone caught him square in the ribs, lifting him clean off his feet. The impact didn't feel like bone breaking; it felt like the sky itself had punched him. He hit the brick wall behind him hard enough to crack mortar, the breath leaving his lungs in a single, silent gasp.
He barely registered the grotesque familiarity of the beast's face looming over him, half-human, half-mechanical, stitched together with threads of shimmering black. It's eyes pulsed with the same cosmic madness as the stranger's.
"Ohh... shit..." he gasped under his breath. "I completely... forgot about... you..." The panic and fear of the stranger had made him entirely forget what had happened to the dead Hunter moments before. He was reckless and driven by fear. A rookie mistake.
Vincard's vision swam with black spots as the beast's fist reared back for another blow. He tasted copper, his own blood this time, and forced his trembling fingers to unclench from his shattered ribs. The vial bandolier was still intact. A small mercies.
The beast's fist trembled mid-swing, fluids dripping like saliva from its joints. Then, silence. A wet, parting sound, like a butcher's cleaver through marrow. The creature's head toppled sideways, sheared clean from its shoulders. It hit the cobblestones with a metallic clang, eyes still pulsing for three arrhythmic beats before dimming to black. The body remained upright for a breathless second, then collapsed like a deactivated marionette, gears spilling from its neck cavity in a tangle of oily tendons.
Vincard spat blood onto the cobblestones, his ribs screaming as he forced himself upright. The severed head of the beast stared up at him.
Beyond it, the stranger stood with his back turned, shoulders trembling in what might have been laughter or weeping. "A waste," the stranger murmured.
He flexed his newly formed fingers. still glistening with that unnatural dark sheen, and touched the gaping ruin where his face should have been. The wound pulsed, threads of shimmering blood weaving across the void in intricate patterns, reforming bone from nothingness, sculpting flesh from the air itself. "Such potential, reduced to... this." His voice reassembled itself alongside his skull, syllables clicking into place like puzzle pieces forced together by unseen hands.
„How?!" Vincard wondered. „How is that possible?" He didn't understand, how flesh could knit itself back together from nothingness, how a man could lose his head and still speak with perfect clarity. The stranger's reforming face shimmered like mercury under moonlight, skin stretching taut over newly formed bones with an audible wet snap. Vincard had seen horrors, but never one that laughed while reconstructing its own skull.
Vincard didn't wait for the stranger's face to fully reform. He lunged sideways as the first silver threads of dawn pierced the fog, his boot kicking up a spray of rust-flaked water. His ribs screamed protest, but adrenaline muted the pain to a dull roar.
But it was pointless. Before Vincard's boot hit the ground, the cobblestones beneath him liquefied, not metaphorically, but in a sickening, literal gurgle of stone turning to thick black sludge. His foot sank instantly to the ankle, the substance hardening just as rapidly into vise-like cement. The impact wrenched his knee sideways with a wet pop. Pain flared white-hot up his thigh, but worse was the realization: the street itself answered to this... thing.
Then he suddenly felt a prick. Vincard's hand flew to his neck, fingers brushing against something cold and needle-thin. The substance hit his bloodstream like a lit fuse. His vision fractured into prismatic shards, the world bending at impossible angles as the stranger's laughter echoed from every direction at once.
The words slithered into Vincard's consciousness. „You don't need to worry. As soon as you wake up again—" His vision kaleidoscoped, the stranger's half-reconstructed face. „—you will be reborn into something better than this... pathetic form."
....
Vincard slowly regained consciousness. Everything was blurry, colors blended into one another, edges dissolved. He knew immediately: this was not a normal awakening. It was something else. Something that the substance in his blood had brought with it.
He stood, or at least believed he was standing, in a room that had once been his father's office. The walls had been freshly painted, and the wood of the desk gleamed darkly with polish. Candles burned with a calm, golden flame. No fog, no rust, and no screams in the distance.
His mother sat at the window, her back to him, her hair loose and dark as it used to be. She was sewing something, perhaps a small shirt or a blanket. Her fingers moved with the gentle precision he had watched for hours as a child. Reginald, his father stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders, and laughed softly.
"Look, Karola," he said, "our boy will outgrow both of us one day. And yet... he seems to be following the same path I once did."
Vincard wanted to speak. He wanted to scream: „This isn't real. This is before the ritual, before the fire and before the dagger in my hand, Mother." But his throat felt stuffed with cotton wool. All he could do was watch.
The scene shifted. Suddenly he was fourteen, kneeling on the floor of the old mansion. The rune circle still glowed red beneath his knees. His father lay on his back, his body already half dissolved, tentacles of black nothingness pulling him into the depths. His mother stood beside him, veins black as ink. She looked at him, really looked at him, and smiled sadly.
"Kill me," she whispered. "Please."
The silver dagger felt heavy in Vincard's hand. He raised it. The blade did not tremble. He knew what came next. He always knew.
But before the blade fell, the scene melted away again. Now he was alone in the garden behind the house. It was raining lightly. His mother sat on the bench, young, unharmed, holding him in her arms, little Vincard, who still had dark hair and no scars. She hummed a song he thought he had long forgotten. Her fingers stroked his head.
"You'll be strong," she murmured. "Stronger than him. Promise me that."
Vincard, the real one, the adult, stood there like a ghost and felt something burst inside his chest. Not a loud pain. Just a quiet, final crack. He wanted to warn the version of his mother, as well as his own. He wanted to scream: „Run. Run away before he begins the ritual. Before everything is taken from us." But he couldn't move.
The scene dissolved like smoke. Darkness returned, not that of the fog, but that of his own skull.
Then there was a sudden jolt. His eyelids fluttered and he was awake. Truly awake this time.
He lay on a hard, slightly tilted stretcher made of cold iron and worn leather. Thick leather straps bound his wrists and ankles, tight enough to prevent movement but not so tight that they immediately cut off circulation. His coat was gone. His shirt and vest had been cut open, his chest exposed. The bandolier, Aetheris, and Mater Doloros lay neatly on a table beside him, but out of reach.
His right hand, the one with the scar, rested on a separate, raised table that looked like an operating table from an old alchemist's workshop. The scar itself had been exposed; the glove had been removed, the skin around it carefully cleaned, and opened with a sharp, almost surgical cut. No blood flow was visible. Instead, dark threads shimmered in the wound, thin as spider silk, moving slowly as if they were breathing.
The room was a mixture of a clinic and a forbidden alchemist's chamber.
A high, vaulted ceiling made of black stone, from which rusty chains and empty cages hung. Gas lamps in wall brackets cast a yellow, restless light on shelves full of vials, jars with floating organs, instruments made of silver and obsidian. A large cauldron stood in the middle, cold but with fresh, black residue on the edges. Pieces of chalk and half-smudged runes lay on the floor, as if someone had hastily interrupted a ritual. Something hummed in a corner, a small mechanical device with gears and glass tubes pulsing with purple liquid. The smell was overwhelming: mercury, decay, ozone, and something sweet, almost floral, reminiscent of burnt memories.
Vincard tried to turn his head. But he could barely manage it. Every muscle protested. His ribs felt like broken glass under his skin, and the taste of blood in his mouth. And yet... no pain that paralyzed him. Just exhaustion. Deep, bone-deep exhaustion.
He was alone. For now.