Asking for financial support because i'd like to keep both writing and having electricity.
If you'd like to read up to 20 chapters ahead, you can support me on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/cw/Thanarit
Thank you for all your support. it really keeps the story going.
Not into subscriptions? No worries! If you'd still like to support my work, you can leave a one-time tip on Ko-fi.
Thank you so much, and may good fortune find you.
☕ https://ko-fi.com/thanarit
Ren looked at himself in the long instrument cabinet's glass door, which was the closest thing to a mirror the clinic had at four in the morning.
The Knight form looked back.
"Okay," he said. "Okay okay okay."
The black-gold robes. The ruff at his throat like a declaration of intent. The thorn crown. The changed mask, heavier now, worked into something that carried depth the plain oval had not.
"So the skill is called the Book of Blasphemy," he said. "Chapter Four." He turned this over. "There's a Chapter One through Three."
Presumably.
"And chapters after Four."
Also presumably.
"So the Ruin Gospel is not a class," he said. "It's a book. And I've only just opened it."
That is one way to put it.
"How many chapters total."
I'm not telling you that.
"Why."
Because you'll find out when you find out. Go look at yourself in the mirror, you look ridiculous.
He stood there in the Knight form looking at the thorn crown in the glass and felt something he could only describe as the architectural kind of excitement, the kind that arrives when a problem reveals itself to be larger and more interesting than you thought.
He turned from his reflection.
Then turned back.
He looked at the robes. At the mask.
"Haaa."
The air went out of the moment.
He was farther from human than he had been when he woke up yesterday. Farther than the version of himself that had started this arc, and that version had already had ten tentacles and void-black skin and a mask in place of a face. The Knight form did not look like something that had once been a surgical resident with a blood phobia and an apartment where the plants kept dying.
He thought about what Hastur had said. The cage of the concept. What it meant to stop calling it loss.
He had chosen the path that led here. The honest thing was to own that.
"Well," he said. "Nothing to do about it."
He turned toward the storage closet at the back of the clinic.
"Bone Saw," he said. "Come out."
Silence.
The mask twitched slightly at the left corner.
"I know you're in the closet. Come out."
A pause. Then something in the closet shifted, the sound of a large object that had been perfectly still for a long time and had just failed at continuing to be.
The door opened.
Bone Saw stepped out, the obsidian skull catching the red grafting-room light, the eye sockets holding their steady red points. Full armor: obsidian plates, the blood-red axe at his back, every surface carrying the scratches and impact marks of a Mythical-rank hunter who had been through several catastrophes.
"Uhhh," Bone Saw said. "Hello, Father."
"What were you doing in the closet," Ren said.
"Storing myself."
"In the closet."
"It was available."
Ren decided not to pursue this. "Come here. I want to test something."
Bone Saw crossed the clinic and stood in front of him. The red light in the sockets held steady.
Ren looked at him.
Axel Krane. His entire family killed in retaliation for a single act of decency. The perpetrator was Malvick Siven, who was still standing, still ranking, still holding the Legendary classification that put him outside the reach of almost everything Axel could do alone.
The dominant flaw was not wrath, technically. The dominant state was grief with nowhere to go, and grief under that kind of pressure accumulates and takes a shape, and the shape it had taken in Axel Krane over the years had become very specific.
Wrath it is.
Ren snapped his fingers.
"Descend into Madness and Depravity. Authority of Wrath."
The black-gold miasma moved before he finished the sentence, pulling from his chest, mixing with the red mist from the grafting room as it crossed the distance to Bone Saw's forehead and pressed in.
Bone Saw went rigid.
Then he went down.
He convulsed on the clinic floor, the obsidian armor clattering against the tile, the axe hitting the wall with a sound that Ren was going to need to explain to the residential side eventually. The eye sockets flickered. The red light cycled: bright, dark, bright, faster each time.
"Aghhh."
The skull cracked against the floor and bounced.
"Aghhhhh."
An arm swept out and took the instrument stand with it. Surgical tools scattered across the tile.
"AGHHHHHHHHH."
Then silence.
"Now now," Ren said. "Don't disappoint me."
Bone Saw lay still on the clinic floor for three seconds.
Then he stood. Flat to vertical, armor still settling, axe already in hand.
He looked at his hands.
He looked at the wall.
He walked over to the wall and headbutted it.
The obsidian skull hit the plaster with a crack that sent a fissure running eighteen centimeters upward. Bone Saw stepped back. He tilted his head. He looked at the fissure.
He headbutted the wall again, harder, in the same spot.
The fissure branched.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA."
He spun around to face Ren, the eye sockets blazing red so bright they were almost white.
"FATHER. FATHER DO YOU FEEL THAT."
"I feel concern," Ren said.
"HAHAHAHA. Yes. YES."
He looked at his hands, then back at the wall.
"That pressure. That beautiful pressure. I've had it locked up for years and it's been pressing against the inside of me and now it's OUT."
He looked at his hands again.
"Can I break more things."
"Those are my walls," Ren said.
"Right. Right, yes. Father's walls."
He turned away from the wall. His hand moved half an inch toward it, then stopped. He turned further away.
"Father. Father I need you to understand something."
"Tell me," Ren said.
"I have been calm for so long."
He grabbed his own skull with both hands and squeezed.
"Every morning. Get up. Be strategic. Be patient. Think about the objective. Don't break things. Don't hit people who aren't Malvick Siven. Measure yourself." He let go of his own skull. "Do you know how boring that is? Being strategic? When all you can feel is this?"
He gestured at himself, at the blazing sockets, at the vibrating armor.
"Father, what IS this feeling."
"Wrath," Ren said.
"HAHAHAHA. WRATH. Yes. WRATH."
He slammed the flat of the axe blade against his own chest plate. The clang echoed off every wall in the clinic.
"It's like a festival in here. Father, every single person I've been very calmly deciding not to kill for the last several years is currently very loudly reminding me that they exist."
"That's the Authority working," Ren said.
"It's working SO well."
Bone Saw started moving around the clinic, not pacing, something more erratic: a few steps in one direction, a stop, a turn, a look at the axe, a look at the wall, a suppressed gesture toward the wall.
"Father, I have a request."
"You may."
"When we fight Malvick Siven," he said, the lunatic energy dropping exactly one notch into something more focused but no less alive, "I want to be the one who does it."
He stopped moving.
"I know Father has a plan. I respect the plan completely. I will follow every instruction. But I want to be there. I want to be the one who makes him understand why it's happening. I want him to feel every second of the conversation."
The red light in the sockets steadied.
"I have been thinking about this conversation for a very long time. I have notes."
"As long as he's alive for the parts I need him alive for," Ren said.
"Of course."
He lifted the axe and inspected the blade.
"I wouldn't rob Father of a patient. That would be disrespectful."
He looked up.
"HAHAHAHA. Father, do you know what I keep thinking about?"
"Tell me."
"All those officers. All those men who knew what Malvick was doing, said nothing, kept their uniforms, went home every night, ate dinner, slept, woke up, did it again."
He pointed the axe at the middle distance.
"They've never had an honest conversation in their lives. Nobody has ever walked up to them and asked them to justify anything with something real. With pain. With blood. With their body saying yes, I believe this, I believe this enough to bleed for it."
He turned back to Ren, the sockets blazing.
"Do you know what that is? Going your whole life without once being honest enough to bleed for something?"
"Comfortable," Ren said.
"TRAGIC."
Bone Saw swung the axe once through the air, not at anything, just for the feeling of it.
"It's tragic. Those poor, dishonest, comfortable people. They have no idea what they are. They've never had to find out."
He laughed, enormous and completely genuine.
"HAHAHAHA. Father, I would like to help them find out. I think that would be very generous of me. I think they would look back on it as a formative experience."
"You're terrifying," Ren said.
"HAHAHAHA. Father, is that a compliment?"
"It is an observation delivered with something adjacent to awe."
"I'll take it."
He stood in the center of the clinic, axe at his side, red light blazing, the clinic wall behind him wearing two new cracks in the plaster.
"I am ready whenever Father decides it is time. I have been ready for years. I am now additionally ready in a way that is significantly harder to contain."
Ren looked at him.
The obsidian skull. The blood-red axe. The two cracks in the plaster. The Blessed Madness sitting in him like something that had been under pressure for years and had just found the valve.
"You know what the irony is," Ren said.
"What?"
"You're the sanest person who's been in this clinic tonight."
Bone Saw went quiet for a full second.
Then he headbutted the wall again.
"HAHAHAHAHA."
He turned back to Ren. The crack was now twenty-five centimeters long.
"Father. Father I want to tell you about what real honesty looks like. About what it means when two people are genuinely trying to kill each other. About the specific sound a bone makes when it finally admits what it's been bearing. About why scars are more truthful than."
Ren's mask twitched at the left corner.
"Why the fuck did you become so talkative," he said.
Bone Saw stopped.