Dreaded Nights
Hunting down anomalies can vary. There are cases like the slot machine where you have to only think outside of common sense to solve it. Even in Changye, the cases of Anomaly vary so much. The gamble anomaly seems to be the kind of anomaly that happens often in the city now. I have been filing the anomalies to a category and by variants now. I would file this anomaly in a Risk Level 1 at most, and in OB terms. They are around Green. If left alone it would grow to an ORANGE risk level, seeing they tried to destroy it without any successful attempts.
After filling the classifications to the database server Sato set up for the office. I also sent my ‘review’ of the database server and wished that they’d add an indexing function so I can search up keywords to it.
My diet for the past few days have been mostly cup noodles and skewer stands selling cheap meat. Once in a while, Boss and Eta treats me to some food. Changye is full of troubles and seeing the past few weeks have been good to me. It was somewhat relaxing hearing the news that the Draugr the city has been neglecting became a WIGHT. Now the night is full of dread and there is now a creature sitting below the RED Risk Level haunting the night, a miasma is spreading everywhere that turns those who are ill into the pawns of the WIGHT.
Eta has been telling everyone she is right and the Draugr should have been slaughtered before it became a Wight. Draugrs, after evolving, become a Wight and after it consumes people, they become an Overlord, and finally a Deathlord. The worst part of them?
Necromancers are appearing everywhere. Licensed and Unlicensed freaks waiting for the right time to ‘harvest’ the Wight and make their power theirs. The city is in the state where you have the Contractors of the Bureau hoping to get the essence while the Neo Crusaders of the Church are waiting like rabid dogs in chains hoping to butcher the Unalive. The night is terrible to work at and the amount of charms and protections you have to buy to keep the miasma out is ridiculous. I am wearing a wax litany seal on my belt and I have Eta’s spare sword benedicted to make it work on the Wight’s spawn. I also have to bring some Chrism oil for my sword to deal some holy and fire damage to the Undead.
I am taking a puff of my smoking pipe in the terrace. Eta is climbing the apartment stairs while muttering curses. She is scraping the gory bits clinging to her two-hander and is using a bucket to collect it.
“How’s the streets?”
“Fine. Undead are walking the street. Everyone’s in full gear and smells like anointing oil. Makes eating hard. You’ve been filling up? How’s Kei?”
“Hard asleep in her room. How can anyone sleep with incense is baffling to me.”
“Well… she's half-japanese and french so she probably got used to it.”
“She’s half-french?”
“She’s like double-blooded.”
“Huh? How does that work?”
Eta wipes her two-handed sword with Chrism oil.
“Her Pa is half-japanese and chinese. Her name is half french and spanish.”
“Complicated.”
She carries the bucket down the chute and sends the gore to the burner.
“Everyone’s half these days. You, though? Can’t figure you out.”
“Lots of churches on the road?”
“Yeah.”
She sheathes her two-handed sword and pulls a plastic chair near the railing. We are looking at the green hue covering the landscape.
“Should have butchered that monster.”
I gnawed on my smoking pipe.
“Well, you’re already busy with anomalies. And we need you to be in full health.”
“Yeah. But the reward is good though.”
Draugrs of any kind are dangerous. They are warriors who have been resurrected with an ancient soul that wants to butcher the living. Draugrs and Wraiths share the same characteristic of being vengeful. They’ll make themselves strong and create a body for themselves. They are creatures of extreme endurance and strength. What makes them dangerous is their uncanny familiarity with manipulating the elements to a frightening degree. Lightning erupts around them. They can control fire with a wave of the hand and their mastery of the wind makes it hard to fight them.
“Can you even fight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your arms are not in shape yet.”
She clicks her tongue and flexes her biceps.
“Augs are settling in, but yeah, it’ll take time for them to properly work. They tried to be as close as possible to what I can remember, but it’s still not the same.”
She takes an ampule and stabs it on her arm. Augments need proper caring. In her case they removed her flesh, and reinforced the bones before regenerating her arm. She can swing hard, but Eta complains to me it just isn’t the same for now.
“So you staying?”
Eta grins. She is always unreadable to me. The grin on her face is a mask she keeps all the time. One she constantly wears it to the point it is hard to understand.
“For now. I have to be combat ready. Most of my scars have healed so no worries.”
She takes a chocolate bar and takes a crunchy bite on it. I turn my eyes back to the landscape and I see the fog creeping in and mixing with the green hue in the air.
I saw the flash of an explosion forming a green cloud. I lay flat on the ground as the shockwave of the explosion broke every glass and almost shattered every ear.
When the last sound of the glass falling stopped. I stood up and chewed on my smoking pipe. A swirling energy of green is twisting in the distance. I look to Eta. She takes a shard out of glass out of her chocolate and takes another bite. I dusted off the shards of glasses clinging to my shirt and kneaded the pommel of my castor.
“Guess someone can’t wait.”
“Yeah. Looks like it. You think it’s a Contractor?”
“Who knows?”
The television shows a reporter broadcasting a scene in the city. I recognize the dilapidated lanes immediately. The lanes aren’t exactly what you call safe. They are lanes where it is common for a monster to find its way among the poor masses. Hundreds of them are weak and diseased. It’s not exactly so surprising when the Wight took over it. The reporter is showing gruesome scenes with OB-affiliated soldiers working directly to contain the area. The lanes have been corralled. The barriers have been deployed and a killing line has been set up with soldiers luring the undead to a killing line. They draw the undead to this zone and start shooting them. Once the dead are shot down. The flamethrowers would burn the undead and purify them. I can see Priests and Neo Crusaders in the fray, purging the dead and anointing them with burning chrism.
“Looks like they are containing the area. Look at them. Having such fun purging.”
The ones involved are composed and are fighting the horde like it is just another day. Our world has been like this. It is a world where one day you find a horde of undead and you’ll have to call the purgers as if calling like there is a fire happening.
Kei chews the butt of her cigarette. Eta is sweeping the broken glasses while keeping an eye on the television.
I am gnawing my smoking pipe. Watching how they demonstrate the process of containing the undead. The Wight is a powerful creature, but in this city, it is a prey that has a large reward. You know why no one took the Draugr seriously? Because they want the damn thing to evolve into a profitable reward before they would risk their lives. Everyone calls them a pot of gold and once they are ready, scenes like this happen all the time. Kei thinks lowly of this kind of hunt precisely because of this manner of hunting them down.
This city is functional. It is a city where you can find a corpse in the road and some people would simply cover their mouth and nose and move on without a care. Just another body to add to the pile. That’s how apathetic this city has become and yet we try to live like normal. Of course, not everyone shares the same apathy to this broken down world. Hopes and dreams is this undying flame that keeps them clinging to life. Surprisingly, the Agents I know have that kind of hope. A hope that keeps them tied to their humanity.
We are bystanders to this. We simply are one of the many who will stare at the television screen and wonder how long the Wight incursion while looking up for any betting pools, hoping to earn some cash. You can’t fight everything in this city. You have to find your niche and stick with it. Although I say that, I am a job-hopping bastard who hasn’t been able to hold a proper job until now.
The next morning. The lanes have been devastated. I watch a video from my phone and see that the Wight has caused some damage. The city issued a quarantine in the area and is blocking any transport and services to the area. I can also hear the drone-speakers announcing it. A neighbor threw a rock and got electrocuted by the drone.
After breakfast I took the service train back to Asobe Street while carrying the replacement for the broken glass. Kei had me pick up the panel and I had to wait in a long line before I got our purchase.
I installed the glass panel while Kei and Eta were out for scouting. By the time they got back they smelled like rotten corpses. They washed themselves in the office and started investigating on a possible anomaly.
After installing the glass panel. Eta showed me a report of a rumors they gathered. This time it’s another anomaly, and one that has been repeatedly shown to be hostile. The anomaly retains its senses and battle wits, meaning to say it is one that has been warped to another being altogether.
“Concrete-based weapons.”
Eta crosses her arms.
“Exactly. This Anom has been using concrete weapons to defeat its pursuers. OB Agents thought of bringing in this anomaly when it suddenly showed powers that aren’t recorded in any database.”
Using concrete to cover itself like armor. Manipulating concrete to shape and using it to rain down sharp spikes of it. Eta shows me the mutilated corpses of the Agents who went after the Anomaly.
“It retains sentiment. Did they rank it?”
“Below ORANGE for now.”
Kei cuts in and then taps her fingers on the table.
“Its abilities are unusual. We know it can use concrete, but can it use others? So far it hasn't shown anything like that, but we need to be careful.”
There are many kinds of augments that have been made to surpass the physical human base form and contracts have been made to wield otherworldly powers. But this Concrete Man clearly isn’t a contractor of a devil nor does it have psychic abilities.
“I’m guessing they want us to investigate this badly?”
Kei nods. She stares at the documents and then alternates her gaze from Eta and back to me.
“It’s a valuable anomaly. If we manage to kill or subdue this anomaly, then we will have the chance to offer this information to headquarters at quite a price. We can find the damn thing in the outskirts, so we better get ready.”
“I’ll go prepare our stuff.”
Eta walks to the storage and starts preparing her tools. Kei’s face is too serious, one that I haven’t seen even when facing a fragment of a devil.
“Don’t look at me like that. What I fear more is walking blind. We know next to nothing about this anomaly and initial reports are so sparse we might as well start from zero and trace the information from the first witness.”
Which means that we’ll have to start with the mortuary.
Dreaded Nights
Hunting down anomalies can vary. There are cases like the slot machine where you have to only think outside of common sense to solve it. Even in Changye, the cases of Anomaly vary so much. The gamble anomaly seems to be the kind of anomaly that happens often in the city now. I have been filing the anomalies to a category and by variants now. I would file this anomaly in a Risk Level 1 at most, and in OB terms. They are around Green. If left alone it would grow to an ORANGE risk level, seeing they tried to destroy it without any successful attempts.
After filling the classifications to the database server Sato set up for the office. I also sent my ‘review’ of the database server and wished that they’d add an indexing function so I can search up keywords to it.
My diet for the past few days have been mostly cup noodles and skewer stands selling cheap meat. Once in a while, Boss and Eta treats me to some food. Changye is full of troubles and seeing the past few weeks have been good to me. It was somewhat relaxing hearing the news that the Draugr the city has been neglecting became a WIGHT. Now the night is full of dread and there is now a creature sitting below the RED Risk Level haunting the night, a miasma is spreading everywhere that turns those who are ill into the pawns of the WIGHT.
Eta has been telling everyone she is right and the Draugr should have been slaughtered before it became a Wight. Draugrs, after evolving, become a Wight and after it consumes people, they become an Overlord, and finally a Deathlord. The worst part of them?
Necromancers are appearing everywhere. Licensed and Unlicensed freaks waiting for the right time to ‘harvest’ the Wight and make their power theirs. The city is in the state where you have the Contractors of the Bureau hoping to get the essence while the Neo Crusaders of the Church are waiting like rabid dogs in chains hoping to butcher the Unalive. The night is terrible to work at and the amount of charms and protections you have to buy to keep the miasma out is ridiculous. I am wearing a wax litany seal on my belt and I have Eta’s spare sword benedicted to make it work on the Wight’s spawn. I also have to bring some Chrism oil for my sword to deal some holy and fire damage to the Undead.
I am taking a puff of my smoking pipe in the terrace. Eta is climbing the apartment stairs while muttering curses. She is scraping the gory bits clinging to her two-hander and is using a bucket to collect it.
“How’s the streets?”
“Fine. Undead are walking the street. Everyone’s in full gear and smells like anointing oil. Makes eating hard. You’ve been filling up? How’s Kei?”
“Hard asleep in her room. How can anyone sleep with incense is baffling to me.”
“Well… she's half-japanese and french so she probably got used to it.”
“She’s half-french?”
“She’s like double-blooded.”
“Huh? How does that work?”
Eta wipes her two-handed sword with Chrism oil.
“Her Pa is half-japanese and chinese. Her name is half french and spanish.”
“Complicated.”
She carries the bucket down the chute and sends the gore to the burner.
“Everyone’s half these days. You, though? Can’t figure you out.”
“Lots of churches on the road?”
“Yeah.”
She sheathes her two-handed sword and pulls a plastic chair near the railing. We are looking at the green hue covering the landscape.
“Should have butchered that monster.”
I gnawed on my smoking pipe.
“Well, you’re already busy with anomalies. And we need you to be in full health.”
“Yeah. But the reward is good though.”
Draugrs of any kind are dangerous. They are warriors who have been resurrected with an ancient soul that wants to butcher the living. Draugrs and Wraiths share the same characteristic of being vengeful. They’ll make themselves strong and create a body for themselves. They are creatures of extreme endurance and strength. What makes them dangerous is their uncanny familiarity with manipulating the elements to a frightening degree. Lightning erupts around them. They can control fire with a wave of the hand and their mastery of the wind makes it hard to fight them.
“Can you even fight?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your arms are not in shape yet.”
She clicks her tongue and flexes her biceps.
“Augs are settling in, but yeah, it’ll take time for them to properly work. They tried to be as close as possible to what I can remember, but it’s still not the same.”
She takes an ampule and stabs it on her arm. Augments need proper caring. In her case they removed her flesh, and reinforced the bones before regenerating her arm. She can swing hard, but Eta complains to me it just isn’t the same for now.
“So you staying?”
Eta grins. She is always unreadable to me. The grin on her face is a mask she keeps all the time. One she constantly wears it to the point it is hard to understand.
“For now. I have to be combat ready. Most of my scars have healed so no worries.”
She takes a chocolate bar and takes a crunchy bite on it. I turn my eyes back to the landscape and I see the fog creeping in and mixing with the green hue in the air.
I saw the flash of an explosion forming a green cloud. I lay flat on the ground as the shockwave of the explosion broke every glass and almost shattered every ear.
When the last sound of the glass falling stopped. I stood up and chewed on my smoking pipe. A swirling energy of green is twisting in the distance. I look to Eta. She takes a shard out of glass out of her chocolate and takes another bite. I dusted off the shards of glasses clinging to my shirt and kneaded the pommel of my castor.
“Guess someone can’t wait.”
“Yeah. Looks like it. You think it’s a Contractor?”
“Who knows?”
The television shows a reporter broadcasting a scene in the city. I recognize the dilapidated lanes immediately. The lanes aren’t exactly what you call safe. They are lanes where it is common for a monster to find its way among the poor masses. Hundreds of them are weak and diseased. It’s not exactly so surprising when the Wight took over it. The reporter is showing gruesome scenes with OB-affiliated soldiers working directly to contain the area. The lanes have been corralled. The barriers have been deployed and a killing line has been set up with soldiers luring the undead to a killing line. They draw the undead to this zone and start shooting them. Once the dead are shot down. The flamethrowers would burn the undead and purify them. I can see Priests and Neo Crusaders in the fray, purging the dead and anointing them with burning chrism.
“Looks like they are containing the area. Look at them. Having such fun purging.”
The ones involved are composed and are fighting the horde like it is just another day. Our world has been like this. It is a world where one day you find a horde of undead and you’ll have to call the purgers as if calling like there is a fire happening.
Kei chews the butt of her cigarette. Eta is sweeping the broken glasses while keeping an eye on the television.
I am gnawing my smoking pipe. Watching how they demonstrate the process of containing the undead. The Wight is a powerful creature, but in this city, it is a prey that has a large reward. You know why no one took the Draugr seriously? Because they want the damn thing to evolve into a profitable reward before they would risk their lives. Everyone calls them a pot of gold and once they are ready, scenes like this happen all the time. Kei thinks lowly of this kind of hunt precisely because of this manner of hunting them down.
This city is functional. It is a city where you can find a corpse in the road and some people would simply cover their mouth and nose and move on without a care. Just another body to add to the pile. That’s how apathetic this city has become and yet we try to live like normal. Of course, not everyone shares the same apathy to this broken down world. Hopes and dreams is this undying flame that keeps them clinging to life. Surprisingly, the Agents I know have that kind of hope. A hope that keeps them tied to their humanity.
We are bystanders to this. We simply are one of the many who will stare at the television screen and wonder how long the Wight incursion while looking up for any betting pools, hoping to earn some cash. You can’t fight everything in this city. You have to find your niche and stick with it. Although I say that, I am a job-hopping bastard who hasn’t been able to hold a proper job until now.
The next morning. The lanes have been devastated. I watch a video from my phone and see that the Wight has caused some damage. The city issued a quarantine in the area and is blocking any transport and services to the area. I can also hear the drone-speakers announcing it. A neighbor threw a rock and got electrocuted by the drone.
After breakfast I took the service train back to Asobe Street while carrying the replacement for the broken glass. Kei had me pick up the panel and I had to wait in a long line before I got our purchase.
I installed the glass panel while Kei and Eta were out for scouting. By the time they got back they smelled like rotten corpses. They washed themselves in the office and started investigating on a possible anomaly.
After installing the glass panel. Eta showed me a report of a rumors they gathered. This time it’s another anomaly, and one that has been repeatedly shown to be hostile. The anomaly retains its senses and battle wits, meaning to say it is one that has been warped to another being altogether.
“Concrete-based weapons.”
Eta crosses her arms.
“Exactly. This Anom has been using concrete weapons to defeat its pursuers. OB Agents thought of bringing in this anomaly when it suddenly showed powers that aren’t recorded in any database.”
Using concrete to cover itself like armor. Manipulating concrete to shape and using it to rain down sharp spikes of it. Eta shows me the mutilated corpses of the Agents who went after the Anomaly.
“It retains sentiment. Did they rank it?”
“Below ORANGE for now.”
Kei cuts in and then taps her fingers on the table.
“Its abilities are unusual. We know it can use concrete, but can it use others? So far it hasn't shown anything like that, but we need to be careful.”
There are many kinds of augments that have been made to surpass the physical human base form and contracts have been made to wield otherworldly powers. But this Concrete Man clearly isn’t a contractor of a devil nor does it have psychic abilities.
“I’m guessing they want us to investigate this badly?”
Kei nods. She stares at the documents and then alternates her gaze from Eta and back to me.
“It’s a valuable anomaly. If we manage to kill or subdue this anomaly, then we will have the chance to offer this information to headquarters at quite a price. We can find the damn thing in the outskirts, so we better get ready.”
“I’ll go prepare our stuff.”
Eta walks to the storage and starts preparing her tools. Kei’s face is too serious, one that I haven’t seen even when facing a fragment of a devil.
“Don’t look at me like that. What I fear more is walking blind. We know next to nothing about this anomaly and initial reports are so sparse we might as well start from zero and trace the information from the first witness.”
Which means that we’ll have to start with the mortuary.
