Arc F1.10 | Chapter 2: Blind Spot

They seemed to come from nowhere, dropping into the middle of the veritable mob of Fräthk’s loyal as though they had always been there. The boy watched, catching shatterings of their bloody arrival. A few slid in from the alleyways, a blur of motion that he could barely follow before they were sliding a blade over the throat of one person or another; others slipped through the streets, as confident in their existence as he had ever seen anyone be.

There were no screams, in those first moments of their arrival. It didn’t matter that most of them had pale skin, so uncommon in Lüshan. The boy had met a few people over the years, with skin tones lacking the depth of those naturally found in Lüshan. Some were diaspora, slipped into their nation during times of conflict. Most were those who had experienced genetic spasms, their skin being pulled into something other as a consequence. One of those people was nearby—one of Fräthk’s most loyal, despite how useless her abilities were.

That woman had no irregular deviation that would ever have gained her favour with Fräthk; instead, she had been someone ostracized by her family and left to find her way into a life of crime. The boy wasn’t entirely sure why she had been kicked out—left to the streets—by her family. Perhaps it was due to her skin tone; perhaps it was because she was a terrible woman, always so happy to do terrible things. He had never bothered to ask. Fräthk’s loyal were an annoying sort, always singing their captor’s praises because they had rescued them from the streets.

That perception led them to, well… do things like this. There were far too many people here, and the boy had spent the last little bit watching everyone move about, doing nothing of use.

Fräthk wouldn’t like it—they wanted Porsq back, after all, and none of these people were doing anything to contribute to that goal. All the same, Fräthk had created the culture that had allowed this situation to happen.

Catching their beloved leader’s favour was something all of their most loyal lived for; yet, for so many of them, they lacked the abilities, the intelligence, the power to do so. What they didn’t lack? Motivation and ambition. So, here they were, doing nothing to help someone else.

They were all in it for themselves, and the boy thought that this was why he’d been left alone for so long: to come to him for aid would have been to admit something between a need for help and foresight to ask him to use his abilities for them. No one wanted to admit they couldn’t please Fräthk by their own will and power alone.

Ironically, the boy had been there for a while and no one had really noticed him—not until the Baalphorian group arrived.

Perhaps it was due to that pale-skinned woman, lingering somewhere in the vicinity and therefore leading all of Fräthk’s loyal to expect white skin to slip through their vision, but the boy still thought it took far too long for anyone to notice the group slitting throats without a care in the world, bodies toppling to the ground, bled of life. A few of Fräthk’s loyal even stepped over their corpses, as though doing so were the most natural thing in the world.

Red splattered across the Baalphorian group’s shirts and arms and cheeks, and it wasn’t just the three clones slicing people down with ease—and fuck if those clones weren’t as beautiful as he had always known they would be. They had been perfect—the one with the deranged smile especially—when he had watched them move through the city. There was no hesitation in their movements, no flinching back from the blood spray.

No, they just moved forward on their mission to cleanse this city.

Luckily, they were also observant, and when one of them caught his eyes—the one who always seemed to stay further back from the fighting and was currently acting as a support for the two other clones, as well as a defence for the one who seemed to be their medical support—Curtisal knew they had already pegged him as there.

Well, that was some mixture of good and annoying—he really had been hoping that they wouldn’t notice his silly little test so quickly; at the same time, it meant the group wasn’t going to try and kill him as well… hopefully not, anyways? Unfortunately, aside from sending off a message on his xphern, asking if everyone currently knew he was there, Curtisal really couldn’t do much to make sure that none of the other Baalphorians shifting through the crowd were about to kill him by accident. That would suck—and Anarch would be really upset.

His friend had already been rather unhappy about them being separated, back when he’d explained his man to send her and Vtraní off in different directions. Something had told him he needed to come to the holding cells, while Anarch had been left to join Cravena and Vtraní had—somewhat reluctantly on both of their parts—taken one of his vehicles towards where Prex had the little boy. Vtraní, it turned out, was not a good driver, and while Curtisal knew that getting his creations out of the city with them was likely impossible, he still didn’t want any of them destroyed by their erratic driving!

The first scream rang out as a message came through on his xphern: Halen informing him that the entire drop group already knew he was there and wouldn’t be killing him. That was nice, and after a quick back and forth, Curtisal confirmed that they were aware enough of his presence to be confident they wouldn’t accidentally kill him.

Apparently, the Baalphorians were able to mark people as friend or foe or unknown with their Censors, while the two Lüshanians with them were a Drinarna intern—someone who should be able to keep track of the crowd, although he had vanished into the side streets along with the more cool and collected clone—and that girl. Cool—so fucking cool. If they managed to get out of the city, Curtisal thought he might like to go back to Baalphoria with everyone. Censors and Baalphorian technology were just so cool, and as he watched the fight, occasionally using his abilities to trip up criminals who got a little too close to several of the weaker members of the drop group, Curtisal catalogued all the things the Baalphorians did.

So. Fucking. Cool.

His favourite Baalphorian was the tall one who was keeping the little Lüshanian girl close, and she had never fessed up about who she was, had she? Curtisal knew her—Fräthk regularly reminded him that they wanted the girl. Every time, Curtisal would make a show of searching—would make sure Fräthk knew he was always looking for the girl, but she was nowhere to be found. This was all a lie, of course: Curtisal regularly sent Anarch out to find the girl and tell her when someone had caught her scent and was liable to show up, looking to return her to Fräthk.

The last time hadn’t been that long ago, after she’d run into the man who had helped Jerrial escape. Back then, there had been no proof that Fräthk knew anything of Jerrial’s friend or the girl’s location, but Curtisal hadn’t been willing to risk it. That girl was dangerous, and Fräthk didn’t need someone like her beholden to them—it was why Anarch had helped the girl escape Fräthk’s eyes in the first place, several years ago.

There was a reason he and Anarch were such good friends—why he hadn’t bothered to tell her he was going to betray Fräthk to The Black Knot until he’d already done so. Some people looked at their friendship and thought it odd; it wasn’t.

He was soft and deranged and wanted everyone to be free from Fräthk, no matter the cost.

Anarch was wild and deranged and wanted the same.

The Baalphorian he was watching—Darrian, he thought—shifted, blades of aether exploding out of him with such perfect precision it was terrifying. A willbrand shifted over his fists, the glittering blue a mirror image of those stunning eyes of his—something crafted specifically for him, then? Who did they have who could do that? Willbrandsmithing was such a rare specialty these days that, even though he had asked Fräthk if he could learn, they had been unable to find him anyone to learn from.

Too busy smithing to teach anyone seemed to have been the resounding opinion, as though, by teaching no one ever, the work wouldn’t become increasingly more difficult as they aged and their peers died, all without anyone to take over.

“Maybe they’re trying to kill the profession,” Anarch had suggested, and that seemed insane—who wanted the profession they were actively practicing to die out? While some of those willbrandsmiths had been forced to work for Fräthk and the organization they worked under as a whole, others had just been random smiths, choosing to continue working but refusing to teach, and it was weird. If they were going to kill the profession, Curtisal thought it better to fully commit.

Of course, killing off an ability or skill wasn’t entirely unheard of. Sometimes, there were irregular deviations so strange and powerful that their owners refused to procreate—Curtisal’s own father had been like that, a single fuck-up leading to him and a lifetime of regret from the old man before he’d killed himself with drugs, trying to escape their shared irregular deviation. That was the thing to do, Curtisal thought, if someone hated some ability or skill they had: death, by one’s own hand, guaranteeing an end to it all.

Curtisal loved his abilities, even if knew the full reality of them was something so terrifying he may never tell anyone more than Anarch the whole of them. Even now, tugging his abilities across the weapons of those who attacked his new allies, he could see the small echoes of fear and confusion in their eyes. It was such a small thing, to be able to pull metals about—the metal that willbrands were made of included. Usually, willbrands were impervious to such things—there was a reason they were one of the few things able to penetrate the defences of a coding lavender code—and those who could use willbrands well knew how to trust the things with their life.

That was a small part of the terror of his ability: this extension of it into the minds and hearts of those who came into contact with him. Most people who witnessed him attaching extra limbs into himself and using them as though they were meant to be there thought that the horrific thing. Curtisal could make even more of a monster of himself than he already had and he knew he would never notice some supposed strain on his body, never regret what he formed himself into.

Horror that one can see is far better than horror that one cannot. Extra limbs can be seen, the lingering distrust in one’s most trusted weapon cannot—and that manipulation of weapons was by far the least terrifying way Curtisal could wiggle his abilities into the hearts of his opponents.

“You ever think it’s weird that people don’t realize that, if you can create limbs for them, you can also manipulate them once they’re attached?” an Anarch of over a decade ago asked, Curtisal kneeling before her to change out her prosthetics. They had to be upgraded constantly, in part due to Anarch being a growing girl, in part because she was an agent of chaos and spontaneity. Curtisal had replaced her legs when they were destroyed far more often than he’d updated them due to a sudden growth spurt.

“Maybe, but I think people’s minds are good at protecting them from thinking too hard on the reality that what they’ve been told isn’t entirely true,” Curtisal had said, working through the worst part of attaching his prosthetics to Anarch’s body: connecting the lines to her meridians.

He could create prosthetics that didn’t have energy conduits, but for someone like Anarch, they were important—for people like those Fräthk had him create limbs for, they were important. Unlike many people, Anarch barely flinched, so used to having her meridians snapped into the limbs she saw as hers, despite the fact that most people described that attachment as far more painful than losing the limb. It was so painful that most of those he had created prosthetics for took excellent care of their metal limbs, using them for far longer than reasonable in an attempt to avoid the procedure of having a new one attached.

Some of the people now moving around them in a ball of chaos, trying and failing to land even singular blows on the weakest members of the drop group, had his creations attached to them, and they were completely fucked. Over the decades of being forced to give his blood and sweat and passion to Fräthk and these putrid people, Curtisal had rarely extended his abilities to affect the limbs he had been forced to give up. Usually, when he did, the person’s life had already been sealed.

The last time he’d pulled a person into the darkness using his ability to tug on the man’s hand in an inescapable demand before Sireth slit his throat, the piece of shit having killed the kid sibling of someone he’d helped kidnap a few weeks earlier. It had been a pointless murder: the little girl had been asleep; the man was just a cruel person who had no longer deserved to live. After, they’d both vanished in different directions. Curtisal had gotten a pastry. Sireth had gone on the mission Fräthk had assigned her, arriving perfectly punctual as always.

Mostly, Curtisal assumed that the people who had his creations were simply in denial that he could manipulate their limbs with far more perfection than even they themself could, or that they thought their energy shifting through his creations would somehow protect them. It wouldn’t, and when Curtisal was able to shift the attack of one of Fräthk’s cruellest loyal—a woman with a long history of stealing children born to Fräthk’s less loyal captives and then mutilating them in some horrific attempt to force their parents to cooperate—so she shot herself in the head with her willbrand, a smile split over his face.

This was the day he had been waiting for—the moment when everyone realized that being a timid creature was only part of his existence. Like so many of them, he could be just as deranged—could snuff out lives without batting an eyes—and when he tugged the woman’s arm from her body and sent it careening towards another dead body, another, collection limbs of his creation from each until a monster of metal stood, one legged, two armed and wielding all of their willbrands with the residual energy still circulating though his metal limbs?

Yeah, Curtisal definitely enjoyed the looks of horror on their faces. He especially enjoyed the horror on the faces of those who had his creations still attached to them—attached to them and virtually impossible to destroy and now a threat to their lives.