After taking a moment to observe the aftermath of her unfinished creation, Krahe once more turned her attention to the miscreant before her, and any sense of satisfaction was washed away by the returning tide of disdain.
“Youssef and Aldritch, is it? And they never involved you in the disposal?”
A feverish head-shake.
“They had me stuff one of them into an old chest, but that was it. Youssef dragged it off on his own,” Ogura insisted.
“Interesting. Any of you use a Mamon Coupler?”
“...Youssef does. The bug kind. Aldritch can do theurgy and a buncha other stuff, he did all the quietening on my house.”
“Good, very good. Keep in mind, if you lie to me, I will find out, and then you’ll wish I had just killed you. Which I won’t do, if you just answer my questions truthfully. If you don’t know, you don’t know, don’t try to pull an answer out of your ass, it’ll just annoy me. Understood?” Krahe asked, smiling.
Ogura nodded feverishly.
“Good. So as I was asking, where are you keeping the girl?”
“Aldritch’s house, it’s not far from here… The upper floor. Sometimes one room, sometimes the other.”
“Where in the room?”
“I don’t-”
“Compared to the doors and windows, where do you keep her?”
Understanding lit up Ogura’s eyes for a moment.
“As far from the doors and windows as possible. There are beds.”
Krahe knew where the house was. It was, after all, her second prime target. After a few more questions, it quickly became obvious that Ogura didn’t know much at all. She managed to get him to confirm that, at the bare minimum, Juno Oldfield was likely not in immediate fatal danger. This was, however, barely any consolation, because the last valuable pieces of information she managed to dig out of his bald head were numbers – the first number was three. Besides Juno Oldfield, their gang had kidnapped, raped, and disposed of three women on and off over the course of about a year, in addition to simply robbing at least half a dozen others. Juno, based on Ogura’s fearful answers, had already been violated several times, but was still “mostly intact” by his reckoning. The second important number was twenty-one — the number of days the previous victim had lasted. Knowing full well that it would look better and probably end up more useful if she brought in all four of them alive, Krahe decided to put her newly-picked-up security skills to the test. She already had a fair number of leftover materials from securing her office, so she used up some of them by setting up a simple perimeter around Ogura’s bed. To the naked eye, it looked like a single line of ink with a few offshoots connecting to a handful of talismans around the exterior and interior — which is exactly what it was.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
“Be a good boy and stay put while I bag your friends. You try to leave, you explode. You try to defuse it, you explode. It’s set to recognize my presence as the defuse key, so you better hope I come back.”
That last part was a lie, but it didn’t really matter.
As she left, Ogura spoke up again. His voice was flat — bewildered, but not disturbed by what he was saying, like reminiscing on a particularly strange animal encounter.
“Y’know, it never really hit me how fucked up it all was. By the end, you couldn’t even tell it used to be a person…”
The urge to kill him right then and there flared within Krahe, but she left it for later. She decided to make her way to the second house, but not before took a moment to prepare. She brought out her calligraphy tools and some pre-prepared ink, working up a “less-than-lethal” Wandrei Faust as quickly as she could — using knowledge gleaned from developing its decoy-sibling, she was able to modify an existing talisman, thus further reducing the amount of time required, and she sped it up even more by simply making it rougher than she normally would, not taking any great care for the purposes of efficiency and making no effort to preserve the offensive beam aspects of the pattern. The resulting theurgy would be a grabber with a terribly foreboding lightshow attached. Instead of taking the time to pack it into cartridges, she just smeared some blood-glue — the Unguent of Nug-soth — on her left bicep, then measured out the requisite amount of thaumine powder, crushed a dregshot bullet, and worked the resulting powder into the sticky surface before applying the talisman itself. It was ugly, but it would work the same once she ignited it. Then, she repeated this process once more. The modified Wandrei Faust would have a limited range, and she would only get two casts of it out of one Chthonian Eel, compared to the usual three. It would suffice — she didn’t expect more than three hostiles, and even if there were more, taking two of them out of the fight without killing them would be better than nothing. A small voice in Krahe had wanted to rush to the other house as soon as possible, but she knew better than anyone how important being properly prepared was. As she saw it, a few minutes wouldn’t magically un-rape or un-mutilate the girl, but if she went in unprepared, those subhumans might get away on way or another, be it by escaping or by making her resort to lethal means rather than capture, and the girl might end up dead as well.
As she left, she pasted a simple locking talisman on the inside of the lock, powered by a 50DD ring. It was weak, but it would be enough to slow down anyone who could try to enter the building while she was away, on the off-chance Ogura somehow called for help.
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