The five remaining gangsters in the foyer hadn't finished reloading. Their fingers trembled as they jammed powder and shot into their pistols, panic blooming in their eyes, so Gael didn't give them the courtesy of time.

He twisted the dial on his back. His Vile Canister hissed like a drunk being woken too early, and then it roared, belching thick green fog into the room. Mist poured from his coat, filling the foyer until the gaudy portraits on the wall wept themselves away and the chandelier sulked into shadow. The gangsters' coughing started at once—wet, sharp, frightened—yet they still managed to fire blind into the haze.

Bullets whistled past, but Gael had already dashed to the side. His lenses glowed, and he slipped between their panicked shots, sliding into the nearest man with his bladed cane.

One slash across the throat. A gentleman's greeting. The fellow clutched at the sudden hole and folded. The next gangster tried to bring three of his spider arms down at once, but Gael sidestepped the clumsy rhythm, hooked his cane under the elbow, then drove the blade between his ribs. The third gangster earned a neat thrust through the gut, the fourth gangster a line along the femoral that let her stumble two paces before he decapitated her as well, and as he turned for the fifth—

The Cleaner got there first.

By the time Gael turned around, the Cleaner had already jammed his rusty greatsword down the final gangster's throat, splitting him in half like bad timber. Blood gurgled as the man sagged around the blade, nailed to death by sheer… obscenity.

Gael blinked. "I still have no fucking idea who you are."

The Cleaner tilted his head like a hound hearing music. "I clean."

"No, but like… whatever." He flicked two coins across the air, and the Cleaner caught them swiftly. "As agreed, one Mark per kill. You really fine with that?"

"Yes."

"Man, how do you make a living off that?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

Shouts echoed from the bazaar outside, footsteps hammering the porch. The house was waking up, but the Cleaner wiped his blade against the corpse's jacket and made no attempt to leave the foyer, so Gael took that as his agreement to hold the gangsters outside here.

That was Gael's cue to twist the canister's dial to keep the fog thick, and then he charged down the main hallway, bladed cane in one hand and the metal sheath in the other.

As he did, the headquarter-mansion's guts spilled Repossessors from every direction. They were high-rankers, all of them with six arms and bursting from parlors, lounges, and music rooms, firing pistols, swinging cleavers, and thrusting spears.

Gael grinned and answered with his toys.

Pulling down the lever on his waist canister, he released his little metal ravens into the air. They screamed and pinwheeled down the hall, wings of madness ricocheting off blades and steel, scissoring through cheeks and throats. He dashed through his enemies while they were at it, cane flashing. A throat here. A tendon there. He split one man's belly open and let his hungry flower do the chewing, its petal-teeth blooming crimson. A pistol cracked into his shoulder, tearing cloth and skin, but he only hissed and laughed.

"Rude," he answered with a cane-thrust through the shooter's eye.

More blood followed him like a drunk friend. Cuts marked his coat and hip, bruises blossomed where bullets kissed too close, but still he kept laughing. It all stung and it all burned, but more than pain, he felt the gnaw of… boredom.

Saintess above, he was getting real tired of killing grunts. It was a fun two weeks for sure, skulking through the Gulch Pipelines using Cara's maps and his 'Basic Setae' mutation—allowing him to walk on walls—before popping into Repossessor bases and watching the gangsters freak out. It was especially fun brutalizing each of the four Fingers. He'd enjoyed disemboweling Luthien after seeing how extensive the man's trafficking operation was, and sending the kids he rescued down to the clinic would surely lead to more employees once he got back, but he had to admit, fighting endless tides of nobodies night after night for two weeks straight?

It's like an endless chain of fucking bitch-quests.

So now that he had the Repossessors cornered into this one last building—one last bitch-king at the top he had to murder—he couldn't help but feel a little excited.

He drove his cane through another Repossessor, then bounded up the lavish golden stairs, boots slapping on the blood-slick marble. Second floor. More spider-armed fucks, more bullets, and more blades. He carved through them in fury, cursing under his mask, while the storm outside banged the windows like a drunk debtor at his door.

Three ravens danced on the gale, fluttering just outside the windows as he sprinted past them.

"Slower than rot!" cawed Winston, the first raven.

"Bleed more of them!" cawed Marlowe, the second raven.

"You disappoint!" cawed Balthazar, the third raven.

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"Shut your beaks!" Gael roared, slashing a throat so hard it painted the wall. "I'm busy!"

The mischievous three cawed at him, cursing him out. He also had to admit, though, that without them carrying his letters across the ward every night—warning nearby civilians about his imminent arrival—half the bodies he left behind would've been poor and innocent bastards caught in the crossfire. As it stood, he'd heard from Cara that even dozens of Repossessors had deserted the gang and went south to the clinic. Smart men. Deaths weren't allowed in the clinic, so Gael couldn't kill them even if he wanted to.

And with Fergal and the others defending the clinic—mostly Fergal, that iron bastard—Lorcawn hadn't been able to lay a finger on it while Gael carved his warpath through the ward.

As he stormed his way to the third and uppermost floor, a single, final hallway awaited him in front. Ten Repossessors stood in his way, so he charged straight at them, braced in the green hush of his own fog.

Status.

[// STATUS]

[Name: ??? / Gael]

[Grade: A-Rank Wretch-Class]

[Standard Class: Wasp]

[Passive Mutation: Profane Eyes]

[Swarmblood Arts: ??? / Blood Covenant]

[Aura: ??? / 1207 BeS]

[Points: ??? / 19 vBe]

[Strength: ??? / 6, Speed: ??? / 4, Toughness: ??? / 4, Dexterity: ??? / 4, Perceptivity: ??? / 5]

[// MUTATION TREE]

[T1 Mutations | ??? / Miasma Mantle Lvl. 3]

[T2 Mutations | ??? / Basic Repository Lvl. 3 | ??? / Basic Chitin Lvl. 4]

[T3 Mutations | ??? / Basic Vision Lvl. 2 | ??? / Basic Setae Lvl. 2 | ??? / Basic Spiracles Lvl. 2]

The half-translucent display lit up in the corner of his eye as he cut the first three men down. Of the thirty or so Repossessor bases he'd raided, over half of them were point stashes. Of course they were; all of the high-ranking gangsters ran Standard Spider Classes that'd eventually be worked into Advanced Jumping Spider Classes, so they had to have been getting their points from somewhere.

But I reckon they don't even bother saving the Hosts like we do. They just want the Myrmur carcasses.

In any case, he'd eaten a sizable portion of the carcasses they'd been keeping in storage—the rest he'd distributed back to the clinic for Fergal, his goons, and the kids—so his physical attributes were a lot higher than before, not to mention he'd unlocked his final T3 mutation as well, 'Basic Vision'. It wasn't particularly useful having eyes that could pierce through thick smog, considering he already had his night vision lenses, but the point was unlocking all of his T3 mutations.

Now, he was technically eligible to evolve his Standard Wasp Class into an Advanced Class, but…

He stabbed his cane through the final man's throat, tugged it free, and his eyes slipped down to the shackle still ringed at his ankle.

The length of the chain connecting to the Hunter's end of the shackles ran nowhere.

Without her on the other end of it, he couldn't evolve his class. He needed her back.

So he sheathed his blade, trudged to the office doors at the end of the hallway, and reached for one of the hexagonal alcoves on his back. The bottle he'd tucked inside his body there was blunt-nosed and honest, labeled with a skull and a number: 80%.

Just what I need.

He kicked the door open as he started chugging the bottle.

Inside the gaudy office at the top corner of the building, Lorcawn sat behind his fancy wooden desk. Beside the desk, one last Repossessor pointed a pistol at Gael the moment he entered.

The young man fired. Gael lifted his coat and let the rounds chew into the chitin plates sewn within. Thud, thud, thud—spent lead flattened and fell with dull little notes on the carpet, and when the hammer finally clicked, Gael lowered his coat.

He raised his right hand and spoke without looking at the corpse-to-be.

"You're still hungry, right?"

Of course it was. The giant flower bloomed from his right hand, huge and delighted, and the petal-teeth snapped up the young man whole. While it worked him in savage, wet jerks until screaming turned to texture, Gael tilted his head at Lorcawn and grinned behind his mask.

"What's up, old man?" he said. "Need a checkup? I'll gladly open you up and check your insides for abnormalities, and the only payment I'll need is the location of my wife. Not a bad deal, hm?"

Lorcawn glanced once at the eviscerated, bloody mess that was what the flower had left of the young man. His dull golden eyes were calm when they came back to Gael.

"I told my men to bring her up here," he said casually, "but they haven't come up yet for some reason. Whatever. I'll just have to deal with you myself, seeing as you're so… tenacious."

And with that, Lorcawn rose like some obscene idol dragged up from the underworld. Two human arms flexed, four grafted limbs bulged grotesquely at his sides, and four great spider-arms reared up from his back. Ten arms in all, every one of them armed: two cleavers, two hooks, two knives, and a scythe in two arms. Only his original human hands stayed steady on his morphing sawblade-staff.

With a snarl, he kicked his desk forward, oak and iron shrieking across the carpet. Gael answered with a savage kick of his own, shattering it between them. Lorcawn sneered and strapped his brass glass-tube mask to his face.

The valves hissed, the glass fogged, and his voice came through distorted.

"I'll enjoy dicing you apart, boy."

In response, Gael tossed his bottle of raw spirit aside, the glass spinning away into the shadows. His bladed cane came free again with a screech.

"To be honest, I feel like I've been keeping on a leash for ten long years," he said, "but these past two weeks have been exhilarating. I think I've killed to my heart's content for at least the next ten, twenty years, so after this, I'll swear the Bloodless Mandate again. No more slaughter for me."

He raised his bladed cane at the old man, his grin stretching beneath his mask.

"You'll be my very last."

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