Chapter 80: 78 – The Charred Judge

Most averted their eyes. 

A few stared her down with a grim coldness behind their glares, a wordless agreement tainted by defeatism.

Three men emerged from the crowd, each burly, each wielding a blade - a large dagger, a war-knife, a butcher’s cleaver. Each of them wore mass-produced clothing, though the one with the war-knife had obviously bespoke workman’s boots, as well as a half arrogant, half furious grimace over his face.

“I’ll give y’the courtesy o’ tellin’ me yer name ‘fore I gut you like a fish, mutt whore!” he growled, stepping forward. 

Alcerys chose to play along, if only for the moment. If only to sate her own ego. She raised her sword, drawing in a breath of Fog, burning away a fifth of it for naught else but to set alight the blade with blue fire. Simultaneously she raised her left hand in an altered gesture of prayer, holding together the tips of the thumb and the pinky finger while keeping the three others pointing straight up; it was one of many she had learned to facilitate her techniques before the inquisitorial geasa took hold, and now it would serve her again. 

In this manner, the Eye hung from her wrist and stared down those before her.

“My name does not belong in the gutter you call your mouth, rabid dog. The Charred Judge will be the only moniker you may curse upon receiving your rightful punishment,” she seethed, reveling in the fact she could set loose all the built-up verbal vitriol that had been boiling and fermenting in the back of her mind for the last decade. Angry glares and signed insults just didn’t give the same satisfaction.

All three came at her from a different angle, each obviously accustomed to the ragtag violence of a city’s back streets. The first to lunge at her came from the left with the dagger, and following a simple duck she delivered a left-handed uppercut to the gut, instinctively trying to invoke Heatshock even though the technique was lost to her. A wave of warmth surged through her fist and he doubled over clutching his stomach, then spewed a waterfall of boiling half-digested soup into the dirt. A familiar vestige took hold in her mind, spun a different way.

The other two came at her at once, attempting a pincer maneuver. Losing the fingers with which he gripped his cleaver turned out to be the right-side brute's fate, as Alcerys just flicked off the sausage-like appendages with Emberthorn’s flame-wreathed edge, leaving behind charred, unbleeding stumps surrounded by bubbling burns. His weapon thumped to the ground and one half of its handle fell away, it too severed and charred. As for the second, he received the mercy of a swift kick to the gut and a short swipe of Emberthorn’s back edge across the back of the forearm to remember her by. All three men would live, and none of them dared strike her again, each shuffling off in a different direction and different manner. One of them stuttered about how he isn’t getting paid enough to pull metal hedgehog-spines from his arm.

A gurgling sound. The sound of heels and fingers digging through dirt. Click. Boom. A sudden kinetic shock reverberated through her back

He had shot her. 

When she whipped around to stare down at him, he returned an unrepentant grin of bloodied teeth.

“Ygh… Yghou’r deeaghd meat,” he choked out a chuckling threat, bubbles of blood inflating between his teeth and from the pinprick holes over his neck. 

Alcerys grabbed the marketer's wrist and with a breath of Fog yanked him up so forcefully that the shoulder popped free of its socket, smashed his elbow with Emberthorn’s pommel, and dragged its spine across his arm over, and over, and over again, until it was covered in a zigzagging pattern of embedded thorns.

“Whoever you think will come for me, tell them,” she spat, dropping the writing mess of a man onto the ground. “Tell them the Charred Judge has deemed you guilty, that what I’ve done to you is a mercy. Tell them. Send the guilty to their deserved judgment.” 

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Her gaze wandered to the boy, still stuck to that wall, staring at her in abject terror. She didn’t try to calm him, knowing it to be a fool’s errand. Instead she said to him, “Get a gun and learn how to use it. Subhumans of this sort only understand violence.”

A few minutes later in another back alley…

“What’s your name?” asked the Charred Judge.

The boy - understandably unable to stem the tide of sobbing - stuttered out, “K-Kch-Karzon Anter-ter-Anteros…”

“Tomorrow I want you to come to Collier’s Equalizers, the store across the street from the town hall. There will be a gun waiting for you, do you understand?”

With a long schlorp of nasally inhalation, Karzon gave a nod. Moments later, when he realized Alcerys was leaving and had no plans to say another word to him, the boy ran off.

She was certain she could get Collier to give the kid a sparklock. Perhaps even an old tarnished pepperbox that wouldn’t sell, if the old hag was in a good mood. It wouldn’t be long until she found out for herself, seeing as she had to visit that street twice today - the first time to pick up an unregistered attribute-reader Tablet from one of Estoras’ contacts who resided in the area, the second to actually go to her meeting with the governor and confirm that she was in a good-enough state to accept his contract.

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The morning broke on another day, and Zelsys woke entangled with a warm, intimately familiar body. She would have been content to drift back to sleep, were she not consumed by a wrenching ache.

Hunger. 

Such deep hunger that she had never felt, almost like she had a second stomach that demanded as much food as the first.

It was punctuated by points on her back from which radiated dull, thrumming pain, that of fresh scars. 

Through the window the sun glared upon the wall and the rising bustle of a waking city slowly crept in as a weak, distant noise, all but drowned by the soundproofing.

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