[Suzerain of Sheol]

Unperturbed by the girl's minuscule attack, Thomas calmly aligns the sights of his rifle over her bobbing skull as she sprints away. With his battle hormones suffusing his blood, she seems to barely move at all, his focus perfect, his finger curling around the hair-trigger...

Until a BLASPHEMY erupts just next to her. That wracked form of the angel dissolving, transmuting, Hellish, serpentine... a hundred vipers exploding from the carcass.

The brunt of them leap at Kadia, as she runs past, crashing against her with their fearsome weight, fangs sinking deep, venom flowing... More scrape their teeth uselessly against Rurik's steel hide.

One surges at Dante, jaws snapping at his left eye, only to seize upon lifeless cloth, hanging dangling...

More attack the strange, sea-smelling wanderer standing so near, unnoticed, biting into the meat of limbs, the sinew of his neck, one launching itself into his mouth, piercing the back of his tongue with its fangs, and slithering down his esophagus, injecting poison all the way.

Several fly at Diogenes, repelled by the ceramic plates in his robe. he catches one and tears it half, throwing it down stamping its brain to pulp upon the filthy floor. He sees several writhing over toward Lev, and assumes the vicious man can take care of himself. He instead stalks forward to the milling, devastated body in the wheelchair and promptly sprays fire from his right wrist, modulating the flow so as not to catch any of his allies, as much as to conserve his dwindling accelerant. He does not relent until nothing but ash decorate the charred steel of the wheelchair.

Thomas snaps a fist up to forestall his men as they reach for weapons, and hurls his rifle away. Rolling his wrists, the blades shoot forth once more, and he begins dicing apart the few serpents who advance down the hall. His soldiers follow suit, drawing combat knives and setting to work.

In all, unimpressive for the powers of Hell. Though an irritating distraction.

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Focused on keep flying debris at bay, it took little effort on Tarja’s part to switch her attention to flying snakes. Still, several now dangled from her back, their fangs stuck in her body armour, while several more were tangled in her robes. A few suspended in mid-air before her, and she narrowed her eyes, the snake suddenly writing unnaturally as they started to hiss, smoke, and erupt into flame, then crumple into ash.

She dropped the sword, its flame finally dying as it hit the floor in the path of one of the snakes. Leaving the ones on her back to dangle, she proceeded to rip the snakes from her ropes with her hands, and her mind, incinerating the ones she held in her telekinetic grasp and swinging others wide until their heads connected sharply with the asylum wall.

[Salone]

Lev had barely began to adjust to sanity before he was set upon by the vipers. They snapped and lunged, sinking fangs in to both boots below and skin and cloth above. It was all too much. Lev had lost it.

He screamed as he gripped behind the head of one of the snakes dangling from his arm. With a massive pull he ripped it from his skin, shouted in to its scaly face before biting its head off. He used the decapitated body as a whip, beating at the rest of the snakes as he spit blood and scale from his mouth. He finally let his makeshift whip fly, now useless that the bones inside were crushed and ill fit for damaging.

He pulled yet another from his leg, fighting to shove fingers from both hands in to the mouth of the beast. He achieved a decent grip and pulled apart, ripping the jaw free. He continued pulling, screaming over the creaking pops and snaps of sinew as it began to tear. The strong skin held, and the creature was ripped down the side, tearing away in to two portions. Freed organs slopped lazily on to the floor, free of their cage of bones and tissue.

And yet they refused to relent.

Lev unfastened the heavy revolver from his chest holster. The long and heavy cylinder was filled with five .410 gauge shot shell rounds, and he made quick use of them. Not caring for assaulting himself with the pellets, he fire point blank across his body. Snakes attached to him became confetti as they were stripped down, cut apart and dismembered by the pellets passing through them. Quite a few entered Lev's own body, shredding in to muscle and burying themselves in his denser tissue. He kept this up, firing again and again until he emptied the revolver. What was left of the creatures continued to hang off of him in ribbons, giving him the look of some sort of nightmarish piñata as he bled once again. Even still he was assaulted. There was no time to reload. But the revolver was metal, and it was heavy.

A sickening crunch signaled the crushing of small bones as he brought the revolver down on the head of a snake, using the cylinder to literally beat the serpents down. He fell upon the floor as he came to their territory, sanity slipping ever so quickly. Eventually the gun slipped from his hands, clattering along the floor. He did not care though. At this point he was grabbing any snake he could find, literally choking the life out of them with his hands as he ignored the ones biting down in to him. Their poison burned, coursed through his veins. But he did not care. Lev carried a much darker poison, a much more final fate. A disease that had not yet run its course upon the world.

And with sanity taking its leave, Lev began to once again feed upon his foes.

[Lawtan]

Running in the shivering structure,
Kadia heard a shriek. She turned, eyes growing, and saw brown-grey forms swimming through the air towards her and Rurik. Snakes, like the horned ones that seemed to crawl around outside, were coming for them. Believing it to be some trick from the priest, she mentally broke up pieces of wall and threw them at the creatures, hitting many, killing a few. Rurik, a little behind, jumped into the fray of snakes as they passed, taking a significant chunk with him.

A large group was still heading towards her, horned reptiles with extending jaws. Quickly, Kadia swung her hooked swords, severing the heads of many of the fellows. However, there were still a few who landed on her, immediately knocking her on her back with force, and latching onto her lower leg. Fortunate enough not to hit her head, Kadia felt a fire in her legs as venom was pumped in from seven snakes.

A normal person would have died, but Kadia had been given doses of many kinds of poison and venom for 20 years. Still, the snakes were annoying, and Kadia could still have some issues with such venom – this was a place that defied logic, afterall. Unchaining the swords, she sliced the horned snakes with two swipes. Looking, she saw the group also had snakes attacking them. Rurik was chewing through five while stomping on another three. An odd… fellow was fighting his own, but also had a few of the ones she threw back head towards him. Feeling the fire in her legs, Kadia mentally lifted her firewheels and spun them towards the snakes surrounding Rurik…

--------

[Enemy_Count = 12
Attacking Enemy…]

Rurik was of the opinion that he hated these snakes. His senses, relying on wavelengths other than color, and a tinge of aura sight, made these annoying creatures difficult to spot. Fortunately, his metal hide caused the reptiles to leave only slight dents…and broken fangs. Rurik let off hot air as he crunched another two.

[Enemy_Count = 10
Attacking Enemy…]

A swack of metal slicing through three snakes called Rurik’s attention to his mistress. From their link, he felt her pain, one of the few actual sensations he gets. Rurik swings his tail, bashing another two in the head while the wheel slices through the heads of two more.

[Enemy_Count = 3
Attacking Enemy…
Mistress.Danger = 1
Running Help.Mistress!]

Rurik grabbed the other three horned fellows between his mechanical lever-jaws, and crunches. A series of heads, arrow-pointed, sightless, and crowned, fell to the ground. Rurik bound towards Kadia, readying the antivenom and chemical toxin kit…

---------

Kadia hobbled over to Rurik. With a sigh of opening machinery, the anti-kit was revealed, stored in Rurik. Kadia put in two IV’s – one to pull out venom, another to inject chemical neutralizers. Within minutes, the pain ebbed to a dull ache, and Kadia could walk again. However, the creatures were still fighting the others. Kadia spotted Thomas’s men heading forward with an uncertainty about them, and despite her common sense, decided to help, asking Rurik to assist Dante…

[Espy]

Dante clawed the blindfold off his face, flinging it and the viper onto the ground and stomping down hard. Things were moving fast. Too fast. And the snakes were barely even visible. And his sword would only hurt both friend and foe alike,

So he ran. With the tail end of his scarf wrapped around his left arm as a desperate means to protect himself, he lashed out with the shorter blade as he tripped over stones and perhaps the bodies of other snakes, fleeing from the outpouring of undetectable vipers. Then he careened into a wall, and felt fangs sink deep into his thighs.

Pain.

Yanking the snake out of his flesh from just behind its head, he felt skin and muscle tear, but set his jaw and ran the monstrosity through with his pocketknife. And as he sliced through another, a sharp pain shot up his supposedly covered arm. In the nausea that followed, Dante dropped the sword, reaching instead to pull the serpent out.

Its spine snapped in half, leaving the curved incisors still buried to the roots.

I can't...

And then colored forms ceased to exist, instead becoming clouds of twinkling lights, and hazy mist... Drawing on his last reserves, Dante channeled rage and fear and threw it all outwards in a telekinetic ripple.

Just a...ripple. Well, that's...pathetic. he mused, even as the colored fog dissipated into nothingness.

[Gallagher]

He hadn't the time to fathom his distaste for the apparent power struggle between the Mimic and its somethings before one, an unimpressive juvenile as far as he could tell, lashed out. The juvenile and its stone beast attacked not only the Mimic, but the very cavern in which they all stood, and suddenly the butcher was no more, broken into countless serpents, flung outraged at them all.

No sooner had he processed the scene that he realized the vipers were already upon him as well, his throat bulging with one all too eager to force itself within his body. Their fangs scratched and prodded at his skin as they climbed, surely seeking the same entrance as the first. His surprise was short lived. Swallowing down the tail at the back of his tongue, he yanked a snake from under his jaw, and held it up. It hissed and snapped inches from his face, its body twining around his wrist and arm as it sought leverage.

Around him, the minnows and their leaders slaughtered the creatures.

He gave them what they wanted.

One after another, he plucked the vipers from his bare form and guided them to his mouth, only taking the time to kill ones too impatient to wait their turn. He crouched to pull apart the masses ensnaring his legs and feet, leaving countless shallow pinpricks where their fangs had sunk, but now only oozed venom.

[Lawtan]

Rurik saw the man…the helpful one…chased by a handful of the slippery-scaled fellows…but another, a rusty black-brown and milky belly-crawler was among them, with ivory horns. Rurik’s rear legs bent, the rotors resisting gravity’s pull to sit, and leapt across the corridor. With a crunch and release of bodily spew, the front paws landed on a sandy viper clinging to an abandoned scarf. Springs dampening the impact, Rurik bounded again, visual sensors trying to identify the odd snake of the two chasing Dante.

[Snake.colors == {33000, fffaa; 04400, ffaac}
Snake.pattern == 2:1_upperlower _ratio
Snake.head == Large and narrow, coffin-like
Snake.bodysize ~~ 2.2 meters
Identifying snake…]

Rurik was catching up, but Dante’s pace slowed as he seemed weakened. The odd snake hissed loudly, angrily…like a cross between a rattle and steam. The dark snake collided with the man, and bit hard. Oddly, the man did not seem to notice this one, but the sandy snake sent him falling. A third snake Rurik snapped with powerful jaws of steel canines, crushing the flying meat-spine.

[Snake identified…
Unknown.snake == Dendroaspis polylepis mortus]

Rurik rapidly clawed at the creatures, tearing snake meat from bone and freeing the convulsing Dante from their bites. Still, the Devil’s Mamba tried to strike Rurik’s hide, black mouth open. Rurik answered with a bite to the head, and continued to the man. Almost in mourning…for a robot…he curled his flexible tail around Dante, Rurik began tugging the man. Kadia would have to help him…

Dante began vomiting, but otherwise, his limbs hung, paralyzed. Rurik turned the feverish, unconscious Dante so as to avoid bile-choking. Rurik pedaled faster forward towards Kadia and Thomas, unleashing a mental cry.

------------

A howl in her head alerted her to Rurik, bounding towards her, a convulsing Dante behind, slowing him down. Kadia ran towards the pair. Dante was a mess of puke, with red/black blood streaming from three bite wounds…

Kadia had Rurik keep Dante on his side, and opened the aid box inside of Rurik. Grapping one of Rurik’s syringe-pumps, and a relaxant, she administered that to Dante to reduce the convulsing. Now able to grab the bitten limbs, she wrapped chords around them, greatly reducing the bloodflow momentarily to those limbs. She could not flush such toxins out of Dante’s system, and he had went eerily still. With another syringe, she tried multiple antivenoms…to little effect. Limited, Kadia did the only thing possible. Cleaning the blood away, she tied Dante’s limb stiff, and injected the two now-empty syringe-pumps near the black-red swollen bite-marks on the leg. Pulling in reverse, despite being a near futile effort, she tried to draw the tainted blood. In coagulated clumps, it collected…
Dante was starting to grow stiff. His pulse and breath were...nothing. Kadia, frantic to not let another person die…not again…withdrew the syringes. She charged her hands with the weak holy healing she posessed. Shoulders over his chest, in a vertical position above his sternum, she began CPR.

“One…Two…Three…Four…Live!”

The dim light from her hands flowed into Dante to no effect. She went down and forced a breath through his still mouth. She got back up, and repeated, not quite remembering the proper count…

"You...Have...To...Live!" Kadia had tears raining from her eyes...desperate.

[Suzerain of Sheol]

At last, the room is still once more, the writhing of serpentine forms at last brought to cessation. Scanning the chamber with his meta-sight, Diogenes sees Thomas stalking back down the hallway, bending to retrieve his rifle and slinging it across his back. Sees the woman Tarja standing over the ashes of dozens of the vipers. Sees Lev surrounded by blasted gore, gnashing the dead creatures between his jaws in frenzy. Sees the nameless wanderer covered in bites, bitter blood leaking from his lips, seemingly undisturbed by what must be a pint and more of hellish venom swirling through his veins.

Scoffing, he sends to the bizarre man, Lo, I was naked, Lord, and thou didst clothe me.

And sees, finally, Dante, inert, empty of thought, dying. The girl frantically ministering useless aid, failing. And, dead.

Calling to Thomas, he conveys, We've lost one. If you would be so kind, priest... assuming your tantrum is finished.

I could label you a traitor to this cause for your inaction. The woman is a heretic.

A heretic. To your cult of the dead God. Tell me, priest, where is it written, "The harmless and the helpless, they shall be put to death. Try them not upon the laws of man, for theirs is the judgment of the Lord thy God"? The girl has done nothing to harm this mission.

I could swear the neuroplasty was intended to strip the conscience from you. Such failure. The Celestrine will be displeased.

Press the matter, priest, and see how my soul cries in anguish at the terrors I wreak on you.

Terror? Pathetic.

Do you ever wonder why you are unique? Perhaps even grim Zaccheus cannot stomach the monster he has created.

We are, one and all, children of the same God.

May He be blessed, lest we all perish, eh? And needs must as the Devil drives.

You think the Celestrine's favor will defend you here? I could render your soul in bloody ruin across the night with but a thought, Diogenes. And your precious Zaccheus would shed no tears.

Dante's soul withers, Thomas. The man served us faithfully and died for it.

Very well... I am growing tired of casual martyrdom.

Crossing the room flanked by his soldiers, Thomas halts behind Kadia's attempt to resuscitate the blind man. He lays his mutilated titanium hand on her shoulder as gently as he can.

"You cannot help him." His voice is flat, without affect. "But my God was merciful, once." He kneels beside the body, almost solemn. He looks the girl in her eyes. "I will be vulnerable during the resurrection. If you mean to attempt my murder, now is your moment. At the price of this man's immortal soul."

His eyes close, and he goes utterly still.

[Espy]

There were voices. There was shouting, sobbing, an inescapable chill. Something cold pulled him along the even colder ground through a foul-smelling...slush? Pressure. There was pressure on...where was it? Somewhere...

And then the pressure faded. Wait, come back. Dante tried to grasp...whatever it had been, but his arm was lodged in a heavy shell. Immovable. All the coldness in the ground had apparently turned his body to ice, frozen his limbs stiff.

Just a bit of warmth should do it. And mentally, he willed the icy shell to melt. After a few moments, he stopped. It certainly didn't seem any warmer. But...oh. He could lift his arm. Or at least, it seemed to move, along with the rest of his body. Dante sat up and looked...

...No, not looked. There was nothing to see. On second thought, this doesn't feel quite right. Am I sitting? What was that shell? ...Did I lose my "vision" again? I can't see...No. Not only could he not see, there was also no applicable orifice for speech. No coldness or pressure. For the time being, he simply was.

Strange. He could feel...no, that wasn't quite the right word -- he seemed to have lost all sensory receptors...various beings around him. As sentience rose up through the murky fog, Dante found the mind of the girl close to him. Closer still was the strict man. Their names...? I think...there was a way I could talk...

"Can...can you hear me? What's going on? Are we still..." No, wait, where are we? It was dark...a cave?

The events of the past several minutes rushed towards him, an unavoidable tidal wave of terror. As the pieces clicked into place, panic gripped Dante's consciousness, threatening to overwhelm him. ...Dead? That coldness was me...?! He tried to turn around, to reach for Kadia, Thomas, Diogenes...The concept of turning around, he quickly learned, was something only applicable on the physical plane.

And he was not on the physical plane. Dead. The idea echoed in his "mind".

Dead. I failed. ...Gabe! He'll know... A flash of yellow. His brother walked towards him, holding out a welcoming hand, but Dante had no hand to proffer, no means by which to move forward. And just as suddenly as he had appeared, Gabe was rent to ashes, flying away into the aether. The brief hope turned to hollowness. No, I killed him. Twice. I...Don't...wait...! Don't leave me.

Dante no longer felt panic. His very essence WAS panic.

...No! COME BACK. Why is everything so quiet?! COME BACK! HELP ME! I...I don't want...I DON'T WANT TO BE ALONE. THOMAS, DIOGENES!

...Don't leave me.

[Lawtan]

Kadia looked up at the tall, imposing, robed priest, eyes brimming with tears. A clunk alerted her to Rurik moving away. No…she didn’t want to leave Dante...but she had no choice. Not able to meet Thomas’s gaze, she pushed herself up. Dropping her weapons, she turned away. Another failure, another person hurt…
The threatening one…the one who could help…she had to trust…her
fault…too much.

Kadia shrunk down next to Rurik, folding in on herself.

The night was covered in shadow…dark beyond nature. Hound-like figures stalked the streets the night she left home. Her pack, holding rations and a set of multitools, strained her back. Pain, but freedom was worth the pain. Kadia looked back on her past. So much to do, but now was her opportunity.

Kadia trekked along the alleyways of the decayed town, looking in wonder at the facades and torn brickware. Lost in thought and wonder, a hand grabbed her. In shock, she could not cry out. Kadia was dragged into the underground while baleflames erupted from her home district…

Kadia snapped to, shaking. She turned and saw Thomas and Dante…her fault…she can’t save anyone…she should just leave…
A hissing…a snake of red and black, spiked all over, reared itself near the group. Banishing her thoughts, Kadia mentally thrust into the snake. She grabbed and broke the creature’s spine, feeling its life fade. Kadia rose for a second time, and stood over the two. She may be unable to help, but she would at least be there, and at least she could try to protect them...

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Ignoring the girl as she clears out of the way, Thomas positions himself at the feet of the corpse, wrapping his hands around Dante's ankles.

Immediately, a biting, unearthly chill descends upon the room.

Hearing the cries of the blind man's soul, Thomas is too focused to acknowledge them. The longer this takes, the worse the trauma upon the spirit will be.

The priest measures his power, careful not to overwhelm the body with the touch the divine, and begins to spread it into the flesh, into tormented muscle and veins bloated with perverse toxins. He begins slowly, reaching into capillaries and infusing Theurgy into the very cells of Dante's body, shaping, restoring... transmuting.

One by one, the molecules touched by the outflow of blessed magicks reform, transubstantiated into more perfect structure: crystals, flawless geometry of ice, angles upon infinite angles pleasing in the sight of God.

With intimate precision, the priest turns Dante's blood to ice, a transcendental coldness, reaching through the ether, obliterating the presence of venom within his body.

The power of the ritual is twofold, purifying intoxicated flesh and binding the spirit to the healing process to cast out the Hellish poison that has seeped into the man's fundamental being.

Channeling the merciless spirit of Heaven, Thomas sets about freezing Dante's soul into perfection.

Every drop of blood, frozen; every artery transfigured into the sacred harmonious architecture of resurrection. The experience is one Thomas has never undergone, though he knows it is agony, terrifying anguish, a quintessential suffocation of the self, sealing the eternal identity of the soul into a crystalline coma, and they are aware every instant.

The priest does not relent, does waver from the euphoric invocation of his power, until the body is pristine, an effigy of the natal spirit, fresh from the womb of God. Without blemish, unstained. Ideal. An impeccable casting of the image absolute.

And now begins the difficulty of the process: reanimation. This will require fire. Reining in the thunderous pulse of miraculous possibilities within himself, Thomas begins to THAW the crystal, blessing it with flame, breathing empyrosis into cell after cell, rekindling life.

There will be screams, soon, reechoing through the firmament. Life can be so very torturous, awakening to vitality in a meticulous crawl, one organ at a time, blood gasping into energetic flow, surging up through reborn veins, washing through the regenerated heart, whispering into the lungs, rejuvenating, crashing, threatening to burst yet appallingly ALIVE.

And into the brain, igniting lightning across uncountable neurons, recreating consciousness, revivifying the mind, the presence of perspective, electrocuting Dante back into semblance.

A forced reincarnation, but under the circumstances, effective for their purposes. Not without its costs.

He can do no more.

[Lawtan]

Kadia stood above Thomas and Dante, knees apart, flamewheels spinning, and hook-swords poised to hack at any who came near. However, a light appeared in the back of her senses, a brilliant disturbance of aura. Turning, she saw Thomas gripping Dante’s ankles tightly, and a maelstrom of power where the connection was. Debris of the storm flew into Dante. Kadia watched in awe while Thomas worked. That such a will could call such things…was foreign to her.

At her temple, it was said the living and dead, God and the material universe, were all parts of the whole, the Balance. It was often whispered how God’s death broke the Balance, and at first, in her falsely restored ego, Kadia believed she could restore the balance.

Here before her was a man…a zealot of such power. One who could right wrongs, and restore lives. It was said the High Priestess could do similar things, but Kadia left prematurely to carve her
own path…

------

Rurik stood over Dante, looking confusedly at the unresponsive man. “Seeing” his life being rekindled, courtesy of Kadia’s link, Rurik still did not understand.

target.friend_02.alive == 0
ERROR#97: Program “alive == 0” does not exist…
Activating program…
target.friend_02.lickface(1,0)
face.found() == 1
if found = 1, then commence Lick()

Rurik’s cold rubber motorized tongue began to lick Dante’s worn and dirty face. A small crack in the antibacterial chemical casing caused some of it to leak down the tongue onto the man.

-----

While waiting, Kadia waved over to the others of the group, inviting them over in the hopes that they wouldn’t be too unforgiving…

[Gallagher]

The last of the angry writhing within his stretched stomach grew still. The burning discomfort, too, faded, what hadn't been forced out of healing punctures dissolved and devoured in his blood.

'Lo, I was naked, Lord, and thou didst clothe me.'

The Lion.

"I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked." He stood and looked to the minnows. A few were already gathering together. "I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls."

There, the Lion. Able to speak without speaking. Curious. "You live?"

[Suzerain of Sheol]

Diogenes doesn't bother to turn toward the unexpected reply, nor even look at the disturbed man. The muteness of tone is telling enough, with the outflux of power filling the room, and this one completely unimpressed -- no, oblivious. Blase resurrection. Enough almost to bring the remembrance of laughter.

You're asking the wrong question. What you want to know is, is living worth it?

Walking to stand behind the still-kneeling priest, he suppresses scorn at the facade of strength the man even now puts forth. That resurrection was no mean feat. Impressive, though. Diogenes hadn't thought him capable of such subtlety.

Overhearing the cusp of the girl's thought, he murmurs to Kadia's mind, Don't be so star-struck. That thing... no, don't dignify him calling him a man, is an artist of destruction. Righting wrongs is incidental, trust me.

If you're searching for a hero or an idol, I might suggest my lord the Celestrine. This... exhibition of hypocrisy is nothing but a child's imitation of its father's craft.

Think on that.

[Salone]

Lev writhed upon the ground. Agony and pain wracked his blood soaked body. He thrashed in puddles of blood and bone and organ, smearing himself crimson. Inside his skull his brain pressed against itself, swelling from the massive hemorrhaging caused by the venom coursing through him. Blood vessels burst, spewing their precious fluids in to his skull. His mad lashing out became uncontrollable movements as his brain became overloaded. Neurons fired off in insane patterns before dying out. His senses betrayed him with false information, assaulting him with sights and sounds that were now there before they began to slowly fade away. Even the pounding headache threatening to split his head open had began to dull. Everything was so far now. So dreary. So grey and blurry and so hard to...

To see...


Lev Gurevich closed his eyes. The fire in his veins was burning, but not so close now. The rupturing veins spilling out in to his brain were too numerous, too severe. He was too far gone now. The parts of his brain that were in charge of motor control were dying out. His entire nervous system was failing. Breathing became erratic, quick in disjointed breaths, and then ceased.

It was there, in that hellish domain of indescribable torture and torment that Lev Gurevich met his end. After countless wars, famines, torture, he had finally come to rest his fury at the hand of the snake, deception itself made manifest.

It was there that Lev Gurevich died.

No! I will put it back together!

Organs sputtered, choked lazily as they attempted to restart. The heart inside the body of Lev began to pulse weakly. With a low rumbling inhale, his lungs breathed in the putrid, fetid air. Bloodshot eyes opened once again, taking in the ceiling above him but not understanding. The brain itself was still dark. Neurons fired off in to nothing, portions of matter still swam in blood. The actual body was moved as if being controlled by some unseen puppeteer, not by its own will. With jerky movements, an open hand with arched fingers was raised in front of the body's face. It stared in curiosity as it turned the hand slowly one way and then the other. It then placed the hand upon the ground and gave a mighty heave.

The body rose, standing upwards. It stumbled as it brought itself to its bearings. Eyes no longer sending messages to a brain surveyed the scene of chaos before them, the other beings of note that inhabited their view. Then with a voice like oil and grit, it spoke.

"I. Am. MANIFEST! I am FLESH! I am NA'LSA!"

[Quiet Man Cometh]

Tarja stood and watched. She was unharmed by the venom, but torn wool and entrails hung from her robes and body armour where snake teeth remained impaled. If there was concern in her eyes, it was not to be seen in the dark shadow cast over her face by her helm. The bronze sword lay abandoned on the asylum floor.

Her eyes moved briefly to Kadia, noting the girl’s demeanor and feeling some degree of pity, or perhaps that was all she was capable of feeling at the moment. The girl had stood up to Thomas and that took some courage, even if it was more than a little foolhardy.

A man was dead, though that could be remedied, it seemed. Another crouched low, naked, and covered in wounds dripping venom and blood. He babbled. Lev babbled, too: something about a being called Na’lsa. She didn’t pay attention; didn’t care. She stood and watched Thomas work, though there was little to see. She stood and tried not to think about whether she should offer to help Thomas; whether she should try to comfort Kadia; whether she should offer a naked man clothes when he didn’t want them…

The thoughts were fleeting. Being human could be far too complicated sometimes.