The sixth day dawned with a palpable shift in the warehouse. The initial, panicked energy of the fortification had burned away, leaving behind the grim, weary ash of a prolonged siege. Men moved slower, their eyes haunted by sleeplessness and the constant, gnawing fear of the unseen net tightening around them.
Lutz Fischer awoke with the first grey light, his mind already clear and plotting. The self-inflicted cuts on his arm and leg were now faint, pink lines, healed enough to be believable yet still visible enough to sell his narrative of a convalescing operative. Today was the day to plant the seed.
He found Peter by the makeshift kitchen, the boy listlessly stirring a pot of thin, lumpy porridge. The youthful excitement had been scoured from his face, replaced by a dull anxiety.
"Peter," Lutz said, his voice low and companionable. He leaned against a support beam, affecting a slight wince as he favored his leg. "You look like you carried the weight of the world all night."
Peter managed a weak smile. "Just... thinking. What if they just starve us out? What happens then?"
"That's not their style," Lutz replied, shaking his head. "The Church prefers a grand spectacle. A public execution. And we're going to take advantage of that." He lowered his voice further, drawing Peter in. "There's new orders, a plan made by the Baron himself, its complicated, so pay attention."
Peter's eyes flickered with a spark of interest. "What plan?"
"Keep your voice down," Lutz cautioned, glancing around with feigned paranoia. "If the snitch hears about this, its over. The Baron... he's not just hiding in here. He's setting a trap. A big one."
"A trap? How?"
"You know that artifact everyone's been whispering about? The heart from the ship?" Lutz let the question hang, watching Peter nod slowly. "The story we're going to let slip is that the Baron is using it. That he's in here, right now, performing some kind of ascension ritual. That we're fortifying to protect him during his moment of greatest vulnerability."
Peter's brow furrowed in confusion. "But... is he?"
Lutz gave a sharp, quiet laugh. "Of course not. It's a feint. A brilliant one. We let the Church think we're vulnerable, that this is their one chance to stop the Baron from becoming some kind of super-powered monster. They'll get greedy. They'll throw caution to the wind and storm the place. And when they do..." He made a fist, slamming it softly into his open palm. "...we spring the ambush. We have the home ground. We have the fortifications. We'll be waiting. We wipe them out in one fell swoop."
The transformation in Peter was instantaneous. The dread in his eyes was burned away by a blaze of fervent understanding. It was a story that replaced helplessness with agency, fear with cunning. "Gods... that's... that's genius!"
"It is," Lutz agreed, his tone deadly serious. "But its genius relies on secrecy. The Church has to believe the ritual is real. So, here's your part. You need to spread the word, but carefully. Tell the others—the ones we can trust—that it's a ruse. That we're the hunters. But we need the idea of the ritual to leak. The loudmouths, the drunks... let them be the ones to 'accidentally' let it slip if they get a chance. Can you do that? Can you be the one to start the whisper that wins us this war?"
Peter stood straighter, his chest puffing out. He was no longer a scared boy; he was a vital cog in a grand strategy. "You can count on me, Lutz. They'll believe it. I'll make sure of it."
"Good man," Lutz said, clapping him on the shoulder.
Throughout the morning, Lutz repeated variations of this performance. He cornered Rikard, a Viper known for his loose tongue and love of gossip, while the man was checking the boarding on a window.
"Keep this under your hat, Ricciard," Lutz began, his tone that of one veteran to another. "But the old man's got a hell of a play. This whole 'lockdown'? It's not a defense. It's a baited hook."
Rikard, a man with a face like a hatchet and the brains to match, grunted. "Oh yeah? What's the bait?"
"Us," Lutz said with a grim smile. "The story is, the Baron's using that fancy heart to power up. The Church hears that, they'll come charging in here thinking they're catching us with our pants down. But we'll be waiting, rifles loaded. It's going to be a slaughterhouse."
A slow, ugly grin spread across Ricciard's face. "I like it. A proper fight, not this hiding."
"Just make sure the boys know it's a trap," Lutz said, layering on the importance. "We want them confident, not terrified. Let the right ears hear the 'secret'."
By noon, the rumor was a living thing, moving through the town on its own power. Lutz could feel the change in the atmosphere. The grim silence was replaced by a low, eager buzz. Men checked their weapons not with dread, but with anticipation. The cage felt less like a prison and more like a hunter's blind. The seed was planted. Now, he just had to wait for it to bear its poisonous fruit.
Deep beneath the soaring arches and steam-driven pipe organs of the Saint Chevalier Cathedral, in a room that smelled of antiseptic, ozone, and old stone, Captain Signeil Krieg opened his eyes.
Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a painful reassembly. Every nerve in his body felt raw, flayed open. A profound, soul-deep exhaustion weighed him down, as if his spirit had been stretched on a rack and only hastily put back together. He was lying on a narrow cot, wrapped in clean, stark-white linens. The air hummed with the faint, stabilizing energy of Church-sanctioned healing artifacts.
With a groan that was more spiritual than physical, he pushed himself up, swinging his legs over the side of the cot. His muscles protested, trembling with weakness. He was clad in a simple gray infirmary tunic. He flexed his hands, then his arms, moving with the deliberate, testing slowness of a man checking for structural cracks after an earthquake. The memory of the backlash from the Judge's Balancer was a searing brand on his mind.
The heavy oak door to the chamber opened without a sound. Deacon Reverie Noire stood there, framed in the doorway. Her wine-dark hair was impeccably coiled, her amethyst eyes taking in his awake state with no visible surprise.
"Captain," she said, her resonant voice cool and precise. "You have returned to us."
"It would appear so, Deacon," Krieg replied, his own voice a dry rasp. He continued to slowly rotate his shoulders, working the stiffness out. "Though I feel like I've been run through a stamping press and reassembled by a drunken machinist. How long?"
"Six days," Noire stated, stepping fully into the room and closing the door. The space seemed to shrink around her presence. "The Karmic Debt from wielding 1-082 was... substantial. The Spiritual Feedback nearly unraveled your spirit body. It was a considerable effort to stitch you back together." She paused, her gaze dissecting him. "The report from your team was fragmentary. They found you collapsed in an alley, spiritually catatonic. They mentioned a confrontation. I require your full account. What happened?"
Krieg took a slow, deep breath, organizing his thoughts like evidence on a docket.
"It began with the translator," he began, his eyes gaining a sharp focus as he recalled the events. "Henrik Moss. He came to me in the library. He was agitated. He claimed to have been followed by the 'Indaw Harbor Butcher,' the Marauder we've been hunting. He said the man was watching him, and he feared for his life."
"He led you into a trap," Noire stated, not a question.
"From the moment he opened his mouth, I knew he was lying," Krieg said, a flicker of cold anger in his green eyes. "His story was too pat, too perfectly tailored to lure an investigator. The fear was a skilled performance, but there was a calculation behind his eyes that didn't match the panic in his voice. I knew it was a ruse."
"Then why follow him?" Noire asked, her head tilting a fraction.
"Because a lie that elaborate, aimed directly at a Church captain, meant something significant was in motion," Krieg explained. "I decided to play the part of the duped official. I wanted to see what he was truly leading me towards. I anticipated an ambush from his Viper associates. A simple, if brazen, attempt to eliminate a high-value target."
He paused, his jaw tightening as he remembered the shift in the atmosphere of that fog-choked street. "I was wrong. It wasn't the Vipers. The entity that emerged from the shadows was... something else entirely. A man, radiating an aura of decadence and spiritual rot. He identified himself as a 'Rose Bishop'. Sequence 6. Aurora Order."
Noire's expression did not change, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop several degrees. "The cultists are here."
"And they are active," Krieg confirmed. "The Bishop, was not there for me. He was there for Moss. Or rather, for the man we believed Moss to be. He accused him of having 'harvested' two of his order. The confrontation was immediate. I was forced to intervene. I deployed the Judge's Balancer."
"The Debt was your price for that intervention," Noire murmured.
"It was," Krieg said grimly. "The battle was... intense. But here is the critical deduction, Deacon." He leaned forward, his intense gaze locked with hers. "Henrik Moss is not with the Aurora Order. The Rose Bishop was hunting him. Moss, the translator, used me. He deliberately led me into a path of a powerful enemy, knowing a confrontation was inevitable. He played both sides against each other with breathtaking audacity."
He let the implication hang in the air for a moment before delivering his conclusion. "Which means Henrik Moss is almost certainly the 'Indaw Harbor Butcher.' The Marauder. And his connection to the Vipers is now the most logical explanation. He belongs to them. He is a Viper.
Reverie Noire listened to Krieg's report without interruption, her amethyst eyes absorbing every detail, every nuance in his tired voice. When he finished, she gave a slow, deliberate nod.
"Your assessment aligns with the evolving situation, Captain," she began, her voice a low, melodic hum in the sterile room. "While you were out of commission, the flow of intelligence against the Harbor Vipers has not ceased. It has, in fact, accelerated. Exponentially."
She began to pace slowly before his cot, her hands clasped behind her back. "It began with low-level operatives. Dock clerks, street enforcers. Easily verifiable, tactical-level data. But in the last forty-eight hours, the quality of the information has transformed. We have received detailed manifests of their primary smuggling routes, the names of their lawyers and paymasters, their methods of laundering coin. We have plucked the Vipers' outer organization apart, branch by branch, like stripping leaves from a dying tree."
Krieg listened, his brow furrowing. The sheer scale of it was staggering. "A single snitch, even a high-ranking one, wouldn't have access to all of that. That's strategic-level intelligence spanning their entire operation."
"Precisely," Noire agreed, stopping her pacing to face him. "The initial, haphazard drops—notes in collection boxes, messages from street urchins—suggested a panicked individual. But the recent, coordinated delivery, the sheer breadth of the data... it began to suggest a different source. Our working theory was that we were being used as a tool by a rival organization. One seeking to dismantle the Vipers and move into the vacuum we would create. The pattern fit: use the legitimate authority to clear the field, then sweep in to claim the territory."
"It's a classic strategy," Krieg murmured, his mind, even fatigued, latching onto the logic. "But you said 'was'..."