Days before Azulus arrived at Vaingall.
Azulus sat alone on the weathered ledge overlooking the southern pronade of Solvish Keep, legs swaying back and forth in silence. She wore a black instead of the usual, with the oversized sword strapped across her back gleaming faintly from recent polish.
Her ears, round and mouse-like, twitched slightly at the sound of distant footfalls, though her face remained blank.
A courier in dark multi-layered robe approached, face obscured beneath a deep hood marked with a single white feather.
They said nothing as they extended a folded letter, wrapped in velvet string and sealed with a wax sigil bearing the triple-circle crest of Karasu’s Obfuscation Division.
Azulus didn’t thank them. She rely took the letter, nodded once, and turned away.
She walked toward the inn of the Keep, where the wind from the eastern road stirred through the branches walls and people of the bastion.
"It’s been a while since I give Nenen a visit."
With each step, the world around her began to dim.
The sky bled out into grey.
The ground dissolved into feathers of shadow.
As she pulled the string and opened the letter, the lines of the parchnt twisted into spiraling glyphs.
Light tore sideways through the seams of reality, and her boots no longer touched stone but sothing less tangible—a vast plain of ink-colored mist.
She crossed the veil.
An expanse opened before her. Endless parchnt towers rose upward and downward, riddled with whispering voices and flickering data threads.
At the center of it all floated gargantuan amalgamation—a mass of grey, veiny limbs intertwined like the roots of a tree choking its own heart.
The limbs numbered in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, each operating different devices—scroll readers, projector arrays, mory pods, voice-locked relay drums.
Communication apparatus from every Nest and Branch under Karasu’s dominion spun around the core of its massive form.
"Nenen!" Azulus called, her voice flat yet loud enough to cut through the ambient murmur of parchnt winds. "Don’t tell the higher-ups are dragging again."
From the tangle of limbs, a smaller arm extended and waved at her excitedly. The voice that replied was cheerful, childlike, and echoed in a thousand tones simultaneously.
"Hello~ Azulus, the Executioner-class Agent pretending to be a humble field hunter!"
"Glad to see that you’re still enjoying your new job."
"I like it as long as I’m useful!" One of Nenen’s hands gave a thumbs up, while the other was preparing a board, and another hand was rapidly writing the details of the needed exposition. "You’re going to Vaingall now. Orders ca directly from Upper Nests, you see~ You’re being inserted as part of the new cooperation agreent. Isn’t that fun?"
Azulus exhaled audibly and rubbed one temple, but barely an expression was shown on her deadpan. "Do I look like I do ’fun’ to you?"
"Your trics indicate suppressed excitent. It counts!"
One of Nenen’s arms handed her a second docunt, a translucent sheet encoded with overlapping mission paraters.
Azulus didn’t bother reading it.
She then shredded the original letter between her fingers, and the world shattered into threads.
She returned to the Keep without a blink.
Days passed.
Now, she stood amidst a patch of sacred farmland inside Vaingall, soil hallowed with divinity, stalks of shrine-altered grain rising in circular patterns.
The Clatur Tribe moved in disciplined motion nearby—bare-chested, tattooed, towering over the crops and each other like walking statues.
Azulus adjusted the collar of her newly worn Void Hunter coat, signifying her relation with the joint cooperation from the Karasu Association, and tried to look smaller than she was.
It didn’t work.
One of the Clatur approached her.
A woman, no less than three ters in height, carried a woven basket in one hand and a tal spade across her shoulder. Her arms rippled with muscle and ash-inked marks that told of lineage and victories.
"You there," the woman said, her voice smooth but thunderous. "You wear the crow mark. Are you lost, or do you require help navigating the routes of this maze of a world?"
Azulus blinked. "No. I an. I’m not lost. I’m just... sightseeing."
The Clatur woman tilted her head, scrutinizing her with a softness that felt more like curiosity than suspicion.
"You are very small," the Clatur woman added. "But your weapon is loud. I will not disturb you further. May your wandering be fruitful, little one~!:
She turned and walked away, leaving Azulus with an expressionless stare and a faint drop of sweat behind one ear.
"That was terrifying," she whispered to no one. "I can’t barely see her face, her massive chest is on the way."
She then sat near one of the countless outer shrines, resting beneath a hollow pillar carved with prayers and lined with faded cloth strips.
Her fingers traced idle circles in the dirt while she quietly watched the strange geotries of Vaingall breathe around her.
And that was when she saw it.
A mysterious sigil.
Drawn in red.
It glead between the grass roots, etched into a stone surface half-buried in the mud.
It looked similar to the ones Clatur used—but not identical.
Its lines were angular where the tribe favored curves. Sohow, it shimred with internal motion, almost as if its ink was still alive.
Azulus stood.
Her eyes narrowed.
She glanced left, then right. No one in sight.
She stepped toward it. One boot in front of the other, oversized sword shifting faintly on her back.
"Suspicious," Azulus muttered. "And suspicious things are what I am supposed to check as part of my work."
She knelt, extended one gloved hand, and let her fingers graze the edge of the glyph.
The mont she made contact, the air fractured.
Light spiraled outward in fragnted mirrors.
The shrine beside her warped, elongated, then collapsed inward like a mouth closing.
The trees peeled upward into threads.
Azulus felt her body lifting, her center of gravity dissolving as if she were no longer an object, but a concept moving across undefined coordinates.
The world cracked open around her.
Azulus erged mid-step.
The motion didn’t finish. It simply beca sothing else—as though she’d never ant to walk but rather appear, halfway through a breath, one hand still raised from touching the sigil.
"What in the Tengu..."
The air was viscous.
Everything around her bled red.
The sky was no longer a sky. It was a ceiling of at—living, groaning, twitching with slow muscle contractions.
Veins the width of towers pulsed in irregular rhythms, stretching into endless distance.
A single impossible column speared downward from the heavens, vast and oozing, woven with spirals of teeth and layered mbranes. Eyes blinked open along its surface. So watched.
So didn’t.
Azulus drew her blade. She took one step backward, then another.
Her boots squelched against a ground that gave too much—soft like rotted leather, warm like a fever.
She tried all sort of thods to exit this world and go back to her forr one.
No reaction.
She tried to utilize a special function of her modified Void Hunter Tag.
It flickered, then vanished from her interface.
Nothing responded.
"Guess I’m stuck here."
A chill crawled up her spine, slow and deep.
And then ca the sound.
Ripping. Peeling. The trees—if they could still be called trees—shuddered. From their trunks poured slick-bodied horrors, quadrupedal and eyeless, their faces splitting open to reveal tongues wrapped in bone hooks.
They shrieked at her.
Azulus didn’t hesitate to defend herself.
She slashed upward, her blade carving through the first with explosive precision.
But more surged forward, uncountable limbs skittering against the ground.
"Living flesh," she muttered, shifting stance.
A snap of her fingers ignited her sword’s spine.
The weapon roared with heat. T
The next swing cleaved through three, and they didn’t regenerate.
They burned.
She lit the terrain. Lines of fla traced the space around her, forming barriers, driving back the tide.
She worked systematically—flank, isolate, incinerate.
It continued.
She didn’t know how long.
Hours? Days?
Ti didn’t work here. There was no sun, only the ambient glow of bioluminescent flesh and pulsing ocular stalks.
When she rested, she did so with her back to heat, weapon gripped, eyelids never fully closed.
Her body ached. But her resolve didn’t.
She no longer needed to sustain herself with food either, since her Hemo Psyche pool was large enough to make herself barely feel hungry for a long ti.
"The flesh tastes awful..."
Then, sothing shifted.
She felt it before she saw it—a presence not made of sinew or corruption. Distant, faint. It moved with purpose.
Azulus narrowed her eyes.
"Soone else is alive here."
She followed the trace. Moved between valleys of rib-like formations, past geysers of steaming ichor and prayer-slicked stones covered in spiral glyphs.
The land writhed beneath her boots, but she held course.
And then she saw it.
A structure.
Carved from the sa material as the Original God’s root, but shaped. Willfully arranged.
A temple.
Its surface was layers of stitched flesh—stitched with bone threads, the seams inflad, yet sohow sanctified.
The air here was thick with liturgy, a pressure like failed absolution.
At its front lood a headless statue. A woman’s body—grotesquely beautiful, composed of coiled organs and shaped muscle, adorned with crowns of teeth and draped in fluttering mbranes that echoed priestly garb.
Its hands were raised, cradling an invisible offering. From its neck, black liquid stread endlessly down the torso.
Azulus gritted her teeth.
"Well that’s not ominous at all."
The signature was inside.
Whoever it was—they were alive. Not clean, not fully human anymore, perhaps, but not of the flesh.
And maybe they had answers.
She stepped forward, through the threshold of the flesh-covered temple.
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