"The third key," Lutz said, a slow, grim smile touching his lips. He fished the key ring from his pocket. The small, brass key he'd dismissed earlier now seemed the most important one of all. He inserted it. A perfect fit. A turn, and he felt a series of smooth, precise clicks deep within the mechanism.
'Well, look at that. A man of his word.'
He lifted the lid.
The moment the chest opened, he felt it—a subtle but distinct shift in the atmosphere. It was like a pane of glass he hadn't known was there had suddenly vanished. A faint, spiritual pressure he hadn't consciously registered simply dissolved, leaving the air feeling clearer, lighter.
'A spiritual wall, in order to seal the contents and make it immune to detection.' he catalogued mentally, pulling the term from his recent studies in A Primer on the Esoteric. It had been actively suppressing the spiritual signature of the chest's contents, muffling his Thief's Nose.
'Clever. You never even know it was here to look for it, sadly for you, i don't trust my intuition blindly, there's always more than meets the eye, or in this case, the nose.'
Now, with the seal broken, his senses were flooded. The contents of the chest lay before him, and his intuition hummed a quiet, multi-layered tune of value and significance.
The layout was neat, almost fastidious:
A Pile of Gold Hammers, a solid, satisfying stack of coins. His mind, ever-calculating, estimated it at around fifty-plus before he'd even finished looking.
There was also a strange symbol, a decoration or crest made of a black, non-reflective metal. It depicted a malevolent goat with two massively curved horns. Black fumes seemed to curl from its nostrils, and its eyes were rendered as pits of burning flame. It felt cold, vaguely ominous and sinister.
Aside from it was an adorned case made of rich, dark leather, tooled with intricate, swirling patterns that seemed to shift if he didn't look at them directly. It was closed with a simple brass clasp.
Finally, a sheaf of papers, neatly bound with a black ribbon.
"Now we're talking," Lutz whispered, the thrill of the find a stark, bright spark in the gloom of the house.
Money came first. He upended his leather bag, then, he began transferring the new, larger pile from the chest. The heavy, musical clink of gold on gold was a symphony of relief. He combined them all back into the bag, the weight of it a tangible, comforting anchor. A quick mental tally: roughly 140 Gold Hammers.
A breath he didn't realize he'd been holding escaped his lips in a long, slow sigh.
'That's good,' he thought, cinching the bag shut and setting it carefully beside him. 'As long as I manage it well, it could even save me if the Filip venture doesn't go well.'
It was a runway, giving him time to maneuver instead of facing an immediate, catastrophic crash.
With the most immediate crisis abated, he could turn his attention to the other items. His gaze fell on the sinister goat symbol. He picked it up. It was heavier than its size suggested, and cold, like a piece of metal left out in a winter night. He turned it over in his hands. No inscriptions, no markings. Just the unnervingly detailed image of the baleful creature.
"Lovely," he said aloud, his voice dry as dust. He got nothing but a vague, static impression of smoke and a deep, ancient disdain. It wasn't an active artifact; it held no power he could sense. It felt more like an identifier. 'A badge. A family crest? Or the symbol of a club you really don't want to be a member of?'
Either way, it was a data point. A piece of Yevgeny's identity he hadn't possessed before. He set it aside. It was potentially dangerous knowledge, but ignoring it would be more dangerous.
His attention then shifted to the two remaining items. The adorned case and the bound papers.
He turned to the sheaf of papers. He untied the black ribbon, its texture oddly slick. The top page was a handwritten letter, the script elegant but with a sharp and aggressive tone.
His eyes scanned the lines, and with each sentence, the room felt colder, the opulent gloom taking on a more menacing quality.
"Yevgeny,"
"We are very pleased with your swift advancement. You effortlessly got accustomed to the Criminal potion, and you seem to be doing the same with the Unwinged Angel. It seems you're a natural at embracing the nature of the Abyss."
Lutz's mind immediately began dissecting the terms. 'Criminal. That must be his Sequence 9. Fits the profile. Breaking and entering, the whole nocturnal predator bit. Unwinged Angel… Sequence 8? A step up from mere criminality. Something darker. And the Abyss… that's the essence of the pathway? It seems to be a twisted and sinister path.'
He stored the terms away in his mental dossier.
"When we found you as a broken link of our Andariel blood we didn't have great hopes for you, yet you've managed to prove you're worthy of walking the path of the Abyss."
Broken link. The phrase echoed in the silent room. So Yevgeny was a black sheep, reclaimed and repurposed. This wasn't just an organization; it was a family. A bloodline. That made them far more dangerous. Loyalty born of blood and shared secrets was a thousand times more potent than loyalty bought with coin or fear. The Andariel family. The name was now etched into his memory.
"We've sent you a package with multiple things that'll aid you. First are funds so that you may continue your activities and maintain your identity, as well as cover the expenses of any sudden problems to take care of. As you know, the rest of the world does not comprehend the might of the Abyss and as such we need to lay low."
Lutz's gaze flicked to the leather bag of coins at his side. 'So that's what this was. An operational budget from the home office.' The "sudden problems to take care of" line landed with a particularly heavy thud. He had been one of those problems. 'You should have used this to hire someone stronger than yourself to hunt me, well, you were pretty close, to be fair.'
"Next thing you'll find inside is the potion formula for your next step. Considering the speed of your advancement and the talent you've proven to have, this advancement shall provide no challenge to you."
Formula. His heart gave a single, hard thump. This was the real treasure, beyond the gold, knowledge of a pathway was power.
"Lastly, we've provided you with the main ingredient of the potion and the most troublesome supplementary ingredient, leaving you only having to gather the rest of the supplementary ingredients which should prove no challenge to you."
"We expect you to accomplish it throughout the month. Notify us once you've done so."
"-Hecarim."
Lutz let the page fall to his lap. He sat there on the edge of the black-silk bed, the silence of the house pressing in on him, now heavy with new, terrifying implications.
'So he was close to becoming a Sequence 7, if he had, I probably wouldn't have survived.'
'Well, shit.' he thought, the crudeness of the mental expletive a stark contrast to the elegant script before him. 'I didn't just kill a man. I killed a high-potential asset of a Beyonder family.'
He picked up the next page. As promised, it was the formula. The script was different, more formal, as if copied from an ancient text.
Sequence 7: Serial Killer
Main Ingredients:
-Abyssal angler's eyes
-Entire head of a mature blood-eyed goat
Supplementary Ingredients:
200ml of blood from a mature blood-eyed goat.
Three drops of venom from a spire-back serpent.
A lock of hair from 10 deceased victims.
100ml of dirty water.
Lutz read the list twice, his mind recoiling from the grotesque absurdity of the requirements. This was the path of something far more sinister than anything he had imagined. The names themselves were a descent into darkness.
He then let the page down, and directed his eyes towards the case.
He picked it up. The leather was supple, almost alive under his touch. The swirling patterns seemed to writhe at the very edge of his vision. He unclasped the brass fastener, the click echoing in the quiet room, and slowly opened the lid.
Inside, nestled on a bed of deep red velvet, was what Lutz presumed to be a Beyonder Characteristic.
It was a crystalized eye.
The size of a large marble, it was perfectly formed from a stained, glass-like resin. Within this dark crystal, was a single red iris, with a long horizontal pupil of absolute black that resembled that of a goat's. And from the corner of that eye, a single, perfect tear of the same crimson material was captured mid-fall, a droplet of eternal sorrow suspended against the transparent core.
Next to it, was a vial with blood so dark it was almost black, the 200ml of blood from a mature blood-eyed goat.
His Value Intuition didn't just hum; it sent a sharp, poignant thrill through him, a sensation that was equal parts awe and a strange, undeserved grief. This was potent. This was rare.
'Well, aren't you a depressing little thing.'
An eye for an eye, the old saying flickered through his mind, feeling unnervingly literal. Is this what an 'Unwinged Angel' becomes? Something that collects the tears of its victims? The thought was chilling. This was the path of something that fed on despair.
'What will I do with this? I absolutely cannot sell this or the formula, not only will it make it easy for this family to track me, it'll also breed coldblooded killers into society. On the other hand, I'm not sure if i want an artifact with its effects...' he mused, closing the case with a soft, definitive snap that felt like shutting a coffin lid on that brief glimpse of anguish.
Finally, he turned to the sheaf of papers, the image of the crystallized weeping eye burning in his mind, a stark contrast to the dry, pragmatic words he expected to find.
The finality of the letter's closing line hung in the air. "We expect you to accomplish it during the month. Notify us once you've done so."
A deadline. A one-month deadline after which a man named Hecarim, speaking for the Andariel family, would wonder why his promising prodigy had gone silent. They wouldn't just forget. A family that invested this much in a "broken link" would come to collect, one way or another.
He carefully folded the formula and tucked it, along with the letter, into an inner pocket. He slid the leather case with the Characteristic into his leather bag, as for the metal-carved symbol that seemed to be the Andariel family crest, he left it there, lest it could be tracked back to him.
After he retired the leather case, beneath it were 10 individual locks of hair, each tied up, each of different colors, tones and density.
Lutz, for a moment, had a disgusted expression in his face, he tucked them inside the leather bag.
He stood up, the black silk sighing in relief. The ambience of the bedroom had transformed. It was no longer just the scene of a victory over a single enemy. It was the forward operating base of a hostile force, one he had just decapitated, and whose command structure was now, unknowingly, waiting for a report.
"One month," he whispered to the dusty, silent air.