Haimer looked up.
Before him loomed a building of pure visual assault.
If he had to describe it, it was a muscle-bound brute in a red-and-yellow elephant mask, sitting cross-legged in the most exaggerated pose imaginable, right in the middle of Northwest Avenue, where land cost its weight in gold.
As for the entrance to this building...
Haimer stopped at the roadside and studied the two enormous brass doors set where the statue's crossed legs met.
The corner of his eye twitched twice, hard.
"Every time I see this thing," Haimer thought, shaking his head, "I'm reminded that Ganesha's taste runs a few centuries ahead of anything the Lower World is ready for."
How broad did a person's heart have to be to duck in and out under their own patron god's crotch every single day and think nothing of it?
Haimer sighed, shook off the stray thoughts, passed through those indescribable brass doors, and walked straight into the compound.
Beyond the doors, the grounds opened out surprisingly wide.
Several beast-tamers with elephant emblems on their chests were cracking barbed leather whips, drilling a few vicious monsters newly captured from the Dungeon's middle levels.
The whips snapped in the air with a bright, clean crack.
Then one of the tamers happened to turn his head and saw Haimer.
The shouting died in their throats, as if a hand had closed around every neck at once.
All of them backed into the shade at the sides of the path, heads lowered, bowing, not daring to draw a full breath.
Haimer paid no mind to those painfully stiff glances. He had grown used to the reaction long ago.
He crossed the relief-carved corridor like a man who knew the way, took the spiral stair, and came directly to the captain's office at the foot of the central tower.
Haimer raised his hand, crooked his index finger, and rapped twice on the heavy mahogany door.
"Enter." Shakti's slightly hoarse voice came from within.
Haimer turned the brass handle and pushed the door open.
Inside the spacious office, the light came through the blinds in narrow bars.
The wide mahogany desk and the floor all around it were buried under stacked rolls of parchment: the tangled, filthy accounts that had to be counted and verified over these two days.
Shakti sat behind the desk, head down in the work. At the sound of leather boots on the wooden floor, she looked up.
When she saw that it was Haimer, her writing hand stopped dead and the nib bled a blot of ink into the parchment.
She shoved her chair back at once, came around the desk, drew herself up straight, and bowed respectfully.
"Lord Haimer."
"Why come all the way here yourself, instead of celebrating this afternoon's victory at the Twilight Manor?"
After all, those monstrous newcomers of [Haimer Familia] had, that very afternoon, in front of every person of consequence in Orario, beaten [Loki Familia]'s Second String so thoroughly they never had a chance to strike back.
And in doing so they had won outright the seats to accompany [Loki Familia]'s First Corps into the deep levels.
With a record like that, any other patron god would have booked out an entire tavern by now and be lying in a puddle of wine.
Haimer only smiled faintly.
"The children's celebration is theirs. An old man like me doesn't need to crowd in."
With that, he walked over to the leather guest sofa, sat down without ceremony, and crossed his legs.
"I came to see you, Lady Shakti, because I wanted to give you notice ahead of time."
"Tonight, I intend to leave the city."
"Leave the city?"
Shakti stiffened. The nerves that had loosened at the sight of him drew taut again, and her brow furrowed into three shallow lines.
"Lord Haimer, by the Guild's rules, a deity leaving Orario must submit a detailed itinerary and a security plan to Lord Ouranos in advance."
Even as she recited the official regulation, she turned and crossed to the filing cabinet, pulled open a drawer with practiced ease, and drew out a thick file, flipping it open.
"And besides..."
Here her gaze grew complicated, edged with something like resignation.
"From the day you descended to the Lower World until now, the Guild's archives have never held a single record of your Familia entering this city."
"Which is to say, your Familia have never used the proper channels at all. They slip past these high walls and their guards by routes and methods of their own, coming and going from Orario as they please."
She closed the blank page and turned to look Haimer straight in the eye.
Faced with her calling it out, Haimer neither confirmed nor denied, only kept smiling back at her.
"That's right."
"So this time, now that my Familia's name has spread far and wide, I'd like to bring my children into Orario through the proper channels, with your help."
It was a remarkably short explanation.
Shakti bit her lower lip, caught between one thing and another.
Given Haimer's dread reputation for bathing the Heavens in blood, and given how Ouranos had ceded ground and authority to this god of calamity...
Orario's rules, written to bind ordinary deities, were plainly nothing but a sheet of waste paper he could tear up whenever he liked in front of her.
That he had come in person today merely to give notice was already more courtesy than she, captain of the guardsman, had any right to expect.
She weighed it for a moment. Then she gave ground.
"Since the matter is urgent, Lord Haimer, I'll handle the records and the filing with the Guild on your behalf."
That was the greatest convenience her authority allowed.
"But, Lord Haimer..."
Her tone stayed severe.
"Most of the land outside the city is farmland run by [Demeter Familia], so it's relatively safe."
"But go any distance and you leave the walls' absolute protection. Out in the wilds, monsters can come upon you at any moment."
"So please, Lord Haimer, allow me to send an elite squad of guardsman to accompany you and guarantee your safety."
Shakti came to stand before Haimer, her manner earnest.
"And if you dislike having us watch your movements, then at least take a few of your own children along. Your Divine Power is sealed as things stand. Going out there alone is far too dangerous."
"There's no need for that."
Haimer turned the request down without hesitation.
"My children have just come through a hard bout of sparring, and in a few days they go into the Dungeon's deep levels with [Loki Familia]. What they need now is proper rest."
"And your guardsman, Lady Shakti, are already stretched thin handling all those confiscated assets. Don't waste your resources on me."
"Besides, if I do run into something..." Haimer smiled. "It's an open question who'd be protecting whom."
That line left Shakti with nothing at all to say.
Her lips parted, but not one word of rebuttal came to her.
After all, her own patron god, Ganesha, had once said with a very grave face that Haimer was a deity of the most extreme martial persuasion.
Even with his Divine Power pinned down hard by the laws of the Lower World, the combat instinct and martial foundation carved into his bones were enough that ordinary monsters wouldn't even qualify to see him move, let alone get near him.
With the deadlock unbroken, Shakti fell back on a lesser request, going so far as to urge that he permit her to change into plain clothes, wear no insignia, and accompany him out of the city herself.
Haimer remained just as immovable as before.
After several rounds of it, Shakti let out a heavy, defeated sigh, her shoulders sinking with it.
"Since your mind is made up."
She straightened again, heels together, and gave a flawless military salute.
"I'll notify the gate guards to open the dedicated passage for you."
"But please guarantee your own safety. Tomorrow morning I'll be waiting at the gate for your return myself."
"See you tomorrow." Haimer waved farewell with a smile.
At the door, he laid his hand on the brass handle.
He glanced back and left behind one line with neither head nor tail.
"Ah, and I hope you won't be too startled tomorrow morning, Lady Shakti."
Shakti's whole face filled with confusion.
"Startled?"
She stood where she was, turning those words over at speed.
Lord Haimer had said, plainly, that he was going to fetch a few children.
And if it was only a few children, how could something so ordinary startle anyone?
Then, in the next breath, a truly appalling thought struck her like lightning, and a shiver ran through her from head to foot.
At noon today she had received a report.
Out on the ruins of the outer ring stood the new base of [Haimer Familia], its construction personally overseen by Hephaestus and a whole host of deities.
That colossal fortress, large enough to house over a thousand people in daily life, was already all but finished, now that a staggering sum of money had been poured into it.
"Don't tell me..."
Shakti's pupils contracted sharply.
"My lord, you aren't going out to recruit a thousand people and bring them back, are you?!"
The appalling guess burst out of her before she could stop it.
Haimer paused just past the threshold.
He turned his face slightly, leaving behind a faint smile heavy with meaning.
"That's exactly it."
Having dropped a bomb that would cost Shakti several nights of sleep, Haimer pulled the door open and walked out, the heavy wood swinging shut in front of her.
Shakti was left standing beside her desk.
It was like being struck by lightning; she couldn't gather herself for a long while.
The dozen-odd members [Haimer Familia] already had were each, taken alone, monstrous prodigies capable of shaking all of Orario.
And through every one of those moments when their name thundered through the city, this patron god had never put out so much as a whisper about recruiting new adventurers.
So all along, she and every other higher-up in Orario had assumed [Haimer Familia] walked the road of extreme exclusion, a road for a mere handful of elites.
And now, a thousand people?
Shakti drew a sharp breath.
A thousand monsters capable of forcing their way up to Lv.3 within a few days, with combat strength off every scale...
She pressed a hand to her forehead, her scalp prickling.
...
An hour later.
Having left the compound of [Ganesha Familia], Haimer followed the bluestone-paved lanes off Northwest Avenue with a light step, all the way to Orario's city gate.
The moment they caught sight of that unmistakable face, the [Ganesha Familia] guardsman posted at the gate all started in alarm.
Not one dared step forward to stop him. They gripped their long spears and drew back to both sides of the road, respectfully opening a broad passage for him.
And so Haimer walked out through the towering walls without a single obstruction.
He skirted the crowded caravan grounds, then followed a weed-choked path into a deserted pocket of barren woodland.
Once he had confirmed there was no one nearby, and no gaze or sensing magic trailing him, Haimer came to a stop.
He lifted his right hand, crossed his index and middle fingers, and snapped them crisply in the empty air.
Snap.
In that instant the space around Haimer began to twist and fold.
The vortex swallowed his figure whole, then rushed inward, shrinking to a black dot no larger than a pinprick before dissolving out of the air entirely, as though he had never stood there at all.
World G-404.
Black Bullet.
Once the barrier between dimensions was crossed, this world's timeline spun rapidly forward until its flow overlapped with Orario's.
Here, too, the sky had already gone to dusk.
The dying sun bled across the heavens.
It washed vast stretches of decaying Tokyo in a mournful, beautiful orange.
Haimer's form gathered itself slowly on the roof of a tall, abandoned office building.
He stood at the crumbling edge of the concrete and looked down at what lay below.
In the past, every time dusk fell, this city ringed by towering Monoliths became a hell on earth.
The girls who lived on the streets, the ones called "Cursed Children," would scatter and run like birds startled off a branch.
They hunted for dry straw in lightless sewers.
They huddled together for warmth beneath abandoned bridge arches.
Or they dug through reeking heaps of garbage for food gone moldy.
They had to hide themselves away before night closed in completely.
It was the only way to escape the cruelty adults heaped on them out of sheer terror of the Gastrea, and the endless torment of hunger and cold.
But now.
Everything had changed beyond recognition.
In that catastrophe men came to call divine punishment!
The dark red Divine Eyes that had covered half the sky had shattered the old, ugly order the way a storm strips dead leaves from a branch!
Now this vast region had been cleared into a broad expanse of clean, level ground.
These days, they called this place Eden.
Haimer watched it from on high.
The slum that had once been piled with refuse, running with green filth, stinking to the sky, was gone without a trace.
In its place were the terrible monsters that by rights should have torn those "Cursed Children" apart and eaten them.
The Gastrea.
A Stage III beetle-type Gastrea the size of a heavy truck was moving its eight thick insect legs, slow and deliberate.
With sharp serrated mandibles it was easing aside a slab of reinforced concrete weighing several tons that blocked the middle of the road.
And on its great black carapace, three little girls in clean lace dresses sat cross-legged.
With every step the beetle slowed its rhythm on purpose, keeping even the rise and fall of its abdomen to the barest motion, terrified of jolting the girls riding on its back.
Remarkably considerate of it.
____
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