Chapter 7: The Pistol Sisters' Gambit
The throne room of Headmaster Death was never warm, but today the cold felt different. It seeped from the black marble floors, from the high, vaulted ceiling where shadows pooled like oil. It was the clinical chill of a dissection room.
Jack Death’s polished Oxfords clicked a perfect, measured rhythm against the stone as he strode down the long approach. The sound was a metronome in the silence, each step precisely spaced. He could feel the weight of his weapons, Elis and Sari, resting in their symmetric holsters on each hip. Their presence in his mind was a quiet, dual hum of awareness.
The air is sick here, Jack, Elis’s voice, usually so calm and analytical, whispered like a draft through his thoughts. It tastes like spoiled milk and static.
Someone’s really losing their grip, Sari added, her mental tone bright and cutting. It’s buzzing. I don’t like it.
Jack ignored them. He focused on the symmetry of his gait, on the perfect alignment of his black suit’s lapels. He tugged at his left cuff, ensuring the precise quarter-inch of white shirt showed. The three stark white streaks in his otherwise jet-black hair, all on the right side, felt like a screaming violation. He kept his eyes forward, away from the reflective surfaces of the dark pillars.
Headmaster Death sat upon his simple, stark throne, a silhouette of absolute authority. To his right, a large, ornate mirror hung in the air, its surface not reflecting the room, but showing a scene of chaotic, violent motion.
“Father,” Jack said, stopping at the prescribed distance. His voice was flat, efficient. “Mother sends her regards. She says the tremors along the Ley Line in Vienna are not natural. She believes it’s an early burrowing sign. She’s investigating.”
Death nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on the mirror. “Noted.”
Jack’s eyes, against his will, flicked to the mirror. The image was crystal clear. He saw the rotting amusement park, the two pairs fighting. He saw the girl with the scythe—the new one, the unstable weapon—and her meister holding their own against a hulking minion. On the other side of a collapsing ferris wheel, he saw the other pair: Amber Delacroix, moving with a fierce, desperate grace, and her partner Leonardo, a hatchet in her hand, dismantling their foe with brutal efficiency.
A muscle in Jack’s jaw twitched. The asymmetry of the separation, the imbalance of the fight, itched under his skin.
“What is the meaning of this, Father?” The flatness evaporated from his voice, replaced by a sharp edge. He gestured to the mirror. “The NOT class. Fighting high-level apparitions in a destabilized pocket realm. I’ve faced those things. I can barely hold my own against two of them with Elis and Sari at full resonance. Why send a group of two meisters and two weapons from the NOT class? One of whom,” he pointed at Angel’s form in the glass, “has had a weapon for less than a week.”
Headmaster Death didn’t turn. “They are getting an extra lesson. To reprimand their poor performance lately. The Delacroix girl and her weapon need to rebuild their soul count from scratch. The new pairing needs field experience under pressure. It is efficient.”
A wet, ragged sound echoed from a dark corner of the room. Jack’s eyes, sharp and annoyed, tracked the noise. Kilson Delacroix was hunched against the wall, his massive shoulders shaking. The man’s face was buried in his hands, but the sobs were unmistakable—great, heaving things that spoke of a profound, unmanly agony. He was watching the mirror, watching his daughter.
“She’s doing great though,” Kilson blubbered, wiping his nose on the back of his wrist. “Look at her form! She’s adapting Leo’s edge for those rapid parries, see? That’s my girl. That’s all her mother’s technique. Oh, gods, she’s too close!”
Jack stared, disgust and a sliver of pity warring within him. He looked back at his father. “This is cruelty. It’s a suicide mission packaged as a lesson. You’re using them as disposable probes to see what’s happening in that park.”
“All lessons carry risk,” Death replied, his tone devoid of inflection. “The risk is calculated. Professor Crow assessed their resonance potential as adequate for the task.”
“Adequate,” Jack spat the word. The scene in the mirror intensified; the minion facing Amber lunged, and Leo’s hatchet form flashed, deflecting a blow that would have taken her head off. Kilson wailed.
Without asking, Jack waved a hand. A simple, straight-backed wooden chair manifested from a swirl of shadow behind him. He sat, forcing his posture into a rigid perpendicular, and watched the fight unfold, his obsidian eyes missing nothing.
He watched Angel and the scythe-girl struggle, then find a shocking, unorthodox rhythm. He saw the moment the meister didn’t attack, but unraveled the minion’s corruption with a touch. His brow furrowed. That wasn’t standard technique. That was… instinctual surgery.
He watched until the fights ended, until the two pairs reunited through the wreckage, until the four figures climbed back into their hulking Jeep and disappeared down the grey path, back toward the world.
Only then did Jack stand. The chair dissolved into smoke. “Adequate,” he repeated, the word now heavy with new meaning. He gave his father one last, inscrutable look, turned on his heel, and left the throne room, his footsteps once again a perfect, angry metronome in the dark.
The adrenaline was a chemical burn in Angel’s veins, slow to cool. The Death Jeep rattled and bounced, the endless grey wasteland a blur outside. She gripped the doorframe, her knuckles white, feeling every vibration judder up her spine. In the back, Alyce was silent, wrapped in a blanket from the Jeep’s rusty storage box, her eyes staring at nothing.
They’d used the communication mirror—a smaller, handheld version—to update the Academy. Headmaster Death’s expression had been unreadable. “Proceed to the coordinates of the Cursed Graveyard. Retrieve Professor Silas’s remains. Do not linger.” The mirror had gone dark before any questions could be asked.
“What will we even do here?” Angel asked, her voice tight. “Just… retrieve his body? Put him in a bag?” The morbidity of it felt thick in her throat.
Amber, driving with a focused ferocity, shook her head. “We need his body to prevent a Keshin from inhabiting it. A dead meister or weapon… their empty vessel is a prime target. A powerful, trained soul-space gone vacant? It’s a lighthouse for corruption. A Keshin egg born from a Professor-level soul…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. The grim set of Leo’s jaw in the passenger seat was enough.
The landscape began to change. The grey earth grew softer, tufted with strange, colourless grass that sighed under the tires. The skeletal shrubs thickened into groves of dead trees, their branches like nerve endings against the purple-black sky. The sun, if it had ever been there, was fully gone now. The only light came from the Jeep’s slitted headlights and a faint, phosphorescent glow that seemed to rise from the ground itself.
The Cursed Graveyard announced itself first by smell. It was the scent of wet granite, deep rot, and something ozone-clean that was worse than decay. They passed a wrought-iron archway, twisted and sagging, the word “REQUIEM” barely legible in the metal.
Then they saw the stones.
It was a vast, rolling field of neglect. Headstones tilted at insane angles, some swallowed to their necks in the soft, sucking earth. Mausoleums crumbled, their doors hanging open like slack jaws. The trees here were not just dead; they were petrified, black and sharp against the sky, webbed with ancient, thorny vines. The silence was absolute, a vacuum that pressed against their eardrums.
Amber killed the engine. The silence crashed in, profound and heavy.
“Stay close,” she whispered, as if speaking too loud might wake the ground. “Don’t touch anything but the path.”
There was a path, of sorts—a faint, winding trail of slightly firmer earth between the graves. They followed it, their footsteps muffled. Angel’s heart hammered against her ribs, the post-battle adrenaline morphing into a sharp, primal dread. The air was cold enough to see their breath, which plumed and vanished instantly, as if stolen.
They found him in a slightly clearer area, a small hillock overlooking the sea of stones.
The headstone was massive, a monolith of dark slate. It was fresh. The earth around it was recently turned, a dark scar in the pale grass. Carved into the stone, with shocking neatness, were the words: PROFESSOR ARIS SILAS. BELOVED TEACHER. HIS CURIOSITY WAS HIS CROSS.
It was wrong. All of it was wrong. The neatness, the specific epitaph, the isolated location. This was no hasty dumping. This was a placement.
Angel took a step toward the mounded earth, a sick feeling in her gut. Alyce hovered at her shoulder, a live wire of nervous energy.
Then the voice came. It was high, clear, and singsong, dripping with a mockery of childish glee. It came from directly behind them.
“Ding dong. Here lies Silas, beloved professor to his students. Ding dong, ding dong.”
They spun as one.
A figure stood atop a crumbling crypt ten yards away, silhouetted against the glow of the dead sky. It was tall, impossibly thin, and its head lolled to one side at a broken-neck angle.
“Do you hear that?” the voice chimed again, the head tilting to the other side with a wet, popping sound. “It’s time to die.”
The figure stepped into the sickly light.
It was Silas, but transformed. His skin was a grayish blue, tight and desiccated over sharp bone. His eyes were huge, bulging from their sockets with milky, unseeing intensity. His lips were completely missing, pulled back in a permanent, lipless rictus grin over yellowed teeth. He looked like a zombie from a medical textbook, a terrible parody of the elegant professor.
“Oh, fuck,” Alyce breathed, the words a shaky exhale.
Amber and Leo snapped into a fighting stance, their movements perfectly synchronized. Angel and Alyce fumbled a second later, Angel raising her hands, Alyce’s form flickering with indecision before solidifying into the blue-flamed scythe.
Zombie Silas didn’t run.
He bent his knees and jumped, a physics-defying leap that carried him twenty feet straight up. He hung for a moment against the dead sky before plummeting down, slamming into the ground between them with a thunderous crunch. The impact kicked apart the dry, dead earth, sending clods of soil and fragments of bone flying.
“Ding dong, ding dong,” he chirped, his voice that same, horrifying singsong. He rose from the crater, dust sloughing from his tailored, now-filthy suit. “You are late for class. That was one thing I was always proud of. Punctuality. I was always a man of my time.”
His bulging eyes swiveled, taking them in. With a casual, horrific strength, he reached out and snapped off the arm of a large, cross-shaped gravestone beside him. He hefted the solid granite like it was balsa wood, readying it as a club.
“Surrender yourself to the Death Weapon Meister Academy, Professor Silas,” Amber demanded, her voice hard despite the tremor Angel could see in her raised fists. “Before we are forced to take action.”
He laughed, a wet, gurgling sound. He mimicked her tone perfectly. “Surrender yourself to the Death Weapon Meister Academy.” He dropped the act, his head cocking. “Girl, I am the Death Weapon Meister Academy!”
He charged. The ground shook.
Amber and Leo met him first. Leo shifted mid-stride, his form flowing into a massive, double-headed battle axe. Amber caught the haft, swinging with all her weight. The axe-head clashed against the granite cross with a sound like a cathedral bell cracking. The shockwave knocked the breath from Angel’s lungs. Amber skidded back, her boots carving trenches in the dirt.
Before Silas could recover, Angel lunged. She swung Alyce in a wide, roaring arc of blue flame. Silas didn’t even block. He twisted his torso at an impossible angle, the scythe blade whistling past his chest. He backhanded her with the cross-arm. The stone connected with her ribs. The air exploded from her lungs in a pained gasp. She flew sideways, crashing into a mossy headstone with a sickening thud.
Alyce reverted with a cry, clutching her own side where the resonance pain flared. “Angel!”
Amber was already moving again, a whirlwind of coordinated strikes. Leo’s axe form was a blur, but Silas parried each one with that crude stone cross, his movements economical, flawless. He wasn’t just strong. He was skilled. He disarmed her with a sharp twist, sending the axe spinning from her grasp. He kicked out, his foot connecting with her sternum. Amber crumpled, gasping.
“Silas Blackwood,” she coughed, scrambling back, rubbing her temple as Leo’s weapon form flew back to her hand. “Age unknown. Estimated to be in the 800s.” She recited it like a litany, a shield of facts against the horror. “One of the highest-ranked weapons during his time, and even now. Transforms into a ranseur. He is so skilled he can fight even without a meister to wield him.”
Angel pushed herself up, her head pounding, her vision swimming. The world tilted. “How do we defeat him?”
Amber stared, her mouth a tight line. She went quiet. The silence was an answer in itself. She didn’t know.
Silas discarded the shattered stump of the cross. He took two slow, deliberate steps toward Amber. Then he struck, not with a weapon, but with his hand. It shot out, faster than a snake, and closed around her ankle.
He lifted her into the air as if she weighed nothing.
“Put me down!” she screamed, kicking her free leg.
He began to swing her, slowly at first, then faster, a human pendulum. Her NOT uniform skirt flared. Amber’s free hand scrambled, grabbing handfuls of fabric, trying to pull it down while her other hand white-knuckled Leo’s axe form. She screamed again, this time in pure, frustrated humiliation mixed with terror as his grip tightened, his grayish-blue fingers digging into her flesh.
Angel saw the opening. Her ribs screamed in protest as she forced herself forward. She didn’t summon a technique. She didn’t have the focus. She just ran, Alyce shifting instinctively into her scythe form mid-stride. As Silas swung Amber past for another dizzying arc, Angel brought the weapon down—not with the blade, but with the brutal, solid metal of the scythe’s blunt end.
BAM.
The impact shuddered up Angel’s arms. Silas’s head snapped to the side with a sound like a rotten log splitting. His bulging eyes rolled back. His grip on Amber went slack.
He dropped like a felled tree, hitting the soft earth with a heavy, final thud.
Amber landed in a heap a few feet away, immediately scrambling to her knees, her face flushed with pain and fury. She yanked a coil of shimmering, soul-bound rope from her belt. “Leo, bind him! Now!”
Leo shifted back to human form, taking the rope. His hands were a blur, wrapping the glowing cords around Silas’s wrists, ankles, and throat. The bonds tightened on their own, sealing with a soft, golden light. The thing that had been Professor Silas lay trussed and motionless in the dirt.
A heavy, panting silence descended, broken only by the ringing in Angel’s ears and Alyce’s shaky breathing. The graveyard seemed to hold its breath.
“Now what?” Angel whispered, her voice raw.
The figure on the ground stirred. The milky eyes blinked open, staring sightlessly at the purple-black sky. The lipless mouth moved.
“The person who created me,” it gurgled, the words thick and slow, each one a stone dropped into a deep well, “is Dr. Frankenstein.”