Timeline: 4 and a half years before the cataclysm.
Characters involved: Helen McKinnon, Thomas McKinnon, Sister Alexandra, Brother Toshiro.
Sometimes when following The Path to Power, the road narrows. No longer can you walk side by side with your kindred. If you rush ahead, you risk being stabbed in the back. If you fall behind to allow others forward, they may leave you behind before the road once again allows you to walk together. Ask yourself, can you trust those you walk beside, or should you push them off the Path?
- Excerpt from The Sanguine Codex
There was an old mining town, long-abandoned and allowed to fall into decay. The last few determined inhabitants had, decades ago, either passed away or moved out. Far from the nearby small towns, only the occasional lost tourist or the desperate homeless passed through here.
Or so it would seem. Now, these structures were inhabited, old root cellars and tunnels used to hide away signs of activity. Rumors of hauntings and strange goings-on now surrounded this place, dismissed by the sheriff as either hearsay or more likely the place being used by a drug ring. But leads went nowhere, superstition and more pressing concerns delaying a detailed investigation. One attempt to use the place as part of a smuggling operation had indeed occurred, just over a year ago. None of the smugglers were ever seen again.
"I'm certain that you will have no trouble, young one. This gift will be adequate insurance against any threat." spoke a middle-aged man in a strange, dark red robe. At his side was a man in a duster and broad hat, a patch sewn onto the breast pocket displaying the image of some sort of bird. The man they were speaking to, one of several in more modern attire, simply regarded the worn-down looking hatchet with curiosity, noting the engraved runes and the cloth wrapping the handle had, the fabric a dull brown as though dyed with ochre. Or more likely, some other pigment made with dried blood.
"Well then. We shall see how well they like a little hot lead to go with this." remarked the man holding the axe. "Pleasure doing business with you." he added, before they turned and exited what used to be a company store. They were unaware, as they approached the row of trucks and motorcycles parked outside, how close their pursuers were.
Across the street, a woman in a mask and cloak, carrying an odd crossbow, watched the people exiting the building. Others were in position nearby, and the first thing the group saw was a faint glow from a figure stepping out of the run-down building's doorway. Faint pinpricks of light from the eyeholes of a masked man, and the slightly brighter glow emanating from a warhammer. They barely had time to reach for their weapons when, from three different directions, brilliant flashes of light and thunderous booms announced the attack, cutting the evening's fading light.
"Fuck! We've been ha-" a man shouted to fall on deaf ears, blindly yanking a pistol out of his waistband only for a bolt of green light to rip through his chest, fired from the rooftop. Already they were in a mad scramble to rush for cover, draw weapons, and fire in any direction that might stave off the assault. They'd expected cops, not this.
The man with the hatchet raised it overhead, the only one with any sort of augmentation affording him protection from the sudden blinding light. His eyes looked pitch-black, shielded by a protective lenses CBM. He mainly used it when adding a personal touch to the vehicles his associates sometimes took in to work on, just one of many things they dabbled in. And to think, that they'd be dealing in weird cultist books and supernatural artifacts.
He was ignorant of what the now-glowing axe actually did. They merely told him how to activate it, and that it'd give him the power needed to fend off whoever they suspected tailed them to the ghost town. Indeed, he could see about half a dozen masked men and woman who halted when he ran with it held high, thinking he might scare them off. "Hah, get fucked you pi-"
He'd made it in between his favorite old muscle car and the bike one of his associates rode in on, when the hatchet exploded with a wave of force and heat in his hand. And with it, a sickening spray of blood and gore painted vehicles that were instantly reduced to mangled, burning heaps of metal. Far more burnt, foul-smelling blood than any human would have in them, in truth the axe left a spray of it from who-knows-what in its wake when set off. The weapon itself fell to the ground where he'd been standing, into a small crater blasted in the weathered old pavement.
The instant this grisly scene finished unfolding, the stunned and horrified gangsters found themselves assailed anew by the masked figures. One had been close to the blast and was sprawled out on the ground, screaming and crying. The other three whirled about and fired frantically, outnumbered two-to-one by their attackers. In mere seconds a glowing white-hot blade cleaved one in half, a hammer staving in the head of the second. A single gunshot was all the last man could manage, seeing the charging man in cloak and mask shrug off the bullet to the chest before he was tripped and pounded into a mangled corpse.
The only survivor of the group watched, now half-conscious, as a strange glow surrounded the cloak the wounded assailant wore. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the man, with a painted blue mask and the barest hint of some eastern accent.
"Sister Alexandra, stabilize that one. Question him when he comes to. Thane Thomas, if you would secure the area with the rest of the support? Thane Helen and the others, follow my lead..."
The shop had storage in a basement of sorts, and careful work had been expended in carving out a tunnel connecting it to another adjacent basement, and through that connected to old sewers, the barest beginning of a subway, even a few half-collapsed tunnels of the old mine. From there they might be able to lose the hunters. But they had no intention of doing so. No, if they were simply eluded until they gave up, they'd come back again, and this place would cease to be a safe haven.
Two of the hunters already sought the basement they had passed through, and four had found the basement in the store. The former happened upon two novice blood mages who'd been left behind to guard the entrance as the others retreated into the tunnels. One, a burly man in a dark, faded suit of leather armor, etched in a pattern resembling scales, and a silver dagger in his hand. The other was a woman in robes, wielding a simple axe. Not one of the veinreavers, but a common woodcutting axe.
They were expecting the hunters that rushed down the stairs, the hammer-wielding woman leaping over a spray of vile hissing liquid that the man conjured up, wearing on the stairs. The other one, a man wielding one of their glowing broadswords, instead mantled over the stair's railing to drop down and avoid it. In an instant the man in the armor lunged at the woman who'd charged ahead, a deft jab of his dagger avoided and the hammer brought down to shatter his collarbone. He seemed to continue in a berserk frenzy despite this, expecting the axe-bearing woman to come to his aid while the other man was still catching up. Instead she charged at the man with the sword, whose searing blade deftly cleaved through the axe handle and most of her hand in one blow.
The woman with the hammer had ducked a wild left-handed haymaker, only for a hard kick to shatter the blood mage's knee, dropping him and leaving him open to a strike that dashed his brains out over the basement floor. The older man deactivated his sword before heading over to her.
"Still in one piece, Thane?" he asked.
The woman, a certain redhead who seven years ago inherited the title of Thane from her mother, simply nodded.
"I'm fine, Acolyte." she said. The older man was one of the founders, an Acolyte of The Knights-Errant of Christ, and the father of a childhood friend of hers. One who so far mainly attended to healing back home in between training sessions. Not yet ready.
Helen and Acolyte Johan were soon joined by Toshiro in his blue mask, and three others.
"Already falling back to the tunnels. They aren't going to flee for long before bloodlust goads them into a counterattack. Let's go." Toshiro directed. Into the tunnels they went. The blood mages had the advantage of knowing the winding, interconnected tunnels they'd developed into a hideout for the last few years. The mage hunters had the advantage of masksight, peering through old brick, stone, and dirt. Tracking prey, only a few of which had faced hunters before.
Elsewhere, a group of six men and women wielding strange crossbows surrounded the restrained, injured man who survived the initial assault. Sister Alexandra and Thomas McKinnon were among those interrogating him.
"You'll live. Now, what were you here for?" the aging man asked, and the young man looked up fearfully at them.
"F-fuck, you aren't cops after all...look, we were just here to offload a book these creeps wanted. What the hell HAPPENED to D-danny? And his ride. And my b-bike..." he stammered out nervously, and Alexandra sighed a bit.
"You were used. They didn't tell you to throw the axe, did they?" she said, and the man went a bit pale. "...they fucked us. Sons o' bitches..."
"Alright. Danny picked up some weird cult fuckboy book during one of this business deals, some creep figured out we had it and arranged a meet-and-greet with these assholes." he explained.
"Do you recall the title of the book?""Mastering the Unknown or something?" At that, the entire group visibly tensed up, making the practically teenage man flinch in fear.
"To Master the Unknown. Hard to get ones hands on a good copy of it. So we're on the right track. They're snatching up any copy they can find, comparing versions for some plan of theirs.""And I'm a fuckin' loose end." he grumbled, wincing at the pain that was still coursing through his body. One of them had forced him to drink a strange, sweet-tasting liquid, and then draped one of their cloaks around him. That was when the bleeding stopped, and the agony started.
One of the others stepped up. "Only one of their cars is still working." At this, Alexandra nodded.
"Well then. When we're finished here, we will let you go on one condition. Tell your fellows of the betrayal you suffered. But say nothing of us. Explain that any who speak of The Path to Power, talk of Blood Sacrament or claim to represent the Ordos Sanguine, are not be trusted." she explained.
"G-got it. I didn't want any part of this shit. Far as I'm concerned, the others died because these assholes fucked us. Going into this ghost town was a bad idea from the start..."
Under the tunnels, the sanguinists were waiting and preparing themselves, making their stands in an area where the tunnels converged into a vital part of the network of minecart tracks, and a little deeper was a dead end the last few prepared to defend.
"They'll be able to see through the walls. Expect them to flank the whole lot and tear them to pieces." remarked the one in the long coat, prompting a simple retort.
"And expend effort doing so."Already they could hear the chanting. Distant, faint, but all around half a dozen voices could be heard, closing in and letting the words echo through the old mine. "Ecce, sanguinem magum! Impium profligatum! Subire mortem tuam, sub malleo deorum!"
Behold, blood mage! Godless profligate! Submit to your death, under the hammer of the gods! The man in the coat grimaced a bit, knowing the others were almost certainly on the verge of panic now.
"If even one of their old blood is among them, the prey will be a hard fight."The chanting was soon drowned out in a grand cacophony. Old stolen firearms firing wildly, the blast of a tossed veinreaver that Helen and Johan swiftly evaded, and from all the directions the thunder of their hammers. Most tried to look away, but again and again the brilliant light filled the mines. None of them dared use scavenged masks, seeing it as a symbol of their enemy. Some had welding goggles and other makeshift means of protecting from the flashes, and one robed man with a staff stood unfazed by the light, letting magic ward his eyes and ears.
For most of the blood mages, they had no idea what to expect, no experience. Blades and hammers tearing through nearly a dozen in seconds. Helen was among them, easily turning aside a machete and driving one woman to the ground. A sweeping tongue of flame engulfed the dead and dying, filling the tunnel with choking smoke and driving the hunters back. "Now! Purge them!" cried the man wielding the staff of hellfire, bolstering the confidence of those remaining. Then something lunged at him through the inferno, flames seeming to part as Toshiro rushed the mage. In one hand, a hammer crashed through the mage's guard and broke his stave in half, and in the other Toshiro held a short knife, plunged into the sanguinist's throat.
In the dead end, the man in coat and hat calmly tied a blindfold around his eyes, drawing a broadsword. It resembled the same that a few mage hunters carried, decorations and holy symbols stripped off or marred. The touch of blood magic had corrupted it, and it glowed with malevolent light as he turned to head down the tunnel.
"What are you doing?" the remaining experienced Magus asked.
"Hunting some wolves."The others were being driven back, prepared to backpedal down the tunnel as Helen and the others forced their way across burning bodies, when a flash of dark red darted past them. In an instant, the other swordsman of the six found himself pushed back, narrowly avoiding being ran through. "L-laniu-" he cried out, but the momentary clash of blades ended via a simple zip gun in the man's off hand, jabbed hard into the mage hunter's chin and fired point-blank.
Regenerate from that, the man in the duster thought.
Immediately the others moved to flank him, Helen watching warily as Johan and Toshiro took the lead in circling the man. A Sanguine Shrike, of course one of them would be here. He seemed undeterred by his self-inflicted blindness, nor the ringing in his ears caused by the hammers resounding around him. He seemed to fight by scent and instinct, and he had them on the defensive soon enough.
Of the five, only three at a time could really harry him much at all. He quickly discerned that the two who pressed the advance hard and led the attacks were the most experienced. Founders, possibly. A challenge he relished. Of the remaining three, one was a mere girl of little concern to him, while the remaining man and woman each seemed reasonably competent. The other woman seemed especially aggressive for a hunter.
In a moment he'd slipped out of their grasp, no longer flanked and with Johan in between him and the other four.
Don't stay flanked, and kill the swordsmen first, he thought. A hard knee to the groin and a careful parry, and Johan's hand was lopped clean off by the corrupted blade. He knew that the oldest of the four, the man in the blue mask, would be on him in a split-second. Path of the Sun, he suspected.
Just end this one while he's disarmed, and...Two had caught up. Toshiro, as expected. And Helen. No matter, he was expecting whoever followed in Toshiro's wake would try to trip him up. Part of him hoped he could read their actions so well because he was the superior fighter, augmented by inhuman gifts. But he suspected the truth was merely how predictable hunters often were.
Just a quick turn of the blade and catch a would-be kick with lethal steel, then finish what you started.The dark metal of the blade skidded off the steel langets of a warhammer, swung low to drop his leg out from under him.
That bitch! he thought. She was faster than expected, attacking with renewed aggression and willing to make an attack that was much less efficient than a quick kick, if the opening seemed right. Toshiro was already upon him in an instant, his head driven back by a hard strike that snapped his neck.
The remaining magus could sense what had happened. There were indeed at least two experienced hunters sent here. Mere months ago he'd been to another hideout that suffered a raid by a party of the same size, and it went fine. They lost many of the novices and neophytes, but every last hunter paid the price. This time was different. When he saw the approaching pinpricks of red eyeholes down the tunnel, he plunged his silver athame into the side of his neck, ripping it open.
Not enough of us left to take any more with me, he thought. Instead they'd want information that would endanger the others.
Consider this your one favor, brethren.There were four left, and immediately they dropped their weapons and knelt. They saw five come in, one clutching his tightly-wrapped limb, now missing his right hand. Got one at least, though none of the neophyte sanguinists had any idea how many hunters to expect.
They were rounded up, subdued, and questioned. Helen watched as one of the other hunters examined the sword recovered from the Shrike, along with checking on Johan's injury. "Stump may never heal up properly, damn sword seems to have a curse built into it." one of the others remarked.
Toshiro's own examination of the sword worried him. The Dividing Blade. That was the very first thing that came to mind when he gave it a more in-depth look. It was a deliberate conversion of a holy sword, one with distressing similarities to the blade that once served as the driving wedge that led to The Schism. It was different though. Its properties weaker and subdued. It fed solely off blood essence to produce a carefully-crafted foil to the properties of its counterpart, without a spirit bound to it for greater power. Somehow, Toshiro suspected, the Sanguine Order had access to some fragment of knowledge gleaned from The Shadow of Arcana, and they exploited it.
Blood essence, tools of their bloody trade, books and such were confiscated. Among them was the copy of To Master the Unknown they found, to be burnt with all the copies of Sanguine Codex they found. The sanguine artifacts, save the corrupted blade they intended to study, were hastily dismantled and consecrated. What they didn't get was any useful information from the sanguinists. They already knew that the Sanguine Order was seeking a complete understanding of the book, for some sort of Sacrament that might well severely disrupt The Veil if carried out. What they wanted was an understanding of how complete that collection was, concrete locations of other sanguine hideouts, movement patterns and contacts. Only the two Magis knew this.
"Brother Toshiro, Acolyte Johan. News from the support element. Father says the one boy they subdued has been cooperative and willing to do their part, now that they've seen firsthand what they were dealing with. No evidence of actual rogue arcanists, just some street toughs who got their hands on something they shouldn't have." Helen said after returning from a ventilation shaft, to get a sightly better radio signal. Some modern comforts were essential, even in the life of a mage hunter.
"Well, if there are no objections then bid the boy to go and sin no more." the man in mail and cloak answered, clutching his broadsword in his left hand.
"And the sanguinists?" Helen asked. She knew the answer. They all did, and it was made clear when Johan calmly activated his incorruptible sword, and with a swipe of white-hot glowing steel, beheaded one of the blood mages.
"Subire mortem tuam, sub malleo deorum..."
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