Chapter Text
Wilhelm hooked a finger under the wool of his collar, prying the coarse fabric from his skin. It scratched at his throat, a constant, itchy reminder of a uniform he did not choose. Mud snatched at his boots with each stride—a wet, sucking sound that seemed too loud in the silence of the district. The rain here did not wash away the filth, it slickened it, the ground becoming a mirror to a sky, drowning everything in browns and greys.
He held the formation's right flank. To his immediate left was Leonard, a collection of spare bones and nervous energy wrapped in a penal soldier's cloth. The gangly man marched with a slight hunch, his eyes manic as they darted between the shadow of the alleyways. His courage failed him in a rhythm. His steps too short, too hesitant, followed by a frantic shuffle to return to the center of the squad.
Ahead, the silhouette of Inquisitor Vincent cut a void in the bland landscape. His black cloak hung heavy, and where the fabric parted, it revealed armor of boiled leather—stiff, scarred, and encasing him like a second skin. A wide-brimmed hat cast his features into permanent shadow. Clamped to his forearm was the dull, oiled mechanism of a hand-crossbow. Its string cradled a solitary silver bolt.
In the rear, three sellswords trailed, draped in a scavenger’s mosaic of rusted mail and padding—gear likely picked from the dead. They shared no uniform, bound only by the chaotic unsteadiness of their gait. Where the Inquisitor marched with the cold rhythm of a machine, these three lurched through the mud like stumbling drunks. They were men bound by nothing but the promise of the Church’s coin.
“Hey, you.” Leonard’s shallow voice barely scraped above the sucking sound of the mud. His manic eyes flicked toward the sellswords and back. “You know they don’t give a rat’s ass about us, right?”
Wilhelm’s jaw tightened. He offered no words, his gaze locked entirely on the deep impressions the Inquisitor’s boots left in the muck.
“But you and me?” A stubby finger jabbed into the damp wool of Wilhelm’s shoulder. “We gotta stick together, yeah?”
Leonard. A living hypothetical of a man. A sheep wearing a penal soldier’s cloth, the kind of man who would happily feed a comrade to the wolves if it bought him one more shivering night by a fire.
Wilhelm’s callused palm slid down to the battered iron of his sword’s pommel. The cold metal grounded him. He let out a slow, measured breath, the coarse wool of his uniform loosening slightly across his chest as he settled his grip.
Leonard pressed closer, his desperation practically bleeding through Wilhelm’s coat. “Let the paid hands earn their keep, right?” When Wilhelm glanced sideways, Leonard offered a half-toothed, frantic grin, already falling a half-step behind.
Ahead, the rhythm of the Inquisitor’s stride broke. The heavy black cloak swept as he twisted back, a single cold eye flashing from the shadow of his brim.
“March.”
The deeper they marched past the safety of the inner city’s improvised walls, the more the city seemed to rot on the bone. Orderly, sharp-cornered construction gave way to shattered masonry and collapsed roofs. Half-collapsed walls leaned against one another like exhausted, bleeding men.
Wilhelm’s thumb traced the grip of his sword, his eyes scanning. It was a suffocating struggle to reconcile the dead silence of the street with his own memory. Just a year ago, this ghost district had been a vital organ of the city. Chaotic, thriving, and supposedly secure against the plague under the Church’s strict, regimental protection. Now, it was nothing but an open grave.
Above them, a solitary crow broke the quiet. Its call was a raspy, grating dirge that echoed off the hollowed-out buildings. Below, the gutters writhed with plump, fearless rats that scurried through the mud, their wet bodies slipping over shattered cobblestone with ease.
But the weather and the rot hadn’t been what killed this place.
Wilhelm’s eyes tracked the marks of violence left behind. Deep, unnatural gouges were carved into stone facades- Claw marks thick enough to fit a man’s wrist, tearing through brick as if it were soft flesh. Heavy wooden boards, hastily nailed over empty windows, had been splintered inward. The jagged wood was soaked with dark, rusted stains, a permanent memory of the slaughter that even the endless rain could not wash clean.
The Inquisitor’s black-gloved fist snapped up. The formation choked to an abrupt halt, boots sinking into the muck below.
The sudden quiet was jarring. The ambient noise of the wildlife had vanished. The earth stood still. Whatever had been scurrying in the dark held its breath. Ahead of them, the Inquisitor’s head tilted slightly, listening to a sound only a trained hunter could hear.
“Penal.” Two sharp flicks of the Inquisitor’s fingers. “Forward.”
Wilhelm drew his blade. It was a pathetic strip of iron, the edge dull and the rusted fuller still stained with the previous owner’s blood. He circled around the right flank, eyes sweeping the jagged shadows of the alleys and patchwork structures.
To his left, Leonard shrank back. The gangly man tried to fold himself into the mass of mercenaries, but a leather-clad hand shot out, seizing his collar. The Inquisitor hurled him forward. Leonard hit the street hard, a pathetic whimper escaping his throat as he scrambled to his hands and knees.
Wood splintered. A barricaded door exploded outward.
A nightmare of rot and muscle tore into the street. It was the profane mockery of a boar, crowned with heavy, twisted horns, but it possessed no hooves. It propelled its massive bulk on three pairs of human limbs. They bent at sickening, unnatural angles, pale palms slapping and pushing through the mud in a frantic, unthinking frenzy. Solid black eyes locked onto Leonard. There was no stalking, no grace of a predator. It was a senseless, hurtling avalanche of meat and hunger.
Behind Leonard, the sellswords drew their weapons and shifted their stances. They aligned themselves perfectly behind his kneeling form.
Bait. The men were waiting for the beast to impale itself on the penal soldier before making their strike.
Wilhelm pivoted, his boots slipping. Too far. The distance was impossible to close. The beast hurtled forward, bearing down on Leonard.
A sharp, metallic crack.
A blur of silver pierced the air. The bolt punched straight through the beast’s eye with a wet thud. Its sheer momentum carried it forward, the massive carcass crashing into the cobblestone, plowing a trench of earth and foul water right over Leonard. The man curled into a tight, trembling ball, his whimpers escalating into a rapid, hyperventilating wheeze against the beast’s corpse.
Wilhelm’s gaze snapped back to the Inquisitor.
The man had barely moved an inch. Another bolt was drawn from the depths of his coat, slotting it into his arm mechanism with a cold, mechanical click.
The Church’s Inquisitors were not mere men; they were instruments. Forged to cull the plague-born, their faith was an iron rod that left no room for hesitation or mercy. In a rotting city where the Church hoarded every scrap of grain, clean water, and medicine, the commands of the Church, and by extension, the Inquisitors, were law. Not to be questioned. The holy men held the throat of the surviving city in their black-gloved hands.
In the displaced earth, Leonard scrambled to his feet. The man was a trembling ruin, plastered in cold, wet mud. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and stared at something unseen as he fell back into formation.
The patrol marched on. Behind Wilhelm, the sellswords fell into a lazy, slouched rhythm. The near-death of Leonard hadn’t even garnered a second thought.
One of the men spat a dark wad of phlegm onto the road. He threw his arms wide, his voice taking on a hysterical, weeping cadence of a street-corner doomsayer. “Behold the wages of sin!”
His head snapped back with a throaty laugh. “Ain’t it funny how the Almighty’s wrath only seems to twist up those poor bastards in the outer districts?”
A rusted chainmail shoulder bumped into his, accompanied by a raspy bark of laughter. “If it takes the wicked, why ain’t you spouting horns and extra limbs yet, Corvus?”
“Must be doing the Lord’s holy work in this new flood,” Corvus grinned, revealing a row of rotting teeth as he wiped a smear of rain from his brow. “Keeping you two bastards alive while the Almighty tries to drown us in claws and teeth.”
The sellword who bumped him snorted. “Bullshit. If sin turned a man to beast, the entire Noble District would be a petting zoo by now.” He tapped the side of his helmet with a dirt-caked finger. “It’s the work of cults. Heretics making blood pacts with daemons.”
At the rear of the pack, the third mercenary unstoppered a dented leather flask with his teeth. He took a long pull and wiped his mouth with a filthy sleeve. “You’re both half-wits.” He gestured with the flask toward the foul slop whirling around their boots. “Look at this piss. Half the city’s runoff, the alchemists’ waste, and the rot of the dead, all sinking right into our wells. We’re drinking our own ruin.”
Wilhelm kept his gaze forward. Ahead, the Inquisitor’s broad, rigid back marched on, his rhythm unbroken.
The truth didn’t matter. Demons, sin, or poisoned water—it made no difference to the Church. As long as the masses were terrified and looking up to the stained glass for salvation, the Church would let these rumors spread. Fear was just another weapon of control, but perhaps in these times, a necessary one.
Hours bled away. The pale sun finally surrendered, sinking beneath the jagged, collapsed rooftops and casting long, skeletal shadows that seemed to scratch their way across the earth.
Wilhelm had retreated into the numb, mechanical rhythm of the march when the stench hit him.
It wasn’t the ambient, watery decay of the district. It was a physical wall of odor—a sickening sweet wave of fresh rot that clung to the stale air like grease. His stomach lurched violently, acid rising in his throat. He forced his jaw shut, swallowing down the hot sting of bile.
His hand instinctively dropped to the pommel of his sword. He swept the hollowed-out windows and jagged alleys, searching for the source. The stench was wet and heavy. Whatever had died had died recently. The killer could still be lurking.
The jokes and conversation of the sellswords had long since vanished. The accompanying silence was vast, swallowing the patrol’s attention.
Wilhelm’s thumb traced the rough iron of his hilt. In his previous five patrols, the orders were always the same: sweep and clear. The plague-born were mindless, driven only by an insatiable hunger that drew them blindly towards the warmth of men.
But this was different. Before exiting the city gates, hushed, urgent whispers had passed between the Inquisitor and a silk-robed official. They were hunting a specific beast. One that possessed unusual qualities… Routines. Habits.
The Inquisitor’s black glove shot up. The squad choked to a halt.
Just ahead, sprawled across the slicked steps of a ruined townhouse lay a body.
Wilhelm edged forward, clinically cataloging the ruin. The corpse was a scout. The corpse wore light leather and in his paled palm sat a short blade. Gear meant to slip through alleys and shadows, not to hold a line.
The scout’s lifeless eyes stared blankly up at the weeping clouds above. His throat was entirely gone. In its place was shredded meat, torn with a devastatingly precise bite.
A shiver coursed down Wilhelm’s spine. It was not the corpse itself, but it was the completeness of it that made the hairs on Wilhelm’s neck stand up. The man’s limbs were intact. His torso was unruptured. In a starved, ruined city where mindless beasts consumed everything down to the marrow, this creature had left a fresh meal to rot.
All at once, the silence shattered. A heavy thud and the scraping of claws against timber.
Before Wilhelm could pivot to face it, a massive shadow lurched from the hollowed-out shell that was once a tavern. It was a blur of violence in his periphery. One of the mercenaries—the one who spoke of dirtied wells—was already on his knees in the muck.
There was no scream, only a wet, desperate gurgle as his hands scrambled at his own throat. Hot, bright blood pumped in arterial spurts through his fingers, welling from four impossibly deep gashes.
Wilhelm backpedaled, his boots sliding in the sludge. He slammed against a nearby wall. His vision pounded with the frantic beating of his heart.
The beast did not linger over its kill. It was a phantom of black and browns, dissolving back into the ruins. It moved with sickening speed, its slouched form fluidly weaving through dips and jagged holes of the masonry.
Wilhelm steadied himself, pulling back his shoulders against the sudden suffocating tightness of his wool cloak. Hot sweat and cold rain soaked his uniform. The encroaching dusk swallowed the ruins. Only fragments of the beast broke through the dusk: unnatural, elongated front limbs pulling a massive form. He swept his dull iron blade in tight arcs, his knuckles white against the grip as he repositioned next to the Inquisitor.
The safest position was in the shadow of the executioner. The Inquisitor was readied, his eyes narrowed against the darkness. His arm remained raised, tracking the shifting shadows with a cold, mechanical precision.
Wilhelm’s breath hitched as a shadow detached itself from a ruined awning. The beast dropped onto Corvus. The mercenary’s rusted mail parted like wet paper. Corvus hit the earth with an agonizing, breathless shriek, his hands desperately trying to hold back the slick, heavy coils of his own intestines as they spilled into the mud.
Wilhelm’s vision constricted, the dark blues of the encroaching dusk blurring into a suffocating, unfocused haze. The blood-curdling wails warped, blurring into a distant, muffled tone, leaving only the frantic, hammering rhythm of his own pulse thudding in his ears.
From behind a shattered brick wall, the beast’s massive form exploded outward. For a fraction of a second, the shape was distinctly lupine.
Just as fast, a silver bolt vanished into the beast’s dark flank, like a needle disappearing into a dense, matted rug. It did not break the creature’s stride as it collided with the third mercenary. There was a sickening, meaty crack. The man’s head snapped back, twisting to an inhuman, impossible angle. The mud gave a wet gasp as the sellsword thumped down onto the earth.
Suddenly, the beast recoiled. It threw its lupine head back and unleashed a wail that clawed at the edges of Wilhelm’s sanity—a grating, horrific sound, like jagged rocks grinding together in a ruined throat.
It did not press the attack; instead, the massive shadow pivoted on its elongated forelimbs and launched itself into the suffocating darkness of a side alley, swallowed instantly by the gloom.
The sudden absence of the beast left a ringing void, filled only by Corvus’s unending, wet screaming from the gutter. A few meters away, behind a stack of rotting crates, a pathetic shifting crept out. Leonard. The penal soldier was trembling so violently he could barely stand, his eyes fixed firmly on the ground to avoid the withering glare the Inquisitor now leveled at him.
Blood-soaked mud grabbed at the Inquisitor’s heavy boots as he approached the ruined man. He stood over Corvus, looking down at the destroyed abdomen with the clinical detachment of a butcher inspecting spoiled meat.
Corvus’s eyes were wide, the whites stark and bulging against the grime of his face. Pure, distilled terror locked his features. His trembling, blood-slicked hands scrabbled endlessly at his own stomach, desperately trying to scoop the heavy, steaming coils back inside.
The Inquisitor’s expression did not shift. He gave a sharp, dismissive huff. The hiss of steel licking leather cut through the rain as he drew a slender rapier from his hip.
There was no hesitation.
A swift, surgical flash of metal in the gloom. Corvus’s agonizing shrieks collapsed into a wet, bubbling gurgle as the thin blade drew a clean, deep line across his throat. The mercenary’s eyes rolled back as his neck opened up, spilling the last of his life into the gutter.
With a deliberate calmness, the Inquisitor pinched a fold of his heavy black cloak and wiped the blade clean before sheathing it with a soft click.
The rain pounded against Wilhelm’s shoulders, the chill finally seeping through the soaked wool and settling deep into his bones. He stood frozen as the fallen man bled out into the cold mud.
A cold knot tightened in Wilhelm’s chest. What were the man’s last thoughts as the darkness took him? Were they of a home long forgotten? The soft warmth of a woman’s breast? Or was it simply a memory of a crowded tavern, filled with roaring merriment and strong, bitter ale?
Whatever it was, Wilhelm silently prayed to a god he wasn’t sure was listening that he would not find out for himself today.
He dared not move, let alone interrupt, as the Inquisitor kneeled over Corvus. Low murmurs of a prayer slipped from the holy man’s lips, barely audible over the drumming rain. His black-clad fingers gently brushed over Corvus’s face to close his staring eyes.
He repeated this solemn ritual for the other two. Only when the dead were closed off from the world did the Inquisitor rise, turning his gaze to the surviving penal soldiers.
“We are not done.” His voice was flat, devoid of the adrenaline coursing through Wilhelm. “The beast is marked for death. The silver poisons its blood.”
The Inquisitor reached down, hoisting a muddied crossbow from the gear of the third dead mercenary. “Do not fall behind.” He tossed it through the rain.
Wilhelm caught the weapon against his chest with a heavy grunt. He quickly checked the groove. It was loaded with a thick, vicious steel bolt. Not the silver he would have hoped for, but glancing back at the mercenaries—their scavenged armor and flesh torn open—he gripped the wooden stock tight. Anything that meant he did not have to get within arm’s reach of that nightmare was a blessing.