Part l
The mission was supposed to be simple: infiltrate, retrieve, vanish. The kind of work I could do in silence, with only the sound of my own metal steps and the occasional cracking bone to keep me company. The moment my fingers brushed the scroll case, the floor answered with a groan. Then the world fell out from under me.
The floor gave way beneath me as abruptly as a gallows trapdoor. I fell, not gracefully, but with purpose—using the tumbling debris to shield myself from the jagged walls until I crashed into blackness—slamming onto a cold cavern floor. The echo of the collapse rolled away like distant thunder. I stood slowly as the dust settled. Above, a jagged wound in the ceiling showed where I had been. Around me, the chamber hummed with faint, oppressive energy. Seals glowed on the walls and ceiling, their ink pulsing with smug satisfaction. Almost instantly my chakra dropped significantly. I tested my connection to the earth—sluggish. The seal was doing its job. Then came the footsteps. Heavy. Measured. Multiple.
They stepped into the dim light—iron-and-wood constructs with the approximate grace of a butcher carrying a sack of meat. Perhaps their crude human forms were made by someone who had only heard of anatomy in passing. Their “faces” were masks painted with single, staring kanji for “watch.” Their arms ended in cleaver-like blades, their joints bound with chakra-thread I could almost taste in the air.
I counted six. “You probably believe that I am trapped down here with you,” I muttered, “but it is you who are trapped here with me.” The first lunged. I caught its wrist, twisted, and tore the arm free in one motion. Chakra-thread snapped like cut sinew. Before it hit the floor, I drove the jagged joint into the second construct’s chest seal. The kanji on its mask flickered and went dark. I crouched over the wreckage, pulling out anything of worth: winding-spools of thread, chakra-conductive wire, joint rings, and one still-faintly-glowing core—an inscribed sphere that hummed faintly against my palm. The others moved to flank me. “Too slow,” I said without looking up.
Two more fell—one with its leg joint crushed under a hurled chakra core, the other beheaded with the same jagged arm stump I’d used earlier. I picked their corpses clean with a scavenger’s precision. Soon I had a pile: copper-conductive wire, reinforced joint rings, and fragments of sealing plates. Worthless to most. To me, they were options. I turned to the sealing tags lining the walls. Thin paper, etched in suppressive script. Even with the ink still glowing, I could feel the patterns, could see the places where lines could be altered, where suppression could be flipped into amplification. The seal wasn’t my prison—it was my forge. I set to work. Chakra-thread wrapped copper wire into a tight coil inside a hollow joint ring. Fragments of sealing plates at either end, linked by conductive filaments. Paper tags spiraled around the assembly, their script changing under my brush as I bent their purpose. It was crude. Reckless. Beautiful. I tested it with a trickle of chakra—felt it kick back against my arm, hot and unstable.
“That’s promising,” I murmured. “I like my inventions the way I like my coffee… volatile.” I mounted the device into a port along my forearm plating. Chakra surged back into me, wild and uneven, like a dam breaking. One construct charged. I let it. At the last moment, I pressed my palm to the cavern wall and released. The coil screamed as amplified chakra tore through stone in a spray of rubble.
Again. Harder. The rock cracked, the seal’s grip loosened. Cold air bled in from above. The coil glowed red-hot, trembling toward its last breath. “One use only,” I told it. “Like a particularly disappointing acquaintance.” The final blast split the wall, daylight spilling into the chamber. The coil hissed and curled inward, collapsing in on itself. I removed it carefully, stowing it on my person… not to use again, but to remember. To remember what I built with nothing but broken enemies, stolen seals, and spite. I climbed out of the hole, dust clinging to me. Anyone watching might have thought I was the same as when I fell. But they’d be wrong.
Part ll
When the battlefield stripped others down to fear, I found it oddly… inspiring. Not in the rally-to-the-cause sense, but in the way a vulture might appreciate a fresh carcass… an opportunity, rich with potential. In the smoking aftermath of my last skirmish, I sifted through the wreckage with methodical grace, my fingers dancing over twisted steel and fractured stone like a pianist rehearsing a macabre concerto. “Some see debris,” I murmured to myself, “I see a half-assembled obituary for whoever faces me next.”
Captivity had once taught me the cruel art of making something from nothing — or more accurately, making a weapon from less than nothing. Improvisation became not a skill, but a form of survival. Rivets pulled from fallen armor, stripped wiring from shattered puppets, ceramic plating scavenged from the skeleton of a demolished golem… all found their way into my grasp, each piece a note in a symphony of destruction I alone could hear.
Where most would labor over blueprints, I designed in my head, guided by a cold clarity that saw cause and effect not as theory but as inevitability. When others saw a pile of useless fragments, I saw configurations, countermeasures, elegant little death traps that could be coaxed into existence with enough stubbornness and sharp metal edges. I didn’t work in minutes or hours… I worked in consequences.
“Innovation isn’t about what’s possible,” I once quipped to a rival, my eyes unreadable in the glow of my latest creation, “It’s about making the impossible regret underestimating you.” My weapons weren’t just tools; they were extensions of my wit… precise, barbed, and darkly amusing. A tripwire wasn’t just meant to wound; it was positioned so the target’s dying fall would trigger the next device. A blade wasn’t simply sharpened; it was balanced so perfectly that its reflection in the light hinted at the final moments it would bring. By the time my enemies realized I’d reshaped the battlefield itself, they were already dancing on strings I’d woven from the chaos. To me, this was art. And every masterpiece deserved an audience… even if that audience only had seconds left to appreciate it.
[mft and abilities]
The mission was supposed to be simple: infiltrate, retrieve, vanish. The kind of work I could do in silence, with only the sound of my own metal steps and the occasional cracking bone to keep me company. The moment my fingers brushed the scroll case, the floor answered with a groan. Then the world fell out from under me.
The floor gave way beneath me as abruptly as a gallows trapdoor. I fell, not gracefully, but with purpose—using the tumbling debris to shield myself from the jagged walls until I crashed into blackness—slamming onto a cold cavern floor. The echo of the collapse rolled away like distant thunder. I stood slowly as the dust settled. Above, a jagged wound in the ceiling showed where I had been. Around me, the chamber hummed with faint, oppressive energy. Seals glowed on the walls and ceiling, their ink pulsing with smug satisfaction. Almost instantly my chakra dropped significantly. I tested my connection to the earth—sluggish. The seal was doing its job. Then came the footsteps. Heavy. Measured. Multiple.
They stepped into the dim light—iron-and-wood constructs with the approximate grace of a butcher carrying a sack of meat. Perhaps their crude human forms were made by someone who had only heard of anatomy in passing. Their “faces” were masks painted with single, staring kanji for “watch.” Their arms ended in cleaver-like blades, their joints bound with chakra-thread I could almost taste in the air.
I counted six. “You probably believe that I am trapped down here with you,” I muttered, “but it is you who are trapped here with me.” The first lunged. I caught its wrist, twisted, and tore the arm free in one motion. Chakra-thread snapped like cut sinew. Before it hit the floor, I drove the jagged joint into the second construct’s chest seal. The kanji on its mask flickered and went dark. I crouched over the wreckage, pulling out anything of worth: winding-spools of thread, chakra-conductive wire, joint rings, and one still-faintly-glowing core—an inscribed sphere that hummed faintly against my palm. The others moved to flank me. “Too slow,” I said without looking up.
Two more fell—one with its leg joint crushed under a hurled chakra core, the other beheaded with the same jagged arm stump I’d used earlier. I picked their corpses clean with a scavenger’s precision. Soon I had a pile: copper-conductive wire, reinforced joint rings, and fragments of sealing plates. Worthless to most. To me, they were options. I turned to the sealing tags lining the walls. Thin paper, etched in suppressive script. Even with the ink still glowing, I could feel the patterns, could see the places where lines could be altered, where suppression could be flipped into amplification. The seal wasn’t my prison—it was my forge. I set to work. Chakra-thread wrapped copper wire into a tight coil inside a hollow joint ring. Fragments of sealing plates at either end, linked by conductive filaments. Paper tags spiraled around the assembly, their script changing under my brush as I bent their purpose. It was crude. Reckless. Beautiful. I tested it with a trickle of chakra—felt it kick back against my arm, hot and unstable.
“That’s promising,” I murmured. “I like my inventions the way I like my coffee… volatile.” I mounted the device into a port along my forearm plating. Chakra surged back into me, wild and uneven, like a dam breaking. One construct charged. I let it. At the last moment, I pressed my palm to the cavern wall and released. The coil screamed as amplified chakra tore through stone in a spray of rubble.
Again. Harder. The rock cracked, the seal’s grip loosened. Cold air bled in from above. The coil glowed red-hot, trembling toward its last breath. “One use only,” I told it. “Like a particularly disappointing acquaintance.” The final blast split the wall, daylight spilling into the chamber. The coil hissed and curled inward, collapsing in on itself. I removed it carefully, stowing it on my person… not to use again, but to remember. To remember what I built with nothing but broken enemies, stolen seals, and spite. I climbed out of the hole, dust clinging to me. Anyone watching might have thought I was the same as when I fell. But they’d be wrong.
Part ll
When the battlefield stripped others down to fear, I found it oddly… inspiring. Not in the rally-to-the-cause sense, but in the way a vulture might appreciate a fresh carcass… an opportunity, rich with potential. In the smoking aftermath of my last skirmish, I sifted through the wreckage with methodical grace, my fingers dancing over twisted steel and fractured stone like a pianist rehearsing a macabre concerto. “Some see debris,” I murmured to myself, “I see a half-assembled obituary for whoever faces me next.”
Captivity had once taught me the cruel art of making something from nothing — or more accurately, making a weapon from less than nothing. Improvisation became not a skill, but a form of survival. Rivets pulled from fallen armor, stripped wiring from shattered puppets, ceramic plating scavenged from the skeleton of a demolished golem… all found their way into my grasp, each piece a note in a symphony of destruction I alone could hear.
Where most would labor over blueprints, I designed in my head, guided by a cold clarity that saw cause and effect not as theory but as inevitability. When others saw a pile of useless fragments, I saw configurations, countermeasures, elegant little death traps that could be coaxed into existence with enough stubbornness and sharp metal edges. I didn’t work in minutes or hours… I worked in consequences.
“Innovation isn’t about what’s possible,” I once quipped to a rival, my eyes unreadable in the glow of my latest creation, “It’s about making the impossible regret underestimating you.” My weapons weren’t just tools; they were extensions of my wit… precise, barbed, and darkly amusing. A tripwire wasn’t just meant to wound; it was positioned so the target’s dying fall would trigger the next device. A blade wasn’t simply sharpened; it was balanced so perfectly that its reflection in the light hinted at the final moments it would bring. By the time my enemies realized I’d reshaped the battlefield itself, they were already dancing on strings I’d woven from the chaos. To me, this was art. And every masterpiece deserved an audience… even if that audience only had seconds left to appreciate it.
[mft and abilities]