Markques’s face darkened as he stared at the glowing amber residue staining the silver packet. The skin around his jaw tightened, a mapping of pure, mathematical panic freezing his features.
But then, after a tense, breathless stretch of seconds, he forced a shaky breath through his teeth. He lowered his hands and calmed himself with a desperate, visibly forced effort.
“Well,” the alchemist murmured, his voice dropping into a frantic, low hum as he hastily adjusted his spectacles to mask a slight tremor in his fingers. “I... I don’t think it would be that bad.”
Agastya caught the defensive murmur. His blue eyes narrowed into twin frozen slits, cutting straight through the alchemist's flimsy attempt at reassurance.
“Meaning it isn’t normal,” Agastya stated. It wasn’t a question; it was a cold, razor-sharp accusation levelled by an operative who had survived a lifetime of poorly hidden traps.
“Focus on yourself first, boy, then ask me about the variables,” Markques snapped, his professional composure cracking entirely as he stepped back.
His hands instinctively reached for a heavy brass measuring tool on the desk, his knuckles white as his brain scrambled for any semblance of control. “Keep your soul anchored to your ribs!”
Agastya offered a stiff, single nod. “I said—”
The words died on his tongue as the true consequence of the alchemical error detonated within his chest.
An invisible, catastrophic fire ignited beneath his skin, burning with the white-hot intensity of a branding iron pressed directly to his nerves. The agony was too absolute, too primal for even his hardened assassin's conditioning to suppress. That he rip a raw, agonising scream from his throat, a sound he hadn't made since he was a child breaking under his old master's blade.
The heat expanded outward in waves, and as the iridescent vapour scorched away from his body, his clothes unravelled into ash, dissolving like burnt paper into the aether.
Then, his skin began to liquefy.
From head to toe, the dermal layers peeled away, leaving him entirely exposed to the cold air of the laboratory. His face, his torso, his limbs, everything was reduced to the stark, crimson architecture of raw, twitching musculature. He stood completely unclothed, a flayed monument of pure aetheric backfire.
Markques began backpedalling in sheer panic, his breath coming in shallow gasps. He was certain the recruit was about to collapse into a slurry of blood. But for some inexplicable reason, despite the horrific structural damage, Agastya didn't die.
His mind, conditioned by decades of severe physical trauma, refused to surrender. His unblinking eyes remained wide, darting frantically from one side of the laboratory to the other with the desperate, erratic speed of a cornered animal. His voice didn't weaken, though his breath hitched violently as his lungs fought the thickening, metallic density of the room.
The iridescent vapour continued to billow from his exposed flesh, but then, the screaming stopped. Slowly, the agonising heat began to recede, replaced by a soothing, localised coolness that flowed through his veins like cold spring water.
Right before the alchemist's eyes, the crimson muscle fibres ceased their twitching. New tissue knit itself together with unnatural speed, and fresh, pristine skin began to crawl across his body, weaving itself anew over every inch of his form.
Markques stood utterly stunned, his jaw slack, his heart hammering against his ribs as he witnessed the impossible reconstruction. Slowly, a heavy rush of relief washed over him, causing his knees to tremble slightly.
“Hah!” the alchemist murmured, wiping a thick layer of cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “God... good god, you didn’t die.”
Agastya’s posture stabilised, his newly formed chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths as he tested the lung capacity of his restored vessel. His eyes finally blinked, clearing the lingering grey haze of the ritual. He looked down at his clean, unblemished hands, then fixed a hard, questioning stare on Markques.
"What was that?" he asked, his voice rough, fighting a sudden, unsettling wave of vulnerability.
Markques looked at the completely bare, reconstructed physique before him and cleared his throat, his eyes darting away in professional awkwardness as he tried to regain his composure. “You should... cover your weapon first.”
With a swift, practiced flick of the alchemist’s hand, the air in front of him rippled like a disturbed pond. Space folded inward, and with a soft pop , a neatly folded stack of fine garments and undergarments dropped out of the aether directly onto the desk.
“This is a suit I brought just yesterday to wear for the district festivals,” Markques muttered, rubbing the back of his neck, his cheeks flushing slightly at the absurdity of the situation. “But since... well, since my mistake happened to you, I am giving it to you.”
Agastya looked at the offering. The fabrics were pristine, as entirely new and untouched as the freshly woven skin covering his ribs. For the first time since waking up in the bakery, a sharp, unfamiliar wave of human embarrassment washed over the assassin.
In the underworld, being unarmed was dangerous; being entirely exposed like this felt like an insult to his professional pride.
‘What the hell,’ he thought, his internal stoicism momentarily cracking under the sheer indignity of the laboratory's silence.
Moving with the rapid, efficient speed of a soldier donning armour before a battle, he quickly pulled on the clothes, turning his back to the alchemist to hide the rhythmic tension in his shoulders. The tailored vest fitted snugly against his torso, and the dark coat draped elegantly over his shoulders, hiding the phantom scars of his past life. He adjusted the crisp collar, testing the flexibility of the fabric against his throat.
"Thanks for the dress," Agastya said, his tone returning to its flat, analytical cadence as he turned around, using sarcasm as a shield to restore his emotional perimeter. He offered a small, humourless smirk that finally reached the corners of his eyes. "And also... You have quite a good taste in tailoring."
The heavy door swung open with a muffled click, and Dictor stepped back into the laboratory. His keen, multi-layered eyes instantly scanned Agastya, sweeping over the crisp, pristine tailoring of the festive suit. A slow, appreciative whistle escaped the marksman’s lips.
"Oh? Look at you," Dictor smirked, leaning lazily against the edge of a heavy timber workstation. "You changed your plumage as well. Clean skin, clean tailoring... now you actually look like one of us. A proper gentleman of the shadow bureaucracy."
He straightened up, his easygoing demeanour shifting seamlessly into something efficient and cold. Dictor stepped toward the desk and extended his right hand. Agastya’s sharp eyes immediately locked onto the heavy, interlocking brass bands of the ring wrapping the man's index finger—it wasn't a piece of jewellery, but a compact, mechanised storage matrix.
With a subtle twist of Dictor's thumb, the brass gears on the ring clicked, and a perfectly stacked file of twelve pristine parchment pages slid out from a miniature spatial fold, extending in a fluid, accordion-like line.
"Sign these," Dictor said, tapping the dense stack against the mahogany wood before sliding them over. "Don't look so alarmed; it’s just a standard operational contract."
Agastya didn't reply. His hands, pilot to a dead baker's body but guided by twenty years of espionage conditioning, reached out and took the papers. He didn't just skim them; he opened the files and began dissecting every line of text under the cold blue light of the Aether-tubes, his mind reading between the lines for hidden traps.
The legalese was brutally transparent, drafted with the clinical indifference of an empire that traded in mortal bodies. There were no romantic proclamations about glory or heroism. It laid out the terms of his mortality in strict, financial prose: if he fell in the line of duty, his family in the Lower Ward would receive a structured, lifetime compensation—a comfortable sum of Elartraum to keep them fed. If he died, however, the organisation was completely absolved of all liability. His life was his own asset, and no one could level blame against the collective if his vessel failed him.
The salary figures matched exactly what Dictor had promised, written down in cold, unbothered digits. But it was the final, heavy section of the document that made the assassin's eyes narrow.
Beneath the standard terms and conditions lay the fundamental directives—the absolute laws governing the Awakeners once they stepped through the Access Ceprum Machna and crossed the threshold into the Other World. The text here changed from standard ink to italic script, requiring aetheric focus just to read. The rules were strict: do not consume organic matter on the other side without alchemical filtering; and above all, never reveal the coordinates of the Imperial Prime to the native entities of the rift. And many more.
Agastya turned the final page, his jaw tightening as he stared at the blank signature line. He was trading his blade for a pen, but the contract made one thing undeniably clear—the world on the other side of the portal was far more dangerous than the slums he had left behind.