-B.J. Blazkowicz

“So, what were you two doing in there anyway?”

“Sorry, what are you talking about? Can’t a couple of lasses have a nice chat without you blowin’ in and trying to sniff out every secret?”

“Just… making conversation?” John asked, growing more and more curious the more that Etriyya seemed to want to avoid talking about the subject. Especially considering it involved one of his creations, one that the Order was normally not very fond of; he was amazed he had gotten Etriyya to agree to join his party. It was mostly so that he could keep an eye on both Seras and her status in case they ran into trouble, but he wasn't going to lie that the experience he'd get from her joining if they did get into a fight hadn't crossed his mind a time or two. Not to mention those famed "Faction War" rewards he was so eager to earn points for.

“Well, let’s talk about the mission,” Etriyya bluntly changed the topic while leafing through the summary she'd been given on a tablet. Despite the modernization of the world, it seemed like bureaucracy still had its place. "According to what I've been told, as well as what Moira mentioned during the brief conversation we had, the Cabal warehouse we're inspecting looked to have been in heavy use recently, and yet the guard was minimal. We suspect they were in the process of relocating to somewhere further inside their borders in case of just such an attack, but it's a sloppy job at best."

"I thought Moira said you caught them off-guard? While they were moving shipments of Foriian Dust?" John mentioned.

"Wha's tha'? Sounds like a weird spice," Seras mentioned, tucked into the corner with John shielding her from the rest of the Knights. His insistence, not hers.

"It's a magical dust that erases memories; the Cabal often use it to cover up evidence of their misdeeds, or to hold someone hostage more easily. Sometimes they use it to make an example out of someone; the memories aren't impossible to recover with the help of someone skilled with removing what amounts to mental enchantments, but it's certainly not easy, nor cheap if you can't do it yourself. They won't do it to soldiers who could eventually pose a threat to them again… but it's often used as a tool against the families of those that can't be directly struck."

Tricia's words were relatively emotionless, but her eyes told a story John was too afraid to ask about.

"Bastards," John growled, imagining what he would do if he found his mother had forgotten who he was - or who she was! Just the thought of it alone had him boiling, seeing his mother in rags down some back alley-

"Easy, John," Seras cautioned, gripping his arm gently. The touch **** him to realize what he was doing to himself - hesitantly, he checked his status, but it was still blank.

"The Cabal are far from the nastiest groups we go up against, but they're certainly a nuisance, and they aren't above using underhanded means where their usual brute **** fails them. That's one of the reasons we've been keeping an eye out for shipments like this one - lately they've massively upgraded their production of Foriian Dust; we can't figure out quite why. It takes a lot to fully annihilate a person's mind, but the amounts we have evidence they've been producing could nearly clean the minds of half the Order. They're either selling it to someone else or planning something huge, neither of which are promising options. Foriian Dust isn't something overly difficult to produce, it just takes time and a lot of mana. If someone is outsourcing their production, they need a lot of it and aren't willing to sacrifice manpower to do it."

"Which means they're planning something huge," John finished for her. Etriyya just nodded along.

"You catch on quick. Always something to spice up Springfield, if you know where to look… like, say, here."

The van came to a halt a few seconds after she spoke. The building they were in front of was a relatively plain-looking pawn shop, complete with half-lit neon entrance sign. It was definitely in a lower-end portion of Springfield, but by no means did John feel like he was about to get stabbed (magically or otherwise). It just looked like your average rundown business about to go under - albeit about ten years past when it should have closed.

"Certainly don't care what their front-facing businesses look like, do they?" John noted as they stepped out.

"I've seen pubs with bloodstains permanently soaked into the ol' tiles that looked friendlier'n this place," Seras agreed, glancing over the street. Nobody stepped out to greet them, but John thought he noted a few windows shuttering.

"Well, as you can imagine, they don't make much money on the pawn shop itself - they'd rather not waste their limited revenue on maintenance of a business that was never meant to succeed. Come inside; I want to see what these runes and ritual setups are all about. I'm rather curious what has brought the Cabal to such desperation they'd rely on their mages' piss-poor skill sets instead of shock tactics."

"Are they that incompetent?"

"As I'm sure you've heard repeated often enough, the Cabal are low-level street thugs, magically speaking. They know enough for direct combat but are inept in most forms of enchanting, illusion magic, alteration magic, and the general magical skills that make daily life easier. They also lack technological prowess that could hope to compete with even my earliest experiments or drone prototypes. If they can't solve a problem by killing something, they typically follow it with bribery or simply abandon the attempt."

A note of pride crept into Tricia's voice as she described their magical incompetency, but John said nothing. As John followed Etriyya toward the entrance to Unforgivable Pawn with Tricia and Seras close behind, the door opened while they were still several feet away. A man in full armor who John didn't recognize but clearly bore the Order's emblem peeked out, glancing both ways before speaking.

"Knight Etriyya, wonderful to see you. Follow me - there is much to see."

"Sounds thrilling," Etriyya said drily, stepping through the doorway and inside. The interior of the building looked much like the exterior - grimy, sketchy, and not at all properly cleaned. Three more Order Knights stood guard inside, both behind the counter and further into the large room behind it. But once they passed through the barred door to the back end, things started to fall into place. Instead of a proper storage room where shelves upon shelves of pawned goods could sit, there was only one multi-level shelf close to the entrance to the storage room crammed full of items, mostly broken or obviously thrown onto a pile without a second thought. Half of it was probably stolen, John realized, and he was half-tempted to call the Springfield police with an anonymous tip afterward. The Cabal were definitely not going to be the most scrupulous or law-abiding pawnshop owners around.

Past that shelf was where the fun began. Only a few feet away behind a hastily-erected divider covered in the blue paint of various sigils sat a massive warehouse-type area, complete with unfinished concrete floor and a loading dock in the back. It would've likely looked normal from the outside, but on the inside the strange-looking statues and multiple strange symbols on the walls would've given it away as something more than your ordinary pawnshop - to some degree, at least. It could've almost passed as a Halloween store or a really shitty off-brand Hot Topic.

"These aren't what you're looking for - most of these are decorations, and the few that are active here are basic anti-scrying runes, hidden amongst the mundane to make them take a bit longer to sort out," the Knight explained, gesturing to the multiple etchings on the walls, ranging from pentagrams to Celtic knots.

"Crude, time-wasting, but effective to some degree, I suppose," Etriyya noted as she glanced around.

"There were some protective spells woven on that movable divider as well, but only the kind meant to keep out a mundane thief or wandering customer if the door were left open. What's interesting was what we found downstairs."

Throwing open a side door John had mistaken for a closet - which was perhaps by design - the Knight revealed a staircase leading down into a dark basement with only a single light bulb hanging from a long cord, swaying gently back and forth as they walked beneath it and casting eerie shadows across the Cabal fortress.

"Down here was where we found most of the stolen tools. It's really only about seventy-five percent of them, but that’s far more than enough to raise some serious questions about why they bothered to start a war over the stuff in the first place."

"Agreed. And you said there were ritualistic preparations?"

"Well… that part you'd best see."

Past what honestly appeared to be an ordinary recreation room, likely for the Cabal soldiers stationed there as guards when it was still in use, John entered a scene that deeply disturbed him. Not so much because the contents were unbearably horrid, but rather because it triggered a lot of John's memories from playing horror games. It was a concrete room filled with the lingering scent of far too many burnt offerings, a mixture of pungent odors that were unpleasant on their own and unbearable together. The floor was mostly emptied, but several markings were there to disclose what had once been present.

Hardened wax layered the floor in several spots, lined up with the stained remnants of magical circles long forgotten. Blood sprays that had not been fully cleaned were small but prevalent throughout most of the room, including the walls and even one corner of the ceiling. Chains hung from the walls, unmoved from the frantic haul to empty the storage. Across one wall hung a rack of tools, both minorly magical and mundane according to a few random Observes. Some of them were coated in fluids, not all blood… but far too many for John's tastes. Some relatively fresh.

"This looks like something between a **** room and a summoning circle," Etriyya noted. "I've seen enough of both to know there was at least a little of each here, and perhaps at the same time. Did the Cabal already grow so **** in this war that they started themselves to risk summoning demons?"

"Wait, Demons? Demons are… real?"

"Real enough to bring nightmares to me for nearly a decade," Etriyya grumbled but elaborated no further. "You live in a world with a deity, John Newman. You may not find proper dragons or manticores in the Abyss, but so long as there are fools idiotic enough to attempt to curry favor with them, you will always find angels and demons. They mustn't have gotten very far in the ritual, though. This circle is so shoddily made it couldn't hold an imp - and if a demon were loose in Springfield, its taint would be difficult to miss."

"So what do you think it was?"

Etriyya went silent for a while, glancing around the room. She focused in on some of the symbols carved into the walls. Unlike the menagerie of random scratching and layers of paint everywhere above, she seemed genuinely interested in a few of these.

"I recognize several of these symbols," Tricia noted, glancing around. "Some are languages, others are merely decorations or classical symbols from cultures. I recognize several Celtic runes, an approximation of hieroglyphs, and a mixture of Latin and what appears to be someone with severe physical defects attempting to recreate katakana they hadn't seen in years. It's been scrubbed at hastily, but I can have my drones scan the writings and come up with something that may have been written here once."

"Sounds like a plan. I'll try to figure out what kind of ritual was going on here; John, can you examine those tools? Your abilities should tell us what they were used for. Have Knight Wirt show you which are ours, so that you don't waste time identifying our own artifacts."

"Right… Seras, can you- hey, easy, alright?"

Seras twitched a bit, shaking her head. For a moment he thought he'd imagined it, but he could see the last flecks of crimson fading away even as she blinked.

"I- uh, sorry, Master, musta dozed out a bit for a minute there. Didn' really understand what ya were talkin' about."

"That's fine, just… stay away from the bloodstains okay?"

"A-alrigh'. Maybe I'll go 'elp 'em keep guard upstairs?"

"Good idea, we could be at this for a while," John noted, glancing over to the wall where Etriyya was using the flashlight on her phone to light up the wall while frantically comparing files on her phone to the shapes and materials she could identify left on the floor and walls from whatever strange arcane ritual had been conducted there.

Seras ventured to rejoin the rest of the knights, John suppressing his distrust of the Order and their hatred of necromancy to allow her a bit of freedom. Frankly, given her apparent bloodlust - literal and figurative - he wasn't sure which place would be safer for her anyway.

John spent a few minutes glancing over the items, with Knight Wirt plucking objects from the wall and storing them in a box, always staying a step ahead of John so that he didn't waste mana and time identifying the Order's **** tools. John probably didn't want to know what half of them were for anyway; the emotionally stunting ones weren't so bad, but if he realized he held a rod used to sear a man's flesh or a cube of metal that could liquefy and fill a man's innards…

"I'm just not finding anything useful," John mumbled after five minutes, his mana half depleted as he scanned what felt like the thousandth non-magical item. "So far, the only things I've found magical besides what Knight Wirt has pulled down were a Durable Crowbar +1, a Rod of Cantrips that seems to only throw sprinkles on things, and a Pagan Symbol of the Misfortune which sounds awful but apparently just makes you trip a lot."

The description on that one had actually been rather humorous, cursing the bearer with a thousand years of bruised shins.

"These languages and symbols seem just as useless. Despite repeated scans there do not appear to be any possible fillings for the gaps in words and phrases that could render anything meaningful. Most of it is gibberish - the most completed phrase I've been able to find was a mostly complete rendition of "The Man from Nantucket" in broken Scottish, as if it were plucked from Google Translate."

"Aye… and this ritual circle is more of a set of concentric paintball matches than anything. The whole floor has been scrubbed, but I doubt that there was ever a full circle here to begin with. It just doesn't make any sense; the Cabal are incompetent but not complete idiots. This looks like what a wee teenie bae does when they learn magic is real and have no idea how to go about it! If they-"

Etriyya's words were lost in a roar like thunder, an explosion of sound from above. The light in the stairwell flickered and dimmed as a cloud of debris and dust rolled in, and the light from outside was abruptly almost entirely shut off.

"It's a trap," Etriyya screamed, a moment before a second explosion rocked the room, one of the walls erupting inwards. Chunks of concrete and rebar shot past John, slicing his skin open for an instant in various places before Gamer's Body healed it shut again.

-2 HP
-5 HP!
-3 HP!
-8 HP!
-13 HP!

That last notification came not from debris but an arrow - really more of a dart - that landed in John's shoulder as a dozen men waltzed through the newly opened hole in the wall that appeared to lead into a dark tunnel to another location entirely. John grimaced and went to pull the arrow out, but his fingers never made it.

Failed to Resist! Status Effect Inflicted: Sleep!

"But I'm still awa-"

Like a patient prepping for surgery, John was never able to finish his sentence. The room began to spin, and John fell to his knees as a torrent of magic and bullets began flying through the tiny room.