A sudden churning and writhing came over her. It was no pain — pain would’ve been easy, a momentary disruption that she could fight head-on with sheer force of will, but this was different. This discomfort was altogether more insidious than mere pain. It was a churning and shuddering comparable only to the transcendental agony she had experienced at Mirzaii 2, when she had attempted to skim with the then-nascent Atomica in hand.

  A voiceless thought forced itself into Krahe’s mind, and she felt her attention dragged inward, towards Barzai’s Eidolon Vault.

  “THE TIME HAS COME.”

  There, the creature pretending to be an eidolon resided, still as formless as before, only… Smoldering, for lack of a better term. A singular point of scarlet glow in the midst of its smoky mass, and it pivoted to meet her mind’s eye.

  “You petulant bastard, now? Can you not wait?!” she spat inwardly.

  At the same time, the system blared an alert, as if she didn’t know already.

  !!!EIDOLON EVOLUTION SELF-INITIATION DETECTED!!!

  “There will come no better time and no better place. This will appear as though any other eidolon evolution,” Barzai argued, continuing to writhe. Krahe felt a mounting pressure in her stomach, as though Barzai was attempting to manifest of his own volition, but she simply refused to permit it.

  “That doesn’t matter. Did you think I wouldn’t punish you for a stunt like this?! I’ll trade you to the Chained Ones, what good is an eidolon that acts out like some fucking demon?!”

  While Krahe was busy mentally scolding Barzai, her shadow stretched from her feet, as if an intense light had suddenly been ignited behind her, and if that light source was slowly being lowered. The shadow’s silhouette flickered and wavered, growing darker and deeper, solidifying; a raven’s wings burst from its sides, and the silhouette of Krahe’s head twisted into the side-on view of a raven’s head, beak open, and somehow, a point of luminous red took form within the black.

  Then, from the shadow’s mouth, as Krahe got her bearings, a distorted voice spoke — it spoke aloud, not merely in thought. It was not the voice of a raven or any other bird, but another voice the eidolon had once used, the fried baritone of a man who shouted too much, further distorted in the manner of a voice synthesizer using a too-small vocal sample to imitate someone.

  “Hiding every little thing, at all times, for what purpose?! We both know there will come no better time, not better place to conduct this, my becoming! We must do it HERE and NOW, else we shall come to dearly regret our overcaution!”

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  Near the end, Barzai’s voice grew frantic, clearly trying to speak fast enough to get out all it wanted to say before Krahe choked it — which is just what she was doing. Before he had even finished his first sentence, his questioning of her methods, she had already turned inward and wrapped her soul’s grasp around the mostly-formless tenebrous mass that was Barzai. With each passing moment, she was enveloping him, just as she enveloped him in his anathema-core state when preparing to use the Daemon Core, only this time, there would be no gaps. Krahe intended to suppress the eidolon to the utmost extent.

  “I speak no lie. I acted knowing that the master would forgo this opportunity! Knowing that you would excoriate me in anger, still I acted! What is done is done, we have revealed ourselves, so let us benefit from it!” the eidolon argued his case.

  “Blackhand. Blackhand!” Firminus clapped his hands in front of Krahe’s face, dragging her into the here-and-now. “Your eidolon is trying to initiate evolution prematurely, is it not? Use this ritual chamber. We’ll help you suppress it for now, make whatever preparations you must.”

  At that moment, she knew that Firminus knew Barzai was no ordinary True Eidolon, and that he had likely known for some time. She could see it in his eyes. It was not simply because Barzai had acted out — an eidolon was “already evolving” the moment it entered the dormant state, meaning that even an entirely normal eidolon could forcibly initiate evolution the moment its criteria had been met. Behind him, some fifteen meters away, Yazata Heptaxia had already unraveled several Black Bindings and was staring at Krahe with four pairs of eyes, three of which were in her hair. The witch-inquisitor gave a shallow nod as their gazes met, and Krahe knew… At least that Yazata would help. Krahe knew enough about Yazata’s character to be sure that if she was going to do or say something about Barzai, she would have done it already.

  Despite her instinct to keep everything about Barzai to herself and to handle everything to do with him on her own, she had no choice. So, she released her grasp on the eidolon. She was certain she could maintain her stranglehold on him for quite some time, but doing so demanded a significant slice of her focus — a significant-enough one that she wouldn’t have been able to make the ritual preparations while also suppressing Barzai. She realized that, no matter how she went about it, she would have needed some kind of external assistance.

  At that moment, right when she loosened her grasp of the writhing, semi-incoherent eidolon, her shadow once more transformed into the image of a humanoid raven, and once more began speaking. Firminus swiftly made his way back to the pipe-organ and began playing once more, a different melody this time, ominous and impending.

  It was then that Yazata’s Black Bindings wrapped around Krahe’s shadow, and with a wrenching, pulling sensation, the witch tore it clean off. Krahe almost fell to her knees at the abrupt sense of relief, while Yazata forced Krahe’s shadow, and with it, Barzai, into a ball about the size of a human head. Slowly, it floated towards the center of the chamber, into the middle between the dust-piles that had become of the four condemned. In spite of this, and to Yazata’s visible surprise, Barzai spoke again.

  “If that is how it must be, then punish this one, chain and grind this one! That is how a sword is honed, how a spear to pierce the hide of any dragon is wrought! This one will be Gungnir-Laevateinn, this one will be Excalibur, this one will be Muninn and Yatagarasu, this one will take one-hundred and eight shapes, but this one will not hide in fear of the master’s allies!”

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