156 – Home Invasion

Putting it away securely in a cabinet he let out a sigh of relief, yet calm didn’t come. His containment glyph tattoo was still red, ever so slightly.

“No choice but to ride it out, I guess,” he sighed inwardly, internal tension building in the absence of something to focus it towards. For a while he did his best to calm down, even considered going through the extra hassle of doing Rubedo Purgation on himself, but… He couldn’t stop himself wanting to fiddle with the Philosopher’s Heart, and so took it to the sink to wash it out in preparation for a personal experiment. There was no residue within the flask and this was mostly just good operational procedures, but he never got past the point of listlessly cleaning what was already clean.

There was a strange noise from the storefront.

“A customer trying to come in after closing?” the high-strung alchemist wondered, setting down the Heart and making his way over to the lab door out of paranoid curiosity. No, he hoped it was a customer trying to come in after closing, even if his instincts screamed otherwise. What he heard wasn’t someone banging on the door to see if someone’s inside, but subtle fiddling. Yanks and pushes, followed by silence.

Opening the door of the lab as quietly as he could, the sound came flooding in, and he was certain it was no customer. From all the way down there, he could hear them fiddling with the door, even muffled speech. There were certainly multiple voices, but he wasn’t sure how many. It was whispered, too muddled to make out single words, but it wasn’t the hard-edged utilitarian speech of Ikesia or Grekuria.

It sounded sing-songy.

Tonal.

Pateirian.

His left eye twitching and with Makhus still strung out on Daytime Dust and Rubedo, the soldier instincts in the back of his mind took over. He looked around for where he’d dropped his war-knife when he came down here, finding it in the corner behind the door, sheath and all.

Getting his hands on it and pulling it free took only a couple seconds, but in that short span he heard the front door opening to the sound of hushed words, now very recognizably Pateirian. There were four voices, one of which he remembered from earlier that day.

“That sleazebag…” he seethed, quietly slipping through the lab’s door and ascending the stairs, blade at the ready in his off-hand. He wasn’t exactly ambidextrous, but he wasn’t going to risk ripping his wound open with sudden movements.

Just as he reached the top and decisively stepped out into the hallway that ran from the storefront to the yard, he heard the intruders curiously walking about in the storefront. The sounds of click-clacking as one of them picked up a seal-bottle, mechanical clacking as another tried fruitlessly to work the cash register.

It would’ve been smart to get Sigmund and deal with the intruders together, but Makhus wasn’t in that type of mental state. No, instead he sucked in a deep breath and strode through the door to the storefront, Fog trailing from the corners of his mouth.

“You fuckers wanna die?!” he barked, and the four men froze in place at the sight of him. In the near-darkness, he could still see them clearly enough when he adjusted Sensory Enhancement to dilate his pupils. All four of them wore old-model gas masks that covered up the lower halves of their faces, though only one had a filter canister. That one being, of course, the sleazy asshole he’d met earlier that day, who stood smack-dab in the middle of the store with a cane in hand and a sparklock pistol on his hip.

To the sleazebag’s left was a towering mass of meat and muscle, perfectly bald and almost two meters tall by Makhus’s estimation. Baggy trousers, heavy build, dark skin. Probably a Grekurian immigrant. His left hand gripped a big, chunky knife, bordering on a cleaver.

He didn’t take note of the remaining two yet, besides their general silhouettes. The one that had gotten behind the register was small and lanky, possibly an adolescent, whilst the third one - off to the right of the sleazebag - looked so normal and unassuming that it made him stand out even more, especially with the lockpicks sticking out of his pants pocket. No visible weapons, but Makhus suspected that the bulge in the other pocket was a pocket pistol.

Makhus took a step towards the sleazy one, shifting his stance to ready himself for combat. An unsettling focus shone behind the man’s eyes with such intensity as to rival Makhus’s Rubedo-amplified fury, to the point that it momentarily snapped him out of it. Just long enough that, instead of lunging and breaking the standoff, he considered trying to talk it out. Well, at least for as long as it would take Sigmund to come down to even the numbers a little. He could hear his compatriot moving upstairs, but going by the lack of reaction from the intruders, they couldn’t.

“Seriously? Breakin’ in on the same fuckin’ day?” he laughed indignantly. “At least wait a couple days, idiot.”

Instead of responding, the sleazebag’s eyes shifted to his right, briefly stopping on the stairs to the basement before snapping to the larger man. He barked something in Pateirian, but it was drowned out by a sudden commotion from upstairs.

Sigmund came running within seconds, shirtless and draped with loose, burning bandages. Both his beard and his eyes smoldered with an infernal glow, as did the charred portions of his skin, pulsating to the rhythm of a slow heartbeat. The historian looked like he was wrapped in flaming tentacles. His eyes instantly locked to the largest thug, whose free hand still gripped a seal-bottle of Liquid Vigor.

Propelled by inhuman, explosive movements, he leapt down the stairs and into the storefront feet-first at the target of his ire. Sig’s legs clamped around the large man’s head like a vice, and with a twist of his torso he flipped the lumbering mass of muscle into an unwilling forward somersault, ending up with the man face-down and Sigmund on top of him.