Freddy stared at the somewhat ordinary, albeit ridiculously handsome individual. "Yeah, that's me," he answered the man's previous question. "Uhm… is there anything I can help you with?"
"You should probably get out of the apartment," the man said casually. "There might be something dangerous in there."
"Uhhh… Who—Who are you?" Freddy asked skeptically.
Some random dude came barging in, claiming there was something 'dangerous' in Freddy's apartment, and now he wanted him to leave? This smelled incredibly fishy, and every instinct Freddy had immediately flared up.
However, the man didn't force him to leave or do anything untoward. He merely closed his eyes for a few seconds, but it wasn't long until they shot open as he glanced at Freddy with a raised eyebrow. "You're an arch," he said, slight surprise apparent in his lightly raised eyebrow. "A new arch at that. Huh. What did you do in the netherecho here?"
Well, this changed the situation quite drastically. Judging by the man's demeanor, he was undoubtedly an arch himself, and based on his behavior, he was here with a purpose. Some details were beginning to line up in Freddy's mind. 'Something dangerous' was probably Bloodshed, and this man had somehow found out about the creepy skeleton remnant.
However, the idea to come clean and lay it out straight to the man had never crossed Freddy's mind for even a second. To him, who had grown up in an orphanage, the unique combination of 'this might be an authority figure' and 'I might have done something they don't like' instantly triggered a deeply ingrained habit of his—'it is time to lie my fucking ass off.'
"Oh man," Freddy said, feigning partial excitement. "I went in there, and this thing was under my bed. It went freakin' wild, slaughtering all the vestiges in my room, and at the end, it was quite wounded, so even though I barely touched it, it just went poof. I nearly shit my pants. My hands are still shaking, see?" His hands were, indeed, still shaking, albeit for several different reasons.
The man frowned upon hearing that. "Jesus, you shouldn't do stuff like that at your level. You're lucky to be alive."
When it came to lying, it was all about how and how fast you said it. Sticking as close to the truth as possible was also vastly preferable. Both criteria were satisfied, and Freddy seemed to have convinced the man—for now, at least.
The casually dressed figure continued. "Did the vestige that went wild in your room look bloody in any way?"
"No," he denied. "I'd say it was more like a mini-boogeyman."
"I see," the man said, nodding, likely convinced by the shadowy wisps he had seen in the netherecho. "Just a quick question. Was there anything strange behind your trash can?"
"Yeah," Freddy responded with a tiny shred of hesitation, but an intentional one. Because he wasn't even really about to lie, he was about to tell the truth. "I had some bloody clothes there. Ah, I mean, I didn't, like, kill anyone—well, I did, but a monster in the passage bre—"
"Bloody clothes?" The man asked. "Where are they now?"
"I… Uh…" Freddy hesitated at the man's unusual curiosity about the dirty clothing. "I Threw them in the trash."
"Ah fuck," the man swore and clicked his tongue. "When did you throw them away?"
"Uh… A—A day ago?" That hadn't been a bluff. He was genuinely unsure.
"Aaarrgh," the man groaned as he turned around to run. Halfway down the stairs, though, he paused and turned around. "Just another quick question. Nothing serious, I'm just curious," the man said as he squinted at Freddy. "Did you kill a monster with a plastic bag?"
Freddy was caught off guard by the question, and he reflexively chuckled. "Hahaha, uh… Yeah, kinda."
The man grinned. "How the fuck did you do that?"
"I uh," Freddy said. "I—uhm, I swung the uh, bag, I mean, it had a can in there, a can of beans, and I swung it like. You know, like a—"
"Ha!" The man guffawed as he clapped his hands in mirth. "Hahahahaha, can of fucking beans! Hahaha—haaaaa," he wheezed. "What a riot! You bean flailed that thing, holy shit!"
"Bean flail?" Freddy asked with a chuckle. "Yeah, I guess it was a bean flail."
"You—you know what, kid?" The man said, wagging a finger at Freddy. "I don't think this is the last time we'll meet."
'I kind of really hope that it is,' Freddy thought.
Now that the man was leaving, Freddy finally permitted his curiosity some freedom. "I have a question for you, too, if you don't mind," he said. "Uhm, who are you?"
The man grinned at the question, waving Freddy off. "I'm just some random bastard." And with that, he rushed down the stairs and left the building.
"Ah, I see," Freddy said to nobody in particular. He slowly closed his apartment door, and once it was locked, his legs immediately lost all their strength, and he crumpled to the ground, breaking into a cold sweat.
'Did I have to lie to him…? He seemed pretty nice…'
But someone just being nice wasn't enough to stop Freddy's habit from kicking in. If anything, it made him even more likely to lie.
'If you come clean, we'll go easy on you,' the thought flashed in his mind. Every kid at the orphanage fell for it once. Only once. And never again.
He buried his face into his knees, unable to move from where he sat. For whatever reason, his first reaction was to enter the netherecho. The instant he appeared there, he felt slightly better.
The anxiety and flush of adrenaline was gone, left behind in his physical body. He didn't feel good in here, but it was most certainly preferable. Yeah. This could easily turn into a terrible habit. But, at the moment, if it freed him from feeling like that, he wouldn't mind letting it turn into one. Running away from one's problems for the win.
The swarm of colorful splotches of color shimmered through the air around him, each morphing and shifting in a way appropriate to their element.
Shadow wisps were like little balls of darkness; light wisps were tiny constellations of flickering lights; water wisps flowed through the air like liquid seeking a path through cracked stone; wood wisps were like branches growing in random directions, wilting and vanishing at the tail end; the metal, crystal, and glass floated in chunks, and what appeared to be air wisps looked like tiny gusts of cartoony wind.
It was a mesmerizing sight once he finally had the safety to observe it as he pleased.
There were even some he hadn't noticed before, and now that he saw them, they appeared kind of… eugh. Bloody marks, tiny masses of what looked like pulsing, freaky, organic matter, and clumps of... rot?
Regardless of their nature, there was a rather high density due to the slaughter that had recently transpired. And without much hesitation, Freddy started collecting them.
His projection wasn't slow, per se, but it gave the impression of sluggishness. Running in the netherecho reminded Freddy of running in a dream. His projection felt weightless, and the air, or rather, the space around him, was like a dense liquid preventing him from gathering momentum.
First, he began gathering all the water wisps he could. Quite a few were floating too high for him to reach. So, he tried jumping. His leap was surprisingly high, and he freaked out when he realized he was about to fall back down.
Yet, on his descent, not only did he slowly hover down, but when he hopped again, even when allowing himself to descend faster, he didn't feel any impact.
When he got slammed by that water jet, he certainly felt like he had fallen to the ground, alright. There was a slam and a thud and everything.
Through experimentation, Freddy gradually realized a few things about movement in the netherecho. Strictly speaking, the 'laws of physics,' or at least, whatever was left of them, didn't apply here. This was a place of ideas and truths in concepts, a world that didn't like playing by outside rules.
It wasn't much later that he replaced the physical action of 'running' with the idea of 'traversing quickly' and embraced the difference between a 'descent' and a 'fall.' His projection fluttered around without fear of injury, and gathering the wisps in range became much more straightforward.
He went from forcefully crushing the shards of ether to pulling them apart and unraveling them, which took half the time and effort. One colorful splotch after another was deconstructed and consumed by the little projection.
At a certain point, he was truly out of wisps in range. Granted, he could simply wait for some to float down, but he had a better idea. Returning to his body, Freddy lifted an arm into the air. Then, he focused, and his projection appeared on his palm.
"Success! Now I just have to—!" He was interrupted the arm he stood on vanished. His projection fell to the ground below, landing without any problem. But he looked at his body in abject terror, seeing that his arm had disappeared.
'Did something cut my fu—!?' But before he could finish his thought, his arm reappeared, but in a relaxed position beside his body instead of hanging in the air. 'Ah, yeah… I forgot about that.'
Upon entering the netherecho, his body would remain in the same position he left it in, but it wouldn't remain like that for long if the stance took any willpower to maintain. His arm had, almost immediately upon entering the netherecho, relaxed and dropped down to rest in a natural position beside his body. Given that moving objects couldn't appear within the netherecho unless their movement was repetitive, the arm had disappeared and only reappeared once it was stationary again.
Not a problem for his plans, though. He just had to react fast enough. Yet again, Freddy appeared on his palm, and before the arm could vanish beneath his feet, he jumped off the hand and into the air. A water wisp entered his range, and he grabbed it out of the air, consuming it.
Through repositioning his body repeatedly, he was able to collect every single wisp of ether in his room. Now, all that remained was to check his progress. "Ngghh…" he groaned in dissatisfaction.
Honestly speaking, he could barely tell the difference. The star in his ethercosm had changed slightly, or at least he assumed it did. Frankly, even the difference he thought he was half-imagining was so tiny that it barely felt like progress.
But that was fine. His room was a rather ether-poor environment, and most of the wisps didn't even have a connection to water, unfortunately. What was important was that he was, well, alive.
The sun was already setting, and Freddy felt incredibly hungry. His entire body was sore, and he was really starting to crave proper rest. So, he would have it. Freddy ate his sandwich, got ready for sleep, and went to bed. It wasn't even 7 PM, but he was already completely out of it.
In more ways than one, he was just fucking done for today. The same way he had told himself many times recently, he thought it again as he drifted to sleep.
There was no more need to rush.
***
Harold stood at the dump yard, sighing deeply. He had tracked the shipment, the person that shipped it, the position it was offloaded in, and now…
Before him was a bag filled with ordinary garbage and a brown-stained work uniform. It was dried blood. And judging the amount, it must have been one heavy fuckin' can of beans.
A trip to the netherecho revealed a cursed object, as expected. The uniform was thickly oozing in blood and wrath, and the surrounding garbage vestiges didn't dare come close to it.
Although this wasn't quite what he had come to acquire, he at least hoped that this could assuage that bloody moron's rage.
***
Janhalar sat in the corner of the tent, his fury heightening with every second that passed. His foot restlessly hopped on the ground, and as the room entrance shifted, his foot slammed the asphalt hard enough to make it crack.
He rushed to get up and marched forward to the city lord. "Did you find it!?"
Rather than answer his damn question, the prick simply handed him some bloody clothes. A quick check of the netherecho left him stunned. This was a very intense cursed object. But the unique was nowhere to be found.
"Harold… where is it?"
"I didn't find it with the man," the lord responded.
"I'm going to have to see that for myself," Janhalar declared, but before he could take even a single step forward, the ground morphed into serpents that wrapped around his legs.
"Hold on there, partner," Harold said. "I can't let you do that."
"I tire of your games, Lord," he said, spite billowing out. "Release me at once, or I swear I'll tear you apart!"
"We are already overstepping the boundary. Our actions until now can be justified as protecting civilians, but this kid is a different story. He is an arch."
"And why should that concern me?"
"We can explain it away as protection when it's a matter of mortals, but both legally and morally speaking, you aren't entitled to anything that man possesses. You only get those clothes because he willingly threw them away."
"So—!? You're saying that he is hiding the unique somewhere!?"
"That isn't what I said. But it doesn't matter. The unique is no longer yours to claim. It is entirely his right to do with it as he pleases."
"Do you seriously think I'm going to accept that?"
"I highly recommend that you do," the city lord said and then hardened his gaze. "If I learn that you've stepped into any form of contact with an independent arch, intending to steal from him no less, I will start the appropriate legal process. A four-star arch arrested for petty theft? That would be quite embarrassing, now, wouldn't it?"
"I do not wish to steal it," Janhalar clarified. "I want to buy it off him."
"You can't do that."
"You would dare forbid—!?"
"I'm not forbidding you anything, Janhalar, I'm merely stating a fact. Can you afford to buy the vestige off him at market value?"
Janhalar hesitated at that one. "I'm not—"
"Exactly," the lord confirmed, "you're not going to be buying it at market value. You'll scam the fuck out of him. An 'offer' from someone like you, even if extremely unfavorable, is something this poor man won't be able to refuse. Such an exchange cannot be considered a consensual transaction, so I will be treating it the same as theft."
Janhalar bared his teeth, growling at the bastard behind him as he moved his legs, shattering the stone serpents that kept him restrained. "I did not take you for someone that behaved like this, Basilisk. You do realize that, even if you can justify them, I consider your actions hostile against me and my faction?"
"Declare me an enemy then, and see what happens. I dare you."
Janhalar stood, maintaining eye contact with the lord for a few seconds. Then, he turned around and started walking. "I've taken all that I was interested in," and with those words, he left the tent.
"I liked you quite a bit more when you were quiet!" The lord yelled from within the tent, causing Janhalar to grit his teeth.
'Very well, then, Freddy Stern,' he thought. 'I'll show you what happens to those that take what's rightfully mine.'
***
Bloodshed sat obediently in the small box, waiting for Master to command it further. But as it sat there expectantly, a long time passed, but nothing happened.
Master had told it to remain within this room. But it had no restrictions regarding moving within the room itself. Its skeletal hand touched the barrier surrounding it. And as it focused, it began slipping through the thin box. Bit by bit, it phased forward, and soon enough, it went through—
And fell to the ground, bones clattering.
"What are ye, ya creepy fucking thing?"
Bloodshed turned, spotting the small vestige that appeared like a pile of boxes. Not even seconds later, the creature was turned into splotches of tumbling brown wisps. Bloodshed grasped one, clutching until it crushed it and absorbed a small portion of the dissipating ether.
A few other vestiges hid around the shelves and within the boxes, and even more wisps fluttered through the air.
Grasping another vestige by its wiry legs, Bloodshed bent its victim's body until it, too, began dissipating.
'I will be preparing, Master…' it thought. 'For the glorious day where we spill all the blood there is.'