Tears streamed down his face as he spoke, his voice hollow and echoed, as though he were speaking through a loudspeaker into the void, "Where is your god now, scum!"
Beyond him, a man Ronin considered his brother, a man Ronin couldn't recognize anymore, he could see inside the church, could see a mountain of corpses, men, women, and children, all dead.
In his hand, a weapon that Ronin had helped develop, designed with no real intent to see wielded, built because it could be.
A weapon that ripped the energy from its victims and redirected it at other enemies.
A weapon that Trigger had dreamed up and only he could have had.
He fought it at first, fought to believe that this man, clad in a red cloak and glowing burgundy eyes, could possibly be his brother, his friend.
Casting his cruel gaze on Ronin, his mouth said, "Kill me...please…," even as the weapon raised up and aimed at his friends.
All around them, dozens of weapons, shotguns, pistols, machine guns, esoteric devices that Trigger had spent his life developing, appeared from thin air, seemingly formed from the Aether present in the air itself and cocked themselves.
The tone Ronin had grown familiar with played again, panicked and loud in his mind and he moved without thought, grabbing Silas, Sellius and Scalpel beneath his arms and kicking down at the ground, sending them all flying into the air.
He felt a wave of sickness overcome him in midair as the drinking from before took its toll.
"No, no, no, not now," he said aloud.
A voice shouted out at him from within his mind and said, "Master, I'm having a hard time regulating your systems right now, you need to get away!"
Fighting the sickness, he looked around and saw a girl, glowing with white light in the reflections in the windows he passed.
Dressed in a maid outfit and a panicked expression, her glowing blue eyes flickered for a moment as she spoke to him, "No questions master, you need to GO!"
Ronin felt a rush of energy that rose up through his feet to his head and when he reached a ledge, he kicked himself out into the open air, jumping up through the levels trying to get away from the maddened man.
As he leapt away he remembered something that he'd seen as he was looking at Trigger, something that filled him with unease.
He'd noticed his name and title, shown through his V.U.I. as he was looking at him.
His name had remained the same, but his title was what worried Ronin.
War, Death's Herald.