In the meanwhile, while Favonia fussed over her gun, Krahe finally took a moment to appraise the black-gold cigar.

  [SEVEN-SIDED SPIRE RELIC CIGAR NO. 31]

  [Status:]

  Unparallelled Quality

  Impeccable

  [Details:]

  Mental Clarification C1

  Thought Ordering C1

  Thought Control D2

  Enhance Recall D3

  Stress Release C3

  Soul Furnace Repair D3

  Gradual Soul Furnace Reinforcement D2

  Persistent Entropy Cleansing D3

  Persistent Toxin Cleansing D2

  When lit, this cigar will never fully burn down. Upon being snuffed out, this cigar will begin restoring itself, and may be used again upon its full restoration.

  Current time to restoration: N/A

  “So the cigar’s a long-term investment, is it?” Krahe asked even as she cut the end off of her cigar and lit it with a flick of her thumb. The flavour was already unique, but so was the texture — the smoke was viscous, in a way. Krahe really wasn’t sure what exactly she was tasting, the only thing she could make out was a sort of cold warmth and bitter sweetness. Just as the colors of Kenoma weren’t properly describable in words, the same went for the first-time experience of smoking the Seven-sided Spire Cigar.

  “Only forty-eight of them in the world, consider it a collector’s item. Don’t expect any miracles. No matter the rating, an infinitely reusable cigar can only do so much all at once. Still, it helps smooth things out, makes my regimen much easier. The restoration usually takes two, three days maybe, it varies.”

  Exhaling, Krahe took a second, much longer drag, this time actually inhaling the smoke. It wasn’t what you usually did with mundane cigars, but she’d seen Favonia do it, so she figured she would follow her lead in this matter. There was a burning, but more akin to the burning of menthol than that of fire. She also noticed the hot-cold viscosity seeping past the physical, reaching far inward, presumably into her Soul Furnace. After observing Krahe with a slight measure of amusement, Favonia’s attention had quickly returned to the gun.

  “Been cleaning it as the manual says, good. Ever shoot theurgic bullets from another gun?” Favonia asked as she worked the Pattner’s mechanism.

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  Krahe nodded, “They foul like crazy.”

  Leaning forward, peering down the barrel through the chamber, Favonia commented: “If you don’t clean the Pattner, it’ll start fouling, too, after a while. It’s leveraged in reverse. Because you’ve cleaned it, it can’t be filthy. That’s the only part of the design I’ve been able to figure out in all the years I’ve had mine. I hate that old bastard. Makes a handful of masterpieces and just dies without passing on the know-how.”

  Finally, she reassembled the gun and set it down on the table. “It’s truly remarkable. To say it’s enchanted would be wrong, yet it’s the most powerful firearm on the face of Zastreon. No matter what corrosive unguents, what power you channel through it, the Pattner doesn’t care. I’ve put things through mine that would burst a cannon at the seams if it wasn’t specifically built for the purpose. I’m sure you know all this, it just doesn’t really sink in until you’re blowing up buildings with one shot. A sword that never dulls, never becomes dirty, that withstands any dragon’s flame and boiling blood, so long as you merely polish and sharpen it.”

  “It’s easy to forget,” Krahe admitted. “Even for me. If anyone knows the pains of maintenance, it’s me.”

  It was now, at this moment, exhorting the virtues of a gun, that she felt the strongest kinship with Favonia. This was the moment when Krahe first felt that Favonia was an actual person, despite having met, spoken with, and killed individuals of greater stature. The entire point of her obsession with the Blackhand Radiation Emitters had been a desire for the ability to take down any cyborg no matter the size in one shot, after all. She wasn’t sure they could down Favonia even in three or four shots.

  “I’ve seen and heard enough. I have a suitable way to put right the remainder of my debt,” Favonia said, resolutely. It almost sounded like she had decided to kill someone, but she merely reached into her hair and pulled out another gun… And Krahe immediately felt her attention magnetize to it. This was perhaps the first self-loader of good pedigree that she had encountered since her arrival. There had been some pieces here and there, some wielded by gangsters and others on display at gun stores, but they had been all, for lack of a better term, mundane. Most of the self-loaders she’d encountered had been fairly cheap, and the few that weren’t were instead gaudy craft-pieces marketed as permitting strong magical firepower to any wielder. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that her Pattner gave off a distinct magical aura, to the contrary in fact — it seemed to be completely devoid of it, even the subtle traces that could sometimes stick to things. Magic of any kind other than its own subtle enchantments just slid off of it. This gun felt similar, albeit not quite to the same extent. In terms of design, it was like nothing she’d encountered on Zastreon. It thrummed with a subtle power quite unlike the Pattner, but still infinitely more similar to the feeling the Pattner gave her than the feeling of any other enchanted object.

  “Want to take a closer look,” Krahe stated plainly.

  “Of course,” Favonia agreed, readily handing the beastly firearm over to her.

  To begin with, the gun was massive. Not just because it was sized for Favonia’s hands, but also by virtue of its design. Unlike the Pattner, this one’s upper half was a monolith, with the receiver being a single solid piece of metal, sloping down towards the muzzle, which was placed extremely low. The gun had a slide, half of which was walled-in by the receiver, with a triangular section of it protruding overtop the receiver’s sloping shape. At the back, there was a charging handle, similar to that of an armalite-type rifle, which moved the entire slide. By comparison to the firearm’s brutal, mace-like body, its grip had an elegantly contoured shape that at once evoked the curved handles of flintlocks while still having ergonomics that would properly make use of the gun’s absurdly low bore-axis, which, Krahe surmised, was the key aspect of its design, allowing it to load high-powered ammunition without suffering too much in terms of recoil, or alternatively allowing it to have extraordinarily easy-to-handle recoil and short adjustment times between shots. This was all assuming a wielder of proportionate strength, of course. The trigger matched the grip, being two-step, and while at first pull it seemed heavy, it suddenly became exactly as light as Krahe preferred on the second pull. There was a manual safety near the trigger-guard that would simply block the trigger, and was clearly designed to be much easier to disengage than to engage.

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