"I'm just sayin'—if your little 'blessed water' blew off my gun's scope, it ain't holy. It's a little bitch."
"That's a purification solution made from the finest Aetherion lacquer!" the old woman barked, her voice scratchy with age. She stood cloaked in the ceremonial garb of the Zhuline Churchery, eyes clouded with age but burning with spite. "It's not my fault your half-brained ass tried to cleanse a cursed demonic steel with it."
"Oi, don't call Jaen demonic, you damn evil nun!" Kai snapped, his voice hot with offense.
The nun's once-gentle face twisted into a mask of disgust. "Get out, heathen!"
A few clergymen moved without hesitation, seizing Kai by the arms and hurling him out the chapel doors.
His black leather coat—normally hanging loose around his frame—twisted mid-flight, folding over his face in a slapstick mess of angles and straps. He landed hard. If Lux had regenerated from that little peck Mary gave him, this mess was his comedic paradise .
Kai groaned, brushing himself off with a dramatic sigh. "Never really fucked with God like that anyway."
He took a breath, looked up at the cloudy sky, then muttered under it, "Ahh, hell. Guess I gotta go to her now, don't I?"
With all the grace of a sulking kid, he stomped off, kicking aside every bit of debris in his path like each was personally responsible for his misery.
"It's okay, Jaen. They're just stupid. Don't be mad," Kai muttered, voice low and oddly comforting—like a madman soothing a wounded pet. He continued stomping down the cobblestone streets, his gun—Jaen—his only companion.
He left the grand central square behind, the stained-glass towers of the Zhuline Churchery fading into the foggy skyline. As the ornate spires gave way to soot-slick bricks and alleys teeming with rust and life, Kai turned a corner and found himself closer to home—if one could call it that. Just a few streets down from Sinfully Yours, past the alley that always smelled like burnt copper and old perfume, stood that place.
That crazy lunatic's shop.
"Oi! You bitch!" Kai shouted without warning, slamming the door open with his boot. A wind chime made from bullet casings clattered overhead. "Put your scripture to work. Need Jaen fixed!"
The small workshop—The Gilded Stitch—was cluttered with unfinished jobs and questionable inventions, the scent of molten alloy, old solder, and engine grease hanging thick in the air. This was where outlaws got things done when gods and governments turned them away.
Inside, Sayaka was hunched over a table, sparks dancing in front of her as she adjusted some sort of smoking mechanical prosthetic. She was tall for a woman, wiry with lean muscle, her brunette hair styled in what might have been a bobcut months ago but had since grown out into a slightly-too-long, jagged mess. A pair of grease-smudged goggles sat perched above her forehead, pushing back the chaos of her hair.
She flinched slightly at his outburst, then rolled her eyes and pushed the goggles up. Her skin glistened with a mixture of sweat and oil, giving her a strange shine under the flickering workshop lights.
"Ai—who the hell's yelling—Oh. Kai." Her tone relaxed. "How you been keepin' our babies safe?"
Kai stepped further into the workshop, careful to avoid a pile of auto-runes that looked like they'd explode if you breathed wrong.
"Yeah… about that," he said with a dry chuckle. "Mary's all good—took a couple of bites, but she's holding up fine. She's been loving Lux a tad too much, though."
He scratched his head, a grin tugging at the corner of his lips.
"But Jaen… well, let's just say the poor girl's lost her touch. Some bastard devil arms dealer hit her with a curse. Think he was a scripture user—proper one, not some bootleg priest with candles and bad Latin. Real damn nasty."
Sayaka sighed, wiping her hands on a rag that looked like it used to be a shirt.
"You know, for someone who claims to hate god, you sure end up dealing with cursed shit a lot."
Kai shrugged, slinging Jaen onto the workbench like he was handing off a wounded comrade. "Yeah, well. You know me. Trouble finds me even when I don't flirt first."
Sayaka narrowed her eyes, already scanning Jaen's frame with a practiced eye. "Mm. Definitely a scripture burn. See the black vein running along the barrel? That's not rust. That's a sigil trail. Must've been recent, too—hasn't nested deep."
"Can you fix her?" Kai asked, more serious now.
Sayaka didn't answer immediately. She pulled her goggles back down, the lenses humming softly as they adjusted. "I can try. But if this thing's got a curse wired into the frame's memory, I'll need more than tools and elbow grease."
"What do you need?"
Her smile turned wicked. "A favor."
Kai blinked, then sighed long and loud. "Fucking hell. I knew this was gonna cost me."
Sayaka didn't respond right away—because she was already halfway into tearing Jaen apart, her fingers moving with a jittery, manic precision. The goggles pulsed as she adjusted the zoom, her breath quickening with every click and hiss.
"Ohhh, baby, you've been through hell, haven't you?" she cooed—not to Kai, but to the weapon. "Atherion scorch on a reinforced demon-core alloy, borderline collapse in the recoil junction, and is that a sentient resonance echo?" She laughed, breathless and giddy, like someone seeing their favorite character die on screen in just the right way. "Gods, Kai, you bring me the best broken things."
"I'm starting to feel insulted."
"You should." Sayaka grinned without looking up. "Only broken things end up here."
Kai leaned on the edge of the bench, arms crossed, watching her with mild amusement as she pulled Jaen open like a surgeon doing autopsy on a gun possessed by an exorcist's worst nightmare.
She paused, turned slightly, and eyed him over her shoulder. "So. About that favor."
"Let me guess," Kai said. "It involves something illegal, dangerous, or cursed."
Sayaka tilted her head, mock offended. "Why not all three?"
Kai groaned.
"You remember that shipment the Spire Authority intercepted last week? The one no one's been dumb enough to try and retrieve?" she said, standing upright now, goggles pushed up again and leaving a dirty smudge across her cheek.
"You mean the one surrounded by border tech, kill drones, and a sensor field tuned to heartbeats?"
"Yeah, that one." Her eyes sparkled like she'd just described a birthday party. "There's a prototype mech core in it. Only one ever made. Runs on wild AER and tunes itself to its pilot's instincts—pure personality imprint technology, Kai."
"You want me to break into a Spire-sanctioned blacksite for a toy?"
She stepped closer, jabbing a grease-streaked finger at his chest. "Not a toy. A dream. The kind you'd sell a kidney for if it meant piloting something that understands you better than your own damn brain."
Kai raised a brow, smirking. "Kinda like you, then?"
Sayaka blinked. For a second, she looked like she was buffering—then she laughed, low and loud, bumping her shoulder against his. "Flirting with your mechanic now? Must be serious."
"Only when the cost seems signed in blood and the target's too high-profile to be worth the mess." he muttered.
She turned her back to him, but her voice was lighter now. "You bring me that mech core, and I'll rebuild Jaen better than before. I'll even lace her with my own script. Old one. From my family's line."
Kai's eyes narrowed. "Didn't know you had a family line."
"I don't." She gave a toothy grin over her shoulder. "They all died in a boiler explosion. I was six. Never figured out if I caused it."
"…You're really bad at making people feel safe, y'know that?"
"And you keep coming back." She winked.
He paused, watching her as she returned to her work. Her hands moved with absolute confidence, like everything in her life made sense only when she was elbow-deep in broken tech and holy-accursed nonsense. It was terrifying. And kind of attractive.
Kai rubbed his temples. "Fine. I'll do it."
Sayaka froze mid-weld, then turned her head slowly, like a villain in a cartoon.
"…You will?"
"Don't make it weird."
"Oh it's too late for that," she whispered with a grin, licking her thumb and smearing grease under her eye like war paint. "You just signed yourself up for the ride of your life, Kai."
Kai rolled his eyes and headed for the door.
"Oi!" she called after him. "Try not to get cursed again on the way there!"
"No promises," he called back, waving lazily. "Tell Jaen I'll be back."
"Tell her yourself," Sayaka murmured, eyes gleaming as she stared down at the half-open gun. "Yeah, yeah, love you too, baby," Kai muttered, giving Jaen one last pat as if she were a living thing. "And I guess I'll see you some other time, Sayaka."
"Not if you die first," Sayaka called out from behind a curtain of sparks. "Which, statistically, you might!"
Kai didn't respond. Just raised a middle finger over his shoulder and pushed the door open, the bell above it giving a final jingle as he stepped into the half-lit alleyway and vanished down the street.
The city breathed around him in waves of grime and neon. Sinfully Yours, the crumbling complex he called home, was just a few blocks away, nestled in a corner of the urban sprawl that smelled of fried grease and old regrets.
His boots clacked against the cracked pavement, his mind a storm of thoughts that refused to sit still.
"Damn it all to hell," he muttered under his breath. "First the kid... then whoever's pullin' strings behind his sorry ass. Bloody bastard, rubbin' salt in a wound that never healed... And now this favor. What do they think I am—a goddamn donkey? Workin' my ass off out here like some street-level errand boy."
His coat flared with every step, loose leather catching the wind like he was trying to look dramatic on purpose.
"Need a drink," he grumbled. "Shots. Several. And maybe a punchin' bag that talks back."
***
""Ermm, sir, where you going?"
"Don't worry about it, kid. Is Lux up?"
"Yeah, Mr. Lux is up. He was a bit mad though—something about getting his bite back."
Julu's a short youth, his lilac hair still in a tousled mess, most likely just woken up. It's only 8 in the morning.
"Of course he was. Anyway, stay close to him. I'm a be out for a while, aight?"
Kai moved to secure Marry in his holster alongside a shortsword—its blade sharp and jagged on one side. The cross-hilt was adorned with a horned skull, its arms gripping the blade itself. The runes etched into its bones shimmered with an ominous red light.
"Aight, I'm out. Make sure that brain dead inbred bastard doesn't waste the food again."