The group of seven-Buck included- made their way up the stairs and into the manor's second story. The entire thing seemed to consist of a single, open room arranged like a studio, with a few key unique traits to it.

  Like the work table, no much different from a carpenter's, pressed agains one of the room's corners, upon which laid many odd contraptions such as nearly a dozen silvery vials and what looked like surgical equipment.

  Or the table that had been set up at the dead center of the room, which supported a dizzying array of quemichal tools both old and new, as though they had been arranged in a diorama illustrating the evolution of the practice over the centuries. Bunsen burners, pipettes and beakers laid side by side with fist sized cauldrons and thick glass flasks containing a veritable collection of dead creatures, from snakes to small rodents.

  But what really caught Kurt's eye was the old and thick wooden floor, scarred with dozens upon dozens of cut marks of varying length and width like the deck of an old whailing ship, an image that was reinforced by the black stains that peppered the whole surface like freckles, ranging from coin-sized dots to full on sprays longer than Kurt's leg.

  He saw those stains, and recognized in them the color of dried blood.

  "Where is it, Alfred?" Kurt asked without drawing his eyes away from the floor.

  The group was standing by the room's door, as though afraid from separating from its threeshold. From his spot, Buck sniffed at the floor, and his head shot staright toward the 'chemichal table'.

  At the sight of this, Maxell grimaced and said, "I think your... dog here already has it." Then, after a moment of silence, he asked. "What the hell is that thing, by the way?"

  "Direwolf," Kurt said simply as he walked into the room. Buck went in too, not so much following Kurt as he was guiding him. "A regular wolf mutated into a magical beast by some source of magic or the other. In this guy's case, he was mutated by an unique spiritual force called The Aura of Red. Conrad here is the vessel for another power from that set, The Aura of Blue." He reached the table, and took a moment to examine it before he turned to Conrad himself. "Care to explain it to them in more detail, man? I'm kinda busy here."

  Conrad nodded and turned to the three Unveiled, going in a small tirade that Kurt filtered out from the beginning. His every sense were focused on the table before him. He reached to grab one of the small iron cauldrons, each one no bigger than a mug, and took a look inside it. It was empty of all fluid, but Kurt could see that on its inner surface were spots of what looked like red clay.

  Curious, he tok hold of a small knife that rested on the table and used it to scrape some of it away. He rose the knife to eye level, and with it the nail-sized blob of red that was resting on the flat of its blade. His aetheric sensed thrummed at the back of his head,but he couldn't tell what that was supposed to mean. The sensation was quite different from that given off by necrotic magic. Whereas that power made him feel cold and as though insects where crawling through his skin, this one was...calmer, somehow. It made Kurt think of syrup: an excessively sweet thing that flowed slowly.

  He tried to get a screen to appraise the thing before him, but all he got was a descriptor for the knife itself (Common quality and made of silver, of all things) .

  Not gonna be that easy, uh? Kurt though, This item screens... they only work with stuf that I am holding.

  After a moment of doubt, and revving his Od and focusing it on his hands, Kurt scrapped the blob of 'clay' with his fingernail, and called for another screen.

  Vampire's Draught

  Quality: Rare

  A blood-based alchemichal concotion that contains both life energy and necrotic essence.

  Upon consumption of a sufficient quantity of this substance, a normal living creature may be turned into a vampire, a half-undead being blessed with eternal life and an array of blood-based magical powers.

  Kurt's body went rigid, but he did not panic. He had known about what this laboratory had been used for already, but to be faced with the result of it, to be physically touching it...

  He swipped at his finger with his other hand, dropping the drought back onto its vessel of birth. Then, without bothering to warn anyone, he conjured his wand and jammed at the cauldron with it, as if to stir it's inexistent contents.

  And then he cast the one lightning spell he knew.

  The interior of the caudron exploded with purple light and roaring sound as the bolts of plasma stabbed at it, burning and scouring the drought more absolutely than even his fire spells could.

  After a few seconds, and when the outer side of the cauldron began steaming, he stopped his effort and cast his wand away.

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  And then he realized that everyone in the room was staring at him, too dumbfounded to say anything. Even Buck looked at him with his ears bolted up and his eyes wide.

  "Sorry," he apologized, gesturing awkwardly at the iron recipient before him. "There was some leftover vampire potion in that thing. Didn't want to risk leaving any of it for the mice or something."

  "Ah," hummed Alexis, staring at Kurt's hands. "You can...throw lightning from your fingers?"

  "Something like that," Kurt said, conjuring his wand again for her to see. "I can control an energy called 'aether', and use that energy to cast spells, like that calming thing I did for Maxell, or controlling the elements. I'm quite amateurish at it though, and my lightning behave exactly like regular ones do, which makes weaponizing them near impossible."

  "I see," she said softly, still staring at the wand, looking, for the first time since Kurt knew her, neither terrified nor depressed. Her eyes shot toward Kurt's, and she asked, in full seriousness. "How does one attain control of this energy. Is it study? Or do I need an artifact like that wand?"

  "Neither," Conrad answered. In the time Kurt had taken to examine and destroy the Vampire's Drought, he had moved toward the working table, and he held one of the silvery vials on his hand. "That wand his just another spell, not an artifact, and the ability to perceive aether is genetic. You either have the mutation or not, Harry Potter style." He stopped himself, and placed the vial down on the table. "Unless you use Kurt's method, I guess. But that's not an option for you."

  "Why not?" she asked, still looking at Kurt, as her hands balled into fists at her sides. "What is the method?"

  Kurt doubted for a moment, but answered. "Controlling your own life force to imitate the structure that allows those with the mutation to control their aether. But that isn't an option for you either because..." He trailed off, not knowing whether to continue that sentence with a lie or with the truth. Should he tell her that Pneuma was something one is born with, despite knowing that untrue? Or should he spill the beans and let a bunch of recently Unveiled Ones know he had access to a teachable skill that was unique even in the Unveiled World? In the end, he went with neither. "It takes years of training to pull that kind of feat, you see?"

  "I..." Alexis began, before her head dropped a bit and a sad half.smile formed on her lips. "I get it, yes. Sorry for bothering you with my questions. It's just that I thought that, if I could somehow use magic like that, even if it's just a little, then maybe I could help trying to deal with this whole thing, y'know?"

  "Oh," Kurt said awkwardly. "Well, look, it isn't your responsibility to do that, okay? That's what us three are here for. To take you to safety, take that thing down and... rescue any hostages it might have."

  Maxell scoffed from his spot, suddenly looking on the verge of tears. "If it has any hostages, you mean. For all we know, it might have already fed on my sister."

  "And for all we know, it hasn't," Mila remarked, placing a hand on Maxell's shoulder. "You saw it drag her into a mine, right? If it didn't kill her on the spot, then it is likely that it is keeping her for when it goes hungry again. And that's gonna take at least a day or two, not a few hours. In fact, if we see it from an objective perspective, then she's more likely alive than not."

  Softly, Maxell removed Mila's hand from his shoulder, even giving her a couple pats on her own. Then, he looked at Kurt, and asked. "You agree with her?"

  Faced with the second difficult question of the minute, Kurt simply shrugged, and answered in all honesty. "Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on whether our guy is the patient kind or the reckless kind. The fact it didn't kill her on the spot is a very good sign, but we should be agnostic about the whole thing. No expectations, no dissapointment."

  Alfred grunted, frowning. "We should act like she's already dead, is what you are saying."

  "He didn't say that, man." said Conrad from his table, his tone warning. "He's just trying to not get your hopes up."

  "Yeah, 'cause that's what's needed right now, keeping our hopes down."

  "Enough," Kurt exclaimed, cutting the argument. "The two of you, enough, please. We don't know enough about the situation to go around crafting thories, either good or bad, that's what I'm saying." Kurt let out a frustrated sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Look, I feel like we've gone off the rails here. Alfred, can you tell me where the corpse is, please?"

  The econ student gave him a hard to read look, and pointed with his head at the opposite corner of the room. "I think your direwolf already knows."

  Kurt turned to where Alfred had gestured, and saw Buck standing nearly frozen before a door at the edge of the large room. He made his way to it, and took hold of its handle, which felt exceptionally cold against the skin of his palm. His aetheric sense was once again invaded by the cold and festering feeling of necromancy.

  He steeled himself, grabbing his sword with his free hand, and opened the door.

  Buck rushed in first, and Kurt followed him into a small, narrow room that seemed to be some type of storage closet. One that had been prepared for a very foul ritual. The body lay on the floor, covered by a thick, white sheet that nonetheless did very little to disguise what it was covering. Around the corpse, as if framing it, where six wooden circles set up un three rows, like the six-face of a dice.

  From each of those circles emanated a necrotic energy thick enough that Kurt was surprised the corpse hadn't yet risen s a wight. Unsheathing his mithril sword, Kurt walked to the center of the room, standing right besides the body and, reinforcing his body through od-flaring, stabbed with it at each circle in rapid succession. The force behind the stabs was enough to make the wood crack like black ice, while the mithril's cleansing effect did the same with the magic contained in them.

  With that done, Kurt resheathed his blade and knelt besides the corpse. With one hand, he swept away the cloth covering its head, and was greeted with a sight out of hell. The face, frozen in rictus, was trapped in a perpetual and silent scream of pain, showing of both his red, mice-like eyes and his lack of teeth. Speaking of lacking, the man also wasn't abundant of hair, whose presence on the cranium was reduced to a thin and curled half-ring around the back of his head, as though his few remaining folicles had been trying to arrange themselves like a kotinos.

  But the worst part had to be the skin.

  Waxy and pale like fresh milk, the surface of his skin managed to look at once too large for the man's skeletal frame, causing it to overflow in thick jowls, yet also overstretched around certain areas, such as his cheeks or the sides of his neck, giving Kurt a clear sight of the two crater-like wounds decorating his carotid, in what seemd like a 'victory' of his rictus over his saginess on who got to mar those specific areas.

  "Holy Christ," Kurt murmured, feeling genuine pity for the horror before him. Who had been this man? A prisoner? An unfortunate tresspaser? The owner of this workshop of horrors? Somehoe, neither perspective made his pity for the creature wane in the least. No man, no matter how evil, should ever end up like this. If not for them, at least for the sanctity of the world, even if a world where something like this could occurr to a sentient creature didn't seem very saintly.

  He moved to cover the man's face with the cloth, but Buck moved faster.

  In a breath, he had maneuvered around Kurt and lunged at the corpse, closing his shinning red jaw around its head with just enough force to deform it without bitting through it. Then, before Kurt could process what he was seeing, Buck reared himself back so that he stood just on his hind legs, and let the body go midmotion, sending its consumed framed spiraling toward rhe ceiling.

  Thump. Crick. Crack.

  The body positively exploded in a shower of bone shards, limbs and ribbons of dead skin, some of which fell on Kurt's shoulders. Any part big enough that fell onto the floor, Buck would be on it, ready to crash it beneath its front paws.

  A forearm. A foot. The head.

  Crah. Crash. Crash.

  He fell on them, reducing them to gray bone dust.

  Kurt just looked in shock and amazement at the sheer hatred Buck was displying, asking himself just what that pitiful thing could have done to elicit such visceral loathing.

  Then, he heard Conrad loudly cursing from the other room, and he sprang into motion.

  "What?!" Kurt screamed as he crossed the door. Scanning the room with a single head-swipe. "What happ...?!"

  He froze at the sight before him.

  Conrad was still on the table with the silver vials, and he was holding one in his hand, with the index of his opposite hand hovering right besides it, coated in dark Blue Aura energy. The nearly black lightning of the Aura jumped from Conrad's finger toward the vial, which was responding in kind with an energetic discharge.

  One that came in the form of the same deep crimson flames that filled Buck's muscles.

  The power of the Red Aura.