Chapter 4-104: Eating Your Own (1/2)
How dare they invade his home...
Malcolm Morgan III stumbled through the halls, a shotgun clutched in his hands, his head pounding with incredible rage, the fury at being manhandled by some invading non-human here, here in his home, these familiar halls...
They were here, he would find them! He would find them and show them their proper places, under his heels, paying for their effrontery of daring to stand before him as pretenders to equality...
He threw open the door before him, and froze.
Dozens of them turned to stare at him in shock, dressed up in fine suits and dresses, playing at, pretentious, arrogant! Preening elves, disgusting halvyr, those thieving hyn, the filthy urkhar, the contemptible dwarves, the horrid orcs, even the damnable hulking Ancients!
He screamed at them with the full force and fury of Imprus, Castigating them for their unclean lives and bodies, and reveled as they screamed and writhed in panic and fear as the sacred words of the Emperor of all Gods lashed at them.
The spell to give him endless ammunition for several minutes was quick to mutter, and then he began to shoot at these rebellious, damnable non-humans playing at being rich and wealthy and stylish.
The roar of his gun accented all his prayers as he brought up the defenses of Imprus to ward himself from their wrath as he began to drive them from these sacred halls...
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The massacre at the Shining Throne made all the papers, of course, and indeed spread across the news nationwide. A Priest of Imprus raging into a mass of the wealthy parishioners while hopped up on a particularly pure and addictive form of Apop, cursing and condemning them all as unclean, impure monstrosities who only deserved to kneel before him and Imprus, was quite the show, after all. So was the death tally before literally a dozen Casters in the audience blasted him to pieces with concentrated salvoes, overcoming his personal Wards and ripping him to seared, bloody bits of cooked flesh.
He was easily identified by the temple’s ecclesiarchy, of course; a strong and gifted Cleric of Imprus who preferred to work outside the temple’s grounds to further the work of the Imprusar.
The whisper campaigns of the racist attacks and drivel that he was spreading naturally didn’t help anyone’s beliefs, especially when he had killed two children he spat at as hyn thieves and leeches on society right in front of their parents and many disbelieving eyes.
It wasn’t hard to determine that he was hopped up on Apop, and had the carefully-concealed marks of having partaken of it many times, despite his bodyguards having sworn they’d never noticed the fits of anger that came with addiction to the drug...
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Sama watched the black vans enter the non-descript house, and particularly two of the fellows who got out of them. The pretentious twits carefully set their tall, broad-brimmed hats on their heads... trimmed in gold and silver, she smirked, as the Tats around her eyes glowed with magnified sight from the roof of the neighboring house.
Imprusar ‘Inquisitors’, the Witch Hunters. In reality, they were more like Internal Affairs and assassins, carrying out the killing of the disloyal and infiltrators, and also hunting down those who spoke out against the Church of Imprus and arranging their deaths... humiliating ones if possible, quiet disappearances if not.
They also sidelined as aggressive bounty hunters, eagerly hunting and taking down non-human Powered.
They were naturally among the most zealous and fanatical of the Divine Emperor’s servants.
Several figures were bundled out of the back of the vans, bound and gagged, and looking quite afraid. She recognized them as the members of Malcolm Morgan III’s security force, who she had left alive.
That, of course, was a great sin, surviving while your boss was sprayed crimson across the name, face, and image of great Imprus. They would be looking very, very hard to see which of the still-living guards was working with the outsider, and so why they had been left alive.
Then they’d be coming after the Shool, once they got a better image of what had happened, put all the facts together, and decided they needed to blame someone.
But in the meantime, parallel public investigations were getting perilously close to revealing that the sadly drugged mass murderer was actually a drug dealer who dealt in multiple versions of Apop, and him taking his own product to vent his extreme racism and elitism was definitely not out of the question. Alas, his skull had not survived his explosive death intact, so there was no questioning his doubtless Damned spirit.
Sama smiled thinly. She had let the guards live, but with what they knew, and the explosion of shitface coming down on the temple, there was no way they would be allowed to live. The Geases which made sure they wouldn’t speak could be removed by Harsites all too happy to learn the truth of the matter... and once they were, the truth would come out.
Those men were going to be reduced to gibbering wrecks, revealing the cookies they’d stolen as children to their questioners, and then die at the hands of the employers they’d been faithful to.
Someone should inform the authorities that the Imprusar had kidnapped several persons of interest in the case of the Shining Throne Massacre, and where they were holding them...
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The Harsite Inquisitors only got there in time to save two of the nine men... the others had been beheaded and their skulls were crushed and burning in a strong fire by the time the team breached the house and charged down to recover them.
The bodyguards who lived were happy to sing like canaries once their Geases were removed, and then were equally happy to blab to the media over what had happened, taking revenge for their mistreatment and lack of loyalty from their employers.
But they weren’t even Powered, so they were disposable, and the Church simply released a few details of the things that the two had been involved in. It didn’t discredit them entirely, but it did make it plain that they wouldn’t be walking free from what they were doing... but since the temple had already tried to kill them, what was that?
Revenge was revenge. Said leaked details soon exploded into more details of the things the late and well-born Malcolm Morgan had been involved in, and his associates...
The Witch Hunters had escaped the raid by their own means, and gotten enough information to clean up loose ends in other areas. With grim thoroughness, they started cleaning up all the dealers that had been part of MM’s network, making very sure no corroborating stories were going to come to the hands of the public investigation, and with it a total lack of proof behind such silly insinuations.
Those in the know in the community watched certain people vanishing from the streets and their homes over several days... and there was a violent and bloody explosion at the holding facility where the blabbermouth bodyguards were being held, regretfully killing both of them.
The insinuation that the Imprusar could get to them anywhere meant the panicking drug dealers didn’t dare go to the cops, and instead tried to go to ground or flee.