The Hammer of War, Chapter 63:

Name: Amir Azad
Title: War-Summoner
War Points: 15,000
STR – 88(300)
DEX – 80(300)
VIT – 202(300)

—

The elevator hummed softly as we rose.

Raynare stood beside me, very straight, hands folded in front of her like a schoolgirl about to be graded. She watched the numbers climb with the same kind of sharp, anxious focus she’d had when Sindaris’ tools came out. Her wings stayed hidden—no trace of them, not even a flicker in the air—but the weight of them clung to her posture.

“You’re breathing too fast,” I said.

She startled, blinking, then forced a slow inhale, shoulders lifting and falling.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “It’s… quieter up here. That makes it worse.”

“You’ll get used to it,” I said. “Or you won’t. Either way, you’re not in the lab anymore.”

The elevator chimed. Doors slid open into the familiar warmth of the condo—soft lights, wood floors, the faint smell of whatever air freshener Alexandra had bullied into the vents. Outside, Seoul glowed behind glass, a city that had no idea what we were doing above its head.

Raynare stepped out first, then hesitated in the doorway like she wasn’t sure she was allowed to touch the floor.

“This is where we live,” I said, brushing past her. “Make yourself at home.”

“Y‑yes, my lord.”

Her voice stuck on the last word. Devotion, welded over fear. Sindaris had done her work well.

I pointed things out as we walked.

“Kitchen,” I said, jerking my chin at the island and the row of cabinets. “You help yourself to food as long as you don’t empty the fridge in one sitting. No stealing blood bags or hearts or whatever you used to snack on.”

Her cheeks colored faintly. “I don’t… feed on that stuff.”

“Living room.” I waved at the couch, the low table, the TV that almost never got turned on. Why did we even buy that thing?

We reached the short hallway that led toward the spare rooms. Jung Aera’s door stood open now, the room behind it stripped down—bed neatly made, wardrobe empty. A ghost of her scent lingered in the air; soap, shampoo, something faintly floral. A reminder that she’d been here, that she’d left upright instead of in a bag.

“Who was she?” Raynare asked quietly.

“A human,” I said. “Who needed help and got it.”

Raynare’s gaze lingered on the doorway a moment too long. There was something like envy there. Or maybe just confusion. For someone like her, the idea that I’d sink resources into fixing one broken mortal probably felt insane.

“This one’s yours,” I said, nudging the next door open with my heel.

The room was basic—bed, desk, wardrobe, a small shelf, white walls that still smelled faintly of paint. We hadn’t decorated. I didn’t know what kind of poster a Fallen Angel was into. Probably something with skulls and erotica.

Raynare stepped inside slowly, eyes moving over every corner like she was expecting the walls to sprout spikes.

“I get… a room?” she asked.

“You get a room,” I said. “Door locks from the inside. If you need privacy, you close the door. If you hear anything in the hall that sounds like a war crime, you ignore it. That’s mostly Sindaris.”

“She… won’t…” Raynare swallowed. “She won’t drag me back down without your command, will she?”

“No,” I said. “She lives by my rules now. Same as you.”

Some of the tension went out of her shoulders. Not all of it. Enough.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “You’ve got work coming.”

She nodded quickly. “Whatever you need, my lord.”

“Good. Rest for now. We’ll talk later.”

I left her there, standing in the middle of the room like a stray dog someone had just handed a house key, and drifted back toward the living area. Alexandra was already at the table, of course, a neat stack of folders by her elbow, her laptop open to some spreadsheet that probably doubled as a death sentence for at least three people she hadn’t met yet. Tea steamed gently at her right hand.

Sindaris sat opposite her, in human guise, ankles crossed, hands folded in her lap. She’d acquired a pair of thin black‑rimmed glasses from somewhere. They didn’t have lenses. Of course they didn’t.

“You finished rearranging your doll?” Alexandra asked without looking up.

“Raynare will be very useful,” Sindaris said. “And very loyal. You may unclench.”

Alexandra’s jaw flexed. “You harvested what we needed?”

“I harvested everything,” Sindaris said. “But yes. The mind is mapped. The structures that matter are preserved. I understand their little cult rather well now.”

Her eyes slid to me as I approached.

“Our pet Fallen has been most… educational,” she added.

“Good,” I said, sliding into the empty chair at the head of the table. “Because I called this little meeting so you can dump all of that into my brain without knives.”

Alexandra shut the laptop with a quiet snap. The binder on her right opened with the crisp, satisfying sound of organized paranoia.

“All right,” she said. “Here’s what we know about the Fallen Angels, straight from Raynare’s mouth and backed by what Granthi hinted at.”

I grabbed a bottle of water from the table and rolled the cap between my fingers.

“Spoiler alert,” I said. “It’s not going to be pretty.”

“It never is,” Alexandra said.

She flipped the first page.

“First, structure,” she began. “Or, more accurately, the lack of it.”

“Fitting,” Sindaris murmured. “Ferals pretending to be a society.”

Alexandra ignored her.

“By technicality, they have a leader,” she said. “Azazel. Founder of the Grigori. Old. Powerful. Smarter than most. He tries to keep them from self‑destructing and dragging the rest of the world down with them. And when he speaks, most of them listen—eventually.”

“But,” I said, “you wouldn’t have used the word ‘technicality’ if it was that simple.”

“Correct,” Alexandra nodded. “The Fallen are fractured. Splintered. They don’t function like the Devils, with their Maou and clans and underworld bureaucracy, or like the Angels, with Heaven’s rigid chain of command. They operate in cells. Small, independent, and often… insane.”

“How small?” I asked.

“Usually no more than a dozen at a time,” she said. “Sometimes just three or four. Each cell has its own leader, its own rules, its own goals. Many of them pay lip service to Azazel. They’ll obey direct orders when he bothers to give any. The rest of the time… they behave like packs of predators that happen to share the same brand.”

Sindaris hummed softly. “Commorragh had cabals like that. Little hungry things gnawing on the corpse of a culture, convinced they were important. This feels… nostalgic.”

“According to Raynare,” Alexandra continued, “most of these cells don’t talk to each other at all. Some don’t even know the others exist in the same city. It’s a paranoid ecosystem. Everyone watches their backs. Everyone expects betrayal.”

“So we’re dealing with a global network of asshole start‑ups,” I said. “Great.”

“Betrayal is baked into their culture,” Alexandra said. “They fell, remember? They already turned on their first master once. Many of them never stopped. They scheme. They politick. They knife each other in the wings if it means gaining advantage. Raynare described it as… constant turbulence. No one ever lands long enough to feel safe.”

“Sounds like Commorragh Lite,” I said.

Sindaris’ smile sharpened. “An amusing comparison. Take away the artistry, the scale, and the capacity for true suffering, and yes. A… diet version.”

Alexandra tapped the next page.

“Most of these cells specialize,” she said. “Some focus on information—spies, blackmail, manipulation. Others act as hit squads for hire. Some just… indulge. Raynare’s former group, for instance, was a ‘fun’ cell. Break hearts, wreck lives, pull wings off human flies. No grand plan. Just cruelty as a hobby.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I got that impression.”

“But then there are the… projects,” Alexandra said. “Cells that treat the world like a laboratory. They are rarer. More dangerous. They stay quiet because drawing attention ruins their work. But when they move, the ripples they leave are… ugly.”

She slid a sheet across the table to me.

Grainy surveillance photos. Morgue shots. Police case numbers. Korean text. English annotations in Alexandra’s precise hand.

“Missing organs,” I said, scanning quickly. “No forced entry, no sign of theft, no follow‑up. Just… gaps. Hearts. Lungs. Eyes.”

“And always from corpses that should have been too compromised to be worth a transplant,” Alexandra said. “Wrong blood type. Massive trauma. Time of death inconsistent. If a normal surgeon tried to use them, they’d get someone killed. If a necromancer tried, they wouldn’t bother being this tidy.”

“So Fallen Angels,” I said.

“Fallen Angels,” Alexandra confirmed. “And not just any. The ones Raynare calls the Mutators.”

Sindaris’ head tilted, eyes narrowing with interest. “Mutators?”

“Self‑chosen name,” Alexandra said. “Raynare heard about them years ago. Rumors, mostly. Whispers passed along in Grigori circles as warnings or invitations, depending on how broken the audience was.”

She tapped the header on the page.

“Officially, they’re just another rogue cell,” she said. “Unofficially, they’re an embarrassment. Even by Fallen standards.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Define ‘embarrassment.’”

Alexandra’s mouth thinned.

“They harvest human organs,” she said. “Not for survival. Not for replacement. For research. They want to understand how Sacred Gears interface with mortal flesh. How human magic—the little scraps of sorcery some bloodlines still manage—hooks into the body. How the soul touches meat.”

Beside her, Sindaris inhaled slowly, like someone smelling a familiar perfume.

“Oh,” she murmured. “Now that is interesting.”

“They dissect,” Alexandra went on. “They reshape. They remove, replace, reattach. They test what happens when you graft pieces of Sacred Gear‑bearing bodies onto those that never had any. They play with sigils carved into bone. They try to force human spellwork into Fallen flesh. They’ve learned some things. Most of the time, their subjects die screaming.”

“Most of the time,” I repeated.

“Occasionally,” Alexandra said, “they get something that lives.”

The folder contained a photo of a man in an alley, shirtless, back torn open. Lines of crude, glowing script had been etched into his spine, trailing out onto his ribs like someone had tried to turn him into living calligraphy. His eyes were burned out. His mouth was frozen mid‑scream.

“He lasted three days,” Alexandra said. “The cops wrote him off as drug‑related self‑harm. No one looked deeper.”

“And these… Mutators,” I said. “They operate here. In Seoul.”

“Yes,” she said. “Raynare’s heard the name ‘Sorael’ whispered in connection with them. A six‑winged Fallen. Scientist type. Obsessive. Rumored to have lost his original Grace in some experiment gone wrong and built himself a new one from stolen fragments.”

Sindaris made a pleased noise low in her throat. “A lesser colleague.”

Alexandra ignored that.

“Raynare says the Mutators are considered… undesirable company,” she said. “Even other rogue cells avoid them. Not because of what they do to humans—no one in Grigori cares about that. It’s because they have a reputation for using other Fallen as test material when they get bored.”

“So they’re freaks among freaks,” I said. “Great.”

“There are no known cells in Seoul capable of opposing them directly,” Alexandra said. “The local Devils keep to their own business. The few freelance Hunters that operate here don’t have the numbers or the firepower to take on a six‑winged madness cell. So the Mutators do as they please.”

“Which includes long‑term harvesting runs,” I said, glancing back through the case notes. “Homeless. Runaways. Illegal migrants. The ones no one misses.”

Alexandra nodded. “The perfect supply chain.”

“Their favorite hunting grounds are beneath everyone’s notice,” Alexandra said. “Subway tunnels. Abandoned buildings. Soup kitchens. Cheap motels. They move carefully. They don’t leave obvious ritual markings. They don’t make statements. They treat the city as a farm.”

“And how much does Raynare actually know?” I asked. “Names? Locations? Schedules?”

“Very little,” Alexandra admitted. “She’s heard stories. Heard Sorael’s name spoken with a mix of fear and curiosity. She knows the Mutators have operated in Seoul on and off for at least fifty years. They go quiet for stretches. They change lairs frequently. They don’t recruit openly.”

Sindaris steepled her fingers. “Wise. You don’t want amateurs contaminating your work.”

“Raynare has never met them,” Alexandra went on. “She’s never been to one of their facilities. Kokabiel considered them a sideshow. He chased war, not methodology. But even he treated them with a measure of respect. He liked their results. He didn’t want to step into their playground.”

“So we know they exist,” I said. “We know their leader’s name. We know their… brand. But we don’t know where they are or how many we’re dealing with.”

“Correct,” Alexandra said.

“Cheerful,” I muttered.

Sindaris leaned forward slightly, eyes bright. 

“My lord,” she said. “These… Mutators. They are playing at something they do not understand. Fumbling toward truths the Haemonculi mastered ten thousand years ago. Their ‘flesh‑craft’ is crude, dangerous to themselves, and likely very… wasteful. But the fact that they have gotten as far as they have in this weak little world is impressive.”

Her smile sharpened. “I would very much like to see their work.”

“Professional curiosity?” I asked.

“Artistic,” she said. “If someone is sculpting with my medium, I must judge whether to applaud or to cut off their hands.”

Alexandra’s expression went flat. “Just remember we’re not handing you a lab full of human victims as a party favor.”

“My lord has already forbidden me from independent acquisitions,” Sindaris said. “I will abide. But other practitioners… oh, it would be such a waste not to cut them open and see what inspired them.”

“Jesus,” I said. “You sound like a music critic planning a murder.”

She tilted her head. “Is there a difference?”

Alexandra cleared her throat lightly, dragging us back on track.

“Regardless,” she said, “they’re a threat. To humanity. To stability. To the already fragile balance between factions in this region. If they figure out how to mass‑produce Sacred Gear compatibility or hijack human spell lattices efficiently…”

She let the thought hang.

“…then they become a problem even Azazel can’t ignore,” I finished.

“Exactly,” she said.

I drummed my fingers on the table.

“All right,” I said. “So we stop them.”

Alexandra didn’t blink. “No hesitation?”

“They’re butchering humans for fun and profit,” I said. “They’re poking at things they shouldn’t be touching. And they’re doing it under my current roof. Of course we stop them.”

“You could ignore them,” Sindaris said. “Let them make noise until some other faction decides to squash them. You have enough enemies already.”

“Ignoring them is how Jung Aera ends up on a slab,” I said. “Or someone like her. Or someone who never even gets a name before they’re torn apart for a science project. I’m not interested in letting that stand if I can do something about it.”

Sindaris watched me for a moment, then smiled a little too softly.

“You are very expensive, my lord,” she said.

I shrugged. “Everything worthwhile is.”

Alexandra flipped to the next section of her notes.

“Raynare can’t give us a lair,” she said. “But she did know patterns. Stories. Places where the Mutators liked to hunt in the past. And I’ve cross‑referenced that with municipal missing‑persons reports, unclaimed corpses, morgue thefts, and unofficial information from a contact in the Seoul police who thinks I’m part of Interpol.”

“Are you?” I asked. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if she somehow became a part of Interpol, being an Inquisitor.

“Not officially,” she said.

Of course, but how?

She laid out a rough city map, sectioned into districts, circles marked in red.

“These are the clusters,” she said. “Spots where people with no support structure vanish more often than statistics can explain. Subway line three, northern end. The underpasses around the old river docks. A block of cheap motels near the bus terminal. A particular soup kitchen in Mapo. This rooftop—”

She tapped a point close to where I remembered catching Jung Aera.

“—which is where bodies sometimes fall from without witnesses remembering how they got up there in the first place.”

“Memory tampering,” I said.

“Or glamour,” she said. “Fallen tricks. They like to blur the edges.”

Raynare’s footsteps were soft coming down the hall. She hovered in the doorway, not quite entering the room until I looked over. When our eyes met, she straightened and came closer, stopping at my shoulder like she’d been assigned that spot.

“My lord,” she said quietly.

“Raynare,” Alexandra said. “We were just discussing your charming friends.”

Raynare’s jaw tightened. “They’re not my friends.”

“Former colleagues, then,” Sindaris said. “Fellow children of a disappointed father.”

Raynare shot her a look that could curdle paint.

“They’re… wrong,” she said. “Even for us. I heard about things they did in Tokyo. In Manila. Fallen who went to ‘study’ with them and came back… different. Or didn’t come back at all. They don’t have limits. Not with humans. Not with our kind. Not with anything.”

“Which is why they have to go,” I said.

Raynare nodded, relief flickering through her expression as if she’d been afraid I’d suggest making friends instead.

“I’ll help,” she said quickly. “Whatever I can. I don’t know where they are, but I know how they think. I know where Fallen like to hide. Where they like to hunt.”

“Good,” I said. “Alexandra’s been connecting some dots. We’re going to follow the missing people.”

Raynare’s brow furrowed.

“The Mutators don’t hunt the rich,” Alexandra said. “They hunt the invisible. Homeless. Runaways. The undocumented. The ones cops write off as ‘transients’ even when their blood slicks the street. If we want to find where the Mutators have set up shop, we start by tracing those disappearances back to the source.”

“We’ll go to the soup kitchens,” I said. “The shelters. The tunnels. Talk to the people who still have faces. See who’s vanished lately and who was seen with them.”

Raynare nodded slowly. 

“I can sense Fallen presence if I’m close enough,” she said. “Even if they try to hide it. We… smell wrong to each other. Like burnt feathers.”

Sindaris smirked. “How poetic.”

“Useful,” Alexandra said. “Between that, my ground work, and Amir’s peculiar talents, we should be able to triangulate something.”

“Peculiar talents,” I repeated. “You mean me turning any magic user who gets too close into a candle stub.”

“That too,” she said. “But I was referring to your knack for making enemies reveal themselves by simply existing.”

“Wow,” I said. “Okay.”

Sindaris chuckled softly.

“We move carefully,” Alexandra went on. “It has to be just us. Amir, Raynare, and myself. Sindaris if she promises not to kidnap anyone in the open.”

“I would never kidnap in the open, like an amateur.” Sindaris said, offended. “I have standards.”

“Later,” I said. “First we find them. Then we worry about how hard we hit.”

“The Mutators will have safeguards,” Alexandra said. “Wards. Traps. Human front organizations. They’re mad, not stupid. We can’t just kick down the front door and hope the Baneblade fits in the parking garage.”

“Disappointing,” I said. “But fair.”

Raynare hugged her arms around herself, wings twitching under her skin.

“We shouldn’t go in daylight,” she said. “They like shadows. Places where the city already looks away. Night is their favorite hunting time. But they move during the day too—it’s just cleaner. Less screaming in public.”

“Then we split it,” Alexandra said. “Day for groundwork. Night for… encounters.”

I glanced at the map again. The red circles looked small from up here. On the ground, each one was a little universe of bad decisions and bad luck.

“Start with the soup kitchen,” I said. “If they’re hunting the needy, that’s where the lines of prey gather. Someone there will have seen something. Or someone.”

“I already have addresses,” Alexandra said. “Volunteers we can talk to. Priests. Social workers. They’ll be wary, but humans who still give a damn are usually willing to gossip if they think it protects their people.”

“Good,” I said. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

Raynare shifted her weight, wings pressing invisible against her ribs.

“Do you…” she hesitated, then forced the words out. “Do you want me to… dress differently?”

I looked her over. Oversized shirt. Bare legs. Nothing about her said ‘normal Korean woman walking down the street.’ Everything about her said ‘demon in casual mode.’

“Yeah,” I said. “We should probably make you look less like a gacha game character.”

Alexandra sighed. “I’ll take her shopping.”

Sindaris brightened. “Oh, can I—”

“No,” Alexandra and I said together.

Sindaris pouted. “No one understands me.”

I pushed my chair back and stood, stretching until my shoulders popped.

“All right,” I said. “We’ve got a plan. Tomorrow we go talk to Seoul’s ghosts and see which ones don’t answer when called. The Mutators think they can harvest the city from the underside. Time to prove them wrong.”

I walked over to the window.

Seoul sprawled beneath us, all steel and glass and neon, arteries of light pulsing between towers. Somewhere down there, people huddled under bridges and in doorways, clutching thin blankets around thinner shoulders, trying not to freeze or starve or get noticed by the wrong set of eyes.

Somewhere down there, a six‑winged lunatic was carving them open to see what made the miracles tick.

I laid my palm against the glass and watched my reflection blur into the night.

“Let’s go find some monsters,” I said.

And we started with the ones no one else could see.