’Razorstella, Hurricroak, where did you two go off to?’
[Oh, hey maestro! Sharp star and I we’re just sharing a drink after we broke your cousin’s heart. Man, that sounded awful now that I...wait, is it still "say it out loud" or would I be using "thought it out loud"? Communicating is weird.]
[In reverse order, I believe "thought out loud" is more accurate given our lack of actually needing to physically talk, and did you seriously use a series of synonyms of my name for a nickname?]
[I...I can’t tell if this is a pun or just plain cringe.]
[Probably the latter ]
’Alright, that’s enough banter,’ Zhen Liu interjected before this conversation devolved into a full-blown comedy skit.
’I just wanted to check in on you two since there were about a dozen assassins assassins on this ship, and I’m about to drag them into the Library for information purposes. Y’all wanna come?’
[We’ll be over shortly.]
________________________________________
The following scene has been removed from the story because it was deemed "repetitive", by the writer of this work.
To those curious as to what happened though, here is a brief synopsis.
After Zhen Liu and company dragged all of the assassins into the library, Zhen Liu proceeded to "interrogate" them one by one, until he knew what organizations they were part of and which people on the boat were their respective targets.
Zhen Liu had no big or good reason as to why he needed this information, he just wanted to know because, to use a line from the removed scene, "Y’all motherfuckers almost ruined my vacation, so I would like to know who you wanted to take out so badly and for what reason."
After he did this about a dozen or so time, he cut the assassins all loose and had Logos and Pathos place a suggestion in their memories that they would wait until after the S.S. Nimona made port in Pearl Tusk Harbor to do whatever nefarious or justified assassinations they had planned.
Once this was all done, Zhen Liu had the kaijin move all of the assassins to their respective rooms or to places they could justify as being "napping spots".
Perhaps it was mildly fucked up that Zhen Liu didn’t stop all of these assassinations wholesale, or took out the assassins himself, but he had no reason to do so in the first place.
However, among the dozen or so assassins he had interrogated, there were two that caught his attention because of just how...weird their abilities were.
Before he cut them loose, he decided to have a closer look and sample their blood.
We now return to your regularly scheduled chapter, thank you.
________________________________________
"Look, I get that you guys probably see me as the devil or someone close to it, but relax. I ain’t gonna hurt you two."
"Okay, it might pinch a little, but that’s because extracting blood always involve needles. You’ll be fine."
"Alright, I might have missed a vein there but you’re not going to die, I promise...well, the black cat over here might but that’s because he appears to be the embodiment of bad luck."
At this point in time, Zhen Liu was standing before a pair of assassins he managed to identify as being a cat bloodliner woman named Yin Yue, and her male cat bloodliner counterpart named Yin Kang.
The two of them had rather beautiful colors of purple and black respectively, but that wasn’t why he had the two of them tied up to medical examination chairs before him.
No, instead, the reason why he had the two tied up before him was because the two of them happened to have very strange abilities that Logos and Pathos recognized as being rather high value.
The two assassins carried the blood of two very powerful, very esoteric cat progenitors known as the Paradox Ghost Cat and the Misfortune Caller Cat.
Granted, Zhen Liu knew that former cat progenitor as "Schrodinger’s Cat".
As the name implied, the Paradox Ghost Cat was a strangely powerful aether beast with the ability to be alive and dead at the same time while also being able to manipulate probability to the point of absurdity.
On a microscale, like in Yin Yue’s case, this allowed those who carried their blood to achieve a level fo invisibility and transparency to the point of non-existence, like that of a ghost. Supposedly the really potent members of this bloodline could make people believe they had died for years on end,complete with firsthand accounts and blood on their hands, only to come back out of nowhere later on.
In other words, the Paradox Ghost Cat was all about manipulating personal probability, including the probability of their own existence and mortality.
On the flip side, the Misfortune Caller Cat was someone who could manipulate the probability of others and force the worst possible outcome on a target with a single swipe of their paw, literally.
As if they were the embodiment of bad luck itself, the Misfortune Caller Cat could use their paws to make attacks miss one hundred percent of the time or even implode due to bad luck.
In the case of this unfortunate fellow named Yin Kang though, he had to accumulate personal bad luck until it was enough to deliver onto someone else.
This observation,however, was speculation at best, with the only way to confirm it being a DNA sample analysis.
Zhen Liu had initially wanted one of the kaijin to possess these two cat bloodliners, but in a strange turn of events, they had all refused to do so.
When he asked the reason why, they explained that Yin Yue’s existence spooked the hell out of them, and they were unsure if they were going to come out of her in one piece if they tried to possess her. This same reason was applied to Yin Kang, as they assumed that if they possessed him, his infinite bad luck might run off on them.
Evidently, these fears weren’t entirely unwarranted due to their existences as beings made of [Chaos] and the ability to force a specific probability was definitely one of the most anti-[Chaos] things out there.
Which is why Zhen Liu was currently handling needles like a phlebotomist and extracting blood from the both of them.
"And...done! See? Nothing to worry about."
"Good to know y’all still have the strength to swear though. Now then..."
With two vials of blood intertwined with his fingers, Zhen Liu simply held his arm aloft so that Logos and Pathos could see that he was done with the task and that the samples were ready for pick up.
He suddenly felt his hand was a lot lighter as the two spirits of the Library proceeded to dematerlize the two vials to who knows where.
’That enough blood for you guys?’
∆It should be, but we could just use their corpses wholesale. It’s always nice to have plenty of samples.∆
=Stop that,= Logos interjected, =the blood is indeed enough, milord. And after careful analysis on our part, we have determined that these two do indeed have the suspected bloodlines. Those individual vials are enough to create a kaijin just by themselves.=
∆That does lead to a more interesting question though.∆
∆=Why the fuck are these two part of such a rinky dink assassin clan?=∆
When Zhen Liu interrogated these two individuals, he had discovered they were part of an assassin clan that loosely translated in his head as "Pale Ghost Clan", a group that was about as mid tier as it’s name.
The Pale Ghost Clan, as far as Zhen Liu could dig up from the two bloodliner memories, was a group of assassins that were set up in a region of Roaring Tide simply known as the Shadow Pools, one of the few publicly known regions connected to the Abyssal Lands.
Back to the main focus though, Yin Yue and Yin Kang had incredibly powerful bloodlines that would normally make them the cream of the crop if they were part of a sect or faction that were in the know.
So, why the hell were these two not part of any of those?
’Well, since I can’t just have the kaijin tell me why, might as well ask them myself.’
Zhen Liu proceeded to kneel down and undo the gags that were keeping the mouths of both Yin Yue and Yin Kang shut, in order to ask the two of them a couple of questions.
"Alright, you two, I’m going to just-"
Unfortunately, moments after he did the deed, the cat bloodliner girl decided to spit at him.
"Let us go you brackborn son of a whore devil dog! Don’t you know who we represent?!"
"Ah, looks like you guys speaking Hoof Speech. That’s good."
Zhen Liu maintained a calm, unamused face as he wiped away the spit on his clothes.
"Yes, we do! Now would you kindly-"
"Which means you’ll understand that unless you answer my questions, I’ll-!"
What the fuck? Did the book break?
|No...I had to censor this part.|
|Apparently the things Zhen Liu threatened to do is banned in several countries.|
|It’ll pick back up , don’t worry.|