Marcus...
He had so many questions on his mind and was struggling to put them at the back of his mind but as soon as he looked at the excited look on Thalia's face it felt so easy to put his mind at ease and focus on her alone.
As he sat down at the table that the head nun had prepared for them in the terrace, Thalia was nearly bouncing in her seat with excitement to hear whatever stories he had for her.
"It looks like you're adjusting to things pretty well so far," he said to open up the conversation. He wasn't really sure what to say after being gone for over a month and leaving her alone to adjust to the new world without him.
"Hmm...yeah, I guess so but its been really boring. Anyways, tell me about your first quest!"
He gave her a weird and confused look to mess with her before he joked, "A quest? Thalia come on. This isn't dungeons and dragons."
"Come on! Stop teasing me and tell me what happened!"
"Okay alright I will," he said as he began to explain all that happened, from their first arrival to Lunaas and finding out that people had been disappearing and nothing was being done about it to Selene training him on how to use his magic and then to fighting the goddess Artemis.
"Artemis is real?!" her eyes widened so much he thought they would pop out of her head.
"Yes apparently, so is Zeus, Amun Ra, Thor...and probably a bunch of others that I'm not aware of. As far as I know, those three pantheons actually exist," he said as he chuckled at the look of surprise and wonder on her face. He probably had the same expression when he found out. Although...he decided to leave out the part about their mother until he learned more about what was going on.
"And you fought a goddess? What was it like?" Thalia asked him and for some reason he was still feeling stressed out about the fight with her. It was probably the closest he ever came to death in his life.
"Well uh...," he stammered as he then grabbed his shirt collar and pulled it down so Thalia could see the scar on his neck.
"Artemis left me with this keepsake," he said and Thalia went pale when she saw it.
"She...stabbed you in the throat? Why!? Why did she do that?!" she panicked and he regretted telling her.
"Whoa, hold on. Calm down. I'm fine, aren't I? I'm far too tough to be killed that easily. Besides, the dragon was way more terrifying," he said and at the word 'dragon' she became distracted from the fact that he just told her he almost died to immediately being curious about the existence of him fighting a dragon.
"A d-dragon? You fought a dragon?" she stammered.
"Yes I did. I even brought part of him back with me. I'm going to try cooking him to see what dragon meat tastes like," he said and Selene's head snapped to look straight at him he thought it was going to spin around the other direction like an owl. She gave him a look that told him that what he said was the most insane idea that she had ever heard.
He gave her a wave that told her to calm down and that he'll talk to her about it later.
"You're going to eat the dragon? Eww...," Thalia said as she made a grossed out face and leaned away from him.
"Oh come on, you know that anything I cook is bound to taste amazing," he said and she gave him an unenthusiastic shrug but she could see the corners of her mouth trying not to smile as she was faking disinterest.
"That aside, do you want to know how big Malthael was?"
Her eyes perked up at that as she asked, "How big was he? Was he the size of a mountain?!"
"Bigger actually. He was even larger than Mount Everest," he said and once again her eyes widened in surprise but then went switched to confusion.
"Wait, how big was Everest again?"
"Over twenty nine thousand feet," he said but she still seemed confused.
"How tall is that?" she asked again, failing to grasp the scale of it.
Hmm...
"Alright, I think it would work better if I just showed you. Give me your hand," he said and she obeyed.
He didn't get to practice it much but he figured now was as good a time as ever to try it out again.
He held her tiny hand in his own and closed his eyes as he focused. As he did he sent a small shock down Thalia's arm and she laughed as the static electricity sparked on her hands. He could then see through her eyes and he tried to visualize Malthael in his full size.
"Look outside," he said as he opened his eyes and could see what they were both seeing. He then squinted and an illusion of Malthael appeared above the city and Thalia yelped in shock yanking her hand back and fell backwards on the ground.
The moment he let go of her hand the connection faded and the illusion stopped.
"Hey, are you okay?" he asked as he walked around to help her up.
"What was that?!" she demanded to know.
"It was just an illusion. I learned how to do it when I was training with Selene, don't freak out so much," he said and Thalia had cautious look on her face.
"Can you...can you show me it again?" she asked.
"Sure," he said using a soothing tone to try and calm her down as he took her hand again and showed her again. The illusion of Malthael materialized in the sky around Duranell again and Thalia gasped in shock as she could hardly believe the size of him.
"You fought that? But...he's huge! How did you manage to beat him?!" she asked in disbelief.
In the corner of his eye he noticed Samael in the street waving at him and Marcus said, "I'll tell you about it some other day. For now you should head back with the head nun. I need to take care of some things."
"Wait! When are we going to have our own house? I don't like being cooped up in there all the time," she said and he felt bad that he had to leave her here but it was the only option he had until he could settle things and get a home ready for them.
"Soon hopefully. You'll have to wait just a little while longer until I can find a house and renovate it for us. Can you wait for me just a bit longer?"
She seemed dejected as she looked down with a look of disappointment but she took in a deep breath before she looked back up at him and said, "Yeah, I can wait."
"Good. I promise that when I have things ready, you won't be disappointed," he said as he gently ruffled her hair and gestured his head to tell her to head back.
As he watched Thalia walk back into the orphanage he sighed and a wave of stress washed over him. Selene noticed the change in emotion on his face and asked, "Hey...are you alright?"
"Yeah...I'll be fine. It was a lot easier when I was working with you in Lunaas and I was too focused on other things to be stressed out over her but now...the more I think about her the more worried I feel," he said.
"You don't need to worry about a thing. Its like you said, so long as I am here you can use my reputation to scare anyone away," she said with a smirk and it drew a laugh out of him and he was grateful to her for being able to cheer him up.
"Thank you for that. Anyways, I think we're keeping Samael waiting," he said and Selene nodded.
"Yeah, from the look of the suitcase he is carrying it seems that he has your weapon ready for you now," she said as she motioned her eyes towards it and sure enough, she was right. Samael was carrying a black suitcase with him which was most likely the revolver he asked to make for him.
The two of them made their way down to him and upon greeting him Marcus said, “Sorry to keep you waiting."
Samael waved him off dismissively as he replied, "Don’t worry about it, you probably needed a rest to catch up with your sister especially after the job you worked on."
"Oh you knew about that?" Selene asked.
"Of course I did. I could see Malthael's beam of energy all the way from here as it reached into the sky and carved a canyon into on of Erebus's moons," he said casually as if he was expecting it but Marcus and Selene blinked in surprise at his words as if they hadn't fully grasped yet the level of destruction that Malthael left in his wake.
"You two should consider your triumph over that monster a massive accomplishment. In his prime not even three pantheons working together were able to take him down. He used to toy with gods as if they were newborns," he said with a laugh which made them feel even more panicked than before. He then walked over to a table outside of the orphanage and set the suitcase down.
"Before we start, do you have the payment? Normally an Adamantine sword would cost around three platinum coins by itself but Light Taker with the new revolver will be seven platinum coins" he said and Selene groaned in annoyance and motioned for Marcus pull out the bag of gold coins.
Samael looked at the massive bag of gold coins and complained, "You couldn't have gotten these converted to platinum coins before you came here?"
"No. You came here before I had the chance to do that but damn...that's one hundred and seventy five gold coins. A little less than half of the whole bag," Marcus said.
"Its expensive but well worth it trust me," Samael said as he counted up his sum and dropped it into his bag. Marcus then divided what was left of his half of the payment and gave Selene the rest. They started out with four hundred twenty gold coins as their reward for capturing Artemis and 'killing' her. Selene took her half which was two hundred ten gold coins and with the payment of one hundred seventy five gold coins for the sword and the new revolver and what he had already spent on spices for cooking he had a little under thirty four gold coins left as his half of the payment.
Shit...
All things considered it was still good pay. Thirty four gold coins was still about three million four hundred thousand in value or about thirty four thousand dollars.
"Alright, now that everything has been paid for, its time to show you what you paid for," he said as he opened the suitcase and spun it around for all three of them to see.
“I took the liberty to add some modifications of my own to the original design,” he gently took the weapon out like it was made of glass and not a legendary near indestructible metal, “Much like your original design which had a seven-cylinder chamber, this revolver has a capacity to fire seven shots before you will need to feed more spiritual energy into it to reload. As a handheld railgun it does not require bullet casings to hold gunpower to fire each round as the electromagnetic current does all the work. This also means that there is virtually no recoil when firing. I decided to install a switch and a motor in the chamber so that if you need to you can choose between single and automatic fire.”
Marcus was visibly surprised to hear that. An automatic firing railgun in the body of a revolver? That would have to require insane amounts of energy to maintain.
Samael handed the revolver to him and he slowly examined every detail put into it. For each cylinder, Samael had carved one of the seven deadly sins of man, with the sin of wrath being etched on a completely black surface in white writing. He didn't understand the point of it aside from being a stylistic choice.
He held it in his left hand the same way he did when held his gun and knife in his hands. He took out his sword and held it out in his right hand to get the feeling for it.
“This is a damn good weapon you made for me. Thank you.”
Samael put his hand to his chin as he said, “You know, while I was making it I tried to come up with a cool name for it, and I think I finally decided on one.”
Marcus smirked as he said, “Oh yeah? What’d you come up with?”
“How does ‘Seventh Sinner’ sound?”
Marcus looked down the sights of his new gun and said, “That sounds awesome.”
"Oh, you'll probably need a holster for that so here you go. Had this made with dragon leather so its durable and also rather soft to the touch," he said sounding almost like a car salesman as he handed it him.
After he had fastened his holster to his left hip and set his new revolver inside Samael packed up his things and was about to leave but Marcus then remembered something.
"Oh! Hold on Samael, I want to ask you a question."
"Yeah? What is it?"
"After we took down Malthael I decided to harvest some of Malthael's muscles, blood, scales and his heart. When I fought him I wasn't able to break through his thick scales not just because of their hardness but also because of his body's conductivity with spiritual energy. It was like a repelling force of kinetic energy surging through his body. I want your help in making a bio-mechanical suit of armor using what I harvested from his body," he said with a straight face.
Samael looked a him with a stunned expression on his face before he gave out a hearty laugh as he said, "Are you some kind of mad man?! Making a suit of armor out of the corpse of your enemy is ruthless."
Marcus simply asked him, "Can it be done?"
"Probably, I've never tried making a suit of armor out of...all of that. I'm actually rather curious to see how it turns out so...yeah. I think I will help you out with that. Any time you're ready to start on it just drop by. Oh, and before you go I forgot to show you this before you left with Light Taker the first time around. Give it to me for a moment."
He obeyed and handed the sword over to Samael who held it tight with both hands. He then closed his eyes as if in a deep state of focus and a split second later the sword had transformed. It was no longer a longsword but rather a thin rapier.
"What the...hell? What did you do? How did you do that?" Marcus asked in confusion as he stared at his once long and heavy sword being turned into such a small and puny little thing.
"I told you that Light Taker was a special sword. You can change its form and design into whatever suits your needs at any given time. All you need to do is focus on the image of what you want it to take on while feeding energy into it and it will change accordingly. Go ahead, give it a shot," he said as he handed his sword back to him.
Marcus handled it carefully as he took hold of the grip. He then closed his eyes and tried to focus on the image of the form he wanted his sword to take. He originally wanted to change it back to its original shape but the image of a katana that he had once owned, one that he had left behind on Terra flashed in his mind.
Light Taker took on the form of a black katana but instead of the flower patterns that had been engraved into the original design of the katana he had once owned, he saw black lightning bolts with silver metallic outlines engraved into the flat of the blade.
"Hmm...a Katana. An interesting choice. Any specific reason why you chose that type of sword?" Samael asked.
"Sentimental reasons...Don't worry about it," he said dismissively as he focused again and the sword turned back into a longsword and he placed it back into its sheath.
"Thank you Samael, I'll see you again soon, yeah?"
"Sure, take care."
And with that he turned around and made his way back to his shop.
"That katana form that Light Taker had before looked like one that the captain has...Oh crap! I almost forgot, the captain came back to the brotherhood hall and we need to introduce you to him. We need to hurry back before the day is over.”
“Yeah alright,” he said as he walked beside her and they made their way back to the brotherhood hall.