Before he began, he explained it to her in plain terms.
He told her that Sacred Gears were bound to the soul.
The Gear and its wielder shared a resonance, but in her case, it had never been properly tuned.
It was like carrying a bell made for a different key—not broken, not wrong, just slightly mismatched, creating a constant low-level friction she’d likely stopped noticing because it had always been part of her life.
He could separate them cleanly.
He had a sensitivity to soul-structure that let him work at that level without damage to either side.
She would feel the process—he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise—but it would not hurt her, and it would leave nothing behind.
No gap, no echo, no sense of loss she couldn’t account for.
He didn’t explain how he came by that sensitivity, and she didn’t press.
She studied him for a moment with the kind of focused scrutiny of someone weighing the truth of a claim rather than the character of the person, which seemed the wiser approach, and then she nodded.
The extraction itself was quiet.
Telos Karma came away in a form he hadn’t fully anticipated—not a clean object, not a raw surge of power, but something that resisted the transition in a way that felt almost personal.
He’d half-expected that.
Longinus were old, and old things developed opinions.
I’m not here to discard you, he told it, in the way he’d learned to communicate with power that had weight and memory.
I need you functional.
Work with me.
A pause, in whatever sense pauses existed in the transfer of conceptual power.
He tried with a construct from Annihilation Maker first—a vessel shaped from pure intent, designed to hold a soul-bound power the way a cup holds water.
It almost worked.
The Gear moved toward it, tested the edges, and then pulled back, unimpressed.
Too hollow.
Too much concept and not enough anchor.
He set the construct aside and reached into his coat for the Pawn piece instead.
He’d spent three evenings remodeling it—not the fundamental structure, which was Ajuka’s work and not something he intended to tamper with—but the form.
Evil Pieces were already soul-adjacent objects by design; that was the entire principle they operated on.
With careful application of AM and soul-shaping, he’d compressed the Pawn into a ring: plain silver, band-cut, with a faint interior structure that could, when called upon, unspool into something humanoid.
A vessel that could think.
A container with presence.
This Karma accepted.
The resistance eased, and the Gear slid into the ring with the ease of something that had found its perfect spot, then fell silent.
He held the ring up in the dim light of the shrine hall.
He’d read about the feeling of holding a Longinus, accounts that made it into supernatural academic literature, testimonials from wielders and researchers alike.
The consensus was overwhelming: significant power, significant presence, significant weight.
What he hadn’t expected was just how practical it felt.
Not power in some vague sense—practical in a tangible way.
Like grabbing a tool and instantly knowing exactly how to use it.
Probability, he thought at it.
Let’s see what you can tell me.
Karma was quiet for a moment.
Then it wasn’t.
He had to sit down.
This was mildly humiliating given that he’d just managed an entire Longinus extraction while remaining upright, but the alternative was falling over, which was worse.
The probability sense Telos Karma offered wasn’t a vision or a calculation.
It felt more like chatting with the universe’s general opinion on what was likely to happen, delivered in the voice of someone with strong convictions but still open to admitting uncertainty.
It came in layers—sure things, near-sures, possibilities that might happen, and branches so unlikely they barely existed, all pressing gently against his senses from different directions.
His brain was doing its best to sort through it all, but it had only ever dealt with two lifetimes of completely ordinary sensory input until about thirty seconds ago.
This was going to take some getting used to, he thought.
The universe, for its part, didn’t seem inclined to sympathize.
He took a breath, letting the weight settle, allowing instinct to take over instead of trying to consciously decode every signal.
Minutes passed, and when the haze cleared, it felt less like an overwhelming flood and more like a compass—a calm, steady pull toward pockets of probability, the way a needle seeks north.
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