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The Negaverse Lieutenants devoutly prayed that they would be left alone to do their work, to screw it up or accomplish it as they would -- whatever method, so long as they were alone. Or at least alone with another Lieutenant, not under the eye of a Captain. Or worse still: having messed up to the point that they were clammy-palmed and buttoned-up under the eye of the General-King. Whip in hand, he would watch you take a starseed. Then he'd generally pronounce you a "complete ******** failure," and make you take another.

After enough of this treatment it did get easier, it did come more quickly; how to do it without hesitating, how to not draw attention. How to coax the seed out, where to plunge in your hand so that you didn't have to root around. Where you should go, where you could go. Where to hide the bodies. But they'd all been blistered under the weight of his displeasure -- sometimes under the weight of his fist, if it extended that badly -- but after that, you wanted to be left alone.

The General-King had seen, beneath his unimpressed eye, two ******** attempts by neophyte Negaverse Lieutenants that night: his wife had started to tell him about blood pressure levels and ulcers, but Nealite had always been up with the play about disciplining people before. It was a cushion thing. He could still stand in the wake of that completely bemused.

The difficulty with training child soldiers was that they were all brats who had no idea how to goddamned do anything. If you got the odd few who did, they had other problems you had to deal with in terms of being convinced of their own genius or wanting to make the red water come on out; he'd believed wholeheartedly that if you took them as children, by the time they reached maturity they'd be Cavaliers -- who the ******** was he kidding -- they'd be Shitennou, they wouldn't have a childhood to look back on and contrast with what their Queen wanted of them. He'd been so sure. ******** it.

Charonite's fist closed around the starseed fluttering inside of the man he'd bent over the dumpster, legs kicking back weakly by reflex. The old methods were starting to look better too. Taking the seeds all at once, triangulated through the completely incomprehensible methods Nephrite had used; capturing high points throughout the city; better youma --

Somebody cleared their throat.

Better youma --

Somebody cleared their throat again.

When the General-King lifted his whip from his belt in one smooth motion and extended it, silvering it to razor wire and snapping it over at the source, he found the source wasn't there any more -- the whip had hit home and would have wrapped around the approximate direction of a forearm, cutting into soft flesh so he could jerk the intruder over, but the irritant had moved. Now he was staring over his sunglasses at the opposite side of the alley where a blue-eyed man dressed in bruise-purple blacks stood, with the expression you sometimes got of a man with an appointment who was waiting calmly at your door to come in.

He reeked of the one thing Charonite had really always ******** hated.

"Did I interrupt?" the stranger said, apparently to thin air. "What would my mother say. Please, don't mind me."

Charonite kept staring. The man kept struggling. He closed his fingers over the starseed but didn't yank it out -- eventually the man went still, limply folded over the dumpster edge. The whip hissed on the ground.

"Some people would say that's a little S&M, but I'm openminded," said the magician.

"State your name and business," said the General-King. "Let me see if I can ******** indulge you."

The taste of magic was old, sour and familiar, but never in this amount. Beryl's magic was that of the Dark Kingdom and Metallia: it wasn't this scummy, gently rippling pool of pure power, undampened. Possibly it was dampened. That was even more unnerving.

"No," he ground out. "General-King." Wiseman didn't look impressed. Even 'Wiseman' was a joke of a stage name, a wink and a nod. The man was young and unblemished and his eyes were dead. "If you've gotten that much information, you'll know that much. Don't ******** with me."

"Never," said the magician. "Not an intention of that in my head."

"I don't give a damn about what you say your intentions are, wizard," said the General-King. Not a senshi, not a Lunar. An unknown variable. He didn't like unknown variables. "Tell me who you are and who you serve."

Charonite recoiled as though he'd seen viscera. Which was unfair, as he'd seen viscera a great deal but didn't recoil: but he took a step back, one hand on his whip, staring down Wiseman as though he were looking at a ticking timebomb. He didn't like ticking timebombs either, apparently. Every muscle in the General-King's body was enforcedly relaxed, much too limber for anything other than readiness. He knew it. The wizard knew it.

"Chaos," he said.

"Not personally," said Wiseman.

"This is Metallia's territory," said the General-King tersely. "Take it up with her. In the meantime: get your flighty magical a** out of my face. I don't have time for you, I'm not interested in your goddamn tree -- " That was too much revealed. Wiseman hadn't moved. "Whatever it ******** is. The Golden Kingdom doesn't bargain with Chaos seeds."

The voice had filled with rage and hate and undisguised loathing. It was an old hate. It was a very old hate. It was one that went beyond patience or any attempt to act coolheaded, and they both knew what he was revealing. "I think what you mean to say is, more than one," said Wiseman.

"Get the hell out my city."

It was a smug, sly, supercilious grin through tinted sunglasses. It was a gloating grin of triumph. It was a cuckoo who had just pushed out all your eggs. They both knew what would happen before it did: suddenly the ex-Cavalier launched forward with his whip, but Wiseman teleported -- Charonite pivoted and snapped it forward behind him, which lashed the air just over the magician's shoulder. "Nice," said Wiseman approvingly, in the manner of a video game giving you points, and then he disappeared again. When the General-King flattened himself back against the wall, there was Wiseman balancing on the edge of the Dumpster.

"I hate it when relations break down," he said.

The starseed in Charonite's hand was crushed, and he crammed it into his mouth. He was still swallowing when he launched forward again like a shell in mid-career: the razorwire whip sliced a massive chunk out of the Dumpster, into the hip of the dead man -- eugh -- semi-decapitated the corpse as Wiseman tripped away from it like a man whose feet were being shot at. Then he hovered in the air an inch above, standing as though it were solid matter, and the whip in Charonite's hand cracked again as it turned into a long piece of intestine.

"We have to admit that you're a hypocrite here," said Wiseman. "You've been playing with fire yourself."

"I serve of the Queen," said Charonite, and the intestine spun out through the air to wind itself twice around the bandages of Wiseman's wrist. Wiseman had let him do it, hadn't even tried to move away, and now he was staring in interested at the suckered piece of guts --

The magician started to bleed.

Charonite was already peeling the whip off himself: he bled in welts wherever it had hit, but was untying it with rough hands before the whip shivered back to simple rawhide. He was bleeding. It had to have stung. It had more than stung both of them. They weren't the type to let show, apparently, though if there was any more winking he was going to yank his ******** eyeballs out, he was going to -- goddamnit.

"Alliance?"

The nerve.

"You want me to make an alliance with you?"

Charonite didn't often repeat himself, but it was so preposterous as to bear repeating. Wiseman just kept that s**t-eating grin, and he said: "You must think I'm completely ******** stupid."

"Why the hell," said Charonite, voice rising, "should I ever not take the chance to take out the Moon Princess just because you've got some ******** plan for her you're not divulging? The Moon Princess is the ******** tool that brought down the Prince -- "

"Yes, yes," said Wiseman impatiently. "The Moon Princess is the cancer that's killing /B. The Moon Princess shot Liberty Valance. I've got no interest in screwing up your amazing plans for the new regime. What I'm trying to tell you is that we have a mutual goal."

"I'm telling you I don't goddamned trust you," said the General-King.

"Ah," said Wiseman. "I never asked for that."

There was silence. Both of them barely seemed to breathe.

After a moment, the grudging resistance in Charonite's voice had enough physical drag to lug a couple of trucks behind it, to abrade every building in the vicinity. "I'm not interested in her living."

Charonite was still staring at him over his sunglasses, their gazes locked. There were some chances you took and some chances you didn't; some alliances you made and some you discarded; some powers you utilized, and some that you threw down and walked away from as though they'd poison you where you stood, and they would --

Wiseman was a Chaos Seed, and it never ended there. It would never end there. It would never end there with Metallia either. He burnt with resentment and humiliation. He burnt, was all.

He could say, that would never be all you ******** wanted, and Wiseman might say yes.

"Why parley with me."

"Metallia and I never got on."

He had him already by the neck.

"You've got ceasefire until I don't want ceasefire any more."

It never ended there with Chaos.