Asuka's office was much better designed compared to the ones outside. It had a sense of fir to it that Antikythera assumed organics must love. A window sat opposite the door, its enchanted gss tinting the orange light coming from the factory and shifting it into a blue hue. Curtains with skull motifs hung loosely in front of it, covering the chaos outside and causing the office to grow into its own space in a way.
Two pnts, ferns to be exact, hovered on the walls between the door, their cy pots built directly into the surface of the pster. An air-conditioning unit on the right wall blew cold air into the room, ventiting it just enough that the occupants didn't feel uncomfortable.
A desk stood in front of the door, standing vigil as though it were protecting the woman behind it. And Asuka looked well, if irritated, as she regarded him from her office seat with a seething gre.
Asuka looked like a surgeon ripped straight from the pages of a gothic horror novel, dressed not for the sterile white halls of a hospital but for a back-alley operating theater where aesthetics met the macabre. Her uniform was a complete inversion of the typical doctor's attire—where others wore crisp, clinical white, she was draped in bck, a shadow in a world of sterility.
Her gloves and mask were made of jet-bck leather, creaking slightly when she flexed her fingers, as if they had been worn so often that the material had begun to mold to her hands. The mask covered the lower half of her face, fitting snugly against her skin, its dark surface almost absorbing the light rather than reflecting it. It gave her an almost executioner-like presence—cold, impassive, and eerily unreadable.
Her pants, tight-fitting and high-shine, looked more like they belonged to a dominatrix than a doctor. The tex clung to her legs with an unnatural sheen, emphasizing every precise movement she made, the sound of shifting material punctuating the silence with each step. Above them, her leather jacket hung loosely over her shoulders, the heavy material adorned with intricately detailed skull motifs, as if to serve as a grim reminder of the fine line between life and death that she walked daily.
Beneath the jacket, the only spsh of color came from her t-shirt—a deep crimson design against the dark fabric. The image was haunting: a stylized heart, torn and scarred, held together by jagged staples, one side adorned with a tattered angel’s wing, its feathers frayed and broken. It was unclear if it was meant to be a symbol of hope, suffering, or some twisted blend of both, but it fit her perfectly.
Everything about Asuka radiated a controlled, almost theatrical morbidity, as if she embraced the inevitability of death rather than feared it. And yet, despite the grim aesthetics, there was a precision to her—an aura of someone who knew exactly what they were doing, who thrived in the contrast of life-saving medicine and the dark aesthetic of decay. She wasn’t just a doctor. She was something else entirely—an artist of flesh and bone, where every incision was both a medical necessity and a statement of intent.
The necromancer steepled her fingers and pressed her elbows against the desk. She leaned forward and rested her chin on top of her hands. Bck eyes pierced through Antikythera's metallic frame and into the internal mechanisms hidden within.
"Why are you here?"
"To talk," Antikythera said. He respected Asuka for the fact that she was an area guardian of sorts. She was weak compared to Kyouhokou or even any other area guardian across Nazarick, and her title was unofficial at best, but she held command over an entire area within his floor, and Antikythera respected that position, even if his considerations of its deeper meaning were false.
"Why?" Asuka asked, one eyebrow raised. "My hospital is functioning as intended. We have thralls at the ready in the parking lot. If you wish to grab them, then you can. What could you possibly need me for?"
"An experiment." Antikythera opened the floodgates and began expining the true purpose of why he was here. "I have a task for you as the floor guardian. You will need to begin selectively breeding creatures to give them more magical potential. I wish for you to start with the swamp that Mare is terraforming outside the tomb. You will try your best to recreate the creatures that lived in the swamps of Helheim. An approximation is fine—just ensure that they are more or less the same species."
"Selectively breeding..." Asuka leaned back, deep in thought. She went silent, and Antikythera gave her the moment to digest what he had said.
"I am aware we've come to another world, but why are we recreating creatures from the nine realms?"
"Because this world has little to no magical potential," Antikythera expined. "With such a ckluster environment, it will not be able to feed Nazarick's operations, and it won't be long before the tomb falls into disrepair should we continue down this path without doing anything about it."
A soft hum reverberated from behind Asuka's leather mask. The necromancer's eyes moved to focus on him, but her body remained still. She was trying to find a way to confirm the problem Antikythera had warned her of.
"I'll do it." Asuka stood up and began making her way to the door. She stopped by Antikythera. "When do I start?"
"Mare should be done with his task now," Antikythera focused on the window. With the room's dim lighting and the factory's brightness, the silhouette of the control tower was visible from where he sat. "You should go to Sakai and tell her to begin the scouting process of the nd beyond the fields. Tell her that it's my order."
"Got it." Asuka left the automaton and then the room moments after.
Antikythera left his seat and followed after the necromancer. He still needed to do one more thing in the hospital before he could leave. Now, where was Hana hiding?
...
Asuka stepped out of the elevator and into the ground floor of the hospital—hers, technically. She quickly moved until she reached one of the mobile ptforms outside the hospital, observing the factory as she rode across it.
Magma, or perhaps molten steel, glowed brightly in rge rivers on the floor. Between them, conveyor belts crafting everything Nazarick would need moved in a loud rhythm, their sounds so deafening that the mortal workers powering this pce flinched every time the sound of hammering rang out.
Calling this pce a factory was a stretch. It was more like a manufacturing pnt that served the Supreme Beings. It created anything they could ever want, mechanically speaking—from refined ingots to weaponry capable of mass destruction to powerful automatons that would serve them without question.
Working here was Asuka's pride and joy, but she knew this type of efficiency wouldn't st long. She had heard the wails of the future coming to life yesterday, and that worried everyone. They needed organic resources, so she worked to try and fix that problem. She just never expected it to be so hard to solve. Antikythera had given her a path forward, but it only shortened the amount of time required to fix the problem. In the end, it would still take years to become fully independent without sacrificing the factory's efficiency.
The control tower soon came into view, and it only took two more minutes before she was standing before its entrance. Asuka walked off the mobile ptform and inside the heart of the factory.
She saw her then—the peak of necromancy and magical technology incarnate. She floated in a vat as nothing more than a brain, a pair of eyes, and various nerves. But the vat before Asuka was nothing more than a phyctery, and it was one of the most artistically pleasing ones she'd seen.
Sakai soon popped into existence on one of the ptforms, but Asuka knew that the specter had been hiding within the digital world before this. Sakai looked at her with barely any interest.
"Asuka, what brings you here?"
"Antikythera has a message for you." Asuka bowed to the reverse lich—a soul walking amongst the living instead of a physical body possessed by a consciousness bound to an object. "He says to deploy the scouting units."
