81 - Blades in the Night [Cherno]

Another day passed.

Upon his return from running errands in the morning of the first day, Casus visited upon Krahe good news. Slaughterhouse 9, the Old Street Butchershop, and two other Hashem Family locations had been cleared and secured by the church, and their bounty payout was still being calculated to adjust for any bounty increases from further crimes registered at the secured sites. The only other notable event in this timespan was the absence of Imraal’s food cart in its usual place, which, as it turned out, had been caused by Casus himself warning the lizardman that he might want to lay low for some time.

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Meanwhile, some time earlier, on the night of the first day…

A simple pick raked open the lock of an apartment door.

Blades moved in the dark.

Imraal awoke to the sound, reaching for his gun. He quietly walked out of his bedroom, able to see just fine in the near-darkness of his home. A blurred, translucent, lithe shape darted through his field of vision, moving with the unnatural nimbleness of a sped-up recording and trailing afterimages. Before he knew it, he felt a sharp sting in his gut, and when he glanced down, he saw his killer’s face. An Inax of some description. Fire flowed into his veins. Venom from a poisoned blade.

He pulled the trigger of his gun. The hammer struck forward. Thaumine-imbued powder ignited and a Thaumshot’s imbued power came to life. A brightly-burning blood-red burst barreled forward, unerringly chasing after his killer, who had already begun fleeing. Before the figure could fade out again, the Bloody Reaper struck home… And an explosion tore out the side of the ancient apartment building. In the moments before the Bloody Reaper struck home, however, an earring for which the assassin had paid far too much came to life. The small paper rectangle grew ten times in size until it was as wide as three fingers and thrice as long, instantly multiplying into a cloud of hundreds, forming a protective shell around one side of the assassin’s body.

A blurred, translucent, lithe shape struggled its way out of the resultant hole and floated down to the ground level. The near-dead assassin crawled away, leaving behind, in his shock, the partial cocoon of talisman papers which had saved his life.

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Krahe had been careful. She’d been using incense sticks imbued with Adefron to sleep for only two hours each night, spending the rest of her nighttime indoor hours reading or exploring the intricacies of Thaumaturgy. Despite that, she couldn’t have reacted. Even having kept an eye on the window at all times, it was no more than a greenish flash atop a distant rooftop, and in the next moment, her world was blades. In that tiny time-gap, however, she had already leapt out of the way and raised her Barrier. Everything in her immediate vicinity had been shredded, like a monowire grenade had been set off at the impact point of a bullet. Dozens of them, shining wires wrought of pure magic, cutting not with edges, but with the pure concept of “cutting” enacting without regard for causality, only limited by the power of the magic fuelling them. In practice, that meant they did not inflict Lacerative, but Arcane damage.

The attack was intended for high precision, a concentrated sphere of cutting force that blossomed out in a wide-spread aftershock, quickly losing power. Due to the direction in which she dodged, only a small portion of the main detonation caught her, and the secondary detonation’s effect only struck the lower two-thirds of her body. The hair-thin silver lining to this all was the fact that her trousers didn’t get shredded in the blast since she didn’t wear them to sleep.

What had been intended to kill her had instead merely left her half-dead, melting down and unable to move her legs. In fact, she couldn’t feel anything below her waist, and the many other, shallow cuts all over the rest of her lower body were so clean that she only felt them when she shifted in place. Running on survival instinct, Krahe dragged herself well out of the broken window’s sightline and quickly formed a scaffold of jade around her legs, then wrapped it in tar-tendrils to create a crude exoskeleton. Then, she used the Forming Toroid to create simple crutches… And crawled. Keeping herself out of the sightline, she made her way to her borrowed dwelling’s secret exit, and only when she had entered into the hidden passage and sealed it behind herself did she force herself up onto two feet.

She finally realized that her cuts weren’t just clean. They had been instantaneously cauterized, barely bleeding at all. This was, unfortunately, a backhanded mercy; the wounds would have to be reopened to heal with any speed. She could worry about that after getting into relative safety. Bit by bit, she hobbled through the hidden passage and towards Casus’s safehouse. It was unconscionably tight, and the stairway was murderously steep, but she made it. With a summoned tendril, she awkwardly grabbed around for the latch release to open the sliding door from this side, then just as awkwardly made her way over to where Casus slept. The Banisher was already awake by the point she reached his bedroom door, having woken up to the sound of her opening the secret passage.

“Lady Blackhand, is that you?” he called out cautiously from beyond the door.

“Yeah it’s me, open up! Someone fuckin’ shot me through the window.”

The instant she said the word “shot”, she heard him frantically undoing a deadbolt and unlocking the door. Before she finished the sentence, the door flew open to the Banisher’s screwed-up expression.

“How? Where?” he questioned, looking her up and down. “Those cuts… And your legs… What happened? Did you see anything?”

“A green flash on a rooftop. It was… Some sort of projectile that created or unfurled into numerous magical blades. Can’t feel anything below my waist, I’m pretty sure my spine is fucked,” she said, slowly turning around. She awkwardly reached back to pull open the hole in her bodysuit, eliciting a rather unpleasant sound both from her own sundered flesh and from Casus himself at the sight.

“We must get you to a grafter. I will take you, there is little time. I fear… I fear that Firminus may be our only choice if you wish to follow his advice.”

“Then let’s get out of here, before they come to check that I’m dead.”