80 - Six Trees Killer [Cherno]

When the dust cleared and the desolation revealed itself, a wide grin painted itself over her face. From where Casus sat, her glasses, turned white by reflection, obscured her eyes, and a strange inhumanity replaced her face. Her grin became almost nauseating to look at, like an open wound full of broken glass. It was just a moment, and the next, it was gone.

“Too slow. I’ll need hotter loads, but it’s a good start. I think I’ll call it… Hm…”

She rubbed her chin, squinting. Without another word, she holstered her gun, conjured a cigarette, flicked it into her mouth, lit it and took a drag. An exhalation.

“...Six Trees Killer.”

“Six Trees?” Casus raised an eyebrow. “Is that the destructive power you hope to achieve with this particular Thaumaturgy?”

“No, it’s just a bad play on words. You wouldn’t get it,” she chuckled.

“Well now that you’ve stoked my curiosity you must explain it to me.”

It turned out to indeed be a very strained play on words. The thaumaturgy was named after the Six Trees Demilitarized Zone, a once-affluent area in the old capital of a nation called Japan. It was also known as Roppongi, which sounded in the slightest way like “RPG”, which in turn was short for “Rocket Propelled Grenade”, an explosive projectile weapon whose name had become a generalized term for any weapon of that type in Krahe’s world. That was how thinly-stretched this play on words was.

“Alright, help me set them up again. Line them up in a row this time.”

Once more. This time, the grenade’s shell was shaped in a strange manner on the inside, like a concave acoustic mirror, a feature hidden by the spherical design. Krahe took some care to implement a noticeable pattern on the shell, whose purpose became clear only after the test-fire.

She fired, and Casus saw that the fact the burster was dragged behind the bullet caused it to maintain the same orientation, rather than spinning and tumbling through the air as it would if it were thrown. There came a different sort of explosion, one which tore out the frontmost dummy’s back half and enveloped everything immediately behind it. From where they stood it looked as if the frontmost target gained a hole only a bit wider than the bullet.

The dummy immediately behind the first was annihilated, but the effect on target fell off steeply beyond that point. Leaning out to the side to get a better look, Krahe let out a disappointed groan-sigh.

“Figured I was asking for too much. I’ll try with a remote cinder flash generator next time.”

“Why next time?”

“This design is already pushing what I can put together, I don’t understand the structure of my arm well enough to feel confident in trying to replicate it as a construct… And it would probably demand a Lesser Eidolon Vault if I were to achieve a result I would be satisfied with.”

They continued with various tests for some time, especially those involving Krahe’s desire to weaponize her Tar tendrils in a more expeditious manner. To Casus’s mild discomfort, she took rather readily to manifesting fanged mouths all over her left arm for the tendrils to emerge out of. She also found herself utterly incapable of producing these tendrils from any unburnt patch of skin. A part of him wanted to ask if she truly had to do it that way, but he also knew such idiosyncratic methods of manifestation were all too common. It was a strangely consistent rule that the more gimmicky, restrictive one’s magic, the more powerful it could be.

Eventually, she began to move away from just her arm to any charred skin at all. Inevitably, that arose a problem, a problem which she foisted upon Casus.

“Mind helping me figure out how far the burns go? It’s a pain to distinguish it by touch and I can’t reach all the way back,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself as she turned her back to him. Before he could even answer, she dug her fingers into her bodysuit’s strange material and simply pulled it off. It stretched and tore as if it were terribly viscous slime of some kind, pulling away from her skin and leaving her back mostly bare. It wasn’t the charring that drew Casus’s attention, but all the other scars; some were obvious lacerations, and a group of four gunshot scars could be seen near her right hip. Many more, however, were crudely surgical in nature, cleanly made and sutured. One such scar ran the entire length of her back, from the nape of her neck down to her trousers and presumably to the tailbone. It was a horrid thing, as if her back had been peeled open and her spine torn out at some point.

It intersected at points with what she was actually interested in; the charring, which may as well have been a birthmark compared to the other scars. Casus simply traced the patch, describing as he went: “It covers… A third of your back, I would say.”

The moment he pulled his hands away, she rolled her shoulders and the bodysuit began to slither back into place. Casus shivered.

“Truly, I have never seen such body armor. It almost seems alive.”

“It is. Counts as a grafted second skin. I don’t think it’s not that different from Mamon Knight undersuits.”

“Right you are, such underlayers are not unheard of even for those who do not use Couplers, only… I have never seen a type that is so proactive in reforming itself. You may be able to reap great profit if you collaborate with a grafter in developing an improved form of amorphous body armor.”

Krahe proceeded to make tendrils of Tar to erupt from her back, seamlessly piercing out from her bodysuit to whip forward and strike at their targets in concert with her left arm. A few attempts later she got the tendrils to strike in concert, machine-gun smashing wooden dummies and the ground alike with force far beyond anything she could generate with her own body. However,before long she crumbled to the ground in a coughing meltdown.

“Ah, fuck me, I got carried away,” she chuckled as she struggled back to her feet, her tendrils rapidly decaying, losing elasticity and crumbling away. “I figure it’s a good time to call it for now.”

And so they left. It had been hours already, and Casus wasn’t particularly eager to overuse his privileges to the detriment of others.