72 - Guilt Repaid in Cold Blood [Cherno]

Having gotten one Hound apart from the others, Casus pressed in the eye of his Coupler. Anathema rushed through the suit and towards his arm, his blade wreathed in a silver glow that trailed behind it. All at once, he forced through the Hound’s Barrier and buried his arm up to the elbow into its body, annihilating its skull and power plant in one fell swoop.

The surviving hounds, both damaged and missing a leg, didn’t hold up for long. An uppercut destroyed one, and a simple flying kick crushed another into a nearby wall such that it fell and didn’t get back up. At that moment, just as Casus was recovering from his kick, the Foreman just barely managed to bark out a command to Tindalos before Krahe could get through his Wards to tear the voice amp off his face. the great beast turned in place, blasting out a building-wrecking attack towards Casus. Prone as he was, he leapt back to his feet and braced himself.

A whirling vortex of destructive force came tearing at him, and Casus once more opened the Second Eye. This would leave him only a half-minute of transformation at best due to how exhausted he was.

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Krahe watched Silberblut’s armor straining and creaking as the vortex pushed against it, tearing at the plating and distorting the metal. Then, with no fanfare, it vanished; absorbed.

The eye on his chest remained open, and with a press of his fist against his belt, he became enveloped in an aura of silver-gold flame. Quickly lowering himself into a braced stance, his arm-blade snap-pivoted by 180° degrees. Just as Tindalos readied itself to fire again, he leapt high into the air.

Soaring to the apex of his leap, his elbow pointing downward and his open hand to the sky, his flame-like aura suddenly coalesced around his right arm. A rocket-like blast of that flame erupted from his right hand, and in a flash, he crashed down upon Tindalos.

Rubble, metal, and gore sprayed all across the immediate surroundings. The cloud of dust and vaporized fuel mixture went up in a swirling blaze, revealing Silberblut’s figure standing solemn in the shredded remains of what had once been Tindalos’s central mass.

FLASH OF LIGHT, TORN APART

RIGHTEOUS ANNIHILATION FROM ON HIGH

SILBERBLUT COUPLER CHARGE: EMPYREAN METEOR DROP

He was staring right at them, pointing at the Foreman.

“GUILT REPAID IN COLD BLOOD…” growled the belt.

“...all and every guilty man!” Casus finished.

Spinning around on a heel, he sprinted across the street below and leapt up onto a one-floor building before scaling the height to where Krahe and the Foreman stood. The exact moment he got up there, his armor was seemingly burned off of him by silver-gold flames.

One moment, Krahe felt his powerful killing intent towards the Foreman. Then, most of it vanished right alongside his armor. He stood, at the edge of the roof, glaring at the Foreman, but it no longer seemed as though he might lunge forward to kill him right then and there. He glanced at Krahe.

“I presume you wish to interrogate him?”

Krahe gave him a nod, changing her hold on the Foreman. She shoved his shoulder back into its socket, eliciting a stifled cry of pain from the man as his knees gave out under him. She couldn’t blame him. As they started making their way to the ground the proper way, she leaned forward a bit and hissed into the Foreman’s ear: “Try anything and I’ll dislocate joints you didn’t even know you had and then boil your brain in your skull, understood?”

The survivors of Slaughterhouse 9 - at least, those who hadn’t fled - had the good judgment to not get in their way. Or rather, they weren’t so dedicated to the mafia as to throw their lives away trying to fight intruders who could easily kill them. Krahe knew that the survivors could take down the two of them if they just attacked all at once, but she also knew they wouldn’t. A handful of men were busy herding Gor’ah, yelling at them so they wouldn’t try to come after the duo.

Possessing far superior physical strength, Casus took over the duty of keeping the Foreman under control as they went.

One single gangster tried to follow them down into the tunnel.

Krahe shot him. Somewhat anticlimactically, his Wards held up and he scurried back up the stairs. She sprinted after him and put a few shots of Cinder Gatling into his back. It didn’t matter that he also survived this, it was about chasing him away properly.

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A few minutes later, down in the tram tunnel…

Krahe had derived great amusement from watching the Foreman rapidly come to terms with his own death over the course of the short walk they had taken into the tunnel’s depths. When they eventually found a secluded spot, he spoke up without resistance to their prompting.

“Look, I might as well be a corpse already, ‘cause that incident back there blew my preparations wide open. That’s why you can trust me when I say this: You’ll be better off if you just leave town and go somewhere else. Do you think you and a delusional warrior of justice wannabe stand a chance against Damrus or his Benefactors? Even the church branches in this city can’t take them down. Those flies have their eggs laid in the very foundations of this place, even old man Sorun couldn’t get rid of them, and that was before he went mad in his old age.”

“You worked with stolen flesh. That, though sacrilegious, is a crime which may still be forgiven… But those whose flesh you worked with were brought in like animals and butchered under your oversight, with your approval! Sacrilege! Heresy! Punishment-” Casus proclaimed, but the Foreman just interrupted him as if he wasn’t a hair’s breadth from death.

“-befall the body-thief, the usurper of another’s flesh, yes, we all know the spiel. I worked with what I had, okay? Do you think Slaughterhouse Nine wouldn’t be around without me? The compound would be even bigger, and there would be no blissful oblivion by way of baneworm venom for the poor bastards we process. Our end consumers don’t care how tainted the meat is - in fact, some prefer it as tainted with suffering as possible. Look, I can help you take down Hashem. So let’s just talk this out…”