71 - Mamon Knight Silberblut [Cherno]

There came a sound from behind and to the left, the building in whose basement the Silberblut Coupler was supposedly stored. It was a strange, hard to place sound at this distance, and right afterward, dust and debris went flying out of the hole in the wall. From within the building then came a voice so loud that it carried easily to where the two of them stood. A distorted, powerful voice, one carrying either a sense of unimpeachable righteousness or unimpeachable conceitedness, depending on one’s perspective.

“ALL-SEEING ARBITER OF RIGHTEOUS WRATH."

“He delayed the invocation…” the Foreman scoffed. Krahe didn’t give the man long enough to afford such carelessness, blasting him in the side with a five-finger burst of Cinder Gatling since most of a Cinder Flash would just get caught by his Barrier. He shrank back as if about to ask why she had done that, only to get himself back together and attempt to actually strike back at her for once. His offense was basic, though an amusing mirror of her own attack; sharpened bone bullets fired out of his fingertips, though rather than continuous fire he set them loose all at once in a shotgun-like spread. Unfortunately for him, he made his aim pathetically easy to read. Unfortunately for her, he somehow had the brute Tolerance to achieve accuracy by volume of fire, his individually weak projectiles battering away her Wards.

A smoke eruption using the remains of her cigarette mixed him up for long enough; long enough for her to get him into a grapple, though only a partial one; she grabbed his left arm and got her leg hooked around his left leg. While she grappled with the Foreman, Casus ran rampage on his creations… And Krahe took the opportunity to turn him so he could see. It was a tactical choice; the sight appalled him enough to reduce his resistance.

She wholly understood why.

Before, Casus had been careful, deftly and tactically avoiding Tindalos’s attacks while gradually inflicting small wounds to wear it down and weaken it, severing muscle bundles and trying to damage power cables.

Now, he met one of its defensive attacks head-on, smashing his fist into the beast’s claw-ended forelimb. It was Tindalos’s structure that failed, the entire lower third of its limb peeling apart like an arrow skewered from behind by another arrow.

“Abomination,” spat Silberblut, Casus’s voice blending with the one which the Coupler spoke in. Krahe finally got a decent look at his armor as he tore his right arm free and simply bypassed the graft-beast, leaving it where it was even as the Foreman tried to speak commands even as Krahe wrapped him in Tar-tendrils and held her Armor-hunter to his throat. The moron just didn’t learn… But she wanted to see if he had any useful info, so he would live for now. It took him until she dislocated his arm before he shut up properly, wincing in pain. However, it was clear he still held out hope for rescue from his Hounds.

The Silberblut armor conformed to Casus’s form just as closely as the others, but unlike either the Omniphage or the High-Pressure Dregsteamer suits, there was no reasonable way for his hair to fit inside its cycloptic helmet. Indeed, this suit had not just those sculpted lips for a facial feature, but also a single huge, vertical eye, spanning all the free space on its face. It was nearly flat, unlike a Banisher’s natural vertical eye, and bright blue. The helmet’s top half was in crown-like, golden shape, swept back rather than pointing upward. The whole of the armor was mostly silver with simple golden trimmings, its majority made up of many overlapping segments laid atop of an underlayer of brownish muscle. Most notable of the suit’s features was a second vertical eye on the chest, though it was closed, forming a nearly vertical line of gold. The eye set into the Silberblut Coupler looked as though alive, a deep blue as its main colour with the symbol of a bright-orange, four-pointed star suspended within it. His right arm bore a blade in the same way it did on other armors, but it was distinctly entombed within thick armor plating that stood apart from the rest of the suit. The blade, too, was subtly different, being thicker and with a significant section of gold where it attached to his arm.

Casus had already taken off sprinting towards the Hounds, one of whom had nearly made it up to the roof by now. Instead of the weightless speed of either of his Dregsteamer forms, Silberblut’s armored feet thundered against the cobblestones as if he were a 200-kilo fullborg. The running high-jump into which he launched left cracks where he had stood, and he seamlessly landed in front of the rising Hound. He grabbed one of its legs and swung it down onto its three kin with such force that all four of them lost balance and crumpled into a pile.

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The Hounds scattered, desperately struggling to regain balance. They know their end is at hand.

Shredding vortices of kinetic magic ripped past him. One was headed straight for him.

Silberblut pulled from his Coupler’s blazing inferno and opened his suit’s second eye, facing the attack head-on.

The Second Eye shone a brilliant blue, and the kinetic force was simply absorbed. Then, it closed once more.

It was neither a Barrier nor a Ward, but a third, unique form of defense.

One by one, he closed the distance to the Hounds and tore them each limb from limb, using their own limbs against them. Grab a leg. Flip the hound. Hold it down with a foot and pull. Finish by stomping on the fuel and suppressant tanks hard enough to rupture them. The forces involved naturally damaged their eye-jars, but they were sturdy enough to not break. Nonetheless there were six of them, and Casus had no choice but to use his unique defense more than a few times. He couldn’t empower the Second Eye for more than a split-second at a time, but it was enough; certainly enough to catch these things’ pathetic attacks. Each use of it severely shortened the time he could stay transformed, however, so he had to wrap this up quickly.