70 - Re: Slaughterhouse 9 Pt. 10 [Cherno]

Krahe ran out back the way she had come, forming another Isotope smoke grenade and raising her Barrier. Simultaneously, she summoned a cigarette, lit it, dragged down half of it, and used the smoke to prepare a normal smoke breath.

The moment she emerged from the gorestrewn alleyway, her plan was set into motion. Start exhaling. Lob the grenade. Cinder Gatling suppressive fire, aimed at the Foreman’s head, hoping not to kill, but to impede him with flashing lights or hopefully damage his voice amplifier. Her disruptive tactic opened up a gap barely wide-enough for her to slip through, but despite it, he still had that mark on her. A simple command was all it took: “CRUSH HER!”

He was so angry that he had slipped back into whatever language was the default in Audunpoint. She felt tremors behind and to her side, and a Blasting Array’s destructive vortex tore the ground mere meters to her side, but it couldn’t quite hit her; the tags were limited in the same way as Casus’s connection to his belt, only giving the receiver a direction and vague sense of distance. Tindalos simply wasn’t an advanced-enough construct to properly interpret the data and fill in what was missing due to Krahe’s smoke. It was, after all, not even advanced enough to act semi-autonomously.

Despite successfully evading its attacks, she nonetheless felt her Wards being torn away in huge chunks merely from the occasional barely-grazing hit of its ranged weapon. It was fine. She wouldn’t have to worry about it for long.

The Foreman, wisely interpreting her intentions, used his own means of mobility to scale a full floor to the roof of an adjoining two-floor building. It was a crude method, blasting a great volume of unrefined magic out of his downturned hands and feet to produce lift, and it left him scratching himself as layers of hair-thin bone solidified on any exposed surface. He looked like a crackhead in withdrawal… And the Pet had slowed down. It continued to chase after her, but it was obvious the machine’s extremely limited autonomy wouldn’t let it make any attack that could actually threaten to hit her.

Krahe couldn’t climb two floors, or leap that high… But that didn’t mean the Foreman was out of reach.

She willed the Forming Toroid to create a pillar beneath her feet, as tall as possible and just wide enough for her to stand on to save on charges. The next moment she was rocketed upward six meters, then thrown a short distance upward by the pillar’s velocity. Tar-tendrils whipped up to a chimney just past the flat roof's edge pulled her the rest of the way. It was an expensive stunt, but the Foreman was still in the throes of meltdown when she did it, and so she could afford to Purge right after landing. She was done just two seconds before he was; two vital seconds.

A swift lunge towards him… But he barely managed to raise his barrier in time to eat a Cinder Flash. Unlike his Wards, it was not anemic in the slightest. In fact, it just ate up Krahe’s assault for a full ten seconds, while the Foreman expertly manipulated his bony shield to stop her from circumventing it. He even had the presence of mind to kick one of her Bursters off the edge of the building quickly enough that its explosion had mostly dispersed by the time the wave of pyroclast washed over the two of them.

In a moment of opportunity, he performed curious hand-seals and bellowed out a command into his hand. A spike of bone formed as if to capture the sound, and he hucked it down the street from whence he had originally come. A faint aura of confidence returned to him.

Stomping resounded anew, and a quartet of much smaller constructs in a similar style as Tindalos came sprinting. Unlike Tindalos, they were structured somewhat like the Dregstrider, with four long, lanky legs and two small grasping hands in front. Their fuel and suppressant tanks poked out of their backs, but were properly armored, and they each had a smaller barrier generator pylon. More unsettlingly, they made use of repurposed human skulls in place of heads, with jars of three floating eyes each set inside the hollowed-out cranium, and clusters of several Blasting units in their gaped-open mouths. They weren’t Blasting Rings or Blasting Arrays, and Krahe had no clue what a middle point between the two would be called. Blasting Clusters, maybe.

More concerning than these graft-beasts’ outwardly completed state, however, was the way they moved… And the way the Foreman didn’t bark orders to make them do so.

“Why not-”

“-use the Hounds first? Yeah, I’m fuckin’ asking myself the same question. I thought you two would be a good test drive for Tindalos, but you just had to go and be proper mid-ranker type freaks.”

Krahe fused a high-powered burster, faking an underhanded throw towards the Foreman before spinning around and lobbing it off the side of the roof.

“That won’t-”

“-disable them, I know. It’ll slow them down well enough. That’s all I need.”

The explosion came, the very last of its concussion just barely reaching them. The Foreman flinched, unused to the sheer violence of a real combat explosive. Perhaps that was why he kept his distance from his own mobile weapon; he couldn’t bear the idea of actually piloting the thing, despite the advantages.

Krahe continued to pressure him after her Entropy dropped by a bit, pounding tar-tendrils into his Barrier. Even if his personal offensive ability was laughable, she had to admit that he’d traded it for a hell of a defense. Accounting for his graft-beasts, it made sense. If she kept up like this, the beasts would soon reach this place and she would at best have to retreat. Already, some of the Hounds had recovered from her Burster and were now trying to scale one of the single-floor buildings - not just that, but cooperating to do so, forming a ladder from their own bodies. They were so tall that just two standing on one another reached beyond the building’s edge; three of four would be able to get up.

That, however, wouldn’t come to pass.