66 - Re: Slaughterhouse 9 Pt. 3 [Cherno]

The Burster soon went tumbling past the wall, sent by Krahe’s precise hand to the other cover wall’s edge so the blast could cover both sides of it. Unfortunately for the gangsters they had only seen Krahe use smoke grenades, and the improved Burster’s shell looked identical to a smoke grenade from the outside. She instantly started Purging when the grenade went out; though a brief lack of maintenance would cause her Armor-hunter’s construct parts to start decaying, it would be easily repaired.

The explosion of her Burster surprised even Krahe with its violence. There was a very distinct blast and a wave of concussion, much like a proper grenade. Then, a deluge of heat and pyroclast came whipping around the stone slate behind which she and Casus hid, streaks of red shining through. There weren’t any screams; only groaning from the one man who had survived the blast, and when Krahe leaned out she saw that he was clearly not far from death by the fact he was missing his lower half and a substantial chunk of his upper half. The stone cover had held up significantly better than she’d expected, its stone surface sanded down, but its structure uncompromised. She also saw the absence of Ronin, or his corpse.

The reason Casus had focused on Ronin first became clear when the latter stomped through the adjacent building and leapt out the window on their sidet with a dagger in one hand and a rotten, broken stump of a sword in the other. A solid third of his clothing had been simply torn off alongside a layer of his exoskeleton, revealing a body with a strong central thorax split into two segments, with wide legs and two pairs of thin arms that had somehow been wound together into two thicker limbs. He had a noticeable rim of armor around his neck, surrounding his proportionally smaller head; at least a quarter of its size had been turbanlike padding. Casus clashed with him again, buying Krahe enough time to summon her Armor-hunter and bury it, alongside every iota of her spare tolerance, into the inside of the beetleman’s shell, going past its rim. The fact he survived that blast was exceptionally impressive, as was the fact even Casus couldn’t quite get into his armor. What got him in the end was a simple leg-sweep preceded with the raising of a narrow, small piece of jade. Ronin’s own weight combined with the damage to his shell caused it to crack right open, and Casus wasted no time using the gaping hole to finish him off. The whole exchange from Ronin’s charge to his death spanned all of perhaps ten or fifteen seconds.

They weren’t afforded much peace at all after that. Though they managed to escape onto the open street and traverse one more building-length closer to where Casus’ belt was being held, Gor’ah and gangsters alike swiftly swarmed them, and the thing which had caused the tremor earlier wasn’t far behind.

For now, though, there was no choice but to fight their way out, and Krahe had the perfect Voidkey for just that application. Against numbers like these, especially with this many enemies that were little more than ambulatory corpses, precision combat dropped off in effectiveness. What she needed was smoke, immediately followed by an Anathema Burster to break the crowd as well as the morale of any survivors. That went off without much issue, her Barrier and Wards holding up despite the not insignificant amount of lead and magical death thrown her way. Here, further application of the Forming Toroid proved vital. She’d already spent 20 charges in the alleyway and 2 charges for her knife and the small pillar to break Ronin’s shell, leaving her more or less 3 cover-slates to work with give or take some mass.

In reality, she needed a fair bit less than 30 to get the cover she needed, certainly not when that cover was made of such tough material. In fact, she managed to put together a decent encirclement of waist-height barriers with just 15 charges, thanks to not only making them shorter, but thinner.

Bullets and death whizzing overhead, Krahe formed her smoke bomb and Burster in tandem.

It wasn’t long before another tsunami of pyroclast washed past her and Casus, and she proudly rose up with Armor-hunter in hand to sprint headlong into the enemy’s broken ranks to play a slasher movie villain for a bit.

“One little explosion is all it takes to break your ranks? Half-boiled pussies!” she mocked as she put her last bullet into a she-gangster’s barrier, only to let go of her gun and batter the woman into meltdown with Tar before burying the Armor-hunter in her spine. With the same hand in which she held the dagger she pulled her gun back in by its lanyard and holstered it. Simultaneously, Krahe dropped the smoke bomb before gesturing for Casus to follow her. Her Entropy was jumping by leaps and bounds as the few survivors hammered her Barrier and she fired off three-shot Cinder Gatling bursts, mixing in full-powered shots with ones just for show. Thus, she created the appearance of firepower that would strain her far more than it did, and these chucklefucks didn’t have the presence of mind to actually discern which beams were weak, or even that any of them were much weaker than the others.

Gouges were being torn into her Wards from the side, but she’d gotten a good-enough handle on how much punishment she could take to not worry about it. Since most of their attacks were Kinetic or Lacerative, her Wards were holding up much better than they otherwise would have… And her Barrier wasn’t. She dropped it halfway through her and Casus’ attempt to break out from the encirclement, Purging under the cover of her acrid Isotope-infused smoke. Between the smoke and the Tar, a pattern made itself clear: Anything that could be catalyzed using Isotope would consume marginal quantities of it, thus making it a pointless endeavor to try using the interaction to accelerate dissipation of the substance. She still had a lot of room to play with, though. Hopefully enough to kill off the Foreman and his Pet if it came down to direct combat. Sure, Casus was an ally, but assuming an ally’s presence or continued usefulness was neither a good idea nor something Krahe was capable of doing due to force of habit.