65 - Re: Slaughterhouse 9 Pt. 2 [Cherno]

“Shame,” she remarked, knowing she had one or two bullets left in her gun. “Here I was thinking we’d have it easy and only encounter overconfident morons with no threat assessment ability.”

“No matter how well you hide your aura, nobody with half a brain can be dumb enough to ignore that arm and those impenetrable anti-appraisal measures… And you’re with Silberblut,” Smoker gestured to Casus. “That’s not what the armor generated by an Omniphage Dregsteam Cartridge looks like, it’s his special Boon doing it: Shining Knight of Silver, which forcibly raises his compatibility with any Mamon Coupler. It’s the only way he can make the Silberblut Coupler work. It’s been an open secret for years.”

Krahe was very familiar with talking as a stalling tactic, so she just fired her remaining two shots. Not faltering another moment, Casus did much the same and rushed forward, dodging two gunshots while two more ricocheted off his armor. He focused on Ronin, clashing with him in a blur of motion so forceful that the insect slid back a short distance.

Three leaden balls struck her barrier.

Blasts of cinder and tendrils of tar lashed out in retaliation both from her Barrier and her arm, the latter’s impact like the cracking of whips. Maws for the tendrils to erupt from opened up all the way up her forearm, three lashing forward in rapid succession with a series of jabs. Though uninjured, their targets were flung back by sheer physical force, their wards flaring and shedding ablation, from luminous yellow shards to torn leaves and bits of rock.

Further gunfire followed. Krahe let it hit her Wards, as she had taken the measure of those guns and seen them fire on Casus moments earlier. She heard the gunshots before they struck, and the sound was anything but thunderous, more like a firecracker. Hashem's Butchers wielded guns, but they were mostly split between two extremes of the primitive firearm spectrum. Either single-shot, large-bore monsters, or pepperboxes with repeating fire capability but lackluster impact. The first, for killing. The second, for deterrence.

No, it was not the guns which were her biggest concern, but the magic they supported. Kinetics and Laceratives, hails of needles and great big blades of magic. They were not brutish magicks, but precise and well-suited to cleanly dismembering a body, merely scaled up for combat. Hardlight, smoke, air, gleaming metal and crackling, glass-like constructs of pure Thauma. Rather than Barriers or Wards, she chose the third option. A sharp drag on her cigarette, burning it down in one go. As she formed a Fusion-empowered Burster in her left hand and imbued the smoke in her lungs, Krahe gripped the air with her right hand. With a rising gesture and an ironclad mental command, the Forming Toroid shone bright green and spun around her wrist. A gnarled wall of jade streaked-through with black volcanic glass rose up before her. Repeating the same gesture she raised another one a few meters ahead, right in front of Hashem’s men. By the sudden sound of pain, she had not only caught one with the rising monolith, but it had gotten him between his legs, its sheer mass great enough to break his Wards.

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It wasn't abnormal for a recently-awakened Thaumaturge to shape his or her foundational skill set around pre-existing skills and life knowledge, and those with higher-order affinities tended to develop broadly before they developed deeply. Those who started late in life fairly regularly saw rapid progress as they came to grips with Thaumaturgy. Nonetheless, there was no word in the Banisher's mind which could describe this other than abnormal. It was one thing for a butcher to apply his understanding of his craft to create powerful Lacerative magic for his level, or learn Thaumaturgies of that kind well beyond what he would be able to use normally.

But that was a matter of weeks, days at the fastest, and with a First-order affinity that would be simple to apply.

This was a whole other extreme. Casus wasn't sure whether Krahe was some freakish prodigy, or whether she had lived a life that would give her the in-depth knowledge she seemed to be using to pull new Thaumaturgies out of her ass on the fly.

"Likely both..." he thought.

The way she fought certainly didn't speak to a low-ranking Contractor. He'd only seen a few wade into gunfire the way she did, and he'd seen even fewer dodging bullets at anything near her attribute ratings. Sure, she was well above human baseline, but it wasn't physically possible for her to react to an approaching bullet. No, the only way she could be doing that was prediction based on the shooter's own movements, which was in part how Casus achieved the same feat… Though still with massively higher physical ratings. That explained, then, why most of the bullets which struck her were shots which tumbled or were fired from shitty, inaccurate guns.

It felt nothing like watching a low-ranker with a good gun and voidkey fight. Not even close. That overwhelming killing intent combined with her utterly serene disposition... Were Casus not a fearless hero of justice, he may have felt intimidated.

"Just who were you, Lady Blackhand?" he thought for perhaps the fourth time in the last few hours, while he kicked away another Gor’ah that wanted to get between him and his target: The swordsman. That beetle was a threat, surpassingly durable and capable of explosive motion. He was clearly not far into his life cycle considering the mutism and general lack of arcane power, so that was a small comfort.

The ground shuddered. The Foreman and his Pet wouldn’t be far behind.

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The ground shuddered at the movement of something massive, but that wasn’t something to worry about right now. Casus returned slathered in blood and with dents in his armor, as he had done several times before this point. This time he stuck around in cover, fending off a handful of Gor’ah who had managed to get through a nearby building to start climbing out the windows. He also stayed because he saw and felt the seething mass of anathemic flame in her hand.