64 - Re: Slaughterhouse 9 Pt. 1 [Cherno]

The particular branch of Sector-7 style she drew from at this moment was designed to accommodate those with weapons built into their arms, and she did have one - a wound-like grin in the palm of her hand, out of which erupted a tentacle of tar half as thick as her arm. It smashed straight into the gangster’s Barrier, its structure of wound-together roots buckling, but holding. As he recovered and swiftly summoned a trio of floating wooden swords, she raised her own Barrier straight ahead, skewed to the right somewhat like she would use a real shield. While Casus rushed around the room killing Gor’ah and keeping them away from her, Krahe continued to batter the flabbergasted gangster’s Barrier with further lashes. It seemed as though physical motions made the thaumaturgy more efficient, or rather somehow fed her own bodily power into the magic. If that was the case, she would be more than happy to turn the whole of Sector 7 Style into the foundation of her thaumaturgy. Her style of gunmanship, too, was influenced by the art, though she did have training prior to learning of it.

It wasn’t long before her target fell, but it was not by her own hand. While she battered his Barrier, his own wooden swords lashed out, taking chunks out of her tolerance… But her Barrier, in turn, did the same to him. Its retaliation was not unlike tracers; bursts of reddish flame enveloped in pyroclast, some slamming into her opponent’s Barrier while others struck his Wards. Regardless, the feedback loop of his own attacks combined with the pounding of Krahe’s tar-tendrils quickly sent him straight over the edge, and he went down coughing up leaves.

Krahe already had ideas for improvement on the concept, from using persistent constructs to creating semi-permanent jade spikes to incorporate into the tendrils using the Forming Toroid. There wasn’t much time for that, though. Casus had just about finished cleaning up the Gor’ah, their lack of intelligence by no means precluding them from having basic voidkeys and blasting rings. Krahe was relieved they’d been too caught up trying not to get sliced into ribbons to even think of shooting at her. They were dead now, their frontloaded Wards pierced through, and Casus had his blade to the man’s neck. It took some effort, but his coup-de-grace came much more swiftly than the surgeon’s.

“Another new thaumaturgy?”

“Just a rudimentary attack using Tar instead of Cinders.”

“That motion didn’t look new.”

“The thaumaturgy was, the motion wasn’t. From before.”

“Ah. One must wonder how magicless martial arts would translate.”

“I’ll see soon enough, but I’ve got high hopes. I used them to get you out of the Old Street Butchershop after all.”

With those words, Krahe formed a Cinder Armor-hunter, using the Forming Toroid to create the whole thing, vents and all, while adding a minimal construct for conduction. She slipped the jade blade into her Kenoma Pocket, finding it caused no spike in Entropy when it entered the precipice, but still continued to demand its upkeep cost even while stored. This was fine by her.

The density of individuals inside buildings steadily grew as they neared the building labeled as “high-value storage”, and though simply killing them with instant and overwhelming violence did work for some time, it was not fated to carry them through.

The surgeon’s directions ended up getting them caught, but not in a way even he himself could’ve predicted. A gaggle of Gor’ah-infested bodies had somehow wandered right into the wrong place at the wrong time, and one of them spotted Krahe just as she was leaning out of a window to jump across an alley in Casus’ wake. Two among them were the Gor’ah from the group which had barred their passage earlier, and of those two, one had the presence of mind to point and scream: “EEEN-TROO-DERR!”

That alone was enough to send the whole compound swarming in. Krahe and Casus continued on their original path for a short time, evading their pursuers and drawing closer to his belt. Krahe lost count of how many smoke grenades she’d used, as Casus didn’t seem to have much trouble seeing through the smoke. A handful of gangsters also managed to push through, and the duo inevitably came face-to-face with a handful of them, each radiating an aura more powerful than Shiva had. One even wielded a revolver with glowing red and yellow bullets loaded into its four-chamber cylinder, two each.

Grey smoke swirled about the revolver-wielder and a bent-in-half cigarette sat in his mouth, while the man to his right had goggles, and the third’s Barrier formed out of congealed light. It was the size of a dinner plate, but zipped to and fro instantaneously. She couldn’t quite tell by what means the fourth man had pierced her smoke, but by his strange and bulky build and the sword in his hand she wagered it to be sheer brute resilience and a strong attunement with his other senses. As she had done before, Krahe mentally assigned them designations: Smoker, Lights, Goggles, Ronin. Lights stood out with his comparatively more expensive-looking clothing and tan skin, while Smoker’s build was gaunt, his eyes baggy and bloodshot, but he had a sharpness to his gaze and a similarly twitchy trigger finger. Goggles was sickly-pale, and stood with a slouch. Ronin wore fully-concealing clothing, his face wrapped up revealing only a slit behind which Krahe saw beady black eyes and what she realized to be not skin, but dark chitin. He didn’t twitch like an evoy, and his physique was more like a squat, bulky human than a lanky flyman. What she had previously assumed to be a backpack, Krahe now saw as part of the beetleman’s exoskeleton.

A fifth man caught up while the two groups faced off, but Goggles held his arm out and barked into his face: “Get the foreman… And tell him we’ll need his pet if any of us wants to make it out alive.”

Krahe popped off a pair of Tracer-enhanced gunshots after the man, both blocked by Lights; one hit his Barrier, the other sent luminous powder spraying from his head as it struck a Ward. It continued to snow from him while the remnant pyroclast ate away at him, but he was unpreturbed. He pulled a pair of pepperbox pistols, suggesting they didn’t need to be manually rotated. Their barrels were quite narrow, so Krahe wasn’t too concerned. Another man had just arrived, pulling two large-bore flintlocks. A glassy-green barrier flickered up in front of him. Fodder.