62 - Femme Fatale Facade [Cherno]

Casus just about stepped forward to valiantly slay the evildoer, and Krahe was of the same mind in terms of final result, but she also knew not to reject intel freely offered, least of all by one who thought truth would buy him a ticket to safety. She held her arm out in from of him, prompting a wide-eyed look from the surgeon, followed by a lick of his lips as he ogled her arm as if it were the most tantalizing display of carnal imagery conceivable by mankind.

"A path to where the Silberblut Coupler is being stored. Stealthy if possible, direct if not."

"Oh, I don't know where-"

"A hundred-thirty meters in that direction, several meters underground," Casus interjected, pointing.

"Ah. There. That's..."

The surgeon furrowed his brow, visualizing the compound... But his focus kept wandering, latching into Krahe's arm.

"You keep ogling my arm. Give us our directions and I may let you take a closer look, maybe even touch it," she teased him. 

That seemed to motivate the surgeon well enough, and he grabbed a sheaf of paper from a nearby desk, drawing up a simplistic map of the surrounding buildings, including a warning about the foreman's usual location as well as the location of his workshop. As he feverishly drew his map, his motions made errant droplets of blood splatter over the paper, and he listlessly rambled out a stream of consciousness.

"The foreman's been working on this huge thing, though it's not finished yet. He's been skimming off the top, taking body parts and materiel to funnel into his little pet project, I think he plans to try using it to overthrow Damrus or something. Didn't care, he paid me my share so I kept quiet about it. I'd avoid it if I were you, but I'm not so sure you'll get that choice. The belt might be in the safe. It won't be much trouble to break into, but it does have a ward that will alert the foreman and every officer in the compound - that would include me, but I'll be long-gone by then..."

Finally, he spun around on a heel and held out the map, having even gone so far as to orient it so that they could read it right away. The man was desperate. Krahe examined it, as did Casus, and they quickly came to the consensus that there was nothing of the map to suggest it had been drawn to deviate from the compound's real layout. 

"Any other security measures besides the safe?"

"Uh, maybe a couple locked doors. They're just normal doors, mostly to keep the Gor'ah from wandering where they don't belong. The pitiful things are just smart enough to be a pain, but far too stupid to be useful beyond basic manual labor. Like... Hundred-kilo toddlers. I fulfilled my half of the deal, so-"

Krahe just barely suppressed a shudder of revulsion. The surgeon wasn't ugly by any means, but he simply radiated a greasy, unbelievably desperate energy. Holding out her hand, she waited, biding her time. 

"H-how does it move? It looks completely burnt-through, and yet it moves without even the slightest nerve-burn tremors... Can't be the talismans, those are just anathema dispersers..." he muttered, slowly sliding on towards Krahe, paying every iota of attention to her arm in between briefly ogling the rest of her. It was as if the man had two desperate perverts fighting for control in his head... Though she couldn't blame the second one, given how closely the bio-armor clung to her skin. It didn't bother her that he looked, she expected that, it was everything else surrounding the action. That was even with Krahe's sky-high tolerance for creep factor, let alone her very loose definitions for what constituted creep factor. She had, after all, lived most her life in a cyberpunk hellhole... And here was a prime example of a creep supreme, the sort that would have stood out even in Megacity Gamma's seediest corners. Casus was more visibly affected by the surgeon than she was, on the precipice between cringing himself out of his armor and trying to kill the man right then and there.

"It's a secret. But here, I'll whisper it in your ear. Careful, those little seals are the only things keeping you from getting fried," she teased, using it to justify the crimson-red light that suddenly flowed down the limb as she charged a Cinder Flash. Once she'd built up the energy for a Thaumaturgy she could only hold off on using it for a few seconds, but that delay was more than she needed here. Just one more step and he would be in range.

She lunged forward, pressing herself against the surgeon as she ran her hand up his shirt. This close up, she could feel out his wards somewhat. It wasn't precise by any means, but it was good enough. With her right hand behind her back, she held it open, hoping that Casus would understand the gesture.

"Feel that?" she breathed in the surgeon's ear.

Before he could respond she let it rip straight into his wards, hooking the back of his knee as she pushed him onto his back. The surgeon's wards had held up, but Casus wasn't far behind, slipping into the space where Krahe had been a moment ago to bury his arm-blade into the surgeon's chest in the very same spot, blood spraying out as the surgeon's blood-wrought wards revealed themselves to defend him. It took the banisher sitting on him and driving his arm-blade into his midsection while Krahe restrained his arms, but after multiple strikes and a Coupler Charge, Casus finally managed to break the man's wards and bury his arm into his chest cavity up to the elbow, tearing out a six-chambered heart that was very much not human. It looked like he had broken through at one point, the surgeon's blood-like wards seemingly shattering, but it seemed as though he had a second layer of glassy, arcane wards underneath.

"This is... A graft. As are at least four of his other organs, and by the looks of it his spine. His natural wards were nothing exceptional, but..."

He tossed the heart aside and went in again, this time pulling out a heart-sized dodecahedron of brass, with thick tubes leading from it into the rest of the surgeon's body. A low-grade voidkey was slotted into each of its faces.

"...Looks like he somehow grafted himself with a secondary ward generator. Clever, though I dare not imagine what's inside the housing and how he managed to make it work. Best to leave it for the church."