61 - Stealth, For Once [Cherno]

The place was being evacuated. Krahe hoped it to be mere coincidence, but then, her mind went back to the odds. Back to the smokery. The diminutive, red-cloaked figure which seemed to have unsettled every was probably a Red Hood, or at least the only thing that Krahe could think of that might be a Red Hood.

Finally the two men neared the elevator, coming into view. Both were well-built and dressed in workers' clothes, one even having a flat cap on his head. Both were also baneworms, but with they only showed it mildly in the form of some bulging red tendrils beneath the skin. The more baneworms she saw, the more Krahe thought it wasn't rejection that gave them away, but their own sloppiness in how they stuffed themselves into the body. In the moment between when the two passed behind the building and saw the Corpse Elevator's interior, Krahe and Casus dashed out of their alleyway and further down the street, closing the distance towards the location of his Silberblut Coupler. Just for good measure she formed a densified smoke grenade, compressed to the point of nearly counting as a burster, stuffed full of anathema. Once formed it demanded some input to stay stable, but her Entropy steadily went back down.

Despite having hoped for the contrary, it wasn't long before she got to use that smoke burster. She and Casus had already ducked into an alleyway well before they could be discovered, but they were still half the compound's length from his belt, and the ol' Corpse Elevator was just about starting a fuss. Screams from a distressed Gor'ah drove the rest of them into a frenzy; not just the immediate group, but something in the realm of thirty or forty bodies at the minimum flooded out of nearby buildings. This included the pair of doors which shared the alleyway with them. Five or six of the things just piled out, sprinting, only to stop and give Casus and Krahe a weird look. Then, curiously, one asked: "Pass... Word?"

Krahe would've laughed or sworn at the subsapient parasite, but it all brought to mind slightly-too-fresh memories of an ill-fated jaunt through Mutie-dump 27. As the name suggested, it was a subdistrict of Megacity Gamma, number 27, which had been turned into a mutant containment zone. In practice, that meant anyone with deleterious mutations had been thrown into the slum and stapled with a turret ID chip so they couldn't leave. It was a grim place and a grim journey.

A simple, light roll of the grenade. It didn't alarm any of the piled-up Gor'un, as it resembled a shiny black ball from the outside.

She quietly raised her Barrier, smoke and cinders swirling together into an umbrella, while charging a Cinder Flash.

"We go through," she said to Casus.

"Through? No through. Password!" a particularly eloquent Gor'un demanded. Acrid smoke and razor-sharp obsidian dust filled the alley. Groans of pain followed. 

Casus rushed ahead of her, his inhuman speed finally coming into play. Rather than do violence upon the creatures, he tossed and shoved them out of the way so that Krahe could pass, and then slammed the door shut in his wake. She knew well enough to instantly raise a wall, the glistening slab of green and black ramming up out of the ground fast enough to make her consider weaponizing the bangle.

The room beyond this entryway had clearly been a kitchen at one point, now refitted with typical choppergang fare of bathtubs and butchering slates. They moved further, continuing to hop between buildings by going through side doors in alleyway or jumping between windows. They traversed a full half of the compound's length by this method, and came across a wide and disturbing variety of butchering setups, but all were deserted, recently too. Trails of blood everywhere suggested that many corpses and dismembered body parts had been removed from these buildings in a hurry.

That easy passage wouldn't come for long, however. The whole compound was in high alert by now, a swarm of Gor'ah-possessed bodies ambling about while some twenty to thirty actual people milled about trying to suss out the intruder. Among them, from the brief glances they had gotten while remaining hidden, Casus managed to pick out five to ten individuals of sufficient power to be concerned over, and one significantly powerful figure whom Casus described as "a good reason to have gone for the Twin Serpent key". According to the Banisher, he was on the lower end of mid-ranking for a contractor, possessing significantly superior raw power to Krahe even with her improved key.

One building they entered wasn't deserted.

The interior stunk. It stunk of chemicals, blood, and viscera, and the man they found butchering a human body conspicuously didn't stink. No, butchery wasn't quite the right word. He was dismantling it.

Then, he turned around with a strange, aloof look on his face, and they noticed that the body wasn't quite a body just yet; the subject's voidkey had been extricated somehow, leaving a gaping hole in the side of his skull, and a tube ran down his throat, powered by a crude breathing-machine nearby. 

"My, my. New faces. And... Ah, Silberblut! What a shame, what a shame, I told those fools you were too big a fish for them. Ah well, line's snapped. I suppose you might want some information in exchange for my ability to walk my way on out of here, yes?"

The surgeon bore none of the marks of baneworm infestation. He was monochrome, just like... Well, Monochrome. Also like Monochrome, he was also well-built and clearly healthy, somewhat contrasting the baneworms riding in corpses that made up most of the compound. Unlike Monochrome, though, the surgeon's skin was matte-black, his eyes grey, and his lips and hair were white. His attire, too, was normal: a striped, bloodstained tank top, black trousers, suspenders, work boots. He certainly didn't look the part of a choppergang's demented body-disassembler, were it not for the blood and the very much demented expression he wore.