59 - The Ol' Corpse Elevator [Cherno]

"Not a time for smalltalk," Krahe shushed him, getting a ring of keys off of the dead man's belt. One of them fit into the elevator's panel, but there was already a key in there, to he disappointment. "Lazy fuckers couldn't even bother with basic security protocol... C'mon, help me hoist these guys into the lift."

"Why?"

"I'll set a construct to start the lift after a delay while we scale the stairs. When the lift comes up all the attention will be on it and we'll get a hair-thin window to slip into the compound undetected. My plan assumes a great deal of things, but assumptions and gut instinct are the only thing you have in the absence of proper intel. Hashem goons are still civvie-adjacent, so the ol' Corpse Elevator ought to work."

Equally appalled and bewildered, Casus turned to her: "...You used this tactic often enough that you gave it a name?"

"To be fair, elevators were much more common in my world," she defended as she pulled the voidkeys out of their fallen foe. A Purgation Chimney and a thick nail that broke during the extraction.

"That is not the problem here!" he hissed.

"Be quiet and help me. Hold the guy's hand up there in the corner."

"Like this?"

"Hold it below the wrist. Yeah, like that. Now hold it still..."

Krahe for the first time made practical use of tar, and found that, to her glee, it came naturally to her. A slick tendril slithered out from beneath her leotard, down her left arm, and lunged towards its target, where it consolidated into a mass of tar to hold the dead man's hand in place. 

Despite the facelessness of his helmet, she felt Casus giving her another furrowed-brow look, as if he was reconsidering his earlier assessment of her character.

"Now the other hand."

He nonetheless aided her in setting up the macabre scene. As they worked, sound from the surface carried down. Whirring of machinery, screams of pain and terror, cackling of gangsters desensitized to the butchery at their hands. She was well aware of the seeming contradiction between the Hashem butchers being desensitized and her expectation that they would be shocked by the Corpse Elevator, but she found that to be the case in her dealings with multiple choppergangs.

"And the finishing touch..."

She proceeded to blast the corpse with a stream of anathema-infused heat, a weak Cinder Flash of sorts, until his face resembled her arm in texture and his eyes had turned to glowing coals. If only she could use up her own anathemic residue for combat-usable Thaumaturgies. Things were never that easy.

"There. Now the other corpse, put him under the first guy in a kneeling position."

"I did not know you had an affinity for Water as well. Is this some sort of cement?" Casus tried to divert from the gruesome work he was carrying out. The other body had a gaping hole through the middle of its head, created by the "omniphage" aspect of Casus' current armor, though the effect had worn off by now.

"No water, just mineral tar. I'm fairly certain one could produce Tar with whatever affinity is closest to trees, but mine is mineral. I have to put anathemic residue into the reaction to produce it, though," she shrugged.

"Ah, anathema explains it. Like this? With the hands in his lap?"

"That's good."

She sprayed more tar to keep the other corpse in place, and fried his face as well. Then, she attached a simple construct to the control panel that would press the "Up" button after a time delay, lacking the skill to create a remote trigger. The "timer" was as simple as a physical fuse which she would light. With that, the Corpse Elevator was ready.

"I would have expected the noise to raise an alarm, but I suppose the only significant noise we made was damped by the barrier before it failed. Though... You said there was no doing this quietly. Why this elaborate setup for a chance at a clandestine entry?"

"Doing it loud is not mutually exclusive with avoiding head-on confrontation. That being said... If this works, we will have an advantageous position to move and attack from, nothing more. We still need to get your belt and extract, which I suspect will involve a fair amount of head-on confrontation. I'd rather not fight an entire compound of gangsters, since it's entirely possible most of them are just following along, that they'll scatter and become small fish again if we behead this operation. Though, I also can't say that I'm opposed to wiping this whole place out, if Hashem's goons happen to look a touch too complicit in whatever fucked up bodysnatcher shit is going on in this place. Before we light the fuse, so to speak, describe the Silberblut Coupler to me. Tell me its direction and distance if you can. By my estimate we're around..."

She leaned into the stairwell, peering up through the narrow gap that ran its entire height down the middle.

"...twenty meters below ground level."

Rather than describe it, he shortened his arm-blade and used it to scrape a head-on and profile rendering of the belt into the nearby wall. It was a segmented, metal belt with an eye-shaped buckle; by Casus' brief description most of it was silver, with golden trim. A band of engraved gold encircled the buckle, with three golden claws holding in a solid half-sphere with a star shaped sigil inside.

"The eye is the Catalyst," he gestured to the half-sphere. "They haven't removed it, thank Zavesh."

The buckle was the eye-socket, after all.

"As for where it is..."

He turned around, then simply raised his arm at an upward angle in a northeastern direction.

"Likely in a basement, or some other place just below ground level."

Craning her head as if she could see through the solid rock, she raised her left hand, and Casus saw a fanged mouth open in its palm. He'd seen it before, and had figured out that it was just a Kenoma Pocket interface; he had also seen stranger ones, like an open wound with a zipper stitched over it, or the mouth of an iron-scaled serpent grafted to to a man's back as if it were a tail.