40 - Hotline Audunpoint Pt. 2 [Cherno]

Krahe pushed as hard as she could whilst also falling to the side in the hope that the man in silver would be unable to adjust his own trajectory, but his velocity far surpassed any that Krahe could generate.

The light of Anathema painted the walls and ceiling in swaths of dancing crimson, and just barely, Krahe managed to get her own head out of the way of his outstretched foot. At that same moment, there came a horrid buzz, and bloody light flowed forth from her arm, and the man in silver was struck aside by the force-wave of not her magic, but the air itself being caught in its terrible deluge. His course was only skewed by a touch,but that was enough; as his armor warped under the terrible heat, the man smashed into the wall and tumbled down the stairs to the landing below. It would’ve been more of a struggle if his armor had been slower and more power-focused, like Monochrome’s opponent; then, he would have been able to withstand even the strongest of Krahe’s attacks.

A terrible cough came over her. Meltdown.

Despite it, Krahe forced herself to her feet. Tailing dense smoke and spitting ash, she dragged herself to the stairs, holding onto the railing.

That armored man’s belt had also spat out its fuel cell, and his transformation had also vanished, just like Monochrome’s in the pit. That burst of ultra-high-performance, it seemed, probably forced a detransformation to ensure the user wouldn’t suffer serious consequences. She’d seen it before, in power armor; the Mk. 5 Interceptors could go from a standstill to supersonic in a flash, but they had a hardwired shutdown right after the speed burst because it near universally knocked out a human operator. Krahe didn’t know if this system worked like that, and didn’t care. They were just memories dragged to the surface, like corpses washing ashore upon a frozen lake’s first thaw in a decade.

Spewing vile ash and smoke from her face, Krahe stumbled down the stairs, emptying her gun into the man one bullet after the next. Ka-clack. Bang. Ka-clack. Bang.

She clumsily loaded a fresh clip and emptied it into him for no good reason, aiming for spots she knew were unlikely to cause lethal injury. The last thing he saw was her smoke-wreathed, ash-coughing countenance, filled with anger and hatred, before she kicked his head in. Krahe hated him not on a personal level, but in the moment, for making her melt down.  She nearly tripped over an extra canister which had rolled out of his pocket onto the landing, and decided to take it and his belt just in case one of his friends came up the stairs. There was nothing to suggest those belts couldn’t be reused, but she also didn’t feel confident in using one herself, considering its obvious deleterious effects on the user. As such, she just tossed the belt over her shoulder for now.

She felt some remorse as she made her way back up those stairs; remorse for wasting good bullets.

To the other end of the corridor she went, slowly checking each door in turn. All but two of the apartments to the left-hand side had been made into holding cells, while the endmost one, farthest from the stairwell, was an office of sorts. The room she’d broken into had a reinforced cell door, but its internal setup suggested use as a recreational room… At least as far as she could tell, under the battle-damage, gore, and burnt-in silhouettes of her own making. The ice-user from before was still in there.

“T-take whoever you want, I’ve seen nothing!” he pleaded the moment her gaze fell upon him.

Krahe briefly weighed what to say to him, whether to tell him to go ahead and tell of her as a terror tactic, or to question him where Casus was to be found. She also noticed heavy window-bars leaned up against the wall, suggesting that the room was in fact in the process of being converted into a cell.

Before she could question him, a voice came from the cell right across the hallway: “Favonia? Favonia, is that you?”

It carried a curious warble, with a depth and timbre that suggested a masculine source. Hoping that this was her target, Krahe approached the ice-user: “The cell keys.”

He fearfully pointed towards the office as she’d expected, and erelong she had locked the surviving gangster inside an empty cell for posterity. There was little reason to kill him now, and Krahe did want at least one survivor to go on and tell the tale. In this world and at this moment she could afford to do that, having exactly zero background or past identity here. This incident would be a good first line on the first page.

As she unlocked the door from beyond which that voice came, she beheld a figure of whose identity as Casus Aristedes she had little doubt. It was either him, or the Hashem Family had managed to kidnap two Pilgrim Banishers.

His sleek form rose up from a curled-up heap on the ground with a not-quite-human grace, languidly sitting up on a wallside cot. Between his build and slickness of motion, the banisher could’ve passed for a street-samurai wetwared to the gills with motoric coprocessors and xenotech nerve accelerators. For all she knew about Pilgrim Banishers, he could very well be this world’s equivalent to that; even the best of the best could get captured by normals if they got caught off-guard badly enough. The faint phantom pain in Krahe’s neck was testament to that.

Much like the Zaveshian receptionist, his skin was segmented into plates, though coloured in shades of periwinkle and blue rather than purple. Unlike the receptionist, Casus possessed a nose and even hair, with a substantially shorter third-eye slit from between his horizontal eyes to the top of his forehead, where his hairline began. As for his hair it was long, far too long for one who presumably used similarly form-fitting armor to the belt-users she’d seen thus far; it was swept to one side, cascading down his back and chest to just below his ribcage. At a glance it seemed white, but it was pearlescent in the light and revealed the faintest of blue shades. Pointed ears stuck out of this mane, almost exactly sideways.