38 - One-woman Death Squad Pt. 2 [Cherno]

That wasn’t a person, staring at Valza from across the butcher’s kitchen, wearing her sister’s boots. Those boots, which Shiva had inherited from their late father; she would’ve sooner died than part with them, and so Valza was utterly certain this raven-haired anathemist had killed her. He was once a renowned freelance contractor, fallen at the soulbeast-muscled, steel-boned fists of a Zaveshian graft-apostle. It had been a minor miracle that there was even a fight, but a fight there was, and the story of that fight was still told to this day… Every once in a while, in certain parts of the city, usually in bars the old man used to frequent. But what mattered was that he was remembered by strangers over a decade after his death, and Shiva told his story whenever she could.

Shiva, in her ever-brash personage, would’ve willfully ignored the signs, but Valza could scarcely ignore it. That stare, the posture, the sense that she could kill at a moment’s notice. Sure, Valza was a gangster, she’d maimed and murdered, but she hadn’t ever done it lightly. Even pit-fighters had to separate themselves from the hyperviolence of their profession somewhat, even they were just normal people outside the pit. And those anathema burns, by Zavesh, she ought to be curled up on a grafter’s table begging for painkillers, not gripping a gun with those fingers as if it didn’t so much as itch.

This green-eyed demon, she wasn’t a person anymore. Like one of the few soldiers who came back from the Third Saglasian Secession War missing limbs only to get themselves fixed up with gun-arms and write memoirs about how much fun they had.

Valza knew that look, that subtle tension, the near-tangible willingness to kill just to overcome a perceived obstacle. Mr. Hashem had that look in his eyes, and it was that look of his which so effortlessly turned his rabid dog of a son into a pacified puppy.

She gathered what courage she could and pulled the trigger, unsurely hoping that a Red Reaper would put her down. Shiva had given her one of her own guns, and maddened by grief, Valza hoped that this strike from beyond the grave would help avenge her sister. The green-eyed demon ducked under it as if she’d known exactly when it would come, and in panic, Valza sprinted to the upper floor to try and warn everyone… As fast as she could, given her footwear.

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Lipstick was shouting. That wasn’t good. There went the stealthy approach, right out the window. On the landing between floors, Krahe caught up to her. Those stupid-looking platform boots had turned her gait into a hobble.

Her life was brought to an end by a kick to the knee from behind, and as she crumpled to the ground and her ankle rolled in a way it absolutely shouldn’t, Krahe caught her. She caught her with her left arm, and put her dagger right into her back, and hit her with enough power to put out a full-scaled Cinder Flash, expecting her Wards to be as strong as Shiva’s. They weren’t. No sooner did her knife sever Lipstick’s spine that the heat-blast ripped straight out the front of her Wards, and the flash-boiling of her bodily fluids blasted the woman's chest cavity onto the nearby window pane.

Krahe immediately started Purging and raised her gun up the stairway, hearing two sets of footsteps approach. As she fired off four rounds in rapid succession, a hail of fingerbones peppered her chest. Soon thereafter their source dropped to the ground, gurgling, made to drown in his own blood by way of ballistic tracheotomy. His Wards had put up enough resistance that the bullet couldn’t sever his spine. Those fingerbones hit like .22LRs and put a good dent in her Wards, she had to give him that. If he could maintain that firepower he would’ve been a real threat, had she had her Barrier raised that would’ve thrown her into Meltdown; unfortunately, gangsters lacked the tactical sense to assess threats and use cover. Or perhaps they lacked the hard-earned instinct to treat everything as a potential combat situation.

Unfortunately, the other man did have the good sense to rush her while she was still purging, and her two remaining rounds bounced right off his seething-blue full-body Barrier. It was unique in that it conformed to his shape, resembling a suit of shimmering armor rather than an ovoid bubble. He came at her blasting rays of that same seething-blue out of his hands, eyes, and even mouth, and ripped sizable holes in her Wards despite her best efforts at active projectile avoidance. Krahe had no choice but to use a simple takedown, once more exploiting the fact neither Barriers nor Wards did jack shit against grappling. It wasn’t long before both his arms had been liberated of their sockets and she had her knife against the back of his head, kneeling on his neck.

He just about got his shit together enough to start pleading by the time she charged another Armor-hunter, bottoming out her own Entropy tolerance to be sure. As she’d expected, the man’s Barrier-armor flared to life a second before she brought the knife to bear against the back of his head. Much like holding one’s breath, Krahe held the massive Anathema charge as she got up and simply kicked him a few times. The impact of steel toecaps made his Barrier ring like a glass bell. Just as he struggled to get back up, she pressed the knife into his back and released the pulse. The only thing his stalwart struggle for life brought him was a messy death, leaving the man melting down with a wound in his back just deep enough to expose his spine. Another pass with the knife did the rest. At that height, her blade reached his heart through the wound.

Hearing only vague, distant commotion perhaps two floors up, Krahe took a few moments to reload and pull the Voidkeys from the corpses surrounding her. All were significantly inferior performance-wise to the Warding Chain, but they would be good money once she could sell them; that is to say, once there was no Hashem mafia left to go after whoever she sold them to.