37 - One-woman Death Squad [Cherno]

Taking the knife in her left hand, she moulded a mass of compressed pyroclast around its handle and down the flat of its blade, with vents facing the edge and point and channels leading to them from the handle. The design came out quickly, not because she had any great mastery over Thaumaturgy, but because she was just using Thaumaturgy to create a crude copy of a knife she was intimately familiar with: a Wolf and Raven Mark 7 Plasma Stinger. The reason to encrust the handle was to maintain a line for energy to flow where it would be needed, as her understanding of nanite constructs informed her treatment of Thaumaturgy-based ones. The blade would, in her mind, function by funneling and focusing a smaller-scale, more focused Cinder Flash around the blade to erode armor and flesh, making way for the blade itself. The high temperatures involved wouldn’t be an issue, since it would be a pulsed attack and she didn’t plan on using this knife for long. A brief test proved the theory correct, at least as far as funneling the power of Cinder Flash through the construct-enhanced blade. It still had the issue of requiring Thaumic Fusion to function, leaving her with a limited number of shots before she would need to turn to normal magic. How many exactly, she couldn’t tell; between her arm’s capacity and her own tolerance, twenty was an optimistic estimate. Ten if she really poured on the power output.

Maintaining the construct itself demanded a constant supply of Thauma, but it didn’t place any significant strain on her passive dissipation when not in use, only rising in demand when she stressed it. When she needed to reload her gun, she could just palm the knife into the Kenoma Pocket.

As she left her hiding place with the knife in one hand and her gun in the other, she pulled up the [Thaumaturgies] submenu. The dagger, it seemed, was sufficiently differentiated from Cinder Flash to count as its own technique.

[Cinder Armor-hunter]

[Tags:]

Second-order

Cinder Element

Burst Beam

Energetic Damage

Weapon Support Construct

Anathemism

[Details:]

A mass of compressed pyroclast formed around any short (sub-30cm) blade.

Its unstable construct-matter requires Thauma to retain coherence. When supplied with the high-energy output of Thaumic Fusion, the construct automatically produces a compact, ultra-short-duration Burst Beam.

Linear input/output scaling. Burst intensity scales with energy input.

Burst Beam has an approx one-meter range with a hard cutoff.

Inflicts heavy, high-precision Energetic damage.

Inflicts a pseudo-lacerative effect against flesh (hydrothermal rupture).

Avoiding those searching for her wasn’t difficult, they were loud and boisterous and announced their presence readily. Even those who kept their voices down stomped loudly enough to hear coming. The first unavoidable barrier: Two men in the alleyway leading to her target street. They spotted her peek out from behind the corner; they called out, demanding to know who she was. Krahe responded by shouting that she had found Shiva dead nearby, alongside four other bodies too mangled to recognize. The bait worked as far as it needed to: getting the two to come closer so she could hit the both of them with a short-fused Burster. One survived, reeling, crawling on the ground; she soccer-kicked him in the head. Once, twice, thrice, until his brain matter signed an impressionistic death certificate on the nearby wall. Some might see it as unnecessarily brutal, but this was a matter of preserving resources, and Krahe wasn’t opposed to brutality in the slightest. This grizzly scene would have a stronger psychological effect on the returning patrols than clean kills. Terror was among a lone warrior’s best weapons against a superior force.

Krahe approached the butcher shop cautiously and quickly, minimizing the amount of time she spent within sightline of the building’s windows. There was just one person visible through the storefront.

She rushed in and took down the man across the counter with a flying headscissor, pulling his arm back until it popped out of the socket. It was a surprise that it even worked; she’d expected his Wards to resist, but no such thing came to pass, as if he didn’t have a Voidkey to begin with. Lifting him up by his good arm and twisting it behind his back as she pressed her knife against him, she hissed in his ear: “Try anything and I’ll fry you until there’s nothing left but a pile of meat on the ground and a greasy shadow on the wall, understood?”

The only response was a vaguely affirmative whimper of pain and fear.

“Casus Aristedes, Mamon Knight Silberblut. Pilgrim Banisher. Ring a bell?”

Another whimper of affirmation.

“Up… Upstairs. Top floor, dunno any more. I don’t care who you’re with, just don’t kill me. Please, I just run the butchershop, I’ve got no stake in this gang shit-” he begged. Krahe silenced him by choking him out, then broke his shin by holding his leg still and kicking it. It was to ensure he couldn’t run away and warn others, in case he had lied in his plea. She shifted him a bit so he wouldn’t try to stand on the busted leg; it wasn’t an act of cruelty, but simple pragmatism.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t gone as unnoticed as she would’ve liked. In the back of the butchershop, right there in the doorway, another figure awaited her, gun in hand and bright-red glow roaring in its barrel.

Another female gangster, dressed similarly to Shiva. A notable difference: heavy eyeshadow, dark-green lipstick. She regarded Krahe for a moment; her eyes ventured downwards, and an appalled and infuriated expression gripped her features at the sight of Krahe’s boots. With that tensing, so too did her hand tense, and Krahe instinctively leapt down into a near-quadrupedal scramble, raising a Barrier above herself. Red lightning lashed at it as its source, another of those crimson rockets, flew overhead and wrecked a portion of the storefront. The windows blew out. She hoped the butcher was unharmed.

Krahe would’ve risen up from the ground to try and take down her foe, but the one she’d mentally nicknamed Lipstick had already fled up the stairs. She gave chase, and soon caught Lipstick in her sights.