36 - Warding Chain [Cherno]

[HEADKICKERS, HEIRLOOM COMBAT BOOTS]

[Status:]

Exceptional

[Details:]

These boots will adjust to perfectly fit their wearer.

They can shrink down to half or grow to twice their original size.

These boots actively repel filth and expel filth produced by the wearer through the soles. This expelled filth is denatured in the process, making it useless for tracking, and evaporates within five minutes.

These boots passively repair themselves over time. This process can be accelerated by supplying Thauma. Breaks can be made to mend instantly by applying a sufficient amount of Thaumine (DDs).

These boots once belonged to a foolish old man who didn’t know when to lie down and die. The wearer’s sense of balance is strengthened, and supplying Thauma allows the wearer to produce a light anchoring effect on any surface touched by the soles of these boots.

Krahe had good reason to have gone for the boots over other loot. Pants and jackets were easy to find, a size discrepancy wasn’t a dealbreaker. But good quality, fitting footwear was a huge pain to find, and could last decades. With cybernetic limbs, footwear sizes became even more standardized and anything that deviated yet further drifted into the realm of expensive custom-made things.

As for Shiva’s voidkey, it was… Interesting, at least its physical design. Its body looked similar to the keys she’d seen at Garvesh’s, a thick, rough iron spike with a wide head. Its surface had been polished and inscribed with ominous sigils, then wrapped in silver chain with brass rivets holding the chain to its body. In short, it was the definition of edgy. The Prospector’s Eyes confirmed her assumption; it was handmade. It didn’t grant any unique Boons, but its characteristics were superior to those of Purgation Chimney in nearly every way. She put it in her Kenoma Pocket to get a look at it, and found that despite listing the same numbered letter grade for Throughput, the system signaled that it was greater than that of Purgation Chimney.

[SHIVA’S WARDING CHAIN, WROUGHT IRON VOIDKEY]

[Tags:]

Second-order

Voidkey

[Details:]

Thaumic Throughput +F1^

Entropy Tolerance +F3

Entropy Dissipation +F2

Barrier Catalyst (Basic)

Ward Catalyst (Basic Hardened)

Ward Hardening +E1

Krahe pulled her Voidkey and implanted Shiva’s Warding Chain. Drawing on Thauma to test out the change, she estimated the increase to have been some 10-15% over the Purgation Chimney. As for her Tolerance and Dissipation, there was a world of difference. She could now fire off two Cinder Flashes in quick succession. A metaphorical double-barreled shotgun; the perfect tool for what she would need to do tonight.

After all, she’d just put down one of Semzar’s lieutenants like an animal, just after the woman had come after her no-less. She’d probably told whoever was still back at that butcher’s shop. Moreover, these boots were a bright holographic sign screaming “I killed Shiva, come get me!”. Krahe liked these boots, she liked them very much, enough that the desire to wear them was a very real factor in her decision to go back to that butcher’s shop, extract Casus Aristedes, and fumigate the place.

There was no doubt in her mind that whoever guarded that place outstripped her in terms of raw attributes... But these were gangsters. People not used to dealing with a put-together opposing force. Sure, gang wars were brutal, and the mafia walked hand in hand with assassination, but that was one thing. Small-time gangsters folded like paper dolls when put up against a militarized force, or more appropriately to Krahe’s case, someone with the skillset to infiltrate and depopulate a high-security corporate blacksite. Even full on killer psychopaths often didn’t know how to deal with someone able, willing, and trained to fight an objectively superior enemy.

She took a bit to prepare; first she pulled everything unnecessary out of her Kenoma Pocket and moved it to the Kenoma Sack, then did the reverse by moving all her ammo into the Kenoma Pocket for fast access. In this process, Krahe also learned that she could now open the Kenoma Sack much faster than at first, guessing that it had to do with her own improved grasp of Thaumaturgy and the reinforcement to her Throughput from Shiva’s Voidkey. Though by no means a combat knife, the blade she had taken from the camp in Jas’raba was still thick, sharp, and with a good stabbing point. After a brief once-over to ensure it had a full tang rather than a break prone rat-tail, she slipped it behind her belt. Krahe was never a close-combat specialist, but she also hadn’t avoided it, since her radiation blasters, much like Cinder Flash, had excelled at close ranges. She had undergone both real and virtual close-combat training in various styles, even seeking out an enigmatic martial arts master deep in Sector 7 to learn his own particular brand of martial arts. Simply named the “Sector 7 Anti-Cyborg Style”, it was a brutal, hybridized system built out of elements from a myriad of martial arts; these included Oshchepkov-style Sambo, Krav Maga, and Escrima, among others. The man she’d learned it from, an unassuming figure named “Sauer”, had also suggested the existence of techniques specifically for leveraging one’s own cybernetics to destroy “Walking Superweapon” type cyborgs, but she’d never gotten far enough to learn even one.

A bitter taste surfaced in her mouth. She had died only weeks from her next visit with Sauer, a visit during which he had promised to teach her one of these mythical techniques. She hoped that he was still waiting, since the alternative was that her fusion bomb Dead Man’s Switch had killed him.

Krahe’s reason to metaphorically dust off this skill set was simple: She had no intent to fight fair, and besides her gun, she lacked any good methods of overwhelming Barriers. Thus, her best choice was to just come after people close-in, bypass their barriers, and pierce through their Wards to kill them without ever getting into a fight.

There was a flaw to this tactic; a knife wasn’t well-suited for anti-armor combat. Sector 7 Anti-Cyborg Style solved this by simply assuming that the practitioner had a vibroblade or some other anti-armor capable short weapon; a reasonable assumption to make.

Krahe decided to hack-together her own “armor-hunter dagger”.