34 - Thaumaturge Battle Pt. 2 [Cherno]

“Krahe. Yours?” she asked, taking a long drag. The thought that ran through her head was a consideration of whether this was just her foe trying to buy time, or some gangster equivalent to a feudal-era name exchange to ensure one could claim an opponent’s bounty.

“Shiva.”

“Nice to kill you, Shiva,” she said, exhaling another Smoke Eruption as she spoke. Shiva was ready, conjuring several blade-ended, wildly-writhing chains and whipping her smokescreen apart before it could even settle.

Krahe closed the distance without uttering another word, ducking to the left and raising her barrier on that side. Another graze from the homing yellow tendril, and just that was enough to fill her Entropy tolerance halfway. Several chains ripped at her back, managing to grab into her bodysuit and tear shallow claw marks through it. Having already dropped her Barrier, she triggered a Purge as the dropped gun came into her hand.

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Shiva couldn’t believe just how suicidal that woman acted; not only was she an anathemist, the way she held herself suggested that she fully believed she could win. Taking down two low-ranking wise guys, barely better than hired muscle, meant little , even if she had done so in admittedly effective fashion; Shiva herself was barely above them in rank, sure, but at least she had real combat experience and a decent Voidkey. There was something else that gave Shiva cause for concern; the way she dodged her Thaumshot. Shiva was all out of imbued Thaumshot by this point, and would have no choice but to rely on normal Thaumaturgy to dispose of this freak.

She activated one of her unique boons, allowing her to appraise someone nearly undetectably, whilst also penetrating most anti-appraisal defenses that she could expect to see.

“5th-level Cinder Mage with a Purgation Chimney? She must’ve gotten her hands on someone else’s voidkey just a few weeks ago and now she thinks she can go against the Hashem Family… Strong base attributes. Explains the explosives. She could’ve set them up ahead of time, though she probably overdrafted or used an entropy shunt to get that much power out of them.”

Her train of thought got thrown off when her opponent raised her own gun to her, as if she didn’t know that Thaumshot could only work for the one who imbued it or someone they designated as its user.

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Click.

Nothing.

A half-disbelieving, half-mocking laughter echoed from Shiva’s mouth.

“Some kind of ID-lock?” Krahe guessed.

Krahe pulled back the hammer and ran the trigger again, emitting a faux-frustrated sigh of defeat. It was a motion of disguise; she used it to conjure the Blasting Ring into her hand, and with some slight of hand, slipped it onto her finger.

“Fine, you’ve got me. Was that a good enough showing to join the Hashem Family? Because that’s all I got,” she lied, spewing whatever ridiculous nonsense she could think of to play for confusion. The split-second it bought her was enough to throw the gun back to its rightful owner, who reflexively grabbed for it, only for Krahe to close her fist and pour Thauma into the Blasting Ring. Faint orange light ran down her arm. Two shots in a row; these shockwaves weren’t enough to hurt Shiva, but they did suffice to catch her off-guard, and more importantly, to send her gun flying out of reach. Krahe purged the small bit of Entropy and instantly collapsed her flame into a miniature sun, pouring that power into her open palm whilst unloading three shots straight into Shiva’s midsection.

Even these gunshots didn’t quite punch holes into her Wards, but they did the work that was needed. The emberlike glow of her arm shifted in hue to an ominous hue of reddest red, alarm appearing in her foe’s face.

“CINDER… FLASH!”

There was no need for her to cry out the Thaumaturgy’s name. She did it purely out of the hope that it would distract, intimidate, or both. To Shiva’s credit, she used the charge time to perform a partial aim-dodge. Hellish light and swirling cinders issued from Krahe’s arm and a loud buzz accompanied it, catching Shiva on the left arm and part of her chest. Krahe swept her arm in the direction of her enemy’s travel, the pulse’s brief duration allowing for the adjustment.

Layers of tightly-wound bronze chains made themselves known, only for them to be torn away from Shiva’s body and disintegrate into dust. She managed to raise her Barrier quickly enough to catch the last one-third of the pulse, and this, too, took the form of swirled-together chains, with gaps between them for her to see through. Nonetheless, her skin bubbled and charred from the heat and a portion of her vest went up in flames and acrid smoke, exposing the plates of metal within.

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Shiva felt absolute wild-eyed panic grip her being as that horrifying heatwave smashed into her, the sickness of Anathema washing over and into her being as it ripped apart her Wards. Its raw power was easily comparable to one of her Yellow Atropals, and though it couldn’t home in like them… It was a Thaumaturgy, not a Thaumshot, and what was worse, that abomination wasn’t melting down. She was just casually Purging, an aura of smoke swirling about her, with that Pattner-type gun raised to Shiva’s chest.

That gun, too, hit like a truck. It hit hard enough to make Shiva reconsider whether it was just another reproduction, as was the reasonable assumption to make; those three shots she’d taken had whittled her Wards down to a fraction of total strength, after they had already been badly weakened by the explosive traps. She prided herself on being able to eat one of her own Red Reapers head-on just with her Wards, but they’d been weakened enough for even this attack to punch through. She quickly rolled to the side, dropping her barrier lest she risk getting forced into Meltdown. Two more shots smashed into her back, and one hit her left shoulder.