33 - Thaumaturge Battle [Cherno]

A bright-red torpedo of screaming magic sailed right into the wall behind her as she slipped beneath and to the right of its trajectory. Its fulgent detonation, which roused memories of plasma warheads, ripped a man-sized hole into the building and sent both rubble and arcs of red lightning flying every which way, temporarily obscuring Krahe’s position and pelting her with small stones. The one single crimson arc which found its way to her gouged a deep hole into her Wards and put a hole in her bodysuit. Luckily it was in an awkward location on her upper back, and as far as she could feel it was a purely surface injury. Concussed by the impact and still reeling from it, Krahe briefly felt her own perception of time come to a near-halt. An adrenaline rush.

In terms of her own survival the best option was to just run, but that was not a choice she could make. There were no good escape routes, and if she let the biker woman live, she would report back and the entirety of the Hashem Family might come down on her. As quickly as she could, Krahe dragged from her cigarette and blasted out a deluge of smoke; an Anathema-imbued Smoke Eruption. The smoke tasted absolutely rancid this go round, it even burned her throat a little. This go round the lanky woman pulled her other gun, and the light which issued from it burned yellow, while her two henchmen looked around in confusion. To their credit they both caught themselves; Fatboy smashed his fists together and conjured flaming gauntlets of some sort alongside a small barrier of flames right in front, while Slim raised a barrier of purple-glowing brambles that enshrouded most of his body, even as his eyes teared up and he held back a cough. With her free hand, Mohawk handed her other gun to Slim through his Barrier, followed by an ominously red-glowing ball in quick succession. He shoved it into the barrel, reloading the arcane firearm much like the muzzle loaders it resembled.

Mohawk fired at where Krahe had been a moment earlier. This time, a bright yellow tendril ripped forth and smashed into the wall just behind Krahe, curving in an attempt to hit her, tearing a swiftly-growing hole into her smokescreen. She heard the lanky woman swear in frustration as chunks of shattered, half-molten brickwork struck her on the back. It was another graze, but she felt the spray of ash as her lower back’s Wards were ablated down to a fraction of their strength. A homing attack, but less than half the strength of that crimson torpedo.

Circling the group, Krahe initiated a Purge, hoping her smokescreen would conceal it. She shot Slim in the back of the head through the gap in his Barrier twice in quick succession. His Ward held up. Once. Blood and brain matter splattered the inside of his barrier before he crumpled, seizing in place. Krahe managed to dropkick Slim before he could hand Mohawk her reloaded gun, the firearm careening through the air several meters. She used a handspring to get back to her feet just as Mohawk raised her other gun without reloading it, a faint yellow glow still present in its barrel.

“The ammo must function as batteries…” she thought. Slim had gotten up nearly as quickly as Krahe, already trying to come at her with those flaming gauntlets of his.

Making a cautionless bet with fate, Krahe rushed in and delivered a push kick, immediately ducking behind Slim so that Mohawk wouldn’t think to fire another crimson torpedo. Their proximity made the second of Mohawk’s yellow tendrils miss her altogether, its velocity and turn rate insufficient at this range. The biker-woman stumbled back a few steps, still visibly unsure as to what exactly had transpired. She angrily drew another pistol from inside her vest, trying to line up a shot on Krahe while Slim engaged her in a close-quarters battle.

Krahe, however, intended no such thing. She hopped backwards and put two bullets into Slim, the man holding up a bare-knuckle boxer’s guard and in so doing generating a small Barrier of wavering flame. She had guessed that those gauntlets had to be constantly generating Entropy, thus significantly reducing his ability to deal with incoming impacts against his Barrier. By his reaction to the first bullet, she decided to attach a Deathsmoke Tracer to the followup, and her read on him proved right. The second gunshot sent him straight into Meltdown, flames belching out of his mouth and nostrils and his gauntlets flickering out. Lastly, the Deathsmoke Tracer which it dragged along smashed straight into his chest just below his neck. It wasn’t enough to kill him on the spot, his Wards made sure of that, but it did send him stumbling back. The plasma ripped his flesh to shreds and bared his sternum, whilst the ravenous fury of its pyroclast continued to eat away at his flesh.

Perhaps thinking herself clever, Mohawk tried one of the older tricks in the book; using a dying ally as cover for a killshot. Krahe had fully anticipated this, and by the time the crackling rocket ripped through the air, she was already two meters out of its path and Mohawk was left standing there, looking like a moron with an empty RPG-7. Two seconds later, the missile’s impact could be heard from a couple tens of meters down the alleyway.

They stared one another down. Mohawk holstered the gun from which she had fired the red missile and began reloading the other. A mottled, cracked metal sphere, faint yellow light snaking over its surface. Krahe took that opportunity to reload for herself, stowing the near-empty clip in her pocket for later.

“So be it. I will give you this: You’ve earned every bit of pain that’s coming to you. What’s your name, moron?!”

Krahe openly summoned a cigarette into her hand, letting Mohawk see the Kenoma Pocket’s fanged grin before she flicked the cigarette into her mouth. A flick of her thumb to ignite.