14 - Deadman [Cherno]

She took a few moments to reload her gun, stowing the empty clip and shell casings in the Kenoma Pocket, conjuring the knife into her hand before she closed it… At least she tried to. It slipped out of her hand and clattered to the ground, eliciting an annoyed groan as she picked it up. The blade found its way into the heads and between the tendons of each mutant she’d put down, just to make absolutely sure they were dead and couldn’t get up even if they somehow survived an impromptu trepanning-and-lobotomy-all-in-one. She’d seen more severe head trauma fail to put down a barely-augmented man.

As she walked away, Krahe realized that she could’ve just blown them all to bits at once with a Burster, or done so without the associated noise using Spray. With a chuckling sigh, she stored the knife away and continued her journey to the surface, trying to replicate that projected shield-esque phenomenon as she went. It didn’t take too long to get a grip on it, there was just one problem - that swirling umbrella of pyroclast ate up an utterly impractical amount of Entropy, demanding her to build up a charge just to make it stick around for a few seconds. Once formed, its distance from her and relative angle was stationary. Combined with how much Entropy it had taken to stop a relatively slow-moving mass of sixty kilos, Krahe assumed that it would be far from her preferred option. She thought it was a niche, unrefined defensive Thaumaturgy spawned by a spontaneous self-preservation impulse. It didn’t even show up in her menu, in her mind proving that it would take a fair bit more work to produce a practical magical defense.

Half of her hoped that this world’s knowledge of magic was as advanced as her own world’s other sciences, while the other half hoped it to be the opposite so that she could leverage her own pre-existing knowledge somehow. Both were true to some degree, as she would soon learn.

Without any further incident she finally reached the lift; that towering spire into the open, bright-blue sky. It was situated at the far end of an outcrop towards the pit’s center, mechanical crucifixes lined up on either side and the remnants of an ominous monument standing right in front of the lift. It, just like the statue in the temple, had been surgically cut off right above its base. She was completely ready for the lift to turn out non-functional, but she meant to try it nonetheless, especially since, just as the camp, it clearly hadn’t been abandoned for long. Its ground level was flanked on either side by chunky machines with dials and gauges that were connected to the lift by black cables; generators, she guessed.

A press of the only button on the lift’s exterior proved her correct. Both machines hummed to life with a weird churning sound, soon followed by distant, quickly-approaching rattling from above.

The cabin came to a surprisingly smooth halt, given its build; it had a sliding grill gate and walls of the same design. Two corpses waited within. One was a man slumped against one wall, his intestines spilling out as if his stomach had been ripped open… The other was, as she suspected, the perpetrator of that violation, still attached to his back, its “tail” visibly going through the poor fool’s pants. The mutant’s head had been blown off, and the same went for the back of the dead man’s skull, but she could find no gun on or near the corpse. His left arm was longer than the right, its skin slightly the wrong shade.

“At least he took the easy way out before he got eggmorphed…” she thought as she gave a closer look. The gate rattled like hell when she pulled it open.

He was charred on his right side since it faced the center of the pit, but not completely melted or even burned. Krahe dragged him out of the lift, so that none of his possessions would inconveniently fall down to a lower level. Once she ensured that the parasite was dead, she took to rummaging through the dead man’s possessions.

The dead man had several things on him: Silver-framed glasses, two small, faintly-glowing, pale-blue gemstones in brass frames, a weird rectangular device, and a stone-and-metal cartridge.

The device resembled a pocket hologram projector, with a round, crystalline lens on one end and an empty slot at the other, into which the cartridge fit. One of its longer, narrow sides had a few buttons with weird symbols that Krahe nevertheless understood to be equivalents of Play, Pause, Forward, Back, Stop, and Eject. It didn’t function when she slotted the cartridge into place, prompting her to turn it over and notice that it had a dull, grey gem slotted into its underside, shaped identically to one of the gems she’d found in the dead man’s pockets.

She set it aside, her attention caught by a spike of some sort embedded in the side of the man’s head, just behind the ear right where one would have datachit slots or cable plugs installed - that was also the reason she had checked there, out of habit. The weird spike gleamed the colours of brass or perhaps bronze; its head was the shape of a flat-topped triangle about three centimeters on each side, embedded with a small amethyst stone at each point, which were connected by a silver-inlaid geometric pattern dominated by a smaller triangle which was inverted in facing compared to the spike’s head  itself. In the smaller triangle’s center was a weird, elaborate rune that she couldn’t read. It looked like a kanji if kanji had evolved from ancient cuneiform. Bracing her right hand against his head, she gripped the spike with her left and pulled… Only for it to come out with barely any resistance at all, leaving no trace that anything had ever been stabbed into the spot. The spike's body was a three-winged key that tapered to a needlepoint, each wing about a millimeter wide and covered in complex etchings. The whole thing was about as long as her index finger and thrummed with the same energy as the glasses and stones, but far more intensely.