13 - Bread and Barriers [Cherno]

“Hard Entropy? How is it different from normal Entropy?” she thought, but no answer came even when she queried [Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom]. Leaving the tent, she investigated the rest of the great chamber, and finding no entrances beyond the one which she’d barricaded, she decided she was unlikely to find a better place to sleep. She dreamt of nuclear fire and woke up in a cold sweat, stomach wrenched by hunger and tongue curled up like a dead snake in her mouth. Quenching her thirst, she ventured into the camp once more and combed it through again, hoping to find something to eat.

Bread. Half of a small loaf, dark brown, dense, filled with nuts and seeds. It smelled… Wonderful. Like nothing she’d smelled before. Even somewhat stale, it was still perhaps the most right-tasting food she’d ever eaten. Unadulterated, made from real plants rather than reconstituted starch, with a strong malty scent and taste that she had previously associated only with a caseful of real beer she had stolen and resold for a small fortune. For the first time since her rebirth in this new world - nay, for the first time in decades - she had fully let her guard down… For a piece of stale bread. It barely took half of the piece to banish hunger, and she thought to stash the other half into her Kenoma Pocket for later.

[Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom] guided her hand in opening the rift; it was similar to the “Kenoma Sack”, as the system described it, merely using the palm of her left hand as a surface. With around one-third the Entropy needed to form a basic Tracer - a tiny fraction of her Tolerance - she felt the process take place, the horrid noise sounding as a slit opened up along the fate line of her palm, from her wrist to right between her ring and middle finger. An untoward sense of hesitation led her to carry it out slowly, feeling the skin of her palm recede. She was greeted by a set of pointy, yellow, scrimshawed teeth. That nauseating, wound-like smile.

With a bit more will the hand-mouth opened fully, revealing the same shimmering nothingness as the black tablet’s rift. Just holding it open like this generated more Entropy than she could dissipate, the feeling of buildup slightly more “solid” while the gauge itself rose with a notch delineating what she assumed to be Hard Entropy - whatever that meant. Quickly, she stashed the bread away, though not before taking one more bite. Her Entropy spiked with its insertion, but only slightly. Krahe closed it, shuddering slightly. The imagery of a mouth on her hand wasn’t what did it for her; it was an undefinable, irrational something about the grin that she found unsettling.

After taking a few more minutes to wash herself using the camp’s water-machine, store a knife in the Kenoma Pocket, and retrieve two more ammo clips, she moved on. The flame of hope ignited in her chest as she neared the great lift. As she made her way there, occasionally warding off mutants more likely to use her to make more of themselves than to just eat her, she gradually got a better grasp of using her individual spells. Smoke Eruption served to give her the breathing room to use magic rather than spend the limited resource of ammunition, being a core component of her toolkit just the same as its equivalents had been in her previous life.

It did, however, still impede her vision.

A particularly large and clever mutant had bided its time, reading the smoke’s movements while Krahe was engaged with two of its entirely feral compatriots. It leapt upon her when it thought that she would be most vulnerable, and it was Krahe’s situational awareness alone that alerted her to that sound. She released a Tracer she’d just charged, annihilating the head of the second mutant; the first one still writhed about after she had shredded away its back and with it most of its organs using a Spray seconds earlier.

Just as her smokescreen had started to dissipate, a form at least twice the size of any other creature came flying at her from the left. Krahe whipped around and raised both arms in a defensive gesture, instinctively fusing Thauma. Given the shape’s velocity, she knew even Thaumic Fusion wouldn’t be fast enough to charge and fire off something strong enough to bring it to a halt; certainly not with the four-tenths Entropy that she still had at that moment.

Krahe stopped the Fusion, releasing what charge she had, bracing in preparation to leap backwards, and firing off a bullet in its direction. She hoped that at least the recoil of a Spray would carry her out of its landing zone. Smoke, ash, and sparks erupted from her arm just as the bullet ripped forward, both clearing away what smoke remained and briefly bringing the hulking behemoth of a mutant into view. Driven by her defensive impulse, however, her cinders swirled together barely half a meter in front of her arm… And the mutant slammed into it as if it were a brick wall. There was a crack. Its mass crumpled to the ground in front of her, neck broken, face and upper chest burned and shredded down to bare bone.

She felt her Entropy spike well beyond her tolerance. Gripped by a fit of coughing and heaving, Krahe still found it within her to raise her gun to the thing and put two more bullets into its skull right where it had cracked open.

The consequences of surpassing her own Tolerance weren’t nearly as debilitating or long-lasting this go around; the ache of being irradiated, however, didn’t make it any better, so she shunted as much of it as she could into her arm. She noticed that her Entropy was dissipating in bursts as she coughed and spat, overall a bit faster than normal. This monster, unlike the others, possessed functional, powerful-looking rear legs, short as they were, its arms were freakishly muscular, and its fingers possessed thick claws. It even had hair, long and matted… And burning, right now. Krahe soon felt the cough-puking fit waning, her Entropy having dissipated completely by the time it was over.