10 - Deathsmoke Burster [Cherno]

“Probably further along in… Digestion?” she thought, hoping that they were indeed just digesting their prey.

Krahe took her gun and pressed it to a spot she thought to be the parasite’s head… Then reconsidered. Would a gunshot wake the other parasites? Would it even matter?

She walked past, hearing relief turn to terror once more.

Once she’d passed the precipice and was securely out in the open, she turned around. Her eyes met the molten man’s.

Somehow, he managed to gurgle out three words: “Jhufst… Khill… Mgheee…”

Krahe took stock of the flesh mounds inside. Eight.

She raised her hand to the man and started burning Thauma. The candle-flame in her palm went out as smoke and glittering particles erupted from the many creases of her arm, swirling about the limb, illuminated by its emberlike glow. At this point, she was getting used to that vaguely sickly feeling; enough that it didn’t really feel “sickly”. It was the feeling of Entropy, nothing more or less.

Release.

A fiery core jacketed in smoke and volcanic glass zipped through the doorway, splattering right atop of the parasite and its still-conscious victim. A shadow burned into the wall and quivering flesh-remnants were left behind, their edges eaten away by Deathsmoke Tracer’s aftereffect.

“Yeah, I’d say calling it deathsmoke is accurate…” she admitted to herself. The system had named the Thaumaturgy as such due to “deathsmoke” being a colloquial term for airborne nanite-weapons. Once she was sure none of the other flesh-masses had started moving, she took a moment to fiddle with the flow of burning Thauma inside her arm, generating more smoke and flame, gathering it into the palm of her hand in an effort to form something more appropriate to room-clearing. These things would make for great testing targets, and she wasn’t about to just leave them here and risk it biting her in the ass later; she had no way to know that they wouldn’t turn into fully formed parasites in minutes, hours, or however-long it took her to get out of this place. Just as with Deathsmoke Tracer, it was a core of flame jacketed by smoke and ash, having taken over twice as much power to generate. She was trying to make a grenade, but unsurprisingly, the result was disappointing given the power input. When tossed into the midst of three flesh-masses, its explosion was just barely sufficient to tear the three apart, and it left behind noticeably more remnants than the Deathsmoke Tracer.

It instantly appeared among her [Thaumaturgies], but she didn’t pay it much mind beyond its name, wanting to eliminate the remaining flesh-mounds as quickly as possible.

[Deathsmoke Burster]

She figured she could probably make the Burster exhibit performance metrics closer to a real combat explosive if she just put more power into it, but the time and effort it would take would limit its combat usefulness to being an opener; a viable surprise attack tool, not much else. Deathsmoke Tracer was still more practical, and with its flesh-shredding wroth she disposed of the others. Investigating the gore-splattered room, Krahe found that the remnants of two of the parasites were still twitching, both the parasites’ and victims’ eyes tracking her movements. Safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t be able to attack, she formed another Burster in her hand and just kept burning as much as she could withstand, to the very edge of tolerance. It took nearly twenty seconds, and in this time she looked around the room; among the gore were some remnants of clothing, but her disposal tactics had already damaged it beyond use. The fact it was all slathered in rancid bodily fluids made it easy to leave behind. Exiting once more, she tossed the burster in from behind the corner. There came a low, rumbling roar, not quite an explosion, which reminded her of a gas pump catching fire. A pyroclastic deluge poured out from the door and windows, flashes of red light streaking through.

The only remnants to be found when the smoke cleared were shadows burned into the floor and walls.

Moving on from the site before the noise and stench could attract other nearby parasites, Krahe continued experimenting with thaumaturgy as she journeyed up the city’s spiral. A few parasites here and there readily offered themselves up as target practice. Hitting moving targets as jumpy as them using Tracers alone was difficult and inconsistent, effectively forcing her to attach them to bullets for consistency. Eight more bullets gone.

Krahe attempted to apply her magic to a more close-range method of direct attack, a pyroclastic shotgun of sorts; simply dispersing a Tracer rather than focusing it into a projectile produced some results, but it was… More of a gust than a shotgun-blast.

“I just can’t make high-velocity projectiles on my own, huh? How about a flamethrower instead?” she thought.

Her throughput turned out insufficient for this application as well; she couldn’t burn Thauma quickly enough to feed a flow any larger than a meter in length, and it wasn’t flame as much as it was a great deal of pyroclast with some flame in there. A barrier easily overcome by charging her arm as she would with the Tracer, then using a flow of Thauma to direct it outward as a stream rather than a projectile. Releasing it all at once through her arm, then, did work. Out poured a forceful pyroclastic flow that sanded out a noticeable pit in the rock wall she was using for a target, with some flame splashing against the stone and scorching it. The recoil was substantial enough that she had to brace lest she lose her balance.

[Deathsmoke Spray]

She figured she could apply a similar charge-up to eventually arrive at something resembling an actual shotgun-blast, but for now, this was good enough, even though it built up a fair bit more entropy than a baseline Tracer.

Krahe took a moment to give both the Spray and Burster a closer look. They both shared their basic properties with the Tracer, effectively just being alternate delivery mechanisms that lacked the Tracer’s special bimodal functionality and damage-over-time.