Page 14

Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Hand is Shown

T hey eventually “got her” in the loading/unloading area of a small warehouse, insofar as she led them to this place because the layout was advantageous to her and the warehouse, being out of use, would be an easy way to split them up or lose them if things went badly. It was an apparent dead end, but she had been around this area before and knew that the “dead end” wall was just a thin divider separating this unloading area from one of the main roads.

Krahe waited for a short time with her back turned, making it look like she was looking into the warehouse as she lit up a cigarette. Meanwhile, Barzai perched on a nearby railing, covering her blind spot.

“I figured I was being tailed,” she said aloud when the group of five entered after her. No other entrance, no way for them to surround her.

No response. From what Barzai saw, they looked… marginally professional, with masked faces and some armor. Two Mamon Knights with dregsteamers, three thaumaturges, none exuding a particularly impressive aura. The apparent leader was a large, bird-like Saurian with a hooked beak for a mouth; thus, she dubbed him Beak . To his right, an unsettlingly humanlike Saurian with a long beard of feathers and a second, weasley looking one. She named them Beardo and Weasel, with Weasel having a dregsteamer belt. To his left, a second Saurian with a lighter, raptor-like build, and a blonde woman who had the second dregsteamer—Raptor and Blondie. Now that she looked at him, she was sure Raptor was the one she saw earlier. They clearly weren’t true pros, but hired muscle that knew the basic opsec practice of “shut the fuck up.”

Turning on her boot heel, hand already on her gun, Krahe asked, “Let me guess. Sorayah?”

“The identity of our employer is not yours to guess at,” Raptor hissed, but the speed and manner of his reaction betrayed that she was right.

C’mon, oldest trick in the book. She gave the weaseley looking man an amused look. His compatriots stared daggers through him. He squinted, glaring at her, as if he recognized her.

Not one to give up the first mover’s advantage, Krahe dragged down the rest of her cigarette. Simultaneously, she fusion formed a high-pressure burster that would be weak, but loud and messy, erupting into a short-lived burst of smoke and ash. A prototype Concussion Burster by any other name.

With a spark of intent, she willed Barzai to reveal himself and set upon the five. In the split-second where he pulled their attention, she fired the concussion burster into their midst by way of Six Trees Killer. The bullet itself struck one of the Mamon Knights, throwing him off and delaying his transformation by two seconds compared to his counterpart.

The strobe-bursts of Barzai’s eyes briefly preceded bursts of small explosions, springing out of nowhere right on the bodies of Blondie and Raptor. They weren’t enough to break or even seriously damage their wards, but that wasn’t their purpose. Krahe exhaled, shrouding her surroundings in a Smoke Eruption. The rancid taste of Isotope burned her mouth. Despite this onslaught, three of them regained their bearings, firing into the smoke. Krahe felt a mixture of wildly varied projectiles zip by her as she raised a wall from the ground.

Rapid footsteps combined with a dregsteamer’s synthesized voice betrayed one of the Mamon Knights trying to close in. “WARNING: High velocity. Explosive pressure. Stand free.”

Beginning to form the Faust Construct, Krahe met the freshly transformed Mamon Knight in battle. Not a fair, straightforward fight, of course. She skimmed twice in a row around him and dived to further improve her own mobility, emerging only once the construct’s formation had finished and Weasel was facing away from her, around six meters away. A single shot was all it took to send it his way, but true to his armor, he reacted to the gunshot with blistering speed and whipped around to come at her. At this rate, she had maybe a second and a half before he punched her lights out. In this moment of adrenaline, she realized the suppressive fire from before had stopped; the only reason Weasel’s allies stopped shooting, she wagered, had to be that they didn’t want to hit him.

Krahe took the risk and ran ahead to intercept him, unable to dive for a few more seconds. With her rather limited control over the missile, she willed Wandrei Faust to slow down. Another transformation announcement, this time for Omniphage, sounded, and Blondie’s armored feet approached as well.

In the absence of better options, Krahe changed plans from a pincer attack on Weasel to splitting up her resources. She smashed into Weasel with a tendril extended straight punch, pushing dangerously close to meltdown to keep him at bay long enough to regain a skimming charge. Afterwards, she skimmed straight through him, using the opportunity to turn herself around.

With every bit of what little entropy she had, she swung again and sent him flying into her Wandrei Faust. At the moment that punch connected, her tendrils rotted away. At that same moment, right as she punched Weasel with her left hand, she gestured up with her right to impel the Forming Toroid into raising another wall.

Her smoke was dispersing by now due to the battle going on inside it, so despite her best judgment she took a moment to refresh her Smoke Eruption. Barzai, upon Krahe’s command, dive-bombed into Blondie, momentarily keeping her at bay. The attack was enough to exhaust his astral form, and so she bid him to return as she exhaled the next blast of smoke. Her mouth and throat were burning and raw from the Isotope.

Meanwhile, outside the smoke, Beardo fled. He simply turned tail and ran, much to Beak’s and Beardo’s vocal chagrin. The two men gathered their wits, unused to such unreasonable combat conditions. The smoke clearly wasn’t normal; both their eyes were sharp enough to pierce most obscuring thaumaturgies.

That smoke had to be some anathemist trick, but what fool would resort to the risks of anathemism to enhance a mere obscuring thaumaturgy? Then again, it clearly worked wonders, and those summoned walls were far too durable to be simple constructs. That had to be an artifact of some kind. That was what Beak told himself, hoping and praying they weren’t up against some insanely strong mid-ranker with a bottomless entropy tolerance. His cousin certainly hadn’t made it sound like that when she called in a favor to have her dealt with.

Both of them being practitioners of the same thaumaturgic style, Beak and Raptor joined forces in trying to salvage their original plan of attack: The Basilisk Dive, a combination thaumaturgy drawing on their thinned-out Drasaurian genes. While Beak showed some of the signs, Raptor’s only proof of his Drasaurian lineage was his shitty blowtorch breath and his ability to invoke draconic powers via thaumaturgy.

Out from the smoke, a monstrous, flying forearm appeared, dragging Weasel and Blondie over the stone. Weasel screamed while Blondie grunted and struggled to free herself. She slipped out thanks to the fact she had merely been caught in its trajectory and wasn’t actually in the construct’s grasp, but Weasel wasn’t so fortunate; the black arm made an unsteady 180 degree turn, smashing him into the left-hand wall and dragging him back into the smoke. A bright yellow flash followed, accompanied by a horrific sound that neither of the Saurians could describe—the sound of a man in Mamon Armor exploding from the pressure of his own boiling blood.

By now, Blondie had circled around from the right, and the smoke had dissipated enough to see at least silhouettes. What Beak and Raptor beheld were alien shapes erupting from the anathemist’s body, striking at Blondie without regard for the Omniphage armor’s caustic properties. Their sightline was broken by a pair of ominous, blackened jade obelisks, and further disrupted by the fact Weasel had been turned into nothing more than a shadow on the wall and a red puddle spreading over the cobbles below.

???

Krahe knew better than to fight a fresh Mamon Knight in a melee while her entropy was pushing eighty percent, doubly so when her two other foes were using this time to build a ghostly dragon head.

So, she dived, sprinting to the back wall with the intent to skim through it. As she ran, mere steps away, she felt a wave of searing heat surround her, and blinding light filled her vision. She passed unto the other side, emerging and instantly beginning a purge, but as she spun around as to not have her back turned towards the trio, she saw that the thin wall was melting. Unsure of whether those lizards could pull this trick again, she raised her third jade wall today just in case.

By the sound of their shouting, the three weren’t dumb enough to assume she was gone altogether. That was fine. She just needed time to purge. Enveloped in an aura of gray-black smoke, she watched and prepared, cycling her gun to eject the current thaumshot-core cartridge and chamber the next Wandrei Faust. Then, a plan took form in her mind.

A second attack came just moments before her purge finished, and this time she witnessed some of its execution. The ghostly dragon head flew upward and came diving down, spewing some kind of boiling, burning liquid. It was most easily described as acid napalm. The original wall was broken down by now, and the burning acid was eating away at her jade slab. She was certain Goldie was helping it along with the Omniphage armor’s abilities, but she hadn’t heard a Coupler Charge callout, so her caustic output had to be limited.

Meanwhile, Krahe formed a Wandrei Faust, forming a Tar-tendril from her upper arm and wrapping it around the construct. She steadied her feet, aimed her arm upwards, visualized Beak in her mind’s eye… and shot herself. She felt the construct detaching to fly after its target, and willed the tendril to extend, giving her around a meter and a half of standoff from the missile. Once it seemed long enough, she launched herself in the same direction using a diagonally rising pillar of jade. Soaring over the wall, Krahe Fusion-Formed and fired a weak Smoke Eruption grenade into the Saurian brothers’ midst, herself letting go of the Wandrei Faust as she came barreling downward.

She stifled a grin when she saw Blondie moving to eagerly play into her hand by attempting to swat her out of the air. For once, she made use of her barrier, wanting to preserve her access to diving as a safety net. Her downward approach was punctuated by the ominous cracking of the Cinder Strobe, smashing down on Blondie like a cruel sun, visibly deforming her armor. Just before she came into Blondie’s melee range, Krahe executed her premeditated plan: She used one of the secondary features of Astro Skimming to reorient herself, ensuring that Blondie got closely acquainted with the stone underfoot for the second time today.

As Krahe slid that short distance, she wasted no time in giving Blondie a full-tilt Cinder Flash at near-point-blank. The woman, previously struggling, boiled inside her suit before it could even fall apart, blood and fluids gushing out of the joint seams, the undersuit cracking and peeling apart. A visibly charred outline formed around her on the ground, but it was washed away by the continuous leakage from her corpse. As Krahe turned to finish dealing with the Saurian pair, Blondie’s armor emitted a kettle-like whistle for a few moments before it utterly crumbled. The residual omniphage would leave no corpse behind.

Despite the smoke, Krahe saw the two still valiantly maintaining the ghostly dragon.

“Well, since you’re pulling out the big guns…” she thought, holding out her left arm that still glowed an ominous anathemic red. Without an explicit prompt, Barzai erupted from her chest and perched atop her palm, imploding into a seething ball of crimson as Krahe already began forming his tendrilous casement.

Raptor and Beak’s ghostly, somewhat bird-like dragon head turned to glare at her, alarm gripping the two of them at the sight of her.

Krahe pushed and pushed, closing up the shell until, at last, it wouldn’t enclose any further. She briefly thought Barzai was refusing again for some petulant reason, but the next moment, alien words pushed into her mind’s eye. Indistinct and formless, exuding not a linguistic meaning but an altogether more primordial sort of truth. In that instant, she knew that they were the incantation necessary to make the Daemon Core function, just as the talisman was necessary for Wandrei Faust. Despite Barzai serving as the power source, it had to be her who triggered the theurgy.

But no matter how she tried, she couldn’t speak them. They just hung in her mind, three burning keys awaiting a hand to grasp them. The Saurian duo’s dragon head reared back, its form becoming more concrete, and Krahe knew she had only moments before it would drown her in burning acid. She wagered, at best, a fifty-fifty chance that she would manage to get out of the zone of death, given her rapidly rising entropy level and the initial burst of hard entropy she suffered whenever diving. Such was the cost of this theurgy; a high price in entropy to give the shell the necessary properties.

The only option she could think of, besides pushing harder, was to attempt, somehow, someway, using the Wound-like Grin. After all, it manifested itself readily upon her left arm when she wished to access her Kenoma Pocket or to conjure a Tar-tendril. She mentally envisioned a black tendril wrapping around the first word, channeling it into her arm.

A fanged maw yawned open, and Krahe spoke from it. Despite speaking it, she couldn’t hear it. As far as she could tell, no sound came out at all. Beak and Raptor stumbled, clutching their heads. Nonetheless, they persevered in their effort.

The second word came out all the same as the first, opening a second mouth on her forearm. At this point, it felt as if time came to a standstill. Nonetheless, with the mouth in the palm of her hand, she spoke the third, and time resumed.

THREE KEYS TO SWING WIDE THE GATES OF BLACKEST BLACKNESS

THREE WORDS SO MIGHTY NO MORTAL MIND CAN HOLD THEM

THREE brEATHLESS MOUTHS WITH WHICH TO SPEAK THEM

In the palm of her hand, a gordian knot of blackest pitch now hovered. An ominous, rising hum emitted from it, and every once in a while, arcs of black lightning jumped off of it, almost as if the flares of a black sun.

With only a thought and a gesture, she impelled it forwards. This, too, was an advantage of using a True Eidolon; it solved the delivery issue.

Panicking now, Beak and Raptor exchanged glances and began feverishly gesturing, taking more direct control of their dragon head construct to try and shoot down the projectile. The Daemon Core simply dodged past the ghost dragon’s snapping jaws, coming to a halt in mid-air right above the two Saurians.

Krahe engaged a dive and pulled the mental trigger. The Daemon Core’s exterior shifted.

The last thing Beak or Raptor ever saw was that ominous spheroid and a green-eyed demon of billowing smoke.

With a flash of impossibly vivid scarlet and thunderous burst of buzzing noise, they were erased. Neither flesh, nor bones, nor any of their possessions remained; only shadows scorched into the red-hot stones. Only a seething ember was left behind, and it, too, popped out of existence a moment later.

AN EYE OF CRIMSON IMPRISONED IN BLACKNESS

ITS GAZE ERUPTS FORTH TO SCOUR AWAY THE UNWORTHY

BLACK HAND OF DESOLATION: DAEMON CORE

She felt sick.

Not due to her surroundings or what she’d just done, but some strange, non-physical exhaustion. It felt, for lack of a better description, as if the muscle involved in theurgy had been strained to the point of exhaustion. Just thinking about using Wandrei Faust again made feelings of exhaustion and sickliness bubble up… and the words were gone. She decided to try asking Barzai later. For now, she pulled the souldregs out of Blondie’s corpse, taking her dregsteamer belt and moving on to try and find what was left of Weasel. She managed to find his mangled head, which was good enough for the souldreg extractor. His Dregsteamer had also outlived him; it would just need a replacement belt.

Knowing that she wouldn’t have a great deal of time before someone came to investigate the commotion, Krahe dragged Blondie to the wall and rifled through her pockets, managing to find a wallet with some ring-cash, a DD gem, and a contractor ID card.

An hour, a shower, and a cursory investigation at a church branch later, Krahe had learned that Weasel had a bounty on his head for several crimes, though it was slashed for bringing in only his souldregs. Blondie turned out to have been a completely unassuming independent contractor with no particular negative or positive marks on her record.

When she had the time to herself, she queried Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom regarding those words. No knowledge came. So, back to theurgic texts she turned, and found nothing. Not a word in any of the books she owned. Barzai, however, gave the answer she sought, once he woke up. He simply pulled up her memory of the first time she drew the Wandrei Faust medallion, specifically the final strokes, and sent her the sentiment that speaking those words was somewhat equivalent to that. He also, as if to placate her, made her aware that she would not need to repeat the feat each time she wished to invoke the Daemon Core.

Meanwhile, Zachariah was in a huff, as were several of his acquaintances, as they had all felt it—the creation of a new High Theurgy. It wasn’t necessarily a once-in-a-lifetime event, but the fact it was so detectable meant that the feat had been performed by someone who either didn’t know or didn’t care enough to take concealing precautions.