Page 32

The mansion shook, and the shouts of men carried through its halls. An immense force struck against its barriers, hammering on without reproach. The outside world laid out of sight, shutters having long since slammed into place over the windows.

Thus, Krahe made her way into enemy territory, checking corners and pushing deeper.

Unfortunately, the building was designed with several chokepoints, and it seemed the defenders had expected an intrusion from below. Perhaps they had even learned of her invasion somehow; she hadn’t enough time to count the corpses.

A phalanx of three gun-armed stillborns blocked the hall, and behind them, four men stood. Three looked fairly typical for gangsters—of these three, two appeared on edge, while one was downright panicked, his eyes wildly darting around. The fourth seemed to have his wits about him and, by Krahe’s guess, looked to be the controller of the three stillborns. His eye sockets were like bottomless pits, the skin around them colored black, and small yellow-glowing gemstones sat within them, far too small for his face. A pretentious, curled mustache sat beneath his swollen, bloodshot nose. His eyes swiveled Krahe’s way the moment she came into view, and she felt appraisal wash over her, seeping into the Viridaimon Armor.

“Ah. Blackhand’s older brother, is it? You’ve made a real mess of things, you know. No matter how good you are, you can’t beat the odds. I know what you are. “

Older brother? she thought.

The man’s eyes flared. Something vaguely akin to appraisal washed over Krahe, but it didn’t try to intrude the way direct appraisal did.

“A fourth-order voidkey! Fourth!” the small-eyed man exclaimed, as if that would save him. Distant footsteps signaled the approach of enemy reinforcements, so she had to act quickly, but she also needed to buy time before she could break through decisively. And so, she willed the Black Sun Coupler to ready another Coupler Charge.

***

“Odds? You want to talk about the odds?!” the green-eyed demon scoffed through its mask. It waved its left hand about, gesturing with its catalyst like a conductor’s wand while its right hand remained clenched tightly to its chest, hidden by the shield on its forearm. The raven on the figure’s shoulder emitted a cackling laugh. Someone threw a chair. The raven’s eyes flashed, and the chair exploded into a hundred pieces mid-flight.

“I’ve seen a full squad of armored killers get wiped out by a myopic car nerd and an overweight alcoholic armed with two-shot pipe guns. These are downright great odds!”

It threw something.

The hallway erupted into a cloud of choking smoke and razor-sharp glass glitter.

Chaos usurped the reins, and any semblance of the enemy’s team cohesion shattered. They all started acting according to their own whims, following whatever plan they had agreed to in only the vaguest sense.

Wooden arms exploded from the walls, grabbing at a silhouette that was not the green-eyed demon, but one of the stillborns. Flammable liquid sprayed throughout the hallway, soon blazing forth with green fire. The shapes of three canine beasts rose from a carpet, only to instantly succumb to the flames.

Of the group, the small-eyed man reacted the fastest, barking an attack order to the stillborns as he manifested a spear and shield of cyan-glowing, glassy arcane force. He thrust it forth and a beam of force erupted from it. Wherever it touched, the hardwood floor exploded as if it was being ripped open, subject to enormous tearing force. It even managed to nick Krahe’s leg, yanking her forwards into a wide, low stance.

The small-eyed man let out a sound of triumph as if he could feel that he had gotten a hit, and bashed with his shield, sending an explosion of reflective shards tumbling through the smoke cloud. Krahe was already out of the way by that point, having closed the distance. Another beam shot from the spear, reflecting and multiplying, bouncing around in the field of shards and diffusing through Krahe’s smoke cloud, illuminating it in its entirety. The beams converged at a seemingly arbitrary point and tore out the chest of the panicking gangster, whom Krahe had shoved into the same spot where she had stood when she was hit. Just by looking at it, she could tell diffusion in her smoke had robbed around a third of the beam’s strength. It was less than she had predicted, but then, it was pure magic, not light.

Despite the varied abilities presented by her foes, the borged-out abominations were her main concern. A person she could suppress, and that’s the tactic she went with, firing recklessly down the hallway. But these things had no self-preservation, yet possessed the wherewithal to make that actually mean something. Their implanted ward generators were far stronger than the inax surgeon’s version, and their pure physicality easily surpassed that of someone wearing a Dregsteamer belt. Combined with their built-in weapons and the fact pain or shock wouldn’t stop them from fighting, they were the real threat here.

***

A force composed specifically to forestall intruders fell apart into panic and incidental infighting, while the lone trained professional struggled to stay alive. Siavash set off two more refracted beams from his spear before a mass of sparks and smoke ripped into his wards and sent him stumbling back a step, falling to one knee. At that point, he instinctively called his shield back, the shards reverting to one whole.

Decision paralysis took hold. Vague silhouettes whirled through the smoke, intermingling and briefly becoming illuminated by bursts of orange and green. The intruder’s footsteps mixed with thunderous thumping and the incessant, obnoxious calls of that raven. Siavash glimpsed the intruder’s form as it tackled one of his men against a wall, burying its fist into his stomach. Thump. Thump. Two flashes of orange, two gusts of dense ash and smoke racing out of the otherwise stagnant cloud. His lower body slid down, and the upper half soon followed with it, tumbling down. The small-eyed man took a shot, but it flew forward unimpeded, the armored juggernaut gone like a ghost. Just as the smoke seemed to be thinning out, a black sphere rolled out of the cloud and transformed the world into a choking limbo all over again.

***

Before long, only Krahe and the small-eyed man were left. He was breathing heavily, leaning against the wall with his shield held up, looking Krahe’s way as she kicked the head of a stillborn against the wall. Thump. Thump. Thump. Crack . They both pointed their weapons at one another in an uneasy standoff, both waiting for reinforcements.

“You ae too good for your readings. What are you doing, skinwalking as a low mid-ranker? Somehow lost your real gear, hm?”

Krahe didn’t answer. The stillborn’s wards finally gave under her boot, and the lower half of its head followed soon after. She turned her gaze towards the small-eyed man, causing him to shrink back a bit, the grip on his spear tightening as a flare of power built at the weapon’s tip.

“Look, I don’t much feel like dying here,” he said, attempting to negotiate. “That’s way above my pay grade. I’m not with the Hashems; I’m just one of the contractors they brought in for today. What’d you say I just get out of your path, and we go our separate ways?”

“Your voidkey. Pull it. Then you can go.”

She could see the reluctance in his gaze, but that resistance suddenly gave way when she took a step towards him. His eyes flickered back and forth, and then, a ray of death screamed forth from his spear, flying right by Krahe’s head, passing left to right in front of her eyes. It had never been intended to hit her, but to obscure her vision as the small-eyed man fled—even if only for a split second. Despite instinctively letting rip a prolonged burst of tracers in his direction, he disappeared around a corner.

Krahe gave chase, not to kill him, but to pass the chokepoint. From there, she picked out a room, cleared it, and set up shop inside, waiting while Barzai perched on a wall sconce just outside. She had never planned to push particularly deep into the mansion on her own, and this seemed a good point to wait for Casus. This was also a good opportunity to give the Black Sun Coupler a rest, as Krahe had felt it straining during that last fight. She didn’t expect it to hold out much longer.

A small group ran through the corridor just outside, but no one checked inside. Their attention was pointed entirely outward at the things besieging the mansion.

Indeed, the mansion shook, and a wave of discordant magic washed through the floor with blackened lines showing through the carpet as the stench of burning fabric filled the room. Through Barzai’s eyes, Krahe saw a similar backlash taking place in the hallway, spreading from one particular window. At its precipice, the walls burst open with the force of rupturing arcane circuitry, the phenomenon she had observed being just the waning aftershocks.

In the next moment, an indistinct distortion clawed its way through that window’s shutter, outlined only by black wrappings. Within the silhouette floated a Red Hood, seemingly controlling the form. It sprinted down the corridor, broke into a room, and dragged out a screaming, thrashing Bane-Saurian. The distorted monster bit into his head, but he remained physically unharmed. He screeched in a rather bird-like manner as s omething flowed out of him into the manifestation, and he went limp, soon discarded like an empty soft drink can.

As far as she had been briefed, she should have had no fear of being attacked by what was obviously a result of the witch-inquisitor’s skills.

Her gut told her otherwise. She still preferred to stay away from esoteric, unknown, and extremely dangerous combat vectors, even if they were allies. After all, even if it had no intention of harming her, she might get caught in the crossfire.

The possessed Red Hood made its way deeper into the mansion. Krahe waited until it was gone, then decided to follow in its wake. A small part of her regretted not laying eyes on it directly. That same part was thoroughly convinced that the distortion-creature was familiar, somehow, not in terms of having met or seen it before, but in terms of its fundamental nature.

Before long, Barzai saw a pair of familiar faces running for their lives—gangsters who had run down the way they were now running from, towards the basement. One of them, unfortunately for him, barged into the room she was hiding in. A prolonged burst of tracers did just the trick, sending the man stumbling back out the door in a seizing, gore-spraying dance. His half-pulped corpse soon slumped against the outer wall.

A third, fourth, and fifth came running from that same direction, but long before they could even reach the now-open door of Krahe’s hideaway, a matte-black blur bulldozed through them, leaving one missing his head and the other writhing on the ground, legs broken. Now that he had stopped, she could see; it was Casus. He squatted down next to the survivor, said something to him, and moved on, with the survivor crawling towards another room.

Krahe willed Barzai to reveal himself, making sure Casus saw him before calling the eidolon back to herself. The Banisher followed as expected.

“Took you long enough. Close the door,” she said.

“How long have you been in this room? Is the suit locked up?” he asked, approaching her where she sat, immediately kneeling to inspect her belt.

“Not long. The belt seemed to be struggling, so I decided to give it a rest and wait for you to get here. Didn’t think it had enough juice left to get me to the upper floor.”

“A correct assessment,” he said, standing back up. “Perhaps half a minute of combat output. Perhaps finish it off with a ranged coupler charge. If you give the mental command, the armor should self-destruct as part of the charge. It will be more potent that way and spare you from the aftermath. However, the coupler will likely not survive. The inserted voidkey will be at risk as well.”

“Can’t worry about that. I’ll just implant the Atomica; won’t have the time to pull the shardkey out of a busted belt anyway,” Krahe replied, holding out a hand. Casus pulled her up without wasting a moment.

“It will take me some time to go through with the implant, so it will be up to you to cover me,” she added.

A simple nod.

“Let us go,” said Casus.

Despite expectations, they encountered minimal resistance on their way to the foyer. Krahe sent Barzai ahead to do a quick fly-through. The first thing she noted was the state of the foyer. Signs of combat were widespread, with five or six corpses strewn about. She wasn’t sure, as some were torn apart while others lay dead with no visible wounds.

At the top of the stairs, the defenders had set up a barricade using furniture and a pair of small thaumine-fired barrier generators. There were eleven human defenders—eight male and two female gangsters, all in cheap suits—the glaringly obvious commander and four stillborns. The man was giant, with a bear-like build, and was dressed far too well to be a foot soldier, wearing a properly fitted, real suit that heroically contained his bulging gut. The stillborns were arrayed behind the barricade, not in a good position to readily spring into action against an attack from the stairs. One of them—an abnormally lanky man with a third eye crudely implanted in his forehead—pointed in Barzai’s direction as he flew through, calling down an ill-aimed outburst of bullets and magic that didn’t even come close to hitting the eidolon.

Krahe immediately decided that spending her last coupler charge on breaking the barricade was the best choice. She reached for her belt, twisted its dial, and honed her mental focus as she did so. Shivers ran down her back as the belt began creaking under strain. The only reason the defenders didn’t hear it being that they were making far more noise.

It would be nothing complex—a projectile that flies a certain distance and detonates in mid-air. A glorified Six Trees Killer. She had considered constructing a giant one with the casting medium as an ad-hoc thruster, but the armor dashed that idea by resolving her mental command with a much simpler response of what it could do.

The power would be an order of magnitude below the Daemon Core, but Krahe was certain it would at bare minimum smash apart the barricade, disable most of the defenders, and seriously wound the commander.

Smoke, ash, and cinders began pouring out of every crevice of the Viridaimon suit, enveloping her in a swirling maelstrom. It resembled a swarm of insects more than anything else. Her casting medium, meanwhile, formed a small bead of sputtering, flame, an ember more than anything else, and yet, its radiance grew. As if being fed with pure oxygen, the Black Sun Coupler roused an ember to the intensity of raging fire. She began walking through the short intermediary room separating this wing from the foyer, raising her arm above her head.

Streams of pyroclast gathered there, swarming like moths around a candle, casting a dark kaleidoscope of unsettling shadows over the foyer as countless shouts rang out and magic began raining down. All was consumed in the storm of pyroclast; in its self-destructive final flare, the Black Sun Coupler brutishly devoured hostile magic and converted it into yet further power for its final attack, its core blazing with the final flare of a dying star. Two Red Reapers, a Yellow Atropal, and four independent, albeit decently potent thaumaturgies struck her. With each one, the ember burned brighter, and cracks spider-webbed across the plates of her armor. A fifth thaumaturgy came, a ghostly fist wrought of stone-gray energy. It landed with such force as to send her stumbling back, caving in her chestplate and knocking the wind out of her. It was that bear-like man, and his other hand was already encased in another ghostly fist just like the first. Even as her body screamed for air, Krahe leveled her arm at her point of aim, above the defenders’ heads.

At some point, Barzai manifested without being prompted and began circling around her, screaming and laughing. Krahe could barely move now, her thoughts wholly focused on firing this off and then immediately diving.

“Hahahahaha! Burn them under the fallen sun! We know what must be done!” the eidolon cawed in a manic tone.

With a low roar, a column of flame came pouring out of the casting medium, simultaneously propelling the sphere of ash and cinders whilst pushing Krahe back. Not the Viridaimon Armor, but Krahe herself. The recoil impulse coincided with the Viridaimon Armor’s final and total structural failure, pushing her out through the suit’s back, which crumbled under her weight with barely any resistance.

Her dive was instant. The moment she felt the air on her own skin, she dove into the astral other , and briefly beheld the aftermath of the Red Hood’s rampage within the foyer. The traces were everywhere, almost painting a picture of how it had slaughtered those gangsters. Krahe’s visual calculus did not have the time to even begin working out the puzzle. There came a high-pitched squeal, a brilliant flash of light, and the air caught fire. The room fell victim to a pyroclastic flow worthy of an actual volcano—not in scale, but in intensity. Krahe couldn’t discern how the effect operated—certainly not through the mess, doubly so not from her side of the astral gulf.

FINAL COUPLER CHARGE

BLACK SUN NOVA BURSTER

In her state, she couldn’t remain submerged for long; she barely managed to escape the foyer back the way she came and was left with a nearly bottomed-out entropy tolerance at the other side. Casus glanced down, nodded, and turned the corner in her wake, shutting the door behind himself, but not before Barzai slipped through to be the lookout, of course. Last she saw of him through her own eyes, the four stars above his head began revolving so quickly as to form a contiguous halo. A moment later, she both heard and felt his explosive take-off towards his opponent, with Barzai’s sightline becoming obscured by a cloud of dust.

Krahe unbuttoned her back pocket and pulled out the Twin Serpent Key, shoving it into place behind her ear. Already, she could feel her wards crumbling, and the Twin Serpent Key’s re-implantation only slowed that decay—it couldn’t hold them together properly. The labor of wrenching open a window to her Kenoma Sack began as the sounds of superhuman violence played out just next door. Rapid footsteps came from the other side, the wing of the mansion they had entered through, and Krahe’s instinctive reaction at that moment was wall.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she dragged a 10-charge slab of smoky jade from the ground, stretching it out to obstruct the double-winged door. She heard it open moments later, and bewildered profanity followed. The people on the other side banged on it, even shot it, and then ran off. Fifteen centimeters of magically reinforced stone would stop a fair bit—a couple reapers, even—but Krahe had no illusions of true safety. She pushed harder and harder, painstakingly dragging the box out of Kenoma’s grasp as Casus fought in the other room. Tremors from his clashes with the head of security reverberated through the floor and walls, and set the overhead chandelier swaying ever so slightly.

***

Casus beheld the aftermath of Lady Blackhand’s final coupler charge. He instantly deduced it to have been some variant of a burster, or perhaps an empowered variant of the Six Trees Killer—a “Sixty Trees Killer.” He chuckled at his own wordplay.

Only the backless, one-armed husk of the Viridaimon Armor remained in the sanded-down foyer, and a layer of ash covered everything. The barricade had been torn asunder, one barrier generator still heroically soldiering on as thaumine dripped from its cracked fuel tank, projecting a garbled wall into the air.

Two of the defenders had survived the blast, alongside what seemed to be one of their graft-beasts.

One of the survivors was an enormous man in an unmistakable suit—the militarist-fusion work of Kharim Bayat, or a truly faithful, high-quality imitation. He stood at the top of the stairs, his suit only slightly charred, clearly having faced the blast head-on. Two giant forearms of translucent gray force rose before him as he held up a boxer’s guard.

Despite blocking it entirely from the front, Lady Blackhand’s coupler charge had clearly bypassed that defense, based on the fizzling and flickering wards around the man’s sides and back.

As for the other human survivor, it was a three-eyed man, currently stumbling away as he coughed up globs of copper-green sludge. He had hidden himself behind his commander, likely using a high-coverage barrier to shield himself from the secondary element of the attack. The graft-beast was at his heel, scuttling behind him until the larger man called for it, causing it to join him instead.

The sizable man stared down at Casus, gray force coalescing around his fists and continuing further up his arms. The telltale tendrils of a baneworm twitched under his skin, concealed somewhat under a generous layer of fat.

A gray fist came flying at him. Casus shifted to the side and came running after his foe right away, closing the distance.

The man was impressive—his strength rivaled Casus’, and despite his size, he was no lumbering brute. It was true that his bulk limited his mobility, what movement took place was both calculated and explosive. His technique was equally impressive—a mixture of common bare-knuckle boxing techniques elevated through understanding and adjusted to fit the user’s nonstandard anatomy. It wasn’t every day one met a man built like a hippo, that is to say, a mountain of solid muscle disguised by far less fat than there seems to be. On top of that, he seamlessly weaved thaumaturgy with boxing, using only simple but rock-solid techniques to enhance his comparatively far more advanced martial arts.

Casus matched the giant blow for blow, sensing something unsettlingly familiar in him. He wondered what exactly it was, and during their second exchange, he realized it. Tsetse. This was astonishingly similar to Tsetse’s style but focused near-exclusively on the arms.

Right hook. Casus blocked it, ducked right, and drove a flame-wreathed uppercut into his foe’s armpit. A left hook came flying in, but Casus willed his arm-blade to spin, its force throwing the punch off-course, cutting through the wards, and biting into flesh. Without time to spin up in advance, it didn’t get much further than a shallow cut.

He immediately hopped back, landing across from the giant. To his right, the stairs and the rest of the foyer. To his left, a scorched, ash-encrusted double door, beyond it a hallway across which awaited the door to the ballroom. The graft-beast was banging on the door beyond which Lady Blackhand was, but Casus held no doubt in her ability to deal with just one of those things. Still, he shouted a warning—he couldn’t afford to do much more.

Though he had not noticed it, a fifth star had joined the four revolving above his head, and with it, his strength had grown in all aspects.

Casus had decided—this battle would end with the next exchange.

“My name is Casus Aristedes. Return the flesh you have stolen and go unto Kenoma,” he recited as he pressed in the eye of his belt, expecting no reply.

“Some call me Strongman,” his foe replied, not divulging his true name.

The third exchange came and went, a dance of violence. Casus took some hits, but compared to Tsetse, Strongman was a manageable opponent. Merely applying what he had learned from his fights with Tsetse was enough to start pressuring the giant.

Such was his thought process: How could he ever become something more than a mere shadow of Silberblut if he couldn’t even best someone objectively weaker than Tsetse, let alone Tsetse himself?

To any reasonable individual, of course, this was an absurd mindset, but it was the epitome of reason for Casus Aristedes.

His heroic aspirations demanded him to surpass himself, and with hope and anger in his heart, that was what he did.

***

Strongman didn’t understand what was happening.

With every passing moment, that black-armored Mamon Knight grew stronger and stronger. He called himself Casus Aristedes, and sure, his suit resembled descriptions of the Silberblut Armor, but it clearly wasn’t the Silberblut Armor. The eye on his belt was all wrong, and the outer rim was the color of copper instead of gold.

And yet, somehow, he would have preferred to be fighting Silberblut right now.

He had sent out his emergency ping before that explosion, but no help had arrived yet. Even that stillborn had left his side, bashing at a random door on the lower floor for some forsaken reason. Strongman hated this but he still put up his fists and summoned his strength.