Page 34

Flight of the Crow

Y azata wasn’t sure what was going on.

It was not a matter of lacking eyes inside the building. She could see through the possessed Red Hoods—or rather, through the things possessing them. The problem was they refused to go to the upper floor. From what they saw through the floor, she couldn’t blame them.

The entity’s shape and damascened pattern suggested the astral body of a human Greater Pilgrim, and even carried with it something sacred. But somehow, it was wrong . Terribly, ominously wrong. A shroud of pitch-black smoke swirled about the shape, obscuring details normally unseen without appraisal, exuding an implicit threat at all times. It was as if it were daring her to try and look closer, to see what would happen if she did.

As the creatures they were, who supped upon the astral bodies of their victims, it was the ultimate form of aposematism. Yazata would have understood disobedience if she had tried to command her hounds to consume such a being, but they refused to even come into its vicinity.

Nonetheless, she continued playing her part, commanding the Red Hoods to patrol the ground floor.

It was not as if she had nothing better to do than watch from afar. She was here not just to keep them in, but also to counter any possible reinforcements from the outside. Going by the group of four rather ominously dressed individuals speeding towards the mansion at this very moment, that prediction was correct.

She struck the Black Trapezohedron against her leg, its blade reverberating with deep pitch. Distortion bled upwards as she spun around to face the newcomers.

“Hear my shining words…”

Yazata spoke, and lo, they heard, but neither their ears nor minds were spared the mercy of human language.

???

The sound of thunder carried through the ballroom as two armored figures clashed, darting back and forth with inhuman speed. Bursts of gold-silver flame and shockwaves of sound tore into the floor, forestalled only by the mansion’s abnormally durable construction.

With each clash, Casus grew to understand the rift between himself and Cabral, or rather, the rift between Tarnished Silberblut and Tsetse. While he now knew that the individual’s name was Cabral, in the absence of a known name for his transformed state, Casus simply shifted his perception of Tsetse from the entity as a whole to the transformation specifically. Even as he was now, it was undeniable that he couldn’t match the might of “Abara Morph Tsetse.” He could keep pace in physical terms, and his increased durability allowed him to weather direct blows, but once Tsetse brought out his sonic weaponry, the scales tilted steeply in the Abara Morph’s favor.

He could read most of them, of course. Most. But Tsetse hadn’t simply stopped evolving since their last battle. In their short battle, in three mere exchanges, Casus had faced three distinct attacks incorporating the sonic blaster in Tsetse’s left palm. It was a horrible, wretched thing, adaptable beyond compare, as Casus painfully learned during the third exchange. Both of them had landed blows on the other, but neither had caused any serious damage—not until the third exchange.

Tsetse threw a quick jab, one which he had thrown several times before as a normal strike, and without anything to hint at its altered nature. He imbued it with an insidious vibration at the last split-second. It couldn’t be more than one-tenth of a second before impact, else Casus would have sensed it coming. His fist smashed into Casus and speared him through with the same concentrated force as that which had defeated him back in the lab.

The shockwave continued through him, blowing fist-sized holes through three men before it shattered a window and dented its shutter. Casus followed, thrown backwards into that same shutter. He would have flown right out of the mansion had it not been there.

Falling to the ground, he picked himself up, uttering prayers to Zavesh. The pain was manageable, and his armor could withstand the damage just the same. He wasn’t the same Silberblut as back then.

He prayed because he had learned what he required and felt the pain he needed to feel. A small part of him was relieved that Tarnished Silberblut didn’t suffice against Tsetse.

“Stronger. Not strong enough,” Tsetse remarked with a faint disappointment in his deadpan tone.

“You speak the truth,” Silberblut agreed. “I must thank you for reminding me that mere imitation of my predecessor would only doom me on my path. That my reason to wear this belt was just as important as my ability to do so.”

He reached for his waist, as if to press the eye of his belt for a coupler charge, only to detransform. To those who knew what to look for, it was obvious that this was not some kind of sudden failure, but an intentional act. Strangest of all, he didn’t just detransform—he pulled the belt right from his waist. At that instant his armor burned off of him, consumed by silver fire. As Casus retreated a few more steps, the burning ghost of his armor charged ahead to meet Tsetse, clashing with the insectile giant for a moment before disappearing.

Semzar shouted, and the three-eyed stillborn-handler to his left sicced two of his creatures on the Banisher—one with clawed hands, the other with two gun-arms. Despite being stripped of his armor, Casus’s arm shot out with the force and speed of a cannonball, hints of golden flame flaring between the exposed muscle fibers. He shattered the charging stillborn’s chitin with one punch and set it off balance. Without wasting a moment, he tore into the same spot, his fingers digging into flesh and bathing in leaking hemolymph as he braced his foot against its chest. With a single motion, he tore out not just its side, but also a vital cable. Oily blue sprayed onto the tile as the graft-beast toppled down.

“No ward generator?” Casus asked as he threw the fistful of flesh aside.

“My employer expressed dislike for the sound they made. Those with ward generators were assigned elsewhere,” Tsetse remarked, pointedly tilting his head as he glanced at Semzar. “Your specifications surpass my data. Your compatibility must be excellent to channel the coupler’s power so readily untransformed. Two questions. How, and why? I sense no new relics. No new catalyst. No new voidkey. The change was you. How, and why?”

Tsetse’s tone was full of curiosity, entirely unconcerned by the destruction of his toy. His attention was fully on the conundrum of Silberblut’s sudden growth.

Driven to a near speechless fury by the implication that something was his fault, Semzar shouted for the onerous intruder to be struck down. Tsetse didn’t move, but those surrounding him did. His silhouette was completely consumed by the assault, tearing apart the floor and engulfing him in a clashing blender of magic, but it was too late—he had donned his belt once again.

The shape of his armored form, of Tarnished Silberblut, had formed from silver flame, overlaying him without actually becoming the solid armor. Five stars of golden flame burned above his head.

“I am a warrior of justice, not because I have been chosen, but because that is the path I chose!”

A sixth star ignited. Their revolutions accelerated.

“In my past life I fought for what is just, and in all lives that follow, so too shall it be!”

A seventh joined the six.

“Should the shadows grow darker than black, so be it! I need only burn more brightly than the sun, even if it leaves my armor charred black!”

Seven became one—a flaming halo with seven notches. It widened, descending to the ground, and with it, the armor of Tarnished Silberblut took form, pristine and gleaming for just this brief moment.

“Igaria steel my spirit and Zavesh guide my hand, so I pray!”

Then, from the halo, a fiery inferno erupted—at once, it consumed Casus Aristedes whole, and a projection of the seven-notched halo emerged in front of him, as tall as he was. One by one, bursts of golden flame flowed out of the flame-vortex and into each spoke, forming the shapes of additional armor components.

From the midst of the golden inferno, an enormous voice bellowed, one that did not belong to Casus, yet also slightly differed from how the Silberblut Coupler normally sounded. It was distorted in a manner that, to Krahe’s ears, resembled a disrupted or otherwise incomplete signal.

“The son of ho-pe, broth-er to anger and cou-ou-ourage! Mamon Knight Eisenretter!”

In rapid succession, the new armor flew into the pillar of flame, joining with Casus’ silhouette.

The swirling inferno tore itself apart, and the burning wheel that had given it shape rose up, shrinking to now revolve around Eisenretter’s head. His previously horn-like crown had expanded even further, completing a physical halo. The lower half of his left arm twisted into a gigantic, disproportionate thing, with spherical joints and clawed fingers, an extra cross-pupiled eye adorning the back of the gauntlet. By contrast, his right arm only possessed a minimal gauntlet, a curved blade attached to it and sweeping forward over his hand. The blade looked as though it had been melted in the transformation’s flame. Neither its star-shaped form nor elegant attachment joint were anywhere to be seen. The closed-eye face on the suit’s chest was a mismatched blend of the robotic and the demonic, with large golden fangs. Similarly, curved golden spikes protruded over the knees, and the boots had short claws of the same color.

It was crude and incomplete, yet the sheer, unrefined power pouring out of Casus at this moment truly felt as if he were the sun.

THE SON OF HOPE

brOTHER TO ANGER AND COURAGE

MAMON KNIGHT EISENRETTER

-IMPERFECT MANIFESTATION-

“Lucky,” Tsetse remarked, a tinge of unease creeping into his voice.

Seeing Semzar’s look of panicked confusion, he added, “Catalyst Resonance Evolution. All old-style speaking couplers could do it. Some modern models still can. Enormous performance increases through resonance with the catalyst. This one is incomplete. He forced it. Got lucky. Hence the detransformation and the excessively complex transformation sequence. Can’t do it properly .”

“Why did you not interrupt him, then?!” Semzar demanded.

Tsetse scoffed.

“Foolishness,” he said. “In seven thousand years, do you think none have thought of that? Even the oldest couplers have countermeasures.”

“Do you mean to tell me you cannot handle him? Did I pay you for nothing?!” Semzar hissed, trying to project the mask of an indignant, angered employer. It was a poor mask, all but see-through. His eyes trembled, his tendrils bulged under his skin, and his tone veered into pleading in the second sentence.

Tsetse, calmly, reassured his employer. “I can keep him busy. Any more is beyond me as I am now. Unless you would prefer I go after Blackhand?”

It was clear that, in truth, Semzar still considered Blackhand the bigger threat, if for no other reason than because there was a good chance that Aristedes would try to capture him alive. Still, Aristedes was the more immediate threat, while Blackhand had run off elsewhere, somehow drawing away the vast majority of the stillborns.

???

As Casus Aristedes, Mamon Knight Eisenretter, took his heroic stand against Cabral Khan, Abara Morph Tsetse in the ballroom, and as Yazata Heptaxia took her own stand outside the mansion, so too did Brunhilde Krahe take a stand of her own.

It was not quite as glamorous as the other two, as her foes could not be said to possess the mental faculties to comprehend what “taking a stand” even meant. They were, nonetheless, numerous and mighty, a writhing mass of grafted flesh and metal armed to the teeth with heretical technology.

The corridor was being torn apart around her, and her wards weren’t spared that fate, each grazing hit another step towards an injury she wouldn’t be able to walk off. The only thing keeping her in the fight was her vastly superior mobility and tactical sense. Time and again, she had eluded the stillborns thanks to a well-timed screen of smoke, their senses dulled, and bodies impaired by the toxicity Arrha held to the Evoy.

Yes, it was Arrha that had become her lifeline at this moment. It was this property that she imbued into her smoke eruptions after she had run out of Isotope to thicken her smoke with—or rather, she still had some Isotope, but she kept that bare minimum for forming tar.

But even this wouldn’t last. Arrha-imbued magical smoke dispersed even faster than that which she didn’t imbue with any extra properties at all. She burned through a dozen cigarettes at a pace comparable to her expenditure of bullets, and at this point, her lungs burned . She couldn’t tell whether the unearthly terribleness of that sensation was natural or if it ought to be blamed on the Class 3 painkiller.

It’s like my airways are full of menthol oil and glass dust, she thought, wheezing against a corner after barely slipping past the jabbering swarm for the Nth time. Barzai spotted them catching up to her all over again, but she was in no state to continue fleeing. She thought to blast herself out of harm’s way once more, but the energy pressure just wasn’t building like it used to. The power she could bleed off for her own use was quickly waning as the attunement process continued—the threshold where it felt as if she would explode became ever tighter.

And so, Krahe purposely cornered herself by heading for the end of the corridor. The door to a bedroom awaited her there, but it was locked, and so, left with no other options, she burned up every remaining charge in the Forming Toroid to put up a barricade. It wasn’t pretty and it wouldn’t actually keep the stillborns out, but it would have to do.

They crashed into her maze of jade like a tidal wave, but soon enough, the smarter and lither among them began weaving their way through, while others scaled the rods to climb over.

She shot down two as they reached her side of the barrier. A third withstood her last bullet, and she had to chop it in the side of the head. That staggered it enough for her to knock it to the ground, its willowy, unarmed frame proving to be the graft-beast’s undoing as Krahe caved in its chest cavity with a full body weight jumping stomp-kick.

In the time it took her to achieve this small victory, two more abominations had made their way through, and both were armed. The first had a Blasting Cluster, the second a sonic weapon-arm as well as a ward generator graft.

It was at this point that she made a judgment call and plunged the Atomica straight into her own chest. The sensation lay somewhere between connecting to a bitey nerve-interface and plugging in an overvolted charging cable. Krahe found relief in it, in the knowledge she hadn’t just killed herself. Rather than refuse to go in, or worse, rather than tear her open from the inside out, the Atomica resisted for a moment, only to finally enter right through her biosuit. An alien, thrumming pulse resonated in her chest, carrying through her spine. She felt herself collapse inward, her awareness of the world detaching from presence, time appearing to slow to a near-halt even as the stillborn swarmed towards her. It felt unsettlingly similar to the Rite of Dho-hna, combined with the dream-like quality of her visions during the Liminal Coil’s implantation.

As she gathered her bearings, she came to the undeniable conclusion that she was inside her own Soul Furnace. She could only make out a few details, including the vaguely spheroid shape and the presence of the Atomica, now as an enormous obelisk reaching the center of the chamber. At the Atomica’s end, in the chamber’s center, there floated a swirling mass of black tendrils, within it glowing the unlight of Kenoma. It resembled the Daemon Core, but it was obviously just a closest-equivalent representation for something she couldn’t mentally parse in its true form.

The enormous flow of energy that had been coursing through her and building up suddenly gathered within her Soul Furnace, rousing the Atomica to glow ever brighter, surpassing even its radiance when it had just been transmuted. Six spotlights erupted from it, one for each side, burning the inner walls of Krahe’s Soul Furnace. The initial pain crossed over into the realm of a sensation that she couldn’t even interpret, registering as an itch perpetually being scratched and irritated in an endless cycle, combined with the hellish burn of menthol and capsaicin.

Spotlights narrowed down to laser-like pinpoints, and at once began a wild dance, carving an eye-crossingly complex pattern in the span of seconds before ending at their starting point, where they carved out six hexagonal empty spaces.

The Atomica resonated with a soundless tone, and she instantly knew what she needed: words. The same sort of words she had used to give form to the Daemon Core.

One would suffice. The others could come later. But she would need all six. She couldn’t afford to take things slowly—she had already felt hopelessly outgunned after losing the Viridaimon armor. How could she keep up if she didn’t grasp every iota of power in her reach, and then dislocate her own arm to reach for even more? How could she strike at the people behind Damrus Hashem if she struggled with the meager forces that Semzar could muster?

And so, she spoke the first word, and its emblem was carved onto the inside of her Soul

Furnace.

WILL TO MIGHT

Might, not power—in the sense of strength obtained through great effort and will, rather than the strength one possessed naturally. Such had been her modus operandi in her past life, and so it was in this one, despite the powers bestowed upon her by her status as Deiphage. Even the fact she had usurped something of Chernobog, infinitesimal as it was, had resulted from Krahe’s enormous will, grasping for strength even as a disembodied spirit, rejecting death in the face of the void.

The moment the sigil was completed, the hexagon erupted with gleaming obsidian, forming a control rod of sorts. She instantly understood—it had to be the influence of her incantation during the ritual. A later version of the Solomon reactor used such “control rods” to precisely manipulate the fusion transmutation, allowing larger reaction masses and more complex target results with the same energy input. This, then, was clearly a similar adjustment mechanism for the Astral Implosion Furnace.

One after the next, the words came naturally. It was no more than self-definition. From the matter of the self, Krahe wrought the rods with which she would control the vast and terrible power of thaumaturgy.

The second could still be vaguely put into words with some effort.

HATRED OF EVIL

It was simple. Straightforward.

However, though she had already formed the base material that were these unspeakable maxims, she nonetheless spent strength to dredge them up and give them form in her Soul Furnace. With each maxim, it felt as though the resistance grew greater. The first came like nothing. The second took effort. The third was an ordeal, encompassing her abiding, melancholic love for the ideal of her hometown—the idea of a “better world.”

The fourth, she could barely finish, spending every iota of mental strength she had. She couldn’t comprehend it in terms of language, and wasn’t entirely sure of its exact meaning, but it was what came into her mind’s hand, nonetheless. She was deathly certain it defined a core aspect of who she was, but she couldn’t mentally process it to the extent of breaking it down into simple, expressible concepts.

She couldn’t even start on the fifth, let alone consider the sixth.

Four.

That was her limit.

With that acknowledgement, everything settled into place.

ASTRAL BODY RESHAPING

FOURFOLD ASTRAL IMPLOSION FURNACE

Awareness of the physical world suddenly pushed back into the forefront. Her body floated half a meter off the ground, scarlet light shining from her chest where she had implanted the Atomica, diffusing through her flesh and out of her mouth. The pressure of time began to return with one subjective second after the next. The hideous faces of the stillborn resumed their approach.

Atomica Refulgent came alive once more at her command, piercing into the beyond, and her Soul Furnace flooded with power—thauma waiting to be set alight, the substance of Kenoma itself. One after the next, the control rods receded, only to slam forward, compressing it all into a spot the size of a hairpin.

At the instant of ignition, Krahe’s awareness returned to the physical. The same could not be said for full control of herself. She remained in place for some time as an uncontrollable deluge of pyroclast erupted from her being. The red-orange death-swarm flooded the corridor, shredding and burning everything that wasn’t its source. Outside, the shutters of several windows visibly began to glow, only to be torn out moments later. A solid flow of glowing embers poured out of each window, gathering up against the mansion’s barriers and forming a waterfall, its color rapidly shifting to red and then black as it moved down.

Krahe finally returned to full presence in the here-and-now to a scene that evoked déjà vu.

Everything was sanded down and charred. The windows had blown out; the shutters melted from the inside. Her smoky jade barricade had become an abstract art piece, and the stillborn transformed into macabre statues of compacted pyroclast. Boiled gore had sprayed out of them in places, painting the floors and pillars in oily hues.

They were left frozen in poses of reaching towards her.

The mansion shuddered as an explosion carried from the ballroom.

Krahe opened and closed her fist, then picked up her gun. Its lanyard had been severed, but the weapon itself was unharmed. A spark of will, and thauma surged in. With its ignition, searing-hot power coursed through and tendrils emerged from her back. The intoxicating sense of newfound power was somewhat dulled by how off-kilter everything felt due to the Class 3 Pain Inhibitor’s persisting effects. There was something different in how things felt off-kilter , but Krahe wrote it off as the Atomica settling in.

I’ll get used to it. Once this shit wears off…

With a spark of anathema and a burst of red light, she sent herself flying to the top of her own barricade, landing atop a pair of narrow pillars. With some trepidation, she skimmed to the next pillar over. Feeling no backlash, she readily initiated an Astro Dive and hurried to the ballroom.

A scattered handful of survivors would later tell of a devil of living smoke flowing through the mansion’s halls.

The mansion was enormous—too large to traverse from one end to the ballroom in a single Astro Dive. Krahe surfaced intermittently to recover, continuing her advance as she did.

From a few tentative tests between dives, it instantly became evident that this was nothing like anathema. More than being transformed, it felt as if every aspect of her natural thaumaturgy had been amplified—the smoke was thicker, the embers burned brighter, the pyroclast came out visibly superheated. Besides being more intense and coherent, it was also livelier , for lack of a better term.

As Krahe rapidly approached the ballroom, so too did resistance rapidly increase—from none to some. Enough to be noted, to have been a problem not long ago. Now, Krahe saw the brave few who stuck around as target practice. She surfaced just as one of the guards finished an impressive burst of thaumaturgy that really tore up the wall right next to her.

To start with, she wore down his barrier with a few shots from the Pattner before hitting him with a Tar-tendril empowered punch, sending him into meltdown. Out of everything, they had changed the least, gaining increased responsiveness and strength, but little else.

As the quickly formed tendril crumbled, Krahe formed a tracer, but even a mere tracer wasn’t a tracer anymore. Its elongated shape remained the same, but the first one came out significantly larger than normal. It flew as quickly as the Viridaimon Armor’s tracers even without a bullet to carry it, and it visibly curved to strike its target as it flew. The man was thrown backwards by the blast, a hole blown clean through his chest cavity.

Two gangsters later, Krahe had settled on a modified casting procedure. Instead of one at a time, she would spew out bursts of tracers. Their homing was very limited—inferior to even the Viridaimon version. It was little better than the cheapest piece of shit smart-guns with the cheapest piece of shit ammo, but even that much was a godsend.

The Viridaimon similarity made her curious as to whether Deathsmoke Spray could now produce a shotgun-blast effect. She poured in some Isotope for good measure, hoping to improve its coherence with a tiny bit of tar. It erupted out of her palm less like a burst-beam and more like a whip, lashing one of Semzar’s goons nearly in half before it fell apart. Hair-thin, gossamer-like threads of tar bound together rapidly disintegrating slivers of red-hot glass. At that instant, her mind shifted, and she lost any desire to replicate the Viridaimon version. Memories from before she had obtained her radiation blasters came to the surface. Wolf and Raven ZT-8, Model 32 “Tactical Monowire Dispenser.”

With this in mind, she pushed onward, intending to refine this current “Death-Tar Whip” into something using numerous, separate strands. There was no time to do it now—she had to back up Casus as soon as possible, and, as it happened, four surviving guards had just turned the corner coming her way. Her current toolkit just had to do. Forming bursters still worked the same, the only major difference was that they felt heavier by almost half and she could tell their shells would hold up to slightly higher pressure. The first one she formed was a smoke burster, intending to just pass them by, given that a fight against four at once could end up going on longer than she could afford.

“It’s her!” an observant man cried.

The four readied themselves for combat, or rather, two of them did; the other two looked for escape routes.

A gunshot rang out, the bullet carrying the burster along.

Not quite a Six Trees Killer. Six Trees Vanisher, maybe… Krahe thought, already entering Astro Dive before it even reached them. Following its firework-like explosion, shrapnel scattered with about enough force to inflict a nasty bruise and a writhing wall of gray expanded to fill the hallway.

Krahe was gone in moments, a black blur.

The four gangsters ended up stumbling around and blindly lashing out in the smoke for a full half-minute as the cloud shifted around, actively trying to envelop them. The terror of having their vision cut off was only intensified by the manner in which the smoke writhed around them, becoming so dense it almost felt solid in places. Worst of all, it actively tried to shove itself down their throats, halted only by their wards. One man, a man whose wards had been compromised, emitted stomach-turning wheezes as he writhed on the ground, grasping for his neck.