CHAPTER 4 #2
It was somewhat amusing to see three individuals arc overtop the wall as if they were jumping on a trampoline. One was an Evoy with an uncannily humanoid build, wearing a suit. The other was that pure-white Inax from earlier, while the third was a Mamon Knight of the insectile variety with a pair of cleavers as his weapons.
“Barzai. Kill!”
Less like a living thing and more like an autonomous missile, the crow whizzed down into the alleyway and set upon the Evoy, turning him into a maelstrom of whirling ghostly mantis-blades, snapping jaws, and swarming insects. Krahe wasn’t sure if he was making a concerted effort to strike down the bird or just panicking.
While the True Eidolon distracted one of her foes, Krahe wasted not a moment more to raise both her hands—her left pointing palm-first at her foe, her right aiming the muzzle of her gun at her bicep. The action, admittedly strange as it was, confused them for just long enough to let her form the necessary construct-shell with her left arm becoming clawed, rocky, and monstrous. Cleavers already moved, and the Croupier already set forth a withering shower of wicked daggers to punch holes into Krahe’s wards, but she had time enough; her wards would hold well against kinetic attacks, and no more than half of the Croupier’s deluge actually hit head-on to begin with. Of the hits, a third were grazing, causing them to be lacerative and thus ineffectual in more ways than one. Krahe felt sympathy for the inax woman; she, too, had felt the disappointment of a withering barrage leaving its target very much alive.
No matter. Cleavers would tear her to shreds if she let him get close. A pull of the trigger accompanied an incantation in an alien, eldritch tongue.
“Wandrei…”
Click. Boom. No bullet came out; its dregshot form burned up instantly into formless thaumic energy. A stream that empowered the theurgic talisman rolled up inside the shell casing and, in the same moment, carried it out the barrel of the gun. It resembled an exceedingly forceful application of a talisman, its sigils burning with a hateful glow as it adhered to her arm.
“Faust!”
A surge of power—burning and seething—the slithering presence surged through her arm, implicating itself within the construct. The talisman burned up in an instant. With the bursting of a liquid akin to boiling blood, the hollow forearm ripped free and went careening forward. There were two alternate modes in which the Wandrei Faust could be set loose; Chasedown, and Standoff.
Chasedown would try to grab the target and restrain them, requiring a manual detonation command.
In Standoff, the arm would instead try to get within optimal range of its target before firing its payload; the range was around three meters at present.
Despite its speed surpassing that of a Red Reaper, Cleavers deftly side-stepped its approach. He would have successfully struck her, had Krahe not been prepared with a skim to his 4 o’clock blind spot. He quickly spun around and reacquired his target, but a diagonally rising pillar of stone smashed into his groin and threw him backward. He was unharmed but displaced and forced to reorient himself once more.
Meanwhile, as her Wandrei Faust changed targets to the Evoy, Krahe fusion-formed a burster in her hand. Another gunshot carried it, the Six Trees Killer flying right at Croupier’s face. She stopped it with her barrier, but the grenade’s impact, and the kinetic component of its blast, smashed her off her feet a moment later.
She skimmed in the Croupier’s direction and raised a cover wall, already turning to face Cleavers and forming another clawed arm shell. Another shot. Another talisman. Another missile.
Just as it left her arm, she saw the first one passing to her right. It held the Evoy by his torso with its fingers digging through his wards and into his chitin, dragging him against the wall so forcefully that it tore the facing off. Cleavers had righted himself and leapt at her, and despite unfurling his armor’s wings, he couldn’t dodge. The black-clawed fist struck him and mercilessly dug its fingers into his armor, carrying him away.
At nearly the same moment, both flying forearms smashed their respective victims into the black jade wall by which Cassius was entrapped. With a spark of intent, both arms flashed with reddish-orange light, with streaks of golden-yellow mixed in. It was accompanied by a sound akin to a high-pitched scream, as opposed to the ominous buzz of her own anathemic power ripping the air. The pulse lasted perhaps one-third of a second. From the seams of both the Evoy’s and Cleavers’ plating, light and boiling fluid burst forth in equal measure, bathing Cassius’ horrified face.
GRUDGE-FILLED GRASP
DEATH BORNE UPON CLAWS OF HATE
BLACK HAND OF DESOLATION: WANDREI FAUST
Before she could do anything else, the Croupier dashed past her wall. Krahe had heard her footsteps and prepared a smoke eruption. Before long, she had the Inax in a rear hold, though she had torn an impressive chunk out of her wards, and Krahe was fairly certain she wouldn’t have been able to restrain her without using several tar-tendrils and an unconscionable amount of entropy.
“I can still leave only three corpses in my wake. Do you want to continue this?”
She had no reason to take mercy on the Croupier in particular; it was a simple gut feeling. As for killing Cassius, though not something she opposed, it would cause more of a stir than she wanted.
After not receiving a response from the Croupier, she choked her out and instead turned her attention to Cassius.
“Well? Do you want to fire another flare? Call more to their deaths? Or can I just empty your pockets and walk out of here? Either works for me.”
“Alright,” he sighed, deflating in his stone shackles. “I’ll make sure you get to leave my territory without anyone on your tail, but that’s all I can do. For all the money on your head, you’re fifty times the trouble it’s worth.”
Krahe sensed no cowardice in the man, yet he wasn't particularly brave either. He lacked the bravado, the ego, that drove others to smash themselves against a wall—the same bravado that had driven her to such an end.
“How much is it?”
“A—quarter mil. A-and another quarter mil for the gun, if it turns out to be a legit Pattner.”
She felt no particular need to kill Cassius, or bring down his gambling operation. It didn’t seem particularly predatory, and she didn’t see gambling as a symptom of societal decline or subversion. In her eyes, given what she knew of history, it was a completely natural part of society that couldn’t be curtailed any more than recreational sex and intoxication. Krahe was sure that if she toppled the Hashems, Cassius would go on running his gambling house all the same.
Before she could leave, though, the two others arrived, busting down the iron gate. Krahe was fully prepared to defend herself, but Cassius defused the situation: “Ey, ey, put ya dicks away, alright? We’re done. She’s leaving. The money ain’t worth this.”
They didn’t need much convincing; the gore of their comrades splattered around was more than enough. While the two new arrivals inspected their boss and slowly waking-up coworker, Krahe got out her souldreg extractor and started pulling Cleavers’ dregs.
“Ey. Can’t you make this shit go away? It’s a construct, no?!” Cassius hissed at her from above while one of his thugs hacked away at one of the bars holding him in place.
“I’m not the one keeping it together. It’ll go away after an hour,” she said, yanking the syringes out of the dead Mamon Knight, who was a sickly bald man under the rapidly decaying suit. She didn’t feel like digging through the gunk and chitin, so she moved onto the Evoy, taking some money and a dregstone from inside his suit. The whole time, she heard Cassius instructing his subordinates that they were not to follow her in-between poor advice on how they ought to best break apart her black jade.
Before they could even think about the option of ganging up on her, Krahe took her spoils and got out of dodge.
It would be another three days before she managed to follow up on Nozar’s lead, in part due to pursuing other leads to break up the pattern of her activity to any possible observers. Besides “that one place,” her other leads went… straight to the Dead Night Tigers.
This made it an easy choice to pursue Nozar’s lead, in no small part because she really didn’t feel like marching into the agency’s front door and asking for information on one of their members with the only connection being that she had been targeted and that she intended to return the favor to his employer. Oh, Krahe was sure that the Dead Night Tigers were professional enough to handle things reasonably, but that was part of why she went for the alternative. Getting ambushed or a simple investigative stint at a bar was a problem easily solved and potentially a nice bit of practical exercise with profits on the side. An agency filled with actual, professional bounty hunters and contract killers? It would take caution and a light hand, subtle negotiations, adherence to the agency’s rules, and very possibly one or more duels against individuals beyond her current level—if what she had read of the DNTs was true.
By comparison, following an annoying cryptographic puzzle to find a secret club for pretentious up-their-own-ass theurgists in a run-down part of town was… preferable.
There were numerous possible qualifiers for entry into the so-called Lost Sun Society; Nozar had referred her to someone who could sponsor her, but, not wanting the loose strings, she decided to go the more direct way: Showcasing an original theurgy as proof of one’s skill in the discipline. There was no fortunate coincidence to be found here; it was just one method of entry out of four that Nozar had suggested. Most of them included somehow currying favor with an existing member or proving one’s ability in specific disciplines, from theurgy to artifact-crafting and so on.