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256 - Case Four: Another Junko Furuta Pt. 6 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2025-02-24 00:50:55 +0000 UTCKrahe didn’t bother with any elaborate torments. Instead, she simply dragged Aldritch off the wall, and before he could realize what she was doing, she dislocated his shoulder. He cried out, but… It wasn’t convincing. The pain was real, but the reaction wasn’t how it should’ve been. That alone was enough to tip her off — despite being dislocated, his left arm writhed and wrapped itself around Krahe’s arms, while something writhed inside his good arm, and in a flash, the limb split open three-ways at the wrist, revealing a concealed stinger. Aldritch twisted unnaturally in place in the effort to bury his stinger under Krahe’s ribcage. She couldn’t dodge, not entangled with him as she was, and she wasn’t certain that her biosuit could stop the stinger’s strangely metallic point. His sudden burst of speed was also great enough that her barrier couldn’t form quickly enough. There was only one thing to do — do as the Nemean Lion did and simply refuse to be pierced.
Aldritch’s stinger dug into the matter of her biosuit, slowing but continuing on. A brief look of triumph flashed over his face, only to be replaced with uncertainty, and then, alarm. The stinger’s razor point had halted against her skin, uselessly scraping against it. Krahe tore her left arm free, and, grasping his right wrist, pulled it away from herself. For a moment, before the biosuit closed the hole, one could see the dark-grey, stone-like skin beneath it. With every iota of strength, Krahe crushed Aldritch’s arm, snapping the stinger, the bones of his modified forearm, and bursting every muscle and vein that held it together. The only reason he didn’t begin fountaining blood was the scorching heat she poured freely from her palm until only a charred, blackened stump remained beneath the screaming man-thing’s right elbow.
His eyes were bloodshot, he screeched in pain, and yet his heartbeat and breathing were both steady.
A malicious smile made its way onto Krahe’s face.
“Any other hidden weapons?” she asked with a patronizing smugness.
“N-no,” Aldritch said, pitifully.
“Too insistent, not buying it,” Krahe disagreed, dragging a single, long lasher from her left thumb. Simultaneously pushing her leg against his side and pulling his left arm away from his body, she swung her arm. With that single lash, his left arm was separated from his body, and Krahe closed the wound shut with a mass of tar.
“It’ll hold,” she nodded, glancing at Aldritch. “Long as I maintain it. It’ll also fall apart on its own if you get more than a few meters away from me.”
Krahe was fairly sure he could deduce this, but she wanted to make it absolutely clear that it was intentional on her part. The fear in his eyes, previously an instinctive, but otherwise hollow reaction, now seemed much more genuine. She had wanted to make him walk to his doom, but in the end, she decided it was too much of a risk. She severed his achilles tendons and his hamstrings, dragging him to the wall and then tossing his arm, under one of the recliners, not wanting to destroy it but wanting to keep it away from him in case it had a self-reattachment feature. Using the chain and cuffs that were readily found within the room, she shackled Aldritch tightly to the radiator — not by his neck, but by his mouth, akin to a bridle, so that he couldn’t easily kill himself by choking.
From paying attention to his accomplices, Krahe came to the conclusion that they weren’t nearly as strong-willed as Aldritch was. Their wills to fight had been thoroughly broken by her initial assault.
Upon looking over Aldritch’s severed left arm, Krahe felt vindicated in learning that her gut judgment had been correct — this one was also weaponized. It contained a short blade attached to a flexible tendril. Its bones also had a unique structure and were composed of a remarkable memory-alloy that bent easily, but snapped back into its original shape once it was able. His shoulder joint was the only part of the limb that actually followed standard human anatomy. The blade was dark and engraved with runes — it reminded her of Semzar’s jambiya. A relative of that blade, or an imitation based on it perhaps. She could only guess what it did.
With the threats eliminated and the victim apparently stable for now, she started taking pictures.
One after another, she recorded the state of the scene as it was, simultaneously recording a straightforward, matter-of-fact commentary, while Aldritch writhed in the corner and Juno sat silently, motionlessly in place. Listening back to a short portion of it, Krahe could hear the disgust and anger in her own voice, but she didn’t bother re-doing it. As she undertook this grisly yet also tedious work, it dawned on her that she could’ve just astro dived or skimmed out of his grasp when he grabbed, rather than tanking the hit head-on. That out of anything proved that she was angry — she had allowed herself to get sloppy, to forget, ever so briefly, two of her most powerful defensive tools.
Once she was done with the documentation, Krahe once more applied her newfound know-how and began modifying Aldritch’s warding network, much to his vocal dismay. He didn’t sound upset that she was doing it as he was upset that she was doing it so apparently effortlessly — but this was no virtue of her own skill. It was a direct result of the fact Aldritch had made no attempt to obfuscate anything, it was all written directly on the walls for anyone to see. Even the key anchoring nodes weren’t really hidden, they were just clusters of coins or rings placed in various locked drawers, whose locks were neither warded nor made with picking resistance in mind. Right then and there, Krahe brought out her brush and some papers, and started modifying Aldritch’s warding formation to simply turn it inside-out. Afterwards, she laid out a caging formation around the three degenerates — one around Aldritch and one around Youssef and Hegio together, after she manhandled their seats to place them back-to-back together in one corner.
“Ugh… Why all this?” Hegio asked, more as an outlet for his pain from behing jostled about than as an actual question. She ignored him, finishing her work before moving on to the room Juno was being kept in. Like she had done many times in the past, Krahe shut out the extensive implications of the environment and the victim’s state, taking pictures as she considered what to do with her.
