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220 - Razgriz Pt. 1 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2024-07-03 23:07:12 +0000 UTCOnce more, the battle settled back into a back-and-forth. Krahe still questioned why Semzar had used the ring that early instead of waiting until he could affect the Wandrei Faust, whose Standoff-mode range was shorter than the ring’s maximum effective range. Did it not work on attacks and constructs of Theurgic nature? Besides being rather generous, that explanation assumed that Semzar knew the nature of Wandrei Faust. The much more likely reason was that Semzar had been holding his mental trigger finger on the ring all along, and ended up pulling it on instinct, without deeper consideration.
Her second Wandrei Faust met its end exceedingly quickly, shot down by such an overkill barrage that Krahe was still happy with the outcome thanks to the opening Semzar had given her. Disappointingly, she had to use that opening to purge entropy instead of ripping into him, but she planted another bullet in his barrier to not let him off easy. Krahe allowed another short while to pass without making any significant moves, half to test whether the ring had a cooldown, and half because she was struggling to keep up. As drugged as she was, the pain of her body breaking down didn’t impede her — but the increasing loss of mobility could not be denied. She increasingly had to rely more and more on diving and skimming to compensate, cutting into her ability to mount assaults of sufficient intensity to pressure Semzar.
A third Wandrei Faust, she sacrificed alongside a burster and a Six Trees Killer to keep the bastard occupied. He shot down this Faust, too, whilst leaping out of the range of the two others before they could detonate. While that took place, he clenched his fist twice, accompanied by flashes of red from the Crimson Star Ring. They were much dimmer than before, bright enough to see, and Krahe observed no tangible shockwave emission. From this, she inferred that he was mentally smashing the button while the ring was still recharging, having both seen and done similar things in the past. Krahe considered using the Calbian Molting Tonic, but the problem was, she would need time to do so, and it would likely take more time after that to take effect. Storing it in the Kenoma Pocket had cost her a significant chunk of entropy, so retrieval would be the same, and she would have to line it up just right to get between the Liminal Coil’s abnormally-shaped ribs, exactly into her heart. In short, the same opening needed to inject it would also be wide enough to finish Semzar off.
It wasn’t long before Krahe lined up another decisive strike, blasting herself through the air and using a fourth Wandrei Faust as a distraction. She rendered her landing abnormally smooth by astro diving, but as she slid away from him, she skimmed into the floor — just far enough to trigger the kinetic rebound. In the blink of an eye she was suddenly sliding towards him, fusion-forming a tar-tendril with a burster in its tip as she transitioned from sliding to a low sprint. He shot down the Wandrei Faust as expected, but before her explosive tendril could reach him, there came another flash from that ring. From this up-close, she could clearly see its two shockwaves spreading out, tearing at the flooring and tossing aside furniture as they went. She immediately realized she had made a severe mistake — she couldn’t adjust her course quickly enough to avoid the shockwave altogether.
Thus, the answer was to skim through it. Spanning no more than thirty centimeters in thickness, surpassing the twin shockwave would be more than possible, and so Krahe committed to that course of action. She released her hold on her burster-tendril, honed her focus to the absolute extreme of Razormind, and, as the world felt as if it would come to a halt, she dipped her feet into the astral gulf, set her target destination, and initiated the skim.
A moving wall of force halted her, and threw her aside like a ragdoll. She had just enough time to realize that, somehow, the Crimson Star Ring’s shockwave could negate Astro Skimming, and presumably Astro Diving. The sole reason she got the time to consider this was that despite her skim being halted halfway, she still experienced a moment of extreme time dilation when she resurfaced — thus she hung in mid-air for a stretched-out split-second, locking eyes with an unaware Semzar. Before she could hit the ground, a pair of flaming fists smashed into her ribcage and decisively sent her flying into the wall.
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Victorious laughter sprung forth from Semzar’s throat, resembling the cackle of a rabid animal due to how hard he had pushed his meatsuit. He didn’t know how or why that demon had been thrown back, he had acted purely on reflex, and it had taken him a few moments to realize what he had just done… But now that he knew, Semzar’s immediate response was to bask in a victory he perceived to be rightly his, even as his body tensed in alarm, senses setting of cascades of body memory that the baneworm himself did not understand.
Another source of laughter rang out. It was that raven. It had begun laughing as it flew towards its master, its persistent presence a hint as to what was to come. A few seconds passed, and, for some reason, Semzar found himself unable to act or move. Something heavy clunked to the floor, followed by a deathly wheeze. Those green pinpricks flared back to life inside the cloud of dust and smoke, and soon she emerged once more. Her skin was utterly decimated, bare flesh showing through in countless places, and the shape of an unnatural ribcage was impressed upon her bodysuit from the inside, lit by a red-orange glow. Her trousers were reduced to rags, yet miraculously retained some vague notion of their original shape as they billowing about her legs. Above her left hand floated a hemispherical tangle of black tendrils, and within that nest, the laughing raven roosted.
“Wh- what are you?!”
The green-eyed demon gave no answer. Instead, the raven ceased its cackling to speak once more:
“AT THE END OF MY LIFE, CUT DOWN BY A BETRAYER, I, BLACKHAND, THE MONSTER, DIED. EONS HENCE, LIKE RAZGRIZ, I, BLACKHAND, THE HERO, HAVE BEEN BORN ANEW. MILLIONS HAVE BURNED BY MY HAND BEFORE YOU AND MILLIONS WILL BURN ERE I PERMIT THIS WORLD TO BE OVERRUN BY YOUR KIND. THIS IS THE CLEANSING OF YOUR SIN. PREPARE TO DIE.”
In concert with her familiar, Blackhand spat at him:
“YOU ARE A TAPEWORM. THAT BODY IS NOT YOURS. RETURN IT TO ZAVESH.”
