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228 - Afterburner [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2024-09-13 02:55:02 +0000 UTC“Can you show me the blueprints of your arm?” she asked, expecting a simple no. To her surprise, Sauer reached up and detached the limb. He tossed it over to Krahe and sat down, leaning on his remaining arm.
One of its external access panels mercifully contained a miniature toolset for servicing and small repairs — something she had made use of many times in her early years. She began dismantling the prosthetic, and found something that at once did and did not make sense. It was clear that its internals were being filled in from her memory, but the structure worked. It was as if, the more she unravelled the prosthetic limb, its underlying concept took form from what she knew of cybernetics, as if it desired to exist. She tried to will it to float, so that she might get a better look at it in 3D space, but no such convenient phenomenon took place. She had to laboriously dismantle and reassemble the limb several times before she felt she had a workable grasp of its structure.
The knowledge she gained only reaffirmed what she had already suspected, but it also gave her a way to solve that issue. The problem was a lack of thrusters — the Left Arm of Chernobog as it was now simply couldn’t direct and focus thauma in the number of directions required, with the responsiveness and the precision required. Krahe’s mind turned towards Chernobog’s Mystic Wisdom, keeping in mind that the Left Arm’s system readout had stated it could undergo autonomous evolution. Even if this wouldn’t work, it would feel amiss to not try.
Her question bounced back with an answer: It could be done — but she would need to ritualistically carry out the external alteration within her mental realm.
“You want me to carve my arm open, is that it?” she mused.
The modification was conceptually simple: she would just add the requisite number of Wound-like Grins across the entire limb. Opening them all over again and keeping them open each time she wanted to use the method would be too taxing, so she intended to create permanent places for them and adjust the limb’s inner flow of thauma to facilitate their functionality, mimicking the design of Sauer’s arm. Were it not for her experience using the simplified movement method against Semzar, she would have left this for after she woke up.
“Alright. Let’s give backstreet butchery a try,” she said, tossing the reassembled prosthetic back to Sauer. She proceeded to explain the underlying idea behind what she wanted to do with the Left Arm, and, not questioning it for a moment, Sauer readily assisted her, holding her arm steady and carving away at the spots she couldn’t reach.
The pain was curious to say the least — because it wasn’t pain. It was itching. It itched like hell, yet also radiated a sensation between heat and static, of the sort one would feel after coming into a warm interior from freezing cold. More importantly, however, it worked. After the first slot was finished, her arm pulled back together, and though it wasn’t visible, she could feel how much easier opening a maw would be in that spot, like it was already there, just beneath the surface. Thus, they pressed on.
When they were nearly done with the process, Krahe started hearing organ music again.
Then, the voices.
“Cognitive pressure spiking...tissue hyperactivity… Left arm. Yes, again. …rearranging itself,” Firminus said.
“And the system?” Fidelia asked.
“No issues,” Firminus replied.
“Good. Aristedes, ready for insertion,” Fidelia said. The music changed, the organ rising to a crescendo, and as it did, the door of Sauer’s hut swung open. But nobody walked out.
“...too deep. Up to… now,” Casus said. The music, and with it, the outside voices, faded completely.
“They are waiting for you,” Sauer said matter-of-factly, continuing to carve away at her arm. There were only two spots left, both out of her reach. It was a matter of waiting, and as she waited, Krahe distracted herself from the itching by mulling over what the movement method ought to be named. Eventually, she just asked: “What do I call it?”
“Doesn’t matter. Not my place to make that decision,” came the exact response she had expected. Engram-Sauer did, after all, consider himself as less than even a ghost. Naming the method was on her.
Knowing that the real Sauer disliked the idea of overly fanciful names for techniques or stances, Krahe thought back to names of techniques she knew and tried to come up with one that was straightforward.
Aimpoint Evasion. Contra-Targeting Acrobatics. Multiplane Thinking. Sauer-style Form 16 Footwork. The 73 Sensor-disabling Arts. Sauer-style Sinanju Jointlock Grappling. Hyper-universalist CQC for Short Blades. Blackhand-style Radiation Blaster Combat. These, she knew. These, she was familiar with. All of these fell under the umbrella of Sector 7 Style, and so did countless others.
She recalled five different techniques built just around the Neptunian Dawn G-Model Railgun. Seven more designed for revolvers. Her mind ran through countless techniques that had been incorporated into Sector 7 Style. She was only tangentially aware of their names, properties, and countermeasures, but had never truly learned the vast majority of them.
In the end, rather than trying to incorporate wordplay she decided on “Afterburner Enhanced-arm Mobility Method”, or “Afterburner” for short. Just like with “Wandrei Faust” and German, she went out of her way to name “Afterburner” in English, refusing to let herself translate it. The reason behind the name was simple: It would enhance her existing movement options in exchange for additional Entropy overhead, much like an afterburner allowed a plane extra speed in exchange for higher fuel consumption. She couldn’t help but think of the stupid names Sauer would mention when disparaging the naming schemes of other martial arts.
“It’s finished,” Sauer said. Krahe stood up, stretching. She turned around, but in Sauer’s place, there was only the prosthetic left arm, suspended in mid-air, its mechanical structure floating apart and fraying out of existence before her very eyes. In moments, it was gone. In its last twitch, the arm let go of the dagger, and it went sliding across the nuclear glass, coming to a rest at Krahe’s feet.
Taking up the dagger, she centered herself and began the baseline kata’s dagger-adjusted variant.
And it worked.
It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it worked. Krahe stabbed the dagger into a crack at the spot where engram-Sauer vanished, and made her way to his hut. She had never seen inside — this would have been an exercise in futility if that had been her goal. But as she grasped the doorhandle, she knew there was nothing left for her to do here. There was no point to going back to Sanctuary — or rather, she was already here. This crater was the remnants of Sanctuary. To pretend otherwise was delusional… And she wasn’t sure she would be willing to leave if she actually went to her memory of that place.
Thus, she opened the door, stepped through, and woke up.
