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174 - Your Turn [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2023-12-12 03:44:31 +0000 UTCThere, in the depths of struggle and pain, he found an abiding and invincible will to move forward. For the briefest moment, he could swear someone was pulling him back to his feet and speaking encouragement in his ear. He couldn't make out most of the words, only an immense sense of pride, as well as agreement with the idea that he had no choice but to move forward as something new.
For a few moments, he was able to claw back true clarity of mind. As he leaned on the wall, drawing in sharp, ragged breaths, he felt and saw something truly strange: The Right Arm of Silberblut, moving of its own accord. It took him a few moments to realize it was using one-handed sign language to spell out individual letters.
Y O U R
T U R N
He felt his mind being pulled inward, into his system, towards the Shining Knight of Silver. The Boon changed right there before his mind's eye, the letters themselves torturously shifting in a manner unlike anything Casus had seen from the system. His boons had changed in the past, but it was never like this. It almost looked as though the Boon was being melted and forced into a new shape.
[CRUSADER OF BLACK AND GOLD]
[Tags:]
Imposition of One's Will
Mamon Coupler Compatibility
[Details:]
This boon forcibly maximizes any Mamon Coupler's and/or Catalyst's compatibility with the holder through "Heroic Subjugation".
Carrying out Heroic Subjugation incurs backlash, the nature and severity of which is highly variable. Severity of backlash can be mitigated in various ways depending on its nature. The holder may suffer astral injury due to subjugation backlash.
The effects of Heroic Subjugation are permanent for Couplers and Catalysts with which the holder has a strong bond of possession. In other cases, the effects last until the item is used by someone other than the holder.
Casus, without thinking, transformed. None beheld the form he took, and even he was in no state to maintain or remember it. He could do it, and that was enough for his utterly drained self, so he detransformed and collapsed on the spot.
When he returned to his senses, the pain was gone. Or rather, he was still wracked by ache as if he had just been fed through a rock-crusher, but he didn't feel as though his Soul Furnace might burst at any moment. He glanced down, and saw that the Silberblut Coupler's outer frame was, for the lack of a better term, shedding. It was now covered in dark, brittle slag. Casus unbuckled the belt, and as he took it off, the mere motion was enough to shake the slag off.
Underneath was alarite. Pure alarite, flickering as if it was reflecting a dancing flame. As for the belt's eye, it now bore a new pattern; in the stead of Silberblut's four-pointed star, over the blue abyss in the eye's depths now shone a cross mimicking the pattern of Casus' own eyes. It also seemed unsettlingly alive. Whereas it had been stony and motionless before this endeavour, frozen in a forward stare, it now shone with a not-quite-human awareness. It was as if the Silberblut Coupler had been asleep until now, carrying out its duties by simple instinct, and only now had it been roused and made to acknowledge its new master.
The banisher, utterly drained, spent the better part of the next day resting.
Meanwhile, Krahe burned away the daytime hours in seclusion, occupying herself with a mixture of reading, physical training, and calligraphy practice. The Decoction of Mind's Dawn felt miraculous at first, too good to be true, even, allowing her to compile several different Human Charcoal Cult scriptures, using them to fill in one another's gaps. It grew increasingly obvious that the individual texts were purposely left with gaping holes, a fairly typical infosec tactic. In several cases, strange phrases or even weirdly written words served as indexing marks for where a section of text should be replaced with another, changing the meaning of a passage. Disappointingly, the information that came together entailed superior, more complete versions of the rites and manipulation methods detailed within each scripture, with an implied anthrocite yield of around 3-4% of the victim's body mass.
Krahe didn't doubt that informing the church of these hidden rites would mean a good payday, but she wanted to know more about the uses of anthrocite and the Hexkey. The Decoction's side effects showed themselves some time after she set aside the cultist texts and began making headway into Yao's scroll. The flavour suddenly became violently acidic and astringent, her body rejecting the liquid altogether, and a thumping pressure made itself known inside her head, threatening to turn into a splitting headache if she took another sip. It was fortunate that she had followed Razem's guidelines, and had made only one day's dose of the liquid. The preparation guide also warned that it was volatile, losing potency in mere hours.
Despite that limitation, the Decoction of Mind's Dawn nonetheless pushed her past the edge of comprehension, and as the sun dipped past the horizon, she grasped Yao's brush in hand with a new understanding of its previously awkward weight distribution. The Chimera-hair Brush, as her glasses identified it, demanded a grip that felt like it would fall from her grasp at any moment, but it didn't. Once she got it moving, she finished the back side of a Wandrei Faust talisman in less than half her previous fastest time, and the same went for the front side. The limitation was no longer the brush, but her own skill, manual dexterity, and ability to mentally parse the patterns she was imbuing in the paper.
She found that, with this new brush, the patterns felt even more angry than before, the theurgic pattern felt almost alive. The claw almost seemed to twitch on the paper, waiting for a neck to grab. Krahe took the time to load three fresh cartridges with these improved papers, marking each with a painted ring midway down the length of the case. She stored these, alongside three of their earlier counterparts, in her Kenoma Pocket. Thereafter she loaded a clip full of six mescalt bullets into the Pattner, and a seventh straight into the chamber before she sealed the gun.
