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162 - VS. Crescent Jezail Pt. 1 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2023-11-21 02:48:44 +0000 UTCA/N: This will NOT be a long fight, or even a direct fight at all. It will be resolved in the first half of the next chapter.
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"I'm sure you can guess," Eutropia said with a wry smile. "I can't say who contacted me personally, but I'm deathly certain the man who gave the order was Semzar Hashem. The message was... It was worded in an exceedingly him manner. Egotistical shit brat with less of a brain than the corpse he's riding on any given month."
As if on cue, Krahe saw a strange shape shimmering on a nearby rooftop through Barzai's eyes - just the next street over, less than a hundred meters away. It was a human figure, one obscured somehow, and difficult to focus on. She noticed it due to the disturbance of the air around it; like overly aggressive active camo, standing out against a comparatively tranquil backdrop. There was a good chance she would've missed it if she hadn't been actively scanning the rooftops, windows, and other such vantage points in Barzai's field of view.
She would had warned Eutropia, if there had been time. The figure appeared one moment as if it had clambered onto the roof just then. The next moment, the cloak broke as the person under the cloak opened it to raise a long weapon into a crouched firing position. Through Barzai's superior vision, Krahe was able to catch the shape of Crescent Jezail's eponymous weapon.
There were all of four, perhaps five seconds between when Krahe initially spotted a weird shimmering shape a rooftop and when a ray of arcane death tore the air apart on its warpath towards her back. Of these seconds, three were filled by what would come to be Eutropia's final words.
Krahe skimmed straight upwards twice in rapid succession, placing herself on the balcony. She had turned herself to see better. Her reason to abandon cover was the assumption that Jezail could see her through walls somehow, considering he had been able to target and shoot through heavily a warded safehouse window, let alone a mostly-mundane stone brick wall.
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A gulf skimmer.
That was a problem... But she couldn't have more than three charges, and Jezail could compensate by predicting the likely direction she might skim next. That stunt had to have cost her one charge at least, and Jezail was willing to bet it had cost two, given the structure's dimensions and typical skimmer ranges. It could be a longer-ranged technique, but then it would have a longer recharge time and likely only two charges. The third option was that she just had the brute attribute ratings to force a standard skimmer's range that far, but he couldn't very well do anything about that if it were the case, so he didn't worry about it. Jezail was, of course, wrong. It was none of these. The characteristics of Krahe's skimming ability were, in fact, objectively subpar. Its range was above-average, but not "long".
Four shots; Semzar had paid Jezail for four shots and impact confirmation. Or rather, three of his standard catalogue, and one Full Custom. A shot tailored specifically to the target, and what a shot it was. Jezail honestly hoped she would dodge the next two just so he would get to use it.
The collateral damage was Semzar's problem. Eutropia was a loose end whose death was included in the contract as a secondary objective, which he had now fulfilled, but his current ammo was rather destructive by nature. All of the buildings behind his target were potential collateral damage, and given the area, some of those buildings were the homes of people Semzar couldn't afford to anger.
That wasn't Jezail's problem.
"You wanted me to use the Oblivion Flow, you get the Oblivion Flow..." he thought. In the same breath, he briefly considered waiving the fee for Eutropia and only charging for the shot that killed her, since information on her was, in the end, what allowed him to catch Blackhand like this. He banished the thought. For a better customer, for Damrus, even, perhaps. Not for Semzar.
Blackhand raised a wall of strange, black-green stone, as if it would shield her. It probably would, against most attacks. Not against his.
He fired the second shot. It didn't burst out of his staff, but rather poured out. It thereafter flowed through the air, an unearthly river of power in a colour darker than than black, creating a trail not through the violence of its passage, but mere incident. Bits of dust, errant feathers, even the air itself were all erased by the flow, sweeping up a light breeze and leaving shreds of impossible blackness in its wake.
It was nearly instantaneous, traveling no slower than lightning itself with a fraction of the commotion and far more focused power than such a brutish bolt. Jezail had no particular talent, no particular elemental affinity, but he felt no need for it. The reassuring absoluteness of Arcane magic's outcomes was one of the reasons he was Crescent Jezail, instead of some idiot with a cooked brain and too much love for literal beams of fire. The Oblivion Flow brought an altogether more elegant and literal kind of obliteration. Eutropia wasn't torn apart, and neither were the walls unfortunately caught in the Flow's path; they were erased, directly destroyed by magic.
Given the lack of overpenetration, that wall had put up a significant amount of resistance, but not enough to stop the Flow from passing through.
Two shots. Half a million DDs without hit confirmation accounted for. The first shot had gotten hit confirmation on Eutropia, bringing it to 600,000. The second, too, had passed through a living target, raising his base payout to 700,000. Jezail didn't relax, however. His method of hit confirmation wasn't foolproof, as he had warned Semzar earlier, despite Semzar's refusal to acknowledge that fact during the negotiations for this very job. Two shots left, and Semzar had in the end caved and paid for direct kill confirmation. Thus, Jezail would circle the target to get a line of sight and make damn sure she was dead.
