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142 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Hand is Shown Pt. 2 [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2023-10-05 07:18:46 +0000 UTCThat smoke had to be some anathemist trick, but what fool would resort to the risks of anathemism to enhance a mere obscuring thaumaturgy? Then again, it clearly worked wonders. And those summoned walls were far too durable to be simple constructs. That had to be an artifact of some kind. That was what Beak told himself, hoping and praying they weren’t up against some insanely strong mid-ranker with a bottomless entropy tolerance. His cousin certainly hadn’t made it sound like that when she called in a favour to have her dealt with.
Both of them being practitioners of the same thaumaturgic style, Beak and Raptor joined forces in trying to salvage their original plan of attack: The Basilisk Dive, a combination thaumaturgy drawing on both of their thinned-out drasaurian genes. While Beak showed some of the signs, Raptor’s only proof of his drasaurian lineage was his shitty blowtorch breath and his ability to invoke draconic powers via thaumaturgy.
Out from the smoke, a monstrous, flying forearm came, dragging Weasel and Blondie over the stone, with Weasel screaming while Blondie grunted and struggled to free herself. She slipped out thanks to the fact she had merely been caught in its trajectors and wasn’t actually in the construct’s grasp, but Weasel wasn’t so fortunate; the black arm made an unsteady 180° turn, smashing him into the left-hand wall and dragging him back into the smoke. A bright yellow flash followed, and a horrific sound that neither of the saurians could describe. They had never heard a man in mamon armor explode from the pressure of his own boiling blood. Blondie had circled around from the right by this point, and the smoke had dissipated enough to see at least silhouettes. What Beak and Raptor beheld were alien shapes erupting from the anathemist’s body, striking at Blondie without regard for the Omniphage armor’s caustic properties. Their sightline was broken by a pair of ominous, blackened jade obelisks, and further disrupted by the fact Weasel had been turned into a shadow on the wall and a puddle spreading over the cobbles below.
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Krahe knew better than to fight a mostly-fresh Mamon Knight in a melee while her entropy was pushing eighty percent, doubly so when her two other foes were using this time to build a ghostly dragon head.
So, she dived, sprinting to the back wall with the intent to skim through it. As she ran, mere steps away, she felt a wave of searing heat was over her, and blinding light filled her vision. She passed unto the other side, emerging and instantly beginning a purge, but as she spun around as to not have her back turned towards the trio, she saw that the thin wall was melting. Unsure of whether those lizards could pull this trick again, she raised her third jade wall today just in case.
By the sound of their shouting, the three weren’t dumb enough to assume she was gone altogether. That was fine. She just needed time to purge. Enveloped in an aura of grey-black smoke, she watched and prepared, cycling her gun to eject the current thaumshot-core cartridge and chamber the next Wandrei Faust. A plan took form in her head.
A second attack came just moments before her purge finished, and this time she saw some of it take place. The ghostly dragon head flew upward and came diving down, spewing some kind of boiling, burning liquid. It was most easily described as acid napalm. The original wall was broken down by now, and the burning acid was eating away at her jade slab. She was pretty sure Goldie was helping it along with the Omniphage armor’s abilities, but she hadn’t heard a Coupler Charge callout, so her caustic output had to be limited.
Meanwhile, Krahe formed a Wandrei Faust, forming a tar-tendril from her upper arm and wrapping it around the construct. She steadied her feet, aimed her arm upwards, visualized Beak in her mind’s eye… And shot herself. She felt the construct detaching to fly after its target, and willed the tendril to extend, giving her around a meter and a half of standoff from the missile. Once it looked long enough, she launched herself in the same direction using a diagonally-rising pillar of jade. Soaring over the wall, Krahe fusion-formed and fired a weak Smoke Eruption grenade into the saurian brothers’ midst, herself letting go of the Wandrei Faust as she came barreling downward.
She had to stop herself from grinning when she saw Blondie moving to eagerly play into her hand, trying to swat her out of the air. For once, she made use of her Barrier, wanting to preserve her access to diving as a safety net. Her downward approach was punctuated by the ominous cracking of the Cinder Strobe, smashing down on Blondie like a cruel sun, visibly deforming her armor. Just before she came into Blondie’s melee range, Krahe executed her premediated plan: She using one of the secondary features of Astro Skimming to reorient herself, ensuring that Blondie got closely acquainted with the stone underfoot for the second time today.
As Krahe slid that short distance, she wasted no time in giving Blondie a full-tilt Cinder Flash at near-point-blank. The woman, previously struggling, boiled inside her suit before it could even fall apart, blood and fluids gushing out of the joint seams, the undersuit peeling cracking and peeling apart. A visible charred outlined formed around her on the ground, but it was washed away by the continuous leakage from her corpse. As Krahe turned to finish dealing with the saurian pair, Blondie’s armor emitted a kettle-like whistle for a few moments before it utterly crumbled. The residual omniphage would leave no corpse behind.
Despite the smoke, Krahe saw the two still valiantly maintaining the ghostly dragon.
“Well, since you’re pulling out the big guns…” she thought, holding out her left arm, still glowing an ominous anathemic red. Without an explicit prompt, Barzai erupted from her chest and perched atop her palm, imploding into a seething ball of crimson as Krahe already began forming his tendrilous casement.
Raptor and Beak’s ghostly, somewhat bird-like dragon head turned to glare at her, alarm gripping the two of them at the sight of her.
