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141 - Lost Sun Killer Myth: The Hand is Shown [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2023-10-04 22:44:12 +0000 UTCThey eventually “got her” in the loading/unloading area of a small warehouse, insofar as she led them to this place because the layout was advantageous to her and the warehouse, being out of use, would be an easy way to split them up or lose them if things went badly. It was an apparent dead end, but she had been around this area before, and knew that the “dead end” wall was just a thin divider separating this unloading area from one of the main roads.
Krahe waited for a short time with her back turned, making it look like she was looking into the warehouse as she lit up a cigarette. Meanwhile, Barzai perched on a nearby railing, covering her blind spot.
“I figured I was being tailed,” she said aloud when the group of five entered after her. No other entrance, no way for them to surround her.
No response. From what Barzai saw, they looked… Marginally professional, with masked faces and some armor. Two Mamon Knights with dregsteamers, three thaumaturges, none exuding a particularly impressive aura. The apparent leader was a large, bird-like Saurian with a hooked beak for a mouth; thus, Beak. To his right, an unsettlingly humanlike saurian with a long beard of feathers and a second, weasely-looking one; Beardo and Weasel, with Weasel having a dregsteamer belt. To his left, a second Saurian with a lighter, raptor-like build, and a blonde woman who had the second dregsteamer; Raptor and Blondie. Now that she looked at him, she was sure Raptor was the one she saw earlier. They clearly weren’t true pros, but hired muscle that knew the basic opsec practice of “shut the fuck up”.
Turning on her boot heel, hand already on her gun, Krahe asked: “Let me guess: Sorayah?”
“The identity of our employer is not yours to guess at,” the left-hand man hissed, but the speed and manner of his reaction betrayed that she was right.
“C’mon, oldest trick in the book,” she thought, giving the weasely-looking man an amused look. His compatriots stared daggers through him. He squinted, glaring at her, as if he recognized her.
Not one to give up the first mover’s advantage, Krahe dragged down the rest of her cigarette. Simultaneously, she fusion-formed a high-pressure burster that would be weak, but loud and messy, erupting into a short-lived burst of smoke and ash. A prototype Concussion Burster by any other name.
With a spark of intent she willed Barzai to reveal himself and set upon the five, and in the split-second when he pulled their attention, she fired the concussion burster into their midst by way of Six Trees Killer. The bullet itself struck one of the Mamon Knights, throwing him off and delaying his transformation by two seconds compared to his counterpart.
The strobe-bursts of Barzai’s eyes briefly preceded bursts of small explosions, springing out of nowhere right on the bodies of Blondie and Beardo. They weren’t enough to break or even seriously damage their Wards, but that wasn’t their purpose. Krahe exhaled, shrouding her surroundings in a Smoke Eruption. The rancid taste of Isotope burned her mouth. Despite this onslaught, three of them regained their bearings, firing into the smoke. Krahe felt a mixture of wildly varied projectiles zip by her as she raised a wall from the ground.
Rapid footsteps combined with a dregsteamer’s synthesized voice betrayed one of the Mamon Knights trying to close in: “WARNING: High velocity. Explosive pressure. Stand free.”
Beginning to form the Faust Construct, Krahe met the freshly-transformed Mamon Knight in battle. Not a fair, straightforward fight, of course. She skimmed twice in a row around him and dived to further improve her own mobility, emerging only once the construct’s formation had finished while she was submerged… And Weasel was facing away from her, around six meters away. A single shot was all it took to send it his way, but true to his armor, he reacted to the gunshot with blistering speed and whipped around to come at her. At this rate, she had maybe a second and a half before he punched her lights out. In this moment of adrenaline, she realized the suppressive fire from before had stopped; the only reason Weasel’s allies stopped shooting, she wagered, had to be that they didn’t want to hit him.
Krahe took the risk and ran ahead to meet him, unable to dive for a few more seconds. With her rather limited control over the missile, she willed Wandrei Faust to slow down, pulling ahead. Another transformation announcement, this time for Omniphage, sounded, and Blondie’s armored feet approached as well. In the absence of better options, Krahe changed plans from a pincer attack on Weasel to splitting up her resources. She smashed into Weasel with a tendril-extended straight punch, pushing dangerously close to meltdown to keep him at bay long enough to regain a skimming charge. Afterwards, she skimmed straight through him, using the opportunity to turn herself around. With every bit of what little entropy she had, she swung again and send him flying into her Wandrei Faust. At the moment that punch connected, her tendrils rotted away. At that same moment, right as she punched Wesel with her left hand, she gestured up with her right to impel the Forming Toroid into raising another wall. Her smoke was dispersing by now due to the battle going on inside it, so despite her best judgment she spent the time to refresh her Smoke Eruption. Barzai, upon Krahe’s command, dive-bombed into Blondie, momentarily keeping her at bay. The attack was enough to exhaust his astral form, and so she bid him to return as she exhaled the next blast of smoke. Her mouth and throat were burning and raw from the Isotope.
Meanwhile, outside the smoke, Beardo fled. He simply turned tail and ran, much to Beak’s and Raptor's vocal chagrin. The two men gathered their wits, unused to such unreasonable combat conditions. The smoke clearly wasn’t normal; both their eyes were sharp enough to pierce most obscuring thaumaturgies.
