209 - Taking a Stand [Cherno] (Patreon)

“Do you mean to tell me you cannot handle him? Did I pay you for nothing?!” Semzar hissed, trying to project the mask of an indignant, angered employer. It was a poor mask, all but see-through. His eyes trembled, his tendrils bulged under his skin, and his tone veered into pleading in the second sentence.

Tsetse, calmly, reassured his employer: “I can keep him busy. Any more is beyond me as I am now. Unless you would prefer I go after Blackhand?”

It was clear that, in truth, Semzar still considered Blackhand the bigger threat — if for no other reason than because there was a good chance that Aristedes would try to capture him alive. Still, Aristedes was the more immediate threat, while Blackhand had run off elsewhere, somehow drawing away the vast majority of the stillborns.

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As Casus Aristedes, Mamon Knight Eisenritter, took his heroic stand against Cabral Khan, Abara Morph Tsetse in the ballroom, and as Yazata Heptaxia took her own stand outside the mansion, so too did Brunhilde Krahe take a stand of her own.

It was not quite as glamorous as the other two, as her foes could not be said to possess the mental faculties to comprehend what “taking a stand” even meant. They were, nonetheless, numerous and mighty, a writhing mass of grafted flesh and metal armed to the teeth with heretical technology.

The corridor was being torn apart around her, and her Wards weren’t spared that fate, each grazing hit another step towards an injury she wouldn’t be able to walk off. The only thing keeping her in the fight was her vastly superior mobility and tactical sense. Time and again, she had lost the stillborns thanks to a well-timed screen of smoke, their senses dulled and bodies impaired by the toxicity Arrha held to the Evoy. Yes, it was Arrha that had become her lifeline in this moment, it was this property that she imbued into her smoke eruptions after she had run out of Isotope to thicken her smoke with — or rather, she still had some Isotope, but she kept that bare minimum for forming Tar.

But even this wouldn’t last — Arrha-imbued magical smoke dispersed even faster than that which she didn’t imbue with any extra properties at all. She burned through a dozen cigarettes at a pace comparable to her expenditure of bullets, and at this point, her lungs burned. She couldn’t tell whether the unearthly terribleness of that sensation was natural or if it ought to be blamed on the Class 3 painkiller.

“It’s like my airways are full of menthol oil and glass dust…” she thought, wheezing against a corner after she had barely given the jabbering swarm the slip for the Nth time. Barzai spotted them catching up to her all over again, but she was in no state to run again. She thought to blast herself out of harm’s way once more, but the energy pressure just wasn’t building like it used to. The power she could bleed off for her own use was quickly waning as the attunement process continued — the threshold where it felt as if she would explode became ever tighter.

And so, Krahe purposely cornered herself, making for the end of the corridor. The door to a bedroom could be found there, but it was locked, and so, left with no other options, she burned up every remaining charge in the Forming Toroid to put up a barricade. It wasn’t pretty and it wouldn’t actually keep the stillborns out, but it would have to do.

They crashed into her maze of jade like a tidal wave, but soon enough, the smarter and lither among them began weaving their way through, while some others scaled the rods to climb overtop.

She shot down two as they reached her side of the barrier. A third withstood her last bullet, and she had to bash it in the side of the head with the side of her left hand’s palm. That staggered it enough for her to knock it to the ground, its willowy, unarmed frame the graft-beast’s undoing as Krahe caved in its chest cavity with a full body-weight jumping stomp-kick.

In the time it took her to achieve this small victory, two more abominations had made their way through, and both possessed weapons — the first a blasting array, the second a sonic weapon-arm as well as a ward generator graft.

It was at this point that she made a judgment call, and plunged the Atomica straight into her own chest. The sensation laid somewhere between connecting to a bitey nerve-interface and plugging in an overvolted charging cable. Krahe found relief in it, in the knowledge she hadn’t just killed herself. Rather than refuse to go in, or worse, tear her open from the inside out, the Atomica resisted for a moment, only to finally enter right through her biosuit. An alien, thrumming pulse resonated in her chest, carrying through her spine. She felt herself collapse inward, awareness of the world detaching from presence, time appearing to slow to a near-halt even as the stillborn swarmed towards her. It felt unsettlingly similar to the Rite of Dho-hna, combined with the dream-like quality of her visions during the Liminal Coil’s implantation.

As she got her bearings, she came to the undeniable conclusion that she was inside her own Soul Furnace. She could only make out a few details, including the vaguely spheroid shape and the presence of the Atomica as an enormous obelisk, reaching the center of the chamber. At the Atomica’s end, in the chamber’s center, there floated a swirling mass of black tendrils, within it glowing the unlight of Kenoma. It resembled the Daemon Core, but it was obviously just a closest-equivalent representation for something she couldn’t mentally parse in its true form.

The enormous flow of energy that had been coursing through her and building up suddenly gathered within her Soul Furnace, rousing the Atomica to glow ever brighter, surpassing even its radiance when it had just been transmuted. Six spotlights erupted from it, one for each side, burning the inner walls of Krahe’s Soul Furnace. The initial pain crossed over into the realm of a sensation that she couldn’t even interpret, registering as an itch perpetually being scratched and irritated in an endless cycle, combined with the hellish burn of menthol and capsaicin.