211 - Evolved Cinder [Cherno] (Patreon)

The mansion was enormous — too large to get from one end to the ballroom in a single Astro Dive. Krahe surfaced intermittently to recover, continuing her advance as she did.

Just from a few tentative tests between dives, it instantly became evident that this was nothing like anathema. More than being transformed, it felt as if every aspect of her natural thaumaturgy had been amplified — the smoke was thicker, the embers burned brighter, the pyroclast came out visibly superheated. Besides being more intense and coherent, it was also more lively, for lack of a better term.

As Krahe rapidly approached the ballroom, so too did resistance rapidly increase — from none, to some. Enough to be noted, to have been a problem not long ago. Now, Krahe saw the brave few who stuck around as target practice. She surfaced just as one of the guards finished an impressive burst of thaumaturgy that really tore up the wall right next to her.

To start with, she wore down his barrier with a few shots from the Pattner before hitting him with a Tar-tendril empowered punch to send him into meltdown. Out of everything, they had changed the least, gaining increased responsiveness and strength, but not much else.

As the quickly-formed tendril crumbled, Krahe formed a tracer, but even a mere tracer wasn’t a tracer anymore. Its elongated shape remained the same, but the first one came out significantly larger than normal. It flew as quickly as the Viridaimon Armor’s tracers did even without a bullet to carry it, and it visibly curved to strike its target as it flew. The man was thrown backwards by the blast, a hole blown clean through his chest cavity.

Two more gangsters later, Krahe had settled on a modified casting procedure. Instead of one, she would spew out bursts of tracers. Their homing was very limited — inferior to even the Viridaimon version. It was little better than the cheapest piece of shit smartguns with the cheapest piece of shit ammo, but even that much was a godsend.

The Viridaimon similarity made her curious as to whether Deathsmoke Spray could now produce a shotgun-blast effect. She poured in some Isotope for good measure in the hopes of improving its coherence with a tiny bit of Tar. It erupted out of her palm less like a burst-beam and more like a whip, lashing one of Semzar’s goons nearly in half before it lost coherence. Hair-thin, gossamer-like threads of tar bound together rapidly-disintegrating slivers of red-hot glass. At that instant, her mind shifted, and she lost any desire to replicate the Viridaimon version. Memories from before she had obtained her radiation blasters came to the surface. Wolf and Raven ZT-8, Model 32 “Tactical Monowire Dispenser”. 

With this in mind, she pushed onward, intending to refine this current “Death-Tar Whip” into something using numerous, separate strands. There was no time to do it now — she had to back up Casus as soon as possible, and, as it happened, four surviving guards had just turned the corner coming her way. Her current toolkit just had to do. Forming bursters still worked the same, the only major difference was that they felt heavier by almost half and she could tell their shells would hold up to slightly higher pressurres. The first one she formed was a smoke burster, intending to just pass them by, given that a fight against four at once could end up going on longer than she could afford.

It went as such: 

“It’s her!” an observant man cried.

The four readied themselves for combat — or rather, two of them did, the other two looked for escape routes.

A gunshot rang out, the bullet carrying the burster along.

“Not quite a Six Trees Killer. Six Trees Vanisher, maybe…” Krahe thought, already entering Astro Dive before it even reached them. With a firework-like explosion, shrapnel scattered with about enough force to inflict a nasty bruise and a writhing wall of grey expanded to fill the hallway.

Krahe was gone in moments, a black blur. 

The four gangsters ended up stumbling around and blindly lashing out in the smoke for a full half-minute, as the cloud shifted around, actively trying to cover them all. The terror of having their vision cut off was only intensified by the manner in which the smoke writhed around them, becoming so dense as to almost feel solid in places. Worst of all, it actively tried to shove itself down their throats, halted only by their wards. One man, a man whose wards had been compromised, emitted stomach-turning wheezes as he writhed on the ground, grasping for his neck.

________________________________________________________________________

A short time earlier…

The Inquisitor’s attention was pulled towards one end of the mansion’s upper floor, as her bound servants broke their orders to flee from the source of the outburst. Even she could sense it, through the barrier. It easily compared to the immense flare of transformation energy she had sensed from Silberblut earlier. Unlike the Silberblut Coupler, this outburst’s signature seemed thaumetic in nature, albeit far too intense, teetering on the output of advanced burning techniques. Yazata didn’t think this was even slightly likely, given that such techniques weren’t common even among mid-rankers, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it.

Her opponents were good. Too good. Their coordination was impeccable, their movements twitchy and unpredictable, and their barriers held up better than most physical walls — against the blunt impact force of her distortions, no less. Their offense, too, was equally potent and treacherous, coming out as invisible sonic blasts with enough force to tear up the front garden and register to the mansion’s barriers. Every once in a while, she would catch a glimpse of the source, the silver membranes and chitinous armatures darting out of her foes’ trench coat sleeves. It was in line with the briefing — a new type of artifact weapon. She was certain now. Certain of what they were. There was no room for guesses with the measure she was about to take, given how vulnerable it would leave her, but Yazata hadn’t gotten this far by hesitating and being unsure.