215 - Vs. Semzar Pt. 1 [Cherno] (Patreon)

The shadowy shape of Eisenretter, blackened by the radiance of his own light, passed unimpeded through Tsetse. His passage and radiant blade cleft a vertical split through the monstrous flyman three-quarters of the way up his chest. Miraculously, Tsetse remained standing. Even as gold-silver flame scoured his flesh from the inside, widening the wound, as Cabral's internal organs spilled out, and as both the Abara Morph's and the Host's blood ran freely down Tsetse's legs, pooling at his feet, he calmly looked down at himself.

“Unlucky… Me. Hoist by my own petard. Heh. I shall see how you do… Against my next self.”

Tsetse went limp, toppling over backwards with a fleshy thud. However, the same could not be said for whomever was inside. Cabral’s lanky, mutilated upper half wrenched its way out of the Abara Morph’s rapidly decaying flesh, confusion evident in his face. Various connection ports stretched between him and his meatsuit, tearing in half as he emerged and propped himself up by his arms.

“Where- Who- How-”

The evoy clutched his head. He then toppled over forward, and the umbilicus connected to the back of his head snapped.

At that instant, he went limp like a puppet with its strings cut.

Meanwhile, “Shadow Eisenretter” melted away and Casus Aristedes was left barely standing in his place, his right arm hanging limply at his side. Frayed muscle peeled away from it. With each laboured step the banisher took towards Semzar’s sofa, blood and other fluids ran down his arm’s length and trailed across the ground. The Silberblut Coupler wasn’t in a much better state — its outer casement had cracked, and its trio of securing claws had been welded open. Casus was somehow certain that the Mamon System’s relic components had purposely taken on the brunt of the strain to spare his life.

Casus, of course, was already unconscious by this point. Nonetheless, his unconscious body walked to Semzar's sofa and sat down, holding vigil over Tsetse and Cabral's rapidly disintegrating forms.

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Whilst rushing to reach the ballroom, Krahe had encountered several more of Semzar’s subordinates. To call them defenders would have been a stretch — they were either fleeing or just frozen in panic when she encountered them, and only some of them turned to fight. Those stupid, stupid few served as further target practice for her heretofore unnamed tar-whip thaumaturgy, each a new attempt to refine it without slowing down. It would have been terribly convenient if she had just so happened to perfect the thaumaturgy by the time she arrived at the ballroom, but alas, no such thing came to pass.

Oh, she felt close. So, so damnably close. Its true, ideal form was within her grasp, she just knew it. But she had to start fighting Semzar without it.

Furthermore, as she approached the ballroom, another thing became patently evident — something far less positive. That something was that quite a bit of her pain stemmed from the Atomica, or perhaps even from her altered Soul Furnace. She couldn’t discern the exact nature and extent of it, but one thing was clear: Burning thauma was somehow causing her body to break down — as to the nature and extent of the damage, she wasn’t sure, but this was certainly the polar opposite of what she had hoped for with the Atomica. A part of her feared that Yao might have purposely sabotaged the key, but a much larger part was certain this had to do with implanting it prematurely, or perhaps some other factor external to the key itself.Perhaps she hadn’t let it cool off long enough after the transmutation, or it was something as simple as her body not being physically tough enough to stand the power, even if such a possibility was counterintuitive given her frequent use of anathema without issue. The silver lining was that she was certain the damage wouldn’t catch up with her before she killed Semzar and dragged Casus out of there. Half of this certainty stemmed from her possession of the Calbian Molting Tonic — the ultimate contingency from Razem himself, an elixir that would by his description allow her to survive beyond-lethal injuries if she injected it into her heart. Another quarter of it came from the fact Thaumic Fusion still worked normally, allowing her to mitigate the damage to some extent. The rest was just self-confidence, bravado perhaps. It would all come down to how good Semzar was and how long it would take her to off him.

All considerations aside, it wasn’t as if she had much choice in the matter. That much she knew the instant she entered the ballroom. She had arrived, as it seemed, just in time to witness Casus carry out a heroic and undoubtedly self-destructive final attack against Tsetse. The enormous gash in the floor and the seething dagger in Semzar’s hand told the rest of the story. She was certain that, had she arrived later, she would have found Semzar leering towards Casus with the intent to take the banisher’s body for his own. If everything went wrong, she would at least try to get Casus out of there and rendezvous with the inquisitor, whom she knew to be stationed outside the property. At least, she hoped she was still in position. And still alive.

Despite her dicey-at-best position, when she surfaced from her dive and set loose that first salvo of Tracers in Semzar’s direction, Krahe couldn’t help but let a grin push its way onto her face.

A body breaking down from an experimental power source, one high-grade drug keeping her going and another in the back pocket to pull her through the final stretch. An opponent — no, a target — such as Semzar, one with bought and stolen power that he didn’t know how to use properly, relying on the muscle memory of his body’s previous unfortunate inhabitant. The one unfamiliar variable was Casus. A wounded comrade whose life, for once, was a higher priority than the death of her target.

All in all, she felt more clear-headed, more focused, more confident than ever. 

Nothing she had experienced on the face of Zastreon had brought her back as much as this. Her mind raced with countless possibilities and past operations to draw on. Every moment stretched on and on like a distended synthetic tendon. The pain burning through every inch, turned sideways by Class-3 painkillers, suddenly fed into a razor-sharp bodily awareness.