LIGHTNOVELONLINE 148 – Unlucky Pt. 2
Silberblut took stock of the situation; Seer was feverishly trying to reload his howdah pistol while backing away, while Tsetse calmly approached. A shallow crater had been melted into the flyman's exoskeleton by Seer's attack, with rivulets of yellow hemolymph seeping out, but he seemed mostly fine. More than that, the wound was healing right then and there, the chitin melding back together and buckling outward. The scar was plain to see, and it would be a weak point until it healed properly, but such resilience was still astonishing. It was also extremely suspicious. Evoy could form Barriers and Wards just the same as anyone else, so why was he this unprotected? A consideration passed Silberblut's mind, but he dismissed it. This couldn't be an Evoy version of Mamon Armor. Surely not.
Dashing in, Tsetse unleashed a barrage of side kicks against Silberblut, using the length of his legs to control the range. Despite using his arm-blade to defend himself, it couldn't get a good cut on the chitin of Tsetse's calves. It bulged outward strangely in the lower half, and its surface was extremely slick. It felt like trying to cut glass, and Tsetse's technique didn't make it any easier either. It was clear he was highly skilled in whatever bizarre martial art this was. Then, the punches came in. Without dropping his focus on kicks, Tsetse flexed his arms, causing the segments of his forearms to raise up, exposing fleshy a membrane with three glassy orbs on each arm. With short punches, the orbs emitted a high-pitched noise and Silberblut felt as if he had been struck. The force was comparable to a Yellow Atropal. A sound-based concussive blaster of some kind. Minimal charge-up, great power output, so the flaw had to be range... And those membranes sure looked fragile.
This exchange went on for some time, high-pitched whirrs and thunderous impacts reverberating through the street. At one point, Silberblut got his fingers into an exoskeletal crease on Tsetse's upper foreleg, taking this opportunity to put his other arm to work as well by grabbing his foot. Tsetse blasted him in the chest twice in a row in an attempt to stop this, but by then Silberblut had already moved him enough that only one of the sonic blasts struck, and even this was a glancing blow. With a mighty heave, he swung Tsetse overhead and smashed him into the pavement. The man bounced; his chitin buckled and cracked in a few places with yellow bursting out, but its flexible nature absorbed much of the impact. Grunting with anger and exertion, Tsetse punched the ground and blasted himself into a quasi-upright position. Silberblut let go as to not get dragged along, and Tsetse now spun on his free foot while using the one Silberblut had grabbed to now try to deliver a spinning kick. Silberblut let his knees fall out from under himself, bending backwards just in time. The strange bulge on Tsetse's lower leg had slid down and over the top of his foot, revealing a single large sonic lens. As the kick followed through, Silberblut heard a high-pitched whirr. A deep gash was torn across the facade of the building to his left.
He followed through on the momentum, delivering a downward spinning left hook. Silberblut had seen through it, and opened the Second Eye. In a bright flash, the force of Tsetse's blow was absorbed, and Silberblut was able to handspring backwards, onto his feet and into a safer range. Seer, at this point, fired two more Pale-Reds in quick succession, which Tsetse dodged, followed by a slow, deep-red missile. It was obviously positioned to try and catch Tsetse after dodging, but the flyman rushed towards it, closing within only a few steps of Seer... And punched the Reaper back the way it came. Rather than detonate, it imploded and fizzled out.
"Unlucky," Tsetse repeated for the Nth time, turning his attention back towards Silberblut, even as he continued talking. "You put a safety primer on them. They don't detonate if it would hit you too. Heard you mention it once. Don't try to remember. I had a different face."
In the meanwhile, Silberblut had been looking for an opening, circling around, but even as he spoke, Tsetse meticulously kept up his guarded stance, adjusting to counter Silberblut's own changes in posture. Not wasting another moment, Tsetse once more closed the distance with a barrage of side kicks, but this time, every once in a while, he would fire one of the sonic emitters on his legs. There was no way to predict when it would come besides trying to find a pattern, and Silberblut did find several patterns: Firstly, Tsetse favoured his forward leg, maximizing range, while also using his opposite arm to attack. Secondly, he couldn't fire two of his sonic emitters at once, and there was a clear cooldown period for each of them. Thirdly, there wasn't a particular pattern to when he used the emitters, but there was a tell: The membrane shuddered a split-second before the equally split-second audible charge-up, giving him one third, perhaps four-tenths of a second to react to the tell. Silberblut hit the center of his belt to prime a coupler charge, feeling anathema pressure build within the device, waiting to be directed. A subtle aura of silver-gold flame built up around him.
Just after dodging a sonic blast punch He slipped under Tsetse's leg and delivered an overhand casting punch, lodging his arm-blade right between two of the sonic lenses. Bringing up his left arm to meet Tsetse's right, perpendicularly to invalidate the sonic emitter, Silberblut released his coupler charge and the power he had captured with the Second Eye: A mere three of Tsetse's sonic punches, but it added up, especially with Tsetse. Something about him drove the Silberblut Coupler into a frenzy. It wasn't mere guilt; the belt reacted to anything and everything from someone's inner evil nature to the wretchedness of an existence, like the Tindalos graft-beast.
An outpouring of Anathema rushed into his arm; silver flame came pouring out around his blade, and a jet of it erupted out of his elbow, pushing it further in. Tsetse's flesh came apart like wet paper, the flame tearing and shredding more than it burned.
