LIGHTNOVELONLINE 152 – Lost Sun Killer Myth: Tying Up Loose Ends Pt. 3
Five seconds passed. Sorayah, wild-eyed, raised the lantern again. The charge-up was even shorter this time, but Krahe reacted based on the tensing of Sorayah's arm and avoided the vast majority of the blast with another dive. Nonetheless, she only avoided most of the blast, and what little she had to block still filled up over two-thirds of her entropy tolerance. Even then, it felt like being sprayed with acid in the way the Isotope-filled blast corroded her wards and wormed into her. One more blast like that would fill her arm’s ability to contain, and it wouldn’t take much more after that to make her get sick.
"I don't know what you expected. I can just keep doing that, y'know. While I admit that there is some effort to doing it, your attacks can't affect me once I've transformed... And I'd wager you can't fire that thing faster than I can disperse what little entropy nullifying its effects costs me," Krahe lied again, omitting the five-second dive recovery time. She took a step forward, prompting Sorayah to take a step back, grasping the lantern with her other arm much like someone whose giant penis-metaphor revolver just bounced off of a cyborg's subdermal armor. She started manipulating something in the lantern's rear for the third time, and the beam began narrowing for the third time, but Krahe interrupted her:
"I wouldn't. I gave you one, two chances, and there won't be at third. Next time I'll dislocate your arms instead of just standing here. Now be smart and take me to your basement."
"You can't expect me to believe that you can break my wards that quickly. Mine are especially resilient."
Krahe stepped forward as if starting a sprint, skimmed towards Sorayah, and mid-skim adjusted her exit position and facing so she would come out into a ground slide... Or as close as she could with her current Control attribute. It was rough at best, she slammed onto the ground in a somewhat awkward slide-kick position, but her momentum carried her through and the smooth rug provided some assistance. She was able to get behind Sorayah in the commotion. The saurian exerted a level of strength and grapple resistance well beyond what her size suggested, but Krahe had three things that allowed her to come on top:
Firstly, knowledge of real grappling arts. This included bits from various martial arts learned over the course of her life, followed by the mnemonic imprints for the Whitestone and Bergmann Security Grappling Manual V.3 burned into her memory, all culminating with Sector 7 Style's brutal joint-locks designed to counter an opponent's superior strength and exploit the common joint weak-points of most cyborgs.
Secondly, the Left Arm of Chernobog. Specifically, it was the unique property that had allowed her to lift a man weighing more than a hundred kilos back in Cassius's - or rather, Seer's - gambling house. The Left Arm's physical attributes grew not just based on her own pure strength, but also her arcane attributes. At this point, it was far stronger than her right arm.
Thirdly, Tar; she could throw the full weight of her magic into a grapple through tar tendrils.
By exploiting all three of these factors to the fullest, Krahe managed to get Sorayah into an arm-lock. In the process, the Saurian had fired two more blasts from her artifact, imprinting reams of purple-smoldering eldritch script into the walls and carpet.
"I won't need to break them, unless you've got some truly special wards that protect against grappling," she hissed into Sorayah's ear. "Now drop the artifact or I'll make you drop it."
"I cannot. It's volatile. Who knows what will happen if I let go."
With a smirk, Krahe extended the tendril she had winding down Sorayah's arm, wrapping it around the lantern.
"No excuses. Let go."
Sorayah didn't, so Krahe wrenched her arm a bit. Not enough to dislocate the shoulder, but enough to make it abundantly clear that she could and would. It was out of mercy, but because Krahe didn't want to risk the possibility of the basement's wards requiring both hands to open. Once she had the lantern grasped in a tar tendril, Krahe skimmed backwards, raising her arms into the firing configuration of Wandrei Faust.
"Basement. Now."
A few uneasy minutes later, Sorayah unlocked the door and proceeded to move her hands over its surface. Her palms, held in stiff gestures, snapped through a sequence of three specific positions while Sorayah uttered a sequence of three inaudible keywords.
When it finally swung open, Krahe ensured that the two of them stepped in at the same time so that Sorayah couldn't try to slam the door shut in her face. Beyond was a short stairway into the earth, leading into the basement proper. It was fairly spacious, a single large rectangular room, mostly plain, smoothed stone. It resembled a laboratory of a sort, with bookshelves and a large L-shaped table that included a sink in its design. A mixture of glassware and occult implements, made from a mixture of brass and strange dark stone, was strewn across its surface. Shards of coal-like material pulsing with red light were suspended in clamps, contained in flasks, and so on. A few of them could be recognized as human parts - mostly fingers, toes, and other such small pieces. None of them moved like the hand in the book; in fact, none of them quite looked like it either, truly resembling charcoal. Krahe realized what the hand reminded her of: high-grade rock coal, anthracite.
One the left of the room, Krahe saw the other side of that door she had tried to break through, barely visible behind a large device the shape of a vending machine, clearly placed there as a barricade. Going off the tank with Thaumine sloshing about inside and the black cabled hanging from it and snaking to the various devices through the room, it was a power supply unit.
"Are these your best results?" Krahe asked, glancing towards the table. She decided to pretend she knew more than she truly did, making the assumption that Sorayah hadn't gotten far in her research.
"Yes. My materials have been sub-par. Perhaps we could work together-"
"Very compelling offer, I'll consider it," Krahe interrupted facetiously. "Move, open the next door."
