LIGHTNOVELONLINE 163 – VS. Crescent Jezail Pt. 2
Reload; a new talisman wrapped around his staff. An adjustment of his fingers on the haft, translating to subtle adjustments to the next shot's properties. The air still crackled with remnant energy as Jezail regained sight and recalculated trajectories. Jezail's mind ran far faster than any Normal's, apropos of his heavy cerebral grafts and a cocktail of elixirs he had taken beforehand. He got up and stalked over the rooftops, eventually jumping across the street to the next roof over.
There he was met by a grinning face, sitting slumped against the stone slab. He raised his staff again, but she skimmed into the building before he could fire.
The game of cat and mouse which followed went on for three hours.
Jezail eventually managed to set up a decoy trap using his camouflage cloak, which seemed to be what she had used to detect him. At this moment, he was buried in a pile of trash on the flat-top roof of a three-story apartment building. He was waiting for Blackhand to cross a sightline from beyond a street corner to get out of his decoy's sightline. She did, and he took the shot...
...Only for her to still be standing once the remnants cleared, grinning at him straight through his camouflage. How? Yes, he was blind for a few brief moments after firing, but her posture wasn't changing at all, let alone enough to suggest any kind of dodge! The feedback he was receiving could only mean his attack wasn't being blocked, as the arcane reverb of a Barrier and the various feelings of Ward impact were distinct from a true, direct hit on target. By every reasonable metric, Blackhand should be dead.
Something clicked in his head.
She must have taken and implanted Eutropia's special voidkey at some point before he took the first shot. He wasn't familiar with it or its strange mechanics, but he knew enough to lay the blame on it. That was the only reasonable explanation for this havoc that was being played with his magic, and it also explained why Eutropia died properly - she didn't have the same defences that had protected her from that street vendor's Reaper. Jezail came to these conclusions in moments of real-time, and decided to take a risk.
Barriers took time to raise. Skimming, too, had a recovery time. It stood to reason this esoteric means of attack avoidance had to also have limitations. So, he brought out Mistress Yao's talisman, wrapped it around his staff, and took the shot.
Krahe had been screwing with Jezail all night, and she had to admit she had enjoyed it. For all its lethality, there was no network layer to deal with, no hacking and counter-hacking, making the game an enjoyable balance of real danger versus relative safety. She'd guessed that he couldn't see shit after firing right away. That black beam just left too much mess behind, it obscured him, but also obscured his vision. It was possible he could see through it, like she could through her smokescreen, but her vision was still impaired by it somewhat. At this distance, even that level of sight impairment was a big fucking problem.
Once she saw that dead-still decoy and that sightline straight out of a sniper's wet dream, she knew she had the right bait for him.
He swallowed it hook line and sinker.
A golden-yellow light flashed from the talisman, filling the many spiraling grooves that covered the staff's surface. A burst of that same light erupted from the rod, sending the talisman itself flying at a velocity that rightly should have obliterated it. As it flew, it rapidly multiplied into dozens, at first flying as a swarm, and eventually reaching such a density they *flowed* at their target.
Yet, something was wrong. Jezail had felt a sense of foreboding when he took aim, as if something was warning him not to take the shot, but he had encountered similar dissuasion magic before.
For this same reason, seeing his target turn into a green-eyed smoke demon didn't intimidate him.
Jezail started reconsidering his odds only once he saw the swarm of talismans surround their target and begin orbiting. By now, they should have mummified and vaporized her.
Krahe didn't trust Yao enough to just eat that talisman face-first unguarded, and there was no guarantee that this talisman was the one Yao had agreed to rig with a rebound trigger. For all she knew, Jezail might have acquired more offensive talismans from the mistress for general use.
Her distrust was once again been proved wrong when, a split-second after being surrounded by that swarm, it suddenly went zipping back to sender, spewing beams of golden light at Jezail from all directions. It didn't even look like he was supposed to get hit, but rather as though the swarm was corralling him, trying to chase him away. It worked, as the sniper-wizard fired off a scattered version of his earlier attack and vanished in the aftermath.
The last Krahe saw of Jezail for that night was his blurred silhouette as he leapt atop his staff and went blasting over the rooftops, using it as a hoverbike of a sort. It certainly didn't look like real flight.
Despite his best efforts, however, Yao's talismans knew where he was, and chased after him. He had, after all, tied himself to them as the caster, and Yao had purposely altered their homing mechanism so it could go both ways. The tie between Jezail and Krahe was much like that of a curse, if shorter-lived. If anything, the rebound was even more powerful than the original attack; rather than homing in on an arbitrary target, it was following the chain of retribution to a perpetrator. At least, such was Krahe's limited understanding of sympathetic magic.
Krahe wasted no time in returning to Eutropia's home, taking a moment to change her clothes in a back alley on the way there. Her caution was rewarded when she found a handful of curious eyes peering from the windows of nearby buildings. She extracted Eutropia's souldregs and her voidkey, knowing that Garvesh would appreciate seeing hard proof of her death. The key snapped, with a sizable chunk of it just bursting apart and disintegrating, but she got most of it anyway. It felt familiar, somehow. Before anyone in the neighbourhood could muster up the courage to investigate, and before the night-watchmen could reach the place, Krahe was gone.
