202 - Black Sun Nova Burster [Cherno] (Patreon)

Smoke, ash and cinders began pouring out of every crevice of the Viridaimon suit, enveloping her in a swirling maelstrom. It resembled a swarm of insects more than anything else. Her casting medium, meanwhile, formed a small bead of sputtering, flame, an ember more than anything else, and yet, its radiance grew. As if being fed with pure oxygen, the Black Sun Coupler roused an ember to the intensity of raging fire. She began walking through the short intermediary room separating this wing from the foyer, raising her arm above her head.

Streams of pyroclast gathered there, swarming like moths around a candle, casting a dark kaleidoscope of unsettling shadows over the foyer as countless shouts rang out and magic began raining down. All was consumed in the storm of pyroclast; in its self-destructive final flare, the Black Sun Coupler brutishly devoured hostile magic and converted it into yet further power for its final attack, its core blazing with the final flare of a dying star. Two Red Reapers, a Yellow Atropal, and four independent, albeit decently potent thaumaturgies struck her. With each one, the ember burned brighter, and cracks spidered across the plates of her armour. A fifth thaumaturgy came, a ghostly fist wrought of stone-grey energy. It landed with such force as to send her stumbling back, caving in her chestplate and knocking the wind out of her. It was that bear-like man, and his other hand was already encased in another ghostly fist just like the first. Even as her body screamed for air, Krahe leveled her arm at her point of aim, above the defenders’ heads.

Barzai had manifested without prompting at some point, circling around her. Screaming and laughing. Krahe could barely move now, her thoughts wholly focused on firing this off and then immediately diving.

“Hahahahaha! Burn them under the fallen sun! We know what must be done!” the eidolon cawed in a manic tone.

With a low roar, a column of flame came pouring out of the casting medium, simultaneously propelling the sphere of ash and cinders whilst pushing Krahe back. Not the Viridaimon Armor — Krahe herself. The recoil impulse coincided with the Viridaimon Armor’s final and total structural failure, pushing her out through the suit’s back, which crumbled under her weight with barely any resistance.

Her dive was instant. The moment she felt the air on her own skin, she dove into the astral other, and briefly beheld the aftermath of the Red Hood’s rampage within the foyer. The traces were everywhere, almost painting a picture of how it had slaughtered those gangster. Krahe’s visual calculus did not have the time to even begin working out the puzzle, of course — there came a high-pitched squeal, a brilliant flash of light, and the air caught fire. The room fell victim to a pyroclastic flow worthy of an actual volcano — not in scale, but in intensity. Krahe couldn’t tell how the effect operated — she certainly couldn’t see through the mess, doubly so not from her side of the astral gulf.

FINAL COUPLER CHARGE

BLACK SUN NOVA BURSTER

In her state, she couldn’t remain submerged for long; she barely managed to escape the foyer back the way she came, and was left with a nearly bottomed-out entropy tolerance at the other side. Casus glanced down, nodded, and turned the corner in her wake, shutting the door behind himself — not before Barzai slipped through to be the lookout, of course. Last she saw of him through her own eyes, the four stars above his head began revolving so quickly as to form a contiguous halo. A moment later, she both heard and felt his explosive take-off towards his opponent, with Barzai’s sightline becoming obscured by a cloud of dust.

Krahe unbuttoned her back pocket and pulled out the Twin Serpent Key, shoving it into place behind her ear. Already, she could feel her wards crumbling, and the Twin Serpent Key’s re-implantation only slowed that decay — it couldn’t hold them together properly. The labour of wrenching open a window to her Kenoma Sack began as the sounds of superhuman violence played out just next door. Rapid footsteps came from the other side, the wing of the mansion they had entered through, and Krahe’s instinctive reaction at that moment was wall. Without a moment’s hesitation she dragged a 10-charge slab of smoky jade from the ground, stretching it out to obstruct the double-winged door. She heard it open moments later, and bewildered profanity followed. The people on the other side banged on it, even shot it, and then ran off. Fifteen centimeters of magically reinforced stone would stop a fair bit, a couple reapers, even, but Krahe had no illusions of true safety. She pushed harder and harder, painstakingly dragging the box out of Kenoma’s grasp as Casus fought in the other room. Tremors from his clashes with the head of security reverberated through the floor and walls, and set the overhead chandelier swaying ever so slightly.

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Casus beheld the aftermath of Lady Blackhand’s final coupler charge. He instantly deduced it to have been some variant of burster, perhaps an empowered variant of the Six Trees Killer — a “Sixty Trees Killer”. He chuckled at his own wordplay.

Only the backless, one-armed husk of the Viridaimon Armor remained in the midst of the sanded-down foyer, and a layer of ash covered everything. The barricade had been torn asunder, one barrier generator still heroically soldiering on as thaumine dripped from its cracked fuel tank, projecting a garbled wall into the air.

Two of the defenders had survived the blast, alongside, it seemed one of their graft-beasts.

One was an enormous man in an unmistakable suit — the militarist-fusion work of Kharim Bayat, or a truly faithful, high-quality imitation. The man stood at the top of the stairs, his suit only slightly charred, clearly having faced the blast head-on. Two giant forearms of translucent grey force rose before him as he held up a boxer’s guard.

Despite blocking it entirely from the front, Lady Blackhand’s coupler charge had clearly bypassed that defense, based on the fizzling and flickering wards around the man’s sides and back.

As for the other human survivor, it was a three-eyed man, currently stumbling away as he coughed up globs of copper-green sludge. He had hidden himself behind his commander, likely using a high-coverage barrier to shield himself from the secondary element of the attack. The graft-beast was at his heel, scuttling behind him until the larger man called for it, causing it to join him instead.