“Well, Rocinante, our first giant has come,” Krahe uttered, grinning at the patent absurdity of her own words. She drew in a breath as the monstrosity climbed at last toward the surface, and ignited the Implosion Furnace, funneling the first of its energetic bursts into her left arm. A mass of writhing smoke streaked-through by red gathered about the clawed limb merely from the presence of her evolved thauma, while her right hand remained securely locked around one of her steed’s control handles. She felt the burning heat flowing out of her arm, seeping through the cracks and thruster nozzles, yet there was no sense of loss. It lingered, building into serpent-like swarms of pyroclast and red glow.
“Burster first, perhaps? No, it’ll suffocate him. Tracers, tracers will be good,” she thought aloud. At a mere thought, the snakes of living cinder coalesced into three fist-sized tracers, revolving around her wrist. That was strange. She felt… Something shift, inside her arm. The thrusters and their energy pathways were the same, but it was undeniable. Being introduced to “Sixfold Imploded Thauma” had triggered a subtle change that elevated the Left Arm’s ability to retain energy. She would look into it when she had the time.
The armored mass of flesh, which she had mentally named the scornbeast for its hateful gaze, had finally leapt from the lift tower onto solid land, wisely not trusting the rickety gangway to support its weight.
Look at it from this distance, a mere sixty-one meters, Krahe could make out far more detail, and she only grew more certain that the one responsible for this thing was a highly skilled heretical grafter. It had been self-evident before, but the visible stitch lines and metallic-black tubing showing under its skin proved it beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt. The scornbeast charged towards her, and with just a slight tug on the control handle, Rocinante went speeding towards it. The leg-recesses in the automaton’s torso clamped down as it sped up. A surface of dry, dead dirt be damned, the horse’s iron hooves still went from a standstill to 100km/h in a split-second, and somehow, the dirt didn’t so much as budge under it.
The scornbeast’s mouth yawned open as it ran, or rather bounded forward, its rear legs just barely big enough to keep up. The lower jaw split, a membrane between the mandibles stretched taut and translucent. Within, Krahe glimpsed not just a gaping cavity of teeth, but also rings of counter-rotating blades behind them, and at the back, a shape she only vaguely recognized until it began to glow. That glow, and the shockwave which soon thereafter ripped forth from the creature’s maw, were the exact same as those she had faced at Slaughterhouse 9. It was a Blasting Array, and its spiraling, ghostly-green force carved a channel into the hard ground like a finger through sand. Just as the shockwave began to emerge, the scornbeast smashed its left hand into the ground and whipped its head — alongside its entire body — sideways, all to send the shockwave on a course it believed Krahe couldn’t evade. And why wouldn’t it think so? It had no way to know of Rocinante’s maneuverability, or of Krahe’s own abilities.
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But much to the scornbeast’s audible, gurgling-grinding frustration, the infernal horse turned on a dime, nearly tilting sideways to achieve such an aggressive angle. She released her tracers, then three more, and a further three afterwards, all in the span of the brief time it took Rocinante to make a full 90° turn. By the time she completed a U-turn, the scornbeast had been struck thrice, with the other six closing in. In addition to their inevitably-enhanced homing properties, they… Didn’t explode on impact. Not in the way they had exploded previously, at least.
Leaving two shallow craters in its armor and a gruesome tear in the flesh within a gap between plates, the tracers’ remnants, which previously attacked in a vaguely lacerative manner, now instead reformed into six-pronged spirals as they attempted to dig into their prey. These tracer-remnants could only be described as drills, with red bouts of rocket-like flame bursting forth as they burned themselves up. The second salvo not only struck through, it struck very close to the first salvo had, while the third chased after the now-fleeing scornbeast, eventually scattered by the cables whipping from its back. At least an inch of solid metal, and tracers had carved through it. Sure, a complete graft-beast would have barrier generators, artificially maintained wards, better and more comprehensive armor, or all of the above. But this was already a fundamental, qualitative transformation, it entirely overshadowed the half-baked growth she had considered evolution during the Mirzaii 2 raid. No, this was thaumaturgy evolution.
One after another, she exchanged blows with the scornbeast — it, realizing she was more maneuverable than it, attempted to catch her with distortion-waves of wildly varying size, speed, and power, while she simply pelted it with Tracers, and nothing but Tracers, for a good solid minute. As they fought in this manner, gradually moving away from the pit edge, neither flagging, Krahe considered the matter of the scornbeast’s origin. Organic core, synthetic reinforcement, crude plating, Blasting Array in the mouth. This was remarkably Foreman-adjacent work. Were she not certain he was dead, she might’ve wondered if this was the successor to Tindalos. As for the possibility of someone else carrying on where he left of, that was far more likely.
As she rode around for yet another strafing run, simply enjoying herself, the scornbeast at last fired off a shockwave that, she had to admit, she couldn’t dodge. There was no excuse to be made, no extenuating circumstance — Krahe had allowed herself to become intoxicated with her new wellspring of strength. She hadn’t truly taken up the sword, she was just playing with it, still resting in the garden. She willed Rocinante to release her, to drop into a low slide, while she astrodived. The automaton would be fine, and so would she. Immediately seizing upon the perceived opening, the scornbeast made to bound in her direction. Krahe readied the Crimson Star, and as the beast approached, she brought out another of her toys.
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