The Cinder Flash’s range was far too short for this use case, but peppering the monstrosity with Cinder Gatling shots proved remarkably effective in slowing it down. This was not because of their firepower, but because she salted them, rendering the orange beams into dark streaks, with only their cores remaining orange, while the outer layer became as black as the swirling mask formed by Salt Mountain’s Visage. The impact alone was enough to turn the scornbeast’s leap into a startled tumble as the creature raised its arms to defend itself, rolling and skidding forward while Krahe dived again to create some distance. Rocinante had turned and was now heading her way again, but it would still be a few moments before it could pick her up.
As she fired off her Cinder Gatling, she came to notice, or rather be reminded of, one thing — the control rods, as part of their foundational concept, also had a marked effect on Thaumic Fusion. It hadn’t been nearly as pronounced before due to the four rods’ uneven effect, but with all six, snuffing the rampaging fusion reaction was far easier. It was almost, but not quite easy enough to say that it “wasn’t difficult.”
Just to see if it would work, she fused some eighty percent of the power she normally put into a Cinder Flash, only to snuff the reaction, retaining that power inside her arm for the moment it took to produce the remaining twenty percent by implosion-burning instead. It was effectively an alternate application of the principles behind the Solomon Howitzer, only simplified to the utmost extent. And lo, with that small bit of additional effort, a two-shaded ray of murderous red sprung forth, with a core of notably greater brightness, screaming and bending towards the scornbeast as it went. It even took a touch longer to scatter than a plain Cinder Flash. The scornbeast, not even having bothered to dodge, simply took the hit head-on, ignoring the faint browning that a patch of its left upper-left back had been subjected to. Obviously, it wasn’t practical at this range, not in this jousting battle, but she had just the thing for such an occasion. The energy-mixing technique had too many steps for her to apply it to the Cinder Gatling shot by shot, but her arm could just as well hold the combined energy for five shots long enough to fire them in a burst. And, just the same, the rays burst from her fingers, curving to strike at the scornbeast’s bare flesh.
And still, it continued on, for its skin was thick, its flesh dense, and its body the size of a small house. Even excruciating the creature was quickly growing less effective, the pain eliciting anger and driving it to behave erratically. Of course a graft-beast based on a degenerate Gor’un subspecies would be resistant to pain. After all, the Jas’raba Civilization’s grafting technology employed no painkillers whatsoever. She wagered its maker had taken measures to further limit its susceptibility, given it was probably expected to suffer enormous trauma in the course of battle. Now that she considered it, Salting the Wounds had likely worked more due to the surprise element than the pure pain. Were she limited solely to the tools she had employed up until this point, she would spend minutes carving away at the beast, using Tracers and Gatling rays to bore into its flesh. She would need to do no such thing.
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As it reached her at last, a cruel joy in its twisted countenance as it gaped its maw and spun the blades inside, she simply raised her hand. The Crimson Star flashed with a flash of equally cruel joy to the scornbeast’s face just moments prior, and an unimpeachable force smashed against it. The force of the collision alone dislodged its jaw from the socket. Yet, shocked only briefly, the living weapon’s savage intellect bid it to spread itself out across the expanding shockwave, such that it merely pushed its feet through the dirt while allowing it to remain in a good position from which to fall upon Krahe. The ploy didn’t work out quite as well as the scornbeast had surely wished it to, for the shockwave cast it back just as forcefully as it would a human, but even so, as it slid backwards, it smashed its arms into the ground and forcibly righted itself. The thing’s arms were simply that disproportionately long.
It closed in once more, and with Rocinante still some distance off, Krahe dove again, attempting to overwhelm the scornbeast through sheer speed, or failing that, buy herself time. She couldn’t cast in the astral, but she could burn and move thauma within her own body just the same. No such luck, simple evasion wouldn’t suffice. Those hateful eyes tracked her without issue, and the monstrous bulk moved such that it would be renowned for its alacrity even if it were one-tenth its size. Nonetheless, her brief dive helped buy Rocinante the time to catch up, regardless of the scornbeast’s clear intention to swat the horse away when it got in reach. Krahe of course had no such plan. She emerged between the two of them, back to Rocinante and front to the scornbeast, and exhaled a salted Deathsmoke Spray into its face. Besides the strong taste and gritty texture in her teeth, it didn’t feel like much at all in her mouth, thanks to the Adamas Organ’s tissue reinforcement. It emerged not as a mass of ash and glass razors, but as the flamethrower she had been hoping for those months ago, when she first conceived of this thaumaturgy, and that single cast burn-shredded the scornbeast’s entire head down to bare bones. Even so, its remnants set upon the creature, burning tendrils shoving into its miraculously-intact, now-lidless eyes. She stared into them, attempting to halt it through Vinculae Peregrinus, but it was still far too slow to go off in time from this close-up. Just as the beast lunged for her, howling in white-brilliant agony, Krahe turned her hand downward and sent herself flying right overhead Rocinante. An astro-skim later she was back in the saddle and the automaton clamped down on her legs once more as they turned rightward, circling the scornbeast. It whipped its head in her direction, screaming out a scattered burst of separate distortion-waves — the synchronization module of its Blasting Array had been damaged.
Krahe set loose another barrage of Tracers, salting each in turn. If she handled this properly, she would be able to buy herself the opening to finish it off in one blow.
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