One after the next her tracers set off to hound the creature, their already dark appearance darkened further still by black salt. Krahe completely bottomed out her tolerance solely to unleash the biggest tracer salvo possible, and as they spiraled through the air, she felt a familiarity. Surely this was distinct-enough to warrant a new name. Were these even Tracers anymore? They didn’t slavishly depend on bullets to drag them along, and were more akin to anti-cyborg mini-missiles both in their flight and their two-step means of attack. She supposed they were still Tracers after a fashion, chasing after a target directly instead of a bullet. But the way they flew and the barrage-effect they could achieve thanks to her ability to stock up multiple salvos was entirely different. Despite the energy cost of maintaining the constructs, compounded with the elevated creation cost due to salting them, she was still, in the end, able to put out more firepower than she would have been prior to completing the Implosion Furnace. Krahe was sure that it wasn’t a matter of having gained greater Entropy Tolerance — instead, having been stabilized, her thauma could simply achieve more with less, because it wasn’t fighting itself.

  Itano Tracer, yes, that was suitable enough. Instead of strained wordplay, she would just use the name of the man who invented the most prominent anti-cyborg mini-missile of her time, the Type-94 M+, or M-Cross. Out of all her missiles, only five struck home, but they all struck at once, and once more cast down the scornbeast with incandescent agony. In its thrashing and wild disgorgement of distortion-waves, it carved a pit around itself.

  Since she had remounted Rocinante, no more than sixteen seconds had passed, but it felt far longer. In that time, she has exchanged three near-miss “jousts” with the scornbeast and carved at least a few dozen kilos of meat out of its back. Most of the cables that had incidentally protected its back now littered the ground, and the armor of its upper-left arm was reduced to scrap, while the surrounding landscape had been torn to shreds. It would have surely been rendered muddy by the creature’s blood were it not the sort of ichor that actively plugged the wounds rather than leak out. There had to be omniphage involved at some stage there. Despite its pain resistance, constantly being subjected to the holy salt was clearly having deleterious effects beyond just the occasional failure of its pain tolerance. The beast’s flesh was growing black and desiccated around the wounds, and the congealed blood plugging them was crumbling apart.

  Krahe had salted him plenty.

  And now, it was time to pay it off. Having purged herself of excess entropy, Krahe prepared to freeze the beast in place for the full duration, barely enough to fit the moment of delay between the casting and actual firing of the Solomon Howitzer.

  In the course of her preparations, she dismounted and remounted twice more, once to avoid a double, arm-and-tail clothesline attack, and once in order to leap onto the scornbeast’s back, with Rocinante running around its rear and leaping over its whipping tail in the meanwhile. All this, just to test Lasher, to make sure the plan was viable. The glass threads, previously fragile and short-lived due to their compound nature, now seamlessly blended the best properties of both, tearing deep gouges into the beast’s toughened flesh and slicing apart the remaining cables on its back with just a few consecutive casts. The individual threads, so thin as to be nearly invisible, lingered inside the wounds, continuing to cut. It was the conjoining of the best traits of Tar and Glass — in a way, she had achieved a perfect replication of the “flex-glass” material that had made up the sharpest monowires of her time. She’d noticed before, in the mansion raid, how the Implosion Furnace had improved her thaumaturgy by allowing it to more directly fulfill its intended purpose. This was the extreme of that, a qualitative change that almost seemed to invalidate typical elemental limits.

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  Foolishly, the scornbeast whipped its bulbous tail forwards whilst reaching back in the attempt to catch Krahe within a pincer attack. For its effort, it grabbed its own tail, as Krahe had already blasted herself off its back, spinning through the air and using the momentum to lash at the thinnest part of its tail with a red-hot, whip-like Lasher filament, weighted by a fist-sized hunk of smoky jade at the end. The cutting power of that strike alone sufficed to sever the tail in one clean go and chop into its back, snapping inward and wrapping around the beast’s torso as Krahe released it.

  Having grabbed its own tail only to have it cut, the scornbeast lost its balance, while Krahe skimmed back onto Rocinante, not even bothering to seat herself properly. She stood atop the iron horse’s back as it galloped to the monstrosity’s front, and the moment she got its gaze, Krahe poured thauma into the Oculae.

  In moments, countless wound-like grins opened across the scornbeast’s body and arms of salt emerged to grasp and claw at it. It froze in place, while Krahe was already stoking the fire for what she would do next. With how much work she had put into softening up the scornbeast’s back, that was the obvious place to strike, but it was also the most resilient part of it. For all her effort, none of her attacks had actually damaged its ribcage to a substantial degree.

  No, the obvious part where the armor was weakest would be the innermost section of the torso, that which would be best-defended by the arms and the beast’s natural posture, and which would need to have the greatest range of motion.

  She skimmed, taking the risk to get in position on time, throwing herself into a slide even as the shell of black salt began to crack. The maximum duration was 0.59s, and she arrived at her firing position on the 0.47s mark, having already “cast” the spell by this point. Indeed, the pulse of furious scarlet was already traveling down the length of her arm, casting scattered rays of light all around. Uncertain of the beast’s true resilience, Krahe pushed so far that this cast’s cost surpassed her total Entropy Tolerance, permitted solely by her arm’s recent evolution.

  Having given into the moment, she incanted aloud. Yet, the words that emerged were not those of her voice, but those of thunderous thought akin to the Three Words of Wandrei Faust. Without realizing, she had opened along her arm the Wound-like Grins to speak them.

  “SO-LO-MON!”

  Krahe went blind with redness beyond red, red akin to Favonia’s astral body. She went deaf with a roar like the unholy marriage of continuous thunder and the scream of an electric arc.

  It wasn’t a single blast, but a pillar of blood-red flame streaked-through by absences, the filaments invisible, yet creating gaps in the beam. It burned and shredded skin, it boiled organs, it sawed and scorched through solid bone and alloy reinforcements alike. The sheer force of it was such that it pushed Krahe halfway into the ground.

  And she saw the night sky through the hole.

  HIGH THAUMATURGY

  TEN THOUSAND CUTS AND TOTAL IMMOLATION

  ALL THE GODS OF OLYMPUS AND DAEMONS OF TARTARUS

  BE YE CONDEMNED TO THE ASH PILE BY ONE MORTAL’S HAND

  RIVAL TO THE SCOURING WINDS OF ITHAQUA AND FLAMES OF CTHUGHA

  BLACK HAND OF DESOLATION: SOLOMON HOWITZER

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