Around two-thirds of the way through the first chapter, the front door opened. Krahe continued waiting, listening to Sorayah walk around for a few minutes, watching her through Barzai's eyes. Then, abruptly, her footsteps stopped in the hallway outside the writing room. She had realized that something was amiss; the door was ajar.
Barzai saw her conjure a brass apparatus, presumably from her own Kenoma Pocket, resembling a bullseye lantern. Soon enough, Krahe was staring her in the face. She conjured a cigarette, raising it to her lips as Sorayah stared at her with a mixture of bewilderment and pure, seething hate. An angry, red spotlight spilled out of her lantern, containing a continuous stream of faint anathema. The way it scattered strangely looked like two beams converged into one.
"You..." she hissed.
"What me?" Krahe laughed. "Did you assume I was dead just because I stopped showing up at the Society? Did you really think the amateurs you sent actually succeeded? I admit I didn't leave much in the way of survivors that could report back, or even identifiable corpses, but c'mon. You didn't hear back from them, and it didn't seem suspicious? Even a little bit?"
"I assumed they taught you a lesson and you took it to heart."
"My, so intimidating. Let me guess, that lantern has Human Charcoal in it and you intend to blast me with anathema, is that right?"
Sorayah didn't answer, but her grip on the lantern tightened, and her eyes narrowed.
"Well? Hit me. Better turn me into a shadow fried into your carpet all at once. Better make sure it kills me in one hit. Y'know what? Let's make it easier for you to pull the trigger. Let's go to your basement, shall we? That's where you carry out the final step to turn your victims into Human Charcoal, isn't it? I'm sure you won't be so hesitant when your interspecies porno isn't at risk of getting incinerated alongside me. Y'know, I've seen my share, and I'm fairly certain human penises don't actually have bones in them, and they certainly don't have knots."
A noise somewhere between an angry snake's hiss and an angry crocodile's rumble began to issue from Sorayah, her throat visibly reverberating. Her teeth grinded together, and she gripped the lantern ever tighter. Even the beam grew in intensity as something mechanical inside the device moved, now starting to lightly burn away at Krahe's wards. Nonetheless, Sorayah backed out of the door, slowly, keeping both her eyes and the lantern pointed at Krahe. To her surprise, that offhanded suggestion had worked. She had fully expected to be breaking into a dead woman's basement ten minutes from now, but it seemed the reason - or perhaps love for her book collection - within Sorayah won out.
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Krahe, not yet trying to stand up, casually picked up the Hollow Book.
Sorayah instantly snapped: "Leave it."
"Get up. If you want to see the basement before you die, I can give you that much," she added, her voice far too angry and not nearly confident enough to make it sound convincing. Krahe couldn't help but derive great amusement from this classical scenario; Sorayah's demeanor reeked of a serial killer caught metaphorically with her pants down, thrown far off-kilter, struggling to convince herself she was still in control.
Her original intention was to split her forearm open lengthwise in the process of putting the item into her Kenoma Pocket, but she decided against it. Actually considering that course of action set off a feeling similar to the consideration of eating something far beyond one's ability. So, she did leave it. A puzzled expression came over Sorayah when she saw that the lock was undone, but she maintained her focus on Krahe while backing out into the hallway. Krahe followed, openly raising her Barrier as she went. It had changed quite noticeably. The swirling umbrella of greyish ash and smoke had grown darker, and glistening, obsidian-like chips were now included within it.
Sorayah stopped a ways down the hallway, once Krahe had fully exited the writing room. Her features tensed, and she raised the lantern. Something inside it moved, the beam narrowed down to a diameter even smaller than Krahe's Barrier, shifting in hue towards purple. Then, in a near-instant, a deluge of strange sigils burst out, crackling with an eldritch energy that was neither lightning, nor fire, nor any single definable force. The charge-up was far faster than she had expected, and since she hadn't seen the minimal telegraphing before, she had no way to predict when the artifact would fire. Despite Astro Diving on reflex right when the beam hit, even the quarter-second of blocking it had built up an intimidating amount of Hard Entropy. The beam had to be anywhere from two and a half to five times stronger than Krahe's strongest Cinder Flash, based on whether it was Energetic or Arcane in nature. If it was Energetic, it would completely obliterate her Wards and fry the living hell out of her if she got hit straight on. If it was Arcane... She wagered she might be able to weather one hit and be fine. Two hits would definitely be very fucking bad, but maybe survivable if it hit a particularly resilient area like her left arm or anywhere armored by her Biosuit. These were all worst-case scenarios, of course, Krahe wouldn't take the risk of eating another hit head-on.
Seeing Sorayah's eyes go wide and her stance falter at the sight of her astral form, Krahe surfaced once again.
“The flame of a candle,” she lied.
But Sorayah didn’t know that. She was too busy reeling from the backlash of Krahe's barrier. Angry serpents made of smoke and ash manifested in her vicinity and spewed outbursts of burning cinders at the lizard-woman with unerring accuracy, their flame reddened by Isotope and smoke coloured a rich, sooty black from the abundance of Hard Entropy. It was burning filth in the purest sense.