Spotlights narrowed down to laser-like pinpoints, and at once began a wild dance, carving an eye-crossingly complex pattern in the span of seconds before ending at their starting point, where they carved out six hexagonal empty spaces.
The Atomica resonated with a soundless tone, and she instantly knew what she needed: Words. The same sort of words she had used to give form to the Daemon Core.
One would suffice to start with, the others could come later. But she would need all six. She couldn’t afford to take things slowly — she had already felt hopelessly outgunned after losing the Viridaimon armor. How could she keep up if she didn’t grasp every iota of power in her reach, and then dislocate her own arm to reach for even more? How could she strike at the people behind Damrus Hashem if she struggled just with the meagre forces that Semzar could muster?
And so, she spoke the first word, and its emblem was carved onto the inside of her Soul Furnace.
WILL TO MIGHT
Might, not power — in the sense of strength obtained through great effort and will, rather than the strength one possessed naturally. Such had been her modus operandi in her past life, and so it was in this one, despite the powers bestowed upon her by her status as Deiphage. Even the fact she had usurped something of Chernobog, infinitesimal as it was, had resulted from Krahe’s enormous will, grasping for strength even as a disembodied spirit, rejecting death in the face of the void.
The moment the sigil was completed, the hexagon erupted with gleaming obsidian, forming a control rod of sorts. She instantly realized the reason behind this — it had to be the influence of her incantation during the ritual. A later version of the Solomon reactor used such “control rods” to precisely manipulate the fusion transmutation, allowing larger reaction masses and more complex target results with the same energy input. This, then, was clearly a similar adjustment mechanism for the Astral Implosion Furnace.
One after the next, the Words came naturally. It was no more than self-definition. From the matter of the self, Krahe wrought the rods with which she would control the vast and terrible power of thaumaturgy.
The second could still be vaguely put into words with some effort:
HATRED OF EVIL
It was simple. Straightforward.
However, though she had already formed the base materials of these unspeakable maxims, she nonetheless spent strength to dredge them up and give them form in her Soul Furnace. With each maxim, it felt as though the resistance grew greater. The first came like nothing. The second took effort. The third was an ordeal, encompassing her abiding, melancholic love for the ideal of her home town — the idea of a “better world”.
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The fourth, she could barely finish, spending every iota of mental strength she had. She couldn’t comprehend it in the terms of language, and wasn’t entirely sure of its exact meaning, but it was what came into her mind’s hand nonetheless. She was deathly certain it defined a core aspect of who she was, but she couldn’t mentally process it to the extent of breaking it down into simple, expressible concepts.
She couldn’t even start on the fifth, let alone consider the sixth.
Four.
That was her limit.
With that acknowledgement, everything settled into place.
ASTRAL BODY RESHAPING
FOURFOLD ASTRAL IMPLOSION FURNACE
Awareness of the physical world suddenly pushed back into the forefront. Her body floated half a meter off the ground, scarlet light shining out of her chest where she had implanted the Atomica, diffusing through her flesh and out of her mouth. The pressure of time began to return with one subjective second after the next, the hideous faces of the stillborn resuming their approach.
Atomica Refulgent came alive once more at her command, piercing into the beyond, and her Soul Furnace flooded with power — Thauma waiting to be set alight, the substance of Kenoma itself. One after the next the control rods receded, only to slam forward, compressing it all into a spot the size of a hairpin.
At the instant of ignition, Krahe’s awareness returned to the physical. The same could not be said for full control of herself — she remained in place for some time as an uncontrollable deluge of pyroclast erupted from her being. The red-orange death-swarm flooded the corridor, shredding and burning everything that wasn’t its source. Outside, the shutters of several windows visibly began to glow, only to be torn out moments later. A solid flow of glowing embers poured out of each window, gathering up against the mansion’s barriers and forming a waterfall, its colour rapidly shifting to red and then black as it moved down.
Krahe finally returned to full presence in the here-and-now to a scene that evoked deja vu.
Everything was sanded down and charred. The windows had blown out, the shutters melted from the inside. Her smoky jade barricade had become an abstract art piece, the stillborn transformed into macabre statues of compacted pyroclast. Boiled gore had sprayed out of them in places, painting the floors and pillars in oily hues.
They were left frozen in poses of reaching towards her.
The mansion shuddered, an explosion carrying from the ballroom.
Krahe opened and closed her fist, then picked up her gun. Its lanyard had been severed, but the weapon itself was unharmed. A spark of will, and Thauma rushed in. With its ignition, searing-hot power coursed through and tendrils emerged from her back. The intoxicating sense of newfound power was somewhat dulled by how off-kilter everything felt due to the Class 3 Pain Inhibitor’s persisting effects. There was something different in how things felt off-kilter, but Krahe wrote it off as the Atomica settling in.
“I’ll get used to it,” she thought. “Once this shit wears off…”
With a spark of anathema and burst of red light, she sent herself flying to the top of her own barricade, landing atop a pair of narrow pillars. With some trepidation, she skimmed to the next pillar over. Feeling no backlash, she readily initiated an Astro Dive and hurried to the ballroom.
A scattered handful of survivors would tell of a devil of living smoke flowing through the mansion’s halls.