Krahe wondered what the hell terms like Anathema or Thaumic Fusion meant, or even just Thauma on its own, thinking of the supposed feature of her first boon. It didn’t go off. She tried focusing on the idea of Thaumic Fusion as it related to the boon, and this time, it worked.
Knowledge that wasn’t her own flooded in, like someone had just given her a back-alley memory implant operation. It was in flashes of thought and mental association, but slowly coalesced into a coherent thought-mass.
First came the idea of drawing in the essence of some nebulous other place, this so-called “Thauma”. Second was the idea of using one’s own body and soul as a furnace, burning Thauma as fuel; to power artifacts, give form to mental patterns, conjure spirits. Magic plain and simple.
Third came the memory of that sickly feeling. Impurity left behind by the burning of Thauma. Entropy. What was happening to her at this very moment was just the body’s reaction to an excessive buildup of Entropy, one surpassing her Tolerance for it.
At last, the actual idea of Thaumic Fusion.
Instead of a flame, there was a sun, but in a flash, it changed to a fusion reactor.
It was a reaction that could only happen inside a living human, the collapse of Thauma into something greater, yet altogether far more terrible: Anathema. A force so great and terrible that only the truly mighty or truly desperate dared wield it, for just as it scoured away one’s foes, so too did it grind away at its wielder, twisting the flesh and cutting lifespans short. Every spell and attack fueled by Anathema carried its mark, causing them to inflict these same maladies upon those struck by them.
The image of a weakling who throws his life’s candle into a fusion reactor just to blaze with that infernal power for the brief moment of his lifespan. A walking corpse glowing with otherworldly power just as her own arm did. Immediately afterwards came the image of an imperious, shining form of true might, a paragon of mankind bending Anathema to his will through unimpeachable power and skill. Both bore the epithet “Anathemist”, but for the former it was a mark of disdain, and for the latter a badge of accomplishment.
Then, there was her.
A foreigner forever changed by contact with whatever it was that had brought her to this world, her being twisted into a form that needn’t fear Anathema’s scouring radiance.
As the sickly feeling faded, her coughing slowly became a bitter, dark, yet thankful laughter.
“You made me a fucking nuke mage… A walking dirty bomb…” she cackled to herself, not expecting that otherworldly presence to hear her.
Her archetype changed, as if in response.
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[ARCHETYPE: Cherno Caster Lvl. 1]
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” she uttered, finally getting her disbelieving laugh under control. The cruel humor of it wasn’t lost on her - she had, after all, voluntarily chosen radiation blasters as her weapon of choice in her past life. That sickly grin in her mind wasn’t there anymore - as far as she could tell, this was just an impassive system trying to adapt to the end user as any adaptive software would.
Krahe took stock of her surroundings, reloading her gun as she did so. Not sure where to put the empty en-bloc clip and knowing what a pain it could be to get new ones, she clamped it around the edge of her bodysuit. Rather than spend any more time in the open where she risked being ambushed again, she rinsed off the ashen remnants of her assailants, stuck the hose back in the water and returned to the laboratory.
Once more, her mind wandered to the true implications of her predicament. Her death, this new world, all of it.
A part of her wanted to struggle coping with this, but she didn’t have it in her. She’d already learned the hard way that letting grief overtake her was foolish, that there would be a safer time and place to process it all. Even this fate - to be thrown into an abandoned city possibly filled with horrifying mutants - was fine. Refreshing, even. Compared to waking up armless in a cyber-butcher’s body dump and having to deal with the everpresent malignant deception of Megacity Gamma’s lower levels… This was a rough hike at worst, she thought.
So it was that Krahe walked through the ancient city, leaving a trail of wet footprints and errant droplets, not all of which were fountain-water.
As she walked, in an effort to occupy her mind, Krahe repeatedly attempted to pull up the menu while maintaining awareness of her surroundings. It was a common exercise to her, one she’d done hundreds of times, as it was standard practice for any modification that added or altered the menus one could pull up on their hud. It worked just as well with this more esoteric alternative as it had with the cybernetic HUDs she knew.
Once she’d gotten a handle on the mental control, she browsed through the various submenus, starting with [Thaumaturgies] since she figured if she could use magic, she might have a basic spell or two. Surely, whatever she had done back at the square counted.
What welcomed her was half of an explanation, in the form of a single listing.
[Deathsmoke Tracer]
[Tags:]
First-order
Cinder Element
Bimodal Projectile
Lacerative Damage
Energetic Damage
[Details:]
A core of compressed flame contained by a jacket of razor-sharp ash and smoke particles.
Linear input/output scaling. Scales more efficiently if imbued with Anathema.
Low-velocity projectile; can be attached to another projectile such as a bullet, trailing just behind it. Dissipates over an approx. five-meter stretch after passing approx. thirty meters; range scales with power input.
Inflicts a burst of Energetic damage on impact followed by Lacerative damage, making it efficient against lightly-armored targets.
“My outburst didn’t count as a Thaumaturgy, then…” she thought. Her line of thought led her to considering what exactly she could do without having it listed in the [Thaumaturgies] submenu.