The waning. Shay emerged masked and ready into what she hoped would be the factory she needed, having skulked through all manor and manner of places since leaving her shop.
“Rest assured…” scratched a panel near her of my nails. “…that I am toiling myself away. Bending preferred the recurred lineages.”
∞
Her mask helped filter against the fuming chemicals steaming creaseless and clean the endless lengths of varied fabrics, all with embroidered scenes across them dreamt. A hail of laser fire was slamming down from somewhere, streaking through the mist. The arachnids that skittered by kept their distance from Shay, being but servants and workers while cyclops-monks rushing to switch off the machines did not see her at all until they were already dying - bleeding and poisoned - seeing her disappear into the mist. Surprise her greatest weapon.
∞
Sheathing still dripping swords she slipped into the shadow of an arachnid that was climbing down the brassy sides of a shrine. From there she leapt upwards to a railing and pulling herself over it, found a long rifle pointed at her head.
“Told you I’d come back.” She nodded to Panzjrah sitting where she had left him.
Scowling or squinting or both through his goggles he turned, finding targets Shay could not see, the laser rounds flashing as they were released. After each or most he would adjust something on its stock near the trigger and its guard.
“You?” his rifle let loose another round and blood sprayed him from a nearby victim. “What happened to your arm?”
“They’re closing in.” Shay hid her face from view, having lifted her mask slightly to sip a potion from her harness. “Want any?” she offered The Killer.
∞
Panzjrah instantly angled his rifle upwards, firing again and again, aiming the barrel higher until:
“What the…” he started dismantling his rifle into pistols.
It was Gargarensyr. Spinning downwards, his fist struck the platform between Panzjrah and Shay. Up was down and down was nowhere as everything collapsed.
∞
Scattered as rubble down on the factory ground Shay and Gargarensyr entered a melee; the potion kicked in nicely - something to sharpen her reflexes. While sharp her blades, his monastic training had hardened his hands over, and he blocked her strikes with elbows, palms and knuckles. His robes all a flow beyond him. She dodged one fatal strike as his fist slammed into a brass shrine behind her instead, sundering and bursting the thing, as though striking open the hull of a ship. Screeches escaped.
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∞
Shay while still leading her assault on Gargarensyr caught sight of short and stocky Panzjrah The Killer, looking bedraggled from the fall, his pistols in his holsters, strangling gleefully the life out of another monk, watching-by the strange of those last moments. Goggles staring into dying eyes.
∞
As neither could easily overcome the other, a near doorway became Shay and Gargarensyr’s focus; trying to fool, trip or shove the other into it, hoping their enemy would vanish into a different version of events.
“You know of the Corridoors, Shadow?” The monk was rhetorical between exchanged blows.
Masked as she was, he did not recognise her as the soul he once was showing around the museum grounds as a guide in how-many-lives-ago. One of her longswords shattered on his block and she vanished momentarily from his view. Metal shards fell as glass. His breathing echoed. Knowing she was in his shadow he swung behind himself into attack - Shay ducked under one of his high kicks, slicing his leg with her poisoned dagger that was once a sword moments ago and his leg froze almost instantly.
∞
Gargarensyr was hopping for balance, his leg weirdly paralyzed, and he wavered susceptible to one of Shay’s own kicks, whacking him backwards through the doorway. He thudded to the ground but did not disappear yet - Shay could hear pages turning and fabric rustling or being torn. She readied herself as Gargarensyr dragged himself towards the door, fading more completely the closer he inched this way, until he was no longer there at all. Banished to another Timeless space by Lay'd Payn or saved by Lady Fate.
∞
Shay saw the vapoured air above clearing, as stormy clouds made sporadic the sunlight through more and more open windows, arachnids scarpering through. She had only moments to see silhouettes in the holy light there barely, as lightning tore through the roof. She took cover where she could as all the metal shrines and machines reflected a blinding flash, conducting off one another, and thunder crushed all ordered walls into chaos-ruins.
∞
Dust and debris made thick their realm across everything. Momentarily deaf in a daze she wandered out into the now quiet factory; a hole in the roof was screaming open, the sky dark with clouds as again and again lesser lightning struck at the rafters Shay remembers climbing along. Remnants of. Quietly and slowly Shay's hearing returned to her from Nature's unstoppable blast. Workers and dying monks were yelling, at first.
∞
She found an unsettling quiet lay across the factory after that. Unable to find a living shadow to step into, her climb was a manual effort once the lightning ended. Electricity flickered and there was only sunlight. She made quick the pass and found Woid there wounded over his eye and holding his side, about to climb through the window. The same she once had passed. The rafters she ran over were glowing with lightning's heat and she joined him by the sunlit sill. Woid had found his fake teeth and slotted them over his crooked giveaway to hide its indigo jewel. He smiled only slightly and bloodily at Shay with ashamed sadness:
“The Ersecutor took her.”