Chapter 164: 162 – Visage of the Fierce Deity

...But then again, she wouldn’t need to walk all the way over there to carry out her judgment, even if she knew it would be an all-too-easy death for human detritus of this sort. The just-waking city was terribly noisy, especially with those horrendous announcements that were doubtlessly timed to wake those who would dare to sleep past this hour. Alcerys had found Collier’s volcanics to be rather quiet as firearms went, thanks to the fact she had purchased and loaded an ammunition type whose projectiles burned only a portion of their propellant upon firing and accelerated to full speed once out of the barrel.

Taking care to keep it all concealed under her cloak, she pulled out her gun and wrapped the Eye’s chain around it, working the lever with her ring finger as she drew in a deep breath of Fog and funneled its power towards a compound prayer.

“By thine silent arrow, may a death in flames be delivered unto he who would falsely punish the innocent…” she uttered under her breath, having waited until they were just about to go out of sight of the grizzly scene. The Eye glutted itself upon the essentia she fed it, and in turn, manifested a minor miracle upon the gun, fiery tendrils of blue slithering across its metal and etching its surface.

Just as that obnoxious announcement system thundered overhead she fired, trusting her enchantment to ensure the bullet’s killing - or, at the very least, crippling - potential.

The noise it made was a bang, but one akin to someone hitting a street lamp or a frying pan with a stick, followed by a whoosh as the flaming projectile ripped through the air, producing a short trail of smoke that would fade away in seconds. 

The first judgment of many.

Alcerys smiled as she heard the shrill, uncontrollable screaming of that commissar, the panicked gasps for breath, the cut-short attempts to call for help. The closest thing she could make out from the sound could be summed up as, “It burns, Emperor help me, it’s in my bones!”

Indeed she smiled, turning a corner and seeing a checkpoint come into view in the distance. A man in the booth, one more on the walkway above, and a golem standing guard. No better time would come to finally invoke the defensive projection she had built to make up for the lack of her warded gas mask.

She ducked into another alleyway, taking a moment to shed her cloak, rolling it up tightly and stuffing it into her Tablet. Then, she began Fog-breathing, accumulating aether and feeding it to the Eye as she prayed.

It was a prolonged utterance, taking nearly twenty seconds and many lungfuls of Fog to complete, not merely because of its power, but because of its complexity. Its Inquisition Arts form had been the Fourth Star of Calamity, the Mercurial Targe, a last-ditch effort designed to ensure survival above all else. 

The Mercurial Targe placed tremendous strain upon the body and mind both, in shaving off a splinter of the self and imbuing it into a fiercely-protective construct wrought of enough aether to cause permanent injury to all but the most resilient or the most arcanely skilled of Inquisitors. A tulpa manifested in the real word by any other name, which would stand by her and lash out at anything that would try to strike the caster, at the cost of possibly permanent mental and physical injury. Thus, most inquisitors never actually cast the technique in its entirety, only ever invoking parts of it and training the performance of its components indirectly.

Magical reactive armor.

Alcerys’s new technique, this reimagination of sorts, placed the impetus of its operation upon the Eye of Fiery Judgment. To say it was a perfected version would have been arrogant at the least, but it was certainly superior, if only in the fact it was perfectly safe for the user.

No matter how much better it was, however, its baseline energy demand remained massive and its incantation could be no shorter than seven lines.

“That the beasts of this world might be judged,”

“That righteous punishment might be carried out,”

“That I might be a light amidst the darkest of days,”

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“That I might be a bulwark against wretchedness,”

“That neither the sun’s burning wrath nor the moon-womb’s seething hordes,”

“Might impede me from walking this path,”

“Shall I don this unimpeachable Visage of the Fierce Deity.”

Each line was accompanied by a wave of searing heat shooting through her arm and up her spine, a circular construct of sparks and fiery magic taking shape behind her head. 

With each line it became more and more defined, until by the seventh line, a concrete halo of flaming briars hovered behind the Charred Judge’s head, constantly giving off sparks yet somehow leaving no mark on neither her hair nor her skin.

Wasting no time but to refocus her breathing, Alcerys continued with invoking the First Arm of the Fierce Deity, striding out into the open street as it finally took shape. 

One of these days, she’d have to figure out how to control it without needing physical gestures… But for now, it would do as it was.

The soldier atop the walkway finally took notice, at first double-taking, then triple-taking, then finally raising his gun whilst yelling at her in broken Ikesian: “C-CEASE AND BE BREADY FOR DETAIN!”

Not guilty. He held his gun in the strange manner emblematic of rice farmers who had been handed over into service as part of tithes… Unlike the man in the booth, who was currently busy hefting up one of those obnoxious dragon-themed infantry cannons, clumsily trying to stuff a canister-shot shell into its waiting maw. 

Alcerys pulled her gun and took a pot-shot shot in the farmer’s general direction, spinning it around on her finger to work the lever before she muttered a prayer for fiery death to the guilty and took aim at the booth’s window. He stunk of vileness, such that the Eye’s thorns dug into her wrist even as she took a moment to compensate for the wind.

Click.

Bang.

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