There was a certain phenonon, known far and wide, yet rarely seen outside of illusionary recreations in performances, or for the sake of demonstration. At a certain point, the combined magnitude, complexity, and profundity of a thaumaturgy could breach a certain barrier, attaining a qualitative transformation, wherein the end result beca greater than the sum of its inputs. It was not a thing of myth or legend, but nevertheless, it was nothing that a civilian or even a common contractor could ever expect to see in their lifeti; it was a phenonon witnessed by only two kinds of people — the peers of those who wielded it, the very fortunate, or the very unfortunate.
High Thaumaturgy.
For them, it was a very real risk factor. If not their target, then the black-scaled tracker, being a veteran soulbeast hunter, might pull out such a trump card, as the great cost and difficulty of casting High Thaumaturgy typically relegated it to such a role. None of them had expected to be t with it as the opening salvo — an opening salvo in the literal sense, in this case.
There was nothing to suggest they had been detected.
And yet, as they approached, ominous energy, a malicious will, flared up within the fortified campsite, and in the span of a second, a dozen swirling missiles poured out into the black, blending with the night and leaving only thin trails of fla to insinuate their path, fast enough that even thaumaturgic senses struggled to track them. One missile of the first wave struck each man and graftbeast in turn, tearing into wards and reinforced flesh, ripping clean off the arm of one wardless stillborn and removing another’s leg at the knee.
When one dodged, the missile simply curved to strike him or the nearest man beside him, and three in a row struck one of the thaumaturges in the head, each transmuting into an ominous drill as they bored a hole into his wards. The man, Igbar, adjusted his barrier to better cover the weakness, but it was too late for him now. Though neither he nor Agmon knew it yet, the man was a corpse that had yet to realize it had died the mont its wards had been breached.
They were dancing, dancing through the dark, at the orchestration of that ominous figure. Agmon managed to, just barely, get his bearings and focus his full sensory array on Blackhand, despite a full third of it becoming blinded by gazing upon her.
One after the next, with each pulsed ignition of her soul furnace, a strange thauma coursed through, flaring out in implausibly vast quantities, akin to the enormous outbursts of magma from an erupting volcano. In instants, ford into those strange missiles of smoke and embers, waveringly orbiting around her limbs. Soon enough, they broke from her limbs and gathered above her head. One couldn’t help but count them as they appeared. Sets of three, next to her hands, around her wrists, her elbows. Each the shape of an elongated droplet, known to have been in this woman’s employ from the earliest points. A natural form of basic attack for one whose thaumaturgy was strong in manifestation. Now, made profound through advancents and iterations too nurous and varied for Agmon to interpret on the spot. He only knew that they may very well be too late, for he recognized that these were not ford of ordinary thauma. It was mutandis, unmistakably mutandis, and not the brute-force elevation of thaumic fusion, nor the incomplete and imperfect mutandis of an external assistance thod!
A creeping terror dawned on him as he ca to the unavoidable realization that even his generous projections had fallen far short of the teoric power spike this individual had undergone since the raid on Mirzaii 2.
Three. Six. Nine. Three. Six. Nine. Three. Six. Nine.
A swarm of dozens, gathered into a baleful halo, an on of death above a green-eyed demon’s head, held in place only by the most tenuous fetters in the grasp of a charred-black, magma-cracked hand.
And above it hovered a raven in the shape of a man, with eyes of bloody fla and bearing a lead-belching silver sword in its clawed hand. Gesturing to-and-fro, firing that enormous gun and screaming things both terrible and profane, cackling, the raven flew down and set upon the task force, breathing black salt, burying one bullet after another into the heads and joints of the Dreadmorphs as if it knew exactly where to shoot. Quills of sharpened steel then flew forth from its wings, and with the flashing of its eyes explosions erupted anywhere it looked, and chaos took hold, not rely because of the raven, but because of its presence amongst the fray. One after another the stillborn were felled.
As above, so below, attached to her other hand, there hung a mass of black smoke, nigh invisible to the naked eye.
He sensed none of the stain of the Black God of the Labyrinth upon her. And yet, Agmon could conceive of no other explanation for what he was witnessing. “Minotaur… Another minotaur stalks outside the labyrinth,” he whispered with bated breath.
The word’s origin, the technicalities, ant nothing. The term had existed for so long as to drift from the aning of “soone blessed by Chernobog” to any individual who possessed the capability to rapidly grow in strength in a particular manner. A saint climbing the ranks was not a minotaur, a Dreadmorph was not a minotaur, nor was a Mamon Knight rapidly gaining stronger forms a minotaur. A minotaur, a true minotaur, was an individual whose fundantal character directly resulted in an explosive pattern of growth, transforming even incidents that should weaken them into pivot points towards new forms of strength. A minotaur was a creature whose existence naturally, spontaneously revolved around conflict and becoming indomitable in every conceivable manner. They were the kin of monstrous entities such as Favonia Hexensser. And was that… Was that the sign of Hexensser upon the eidolon’s gun?
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