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Your eyes well up with tears as the metal burns through the back of your neck, your body tensing with the pain before eventually going limp. Thin rivulets of metal trickle past you, mixing with the yellow and orange threads embroidered into your jacket. You'd crossed the foundation, met Corvus, crawled up through the hive, survived scrapcode with Tobias just to die here...?
Oh, Omnissiah. Was it all for nothing?
Fat droplets of water fell on your lap, as you felt your jaw going slack. The thin tendrils of metal breached the bone of your spine, and you felt the feeling in your legs going dead, your heart turning sluggish. The conductive force in your nerves was being overwhelmed by burning pain, and your limp head rolls back enough to give a face to the creature that was descending upon you, Corvus Lictor's ruined legacy running down your face where it had spilled over your head. There were screams coming from elsewhere in the temple, and you realize finally that the fires you had felt before had not been a trick of the light or the daemon- whatever forces Korash had unleashed, the forges were burning.
Perhaps you'd be lucky, and the molten brass would eat through your spine and kill you before the daemon could extract whatever Korash wished for from you. That may be nice, a partial cremation in molten metal...
Then, your vision softly fuzzes and clicks. The world deepens around you- not sharper, but you feel more of it than you once did. It's hard to explain- you felt as if you knew things about what you couldn't see.
<span class="mu-g">+++ System booting... +++
+++ User ID: 0x434C2D343134 +++
+++ System Pattern: Mars-2-2.0.1 +++
+++ Detecting other devices... done. +++
+++ Loading new coprocessors. +++
+++ Detecting noospheric parameters... done. +++
+++ May the Omnissiah's Will be done. +++</span>
Your fingers twitch, and then your hand curls. With a gasp, you jerk slightly forward. Symbols fill your vision, and something very warm is filling your insides, coalescing in your spine and cooling inside of you. The back of your neck feels oddly stiff, though it gently cracks as it flexes, something stiff falling away. You can suddenly breathe normally again, and you look up and into the eyes of the daemon bearing down on you.
Acrid red text highlights it's core as a <span class="mu-r">HOSTILE</span> target.
Then it's front section crumples. The imprint of a hand appears in the mass of nerves and spectra, digging into it's empyreal flesh and tearing it, ripping the daemon's body with but a thought.
You freeze as the hand retreats back over your shoulder, and you can't help but carefully glance over your shoulder, wide-eyed, seeing only the bare walls to your right, and part of the podium. Your hair suddenly billows as something moves over your shoulder faster than you can believe, but by the time you whirl around, the daemon's center has already been caved in, sending it back in a flailing mess of limbs and arcs of motive force.
