>>5396737[GG, can you patch me through to Francine? I’ve got eyes on the relic’s wielder, and I need to know if she’s in the path of any other Daughters]
With Gina daisy-chaining you and Francine together via her own Neuromancy and the Crimson Cord, the Void Orrery’s map of the area’s overlaid on your scout’s second-hand vision as you watch the gunslinger’s westward amble. The woman’s face is only barely visible thanks to her upturned collar and her hat’s tilted brim, but one of your particularly daring constructs manages to catch a glimpse of the girl’s calm, dark eyes, staring straight ahead as her desert path unfurls towards the Cord. She’s possessed of a steady, stalwart gait, her focus evident in the squared angles of her shoulders, their bony edges visible even beneath her heavy leathers.
A lone, quiet figure adrift in a sea of violent lights.
It doesn’t take long before there’s movement in those chaotic waters in response to the solo Daughter—of the countless lights swarming in the distance a set of four begin closing in on the weathered Daughter, moving to flank her in the cardinal directions. You don’t see them at first, but when your Neurotic Halo flares to life with a thought the team is revealed; a quartet of stalking figures, each one cloaked in a buzzing semi-solid cloud of tiny insects, their garb at once a roiling swarm and a fluttering shroud of pitch-black movement. To the north of their target, the largest of the four—easily three times the size of any of their fellows—gestures for the other three to make their move. Silently, they slip down the waves of churning biomass, each of them hovering mere inches above the corruption’s surface. The gunslinger’s head subtly tilts to one side when they cross her threshold of sand and grit, but she continues her march even as they close the gap, multitudes of multi-jointed arms slipping from underneath their shrouds, each gnarled hand clutching a calcite needle sharpened to a killing point. They’re frighteningly fast, a fact beyond doubt…
…but they’re far from the quickest draw in the west.
With a whiplike crack of bone and tendon the slinger brings her fingers to bear against her attackers’ skulls, the barrel of each of her hollow digits pressed against their crowns—the index of her right hand trained on the Daughter in front of her, the thumb and pinky held to the foreheads of the two behind her. In the wake of that flurry of movement there follows the stillness of imminent violence, the larger Daughter tensing on the nearby ridge as her comrades are held at silent gunpoint…at least, until the cowgirl dissolves into sand only to reappear a few meters away, her hands quickly signing to her attackers.
[Francine, can you translate?] You ask as you watch the trio below turn uncertainly to the fourth.
(Continued)
