The Shard Storm
It is not aiming. Nothing in it decides.
elemental swarm · Challenge rating 6
Still alive. Nobody has ended it yet.
Behavior
It is not aiming. Nothing in it decides; it follows air currents and the path of least interference, turning through the corridors like weather that got indoors. The problem is authorship: your movement makes the currents, so wherever you run, you are writing its route a half-second ahead of yourself. It passes over the perfectly still.
Appearance
A rotating cloud, two meters across, of charged crystal fragments — chandelier drops, window glass, things ground finer — refracting the corridor's light in too many directions at once. It drifts like debris in a current. What it crosses, it edits in fine parallel lines. Doors keep being found wedged open in patterns that keep the drafts moving; no one on staff wedges them.
Physical description
A roughly spherical swarm of hundreds of faceted fragments, fingernail to hand-sized, orbiting a center that keeps moving. Light through it lands scattered, so its shadow is a glitter on the walls rather than a shape. In its wake, surfaces carry parallel scoring at the depth of a paper cut, thousands deep.
Weaknesses
- true stillness in a side passage — it passes what makes no current
- redirected air — a strong draft rewrites its route
Resistances
- weapons — they pass through and come back duller
- fire
Hunt it
The Shard Storm is on the list in Horror Story: Gotta Kill Them All. Study it here, then go and find it in the app.