Burns and tumors in the bodies of victims recovered from Pingfang first indicated Noir experimentation with radioactive material to the Unity. Ionizing radiation has been regarded as ‘the great equalizer’ since before contact with the Noir, able to mortalize the Vulkaz-wrami and to a lesser degree even the Inrisus. All Noir weapons with a radioactive element are said to be ‘cured’, their effectiveness as weapons restored (and possibly a reference to an ancient pioneer in the study of radioactivity).

Cured bullets

Cured bullets are intended to deliver radiation to their targets in the form of a fragmented or powdered filler material, typically polonium or plutonium. This material is meant to be released into the target’s wounds from a bullet that break opens on impact, contaminating and infiltrating the body with milled particles able to travel through the bloodstream. Amorphous metals with lead are included in the guns that fire these bullets, to both conceal the weapons and protect their bearers. Firing these bullets is complicated by the additional care that must be taken to avoid premature release of the filler material, resulting in lower velocities and larger bullets to compensate for this lower speed.

Demon cores

Demon core weaponry was used during the original occupation’s later stages once simpler gas and electrical traps were known to the Austral occupiers. Such a weapon is meant to be undetectable even to advanced radiation sensors, unlike a conventional nuclear bomb, and they are much simpler than nuclear bombs.

A demon core reaches criticality upon activation, able to guarantee the death of everyone in a room-sized area in a matter of days to weeks by radiation poisoning. They are bulky, clad in lead and lead-based alloys to trap any betraying high-energy particle. Almost all demon cores were mechanical devices, exotic to Austral eyes, given unique and intricate designs around the actual core to practically guarantee that they would be activated by anyone attempting to disarm them, or even move them, and so they were naturally left behind in valuable strategic locations that had to be ceded to the occupiers. Often, they would be activated by mechanical or pneumatic pressure sensors once a sufficient number of victims were standing near them.

If they went undiscovered they could usually be reset and fired multiple times, sometimes automatically if the creator was very skilled. To this day some areas of the Noir Scape are uninhabited because of demon cores; most of them could be disarmed safely with a complicated key extended with a long pole by their creator, but lock-picking a demon core is rightly regarded as suicide.