2018-01-12: Vorthuzahl's Prize
- Log: Vorthuzahl's Prize
- Cast: Ida Everstead-Rey, Vorthuzahl, Yarobeleedt, Lady Harken, Riesenlied, Lily Keil, Neriah Parringer, Jacqueline Barber, Fei Fong Wong, Leon Albus, Elhaym van Houten, Cassidy Cain, Noeline, Jack Van Burace, Matilda Whitehead, Loren Voss, Primarch of Muse -Rahab-
- Where: Hadal Temple
- Date: January 12th, 2018
- Summary: Vorthuzahl, Lady Harken, and Yarobeleedt strike at the heart of the Hadal Temple, seeking to claim the derelict skyship for themselves. Many individuals arrive, hoping to fend them off. A blademaster undertakes an ancient rite, achieving a new form...and the ensuing battle catches the attention of the Temple's master...
==============================<* Hadal Temple *>============================== The Hadal Temple's entranceway rests at the deepest recess of the Wayside Qanat, beyond what was once the site of the Guardian Statue of Water. The ground is cold and clammy, slicked with ice past this point, and the temperature takes a deep plunge as the air starts to puft up with bouquets of frost. A menacing depth awaits you beyond this point, taking you to the realm of the Detestable and its Deep Soldiers... BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3KJ7TE0Fss DC: Riesenlied switches forms to Fallen Sword Riesenlied! DC: Vorthuzahl switches forms to Commander Vorthuzahl! DC: Ida Everstead-Rey switches forms to Pugilist Ida! DC: Noeline switches forms to The Capricious Crimson Noble??!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Deep within the bowels of the Hadal Temple lies the resting-place of Rahab, Primarch of Muse. By all rights, a cavern this massive should've been noticed long before now, but this is Filgaia, and things have a way of vanishing from collective memory. Just beyond the entrance is a treacherous frozen waterfall--beyond that, a cliff-face with a frozen lake, a vantage-point overlooking the rest of the cavern. The vast expanse looks and feels very much like the frosty tomb it is--it's a lake that looks like it has been frozen since the dawn of time, a landscape of snowdrifts and ice and rime-covered rock etched with eldritch symbols. The ice twists and curves in ways that hurt the eyes if looked at for too long; it looks organic, and some patches glimmer with an eerie blue light. Scraggly, crystalline trees cling to patches of rock and frosty earth. The very air seems to hunger for the body heat and lifeforce of intruders, and the icy ground is a hazard in its own right.
In the heart of the chamber lies the corpse of the Metal Demon super-carrier Astrid. Much of the warship is entombed in ice and rock, and it's shrouded in a thick, dense fog. From this angle, it's difficult to tell what kind of shape the warship is in--and getting to it requires braving the miasma. As impressive as it is, it's far from the most eye-catching thing in the chamber. One of Filgaia's leylines threads through this segment of earth, and it's visible in the very center of the tomb--a point of searing blue-white light that shines like a tiny sun.
Three figures overlook that tiny sun, and the corpse of the ship it overshadows.
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
Conflict seeps into the air, a great presence of something burning hot thrust into the heart of an icy cold rippling across the landscape, sending snow into tumbling spirals across the ice of the lake. There, near the end of the overlook, towering in gleaming silver brimming with a volcanic red, is the bastion of hate responsible for such an atmospheric disturbance. Closer than ever to his goal his eyes burn with a hatred yet unleashed, pinned down to the place where his heart once was, burning, swirling, an ephemeral energy that serves as the center of his soul. They thought they took from him.
They only encouraged him to find a replacement.
It is not until he senses the familiar disturbance of rats on his ship (that is, the entire world), that VORTHUZAHL, COMMANDER OF THE LEGION, turns a head towards one shoulder. Burning like two embers, his eyes catch sight of something in the distance, through the fog that his very presence kicks up on the frozen lake.
"The fleshlings have come here, hoping to steal what is not belong to them. We shall give them 'nothing', and take from them, EVERYTHING!"
A hand reaches across his body for the hilt at his upper arm, and with the sound of metal on metal, sparks shower the air as the burning blade is drawn into existence, the metal shimmering in a disdainful hiss against the frigid air as he brings it down to one side.
"PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR DESTINY..."
The call echoes, as the blade scrapes against ephemeral strands tied to the ley line, forever marring it's purity. "...CREATURES MEANT ONLY TO DIE!!"
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
Yarobeleedt was hand-picked to be a part of the mission underneath Wayside. Being picked over others of better health and, let us be honest, track record is a high honor - a show of confidence that as a loyal soldier underneath their Holy Mother, he can be entrusted with this excursion.
He would be bragging about this non-stop the entire way, insulting any of the other candidates in normal circumstances. No, today, Yarobeleedt is well-behaved. Deathly quiet. Maintaining the proper distance to maximize coverage of the unnaturally iced-over caverns, across lakes of ice and peculiar crystal trees. He reports the routes directly to Vorthuzahl, respecting the chain of command in regards to communication, and not at all hiding from the sight of one specific Quarter Knight any time he even thinks he might enter her field of vision.
In fact, he's just at the tail end of reporting to Commander Vorthuzahl that he believes they are arriving as his blobby lower half pulsates and vibrates to shake off the cold. He flinches with every furiously spoken address to those underneath him present, gleefully rubbing his hands - now in the form of some kind of bladed weapon each - with an anticipatory grinding sound (and ducking his head as the sparks of Vorthuzahl's flame sword flares to life, lest he get another ember in the eye again).
Of course, he's not going to turn down an opportunity to find more glory for himself, starting to slink about not to directly engage, but to perhaps coincidentally find something else of interest the Commander missed, so that he may be praised for his thorough scouting and not at all hiding a discovery to reveal for later.
"Is as you say, think, Commander!" Yarobeleedt says as he edges off. "Fufufu...!"
He probably won't be laughing soon.
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
Betrayer
A feeling of disgust, an impulse of wrongness that unsettles her to the core more than any mere annoyance, or even outrage, permeates Harken's every waking thought. It is curious. It agitates. None of the Photosphere's residents warmly anticipate the thought of any of their leaders being unduly agitated.
Turncoat
There remains work to be done. A planet to subjugate. A people to erase. Piece by piece, step by step. And under her Lord Siegfried's command, and not so much Mother's, Lady Harken leads from the front. As she ever does. As she always will. As she has ever known. The ever-shrinking number of quality, loyal lieutenants among the Hyadean ranks deserve quality leadership.
Traitor
Instead, right now, they have Harken.
***
Twelve feet of scarlet, alien armor and similarly-hued hair stand with legs squared and arms folded, overlooking the azure star burning at what almost feels like the heart of the planet, though it is anything but. The Quarter Knight's meddling with this mission was, as ever, announced approximately five minutes prior to Vorthuzahl's time to sortie.
Consequently, she does nothing while he does the talking. Harken does not give inspirational speeches, at least not often. Her threats, her very expression, only truly come out in the soul-baring ritual of combat. "Now, they know we are coming." she chastises Vorthuzahl, though her tone doesn't sound particularly dangerous. "No matter. This prize will be ours." there's a beat. "Impress me."
That one sounds a little more worrying. Wherever Yarobeleedt might ooze, in this very instant, rest assured that Lady Harken's gaze sharply swivels towards him. Even as she sweeps her cloak free from her body and prepares to unleash hell. Presumably, she will not finish until the surface burns with her wrath as well.
<Pose Tracker> Riesenlied has posed.
The topic of the skyship underneath Hadal Temple and Wayside was becoming more and more common knowledge, and with multiple groups and assailants under it... there wasn't the luxury of time for the Ebony Wings.
And now, with the news that their brethren had broken into the depths of the Temple, the issue had been forced for them.
"I'll need some time to get the field set up, but..." Devet murmurs as she floats atop Muni-Muni, with a serious extension of keyboards scattered around her as she stares into her screen. A floating globe bobs beside her, the size of an adult's palm, laced with glowing lines that thrum with a passive power within.
"We will do what we can to buy you time."
Riesenlied descends unsteadily, a visible wound already bandaged at her chest where the neckline her of her modest white gown ends. She's particularly tense and on edge, her face pale as the Dragon's Tear shimmers with a dark and anxious light.
Those that know her well understand that she carries an unusual weapon into battle this time... yet, it is not an unfamiliar one. She holds onto a an attache-case, a thin-bladed crystal sword in a frosted window within.
AN HOUR AGO
Cetiri's 'brow' wrinkles -- a metallic flap with enough give to be able to furrow. An electronic grunt escapes her throat.
"You realise this will only hurt you further," she murmurs.
Riesenlied holds the blade in her hand, a cloth staunching her chest. "This is urgent, mother. Just... just do it. Please."
Cetiri sighs, as her tail flicks to a switch behind her. A machine thrums in the background. "This will give you at the very least... six minutes, if not slightly less, once you release the condenser."
"Double the time... it will do," Riesenlied mutters.
NOW
The Fallen Sword -- the ARM that manifests out of her, yet only drawn at the most dire of times. That she would crystallise it ahead of time speaks volumes of the urgency of the situation...
... she can only hope it can make up the difference.
The announcement had rung clear in her eyes -- and she knows who it is. Vorthuzahl, master of the Burning Blade... and someone she'd briefly taken tutelage under. But no, moreso than that... Yaro is there -- as he often is. She regrets that she still cannot reach him...
... but the red-haired woman in the armour is even the more surprising one, as she cups her hand over her mouth. "Lady Harken..."
She shakes her head. When she chose this path, this had to come... sooner or later...
And she will see it through to the end. The Dragon's Tear shimmers, and coalesces with an ornate border of light that surrounds herself and Noeline. "Let us go."
GS: Riesenlied has attacked Riesenlied with Rising Heart - 'Seek the New World'! GS: Riesenlied has attacked Noeline with Rising Heart - 'Seek the New World'! GS: Riesenlied has completed her action. GS: Riesenlied heals Riesenlied! She gains 200 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Several days ago, Marcus Rider offered to lend Ida explosives and general assistance in the matter of the skyship beneath Hadal. She almost took it. It certainly wouldn't hamper the villagers' withdrawl--they came out here on their own, after all, and they can certainly leave the same way, using means that are far less likely to cause massive collateral damage and an international panic. Ida can only imagine what the Master would do if he learned the Metal Demons had reclaimed a legendary war relic capable of laying waste to nations, context be damned. More escalation. More death. More suffering. All of it so that Riesenlied can have her 'New World' instead of the world she was born into.
In the end, though, she decided that if she were to sabotage this vessel, she would do it herself, with her own devices, and in the company of people who do not deny what they are.
A figure in a thick winter coat runs through of one of the cavern's entrances, moving as fast as she can while wearing crampons to offset the ice. Her right arm is encased in a metal gauntlet, and a heraldric brooch is pinned to the outside of the coat, bearing--among other insignia--the white lotus emblem of dead House Raye of Arctica. Upon hearing Vorthuzahl's voice, Ida's blood runs cold, but she doesn't slow down. She fully expected him to be here at some point, though really, his timing leaves much to be desired. Ida plants a grapnel in the cliff-face and rappels down as fast as she dares, cutting the bottom of the line once she's reached the lakebed. There's still the bigger drop to deal with, but one step at a time.
"I wouldn't call myself prepared," Ida says, as she walks towards Vorthuzahl. "But I accept regardless. The Demon Fist's descendant sends her regards in her place."
Ida becomes a blur. Chi speeds her motions, turning a headlong charge into a lightning-swift assault. Ida is suddenly there, in Vorthuzahl's face, driving a fist right into his armored gut and--hopefully--making a nice, big opening for the woman Ida is with.
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has attacked Vorthuzahl with Body Blow! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
...This place is not wholesome.
...But Riesenlied called, and she was answered. A woman in black--all in black, with metal and gray here and there, with a rosewood ARM over her shoulder and a medical satchel on her person. Her boots are caked with the dust of this place as she looks out down the stairs, approaching behind Riesenlied, to the side, looking here and there, before she looks ahead to the others. ...She's not in command of this particular mission, of course... But she doesn't need to be.
At this point, she pulls her weapon from her shoulder, taking it in both of her hands, quietly checking the chamber and eyeing down the barrel. ...Then she moves forward. She's seen Riesenlied's sword, all right. She can imagine what it will do to her.
"...Fall back to me if the strain is too much," Lily instructs Riesenlied, as she looks down to the announcement, hears talk of dying. ...But the truth is, she has similar thoughts to Harken about a fair fight. She looks over their foes. She glances to the leyline. She considers the impact it may have on what she's about to do...
Because she is not within Riesenlied's barrier of light. She is in the shadows, allowing it to draw attention away from her, behind her, as she puts a hand about a strange pendant from an old temple for some good fortune. Prepared...
Ida is already moving in all of a sudden, and Lily smirks. It's the perfect distraction, really. So when Riesenlied indicates they should be freed, when Ida strikes--
Lily, crouching, takes aim with her rifle, careful aim, one golden eye open staring down the barrel... and heat grows around her. There's a spark--
And a gunshot, brilliant, with a bullet aimed straight for Lady Harken's head, that explodes into mist that turns into jagged ice crystals all around, shaping up in fractal masses around the target.
The Black Wolves' lieutenant stays in place after her shot. "...Now."
GS: Lily Keil has attacked Lady Harken with Mistflash! GS: Lily Keil has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
Bearing this place is taking more focus than Neriah's had to put forth in quite some time.
She forces herself to think nothing of the mind tricks - the illusions - the sense of ancient, abiding darkness that seems somehow more ancient than even this world. The little voice in her mind shrieks at her for attention. She focuses straight ahead and ignores it.
Thinks of a small girl with bright eyes and a wide, shining smile, and an older woman with a cucco in her arms.
Welcome home.
...Creatures meant only to die.
From beneath her newsboy hat, Neriah looks up, dropping her shovel to the ground as she emerges from the cavern. The effort of holding herself together shows in her face. Stress lines are etched around the corners of her eyes and mouth, dark shadows under her eyes betraying her exhaustion.
SLAUGHTER THEM ALL. YOU WISH TO, DON'T YOU?
"No," Neriah hisses to that sinister urge. Looking over to Riesenlied, she bites down to her lower lip. The horned woman - herself a traitor to her people, an outcast just like Neriah - has been one of the few in Filgaia to show her kindness and love.
"All creatures are meant only to die," she states as she turns to face what's coming, fixing Vorthuzahl with a tired, almost resigned look. "Birth is just the first phase of death anyway, so--"
Ida Everstead-Rey suddenly shows up and starts punching Vorthuzahl in the breadbasket. Neriah blinks a couple of times, then affects a small pout. "...Or we could just punch things, that works too," she deadpans.
Her right hand dips to her belt and comes out with the only other weapon she's got, aside from the darkness she's bottling up inside and refusing to let out.
It's her pistol. It's a simple handgun plated in Dragon Fossil silver and incorporating what looks like a small metal dragon's nostril assembly. Against a Quarter Knight and two Metal Demon commanders, the gun Neriah's family calls Marilyn seems almost ludicrously inadequate.
SHOOT EVERSTEAD-REY
SHOW HER THE PRICE OF HUMILIATING US
MURDER HER AND WATCH HER BLEED
Neriah forces aside the inner voice, whips her pistol forward, then lunges to the side and fires a shot. The gun barks with a sudden SNAP-hssssssh of a steam-powered piston, disgorging a bullet towards Vorthuzahl's faceplate at absurd velocity.
GS: Neriah Parringer has attacked Vorthuzahl with Her Name Is Marilyn! GS: Neriah Parringer has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Jacqueline Barber has posed.
Jacqueline had been here twice before. This third time, she was more ready for the terrors and hallucinations brought upon by the Primarch. She had steeled herself, knowing that if she intended to fight against it, she would need to be ready, mentally and physically. Weakness in either could prove fatal...or worse.
The Leyline threaded through this place. She didn't need to look upon it to know that. She could feel its power. As a Crest Sorceress, it was a power she was familiar with. She had known it instinctually since the first time she had set foot in this place.
The ship is important to Riesenlied, she knows. However, more important to Jacqueline is the Primarch itself. Whatever it was doing with the Leyline...surely it could not mean anything good for Filgaia.
That is why she is here, pacing quietly through one of Hadal Temple's caverns in a thick coat. Riesenlied may or may not already be aware of her presence - she might even have enabled it. Though that was her purpose, more immediate threat presents itelf. Threats that sought to eradicate her and everything she held dear.
There would be no ignoring them, as they undoubtedly would not ignore her.
Jacqueline stops in her tracks, her blood running cold and her breath hitching in her coat. Very quietly, she peeks around the next corner, bearing witness to those two titans as they proclaim death for humanity.
She recognizes the one bearing the flaming blade. Though the wound had healed what seemed like an eternity ago, she could still feel a sharp pain from where it had run her through, on that fateful day that changed everything for Lunata...
She has not seen the imposing armored woman before, but she knows her by reputation. Lady Harken, of the Quarter Knights...that she was here spoke of the seriousness of the situation. Jacqueline takes a deep breath. This...wasn't good. Against enemies like that, what could she hope to do...?
Quietly, Jacqueline reaches into her bags, drawing out a pair of potions. She keeps one for herself, and hands the other to the companion that is with her. They will surely need them, for the fight that waits ahead...
What she does not realize, at the moment, is that fate has something else in store for her this day, beyond what she anticipated.
She has not seen the third figure, overshadowed as he was by the Quarter Knight and the Commander's aura of intimidation.
GS: Jacqueline Barber has attacked Jacqueline Barber with Distribution Theory! GS: Jacqueline Barber has attacked Matilda Whitehead with Distribution Theory! GS: Jacqueline Barber has completed her action. GS: Jacqueline Barber heals Jacqueline Barber! She gains 100 temporary hit points! GS: CRITICAL! Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Ida Everstead-Rey's Body Blow for 133 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Neriah Parringer's Her Name Is Marilyn for 96 hit points! GS: Jacqueline Barber heals Matilda Whitehead! She gains 100 temporary hit points! GS: CRITICAL! Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Lily Keil's Mistflash for 94 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
Fei Fong Wong doesn't usually want to kill anything, but he wants to kill this Primarch of Muse. He feels a little bad about it. Should he be okay with killing something? Even if that something is really horrible and monstrous? Well, he sets aside such thoughts. As usual, in this arena, he is unsettled but it isn't the Primarch he senses trying to claw its way into his mind, it's a general unease, a killing intent. He rubs the back of one hand with the fingers of another.
He's also with Riese, the Black Wolves, and Elly and he's looking as weird about it as ever. He glances over to Ida for a moment. How did she get so strong, he wonders, and in such a short span of time? She couldn't do that before. The way she moves the chi through her body... it's unreal.
Maybe he should ask her about it later. For now, though, he doesn't exactly have much choice to investigate. He knows what his talents are and investigation in a situation like this is a decidedly inefficient use of them.
"Harken..." He murmurs to himself.
What is this curiousity welling up within him from? It doesn't feel like his own. It feels like his.
He closes his eyes, steadying his breath. Meditation is rarely enough, but whatever's inside him seems to be slumbering right now. He can keep at it. He doesn't move yet. Lily's going to give the order. Not now, not now, not now...
Now.
Fei leaps for Harken with a burst of speed that may be considered by some to be 'quick' but whether Harken considers Fei's strikes to be fast punches or fat punches is something Fei's likely only going to find out after throwing them.
"It's funny," He says. "I'm fighting to protect your people and somehow we're still at blows. What is your reason for fighting?"
Keep her off Elly and Lily, he thinks. It's practicality as much as anything else.
GS: Fei Fong Wong has attacked Lady Harken with Triangle Triangle Triangle! GS: Fei Fong Wong has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Leon Albus has posed.
Leon promised Riesenlied that he would do what he could to defend Wayside, and the secrets of Hadal Temple offer one of the best chances for life and success that Wayside Village has. The former captain of the Black Wolves came, as he promised he would. He follows a little after Lily, his boots slamming into the dust here, and his eyes narrowed. Argent Divider is gripped, firmly, in his hand.
The weapon is unfurled into its sword-formation. The long, telescoping blade has unfurled and glints silver in the dim light here -- and he looks ahead, to Riesenlied and Noeline both. The barrier flashes, brilliant, and Ida strikes. Lily takes her rifle to shoulder. She fires.
That is Leon's distraction--or maybe he is Lily's, too.
He shouts, then, bellowing out a wordless battlecry before he goes rushing forward. Lily's shot comes in before he does -- and Leon ducks low, running across the ground, sword held to the side and gripped in two hands. His coat flutters out behind him, before he leaps -- and then comes crashing down for Harken. He does with a tight, mid-air spin, and tries to slash the weapon down for the Quarter Knight's midsection. There is a glance, sidelong, at Fei.
By now, he moves in concert with the martial artist. They've fought a few scraps together.
GS: Leon Albus has attacked Lady Harken with Raze Slash! GS: Leon Albus has completed his action. GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Fei Fong Wong's Triangle Triangle Triangle for 81 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Leon Albus's Raze Slash for 74 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
EARLIER
"It's a little peculiar how there are so many of these vast caverns," Elly muses in an orientation seminar. "I wonder what formed them? Is Ignas composed of limestone...?"
BUT NOW
Elly has come. She was not far away and how could she have easily said no? Oh, she could have made her excuses. She doesn't LIKE this place, and it has not improved on a third journey down into the depths, but now...
Something about it...
She can't put a finger on it. Maybe it's because exposure is taking the edge off, maybe it's because Lily's here, maybe it's because she doesn't have to fret about Loren or the Major or Seraphita judging her right now, maybe it's just because she's now here for a reason that helps someone.
"I suppose this isn't exactly what we talked about," Elly says to Riesenlied. She is dressed a little oddly; another of those denim dresses, tight-cinched at the waist, and with nylons on underneath. The relative profile similarity to the Gebler uniform is pretty clear, of course, to those who "have eyes to see."
From one pocket of the denim dress comes a metal rod. Snap it out. There's an irony here, Elly thinks, but then she's feeling out the flow of ether, the titanic surging of that subtle aspecting of 'Water' in the air. It is not precisely what she needs or what she wants, but it is not hard to feel and hear the flow of things.
And the air is already misty. When Lily starts her crystallizing attack, Elly raises her metal rod like an out-sized magic wand --
-- and those seeds of ice start getting fed hyper-cooled water, sudden sparkling fractals rising outwards. Elly tries to steer them down to grasp at Harken's legs, knees, ankles, feet: mobility. Impair that and everything else gets easier.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
"Who?"
These days have seen Cassidy Cain as Ida Everstead-Rey's occasional comrade at arms, and today is no different. Emerging from somewhere behind the heiress and dressed in items more appropriate for colder climes. There is a heavier jacket upon her, leather breeches and boots trimmed with fur. Her hat has been replaced by a woolen cap encircling the back of her head and holding most of her pale-gold hair loosely.
She is busily scraping something off her boot when she hears a familiar phrase echoing somewhere in the depths of their present labyrinth and the expression that flits her face soon afterwards is one of absolute exasperation. The thief and conwoman rolls her head back and expels a loud sigh.
"Figures," she mutters as she moves after Ida's charging wake.
There's an appreciative glance for when Ida threads chi over her form before engaging the large Metal Demon that she has tried to kill multiple times. But with Vorthuzahl left wide open, armor and plates soaking up what he can of the heiress' charge, she retrieves Hawthorne's Revolver from the small of her back, spinning the chamber and pointing it straight for the Metal Demon's heart.
She pulls the trigger before Vor even realizes she's there.
"You really need tae come up with some new catchphrases, luv. Dinnae want tae be predictable now, do you?"
Despite her earlier exasperation, a reckless smile pulls up her mouth, the resulting grin as sharp and cutting as the innocuous-looking knife by her hip. But to assume that she is actually happy about this present state of affairs is an egregious mistake to make - she is, but not in the traditional sense, when bloodlust and black fury braid together to join the way white-hot adrenaline sings through her veins.
GS: Elhaym van Houten has attacked Lady Harken with Aqua Stall! GS: Elhaym van Houten has completed her action. GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Vorthuzahl with Blame It On My Youth! GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Noeline has posed.
Noeline knew that their time would come eventually; that Wayside would attract the attention of the Quarter Knights, likely again and again. Riesenlied's declaration of peace, despite the feelings laid behind it, could only be interpreted as a slap in the face - a Hyadean wish against Metal Demon pride, at least the way she sees it.
So, of course, she and the Tainted had been making ready. Scouts out in the hills and nearby settlements keeping watch; marksmen she could trust guarding the Gates of Wayside. They could not hope to outrun Siegfried's forces forever, but perhaps they could at least buy some time to evacuate the village, and get the wounded and the children to safety. The ship they could come back for, if needed - the Primach they could ignore, if they really had to.
But that had been under the expectation that Berserk would simply crash down into their village and start swinging - that a frontal show of power would be the way in which the Quarter Knights would first display their displeasure. Not for a moment did she expect an undercover infiltration into the Hadal Temple and below - a strike at their one hope of survival in the future - not until the warning alarms start to blare. If she had time to think, she'd blame Alhazred, but then that's something she'd do as a matter of course.
Tight-lipped, she descends next to Riesenlied, her eyes alight with a mixture of fear and determination; her knuckles are white on the haft of her scythe, gripping it hard enough to draw blood were she made of simple flesh. She, too, looks far from pristine - lacking her usual composure, with arms wrapped in bandages and her dress scuffed and torn. There's simply been no time to pause for breath, after all.
The sight of Harken confirms her fears; she can't even bring herself to say anything at first, not until the light from Riesenlied envelops her and reminds her of her cause, making her drag in a slow and ragged breath. She has people to protect. She has a Guardian, apparently betting its future on her. Most of all, she's a Tainted. They try to survive, at all costs. It's kind of a thing.
"Lady Harken," she bows her head for just a moment; she doesn't have a quarrel with this demon, per se, especially not if the inkling crystallizing in her mind has even a grain of truth to it. "... I apologize, but-- you realize I can't let you lay a hand on anyone here. ... you realize what that would mean for them, should Mother awake," she adds. It's a tiny, tiny attempt, a little prod to see what the Knight's feelings on the matter are--
--but then Lily's smokescreen flares into life, and Noeline takes the opportunity for what it is, pressing forwards. A series of darting motions take her around in a circle, flanking Harken as best as you can flank any twelve-foot figure, before she leaps forward in a sudden launching swing that might, just might, count as the most stupid thing she's ever done.
GS: Riesenlied heals Noeline! She gains 200 temporary hit points! GS: Noeline has attacked Lady Harken with Pointed Commentary! GS: Noeline has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Jack Van Burace has posed.
He isn't here for Riesenlied and Wayside.
He isn't really here for Ida and her quest either.
No, Jack is here for one reason. Because he knew that there would be Metal Demons there to fight. To kill. To slay. To take that anger of his out on. He came because there was a chance for him to once more test himself against the metal monsters of the world.
That is why Jack is there.
Around his neck, tucked under his shirt, rests a small medallion. Cracked and soot stained it feels almost warm against his skin as he stares at the figures there. The rough ridges of the old medal of the Fenris Knights seems to pulse for a moment, answering his anger. Mangifing it. Focusing it.
"Harken." The voice of his is a low growl. Almost animalistic. Hanpan, sitting on the man's shoulder, looking askance at him a moment.
"Jack? Whats wr--"
The Wind Mouse doesn't get to finish that sentence because suddenly the swordsman is moving. Flash-stepping, leaping from perch to perch even as Lily fires. Speeding across the distance, ignoring all others. Eyes only for the scythe wielding Quarter Knight.
"I'll find out where you corrupted my technique if I have to sift though your skull for it!" He snarls as his sword suddenly swings free, faster than he was in their last meeting. The anger channeling into the strike as he passes her, blade intent on shattering the armor over her perfect knee.
<Pose Tracker> Matilda Whitehead has posed.
Matilda has been back and forth between Wayside and the Carakin a lot lately; the compounder is... drawn to something there, after her last trip, despite the terrible experience she had beneath the village. Her timing, however is -- either excellent or poor, we'll say.
She ends up descending as well, alongside Jay, rather than on her own as she'd originally expected; Freischütz is already at the ready, the dark weapon gleaming. ... it's also no longer the only one Matilda's carrying, but that's neither here nor there.
'Creatures meant only to die'... something about that comment prompts Matilda's lip to curl into a sneer. "I refuse," she says, voice tight, "to accept the fate that Filgaia has set for me. For us." Her gaze sweeps across each of the Metal Demons in turn, and rather than swap the load within Freischütz as she would usually do...
... she accepts Jay's potion with one hand, and uses the other to swap weapons. The ancient ARM goes back into her coat, and out comes a simple revolver, instead. She quaffs the potion quickly, and then leaps low and to the side, firing off a shot at something moving past the Metal Demons in the darkness.
Poor Yarobeleedt, aimed at on a guess.
GS: Jack Van Burace has attacked Lady Harken with Heal Blade! GS: Jack Van Burace has completed his action. GS: Matilda Whitehead has attacked Yarobeleedt with Simple Pistol! GS: Matilda Whitehead has completed her action. GS: Yarobeleedt critically Guards a hit from Matilda Whitehead's Simple Pistol for 16 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Blame It On My Youth for 91 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Jack Van Burace's Heal Blade for 66 hit points! GS: Jack Van Burace takes Cover! He gains 50 temporary hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a glancing hit from Noeline's Pointed Commentary for 38 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Elhaym van Houten's Aqua Stall for 77 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Some things vanish in this world. Sometimes, given the well-tread process of the past, it's for the better. Some things should not be touched.
Not by the people of the surface, and not by the Metal Demons threatening the world's destruction.
The orders had been clear.
It's frigid this far down in the depths, a change from the clammy depths of the waterway. This is the sort of chill that seeks to snatch life itself away, and perhaps if it weren't for the face-concealing mask of the black combat armor, Loren would even see his breath frozen in the air.
In the end, haste was important.
As was knowledge of the expanse that is Hadal Temple.
Someone who can plant a bomb.
Before the threat can grow, there is something his nation must see destroyed.
An a small group can reach what a group cannot.
In this case, 'small group' means precisely one. He knows why. It's what can be spared. And if he fails...
Well, there's always the element of last resort. It isn't as if he'll be around to complain about it.
Moving quickly, he finally reaches the heart of the temple, dropping down over a rise further along this section of the chamber. There's the ship.
...And there's the leypoint. Shining. Even behind the mask, he angles his head away.
The headache has returned.
And there -- of course this couldn't be simple -- are Metal Demons. Two familiar, one less so: from Adlehyde, from the Guardian Temple. This is going to be a problem, he won't be able to reach the ship with them in the way. Maybe he should pull out and tell them to go ahead with the backup plan.
Then things get complicated.
Riesenlied makes her arrival, no doubt with more Drifters not far behind, given the words from the large demon -- Vorthuzahl. He can't see anything more from here, not yet. There's little for it and even less time.
He drops down the rest of the way to the base of the rise he's currently atop, suit absorbing most of the shock of impact. From the shadows towards the back he rises from the crouch he'd fallen in, sending a single short arc of rock in a jarring rise for the largest of the lot.
If he can't slip in, he'll use force.
Use the rest of them as a distraction.
It's at some remove, as his focus spreads, that he realizes he recognizes a few familiar voices in the group.
Oh, this is going to go well.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Vorthuzahl with Terra Circuit! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Loren Voss's Terra Circuit for 79 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
There is something about the gaze of the scarlet Quarter Knight that emits some imperceptible - completely imaginary, to be more accurate - signal of which the slug-worm-thing of an advance scout seems sensitive to. Any rustle of cloth, any change in the color red of what yet shows on any surviving reflective surface... Yarobeleedt instinctively maneuvers in such way he believes himself safe from scrutiny.
From one corner of an unfocused, googly eye, someone with a tiny blue thing moves faster thanhe can register. One of his arms fan out as though liquefied and then instantaneously flash-frozen - a fear reflex, in which his own body loosens its ability to stay semi-solid and then overcompensates to stop himself from turning into a gooey liquid metal puddle - which is an advantageous coincidence.
A bright spark flashes his abominable form among the two women skulking about the perimeter of the location as Matilda's blind pistol shot finds purchase only in a concidental metal flesh shield. Aimed on at a guess, but a confirmation that might have saved both Matilda's and Jay's lives alike. If he were planning to move in on them unseen...
That possibility has been neatly averted.
His lower body scrapes noisily against ice-cold metal at frequencies and pitches most humans would find unpleasant as he is spurred to more rapid action, scratching and struggling in ways that suggests such rapid locomotion in this location is not only difficult. It's painful!
Where sight may fail for a time as the quasi-incoherent creature crawls back into deeper shadows, sound may yet prove a wonderful guide as they try to approach from any angle available - any intact wall, maybe a patch of ceiling above - soon coming up on Matilda's right flank as the creature's left arm morphs into something akin with a scythe that holds an imbalanced, misproportioned blunt end, stabbing it down into the ground like one might like a pick... and then ripping it up out of the ground and swinging that heavier blunt end right around collarbone level for Jay.
Both would hurt, but at least he hasn't spoken anything yet.
GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Matilda Whitehead with Sigh! GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Jacqueline Barber with Back Ham! GS: Yarobeleedt has completed its action. GS: Jacqueline Barber takes a glancing hit from Yarobeleedt's Back Ham for 46 hit points!
DC: MISS! Matilda Whitehead completely evades Sigh from Yarobeleedt!
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
As the battle joins, Vorthuzahl seethes at Harken's words, enamored by a different master now, one that seeps into the senses. One that calls to the place where his heart once was. All he has left is anger. All he has left is RAGE. A single step forward, and he thinks to intercept them, to show the Quarter Knight his mettle, but then 'Ida' is there, slipping through space in an incomprehensible blur and all at once powering a great fist into the plating of his midsection. Metal rings in a cacophonous echo, one that reverberates across ice and snow as the Metal demon is sent sliding. More than that, plates crack. Molten blood drips. Ice hisses in protest where it lands, and spines sink into the frozen lake from his metal boots to slow his slide as he takes a knee.
"Your ancestors will be disappointed here today, fitful creature! PREP-"
He never gets to finish, 'Neriah's' piston-powered blast sending a round directly into his faceplate, which almost helps him stagger back to his feet, cracking metal and exposing a gaping maw of shattered mass beneath. It falls out of his face like smashed teeth, and his head turns as it rights, as eyes settle on the woman who had dared interrupt his threat. Slowly it tilts to the side, and he seems to spit. Yes indeed. He spits hot fire. Or something close to it, searing ice and causing it to crack and pop.
The combined blows test his fortitude, call to his spirit. Perhaps their onslaught alone would be enough. But no. They brought a living potion of rejuvenation in the form of Cassidy Cain. They may have well brought a battery to fuel the destruction of them all. 'Cassidy' takes aim at his heart, and for her effort she will find a creature staggered, and more, a shattered chest, shot through and through, to reveal a burgeoning, bright apex of light within. Something that was not there before. Something that hungers.
Something CASSIDY is responsible for.
"DO NOT SPEAK TO ME OF TRENDS, SHE OF APPLEBOTTEM BREACHES AND BOOTS, WITH FUR. TONIGHT YOU AND YOUR MANLET ARMY WILL BE FELLED 'LOW'. TONIGHT, I ASCEND AND YOU, ALL OF YOU, WILL ALL WITNESS THE END OF YOUR WO-!!!"
The arc of rock crashes in sidelong, and drives Vorthuzahl back to his knees to skid again, metal cracking open at his back, spilling more of his hot blood onto ancient ice. He arrests his motion only as 'Loren's' blast finally falls away, his sword stabbing into the frozen lake to send a shriek of protest into the air and send cracks spiderwebbing towards them all with dangerous ease.
"ENOUGH! YOUR TIME HAS COME!!"
For 'Ida', the world will become a blur of red, a strike meant to steal initiative whirling her way with a relentless bent, searing overhand arcs and whirling cuts meant to power the woman from life to death sent shimmering through the chi around her!
For 'Neriah', She Who Has Ruined His Face, a single, whirling cut meant to draw defensive energy around his form, a counter-strike playing out with a sudden blur of motion that puts the metal monster right in her face, bringing a cut down towards her shoulder, intent on bringing his blade through her very center.
For 'Cassidy', only the most tender touch, a lashing, whirling flare of his blade turning to a draining inverse of energy that means to steal the life from her limbs. To draw away sensation. To steal the very essence of everything she values, but to leave her alive, helpless, so that he might watch the suffering in her eyes. It culminates in a sudden, charging thrust, one that he ends with a whirl, and a rising power that he sucks from the very ice itself, reinforcing his form as mercurial fluid runs over his armor to fill in the gaps, stop the bleeding, and show them how futile their efforts are. In summoning his Bastion, 'Loren' has earned a reprieve for now. Perhaps the monster thinks the rocks of the cavern had come for him?
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
No matter. He does not notice the true intent of The Man On A Mission.
GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Cassidy Cain with Invigorating Ruin! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Ida Everstead-Rey with Relentless Assault! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Neriah Parringer with Searing Riposte! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Vorthuzahl with Bastion of Hate! GS: Vorthuzahl has completed his action. GS: Neriah Parringer takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Searing Riposte for 109 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes Cover! He gains 50 temporary hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Bastion of Hate for 0 hit points! GS: Shield! Statuses applied to Vorthuzahl!
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
Not that silence reigns, by any means, but the rifle-crack of Lily's magicked shot pierces the rising rumble of noise with an echoing shriek that ricochets around the cavern uncomfortably. Of course, by the time it is heard, the bullet has already long-since reached its destination: Harken's armoured palm, having intercepted its path with frightening celerity. In slow-motion, the lead body deforms, briefly rippling and flowing like water as it crumples against the Hyadean steel, but 'tis a ruse! A thundering clatter of shattering crystal rings true, and a blossoming bouquet of icy shards coalesce before the Quarter Knight on all sides, threatening to impale her. An ambush!
"Hoh~." Harken muses, one eye unnervingly tracking each of the oncoming blades of frost, and the peerless warriors who rush to the field to capitalize on the chance. It is a glowing point of light, a burning coal where an iris ought to be. "They always rush to their deaths..." she sounds very grateful, but let's be real: Harken, your actual bodycount here sucks (for good reason).
Fei moves with a speed unbecoming of a mere human, but Harken is getting wise to the fact that Humans are not as weak as previously advertised inside the Photosphere. She spins to meet him in a whorl of cloak and a blur of scarlet, because being the fastest thing in the room is generally her goal in life. "It is funny," she greets the ponytailed champion of Rock-Paper-Scissors as his fists rain down on her. The first few strikes, she catches with a surprisingly good form, parrying the oncoming blows with her forearm, but not all of them. But, Fei, it's like punching a wall. How much sandbag training have you done to harden those knuckles!? "Because we will rule over this land long after you have turned to dust, and your misguided efforts forgotten. I fight because I love to fight, and to win."
Leon's combination strike with Fei, unintended as it may have been at first, is effective. Harken's defensive attention goes towards weaving between the blades of ice surrounding her and parrying Fei, giving him a clean strike at the lightly-armoured midsection on the Quarter Knight. Still holding Fei at arm's length, he finds Harken's burning gaze is upon him, even as he descends upon her with a strike aimed true! She maintains eye contact even as she raises a knee, surprisingly mobile for someone in such heavy armor, and--halts the blade's movement before it can actually cut her. It's awkward, but it beats taking a direct hit. "No pithy thoughts? I've seen you before--and that woman of yours. I admire the professionalism."
Elly's magical assault joins Lily's. The storm of enchanted ice soon becomes a blizzard, raging about Harken and those come to fight her. "Sorcery," she spits in disgust, now standing on one leg and grappling with Fei with both arms. Azrael, the dread scythe, remains harmlessly hooked to her back. Frost soon chains her remaining leg to the ground, in theory rendering her immobile. "A poor excuse for strength, but then--you are weak, after all."
Noeline apologizes to Harken before coming for her. Well, the Quarter Knight has one hand free, which is four fingers more than she thinks she needs to defeat anyone. "I know where your loyalty lies, in the traitor's bed." she cuts Noeline off before she can explain fully, pivoting to catch the traitorous Hyadean's blow with her remaining hand. Or trying to--but this is harder than she should admit. "But these pathetic apologies are unbecoming of one who lived amongst us! Fight me with more spirit, you dolt!" d--does she sound delighted at this? Lecturing Noeline in the midst of her attempt to kill her?
Jack roars mightily and charges for Harken, and a terrifying smile lights up her face. "Like him," she briefly barks back to Noeline. "One who lusts for the fight, single-minded! Pure of purpose!" Harken's laugh is haunting, and not at all wholesome. The Quarter Knight welcomes his advance with glee, despite tangoing simultaneously with Filgaia's finest. She is also, technically, out of limbs. "Look at this fool who thinks his panicked swings can be spoken of in the same breath as my art! Let me show you technique, boy!" and she proceeds in the only direction available to her to fight Jack: forwards. Given that Harken is rooted to the ground, she catches his blade with her...
... teeth.
There's an ominous silence that follows. "Are you watching, Riesenlied?" the bloodthirsty Demon howls, best she can, gleefully. "This is inevitability... so wait there like a good girl, and we'll sort this out in just a moment!"
If anyone was wondering how Harken plans to fight off all of these people with no hands or feet available to press the attack, their answer comes shortly. Her eyes blaze brightly with what is roughly approximated as 'fighting spirit', before a tremendous shockwave erupts from her armoured form. But that's not all there is to it: that'd be too boring. Whether the melee combatants are thrown backwards, or hold on, all of that sorcerous ice becomes the biggest magical fragmentation grenade in the room. There's a sound like a thousand exploding chandeliers, as ten-thousand needles of razor-sharp frost whirl about and fly for the far corners of the cavern, fleeing the wrath of the Quarter Knight's wrath.
Oh, and the polearm on Harken's back also begins to vibrate intensely, yearning to be free. It's not a good sign.
GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lady Harken with Lethal Momentum! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Lethal Momentum for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper and Quick! Statuses applied to Lady Harken! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Jack Van Burace with Parrying Your Sword with My Teeth - It Just Works! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Fei Fong Wong with Nameless and Unpracticed Martial Arts Kata! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Noeline with Please Spare Me Your Apology! GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action!
DC: MISS! Cassidy Cain completely evades Invigorating Ruin from Vorthuzahl!
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Relentless Assault for 137 hit points! GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Leon Albus with Frost Blade Reversal! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lily Keil with Frost Blade Reversal! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Frost Blade Reversal! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Riesenlied with Frost Blade Reversal! GS: CRITICAL! Riesenlied takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Frost Blade Reversal for 140 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Riesenlied! GS: Lady Harken has completed her action. GS: Elhaym van Houten guards a hit from Lady Harken's Frost Blade Reversal for 68 hit points! GS: Noeline takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Please Spare Me Your Apology for 58 hit points! GS: CRITICAL! Lily Keil critically Guards a hit from Lady Harken's Frost Blade Reversal for 26 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Lily Keil! GS: Jack Van Burace takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Parrying Your Sword with My Teeth - It Just Works for 54 hit points! GS: Fei Fong Wong critically Guards a hit from Lady Harken's Nameless and Unpracticed Martial Arts Kata for 20 hit points! GS: Leon Albus takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Frost Blade Reversal for 54 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Riesenlied has posed.
Lily can sense the emanation of anxiety and concern coming out of Riesenlied -- as composed as she seems, she worries about a thousand and one things, always racing ahead to think of the different ways their hope can be compromised... but there is a strength in her demeanor, the way she upholds the desire for that new world.
Even if she knows, even atop the Metal Demons, others seek to sabotage her. That Ida is here with her compatriots does not give her rest, after what had happened at Port Solde. She thinks of the Galadian Marines, and forces that inevitably prompt Ida's actions against Wayside. They would sooner choose to lump them in with the other demons, no matter what.
But that is not new to her. Those who 'have' have always, throughout history that she has observed, been fearful of those who 'have not'. Whether the aristocracy who fear the poor... or the powerful who fear the powerless... the meagre are a blight to those who manipulate. The routine and dance do not change, no matter the ages.
Lily's distraction comes in -- and Noeline and Leon each move inwards in differing angles. The way the Captain of the Black Wolves moves with the martial artist is something to behold -- something she can only safely say she has concert with Noeline, at this point in time. And Elly is here as well...
I suppose this isn't exactly what we talked about.
"No, but... I am glad that you all came -- I will do my best to support you," Riesenlied answers--
Are you watching, Riesenlied?
Her hair whips forth as that fighting spirit of Harken's lashes backwards -- and it nearly bowls her off her feet. She grimaces as she flees the incoming frost, gasping as the blades of ice nick at her feet and cause her to falter, choking for breath.
"Lady Harken... I..." she falters, and lowers her head. "I do this for Hyades. I do this for our brethren. I shall not falter in my desire to break us free of the chains of vengeance...!"
She rises into the air, rather intentionally making herself the easy target. She concentrates as she holds that case closer to herself, clutching at the Dragon's Tear as she affixes her gaze inwards, her mind's eye awakening...
I shall shield you from the dark reach of the Primarch. Do not fear, and focus on the battle...!
An emanation of light bursts out from her body, creating a sphere of freely floating photons that start to intertwine and lace about the Black Wolves, and Elly and Fei as well. They would find it easier to concentrate, as the black voices that lurk in the ambience of Hadal Temple become muted and less oppressive...
GS: Riesenlied has attacked Fei Fong Wong with Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst'! GS: Riesenlied has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst'! GS: Riesenlied has attacked Leon Albus with Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst'! GS: Riesenlied has attacked Lily Keil with Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst'! GS: Riesenlied takes 7 damage from Poison! GS: Riesenlied has completed her action. GS: Leon Albus takes a solid hit from Riesenlied's Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst' for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Leon Albus! GS: Reload! Leon Albus gains 15 extra FP from Riesenlied!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
This is not the first time she has engaged this Metal Demon, and whatever passes for her tattered destiny practically decrees that this will not be the last. That does mean, however, that she is familiar with his moves - a veteran of a thousand years of battle, despite this however, his experience dwarfs her own and in spite of her flippant attitude towards him, Cassidy Cain has never taken him lightly.
She's caught his attention and knows that every time he looks upon her, he would remember - green motes of light and the way she carved his chest open, reached inside and ripped his beating heart from his chest.
He moves with a speed befitting one of his strength and stature, but she is ready for it this time. The blade twists in a deadly arc for her and without even truly registering where it is or where it aims, she moves, capable of thinking and acting at the same time. Grenades wink from underneath his feet where his weapon ultimately finds purchase - it hits the ground instead, upon which she plants a foot and drives all of her negligible weight down as hard as she can. In a contest of brute strength, she's no match, but against a blade's downward momentum and what he has to apply to pry it away from her, she can pin it down for just a few seconds.
She swings the revolver to point between his eyes while this close to him and fires, before charging up the massive weapon and springboarding off one of his massive shoulders and off, soaring like a bird away from him. Within her hand, she presses a button.
The grenades explode amidst her laughter.
"WHAT WAS THAT?" she asks. "I'M SORRY, LUV. CANNAE HEAR YOU FROM ALL OF THESE EXPLOSIONS. WAS THAT A THREAT? WERE YOU THREATENING ME?"
GS: Lily Keil takes a solid hit from Riesenlied's Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst' for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Lily Keil! GS: Reload! Lily Keil gains 15 extra FP from Riesenlied! GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Vorthuzahl with Bye Bye Baby! GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action. GS: Elhaym van Houten takes a solid hit from Riesenlied's Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst' for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Elhaym van Houten! GS: Reload! Elhaym van Houten gains 15 extra FP from Riesenlied!
<Pose Tracker> Jacqueline Barber has posed.
Matilda's instincts are keener than Jacqueline's. Jacqueline whirls quickly in the direction of her shot, drawing a Crest Graph from her pouch. She eyes the area carefully...and that is when she sees it. She's forgotten her earlier fear for a moment as she spots Yarobeleedt. Her eyes narrow and her expression becomes a touch less pleasant.
She remembers him. They've had many interactions before. She could tolerate trying to steal Christmas. She didn't approve of trashing the Wynnes' store, but he had already paid for that.
What she could not forgive, however, is that he had tried to kill Lunata. He could have succeeded.
He disappears from sight quickly and Jacqueline frowns, gripping her chosen Crest tightly. She hears it soon, the sound of something rushing through the air. It swings at Matilda and then comes for her with the blunt end. Jacqueline backpedals away, though it does manage to catch her with the end of it. It sends her staggering backwards, massaging the wound with a wince.
She brandishes her Crest, then.
"This isn't the place for you. Go cower in a hole, please. Preferably somewhere else." She says, her voice cold. The air around Yarobeleedt will energize...before sending a bolt of lightning crashing down toward him. It's a warning more than anything. Something to hopefully convince him to back off.
"Are you alright, Matilda?" Jacqueline asks, unwilling to take her eyes off her opponent to confirm visually.
GS: Jacqueline Barber has attacked Yarobeleedt with Lightning Strike! GS: Jacqueline Barber has completed her action. GS: Yarobeleedt takes a glancing hit from Jacqueline Barber's Lightning Strike for 74 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Bye Bye Baby for 90 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
It's probably a wonderful thing that Neriah can't quite see who's in the shadows. There are few people in this world she hates more than "Thomas the Medical Student."
Instead she's got a very angry man in very angry armour to deal with. She narrows her eyes as her hit reveals what was behind Vor's mask.
Perhaps unbelievably, even in the face of such a hideous maw spewing fire, Neriah doesn't so much as bat an eyelash.
"Joke's on you," she says flatly. "I don't like breeches and I don't have any ancestors worth a damn."
She doesn't have much more time to sass, however - because Her Time Has Come.
Before Neriah can move out of the way, Vorthuzahl is bearing down on her like an oncoming freight train. Sucking in a breath, the girl begins to inch backwards and off to the left --
Not nearly fast enough; the huge Metal Demon hits her squarely centre-of-mass. Only the fact that she's moving off to one side prevents his weapon from shearing her in half. Instead it bites into her side just below the ribs and tears a horrifyingly deep wound through her.
Neriah's eyes blank for a moment as her senses collapse under a tidal wave of excruciating pain. She lurches the rest of the way to the side and hits the ground with a thud. She can taste and smell blood, but that's about all she can do for the first couple of seconds, spared death solely because Vorthuzahl's real grudge is with Cassidy Cain and not a weak girl with nothing but a pistol.
A pistol, and a horrifying voice whispering privately in her head, sibilant and demanding through layer upon layer of screaming pain.
BRING IT FORTH, CHILD
YOU WEAKLING
YOU ABSOLUTE WEAKLING
CALL THE DARKNESS
Neriah clenches her teeth and rolls away. She leaves a trail of blood behind her; it's running down her hip, soaking through her tank top and on down the side of her shorts, continuing down her thigh. It's all she can do to not scream; tears stand in her eyes as she forces back pain.
"I won't do it," she rasps, her voice weak but with a desperate fire behind it. She pushes herself to one knee, taking her pistol in hand again and aiming along it.
"Riesenlied is one of the only people in this world who's ever treated me like I belong," she grates through the pain and unshed tears. "So... you know what... go ahead and end me. Go ahead! I'd rather die! I deserve to be summarily executed!"
She rolls to the side, leaving more blood behind her; holding herself low, she fires off a couple more quick shots, aiming to put two more bullets in Vorthuzahl. This time she's trying to take out the Metal Demon's gun arm.
"I'd gladly throw away my shitty life to stop you from hurting Riese--!" she shouts, her voice pinched with pain and strained control.
GS: Neriah Parringer has attacked Vorthuzahl with Marilyn Snapshot! GS: Neriah Parringer has completed her action. GS: Fei Fong Wong takes a solid hit from Riesenlied's Rising Heart - 'Empathic Burst' for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Fei Fong Wong! GS: Reload! Fei Fong Wong gains 15 extra FP from Riesenlied!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Last time, Ida was able to stay one step ahead of Vorthuzahl. This time is different. Her crampons crunch into the snow, stabilizing her, but that just means she's locked into place when Vorthuzahl swings at her. She bends back at the waist, the burning blade passing over her chest with less than an inch to spare--but it arcs back around as she tries to pull her feet free, tracing a smoking line down her right shoulder. Ida bites back a scream of pain and allows herself to fall back into the snowdrift behind her. Snow crunches; Ida rolls onto her side to smother the flames before they can engulf her. She reaches down to snap off one set of crampons, then the other, moving with speed born of adrenaline. Cassidy makes an excellent distraction.
Ida scrambles away from Vorthuzahl as Cassidy throws grenades. She's quietly glad she's not actually carrying the thermite this time around. Good call.
Ida moves back in, taking ruthless advantage of those grenades. She aims a stomp at Vorthuzahl's right instep, then a high punch for his sternum. The last one is the dangerous one, because Ida knows precisely where Vorthuzahl's weakness is now. Thanks, Cassidy!
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has attacked Vorthuzahl with Meridian Strike! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
Fei punched a dinosaur in the face and he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who takes a day off from punching sandbags. Indeed he may be the kind of guy who punches sandbags over and over and over and over until it ruptures and then he punches it a few more times because he's not DONE WITH IT YET.
He doesn't see Jack until he's already attacking. "Jack! What are you doing here--" He says why, essentially. "It's the same technique? But--" He remembers now, when he was fighting those dead people, he was slowed, but seeing his movements now--that's right, his technique's and Harken's are similar. And, more worryingly, familiar. Sometimes Fei wishes his brain would stop foreshadowing at him.
Fei looks to Leon and gives him a firm, if singular, nod. He likewise doesn't see Loren just yet which you know because if he saw Loren he'd probably do something even stupider than fighting Harken--turning his back to her. So far, he's being a fairly reasonable fighter. He doesn't turn his back towards Elly but he does glance back perioidcally so as to not lose track of her. If she ends up in a situation she needs help, she might not have time to alert him.
Unfortunately his capacity in this will be limited by Harken's speed.
Id approves of Harken's attitude but Fei is offput by it. "Is that why you attacked the colisseum? How successful has your war been so far!?"
Fei can feel what Ida's doing. In fact, it feels like second nature. If he lets the chi flow through his bruised fists, the pain will flow through to the rest of his body and dissipitate.
This is how it is sometimes in Xenogears. You just learn a technique while punching somebody.
Fei decides to try another approach. "Hagan, Leon!" He shouts, giving his friend the headsup to what he's going to do so he can adjust his strategy to compensate. He highly doubts the demon knows the name of his techniques and what they mean.
He leaps suddenly into the air and throws his feet rapidly down at Harken's face. It's a highly offensive maneuver that leaves him open--but he's counting on his comrades to back him up. This fight has to end sooner rather than later or something might just wake up.
Or worse, be freed.
Riesenlied's support to Fei to help him resist the Primarch....
...is absorbed by something within him. He doesn't seem to be listening to the Primarch. He's just chosen to not listen to him. Not now.
GS: Fei Fong Wong has attacked Lady Harken with Hoten! GS: Fei Fong Wong has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Let's just run down the list:
For one, there's Lily Keil. Enough said.
And so is the pilot of SLIDE-1.
And Neriah.
And Ida.
What next, Loren thinks distantly, gaze darting from his current position in the shadows to the drop further down to the point where the ship lies, will they see the sudden arrival of Rephaim, too?
And Van Houten's here. Had that one been passed along and he'd missed -- no, of course not. Her deep cover situation would make that impossible.
If she sees you, she'll have to know who you are. Wouldn't this be the perfect time for it? No one would ever notice
that she was killing you.
Loren takes a breath, threading himself further into the shadow. Stealth was never on his curriculum -- trauma medicine, he was a specialist in trauma medicine -- but there's something to be said for the flurry of attacks delivered from both sides of the shortened battlefield.
Including among them spells.
...Explosives.
One hand swings back to plant on the ice-ridden rock of the wall immediately behind him.
If a distraction's what he wants and if a chance is what he needs, then this should suffice.
His focus blurs, sinks into the rock.
Readjusts it. Realigns the stone, adds stress.
Releases it in a sickening lurch of rock, a scything rise just for Commander Vorthuzahl.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Vorthuzahl with Terra Set! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
The presence of that being past the fog, the terrible Thing out there... Still it seeps towards Lily's mind, radiating. She is paler than she should be, now that she is shown by the light, her golden eyes strangely intense as she stares for her enemy, watches the rest of her squad surge forward. ...Elly's Ether builds on her own, and Lily lets herself feel that, rather than focusing on the voice echoing at the edges of her perception. No, she focuses on Harken, on the way she catches her bullet, and on the way their magic builds--
She does not catch Loren as himself in the melee; instead she stares coldly at her foe. She does not answer the words Harken has given others; she starts to stand immediately, ARM still in hand, stepping to the side. Harken, of course, is too strong to catch unawares entirely, too strong to overpower so easily, but it is not done. It is not over.
...She can't do away with the concern she feels from Riesenlied, or the anxiety, but the fact that the other woman has control over it is helping her; Lily does not try to lean on her, precisely, but the Presence is helped by her own. Still however the voice calls, distracting her from her own battle, the starry void catching at the corners of her vision. Lily's hair whips in a sudden wind as--
The shockwave erupts, and the ice crashes back towards them; Lily's eyes widen an instant before she thrusts out a hand, and a wall of brilliant flame erupts between her and the needles; some get through, one crashing along her cheek and drawing a long line of blood, but most become nothing but harmless water. ...A rare event for one of Harken's attacks, and not one Lily intends to take lightly.
"Riesenlied--" The light shifts towards her. The light washes over her, lacing about her, and Lily takes a breath. ...She hears a different voice, this time, a warmth closing out the other. "...I'll shield you," she murmurs back to Riesenlied. One for another. Lily's mirror is brilliant light, and Lily herself slings her ARM over her shoulder. "I can hear..."
Extending both hands before her, Lily closes her eyes for an instant, adopting a wide stance. "To stand against this place..." She murmurs, trying to draw on that opposition; light, and dark, the leyline of water, and--
Her eyes snap open, and brilliant red magic erupts from her hands, orangish circles of runes that pre-empt a column of flames slamming gigantic from the ceiling chamber, moving towards Harken for her allies to dance among. And at that--
Lily bends at the knee and leaps, a coruscating set of violet lights crackling about her gloved hands as a sword of pure darkness erupts into her hands--and she closes towards melee. "Haah--!"
GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Neriah Parringer's Marilyn Snapshot for 60 hit points! GS: Lily Keil has activated a Force Action! GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Ida Everstead-Rey's Meridian Strike for 70 hit points! GS: Lily Keil has attacked Lady Harken with Conflagration! GS: Lily Keil takes 8 damage from Poison! GS: Lily Keil has completed her action. GS: Vorthuzahl critically Guards a hit from Loren Voss's Terra Set for 26 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Leon Albus has posed.
"I'll spare you any pleas to your better nature," Leon says. "I doubt that you have one, and my allies are better with those words than I am. You've shown where your desires lie before--and they've left a king and more dead in their wake." His blade is caught, held at bay by her hand. Leon's eyes widen a little, as he finds Argent Divider parried by her hand -- to say nothing of how she catches Van Burace's sword with her teeth.
He gawks at that.
Until, of course, the shockwave comes rolling out for him. He cries out, sharply, then: "Get down! She's going to--" He can't get the warning out in time. The shockwave rips through the ice and it explodes. Shrapnel flies every which way -- and Leon dives down, hits the floor, and slides. He ducks underneath the wave of icy shards. They shoot over his head, shrapnel just nicking his hair, and the shockwave rattling him.
But the former soldier slides over the ice-slicked floor, and then comes up. Standing, but shaken. Leon turns, slowly, breathing heavily. The temptation to be distracted is powerful, but light washes over him; Riesenlied's empathic burst settles in, and he finds himself more aware of his allies, and less unnerved by the nature of the Temple. "Riesenlied...?"
He shakes his head once, though he hardly needs to clear it, and then swings up Argent Divider. The blade slides in, telescoping downward, and the two barrels click into place.
He spins the chamber, locking a round into place -- and then fires. The round bursts from the barrel, and explodes into a glob of corrosive, rust-red fluid that hurtles towards Harken.
Which fires just before Fei's strike launches, to provide the very back-up that Fei requested.
GS: Leon Albus has attacked Lady Harken with Rustshot Round! GS: Leon Albus has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Matilda Whitehead has posed.
Yarobeleedt closes the distance with inhuman speed, and Matilda's ready for it; the creature advances on her right flank with that scythe, and she pointedly refuses to meet him. She spikes something down onto the ground, creating a brief burst of gas and sliding back away.
Matilda's free hand reaches into her coat again, this time withdrawing a knife. It's held mostly in a parrying position -- not much against the massive options Yarobeleedt has at his disposal, but certainly better than nothing. Matilda's maneuvers stay fluid, even aggressive, as Jay casts her spell. "I'm fine," Matilda offers, voice clipped as she steps forward and to one side.
Insofar as Yarobeleedt has an armpit, that's what she aims her knife for, jabbing it up under the appendage with the scythe. She follows up by taking a grip as best she can and wrenching the knife and the arm in opposite directions, trying to simultaneously cut and twist.
She leaves the knife in, rather than try to pull it away. There will be other knives.
GS: Matilda Whitehead has attacked Yarobeleedt with Planting a Seed! GS: Matilda Whitehead has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
A strange man runs in to try and help slay their foe. Elly has learned to accept this. When she sees that Harken has succesfully caught his sword between her teeth, she gawps momentarily. The rod in her hand ends up dowsing, pointed at the ground. When Harken continues, by speaking from her heart...
LOOK OUT, ELLY! You're gonna get BLOWN UP!
She does not even have time to worry about Fei - something at which Elly has become suspiciously efficient and skilled at, in a very short amount of time - as she throws up an arm to guard her face and precious eyes from being punctured. The first few slice into her upper body, her leggings seeming more durable; a sudden bloom of heat in front of her melts others, making them, at least, blunt hail instead of organ penetrating shards. That force. Can they -
- Riesenlied's light shines deep here, within the bowels of Filgaia.
Elly's eyes close for a moment and she sucks in a deep breath through her teeth.
The words of Harken echo through the clash of war and they sink into Elly and a subtle pressure builds. The subtle tensions of this horrible place's voices, which had perhaps always struck Elly a bit weakly compared to others for reasons she does not know, vanish...
And she is moved to answer Lady Harken. Only it is not really an answer so much as a
"Shut up!!"
shout.
"You keep calling us weak and mocking us and calling them traitors and saying you'll grind us into the dust--!! You aren't - you aren't acting like a person of strength at all!" Elly shouts, her eyes widening. "You're acting like a BULLY! You're twenty times my age and CHILDREN under the care of RIESENLIED act better than you do!!"
That's an attitude to take there, Elly. She raises one hand, the one not wielding that baton, and curls her fingers towards Harken even as Loren manages to completely evade her radar. (In her defense, of course, there's more going on here.) Lily, Leon, Fei, all of them are running in close - gosh, all of you, Elly thinks, I can't think of where - Ah!
I don't have to see it directly, do I? A warm and sunny feeling would pass over Leon and Lily for a moment, an instant later; this is not, in fact, the radiance of Elly's heart, awoken to the cause of justice by Riesenlied's encouragement and the cruelties of Lady Harken, but is rather because of the cube of superheated gas that has formed, like a tiny pocket sun, right near both of them. Elly corrects a moment later, and that 'cube' jerks closer - and hopefully, into - Lady Harken.
The results get fiery quickly. It is hot enough to ignite titanium, at least if she got lucky.
GS: Elhaym van Houten has attacked Lady Harken with Thermo Cube! GS: Elhaym van Houten has completed her action.
DC: MISS! Yarobeleedt completely evades Planting a Seed from Matilda Whitehead!
<Pose Tracker> Noeline has posed.
The Yggdrasil crew was expected; Jack van Burace's impressively timely entrance, not so much, and Noeline has to huff out a surprised noise of quiet astonishment as her scythe slams into Harken's hand. Immediately she pushes forward into her blow, gritting her teeth as she seeks to pit her strength against the Quarter Knights - and immediately, she knows she's bound to lose. She's not made for direct combat, or at least not as much as Harken, and it's only going to be a matter of moments before she's pushed back.
Maybe that's enough, though. Perhaps Riese is rubbing off on her.
"Well, I suppose it's true I'm mostly here at Riese's side," she finds herself grinning over the top of her blade, perhaps a touch manic. "But more than that, Lady Harken - I'm done standing on the same side as Berserk and Alhazred. Can you truly say those are values to look up to?" she challenges, forcing the words out even as she senses the incoming shockwave--
--that blows her backwards as it bursts out from the demon, sending her skidding backwards on her heels. She knows that's not all there is - Lady Harken wouldn't use so unfocused an attack without something more - so she instinctively brings her arms up to shield her face, hissing out a noise of pain as the array of abrupt icicles slam into her bandaged flesh. One of them frays, coming mostly undone; underneath, it almost looks like she's been burnt, the skin red and raw from something other than the occasional white-blooded cuts that dot her limbs.
At least she's still standing, a final spin bringing her scythe around to tear the last of the ice shards out of the air before they can crash into her. The move reverses her momentum and brings her to a halt, blade held defensively in front of her with one hand on the metal arc as she grits her teeth. "... well, then. If you insist--" she adds as her hand abruptly bursts into blackened flame, the air suddenly thrumming with the power that sustains the world. It is undeniably muted - especially here in the Primarch's domain - but it's still enough for her to spread the flickering darkness across her scythe's blade, where it almost seems to cling fast.
When she spins her scythe back around to the ready, it leaves a trailing arc in the air, a smear in reality that shifts and twists as if it were oil on water. "I'll fight you with everything I've got, if that's what I need to do." For just a moment, her gaze flicks to Lily's promise - and then she slams the butt of her scythe into the ground in challenge, aiming to goad Harken forward. "--so come on!"
GS: Noeline has attacked Noeline with Duras Drum's Blade! GS: Noeline has completed her action. GS: Noeline takes a solid hit from Noeline's Duras Drum's Blade for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper and Quick! Statuses applied to Noeline!
<Pose Tracker> Jack Van Burace has posed.
Shock.
Again this Quarter Knight proves herself more powerful. Faster. More deadly that he is. The ancient techniques of his people made a mockery of just like that. The laugher makes his teeth grate. The mockery causes him to see red. He hardly even hears Hanpan shouting for him to be careful, let along Fei's question.
He is focused not on his own defense, but on Harken's death. His defence borders on suicidal as he simply leaps though the wall of force and shreading pain. The medalion on his neck now burns, though he can hardly feel it. "You mistake panic for rage, Demon." He snarls as he shifts his stance even as he lands, standing still for only a split second before he leaps forwards. The overhand swing aimed for her face. So fast that he hardly seems to move so much as simply reappear before her.
He's not holding anything back for defense of course, but that's not how he does things. Especially when he's this angry.
"You'll bleed for what you did to my people!"
GS: Jack Van Burace has attacked Lady Harken with Speed Fang! GS: Jack Van Burace has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
It comes in terrible waves, as 'Cassidy' lays the groundwork, always an eager distraction, absorbing as much of his attention as she might stoke in his fighting spirit. Fire spits and ripples around his legs, shockwaves ripple outward, and a hole forms where 'Cassidy' shoots him in the head. It does not stop him, and almost looks like she gave him a third eye. The energy inside swivels towards her. "WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME, CORSETTED CUR? I COULD NOT HEAR YOU THIS ICE IS INEXPLICABLY EXPLODING!!"
'Ida' is there again, a fist forged of power from ages beyond plowing into his chest, ripping at the energy inside him. It forces something akin to a groan, parts of him littering the ground in a molten deluge and clinging to Ida's fist as it pulls free.
Somewhere from the side, 'Loren', the Man On a Mission, Master of Minerals, plows a scythe of the very earth against his metal hide. It does not crack, does not break, but still it shakes him enough to crack the ice. Enough that it begins to separate. Enough that soon, they will all be in peril!
But Vorthuzahl, Master of the burning blade is FAR TO DISTRACTED by 'Neriah's' blood on the ground, smearing more than just life across the ice. It scrawls a message. One he sees so clearly, head tilting. Maw drooling.
"I feel it. An awakening. Something lurking beneath the surface. Something.... 'YOU'."
The blade points at Neriah, and anger flares in the monsters eyes. "Yessssss. Weak creature, you were not MEANT FOR THIS!"
Rounds from the woman, this small girl, someone The Metal Monster should not notice, crack through armor and send raindrops of mercurial heat to the faltering ice. His attention never wavers. His blade burns. His blade hungers.
He lets it feast.
Suddenly he calls to the metal of this earth to surge to him, to rebuild his body, a stopgap until finally the creature explodes into action, his wounds healed as spearing thrusts seem to come from phantom versions of him, drawn from the echoes of his hatred and the mystical construct of this place, seeking to steal their lives - ALL OF THEM - much in the way he attempted to steal Cassidy's alone.
GS: Vorthuzahl has activated a Force Action! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Cassidy Cain with Invigorating Ruin! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Ida Everstead-Rey with Invigorating Ruin! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Neriah Parringer with Invigorating Ruin! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Loren Voss with Invigorating Ruin! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Vorthuzahl with Mercurial Regeneration! GS: Vorthuzahl has completed his action. GS: Vorthuzahl heals Vorthuzahl! He gains 200 temporary hit points!
DC: MISS! Ida Everstead-Rey completely evades Invigorating Ruin from Vorthuzahl!
GS: Loren Voss takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Invigorating Ruin for 160 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl drains Loren Voss! Vorthuzahl gains 250 temporary hit points! GS: Neriah Parringer takes a glancing hit from Vorthuzahl's Invigorating Ruin for 82 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl drains Neriah Parringer! Vorthuzahl gains 250 temporary hit points! GS: Cassidy Cain takes a glancing hit from Vorthuzahl's Invigorating Ruin for 78 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl drains Cassidy Cain! Vorthuzahl gains 250 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Elly accuses Harken of being a bully. Isn't it strange that you feel more like her than like Elly right now? Jack unleashes his rage, grief and anguish pouring out of him. You're not helping him. Why aren't you helping him? If Ida weren't skating on a razor's-edge of adrenaline, she would want to vomit. How does it feel to know that everyone loves a Metal Demon more than you?
Vorthuzahl--/a Vorthuzahl, it seems like--rushes forwards. Ida skids backwards on the ice, the blade nicking her coat--he didn't run her through, but only because she got /very lucky/. She skids back into a rock, looks down, and--
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
The earth trembles and shudders, as though something incomprehensibly vast just moved in its sleep. Pebbles break free of the cliff face, tumbling down into the cavern below. The ice of the frozen lakebed begins to crack, forming strange geometric patterns. In the very center, a pinprick of light flickers against the endless blackness beneath. It rises from the depths, gaining definition--a jet-black pupil shaped like a sideways C, against a field of filmy, icy blue-grey. An eye.
The earth heaves. The cliff-face, the lake, the waterfall--all of it gives way in a single instant, turning into an avalanche. Snow falls from the chamber roof, enshrouding the area in a thick blanket of powder. It might slow one's fall, but it's also a blinding, deafening, smothering blanket. The fall feels far longer than it should, and the sudden stop at the end is even more jarring.
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
As fate would have it, Vorthuzahl all but tumbles into the Astrid's hull. Part of it has been carved open by something, and left that way for centuries. The hull has been flayed open, and so has the auxiliary gunnery station beyond that. The remains of an officers' meeting room are exposed to the cavern air: a shattered table, broken chairs.
There, lying on the floor, is Strategic Item Ur-An-Alg, mentioned in the logs that Vorthuzahl tore out of the dropship in the Kislev mountains. It's a crate the size of a suitcase, still covered in the faded heraldry of the Ash Legion. It was sealed, once, but water seeped into it and burst through the locks holding it closed. Inside is a chunk of Living Metal encased in metal-foam padding. It glows with something akin to soft firelight, a touch of warmth in the desolate cold of this place.
It is so easy for Vorthuzahl to reach out and touch it.
It feels warm to the touch, like a living thing--like a chunk of living Hyadean flesh, sustained in a state of near-torpor by the life-support unit inside its storage case. Judging from the symbols coating it, though, this isn't a mere cargo crate, even though it started life as one. It's a reliquary. It's a piece of history. It's the key element of a rite of passage.
As soon as Vorthuzahl sets a hand on the crate, something like a glassy eye eases itself open. The sensor sweeps a greenish beam over him, and then--one by one--the cables attached to the Ember Catalyst detach. Another eye-like device on the top of the crate tilts upwards, and the air flickers with soft light. The image of a man appears before Vorthuzahl, quickly growing to what must be life-size as the projector moves it beside the crate. He's tall and lean and athletic, with thin, sharp-edged features. His hair is short and red and roguishly unruly, especially given the fact that he has the collar and shoulder markings of a Division commander from the old war. His eyes are bright metallic green, and look directly at Vorthuzahl's. His armor is red and gold and black, immaculately-maintained.
For Vorthuzahl, it may feel like he's looking at nothing less than the ghost of Fafnir, commander of the Ash Legion--a man slain by a human warrior known as the Demon Fist. Ida, Fei, and Elly know that same human warrior as Luisa Rey. Lady Harken and Jack Van Burace would know her as the legendary Dragon-slayer who founded a lineage that would one day become House Raye of Arctica.
"Pupil," says Fafnir. "If you're seeing this, then I cannot be there to witness this in person. I know it may not mean much, but I wish I could. I could say something about the Trial of the Ember Catalyst being a test of discipline and a rite of passage, given the nature of this message, it would ring false. I don't do things that ring false to me. You are about to attempt something enormously risky, and your motives for doing it are your own. Are you doing this for our people? For Mother? For a world scoured clean of corruption? I don't know. You do. This may be the last time you can think of it, so do it."
The Ember Catalyst slides upwards, pulsing, waiting for Vorthuzahl to take it.
"It's there whenever you're ready."
GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Leon Albus's Rustshot Round for 37 hit points! GS: Poison! Statuses applied to Lady Harken! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Fei Fong Wong's Hoten for 109 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Lily Keil's Conflagration for 140 hit points! GS: CRITICAL! Lady Harken takes a glancing hit from Elhaym van Houten's Thermo Cube for 116 hit points!
DC: MISS! Lady Harken completely evades Speed Fang from Jack Van Burace!
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
The electrical bolt courses through Yarobeleedt's extended arm. With an ear-splitting yelp and a snapping noise, he twitches as such that the electrical sorcery passes through his arm and right back out the elbow to leave the frigid eldritch air with the new added scent of ionized air.
Matilda wastes no time going on the attack when she believes there to be an opening. From the surface Yarobeleedt sticks to, he twists and contorts, even twirling his midsection together just shy of being a knot, trying to get away from the tiny blade. For a moment, one may find themselves questioning as to which one of the two in this exchange is attempting to survive a close encounter with a terrifying enemy.
He moves and twists about so much in his attempts to evade Matilda's armpit (equivalent) stabbing/wrenching attempts that he slips from where he is. He plops down from whatever surface he's clinging to, the sound of his bulk colliding against the icy ground less 'plop' and more 'smack.' Cracks form around where his lower body fights against being solidified by the ambient chill of a locale so rich with the elements of water and ice. He yelps from the drop. If it weren't for that they were in the sight of a large, alien, half-melted monstrosity who is also presently drooling something else also awful from the side of his mouth, that 'yelp' might sound like a squealing puppy.
Let us not entertain the very idea that a puppy is at all a nearby evolutionary cousin of whatever a Yarobeleedt is.
"What? Not place? Not do cow! Do not know her!!" He gibbers. "You go! Go many ways. There are many. Many many. Even just one! Then go a way. Go three ways! Not matter," he continues to spew gibberish as he draws back another blade-like arm--
Filgaia underneath them gives out. Yarobeleedt screeches again and lunges to cling to any surface horizontal enough for him to stab his arms deep into for dear life.
The piece of metal fused with icy rock he clings to collapses down, and there is a an eventful tumble down further into miasma. Color and texture of the surrounding environs lose meaning. The ochre partial-blob flails, wrenching free an arm as he swings about in free-fall. The issue is, there isn't much of a solid, flat plane to smack with, or a bladed edge to cut with. Just one, wide-swinging noodly half-melted arm that, at best, will find itself likely coiling around one or two of them in an arrangement absolutely neither of the three will enjoy.
No one wants to die in Yarobeleedt's arms as they collide against the ground, after all.
GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Jacqueline Barber with Luna Way! GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Matilda Whitehead with Luna Way! GS: Yarobeleedt has completed its action. GS: Jacqueline Barber takes a glancing hit from Yarobeleedt's Luna Way for 35 hit points! GS: Entangle! Statuses applied to Jacqueline Barber!
DC: MISS! Matilda Whitehead completely evades Luna Way from Yarobeleedt!
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
The world tilts, ice cracks and crashes, and Vorthuzahl, Commander of the Order of the Burning Blade becomes a meteor through ice and rock, tumbling heavier than most. Rolling and cracking despite his mercurial regeneration seeking to keep him together. His sword, lost somewhere, shatters into oblivion to land somewhere near Ida and Cassidy will finally come to rest.
Neriah and Loren will be able to claim the melting, bubbling metal of one of his left arm, as it twitches nearby.
No matter. No more. The Commander steps forward, a haze of miasma sucking into his chest, as if he had a black hole at the center of it intent on stealing it all away. Dark energy. Life energy. It made no difference to him. There before him, the finality of his journey. They could layer Gear fire upon him, topple his body for the world.
It would no longer matter.
A shambled step takes him close as the hologram flickers into being. For Vorthuzahl, it is not measure of hallucination. Perhaps for a brief moment. Perhaps he sees another world entirely, caked in another kind of darkness. The name Beruss on his faltering mouthparts....but it passes. No, it is only a measure of what this energy feeds in his soul. It is there that the hologram's musing catches, on the edge of a soul filling with miasmic darkness. On a power yet claimed, but fueled and reaching a dangerous brim.
His hand reaches out, curling around the Ember Catalyst, even as meaning fills his burning soul.
Is he doing this for their people? For Mother? For a world scoured clean of corruption? He would like to say so. But the truth is clear.
"I am doing this because I want them, ALL OF THEM, TO DIE SCREAMING!!!!"
With a terrible ripping motion he plows the Ember Catalyst into his chest, and they will, all of them, feel it.
A wave of exalted power rippling out of the ship, shaking it through and through, peeling metal and blowing small items away from him as metal begins to metal and bubble. It will nearly blind any who might look into the gap, and then they will know.
The creature that was once Vorthuzahl is little more than a shattered memory, a sudden, crashing explosion cracking the top of the ship as metal SCALES ripple, as WINGS unfurl, and a TAIL lashes. Fifty or more meters of him, from snout to his most hind tail spine, the glowing eyes of a METAL DRAGON loom above them all, a burning heat still in his chest, glowing and sizzling in his throat as he surveys them.
"Look upon what you have wrought now, Fleshings. Look upon the face of your destruction. LOOK UPON DRAGONLORD VORTHUZAHL, MASTER OF THE BURNING SKIES!!"
DC: Vorthuzahl switches forms to Dragonlord Vorthuzahl!
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
Despite the distance between them, and all of the impediments to talking that battle (and a mouthful of sword) bring, Riesenlied's words reach Lady Harken's ears. She guffaws, but it doesn't sound one-hundred percent mirthful. The empathic demon can tell there's something more--disappointment, perhaps? Something running counter to the high of the fight. "Mother birthed you a thousand years too soon... you were destined to rule in an era of peace, but this is not that time." how her words carry directly to Riesenlied despite no shouting is a secret, but then, such is the power of theatre.
Leon's words clearly reach Harken, who's laughter is not as shrill in response as one might expect. It's not hard to imagine it could be warm, laughing at a joke that really meets with her approval. "And they try to tell me that Humans are stupid creatures, yet here you are. Very wise." she says around a mouthful of blade, before the professional soldier goes tumbling to a safe distance from the spiritual burst and the resulting fragmentation storm. In her eyes, he is down, and she has other threats to deal with. "Unless you want to be buried with that king and his retinue, stay there or flee." she spits, turning away from Leon to deal with a certain ponytailed prankster coming at her. This is his chance!
Fei might not, technically, be as fast as Lady Harken, but this doesn't mean that he's too slow to hold his own. Or impress her. "Coliseum?" the scarlet-haired knight laughs hoarsely, "I don't know what you're talking about, do you think me some kind of prize fighter? Please!" the pugilist's momentary retreat means she has one less hand tied up in the fight. Fei's decision to leap into the air and spike his momentum downwards again, inexplicably, is a lifesaver: a knife-hand swipe scythes (get it?) through the space he occupied just moments ago, and his counter-strike with both feet is well-aimed!
Fei might be thankful for Jack deciding to press the attack elsewhere: it means Harken cannot, somehow, counter this blow with the sword once held in her teeth. As much as Id would love to see it. The surprise of Leon, who she thought downed, discharging the Ardent Divider into her back gives Fei the opening he needs. He strikes a fair blow to the head, luckily getting none of the nasty corrosive goop on his feet, and the towering lady in the scarlet armor does stagger! "Oh. You're fast." she breathes, eyes positively glowing with approval. A thick metal pole appears to have slipped into her hands at some point. "But you can go so much faster. Show me." and, hopefully with Fei still tumbling to recovery in the air, Harken swings the un-bladed end of her weapon at him as if to swat him from the air like a noble Hyadean batswoman might, in the fine sport of Bloodright Combat Ball.
Note: she's attempting to spike Fei into Leon, like a ponytailed projectile. Naturally, this may not work, but anger does things to one's judgement.
Lily strikes Harken as conflicted: can such tender emotions, roused by Riesenlied's empathy, really be used to stand tall and fight? The answer is clear: a casting circle of glimmering ruby traces itself on the cavern roof, and Harken glances upwards with eyebrow cocked. "Oh, I know whose power this is," she chuckles ominously, as a great swirling of magical fire gathers in the center. "But I know you have another, more personal touch. Show it to me again, Human! Your life does depend on it!" it's almost a command thrown Lily's way. Harken is rearing back with her polearm, the blade not yet extended. What is she doing--shoudln't she be dodging?
Elly demands that Harken shuts her mouth. Harken does not shut her mouth. She instead is settling into a stance that looks reminiscent of a bad samurai flick, legs sliding apart as the corrosive fluid sizzles noisily on her steel plate armour, wispy tendrils of steam wreathed around the Quarter Knight's form. "I'm not mocking those who can stay my blade," the ginormous lady lectures her in return, with the tone of an unpleasantly impatient teacher. "But you don't have that strength. You hide behind magic and allies," her gaze indicates Fei, regardless of his fate from earlier, "Who do."
That said, Lady Harken hops backwards a step and lashes out with the still-folded Azrael. The polearm strikes a three-dimensional construct of stable plasma, as if daring it to explode on her. Just daring it. Neverminding the physics of such a proposition, Harken spikes the cube upwards into Lily's oncoming pillar of flame and causes an even more unpredictably large explosion! That's not a very good defensive move at all! But--is she proving a point with this, or just taunting Elly about her magical prowess? Ugh. Harken.
Noeline brings her scythe to bear, and Harken is there to witness it with a gleeful grin that looks more unsettled than anything she's shown so far. "That is, I daresay, what you need to do." she croons almost musically. The dread scythe Azrael clicks once, and a great scarlet blade swings into place, transforming it from a mere quarterstaff into a much larger, angrier, and hungrier implement of farming being irresponsibly used for combat. Noeline's taunt appears to work, and Harken appears fixated on her for a moment, but...
... Jack appears in a blitz of motion to capitalize on that distraction. He throws defense to the wind and hurtles through the wall of bladed projectiles. Puts everything into a single blow, his reflexes and years of meticulous training guiding his hand even as rage overtakes his heart and mind. The fast draw technique of the conquered Arctican people sings loudly!
Harken's scythe sings more quickly. The towering lady doesn't even assume the proper stance--with a false sun blazing behind her, she mirrors Jack's movements almost instantly. "You'll bleed for your portly depiction of my technique!" she laughs, utterly untouched by the sword. Her scythe seems to rip open a hole in the air itself, such is the speed with which it descends on Jack Van Burace.
***
The earth suddenly shakes, and crumbles. Sunders itself. The cavern feels as if it implodes, and the cliff-face shears itself from its moorings. Whatever lethal followup Lady Harken had planned for these humans, it goes unheeded as she springs adroitly from crumbling boulder to crumbling boulder, managing the descent by way of being quicker than gravity (a mere 9.81 metres/second squared, after all).
But this demands all of her attention. And despite the danger, surely, this leaves her open for just a moment...?
GS: Lady Harken has attacked Fei Fong Wong with Feiball Strike!! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Leon Albus with Feiball Strike!! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Sorcerous Plasma Counterstrike! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lily Keil with Sorcerous Plasma Counterstrike! GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Jack Van Burace with Fast Draw - Speed Fang! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Noeline with Fast Draw - Speed Fang! GS: Lily Keil takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Sorcerous Plasma Counterstrike for 168 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
He uses the same trick twice, but given what she has just expended, he doesn't miss this time.
He almost does when his blurring figure closes the distance, and she twists away in an attempt to avoid the worst of it. The jacket tears along the back, destroys some of the metallic protections she wears underneath, and she's left skidding on ice and staggering backwards. She manages to retain her footing, however, by planting a foot back and achoring her heel into a rock. Her body folds along with it, knees bending, the line of her shoulders tightening....before she launches herself forward in an attempt to cross the battlefield and engage Vorthuzahl's true self. She keeps her grip on her gun, her forearm swinging upwards...
The rumbling starts and everything goes to hell. She takes another step...
...it finds nothing but air.
Everyone falls. Everyone. Her heart leaps into her throat as Cassidy plummets along with the rest of the battlefield, eyes wide as gravity pulls her down to the floors of the cavern underneath. Her fall is buffeted by falling snow, painfully slamming down on channels of ice that crack and break under her weight. She is only human, after all, there's only so many ways she can mitigate the damage and this ends with her, twisting her body and angling it, sending her into a mound of fine, white powder, through a gaseous cloud of...
What is that?
She grunts, digging herself out of the literal hole in which she finds herself, pushing her cap out of her eyes...
The cavern is dark and full of vines, disembodied teeth and drops of viscous saliva dripping from a ceiling that is impossible to make out in shadow. She feels strange, left to stagger as she manages to find her feet, but she pushes on forward, ingrained muscle memory moving on instinct as she shuffles forward to the sources of light that she finds in the distance. But it feels very far, somehow. The knowledge that something is happening to her, to her body, making a mess of her senses, doesn't stop her from reacting to its effects.
"What the...fookin'...nightmare..." she hisses. If only she knew.
Because before her, Vor is changing.
She doesn't wait. She fires directly for the open, beating core in his chest - if it's still visible. If not...
Well, it'd be time for Plan B then.
...she's working on it.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Vorthuzahl with Now Is The Hour! GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Leon Albus takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Feiball Strike! for 99 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Leon Albus! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lady Harken with Lethal Momentum! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Lethal Momentum for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper and Quick! Statuses applied to Lady Harken! GS: Lady Harken takes 6 damage from Poison! GS: Lady Harken has completed her action. GS: Fei Fong Wong guards a hit from Lady Harken's Feiball Strike! for 94 hit points! GS: Elhaym van Houten takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Sorcerous Plasma Counterstrike for 162 hit points! GS: CRITICAL! Noeline takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Fast Draw - Speed Fang for 220 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Noeline!
<Pose Tracker> Riesenlied has posed.
Riesenlied's feet start to falter as the cliff face breaks; her eyes widen further as she starts to slide and grasp against the side of the very forsted earth, but her fingers slip as she falls with a wince. "Noeline--!"
That is the only word she lets out, as a moment later, a familiar yellow blur cushions her fall. A timid little squeak of 'muni...' later, Riesenlied nods as she looks to Devet to utter, "Keep your mind focused... the reaches of the Primarch can affect even our kin."
Devet shudders to say, "You don't have to tell me, I'm already seeing weird things in my program... just a little bit more though...!"
She lays her eyes upon that of the Primarch's, that sensation of fear starting to creep at the very back of her mind once more. She does not understand, in any way, how such a creature could have become. It is beyond her...
But no, there is more than that, something within the hull of the Astrid itself--
Her eyes widen as she sees Vorthuzahl collapse into that office. That pulsating, writhing piece of... what she can only tell is something to do with her brethren. She's too far away, she can't stop it--
Her face drops, as does Muni's, as what was once the master of the Burning Blade turns... and emerges into a massive creature -- something she has experience raising, and would know in a heartbeat. A Dragon of the highest caliber, unlike that of her own flock. The conversation that they had in that Photosphere chamber, all that time ago. Of the course of the path to Dragonhood.
"Vorthuzahl... is this truly what you seek...?" she murmurs, shaking her head. "Do not let that trasnformation destroy your mind... as it has so many of our kind..."
As if on cue, Muni-Muni lets out a 'muniii--' of nervousness and fear.
There's a faint and harrowed gasp as Riesenlied further descends, along with Devet -- she concentrates on the Dragon's Tear once more when she sees that Fast Draw technique, wincing as she murmurs, "I'm here--"
And a cascade of shimmering light surrounds Noeline's form, to buy her some time to what she needs to do.
GS: Riesenlied has attacked Noeline with Rising Heart - 'Seek the New World'! GS: Riesenlied takes 8 damage from Poison! GS: Riesenlied has completed her action. GS: Vorthuzahl has activated a Force Action! GS: Vorthuzahl critically Guards a hit from Cassidy Cain's Now Is The Hour for 24 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Jacqueline Barber has posed.
As Matilda moves in with her knife Jacqueline returns her chosen Crest to her pouch, drawing out another. She's never seen Matilda move like this before. It's...quite impressive, really. This isn't the place to compliment her, though.
"Sorry, I can't do that." Jacqueline replies. That, at least, was understandable enough out of all his babbling. "If you won't leave yourself, then I'll have to force you."
Jacqueline begins to brandish her Crest...
But then, something happens. Jacqueline looks straight into the Eye, and the Earth Medium in her bags begins to heat up. It is a warning, but a warning she can do nothing to heed.
"M-Matilda, we need-" Jacqueline shouts, but before she can form her instructions, the earth heaves, cracks...and shatters, and she begins to fall.
A rushing, bone-crushing avalance roars, sweeping her down along with it. Jacqueline invokes an earth pillar...
But there is very little it can do against the fury before it. If it manages to slow it down, even by a miniscule amount, it is still not enough. It, she, and her opponent are swept away in the snow, into the miasma below.
As they fall, the creature swings for her. She has no means of escaping it. One of Yarobeleedt's arms wraps around her, pinning her arms to her sides. Even if there was a Crest Graph in her possession that she could use to slow her fall, there's nothing she can do about it but fall.
Ironicly enough, Yarobeleedt's actions may just save her life. She will crash down on top of him, his form as always making a surprisingly effective cushion.
Not enough to prevent her from losing consciousness for a few seconds, however. Seconds that may prove critical.
GS: Jacqueline Barber has attacked Yarobeleedt with A Long Way Down! GS: Jacqueline Barber has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Yarobeleedt guards a hit from Jacqueline Barber's A Long Way Down for 74 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Fire erupts; her own, and Elly's. Lily's magic is an extension of her will, and the black-haired sorceress stares down at it, attempting to force it the rest of the way to Harken--as she chuckles, and Lily certainly hears it. "Do you?"
Lily asks the question, and is in the air. "As you wish." Her voice is cold, but carries somehow; the roil of emotion in the air crashes against her like waves against rocks, from all sides, but a light, a brilliant light, puts some of it at bay. And yet--
The fire erupts towards her as Elly's magic and hers meet. Lily, in the air, cannot dodge, does not have time to defend herself with her magic save for the blade in her hands. She puts out her hand with the sword, attempting to split it around her--
But there's too much. Elly's power and hers both are too much at once; Lily is engulfed in the flames, disappearing without so much as a scream of pain, just a grunt of surprise.
The earth shudders, but Lily is not in contact with the ground. ...She sees it with her mind before she sees it with her eyes, shaded by the light Riesenlied has shared with her. She sees the eye. The fimly, gigantic eye that locks onto Lily, that seems to her to consume everything in an instant, for an instant, to suspend her in the air. It is there. It is huge. Its darkness is not absolute...
But something else is. The ground falls, the snow crashing towards them, and Lily is not breathing for an instant. She is ashen, staring into nothing. Riesenlied's light shines.
...But Lily's eyes fall sightless over the scene in the ship as they fall, and when she hits the snow, still, she does not move for an instant. The dragon--the dragon--is there, but Lily is still in the snow, smoking as a result of the heat all around her, hot enough to melt the armor plating in her jacket and burn her skin. ...And steam rises from where she is. Still, there is silence.
...The steam gets heavier, becoming a fog, as a woman's figure rises from the snows that are now just meltwater. ...Patches of her sleeves are missing, thanks to the flames, burnt fabric obvious; strange lines and symbols glow in the gap, as she looks, dull-eyed, at Harken. She breathes--
Her breath mists. ...Her eyes should be gold, but they're glassy, slightly aglow. The magic about her glows violet as she hefts the greatsword, a rift in the world that hurts to look upon. She is pale, too pale, and she stares forward wordlessly.
She opens her mouth, but no words come out; instead there is a painful sensation to replace them, as she lunges abrubtly, closing the distance towards Harken with a brutal overhand swing. It is utterly silent.
GS: Lily Keil has attacked Lady Harken with Black Wolf's Claw! GS: Lily Keil takes 6 damage from Poison! GS: Lily Keil has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
As far as guns go, Marilyn's a good one, driving bullets at absurd velocity through means of a steam piston powered by the nostrils of a small Metal Dragon. But it is just a handgun. The shots Neriah fires off at Vorthuzahl should be of no merit to him.
And yet... even here, even a Metal Demon can feel it. Some sickening magic building within Neriah. Her body barely contains it. To stand close to her is to feel it, a mental pressure as if the thoughts had just sipped curdled milk or worse.
The Metal Commander brandishes his weapon at her. Neriah widens her eyes and draws in a breath, blinking away her tears.
That burning blade feasts. Neriah gasps again and attempts to roll out of the way, but not fast enough. She throws up an arm and squeezes her eyes. The blade hits her - begins to draw forth something -- she lets out a sharp cry --
Until Vorthuzahl's blade is suddenly shoved away from Neriah by a bloodcurdling upwell of raw power. A globe of unlight pushes out around Neriah, semi-translucent, its surface rippling with incomprehensible eldritch patterns. The surface of it is probably penetrable if you try hard enough, but at the moment it's holding the worst of Vor's attack at bay.
From behind that shell, Neriah looks up. She meets Vorthuzahl's gaze. Her pupils have shrunken down to tiny points against the whites of her eyes.
The cliff face gives way. Everything crumbles as Neriah and everyone else plunges into the ship - into the abyssal chaos that is the miasma of an elder god. The collapse of the cliff face conceals her from view for a moment - but to her eyes, there is simply a clear, haunted view of the rest of the world.
Even Metal Demons have special things, she realizes with horror. Now he's a dragon. A true monster.
In front of her she can see the Metal Demon receiving unto him his trial somewhere far ahead of her. As she watches, she can feel hands running through her hair. A shape standing behind her. The shape of a man, his hair dark, his eyes as hollow and pale as Neriah's own. IT UPSETS YOU, DOESN'T IT, he breathes into her ear with the sibilance of a serpent. THAT THEY STAND HERE AND FLAUNT THEIR SPECIAL LEGACIES. AND THEIR SPECIAL TOYS. AND THEIR SPECIAL THINGS. HOW UNIQUE THEY ARE. BUT YOU ARE THE MOST UNIQUE OF ALL OF THEM. YOU HAVE A LEGACY THAT CANNOT BE SEEN UNDER A GREAT LIGHT.
NONE OF THEM CAN TAKE THIS AWAY FROM YOU.
The world around her opens a thousand eyes. She can see the walls beginning to distort into hideous faces. Far below, a vast eye stares at her.
The monstrous eyes inside her heart stare back.
but i mustn't. i have to protect riesenlied. YOU CAN NEVER PROTECT HER WHEN YOU ARE WEAK. WHEN YOU LIE TO YOURSELF. but i'll hurt someone. SOME PEOPLE DESERVE TO BE HURT. i know they do, but it's wrong. THEY DON'T THINK IT'S WRONG WHEN THEY DISMISS YOU. CALL YOU A WEAK THING. TREAT YOU LIKE A MONSTER. i am a monster!! THEN BE ONE!! then be one... THEN BE ONE. be one. BE ONE. BE ONE. BE ONE. BE ONE. BE ONE. BE ONE¤ë-=,,&?...... . . .
Vast chunks of icy debris explode out through the miasma, wreathed in a rumbling cascade of shadow flame. Waves of it wash through the ruined hull of the ship. They billow past Vorthuzahl but don't strike him in all his majesty.
Then the flames reverse. The inky black coils are suddenly sucked back into the debris field - and the air itself ripples. Whatever's within that haze and icy mist is practically feasting on the miasma, sucking up negative energy and eldritch malice like ambrosia.
The haze itself burns off. What's left there isn't Neriah - it's an entity composed of undulating malice, with empty white eyeholes and strands of hair like ghostly cilia streaming around her head in a phantom halo. But even those who've never seen Neriah like this can tell that something is wrong.
There's too much. Her body ripples and distorts hideously, as if she's barely able to hold her shape. Her limbs and body warp and pulsate as if something were trying to rip itself out of her.
The entity shrieks, a sound that's below the frequency of human hearing but rings deafeningly in the ears nevertheless, like some impossibly loud bass played from twenty separate subspeakers right next to one's skull. Black light gutters and billows as the dangerously unstable shape suddenly goes hurtling upwards. Ship struts and ancient plating give way as the malevolent being ascends and ascends.
There is a dull rumble overhead as Neriah punches through the ceiling of the Hadal Temple and, presumably, into the sky beyond, far too out of control to stop herself from going absolutely berserk.
At least she seemed to be on a course away from Wayside.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
It's not enough.
For a moment, he wonders if the gambit had been in vain; it barely so much as slowed the Metal Demon commander. His breath catches. Perhaps there's still the chance to push past before he's noticed, he thinks hurriedly, glancing down towards where the ship rests, calculating the odds.
He won't make it back out. He's certain of it, this time. Pushing against the wall, he steels himself--
Vorthuzahl is at once -- to the senses, impossibly -- in multiple places at once, swinging his weapon. Even Loren's attempt to deploy shields and stand firm are undercut; it slams into his body armor, crushing him into the wall.
And it feels impossibly like some vital fraction of his lifeforce has been torn away in the weapon's passing.
There's no room to retaliate, or even to shout.
Or at least, should coherent words.
Something stirs in a shallow sleep, and the chamber shudders.
The rise crumbles.
Loren falls with it.
A hexagonal-tiled wall of light erupts around him as he falls, knocking rock and debris away. He doesn't stop there, running/sliding the rest of the way down the crumbled remains of the cliff.
He's aware, dimly, that Vorthuzahl has not had himself a good landing, his masked face turning briefly for the wreck of what had been the Metal Demon's arm.
Other things conspire to steal his attention.
Ice crackles underfoot. Loren looks down, into the depths of the ice.
There he stops, staring.
The eye.
Pain blooms somewhere behind his eyeballs. He rolls back a step as if he's just been punched. Furiously, he shakes his head.
To his view, light streams upwards in an endless sharp-edged rise from the cracks covering the ice. Sickly light, some horrible violation of the natural order.
And below, the yawning abyss.
But there, still, stands the ship.
And the Metal Demon Commander, already within it.
Loren hestiates only for a fraction of a second, then plunges through the phantom lights that only he can see. If nothing else, here. Here, here, he needs to complete it here.
"This may be the last time you can think of it, so do it."
"It's there whenever you're ready."
A few snatches of words, the end of some recording.
And then, there was light.
The explosion sends Loren flung back across the ice, shards of the stuff flying in his wake as he skids. He stands, slowly, gaze lifting as he takes in the sight of the Metal Dragon.
"LOOK UPON DRAGONLORD VORTHUZAHL, MASTER OF THE BURNING SKIES!!"
He knew something like this was going to happen. There, he thinks it, even in the face of this hopeless situation.
He still needs to complete the mission, or die trying. With a jerk of his wrist, the shield unfolds with a snap.
He knows instinctively what's right under his feet. He's not looking down.
Instead, Loren bolts across the ice, shield at the ready. If he's at all serious about completing this, he needs to get close. And if he's to get close--
No more room for attacking from the shadows. He charges for the Metal Dragon, shieldfirst, ducking low as he makes his pass.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Vorthuzahl with Starfall Aegis! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action.
DC: MISS! Jack Van Burace completely evades Fast Draw - Speed Fang from Lady Harken!
<Pose Tracker> Matilda Whitehead has posed.
The cold stone gives way, and Matilda is ready for it -- even as the eye of darkness turns on her. It gnaws at the edges of her perceptions. Lights are dimmer, greyer. Features of the land are sharper -- more hostile. Every inch of the world drips with poison, with blood, with threat.
... but that's just fine. Matilda already knew that.
As Yarobeleedt reaches out for Matilda and Jay, Matilda clings to the crumbling stone, making a controlled fall that lets her evade Yarobeleedt's flailing, if only by inches, and only by exposing herself to crumbling rock. She descends one-armed, using her knife -- since she didn't get to abandon it in Yarobeleedt -- to enhance her handholds.
When she nears the bottom, she decides to let her good friend gravity help her in her oncoming assault; whatever Jay had said is discarded in favour of springing off the avalanche and down toward Yarobeleedt, throwing one knife, drawing a second, and landing hard with that one, aiming for Yarobeleedt's... honestly it's hard to tell what of Yarobeleedt's one is aiming for from moment to moment. But she's aiming for something and that's what's important.
"Jay, watch out!" she calls, mid-descent, her white coat billowing in the air; she does her best to control her fall to avoid landing on her, though controlling a fall is difficult even under much better circumstances than these.
GS: Matilda Whitehead has attacked Yarobeleedt with Planting a Seed! GS: Matilda Whitehead has completed her action. GS: Yarobeleedt guards a hit from Matilda Whitehead's Planting a Seed for 73 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Loren Voss's Starfall Aegis for 39 hit points! GS: Loren Voss takes Cover! He gains 50 temporary hit points! GS: Riesenlied heals Noeline! She gains 200 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida manages to get her right arm clear of the avalanche long enough to fire a hook. It flies through the air and sinks into the icy ground near the Astrid's hull with a solid clink. Ida reels the line in just fast enough to keep her from being dragged under by the surge of rock and ice and snow. She knows what she saw, in that instant before everything gave away. The Primarch did something, and Ida doesn't know what. She tumbles down, down, down, and is battered the entire way. Chi surges upwards to reinforce her skin. Somehow, she manages to make it to the bottom alive, without breaking anything.
Ida slams her hand down on the gauntlet's side, severing the cable. She sucks in a breath, and the miasma rushes into her lungs. She opens her eyes, and sees Kalve's crumpled, broken body lying next to the table, and the crate Vorthuzahl reaches for. His face is hidden behind layers of shell and bone, but she knows it's him, knows the armor. Mercurial blood still pools around him. Too late.
Ida remembers what happened last time. She tears her eyes away from the sight, and half-crawls, half-stumbles into the crashed skyship. She sees the hologram of the long-dead Metal Demon, and hears his words. Her eyes widen.
Too late. Too little, too late. Helpless. Helpless.
Ida has never actually fought a Metal Dragon--a live, free-willed Metal Dragon. The concept seemed ludicrous to her up until eight months ago, give or take. Now she finds herself paralyzed with terror, caught between Vorthuzahl's change in front of her and Neriah struggling to maintain composure and Kalve's body slowly lurching upright, as if on puppet strings. She wants to scream. She wants to vomit. She finds herself honestly grateful for small mercies when Neriah ejects herself from the battlefield.
Even she
isn't as much of a monster
as you.
Ida tries to remember what worked against the other Dragon, the one that hasn't shown up yet. Loren darts forwards, and Ida darts with him, in an attack pattern he might recognize--she goes wide at the last second, twirling around Vorthuzahl's right foreleg. Her lips peel back from her teeth. She raises her right hand, chi boiling around it, and then brings it down like a sledgehammer. She can't muster up much pain past the fear, but she's trying.
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has attacked Vorthuzahl with Steel-Breaking Fist! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has completed her action. GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Ida Everstead-Rey's Steel-Breaking Fist for 85 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
A lot of nonsense happens simultaneously. "You...don't remember what you did in Lacour? Do you remember Adelhyde? Do you remember Arctica?!" Fei is in disbelief here. Jack's not listening and, judging from his words, an instinct keyword flashes in his mind. He'll have to ask Jack about it later. Right now, he's just going to have to hope he survives through his own fury. It's not like Fei Fong Wong has room to critique his bad habits.
Fei realizes that he has a few things going for him in this battle. Harken is faster than him, but not so much that he can't keep up--particularly as she hasn't analyzed his fighting style just yet and has a lot more to deal with than him, allowing Fei to move into his own techniques more smoothly than she is. Unfortunately, the longer this fight goes--the more quickly she will adapt to his techniques and eventually he'll be throwing a punch only to get gutted by a blade mid-strike. Before that happens, he has to change things up. He has to do something Harken CAN'T expect--because it's something Fei isn't even sure why he's able to do.
He raises his guard in time. The chi flow ripples (Fei is also something of a Jojo) around him once more but it seems Harken planned for this and he crashes into Leon, resulting in some of that damage he was rolling off of him to shockwave into Leon himself.
"Leon!" Fei shouts. "Shit--! Hang in there, Leon! I have a plan!" And he has this plan because Harken decided to start sassing Elly. It reminded him of something he's seen that woman do.
The earth shakes and crumbles. More nonsense happens. He sees and recognizes Fafnir's image, but he's not sure why. He's reminded of Luisa. No, he thinks, no flashback now. It's just a recording. Not useful right now. That other guy can get into his super form or whatever, he's dealing with a super form already as is. He has to trust in his companions.
There's drugs. Fei starts seeing things, but the effect isn't as powerful as one might think when imagining Fei's usual reactions to this stuff. Id just came out not so long ago, he hasn't recharged yet. There's no taunts rearing up in his mind.
Instead, Fei sees something else. He sees a boy in front of a screen. He sees a moment on that screen that makes him feel at peace. He also feels something else that's inside of him, but also outside of him.
The mind of the primarch can't get in. The mists try to bypass this with chemicals, but a moment of meditation pushes it away. No entry. Locked. Does the Primarch want to bust down that door? Does it really want to get inside? It's usually so open, so inviting--and now it's not. Not right now. Not in this moment.
Fei stands back up. "I have an idea." He smiles at Elly for a moment. "It should work on her too, right?" That's the only clue to Elly that she gets before he dives back in.
"We'll go in order then, Harken!! You might be a true warrior... but you're fighting alone! You don't even really fight with your other Quarter Knights...and that's why you can't see Elly's value either as a warrior or as a person! Filgaia will never bow to someone like you!"
He punches down for Harken and unleashes his built up chi. Though he's striking with his fist, he's not really connecting with his fist--
--no an icy mist erupts from Fei's fist which is rather improbable for a lamb, and it is potent too. It is not a slow freezing cyrogenic mist, no, it freezes rapidly, expanding outwards from Fei like a rapidly growing iceberg, killing hallucinagenic mist even as it grows--freezing the molecules into an inert state.
<Pose Tracker> Jack Van Burace has posed.
That strike should have hit.
It should have struck into the face of Harken's smug face. Those insults they are tossing back and forth. Two figures blurring though the air, its familiar. Its almost comforting in a away, ringing some long repressed memory in the back of Jack's head. A memory his conscious thought does not want to contemplate. No, he wants to kill. He wants to maim and cut and crush. He wants to end this Quarter Knight.
He wants her death to be the first of many.
But that scythe is so familiar. The technique. The speed. The crashing perfect technique, so perfectly meticulous in its perfection. Its right on the edge of his mind, shoved aside by the rage and the pulsing heartbeat of the amulet around his neck.
Sword meets Scythe. Speed meets speed. A crash of the weapons as Jack steps forwards, under the sweep of the weapon to parry hard against the shaft of that massive named weapon. A smirk curls up his lips. One that makes him seem younger, less careworn for only a heartbeat.
"Too slow. Again. What shall I do with you?"
The teasing is there even as stone crumbles and they all fall. Scattered like chaff under the shrug of a titan and the pull of gravity. He turns and falls, bounding down from falling stone to falling stone. Intending to end up above and behind Harken.
And he kicks a stone towards her, riding the rock as cover as he intends to use gravity and leverage to impale the woman on his ancient blade.
'It won't do any good. That sword isn't powerful enough.'
The voice whispers and he ignores it, or he tries too, concentrating on his kill.
GS: Jack Van Burace has attacked Lady Harken with Trickster! GS: Jack Van Burace has completed his action. GS: Fei Fong Wong has attacked Lady Harken with Suikei! GS: Fei Fong Wong has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Leon Albus has posed.
"Elly," Leon says, eyes shifting to look in her direction. "You're not wrong. But don't lose focus down here. We need to keep our wits about us--and not give this Quarter Knight, or any of them, another edge over us."
Which is when Fei Fong Wong gets pitched at him. The shockwave rolls off Fei's chi flow -- and slams back into Leon. It smashes into him, driving him back, where he slams against the ground. He rolls and comes up, smoothly, into a three-point stance. "Nothing to be concerned about, Fei--"
And that is precisely when ground under them shifts and collapses. The cliff's face comes crashing down -- collapsing right under Leon's feet, and sends him crashing into the miasma below. He slams down, splashing down, into the mess of it. He turns, peering about -- and catches sight of the the eye. He stares, for a moment. He doesn't have a great deal of time to stare, however, for a dragon emerges. A thing of steel and fury, fire in its chest, and glowing burning and bright.
He sucks a sharp breath in. He needs his Gear, he thinks, even as the miasma fogs his eyes and icy snow burns into his hands and feet.
And other things burn into his mind. He tenses, muscles flaring, and cords tightening in his neck. Something that his rational mind screams is a fear response, though he knows not where that fear is coming from. He snaps Argent Divider to the side, wildly; it still moves with a fluid motion, swordblade telescoping out and barrels snapping into place.
Then, he goes running forward. He charges over the snowy ground. blade held to the side. He sees Lily moving, too, and falls into step instinctively with her. He comes lunging at Harken from the side, and then swings his blade around in a wide slash. It leaves black afterimages in the air, as he strikes.
GS: Leon Albus has attacked Lady Harken with Black Wolf's Fang! GS: Leon Albus takes 8 damage from Poison! GS: Leon Albus has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Noeline has posed.
For Noeline to face Harken in such a manner - scythe against scythe - is surely folly. For one thing, Harken has a much bigger weapon, and what could easily just be a game of numbers is further supplanted by the Quarter Knight's strength and speed, easily matching and eclipsing Noeline's own. Yet still, she faces her opponent. Perhaps it's just her natural sense of defiance, or perhaps it's her own way of signalling that she's still going to follow a course she considers her own, even at a time like this.
In the moment, though, it barely even matters. The sweep of energy from the Fast Draw arcs towards her, racing through the ground - and as if in response, the ground ruptures and breaks, tearing itself apart. Were she on-balance, Noeline might have been able to defend against the raucous attack, at least at some cost; instead, her back foot suddenly pitches, her stance off-kilter as she yelps and feels herself suddenly tip backwards.
When the wave hits her, she ends up taking it head on, letting out a sharp cry of pain that marks her sudden and abrupt fall through the mist and miasma; rocks smash against the ground beneath her, nearly ending her brief resistance, but an instinctive tuck and roll to one side means she's just showered with smaller stones instead.
Her wounds are screaming at her, her scythe shattered into so many collective pieces - but the dark corona still ebbs around them and connects them. As she hauls herself to her feet with a noise of pained effort, the shards of metal - shards of her - skitter across the stone floor, reforming themselves in her hand. It takes effort; her vision swims, and only the sudden formation of a haft bracing her against the ground stops her from pitching forwards and back to the ground.
She grimaces against the pain, uncertain for a moment if she's fighting one Quarter Knight or four; her vision swims again - it has to be a hallucination, because she's watching as a Metal Dragon explodes from the wrecked craft that they hoped to raise from this cave. Harken, she reminds herself. Harken was here. She tilts her head up, trying her best to focus on the descending Knight, trying to ignore the dancing threats of scalpels and the metallic tinge of Photosphere corridors that shift across the walls.
These are illusions, she reminds herself - and something in the back of her mind chuckles.
Just like that, the world around her seems to resolve, not least because a shining light envelops her once again; Riesenlied's defence against the Primarch, and perhaps a little of Duras Drum's power enveloping her further, whether she wished for it or not. She sets her jaw, not waiting for Harken to even touch ground before she's pivoted and swung her scythe upwards in another wrenching blow, one that could surely never reach - but one that sends an arcing crescent wave rocketing upwards, a twisting, spitting mix of a Guardian's power and her own ability.
GS: Noeline has attacked Lady Harken with Stinging Rebuke! GS: Noeline takes 6 damage from Poison! GS: Noeline has completed her action. GS: Lady Harken guards a hit from Lily Keil's Black Wolf's Claw for 62 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Fei Fong Wong's Suikei for 109 hit points! GS: Lady Harken guards a hit from Leon Albus's Black Wolf's Fang for 43 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Noeline's Stinging Rebuke for 97 hit points! GS: Sneak! The true nature of Jack Van Burace's attack becomes clear! GS: Lady Harken takes a glancing hit from Jack Van Burace's Trickster for 73 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
Yarobeleedt's bulk in his lower body has just the right amount of both firmness and give - the platonic ideal - as maybe the one very thing about Yarobeleedt that is tolerable to physically interact with. It disperses enough of the force of Jay's fall through him that he does, indeed, accidentally save her life. The entangling arm snaps upwards, free of her - and Matilda times it that she manages to run that knife deep through the noodly arm with a spray of gross- and probably-poisonous silvery ichor as the disgusting creature wriggles and writhes while a lowly human knife gets embedded so deep that it proves equal parts difficult and agonizing to flex out of the semi-solid mass of reconfigurable limb.
At the very bottom, through all the miasma, Vorthuzahl finds what he seeks - a means in which to inflict nothing but a sure end to all those here. Gone is the imposing figure of a commanding figure who oft seemed all but unstoppable as he laid all around him to waste with a blade of flame. Now, in his place...
Yarobeleedt nervously taps the tips of his arms together. "Affirmation! An affirmation. Is burning sky, ground, and cloud, star," he gibbers, voice weakening. It is not clear if what he sees is something he shows with joy, or with true primal fear. It is not certain.
Further context clues might be given as he maneuvers behind where Jay and Matilda are now. His arms, both of them, form into large flat surfaces like shields to shove forcefully into them, bringing the sides of both together as if to try and pass them for a wall as he nudges the two of them forwards.
"Screaming! They scream! Not me. So not die, because not screaming. Yes." He is shaking so much from behind those arm-walls. (Incidentally, the handle of Matilda's knife sticks out of the surface attacking her - she can pull it back out without much issue. Yarobeleedt might appreciate that.)
GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Jacqueline Barber with Push a Bar! GS: Yarobeleedt has attacked Matilda Whitehead with Push a Bar! GS: Yarobeleedt has completed its action. GS: Matilda Whitehead takes a solid hit from Yarobeleedt's Push a Bar for 108 hit points! GS: Disrupt! Statuses applied to Matilda Whitehead! GS: Jacqueline Barber takes a glancing hit from Yarobeleedt's Push a Bar for 88 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
They come for him.
Streaked in heroism that is almost lost in this age, it does not escape the notice of Dragonlord Vorthuzahl, his perspective different. Changed. Longer and wider, he sees all. Hears all. It is this perspective that will let him sweep across this world, and turn it into a sea of boiling metal and glass.
Below, he feels them as one might feel the bite of ants, a shield scraping against metal so thick he barely earns the contempt of sparks as they scatter under his blow. But still, he takes his attack and turns it into a defensive posture, one the Dragonlord finds most offensive. As the sparks die away, as Loren dares to see the Dragonlord in his glory, a clawed wing lifts, and then sprouts energy blades that sheer downward, intent on cleaving through shield, through flesh, and stealing the last of Loren's life away.
'Cassidy' will find that she earns a single blink of reptilian eyes, that burning gaze turning to regard her as her pellets ricochet off of a fully formed, near impenetrable hide. At the very least, his nemesis can know one thing is true: He has a new heart for her to steal.
Good luck storming the castle.
For her a turn of his body, a tail lined with burning, destructive energy sent whipping in her direction, which brings him around to face -
'Ida,'
As plates crack, dent inward, Ida will know the true enemy she faces. Not some half imagined dream or terrible story from beyond. It was a blow that should have felled a mountain. Unfortunately, Vorthuzahl is made of stronger stuff. There is a heave. A pull backwards, an inhale of breath.
Then the world is made of sizzling, energy ejected from the dragon's mouth, half fire, half electricity, and something more. A pummeling miasma that he had absorbed. A pure darkness.
It comes for her.
GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Loren Voss with Crushing Condemnation! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Ida Everstead-Rey with Searing Sortie! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Cassidy Cain with Sweeping Destruction! GS: Vorthuzahl has completed his action. GS: Cassidy Cain takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Sweeping Destruction for 108 hit points!
DC: MISS! Ida Everstead-Rey completely evades Searing Sortie from Vorthuzahl!
GS: Loren Voss has activated a Force Action! GS: Loren Voss critically Guards a hit from Vorthuzahl's Crushing Condemnation for 39 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
"Is 'strength' so important to you that you'll hurt so many?!" Elly cries out, although that burst of plasma erupting outwards in a smashing burst is sufficiently complex and roundabout that Elly's reflex Ether defense training is... well... it sort of helps? There's a sense of something buffering it but this is probably more in the area of 'Elly is struck back, almost falls over' than 'Elly avoids harm'. "Gah--!"
NOT SO SMART NOW, ARE YOU VAN HOUTEN
The ground gives way beneath them, sighing in frustration. Elly topples backwards and thinks in sudden sobering clarity: I should have used Earth, shouldn't I?
After this there is
f
a
l
l
i
n
g
and this suppresses Elly's thought long enough that there is an interlude and she finds herself sprawling in hallucination for a moment. The world swims. It feels like she's on the bridge of the mothership but that's wrong, isn't it? Her view focuses, her eyes squeeze shut. She reaches for her - her what? Her rod, that's right, she tells herself, grasping it and straightening up to her feet, sore - but is anything broken, she doesn't think... so...
Ah. The dragon.
Why is it familiar? No, Elly thinks, seeing the form of Ida moving with familiar (WHY?) motions, no: that's not what's familiar. Her eyes turn, blue and soft, towards Fei, and she blinks several times before-- before she actually smiles at him.
I can't think about the dragon right now, Elly thinks. It is a weirdly familiar thought even as she turns her attention back towards Lady Harken.
"I don't know you," she tells Harken, with an air of preamble. "I don't know your past or what's brought you to this place, other than the most basic of facts. I don't know if you were here for the sake of that person's transfiguration, or to hurt people, or to try to seek revenge... and you've got no reason to listen to me, either..."
"But for however much you disdain the things, that to us, are 'strength...'"
Elly's tone shifts and her head tilts back a little. Loren may suddenly feel a pricking tension in the back of his neck for a moment as Elly's tone of voice changes. "You've forgotten something important."
What?? Explain yourself, van Houten!
Elly tilts her head forwards, speaking as the images, the planes, the shapes of structured and channeled Ether coalesce in her mind. They appear in the subtle twilight of the immediate area, too, but they don't make any sense at first glance. "You're incredibly strong... probably, you were so strong that you never thought that you would need to have concern for where you fought. This place is nasty... I don't know what's happened to it. I barely understand why there's so much 'energy' in here. You may know it far better than I..."
Something sparkles in the lake. The ice lake. It's not touching that dread EYE - it is solely in the material itself.
"But I remembered something about it, Lady Harken. Everyone, careful--!!"
A sudden pencil-thin lancing beam of heat arises behind Harken, at about the 8'o clock position, and streaks harmlessly up into the air. A palpable miss!
Then the ice rises upwards slowly, almost drunkenly, with a few dozen snaps and cracks like a skeleton being demolished... the cracks chase after Lady Harken, one particularly telling set aiming to get underneath her, inside her stance...
At this point the superheated steam finally bursts its way upwards, expanding upwards with a shrieking artillery-cannon BANG that probably gives Vanderkaum, so many kilometers away, a happy night's sleep.
GS: Elhaym van Houten has attacked Lady Harken with Thermo Dragon! GS: Elhaym van Houten has completed her action. GS: Lady Harken guards a hit from Elhaym van Houten's Thermo Dragon for 96 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida feels metal give beneath her hand. She hits the ice and slides, a tight, burning pain shooting through her back as she twists something snapping upright again. She remembers the smoke and flames at Adlehyde--remembers herding a crowd of terrified civilians away from a Metal Dragon much like this one. She remembers begging her father to let her go see the Dragons, again. Thoughts spiral through her head like angry bees. Everyone is still dealing with Harken. They're right to. She's clearly still the more dangerous opponent. She's so tired. Her arm hurts. Everyone pities you. No one loves you. Even if it's her off-hand, she's not sure she can muster up another strike like that last one. Why don't you go crying to Mommy Riesenlied for help? I'm certain she would wipe it off and kiss it to make it better.
Vor wheels on her. Ida sees those terrible jaws opening, and a blast of flame issuing forth. It would be so easy to stop moving, to let that horrible energy scour across the ice and leave nothing more than a carbon stain in its wake.
Do you really think some spoiled rich girl from Guild Galad can kill a dragon?
Fei might have Elly there to stabilize him. Elly might remember something she once learned, a long time ago, that gives her strength. Riesenlied and Noeline have each other. So do Leon and Lily.
Ida remembers an old man living in a junkyard who vowed to hunt down her ghost and smack it senseless if she got herself killed. It's not a touching inner moment, but it snaps her back to reality.
Ida throws herself flat against the ice, skidding out from beneath that horrible ray as it traces across the frozen lake. The water boils instantly, and something in the incomprehensible depths churns, as if angered. Ida sees it all-too-clearly. She can feel the heat on the back of her neck as she careens out of control. Ida lands in a snowbank. What did Jackie say to her? Tunnel-vision. She's doing it again. Part of why she survived Harken in Lacour is she knew the environment, knew--
Ida stumbles to her feet, trying not to skid out of control again. She turns to face Vorthuzahl, staring the dragon down. For a moment, it looks like she's about to say something, perhaps to challenge him.
Then she turns on a heel and runs like hell towards the center of the lake--and the great, glowing knot in reality above it.
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has attacked Ida Everstead-Rey with Ancient Family Technique! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has completed her action. GS: Ida Everstead-Rey takes a solid hit from Ida Everstead-Rey's Ancient Family Technique for 0 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
Vorthuzahl is losing control is what Harken thinks to herself as she Graceful Crane Stance leaps down the falling boulders, and her assumptions are soon proved correct as his form shatters and gives birth to a much greater, more terrifying incarnation. She was afraid of this, but then, Harken doesn't exactly take a lot of corrective action to prevent people from being harmed, so it's entirely possible she knew this was actually going to happen all along and planned to do absolutely nothing about it. That's fine. Still an easy mission to complete. she strikes a curiously lonely, wuxia-esque pose atop a snow-crested rock, shards of stone and motes of ice aflutter around the nimbus of her roused fighting spirit.
"Vor," Harken begins while reaching for her throat microphone before realizing that the intended recipient of her message probably no longer has any kind of radio contact. She scowls. Hopefully, he'll still heel Siegfried's command, if not hers. This can still work.
A swirl of mist in the distance roils uneasily, growing in intensity. Boiling snow and something greater beneath it mask the silent, phantasmal killer lurking within. Lily emerges from the wintry smokescreen with a throbbing spatial anomaly in her hands, without a word to the Quarter Knight. She crosses the gap between them in a heartbeat's space.
"Come forth." Harken instructs her weapon, whose blade hums to life. A filmy shell of lilac-hued phantasmal force flickers across the surface of the metal, an oil slick upon the waters to look at. It is a great, loping motion of a slash that she carves towards Lily as she advances on her, but in this moment, the lieutenant of the Black Wolves has the advantage of speed, surprise, and style. Azrael's vile blade catches the falling overhead strike instead of Lily's flesh. "Now this, I remember. You grew stronger, just like I asked..." Harken seems resolutely serious, as she and Lily practically engage in a spark-shearing lightsaber-style struggle against one another. "But did you lose yourself in doing so? Unfortunate."
Despite enjoying the clash, Harken takes no chances. The towering lady swiftly eases onto her back foot and brings her other up with alarming speed, giving Lily but a few moments to relent with her assault and get out of the way, or take a mule-kick to the guts. What will she do!?
Leon could never leave Lily alone in such a state, could he? No, of course not. Even when the chips are down, reeling from the impact of Fei Fong Wong smacking into him and from the mountain collapsing beforehand, he leaps into the fray. "Have you considered," Lady Harken lays an eye on the Captain of the Black Wolves with a (possibly) frustratingly placid smile, despite the severity and speed of his assault. And the way he disappears from her sight soon after. "That I am not the one you should be concerned with, right now? I'm honoured."
But Harken isn't giving Argent Divider's wielder the respect he deserves. Preoccupied with the renewed attacks coming her way, Harken's counterstrike traces a clear path through an inky black afterimage, and the blade traces a glowing slice through Harken's scarlet-red plate armour. That's a clean hit, though it's impossible to tell what colour this monster ought to bleed. "Maybe you and I aren't so different--isn't that a frightening prospect!?"
The Quarter Knight sounds frustrated. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is still to be determined, but she does whirl about on the spot, carving an enormous circular slash at her elusive foe. A lonely, falling boulder splits in two as if to punctuate the dreadful force behind the blow!
Fei finds that Harken's memory must be very selective. She whirls to face him, leg still outstretched, adopting a crane stance with her polearm held across her body. If she weren't such an inhuman monster bent on the destruction of love and good, she'd look inspiring. "Adlehyde...? Ah, the castle. A reminder of what we did at Arctica," she corrects him. "Sorry, but I don't memorize the face and name of every insect I stamp out."
"Besides," Harken taunts Fei, her pretty face twisting into a cruel smile. "The last time all four Quarter Knights so much as breathed together at your combined might, your Kings died and your Guardians trembled. What fun is a victory with no struggle?"
Elly so rudely intrudes on the little exchange the Quarter Knight and the martial artist are having. Fei capitalizes on the ginger's words taking Harken's attention for a split-second and strikes her with what should be a physical impossibility: a blow of freezing force, the rivulets of melted snow on her armour crystallizing anew as his strike rings true. "You spit platitudes that sound like they came from one of Zed's wretched comics." Harken bites back at Elly, since Fei has proven himself by kicking her ass in this moment. She cranes her head to avoid the superheated ray of energy that Elly soon pitches at her, not realizing the true intent of her attack!
"Really. I gave you that one, and you still--" Harken begins to taunt Elly about her awful aim, but her sharply-honed senses soon warn her that something is amiss. A spreading network of cracks shoot towards her feet, steam hissing from deep beneath the ice, and the Quarter Knight is forced onto the defensive. She folds both arms before her, soaking the volcano-force blast of steam and shrapnel-spray of ice. And while this doesn't appear to inflict lethal damage, per se, it's achieved another possibly intended effect: irritating Harken out of a position of combat superiority. Thus, the enormous martial ace lunges for Fei and Elly alike with a sweeping scythe blow without so much as a comment. They've broken her sassy spirit!
Something about Noeline seems to be irritating Harken further, now that the fight isn't going her way. "Unlike punishing these humans, this leaves a sour taste in my mouth." she admits as she advances on the traitorous Hyadean. "But look at you," Azrael spins loosely in the Quarter Knight's hands, and the speed with which Noeline presses the attack despite her wounds catches her off-guard. It's just not a good exchange for Harken, today. She catches the polearm segment of Noeline's scythe with her own, but the foul taint of the Guardians' power sears her to touch, despite all the armour in-between. "More than Riesenlied, now, you are tainted. Perhaps I should have kept you closer at-hand, but now you've fallen..."
Harken, with that said, suddenly headbutts Noeline as hard as she can. It's positively venomous in intent. There's no guarantee it works, of course, but if there's one thing to be said for the Quarter Knight's style of arms, it's that she never let her choice of weapon get in the way of an effective fighting style. "Let this place be your grave, and I'll write you a nice eulogy. You can still die nobly."
Riesenlied can see from this far away that Harken stops and points at her, voice heavy with resentment. It's beginning to feel like that time she lost control at Lacour--there's something in the air. In her voice. The glee of battle giving way to confusion, and rage. "And you, you're my greatest failure... I knew you were cavorting with humans and flirting with peace for so long, but I let it happen." she breathes this at her, clenching her hand into a fist. "And now you keep resisting, so, you leave me no choice."
There's a blur of motion as Harken suddenly kicks a boulder, flinging it at Riesenlied despite the considerable distance between them. W--what force! "Come and fight, traitor, or will you watch your beloved friends all perish!?"
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
Jack thinks he got the last word in, after escaping the bite of Harken's blade last time, but something else is waiting for him, this time. The Quarter Knight's gaze swivels upwards quickly after having booted a boulder at Riesenlied, and she spies the practitioner of that dead Arctican sword-style falling towards her with his blade at the ready.
"Persistant dog." Harken scowls at him, spreading her arms and dropping her scythe entirely. It lands in the snow and hisses with a terrible noise. Almost welcomed to her form, Jack van Burace strikes the breastplate of Lady Harken with what should be a final, fatal blow.
... except...
In the last heartbeat before the tip can pierce that Hyadean steel, her gauntleted hands slap either side of his blade and twist. The sword turns, uncomfortably freed from Jack's grip. He is disarmed in a heartbeat.
Just like that one time...
"If you're expecting a reward for your dogged mimicing of my style, then I'll give you one." Harken shoves Jack backwards and tosses his sword upwards, catching it again by the hilt. "Here. A clean death!"
Something is definitely wrong with Harken, her eyes hazy and her mind clouded. She slips into a mirror image of Jack's own sword-wielding stance, blade held low and by her side, and then--there is a crescent arc of light. A beautiful ringing. His teacher's favourite technique, and the one he could never master...
... what's it like being on the receiving end?
GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lily Keil with Mule kick counter!! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Leon Albus with Fast Draw - Speed Fang! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Fei Fong Wong with Fast Draw - Slash Rave! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Fast Draw - Slash Rave! GS: Lily Keil guards a hit from Lady Harken's Mule kick counter! for 99 hit points! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Noeline with Azrael - Reaper Slice! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Riesenlied with Boulder kyaku!! GS: Fei Fong Wong critically Guards a hit from Lady Harken's Fast Draw - Slash Rave for 32 hit points! GS: Riesenlied takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Boulder kyaku! for 167 hit points! GS: Noeline takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Azrael - Reaper Slice for 105 hit points! GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Jack Van Burace with Fast Draw - Magnum Fang! GS: Jack Van Burace takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Fast Draw - Magnum Fang for 262 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Jacqueline Barber has posed.
Jacqueline awoke early that day, as she often did. There was always a lot of work to do to get the business started, but in the end it was always worth it.
'I-Isn't...there should I should be doing right now...?'
Surprisingly, it didn't seem like she was the only one awake. She could smell...something, from the other room. Was someone cooking?
'B-blood...am I...am I dying...?'
Whatever it was, it reminded her that she hadn't eaten much the previous day. She got up, stretched, then strolled out. Faint light streams through the windows, the sun just starting its climb into the sky. She rounds the corner, resting a hand against the seperator as she spies on the cook, too busy with their work to notice her.
'I...I can't die here...not like this. I-I...have so much left to do...everyone needs me...'
"That smells delicious, ____. What're you cooking?" Jacqueline asks... Asks... The cook...who was it? Why couldn't she see them? Why couldn't she see their face? They were blurry, indistinct, and yet she knew instinctively it was someone she cared for. At the sound of her voice they turn around, and speak. It is a familiar voice, but to her ears now it sounds only like so much rushing water...
'I...I know your voice... I know your lies... This isn't real... I have to...wake up...I have to...!'
With a warm, sweet smile that warms her heart the cook turns, the knife they were using held firmly in their hands. They approach as if for an embrace, pushing the knife slowly and kindly toward Jacqueline's heart...
'I have to...I have to...'
"Move!" Jacqueline shouts, returning to consciousness. Jacqueline bolts to her feet, moving into a defensive stance as Yarobeleedt pushes at her. His shield-like arms collide with her, pushing her roughly back, but she manages to avoid losing her footing. Her vision is still blurry and indistinct, but in the distance she sees it... a massive creature, obviously a dragon, lashing out at figures she couldn't make out from here.
She wanted to help, but...right now, the opponent before her deserves her attention. She starts to back away, a Crest gripped firmly in her hands that she invokes. A pillar of earth slams out of the ground toward Yarobeleedt, attempting to force him away much like he tried her.
As she moves, her hand reaches for the Medium within her bags...
GS: CRITICAL! Elhaym van Houten guards a hit from Lady Harken's Fast Draw - Slash Rave for 112 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Elhaym van Houten! GS: Jacqueline Barber has attacked Yarobeleedt with Pillar Crash! GS: Jacqueline Barber has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
She's unable to dodge him, this time.
The tail comes whipping for her and Cassidy is sent flying, landing on blackened snow and the back of her jacket smoking from the assault she has just endured. The fine powder enables her to cushion what would be bone-jarring impact, but she grits her teeth and follows through with the roll, to get on her knees and stare, momentarily, at the new and incredible form that the Metal Demon - 'Metal Dragon' has become. She watches, and she waits - there's no relief present when Ida manages to dodge the dragon after punching it, and in spite of everything, realization sets in.
Vorthuzahl is a dragon.
She is the nemesis of a Metal Dragon.
This is just about the last development she expects and she can't help but backtrack through her life, trying to put the pieces together as to what the hell did she do in order to land herself in such a frightening and deadly position. She has accepted the fact that she is set with a personality that makes more enemies than friends - but this?? This tendency of hers, this ability to make things worse for herself without even trying, being just how she is, takes her own breath away.
So as she watches the massive body whirl around and stare at her and her ilk with those reptilian eyes, all she could think is one simple, glaring truth. Just one.
This is all Jude Moshe's fault.
Lifting a hand, she presses it against her face, and laughs. It is bright, unfettered, reckless laughter as she straightens up from where she's crouched, white-hot blades of mirth her up from underneath her ribs. She can't help it, can't stop herself. Because it's true. It is objectively true.
"Ach, if that's how this is going to be..."
She places a hand on the 'knife' on her hip and draws it out.
"Fook it, then."
Meeting Ida's eyes across the distance, she starts taking several steps towards the dragon.
"S'pose it's time tae get serious, then."
Green motes start to collect on the bared blade as she charges, slender form suddenly breaking out into a daad run, to engage the dragon in a seemingly reckless and suicidal charge. Ephemeral threads start to spiral as she moves, growing in luminosity until for a moment, there is nothing but bright, brilliant light that spirals out in a scything arc for one of the nigh-near impenetrable dragonhide's most vulnerable parts...
...its eye.
Still laughing, she uncoils her body and uses her environs to gain momentum, springboard off a rock and sends herself rocketing like a comet for the side of Vorthuzahl's face. The side, because she still has some degree of self-preservation, she's not about to descend upon the jaws of life if she can help it, but still. His face.
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Vorthuzahl with Anything Goes! GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Yarobeleedt takes a solid hit from Jacqueline Barber's Pillar Crash for 208 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Cassidy Cain's Anything Goes for 66 hit points! GS: Poison! Statuses applied to Vorthuzahl!
<Pose Tracker> Matilda Whitehead has posed.
Matilda considers pushing past Yarobeleedt and attacking the dragon -- but, as Yarobeleedt attacks Matilda again and finally finds purchase, Matilda concludes that there's a time and place for that and that time and place are 'later' and possibly 'not here,' depending.
Matilda watches Jay's few moments of unconsciousness for a long while, nervously. Is she dead? Her neck does look wrong... But she's breathing, isn't she? Are you sure?
Jay moves, and Matilda's relieved -- though she pays deeply for that relief with a shove. She's able to retrieve her knife, but as a result, gets shoved into the rubble; she hits a jagged piece hard and feels herself start to bleed... but again, it's no surprise. Not in this place, where every stone and every corner holds misintent.
Just as last time, she's finally getting the sense that maybe trying to punch and stab an amorphous blobman to death is not among her best ideas, and swaps, at long last, to Freischütz. The bullpup ARM comes up, and Matilda takes aim, her posture sagging a little thanks to her earlier wound.
For now, she keeps her movements simple, restrained, as she fires shot after shot after shot of high-powered ammunition from the barrel of the Freeshooter. After the seventh, she at last stops, popping the magazine-slash-reservoir out of the gun and keeping her options open.
GS: Matilda Whitehead has attacked Yarobeleedt with Seven Bullets! GS: Matilda Whitehead has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Yarobeleedt takes a solid hit from Matilda Whitehead's Seven Bullets for 198 hit points! GS: Cripple and Jam! Statuses applied to Yarobeleedt! GS: Yarobeleedt has Fallen! It is no longer able to fight! GS: Leon Albus takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Fast Draw - Speed Fang for 184 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Power roils off Neriah, grating against his senses. He's aware of her ceilingwards flight mere instants before he launches himself at Vorthuzahl.
One dangerous piece off the board, but that only leaves him with a nearly full set still remaining.
He's aware of many things.
The gaze follows him as he moves, the weight of its attention heavy. It watches. It watches.
All is clear before it.
He's aware, if in a far less spiritual sense, of Ida's presence close to his side.
He doesn't call out. Doesn't acknowledge her. He might as well be a silent ghost in black in a hard run for the monstrous dragon.
Where has he seen that attack pattern before?
There is no time to dwell on it.
So much for a distraction, so much for an opening -- Vorthuzahl retaliates with astonishing speed. The wing lifts, glittering with energy blades. Loren slides one foot back, raises the shield overhead.
White light shines forth. He reaches for more ether, burning it into the shield; thin and only faintly shimmering, the wall extends in a technique Lily may well recognize.
Vorthuzahl's blades make impact, slamming into the raised shield with a flash of light.
There's undoubtedly a groove cut into the shield that enginnering will have a hell of a time fixing. But it holds. His arm might shake as he holds fast against the strike, his footing might slip, but it holds.
He doesn't stay there. Pulling back out of close range, he rounds on the Metal Dragon, damaged shield still raised.
For a given value of 'rounds on', given the size of what Vorthuzahl's become.
He takes a breath. Now what? Chance it?
He glances towards the ship.
...Wouldn't work. Damn, damn...
A voice from across the field gets his attention.
The hairs indeed rise on the back of Loren's neck. What is she doing--
Elly laughs with evident delight as fire washes across the lake surface, ice cracking and snapping as it passes, what lies beneath STIRRING
RISING
The horrible moment goes no further, as if somehow still leashed.
The frozen lake is cracked but still.
this isn't really happening
The realization comes swift, cold.
He wrenches his mind, his focus away from such things. Focus, he reminds himself.
Cassidy may opt to rise above it all, blade glittering after a curious display of power.
Loren, stuck on the ground, instead opts for the direct route.
If he can't slip around, then he has no choice but to go through.
Once more, rock shudders underfoot. Dredging up what rests beneath the ice, Loren raises the sharp-edged pillar of stone from the depths of the earth towards the ceiling.
Right below Vorthuzahl's feet.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Vorthuzahl with Terra Set! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Vorthuzahl guards a hit from Loren Voss's Terra Set for 70 hit points! GS: Break! Statuses applied to Vorthuzahl!
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
They 'run' from him. A new thrill, one that crushes away the old rush of battle and seeps into a growing vanity, a growing pride, one that is only eclipsed by his unending HATRED. But still, he cannot be fascinated by the retreat. A shake of his whole body shatters ice, sends water raining over them all, the heat of his body enough to destroy the frozen waste around him. Metal crushes under his claws as he steps over the remnants of the ship, hindparts dipping as he prepares for a pounce to chase 'Ida' down and put a final end to her legacy!
But then comes that laugh. Pupil slits shrink, eyes shift and head tilts, coming to find the mirthful form of Cassidy Cain. Motes of energy gather, and then a blast of destruction rips across the dragon's face, forcing that eye closed, searing metal in a long, dangerous line. It lets 'Cassidy' make her leap, but not before that mouth opens, and a blast of pure ruin sails through the air in an attempt to intercept her as she seeks purchase on the side of his jagged, blackened, scarred face.
Really, there's only one reaction to the touch of Cassidy's fleshling form to his perfect metal form.
Dragonlord Vorthuzahl THRASHES!
Shaking, twisting, stomping, wings beat, enough to send those foolish enough to have uneasy footing into a tumble, a roar splitting the air and fire shooting towards the sky.
"SURVIVE THIS CURSED FUR BOOT WEARER, SURVIVE THIS TO SEE YOUR MANLETS DIE!!!"
His voice is cut off by the sudden spike of terrible rock, metal scales crushing, breaking and -
Blood that ignites on contact with air drips to the ice below. The terrible thrashing shears off a part of his hide to tumble over, to stick in the ice still covering the monster beneath.
It glows red hot.
It begins to sink in.
The key is turning.
For Loren's bravery, he is rewarded with the tumble of the dragon, limbs catching anything and everything, destruction following in his wake, and so too does flame. Flame headed right for 'Loren's' path.
GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Cassidy Cain with Untold Malice! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Loren Voss with Untold Malice! GS: Vorthuzahl has attacked Vorthuzahl with Aura of Dominance! GS: Vorthuzahl heals Vorthuzahl! He gains 200 temporary hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes 6 damage from Poison! GS: Vorthuzahl has completed his action. GS: Cassidy Cain has activated a Force Action! GS: Loren Voss has activated a Force Action! GS: Cassidy Cain takes a solid hit from Vorthuzahl's Untold Malice for 145 hit points! GS: RUIN! All positive status effects and temporary hit points purged from Cassidy Cain! GS: Loren Voss critically Guards a hit from Vorthuzahl's Untold Malice for 29 hit points! GS: RUIN! All positive status effects and temporary hit points purged from Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Riesenlied has posed.
"Do you truly believe in a time of peace, Lady Harken...?" Riesenlied grimaces as she recalls her earlier words, clutching at a wound that is reopening, even as she avoids retribution for the time being. "You have always ever been at the edge of battle, ever thirsting, ever seeing--"
And you, you're my my greatest failure...
Riesenlied cringes as she hears that voice, clutching at her chest tighter as the Dragon's Tear starts to erratically flux with an emanation, trailing with a light that falters...
"... it is not violence that Hyades needs! We have squandered so much that we have become the very sustenance dug from this earth... it is not the time to repeat mistakes--"
A boulder comes her way, and there's a shriek from Devet as she complains, "Emergency manueveeers!"
Muni-Muni quickly responds, and erupts into something resembling a sphere as she cocoons the riders currently on her back. It looks goofy, especially as the boulder slams against her side and leaves a visible marring...
Riesenlied gasping as she falters softly, watching the Dragon as it continues to battle the Drifters closer to the ship.
"How much longer, Devet?"
"I--I can launch it anytime..."
"Do it," Riesenlied answers firmly.
Devet looks a bit too shaken to grin or say anything, her finger simply hitting the 'Enter' key--
--and that orb that undulates about them flies off, the Hyadean remotely controlling it on her screen. It hovers above the captain's deck of the ship...
And a forcefield of great measure blooms outwards, individual petals lacing and joining over the broken hull of the ship as a protective umbrella would. It sears where it anchors over the ground, and then holds steady.
The Astrid isn't the only thing that gets a barrier; Riesenlied's pang of anxiety reaches a hitch once more as she listens in-- no, not to Lily's words, for she lacks them...
She senses that glossy feeling in her eyes, how that magic -- that hatred -- emanates from her palm. She is pale, too pale...
... stand strong, Lily, Elly... and remember your own strength...
... and all she can do is protect them, cascading layers of shielding forming over Lily the next time she throws distance between them and Harken. Cascading over Elly and creating more of a gap between her and her assailant.
But it distracts her for long enough-- and her eyes gloss over and widen as she realises what Vorthuzahl's true target is...
GS: Riesenlied has attacked Lily Keil with Rising Heart - 'Seek the New World'! GS: Riesenlied has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Rising Heart - 'Seek the New World'! GS: Riesenlied takes 9 damage from Poison! GS: Riesenlied has completed her action. GS: Riesenlied heals Elhaym van Houten! She gains 200 temporary hit points! GS: Riesenlied heals Lily Keil! She gains 200 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Jack Van Burace has posed.
He smiles. Wide and wicked. The sudden promise of death and violence done to this Quarter Knight. Its what he wants. He wants her to bleed. To be pained. To die. He can hear the blade start to scrape against the armor of hers before those hands snap up to clasp against it.
'Always with attack. Never with defense.'
A voice from the past rings in his ears as that sword is torn away.
'You'll never learn, Stampede. Technique and timing.'
He lands on snow, bouncing quickly to his feet. Eyes fixing on Harken. Even with a dragon in the background. Even with the mess going on around him. The explosions, the magic, the ARMs. He is fixed on his opponent. Everything else falls away, if he can time this next leap right he can reclaim his sword. If he can do that he's sure he can...
She drops into that stance. That sweet music sweeps into the air. A song of sword and technique that only the Fenrir knights know. Only they can hear.
His eyes widen and cloud as a vision flits before them. A woman in armor parts the mists. Armor of a color akin to Harken's, of hair somewhat like Harken's, of bright blue eyes full of studious mischief instead of murder.
'Garrett, have you been slacking again. Let me show you the proper technique...'
He staggers a moment, one arm reaching out for Harken as she tears though the space between them. Not a gesture of violence but one of hope. Wonder. Loss. So many things mixed into one simple gesture.
"Elmina---"
Hanpan shouts into his ear as Harken tears though the image of his past and buries his own sword into his chest. Pain explodes in his mind, the vision torn to shreads on the winds of Miasma as blood decorates the ice behind and under him. He chokes, falling to one knee and grasping the hilt of his own sword. Shock consumes him. Cold makes his limbs heavy, his body dim.
'WEAK!' Now its the voice the Trial Knight that rings in his ears. 'I told you mortal. You are weak. You will die here. Quest unfufilled. Life unfulfilled. Your people will have died for nothing. There will be no rest for them. Or for you.'
The medal on his chest, torn free pulses once. The light catches on the sigil of the shattered Knights of Fenrir. The once proud symbol of a dead kingdom.
"No," He answers the voices in his own head. "I will not die here."
And he starts to tear the sword free of his body.
...which. You know. Medically speaking is really bad but he's a swordsman not a doctor.
<Pose Tracker> Lily Keil has posed.
Lily is now in melee with the others, striking in time with Leon in a maneuver they've executed time and time again now. Her black blade hurtles downwards, with a strength beyond the tension in her muscles. But Harken's words slide into her consciousness too, a strange sensation as abrubtly Lily feels... in place, again. Azrael's vile blade sparks on her own. "...Did I do it for you?" she asks, a strange murmuring in her voice, a smirk. Spark-shearing blades move onto one another, and for an instant she does not seem so lost. But--
The kick slams out at her. Lily is not known for her dodging; she is not known for holding back. She attempts to press through as Harken kicks, but in this case it doesn't work; Leon strikes at the same time, but Lily takes the kick hard and flies backward, blade dissipating as she loses hold of it and tumbles where she is. ...There is...
a heartbeat impossibly loud in her ears. The light seems far, now. Has she lost herself? ...No. No, what was there to lose? in this place, as Harken mentions that she and Leon are not so different. Lily, from where she is, rises. Failure...
Soldiers stand before Lily. Soldiers in place, in place of Elly and of Fei and of Jack. Familiar faces, in Kislevi uniforms... One's head is bent at an impossible angle. Another is covered in bullet holes. ...Another has an arm severed. They are there, and more. Lily knows every face. Every face, she can see--
"They're--" She breathes, stumbles where she is, casting about with unseeing eyes. Eyes that see too much. "Ah...Aaah..." A sound of pain starts to issue from her throat, "Leon, I--They're--"
Leon is there with a hole in his chest. Lily's eyes widen--as the layers of shielding start to cascade over Lily, the light shading and removing the wounds--they return, they fade--
"My..." Lily straightens her back, and closes her eyes. The voice is there, and Lily cannot block it out. But maybe... Maybe, instead, with her own strength-- "I never imagined we were different," Lily says to Harken. "Why should it frighten me?" Her eyes begin to cloud over, to darken, as her hand rises, and the glows about her arms turn painful shining as a burst of darkness erupts in front of Harken, a photonegative snapshot that seems to linger in the air--and another, and another, and another, and another, bursting slow and first and faster, faster as Lily steps forward, eyes turning completely black. She cannot block out the voice.
But she can drown it. The visions dance in her eyes and each one turns into a crashing explosion of raw Etheric power, pulsing erratically against the light around her.
GS: Lily Keil has attacked Lady Harken with Gloomhammer! GS: Lily Keil takes 9 damage from Poison! GS: Lily Keil has completed her action. GS: Jack Van Burace has attacked Jack Van Burace with Maximum Risk! GS: Jack Van Burace has completed his action. GS: Jack Van Burace takes a solid hit from Jack Van Burace's Maximum Risk for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper and Quick! Statuses applied to Jack Van Burace!
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
Yarobeleedt pushes his shield-like arms out, the bottoms scraping sickly against the ice. He dares not advance. He's all for those two advancing into the Metal Dragon. In an instant, he feels powerful. He feels like he can do whatever he wants to these humans in front of him and that they can't do anything about it. They can't move with blinding speed.
The... underneath... rumbles, and violating what is underneath the ice is one of Jay's pillars. The impact shakes the very ground. Cracks run up through both arms as he finds the both of them flung overhead. Yarobeleedt gapes as he finds his forearms stretching within the very limits of their elasticity, to say nothing of the stresses inflicted by having to carry two solid masses.
Neither of them draw a blade on him or act the victim. This opening will not last long. Matilda decides to bring a gun to an alien biological Swiss army knife fight, hefting Freischütz to bear as she takes aim with the eye of a sword wielder faster than the wind - faster than anything that can come out of the barrel of her ARM.
Shots are fired. Seven of them. Without any protections in place, the first six shots tear through the half-blob mass that threatens to harden underneath the icy cold that wishes to claim what warmth and motion yet exists within them. The seventh strikes, cutting through in one single stroke - condemning him to be as low as the very ground.
Yarobeleedt screeches and whimpers as his arms flail uselessly within the miasma, sinking backward, further out of view.
"Not liquid! Not. Notnotnotnotnotnot. Not to human! No, no, no!" He stammers. What words slip out of that mouth of his are even less coherent, beyond the scope of written word to capture. The way he slips back - is he pressing himself up against an unseen wall? Is he about to sink? It is not clear.
There are more important things to be had. An opening to get away as he watches his would-be slayer continue further into the castle in disregard of him.
A flash of red and gold (and a tiny bit of blue) dance beyond the veil of miasma. He doesn't want to see any more of it.
A shiny metallic fabric coating is pulled around him as he ducks out of sight.
<Pose Tracker> Yarobeleedt has posed.
Yarobeleedt pushes his shield-like arms out, the bottoms scraping sickly against the ice. He dares not advance. He's all for those two advancing into the Metal Dragon. In an instant, he feels powerful. He feels like he can do whatever he wants to these humans in front of him and that they can't do anything about it. They can't move with blinding speed.
The... underneath... rumbles, and violating what is underneath the ice is one of Jay's pillars. The impact shakes the very ground. Cracks run up through both arms as he finds the both of them flung overhead. Yarobeleedt gapes as he finds his forearms stretching within the very limits of their elasticity, to say nothing of the stresses inflicted by having to carry two solid masses.
Neither of them draw a blade on him or act the victim. This opening will not last long. Matilda decides to bring a gun to an alien biological Swiss army knife fight, hefting Freischütz to bear as she takes aim with the eye of a sword wielder faster than the wind - faster than anything that can come out of the barrel of her ARM.
Shots are fired. Seven of them. Without any protections in place, the first six shots tear through the half-blob mass that threatens to harden underneath the icy cold that wishes to claim what warmth and motion yet exists within them. The seventh strikes, cutting through in one single stroke - condemning him to be as low as the very ground.
Yarobeleedt screeches and whimpers as his arms flail uselessly within the miasma, sinking backward, further out of view.
"Not liquid! Not. Notnotnotnotnotnot. Not to human! No, no, no!" He stammers. What words slip out of that mouth of his are even less coherent, beyond the scope of written word to capture. The way he slips back - is he pressing himself up against an unseen wall? Is he about to sink? It is not clear.
There are more important things to be had. An opening to get away as he watches his would-be slayer continue further into the castle in disregard of him.
A flash of red and gold (and a tiny bit of blue) dance beyond the veil of miasma. He doesn't want to see any more of it.
A shiny metallic fabric coating is pulled around him as he ducks out of sight.
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
Wait, a distant part of Fei's mind thinks, Harken thinks Jack is stealing his techniques? What's going on? Is this some vast strange conspiracy?
Well yeah, it's always one of those things, do you really have time to worry about this particular vast strange conspiracy, Fei Fong Wong? Nothing's more dangerous than a noble wolf that is cornered.
With that heat hitting her so quickly after the fast freezing, Harken's armoring should be weaker, Fei reflects. It's a testment to her construction that she hasn't shattered. That's troubling, but sometimes you gotta accept that your enemies have 5 resist to debuffs and still need to be ARMOR BREAKDOWNED if you're ever going to defeat them.
"The Guardians?" Fei says. He's tense enough that something spills out of his lips that he'll forget about shortly after saying it. "They don't hold a candle to humans. After all... There's no Guardian of Wisdom!" He focuses his breath. "As for the King, well... It's not like I was there for that." He smirks confidently... is it a bluff? Is it true? Fei might not be certain himself. He still doesn't know what he can do and what is him and what is...someone else. "I'd be more worried about what Cecilia ends up doing 'cause of what you did to her. She's crazy."
Id concurs with this sentiment as he judges the meager, but notable, evidence at his disposal. Cecilia, wherever she is, might notice the distinct DING of a social link starting with that guy.
But that's the extent of the taunting and wordplay. Something's strange about Harken and the fact that something is strange about Harken, well...it means that his understanding of Harken is direly incomplete and taunting someone with such mystery around them is a hazardous preoccupation.
Luckily what isn't hazardous in this situation is old fashioned violence. He doesn't even say 'See? Elly is very capable!'. He just smiles back at Elly. It's genuine. Peaceful even considering the circumstances. Knowing Fei, a smile like that is practically alien on his face. It's usually tainted by cynicism or depression or concern but that's the smile of someone who is just plain happy even in this insane circumstance, even with an alien mind trying to pry in.
Harken dives at Fei and Elly with her scythe. Fei slides in front of Elly automatically, not because of disrespect, or fear, but because of appreciation.
Fei at first catches the scythe in his hand, but Harken overpowers him and slices through his chest with the weapon. Fei sinks to one knee, panting for breath as his blood drips along the floor.
"Keep at it..." He suggests to Elly. Something inside of him tells him that Elly's weakening.
That medal...so it's true then. I can smell the K.K on him
Fei stands himself up. "Lily! Leon! We're alive! The Quarter Knights might be strong but we've gotten stronger too!"
Fei dives in for another series of strikes for Harken. His kicks are a blur of motion. He's speeding up, whether from adrenaline or his desire to help Elly, Lily, Leon, and Elly (he's bleeding a fair bit so he counts her twice). His body is far more beaten than it was moments before that strike, but his will is, somehow despite these circumstances, stronger than it's ever been.
It's unlike Fei.
It's really unlike Fei.
Or maybe you never really knew Fei because he's not despairing, he's not unhappy. Indeed, maybe it's something that Harken can recognize in this moment that few others ever really understand and fewer accept.
It's joy. It's pure unbridled joy. Fei is happy. Fei is more than happy. Fei is ENJOYING himself. He's having FUN. His heart is aflutter.
Elly smiled at him.
Elly smiled at him!!
GS: Fei Fong Wong has attacked Lady Harken with Tenbu! GS: Fei Fong Wong has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Leon Albus has posed.
"I have considered that," Leon says. "A bloody Metal Dragon has taken to the sky. But I've no Gear -- and I'm no dragonslayer. I see an enemy in front of me, and one I can strike and hope to lie low. I'll find a way to deal with your comrade next."
The plan, at present, involves asking for fire support from the Yggdrasil.
He tries to duck away from the slash -- and fails. The blade slashes deep into his side, and this time crimson splashes out along the ground in a line. Leon stumbles, with a hiss, and then he straightens himself up. He tries to ignore the deep gash left by Azrael in his side, and glances to the side -- towards Riesenlied, as he watches Harken move to her (and, indeed, to all of his allies).
'A failure,' she says. His teeth grit together and his eyes narrow, before he sees her move against Jack Van Burace. He has only seen Jack fight a few times; he has, however, seen Arctican swordsmanship before. He draws a gasp in -- and he shakes his head once, sharply, as he compares it. "Wait! That style... the Demons are--"
Learning from humans? It seems strange, somehow, to him.
His teeth grit, and he forces himself to focus. Thoughts rush through his mind. Images and memories, none quite clear. Flame washing over the countryside. Light dimming down a hallway. A man's face, vanishing before him. The crunch of a crimson mechanical leg in the earth. A television screen, flickering to static.
He closes his eyes. He exhales.
An Argent Divider ignites. A blade of silvery light shoots up the length of the sword, transforming it from a long, thin blade to a broadsword in his hands -- if one made of energy.
And he goes running forward. He swings the weapon backward -- and then lunges in for Harken. It comes crashing down over his head, slashing down straight for the Quarter Knight as he finishes closing the distance -- stating his agreement with Fei with one stroke of his weapon.
GS: Leon Albus has activated a Force Action! GS: Leon Albus has attacked Lady Harken with Code.26 CLARENT! GS: Leon Albus takes 8 damage from Poison! GS: Leon Albus has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Blood spills onto the ice where the pillar had scraped. Burning. Sinking. Here is the key. Now, open the way.
Loren in this moment becomes aware that Ida is no longer here -- at least not at short range.
And then in the next moment, he has no time to dwell on that fact at all.
The Dragon reaches for him in the next heartbeat, all claws and rage; there's no time to raise a shield so he doesn't try.
He reaches out with his will, casting up a hard-edged crystalline wall of light. It slows the impact, stays some of the strikes.
Deflects a few others.
Loren stands his ground throughout, one hand outstretched as he pours more of his will into the wall.
Light is echoed by light. The ship is enfolded in its embrace.
Loren releases his focus, sidestepping the last of Vorthuzahl's strikes by a hair. He exhales a hard breath, gaze behind the mask shifting suddenly for the boat.
In passing he'd been aware. Now he can see it, and he can realize what this means.
...Failed. It settles over him like a shroud. It's been a failure.
He takes another breath, psyche already off at a clip.
His attention shifts, landing on Cassidy Cain.
...If it's a failure, he can't die here. The logic of it seems perfect in this instant.
He reaches out, dredging up a fragment of the horrible force that the land can bring to bear. All the stress of a fault zone, pent up and ready to release. The inescapable weight of the earth.
This strength, in a dark-tinged light, he bestows upon her.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Cassidy Cain with Power Factor! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Cassidy Cain takes a solid hit from Loren Voss's Power Factor for 0 hit points! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Cassidy Cain!
<Pose Tracker> Noeline has posed.
Noeline takes the attack head on, if you'll pardon the pun. Harken simply crashes into her without preamble or fanfare, and while Noeline's well aware of how readily the Quarter Knight will discard her weapons to descend(?) into brawling, the speed with which her opponent does so takes the twintailed demon by surprise, sending her reeling and staggering backwards for a moment as she grits her teeth in defiance of the sudden blossoming pain.
Again, her vision swims, as exhaustion and dizziness threaten to catch up with her; the world flickers around her, bringing a gasp from her throat as she feels the walls crush in, feels the weight of years of memories and years of biding betrayal suddenly pressing down on her shoulders. Riesenlied might be older than her, but surely she is the Metal Demon's greatest traitor, the first to decide she didn't want any part of their Mother's plan, the first to cavort with Guardians, the first to give up on her kind--
A searing light pulls her out of the sensation if only partially; her vision fuzzes towards static, for a moment rendering the cave as a giant laboratory, or perhaps an operating theatre, or perhaps both - but then it twists again, resolving into the sight of Devet's shield shimmering into existence around the Astrid. Despite herself, Noeline heaves out a ragged breath of relief: that's one mission complete. Now they just have to hold out against the Quarter Knight, a newly crowned Metal Demon, and Yarobeleedt. Easy, right?
That thought draws a very hoarse chuckle from her throat as she faces Harken again; her arms are shaking from the effort of the black flame searing her incompatible skin, and yet she still has the strength to at least raise her scythe, buoyed up by her channeling of Duras Drum even as it eats at her. "... I stand with the Tainted," she rasps, her eyes alight despite her wounds. "But I do so because that's the only way we're going to see a future. Mother wants nothing to do with our future, nor even yours. Only her own."
Not quite a bluff, but it's not like she's got any concrete proof close at hand either. Not that it really matters, she knows that much - instead, she sucks in a breath and wills her legs to move, pushing herself into a run to start closing distance on the melee around the Quarter Knight as she reaches within herself for a little more of the power searing around her.
She's all of a couple of steps away at most-- when she suddenly melts into the air around her, an odd elongated smear of Noeline-shaped black that twists and boils away into nothingness. Just another illusion, perhaps - because the next moment her presence abruptly emerges behind the Quarter Knight, her approach shielded by a combination of Duras Drum's powers of illusion and the miasmic mists of the Primarch's cavern. "Call that noble if you like, but I'm not about to die here!" she roars hoarsely, bringing her scythe down in both hands.
GS: Noeline has attacked Lady Harken with Cutting Words! GS: Noeline takes 8 damage from Poison! GS: Noeline has completed her action. GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Lily Keil's Gloomhammer for 167 hit points! GS: Lady Harken guards a hit from Fei Fong Wong's Tenbu for 92 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Leon Albus's Code.26 CLARENT for 142 hit points! GS: Lady Harken takes a glancing hit from Noeline's Cutting Words for 65 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Elhaym van Houten has posed.
When Harken speaks to her - accuses her of the source of her platitudes - Elly's eyes widen.
LONG AGO, but not so long
"The new shows have finished generating, Elly. Would you like to watch one with me?"
Elly, feeling a hollow desperation she can't put a name to, nods her head. But gingerly; her ear still hurts, from where one of the other children struck with a drawing stylus.
The colors are bright and the stories are simple. Elly falls asleep, after a while, and Medena smooths her hair.
NOW
Elly thinks: How did she know?
Frustration rises inside of her, a helpless sensation that, much like the feeling of being in need of focusing away from a dragon, is familiar. More familiar, honestly. Something about it feels well worn and comfortable. Her fingers tighten, squeezing her rod. "I don't have a king," she huffs to herself, but at least she's off balance, Elly thinks, at least - no - Fei! Elly thinks.
He's there. He's bleeding! Elly has no time to do more than reach forwards before he leaps in with gusto despite the blood! The blood which
Elly sees a momentary blossoming crimson rose on Fei's chest, one which ripples outwards with a juddering, blurring intensity that spreads over his body, focusing mostly on his throat and, for reasons she cannot yet understand, his right thigh on the inside. Elly shakes her head violently once - the vision passes - but something else comes to her. A position of Harken's face. It reminds her of
tolone
the wind
lightning
metal
Elly's eyes widen. It's so obvious! The clouds clear from her eyes, although they almost immediately blow back in as the memory of blood and the desperate struggle that Leon rushes into. She wishes fervently she had Vierge right now. But maybe even Vierge wouldn't be enough.
But before doubt can fill her... Riesenlied cries out encouragement and protects her as well, her forces washing around Elly. "I won't let you down," Elly breathes as she presses a hand to her forehead, index and middle finger sliding outwards as she tries to think desperately. She's probably expecting lightning, Elly thinks: that's the obvious thing, that's the form it usually takes.
Desperate memory. If Tolone was here, Elly thinks, before grinding herself down: If Tolone was here we'd have a lot of different problems! She isn't, I am - I have to -
The plates and grids form in her mind's eye. They spark a little in the air about a yard in front of her as the humidity her previous flame blasts and the sundry other acts of intense violence have kicked up, makes contact with focused masses of free electrons.
Then Elly sweeps her hand out and points towards Harken.
SNAP!
It's not the most dramatic noise. Not everything can have a cool sound. The sudden lancing arc of quasi-degenerate electron fluid is a lot more dramatic, although hopefully it will not hit while Leon has a sword actually in contact with Harken.
GS: Elhaym van Houten has attacked Lady Harken with Industrial Light and Magic Attack! GS: Elhaym van Houten takes 5 damage from Poison! GS: Elhaym van Houten has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Cassidy Cain has posed.
He ruins her with fire and blood.
But Cassidy Cain doesn't stop. It's too late to. She will not be denied.
Flames lick over her clothes, but the wintry climes have given her the benefit of having several layers and these fall off her in a spiral of tatters and ash. Like blackened feathers peeling off emerald light, she sails for the side of the Metal Dragon's face, undeterred as she slams her blade within right when that metal lid shuts, the point managing to puncture into a tender layer - enough to inject poison into the creature. Green mist hisses out from the impact point.
When the light fades, she is anchored on Vorthuzahl's face, her clothing reduced to nothing but webs and steel cages. Scandalous swaths of bare skin look all the more alabaster under the light of the moon, her corset reduced to its metal framework. Her hat is gone, leaving pale-gold tresses spilling free, emerald irises shot with gold burning with incandescent fury and wild, passionate, unshackled desire to dispense as much murder on this creature as she possibly can. Her lips are pulled up in the vestiges of her laughter, but the humor in it is gone...
And ether hits her.
Hatred from the very ground itself bleeds into the already volatile cocktail of wants and needs inside of her veins, amplifying every sense, every emotion. She digs sharp heels into the side of the creature's maw, applies enough pressure on her blade to make herself a nuisance in an attempt to point him into the direction in which Ida needs to perform her work. Emerald fire - or what looks like fire - leaks from the length of the blade she has buried in the corner of its eye...
....a blade that wasn't there before.
She flashes the dragon a blazing grin, all teeth, liable to blind the unwary and cut deeply enough to bleed as she starts to push it in. She leans her face forward.
"If I cannae take your heart, luv, maybe this will work as a prize."
Energy thrums along the blade at the painstaking push in, emanating with ridiculous heat - to scald, to melt. The technique does not look familiar to anyone else, except perhaps Loren Voss.
Whether or not she does enough damage, she leaps from the dragon's lowered face, to land upon the ground, swinging the blade and pointing it directly at Vorthuzahl as she backs up towards the center of the chamber.
This better work, Ida.
"What say you, luv?" she calls. "Let's dance, you and I!"
GS: Cassidy Cain has attacked Vorthuzahl with Now Is The Hour! GS: Cassidy Cain has completed her action. GS: Lady Harken takes a solid hit from Elhaym van Houten's Industrial Light and Magic Attack for 87 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Ida Everstead-Rey has posed.
Ida runs. Her lungs feel like they're on fire. Her left shoulder still aches from where Vorthuzahl tore into it, and she can feel the heat from his burning presence as she makes her way across the ice. She feels like a small, frightened animal trying to run from a hawk. You're going to die running. No one will mourn you. She chances a glance back over her shoulder, sees that massive shape rounding on Cassidy, and out of the corner of her eye, Riesenlied pointing at her. Lily and Leon look at her--a menace to Wayside, a menace to Riesenlied's dreams, a menace to those poor, innocent orphans. She whispers poisoned words to them. Lily slips a--
The shield blooms up around the corpse of the Astrid. Golden light plays across Ida's face as her features draw tight. No. They're going to get into that ship and all of them are going to die. Perhaps she should let them. Why does she care? Why does she still care?
Ida keeps running. The Ley Point is a hundred yards ahead, now. Waves of force flicker off of it, throwing back her hood, lighting up her face with a brilliant blue-white glow. It's pure and clean. Energy crackles between Ida's teeth, and caresses her face, but if she gets any closer, it will start to burn.
Ida runs closer. The Ley Point starts to burn. The warmth turns to pain.
Ida glances to the side, sees Cassidy baring scandalous amounts of skin on account of almost getting cooked alive by Dragonbreath. (How did she survive?, Ida thinks.) She's doing good, aside from that. Almost there...
Cassidy strikes. Ida sinks in her bootheels, raises the grapple, and fires--the dart sinks into the ice beneath Vorthuzahl, and Ida almost wrenches her arm from its socket trying to arrest her momentum. The load-balancing harness does its work, though, allowing her to sweep through a quick 90-degree turn. She cuts the line and starts running again, approaching Vorthuzahl from the side. When she's five yards away, her lips peel back from her teeth. When she's three yards away, the knot in her hair finally gives up, and it billows out behind her like a war-banner. When she's two yards away, she leaps, her fist glowing golden as she drives it towards Vorthuzahl's ribcage. There's nothing fancy about it--no delicate twists of life-energy, no careful channeling. It is not the proper use of the technique, because Ida hasn't finished learning it yet--she just has to use what she has to survive this moment. Golden light burns between her fingers. She's burning her own lifeforce to hurt Vorthuzahl--to make him hurt.
Momentum carries her through, even though it really shouldn't. Between that and the ice, Vorthuzahl has just entered a very dangerous situation. The Ley Point is at his back, after all, and Ida is literally trying to punch him into it.
"Filgaia rejects your kind, Vorthuzahl," Ida says. Something twists in her chest, and she remembers being held under the night sky. "And I reject YOU!"
GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has activated a Force Action! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has attacked Vorthuzahl with School of the Demon Fist! GS: Ida Everstead-Rey has completed her action. GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Ida Everstead-Rey's School of the Demon Fist for 141 hit points! GS: Vorthuzahl takes a solid hit from Cassidy Cain's Now Is The Hour for 116 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Jacqueline Barber has posed.
Jacqueline watches as her opponent is riddled with bullets after being sent upward by her pillar. She watches him, her gaze cold, and brandishes her Crest again. He cowers before her.
'I should just kill him. Just like he tried to tried to kill her...'
Jacqueline shuts her eyes tight as this thought comes unbidden to her mind, and shakes her head. ...No. That wasn't like her. Even he was someone she didn't want dead. However, whether or not she decided to go through with it, her brief moment of hesitation is enough. He slips away, and any attempt to pursue him would be foolhardy in this ice wasteland.
With a sigh, Jacqueline returns the Medium to her bags and draws a couple of bottles out of her bags. She takes one for herself and offers the other Matilda. The bright red liquid inside each is a tonic of warmth and vitality, to help restore and maintain energy after that fight.
"Here...we should probably try to reach the others." Jacqueline says, looking off into the distance where fights are still raging. By the time they get over there, however, they may very likely have already concluded...
...Or perhaps they will have only just begun.
<Pose Tracker> Vorthuzahl has posed.
Venom seeps in, caustic. Destructive. A match for the blood of the Metal Dragon, until it's thrashing arrests and a surge of power sears through it's scales to burn it all away. It does not dislodge the foul presence of one 'Cassidy' however, and her blade burns deep, cutting through flesh that tries to heal in her wake, in towards and eye that closes. There, she almost has it. There, her new prize waits, blood spilling out to sear at her arm and scald her flesh.
Her blade is forced to twist with the sudden, overwhelming impact of Ida's fist plowing through metal, cracking great, giant ribs, and unleashing a torrent of energy that should destroy her. Should cook her in place. But the gathered chi that hums in the air, the pain that crackles against 'Ida's' skin, suddenly swirls with the bastion of her ancestors, the legacy of bravery in the face of certain defeat.
A reprieve from fate, perhaps.
Cassidy dislodges a great big scale, half impaled on her sword, and Vorthuzahl ROARS!
Fire spills every which way, cascading over the metal demon's form, out into a whirlwind of destruction, and onto what remains of the ice.
Then Metal Dragon impact Leyline.
There is a flash, and no one in this cavern, no one for a hundred miles can draw breath, hung on the edge of a pin, time freezes as energy lances outwards in jagged cracks, searing through rocks in realtime, while everything else remains blissfully frozen.
FA-TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!
Time rushes back in, and the explosion ripples outward. Cassidy will feel her hair blow back, before being blown skyward. What happens to Ida, Vorthuzahl doesn't see. Because he is blinded by the flash as he is tossed outward, through rock, through a temple, through air.
<Pose Tracker> Matilda Whitehead has posed.
Matilda... takes a long, slow breath, closing her eyes and putting Freischütz away for now. The pistol and knife come out again as she advances at first... but she lowers them and awkwardly shoves the knife in a pocket as Jay offers her a bottle.
Matilda takes a long, deep drink, steadying herself. The world seems a little less hostile for just a moment, as foolish as that is. "You're right, of course," Matilda replies, nodding to Jay. "... Ah -- can you take point? I think I have to reload."
Sure enough, she starts to do that, dumping spent brass out of her revolver and replacing it. ... she could swear she fired more than the one -- no, that was with Freischütz... wasn't it? Something about this place is -- disorienting.
... a fact helped not at all, of course, by that massive shockwave, by the seming split-second skip in time that leaves Matilda reeling, despite being fairly far from the point of impact.
<Pose Tracker> Lady Harken has posed.
A few heated exchanges ago, Harken might have decided that Riesenlied was too dangerous to leave alive after watching her prop up Filgaia's various fighters with her empathic strength and ablative energy shields. But a few heated exchanges, and a hazy clouding of memories later, and it doesn't seem to catch Harken's attention whatsoever. Her breath is uneven and ragged, the unfamiliar sword feeling strangely comfortable in her oversized grip.
"You're delusional." spits the Quarter Knight at the greviously wounded Jack van Burace, relinquishing her grip on the sword. Whether it later survives the wroth of being wielded by such an inhuman monster is a good question. "She is dead." the words escape Harken's lips, but she doesn't really comprehend their meaning. Why would the name the blonde man spoke of register with her at all? It's just a plum-tickling mystery. She brusquely shoves Jack with her empty hands, finding him unworthy of strangling to death. More to the point: the piercing keen inside of her skull has become un-ignorable. "And soon, you will join her."
Vorathuzahl increasingly rages out of control, and now Yarobeleedt is in full retreat and Riesenlied seems to have sealed the ship off from invading hands, kiboshing the Quarter Knight's primary objective. This is looking increasingly like a loss, and Lady Harken does not like to lose.
But that appears to be what's going on. Fei Fong Wong presses the attack, seizing the moment. The constant flux of extreme temperatures is beginning to try the patience on Harken's masterwork armour. Even for the youngest of the Quarter Knights, they don't make armour out of the stuff you survive re-entry with. Worse than that, the spirited young man is perpetually picking up speed, and is unrelentingly spirited. Fog thickens before Harken's vision, and her technique suffers accordingly. "You... smiling even as you strain against your leash? Hah..." she sounds spiteful, and bizarrely exhausted, even as the scarlet plate armor on her form cracks and begins to chip. An oversized pauldron shatters into quicksilver shards.
The giant is definitely slowing down. She swivels to face Lily Keil, whose eyes drink of the precious ambient light, dark pits of power. Azrael rises from where it lies in the snow, returning to the Quarter Knight's hands, but it offers little protection against the magical assault that soon follows. The first dazzling burst of negative energy, through which all the world's colours seem inverted and dizzying and wrong, knocks the demon to one knee. "Ah, you ever aim to please..." she hisses with a sinister smile on her lips. "What is it, that makes you so different from the rest of the herd, the cowards...?"
Leon might be reeling from the injury sustained mere moments prior, but shows no sign of faltering. Indeed, drawing upon the strength of memories and finding a moment of inner clarity, he finds it strangely simply to find a more suitable vector of attack on the Quarter Knight than when she was trying to omni-fight everyone at once when the cliffside still held firm. "Tch, you know..." Harken rumbles ominously as the Argent Divider glows brilliantly with the hue of distant stars, becoming a weapon of light. Just like that one in Lacour.
Lacour?
That Harken cannot remember it clearly doesn't appear to trouble her greatly, as instinct eclipses reason. "You and your woman are powerful, but sometimes, you lack imagination..." there is an almost otherworldly and eerie quality to her voice, a kind of serenity just waiting to be disrupted. Leon brings his weapon down with a furious and just stroke, and Argent Divider's blade of light bites through the fractured armour as easily as butter--but the scarlet-haired woman has opted to slow the blade's descent with her outstretched palm. There is now a sizzling hole in her hand, but her head remains unsplit. "Ah--it hurts, you know? It really hurts...!" it doesn't sound like a complaint, so much as a realization: this hurts, and it's strange. Why didn't I notice earlier?
Noeline's voice does reach through the fog, at least. And Harken being so greviously wounded, and addled by memories unfurling somewhere in her noggin, gives her the time she needs to recover. "Mother, Mother, Mother..." Harken hisses as if the name doesn't actually bring her that much joy. She covers her face with her un-ruined hand, and starts to laugh hoarsely. "You think I'm so blind? You think you're so clever, like you've figured out some great secret? You great trickster! Fleeing to protect your own hide, while Siegfried works himself to death to find a way forward!"
The scythe threatens to finish what Argent Divider could not, and Harken grabs the blade with her other hand, squeezing tightly. Her pupils have shrunk to pinpricks. Blood seeps from her fingers where the trickster's weapon cuts through the thinner plate, notably crimson and not quicksilver. "It's because of you!" her grip tightens, and any normal weapon would probably shatter at this point (but not this one!) "It's all because of you! I should have known nothing good would come of you!"
Uh-oh. It appears that Noeline has enraged Harken again to the point that she's becoming combat-capable, steam rising from her ruined armour. She might be down, but not out: the Quarter Knight is starting to struggle back to her feet, and turns a shoulder towards Elly just in time for the piercing bolt of electromagnetically-accelerated fluid traveling at some appreciable fraction of C to lance through her upper arm, instead of her heart. That's a win.
There's no telling what illusions cloud Harken's vision in this moment, but surely, her erratic madness is a result of them. Something inside of her head snaps, a little whisper that pushes her over the line, and she rises back up to her full height despite the myriad of weapons perforating her form and the wounds they've inflicted. The Quarter Knight sweeps one of those monstrously large arms, trying to throw Leon clear. Or at least dislodge his blazing sword of light from her hand before he can make a second stroke and behead her. She relinquishes Noeline's scythe and tries to backhand her away from her, lunging, grabbing again, trying to strangle her. There's something primal about this fit that definitely reminds her of Lacour.
"THEY did this to me! THEY're the reason I'm like this, but you wouldn't know anything about that!" Harken is screaming at Noeline as if she's to blame for something, here.
The fit culminates rather visibly. An odd phenomenon, like violet liquified fire, ebbs from Lady Harken's eyes and wounds, before boiling away with an unstable crackle. It's the only warning given that something is deeply wrong, before terrifying force erupts from the Quarter Knight's form. A lashing appendage of phantom light, it is at once an explosion, an arm, a sword, its shape difficult to pin down. But it happened before at Lacour, and it's happening again now. The loss of control threatens to throw everyone currently engaged with Harken, well, off of Harken. Except for Jack. He'll just get ragdolled despite lying there doing nothing mean to her.
Curiously, Jack might note, the towering beast of a Metal Demon sounds a lot more like some random girl he used to know despite her freaking out in a very untowards way. Weird coincidence.
GS: Lady Harken takes 7 damage from Poison! GS: Lady Harken has completed her action. GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has activated a Force Action! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Lily Keil with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Leon Albus with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Noeline with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Jack Van Burace with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Fei Fong Wong with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Elhaym van Houten with Loss of Control! GS: Lady Harken has attacked Riesenlied with Loss of Control! GS: Riesenlied guards a hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 89 hit points! GS: Fei Fong Wong takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 151 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Riesenlied has posed.
The enormous impact creates heat -- so much heat, such that even the unnatural frost of Hadal Temple cannot sustain it. It is the heat of a legendary creature thought lost to myth, one that melts away at the primeval ice that has lingered over centuries untold... such a power is now within the grasp of Dragonlord Vorthuzahl, as he impacts upon the Ley Point and erupts it with such force that it swells and rises as a thin line tht spreads outwards.
When the flash descends, what is left of the ice does not melt, so much as crack.
The miasma intensifies.
There is a strangeness in the air, a genuinely abysmal antiquity that touches the eye and glimpses archaic vistas towards it. The sensation of crawling insects and writhing worms dig at the back of the mind. It abandons all thought of callous rationalism. Five hundred years of recorded human knowledge seems dim in its bluish surface of implacable presence.
Piece by piece, chunks of the crystalline lake that rest at the basin of Hadal Temple breaks. Fissures run deep and clear, and with an unsatisfying hiss, the ice splits apart like tectonic plates shifting. A deep quake shears the very ground, making it difficult to stand. And within the depths of the brackish water too murky for light to gaze through...
-It- rises.
<Pose Tracker> Primarch of Muse -Rahab- has posed.
This Thing, inspiring the instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy. It is vaguely anthropoid, with an octopus-like head. A grotesque and disorganised mass of eye-studded feelers writhes underneath, each of them bloated and slothful in how they wriggle and lash. It is a Thing of bloated corpulence, laced with undecipherable characters so remote to any kind of linguistic kinship.
...Call upon my Name...
It is horrible, because its presence seems so alien, suggestive of unhallowed cycles of life in which Filgaia has taken no part.
Yet, it is perhaps more horrible... because it so clearly contradicts that notion, drawing from concepts the human mind can comprehend. The crest of Muse shines upon a fixture on its forehead. This is no alien thing. This... is a creature of Filgaia.
...and walk beyond the Ley...
It sups upon the very point of light that it cradles upon, bulging and gluttonous feeding upon the very planet's lifeblood as it has for so long. And it has awoken, now.
GS: Noeline takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 79 hit points! GS: Lily Keil guards a hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 99 hit points! GS: Fei Fong Wong used the Force Action Protect! He takes Lady Harken's attack on Elhaym van Houten on himself! GS: Fei Fong Wong has activated a Force Action! GS: CRITICAL! Fei Fong Wong critically Guards a hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 38 hit points! GS: Poison and Cripple! Statuses applied to Fei Fong Wong! GS: Jack Van Burace takes a solid hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 162 hit points! GS: Leon Albus takes a glancing hit from Lady Harken's Loss of Control for 83 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Jack Van Burace has posed.
'Weak!'
It rings in Jack's brain as he tears the sword free of himself. More crimson splattering on the ice around him as he struggles to raise.
'Useless!'
He shakes his head viciously, Hanpan's healing magics trying to keep at least some of the blood inside of him as he takes a shaky step forward.
'You could have the power if you only grasp it. You felt it before. All you must do is call for it...'
Then Harken backhands him away and he falls again. Her words sinking into his skull like daggers. But...he struggles again, head snapping up. "...how do you know that name?" Eyes wide and staring. "HOW?!" He doesn't know where he finds breath enough to shout but he does. His struggles to raise cause him to push up to one knee, reaching for a stance again even as others pile onto the form of the Quarter Knight.
'Take it.' The Trial Knight's voice is incessent. 'Give in. Use it.'
He stares at Harken, she's wounded. She's out of control. Something wrong is going on with her. And he knows it...vulnerable. Anger pulses within him. Unconciously his hand twitches towards that amulet...
Then Harken's voice shifts. Changes. The deepness fades to something just on the verge of what he remebers. That tone. Almost there. Almost right almost...
"Elemia.." A breath as her words register. He doesn't comprehend yet but they register. What is...
And then that wave of force slams into him, knocking him from his feet for a third time. Sending him skidding across the icy ground to slam hard against a rock.
Feebily he moves as Hanpan, knocked flailing from his shoulder, sampers though the blood colored snow back towards him.
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
What's with her, Fei wonders. She's behaving so strangely. It's not strange for a warrior to behave oddly as the tide of battle turns, but this is not typically how it goes. Usually there's panic, anger, fear, this kind of strange exhausted accusations, can she see behind his eyes? But even stranger is when she 'realizes' something hurts. It's not a complaint, Fei realizes, what's going on? It's even familiar.
Fei suddenly grimaces, holding his own head. Why does he feel empathy with her? Why does this feel so familiar??
They did this to me. They're the reason I'm like this, but you wouldn't know anything about that
Those aren't Id's words, but they resonate with him. Fei's assault comes up short in the worst possible moment.
Elly live, he thinks, as he steps in front of the explosion. He is stabbed all across his body by faster than fast draws as the scythe tears through him. Fei is thrown back, cracking his head against a cavern wall and he drops down on his feet. He raises his fist into the air, as if to strike again.
We're the same, she and I.
And then the energy drains out of Fei's body. Something happens nearby even as he tilts forward. Something is awakening. It's clawing at the lock on his door. It wants to get in, why does it want to get in so badly? It's already crowded in there!
Fei crashes to the ground and, for a moment, just a moment, closes his eyes.
<Pose Tracker> Fei Fong Wong has posed.
ONE THOUSAND YEARS AGO
"...increase the output by 12 percent."
"Roger."
A pulsating flame roares in the background; the thrum of machinery ebbs and flows as the fluctuation of energy echoes through the cabling. A glop of thick blue fluid distends within its chamber.
A long-eared woman in a lab coat stares towards a device in her hand. It shimmers with a crest -- the crest of Muse. "It's reacting... more. Increase the power further -- we aren't seeing the results we expect."
HE gets deja vu a lot, HE thinks. Why is HE getting it now?
"B-but this is past the container's established threshold--"
"more."
A dull siren is heard in the distnace -- and the ground begins to shake. The woman's lips thin as she turns and frowns towards HIM. "I expect those will be our 'guests'. You may evacuate to the shelter if you like."
HE looked over his shoulder for a long moment. What was this feeling of guilt coming from? Could he just evacuate? He looked back towards the Elw. "No. Your people can't bear this burden alone. Humans have to help too, or we'll both pay the price."
What an idealistic thought. In the end who really paid the price?
"Ma'am, unexpected resonance from the--- aagh!"
The woman whips her head, her eyes widening...
...and within the glass tube at the centre of the room, past the folds upon folds of liquid that agitatedly pulse...
...an eye stares back at her.
But why does he feel like it's reaching for HIM?
With the Primarch awakened, priorities shift...this scene is concluded in 2018-01-13: Dead and Dreaming.