2023-01-21: White Light
- Log: White Light
- Cast: Georg Heldalf, Seraph Harmaus, Hiro, Lydia Seren, Kaguya, Layna Manydays, Seraph Lanval, Margaret, Zed, White Knight Leo, Rixia, Magilou, Shige Kiwako, Pearl
- Where: Artorius' Throne
- Date: January 21, 2023
- Summary: A confrontation with the Lord of Calamity comes, at the heart of Artorius's Throne. The way to Pentagulia lay past him... but he is quite the wall, and he has his own revelations to bring to the fore.
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
There is one final trek.
It is not such a long one. Once the wounded are seen to -- with some staying behind to guard, to deal with any Hellions that might come after -- there is merely the path up to two large double doors, which lead into the throne room at the heart of Artorius's Throne. The doors open to reveal a massive stone room, which is open to the sky -- a sky that is a storm of Malevolence. It churns, like a cyclone.
The center of it is over this room. Past the throne is a gaping, open pit that leads into sheer darkness. The room has three walls -- that pit is a chasm in the mountains itself. It is as much a balcony as a throne room, though it seems some damage was done to this place in ancient days to make it so.
On one wall, there is a massive globe of pyreflies. Some sorcery suspends it there -- several gemstones, built into the wall, with arcane lines and sigils between them -- and that floating globe has the slumbering form of the Shepherd, Sorey, inside it. It is his prison, it would seem.
Standing at the pit, facing those who enter, is Heldalf.
The former Imperial General has been transformed -- though this was long ago, as they now know. His head has leonine features, with pale grey skin; his eyes blaze with an unholy light, and his beard and hair seem to form a mane. He is clad in black armor, which is closer to coat at times. His body seems to be a core of burning violet Malevolent fire -- and both his hands and feet are clawed and metallic. His entire body seems to become like smoke at the edges.
"So," Heldalf says. "You come. You come to see my ascension -- the moment that I free the Silver Star from its future. Try your might against me, if you would." He raises a clawed hand before him. "It will avail you not!"
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
The Lord of Malevolence -- and his captive -- are not alone. Standing before the floating orb and the arcane lines that keep it and the Shepherd within captive, is a voice that may be familiar to some. Wreathed in the flames of Malevolence, it bears the form of an armored knight in armor of pearly pale-grey, with fine decorations in gold, particularly the small suggestions of pointed ears on the helm. It bears a sword composed of brilliant white light.
"Yes... it that stands before I and my master... finds its destruction! No more shall you or Althena deny us!!"
The voice may be the more familiar. The Hellionized Seraph Harmaus would bar the way before all who would attempt a rescue of the trapped Shepherd.
It has, indeed, found its Lord at long last.
DC: Georg Heldalf switches forms to The Lord of Calamity!
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
The price of moving forward. Facing the Lord of Calamity when they are all worn from the battle against the Trial Knight, Ragnell, and Marivel.
Moving on without Talia at their side for this. He felt awful about that. She'd been with them for so long on this journey, and they'd faced a lot for her sake - she'd committed so much to theirs.
The Trial Knight exacted a heavy price.
The air is so thick with malevolence, an open pit into a yawning abyss. The pyreflies are curious but Hiro can't even contemplate their presence.
Hiro looks upon the former Imperial General- then to Harmaus with his orb. Anger is writ upon his brow, but after a moment, he tears his eyes away from the Hellionized Seraph, "... Your ascension?"
Hiro inquires, as if in disbelief, "After everything you've done, after everything you've suffered from that curse Michael cast on you-" The curse should have never happened, the price was too high, too horrific but...
"-have you really learned NOTHING?" His tone is just, aghast, "You were like a father to Leo, you mean the world to him! Do you have any idea how he feels seeing you like this?! Seeing the horrors you've inflicted upon this world? Have you become so twisted that you don't even CARE?"
There's just more and more heat to what he says, the longer he speaks, "... We're putting a stop to this now. Everyone! Let's show him all that our journey here has taught us! Together!"
Hiro draws his sword, takes a running leap, and brings it down, two-handed, in a vicious slash right towards his Leonine head, "DODGE THIS!"
GS: Hiro has attacked Georg Heldalf with Poe Sword! GS: Hiro has gained 2 Combo! GS: Hiro has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia Seren was running late. She rushes by the KK and friends platform and sees the wounded Talia and says, "Oh shit...! Talia!!" She slows down a bit to check if the healing is taking effect before adding, "Uggh!! This sucks!! I'll be right back after I give the guy who did this a real clobbering!"
She runs off before this can be seriously interrogate, bursting past the throne room to the pit of darkness. She seems confused by the hoard of pyreflies but ultimately points a finger at Heldalf.
"YOUUUUU!" She shouts. "How dare you hurt Talia!! Well unfortunately for you, your HEELIONS couldn't stop me!"
She puffs out some smoke because they were Electric Heelions.
"I'm gonna beat you so bad that people will leave them alone finally and they can just have little happy lives with only occassional molting problems!!"
She fishes out her Silver Star Medium (not THAT kind of Silver Star) and raises it into the sky.
"And you made Leo feel the anxieties how dare you!! He's a good guy!! You should've appreciated him more!!! And leaving a town to die when you have a responsibility to protect it is an abuse of power especially when you are in the military saving the villages is what they hire you for it's part of the social contract!! It's like how you give some power to the police so that they protect you but if they violate that contract by arresting a perfectly reasonable asteroid-headed person for crimes they didn't even know she committed yet, then that is a forfeiture of that contract!?"
She exhales out slowly and then sends a blast of Light coming down towards Heldalf like a SAT laser.
GS: Lydia Seren spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Lydia Seren has attacked Georg Heldalf with Beautiful Morning! GS: Lydia Seren has gained 1 Combo! GS: Lydia Seren has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Hiro's Poe Sword for 133 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Guard bonus activated! GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Lydia Seren's Beautiful Morning for 150 hit points! GS: Poison applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
One more task...
"No," Kaguya says, when Heldalf speaks of his ascension. "We came to--" Kaguya pauses. She thinks about what she was going to say, and how she was going to say it. "...We came to stop you," she finishes instead, opting to go a little more serious.
She turns to Harmaus. "I guess you found your 'truth', huh..."
Back to Heldalf. She draws the Zeikfried from her hip, hefting it up towards the ceiling in a ready pose, her posture loose and lean. "And if you want to give me the first shot..."
"That's just fine with me."
Fire swirls about Zeikfried's barrel as Kaguya points it forward. "I'm with you Hiro," she says, as he calls them together.
"Heldalf..."
She fires, and a blazing round of burning magic erupts forward for Heldalf, which will explode into a magical seal on his person.
"I swore I'd stop you, on my own name. And today I fulfill that oath!"
GS: Kaguya has attacked Georg Heldalf with Fire-Binding Shot! GS: Kaguya has gained 1 Combo! GS: Kaguya has completed her action. GS: COUNTER! Georg Heldalf counterattacks Kaguya with Counter Attack! GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Kaguya's Fire-Binding Shot for 64 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Blind applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: Hyper applied to Kaguya! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Kaguya suffers a terrible blow from Georg Heldalf's Counter Attack for 117 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
The time has come. Layna stands before the double doors. Beyond, the Lord of Calamity and those who stand with him awaits them. Layna rolls her neck and cracks her knuckles to prepare herself for the fight ahead.
"Well, me hearties... This is it. A more motley crew's never been seen, but it's been an honor fightin' by your side." Layna says. "We're all gettin' outta this on the other side. When we do, let's grab a drink, aye?"
The doors open and Layna strides through. There, she is greeted by the sight of Heldalf... as well as the imprisoned sorey, and Harmaus in his Hellion form.
"...Looks like he's got company." Layna comments, then turns her attention toward the Lord of Calamity himself. ...This isn't their first meeting. They've fought, long ago, in the Pleasing Gardens. She didn't know his name, then. It was a fight beyond victory - more for survival than anything. He shattered the weapons that she had been using up to that point, the mark of the legacy of the man she once called her father - and in so doing, set her on the path from straying from that legacy.
In any other situation, she'd thank him for it. Instead, she tips her hat in greeting.
"Heldalf." She says. "...See, that's gonna be a problem. 'Cause we intend to seize this world's future for ourselves, aye?"
She lowers herself into a combat stance, and grins at Hiro's speech, as Kaguya says they're here to stop him.
"Aye! Well said, me hearties, well said! Let's go, then! The world's waitin' with bated breath how this ends!" She says... and then she charges right for Heldalf. Her right fist becomes wreathed in fire, and with an incantation she punches forward. A searing shockwave of wind and flame launches out, heading straight for Heldalf!
GS: Layna Manydays has attacked Georg Heldalf with Searing Tempest! GS: Layna Manydays has gained 1 Combo! GS: Layna Manydays has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Layna Manydays's Searing Tempest for 59 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Poison applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
After seeing the last trial before the heart of the Domain through and helping ensure Talia will survive her wounds, Seraph Lanval goes back within his present Vessel (Layna) to prime himself for the confrontation. While his spiritual strength is considerable, bolstered further by his connection to a greater spirit entity of Filgaia, it is not absolute.
If any of them were to waver, they wouldn't have pushed past K.K., Ragnell, and Marivel. Any speculation about Siegfried has to wait, or else there won't be anything left to speculate.
Both Layna and Lanval both know what each other are about and trust one another within the depths of this blighted Domain, and Layna takes the lead for both of them - both in form and in words as she strikes forth with her fist.
A brilliant aquamarine sphere of light escapes from Layna in the wake of her initial blow, showing the form of that portly, long-bearded manifestation of the Water Seraph Lanval, he who is filling in for Prime Lord Lailah in the many quirks of fate that have led here, whirling outward with his drinking gourd like a priest might spread sanctified water.
What flippancy and silliness he shows to the concept of 'anatomical limits of flexibility' gives way to form, fluidity, and grace as he puts forth his own might to push back against the ambience of thickest Malevolence from swallowing him, Layna, and the others whole as much as it is a whirling strike for the Lord of Calamity himself.
"'m thinkin' we won't be sheein' any of that, Heldalf," Lanval says with his eyes closed in this singular moment of humor as he opens them half-way to the brilliant glow of aquamarine underneath, as the Oracle of Schturdark joins his Seer of Water.
He can trust those accosting the Hellionized Harmaus to save the Shepherd in turn.
GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Georg Heldalf with Layabout's Lariat! GS: Seraph Lanval has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Lanval has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Through it all.
Through the meaningless butchery. The suffering revelations. The enormous insinuations dropped first by Heldalf himself during the aforementioned butchery, then by the Trial Knight and his allies, the Seraph Ragnell and the "Miss Marivel" of Filgaia. Dark insinuations; not merely sacrifice but sacrifice of an innocent and of a child.
Through, too, the fact that they are going into a lair of deep Malevolence. Through THAT, as well as the hellions and Fell Wyverns and menacing portents. Through seeing Magilou speak with darkling certainty of the horror that might come with a RED moon. (Well, hearing it, too. Hearing was the important part.) Through seeing the White Knight Leo suffer in the hooks and agonies of his mentor revealing himself - if it truly is him (Margaret has hopes, though thin) - to have been a wicked man. Through chaos, vile exposure, and the touch of the Abyss, Margaret has soldiered on...
Because the only way out is through.
Heldalf, Margaret expected. She had nothing to say to the Lord of Calamity. What would there be to say? Margaret doubts there is anything she, a mere witch of the hedge who put on airs, could have to say to a lord of this sort. Or at least not much a Lord would care to hear. Her lip curls at the sight of him, but there is another problem. A prison holds the Shepherd.
And the prison has a guardian.
"Terribly sorry," Margaret says to Harmaus, "but I'm just too young and full of juices to heed your better understanding. I suppose you're just going to have to prove to me how foolish I was to confront the profound power of your darkness, won't I?" She's looking past Harmaus, towards that prison. Taking a deep breath, she lets it out, and raises up her left hand. Her fingers twirl around, and the index and middle finger come together with her thumb as her lips purse.
Looking over her shoulder, she says, "Shall we?" and to Rixia, "Let's go to 'that place' again. Now we know what we're doing." Her hand suddenly comes apart; a snap averted, but there's an invocation on the air, a crackling surge of energy and velocity up the spines of those who have taken this road.
Margaret glows in a different color, drawing her sword. (One of two remaining.) "En garde."
GS: Margaret has attacked Zed with Thunder Road! GS: Margaret has attacked Rixia with Thunder Road! GS: Margaret has attacked Shige Kiwako with Thunder Road! GS: Margaret has gained 1 Combo! GS: Margaret has completed her action. GS: Zed accepts Margaret's Thunder Road for 0 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Zed!
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
So hey this is a whole lot of malevolence roiling around in here. Walking through it all is vaguely like trying to wander through a gelatinous cube made entirely out of black currant jam. Specifically black currant jam. Grape jam is far too pure, nevermind a beloved staple of children's sandwiches everywhere. But black currant? Ain't nobody that likes that who doesn't have a soul pockmarked by the touch of evil. Even Zed, a being who is A) a demon and B) entirely too alien for this human-soul-stankiness finds his eyes watering as he makes his way deeper into the Hell of Malevolence.
Georg makes his pronouncement. Zed nods twice as if he understands completely what's going on. (He does not. He's only here because there is fights, and also because he owes someone a favor.) "Indeed! Indeed! The future is unstoppable, this I believe as well. Unstoppable as the unstoppable march of time. Unstoppable as the sands through the hourglass. Humu humu. It's up to everyone to determine whether those sands are golden with hope... or purple with despair...! But me... I'm just here for that guy," Zed says, instantly clarifying his motivation by thumbing over at Sorey, trapped in his bubble of pyreflies in the distance, "So, have fun everyone!"
THERE IS NOTHING FUN ABOUT THIS.
But Zed seems to be having it regardless, leaping forth with a spring in his step. His blade flashes out before him, shining with the light of distant stars... At the tools and methods binding Sorey in place! But surely, he alone will not be enough...!?
Fortunately, he's not alone! For in the last instant, Zed's sword and body are charged... WITH MAGIC POWER-UP LIGHTNING!!
...At least this time he has no more tan left to lose.
GS: Blitz! Zed has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Saint Arts - Starstrider's Valor! GS: Zed has gained 1 Combo! GS: Zed has completed his action. GS: Rixia accepts Margaret's Thunder Road for 0 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Rixia! GS: Quick applied to Margaret! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus solidly guards Zed's Saint Arts - Starstrider's Valor for 68 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
With the Trial Knight gone, the done they built of their own willpower is gone, too; the full weight of Heldalf's Malevolence bears down on Leo as he walks onward, towards those great doors. Every footstep seems to take more effort than the last. Malevolence hangs about him, a bruise-colored miasma speckled with black and red. His arms ache. His armor is missing scales, torn off by K.K.'s black hole. There are others here: his Guards, kind strangers, even people who should be his enemies. He feels at once glad for their presence and so desperately alone.
The doors open, and Leo follows the others across the threshold. His gaze alights on Heldalf for a moment, and his eyes grow dark and flinty. Then he follows the trail of Pyreflies up, and--
"What have you DONE with him?!" That Heldalf has kept him around is... a sign that Sorey still lives, in there, but why the Pyreflies? What ascension? Leo draws his blade, fumbling it a little with fingers still cold from K.K.'s shadow-sorcery.
'You were like a father to Leo, you mean the world to him!'
'He's a good guy!! You should've appreciated him more!!!'
Hiro and Lydia defend him, and validate him, stoking the feeble, guttering flame in Leo's heart. "Heldalf," he says. "I remember a man who took a young boy under his wing, and taught him the way of a true knight. Not just martial prowess, but honor, compassion, justice, faith. That boy became a man, and that man became a Hero. And all this while, you were suffering."
"I was not there," Leo says, and his voice breaks. "But I'm here. And if anything of that man exists, I will save him, or I will die trying." Tears slick his eyes. He glances sidelong at Margaret, makes a gesture of benediction at her and the others with his free hand. Then, he focuses everything on Heldalf.
"En guarde," Leo says, and his blade cuts the air. A sizzling POP echoes through the room, followed by the howl of racing energy as a Demon Fang springs from his blade, and roars towards Heldalf's chest.
GS: White Knight Leo has attacked Georg Heldalf with Demon Fang! GS: White Knight Leo has gained 3 Combo! GS: White Knight Leo has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
To say Rixia's running on fumes is... perhaps it's inaccurate, but she definitely looks like she's propped up by something other than verve and pluck at this point -- with the intensity of the Malevolence drenching her unfortified spirit, all that's keeping her afloat is the constant drip of artificial Symbological junctioning keeping her emotions in check.
You know, the nanomachines are sampling her The Goods. Basically.
Still, the wreathe of Malevolence seems to be hanging off off her, like a faint cloak made out of flame -- if flame were a violet, violent morass of awfulness. Her eyes look dull and tired, but she's still standing and holding together as she marches in with her fellow Drifters and adventurers, gunblade at the ready.
She simply looks towards Heldalf -- the man Leo calls a second father -- and how his form has been so transformed, it must barely resemble what he used to, in the past. Still, the irony of fighting a father figure and a warrior that appears like a Ronso is... not lost to her.
Maybe one day, she too will walk that plank between one and perdition.
Heldalf speaks of ascension. "You know... Althena promised the Silver Star freedom and wonder and glory too, back when I was just a kid. I remember it like it was yesterday. She appeared on every surface that could reflect her, even the muddy pools of water on the broken roads between battlefields..."
Rixia remembers The Plan, though; that Pearl, Kaguya and the others are going to execute, and that her role here is to, in Hiro's words, "be a meat shield" for long enough for everything to take place.
She turns towards the orb -- where Sorey is being held captive. Was this the boy who was Shepherd? He doesn't look any older than her, if at all; again and again, they put everything onto the shoulders of kids... perhaps it's the Malevolence starting to whisper to her, but the term "Shepherd" was starting to sound pretty dirty to her.
She doesn't know Harmaus, but she doesn't need the Sleeping Lion's warnings to know the armored knight with the cat-eared helm, wielding the sword of brilliant white light, is a threat.
Rixia's eyes narrow a little at him. "You adults promise the world to us, but you never follow it up. I'm... so sick of lying adults..." She looks to Margaret as she looks over the shoulder and invites her to battle. "Miss Margaret. I'll help save him. The Shepherd," she calls out.
>> tactical level 3, strategic parameters confirmed
>> inventorying available magic for survival in close-range skirmish
>> junctioning... ... ...
>> -WARNING- -WARNING- stocked paramagic integrity compromised due to foreign corruptive matter
Rixia flinches for a moment. What happened? The Junction should usually work... "Come on... just do it... I need your power right now... no matter what."
>> ... ... user input accepted
>> prioritising: tactical level user objective
>> de-prioritising: long-term user survival
>> junctioning... ... ...
Rixia's body seizes up a second time, and a faint flare-up of magic and power rises around her feet, up through to her arms; within this is the faint tinge of Malevolence, dissipating as soon as it rises; this is harder to notice in part because Margaret's surge of electricity starts to fluctuate within her, one source of power for another.
"For Miss Magilou's important one... for Mister Leo's sake... for Miss Margaret... I'll fight!!"
Rixia, for once, has no fear (but should she have no fear...?) as she charges in after Zed, the speed of the Thunder Road letting her drift to the opposing angle and wildly swing her blade in a violent circle of fire; she visibly whiffs Harmaus by a few inches, but--
There's a circular pattern of fiery Symbological mines in her wake, detonating seconds later as she disengages.
GS: Rixia has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Fated Circle! GS: Rixia has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"See to him, won't you?" Magilou says, first, of Harmaus, to Margaret. She speaks quietly, sotto voce, with veiled eyes. "I'd like you to do it. He was... a friend, once."
It's a vulnerable sort of aside. Dangerous, in an aura like this. And she does not ask for his salvation, though she does ask: "... and keep an eye on the fox girl, would you?" Rixia, that is. "She's trying so hard..."
Having trusted the feline knight to Margaret, Magilou strides forward, towards the pit. Towards --
"Heldalf," Magilou greets him, and her voice is a hollow sort of casual. "I see you've taken your coat off... it must have gotten so hot, no?" A particular vocal cadence; she remembers Talia's efforts, too.
"I've seen an awful lot of ascensions," she remarks, brows lifting. "I have to say... this one's quite a mess. Where is your parade, Heldalf? You can't have a proper ascension without a parade."
Does this matter?
Does anything else matter more?
A green Seraphic glyph alights, below Magilou's feet. "But even now you're properly dressed... is it hot in here, or is it just me?" Magilou switches from taunt to invocation, again, seamlessly, as she thrusts out her hand to summon a swirling tornado of flame around Heldalf. "Crown Fire!"
GS: Magilou has attacked Georg Heldalf with Crown Fire! GS: Magilou has gained 2 Combo! GS: Magilou's stances have changed from Counter to Avenger and Counter! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf partially guards Seraph Lanval's Layabout's Lariat for 107 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Riposte applied to Seraph Lanval! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Sufferer activated! GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from White Knight Leo's Demon Fang for 117 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Sufferer activated! GS: Gamble: Lowest! Georg Heldalf solidly guards Magilou's Crown Fire for 28 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Mighty applied to Magilou! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus fully evades Rixia's Fated Circle for 0 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated! GS: Rixia drains Seraph Harmaus! Rixia gains 7 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Shige Kiwako has posed.
Shige's struggling at this point. She's dogged though. Still wearing her mask and cloak. Trying to use it to force herself to 'stay in character'. To be what she thinks a guide should be when it's at the hardest. Not angry, not sad. Just there and understanding. The reason she chooses a blank mask. Behind it, she looks tired. She feels it too, but you can't stop. It's not the first time. Won't be the last.
She follows the others, lingering long enough to help with Talia. To refresh herself even with a few home brew remedies that may or may not be the sanest choice, but at the same time- that's a later problem.
She's stuck with both Rixia and Margaret, finding some excuse in the back of her head to do so. Might just be who she has fought with most recently. Might be that she's found some comfort in actually helping Rixia. She's not talking about it either way. This is why she's facing down another Seraph. This one she doesn't dub with a silly name that she knows better than to believe at this point. That doesn't matter though. "She's not who you should be concerning yourself with right now." She finally says, gathering her wits. Standing up straight, digging deep into the well that is... her. Something from earlier had spooked her, had her on edge. She still can't put her finger on it, but she knows she can't fall into that darkness. The arm is held out, the lantern is held before her high like a beacon.
"It's always a self proclaimed saint, isn't it." Is her response to Georg's attempt to 'save' the Silver Star. She doesn't have enough context, truth be told, but history's full of similar, right?
Either way, she nods to Margaret, "I'm here too." Trying to sound reassuring. Same to Rixia, "Be careful." She sounds tired. worn out, but trying. Sneaking another drink might not hurt right? Zed's speech sounds familiar though. "The endless march, right?" might as well borrow from earlier! It fits kinda. Either way, the lantern's cast light reveals a creeping shadow. A cold darkness that clings to the Seraph. That brings the chill of the beyond. Of silence.
GS: Shige Kiwako accepts Margaret's Thunder Road for 0 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Shige Kiwako has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Mute Horror! GS: Shige Kiwako has gained 1 Combo! GS: Shige Kiwako has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus solidly guards Shige Kiwako's Mute Horror for 0 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus's Mute Ward may block the effect! GS: Interrupt applied to Seraph Harmaus! GS: Mute blocked!
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
Pearl had held back for the battle with the Trial Knight. Whether it was prudence or fear of losing what she had, she couldn't say. But she walked with them here, in her robes, the First Not of Yevon. She looks at the Hellionized form of the General. The cat too, rambles. She looks past him- to the pyreflies. "...I see you have no issue defiling the dead." There are enough to make a fiend there, perhaps a strong one.
Hiro's anger, Kaguya's oath, Layna's defiance, Lanval's humorous rebuttal... And Leo's growing flame. Pearl starts to walk forward as well- calm as anything, to stand beside the commander.
"Rage can be twisted and misused, and it can be used to fuel horrid things." She places a hand on Leo's shoulder. "But sometimes rage and anger and fury tell can fuel us to finally do what is right... and cut through evil. I believe you can do what is right. Face the man who betrayed you as you. Not for anyone else."
Pearl steps back... and dances. A Spiran dance, wide movements and spinning steps, slow and deliberate- and the magics of the sea embrace Leo. The torrent rises in him- amidst all this fire and steal, the crashing waves of the sea move to crash with Leo's blows.
GS: Pearl has attacked White Knight Leo with Torrent Dance! GS: Pearl has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
"Of course I care, boy," Heldalf answers Hiro.
Heldalf raises his clawed hand, a barrier forming -- and Lydia's spell smashes into it, before piercing through and slashing into his arm. Motes of Malevolence flow out from it. He looks at Lydia -- and his eyes narrow. He doesn't know who Talia is. Someone he killed, perhaps. But, if he knew the name of everyone who died at his hand, then he would know the name of every resident of a dozen some odd villages in Hyland.
"Your bitterness is nothing to me," he says. "And those you care for, if they died at my hand, are forgotten. Embrace your defeat."
Then, his eyes settle back on Hiro, blazing. "But I have learned that despair must be harnessed. That we cannot escape it, and so we must MASTER it. I shall teach Leo this lesson, before this day is done!"
Hiro comes crashing down -- and his sword slams down into Heldalf's open palm. Sparks fly when his blade meets it, and then he slams his other hand forward, his massive palm smashing towards Hiro's midsection.
A moment later, Kaguya shoots him -- a magical round slamming into him, fire exploding out where it hits his armored shoulders. His eyes narrow, when it does. "You come bearing that weapon... and you swore an oath on your name. Then, you throw that name away!"
He swings out his right hand -- and the roaring head of a boar, in red and violet energy, explodes off his fist. It shoots out, barreling towards Lydia and Kaguya both, and threatens to pitch them backward with its sheer force. "I will show you the folly of making an oath you can never keep, girl! Mind your own world!"
He turns, then -- spotting Layna's tipped hat -- then grunts, and swings around his palm. He catches the searing shockwave that Layna hurls for him, and breaks through it with one mighty punch. "This world's future... you know not what it will be! And I will not entrust it to you!"
Then, he slams a fist down into the ground. A shockwave of white light explodes across the ground -- like a kiai strike -- towards Layna.
Heldalf rises, a moment later, as purified water strikes about him. Heldalf grunts, sharply, and his eyes narrow. "A Seer... and an Oracle. Strange, that Filgaia would send its champions here--and tragic. For I offer you the one salvation you can hope for!" the Lord of Calamity roars, even as he feels the sharp pain of that purified water hitting him.
Then, he throws a hand out -- and the ground under Lanval rumbles, before a large block of stone thrusts out of the earth and up for his feet.
"It is only beginning... Magillanica."
Heldalf says that name so simply; so easily. Fire explodes and erupts around Heldalf, burning into him. It scorches across his body -- and his eyes narrow at her. "And I shall show you. You think you have fallen to the depths of despair?" he says. "No. Witness!"
He raises a hand aloft. Sickly, violet dust explodes up around Magilou; to breath it in is to breath poison, to feel the lungs burn, to feel the eyes sting. An illness, carried in the earth.
Then, he looks towards Pearl. "The dead are gone, girl," Heldalf says. "And if you would claim the arts of Spira as yours... THEN LEARN THE LESSON THEY CANNOT!"
He looks, then towards Leo. "You ask the correct question, my disciple."
His eyes both narrow for a moment. "You may have realized that pyreflies hold Malevolence at bay," he says. "As have I. I have also learned that pyreflies can hold the Silver Flame of Purification at bay. And thus, the Shepherd is sealed -- and so might this Oracle and Seer, after I am victorious."
He swings up his hand. He catches the Demon Fang, though it explodes against his hand with not a small amount of pain. He grunts, then he thrusts out the sam hand -- and sends out the roaring, furious head of a boar. That huge wave of energy explodes at Leo and Pearl both, as they stand together, and threatens to engulf them. "There is nothing of that man left!" he shouts back to Leo. "My eyes have opened, Leo! Michael's curse... was also a blessing! For through Malevolence I could not banish, I had the power to withstand--to learn!"
His eyes blaze. "To learn..."
Thunder CRACKS in the distance. There is a roar, from the pit behind him. Heldalf continues to speak. "...to learn of Zophar. To learn of what I must do, to command the power to BREAK A GOD!"
GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Hiro with Palm Strike! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Lydia Seren with Beast! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Kaguya with Beast! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Layna Manydays with Karmic Stance! GS: Georg Heldalf enters a Counter stance! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 2 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Geo Rumble! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Magilou with Geostigma! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked White Knight Leo with Beast! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Pearl with Beast! GS: Georg Heldalf takes 27 damage from Poison! GS: Georg Heldalf has completed his action. GS: Hiro takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Palm Strike for 74 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst activated! GS: Pearl takes a solid hit from Georg Heldalf's Beast for 128 hit points! GS: Layna Manydays takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Karmic Stance for 72 hit points! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated! GS: COUNTER! Magilou counterattacks Georg Heldalf with Counter Attack! GS: Magilou suffers a terrible blow from Georg Heldalf's Geostigma for 82 hit points! GS: Dispel! Mighty removed! GS: Disease and Poison applied to Magilou! GS: FP up! Arcane Font activated! GS: CRITICAL! Kaguya solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Beast for 77 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Kaguya gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
Set in particular intervals about the sphere in which Sorey remains unconscious and suspended are several dark purple gemstones -- nearly black, were it not for their vibrant core -- and also importantly a great many inscribed and painted sigils in the Ancient Tongue. Purple light traces from these places to the sphere in which Sorey is caught. The working that is keeping the Pyreflies in place -- and keeping the Shepherd trapped -- is a mighty one, but not one that is absolutely immune to meddling.
Break the stones and interrupt the sigils, and the enchantment will shatter.
Of course, there is also the matter of the one that guards the seal.
BGM: Shoji Meguro - Hari-Hara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdZ_2QwqwQQ
"Yes." Harmaus answers Kaguya simply. "I has."
This -- all of this, right here, right now -- is his truth.
Margaret speaks of her defiance. A huffed laugh emanates from within the 'knight's helm. "Is not darkness... and is not light! Truth, is. All is... meaningless," Harmaus tells her. "It stands not against me long. It dies here. Dies, and never realizes 'true world'!"
For all his relative calm here in the heart of corruption, there is still that spiraling bit of the Seraph he'd been that comes nastily to the fore.
Light flares, briefly, within the depths of that pearly helm. "Lies...?" echoes Harmaus, its tone a dangerous one. "I am not liar!" it hisses. "I speaks of only truth! It, standing against me and my Lord... it dies," it concludes, that mania it still possesses settling out into a quasi-calm sea.
Zed's blade snaps out then, cracking one of the stones ensorcelled with the spells keeping the sphere of Pyreflies locked in place; a white light crackles up one of the shimmering beams but the enchantment does not break. The Hellionized Seraph turns as if to direct its vengeance upon him, but there is the fleeting intrusion of another that follows. Rixia.
Harmaus, for lack of a better word, overcompensates on its withdrawal from Zed's approximate vicinity; fiery Symbology travels in the line after where she'd failed to hit it (and failed to hit it in her failing to hit it) but...
Harmaus isn't the only thing here that is important to deal with, is it? Flames from that evaded spell lick across one of the sigils lining a gem lodged in the wall and there is again that bolt of white light that dances down the length of one of the beams but fails to dissipate it.
Neither does Harmaus get the opportunity to immediate turn on Rixia, either. A creeping shadow descents upon the would-be saint Harmaus, and though the chill of the beyond means little to an immortal, there is still cold grip that wraps around its core. Its light dims for a moment. It stops it for a moment. But only for a moment.
"Ah... it tries freeing it, yes? It gets past me not!" Harmaus declares, its helmetted head turning to regard the lot of them in turn as if afresh. It brandishing its bright, bright blade as its swings before itself, a wash of golden light smoldering with violet flame flooding towards the three who have approached it and its charge the most directly.
Sighting Margaret towards the back, Harmaus follows its swing with a skyward leap, light erupting as a terrible gold-black beam as it attempts to destroy her and eliminate what support she might lend the others.
It lands after but a moment more, taking up again its guardian stance before the sphere.
'Zophar', Heldalf speaks, for that was the being of which he had learned. Harmaus' full attention is on its Lord for the moment, rapt, as if this is the first of which it has heard this name.
In this moment, might it be possible to...?
GS: You cannot act while you still have attacks in queue. GS: You cannot act while you still have attacks in queue. GS: Lydia Seren takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Beast for 65 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst activated! GS: Georg Heldalf has canceled their attack on Seraph Harmaus. GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Magilou's Counter Attack for 52 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Power Burst, Guard bonus, and Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Rixia with Searing Halo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Zed with Searing Halo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Shige Kiwako with Searing Halo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Margaret with Novalight! GS: Interrupt expired! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Seraph Lanval with Geo Rumble! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Seraph Lanval has activated Force Action: Accelerate! GS: Seraph Lanval takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Geo Rumble for 72 hit points! GS: Mighty applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Interrupt! Attack weakened! GS: CRITICAL! Margaret solidly guards Seraph Harmaus's Novalight for 83 hit points! GS: FP up! Arcane Font activated! GS: Interrupt! Attack weakened! GS: Rixia takes a glancing hit from Seraph Harmaus's Searing Halo for 49 hit points! GS: Delay applied to Rixia! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Interrupt! Attack weakened! GS: Zed suffers a terrible blow from Seraph Harmaus's Searing Halo for 116 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Zed gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Delay applied to Zed! GS: Zed has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight! GS: White Knight Leo accepts Pearl's Torrent Dance for 0 hit points! GS: Burst, Hyper, and Surge applied to White Knight Leo! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: White Knight Leo takes a solid hit from Georg Heldalf's Beast for 105 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Gleam activated!
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
"If you think he needs to learn that lesson then you truly have nothing to teach him!" He yells, voice dripping with vehemence.
Hiro doesn't need to look at Leo to understand he's crying. It's such courage on display to face down a man who has become a monster, to shed tears for him - but then to step forward to stop him.
And Magilou, after her impassioned breakdown so fresh on his mind from not long ago right now he at least tries to read between the lines of her behavior, "Magilou... I wish it'd never happened. Now that we're here though? We're going to take responsibility and set things right."
While he never says a name he knows is on her mind, it's clear whom he means.
Sword meets palm, and as the palm then smashes out, Hiro twists, biting down to prevent him from crying out against that immense strength of the blow. It knocks him away, but he recovers enough to be on his feet.
He takes a moment to recover, holding his side, as Heldalf relates there's nothing of that man left. Thunder crackles, and his eyes widened, "What are you talking about!? How could that teach you anything of Zo..."
And then he remembers, the curse. The one that inflicted enough malevolence upon Lucia that at times she could hardly stand it. That people could think she truly was the Lord of Calamity.
Alarm writes its way onto his features, and Hiro just calls out, sounding disturbed.
"... You're crazy! Do you really think MALEVOLENCE will give you the power to challenge Zophar!? Do you have any idea what he's capable of!? What he can DO with it!?"
With some gestures, he imbues the air around Heldalf with howling life, seeking to hinder him at every turn.
"You're not ascending! You're playing right into his hands!"
GS: Hiro has attacked Georg Heldalf with Tempest! GS: Hiro has gained 1 Combo! GS: Hiro's stances have changed to Stoic! GS: Hiro has completed his action. GS: COUNTER! Georg Heldalf counterattacks Hiro with Counter Attack! GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Hiro's Tempest for 82 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Cripple and Mute applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Charge bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Ha! She's still alive and is totally getting healed up as we speak!" Lydia says. There's now decent odds that she's going to think HEldalf is responsible for Talia for the whole fight. She dashes suddenly away from the boar head though it does seem to wind her in doing so. She turns her gaze to Kaguya and blinks at her.
"Oh shit hey Kaguya, nice gun. That's a new gun. When'd you get that gun? I don't think I've seen a gun quite like that before. Can I take it apart and study it later? Maybe I can learn how to make another one and then you can duel wield, blam blam blam blam."
She makes a pair of fingerguns as she makes the noises.
She glances to Heldalf. "Zophar?" Pause. "What? If you wanted to break that asshole why didn't you join the Vile Fiends or somethin' and instead did a bunch of murder and warrin'? And I mean, I'M all for capping Zophar in the head but why do you care about capping Zophar in the head, how do you even know Zophar like I've seen nada evidence of the dude out there."
She backpedals a bit and asides to Kaguya, "You don't normally talk all dramaticlike like that but it's really cool like I'm imagining you taking a staff and slamming it to the floor like a wizard when you're saying that. I mean you have a gun not a staff I'm just speaking like what it feels like." She beams. "You're so good at the like hero drifter talk now I wanna treat you to some crepes."
She hops around a bit before throwing herself at Heldalf, carving upward with a blade that rips out of her arm and slides into her hand, she's aiming for that left side and arm with the swipe.
"Isn't all this stuff you're doing gonna make breaking Zophar pretty moot I mean it's not like there's gonna be much of a world left with this method by my understanding? From the videos I watched?? Can you believe that guy killed a baby?????"
"AN ACTUAL BABY???"
GS: Hiro solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Counter Attack for 51 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Hiro gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Lydia Seren has attacked Georg Heldalf with Rabbit Heart! GS: Lydia Seren has gained 1 Combo! GS: Lydia Seren's stances have changed to Avenger! GS: Lydia Seren has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Lydia Seren's Rabbit Heart for 163 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst, Charge bonus, and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
"This is my world too, monster." Kaguya spits it out at Heldalf as she throws up one gauntleted arm to block his powerful attack, sliding back on the tiles as its force knocks her back nevertheless--no, knocks her back by a transparent-edged buckler on her left wrist, unbreakable.
She glances to Sorey, in the pyreflies, considers. And then--then Heldalf explains. Kaguya's eyes widen. "You--"
She narrows her eyes again. "I've already seen folly," Kaguya says. "And I'm seeing more of it now. I bled for this world. And I will again."
"But you--you think you can take Zophar? With THIS power!?" She remembers what she heard. She remembers what she's sensed--
As if in answer, something stirs deep within her. Red power. ...She banishes it again, though with more difficulty, as the Malevolence itself parts around her.
"Gh--NO," Kaguya starts, and the red sparks begin to fade.
"I bear a weapon entrusted to me to stop you," Kaguya says. "And I will use it. And the one who needs to see my vision... will see it!"
But who? She doesn't say.
But she does say to Lydia, "You can't take it apart. But we can talk later." She doens't comment on 'dramatic'. It's fine for now. She's just very serious.
And she levels Zeikfried at Heldalf once again. "Leo!" she calls. "Do you still think you can save him!? Is that the best way to honor the man you knew?"
Kaguya leaps for the wall and kicks off, jumping off another platform and another as she gets into a good position to aim. The gunner gathers up her power, and takes aim again, concentric circles beaming into existence about Zeikfried's barrel as she takes aim again. "...Greater Binding!"
From high above, Kaguya starts to fall. "Saying what 'must' be is a coward's excuse!" Kaguya says. "The only reason you think you must is that you can't justify your crimes otherwise! Trust me!"
GS: Kaguya spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Kaguya has attacked Georg Heldalf with Greater Binding Shot! GS: Kaguya has gained 2 Combo! GS: Kaguya has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
As they came close, Margaret looked to Magilou.
Magilou entrusts her with a duty. Two of them. Margaret reaches up to briefly slide a finger through a stray lock of the shorter woman's hair. "I will," she tells her. "She's something else." And then...
Well, maybe that's where Margaret's found her second (third?) wind.
To Zed, Margaret says, with air in her voice, "The future is whatever it is. I can dance between the sandy grains of your hourglass, just you watch. But," her voice comes down to earth, "we've got people to protect, don't we? You and I, we're the veterans. It's our job. I hope I can rely on you."
To Shige, Margaret smiles. "I'm glad," she says. "You've been bearing up, haven't you? It's hard. But I don't think we have much further to go, eh? Save the Shepherd, and if he's right, we can be home for dinner tomorrow." This is probably over-optimistic, but Margaret sounds like she believes it.
To Rixia, Margaret says - "I won't tell you any lies I don't believe myself. ... I'm counting on you, Rixia. And I thank you, for - counting on me." She can't quite bring herself to look at the young fox as she says it.
And to Harmaus, Margaret says - "Is that right?"
A name is spoken. A dark name and a dark prophecy from Heldalf. And Harmaus begins to move. Margaret sinks into a more ready stance, even from her distance, and intones, "Starlight, attend me." The nebular light around her comes up, familiar and limning. She watches Harmaus as she continues: "May every vow I have made witness me. May everyone who has fallen live on in sainted memory. May every promise bear me into the realm of the three gods--"
Didn't she just make that up half an hour again?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0GtSSTaKo0
Yeah, she did.
But even so.
Margaret's eyes track Harmaus. He calls on a bolt of power and it's coming towards her. Margaret wills herself down the course that Rixia's enchantment opened for her. It's like slamming her face into an entire gelatin dessert. Listen to your heart, Margaret thinks, as her pulse seems to slow... nearly to stop as the ray erupts... and then pick back up as a thrill runs like an incoming tide up her spine. Her sword comes upwards to rest in her palm, held up in a guard.
"RUNE BLADE --"
The ray comes downwards.
"IGNITE!"
And the blade, the recovered and rehabilitated blade of Celesti, a factory-stamped piece of decent steel painted with runes from a tome in Spira, erupts! Spiritual fire, bursting with a heart's ignition as Margaret swings upwards. The spell CARVES, like a pudding, much of it back-splashing and stinging on her skin. She 'feels' it but not deeply even as she turns to run towards the largest durable object nearby; Zed, as it turns out, though she steps lightly, one foot on the small of his back, another kicking off her shoulder, and up into the air.
Close faster than they can think, Margaret thinks herself, leading outwards in a dive to start with a stab and then, in the pudding-thick air of this atrocious acceleration, aim to slash, slash again, close with a two-handed chop, and kick OFF to land in a skid out, sweat pouring out of her pores as she resolves into something nearer to a galaxy-outlined Margaret rather than just, like, a streak of elf with a burning sword.
"We won't try to free him," Margaret says. "We *will* free him. Subtle difference, sweets. Can you spot it?"
DC: Margaret switches forms to Rune Blade IGNITION!
GS: Margaret has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Twisting Flurry! GS: Margaret has gained 1 Combo! GS: Margaret has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Harmaus partially guards Margaret's Twisting Flurry for 112 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Margaret! GS: FP up! Guard bonus activated! GS: CRITICAL! Georg Heldalf solidly guards Kaguya's Greater Binding Shot for 92 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Hex and Poison applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Guard bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
Heldalf speaks of teaching a lesson, and Leo bares fangs. That lesson feels like it's sinking in already--he hasn't forgotten what the Trial Knight said, or the rot he knows is eating the Church alive. He is a Hero, and there is so little he can do when the world is tearing itself apart.
Pearl sets a hand on his shoulder. Leo remembers a time when she shied away from all contact that wasn't violent. "Cut out the evil," he echoes. He looks up, again, at the Pyreflies. A prison. A risky gambit, because as he himself said, Heldalf knows what Pearl is capable of.
He needn't tell her.
Power flows into Leo's body, a rhythmic flow in tune with the beat of his heart. As the tide ebbs, Leo sinks back, sets his feet, and raises his saber. Heldalf DRIVES that phantasm at him, and Leo meets it with a wall of steel. Pearl's power reinforces his grip, keeps his aching arms steady, even as energy pours over his blade. It rips into Leo's shoulder. Crimson splatters the stone behind him. Beside him, though, Kaguya is running into her own problems. "Kaguya!" Leo cries, seeing those red sparks, feeling something that isn't part of Heldalf's Domain. She asks a question, and Leo does not know the answer.
"I," he says, and the Malevolence swirls around him, thicker and thicker. "Listen," Leo chokes out. "LISTEN TO HIRO!" Heldalf is bringing his own sorcery to bear, and the White Knight answers him. "GRAVE!" He thrusts out a hand. The rock beneath Heldalf's feet rises into a single, massive spike, thrusting up from the stonework to stab him clean through.
GS: White Knight Leo has attacked Georg Heldalf with Grave! GS: White Knight Leo has gained 1 Combo! GS: White Knight Leo has completed his action. GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from White Knight Leo's Grave for 142 hit points! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
It is only a supernatural awareness that belies Lanval's seemingly drunken manner that prevents him from being thrust against the block of stone. He taps a foot against it and leaps as it happens, if slightly late. Enough that he has to hurl himself up higher in the air and risk a bit more of the corrosive exposure for it, precious seconds further out from the protective energies and auras and powers that are at play.
He lands upright on his feet not seeming all that worse for wear, not far off from Layna, and just in time to hear the reasoning behind the use of the pyreflies.
"Sho it'sh 'bout shtoppin' the Shepherd from doin' their thing," Lanval echoes - and the notice that this same treatment will be applied to Layna and himself. He gives an aside glance to Pearl, she who holds the greatest knowledge of how to work these pyreflies into the bizarre miracles and workings of Spira, and gives her a nod.
"After? Yer gonna be waitin' a real long while fer that," and that's all he can get in before Heldalf reveals what he's also really after in all of this - the same target that the accused Lord of Calamity, Lucia, had professed. He doesn't speak over Hiro's disbelief and anger of it, of the young man standing at the forefront of dangerous truths all of Lunar will be confronting - whether it's ready to or not.
"Sho what comesh next after that 'God,' then," Seraph Lanval asks, "what'll be left if it all did work like ya wished?" Hellions are all creatures of contradiction. He might have accepted the despair to harness it, but that doesn't change that fundamental truth.
From there, the Water Seraph gives Kaguya space to move and have a clearer shot (also due to a sense of something... else), and Leo to scream his difficult feelings as the one close to him.
A chant is lost in some of the sounds of battle as a Seraphic Arte glyph forms underneath Lanval, pouring a greater volume of water out of the drinking gourd than seems possible as a stream of water crashes and floods between some of the more vulgar uses of earthen sorcery, channeling a flood in microcosm towards the Lord of Calamity.
GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Georg Heldalf with Flooding Wave! GS: Seraph Lanval has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Seraph Lanval's Flooding Wave for 187 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Georg Heldalf enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
"Eh? Zophar?" Zed perks his head up. "What? Like the same Zophar that Lucia's talked about before?? He wants to bust up THAT Zophar? But she's a way stronger Lord of Calamity, isn't sh-- oop." A wave of violet flame washes over him. Magic, as ever, is the bane of the Hyadean species. It sizzles and burns at his body as if it were... Well, normal human flesh, honestly. Zed is regretfully bereft of the normal protection his species provides to things like 'swords' and 'bullets to the face' when confronted with such an overtly magical assault.
It still doesn't stop him from continuing in his god-given(???) task of... smacking the heck out of all this magic around him. Zed does what Zed does best in a scenario like this: Smack things with his sword until they break.
This time his sword glows more than it usually does. But not in any colors that make sense. The glow of his blade is in the ultraviolet and beyond, an invisible aura of power that--
Oop, he's being used as a stool. "Ack, my back! I just got this jumpsuit cleaned!!" Zed complains, before lunging suddenly from his assault on the magic holding Sorey in place to scythe directly for Harmaus in the shadow of Margaret's attack. "It's hard to find a place that'll do Photosphere-grade synthcloth right!!"
GS: Zed has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Miracle Strike - Phantom Bite! GS: Zed has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"Yeah... you too," Rixia answers Shige, sounding a lot more dull. Maybe a bit more awake than she really should sound, but... she's running on a veritable cocktail of things right now. "Just a little more. You're doing great... thanks for being here, Shige. Let's guide these people back together..."
Is Harmaus a liar? No, it speaks only truth...
"I guess you aren't. Sorry. But I've got my own idea of a 'true world'. I can't die until I make that 'eternity' a reality, sorry," Rixia answers while landing from her disengaging manoeuvre. It doesn't take long for Harmaus to react, its blade washing with violet flame to add to the ones already ensconcing her. She doesn't even scream right now -- she just lets whatever Junction repel it, like her body's less than a puppet she's in control of right now.
When the flames fade, the sight of a burnt sigil from countermagics is seen, collapsing into pieces of errant motes of energy.
Zophar, Heldalf says. Zophar...
Margaret thanks her, directly. For counting on her... and she counts on her too. "Let's go... to the Three Gods' Realm. Where we can maybe find an exit from this cycle..." (Wasn't there supposed to be Six Realms? Well, we ran out of time to render all six, maybe...)
Rixia takes hold of Margaret's shift, however -- as the Rune Blade... Ignites. Her pupils shrink for a moment, and she witnesses it; a sword that erupts into fire, just like... just like her father's. Unlike the imitation that came from the depths of her mind that she's holding right now. Already, she's admiring her, as someone to look up to, someone to chase, someone to emulate, someone to desire validation from...
And she's counting on her.
"I'm going in," she remarks, pulling the entire heft of her gunblade as she follows from the other end. The last remnants of Thunder Road propel her forward, and right after Margaret's leap off off Zed and stab-slash-slash-chop-kick, she's there with a two-handed grip to drive the bulk of the Sleeping Lion between the gaps in Harmaus' armor--
"Sleeping Lion--"
---squeezes the trigger--
"Ignite!"
--and promptly discharge a devastating orb of gravity to suddenly implode in space where there exists no untoward pressure before.
GS: Rixia has activated Force Action: Full Clip! GS: Rixia has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Revolver Gravija! GS: Rixia has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus takes a glancing hit from Zed's Miracle Strike - Phantom Bite for 67 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Cripple applied to Seraph Harmaus! GS: Delay! Attack greatly weakened! GS: Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Rixia's Revolver Gravija for 141 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Purge! Cripple removed! GS: Purge explodes for 25 damage!! GS: Charge!! You gain 40 FP!
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
They're all here, fighting together. It's encouraging. Layna might be a strong fighter on her own, but she's always worked better with a team. She couldn't ask to have better allies standing by her on this day.
Heldalf intercepts her attack with a single strike, and sends his own shockwave exploding toward her. Layna ducks to the side as it goes screaming past her, wincing. It doesn't strike her directly - it doesn't even need to, the sheer force of it sending her recoiling back.
"Well... that's fine by me. I've always been more the sort to take what I want, aye?" Layna replies, straightening up. She speaks confidently, but she's fully aware of what level of strength he wields.
The one salvation they can hope for, though, huh... Layna frowns, glancing Lanval's way. The frown only deepens as Heldalf continues, revealing what he knows. Pyreflies... they've known about how they react to Malevolence. But they hold purification at bay, as well - and that is how he has sealed Sorey.
And how he intends to seal herself and Lanval, too. Layna rolls her neck. ...Well, that's another reason to keep fighting.
"...So what's the price, then? The price for the power to break a god. Is it somethin' the world can stand payin'?" Layna asks. She nods, then, toward Lanval. They're both on the same wavelength, it seems. "...Aye."
Layna rushes forward, this time going right for Heldalf himself. Red energy briefly flows over her right hand as she swipes it toward his chest. An attack to steal stamina from him directly and add it to her own reserves.
GS: Layna Manydays has attacked Georg Heldalf with Plunder Life! GS: Layna Manydays has gained 1 Combo! GS: Layna Manydays has completed her action. GS: Interrupt! Attack weakened! GS: CRITICAL! Shige Kiwako suffers a terrible blow from Seraph Harmaus's Searing Halo for 143 hit points! GS: Delay applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Layna Manydays's Plunder Life for 64 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Sufferer activated! GS: Layna Manydays drains Georg Heldalf! Layna Manydays gains 31 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
'It is only beginning...'
OST: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1L_AyHM5WI Tales of Berseria - Broken Heart
'Magillanica'.
And all her performance falls away, mummer's farce stumbling, as he invokes it as easily as she spoke not moments prior.
('... will you not return to our side? You still seem to think of yourself as a Mayvin.')
"I'm Magillanica no longer!" Magilou yells, as she lurches forward INTO that horrific mist -- and though her heart is pure enough for the darkness, her lungs still boil, at that horrific air, even as she calls forth the minor spirits around her to crash orbs of water and fire into him in turn.
In form as in expression she stumbles, drops to a knee. "You won't... take the Silver Flame from them. From us! It's... it's the last gift she ever..." Her breath gutters, for a moment, ragged. Her fingers tighten, over the fabric about her leg.
But what Hiro's saying... Magilou coughs, to clear her lungs, and straightens up. "You're right," she grants him, nodding to the younger swordsman. "We're here, so let's get it done."
She looks amongst them -- her gaze settles, for a longer moment, on Kaguya, and then Layna and Lanval. "All of us," she includes them, though they come from other worlds -- or have changed their home addresses.
They have a plan. They're important. And she has to...
"Magillanica could not have done this," Magilou says, to Heldalf, with unvarnished spite.
And what 'this' is:
"Super Absorber."
With a flash of Light, the pink on Magilou's outfit turns to red -- the blue to black -- the purple, white. Her books gain an almost sickly green hue, about their pages, as she invokes Spell Absorber and never quite tells it to stop. Passively, constantly, she consumes the power around her, deconstructing it, threading it into her veins.
Maybe it's a memorial, reconstructed with her own tragic fate.
She must miss her Lord of Calamity... so terribly.
"Calamity Flare!" Magilou declares, without preamble, as a tidal wave of flame erupts in an attempt to push the Lord of Calamity a thousand years later back even a single step.
DC: Magilou switches forms to Scourge of the Self-Righteous ~ Face the Wrath of Magilou Mayvin!!
GS: Magilou has attacked Georg Heldalf with Calamity Flare! GS: Magilou has gained 2 Combo! GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou takes 25 damage from Poison! GS: Magilou has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Magilou's Calamity Flare for 113 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Dispel! Mighty removed! GS: Misery inflicts a random effect! Blind applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: Hyper applied to Magilou! GS: FP up! Guard bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Shige Kiwako has posed.
Shige Kiwako briefly turns her attention to Heldalf's direction at the mention of the dead being gone and fair game. "I want you to remember those words." Her voice hard. Actually angry. Even the lantern seems brighter for a moment. Not that she's got the opportunity to do more than that right now.
She pulls her attention back to the here and now though. Looking to Margaret first and nodding. "Yeah. Food." She sounds vaguely disconnected. Still angry briefly. She shakes her head and adjusts her grip. "Haven't cooked for everyone in a long time. It'll be fun." She tries again. Sounding... confident enough at least.
"Not a matter of trying, just a matter of when." She replies to Harmaus's statement. Failing to get out of the way of the blastwave. Landing on her back. Maybe she shouldn't be shouting at people on the other side of the room. She gets back to her feet, mask showing a faint crack. Catching the light, exaggerating it. The shade from before, still lingering begins to manifest properly. Garbed in white. Fingers hooked into claws. Digging in, clinging tighter to the Seraph, still silent though now grinning. Its eyes still hidden behind long, tangled hair.
As for Zed's antics, she has no idea how to react to this. It's deadly serious, but there's something to be said for laughing in the face of it. The feline herself is moving properly now. Trying to be less predictable, to be less likely to get knocked on her behind again. "We'll make sure they make it where they belong Rixia." Which.. is in a way comforting, right? Though that depends on which side of the line of dead or alive you're on at that point really. "We'll make it through this."
GS: Shige Kiwako has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Onryo's Grudge! GS: Shige Kiwako has gained 1 Combo! GS: Delay expired! GS: Shige Kiwako has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
The blast of Beast hurls Pearl off her feet, and she flips to land on her feet and one hand. It's horrid but- Leviathan grants some protection. He roars to be unleashed. "Not yet. Not yet." She looks to Hiro... "Hiro is right. You are a woeful teacher- and I am full familiar with them."
She stands up, trying to hide the extent of the hurt. She's good at that. "...Still... Althena breeds these sort of teachers, does she not? The Blue Master said the same to me before I killed him. But he chose his motivation. He chose to feed his ego and gain his power on the backs of children thrown through his meat grinder. He chose to take on dark power- you didn't even choose. Which of you is more wretched?"
Pearl flips backward into a kick charged with watery ki, dropping into a defensive stance, the slice striving toward Heldalf. She will act to steady Leo, standing near him.
She looks up at Heldalf. "...I truly wonder. Would such a goddess really let two such teachers gain power, without realizing? Do you truly defy her?"
Then she whispers to Leo. "You need not be a hero here. You need to be a good man, nothing more, nothing less."
GS: Pearl has attacked Georg Heldalf with Low Tide! GS: Pearl has gained 2 Combo! GS: Pearl's stances have changed from Counter to Counter and Stoic! GS: Pearl has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Pearl's Low Tide for 128 hit points! GS: Cover applied to Pearl! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Sufferer activated! GS: Delay! Attack greatly weakened! GS: Seraph Harmaus partially evades Shige Kiwako's Onryo's Grudge for 64 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated! GS: Shige Kiwako drains Seraph Harmaus! Shige Kiwako gains 42 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
"I have studied it carefully," Heldalf answers Hiro. "Zophar moves ever in the shadows. The Children of Zophar were defeated over a thousand years ago, by Dragonmaster Dyne -- and do you know what helped undo them? That several of them became Hellions. Since then, his presence has laid even lower -- and I have found what the Church, what the Goddess, what all of you COULD NOT!"
Wind smashes into Heldalf, slamming him backward. He doesn't tell Lydia more of his evidence -- her blade slashes along him, violet energy crackling away from the wound. Then, Kaguya shoots him again -- and the energy shot strikes him. He screams -- his body convulsing, as something ripples through him. A spell, that plays at the energies making him up.
"And what would you know of cowardice? Of crimes?" he bellows back towards Kaguya. "When the world is at the brink... the strong are the ones who are tasked with acting!"
Leo's stone spike rises up -- smashing up through the ground, and slashing into Heldalf. His eyes turn, looking towards Leo. "No," he says. "I taught you of honor... of duty. And what is our duty? To protect! To become what we must, to save those we protect!" he says. "I HAVE BECOME THAT, LEO!"
Lanval's water smashes into him, blasting him backward. It rushes in rivulets over the stones -- and down into channels, that let it rush down the pit below. The Lord of Calamity looks towards Lanval, then. "What comes next? I cannot say," Heldalf says. "But there shall be a next. And that shall be enough, Oracle."
Then, he turns, and he considers the pirate for a moment. "The world must become strong. Perhaps only those strong enough to persist, as Hellions, shall persist." He pauses. "But some shall persist, Seer."
The red energy on Layna's hand slams into his chest. It pushes him backward, even as it seeps energy from him. Then, Magilou unleashes a titanic wave of flame. Heldalf crosses his arms -- and it blows him back from Layna before he can counter strike. His eyes turn back towards to Pearl.
"It matters not. I will not pity my lot," he says. "And if the Goddess will not or cannot act to stop those who would challenge her -- or make a crueler world... then let that speak for whether she cares for us or the Silver Star!"
Pearl kicks into him. Water explodes off the strike, blowing outward; droplets rain down. Heldalf stumbles back, but finds his footing quickly. Even in this form, the warrior is not one to lose his footing.
"Enough, Magilou. Don't speak for me."
The voice that comes up next is a contradiction -- youthful but reverberating, massive yet with a certain innocence. Wings beat loudly -- and then a great white fell dragon rises up, born on wings; Maotelus rises, writ in the form of the dragons that serve the Goddess. Blazing golden eyes, taken by Malevolence, look out. Parts of him are stained violet and gold; his once gleaming form is tainted.
"Heldalf is right. He showed me... he showed the danger that Zophar poses to this world. And I am with him! I WILL NOT LET VELVET SACRIFICE HERSELF--" And his innocent voice becomes a furious, draconic roar. "--FOR NOTHING!"
Heldalf looks back at Maotelus. The great fell dragon looks at him. Both nod -- and then both shine, with a sickly golden light, until they are consumed.
That light expands outward, and there -- in the great dark pit -- stands an Armatized form. A draconic body, with huge arms that end in claws, and gleaming white scales. Under those scales, purple light crackles. The scales turn to a sickly gold and violet at the tips -- and the head is a massive lion's, with glowing white eyes. The face is not unlike Heldalf's.
When he speaks, he speaks with the voices of Heldalf and Maotelus, laid over each other. "This star will be saved! And whatever gods claim it WILL BE LAID LOW!"
The two huge white claws slash out -- crashing across the battlefield -- and lashing out at everyone here. When they strike, they leave huge rends in the very stones of Artorius's Throne.
DC: Georg Heldalf switches forms to Armatized Heldalf and Maotelus!
GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Pearl with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Hiro with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Lydia Seren with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Kaguya with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked White Knight Leo with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Seraph Lanval with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Layna Manydays with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has attacked Magilou with Claw Swipe! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf takes 24 damage from Poison! GS: Georg Heldalf has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Hiro takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 102 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Hiro gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Power Burst activated! GS: Lydia Seren suffers a terrible blow from Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 211 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst activated! GS: Layna Manydays has activated Force Action: Accelerate! GS: CRITICAL! Layna Manydays takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 116 hit points! GS: Seraph Lanval has activated Force Action: Accelerate! GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Lanval partially evades Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 192 hit points! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Kaguya partially evades Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 199 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Kaguya gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated! GS: Magilou has activated Force Action: Guard! GS: CRITICAL! Magilou solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 122 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Magilou gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Pearl fully evades Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 0 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
"Hey! Kaguya acts all the time, buddy! Maybe more than she should! She's got like ALL THE IRONS IN THE FIRE! Don't talk like you know!" Lydia protests, snapping her blade back as she takes a moment to catch her breath. This level of Malevolence is more to endure than she's really used to.
And in that moment, a fuckin' dragon (Lydia's parlance).
Lydia stares. Her eyes widen. He has Malevolence but unlike the Saint of Sinners, he does seem to still have his full faculties, amazingly.
"I-I don't know who this Velvet is but I bet she wouldn't want you going on a vengeful rampage like this!" Lydia says, quickly backpedaling.
But not quick enough. The thick claw tears through her along three places. Below her neck, across her chest, around her waist.
Lydia extends her hand towards the dragon, Celesdue's power over the moon lashing out in retaliation, aiming to grip the dragon and slam him into the floor though even Lydia is hesitant to go all out against this dragon, even in the process of being eviscerated.
The power pushes for a while as Lydia starts to split apart.
"Lanval buddy... You gotta... Save that guy or Lunar's...fucked..."
He body splits into three and collapses in around itself, spraying silver in a rapidly expanding pool.
It's not great. Her quippy attitude doesn't seem like it'll last since she says nothing as her head rests against her waist with her stomach over there somewhere.
GS: Lydia Seren has attacked Georg Heldalf with Illusions Scattered Away With The Tide! GS: Lydia Seren has gained 1 Combo! GS: Lydia Seren has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Lydia Seren's Illusions Scattered Away With The Tide for 72 hit points! GS: FP up! Guard bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"Yes," Harmaus answers Margaret, and if it were now the flesh-seeming corpus of its spiritual essence -- Harmaus the Seraph rather than Harmaus the Hellionized Seraph -- perhaps it would bare its teeth in a mockery of a grin.
Perhaps it's fitting -- as relatively constrained as Harmaus has now become in spirit as his corruption has settled in and taken hold, so too has even what forms of expression it can now apply to the world have become lost.
In the wake of Heldalf's declaration about Zophar, it is Zed who pipes up first about the matter in Harmaus' direct earshot.
"...Zophar," it echoes. "Yes... yes! Hears I it," and Harmaus spits the word out, in reference to Lucia, "say tell of 'Zophar'! Thinks I it misdirected. Misled by those around it! But speaks now my Lord of 'Zophar'--"
Speaks Heldalf much of Zophar, truly. Gold blazes from deep within Harmaus' helm. "Yes-- yes! This is 'lie that binds the world'! The string that pulls even 'Althena'! We must destroy Althena! Destroy Zophar! Bring all, all to glory we lost!"
Harmaus' old fervor is, once again, alight, burning through its terrible corruption.
"--It tells me of 'Zophar'!" Harmaus demands.
Margaret gives it an answer of her own, her blade like the trail of a comet. It strikes not just Harmaus, set upon by not only her but also by Zed; Margaret, in her blurred flight, strikes other places close by.
Important places. Places like the gemstones that empower the working that traps the Shepherd Sorey.
One stone cracks.
Another shatters outright, its shards twinkling in the fell light of this Domain, before one violet tether is awash in white crackling sparks before the beam vanishes outright.
"No!!" shouts Harmaus, horrified by her accomplishment even as Zed's blade cuts into the steel that is also its corpus.
Neither is it the only so afflicted. Harmaus stands close in this moment to another array of sigils, another gemstone. Another place so important and meant to be guarded with the corrupted Seraph's life.
Rixia intrudes into its space, and by proxy, another of the anchors for the sphere of Pyreflies. Her blade sinks deep into Harmaus side, slipping between the plates that both protect and are its body. It roars in agony.
And as gravity presses down on that gemstone... as it causes carved sigils to crack and paint to fly from stone in so many fragmented pieces...
As the gemstone gives and erupts into so much glittering powder.
Harmaus roars not only in agony but in rage.
Were it not for the shade that descends now upon it, rising to sink its claws into its spiritual corpus -- to leave wounds that will take longer than the spiritstuff of which Seraphim are made to heal. Harmaus finds itself with a battle of more immediate import to attend and it here struggles against the shade, vanquishing it in a flare of gold-black light -- if but for a time -- only after Rixia has earned the time she needs to get clear.
It's time, though. It's only time.
"Heeds it now power of my Lord and Master! Heeds it now, power of Malevolence! The truth of this world!" Harmaus howls, plunging its blade into the floor. The brilliant white of its sword turns a dark and potent blue. Up from below comes its power: a rushing flow of blue light that rolls like flame and bubbles like water. It is neither, but seeks to swallow and sear Zed, Margaret, and Shige under its brilliance all the same.
Harmaus though has perhaps a particular score to settle with Rixia. Seizing its blade from where it had left it with its right arm, it rushes for her. It swings its sword.
Again, and again, and again, the blue light that the blade possessed fading, boiling, washing away with each blow it delivers.
"Die, die, die!"
Harmaus' fury in its defense of the seal is but a backdrop to the Armatization of Heldalf and Maotelus, but truly... is there nothing that the Shepherd could do here, if he were freed?
GS: Seraph Harmaus spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Margaret with Cyanosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Zed with Cyanosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Shige Kiwako with Cyanosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Rixia with Bright Repeater! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Shige Kiwako takes a solid hit from Seraph Harmaus's Cyanosis for 95 hit points! GS: Delay, Disease, and Poison applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: Shige Kiwako enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: White Knight Leo partially evades Georg Heldalf's Claw Swipe for 120 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! White Knight Leo gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Power Burst and Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Margaret takes a glancing hit from Seraph Harmaus's Cyanosis for 38 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Margaret gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Delay, Disease, and Poison applied to Margaret! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated!
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
What Pearl has to say, Hiro can't even refute it. How many awful teachers have been bred by the Zealotry of the Chosen? He struggles to align the Althena Lucia trusts so much with the Althena that does not realize these things are happening...
... but in the barest whisper at least, she finds agreement. He never looked at Leo as a hero, only a good man.
Heldalf speaks of the Children of Zophar, and Hiro has certainly heard of them, even if it was in the briefest mention in the most obscure sections of history tomes.
He hadn't heard that...
"But what if you're wrong!? What if they only brought down his cult that way! How do you know it brought him low too!? His curse upon Lucia - it instilled her with so much malevolence that people thought she was YOU! How do you reconcile that? ... And from what we've brushed against of his works along the way that was only one of his powers!"
Heldalf tells Leo that he is becoming something to protect. Hiro again sounds aghast, "To protect by destroying so many lives!? How is that a protector? You're just another destroyer! Ravaging everything in his own way - you're only justifying your actions!"
Hiro falls silent however, when Maotelus arises, the white Fel dragon, speechless as Magilou's friend, someone she cares about refutes her-
-that he's with HIM, because of the danger Zophar poses.
Twinning together, the huge white claws of the Feldragon slash out, and Hiro finds himself diving even as the claws bite through fabric, sever chain links, and trail a line of blood-
Who is Velvet? What sacrifice did she make? He has no idea.
As he takes a knee, holding pressure to his own ribs, he calls out, "Maotelus! Why join with him!? How can his way be better? Lucia has her own plan to take care of Zophar! Why rely on him!? ... Why trust him over your old friend!? It doesn't make sense!"
It has to be some kind of control, it has to be the malevolence... there's no way. He has to believe it's that
Gathering his wits about him, he tries to rush Heldalf, sword flashing in quick cuts and footwork, in an attempt to break up the Leonine Hellion's rhythm.
"Whatever hold you have on him - WE'LL BREAK IT!"
GS: Hiro has attacked Georg Heldalf with Sword Dance! GS: Hiro has gained 1 Combo! GS: Hiro has completed his action. GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards Hiro's Sword Dance for 62 hit points! GS: Disrupt blocked! GS: Hyper applied to Hiro! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Margaret used Defend! She takes Seraph Harmaus's Bright Repeater attack on Rixia on herself! GS: Margaret solidly guards Seraph Harmaus's Bright Repeater for 88 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Margaret gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: Margaret enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
What comes next? Lanval has a good question, Kaguya thinks. And... well. She's getting used to being able to work in the same spaces as him. Layna is less complicated for her. Something the world can stand paying...
Yes, it is encouraging.
But Heldalf asks her a question. "Are you kidding?" Kaguya asks. "I broke the wall at Lastonbell, which led to the Saint of Sinners overwhelming the town. I made the Golems that terrorized Spira. I broke the Statue that was meant to protect against Mother! ...I'm strong. I know. But strength alone doesn't give me the right to determine the course of other peoples' lives! And it doesn't give you that right, either!"
Kaguya winces at Lydia's condition, and at her defense of the self. But she has no time to focus on it, because there is a DRAGON here. A dragon, who can--who can speak?
No. This is the one...
The white claws lash out, and Kaguya attempts to whirl out of the way--but there's just too much attack. All she manages is to take the attack on the armor instead of at her vulnerable face and neck. Once again, she shields Zeikfried, but she goes tumbling through the air and hits the ground roughly enough to crack the stone, rolling. She groans, once. It... wasn't a good fall.
"No," Kaguya says. "I won't..." Dragging herself up, Kaguya takes the legendary gun from where she'd cradled it against herself to protect it. "Stop here!"
"Maotelus!" Kaguya calls. "You don't know me... But I've seen where this path leads! When you feel like the enemy is so strong you have to lose yourself to defeat it... When you feel like there's no hope, and so you cling to the closest thing you can find..."
"What good is saving your life if you throw away everything that matters to you!? What good is protecting a sacrifice when you let the heart be carved out of the world!?"
Gods...
"I don't care much for deities myself," Kaguya says, as she widens her stance. She stands up straight, and lifts Zeikfried over her head. "Zeikfried, I call upon you! Bind me to my oath!"
She FIRES straight up, and a brilliant golden aura surrounds her, shimmering bright and suffusing her with power. The aura doesn't fade as she lowers her weapon again.
"I'm not going to tell you you're deluded. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't look grim. But we can't save the world if we divide ourselves! Holding ourselves apart from the world, pretending not to be part of it... That's the cowardice I've known! The cowardice not to expose your own heart!"
Kaguya points forward. "...I'm not going to speak for either of you. But I'll share my vision. The person I must fight is Heldalf. But the one I must communicate with..."
"It's you, Maotelus!"
GS: Kaguya has attacked Kaguya with Binding of Purity! GS: Kaguya has gained 2 Combo! GS: Kaguya's stances have changed to Hero! GS: Kaguya has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Kaguya heals Kaguya! She gains 223 temporary hit points! GS: Quick and Shield applied to Kaguya! GS: Mighty applied to Kaguya!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
Magilou's head snaps up; her eyes widen, pupils shrinking to pinpricks. "Mao..te..lus..?"
She has not spoken with him for too many long years; not since she last visited, last told him of the chronicles she had written in her Accounts, last related the works of man. It always felt like enough, on a timescale of centuries or more.
It always felt like enough, until he disappeared.
It's been some centuries since tears last flooded her eyes, too.
"HOW CAN YOU SAY IT'S FOR NOTHING?!" She screams, and her voice is raw to tearing. "D--don't say that! Not you! It can't be... breaking such a God with Malevolence, or leaving Velvet to nothing...! That can't be the choice...!"
She clutches her head, with a hand, grasping tightly to her witch's hat, as that golden light consumes them. "No... no, stop it! Maotelus! Stop! If you ARMatize with him -- YOU'LL DIE, MAOTELUS--! Don't! Don't...!" But he does, and Magilou collapses, again, all her strings cut.
Those claws lash out, and --
It's Bienfu, who manifests from Magilou, with the greatest difficulty, to raise a barrier of flame and water around her. "Biennn!!" He wails, forced back a stumbling step, and another, until he's blown all the way back into Magilou's hapless lap. He barely manages to divert the path of that claw, and one of Magilou's legs sinks, as it drapes into the deep gouge left behind.
"Maotelus!" Bienfu yells, pipsqueakish and cowardly and very, very brave. "You're like a God to these people, too, you know?! Are you okay with that...?! 'Cause I'm not!! I don't want you to sacrifice yourself either, okay?!"
"Bienfu," Magilou murmurs, looking at him without really seeing him, with those hollow, lightless eyes. "You can't... be out here. It's too much..."
"I'm not about to let you give up, either!" Bienfu flaps his little bat wings to get up to Magilou's face -- and gives her a good SMACK, with his little paw, right across her cheek. "Stop zoning out! Stop it! Stop it!!"
"But... Velvet..." Magilou murmurs, distant, disaffected, "if Maotelus thinks this is the only way, we..."
"Biennnn!" Bienfu wails, with the pressure of it all.
GS: Magilou gains 10 FP from her Daredevil! GS: Magilou takes 24 damage from Poison! GS: Magilou has completed her action. GS: Zed fully evades Seraph Harmaus's Cyanosis for 0 hit points! GS: Delay, Disease, and Poison blocked!
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
Margaret, naturally, has her own enemy chosen, and her own row to hoe, and it is there she has focused. But when a great draconic voice - the voice, it is revealed, of Maotelus, in fact, as it turns out - speaks, Margaret's ear must hear it. They begin to shine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My52nBpmLzM
Well, Margaret thinks as she hears that twofold voice. Shit.
They are harrying Harmaus, but is it enough? Zed breaks his armor. Rixia too. Shige's sorcery is acting as well but more subtly. They can pull this off, Margaret thinks, even as Harmaus begins to scream oaths to the power of his Lord and Master. Such oaths have their own power, Margaret can tell. His sword goes from white to a threatening blue. Flowing light, a frozen flame rolling like a liquid knife, erupts; Margaret throws herself forwards, dipping towards that new place, that 'three-gods realm' in desperation. Her legs are singed, but that's why she wears those big, thick boots. She may need new ones after this.
But to buy new boots, all with buttons on and copper-plate heels, is something to look forward to.
Harmaus is going towards Rixia. The girl who she has sworn on several stones to protect. Margaret beelines forwards, throwing herself forwards in anticipation of parrying the blows. From Rixia's perspective, the stars streak forwards and resolve into Margaret. Her burning sword smashes upwards, parrying lightly, smashing, crashing, a fall of meteors with each blow! It's quite glorious until the sword breaks suddenly. The upper two thirds of the blade burst into sparks, the refurbished steel of the Celesti factory works finally giving up under this abuse.
Margaret has a fourth sword. A final sword. But she could have thirty swords and even in this shining space she cannot force herself to move fast enough to pull it out. It would need to carve out of the scabbard to do that, and vanity that she is, she used metal scabbards for the sake of hip armor. She has a glove on her hand. It's armored, kind of. It will have to do. She slams her right hand upwards, fingers spreading out. Curving, pushing through that gelatin-feel again, *she grips the blade* and she *pushes*. She *holds*. Her accelerated body *brakes* and the problem is that one can *brake* until one *breaks*.
The thin chain over the leather gives way as Margaret starts rolling her hand forwards, twisting round. A magic-trick. More friction, more sparks. Her knuckles push upwards -- and the blade rolls forwards with the last of its atrocious strike-force and it carves a deep furrow into the back of her arm with a sudden spark of something that -- huh, Margaret thinks, I don't quite feel it yet. I'm going to scream when I do.
No I won't, she thinks, swallowing the scream and hurling the remains of her penultimate sword, still shining and burning, towards the prison of the Shepherd. NOW she finally says something:
"NO!"
Her left hand (the dominant one - of course Margaret is left handed) whips out that other sword now that she has momentary blade lock. Grasping it as she pushes forwards, she does feel the strange, cold-sunburn pain ripple up her arm. Can't think about it too much, Margaret reasons, as the last arming-sword comes out. Twirling it in her hand, she aims to stab it into one of the gashes in the armor the others have created, and THEN:
"Rune Blade -- IGNITE!"
Light it up anew.
"I'm just getting started!" Margaret declares to Harmaus. Just how true is that?
GS: Margaret spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Margaret has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Coiling Impale! GS: Margaret has gained 2 Combo! GS: Delay expired! GS: Margaret takes 28 damage from Poison! GS: Margaret has completed her action. GS: Delay! Attack greatly weakened! GS: Seraph Harmaus takes a solid hit from Margaret's Coiling Impale for 103 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus's Poison Ward may block the effect! GS: Poison blocked! GS: Mighty and Quick applied to Margaret! GS: Charge!! You gain 40 FP! GS: FP up! Charge bonus activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
'But there shall be a next,' of which Heldalf sounds certain, as Lanval's half-open eyes press against the pressure unwavering in the certainty there won't be. He expects Layna will not be swayed by the idea that some shall persist after something like this.
The Oracle of Schturdark is already readying the next barrage, when a voice reverberates through the space like it may well be this place, itself, speaking. Another surge of power to be braced, from presence and scale alone.
One that knows Magilou, in the shape of a white Fell Dragon - or perhaps more akin to the dragons that serve the Goddess - who has maintained verbal coherence and clarity. It is alarming unto itself to witness the very idea of it.
A roar. Lanval conjures water defensively against such power, where it is flung in twain as the dragon and the Lord of Calamity Armatize together. There is no speaking before they have their turn at 'the floor,' and what a turn it is! The white claws lash out, and as Lanval opts to backflip again, he catches not the severing end but a blunted impact that serves to hurl him across the length of the battlefield, towards the very tip of the abyss.
That Lanval may take this impact the worst of those in the way of the Armatized Heldalf could speak of a dire portent. That Maotelus himself has come to agree with the Lord of Calamity and lend their strength to this end has even further-reaching consequences - the weight of which would be crushing if comprehended.
Something Magilou appears to, as Lanval rises against this tide of power. He is still himself. The aura of water of all forms great and not via Schturdark surrounds him, with Lanval aware about 'a lot' resting on his and Layna's shoulders - as Lydia emphasizes - without knowing how much. If he did...
He can't speculate on that because he doesn't. This is a moment where this singular modicum of ignorance is to his benefit.
"To hear from the face of one thou hast cared for after all one hath given and lived..." Lanval's eyes are open all the way as he steps forward, a ways behind Magilou. Her rejection of her efforts and sacrifices came after a thousand years. His, just a bit over half that. For others, a much lesser span of time.
But no lesser in impact, worth, or importance for it.
"When one doth put their all for another and their design... and find one hath done away with the latter and those who hath dedicated all to it... doth it end then?"
Lanval comes along up towards Magilou's side, as Bienfu bravely chances his very being to reach out to someone who has found their heart has been capable of shattering ever further all along.
"I no longer hold title of Lord of the Land of the monastery of Rylia, nor what it became." It became, um. A place! "Althena doth declared mine dedication was no longer wanted, as her Guard acted in defiance of all we knew."
"But I did not let go of the worth of the small joys. The small joys that doth not solve strife and ruin on its own. The small joys that Lunar once loved - of song, dance, and wine."
"That they still do." As a rambunctious bard had shown over and over in their travels, as Seraph Lanval takes another step forward against the gloom of the combined will and might of Maotelus and Heldalf, looking back over to Magilou and Bienfu alike.
"Mayhaps... a worthy ideal survives the one who doth inspired it. If that is what thou wish believe, then by name as the Mirthful Wellspring and Oracle of Schturdark, take of thee the essence of what all life drinks, separates, shapes, transforms... but nonetheless all need, and raise thy arms!"
Seraph Lanval throws the contents of the drinking gourd into the air, into an enormous pool of sanctified water before several among the gathered. The blessing of water, filtered and mastered further through his own personal experience in sanctifying such as a Lord of the Land, reaches out to those of his choosing.
To fight against the Malevolence, the contradictions that have given rise to a will that cannot be allowed to go unchallenged.
"Maotelus! Heldalf! I defy thee until laughter ceases to exist within the deepest depths of all's hearts... and that shalt be a long time indeed! Ha ha ha...!"
GS: Seraph Lanval has activated Force Action: Extend! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Layna Manydays with Lord Of The Lake! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked White Knight Leo with Lord Of The Lake! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Hiro with Lord Of The Lake! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Magilou with Lord Of The Lake! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Seraph Lanval with Lord Of The Lake! GS: Riposte expired! GS: Seraph Lanval has completed his action. GS: Seraph Lanval accepts Seraph Lanval's Lord Of The Lake for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Surge applied to Seraph Lanval! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Layna Manydays accepts Seraph Lanval's Lord Of The Lake for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Surge applied to Layna Manydays!
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
The draconic claws of Maotelus and Heidalf swing out at Pearl, with force enough to tear her apart. It leaves gouges in the ground- but not on Pearl, who flows up and around the claw like water, standing atop the swinging claw for a moment, then flipping out of the air off it to where she was, staring down the creature that could have torn her to ribbons but a moment ago.
"Hatred can be sown and nurtured in anyone, Hiro. Providing an enemy does that." She looks up. "Heldalf had years, decades to do as he wished? Years to cultivate the seed and plant it. And good people can be led astray most easily. Even good seraphs."
Her movments are small, and controlled- she's afraid, but her voice still can't show that emotion, her muted affect giving an air of calmness she takes advantage of. It's a fear that possessed her earlier. Soon.
"...Magilou, have you been so boxed in that even you cannot dance?" To convey this, now. She starts to build a rhythm in her head. "Hiro, support Leo."
She spins, and shadows flicker at her feet. The first Lunarian dance she knew, one that can be done solo or partnered, if need be. The energy is high. "If someone has taken away your room to step, then one should make room, should they not?" It's... extrapolating on the lesson she was taught. "If both your choices are unacceptable, then they are not choices and should be swept from the table." She doesn't offer a hand to Magilou, instead reaching down to try and take it. "If neither outcome is what you desire, then better to risk your life taking what you would want, yes?"
She looks down at Magilou, a faint smile on her face, despite the battle. It could be seen she is *ignoring* the Armatized Heldalf for her allies. She has already mocked them twice.
"Shall I lead this time, or will you?"
GS: Pearl has attacked Pearl with Flicker Dance! GS: Pearl has attacked Magilou with Flicker Dance! GS: Pearl has gained 1 Combo! GS: Pearl has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Pearl accepts Pearl's Flicker Dance for 0 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Pearl! GS: Hyper applied to Pearl! GS: Hiro accepts Seraph Lanval's Lord Of The Lake for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Surge applied to Hiro! GS: Magilou accepts Seraph Lanval's Lord Of The Lake for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Surge applied to Magilou! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Magilou accepts Pearl's Flicker Dance for 0 hit points! GS: Quick applied to Magilou! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! White Knight Leo accepts Seraph Lanval's Lord Of The Lake for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Surge applied to White Knight Leo! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: White Knight Leo enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
"Send them on their way... give them some peace... maybe make some food together..." Rixia kind of cottons onto that earlier comment to Margaret too because the idea of them all having food together does sound very great, as someone who was trying to stave off Malevolence with the simple, little joy of food.
But Heldalf continues to speak, of how Zophar was lain low by... Malevolence? But she's heard this rhetoric before. Just one more skirmish, one more atrocity, and that'll surely unite Glenwood once and for all. But-- but more than that--
Someone else speaks. A youthful and yet powerful voice, wings beating loudly... and then another Fell Dragon descends from above. Maotelus addresses Magilou. Her eyes widen. Was this Magilou's...
Why.
Rixia loses the energy to fight then and there for a moment. Magilou begged her -- begged them all -- to rescue her friend with such sincerity, and here they're now assaulting the Sorceress, and speaking of further sacrifice! Just how bloodstained is the past? The past will keep clawing back, again and again, never letting its sins lay low... always infecting a future generation...
A thousand years separated, now, what Magilou described as one of the most important people in her life is now attacking her. She hears her scream, and her heart breaks.
And from that break, an insidious whisper bubbles out of her Malevolence-soaked heart:
-- Time truly is everyone's enemy. --
So sapped she is of energy that she has no defence at all against Harmaus, her face contorting and ugly as it howls to heed the power of Malevolence -- threatening to just cleave her into two, no four, no, more--
Is this the end?
...
...
Rixia dares to open her eyes, and... Margaret is suddenly in front of her, starlight empowering her as arcs of her conflagrant blade clashes against Harmaus' blue, boiling light. Red, and blue, and red, and blue clashing with one another and then-- the sword breaks.
Her heart breaks a second time because she already fears the worst. Because she fears someone else she dared to care about will die in front of her. But Margaret is more resourceful than that, her armored fingers grasping against the blade of light, and she holds, pushes, no--! Rixia's body feels entirely like lead as her brain screams at her to act.
Rixia bites down on her lip so hard that she swears she draws blood and finally hurries forward to join that bladelock as Margaret finds purchase after suffering a wound on her arm. The Sleeping Lion joins the clash, with Margaret's arming-sword, against Harmaus' blade.
"It's not enough..."
She pauses, because she feels the need to let something out for her Sorceress parent-figure-teacher. "Miss Magilou, just because he's really, really important to you... doesn't mean you have to agree with what he says! It's especially important that you rebuff him! You're the one who has to do it! Please, Miss Magilou!"
Rixia's eyes are baleful by the time she turns back towards Harmaus, staring it down to the slits in its helmet, voice filled with the tell-tale tinge of someone finding resolve (but is it a resolve she should find?):
"It's not enough to stop time... I understand that now. In order for all these tragedies to stop happening... I have to BREAK TIME ITSELF--!!"
(BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTlm70aG4Yw )
A sphere of light expands from within Rixia, threatening to consume the immediate space in which Shige, Zed, Harmaus, Margaret are all battling; threatening to consume the space in which the Shepherd is being held, too. It is describeable as... Light.
...Light...
This is not the Light of healing, of comfort and rest.
This is not the Light of metaphor, wielded for one's justice and peace.
This is not the Light of virtue, as people speak it from their heart.
This is Light, which viciously smothers the reprieve of darkness in its wake.
This is Light, gluttonously devouring vision and action alike.
This is Light, refusing to ever be impeded for any reason.
This is Light, in its purest principle of least-time.
And for a scant precious few seconds, in this dirty trick which still is truly not Time Magic, no matter how much Rixia's bloody heart wishes it to be, Zed, Shige and Margaret find that blades and spells will find its mark in a path that can be traveled in the last time... in imitation of light.
GS: Rixia has attacked Shige Kiwako with Shatter the Hourglass! GS: Rixia has attacked Margaret with Shatter the Hourglass! GS: Rixia has attacked Zed with Shatter the Hourglass! GS: Rixia has gained 1 Combo! GS: Delay and Quick expired! GS: Rixia has completed her action. GS: Zed accepts Rixia's Shatter the Hourglass for 0 hit points! GS: Blitz and Hyper applied to Zed! GS: Zed gains 2 Combo from Inspire! GS: Margaret accepts Rixia's Shatter the Hourglass for 0 hit points! GS: Blitz and Hyper applied to Margaret! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Margaret gains 2 Combo from Inspire!
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
The world must become strong, and only those strong enough to persist as Hellions will persist.
"That's a little too steep a price for me. Sorry, I'm really greedy, aye? I'm not willing to gamble on 'some'." Layna replies with a shake of her head. "...Besides, I think we've got different ideas on what counts as strength."
...And then, there is a voice. Youthful, but powerful. Layna stares in surprise as a white fell dragon rises up. This has to be... Maotelus. She doesn't know who 'Velvet' is, but she can hear the fury in his voice and she can see what change it's caused in Magilou. A strained grimace crosses Layna's face.
...This hurts to watch, a little. But she can't dwell on it too long, for Lord of Calamity and Fell Dragon have combined into one - Armatized. Claws lash out and Layna curses, bracing herself as she leaps back out of the way. They're too big to dodge fully - she winces as they scrape across her front and she lands haphazardly with a bit of a stumble, cursing as she tries to regain her footing.
"...You're talkin' about savin' it... But if this keeps up, there's gonna be nothin' left worth savin'." Layna says with a grimace. ...They came here to save him... but now, he's the one they're having to fight.
But she isn't alone. None of them are alone. Lanval speaks. He, as ever, has a way with words - when he wishes to have them. She has always respected him, as her friend and now as her Oracle.
"Aye! Well said." Layna grins. Her thoughts turn to what she cares about. "My crew. Dahlia..."
Strange that she'd separate them, when she is part of the crew...
"...My friends. All the treasures and beautiful places of the world! Aye, greedy I am, and my grip is like a vice! I won't let anything slip through my fingers! Not a single coin - or a single person!"
She takes in the power of water that Lanval provides, letting it suffuse her. The essence of water fills her. So empowered, she leaps and charges toward the Armatized Heldalf and Maotelus.
"And Lanval and I... we might not be combined into a single form like you are, but we fight as one. If he defies you, so do I!" With that, she drives her fist toward them!
GS: Layna Manydays spends 2 Combo on Gatling, loading 2 into Gatling! GS: Layna Manydays has attacked Georg Heldalf with Dead Men Tell No Tales! GS: Layna Manydays has gained 1 Combo! GS: Layna Manydays has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Layna Manydays's Dead Men Tell No Tales for 194 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
Again, it comes back to Zophar. Again, Leo has nothing to draw upon but rumors of cultic activities--nothing concrete except for what Hiro himself has witnessed. The knight's eyes dart back and forth between Heldalf and Hiro. His breath quickens. "Zophar did that to her--"
And Althena was so, so sure that she was the true Lord of Calamity. So were many of the office of the Inquisition, including his own sister. Tension lines Leo's face. His blade wavers in his hand. It's only Heldalf insisting that he's a protector that drags Leo away from chasing that thought to its gut-wrenching conclusion.
"YOU'VE BECOME A MONSTER!" Leo shoots back, his anger boiling from him. Harmaus makes his assertion--destroy Althena, destroy Zophar--and Leo hears it. But...
But someone else is here. That someone else is a presence Leo recognizes from iconography and context, a great Seraphic Dragon--and as he steps forward, that flicker of hope brightens in him.
In the next few moments, it's snuffed out. "Magilou?!" Leo looks at her, confusion and terror writ on his face. He swore he'd help her. Now...
Now it's too late.
"NO!" Leo's voice erupts from him, all ragged and raw, as Heldalf and Maotelus speak in unison. His body moves on drilled instinct; one hand braces the blade of his saber, while the other holds the hilt. Maotelus' massive claw SLAMS into the weapon, RIPS it from Leo's hands, and knocks him off his feet. He sails back, slams into the wall of the chamber. Puffs of whitish-violet Malevolence erupt from the stone, engulfing Leo in a cloud of dust. Sharp, violent coughing erupts from within, the only initial sign that Leo's still alive. He stumbles from the cloud, weaponless, and choking.
Lanval speaks. The power of a mighty Oracle settles into the air, in defiance of the oppression of Heldalf's nature. It settles onto Leo, keeping the Malevolence hounding him at bay for a few crucial seconds. His thoughts start to clear. He sees the gleam of steel in the dust, on the other end of the room.
He breathes in, and takes the watery essence of Lanval's sorcery into his lungs. He lets it swirl around until it becomes nigh-unbearable, until its depthless nature makes him insist he's drowning, and then--only then--does he let it loose. With a sharp exhalation, the water erupts from his mouth, actual water, spraying Heldalf with all the force of a high-pressure hose. It won't hurt, but it will slow him, disorient him, perhaps. Buy Leo the time he needs to get his sword back.
GS: White Knight Leo has attacked Georg Heldalf with Aqua Breath! GS: White Knight Leo has gained 1 Combo! GS: White Knight Leo has completed his action. GS: Shige Kiwako accepts Rixia's Shatter the Hourglass for 0 hit points! GS: Blitz and Hyper applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Shige Kiwako gains 2 Combo from Inspire!
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
Zed is, fundamentally, a simple creature. This does not mean that he doesn't understand complexity, nor does he lack empathy. The pain and anguish weighs on him as it does anyone with a heart. But he is a simple creature.
And he cannot, at all, hide the giddy excitement on his face when a dragon descends upon the battlefield. Not even when it's ostensibly there to help destroy them all. Zed, he likes dragons. He really does.
But that mood is ruined quickly when he realizes that there is History about this dragon. And that it is willing to weaponize that History to wound the heart of a precious friend. That, the Metal Demon cannot countenance. Once he's done with Sorey, he thinks to himself, he has a dragon to fight. But not now.
Now, there is meaning in this fight. Not that there wasn't before-- he owes Sorey, after all, for teaching him the secret of <<Resonance.>> But the emotion surging through the battlefield, conveyed by the conductive media of Malevolence, is palpable.
Zed, Warrior of Hyades, does not know what the words mean when they sail between the mouths of the furious, the sorrowful, the desperate, the pained. He does not understand the meaning of this Maotelus' advent, nor the significance of its fusion with Heldalf. But he feels the anger and anguish of many who he would call friends.
And it renders him... most cross.
Harmaus unleashes a wave of magic-- fel fire that scorches soul and steel alike. But where there was once Zed, there is now just empty air.
He has a battle to fight. A battle to win. The spell holding Sorey hostage is still as solid as ever. But it is still just a thing and, if old history is to be brought back to center stage here and now, Zed has just the right tool to break things.
He reaches into his scarf, down into the confines of its voluminous folds, and draws forth...
A familiar spiked ball and chain.
"We need you now more than ever, Shepherd of Glenwood," Zed says, the humor vanished from his voice. He whips his arm to and fro, heavy chain dragging across the tainted porcelein of the once mighty temple. Back and forth, building momentum, the chain stirs faster and faster, accelerating with each moment, until finally it has enough force to drag the spiked ball from Zed's hand...
And sends it whirling with the force of an unstoppable hurricane straight for the Pyrefly wards. Because if there's ANYTHING in his arsenal that might be able to break this spell...
It's this.
GS: Zed has activated Force Action: Full Clip! GS: Formation! Blitz! Zed has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Berserk Memoria - I'M GONNA WRECK IT! GS: Zed has gained 1 Combo! GS: Zed has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
In this form, Heldalf and Maotelus are immense -- the lower part of their body vanishes below the floor -- and when Lydia's spell grips, it just can't find purchase. Chains of light grab into the draconic form, pulling down, but shatter as it tears free.
His draconic eyes turn down towards Hiro. "Then answer this! If Malevolence is his doing... then he could curse Lucia and make her do his bidding! He did not!"
Their joined voices yell again.
"HE COULD NOT!"
Kaguya summons down a column of light, from Zeikfried. It washes over her -- and Heldalf and Maotelus, Armatized as they are, roar like both dragon and lion at the same time. "What is there to say!? This world has gone too far! Our every effort to build peace... to make this world better... it fails! they yell, though it is more Maotelus than Heldalf now. "I WON'T BE DETERRED! I CAN DO THIS MUCH!"
Magilou calls out to him -- and the leonine head turns. It's the Maotelus in there that gives the leonine face a mournful expression. "Is this truly the world we fought for? Magilou! Tell me! Is it?"
But he hesitates at Bienfu. His eyes widen -- and he pauses, for a moment. "Bienfu... I..."
And then he jerks upright, roaring again -- and his voice is more Heldalf's when he next speaks. "NO!"
The Armatized form turns, and slams down both clawed hands into the floor. It shakes mightily; violently. Heldalf's leonine head turns, looking down at Lanval. "Defy me all you like. You shall see that Maotelus has fallen... that he sees his struggles meant nothing!"
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
And yet, despite having both their voices, it is only one that speaks now.
He looks to Pearl -- a snarl coming from him, bestial and draconic at once. He dislikes what he sees. But Layna rushes in, driven forward by Lanval's empowermnent. She swings a fist out, and it slams into his chest.
With a resounding, thunderous BOOM, the Armatized dragon is thrown backward. He lets out a roar. "Your greed will be your end! YOU CANNOT HAVE EVERYTHING!"
Leo screams, ragged. But he draws on Lanval's power, and sends out a blast of water. Before Heldalf can swing his clawed hand down for Layna, the blast of high pressure water than Leo breathes out slams into him -- the ancient Ronso technique beating him backward for a moment.
His eyes blaze. "A monster... perhaps. But a monster is what is needed. And despair is what shall drive ALL OF YOU!" he bellows. "SERAPHIM! I DEMAND YOUR POWER!"
Light flows out of the bound Shepherd. Inside the globe of pyreflies, Sorey's eyes snap open -- they glow white -- and he SCREAMS as elemental energy is drawn from his body. Four streams: of red, blue, green, and gold. They swirl together, gathering and growing over Heldalf's draconic, clawed hand, and form into a shimmering ball of all of them.
"QUATTUOR TRAGOEDIAE!"
Then, he SLAMS the ball of gathered energies down -- stolen from Dezel, Mikleo, Edna, and Lailah -- and it explodes out. Torrents of flame; rushing tidal waves; great hurled stones; gale force winds. They all rush across the battlefield with terrible might, ripping and tearing at all of those here.
GS: Georg Heldalf takes 33 damage from Poison! GS: Hex expired! GS: Georg Heldalf has completed his action. GS: Shige Kiwako has activated Force Action: Extend! GS: Georg Heldalf solidly guards White Knight Leo's Aqua Breath for 0 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Slow applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Georg Heldalf spends 5 Combo on Headshot and Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Lydia Seren with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Hiro with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Kaguya with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Magilou with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Seraph Lanval with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Pearl with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked Layna Manydays with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Georg Heldalf has attacked White Knight Leo with Quattuor Tragoediae! GS: Georg Heldalf has gained 1 Combo! GS: Georg Heldalf takes 26 damage from Poison! GS: Georg Heldalf has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Lydia Seren takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 204 hit points! GS: Lydia Seren enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: CRITICAL! Hiro solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 145 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Hiro gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Hiro used Defend! He takes Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae attack on White Knight Leo on himself! GS: Seraph Lanval has activated Force Action: Accelerate! GS: CRITICAL! Hiro solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 144 hit points! GS: FP up! Guard bonus activated! GS: Hiro enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Hiro has gained 1 Combo! GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Lanval takes a glancing hit from Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 192 hit points! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Layna Manydays takes a solid hit from Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 388 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Layna Manydays gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Shige Kiwako has posed.
Shige Kiwako covers her face with her free arm, keeping the train's lantern behind her as the heat and blast tears at her. Forcing her forward. Having decided she won't back away from this. (You know. When possible.) Not quite knocked down this time, she pulls herself back up straight. Back straight, arm out and calls out, "You'd trade one failure for another?" Gesturing briefly around the room. "Keeping the dead from their rest. Destroying everything you touch. Dragging everything down?"
Lifting the lantern, banishing the shadows immediately around. Trying to cleanse some of that misery and hatred clinging to them. Faint whispers of heroes past, guardians and defenders trying to safeguard the living. Driving out the corruption. "Hell with that."
"Story's not finished yet." she states simply. Walking forward again. It's probably not healthy, but the others are better suited for breaking things. She'll keep them safe. She'll give them a light to see the way at all costs. "You though. I'd hear your story. Even you don't deserve to be forgotten. Yet."
The landing of a dragon does jerk her attention away again though. More problems. She clenches her teeth, glad for the mask. This might be too much.
Rixia's panic, Margaret and Zed doing what they can. She puts her hand on Rixia's shoulder as she walks past. Pausing briefly as she starts to boil over. That's the phrase that comes to mind. She moves, tightening her grip on Rixia's shoulder, that light washing over her. "Stay with me." Leaning in closer, "We still have to compare notes." her voice has evened out. Things have gotten bad. Her own bad thoughts keep bubbling up. Then bouncing off of an inner calm she hasn't felt in years. That calling. That moment when she knew she had to take a one way ride with others, whether she made it or not to keep them safe.
A different shadow steps in behind Shige. Older, wisened, wearing ancient armor and a full helmet. His touch calming as he checks on each of those close to her at this point. Faint whispers on the wind, words spoken from an experienced battlefield medic. The figure even tries staring down Harmaus as it moves to Margaret and Zed. His magic forgotten, but still potent.
GS: Blitz! Shige Kiwako has attacked Margaret with Chirurgeon's Spectre! GS: Blitz! Shige Kiwako has attacked Rixia with Chirurgeon's Spectre! GS: Blitz! Shige Kiwako has attacked Shige Kiwako with Chirurgeon's Spectre! GS: Blitz! Shige Kiwako has attacked Zed with Chirurgeon's Spectre! GS: Shige Kiwako has gained 3 Combo! GS: Delay expired! GS: Shige Kiwako takes 32 damage from Poison! GS: Shige Kiwako has completed her action. GS: Shige Kiwako heals Rixia! She gains 284 temporary hit points! GS: Regen applied to Rixia! GS: Cover applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Shige Kiwako heals Zed! He gains 283 temporary hit points! GS: Regen applied to Zed! GS: Cover applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: Shige Kiwako heals Shige Kiwako! She gains 72 temporary hit points! GS: Restore! Disease and Poison removed! GS: Regen applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: Cover applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Shige Kiwako heals Margaret! She gains 71 temporary hit points! GS: Restore! Disease and Poison removed! GS: Regen applied to Margaret! GS: Cover applied to Shige Kiwako! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Kaguya takes a solid hit from Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 357 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Kaguya gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Guard bonus activated! GS: Magilou has activated Force Action: Guard! GS: CRITICAL! Magilou solidly guards Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 185 hit points! GS: FP up! Arcane Font, Guard bonus, and Gleam activated! GS: Magilou enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Disease and Poison expired! GS: Lydia Seren used Force Action: Mystic on Kaguya! FP up! GS: Sneak! The true nature of Zed's attack becomes clear! GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Zed's Ultimate Attack of the Week for 286 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Magilou used Defend! She takes Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae attack on Pearl on herself! GS: CRITICAL! Magilou takes a solid hit from Georg Heldalf's Quattuor Tragoediae for 391 hit points! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: Magilou has Fallen! She is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Hiro has posed.
In this moment, understanding. Hiro has shouted this to Leo so many times, but it was so difficult to believe, the thought of a being that creates Lords of Calamity. He can't blame him for disbelieving. In this moment, his eyes only say one thing to him.
'Yes'.
In Magilou's distress, he hears things. Armatize? That's what Maotelus is doing with...
He thought that was an ability only the Shepherd could use. More importantly though, he hears her distress. He still doesn't know who Velvet is, what her sacrifice was. The weight of that action versus trying to break a God.
In her despair...
"Magilou!" He's at a loss, what to say to her, what to do. He doesn't even know what's going on but...
"... I don't know who Velvet is, but she sounds like she was real important to you. So I'll just ask... what does your heart tell you?"
He's never once believed she has no heart. "Is this what she'd want? If this feels wrong to you then... there's your answer!"
Lanval speaks his resolve, his defiance, and Hiro finds himself agreeing, that it will be a long time until laughter ceases to exist within the hearts of people. The sanctified water shimmering and blessing him with the power of the Lord of the Land.
Heldalf shouts, so many things, and for a time he can't even comprehend the answer to this dilemma. His mind struggles for an answer.
Pearl notes that Heldalf has had years, decades to perform his works here, and he grimaces at the thought of how to undo the work of decades - before she asks him to support Leo.
And he can see him, now in his bravery still trying to face him down, even without his blade. "LEO!" His hand sweeps down to scoop it up. Then he starts to run, feet stabbing at the ground.
Half-way there, he throws the sword in a lazy arc. It's only then, he sees the elemental energy being drawn out of the Shepherd. "SOREY!" The power flowing into them of that stolen Seraphic energy.
He sees death facing them down, and that sword will only barely reach Leo's hand. The moment he catches it, is the same moment that Hiro skids the final few steps in front of them, the same moment that ball of gathered energy slams down in their midst.
For a while, all vision of the two of them is blotted out, then when that eruption of so much power clears...
... Hiro stumbles forward, his shield clanging to the floor, his entire form looking tortured like he might just - collapse at any moment, and take his last breath. Not one speck of that power struck Leo.
Around his neck, a gnarled talisman just glows ever so faintly with a white light.
Another step, and he falls to his knees, sword edge wobbling, "You..." He rasps, "... underestimate her."
He cracks a smile in defiance of him, defiance of death, because he had his answer. Lucia has never once Hellionized. Even close to death she did not succumb.
He dares a glance over his shoulder, daring an unfocused glance at Leo, "... You underestimate him too. And then past him straight towards the blur that is him, "Underestimate... everyone."
He then reaches out a hand towards Leo, because he truly can't stand on his own, needing to be pulled back up. "Can fall over... later." Somehow it becomes easier to keep that smile on his face, "Together?"
Hiro seems to snap to attention, before he takes a step, then another - then begins to run, matching Leo's pace as he comes from one angle, and he comes from the other.
He moves on sheer momentum, if he stops, he knows he'll pass out - he knows he'll fall and not get back up again. It's not even a question.
His image triples - and as Leo calls out the attack his master taught him, Hiro's image triples. And all three run right through the form of the Armatized Lord of Calamity one large slash in three parts.
The wind howls as if to fill that space with its violence... and the youth that committed to it, slows to a stop.
There's one lengthy pause, as he looks over his shoulder at the Lord of Calamity, just long enough to see the results. Smiles. Then teeters over and falls flat on his face.
GS: Hiro has activated Force Action: Lock On! GS: Hiro spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Formation! Hiro has attacked Georg Heldalf with Trinity Crisis! GS: Hiro has gained 1 Combo! GS: Hiro's stances have changed from Stoic to Hero! GS: Hiro has completed his action. GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Hiro's Trinity Crisis for 293 hit points! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Strain! Hiro takes 28 damage!
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
He could not, Maotelus, Heldalf, they scream; he could not, and isn't there some logic, to that?
"I..." Her head lifts, gutted, voice guttering as Maotelus calls out to her. "I don't know... asking a witch like me something like that..." It was always Maotelus, with the hope for the world. Magilou's bitterness is... so ill-fitted, to this.
"Of course it is!" Bienfu yells, instead. (His Normin name is Breyve, you know.) "Your brain's poisoned, Maotelus! Rrrrgh!!!! Stand still and let us get you out--!!" And he tumbles, hat-over-heels, as Heldalf wrests command back and roars.
Magilou barely blinks, gazing, hollowed out, up at him.
"Snap out of it," Bienfu whines, pleads, as he scrambles back over to her, shaking at the now-white ruff of feathers about her neck. "Miss Magilou...!"
The crushing Malevolence which pours from Heldalf -- from the union between Heldalf and Maotelus -- it's too much, for his tiny body. He might be a Greater Normin, he may perhaps the most unique Normin to live... but he is still, in the end, a Normin. They accentuate the power of the Seraphim around them; they are they assistants of the mystical world, and where they do not lend their power to another they hide themselves away in fireplaces and fallen logs.
But Lanval -- Lanval, who has ever been Bienfu's friend, since they bonded in their cups -- steps closer to them. In front of them. Protecting them, as he invokes his small joys, in eternal defiance. Bienfu brightens, as he feels that pure water wash over them -- responds with his own understanding of water, though it is not all he knows, holding it about them in flourishing eddies. He reaches up with his little paws to dip them into the water, and pats Magilou's cheek.
(Her cheeks are already damp. This doesn't hurt as much as that, though.)
It's a holy-water wakeup call for Magilou, but it isn't until she hears the people calling out to her that her brow knits, eyes blinking shut, for a moment. "I..." She says, again, as she processes all they're saying.
"It has to be me..?" She echoes, as Rixia's words reach her. And as Hiro speaks, she murmurs, "my heart..."
Slowly, agonisingly, her hand lifts to her cheek. "I'm... crying," she realises, numb. "This feels... it feels..."
Shadows flicker, as Pearl dances into her line of sight. Making room... yes, she remembers. She remembers, though her hand is distressingly lax, in Pearl's fingertips, for a moment. Perhaps Pearl knows; perhaps that's why she takes it.
Slowly, with Pearl's help, Magilou stands. "Help me," she murmurs, of the dance. And Pearl, as it happens, has learned so well how to dance; Magilou spins, outwards, from her, and twirls back in. As the light sparks back to her eyes, lit by motion, Bienfu turns into a mote of light and disappears back into her heart.
It is so like Tetra Detonator, what comes. The heat of a boiling sun; the crushing waters of deepest ocean. A mountain, unmoving. The harshest hurricane.
Quattuor Tragoediae.
"Come," Magilou bids them.
And as she dances with Pearl, the energies of Dezel, Mikleo, Edna, Lailah -- they END, as they come into that sphere of water. They end, and the dance Pearl summons does not, with such fine and nuanced control over that annulment of power.
Around them, horror rages.
And in their sphere, untouched, they know only the dance.
It is not a thing without cost; this is not something Magillanica could have done. When Spell Absorber was a focused thing, it could erase something totally. Now Magilou has broadened its remit -- now she has made something which can consume ANY threat -- all that power has to go somewhere. It has to go somewhere, unfolded to its most basic state in her veins. The very potential of all their power rages in her.
It's a wonder she is not torn apart.
Leviathan rises, and Magilou sinks, as Pearl lets her down on their vast head. She lays her hands on their scales, and looks out, over Heldalf, and Maotelus, lashed to him.
"Do you remember her answer?" She asks, and asks one of them.
"That birds fly... because they want to fly, and for no other reason?"
Magilou smiles, gently. "I remember... and I've seen... the people of this world are still flying, Maotelus."
She's smiling, but there are still tears in her eyes.
Maybe that's a victory.
"Even if you're blinded... I'll believe in them."
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"Destroy? I destroys only what is false. Much false... much yet! Much destruction needed," Harmaus tells Shige. "When all is broken... what is true arises."
This one is far gone -- will anything be left of its story, once it itself has been erased?
Harmaus' blade of light does not, in this moment, meet with Rixia's body. Another -- starlight smears and resolves into that of the elven woman, Margaret -- stands in its path, blocking the blade with one of her own. Upwards, its blade of light is driven by hers of flame; both lock, struggling for one perilous moment as sparks and photons alike swirl and dance.
Fire gives, drowning in light. A flame cannot stand to the might of the sun, one might say--
Margaret's blade breaks. Harmaus emits a sound that is half snarl, half triumphant howl, and its glowing blade continues along its inexorable path.
Margaret is not finished. No, even with her broken sword, she still holds her ground. Pushes, pushes--
Breaks.
"Its weapon shatters!" calls out Harmaus. "Now, it dies!" That wicked white sword swings wide, as if to bisect her in the next blow.
But Margaret has one more sword. And she drives it for Harmaus' body, for all the cuts and wounds that others have laid out before her in the Seraph's corpus.
Harmaus never does see what becomes of the fragments she casts aside, of how they impact the prison in which the Shepherd floats. How the Pyreflies roil at the impact. How the sealing spell rejects her fragmented blade and casts it aside.
How that fragment, still glowing hot, still possessed of a sharp edge and still traveling at a dangerous velocity, smashes into one other gemstones which erupts in a ball of flame.
Harmaus doesn't see it because it swings its blade wide and it is caught by Margaret's fourth, because she takes her fight to the wounds rent upon its body, yes -- of course it is distracted. But it also does not see it because time itself shatters.
There is light when there are no further moments to occur. Perhaps that is the best word for it. 'Light'. Can they see it? Can anyone see it, in a no-moment instant, where causality itself has been broken? Is there a way to parse what is happening? Or is it simply... everything happens. Everywhere. All at once. Perhaps they can know it even without sight or sense -- the paths to failure. The paths to victory. The many greys and muddled ends that filter in between.
Yes. Let there be light.
And time... stitches itself back together. Do they know? Do they remember?
What it is they must do?
Sorey, still trapped in the sphere of Pyreflies, screams.
Zed, perhaps driven by those very cries, draws forth a weapon once used by a former ally -- and enemy. This, in a mimicry of one who knew best the art of what is now needed, is let fly...
...And sails overhead, crashing through the few remaining wards in a terrible stone-crunching masonry-rending display of absolute destruction. The scant handful of remaining beams snap in sparks of white light, and with a rush, the Pyreflies flee the confines of the spell that had caught them.
Sorey--
falls, tumbling towards the ground, now freed from the sealing spell.
"No! No!!" howls Harmaus, turning in the wake of that devastation to see clearly that it has failed. That the Shepherd has been loosed from his prison. Even as others might leap to catch the Shepherd, Harmaus hesitates not in the slightest, whatever such might now cost its master in the long run.
If it cannot keep the Shepherd locked away, then better the Shepherd not be alive to be rescued.
It lunges forward, a deep bruise-purple light erupting from its blade in to fall in a comet-trail rain in with abandon for all it might thus catch. This includes even the beleagured Shepherd.
"It dies! It dies!" Harmaus calls again and again with each falling star. "The Shepherd dies!"
GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Margaret with Iosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Shige Kiwako with Iosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Zed with Iosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Rixia with Iosis! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: Margaret suffers a terrible blow from Seraph Harmaus's Iosis for 230 hit points! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: CRITICAL! Rixia solidly guards Seraph Harmaus's Iosis for 177 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Rixia gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Gleam activated! GS: Zed partially evades Seraph Harmaus's Iosis for 221 hit points! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated!
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
"As you wish." Pearl says, helping Magilou to her feet.
"Are you ready, my soul's companion? I have left you cooped up for too long."
The Lord of All Waters *bellows*.
The dance begins, Pearl taking Magilou in one arm, and thrusting out the other. The waters gather at her feet from the Lord of the Lake's actions. She spins, lifting Magilou off her feet, before going into a perfect pirouette, spinning as the waters grow into a vortex of pyreflies, circling them both-"
And then Leviathan spirals up out of the water, surrounding them in a coil then diving again, only launch Pearl and Magilou in with a flick of their grand tail- and rising to their full height to let the former assassins land gracefully on his head. Pearl will set down Magilou here, Leviathan's magic giving no chance of falling. "Leave the rest to us."
She steadies herself one of his great, sharp fins.
"That being wishes to teach us a lesson that Spira failed to learn, my comrade. What say you to that?"
Leviathan roars once again, their powerful bellow echoes out to everyone. Pearl smiles. "My companion says they never went to school before, and they have no intention of starting now." There is another bellow. "The waters make their own calamities. Let us show you one."
Leviathan swims backward in waters they summon, raises their body, and roars- and the tides come for Maotelus and Heldalf. Pearl looks down to Kaguya. It's hers to start the next song.
DC: Pearl switches forms to Aeon Leviathan!
GS: Pearl spends 3 Combo on Headshot and Gatling, loading 1 into Gatling! GS: Pearl has attacked Georg Heldalf with Overdrive: Tidal Wave! GS: Pearl has gained 2 Combo! GS: Cover expired! GS: Pearl has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Pearl's Overdrive: Tidal Wave for 269 hit points! GS: Hyper and Quick applied to Pearl! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia is split into three portions. She is starting to pull herself together but an explosion of flame rips through her before she can properly knit herself back together. The remaining synthetic flesh melts away revealing skeleton. Then leaving puddle. Then leaving a fine silvery mist that sprays out in all direction from the pure explosive force of te attack--some briefly over Kaguya--and soon itself disipitates away from view. She doesn't even get a chance to scream.
And there is, by all accounts.
Kaguya feels a prickling of the skin first.
When she looks she'll see a thin sheen of that silver metal.
Is Lydia trying to reform there? IS that Lydia?
No.
"Blgkgglll." Some distance away, a slowly reforming mouth out from a silver puddle burbles because even in this state Lydia can't shut up.
The metal expands slowly--but rapidly if you really consider what it's doing--around Kaguya's left arm and then, connected by a strand invisible to the naked eye, the right. Thick cables erupt out to stabilize Kaguya's Shootin' Arms. With Lydia's consciousness on the backburner, the machines are operating on autopilot but even Lydia knew that there was something important about that gun, and even on the subatomical level, sub-neurological level--the machines know that the most important thing they can do right now is help Kaguya Shoot That Gun.
Protect. Enhance. Empower.
Lydia, in the meanwhile, starts to bubble out of the puddle, eyes forming irregularly like that weird final fantasy jello voidsent with eyes.
Protect. Promise. Fire.
Lydia's vow to Kaguya goes deep into her skin to reach even the nanotechnological subatomic level.
The head opens its mouth, expelling staticcy noise, the occassional beeps and boops, but mostly a hideous screeching like nails scraping on metal.
The eyes fill in with silver fluid as a black hole erupts into existence behind the Armatized Heldalf, trying to drag him into its oblivion--
--before exploding with the power of original creation rushing out with far more force than the black hole that proceeded it. The power is expelled from Lydia less like conscious mystical assault and more like an automated defense system that just involves Guardian-powered explosions.
Cables out from the Lydia-puddle, some distance from the augmenting silver helping Kaguya out, stab into the ground and try to stabilize the form but it's a terrible, imperfect process. Probably the best that Lydia doesn't seem to be entirely conscious for it.
GS: Lydia Seren spends 1 Combo on Link! GS: Lydia Seren has attacked Georg Heldalf with Black Hole! GS: Lydia Seren has launched an attack Link! GS: Lydia Seren spends 2 Combo on Poison and Gatling, loading 1 into Gatling! GS: Lydia Seren has attacked Georg Heldalf with Big Bang! GS: Lydia Seren has gained 2 Combo! GS: Lydia Seren has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf partially guards Lydia Seren's Black Hole for 0 hit points! GS: Break and Entangle applied to Georg Heldalf! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Georg Heldalf takes a solid hit from Lydia Seren's Big Bang for 219 hit points! GS: Poison blocked! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
Leo can't stop to think, because the moment he does, everything will sink in, and drag him down. He's in the heart of the Lord of Calamity's Domain, and he is faced with a horrific choice: acknowledge Hiro's 'yes', and the knowledge he was used by people he loves, or bury it. Either choice could crack him wide open, and give the Malevolence all the opening it needs to seep in.
If it hasn't already. Ignorance has ever been Leo's shield, as loath as he's been to admit it. But Hiro and Pearl and Rixia and Lanval and Layna and Lydia and even Magilou have seen things in him that they deem good and worthy. Leo clings to that thought as he starts to sprint across the broken stone.
Sorey screams in agony. Hiro shouts his name. Leo reaches out to catch his blade, and elemental power washes through the air at him. The clashing Seraphic energies drown out sight and thought and sense for a few, horrible seconds.
When Leo comes to, he's standing in front of a patch of scorched, broken stone, holding his sword. Hiro stands in front of him. "Hiro," Leo chokes out. "...Hiro."
Fresh tears well up in Leo's eyes. "Together," he says. The knight spins on a heel, leaps over the stony shards left behind by Edna's stolen power. He holds his sword low and to the side as he rushes Heldalf, its blade gleaming with a brilliant white light that grows brighter by the second. Behind him, he hears Pearl's invocation, and the ROAR of both Leviathan and the surf they command. The Aeon's ferocity echoes in his heart.
"Lion's..."
Heldalf knows how this goes, but in this moment Leo is in a flow state, despite his injuries and emotional exhaustion. He sweeps his blade up, and a wash of flowing power forms the rough outline of the icon. Another sweep, and the power boils outward, sparking and twisting like the plasma streamers of a star.
"...HOWL!"
Leo's voice echoes off broken stone. The leonine icon--a bright, stainless answer to Heldalf's own Malevolence-twisted form--stares him down, looking him in the eye as it races towards him and detonates. Leo is right behind it.
GS: White Knight Leo spends 5 Combo on Headshot and Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! White Knight Leo has attacked Georg Heldalf with Lion's Howl! GS: White Knight Leo has gained 1 Combo! GS: White Knight Leo's stances have changed to Avenger! GS: White Knight Leo has completed his action.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
The pain in Margaret's arm feels immense. It isn't settling out. It felt, if not lethal, disabling. Riding the magic is helping her, but, part of her thinks, I'm going to collapse once it's done. That's no good to anyone. Either I'll die (definitely not on my agenda), or one of them will run to help me and -
We'll all die, Margaret thinks. Her eyes turn towards her arm for a moment. It feels as though it's - shredding? Coming apart, underneath the fabric. It hurts indescribably, but something strange happens. A shadow comes forwards, armored and helmed. A shade, called by Shige. A shade that reaches for her arm.
* 'Unravelling' identified!
* 'Unravelling' transmuted into '????? ????'
The pain does not stop, but it becomes something less... open-ended. Margaret has no time to wonder. Something feels like it's erupting and she wonders if it's her. Zed, the man from another star, is smashing the prison with his great flail. Good, she thinks. Good -
Rixia's magic does something wonderful. Indescribable. The world seems to unfold for Margaret, who is briefly quite certain that she's died.
And maybe she has. Who is to say? In many places, in many times, she could have, SHOULD have died. At Operation Mi'ihen. Of a tooth infection. Falling off a tree. A slight miscalculation in the variables for Starlight Express detonating her cardiac valves like a rusted steam engine. A thousand battles, survived, if not all won.
But now - it's like a funnel in front of her. To survive, she would have to become -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOG3eus4ZSo
Margaret hears the voice of a man dead for over a year in her ear. He's laughing, but without cruelty. A hand squeezes her shoulder, a familiar hand. "Mag, you idiot," Rex says to her, "*it happened seven years ago and you didn't even notice.* This is just sealing the deal. Get 'em," and he's gone, but
They aren't. Margaret's left hand tightens into a fist around the hilt of her sword.
"Rixia," she says, "do you see it - can you smell the sea? The plan, they're putting it into effect. You've done astoundingly. Magilou was right -- if anything she understated you. Ha! Habitual of her. But that's not the point. All we have to do now is overcome the Hellion and save the Shepherd. Shige can care for him while he recovers, but I bet he'll rally up for the last ditch; he's that kind of man!" Margaret has never met the Shepherd. Yet it feels true to her.
"One last big push," Margaret says. "We'll bowl 'im over, hook left, and hit the Lord from the flank. He'll never see us coming. Are you ready? Let's do it together, alright?!"
Margaret raises her blazing sword in salute, turns -- and she's off. It takes less than a heartbeat to reach Harmaus in his horrid form. The blade begins to smash down, desperate will behind each blow, with only caution behind it. It's the last one. There is no room for recklessness. And besides, only her left arm is at full capacity. Her right hand feels -- never mind!
"You damn fool," she laughs. "Do you think I would be outthought by a simple breaching sword?" Meteor showers; fireworks.
"Did you think - you could overcome the Black -gh - Hahaha! If I have to tear out my own bones to stab you, I won't stop it! I've hundreds, you know!" Grinding downwards. Margaret thinks the metal is breaking. Which metal? She doesn't know.
One shot, Margaret thinks. This is the sort of thing heroes do.
Sweeping the blade backwards, its white flame suddenly banks and expands, glowing a hot furnace-red and sending a hot backblast into the humidity of the air that Leviathan and Lanval have blessed. Her eyes open wide.
"If you love DEATH so much--"
Her left arm comes down in a single screaming burst, aimed to make one great slash - or perhaps one half of a certain mark - across Harmaus's body.
"Try it - yourself!"
GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from White Knight Leo's Lion's Howl for 253 hit points! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Margaret has activated Force Action: Full Clip! GS: Margaret spends 1 Combo on Link! GS: Blitz! Margaret has attacked Seraph Harmaus with A Continuous Motion...! GS: Margaret has gained 3 Combo! GS: Margaret has launched an attack Link! GS: Margaret spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Blitz! Margaret has attacked Seraph Harmaus with THE GREAT DIVIDE! GS: Margaret has gained 2 Combo! GS: Margaret gains 63 THP from Regen! GS: Margaret has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Gamble: High! Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Margaret's A Continuous Motion... for 279 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus's Slow Ward may block the effect! GS: Slow blocked! GS: Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Margaret's THE GREAT DIVIDE for 232 hit points! GS: FP up! SOS Overdrive activated!
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
"Then we keep building!" Kaguya calls. "It's because... a world is more than just the structures and institutions and rocks and trees! A world is alive! And humans--stupid, shortsighted humans--are worth the bother of teaching them over and over!"
She sees Magilou's doubts. She does. But what can she do?
...Lanval doesn't share his blessing with her. Not directly. But his defiance inspires her, too. Until laughter ceases to exist within the deepest depths of all's hearts...
Hers, too. Even if she does not feel like laughing, now, it eases the strain within her, makes that red force within quiet. For now.
But then... Horror, and stolen power. The energies crash down at all of them. Kaguya no longer feels the additional weakness of Earth, as she once did. She doesn't have to. The terrific elemental forces batter her, crash into her golden aura, and she is burned. She is washed away. She is smashed. She is thrown. And it all seems like too much; her Veruni armor, underneath her shirt, finally cracks, a vestige of ancient technology that cannot hold against the sheer force of elemental might given here.
Might, stolen.
Kaguya is on the floor for a little while--itfeels longer. But Lydia haxs disappeared... and then reappears. Kaguya feels the meal on her skin, and peers down at it. "Lydia?" she wonders. Then--Nope. That's Lydia, over there. This, is...
Cables shield her arms, reinforce her, and she smiles. "...Dork," she says. "...But thanks, sis."
Pearl is moving. Magilou shielded her, Kaguya realizes as she's looking at them, as she's seeing the Aeon appear, and she knows--it's time.
"Despair..."
That's what he said, wasn't it? Despair. "No." Kaguya shakes her head. "It doesn't drive me. It did, once. I get it. I do. But Heldalf... Maotelus. I learned..."
"I learned something else. I learned hope. And I think you, Maotelus, know it too. You just need to remember."
"So..."
Leviathan surges forward, and strikes. Kaguya hefts Zeikfried, and feels its weight in her hand. The whole world seems to her to fade into one silent point. And...
"I'll show you," Kaguya says, and she does not pray. There is no one to whom she would. ...But she hopes. And on that hope, she'll stake...
"By the power of Lunar! By the power of Filgaia!" Kaguya intones, and she calls upon it. She calls upon a world that her ancestors abandoned. She calls upon a world that rejected her. And she calls upon the world that she loves anyway.
The golden aura that Kaguya called flares back to life, and more; green light surges at her feet, and there is a pulse of life.
This song belongs to her.
"BY TWIN WORLDS BE BOUND!" Kaguya shouts, and it suffuses her, blinding light blocking out all view of the small Veruni.
Until she fires. And when she fires, the power of both worlds rocketing forward in a torrent of energy to force Heldalf back into this world where he seems to have transcended it. 'This' world. 'Their' world.
"NOW!"
GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Formation! Kaguya has attacked Georg Heldalf with Moment of Truth! GS: Kaguya has gained 1 Combo! GS: Hyper expired! GS: Kaguya has completed her action.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
"And yet... Maotelus doth reach to Magilou still," Lanval shoots back, but that's as far as he can go in bandying words back as he's almost struck by that same clawed hand about to go for Layna (he's not that far away), both saved thanks to Leo finding his gumption... through water he swallowed and spat back up.
That'll be funny over drinks once time does its part to create enough distance between the horrible now and the wonderful later they're fighting to make.
But a demand is made of 'SERAPHIM.' Lanval is one, but does not give up his power... because there's something far darker in this vulgar display of command and control of these summoned streams of colorful energy..
"Those art Seraphic sorceries!" Lanval calls as Heldalf's draconic, clawed hand receives those stolen powers. He might be able to do the math in the moment, what that might mean for Heldalf to be able to pull power directly from the Shepherd's sworn companions. (It may not be Heldalf, but Maotelus, which means...)
He will not be the one to spell out what that means. One quartet of the combined power, alone, is a match for his if not moreso, and what's here is not something to be laughed at or laughed off.
"'Tis through the gouts of flame there may yet be salvation!" It's the same principle from when they went through the ambush of the Four Wyverns - Lanval works his escape through the power in which his element is strong against, summoning another torrent of water to try and quench that wave of flame to give even the faintest opening to allow survival.
Lailah's stolen strength can't be put out so easily, and scalding steam and embers scald Lanval as he scarcely avoids the earthen component which he would not have been able to withstand, stolen wind and thieved water accompanying this almost-gap he made slicing and splashing around and aside him.
He has to give a little ground to move back from where the Earth-laced stones and pillars crash down regardless, but such allows him to keep his very spirit on its feet - as he watches Hiro's defiance and faith in Lucia's plan over any of this keep him moving forward, working in conjunction with one who would have been his foil and enemy until now. As both of them find common ground, in a common enemy... and Leo joins with Hiro with the ultimate culmination of the technique he learned from Heldalf when he believed it for better ends, matching Beast for Beast, a Lion's Howl against a howling lion-dragon of an Armatized abomination.
He watches Magilou and Pearl dance, as Magilou's Spell Absorber takes far more than he can comprehend in the moment as Leviathan, Lord of All Waters (of Spira, Lanval would insist and append in lighter circumstances) rises... as Pearl takes the one who helped give her the courage to dance a place to rest and be safe as the mass of pyreflies given form of a mighty Aeon to work their magic not only as a destructive force of watery sorceries, but as something wholly incompatible with the Malevolence to get it to part.
To clear the way for Kaguya's shot, through a weapon entrusted wholly by Seraph Zenrus, as Lydia engages elements of her personhood that will always be challenging for some to accept, but doing her part whether by instinct or by choice to protect. Enahnce. Empower. Protect. Promise. Fire.
Kaguya, she who is presently entrusted with the fate of two worlds by unlikely circumstances - due to having effectively lived in both - has her clear shot. Lanval's at the point he's already got some ideas on how to bend how he's not allowed to render direct assistance to the Veruni. As Kaguya prepares her shot...
It is time for Lanval and Layna to play their parts.
"Seer of Water... Layna Manydays... best friend," Lanval smiles gently with all the grace and wind-up of someone who would be begging to have a bit more from the Quartermaster's Stash in any other circumstance, and that's not even off the table because he's always like that, he raises that ever-heavy drinking gourd in one arm towards her gauntlet...
And gives it a gentle tap, a little water splashing out of that humble container of a piece of the very Water of Filgaia itself.
"Cheers," Lanval says, and broadly points towards the Armatized Heldalf after that tapping. In that simple gesture of trust, he serves as a more intimate conduit between Schturdark and Layna. Intimiate and mortally risky in the middle of this Malevolence-filled maelstrom... though lessened considerably with Leviathan's presence fighting against that pressure like a ventilating flood.
His part may seem understated on the surface, but yet...
The Power That Sustains The World is meant for those that live in the world (and/or its moon) that they're sustaining.
"Maotelus! Heldalf! I bid thee to release thy despair, for thou art company of many who yet live and fight for a world worth striving!" Heldalf has shown no doubts. Only Maotelus, in flickers... but they need only reach one to break it.
He quiets to give his focus to Layna, who has a heart, a grin, and a fist ready to reach out.
GS: Seraph Lanval spends 2 Combo on Inspire and Reload! GS: Seraph Lanval has attacked Layna Manydays with A Toast!! GS: Seraph Lanval has completed his action. GS: Layna Manydays accepts Seraph Lanval's A Toast! for 0 hit points! GS: FP up! Seraph Lanval's Reload! activated! GS: Healthy! For entering Condition Green, Layna Manydays receives 100 temporary hit points. GS: Layna Manydays enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Layna Manydays gains 2 Combo from Inspire! GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Kaguya's Moment of Truth for 277 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Strain! Kaguya takes 27 damage!
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
Once upon a time, a demon and a shepherd walked into a bar. 'Wow,' the demon said, 'You have invisible magic friends!? That's awesome! How do you do that?' The Shepherd, feeling quite concerned at how eagerly this strange person seems to believe his stories, but seeing that the demon seemed to mean no harm, answered: 'Oh, it's something called Resonance...' The demon, not understanding, could only blink and nod, 'Oh! Resonance? Like... frequencies? Vibrations? I can do that...!'
That is the story of how the demon set upon his task to learn the art of Resonance. That is how, somehow, perhaps by the whims of Chapapanga, he discovered that vibrating his eyeballs at particular wavelengths could allow him to see the unseeable. Or perhaps it was just that curious, innocent aspect of the demon's soul that allowed him to perform a miracle unheard of by so many of his people.
And this... is how Zed the Demon came to know so many who would become his friends. Perhaps without that meeting, he would have never come to this point? Sorey gave him a gift without knowing, and now it is time for that gift to be repaid.
The spell is broken. Berserk's ball and chain withdraw back into their inexplicable hiding place within Zed's scarf/tool inventory. Sorey falls from his prison, and Zed sees him tumble in slow motion through the air. Those eyes also see something else-- an otherwise invisible assassin, moving like a dagger thrown through the dark with a blade that shines with the inverted light of the abyss. Zed...
Does not move in slow motion.
With one hand, he catches the Shepherd, and throws him over his shoulder. With the other, he meets Harmaus' blade with his own. Sparks fly from Doombringer's edge as profane energies wash over the Metal Demon, but they do not take from him either life or sanity. Magic, as ever, burns his flesh and sears his essence, but Zed is strong.
He has ever been strong.
He can, after all, technically be counted among some of the First.
Black light casts a bright shadow. Zed grabs hold of the sliver of starlight cast by Doombringer's edge, and with it slaps Harmaus' sword aside-- and counters.
One strike, horizontal. The second, diagonal. The third-- horizontal, again! "Did you think," Zed grins a fangy, demonic smile, "You would be able to kill him so easily? You'd have to kill me first. And--"
One more strike, a vertical cut that terminates in a catastrophic explosion-- that inexplicably leaves Zed and Sorey both untouched (such is the power of attack cutscenes). "--Like I said before, I wouldn't die even if you killed me! Nahahahahahaha~~!"
GS: Zed has activated Force Action: Full Clip! GS: Amplify added to Zed! GS: Zed has activated Force Action: Boost! GS: Zed spends 5 Combo on Headshot and Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Zed has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Split Ladle - Sakura Supernova! GS: Zed has gained 1 Combo! GS: Zed has completed his action. GS: Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Zed's Split Ladle - Sakura Supernova for 273 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo!
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
Layna flinches at the scream that is torn forth from Sorey as power is stolen from his Seraphim companions. The stolen power is gathered into a ball and then slammed down, where it explodes - Layna braces herself, but she finds herself consumed by the four elements. Fire, water, earth, and wind - they explode against her relentlessly and is sent flying, slamming into the floor of the Throne Room. Layna lays there for a moment... and then, she laughs. It's a faltering, choking laugh at first due to her injuries, but it picks up steam as she manages to draw herself to her feet.
Nearby, Leviathan rises from the waters of Pearl's soul at her call. Layna looks up at it with a grin. As a woman of the sea, she can appreciate what it represents.
And if Leviathan's coming out... that mean it's time.
The boundless waters of the sea comes for Maotelus and Heldalf. And Kaguya - she draws upon the powers of two worlds, to force Heldalf back into theirs.
And Lanval... 'Best friend'. Two words, that carry the weight of the world - of worlds - followed by a third.
Cheers.
The risk posed to him by being here is not unknown. But he is here, because it is worth being here. She lets the waters of that power flow through her, and she turns her attention to Heldalf and Maotelus, that everpresent, confident grin crossing her face.
"You say my greed will be the end of me. Then let me show you, aye!? The vast, endless depths of my greed - as deep and sure as the sea itself... and, the heart that contains it!" Layna calls out. Her heart has always been vast and boundless - taking in those society would cast out and giving them a place to Be, a place to live, under her banner. She's claimed as a friend few others would accept. She lives freely - and gives that freedom to others. "I'll take everything from you! Your pain, your sorrow, your anger, your despair! I'll take it - and let it be washed away with the tides!"
She glows - first green, as she harnesses the winds to enhance her movement, then blue, as she surrounds herself with purifying waters. She charges them down, and unleashes it all - a strike with the power to part the very clouds of a stormy sea, followed up by letting those gathered waters flood over and around Heldalf and Maotelus. She gathers her will, letting the purifying waters flow - as much as she can pour forth.
GS: Layna Manydays spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Layna Manydays has attacked Georg Heldalf with Stormbreaker! GS: Layna Manydays has gained 2 Combo! GS: Layna Manydays has completed her action. GS: Georg Heldalf suffers a terrible blow from Layna Manydays's Stormbreaker for 258 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Georg Heldalf gains 1 additional Combo! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Georg Heldalf has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
Lydia's black hole slams into Heldalf. It slams him back, and the explosion that follows thrashes him backward. He roars with pain, stumbling; chunks of scales are shorn free -- and the metal hits the ground, smoldering, from armor that had been underneath it. Heldalf is blown backwards by it, with a snarl.
But he rights himself, with a claw slammed down to the ground.
"Too stubborn by half. Poor fool."
Such is the condemnation of the Lord of Calamity upon Hiro, after he survives the blows that he has taken. He looks between them -- Hiro and Leo both -- and Hiro launches in. He splits into three figures, and the Armatized hellion cannot track -- cannot keep up with -- all three. They launch together, slashing and striking. Motes of Malevolence explode away from the wounds. Underestimate, indeed.
"Nngh... GHHAAHHH!"
From the other side, Leo rushes in with Hiro. Heldalf turns, swinging back a fist. His own Lion's Howl begins to gather -- but he can't manage to form it in time, as Leo leaps upward. His blade gleams with a brilliant light. Plasma twists together.
BGM: White Light - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nau1BvFAGLY
The Lion's Howl explodes off Leo's blade, and SLAMS in Heldalf. Armor and scales burst off it. Huge streams of Malevolence blow backwards, and the huge figure sags as the blast of energy rips through him.
"LEO!"
He is staggered.
Magilou falls. And suddenly, Heldalf's Armatized body jerks. It freezes in place -- trembling, tense, muscles paralytic. No--struggling, as two wills fight each other. "Magilou... MAGILOU!" their voices cry, in unison, but it is Maotelus's that is stronger. "No... no! Heldalf! We have to stop this! She's right! This can't be the way--"
"No!" Heldalf cries, his voice becoming dominant. "We must press on!"
The Lord of All Waters rises. It is a draconic cry to match Maotelus's own; the serpentine form of Leviathan rises up, surging into the Malevolence. Pyreflies explode outward, and the Malevolence is beat back. A wave of sickly, oily corruption beaten back by pure seawater. The Tidal Wave crashes down, slamming the draconic form backward.
And Malevolence roils backward, blown back for a key moment. A moment that Kaguya capitalizes upon.
With the power of two stars, she fires Zeikfried. Green light explodes from the barrel of the ancient gun -- and it shoots into the towering, terrifying Hellion. That power rips through Maotelus and Heldalf, both of them bound by twin magics. Rings and strands of green light explode around arms and wings, holding it in place.
Lanval taps Layna's gauntlet. A surge of power fills her -- and Layna closes the distance. "What can you expect to do against the Lord of Calamit--"
Glowing green, then blue, Layna strikes. The clouds of Malevolence part as the blast rips through Maotelus and Heldalf. Brilliant sunlight shines down on Artorius's Throne for the first time in years. The Malevolence, mixing with pyreflies, and then thrown back by the explosion from the bindings Kaguya made, is thrown backward, as the Seer strikes true.
And two forms are thrown aside.
A white Fell Dragon, slamming down against the pit -- head smashing, unconscious, into the ground. And a man: the bedraggled, armored form of Georg Heldalf. He grunts, a fist on the ground. He begins to push himself up, weakly. "Nngh..."
Sorey's eyes blink open, over Zed's shoulder. Then, he nudges -- and drops to his feet. "Zed... ha," he says. "You've got... you've got great timing."
On the ground nearby, four unconscious forms appear: Mikleo, Dezel, Edna, and Lailah. They lay there, prone, but unharmed.
Heldalf looks up. He makes eye contact with Leo, after a moment.
And then a mote of Malevolence drifts down -- and falls into him, and then another, and his lips curl back into a smile. "Purify me all you like," he says. "But... it cannot change what I am. What I will choose to be. For the Silver Star. For my people. For my pain."
DC: Georg Heldalf switches forms to Imperial General Georg Heldalf!
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
The singular and very simple issue with Light, within that seemingly casual causality break, is that Light is ultimately extremely greedy and wants nothing but the path of least-time for itself. And in order to find the path of least-time, one would think it would have to evaluate every path that isn't the least time...
Every path that results in their horrible, gruesome, untimely demise.
Every path that results in despair and heartbreak, as Malevolence swelters within.
Every path that results in truths that are better left unknown...
But there is a reason people use Light for so many metaphors. It is, after all, a fundamental element that inexorably reaches its destination, no matter where it may lay. To reach for that singular point of light in the murky depths of the abyss...
There is a future there. Even if she doesn't want to reach for the future, it will come anyway. Because no matter how hard she tries to hold onto it...
The dirty little trick of a spell crumbles, and Zed draws forth a menacing spiked ball and chain that sails overhead and rams straight into the remaining few wards that trap the Shepherd, Sorey, and he falls free, tumbling towards the ground. Harmaus pursues, viciously whispering that the Shepherd shall die--
Rixia is girded, but for a moment, by a kindly old chirurgeon whose magic has been forgotten, but... the faint whispers from a medic so far more experienced than she gives her strength. Calm. Along with Shige's own hand on her shoulder. "Stay... with you..." Shige can see it for a moment; whatever Rixia's using at the moment is straining her so badly the nerves on her cheeks are straining purple. It's not a good look. But it's nearly over. "Gotta compare notes."
Within that space, too, Margaret very plainly calls her name and cuts to the quick of her attention. The plan -- they're putting it into effect. Rixia remembers; Leviathan, the Aeon. Magilou's own gentle reminder, Hiro's last-ditch effort, Lanval and Layna acting as Oracle and Seer in tandem, and Kaguya's own moment of truth... and Margaret has compliments for her as well.
"Let's save him..." she whispers. At this point, her soul starts to actively push back against the Malevolence which has so ensconced around it, like the membrane around an egg. This chick will not suffer a death within its shell... Marivel told her as much -- that she's no child to be looked after.
Margaret has her pomp and verve, and she sweeps forth with white-flame blade, and her left arm comes down in a single screaming burst at a diagonal angle, leaving one half of a certain mark upon Harmaus' body.
"Sleeping Lion...!!"
The Sleeping Lion junctions one final burst of strength, as if in tandem with her for a moment -- and within that moment, Rixia's moving with so much clarity and purpose that she only needs one path of least-time to proceed straight through the former Seraph and towards the Shepherd. And as she does so, moving within that lionspath, she rears the gunblade back with all her strength, wrenching her strength forward into one cut, followed by a--
,_LIMIT________,______________________________,
| | | || |
| | | || TRIGGER!! |
|____|_________|_||___________________________|
--the resulting bright, red diagonal line is so clear that it retains itself in existence for seconds, to join in Margaret's own:
That's right! It's the X Strike of those that stand tall and shake the Heavens!
As Rixia emerges out the other end, it's clear that her movement, in imitation of light, has another purpose:
It lets her take Sorey's falling body mid-air and come to a horridly rough, but passable three-point landing with the Shepherd in her arms, gunblade miraculously revolving in the air as if a feather and planting itself upon the ground.
"I got him..."
GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Formation! Rixia has attacked Seraph Harmaus with End of Heart! GS: Rixia has gained 1 Combo! GS: Rixia gains 58 THP from Regen! GS: Rixia has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus suffers a terrible blow from Rixia's End of Heart for 286 hit points! GS: Purge explodes for 5 damage!! GS: Seraph Harmaus enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Strain! Rixia takes 85 damage! GS: Seraph Harmaus has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Shige Kiwako has posed.
The flash of light leaves Shige remembering one of those things she avoids at all costs. It's the source of her conviction, of her ability to endure. It's also the source of nights of sitting in the dark, staring at nothing with a drink in hand. This all feels familiar. It always creeps in when she's at her lowest. When it looks worst and she's had to rely on her persona. That social mask she hides behind. This climb has had that silence creeping in more and more.
She sees the path forward. She sees multiple paths forward. She sees things playing out over and over. Each little action. All of it is overwhelming. The one constant, the one thing she can focus on is her own beacon of light. When reality snaps back in, she lingers. Stuck in place briefly. A thing that had happened in each of those.
"Yeah. So much to learn and teach right?" Her voice is wrong in her head, but what can you do.
She doesn't have anything flashy, nothing that will match up with the slashes the other two did. Instead all of the wisps around her, those things at the edge of sight even for her manifest and converge on Harmaus. Bringing remembered magics, long gone weapons and techniques to bear. All of it almost a fleeting memory, but all of it infused with sorcery to give it strength.
GS: Shige Kiwako takes a solid hit from Seraph Harmaus's Iosis for 208 hit points! GS: FP up! Arcane Font and Gleam activated! GS: Blitz! Shige Kiwako has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Wandering Wisps! GS: Shige Kiwako gains 61 THP from Regen! GS: Quick expired! GS: Shige Kiwako has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus solidly guards Shige Kiwako's Wandering Wisps for 117 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Charge!! You gain 55 FP! GS: FP up! Charge bonus activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus has Fallen! He is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
The scent of the sea is in the air.
This is the moment when everything matters. Rescue the Shepherd. Stop Harmaus before it can do them -- or Sorey -- further injury and/or death. Tend to the Shepherd, get him back on his feet. And then... and then...
One thing at a time. One foot after the other. Causality has reasserted itself and time is not so easily slain. They must tend to the most pressing of the issues before them, chief of which is...
Harmaus, bearing down on the still plummeting Sorey with that brilliant sword of light.
And yet. Fire may rain from the skies at the behest of the Hellionized Seraph, but that gleaming blade gets not even with a yard of the Shepherd Sorey. Doombreaker answers where Harmaus' blade calls, interposing itself as Zed forces Harmaus back and takes the plummeting Shepherd into his arms.
Margaret had traced some of those wounds afresh mere moments ago. Zed repeats the action.
And reverses it. There are wounds -- glittering white and shot through with red-violet contamination -- where there had been none before. One, two. Three.
And four.
"How dares it! How-- how dares it!" screams the foiled, injured Hellioned Seraph.
Harmaus, thus wounded, staggers back. Stumbles. Seizes upon its blade and moves to strike again to end the Shepherd Sorey. Margaret, grievously wounded, interposes herself between it and the Shepherd -- and Zed -- with her last blade, battering it back with one forceful smash after another. It responds in kind; theirs may be a lethal dance. The slightest slip would result in unmitigated failure for one side or the other. Both fight for the sake of the world as they see it -- but the worlds both seek to save are not at all in alignment with one another. Truth, lies. Malevolence, purification.
One blow, after another. Forward, back, and forward. It all happens in an instant. Zed tumbles downwards, the Shepherd in his arms.
Then Margaret calls Harmaus a fool.
"Fool?! It is fool -- I sees its hurts! It almost dead, already!" Harmaus retorts. When she draws back to sweep her sword out, Harmaus lunges forward.
Harmaus catches one half of a great blazing mark across its chest. Its armor -- its body -- burns bright, and red.
It's followed by another.
It's followed by an explosion of light.
It's followed by Rixia, settling into a rough landing with Zed, bearing Sorey jointly to safety.
Motes of light bleed from Harmaus' corpus: white and red-violet, the stuff of a Seraph and the stuff of Malevolence both. It staggers back, its form sundered from it.
From him, reduced -- returned to his Seraph form. Arching his back, the catlike shape of Harmaus the Seraph hisses in reflex as Shige's wisps swirl towards and through him. There is little now he can do, not even to save his master from such a fate that now awaits him. He is drained. He can fight no more.
"My Lord--" Harmaus calls, despairing.
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
'Too stubborn by half. Poor fool.'
"He's the best of us," Leo says, and there's surprising focus in those words.
The knight lands on his feet, more gracefully than Hiro--but only barely. His shoulders sag, and he trembles with exertion as he steps forward, to press the advantage as Heldalf reels. He doesn't need to.
"Lord Maotelus," he breathes. "LORD MAOTELUS!" The ancient Seraph has some fight in him yet, it seems, and his resistance is exactly the setup the others need. In another time, and another place, perhaps Heldalf could've appreciated it. Perhaps he could've seen the fire everyone brings to it, the determination to see this through. A glance to the side, and--oh thank the Goddess, Sorey's safe, that was a fright on top of a stack of other frights.
"You've lost, Heldalf," Leo says. He steps closer, blade still in hand, his battered armor jingling. "You're coming with--" No. This can't be right. Layna just Purified him. Right? Right?
Leo knows nothing about the metaphysical mechanics underlying the Hellion state, but even he can process what Heldalf is saying. If he doesn't wish to be Purified, he never will be. Layna could try all day, and gather up all the other Seers and Shamans and the Shepherd and they could try, and it wouldn't work. As long as Heldalf has a will of his own, and that will claims Malevolence, he will remain impossible to Purify.
The process is already reversing itself. Heldalf could be back at full strength in mere minutes; the Malevolence of his Domain didn't go anywhere. Leo starts to tremble. Someone asked him what he would do, once, if he caught Lucia--if he would execute her. She was the Lord of Calamity, after all.
"You've made your choice," Leo says. His voice is raw, agonized. The Malevolence curls around his ankles, winds up his legs, still searching for its way in. Leo raises his blade, and whispers something only he and Heldalf can hear: the start of a blessing for the dying. "May your soul find its way into the heart of the Star, and be born again, into the Goddess' embrace." The words are hollow on his lips. His face twists into a rictus. He has to do this. No one else deserves to bear this sin. The Goddess chose him for this. (The Goddess used him for this.)
Leo raises his blade once again, and sweeps it out, at roughly neck-height, with all his strength.
Leo hits the ground only a moment after Heldalf, sinking to his knees, his body wracked with sobs.
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
Sorey is rescued!! But he had already been rescued by Zed. So this means...
ZED IS RESCUED!?
IT IS ZED WHO IS PRINCESS-CARRIED?!!?
"Oh, thank you!" Zed says to Rixia. "That sword is really cool! Is it... some kind of GUN X SWORD? I'm a big fan! Nahahaha!"
Sorey stirs. Zed nods and hops out of Rixia's arms to let him down. The dragon-lord is dislodged from the Lord of Calamity, and Leo...
Leo ends it.
...
There's nothing left to be said. This is not the time for a clown.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
Everything goes according to plan, to appearances, as Seraph Lanval takes a seat near Layna in the wake of that final, miraculous push that took so many disparate powers working together in tandem to make happen. He has himself a drink from that gourd to ground himself after all of that.
What can Layna expect to do against the Lord of Calamity, indeed. What can Kaguya, Zed, Rixia, Margaret, Lydia, Leo, Pearl, Magilou, Hiro, and Shige do against the Lord of Calamity?
"That." Lanval answers, belatedly, in his more sedate voice.
A rescued Sorey comes to, and stands. The four unconscious Seraphim whose powers were called upon by the Armatized Heldalf and Maotelus are there, and Lanval can give this reassurance to the gathered as a fellow Seraph who can sense this sort of thing.
"The four of 'em are all right," Lanval says, looking over to the quartet that dealt with that part of it. "Thanksh ta them."
He sees how Harmaus' faith in his Lord of Calamity is shaken, and pays them little more heed in the moment since his attention is pulled as a half-open eye looks to where a mote of Malevolence descends to collect back into Heldalf's person, and his defiance of being purified. It can't change what he is, what he'll choose to be - for the Silver Star, his people, his pain.
He reaches a hand up to Layna's shoulder in quiet reassurance if she lets him, setting the drinking gourd down on the ground to rest his other hand on top of. Heldalf does not want to let go, and there...
Leo asserts himself, knowing the weight of what it's going to mean. Lanval watches the happenings, seeing the Malevolence curl around for that opening as the White Knight Leo swings that blade, releasing one from the mortal coil... and lets the sorrow and despair of it all out.
"Let him feel ash he needsh," Lanval advises. Even as a Seraph whose native Domain is all about the enhancement of the small joys of life, he understands when there are places where it needs to give way to something else.
"...Let everyone feel what they need."
<Pose Tracker> Lydia Seren has posed.
Lydia's puddlemouth works slowly. Kaguya says something that resonates deep with the very slowly reforming puddle. There is a response.
"Dddddrrrrr...."
What could it be trying to say??
A glowing blob pushes up out of the floor, pseudopods pushing out and growing hands that help the blob ambulate towards Kaguya and her gun. "rrrrrrrkk....."
Feet grow out up top and there's a bit of an ambulatory half cartwheel to get the feet and the hands in the appropriate spots. It wobbles horrifically towards Kaguya. Step by step. Perhaps Juni is right. Perhaps this is just another monstrous thing? Though Kaguya never seemed to think so.
But the shambling mass rumbles, "sssssshhhhh...."
Piece by piece it reassembles itself into something gradually more coherent. It's still scarcely humanoid outside of the limbs pushing it along. The eye somewhere in there. The mouth somewhere else.
It places an appendage on Kaguya's shoulder, leaving a silver stain.
"Drrro... Doorr..."
And then finally, language is reinstalled.
DORK DORK
DORK DORK DORK DORK
DORK DORK DORK DORK
DORK DORK DORK
DORK DORK
DORK DORK
DORK DORK
DORK DORK
DORK DORK
DORK
Having passed on its message, the figure worbles and the eye twists and then focuses in on Leo.
As he's killing his mentor, maybe even a father figure really.
The mass shuffles off to Leo, leaving a sticky silver trail as it moves onward. In the moment there is noting to do but move on. And on. And as it reaches Leo, a pulsating limb pushes out and rests on Leo's shoulder.
Comfortingly.
"L..Leo..." Lydia's voice manages, desperately.
"I'm ss..sorry... you co..couldn't reach 'em. W..we're here... For... You...Can ... Can lean... on us..."
She knows how it felt like with her parents, and how it would feel like if it was with her found family. Riesenlied. Granny Halle. She doesn't think she could recover from that.
But at least she can tell Leo he still has found family left. She can do that much.
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
'it almost dead, already!'
Who does he mean, Margaret thinks, but she flashes Harmaus a grin. "That's when we're the most dangerous," she says, even as the ignited blade does not burst so much as disintegrate. Harmaus is foiled - reduced to the shape of a smaller animal. Margaret stares at him but the peril is reduced enough that she finally looks at her wound.
Her expression does not suggest something encouraging. She squeezes the flesh of her hand for a moment, pinching, and then shifts her hip to slide that hand into a side pocket of her armored dress, gesturing with the other.
"It's over," she tells him. "I won't rub it in." Margaret's head turns then, to look at the others, as the aura of starlight around her dims... (though she does glance towards Harmaus, rather frequently.)
She takes a step towards Pearl and Magilou - almost stumbles - and laughs it off with a, "We've done a lot, haven't we!" and a glance towards Rixia - before walking at a normal, even *sedate* pace towards them. (everything hurts)
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
Layna strikes true. She didn't do it alone, of course - on her own, it wouldn't be enough, but it took the combined efforts to get this far.
...But... despite everything, Malevolence continues to seep into Heldalf. Despite everything, he continues to choose the path of the Lord of Calamity.
"...So that's it, huh? That's what it's gonna be?" Layna says with a frown. She grimaces.
"...Stubborn bastard." She mutters. It isn't hate, but a sort of... resignation. Freedom is important to her... and that choice is one he's free to make, too. She looks to Lanval as he rests a hand on her shoulder and nods to him... and then, she looks toward Leo.
"...You sure about this?" Layna asks. ...He seems sure, or at least, resigned. "...Alright. Do what you gotta do. You've got a right to see how this ends."
She looks away, briefly tipping her hat over her eyes in a show of respect. She doesn't shy away from death - she's a pirate and a fighter, after all, it happens.
But this moment... it's Leo's, and Leo's alone.
And next... What'll happen with Maotelus...?
<Pose Tracker> Rixia has posed.
The problem with Light is that it's so singleminded on its destination that it's entirely possible that it doesn't realise that the destination itself has changed. When Rixia emerges on the other side, she ends up catching Zed catching Sorey instead, and she lets the two down with surprising Strength.
(she has some stacks of apocalypse in str-j, don't worry about it)
"It's... dad's sword," is Rixia's quiet response to Zed. That's a lie, though. It's the mental image of dad's sword from her mind, which is about as accurate as the memory of a person within your mind rather than the actual person themselves.
Rixia can see Shige's struggling too. She's worked so hard, strived her hardest. If her shades weren't with them, it certainly may have ended quite a bit differently. "You have to keep passing it on..."
But...
As their battle comes to a close, as Harmaus cries for its Lord, so do the others' -- and it's clear that the ground rules of Malevolence won't be subject to an exception here. The process is already reversing itself, no matter how perfect and well-executed their plan was. It simply hinged on the target's willingness to be Purified, and... there was no turning back from him.
And so, Rixia is forced to watch, once more from a distance, as Leo has to bear a grim sin in his heart.
If there's a silver lining in all this, it is that Maotelus seems to have reversed course; but... but wasn't there a fact standing in the way of their happy ending? That Fell Dragons were unable to be purified in turn? ... did a grim end still await this measure of history?
... ... ...
Margaret responds that it's over -- that they've done a lot. "We did... do a lot."
She watches Margaret walk towards Pearl and Magilou, but doesn't quite follow yet. Doesn't follow, as Zed and Sorey proceed to their unconscious but unharmed friends. Watches, as Leo collapses to his knees, body wracked with sobs. Anxiety doesn't let her hurry to his side. Lanval cautioned to let him feel what he must, as well.
Rixia looks fine. The Malevolence didn't take hold in her, in the end, and turn her into a Hellion. But it is also a rule that those who are unwilling to be Purified cannot, and within Lunar... everyone bears a measure of Malevolence within them regardless. She's quietly witnessing everything from a distant viewpoint, where she can absorb the enormity of all of it.
The most instantaneous of whispers that she acted on, that felt like explosive bursts of frustration before that nonetheless linger that she's now more certain than ever...
Time is truly everyone's enemy.
It isn't enough to simply stop time.
It has to be broken... forever.
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
"They don't need a reason," Magilou reminds Maotelus, slumped against Leviathan's scales. She leans on their vast fins, a grateful visitor to their oceanic court. Her voice is breathy and faint, but his ears are so, so vast. "Even if their wings may snap and doom them to die... not for anyone's benefit, not because they were ordered to... that's what she believed."
Her eyes lid, and her head lolls, against those fins. "Haha... something like that... it even took me down. Eizen's little sister... she's fierce, huh..?"
Maotelus falls.
And Magilou asks Pearl: "Please... let me down."
She reaches out to Margaret, to help her off of Leviathan's head; she steadies herself, against her. And as Leo makes his decision with Heldalf, Magilou makes, instead, for Maotelus.
It's hard to put one foot in front of the other.
But then, her strings were cut a long, long time ago.
"Maotelus," she calls out, to the Fell Dragon, as she reaches out her hand.
"... we don't want to lose you, too."
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
Kaguya watches Maotelus hit the ground, and she hopes. He seemed to understand--seemed to listen, when Magilou...
Heldalf has lost. And once Sorey's eyes blink open, Kaguya turns to regard Harmaus. He is back in his Seraphic form again. He calls, in despair, and in the moment Kaguya just can't hate him. Not even with what he tried to do; not even with all the rancor she's held for him in the past...
And so that power remains sealed.
...It helps that Lydia blobs her way over to her. Kaguya is sort of used to Lydia being... not entirely 'mortal' anymore, in this particular respect. Though she doesn't see her quite this blobby much. She doesn't think of it as a monstrous thing, though. She hears it rumbling, and looks over at it, waiting--
Dork.
Kaguya smiles at Lydia for a moment. But it's not a smiling time, so it doesn't last.
Not when Leo falls. When he finishes Heldalf. She is quiet; she has no quip, no easy statement this time. Lanval has words, first. To what Lanval says, Kaguya answers, "...Yeah."
But it's not over. Kaguya looks to Magilou--and over to Maotelus.
"...I wanted to show you my vision," she murmurs. "The shot... it was against him, but..."
"It was for you."
So is it too late?
<Pose Tracker> Pearl has posed.
The plan... almost works. One can simply choose to embrace the malevolence. To continue to regenerate that quickly, to become that cruel a threat again and bear down on those who would attempt to save them.
What a vicious trap.
Leviathan's head lowers as Magilou requests, and Margaret takes her hand. This is good, as she is needed elsewhere. She jumps down herself- the Lord of All Waters will hold watch over all for now, as long as Pearl can channel him.
She walks wordlessly, steps silent to Leo. She kneels down next to him- close to him, and some could note her trembling, breathing deeply to control that fear. And with no words said, no extraneous movement...
Pearl wraps both her arms around Leo, and pulls him close.
As much as this action fills her with fear- she could ill be considered a friend if she is not there in this most painful of moments.
<Pose Tracker> Georg Heldalf has posed.
Heldalf has no answer for Harmaus. He is on his knees, staggered and weakened; blood runs down from a cut on his temple. He looks up at Leon, then, and his eyes are empty. Hollow.
And there is something else there.
The immeasurable, constant pain of a man whose life brings sorrow to him -- no matter his deeds. The weight of a curse that will conspire to murder his family, to poison his friendships, to turn loyalty to fanaticism and honor into violence. A knight cannot survive under that.
"You learned well," he says. "My pupil."
It's his last words. Leo's blade strikes true -- and his head is shorn from his body. Heldalf's corpse crumples over into a heap. Red, human blood pools -- and the Malevolence around him vanishes, wafting away. The clouds cease to churn. Sunlight shines down.
The only Malevolence is that around Maotelus. It still rises off him. He looks at Magilou, eyes forlorn. But he doesn't resist, when she puts a hand on his draconic head. "Magilou... I need to go." He looks at Kaguya, then. "It's hard to maintain my sanity. I feel it gnawing at me. If I go now... maybe I can get far enough away. Or I can fight Sin--try to take it out with me--"
There is a note of desperation in his voice. But it's cut off, by another voice. A tired one, but still with some light. "Wait. Wait, just a moment."
Maotelus quiets, for a moment.
Sorey nods, then, and he turns to look everyone over. At Rixia, first -- another of his saviors. There is a moment of hesitation; it's not a great place to make introductions, and it's a tough time to do so. Still, Gramps taught him well. He smiles at her. "Thank you," he says. "I'm in your debt. Especially for saving my friends. You did a really good job."
Then, he looks at Maotelus. The Fell Dragon is quiet, now; stunned into quiescence, and fighting the way that even now, Malevolence starts to cling to him. He takes one step forward, then another.
"There's an Earthpulse here," he says. "The Ley. The same power that... that Miss Riesenlied and so many others used. I think I know how. It can be used for something good. And it can give us the time we need--to make sure that Maotelus can be saved." Sorey turns, looking back at the others. "Zed, take care of everyone. Watch after them. I'll be gone for awhile."
Then, to Layna and Lanval. "It's in your hands, now. Oracles and Seers... I'm glad that Shepherds to come won't be alone." Then, to Kaguya. "And you'll have to make sure of it."
Sorey looks to Leo -- and nods, a sign of respect and silence at his mourning, but he says nothing more. Then, finally, to Magilou. "I'll bring your friend back to you. It'll be a long time..." He smiles. "...But it'll be worth the wait."
He steps forward, then, and puts a hand out -- and rests it on Maotelus's nose, next to Magilou's.
Maotelus looks to Magilou. "He didn't lie about Zophar. He is out there. If... if you see Velvet again. Before I do. Tell her. Please. I'll see you again someday." Then, the dragon turns his head. "And you too, Bienfu."
The dark pit below is suddenly brilliant -- as the Earthpulse's energies rise up. A rush of brilliant white light, surging around Shepherd and Fell Dragon. It envelopes both, winding high around them. "I'll help," Sorey promises. "In the future. When I can. When I can..."
"And I will be watching. The oaths will be renewed."
A column of light shoots into the sky -- and then both vanish into the Ley.
The sun continues shining down on Artorius's Throne. The Malevolence no longer lingers. In the distance, on the ground, there is a faintly glowing magic circle.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
All Harmaus can do is watch. And watch, as his Lord speaks his last.
As again, the Lord of Calamity to which he has sworn himself is slain.
"I... forgets this not," Harmaus speaks quietly, amber eyes dull as he watches that red pool around all that remains of Georg Heldalf.
There is the faintest shimmer, the barest suggestion of auroral light gone wrong twisting in the air.
Harmaus is gone, long before anything in him could dare be purged.
<Pose Tracker> Shige Kiwako has posed.
Shige Kiwako watches Harmaus swat at ghostly lights for a moment. There's some absurdity there that she can't quite place. She might have even joked at the idea some time ago. Not here though.
Zed continues to confuse her and she gives him a look that suggests as much as she pulls her hood back and removes the mask. There's a lot of cats bouncing around the room.
Instead she turns to focus on the others. Hands down at her side. Tired. "It's easier when I know where to take people." Is all she can murmur to herself. "I don't even know where to start here." Probably at the end of her rope by now. She starts to try and move towards the injured people, but there's a lot of help there already. She goes to move to Leo, but she doesn't know him. Would he even want her help? Normally this is easy. Right? Just slip into a role and go.
Her eyes catch Margaret's oddness briefly too. She tilts her head. Starting small. Trying there, "Are you okay?" Pointedly looking at the hidden away hand, but she's not going to press too hard. She just sounds tired. Looks it.
She watches instead. Quiet at first. She isn't even drinking yet. She's not holding that lantern high.
Eventually she starts to fumble, fishing in her bag, hand shaking as she tries to find something. Eventually giving up on that she tries to slam the lid. Of a leather satchel. Her knuckles bounce off of the glass bottles hidden away and she just falls silent to watch again.
"I think he'd be proud." she finally says to Rixia. Trying to slip back into a familiar role. She wants to say more, but can't find the right words. She'd be embarrassed if she weren't just drained. "Glad you were here to help." That's reassuring right?
What can she do? She doesn't know the rites. She doesn't know the rules as she imagines them. Can she still help? That part's going to linger. She starts to lift the lantern. Maybe to try and give the fallen knight one last guide, even if she's lost too.
<Pose Tracker> Layna Manydays has posed.
The Lord of Calamity is slain. And Maotelus... they've earned him a moment of sanity. Not a full purification. It's difficult, but... that much is worth something.
...But what can they do?
For the first time, Layna can't maintain her confidence. She grimaces... and then, Sorey speaks. She looks toward him.The Earthpulse. The Ley.
"That... could maybe work, I guess." Layna says with a frown. She looks conflicted at what he's proposing, but... she nods, tipping her hat to him. "...Aye. Godspeed, lad. We'll make sure there's a world still waiting for you both when you're done."
That's all they can do, for now - but it's enough.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Lanval has posed.
Lanval, for his part, offers a smile, a nod, and a raised drinking gourd.
"I'll fill 'em in," he refers to Sorey's Seraph friends. He does not realize how difficult a task this is going to be for at least one of them to accept what's happened. To give Sorey that peace of mind, as he makes that decision to see to the help of the Fell Dragon Maotelus.
He's never seen such a thing before - a Seraph of such strong will that even becoming that state of being would still fail to snuff all of themselves out.
"Cheersh~"
<Pose Tracker> Magilou has posed.
The Malevolence clings to Maotelus, still, but Magilou has never feared it. Be it some fluke of her birth or the tragedies visited upon her -- she remains a pure vessel, even when her hands are stained.
(Later, she will speak to Leo, on the matter. But now -- now she looks only to Maotelus, one of her oldest friends, as he lies dying.)
That purple flecks from her palm, as her hand rests there. "You copycat," she chides him, tears still in her eyes. She's smiling, but she can't stop crying, either. "You learned that from Eizen, didn't you...? You've got to stop... picking up all our... bad habits..."
But a voice bids them to wait, and Magilou's head turns, as she quiets just the same.
"Sorey..." She breathes, finally. "... you really made them proud, huh?" She looks to the Seraphim he devoted himself to; her meaning is clear. "I'll look out for them," she promises Sorey, in turn. "Just while you're gone."
Her attention goes back to Maotelus, and Magilou nods, to him. "I will," she promises, on Velvet, and the problem of Zophar. "And I'd better." See him again, that is. She grins, and assures him: "It's not like I'm going anywhere before all this ends!"
"You got it!!" A pipsqueakish voice emits, from Magilou, because Bienfu is still here just the same.
Reluctantly, finally, Magilou steps back from Maotelus -- she finds Kaguya, close to them, and leans on her as Shepherd and Fell Lord disappear.
"And so, they were eaten by the Earthpulse..." Magilou says, vaguely, as she watches that light fade.
"I'll be here, ringing the bell."
<Pose Tracker> Margaret has posed.
When Magilou needs a hand down, Margaret provides it. She is a little less stalwart in her aid than usual. But only a little. Then she steps off.
Margaret answers Shige. "Oh, yes," she says, "quite fine - thank you for asking. Just tired, really." Her hand stays firmly in her dress pocket, so it looks insouciant.
She watches, and when Maotelus and Sorey gather the Ley and move into the Earthpulse of this world, she bows her head in silent respect.
<Pose Tracker> Zed has posed.
This... is what Sorey has decided.
"I'll take care of things," Zed says, offering the Shepherd a genuine smile. "Don't you worry, us Hyadeans can live for a pretty long time! I'll make sure there's still a Lunar-- and a Filgaia-- waiting for you when you get back. When you do, I can help fill you in on what you've missed. So don't worry about us."
"Go," he gestures at the Not Quite Fell Dragon, "You've got a job to do. And it's our job to see you off with a smile, isn't it? Nahaha~"
There's nothing funny about this. Nothing light-hearted. But part of Zed is glad at least that one of his friends will be around again someday. That's reassuring.
More importantly--
He has to keep smiling, Sorey has to know that they'll be alright.
That's what a dark hero does, in the darkest of times.
<Pose Tracker> White Knight Leo has posed.
Above, the clouds part, and the stifling miasma starts to dissipate. Sunlight touches Leo's face for the first time in what feels like an eternity, but he barely feels it. Sorey and his companions are all safe and well, and even Maotelus seems to have kept hold of his selfhood, despite his warped form. Leo is already turning Heldalf's last words over, trying to pull comfort from them. He can't, not when his mentor's body is cooling on the stone.
Pearl embraces him. Leo lets out a soft noise of surprise, and his body tightens, but the moment he realizes who it is, he sinks into her embrace. Lydia rests a pseudopod on his shoulder, and despite the alien nature of that comfort, it's coming from someone he knows and trusts.
Leo very nearly breaks down right then and there, but the urge to do otherwise is strong. Eventually, though--as Sorey explains the plan, as Magilou and Bienfu and Maotelus say goodbye for now--
"Be well," Leo says, as the two vanish. Then the tears come. The sobs start not long after, soft and almost hesitant.
The White Knight has slain the Lord of Calamity. This should be cause for relief.
But things are rarely so simple, aren't they?