Had the APC been driven by anyone other than Katana, real name Yuki, the vehicle might have stopped to save the two women. But Yuki was a cruel woman elected not only for her absolute loyalty to the family but for the black heart that made her capable of anything and everything. The forest was on fire, the entire thing, and it was filled with ghouls; when they should have been gasping for air and weeping with panic they hailed the carrier with casual ease. Well Yuki was no fool and where Gever’s aim had been off Yuki’s was not.

One twist of the wheel and the APC rolled over both women with a wet crunch before driving on.

Miles away Satori was advancing ever so slowly on the Pater, taking note of the way that the beast started rooting through his chest, and smiled. So maybe Eleanor wasn’t as bad a shot as she had let on. Still the Primeval was nine feet tall, far larger than it had been while squaring off with Nergal, and had a lot of meat for any projectile to work through before striking vitals; if the Primeval had vitals to speak of beyond its rotten brain and wretched heart.

Still an opening was an opening and Satori was getting tired of waiting.

With a flick of her free wrist a bolt of shadow leapt from her left sleaze at untraceable speeds. And a bolt it was or perhaps a supersized railroad spike long as her forearm and just as thick flew the distance and aimed to nail the Pater’s pseudo-hand to its chest. The way it solidified into a glistening black stone along the way would give the impact a nice weight to it that would hopefully topple the risen beast. The distance between them was short, originally fifteen feet before her silent advance, but the Primeval had shown a tendency to react nigh instantly and for that Satori had another trick. Her command over the darkness was such that she could nudge the construct in any given direction, should the beast seek a simple dodge the spike would curve, meaning he either needed to commit to a dramatic dodge or block.

All the while Satori choked up on the warhammer with her right hand, the heat glowing red in preparation for what was to come.

As the monster launched itself into Satori and Eubeal's direction, covering fifteen feet in half a second. An average person would see this coming, but might not be able to dodge this, he himself wasn't average in the bit, having some battle experience in the past against a Godmodder. This gave Eubeal enough time to displace himself five meters away from the monster's landing area, intent on keeping his promise of intervention, only when Satori called for backup.

The Pater dove forward and to the right, preempting Satori’s cast to catch her with a savage swipe of its left wing as it passed her by. The details were a bit fuzzy most likely due to the Pater’s vampiric discipline but ultimately it amounted to something of a passing clothesline. Only to be met with a strike from the Verdissian Warhammer clutched in her right hand.

In their short time together the Princess of Darkness had deduced the Primeval’s primary strategy; overwhelming reaction time. This strategy had no doubt served it well throughout its long life but it quite simply wouldn’t happen against Satori. Truth be told there were no definite numbers on exactly how strong Satori was. Shin-Ra Industries had never seen anything quite like her since the advent of one Vincent Valentine and the Princess wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information. The bulk of their information came from training exercises with the likes of the Twin Towers and the Chromatic Knights. It had become readily apparent that Satori was the fastest member of her division, capable of thumbing her nose as the consequences of supersonic and even hypersonic speeds, and while those recruits with sufficient metaphysical juice and muscle mass could overpower her she was more than capable of generating devastating amounts of explosive force.

In a sense she was the lightning bruiser of Shin-Ra Industries. Her only major weakness being her relatively low natural defenses.

What made her dangerous however was her mind that pierce through any attempt at obfuscation, supernatural or otherwise, in order to find the best course of action. While she was by no means prescient enough to predict the Pater’s exact reactions she knew the time would come when the beast attempted to overwhelm her. Hence why she had been steadily advancing on him since the moment she landed, daring him to lash out before she was close enough to do horrible things. In reality there was less than ten feet between them and closer to five. Very little time for the Primeval to realize Satori was following him, without eyes or even a turn of her head the only real tell was how her spike never fired, and by then he was already committed.

*Bam*

Verdissian Steel met Primordial Might. She had already shattered its bones with a rock no larger than the softball and this alien tool, glowing so hot that it could sear flesh from bone, was far deadlier than stone. She would catch the sweep while her arm was half extended and then as if that was not bad enough the Warhammer unleashed its payload, generating an explosion like a miniature warhead, likely obliterating the Primeval’s wing and send it spinning wildly towards Eubeal.

Simultaneous to this Satori would dash forward a few quick steps, not just to add her own momentum to the strike but to escape any last minute reprisal as the Pater twisted and spun. Once she took those steps she would whirl around, her upper set of wings closed formation overhead and those at the small of her back curved down to her thighs. This move put her by one of the Pater’s favorite weapons, its tail, and for that she had her spike. With far less flair than before she traced the trail, whether it dared to attack or just tried to defend, and fired her spike at the center line. If successful she would nail the Primeval to the ground, forcing the thing to either rip the appendage off of flop to the ground helplessly, nevertheless she kept her mind’s eye on it from the safety of the darkness.

And if the Pater had any other surprise movements in store it would do well to use whatever martial skill it could muster with that lumpy cinnamon roll that it called a body, “Eubeal. When I pin the monster finish him with whatever it is you call your magic.”

Eubeal once again lost an accurate vision of the electro-magnetic spectrum called light, though he manages to quickly deduce the sight-switch with Eleanor. "Sight switched, accuracy reduced." He states loud enough for Satori to hear from where she is, and probably the beast too, cutting his sentence down into concise and efficient dialogue. At the least he still retained his four other senses, quickly, he cut off his own ability to perceive light with his 'eyes.'

Being able to feel the touch of quanta, taste its vibrations, the electrons, photons, and the rest of the particles bombarding and radiating off his 'skin.' He could perceive the world still as shifting lines and curves, except for one point in space-time, which was completely blank, but the void does have the silhouette of the beast against the backdrop of shifting spacetime and quantum interactions.

To Satori he addresses again; "G-increase on your mark. Prepare to dodge far."

@Doc Doctor

There would be little resistance as the Pater tore out its own tissues, causing far more damage to itself than a mere gunshot wound might have. Within the now forsaken flesh, two small devices activated, small claws sharper than any scalpel blade emerging from the projectiles and discarding their tough outer shells, the part that had actually taken the impact. Like bugs emerging from pupae, two minuscule metal spiders ripped themselves free of their confines. For now, however, they remained within a chunk of the Pater it had discarded, and their emergence would do it no harm.

As for Eleanor, she vanished without a sound.

At that moment, Eleanor no longer existed. There was no longer any sight to be switched with Eubeal's, thus granting him his eyes once again. The Pater might react to this, and pull another switch, but it would have less than a split second to do so.

After a few seconds, Eleanor would reappear, in the exact same spot she had disappeared, having traveled a very short way into the future. Unfortunately, this meant that the APC had left her behind, leaving her suspended in midair. Instead of falling, Eleanor let out an annoyed "Hmph," then flipped over so that her feet were facing the sky, and fell upwards, rising high above the terrible forest.

Eleanor was honestly starting to wonder whether it was worth it.

She could have killed the Pater already, if she'd actually been bothered. On the other hand, Satori had seemed to eager to fight it, and Eubeal had told her to take care of his tuxedo (which at the moment was being carried away on the APC, having been left behind when Eleanor had hopped into the future). There had been no good reason to ruin the fun for the other two, and so she'd stayed her hand.

Right now, however, the Magna Pater was making the grave mistake of interfering with what she was doing. Eleanor liked her sight very much, and wasn't inclined to idly continue with her travels while it was impaired. On the other hand, simply waiting around was boring. She wanted to get going again, and as the seconds ticked by, she had less and less faith in the abilities of her two companions to actually finish it off. Perhaps they were simply taking their time, toying with the creature before finally snuffing it out, but Eleanor was getting impatient. If they took much longer, she'd steal their prey for herself, politeness be damned.

As it was, she was learning a great deal about the beast. The spiders her brother had made for her had found a nice little sack of meat to play in, and though they were cast out from the body where they had made their home, there was still a great deal to be learned from loose gristle. Every single cell in an organism contained the code for its entire structure, and much else besides. As they cut and crawled, dissecting and analyzing the dead tissues, the spiders were feeding back to Eleanor what they found. Given a little time, they would be able to tell her the locations of all the Pater's major organs, the chemical composition of the goo it excreted, its maximum potential speed and strength, and many other useful tidbits.

Eleanor slowed, her ascent gradually coming to a halt around a hundred meters above the forest, where she floated, weightless and upside down. Just for the sake of trying, she disconnected her optic nerves- or rather, the cords that had long ago replaced them -removing her own vision. Easily undone, when the time came, but for now it might reveal a little more about this nuisance. Could the ability still work when an affected individual possessed no sense of sight?

@Doc Doctor

Much as the Magna Pater refused to believe it so the Princess of Darkness had his number. In his attempt to appear unpredictable the Primeval had some exactly what Satori had predicted he would all along. Namely the Pater attempted to use its raw speed and power to overwhelm Satori by performing an entirely new action in the span it took her to complete a swing of her hammer, conveniently backing out of its own shoddy offense along the way.

And Satori was ready.

She had even been prepared for the Pater to attack her from above. As mentioned before Satori’s wings had been close formation overhead, a curious move, after all she’d already shown an inability to fly with that unceremonious landing of hers from before. In truth the wings (and the half-hands that had gone into their formation) were there for defensive purposes. When the ball of mucus came her way the wings crossed at the tip and dipped forward, providing a blast shield for her face, the thin film between the bony supports giving a few inches before sending the attack bouncing off at an angle and to the right.

Offensive trap failed and defensive maneuver largely predicted on her inability to track his movements the Pater was about to have a bad time.

All things said Satori merely lowered her sweeping swing and brought it crashing into the Pater’s left arm anyways, reducing bones to dust before releasing an explosion of heat and force potent enough to reduce everything surrounding the impact zone to ash and tear whatever limp and useless meat survived from the socket. With his new low position the Pater was more likely to skid and tumble from the blast but that was neither here nor there. It certainly didn’t stop Satori’s turn or the way she traced his tail and fired her spike into it, pinning the beast to the ground and grinding all of its momentum to a stop, all well before he could savage Eubeal.

But that merely covered Satori’s last bout of actions. The Princess of Darkness not only promised to tear through attempts at obfuscation but to present her own relentless offense in its stead.

With the Pater’s offense soundly ground to a halt the Princess of Darkness would leap onto the beasts back. Displaying a supernatural ability to stand on nearly any surface as she balanced on the Pater's slimy upper body and brought her hammer crashing down onto the middle of its back. Another detonation sounded off in time with the impact, several magnitudes beyond her first swing, almost as though every sweep of her arm was shaking the Verdissian Warhammer from a deep slumber. One could only imagine what would happen when it fully awoke.

“I warned you monster, I gave you the chance!” Satori roared past the explosion.

Satori's offense managed to foil the beast's attempt at piercing Eubeal's 'face,' a shame really. Scratching only the surface of his mask. Now that both sides of the sight-link were blind, it was much easier for Eubeal to perceive the universe with less visual feedback. He would still be able to perceive the monster to some extent as his own senses were an extension of the five. Hearing light and vibrations of the electrons, feeling photons and neutrons, smelling atoms. etc.

And of course he could perceive his allies as quanta easily. With Satori mounting the Primeval's back, Eubeal thought it best to end this fight quickly, choosing a lump of fluids within its ribs, he rapidly increased the mass of said lump while lessening its volume, once its volume reached a millimeter and its mass was about vaguely 2 x 10.9^6 kilograms, he would then shift himself and Satori back to the caravan where his tuxedo lied, or with Eleanor if it was.

The rest would be done by gravity as the beast would find a black hole the size of an atom, rapidly consuming what was around it in a few seconds, and as it wasn't massive enough, but certainly dense enough, it would rapidly decay to the point of exploding, the force in tons would be roughly equivalent to twenty world war 2-era nuclear warheads, detonated right at the center, within the Pater.

The Magna Pater's arm had thrust straight through Eubeal's face mask with ease and out the back of his 'head.' The chrome mask cracking, a huge hole in the center. The beast had indeed pierced through Eubeal's 'face,' but the Primeval would find no such thing as a frontal lobe nor a head, nor any semblance of anything physical, it would feel like air, or a vacuum in between those two holes in the face masks that the Pater touched, if it sensed beyond the standard five senses, and a sixthe sense possibly, it could know Eubeal's 'face' for what it actually is. Though, he didn't care about that right now. Eubeal could have dodged that easily as he perceived the beast's own fundamental particles, they may be foreign and certainly eldritch, but they were fundamental particles nonetheless, though it was interesting how much smaller they were compared to the average universe's atoms.

As the monster's arm was now caught by the mask, Eubeal increased the mass of the monster's heels to that of a three mountains, making it exceedingly heavy. He had stopped caring, and his efficiency had taken over. He chose a spot on the ground right below the Pater's feet and increased its mass a million-fold almost instantaneously creating a black hole, the size of a penny, he then shifts both himself and Satori back to where his tuxedo is waiting for him. Unless the beast is faster than light, it would not be able to break the grasp of the black hole that would be consuming the beast with a vast gravitic force, along with the air, the ground, the light.

The whole planet would soon enough be gradually be eaten by the black hole as it orbits the singularity wildly. Its own mass, being ripped off, chunk by chunk. Then, if left unchecked, and it probably would be, the planet would turn into a molten donut ,in space spinning and orbiting the black hole in its center. But that was later.

@Doc Doctor

Would the Pater be shocked to find that mucus sliding free of Satori’s wings? Would he be furious to find that a girl still in her teens who treated the occult like a game had read him like a book? Would he be embarrassed to learn that even the ancients could be cajoled into chasing shadows in the night?

While Pater’s slime was fantastic at what it did(chiefly trapping prey) it was no match for the sheer versatility of Satori's darkness. She could elect what physical properties her shadows took before every encounter, mix and match their strengths to find the perfect tool for the job, and if circumstances changed she could adapt on the fly. In this case she had angled her wings such that the mucus had struck her right limb on the thin sheet of darkness that had spread between each bony finger and when the mucus did not fly away on its own she simply elected to tear that layer free after the initial impact. No longer attached to the main body the mucus was free to sail off on the rebound.

From there a defense against the Pater’s tail was easy, she had been watching it for quite some time and now it was rushing straight into her primary defense. Her defense was much the same, letting the tail skim off the film on her left wing only instead of bouncing off it would find itself stuck in place by something distressingly similar to the Pater's mucus, by then it was already too late and her wings were closing formation to drive their bony claws through the tail and hold it in place. It was not impossible to catch Satori off guard, though it was extremely difficult, but the Primeval’s archaic brain would need to find a strategy that relied on more than overwhelming speed and relentless backtracking if he hoped to survive the night.

The rest was a repeat of before. Pater was not fast enough to duck to the ground and initiate his strike in the time it took Satori to swing largely because she had prepared her swing well beforehand and nothing the half-digested mountain of vomit had done was clever enough to divert her attention. His left arm was reduced to dust and then with her spin and turn, this time with Pater's tail on a spit, she would release her spike and nail the Primeval to the ground. Since he had no particular defense in mind for his inevitable failure she would settle on his back and bring her hammer with her, likely crippling the Pater by shattering and/or completely obliterating its spine.

Afterwards Satori’s lowest set of wings would curve to her front and extend into a set of hooks that dug into the Pater’s flesh and slipped beneath his rib cage, fastening her to the monster's back in the same way a rock climber might attach themselves to the slope of a canyon. Her upper wings had assumed formation overhead once more with the fingers turning razor sharp and carving their way out of the capture tail beforehand.

Satori’s third and potentially final swing came crashing down to the deafening roar of thunder. The Verdissian Hammer was half-awake now and it was spitting plasma instead of fire, filling the air with forks of lightning while the impact zone itself reached temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. For a brief moment the forest turned white and when it faded Satori sincerely hoped to find a blackened lump of flesh where the Primeval, as fun as desperation could be she was not fond of time loops.

It was only after that third swing that she realized an uncanny pressure was now filled the air; apparently Eubeal had decided to forego signals.

It had been a bumpy road to say the least as the Shinra transport had encountered the enemy. Corpses going under and even Gever unloading his considerable firepower from the side. All the while Nergal, the company dark knight and a willing spiller of his worlds secrets to them, he was quite a pickup for them when he asked to join. They were all ways happy to get more knowledge from other worlds and Nergal not only brought it, but other artifacts from his world as well.

He came from a dark world that long ago was ruled by the oppressive gods of light and their champions. It was his order that found and freed the dying old gods from their shackles and entered into the pacts with them. Though they were to die their will would live on with the dark pacts made with his order. Taking the fallen gods bodies and making them into weapons and inheriting ways of summoning up the horrors that survived the wars long ago.

That was the ritual he has been preparing the whole time in a separate chamber all to himself in the convoy. The room in almost complete darkness as he rips open a gateway to allow it to pass over. The whole time he could feel what was going on outside and even Satori telling him to take point, but even she knew his work was delicate and having to compensate for the rough ride was hard enough. He would take point soon enough, when he had done all that was required. Spilling his own blood into the circles pool mixed with the black blood of a long dead old god and using his runes in a certain combination to channel the calling towards him.

Usually with such a summoning the summoner has to implore the monstrosity for it's help and subdue it, but nergal found this one was ready and itching for the fight as he and his old dark lord master loathed the undead. It however didn't like the current state in which nergal was in being a minor lich himself so as soon as the ritual was done and the doorway opened the first midnight blue pincer claw erupted out of the circle as big as nergal himself he knew it was time to evacuate the chamber.

Finally opening the door to the pitch black room the dark knight in his full battle black armor save for his helmet which rests in his left hand he watches with the darkness around them. The Pater's trick didn't effect him before as he was secluded in the room, but now he could concentrate on where it was as well as the others. Emerging out the back hatch of the land vessel he stands looking towards where Satori and the others are fighting the Pater. Nergal takes his right hand to help twist his head and neck until the bones give a reliving popping sound. Since recovering from the fight with the horror his neck just hasn't felt right. Resisting the urge to go help the others with the pater, he simply slides his black helmet on as it connects to the rest of his armors system. Once connected he reaches for the handle on his blood drinker sword, the thin great sword with grooves along its blade slides from his back to his right hand as he moves to the top of the caravan and walks its top to the front of the drivers cab.

"Keep going towards the target, no stops unless myself or Satori tells you directly! " He yells down to the driver just in case there was more incidents with foolish women coming up to them. He was familer with cults worshiping death gods and in his thoughts he wonders if this world is a slight variation from his own that went a different path.

His gauntlets open the valve inside of them to let his blood inject into the swords handle and then fill in the grooves of the blade. He was ready for anything else that came their way and wondered if any of these things had blood left in them. The black helmet covered up the smile on his face as the same pincer claw from the circle before erupts from the metal top of the vehicle cleaving it open like a hot knife through margarine. Peeling itself from the tight metal frame the second claw pushes the side open to reveal its crustacean-like face and four "wings" on its back that look like lobster legs but only serrated. Its large body pushing itself out of the small summoning portal as if it was being born. Its body seems to be a mixture of a hard shell and fleshy sections and the midnight blue color of its entire body is only separated from the black ooze that covers it much like a mothers blood over its child.

With an indescribable roar the dark energies inside of it fluctuate as it finally pulls its legs up. The horror now barely standing on the moving vehicle with one of its feet in the former chamber of its birth, the other raised up and sitting on top of the roof of the next chamber of the caravan. Its two toes seen on its feet like claws that dig into the metal to try to help stabilize itself from the rough and fast moving vehicle. Not doing a good enough job with just its toe claws the two oddly purple colored tentacles coming out from each side of its waist reaches out and grips the sides of the metal to brace itself even more.

The "hole" it crawled out of it oddly seems to be staying open for some reason...

Satori did not currently have eyes to pop from their sockets nor did she have a functioning respiratory system to choke the life out of. Oh she had lungs, but ever since her transformation they had steadily fallen into disuse, outside of the occasional bout of manual breathing to keep herself from slipping into the uncanny valley she had honestly begun to consider them vestigial. But she did use them now, sucking in a lungful of air before booming with laughter, mocking and cruel with a mouthful of savage fangs on full display.

She laughed even as the Pater’s tail tightened around her throat but it wouldn’t last for long.

Yes, it had been a mistake to emulate the Pater’s coat of slime but not necessarily a failure. His tail still made a connection with her left wing and rather than retreat it decided to play coy, yet again, by slipping around her neck at lightning speeds. Now it would have been entirely understandable for Satori to simply shrug off the attempt, after all her wings were already in close defensive formation around her head by forming something of a half-dome around her dome, and without penetration the only way for the Primeval’s tail to make it around her neck was by slipping in from below. This was just fine by her. Doing so put his tail right in line for the two of the three bony fingers hidden inside of each wing (four in all) to plunge their way deep into its tail without resistance, razor edges punching through the spongy meat and remarkably flexible muscles, eventually shattering whatever served as the beasts spinal column and provided it structural solidarity, before finally popping out on the other side. Even if a crippling wasn’t enough to stop the Pater her follow up would be. So fine were the edges of Satori’s shadows that they were damn near two-dimensional and her wings played loose with geometry to obtain multiple per digit. It was a blur of motion that saw her wings vibrate within the Pater’s tail, cutting the limb into a dozen pieces from the inside out, then a hundred, and so on until all that was left of meat was a fine bloody mist.

When the deed was done the wings returned to their defensive formation overhead. Meanwhile the pinky and thumb of each wing had turned their attention inwards to peel Satori free. It was a fine series of cuts but peel was the operative word for they sliced away the Princess' pearly white flesh and left a ring of raw red hypodermal skin around her neck.

Simultaneous to Satori’s newest party trick (hypersonic slicing and dicing was going to be a hit with the orphans) her right arm would be wheeling around for the backswing. Impressive as the first strike had been it not been enough to send the Princess of Darkness rebounding, the next might change that. The strike came from the left at a diagonal angle from above, cutting its way down if you will, such that it would be crashing into the side of Pater’s head with a localized thunderstorm following in its wake. Awoken by the fresh spike of pain from Satori the Verdissian Warhammer completely skipped phase two and went straight to phase three, and should the Pater manage a dodge that would not stop the blinding flash of light or the outpouring of hyper aggressive plasma that ravaged everything surrounding Shin-Ra's youngest daughter.

Heck even Satori herself was not immune to the thunderous rampage. Mere sparks compared to what the Pater would suffer from the expanding dome of plasmatic force but forks of lightning would occasionally snap at her, delivering sharp bites at the behest of a barely contained supernatural force that wanted to be free, from the Maiden of the Night and back at the side of its true master yes. But not before it swallowed the Primeval whole.

Eubeal exits the arena.