Hector covered his mouth to stifle another laugh as Gregory prepped an attack. His eyes were black glass once more as communications between him and Miranda played like a movie reel in his mind.
With a cursory knowledge of what Gregory could do, Hector had a slight advantage.
"Shouldn't have tipped your hand to me~" he muttered to himself, the sing-song taunt catching automatically to an old lullaby nudging at the borders of his consciousness.
Miranda smacked a three-meter-tall chunk of wood from a nearby tree with an audible crack, pitching the hunk of tree trunk at Gregory's general position before sliding to the right for another blindside.
A distinctly different sound called for Gregory to abandon his position and he jumped out of the way to the left, rolling to a stop some feet away. With the path broken, the rock shot forth and thunked uselessly against the massive chunk of wood, illuminating it for a brief moment as the glow faded.
Flinching as it crashed into the ground and kicked up a spray of dirt, he scrambled to his feet just in time to see Miranda drift past its own projectile, buried partially in the ground, right at him. He would have liked his thoughts to race for a solution, but it was a mess up there at the moment.
So, when an utterly insane idea came to mind, he didnβt take any time, time he didnβt have anyways, to weigh it out. A few steps back as if retreating from the approaching figure, before he rushed towards Miranda. Now he just needed to avoid the arms and not get skewered by her Licker tongueβ¦
Hector grinned. Miranda took the bait, moving forward at breakneck speed to meet Gregory. The Aberration boy considered actually breaking a particular neck, but refrained.
Miranda slipped just far enough left to catch Gregory by the upper arm as the two nearly collided. This time, though, instead of holding him or throwing him, it just gripped harder. And crushed the humerus.
He grimaced as Miranda maneuvered through the air without any sense of effort, snatching his arm as he nearly ran right past her. Jarred to a sudden halt, his eyes widened when the monsterβs grip tightened around his upper arm. The rock clutched in the hand was released moments before he felt as the bone was ground to dust.
Even adrenaline wasnβt enough to dull the pain as he slumped to the forest floor, apparently intent on screaming his throat out. The pain was blinding, but it had not rendered him unconscious just yet. While one arm dangled uselessly in Mirandaβs grasp, the other tried its best to trace a path on the ground next to Gregory. It wouldnβt be a long one, but maybe itβd be enough at point blank.
Miranda remained in place, face turned towards Gregory, curious about her victim's next move.
Clouded by pain, it took Gregory a few moments to realize that his hand that still worked moved meaninglessly over the forest floor. No glowing path trailed behind, nor was there a rock positioned to punch a hole through Miranda. βShit,β he croaked out, stumbling over the simple curse, as he stared up at the near-featureless face.
βMust not have actually activated my power,β he realized with surprising clarity as his free hand reached up to try and bap Miranda. A last desperate attempt with the hope that she didnβt really count as living and weighed about as much as she looked to.
The glowing hexagon inscribed in a dual-ringed circle appeared on Miranda's body, but the moment the spell activated, Gregory felt his entire body slump, as if a great weight had settled over his shoulders. Which it might as well have, since the meaning was clear even to his pain-addled mind; he wasnβt moving her in the slightest. Course the density probably also meant he didnβt actually have a way to hurt herβ¦
The glyph winked out as he released it, and he slumped even further in her grasp if that was even possible at this point. His free hand fumbled around him for something, but the fight seemed to have left him even as he grasped at the dropped rock.
Miranda released him, letting the dangling body drop completely as she moved back into the darkness. A hiss punctuated the brief silence that followed her departure. The game was still afoot. How many lives Gregory had was a number he would have to find out--one way or another.
Blinking away the stars that covered his vision when his mangled arm hit the floor, Gregory only really became aware of the other, lesser pains as he was left alone for a momentβs respite. Each breath was accompanied by a flare of pain that radiated from his gut. Of course it had reopened; it wasnβt even a fucking day old.
He considered just laying here for whatever was supposed to happen. Honestly did for a moment. Why the fuck was he trying so hard anyways? If he proved himself, theyβd just send him out. And if he survived? Theyβd send him out on harder missions, until one day the dice came up in snake eyes and he didnβt come back. Assuming he was fortunate enough that a stroke of bad luck was what ended himβ¦
Regardless of those thoughts, Gregory eventually propped himself up unsteadily. Thumping the rock into the soil next to him a few times, he didnβt want to roll over and die, but his options were narrowing. Standing up took an effort on its own, and he swayed a bit as he tried to gather his bearings again. Where the hell had he seen that flash?
Hector scratched his chin, mental eyes running through the film reel of events Miranda was sending his way. Ew. A deadweight. One of those guys. Being a waste of oxygen was one thing, but being a waste of magic was quite another. Hector had to admit his power was one of the better ones, though, so he was just a little biased against Gregory's lackluster participation. If Rosa had seen fit to give this newbie special treatment, then there had to be more than just some loser who would roll over at the first sign of defeat. But Rosa had always said that Hector was too mean to the other students.
"You need to play with them, Hector, not with them."
Rosa sucked at giving advice. But in some horribly right way, she made sense.
Hmm. Fine.
"What a party pooper," he mumbled, crawling out of the recess in the tree.
Tag, then. Because if Gregory gave up that easily, Hector would have to go back to his containment chamber (or get shot). And he hated that boring, white room with no windows. Sure, they had filled it up with knick-knacks and games after he had 'gotten better,' but what was the point of it all if he only had Miranda to play with? She wasn't even that fun. Especially not after she became stronger.
Near Gregory, Miranda began to make a clicking noise instead, like the sound of a tongue sucking against the roof of a mouth. Rhythmically. A metronome. Constantly telegraphing her position.
Before long, the clicks had relocated to Gregory's right and Miranda hovered just within range of the paltry moonlight filtering down through the foliage. She hissed again and feinted forward with an awkward lurch made only stranger by her particular brand of movement.
In the direction Miranda was facing, and far ahead of Gregory, Hector fumbled through the half-remembered lyrics of that "Clementine" lullaby he used to hear so often, deciding to just sing the chorus over and over again in a loud voice as he walked even further from Gregory's position.
"Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, Oh, my darling Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine." After a few moments, Gregory decided he prefered the silence to the noise Miranda was making. It let him keep track of where Miranda was, but only highlighted that there wasnβt any real escape as the source drifted around him. Grabbing at the shoulder of his broken arm to try and keep it from swinging about too much and blinding him with pain, he darted backwards as Miranda floated into the moonlight and towards him.
Off in the distance Gregory could hear a voice, though the words were distorted by the frantic pounding of his own heart as he tried to play keep away from Mirandaβs grasp. Digging the front of his foot into the ground, he kicked up a spray of dirt and grass at it before he threw himself aside to put even just a bit of distance between them.
Rolling to his feet with only a sharp hiss of pain as adrenaline temporarily overcame his injuries, he bolted in the direction of Hector's voice even as he glanced towards Miranda.
The creature followed behind him at a leisurely pace, matching his speed, but not surpassing it. It remained just barely in sight, making sure Gregory was aware of what stopping or slowling down meant.
Hector, meanwhile, stopped singing as Gregory got closer. With a loud laugh, he broke into a run.
Since he couldnβt really do anything about itβ¦ Gregory ignored Miranda in favor of making sure he didnβt stumble over some roots and eat dirt. It was distant, but he could hear the sound of anotherβs footfalls as dry leaves crunched and sticks cracked. The sound of Hectorβs laughter wasβ¦ annoying, and he gripped his broken arm all the tighter as he ducked his head lower and picked up the pace.
Once again, Miranda matched his pace, her distance behind him never increasing or decreasing. As she glided past a tree, she ripped a handful of wood from the trunk, casually pitching it at Gregory.
His initial urge was to dodge the projectile, but he pushed onward instead as he raised his one good hand. Eventually... something would hit him or the adrenaline high would run its course. If this didn't work, it just meant the game came to an end a bit quicker.
Jagged edges and splinters dug into his palm as the chunk reached him, but he willed for his ability to manifest over it, claim it as his, and rip away the physics that otherwise would no doubt shatter his remaining good arm.
In his careless amusement, Hector didn't realize he had reached a dip in the forest floor and with a loud cry he found himself tumbling down the incline, rolling to a sprawling stop across a bed of branches and leaves. Aside from the dirt and vegetation covering him, his body sported no injuries.
Behind Gregory, Miranda flickered repeatedly, synced to the thudding rustling of Hector's fall. With every flicker, the Gregory-form took on more scratches and bruises, until the noises ahead stopped.
Pouting, Hector scrambled to his feet and continued moving.
The sense of victory when his hand wasn't crushed faded quickly at the yell that came from ahead of him. Not from any concern for Hector, but the realization that this was a chance. Miranda's form flickered, injuries manifesting, but despite that it did not stop its advance. Releasing the stopped chunk with a muttered curse, he continued on after Hector's trail, careful not to fall down in the same way Miranda's controller evidently had.
Hector was out of breath. Being cooped up in one room for a year had the expected effect of rendering him out of shape, even with the boisterous energy of his age. He jogged away from Gregory at a slower pace, grumbling to himself about being a party pooper.
He spun around, hands on his hips even as he huffed and puffed for breath.
"Come at me, Clementine!" he hollered in Gregory's direction, signaling Miranda to screech wildly behind his opponent. The creature charged forward, closing the distance between itself and its prey.
He was closer than he thought from how cloes Hector sounded, but the screech behind him was hair-raising and he swallowed the panic as Miranda rushed towards him. Pushing into an outright sprint, he tried futilely for a few more moments to keep the distance between him and it from shortening.
Then he dug his heels in, tried to spin on a dime, and sucker punch the monster. His expression was resigned to a grimace as he gave the haymaker his all, fully expecting a broken hand for his efforts, but he needed the force to transfer to Hector.
Unfortunately, Miranda's damage was a one-way street and Gregory's fist met her open mouth head-on, punching all the way to the back of the creature's head and inflicting no damage. Miranda clamped down with her vertical maw and flung the student to the side with a flick of her neck, throwing him against a nearby tree. She had let go on the throw's finish, but the rows upon rows of jagged teeth had brutally marred Gregory's hand and his wrist.
Why the fuck had he ai- Whatever thought that might have been didnβt have a chance to finish as he felt Mirandaβs blender of a jaw go to work. Any sensation beyond pain faded with a sharp crack as it wrenched him into the air and then into a tree by the hand. The impact drove his breath out in a sharp gasp, and he didnβt get back up when he hit the forest floor with a thump.
Miranda glided towards his prone form, bending over and prodding him experimentally. When Gregory didn't move, it hefted the boy over one shoulder and drfited towards Hector, who had now approached the two with an annoyed groan.
"Well, that's great! He's bleeding, too, just to make it look worse for me," the Aberration grumbled like it was Gregory's fault for bleeding, huffing as he reached out to tug impetuously on Gregory's hair. "Stupid idiot."
Without any response from the unconscious student, Hector kicked at the dirt and picked his way through the underbrush back towards campus.
It wasnβt until he was slung over a shoulder that Gregory began to stir. Even when Hector yanked on his hair, he didnβt do much to resist the smaller child. While conscious, his injuries left him dazed and scattered his thoughts. Yet he somehow managed to spit out a winded, "Redundant," in response to the boy before he went limp in Miranda's grip again, slipping under from all that'd happened.
Thankfully, having a target of a suitable size made for easy pickings. Siena couldn't help but give a small breath of triumph--one that would have been paired with a smile if her body wasn't starting to feel the effects of using her power twice in fairly rapid succession. There was a faint ache settling into her legs, but more importantly, a fatigue that Siena couldn't even begin to explain. Having only pushed herself to the limits twice before--once. Only once truly, right?--the brunette wasn't the best gauge of her stamina. As a green smoke swept through the field, Siena took a moment to catch her breath. Through the sudden feeling of nausea and dizziness, she considered the lone beast in her team's field. For a brief instant, Siena considered taking a risk and trying to attack. Had she not braced herself for the wildness that drafting green luxin would inflict onto her, the girl might have recklessly gone for it.
The rational part of her, the blue part...it told her that there should have been at least two or three others ready to take it on, and adding her to the mix likely wouldn't make enough of a difference to matter. Accepting the thought, Siena found, with a faint level of surprise, that she still had a somewhat firm grip on Gavin's name. That though she could acknowledge that he had some power, evidently the state she'd taken him in was far from his prime.
Ah, of course it would be. She'd taken Gavin Guile, sixteen year prisoner.
'There were other teams...' That said, it only took a sidelong glance for Siena to be made aware that there was at least one team that could benefit from her aid. Ignoring the protests that both her rational mind and her exhausted body tried to scream, the mage started moving towards what looked like dinner gone horribly wrong. They weren't far, thankfully. Far enough that they wouldn't interfere drastically with another fight, but not at enough of a distance to deter anyone with even moderate levels of drive to leap to anyone's aid.
It took about ten seconds to make it to the group. By then, the dizziness and nausea had set in full force. Trying to blink away the discomfort, Siena scanned the field, her vision blurring for an instant and the faintest pulsing audible in the back of her head. He was desperate, and it was starting to build into a second adrenaline rush--this one, Siena wasn't certains he'd be able to hold. One spaghetti monstrosity down (not worth the effort), one flinging earth (too much effort), and one with a girl dangling precariously in its grip. Bingo.
'Split white into blue, stupid. Don't rely on...eugh...' Another wave of nausea, this time making Siena almost break into a dry heave. Oddly, there was some familiarity about the discomfort. Muttering to herself, the girl clumsily pulled her jacket off, grimacing when she could hear stitches popping in the fabric at the force she applied. Fancy mini jackets, absolutely useless in combat except for this, she supposed. Awkwardly adjusting it into a makeshift filter (read: scarf) in a desperate attempt to shield herself even the faintest amount of whatever the green gas was, Siena considered her options like rapidfire, and it settled into one.
No red. Just blue. Cool, calculating blue.
It was too risky, again, to try any fancy aiming, especially when breathing made her head spin and her stomach churn. After about three seconds of trying to follow the noodle holding the girl above the mouth of the beast, Siena gave up. Center mass it was, and hopefully a miracle would land a cut on the appropriate strand. With the plan set in mind, she began her work.
Drafting blue was harder than green, but Siena attributed that to the fact that she was working on both a smaller scale and with only a small amount of direct vision of the shade she wanted and splitting the rest from what light there was available. Groaning faintly with the effort, Siena drafted four awkwardly shaped spear tips, opting to avoid drafting the shafts to save her energy. Taking a muffled breath, the mage built up energy, as if holding her thumb over the opening of a hose, releasing only to let the spears fly towards the center mass of the tangle of starchy goodness. They were faster than the spear, at least, but still not as fast as she'd imagined them. The sight of blue residue faintly breaking away from the projectiles caused Siena to grimace. Not long before Gavin left her too.
Mostly pointless arguing between two people who can't let someone else get the last word in. @January@GreenGoat
I. Fucking. Hate. Magic.
Lawrence fought back against the poison for now, the nausea being no big deal, but he felt his eyes begin to shift around with the beginnings of what felt like vertigo. Both effects were mild, but heavily distracting as hell all the same. Thankfully, he had no need of his power at just that moment. What he did need was the strength to slap some sense into an entire team of combat veterans.
"Get away so you can-"
Lawrence paused to take a deep breath, fighting back the nausea before continuing.
"- Buy us less than a minute as you're crushed to death? You dropped a goddamn nuke, Ethan. Take a second to relax and... enjoy this lovely mist."
"Wait, Lawrence? They sent you out?!"
"I wasn't my first choice either, but you have to work with what you're given."
Ethan eyed him doubtfully, taking a few breaths to quell the nausea. "Uh, last I checked, you dick around with people's feelings, right? Magically? Does it work on this thing?" he said, nodding towards the golem that was still curiously watching everything.
"Who knows? Worked on one of those things back there, although it was slightly more... Organic. I don't think provoking it with a test would be to our advantage right now. Unless you think a bullet is going to put it down."
He lifted the shotgun for emphasis, not that he could shoot straight right now given the mist.
"Was hoping you could have it running for the hills, pissing its pants off," Ethan sighed. "But that just means you really need to get away."
"Right, because nothing is so much more than you were able to do to it just now. If you want to be stubborn and stay anyway that's fine, but don't be a hypocrite by telling me to piss off right now Ethan. Now let's try to think of something that allows both of us get away and turns that thing back into soil."
"No, seriously, Lawrence, get the fuck away. It's a cat two or three and none of you guys have experience with that. Either you die for no reason, or we die for some reason."
"I don't think corpses care about reasons, dead is dead either way."
Myla spoke up, then, finally recovering enough from her dizziness to say something without vomiting.
"It hasn't made any moves, Lawrence--at least, nothing beyond making sure its presence was known. Waiting for the curious children to gather, wouldn't you say?"
Almost looking relieved at the change in conversation, Lawrence turned to her, giving the Golem another long look before answering:
"If so, then that works to our advantage. Someone might be able to kill it if we give them an opening, I know one of the newbies on my team was very strong, although his methods of powering up leave a lot to be desired. Did you see the sphere as it was reforming? A bit of an obvious weak point, so it might be a red herring, but it's a better target than trying to bash it's skull in."
Another pause.
"Did you notice anything else about it from the fight? Something we could use?"
Another headache was coming on from the poison's effects, and Myla rubbed her temple as she recapped the events in her head.
"The nuke did hurt it. It lost the left arm and part of its torso and there were cracks all over it. After it reformed..." she trailed off, eyes running over the golem's currently undamaged body. "It was damaged before it moved out of the pit. Regenerator or converter. Maybe a size limit? It doesn't seem any larger. Thickest concentration of rock looks like it's around the sphere--so targeting that would be a safe bet."
She groaned as her stomach protested its contents again.
"Not enough repetition to call it a p-pattern," Myla took a few moments to focus on the ground, bracing through another wave of nausea, "but it may need to reconfigure to fix itself."
Ethan's breaths were irregular as he listened. "Fucking love you, Myla. Always got us."
She shook her head in response, mostly ignoring him.
Lawrence looked at the Golem, no plan coming to mind yet as to how exactly he was going to take it down. If it had survived Ethan's earlier attack, or even worse- regenerated- then there was fuck-all they could hope to do against it at the moment. Thankfully, it seemed content to wait and watch, a creature after Lawrence's own heart. Unlike that Eyepion that was quickly becoming his arch nemesis- as another wave of nausea reminded him.
"I would suggest that you follow their instructions. I am unable to defeat that beast, nor do I have any adequate means of protection should it attack you."
Lawrence couldn't help but laugh in response, defeating the Golem was not what he intended right now.
"I said 'save Pink team' didn't I? Can your power lift those two out of here without hurting them? I don't expect you to fight that thing right now."
He nodded over to the unconscious- and maybe dead for all he knew- team mates. At the very least they could try to get the injured out of the way, barring any stubborn still-conscious injured that were refusing to move. Sometimes Ethan took his job as leader too seriously, a couple exchanges with Myla had accomplished far more.
A scream caught in Allison's throat as a noodle crept up leg, wrapping itself around her waist. She was an idiot. What was she doing? She was getting herself killed. Allison's grip tightened around the makeshift blade as she was lifted into the air, hopelessly dangling above the ceramic maw of the spaghetti monster. What was she thinking? Of course this was going to happen.
Allison screamed at herself in her head as she pulled at the pasta around her thigh with her free hand; the slimy noodle was too close for comfort. She was hanging right above the thing's mouth, but if she was able to swing just a bit to the side, she might be able to avoid certain death. It was do or die for Allison Revel. She would have to maneuver her body just enough to cut the noodle at where it wrapped around her leg first, though.
Allison moved quickly, bending her torso and making a swift chop at the noodle, swinging her free leg to the side as she did so. The nauseating fog hit Allison just as she swung.
Kusari didn't take much heed to her senior's yelling, she didn't see much reason to leave, or why she couldn't be here. Instead she was staring at the golem. Now, she couldn't exactly call herself a monster expert, in fact there was a pretty good chance this thing had never even existed before. But these monsters did come from somewhere, be it mythology or just a simple idea someone may have had at some point. Keeping that in mind she asked herself 'This thing must have a weakness.' It surrounded it's self with more rocks which converged around what she assumed to be what was the actual monster. Well, there it is. Now what were they going to do about it?
Lawrence and Hazel arrived, which reminded her of something. In her right hand she was still holding the knife Lawrence had given her. Her grip was so tight on it her hand had nearly gone numb. She folded the knife and put it in her pocket, she would have to give it back to him, she certainly didn't need it now that she had this ridiculous leg.
A bright light originating from where the giant eyeball had run off suddenly flashed, and a green mist blanketed the entire field. Kusari waved her hand in front of her face, trying to fan the stuff away. Fanning the mist was futile, of course, and she ended up breathing it in. It wasn't as bad as she was imagining it to be, though she was imagining that this stuff would literally melt them all from the inside out or something similarly grisly. It wasn't any more annoying than breathing in a room in which gasoline had been spilled, irritating, but easily ignored. The others weren't taking it quite so well. Hazel seemed to panic, and attacked the golem, in spite of it not being the source of her visible nausea and pain. Kusari blinked and looked down at her body, the same dim glow that signified that her body was regenerating surrounded her. Of course, she should have known poison wouldn't effect her.
She listened in as Lawrence discussed the golem with the seniors. It seemed much of her hunch was the same as theirs. Again, the problem was actually doing something about it.
"It sounds like this thing is taking us for chumps." Kusari spoke up, addressing everyone near. She tilted her head towards Ethan specifically. "There's no running from this fight anyway, is there? I doubt that psycho director will accept any of us just running away. Right, she won't, right?" Kusari's right hand ruffled the hair on the side of her head. She looked around seemingly aimlessly.
"First of all, until the others can deal with that giant eye, which I'm assuming is the source of this green nonsense, you need to at least limit it's effects somehow." She waved her hand around in the air. "It seems pretty thick, like a mist, maybe wrapping your shirt around your nose and mouth could help? Even more so if you dampen it." She shrugged her shoulders. "Or not, this could just be magic and that won't help at all, can't hurt to try though." She looked back to the golem. "As for that, if it's trying to kill us all at once then we should spread out. I can distract it if need be, this body of mine can't die that easily after all." Kusari grumbled and ruffled her hair again. She walked over to Lawrence and Hazel. She pulled out the black knife and handed it to Lawrence. "You may want to soak it in bleach or something, there's all kinds of blood on it at this point..."
She gazed over at Hazel thinking about what she'd seen and heard of her power. "Hazel, you may not be able to destroy that thing, but if it tries to attack us you can try to hinder it's movements by striking the ground at it's feet. I doubt with all that weight it's balance is all that amazing..."
Kusari was talking a bit more than she was comfortable with, but just standing around felt like a stupid thing to do at the moment. She needed to be useful in some way.
In the amount of time it took Callan to notice the giant spear soaring over her head, the eye scorpion had turned to face her. There was no time to react. For the second time that night, she was batted away. She felt the air abandon her lungs as the stinger collided with her gut-- sending her spiraling off towards her comrades. With a hard thud, she awkwardly skidded to a landing on her shoulders with her chin against her chest and legs up against the inside of the trench, leaving a decent divot in the earth where she'd crashed.
"Augh... ow," she grunted breathlessly before opening her eyes to see her teammates-- plus a new addition it seemed. She'd touch base with them in a second....
Callan folded herself over-- essentially rolling into an upright position. Through grit teeth, she got to her feet and gripped the edge of the trench, pulling herself up. Maybe the eye scorpion still got trampled.... "What the shit," she muttered with a slightly aggravated sigh. The quadruped was dead-- very dead. That spear had made quick work of it. Oh well... she wasn't sure who had thrown it, but she'd have to thank them later. Her plan hadn't quite gone the way she'd envisioned, but one out of the two monsters was dead so it couldn't have been a total failure. She only hoped the greater of the two threats had been eliminated.
Marcus jolted when Lily yelled at him; he would have stammered out some sort of apology, but by the time he found the right words to say, she had transferred the injury, and Grant had thrown the fishbomb. All thoughts of apology shot from his mind when the bomb exploded, his heart jumping in surprise and him instictively ducking. Once again, his ears rung, but not as much as they had the first time around. He could feel little pieces patter against the ground, and he was hestiant to guess what they were. More important than the little pieces, however, was the big thing that came hurtling into the hole; causing Marcus to once again jump and ready his aim.
"Oh hey Cal, how'd it go?" he said, lowering his pistol. His question would probably be lost under the roar of another creature; a roar which struck ice into his chest at this point. He slowly peeked his head over the side of the trench, ready to see an angry beetleman standing by and waiting to kill them. Fortunately, that was not the case; a fact which allowed Marcus to breathe a huge sigh of relief. The beetleman, while not dead, was pretty much out of comission. The only thing left was for someone to go over and put it out of its misery. Which meant the only enemy remaining was the wierd scorpion thing.
Grant slid lid down the dirt that he leaned on, his back pressed up against it. Once he hit the dirt below him, he shut his eyes tightly, hearing what he can only assume was the fish bomb that he threw at the beetle man. He would check to see if it had worked, but he barely had the energy to hold himself up at the time. His eyes opened back up, seeing the feet of a person hit the ground in front of him. Looking up, it was their so-called "leader." He shut his eyes again, focusing on regaining his energy, not bothering to greet her as Marcus did.
Lily heard the explosion and was about to jump up to her feet to peer over the edge of the trench when suddenly, everything became deathly silent. There were no more monster roars, no screams of pain, no chatter about what to do next. There were no people around and Lily found herself on her back and staring up at the night sky. Am I... dead? She tried remembering what had just happened.
A grenade crammed into a dead fish's mouth and a gunshot to her knee. She remembered the pain quite clearly just as she did the absence of it when she had transferred it. And then the explosion... Did she somehow get caught up in the explosion? Did the beetleman bat it back towards them? What of her team mates? And Emma from red team?
She looked around. Stars. A million of them all around her. They were twinkling at her from everywhere...up, down, left and right. She looked around her and realized that she was no longer in the ditch Grant made but was actually floating in... Space? How did I get here? She looked around in the darkness again, waving her hand and feet, trying to grab onto something. But there was nothing to hold onto, there was only the empty space filled with tiny slivers of light from the multitude of stars. Nothing... but at the same time something... Something boundless, something infinite...something that was so immense and incomprehensible that she found herself reaching out, her hands seeking to part the darkness like a curtain and see what was beyond. She felt that desire to understand, to catch even a brief glimpse of what it was that seemed to be beckoning at her.
Her fingers touched touched nothing but the idea that something was there just beyond her reach prompted her to try and reach out more. Just a bit more...just a bit more. Maybe if I... She stretched her arm and tried to reach her hand farther, wiggling her fingers, wanting to reach whatever it was that she was sure was there but couldn't really see. Just a little. Bit. More. But then there was a sudden burst of light as the stars seemed to coalesce together. Lily averted her gaze from the intense brightness, closing her eyes as she did. When she opened it again, she saw a crystal of pure light hovering in front of her.
Lily stared at the crystal and at that moment, she knew with certainty that it was meant for her. Only her. Mine. She echoed the thought in her head as her hand automatically reach out to it.
Her hand paused as it came within a few inches of the crystal. There was something moving and pulsating just beneath the smooth surface of the gem. And it whispered to her of power beyond her imagination. She reached out to bridge the small gap between her hands and the crystal and as she touched it, she felt that terrible desire to make them feel pain...her pain...magnified two folds...no...three folds. She wanted them to suffer, to writhe in agony, to cry out in anguish. The crystal slowly sank into her hand, cold and hot at the same time, the light in it pulsating and turning into an angry shade of red. A realization struck Lily.
Tainted. It was tainted.
But despite the realization, Lily didn't pull her hand away, her eyes glued to the remaining half of the crystal jutting out of her hand. The red glow pulsated, whatever was inside roiled underneath the surface, disturbing the fading light and finally turning the crystal black.
She was tainted.
When the blackened crystal completely disappeared into her had, Lily stared at it. She stared at it for the longest time until she heard a loud thud to her left. She blinked and then turned her head. She was back in the trench and was staring at the Callan. Everyone seems to be fond of just dropping in... she thought idly as her mind tried making sense of what the vision meant. "Hi," she greeted Callan just like the way she greeted Emma earlier.
An emerald flash in the sky seemed to confirm his analysis, and the eerie green fog that swept the ground froze him for a second. It was at this moment that Marcus felt his stomach flop once more, and the world seemed to spin ever so slightly. He pulled his shirt over his nose to try and protect against what he could only assume was the eyescorpion's attack, but the effects had already settled in.
Lily looked up at the sky as it flashed green. Slowly, she stood up and peered over the edge, her eyes on the green fog as it rapidly swept towards them. "What--- Ugh." The fog surrounded her even before she could finish what she was saying. She felt nauseous and sick. She looked towards Marcus and tried covering her nose and mouth the same way he was.
Grant's eyes shot open, his head feeling light, numb. His surroundings twisted and turned around him. He tried to gulp down that lump in his throat, but it refused to go down. Padma's knife clattered back onto the ground beside him as he pressed a hand against his stomach, and then another against his mouth. He glanced around once more, noticing his other team mates seeming to be going through the same thing he was going through. Nausea and exhaustion mixed together, and his mind was clouded by dizziness. Slumping against the dirt, his eyes narrowed, trying to focus on his surroundings that blurred together. A mixture of green and brown was what dominated his vision.
Emma followed the others' example, trying her best to avoid inhaling the green fog. Despite her efforts she felt the same effects as the others, teetering slightly in place. Her head spun, threatening to send her off balance. A hand against the side of the trench helped her right herself, glancing across the others for some sort of signal about what to do next.
As Callan lowered herself down, she caught the tail end of Marcus' question, but before she could respond an intense green fog spread across the field at breakneck speed. With it, she felt a touch of nausea, but nothing she couldn't handle. The others didn't seem to be fairing as well. Given the color, she could only assume this was the attack that ugly eye ball had been charging.
"Hang in there, guys-- just one more left, right?"
"Ehhhhh, basically." Marcus said, giving a quick jab towards the crawling husk of beetleman. He waited a moment for his vision to steady and his lunch to settle before continuing. "Fish flinger's still alive, but only barely. I can finish him off; if that thing punted you over here, then he can probably kick my scrawny ass in half, and I'd really not appreciate that." He shrugged ever so slightly, his grin hidden underneath the makeshift mask.
Callan smirked, shaking her head, "So far everything's been hitting harder than I thought it would. Be careful."
He fully stood up in the trench, tottering a bit as his vision blurred once more, and hefting himself out of it. "Trust me, I'm not going to take any risks here." He avoided taking a deep breath to calm his nerves, instead just focusing on the half-dead monster in front of them, rather than the churning of his gut. With a quick peek behind him and a reassuring glance, he cautiously made his way over to the dying creature.
Callan's eyes followed Marcus warily before she turned back to the others. She needed to figure out what she had to work with and fast. Grant looked pretty wiped and according to what Lily had told her on the truck, she wasn't going to be much help... unless....
"Lily, could you--" she started, not meeting her eyes, "...uh... watch his back?" She flicked her head towards where Marcus had gone.
Lily was waving her hand around in a useless attempt to fan away the fog that surrounded them all. She looked toward Callan when she was addressed and then looked towards Marcus, who was making his way to the injured beetleeman. She coughed out and swayed a bit on her feet, still feeling nauseous from the fog but gave Callan a small nod nevertheless. Without wasting time, she obediently pulled herself out of the trench and followed after Marcus.
Her leg was throbbing like hell. Callan probably wouldn't be able to get a good hit off on that eye scorpion like this, but... she couldn't bring herself to ask. They'd find another way. Besides, she didn't feel good sending Marcus off on his own. And then there was this other girl. She could-- wait. What could she do again? What was her name?
"Sorry, but... who are you?" Callan asked bluntly. She couldn't remember if the girl had even been on the truck with them or not. "Must've hit my head harder than I thought."
Emma glanced at the girl, Pretty hair, she thought to herself. She mustered up her smile. βIβm Emmaβ¦ or Em is fine. Iβm on the other team,β she said, gesturing to where towards where the red X once hung over the battlefield. She hoped that the girl would give her some indication of what to do, because she was entirely unsure of where she was needed.
"Cool-- some good news for once. I'm Callan," she nodded, "So-- whatcha got?"
For a moment Emma gave Callan a blank look. What have I got? A look of understanding crossed her face. βOh, my powerβ¦β Without a word Determination and Devotion appeared next to her. βI can summon two of them and tell them what to do. They have different powers. Uh, the armored one is really strong, the other one can create a, er, sticky sludge that will slow enemies down.β She decided to abstain from explaining what the others could do- she didnβt relish having to explain that her power wasnβt fully working because she was having a bad day.
As the shadow creatures appeared, Callan had to subdue the sudden urge to step back. They were eerily similar in form to her shadow monster, but-- Emma could tell hers what to do. She could fully control them. "That's... so awesome!" she said with a toothy grin-- and she meant it. If she could control her power like that, maybe Callan could control hers. Someday. She'd certainly felt like she was in control when that arm reached out and killed that bird head, but... the thought of willfully trying to summon it again still terrified her. Besides, if everything went as planned, she shouldn't have to use it at all.
"Grant, can you... move?"
Just one one look at Grant, it was fairly obvious that he was not having a good time dealing with the exhaustion of his power and the nausea of the fog at the same time. To put it bluntly, he felt like shit. He turned his face up only a bit, his eyes willing open as he looked up at Callan with a somewhat unamused look. He lowered his hand from his mouth as he spoke his answer in a tone that matched his state. Tired. "...Depends on what I'm moving for..." He'd answer, his hand gripping onto the material of his shirt, around the area of his stomach, which unpleasantly felt like it was twisting and turning.
"Uh... nevermind," Cal winced, "I think we got this." Yep-- wiped. The guy looked like he could use a breather anyway.
Callan turned back to Emma. "So I'm thinkin' we should flank it. Me and your... shadow... things. Its only got one eye, right? At least one of us is bound to hit it if we all aim for the eye," she said decisively. She lifted herself out of the trench, inhaling sharply through her teeth as she accidentally led with the wrong leg.
"Ready?" she exhaled, waiting. She tightened her grip on the broken katana.
Emma nodded. "Follow Callan's lead," she commanded.
Callan raised an eyebrow at Emma's command. Did that mean she could give them orders? "Er-- one of you attack the eyepion's right side and the other attack its left. Aim for the eye and attack at the same time... go!" She took off, squinting through the fog at the figure of the eye scorpion while still trying to keep tabs on Emma's creatures in her peripheral so she could match their speed. Hopefully they wouldn't out run her.
Marcus meanwhile, had placed himself near the monster, readying the killing shot. He was about two arm's lengths away at this point, having inched ever so slightly closer as he tried to compensate for the fog's effects. He stared hard at the creature before him, taking a step backwards as it continued to pull itself forward. Normally, this is when the hero would say some snappy one-liner, before executing his foe; but this was not the action movies he'd grown up watching - this was a battlefield. This was just a scared boy with a weapon he barely knew how to use, killing a monstrosity from someone else's nightmare.
He tried not to think about that too hard as he forced his vision to converge on one spot and pulled the trigger. Two shots to the head, followed by one more, just to be safe.
Lily almost felt sorry for the injured creature Marcus came to finish off. She wondered why it was created. Was killing its sole purpose? And was dying its ultimate fate? She looked at it and thought about how the injuries she had transferred to it helped in bringing it down and a surge of glee came over her again. It wanted to kill them but instead of doing that, it had gone down and felt her pain. And suddenly all sympathetic thoughts she may have had for the monster dissipated into thin air. She swayed on her feet as she stood a few feet behind her team mate. She watched Marcus aim and then pull the trigger.
Brent shook his head violently, trying to shake off the awful burning sensation that arose from everywhere. Oh god, it was literally searing him, wasn't it? Was SCN Wild Turkey some sort of euphenism for 'feed him poison'? Or maybe he WAS drinking it wrong the whole time. More studying then...after he stopped tearing up like a twelve year old watching an emotionally-manipulative movie about puppies.
"You flatter me, Director," Brent said, wiping tears from his eyes, "Never thought I had dignity to begin with."
As his face flushed further, he eyed his drink apprehensively once more. Round two? Would he even survive? Or would he start stripping and partying hard? Brent turned to Sophia, then to Steve, and finally to Zhang, before deciding that they probably weren't close enough to him to be amused by THAT sort of thing. With that, he nodded to himself.
"A challenge for another day then."
WIth that, he worked on that mountain of meats instead, chewing thoughtlessly as he watched the Director check her phone once more. He watched, and then, his eyes narrowed, just a little bit. Bad news from the battlefield. He stopped eating altogether when she got up, telling the duo to follow her.
"Guess we were drafted," Brent muttered to Sophia. He plucked the ice cube from his glass and tossed it in his mouth, crunching down on it as he jogged to catch up with the Director. He was totally fine with showing off his powers. He was even fine with fighting when there was already a hole in his dominant arm. But Sophia going to battle? What sort of monster ability did she have, for such a timid kid to get sent there?
He disliked that...but he was also curious.
The night air felt pleasant against his flushed skin. It had ultimately been only a sip or two, and while the initial effects were a surprise, Brent could say that his thoughts were lucid once more, and he no longer had the desire to take off his own top. Especially not when he was going to have to compete with Shane's bandaged yet muscled figure. The Director, if nothing else, seemed against it, but, on the other hand...
Such determination was absolutely lovely.
"You're planning on dying for them or something?"
A question to test the waters.
The heavily bandaged Arbiter looked towards Brent for the first time, stiff anger on his face softening at the familiar figure. He quirked a weak grin before replying, "Don't even joke. If Decker heard that, he'd literally sew my ass to the floor and use me as a footstool--oh, sorry. Decker's the healer I told you about earlier."
The thought of his dead teammate set something else in motion and the student took a deep breath, groaning as he forced himself to stand up straight. He eyed the Director, his conviction adamant even as his body screamed in every soundless way.
"I--" he started to speak, only to be interrupted by Director Zhang.
"If you manage not to fall apart before reaching the battlefield, I'll approve the request."
"Wh--really?" The incredulity in his voice was mirrored in the surprise on his face.
"Really," and something in the Director's tone immediately made the student's almond eyes narrow suspiciously. He was justified a second later. "And you'll take these two with you," she gestured neatly at the two students behind her.
"You're...completely serious," he stared at the injured kids behind her. "Do they even know how to fight?"
"They'll learn soon enough. I'm just helping them earn their stripes," the Director replied with a faint smile. "But the next time you decide to cause a commotion in my office, Mr. Alkana, I won't hesitate to shoot you somewhere vital. Be glad Ms. Schur was there to prevent Commander Kardos from doing the same. I take it she also pointed you here?"
"Mr. Alkana" nodded quietly.
"I'll let the issue slide this once. Thank Mr. Roless for that," she nodded at the boy behind her. "Commander Kardos will forward coordinates to your phone, as well as the positions of healers and relevant information about their powers. We have two in the current batch. Make sure you take advantage of them."
The student's phone was in his hand almost immediately as he sifted through the information streaming in. Once he had given everything a careful enough glance to catch all the necessary details, he pocketed the standard-issue IP69 phone all certified personnel were required to carry.
Without another word, the student took a deep breath and stepped backwards several meters. A brief moment passed before glimmering, pale blue hexagons danced in the air around him, the shapes sliding into and out of each other aimlessly as they drew themselves rapidly on his body and flaked off, folding and shifting at impossible angles.
The Director stepped aside quickly, giving the group plenty of space as the Arbiter formed the crystalline skeleton of a winged creature around himself and the other two students. The magical construct slowly filled itself in around them, flickering hexagonal lights dancing all along its body. The student stopped every so often to create more of the crystalline solid around his body, slowly maneuvering more and more pieces onto the rough skeleton.
"You could have taken the trucks," she pointed out, the spectacle quite a sight to behold no matter how often she saw it.
"This is faster and gives me more ammunition," the Arbiter replied without missing a beat.
It was true, of course, but she wondered how much of it was out of efficiency and how much was out of his need to look impressive no matter his state.
When the impossible avian was finished, it resembled a sharp, stylized hawk with six wings and a svelte body, the entirety of it meticulously faceted and sparkling like it had been made from flawless diamonds. Ritzy. The glittering hexagons that signified the Arbiter's power in effect only made the giant bird even more conspicuous and the remaining people in the dining hall were crowding up against the glass of the doors and windows to watch. With the Director armed and in view, however, they didn't dare step outside.
Director Zhang had to resist scoffing as she eyed the group of three now nestled snugly in the hollow of the crystal bird's chest. Impressive for display and efficient for the sheer quantity of the material generated in advance. She hadn't selected him as the original team leader for his pink hair, that much was certain. And then there was something to be said for the stability of his personality. Despite everything that had fallen apart throughout the year, he had never lost the little idiosyncrasies that made him unique--from the carefully brushed dye job on his fringe cut to the bits of flair in everything he did. Rosa had been confident in this student's success from day one. The Director had to admit that for all her silliness, the woman had yet to be wrong.
Inside the glowing bird, the Arbiter heaved a pained breath and sat down while the construct simultaneously took off towards the battlefield, flapping its six wings only for show. The magical effects still drifted off his body, but he didn't seem any worse for the wear even after creating something as wide as one of the dorm buildings.
After several moments of catching his breath, he looked up. And grimaced. Oh, Jesus. Icebreakers. It was day one with his team all over again.
"So...uh...my name's Shane and I generate," he gestured briefly at the bird with his hand, "this stuff within a hundred meters or so of my body. Can't do it if anything's in the way. Fine control is within 300 meters, but I can roughly maneuver this stuff for about 500 meters, so I've got range. Looks like some kind of crystal, so they just call it crystal, but the properties are apparently 'off the charts' and have the researchers freaking out. I dunno.
In combat I really just shape it into something sharp, throw it at things, and hope it works out. I can only manipulate what I create, but I can't really make a ton more while moving the stuff. Tends to just make both aspects worse.
Last thing: I am on enough painkillers to probably give birth through my dick and not feel it, so that should tell you how much this damn injury hurts. Which is to say, if I don't look stoked about meeting you, it's a lie. I'm stoked. I'd be treating you guys to a home-cooked meal right about now if shit wasn't hitting the fan."
While Brent had his drink and exchanged words with Director Zhang, Sophia focused on her meal. She ate quickly and neatly, though she still kept an eye on the people seated beside her. The good food combined with her hunger made her plate empty at a quick rate, but she was still only half done when she heard the Director mention her name along with an order. Putting down her fork, she stood up as the Director did so, now even more worried. The wariness that she felt as a pistol was revealed didn't last long as she heard Brent's remark. It was replaced with fear. They had been drafted? She was pretty sure that the only thing you could be drafted for here was for fighting.
Trailing slightly behind as the two began walk, her unpleasant thoughts continued from where she had forced them to stop while in the cafeteria. Thoughts about how useless she would be in fighting, how that meant she would probably die, about how she didn't want to die yet. They excited the building, but she barely noticed until someone approached them and began to speak. She pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes for a second before removing them. Focus. Pay attention.
Listening to the conversation between the Mr. Alkana and Director, it was soon unfortunately clear to her that she would be joining the man on the battlefield, along with Brent. Did she know how to fight? No. Was this fighting going to help her earn her stripes? No. Glancing over at Brent, she wondered if his power was more useful than hers, and if he was scared or just viewing this as an exercise or something like that.
When the strange blue hexagons appeared out of thin air as a result of Mr. Alkana using his magic, she watched carefully, her eyes flicking from one hexagon to the next. A little of her fear was forgotten as the shapes began to form around them, creating some kind of a many winged bird. It looked amazing when it was finished, but at the same time it made her feel so much smaller and insignificant. So that was what his power could do.
A soft gasp escaped her as the creation lifted off the ground with her inside it. This was one kind of flying that she had not tried before. The man began to speak from his position on the floor, and she made sure to repeat it to herself inside her head so she would remember it. After Shane went on to let them know in a little too much detail how much pain he was in and expressed how stoked he was to see them, all she did was nod, her arms now crossed. Now she needed to figure out how to introduce herself.
Brent smiled back, that beautiful expression this time tinged with something genuine. Good, that was an answer he could fight for. There's no meaning after all in saving everyone else if you weren't going to save yourself, after all. The best ending was where all the monsters died and all the good guys survived, and aiming for anything else wasn't a sign of naivety. It was a sign of being a weak-spined bitch.
Before he could dwell too much on all this, though, Zhang decided to approve Shane's request as well, and apparently, she did it because of something he did?
"Wait, what did I d- ho shit, that's a big bird."
A giant eagle with six wings, made entirely out of goddamn DIAMONDS, stood up above them all, a construction created from someone who was just recently bisected. This...wasn't even Shane's full power then, and the thought of it made Brent shiver. It was almost pointlessly gaudy, and definitely a waste of energy if one thought from a purely combative point of view, but goddamn, it was going to be one badass ride to whereever they were heading.
The inside of the bird was equally resplendent and luxurious. Though a hard crystal surface didn't make it the most comfortable seat around, Brent was way too busy trying to pick out all the details to care. He was even too excited to realize that, considering his own power, they really would have been better getting driven there on an armored truck that was probably loaded to the brim with weapons.
Once Shane finished with his own explanation, Brent said, "Sharp shit getting thrown usually does do something, so hey, useful shit's useful. And I'm Brent Roless, 18 years old, would be graduating from high school if it wasn't for sudden surprise superpowers. I can magically scientifically improve objects with my power, basically. Had researchers celebrating until they realized that magical technology was more magical than technological."
"A homecooked meal does sound nice though. After us three musketeers save the day, wanna have a BBQ party with all the other battling dudes? Oh, wait, Sophia, you're not a vegetarian, are you?"
She was clamping up again, after all, so perhaps a lighter topic would get her to start talking again. Hopefully.
Brent could improve items scientifically using his magic, that was interesting. Now it was her turn to say something, but she wasn't ready to speak yet. Since Brent had mentioned his age and grade, should she do that as well? Too bad the two others hadn't talked for longer. Sophia swallowed hard, then decided to answer Brent's question first. "No, just... no beef." Her voice was soft and whisper-like. There, now he had his answer.
After a second, she continued. "I... I'm Sophia Lemane." She paused again, this time for longer. Each second she remained silent made her feel more and more tense, and she uncrossed and uncrossed her arms. She knew they were waiting for her to say something. Time to say something, she thought desperately. Like, now would be a good time to begin.
Sophia opened her mouth, then closed it. Now beginning to count the seconds that passed in her head, it was after another five slow counts before she managed to speak again. "I'm thirteen." She drew a breath, not looking at either of them and turning to that her side was towards them. "I should be in 8th grade." She really hated how wavering her voice sounded. "And for my power... I can, like, either see through translucent things, see in the dark, or... uh... see all around me. 360-degree vision." She bit her lip before adding, "But I don't think I can see living things..." Her voice trailed off, and she sighed.
"So, recon and item buff," Shane mused after they finished. He pulled out the Institute-issued phone again, checking through the information Commander Kardos had forwarded. The list had been updated to include Brent and Sophia once the Director had ordered the two onto the battlefield, but he had wanted to get a genuine introduction in. Cross-checking what they mentioned with the given information, Shane was glad to not be dealing with any pathological liars. Because that sure hadn't been fun the first fucking time.
Satisfied, he tapped the phone's edge against his leg, leaning forward with a thoughtful expression while he stared at Brent.
Before long, a small chunk of the construct's body split from the inner wall near Brent and hovered in front of the boy. The piece was as long as his forearm and dangerously sharp, tapering down to a needlepoint tip.
"That. Can you improve that?"
"No idea what I'm supposed to..."
Brent stopped and thought for a moment. No, this was a sharp point, meant to be used as a projectile, magically launched via Shane's manipulation. The function would be to pierce then. So, in order to improve that...
He grasped the crystalline arrow, before reaching into his inner reserves. Silver veins raced from his shoulders to his hands, before extending into the weapon itself. He felt a momentary drain in energy as the quicksilver left from his fingertips, before, rather suddenly, it retracted, flowing back into his body. Brent blinked, before releasing the object.
"Weird. Pretty certain I can improve rocks and shit, but I can't do anything with this."
"Okay," Shane nodded, seemingly unsurprised. The shard melded smoothly back into the eagle's body. He tapped his phone against his leg again before continuing. "Can you improve guns?"
"The best use for my power, really. Though I never actually tried it yet."
"Does it last permanently?"
Brent laughed. "If it did, that would have made my first time so much easier. Five minutes, tops, but I can refresh it by buffing it again. And I can do that three times, at the risk of making it explode...so 15 minutes."
"Retrospectively shoulda raided that truck before we went on our magical journey, eh?"
A snort of laughter followed by a quick wince was all Brent got as a reaction before Shane doubled over again, breathing hard for several long seconds. When the Arbiter finally recovered, he nodded again, filing away the small details for later use.
"Definitely trucks and soldiers there," he commented before flashing Brent a sheepish grin. "Was gonna have you buff my phone if it lasted longer."
"Gotta get a better inferface to deal with those bullshit Angry Birds levels?" Brent cracked. He really should stop this, considering Shane's whole die-on-the-inside-with-every-joke deal, but it just came so easily.
Shane shook his head with a grin, biting his lower lip to stymie the laugh. After a while, he huffed a quick "Hah, you know it." His eyes lit up as a thought came to mind. "Wait, what happens if you try that on your shirt?"
"My shirt?" Brent gave Shane a look, before turning to his own bloodspecked shirt. "Hm..."
Placing his hands upon his shirt, the amethyst-eyed youth pushed silver circuitry from his heart to the shirt once more. The lines traced all over the textile, before glowing vibrantly. Each individual fiber burst away from him, temporarily revealing Brent's toned pecs and his taut stomach, before they wrapped around him once more. He let out a soft hiss as the oddly warm cloth touched his skin, before it all 'cooled down'. N0 NAME was emblazoned on the front of the white shirt. It now felt noticeably more comfortable, and Brent was fairly certain that it kept him warmer as well, but...
"Yeah, that's pretty much it. Guess it made it more comfortable? Changed the material?"
"Damn. No extra defense, then," Shane replied, disappointed.
"Think it needs to function as armor to begin with."
Duly noting the distinction, Shane nodded and turned to Sophia.
"So, Recon. How far can you see?"
"Uh..." Tilting her head to one side, she tried to estimate the range of her power. "Ninety... or a hundred feet?"
"Hmm, that's not too far," Shane was looking at his phone again, gauging the ETA from the coordinates. 11.6 miles north of Crimen Culpae 1's border was typically 12-18 minutes by the interstate, so if he wasn't heading in the completely wrong direction, their travel method would have them there in little over five or six minutes, and at least two had passed since takeoff.
He was tempted to push the speed even faster than the rapid 190 or so kilometers per hour they were already going at, but moving this quantity of his supernatural crystal any faster would actually put a strain on him. He was saving strains and pains and all that general bitching for the actual battlefield, so with a quiet grumble Shane went through the notes on the emergency instead.
An attack from Menagerie. Okay. Ramifications of that later.
42 category one hostiles and 1 potential category three on the northern outskirts, 21 students sortied, 6 soldiers on standby to escort them, 17 of them brand new. He trusted Ethan to handle the majority of Menagerie's category one types with ease, but Shane had never been one to leave the heavy lifting to his teammates. The amount of enemies concentrated in one location was also suspicious.
Nice guy reputation or not, Menagerie had never been known to be stupid. If the Precursor had truly wanted to attack the Institute, it would have been a simple matter to amass literal hundreds or thousands of creatures somewhere safe and march them to the school before their week-long expiration period hit. East's last year had been unbearably difficult and an all-out attack at the school's weakest moment would have easily accomplished an objective like "obliterate."
So that probably wasn't the objective.
That, or this wasn't Menagerie, which meant Shane was working with an entirely different set of similar-looking powers and limitations. The phone's information page noted the "Menagerie" target designation as a manual input from the Director herself, so supposedly the information was trustworthy. But the pieces didn't fit and he didn't have enough information to understand why.
A sigh of frustration escaped his lips. It was pointless to consider angles where Dreamcatcher's magic was involved, so he'd have to just wing it under the assumption this was Menagerie's power. Technically speaking, the creatures shouldn't have posed much of a threat and he half-expected to arrive at the battlefield just to mop things up.
But two years fighting against Dreamcatcher's monsters had honed Shane's instincts to a fine edge, and it was that instinct combined with a strange dream about Decker that had woken him up in a panic earlier. When the phone displayed his teammates as "Sortied," he had practically torn the hospital wall apart to get to the Director's office. The structural damage would repair itself, courtesy of more utility-centric mages the Director had 'acquired' through deals made with the other USARILNs, and punishment had been the least of his concerns then.
If the Director wanted to throw him in one of the containment chambers for a month afterwards, he'd take it. So long as he could make sure his teammates survived to tease him about it. The furrow in his brow worsened when no one from his team responded to the brief message he sent as a cursory check. A simple location ping in response would have sufficed--and they knew it.
Assuming the cuffs weren't malfunctioning--and they never had as far as Shane knew--his team was still very much alive. Which meant they were extremely occupied at the moment.
"Okay, here's how this is going to work," he addressed the two in front of him, "We're going in assuming everything's at least a category two--so dangerous enough to wipe out a few city blocks with ease, in short. There was a recent update that changed one of the targets to a category three, but until I figure out which one that is, we're going in a little blind. No notes on high-flyers, so I'll be keeping us in the air until we get a better grasp of how everyone's doing on the field. Sophia, when we're close enough to the ground for you to use your power, I'll need you to light up and tell me if any of the monsters have structural weaknesses--" he held up a hand to explain in case she was going to point out again that she couldn't see living things.
"Generally speaking, their magical bodies are usually 'alive' and have varying resistances and properties, but anything that's not magically incorporated into them often follow the laws of this world, and more often than not don't have that same quality that makes them 'living.' I've seen plenty of exceptions, so don't take that too literally, but against category ones and twos, that little rule of thumb is a safe bet. Against Menagerie's spawns, it's a really safe bet. If you can spot it, I'll shoot it."
"We're getting pretty close so I'll keep the rest short. Once we're there, I'm breaking the bird apart for ammunition and keeping us in a floating chunk of crystal unless one of you wants the floor. If I find any weapons in range, Brent, I'll see if I can spare the concentration to bring them up to us. Let me know if you spot something, or better yet, ask Sophia."
He looked between the two of them before his mouth quirked into a small smile.
"Any questions?" he joked, knowing full well they probably a million tangent questions they weren't going to ask for now.
Brent had a million tangent questions that he wasn't going to ask at the moment, but he also had a couple of important ones that he did plan to ask. After all, though he was a hard-headed tryhard, he also wasn't THAT emotionally insensitive. It didn't take much to put two and two together as he watched Shane drift into quiet contemplation about everything that was going on. He WAS concerned for his team, even if he focused more on the mission than on salvation.
Probably out of concern for the two plebs that were cramping up his bird-space, really.
"Yup. Describe your team for me. Dunno how many you can magically float, but seems like East's having a bad time with mortality rates and all. If it looks like hell's not on earth yet, maybe I can drop down and get them in the air with you?"
And then you can stop worrying about them and unleash your full power?
Stupid thoughts like that crossed Brent's mind, but the core concept was the same. Destroying the enemy and rescuing your allies were both win conditions, but doing both, simultaneously or consecutively? Bi-winning~!
"If something's giving them trouble, you're better off staying topside. As for what they do..." Shane swallowed and grinned again.
"Ethan's got my gear at the moment, so he should be pretty shiny since he's our personal snappy solarbeam. Kind of. Throws exploding balls of magic. They're really fucking bright. Myla's the only sensible noggin in the group now and she's got cutting lines that she needs to draw and launch. Looks like neon lights from afar. Genevieve's our precocious barrier maiden, because that's exactly what she does with attitude. Hurts her when the barrier takes damage. And Eric's our good guy Steve--wait, that sounds weird; good guy Greg, that was it--he's our backup power supply. We run out of juice, we tap Eric for more." He stopped a second, grin settling down into a rueful smile. "And that's my team."
"Sounds super flashy," Brent said. So Genevieve was the protector, who can use Eric to maintain the whole group's defenses if her own energy runs out, while everyone else had some form of long range offensive ability, huh? It really did sound like they were a 'safe' team then, especially if they could turn their 'fortress' into a flying 'battleship' with Shane's ability. Toss in Decker's healing, and it made sense that the main team could stick around for so long.
Well, at least until now.
"Well, here's to hoping there IS a chance for me to go...bottomside then. Never actually shot a gun before, so it'd probably be a bad time, trying to hit things from afar...unless you wanna do drive by shootings? Got some thug music on that phone of yours?"
"You've never...?" Shane looked surprised at the revelation that Brent had never shot anything before. He had been used to students coming in knowing a lot of hokey self-defense and gun habits, because between displaced people-turned-criminals and smaller Dreamcatcher monsters, the last ten years had a lot of good reasons for civilians to become roughshod militia.
"Never mind on buffing a gun," he quickly recovered from the surprise, reevaluating how best to put Brent to use. "Has to be a melee weapon, then, since we can't trust your aim. But sending you down.... I'll decide once we see what the battlefield looks like. Speaking of--we're almost there."
He pointed towards the near distance, but even from their height of nearly five hundred meters above ground level, it was hard to miss the two massive green circles drawn in the air above where the fighting was happening. Another stroke of luck: there was enough moonlight in the clear night sky to make out the military trucks parked near the moving figures and grotesque monsters. "I should be able to see Ethan from here. I don't."
As if on cue a flash of emerald light colored the distant battlefield a sickening green before fading, and a mist in the same shade of green quickly obscured the fighting.
"Of course," Shane muttered, slowing the bird down as they neared their destination.
When they had covered enough ground to see more details, and Ethan's typically eye-searing presence still wasn't in plain view, Shane breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. Later.
Confirming his teammates' safety came second to regaining control of the battlefield, as much as it grinded his gears to set those priorities. He shifted his focus to the mass of crystal he was moving, fully concentrating on the needlessly fantastic bird. Flair aside, moving one large hunk of the material was a hell of a lot easier than moving multiple pieces at the same speed for the same distance, but if he was going to take the time to prep that much beforehand, it would at least look better than some floating, misshapen mass.
In the painkiller-induced haze that glazed over a good chunk of his consciousness, a dumb conversation with Decker came to mind.
"Literally, how do you even handle yourself, you flashy motherfucker?"
"Fabulously," Shane had responded, sliding breakfast across the table to a fresh-out-of-bed Decker blinking the sleep from his grey eyes.
"In what shithole of a universe is it okay for you to wake me up at--" he had squinted at the square, glass wall clock striped with blues, purples, and whites (and without any actual tick marks for the damn times) "--five in the fucking morning to check out a new...piano outlet?"
"Loro Piana, Decks, get it right. Quality cashmere in CC1? We need to be there at oh-800 sharp for the grand opening."
"Am I allowed to kindly fuck off from another of your damn shopping trips?" Decker had groused magnificently, digging angrily into the Eggs Benedict in front of him.
"Sacrilege. Where would I be without your keen eye and sharp tongue denigrating my every move?"
The healer had snorted, scratching at an itch in his sun-kissed brown nest of a morning bedhead.
"Probably still going around putting the moves on people by sticking crystal flowers in their hair. Like the sap you are." He had chewed thoughtfully on the food for a while before continuing, "And probably still making your retarded animals on the field. 'Cept you still do that. And I think it's just to piss me off at this point."
"Yeah, probably," Shane had agreed, sitting down with his own plate.
The construct's six wings split apart from the main body, feathers like blades serrating into existence all along the wingspan and reshaping into layered spears of crystal that eventually detached from the main body. Shane slowed the bird down gradually, having learned his lesson a long time ago about sudden stops. The creature's shape diminished steadily and methodically as shards flecked away from its form, shifting into sharp weapons instead. While the bird's body broke down to its core, Shane maintained a thick barrier around the floating group, reinforcing it slowly while repositioning the almost invisible air slits towards the ceiling of the barrier--away from the green mist settling across the combatants.
By the time the mass of crystal came to a stop above the battlefield, most of it was a sparkling array of vertically aligned javelins each at least 30 meters in length. They centered around a smooth sphere of the same material, with the bottom sixth of the sphere filled in to make a level floor where two people stood beside an injured third person sitting down.
Shane pulled out his phone, tapping Decker's name out of habit before cutting off that communications line and reconnecting to Ethan instead.
"Eyes up, guys. Give me priority targets."
β
Shane's voice blaring from the phone in his pocket had Ethan stock-still with surprise. Then he had looked up to behold Shane's typical method of air support--raining sharp things down from afar. Except with Shane, those sharp things would hammer down, then drill until they broke whatever flesh the DC creature was sporting. Or they'd bury themselves into the ground and detonate as crystalline land mines. And then Shane would move closer until his power's fine control could pick up the crystal particles and repurpose them for more damage output.
For fleshier things, crystal dust could tear them apart from the inside out before they even realized what was happening.
"The next Merlin" was how a lot of the older students at the Institute referred to Shane, but last Ethan checked, Merlin just fired various elements at things. He didn't get creative with combat. He didn't get down and dirty. He didn't play for keeps.
And Shane had thoroughly blamed Ethan for the fiasco that had lost them Decker.
As terrible as he had felt for thinking it, Ethan had been glad when Shane had been hospital-benched for the weeks following that fuck-up. It was a harrowing experience knowing that if Shane really lost his shit, Ethan would be dead before he could even retaliate. Except that Shane never lost his shit. And that was somehow scarier.
"You fucked up," was all Shane had deigned to say the last time Ethan had been coerced into visiting him in the hospital two weeks ago. He hadn't visited since.
When he didn't pick up his phone immediately, Myla pulled out hers, instead, entirely too aware of why Ethan was hesitating. And entirely too aware that this wasn't the time for that kind of nonsense, especially as the poisonous fog seemed to progress its effects. She held her stomach for a moment, waiting for the fluttering sensation to pass.
"Two PTs," she answered at last, "golem construct on us is a potential cat three. Converter or regenerator. Has a core somewhere in the chest. Second PT is a caster--it's emitting the green fog. Stuff's poison, so stay out of it."
"Caster near you guys?" Shane's voice had a strained edge to it, and Myla knew it was the injury.
"No, source was around 150, 160 meters from us. I don't have a pinpoint. Golem's making no moves for now, so PT1 is the caster."
"Where are the others?"
Ethan flinched at the question.
"Ethan's with me. Out of juice. Gen and Eric are out cold--can you get the three of them up safely?"
"Wait, what?" Ethan spun around at the suggestion. "What about you?"
"I'm staying down to be the spotter," Myla responded, tone brokering no argument. She drew a line straight upwards from where she stood.
The golem's head followed the neon pink line as it extended upwards, past the green mist.
In response, Shane hovered closer to the ground, until he was in range to fine tune ten of the spears into a large, bowl-shaped cradle, maneuvering it several meters away from Myla's line.
When the cradle (bowl) dropped slowly beside her, the golem moved forward, its arm reaching for the new object.
"Get back!" Myla shouted, moving away immediately, though her gait was unsteady in the worsening nausea. Ethan was already moving with a quiet groan, having recovered from the shock of Shane's appearance.
"What's--" the rest of Shane's question was muffled in the golem's rumbling approach.
In the air, Shane swore. The location markers on the phone's display showed him right above a group of dots with labels corresponding to Myla, Ethan, Lawrence, and a pair of new students--Hazel and Kusari, but it was too risky to gauge safe shots from just that, and the green fog was blocking most of his visuals.
The fog needed to go. Immediately. On top of being poisonous, obstructing his line of sight was wasting time he could be helping.
Slamming a hundred of the javelins together into five ceiling fan blades each about 50 meters in length, he aligned them into a circle and rotated them. Really fast.
Simplest solution and all that: a giant fan.
The effect was entirely expected: the downwash mixing of clear air pushing into the fog layer dispersed the green air below. Focused on rotating the fan blades at speeds fast enough to produce winds that could snap power lines and moving the entire setup across the battlefield, Shane couldn't spare the attention for precise attacks, yet--and he sure as hell wasn't about to rain the rest of the spears down willy-nilly. But getting a clear view of the fight was a crucial advantage for him, especially if the caster could produce more fog on the fly and render his efforts wasted. Myla was right--that would be the first target.
A bit of strain tugged on the back of his mind, and his injuries reminded him that they'd be coming back in full force once the painkillers wore off. Keeping his breaths shallow to avoid aggravating much of his torso, Shane blocked out the background noise with a refocus on every bit of crystal he had at the ready. The cradle near Myla caught his attention, and he wanted to leave off on the fan and just get his team out of there, first, but finding the caster was arguably more important here.
Again, he set those priorities and turned away from the now easy sight of Genevieve and Eric unconscious while a hulking, black golem lumbered towards others nearby.
As luck would have it, the golem stopped its advance in the wake of Shane's improvised fan.
Below, Ethan and Myla breathed a bit easier--though the nausea remained--as the poison fog dissipated and the golem preoccupied itself studying the floating spears above it.
While the makeshift fan made its way across the battlefield, the people and creatures below were hit hard by the cold, buffeting winds that whisked away the layer of mist, restoring full sight to the area as well as the ready support above.
Emerging from the forest with a limp Gregory in tow, Hector was the picture of a child ready to throw a tantrum. One that wouldn't come that day as a sniper bullet streaked through the air towards his head.
The metal slug flickered away as it made contact with Hector's forehead and pierced through Miranda's head instead, the creature's entire form flickering violently before losing corporeality. Gregory fell through its body and landed heavily on the dirt and leaves below.
"The next shot will kill you, Rivers. Do not move. Your pet won't be able to take another hit for you," Commander Kardos's voice rang out from the cuff as Hector stood still.
"He's not even dead!" Hector shouted, shrill in his irritation and surprise. Miranda was wholly transparent beside him, her form now ghostly, her outline wisping at the edges.
"Do not move."
Soldiers came for Hector soon afterwards, clapping suppression cuffs on his wrists before they led him away. Under the increased suppression, Miranda faded even further.
"I just wanted to play with someone..." he grumbled as they led him away.
Another group of soldiers checked Gregory's vitals before calling for a paramedics team.
When they arrived, they lifted the boy onto a gurney and strapped him down, moving him to the nearby ambulance and taking him back to the hospital building he had just left not two hours ago.
With the proximity of the beetle man, it was impossible to miss. The first bullet entered the 'head' of the humanoid, rupturing its cognitive vitals. The second bullet did the same. The third shot was just plain overkill. With a pathetic final wheeze the beetle man perished, broken and covered in its subordinates' gizzards. The trench team had won.
On the other hand, Cal was having significantly less success than her teammates. Accompanied by Devotion and Determination, she rushed towards the scorpion. Her opponent was ready, eager to face off with the aquamarine blur once more. The tulpas bounded behind the girl, as per their master's instructions. Unfortunately, those instructions had not been specific enough. Cal's tactics fell on deaf ears. When it finally came to the coordinated attack the shadow creatures stuck by their original orders, to "follow Callan's lead" or more specifically, to mimic Cal's actions. They decided against following Cal's strategy, instead leaping at the scorpion from the same direction as their temporary leader. With a single whip of its stinger, the scorpion bat all three of them aside. Too easy. Cal was knocked back once again, with greater force this time. Devotion was dissipated upon impact. Being the sturdier of the pair, Determination managed to survive the blow, though it struggled to get back on its feet.
@Baklava: Cal's taking them hits like an absolute champ. Determination's barely alive and on its side a few metres from Cal. @Deathmyster, @Chasers115, @Kyrisse and @Diggerton: Nothing engaging you at the moment.
Notes:
Fog has been swept away by heavy winds from a crystilline structure by pink team. Nausea remains for a short while.
Allison's attempt to cut through the noodle arm was a success.
"Hey, how about picking on someone your own size?"
Excited by the idea of yet another meal, the spaghetti monster began reaching towards Zoe. It delayed eating Allison long enough for her to slice almost completely through with her makeshift blade. The monster screeched in frustration as what was left couldn't support her weight, causing Allison to fall-- albeit straight towards the mouth, which pulsated with hungry anticipation.
At the same moment, Siena's four spears drove themselves into the monster's body, causing the entire creature to lurch. Allison nearly landed directly on one of the outward facing shards of the plate, deeply slicing her side instead of severing her spine. She monster's tortured scream was deafening-- her ears continued to ring long after it resorted to angry mewling. Its noodles weakly lashed out in the direction the spears had come from-- trying to find their source. For now the monster, seemed to completely forget about Allison as well as Zoe.
Meanwhile, the deadly dragon bile ate through the defenseless spaghetti monster like boiling water on an ice cube. The plate clapped to the ground before Angel, sending a cloud of dust and bits of dirt flying towards her. The spaghetti monster's screech pathetically died out and before long, Chris was vomiting directly on the ground-- having charred the monster straight through it's center. A good portion of the caustic vomit splashed Sander as he'd been easily tearing through the monster's appendages.
Important Note: --Fog has been swept away by heavy winds from a crystalline structure by pink team. Nausea remains for a short while.
Remaining enemies include: --(1) grounded spaghetti monsters (roughly the size of a barn) with a massive leech-like mouth. --(1) meatball monster-- out of sight, out of mind?
@Lasrever : Keep it cool, Zoe. @VarionusNW : Bleeding a lot and plated. Someone tell Sander his dinner's ready. @PapiTan : Several noodles comin' at cha'.
[@RedDuskl] : Someone probably needs a bath... and some new clothes. @dragonmancer : A graceful kill... nice work... eugh. @Riffus Maximus : Good thing she's wearing sunglasses.
@Holy Grail : By the trucks, safely out of range... for now. @canaryrose : Standing by the dead soldiers' remains. Safely out of range of everything for now.
A rapid exchange of information flew over Brentβs head as he watched the battlefield from above. Menagerieβs monsters clearly gave no shits about Geneva conventions, what with the gas warfare that was going on. It brought back bad memories, and the youth instinctively reached for his mouth, before stopping.
They were high up. And if this was like that bitchβs gastritis, Shane wouldnβt be getting a response back at all. He took a shallow breath. Category three was stronger than two. The golem was a huge threat then. Category two destroyed city blocks with ease. Category three thenβ¦cities? If only he could maintain an Overclock without being in contact with it. Then maybe they could just drop hydrogen bombs or whatever.
But that was enough milling about.
Brent slapped both hands against his cheeks as Shane displayed another show of strength, blowing away all the poisonous gas with gale-force winds. For something that sounded so simple, his power really was ridiculous. Nevertheless, the field was now clear to view, and it wasβ¦horrifying.
Even this high above, it was easy to see all the bodies strewn across the plain. Both monsters and humans were laid down like broken dolls, red splotches on a dark brown canvas. In the lighting of the moon, the stark contrast was made even more prominent, and he couldnβt help but narrow his eyes. This was what he would be dealing with now, huh? This was what others had to deal with while he had his dinner date and messed around in the hospital.
Shit, he missed out on everything!
Amethyst eyes flickered from one place to the other as he leaned as close as he could to the carnage below. The golem was a definite threat, but most other monsters were eradicated. Amidst a field of monstrous meatballs, a couple of students were facing off against some scaly half-lizard thing as it spewed some liquid all over the place. Off by her lonesome, an aquamarine bullet was repelled constantly by a scorpion monster, her βclonesβ advance similarly dissuaded.
So, the question wasβ¦where was that caster?
There were too many meatballs that looked like the same trash mob monsters. Not a caster, unless it was the whole βhide a tree within a forestβ concept. Dragon was either breathing out vomit or had also been afflicted by the poison gasβ¦which meant that it didnβt spew that out. Scorpion was doing fairly well considering the circumstances. Immunity? Or did it not need to breathe? Giant, going by whatever that girl said, couldnβt be the caster for some reason. Heβll trust that for now.
Brent took in a deeper breath, catching a whiff of the blood and death that pervaded all over the chaotic battlefield, and said, pointing, βAim for the scorpion. If thatβs not it, the casterβs either invisible or underground, and youβd be better off taking down the golem first. In that scenario, Iβll watch and see where the gas is being drawn, if it starts heading back over to the area. Convergence might indicate the location of the caster.β
He couldnβt do much, really, not without any weapons training or any technology to upgade, but, if nothing elseβ¦
Sander fully intended to move onto the scaly beast, right after he finished with the spaghetti monster. The creature was hardly resilient; its tentacles gave far too easy underneath his fingers. Then the scent of pine needles assaulted his nostrils. He half-turned, just in time to stare down a massive maw with rows upon rows of jagged teeth. Caught by surprise, he barely had time to turn before fire licked at his back and left shoulder just as a horrendous stench hit him. He cried out first, though it had already begun to sound like the maddened howl of a wounded animal than a frustrated grunt of a man. Instincts took over, and he twisted himself from the erosive substance and launched himself to the waiting ground below. The awkward angle of his leap prevented him from landing on his feet, but he managed a few quick tumbles to soften his fall. Once he regained his footing, he clawed at what remained of his tattered shirt, getting the bile off his skin. The fabric fell apart almost immediately, revealing red, angry burn marks across his back and left shoulder. And they hurt, but the pain was already receding, a reminder that Christmasβ magic still lingered. Sander allowed himself a few shaky gasps of air, crimson eyes locked onto his next target, now just standing on the other side of the tentacle monsterβs corpse. He took a moment to observe the monster, noting the patches of blood on its left side and the way its legs wobbled.
Then he was moving again, sudden like the snap of a whip. He dashed toward the creature head on, only to change his route at the last minute with a quick sidestep, targeting what he felt to be its weakness.
Had Chris recovered from his stomach ailment, His crimson orbs looked towards a human, Sander, racing towards him. At first he was confused since they were supposed to be allies, had Chris not have time to think the impulsive nature of this form might have mistaken Sander for prey instantly. Chris tried to speak, try to ask his fellow mage why the hell he was charging at him, but he could not, only let out a rather monstrous growl chippered with different pitches, as if the beast was trying to make a complicated sound. Realizing the futility of communication, Chris looked off to Allison who was being constricted by noodles. His attention now drawn anyway from the charging vampire as he was thinking about how fast he could get there to save her.
Taking advantage of the monster's inaction, Sander closed in on its left flank, throwing a punch toward the bleeding spot on its armor.
Chris's thoughts were broken when a sudden rush of agonizing pain banged through his ribcage, causing him to release a screech of shock. The barely scratched injuries from the bullets had now somehow transformed into a great wave of a wound. Sander's punch had shattered a section of scales making a bleeding bruise twice the size of his fist. Dozens of fragmented scales fell to the ground like broken glass or metal. This was the first time Chris, or at least, His draconic body has ever felt such pain. Even the previous boulder could inflict actual damage to him. It took him a moment to register that the seismic pain was dealt by the mage that had rushed him. It was that betraying punched that allowed his creeping, predatory conscience to indudge Chris once again. With His red orbs locked onto Sander, He would spin the other way, slamming his mighty tail against Sander's side of his torso with great force as he rotated fully to face Sander again, letting out another screech though this one was laced in primal rage.
Sander turned just in time to watch the massive pillar of scales and muscles barrelling toward him. There was no saving it anymore, so he dived backward, letting the sheer force of the blow propelled him away from the fight. The creatureβs attack caught his right arm though, and from the way it cracked earlier, something broke. He grimaced, breaths turned ragged, but he stood his ground. A red glow engulfed as he tried to absorb the creatureβs red blood. However, it was like grasping air; his power searched and searched but found nothing. Dark rage bubbled in his chest, and a part of his mind began to falter, searching for a new source of heat. He clamped down on said urge hard, fighting to focus on the fight at hand. But it was not so easy, when the tempting aroma of blood was closer than ever. He managed, still.
Staring down the monsterβs massive maw, he began circling, baiting the creature while biding time for his right arm to be functional again.
Chris stared Down Sander as he began to move around. Though the pain had awakened instinct, the ill air dampened it. He could think clearly, despite blood was drawn, granted had he not have been so ill there was no question that Chris would outright try to murder his fellow mage. Not wanting more blood on his hand, Chris bowed his head so that his two back-facing horns were pointed towards Sander, his eyes still locked with him. In a sudden charge, he would aim to pin Sander to the ground between his two horns. His movements were sluggish due to his shattered side of his body, likely having a broken rib, and the illness still in his system. However he was still pushing through and gave off a fast sudden sprint.
Sander lowered his stance, waiting for the right moment. Just as the dragon neared, he sidestepped out of its path, then grabbed onto its horn with his left hand. Using the creatureβs momentum, he flung himself onto its back, fingers finding purchase in the gaps between the scales. The spikes dug into him, but they were a mild discomfort at most.
Chris's eyes centered to the ground, he would hope his next action wouldn't kill his comrade. With Sander ontop, Chris would stand on his hind legs in an abrupt jerk, letting out a triumphant roar and quickly began to fall over on his back, hoping to crush Sander asasuming he didn't already fall off and roll out of the way.
The beastβs sudden lurch gave away its intention. Once the thing was upright, Sander hastily leapt off, escaping the situation by a hair breadth. He landed awkwardly on his back, unable to position his fall. However, the knowledge that the monster was just steps away from him pumped another surge of adrenaline into his system as he scrambled to his feet. With eyes still on the beast, he backed away quickly, racking his brain for a better approach. The creature was far more dangerous than the doll he fought, and it unnerved him. He would need to find away, and he needed to it fast. Really, there was only one way. He turned his head toward the tempting scent, eyes searching for the patch of red in landscape until he found. There, beneath a broken body. He would have cared, in a different time and different place. But now was not it, not when blood roared in his ears and fire pulsed in his chest. Turning his back toward the monster, he made a mad dash toward the body.
Chris would get back up, he could feel blood leak from the massive wound in his chest that Sander left him. As he turned over and stood up, he saw Sander retreat, his eyes followed his direction to a dead body. Eyes wide, a comrade was already dead beyond his notice. His thoughts raced with anxiety, he had let someone down, someone died because he wasn't fast enough. His eyes followed back to his comrades, seeing another unfamiliar magi being attacked by another noodle monster, and what appeared to be blood on its plate, Chris immediately charged after it, hoping Sander had given up on attacking him.[
She was dead. Very much so. The congealing blood did not have the same pull as its flowing counterpart, but it would do. Once reached his destination, Sander dropped to his knees, hands dipping into the pool of crimson fluid. There was a bit of hesitation, there always had, but soon enough, he glowed red, his mind closed to the world around him.
As Chris got into range, he'd leap at the noodles reaching for Siena, biting down on a few while tackling the rest out of the way. Severing the noodles with maw and claw, he would turn to the monster with another monstrous roar. Blood was still welling up from the massive wound in his side Sander had left him.
Looking up as she felt the cold wind on her face, it took a moment for Zoe to control her expression as she took in the scene in front of her. It was a scene which she had mixed feelings on, to say the least. On the one hand, whatever the new arrival from the other team did seemed to have had a pretty big effect on the creature, and Zoe thought she could finally see an opportunity to end it. Taking out the last spaghetti monster meant their fight would be as good as won as far as she was concerned.
On the other hand, she hesitated. Her teammate was up there, and not in a great position from what she'd seen. If she didn't think about what she was doing and made the thing angry too quick, it seemed like there was a very real chance it'd get the other girl killed.
Could always do it anyway. Might be fun! The thought wasn't completely unexpected, but Zoe pushed it to the back of her mind as well as she could. Although it would be the fastest way out... And besides, didn't she kind of want to? Since she got her powers, didn't it always feel pretty good to watch whenever someone else got--
"Stop." She hissed sharply under her breath. This wasn't the time to let those thoughts come to the surface. It gave her a sick feeling in her stomach, and she'd got enough of that from the poison. It was just the stigma talking, she reminded herself. Apparently it didn't mix well when she let herself get angry on top of it. Still, she didn't want to do anything that'd get Allison killed. She was pissed about this whole fight, but not that pissed.
Still, Zoe wasn't going to personally help Allison's escape for a couple of reasons. One, her powers seemed like they'd be more effective in actually killing this thing than anyone else around here, and two, right now she'd be as likely to somehow hurt the other girl as she would be to help pull her out of there. No, she'd just have to do her job and hope everyone would be out of the way when the creature died.
Besides, making sure the monster couldn't get a hold of anyone else was priority number one, so it looked like it was time for her to be the one getting actually getting shit done. Again. If this kept happening, she was gonna start keeping score.
Because of the risk that it'd send the thing into a frenzy, Zoe wasn't going to take out any of the noodles right now - instead running without a word towards the edge of the plate that they'd emerged from. What she was planning on doing was probably reckless, but she was desperate to tear this thing open as quickly as she could because maybe that'd be enough to make the urges stop. She didn't want to hurt anyone when the fight was over, so she was hell-bent on landing the killing blow.
Once she reached the source of the noodles, she looked at the gap between the edge of the plate and the ground. It wasn't huge, but it looked big enough for her to get through. Now that she knew where the stomach was, she figured tearing it open would be a piece of cake once she got underneath. Good thing the creature was upside down. Steeling her nerves, she took her last few steps towards the plate.
It's almost over. I can finish this.
Gritting her teeth, Zoe grabbed the edge of the plate, pulling herself through the gap and underneath the monster. Holding her breath and closing her eyes in anticipation of the stomach acid that she expected to follow, she lunged upwards, power once again active in her arms as she attempted to rip open the stomach the same way she'd managed to kill the other one. She really hoped this worked, because otherwise she was completely screwed.
As Shane answered Brent's questions, Sophia listened but didn't provide any of her own. Though she made sure to listen to Shane's description of his team, she was beginning to partially tune the two talkers out as she went over what she had been told she should be able to do. Though what he had said made sense theoretically to her, there was still something strange about how she might be able to see the monsters with her power on. That would mean that they weren't really alive, but how could something that wasn't living be capable of causing so much damage?
Pushing those skeptical thoughts out of the way when Shane announced they were almost there, she peered down at the ground far below her. The two distant green circles hovering in mid-air caught her attention as she began to look out for the battlefield, but her view was soon obstructed as a light flashed and a green kind of mist spread out. It caused her to instinctively jerk backwards, even though it did not reach her. What is that stuff?
The answer was soon supplied to her as Shane began to communicate with someone on the other side of the phone, getting information about the battleground below them. It was poison. But that problem didn't last for long as Shane, with his miraculous power, blew away the fog so that they could see the ground once more. The view... wasn't what one would call pretty. Monstrous figures were revealed to her, along with the smaller forms of humans that were attempting to fight them off. Attempting, and were they succeeding? There were some motionless bodies of monsters strewn about, but along with them lay a few smaller bodies of humans that were either dead, or unconscious.
At this point, things seemed pretty surreal. She would never have imagined herself arriving in a floating creation, hovering above a battleground and watching monsters and humans face off, while being expected to help provide backup. That was something that heroes did, arrive late and save the day, right? A scene suddenly formed in her mind. She was describing and pointing out to Shane where exactly he should shoot his crystal shards, and he followed her instructions with excellent aim, shooting down the monsters right and left before they had a chance to attack any of the other fighters below. Then all the monsters were defeated, and-
Impossible. All of it was impossible. Especially the describing and pointing part, she didn't have any communication skills. Sophia let out a single huff of laughter, though she was unsmiling and obviously unamused. Though perhaps it was time to see if she could be of any use. She hesitated before beginning her question. "When should I..." Her question was left unfinished, for she lost courage in the middle of her sentence, leaving her words hanging. After a pause, she added, "You know."
Admittedly, the situation seemed to be getting a bit better as time went on, at least according to Aaron's short observations of his surroundings as he continued to pour his focus into summoning. For one thing, there were two less spaghetti monsters, another ally seemed to have leapt into the battle, and from his glances up it seemed that no one else had died up until this point beyond the on girl he had seen dead before. Then again, the new ally was currently naked and doing something strange to the dead body it seemed, there was at least one spaghetti monster left and seemingly kicking, and their resident fire-breathing lizard seemed rather hurt as well. So perhaps things were not the best overall, but at least there was some sense of positivity.
If naught else, he also knew for sure that the green fog that had enveloped him had finally been blown away by someone or something. While he hoped that whatever it was would be a friendly or an ally of some kind, it at least made it easier for him to continue his summoning and actually observe his surroundings without having to focus on not throwing up as much. Yet even so the lingering nausea in his stomach made him feel like his insides were being tied up in knots, and the urging of his stomach to upchuck its contents was something that still had to be resisted on his part for the time being.
Whatever the case was, the sixteen year old hoped that if he was needed he would be able to finish his summoning in good time. Otherwise, he hoped that the others would be able to wrap things up without him if that was possible.
Callan once again flew back into the trench, this time leaving a decent crater where she landed. She rolled over to her non-chemically burned side, holding her stomach while she gasped for breath. She scrunched up her face and repeatedly pounded the side of her free fist into the dirt as she waited for the pain to subside. Question answered-- she couldn't control Emma's shadow things. She rolled onto her knees and pressed her hand up against the trench wall for support.
"Urghh... I don't... I don't think they wanna listen to me," she said to Emma with a forced laugh, the slightest note of irritation in her voice.
Emma winced as Callan flew back into the trench. She was thankful that she didn't have to fight in the front lines like her. "Sorry Callan!" she called out. Emma had thought that would work, but apparently the tulpas really weren't great at thinking independently. Devotion reappeared next to her. Okay, I just have to copy Calβ¦ thatβs all. She called out to the pair, βDevotion, attack from the right side, Determination attack from the left. Aim for the eye!β Emma hoped that her commands would suffice this time.
Callan pulled herself to her feet and climbed out of the trench-- albeit a bit slower than before. "Time for a redo," she muttered. Truthfully, she was a little frustrated, but she couldn't blame Emma. By comparison, Cal had far less control over her own ability than she did. As she took off, she realized the green fog was suddenly being blown away by a massive crystaline structure near pink team. Reinforcements? Through the dissipating fog, she spotted 'Determination' and 'Devotion' following Emma's orders. Hopefully things would work out better this time around.
Oh, how Grant longed for a nap right now. Nap? No, maybe full on sleep. He was tired, yet the battle was not won. He kept his eyes shut for the time being while his teammates were working on getting rid of the remaining monster. It helped with the dizziness, just a bit. But with every breath he took, the nausea seemed to punch him straight in the gut, and it wasn't nice at all. He wished that it would end, just end already... His eyes opened, and he noticed, the fog was going away. Blowing away, more like. Relief. He took in a big, deep breath and let it out, feeling the fresh air fill his lungs to the brim. Though the fog went away, that feeling of nausea stayed, not as strong, but lingering. Looking down, he noticed the knife that he dropped. Padma's knife. He let out a sigh, shaking his head and picked it up. He regained enough strength to push himself up from the ground at least, but he still leaned against the wall.
While the beetleman let out one final wheeze, Marcus still stood alert, waiting for any sign of movement. It certainly seemed as though his execution had actually worked, and it doubly seemed as though this creature was now nothing more than a corpse. Although the battle wasn't over, it felt like a small victory to him; they'd been able to reduce one of these monsters to pathetic wheezing and gasping, a trait all too often reserved for the human combatants. It was kind of poetic, or karmatically appropriate at least.
He turned to look behind him, not really surprised that Lily was there. As he opened his mouth to say something to her, a sudden shift in the weather drew his attention elsewhere. A great wind swept over the field, dispersing the fog ever so slightly. Marcus took the opportunity to hesitiantly pull his shirt off his face and take a small breath, followed by several large and eager breaths when he realized it was not poison. He had no idea who was responsible for the windmills, but he made a mental note to thank them later.
He turned back around to meet Lily's eyes, his grin less forced and more confident this time around. "How're ya feeling, Lily?" he asked, moving to stand beside her. Off in the distance, he watched Cal climb out of the trench, and Emma summon some...things. Shadows, by the look of it.
Lily swayed on her feet, the front of her shirt held tightly against her nose and mouth. She tried to fight off the overwhelming nausea and dizziness from the fog as she focused now on Marcus' back rather than the beetleman who had let out one last wheeze before completely becoming still. How am I suppose to watch his back when I feel like I'm gonna keel over anytime soon? she thought irritatedly as she continued to fan the fog away with her free hand. The small movement aggravated the dizziness and she slowly sank down to the ground to avoid falling over. Are we all just gonna die in this fog?" she thought, her muddled mind trying to figure out if she could transfer the effects of the poison the way she did her other injuries. Did it work that way? Her eyes sought out the remaining monster that was closest to them. Maybe she could make the eye monster sick enough for her team mates to finish it off. She let go of her shirt. It was useless trying to shield her nose and mouth anyway. She can't escape the poison unless she stopped breathing. And besides...if I'm gonna transfer it, it's gotta be potent. She inhaled deeply, the nausea doubling as she did.
But before she could do anything, she felt a wave of fresh air sweep around her...or at least air that wasn't tainted with poison. She sighed in relief as she felt the nausea and dizziness abating a little. She looked towards Marcus and nodded. "I think so," she said as she slowly got to her feet. She still felt nauseous but it was a lot better than it was a couple of seconds ago. She followed his gaze towards Callan and Emma. "We should help them out."
"Funny, I was just thinking the same thing!" Marcus said, slowly walking over beside her. "I don't know how much good a bullet will do against it, but it's always worth a shot. Plus, we've got you if we need...oh yeah, you alright?" he asked, looking down towards her leg almost reflexively. Some part of his brain outright refused to believe that she should be beside him just casually chatting after that little incident, but that part of his brain hadn't quite caught up yet.
"Of course I am," Lily grinned as she looked down at her leg, her mood automatically picking up when she thought of how useful she had become in the battle. She bent and then extended her knee. "Good as new. As if nothing happened," she added triumphantly. "Plan B worked really well."
Marcus smiled, nodded, and jogged over to the hole, coming to stop slightly behind the pit. With the beetleman executed, he and Lily were free to help with the last remaining beast. He stopped to take aim again, wincing as his shoulder sent electricity sparking through his body. Not the greatest strategist, his current plan was 'shoot the large eye monster in its large eye'. Finess would have to wait until later; this was not a plan that required it.
Lily followed after Marcus, still set on watching his back as she was told to. It was easier now that the nausea had already faded. She stood to his side, not wanting to get in the way of what he was planning to do. She, however, noticed how he winced when he took aim. How best to help in this kind of situation? She couldn't just stand there and do nothing. Figuring that the best way to help him was to take away the injury, the black string reappeared on her wrist with the other end wrapping around Marcus' wrist. Pain blossomed in Lily's shoulder. It was tolerable though. "It should be easier to shoot now."
The dull thudding that accompanied his aim suddenly stopped with the appearance of a black string on his wrist. He turned to Lily, looking at her just in time to see her shoulder turn red. He appreciated it, especially whith his arms up and aiming, and he hoped his look of gratitude conveyed that. When this was over, he'd probably ask for it back, just so he didn't feel guilty. That was later though, there were important things to be taken care of now.
Same as before, two shots, aimed directly at the thing's giant eyeball. He caught himself holding his breath, but only after he'd fired the shots.
With each painful step of her sprint, Cal could feel her mind clear. It was just her and this one single goal for a moment-- to finally kill this nasty fucker. Twice it had swatted her away now and she wasn't about to let it do that a third time. More likely than not, she assumed it would be anticipating her. She half expected it to be patting its stinger against the dirt like it was a home plate-- waving it in the air expectantly. Well, either way she wasn't about to be intimidated.
The moment she saw the tail move, she sharply twisted her torso to the side and kicked one leg out in front of her. It was her turn to score a homerun, she thought to herself with a slight smile peeking through the grimace on her face as she slide across the ground-- aggravating her leg and the scorches on her side. She unintentionally growled as she thrust her arm upwards. Corny, unspoken one-liners would be a small comfort compared to the satisfaction of driving what was left of her katana through this thing's gut-- assuming its on-the-fly hockey skills weren't a concern.
After the monster died and the projectile boulders stopped, Savannah stood up, feeling like she was about to puke. Which she did. She emptied the contents of her stomach onto the ground -which wasn't much but bile considering the only thing she had had for two days was a salad- as the back of her throat burned in reaction to her stomach acid. She hurled a bit more until her stomach's contents were fully cleared, leaving her dry heaving. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and then shakingly stood up on her own two feet.
She observed the battlefield, noticing that things were getting better for green team. It seemed that the girl that had 'died' earlier had fought her way out of its stomach, which was impressive to say the least. But her brief happiness faded as she saw Allison. The girl who had given Savannah a suffocating hug just moments before was now bleeding all over the place and about to be eaten. The dragon had vomited all over the monsters, killing it. Two allies had joined the fight, one that seemed like he was high on drugs or something like that, and the other throwing spears all over the place.
She was useless until her power recharged. Firing a gun would be a huge mistake at this point, and her power was still recharging. She couldn't startle the monsters or anything without it. She would begrudgingly wait until her power recharged.
Normally, Siena wasn't an awful tactician, but normally the lives that she played with weren't real. The girl that she had tried to draw the attention away from had fallen into the mass of spaghetti, and though Siena did her best to pull it back, she couldn't help but cringe a little at the development. That was, by and far, the last thing that she had wanted to happen. Hopefully there wasn't too much danger in that, but the rational pull of blue told her that was wishful thinking. With monsters, nothing really lacked the thrill of danger. Unfortunately, the rational side that she wanted to follow didn't let her think long before the noodle-lord turned its attention to her.
'Red, I can do red. Red can at le--oh no.' The other girl was still on the noodles. Risking something as volatile and vicious as red luxin or sub-red was not only asking for Siena to give into instinct, but it was more than likely going to roast the other girl. The brunette froze, her breath catching in the back of her throat as panic mired itself deep into her thoughts, her emotions starting to break free from her mark's. Bad sign number two. He wasn't going to be with her much longer. The spaghetti creature was getting closer, and every muscle in Siena's body refused to respond for a terrifying instant.
Almost on instinct, Siena drafted a small, basketball sized orb of red. Rationally, her mind screamed to stop--stop it, now!. Someone was still on the beast, but a wild desperation to survive dug deep into Siena's mind. Breath coming short, she didn't even bother sealing the luxin before launching it towards the spaghetti monster, hoping that the resulting burning sensation would deter the hostile. The ball flew forward, slower than her previous attempts, red luxin shimmering as it broke free from its shape.
That, as it turned out, was a mistake.
The blast hadn't even managed to reach the creature when it suddenly broke down and vanished--along with all semblance of pressure in the back of her mind. Gone. She was defenseless. The desperation and anger converted into mind-numbing terror. She was going to die. The mage staggered a step back, her legs almost giving out beneath her weight. She should have run, but the thundering heartbeat that rang in her ears scrambled all rational thought.
No sooner had she processed that she should be prepared to meet an untimely end, another creature came rushing in to tackle the spaghetti monster, letting loose an ear-shattering roar. It was only the size of a horse, and it might have saved her, but Siena was more than aware that she was defenseless--she'd left the knife in the squirrel, hadn't she? Stupid, stupid girl--and at any moment the creature could have turned to her and decided that she was a better snack. A better, more protein-filled snack. Swallowing a breath of air, the mage backed up a few steps, her stance shaky and her thoughts almost blank.
Allison Revel couldn't think straight. She had hit the plate hard, with a piece of the plate now jutting from her side. She was bleeding profusely, the pain flooding through her just as quickly. Everything was pain. Her vision swam, a combination of nausea and the beating pain from the wound at her side destroying any semblance of coherant thought that she could muster. Allison was sure that she was going to die. She was bleeding out, right next to the mouth of a giant monster, and no one was there to help her. She was ready to resign herself to death.
Her hands grasped at the plate, desperately wanting to make sure she didn't fall off, though they found no handholds. She felt as if she was on an endless, hostile expanse of ceramic. Nothing made sense. Allison looked at her left hand, which still grasped the makeshift blade, her grip so tight that it had started to dig into her skin. She loosened her grip on the thing and tried to breath, her lungs filling with the nauseating fog, which only worsened things. The burning of her side seemed to increase with every minuscule movement, the plate digging further into her side. Allison stopped moving, taking several deep breaths, in the hope that she could just swallow all of the fog and drink in fresh air once again.
Allison's breathing stopped short as the plate beneath her seemed to fall away, leaving her floating, weightless, surrounded by nothing. There was nothing, except for Allison, and a vast ocean far below her, so far below. Allison began to float towards it, realizing that the she felt no pain from her wound as she did so.
As Allison approached the vast sea, she found an eternity beyond it. She could only see it in blurry glimpses, but beyond the surface was something incomprehensibly beautiful, everything just beyond her grasp, everything beyond the nothing in which she floated. She felt inherently separated from that vast, incomprehensible ocean, which only drove her to seek it more. She wanted what lay beyond her grasp, she needed it. Allison neared the endless ocean.
She reached out her hand, which seemed to lose it's weightlessness as she neared, becoming immensly heavy, taking her full will and determination to keep it straight. As her hand neared the surface, mere feet away from it, ripples formed on the pristine surface, and a single droplet of water pushed away from the surface, seeming more like a bead of glass than a drop of water. It was too perfect. It was as if the ocean was offering a piece of itself to Allison, a glorious gift that Allison had to accept. She moved her heavy hand to grab it, though the droplet seemed to shift as she did so.
The droplet began to glow, a brutal, sinister shade of red, seeming to glow brightest in Allison's direction, accusatory and hateful. The glowing droplet now resembled an eye, staring down Allison Revel, who floated in an endless nothingness.
Tainted, that was the word that came to Allison's numb mind first. This thing was tainted, a horrible machination with only the goal of causing pain and suffering. Allison was no different. The endless, pure ocean seemed to fall away with Allison's realization, being replaced by a sea of red, piercing eyes.
Tainted.
Allison was thrown back to reality, the pain in her side reminding her of her impending doom. The beautiful nightmare had felt like several minutes, though it seemed to occur in mere moments. Allison took several deep breaths as she considered what she had just seen, realizing that the air was clean. The fog was being blown away. Allison couldn't tell what had blown the fog away, but it was likely one of the other teams.
Allison took this as an opportunity to gather herself, though the nausea stayed constant, her vision still dizzy. At least now, her thoughts were clear aside from the sharp pain from her side. She needed to do something, if she was going to die she wouldn't let her death be in vain. She felt the cool ceramic against her hands, which were undoubtedly covered in blood and pasta sauce by this point, drew in a deep breath, and summoned the shard.
The shard appeared in Allison's hand in mere moments, much larger than it had ever been before. The thing was roughly 6 feet long, taller than Allison, though it had no weight to it. The shard now took the form of a massive sword, a feverish cross between several different kinds of sword that Allison couldn't name. It seemed to glow a deep purple, though emitted no light. Allison looked at the massive object in awe before swinging it through the sharp shards that jutted from the plate, following with wild, almost careless swings at the plate. She needed to cut as much as she could in the time she had.
As Allison swung, she felt the plate in her side dig further, the blood loss compounding with the nausea. She felt the full force of her exhaustion as she swung. Allison couldn't carry on much longer.
Kusari stood speechless in the face of the powerful winds created by Shane, her white hair was blown back to the point she could have been used as a sign of surrender. She blinked at the crystalline constructs as her right hand twitched involuntarily, now here was a nostalgic sensation. This only happened to her when she was still drawing, or rather when she had the motivation to draw. Whenever she saw something she considered beautiful she got an irresistible urge to draw it. She'd completely forgotten that everything she'd said was ignored, it had all been invalidated after all. This person before her was special, but not special like the rest of them, he was...
"Awe... awesome." The words quietly slipped from Kusari's mouth, she was in awe, but there was something else she felt. She was utterly outclassed, to the point that her presence felt insignificant. She looked back to the golem and strained her eyes. What could she do? What was something that only Kusari Bloodworth could do?
Her leg kicked off the ground, then again as she jumped towards the golem. She was going to stop it, then she was going to rip a hole in it's chest. If the attack didn't break it's core, she could at least chip away at it's armor to help the others kill it. The monster wasn't focused on her, so she believed she had a clear shot at it.
Leaping upwards, she kicked at the golem's chest as hard as she could, positioning her crimson talons to tear away at the rock.
"No one asked you to be a hero, you fuck," Decker complained quietly, red and blue needles threaded with black and white thread, respectively, hovering in the air behind him as three blue needles stitched white threads across Shane's lacerations. The wounds healed immediately on the last stitch and the used threads shimmered out of existence, leaving the corresponding needles empty. Decker discarded the empty needles with a wave of his hand before mentally pulling on a few others.
He was sitting on a borrowed stool beside the hospital bed, glaring daggers--or needles, in this case--at their team leader.
Ethan, on another bed, groaned loudly in an attempt to rush the healer. Decker flipped him the middle finger before turning back to Shane, waiting on the response.
"If I waited until people asked me to help them, I think it'd be too late," Shane flexed the previously damaged arm as he spoke, testing for any injuries Decker might have missed.
"...Could've just let 'em die. And saved me the trouble," Decker glanced at the bloodied hole in Shane's shirt. The stomach wound had been the first thing stitched up and the ruined dress shirt was now the only evidence that one of the civilians had shanked the subnatural who had saved their ungrateful lives.
"If I had let them die, you'd have stitched my ass to the floor and used me as a footstool."
"Ye. But it still would have saved me the trouble."
The last cut on Shane's scalp healed without a trace of damage just in time for the healer to reapply mild cranial trauma with a slap upside the head. Decker's remaining needles angrily spun to face Ethan once their perpetual grouch of a medic had violently emphasized his point.
The giant fan blades in the air sharpened into blades as the last of the mist cleared. Shane sucked in a breath at what he finally saw in full.
Fights between mages and monsters were always messy, especially where powers collided, but this battlefield was one hell of a soup sandwich. No organization, no tactics, no fucking clue.
And the Director, without missing a beat, had doubled up on the pressure by turning this into a combat assessment, too. Always make or break with her, but this was bordering on extreme. He knew the current testing methods had been under fire for years due to the unreliability of the results, but sending fresh faces against monsters--even if they were supposed to have just been category ones--was just...cruel. Not surprising, given the alarming depletion in combat-ready mages over the last year, but still cruel.
He supposed it was a terrible twist of fate that had collected an entire batch of new students stable enough for Rosa to suggest sending out and strong enough that the Director believed they had a reasonable chance of success. The cherry on top of the universe's terrible comedy routine was the sudden attack, though Shane had a feeling the Director would find one way or another to turn even this disaster of a battlefield to her advantage in the long run. It was simply how the woman operated. Selfishly. Efficiently. And with a sense of purpose that no one but Rosa and Fredric had figured out.
Shane noted Brent's target suggestion and Sophia's question, but with the mist now cleared and showing no signs of returning, rescuing his teammates was too tempting for two reasons: they were his teammates and Ethan had his gear. So he took the bait. He waved the two off with a hand and an apologetic "Sorry, guys, change of plans now that I've seen this mess," before turning back to the group by the golem. Teammates first while he had a chance, then back to hunting for the caster. If the glowing green circles in the air prior to their arrival was any indication, the caster needed some time, which meant Shane would at least get some warning if he couldn't pull this off in a timely manner.
He could practically hear Decker's bitching in his ears as the large cradle near Myla and Ethan broke apart, the readily positioned strips of crystal reforming into vague climbing harnesses that picked up everyone near the golem by the armpits and torso, catching in mid-air the partially shifted girl whose red talons had left a clean, shallow gash on the golem's chest.
The construct reacted immediately when the harness began lifting the nearby targets backwards and upwards. Its body broke apart again, turning back into that deadly whirlwind of black, spiked rocks as the monster attempted to murder the students before Shane could lift them out of its range.
But he had been expecting some kind of attack. It would have been too easy if the thing had just stood by to let him rescue people.
The whirlwind picked up the nearby earth, which seemed to melt before morphing into that same black rock the creature was made from, proving one of Myla's guesses correct. A converter, and earth was its material of choice.
So then he'd test her other guess.
The white, visible core in the center of the maelstrom vibrated faster as it built up more material, the whirlwind rushing towards the students even as the crystal harnesses dragged them away and upwards as quickly as Shane could manage in his current state. One of the larger rocks whipped towards Myla just as Shane struck it down with a crystal spear. The collision slammed it into the earth instead, where the golem's core dragged it slowly back towards the main body, the rock's movement hindered by the embedded crystal still under Shane's control.
30 of the readied javelins shot towards the core, deflecting sharply off a barrier around the white sphere and slamming into the inside wall of whirling rocks, where the force of Shane's will over his shards battled against that of the creature's control of its body. With every impact on the barrier, large portions of the construct's tornado fell away, the glossy, black rock turning back into regular dirt. 30 times was enough for the initially tractor-sized swirl of rocks to nearly dissipate.
While the golem's core vibrated and recovered from the attacks, Shane whisked the seven people up towards his large sphere in the air, where he slid them through a newly formed aperture in the sphere's roof and deposited them gently on the floor of the floating orb before refocusing on the rest of the battlefield.
Detailed maneuvers and multitasks like what he had just pulled were still too slow for his tastes. In the month since he had returned from that mission, he hadn't been allowed to spar or practice. And it was showing.
Before the new arrivals could say anything, he snapped his fingers once at Ethan.
"Strip. Gear."
The words were clipped and the tone cold.
Ethan fell to floor in a rough, seated posture, legs splayed out in front of him and arms braced against the smooth crystal while he leaned backwards, tilting his head up to blink through another surge of dizziness. On another day, he would have been irritated that Shane prioritized the armaments over his health, but today was not that day.
When the nauseating feeling passed, he obliged, sliding his hands over the barely visible seams in the chestband and armbands. They opened without a sound and fell to the crystalline floor in a heap like heavy fabric.
There was no response as Ethan slid the armaments towards Shane, nor was there any appreciative acknowledgement from the recipient. Myla's lips thinned in disapproval, but she left the two alone, checking instead on Genevieve and Eric.
Shane slid the devices over his forearms first, snapping them shut and watching as the bands molded to fit him like a second skin. Last was the wide band that wrapped around the upper torso like a tube top--something Decker had laughed derisively at when the Director had first presented the gear to the person she deemed USARILN East's strongest Arbiter.
The material looked like quicksilver, but felt like silk. A trick for the senses.
While the set could be used by anybody, the intended user had been Shane, and the amplification had been customized for his power. After he had grimaced and hissed his way through wrapping the chestband around his injured torso, he took a moment to wait through the fresh pains he had awoken from moving the muscles on his upper body. His injury was still sensitive. Still healing. Still not okay with movement, especially after he had taken advantage of a fresh painkiller dose to recklessly beeline for the Director's office. Now that the medication was slowly wearing off, that particular decision was really coming back to bite him in the ass.
One thing after another, really. But with the gear on, everything that would otherwise be magically straining him felt lighter and easier. Clean-cut. Polished.
Precision control and generation on the fly was as natural as breathing now and the fog that tugged on the back of his consciousness faded away.
The light blue hexagons shimmering across the crystals under Shane's control almost tripled in density, pluming in billows from Shane's body and his crystals like soft-hued, geometric conflagrations.
"Raise the roof, you shitter," Decker had joked with a mixture of awe and amusement the first time the team had seen the gear in action.
Shane had stepped towards the helicopter's open door, the wind screaming against the metal frame. His parachute was on the floor of the cabin, under Decker's feet as a makeshift ottoman. Thirteen others sat in the large cabin, awaiting their first-hand glimpse at Hephaestus-customized gear in use with a combination of trepidation and anticipation.
He and Decker had both grinned like madmen.
"Sure. Just watch me."
The entire field exploded with crystals.
They rapidly unfurled from the points of creation like glass flowers violently blossoming to life. Some were close to the ground while others floated in the air, but they all covered space in smooth, bladed fragments that spiraled away from the center, filling up the available volume rapidly as they merged on contact with other masses of crystal.
Where they touched students and guards--dead or alive--the material swept against them, pushing and wrapping around them, then ballooning into large spheres that shot upwards towards Shane. The spheres encapsulated the students in groups if they were close together and individually if they were further apart. Grant was picked up from the trench while Zoe was pulled out from beneath the spaghetti monster, leaving a trail of rotting flesh as her power scraped against it. Allison was picked up with the porcelain shard embedded in her body, the sphere breaking off the wedge as it sealed up. The sphere around Christmas closed on the wires still attached to the dismembered doll arm, severing them. A shapeshifted dragon in a much larger sphere floated up last as Shane checked his phone again, confirming the dragon was a friendly.
That neither Commander Kardos nor the Director protested the sudden end to the combat assessment indicated the woman wasn't at all surprised by the turn of events. She had likely seen it coming.
Did you know? he thought the question without following through, knowing the Director would never answer what he really wanted to ask. He glanced towards Brent and Sophia, the two of them sent out by the Director herself. Why? To test him? To test them? She could have sent him out alone with the same effect. The two students she had selected were practically liabilities with their respective injuries and lack of combat experience to make up for that. Pretty useless, right?
Right?
Wrong.
He'd have been lying if he claimed that their presence hadn't at least reassured him on the way there. People to brief. A pseudo team to plan an attack with. Fresh faces clear of the grief, resentment, and tension that permeated what remained of his original team. The hinges that had been falling apart for the last year. Had the strain of it all showed that much on him? Had the Director really considered that he would find a grave for himself here? Or was he just overthinking things again?
In the clarity of control he had from the armament's effects, Shane heard that raucous voice again.
"What the hell! You need a call-out for that! That's lit as fuck! Call it, like, the Dome of Diamond Death or something!"
On the floor, the crystals had now formed one solid mass that spanned the entire battlefield, with more still bursting into existence.
The creatures below were completely encased in the material, pierced through where they had tried to run--some still alive, but unmoving. The golem's core had managed to reform the majority of its body, but it had lost the lower half to the crystal mausoleum rising in a solid dome that was slowly filling itself in.
The golem swung at the floating orb, the range of its control extended the arm through that same segmentation again. Shane speared it through with the remaining 44 spears in the air, coupling the projectiles with five swipes from the five literal fan blades still hovering above the dome. As the spears and blades made contact with the rest of the material, they melded into the dome as well, shattering the golem's upper body almost completely before enveloping it. The golem core's barrier remained, but even as the white sphere rumbled and vibrated, the rest of its pieces could barely damage the entombing material. What cracks did appear were small and quickly repaired.
It was, in essence, the extreme version of isolating a converter from whatever material it was keen on converting. That this creature could break apart and manipulate every section of its body meant its movements needed to be restricted. The casing handled all of that.
The eye scorpion, trapped, but still able to cast, spun red circles in the crystal, detonating the glitter bombs again. To little effect. What room it gained for small bouts of movement was quickly lost as the material filled in again. It repeated this process several times, but failed to make any significant progress through the crystal mass.
Meanwhile the spaghetti monsters and meatballs lost room with every wiggle of a noodle tentacle, losing ground to the encroaching crystal as Shane topped off the tomb with a smooth finish.
The dome was complete--a perfect, 400-meter-diameter semicircle that had, by design, barely missed the trucks on the periphery of the battlefield.
"NO WAY! You just iron maidened the shit out that thing! That's so overkill...and completely you."
The solid mass of crystal imploded in a rush of spikes, collapsing inward in successive layers and reducing everything inside to a mess of white blood, marinara, porcelain fragments, and fleshy bits that were once terrifying nightmares given life. What remained of the golem's body suspended in the crystal was pulverized and the core body only held on a fraction longer before the barrier around the white sphere thrummed one last time with energy and caved in on itself, the sphere winking out of existence as the crystal mass compressed in pointed ends and jagged tips straight through it.
The particles of the golem's body turned back to dirt once the core vanished.
Brent had mentioned potential underground enemies and Shane hadn't forgotten how difficult a burrower fight could be. As the dome fell inward, it dug and drilled deep into the ground below, leaving a jagged crater about a hundred meter deep at the lowest point.
Shane held on to the compressed crystal mass a bit longer before dissipating it.
From above, the battlefield was remarkably silent now, empty save for the fresh crater in the ground speckled with supernatural viscera; the new hole wasn't far from the comparatively small pit blasted into existence by Ethan's earlier attack.
In stark contrast to the violence not a minute earlier, the floating spheres gently lowered themselves back to the ground, depositing their occupants in one scattered group near the trucks before breaking apart and vanishing in a blue spray of variously sized hexagons folding haphazardly into and out of themselves. Shane's group, including his more recent pick-ups, landed several meters away, their bubble lowering itself into nonexistence as carefully as possible, leaving them on dirt and grass with barely any bump in transition.
When Shane didn't actually turn off his ability, however, Myla's eyes narrowed. She watched the stream of power rising from his body, saw the way he clutched at his torso as spots of blood seeped through the gauze, noted how he had remained seated the entire time, cross-legged and deathly quiet.
"You overexerted," she said simply, knowing as well as Shane did that once the bolstering effect of the armament was shut off, the backlash of exhaustion and agony would crash down like an ocean above him. If he wasn't in peak condition going into that, he would die. Hell, going into that in perfect health still posed a risk of death.
"Healers," he slid his phone towards her, the word a whisper.
She saw the markers, flipped through the notes on powers, and found the two healers in the group. A healer who regenerated by feeding blood and one who transferred injuries to herself.
Myla disregarded the girl who transferred injuries. The one Shane sported beneath the bandages was not something the girl could take safely, especially if it had reopened.
So it was the other healer.
She headed towards the batch of students that had Christmas Halvost's marker in it, surprised to find a bleeding, unconscious boy at the location indicated, a filmy veil of shimmering mist still glowing around his torso. A persistent effect, the notes had pointed out.
Myla knew the rule about not moving the injured unless absolutely necessary, but if there was an injury transfer mage nearby, then it didn't matter so long as the wounds weren't life-threatening. She dragged the blonde boy by the shoulders unceremoniously to Shane, nearly retching as another round of queasiness slipped into her stomach and down to her shaking legs. Still, she managed to get Christmas to Shane.
Rosa's forwarded notes had mentioned the boy could heal poison. Time to confirm. With the barest trace of hesitation, Myla dug a hand into the largest of the gashes on his thighs, shouting in pain as her hand came into contact with the magical wires left behind by the doll. They cut on contact, apparently. Annoying.
Shane had looked up at the shout, a thick mass of crystal already sprouting in the air near him.
"Leftovers," she explained, ignoring the cut on her fingers as she licked the blood on her hand. "Wires in the wounds."
The same veil of magic wrapped around her as well and the fresh injuries on her fingers slowly faded. Her nausea, too, was slightly alleviated. Not showing on her face how disgusted she was at this particular method of healing, she cleaned off her hand like a cat, noting the increase in healing speed.
Meanwhile, Shane had slightly loosened the tourniquet and picked out the wires with hooks and tweezers of crystal, pressing a small crystalline cup against the largest gash for a shot glass of blood. His mouth twitched downward in disgust, but he threw the drink down, trying to taste it as little as possible. And then he went for round two. Three. Four. The white, glittering veil around his torso and shoulders was almost opaque now from how heavily he had layered the healing effect.
Christmas looked pale, as was expected from the method through which his power worked, but the compounded effect was noticeably faster, which meant it'd be far more efficient to have one person constantly healing at high speed through injuries than 16 others healing slowly off safe amounts of blood drain.
Within a minute, speaking was no longer brutally painful, and Shane could already feel the worst of the wound healing.
He glanced at Ethan, who had remained seated, leaning back on straightened arms.
"Tell them to heal up. Get the injury transfer girl--Lilianna something. Prolonged effect, so have her take all the injuries and drink his blood. Minimizes the amount he'd need to lose."
Ethan looked back at him, face unreadable.
"You can't do it yourself?"
"Aren't you field commander in my absence? Do your job. Correctly, this time."
Swallowing down another bout of potential vomiting, Ethan barked out the order loudly enough that the other groups could hear it.
"Lilianna! Front and center! You're taking all the other injuries and healing through them with this guy's blood!" his voice lost momentum near the end as he held back a spell of disorientation and fatigue rolled into one.
Myla took the time to send a request for transportation through Shane's phone, reporting in the finished mission in the process. Formal paperwork would come later.
When she finished, the cuffs on everyone's ankles beeped, including the one nestled deep within the dragon's back, left leg.
An automated voice announced, "Combat assessment concluded. Mission status: complete. From current location, return expected within 2 hours."
The surviving four guards stepped away from the group warily, reminded after the cuff's announcement that for all the amazing feats displayed, the students were still 'attending' USARILN East and needed to be treated like the monsters they were. Shane's obliteration of the enemies had only solidified for them exactly why the kids needed to be kept under lock and key, not that any of them needed reminders of the terrors plaguing the world at large. The nausea hit one of the guards again, and this time he vomited onto the ground, unable to catch himself in time.
1. Battlefield exploded in crystal. Shane picked everyone up in multiple crystal spheres. Those of you near each other were put into the same sphere and moved about 300m up. Those standing apart got swept into individual spheres. Dragon!Chris got his own sphere a few seconds after everyone else.
2. Dome. Inward spikes. Collapse on everything. Annihilation. You guys get a bird's eye view.
3. Shane lowers everyone to the ground in a large group--along with the dead bodies. Spheres slowly dissipate from the 'floor' first for gentle landing.
4. Myla drags Christmas to Shane. Healing happens. Ethan calls for Lilianna to pull all the injuries and just heal herself off the prolonged, regenerative effect from Christmas's blood.
5. Feel free to crawl into one of the trucks and decompress. Or break down and cry. Whatever works.
6. Also feel free to interact.
7. Battle is now over. Quickened timer is on for this last round to end the event.
8. Week-long timer will be back starting next update. Same policy applies. All posts come in = we move on early.
9. No update for Gregory this round.
10. Next update will move everyone back to the school. The update after that will involve a brief time-skip. Details to come.
