Yasu caught Niid as he was knocked back into her, holding the cybernetically and chemically enhanced boy by his hips as she spun around, a dancer swinging her partner. A moment later, he found his feet on the ground and found Yasu advancing further.
Visions of death were commonplace, and the scepter of death itself was even more so. Factories would grind their workers to bone meal. The underworld was chocked full of corpses that would never move on. Every day, Fixers arrived to replace the Fixers that left. Every night, a light turned off was a life taken swift. Gun retorts and the sigh of a knife. Spatial rupturings and the whispers of the mind. A few seconds ago, it had been that green finger, hidden in the shadows cast by the projector. Now, it was the ringleader, arm cocked back and rippling with muscles that had not been there a moment before.
Visions of death simply indicated the Boundary of Death.
And the best Fixers learned to walk right on that edge.
The cross burned bright within her odd-eye, showing her the myriad Yasus who made the same choice as herself. As one, they launched themselves forwards. As one, they gripped their sword. As one, they swung out, the beloved blade swirling with their own lifeforce. All for the purpose of slicing that whip in half.
Coins spun in the heavens above, but she never worried about the result once she set it into motion.
Whether heads or tails, whether success or fail, Yasu remained fearless.
Emma watched with unabashed curiosity as the unicyclist's torso was torn open, blood and chunks of flesh spilling onto the stage in copious amounts. It looked like theater blood to her, a little too bright under the blare of the spotlight. Briefly, she wondered what internal organs the creature had; whether a heart beat in its chest, whether it needed lungs to breathe. At the very least, all it needed to move was its wheel, the screech of it loud and ear-piercing. It sounded like a warning, the whistle of an incoming train, and she was stuck in the middle of the tracks.
Aware of her own limits, Emma knew she wouldn't be able to outrun it if she tried - and neither could her shadowy friend, though it certainly did try. It howled, a sound that echoed from a thousand throats at once, as it tried to chase after the threat. It was no use; the unicyclist was fast, almost impossibly so, and the longer her canine lingered in the light, the more it shrunk. But that was alright. For no matter how fast the elephant-headed man may have been, there was one shadow it could never outrun.
Its own.
In the harsh light of the projector, the shadow the unicyclist cast was long and dark, features stretched almost beyond recognition. Like a snake, it slithered upwards where the floor met the wall.
Emma liked snakes.
And so, the shadow suddenly shifted. Not with the motion of the unicyclist, but with the power of vitas. It peeled itself off the wall and floor, stretched body dangling as its own wheel, startlingly silent, spun fast to carry it towards the original to crash straight into it. Upon impact, the shadow's elongated body would attempt to wrap tightly around the bloodied creature and wrestle it to the floor, to squeeze, to constrict, until nothing was left but blood and guts. The shadow's trunk, attached to its own, elephant-like head, bent unnaturally upwards. The trunk had fangs, a jaw that dislodged, and a forked tongue that slipped out to taste the air with a hiss.
A little ways away, Emma took a few steps back towards the darkness that awaited at the stage's edges.
Cam let out a small growl of frustration, as the freshly spawned clown, now normal sized, swung in her direction. She was not so sleepy and slow so as to miss the obvious attack, dodging deftly out of range. She had seen the doors pop open after all, she had been ready. Darting forwards and ducking under clumsy swings that sailed over her head with comical cartoonish sounds from the clown, Cam swung bloodied claws across whatever passed for the swollen stomach of the creature. Silly string entrails tore free with a sickening POP! partly showering Cam with bitter fruit punch tasting blood as the clown expired.
Spitting as she fought a new wave of disgust, Cam wasted no time. She had too little already and she needed more. She needed to stall. She needed something that would go boom. She needed something heavier. She needed something that could smash a car in one fell swoop. But she could hear fighting. She could hear dying. Everyone was busy. She needed to buy time.
Jumping forward, Cam put her entire weight into a heavy kick more like a full body stomp that smashed into the right side door of the upturned clown car monstrosity. She hoped it would jam, but she didn't wait to see if her new strategy would bear fruit, instead she dashed around the upturned half-man sized car, sensing a pattern in her biomechanical supernatural foe. She would be ready by the door should another clown pop into existence.
Raising her voice, not quite shouting, but hopefully loud enough to be heard over the battle unfolding around her, Cam spoke as she moved,"If you aren't too busy fighting, I need something big enough to smash this car. Before more clowns crash our party!"
Special characters have special qualities that may be hidden until they become apparent. Undetected characters can freely act until detected, but can only take one action that would reveal them.
Elite entities require multiple actions to fell and have special (possibly unknown) characteristics. Greater entities may require multiple actions to fell. Lesser entities can be slain by a single action. Destroyed entities are usually out of the fight [state] denotes their current state and [#] denotes how many actions they can perform each round. > {Name} denotes who the enemy is currently focusing on.
Yasu's blade met the whip as she charged forward. Each Yasu felt the full strength of what they had faced. Their shoulders screamed out in agony, desperate to pop out of their sockets. The vibration melted their hands, even if it was just sensory. The air pressure cut into their faces, small rivers of blood forming and clotting in an instant.
But Yasu won. The whip was cut before Yasu was torn asunder. The beast could only respond with its anger, its muscles continuing to bulge larger with rage.
They all had an opening.
Niid, on the other hand, was less fortunate. What had been cut remained in motion. Disconnected from its handle, a portion of the whip quickly spun its way over to him to strike him in the skull. If it struck his skull, there would have likely been a fracture. Fortune favoured metal more than bone, however. While his brain rattled around in its cage, the remains of the whip only wrapped around his head and pulled him to the ground. He'd live, even if his pride was continually wounded.
The snake-like clone that Emma birthed from the cyclist's own shadow was enough. No matter how fast one could be, one couldn't outrun their own shadow. Well, one could provided they were sufficiently airborne, but a single metre was not enough. The unicyclist was dragged back towards the ground, its wheel millimetres away from grinding Emma's face to the bone. The shadow constricted the cyclist. It tightened and tightened. Did the supernatural feel pain? Its writing certainly made it seem so. Its joints popped. Its bones cracked. Its head rattled and shook until finally...
Like a grape.
Cam's kick put a firm dent into the door. Another clown appeared within and pushed against the dented door. It wouldn't open. Her plan to block the door seemed to work. A second clown appeared and went for the opposite side. The door that Cam was eagerly awaiting at was, by some miracle, locked. The car spawned another clown. No luck opening the doors. Rapidly, the car became filled with malformed and underdeveloped clowns as it struggled to spew more at the beast who had killed its brood. Again and again, clowns of progressively worse development filled up the supernatural compartment until the car began to bulge, the metal--if it was even metal--weakening under the stress of so much pressure.
The windows gave way first. The glass pane was pushed out by a torrent of cream, confetti, and clown consistencies. The pressure inside was enough to destroy the hardened entity from the inside. While the frame was undamaged save for the Cam's dents, the synchronized detachment of each wheel signified its demise.
There would be no more funny business on this day.
Of course, with her focused on the car, Cam failed to notice what remained of the trapeze. With surprising agility, it leapt at the bestial woman from behind and subsumed her upper body within its butterflied flesh. It tightened around her and...
Well, that's all it did. Unlike the unicyclist, it didn't have a heavy spinning wheel that could grind others with. It didn't have the strength of the ringleader. It certainly didn't have the comical weaponry of the clowns. It would seem that the trapeze's main purpose was to pick someone up, throw them around, and be a general nuisance from the ceiling. Fortunately for the cleaners, they had dealt with it before it had come up.
Cam only had to deal with the death rattle of a sad performer who hadn't had a chance to shine.
She saw it in the reflection of her extended blade.
A myriad of presents expanding outwards in the instant of severance. Shadows fading away as Yasu met her end, her mouth opening up to speak the last words that only Yasu could read. Some filled with encouragement. Others filled with unsated wrath. Still more happy to have made it so far. And all of them, confident that this wouldn't be their end. For where Yasu fell, Yasu continued, living the futures that had been lost.
The whip flew by, impotent rage cut down at the root, and the youth charged on, not giving herself a moment to rest! Prodigious size simply merited greater exsanguination! Muscles that bulged like that were simply filled with fluids, not flesh! And an angry cat was cute, not scary!
"Everyone!" They could hear the joy in her voice, the joy of living to personally see another sun rise, the joy of living to continue down the path that the others could not. "It's time for an all out attack!"
And with that, Yasu hurled her sword forwards with all her might, mirror-polished steel turned into a brilliant disc as it sank into the chest of the blind lion. Without even giving it a pause to roar out in pain or sink into itself to protect its vitals, the young girl dashed forth, the crimson cross within her odd eye bending into a crimson halo, a crimson ring. She could see it all. All the paths she could take, all the methods of execution available for her. And while the precocious Cleaner occasionally had a taste for being a contrarian, in this case?
Branches converged, three hundred Yasus deciding that they all wanted to do the same thing.
Launch into a Rider Kick that would shoot her sword straight through this third-rate ringmaster.
With no fighting prowess of her own, Emma was accustomed to watching her fellow cleaners from the sidelines. She knew how they fought, could recite their movements like the steps of a macabre dance. Her entrance to today's battle had been sudden in both method and timing, but with the immediate threat to her life now taken care of, she could resume her usual duty; watching over the battlefield and those that danced upon it.
"Watch out!" she called out as a straggler flung itself at Cam - only to realize, much to her relief, that the creature posed no threat to her. Instead, then, she redirected her attention to Yasu and Niid, both still engaged with the leader of the troupe. They were nearing the final act, the moment when everyone gathered to join hands and bow.
She didn't want to miss it.
The shadows stirred even before Emma heard Yasu's call. The canine left behind, the snake-like elephant now covered in guts, the shadows cast by each and every performer that still stood - and even those that did not; after all, even the dead cast shadows. They converged, flowed together like rivers into a lake, forming a wave that crashed across the stage towards the ringleader. The black mass pulsated, shifted, almost took form, but then not. They could be anything in the world, but before Emma's imagination settled on a visage, they were but potential.
The cleaner's gaze fell upon the ringleader once more, eyes trailing his face. He should have been scarier. Lions were supposed to be scary.
A lion, then. The shadows leapt from the floor, taking the shape of a hundred-headed feline, each head splitting into three, then to three more, until they were longer than its body proper. Each one roared, tearing through the air, so eager to devour that some ate each other; and where a head was bitten off, three more sprouted in its place.
Emma lowered her parasol for a proper view and wondered; when the ringleader's head was bitten off, would a new one spawn in its place, or would it simply die?
Hands and arms moving in a blur of motion, Cam broke through the weakened grasp of the bloodied trapeze clown trying to squeeze her to death. She grabbed hold of the mangled elephant head that the creature possessed and tossed it front of her. The tragic performer smacked into the floor with a audible thud as whatever remained of its skull painted the floor rainbow colors.
Savoring the sudden surge of vitas she could taste, Cam didn't hesitate, and with three long strides, she launched herself across stage in a catlike leap. Trailing just behind Emma's wall of snapping shadows, Cam prepared her own blow for the ringmaster. Claws to strike wherever there was weakness. Throat, limbs, body, or remaining eye, it didn't matter.
They had dallied long enough. She wouldn't take any chances. Dead was only dead when it was certain. It was time to end the sad performance.
Tough Love: Refuses to act unless someone is in danger or it's funny
Yasu
Cam
Niid
Emma
TARGET LIST
Lion-headed Ringleader[MISTED]
Beast of Rage: Gain strength as wounded.
Nemean: Unless annihilated, recover from lethal damage.
Half-Man Sized Car[EXPLODED]
Clown Car: If possible, creates another clown.
Elephant-headed Unicyclist[POPPED]
Elephant-headed Trapeze[SPLATTERED]
Clown with Accordion Arms
Clown with Oversized Axe
Clown with Undersized Mallet
Clown Covered in Party Poppers
Clown of Normal Human Size
Special characters have special qualities that may be hidden until they become apparent. Undetected characters can freely act until detected, but can only take one action that would reveal them.
Elite entities require multiple actions to fell and have special (possibly unknown) characteristics. Greater entities may require multiple actions to fell. Lesser entities can be slain by a single action. Destroyed entities are usually out of the fight [state] denotes their current state and [#] denotes how many actions they can perform each round. > {Name} denotes who the enemy is currently focusing on.
Yasu's blade met the ringleader's flesh. If Nils proved that hewing was not an option, then all Yasu had to do was pierce the beast. The blade became lodged in the ringleader's chest and stopped moments before touching its heart. Then, Yasu's foot met the hilt of her blade and was freed from its lodging; it had penetrated through its heart and body, handle and all. A failure to cleave was not a failure to pierce judging by the fist-sized hole in the ringleader's torso. With her foot now placed upon the ringleader, she leapt off as shadows encroached.
The hydra-lion that Emma bit into the ringleader. Hunks of flesh were torn off as the snake-like lion heads recklessly chewed through everything in front of them. Even without its heart, the ringleader wouldn't be stopped. Its muscles swelled more and more to make up for the lost mass. Its attempts to rip the shadow off itself were fruitless; each crushing attempt only made more heads.
As a final coup, Cam leapt at the lion's throat. Her claw took the beast's neck windpipe and all. It finally slumped to its knees. What once had been a countenance of magnificent showmanship had been reduced to a bleeding mass of flesh and holes.
But the beast was not slain. Sinewy flesh extended between the gaps. Strings of muscle tightened and the holes shrunk. Its body contorted as it no longer had the shape of man. No, it adopted a more primal form: a lion of flesh and verisimilitude. What stood before them was not a ringleader. It was a beast of closed wounds, swelling muscles, and true rage.
A familiar sound came from behind the cleaners. The revving of an engine. The rattling of a chain. Honest had leapt into action as she bounded across the hall in a single leap. It was the acknowledgement of a fatal combo. One that had to be dealt with swiftly, otherwise it would perhaps never end.
But it was not Honest who reached the Nemean's true form first.
A figure leapt from the projection room and collided with the Nemean. With a single crack, the former-ringleader erupted into a red mist that covered the stage and filled the air.
An eccentric-looking woman holding a plastic bag turned around and faced the cleaners. Emma's lack of combat instinct prevented her from feeling fear, but she still understood that this person was bad news. In comparison, Cam's animalistic intuition screamed at her. She was no longer an apex predator. It was as though she was a mouse staring down a hawk. Yasu understood the truth of what she felt in the projector room: the danger came from the realization of their insignificance. It was as though their lives were meaningless before such a person. They were insects who had hidden themselves in the corners of a room and had to pray that they would not be noticed.
"That's probably enough entertainment, yea~?"
Immediately, Honest's chain glaive cut into the woman's skull. A putrid purple liquid spun as the saw dug deeper and deeper into the woman's skull. Quickly, the chain on the glaive shattered and spat its teeth into the woman.
With a mere gesture from the eccentric, Honest had been pushed back. The woman's split face stretched. The dripping purple fluid formed into strings between each half and pulled itself together. It looked as though nothing had ever happened.
"Hey now, I didn't come here to fight~!" She exclaimed. "Besides, do you really want to endanger these chiclets to capture a fraction of me?"
Honest paused for a moment. "Tch."
"Man, you really put me in a tough spot~" she said as she turned to Yasu. "The dreamer told me that it was just going to be someone shady who would have given up trying to get in. Made me think that dumping the bodies of those culties in there would be safe. You have no idea how hard it is to try to hide yourself~!"
"Get to the point, Roqe." Honest interrupted. She was still gripping onto the broken glaive, seemingly seconds away from pouncing.
"Can't have a pleasant conversation now, can I?" She sighed as she tossed the plastic bag at the cleaners. It struck the ground and its contents slid out. While the bag said "Yum-Pyang! Heart Food", what was inside was a book bound in patchwork leathers.
"Eurgh, can't stand looking at that thing..." The woman winced as it came out of the bag.
"But this is all out of love for the 10th. You'd hardly find someone else who's still so attached to it like I am. Give this to Mel and tell her that he is returning to the 10th. She'll figure out what it means."
The danger, both dangers, had passed. It was rare enough, after all, to see the fractured timelines converge upon a decision to fight or to flee, but that simply proved the capabilities of this mass of malice and terror. And while the curiousity remained, the curiousity of just what sort of end would await an individual who drew their blade against the eccentric...well, the ringleader served as an example there, and that was definitely not nearly as unique as turning into an apple or getting shot out of your body as poop.
With a whistle, she spun her sword twice, flicked the viscera off its mirror-polished form, and then sheathed it with a definitive click, as if signalling the end of this fight. She picked up the book after, leaving plastic bag where it was, but rather than cracking it open, Yasu tucked it under her arm instead.
"So, Roqe, right?" Her lips stretched out to a smile, crimson gleaming upon the sad remains of the stage. "Why did you hide yourself, if you were going to show yourself anyways? Think it'd be a lot less scary if you were you, instead of a floating finger." Yasu turned her gaze up, towards where the last pieces of the trapeze were slogging down. "Though I guess I would've done the same thing anyways."
"Oooh, I wouldn't get cozy with that book," Roqe said with a wince. Immediately after placing the book under her arm, Yasu felt it. Every so often, the book pulsed from deep within the pages. It felt alive, even if it couldn't be called that. Was it a heartbeat or was it just a supernatural quality it possessed? What would be the difference between the two?
"That's human skin, by the by."
Trying not to look at the book that Yasu now held, Roqe answered.
"I didn't try to hide earlier. But, uh, the culties got here first. One thing lead to another..." She placed her hands on her head before quickly rotating, her tongue making a clicking noise. "So I thought it was better to hide in case you lot weren't actually part of Mel's group. I wasn't actually going to jump down until I saw that dreary bitch jump in. I'd rather not spend my time killing." A pause. "More than I already have."
Although stranger had made no move to attack them after splattering the ringmaster across the stge, Cam felt every cell that she commanded and those buried far beneath her awareness bristling with fear. Roqe. Whoever...whatever she was, was something else. Power practically poured off of her. And death lurked behind every movement, forestalled only by the strange motivations of the monster that stood in front of them.
Roqe. Whatever she was. She certainly didn't seem human. Her scent was different. Sweet, so sickly sweet that Cam felt a fresh wave of nausea rolling over her. It was wrong, very wrong, and Cam could almost taste the corruption. Plant like, a great sapling of evil, Cam thought with a shudder, sheathing her claws with a frown.
Curiosity had killed the cat, Cam had been told, more than once, but she couldn't resist asking a question as she remained a respectable distance from strange, powerful creature that had robbed them of their prey,"You know, Mel?"
"Do I know Mel?" A chuckle escaped from Roqe's lips. "Most people do. She gets around. Though, I'm technically pretty close to her~. Even worked on some things toge-" Roqe's head quickly shifted to the right as she dodged a damaged chain-glaive thrown directly towards her skull. "Well, I'm not supposed to talk about that. You can ask Mel about it. You even have the book we-"
Clonk.
A brick came flying at Roqe's head and bounced off.
Roqe was quite chipper about having something hit her noggin. Perhaps she didn't even see it as an attack. After all, the sensibilities of someone who couldn't die would, without a doubt, be dissimilar. If they weren't cursed and reviled, immortals would be great at slapstick comedy. Though, perhaps the funnier thought was if Honest kept a stack of bricks linked to her power solely to throw at immortals.
"If you want to talk about if I know Mel personally, then that's a very big yes~! We go back to when we were children. I was the one who dragged her out of the underworld, after all. Funny how that turned out. I'm back down there, Mel managed to rub shoulders at the first. Though last I checked, she's voluntarily persona non grata now."
Roqe looked at her fingernails. Still green. One fell off.
"I don't quite have much time left in this form, so if you want me to give you a quick summary of the past before I leave, ask. Otherwise, I can answer any question you kiddos have. Roqe knows many things."
She paused.
"Though don't ask about what that does." She gestured to the book. "I was never exactly told why we had to use it last time and never cared enough to ask. I just know that it's important."
Clonk.
What an immortal considered bad was definitely something curious. Even more curious was that a second brick had struck Roqe in the head after she mentioned the book being used last time.
As the young man groggily regained his balance after the failed de-limbing of the lion man he found that the combat had decisively finished before he could recollect himself to counterattack. The short but powerful burst of stimulants had already exited his system and as he collected his machete from the remains of the ringmaster he tiredly looked around, listening to the conversation at hand.
The strange figure had piqued his interest, but nothing she had said up until this point had really been understandable to his unknowledgeable self. Upon her mention of the book's uncomfortable qualities, he glanced at his robotic arms, then at Yasu beside him. He offered his assistance with wordlessly stretched out his arms; his logic being that a combination of his limited vitae and his cybernetic limbs would prevent him from feeling the effects as much as any of the others. And he could put it back in the classy plastic bag.
Until the second brick hit. His head raised, cocked to one side as his semi-synthetic voice butted in. 'Used it? How did you use it?'
"Well, I didn't use it or see it be used. I was just involved in-" Roqe immediately froze and looked at Honest. Honest was, as always, mean and glaring. Thankfully, Roqe had caught herself before a third brick hit her in the face. "Won't talk about that. Anyways, that's pretty bold of you to ask how to use it before knowing what it does~! Now I don't want to tell you. Feels like it'll be dangerous if you're in the know now. Try thumbing through the pages and figuring it out yourselves! It's safe enough to do that."
