"We were sent here to suffer, right?" he said, sounding so tart that he surprised himself.
Hiecro's eyes widened, shock plain on her face as she whispered a single word.
"
Proxy..."
He pushed her, and grabbed her by the wrist. He let his feet hang out behind him -- but Hiecro wasn't the one moving. Luca calculated everything as well as he could. He drifted backwards towards the spinning wall, with Hiecro acting as his anchor towards the center of the.... slug, was it? It didn't matter. He did the best he could. If it all worked out, then he'd wind up planting his feet on the revolving shield -- that might reduce the initial friction, or it might cause some spontaneous nuclear explosion. It might slow the rotation of the vessel, or it might splatter his bits all over the compartment like a Bycroff mine in a kindergarten.
His shoes made contact with the invisible spinning wall first, and it was then that Luca was shown just how awful an idea this was. Without appreciably affecting his own momentum or trajectory, the invisible walls tore the soles straight from his shoes as though they were damp tissue paper, the rubbery mass proceeding to disintegrate and scatter across the interior of the sphere as little wisps of what looked like chewn-on off-color gum.
Then his actual feet hit the invisible spinning wall, rewarding him with but a split instant of pain and the realization that he was going to die. The flesh along the bottom of his feet was ground into a liquefied visceral paste instantly, and the moment his momentum carried something a touch more durable than mere flesh into the wall, his entire body was rocked by a massive force that instantly spun him head-over-heels, pinwheeling him just like the pavise had been. His actual trajectory did not change though - so they next thing to make contact with the invisible spinning wall was his head, roughly face-first.
117A9 Luca died then and there as the entirety of his head exploded in a stringy mess of gore entwining mechanical components, most of which were instantaneously broken apart, chipped, or shattered from their own impacts with the wall - right before they hit the invisible wall a second time and were flung out into the slug's interior. Thankfully, most of them immediately collided with the fully armored Hiecro - and completely stopped in place to float listlessly in the air, the whole of their velocity robbed. Hiecro herself, aside from her looked of dazed confusion, was utterly unharmed - though it did appear that the impacts
had affected her trajectory somewhat, as she was now drifting back towards the center of the slug's interior.
The remainder of the metallic parts shot right past the passengers without hitting any of them, largely thanks to Hiecro having acted as a shield for most of them. They hit the internal wall again, and this time most of them were caught and adhered to it by the centrifugal force keeping the pavise in place and started to orbit the passengers along with it. A few, however, rebounded and shot off in new directions with additional velocity. The outer boundaries of the slug became filled with bits of flying shrapnel and metal, soundlessly impacting the unseen barrier around them all and then tearing through space with an audible sound akin to a razor slicing through air. Every few moments, one would bounce off at a particularly odd angle and shoot through the space the passengers occupied, with three near misses occurring in the first five seconds.
Instead he reached under the gap between himself and his breastplate in order to grasp two amulets that he kept there, holding one the first (a small symbol of a shield and spear) tightly as he softly prayed "Myrmidia, please do not allow one of your servants to perish in such a dishonorable manner as this." before grasping at the second talisman (a white dove in flight) and muttered a different prayer softly under his breath. "Shallya, please show your servant mercy and protect those who travel with me from harm."
@Bright_OpsFortune was struck by an epiphany.
Not everyone could be saved.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl for him as a piece of metal drifted in front of his visor, doubtlessly careening through the slug faster than his eyes would normally have been able to follow. For that split instant of time though, he could see every edge and detail of the piece of metal as it flew straight past him. He could even tell where it was headed.
Amelie erected her sphere of power and anchored it to herself to prevent it from flying off, and she took in the slug and the other passengers into it. As to prevent their immediate death by slamming into something, she drastically slowed down the speed of their descent and the rotational speed of the slug, by manipulating the objective measure in relation to themselves. The intention was to slow it down enough for it to no longer be lethal to all of them in order to hit the ground softly, eventually. This while also slowing down the rotation to that of a gentle carousel, to ensure impacting it would not injure anyone.
As the sphere was erected, Amelie discovered several complications. The slug they were all traveling in appeared to be some convergence of multiple, layered, spatial forces akin to her own abilities. The invisible walls carrying the pavise shield around the interior, the ghastly remains of the bird the slug had collided with, and now Luca's mortal remains - each of them was bending space and time in a particular way. The
relative velocity of the slug was actually incredibly slow. It was moving no faster than a leisurely pace. However, the walls were contorting space in such a way that its velocity relative to everything outside the affected area was super-sonic.
That was both bad and good. On one hand, it meant she did not have to worry about the slug's velocity. The moment it hit the ground, assuming the fields fell apart, the
passengers would hit the ground with all the force of having missed the last step on a staircase. Hiecro had apparently known what she was talking about.
On the other hand, the interior of the slug was quickly filling to the brim with death, and if she could not find a way to slow down the spinning of the interior wall then they all might die from the shrapnel being thrown around anyway. That would be difficult though - it already appeared to be slowing down somewhat, and the speed of its rotation was apparently linked somehow to the external distortion of space. If she slowed it down
now it might leave the slug to start falling at terminal velocity in regular space. Or it might cause the slug to vanished entirely somehow. Just to complicate things further, the interior wall's rotation was being affected by the movement of the layered walls between it and the exterior wall, meaning that even if she tried to slow it down, the other walls would keep it at a relatively stable velocity. So in order to slow the whole slug down, she would need to slow all of the layers of the slug at once, according to their different relative velocities. Which would be tricky, as they were not even actual objects but some strange ephemeral force tha-
Amelie never even saw the piece of metal that flew straight past Fortune's head before it shot straight through hers, exiting the back of her skull and causing a spray of hair, torn skin, shattered bone fragments, gray matter, and visceral fluid to surge out, most of it making contact with the interior wall and starting to create a wet, fluid cascade of gore-soaked debris continuously rebounding and spinning around the passengers.
Fortune's own perspective was still crawling along, slowly. As if time itself had deigned to show him the finer details of curious moments like this one. He had been forced to watch as the ballistic shard of metal had torn through the air and impacted Amelie's head.
The epiphany came to him again. Not everyone could be saved. Nearly everyone who remained within the damned, invisible carriage could be saved by the grace of his faith. Nearly. He was then burdened with a singularly divine decision. It was his alone to make.
One of the remaining passengers could not be saved. All but one of the remaining passengers would live.
Who would he permit to die?
