Mosiac!
The Slitted began with arrogance. A new wave of Plovers and chemfighters were dispatched, broadcasting with laser-flickers orders to stand down and face the judgement of the Skies. They were swatted from their Skies by the increasingly online ELF defense array, crewed and targeted by the galaxy's premier soldiers.
It progressed to wrath. The mighty Gravitation Projector of the Slitted was brought to bear, a huge glittering lens formed from an entire segment of the ship's armour detaching and configuring into a dish shape. Fueled with the wireless ambient power from the Slitted's remaining reactor sphere it began to concentrate force into microsingularities, extreme-range artillery blasts, micro black holes that wrench entire armour panels off the Plousios, warping metal into spaghetti streams. A direct hit lands in the centre of the ship's guts, obliterating hundreds of cubic tonnes of seawater and tearing a swathe through the metal.
Too late, it turned to fear. The Projector's fire stopped as power was rerouted to locomotion. The Slitted began to use that same gravitational energy to collect its sub-spheres and hurl them into the path of the Plousios. A barracks sphere splatted into the side of the Imperial Warship's massive ram spike, metal flowing like liquid as it merged into place, but it was poorly aimed and the troops did not have an easy boarding path from there. An arming sphere, bristling with torpedo launchers and ELF strikes, was placed directly in the Plousios' path and was bisected by the monomolecular edge on the ram, detonating in a cascade of secondary explosions. Finally the Slitted itself launched its Grav-Projector in one direction while overloading it with the force it would take to throw the Slitted in the other. Just barely, the Azura warship slides out of the path of the oncoming Plousios, the two ships tearing at each other with talons of ELF fire like the claws of wildcats.
But in dodging the Plousios, the Slitted had exposed itself to the warship's full broadside. The boarpedoes began to launch, melting charges activating in a hundred white-hot needle strikes as ancient boar-head rams crashed into the still-damaged Azura metal.
Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.
Ember!
Ceron. Ceron. Ceron.
Everywhere, the howl of wolves, all the more terrifying for being underwater.
The Slitted took on water when it crashed into the sea after Mosaic's throw. The Crystal Knight's servitors, like any living creature, could of course breathe underwater and still manned their posts, but they were not adapted to it. They had not had time to regrow their feathers into sleek water-piercing coats, to trim their hair, to switch to better balanced arms and armour. The Silver Divers slash amongst them like seals amongst chickens, darkening the water with clouds of black blood that solidifies into new schools of fish.
Everywhere, the sonar howls. Drowning out the ill-adapted enemy's voices, letting you know where everything is in relation to everything else. Once again you emerge to battle but this time as part of a pack, with your pack behind you, bringing the wrath of the sea to this city of the Sky.
Dolce!
Polytechnic lights ignite along the stasis coffin. It shivers and flows, oil-slick fog drifting aside, before hardening and resolving into a crystalline blue. With a cold rush of air and the fracturing of the world into its gridlike substructure, a specter pulls itself from the coffin and looks around.
It is both real and not, solid but broken, a shape holding itself together despite the interior being broken and faded. At first it is indistinct, but it quickly becomes clear that its shape is indistinct: you look upon a pilgrim of the Order of Hermes, huddled underneath a thick and shapeless yellow raincoat, crumpled wet plastic with a glassy face-mask. It - she - looks at the sign of the wall, then rummages in a nylon fanny pack, produces a little instant camera, and snaps a picture. It hurriedly looks over the photograph that the device spits out, hmming and clicking her tongue, muffled behind the mask, before spinning around on a hair cue to look at you.
"Oh! Lord Hades!" she cries, and reflexively takes a photograph. She hurriedly hides it and the camera behind her back and falls into a bow - though her reflective mask maintains eye contact. "I apologize! I was - I believe I learned something quite remarkable about - can I ask you some questions? There's so much I never got the chance to find out!"
When she fell she left half her mass and her silhouette in the space above her, bloodlessly torn, little cubes of energy one by one realizing they'd fallen behind and gently drifting back into place.
Dyssia!
It's amazing the knowledge you pick up. Fucked if you could cite any of your sources though. Some late night encyclopedia bender or other embedded all of this in your head.
Firstly, these crystals are properly named Elysium Crystals. The leading theory - advanced by philosophers and not scientists - is that they are a consequence of Hades' banishment from the material world. Upon death, while the body's earth and water elements takes on new shapes according to the will of Demeter, the fire and air sink into the ground that they might return to the underworld. Denied this, they crystallize in place and form clusters, tearing strange paradimensional portals in the regions around them as they seek the realm of Hades.
To strike a living being with an Elysium Crystal, the theory goes, doesn't so much duplicate them as it manifests their infernal ghost - the version of themselves they would become in the depths of Hades. Warriors are extremely susceptible to this; their deathless ghosts are primed to engage in endless battle and so lash out at anyone around them in wrath and confusion, especially if they awaken in the midst of the battlefield. Other duplicates have been known to flee, or cower, or offer bargains as their nature commands.
How could it help you? You do not think that violence is so deeply embedded in you that the first thing your ghost would do would be to attack yourself in a rage. You can't say the same for anyone else here. How could it hurt you? Well you could be shoved into an arena pit, like the one being prepared just to your left, and made to battle endless copies of your own screaming ghost for the entertainment of the Crystal Knight, which seems to be what she's preparing to do next. What specifically would happen if you duplicated yourself? You'll have to find that out the hard way.
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