Episode 130: Flood Warning
While they walked, Magus took a moment to make her usual sword
appear...and then made a twin for it in her other hand, out of a
combination of light and rainwater. "Sssoooo...do we have to
kill all of them, at the same time? However many there's gonna
be?"
"I don't think so," Light said. "The twins and
triplets are easier to kill at the same time, but the main
problem is just that they can 'donate' their health to each other.
Or, I guess, that any pair of twins for example—is just one
monster with 'two bodies'. If they were invincible unless killed at
the same time, it wouldn't make any sense for them appear so close to
each other."
"Oh, yeah—'cause if they were like,
halfway across the world from each other then they'd just plain be
invincible."
"And even if the 'mind' behind the
monsters is really as stupid as 'she' says, it still would've
stumbled onto that trick ages ago."
"So, then..."
"We need to focus on keeping their
attention. Binding, clumping, area-of-effect damage. We really
shouldn't expect to finish them before Rowan shows up.
"...Here's the spot." Light held out her hands, and one
'copy' of her own blade appeared in each. "And we're not at all
early..." She pointed the tip of one of the blades up at the
sky.
"Huh?" Magus thought she was looking at one of the black
stormclouds at first, but then picked up on what Light had
already noticed: It was flying much too low to be that, and it was in
the process of coming even lower. "..Oh, wow. That's the 'class
3' experience though, I guess?"
"Sometimes."
"What if I hit it now?"
"Try if you want,
but it doesn't look solid enough yet."
"So, it'd just go right through it, huh. Okay then—"
Magus could feel a lot of concepts bumping around through her
brain. She felt like she kind of half-understood how a bunch of
different people's powers worked, including Light's and Rowan's and
several other people, some of which she'd barely or not-at-all met.
It was enough understanding to imitate the way Gemma imitated
them—maybe not quite as well as her—but it also
felt like enough for her to personally make a spell that did
something similar, and somehow 'boost' it with that knowledge: Make
it stronger but at the same time easier, more efficient. And, in
terms of preparing for a fight, there was one power that stuck out as
especially useful.
"Barbs of blades, form traps of steel..." The motion
to do this sort of 'enhanced spellcasting' required both
swords, her mind insisted. "Winding Wires!"
She pointed both of them forward at the end, and from the tip of each
a bunch of thick, thorny metal wire twisted out, the two streams
weaving together and placing themselves out in a large net spread
across the ground ahead of the two vixens, a massive trap ready to
spring itself on the monsters the moment they landed above it.
They waited for a tense moment as the black cloud slowly drifted
lower. Then, rather than the whole thing forming into the so-called
'army' at once...some pieces of it broke off and fell faster, each
one landing on the ground as it formed into a humanoid shape. Like it
was imitating the raindrops from farther above, at a much larger
scale.
The first few landed in range of Magus's trap, but it was obviously
too soon to spring it. Light looked her way and nodded, then appeared
next to one of them, slashing into its body and kicking it back. The
other ones all started her way as they landed. Magus might not have
been bright enough to understand the meaning of that nod right away,
but it was sufficiently obvious what Light had meant as she
continued getting each one's attention when it appeared, then backing
up, running away, or light-iporting, always in the direction of the
center of that net. By the time there were fifteen or so of them,
they were starting to crowd her too much to keep this up, and she
moved back next to Magus, out from above the trap. So, with a slight
flick of the 'Gemma' sword, she sprang it, and a bunch of thorned
wires twisted up around the whole group, holding and crushing them
against each other.
It occurred to Magus at this point that running monsters into each
other usually had bad results lately...but it didn't happen with
these. Instead they remained a bunch of separate bodies all
crushed against each other in the net. Maybe it was because they
really were all parts of the 'same monster'. At any rate, it
gave Light an opportunity to raise one of her blades skyward and call
down a lightning bolt, directly onto and through the net. It seemed
likely to hold that group for a while.
However, there were more of them dropping down. The cloud almost
seemed to have the intelligence not to drop them directly onto the
tangled mass—perhaps the overall monster knew that parts of
'itself' were there, and 'wanted' to spread itself out more to
properly surround its prey. Whatever the reason, the two of them were
faced with the steady approach of an increasing number of the
monsters from either side of the net, some moving to get farther
behind in an effort to surround them.
Light moved herself past the group on her end, slashing into them one
after another in a rapid, elaborate dance. Most of them turned to
face her, trying to catch her but always too slow—or she would
light-iport away any time she was nearly pinned. Magus started off
sending some basic projectile-spells out at the group coming toward
her, but when they started to get too close for comfort..her
instincts told her to do something she usually wouldn't in this
situation.
She tended to think of her own powerset as that of a 'mage'. Sure, it
came with a sword, but it always felt more natural to use it like a
staff. Staying in one place, away from the main action, and throwing
out the damage, was what she was good at. But just now, as a thing
the size and rough shape of a very tall man came up to swing its
blade of an arm at her, it felt much more natural to...dodge. Block
the other arm with one sword, slash through it with the other, move
over. Another weapon-hand—a long spear—she didn't so much see as
feel coming at her from another side, and ducked under it,
retaliating smoothly with a stab and a kick to knock its owner over.
The kind of elaborate sword-dance that 'natural' vixens would do when
sparring with each other, or when fighting monsters this size, was
something Marcus always had difficulty following. He never got quite
how anyone's mind could think or body could move that fast,
how they seemed to be able to sense attacks coming that there
was no way they could see. But before she knew it, thanks to
Gemma's power—Magus was doing exactly that.
It wasn't just her weapons and her body that flowed like water
between and through the increasing stream of attacks, but her spells
and Emma's magic as well. An attack from her side met the shield of a
hasty block-spell, bounced off, the ground tilted under the monster
to help bowl it over backwards. Her shadow twisted up to catch a
weapon-arm coming at her from behind, she turned and cut through the
beast, in the process making her sword go through the motion for a
chain-lightning spell through all of the surrounding monsters. She
jumped down into and 'swam' through the monsters' shadows to behind
them, emerging with a flurry of water-shurikens to their backs.
This felt amazing—it was amazing! It was fun, it
thrilling—but at the same time, coming so close to death (or at
least severe injury) so often didn't stop being terrifying. She
didn't always quite know what she was doing before she did it, like
an unconscious part of her mind was working too fast for the rest to
keep up with. Still, there was the gradual sense that the number of
opponents, and their coordination with each other, was approaching a
threshold of 'too much'. She did a few blocks, strikes,
anti-explosion-ball-things, and other various little tricks to buy
herself some space, then cast a sielnt, quick transposition to
get herself out of and away from the crowd, far enough to get a
better sense of just what was going on, and maybe catch her breath a
little bit.
An enormous mass of black mist obscured the horizon, rapidly
coalescing into a solid form.
"Theeere he is," Rory said.
"...Indeed." Clark
let herself be picked up into a hug, and each of them said the
other's phrase at the same time...the simultaneity being more or less
an accident, as they hadn't decided ahead of time who was to initiate
this fusion. Regardless, the result was the same: They came together
to form Quinn.
She wasted no time forming a few puppets and lifting them along with
herself up into the air, taking the needle out of her ear to form a
warhammer out of thread. By this point the mass of mist had
compressed into a solid form, and seemed to just now be waking into
consciousness.
The "tank" was as grotesque as it was gigantic. Its main
body was about as wide as it was tall (which was very), but
was much longer than that from front to back. The entire front
end seemed to be its head, the top third or so of which was taken up
by a lot of giant red eyes, all of various sizes and shapes, in a
random, patternless arrangement; the rest was a mouth that opened
horizontally, full of the same disorganized, spearlike teeth that all
of the mist monsters seemed to have in common. Coming from the sides
of its main body were a large number of arthropodesque legs: Each
one's first half going up from near the bottom of the body's side to
a main joint around three-quarters as high up as the top of its body,
and from there going down again to a sharp spike stabbed into the
ground. It also sported a few more limbs, five highly
flexible..things with bases somewhere shortly behind its head
that were each about the entire length of one of those legs and
mostly as thick as a person's entire body, except where they tapered
off to a sharp tip at the end. Quinn had the thought, when it came to
those limbs, that apparently none of these monsters understood how
tentacles were actually supposed to work.
The first thing it did was start to move. Its legs all coordinated
into propelling it forward in a motion not quite as sudden as your
average mist-monster, but it built up momentum pretty fast, and there
was a lot of it, which meant if it wasn't stopped, it was
going to plow through every building in its path. That..wasn't
something she could let it do.
Two of the puppets went to either side of it, to try to distract
those extra limbs. This worked pretty well; they seemed more
interested in stabbing the flying puppets through their chests
than grabbing them or anything. So the rest went for its lower body,
the relatively small part near the ground not taken up by its
enormous mouth, and landed to anchor themselves and push back, acting
like brakes to stop a moving train. Quinn herself flew up in front of
its eyes, readying and swinging the hammer into somewhere near the
center. Besides disgustingly splattering the eyes in the central
impact with that blow, she succeeded in making it skid backwards a
yard or so, its feet stabbing into the ground and scraping along to
keep it from going any farther.
She followed this up with a second and third strike to around the
same area, but none of these managed to impart quite as much momentum
now that it had dug itself in. There was a satisfying stream
of black mist coming out from the points of impact. Her remaining
puppets floated up into a formation around her to intercept the
whipping limbs, catching them in bear-hugs to keep them from stabbing
Quinn herself as she darted back out of the way.
Its mouth opened wide to emit a low, rumbling roar. One of its limbs,
rather than coming after her or the puppets, reached backwards and
stabbed into its own central mass. This seemed like a very weird
thing for it to do until that limb yanked itself back out again with
a partially-solid clump of that mass stabbed onto its spiky end and
whipped forward, throwing that bit of mass out onto the ground, where
it immediately reshaped itself into a "gryphon" type of
beast.
Quinn raised some more puppets, sending them in the main monster's
direction, while approaching the gryphon herself. "Note to the
Giver: Tanks are not meant to be APC's!" she said,
punctuating the word 'not' with an upward whack to the gryphon's chin
that sent it careening into the air backwards. The puppets halted
another attempt to charge, and one of them caught the gryphon by the
tail midair to hurl it into gargantuan thing's mouth, which was still
gaping open. This probably gave it back the 'health' it had
sacrificed to summon the gryphon, she figured, but better one
opponent than however many it was willing to throw out.
Speaking of that—three of its limbs now whipped back to stab
itself, and came out one after another to throw out some more "class
1" type things. Quinn just went to each one in turn and whacked
it with the hammer to send it back in its maker's general direction.
She replaced some puppets lost to being stabbed by the limbs or legs,
or in one case crunched in the thing's mouth as—despite all
appearances—it could turn that thing to some degree, and
stretch it out enough to bite anyone who came too close.
More stabbing itself in the back and throwing out whatever came up.
Quinn swatted them back as they landed, two of them before they were
fully formed. The whipping limbs hit a couple more puppets, so she
replaced them again. This was starting to turn into a war of
attrition between the monster's adds and her own. It'd be nice, she
thought, to keep it that way—better than letting it level a
building!
Light appeared next to Magus as all the monsters started to turn to
face the two of them and prepare to again approach and surround; she
was panting slightly. As soon as the mage vixen's breath was caught,
she used it to recite another spell: "Fruit of the earth,
arrest and tear. Binding Thorns!" The
application was a little different this time, as instead of a bunch
of vines all coming together to grab one big monster, they
appeared across a wider area, grasping the legs and lower bodies of a
good majority of the humanoid beasts approaching the two of them.
"You, holding up?" Magus said.
Light nodded. "Just
gotta be careful. That's, not holding them as well as the metal one
did..."
"Uh, yeah, sorry. Those, kinda need some setup." This
conversation couldn't last much longer—the ones she hadn't caught
with the vines were getting too close for comfort.
"Get farther back, then. I'll buy you some time."
"'Kay." Magus transposition'd herself a good several
yards away from the action. At the same time, Light...copied herself?
At first, Magus thought that Light had made a bunch of illusory
copies of herself to face all the monsters—both the nearby ones
that hadn't been caught, and the ones now getting themselves free of
the vines. But that would've been stupid, because these things didn't
have eyes, and so wouldn't be fooled by such illusions. And anyway,
Magus's own power—well, Emma's power in her at any
rate—could 'see' that that wasn't quite what was going on. All of
the "Lights" were real...and yet, only one of them
was?
She didn't have time to try to really figure this out, of
course. Her focus was much more on concentrating to channel as big of
a net trap as possible. She watched as the monsters fought against
the several "Light"s, who behaved very differently from how
the singular, actual Light normally would have fought. Rather than
blocking or retaliating, every one of her focused on dodging,
feinting, moving aside. It became clear why she was behaving this way
when one of the monsters landed a "hit", and its hand-blade
instead went straight through open air. Nope, the real Light
wasn't there after all! And this continued to happen, the copies of
Light blinking out one by one, even from a hit to her blade or a
glance through her hair or clothes, until there were only a few left.
By now, Magus was ready, so she recited the incantation again,
swinging both of her blades through the motions needed to form a wide
net to catch most of the monsters in. Hearing her cast it, one of the
remaining Lights turned and bolted, stopping just next to Magus to
lean down with her hands on her knees and heave in some air. The
other two 'copies' vanished at about this point, so all the monsters
started to move in Magus's direction.
Taking a sharp breath in to steel herself, Magus stepped forward,
brandishing her blades. She came to just past the center of the net,
throwing a few low-grade spells—plus some light-arrows,
shadow-bullets, icicles, water shurikens—out at the beasts to
ensure their attention was on her. They came steadily forward,
one after another making a strike or a feint to try to give a
different one an opening. She danced through their attacks the same
as before, letting them surround her as completely as possible,
before finally bending her knees down, buffing her phyiscal strength
as much as possible—probably the same thing Gemma had done to leap
in front of the snakewolves earlier that day—and then sprang high
into the air, springing the trap below her at the same time. She
flipped in midair, just barely clearing the area the trap was closing
around, and was headed for a pretty rough landing—but Light noticed
this with plenty of time to go catch her in her arms in midair,
making a perfect landing before setting Magus down on her feet.
"Phew..thanks." Light nodded, taking a small step away
to point one of her swords skyward and strike the trapped monsters
again with lightning. There were still maybe a fourth of their number
not caught in the trap, moving around it now to again try to surround
the two vixens.
They were a little too far away now for Magus
to be certain, but...was the cloud of black mist steadily dropping
those things down...still not gone?
Thad suddenly sat up straight at a strange noise from the door. The
more typical sound of someone knocking would've gotten his
attention too, but this was something else—a clack-ick-clack
sort of sound, like something solid but lightweight, maybe
hollow, had been thrown at the door. Shrugging to himself, he
got up and went to try and see what it was. Opening the door brought
another opportunity to hear basically the same sound, because the
object that had made it was actually hanging from the outer doorknob.
"...Huh?" It was a mask, like one of those ornate Japanese
festival mask things—seemingly sized to go over the entirety of a
person's face, with a sort of bright, sandy color to most of it and
some green highlights here and there. It had some fairly short
triangular ears at the top left and right, a sort of
short-muzzle-like shape to the front, and a painted-on mouth that was
very much a ":3" kind of thing. Thad carefully pulled it
off, admiring its artistry while simultaneously thinking, why'd
someone put a cat mask on my door and run away? It didn't strike
him as a very good prank.
Examining the strange object a little closer, he found a folded-up
piece of paper taped to the inside. He closed the door and set the
mask down on the nearest available surface to get the paper off,
unfold it, and check for some kind of message to explain this whole
bizarre thing.
There was a message, in plain English, and its first line made
him jerk back slightly. It was kind of like if he was a character in
a horror movie and had gotten an unexpected text announcing, and
proving, that he was being constantly watched by the killer.
It said: What if you could be a catgirl without anyone else's
help?
What if, indeed...was this weird mask supposed to be able to do that?
But then, if Marcus's hat could achieve something similar...
The note didn't end there, but continued: Don't consider it a
price, but if you are at all grateful for my Gift, I'd appreciate you
passing on a message for me.
A snakewolf's claw bounced off of Quinn's hair, and she picked it up
by the offending forepaw, taking it on a 180-degree hammer-throw to
send it back to its maker. "So long-ey-Bowser!" Another one
came at her, missed, and got a bicycle kick to the chin that sent it
flying up into the air, with a follow-up punch from an aerial puppet
to knock it in the right direction. A gryphon that tried to grab her
in its talons met hair too, and she flew up fast enough to grab the
offending leg and throw it violently back at the main beast by it.
She'd dropped the needle and sent some puppets behind her, out of the
immediate danger, to start weaving thick rope out of Clark's string
to make a big net out of. Making and losing puppets nonstop turned
out to be slightly tiring, and—given her enormous energy pool from
Rory—something being noticeably draining was a red flag.
This new plan was a better one, but for the moment it meant getting a
little more personally physical with the creatures being spawned from
its back. Well, at least a certain, probably-Rory part of her liked
it this way.
It stopped throwing minions out to try to charge—right on cue. Too
bad the trap wasn't ready yet! Quinn landed just to plant her feet
and leap into the air, making it high enough to kick it about where
her hammer had popped out some eyes before, shoving the whole thing
back a couple of feet before it stabilized itself. She then kicked
back off of the monster's face, using a couple of nearby puppets to
block attempts to stab her and landing into a handstand-backflip to
avoid an awkward tumble. There was a certain "speed limit"
to Clark's floaty power that normal momentum could far surpass,
making moves like jumping and running still pretty meaningful if she
needed that momentum to actually go somewhere.
The next round of spawns brought a new surprise, as instead of the
clumps of misty shadow forming into single bodies, they erupted apart
like spider eggs to spawn a dozen or so miniature flying nasties
apiece. Quinn knew she couldn't throw these things back at their
maker anywhere near efficiently enough, so she temporarily
recalled her needle from the netmaking work, forming something like a
giant flyswatter to swing through the swarm of fliers as she zipped
back and forth through the air. These small, weak monsters were too
fragile to take a swing of Clark's magic with that level of strength
behind it, so she was rid of them in only a moment. The needle
quickly went back to the netmaking operation while she gathered the
leftover string into a soccer-sized ball and kicked that into
the tank's mouth for good measure. It didn't seem to like the
taste—it roared again, using its stretchy limbs to lift the front
of its body partway off the ground before slamming back down to
earth.
Another attempt at a charge, and another four puppets or so had to be
used to push back against it—most of which got destroyed by its
limbs before they went for its back to help spawn more things. Quinn
raised a couple of new puppets around where those were going to get
flung, and took the opportunity to make a running-jump-kick to the
monster's face again and push it back a few more feet. It took a
little bit of extra effort and concentration to have the puppets
punch, kick, or catch and throw the smaller monsters the thing was
spawning, but she couldn't let it gain too much ground. Never mind
spoiling her trap, every step it made toward the city was a step
toward destroying a chunk of it.
Finally, it was done. Quinn floated herself way back to where the net
was, taking the end with the needle in it from a nearby puppet before
sending it and the rest of the netmaking ones forward to where the
others were to help deal with the tank's adds. Then she flew up and
around to one side of the monster, lifting her hand up and swinging
the gigantic, knotted bundle of thread around in the air like a
lasso. It was only a couple of seconds from there until the monster
started trying to charge, and she threw the net out, keeping a tight,
two-handed grip on the 'handle'. It spread out as planned, taking up
the entire space in front of the monster as it began to charge, and
she floated down to the ground while the tank slammed itself straight
into the net. Between Quinn running forward with the handle in both
hands and the beast's attempt to go in the opposite direciton, the
knotwork's design had it close tight around the thing's face and
frontmost legs and most of those five irksome limbs.
Its voice rivaled the noise of thunder from above as it thrashed
around, struggling to move forward or free itself, and was instead
dragged backwards, the brightly glowing thread digging into its body
and sending out a blinding cloud of black mist. Quinn's run quickly
became a walk, and then she had to turn around and pull back on her
end of the net like a strongman pulling a semi truck. The beast took
longer than expected to remember its original strategy of stabbing
its legs into the ground to arrest its motion, and by that time she'd
pulled it quite a ways back from where it had first begun. With that,
Quinn yanked the needle out of her end of the net and stumbled back a
few steps away from where the beast was. It seemed so dead-set on
going toward the city that it didn't even care to turn toward her,
instead continuing to thrash and struggle against the net while she
panted slowly, working to catch her breath from all that effort.
Dodge, block, slash, splash—chain lightning, fireball, shadow-vine,
throw rock...grab this one with a water-limb, tilt the ground just
enough to trip that one up. The number not bound by her trap wasn't
unbearable, but as the fighting kept going, Magus lost track of where
Light was and which way she was going, and eventually a keen sense
that only a minute or two had passed began clashing against the
emotion that she'd been doing this nonstop for an hour. She
needed just a second, to think, and so she risked the
MP to put a proper Barrier spell all around herself and then use that
space to cast with her offhand sword to transposition way away
and out of the crowd.
"Hff..fhh.." What she saw wasn't great. Light was
probably in the middle of that crowd over there—bigger than the one
Magus had just escaped, but seemingly all kept futilely busy for the
moment. But..the second net she'd cast was really that far
away? And pieces of it were starting to snap apart. The monsters that
had been surrounding her needed a moment to figure out where she was,
and then would take a bit longer to get to her—or to go join the
group Light was keeping busy, which meant she had her second to
think...and catch her breath, apparently.
It nagged her that Gemma's power actually had a lot of weapons
available to use, and so far she'd only made one and used that this
whole time. The way Gemma used them all was to treat them as
individually disposable, throwing out one after another, but Magus's
instincts weren't tuned for throwing her weapon away—it felt weird,
and almost wrong somehow. Still, there should be some way to
make use of so much weaponry, right? An inspiration came to her as
she recalled something Espadas always liked to do, espeically when up
against a lot of monsters at once. But—she risked taking just
another second to think whether it was a good strategy, and
realized: If Light was still in the middle of the crowd when she did
that, it'd be pretty bad.
Why don't you just focus on communicating a little more?
"Light, over here! I'm gonna try something."
The
response was instantaneous, Light appearing next to her before
suddenly stumbling down onto one knee, using her sword as a crutch.
And loudly, heavily breathing. That...wasn't a good sign.
Laying that aside, Magus decided
also that this new idea could use a lead-in. First of all: "Impact
Wave!" She swung both her
swords at once, each sending out a wave of force more than sufficient
to knock the first couple of rows full of weapon-armed monsters over
onto their backs, and from there it was like a bunch of bowling pins
all knocking each other over. Perfect! Then...
"Elements made
steel, take a life of your own..." Both of the swords in her
hands were involved in a fairly intricate dance. A bunch of things
raised up or appeared in the air in front of her in preparation for
what would happen next: Ground, raised shadow, a flicker of light
from a distant lightning bolt, a chunk of the ground, a piece of
'time', a piece of 'space', a chunk of frozen rain, and more and
more...
"Dancing Blades!"
Every one of them turned into a sword, and with the final motion of
the spell Magus threw out the two in her hands to join them. All of
them floated through the air and marched forward like they were held
in so many invisible soldiers' hands, slashing and stabbing into the
prone monsters' bodies, working together to skirt around their
attempts to block, completely no-selling their attempts to strike
back at the place where bodies wielding those weapons might logically
have been. Magus remained standing with her arms out in a forward Y
shape, palms pointed outward and fingers spread, concentrating on
keeping the spell going. Even as the formerly-trapped bodies of the
"army" joined their number and the group began to try to go
around and flank the two vixens, the wall of blades wouldn't let
them. Sometimes one would disappear from one place and be resummoned
in another, or else Magus would 'feel' something else she hadn't yet
used to make a weapon with and bring it up in a useful spot.
For a full two or three minutes, the onslaught
continued. It felt even longer than when she'd personally
been fighting, and about halfway through Magus's legs wobbled and she
had to carefully go down onto her knees to keep her increasingly sore
arms stretched out and maintain concentration on the spell, on all of
the animated weaponry. She didn't really notice how heavily she was
breathing by the end of it, thinking that it was still Light's
respiration she was hearing and not her own.
It took less time than Quinn had hoped for the tank to start freeing
itself from that net. She'd come around in front of it, re-forming
her hammer and summoning a small crowd of puppets—most of them sent
off to the sides to be on standby—and she could see it using its
long, whipping limbs half-intelligently, starting to untangle the web
of rope even as its thrashing around and the gnashing of its teeth
tore and broke some of it apart. She drew back her weapon and 'threw'
it, detaching the thread from the needle so the rest of the mass went
flying forward, whirling through the air, and smacked it hard in the
face, coming apart into a bunch of thread that spread out across its
front side, sending another flood of black mist up off of it.
It freed itself not long after, throwing the remaining ropes off to
either side and beginning to charge. Quinn sent some puppets to
recover that thread, fly up in front of the monster, and use what was
in their hand as whips and/or throw it back in its face—and, of
course, sent enough of the others to the monster's front side to
arrest its momentum before it could get going too fast.
She took a deep breath in, and out. There just wasn't a way to fight
this thing that didn't involve a lot of puppets, or a ton of
risk. Keeping her fused self together was starting to feel slightly
tiring in and of itself, meaning she didn't have too much longer as
'Quinn'. She couldn't risk holding together so long that Clark
completely collapsed when exiting; she needed to be able to get away
while Rory held the line.
Rory, alone, would have to go for a different, much more direct, much
riskier strategy. Even borrowing Clark's thread and puppets, it would
probably take more effort and time than she could afford to make them
strong enough to be useful here. How long could she hold out
alone...?
Thad double-checked the apartment number, then knocked on the door.
"Hello?"
After a burst of somewhat loud shuffling
inside, a girl's voice he knew moderately well said, "G-go away,
nobody's home!"
"Aah, perfect. I got a message here for
'nobody', from uuh..someone named 'Beryl'?"
The person on the other side of the door went completely silent, so
he continued.
"Lessee here...it's just: 'The probability Rory Quinn survives
alone is approximately fifty-seven percent.' Yep, that's—that's the
whole thing."
He folded up the piece of paper and jammed it in his pocket,
listening for any response at all, but not hearing anything. "Uh,
you know, I was never too great at math and stuff myself. But,
grades—any college student gets grades. I don't like the
sound of fifty-seven, myself," he said. "In't even a D
minus, right?"
A hard sniff carried through the door. "You're...Thad,
right?"
"In the flesh."
"Don't you...have a car?"
"Do I have a car," he repeated
with the kind of intense sarcasm that was far stronger than just
saying yes.
"How...fast. Do you think, you could get me across town with
it?"
"Girl, if the cops don't stop us—five minutes flat."
There was another brief pause with some audible scuffling around
inside, something being shoved around and some stuff picked up, and
then the door was thrown open from the inside to reveal a certain
two-tailed vixen.
"...Let's go. Please?"
"Hhhghhhhkh..." An uncomfortable exhalation came from
Magus's mouth as she finally dropped her arms, and at the same time
all of the summoned weapons around the two vixens stopped swinging
themselves, floated unsteadily in the air for a second, and then
finally fell to the ground, the majority also dissipating back into
the elements they'd been made from. The army now forming a
half-circle around the two vixens seemed to pause for a moment, as if
unsure whether the wall of blades was really gone or it was
some kind of trick.
Magus looked over Light's way; she was at least back on her feet, but
not holding her weapon. "Uh..hff..y-your turn?" she said
with a nervous, hopeful, slight grin.
"I don't know..if there's much left I can do, at this point."
The monsters took a cautious step or two inward, all uncannily
synchronized with each other, those that wouldn't fit in the tighter
semicircle moving aside to surround them further. Light raised her
arms slowly, wearily, and a brief glimmer of light formed into her
weapon as she readied it, holding it in both hands. "I'll do,
all I can. We just need...a few more...minutes...!"
Magus
had thought, at first: Gemma's power seemed more like something that
energized her than a burden that would make her tired. But it seemed
that the exact way it
exhausted her was more insidious than expected...and perhaps what she
was feeling wasn't the same as how Light experienced borrowing
another person's power in the first place.
It
was this...manic, excited, hard-to-grasp urge to keep going and
going, and not ever quite repeat herself. A bunch of half-formed
ideas swimming around in her head, each one demanding attention. She
always had a little bit of this when using her own powers,
honestly—but somehow having access to Gemma's ludicrous multitude
of options made it a lot worse, to the point of constantly
threatening to overwhelm her. It was a nonstop stream of different,
jumbled thoughts, but they all stemmed from one basic concept:
I need to do something else.
She
picked herself up, even though she was still a little unsteady on her
feet. Another big, flashy attack was what she wanted
to do, or at least felt
like doing, but it was obvious she couldn't keep something like that
up again. Her level just wasn't high enough yet—her MP and stamina
were far too low to keep that kind of thing up for such a protracted
fight. It was hard to say that she'd made any mistakes necessarily;
this situation was simply unfair, and overall just sucked
beyond belief. But there still
had to be something.
Light was clearly exhausted, only slightly less than she
was, and by now the sun had fully set, so there was no...
Magus's
ears perked up a bit. That was
the main problem, wasn't it? 'No light, no power'?
The
overwhelming urge was still to something to push back or strike down
the encroaching monsters. But there was so much more to
what magic, what spells
could do, after all. And anyway, hadn't Magus sworn not to put down
support classes back when Light was
playing the role? Maybe it was just her turn
to be the 'helper'. A summon..! That could stick around a while, and
wouldn't require her to move around herself.
"Hh..hey."
She smiled in spite of herself. "You just need..ffh..some light,
right?"
"Well, it'd help.
Listen, you should...wait, what are—?"
Magus's
weapon—just the one, the blue-spark-made sword she'd started out
with, showed up in her hand. The motions for this spell weren't too
bad, but her arms didn't want to
cooperate all that much, so she had to go through them a little bit
slowly. She clamped down, using the time delay to channel the spell
she was already casting for extra strength, efficiency, and
especially duration.
Near the end of the motions, she incanted as loudly as she could:
"Rays
of light, coalesce into blinding fire..."
"SUNBLAZE!"
This one's fairly long, but for various reasons, I couldn't break it up. 132 is also about the same length.
