Battle Vixens! - 125

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Episode 125: Oops

"Should I be happy we're here again?" Karis put out a hand to her side, bringing Remedy into view to walk next to her. "Or should this bring back the trauma of a thousand grabby-hands, plus almost having lava dripped on me?" She followed Petra past some buildings, to the scenic view of the massive hole in the ground their fight with the Hecatoncheires had left behind, now partially filled with rainwater—and getting a little deeper all the time, as a light drizzle continued to fall from above.

"It's not all bad. Look-look, the restaurant's still here!" her husband said, gesturing backwards. "We had a great time there, right? Maybe they'll spare us some cheese fries once this is over."

"I just wonder what exponential function their insurance rates are now following..."

Rowan arrived from another street, Dawn and Phoenix trailing behind her. Karis immediately didn't like the careful distance those two were keeping from each other, the way they refused to quite look at each other. "Okay, everyone," she said. "We have a turtle and two of those squidlike aberrations."

"Ooh, now that's an SAT word!" Petra japed. If she even sensed the tension in the first place, this was probably just her way of trying to defuse it.

Rowan gently cleared her throat before continuing, and Simon seemed to take the hint. "Focus on survival and damage control," she continued. "Cutting off the limbs of the..ugh, mouthtopi," (Karis didn't blame her for disliking such an awfully-constructed name) "should reduce the threat they pose over time. The larger threat is the turtle—that'll be your job, Petra. Since the ground here is already as dilapidated as one could imagine from yesterday, there is little need for restraint here. Just—don't break anything that isn't already broken, if you can help it."

"Alright alriiight," Petra beamed.

"Let's try to draw the three of them apart while we're at it. Dawn and Cynthia, you take one—I'll try to keep the other one busy with Karis. This isn't hard-and-fast; if someone else needs support, give it. I'll probably be splitting my efforts to help with the turtle regardless."

The fact that they didn't seem to object to being paired up—instead each giving a serious, solemn nod—actually worried Karis a little more for them. It meant whatever was going on between them wasn't petty, and wasn't just young-teenager emotional. It was serious. But she wasn't one to question the more experienced 'commander'; Rowan seemed to have an almost-parental level of concern for those two, so it was believable that she knew what was best.

"Hey hey—" Petra pointed ahead, at a dome of shadow starting to gather. It was flanked by wispier swirls of black mist on either side. "Looks like the strategy meeting's over just in time, boss!"

"...Indeed." Rowan gestured to the left, then crossed toward the right. Karis had Remedy follow, staying back with Petra for now; Cynthia marched herself confidently forward, and Dawn seemed to drag along behind her reluctantly.

---

The first time the monsters appeared, there was no warning. There was no buildup. It had seemed to be a relatively normal day, apart from everyone still reeling from the shock of superpowered fox-girls suddenly existing. They had shown up like a magic trick: Not there one second, there and ready to kill and destroy the next. It turned out afterward that suddenly showing up like that wasn't the only way they could appear. Sometimes they'd manifest as a slowly-swirling mass of black mist in the sky, building up more and more until something even the vixens could barely survive fighting showed up. Sometimes it was at least thirty seconds, or a few minutes, even for relatively "low-level" monsters. It was all kind of random, to some extent, just how suddenly they'd appear.

Added to that, there was now that "early warning system" of sorts. Even if you didn't have the app, someone around you probably did. There would be an alert, and everyone would flee. The first couple of times that happened, it had been panicked fleeing. However, between the warning usually being at least a few minutes out and the monsters often having a buildup before they appeared, it hadn't taken long for the fleeing to turn more orderly and careful. Nobody wanted to be there when a monster was (probably not even those who had to fight them, really), but nobody wanted to get trampled, either. But there was always the possibility of the worst-case scenario. The early warnings weren't always so early.

Thad had successfully put the events of the previous night out of his mind—for now, at least—and so was enduring a normal day of class..or at least, a day in the "new normal", which usually felt a lot like the old one. The rain over the college had lightened up for a few minutes, so he and some of the guys from the team were on their way across the quad just after lunch, all of them probably just about to scatter off toward their various classes. A loud noise from a large number of phones got everyone's attention—this was part of the "new normal", too, of course. But the thing that happened next was a lot less familiar to most of them.

Everyone had just processed what kind of alert was going out, understood that it related to the place they were in, and started to move toward the buildings—more or less, each person toward the closest available entrance. Then, just like a magic trick, something was there that hadn't been before. Two somethings, big black shadows in the shape of wild animals, were just suddenly—present right in the middle of the grass. It felt like a miracle that they hadn't literally appeared inside of someone, given the crowd present.

Now, Thad himself wasn't in immediate danger. He was some several yards back away from the big, wolf-looking things with black, wispy snakes for tails, and there were several people between him and them. He was nonetheless struck by the immediate impression that something that shape wasn't supposed to be that size. He'd seen a decent amount of news footage of fights; there were the vixens fighting the monsters, at least, to give a sense of scale and help measure how big the monsters tended to be, but it still just looked wrong to him, in person—how big they were. It looked like either one of them could crush his car just by landing on it from a jump. And these were supposed to be some of the weaker ones, right?

Everyone was briefly, completely and totally silent. A couple of guys he didn't really know were standing right there in front of the monsters. They froze in place, staring up at them, and for a few miraculous seconds the monsters seemed to be looking around like they were disoriented...or maybe it was that they had their pick of defenseless prey, and were deciding which of the college students scattered around nearby would be the easiest to kill. When one of them tensed to move—the guys in front of them, in easy pouncing distance, still standing there in a paralyzed panic—the silence broke, and a few things happened in rapid succession.

Thad heard a voice he recognized from behind him—the first voice to be heard, before everyone else started screaming and running—saying something he didn't quite understand. It was kind of gibberish, but felt like it had a profound meaning all at the same time. He couldn't quite imagine how he'd pronounce it himself, even though it rattled out of her mouth as easily as her own name might. Then a sort of grayish blur went past him, above him in an up-and-down leap, and managed to land in between the monsters and their imminent prey. After that, the one body, sporting two tails, sort of..stepped apart, becoming two bodies going in two directions at the same time: One forward, one back.

The one with the white tail went forward, drawing a fist back and punching at the snout of that monster that had been getting ready to pounce, meeting it in midair and somehow imparting enough force to throw it skidding backwards along the ground. The other one turned around and, in a different, but still reasonably familiar voice to Thad, screamed out "RUN, STUPID!" in a panicked voice at the top of her lungs. The one with the white hair was already busy running away from the other monster—which seemed to have decided that she was the best target possible—and the one that had just yelled now turned around to help.

By this point, the screaming and running had started—including the guys who'd just been a few inches away from death. Once the silent spell was broken and the threats were in motion, they probably hadn't needed to be told what to do at all. Thad turned and sprinted for the nearest building himself, feeling a sharp adrenaline rush from how incredibly close that had been. He got inside and stopped, bending over with his hands on his knees and panting, and then he started to realize what had just happened.

That first voice he'd recognized was that of Emma—little Emma, who'd had a serious growth spurt recently and started wearing contacts. The person who'd leapt forward, punched a monster away and told everyone to do what they should've been doing in the first place—anyone in this town would know that that was Gemma. Gemma, Emma. It almost seemed obvious now that he knew it. But more importantly—if he knew it, then so did everyone else.

As in, EVERYone else.

Thad wasn't about to spill her secrets any more than he would his own roommate's, but if he'd recognized her as only a slight acquaintance, then there were others around who knew her too. With where they'd been, and how many people they were, she'd be lucky if someone hadn't recorded the whole moment on their phone. It could be on the internet before the fight was over, and in the news by mid-afternoon.

From what he knew of Emma, she was a pretty shy girl, and definitely not someone who wanted everyone's attention. She had a big family who'd all be concerned about her—especially with her being her—being in such dangerous situations all the time. This definitely couldn't have been the time, or the way, she'd have wanted everyone to know. But she'd saved someone's life by doing that. Another half of a second and that guy would've been monster food—laying aside that they didn't really seem to eat their victims unless they were vixens. If she'd hesitated to do it, people would've died.

He stood up, breath fully caught, and saw Magus running the other way, pushing through the door and out of the building. There wasn't anything Thad could really do about this, but maybe Magus could at least make sure she didn't get hurt. He silently wished her luck, and headed for somewhere he could get a vantage point to watch the fight from. After all, personally knowing someone involved had him a lot more invested in seeing how things turned out.

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No sooner did the turtle appear than it was buried in spiky rocks, dirt, and shattered concrete, the very ground its legs stood on twisting up around them to shackle them in place. It didn't take being bound very well, of course, but flailing its flail-like tail and snapping its giant head around did little to free it faster. Petra was kneeling forward with both of her hands palm-down on the ground, focusing hard on keeping it pinned.

Karis had Remedy run recklessly ahead, slashing her sword around; this succeeded in cutting off the ends of some of their opponent's limbs, but got her grabbed pretty quickly, the tentacles knotting themselves all around her body and starting to pull her toward the monster's mouth. Then Rowan sprang her trap: She'd been gathering a bunch of the water from the pit up around herself, and now turned it into a collection of large watery blades, sending them through where the mass of limbs had gathered to all go toward Remedy and cutting enough of them off for the Stand to slip herself free and land a bit roughly on the ground.

Cynthia seemed to compete with Remedy in the 'charging ahead' contest, lifting her right hand to form a giant fireball over it and tossing it ahead of her as the mouthtopus started swinging its limbs her way. She landed a direct hit on the beast's center mass, the fireball exploding into a flame all across its body that sent black mist streaming up off of it. At the same time, she leapt and backflipped past Dawn to behind her, evading the tentacles' reach by a couple of seconds or so, and landed into a one-knee kneel, panting softly. When the moster charged forward in a rage, it met a spiked wall of ice, bouncing off of it first, then skittering forward again and wrapping its limbs around the wall to try and yank it out of the way. By now, Cynthia had gotten back to her feet, and both of them circled in opposite directions, moving to either side of the monster's forward charge. When it got past the ice wall, no one was there.

The turtle broke its legs free of the shackles and shook the rocks off of itself, sending them flying all over. Petra stood up quickly and hopped backwards a couple of times, lifting her arms to the sky to catch all that flying earth and keep it floating in midair instead of allowing it to scatter and possibly hit her allies. Then she dropped most of it safely, merging the rest into some large spikes she drove down into the turtle's limbs as it started to advance toward her.

Karis and Rowan's opponent gathered its remaining limbs together, tilted back, and went for a head-on charge. Remedy vanished, and Karis ran herself over toward the right to bait it away from her husband. Rowan recovered some of the water from the giant blades into a bumpy, spiky solid mass on the ground in front of the monster, tripping it into an awkward tumble and then grabbing it with that same water, now in thorned-tentacle form.

Disappointed to find no one past the wall, the mouthtopus started to turn Petra's way. "Nope!" A scattering of a few small fireballs peppered its main body, making it tilt over and start charging straight Cynthia's way. She took off at a run to one side, narrowly evading some of the tentacles whipping out on either side of it by diving and rolling along the ground. When it started to get up again, Dawn was throwing a bunch of rough, quickly-thrown-together spikes of ice into it, getting its attention once again and convincing it to charge her this time. Cynthia stood up and panted heavily; even making that little fire was getting harder for her as the rain came down heavier. Dawn dodged aside of the charging monster, raising up a giant icy blade made out of the rain and wielding it two-handed in an expertly-placed chop, cutting off maybe half of the beast's limbs all at once.

An enormous fist of stone, maybe four times the size Petra usually managed, raised itself up from the ruined ground, delivering an uppercut to the turtle's head with enough force to flip the entire beast up, pivoting on its tail to land back down onto its back. The fist fell apart as soon as it had landed this hit, Petra audibly exhaling from all of the recent effort, but then grinning as she watched as the monster did the same thing its tiny, normal-animal counterpart would do in the same situation: Futilely wiggle its limbs around in the air. However, there was the extra flavor of its head violently biting and its tail whipping around agressively.

Remedy reappeared next to the monster to slash off a few more of its limbs while they whipped around at the water-tentacle holding it. Rowan joined this dance of blades for a moment, somehow landing more hits one-handed (while her other hand stayed raised in the air to keep the water-limb holding tight) than Remedy did with both. This didn't last long before the beast wriggled itself free and charged again—thankfully, at Remedy, who was promptly disappeared out of its way.

The monster that had missed Remedy kept recklessly charging forward, seeming to lack the mental capacity to register that it should've caught its target by now if she were still in its path. The monster that had gone past Dawn seemed able to run just as fast as ever without the limbs she'd taken from it, but it did try to stop in reaction to blow. However, it had a lot of momentum to try to get rid of, so it skidded and slithered across the wet, uneven ground for a bit.

Just long enough for its wide-open mouth to collide with the upended turtle. At the same time as the other one charged headfirst into the very same's shell.

Petra's grin evaporated, and as she caught her breath, she said something everyone else was probably thinking. "Aah...shoot."

---

"Thundering flood, bind and restrain. Wrapping Waves!"

It just seemed like the best spell for the situation. Both of Gemma were being chased by the snakewolves, and there was some light rain falling, plus the earlier rain still soaked into the ground, that Magus figured she could use as sort of 'material components' to make it a little less costly. It worked pretty well, too: In an imitation of Rowan's magic, some tentacles of water raised themselves up from the damp ground to wrap around the beasts' bodies and hold them back, buying the two-bodied vixen some breathing room.

Walking slowly forward, still holding her sword up to maintain the effect, Magus called: "Gemma! You okay?" As soon as they weren't being chased, both bodies had turned around and just started unleashing on their former pursuers.

"I'm, not hurt," Plus said uncertainly, over Minus repeatedly saying...something. It was too fast and quiet to properly make out at first. By about the sixth or seventh repetition, Magus was pretty sure it was...'Everyone saw me'?

"Okay, well uh, don't think I can hold this much longer, so—"

"I'll get it," Plus cut her off, some uncharacteristic aggression to her tone. Both bodies lifted their hands, and the monsters' shadows rose up through their bodies as big spikes, pinning them in place even longer. "Just, kill them!" she said, sounding genuinely angry. Minus was...still saying the same thing as before; her tone of voice read as nervous, or maybe even scared.

"Um, okay?" Magus just went with channeling some bolts of lightning down from the gathering clouds above. It was very strange, and a little off-putting, to see the two bodies of what was supposed to be the same person expressing such completely different moods.

The beasts struggled free of the shadow-spikes, but by now both of Gemma had stepped far enough away that they had some catching up to do. Plus jumped aside, leaving beind a faint, blurry illusion for her persuer to try to bite through; Minus dove into a shadow to let the other one pass. Then, finally, Dr. Quinn showed up.

She had her string wound up into a club, and raised up a puppet from the ground to hand that weapon to. It ran up and slammed the club into the side of the snakewolf that had stopped in its tracks to bite an illusion, making it break apart and wrap its strings up around the beast's body. While black mist erupted off of its body, it turned and swiped a claw at the puppet, landing a hit clean enough to destroy it, but the strings continued twisting around its body until it was bound in place.

The other snakewolf had started to turn Magus's way. She tensed to run, but Clark had already brought up another puppet and put it between the running monster and her, getting its attention on chasing that instead. So she took the opportunity to focus on channeling some more lightning.

With the monster bound up again. Plus started grabbing daggers out of the air—from light, shadow, air, water vapor, some of the dirt lifted out of the ground, and who-knew-what-else—and throwing them at it one after another. "RrrrraaaAAAAAGH!" Minus had popped back out and started making some small fireballs to throw after the one still chasing a puppet; it sounded like her chant had changed to just the word 'stupid' over and over again at some point.

"Gemma! Don't overdo it," Clark said. From all of the damage so far, the snakewolf in her strings was already starting to look indistinct as it shook off the last of them and turned Plus's way.

"I know, I know," she said, spreading her hands to place a fairly large light-shield, then jumping away when the monster slammed itself into it, shattering it but recoiling back in the process. Minus's concerning mantra got slightly louder, adding in the word 'idiot' occasionally.

By now Magus was ready to send down another bolt, so she focused it on the nearly-dead monster, succeeding in finishing it off. The other one bit down on the puppet it had been chasing, breaking it in half before it was unsummoned, and both of Gemma turned their attention to destroying that one, too. Clark retrieved her needle and started weaving some new string with it with one hand while the other one raised up another puppet and sent it toward the remaining monster.

The snakewolf had turned around and started toward Minus, only for Plus to lift some of the ground in front of it just as it picked up speed and trip it into a forward tumble. Then both of her twisted a bunch of shadows into spike-covered, vine-like appendages wrapped up around the monster's crumpled body before it could stand back up again. Minus held the shadows tight around its struggling body while Plus threw a bunch of seeds into its main mass, using each of them as the center of a small but poten point-explosion.

Magus thought she'd almost feel bad for it at this point if not for..everything about these monsters. So instead of that, she focused on throwing some cheap, quick-cast attack spells at the now-stationary monster. Clark had a puppet waiting to get its attention in case it broke free, but by now she'd finished putting together another club and sent a second puppet along to slam that into its body. Between the three vixens' prior onslaught and the monsters' apparent extra-strong weakness to the magic of Dr. Quinn's weapon, the hit from the club was enough to finish that one off completely, too.

"..Ffffh." Magus let go of, then unsummoned her sword. Chain-casting a bunch of spells in a row was still a little tiring, after all. Clark dismissed all of her puppets and went up to where Gemma was. Minus was still mumbling something in a high, panicked voice, and Plus didn't look happy, either.

"What happened?" she asked, her tone concerned and serious. "Are you alright?"
"Alright?! I j—" Minus seemed to start saying something before Plus clapped a hand over her mouth, then stepped into her to recombine. "...Sorry. I, I'm okay. I just..needtogo!" she said, and then suddenly took off at a run, taking the extra effort to make herself invisible about five or six steps in. This didn't work as well at hiding her path as it should have, since both of the remaining vixens could see and hear a door being thrown open and left to close itself in her wake.

After watching that, Clark gave Magus a questioning look. "I got here after she did. But I think..."

---

The tentacled beasts' remaining limbs convulsed chaotically around as the turtle's shell seemed to begin to eat them, starting with their main bodies. Petra took a deep breath, then lifted her hands, raising up an arch of stone above the middle of its shell. "Okay okay—new rule! Never ever ever ever, run them into each other!" While the shell swallowed up the rest of the other two monsters' bodies, it withdrew its legs into its shell, only to then have dozens of large, thick tentacles much longer than those legs had been erupt out from each of the four holes. Its tail grew twice as long, and the shell and head simply reshaped themselves so that the entire monster was now right-side-up again. Now Petra brought the arch down around its body to try to restrain it, but it used its multitude of limbs to propel itself upward, shattering all of the condensed rock as it jumped into the air and tried to come down at Petra mouth-first. She raised and rode a wave of concrete away from it, and then the pit full of rainwater suddenly emptied, its contents turning into a dragon's head and rushing over to meet the beast where it landed. Its 'neck' wrapped around the turtle's head, and its teeth bit down hard around its snout.

Karis moved closer to Rowan, placing a hand on her shoulder and having Remedy 'possess' the blue-haired vixen. "I guess combining our problems isn't as convenient as it sounds, huh?" Rowan just grunted with effort as a bunch of the rain around them decided to start falling inward toward the monster instead of downward, combining into some independent limbs that each tried to grab at its writhing tentacles and keep it in place. There was a momentary struggle before the turtle shook free, the entire dragon plus all the limbs dematerializing back into ordinary water and splashing off of it as it spun itself around to go after Petra a second time.

By now, Dawn and Cynthia had come next to her, the former building as large of a wall of spiked ice as she could well ahead of them. Petra tilted and threw the ground around under it as it ran, making the process as difficult as possible, so it didn't quite manage to pick up enough momentum to charge all the way through the wall of ice, instead crashing against it. Then the three of them scattered, forcing it to pick a target. When it went for Cynthia, a stone fist punched it in the side of the head; it turned and snapped to retailate, but no one was in that direction. It whirled around and charged Petra's way, and Rowan came over, now in her dragon's mouth, grabbing up all of the water she could to hold its front limbs as the dragon's teeth bit into the base of the turtle's neck.

They wrestled for a long moment, giving Petra enough time to catch her breath again and start twisting some ground up around the thing's back limbs. Still, the turtle eventually shook free, and Rowan had to ride a wave of water away to keep it from snapping her up in its mouth.

Remedy jumped forward out of Rowan, threw her sword at its muzzle, and bolted. It chased her down in no time flat, but it got a big bite of nothing for its efforts. Cynthia seemed to take this as a cue to throw her own sword at its face, exploding its material into some flame crawling along its head briefly before the pouring rain put it out. So now it came after her. Petra tilted the ground to ninety degrees to flip the turtle sideways, but it just used its tentacles to turn this into a hundred-eighty-degree roll, spun around and ran after Karis—because she happened to be the closest thing in its view at the moment.

Karis knew better than to get anywhere near that thing, so she brought Remedy up in front of herself and ran backwards, having her Stand run briefly toward the beast and then off to one side. Knowing that these things never learned anything ever gave her some peace of mind about this maneuver, and it did, in fact, predictably chase down the one 'person' who it couldn't actually eat yet again. When it caught up, its jaws closed on the empty air Remedy was no longer occupying.

The turtle turned around rapidly, picking another target. It chose Rowan, who'd been kneeling in place with a hand on the hilt of her sword stabbed into the ground as a crutch, a tall pool of water unnaturally keeping itself in place around her. She had the water pick her up, leaning back into it and riding it in a wave backwards toward the pit it had come from. Her retreat was less immediate than it should have been, the wave moving too slowly to guarantee she'd outrun the turtle—especially if she had to continue past the pit and climb up its back end. But then the water she'd left behind suddenly froze, turning into ice and then shaping into spikes that pierced up into the tentacles on the turtle's left side, followed by a large, unshapen mass of ice landing a direct hit on the side of its head.

That got its attention, and it turned toward the owner of all of that ice. Dawn panted heavily but leaned down, putting both of her hands onto the ground and freezing all of the water that fell onto it into row after row of spikes for the turtle to bash itself into. Still it picked up speed as it went, even as the spikes twisted inward, grabbing or stabbing into the monster's many limbs. She took a hard breath inward and screamed it out in an enraged voice, like she was daring the thing to get any closer.

Since everyone else seemed to be out of breath at the moment, Karis called out: "Dawn! Move! Cut and run, girl!" But it seemed like she either couldn't hear over all the yelling, or more possibly, was too spent to move aside quickly enough—or too stubborn to be willing to try at this point. The gigantic, tentacle-limbed turtle advanced on her despite some water-limbs and spikes of earth trying to arrest its movment, despite a thrown sword from Remedy trying again to get its attention. When it came close to its target, it drew its head back for just an instant, its jaws wide, before snapping it forward and closing them around a vixen.

But it didn't catch Dawn. She'd been shoved, hard, imparting enough force that she tumbled along the ground several feet to a spot well out of the way.

---

Sometimes it feels like Emma's entire character arc can be summed up in a single trope: "Break the Cutie".
Anyway, I've had both "sides" of this episode more or less planned out for a while, only closer to writing it realizing they could fit in the same episode. Magus's side was really easy to write, but I was fuzzier on the details on the city side, so that took me a lot longer to come up with.