Battle Vixens! - 40

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Episode 40: Another Monster

The tornado sirens started. There was no tornado.

Announcements on the local TV and radio channels made the situation more clear, but either way the usual practice of getting and staying safely indoors, in a basement if possible, was of more use than simply continuing on as normal, unaware of any danger.

The Vixen Initiative had a way of alerting people, but it was only somewhat widely adopted; some people didn't have phones or didn't have the right kind of phones to use it, and even assuming that everyone was near someone who would receive an alert that way seemed like too great a risk at the moment. Therefore, the tornado sirens were engaged, even though it had been a minute or two since the VI's own alert began.

Ning folded her ears down, looking up at the sky. "Nngh..it's so loud," she complained, aware it was bordering on whining.

"At least you only have two ears," said one of Gemma—Plus, probably, judging by the voice. The other one was pacing around nervously.

Usually, the mist appeared pretty close to the ground. It would coalesce after not very long, and then there would be a monster to fight. Today, in the middle of the afternoon, it had begun to swirl toward a specific point up in the sky..and it hadn't stopped. For three or four minutes it kept gathering, resembling a lone stormcloud in an otherwise clear sky; in fact looking just like one with a peculiar shape to cameras. To people, however, it was immediately obvious this was something else; it possessed some quality that was difficult to put into words. Maybe...it was alive. Or maybe it gave off an oppressive atmosphere, like staring into the eyes of a lion getting ready to pounce right on top of you. The effect was strong enough to send pets and strays fleeing or panicking at the sight of it.

"I hope it just keeps doing...that until the others get here," said Ning.

"I really hope it doesn't," Plus replied. "If it's getting bigger, it's getting stronger," Minus added quietly, explaining what she meant.

Ning couldn't keep staring into the sky like this. One of Gemma was always looking, anyway, so she turned toward the other one. "..Any sign of puppets?" Her fingers were unconsciously running across the hilt of her sword, still in its sheath.
"I've been watching, and 'feeling' for shadows being pulled around or anything like that," said Minus. "So far, nothing.—" "—She must be focusing on the city today. I hope they'll be okay..."

There was a moment of tense silence; Ning occasionally glanced up at the sky and didn't see much change, just a bigger cloud. Then Plus said, "I think it's forming! Get ready..."

"Right, always." She looked up herself and saw the shape of four limbs forming, a gigantic, thick tail, wings...a short muzzle toward the front. Before long, it opened two enormous, bright red eyes, and it moved: The limbs and tail twitched strangely, and then the wings spread out and give one swift, hard flap, sending the remaining bits of mist scattered around it away and showing the monster's full form. It made a distant, screaming roar that could be heard over the noise of the sirens, and then dove straight at the center of town, right where Gemma and Ning were waiting.

It landed a few yards away, hitting the ground hard enough to shatter the road and make deep pits under each foot. Seeing it at a distance before just hadn't done its size justice: Its legs were like black tree trunks; that proportionally short muzzle alone was big enough to easily fit all three of them inside, and it was lipless, row upon row of teeth as long as spears laid bare.

"W-we have to fight that?!—" "—It's as big as my house," Plus squeaked.

"I guess we do." Ning wasn't feeling particularly confident about this herself, but put on a brave face, taking a couple of steps toward the thing. Fighting a literal dragon had never been considered a possibility for her bucket list, but it seemed like it was getting checked off anyway.

The monster drew its head back, and snapped it forward like a snake, spewing a torrent of mist from inside its body. Some of it stuck around like a fog, while the rest congealed into smaller creatures, resembling malformed animals with little glowing eyes and sharp teeth of their own.

"Oh, come on," said Ning.
"Like it's not overpowered enough?!" Plus agreed. The dragon took one slow, earth-shaking step at a time while its creations charged the three fox-girls. Ning caught the first one to arrive with a single swipe of her blade, and it was gone. Gemma threw some knives and other projectiles at some of the others, dispatching each with two or three hits. It only took one bolt of arcing lightning to be rid of the rest, but the dragon was still coming.

Ning tried striking it with lightning two or three times. Some mist poured out from each spot she hit, but the dragon continued forward without so much as a flinch. "It's gotta have some kind of weak point," she said. "Like, that big turtle was soft under the shell.."
"That's normal for turtles, though—" "—do dragons even have weaknesses?!"

Tired of waiting for it to get there, Ning ran forward, hoping to get it in the eye. After all, that was usually sort of a weakness for the ones that had them, right? No sooner had she made the leap over its mouth than its neck snapped toward her and the side of its head rammed straight into her, sending her flying away.

"WAAAAAAH!" Ning managed a clumsy roll at best, and levered herself back to her feet with her sheath. Gemma scattered, Plus coming closer to her while Minus went toward the opposite side of the dragon, trying to lead it to follow her.
"A-are you okay?"
"I'll live." The side it had hit was going to be sore, but there was plenty of adrenaline to help ignore it for now. The dragon took the bait, moving much faster than it had approached earlier and snapping its head down at her; she made a black ball of energy-absorb to stop it cold, and then shot five or six shadow-bullets in its general direction while dancing her way back. Ning took in a small huff of breath before running toward the dragon with its back now mostly turned to her, Plus following a bit behind.

"I'll get its attention on me," she called back. Once she reached its leg she leapt up, drew her sword in a slash-then-stab motion, and kicked her way off of the giant foot, backflipping and landing on the ground just soon enough and far enough away to avoid a reflexive backward kick from the limb. Then she called down some more bolts, bending them into and through the sword, before summoning it back to her hand and taking several steps away from the dragon while it whirled toward her.

Plus had split off, and now began tossing knives with small points of light at their tips toward the dragon's side; Minus drew up some of the crumbled concrete, forming it into small spikes before tossing them at the creature's back. When the knives hit there were small, audible explosions each time. But the dragon was focused on Ning now, taking one step after another toward her and nearly reaching her with every snap of its gigantic jaws. She fired back repeatedly with electricity, but it showed no signs of slowing down as it came dangerously close to backing her up against a building.

It drew its head back to strike, and another small black sphere appeared between her and it; its nose rammed and recoiled, dissipating the sphere while reacting to it like a solid wall. Minus waved her over, and she wasted no time getting out from under the monster in those precious few seconds it took to recover. It turned its head and then its body, drawing back as it had before and breathing more black mist out at the two of them. Ning had an undefinable bad feeling about the fog it produced and made several swift jumps back out of its range, inadvertently leaving the other fox-girl inside of it. Minus began coughing as the smaller monsters appeared around her.

She was shaking her head slowly, like she was confused. It was obviously a time to attack or get away, and she was doing neither. Something was wrong.

Now that she knew it was dangerous, Ning couldn't go into the fog to rescue her: It wouldn't do any good, she'd just get affected the same way herself. But the smaller monsters were getting ready to pounce on her, and then the dragon could..! The only possibility was to fire some lightning that way, but even with the control over it she had now, she couldn't hit all or even most of the animal things without the spread being high enough to also hit the person she was trying to protect. Minus could resist magic, but it was an active thing, and she didn't seem to be in a state to protect herself; and besides all of that, even if all the animals were gone and Minus miraculously unharmed there was no way to get her out of the fog!

Ning's brain spun in a panicked cycle like this for a second or two before tripping over itself as she realized that Minus had just disappeared. "Wha—?" There was no time to figure out what was going on; the dragon started charging her again. She turned and ran, hoping desperately that 'making someone just disappear' wasn't another thing that the fog itself did. After running for a few more seconds, she heard the dragon change course behind her, turning to their mutual left and continuing at a speed that suggested it was still pursuing the same target—or at least, thought it was. When she stopped and turned around, there was a familiar glow there, which formed into a much more familiar person.

"Light!" There was a moderately hard-to-resist urge to jump at her with a hug; Ning carefully reminded herself this probably wasn't the appropriate time for it.
"Sorry I'm late," she said quietly, nodding. Behind her—past where the dragon had been before—were both of Gemma, Minus visibly shaking off the effects of the fog. Of course—she must have changed back to "recombine" and get the affected body away from the dragon.

"The Quinns should be here pretty soon too." Light's voice was noticeably deeper too, like it had been during the turtle fight. "I, uh, see we're fighting a dragon today?"
"Apparently. The puppets haven't shown up yet."
"I'm keeping an eye out myself."

"So, its breath is some kinda poison and makes a bunch of mini-monsters," said Ning.

"Seems so," Light agreed.

"They should probably know that before charging into this fight."

"Oh! Right." She shimmered out of view again, as the dragon began to turn in the direction of Gemma, after successfully biting the illusory Ning and only tasting air.

Her breath properly caught after that break, Ning raised her sword to the sky and hit herself with some lightning to recharge. Then she ran toward the beast, planning to do one better than getting it in the leg this time. It had its sights on the twins by this point, beginning a relentless series of bites, swipes with its forelegs, and continual forward motion. Some strikes Minus would block with those black balls, and others they would both dodge, Plus shifting its targeting off to one side or another to make it easier. While it was busy with that, Ning ran up to one of its hind legs from the outside, carefully keeping clear of its gargantuan whip of a tail, and jumped, stuck her weapon halfway into its leg with the blade horizontal, swung around on the hilt to land her feet on the flat of the blade, and pushed herself off of it for a second leap, making it most of the way up onto the thing's back. She resummoned the blade to her hands and stuck it in there to help climb the rest of the way up before running farther, closer to its center, and plunging the blade in there just as the dragon's body started to shake and buck to throw her off.

One after another, bolts of lightning came from the sky, through the hilt of the blade, splitting equally to Ning and the dragon. She could feel the sword coming steadily loose from the partially indistinct solid mist it was stuck in, which also conveniently provided no handholds itself. By now the beast was bucking too hard for her to readjust her grip or push the sword back down, but she held out as long as she could before finally being thrown off by a violent upward motion, sending her flying what felt like a mile into the sky. She winced in anticipation of a particularly nasty landing, not having any particular control over her motion at this point, only to find herself slowing down on the descent instead of speeding up.

"Uhh..." Ning examined herself and found a faint blue glow surrounding her. Then she looked up to see Clark—or anyway, what looked like a slightly more "mature" verison of Clark's fox-form in a different outfit—floating in her direction, with a much brighter version of the same glow around her.

"Glad I made it in time," she said. "I don't think it takes a physicist to figure out how that was gonna end." They both were placed gently onto the ground.
"Right..thanks. Rory made that look so easy," she said.

"It was also a really bad idea. Anyway, you look super tired to me. Take the rest of the fight off?"

"I can't," she said, waving vaguely in the dragon's direction to emphasize why. It had risen to its hind legs and then crashed back to the ground, making another palpable quake; now it was spewing its black breath where it thought Gemma was—which, thankfully, she wasn't by now. Light was with her on one side of the dragon, and Rory—well, someone Ning assumed to be Rory anyway—was on the other, hitting her palm with her fist like she was about to join in on a bar fight.

"You should at least move to the back row, just hit it with lightning from a distance," Clark suggested, with a visible expression of worry. "It'll make everything worse if you get eaten."
She sighed. "I guess you're right." She summoned her sword, complete with sheath, and offered it over. "For your wife."
"I'm sure she'll just love it," she half-joked, gently taking the weapon before floating up and off in the direction of the recipient.

"So, nothing particularly works so far?" Light said.

"Not really...—" "—...I mean, it loses about as much mist as a normal monster would from lightning and stabs and slashes—" "—but it just has so much. I mean, it can just breathe it out to make that poison fog as an attack."
"I guess our only option is to wear it down, then." A 'hologram' reflection of the surrounding area was being projected into her eyes in a way that didn't quite obscure what was right in front of her; she could see Clark headed for her wife with Ning's weapon, and Ning sitting down a decent distance away to physically rest. The dragon and its recently-breathed minions were just about realizing their present targets were fakes. "I just hate when they make a boss 'harder' by upping its HP a couple orders of magnitude."

Light blinked herself into place to the left of the dragon's head, the same side she'd been on before but now visible to it. She raised a hand and fired her strongest laser right into its eye, which instantly got its attention. Then she made several images of herself all jump out from her present position, some charging into the fog and mini-monsters while the rest ran off to the left; she herself waited for it to begin to turn, blinked next to its neck, and gave a hard downward slash with both "copies" of her blade, then moved to just between its shoulders while it tried to snap at that. She stabbed "both" of the weapon into it, and then superpositioned more copies and stabbed those in, and then more...when the number got up to about ten the oldest ones started "decohering" or whatever, fading out of existence about when new ones appeared. On a hunch, she spoke Ning's phrase, telling her power to call a bolt of lightning down on that sword. The nature of the sword-splitting mixed with the bolt, splitting it into ten bolts each with the same power, each of them hitting their apparent mark.

The dragon scream-roared at a volume comparable to a jet engine, and jerked its head back to throw Light off; she blinked away ahead of the maneuver, leaving the weapons in for the moment, and landed next to Gemma again, taking a second to catch her breath from moving so quickly during that entire last attack. Plus and Minus had been taking turns peppering the thing's side with smaller attacks, which were doing damage, but not all that much.

Rory now had Ning's sword in hand, and she flew under Clark's power to a few yards over the monster before descending blade-first into its back, pulling the blade out and slashing wildly with it before jumping back off just as it started bucking again. Clark stayed up in the air, her needle weaving a massive club with the end of Ning's empty sheath in her hands as the "handle". She slammed it down on the dragon's head when it turned to retaliate against Rory, the strings coming alive when it broke apare and wrapping all around its neck and muzzle, squeezing a deluge of mist from it before dissipating; this drew the second deafening roar from its throat, muffled slightly by a temporary inability to open its mouth.

When it did open, that mouth spewed a thick fog in Rory's general direction. Clark picked her up out of it while Light appeared over the dragon's head, stabbing it through the neck another few times before driving the strongest laser she could manage straight at its nose. Rory came down, grabbing the hilts of two of the blades to drive them farther in. "Bad dragon! No poison breath!" A bolt of lightning from Ning hit the smaller monsters just as they formed, and then a second one struck the middle of the monster's back.

The dragon's enormous wings spread out and flapped, and it raised its head, snapping at Clark in the air; she quickly floated out of range, and the monster flapped again, lifting it off the ground and into an aerial chase of the hovering fox-girl.

"HOW CAN IT FLY?!" She turned tail and zoomed away as quickly as she could, but the dragon was clearly moving quickly enough to catch her at this rate.

"How can you fly?" Rory shot back, still hanging on by the two light-swords she'd grabbed.

"Not a good time for that!" said Light, running up the dragon's head and jabbing a sword into its right eye to try and get its attention off of Clark for just a second. It screamed—even louder from right next to the head—and twisted to get her off, which was just enough distraction to make its real target invisible and send a false one away to its left (just in case that was the only direction it could see now). Light blinked off of its head and began turning to light and back every second in lieu of not being able to actually fly herself. The image was moving faster than the real thing, fast enough to get away, and on seeing this the dragon breathed more poison its way, making a bunch of little winged monstrosities in the process; Light blinked near them, holding her breath while getting rid of them with a series of rapid slashes; then she teleported over next to Clark and accepted her help aura-flying to get a break from the constant light-and-back changing.

The dragon whirled and twisted in the air, turning upside down in a bid to get Rory off of it. The blades she was hanging on by were clearly coming loose, so Clark flew over to help her defy gravity for a bit while Light blinked her way up to the dragon's underside, curious if that had any chance of being a weak point. She brought Ning's blade to her hand to avoid stealing one of Rory's handholds, and plunged it into the monster's belly, calling another bolt of lightning down into it for good measure. There was damage, but nothing particularly special; if this thing had a weak spot here then it was at some very specific point. That experiment done, she blinked away to one side of the flying beast just in time to avoid it twisting its head around to bite at her in midair.

She left an image of herself to get away from it more conventionally, leading the dragon into a convoluted, corkscrewing path while steadily blinking her real self closer and closer to the ground. After a little of this the gigantic monster lost all control over its position in the air and went crashing back to the ground, demonstrating that, thankfully, it obeyed some sort of aerodynamic laws even if they weren't the usual ones. The impact tore another huge rut into the road, and she winced briefly to see so much destruction coming from this particular battle. But it wasn't like they could easily lead it out of town or anything...right? At least she'd managed to prevent it from crash-landing through a building.

Gemma was over with Ning, Minus channeling her version of Clark's power to "recharge" Ning's ability to shoot lightning. They had also gotten well clear of the impact site. Light placed herself near them, while Clark and Rory dove toward the dragon to press the attack. "What I wouldn't give...for a health bar," she said between some rapid breaths.
"Like, some granola?" Ning asked, confused.
"No, I mean—how much is left of that thing? If it just keeps going and going like this, we're gonna wear ourselves out and have nothing left."

"They do sort of go fuzzy when they're close to dying," Plus pointed out. "Not that it's doing that right now," Minus added.

Clark had given the sheath over to Rory, after wrapping it in a few layers of sharp spirit-string. She began bashing the monster's right wing with it, sending string spiraling and wrapping around it, binding it so it couldn't take off. Clark hovered over the middle of the beast's body, weaving new string around her wife's present "weapon" as she hit the old off of it and onto the monster. It screamed in what felt like a frustrated rage in addition to the pain from the several blows.

Light nodded in the direction of the fight, deciding that her breath had been caught enough by now. And she blinked over that way, starting a pattern of stabbing her sword into the thing on the side opposite of wherever Rory was hitting it just then. Ning stood up and raised a hand to the sky, calling down lightning into each sword immediately after it was in. Minus continued recovering her magic while Plus ran to join the fight, throwing arrows and explosion-laced knives at the monster as soon as she was in range.

When the dragon spewed its breath down, Plus was lifted out of it and placed behind its back, and a bolt of lightning got rid of the animals spawning from it. When it turned its gaze skyward and tried to hit Rory, Light stabbed it in its already-damaged right eye, made it target a fake image of her, and then held her breath to make quick work of the winged things it formed into. The dragon was twisting and snapping like a dog chasing its own tail, flapping half-tied wings futilely in an effort to take to the air again, and as the combined onslaught continued it began to scream more often in pain and rage.

It felt like an eternity of just keeping the barrage of attacks going before the thing showed real signs of weakening. First it stopped breathing mist, resorting entirely to swiping with its paws and snapping with its head in an effort to conserve what was left. Then, little by little, it became less distinct, looking more and more like the cloud it had first formed from. Rory landed in the middle of its back, tossing away the sheath and stabbing it repeatedly with a sword borrowed from Light while Clark focused entirely on binding its wings. Light took Ning's blade to the middle of the thing's head and leapt away, firing several heat-lasers all over the thing's body while Ning hit her own weapon with as many bolts of lightning as she could manage. Plus fell back, completely spent, and Minus was leaning her hands on Ning's shoulders to remain standing. But finally, through all of the effort, the gigantic beast gave one more deafening roar while it dissipated, leaving Rory to fall through empty air and land a little roughly on the ground, ending up lying on her back.

Light and Clark floated to the ground next to her, the latter kneeling down to see if she was okay. All three of them were audibly panting. "Whoo! Killed a dragon," Rory said, pumping a fist up into the air.
"I'm..just glad....it's over," Clark said between heaving breaths.

"Wha', you gettin' tired?" said Rory. But despite the bravado, all three of them could feel a distinct sense of defeated tiredness and impending loss of powers.

"Oh..ooh no. We need to get out of here." Light grabbed Rory's hand by the wrist and pulled her to her feet. "I ch...can't keep a lookout for puppets nearly as well with my normal powers, and we're all way too tired to fight if hh, if any of them show up!"

"R-right." Forcing her body to stay itself for a moment longer, Clark picked the three of them up, flew them over to the rest of the fox-girls, and then flew everyone a couple of blocks away before placing them down a little less gently than she would've liked. "Invisible, still?"
"Yeah.."

"Far enough?"
"Th-think so."
"Great!" She finally, visibly let go, relaxing as a white mist poured out of her body. The same happened to Light (though she was keeping her "normal look" illusion on, so it wasn't visible), and then to Rory, who had managed to land standing up and then leaned against a wall.

Once the three of them were back to normal, Light looked at Gemma, expecting her to demand some kind of explanation. Instead...both of her bodies had fainted from exhaustion, and were lying next to each other on the ground. Ning was sitting up beside them, looking over them with concern. "Just, uh...yeah. Overwork your powers and that happens. Happened to me once," said Light. "I think I'm gonna end up sleeping like death tonight anyway..."
"Hey, at least the monster's dead," said Rory, going over and carefully lifting Minus into her arms. "You okay to get the other one?" she asked Ning. "This random alley's great and all, but I'd really prefer someplace on campus or our house as a spot to have a post-dragon-slaying party."
"Hmn..nngf!" Ning picked up the other body with slightly more trouble; not that it felt at all heavy to her, but her muscles just didn't want to obey any orders at all at this point. "I'm in no condition to party, but this much I can do."

"Great. Bit of a walk from here."
"Hey, I did move us in the right direction," said Clark.

"Yeah, yeah."

---

FINALLY!
Finally.

As it often happens, it took me forever to just start writing this. Once I made that step, the whole thing pretty much flowed out at once. I'm sure taking a break from this was probably good; it feels like I'd been at it almost nonstop until this point. There's quite a bit after this that I have pretty well planned, so maybe I'll be able to pick up momentum again.