Battle Vixens! - 44

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Episode 44: The Twin Nightmare

On an unfamiliar instinct, Light reached out with each hand and took a weapon: Lightning struck from the sky into her right, forming Ning's blade, while the vapor in the air became Rowan's weapon just as her left hand closed around its hilt. Her own sword appeared in six places at once around herself, seemingly six separate swords all floating in the air unbidden though she was aware of her power simply 'superpositioning' it, moving between all the visible positions too quickly for gravity to properly affect it at any of them. Whether or not that really made physical sense she couldn't say and didn't really care just now.

She hadn't fully understood what she was doing for a moment, but the memories came back slowly: It felt like the anger and pain had broken something in her, or at the very least come unhinged, and as a result her power overflowed. Somewhere in the middle of it she had spoken Rowan's, Gemma's and Ning's phrases all in a rapid sequence, ordering all three of their powers to act as her own until further notice—again, not entirely consciously. There was no obvious change from the middle one, but from the other two she could feel the electricity in her nerves, the water running through her own body, the vapor and magnetism in the air, all of it just as responsive to her will as light had always been.

Faced with not one, but two opponents three or more times her size, likely much stronger and wielding magic of their own, Light's head knew that the correct thing to do was endure and stall. She didn't do that, instead screaming and charging the original one—the one which had eaten Plus. It swiped with one of its upper arms, directing a bolt of lightning at her which she deflected with Ning's sword. It raised a mace and threw a wall of concrete up which she simply became light long enough to be on top of, and used the added height to leap forward and swing her left hand and send a wave of spinning blades made of water vapor ahead of her at it. It swatted at them while she made a forward stab with Ning's weapon, sending a bolt of lightning coursing through the water and forking out across all of the thing's limbs, and then light-sped her way backwards while sending the swords floating in the air around her at the thing's head; most missed and disappeared but one hit it square in the eye, making it scream in pain.

By the time she landed the other one was after her, slamming a pike into the ground and making a wave of spiky, tendriled shadows rush toward her while the concrete around them exploded into a million rocks all aimed her way. Light swept Rowan's blade upward, drawing a torrent of water out of a sewer main that turned into a wave crashing against the rocks, throwing them away from her; the glow around her body blazed brightly, and when the shadows not affected by the wave reached her they couldn't even touch her, only vainly dissolving themselves against the light. In retaliation Ning's sword was swung again, lightning spreading through the wave just as it crashed against the attacker's body and making a wave of black mist pour off of it.

She lightsped out of the way of a flurry of arrows from the first one, and returned fire with more water blades, the first few of which met a gigantic shield of light before a simple twitch of Light's will shattered them into pieces. She danced to one side of a blast of sound, and leapt away as the monster set an expanding white orb before it, stepping back as it expanded to a radius no less than the thing's own height.

Light reformed her weapon in the same six places around herself, and turned toward the 'Minus' beast. It had been firing shadow bullets at her this entire time, all of which she had no-selled the same way as the earlier shadow attack. She moved the sword in her right hand like a general ordering troops to charge, and her weapon turned its tips toward that monster, the blades firing toward it one after another, forming a fast-moving line which another bolt of lightning travelled from Ning's blade through each one's hilt and tip all the way to the thing's chest. It made a smaller black orb than the explosion the other one had made, but one big enough to block the swords; all the same, several more bolts of lightning fired through the blades before deliberately arcing around the sphere of anti-energy to hit the thing.

The 'Plus' mist monster roared and charged at her, swinging its weapons; Light turned its way and stepped back slowly while blocking its swings one after another, lightspeeding herself out of one or two otherwise successful traps along the way. Her blade returned and began blocking its swords for her, allowing her to take some more steps back and draw more water from the sewer, breaking it apart into countless blades of water which came at both monsters from every angle she could manage. The 'Minus' one raised a massive pillar of fire to evaporate the assault while the 'Plus' one held all of its weapons out around itself defensively, making a wall of supercooled air that froze each blade, making it fall to the ground and shatter before it could arrive. Light heard an animal growl of frustration in her throat; she followed up with more swings of Ning's sword, lightning coming from each one into the things' heads and sending more black mist out of them.

Her 'enhanced' sight from the glowing eyes was something like the usual 'holograms' she was able to make to keep an eye on the wider area, except somehow she could see in front of, behind, and above herself all at the same time with zero confusion. She couldn't have sketched a coherent drawing of how her sight worked just now if her life depended on it, but it did give her a significant advantage to perceiving attacks, even from behind, well ahead of time along with the awareness necessary to respond appropriately. It also now gave her a view of Clark and Rory approaching from the direction behind the 'Minus' beast, so she spared a shred of concentration to make some lettering in front of them explaining the situation in brief: It ate Gemma. Using all powers she knows.

Seeing that fire and ice had been moderately successful, both of her opponents tried to press this advantage, the 'Plus' one forming gigantic javelins of ice next to the weapon-appendage of each of its arms and making a tossing motion to throw them at her while the 'Minus' one sent a deluge of fireballs her way in similar manner. Light gave herself some distance from them, raising more water from below into a persistent wall against the fire that emitted a jet of steam back at the beast for every fireball that hit it and having the several iterations of her sword swarm forward and swing wildly at the icicles to deflect them away from herself. She took advantage of the icicles as she dodged away, sending more lightning through them into the 'Plus' beast with every motion of Ning's sword.

The fireballs were interrupted when a rope woven from Clark's strings coiled itself around that creature's arms, binding them temporarily together and sending a stream of mist from its body while it roared in pain, struggling back and forth. Rory crash-landed in front of Light and started swatting icicles away with her hands as the 'Plus' monster changed its aim to her. "Well, this is gonna leave a gigantic mess!" she yelled over the noise of the fight; Light ordered her own weapon to float near her and make itself available to take and use as many times as needed. "Aha, thank you!" she said, grabbing two of them and using them to swat away icicles during a steady advance on her opponent's position.

Taking a moment to catch her breath while Clark landed next to her, Light realized she hadn't exactly been using the abilities typical to her when not in whatever her current state was. Maybe it was time to fix that. Her aura blazed slightly brighter once again as, to the monsters' eyes, each of the three vixens present split apart into an army of nearly a hundred, all moving toward or away from the beasts while accurately dodging their attacks; the sunlight around them faded to half its brightness as she concentrated what was coming from above into several lasers targeted directly at the tops of the things' heads, using her enhanced perception of the surrounding space to keep each one trained on them against their every effort to dodge or block.

"What happened to you? Go super-saiyan or something?" Clark said.

"Don't know, don't care."
"Well—you're not injured but you're burning through energy faster than you're getting it back right now. I have no idea where you're getting it from."

"Ropes are breaking." Light waved Rowan's sword slightly in a gesture toward the 'Minus' monster, and Clark turned to look.
"Oh shoot you're right, uh." Clark tossed her needle upward, making it form a 'club', and floated high enough into the air to swing it at the monster as it charged, wrapping the strings around its body as it broke apart and floating quickly back as it threw concrete and lightning at her—rather, mostly at Light's false images of her—in return.

Rory leapt back out of the way of another gigantic white explosion, and kept backing up as it grew to the same size the previous one had. "Holy—why are all of its attacks all so big?!" she said, throwing copies of Light's sword through the explosion at the monster, most of which it deflected but one or two landed squarely in its chest and persisted. "Gemma can't do this, right?" Light raised Ning's sword and a bolt of lightning struck it from the sky, coursing through the copies of her own weapon before they exploded back into the light that formed them.

A car was coming fast, and with a small twitch of will one of Light's 'viewpoints' shifted briefly to the interior to show Ning in the passenger seat, someone she knew from news footage to be Petra driving. Light raised the former's blade to the air and spoke her phrase to return it and all related power to her, converting the weapon into a skyward bolt that branched into two parting shots, one aimed through the chest of each of the mist beasts present. Then she waved Rowan's blade in a circular pattern, raising a new multitude of water blades from all the water, ice, and vapor already present on the ground and in the air from all of her previous attacks and sent them whirling through the air at the things from every direction once again.

With the explosion out of the way, Rory charged the 'Plus' monster again, throwing Light's sword at it a few times until it made a hard-light shield again, jumping out of the way of a sonic wave and landing on the shield, running up it and leaping off as Light shattered it, burying both blades firmly into the sides of its head. She scurried around on top of it, drawing more copies of the weapon as they continued to appear in the air around her and sticking each one in in turn, before jumping off as the thing swung its upper arms at her, landing behind it while the spinning blades of water stuck into it too.

Clark's opponent blocked incoming attacks by surrounding itself as much as possible with several black orbs of anti-energy; in response she flew above it and wove string around through the holes, getting some around its neck, its legs, and every one of its arms before returning the needle to her hand and then throwing it pointy-end-first at the top of its head. She saw a car stopping and Ning getting out, and flew well clear of the monster and its black orbs and down toward the ground just before the small girl held up her hands and rained lightning bolts down on the heads of both of their opponents. Petra stepped out of the same car and ran into the scene, making her own weapons from the surrounding earth and heading toward the 'Plus' monster while both of them screamed out in pain, leaking copious amounts of mist from every lightning strike and the continued assault of lasers from above. Light kept both of them, and the car, invisible throughout this, giving the mist monsters no warning for the ground to tilt under their feet and send them over toward their sides, each one cartwheeling itself along the axis of its fall until they landed on their feet, right next to each other.

Both were looking somewhat indistinct, considerably spent and obviously enraged. Rather than taking off to retaliate, the mist monsters stepped closer to each other—then into each other, combining back into the single body they had started out as and regaining some of their lost solidity; the eye the 'Plus' one had lost reformed, green now. The combined beast gave a deafening roar, flailing its arms in every direction and unleashing a flurry of arrows, fireballs, icicles, bullets, lightning and sound impacts all around itself at every false image and real vixen it could see, hear or otherwise perceive. Ning drew all of the electricity into herself and away from the others; Light raised a new wall of water around it as quickly as she could while Petra made a wall of earth around that, and still some considerable evasive retreats were necessary to avoid receiving more than just a few burns, cuts and bruises from the assault.

Light made a series of bright flashes in the thing's eyes to keep it from seeing anything, and Petra stomped, tilting the ground under its feet forward to try and interrupt the undodgeable continuous attack. It fought the movement of the earth, but its influence proved weaker than hers, and soon it toppled forward into the wall of water and earth—the latter growing some solid spikes and the former exploding into hundreds of little blades all aimed at it once again. Rory took Ning's weapon in one hand and Petra's in the other, no less than twenty copies of Light's sword swirling around her, and leapt into the air to strike the swords square in the center of the thing's back while the other blades rained down upon it before vaulting back over toward the ground. Another rope coiled itself around the thing's arms and legs, preventing it from easily standing back up. Ning called lightning upon it from the sky as frequently as she could while it roared, screamed, struggled to stand and threw more stray attacks in every direction it could manage, and this was enough for the combined beast to start to lose cohesion.

Light lightsped on top of its muzzle, calling every superpositioned copy of her own blade back to herself, two fans of swords like a pair of wings behind her back, and beginning with Rowan's slammed one sword after another into its eyes, screaming back at it as long and as loudly as she could until her foothold dissipated, leading to a rough forward fall that left her on one scraped knee, just one remaining copy of her own blade plunged into the shattered ground and leaned on to keep herself steady. The blazing aura and glowing eyes were gone, as well as the sense of empowerment and rage. There was just a hollow, intense frustration and the feeling of tears flooding out of her eyes as she remained in place, panting too heavily to readily perceive anything else going on around her.

In a spot near where the monster's chest had been, a girl appeared. She had dark gray hair running halfway down her back, black ears, and two tails, one silver and one black, both with white tips. Her clothes seemed to have been stitched together right down a vertical line in the middle from two completely different outfits; there was a hole in the clothes off just to one side of the center and a moderate stab wound behind that. Her eyes were closed, but her face had a pained expression, some recent tears coming down her cheeks. She seemed suspended in place very briefly before landing roughly on the shattered ground a foot or two below, letting out a weak cry of pain in response like someone anticipating injury in a nightmare but remaining asleep.

Clark rushed over to her and set herself down, plucking her needle out of the ground when it arrived and turning the bulb toward the body, quickly repairing the obvious wound and assessing any other damage. The fall hadn't hurt her significantly, but Clark's powers informed her that her target was in a coma which they could do nothing about.

Petra and Rory walked up, Ning busy checking on Light. "Well, that was, completely nuts," Petra said. "Who's this, now..?" She bent forward, looking at the odd girl.

"I think it's..Gemma. I guess she can be in one body after all," Rory said.
"More importantly.." Clark sighed, standing up. "She's like the others were described. Not even anything I can do about it."

Ning put a hand on Light's shoulder, and her body jerked and shuddered in response, prompting her to carefully pull the hand back away again. "Hey, are you..okay?"
She took in a long, jagged breath, and sobbed once. Then a slightly more stable breath, before saying: "I'm not, h-hurt bad. I feel, sick.." Her voice was hoarse from all the screaming; she gulped uncomfortably. "L-like I just..threw up or s-something.." Light shook her head, and slowly pushed herself up onto her feet, wiping her face with a sleeve and looking forward, toward the rest of the group. "I should've..I didn't..I wasn't..."
"Light, you can't put this on yourself," she said. "Those things..this is what they do. It had help from some of the puppets too, right?"
Light shuddered again. "I'll kill her," she said quietly, with an uncharacteristic intensity. She took a slow step forward, still shaking. "I'll tear her throat out with my bare hands if have to." There was another jagged breath, a half-sob, and then she drew herself up, taking another deep breath, and shook her head. "Didn't really mean that..."

"It sounded like you did," Ning pointed out. "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

Clark floated closer. "You two hurt anywhere?"
Light shook her head. "Don't know..."
"Just a couple of places," Ning answered after her. Clark checked each of them out in turn, Light first, and fixed the few cuts and bruises from the combined monster's final attack.

"Hey, we're..thinking we should bring everyone to our house for a bit," she said while doing so. "Our other friend's already there. I could bring everyone, but Petra wants to drive."

Light nodded slowly. "Good..good thinking." She was still panting, out of breath.

"Light..." Clark brushed some of her hair away from her eyes. "You can't blame yourself for this. You always give it everything you've got. You should, try to get some rest."

"Can't..." She shook her head. "Just..take me there, please."
"Okay."