Battle Vixens! - 65

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Episode 65: The Swarm

The meteorologists were confused at first, until it became increasingly clear that those things weren't clouds. Steadily, the black vapor high above the city began forming distinct shapes—at least twelve large ones, the size of cars or buses, and numerous smaller ones. The city's citizens were advised by all available outlets to take shelter as the shapes grew more solid, and orders went out to the VI's active members.

Rowan directed Tora and Fay to join him, Zeno to go with Hugo to a spot near the VI's office space (where the former already was), and Corporal Langdon and Petra to make their way to a point under the highest concentration of forming monsters. Each group was chosen to have at least one member who could hit things in the sky to provoke them, and at least one heavy hitter who could tackle things that landed or got brought to the ground. Their rendezvous points were placed more or less equidistant from each other, intended to cover the city's area about as well as a mere three points could. He knew the monsters would probably target the vixens first anyway—and hoped that most everyone else would have the good sense to stay inside.

Around an hour after noon, they finally finished appearing and began to descend. The larger ones were like gryphons or long, snakelike dragons with wings every few feet; the smaller were like human-sized bats or just big mouths with wings, and buzzed around the bigger ones like hornets around a nest.

Tora craned her head up to the sky, shading her eyes from the afternoon sun with a hand. "Well, uh, I guess you got a good way to bring 'em down? 'Cuz Fay and I can't do jack at that distance."
Rowan nodded. "This will momentarily exhaust me; you will need to cover me when they come." She had also chosen their position to be right next to a sewer main. It was disgusting, but probably the best, least utility-destroying source for a lot of water, fast. If necessary, there was a fire hydrant on the corner here, too.

She grabbed the lid, flipped it over, and then pulled the water from below into a pillar reaching up into the sky, near the altitude of the beasts above—all with a motion like she was slowly lifting heavy weights in her hands. Then she threw her hands apart to either side, and the higher portion of the pillar broke apart into dozens of blades or thin, barbed tentacles of water, the former flying at and cutting through the mist monsters they found while the latter grabbed for wings or body mass as best they could. This assault was short-lived, the lower half of the pillar collapsing when she split the top and the rest soon melting to nothing as she bent over, panting heavily from exerting control on so much water, so far away. But it did its job, provoking two gryphons and a dragon; they screeched and roared and came diving down, along with quite a few surviving smaller monsters.

Zeno pointed her bow skyward, drawing an arrow into the string. "Setup." She fired a volley up with as much drawback force as she could manage; usually her targets weren't quite so far away, but she managed to score a few hits all the same. A dragon dove straight toward her in retaliation with its mouth agape. She placed a shield for it to crash against and dove aside.

"Spike!" Hugo replied, amplifying the word into a pressure wave of sound at the dragon that threw it into a hopeless spin and crash to the ground. This she followed up by coming in and bashing it with the shield while Zeno quickly picked off its attending bat-things with more arrows. It got up and started biting at the nearer vixen, but Hugo stuck her shield in its mouth and hopped back, clapping her hands to turn the big hunk of solidified sound back into actual sound, a sharp wave of pressure going straight through the monster's insides.

"I..ain't sure I got a way to hit somethin' that high up," Corporal Langdon admitted in the car on the way to their position. "My wire don't exactly have unlimited range."
"No no, I know just what the boss was thinkin'," Petra said. "You just focus on making a big spiderweb to catch 'em. Then I throw some rocks at 'em, and they stab themselves, you tangle 'em up so they can't get back in the sky."
The silver-haired girl fixed Petra with a slightly confused sort of look, one of her ears off to one side.

"What?" she said.

"Sorry, it's just that you ain't the sorta person I'd think would pick up on strategy all that quick," she admitted.

"Oh, are you kidding? I sell art for a living," she said. "Sales and advertising is all about strategy."
"Still...that really ain't the same thing."

"Look, it's more just that I know Rowan. And, you get to know a guy, you get a feel for how he thinks."

By the time the monsters were fully formed, Samuel was holding up her hands, maintaining a network of wire with irregular gaps throughout, the ends attached to buildings, telephone poles and streetlamps, her fist closed around a thick bundle consisting of one end of every strand. Petra raised a hunk of concrete, joyfully throwing it sky-high through one of the bigger gaps, then quickly clasped her hands together to make it explode into rocky shrapnel in the midst of the big crowd of beasts. When they descended toward the earth, they charged straight into the trap, and Corporal Langdon stretched her concentration as far as it would go to twist the wire up and around each big beast as a net, tying its wings and limbs and bringing it crashing to the ground.

Petra leapt and swung her sword through some of the bats and winged mouths flying around, lifting chunks of earth in a chaotic rain to catch still more of them; Samuel kept one hand closed in a tight fist, focusing most of her strength and concentration on keeping the big ones bound, growing more wire when some of a net broke, but used her other hand to form and toss her knife, occasionally scoring a kill or two with that.

Tora leapt, pushing herself high into the air with the gravity trick that Gemma had more or less taught her she had, and landed on the back of a gryphon, tearing into its wings with her claws. She jumped off, sweeping through the air and slicing some smaller mist monsters on the way to land on a dragon and run down its length, swiping at its back and wings and anything swooping down toward her all in equal measure.

Fay kept close to Rowan, swinging her staff and placing as large an explosion as she could manage in the way of diving monsters to deter or hurt them. When one gryphon came too close for comfort, its tooth-filled beak open wide, she tossed her staff at it and picked up the blue-haired vixen in her arms, jumping out of the way of the dive before setting her somewhat roughly down again.

The rapid chain of leaping, slashing, landing and running ended with Tora hitting the ground on the opposite side of Rowan from Fay, her claws raised and a shaky growl erupting from her throat as the exertion started to show. Finally, Rowan got up and raised the water that had splashed on the ground from the earlier assault into a solid dome around the three, pushing thick tentacles out from it that whipped at the remaining smaller monsters and grabbed the gryphons and dragons, throwing them to the ground.

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By all accounts, the plan was working, the matchups effective at drawing fire and taking their targets down. But there was one thing that Rowan had failed to account for.

Most of the amnesiac vixens had come to the cafeteria for a somewhat late lunch. They were more or less in the middle of it when the assault of the monsters from the sky began, and of course the employees had the TVs tuned to the news by then. Many of the vixens, driven by a mixture of curiosity and unaccountable familiarity, were drawn closer to the screens to watch.

"Are those the monsters that lady yesterday was talking about?" Cynthia said.
"Well, that's some of them," someone said. "They come in a lot of different forms."

"They attack every day?"
"On average?" someone else replied. "I mean, it kinda varies..sometimes they'll do nothing for a day and then a really big one will—"

He was interrupted by a loud boom as something hit the roof, hard. This was followed by more worrying sounds: A mixture of thunks as smaller masses landed, and then scraping or hard bashing sounds. Everyone looked up with a brief mutual sensation of panic, but there was nothing coming from the ceiling yet.

"Uh, we should be fine," someone spoke up over the din. "They heavily reinforced the roof, for pretty much this reason." An especially loud crash—something crumpling above them—seemed to contradict him somewhat.

The redheaded vixen stood upright when she realized she'd been crouching. She looked around at everyone else to find them still cowering in fear, and especially at Dawn, who looked back up with an uncertain expression. "Well—screw this! Let's go kill 'em!" she said. "Dawn?"
"Uh..y-yeah." Something felt familiar about this, in a way she really didn't like—but the tall, dark-haired vixen stood up slowly. She knew—or felt she knew, anyway—that there was no stopping Cynthia or changing her mind, and wanted to be there rather than make her fight alone. A few murmurs of protest came from the employees and translators present, but Cynthia went around everyone and ran out of the cafeteria, Dawn right behind her, before anyone could muster a fully-formed objection.

After a moment, and another loud crash, Serra slowly stood up, gave a meaningful look to miss 'shadow play', and went to follow them. Then the shadow-wielding girl followed her. A proper chain reaction had started.

The four of them—the first two to follow catching up with Cynthia and Dawn—met their first opposition near the door, a couple armed guards who were at least standing upright, but whose expressions betrayed their uncertainty about the situation. They went to block the group. "You should stay inside," one of them said. "It's safer here."
"We can't have you all getting hurt, right?" the other one said, a bit less certainty in her voice.

"Rrrgh," Cynthia growled, coming as close as her shorter stature allowed to being right in the more confident one's face. "Look, do you want us to stay here, or you want those things offa the roof?!"

The guards exchanged a look, and then, more or less in sync, stepped aside. "Please be careful," the second one said.
"Mr. Shepherd'll kill us if this gets any of you hurt," the first one added.
"Yeah yeah, whatever—come on!" she said, waving back to the group of—now five vixens behind her to hurry up as she broke into a sprint out the doors.

A number of the smaller, batlike monsters were flocking around the sides of the buildings, and no sooner did the doors open than a massive wave of fire shot out, destroying the majority of them on contact. The remainder screeched and cawed in a panic as a crossbow bolts and daggers of ice cut through them and their shadows cast by the afternoon sun turned into spikes shooting up into the air to impale them. These cries of distress brought the rest of the crowd flying, lifting off the roof of the building to swoop at the small crowd of recently-revived warriors.

They spread out to take the monsters on: Kagee-Shibai kept in front of Serra while Dawn stayed close to Cynthia; the girl with the rod who didn't speak English and the one besides Cynthia who had a sword paired up similarly. The grass of the VI headquarters' front lawn erupted into long vines, whipping and grabbing at a dragon and its attending monsters and making them easy targets for some flying orbs of light that shattered into them like glass.

"TRY ME!" Cynthia yelled back at a gryphon that landed right in front of her, throwing a stream of fire from her wrists like a hadouken (not that she knew what that was). When it snapped its sharp-toothed beak forward to try and grab her, Dawn tackled her out of its way, and its shadow solidified into thorny ropes that twisted up around its body, particularly its wings. While it cried out and flailed, trying to free itself, Dawn came to its side and formed one sharp spearhead of ice after another, driving each one hard into its body.

The redhead moved closer to Serra's position, noticing she had another gryphon bearing down on her despite several bolts and waves of cutting wind trying to deter it—the shadow-girl was pinned down maintaining the ropes around that other gryphon while dodging away from a dragon—and they exchanged only the briefest of glances before Cynthia threw a giant wall of fire in front of her and a massive gust of wind turned it into a wave of conflagration that tore through every small monster it touched and brought the attacker crashing to the ground in front of them. Then she formed her sword, wreathing it and her body in flame before jumping at the gryphon and slicing clean through its wing, its side and its legs in several swift swipes.

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The last gryphon facing Rowan's group dissipated as another of Fay's explosion tore through its form, and the blue-haired vixen panted softly as she reached for her phone, pulling up the comms more or less automatically. "Sitrep," she said as loudly as she could, not entirely succeeding at keeping the breath out of her voice.
"Slow going, boss!" Zeno said, and a spike of incoherent noise came through the speakerphone. "We'll survive," she yelled afterward, "but a little support could end things here way quicker."
"Still busy-busy here!" Petra said. "Be done pretty soon though."
"Uh, the—a bunch of them came down on HQ," another voice cut in. "But they're...gone now."
"Details," Rowan barked. "We're on your way, Zeno." She began walking and made a gesture like she might have to toss a wave of water in front of herself—which instead directed Tora and Fay to follow her back to the car.

"Aye-aye!" Zeno replied, then cut out of the call in the middle of another loud burst of noise.

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Most of the smaller beasts were gone by now, and the big ones were either downed with torn-up wings or being bound by plants or shadow. Almost all of the vixens who'd been taking shelter in the headquarters had made it outside, including some more melee-focused ones: A girl who could teleport with her little knives, one who kept her eyes closed and wielded a giant axe, another with a naginata. They—and Cynthia, Kagee-Shibai, the plant-girl and Dawn—bore down on the still-mobile monsters, distributing themselves evenly more or less by instinct, and tore them apart in short order. The bound ones were next, each one executed cleanly as Serra and the one with the staff picked off the last few "bats" when they tried to swoop down on the others.

Seemingly as suddenly as it had started, it was over—the loud, chaotic fight turned to silence as all the vixens stood still for a moment, most of them panting from a mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration. They glanced around at each other for a moment, feeling a strange mixture of satisfaction, nostalgia, and...confusion. There had been very little talking—incoherent yelling at most—and many of them didn't even speak the same language in the first place, and yet they had coordinated almost perfectly: Cynthia's flames coming nowhere near the plants, Dawn's cold not dampening the flames, no one hitting anyone else..it had all just, worked out. As if they had functioned as a team before, all directed by the same intelligence—or as if working together like this was what they, or at least their powers, were made to do.

The silence was broken by some applause and cheering from nearby windows, and from the open doors of the VI headquarters. Whatever the meaning of that sense of synchronicity they had all felt was, for the moment it was clear they had done some real good here. And many couldn't help but turn their heads Cynthia's way—knowing that without her speaking up and acting first, they might have remained cowering inside until the roof came crashing down on them.

She turned back around, toward the door they had gone out through; one of those two guards from earlier was trying to wave everyone back inside. Looking around slightly more, a few brave souls were hesitantly cracking open the doors of the other buildings, and...the group of vixens were mostly still looking at her for what to do next. "Uh.." Cynthia waved back toward the VI headquarters and started that way; they all more or less fell in behind her.

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When Rowan's car arrived, there was little left of the multitude of smaller mist-monsters, and the three big ones were already looking very worn-down, all fairly indistinct and skittering around the ground rather than flying. Zeno and Hugo were positioned back-to-back, mostly occupied with taking quick potshots and each using her own variety of shield to block their assaults. Despite the former's earlier assurance, the two of them were looking badly worn out themselves.

The monsters hadn't noticed the new arrivals yet, all of their focus clearly on the pair who'd held their attention nearly since they had formed. Rowan signaled for Tora and Fay to each take one of them, and strode toward the third herself. There were no sewer mains nearby, but she spotted a fire hydrant and used her sword to quickly flip off the cap, turning the pressurized flow from inside into a huge tentacle ending in a blade which rose up and stabbed deep into the center of her target, pinning the struggling gryphon into the ground for the brief period it survived before turning back into indistinct mist. Tora shredded into the dragon before her at more or less the same time, and Fay pummeled the other gryphon with her staff before finishing it off with a small explosion.

Rowan's phone rang almost as soon as this was done. "Y'all still need help?" Corporal Langdon's voice came through. "We're all done here."
"Likewise. It appears we are through for today," she replied.

"Meet back at HQ, then?" Petra asked.
"Desirable. But it would also be acceptable to leave, if there is anything urgent you need to attend to."

"Weeelll, I'm giving metal-head here a ride anyway." Rowan could easily imagine the gray-haired vixen's confused look. "So I'll see ya there!"