Battle Vixens! - 120

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Episode 120: Gust Front

"I don't like this."

Magus jumped slightly—her focus having been a little too much on the center of the campus courtyard, where their first monster of the day had been forecasted to show up. She turned her head partway around; Dr. Clark Quinn—just arriving outside after getting a boost from Amp—was the one talking. "Uh, don't like what exactly?"
"The mist monsters showing up here," she said, gesturing where Magus had just been looking as she came up next to her.
"How come? I mean, it's pretty convenient that they're not wrecking the buildings and stuff, right?"
"Students pass through here, if not congregate here, all the time. We've been lucky so far, but just imagine...one attack with the wrong timing, and only a few seconds' warning."

"Well, it's not like we can ask them to relocate."

"I suppose not."

Gemma was standing quietly on either side of them. She'd been the first to arrive; Magus figured she'd been with Amory when the alert when out. "Sooo, uh, giant bird thing. Any pro tips?" Magus asked the closer one (Plus).

"The one we fought yesterday had Void's powers—" "—so hopefully this one will be easier. But—" "—we still need some way to ground it..."
"You can't like, use aerial denial stuff like yesterday?"
Plus shook her head. "That was taking advantage of how it was flying so fast—" "—and Prism is way more powerful than I am alone."

"Well, can you like, imitate Sam's wire thing?" she said, making a vague gesture with her hands. "Or I guess I could—"

Clark quietly cleared her throat to get their attention. She had her hands raised, and her needle was rushing around through the air in front of her, weaving a big net of glowing blue thread.

"Oh...yeah, that should work."

"We could also fly with me around, but..."

"Fighting in the air's a bad idea," Gemma said. "We wouldn't be able to move fast enough to keep it from grabbing us—" "—or just swallowing someone whole."

"My thoughts exactly," Clark nodded.

"It has a certain, um, pattern—" Minus said. "—I'll let you know when it's coming in for a dive," Plus finished.

---

A volley of five or six light-arrows cut through the mildly disturbing sight of two monsters becoming one. "Hey, no cutscenes in real life!" Zeno said. "Keep hitting it!"
"Uh—right." Hugo broke her weapon back into sound waves, amplifying them and sending them forward to crash into the fusing monster.

It continued forming all the same, spreading two wings even larger than those of the gryphon out and sprouting two heads...make that three, with the snakewolf's usual tail-head appearing at the end of a tail two to three times as long as either of its 'parts' had had. It was also noticeably taller and larger than either monster had been on its own.

Naturally, the beast screeched/roared/howled when it finished forming. Hugo was ready for this, turning the noise back on its body to send an eruption of black mist off of its center mass. She was a little less ready for it to immediately and rapidly charge straight at her, its running speed apparently improved rather than being hindered by its larger size. Her reflex of raising a shield in the face of danger saved her; the lion-head bit down on the shield instead of her body, and she had time to let go of it and scramble backwards before the wolf-head could come in for a second try. Feeling the familiar pull from Warp, she let herself be teleported a fair distance away before finally losing her balance from that awkward back-run and falling on the ground for a moment.

"Hey, get its attention so I can call this in!" Zeno said, currently busy backing up and placing light-shields while the snake-headed tail, apparently misunderstanding how a snake was supposed to work, kept whipping its snout straight into them.

"No worries." Warp threw her knife at it from a little to one side—enough that the wolf head could see her doing it. Finally on her feet again, Hugo blew up the shield still in the lion head's mouth, sending the noise straight into its body, and yelled to quickly form a new shield in her hands, letting the sound carry to where the beast could hear her. It charged after Warp first, its snake-head behind it turning its attention on the shield maiden.

It bashed against her shield a few times, then unhinged its jaw and tried to bite it, scraping its teeth down along the front. If vixen weapons hadn't proven to be generally indestructible, she'd be quite worried about this.

...No, actually, she was worried about it anyway, and backed away as it kept beating itself against the shield.

"This is Zeno! Two of our targets fused, looks like it's gonna delay our next appointment. Any assistance would be appreciated."
After a moment, a response came: "Petra here—same problem. Think we got it under control here, but can't come help. Sorry!"
Then, finally: "I'm on my way." This was unmistakeably Rowan's voice.

Surprisingly, Zeno didn't put the phone down just yet. Instead, while Warp got Hugo and herself out of danger and then taunted the monster with another knife—she quickly dialed someone else. "Listen—I know you don't like to fight, but there's a few showing up right next to your office and now we can't get there in time. Can you just—lure them away from your collagues, to us?" She named the corner they were on, then hung up, not waiting for the other side's reply. And then she raised her bow, firing it on the chimera from behind until it whirled to charge at her instead.

---

"Wh—come on—that just isn't fair!" Karis complained, gesturing at the triplet she'd just punched into the air as it sank into the torso of one of those bear-monsters. The other two "parts" of their three-for-one opponent pulsated and grew as the original bear became slightly smaller, its claws reshaping into giant weapon-like appendages. "It wasn't there two seconds ago!"

"It's not like these things ever played fair in the first place," Petra said, taking a few steps back from the pair she'd just been fighting. "Just get ready to punch out the three bears, Goldilocks." As they came close to being fully formed, she raised up a fist of stone from the concrete, pulling it back to prepare a punch.
"Which one's papa bear, then?" Karis summoned Remedy behind the fusing monster, ordering an all-out attack on its back.

"Aren't they all kinda the same?" Nico remarked from the sidelines—her fruits still pelting the three of them as they finally 'came to' and moved to attack.

Petra's fist slammed into the two in front of her, sending them staggering backwards but not landing quite enough force to knock them over. So she drew her other hand back, making the stone-fist reshape into a right hand to match it before punching forward again, managing to knock one of them over. The one Remedy was assaulting turned around to try to grab her, and she disappeared, Karis running up behind it, leaping with her arm raised and then slamming a gauntleted fist down into its side before kicking herself off of it and backflipping away.

---

"I'm on my way." Rowan looked around briefly. "Tora, Fay—with me. You two keep working with Sam here."

"Sure," Cynthia said; Dawn nodded. The other two vixens silently came up next to Rowan before the three of them took off at a run, matching pace with each other as they headed off in the direction of Zeno's team.

They just had the last of those tentacle-rat things left, and Cynthia was taking her latest turn trying to incinerate it before stepping back to catch her breath, Dawn moving in to take her turn stabbing and slashing at it. It broke free of its trap and both vixens ran, luring it to another one for Sam to snap shut around it.

"Dawn, head that-a-way," Sam said, pointing with one hand while holding onto the traps with the other. "Got two bashers showing up; lead 'em here. Keep 'em distant from the overgrown mouse too—don't want no fusions to deal with on our end."

"Got it!"

---

"It's diving—" "—Now!"

Clark had summoned four puppets to help hold the net. Now they tossed it up and forward into the approaching bird-monster, and she pulled it tight around its body and wings as it tumbled screeching to the ground. The puppets kept a hold of the thread to keep the thrashing monster tied down while Gemma threw several dozen projectile attacks at it in a row. Magus could hardly keep track of all of the different powersets she was imitating just now. The mage vixen focused on some long-chant, high-damage spells, making sure to channel each one to make it less tiring to cast. There were two more fights to get through today, after all!

Eventually, it thrashed enough to tear apart most of the netting and broke free, immediately hopping forward and pecking down at the vixens to try to catch whoever it could. Clark had given everyone plenty of warning, so it only managed to destroy a couple of puppets. Then it screeched, lifting its wings and flapping them to send a gale of wind forward.

"Eeyaah!" Magus was knocked off her feet, the wind lifting her several feet up into the air. Gemma thought quickly enough to have Minus run up and grab her, diving both of them down into a shadow-hole in the ground before the big bird could swipe one of its excess limbs forward, trying to grab her in its talons. Then it took off into the air again.

After they came up out of the magic-based hole in reality, Minus set Magus back on her feet. "Uh, thanks."
"No problem.—" "—The wing flap was uh, super deadly with Void's power,—" "—so I didn't know what it usually does with it."

"But I guess 'hit the deck' would be a pretty good idea, huh?"

Clark was busy using her surviving two puppets to make another net, braiding together rope to make this one sturdier than the last. Magus spread out with Gemma's two bodies, sending a couple of lightning bolts down from the dark clouds above onto its head while waiting for it to dive down at them again.

---

Hephaestus sighed.

She stood watching out one of the tinted windows toward the street. Despite the evidence on hand, a small part of her hoped that she would see someone else with a fox tail show up out there before any black mist did. She already had a plan for when that didn't happen, a way to try and minimize how many people saw her—the first part being to wait here and not show up outside until the danger actually appeared.

Luck was an illusion, and if the Giver was to be believed, their enemy lacked the capacity for emotions like empathy or mercy, let alone the intellect required to intentionally irritate one person in particular. She still cursed her bad luck when the black mist appeared outside, then quickly turned around to the open space behind her, confirming that no one had idiotically stepped into said space before raising her blades and slashing open a portal to outside.

It didn't help that there was a sheet of rain coming down just now; she dove through the portal and closed it immediately to minimize the wet floor left behind, but there was nothing to be done about the water immediately soaking her excess of hair and fur as she raised her black-hilted blade and threw it at one of the three chargers which had just now begun to look for something to destroy. On the one hand, these things were very good at vandalism, but—to her advantage—they were also very easy to lead on a chase.

It squealed, moving to charge at her, and the other two followed alongside it. Re-summoning the thrown weapon was trivial, so she did that and cut a portal in front of herself, standing her ground. While she usually used this part of her power to make portals she could jump through—that is, openings that faced her—there was no reason she couldn't instead use it to open a portal facing away from herself instead, as a defensive maneuver. This one in particular dumped the stupid beasts out as far in the direction behind her as she could make it reach.

The dumb beasts were already at a full-tilt charge before she made the portal, and they weren't nearly smart enough to be disoriented by the abrupt shift in surroundings. They kept going for several more yards before screeching to a halt, looking around for a new target since the one they'd been after had disappeared. By that point, the monochrome-maned vixen had used two judiciously-placed portals to put herself a good distance past them—but still close enough to be seen, and to raise and throw her white-handled blade at one of them to get its attention.

These monsters' collective idiocy was as well-documented as the immense danger they posed to civilians despite it. When they made mistakes, and even when they suffered for those mistakes, they didn't learn from them. So even the flat of the blade awkwardly bouncing off of one's face was more than enough to draw its attention her way, and when the three of them went into a full-tilt run at her again, she cut open another portal.

This was going to take a few minutes, but it was relatively safe, got them away from her research and her colleagues, and it didn't leave her in one place for very long. No one would get more than a couple of seconds' glimpse at her. At least—that was her hope anyway.

---

Remedy leapt and stabbed her sword partway into the back of a bear-triplet, using her weight to drag the sword down through its body while it tried to swat back at her with the two giant blades it had for hands—neither of which could actually get to the middle of its back. The Stand left the sword behind while merging with Karis again to let her punch another one in the side, knocking it over. Petra was busy slamming the third one with her stone fist, knocking it in the general direction of the other two. All three were starting to look indistinct.

"What, are they dying already? I thought fusing made them last way longer!"
"You and I both hit pretty hard, dear," Petra pointed out. "And the barrage of fruit is not to be underestimated. By the way—you holding up, Nico?"
"Yep!" The green-haired vixen was sitting on an upper branch of one of her trees a decent distance away, giving a thumbs-up.

"Good. Let's finish this." Petra gathered the material for her weapon and the stone fist, along with a decent amount of concrete and dirt, formed it into three large stone spikes, then drove them down through the bodies of the three monsters, merging their ends into the ground at the bottom to keep them pinned in place. Just keeping them pinned like this seemed to take most of her effort and concentration, so Karis went and punched/slashed them each in turn, one after the other, ducking around the continued fruit-volleys from Nico's trees, until all three of them finally dissipated at once.

---

"Guess it can still fly," Hugo commented, watching the fused monster climb higher into the sky, only a couple of arrows from Zeno going high enough to hit it.
"That's to be expected."
"Ready to go up after it again?" Warp asked.

"Bad idea—that tail'd bite her," Zeno said before Hugo could answer.

"So we just wait for it to feel like landing?"
"Not necessarily...we could try focusing fire on one of its wings. If you don't mind helping?" She readied another arrow, getting ready to fire forward-up. Warp nodded, sending several arrows and her own weapon along to hit the beast in its left wing. It twisted around in its flight, trying to bite at what the projectiles would've been coming from if they were following normal physics—and it did more roaring and screeching, which Hugo was able to turn back against it with some concentration.

This process was interrupted by the noise of something running closer to them. Turning that way, Hugo found what looked like a hole in the air, out of which three chargers seemed to have just emerged. She moved to intercept, raising her shield and yelling a wave of noise over at them to get their attention. Their manner of arrival raised some questions, but she had a guess those would be answered pretty soon without her needing to ask.

Indeed, the hole the monsters had come from disappeared, and a new one opened itself next to Zeno, an unfamiliar mostly-white-haired vixen with a pair of katanas in her hands stepping out of it. "Heph! Welcome to the party," she said, seeming to recognize the stranger.

"This is not a party," Heph said flatly.
"Think you can get that thing back to the ground?" she asked, ignoring the objection, and pointed up at the gryphon-snake-wolf.

Heph glanced upward. "It may be too big to fit."

"Well, it's a great opportunity to test what happens when you slam a portal shut on something then, isn't it?"

Meanwhile, Hugo waited for the first charger to come ram itself into her shield, then used the momentum to toss it over herself and slam it into the ground judo-style. Warp teleported her out of the way of the other two, and she sent another, stronger wave of noise through them, enough to topple them and send them briefly rolling along the ground. Zeno turned away from the conversation to pepper them with a few arrows while they were stunned, then ran over away from Heph, placing a light-shield for them to ram into and then diving away to the side.

Warp appeared next to Hephaestus. "Looks like it's 'bout to dive."
"I can see that." She jumped into the air and slashed her swords in an X shape diagonally forward-above herself, making the widest portal she could and pairing it to one in the apparent trajectory of the monster. Then she dove down past the lower edge of the portal, rolling along the ground and bouncing back to her feet again, turning to face where she'd just been standing.

The monster was, indeed, too wide for the portal, especially with its wings spread out. Part of its body went in, while the rest crashed against the outer edge of the portal as though it were a physical object. When Hephaestus tried to close the portal, it visibly squeezed in on the monster's body, but the monster violently jerked around and pushed back, black mist erupting off of it, and seemed to force the opening wider for just long enough for its body to squeeze through and fall awkwardly onto the ground; then the portal slammed shut.

Hugo's voice was starting to get a little hoarse, so she clapped her hands together to make a wave of noise instead, sending it over at the three chargers to get their attention before they hit a building. They turned and ran her way once again, and she again raised her shield. Before they could reach her, however, a bunch of the water pooled onto the sides of the street gathered into some thin tentacle-like limbs, grabbing for their front legs with just enough force to trip them and send them toppling along the ground.

"Boss! Glad you're here," Zeno said, shooting some more arrows at the grounded gryphon-wolf-thing while it worked to regain its footing.
"What about us?" Fay asked while running up to start placing some explosions into the downed chargers.

"That was a plural you!" she insisted. Rowan strode toward the large target, using both of her hands to gather some more water up into spiked tentacles and wrapping them up around its body and tail to keep it from moving. Hephaestus came close enough to start slashing into its already-injured wing, stopping only once it looked too damaged to fly with, and then slowly stepped back away, panting heavily.

Tora ran up and started slashing the chargers until they got up, then led one of them on a chase straight up to Hugo's shield; Fay ran the others around until Zeno could get their attention with some arrows. The three of them had this more or less in hand, so Rowan ignored the chargers and focused on keeping the fused monster pinned down. Warp alternated throwing her weapon at the several available targets, watching for anyone who needed bailing out.

The fused beast was starting to look indistinct, and the chargers never lasted very long anyway. It wasn't going to take them much longer to finish them all off.

---

"It's gonna dive again!—" "—Is the net—?"
"Close enough!" Clark interrupted, bringing up two new puppets and having them and the two old oens grab what she'd made.

Magus tried to follow the motion of the giant bird through the sky, and soon realized that she was between it and the net. Taking a deep breath, she channeled a transposition spell, and when it did dive down at her, she teleported over past the net to get away. Then it was caught again, and they had a repeat of their first set of attacks. Only this time, Magus dove to the ground and grabbed some of the grass in her hands (like that would help) when it broke free and started flapping its wings at everyone. It turned out to not even be aiming the wind her way, so she stood back up again and brushed herself off when it took to the sky again, feeling slightly silly.

The bird in the sky looked somewhat indistinct; it didn't have much life left in it. It also looked to Magus like it was just circling around once in prepation to swoop down at them again.

"Um—" "—It's already diving!" Gemma said, confirming this suspicion. There hadn't been any time for Clark to weave another net, so they'd just have to dodge this one. Magus ran for the nearest wall, and Dr. Quinn raised up several puppets and had them run around the middle of the courtyard, seemingly to keep the monster's attention. This seemed to work well enough, the giant bird grabbing a few of the puppets and continuing up into the air to circle itself around yet again.

Clark seemed a little out of breath from bringing up so many puppets in a row. She wasn't about to have time to make more net this dive either, and it seemed likely the monster was going to just keep doing this. Maybe this was just what this kind did when they got damaged, and they'd all been lucky the day before to take that one out before it could fly again? Clearly something needed to be done to knock the thing out of the sky again, or damage its wings.

It was going to come for the center of the courtyard again, after some more of the puppets. Gemma was probably using light-and/or-shadow magic to hide the three of them and make the puppets seem like the only targets. Magus was pretty sure of the timing, and got started on a new spell. It would be moving fast, and her aim wasn't amazing, so it'd need to hit a wide area. A bolt of lightning really should be enough to knock a bird out of the sky, but that just wasn't how these monsters worked. However, they did need to follow the laws of physics to some extent. She just needed a physical hit, to give it enough momentum in the wrong direction.

With the idea for the spell solidly in her mind, she began making some of the first motions of it, channeling to make it as cheap to cast as possible. She needed to be ready to capitalize on the downed bird, after all, and there was no better use of the time spent waiting for it to actually dive. From there, it was just a matter of waiting for the timing to be right...

"Impact Wave!" Magus swung her sword in a sideways slice, left-to-right, sending out a wide wave of kinetic force—like what Lift's power could do sometimes. The monster dove right into the wave, catching it full in the side of its body; the momentum imparted to it sent it twisting sideways/forward through the air, losing control of its flight and crashing to the ground. All of this should have been great news, except that this sight came along with the sound of someone yelping in pain and then hitting the ground.

---

People-watching had never been a habit of Blake's before. But, sitting on a bench in the park, waiting around while invisible, there wasn't much else Light felt like doing. She needed as much of her attention as possible to notice the alert when the monsters showed up and respond to it immediately. And she needed to conserve all the energy she could for when that time came—and when it came again, and then a third time today.

It felt a little strange...maybe even wrong, to do this while invisible. But, at least, it was a relief to see normal people mostly just living their lives still. This...this was what everyone was fighting for. Someday, somehow, they would drive those things away for good and everything would...

Well, it probably wasn't exactly right to think that everything would go back to normal. But at least there would be a chance for everyone to live peacefully again.

At this point in her thoughts, the familiar noise came out of her phone, and she pulled it out immediately to look, hopping down onto her feet at the same time. There was an attack at the school—good, they had people there to take care of that. And there was one in the city, closer to her. It wasn't somewhere that monsters had shown up before, as far as she was aware, but with the map on her phone she was pretty sure she understood how to get there, and started quickly walking in the right direction while double-checking the surrounding area on her phone.

It was near a few businesses...and an elementary school. Well, that wasn't good, she thought, putting away her phone and picking up the pace into a proper run. Maybe they weren't going to go that way, and would focus on the people immediately around them—but it'd be best if a vixen was already there to greet them and hold their attention instead.

But...an elementary school...?

A terrible thought occured to Light. No, it wouldn't make any sense—these monsters didn't work like that, right? It had to be a coincidence. But still, that thought drove her to run a little bit faster.

---

So, hi, happy 2024 and all that. I've been doing a lot of "writing, but not publishing" lately, in some cases not releasing things because they just aren't finished, but sometimes (as in the case of this entry) because I kind of want to finish the next one after it so there won't be such a wait in between. But I got over it and decided to publish this anyway. I do hope to finish the next part soon, but no telling whether I actually will.

EDIT 1/21: Don't mind me, just plugging a minor plot hole with some extra sentences in the third paragraph...