Ah, power. Fire and brimstone. Lunalette luxuriated in it.
Red Aether dominated everything around him, every inch of the titanic being he'd made himself the core of. Controlling Vangloria was as easy as moving his own body. All it took was a thought to move that massive arm upwards, metal creaking and screeching, and wave it in the direction of the Hanged Man.
The movement produced a mighty gust of wind, forcing the Hanged Man to brace itself as it went skidding backwards, but that hadn't been the intent. No, not at all. As Vangloria made the movement, crimson Aether shot out of the hand, stopping in the air like a second miniature sun.
With a flash, the confluence of Aether transformed -- into a flat black plane, circular, like some kind of dark portal. The Hanged Man, clearly anticipating what was about to happen, went to roll out of the way. Oh, but it was far too late for that.
"Kill them, Vangloria," Lunalette hissed.
The black hole widened -- just a tad -- and an endless flood of pitchforks came flooding out, buffeting the Hanged Man. These weren't the same as the pitchforks Lunalette had used before -- more like shadows with substance than anything else -- but they were more than enough to do damage. Each pitchfork that struck the Hanged Man was scraping away just a bit more of its liquid metal, slowly but surely reducing its size.
How long would it be before he saw the Arcana Automatic's skeleton? The Baron was so looking forward to it.
"Oh," Lunalette remembered. "You exist as well, don't you?"
Vangloria whirled around with speed incongruous to its size, and Lunalette came face to face with the man who'd come swooping in -- Roy Oliphant-Dawkins. His skin-dragon had reshaped itself again, more like a butterfly than anything else, with two massive wings spread out as sails.
Lunalette considered the Oliphant patriarch. A brown mane of hair, cascading and wild like that of a lion. Eyes narrowed in single-minded predation. A body built to survive. Every aspect of this man suggested the animalistic.
Well… it rather suited a disgraceful beast to be skewered, didn't it?
Vangloria raised its hands up -- and black portals opened on the ground, each providing a massive black pitchfork to his waiting grasp. In an instant, he flipped them over in his hands and thrust them down through the wings of the skin-dragon, piercing the epidermis and pinning Oliphant's familiar to the ground.
Roy stood up, releasing the reins of skin he'd been holding. No doubt he'd predicted Vangloria's next move, but too late, too late. Always just a second too late. These people were so slow.
Lunalette spun the pitchforks buried in the ground, contorting the skin between them and twisting it around Roy, holding him in place like a spiderweb. He was fully restrained, with only his head and a single forearm being visible. Captured by his own ability. How droll.
Thump.
With that same grin on his face, Lunalette turned his head to see the Hanged Man charging towards him once more. The Arcana Automatic had escaped the barrage of shadows, but it seemed it had lost roughly half its mass in the process. Such a tiny thing it was, running towards Vangloria as if all life depended on it.
Well, Lunalette supposed, it was just the right size for a kick now. Turning Vangloria back to the Hanged Man, he drew its foot back, ready to slam into the automatic with all the power he could muster. An involuntary laugh spilled from his throat, free and wild and -- more than anything -- victorious. He was curious to see just how far this supposed legend would fly.
Vangloria's leg struck out at the Hanged Man, fast as lightning --
-- there was a flash of white light --
-- and a second later, Lunalette found himself falling over.
His balance had suddenly failed him, Vangloria toppling over under its own weight -- and the only thing that prevented a full collapse was the great armour planting its hands against the ground and pushing itself back up. What had happened? Lunalette looked around wildly, his eyes uncomprehending. An attack? Had an unseen enemy struck?
Before he could consider the situation, though, the Hanged Man was in his face again, attacking without mercy. One of its arms had disappeared -- the material reallocated to increase the size of the other huge hand, fingers extended and sharpened into claws. It slashed towards Lunalette's body directly, taking advantage of his sudden decrease in elevation.
Damnation Vangloria!
The black titan twitched its fingers, and another portal appeared immediately to the left of the Hanged Man, firing off another swarm of shadows before the attack could make contact. Instantly, the Hanged Man moved to dodge -- but not by ducking or leaping. Instead, it decomposed into a puddle of liquid metal, splashing onto the floor as the torrent of pitchforks passed above it.
There was a hollow crack as Lunalette creased his stone brow. Irritating, but vermin often were.
Vangloria raised its foot up to stomp down on the pest, but at that same moment the Hanged Man reformed itself. Abandoning the shape of humanity entirely, it lashed out as a long snake-like creature, wrapping itself around Vangloria's leg as it came down. The constriction wasn't strong enough to actually do any damage, but the positioning meant that Lunalette couldn't easily attack it without hitting himself.
What on earth? When had this pilot assumed such competence? A moment ago, he'd just been running at Vangloria again and again, attacking with simple punches and kicks, and now this? Had Lunalette been tricked? Had Lunalette been hustled?
Each thought provoked a new spike of anger, a new fury that tightened his grip and clenched his jaw. To hell with it. An insult like this could not be tolerated, never tolerated. Vangloria could withstand its own power anyway.
Six black portals opened around Vangloria's leg, facing inwards, locked onto the Hanged Man's tightening shape. He thought he was clever, didn't he? So very clever. Would he feel the same once he'd been reduced to mincemeat?!
Ha! Doubtful!
The shadow pitchforks fired, zooming towards the Hanged Man from every direction, ready to cut away at insolent meat, and --
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Skeletal Set.
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-- they missed.
Lunalette's eyes widened.
No, no, they hadn't missed, they had been dodged. A second before they would have made contact, there had been a red flash of light -- and something about the Hanged Man had changed. It had pulled itself up his leg with new strength and speed, and the shadows had done little more than buffet against Vangloria's leg. It creaked with protest as Lunalette swung that massive body around, looking for his prey.
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A weight on Vangloria's back. There.
Lunalette thrashed the construct violently, enough to send the unwelcome passenger flying off -- and then he whirled around, seizing it out of the air with one of Vangloria's hands. Seeing that he'd effectively captured the Arcana Automatic, he allowed his grin to return.
The Hanged Man had retained its serpentine shape, but now tiny little legs wiggled out from its form as well. It must have used those to climb up Vangloria's body. It took Lunalette a second to realise just what the pathetic organism reminded him of -- a ferret! How dull.
What was more interesting was the armour the Hanged Man was now wearing. Strips of industrial-grey metal were wrapped around the automatic like a ribcage, and a skull-mask was stretched around its head. Lunalette had seen this before, hadn't he? Ruth Blaine had used an ability just like that to increase her own strength and speed. So she was piloting the Hanged Man.
Just as Lunalette realised that, the head of the Hanged Man split open vertically and -- like the tongue of a frog -- a sharp tendril lashed out from the opening to strike at the Baron directly. With a contemptuous sneer on his lips, he easily snatched that out of the air with Vangloria's other hand. The tendril quickly exploded out into a net that kept that hand closed, but no matter. He could more easily kill this woman with clenched fists anyway.
"Very poor showing, Ruth Blaine," he declared, knowing she could hear him. "It reeks of desperation. You --"
Footsteps.
A thought occurred -- and it was one that really should have occurred a while ago, delayed only by the chaos of combat. If Ruth Blaine was the one piloting the Hanged Man now…
…where was the one who'd been piloting it earlier?
Lunalette whipped his head around -- just in time to see a young man running across Vangloria's shoulder. Pink Aether was coursing across his body, so it took a moment to get a good look at his face, but the Baron recognised him all the same -- Scout Oliphant-Dawkins, another member of that accursed family. Something was clinging to the back of his neck, too, legs buried into his skin, Aether shining from it like an aurora borealis.
He knew this. Lunalette knew this. Aether battery.
"Begone!" the Baron roared, moving to swipe Scout off with Vangloria’s hand -- but that hand refused to move.
His eyes flicked back, wide in horror. The main body of the Hanged Man had oozed out into a web as well, holding Vangloria's massive hands firmly in place. He was trapped. He was stuck. In that moment, all he could do was watch as Scout Oliphant-Dawkins leapt up towards him, hand outstretched in a grab.
"Get away from me!" Lunalette screamed.
"Perfect Palace!" Scout cried. "Palisade Princedom!"
And, in a massive flash of pink light, the two of them vanished.
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The second the Baron disappeared from the 'head' of his mecha, the red light that had coursed through it faded away, and it ceased all movement. It was still holding onto the Hanged Man tight as shit, though. That was a pain.
Accepting she wouldn't be able to break free, Ruth raised her hands up into the liquid metal above her and let it pull her inside. Her eyes and mouth firmly shut, she felt herself be transported through the body of the Hanged Man, finally emerging on the outer hull. From there, it was just a matter of squeezing out from between those metal black fingers.
"Roy!" she called out through her hands. "You alive?!"
"Yeah!" came the distant reply. "How about you?!"
Ruth ignored the useless question as she jumped off the Hanged Man to the ground below, using the Skeletal Set to break her fall. Every few seconds, she glanced nervously over her shoulder at the spot Lunalette had vanished from. How long would he be gone? How much time did they have?
"I can seal him away for a little while," Scout had said, before handing her the controls. "Give you folks time to come up with a plan or somethin'. All you need to do is distract him so I can get in close."
Ruth wanted to have faith in her comrade, but when he'd said it, there'd been that look in his eye…
Running across the scorched ground, she reached the pile of skin that served as Roy Oliphant-Dawkins' prison. Her nose wrinkled as she caught a whiff of the skin-blanket -- it had already started to rot -- and she had to wave her hands wildly to keep the flies away. She looked up at Roy, at the head and arm emerging from the epidermal mass.
"Am I okay cutting through this?" she asked, holding up her claws.
Roy shook his head. "Won't work -- way too tough. This ability is an asshole. Once I grab skin, I can't, uh, ungrab it, looks like."
"Shit." She glanced over her shoulder again. "How long do you think we have?"
Roy sucked in air through his teeth. "Maybe a couple minutes. Four, five at most. Hard to say. Either way, you'd be best off getting back into the Hanged Man, girlie."
Girlie? "The Hanged Man's trapped," she said.
"Yeah, but it's sturdy. When Scout's ability ends, this whole place is gonna go through it. This damn skin should protect me a little, and I can infuse just my arm and head to get through the rest, but you don't wanna be out in the open."
Ruth furrowed her brow. "What do you mean? Gonna go through it -- what's, what's that? I thought his, uh, Perfect Prison thing sent things to another dimension or something."
"Well…" Roy sighed. "That was the idea, yeah, that was what Scout was going for. But that's a damn hard thing to do, you know? Whole other plane or realm or whatever. Couldn't figure it out, in the end. So, uh…"
"So what?"
"So," Roy winced. "He kinda found a workaround."
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The Baron Lunalette de Fleur had been shrunk. He could tell straight away.
Vangloria, summoned and controlled by his Aether, was like an extension of his own body. Even if he couldn't move it from outside of the cockpit, he could still feel it's position and status -- and as he'd been swallowed up by this ability, he'd felt the construct grow larger and larger in relation to him. There was no way Scout Oliphant-Dawkins would have used an ability to enlarge his enemies weapon, so the obvious conclusion was that he himself had been shrunk.
It could have happened in worse places.
The room Lunalette had been deposited in seemed to be some kind of kitchen, stocked with ovens and stoves, freezers and fridges. The Baron experimentally tapped away at the controls of a nearby coffee-maker, but there was no response. Just a hollow prop, then. Why even bother with the decor if it served no purpose? An utter waste of Aether.
As he strolled through the room, the Baron showed no trace of anxiety. How long would he be restrained within this ability? Was there a time limit, or was it a conditional seal? Lunalette peered through a nearby window, and saw vast and indistinct shapes moving in the distance. The outside world, made unrecognisable by the sheer size difference.
If he were to hazard a guess, Lunalette would say that he was currently within a space that occupied less than a millimeter, floating in the spot he'd originally been taken from. When the ability ended, he most likely would be returned to that previous location. But if leaving required some kind of action from him, just sitting around thinking about it wouldn't do much good. No, not at all.
First thing first. Lay of the land. Lunalette gently closed his eyes and released a ping of Aether, allowing his red energy to flood through the space.
As expected, he was surrounded by his enemy’s Aether, down to the walls around him and the floor he stood on. If he traced the shape of that Aether, though, he could get an idea of the layout. Six floors, with a staircase running through the corner. Right now, he was on the bottom floor.
Plus… he could feel the spot where the Aether was thickest, most prominent, right at the top of this complex. Lunalette was willing to bet that was where Scout Oliphant-Dawkins was.
There was a possibility he was intentionally focusing Aether there as a decoy, but Lunalette doubted it. The boy had needed to use an Aether battery to pull off this bloated ability -- there was no way he'd waste his capacity with a cheap trick like that.
So, the Baron had to get up five floors to reach his adversary. He doubted it would be as easy as just walking up the stairs. Perhaps there were traps in place, or some other kind of defences?
Best to test things, first. With a grunt, Lunalette allowed a single pitchfork to crawl out of his elbow, seizing the handle with his other hand and pulling it free. It was thin and fragile, the barest sliver of Lunalette's power, but it would do.
With an analytical gleam in his eyes, the Baron released the pitchfork…and let it zoom up the stairs.
It wouldn’t take much to dismantle an ability like this. Murder was but a simple labour.