Taubitha braced herself as she watched the three ladies step away from their respective kegs, stretching and practicing fighting positions. In the distance, someone was singing a song about fighting dragons in the sky while being exponentially high, and large spheres covered in mirrors were spinning around in midair - doubtlessly conjured up by light elementals to help put on the show. Every once in a while the glittering orbs would ingest one another and then release two more orbs so that slowly over time there were more and more of these progressively smaller orbs. Eventually, it seemed that they had all become just specks of light in the sky and on the walls of the dance floor, but then all of a sudden what those small little specks actually were was the reflections off a large, conglomerate orb, which spun slowly, slowly, slowly around, glittering the crowd until it began the cycle all over again by subdividing itself into but two orbs.
"What do we think?" one of the ladies asked Taubitha with an icy smile on her face, almost like she was some strange, porcelain doll trained to kill. "Shall we give you a little bit of ze training, ya?"
Before Taubitha could aptly respond, it was too late. Two of the women cartwheeled towards her, ending up in handstands and kicking at her with their feet! This would've seemed a little silly to Taubitha, especially considering she was used to such gymnastic maneuvers, except in that as she quickly dodged their strikes, she noticed that on the ladies' shoes were retracting blades! That was seriously nasty, not to mention dangerous and harmful. One thing was abundantly clear in that moment: no matter how nicely these ladies presented themselves, this fight was not just training. This was a serious brawl!
What made it all the more stranger was that the partying scene around them was so miasmic and loud that it was indeed as if nothing was happening to anyone around them - it was almost like even if Taubitha had not been an adept fighter and had instead called out for help, there would've been nobody there to answer her.
Luckily, Princess was there with her powerful acid breath, but Taubitha signaled to her pet to lay low and not attack in her defense. Who knew what these ladies would do if they knew that Taubitha's pet's powers were. Yes, the last thing she needed was someone to take her fony away from her.
Before Taubitha could do anything other than evade the two ladies' attacks, the supposedly nice and welcoming lady with the strong accent lurched forward with three jabs towards Taubitha]'s face! Thankfully, Taubitha was easily able to dodge and parry them. This was not her first fight.
"Wow! You're doing quite good, ya?" said the lady with a smirk. She twirled her hair and cracked her neck. "Well get ready for zis, then!"
Suddenly, the lady started morphing! She must've had a [skill] somewhat like Taubitha's, that allowed for the change of shape! She grew four extra arms, all with sharp claws, and it was all Taubitha could do to gasp before she was impaled and flayed time and time again by these cruel instruments.
[You're taking damage]
Princess was looking worried. Well, actually Princess just looked angry, because she always looked angry, but Taubitha liked to think that Princess looked worried about her considering the situation. Regardless, she continued to signal to her pet to lay low. It was time to Taubitha to show these ladies her own powerful [skill]!
Taubtiha smirked as she continued to take damage. Sure, it was pretty bad damage - but her own [skill] would blow it out of the water! Plus, changing her form increased her [HP], and Taubitha knew that a lot better than these ladies seemed to do. So she started laughing.
"What's so funny?" asked one of the handstanding ladies as she twirled her feet blades around with her toes, trying and failing to stab Taubitha numerous times.
"Yea, what's so funny?" asked the other handstanding lady, who was doing much the same thing.
"Oh ya, what's so funny?" growled the mutated lady who was landing nasty hit after nasty hit on Taubitha. "They might struggle to hit you, but you are no match for my [skill]!"
"That's what you think!" said Taubitha.
"No, it's what I know, ya? Look at how much damage you're taking, zere is no way you can come back from zis unless you have some sort of [skill] that heals you!"
"Yea, well, I've got something better than that for a [skill]!" Taubitha activated her [skill] and started morphing. Her legs became talons, her hands claws, and her grinning mouth grew wider and wider, with pointed teeth to fill. Suddenly, the notices that she was taking damage just... stopped.
"What is going on, ya?" gasped the lady as she failed to land a substantial hit on Taubitha's transformed body, which seemed to have a mixture of scales and fur that were seemingly impervious to the lady's claws. It was almost like kevlar! "It's like my claws can't even go into you!"
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Yes, that's one of my transformation's [skills], it's known as [Iron Skin] and it makes the amount of force to damage me exponentially higher than what exists for my normal tauman form, you fucking skank. Not only that, but it also increases my health by, like, 60 fucking percent! So, although I am proportionately hurt just as much as when you first attacked me, the amount it takes to deal the same amount of damage to me is also substantially higher, and by result I effectively have much more [HP] now than I did before, you obnoxious bitch!"
"Wow, that is pretty impressive, ya. Guess we will have to get a little more creative. Zere iz more than just zis up my six sleeves, ya!" The lady nodded to the other two ladies, who immediately flipped back right-side up and stood in a crouched stance flanking the transformed lady.
"Um, what is happening?" asked Taubitha as she saw the three ladies standing in a dramatic, crouched pose. And then, it hit her - they were powering up some sort of charged attack! The faint blue aura slowly becoming more and more opaque around them made this even more clear. She had to act, and fast! Taubitha didn't want to find out how powerful this charge attack was.
Taubitha let loose a mighty roar and slashed at all three ladies! She could see from their skin lighting up a translucent red that they had indeed taken damage, but they didn't stop charging their attack, either! They must've been very confident in the power of this attack, otherwise they definitely would've had a bigger reaction to her own. Still, Taubitha wasn't done with this. She unhinged her huge jaw and chomped down on the main lady!
CRSHHHHH
It felt almost like grinding her teeth as Taubitha bit down on the lady and soon enough had her jaw forcibly slid off the lady's body. Once again, she knew she'd dealt some serious damage, but at the same time it was almost like she'd bitten into raw marble instead of biting into a tauman being, and her jaw was now in serious pain. If anything, it was also a bit of a wonder that Taubitha hadn't taken much damage from her attempt to attack, she realized. Then again, her damage threshold was that much higher. Taubitha wondered if this charged attack would be strong enough to hit her damage threshold. Then again, if the ladies were able to remain strong and stand there and charge up to her face while she attacked, it had to be a pretty substantial [skill].
Taubitha hadn't ever seen a group battle where people pooled their differing [skills] into one, but she'd heard of them a few times. The theory was, charging up and pooling energy into one discharge of certain attack [skills] would increase the power of each attack by two, so that the charged attacks of two people would be more equal to the attack of four people at once, three people equal to six, and so on.
As she alternated between chomping and slashing at the three charging ladies, Taubitha noticed that their power charging seemed to be slightly affecting the floor of the blimp interior. Of course, nobody else, most if not all of whom were partying, seemed to take note of this situation, but how would they when the music was so loud and the boogie was so strong? How were they supposed to interpret a shaking other than to believe that it was a result of their shared, grooving rhythm?
Taubitha was getting frustrated for a number of reasons. First of all, these obnoxious ladies just wouldn't react to her damage! Second, they seemed to be obfuscating their [HP] slightly, or else it seemed that their collective [skills] were doing so temporarily, as when Taubitha focused above each lady's head she only saw a fuzzy bar of an indeterminate color above their head when she concentrated. Useless. Third, worst of all, she was running out of time.
Something she'd been embarrassed to admit to Kahli, whose skill seemed to have no timeout or tie to her [STM], was that her own [skill] timed out after her [STM] ran out, which was usually about 5 minutes. After it ran out, she'd have to wait for her [STM] to replenish fully before she could transform again. It was, needless to say, a limiting factor that she hadn't even taken to account when regarding this fight.
So what would she do?
Well, there was only one thing she could do, Taubitha thought. She would have to give it her fucking all and attack with all her might while she still had the energy to. What happened afterwards was... well... Taubitha figured that after that, she'd let the chips fall as they may, because what was her other choice? Ask Princess for help? That was too far to go, she thought. Princess was just a fony!
And so Taubitha did go at it, she went at it hard. It was such an insane battering of charges and power that she truly felt she might shake the blimp. And then, all of a sudden, it ended.
[You are out of STM]
Taubitha sighed. Of course she fucking was.
And then the ladies finished their charge. Taubitha could see a terrible ball of energy forming.
Princess jumped in front of Taubitha and vomited acid on the face of the lady in the middle, the lady with a six armed transformation, the lady who'd at one point been oh so nice to Taubitha. And then, the two ladies beside her stopped whatever they were doing and started screaming.
Screaming? Not even trying to fight. Just screaming.
The lady fell down, convulsing, as the acid melted her face off. Within moments, she was clearly dead.
"Gods damn, Princess. Good job!" said Taubitha. She petted her fony with a smile as the ladies huddled around their companion and screamed and cried.
"What have you done?" cried one of the ladies.
"Yes, how could you do this?" asked the other lady. "How the could you just... just sic your pet on her and let it kill her?"
"What? What do you mean??" Taubitha asked. "You were about to fucking attack me!!"
"No we weren't," said yet another lady, who hadn't even been participating in the fight. The other two ladies shot her a glare, and then gestured for her to come over to her dead friend's corpse. "Or, better said, no they weren't. They were charging up to take all of the hits you could deal til you ran out of energy. To help you level up."
Taubitha sighed. "Shit."