As usual, everything was beautifully fucked up. Honey was a godsblessed menace, the Dungeon was trying to kill them both, and Tanya had nowhere she’d rather be.
They hadn’t fought a bonehound Elite on their current Layer, which meant that they were taking things seriously—as seriously as they ever took it, some people might say, but those people were fuckwads, assholes, and idiots. They were taking it completely seriously, and anyone who disagreed could feel free to say that to Tanya’s metal-clad, impeccably-muscled ass.
Honey’s sparkweb is on point, she thought to herself absently as she approached the bonehound at a leisurely, loping run. If I know her, and heh, I do know her, she’ll be packing the heat down for a proper blast.
Theirs was not a complicated strategy, and Tanya put her side of the formula into play immediately. She begrudgingly hefted her two-handed sword, the cursed artifact she’d picked up a few chambers before, and charged the bonehound with it as though it were a lance. Her feet pounded against the hard-packed sand of the arena chamber’s floor, the chanted background music pushed to the side to avoid being influenced by its rhythm just in case the bonehound could take advantage of that.
Awareness of Honeydew dropped out of her mind, filing her presence as a given and her contributions to the fight as simply part of the assumptions of combat. The mass of shadowy figures that rose out of the ground were flickering out of existence from the web of lightning as fast as they appeared, and they weren’t lasting any longer with every second that came by, so there was nothing to pay attention there—Honeydew would outpace their growth until she blew her mind apart with pleasure or her heart stopped from electrical shocks, and there was nothing else that Tanya needed to be concerned with.
The bonehound rose to its full height as she approached it, skeletal paws spreading out on the sands for balance and leaving distinctly full-paw-shaped indents in the ground. Aura or effector, she noted, and then she caught the flickers of displaced and disturbed air around the Elite’s haunches and joints.
So forewarned, she was able to hurl her body to the side when the hound charged her, aiming for a shoulder-check even as it whipped its hammer-tipped, blade-sharp tail around to cut her off. Her feet skidded on the ground despite the increased traction that Honey was providing her with somehow—Tanya understood very little of the arcane theory behind it, only that it had something to do with friction being a kind of attraction, which was a very Honeydew thing to say—but she kept her balance, if barely, long enough to get the sword angled perfectly to intercept the tail-strike.
The bonehound tried to wrap its tail around the parry and hit her that way, but she’d parried with her piece-of-shit sword held almost horizontal. It was hell on her wrists, since the razor-sharp double-edge of the fucking blade went all the way down to the grip without the courtesy of giving her a dulled area to grip or even a fucking crossbar, she mused to herself in a glowering anger, but she’d done it anyway. She’d seen the way the tail was moving, known that it would try for it, and instead it got the opportunity to re-foul its own strike as the attempt to wrap that tail around her just had it flexing impotently against the edge of the blade.
It didn’t exactly cut the tail. A dozen bones fractured, two of them breaking in at least two pieces, but the effector fields which were giving it the ability to move in the first place do double duty in holding it together. But the bonehound definitely didn’t appreciate it, and its leap was just as constrained by the laws of physics as she was, though not by the laws of muscle and tendon; the shock of impact jarred it, and her instinctive, casual return-strike with the pommel of her sword sent it staggering as it tried to get past her.
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Idiot, she thought to herself coldly. Idiotic goddamn fucking thing. Oh, she’s not a mage, she’s just a fighter, just a warrior, I’ll just bypass her. Guess what my first job is, asshole? Watch, it’ll do it again, it thinks that was a fluke.
Her breathing stayed perfectly steady as she let the emotions roil in the catchments she’d built for them. Her mind was quiet and clear, possessed of nothing but a singing crystal calm as she watched and waited for her opening, and she let a trickle of resentment leak to prepare for—
There. The connection already established, she could stand to the side and let the overwhelming distaste at how everyone trifled with her surge into her body and through into the metaphysical representation of her strike. She moved almost as fast as the bonehound, faster than her conscious thought could follow, and she was inside its arc as it tried again to get past her. Her strike took it on the upper foreleg in a diagonal, but it had seen her coming and she merely cracked a few bones and sent it staggering.
Effector fields again, she thought to herself coolly, the resentment having expended itself in the motion of the strike. But it won’t make that mistake again.
Tanya took in how it moved and how it stabilized itself, judging the timing. She rose onto the balls of her feet with deliberate grace, sword going almost vertical as she threatened an overhand strike with a slowness that would have seemed like greased lightning to her younger self. It left her open, of course, and the bonehound lashed out with a talon-fielded paw—
—and a bar of hungry lightning connected with it for a hundredth of a second, consuming enough of the fields holding that paw together to make it flinch.
Second job, she noted to herself with a faint smile. Bait them into thinking there’s an opening. Make them think twice. And then, third job.
She mixed smugness, satisfaction, and awe at her lover’s magic and fed those into the strike she’d used as bait. Not as the downwards slash that she’d threatened, however; she stepped into the bonehound, almost leaning against its side, and drove the sword point-first through one of its joints. It jammed into another joint, vibrating in place as Tanya shoved derision and contempt into her leap and roll away from the Elite as it scrabbled for balance.
“She brings the lightning,” Tanya said out loud once she snapped back onto her feet, performatively dusting her hands off as she turned her back and started to walk away. “And I,” she added as the hound crouched to pounce at her, “bring—”
—the lightning rod, she couldn’t hear herself say over the sheer volume of the impact, as every ettana of charge in the sparkweb slammed home into the blade of the sword. The bonehound seized, its effector auras threatening to decohere, and then the orb of plasma arrived with a sound like the coming of an excited Goddess.
Tanya wrapped an arm around her Lady’s waist, kissing on the underside of her jaw as Honey shuddered in the power’s ecstatic passage. She sidled them around so that the two of them were looking at where their enemy had been, and both of them sighed happily. Goodbye, piece of shit so-called weapon. She grinned, looking at the thick, crackling cloud around the impact point, opaque with billowing osseous dust. You died epically.
“Don’t celebrate too quickly,” her partner murmured to her with a husky, teasing tone that shook only a little bit as the air cleared. “Always wait to confirm.”
“Ground and neutralize,” Tanya swore at the absent Fulminator and her present lover a moment later, seething. “I hate your half-spark witless excuse for a God sometimes.”
Despite it all, despite the unimaginable power Honeydew had just poured into that strike, the sword sat on the floor, dusty but unbroken.
And then, as one, the two of them remembered about the existence of their new Millionborn companion.