It felt…
Jittery and twitchy.
Like there was some electricity inside its muscles buzzing away and not letting it relax.
It hadn’t incorporated that weird water worm’s biology yet, so it was mostly just a need to move, to do something.
The fact it wouldn’t be fighting had a lot to do with that.
It had been very excited to fight side by side with its human for the first time, and judging by their tumbling earlier, she could somewhat keep up now.
But it understood the need for the ‘Katherine’ human to fight and get her own growth in, and if it involved itself, there wouldn’t be a fight, not really.
It wasn’t like it would gain anything from fighting these humans. They all walked like they were a threat, but it didn’t really feel like any of them were, not really. There was none of that measured pace and fluid grace that people who knew how to move possessed, they were all basically stumbling on their feet.
There was no point in fighting them beyond its own entertainment, whereas if ‘Katherine’ fought them with ‘Emreeil’, they could both get a bit of experience and maybe even some Levels.
It was still connected to the strange mental tunnel ‘Emreeil’ had made for them, as was the weird little green human walking with it, the ‘Scruffy’ one, but it was tempted to ramp up [Mental Resistance] and be done with it. It felt naked without having it up.
The green human was odd. And fairly refreshing in her lack of fear.
It circled slowly, deciding to leave the decision making to its humans, content to stew in some faint haze of annoyance bubbling into the back of its mind.
There wasn’t too much room for circling, however, and that fed into its inner frustrations.
The odd tower the building was perched on was more akin to a titanic metal screw that had stone and rubble growing out of it like tumors, and the downwards metal slide didn’t extend much further past the building before it dropped off into the abyss, the metal warped and melted from some past conflict or accident, hanging above light-speckled mists below.
Off to the side of the wide metal curve supporting all of them was a fairly unreliable-looking walkway that extended off in the far distance to the right, to a messy network of railings and caged stairways, almost like a wall made of iron sticks. Glowing signs covered in symbols peeked through the mess, some leading to a small open window where white light shone from deeper within while along the edges, light crystals fought to keep the dark mists away, and the steps visible.
It took a deep breath, nearly able to taste the undermining tang of rust and iron beneath the scent of burnt rubber and something like rotten smoke and human waste.
It smelled familiar. Comforting, even.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to not be involved in a fight. It wouldn’t be that exciting anyway, not against weak humans like this. And it would get its pound of flesh regardless. ‘Emreeil’ feasted on blood, not flesh.
Besides, their prey was cornered. A few might still try to run out of the side entrances or windows or just jump off the roof hatch because of fear, but they didn’t really have anywhere to go. Running up the cork-screwing path would be like running up a steep metal hill, running down would send them to the abyss after a hundred feet, and running to the walkway that ran off to the side over the abyss would be unsafe.
There wouldn’t be a chase, even if some of the humans inside ran away.
It let out a long exhale, and felt the green human’s hand pat its head, scratch a bit behind its ear.
That felt bizarrely nice.
It felt its leg twitch, and that immediately soured the experience, making it move its head out of reach as its ears tugged backwards, resuming its half-hearted patrol.
It was a mild thing, but it didn’t like not having control of itself or its limbs. Reflex or not, it was uncomfortable and made it… snarly for a lack of a better expression to the mood it was put in by the brief experience.
It slowed to a stroll, smelling the oddly sweet smoke in the wind, flitting through the sponge-like planks boarding up the windows, twitching its ears to catch human sounds it could try to mimic.
The humans inside did not think to put someone outside on lookout, so it passed by its two pack members as they huddled in a dark corner, making their human gibbering as they planned for how to engage the people inside. ‘Emreeil’ glanced at it, and made some kind of hand-wag. A human greeting, as far as it had observed.
It wagged its tail a bit in acknowledgement as it continued prowling around.
Impatience and restlessness were slowly blooming.
The spiral around the tower they were on was mercifully gigantic, so neither was the slope too steep nor the sides too thin.
Still, it was annoying to not have much space around. Even if a human escaped, they wouldn’t get to run. No chase, no action, no fight.
Boring.
It took another lap around the building, watching ‘Emreeil’ brace against the front doors in a peculiar stance, ‘Katherine’ standing behind on the opposite side of the building, far more cautious.
It glanced through the mess of lights and iron sticks and walkways to the far distant right, barely paying attention.
A light jerked oddly, unnaturally, merely a blur at the edge of its vision, and it took a moment to process that and whip its head to the side to find it again. Its steps paused, and two more eyes on its flank opened, searching.
It found the odd light a moment later, now still as any other.
It stared at the yellow circle, barely visible underneath three layers of metal bars and grates, in the corner of a staircase. Scarce light and reflections outlined a vaguely humanoid silhouette of tattered fabric.
But the light was perfectly still, and quite far away, to the point it wondered if it was seeing things.
It slowly began to move ahead, turning its head mostly forward, side-eyeing the yellow circle.
The light moved, just a little bit, imperceptible, almost. Like its innards shifted. It was the same structure and jerky way of movement that had alerted it to the light on ‘Emreeil’s’ sternum being some kind of mechanical eye, back when she needed it. The way there were plates and rings in the light that shifted and moved in a bizarrely organic manner as if to mimic an iris and a pupil.
It stopped moving, four gold eyes staring into a sickly yellow. It wasn’t sure why, exactly, but it couldn’t help but stare, feeling a ramping tension coil up around it like a physical force. Throwing [Mental Resistance] up as high as it could go, it felt messages prod at its mind feebly and ignored them in favor of trying to decide what to do.
Someone or something was staring at it very, very intently from a great distance. That knowledge was obviously quite uncomfortable to think about, and there wasn’t exactly much cover around. But there was some.
With a haphazard plan, it began to trot along the same line again, changing its trajectory quite a bit so it could move up behind a stack of boxes up and to the right of the building, enough to hide from the eye, and then it stopped, turning to the green human.
Big brown eyes stared at it, and it lifted a hand to point at her with a claw.
She tilted her head, and pointed at herself.
It let out a positive chuff, then pointed past her, swirling its hand in a circle, before quickly miming a calm walk, trotting in place.
The green human blinked at it before bobbing her head up and down, something it assumed meant agreement by now, and without a second thought, turned around and kept walking along the path they’d made.
More messages and prods hit its mental shield, and it ignored them in favor of covering its paws, palms and eyes with darkness. Then it let its chest brush the floor as it stalked around the boxes, pressing its ears flat as it took a peek past them at the bridge.
It was a bit hard to see through the murky sight of [Echoes of Oblivion], but after a moment of squinting, it could see that the light had moved, now away from the staircase and closer to the box-like floors of metal grating lining the rooms they provided access to. The eye’s holder was sitting in a corner while curled into a ball, their eye still unerringly focused on the visible section of the path, staring somewhere to the wolf’s right.
Chaos erupted behind it, and the wolf ignored it for the most part, too uneasy and curious to move.
It waited, its attention split two ways, eyes focused on the hooded figure and its antenna loosely following the chaos of the melee in the building, writhing softly against the floor like a hundred little tentacles unsheathing out of its forearms.
The hooded figure slowly rose, in a movement too measured and precise to be organic, and began to move forward, closer, almost sliding forward onto the long walkway separating the wolf’s spire from the opposite nest structure, steel cable softly groaning on both sides as the bridge ever so subtly shifted.
Steel striking steel and shouts rose from behind it, and the figure seemed to speed up, the glowing eye beneath its hood unerringly focused on the same spot, a tattered cloak sliding against gray iron. An errant breeze and a metal bulge parted the cloak, just enough to show something angular, metallic, and vaguely familiar.
It had seen that way of moving before. A smooth, unnaturally even gait that looked less like running and more like a blur of metal stilts pounding the floor.
It had seen a large eye like that before, big, yellow, in the middle of a head that was likely not wreathed by flesh but metal plates.
The realization made it abruptly stiffen and twitch.
It had wanted a fight, but it wasn’t sure if it wanted to face anything like that metal human it had run into while deep under the human nests.
Then again, it was far stronger now than it had been then.
It wasn’t sure what one of these things was doing up here. It had only ever seen one metallic person before, and it had been deep inside the human nest’s guts.
Did the tunnels send this one?
It could understand how even to itself, that sounded more than a little dubious, but what else was it supposed to think? It escaped the tunnels once, twice, and now it had what was likely a human that had been consumed by the metal, stalking it.
It tuned into the fight happening a mere two dozen feet behind it.
From a cursory look, they seemed to be struggling, but winning, which was perfect in its opinion.
It didn’t want to interrupt them, it didn’t want the green human or ‘Katherine’ near one of these metal men creatures, and it certainly was in the mood for a good fight now.
So, it stopped peeking over the edge of the small wall of rotting crates, and went to the other side, not bothering to hide as it strolled to the edge, eyes nailed to the puppet-like creature.
The yellow eye jerked to the side a little from where the thing had been looking, and focused on the wolf.
It sat on the edge and waited for the metal man to charge forward, gathering air into its throat in preparation, just to see how much damage it could do with one blast.
Unlike what it had been expecting, the hooded figure stopped cold, and without an ounce of hesitation, turned around, and tripled its speed, rushing away.
For a moment, it just blinked at the figure’s back, bewildered.
Then it growled, and strained its will, mentally projecting for the Skill it was using to keep the ball together for as long as possible.
It spit the ball forward, and turned to the right, leaping down onto the metal stairs that led to the bridge with a deafening crash and a precarious wobble, pivoting with its lower body to kick off the railing and down the flight of stairs.
It turned its head right as it slid to a stop in front of the narrow bridge, and witnessed [Sonic Blast] detonate above the bridge with a sharp crack of air halfway across the bridge, sending the hooded figure down and back into the bridge’s segmented plate-like sections, denting them as it bounced and rolled backwards, barely managing to stay on the bridge thanks to the mangled railings.
Sharp shrieks and creaks and clunks continued for a moment as the sound traveled back to the wolf, bolts and fragments of chain peppering the mists below as the bridge rocked violently from side to side in front of the wolf, the cables groaning on either side of it.
It wasn’t enthused about crossing the threshold from the stable metal platform it was on and onto the rocking bridge, but it didn’t feel letting the metal man-thing run would be a good choice. Mostly because it couldn’t understand why it would run just from seeing it. The last of its kind the wolf had fought had been extremely tough and mindless.
It activated [Bloodrush] and lunged forward with a burst of sparks as its claws raked through metal for more traction.
For the second time, not even three bounds onto the bridge, its eyes widened in bewilderment when the cloaked figure stumbled upwards, jerkily, and without an ounce of hesitation, threw themselves over the wavering railing in a smooth motion, tumbling out of sight.
It slid to a stop and grabbed onto the railing, raising itself over it as if it was a human, and barely caught the metal ball of limbs and yellow circles tumbling through the slowly shifting smog clouds below, its tattered covering trailing after it, slowly enough to seem weightless, detached from its heavy form.
It caught a glimpse of a painted eyeball within a gear, painted in red on the back, before the mists curled around the cloth and that too disappeared.
It spent a few seconds staring into the mists with a sense of dissatisfied confusion.
That was too nonsensical for the wolf to feel like a problem had been solved. It felt more like it just watched a problem escape.
The sounds of fighting from above heightened, and its snout curled into an annoyed snarl as it turned back around and rushed up the stairs, seeing snippets of the fight inside, muted by the vibrations moving through so many different materials. It was more than enough to see that one person had ran away, stumbling straight towards it, waving its arms oddly.
Its pack was still fighting, but [Pack Hunter] didn’t make it seem like they were struggling too much, so it wasn’t concerned.
It paused near the top of the stairs, and decided to wait for the human to come to it instead, hoping his blood might wash off the taste of failure.
----------------------------------------
She sent requests to the wolf to get an update on the positions of the people inside, but he was blocking them all, so after a moment of hesitation, she decided to let him be and do whatever it was he was doing. It could wait for later.
Scruffy sent back an image of him staring out into an undefined vast space, which wasn’t… terribly helpful. Was he sightseeing? Now?
She shook her head, and braced.
Her left hand was pressed against the shoddy front doors of the building, right where the locks were, gathering a substantial [Sparkburst], and her right was reared back to slam into the first person she saw.
Katherine was waiting on the opposite door for her cue.
She formed another spell on her right hand, charging up an [Illumina] for a short but violent flare. A third prepared itself in the back of her mind, [Haste] charging with a slight boost.
She let go of her first spell, and the doors exploded inwards, folding and breaking in half as they showered the inner occupants in dust and splinters.
A brief push of [Telemantic Construct] further propelled the dust and splinters to push forward, blinding her immediate opponents and clearing her own sight to catch an actual glimpse of the inside.
It was a building made of metal sheets, lit by lantern light and with a firepit right in front of the entrance, just ten feet away from her. Four people were around it, their hands occupied with something she couldn’t see through the splinters, in the middle of turning around.
The one closest to her, with his back turned to her, would be the first unfortunate she would use to test how strong her right arm was.
She straightened her fingers to the best of her ability, and lunged ten feet forwards by kicking forth and using her arm-wings to propel her, slapping against the patch of cobbles outside.
She felt ribs and organs snap and part before her hand like it was nothing but jelly. Her elbow sank through the man’s half-turned torso, her claws slamming into the ribs on the other side and finally stopping as he jerked and went limp.
Distantly, she realized this guy likely had nothing in Endurance. His flesh felt like firm pudding.
Her wing-arms had a similar range of movement to actual wings, so she couldn’t exactly move them over her shoulders to kill the other three, so she twisted her body to the right, tearing her arm out of the convulsing gangster’s body, a mass of gore in her fist, and thrust her left shoulder forward, bending her back so the wing could swing.
Or, unfold, rather. It zipped forward like a loaded spring, five thin blade-like claws spearing through a gangster in the middle of yelling as he stumbled backwards over his seat, and carrying him for another foot before her wingspan maxed out at twelve feet, momentum pushing the man off her claws and to tumble into a metal table.
Katherine burst through the back door by kicking it open, and immediately, someone whirled on her.
She couldn’t afford to pay attention to Katherine too, but [Pack Hunter] made her feel how she moved with that dagger, nothing but efficient strokes and cuts and thrusts.
Two down, two in front of her. Katherine dealing with another, and eight or so people in her peripheral vision scrambling upright or unsheathing weapons.
One thing that she felt quite keenly, was the blood. She could feel it, smell and taste it. She tugged it with [Blood Dominion]. It felt like stretching a muscle she never knew was so sore. It felt good.
She began to exude mana, a steady stream. A sword flashed towards her wing from the left, and she folded it just enough to let it fly back before she grabbed onto the hand holding it, and spun, tossing him to the group coming in from the right.
Something slammed into the fire pit, washing her with fire and ash, and she felt right at home.
She jerked out of the way of a punch, feeling like they were all fighting through molasses while she was as free as the wind, and with a jerk of her right shoulders, a head went flying. A metal arrow cracked through the air and into her wing, sticking into the bone, and she briefly grunted from the pain of it embedding into the bone. It was a nice reminder that she was still fragile, even if she was strong and fast.
“Kat!” She barked, mentally pushing [Illumina] through the mental link and then placing the spell between herself and the group of six rushing at her.
Distantly, she noted how the wolf’s form flared up somewhere behind her, far further than he should be.
Katherine jerked around, throwing her hands over her head, and Emhreeil simply looked away, turning around as she hopped back.
Illumina flashed for a fraction of a second, and she heard the shouts turn into screams as retinas burned and reflected light rendered even those who were not looking into stumbling buffoons, at least for a while. Someone rattled the rusted door knob of a side door, before falling outside in a half-run, retreating.
In fact, everyone was retreating. Most just couldn't find an exit or weren't trying to.
The main reaction to getting blinded seemed to be roughly flailing in her direction to ward her off as they scrambled away from her.
[Illumina] was such a cheat spell when used right...
She spun out of the way of a wide swing from a spear that looked more like a sharpened fire poker.
Katherine fought two people on the corner of her vision, one flailing and the other stumbling with squinted, teary eyes. She could have easily killed them and moved on, but she was just beating on them.
She suppressed the urge to snap at her to kill them when the swipe of the spear abruptly changed direction and thrust at her throat, but it was too slow, and it was so impossible to misjudge distance when she could feel every last millimeter of space around her as if she was touching it with her fingers.
She ducked her shoulder under it and leaned away, then used her right wing to slap the floor and keep herself upright when she realized she had leaned way too far.
Grabbing the ten foot long spear with her right arm, she yanked it past her, its wielder dropping face-first into the remnants of the fire pit with a cry. Not knowing how to use a spear whatsoever, she simply spun it and put her whole weight and all her strength into impaling its previous wielder through the back, wincing at his animalistic howl as he began to writhe on the floor, feebly trying to reach the spear as his blood crawled towards her.
Someone in a dark corner shouted something, then they rushed up the stairs to the half-floor above.
She caught a glimpse of a metal bow glinting in the lantern light behind the men as she darted forward over the dying man at her feet, placing herself between a gangster and the bow as cover, arm-wings wide open in a no-doubt nightmarish sight.
The arrow cracked forward again, this time through the gangster she was using as cover, weaving between his ribs with impossible accuracy to shoot straight for her head, and she jerked to the right, lowering her left shoulder, throwing a foot in front of her to slow down.
Even so, she felt its flared edges cut into the corner of her brow as it flew past, and she idly realized that even if these were manageable opponents, she should not be underestimating them so much, nor being so arrogant just because she felt invincible.
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A few inches to the side and a little slower in her reaction, and she would have had an arrow through her eye. Another odd sensation rose from her brow, a sense of control and hyper awareness that surprised her too much to delve into.
Her wing-arms had much better reach, so she spun her torso to the left, unfurling her right wing.
Half-stumbling and half-crouched as the men in front of her were, two of them already dead and four blind and retreating, it wasn’t too hard to use her wing as an awkward broom and throw them out of the way of the archer.
He didn’t look like much. If anything, he looked like some middle aged man with a cleft chin.
But his eyes were sharp and severe, locked onto her with unsettling confidence.
How did he not get blinded?
He had notched another arrow already, and aimed it to the side, a little too far to the left to be aiming at her wing. At Katherine.
She jerked her head to the left as she zipped forward, imbuing Katherine with a strong [Haste] buff as she pushed a warning to her. She hooked her right arm to the floor, doing the same with her wings, before wrenching all of them down, throwing herself forward like an arrow, preparing a repulsion field next to the standing archer.
Something brushed along her mana field, coming from above and in front of her, the tips of boots breaking through in rapid descent.
The bow was almost in line with her, so she used the repulsion field to throw it to the side, and lifted her left arm to launch two darts that punched into the archer’s stomach.
The arrow went flying mid-way through the motion as the archer jerked with a muted cry of pain, and she only had a brief moment to panic for her friend before a shortsword slapped the arrow away in the corner of her vision, shattering into a dozen pieces as Katherine quickstepped away from the fragments.
The boots lowered, followed by muscular legs, and she threw a large chunk of mana into a stronger [Haste] cast.
The sudden burst of added speed let her dart under her falling assailant, and she brought her arms forward until her wrists were touching, her shoulder blades shifting forward in ways that she felt should be agonizing, all to line her wings up to the archer that had fallen against the wall, struggling to reach for another arrow.
Her arm wings both unfolded from her back, ten fingers with blade-like claws ramming through the man’s arms and raised leg to spear through his torso and into the metal wall behind him.
With a sound like a whimpered, wheezing snarl, his eyes widened as they met hers.
He went limp, life fleeing his eyes, and she felt another pang of something heavy in her gut, even if she knew from their uniform-like wear that they were part of one gang or another. She ripped her claws out of him, pulling his blood towards her almost subconsciously.
The man that had tried to drop on her made a double under-armpit slash for her tail with his machetes before the body of the archer had even hit the floor. She whipped it out of the way as she turned, only for him to abort the slash for an expert throw.
One of his machetes flew for her chest, and she was about to slap it away with her right arm before she reminded herself again how easily she could have died just a little bit ago, how fragile she still actually was. Why take unnecessary risk?
She twisted her waist in that ridiculous way again, letting the weapon fly past her chest as her eyes moved past him to check up on Katherine, who was, surprisingly enough, fighting four people, only one of them half-blinded, judging from his pained squint, and not appearing like she was having too hard of a time.
It was her first time actually seeing Katherine fight, and she was genuinely impressed at the skill it took to dual wield a dagger and a pipe against four people and win, regardless of boosts.
The machete struck the wall behind her with the handle in the time it took her to make that thought.
He rushed forward with a physics-defying quickstep, his second machete rising in a diagonal uppercut, perfectly dodgeable. His other hand made a pulling motion at empty air, and she faltered mid-dodge as she felt the machete behind her suddenly rush straight for her back, heading exactly where she planned to dodge into.
The other machete was swinging in an arc that denied her other way out.
She realized she was boxed in, despite being significantly faster, and after a moment of freezing, she spun, and used her right arm to slap away the machete from the flat side, sending it off to the side.
Seeing his chance, the man shifted his stance to stab forward instead of swiping in an arc, and she darted out of the way, moving her tail to grab his leg.
He yanked his foot out before she could do so, despite being slower than her, and a bubble of frustration mixed with adrenaline to make her brow twitch.
His second machete spun into his hand as he let his knee hit the floor and spun on it, ending up with both his weapons held in a loose X in front of him.
She jumped back, over writhing bodies, and sidestepped stumbling blind people, grabbing them and throwing them over each other to put more distance between her and the bizarre man with the machetes. She unwound one of her wings to slam into someone to her right who was trying to sneak up on her with a giant axe, cutting a deep, wide furrow through his stomach and up his neck, his choked scream turning into a gurgle as he stumbled back and toppled to the floor. She tried to ignore the feeling of his innards spilling out of his stomach, maintaining her field of mana.
For the first time, she got enough of a gap to catch an actual glimpse of the man wielding the machetes as he followed her, hopping and twisting through the mess of bodies and corpses as if he was making it a dance.
He barely looked like an adult, yet his eyes had less humanity in them than the golem eye she used to wear on her neck. It was how she imagined Ghoul’s eyes to look. A dull brown, cold and sharp. His clothes were more put-together than the gangsters' too, a simple brown short sleeve and tight, elastic pants supported by a belt, from which two sheathes hung for his weapons.
That was about as much observation as she could make before he kicked the remnants of the firepit at her, and she blasted a hasty [Sparkburst] at him and the burning coals to force both back, mind reeling.
She wasn’t in severe danger, but she doubted she could beat him in melee, and she needed just a second or two to think about her options instead of flailing.
Katherine was almost done with the rest of the gangsters, impressively enough, but she didn’t care about them more than she did the immediate threat in front of her.
She didn’t get that second or two she wished, and trying to use [Telemantic Construct] on a moving target was rather futile.
So she laid a trap for where she expected him to be as her wings slammed into the floor and threw her away from another double-swipe.
She had twelve feet of reach, he had maybe three and a half.
And there were only two ways for him to reach her.
He went for the second one that she expected, throwing both machetes at her, one center mass and the other to her left as he lowered his center of gravity and zig-zagged towards her, his eyes not straying from hers.
She recognized a similar trick to what the archer had done. Pretending to have a bad throw to hit something behind her.
If [Pack Hunter] wasn’t including them, she would have dodged both and given Katherine a machete to the back of the neck.
As it was, she dodged out of the way of the one aimed at her center of mass, and grabbed the second machete by the blade with her right hand, trusting the thick plates to withstand what looked like an ordinary blade, before twisting it and slamming the handle into her knee to break it, something she was surprised actually worked, even if just barely.
Judging by how the faint sense of mana she could feel inside the weapon abruptly vanished, she had been right in her assumption. He could only move the weapons because of some kind of enchantment, otherwise, he would be throwing and returning all manner of other weapons and debris strewn about the floor.
He recalled the other one, and lunged low as she tossed the broken blade in her hand aside.
Despite his entrance, he liked having contact with the ground. Everyone did when moving at such speeds. To deny him that, she activated the trap, one repulsion field slamming sheer force into his stomach with just enough power to get his bottom half off the floor, and she whipped her tail at the back of his head, snapping her right arm towards him with her spin.
His right hand got in the way of her tail, breaking the bones within with a series of sharp cracks, and he rolled with the momentum and sudden change with shocking ease, tucking himself into a tight roll that placed nothing vital in her strike path.
She didn’t need something vital.
She reached for his foot instead of her intended punch target that was now awkwardly far, and narrowly avoided a lightning fast kick to her head. She tried to grab his leg and he hit the floor with his other foot to spin like a top and flip himself to his feet, dodging her.
She could probably overpower him by just throwing her entire mana pool at him, but something about how he fought bothered her.
He wasn’t faster than her.
Yet, as she twisted to hit him with her wing and its claws, backing up, he dodged the strike, tilted his body, and managed to narrowly avoid another whip of her tail by twisting his hip out of the way, damn near managing to cut the tip off with a counter strike.
She thrust an open hand to him, a simple [Sparkburst] at her palm, watching him intently as she cast another [Haste] spell on herself, throwing a monstrous amount of mana into it.
The world slowed to a complete crawl, and her equally monstrous mana regeneration was the only reason she wasn't dry of mana right now.
She could tune her perception, mentally, to speed up, but she didn’t want to at this moment.
She slowly cast [Sparkburst], and noted how by the time her hand had actually thrust forward, he was already dodging out of the way.
What bothered her about how he fought seemed so simple in hindsight.
He seemed to dodge before she even began to move.
She activated [Psychometric Vision], her slowed perception of time allowing her Skill to do its work in technical fast-forward.
Tightness around the eyes suggests mild emotional response. Is feeling muted grief. Expects to die by the end of this fight. Accepts death. Injured right hand. Wishes to kill at least one of the assailants before he dies. Had some attachment to the unnamed archer.
She focused more on his movement, squinting.
Eyes very briefly flick to center of mass and points of tension on Emhreeil's torso, is reading the pull of muscle and the shift of Emhreeil's shoulders and feet to anticipate the sort of movement she will make and preemptively dodges, is making up for lack of speed with skill.
She had expected it to be some kind of short-term precognition. Maybe a Skill.
But just pure, raw skill?
It felt like both a slap in the face and a reality check.
With time on her side, she slowly dredged up the last bits of mana in her body and some from her core to make a bunch of explosive repulsion fields at key points along his body.
Then she allowed her perception to speed up.
A push to his knee, another at his weapon, and one at the back of his head, all throwing him out of order as he crumpled three different ways.
Yet still, he was already shifting his weight onto his right foot to roll with his momentum off to the side.
She felt a brief sense of shame, not personal, just a sense that it was such a waste that someone this skilled worked for a gang.
Then she hopped back, took a slight running start, and dashed forward to slam her right first into his downturned face in a vicious uppercut.
She felt bone crack and fold inwards from the force, and her lips formed a grim line as she watched the force of her blow distort his flesh in a clear wave, felt one of his eyes pop like a grape against her knuckle.
She let time flow fast enough to almost be normal, just to save herself the slow-motion look, and winced as he folded backwards, the two-way momentum making him spin once in place, legs kicking up high into the air before crumpling down with the rest of him, dead.
She shook her right hand free from all the gore that had accumulated along the scales and fur, unconcerned with the single thug Katherine seemed to be beating to a pulp behind her, the high Perception almost enough to allow her to judge distance and movements from sheer hearing.
She stood there and stared at the man’s corpse, someone who, if they had the same tools she did, would have absolutely destroyed her without a shadow of a doubt. Her eyes flicked to the side where a man with a metal bow might have managed to kill her had she not dodged.
Her hand rose to the small cut she remembered being there, and frowned when she noticed it was already gone.
She watched the blood slowly crawl across the room on the floor, gathering around her feet in a lazy swirl, as easy and natural to control as breathing air.
She’d come in here expecting… something different. Something more like one-sided slaughter.
To some extent, it was, but it had the real potential to not be, had she been a little more careless and had [Pack Hunter] not helped her save Kat’s hide at least once.
Part of her felt like this was what Ghoul’s intention was with this fight. Something seemingly easy so she could let herself get arrogant and high of her newfound power, only for one or two seemingly random people to put a slight scrape on that image and remind her not to be stupid in the future.
A dash of humility here where she could afford to make some mistakes, rather than a chance to indulge. She wasn’t sure if she should be thankful or angry at him.
She was leaning towards being thankful. Had she gone into a real tough fight without learning that lesson, again, she’d probably have died or gotten really injured.
Though getting injured had a much less potent kick to it now.
She glanced aside to Katherine who was panting and wiping sweat off her brow.
Katherine had dealt with just as many gangsters as she had, though admittedly, she handled the two most dangerous ones.
And Katherine had that… that same sense of discipline and stiff efficiency.
Kat glanced at her, saw her examining gaze, and sent a sense of confusion at her, a mental ‘what?’.
“You know how to fight.”
Kat’s brows furrowed faintly in puzzlement, staring around at the moaning and groaning bodies around them, those that Kat had been too softhearted to kill.
“You did most of the work by blinding them.” Katherine said.
She shook her head.
“No, I just… I mean that the way you move, the way your feet place themselves, its… the way you move, really. It feels like you know what you’re doing even if I’m not sure I can point to why, exactly. You know how to fight. And I…” She paused, licked her lips.
She thought back to how she fought.
She fought dirty. She fought with tricks, she used people as shields against their allies, she fought for surprise, and she did her damn best to keep any fair fighting to a minimum. She’d stumbled and missed repeatedly, as well as pretty much freezing at least once, even if only for a moment.
Having fought in mostly close range, as a sort of self-test today, she couldn’t say she was enthused about her performance, even if the machete wielding guy was immensely skilled.
Getting into melees felt inevitable. She was suited for close range and supportive mayhem, which was likely why fighting like this felt so off to her, despite how good it felt, how she could still feel some remaining jitters of adrenaline in her limbs.
Brawling like this was doable, but she would have felt so much more comfortable fighting behind the wolf, dashing in and out with quick executions and flashing balls of light in people’s faces at critical moments to make any cohesion and resistance crumble.
If Kat had the same powers and spells she had, what kind of damage could she do?
“I don’t know how to fight.”
Instead of offering some kind of reassurance or denial, Kat nodded, and she blinked in surprise, lifting her gaze off the wall to stare at her.
“It’s- well, I saw the punch. You gave me a boost too, remember? Which, I did not know you could do with merely line of sight, so that would have been nice to know beforehand, I assumed it was touch-only." Kat commented, shaking her wrist a little as if to loosen it, and continued before Emhreeil could sputter out a defense about how she was kind of blind for a while so she'd just gotten used to tapping things to boost them.
"Anyway, you don’t know how to properly drive force into the target, your hips are stiff and your stance is either too narrow or too wide whenever I could catch a glimpse of you. You had some moments of brilliance where I think I saw you maneuver yourself between people to use them as shields, and you somehow dodged a few attacks I felt like you had no way of knowing were coming, but I’m not sure if that’s experience or because you have Skills you haven’t told me about. You know, we still haven’t sat down and discussed what we can each do, as a team. Both you and me, and the wolf.” Katherine pointed out, and she opened her mouth to object, only to realize that beyond some offhand remarks while travelling about her spells, she hadn’t actually sat down and asked Kat what her path or even her Skills where, or told her everything she could do.
“Yeah, that’s... true. Fair. I'll hound the wolf to sit down and explain his Skills to us once we get somewhere quiet, we can have a... group planning session. Sorry about the... boost thing," she said with a mild chuckle, unsure of how to word it. "Say, can you point to a couple people who haven’t been blinded entirely that we could take with us and use for practice? I’ll kill the rest. Though you should kill someone too, just to desensitize yourself and not freeze up when it becomes necessary to do it,” she added with a falsely mild tone, and grimaced at how the whole sentence just sounded off and manipulative.
Katherine shook her head.
“I can kill. I’d just really rather not. You and the wolf can deal with that.” Katherine said in a tone that made it clear she didn’t intend on arguing about it, and she smiled a little at the assertiveness. Good for her.
The Katherine she knew from before the dungeon would not have said that, not in that tone.
“Also, while practicing with weak strangers might get us some Level progression due to their very real desire to kill or hurt us and escape, I think we’d have more luck just having me train you. I know what I’m doing, as you said.” Katherine said, and shrugged, her trench coat bobbing up from the motion.
“I’d like that,” she said with a genuine smile, and summoned her dagger. “Now, which ones might be able to actually see us? Could you tie them up?” She asked, jutting her chin at the selection of seven living people they had ended up with.
Katherine took a deep breath, and moved forward, pointing to one, and then another. Then she shook her head, and brushed past her to make some bindings from the clothes of the corpses, whipping out a plain dagger and sawing at wet cloth.
The smell made her feel like there was a black hole in her stomach, and she idly floated up a tendril of blood to slowly push into her half-open mouth in a sedate sip as she moved up to an unconscious man to slit his throat, once again ignoring the tiny pang of nauseated unease it set off in her gut.
A familiar chuff came from where the doors used to stand, and she turned towards him with a smile, sending a mental prod through their private bond as he licked the blood off his own snout in a sight she found to be oddly cute.
Her message didn’t… catch, for a lack of a better word. She tried again, and it did, whatever he had been doing to block her being momentarily lowered.
So she began to slowly ask some basic things, about how exactly they were going to find some quiet place to cool off in, while he sent back some strange images and events that made her distinctly uneasy.
She could have sworn she’d seen that symbol on the cloak somewhere.
And golems did not run, ever. Nor commit suicide, assuming it died from that fall, which it should.
With a pensive frown, she set off to kill another coughing form on the floor, doing the grisly work her nature now required and making sure to leave no witnesses.
Besides that golem.
How did a golem get all the way up to the third floor? In the middle of it?
Another question to save for later, in case Ghoul somehow had a clue.
She watched the wolf stroll to a corpse and begin eating immediately out of the corner of her eye, not bothering to let her bleed it out, and sighed.
By the time he would be done, she'd have the rest nice and dry, hopefully. She wasn't interested in having to contest food against a greedy wolf. Though she could try to convince him...
Maybe next time.
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