"EEEEEEEEE!"
A blade of poisonous water lashed from Lulu's body and knocked the Daeva's sword to one side. An expression of surprise flit over Rachini’s mouth.
“Nuu!” Lulu unwound from around the human's body and bodily leaped onto Rachini, clinging to her. The Daeva, now suddenly half a ton heavier and much slimier, let out a screech of irritation and backpedaled. She raised the blade to plunge it into Lulu's mass, and the Limne - with her seeming ability to see everything in all directions at once - shrilled and pulled herself away before the fatal blow.
Rachini stabbed herself in her own damn leg.
The Daeva howled.
"Yeah! Get her, Lulu!" I bowled into the Daeva from behind, sending her staggering away as Lulu peeled off and onto me, sobbing. She was hurt bad. Watery goo ran from half a dozen deep slashes, and they weren't healing.
Behind us, Angel got to her feet. "I'll keep kiting! Run! Go go go!"
Snarling, I sprinted across the arena, dodging Rachini as we made a beeline for the high vertical wall. "Alright. Hang in there."
Lulu was doing her best to hold herself together. Her stress and pain pounded through our link in waves. She was at 5% HP. One good hit would kill her. We steeled ourselves as we ran at the medium-high wall, the smooth one. Now I knew the bug balls did damage when they exploded, I couldn't risk Lulu getting hit.
"Lulu, I need you to slap the wall and kind of slingshot me up and let go," I thought to her, quickly. "You got it?"
"Oo!" Her voice trembled.
"One, two... NOW!"
At first, I thought she'd fucked it - because I started the leap and jerked, only to find myself flying up as she launched me like a spear from an atlatl.
“Holy-OOF.” I flailed out with tentacles to catch the edges of the alcove and yanked myself down before I overshot, slamming back into the stone. My back legs paddled against the smooth wall, claws slipping until I willed them to sheath and finally got some purchase with my toebeans.
Angel had given up trying to duel Rachini while the fight was so one-sided. She just fled from place to place, putting the altar between her and the Daeva to halt her frighteningly fast dashes and strikes. But whenever Angel got a certain distance away, Rachini stopped trying to chase or head her off. She either tried to blast her, or sent a wave of insects at her. Angel's stamina was dropping at a frightening rate, as fast as mine had while I was dodging the lightning. Panting, stumbling, she kept the heat off her as best she could. The spheres were charging up again.
"Fucking... DIE!" I snarled at the ball of bugs as I hit it with poison and psionics over and over again. After what felt like an hour of wailing on it, it burst, peppering me with hot bug bits.
Down below, Rachini screeched with rage and whirled to face us as I vaulted out and slid back to the ground. She launched a new attack, blazing forward in a blue-white trail of light, and smashed into the wall as I dodged. The impact shook the entire arena. I backpedaled away from her, dueling her sword with my tentacles. Every touch left a bleeding wound. Rachini let out a triumphant rattling hiss - then choked on it as I blasted a cloud of acrid gas and sprinted off across the arena. Rachini blazed after me, trying to stop me from reaching the spiked wall.
Angel, teeth bared in a silent snarl, seized Rachini’s fixation on me. She ran at the Daeva from the side and plunged her sword into her ribs. All the way to the hilt.
Rachini let out an unearthly shriek as she stumbled, coughing up a gout of sickly blue ichor. Angel froze with surprise - a moment too long. Rachini’s hand snatched her by the face, and then she hurled her across the floor, sending her crashing to the bug-slick tiles. Angel hit the ground hard. Too hard, tumbling like a ragdoll until she lay limply on her face. The sword was still buried in Rachini's body, ichor oozing over her fingers as the Swarm Queen scrabbled at it. She sunk to her knees.
"Lulu! Get Angel out of there! Up into one of the alcoves!" I snarled and slung around. The third sphere discharged a snap of light, which hit Rachini and replenished her sinking health. The spheres didn't discharge attacks if they had to heal her. I sprinted for the wall with the holes, and sure enough, spikes began to thrust in and out of them as I approached within leaping distance. The motions formed a pattern that could be used to platform up. Judging that pattern with one eye was harder than it needed to be.
"This is uncomfortably phallic." I growled, flinging myself up to grasp one of the spears. It withdrew before I could kick off, and I took another to the side as I tumbled back down. I tried again, and again. On the third attempt, I managed to kick off and scramble my way up into the alcove as the ball continued to intermittently heal Rachini.
"Die, die, diediediedie-!" I fixated on the bugs, discharging wave after wave of psionic force into it. The intricate geometry of the whirling specks shuddered, stubbornly reforming each time they were disrupted. But as the sphere's HP drained, the reformation got more and more sluggish until-
BOOOM.
A thunderclap shook the entire arena, drowning out Rachini's thin wailing cry. Above us, the tornado of insects suddenly dispersed in all directions.
[The Swarm is unleashed!]
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[You have regained access to your inventory and items.]
"Thank fucking God." I bounced down the spear wall, stumbling as I hit the floor. Rachini was between me and the rest of my team. Angel and Lulu were fifteen feet off the ground in the alcove, chugging potions. Meanwhile, Rachini grimly clasped the hilt protruding from the split in her armor and slowly drew it free. The blade slid out with a sickening crunch.
"INFIDELS!" She threw her head back and let out a piercing metallic screech, lips thinning as her mouth opened impossibly wide. The skin of her face frayed and tore as mandibles unfolded from inside her cheeks, sparking and dripping. "NOW YOU WILL KNOW PAIN!"
The thunder echoed her cry, rumbling as the heavens opened. Rain. It didn't fall so much as dump down, slashing the arena and soaking the floor, me, and Rachini. There was a warning flash, then lightning. One bolt, same as the start of the fight. Except now the arena was wet.
[This is a Water-type arena. All electricity-based Air attacks deal double damage.]
"Great."
[All Electrical attacks also now Area of Effect.]
"Marvelous."
I knew the pattern from the first time - and after Karkinos' boon, I barely felt the shocks crawling across the floor under my feet. It would be a different story for Angel and Lulu. They weren't cowering in the alcove though. Angel had pulled one of her turrets into place, working over it with a wrench while the setup bar slowly filled. The Vickers was powerful, but it had two major flaws. The first was that it was water cooled, and because of that it operated in short bursts because of how fast it heated. The second was that the setup time was longer than for the junk turrets. But if she could pull it off...
"I'll keep her busy! Get that turret!" I dodged the three, five, seven, then eleven lighting strikes. Warning thunder boomed - and then all thirteen bolts smashed down to the broken floor around us. I was about to catch my breath and reorient when one last sneaky lightning strike came down right where I was standing. I heard the clap just in time to avoid taking the bolt right between the shoulders, throwing myself to the side. Wildly, I looked up - and all the muscles of my body seized in a way that had nothing to do with electricity.
Rachini's true form - I guessed this was probably her 'true form' - was worse than the Whiphorse. Too many legs. Too many spines. Snapping mantis claws fully capable of cutting me in half. Mandibles drooling black goo as she screeched again, summoning a swarm of insects into the arena from the sky. A broken, distorted memory flashed through my mind as they swirled around their queen like a living cloak.
… A man, bound in a fetid cellar. Asian. Thai, maybe, or Burmese. He moaned deliriously, shaking with fever. He was emaciated, filthy. Half his face and both legs had been eaten away by beetles. Larvae writhed in the exposed, bloodless pink flesh.
There was a hand on my shoulder, gripping tightly. The barrel of a pistol dug into my lower back. The man was being shown to me as an example.
I'd known him. He was... an informant. My friend. His name... his name was...
"NOODLES! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! MOVE ALREADY!"
Angel's voice cut through the sudden paralysis.
Too late.
Rachini swung out and scooped me from the ground, hurling me toward the wall of the arena. Before I hit it, she flitted forward and hooked me from the air, slamming me into the electrified floor. The blow drove the breath from my chest and filled my sinuses with the smell of ozone. Desperate, disorientated, I expelled a cloud of poison. Just in time. A solid pillar of locusts poured from behind Rachini to finish me off. The voracious swarm parted around me in a gnawing, biting wave, dying even as they slithered over and around me. The survivors curved back around toward Angel. As did Rachini herself.
"I really wish someone could have warned us that she was a swarm boss!" Angel paused construction and pulled her rifles, boosting herself so she could fire them from the hip. She blew chunks of chitin and flesh from Rachini's body, right up until the swarm closed in - and Lulu bounced forward. Freshly healed but no longer protected from lightning by her Omnishell, she flung pseudopods of slime up and down, forming a living, sticky web. Most of the insects veered away, sensing danger. Those that impacted her were efficiently absorbed.
The smell of gunpowder kicked me out of my phobic trance, and a snarl pulled from my throat as I charged the daeva from behind. Rachini was faster, whirling with her sword arms raised, but I avoided the twin guillotines and pounced onto her: wrapping her torso, bearhugging her upper arms to her spindly thorax. The ten-foot long snapping blades were useless like this, scissoring uselessly to either side of me. It was her raw strength versus my leverage as we spun a deadly waltz around the arena. She rotated her head like an owl, mandibles stretching to either side of her face. A ball of lightning gathered between them. I rammed my forehead right into her mouth, discharging a blast of psionic energy right into it.
"WHY DOES IT ALWAYS HAVE TO BE MANTIDS?" I butted her mouth again, aiming my invisible third eye right into the X shape formed by her actual mouth, which lay behind the mandibles and feelers. Spikes ejected from my tentacles as they coiled around her, crushing and piercing chitin. Meanwhile, Rachini's jaws fixed on my neck. Mantises killed their prey by gnawing their heads off. She started to chew.
“ARRRGH! FUCK YOU!” I spasmodically kicked with my back legs, bucking like a rabbit against her belly. Rachini managed to get one of her claws clamped around my thigh, bearing down on it and locking me in place as our HP began to drop.
"Spin her around! Put her back to me!" Angel called to me through the blinding pain.
"YOU SPIN HER AROUND!" But I tried, throwing my weight to the side to get the mantis to pivot. She spun with me distractedly, fixated on gnawing. She took damage from my poisonous blood even as my HP tanked into the red, but she knew that if she kept going, she was going to win. She put her back to the girls.
The Vickers came online.
Machine gun and rifle fire plugged the Daeva from behind, tearing twin stripes of hot lead up through her bloated abdomen. Rachini screeched with pain, letting go of my neck and trying to shove me away. I hung on, fighting to keep her from fleeing.
“Just a little longer!” Angel manned the turret manually, her face a mask of concentration as she fired down from her vantage point. A line of bullets slashed through Rachini's right-side legs, sending her teetering and crashing to the ground.
"Fucking hell." I unwound from her and stumbled away, limping and panting. Blood dripped from my neck to the ground. It felt like one huge bruise, and it ached to keep my head up. Rachini flailed, screeching with fury, but every time she tried to get up, Angel cut her down. I made to run toward the daeva to deal the final blow, but my legs weren't working right. For the first time since my desperate run along Noobie Beach, my body felt uncoordinated and heavy. The sounds of gunfire, the arena... It was all one big dull rush as I suddenly found myself crumpled on the floor. I didn't remember falling.
"Nooduu!" I heard Lulu cry out. Her voice sounded very far away.
[Your team has defeated Rachini the Swarm Queen!]
White noise. Ringing. Drowning out everything.
[You gain… ]
[... …. …]