It takes the Manly Duo a while to recover from the shocking revelation, the moment itself easy to spot as the two of them finally stopped bear-hugging each other while saying a lot of words to each other, a worrying percentage of which was either ‘bro’ or ‘manly’.
It was met with general relief from the audience, who really didn't know how to address the whole situation. Because seriously, how do you react to the discovery that two very similar acquaintances of yours - that you’ve repeatedly made fun of on account of their similarity - might have been brothers all along?
Even if the connection that Shigaraki made was actually incorrect - not like they could test us here, at least one universe away from a nearest DNA testing facility - it was made correct at this very moment, Tetsutetsu and Kirishima taking advantage of the mere suspicion to declare eternal brotherhood with one another.
“Alright then!” Kirishima speaks for them both, seeming more pumped that they ever remember seeing him, a fact matched by Tetsutetsu and clearly making Ashido giddy on the inside. “Let’s go!”
“Finally.” Uraraka says quietly enough for just her and Tokage to hear it, before grinning widely. “Let’s go! There’s an enemy out there with my name on them, and I’ve waited enough for that!”
And then, they can finally open the door. Although, to be honest, it feels a bit weird to call it ‘door’ when it looks more like an entrance gate of a castle. Those doors were really damn solid.
And worse of all, barred from the other side.
“Well, now that’s a disappointment.” Uraraka sighs. “All that waiting and build-up for a good fight, just to discover that the doors are locked.” Tokage nods at those words, which Izuku finds a bit odd, but…
“That would be a disappointment if we were in a videogame.” Yaoyorozu replies immediately. “But thankfully, we’re not. And we can employ some more unorthodox solutions to the problems we’re facing. Toga, Compress, if you please?”
“Sure, sure.” Compress nods. “Give us a moment.”
How do you inspect doors such as these? Well, they were made to - when open - let minecarts through. As a result, there were the minecart tracks going underneath them, with a small - really small - opening between the rails.
Too tight for even Toga to squeeze through, but quite enough to partially stuck your head in. Just enough to shed some light at what was behind the gate itself.
Dangerous, yes, but they could easily find out if there was something waiting for them on the other side of the doors before trying that (by just laying down on the ground and looking underneath them). And having done that, Compress announced that he sees no feet on the other side.
Toga took a look at the other side of them after that, before telling them that there was a solid wooden bar blocking them from the other side, but also that it didn't seem to be blocked in any other way. In short - if they lift the bar up, the door will open.
And so they did. But Toga borrowing Tokage’s sword and using it to push the bar up, unlocking the door with minimum amount of noise possible. Which, as the wooden bar hitting the rails beneath them prove, still didn’t mean ‘quiet’.
But it was definitely better than trying to use something as an improvised battering ram.
gaming problems require real life solutions I guess
Hmm?
Your lack of knowledge about the real culture of Mankind is as disappointing as it was entirely expected.
Has it ever crossed your mind that memes older than quirks might not be an epitome of humour and culture?
No.
And that’s the problem.
***
Behind the doors they found a tunnel, lengthy and straight, which eventually opened up to another hall. However, even before reaching it they have ended up discovering that their attempt to stay as quiet as possible has been met with failure, of the worst possible kind.
Uraraka and Tokage were leading their group, with their shields raised up. They were close enough to hear some movement in the hall ahead, but even they were surprised when they fired upon, one bolt hitting the top of Tokage’s shield, piercing and partially shattering it, scattering bits and pieces around them, but ultimately not hitting anything vital.
The other flew right past Uraraka’s head and lodged itself into Kaminari’s skull, killing him instantly and scattering bits of his brain all over their group, all while talking close to half of their offensive AoE magic in an instant.
It was the worst start to a fight that both Izuku and Tomura had seen in their life. And it was about to get a whole lotta worse.
Despite Kaminari dying a grizzly death in front of them, no one panics. Incidents such as Ashido’s death doing a training accident has managed to ingrain the fact that they cannot permanently die into all of them. Instead, they move.
They rush down the corridor, doing their best to shorten the distance between them and the enemy, before they can fire another salvo while their entire party was still in the narrow corridor.
The enemy that they encounter when they reach the room ahead could only be described with one word.
Grotesque.
They weren’t just obese. They were grotesquely obese, in the way that made them look inhuman, their towering bodies swollen with fat in not only the places where you’d expect it to be but everywhere else too.
They weren’t obese people as much as they were walking caricatures of those, their skin dotted with stretch marks and looking strangely tense when they were moving, as if there was so much fat underneath that their bodies were about to rupture under pressure.
Their faces were… abhorrent and grotesque just like the rest of their bodies. Bald but thick with fat to the point when they seemed almost round like a football, with two vertical slits in place of their noses and giant mouth filled with razor sharp teeth.
With how thick their upper bodies were, any clothes or armor pieces they would try to wear wouldn’t fit, so up there they wore nothing. They wore pants, parts of them at least - from thighs down they were mere shreds of cloth, torn apart by their very movement, leaving only the most strategic part (mercifully) covered.
They seemed to be busy erecting a makeshift barricade in the room, likely as a response to their dogs being killed off by someone (they weren’t exactly quiet during their last fight), or perhaps due to the sounds that the falling bad did?
Whatever it was, they barely started their work, meaning that the fortifications weren’t going to be a problem. There were six of them, however, two carrying heavy crossbows with meat cleavers attached to their belts, with the remaining four having either two-handed hammers of impressive size or a one-handed hammers alongside tower shields.
Each and every of the hammers that they could see had an unmistakable shape of meat tenderizers. All weapons in front of them - save for the crossbows and shields - were oversized cooking utensils meant to cut and hammer meat being prepared for consumption.
That, somehow, fit those creatures extremely well.
The moment their group charges into the hall, they immediately split. Ashido is the first to attack, casting [Corrosive Spit] at one of the crossbowmen hiding in the back. It wasn’t a literal spit - that would easily kill Ashido herself - and instead it fired a small ball of acid from the area surrounding the sorcerer’s face, which made aiming it pretty natural.
The creature raised their weapon to block the impact, their crossbow rendered immediately unusable, its spring snapping after being eaten through by the acid. Instantly she attacked the other one, disarming it as well, removing the threat of their crossbow from the fight once and for all. With that done, the creatures at the back of the room have no other choice than to draw their meat cleavers and advance behind their kin.
Ashido kept attacking them, despite the disgusting results of her acid applied to the exposed flesh.
In the meantime, the rest of them clashed with the creatures up front.
Kirishima struggled in a contest of strength with one of them, their weapons locked together, the ogre protecting Uraraka’s right flank. Her left one was still exposed, one of the creatures taking advantage of that to try to swing their two-handed meat tenderizer at her.
She took a step back, easily avoiding the swing… just for the creature to intentionally topple forward, barreling toward her with a speed that left her unable to dodge. She fell backward, the creature’s unholy weight pushing down at her shield and spear, the latter of which she managed to raise up just in time for the creature to impale itself onto the spear.
Uraraka isn’t Kirishima. She doesn’t have the strength to push the thing off her, hell, to even hold it up for long. The only reason she’s holding on is that it lost the grip on its warhammer when it fell onto her, otherwise it would raise itself just enough to smash her face in.
And then she can see its throat bulging out.
Oh no, you don’t .
The creature vomits a mouthful of bile onto her, Uraraka twisting her neck barely in time to avoid having all of that land on her face. And if she had any doubts as to the nature of the liquid, they disappear when it starts to fizzle loudly as it touches the ground.
It’s acidic enough to partially dissolve solid limestone. Yeah, no. She’s officially drawing the line here and…
Himiko appears out of nowhere landing on the creature’s shoulders (the additional weight is… OOF) before immediately piercing both of its eyes with her daggers. The creature roars and raises up a bit, one hand on the ground while the other flails around, trying to grab the assailant who was already gone from its back, as Toga immediately rolled off him.
The creature is weakened and distracted, Uraraka takes the advantage of this to crawl from underneath it, stand up and then immediately shatter its neck with the edge of her shield that she slammed into it from behind.
One creature out of the picture. Three if you count the one crossbowman that Mina liquidated in the background and the one that Tokage and Compress managed to kill in a way that was much less messy than the joint work of Uraraka and Toga.
That was going better than intended! Only half of them were left, two of them occupied by Kirishima and Tetsutetsu (whose skills weren’t particularly useful against enemies that turned out to be physically stronger than them) and the third one rushing from behind the barricade to join them, but only armed with a single meat cleaver.
Stolen story; please report.
Rushing in its own way. It was marginally faster than walking, but not by far.
She’s almost immediately forced to change her outlook of the situation when the creature whose neck she just shattered suddenly grabs her by her ankle and twists it, almost breaking it on the spot.
Uraraka yelps in pain, as she lands on the ground again. The creature was still partially immobilized by the spear going through its chest, but it was clearly lifting itself up, with the neck already being healed and…
They can regenerate!
Tokage-san, behind you!
Tokage fails to react in time. The creature that they seemingly fell and left behind lifts itself up just enough to grab its hammer again and do a wide sweep with it, hitting her left leg from the side and breaking it instantly.
Tokage screams and falls to the ground. The creature immediately begins to crawl towards her in order to finish the job, despite its grievous injuries.
Regeneration? Inhuman vitality? Or both, to some degree? Those creatures weren’t individually dangerous, they were slow and cumbersome, their attacks easy to dodge if you had enough space, but they just refused to go down.
Compress immediately gets close and pierces the side of its neck with his dagger. Uraraka in the meantime slams her shield into the blinded creature, which makes its grip on her ankle weaken enough for her to free herself. And then…
Then she’s doused in blood as she gives in to the Bloodrage. She immediately leaps forward, her vision tinted red, as she gets close enough to wrap her arms around the head before delivering a bone-crushing kick straight into the creature’s face.
And then, before it can recover, she jumps up just enough to slam her entire body’s weight (elbow and shoulder first) into the head from above, the head hitting the stone floor with enough momentum to crack its skull even more.
She tears her spear out of its back, the entire length covered in its blood and nails the creature down into the ground, piercing its neck from behind.
And then doing it again.
And again.
And again.
In the meantime, the others were busy fighting their own enemies.
Tokage, despite Compress’s best efforts, was killed, her head crushed like watermelon under the creature’s hammer before she could stand up or crawl away from it. .
The advancing crossbowman was attacked by his fellow crossbowman from behind, Yanagi thinking quickly and succeeding in reanimating the creature a moment ago. The undead is missing most of his head due to Ashido’s acid, so it’s much weaker than its opponent, but at least it’s enough to delay it a bit.
Kirishima was still struggling with his opponent until Yaoyorozu cast [Float] on him. With his immense weight, he doesn’t float, just gets lighter. This is enough for Kirishima to push him back, and slam his log into his head.
His blow finds limited purchase. The creature was nigh-impervious to blunt damage, likely due to the size of his body and how much fat was there to absorb the impact, especially in tandem with their immense vitality.
They don’t even bother attacking their body anymore, instead going for their heads. Or legs.
Compress proves that the latter option is pretty good too when he lands on the ground behind the creature struggling with Tetsutetsu and cuts through the creature’s tendons, before jumping to the side before the creature falls back, Tetsutetsu finally succeeding in pushing it back.
Uraraka in the meantime helps Kirishima. She’s still under the effects of Bloodrage, her attacks much more vicious than usual. Her spear’s blade broke off when she impaled her earlier enemy a bit too strongly, so she instead jumped at the other creature’s back, her broken spear in his hand, before she started to strangle the creature with it.
The remaining crossbowman is eliminated by a combination of more [Corrosive Spits] and Yanagi’s [Black Bolts] together with his very own undead companion still clawing at them relentlessly.
The latter spell was pretty much what was said on the tin. Yanagi could fire small, black bolts of energy at the target. The effects of being hit by it, despite the system identifying the damage type as ‘death’ are pretty minuscule.
It makes you weaker. Get hit in the eye, and the eye will be temporarily knocked out of operations. Get hit in the heart, and the heart will stop - and you’ll die.
It also had another interesting property.
I think that [Black Bolts] interrupt or slow down their recovery!
Yanagi-san, target the injuries of the ones that are knocked out but not definitely dead.
“On it.” Yanagi replies shortly before firing a [Black Bolt] as ordered.
Ashido helps her too by getting closer and using her own sorceries to finish the fallen creatures down.
It takes them a few more minutes to finally finis their enemies off. Their vitality truly was something else, and their strength and resistance to impacts were immense . Their lack of mobility and armor and relatively easy to dodge attacks made them vulnerable to sufficiently fast attackers, though.
Even worse than that, when the fight started, they were scattered around, meaning that they were getting knocked out one by one without being able to aid each other.
If this was a more regular battle and if they were dealing with those creatures fighting in a formation, it would be… much more troublesome. Their vitality would allow them to recover from minor injuries while protected by their allies, making them near-invulnerable to skirmish tactics.
In short, they had a lot of luck. Or, to be more exact about it, they made the correct choice when they decided to sneak past the gate instead of breaking it apart. If those creatures realized that they were coming a bit earlier…
And they still lost Tokage and Kaminari. They definitely have to get stronger. Or at least that’s what Uraraka thinks when the battle ends and her Bloodrage subsides and she can actually think clearly, even if she’s still completely covered in blood.
No points for figuring out what sort of look was Himiko giving her. At least this time she had the decency of waiting until the fight ended to begin to indulge in her daydreams.
“Alright.” Uraraka takes a deep breath. Her muscles hurt a bit, the Bloodrage is definitely not easy on her body. She can move, but… “Let’s carry the corpses back. I don’t think that we’re up for another fight.”
“True.” Yaoyorozu replies while nodding. “Let’s get back. Carrying the spoils of our victory back will be a challenge on its own. Yanagi-san, can you reanimate another one?”
“Hmm…” Yanagi looks down on one of the corpses. “No, I can’t. Out of mana for now, sorry.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for, you’ve done a great job.” Uraraka replies. Tokage isn’t there so it’s her job for now, right? “ Unlike our mages. You didn’t do a lot, sorry for putting it that way.”
“Rude.” Monoma says dryly. “But you’re not wrong. Those things were pretty much invulnerable to all our magic, even [Float] was barely making them budge. When it became clear that we’re overwhelming them without our help, I’ve decided to conserve mana for our way back.”
“Makes sense.” Uraraka sighs. “But I think that Yaoyorozu-san proved that a well-timed [Float] could still help. Anyway, we’ve won and that’s what matters. Let’s start carrying them back and…”
And that’s when she heard a noise. A distant one, but slowly coming closer. Steps. Synchronized ones, as if multiple people were marching in a formation. They sound of …
…metal?
Ah, shit. Armors. Metal armors. And pretty solid ones, for what Uraraka can tell at the distance.
“We have to go.” Uraraka turns her head away from the source of the sound and back to Yaoyorozu. The elf gives her back a confused look, her senses not even nearly as good as the ones of the beastkin. “We have company. A lot of company. Move, now .”
***
Kirishima, Ashido and Tetsutetsu each manage to carry one of the creatures mostly by pulling them by their legs - which isn’t the best way of doing it, but at least it works.
Uraraka and Toga carry another one together, Yaoyorozu keeping it under [Float]. Fifth one is carried by Yanagi, Compress and Monoma, a feat only capable thanks to Monoma’s own [Float].
Finally, the sixth one was walking alongside on their own as an undead.
This sort of arrangement works, but they’re far from being fast , and they’re still rapidly exhausting themselves.
Just get to the elevator, that should stop them!
“It’s not as easy…” Uraraka says. She is exhausted, her legs and arms hurt so much. Why is this goddamn thing so heavy?! “... as you’re making it, Izuku.”
… sorry.
Uraraka immediately makes a mental note to apologize to him for making him feel bad, but that’s for later.
For now, they have to run.
And run they do, all the way until they reach the elevator, the sound of feet coated in metal getting very, very close. In fact, just as they finally stumble onto the platform and throw the corpses that they’ve carried onto the floor, they can finally see their pursuers.
There was a line of four armored soldiers walking down the corridor behind them, with four more standing right behind them.
Each of the coming figures was a woman, wearing an exquisitely crafted, rose-coloured armor consisting of a chainmail under a light plate armor, which in turn was composed of a breastplate with a neckguard (decorated with what looked like a living rose right above the breasts themselves), shoulderpads, gauntlets, chausses and high boots.
There was, of course, a helmet (an open one, letting them see the faces of the people underneath it). As for the weaponry, each of them seem to be armed in a round metal shield with a picture of rose engraved in the front section of it, a spear and a sheathed sword by their side.
There was just one thing that was odd about them, and that instantly dragged their attention away from their exquisite armaments and perfectly-fit armor.
Are they… gagged?
Oh boy
I think that we’ve found the servants of the divine big horni
At least they’re more into looking pretty than slutty, so it’s still fairly child-friendly, it probably only gets worse from there
I’m moderately concerned by it.
Uraraka doesn’t bother waiting for them to come any closer. Instead she throws a javelin at them. The warrior she targets decides to utterly disrespect her attempts and doesn’t even bother using her shield.
Instead, she lets the javelin bounce off the side of her chestplate as she continues approaching, her eyes rolling up for a second in an expression that Izuku can only describe as enjoyment before they return to marching forward in formation. They are still on their guard, not breaking the tempo and still holding the wall of shields up.
The look she gives Uraraka is one of pure disrespect.
Naturally, Uraraka is furious, but that’s when Kirishima pulls the right lever and the elevator platform moves up, leaving the group behind. Just in time for Uraraka to notice some of the earlier, obese giants behind the formation, and a few more warrior women with longbows.
Thankfully, they fail to fire at them over their allies’ heads.
The elevator goes up and they successfully manage to disengage from their attackers. Which is great. But then a problem becomes immediately obvious.
Their enemies can use levers as well.
This turns into a bit of a weird moment, with Toga and Compress quickly climbing up to the upper level of the mine to push the lever back, which lasts for a short moment before the attackers give up and let them get up.
They immediately move the corpses off the elevator platform, only for it to start moving down again, forcing Uraraka to make a hard decision and have Kirishima sabotage the mechanism of the elevator by pushing his log into it.
It likely won’t stop them permanently, but for now, they’re off the hook.
Return to the Dungeon.
I think it’s enough for the day, and you want as much space between you and those things as possible, which isn’t going to be easy while carrying the loot.
Yeah, this won’t stop them for long
“Alright then.” Uraraka nods. She doesn’t like it, it really feels as if losing a fight, but… you can’t always win, right?
… guess I’ll go start making preparations.
Hmmm?
Not your business.
(-_- )
***
I am not... fully comfortable about posting it, and I'm not sure if I like the gag, but... ehhh.
image [https://images.squidge.org/images/2024/07/15/image.png]
TCP is likely kept ~16+, so don't expect more than that lol.
Those guys, uhm, 'behaviour' will be played for laughs.