As soon as the canister breaks and the crystal touches her hand, a surge of energy shoots through her like she’d been hit by Julia’s plasma–intense, unyielding, and immense power that she can’t quite control. She holds her chest as the light from the crystal intensifies, and it’s taking her all to hold onto it, vibrating with the intensity of an earthquake in her palm. She staggers back while Valosterla takes in this spectacle, and Nick and Levine wince from the overwhelming brightness.
“Angela, let go of it!” Nick bellows out, but dares not leave cover, not as a human against a Siberian hellkite–even as formidably armed as he is. But she can’t. There’s a compulsion to hold on as tight as she can muster, and she grimaces against that overwhelming power that could tear her apart from the inside out. She curls the core of her body, trying to will this untamed power, directing it. Forcing it to take form in a new way, that hum of life and vibrancy being guided by her will.
She doesn’t know how this works at all, only that a small whisper in her mind tells her that this is important to endure. Standing against the deadliest dragon on the planet as she was, even given her rapidly improving skills, would not be enough. This time it’s going to take raw power, and she feels an itching and cracking sensation across her scales. Her scales aren’t just darkening when they’re charged, they’re becoming iridescent–gleaming with light. It’s almost as if they turn slightly translucent, just like–
–like the crystal now in her hand, transferring immense power into her. Valosterla tries to close, violet energy tinged with black motes in her claws and lashing out like a whip of infernal energy. Angela catches it on the armor scales of her forearm out of sheer reflex while holding onto that crystal that is vibrating in her hand. This infernal lash burns with an intensity she’s never felt before, even as her scales reform against the damage, and she lets out a growl of pain. She readies her attack and sends out a kinetic blast, staggering Val backward. She looks at her forearm and the rapidly healing scales.
They’re not just healing, they’re changing. She can feel a pulse of energy, deep within her own heart, that is resonating at the same frequency, a vibration of life itself that she is intimately in tune with. The crystal hums with a song only she can hear, a sound that transcends the physical. Her scales begin to hum too, and turn bright, and translucent. It’s almost as if the scales on her body are reforming into small crystals of mana, and Valosterla stares at this spectacle.
“What are you, child? I have lived for twelve hundred years, and the last time I saw one of you brats wielding this power, I snuffed out her life without a second thought! She was the last!” she roars even as she lunges.
Nick unloads armor-piercing rounds into Val when Angela turns the blow and grapples with her, those deadly black talons unable to pierce her new scales brimming with newfound strength. She doesn’t know how long this will last, but she needs to buy time and space for Drenar and the others to get to safety and keep securing the facility, getting Kyle time to build an escape plan. She uses kinetics to match Val’s raw strength, maneuvering her into Nick’s line of fire while keeping herself out of it. Levine’s rounds do minor damage to Valosterla’s arcane barrier, while Nick’s dragon-killer rifle leaves massive cracks in the violet barrier enveloping Valosterla’s body.
“So this isn’t the first time you’ve fought someone like me,” Angela concludes with utter tranquility, her heart practically vibrating under this intense energy. She’s never felt stronger in her life, and she isn't going to let it go to waste. She flings Val into a wall and pummels her while she’s off balance, kinetic-enhanced claws raking through the barrier and ripping open small but notable wounds. She won’t win a fight like this, because Val’s flesh and scales begin to heal in mere seconds after the initial injury, slowly closing. It takes about a full thirty seconds, but by that time, Angela has a strategy.
She can slow her regen down by inflicting multiple narrow wounds, but the damage isn’t one way. Val’s talons do pierce through, drawing blood from a raking blow she can’t avoid. The deadly dark energy surges off her arms and ripples across Angela’s body, searing her from the outside in, but she holds on, keeping her claws raking to do as much damage as possible, tearing through this monster like she’s tinfoil.
“Angela, fall back! Drenar and Kyle are almost done!” Nick screams out, even as he hefts a canister of burning particles and hits Val square in the back with the incendiary device. It barely phases her, and he has to duck for cover as Val’s tail nearly sideswipes him. A deft roll avoids the impact, and he’s darting for the doorway, giving cover for Levine by firing that dragon killer rifle that so far has lived up to its namesake.
Val is no longer alone as the knights peek through the shattered bulkhead door, firing at Angela. They might as well be firing foam darts at her, because she barely registers the impact, but the pain is still present in the absence of physical injuries. She braces against a support column and kicks Val squarely in the chest, causing her to flinch. She uses her strength surge to blast Valosterla into one of the knights, and when she falls on top of him with her body, there’s a crunch and a scream. Val looks unamused at this. Or the handful of feathers that float through the air like someone beat open an evil dragoness pillow.
“You’re not supposed to break under my fall, you’re supposed to break my fall, you useless, consumable henchmen!” she utters with all the drama a maniacal CEO at her apex can muster. Angela has taken the moment to grab the biggest, heaviest machine she lift and kinetically charges it, and fires it off like a small missile at Valosterla with a mighty kinetic lasso. Her aim strikes true and stumbles her backward.
“Maybe pay the hired help more? Oh wait that’s right, you’d be so poor! Evil dragons don’t suit this place, I guess I’ll smash your scaly face!”
She felt proud of throwing an insult to Val in the form of prose, and flung another heavy metal support beam that had been knocked loose. Val catches it with a snap reflex, but it puts her in motion. Angela charges into her with her shoulder, smashing her into the wall and cracking it with immense force. Val rakes her claws off her scales, doing superficial damage. She knows her power is short-lived, because her scales are no longer glimmering with as much light as they did before. She figures it must be some kind of unusual ability tied to mana crystals, something that none of the dragon species are noted for.
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Is she like Drenar and Julia? Does she have unique powers that no one else does? She has to survive here in order to find out, and that means putting this monster in her place for a spell. She slams her into the wall again, and it buckles–the magical infused masonry starts to crumble under the brawl of two absurdly powerful dragons engaging in a knock-out, drag-out fight. She’d make a pun if she wasn’t in the fight of her life.
She blasts Val one more time and ducks under a ray of deadly purple energy, and it singes her feathers from the near miss, and those black particles radiate off from the burn. That stuff is helluva deadly, and she has no interest in taking another direct hit from it. She thrusts her claw out and heaves at the weakened bricks with all the force she can muster, screaming in fury as she brings the wall and part of the ceiling down on Valosterla and burying her under debris--one of the soldiers takes a chunk the size of a bathtub and there’s and unpleasant squish sound as his body essentially…deflates from the violent impact.
That one’s going to be nightmare fuel later. One of the knights has grabbed a tubular object and she doesn’t need a second thought to realize that firing rocket launchers inside an enclosed space at lethally close range, is a bad idea for everyone involved. She grabs the weapon with a massive kinetic grapple, and aims the deadly weapon against Valosterla, who is struggling to rise.
Given what she’s survived so far, including imploding a teleportal, Valosterla is either an actual literal goddess, or a looney tunes character, and she’s not sure which of those is less outlandish. But she does know from video game memory what a firing trigger and safety disarm button is, and gets a claw on the trigger with a quick check of her surroundings. The rocket brings down more of the ceiling, and Val lets out a scream of frustration as masonry, debris, and now the fire suppression system all rain down on her.
“You’re dead, you little bitch!” Val screams. “I’m going to make it my life goal that everyone you love will be dismembered by me, one at a time, and then, when they’re down to a bloodied torso in agonizing, indescribable pain, I’m going to make you watch me devour them, a bit at a time!”
“Val, my favorite psycho, You lack such great vision! Try your hand at drawing, heal your minds condition!” she sings out in yet another laser targeted moment of driving this utter madwoman berserk.
She must get it from Drenar and Julia, for sure, because James can’t sing to save his life. She scrabbles towards the barricade door, panting and out of breath. Bolts and rifle rounds ping off her scales, but the impacts barely register as she belly slides under the barrier in a scraping sound of crystal over stone–its a truly loud sound, in retrospect. Several steely locks engage behind her as the door slams shut, and heavy metal bars reinforce the door in a series of mechanical thuds. Her strength finally gives out and she falls on one knee, out of breath.
Drenar and Julia stare at her, and Joey is utterly fascinated by the appearance of her crystalline scales. Nick looks like this is the strangest day of his life, and Kyle–Kyle is busy trying to not have an anxiety attack as he engages every lock this wing has from the console just adjacent to him.
“So…I might have…hah-hah…I might have pissed her off a bit,” Angela laughs, and she feels like she’s suffering an utter crash as her scales itch and crackle again. The light fades from her armor scales, and they revert to their normal lustrous silver shades. Drenar and Julia stare at each other, then at her.
“You gonna say it?” Drenar finally states.
“Which part?” Whatever funk Julia had been in before is put on hold. “You mean the part where Angela just held her own against the deadliest dragon of the realms, and–you had crystal scales? Girl, seriously, I’m kinda jealous, it's so pretty! But they’re…gone?”
“Guess so.” She is saddened by that just a little bit, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any permanent harm. Except for some burns from Val’s energy attack, which still burns mildly, and a few rapidly fading claw wounds. Nothing that would impact her effectiveness in protecting her friends--her team.
“Drenar, I hate saying it, but weird shit is no longer exclusive to you after we met the psionic and the engineer. Also, my bestie now officially has superpowers.” Julia has a faint grin on her face, and gives Angela a pat on a wing. “Tell me you plucked that bitches’ wings!”
“For now,” Angela says after rubbing gingerly on the wounds across her body. Joey is once more on the spot with the bandages and regen potion for the deeper wounds, her lavender eyes focused on the job at hand. “They’ll uh…be digging out of debris for a bit. So we should work on our next insane plan. You know, before the dancing, singing murder lizard comes back for round two. I’m flat out of rhymes to battle her again.”
She laughs triumphantly, even though she is exhausted to her breaking point. Joey looks like she could melt on the spot in admiration. “You know what Angela, I take it back. You guys are cool. Weird, but strangely cool.”
“Awesome, Joey. I’ll put you down for our next tabletop session for gaming. As soon as we save the world, first.”