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Priscilla     It's probably for the best that the job had the big ol' disclaimer 'you'll be stuck going to Lordran, here's danger pay up front', because it'd be pretty hard to dupe anyone into not noticing.

    As most people are probably familiar by now, Darkroot Garden, despite one half of a generic fantasy goblin-filled forest name (and one half perplexing), is unmistakable as anything but a lush, leafy green hellhole. The trees don't need to be withered and decrepit or covered in spider webs to give off the vibe. The near jungle-like greenery is so dense that it turns everything below the boughs into a dark ocean trench, illuminated only by appropriately bioluminescent flora.

    The whole forest seems to grow on top of a few centuries of dirt that has buried some impossibly vertical, ancient city, of which only a handful of crumbling balconies and steeples are still visible through all the moss and vines. The sound of distant, rushing water, is ever-present, but there is never any to be found; just sharp, bottomless drops into uncanny darkness.

    As one can only gather at the edge and push inward through a very limited number of clear(ish) paths, the prospects are not great, especially since, unlike the last time, the forest is not as eerily quiet as it should be. The foggy dark is alive with the sounds of slithering, rustling, hissing, croaking, and heavy, trudging footfalls, of such frequency that it's more difficult to hear the backdrop of strange insects and what are hopefully birds. Hopefully. Thankfully, a couple of people have been in fairly deep before, and know a paths.
Janine Liberi     Janine does not like Lordran.

    Last time she came here, she got thrown into a canyon by a crazy catgirl, had to murder a bunch of not!dragons while fighting for her life, and met the man who burned her apartment down. That level of nonsense would put anyone off anywhere, and the dangerous reputation of the kingdom just accelerated the prospect.

    But there's one thing she needs, and that is to 'get paid.'

    Since her mother and younger siblings were living with her now, there are going to be more eyes on her finances. She can't explain away expenditures as 'expanding her wardrobe' when someone is there to see it's not changing. Thus, she once again has to rely on receiving funds from elsewhere to keep Die Reisende afloat.

    How the hell she became treasurer, she'll never know.

    "This forest is some dank-ass bullshit," she declares, having taken up her sabre to hack through any branches in her way (and a few bushes not in her way). Thankfully she had the good sense to wear some sturdy hiking boots today, her usual loafers would be ruined by now!
Kazuko Kawakami It's time for Kazuko's second official mission as a Watch member! Unofficial. This isn't tied to the Watch at all, is it? Well, at least money's involved, and the temple isn't going to repair itself for free! The martial artist hasn't done much in the way of fighting inhuman threats in quite some time, so working her way up from cultists doesn't sound like it should be too bad. Cultists means people or people-shaped monsters, right? It can't be too hard!

     Clearly, the girl has no idea what Lordran stands for. Still, Kazuko's careful enough to arrive with her bladed naginata this time along with forest-appropriate clothing in the form of a long-sleeved jacket and track pants. She wrinkles her nose as she arrives at the edge of the forest, taking note of the smell and noises surrounding her.

     "It's really thick here, yeah..." Kazuko mutters as she moves alongside Janine, slicing down foliage and things that look like foliage to widen the path. "Smells funny, too. Not like trees or bugs, but... I don't know! It's super weird."
Tomoe So here Tomoe comes again, she had a mess she made she was going to damn well help to clean it up for good or ill. She was here in Lordran and she was used to the danger even though it was a dangerous place and she was on edge. She had experiance here and that taught her be as paranoid as a cold war spy about everything. For all she knew the grass might one day try to kill her here after all yet she does care about it or she'd not have stuck her neck out in the first place for it. So here she was with a small group of people who'd been hired on one way or anoteher.

"This forst used to be worse, all of it did. It's at least not crawling with the undead but i getcha it can be ... opressive. Name's Tomoe by the way."

Kazuko also gets a look from her as well.

"Keep on your toes and I'll try to intercept anything that wants to get in our grill it's my job to keep you both from getting messed up."
Yuuki Kuran     It turns out that Yuuki feels an overage of responsibility for Lordran, and not for any good or healthy reasons.

    It is for awful, shojo reasons. Her feelings are a tempest of accepting too much responsibility and being a sadsack who has Far Too Much Time On Her Hands.

    But she's here! 'Accepting' a 'contract'. Bundled up in her favorite puffy coat, she crunches her way through the forest, her eyes not deviating from the path. "I would be careful, everyone. Relations with the owner of this forest broke down. Perhaps it could have gone better, but I doubt it could get any worse."

    She pauses, midstep, shaking her head, sadsacking a little bit as her shoulders droop. "Well, now that I said that... You never know? At least perhaps there will be something for everyone to fight in a productive sense, rather than..."

    Her eyes get a distant look. "Well, nevermind. I hope this goes well."
Gilgamesh      Well, the King of Heroes *was* offered a visit to this Lordran, so it's not unfeasible that in his weird wanderings he'd wind up in the miserable hellhole/fallen capital/dark dimension that it is. Indeed, it's sort of a surprise he hadn't made his way there sooner. In his defense, he's been distracted.

     The basement of Hellsing Manor may or may not be covered in Legos right now.

     The basement of the Hellsing Manor is *definitely* covered in Legos right now.

     It's Gawain's fault.

     The King of Heroes does not care overmuch for money. He has plenty of that. He has more of that than he could spend in one lifetime. He has more of that than he could spend in /all/ his lifetimes. Besides, it is his custom to take treasures whenever he lends his aid; 'hard payment' is after all less useful to him than 'that or those which he finds and claims as his own.'

     No, currently, Gilgamesh is more interested in finding out what's in Lordran that MIGHT be of interest to him beyond a creature uncannily like (but not identical to) himself. It is for that reason that the King of Heroes has come.

     Even before he's in view, his aura is...noticeable. Palpable. Divinity runs before him like a river. It is a physical fact of him, an aura of Royalty and Command and Godliness that is a fact of his existence more than any assumed title or power. He Is The King. Without being The King, he does not exist. It is an essential part of his fabric, and it flows out of him and around him, around the trees and rocks and land in his immediate vicinity.

     ...he hasn't figured out how to turn it off yet.

     The King crosses paths with Kazuko and Janine more or less by happy accident, because they're all going the same way and there's only a few paths. He stops to regard them for a moment, then continues walking alongside them, more out of convenience than acknowledgement. His robe scrapes along the ground, a patchwork of XCOM and Hellsing uniforms that should by rights look poor and dirty but on him looks like the finest silks. The words VIGILO CONFIDO are emblazoned on the robe's back like a promise stitched in godhood; HELLSING: WE ARE ON A MISSION FROM GOD seems radiant around his arm.

     Gilgamesh is also completely unarmed, but anyone who thinks *that's* an impediment to an unearthly, impossibly beautiful young man radiating Divine Majesty at an almost physical level in the Multiverse clearly hasn't been in the Multiverse for very long.

     "If this is enough to bother you then perhaps you should not be here," is all the young man says at the snippets of their conversation about the forest's misery, "And I will graciously keep the reward for myself as you run home crying of the smells of the forest."

     Oh, he's also kind of a jerk. At least he's a /gorgeous/ jerk?
Zero Kiryu "The nature of this place is predation." Zero Kiryu explains, plainly. He had come, as usual, by accompanying Yuuki Kuran. He is likewise not dressed appropriate to the environment, although he is less /heavily/ dressed than his companion by far. He continues, "This is the seat of power of an entity that holds outsiders in complete contempt, and asserts dominance over the other predators of this place."

"In the absence of its hospitality, the locale becomes much more hostile. What you are experiencing is most likely the difference in demeanors that represents." He says it matter-of-factly, but the hunter is really just speculating based on his limited experiences here.

Flatly, he adds to Yuuki, "I doubt it."
Priscilla     Granted, even if Gilgamesh wasn't oozing the kind of divine aura that only the closest relatives to the lineage of the Sun can manage back in Anor Londo, everyone here sticks out like a sore thumb. Yes, even the regular humans. Going deeper under the trees, where tall flowers create spots of light like fey street lamps, and the pulsing glow of strange mosses, bugs, and amphibious things, marks the way, this is clearly not so much the kind of place where man fears to tread, but where it is completely out of its element. The air is less 'foreboding' than 'completely out of depth'.

    Zero's mental radar is going to be buzzing pretty much the entire time. So much that making it a point of note would become uselessly repetitive. Kazuko does not pick up the scent of foliage, earth, rot and animal, like a real forest should, as it seems everything living has learned to mask its scent, so that it smells more like diving some abandoned oubliette, complete with the occasional whiff of old blood and corroded metal.

    The plus side is that nobody has to deal with awful mosquitoes or jungle humidity or anything. The downside is everything else. Within minutes, a greened branch on the edge of a tree reveals itself to be three quarters of a lizard with two snakes attached, and bites at Yuuki from a cool two meters away. Not even a minute later, Tomoe steps on something slippery and tough buried under the moss, which then produces a giant, literal stingray needle and whips it up toward her chest, before scuttling off as some kind of spotted . . . frog . . . ray . . . thing . . . with no legs. A tree picks up its roots and wobbles away on a web of prehensile tendrils as the group goes past, making unnervingly human moaning sounds. Shortly past that, something from the boughs behind it fires off an absurdly long, toad-like tongue, covered in poisonous barbs, at Kazuko's head. Even past that, a big, fat, bright orange moth alights on a hanging vine, and then showers the entire group with blasts of chokingly thick, acid green powder, which is of course insanely toxic and also actually acid.

    The last few walks through here had been downright pleasant by comparison. The only thing marking the way is the odd bit of centuries old masonry jutting out of the ground like yellowed and broken teeth. The little shrine that some here had met Alvina at before is visible in the distance, but the area is still, more or less, a dangerously wide and dark clearing, at the edge of a moonlit cliff, where the trees are wide apart enough to allow something very large to move between them.
Janine Liberi     Janine strides over surfaced roots and grumbles over the companions she found herself having. Logically, she knows she can't handle this on her own, but... ugh. /People./ "Maybe that's just you," she comments to Kazuko, before glowering at Tomoe. "Hi. My name is, 'I Didn't Ask For Yours.'" Very rude.

    Yuuki though? She hates this girl slightly less. She can respect a pragmatic view on things, no matter how dour. "They won't go well. Stay frosty. At least you're bundled up for it." Harsh insults one moment and lame puns the next. She really is a teenager.

    And then Gilgamesh swaggers up.

    Janine knows handsome pretty-boy jerks. Drachenblatt is full to burst with them. But this guy makes them look meek and mild-mannered in comparison. She dislikes him immediately. "Are you my boss?" she asks, before answering her own question, accompanied by a raised middle finger. "No? Then screw off, I'll piss and moan all I like while I do this dirty work. You don't like it? /You/ can leave."

    Onward! The mass of things that try to make life difficult for others draws agape looks from Janine. She's seen things such as these in the Mirror Forest, but they're reflections of humanity. Looking fucked up is understandable. Seeing things like that in like, a 'real world' context is mindblowing.

    She doesn't really do much to stick up for her comrades. But when the moth-thing blows dust at them, she peers into her sword, into the reflection generated by the filtered light. "Biancabella!" Her Persona arises from the blue aura shimmering about her, the image of a maimed woman. With a gesture of her bloody stumps, a powerful gust of wind blows the dust back, and attempts to send the insect blasting into a tree trunk! Hopefully not a moving one.
Kazuko Kawakami "Kazuko Kawakami. A student of the Kawakami Temple isn't going to leave just because it smells bad or the entire area wants us to!" The brunette states, both in greeting to Tomoe and IDAFY while as well as defiantly to both Gilgamesh and Kiryu. The latter two get a huff and a stare as if challenging them on that.

T% Stupid pretty jerks. Also, huffing sucks here. What's with the air being so... Not-smelling like a forest at all? How creepy.

     Her pride is at stake, too, and that shines through in Kazuko's steady gaze even as she keeps hacking away at the underbrush. "... Or because the owner of this place hates us and has a lot of bloody metal out here. If there's a cult leader, then it's our job to kick his butt!"

     Also, money. Being on an allowance sucks, so maybe she can just hide the payment from this job under her bed or something. Luckily, she doesn't have to go far before she gets her first chance to show her worth. Yuuki and Tomoe are attacked, but before Kazuko can react to assist, she finds something weird and long gunning straight for her head!

     Or tonguing. Weird. Luckily, the girl is fast on her feet, and she dips into a low crouch while swinging her weapon upwards at the offending tongue to try and slice into it or get it to catch around the blade of her weapon. In her haste to counter against that, however, she doesn't notice the awful powder, and she gets some of her jacket burnt off and even some of the poisonous substance biting into her arms for her trouble!

     "Gyah! Stupid bug thing! Watch out, everyone!"
Tomoe Soon Yuuki and her companion Zero show up and that doesn't shock her but then Gil shows upand the purpled haired and towering woman just /sthares/ at Gilgamesh for a moment. She isn't sure what to think for a moment. She catches sight of the XCOM unit patches and she knows those also Hellsing's readable but she's not sure who they are.

"It really is and I'd rather not be dinner. That aside good to see you Kazuko it's been a while."

She notes to Zero for a moment the then looks back to Gil. She sure got some questions for the man about things. Then Janine goes rampant bitch on /everyone/. Tomoe's at a loss for words, or more correctly has more control over her mouth.

"I knew people like you, they ended up dead an attuide like that will get you killed. Possibly even others."

Tomoe blows the rest off, DPS being assholes? Sky blue, grass green really. Also there's something she stepped on she calls out a warning as she pulls back the stinger grazes her as it did catch her flat footed, It mostly gets her armour but she still feels the hit. It's time to get to work, as she focued upon her, the mourning wall and Dawnbreaker go into action now as she's trying to get in close and get as many of the thing's attentiuon on her she lets lose with starting to taunt them. She shouts things and pops her various abiltieis as he's trying to avoid gettinv caught in acid. At least Janine has some firepower to her, she knwos though she can count on Kazuko? She knos Yuuki and Zero are good, but Gil is an unknown factor and Janine has at least a sort of power known to Tomoe, though she knows only it amounts to brain god that fires magic more or less.

"I'll try to keep them off the rest of you burn them down!"

She's going into tank mode it seems and she's gong to darn well do her job in the end.
Gilgamesh      He can turn his aura off any time he likes! He just...doesn't like to, that's all! There's nothing complex about it! D-don't read anything into that, mongrel!

     "Hmph. Mongrel," Gilgamesh snorts in Janine's direction. He *also* is a teenager, clearly. He waves his hand dismissively at her. "Your will may be fine but your tongue is unclean."

     And then he doesn't say anything else at the moment, because he's kind of distracted by all the HORRIBLE SHIT in this forest. It is really horrible. For a moment it briefly reminds him of some adventure or another into some forgotten wilderness lost to time and space. Serpents with two heads, giant frogs, stingray needles, all kinds of horrible, primordial, giant beasts.

     The King is plunged back into the realm of his memory as they walk. "It is /primal/," Gilgamesh says...cheerfully?...in Zero's direction, "Old and ancient and full of strong beasts to slay."

     It reminds him of home *so much*.

     The butterfly's poison begins spreading. Gilgamesh is about to simply open the Gate of Babylon and dispatch it when Janine's Persona catches his eye. He watches it for a long moment.

     "Yes, that will do."

     The world behind him ripples and splits. The young demigod reaches behind him. Space and time break in a glorious shine of gold as a jagged red knife emerges in his hand. He flicks it in front of him. It rains rose petals with the motion, sprinkling flowers before him where it passes. He raises the dagger into the air.

     He swings it over his head.

     The butterfly poison around *him* disperses in a gust of roses and wind, sending the poisonous acid scattering away from him and blowing through the trees above.

     "This place is truly pleasant," Gilgamesh observes contentedly. "She was quite right."
Zero Kiryu One of the things spending so much time around other predators does, is that it gets you used to having your mental radar going off literally one hundred percent of the time. Zero regrettably is a person who is already contributing a great deal of his mental energy towards fighting the overall misery his body inflicts on him at essentially all times. He focuses for the moment on his mental radar instead of his visual acuity, trying to pick through the relative danger levels at hand here.

An easily missed, faint sigh escapes him as the trouble starts. A burst of force -- air? -- from the rude girl's magic dismembered creature is primarily what spares the hunter from getting dusted with the corrosive powder venom that it was spitting their way. He spares a glance in the direction of the /thing/ that decided to harass Yuuki, considers taking measures himself, and ultimately decides that the problem she's dealing with is one that she can handle.

A hand plunges into his jacket and draws out the simple-looking pistol he always carries.

"All of those things are true," he says to Gilgamesh, "but the creature that controls them acts on the same pettiness as any thinking predator does. The beasts aren't hungry. Their master is just an oversized house cat with all the attitude that implies. I don't know if this place would be more or less wretched without her here, since she's made it clear she'll hound us the whole way through for not capitulating to her untenable demands."

Vines begin to spill out from Bloody Rose. They don't seek out the /obvious/ predators, which are more-or-less handled. As they grow they extend into the surroundings and just start experimentally jabbing at the environment.

If the whole damn place is going to act as a unified superpredator against them, Zero is just going to find everything he can possibly eat here and start eating it to assert dominance.
Yuuki Kuran     Trudging along the ground and getting vague support-agreement (she's going to take it as support agreement) from Zero, feeling surrounded by SO MANY TEENAGERS. It makes her even more morose, as if the world was conspiring to make her suffer. Unfortunately for her, in this case, the world actually WAS conspiring to make her suffer - and even worse, SHE WAS THE TEENAGER. Well, Young Adult. Same difference in NORMAL GIRL years.

    She gives a helpless smile at Janine. "I don't think the coat will help stop what's coming."

    She is proved shockingly correct as Garbage Cat's Shitty Fuck You Forest dumps acid pollen on her flat-footed ass, causing her to stumble back as it gets all over her coat and face! Yeowch!

    Thankfully, Janine is on it, blowing the dust away.

    "I'm glad you two are having fun and making friends, but this place really is trying to kill all of us. Especially its ruler!" She asides, stripping off her chemically smouldering coat to reveal a rather pedestrian baggy long-sleeved shirt under it, as well as a baton clipped to a belt around her waist. "And that was my favorite coat, too!"

    Oh well. That Gilgamesh guy seems to have the beasts handled. And if he doesn't, Tomoe and Zero certainly do.

    "I suppose, Zero, this is where you come in."
Priscilla     Were this, say, a few miles west, Biancabella looks like she may actually fit in more than anyone else present. As it stands though, she (?) does a good job of clearing the way. For as heinously awful as the moth's scales are, they blow away on the wind just fine. Gilgamesh's dagger swing of maximum sienen elegance penetrates far enough to stir the upper branches, and an entire flock of the damned things takes off. Previously motionless up above, the sheer number of them, as well as their size, had been making the area all around a danger zone just waiting for more poison bombing. They leave, rather than stay, though.

    Kazuko lops the tongue off at its midsection. It sprays a thoroughly hydraulic, rather than muscular, gout of clearish, acrid blood at her, like a severed hose. It also burns. It may actually just be pure poison instead of blood. Tomoe finds the awful frog ray thing annoyingly fast, only managing to clip its stinger off as it . . . undulates, off into the dark. When Zero deploys the vines of bloody rose, a veritable minefield of them spring up and skitter away, having just been /waiting/ to be stepped on, like a dark shed full of venomous rakes.

    The seeking vines disturb many such lurking critters, most too difficult to really pick out in the gloom, but seemingly coating the surroundings almost as much as the moss. One of the vines is made to twitch upward rather suddenly though. Instead of finding something that had been disguised all along, something has just appeared where it wasn't before.

    It's a big, boxy, hideous looking cat creature, almost more like a wolverine, and grey-white in colouration, with a grin that's all jagged teeth, and goes well behind its ears at the side of its skull. Cats are normally known for eyes that shine in the dark, but this one's are more like dark pits. It perches lazily atop an especially large branch, wrapped in several kinds of slumbering snakes (probably?). When it starts making awful, skin-crawling, mrowling and growing sounds, it also projects the voice of a sly, acerbic old woman.

    "And so thou hast come sniffing about again, precocious, barbarian dregs. Truly, I knoweth not why I spared the effort, grossly heathenish brutes as thou art." A twitch of the cat-thing's tail, and it spares a sniff in Gilgamesh's direction. "And a pampered godling from on high, no less? I very much wonder, did you think thou hold any sort of sway here. I hath told thee as much before, the pretty laws of Anor Londo hath no meaning to the creatures of the old garden."

    The cat, which is Alvina, disappears from the spot, letting loose an echoing meowl that fades into the fog. A little bit of looking, and one can find her again, curled up atop the head of a preposterously large mushroom, spotted like something out of a fairy tale; appropriate, given the Cheshire cat-esque teleport. "But really, what dost thou hope to accomplish? Unless it is to forfeit thine lives. The godling's soul in particular will make a fine prize for mine huntsmen."

    The mushroom blinks, and then stands up, revealing hilariously stubby little arms and legs, on which it goes waddling along, guided by only a pair of tiny, beady button eyes. It looks absolutely comical, and seems to be the first thing so far that hasn't tried to kill anyone. Alvina remains where she is as it carries her around, seemingly without being aware that she's there, making the odd, haunting noises of a loon.
Gilgamesh      "Such is diplomacy," Gilgamesh tells Zero and Yuuki lazily, "The act of two powers struggling against each other until one capitulates." That's not cynical /at all/.

     "We find it and prove that our power is superior."

     The dagger vanishes back into that golden ripple as he resumes walking along with the party. He's silent, appreciative of the area - appreciative of the /beauty/. The others may find it repulsive. He simply finds it comforting. There are wilds to be challenged in every era.

     And then there is the cat.

     The cat talks. The King does not move. But without even a flick of his hand, a magical sword *embeds* itself in the wall where it was, and a second embeds itself just beneath the cat. They're fired at speeds equal to or greater than some /missiles/, magical swords from an age not unlike this place's own - or perhaps not unlike this place's youth.

     "I am Gilgamesh, the King of all that Is, Was, or Ever Shall Be. From where the sun rises to where it sets is mine to rule and mine to do with as I please. I do not know what your Anor Londo is, but if I wish it, that, too, will be mine. And you, prattling thing, wish to claim *my* soul?"

     "You think *I* will be *your* prize?"

     The golden-haired demigod throws back his head and laughs. It's a musical sound, like a perfectly-tuned bell, a chime that rings through the forest clearing. "Very well then. Let them come."

     "Each man who comes before me," Gilgamesh booms, "And seeks to take my head, step forward! Only one man can go down in history as the slayer of Gilgamesh! But I assure you that before that man's name is writ in stone, the warrant of all who fail will be writ in blood and steel!"

     "Who will it be, servants of this pitiful cat? Who will be among you to claim the head of the King of All That Is?!"
Janine Liberi     "If you're going to call me a rude word based on an animal, keep it specific and call me a bitch," Janine jeers at Gil just before dispersing the toxic cloud. No big deal. To Yuuki, who complains of the lost coat, she has no sympathy. "Just buy a new one with what you make today. That's what money is fo-" Until she hears Gil again and sees him produce a knife from nowhere. A knife that has many traits comparable to her Persona.

    "Bitch did you just copy my gimmick?! I should sue your ass for copyright infringement!" she barks, seemingly fuming. Unfortunately, the patent office back home don't have departments for 'magical soul ghosts,' so it's a hollow threat.

    And now there's a big lump of a cat talking hot mess at them. Based on it's wide grin and it manner of disappearing and reappearing, Janine immediately gets the reference. Somehow, she is even less happy. "I can't fucking escape it... every time I go into a weird forest I have to deal with only whimsical story bullshit with a dark facade. My life is a nonstop barrage of shitty Hollywood gritty reboots, just fuck everything..."

    Finally, her moping turns to anger as she points her sword at Alvina. "Right, listen up Garfield. I don't know what your beef lasagne is with whoever's paying us, but you gotta piss off or you deal with us. Believe me, I'm gonna rain a whole month of Monday's on your ass if you don't take the former. Today will be goddamn educational, we'll employ the scientific method to discover how many ways we can skin a cat with just one arm."
Kazuko Kawakami Kazuko's regretting her choices today already. If it's any consolation, at least Tomoe's a known friendly face around here. "Hi, Miss Tomoe! Yeah, it's been a-gyah! A while. Owowow... Careful around everything!" She winces as the moth powder burns through some of her jacket and into her skin, using her undamaged sleeve to brush away the residue before it can harm her too much... Just in time for the cleaved tongue to spray its own burning blood at her. The martial artist lets out another pained scyelp before leaping away, waiting until the substance has stopped spraying at her before starting to step forward again.

     Not that she steps forward much, though. Between Zero clearing the path of all those plant-vines and other creatures while the rest of her allies clear out the rest of the horrible creatures, the martial artist has a moment to take a breather and listen to the cat-thing!

     "Brutes? Hey, just because we don't talk all /thou arf thee/ doesn't mean we're dumb!" She speaks in a mix of Japanese and mangled sort-of English, then growls lightly in irritation like a... Well, like a dog would at a cat, but keeps her temper in check enough to gawk when Alvina abruptly disappears and reappears atop a... Giant mushroom creature?

     He looks friendly. Kazuko blinks slowly as she watches the approaching mushroom, moving towards it cautiously as well while raising a free hand towards it. "Uhh... Hi there! I mean..." She pauses, letting Gilgamesh and Janine focus on exchanging barbs with Alvina while she focuses on the mushroom. "/Do-est you understannnnnd?/"
Zero Kiryu Zero weighs the possibility of the Alvina that just appeared being some sort of ruse. It would be relatively easy to grab at it with Bloody Rose's vines, but the one thing that he really can't control for is killing something he wasn't supposed to, and the damn thing jumps around even when it isn't something that he can't be sure is real. The surroundings are too thick with... well, exactly the sort of nonsense she is. It probably becomes clear pretty early on that he isn't actually /listening/ to the words that are coming out of Alvina.

The outcome and his role in this are more or less foreordained to Zero Kiryu. She's a monster, and he kills monsters. There's not really much else /to/ it. That is, unless Yuuki decides to take another swing at diplomacy. He seems to be deferring temporarily to that possibility, except for the fact that the gun in his grip is still growing vines.

Check that, it's not /just/ growing vines, it's just not attacking Alvina specifically yet. The vampire hunter is allowing Bloody Rose to seize anything it comes across and drink all of their blood (such as they have it) basically without restraint. Its properties should become fairly /obvious/ from that alone.

Bloody Rose will kill things dead that shouldn't be subject to things like 'death' at all.

"... Hey. Useless." That /appears/ directed at Yuuki.

"Tell it about the other forest."
Tomoe the Fight is well underway now as everyne else is geting in ont he action. Tomoe finds the frog thing quite annoying /very/ quickly. She get s clipping 9ihit in but it's not enough and thankfully Zero's got her back and he gives her enough time to now start to chant, gold runes fly about her body now as she chants in very badly accented Norse. The Runes finish dancing about he and that's when the rays of light start up asthe thing try to seek out those horrible creaures that are laying inw ait, maybe she will get lucky and help to clean them out. It's not long before the cat shows up again. She should have expectes it to do so for a moment.

"You damn well know why were here, cat."
% She doesn't move to attack just yet as some of the otehrs are talking and setitng up bigger stakes she looks at Gil for a moment. Janine's mouth contiunes to just keep going uncontroled. She will focus on the cat at hand and keeping an eye on Kazuko for a moemnt to make sure she's all right as she's glad to have Kazuko along she knows her and can rely on her in a fight. She also will not quitely to Kazuko for amoment

"We can catch up later, when things are less hectic."

She keeps her weapon ready as she stares the cat for a moment.

"Kuzako...? Are you all right?"

also she now gets whom it is? Gilgamseh? She's heard the odd old story of the mighty king of the distant past, he was but of myth on her world? The Multiverse shows that out there somewhere? Gilgamesh is indeed a real man and this man seems to maybe live up to the legends hype. She will see but she won't just let him be taken down either he is part of the party tonight after all. Yuuki and Zero's exact plans are unknown to her but she does trust them and she waits for Yuuki to make her move.
Yuuki Kuran     Yuuki makes a face at Janine. It is the face of 'hey I can't /buy/ sentimental value', or potentially 'woob woob woob flower mosaic overlay woob woob my eyes are 60% of my face by surface area'.

    With how she is, it's unclear.

    Then, a litany of problems occur. This problem is named Alvina. She is a garbage cat. She calls the party Brutes, though she herself only responds to force and the threat therof, to power, and lacks respect to basic decency. She plays at superiority, at dominance. Perhaps she knows of it.

    But however old, however impressive, however powerful Alvina is, her vision is narrow and lacking in imagination.

    Tomoe looks for prompting, which Yuuki gives in a sweeping gesture forward. "I know now - having been taught in the worst way - what earns respect in this place. Taught by you, actually. Priscilla gave me a taste, but you..." Yuuki sighs, her head hanging. Zero prompts her for the story of the forest. "I have been in a forest before. It sung to me, calling me. Every part of it wished to devour me, but in the end, it was the one that was eaten. It asked for no respect and gave none. It was a beast. There is only two things to do to a beast - bring it to heel, or treat with it. We have tried the latter. Now, insultingly, you bar us. So there is just bringing you to heel."

    "It's presumptuous, I know. But I am not as intelligent as my brother and my peers, and so perhaps this is my foolish mind coming up with a poor solution - but I don't think this will resolve itself without fighting."

    "So I will show you a predator's respect. Zero, kill it. Don't hold back - it will not in turn."
Priscilla     Alvina is, by all standards, terminally disrespectful. Oddly, despite her profoundly shitty attitude, Gilgamesh might detect a little of himself in there. Just a little. Though the cat is clearly far, far older than he, there is a faint sort of similarity between her attitude, and that of his towards the 'clay dolls'. There is something kindred in the way she looks at him, as something incomparably lesser than what once was.

    The mushroom waddles towards Kazuko. It is not tiny, probably about as big as she is, but it stumps along like some kind of children's toy, oblivious to its arrogant passenger. As the martial artist gets close, Alvina disappears from its back again. The mushroom blinks at her, making an adorable, burbling crooning noise, and then winds its laughably nubbly arm back and punches her with its mushroom fist.

    It hits her with all the disproportionately stupid strength of a battleship cannon. Somehow, the dumb, cutesy, plodding mushroom thing, ascends far past beastly strength, then superhuman strength, and then even godlike strength, into some utterly absurd realm where one could imagine it punching a dude's skeleton out the back of his armour. It makes absolutely no sense. Its fist doesn't even move that fast. It's made of fungus. It feels like a tank round anyways.

    Alvina laughs. She laughs and laughs and laughs in that awful, scathing mixture of cynical elderly woman and smug, decrepit cat. "Oh, thou most sincerely believeth that thou art beyond the Garden? That thine swollen egos of thine infantile years shalt provide thee invulnerability to the garden that hast grown beyond time? Fools. Even I am the least of thine worries here! Ahahahaha!"

    The AO is about to get very hot very fast. Scores of arrowhead bushes burst out of the earth all around, suddenly animated by some unseen force that uproots twisted, humanoid bodies of demonic foliage beneath their tops, which bounce lightly across the underbrush. Hulking, bestial shapes advance out of the mists, resolving as massive, dark, predatory silhouettes not unlike Alvina's, but clearly younger specimens, jet black in colour, and sized and muscled like bison. The moss and vines shuffle and snap as other things appear as well. Things that are very different.

    Unlike the hyper-specialized, predatory fauna and flora, these beings are clearly not alive. They fit somewhere in the terracotta soldier archetype, being warriors ornately chiselled out of solid stone in all sorts of exquisite regalia. Though they are overgrown to near unrecognizability, through unspeakable years of inactivity, they are easily as large as the Knights of Anor Londo, and have no trouble hefting stone swords and shields the approximate size of motorbikes.

    The situation becomes a clusterfuck nigh-instantly. The ambulatory foliage closes, and extends lashing, stinging appendages of prehensile vegetation that quintuple in length, turning the space between them into a blender of thorns. The cat monsters break into a run, and then, bizarrely, dive curl up into balls, rolling forward at some absurd speed, where their fur bristles with hidden quills, fit for skewering whatever isn't crushed underneath them like giant, furry boulders.

    The stone soldiers slowly bring up the rear. One of them pauses to hold its sword aloft, and runic characters spread glowing across the forest floor. Where they find people's feet, a crushing, metaphysical sort of weight grips them. In an oddly specific fashion, any attempt to cover ground quickly, whether that be to charge, leap, dodge, dive, or flee, is badly restrained by an impressively powerful force, as if demanding they walk slowly and respectfully. It /significantly/ complicates things.

    "A most interesting choice of approach, thou juvenile wench, but if thou thinketh of this sacred place, and what came before, merely as the hunting grounds of beasts, thou shalt be consumed; and not by fang or maw."
Gilgamesh      Gilgamesh isn't part of the party. He's the asshole guest character who's going to eat potions but not heal you. The guy who splits your treasure and XP because he's got ridiculous tricks but you can't control him and he insists on wandering directly into the boss fight.

     "Be quiet," Gilgamesh snaps, "I have owned this knife for longer than you have been alive, mongrel. Be honored that something *you* possess stirred memory of one of *my* treasures. Take comfort that /that/ has value, even if nothing else about you does."

     Gilgamesh looks at Alvina with that same scorn. The fact that it's kin to him is irrelevant. *He* is the King. *It* is a filthy beast. "I am far beyond your wretched little mud puddle. How dare you, mongrel, compare yourself to *me*? Do you imagine that you are invulnerable here, simply because it is your lair?" he says calmly.

     Everything goes, as they say in Bullshit Magic Hypertech Babylon, Sandals Up. Foliage and stone beasts rise out of the ground. Cat monsters burst forth from the maw of hell. A Mushroom that punches like a cannon just knocked somebody halfway across the map. Runic characters spread across Gilgamesh's feet, tying him to the ground.

     "Don't be foolish," the King continues as he raises his hand, "A hunting ground for beasts is merely a hunting ground for men that has not yet learned its place."

     "It's time for me to teach you yours."

     Snap.

     Gold ripples split the sky. The air behind Gilgamesh breaks like wildfire, shining like a sun. Or no - it is space, space and time, that ripple, not the air, not something so simple as the air. The world ripples. The fabric of reality yawns.

     Swords. Daggers. Spears. Hammers. Shields. Wicked blades that look like weapons fit for demons. Holy swords that shine with glorious light. There are so many of them. So many, many weapons. And all of them - every last one - burns with magical power. None of them are 'simply weapons.' They are prototypes, nameless things that will one day bear the weight of /stories/. They are divinity coalesced into physical form by hammer, fire, and steel, the power of the Age of the Gods stolen by Men and made tools for mortals.

                          Gate Of                          
                          BABYLON                          

     It is a rain. It is a rain of weapons of every shape imaginable. They scream forth like bullets - no, like MISSILES, missiles dancing in the air towards the cat, missiles that curve at impossible angles and swing back around when they miss their mark. One of the foliage monsters coming towards the King is caught incidentally in the rain, but Gilgamesh's target is Alvira, and the countless, *unending* stream does not deviate.
Janine Liberi     "Oh what a load of rot! Just own up to it!" Janine snaps at Gil, distracted from Alvina due to outrage. Although, Yuuki snapping out of her funk to talk some serious smack to this cat has made Janine hate her less still. "What she said. Let's do this shit."

    Of all the things Janine might have ever said to her mother about her day, 'threw down with a giant cat and her plant cronies' had ever occurred to her. Not that she ever had any plans of telling her about the multiverse at all, but still.

    "I run around in a forest of glass, Heathcliff! This place is a basic bitch, just like you! Go fly a kite or whatever incomprehensible nonsense you're doing in today's strip!" Creepy plant people, she can handle. Spindashing cat things is a little weirder, but okay.

    Big rock men that pin down her fancy footwork with metaphysics? That's real bad for a fencer. Which might explain why she gets one of those cat monsters knocking her to the ground and rolling along her back.

    "OWFUCKINGSHITCHRIST!" she cries out, pushing herself back to her feet once it's off her. "You think you and yours know venom? I'll show you some goddamn venom! Persona!" Looking into the sword makes Biancabella arise again, writhing due to sharing pain with Janine. The girl's back is bleeding pretty bad now.

    The Persona whirls, arms spread out, causing the blood from her stumps to splash out, transforming into wilted rose petals as it does. They swirl throughout the woods, carrying a cloying perfume on them, carried by subtle winds generated by Biancabella. They are, essentially, massive debuffs on everything other than Janine's allies. The fact that they rely on scent might make the stone giants resilient though.
Kazuko Kawakami Kazuko raises an eyebrow slightly as she starts notice something a little... Odd in their group today. Quite a few of these people aren't all that fond of each other, are they? The barbs between Gilgamesh and Janine, Zero and Yuuki having their own issues... Tomoe doesn't seem to be snarking at anyone, at least. Sure, Gilgamesh is getting his fair share of pointed looks from Kazuko, but that's different!

     Okay, maybe it's not that different. Still, maybe this is just the hallmark of an effective team. Yuuki's getting them more on track, and maybe their new mushroom friend can be a helpful addition!

     ... Or it can punch her in the face. That works, too. The brunette just barely manages to get her hand up and her ki flowing in time to keep herself from having her head bashed in outright, although the impact still sends her tumbling back and over several yards away. She's coughing painfully while clutching her injured arm to her side, and...

     Well, good thing she covered the face. Can't let that get too banged up under any circumstances. "Th.. That was just dirty!" Kazuko complains with a cough and hack, staggering to her feet unsteadily while trying to shake the stars out of her vision and the blood out of her face. Alvina's laughter just spurs her anger, and she points (with her naginata) in some vague direction where the cat might be.

     "Keep laughing! If you're not even as strong as that, then... Wuh... We'll have no problem butting your... Kicking your butt!" She boasts woozily, then braces herself on the naginata as chaos starts to encroach around the party (and Gilgamesh). Big things, small things, black thing, plant things! Willing her ki around herself and her weapon, Kazuko braces the wepon against her back to focus herself, then starts lashing out at the oncoming catballs to halt their advance. She's moving to thin the herd even with just the one uninjured arm, all the while manuevering around deftly to try and slice them down at a blistering pace!

     And also not stare too closely at the stumpy bleeding ghost-lady. That's just freaky.
Tomoe Tomoe gets the order to go from Yuuki and her obnly reply is now she moves to nod once ready her blade and start to make ready. This is go timeand she moves iwth inhuman speed now as she knows it's time to fight. She hears Alvina laigh for a moment she smirks for a moment.

"In the end all you seem to understand is eat or be eaten."

Tomeo moves rapidly her body picking up speed she knows she's got to move but she sees all the horde of things that are coming for them. She needs to keep them on her and she moves in trying to get into a pack of them rapidly attacking, trying to draw them trying tog et them to attack her.

"You think just like the Laughing Coffin. Kill, rend maim all for no reason other than pleasure and your own lust for power."



then Gilgamesh just well goes all epic about thing. Tomoe keeps going but some od the blades she sees, catch her attenion but she moves on she keeps moving to attack even as the battle is joned she will also if she is able tpo intecept things on them. She's got to do something to keep them off Janine and everyone else. Tomoe is not getting ogg scott free these things hit fairly hard ans she's taking hits, her avatar is taking damage as is her actual body. Even as she's trying to close on more of them she's finding she's got an issue with how fast she can move? Damnation this is going to be harder than she thought.

Kazuko is trying to move in as she notes about kicking the butt of the cat and honesly Tomoe wants to wipe the smirkoff that cat's face but first she's got to try to pull as mush trash as she can off the others.
Zero Kiryu "Useless there might. Her family is almost as egotistical as it comes." Zero glances towards Gilgamesh, briefly. Almost. Vampires will play petty dominance games but he has a hard time imagining even Kuran acting like that, even in the fullness of his predatory nature. And that one is perfectly capable of asserting his right to rule by ordering the whole of the existing government to twist their own heads off, which is /saying/ something about their golden ally here. He steps through his own foliage as Bloody Rose's mass of vines reaches out to act on his behalf.

"But she's not the one who was put forward to fight."

"Humans fight from a position of physical weakness. We're strong, but not that strong. We're fast, but not that fast. We bleed and we die. Why would I think I'm invulnerable to your forest? I wasn't invulnerable to the last forest, either."

How Zero Kiryu fights when the enemy actually reaches him is telling of that philosophy. Relative to some of the people around him, the degree to which his actual body is superhuman is minimal. Certainly he moves with speed that a regular human /couldn't/, but it's obvious that he's nowhere close to completely almighty.

He skirts the edge of one of the charging cats adeptly, but not quick enough to avert injuries -- quills rake the right half of his body and embed themselves along his vine-enshrouded weapon arm, piercing through the gaps of the metal and remaining there in flesh.

Blood flows into the surrounding landscape from the injuries, exacerbated immediately by the fact that he forces the quill-riddled arm upwards to angle the barrel of Bloody Rose towards the distant, colossal golems running Crowd Control.

When he fires, what comes out is honestly fairly /absurd/ relative to the plain appearance of the gun itself when the vines coming out of it are disregarded. It is not a bullet that comes out, but a burst of white energy that opens up into a shape that at first presents as a red cross and soon after has more the shape of a great flower.
Yuuki Kuran     Yuuki Kuran doesn't answer Alvina's laughing retort, and further ignores all of the things coming at her. She isn't invincible, and she knows it. She wouldn't risk her life in a foolish way, one that had some chance of dying.

    Oh wait. Yes. Yes, she absolutely would. Rock golems tie up her feet, rollercats run her down, and Yuuki Kuran disappears into the Pile of Directed Clusterfuck.

    It would be a bloodbath, as the wet sounds of Things Hurting Shojos like she's dropped into a woodchipper.

    Thankfully, she has The Squad to batter away things. Leaving her...

    There are seeping gaps in her body - legs, arms, chest. A long gash runs down her face, and one of her eyes seems to have simply been torn apart.

    It's rather greusome, though the Fog of Clusterfuck - the haze of battle and dirt and muck and forest stank dankness - covers it up some. She doesn't /bleed/ however, her blood sort of holding within her body. "Ow." She mutters.

    "Ow, ow owwwwwww."

    Then, like a George Lucas screen transition, her injuries just sort of wipe away. She turns her face, her hair falling over her destroyed eye, and then brushes the locks out of the way, revealing an eye there as if it had never been torn apart. Similarly, the wounds all across her body simply cease to exist as a problem on her, though her clothes are reduced to Tasteful Tatters, still mostly holding together but ruined in terms of resale value.

    She takes a deep breath, as everyone unleashes attacks, as her own glowing red eyes search for Alvina. Well, no, she knows where the cat is. Can feel the Garbage Garfield.

    "I wouldn't want to bet my ability to not die against yours, becuase that's foolish. But sometimes, I suppose, I do very foolish things. And I don't have to lift a finger to teach you this lesson tonight - look at all the powerful people willing to ruin your forest for /simple pay/."
Gilgamesh      "Are you joking? I would do this for free!" Gilgamesh laughs over the river of swords.

     "But I do expect treasure," he adds hastily.
Priscilla     As horrid as the forest is, it's in the way of forests to ambush, exhaust, whittle down, and slowly pick people off, rather than outright go to war. As such, the swarms of the Garden's strange residents are unprepared for the sheer level of slaughter the Elites are prepared to unleash. While no doubt absurdly dangerous to even well prepared travelers, nobody is here with any particular destination in mind, and little ability to get lost.

    Biancabella's grotesque form of magical weakening takes advantage of the area's relatively sparsely wooded nature, spreading all throughout the trees and plying its withering effects on that which advances from them.

    The giant hedgehog-wolverine-cats plough into the group like a stream of bowling balls, but their tremendous speed makes it difficult to do much else. One runs over Janine, and unrolls itself just in time to turn and pounce on her, and another grinds its full weight into Tomoe's shield, whittling down her HP and stamina, whilst yet more slash at Zero and Yuuki, but a hail of legendary, or perhaps, pre-legendary, weapons rain down on their predictable paths, turning them into pincushions of gleaming metal and divine magic, and turning their rolling attacks into screeching, bloody tumbles. Kazuko does her best to sprint between the total chaos, slashing at the massive predators that tumble around her, and splits the one pouncing on Janine in mid-air.

    Unfortunately, the strange, ancient 'magic' weighs heavily on her steps, and leaves her right in the way of a converging mob of leaping shrubs, assaulting her from all angles with waves of lashing, thorny tentacles, attempting to bleed her as much as grapple her. Just when it gets really bad, however, Zero fires into the plodding line of stone knights, and the strange sort of ethereal flower bullet ploughs through their ranks. Those that bring their ponderous shields to bear actually survive it, albeit just barely. As the stone disks crumble to dust, they release a last spurt of their old power, and ward away the supernatural attack. The focal point which maintains the gravitational effect, however, is obliterated. Tomoe is free as she wishes to dive into the fray, hacking at the killer vines alongside Kazuko.

    In fairly short order, the grove is a wasteland of shredded plants, shattered statues, and dying cat monsters, riddled with powerful swords and ghastly petals. The only things that aren't either dead or scattered, are Alvina, who manages to leap out of the way of a sword with a rather spritely motion, and then clutch teleport as it curves in midair to just trim her fur, and, vexingly, the mushroom, which just sort of wanders obliviously through the carnage, miraculously without being hit.

    The queen cat retreats to another perch with a decidedly less Cheshire grin. Despite her forces being decimated however, Alvina doesn't exactly have her hackles up. "Oh very proud of ourselves, art we? So very confident and full of braggart's pride. Thou pernicious curs fail to remember, however, that thou art here as long as I am, and oh we have /much/ ground to cover."

    It seems Alvina is intent on doing that very first thing, by leading everyone through an endless, wild chase, through hostile and unexplored territory, far faster than can be safely explored. The ancient cat leaps from one branch, and to the next, and the next. Where the gap is too wide, it fades in and out of existence, chaining short ranged teleports through the thickets of canopy. The way ahead is a steep, downward gradient, towards the sound of water, and delaying too long risks her vanishing completely into the fog.

    Zero gets the faintest kind of ping on his sensory map, so quiet that it feels like he might have imagined it entirely. It'd be easy to brush off, were it not directly behind and above Yuuki. Actually, it might have blended right in to the rest of the mess, were it not so outstandingly obscure.
Gilgamesh      The horrible thing about the Gate of Babylon is that the river of swords just *doesn't stop*. Gilgamesh isn't bothering to /restrain/ the flow of the Gate; he isn't stopping or stilling it. It's a *floodgate* of weaponry. Even as he walks forward slowly (much slower than he should be, because of the damnable runes around his legs), the Gate is still firing weapons straight ahead into the forest. It's a metaphor for humanity - metal and blades and clearcuttery carving a swath through the forest and replacing it with steel jammed into the ground. Weapons are dug into the ground everywhere, sticking up like grave markers. It's hard to tell if he's even *firing* at the cat anymore, or if he's just spiting it by cutting down its sanctuary. He's that kind of guy, after all.

     He's not attacking anything this round - he's depriving horrible things of cover for other people. Granted, that might be kind of /incidental/, but...that's what the King is currently engaged in.

     *Aggressive Civilization.*
Janine Liberi     As the cat responsible for making Janine's back look like sieve, Janine starts bringing up her sword to smach it away. She would have been too slow, had Kazuko not loped past to splatter it with her strike. That's another person she's going to have to have less from now on.

    By the time she's back on her feet, the fight is mostly over. The dopey mushroom guy is just wandering and not punching anyone with the force of an atom bomb, so he doesn't count. She kicks a chunky half of her assailant and spits on the other, before noticing what Alvina is doing now. "You gotta be fucking kidding me... the one time August isn't around." She could really use a lot of flame right now to burn this cat to death.

    With Gilgamesh's rapid rate of legendary weapons blasting the forest to bits, a careful search is not ideal. So she just gives him a hand. Biancabella comes out again and creates gale-force winds going in the same direction as his weapons. Not only adding a little to their velocity, but knocking down partially-damaged trees so that they can strike deeper, hopefully murdering that goddamn cat for true this time.
Zero Kiryu Zero Kiryu takes a moment to deal with his injuries after obliterating (most) of the crowd controlling golems. He begins to draw his vines in back around himself, not dispelling them but using them as a wholesale barrier to keep himself from being reasonably approached. With his free hand he begins to draw pins from his side. They clatter to the metallic vines that surround him as he discards them one by one, the wounds in which they were embedded slowly sealing up and ceasing to bleed. It's not the dramatic recovery that Yuuki just displayed, but it's clearly not /normal/, either.

He feels hungry, and his approach so far is... sub-optimal. He can't just tank this like Yuuki can, it'll wear him down. He needs his armor.

He flicks the hand in which Bloody Rose is held and gestures forward. The vines close around him and take on a distinct and easy to discern shape. It is a shape that he has demonstrated before, on occasion, in the heat of battle when he was getting carried away with himself. Today he presents it voluntarily. From the vines the shape of a tremendous wolf forms, into which the body of Zero Kiryu has vanished.

It is enormous. Or enormous at least compared to Zero himself. It lumbers forward with its wielder ensconced safely within, and if in answer to the feeling of /some/thing lurking around Yuuki Kuran moves to stand over her altogether.

The vine-beast shifts its head up, as if looking towards the "ping" on Zero's radar.
Kazuko Kawakami Moving around quickly is a lot harder than it has any reason to, and Kazuko can't really figure out why. She hasn't had enough experience with magic nor Lordran to figure out the source of whatever it is that's hampering her movements, but she's less concerned about why that is and more that it's happening at all.

     Mostly because she's got something else bearing down on her now: Weird sharp tentacle things! With her ability to dodge hampered significantly, the martial artist can only rely on her ki and natural endurance (not much of it) to weather those attacks. It doesn't go all that well at first, and her jacket's all but shredded by the time Zero takes out the disks and Tomoe works on those awful plants.

     "Stupid... Cheaty dumb things. Wh.. What else do you have?!" Kazuko shouts out defiantly at Alvina and starts swinging her naginata about again, twirling it around at the encroaching plants with enough control to still avoid striking at any nearby allies.

     She's also trying not to let the whole 'concussions and blood loss' thing get to her too much. Kazuko might be wobbly and having trouble just standing by the time things have quieted down, but hot-blood and a healthy flow of ki to augment herself will make up for it.

     At least until she passes out, anyway. For now, though, she keeps pushing forward! Although there's not much for Kazuko to do as Gilgamesh and Janine work on removing Alvina's potential hiding spots or even attacking the cat outright. "I'll.. Keep you covered. Leave it to met!"

     Still confident. Kazuko keeps a firm one-handed hold on her naginata while moving near the bloodied Persona user and the young king, ready to provide them with both cover (as aa human shield?) and standing support should they need it.
Tomoe It's a giant cluster frag of a fight there's magic, monsters and a lot of powerful people throwing their powers around. Tomoe runs into one of the things as it moves to pounce her and slamming into her shield she's forced back she's taking damagebut she then moves to try and gut the thing as it forces her back, digging her feet into the ground.

"No. I'm no one's prey..."

She keeps fighting and the magic slow her down it's like her soul is weighed down by the gravity of this magic. She sturggles ot keep righting and then finally the effect is broken and she's abke to move.

She dives right into the figt hacking and slashing as she goes. There sno yelling no chating she's just in full on battle mode as she fights hacks and slashes. Where did the cat go? She doesn't know and she can't argue with Gil's act of clear cutting things to hinder the enemy's ability to fight or just piss the damn cat off.
Yuuki Kuran     Yuuki recovers mostly from her ordeals and her eyes dim back down to their normal red-brown as Gilgamesh Civilizes The Shit out of a line of the forest, bringing Guns and Steel to the Germs of the Darkroot Clusterfuck. She was going to ask if she could Burn This Shitty Forest Down To The Dirt and potentially also Burn The Dirt For Good Measure, but her hungry, growling beast is satiated in part by the show of ridiculous force.

Yes. Fuck this forest, it displeases the Princess. Yes, Good.

    As things progress, Yuuki raises a hand again, bent at the elbow, not an imperious gesture but a more halting motion.

    "Everyone, please. I want more than anything to bring this animal to heel, but..."

    She looks down the path. "To chase is to do so recklessly. To hesitate is to lose her. I wish for there to be safe passage for the Knight Artorias to find his companion Sif. Perhaps it would be a greater slight to simply... ignore the beast, now? Clearly it wants us to follow."

    She smiles. "And I'd rather a leisurely stroll than a pell-mell forced march through the forest where she has all the advantage."
Priscilla     When Zero turns around, he has to squint really, really hard to pick out where the source of the hazy little dot on his senses comes from. The dark, the fog, the brackish shadows, the crazy silhouettes of the forest growth; it's all, already perfect cover for something sneaky. What he finds is tripling it up, at first with dark, form-concealing clothes, broken up with earth coloured sashes and bits of armour, to be difficult to see under normal circumstances. Second, the figure is almost completely see-through, only present as faded, translucent smudge on reality, like an artifact of an over-exposed photograph. It isn't just optical either. Something about it renders the persona difficult to pick up in many different secondary senses, down to where there should normally be a scent.

    The person is also a ninja. As in, an honest to god ninja. Out here. Climbing claws, eastern sword, belt of knives and all. Something seems off about the sword, but it's difficult to place. He also opens his empty palm as he stealthily approaches Yuuki unawares, which produces a tiny, almost invisible flame, seething with faint red mist. All of it feels ten different kinds of wrong, though it isn't exactly difficult to figure out what the guy is about to do. He's /seen/ the extent of Yuuki's regeneration, but proceeding anyways. He must have a plan. More importantly, he is a human servant.

    Further on, Gilgamesh is laying waste to the forest, moving as a mobile gun battery/combine harvester with the two girls roughly his age in tow. When it comes down to it, not much can get very close. Beasts are pinned to the ground, blasted from the trees, or shredded to ribbons if they even try, until they mostly start fleeing the advancing hail of blades like the edge of a sweeping forest fire. Alvina has her work cut out for her, in her mad scramble through the forest. Truly only a teleporting cat could have a dodge AC high enough to survive even a few seconds in the mess. One last sword clips her on her way off the edge of what appears to be a sharp, and very steep cliff, hurling her through the air. She, of course, twists and rights herself quickly, because that's what cats do. The fact she wasn't reduced to a fine mist says something about what happens when things get old here.

    Chasing her any further, the cliff edge drops what must be thirty storeys straight down, and finally the source of the crashing water sounds become obvious, as an ancient stone bridge crosses the rapids that lead to a titanic waterfall; clearly the origin of the pervasive, cold mist. At the bottom is an inky black lagoon, too foreboding for one to imagine any fish living in it. Something certainly is, though.

    Something with approximately half a dozen serpentine heads, crowned into aquatic fins, and which can almost look over the top of the cliff for its sheer size. It accomplishes that specific feat when it rears up, exposing a massive, ray-like body. It could be vaguely compared to a hydra, perhaps. One which has no trouble letting Alvina sit atop one of its swaying heads. One that also responds to the intrusion by rearing back, and spitting a volley of projectiles.

    Spitting is actually too weak of a verb. It rears back and disgorges half a dozen mouth-cannons, bombarding the adventurous Elites with 'shells' of water the size of cars, which strike with enough force to certainly explode like them. Whatever reason this creature needed to develop living, literal artillery, is a question best left for scholars, but the cliff edge people need to stand on is turned to deadly sprays of gravel in short order.
Janine Liberi     Janine distantly remembers her biology classes, in which she learned the importance of preserving old forests like this. Ancient trees, alive since the days of Christ, are living heirlooms of the planet and should be treasured.

    "Fuck you Mrs. Chill," she mutters to herself as she helps some demigod and a martial artist tear up enough wood to bury a small nation in sawdust. Onward, until they reach the cliffside, and the creature writhing in the lake below. After all the crazy bullshit she's seen in her short life, something as simple as a hydra almost seems mundane. "Well shit. I could probably survive a fall like that if I used Biancabella to slow it, but..."

    And then the hydra unleashes a hail of water bullets.

    "FUCK!" she barks, staggering back from the edge just in time to only be thrown back and not struck dead on. She moves further away with frantic scrabbling as the edge is blasted away, again recalling her lessons on natural erosion caused by water.

    "FUCK YOU MRS. CHILL!" she yelps again.
Gilgamesh      It is a Hydra.

     It may not be called a Hydra locally. It may be a Hydra with a massive murder cannon of water pressure. It may be gigantic. But it is a Hydra, and Gilgamesh knows how to deal with Hydras.

     "That," Gilgamesh says imperiously, leveling his finger at the Hydra, "Will make a fine main course, to go with the side of cat!"

     Artillery meets a rain of magical swords, and they collide in the air, a spray of water and steel sending water and weapons everywhere. The blades jam into the cliff next to Gilgamesh, into the walls of the side, into other places. Pressurized water still crashes into the King and the ground around him, sending him skidding backwards, a heavy bruise on his chest. Even dispersed by his treasures, it did that much. This Hydra was no ordinary beast. The rain of the Gate of Babylon would not be enough to stave off those attacks for long.

     Very well. Then he would fight Hydra with Hydra.

     Gilgamesh snaps his fingers. All across the forest, the scattered swords begin to vanish, as if they're being slurped up by straws. Gold ripples run from their hilts to their blades as they're devoured by the Gate of Babylon once again and return from whence they came. The only sign they were ever there is the upturned land and the obliterated trees.

     The chains of runes around his feet still weigh him down. There's nothing he can do about that. He's going to eat another shot before he can launch.

     Gilgamesh grits his teeth in a wide grin. He throws open his arms. "Come, then! If that is what you think it takes to kill me, then I invite you to try, unthinking beast!"

     "For only a fool would challenge the King of Heroes to his own game!"

     The next volley of water crashes into him almost directly. Gilgamesh is sent up into the air, flying, until he crashes painfully back down on the ground with a loud and horrible *whud*. Dirt is upturned. Earth is broken. His body is bruised and battered badly, and one of his arms might also be shattered from the impact of both the artillery barrage and the water.

     But as he sits up, he's laughing. His working hand is over his face, and he's laughing that mocking, uproariously cruel laughter.

     He's laughing because of what's emerging from the Gate of Babylon.

     It is huge. A stone fixture, like a great arrow, it bursts free from the Gate of Babylon and mounts itself with chains. It locks itself into place piece by piece, unravelling one by one. A massive bolt loads itself atop the huge chained bow, unbidden, appearing as if by magic.

     "I will answer your Hydra with my own!" Gilgamesh laughs. He points his hand forward.

     The chains loose.

     The single arrow goes *hurtling* forward towards the Hydra. Then, in the middle of its arc, it *splits* into nine, nine blue beams of light that arc and curve and split and home in on the Hydra's heads. But it isn't aiming to kill the Hydra - no.

     No, no. That would be...less than satisfying.

     Gilgamesh wants Alvina to *know*. Wants the cat to understand that it was beaten the instant it tried to challenge him. Wants the cat to realize, in its final moments, what it has done. What its arrogance has bought it.

     That no matter what Nature can do, Man can do it better.

     The nine beams of light strike the mouths *just* as the Hydra is charging up another round of water shots. They detonate with explosive force to tear the Hydra's water blasts apart before they ever leave its mouth - and, more importantly, to clear the way for the others to kill it, and Alvina, in the downtime.

     Gilgamesh is /such/ an asshole that he's not content to just deforest the place and kill the cat - he has to /break the cat's spirit/ with *overwhelming counter-tactics*.
Kazuko Kawakami When Kazuko offered to provide cover, she was expecting something more along the lines of plants or frog tongues or something. Maybe a mushroom launcher at worst! Just... Not this hydra thing shooting freaking WATER MISSILES at them. She braces herself nonetheless, unwilling to back down when she's already made the offer despite the fact that produce any sort of ki barrier is unlikely with just the one arm.

     Alas, that's just what she tries to do anyway! Heavily favoring the uninjured arm, Kazuko starts spinning her naginata in front of her as a yellow aura starts to gather around it and growing more solid as the spinning gets faster. With Gilgamesh switching to the defensive, that even leaves her time to /not/ get obliterated by the creature's first strike this time!

     Time to show off. Instead of defending, Kazuko starts running sideways. She lunges past a spray of gravel and water, wincing as she gets even more shallow cuts on top of the older ones, but she's relentless in her charge. The weapon spinning continues until there's a yellow blur trailing behind her weapon, and the martial artist zips around in an indirect path forwards before finally taking a massive leap at the hydra.

     "Kawakami Style: Daisharin!"

     And then she brings that ki-infused naginata upwards and across the creature's stupid neck. Necks? Necks.
Zero Kiryu If there's one thing Zero knows about this world, it's that stupid bullshit enormous monsters that can kill you immediately if you let them get their grimy claws or mouths on you are absolutely a thing. It therefore stands to reason that this little shit of an assassin creeping up on Yuuki has started accounting for the titanic wolf that is playing overwatch on top of her and will be able to respond reasonably neatly enough. Which is why the whole murderous giant wolf thing just ends up serving as a distraction.

He doesn't stay inside his vine-wolf.

As the great beast takes overt notice of the approaching ninja and bears down on it like a titanic train, dipping its head to bite at the ninja and obscuring what is going on around and beneath it with its sheer mass, Zero slips out.

The hunter circles to one side, following the movement of the tiny blip on his radar and moving in towards the back of it. The silhouette was human. Does that mean the individual was, themselves, human? They don't have as strong a presence as anything else here does.

Doesn't matter.

Zero delivers a punch that could tear through a normal human being towards the base of the would-be assassin's neck, deliberately targetting what he would /assume/ was the brain stem on a completely ordinary person.

"Yuuki," He says, only once he's actually /executed/ his plan, so as not to tip off the ninja, "Mind your back."

What amounts to artillery begins to fall. The vine-wolf acts as a bulwark against it, but it isn't invincible-- in fact, it's rather more /ablative/. Since he was hanging back he's not among the brunt of the volley, but the construct winds up having massive holes in it and crashing forward onto its face while trying to piece itself back together.
Kazuko Kawakami Once Kazuko's attack concludes, successful or not, she lets a long breath out and...

     Just passes right out on the spot, whether that means she's floating in the water or dangling from something's mouth.
Tomoe Tomoe is not going to run in after this no, she knows not to do so she's going to start moving ahead chanting fire spells to add to the destructionas they move to clear cut things as they go. She keeps a rather muted expression as she does so he's just cutting and burning with everyone else as they go. she'll make sure to do what she can to intercept attacks where she can and now she keeps going for the target. This thing is pretty much a Hydra and he stares at it s she comes to a halt and soons he's mocving into attack.

Five years ago this would be fiction or myth to her? Now it's real she has to wonder fotr a second as she now dives on in even as the chaos is raining around her but her HP bar is noticably down and no amount of battle healing will let her keep this up forever.
Yuuki Kuran     Yuuki doesn't want to follow down that path of devastation, even as Alvina gets winged. Her attention is elsewhere as Zero's Metal Wolf Chaos stalks above her. Her pace is more measured, hesitant.

tThankfully, she can rely on the strength and prowess of others to get the job done. Not that she would really care if this wasn't a paid job, but it is in the best interests of her superior to do it, and also, again, she feels responsible.

    And then the Hydra shows up.

    Yuuki shields her eyes even though she's a decent distance away, drawing back a step under Zero's vinewolf constuct as the exploding water cars start raining down on her.

    Now, she may be Pretty Much Invulnerable to Being Stabbed, but that doesn't mean she doesn't FEEL it - and it also means she's not entirely sure getting pulverized into a fine mist under an explosive blast of water pressure would be surviveable either. It WOULD be extremely painful if it wasn't lethal, and... Really, there were limits to her foolishness.

    There were not, however, limits to her ability to Fail a Spot Check, as her bodyguard went aggro on the Ninja trying to sneak up on her ass and gank it.

    "Oh no! An assassin!" She yipes, blasts hitting above her head as they rain on WuffVine and blow holes in it.

    She draws out Artemis, but Zero seems to have it well in hand. And, if he was to die...

    "I'm fine! Just... blast the snake... thing!" She calls, before moving to try and seize the (probably dying) ninja who attacked her. Dead or not, he was full of blood, and blood wouldn't lie to her.

    It was really fortuitous that there was a giant monster. She would hate for people to see her do what she's about to do...

    But now she had to know, and Random Ganking Asshole who Zero Probably Killed was going to teach her some things.
Priscilla     The ninja has been caught out. Mere instants before striking Yuuki with whatever his game plan is, the wolf finds him first, and leaps on him about as gently as a semi truck. Its target responds by breaking into a kind of backflipping handspring that is improbably fast, to say the least, accelerating to 'what' from nothing, and carrying him a considerable distance out of the way. His feet have just planted on the ground when Zero's fist connects with the base of his skull, and winds up careening into the trunk of a close bye trees hard enough to snap it in half.

    In all academic respects, the guy is human, as evidenced by the thoroughly agonized sound that squeezes its way out of his lungs once he can inhale, drooling blood through his mask. His flesh felt more like hitting a brick though, and he clearly isn't dead, though probably not far away from it. There didn't seem to be any magic about it either. He's just arbitrarily way tougher than someone should be.

    Despite that blow, the ninja remains in his weird, foggy, half-there state, as he staggers to his feet, reaches for a dull, solid emerald flask at his belt, and then realizes the motion for some old reflex, where he then drops it to the ground with a projected sense of crushing finality. "Heed the old guardian's warning." he coughs out, in a thick, east Asian accent. "Long before it became a forest, or the Darkroot, once upon a time this land was the empress' garden, and the cat knew the girl and saint who played within it. You tread upon the memories of her old master, but you also tread upon that which ruined them. It is not purely of spite, that the old guardian forbids this place. Even hunters have our duty. For a woman and man like you, so full of Dark, the black things of the below will call to you, when her duty is through."

    Then, cryptic ninja opens his flaming palm, and abruptly explodes, going out in a pyromantic blaze of suicide glory, boosted up by multiple buffs and critical HP hypermode. Out of everything within fifteen meters, only his scorched sword, and a golden ring set with what looks like a bead of solid fog, survive.

    Meanwhile over at hellcannon waterfall, an artillery duel is commencing. The hydra, because it might as well be called one, has clearly grown out of it spooky mook britches, and into a full-fledged miniboss, having done that thing everything in this horrible place does, and absorbed the souls of untold numbers of kills, until it got ultra double plus huge. It is unfortunate, then, that such an ancient and impressive specimen, runs into 'straight up the legend of a guy famous for singlehandedly killing a hydra'.

    This one, as a departure from the Greek legend, has seven heads instead of nine. That means when the Nine Lives hits, all seven are blow straight off their necks in a devastating, simultaneous execution sequence, busting its multiple skulls like grapes and painting the far cliff wall red, two are left over, and Alvina only manages to dodge the one. There are limits even to the old cat's cunning, and when the platform she had been standing atop suddenly disintegrates into a wavering mirage of souldust before she can even teleport, there's little arguing with physics.

    A bloodied ball of grey white fur falls a long, long way, and thunks into the icy black water far, far below. The dull roar of the waterfall continues its rumble blithely in the background, oblivious to the significance of the event. It makes the whole feel anti-climactic somehow. Unsatisfying. Aside from blowing up a hydra, that is.

    One gets a sudden, sharp, deeply potent sensation of violently familiar nostalgia. It makes no sense, but for some reason it's as if something excruciatingly important had risen from long forgotten memory, and frustratingly escaped focus by a hair. It goes away without incident, but leaves a lingering impression of missing something.
Gilgamesh      Gilgamesh gets to his feet, battered and bruised.

     Then, because Gilgamesh is that much of an asshole, he snaps his fingers and produces a gorgeous, glittering rope from the Gate of Babylon. He ties it to a rock, ties it around his waist, and, with one arm, proceeds to climb down the cliffside towards the water.

     He's going to put that cat's stupid dead body and its stupid dead hydra in his magic food processor and /eat it/ and a little thing like 'a lake' isn't going to stop him, that's for damn sure.
Janine Liberi     It's over?

    Somehow, from her prone position, Janine knows it is. And she's... kinda sad about it? This is bullshit, she decides. If this place can somehow influence how she feels, she wants nothing more to do with it. Pushing herself back to her feet, she groans. The back of her dress is thoroughly bloodstained now. "I'm outta here. Good hustle everyone I guess."

    And with that, she drags herself back the way she came, looking miserable. Emily is going to have an earful as she tends to those wounds.
Zero Kiryu Notwithstanding that it was necessary to stop the assassin reaching Yuuki, Zero isn't actually happy to be killing a human like that. So rather than moving in to finish the job when his quarry simply doesn't die, the hunter hesitates. It's not the first time. He hesitated with one of his first /vampire/ kills as well. It's a memory that resurfaces every so often, and especially now, although the events weren't all that similar. Except, that his quarry spoke to him and he realized that he wasn't all that comfortable with dealing with them at all. Bloody Rose's barrel twitches lightly upwards as the assassin rises.

He should have fired then, he realizes too late.

Zero disassembles the shape of the vine-wolf that has crashed to the ground nearby to provide some cover for himself, and for Yuuki-- he hardly suspects she needs it, but provides it all the same. Again, he's not quite fast enough. Fire and flames wash over him through the cracks in the vines, and the gaps where he simply hadn't the time to place vines to begin with. When the flames die down and the explosion is done, many of the vines are scorched and withered.

The vampire hunter himself is badly burned, his clothes unevenly tattered and the skin that was beneath violently blistered. The smell of cooked flesh fills the air. The damage is there, but it's slowly beginning to reverse itself as he stands there amidst the devastation.

Labored breathing escapes Zero Kiryu in answer to the pain that his body is dealing with. He regards the fallen sword and golden ring with contempt.

"Don't talk to me about the dark." He says to the fallen equipment.

Hunger pangs rip through him with ferocious insistence as his body knits itself together. Zero turns away and exhales sharply, shutting his eyes and trying to concentrate through the haze of his body's impulses.

"We're going home." He asides to Yuuki, as the remaining vines on the battlefield withdraw into Bloody Rose. It's like a clown car of materials cramming itself seamlessly into the firearm.
Tomoe It's time to get going with the sword arts now as everyone is just unloading thei power and now she channels a sword art as she makes ready, Her body tenses but the fighthas left her open herHP's now deep into the yellow as the battle is going on. She's about to let it lose when the beast finally goes down and she slumps a bit.

"Everyone still standing...? Seriously a damn Hydra? That's /new/ even for here."

she slumps a bit glad to be alive and is going to keep with the party till they pull out.