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Kyoko Takada     This is, ostensibly, Japan. From the air, from high enough up, the coastline looks roughly correct. There are bits missing, here and there, where the water has come in. Some mountains are deformed, but the most telling difference from most Earths is the lack of greenery. This is a desert of sand and ruins where once stood gleaming cities, housing more than a hundred million souls. That loss is not the reason for the distress call slash offer of work transmitted by the young-seeming soldier, Alpha-Three-Nine. Her immediate issue is, instead, the castle.
    It doesn't look like it belongs here. It's of a Western European construction, and it's floating several hundred feet in the air. Some have seen this before, with its concentric walls and towering defenses, though not at this exact location. It's drifted over a city this time, coming close to the skeletal skyscrapers, though not set to collide with any just yet. "Bring it down" is the basic order of the day, along with some story of it disgorging monsters, "demons" that drop down in waves and attack what few survivors still live in this wasteland. Approaching it from the air will quickly reveal that there are such defenses, in the form of beasts that look like giant, disgustingly slimy crows. Other approaches are successively safer.
Starbound Flotilla     The Starbound Flotilla have kept their eyes on this castle. By which I mean they've kept their sensors and assorted other measurement tools on this castle, and have been looking for a time when various factors would let them align both a period of operational viability and a period of teleportation alignment. In this case, they're keeping their ships in nearer orbit, and have given a free ride to anyone on this operation who asks for it.

    They left a teleportation beacon near the door. They're not sure how /precise/ that landing might be, nor how much time it'll take to get through the door itself, but Seft has crafted some sort of rocket-equipped thermal battering ram for getting into it. Those who choose to teleport in may get scattered a bit by the demons interfering with the targeting, but hopefully they'll at least get nearby. The Flotilla itself are intending to arrive all atop the battering ram! A massive, twisty, junky apparatus of steel and wood and complex brass machinery.

    Let's see where they land. One hopes it's near the outer gate where they set up that beacon, so they can rush it down and start trying to crash in!
A2     A2 has to take the free teleports coupon. Without a flight unit, there's absolutely no way she's getting that high up into the air unless the thing is basically going to scrape the top of a skyscraper that she was lucky enough to be on top of at the time. It's . . . an experience. Despite being a YoRHa unit, A2 has never once done the upload shuffle, and so it takes her a second to sort out the total disjointedness of her sensor feed from one second to the other. It looks like dizziness, if one didn't know better. At least holding half her face and trying to stay balanced isn't followed by any kind of breakdown this time.

    A2 hasn't bothered to show up 'undercover', generously termed, and seems relieved to not have to do so, walking with purpose (and renewed fluidity, despite the ever-extensive battle damage all over her perpetually half-broken body). Approaching the perimeter, she starts looking around for avenues of entry immediately. Gates and what locks or bars might be on them, towers and any windows or slits into them, scattered structural features such as ridges, gargoyles, banner poles, or such and failing that, any kind of handholds on the walls.

    At the same time, her sensor software is pinging and rapidly constructing a 'minimap' of the area, bland and low-resolution, but with key details, such as power sources and lifesigns, spread out on a sort of spartan 'tactical grid'. This is made available to the Flotilla in return for their assistance getting here, and little else.
Nozomi Houken     Technically, Nozomi Houken could fly in. But that would require transforming with Taiga. That's a distasteful prospect most days. On a day where she's already deep in worry about her Servant? She has absolutely no desire to use Rampart Mode unless there's no way around it.

    So shortly behind the Flotilla, a second figure uses the teleporter. Well, a second and a third. Nozomi and Taiga ride in, but until they get a good look where they are, there's not much they can do but 'hope they end up somewhere not-deadly'.
Maya In the last few years Maya had been known as a healer and supporter in the waining days of the Union's war with the Confederates older elites like Alexis might be more aware of what Maya could do when she turned her talents with magic elsewhere. To day is a day that calls for her talents to be elsewhere. She'd not teleported no she's formed a pair of blue energy wings which she's using to make for the castle, she's ready she has a number of strangly glowing runes held in the various pouches on her post apocxh like clothing she's ready to fight and she's not going to be holding back either.

"Been a long time since I had to do this..."

Maya thinks to herself but it's time to cut lose today.
Origami Hiiro Origami is coming into this mission a little late to the party and a little underinformed, but wasting time with explanations is not really in the heroing book. There's a big angry castle in the sky and they gotta go smash it, at least that's the gist she got from the Starbound Boyos. Someone who has flight /and/ arguably teleportation is a good fit for not dying if things go south at any rate.

    But she's also smart enough to know that her teleportation method is just going to cause more problems than it will solve compared to just trusting in this teleport beacon. So that's what she's going to do.

    Beacon, it turns out, is unreliable: Origami arrives in a wall. Telefragging usually ends badly for both ends, but in this case the wall just sort of deletes and pops free. "Uh." She manages, considers. "I appear to have opened a weird passageway by teleportation acciden- well hang on." There's a brief and confusing set of noise across the radio that are nonetheless unmistakably those of a Henshin, followed by the sound of an explosion and cracking stone. A much more confident and bold voice now: "/Now/ it's open."
Lin The Flotilla teleporter crackles to life and beams down one more ally. KARAL REI LIN materializes near the battering ram, fiery crimson ponytail whipping off to one side in the wind. Her right hand's curled into a fist, which she eagerly slams into her left hand's open palm. Clearly raring to go with this assault!

    "It's been WAY too long since I've gotten out and about into the Multiverse! This weird place should be a good warm-up."

    She knows where she intends to be though, and no amount of guard demons is gonna stop her from pulverizing a path over to the Flotilla's landing zone! She strangely doesn't appear either armed or armored. But anyone brave enough to just drop in on a floating castle without flinching is either fearless or just plain stupid. In her case though... she'll just resort to some acrobatic leaps, fists to demon faces, and other manuevers to get herself over to the Flotilla!

    "Hey! You six spacefarers! Long time no see... last was in Whitewall, wasn't it? Way up in the North?"

    It doesn't take her long to figure out what the construct the Flotilla's assembled is for either. "Dang that thing looks complicated. Should work though! Need any help pushing through?"
Alexis Okay, so flying directly to the castle is a Bad Idea(tm), or so Alexis has been warned beforehand. There's an open teleport option from the Flotilla... But that's the easy(?) route and that's not her style.

It's okay, she's got other options at her disposal. Considering they're surrounded by the remains of an urban environment, with lots of tall abandoned buildings that the castle is drifting through.

"It's getting close." Alexis put away the binoculars she was using to watch the castle's path. She gave both her gloves a tug to make sure they were on firmly. She was going to need the extra grip for this. Then She grabbed onto the shoulders of the large crocadilian reptile standing next to her and sprawled on his back. "Ready to do this?"
"Krook," growled the Krookadile as he hunched his stout legs and held his forelimbs up at the ready.
"Alright then." Alexis made a little adjustment to her position so she won't cause too much drag on his backside. "Assistant ready?"
"Sylveon~" Chirruped the pink fox as she popped her head out of Alexis' bag, all four ribbon-feelers unfurled should they need additional grappling.

"Then let's do this. Rock Climb!"

"Kroooo!" His claws started to glow as Krookadile used his legs and tail to spring himself into the air, grab onto the side of the skyscraper, and start climbing his way up at an impressive pace even as little bits of decayed rubble clatter away from where his claws strike hold. You know how crocodiles are surprisingly fast when on all fours? It's a lot like that, just taken to the vertical thanks to Rock Climb's aptly named ability to do just that.

As the ascent reaches the same level the fortress is passing at Krookodile will push off the derelict building and twist around to face the castle, reaching to grab on as Sylveon whips out her feelers to do the same and pull them in.
Kyoko Takada     There's not a lot of room around the teleport beacon, but there is enough for a battering ram. The ground trails off at the outer edges, the supporting (flying) terrain thickest in the middle and coming to crumbly, weedy edges just far enough from the walls to have a comfortable standing-room-only get-together. Nothing has damaged the beacon in the meantime, or even seemed to notice it, so it works as advertised, taking the Flotilla captains, their gear, and anyone else who chooses to make use of it right to the outermost gate.
    It's a great big gate, repaired to pristine condition since that last spat of violence, with wooden doors entirely blocking from view the iron portcullis behind them. There should be another portcullis behind that one, and another set of doors, per the standard practice of letting invaders walk into a kill-zone as many times as possible in a battle. That said, there's no sign of anything manning the walls. The very tall, stone walls, that should nevertheless be easy, if slightly time-consuming and putting one greater danger of being attached without the ability to dodge, to climb. There are arrow slits, though they are predictably narrow and high up, just where you'd want them to be if you didn't want them exploited.
    The crows are really more annoying than anything else, as any sufficiently strong combatant will find out. They have plenty of maneuverability in the air, but a limited ability to attack anyone on the ground, and are only really a major hazard right now for anyone in the process of flying or climbing without a great deal of maneuverability, themselves. Maya, being in the air, will have to deal with them somehow, and may discover (if she doesn't avoid them entirely) that they're so slimy because they're effectively covered in an effectively limitless supply of dirty oil.
    A2's sensors start mapping things, which quickly reveals that the terrain itself registers as one giant, hostile entity. It's hard to see anything through that, but at least she's learned something straight off. Some tuning could probably get her more than 'this place is bad' and 'there's movement inside.'
    Going straight through the wall, as Origami opts for, is certainly possible, if also definitely the slowest way through. The hole she opens has to work through more than thirty feet of probably-magical stone, and starting that at ground level starts to bring the upper parts of the wall down on her. That will, at least, make it shorter and easier to climb, if she doesn't either just keep blasting it or find some way to hold it up long enough to speed through. There's a wide expanse on the other side to run into, once she manages it, where she'll find smaller, wooden buildings of typically Medieval design.
    Alexis has a similar idea to A-39. The latter has gone halfway up one of the taller skyscrapers, and actually gotten higher than the castle's ground floor, as she pauses to scan for anything worth sniping. Alexis goes straight for the leap, making it on just as the castle gets close enough.
    There still isn't anything visible... and then there is, with squat, muscular figures with pinker-than-standard skin and face-covering helmets taking looks over the walls, throwing stones by means of slings and dumping buckets of what might be more oil to anyone right up against a wall, with the exception of the damaged wall in front of Origami.
Nozomi Houken     After hearing that the teleport beacon might be a bit unreliable, Nozomi is mildly surprised to see that they're actually where they're supposed to be. But that ends up not being the best of things either; while the Flotilla works on the door, strange pale dwarves begin assaulting them from above. Taiga leaps back a few meters, and his cannons swivel upward to begin shooting down some of those rocks before they can hit someone - but this is unsustainable, and he knows it. "Nozomi. Please stay with the Flotilla for now." The girl nods without a word, and slides off, moving in where she can stick with Seft and Albert; meanwhile, Taiga takes one leap, two, and then hurls himself right at the castle wall.

    Magic-enhanced claws dig into the stone, and the robotic predator hurls himself straight up the castle wall in a few hard flings. The last one takes him right up over the parapet, and down he comes, dropping in on the first hostile he can see with claws extended.
Starbound Flotilla "Oh hey, whassyerface! Saw you at those negotiations, yeah!"
"Yahaha, put off by that business with the solar, huh?"
"It was all resolved. We are glad to have you with us again, Lin."
"Yeahyeah! Help push, isss good!"

    The STARBOUND FLOTILLA are here, in their standard Durasteel equipment! Moonfin, the fishman, is in elaborate full-body durasteel armor that looks like a powered cross between a diving suit and a samurai's armor, glowing cyan at the faceplate. Biteblade, the humanoid plant, is in durasteel plating with elaborately carved wood and bone ornaments over glowing powered components that glow an intense green. Pavo the bird-girl wears a divine-aesthetic set of mesoamerican-style armor, with yellow runes and inscriptions lighting up on stylishly gleaming golden armor and robes. Albert the monkey-man is wearing elaborate dystopian commando armor reconstructed with a 'rebel spy' aesthetic: A sleeker faceplate, a slimmer form, and a more chaotic design that integrates thin, resilient plates of durasteel, and lines of bright white. George (just plain human) wears a futuristic combat EVA hardsuit that glows a gentle red at the flat faceplate. Seft, the robotic Flotilla member, is wearing full-on medieval knight armor with a soft energized blue glow below the plates on her body, and especially around the eyes. Each has a heavy industrial-yellow two-pronged plasma-cutter-like tool strapped to their side, a Matter Manipulator.

    Their heavy Thermal Battering Ram looks like a mobile blacksmith's shop on clockwork brass hover-supports. What a mess! They'll need plenty of time to get it roaring hot and burning through, during which they'll need cover! But Seft and Albert immediately break off from that effort and move to cover Nozomi, with Albert firing heavy airbursting shots at any flying creature that menaces their friend, and Seft hoisting a tremendous, elementally burning tower shield to interpose between Nozomi Houken and any danger. Taiga has way more specialization and utility here, they've learned well enough, so losing two of their members to handling his duties is an objective net gain, especially to finding their target. "Assuring. We'll keep her safe! Let us know if your sensors pick anything up, Taiga!"

    "Woah woah woah!" George calls out suddenly. "Hey! Knock it off! Stop throwing stuff at us! We need cover, shit!!" The man takes a heavy rock dead on the back and it breaks over his body brutally as he manages the battering ram. However much progress they've made, it's going to be badly hampered by the impacts of those stones. "Someone give us cover here!"

    Hopefully someone can keep at least the ones above the battering ram away. If they can, the Starbound Flotilla are going to push it further as best they can, and try to make it through the courtyard of sorts, and to the inner gates, where they'll try to set it up to pulse brutal blasts of heat to slag straight through the gate itself, hot enough to melt futuristic supermetals!
Alexis     The Pokemon Trio makes it way onto the chunk of land surrounding the floating fortress, hauling themselves and trainer up with a combination of claws and tendrils. Just to get a good look at their real objective looming ahead of them.

"That's some big walls." Astute observation there, Alexis.

And the locals are taking full advantage of said walls, rising over them to chuck rock and oil and such down towards the grounds below. Alexis gahs at the pelting, holding an arm up to somewhat shield her face without obstructing her view. Being a ground type Krookodile doesn't seem all that bothered by chunks of stone being tossed about, though he slaps a few away from hitting his more vulnerable Trainer.

"Sylveon" < Why are they throwing rocks? > Caddie, on the other hand, does not take kindly to it at all. Her pink color turns a darker hue as she scowls, and the cutesy tone of her translated voice goes almost demonic instead. "SYLVEON!" <THROWING THINGS ISNT VERY NICE!>

What could be worse than an angry fairy-fox screaming? How about that she's screaming using Hyper Voice, and her Pixilate ability turning it into a Fairy type move and thus boosting it's power even farther.

Long story short, that's a bellow with enough concussive force to possibly knock thugs away from the top of the wall. Or at least keep them from throwing things at the battering ram being set up because they're getting their eardrums ravaged by screams of adorable rage.
Maya Maya has crows coming at her somewhat as she's fluying up Maya's able to fly and not be held back but she finds out the darn things are covered in oil. Wait covered in oil? Maya is already planning now as she has her rifle out and is firing cans of exploive napalm into the mass of crows and she doesn't stop there as she keeps moving.

"Burn."



<<Alexis? The birds are covered in oil light them up if you can!>>

She seems intent to work with her old friend a she makes for the castle and she's got osme ideas too.

<<I may need some cover as well in a bit....>>
A2     A2's expression darkens when the map readings come in, at first in potential frustration that something might still be so badly broken after she'd fully overhauled her internal hardware so recently (yet still without bothering with the small effort it'd take to put her human exterior back on), and then a way much stormier on realizing that they're correct. Whatever the hell they're standing on . . .

    "Dammit, I'm not a Scanner model." she says aloud, in plaintive frustration rather than any real lamentation. "There's something screwed up about this castle. There's no engine or drive keeping it up. It's flying because it just can. It's . . . alive, or something. Or maybe one giant machine. It has a castle on its back." That's as eloquently as she can communicate the bad feeling she gets, starting to walk more heavily as if hoping it'll somehow annoy or wound the /thing/ they're stuck on. There is a limited fidelity she can uptune her sensors to. She'll do it, of course, trying to beam in on a narrow arc section towards the island's center, but the Attacker model doesn't have high hopes.

    She has her own plans for getting over the top, but it seems the Flotilla have planned out an entire frontal assault, which A2 can't abandon them on in good conscience; not when the whole team comes under surprise fire from a strange, previously unseen enemy.

    "Oh go to hell!" she growls when the chunks of stone and oil come spilling down from the wall, interposing herself between the battering ram and the fusillade as best she can. Her more agile sword materializes in her hand, swiping out in quick and unnatural intercept courses for any wayward stones that come the Flotilla's way, hurling them off the island or cracking them to pieces. When the oil comes down, she actively thrusts her hand into it, and barely visible ripple of energy goes with it, freeze-framing the oil momentarily, before she swats the deluge aside as if it were a single, solid mass, or as if it'd been splashed mid-air by a solid wall of wind.
Lin "Good to hear! Was kinda worried about having to leave you guys to deal with that mess... wait, PUT OFF?! No way! I would've loved a chance to see what the Bull's made of!"

    Lin... is kind of distracted. Because there are ALL KINDS OF DEMONS starting to man the walls. She cracks the biggest grin, as if having all kinds of lethal opposition is somehow ENTERTAINING more than it is terrifying.

    Or maybe if the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

    "Hah... let's see what you guys can do without all that distance between us!" With an eye for protecting the battering ram, Lin crouches down... and her muscles surge with tension beyond any human's tolerances.

    When she next moves, she's like a ROCKET surging up at a hard angle for one of the walls. Hints of golden light color her brief set of impacts as she bounces swiftly from wall to wall in the killzone and up towards the battlements, where she aims to come smashing down on some of the demons with a pulverizing display of fists of fury!
Origami Hiiro     There's a cheerful 'Hey again,' from Amelia on the line to the Starbounders. "So we need to get deeper. . .? I think that hellblasted contraption you're packing is gonna be useful for more than just some gates, so I'm gonna see if I can't stir up trouble on the far side." And just like that, having had a moment to look over the location they were in, Origami Hiiro/Amelia Earhart is gone.

    Falling into another reality with but a tug on the brain is always odd, and exploring Origin is no different in this sense. The actual lay of the land doesn't change much, except for a hole bored through the wall in the shape of all the bricks being neatly arranged to form a tunnel. Also the sky is earth and probably far below is the sky, but the castle being upside down is largely irrelevant. Gravity's still behaving sensibly enough. The brass-and-glass woman starts to lope easily through the tunnel. The far side is total guesswork, who knows what'll-

    There's a panicked look behind as the hole closes up behind them, then bricks and mortar start to fill in rapidly, the tunnel threatening to close with them still trapped inside. This is not normal and not okay! Amelia guns it, the jets protruding from arms and legs kicking into full power as she rockets her way through that tunnel. There's the dizzying sensation of the sky inverting even though she can't see it, suddenly intensely aware that she /is/ flying upside down form the castle's new perspective. Blood rushes to her head but a squick jet aimed clockwise sets her spinning to nearly straight up as she punches through the far side just before it closes up on her, arriving back into the expected reality going /very/ fast and having no idea what to expect.
Kyoko Takada     Taiga makes good use of his mobility, leaping and climbing in that way big (robot) cats do. When he gets to the top, he slashes, hard enough to get straight through the guard's armor. The other guards are courageous enough not to care, or else just lacking in compassion or self-preservation, as they only give grunts and attack in turn. Some of them do, that is--the ones carrying spears or swords. On second look, they're a bit too tall to be fantasy dwarves, almost at human-height, but so wide and muscular it looked otherwise from a distance. They're about as strong as they look, too, but their armor doesn't fully cover their skin.
    The guards with ranged weapons continue to assault the folks below, but that also makes them an easier target, should one ignore the spears and swords. Taiga is now in Alpha-39's sniper support zone, and she starts splattering the brains of anything that gets right up behind him, so that's not an unworkable idea.
    Lin joins the ramparts battle, as others act against the incoming fire. The stone walls don't seem to care much about the attack from Alexis' pokemon, but the projectiles are swept away, while other attacks impact or are perfect-parried by A2. The Flotilla gets time to set up, which will give them an opportunity to start busting their way through to the other side.
    Origami takes the quick (and far less orthodox) way through, coming out on the other side to find that there's not a lot in her way. "Not a lot" is relative to stone walls, as she instead has to either dodge or impact wattle and daub and thatch. There's not so much wood involved, though hard clay mixed with sand might not be that fun to smack against, either. She's got a good twenty meters to decide.
    Either way, she'll find herself in the town-between-the-walls, abandoned either because the inhabitants have moved or because there weren't any here, in the first place. The opposite side of the gate that the Flotilla are trying to batter through isn't far away, the (extremely heavy) bars on the interior wooden gate on this side. There's also all those guards up on the walls, some attracted to her sudden entrance.
    Maya finds that shooting the birds works in general, though lighting them up causes them to burn for a good, long while, as flaming crows (closer to the size of horses) become even angrier in attacking her, dropping dead only after the fire burns through the sludge-like fuel. If she can get on the ground, it's relatively easy to keep them off from there, as any significant effort toward anti-air will keep their awkward dive-bombing off the party.
Origami Hiiro Stopping on a dime is not exactly easy at these speeds, and a twenty meter skid with no warning is not quite going to work. Amelia's hurtling through the air, cutting the jets and rying to lose speed gracefully. Which still ends up involving briefly planting her arms against the top of the clay and bouncing over it with a quick burst of jet for lift. She catches herself on the ground in time to look around a moment then wince in pain at a crossbow bolt rending part of her cap and nicking her ear.

    She whirls about, catching sight of the guards trying to dislodge her from the inner court. So she does what comes naturally: She charges straight for them through the air on a blast of explosive power, going in to sock one clean off the battlements before dropping another with a knee to the stomach. "Hey far side!" She calls out into her radio, "Anything you need me to do on this side of the gate?"
Nozomi Houken     The first sword swung at Taiga glances off a shoulder plate - but does so with a shower of sparks, a faint glimmer of defensive enchantment clashing with a magical edge. Taiga utters an irritated rumble. The plate has held, the line of scoring along it is relatively superficial, but it still means that these weapons are more dangerous than he'd hoped. So the followup spear finds the robotiger already moving, leaping into the air and showering down a quick barrage of energy shots that should keep them distracted from the sudden sniper support (and, thus, make it easier for A39 to keep shooting them). As soon as he lands, he lunges, lashing out wherever he can; his main targets are the ranged soldiers, taking out anyone who presents a threat to those on the ground. He's relying a lot on A39's ability to keep spearmen and swordsmen off his back.
Alexis     Or Maya could get some help from an old friend.

    Looks like the Flotilla is going to have smashing gates and walls under control once they get their ram going, so Alexis recalls Krookodile for the time being, and instead turns her attention to giving the Junker a hand. If Maya is going to bring her proverbial 'big guns' to the party, she's going to need some cover. The tomboy takes a different pokeball, twirls it on a finger and then lobs it in the same direction as Maya is coming in for a landing. "Redline, I choose you!" The ball splits open and spills out it's surge of energy that reconstitutes into the winged orange lizard with a roaring "Charrrrr!"

    That's just the first step though. Next Alexis slides back one sleeve of her hoodie to reveal the wrist bracer underneath, and the glowing gem with a DNA helix carved into it. "Time to light things up!" She slaps the glowing stone to activate it. "CHARIZARD, MEGA X EVOLVE!"

    The following surge of energy envelopes the Charizard as the matching Charizardite worn around his neck. Only to be shattered with an even louder roar as a large pair of wings smash free, his colors having go midnight and sky blue, while the flames on the tip of his tail and the twin streams flaring from the corners of his mouth are now so hot they're burning bright blue instead of of red.

"Now," Alexis does the Dramatic Trainer's Point towards the oil covered birds trying to harass Maya before she can set up. "Heat Wave!" "CHAARRRRRRRZRRRRD!" A massive gout of blue flames spews from his mouth at the oil-birds, spreading wide like the 'wave' in the attacks name to catch as many of the offending avians as possible. Even if they don't immeadiately succumb to the scorching fire it should get their attention away from the Junker so she can work her own magic.
Starbound Flotilla "Little less of the heat from above!"
"Yeah, solid, let me just get my vertebrae back in."
"Big whiney baby human! Go turn on maximum heat!"

"Nozomi is remaining safe."
"Grateful. Thank you so much for the cover, Maya!"
"Hiiro? ...Aha! I see. If you have some means to disrupt the integrity of metal -- cutting through any sites that seem weak -- our battering ram should punch through much faster."

    George finally has some cover, so the battered and bruised man clambers up on over the overheating massive thermal lance and amps heat up intensely, to match the wood that's primarily composing this side, in hopes that Hiiro will handle the metal on her end! Meanwhile, Biteblade and Pavo work together, bracing the entire apparatus against the gate and activating a heavy rocket-booster. People on the inner side may need to evade, as their plan is to build up huge amounts of kinetic force against the door to improve its pressure, while also slamming directly towards the inner doors to blitz the enemy defenses!

    Seft and Albert try to get Nozomi seated somewhere safe on this machine. It's got seatbelts even! It should let her stick right in between the main defensive forces of the Flotilla.
Lin "HRYYAAAAAAAH!!" When surrounded by Demon warriors, Lin focuses her power and SLAMS a fist down into the floor beneath her. A thunderous BOOOM erupts from the point of impact, and the pure shockwave of it is apparently enough to send anyone nearby bouncing high into the air - unless they can successfully brace themselves or see it coming, that is!

    But Lin's not content with just knocking the Demon brigade for a loop. She dives in under any that were sent flying for further down the walls and DIVES foot-first into another line of defense, aiming to bowl over several opponents by turning their own body mass against them and then football kick a vat of their favored oil onto the lot!

    Yeah, it's probably gonna take a Hero Unit to stop her methodical but stylish show of prowess.

    "How much longer, you guys?! I wanna see this thing in action!"

    ... Or it might take a sufficient show of crazy weird technology. That works too, it seems!
A2     Fending the attackers off from the Flotilla seems to be working well enough. Sooner rather than later, the castle defenders (in as much as they can be called that, given the incredibly strange context) are engaged by the others and seemingly heavily overwhelmed. A2 moves from a supportive position when the heat dies down and steps away from the gigantic thermal lance cum battering ram, exchanging swords with a flicker of buzzing golden motes, and exchanging battle plans with a single chipset rotation.

    Her stance shifts in a single twitch. The massive anti-tank cleaver hovers over her head in statue-like stillness. A faint wind blows up from under her feet, catching her hair in the updraft and causing her scant remaining clothes to flutter. Ruby red 'pixels' swirl like embers in the current, rotating swiftly around her in scattered streams. A loud click sounds from the overcomplicated hilt of the Type-4O sword, and coruscating arcs of white hot lightning surge down its length, charging the metal a molten cyan hue.

    In the space of one exhalation, she brings it down against the gate, where the energy discharge explodes through the metal banding in an outwardly radiating fracture pattern around the head of the ram. The arc of light it leaves in the air takes on a life of its own, crystallizing into a beam of humming energy and streaking forward through the air, charged to overpenetrate the multiple stages of castle gate defense and cleave through the several layers of iron portcullis like a car-sized lightsaber.

    It cost the weapon's entire charge to do so, but A2 always keeps her frontal assaults expedient and overwhelming. Giving enemies time to react and throw more defensive measures in her way isn't how she's gotten this far.
Maya the attck is wll under way now as various elites engage the monster Maya's got some ideas and with help from an old friend namely Alexis. With her Pokemonm here she's got some serious support froim her. Her plan ahs woerked somewhat but they are coming after her now that she's set them on fire and it seems that they will be quite the problem or her. Up until the point a certain old friend is joining in. The Flotilla are smashing the gates in she's going to be able to come in for a landing with help from Redline and then the Charizard transforms in a new way she's not seen before, with the hulking Charmander now letting lose with fire and fury? Maya's hit the ground and she's now looking to force her own way into the castle as she makes ready with a spell of her own or more correctly she's gathering magical energy now... Also she has a moment of the Chamander can do WHAT? Seriously how did they? She thought she knew Pokemone pretty well but this was new...
Kyoko Takada     The upper walls are getting cleared off--or at least, the areas near the gate are getting cleared off. It's a long wall, and there are plenty of reinforcements to show up. Despite the continued enemy presence, the efforts still prove useful in preventing what would likely have happened next: guards with torches tossing them down to where any of the black slick managed to fall. This is especially important once the Flotilla's battering ram has busted through and into the gatehouse, putting them in an interior space designed as a very purposeful and effective kill zone against anyone coming in on foot, with or without armor. As-is, there are still guards in the floor above to fire and drop fire through the aptly named murder holes, but most of their number has exited for the exterior ramparts.
    The interior side of the gatehouse is stout enough to take a hit, but with A2's attack, the combined assault carries the ground force all the way through without even having to bother much for the attacks from above. There are still no visible enemies inside, so getting away from the walls might be a good idea. The birds are burned down, and aren't flying directly over the castle, so that might keep their survivors off, too.
    At least, there weren't any enemies visible inside. In a little more time than it takes to get everyone through, more obvious hostiles start appearing from the scattering of Dark Ages-style homes. These ones are dressed just like peasants, merchants, and soldiers fit to that time period, but they have no visible skin at all, instead giving every appearance of being robots with blocky heads and "faces," most with just two glowing eye-shapes for the impression of eyes more so than any attempt at realistic human impression. They're armed with yet more period weaponry, including oversized axes and pole-arms, and while not a dense enough throng to choke the streets, will attack anyone making their way down the road and toward the next, towering wall's gatehouse from all sides and using the buildings for cover and concealment. They make artificial clicking and whirring and buzzing sounds but don't speak any more than the grunting guards on the walls.
    A2's sensors detect them before they leave the houses, but they weren't detectable at all before they began to move.
    That next gatehouse is a good distance down the road and around the next of the concentric design's walls, towering even higher than the first.
    "Can't get a bead on anything past the wall. I'm coming to join you." Alpha-39 radios from her sniper's perch while reloading, and starts the business of getting a grappling line from a skyscraper to the still-drifting castle grounds. She'll catch up shortly, but can't provide more cover until then.
Nozomi Houken     For the moment, the way is clear, the enemies on the walls are no longer a direct threat to those pushing their way inside - including, most importantly, Nozomi. Taiga is satisfied with this. And once they're inside the walls, the majority of the threat will be at ground level. Nozomi is... well, as safe there as she'd be anywhere up here, and he knows full well she'd insist on staying up here just in case.

    So for now, his best use is retrieving the straggler, so to speak.

    As A-39 comes grappling up, she'll see a black, mechanical feline head peek over the edge. Thankfully, he does not give in to the feline urge to bat at the cable; instead, he simply waits for her ascent, wielding his cannons to clear out anything that presents a threat to her (or himself). When A-39 has arrived at last, he offers a simple, "Climb on. I will bring you to the rest of the group. Or a suitable sniping perch, if you prefer." Pause. "...do not expect this to be a regular offer." Cat back is only for Nozomi in most cases, it seems.
Alexis     Well they're not chickens but the birds are fired all the same. Maya is on the move to follow the ram and the others inside, and once the oil-birds are burning Alexis motions Redline to follow. "I'll explain the whole Mega Evolution thing when we're not busy avoiding dying while storming freakshow castles," she asides to Maya.

    On the other side, despite all the opposition they faced from the walls before, there's a whole lot of nothing. "Somethin' about this ain't ri--"

Cue the mediveal clad robots(?) emerging from the houses and hovels without prior indiciation of being there.

    "--Yeah, that's more like it." Alexis snaps her fingers and points. "We need a path. Rush 'em!"

    Or to put it more aptly, Dragon Rush 'em. Mega Charizard X makes full use of being a Fire/Dragon type in this form, spreading his wings and charging into the fray with both speed and power, like some sort of monsterous linebacker plowing the enemy team away from a runner. Just instead of a runner with the football it's a crew of space lunatics trying to drive a seige engine through.

    There's probably some weird karma in attacking a bunch of medevial robots with a modern dragon, too.
Origami Hiiro Amelia nods, before remembering that probably nobody can see that. "Cheers. Let me just. . ." Another set of the poor devils get a whirlwind kick for having elected to be the next wave to attack her, scattering them all across the wall's floor. But the ram is through and she's on the clock.

    She leaps off the wall with another flare of jets, pinwhieeling through the air before settling into a jet-assisted low flight. She jets up the path, 'dodging' incoming attacks by bodyslamming whichever unfortunate mook is in her way en route to the castle's second gate. "Any idea where they might keep the controls?"
Lin Down go the demons! The ones around her, anyways. Lin's hitting pretty hard, but strangely enough has yet to do anything terribly LETHAL to any of them - unless the oil's enough to kill. No deliberate deathblows. When an enemy goes down, that seems to be fine enough for her.

    As long as they stay down.

    But she's quickly grown BORED of tussling with the monstrosities on the ramparts. So she dashes ahead, changing her target to the gatehouse ahead - particularly the portcullis.

    "Huuuuah!" The girl whips a hand out to the side, and sparks fly from empty space as she grabs onto a hilt that wasn't there before. Space flares with golden light as she RIPS her chosen weapon free of its Elsewhere sheathe--

    A gargantuan, craggy club that strongly resembles a tooth. The size of an adult warhorse, solid rock, tapering unevenly down to a carved grip. Her knuckles are white from the sheer effort of keeping the ungainly thing under control, and beads of perspiration begin to roll down her face. And yet...

    "Outta... THE... WAAAAAAAAAAYYYY!!"

    With an alley-oop swing she brings the weapon DOWN in front of her while running, and uses that to CATAPULT herself high into the air where she briefly hangs and orients herself...

    And starts to enter a vicious angled PLUNGE for the next gate. An inhuman, hungry roar seems to come off the weapon as Lin brings it around and channels insane muscle strength and all the force of her plunge into one freakish, crushing STRIKE!

    This weapon is Old Stone Tooth, made from the tooth of a behemoth that once devoured entire mountains before it was slain by the Exalted Host in an age long lost. It's said that no stone or metal fortification can stand up to its hunger, and hundreds of walls and swords have been reduced to bits and pieces by its mighty.

    Can these fortifications hold up?!
Starbound Flotilla     At least they can deal with the gatehouse droppers. Swords, shotguns, daggers, axes, and hammers are drawn, smashing the guards who drop in aggressively. With a little more pushing, they can crash their way out through the other side of the gatehouse, kicking and slashing and punching and battering and shooting and pushing further ahead, trying to rush through the village. But then...!!

"Panicked. Wait, w-what?! There's GLITCH here?!"
"The hell is going... What? /Are/ these Glitch? They look weirder, but..."
"No, I believe it to be the phenomenon we have long observed here."
"Doesssn't yell and talk like Hivemind!"
"Suck it up and murder as you go, yeah!"
"Confusing. Irrelevant. Fight through."

    Seft's a little caught off-guard, but she and the rest of the Flotilla surge on through, trying to get this siege engine up to the next gate, to lance through it. It's... Confusing, and strange, but it's not like it isn't straightforward to deal with. Alexis has much of it dealt with. Seft calls out to Hiiro, "Confused. I would assume a mechanical control on the interior side, above or to one side, but I can't guarantee anything! Look for a large chain and follow it!" She does know plenty of medieval construction, so hopefully this guess is right. If it isn't, well, she'll be trying the traditional battering ram soon enough anyway, to break in.
Maya The battle is ranging right now but it's far from over here as the birds are mostly handled at this point. She is glad for Alexis help to let her move o and then she gets into the building seeing the robots? She thinks they are robots, maya could be wrong but she only has how they look to go off for the moment and she wonders about the crows now? Could this be a construct of somesort that's glitched? A Park or something akin to the Glitch like Seft? She doesn't know what she does know though as she's going to start unleashing maguic now as lighting arcs from her right hand while her left throws up seveal glowing cards into the air and Maya just chain lighting the attacking robot like things with all the magical force she can muster at the moment.
A2     Breaking through the gatehouse quickly was the goal, and it seems that, under anti-air cover, the blitzkrieg is successful. The Flotilla and A2 blast through the killbox and into the castle grounds before anything on the walls can come to stop them. A2 tries tuning her area sensors a little more in the brief downtime, sending out a stronger wave signal in the direction of the 'keep', wherever that is. That's what makes it all the more shocking when the streets fill.

    "What the hell?! /Machines/?! How long were they here? They didn't show up at all under just now!" A2 yells in exasperated fury. "What the hell /is/ this?! Why are these here? Isn't this supposed to be some trash about 'demons'? Why now?" She looks wildly from robot to robot emerging from their hovels, barely paying attention to their weaponry so much as their dead machine eyes, her fingers clicking and twitching around the hilt of her giant blade. "Here too . . . it's always /them/!"

    The oddity of the situation doesn't stop her. It can't stop her. The last and best data A2 can get from her mapping sensors goes out, with the closest approximation she can get to any kind of interface console or power core. After that it's just a long and chaotic blur of violence. She doesn't just charge through the crowd, cutting down the robots that are in the way so the group can go forward. She /stays/ in the courtyard, running the streets back and forth to mow down every metallic peasant she can find, going as far as to smash down the doors of buildings to root out any inactive models she finds inside. It seems she's gotten distracted from the mission objective to commit mass robot genocide, attracting the aggro of everything in the 'village' and trying to turn it into her own personal battleground, where she remains even as the others advance. At the very least, it's probably a tremendous distraction.
Kyoko Takada     Alpha-39 expected to be slowed a bit in getting back into the fight, but Taiga gets a curious, only slightly confused look from her, "Huh?" before she nods, "...alright, thanks."
    There's still danger everywhere, this area included, and so she has a relatively safe reentry into the battlespace by vaulting onto his back, her SMG in her hands for the moment, and directing, "This is enemy territory. Let's just go straight in. If there's any good perches in there, they're gonna be occupied." She can leap back off him once they're somewhere to fight at, dragoon-style.
    Dragon-style rushing works, too. These suspiciously Glitch-like opponents aren't forming a wall to really block access, instead just getting in the way (in futility, to the ones Charizard rushes over), or dodging to the sides, taking cover, and then waiting for an opportune moment to rush out again and swing axe or halberd. Some windows unshutter to release arrows or crossbow bolts. They're difficult to spot in time, but the projectiles are at least not bullet-fast.
    Magic lightning works, in response to the visible enemies, as do swords, shotguns, hammers, and so on. These opponents have more of a tendency to block, dodge, or parry, but if one is just trying to get past, then their greater lifespan only means that there are now also enemies behind, as well as in front. Some of these are gunned or sliced down by those catching up as the group splits to rush forward as quickly as possible.
    Lin pulls out her own siege weapon, and attacks. It's a weapon well-suited for the task, coming down on the gate hard enough to break wood and iron together, and carve out stone besides, fully wrecking an opening big enough for even the larger invading elites to get through. The shuddering in the ground as it strikes continues longer than it reasonably should, the ground quaking as if in exaggerated response, though this soon subsides. Some figures start coming through the ruined entrance, there to meet the exalt. There's yet further incongruity in appearance, though not everyone here is equipped to notice the difference between 1st-millenia Japanese and Chinese martial styles of dress, it's at least clear that these aren't like the pseudo-Europeans outside. One is a samurai(?) with four eye-slits and the same number of glowing eye-shapes behind them, possibly another robot beneath all the armor, and stepping slowly toward Lin with a katana held high, the armor ostentatious and the katana much too large to be accurate to this Earth's history. The other wears sweeping cloth and what suspiciously looks like blue jade, as well as wielding a flashy, curved sword that's much too thick to be historically accurate in many worlds outside her own.
    A2 wreaks havoc. Will she notice when she finds machines that are squatter, with spherical heads and cylindrical bodies, still in knights' garb? Maybe. Will she care? Probably not. Their charging attacks are something she might be used to.
    There's still another gate past the two that are facing off against Lin. Seft will prove to be correct in the construction of the area, as A2's sensor feed (before she became distracted) also hints at, providing an avenue of inquiry for Origami if she wishes to continue opening things up.
Alexis     The enemies have spears and other mideaval style weapons but they seem more intent on just avoidance and then blindsiding, rather than put up a direct resistance. The ones that don't just get trampled over at least. Having longer weapons and arrows does help them get in some hits, but as much harm as they're doing they're also just making the Mega Charizard all that more mad.

    Alexis has gotten out her own 'weapon', using the hockey stick to knock rocks and such back at various enemies to keep them at a distance. "Redline, do something about those hiding archers!" She probably means burn the buildings or something.

    But the fire dragon has other ideas. He grabs one of the robots trying to stab him with a spear, and with a pump of his wings lauchs up over the yard. Just to stop at the apex, somersault a few times to build up more speed and then comes roaring back down to slam, enemy first, into one of the buildings the archers are trying to snipe from and collapse the shelter on top of them.

    "Or that works too," Alexis grunts, and wacks another rock at an enemy with her stick. It's not like they're suppose to avoid breaking the place, that's entirely what they came for.
Origami Hiiro     Origami - presently Amelia for most intents and purposes - ends up arriving just in time to see Lin smash her way through the second gate with that club. She passes her a little salute as she flies right through the smashed open gate, blasting to full power to make her way for the third. She totally misses the strange presence of Samurai as she's focusing on following Seft's instructions.

    And indeed, arriving at yet a third gatehouse, Amelia smirks at the defenders before dropping out of this reality and into Origin once more. This time she's ready for it, and the castle can't even close it as fast as she's moving, skipping to the far side of the defenses as she reverses course back into this reality. Time to look for those controls!
Lin BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!

    Down goes the Gatehouse, and now...

    Lin rises from the dust and the rubble. But there's something quite different about her.

    Her body's wreathed in a murky shine of golden-white light, like liquid flame.

    And as she rises and casts a few drops of perspiration from her forehead, cracking a brazen grin... the display ignites into a swirling bonfire of sun-flame.

    The sunburst mark of the Unconquered Sun's favored Warrior-Generals burns on her forehead as she faces down the faux samurai.

    "That's more like it!" She merrily guffaws out. With a flourishy swing-woosh of the oversized weapon she somehow STUFFS IT BACK INTO NOWHERE with another flash of golden light... and draws something else.

    It's an ordinary-proportioned katana, at first glance, sheathed in a simplistic white scabbard.

    "Wait a moment, isn't that style Shogunate era...? And something like the Realm's, too..." She's a bit puzzled, but the prospect of a good challenge has her sweeping such concerns to the side for now!
Maya Maya is doing a godo job of cutting a path through this thing and she starts to wonder is this some sort of high tech amusment park or something like it? She keeps with Alexis though not wanting to leave her comerade behind. She fights along side Alexis and her pokemon. She starts to cast other spells moving to cast barrier spells on Alexis and her pokemonm in a breath breather from her assault to help them with their own.
A2     Robots dressed as knights and samurai holed up within a castle together?

    Nope. Inconceivable. Nothing like that would ever happen where A2 is from. No way.

    At least she assumes. It takes her a while, midway through her mass butchery of every machine she can get ahold of, to notice the difference. The steady transition from a strange and aggravating situation, to one that is all too familiar. The slide from alarm and frustration, to the thoughtless, automatic motions of the same-old.

    Arrows fly at her from behind and her early warning sensors calculate their trajectories in bullet time. Swords and axes come at her and are repulsed and broken by her counters. Here and there she is surrounded completely, and warps out of danger in flickers of holography. Explosive waves of energy cut down dense formations of enemies, and wreath her when she clears too much space and has to close back in. Her charges scatter and knock down. Her blades dance in remote patterns around her. Metal tears and screams and sparks fly like blood splatter. It's when she's putting her slender sword through the head of a downed and crippled machine that she suddenly snaps out of calm and blurry autopilot and takes a good, long, eye-widening look at the thing underneath her boot heel.

    "What the /hell/ . . . ?" she hisses, looking up at the wrecks all around her so abruptly that it tangles her long sheets of hair. "/What the hell/?! How are they- no, how does this thing know?!" Thankfully it only takes her a split second to discard the revolting implausibility. Having already seen the strangeness this world contains, she knows that the Machines being here is less likely than the alternatives. She thinks. She hopes.

    Realizing she's seen none of the inactive units that would have dodged her scanners at all, A2 is gripped with the sudden, intense paranoia that the castle is /creating/ them. Her black box temperature spikes in keeping with a racing heartbeat as she kicks aside the nearest machine corpses, taking a tense and rigid stance in a cleared 'village square' and pinging as widely around the dead space as she can, watching with feverish intensity, both the horizon and the map, for where the familiar shapes and the digital black dots crop up as new contacts, without the bloody haze of battle distracting her.
Starbound Flotilla     At last, the castle interior.

    But first, concern. "What in the world... Almost Hylotl, but far more like Creation's own..." Moonfin looks to Lin the moment she shines as bright as she does, and all three eyes narrow. His reaction of concern isn't nearly as intense as Pavo's reaction of abrupt, gut disgust. She makes a noise like someone spitting, like a swear but completely inarticulate. No hostility, of course, just a simple bit of negativity that emerges from the solar display.

    There's not much she can say about it right now. What's going on here at the big door is more important. "Fucking hell, now it's samurai or something? God damn it blondie, the fuck do you know about all this?" George mutters. "Or robots? Or... God, what the fuck is even going /on/ here?!" He pumps his shotgun and mounts the battering ram. "Ami, I really hope you've got this figured. We're punching pedal to metal solid!" Here's hoping Origami has finished this off, because Seft and Albert are retrieving Nozomi from that battering ram and setting the rocket to full power, sending it crashing through the door and into the interior of the castle to wreak havoc on a blind crushing rush. As they do, they chatter among themselves, anxious and curious about the strange things they're seeing.

"I can't tell what this is. Another mixed organization?"
"Worried. No, that can't be right..."
"Unity only within groupsss, but working together. Why?"
"Sure as hell don't like being up against variety like ours."
"Some kind of cross-world collaboration? Could it be a consortium?"
"Don't know, don't care. Smite this heresy down hard, whoever is involved."
Nozomi Houken     Taiga will ferry A-39 as far as he can, preferably directly to the rest of the main group. There's enough enemies, however, that doing so is going to be a run-and-gun battle. "Hold on tightly," is the only advice he offers. And then he leaps for the path of least resistance.

    Over the rooftops of the castle town.

    From one to the next, a swift and smooth procession with a lot of direction-changes but no real pauses. And every time Taiga has anything even vaguely resembling a shot, one of his shoulder cannons swivels to take it - a robot here, a robot there, whatever he can do to thin the herd without slowing down too badly. Less enemies behind the main group is less danger.
Kyoko Takada     Buildings get wrecked, and the ground shudders again, though not for as long as the tremors after the inner gatehouse was hit. A2 watches her sensor map, and 'everything' continues to register as an active enemy, with the kind of fluctuations that would be consistent with an active combatant. There's one difference she might note about the machine corpses she's been leaving everywhere--the wrecked corpses pile up without obliterating themselves. As long as she watches, more enemies do show up on her minimap, inside the buildings surrounding the open square she's standing in, the squat, toy-like enemies in their ragged chainmail advance with spear and shield. She might remember having already thoroughly cleared a building a pair of them just came out of.
    Alexis' pokemon focuses on clearing out the buildings with hiding ranged enemies, though this might take awhile to finish up. The buildings themselves go down quick as you like with that much power directed at them, but they're scattered far enough apart that any reprieve is temporary, and any safety relative. "Relatively" safe is the approach path that Taiga follows, thanks to this, getting up to the gatehouse where Lin draws a weapon likely more appropriate for dueling man-sized enemies. There's still plenty to shoot at along the way, as both robo-tiger and passenger-soldier do, one arm being enough to brace Alpha-39's SMG, stock to shoulder.
    The way into the gatehouse is open, but getting stuck inside isn't a great plan, in all likelihood. Fortunately, Seft was right about there being a control mechanism to get it open, and Origami is able to find out without too much trouble, tunneling through walls as she does. This reality reasserts itself in short order against her powers, but quick enough motions carry her to a large, locked, wooden wheel. Kicking out the lock is enough to let counterweights pull up one iron gate, and the Flotilla's battering ram slams right into, and through, the wooden gate after it.
    The two unusual guards, so far unique in being (so it seems) a samurai and a warrior in blue jade, let the ram charge through, but only because Lin is right in front of them. They don't charge, but move with sure purpose, the samurai coming in with an overhead strike that is astonishingly fast in execution for how telegraphed it was, followed up with a reverse slash and backstep. The jade warrior comes in at the same time from the opposite direction, spinning from one foot to the other, blade flashing around in circles that approach and retreat.
    There's no third wall to break through, on the other side of the gatehouse. There's the keep, its doors another huge, wooden set, but no harder to break through, in all likelihood, than the four sets the party has already broken.
Starbound Flotilla "Alright, I'm starting to get /real fuckin' sick/ of these doors."
"Plaintive. It's a castle! This is how castles work!"
"Redundant defenses. It makes sense."
"Door number four?! Aaaaaaahhhhh!! Break more again!! Forever!!"
"The more gates we find in our way, the closer we are to our target."
"Nothing worth taking was ever out in the open. Look for heavier doors."
"Fine, fine. But we're overtime on the horse hockey world cup here by now."

    "Woahwoah woah! Ha ha ha!! Heya 'Ami! Thanks for holding the door for us!" George calls out as he latches a grappling hook onto the careening massive rocket-battering-ram. "I'm hoping hard there's not more than just the one door left, because this thing's just about spent!" Pavo joins him on a glide, and they thankfully don't need to worry about the dangers of that pair here as the rest of the Flotilla rush to keep up. By reigning the rocket, they hope to basically have the battering ram suicide bomb the last door with its remaining fuel and power! A huge crushing attack, meant to strike as if it were impaling the structure itself. They've noticed a little bit of the tremors, though they're clearly not as caught up as A2 might be on the nature of things, so they're just trying to focus on what works.
Origami Hiiro Hiiro is as always the backseat driver in these situations, the voice in Amelia's head telling her when it's wiser to not just rush off hot-headed at the next objective. Obviously she doesn't always succeed, which is why they've never truly achieved Synchronization. But, here, Amelia listens, especially so overheated with the shenanigans and combat they've been up to, Amelia swoops down and gracefully stops just short of landing atop the siege engine marching toward the final barrier. "So many layers of walls and gates, what're they hiding?" She murmurs, saluting the Starbounders pushing the glorified goblin death machine to its final destination. "So I'm not the only one sick of doors, that's good to know, but I'll give you a bit of an escort on this last leg. I'm not fancying continuing to play with how this place hates Hiiro's powers more than I need to. Conventional Siege." She rises a bit higher up, scoping for incoming attackers to immediately divebomb and defeat.
Alexis     Building collapses, but after a moment the Charizard X bursts out of the rubble and back into the air with a roar, a bit bruised up but still more angry than hurt. Or angry enough hurt doesn't register.
    It may be relative safety, but in situations like this, relative is about the best you can ask for. There is no true absolute 'safe' in the middle of a battle, something Alexis has been around the proverbial block more than enough times to be aware of. Still, the more enemies Redline is thrashing and trashing, the less enemies that are getting into direct opposition of the Flotilla seige engine.
    We will work with it, especially with Maya giving some additional defense of the mystical sense. Less damage from enemy attacks means they can play a little more loose with other aspects. Like recoil damage.

    "Redline!" Alexis shouts to get the fire dragon's attention even as she starts skating towards the gates to catch up with the moving ram. She motions towards the two guards trying to pin down Lin. "Cover the rear and box them out!" Redline nods, and with a powerful beat of wings takes back into the air. Then twists around to face behind the group, wings spreading full to hold him aloft for the moment. "CHARRRRRR!" The roar is accompanied by a massive gout of superheated blue flame spewing from his maw. But rather than aim directly at the enemies the flames hit the ground and rush along the surface to form a ring around as many of the enemy groups as possible. When the two streams meet together again then entire conflageration roars upward in twisting wall of fire.

    Fire Spin won't do a lot of direct harm but the immense flames are a dangerous obstacle to anything trying to actually escape them. The use of the move was more tactical, trying to keep the remaining mook forces from easily flanking them from behind as the group moves farther into the fortress.
A2     Trying her best to ignore the active pulses coming from the /entire/ castle-island around her, A2 focuses on where the !Machines first register as contacts, and finds her fears are completely realized. As the fresh wave closes in on her, she sends her giant sword spiraling around her with the full-body pivot of invisible technological 'strings', imparting it with enough momentum to keep whirling around her like a massive, high momentum buzzsaw for a few moments while she gives the heads up.

    <<"They're coming out of the- I don't know, but the damn /thing/ is just making more of them! There's no end to these things! They're not real! Hurry up and find where the core is, or else we're going to need a tactical bomb to wipe this thing off the map!">>

    She catches the sword in one hand as its orbit tightens back in around her, smashing some of the repeat Machines into the distance with a bat-like swing, and then starts charging through the crowd. Even she isn't so overcome with tunnel vision that she'd commit to fighting a literally infinite horde, even if they do look like 'them'. Her objective is to find whatever looks like a castle keep or central structure; failing that, some kind of chapel. Those seem like likely places to keep something vitally important.
Lin Lin's overjoyed to meet opponents who actually look like they'll present a CHALLENGE! Because the demons out there sure didn't. Strangely, she doesn't draw that weapon of hers. It remains in its simple, but polished White Jade scabbard even as she brings it around to a guard as though ready to strike.

    Common sense that this is a bad idea. The scabbard will either go flying at the first swing or be crushed uselessly, right?!

    Then reality unfolds, and such notions are cast aside to the winds.

    In comes the overhead strike! Lin whips her weapon about in a deflecting parry, arms rising to meet the challenge just as quickly. Between the two's movements the winds pick up from the sheer speed and force of impact...

    And Lin develops a HEINOUS, joyous grin!

    As yet more slashes come in from multiple directions beads of perspiration roll down her forehead from sheer focus! Golden light surges down her muscles and her movements turn unreal in their swiftness, leaving afterimages and sending out sprays of sparks.

    ALL of their blows are caught on her blade, and only one manages to graze her along an arm and draw a crimson line with its tip. The sheer pressure of the impacts does send her back two yards, but...

    But the moment her feet have proper purchase again, she bends down, SPRINGS forward with a leap and turns into a whirlwind of slash-clubbing with her sheathed weapon!

    Exactly hOW isn't that scabbard flying off, anyways?! Any why hasn't she drawn it...?!
Maya Things were heating up a bit as she moves to now turn fro9m buffing Alexis and her pokemon with the support handled she'll turn to making ready to let lose with some more magic as she moves forward she moves along side Reline as he goes and she'll start adding her own magic to the Pokemon's assult this time massive pillars of fire will start bursting into existance as Maya picks her targets with the neemy and she calls back.

"I think this warrents some of my more powerful spells Alexis."

They could be taxising on her from the strain then A2 gives some vital intel. She will hold off they need need to break thls source of the attackers. Still the fire keeps raining down as she moves ahead.
Nozomi Houken     And there, time to rejoin the group. With A-39 delivered to the main advance, Taiga crouches down to allow her the chance to dismount; once she's off, he darts ahead, right through the gate as soon as it's open. If there's anything between them and the keep's doors, it's going to be subject to a very hostile mechatiger unloading energy cannons. And probably claws, if it lives that long.
Kyoko Takada     Lin finally gets that fight she wanted. The jade-armored warrior at least fights in ways that might be vaguely familiar to her, reminiscent as they are of that coincidentally thin line between Chinese and Realm martial arts, attempting to turn her blows to the side with its blade and free hand and strike into the gap. It's soon clear, however, that this opponent is markedly inferior to her in strength, unable to use such techniques fully against her heavier or faster blows. The fight would be over quickly were it not for the other opponent, the samurai(?) working in coordinated tandem, catching her attacks close to the hilt and narrow guard or redirecting force with strong counter-strikes against her sheathed weapon, giving ground readily but advancing when able. Some of her strikes, still, do make it through, bashing armor and momentarily ruining balance, forcing the enemy's partner to take in and narrowly rescue the other over and over again in mere seconds of flurried attacks as she wears the two down.
    The "town" area is still full of potential reinforcements, but only weaker individuals have appeared, so far. Redline and Maya practicing battlefield control keeps them at bay to a significant extent, leaving Lin's fight uninterrupted, along with the approach into the keep. The nearer buildings have been wrecked, and the farther ones present at least marginally less danger as the long-distance arrows are less accurate and easier to see coming.
    The battering ram strikes the keep's main doors, and everything involved in that collision explodes. There's a peek from above, as defenders in helmets look down from the top of the keep, but rushing inside will make it easy enough to avoid those should the Flotilla and Origami choose to. A2 closes in on the same location, though she has more space to cross to reach it. Taiga reaches it ahead of her, just behind the forward-most team, while Alpha-39 hops off to check the sides, turning one way and another at the multitude of avenues from which an ambush should occur. To Lin, she calls out, "Need a hand?"
    The inside of the keep, to the first to look in, is an open space with a floor well below, and ceiling high above. This is true for only a moment, before new floors assemble out of the walls, stone blocks sliding out and into place in such rapid fashion as to make one doubt whether anything at all just happened. The newly created room, already dirty with use, is a feasting hall by the appearance of its long tables, high-backed chairs, benches, some raised area for the literally-higher-class to sit, and pennants showing designs that might, if only by coincidence, be familiar in their heraldry to one or another present. The place is empty of all life, but for the echo of a tortured scream, still rebounding in that moment as the room forms, from the area below that was just barely possible to glimpse. To any who did, there certainly appeared to be a young man down there, a human wearing a Japanese school uniform, sitting stiffly in a chair not designed for comfort.
    One new presence appears, though its form is indistinct. It's not machine-like, but more like what one might expect a horrible and monstrous demon to look like, all disturbingly purposeless yet gargantuan flesh, not formless, but swiftly changing form. It doesn't step out from behind the highest and grandest chair at the back of the room, only because it doesn't have legs, and was in any case too large to be hiding there, until it condenses and slims into something roughly humanoid. It shrinks from forty feet tall to twenty, gaining arms, legs, silk clothing like a Victorian dress, slimming further, proportions still nightmarishly uncanny, but becoming moment-by-moment more "human." It has, even before that point, two eyes that are decidedly human and aware, if rather too large, in its indistinct face, and a crown of gold atop its head, spikes gleaming.
Alexis     That will at least keep the mooks at bay while they move ahead. If what she's hearing over the radio is right, these things aren't worth wasting more time and effort on. "Let's go, Maya." She gives a whistle, and Redline loops around in the air to come back towards them. Instead of making him stop to pick her up Alexis just grabs his ankles as the Mega Charizard passes, so he can pull her underneath and catch up with the others in the main keep.
Nozomi Houken     In this form, Taiga's most useful purpose by far is serving as a scouting force; he is armed and armored enough to survive an unexpected assault, and more importantly, he has the sensors and agility to make 'unexpected assault' much more difficult. He's unafraid to go darting into the keep, though the brief glimpse of an empty 'tower' with some schoolboy down at the bottom gives him pause. Then it's gone as quickly as it was there; but the TIGER most certainly saw that.

    'Human in distress' now officially takes high priority.

    A streak of pitch black and glowing yellow goes darting around the room, rebounding here and there in a wide arc intended to take him around and /past/ the quickly-changing demon. He doesn't even attempt to engage, just to circumvent, and make himself a hard target in the process.
Maya Maya does keep up with controling the flow of the battle alongside Redline for the moment and she seems to show no signs of tiring let from the amount of magic she's slinging about either. She will keep moving and moves along side Alexis and co as they move ahead she'll summon her wings, take flight and moves to follow ahead ceasing the magical assault in the process.
Origami Hiiro Amelia is still escorting the siege as it beats down the door. She gives a slightly tired cheer as they bash it down. Good. Then a whole lot of shit happens at once. "Why is the big bad guy always at the end of a horrible gauntlet of traps and minions anyway," she says exasperatedly, feigning a fainting spell in midair. But then she straightens up, and gets serious.

    After some quick radio discussion, it's determined that yes, she should totally try origin-tunneling through the freaky extend-o-matic floor. So Origami reaches out with her mind and then Amelia winks out of existence like an analog television being turned off. For them it's more of a perspective shift, seeing the weird, angry castle in their version, more of a tortured hall than an abandoned banquet, but Origami reaches through, wrapping the floor into a tunnel for her to pass through, Amelia diving into the resultant gap with one quick downward burst, looking to spend no time and get down to the unfortunate as quickly as possible.
Lin With Alpha-39 getting near, Lin's grin gets a little bit pressured! "Aheh..." This is after an amazingly swift exchange between her and her two opponents. Their different fighting styles is throwing her off, because working together they're able to stymie her assault!

    "... Only if THIS doesn't work."

    She backflips in retreat several times and lands in a quick-draw stance, right hand hovering open over the sword's grip while she holds it 'round the scabbard in her left.

    A deep breath later, she focuses all her efforts into one swift motion! The blade leaves its scabbard from her own efforts where physics failed, and the moment it's clear...

    THUNDER roars in the heavens above, the skies darken and swirl in a patch directly above Lin! The darkness spirals outwards, stormclouds opening with unnatural swiftness. A gentle drizzle begins to fall on the castle grounds and the air sizzles with static.

    But more than that. Those nearest Lin - or especially spiritually sensitive - immediately feel a horrid feeling. Like drowning in a river of freezing blood while caged by blades. The unmistakable feeling of MALICE UNCHAINED, a decisively lethal intent.

    But it's all over in one freakish flash of speed. One moment Lin's standing on the rubble, and the next--

    KRAKOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

    The next, she is a living lightning bolt carving a path into and hopefully BEYOND the guards!
A2     Carving through machines left and right, jumping over the wrecks that refuse to explode, and pounding ground towards the keep in absurdly accelerated time, A2 arrives just in time to see the reconfiguration of the inner keep, stopping abruptly to look back and forth at the rapidly reassembling interior with an expression of dull, distant shock. The Android takes a step backwards, unable to keep her eyes from roving over the scenery with a wary, mistrustful glare, muttering "What the . . . hell?" more to herself as anyone else.

    She only just catches sight of the . . . boy? A2 shakes her head, taking one more step back. She has no idea what this means --what's going on here. It fills her with a creeping sense of dread on multiple levels, too close to the stranger aspects of deliberately locked and encrypted memories. It takes her far too long to even notice the demon, 'hiding' in plain sight for her shock. It takes human form right before her eyes, abandoning its towering, grotesque stature for something almost inoffensive, if still creepy. Does it want to communicate? Hide? Parlay?

    "/You/!" A2 seethes, her voice intensifying its usually hoarse and deadly serious cadence. She doesn't seem to feel any more articulate than that. She snaps her sword ready in her hands, leaning into a forward pose, and then rockets across the dining hall with enough force to bulldoze straight through the tables. She doesn't so much as take a second step; her speed takes her at such a fast and shallow lunge that it skates across the flagstones, leaving deep, trailing gouges where her heels rake across the floor, as if skating. Her silhouette visually darkens. The air around her ripples with a visible pressure wake. One eye briefly glints bright red, not unlike the Machines themselves. She slams into the humaniforme demon, and where she makes contact, the potential energy field around her detonates as a lethal kinetic explosion.
Nozomi Houken     Over by the Flotilla, Nozomi has been relatively quiet; by now she's gotten (perhaps distressingly) very good at keeping her head down and moving through a warzone under the protection of others. But when Lin draws that sword? She makes noise.

    It's a quiet noise. A tiny little distressed squeak, an alarmed noise that accompanies the brief but overwhelming desire to run and hide. Seft and Albert will almost certainly have to deal with a few moments of her freezing up entirely. Thankfully, it soon passes.
Starbound Flotilla "GaaaaaAAAAAH WHAT THE FUCK?!"
"Terrified. It's some kind of spatial warping effect!"
"Or that humor about the nanomachine swarm was not without merit."
"Might as well be magic. Doesn't matter."
"Gotta see how they're making this happen! This is some divinity-tier power!"
"After kill, then be god! Focusss on kill now!"

    "What in the hell is-- God damn /jesus/, if killing anything's gonna make this pile of rocks fall outta the sky it's /probably/ this thing." George mutters, freshly drawing his shotgun and calling out to his disturbing, stomach-churning foe. "Hey there! Zoning enforcement board, sorry but you can't float a castle like this in this district!" He says, spouting nonsense the way he always insists on. "Don't worry though, we're happy to help with demolishing! We just need to make sure we take back a little of what you grabbed on your way in!"

    "A2 has melee. Taiga is scouting. Cover at range, open fire!" Albert calls out. Immediately, the Flotilla swaps to primarily a ranged loadout: Biteblade brings out a bow, Pavo summons a trio of gleaming gold orbs, Seft equips a heavy laser pistol to work in tandem with her tower shield, and Albert hoists a heavy rocket launcher. "Star Two, cover Houken." He calls out, giving Moonfin, someone with only melee ability, something he can do... And maybe even trying to help her emotional state a little by reinforcing with a third protector? He wouldn't shift tactics just to help her /feelings/, would he?

    Hmm.

"Star Five, break left!"
"Yeahyeah!"
"Star Four, above! Out of A2's way!"
"Don't gotta tell me twice. Smiting hard!"
"Star Six, flank hard, cover Taiga and then engage close from rear!"
"Cool, I love being right at the highest risk closeness to A2, sure."
"Shut up. Open fire!"

    The Flotilla that isn't busy with protecting Nozomi coordinates, and /carefully/ sticks out of A2's way to flank around, covering Taiga's scouting, spreading out around the forming foe, and opening fire with a vast multitude of different projectiles!
Kyoko Takada     There aren't any easily-reached avenues down, but Taiga is right in thinking that there'll be one that's hard to reach. He has to get past the crowned demon before getting an eye on a hall that heads to a staircase down, almost like a post-boss exit hidden behind the almost-a-throne area. Getting there without defeating the guardian is dangerous, even with cat-mobility. He's saved from having to deal with this through a combination of his own speed and A2's immediate aggression, as she attracts its attention, and the Flotilla try to tax its multitasking capability.
    Origami's direct route is the safer of the two, if only because she gets through too swiftly for the stone to close in on her. Either route works in bringing one to the torture chamber. There are no torturers in sight, but the array of tools give that distinct and obvious impression, from wooden racks to cages to chairs covered in spikes to smithy tools, along with certain items known to Japanese period pieces but seemingly out of place in a European inquisitorial chamber. Unlike the last few times, the lack of enemies continues more than a few seconds after entry.
    The boy here isn't on one of those easily-understood torture devices. In his late teens and wearing a school uniform, he looks half-dead, yet conscious, eyes tracking on two of the castle's invaders. "What... what..." he starts, but even that much seems difficult, for him. The chair has no pins, no iron manacles, and no collar. Instead, something fleshy crawls up from the floor, around his legs and arms, and holds his head straight. It looks like nothing so much as purplish muscle fiber, faintly incandescent in pulses, as if transmitting terribly slow signals up and down its length, to where it disappears within the stone.
    Outside, Alpha-39 waits to see what Lin will do, and shouts, "What the /fuck/ was that--" as the wave of malice hits her and then passes. The desired outcome does occur, as this strike's speed surpasses the abilities of the two "captain"-class enemies, giving no chance for one to cover the other before both are struck. Already damaged, the blade finds purchase and slices through, as the four-eyed samurai comes apart in a shower of sparks and robotic bits, while the jade-armored warrior gushes blood. Both fall. A-39 shakes her head, looks back up toward the defenders on top of the keep, then rushes inside.
    Within, rockets fire, androids charge, lasers beam, arrows fly, and one monarchical shape-shifter takes all of it head on. A2 strikes in first, hitting and driving the demon back to the wall, hitting heavily with that twenty-foot-tall bulk. The silk dress may as well be part of its body for all the damage it takes in particular, and the whole thing feels like hitting a particularly hard mountain that's merely been uprooted. Explosions and projectiles strike and play across its form, which continues to condense, if now more slowly, dropping to the fifteen-foot range after that first wave. It might be losing mass, but it's hard to tell, especially after it counterattacks by merely waving its arms (now complete with upper and lower arms, wrists, hands, fingers, long gloves) like clubs, each one unsophisticated but deceptively massive. It charges with nigh-unstoppable inertia, not so much at A2 as through her, making for the door but changing direction as soon as it comes within range of any of those firing ranged attacks. The legs shift mid-charge, but the dress hides all but the heavy, bronze heels, coloration matching the decorations on the sheathe that grows out of the dress' side, as it ends its charge by drawing a blade likewise two or three times one sized for human hands. Its eyes shift from target to target in a purely ordinary way, like one hurried and surprised, independent of the motion of the body.
    Those just reaching the room are yet spared any attacks.
Nozomi Houken     Getting past the monster is accomplished only through the aggression of his allies - but that's fine by Taiga. What works, works. And both Hiiro and Taiga have the same idea, for that matter. This will probably make /both/ their lives easier.

    Once they come within sight of the captured teenager, the robotiger glances Origami's way, then says simply, "I do not have opposable thumbs. Please help deposit this young man on my back." And without further preamble, he lunges. There's too many tendrils coiled all around the prisoner; so instead he opts to go for the root first, slashing at it with one paw in a rapid movement. If cutting at the root doesn't fix it, he'll start slashing for other parts of that muscle fiber, but that's his first shot.

    Of course, if he can't claw the tendril off with one slash, he'll use more.
Lin As Lin once again blurs into visibility, she slides the demon blade back into the White Jade scabbard. The instant it's fully sheathed... the radiating malice is sealed again. The air sizzle-crackles, sparks and arcs of electricity warningly sprouting on the ruins of the portcullis and the enemies Lin just trounced - especially the robotic one. ANYTHING conductive shows these warning signs--

    And then, an instant later, a bolt cleaves the heavens and scorches what's LEFT of what was her foes and booming thunder rolls over the battlefield.

    With that, the storm that was brewing above simply disperses, and the rain stops as soon as it began.

    "Hrrrrngh... I didn't need to draw it just for that..." Lin stuffs the sheathed weapon back into seemingly nowhere, and now draws forth a sleek, wicked-looking naginata. Lean on the decoration, but the shaft is made of an icy blue material that definitely isn't wood, while the blade bears a silvery sheen that gleams like liquid dreams.

    Grasping this weapon, she dashes across the battlefield, aiming to re-join the Flotilla!

    Though, she's left gaping about as much as Alpha-39 when she barrels past the keep's doors...
Origami Hiiro A quick glance to Taiga, a firm nod. "Let's do it." After all, the kid doesn't look in any condition to talk, so the brass woman attacks the problem from the head, attempting to rip the strange fiber from him at the far end, pull apart the coils or rip it where needed. She even uses the jets to force it where stubborn, though the kid may get a bruise or two from that.

    If they're successful in prying it away, she's swiftly hauling the boy onto Taiga's back, keeping her scorching hot elbows out of reach of the others in the direct handling.
Alexis     There's some steam from evaporation and an annoyed hiss at the rain, but a fully evolved Fire type isn't about to kheel over from the exposure like it's unevolved stage might of.It's a bit late to the party since they were holding back the remains of the mook horde, but that may not be the worst of things in this case. Seeing the mass of... whatever undulating its shape as it contends with the first wave of arrivals is enough for Alexis to let go of her pokemon and skid to a stop. "Yeah, that ain't fucking right." This is pretty high on the weird-shit-o-meter, even for an experienced multiversal adventurer.

    But weird and dangerous has never really been something to deter her, or her companions. "Play time's over, time for the real fun." She glances up, and it looks like Redline already has a similar idea as once she let go he's flown up as high as the chamber allows. "This thing oughta be extinct like a dinosaur, so make like a comet!"

    With a roar Mega Charizard flips over backwards and goes into a dive, his entire body sheathing in the superheated blue flames spewing from his mouth and tail as he does so, until much like the tomboy said he looks like a comet as he charges the metamorphing form from above with Flare Blitz!

    Like I was saying before, thanks to the defense buffs before we've got a little more health to spare for hard hitting recoil attacks. Not to mention Mega Charizard X is a lot more physically powerful than it's standard counterpart.
Starbound Flotilla "Woah woah woah WOAH-- Fucking android!! God damn it I hate rear flank!"
"Remarkable. It has near uniform anatomy. What could this possibly be?"
"Higher dimensssional intersssection! Kill with SSSTAAAAB!"
"Anxious. Watch out! That inertia is almost impossible!"
"Blade out! Ready defenses, keep Houken out of range!"
"Damnation, is there /any/ kind of weak spot on this monster?"

    George has to dive out of the way of that charge from A2, rolling and scrambling to his feet to fire off another shotgun blast, knocked around and bruised by what fraction of the impact he wasn't able to deflect. As the creature rushes back against her, Moonfin and Seft have to come together to defend Nozomi in melee; Seft leaps forward with the tower shield and takes the bulk of the blunt impact from the woman's changed direction, before Moonfin overloads one of his katanas to change its direction just a little, leaving Seft dented and battered.

    "Not a talkin' type, huh? Just a building type? I can respect that. Wait, no that's exactly the opposite of what I can expect. Seriously! Fuck off!" George calls out, jamming an autoinjector full of painkillers and stimulants into his thigh and leaping back to his feet with energy. "Hey, it's figuring out how to be People fast, and I'm kinda worried about what's gonna happen when it's all the way to /person/. Do we got anything good for making it /less people/?" He calls out, and as he does, something forms oddly in his mind... "If this shit's all projecting out of the castle, maybe it..." He stops loading his shotgun after the final blast, and tosses it aside. "Fuck. Give it a go, I'll try...!" He dives to one side, making sure he's out of the blastwave and the blowback from Alexis' heavy shot with the Mega Charizard! He's hoping it'll at least stun or pin the being long enough for him to try to dig in with... Mining beams! If things here are like A2 says, and this is all projections of the castle, then maybe its mountain-like constitution means it'll be more vulnerable to a mining beam than it is to high-power buckshot.
Maya The party is moving foward at this point, the rain doesn't bother Maya as she keeps up with Alexis and her crew. She too jhust stares at the thing blow them and she follows up Redline's assault this time it's not just fire she's shifting spells, some times it's fire, some times it's lightning other ti,mes it's massive chunks of earth as Maya unleashes a volley of elemental attacks on the thing keeping her distance and trying to give cover to those who are already engaged.

"There's always something new to hurt your mind in the multivese it seems Alexis!"
Nozomi Houken     Thankfully, with Seft, Moonfin and Albert all covering her, Nozomi recovers quickly. She's sharp enough to back off a ways, giving her protectors less immediate worry and more room to work with; and when she sees an opportunity, she immediately dives for cover, something more solid to hide behind.
A2     Maybe A2 hoped the boss demon would be squishier, or maybe she just didn't care. At the very least, driving it into a wall crater doesn't seem to harm her. As busted up as the Android looks (always), for the time being it seems to be superficial, and her subdermal armour and sturdy construction absorbs the impact. She stands her ground when the shapeshifting monster rights itself, watching intently as it continues to shrink under the fusillade of weapons fire, trying to ascertain if it's actually taking any damage. She's directly in the way when it charges again.

    This time it's the demon's turn to slam headlong into her, and despite her unusual weight, A2 is still much smaller and lighter. It takes her off her feet instantly. The keep hall rings with the sound of a bowling ball falling on a manhole cover, and A2's vision crackles with lines of jumbled static. She is carried almost all the way into the Starbound Flotilla, but gyro-sensors and balance stabilizers kick in shortly thereafter, and her body reorients in a way that is half like ballet and half like a Boston Dynamics video.

    She pushes off the Demon, digs her heels in to grind to a halt, rolls her shoulders back, and then throws her whole body forward into a powerful double palm thrust, taking on the charging monster's bulk directly. Grey-gold light flashes from her hands like a spark of static electricity when they make contact, and the full force of her counter disperses throughout every inch of the target, slamming it towards a standstill despite having absolutely laughable leverage at her size and weight. If she can slow it enough, she then pulls back one arm, briefly crackling with red lightning, and then drives a wild punch into its midsection, letting off a loud bang as it breaks the sound barrier and fires off a visible shock cone into the demon's mass.
Kyoko Takada     It takes a couple of slashes from Taiga, but the fibers aren't that tough. They break, and the upper portions quickly "die," no longer fed whatever it was they draw from the floor. After that, it's not difficult for Origami to pull off what's left, the tendrils closely touching but thankfully not penetrating any skin. There's immediate relief on the boy's face when it's off, a face only now easily recognized (by Taiga) as the one from the school, called "Dragon" for (presumably) his firepower. He doesn't look capable of much right now, severely shaken, but does say, "It's you? ... had a dream... got me out..." He doesn't look ready to stand, nor even to grab on with too much strength, on his own.
    Alexis finds that there's about fifty feet of clearance, making for permissive but perhaps less than ideal conditions for large-beast flight. Redline strikes, and it's another heavy blow, the impact hard and clear and staggering, and the flames setting that silk dress on fire. It's on fire, yet it's not burning up. The sword flashes, a faster motion than its earlier club-like arm strikes, as five feet of sharp metal strike back at Alexis' pokemon.
    Lin has yet to attract aggro, but Alpha-39, nearby, is quick to put aside her "The fuck is this?" reaction and begin firing. Her options are a bit limited in an enclosed area with plenty of friendly targets, so she opts to use the tables A2's charge overturned as cover while she starts off with unloading a full magazine of penetrating rounds into the demon. For the most part, it looks like they're failing to penetrate, and similarly failing to attract much of its attention. The soldier delivers a choice few curses as she switches guns.
    George has an idea, but the intersection of what he's got right and what he's guessed wrong at come out to the mining beam being only partially effective. The thing (already) registers as "flesh" rather than "construction," from what he can tell. He's probably still damaging it, but it's able to take so much punishment, and is still changing form quickly enough that it's hard to tell what's causing what. Given that the demon steps in his direction after he starts firing, the answer is probably "yes, that hurt it" to at least a greater extent than A-39's SMG. He might be less happy about the blade slashing in an upward, sweeping strike toward him, a one-handed golf swing of a strike. As it gets smaller, it's also getting faster.
    A2 actually manages to stop it, despite that, if only for a brief moment. Her follow-up strike hits so hard that its back bulges, dark gases hissing and escaping explosively as she craters its midsection and splatters pieces out its back--only for the crater to close back in as it shrinks again, dropping shy of twelve feet, but gaining the kind of perfect, blonde tresses that could only be found in books about fairytales, its proportions again approaching through the uncanny valley toward "possibly human." The lower edges of that golden hair catches fire from the burning dress, but this still seems a minimal bother that does nothing to destroy the feature. A2 has no appreciable time to study this change before a counterattack arrives, as a wrist-flick toss that shouldn't have worked at all with a full-length sword sends the whole thing, still that outsized five feet in length, zipping straight toward her as the monster dances back on high, bronze heels, and draws jeweled rapier and main gauche from effectively nowhere.
Nozomi Houken     "It's us," Taiga confirms, his tone taking on a rare note of gentleness. "We will return you to your schoolmates as soon as we can. Rest." Then, his head cants slightly, his attention turning up to Origami. "He is extremely weak. If he cannot hold on to me I will have to move much more slowly. We will be a rather large target." A glance up the stairs. "I would appreciate your taking the lead." Assuming Origami does so, the robotic feline will definitely be close behind, but will be moving much more gingerly than usual.
A2     A2 huffs with savage satisfaction when her fist blows such a hefty hole through the target; something sturdy enough to soak up and feel the full force of her anger for a change, instead of breaking too quickly to feel good. She flicks off her figers and rears back for another, possibly a full barrage, when the swords fly at her seemingly out of nowhere, ripping the air with their impossible speed and filling her audio sensors with an awful buzz.

    The keep greys out. The firefight slows to a crawl. The gunshots dull to a low roar. That's what it looks like to A2 when her black box temperature skyrockets, overclocking her systems to push her body away from the incoming blade at maximum speed, putting her arms up in front of her face and chest in a boxer's guard. The edge rips into her Android armour, shredding vulcanized layer where her artificial skin is missing and spreading an arc of equally artificial blood, before it bites down into the metal and is wreathed in shrieking sparks.

    It's close, but she rolls back with the strike so fast and so flexibly that the rapier doesn't have the leverage necessary to cut through her arms. A2 slides backwards as if she'd been thrown across slick ice, rocking back on her heels before tilting herself forward with a momentum-arresting stomp that shatters the floor. If she has pain sensors, they don't look like they're working. The deep breath she lets out is almost /relaxed/. Like she's enjoying this.

    Her gargantuan anti-tank sword flashes into her hands instead, and the broken flagstones gush with glowing red 'pixels' of light that swarm around her, twisting on a violent, intangible updraft. "Don't break too quickly now~" she all but purrs, lowering herself into a deep crouch with her oversized blade at the ready. Concentric rings of holography lock into place around the sword in staggered layers, letting off a chorus of successive chimes and a fiercely rising electronic whine. When the final ring fixes into formation, the sword audibly beeps, and a blast of howling wind gushes out from A2 and her weapon, now radiating bright light.

    She blasts straight back into the fray with the monster, heedless to its impossible strength and durability. Broken stone spits out behind her like grenade shrapnel. She briefly ceases to be visible. The utterly colossal sword flickers in her hand as if it weighted nothing at all, all but propelling itself through a full thirteen strike sequence that executes so quickly all the slashes seem to happen at once, pummeling her continuously shrinking target in an avalanche of battle android-powered blows. Each one discharges a hot flash of pseudo-magical energy into its hit zone, deleting one ring each time until the holography breaks and the Type-4O sword simmers down.
Origami Hiiro     Amelia nods to Taiga. "I'd take you out my way but the castle's fighting it. If you can't go fast I can't do it at all. So." She jets over to the stair well. "I'm gonna scout ahead, yeah. Shout if you need me." And then she's gone, whizzing away to clear enemies out of the way instead of looking for the 'coast to be clear'. Subtlety isn't in Amelia's rulebook, that's Origami's. She's just the escort on this mission and beating up dudes is the more satisfying way to do it.
Lin "Oh damn. What is THIS thing?!" Lin's never seen such a creature. And, with luck, never will have to again.

    Knowing Solars though, it's only a matter of time.

    She makes a face... but her blood's still running hot! She brandishes the naginata in a quick little preparatory kata that leaves the air around her chilled and frosty.

    Then, with a single leap she's using a completely different fighting style from before. Nimble and mobile, she crosses the distance up to the monstrosity with great but swift leaps and goes skidding to a halt at its side...

    And from there, lashes out with a barrage of thrusts with the weapon! Any that successfully bite into its shifting flesh spreads a deathly cold that brings a terrible lethary!
Starbound Flotilla     "Haha! Figured out some higher damage!" George calls out, before his smile fades off his face like rats fleeing from a sinking ship. "Oh, shit, wait. /Fuck/--" He has no time to dodge or slide out of the way. All he can do is quickly reverse the mining beam into a construction beam on his Matter Manipulator and try to construct a few chunks of solid steel into the ground ahead of him. Which is unfortunately less than fully effective. With a tremendous CLONG the mess of metal is sheared straight through, and the strike is only blunted; George himself is slammed hard with a heavy, wet crack, and goes flying. His helmet crunches badly, an entire half of it shearing off completely, while one of the arms on his powered EVA armor completely shuts down, sparking and sputtering arcs of electricity. Only emergency impact stabilizers keep him from dying as he slams hard into the far wall, and then crashes to the ground.

    Inside, though, his mind is fairly clear.

    . o O (Alright, Georgie, brain on. Can't deal with this while you're trying to throw off anything. What's the plan? Objective is to get Dragon out. Numero Uno. We can come back for the castle later if we need to. Obstacles? Big and Tall going small over there will for sure kill him on the way ourt. It's getting smaller and more coordinated. Something about it is locking on. It showed up, appearing suddenly. Pushing into here from something else. Projected, or intersecting. And it's zeroing in on something. So there's something at the other end of what it is, narrowing the view.)

    . o O (So the biggest threat factors are its narrowing down and its projected nature. Great work, George. Now figure out something to actually stop the threat. Uhhhh... Okay, we need something that brings some damage backwards. But what? if it's appearing, this can't just be a communications proxy, it's gotta be a physical proxy. If it's losing mass it can't just be a projection, it's a two-way process. Maybe something that conducts? Stun baton the thing, maybe?)

    . o O (Stun baton. Electrical. Heat conducts, maybe thermal. Resonance, maybe-- No, don't have anything for that now. Chemical? If it's losing mass, maybe mass lost can take the hazard backwards. Alright, we got a plan. What's our arsenal? Let's see. Ankle's sprained, no agility there but I can stand. How's that wrist feeling? Broken for sure. Let's see, let's see... Thermite the bitch, set it off with a stun baton, and then go for a chlorine trifluoride bomb. Chemical, incendiary, electrical. We all good? We're all good. Alright.)

    . o O (Mark. Set.)

    George gasps suddenly for breath, jams another autoinjector of stimulants (and this time, only stimulants) into his body as if by second-nature, and activates what few microthrusters remain functional on his armor to bring himself straight onto his feet. What little of his face is visible through the shattered helmet looks... Entirely different. Dead set on something. He jams a hand into his Matter Manipulator, and brings out a thermite bomb! He leaps forward, tossing the dangerous chemical out in an airbursting blast. Then he dashes, limping through the pain in one foot, to close in and strike with a heavy electrical baton, jamming it against the demonic body and unloading its full overloaded payload to activate the thermite and to conduct electricity all through it. And then, when the baton detonates from overloading, he whips out one last heavy chemistry bomb and slings it at the creature, trying to cover it in some of the more dangerous possible chemical payloads, one that synchronizes well with heat. The others have physical impact damage dealt with, but George has calculated what he hopes will be something that feeds damage backwards into whatever awful extraspatial processes are responsible for this creature.
Alexis There may not be enough room for fancy airborne acrobatics but it's enough distance for a strong dive. Unfortunately between the recoil of impact, and now being right up in the thing's face (if it even truly has one) there's little Redline can do about the sword. And it slams into the fire dragon with enough force to lob him away from the foe and into a wall, heaving a growl of both pain and annoyance as he drops to the floor. "Arrrd." Not entirely out of the fight, but that definately knocked the figurative wind out of him. He has been fighting for most of the night thus far, even with the Mega Evolution boost.
    "Guess it's time for a little backup," Alexis murmurs, pulling a second pokeball out. She can only have one Mega Evolution active at a time in a fight, but that doesn't limit her to one pokemon total. "Go, Majorette!" This time it's a yellow fox, given a somewhat 'cartoon animal' appearance with the way she's standing on her back legs. "Braixen~" She pulls a stick from her tail, twirling it in her paw as one end ignites.
    "It's already on fire, zap it with one of your other moves," Alexis calls before hurrying over to check on Redline.
    The stick is spun again, then held up over the fox-mage's head as it's flame burns brightly and several glowing lavander orbs form around it. So when she snaps down her arm to point the stick like a wand at the bizarre boss creature the orbs go flying towards in somewhat arcing paths that seem to home towards, bringing more the phrase 'magic bullets' to mind for a moment.
Maya There isn't much room here, no for flying she's going to find a good spot to land and keep with Alexis and her latest let out Phokemon.

"Right I have an idea Alexis I may need some cover for when I do this."

There's flare of blue fire from inside Maya and then it surrounds her hair moves like it/s in the wind as she focuses on her own powers as she starts to focus upon the thing before them she keeps focusing her magical energies are being focused as she pulls three cards from her fate deck.

One Red, with an image of a joker like being on it, another green with a demonic looking humanoid on it and one blue with a huge man in armour with a pair of massive rune blades.

She has the three cards rise up over her head and she focus upon her foe.

"When chaos and order meet change is born but in destruction... DESTROYER!!!"

There's a moment as the cards rise and then Maya focus her full magical fury upon the thing she will tear and rip at it magically seemingl7y trying to rip it apart and force it back together in a very violent amount of magic being let lose whatever this thing is.
Kyoko Takada     The boy, Dragon's strength is returning on the quick side, but from a low starting point, as if he were not so much weakened as suppressed. He goes from near-incapacitated to at least able to hold onto Taiga, so long as any increase in speed is gradual. "Yeah... the others, too. I thought there'd be... those captains, right? And... a white-haired woman? Sorry, still, disoriented."
    Origami strikes ahead, and momentarily surprises the guards coming down from the upper levels. These ones are a mix, some like those wide-bodied, pinkish guards from the outer ramparts, and some like the cylinder-and-sphere machine knights that A2 piled up in town. Both groups were about to make for the main fight area, but instead, they level spear and sword at her, and charge her as a group.
    Overturned tables, burning chairs, and cracked stone mark the high-ceilinged hall. A2 needs a moment to charge her attack, which would likely not go uninterrupted if she were in here alone. Instead, as it raises the hand holding the rapier, its face morphing into a closer approximation of "nose" and "mouth," that hand is shifted out of position along with the roar of an anti-material rifle being fired indoors from effectively point-blank range. Alpha-39 doesn't take the time to switch positions, knowing it'd be useless with how much faster the demon queen(?) has gotten, but fires again, just as Lin engages with her naginata. The first thrust is blocked by the demon's parrying dagger, and the second, but then A2 closes the distance and begins her combination attack. Shrinking from twelve feet to ten in height, pieces of armor sparkling into existence here and there over the ball gown, the dagger and rapier move at inhuman speed as eyes flicker in the swift tracking of multiple targets, but it's not fast enough to overcome the assault. Not every strike gets through, but some hit cleanly, some with enough force to take out anything else this castle has thrown at its invaders, while even blocked strikes carry force through and drive it to step back. It's the perfect setup for George to get in his own combo without missing or being interrupted, adding several more damage types to the mix even before Alexis' Braixen attacks, and finally Maya lets loose.
    Not just the visible enemy, but the entire castle shudders. For a brief moment, everyone present experiences complete weightlessness, followed by a quick return of gravity, and then the sensation of a finicky elevator descending.
    Only that one opponent (and not the guards Origami encounters) is unaffected by the sudden shifts in weight, as it continues to shrink down to a mere eight feet of height as it's burned, sliced through, electrocuted, and stabbed. Every wound closes again, but not without effect. Its mouth (as it now has one) opens, and what could be but probably aren't words come out. It doesn't even properly sound like it could be a language, but perhaps a vague imitation of one as crafted by half-deaf apes. The weapons don't shrink with it, and it tosses away the triple-sized dagger at Pavo and flings the rapier at Maya, replacing them with a potentially less threatening scepter, only vaguely accurate in its historicity, and a gem-encrusted, gold sphere, its mounted symbol still at least recognizably making it a globus cruciger.
    Faster, now. Much faster. Repeated strikes from the much-harder-than-gold scepter come at Lin, while the orb is merely tossed in A2's direction, the cross half-broken off the top. For one half of this traditional royal regalia to take the form of an incredibly expensive-looking and similarly powerful grenade is... for all she knows, perfectly accurate to its historical use.
    And that's the room Taiga plans to cross.
Origami Hiiro Amelia reaches the top of the stairs and nearly runs straight into a guard patrol. They all level weapons at her. She grins. "Perfect." The jets interspersed on her body all kick on at once, the woman taking a wide stance. . . before she's suddenly practically skating around to the side of them as they charge. In reality she's skimming the floor as she puts almost everything into horizontal thrust. Turning and torqueing those jets, Amelia aims to deliver a brutal roundhouse kick to the guard on the edge, knocking over him and a few of his compatriots. She snags his spear from his hands as he falls, finishing out the spin to bring herself upright. The way she holds the spear, it'd be evident to anyone who was an actual master of weaponry that she doesn't know a good spear from a rusty fork, but with this much speed and the ability to translate it so cleanly into power, she hardly needs such talents against non-Elites. And shortly she's running a shop on these guards, using the spear more like an improvised beating staff as she has no especial interest in delivering 'killing blows' over incapacitating them. Regardless, there's not likely to be many guards left in the way by the tme Taiga makes it up the stairs.
Nozomi Houken     "The Flotilla, and A2," Taiga confirms for Dragon. "Focus on recovering for now. Hold on as tightly as you can." Already, Taiga is starting to speed up. With someone to cover the path ahead, he doesn't have to focus as much on sweeping for hostiles or moving defensively; which is good, because this place is starting to get more and more hostile all the time.

    Like temporarily losing gravity and then beginning to descend. Oh /crap/.

    Must go faster, must go faster. Taiga moves up the stairs as swiftly as he'll be able to without dislodging Dragon, the ride potentially getting a little rough. It's not his full speed by any stretch of the imagination, but it's much quicker than he's been going. The stop is probably almost as rough as the ride, though, as most of that momentum ends at once. Because this room is very full of danger.

    So the robotic tiger pauses, lingering just inside the door, beside Amelia. He takes that moment to address his passenger. "I want you to take slow, deep breaths. Recover as much of your strength as you can. As soon as I see an opening, I intend to cross the room. It won't be an easy ride."
Starbound Flotilla     . o O (There we go. Keep working the system.)

    George is the one least caught off guard by sudden weightlessness. A history of working day in and day out on space stations, and often raiding those same space stations, has made him well accustomed to sudden lack of gravity.

    . o O (No time to let up. Dragon needs to get through. This thing's gotten too fast for that to be safe. Need to make it too dead for it to be a danger. Focus. It's royalty. It's pulling behaviors off of humans. Importing libraries it doesn't know how to use. How do I do this? I can't interact with the information it's pulling on this end. I can interact with its processing of that data.)

    Pavo bounces off of him, helping him get down faster. George drops to the ground, rolling dramatically, grunting in pain as he stabilizes his fall with one hand -- the one with the broken wrist. He doesn't move at ALL when Pavo's slammed hard out of the air by the tremendous blade, crashing into the opposite wall with a squawk, brutally knocked out of the fight. Moonfin and Seft ready more defenses near Nozomi. Albert keeps his fire up. Biteblade does the same. But George plans. More specifically, George schemes.

    . o O (Speech. It speaks but it doesn't understand. It speaks without knowing what reason you speak for. It's trying for blind responses. How do I take advantage of that? Blind guesses on this end -- I need to indulge the system. Betray it through a moment of compliance. Strike decisively after following the rules it thinks things follow. Old ways. I know how to do this.)

    . o O (It follows rules. Follow its rules.)

    George manages to scramble back to his feet. He sweeps onto them dramatically. "Bomb! Handle!" He calls out urgently to A2, in a tense voice devoid of his usual good humor. And then he turns to the woman, diving into melee range. "Your highness!" He calls out, and then performs a swift, dramatic bow meant to get him swiftly out of the way of a melee attack -- but also meant to provoke any aspects of the growing system of partial "imitation" that it has.

    . o O (Follow the rules.)

    "YOUR HIGHNESS!" He calls out again, abruptly pressing to close in on the noblewoman as she becomes smaller and smaller with a quick, rushing dash. His motion is meant to ensure he isn't struck down, kneeling out of the way of most combat counterattacks. It's full-body, he even sweeps his broken-wristed arm across his chest to try to provoke as much of the visual aspects of recognition as he can. It's a little unstable since the castle is... Falling? Is it? Is that what that sensation was?

    . o O (Follow rules.)

    He grabs something from a sheath at his ankle.

    . o O (And then betray.)

    Monarchs die when they are betrayed or assassinated by visitors. Follow every demand of the system -- except the demand that the system survive. George /despises/ monarchs, nobility, any kind of leader. And with a single hateful crush, he wants to stab to a brutal death any entity that aspires to be like them. The knife glints dramatically as he tries to close in any bring it straight into the demon's chest.
Alexis     Maya wanted cover, and she's getting cover.
    For as much as a tempermental, aggressively competative and sometimes jerkish (though not to the levels of a certain other Charizard) as he may be, Redline was also dependable in a pinch. Despite already being roughed up he shoves Alexis aside and pushes himself into the air.

    Just long enough to intercept the raiper flung at Maya, knowing from experience that his Trainer's friend needs to keep a focus on her big magic. Fortunately he rams it from the side rather than get in the path of being impaled, but considering it's moving at quite some speed and is bigger than usual for such a weapon, it's still a painful collision to be enough force to keep it from spearing the Junker.

    He hits the ground hard afterwards, rolling as he reverts back to his normal Charizard form, too beat up to keep the Mega Evolution intact. Alexis, recovering from the shove, hurries over to him. "Good job, ya big lug." She turns her head back to the others while finding his pokeball to recall. "Keep her covered, Majorette, so she can keep blasting that freak's ass!"

    There's a salute with her stick-wand, and Braixen hops over in front of Maya. Her name becomes a little more obvious in meaning when she starts spinning the stick in both paws. Followed by brief flashes of light as multiple Braixen also doing so appear around the Junker. It's Double Team used as a means of defensively disrupting visibility, surrounding the caster with mirrored decoys to hopefully take any farther attacks and let Maya get more of her potent powers into play.
A2     The enemy shrinks back, one step at a time. The Type-4O, as hard as it is heavy, hammers on its guard and on its flesh unceasingly. The castle cracks and lurches for a sickening instant, lifting A2 off the ground for just an instant, but the Android touches down on her high heels without missing a beat, perfectly balanced when she leans back into the attack. It's like she can smell blood. Or like she can't stop herself. The further the demon shrinks and the more last ditch measures it throws out, the more vicious --the more relentless-- she becomes, until every advancing step craters and splits the floor into slivers, and every swing of her sword booms like a gunshot.

    She's caught at point blank when then increasingly human monster throws out its emergency weapon. It doesn't take long for A2 to figure out what it's going to do. With all of her systems in high-consumption overdrive, the tumbling grenade seems to take almost a full minute to reach her; plenty of time to size it up, to predict its trajectory, to track it with her ballistic defense software, and to calculate and triple check her best chance to deal with it. She only gets one shot at it before it blows her to pieces.

    The golden orb comes tumbling through the air towards A2's face. Her free hand rises in front of her, fingers relaxing into a loose arrow hand. One foot slides forward, raising dust from the broken ground in slow motion. Her arm thrusts out on only the pivot of her elbow, without windup, and her nearly-scraped bare knuckles slide past the grenade so closely that they almost brush the jewel encrusted casing. Maso particles condense and harden around her fingers in the blink of an eye, then a flick of her wrist 'brushes' the grenade aside with some invisible buffer. Her arm rotates out, widening the motion and swinging the grenade around her body, as if caught in a water current, or swung tense at the end of short, transparent strings. Without applying any actual force to the explosive, A2 hurls --almost swats-- it aside, and sends it flying into the wall near the entry behind her, where it will no doubt cause a ridiculous amount of damage.

    It's the perfect time for George to launch his distraction. Just as he calls out with 'Your Highness!', while A2's right side comes around in measure with deflecting the grenade to her left, she releases her hold on her sword and lets it fall to the floor, throwing her fist forward as if going for another punch and leaning into it with a powerful stomp. Before it connects, motes of gold light collect between her fingers, and her smaller, slimmer blade soldifies in her grip, streaking forward into the (hopefully distracted) monster, where she hopes to bury it deep into its back. If she can, A2 twists the knife as viciously as possible, pulling both triggers in the second Type-4O's hilt and unloading its charged payload of destructive Maso energy straight into the demon's compressed internals.

    With any luck, she'll skewer and magically electrocute the thing just as George stabs it from the front, and she'll do it with the faintest hint of a lifeless smile.
Lin Lin RIPS her weapon free after finally getting a clear thrust in. The blade glides free instead of being trapped. A few backflips later and she's on guard... just in time to see the thing SHAPESHIFT. "Is it shrink--" She doesn't have a chance to finish that, because with a yelp the girl lifts a few feet off the ground and flails helplessly - only to topple down a moment later as gravity returns!

    "Ooooof... WHAT was that...?! Is the castle falling?!"

    She picks herself back up to her hands and knees and then FLINGS herself backwards and onto her feet again. Looking only a little worried.

    "What are we supposed to DO now anyways? Kill this beast?!" Nobody actually told her what the mission was, and this is a fine time for her to realize that!

    Since that's what everyone's trying to do though, she rejoins the efforts by raising her naginata over head and spinning it stylishly!

    Icy winds gather, frosting over the ground near her as a tight blizzard forms. Then... with a decisive swing, she sends a wave of icicles running along the floor to impale the beast!
Maya Maya is not holding back today not agains something like this, she is in rare form today when it comes to magic and she doesn't seem to be done ever and she did call for cover, it's a good thing too as a sword is thtown at her. Maya has a bad history with swords and her body, really bad history. Thankfully this time history does not repeat itself. She's protected by Aleix and she's not done with the magical smackdown as she is quite thankful for the protection but she can't make much sign of it's she's focusing on chaining another spell. She's challening again but this time something else is happening this time it's blue and a green card alone, they glow there is the blue fire than Maya seems to fade becoming semi transluicent as she focuse her powers.

"Humbrana lord of the element of earth I call you lend me your strength for a moment."

Then a hulking being takes shape made of the living earth, with a massive gem for an eeye, fists made of the rock old as the world of Septerra and it's movments sound like a stone grinder as it looks to teh thing and moves to slam it's massive fists down upon the thing, while taking shocking care to not hit anyone else but the enemy.
Kyoko Takada     Taiga makes it up before Origami is entirely finished, but after she's tripped up all the guards in the patrol, with the cylinder-bodied machines working their feet in a vain attempt to lift themselves back up, something they can only accomplish by relinquishing their weapons and using their thin but oddly strong arms. When they do, she has a chance to keep them disarmed, if she wants to keep to nonlethal.
    It's safe enough for the moment, while the room ahead is not. Dragon gives a nod, holding on tightly. "Yeah. No problem." He sounds tired, but not like he's forcing himself to be brave. Despite the circumstances, he's maintaining a positive outlook.
    "Primary objective... complete?" Alpha-39 mutters, tumbling behind different cover to reload, as the gravity shift moved around all the remaining furniture. Things are even starting to tilt slightly, which is going to be a problem once it goes far enough for the furniture to overcome friction, but it's still barely noticeable at the moment. Looking back around, she aims, trying to get a lock on the increasingly fast-moving and decreasingly sizable enemy. It's damnably difficult, but not so far that she can't get a hit in here and there, when she thinks it'd matter. Her AMR packs enough of a punch to shove at least a limb out of position.
    Someone with a thing for pattern analysis, had they been present, would certainly have compared the time that those active, aware, and all-too-human eyes in the monster's face stayed fixated on each object. For the most part, they shift rapidly. They always point in the same direction, despite the ability of various creatures to do otherwise. The flickering is more rapid than usual human capability, but otherwise unremarkable. When George calls out, and when he calls out again, the eyes focus on him and, more importantly, they linger. Curiosity. Interest. Potentially, cognition, processing. His gamble in following rules he's guessing exist at least pays off in distracting it, and the lack of hostile action on his part, coupled with the continued hostile action from his fellows, momentarily saves him from retribution. He's an object of interest, but this doesn't increase the priority of stabbing a scepter through his neck, evidently.
    The distraction is useful on its own, as A2 swiftly makes use of, but not complete. George draws eyes, but doesn't stop the demon monarch from moving, as it now seems keen on doing as much as possible, coupled with no one else presently engaging it in a stand-up melee.
    Near the entrance, the faux-holy hand grenade blasts open the doorway, already effectively wrecked from their initial entrance, but now helpfully widened. The sense of falling increases, just slightly.
    Free to swing the scepter through one of the Braixens it sees, the demon steps twice and does so, then steps again, across to swing a lightning-fast homerun at whichever of Seft or Albert is closest, and dance and glide across the floor as it makes A-39 test the upper limits of her marksmanship in getting any hits off at all. Lin's attack slams into it, both slowing it down and earning her its immediate attention, the intervening distance mattering little under the circumstances as she gets another clubbing attack for her trouble. Maya's elemental strikes, and it's again limited in motion.
    Yet, George is persistent. The crowned figure looks at him. Something unseen moves, settling into place. He completes his ritual. His knife stabs into the thing's front, and it looks at him with no surprise, only the same level of calm curiosity. At the same moment, A2 finally gets her proper chance, and stabs into its back. Her weapon releases its high-tech blast, predictably causing damage that sends another, stronger shudder through the castle's floor. George's knife shouldn't, from the look of it, be capable of causing the same level of damage, yet it sinks in at a touch, as if piercing wet paper, and no counterattack arrives.
Kyoko Takada     The thing's eyes close, and the stones crack. Weightlessness is swiftly returning.
    A-39 runs first, shouts second, "Everybody off! Mission accomplished!"
Origami Hiiro Amelia throws open the door in the wake of the demon's death and is booking it out of the castle. She's suitably impressed but kind of in a hurry, jets flaring anxiously. She needs to be ready to help others. Jumping back out through the gateway of the castle proper she's got plenty of open sky above, just need to not be on the ground when it hits. She waits, though, to make sure everyone has a way out, crystalline goggles shining like a beacon.
Alexis     "Y'know what's sad?" Alexis remarks as she stands up, only to realize things are getting on the light side again. "This is -not- going to be the first time I've had to make a mad dash out of something collapsing from the sky." Not after all the places she's been to helping put the Bastion back together.
    Really from all that is probably why she's prepared in having more than one flight capable monster with. So with her Charizard already out of the fight, she releases her shiny Flygon instead. "Let's go, girl!" She climbs onto its back while Majorette jumps into Mirage's arms in case they need to shoot any crumbling castle out of their way. Really this was better than Charizard in some ways, the Flygon was more maneuverable. Insectoid wings buzz to life. "We need to get out of here, and -fast-." Fast it is, as she takes off the insectoid dragon starts using Agility to farther crank up the speed.
A2     The significance of what George has done is lost on A2. A lot is. If anyone has ever heard of the phrase 'battle haze', A2 is the picture of it at the moment. Rather than being consumed with livid rage characteristic of the classical 'red fog' however, her miles-away expression is unfittingly peaceful; as clear and untroubled as anyone has ever seen her. When the 'queen' crumbles dead to the floor before her, sliding down the length of A2's dipping sword until it hits the ground with a wet thunk, the Android sighs slowly, closing her eyes for a minute as her black box cools and particles drift from the seams in her frame. Despite the huge, ragged scars across her arms and knuckles, she looks, up close, as if that incredibly vicious and brutal fight had brought her some measure of deep happiness; or perhaps it's just something like someone in withdrawal getting their fix, depending on how George sees it.

    With the castle in free fall, A2 finally turns around and heads to the door, slowly picking up the pace while her sensors calculate the castle's falling velocity and the remaining distance to the ground. She keeps going up to the crumbling edge of the island, takes one look over, and then throws herself off without hesitation, flattening her body into a braking dive at a steep trajectory from the castle. She angles herself towards the tallest skyscraper she can reach, and then when she gets close, suddenly curls her fingers and stabs them into the concrete along with one of her boot heels, shredding down the side of the building until her momentum is fully spent, where she hangs a while to watch the colossal island crash to earth, simply out of fascination.
Nozomi Houken     Slowly the room shifts as the whole... entity? Begins to lose its power. Slowly gravity begins to assert its absolute authority once again. And slowly George seemingly goes insane.

    Even Nozomi is giving him very confused looks.

    Right up until he and A2 both bring the strange... sub-entity? Core entity? ...thing, down with a double-tech stab. Taiga decides that now is the moment, because very shortly he won't have the traction for any more moments. Out darts the tiger, not so much running across the floor at this point as /clawing/ his way across it, beelining for Nozomi's hiding spot. His back is already spoken for, for once, but she can run along with him well enough. They're going to have to meet up with the Flotilla; it might be cramped, but a spaceship is the easiest option for Taiga and Nozomi to stay together, without losing time getting Dragon off his back.
Starbound Flotilla     "There we go. You know how this ends." George says, like a man who isn't a close shave from death. That moment -- the moment of following rules just to kill the ruler -- is the moment he lives for. And thankfully, in this case, NOT the moment he dies for: He casts the blade aside and turns tail. Seft is down, struck down by the homerun, and Albert grabs her, keeping close to Nozomi as he does. Pavo is badly wounded by her own impact, and it's Biteblade that has to get her. Moonfin rushes out to bring up George.

"I'm always getting you after these feuds with leadership."
"She started it."

    They all stumble out as fast as they can. Soon it becomes weightlessness, ang George is by far the most capable in that. "Keep ahold of Houken! Get her to the teleport zone!" Albert calls out, trying to grab ahold of her in that weightlessness so Taiga can focus on getting Dragon outta there. George has summoned down one of the Flotilla ships, which boosts into a synchronous freefall with the castle from orbit. All six leap out, and Albert tries to get Nozomi out there too, "flying" away from the castle, hoping the ship can get a lock on them...

    They configured it to lock onto Nozomi first and Taiga last. Not because they hate Taiga, or anything, just because that's how Taiga would probably want it. So Nozimi will be the first to beam into the teleport intake area, followed by Dragon and then the Flotilla proper, before Taiga clonks his way into it and throws the whole ship's kinematics calculations off. There's not a lot of room as they mostly fill the ship, but A-39 can latch onto the outside easily, and hold onto one of the maintenance hatches, until they slow down and reach the ground, seemingly to deposit dragon and to see the castle fall to the earth.
Lin Who the heck uses a SCEPTER to fight?! The oddity of this finally dawns on Lin, and by then it's too late -- BOOOOOOOOONK!

    The impact sends her flying, and it's a wonder that it didn't break bones! Lin goes flying into a wall, given her smaller size, and hits with a CRUNCH!

    But THAT, it seems, was only enough to wind her. And bruise her. Broken, she isn't. She rises once more, an arm across her gut... "Owwwwww..."

    But just as she's preparing another assault...

    THEN there's that sinking in her gut - "ah no no no not again!"

    The moment she has ANY footing at all, she shoves off for the door and barely cleaves the keep.

    She'll quickly hop atop one of the ramparts and get an eye for her surroundings... and take a flying leap for the nearest rooftop!

    ... She's gotta be crazy.
Maya Maya is glaf that Origami Hirro has an option to help people escape if they need it for now Maya's going to be moving to get out with Alexis. She's flying on out of here and getting the here with her allies today. Maya doesn;'t say much she just forms those wings and /flies/
Kyoko Takada     The castle falls. The ground upon which the castle stands, falls. The further away one is, the more slow that descent looks, just as the dust cloud seems to grow with a touch of laziness as it impacts. First, it scrapes into the side of a ruined, skeletal skyscraper on the way down, finally toppling that sixty-story structure that's stood ever since whatever calamity wiped out this country. The centerpoint, right beneath the keep, strikes the ground next, and everything about it buckles and snaps as the reset of the uneven undersurface strikes afterward. Nothing of the walls remains when the dust clears enough to make out anything for sure, the keep itself is in a thousand pieces, and the town between the walls is so much rubble, parts of it still strewn with fallen machines in medieval garb.
    Alpha-39 does as she said she would, hanging off her grappling line, foot to stirrup, from one of the Flotilla shapes. It's the least risky of all the unacceptably risky ways she could think of for getting out of there.
    Dragon's still regaining his strength, though it's clear that he wants to do the most right now is get back to the school where his fellow students all live.