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Lilian Rook     The vaguely defined operation takes place in northern France, but without a positioning device (and not one that relies on satellites), you'd never know it. There isn't a convenient Warpgate out in the middle of nowhere like this, which gives you plenty of time to get acquainted with the landscape below; and it is below, because you've been duly warned that going hundreds of miles by ground would take days and is also absolute suicide. It's also close to the ground, because flying too high is also apparently liable to attract the attention of things nobody wants. You're provided a singular stealth craft, which bugs out immediately once the location comes into view and you're dropped off.

    The landscape below is very different from some of the countrysides of the British Isles, but equally unsettling and bizarre, completely unrecognizable as formerly being anything on Earth.

    Fields of fleshy white tendrils like waving grass, glittering with patterned pulses of purple lights that sweep across them, stretch from edge to edge between adjoining forests of towering 'trees' like frosted glass, their roots winding and tangled together until they all seem to be one big colony, festooned with heavy red 'fruits'. Jagged chunks of what look like tooth enamel sprout from the ground like thorns, the size of buildings, and whorled wastes of blue sand churn in slow spirals like the motion of a hurricane seem from afar.

    There is little alive to be seen. Pale and gaunt deer manage to nibble on barely edible things here and there, skinny black rabbits wind through the 'grass', dodging around purple flowers that lean towards them as they pass, stalked by an unseasonably white fox. Anything like a pond or riverbed is completely dry, nothing but shallow pools of teal, gravelly sand, leaving nothing in the way of aquatic life. Stranger, more alien shapes, are far more prevalent, and though the scarce remaining animals, slightly unwholesome as they are, give them a wide berth, the unwelcome creatures seem to have no interest in them at all.

    The anomaly site, however, is instantly distinguishable from everything else by far. On the horizon just before the coast, a shallow crater in the ground, five kilometers across, dominates the scenery until it reaches the water; the far side would be invisible from the ground. The depression is barren of life, and seemingly made of pure silver that glistens as if slightly slick or oily. Rather than smooth slopes, it spirals inward as a set of thousands of small, steep cliffs, like giant steps, or a ramp hundreds of kilometers long. Near the edges, the gradient is shallow, but as it contracts towards the center, the incline becomes steeper and steeper, until it's more like a funnel leading to a straight shaft into the earth.

    Squareish pieces of reflective silver hover inexplicably in the air within the crater zone, scattered in such density that it'd be impossible to fly a plane or helicopter through it, the lowest only a few meters from the ground, and the highest far above the generally accepted safe flight ceiling. From up high, you can see barely across the English Channel, where the once white Cliffs of Dover, now coal black, are a dark strip on the horizon, and the circular, luminously scarlet disturbance in the sky centered over former London glares threateningly on the skyline.

    Descent to ground level is swift and hurried, intended to be carried out while there are no nearby Antegent roaming the wilds, but the sharp delineation between the crater and the frosted glass 'woods' to the south of it appears to be a no man's land. Given the narrow, tangled waste between the two of them, and complete absence of further alien structures, it feels like the border between two different mighty terraforming entities that'd run up against each other and settled.
Lilian Rook     Nothing stirs at all in the crater. It's either abandoned, and now a passive, hazardous anomaly zone, or whatever is still home dissuades creatures of lesser classes from approaching. Either option isn't great; the energy source you're after reads as being kilometers underground, at the dead center of the massive depression.

    Outside of a handful of portable air quality readers, picking up the anomalous source by some unnatural disturbance in the atmosphere, and backup radios, you're provided with nothing. This is far outside an Urban Center's defense perimeter. There are no dead drops, shelter outposts, emergency ordnance, or potential means to call for backup.

    Only two people that could reasonably be called experts are available: Lilian herself, in battlesuit, seriously debating whether to put something like a black rebreather with an attached red visor on, and the French territory's own singularly chosen operative, apparently the compromise the two jurisdictions had formed to oversee the operation. They're ostensibly there for 'local guidance and support', but the tense silence between them the whole way and the constant tapping of the young blonde man's datapad --probably a year or two older than Lilian, though a foot taller-- makes it feel as if they might really be there to make sure the other side doesn't try to pull something; quite possibly, they might even be assigned to dispose of any Elites that go rogue as well. It's just a feeling.

    Even long after dustoff, the air quality is garbage. It has an acidic taste and smell like hot sand and bile, and the oxygen content is low enough to feel like being high up a mountain. The outer edges of the crater give off a strange sense of perceived semi-weightlessness. The place crawls with a certain, indescribable 'density', the closest approximation something like being aware of being immersed in water, though no true description comes to mind.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry Princess is dressed up in her magical girl outfit; an incongruously tall and noble figure in a Golden Age-ish pastel pink-and-yellow heroic suit broken up with frills, fruit motifs, boots and gloves. An opaque red-pink visor hides the top half of her face, but her mouth is drawn in a smile that shakes sometimes as the muscles in her face compete to form a coherent expression.

     She tries to make pleasant conversation on the ride over, in her hoarse and tender voice, to distract herself from the surroundings. One gets the sense this is dredging up memories. One gets the sense they aren't good ones.

     It takes her a moment, after they set down, to orient herself. That scarlet glow above the horizon from London catches her gaze for a moment or three. Then she does some mental figuring- where they are, and by reference what that place across the ocean must be- and turns away abruptly, her expression tight and pale.

     She sticks close to Lilian, the only person here she recognizes by sight; though I4, Tamamo, and Gawain get a cheery greeting as well once she recognizes their voices. "People used to live here," she says quietly, as she reaches up to tap one of the lowest cubes with her dormant wand. It's not a question; just thinking out loud.
Mordred Someone said that this mission would be taking place on France. Clearly, they were lying. That's the only reason Mordred can identify for this looking like... Well, /this/.

What happened to the rolling fields? The castles? Hell, even the colors of anything don't look like anything thatM ordred's seen before, and the silver crater does little to help the Knight of Treachery understand the situation at all. The readers do little for her, and the only thing hiding her displeasure is the fact that her horned helmet (obscures her face entirely.

"Where's the grass? This ain't anything like France!" It doesn't obscure her voice, though. Audibly disgruntled, she gets up with a heavy stomp in that heavy suit of white armor, stopping at Strawberry Princess' observation.

"... What the hell even happened out here? Is the rest of your world screwed up like this?" Mordred turns from Strawberry Princess to Lilian. "Is this really what's left of France?"
Alexis "Yeah I don't think this place is going to do much business in tourism anymore." Alexis snarks somewhat darkly as she steps off the transport and onto the... ground. Is it still ground? Seems close enough. Even if everything -else- about the scenery is unnaturally unsettling. "Honestly I think this place would even give Cronenberg the heebie-jeebies."

Now that they're out of the transport and space is less of a restriction she flicks a pokeball in her hand, catching it with a certain jostle to trigger it instead of throwing it onto the alien landscape. Light briefly spills out of it, congealing itself into a vulpine form next to her. The white-gold fur and luscious flow of tails immeadiately contrasts with the surroundings -hard-. But despite the graceful poise her red eyes narrow with hardness. "Niiiii." ~This is not a safe place to be.~

"Yeah, I know. That's exactly why we're here." That gets Alexis a bit of a look, but the fire fox nods her head after a moment. This is not an unusual situation. Just more of an extreme than usual. "Just keep an eye out for trouble."

Then turns her attention to the crater proper. "Hmm. I brought something tought and sturdy if we need to dig any," she notes, for the sake of the group.
Ishirou Flying over the noman's land reminds I4 of his own world's problems and the nullzones.  He notices the bits of life clinging on, and it's a welcome change from his own world.  Where life tends to only cling outside of places like this.  There is a lot to say about all of this, about the tenacity of life even in the bleakest of situations.  Hovering next to him is a Black box with a small pair of arms, it seems to be 'watching' the same thing he is, but it's hard to tell without a face.  

I4 himself is a short young man, or appears to be that way, with a head of blonde hair and bright blue eyes.  He's wearing a black military uniform.  In his hands is a black visor, more akin to a blindfold than actual equipment.  

-Devastation index is over ninety percent, life values do not indicate that life could adapt to such conditions.  More data needed.- The box chimes in, to which I4 does not disagree with, but it's a touch more clinical than he'd like to admit.  

The large juts of land that go so far as to pierce the very sky are abnormal, obviously.  They're still...fascinating in their own way, it could be considered beautiful if not for the /literally everything else/ in this blasted hellscape.

"Yeah.." he responds to Strawberry.  "POD, deploy scanners and let's try and see if there are any caves that lead underground," He commands the pod, which chimes once softly, and starts feeding data back to I4, to which he starts going over, trying to map the topography of the area much more detailed than an aerial view.
Gawain Gawain is here, armed and armored and ready to go. He takes this world seriously, so his full platemail is on, and Galatine is sheathed at his side. He watches the nature, looking at the plants and red 'fruits' as they fly by, watching the deers sadly, as they drop down. Mordred being here means Gawain hovers over her.

Not because he wants to be near her /exactly/, but because he wants her to not do anything stupid and go rogue.

Strawberry Princess, though, gets approached once Gawain hears her voice. "Hello! You must be Strawberry Princess. Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun." He greets her briefly, and then moves to start investigating, coughing at the air quality. He senses briefly to see how fuckoff magical this is, waits for the others, and then starts heading forward. "Let's not waste time! We're not getting dead drops, after all, so let's be out here as short-term as possible!"
Tamamo     Tamamo no Mae is present, as one might expect, though wearing her coat, gloves and tall boots rather than the flowing, Eastern outfit she's been seen in in those places that don't qualify as Northern Winter. It's the same as a couple here have seen, though Strawberry Princess is a new 'face-to-face' meeting for the fox-eared goddess. Tamamo cooperates as well as she's able on the ride over to keep up a few distracting words, just as happily not engaging with the serious French agent.

    They arrive, and Tamamo makes her way in the direction of the crater, her enormous, floating mirror by her side. "The air is... thick, no? How unpleasantly oppressive, this presence."

    After a glance in the direction of the black cliffs, "All know, of course, the broadest strokes of the story that took place," except Mordred, "but is there not a more detailed tale that will tell of what occurred just here? Is there nothing that would explain these fields, in even the smallest particular?" For her own part, she doesn't wait for an answer before making several subtle passes of her hand and tossing a talisman, a strip of paper covered in nigh-indecipherable calligraphy, toward the silver landscape. It's not a shikigami so useful as to give her a remote view, but it is something to react to and point her in the direction of active spirits, handling some of the 'detection' side of 'detection and analysis,' the latter handled by her simultaneous magecraft.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry straightens up a little more when Gawain approaches her, her mouth slightly open in surprise. A real-life knight in shining armor? But then her gaze drops down to her own frilly strawberry-skirt, and her mouth shuts with a little giggle. The train of thought isn't hard to follow: no sense in being a hypocrite about outfits.

     "That's right," she says, shaking his hand with an almost disconcerting firmness. "It's... nice, to meet you in person, Sir Gawain. Especially someplace like..." She gestures around them with her wand. Like this.
Korra Flight was a new experience for Korra. She hadn't really gotten a good feeling for the air at all even in the months of training and meditation. Getting experimental was the next step.

Throwing herself off something high into water was her next one, so things short of 'for sure taking her life into her own hands' seemed like a wise play. Thus, arriving at the site and being dropped off and left at the site where world reshapment met and came to rest, there's context to the next words out of her mouth:

"I really should have thrown myself off that cliff."

Not really knowing anyone else at the group was an isulating effect, certainly, but Korra strode off of the landing site right to the edge of the silver crater and drew in a breath.

And immediately began coughing. Hacking and spitting, doubling over, and heaving quietly, Korra remains undone for several seconds. "S-spirits..." She groans, looking up. "Not doing that again. The air here is... awful."
Vergil     Vergil came along. Given their prior encounter, this may be awkward, considering that Lillian is co-leading the operation. But he seems content to ignore her if she extends the same courtesy. He spends the ride to the location looking away from everyone, eyes fixed on the window to watch the landscape whizzing by below. The white tendrils, near absence of life, the bizarre terraformation... "It's Hell on Earth," he says, in a tone that implies he's very familiar with the former.

    He watches the craft take off with a wry expression as he looks at everyone else knowingly. They are stuck here. Without speaking a word of this, he strides to the edge of the crater and feels the unusual sensation. "Hmph. Irritating." He draws Yamato and begins slashing at the air, moving from stance to stance as throws out practice swings one after the other, testing to see if his swordplay is affected.

    At one point, he returns the sword to its sheath and his hand blurs, a blue bubble of whirling slashes appearing around one of the floating pieces of silver metal. Can it be cut? He then examines another hypothesis by vanishing in a blur, reappearing atop one of the lower floating pieces, to see if added weight will make it descend.

    When it does, he allows himself a little laugh, jumping from one to the next until he stands upon one that is above the edge of the crater. "The prize awaits at the bottom. Be silent and get on, or else be left behind." It's close to the edge, and big enough to fit several, but Vergil shows no signs of actually stopping it so people can get on.
Lilian Rook     "Exactly like this? No. In a similar state?" Lilian says to the random knight, not caring to ask who she is or where she's from. "Mostly." The taller, masculine figure strides to the edge of the crater, looking over. His mask is already on, and a huge sword scabbard is slung over his back. "There's more to it than this." he says, in slightly accented English. "They did tell you that this was far out of the way, no? The furthest away from where people live . . . it is the worst, where 'they' have settled in. Closer to the cities, where we have the force projection, we can keep things closer to the way they were."

    Lilian glances to the horizon herself, when Strawberry princess speaks. "Well . . . they still do. Further south, and to the east. You won't see anyone again until the middle of old Germany. One and a half million people, still. Safe enough." The slightly older youth interjects. "One point six, in fact." He has the sort of patiently corrective tone that'd stereotypically come with a 'mon cheri', but the identical grey-black armoured bodysuits seem to afford, even over national boundaries, a sort of basic respect between the two.

    Scanning for caves only finds the remnants of old groundwater reservoirs; they're empty now, dessicated by the same thing that happened on the surface, whatever it is. The atmosphere is only mildly tainted with metal and lipid particles, however; the smell and taste is awful in qualities that can't be described as purely physical. Nor is the place especially 'magical'. The lines that'd usually run through the earth have bent and twisted wide around the entire crater, in unnatural ways, as if it'd opened up between them and displaced everything around it. The ambient quality of energy is . . . different.

    The place is heavy with something adjacent to something 'mystical', but it eludes proper description, like seeing the edges of ultraviolet light in the few vestigial parts of the eye that still can, in absence of any other wavelength. The atmosphere itself reads as having the exact same density; it's a feeling of 'mystical pressure'. The spirits give this place a wide berth, only the most lesser, least intelligent, forms of airborne magical entities passing well over. The terrain seems to be anathemic to their kind.

    he local power doesn't radiate from the earth, or the air, or the sun, or some divine beyond, but some perpendicular, inaccessible place. 'Respiring mana' from the atmosphere would be almost useless; it's almost completely crowded out. The 'living earth' is many meters below the silver sheen, growing more distant as one descends, and still frozen from winter.

    Over the edge of the crater, the real difference becomes much more apparent. The feeling of weightlessness greatly intensifies. Dropping from one step to another results in a slow sort of moon jump, getting floatier and floatier after each one in sequence. Hair stands up. Clothes billow up around you. Possessions on straps lag behind. It feels as if the place has its own buoyancy, like you're wearing partially filled floaties and trying to push your way to the bottom of a deep, deep lake.
Lilian Rook     Consequently however, Vergil immediately discovered that the discrepancy physically flows from out of the hole, like an invisible wind tunnel. Standing atop one of the squareish silver panels seems to shield him from it in some way, and it begins sinking at a pace like an elevator, slowly picking up speed as it goes. At the periphery, obviously the chosen platform won't take him all the way down, but one over the dead center would. The silver is obnoxiously hard. Steel would shatter on it immediately. Once cut, it splits apart like thick clay, however, though once left alone for a few seconds, it begins slowly squelching back together. It leaves Yamato covered in a thin layer of iridescent and unpleasant, but ultimately harmless liquid.

    The signal at the very bottom of the hole, when detected, is very obvious, and very strong, mostly having been crowded out by the silver chaff in the air. Given its very low and even levels of emission however, it seems 'inactive', like an abandoned shrine that'd slowly dwindled in divine power. It's so far down that the dark of the hole becomes an impenetrable abyss to the eye, however.

    "There's just enough flight time to make one additional pass, but and air strike on something that deep would be extremely difficult." Lilian mutters. "You get one drop of anything off the craft, and then we're limited to twenty minutes to exfil." She remains hovering in a roughly consistent area around Tamamo, having given up by now on trying to persuade her out of following her out to these places, and apparently simply intent on keeping herself between a couple of unsavoury characters and the fox woman.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry stares at the descending Vergil, hesitating to follow him. She hesitates for almost too long- he's a good twenty feet below her by the time her expression settles into determination, easily ankle-breaking distance on a hard surface. "Wait!"

     She runs to the edge of the crater, takes a flying leap off of it, and lands in a practiced slide to diffuse the momentum of the impact. She slides far enough to go off the other edge of the cube- but twists around onto her belly as she slips, grabs onto the edge with both hands, plants one foot against the vertical side, and manages to push herself back up. She dusts her hands off on her skirt as she stands, giving Vergil an anxious little smile.

     "Thanks. That was pretty clever of you."
Mordred Although Mordred doesn't glance at Gawain, her irritation at his proximity is hard not to notice. She shifts every now and then to get a little bit more space, taking half-steps away every now and then when she sees an opportunity to do so without him noticing.

She's not as subtle as she thinks, though, so it's mostly a lot of random shuffles away every five seconds or so even if he's looking right at her.

Tamamo's inquiry into the history of the area keeps her distracted from whatever it is that's going on between Gawain and Strawberry Princess, though, and she listens to the answers given by Lilian and the taller figure closely while pieces of what happened in the area start to come together.

It might take her a bit to figure out the rest.

The history behind Korra not throwing herself off a cliff doesn't so much get a focused look as it instead gets  a more dismissive grunt. "Go out in a blaze of glory, then. Better than going out like a chump." Mordred suggests in that dismissive, yet mildly encouraging sort of way before heading towards the crater proper once her curiosity is sated.

The fact that Vergil's  just charging right in there certainly doesn't have anything to do with Mordred's sudden haste. "Tch... You wanna make this a race, then? Let's do it!" And with that, the knight charges forward, leaping through and around whatever floating silver may be in her path so as to not fall behind. She observes the silver's odd behavior, grunting a bit at the initial impacts when she crashes right through several bits of it.

It's not until Mordred reaches the strangely behaving panels, though, that she really starts to listen. "Antegent's lair... So a monster nest, right?" She leaps from platform to platform, noting the differences between those closer to the center and those further away, then settles on a platform near the center to get as close as she can. If there's rubble or a floating chunk of siler nearby, Mordred grabs it to try hurling it right into the hole to see what happens before leaping in herself.

"If you're down there, don't keep us waiting!"
Ishirou I4 makes a noise, going over the odd readings.  It's not magic, at least not what he's used to.  Perhaps it is mana from another plane.  Another source of power that is leaking into this one?  This causes the scanner to think about this for a moment, but his scan for caves comes up short.  There is no alternative way down, which means they have to go the way provided for them.

"Ugh...what a mess," he says, and slowly ties the visor onto his head.  "Guess we'll have to be serious," he comments and walks to the edge as Vergil and Strawberry go down the hole.  "POD, go with them," he says, as the black box beeps once, and flies off after the two.

Meanwhile, I4 just can't leave well enough alone, he looks for the source of that energy pouring into the world.  Maybe it could be obstructed?  Or maybe it's the thing they are looking for.  Would killing it stop the flow?  Failing that, he'll try and continue a detailed mapping of the hole down.
Alexis     In the meantime Alexis has decided to take a few extra precautions herself. Which consists of rummaging in her pack until she finds her Go-Goggles and tugs them onto her head. That will at least help keep some of the particulate in the air out of her eyes. The smell and the taste, bleh, it's nasty but endurable. They're hopefully not going to be sticking around any longer than necessary in this place.

She turns her attention as Vergil calls out, and smirks. "Com'n Vix. We've got a ride to catch." The tomboy puts her athletism to use to run up and jump onto Vergil's panel before it gets too far out of reach. She lands in a crouch, and a moment later the nine-tailed fox seems to just appear next to her. Despite the appearance it wasn't a teleport, just creative use of Feint Attack which moves in a way the eyes can't easily follow. "Nice of you to pick one out for us," she remarks to Vergil with a smirk.
Tamamo     Much earlier, Tamamo had taken Lilian's lack of protest to be as good as enthused agreement to her company. Now, she keeps close to the knight of the Isles, herself, though others rush ahead. Tamamo shows little worry for the maneuver, reasoning that the fact of Vergil being alive today, while acting as he does, must surely mean that he is skilled in 'surviving,' if nothing else. She can afford to let someone else spring whatever trap waits below.

    That doesn't mean that she shouldn't be reasonably close behind. Having seen Lilian put on significant speed before, Tamamo makes her way forward at much better than a walking pace, merely leaping and sliding down the spiraling giant's steps toward the center, after having first determined that there was nothing immediately dangerous about the silver surfaces. It's all going down, and going down is fairly easy. The strange effect of buoyancy may be an issue, but between the demonstrated use of the large silver 'chaff' and her own willingness to set foot and hand to the walls to propel herself forth, it isn't one that won't be overcome. She carries her divinity with her, and so, stepping into a place sapped of mana isn't an immediate problem.

    "But for the spirits to avoid this place... naturally, they would see it as a wasteland and, perhaps, more dangerous yet." On the way down, Tamamo remains concerned with attempting to detect what lays below, considering that alien not-mana, and making some modifications to her 'craft to see if she cannot get this alien force to react in some discernable way to an active ping, like a sonar sweep below. Both reflective and nonreflective surfaces are things that can be 'seen,' after all, and here they are not chiefly concerned with stealth. A moment's forewarning may be important.
Korra "Blaze of glory." Korra repeats, a rakish yet uncertain grin spreading across the corner of her cheek. "Nah. Kinda wanna live forever. Blaze is probably my third choice down." She offers back, wiping her mouth with the reverse of her hand deliberately and looking down the hole.

"No life. Earth's dead. Air's filthy. Water's nowhere to be found. Even the animals are..."

Korra glances at the dark 'rabbit', past where the purple plant was reaching out to get a bite. "Well, weird. This isn't a healthy energy. I'd say it's not an energy at all, but there's something down there tha-"

Korra has no time to finish as Vergil just deadass jumps down and cuts one on his way down, and Mordred follows.

She is above a 'hey, wait up!' she is also above a haughty 'stop!'. Barely, in both cases, but it's true! Instead, she leaps after, her feet surely finding weird stone chunks alive or inert and floatjumping down to the abyssal depths.

"Well, sword guy, are you just going to behead it or... something? If it's asleep..."
Vergil     As the platform comes to a stop near the edge, Vergil scowls and lashes out with a kick. By pushing against the crater's edge, he shoves himself and the silver back towards the centre so it can properly descend. He busies himself examining the coated blade of his sword as he goes down. The Judgment Cut, though partially a product of his own skill, also uses the Yamato's space-cutting property. For the material to follow the blade back through space... ultimately, he just hmphs, and does a dramatic flourish of the blade to whip all the liquid off before sheathing it.

    It is at this moment that Strawberry Princess jumps down. He watches her slide impassively, offering her no help as she nearly goes off the edge, but just moves over to help counterbalance the extra weight. Alexis joins and throws a quip his way, his face stone cold. "I did not do it for you," is all she gets. Strawberry Princess only gets a sniff in response as she complements his ingenuity.

    Mordred yells at him, and he lets out a wry laugh. "It already is a race, girl. Could you not tell by the way our leaders compose themselves?" He looks to Lilian, then the accented man. As the knight tries tog et ahead by throwing some silver down, he rolls his eyes. "If the fool would persist in his folly, he will become wise. I'm sure more of this will get you there eventually." He holds the sheathed Yamato out so that it is no longer shielded by the force exuding from the crater. The ribbon tied to it floats right up, and he has to exert force to keep the weapon from flying away. "Throw your mounts ahead of you all you like; you will be slow in catching up to them, ultimately losing time. Foolishness."

    He seems a little more excited than before at mentions of 'Demons.' He plants Yamato before him, the bone of his knuckles shining through the skin as he clutches it. He looks to Korra and says only "Yes," in response. His tone betraying his arrogant confidence.
Gawain As Mordred heads to jump into the hole, Gawain, who has found no real traces of magic, follows after her. He leaps from silver platform to silver platform like a moon man, uncomfortable with the buoyancy, until he lands on one close to the center. And then, as Mordred jumps in...

The Sun Knight just takes the elevator. If anyone else wants to ride with him, that's certainly fine!

If the elevator turns out to be way too slow, he kinda just steps off and falls the rest of the way. He'll be fine!
Alexis Alexis stays in the crouch to keep from overbalancing the silver platform one way as Vergil kicks the crater wall to move it closer to the center and continuing its descent. The tails of her coat and more noticably her ponytail start floating freely about the weird shifts in.. it's really hard to tell if its gravity, density of the air, or 'something else' causing the effect, since nothing feels normal here in the first place. Trying to dwell on it too hard is going to be like staring into a void and the way of madness.

Her tails are always swishing and swaying about so there's little telling where the Ninetales' natural movement ends and the effect of the area begins, except maybe the tips being turned up a bit more than usual.
Strawberry Princess      En route to the bottom, Strawberry anxiously thumbs the elaborate gunmetal controls of her wand, still working out the jitters of her bold little maneuver. It's four feet of rose-pink elegance tipped with a crystal, with twenty extra pounds of NASA-aesthetic brutal nuclear technology bolted to the side- powered down for now, but there's still a faint taste of metal in the air radiating from it.

     "I know you didn't do it for us," she says gently, taking an almost chiding tone as she looks over at Alexis. "But I still like the idea, you know?" She waits for a few moments- her eyes are still concealed by the visor, but something in her swaying posture hints that they're meditatively shut. "You're very proud of that sword, aren't you? Or, no. Your skill with it. I've... never seen anything like that."
Vergil     There's a long silence after Strawberry's statement. Long enough to hint that Vergil might be ignoring her deliberately. But eventually, he does speak. "Both. The sword - Yamato - was a gift from my father."

    That's all she gets.
Lilian Rook     There are a handful of questions that beg answering between the group, and Lilian does her best to provide. "What you're tasting is the residue of the process that formed this place. We're not far from where Caen used to be; it was wiped out in the second year of the Onslaught, when communication and readiness was still very poor, so what happened to it isn't fully documented." The older, male figure, somehow conveys a grim look even through his mask. "We're almost definitely looking at the lair of an Antegent. Architect-type. A big one, probably level Demon." Lilian continues. "This is the result of it shaping the area to its own preference. Most likely it went south to take care of Caen and Bayeux, then was either killed, or driven back here. Hopefully killed. Whatever's at the bottom isn't it."

    Continued analysis of the area narrows down the most likely suspect of the broad area anomaly to be the oily sheen itself. The 'buoyancy' of everything overtop of it seems as if it radiates off of it, becoming stronger towards the center as the steps become steeper and more crowded. Indeed, it seems sort of like the silken walls of a burrow constructed by a ground-dwelling spider, holding the dirt up, though in this case, it seems to be more like holding the spatial coordinates of the countryside at bay, having bent the leylines like pushing a pair of fingers through plastic film and stretching them in opposite directions.

    Trying to jump to the bottom proves to be a totally fruitless effort. The blonde Frenchman tries himself, jumping down several steep sub-cliffs at a time, slowing more and more, until he barely makes progress. He seems to consider his options for a moment, before simply grabbing hold of a plank of unwholesome silver. Morded throwing a cubic, silvery 'rock' down into the center causes it to drop precipitously quickly and vanish into the dark, but trying to follow after it, she quickly reaches a state where gravity is in equilibrium with the warping effect radiating from the hole, leaving her bobbing uselessly in the air a ways down. Gawain will roughly have to deal with the same, though he starts floating a further ways down, simply due to being heavier.

    Tamamo quickly finds herself being repulsed by the same force, though using the walls to 'leap' downwards continues to carry her forward with increasing difficulty, requiring her to cling to them or else slide right off and shoot right back up, or else leap perpendicularly and catch a floating plank on the way down. Vergil doing roughly the same, though stood atop one of his own and pushing it off like a moored boat, falls steadily towards the deepest part, making good pace ahead of everyone else.

    The others taking the 'rides' down sink in suit as well, however. Even though the repulsion gets stronger the further they go, the debris seems to actually speed up, in total opposite. The distortion appears to be mostly separate from the raw 'power' about the place. Rather than radiating from anything, it's like a thick, heavy soup; a dense fog that's sunk into a barrow and now stews around in silent, roiling clouds. The pit is essentially filled in with it, according to I4's analysis.
Lilian Rook     "That feeling is . . . as far as anyone can tell, 'their' closest equivalent to mana. The thing that's like magic, but isn't, that they brought here with them. The reading sticks out because it isn't the same thing. It could still be here, but it'd be dormant." says Lilian. Monitoring Tamamo, little ripples of black static ripple off where her feet touch the ground, and sever her bond with gravity, allowing her to float/fly down to her, and eventually offer to just take her arm around her waist and bring her to a larger chunk of material. "The French barely used any nukes before losing all the silos and submarines, so it's unlikely it'd have been killed in a roundup and strike operation. Odds aren't great." The boy grunts, and says "The Americans will be sorry they did, in thirty years, when we turn this land back. Better perverted like this, than a glassy crater." Lilian finally puts on her mask to get the HUD data from I4 in her visor. "Optimistic aren't we, Deveaux?" she says. She must have only gotten his name and rank from the squad indicator just now.

    Once he himself is situated, the young man extends a hand, and a golden filament shoots out from somewhere adjacent to it, connecting to another chunk of silver debris with a tiny little circle of what looks vaguely like Latin lettering. He pulls it towards himself, and the two chunks collide, then merge, like when Vergil had cut through one. The wider space seems to sink faster, starting to catch up to the half-demon himself. When he passes the two knights, he fires out to more threads for them to catch, then bring them to the platform, then goes about assembling it on the fly, so that it can hold more people.

    As the depth increases, fragments of things that *aren't* alien silver start to drift by. Clumps of earth. Broken rock fragments. Blobs of water suspended in microgravity, some even with the bones of fish still inside. Eventually bits of plastic and metal. The oppressive aura grows thicker the deeper they descend, and the area grows chillier as the presence of the sun diminishes. Speaking of which, Tamamo seems to have sent her active ping out just in time; a very large, solid mass is plugging the hole less than a hundred meters below Vergil, coiled up like a snake wedged in a pipe. It tingles with trace amounts of the alien power oozing from its surface, but only to the barest extent, like a winter frog that hibernates by letting itself freeze into a coma.
Alexis It gets chillier as they go down, prompting Alexis to pull her jacket a little more snug. The longcoat was well insulated, sure, but this wasn't exactly natural earthly cold either. A couple of warm tails are coiled about her midsection as well, though most of her supernatural vulpine's attention was on the approaching bottom of the crater.

~A horrible power lies below. Sleeping fiend none should know.~

"Shit." Alexis scowled at the Ninetails. "You only do the mystical rhyming thing when it's serious." She leaned a bit closer to the edge to look for herself. "Ugh. Reminds me of the last time I had to unclog a Dunsparce from crawling up a sewer pipe. Times infinity."

She pushes herself back up to kneeling. "Can't say I was expecting an nearly -literal- plug-up."
Mordred "So we're dealing with something that's not one of those Antegents? Hm. Guess I'll keep my expectations low, then." Mordred sounds disappointed even as she freefalls down that hole. Or tries to, anyway, as that messed up gravity keeps her from falling as fast as she'd really like to.

And then it stops her outright. This results in a solid half-minute of Mordred angrily swinging at the air until something drifts by close enough for her to launch herself out of her descentless limbo. She mimics Tamamo's and Vergil's efforts in bouncing off further debris for a little while, then settles on holding onto something when the speed difference becomes more apparent.

"France really got messed up by those Americans, then. Hm. Those guys still around, then?" Mordred asks after that explanation, pausing briefly when Deveaux leaves those threads hanging for her and Gawain to snag. "Might not hurt to see what they're up to after... How long ago did this happen?"

She's going to wait a bit to see if Gawain goes first, of course. Better than letting him follow her too closely, but Mordred won't wait long before going in ahead if he ends up waiting for her as well. She's still racing Vergil, after all!

Sort of. She sees the finish line in the form of the strange mass, and she sees her opportunity to finally get one over on this guy she just met today.

"Outta the way if you don't want to get blasted!" That's all the warning Mordred gives as the two-handed sword Clarent materializes in front of her, snagging it out of the air while red lightning crackles around it. She lets the lightning churn around it for several long seconds, then swings her weapons downwards to send a massive blast of lightning at the mass to try and destroy, dislodge, or otherwise disrupt it from its slumber.
Ishirou "POD, grappling hook," I4 commands, as the POD shoots a hook up towards I4, so that he can grab it and be brought down.  Between the microgravity and the wall, he can easily make the distance down towards the platform and catch up.  This is about as much as he can get from here, so no choice but to go down.

"Huh, so that's reading..." I4 muses, before looking down.  

"So maybe we could start by trying to scan it a bit hea-" And there goes Mordred.  "Ok nevermind, reckless endangerment."  I4 doesn't get much of a choice, instead, he points his hand down and attempts to start a sympathetic connection, attempting to see if he could FORCE the creature to remain ASLEEP even while people were shelling it.

"This feels like a bad idea."
Vergil     It's cold and it's dark. Vergil does not seem bothered by the former, but the latter presents an issue. He raises a hand aloft and conjures a source of light in the form of multiple small blue swords that hang just above his head, blades pointed down. Concerningly, they're spread enough to cover the whole platform he's standing on, including his two passengers. However, he seems content to use them only to see by.

    He observes the other things floating about, Yamato lashing out occasionally to neatly slice a water droplet in two. He watches the co-leader - Deveaux - bind together masses of silver to speed his descent and scowls, clearly annoyed he didn't think of that. But as Tamamo puts out the word that they've reached something blocking the way, his frustration eases. "Finally."

    Now the quandry arises. He cannot dismount the silver without being repulsed. So how to attack whatever is in the way? He takes a moment to think on it, before looking up at his summoned swords. He smiles grimly, and his form becomes enveloped in a blue haze as he concentrates on them. They grow, becoming more defined and shining brighter as he infuses them with power.

    And then, with a wave of his hand, they scatter, shooting around the platform to push against the antigravity and strike whatever is beneath in concert with Mordred's lightning.
Tamamo     "Ah, thank you, Lilian." As much as Tamamo was willing to run along the walls to continue her way down, even that was made difficult by the sparing availability of purchase on every side. There was far too little to grasp and push against, and so she needed to make use of the falling silver sooner than expected. "Now..."

    Peering below, she makes out the shape, and little more. There is something down there, and it still lives, if such things can be said to live. She calls out her warning. "There, not far below us, something foreign waits. There is no path but through."

    The sun is faint here, and this space is somehow, almost, disconnected from the world proper. Together with the absence of mana, it brings a frown to her face, until she claps her hands together, her expression shifting to the clear meaning of 'Right! That's enough of that.' She brought her divinity with her, as previously noted. That nature is the Sun, and she releases enough of it to fill this small space, and those nearby, with natural, life-giving, mana-charged Sunlight, like a pleasant awakening after a restful sleep, but condensed into each moment.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry Princess is already putting her acrobatics to good use in assembling a falling 'raft'- leaping off the main silverchunk that Vergil's using to grab onto other nearby chunks, and kick off of walls or less-useful fragments to propel them back to the main chunk. It also gives her an excuse to get out from under those Damocles-like light-sources.

     It's during one of those maneuvers that she spots the looming shape below. Her reaction is almost instantaneous. "We're gonna hit it!" A dial turned on the wand. A series of switches flipped. A glowing red button pressed. Three control rods, radially arranged around the wand's reactor, pop out with a sharp hiss of steam. A tingling feeling pervades the area, combined with a high-pitched tinnitus-like ringing. The reactor glows Cherenkov blue as she holds it out, far from her body.

     A pink defensive aura flares just over her skin as a piece of errant debris strikes her shoulder. Sparkling wings of ethereal light unfurl from her back, carrying her aloft- up, up, above the falling platforms and away from the worm below.

     She flips around at the apex of her ascent, facing directly downwards and holding the wand in both hands like a rifle. The people below, their platforms- all obstacles in the way of her shot. She threads the needle.

     A column of thin blue light appears, like an area indicator, lancing downwards between the platforms to paint the beast below. That's the warning to get out of the way. Then the air crackles, a white-pink beam five feet across chases the column of ionized air down into the darkness, and a noise like a thunderclap erupts- every bit of matter in the beam's path reduced to gray dust, swept away on the wind an instant later.

     Far above, Strawberry's wand shifts its control rods and vents scalding steam as she lines up to take another.
Korra It's a drop that's cold and, eventually, hovering. The backstory rattles in Korra's head as it's announced into the radio's aether, but Korra loses herself in the slipstream. Being weightless is interesting, the opposite of being grounded. Fluttering like a dandelion seed in on forceful breath, spinning like a winged seed towards a wintery bed that doesn't come, and trades snowy white for swallowing black.

"Hey, uh--" Korra begins to indicate Tamamo, but the foxtailed calligrapher releases the power of the sun, obliterating the thoughts she had.

"--nnnevermind." She finishes.

Mordred and Vergil, however, go at things with a bit more direct force and cutting panache. Thunder and phantom blades, followed by Strawberry's 'orbital' blast of azure illumination that rips through the strangely fleshy platforms and zips past allies to crash into it.

"So we're just going to blow it up?" Korra asks the crowd rhetorically as she takes a stance on her own floating platform higher up, fists low and clenched in martial poise. Cocking a fist back, she transitions her whole body with a deliberate right hook punch, a point of red light flaring into existance at the fore of her arc and flaring into burning life at the end of it, a sun-empowered hot javelin of fire blazing a parabolic trail towards the monster in the pit.
Gawain As Gawain gets to the bottom, Mordred decides to blow it up. Gawain frowns, turning on a flashlight to look through the darkness, and try and see the creature a little better, but...

He needs to get ready. He moves in front of the rest of the party, as Tamamo's sunlight soaks over him. His speed, strength, and endurance all scale to absurd levels, as he basically just /blurs/ in front of the others, taking their defense, and admiring Strawberry's blast in the process.

"Hey, hey! Sorry for attacking you, big monster! Can you understand us, or is this going to be a fight?"

Yes, Gawain is trying to talk to it before they kill it. They /did/ just barge into its home.
Lilian Rook     "What? No. The Americans didn't do anything to France. They started sending aid at one point, before the Americas came under attack too. They had the largest military in the world at that point, and thousands of nuclear weapons. When their territory came under siege, they emptied the nuclear stockpile several times on all the places the Antegent popped up." explains Lilian. "Early on in the Onslaught, there weren't many that could deal with nuclear bombs. It kept the outbreaks under control, and let them evacuate civilians to larger, centralized, defended areas, but half the states are just wastelands now --totally uninhabited."

    "Which will stay that way for hundreds of years." Deveaux adds. "The earth, here, at least, will return to normal, bit by bit, once we begin the reclamation." The way he says the last word isn't quite audibly capitalized, but pronounced with a habitual sort of keyword reverence, like saying 'Holy Land'.

    Reaching the blockage, forewarned by Tamamo, there seems to be little time for planning before the platforms fall all the way towards it with people's weight on it. Before anyone can even come up with hurried instructions, however, that scarce time vanishes completely when Mordred opens fire. The shaft is narrow enough now to only be a few hundred meters wall to wall, and so the red light of Clarent glints off the silver dimly as the bolt of crimson lightning crashes down against something below and splinters into a carpet of writhing arcs, crawling across it.

    Vergil's summoned swords streak downward right after, followed by Korra's fiery spear plummeting down the shaft, the former of which stabs shallowly across a wide enough area to briefly become a field of glowing blue blades, and the latter of which bursts violently enough to have a hot gust of air sweep upwards past the platforms.

    In the dim, colourful flashes, they can barely glimpse an outline, but when Tamamo calls up the sun, everyone can see the faintly slick, glossy skin of some dark monstrosity, probably a kilometer long, curled up like a corkscrew against the silver walls. It'd be almost like an eel, were the shine of its body not somehow prismatic, displacing your view of its own texture based on the angle. The end where a head should probably be resting is covered in hundreds of interlocking, dull silver plates, like a primevil predatory fish, heavily armoured. Four long, fleshy tendrils float upwards over it, ending in spear-like silver points each as big as a car, from the fringes of its broad, arrow-shaped head.

    The shaft rumbles uncomfortably as the barrage of attacks lands on top of it, the creature reflexively tensing whatever passes for its muscles and expanding against the walls. I4 briefly suppresses it from rising, but Strawberry Princess' nuclear annihilation beam is far more than he can force it to sleep through. The massive ray crashes against it like a peal of thunder, driving its body sliding down the walls by several meters. Rows of six eyes on either side of its head snap open, featureless and pale blue, matching the bio-lights that turn on in sequence along its back, trailing the length of its coil. Spots on its side glow fiercely in the same colour, every hundred meters or so, inflating slightly like clenched muscles, and rows of metallic, fin-like wings unfold from its back and belly.
Lilian Rook     I4's hacking link is immediately filled with a massive volume of incomprehensible garbage data, repeating the same encoded loop over and over again at high speed, drowning the link until it shuts off. Gawain's voice, innocent as it is, is the thing that is finally met with a deep, subsonic keening, too low for anyone to hear, but so loud it becomes deafening anyways; they can't hear even themselves speaking, despite everything seeming silent. The monster shifts loose, exposing its burn wounds and black-oozing cuts, as well as a smoking hole that has been blown straight through one part of its serpentine body, displaying absolutely nothing like bones or blood-vessels inside. For some reason, it's the knight speaking that enrages it.

    Uncurling from the midway point, the falling platforms streak right past it, through its coils in freefall. It has to invert itself and 'swim' downwards after the group, rapidly gaining speed through noiseless, fin-propelled flight. It opens its mouth in a three-split way, and then opens it, and opens it, and opens it, and its maw fills almost the entire hole above you, incomprehensible rows of gills and teeth lining it all the way. Around the edges, at first it looks like it's raining dark saliva down on top of the Elites, but the black, streaking globs are too fast. They wiggle and adjust their flight, converging on the platforms, then glow with their own lights. Within seconds, dozens of dog-sized creatures that are like miniature, unevolved versions of the main one, hit the rafts like machine gun fire, latching on with their fangs and thrashing like sharks, tearing pieces away to slow the rafts down, so they begin to float up towards the host monster. Where they miss the edges, they strike Elites directly; they hit hard enough to just punch right through an ordinary person, but otherwise bite and shred at them in the same way as the rafts.

    Lilian and Deveaux yell something, but their voices are silent, drowned out by the inaudible sound. The former spreads her concentric golden spell circles, and begins shooting the submunition critters down with strobing sheets of black-gold magical beam fire. The latter ignores his sword for the moment, and unlimbers a heavy assault rifle crossed over it, which splits thinly down most of its middle when he activates it, and the holographic displays come on. Blue-white muzzle flash flickers at its end, tracers punching through the monsters end to end one after the other. A trail of thin black shell casings sails into the air and into the monster's mouth.
Alexis So a bunch of people start flinging attacks at the clog-montrousity. There was a time when Alexis would of just joined in, but for now holds up a hand to keep her firefox at her side. "Let's see what kind of response they get first. Don't really know what we're dealing with yet." If this turned into a fight it wasn't going to be the sort of battle they could just charge into and fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to tactics. 'Just keep hitting it harder' only went so far with the kinds of monstrousities this world had.... Something alien even to this world might be even crazier...

Which turns out to be absolutely true. The giganormous bioluminecent eel, for lack of anything more precise to compare it to, uncoils as they pass down, and then looms over them to spew out even more worms. Gross.

Nothing can be said in the deafening silence... Good thing she's not one of those Trainers that rely on shouting out attack names to her battle critters. Alexis leans back from the Ninetales, making a wide motion with one hand. It's enough to get her point across. The firefox's eyes ignite, white-gold fur glowing as she absorbs energy from the blessed Sunlight provided by Tamamo. It's effect is similar to Sunny Day, amplifying her power.

"Niiiii!" The thermal intensity rolling from her body becomes hard to miss as she fans out her nine tails and releases the energy, a suped up Heat Wave spreading out from her epicenter to roast as many of the eely parasites as possible!

With a grunt Alexis stands up, pulls her hockey stick from where it's tucked between the straps of her backpack, and uses it to smack away a mini-eel that manages to survive being scorched. The nods to the fox. If they can keep the minions at bay so the heavy hitters can nuke that thing, all the better.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry's 'head start' turns into a lagging position as the worm inverts itself- now being further up in the tunnel doesn't insulate her from danger, but places her dangerously close to the massive beast's jaws. She spins around to face towards it, pumping energy into her glowing wings to boost her falling speed, and takes aim. The red timer on the side of her wand is already pressuring her to end it quickly.

         04:43

     One by one, the remaining control rods on her wand pop out with a rumbling, grinding clunk. The reactor itself whines and rattles like a tortured living thing, skirting dangerously close to supercriticality as she lines it up with the monster's spine. The hideous light of the powering-up crystal irradiates her skin sunburn-pink as the air around her shimmers with heat. This is the Big One. This is-

     At the worst possible time, the falling dog-sized serpents plunge towards her, leaving barely any time to react. One slams into her side, forcing her to twist in the air and kick it away before it can latch on with gnashing jaws. She comes out of the roll with the wand facing upwards again, but the persistent torrent of monsters forces her to swoop and duck in a near-blackout evasive maneuver instead of taking the shot again.

     The wand is screaming at her by now, forced to hold the charge for too long. With the flip of a switch, the control rods plunge back in, drooling white-hot slag from around the slots with their near-failure to pull back from the nuclear brink. Shifting the wand off to her left hand, Strawberry pulls a Glock from her costume's frills and takes aim at the falling beasts as she dives to a safe distance, nailing them in their open mouths with each bullet despite seeing black spots.
Ishirou The deafening silence drowns all out, including his hacking.  He tries to warn the others, but nothing he says can really overcome this.  Worse, the mini-eels swim out to them, trying to force them upwards into the mouth of the beast.  They come down like rail gunshots, trying to either take out their platforms or their chests.  

I4 flips back where he can, trying to keep one foot ahead of the creatures.  He can't call for help to cover...and he frowns.  Taking a breath, he looks towards his POD, and a mental command is made.  

The POD sets up, trying to shoot down creatures that get too close to him.  In the meantime, I4 attempts to thoroughly scan the creature.  Trying to find some kind of weakness, some sort of method to how it attacks or how to stop their inevitable rise into its mouth.  

If he can work out a solution, he sends a link directly to Lilian and Strawberry princess.  Gawain is too old to operate a VCR, so he can't get a proper HUD update.  Various points are pointed out, as well as any other information he gets.

The disadvantage of this is he can't focus on his surroundings while doing this, and the POD is the only thing protecting him.
Tamamo     Tamamo no Mae continues to fill the immediate area, being the platform Deveaux had joined together for those falling through, with light. She is, and is not, the Sun, in that way that invites theological debate. Immediately and obviously, the light continues to provide its benefit of giving that all-natural high of wakefulness, replacing lost energy even as it is used, ensuring that others can continue to fight without rest, and fulfilling the conditions of Gawain's power-up in that coincidental but fortunate meshing of Eastern and Western legends. It is, in every way that matters, a sunny day.

    Her lips are moving, and sound may be coming out, but it's not enough to be audible. Her eyes shift quickly to either side. She moves between Lilian and Gawain, trusting the former to keep her back and the latter to protect everyone he can. Upward, her eyes lock on Strawberry Princess, and Tamamo's arm raises, her fingers spreading the sheaf of paper talismans that fly briefly into the air, then burst into vapor. Chill winds brush briefly against warm sunlight as massive spikes of ice hurtle through the air, each aimed at a falling serpent, clearing the way between Strawberry and the monster above like a colder but similarly spectactular multi-launch rocket system with individual target lock-on.

    Uncertain how a Frigid Heaven may slow the beast, but having already seen others punch holes into or through it, Tamamo only turns her own attack against it directly once she's certain she's cleared the way.
Mordred So that's what happened to France. Probably.It's certainly something for Mordred to chew on mentally, at least, once she's out of this strange hole and away from the rapidly unfurling mouth-giant trying to devour the entire group with its own swarm of dog-sized babies. Dog-sized babies with incredibly powerful jaws and heads, no less, as one of them smashes right into Mordred's helmet and others start gnawing at her arms and legs. Sturdy as her armor is, Mordred obliges the first creature with a headbutt in return of her own, then takes a quick one-handed swing at it before gauging her surroundings and bashing the others' heads in while they're occupied.

That's a lot more of them than there are Elites. The rafts are falling apart thanks to those same creatures, so space to maneuver will be at a premium sooner rather than later. That leaves Mordred with but one option: Focus on wiping out the creatures and their host while there's still room to move at all.

The Knight of Treachery yells something unintelligible towards her allies of the day, waving them back with one hand after a moment and realizing the lack of sound issue. The crimson lightning surges around the blade once more as Mordred drags it along the ground, letting that electricity crackle and build further until she sees a potential opening from Strawberry Princess' and Alexis' efforts.

Holding the sword forwards with both hands, Mordred's helmet shifts downwards into her armor, and she unleashes that pent up lightning, aiming it in a narrowly focused blast of lightning to try piercing right through the swarm into the host itself.
Gawain Gawain makes things worse. Oh no. As the deafening silence bursts out, he tries to speak, but can't hear anything. He can't communicate with the team. So, with the sunlight as his guide, he reacts with instinct.

As the creature slithers, he leaps from platform to platform, drawing Excalibur Galatine and igniting it with holy fire to slice through the 'dog-sized' eel-monsters. One of them impacts with his chest. Normally, that could wind him, or even knock him off the platform entirely to plummet.

The sun beckons.

The blow staggers Gawain, but he maintains his footing and his ability to fight, even as the armor is pierced. He moves to try and behead the dog-eel that attacked him, and knock it back into the big body as a rapid projectile with his sheer strength.

A gesture to the others. He's trying to rally them to fight, even as he's, internally, scared they won't win.

They gotta win, though, right? He has to believe in it.
Vergil     The creature is revealed by the light of the sun, and Vergil lets out a short laugh at the sight of it. "Ah yes, a beast befitting the title of 'Demon.'" He watches it intently, seeing what its response to this rude awakening will be. It uncoils, letting them pass, and he looks disappointed. Was the opening volley too much?

    No. It chases them, opening its hideous maw and clogs the entire exit. It issues its spawn to attack their platforms, and them. Vergil... laughs. He can't be heard over the subsonic cry, but his body language befits the action. A smile, throwing his head back. He doesn't even stop the awful little slugs from eating at his silver. Not even stopping them form eating him. He is massed upon by them, putting up no resistance as they bite and chew, as he ceases falling, and begins to rise.

    A blue flash of lightning lashes out from him, shoving the dog-sized creatures off.

    Where Vergil stood is no man, but a being also befitting the title of 'demon.' A scaly, blue humanoid with wide, short horns atop his head, burning red eyes, and long flaps that resemble Vergil's coat. The Yamato is now encased in an organic sheath that juts from their left arm, and they grasp the handle with their right as they take on a combat stance, demonic power flowing from them like a broken valve. His mouth moves, issuing a threat that, while unheard, is evident in the obvious aggression this demon is showing.

                                 You shall die.                                

    Once the platform is high enough, the demon vanishes, and multiple streaks of blue light cleave through the maw of the Antegent. They reach down its gullet and along its tri-segmented jaw, painting near every inch of its body for a long, pregnant moment. And then the demon lands upon the silver once more, coming back in with such force that it begins to descend again for a moment. The Yamato is slowly, lovingly sheathed once more, Vergil reverting to his prior form once the hilt touches the opening with a visible glint of light.

    At that same moment, time catches up to his surpassing speed, and the damage he's done becomes evident.
Korra The creature rises, and Korra is awestruck. There is not a lot she'd stand in awe of but this?

This is awesome. The Avatar has no snappy words, no smart quips to lay at the beast of countless fins as it rises up and then swims 'after' the party. Like a leech at the top of an elevator shaft, a yawning maw of death filled with knifelike sobber.

With a confidence born entirely out of ability, Korra sweeps a hand through the air in a vertical arc to freeze and scatter the falling 'droplets'.

Oh, the little leechfins may get a little chilly, but they certainly aren't made of water!

Korra is forced to leap from platform to platform as her path is chewed by the pirhana-missiles. Lilian and the local knight blast away, and with a bracing blast of fire to her aft to ward her trail and assist in her mobility both she lands.

"If you're hungry, try some cooked food!" Korra oneliners, though nobody can hear her, shortly beforeher breath turning to silent-roaring fire as she chases the empty quip with a far less empty column of flame in a dragonlike cone.
Lilian Rook     Those getting a close look at the smaller creatures can be discouraged of the idea of them being the giant's young in any way. Though superficially similar, they lack a large number of the greater monster's features, being little more than pure propulsive muscles, bite force, and rudimentary senses. They're literal living munitions; unintelligent symbionts created by Antegent's body. When Gawain throws one back, the fourth row of internal jaws snaps it up and devours it, like each set of teeth is a semi-sentient part of a colony.

    They're still awful. They thrash with the power of an animal many times their size, trying to drag people off their only solid ground in high g-force death spirals, like a rabid, suicidal crocodile. They aren't very tough, not being built to defend themselves whatsoever. Even the regular bullets of the glock cause them to screech and tumble out of the air, falling into the abyss. The scorching heat wave from the Pokemon turns a cone of them to crumbling charcoal, and the flash frostbite from Korra causes those afflicted to bounce off the rafts instead of attach. Sword blades chop through them like logs of meat. The ice spikes plough through multiple of them in a row without losing much mass or momentum, punching through the cloud and back towards the massive Antegent. The two Immunes in training continue firing, Lilian constantly refilled by Tamamo's energy, and Devineaux leaning on the monstrous ammo capacity of his rifle rather than draining magic.

    The volley begins to slow down. Given a minute to breathe, the latter agent sweeps his hands around and fires out a circle of those golden magical threads, snaring a wide ring of silver panels and pulling them back in to replace the lost mass of the largest raft, then bridging it to the others in makeshift stairs and ramps, accelerating the fall of the whole contingent and regaining a bit of distance from the hellish beast.

    I4's scan is brief and baffling. He can't detect anything like bone structure in the creature's body, nor a circulation, only that it's filled with a large amount of some kind of fluid or another. It radiates no heat, though a number of non-visible light wavelengths. Most of its internals are confusing labyrinths of intersecting membranes and fibrous webs that resonate in a hundred different frequencies, with few large masses that seem like organs. The silvery substance is present in several cavities in its body, probably secreted there, as well as other glands that create the anti-space oil, and others with extremely high energy signatures. The glowing swells dotting its sides have the strongest gravity effect, probably something like swim bladders. Its head is probably not a useful target in the slightest, though its exposed jaws can be damaged, and more importantly, the ducts the munition creatures wriggle and launch themselves out of.

    Upon receiving the HUD updates, Lilian and Deveaux alter their firing cone to aim at the fleshy 'barrels' within the creature's mouth, tearing and blasting them, ruining the softer tissues and leaving them black and scarred. The rain of serpents slows to a halt. Tamamo's ice spears make it all the way through the crowd and slam down its throat, immediately cutting off the deafening non-noise, leaving ears ringing but otherwise now functioning. Mordred's column of red lightning, this time much more focused, skewers through the exposed maw and tears through a number of layers of membrane in its guts, causing it to vomit a brief shower of thick black blood on her, until the flaming blast from Korra cauterizes the wounds shut anyways, and melts away rows of teeth.
Lilian Rook     Vergil flashes right up its face, and the titanic triplicate jaws snap shut like a bear trap, aiming to completely crush him in hundreds of sword-like teeth. It's not quite fast enough. A forest of sword slashes erupts inside its closed mouth. Blood and tattered, pale white webbing streaks out of it and up the shaft behind. The creature bellows subsonically again, this time in a brief paroxysm of rage. It presses its metallic fins to its back, and accelerates down. It keeps its maw closed this time, closing the weak spot, becoming an aerodynamic missile; shifting stages, even.

    The four tendrils suddenly stop trailing behind it and whip around in front; prehensile. Touching together, immense amounts of energy suddenly flow from the deeper organs and into the appendages, the rows of biological lights down its flanks pulsing in waves. It pulls the glowing tips of the tendrils apart, creating a spherical vacuum that fills with an immense amount of cold, searing blue light, swirling around inside like water disturbed in a glass bowl.

    The orb defends it for a short white, breaking or vapourizing incoming projectile fire. Once it grows to a worryingly immense size, however, the freefalling demon tears its tendrils away, and the whole thing shatters into a shower of falling beams, accelerating until they become as fast as strokes of lightning, and fills the rafts with hundreds of molten holes --as well as those in the wrong place on them. Deveaux protects a limited space by slapping his gauntlet and projecting a large, rounded shield of amber light, extending from his forearm for a meter to each size, encircled with ancient lettering, and hunkering down underneath it. Lilian dodges them without issue, but moves to protect Tamamo as well if it becomes an issue.
Ishirou The sheer amount of perplexing data is enough to make his head spin.  Trying to make heads or tails of a creature fundamentally alien to life as they knew it.  Even the Nullborn followed patterns, they were based on something of the earth.  Thankfully, I4 can notice patterns and energy, he can use this to piece together what is going on, and to provide that data to people.

Of course, when the thing counterattacks, there is only so much the POD can do, I4 tries to move but does so too little too late.  The blast sends him flying off the platform, and without a place to stand, he starts floating up.  

Burn marks run down his body, heavily around his right hand.  He manages to speak again, "POD...hook, try and hook us to the wall," he mutters, as the pod does JUST THAT.  With that covered, I4 turned his hand back and fires another set of hacking orbs.  He tries to hit the bladders on the side and attempts to disrupt their function.  
Strawberry Princess      Click, click, cli-

     Strawberry lets go of her empty handgun, which quickly plummets upwards in freefall, and re-engages her wand- by now mostly recovered from its horrifying foray into near-detonation. A couple of casual laser-blasts utterly disintegrate the last few shark-worms that might menace her. Then she pauses for a moment, falling in silence. Likely not enough juice left to obliterate the demon, but if she runs out of power before it's dead, she's a goner. The timer ticks down remorselessly, an incessant reminder of her ever-depleting fuel.

         04:21

     Time to get creative.

     Zipping towards one of the walls, Strawberry angles a shallow downwards shot into it, blasting a narrower tunnel into the rock parallel to the main one, hundreds of feet deep. She zips inside and starts to plunge more slowly, deliberately letting the demon 'catch up' to her on the narrower track as her wand cools, and intermittently firing another blast downwards to extend her personal cavern. Her awareness invisibly expands outwards, permeating through the dozens of feet of rock now separating her from the beast and giving her a reference point for I4's targeting data.

     Then she starts to fire her horrific disintegrating lasers in a steady pattern: two blasts through the cavern wall at the demon, one downwards to extend her tunnel as she falls, repeat. "Wallbanging" it somewhat diminishes her raw destructive power, but it lets her line up with those scanned organs with impunity: she's insulated by dozens of feet of raw stone from any retaliation, which her own attacks have no compunctions about punching through.

     From an outside perspective, white-pink blasts just appear to erupt from the walls to pierce the worm's body at arbitrary points.
Vergil     Vergil arises and turns, having completed his little ritual to examine the damage. The mouth has been rent, and that he is satisfied with. But the creature still lives. "Blast! No vitals... no matter." He watches the tendrils compressing some strange light and takes a long slow breath. As the lasers come raining down, he acts. Not to defend himself, but to create an opening.

    His hand blurs again repeatedly as it did at the lip of the crater. Swirling bubbles of whirling slashes intercept the falling lightning, the warped space aimed at scattering and blunting the light's power. All the while, another array of blue swords assembles around Vergil, all pointed upward, awaiting his command.

    The swords fly once a space has been cleared, and Vergil follows them. A few of the rays cleave through him, opening holes and scattering blood, but he pushes on regardless. By using his flying swords as platforms, he jumps from one to the next in a flurry of motion to catch up with one of the tendrils before it fully retracts. Once upon them, he moves again and again, the appendages carving into pieces in his wake.

    The closed mouth might have sealed up a weak point, but it means the entirety of the chasm isn't blocked any more. The rest of its body is exposed.

    Once he stands upon the enormous eel's long form, he moves even faster, leaving blue after images behind him as he runs literal circles around it, Yamato flashing again and again to slice at the points where those enormous fins meet the body. "Fall, scum!" he bellows. He truly intends to leave it flightless, consequences be damned for those still below its bulk.
Mordred After getting chewed on and headbutted, Mordred's alraedy feeling less than charitable towards the giant and its minions. An excited grin crosses her face as she sees her lightning blast right through it and mingle with that cauterizing flame courtesy of Korra, wincing only briefly when its blood gets onto the Knight of Treachery more directly. It's more gross than painful compared to the maws of those creatures that had latched onto her earlier, but it does serve to highlight what the Elites have yet to deal with.

The creature starts transforming. Or adjusting its approach, at least, when it starts hurtling towards them and stopping their ranged attacks for a good while. Mordred tests it with some more lightning at first, stopping shortly before it starts exploding pieces of itself at them. As fast as she is and as strong as her armor is, she still can't avoid everything, and she takes quite a number of heavy shots into her as that white armor turns red in multiple spots.

"Jackass...! Alright, screw it. You wanna do this head on, let's do it head on!" Planting her feet firmly on what's left of one of the rafts, Mordred launches herself upwards, then starts bounding from wall to wall and platform to platform to get herself closer to the giant.

It probably takes all of a few seconds for her to reach it, and Clarent is already poised to strike with that familiar red lightning as Mordred gets into range. She drives the weapon forwards as she aims to just ram Clarent and herself right into it as hard as she can, fully intending to cleave into it from the inside.
Alexis A few options are considered, and promptly discarded. This was nothing like they had ever fought before, and Alexis quickly came to a conclusion that it was going to take making up some new tactics to contend with what this monster can do.

Especially when seeing it start to charge up something. Instead of trying to puzzle over what it could be she acts, recalling the Ninetales and releasing a large metal-clad saurian, the Aggron's roar in defiance now very audible without the subsonic muffling. Then Alexis reachs over to slide back her sleeve and reveal the glimmering gemstone inset to the bracer worn under it. There's no time to make witty remarks like usual, she just grabs it with the opposite hand and holds her arms out, focusing the bonded energy into her newly released pokemon. The energy engulfs them, just as the massive orb splits and rains beams of destruction down. Several of them even pound into the glowing form.

The tense moments are shattered as the coccoon of energy is, and an even louder roar erupts from the pokemon within as seven feet and nearly 900 lbs of armored, bladed and spikey Mega Aggron are revealed.

It's visible were several of the beams burned into his metal form as he had used his bulk to take the assualt and shield his Trainer. Dodge? Dafuq with that, he's a living metal dinosaur tank, he's going to tank that insanity no matter how much it hurts, which has left his hulking form glowing a bit.

And that is exactly what Alexis was counting on. Time to turn this monster's power back on itself. "Alright Grindcore... METAL BURST!" "AAAAAGRON!"

A massive foot stomps the ground to brace himself, draws on how much he was just hurt because this is one of those attacks that fires back with more power from being damaged first, and with a defiant roar expels a massive metallic beam from his maw, sending all the magnified force screaming upward back at the monsterous eel!
Gawain Well, it ate the mini. Gawain frowns, and then, as everyone attacks, and Vergil does his devastating blow, it becomes an aerodynamic missile, and he has to move. Immense amounts of energy become weapons agaisnt the group, so he goes into a guard stance. When the beams impact, Gawain finally loses his footing, and is burned up, his armor keeping him safe, but not away from pain or /many/ searing holes that would eviscerate a weaker man.

He falls for a short while, before hitting another platform /hard/. He oofs, before slowly rising, shakily. Gotta get his groove back, his focus, even if he's unsure how exactly to hurt this thing.

Now that he can talk again..."Galatine! Burn it to ashes!" It's meant to make him confident, as he leaps off his platform with superhuman strength and moves to land flaming-blade first onto the creature and start cutting into it. Hopefully the gravity problems don't shift him backwards or away from a solid holy-fire hit.
Tamamo     If there's a silver lining to the attack the creature uses next, it's that it could hardly give greater warning. The exact moment may be hard to spot, but if it's just a matter of preparing to receive, then it's a lesser issue. Even more fortunately, the orb doesn't merely obliterate chunks of the platform upon which the non-flying members of this band must stand. Deveaux has been quite helpful in regards to keeping them falling downward, as opposed to flying up and away from their goal.

    "Thinking back upon it, why /did/ Sir Gawain's words anger it so? Apologies, entreatments... what hides below..." This time, Tamamo watches the falling light for the barest moment, then moves directly into the path of the greatest density of harm, as if heedless of the risk.

    "Invoke the Mantra, the Caverns Hiding the Sun." Her mirror, that manifestation of the blessings of Amaterasu, comes to the fore, shielding her from above. The shards of the orb strike, fast as lightning, most against her shield, some against the platform, some against her. Blood flows, Tamamo coughs once, and her shoes are once again ruined. But that which struck her mirror is held, roiling within the not-space of the reflection, as the magic seeks to consume it. It cannot fully do so, but a Mantra that can consume the energy of a spear's thrust is necessarily not a picky eater.

    "Invoke the Charm, Steal the Spirit." Though bleeding, Tamamo ignores that for now. She has things she needs to do. A talisman burns away in her hands, and a glow suffuses her hands. In that blink-and-it's-gone look, there's the impression of claws. A confident glint of the eye, the extending of fangs. But gone again.

    "Invoke the Mantra, Praise to the Merciful Sky." The mirror has done its work, and new light shines in flashes, like stormclouds churning on its surface. That which struck it was consumed, transformed, adding to its own present power. It flips, and Tamamo reaches into it, pulling away the lightning in her hand.

    "Invoke the Curse, the Chaos in Heaven!" Lightning strikes again, from her hand upward, spreading, arcing all through the space above, every flash burning through the air upward and then returning, as lightning must, back downward in its circuit. It burns, of course. It brings chaos, as she said. But most importantly, every strike steals away the 'spirit,' that identified not-mana, charging forward to grab hold of the creature's essence and then dragging it back down and away.
Korra This is all so wildly new to Korra, a part of that 'big multiverse' that she hadn't seen or consumed yet. The monster is strange, with tangible 'fight phases' and fantastical threats. It was like some sort of very angry, very dangerous Spirit, built entirely for mindless, senseless consumption.

"These Antegent are the real deal..." She mutters to herself, rubbing her throat from venting so much fire through her lungs - especially after taking heaping lungfuls of what passed for local air!

Laserbeams rain from the powered up sphere, and Korra's rapid bending of floating sheields runs her out of strange white organic stone quickly. Like heaving a rope trailing from the walls of the chamber as they 'fall', Korra rips long noodles of flowing stone that shield her like pasta sprayed with highly lethal spaghetti sauce.

Pinching the tips of her fingers, her flowing stone whips through the air rotationally, forming sharp hazardous points from what remains. A shove with both hands in a horse stance sends the lethal noodle-spears across the area into the flying beast. "If it won't chew on it, then it can choke on--man, my one liners stink tonight. I really have to practice more!"
Lilian Rook     With the encroaching wall of death descending on them from above now having retracted to the point where there's some space to maneuver, several Elites disappear into the walls. I4's 'hacking bolts' hit the unmissable creature dead on as it plummets past him, battering him with a wall of wind dangerous in its own right, threatening to suck him into the shaft like standing right next to a bullet train on the edge of the platform. A trio of blue swells on its left side flicker and dim erratically, and the monstrous Antegent curves to the left as a result, slamming the edge of its arrowhead-shaped closed jaws into the wall, the silvered bones carving a deep, jagged trench through it, showering those below with rubble, but slowing it down some until it rights itself.

    Vergil leaps up and slices right through one of the tendrils before it can fully pull back. Coruscating energy arcs from it like a cut power line, completing the circuit between it and him on the way past and dumping quasi-electric mystery energy into him, but shorting out quickly with a spray of tarry blood. Running along its outside, he passes by Strawberry Princess along its length. Muffled thumps and flashes of pink rattle through the cavern while she keeps pace and skewers it over and over again, stabbing through gravity adjusting organs, rupturing biological capacitors, and causing bursts of flash vapourized oil to split its skin. The Yamato flashes up and down in hundreds of cuts along its hide, carving into its strangely homogeneous muscle and bleeding it in sheeting gouts, but the thing is just so *massive*, and has such *tremendous* vital force, that it charges on in a blind fury.

    The metal extruding organs contract inside it, and spikes of silver erupt by the hundreds from the open wounds, stabbing outwards like a forest growing from its skin, and then each of them erupting outwards into dozens of more spines, these ones like razor thin branches, endangering all of the Elites that had attacked its flanks. It isn't a natural defense, because there are no specific pores or ducts involved; it's actively manipulated the silver to do this.

    Mordred charges the monstrous thing head on. Clarent clashes straight into its wounded face, and a jagged red glowing crack splits along its silvered bony 'helmet', gushing fire back at her as much as it sears where the creature's brain should be. Bellowing like subsonic whalesong, one of its tendrils sweeps out of the corner of her eye and strikes her with the force of a freight train, discharging an immense amount of crackling energy into her on contact, making a guncrack electrical sound that echoes down the shaft behind the flash.

    Grindcore's returning metal beam slams into the compromised armour head on, causing the smouldering cracks to split and spiderweb, spreading wide and deep across the Antegent's face, now flaking away into spinning pieces of silver, flying up and away. Gawain collides with it next, and against its crumbling defenses, Galatine finally flays its armour away in great flaming strikes, melting the damaged silver into rivers of molten slag that stream away from it, intermingling with its blood. The other two remaining tendrils turn on the pair, coruscating only briefly, before firing thin rays of scorching blue light that carve through the walls like butter, independently sweeping around to rake over Gawain, while the other stabs into the aggron and focuses on the same spot, even as it moves, working to bore through its chest.
Lilian Rook     The barrage continues all the way up until Tamamo reuses the creature's energy to fire back at it, connect to its inner stores, and drag away streams of it into the ether. It courses through the monsters inner membranes, quivering like a score of separate heartbeats, disrupting their resonant frequency and tearing free 'leaks' of scarcely visible, roiling, dark-purplish . . . something. The beams sputter out then, straining the remaining accumulation organs to pump their power down its whole length, much of it severely damaged and bottlenecked, back to its head to recharge.

    Korra's stone lance skewers it between the eyes, into where a skull would be, through the ruined armour, causing it to spasm from head to tail. This time, it curves and slams its head into the wall on purpose, cracking off one of the broad 'blades' to the sides of its head, which falls off entirely like a broken horn. It briefly spins away, then halts, then rotates in the opposite direction, gathering speed like a buzzsaw, and is telekinetically launched straight down at blistering speed, on track to turn Korra and Alexis into a pair of red splatters across its edge.

    It repeats the process with the other side of its hammerhead shark shape, hurling it towards the two Immunes and to smash into Tamamo's mirror with pure kinetic force; far more than she has the strength to absorb, being a multi-ton object going hundreds of meters per second.

    Deveaux evacuates immediately by use of his runic mana wires, then clinging to the wall, finally draws the broad-bladed sword over his back; a simple cruciform shape with a golden hilt, and a blade that blazes with pure white light, shining a circular corona that splits into glaring rainbow arcs. Mostly out of magic, he rockets from the side of the chasm with pure physical force, colliding with the side of the Antegent and cleaving into it with a great, shining arc, a wave of terrifying force biting all the way down to its middle, before a curtain of metallic spears shoots out of the wound and stabs into him, buried into his armour plates and throwing him free, blood trickling from puncture wounds in the flexible sections of the suit. Lilian merely disappears beforehand, immediately lost in the chaos.

    The Antegent, without energy projection abilities, having used up its main metal stores and organic missiles, its flight failing and erratic and falling behind, bleeding badly, its armour ruptured and its head and 'neck' grievously torn to pieces, suddenly goes almost totally dark. The lights all over it shut off, the feeling of active power momentarily dies down, and then it spirals into almost totally uncontrolled, meteoric descent, powered solely by its thousands of tons of body mass to smash into and devour whole whoever is left beneath it. Even avoiding it, the rafts will be totally destroyed, hurtling the survivors back out at lethal rates of 'kilometers per second'. Its glowing eyes --the sole remaining sources of light from it-- visibly swivel in sets to track them, coiling and turning its body to angle its fall towards them.
Lilian Rook     A red-black streak of magic like fire and smoke and blood painted by strokes of a brush winds and curls about the Antegent in dazzling ribbons. Its exposed eyes rupture into fountains of gore. The stone spear wound from Korra is split wide open and the object has been somehow rammed all the way up to vanishing inside it. The flight control organs hacked by I4 burst open, vomiting blue jet fire. The multiple nuclear punctures caused by Strawberry Princess split open from the inside out, as if a multi-bladed arrowhead had gone through the open wound channel. The myriad slashes opened by Vergil double in depth, the hard skin exposing soft flesh that comes shredding away. The exposed, blooded, battered front of the creature, its armour shattered by Mordred and Alexis and Gawain, erupts into a conflagration of blood that paints the walls all the way down. Two of the three jaws, wounded and mangled by Korra and Tamamo, completely come loose, cleanly amputated at the broken joints. The huge ravine chopped into its neck by Deveaux finally meets the opposite side, roughly decapitating the seemingly inexhaustible monster.

    The creature drops past the Elites completely, limp and lifeless, all of its many wounds, inflicted by everyone present, compounded in severity all at once, extinguishing its lifesigns with sheer system shock. The resounding boom as it hits the ground below is a warning. There's very little drop shaft left. They're descending extremely fast. There's not much time to slow the platforms.

    At the very bottom, the Antegent's corpse is coiled like rope around a singular object of unknown origin, pierced deep into the earth. A jet black pylon of some metallic substance, perfectly smooth, towering thirty meters over the cavern floor, but seemingly going much deeper beneath. Below the surface are designs of somehow perfectly tessellating pentagons. Its top end splits and spirals into an open spearhead, inside which hovers a massive, clouded red gem. The air prickles around it; stagnant, heavy, hot, menacing, choking. It has an entirely different character than the monster that lies dead around it.

    It's exactly like the one from London; actually, this one is three times the size.

    The lethal freefall, finally, is largely mitigated by the fact that, as the platforms rocket towards the monster's oozing body, the sheer amount of liquid splashed up and down the walls by its impact massively intensifies the floating effect, slowing their fall greatly. Past the tip of the pylon, though, the effect abruptly ceases, and normal gravity is restored. Its only then that the two Immunes rejoin the group. Deveaux's damaged plates are stripped off, and the puncture wounds filled with some kind of gel or foam and taped over. Lilian looks essentially unscathed, but falls on her butt, back against the wall, as if terminally exhausted, blood smeared from her lips as if she'd just recently wiped it away.

    "Definitely at least level Demon." Deveaux says, walking while favouring his right leg, using the hand reader to scan the giant object. "But there's no way we can lift something this huge out of the ground with the single craft we have. We can't carry it back either. It can't just stay here. With the Architect Type dead, other Antegent will move in." Lilian coughs raggedly, catching her breath, and then says "You saw outside though, right?" as an answer to Tamamo's question. "They totally ignored the remaining wildlife. Why? Because they only attack humans. They don't even eat humans, except incidentally to killing them. It's purely done to exterminate them." Then, looking to the massive, ominously glowing spike, she says "It's pretty obvious what we do, right?"
Ishirou I4, with the aid of his POD slowly decend from the side of the wall until he lands nearby to the other elites.  He then promptly falls on his butt and puts his back to a wall.  He looks up, very exhausted, and hurt.  

"Give me time to get repaired and I can start scans on the thing," I4 says and just...lays there for a bit.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry blasts one last hole in the wall as the beast goes limp and hurtles out through it, plummeting to the bottom with the rest of the group. Her wings tilt and angle only occasionally, to help her dodge the also-falling debris by gentle redirections. Her demeanor's changed to something softer once again, though her wand's still glowing and ticking as she lands at the bottom- she might need it to fly back out of that hole.

         03:46

     She ambles over to Lilian, smiling tiredly, and crouches down in front of her instead of offering a hand up- they've earned a moment of rest. "You did great," she offers. No 'are you okay'. That seems like it would be insulting, somehow. "Thank you, Lilian. And- thank you too, Deveaux. You both have really hard jobs. Thank you for... sticking with it, even so."

     After a moment, she seems to remember something. She stands up, walks towards the center of the room, and holds out her hand. Her Glock, discarded two minutes ago, falls into it at terminal velocity. She reloads and holsters it.
Alexis The tendril slams into Grindcore's chest, digging hard and deep into the juggernaut's metallic hide. That would of been a killing blow to many supernatural creatures out there. There is clearly pain in the titan's expression, visible despite the layers of armor covering said face like a horned helmet and bladed mask.

It's only by the sheer rediculousness of defensiveness Mega Aggron posesses, part due to being a pure Steel type in this form, and part due to the Ability that dampers the power of highly effective attacks to a degree, that Grindcore endures. Long enough to grab the tendril bore with his claws, and as the creature is finally losing it's strength, rip the offensive appendage out. That's a nasty looking, deep gouge of a wound left in it's wake.

No surprise the metallic saurian gives it little concern now. Instead Grindcore turns, snatching Alexis up with his tail as he does so, and hunkers around the tomboy to brace themselves against the platform's plummeting inertia. Up until it slows a bit from the fucked up gravity, seems to stall at the height of the spire, and then crunches abrutly to the ground like some insane monster-size drop-tower thrillride.

It's not until after the platform has stayed still a good minute or two to be sure it's not going to move again before Grindcore clomps back on his rump with exhaustion, letting Alexis free.

She peers up at the spire, frowning. "Yeah, I don't think we're gonna be able to dig that loose to move anyways. So now what?" It's an important question to ask, even as she unslings her pack from her shoulders so she can get some aid for her battle monster. Pokemon can take a shitton of damage, but that monstrousity was pushing the threshhold dangerously thin so she's not taking any chances leaving those wounds unattended.
Vergil     Vergil is taking a moment to prepare to cut deeper, preparing to fillet the Antegent entirely when the silver spikes extrude from the many wounds he's opened. In a grisly display, Vergil is run through time and time again, held suspended by the metal spikes. For a moment, it might seem as if they've done enough damage to kill him, then another bolt of blue marks his transformation.

    With an almighty twist, he rips himself free, his insectoid wings fluttering to hold him aloft. "Wretched scum!" he bellows, giving chase to the enormous eel. The incredible efforts of everyone else have left the thing with scarcely a head, loose jaws, an enormous stone spike in its skull. Only that one eye remains alive, and he flies before it, intending to run it through.

    And then, in an instant, all damage done to it redoubles.

    Vergil flies aside, watching it fall. His face is extra rigid in this form, but it seems like he is scowling. He descends, landing at the bottom and reverting. Upon landing, he looks around and spots the 30 metre tall structure. He tsks, and says "Is this all there is?"

    He sounds mad. He shoots Lilian an angry look where she rests and says aloud to everyone, "Enjoy your prize." Yamato flashes, slicing the air twice and creating black streaks that bleed to form a portal. With long strides, he steps through before it reseals itself.

    At least the ride back will be less cramped?