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Marigold      The war is going better than anyone could have hoped. The war is going poorly.

     Laus and Thria have betrayed the Lycian League, and though their backstabbing was thwarted they were left leaderless, weakened, and in disarray. Far too many of the League's nobles and fighting men lay dead at Castle Araphen anyway. News trickles in while the caravan's on the road, and the lords and lordling murmur to each other what lurks silently behind everyone else's eyes:

     Bern's wyvern riders stalk the countryside, hitting and running too fast for Lycia's thinned forces to oppose. Commoners hole up in their Marches' respective keeps, with no telling if they'll be starved out or just have the castle-breaking dragons sent after them. No Bernish flags yet fly on Lycian soil, but what started as open war is looking more and more like guerilla resistance.

     But Ostia, Lord Hector's territory, still stands. It always has. And the Divine Weapon it holds- Durandal, the Blazing Blade, which slew dragons long ago- is surely the key to toppling Bern now. And as Araphen was the mountainous doorway to Bern, Ostia is the doorway to Etruria- a powerful potential ally.

     So there's something like a long collective sigh of relief as the caravan winds through the hilly meadows of Ostia. Smiles get a little brighter. Postures around the campfire get looser. Lucius's kindly preaching feels a bit less threadbare.

     Surely, everything will be alright.
Marigold      March of Ostia, near the Etrurian border
     In sight of Castle Ostia.

     Unlike most roads Roy's army has traveled, this one is well-worn stone. In the distance ahead, high snow-capped mountains rise up to the left and right, and between them- as the range mellows- is a beautiful city on a hill. Ostia's walls are gleaming pale stone, accented with a gorgeous blue marble that immediately contextualizes blue as the Lycian color. Beyond, the rooftops are a patchwork of brightly-colored shingles, and great old trees that rise higher than the buildings shade the central square. The castle-proper rises at the city's far side, keeping a watchful eye on Etruria.

     Merlinus drives the caravan forward. The little army's horsemen trot alongside (Sue and Clarine included), and Hector trudges too, because there's no telling how the wagons would bear his weight. Roy, who nearly always marches on foot out of solidarity, has finally allowed himself a little nap in the caravan- on Father Lucius's shoulder, who looks delighted. Roy isn't much older than the children Lucius takes care of, anyway.

     When the caravan comes to Ostia's gate, Hector steps forward to the portcullis and holds his arms out wide, proudly beaming up at the guards atop the wall. "Ostia! Your marquess has returned! Throw open the gates, and let there be a--"

     "Lord Hector?! Aren't you dead?!" an archer calls down. "Huh? Well, for a moment there, but--" "It's an impostor!" "No, look at his armor..." "Regent Leygance said--" "Regent?! He's my general! What's going on in there, open this damn gate!"

     Already, Roy's people are subtly reaching for their weapons.
Ru Li Cheng      Ru Li Cheng has not been having a great time on this journey. Oh, he enjoys spending time with Roy's entourage plenty - the god could enjoy sitting across the table from his worst enemy (currently Petra, whom he likes quite a lot, if 'worst enemy' means 'person who has dealt the most injury to him') and still have a good time. But he can't help but remember that he's an outsider - and while he may be a valuable one in terms of keeping the army rested and secure, the night sky above still lacks the turning gears of his home, and from time to time he feels more a guard dog than a comrade.

     Made moreso now. In his wheelchair, he can't even practice his martial arts, or learn from the others. All he can do is wheel along in silence, occasionally fighting the wheels with his own strength to push through the rough terrain, putting a smile he barely feels on his face.

     When Ostia refuses to let them in, Ru Li holds up a hand. "Please, hold. He is not an imposter. He was saved from-"

     There's a pause. Then, his eyes narrow.

     "How would you know that?"

     Ah.

     An ambush.

     Already the god wheels himself in front of Hector, preparing to take any initial blow and try and evacuate him as fast as possible. If that means doing some damage to his legs, then so be it - his legs can be replaced. Hector cannot.
Blemishine     The state in Lycia is... not all that good, no. Even just as spoken over the radio before, the local lords - those that weren't slain at Araphen - they've encountered have proven themselves willing to become turncoats and take advantage of the chaos with alarming regularity. Bern hasn't /had/ to directly conquer any soil here. The Lycian League has been doing almost as much work allowing for Bern's success as the horrors at Araphen did initially...

    Maria doesn't like it. It's not pleasant seeing how easy it is for it all to come crumbling, but she can't avert her eyes from it either.

    Still, Ostia should mark a turning point! It's Hector's own territory, and she can't imagine his countrymen won't be relieved to know he's safe and sound. He'll get to see his beloved daughter while they're around... and Durandal should only be a metaphorical stone's throw away. Things are looking up! For a change, finally.

    A gloved hand visoring over her face, the blonde knight slash craftswoman has a warm smile on, scanning over the high mountaintops and the pale bluestonework ahead as she walks alongside the caravan - blessed with the stamina to avoid even the long walk here tiring her out, and easily keeping pace with the horseriders.

    "It's beautiful, Hector...!" She's gotten used to dropping the 'Lord' now. "I can tell why you're so proud of Ostia! I might have to be greedy and ask you for the tour once we're inside...!"

    Her smile only widens as they make the approach to the gate.

    Only to slowly drop, when what should be the triumphant return quickly becomes anything but.

    "/Regent/ Leygance...?" Blemishine immediately understands what /that/ has to mean, speaking under her breath. "But now that Hector is back, and they know he didn't die at Araphen, shouldn't he..." She trails off, at the exact time a sinking feeling overcomes her gut, and her left hand rests on the hilt of her sword at her side with a grimace, as she moves closer to Hector.

    She doesn't draw - but that's only really a 'yet' - but she does call up to the guards herself. "Lord Hector is the real deal! We have Lord Roy with us, too! What in the world /did/ the Regent say...!?"
Madeleine Cadrasteia     "Everyone thinks they can be a regent, huh," Madeleine scoffs. "Lord Hector, have you got some seal of office or the like that'd prove who you are? I'd expect that's the sort of thing you'd have with you at a meeting of Lycian lords. Otherwise," she says, drawing her spear in one hand, "I can go up there and *explain* to those gatesmen that you're the real thing."
Trudy Grimm     When Trudy joined up with the Lycian contengent, she was accompanied by both the Black Knight and Grimnir the Sage as usual. By the time the unit has moved deep into Ostia, though, the Black Knight had sunk into his shadow and disappeared. Clearly the witch doesn't feel especially in danger here.

    Grimnir has as normal taken a space for himself amongst the nobles and non-fighters, exchanging stories and parables to keep spirits up. Trudy rides on top of one of the wagons, staring into her crystal ball in one hand while shading it with the other. The convoy coming to a stop prompts her to look up and tuck the sphere away, blinking slowly at the guardsmen's behavior.

    "Oh? Has word of our feats at Araphen preceded us?" The witch stands, making a show of smoothing out her skirt as she does so, "Then your information is incomplete, for Sir Hector is indeed alive and stands before you."

    "That you would presume one and doubt the other speaks unfavorably, you know~?" Trudy tucks one hand behind her back, the other resting on the spine of the Grimoire as she leans forward at the hip-- perched as she is atop the lead wagon's roof, "Where have you come upon such information, I wonder? Could it perhaps be the soldiers of Bern who destroyed Araphen and left Hector to die, before we rescued him~?"

    "Answer quickly. I would rather not have to resort to more drastic measures against the people of my dear friend's homeland."
Aidan Proudpick Aidan doesn't like horses. He can do cats, not dogs, and a few other animals. Not horses.

So he walks beside Lady Clarine's horse, living up to his word as being her current bodyguard. Beastman armor, shields on his wrists, armguards strapped tight. Aidan is even amicable, listening intently to her every complaint with a broad smile.

A hand over his eyes to shade them, Aidan lets out an appreciative (and pitch perfect, thank you wind magic) whistle as he gazes over it. "I've never seen a castle that blue before! And look at those trees. Trees like that would blow down where I'm from! Your home is beautiful!"

"It's an impostor!" "No, look at his armor..."

A flick of the eyes around. Then a frown. "They wouldn't have guards who are confused, right?" Aidan keeps his hands down, shaking out some of the paranoia, but does the same as Ru Li, moving in front of lady Clarine and her horse. Just... don't assume the worst. Don't be pragmatic.

"Probably just a mix up, right? There's no need to get violent. There's no phones here."
Angela "don't worry, Ceri!" Tennant is saying. "What are the odds that Hector's going to be betrayed by HIS OWN people?"

"Please stop saying stuff like that. You know if there's trouble I can't actually help."

Ceri has returned largely to act as some reassurance that she hasn't just abandoned the cause but unlike before, she is no longer in a wheelchair--instead she's using a cane and walking on her own power, though Tennant is staying close in case she needs a hand here or there.

"I'm so excited," Tennant says. "I haven't had an actual FEAST since I joined up with L Corp. I'm going to eat so much stuff my stomach will explode."

"Just please don't go on your tangent about how Peanuts is actually a piece of existential horror again. You've been insufferable since you've gotten obsessed with multiversal media."

Tennant makes a face, "Don't you find it at least a little weird that the person seen as a font of wisdom is carrying a security blanket? And it isn't it weird that we ''never'' see the Great Pumpkin??"

So bickering, Ceri is slow to leave the caravan whereas Tennant start to slide out when--

''Regent?! He's my general! What's going on in there, open this damn gate?''

Ceri shoots Tennant a nasty look. Tennant lets out a long heavy sigh.

"It all sounded so delicious too..." Tennant sighs, sliding out of the wagon and readying their rifle, moving in closer than usual because they are upset and wouldn't mind having to cold lock someone with the shaft of their rifle at all. It's only because they haven't been given an order yet to start firing that they haven't started firing. Instead they start explaining, "When a regent takes over a country it's almost never a good thing in media, they usually are acting on behalf of a 'false order' beholden to outside interests, that's the idea of where the 'rightful king' or 'rightful lord' comes in--"
Odette Raskins Hector may be a war hero, but Odette's plenty familiar with how old wounds can reopen at the worst times. That's why, during the trek to Ostia, she's paying particularly close attention to the heavily armored lord's posture, following not too far from behind him with her trusty medical bag in tow. Between the vague health readouts on her glasses and just using her eyes to watch him, he should be able to get back home just fine!

Roy taking a much-needed nap gives her some semblance of relief, too, along with a slight twinge of envy at where he's getting to sleep.

"It really is nice here, yeah... Oh, but would a tour be too much for Mister Hector? I-I mean, after the feast..." She comments to Blemishine while patting her gut and pantomiming a huger gut, chuckling lightly a moment later.

Keeping Hector healthy upon his return, however, might be trickier with someone calling him an impostor and the rest of the crew already on guard. Scurrying to the front of the caravan, Odette throws her hands up in a slightly panicked stopping motion. "W-w-wait up! He can't be an impostor! We made sure he could come back alive and everything!"

Noticing Ru Li moving to put himself between the guards and Hector, Odette's lower lip quivers a bit in barely-masked anxiety. Trudy's and Tennants suggestions that there might be traitors among them gives her even more reason to be nervous, and the EMT forces the fakest of laughs as she backs away slowly from the guards out front. "H-hey... It's.. There's just some kind of mix up, right?"

Even she can't lie to herself about how suspicious this all looks, of course, nor can she dispute Tennant's logic.

She's probably watched plenty of those shows herself.
Petra Soroka <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "I just mean, like, you know. I guess it's weird to me what you guys got betrayed and backstabbed like three times in a row, and then once I show up it's just campfires and feasts and stuff."

    In comparison to the worn down and haunted army, Petra is a little huffy that she's getting *two* outings of rest in a row. What's even the *point* of being a soldier if she's going to get two whole days of rest? It feels like she's just loitering around and mooching off of the limited time and resources of the army to prance around playing war, rather than actually doing anything, and all the peripheral reminders in the army and the land that all the rest have had a far worse time of it than her just worsens her mood.

<J-IC-Scene> Tenant says, "I guess you're this war's good luck charm!"

    Just her fucking luck. Petra can blithely saunter onto a battleground and swear herself to fight on the losing side-- not arbitrarily, even though she knows little about the conflict. Lilian's here, so it's the right one-- and kick her feet waiting to get wiped off the planet by artillery fire or dragonsbreath , and then she's a *good luck charm*. What's the point! Is she *actually* cursed to never be able to inflict herself with cameraderie with the soldiers even while literally walking along the horses beside them?

    She is, in a word, gumpy. In classic overzealous new-recruit fashion, Petra's pouting isn't particularly well-concealed, even though if she was questioned about it, she'd emphatically insist that she doesn't actually want anything terrible to happen to the army just to satisfy her dysfunctional brain. Even while saying it, though, she knows this is a position she can only maintain as long as she feels confident that something terrible will be happening soon enough; without that, she might be quietly trying to manifest an ambush or a particularly gutting betrayal.

    For now, though, the sight of strikingly blue marble facades is enough to distract her. A strong color scheme, melded into the structural foundation of the city, is exactly the kind of thing that appeals to her architectural sensibilities, which is a phrasing more elaborate than Petra would come up with to convey that she thinks it's pretty. After making some pleasant small talk, 'Oh, that's pretty; is more of the city like that; is the *castle* like that?' Petra takes a short detour as the caravan begins to slow in front of the gate.

    As quietly as she can, once she spots Roy sleeping, Petra approaches the back of the wagon that Lucius is in to peek inside and apologize for last time. Putting her weight on the wood to try to hoist herself up inside makes a loud creaking noise that immediately makes her freeze up and glance at Roy, so she instead relegates herself to awkwardly walking at an uncomfortably uneven pace behind the wagon, leaning her weight on her hands to shamble in time with it and look up at Lucius.

    "Er, hey, man," Petra's sloppily casual speech pattern flips a coin to come up as gender-appropriate for this, "I'm still sorry about last time. Like, now that I'm not being punched, I mean. I feel like it doesn't count as much if I just say it while I'm getting hit, and then figure that it's solved after that and never mention it again, so--"
Petra Soroka "How would you know that?"

    With everyone clamoring-- and some even immediately drawing weapons-- at the guardsmen, Petra is forced to turn away and deal with that. She frowns, looking up the walls then down at Madeleine's spear.

    "Okay, aren't you all kind of deciding on that way too quickly? Of course they heard that Castle Araphen got wasted, and they knew Hector was there, so it's not a big leap to figure that he's dead. Immediately pulling out weapons when questioned makes us seem even more like we're, uh, decoys...."

<J-IC-Scene> Ru Li Cheng, tensely, says, "There were fights in the streets. Mercenaries, armoured not unlike Shanna, are aiding the losing Ostians. Bernish wyverns are on the winning side. At the inner gate, an important man is negotiating with them.

    "Oh." Petra can't bring herself to look too disappointed. "Damn."

    Petra flips open the cap on her Silver FullBottle on her hip, drawing out a coiled quicksilver stream and gripping it around the center so it snaps into a spear. Calling up to the guards and shielding her eyes, she shouts, "Hey, could you tell us what's going on in there, actually? Obviously we've got the real Hector here." Then, quietly, she mutters to herself, "Er, well, I *assume* he's the real one."
Lilian Rook     "My. Now that I see it, I may have to revise my opinion." Lilian spends a little of the way talking to Hector on foot. Without the fatigue of marching for weeks, she relishes the opportunity to stroll for hours in the countryside-- more or less-- and seems to intend to give Roy some space now that he's finally resting. "Of course I believed you, but you understand that every lord vouches that their own kingdom is the most beautiful." That, and it's a paper thin bid to stay as far from the horses as she can, which means getting distance from Clarine. "But with the mountains, the trees, that gorgeous stonework . . . goodness, it's just like something out of a novel. Perhaps I should assume you aren't exaggerating about Lilina, too~?"

    'Lord Hector?! Aren't you dead?!'

    The influence of fresh air, good company, and her enrichment cloak, allow Lilian to only sigh and rub her cheek with a gloved hand instead of immediately getting tensed up. "I suppose that was inevitable. Anyone seeing Araphan from the other side would have arrived back at Ostia well before us." she says. "You were prepared for this much when you left that prison cell alive, weren't you--"

    'Regent?! He's my general! What's going on in there, open this damn gate!'

    That, finally, does the job. Lilian's casual air evapourates alongside her sense of whimsy. For everyone else, it's just how she always sounds, but for those in the caravan, it must make for a 'customer service voice'; or the equivalent that nobility must use; crisp and clear and projected, carefully balanced between politeness and concealing tone. Lilian, not a lord of the city at all, marches up to the gates as well.

    "If he's an impostor then do your jobs and open the gate to arrest him. If you can't so much as do that, then you're either gutless layabouts who shouldn't be trusted with the gate anyways, or you know perfectly well that you don't believe he is either." She takes a deep breath, and then turns her eyes on the one with the highest ranked livery. "With us are numerous noble members of the Lycian League and representatives of their vital military allies. Open the gate or I will open it for you."

    For the first time in quite a while, Lilian is just more or less mind controlling someone.
Alucard What are caravans for if not for stragglers to join them? In this case, the straggler isn't from here, has never been here, and yet he trickled himself onto the end of it and has been placidly walking along with the soldiers and camp staff.

Alucard of Wallachia has joined the party!

As the wagons and soldiers stop at the gate, the half-vampire tilts his head, listening to the commotion at the front of the line. While he is not technically a noble, he is steeped in nobility. (Vampire aristocracy isn't really any different from human aristocracy, except there's a lot more physical violence that -doesn't- end in death). His preternatural hearing lets him get the gist, and he frowns. He steps out of the line and picks up his pace, walking quickly to the front, left hand resting on the sword at his hip. They might need his help!
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Ru Li Cheng, tensely, says, "There were fights in the streets. Mercenaries, armoured not unlike Shanna, are aiding the losing Ostians. Bernish wyverns are on the winning side. At the inner gate, an important man is negotiating with them."

    "Okay, that does it. I'm going up there." Without waiting for Hector's word, Madeleine pounces. As she kicks off the ground, a spark flares in her eyes - a fragment of her unworldly power. Untethered from gravity, she leaps forward and partway up the wall, landing softly against the wall and bounding up the hewn stone surface in a zig=zag to pre-empt any arrows or other projectiles. When she reaches the top, she vaults over the edge, allows gravity to reassert itself, and comes crashing down on one of the guards knee-first. Up on the battlement the huntress levels her spear at the rest of the guards. "You heard the Commander. Open the gate."
Flamel Parsons     Flamel Parsons is fucking *hungry*. He's been stressed lately! He was promised venison roast! Cream-stuffed pastries! He's been thinking about *flatbreads!* You can literally, I mean LITERALLY see the hunger coming off of him in waves. So when there's trouble with the portcullis, he's already involved.

    Invisibly, though maybe anyone nearby him is feeling the Hunger Waves. He's going to be attempting to use a combination of levitation, raw jumping, and telekineses to scale the outer walls, crossing over the top as quickly as he can, and getting himself suspended over or at least near to whoever's in charge of keeping Hector out. Then, fueled by pure hangry energy, he barrages the men with a vague, malformed understanding that something is grumpiness-inducing and stressful and the only way to open up the gate, like the way people interpret feelings of hunger. It'll take some pressure off Flamel! And it'll put that hunger to use.

    He wants his fucking MEAL. But he's also focused on stopping this coup he's heard about! He can't afford a *third* betrayal here... And Madeleine getting involved in that isn't unwelcome. A threat can go a long way there!
Desire Stars Neon anxiously scrolls on a phone that looks like it could survive an explosion; a brick of a thing in bulky black. Ace, meanwhile, has his nose in a book.

    Both he and Neon have dressed for meeting heads of state--even if Hector is the marquess, it's never a bad idea to have the whole cabinet in your corner.

Regent?! He's my general! What's going on in there, open this damn gate!

    "Oh, come on! Again?! What is this, the third time, now?" Neon whines and pumps her hands in exhausted frustration, almost dropping the phone. Catching it with an aggrieved sigh, she adjusts her navy lavallière, smooths the lapels of her matching jacket, and steps out of the wagon.

    Ace smirks, folds his book closed, and steps out a moment after. He runs his thumbs along the white scarf which offsets the black of his tuxedo and his gold bow-tie; the man looks more dressed for the film industry's red carpet than arriving at a castle.

    The two of them address the situation as differently facing the soldiers as they had in the wagon. Neon is putting on her best polite smile--but Ace is wearing his usual smug smirk, pointed right at the guards atop the wall.

<J-IC-Scene> Ru Li Cheng, tensely, says, "There were fights in the streets. Mercenaries, armoured not unlike Shanna, are aiding the losing Ostians. Bernish wyverns are on the winning side. At the inner gate, an important man is negotiating with them."

    "Did you swear an oath to 'Regent' Leygance, or to Lord Hector? That kind of thing used to matter, but I guess times have changed." He shrugs his shoulders.

    "We know... what's going on behind the gate. You don't have to pretend. I know that even before today, things have been scary, lately." says Neon, her polite smile wavering and fading to something more sincere in a sympathetic frown. "If you want things to be okay again, if you believe they can, please open that gate, let us through, and help us fix it. It's very important." She bows her head imploringly.

Open the gate or I will open it for you.
Okay, that does it. I'm going up there.

    Neon clutches her Desire Driver in both hands. Ace's hangs in his hand, seemingly held casually at his right side. They're going to be needed in the city, for sure.
Dysnomia     Mia's been watching Hector for some time during this walk, like a cat peering out from under the bed, assessing whether or not to allow him close. Chewing over Marcus' words, brows knitted together in what could have been irritation or could have been thought. Until they arrived...

    "The Dame Commander might be right. They might truly think him dead." Her lips pursed. "Might not change what we have to do." For a moment, she considered flying over the wall. The memory of arrows pincushioning itself into her was enough to make her hesitate, turn her attention to the gate.

    Instead, she walked up to the gate itself. "Your Lord Hector is here. Whether you believe it or not..." She simply stepped THROUGH the gate to reach the other side, mist unspooling from her feet to grab at any controls on the inside and force it open for the rest the Roy's forces.
Marigold      Lucius manages not to look apprehensive at all when Petra catches up, which is a little heartbreaking on its own. His smile could melt butter at ten paces. "Oh, Petra! That you've still returned to help us after all that... you truly have a kind heart. Please, there's no need for apology. You were only trying to be kind, were you not? I should apologize for Chad's behavior, truly."

     Roy stirs against Lucius's side, starting to awaken, and immediately looks away from Petra after recognizing her. Who can say why?


     "A seal of office, Madeleine? Of course. I've got it right, uh..."

     It's a sign of Hector's terrifying reputation that just absentmindedly reaching behind his back ratchets the standoff's tension tenfold. Bowstrings creak and pages rustle on both sides. Then- before Hector can do much more than yell "Hey!!"- it erupts.

     It's impossible to say which side fired the first shot. A withering barrage of arrows and a few exploding fireballs cascade down from the wall-top guards, minus the ones Flamel and Lilian have controlled. Madeleine catches her fair share too as the archers back away from her in evident dread. Whistling bolts from Sue and Wolt, Dieck's throwing-axe and Shanna's javelin, and Lucius's roaring beam of light retaliate.

     And Hector...

     Ru Li takes enough arrows that he might well have saved Lord Hector's life. But the god's in a chair, and Hector is a giant, so the one that grazes Hector's head is simply out of reach.

     He touches his temple in dawning horror. His fingers come away with blood. In that bowstring-whispering sixteenth of a second, it's all over. "Lord Hector!!" Roy yells, scrambling out of the wagon to his side. "Your curse- we have to fall back! If you're hurt, we've..."

     Lost already. But Hector comes to a realization. The portcullis is already starting to open, with Mia cooperating with mind-controlled soldiers, but he shoulder-checks it into an eruption of splinters and twisted metal and stomps through onto the main tree-lined avenue.

     Ostian cavaliers emerging from the side-streets- happy to attack the rest of the party- freeze in their tracks when they see him, and he wrenches an axe out of a paralyzed knight's hands. Archers hesitate to shoot him on instinctive dread. A murmur runs through the streets, casting a chill over the ongoing civil war.

     "LEYGAAAANCE!! DEVIAAAAAAS!! WHERE'S MY DAUGHTER?"

     At the far end of the avenue, that heavily-armored man flinches and then snarls. The half-dozen wyvern-riders gathered near him wheel around sharply and immediately start climbing onto their mounts. One throws a long-shot javelin at Hector; he back-hands it out of the air, and it shatters.
Ru Li Cheng      He will not let the arrows pass.

     He *will* not.

     Arms strain. The sound of gears and springs grinding against each other cuts through the air. The arrows come, and he tastes the wood and metal on his lips, following them by their smell. His hands reach upwards. It hurts - it grinds, it strains - to even try. But he manages. He manages through the pain. He manages through the hurt. Sheer willpower drives him on as he snags them out of the air. Between his fingers he catches them - he catches all of them, and for a moment, he's proud, because this time, *this time*, he-

     -didn't.

     -one arrow is too high.

     And the taste of Hector's blood spills across his tongue, and-

     -and Hector is still warm, and still standing.

     The arc of pride to shame suddenly finds shock and delight raising it, followed immediately by a plateau of concern as Hector goes barreling past, screaming about his daughter.

     Ah.

     Yes.

     That would do it, wouldn't it.

     Ru Li grabs the wheels of his wheelchair and starts wheeling into the battlefield, arrows still between his fingers. Again the grinding sound. Exerting this much force is almost assuredly bad for him. But...

     He crosses his arms, fanning the arrows he's caught like cards.

     With the force of a train he flings them outwards, most back at the enemies. The unearthly scream of divine clockwork punches through the sound of battle, and Ru Li grabs at his arm and hisses. But with that he resumes wheeling furiously after the larger man, pain be damned. He said he would protect Hector. He is *going* to protect Hector. Damage be damned.
Alucard Alucard moves forward, reaching the gate an instant before hell breaks loose. Arrows and magic rain down, and the dhampir ducks and twists. Much like Hector, an arrow strikes him in the head. The razor tip slashes his cheek, flaying it wide. Oddly, the blood is only a trickle, and marble white flesh begins to knit instantly. Luckily, it happens too fast to be grotesque. Golden eyes flicker as Ru Li tanks for Hector. He has no idea what they guy's deal is, but he seems incredibly tough.

In a smooth motion, Alucard draws his sword, the long, thin blade is nearly as long as he is tall, glimmering and flawless in construction. As Hector smashes the gate, Alucard moves smoothly to back him up. Because he looks like a trustworthy fellow and the people who shot at Hector also shot at him. Good enough.

As the chaos erupts, Alucard moves, sprinting swiftly with his sword at the ready. He seems to have a target in mind. The Wyverns. The first one he reaches, hopefully before it takes off, he strikes at. With brutal, unyielding force, he thrusts the enchanted weapon for the beast's center mass, seeking to drive it to the hilt.
Aidan Proudpick "If you want a bodyguard, Lady Clarine, you are gonna have to follow me!"

Hector rips through the door like it was paper, getting a whistle of awe from Aidan. And a wide grin spreads on Aidan's face.

"Your curse- we have to fall back! If you're hurt, we've..."

"Come on, Roy! Are you gonna let something else control this narrative? A man's daughter to save. Homes to save!" A rush of white wisps roll out of Aidan's mouth. He throws his hands forward, fingers spread, and the Lifebreath immediately solidifies into a barrier. Each arrow that passes through it slows to a crawl, making it easy for Aidan to simply swat them out of the air and to the ground. A turn and a wave to Lady Clarine. "If you are gonna fight, we're gonna need help protecting people. If you are gonna stay back, hide behind the outer walls!" He's trying to poke out ways to get Clarine going, to push her to act. But he's not going to baby her.

More, he can do more. Ceilings, barriers, walls. Aidan thrusts his hands out, drawing on his Lifebreath to make more, creating safe areas from the archers.
Trudy Grimm     Tension rises rapidly. It's so tight Trudy can feel it in the air; like moving through molassas. Thick enough to cut a slice and eat it like a piece of cake. Her shadow darkens around her feet, subtly extending in front of her as the men on the wall go nuts over Hector reaching for his seal.

    Someone shoots. She can't tell who. The world briefly transforms into a storm of arrows before the culprit could ever be identified. The witch brings up her arms to defend herself. In the same motion, the colossal blade of the Black Knight shoots up out of her shadow to serve as cover from the worst of it.

    His gauntlet-clad hand grips the shadow's edge and, with the creaking grind of metal armor and rust, the Black Knight hauls himself out into the open while being pelted and pierced. Only when the archery dies down does he retrieve his weapon and leap off the wagon's roof, causing it to wobble precariously for a moment on its suspension.

    "See to Lord Hector and Ru Li Cheng!" Trudy shouts after hm, to which the Knight stalks off in the wake of Hector's furious rampage.

    Trudy herself snaps out a blood-streaked hand, producing the Rune of Man above her palm. Mannaz rotates slowly as she fixes her gaze on Hector as he smashes through the gate, her expression severe.

    After a moment, she breathes out softly, eyes closing as the rune disappears.

    Retrieving the Grimoire, Trudy unbuckles and opens it. The Death Rune manifests above the flipping pages, its glow a sickly green. Following the appearance of Eiwaz, a thin green mist rises from between the cobbles, seeps up from drains, curls around the Ostian dead.

    "Sons and Daughters of Ostia whose lives have ended while in service to the lands you love, rise up once again. Please accept my gift and defend your home once again from the greedy claws of Bern."

    Not every one will answer. But some most definitely will. That green mist sinking into broken, battered, or impaled bodies. Blazing to life in their eyes. Corpses shuddering, shifting, lurching back to life. One by one they climb back to their feet, gather their weapons, and spill back into the fray against the forces who have sworn loyalty to Bern.

    Perhaps predictably, the majority of those Trudy has given second life to converge on the wyvern riders. Thrusting at the riders themselves with lances, shooting at them with arrows, swinging at reptilian legs and wings with swords and axes and a severe lack of any sense of self-preservation.
Dysnomia     Unfortunately, slipping through the portcullis leaves Dysnomia out in the open to exactly the kind of assault she'd hoped to avoid arrows fly, digging into her once, twice--more than she could count on both hands. It's perhaps only the incorrect assumption, that the kind of damage she'd taken would SURELY be enough to bring her down that makes the flurry of arrows turn to another. She staggers back, one step, two, hacks up steaming fluid onto the ground.

    Mist coils around her--around the arrows--and in one motion, pulls all of them from her back, with a sharp, pained grunt. But they didn't fall to the ground--they floated their, alien blood dripping to the ground. Dysnomia turned to face Devias' men, snarling. She raised one finger into the air and turned it in a slow circle--

    --And all the arrows turned too, fanned out...First toward the archers. Then, they shifted with Mia's gaze, toward the wyverns. While the Bernish riders rush for their mounts, they're not quite there yet. She lowers her finger toward them, eyes narrow, and the arrows that had penetrated her flesh loosed, all at once toward the dragon's domesticated cousins, twined with an otherwise invisible pressure of fear--raiding a vulnerable nest, only to confront its furious keeper. Of finding oneself suddenly in the deep end, where the only way to survive is to run.
Odette Raskins Odette's already bracing herself for the worst even before weapons and magic begin flying. It's a defensive mechanism for sure, but it doesn't do much to calm her nerves no matter how prepared she is for the bloodletting to start. The rain of arrows coming down at her, predictably, has the EMT yelping and squealing as she jukes and jives seemingly at random to not get punctured through, and it's only through a combination of having larger allies nearby, throwing herself into a rolling and cowering pile across the ground, and sheer dumb luck that she gets out of it with only a couple of nicks and scrapes.

"Lord Hector!!" "Your curse-"

"He's not... H-he can't be cursed!" Odette shouts back at Roy in indignant terror. "I-if something's gonna bring him down, it's-"

Hector blasts that gate open with himself, and then he smashes a javelin away with his fist. Odette's eyes go wide in awe, having just enough strength in her arms to push herself up just to a sitting position. "Whoa... When did he...?" It takes her several long seconds of wistful staring before realizing that she could still be in danger sitting there before she lets out another frightened noise at a fireball exploding nearby and launches herself forward.

No time to think too hard about what does or doesn't exist. She just knows Hector's bleeding, and-

<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Oh, uh, there's definitely curses."
<J-IC-Scene> Ru Li Cheng, biting down on his lip to keep himself from yelling too much, says, "There are of course curses."
<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Like, I've *been* cursed bef--"
<J-IC-Scene> Odette Raskins whines quietly, then says, "Wh... F.. Fine. Magic exists, so curses.. I-I guess. But..."

The curse can't take effect if he's just not hurt, right? Ripping a medicated patch out of its packaging and a small spray bottle out of her back, Odette sprints over to Hector and looks right up at the bleeding wound on his temple, then a little lower to his face.

"H... Hold still for just a split second!" She gives him that much of a warning, at least, then sprays the arrow wound with some medical-grade sealing chemical that stings quite a bit. She follows that up by practically slapping the patch over the same wound, ideally closing it up and staunching the bleeding so Hector can fight on without worrying about bleeding (from there)!
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Madeleine catches a few arrows with a decoy as she scrambles up the wall, but a fireball catches her with no meaningful cover. She barrels upward-forward out of the cloud of flame, coughing and choking, but completes her maneuver over the wall on blind instinct. Her weight isn't enough to cave in a man's chest, but it's plenty to pin him down while she brings her spear to bear on her quarry. Then she's up like a flash and into the thick of the archers and battlemages atop the wall, staying in their midst to baffle their vollies and draw their attention onto her, away from the elites forcing their way into the city below. And away from Flamel, for that matter.

    A wide sweep of her spear topples a pair of archers over the battlement into the city below, and Madeleine finds herself face to face with a mage. Presumably the one who caught her with that first fireball judging from the look of shock on his face that she's even still alive, much less up here and running a spear through his unarmored chest. "Too slow," she snarls, and the life leaves his eyes as the last of the scorching on Madeleine's face fades away. A moment later she's back in the melee, facing the remaining archers who've had enough room and time to drop their bows for hand weapons.
Blemishine     Arrows and flame rain down from overhead, proof as much as anything that they've stumbled on another situation that's already escalated far more than it should've before they even arrived. Her shield comes up just in time to deflect one projectile and then another, sidestepping away from one and then battering aside another, just for a third and a fourth to scrape into her armor at her side. It doesn't penetrate, but bruises beneath.

    Most likely because it's not her own safety she's primarily worried about. It's--

    Hector was grazed by an arrow.

    "Hector...!?"

    ...And now Hector is charging in fearlessly, stolen axe in hand and stunning fighters into shocked silence wherever he treads.

    That's certainly something to be glad for, watching him rush ahead and finally showing off the prowess he always spoke of having yet regretfully could not show off. Trudy might be right; with the realization the marquess of Ostia has made and his decision to barrel ahead straight through the gate, they might not have anything to fear from the curse of Armads this day. But after, will Hector...

    "...Let's count our blessings while we still have them and get moving!"

    No, there's no time to worry about that. If they fall behind, he won't wait up for them! And with that in mind, the white-armored knight raises her shield and bears her sword as she charges ahead into the busy avenue. While Ostian cavalry might have balked at Hector, they won't do the same for them - luckily, the encounter with Laus' own horsemen on the plains has given her some ideas on how to deal with them.

    Namely, one of them she outright springs off the ground to shield-tackle off his mount entirely and slam him into the street. His lance is wrenched free as they both go tumbling down, gripped in her shield hand - and as Blemishine rises back to her feet, she takes aim and javelin tosses it at another cavalier to dismount them as well. Aimed at a shoulder, not the chest.

    She meant it when she said she'd try and spare the Ostian soldiers following orders on Leygance's behalf. The Bernish wyvern riders will be another story... but before that, she has to fight her way after Hector.
Angela Tennant fires off a shot towards one of the archer's during the quick exchange of immediate firepower. Curses aren't something Tennant understands out of cinema so they don't think twice of Hector bleeding--maybe there's specific circumstances here, maybe there aren't, but the sad truth is--it doesn't matter if the curse is real. Tennant is hired to fight and die for--well, for a particular cause and they are nothing if not loyal to that cause.

But there is something specific today that Tennant never expected to be inspired to fight for but as it turns out, having missed pretty much every little moment Roy's army had a chance to relax only to be promised a grand feast that has suddenly been seized from their dreams, they are now doubly inspired.

"LEYGANCE!!" Tennant joins in after Hector, triple inspired by his battlecry and the fact he shattered a javelin with his hand. "Where is the mushroom flatbread!? The venison roast?!"

They push into the city, raising up their EGO armor sleeve to block a slew of arrows, relying on the armor's natural resilience to such assaults.

"Where are Ceri's creampuffs?!"

Ceri, still using the wagon for cover in an attempt to follow her doctor's adviec. "Tennant! Shutup about the food!"

"I cannot! We have come to see the splendor of Ostia not it's blood! The ones to deliver the first course shall be spared!"

Tennant takes aim towards the group of Bernish Wyvern Riders, sending a flare of dark-blue fire bursting out of its barrel and towards the enemy soldiers, hoping to punch through at least two in a single blast. They're only going to have four bullets after this so they best make the rest count.
Desire Stars Your curse- we have to fall back! If you're hurt, we've...

    Ace and Neon dart forward in the confusion, both of them equipping their transformation belts and sliding in their respective Buckles.

"Henshin!"
"Henshin."

                              DESIRE DRIVER! Set!                              

    For Ace, it's the white-red ranged combat focused

                                    MAGNUM.                                    

    --and for Neon, the unwieldy but flight-capable

                                ARMED PROPELLER.                                

    Metal rings expand from the center of each Driver, surrounding each Rider and expanding vertically, flash-printing suits of matte-black armor onto each. The faceless helmets are the last detail; each one is then given a unique stylized faceplate. A cat in gold and black for Neon; a fox in white and red (plus a slim shoulder cape) for Ace.

                                 Ready? FIGHT!                                  

    Ru Li manages to stop the arrows headed for Hector--but there are still a fair few on their way to the two Riders, Geats and Na-Go. It's clear which of the two is more used to being shot at--Geats procures the MAGNUM SHOOTER, a laser handcannon with a mounted scope, hipfiring to blast the arrows headed his way out of the air, before making a run for the hole Hector made.

    Na-Go, however, makes a panicked shout, flailing with the ungainly Propeller as would a green recruit with a quarterstaff. She manages to knock a few aside, but her last-minute dive doesn't keep her from catching one on the shoulder. A pained gasp escapes her, and sparks fly from her armor as the impact is redistributed. Rolling back to her feet, she squeezes the handle of the Propeller and sets its blades to spinning.

    Lifting just barely off of the ground, Na-Go flies low, inadvertently buzzing Hector as she makes a beeline for the wyvern riders. "S-sorry!" She sputters at him following the close call, before making a high-speed cross kick aimed at a wyvern's rider as she passes by.

    Geats, meanwhile, breaches the hole in the portcullis, heads straight for a tree, and runs up the trunk, his feet quickly finding steady branches when his momentum runs out. From the highest branch, he makes a forward somersault, his hand just barely catching the lip of the wall. Pulling himself up one-handed, he sweeps with the Magnum Shooter, white-hot laser bolts flying to disarm the guards near Madeleine as they reach for hand weapons. Madeleine herself gets an upnod of recognition. "Yo," the Rider greets.
Flamel Parsons     "Woah! Hector, wait up!" Flamel calls out, stumbling as the whole wall rocks from Hector's impact. "Hey! Wa--" An arrow cuts him short. "HRK!" He falls from his precarious position on the wall, arrow lodged in his shoulder, and he strikes the ground with a painful crack, but not without a tactical roll to minimize it and a quick shields to brace against more arrows. "Gotta make it to those Bernish forces..."

    Fastest way over is through. No way Flamel can match Hector's unstoppable force, but he can follow in his wake with all kinds of help! He tries to flicker back into invisibility, though it's unsteady given the wound on his shoulder. His focus isn't too shaken that he can't muster plenty of confusion bombs, though.

    As he latches a telekinetic hand onto Hector's back and levitation-skis on his charge, a dozen question marks rack back off his head like loaded guns and launch their spherical confusion-gas payloads into the air! The intent is to airburst on Bern's riders, and especially to make the wyverns themselves, who have way more human-face-blindness, become a huge risk to everyone, even allies and riders! On this third instance of Bern pulling this shit, he has to acknowledge that maybe inducing them to hurt the people is the right approach.
Lilian Rook     Seeing the archers tense at a so-called 'impostor' Hector's movements catches Lililian's wary attention immediately. Her eyes narrow at their restless fear; dread felt for the strength of the man in the flesh, while they claim to doubt his veracity. Looking aside on purpose, she taps her fingers to her earpiece to confer with the recon experts. She hears the news within minutes. And--

    The sharp buzz of flying arrows drags her away from it. Eyes wide, moving with the speed of wired nerves, Lilian snags two arrows with her cloak in the same instant she twists to face them, and fires from the hip in the instant before she can draw. Black-gold lances of magic join the crossfire, leaping from the circle at her fingertips and raking across the keep wall. Her other hand reaches her sidearm just after-- a subtle betrayal of where her spinal reflexes truly lay-- and yet she only freezes on the spot. Her mouth hangs open as she looks upon Hector's face. Her heart skips at the sight of blood oozing from it. After all of this, could their own side have . . . ?

    'LEYGAAAANCE!! DEVIAAAAAAS!! WHERE'S MY DAUGHTER?'

    "Lord Hector--?! How?!" Lilian cries out, almost more relief than alarm. Any doubt that the miss was simply a miss is abolished; the javelin seals it. What she's seeing is a real fight.

    Again. In a place that was supposed to be safe. Another castle, another turncout, another capitulation to Bern. War at the place she had heard so much about, so fondly, endlessly promised in the weary and hopeful smiles of the people she's begun to care for, here.

    At the meeting, peace was never an option. She was all but thrown out of the room by a king whom she almost struck. At Araphen, there was nothing but atrocity; burnt flesh and fallen heroes, with dread portents instead of answers. At Laus, a betrayal, and Thria, another; each place at each time she could have come in from the portal and the trail and been welcomed as someone who genuinely belongs in this world, another knife in the back. And Bern is right here, and Hector is fighting.

    "Forgive me Father Lucius. I fear I may have let you dream sweetly for too long." Lilian says. Her back turned to him, what should sound theatrical seems only full of regret. She lets her hand fall to the hilt of her sword, and her fingers gleam in black gauntlets he hadn't seen her don. The glinting picks out the way her hand trembles. "Thank you for believing me a righteous woman for so long." Lilian says, hoarsely. She exhales deeply the moment next, and naked blade clears the scabbard; then her trembling suddenly stops.

    Lilian looks over her shoulder to Rutger. Pulling the brooch at her cloak, the garment falls away onto the flagstones under the weight of its embedded arrows. Her hair spills over the black plate as she fixes them with her flat gaze, lit with a silent, angry spark. "We spoke yesterday, on swords and those who carry them. I will not beg you to think no less of me." Her blade snaps perpendicular to the ground with the clenching of her fist. She crouches, tensing up nearly all of her muscles in unison under the clicking of her armour.

    She disappears.
    No, there's a faint trail. Blink and you'll miss it. A fading ripple of black static, and the taper of trail-dust high, high into the air, dragged by--

    "Cleasanna Lilí Dubha! Lann Réalta Reathata!"
Lilian Rook     The wyvern formation is punctured by something like a falling star; a light that streaks from on high and threads through their airspace to touch Earth in the same momentary stroke, and blooms fire and thunder so severe that it the sound rattles the windows of the castle entire seconds later.

    The building block directly beneath explodes inwards as if struck by a meteor. The debris hurled high enough to be a hazard for the riders incidentally. The blast wave carries rolling dust and smoke down every adjacent street. It reveals spiderweb cracks through the flagstones for a hundred meters as it clears.

    Lilian emerges from the smoke, on the other side of the gate, and takes a dead-on sprint at full speed down the main street. Half the City has already seen that move put Gebura into a different floor of the Facility; she doesn't intend to wait for severed wyvern limbs to hit the ground first. The wake of the attack alone should send falling riders into the windows and attics of the nearest buildings.

    Arrows that chase her down the street are struck down into burning splinters. Fireballs can't keep up. She flourishes Night Mist as she rounds the corner to the first pocket of attackers, and while her sword is still glowing hot, she leaps through them like an arc of chain lightning. The burning wounds she leaves behind aren't even as barely-gentle as they were before; this time; taking hands and arms with her blade, shattering ribs and puncturing lungs with blunt blows, or even leaving helplessly bleeding men for Odette to find aren't out of the question now.

    Lilian gathers up momentum as she goes, homing in on the sounds of battle at top speed, without pattern or overall strategy. Jumping from the nearest foe to the next, it's as if she intends to plough head first into the city and fight every single Bernish soldier in it.
Petra Soroka "That you've still returned to help us after all that... you truly have a kind heart."

    Despite initiating the apology, Petra looks briefly confused at Lucius's reassurances, before realizing what he means. "'After all that'? Oh-- oh, no, that was nothing, for me. That happens all the time." Getting beat up for saying stupid nonsense, she means. "Of course i wouldn't avoid coming back just for getting smacked a little by someone trying to protect someone."

    She pauses, and then repeats, that thought becoming more concrete in her mind after she said it out loud. "No, yeah, I think Chad's cool as hell for that, actually."

    Then, finally, some good fucking war. It's not like Petra's really had a conversation with Hector, or gotten much context at all for Ostia as a strategic or emotional stronghold, besides the fact that it's pretty and the secondhand tactical murmuring of needing time to rest and recuperate after the grueling early months. She also hasn't been through a series of increasingly infuriating betrayals already, so she's fresh off the shelves for this one. All in all, it doesn't hit her with enough distress to outweigh the adrenaline exhiliration of proper staged combat.

    She's not entirely clear on the details of Hector's curse, either. He's supposed to die in the next fight he gets into, and his side is supposed to lose? Does that mean they're *all* going to be slaughtered, for a total loss? Or does it just mean that they'll fail at whatever tactical goal they set for the fight? They didn't exactly come here looking for one, so there's no full-side consensus on what the end-point of this battle is, and the idiot fightgirl part of Petra can't help believing that she can simply smash her head hard enough into fate to overcome it.

    And smash her head she will. When Hector charges through the gate, Petra is at first content launch a spray of retaliatory flechettes up at the soldiers on the wall, not expecting to hit any, but hoping to make them duck and give the rest of the army a moment to breathe and reposition. Her remaining morphmetal, dissociated into vague floating globules around her, pierces into the Ostian wall (carefully avoiding the blue marble, like skipping over cracks in the sidewalk) in a series of spikes, which she hops up to ascend to the top.

    Hector's a big guy and can handle himself. His dramatic entrance through the gate and the uneasy pall his mere presence lays across his opponents is the exact kind of war heroic stance that Petra respects, and maybe admires a bit, but ultimately doesn't draw Petra's awe too strongly. Something about him just fails to appeal to her, despite her fixation on the heroes amongst the battlefield and the way figures of intense charisma can sway whole battles in their favor. What does pull her down from where she's snapping the bow of a soldier on the battlements is--

"WHERE'S MY DAUGHTER?"

    Petra crashes into the ground besides Hector, morphmetal cratering beneath her to soften her impact with a gleaming semifluid splash. She scoops her hand through the weightlessly suspended Silver, accumulating it around her hand until it stretches back into a spear in her grip, which she angles up defensively while standing to Hector's side.

    "Do you have any idea where she *might* be? A dungeon, or something? Isolated rooms in high towers? If you can't fight," She's really not sure how the curse works, "I can."
Marigold      With the walltop archers cleaned up by Madeleine and Geats, those who push through to Ostia's cobbled streets aren't at risk of being shot in the back. They're the ones with the clearest view: it's a mess down here, and it's getting messier every second.

     Out of earshot of anyone who could scream orders at them (besides Hector), the traitorous Ostian soldiers lose momentum in the streets- and even moreso, when the Elites prove more than capable of fighting back. They get more and more timid, edging into a fighting retreat.

     Wyverns are bigger than a warhorse and their scales are as tough as steel breastplates... which is to say Alucard's strength and Tennant's cannon can rend them satisfyingly, and the mass of redirected arrows or Trudy's resurrected men roll a lot of dice to catch them on a lucky hit. Four of the wyvern riders don't even make it into the sky, although the ones who don't get savaged by their own confusion-gassed mounts are swift to form up around Devias. They're still elite spearmen when dismounted, after all, and can at least stop the undead from swarming their Lycian contact.

     "'Nothing for you'," Lucius repeats after Petra, while sparing a touch of his glowy staff for an arrow-wounded Dieck. "Ahahaha~. To be such a hero at your tender age... I can't say I was so dedicated." Praising Chad makes his stress-tightened smile relax and widen.

     "'Dream sweetly'? Dame Commander..." Lucius murmurs softly, a second later. "The Saint was a violent woman. I have spilled blood, too. Please--" And she's gone, and a second later he sucks in a tight breath. "... Ah."

     Shanna jousts with two wyvern riders in the sky, though it looks like a losing battle until Lilian neatly annihilates one; she keeps trying and failing to lure them into a chase. Rutger sprints along rooftops towards the castle, ignoring the havoc below. Roy, after a moment's panic, hurries to try and catch up with Hector.

     "I'm fine," he insists to Odette, though he does slow for a half-step to let her spritz his temple. "You too, Ru Li. The curse can't happen. Not if I'm fighting my own people. It said--"

     He can't say much more, because just then a wyvern rider swoops to slam into him and plow him into the side of a building. Masonry cracks. For a moment he wrestles with it, claws and teeth against hands; then Hector yells and something else crunches with a twist, and the wyvern goes limp, spilling its rider. "Narcian was better. Hhh- stay out of it." He turns his back on the rider; Roy locks swords and struggles with them, leaving Ru Li (and Odette?!) an opening.

     Petra asks the one question most likely to slow his stomping advance, too. For how he acts, he's pretty clear-headed: "In the castle. Might be in her room." Sparing a finger to point at one of the towers: "It's secure. Could've locked her in it."
Marigold      https://youtu.be/GWsoJVZX4zg

     'Devias' and his dismounted Bernish bodyguards are just recovering from the shockwave of Lilian's blow when Hector closes the distance. He trusts his Elite entourage to handle the ex-riders.

     "Anything to say for yourself?" "I- we thought you were-!?" "Bad excuse." "Hrk?! Wait, Lilina's--" Hector grabs his former lieutenant by the head, lifts him up, smashes it against the castle's front steps hard enough to crack both skull and stone, and then hurls him to smash open the castle's front door with his body.

     On the other side, in the castle's main hall, is a formation of hastily-scrambled Ostian knights- the revolt's most "loyal"- with bristling spears. They part around the rolling corpse. In front of the throne stands a man dressed like a walking fortress with a chain-mounted axe in hand. That's-- "Leygance."

     "You don't know what you're doing, Hector," he says, slimy but measured. That helm gives his voice a thrumming quality. He and Hector eye each other as if the small army between them were invisible. "Cleaning up trash. You took an oath!" "To Ostia. Not to you. You lost to Bern once. I won't let you throw the people's lives away again." "And my daughter's life?" "Is in your hands. Move carefully, Hector."

     A handful more wyvern riders take flight from other parts of the city, turning their attention from the loyalist remnants to you. Their jousting dives come with tons of weight behind them, predictable but fast and crushing, and they have a nasty habit of ganging up on easy-looking targets. With them circling behind and above, and Leygance's forces in the castle, it's an ugly hammer-and-anvil.

     Lucius burns one out of the sky with his laser-like magic, but then he has to duck into an alley to dodge reprisal; Sue can exert a bubble of safety against them with the threat of her arrows, but she can't keep two at bay.
Ru Li Cheng      "That does not matter," Ru Li says firmly as Hector tells him he's fine, "What matters is that I said I would protect you, and I will. I do not care if you do not need it - you understand that much, do you not?"

     His head tilts at Odette. "I will be counting on you, then."

     He wheels after Hector furiously as Roy gives them an opening. There's a brief wave of the hand as he goes as thanks, enough not to distract them.

     "She is barricaded within," Ru Li confirms as Hector answers Petra, "I see her."

     Ru Li wheels through the opening behind Hector, grabbing a piece of the shattered door. He tears it off with the shrieking of metal, but it comes apart easily.

     That prepares him for the Wyvern Riders. Sort of. It's no sword, but it's something he can grab onto in both hands and use as a shield, and, if necessary, a pointed tip for piercing.

     This is a war. It is glorious, isn't it, Ru Li? This is what you wanted to be. A hero. There are gods made for this, and you are not one of them. For you, here, as you fight against men with spears and monsters with teeth and tails, parrying them with a block of ruptured door, this is not a job. This is not a duty. This is excitement.

     The thoughts in the back of his mind leap unbidden as he drives a spear aside, only to have it cut just across his face, in a mirror of what happened to Hector. With another grinding of gears and straining of springs he grabs the spear from the hand of the soldier, ripping it away easier than taking a toy from a child. With the other hand, he drives the wooden stake-

     -into the man's shoulder. He hasn't reached that point. Not yet. Not where blood is exchanged for glory.

     Has he?

     He spins the spear above his head between his fingers, driving aside the last wyvern near him as it claws against his side. Silver blood mingles with gold blood as it drips down onto his robe. He releases a hiss of actual steam and presses the spear against the ground, vaulting his chair backwards over the door and landing with a *thump* inside next to Hector.

     "I can give her a way down before anything happens," he says to Hector, and then pulls the spear back. His arms ache. They scream. They're hissing. They're burning. Literal steam is pouring out of his body, scalding hot, too hot for people to get near, as he winds up. As the pressure builds in his arms. As the force builds in his springs.

     "Be ready to catch her."

     He releases the spear with an eruption of steam and some very literal flame, directly upwards. More than the force of a train this time - genuinely enormous strength, straining his already-aching body heavily. The force of it may even knock some people around. Certainly some furniture.

     But the spear is aimed to punch through the tower floors (all of them), to give Hector's daughter a way to jump down without risking an execution by the guards outside, and to give her a place to land safely.
Aidan Proudpick It's awe-inspiring. To watch Hector turn into a charging train. To burst open the door, to charge forward, to demand his daughter. To watch Petra immediately charge in, demanding to know where to go to save someone.

And to watch the dead rise. Aidan watches silently as they get back up. And then he slowly nods.

"One last chance to do something. One last chance to save yer people. To fight." He looks over at Trudy Grimm. "And you ain't forcing them, are you? They got a choice."

A slow nod of understanding. A smile on his face. "It's kinda romantic in a way. If ya think about." He tilts his head towards Trudy in respect, only to find the cavaliers coming in. Claws dig into the side of the building. Spears weave and jab around Aidan as he scrambles up. A spear head drags along his leg, pushing across the flesh, making him drop back down. His body rights itself in mid air, dragging, twisting the hips, moving his tail, until Aidan hits the cobbles with ease.

"One last chance. For Home and Hearth!"

It's the same trick as before. If it worked once, it should work again. Walls, wind walls leaping up from the ground around the square. Just high enough to muck up any horse pushing through them.

And give the risen dead a chance to make their final heroic act.
Alucard There's some coordination, it's good. Alucard is a little surprised at how well the teamwork is going. It's not quite on the well oiled machine that he, Trevor and Sypha were, but he sees glimpses of it. The half-vampire kicks the ground with his leading foot, skidding backwards on the soles of his boots, wrenching his sword free of the wyvern he ran through, the beast collapsing in a bloody heap. He flicks his sword to the side, the beast's blood flinging to the ground. It's then that he catches Hector grabbing Devias by the head and smashing it into the wall. He tenses, remembering his father doing the same to him, and, well.

Wyvern riders.

One dives, punching clean through his torso with a spear and pinning him to the wall. Blood gouts from his mouth in a grotesque display, and his sword goes flying from his hand, clanging to the ground. He bares his fangs, gritting his teeth against the pain. Golden eyes lock on the rider, his gaze clear and coherent despite his impaled state. He grips the haft of the spear and starts to push. Wet, sucking sounds come from his wound as he, through brute strength, begins to push wyvern and rider back. Indeed, as the spearhead leaves his body, the rider can watch his wound close. Muscle, vicera and skin knit cleanly and quickly. Alucard's eyes glitter dangerously. He pushes back, stepping to the side, giving the spear haft in his hands a ruthless twist and pull, stealing it from the rider.

With deft hands, he twirls the spear so that it's pointing the right way. The wyvern rider starting to, correctly, panic. The wyvern starts to rise, and Alucard jumps. Naturally, he can jump almost a dozen feet. Then, in midair, he jumps again, the suggestion of feathered wings throwing him further upwards.

Then he jumps again.

In a streak of blue, Alucard rockets upwards. Higher than the wall. Higher than the tower. His coat ripples like wings behind him as he twists in midair, angling the spear downwards, letting gravity take hold. Then, for a little extra oomph, he uses the Gravity Boots in revers, hurling him downwards at an incredible rate of speed. The spear will disintigrate on contact, the paving stones will powder, and the soil beneath will crater.

What will happen to the wyvern and rider?
Madeleine Cadrasteia     "Yo."

    "Rider!" Madeleine says, kicking a dead archer off her spear. "I don't believe we're acquainted. Maybe when we get that feast we'll have to catch up. For now, want a lift?" Drogrung's serpentine tail unfurls from the butt of Madeleine's spear, draping over the city-facing side of the vacated battlement and coiling against the wall. Madeleine waits a few seconds for Geats to take a shot, then gestures for the Rider to take her free hand while she steps over the edge.

    The very moment she does so, Drogrung shoves off from the wall as hard as it can - and immediately discorporates as Madeleine untethers herself from gravity. Acceleration equals force over mass, catapulting the duo (trio?) forward across the city at a truly astonishing speed, toward the tower Madeleine saw Hector pointing at a minute ago. She twists around in the air to crash backwards through a window, landing in a somersault with her spear ready in one hand and Geats still held by the other with the sort of death-grip that comes from soaring halfway across a city on pure momentum.

    The whole point of towers is that people usually *can't* enter through the window, so any guards inside probably have their attentions turned groundward. Even those who aren't will be short work for a legendary huntress and a Kamen Rider, surely?
Trudy Grimm     "To think Sir Hector was concerned about fighting without his axe," Trudy thinks out loud with a laugh. The brutal trail he's left through the city is proof enough that every piece of this man is terrifying. He hasn't used his weapon even once.

    When he smashes open the castle doors with a corpse, that exchange with Leygance is about when the Black Knight finally catches up to him. The silent warrior comes to a stop beside Hector, greatsword in hand. When the threat is issued not towards Hector's life or entourage but to a prisoner and hostage, the Black Knight's grip tightens and pulls his sword into an angle more parallel to the ground.

    He stalks forward, hefting his weapon up onto his shoulder, absolutely heedless to the formation of spearmen gathered around Leygance himself. This leaves him open, of course, to being impaled from every conceivable angle; but the Black Knight does not stop until he is close enough to bring his colossal sword down on Leygance himself.

    Trudy is still outside, though, contending with soldiers and wyverns and commanding her recently reanimated troops while the sickening green light of Eiwaz glimmers off the walls and streets around her. When the wyvern riders take to the air, they can almost seem the shape of the rune itself, a glistening greenish stain on the streets of Ostia that reflects the form of Eiwaz, the Death Rune.

    Dive-bombing wyverns and riders with spears and lances scatter formations of reanimated dead. Archers fire back as best they can. The wyvern that dives Trudy directly almost impales her, save that she dove away in time, leaving only some of her blood on his weapon. The second to dive on her isn't so lucky.

    She hesitates, flat on her back, staring up at the great reptile as it descends. Her eyes flit to the side for a heartbeat, then back. At just the right time, she rolls to the left. Her shadow remains, an inky black pool of expanding shadow. The wyvern and rider, intent on crushing her in a heavy landing, have no time to stop and instead sink soundlessly into her shadow.

    An instant later, both mount and rider surge out of the shadow cast by the wall of a building, directly into the opposing wall of another building, with a thundrous crash.
Desire Stars <J-IC-Scene> Madeleine Cadrasteia says, "Hey Rider, want a lift?"
<J-IC-Scene> Ace Ukiyo says, "Geats. Give me a second to make a shot."

    Geats places one foot on the merlon of the wall, bracing himself. He pulls at the butt of the Magnum Shooter, extending the gun into a--

                                     RIFLE!                                      

    He pulls back the weapon's red charging bolt, causing a buildup of energy at the muzzle as he shoulders it.

                                 BULLET CHARGE!                                  

    His red-orange lenses look through the rifle's scope. Blue sky fills the scope, clouds racing past the notched crosshairs until the rangefinder markings briefly hold the beating wings of a wyvern. Up, down, up, down... "Got you now," the Rider smugly muses, before pulling the trigger.

                             RIFLE TACTICAL SHOOT!                              

    A lance of red light pierces the sky, heated air displaced and setting his shoulder-cape to billowing behind him. The searing bolt races towards the wyverns menacing Lucius and Sue, in a called shot meant to hit the wing of one and pierce through to the other.

    "Just in time," says Geats, stepping off of the wall and turning to Madeleine as he lowers the rifle. Behind him, Ru Li's spear crashes through the tower. "Our friend in there could probably use an escort."

    The skies aren't totally unfriendly--Shanna has help from Na-Go in dealing with that remaining wyvern rider. She isn't the trained flier that Shanna is--but her unpredictability in the air works to her advantage.

    Her means of flight is also her weapon, which she uses to try and chip away at the wyvern's tough hide from behind, demonstrating impressive upper body strength in pulling herself up to threaten the rider with side kicks. If they won't give chase to Shanna, then Na-Go has resolved to corral them towards her anyway by giving chase to *them.* All of her harassment is in service of that--in driving the beast and rider towards Shanna, keeping their attention on herself until Shanna can capitalize.

    Meanwhile, Geats crashes through the window with Madeleine, landing in a tuck and roll once her grip releases. "Now," says Geats as he rises, to bring the butt of his rifle swiftly into any guards not bowled over by Ru Li's spear, "Here comes the highlight." A quick turn of his head towards Lilina.

     "The fastest way out is down." Ru Li has seen to that! "Need some help?"
Odette Raskins "I-is that how curses work...?" Odette sounds skeptical about Hector's reasoning, but she's a little more receptive to the idea of curses now than before. Only a little, but the testimony encouraging her to think otherwise certainly helps. Before she can probe further, however, a wyvern rider divebombs Hector, and she lets out a frightened scream before grabbing a chunk of broken masonry from nearby to hold onto for self-defense.

It's only after she raises it overhead does she realize that the grotesque crunching noise was probably Hector breaking that wyvern, and she gawks at him a little bit longer before realizing that Roy's still engaged in combat with the dismounted rider. Without skipping a beat, Odette winds up, and she hurls that messed of brickwork at the rider's knee from the side to try and blow it out for Roy to capitalize on before sprinting after Ru Li. "R... Right! H-here, I got a..."

She can barely get out words with how anxious she is about everything going on, but Odette still manages to aim another one of her helpful(?) medical patches. Whether it'll actually work on Ru Li is another story, but that's something she'll have to figure out later.

Afterwards, Odette looks over as she hears Na-Go shouting, then reaches into that medical bag again while she tries to remember how it was that Na-Go and Geats had posed with their own devices earlier. Her hand grasps the Desire Driver inside, and part of her is terribly tempted to put it on so she can fight alongside everyone, but...

That wouldn't be the best way for her to help here. She still has to try and keep as many people alive as she can, and she's reminded of that role all too quickly as she hurries along to keep up with all of her allies. Missing limbs, broken bodies, and just a whole bevy of combatants with both internal and external bleeding show up in the wake of Lilian doing something she still has yet to comprehend, but it's almost... Beautiful?

Beautiful in a terrifying way, but still beautiful even if Odette can't follow what's actually going on beyond that staticky ripple and the dust leading to so many wounded soldiers. The way Lilian poses and moves is so different from how Lucius and Hector fight, and the way all three of them behave could barely be more different, but...

It's the smell of blood hitting her nose that gets the EMT's head back on track, reminding her that she's still here for something besides ogling her allies. While she checks on literally unarmed soldiers, however, Odette is faced with another problem: Won't Bern's soldiers and the Ostian traitors just attack her and her friends from behind if she helps them out now? They might very well bleed out and die if she doesn't treat them, but she can't risk her allies getting caught in a pincer attack if she tries to help these guys out, too.

Luckily, she's actually planned for this problem in advance: A second set of patches! When applied to the wounded enemies, those patches will still do a great job at disinfecting and cleaning up those wounds so the soldiers don't bleed out. Unlike the patches meant for her allies, however, these have rather potent dose sedatives in them to help soothe the pain more  quickly and knock them out. Her allies get the stuff without the sedatives, of course, to help them stay in the fight without messing with their heads.
Odette Raskins Even while treating the fallen combatants, however, Odette doesn't get a break from the wyvern riders. She only manages to get her open hands up in a sign of 'not a threat' before she has to scramble and scream reflexively, hurling herself into blasted holes in nearby buildings and those wyvern-shaped craters that Hector seems so skilled at making just to not get crushed or impaled herself.

One particularly stubborn rider even slams an axe into the ground right in front of her, inches away from cleaving through her leg, and she kicks along the ground to get away from it before letting out another unheroic noise when a second wyvern rider spots an easy target and comes for her head. She flattens herself against the ground to keep said head, then latches onto the weapon itself with all her might and body weight in a desperate bid to wrench it out of their hands and survive a little bit longer!
Angela Tennant briefly considers busting down the barred room with Hector's daughter in it but it seems dangerous to aim this gun at anything but living enemy targets. It would be pretty tragic if the blast from Magic Bullet ripped through Hector's kid!

They follow after Lilian since a major objective of any LobCorp Agent is to support The Dame Commander to the best of their ability and also Tennant is accustomed to following the whims of rich ladies with an almost religious fervor. A wyvern rider comes javelin first and Tenant catches the javelin with Magic Bullet's stock and flips them over the back of the wyvern and into the ground, following up with a blast to the face with bullet #3. That leaves three bullets left, Tennant thinks, but they don't have to tell the enemy soldiers.

They blow black and blue smoke out of their pipe and through their nostrils.

They come upon a door.

"Ah, Lord Hector, let me try and--"

Hector smashes through a door with a human body.

"Looks like you have it, sir." Tennant continues fluidly without even a break in their dialogue.

Leygance.

''To Ostia. Not to you.''

"Now that's not right." Tennant says. "It's not like Hector changed. If you swear an oath to someone you can't get all legal about it, that oath has to originate from your heart and encompass your whole being." Their eyes shine with a hint of madness. "It is that dream of your lord's that you follow, how can that dream continue on if you murder someone still harboring that dream."

They crouch down and take im. Leygance threatens Hector's daughter but Tennant is unconcerned.

Petra's on it. That means she's as good as saved.

The Magic Bullet is roaring hotly in Tennant's hands as they unleash another dark blast out from the rifle towards Leygance, aiming dead square for the center of their body. Two bullets. They'll fire one more shot to follow the first. One bullet.

MEANWHILE

Ceri sighs, looking at her rapier.

"..." She looks at Sanguine Desire. "..." She looks at her cane.

"They're disorganized, Ceri." She tells herself to try and convince herself to not go in against the orders she's been givne. "Rest up now and you'll be in top fighting shape soon. Just wait patiently... You can do this, Ceri." She can hear the sounds of rifle fire in the distance. "...I really wanted to try those pastries..."
Lilian Rook     Fighting on the streets is different than fighting in the wilds. Without a plan is different than simply surrounded by Elites with none. People's homes are to either side. Civilians could be anywhere. One side is wearing the other side's colours. Everything turns into a dead end, a choke point, or an open firing range. And every instant Lilian spends figuring it out, another loyal man of Hector's might be dead.

    Men in Ostian livery draw arrows on her. Lilian vanishes before they even reach her. Bows shatter with along with wrists and helmets. A man falls from a roof skewered just below the diaphragm. Lilian neatly sidesteps a fireball from her blindspot, and stares the caster down in side profile while the thermal whips her hair around her head. The second one parts around her sword, only twenty feet away, and the point erupts from the inside of the book into the man's shoulder. She strikes him in the head with her elbow, then twice, and once more.

    Lilian thinks back to the Agents that didn't even get to help her. Those who rushed to her aid and were turned to red mist on the spot. Because she had her hands full. Because she hesitated, and believed. She remembers Shajo hurling herself at Gebura's leg.

    On the street, a line of spearmen charge her, and Lilian's wild gaze dissects the line apart in short stopgap advance of her blade; the sword whirls through halfs and heads as if it were only pulled along behind the green zigzag light trails leading it. A surprise attack from the adjacent alley tumbles out on the street, covered in blood and smouldering broken armour. She vanishes from out of the crater of a magic blast, and falls back down with another soldier crushed in her trembling grasp, holding tightly until he goes limp.

    She is dimly aware that her muscles burn, but is growing used to it. She hears impact across the street, and skips off the roof three blocks over to kick the wyvern's wing, twirling it around in the air and cleaving its head clean off, riding it down to crush the rider beneath it. She looks for the cornered loyalists.

    Lilian thinks back to the Harpoonists aboard Union Busan, picked off in the first few moments of the migrational crossing before she even realized they were in combat. Those brave and desperate men and women who vowed to risk their lives to save their homes, and the unlucky few who were carried screaming overboard without even getting to swing their blades once. She recalls, clearly, the few she had picked from the patrol boats, pulled from the crimson-stained teeth already gorging on their comrades; alive but two seconds before.

    A rider barrels down on her from above, and makes a direct charge at her this time. Lilian resists the urge to square her footing and stare him down, waiting for him to come into attack range; even if Lycia is under attack by Bern's greenest recruits, a rider is a rider, and they've won so far for a reason. She rolls away from the lance, slashing defensively at the talons that pass over her and sliding onto her back, sword braced. Blasts of magic sail after the rider as he climbs again, until she accepts that he's too far to lead accurately.

    When he comes down again, Lilian's boot touches the wall and her knee strikes his head, and both of them go rolling over the flagstones. She lays into him with her fists until the wyvern's scraping and beating of its wings tells her that it's halted, and she meets its charge with another technique that takes it apart above the shoulders. Its bulk slams into her as it collapses at speed, throwing her against the wall.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel endures one hell of a jousting dive that catches him completely off-guard during his anti-air fire. He can never catch a break! Not from steeds, anyway. His focus is smashed, his telekinetic grip releases, and he's tossed around. By the time he's back on his feet and focused, that familiar gleaming white light is spilling from scrapes and cuts.

    The others are handling rescue operations. What's happening just inside the inner castle gate is something that Flamel is much more suited to address. Who's this Leygance fellow? Flamel doesn't know, but it sounds like what's going on is a lot more focused and idealistic than some kind of ambition. It's more worth shouting, and more prone to causing it. "Stop! This isn't what you're taking oaths for! You're not serving Ostia by allying it with people who burn noncombatants to death and field those horrible monsters!" He calls out, planting two fingers firmly on his temple and reaching a hand out. Eyes shine bright behind those sunglasses, but what he's doing isn't very clear from the outside...

    For this one, he recognizes that armor that heavy isn't going to be very good for his skirmishing spy tactics. Better, instead, that he cast himself -- and Hector -- into the outer layers of Leygance's mind, where Hector can work directly without the implicit threats activating. Hector needs to save his daughter, most of all! It's impossible to know what he's about to do before he does it, and hopefully Hector will know what to do to fix this guy's mind without messing up his suspicions in the real world! From the outside, since this is only an outer-layer push, it should just look like a slight defocusing of the eyes...

    Yet again, Flamel wishes he had Lugh here to help. Dang!!
Lilian Rook     When two more coordinate their charges against her at the same time, Lilian is forced into breaking two lances in the same impossible motion, striking one man with the pommel and half-swording into the other man's armour to unseat him, even as sharpened steel graces her face and the haft cracks on her armoured waist. She pursues into the air to catch the first before he can find another target. She stands over him, steaming lightly, wicking sweat into the high-altitude breeze, and brings the sword down with both feet on his mount.

    Lilian thinks back to the words she'd heard from Miyamomo. Only a piece of throwaway instruction, meant for other Elites; lesser ones. She'd clung to it ever since anyways. 'Have you ever held your stance for an entire day and night? No? Imagine then fighting for so long.', to that effect. She thinks of her own master's words; why even the legendary Hound of Chulainn went to battle with an army of his own.

    For the ten-thousandth time, Lilian thinks about the power she'd refused for the sake of love, and puts it out of mind. It'll hurt more to let her pulse slow down than it will to stop pushing so hard. She leaps to the rooftops, where two men are locked in a blade-to-blade bind, and . . .

    ......

    Lilian's storming steps into the castle are heard before they arrive. A door crunches somewhere nearby, and an armoured plate hits an opposite wall without its owner. A bloody handprint smears the bannister she vaults, rubbed off the spatter coating most of her armour. The echoing clack of each footfall becomes clear as gunshots as she ploughs towards Hector. Cursed or not, she can't leave the Lord of the castle to fight for himself against superior odds a second time.

    'To Ostia. Not to you. You lost to Bern once. I won't let you throw the people's lives away again.'

    "So if I take your head, then you should have no complaints about who's in charge, right?!" It'd be easy to believe the cold rage behind Lilian's threat caused the nearby tile to crack, but it was only her landing there. "If you don't, Lord Hector, I will." Lilian heaves, nearly out of breath, but not enough to be more encouraging than her appearance is frightening. "I promised you that three or four dragons shouldn't be a problem. These gutless, boot-licking animals won't even grovel loud enough for you to hear." she says, and looks directly at the regent's assembled guard.
Blemishine     With Ostian soldiers in a fighting retreat, Blemishine can breathe a sigh of relief - it's difficult to strike without killing even in a situation that's not as chaotic as this. With the way far less painful to traverse now, she can turn and begin sprinting down the avenue to catch up with Hector and company - just in time to see sights like 'Lilian descending from on high' and 'Hector outright chucking a man through the inner gate'.

    "And Miss Lilina's trapped in her room, is she...?" Her eyes drift up in the direction of the tower, but there are plenty of others better suited for scaling that height than her. And indeed, Hector himself will be fine after all, given the terms of this particular battle! And being a human force of nature. That means the best place she might be is...

    ...right here on the streets of Ostia. Those eyes of hers can see Bern's wyvern riders ascending into the sky, after all, making it good that at least /some/ of them were prevented from taking off. That just leaves the rest.

    In the interest of ensuring the rest of their retinue don't get overwhelmed by the attacks from on high, Blemishine heads off to join up with some of the others! It just so happens that she moves towards the source of some of the arrows launching skyward - which takes her in the general vicinity of Sue.

    And while she can't stop two at once, Blemishine can lend a hand to fix that particular issue - as while the mounted archer is focused on staving off some, she sidelines another! A leaping jump higher than any normal human could make, to throw herself and her shield in the way of a falling spear stab.

    With a resonating, arm pain-inducing clang of metal on metal, that sends her back down to the ground but saves Sue from having to worry about them for a second. "Pardon me...! You looked like you wouldn't mind an extra hand or two around here!"

    Which is to say, she'll be doing her part to make sure that bubble of safety turns into a safe spot of iron defense; when those golden eyes of hers track the rider coming back down for another strike, with all its overpowering predictability, she gets one up on them by waiting for that deadly dive to encroach in-- and then duck low, scrape against the spear tip with her shield in a sparks-flying parry, and then swing out to throw their weapon arm off-balance.

    And seal the deal with a stab upwards to impale the rider, leaving the wyvern itself to actual archers after.

    She'll be at this sort of thing for a bit, probably.
Dysnomia     While some put themselves on rescue duty, Dysnomia joined the combat itself. "You've decided that Bern's victory is inevitable." Mia found herself beside Hector, facing up against that other mountain of a man. "You've decided that fighting would spill unnecessary Ostian blood...You think he's just another conqueror you can appease. You don't understand what that man is like." A sigh. "Maybe you'll never get the chance..."

    "...Hector. I'm your air support. They won't reach you." Unspoken was the assurance that Hector would have his chance to settle things with his former ally, without distraction. A small legion of wyverns rising into the sky didn't seem to dissuade her. She bent her knees, and then propelled herself into the air, leaving a trail of violet behind her.

    Her suit's flight functions weren't enough...Not for a force like this, not like she'd like. So, she allowed herself to loosen up, becoming a sharp streak through the air--this high up.

    They were trained for aerial combat, but the air was part of Dysnomia. There was a noise like a thunderclap, an arc of electricity leaping rapidly from the head of that swirling violet line in the sky to the wyverns it ducked and dove around--and then another, another, spears loosing from her hand into jagged lines of plasma piercing through wyvern after wyvern--and when their lances turned on her, she met them head on, taking the wound through her midsection--closing as quickly as it had opened--and tore through them with burning fingers too far from the ground to see as claws.

    And the riders in the air that did see it? Dysnomia had no intent of allowing to live.
Petra Soroka "In the castle. Might be in her room."

    Petra hisses quietly, mostly inaudible in the din of combat, "I knew it." Hector is a marquess, so his daughter is a princess, or lady, or something along those complicated nobility lines that Petra doesn't quite understand, and that means that she gets imprisoned in a tower. Lilian was effectively imprisoned in her room back then too, but Petra didn't have the means to just crash through the walls back then and solve the problem.

    Petra lets herself reflect fondly on the opportunity to rescue a princess from a tower prison for just a moment before actually putting into motion the actions to do so. "Got it. I'll get her to the wagons. It's important, so I'll do it." The oddly banal statement is delivered with enough determined sincerity that she obviously means it, but the particular dimension by which she means it aren't really clear. In her mind, though, she's decided that Lilina is the person around whom the narratives and morale of this sub-arc revolve, so it's necessary to save her or the mood after this battle will crater and make Lilian really unhappy-- also, she's a figure of interest to Petra, because even a three-step-removed relation makes her more important than any of the other faceless soldiers on the Ostian side.

    Rather than entering the castle properly, Petra clicks the empty FullBottle into the underside of her transteam gun and swings it through the floating morphmetal to re-collect it. At the end of the arc, fully extended out to her side, Petra squeezes the trigger, enveloping herself with black glittering smoke that explodes with the callout of S-S-Silver! Clad in her black and yellow armor free-flowing with morphmetal, she crouches and then leaps up twice through the air to half the height of the tower that Hector pointed out.

    Robotic propulsors on the back of her armor's calves flare to life, keeping her hovering in the air as a wyvern rider flies at her. Rather than dodging, she matches their charge with a spear of her own, formed from the trickling silver in the moment before collision, slowing the enemy joust enough that she can tackle them midair. She wrestles with her grip before getting the leverage to brutally slam the pair of rider and wyvern down as hard as she can into the castle rooftop, throwing herself upwards with another jet pulse to crash through the side of the tower along with Madeleine and Geats.

    Rather than going through the already broken window, though, she smashes straight through another wall, tumbling to the ground in a cloud of stone and dust before popping back up to her feet. The closest guard is simply grabbed by the collar and backhandedly hurled out of the hole she punched through the wall, clearing her way to Lilina. Petra exhales heavily through her mask, and then kneels down with both her arms outstretched in offer for a princess carry.

    Flooded with adrenaline, it takes her a moment to remember to use her words, and when she does, they're the wrong ones. So, kneeling there in full armor, having almost certainly just killed two soldiers consecutively, Petra belatedly says, "...'Sup?" She recovers quickly, at least. "Uh, we've got the army outside the walls. I'll get you there safe, alright?"

    She looks up at Ace, "She's hurt, and I can do gentle landings." Flinging herself through a stone wall notwithstanding. "We don't want to jostle her around too much or it'll get worse."
Marigold      Lucius waves to Geats as he emerges from cover; Sue might nod as she gallops off, but it's hard to tell. Regardless, one good deed is quickly repaid with two more: this is a game of pressure, and the fewer wyvern riders prowling the skies, the more easily they can pick off the remainder.

     The wyvern-riders that have good sense start to realize they're overmatched. The ones that don't have mostly been dispatched, with gentleness ranging from 'love-tap' to 'visceral atomization'. The amount of blood on Ostia's roofs starts to approach the amount on its streets. With a shouted signal from what must be their squad-leader, they wheel and try to retreat; whether Mia, Blemishine, and Alucard are mercifully inclined to allow them is a different matter.

     Of course, nobody would give up on a "willingly"-"surrendering" capital so easily. That can only mean there are more Bernish forces in the wings.

     "Dreams?" Leygance scoffs. "Who filled your head with ideas like that? You don't know the absolute power Bern wields. We should be thankful for anything less than absolute defeat." "Doesn't look too absolute right now, Leygance." "Tch. Mind your daughter's position, old fool."

     Lilian's entrance and emotionally-scorched hiss makes Leygance recoil, though he tries not to show his discomfort. Rutger emerges from a side-passage, already drenched in blood; they barely look at Lilian before nodding. Wavelength. "This isn't about might makes right you murderous imbecile. But I wouldn't expect you to--"

     Tennant, sensibly, shoots him. The first shot damages his breastplate; the second he deflects off the flat of his axe. "Typical. Guards, kill them all." But his mob hesitates. "I SAID KILL THEM ALL, OR I'LL HAVE YOU HANGED!" That finally drives them into action. These are heavily-armored, well-trained men, but they're knights used to an open field, not formation-fighting soldiers.

     Leygance himself unspools the chain on his axe, but he doesn't get a chance to swing it: Hector nods to Flamel and lays a hand on his shoulder, and together they start to probe the general's mind, tugging on atrophied sympathies to hold him back. There just might not be enough good in his heart to fully disarm him.

     The girl that Ru Li sees to rescue- the girl that Madeleine, Petra, and Geats all crash in for- is crouching behind her bed and shivering in distress with two arrows in her back. Someone too cowardly or wary to enter the room has been firing on her through a little letter-slot in her barred-from-the-outside door, and as you enter, pounding footsteps outside flee.
Marigold      Blood aside, it's astonishing how like-and-unlike Roy the huddled girl is. They're like puzzle pieces that neatly slot together.

     After her initial yell of panic about the erupting spear, her voice is even a little like his: "You're... you're not with Leygance?" Her hands ball up over her chest in defensive disbelief; then she reaches out for Petra-or-anyone to help her up. Pain-bleary eyes search the faces of her rescuers. She puts enormous effort into straightening her expression. "If there's fighting, I... it'd be shameful of me not to help. Please, all I need is a tome."

     When Petra princess-carries her down, she holds on with a strength reminiscent of her father, then gasps at the bottom. "Father!! You're back!" "Lilina?! You're hurt, I--" The thing Hector wants most in the world is to rush over and embrace her, and a tense knight almost stabs him in the throat in his moment of distraction. Batting the spear aside jolts him out of it with a grunt of irritation.

     Leygance knows what her rescue means. He tenses. He doesn't tense enough. Hector hurls his greataxe across the room after parting the crowd with his dreadful wind-up, and it clobbers Leygance in the head. The man-who-would-be-marquess slumps back against his throne.

     Hector stomps forward, heedless of the intervening knights. His hand punches through the Tennant-weakened part of Leygance's breastplate, rips it off from inside, and then- "HECTOR! You'll doom us--!"- drags the axe down from Leygance's helmet through his weakened armor to bisect him.

     Blood runs down the throne's legs. The fight isn't quite over, but he heaves a deep, deep breath.
Ru Li Cheng      Lilina is saved. Ru Li's arms dangle like those of a broken doll, hanging over his wheelchair. The flesh is open in several places to allow steam to vent forth in blasts of superheated electrum-colored air. Underneath those panels the divine clockwork and springs coiled and wound into his flesh tick and grind amidst the bursts. He breathes, slowly, exhaling more of that superheated air once he's sure the girl's been rescued properly, once he sees her and Petra land.

     A knight comes at him. He's in no shape to defend himself with anything held in his arms, and he's lacking weapons. At best he could raise his arms and-

     -and raise his arms.

     So the knight comes at him, and Ru Li raises his arms and exhales. Steam, hot and shimmering, tasting of metallic gold and quicksilver, strikes the knight's face. His hands reach forward to grab the man's head.

     His palms open.

     The inside of that helmet is not a pleasant place to be. It will probably not kill him - but it will not be fun for the man trying to attack the Yinghua god.
Alucard Alucard, upon landing and cratering the ground, leaps backwards, extending his hand. His sword, which is no longer on the ground and has been picked up by a fleeing Bern rider, wrenches from the man's hands, cuts him deeply and flies back to the son of Dracula. He flicks the blood of the wounded man, and lets them flee. He will not be chasing them down. He has other things to worry about.

Like the traitorous guards.

Five of them come for him, and Alucard fends them off with his blade. For a moment, anyway. Five on one is still a challenge for Alucard. He parrys an axe blow, only to be speared in the back. This makes him stumble, letting another of the guard pierce his torso with a sword. He staggers, and the axe is driven downwards, buried in his sternum with a spray of dark blood. He wheezes, the traitors laughing and congratulating themselves.

The celebrate too soon.

Hidden in the wheezing is chanting in some old, terrible language. Black magical energy flickers through Alucard It bubbles and simmers until all at once it erupts into a tempest in a teapot, held back by only Alucard's will and his desire to make this punishing. His eyes glow briefly, and he releases the spell with a shout tinged with gurgled breathing.

"SOUL STEAL!"

The spell erupts, wrenching the lifeforce from everything it strikes. Somehow, this includes inanimate objects. Stones erode, wood decays, plants wither. People die.

Much of this energy is lost, fed to whatever terrible entity fuels Alucard's magic. Some of it feeds back into him, helping his wounds close, forcing the weapons free to clatter onto the ground.
Trudy Grimm     'Kill them' is such a direct and unambiguous command to give a squadron of soldiers. It's a bit less direct when the closest and most quickly-approaching enemy is the Black Knight. The first spear gets him in the side, sinks in with a series of snaps, and erupts out of his back through his shoulder blade. A second spear impaling his midsection with a screech of tearing metal. A third skips across his breastplate and bites into his left shoulder right under the pauldron.

    The Black Knight's approach slows as more spearmen sink their weapons into his armored body. Distressingly, he does not stop moving. Even when one of those spears pierces what should be his heart, it only slows him down with the weight of yet another man resisting his advance.

    The Knight keeps the guardsmen suitably occupied for Hector to go after Leygance directly. As the enemy commander slumps into the throne with an axe in his helmet, the Black Knight wheels his sword off his shoulder and wrenches his torso to one side, cleaving through the formation around him with both his greatsword and the shafts of all the spears lodged in his body. At the end of this arc, he cleaves in the other direction just to get any that he may have missed-- coming to a stop with the great blade perfectly parallel to the floor.

    After a moment, the Black Knight straightens his posture, swinging his blade forward and them ramming the tip into the stonework at his feet. With an almost dismayed motion, he starts dislodging one of the spears from his chest.

    Outside, Trudy regains her feet, testing the wound in her side with a frown. Forcibly neutralizing her expression, she looks aside at the building collapsing on the wyvern and its rider, then skyward as the remaining riders attempt to flee.

    The witch exhales, raising her bloodied hand and gesturing. The reanimated archers in the group who answered her call continue to harass the airborne Bernish troops. Those with lances, axes, or swords instead begin regrouping in the streets and moving on the areas where fighting is still active.

    "What a mess," Grimnir remarks from the wagon he's still inside. After a pause, he releases the curtain so that it falls back in place, leaning back on his seat while giving his beard a stroke, "Fortunate that we would have Hector with us, though. And fortunate that the circumstances allowed him to act. Heh..." His one eye closes, "A father and child... Put the child in danger and no force-- no man, no beast, no curse, not even the Gods-- could stop him."
Angela ''Who filled your head with ideas like that? You don't know the absolute power Bern wields.''

"I've been fighting absolute power since I was twelve." Tennant smiles dissonantly with the situation. "I suppose we didn't win, but... Isn't that the wonderful thing about media?" Tennant throws their arms wide. "THE MOVIES! In that landscape, absolute power can be defeated, in the movies you can save the damsel locked in the tower! In the movies, the old veteran can live thanks to the timely aid of a healer! Cinema! Is! Life! Just as Art imitates life, life imitates art!"

An axe drives into Tennant's arm, a spurt of blood bursting from the injury as their speech is interrupted by the embedding of a sharp object in their body.

They backpedal a little to open up some space. They only have one bullet left (outside of the fatal Devil's Bullet) so they best make the most of it.

"My friends... Servants of a kingdom... You...did not bring us a welcome home meal. Venison has been promised in the first act, this is the third!"

They brush their hair back with their bloodied hand when--

''Father!! You're back!''

Tennant knows what that means too.

"There, you see?! There, you see! The heroes rescue the princess! The long lost champion returns home! It is... JUST like the movies!! Isn't this wonderful?? Shedding my blood, shedding your blood...for moments as beautiful as this, gosh! Isn't it all worth it in the end? We have made the fantasy real today and all it took was a bit of fighting."

They fire one last bullet into the throng of knights.

"The final act." They say. "The heroes have overcome the trials in their path and your leader that has led you astray has fallen. Does Bern feel so invincible now? Certainly they will strike back! Ah, but you have a choice to fight on to an ignoble death... or you can seek..."

They thrust their fist into the air. "REDEMPTION! And wouldn't that be a beautiful story, my friends? Much more beautiful than dying over nothing! That's reality, but the fantasy... you can still choose fantasy. Wouldn't that be much more wonderful for everyone? For your home? For yourselves? Wouldn't that make... just make the epic fantasy that much more beautiful?"
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Madeleine grabs a tome from one of the shelves in Lilina's room and leaps down after Petra. Her landing is heavier, but she keeps on her feet well enough and is scanning the melee a moment later. She circles the room warily, looking for the right opening - there!

    Instead of pouncing into the fight, Madeleine takes only a short hop forward and jabs her spear into empty air. Drogrung's ghostly-reptilian head manifests around the weapon, and finishes the lunge, picking up a knight bodily in its enormous jaws. A spray of blood and the crunching of metal plates signals the warrior's demise, and the remains are cast aside, knocking another traitor-knight off balance. Madeleine is on him in a flash, sinking her knife-blade between metal plates and into his neck.
Aidan Proudpick Anger. Civil war is one thing. But this.

"You are standing against your HOME! Your own people CHOSE to come back from the dead to fight you!" Wind has been clearing a path for the risen dead to do their work, aiding Trudy in granting these people their final deed. "You'd turn against your friends?! Your own home?!"

Aidan isn't angry. He's begging, pleading. Blood pours on the floor. It runs like rivers, pushing up along Aidan's feet. He's never fought a war on this scale before. He's never had to just stand in a pool of people's blood as it laps up against his feet. The blood on Rutger's sword. The stench from the bisected man's entrails. But Aidan doesn't let it back him down. It just makes him pained.

"Don't make us do this! Just throw down yer weapons! Give up!" Men being boiled alive. This isn't the same as guerilla warfare.

Fingers grasp around the wind itself, a passing swirl of white turns solid as Aidan commands the wind. Both hands hold writhing arms of the wind itself in the castle and pulls them together, lacing them around one another. The wind in the castle shudders as Aidan displaces it, a sudden KRACOOM as he hurls a wave of wind and force at the line of knights, trying to simply get them to LIE DOWN.
Dysnomia     The closest rider to Mia never gets the chance to heed the retreat order. She seizes them by their breastplate and pulls them forcibly from their mount, only to let them drop, falling to the ground where the weight of their fall and their armor CRUNCHES on the pavement stones--a display she hopes demoralizes Bern's allies and rallies their foes. She doesn't stop there, carving death through their ranks until they've properly started pulling away, leaving Mia with no option but an extended pursuit.

    Her hands burn. For a moment, she watches the riders retreat, chewing on her lip, mist whirling uncertainly around her. She holds up her hand, and another jagged spear materializes. Dysnomia hefts it into the air and loosed, watched its charred body fall, turned to the next--

    --She lets her hand fall. She decides, I won't waste my time on them is the reason that she stopped.

    She lands in a dive, tattered cloak pulled around her. Her body had recongealed, and a teeming plasma whip lay in her hand, scorching the floor it touched black. "I see. The only kind of fight you can still have." Dysnomia breathed, not unsympathetic, for once. "A win that still feels like a loss."

    Her voice grew harsher, as she addressed the soldiers. "You bent to where the wind blew before. Do it again. Now."
Odette Raskins As Odette finally gets back up, she's able to take better stock of the situation: Leygance is being held at bay, and Hector's doing... Something? With Flamel. Petra brings down a blue-haired girl bleeding from her back, and her relation to Hector is made apparent through words and actions rather than an easily determined visual resemblance.

That settles what Odette has to do, then. She runs forward all of three steps towards Lilina before she sees a massive axe flying across the room, freezing up with her hands clenches right in front of her before staggering back from her sudden imbalance. She doesn't even try getting up until Hector has long walked right past her, and it's only a split second after Hector starts cutting right through Leygance does she look over and let out another horrified noise at just how bloody that winds up being.

Definitely no recovery from that one, but Odette has far more important people to worry about, anyway. First things first: Lilina needs medical attention! "M... Miss Lilina! St-stay right there. I'll get you fixed right up!"

There's still too many lingering wyvern-riders and knights in the area, though, and Odette's luck doesn't quite last when she's still winded from just trying to wrestle that axe out of one of the riders' grips. She manages to squeak by two axes coming her way via yet more panicked sprinting before she's caught square in the gut by the haft of a spear swung before she can recover from her last hop.

That single hit takes the wind right out of her, and Odette's back to scrambling across the throne room just to keep her distance a little longer. This is as good a time as any other to go with her last resort, but instead of slapping the Desire Driver against her waist...

She ends up pulling out a bottle instead. There's a brief moment of confusion as she looks down at what is definitely not a belt, but it works out just well enough for her to chuck the bottle full of acid right at the oncoming knight's helmet, aiming to burn right through it and delay his advance long enough for someone else to dispatch of the knight.
Desire Stars She's hurt, and I can do gentle landings.

    "Go for it," Geats says, with a little upnod of his helmet. "We've got your back."

    Geats transforms the rifle back into a handgun to free up a hand, then answers Lilina.

You're... you're not with Leygance?

    "Nope."

Please, all I need is a tome.

    "I'm fresh out of those," he says flatly. But, cover her and Petra he does, swiveling his Desire Driver so that the Magnum Buckle is on the opposite side. "But it looks like she has you covered. Now--here comes the highlight." A metal track, circular, appears behind him, and he makes a running cartwheel towards the hole.

                                  REVOLVE ON!                                  

    As Geats tumbles, his body shifts, armor reconfiguring itself so that the white Magnum armor is a set of greaves and sabatons rather than a cuirass and bracelets. With his back pressed against a supporting beam, he slides down the tower all the way to the ground floor. Every floor he passes with soldiers still in it is one that he fires into, his pistol hipfired to send weapons flying away as he zips past.

    Springing from the cross-section of tower at the last second, he sails across the throne room, landing in a slide that lets him feather the trigger. A swarm of white laser bolts fills the room, heralded by the barking report from the handgun as it bucks in his grip.

    Right when the momentum from his slide ends, he drives an elbow into the ground, sending him flying upwards--a scissor kick follows, seemingly aimed at the empty air. As his first strike flies, however, an ankle-mounted cannon extends, making the barking of the Magnum Shooter from a solo into a duet, and then a trio as the right leg enters. Lines of white-hot fire slam down the sides of the descent, ensuring a safe landing for Petra and Lilina.

    When they're safely down, he switches from keep-away to offense seamlessly, charging in up close to help Madeleine drop the rest of the knights. Where Drogrung fells them with jaws, he does so with furious roundhouses, their strength bolstered by timely bursts from those ankle-mounted cannons.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel Parsons' efforts make some headway, but not very much. He suffers the knights, and Leygance, and everything else. "Hector--?!" He calls out, in the moments before the axe turns the man into two half-bodies. One supposes he figured there was more connection between the two. Or, maybe, the involvement of Lilina took this to another matter entirely.

    He's knocked out of thinking about this by the difficult matter of evading a dangerous swing. "Ghhh!" This is accumulating bruises on him, knocking him about. Sure, the knights may be used to an open field, but Parsons is more used to spycraft conflict, not this! He'll do his best, though, and right now, his best is to use the two mental images he has in mind: Leygance, bisected, and Devias, his skull smashed to fragments. Sprinkled in, the mental image of the fleeing Bernish wyvern-riders. Like the hunger he used before, he can channel this into the minds of the knights.

    "Stop!" He's shouting. "The rest of you, pull back and think about it with a clear head! That's all you have to do, just for a few moments! Just step back and *think*, you can't give everything up for something like this!" The two leaders of the coup are both dead, and the enemy are fighting for nothing. And most of all... "Hector's back! *Stop!!*" When he beams it into their skulls with high-intensity orange bolts, it should break their will to fight. An advantageous tactic given the armor is still an issue.

    Really, at this rate, with how much armor he runs into here, he needs to pick up a tome or something. For now, he struggles to keep his footing, and he gets through, blasting as much as he can while he covers Hector near the throne. Better let that guy rest after all that.
Blemishine     The Bernish wyvern riders are smart, they can absolutely be given that; they know not to stick around and fight a losing battle that can be won by returning in greater force later. After extended fighting against the mounted fliers, she's got more than a couple of decent gnashes rent into her armor, ponytail disheveled and shield quite the worse for wear - but nothing that can't be hammered out and fixed later.

    As for the matter of their retreat... well, cutting down an opponent who has their back turned to flee isn't especially knightly. And although Blemishine styles herself as a better craftsman than a knight, she still isn't inclined to chase them down for the sole reason of ending them.

    Which leave the rider she's currently engaged with, preparing to fall away - she doesn't let him. Right away. As he readies to fly, she sprints forward in the interim and lands right atop his flying mount, atop its neck, where she can come down in a crouch and swing her blade for his throat--

    And pause it right before, inches away. "I would suggest reiterating to your squad commander, and them to your reinforcements, that Ostia won't fall so easily. They'd be foolish to try anything without plenty of preparation, now that the 'regent' has been ousted."

    "And try to consider what you're fighting for and if you should be there, when they return to get beaten soundly a second time."

    The sword to his neck is held for a moment, before it swivels to the side to tap against his shoulder in a vaguely threatening 'it would've been that easy' manner - and then she hops off to allow him to turn tail. There'll still be the remnants who're following Leygance's last orders to worry about, and she has to help subdue them. When in doubt... a bit of terrible-but-temporary blinding has never failed her in the past.

    It'll probably do just fine for this, too! And she'd be lying if she said she didn't want to hurry to rejoin Hector and triple-check on his continued safety. She's not sure how many more times they'll be able to get away cheating that curse out...
Lilian Rook     'This isn't about might makes right you murderous imbecile. But I wouldn't expect you to--'

    "It's about you having neither." Lilian spits. "Neither the strength to save your country nor the will to believe in it. It's an affront to all reason that you dare speak to the man who dragged himself out of the grave to save Ostia while you were burning it." Lilian steps forward regardless of Hector's wishes. Walking up to the mob of elite guards in the way, she punctuates her sentence with a swift blow from her clenched fist to a blue marble railing beside her, pulverizing the decorative head.

    "There is no justification, you worm. You're afraid! You were tested and you broke! Your tongue isn't worthy of shining a Bernish soldier's boots, so I'd suggest you hold it."

    'Typical. Guards, kill them all.'

    Lilian is fully aware that the men gathered into the room aren't actually drilled in fighting shoulder to shoulder with each other. She isn't a military strategist, but a thousand and one reminiscences of Aobheil's weigh on her mind, and so she chooses to believe that the fine arms and armour arrayed before her are the act of a desperate man simply gathering up his strongest soldiers to defend him personally.

    'I SAID KILL THEM ALL, OR I'LL HAVE YOU HANGED!'

    "Typical." Lilian barks in imitation of Leygance. "Another man who claims to bow to absolute power, but starts feeling lucky when it's standing right before him." She laughs, bitterly, when the men begin to move, and trails off into a breathy sigh completely at odds with how tensely she readies her sword. Loud disgust and quiet rage hold her grip in place where fatigue might undermine it. "Seascann Ceilte dá Coiscéim."

    So despite her anger, rather than crashing into them head to head and testing her resilience versus theirs, she feints a charge, diverts her momentum into the wings of the throne room, and seems to partially flank the formation between herself and the virtual presence of where she was just visible in the same instant.

    Trusting the guards aren't drilled in close-in tactics for dividing up watch and covering each other's flanks, Lilian strikes from the perimeter of their formation, weaves two or three men deep with her grip choked halfway up her blade, leaves a short trail of savage injuries piled on a handful of soldiers, and then slips away and vanishes again while they're still struggling to fight around one another, reappearing from the next most open front before the rest of the formation can see that she's already gone through the press of bodies.

    Swiftly moving from place to place, using both the architecture and the bodies of soldiers for cover, alternating her steps, varying up her pace, throwing out feint motions, and making heavy use of field of view restrictions and close quarters crush points, Lilian creates a very convincing illusion that she happens to be in several places at once, and practically overwhelming the entire guard on a military basis alone. Ordinarily, they might get used to it, and force her to change her strategy, but Hector is already--

    'HECTOR! You'll doom us--!'

    Lilian somehow looks relieved at the horrid wet crunch. Hector doesn't need to know that she was bluffing.
Petra Soroka "You're... you're not with Leygance?"

    Petra has only heard the name in Hector's drawn-out bellow, a tone entirely incompatible with the girl's tentative question. She carefully slides an arm underneath her knees, supporting her back with the other, then hoists her up and confidently declares, "I don't know who that is! I'm Petra; we're with your dad. It's alright now."

    One of the wounded wyverns outside careens out of the air and crashes into the side of the tower before falling to the ground, shaking their footing. Petra automatically slides her foot to widen her stance, dispersing the rumbling so it doesn't jostle Lilina in her arms. "Everyone's here." It's a bit of a non-sequitur, since Lilina doesn't know or have confidence in the Elites present like Petra does, but it's delivered with the air of unconditional reassurance.

    Petra drops down through the hole that Ru Li punched through all the layers of the tower, slowing her fall with a steady thrum of propulsor power. At this point, though she wouldn't have ever expected it, sticking a heavy landing while princess carrying a woman is a skill she's practiced thoroughly, and she touches down on a slanted piece of rubble at an angle to smoothly transition the momentum of falling into running down the slope. The morphmetal dripping off of her hangs in the air then gets caught up in the fluidly forming hexagonal grid encircling her, preemptively ready to deflect any arrows aimed at her.

    "Well, right now you're an objective, so don't worry about that." Petra sounds briefly like she's been talking to Neutron too much, but in reality, she's just honestly explaining her own thought processes. This probably says nothing about any similarities. "People are going to be more motivated by seeing you safe, rather than, like, barely managing to stay on your feet and forcing yourself to fight today."

    Hector's call out to Lilina once Petra carries her into the throne room drowns out her unnecessary "See?" and Petra is quick to keep moving when it seems like the fight is still going on. She's turned away to rush towards the door when the sound of Leygance's demise reaches her, and she pauses. It's plausibly safer inside the throne room for the moment, rather than rushing out where any number of straggling combatants could take a shot at Lilina, so Petra has the time to listen to Tennant.

"That's reality, but the fantasy... you can still choose fantasy. Wouldn't that be much more wonderful for everyone?"

    "You all know how this goes. Give up now and you can start fighting for the future you were too scared to bet on before, and that's just the best you can do at this point. Bern's not watching. There's no one to give you your fucking good boy points anymore. It's a more hopeful ending to not have to kill all of you."
Petra Soroka "M... Miss Lilina! St-stay right there. I'll get you fixed right up!"

    Petra had forgotten that was an option, rather than carrying her all the way back to the wagons. For some reason, Lucius stuck in Petra's mind as the primary healing resource for the army, even though she's fought beside the combat medic plenty often by this point. "Oh... let me...." She lays Lilina down in a safer corner for Odette's care, and then the morphmetal hex web peels away from around her to form a glimmering fence that cuts the medic and patient off from the fading battle.

    She doesn't actually leave the area, because she'd decided in her mind that the goal she'd promised was to get her back to the wagons, not just safe, but she does back away to rejoin the localized fray. Before doing so, though, she mentions, "That's Odette, by the way," as if that's the most immediate information to convey.

"A win that still feels like a loss."

    Petra gestures dismissively with her head towards the corpse of Leygance, shrugging. "Fuck that guy." It takes her a beat to remember the presence of considerably more Ostian corpses alongside him. "Well, uh, and the rest. Sorry, but they sucked. We won. It counts for something that we did, so you don't need to start shitting on the mood instantly, or you're gonna ruin the feast."
Marigold      "You-?!" The wyvern rider Blemishine's pounced on startles, at first, but doesn't take long to regain a spiteful edge. One hand slowly reaches for his sword while the other tugs the reins.

     "... If I told Galle that, he'd kill me. And I'd deserve it as a liar. Run. Maybe Etruria will take you."

     "Ah- thank you!" Lilina stifles a wince when she reaches out to take the tome from Madeleine- those arrows in her back are doing a number on her- and then prepares to wince when Petra lands, but looks surprised not to need to. She papers a grateful smile over it anyway, and the gratitude is sincere even if the smile isn't. "It's good to meet you, Petra. You seem like a very kind woman. But . . ."

     She clutches the tome to her chest with mild embarrassment. So she's one of those people who needs to feel useful. Did she grow up to be just like Roy, or did he grow up to be just like her?

     When Petra sets her down, she wobbles on her feet instead of laying, and flips to a page in her tome to conjure up a latent fireball in one hand as the assorted Elites menace too. "Please! There's no need to- oh, thank you Odette- to fight anymore!"

     Vivid displays of power and persuasive words cow the remaining knights; half of them lie groaning on the floor or (much, much) worse, and the other half are piled into Rutger's corner of the room while anxiously clutching weapons, because somehow between Hector, Lilian, the Black Knight, and everyone else, they feel like the least menacing presence.

     Dysnomia's right. Unlike the loyalists they were killing, these are all people who bowed to superior force before. They'll do it again. When Flamel loosens the first pair of hands from a spear and it clatter-clanks to the floor, more follow, like the pattering of rain. Shoulders slump in wretched defeat, and they eye their conquerors warily for signs of mercy or cruelty. Lilina sighs in relief and dismisses her fire, then tries not to look so shaky.

     "What's a movie?" one of them whispers, despondently, to another.

     "A fight against my own countrymen," Hector agrees with Mia. "Where even if I win, I've lost." He hadn't had it in him to menace his former knights even further; physically or emotionally, who can say. He looks drained both ways, awkwardly easing himself down in the manner of very large men to sit in front of the throne. He eyes the surrendering knights warily, but then: "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you," to Lilina's rescuers, those who'd protected him in the throne room, and everyone else respectively.

     He beckons Lilina over. As soon as she can worm out of medical custody, she jogs across the room to throw her arms around him. "Oh, I was so worried about you! They wouldn't tell me anything, I thought you were dead!" "Hah! Dead, me? ... Well, it's a long story. Lilina, I-" "Ow! Father, don't touch the arrows!" "Well where can I pat your back then? Inconsiderate of the archers, if you ask me." "Father... oh..."

     If you weren't here, she'd definitely cry. She might be about to anyway.

     "... They'll be back," he eventually says, around her shoulder. "I'll send more messengers to Etruria. And we'll need to get Durandal from its shrine. But that can wait... for just a minute."
Marigold      And: "Lilian," says a very gentle voice from behind her. One hand touches her shoulder, so as not to startle her. The other arm wraps around her waist after a second's pause to let her wind down from the violence, and a soft cheek rests against her back. "I didn't really understand. But... you were very, very gentle, I think. As gentle as anyone could be. Thank you for being the way you are."
Ru Li Cheng      Ru Li's arms slump again. The last of the heat vents. It's sweltering around him. It's like being in a sauna that tastes of the pipes themselves, if the pipes were made of rare and slightly poisonous metals. If he could sweat, he would probably be sweating. People in his vicinity probably are at least a little.

     It takes him a moment before he can actually muster the strength to wheel himself over to Hector and *not* be hot enough to burn someone. When Hector thanks him, he waves his hand. "Thanks are unnecessary. You are a man who has stood time and again with strength and courage and hon-...you do not need me to tell you these things. Merely, it is a privilege to be of use to you." Ru Li bows his head slightly, respectfully.

     Then, he says, "I apologize for your ceilings."

     A pause. A wry smile. He's clearly trying to make Hector smile, too, when he next says, "But not for your floors. They were somewhat filthy."
Alucard Alucard, reinvigorated a bit by the, well, stolen life force, staggers a bit as he feels his wounds start to close. He yanks the blade and the spear from his body, discarding them onto the ground. The axe is already gone. His wounds seal rapidly and soon enough, he's just a tall, pale man in a ruined shirt.

The coat, somehow, seems untouched. Magic.

He extends his hand, and his blade slings into it from afar. Smoothly, he sheaths it, and finally takes a look at the aftermath.

Wordlessly, he begins to gather weapons dropped by the dead, injured or those that have fled, starting the process of cleaning up.

After all, he helped make this mess.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's brain ejects concentrated mental images of death like they were overheated heat-sinks. *That's* not an OK tactic in 99% of cases. It's just not fine, broadly speaking, so he can't be doing that regularly and he definitely can't keep himself being the kind of person who does that.

    "No problem." Flamel lies, bleedingly, to Hector. He's not tremendously busted up, but it's just enough wounding to make that funny. "We need to get everyone private spaces to mentally decompress ASAP." He recognizes the probable outcomes right now. "But especially you two. Alright? Find somewhere private and I'll keep anyone from visiting for an hour or two. That was a *lot* to go through."
Odette Raskins Thanks to Petra taking Lilina over to her, Odette doesn't have to get far to actually treat her injuries! It's just a little awkward at first when she's struggling just to catch her breath, but a quick dose of painkillers and applying some foul-smelling salve from a bottle to her own injuries helps get her head back on straight before greeting the blue-haired girl with a fidgety wave.

"D-don't worry, I'll... Yeah, I'll get you patched up. Just hold tight and... Don't worry." Odette's feeling rather anxious about those arrows just being in there, but Lilina's brave face in trying to stop the fight instead of complaining about the injuries does give the EMT some more fuel to be brave herself. "You're really something alright... Y-your dad was really cool out there, too, so let's make sure he doesn't have to worry about a thing."

With her spirit ablaze, Odette makes sure she gets some numbing agents on Lilina's wounds on before getting to work actually extracting the arrows, cleaning the wounds, and closing them up with a combination of high-tech medical paste and old-fashioned suturing. A few more sprays to sterilize the area and a carefully applied bandage to cover it up later, and Odette will even release Lilina with a sigh of relief!

Not without following her out of that area Petra closed off, of course. She lets out a heartfelt 'awww' when she sees that reunion between Hector and Lilina, clutching her hands together lightly in front of herself as well. Coming out from that medical space also has her seeing the half of the soldiers that are on the floor, though, and the 'aww' that follows that is far less heartwarming.

That's about all the time she afford herself before getting right back to work on treating those that are still alive. Enemy or not, she'll probably be emptying out almost everything in her bag by the time it's all done.
Lilian Rook     The sight of the arrows in Lilina's back makes Lilian feel sick. The sight of Lilina herself is more of a sort of stunned vertigo, setting in between her looks and the fact that she's actually real at all. In fact as the soldiers surrender, Lilian watches Lilina climb up onto the throne as if she were a ghost, spoken of so many times without any realistic belief that she'd actually meet her.

    So when Hector speaks, and finds reserves within himself to joke, Lilian forgets herself just long to begin to smile. And when Lilina throws her arms around him, and he holds her in return, and Hector looks over her shoulder so tenderly as his daughter nearly cries in his arms, Lilian's smile becomes so dizzyingly fake that she suddenly has to lean on a pillar for support.

    'But that can wait... for just a minute.'

    'I'd be happier to have lost that coin flip that you people do.'
    "Of course. You're her father. Anyone would understand your priorities."

    Excusing herself away from their heartfelt reunion under the guise of politeness, Lilian begins looking around the final state of the throne room. Whatever joy that victory brings, and whatever relief at seeing her allies in one peace, all of it put together isn't the same as what she feels seeing the guards huddled in the corner with Rutger, away from her. The anger that had propelled her is all dried up. That sense of injustice that she'd felt; of four and fivefold betrayal, turned away from every door; tastes like ash in her mouth. The overpowering urge to shout her name for all to hear and cleave all of Bern in two only feels repulsive in retrospect. Everything she'd promised Roy comes back up from memory like vomit. Recalling her introduction, Lilian remembers the words she should have used with crystal clarity.

    'Lilian'

    Lilian flinches at Lucius' touch. He'd succeeded at not startling her; it only seems that she reacts to defend him from touching her instead. Because of all the blood? She--

    'Thank you for being the way you are.'

    Lilian squeezes Lucius in her arms, and buries her face somewhere past his neck that he can't turn and see.
Desire Stars      Na-Go touches down in the embattled streets, after the fighting winds down, entering the tower just in time to reveive Hector's thanks. Her helmet dips, briefly, in assurance.

     "I'm happy I could help," she says, and she is. The 'but' hanging in the air feels tangible. "I'm sorry I had to." She pauses, and then takes her Propeller Buckle from its slot on the Desire Driver. A pillar of blue light starts at her midsection, expanding up and down to envelop her completely. A black logo of her Rider avatar flips around to the front, and when the light is gone, Neon Kurama stands in Kamen Rider Na-Go's place.

     "Coming back from this will be hard, and expensive. I can help with both."

     "I'd be happy to help with that, too," Ace Ukiyo interjects. "Your corner of the world's a charming place. " He smiles smugly, striding up, hands in pockets. "And I'd love to try that flatbread of yours sometime." Two 'mercenaries,' offering to finance recovery? Maybe it's little wonder they don't seem keen on working for Roy or Guinivere. Or maybe there are things that all the money in the world can't buy.

     The both of them otherwise leave Hector to his reunion, still dressed for meeting with heads of state. Each takes their leave--Ace to help look for wounded survivors and Neon to check on Shanna.