Scene #9827: BINDING BLADE Ch65: Iðunn, Part Two

Owner	Pose
Marigold	There's a noise like a gunshot, and a plume of blood and glittering shards, as the Demon Dragon's whip-crack tail cuts through Roy's Blade, his arm, and most of his neck. The glowing arc fades just before it can descend, a miracle nipped in the bud. He drops, limp, along with the shattered hilt. The Demon's attention leaves him, not even bothering to savor the victory, and swivels back to you. . . . Twelve hours have passed. SOUTHEASTERN BERN In the Demon Dragon's wake. Evening has turned to a starry night lit violet by unnatural wildfires burning out to the horizon, and night has turned to a horridly bright morning. In that morning, stars still unnaturally burn as pinpricks against a day-blue sky, and a light snow falls in the absence of clouds. Those dark flames still rage across the mountains and the forests at the blue sky's edges. Here, at ground zero, everything is mercifully already black ash dusted white with snow. The Demon Dragon, at the center of everything, is now marred by a thousand thin glowing cuts from Divine Weapons about her legs, belly, and face. Her one green eye weeps, but if she could really feel pain, surely she'd be reduced to agonies. In reality she is deterred not at all. She stopped trying to fight you, in any determined sense, after the first hour; roughly when Brunnya's army was one-third torched and two-thirds fled. With the Dragon Temple annihilated and the lake enclosing its island boiled away, she has been trudging, slowly but steadily, into the northeast. Towards Bern's densely-populated capital, that is. Being harried by heroes is no excuse, it seems, to delay the extermination of the human race. Normal human beings cannot fight for twelve hours. Fighting at any level of intensity for one hour is already a nearly inhuman display of endurance. Cecilia's remaining soldiers, after the initial fiery massacre put to work in hewing back the oozing claws and teeth that grow from the long shadows cast by violet-burning trees, are drenched in sweat and trembling with exhaustion after twenty-minute shifts. The wyvern knights are mostly scattered, save for a few who stay as scouts, careful to fly well above the Demon Dragon's range. The heroic locals of the Lycian army don't fare much better. Those with Divine Weapons- Rutger and Echidna after several hours to recover, Lucius on the rare occasions he can leave tending the wounded to Clarine, Sue and Igrene taking turns with the bow with bleeding fingers- coordinate sallies to mar Iðunn's scales further, delay her forward march by turning her attention to swatting flies instead. Those without the Weapons help as best they're able through pruning back the nauseatingly endless trickle of war-dragons and their half-formed oozing kin. The first time you have to rest in the middle of the apocalypse feels obscene, even if exhaustion leaves no choice. The fifth time starts to feel rote, maybe; or relieving; or darkly humorous. People set up little tents, in the places char-blackened already but outside the Demon Dragon's rampage. Some soldiers try to sleep. Someone starts a little campfire with spare wood from a smashed boat, reheating their rations and boiling water.
Marigold	+ Unless anyone made concentrated efforts to save her, Brunnya died early on. When the Demon Dragon turned against her army, self-preservation and shrieking hatred finally overcame duty; that ice magic bought her a minute or two. If she lives, she lives terribly burned. + Sophia has twice tried to use Apocalypse against the Demon Dragon, and twice failed; the second time little wisps of magic gathered at her fingertips, but to no avail. Without help, she remains queasily dejected in her reserved way. + While the Demon doesn't purposefully target Warpgates, several lie within the swath of her rampage. A few of the worlds her violet fire or war-dragons spill over into are populated; even a half-formed dragon erupting at a transit hub is disastrous if unmitigated. + The Binding Blade is just a hilt. Raigh is making his best attempts at repairing it, but it's a worse case than Eckesachs was; some of its pieces have been nearly reduced to dust. He seems unlikely to succeed on his own. + Roy has been stabilized, but he's still in terrible shape, on the edge of wakefulness. Lucius's magic can't really reattach a mangled arm; the gash across Roy's throat is ugly, glittering glowing-gold where shrapnel of the Blade splashed back into him, but the healers are stretched thinly enough at saving lives as it is. Merlinus kneels by his side in a little camp, fretfully squeezing his hand. + Larum the dancer and Shanna with her bright spirit are trying to rekindle some amount of hope with Cecilia's soldiers, but the average spearman resting in camp is utterly dejected and shellshocked. + Lugh the junior psychonaut is trying to help Flamel reconstitute enough of a mental model of the Demon to emulate her mind, but with the Dragon Temple shattered, that's harder than ever. He's recovered just a couple of old engravings from its broken stones... + Iðunn is perhaps faring the best out of anyone here, but she can be hurt, even if it costs you worse. Anything that worsens her limp or impedes her progress buys more time for hope to be found. What have you been doing?
Odette Raskins	Calling the first encounter with Idunn a battle would really be a stretch. It felt more like an evacuation than anything else to Odette, between pouring healing magic and drugs into Roy to keep him from bleeding out from his grievous wounds and barely escaping with with all her limbs intact. She'd even put in her own share of fighting against the encroaching war-dragons and shadowy figures, too, but that was more for the retreat. She knows what her time is best spent on, and what she can actually accomplish with her stockpile of supplies. Stretching it all out is the name of the game here, utilizing a mixture of medicine-based healing to mend the more delicate areas while using her healing staff to treat the most dire injuries right away before they become causes of death. Having brought her tools with her, acting as a field surgeon is actually possible for Odette instead of just hoping for a miracle. She's joined Lucius to work on reattaching Roy's arm, and it takes a lot of convincing for her just to try and take a short nap to refresh herself before getting to the hardest part of the entire procedure. It's a delicate procedure, too, not only because she's never worked on an arm that's been mangled by a dragon before, but also because of everything else surrounding this whole situation. She needs to do all sorts of calculations in her head as she works, carefully figuring out how much medicine to actually dose him with. Too much, and he might not wake up again in his already fragile state. Too little, and he might wake up in utter agony while she's still rearranging bones or sewing flesh together. The hardest part, however, isn't getting the arm back on, or making sure it's fixed enough for him to even consider moving it later. It's Roy's throat that should and does give her reason to third-guess everything. How much can she afford to cut to get at those bits of gold shrapnel? How much is too much to leave in if it's too close to veins and vessels? Good thing she's got plenty of injectors, including one she sticks herself with just before getting to work on the boy's neck. She just has to hope it's enough for him to wake up and be able to move.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Fortunately for Madeleine, 'curtailing the rampage of an enormous monster' is exactly what she's spent her life training for. UNfortunately for her, this enormous monster - compared to many of the critters and kaiju encountered in day-to-day work for a monster huntress - possesses a frightful alien intellect, has absolutely no preceding body of study performed regarding its habits and abilities, and seems to have few-to-no desires greater than the utter destruction of human life. Normally there's something, anything a monster wants or fears that supersedes its appetite or rage. So what should be a hunt has instead amounted to damage control. Much of her time has actually been spent not on Elibe but on worlds connected to the warpgates in Iðunn's path, pleading the gravity of the situation with a hastily-assembled slideshow of the damage and lingering nasties near the Dragon Temple. For Iðunn herself to look so reasonably-sized in that last photograph, she must have been caught on camera from very far away indeed. Evacuation procedures are invoked on a mix of Concord authority and sheer panic factor as the huntress makes the rounds, one transit hub to the next, in frantic advance of the Demon Dragon's trail of death. When she can find scant time for work in Elibe itself she tends to Fae's injuries out of a mix of genuine worry for the little dragon's health, and a sort of grimly fascinated practicality. There's a lot you can learn about a creature from the marks it leaves behind. There might be something to be gleaned from an ordinary dragon's biology that might be turned to harming Iðunn. She won't stoop to leaning on the little one as a test subject, but even the passive collection of data could lead to a breakthrough.
Nobunaga	In the hours since Iðunn's ascension, it's become worryingly clear that Nobunaga's ability to directly harm gods is of little use against the Demon Dragon. Considering none of the local Divine Weapons are doing any better, she isn't particularly beaten down by it any more than is normal when facing the End of the World made manifest. She had spent that first hour fighting tooth and nail to get any purchase through that hide, between sword and gun and blazing hellfire, and had managed to come out of it mmmmostly intact. By the end of it, utterly exhausted, the warlord had to fall back and recover; shirking her Demon King ascension form in the process. That's when Chacha joined in, still astride Great Mecha Nobbu's shoulder, though harrying Iðunn with the giant robot soldier's lasers and missiles (wait were those just regular Nobbu?) didn't have much effect either. When Great Mecha Nobbu took too much damage to fight, Chacha was also forced to fall back. Which is when Nagayoshi rejoined the fight. He's still bloodied and broken from the fight with King Zephiel, but he's not about to let blood loss and broken ribs make him miss out on fighting The Apocalypse, Personified. Most of Mori's part of the fight involves going after the great dragon's lame leg. It's clear at this point she can't fly but she is limping along, and so he goes after tendons that show through flesh, or jams spears up under the cuticle of her claws when the chance presents itself-- and just leaving them there. It's been like this for twelve hours; each Servant tagging in one at a time when the Warlord has run out of steam. An hour each, falling back and resting for two. For the two magical familiars, though, the lack of sleep is nothing. Nobunaga however is flesh and blood; and the endlessness of this is wearing on her mind and body. She's become grouchy, irritable, and overall quiet. At the 12th hour, Mori is dashing about amidst Iðunn's lumbering steps in the distance, screaming like a lunatic, scooping up Bernish spears from the ground as he goes, hurling everything else he finds-- damaged swords, shields, discarded arrows-- at the dragon's underside and flanks. The spears are the closest thing he has to a plan to slow her down and he needs a bunch of those, he thinks. A singed and tattered Princess Yodo Azai has spent the last 20 minutes draped across a scorched, fallen tree. Her right forearm rests across the crook of her helmet, having pulled it down to cover her eyes. It's clear that despite all the noise, the young retainer of Nobunaga is doing her best to sleep. Nobunaga has not slept this entire time. She has not been willing to or, though she won't admit it out loud, able to. Her periods of inactivity are always spent glowering after Iðunn, trying to formulate new plans of attack. Focusing her eyes (didn't seem to work), digging a great trench for her to fall into (that one didn't get far enough and had to be abandoned). Making her even more lame at walking was Mori's idea but it's unknown if that's even having an effect, Iðunn isn't responding to pain like any other person or animal Nobunaga's ever dealt with before. And so she squats there like a goblin on the same log Chacha snoozes on, glowering at the heels of the Demon Dragon, dark marks under her eyes but refusing to acknowledge them. She munches on a rice ball held in both hands, surrounded by her ragged and burned cape as she examines the dragon, the landscape, the city, searching for anything she can turn into an advantage.
Riku Asakura	Ultraman Geed, already transformed, does his best with the time that he has to fight. Despite everything they did to get to this point, he's not going to throw away other lives or let others make the decisions about what needs to be done. The toll that has to be taken is something he can't live with ignoring anymore. He gives as good as he gets; however, perhaps even more so. Geed can fight the Demon Dragon on her level, being equal or thereabouts in size. He chops, punches, kicks, uses the Geed Claw, and even throws ridiculously named special attacks from point-blank into her body. Unfortunately for Geed and fortunately for the Demon Dragon, Geed can not take punishment forever nor last forever. Eventually, the gem on his chest starts to blink red, and despite that, he pushes himself until it starts to blink violently. He's probably yelled at by the others to pull off, and despite himself, he does. Falling back and transforms back into Riku. During his downtime, he is treated by Clarine first. This is when he gets an idea, because of the 'light' magic that Clarine uses to heal. "Hey, I got an idea..." Actually, it was something he remembered about Tamamo and how she uses the sun. "Can you apply concentrated amounts of sunlight into me? I know it sounds crazy, but it's how I turn into an Ultraman." The next time Ultraman Geed takes to the battlefield, it's FAR sooner than he normally could. Thanks to Clarine's spell, he replenishes enough solar energy to fight again. Unfortunately for Geed, while he gives as good as he gets, it turns out mostly the same way for him. He fights until he can barely keep Ultraman going... and then falls back and returns into Riku. He can't get up right away to go again, because despite everything, he IS injured and needs rest. Even if he can't sleep, he's convinced to take a break. So later into the night, he rests, even manages to catch a few hours of sleep, and wakes up ready to do more. He still needs more time to transform into Geed again, so from then until the current hour he is using his Paladin's medical training to help treat people on the battlefield as well as he can. While the training is helpful, it DOES eventually cause him to excuse himself for a moment and throw up. The injuries and wounds get to be too much for the boy who has barely seen conflict, never mind an all-out war. When he manages to compose himself again, he throws himself back into treating what he can... which is far less than what he'd like. He's not a trained surgeon, and he's at best a convincing nurse. Which is still good; it's at least helping people and putting skills he learned to good use. It just feels like he wants to do more, but can't. Eventually, he looks over the battlefield, knowing his time as Ultraman is coming up again.
Flamel Parsons	--- The Parsons Institute has reached its most withering code-red scenario. Anomalies scream out of their cells and are annihilated just as quickly by sheer cognitive hazard. Containment is lost, coherence is lost. And yet the Director calls on reserve after reserve, contingency after contingency. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of staff deploy. The fighting has spilled out of the Institute, and into-- --- --The real world, where the inside of Flamel's mind has spilled into the exterior. Like the Psychogate incident, the man's inner thoughts have thrown open what few doors there are to be found in war-camps, countryside cabins, and the like. Desperate efforts by mental figures of the Parsons Institute to set up UPE countermeasures merge with converging Psychonaut agents who are being pulled away from field operations in a dozen, a hundred other worlds. And it's not making a dent. Flamel Parsons has refused to break. For twelve hours, he has done all things necessary, chugging coffee, pounding back dream fluffs, disabling uncompliant regions of his brain. A spy isn't meant to engage in attrition warfare. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesnm't matter. The camp he's formed, with the few survivors he could gather that needed the sort of attention that precluded moving, is the same as the research camp. Lugh is pushed to his limits; Flamel doesn't accept breaks longer than five minutes. Every inch of slack the junior psicadet was given in the past two years is nothing but strictness in this moment of disaster, a brutal demand that he find every piece he can. And every fifteen minutes, a ways from the camp, Flamel himself rises above the shattered remains of the temple, and emits a vast beam so terrible it seems to shake his own body apart. The contents of the Parsons Institute shake apart with his body, too; screens, concrete chunks of wall and ceiling, 70s-era wood panel; they fall away from his brain too. Lilian might remember the shape and color of that beam. Flamel's remote projection system, the one he attempted to use on her and on during the Shattered Mirror incident. If Persephone were here, she'd feel the same atmosphere, the same twisted, horrible, high-intensity mental assault. Flamel has been slamming his mind into Iðunn's, testing iteration after iteration of his astral construct, like he's brute-forcing the password to a computer system. It was a strategy that never could have worked, before. It's, still, a strategy that can't work now. He tries, again and again, over and over. A machine iterating and repeating. And every blast kicks up dust, rocks, trees, chunks of rolling hill; the telekinetic aftereffect of an astral effort is still enough to rip up the battlefield. Once per fifteen. Four times an hour. You could set your clock by the repetition, if your clock weren't torn apart by the shockwaves. Disregard the bleeding of searing purple substance from nose, ears, eyes, mouth. Disregard the ragged, bloodshot eyes. Flamel will not break this time. He's broken in so many other disasters now, but this, this one disaster, this is his: What he was made for, what he exists to do. He will breach her mind, or he will pound the life out of her skull in the forty-something times he's sent a searing column of light into her head, enduring whatever he must in her counterattacks. "Stop the launch." His voice is hoarse, every time he comes down from his levitating artillery-blast. Like he spends his time up there screaming. And he has struck hard, pushed into that mindscape, each time. But only because he is wearing his mind and body down to shreds to do it.
Angela	What IS Love doing? Well that is a question best answered by what Love did. She is a magical girl. And magical girls are only supposed to lose in very specific circumstances. This is one of those cases, in a way that feels true to Love in a manner that works deep into her soul. But at the same time, Roy was hurt, and her hatred overode her understanding of narrative and she fought. She kept fighting. She didn't fight until she was tired, or exhausted, because Abnormalities don't get tired, they don't get exhausted. They are either beaten to death, they lose their interest, or they just go home for some other inscrutable reason. So she fought. And she kept fighting. And she bled. And her soul burned from Idunn's flames. And she kept fighting until her body had been too corroded by claws and her spirit too corroded by flame to keep on fighting. Pale damage works unfortunately well for most Abnormalities. Eventually she reverted to her girl form and unleashed one last massive violet blast of destruction before her body collapsed out from underneath her. Roland, who can also fight for a real long time but stopped hours earlier, had been waiting for that. He slipped towards Love and spirited her away to the camp. She isn't the only person Roland endeavoured to save. Using his forgetability, and occassionally trading the helmets of fallen soldiers for anonymity in place of his mask, he has slipped away to recover the fallen and bring them back to camp for pretty much the duration of those twelve hours after he started to realize this was a doomed fight. If nobody gets to Brunnya first, Roland even goes to the trouble of saving her, dragging her burned body to the camp. Maybe it would've been kinder to let her die, but Roland's attitude towards war comes in full force now. It's shit. It's shit for everyone. And it's shit for the loyalists as much as anyone. And frankly, he is not entirely unsympathetic to someone burned by loyalty. It feels hauntingly familiar. He doesn't talk to anybody. He sees no need. Gebura kept fighting for as long as she could but eventually even the Gold Rush EGO was obliterated and, functionally weaponless, was called back by Angela. She could have refused. But she didn't. She leaves in short order. There is one benefit to fighting for twelve hours, though, it means that Angela can in fact send backup this time. And so she does. Unfortunately, the backup is only one person. The Knight of Justice arrives. She's an impossibly tall woman of around twelve feet, a giant really. The Knight makes her way towards Roy. Well, it isn't really Roy. It's the dying girl in the cot next to her. Love is in terribly agony, and screaming. Even after the wounds of her body are treated, she is weeping and moaning in terrible pain. "Love... These wounds..." "It's...It's my fault..." Love whimpers. "I didn't change enough. I still thought... all we had to do was believe in ourselves... I got Roy hurt real bad... I got him hurt so bad and I took him there..." She bawls, guiltily and terrified. "Love, you must be strong. If you perish..." Justice says. "I know... I'm scared, Eonni... I... I don't want to forget... I'm so tired of forgetting all the people I love..." Tears have already been falling but they burst free in droves as she says it. "I will fight now. You must rest. You must try your best to heal... Oh the wounds on your story are..." "Woah woah woah, Gebura said that fire was ESPECIALLY good against people like you." Roland tells Justice. "You definitely can't join the fight." "Pale damage... does not harm me that significantly." Justice assures Roland, then looks to Odette, "Please do what you can for her, great healer." The giantess leans forward towards Odette, kissing her on the cheek. Perhaps for good luck.
Petra Soroka	At around the four hour mark, the Beauty of Ash was drenched in a waterfall of blacklight fire with a direct hit, only minutes after returning to the field from resting. One of the few physical bodies on the battlefield operating on a comparative scale to the Demon Dragon higher than 'ant', Petra had been filling in when Geed was recharging as the frontline in Iðunn's face. Still tiny compared to her, the Beauty of Ash could throw itself at the Demon Dragon's head and survive distracting her from others, even pulling its mangled body out of her mouth from a bite that would've wiped out a dozen soldiers in an instant. Small though it may be, the mech is a radiant flag for humanity's vanguard. A chihuahua-sized barbed wire deterrent, returning over and over again to the forefront of the battle and always visible when it's there, does wonders for the morale of choosing to fight at all. Hurling itself at Iðunn's snout as a mass of razor shards, it's easy to at least imagine that it's slowing her down. Until a torrent of fire douses the starlit machine, caught in the center of a sustained upheaval. The Demon Dragon's slow march moves past where the Beauty of Ash smolders, and it's only a minute later that it even musters the strength to stagger out in her wake. Sticky fire clings in patches even when it shakes, until, limping, shuddering in a panic through the spectrum of visible light, the Beauty of Ash shatters and drops Petra to the burning ground. . . . During downtime, Petra is with Raigh. The mirror around her neck is shot through with rot with the Beauty of Ash's temporary destruction, and the corrosion prevents her from reaching through to Qetra to retrieve any of her supplies. With only what she has on hand, she tries to help mending the Binding Blade. The Silver forms a mold shaped to the Blade's outline. If there's anything left of Maltet after reforging Eckesacks... there's just no way to piece the Binding Blade back together like a jigsaw from dust, but maybe Fae's breath could melt the scraps together to pour into a mold to reshape. If not, maybe a Silver-reinforced spiderweb, manually gripping the shattered remnants of the Blade together, could mimic it well enough for a swing? . . . Sting Silver lunges through a warpgate seconds after a tide of dark magic pours into it. The warpgate hub on the other side is in a state of panic as half-formed war dragons blindly spit fire and thrash at the too-small structure. It's caught on camera when Sting Silver is thrown down into a crater in the concrete by the whip of a dragon's tail, debelted but using Eckesacks to cut its tail from its body to draw back its attention to her. On Petra's order, Heyalexa works with Madeleine's campaign to boost recordings of the attacks to the Concord's attention, so that warpgate network analysts can predict where Iðunn will next cross by.
Petra Soroka	. . . Petra hasn't been able to sleep, but not out of lack of need. It's just kind of impossible to sleep in one place and have time uncontrollably pass, when each world-shaking step brings Iðunn measurably closer through the finite distance to Bern. Bern, which was already torn apart by war dragons some time ago, when the castle collapsed and the civilians scattered to hide from both armies indiscriminately. The vague hope enters Petra's mind several times over the course of twelve hours, that if Iðunn takes this long to get to Bern alone, then they actually have a lot of time before humanity's wiped out. If the deadline isn't Bern, specifically, being destroyed, then it'll take at least another day before Iðunn can turn Sacae into a smoking wasteland, and then maybe two or three before Ilia's gone, assuming her magic doesn't get stronger with time. And, like, Bern sort of deserves it a little bit, at least, if you think about it. Unfortunately, thinking about it too much makes Petra too restless to mentally accept that time frame. There were those, what, scullery maids and servants that she tunneled out of the castle basement before it collapsed? Having vague faces to put to them, she can imagine how they'd flee back to their homes or find shelter, holding their breath as the inner castle is demolished by dragons and then both armies pull out of the city, until it seems like it's over. That's the state of the people, at least in her imagination, that are gritting their teeth and just waiting until Guinivere can take the throne and put this all behind them, vicarious bloodlust from the winning war already forgotten when the lesser dragons showed up at their doorsteps. So, it's back at it again. Now, Petra's stripped down to just Eckesacks and the Silver, traversing on foot with the rest of the soldiers to challenge Iðunn's advance.
Flamel Parsons	--- The Communications Department fights too. Normally, it would have telepathy. Instead, it has something else. Today, the Parsons Institute spreads itself throughout the countryside outside its walls, and as it does, its posters make this struggle seem like it has been happening for months on end. --- Flamel's dysfunctional telepathy and efforts to coordinate or boost morale has become odd. Instead of voices in your head, his leaking psyche has populated the world with projections of his mind. Posters, pamphlets, and other displays barrage the optic nerve of most of Bern. - 'GIVING UP ON PEACE? TELL HIM WHY FIRST!' Declares a poster pressed against a town's wall, displaying a nobly wounded Roy in Rockafeller-esque stylization. - 'HE DIDN'T DIE FOR NOTHING! SHOW HER A REAL BRIGHT FUTURE!' Displays something showing Zephiel's face dead-on, shadowed deeply. - 'IF HE COULD LEND A HAND FOR PEACE, SO COULD YOU!' Calls out a poster with Galle in profile, up on a notice board in a camp. - 'BE SMART TODAY -- THERE MIGHT BE NO TOMORROW!' Seemingly Murdoch points at the viewer from a poster drifting on the wind. - 'HE LIVED THROUGH IT FOR PEACE, AND SO CAN YOU!' Prince Myrddin, King Mordred, and Cecilia all raise linked hands in a triumphant pose. - 'PEACE IN BERN TODAY -- PEACE IN THE WEST TOMORROW!' Asserts a goddess-like image of Echidna with Larum behind her, printed directly onto wagons. - 'BULGAR'S SPIRIT ASKS YOU FOR JUST AN HOUR MORE -- ACHIEVE PEACE!' The old skyline of the trade city can be seen on the billboards put up. - 'TODAY'S WAGE FOR ONE HOUR OF WORK: ONE THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE!' Sigrun leads a charge on pamphlets, posters... And all of them have the same odd line, in smaller text, at the bottom: 'STOP THE LAUNCH. PARSONS INSTITUTE DEPT. OF COMMUNICATION.'
Lilian Rook	For the second time in barely more than twenty years, the single action of selfless heroism that defines the future peace of all Elibe, manifested in the inevitable turning of ages that have unfolded ever since the scouring, doesn't happen. For the second time, the pen-stroke that should close the final chapter and begin a new story fails to occur. The writing goes on, grim and miserable and bloody, first from the moment that a young Zephiel should have fled from Bern in Murdok's care, and now from the instant that Roy carried all the hopes and lives of mankind on his shoulders and wielded the Binding Blade just as he should have. For the second time, Lilian has to reflect on what she had told Guinivere in confidence; of her personal vision of the end of the world, gratuitous in its detail and pitiless in its simulation-to-exhaustion. Most of it had taken place days or weeks afterwards, as she had described it, and Iðunn had hardly needed to feature in it. Hours after the worst only hasn't come to pass in that Roy is barely alive and Iðunn can be wounded at all, Lilian is forced to grimly congratulate herself; it's going almost exactly as she envisioned. . . . . . . . . Miyamomo's fateful words have had too long to stick with Lilian for the reality of the last twelve hours to be much of a surprise; she has repeated them to her own students many times, 'do you think you could hold your stance for twenty-hour hours?' and onwards. Battles of attrition are her anathema. They have always been. The years that she has spent slowly building up her abilities to compensate began even before it was the strategy chosen against her in the One Week War. The rate at which she can use magic is far in excess of how quickly she recovers it. Her battle arts exhaust stamina well beyond what an ordinary human even has. Her 'Type Black' power as a Bloom is that exponentially worsens its feedback the longer she goes without real time to cool down. Against regular soldiers, the Lilian of now could fight five times longer than the Lilian of just a few years back, but that accomplishment feels like a strange kind of black humour whenever she has a few minutes to reflect on it. Right now, every second of that training was incomparably well-spent, and yet, all of it combined might just mean nothing at ths rate anyways. It's maddening.
Desire Stars	It isn't any desire of Kamen Rider Geats' that sees him take his rest. At the first sign of a lull after that initial hour, something in his body just gives out. Na-Go's frightened scream of his name, Iðunn's thundering footfalls, the teeming masses of misshapen teeth threatening to rise from her wake, all of it fades, numbed and dulled under a high pitched drone and blurred into visual unrecognizability, until even the droning and the vague shapes of his allies and the existential threat are drowned in the pitch blackness of unconsciousness. The Boost Mark II buckle removed from his transformation belt, Ace's body tells a story to any healers able to spare him a moment--a story he'd tried to hide days ago with Roy. The strain on his body is as if he'd been fighting for twelve hours beforehand. The strength and speed the new armor confers is an order of magnitude more than the original Boost Buckle, but so too is the toll it takes on the user's body. Every time he uses it, the armor must be wearing on him; he must have thought that he had enough left in the tank to see this through. His body clearly disagrees. Ace is out for hours, in the unrestful sleep brought on by intense exhaustion yet compelled in a moment of dire need to do anything else. His brow furrows in his sleep, he murmurs half-spoken thoughts from whatever dreams come to him, but he doesn't wake until Iðunn has had ample time to clear the temple. Na-Go, exhausted, fights on in his absence during that time. She doesn't pursue Iðunn directly, but rather, hurries through the gates in her wake to smash any half-formed dragons that might have gone through, or to put out the flames with wet cement from the armor's manipulator arm. It's all she can do to catch up in her exhaustion, and sometimes, even that she can't manage, but she forces herself to, all the same. The last gate she manages to reach before having to turn back from sheer fatigue is protectively walled off with thick stone bricks just in time to keep the flames from passing through; though the bricks themselves melt and sag under the flames, better that they do than whatever was on the other side. When she returns to camp, she finds Ace trying to arm himself--to his dubious credit, not with the Mk II Boost buckle. Her armored hand stops his at the bare wrist, before he can slot the Magnum buckle into his Desire Driver. "Please... don't." Ace struggles against her grip, but can't shake it. "I have the least excuse of anyone here to rest, and I did anyway, because this body betrayed me." "If you die fighting her exhausted--" "Then I'll be back." "Years from now! Decades, maybe!" Na-Go all but shouts. "After all of us have already grieved for you! Maybe even after we're all old and gray! What right do you have to do that to us, when we've already lost so many people here?" "Try eating a plate of your own words," Ace says, his hand going limp in hers, "It's because we've lost so many that I can't afford to be selfish. Please let go of me." That gives her pause, and draws from her a stuttering sigh. "I'm tired of letting people go," Na-Go says, tearily. "...I am too." He reaches up and puts a hand over hers. He glances over towards Petra and Raigh. "I bet they could use some help. Why don't we give them a hand?" ... Between Na-Go's Powered Builder armor, and a mysterious knowledge of metalworking that Ace can call upon, they can get a small forge up and running, especially if Fae can help by providing the heat for the furnace.
Lilian Rook	. . . . . . . . Lilian is the only person who can evade Iðunn's fire with absolute surety, but after twelve hours of fighting, the burns she gets from doing so are nearly as bad as the burns she gets from being grazed by it. The steady, automatic reconstitution of her armour over time is barely more a trickle; this is the first time that it has been tested for long enough to save healing resources at all. Night Mist is supernaturally effective against the war-dragon-shadows, but as she's already discovered and disclosed, only when they're fresh. Her weapon has no special properties against Iðunn herself, which makes her role obvious, crucial, and functionally endless. The woman with an anti-shadow weapon, who can be everywhere at once if she pushes herself, must be. The way in which Lilian belongs here is the way in which she does in any gruelling ordeal set before her by God, wherein comfort, civility, sanity, mercy, and humanity are all stripped away until the qualities of 'a Bloom of Humanity' are bared. She never sleeps. She never rests. She appears by camps at the top of every hour to retrieve the most edible thing she can and is starving again by the next. After the first thirty minutes of her direct assault on Iðunn had failed to kill her, Lilian's presence has been eerily stochastic, perpetually on-duty, but ambiguously 'in' or 'out' of combat. She left her sidearm with Lucius for safekeeping hours ago, when it broke down from overuse just before the spare ammo in the wagon ran dry. She has taken to retrieving spare tomes from dead mages and using them in gruelling flurries to support the Divine Wielders on each assault. Lilian has made more trips to the Lycian and Etrurian camps' healers than anyone else on the field, drenched with sweat, blood, and dirt, and her wounds have grown more inexplicable with time. The most definitively she ever seems to stop is when she lowers Night Mist into snow or water and endures the steaming until it stops. Sometimes she lowers herself. Her time between reactionary strikes, short as it is, is spent on several things. By now, Lilian has direct access to escalated strategic command within the Paladins Elite corps, and gives verbal situation reports every half-hour, indicating which Warpgates are next in the way so that teams can be sent to preemptively evacuate civilians and secure them. She has, at some point, urged Petra into doing the same with the Concord, so that both sides might cooperate. Under the current state of diffuse disaster ,relief forces are, at best, another twelve hours out; and even then, the prospect of a dozen more Elites doesn't fill her with confidence. Roy's healing and the Binding Blade's repair are both beyond her. Past a point, Lilian's perpetually ragged state, armour burned away in ever-shifting splotches that never quite cover up her bloody bandages, wraps back around into a perverse sort of morale booster when combined with her attitude, and so she's begun making rounds of trying to encourage key Lycian personnel where possible; which she has very little time for. Both times after Sofia failed to cast Apocalypse, Lilian found someone to trade duties with her and so she could have enough time to discuss her own experience with Apocalypse and offer helpful guidance. She visits Flamel only once, twenty minutes ago, to demand to know what's taking so long, eerily without a single criticism of the psychic propaganda effort. Something about the ensuing 'argument', one-sided, sends her to Larum and Shanna, whom she begins filling in on the factional emergency-bureaucratic side just so that somebody knows that news of this disaster is spreading in the Otherworld. As for Iðunn . . .
Petra Soroka	Petra peels a poster with Echidna on it off of a cliff face with a complicated expression. Flicking her wrist and indenting it with her thumb to hold it flat, she mumbles without any clear indicator as to who her audience is. "You know, like, given the colonial mindset, wouldn't this come across as more of a warning than a promise? Like, 'if you stop Hitler, Africa will be free next!', you know? Any sane person wouldn't worry about that now, but..." She sighs. Whatever. Whatever! Maybe the political consciousness in Elibe won't matter at all in another twenty four hours of this! Her college is one billion miles away and she might go back to it having wasted two years of her life trying to fight the turning of the seasons! Pulling out her radio, Petra drags her eyes up towards the psychically manifested artillery of Flamel's freakout. "Parsons? Or Lugh, if he's too focused on jerking himself off in his castle. What do you need us to do to help?" . . . Na-go's arrival to Petra, Fae, and Raigh's arts and crafts corner is a huge relief, in actually bringing a physical structure to the attempt. Petra ties her hair up with a Silver metal scrunchie and beckons her over. "Oh thank god. Raigh? Neon's here to help. So, this is the total remnants of the Blade that we've got . . ."
Lilian Rook	Lilian knows much better than to throw her strongest attacks against the Demon Dragon's uninjured scales by now. Each time she helps to break a wave of war dragons, Lilian pushes herself to rendesvouz with whichever wielders are 'on-shift', wherever they are, and arbitrarily points out half a dozen areas she wants them to attach, dragged from some blurry sea-chasm of adrenaline-fuelled subconscious quasi-divination in her hyperfocused and badly dprived state. She limits the number each time, leaving the rest to the Wielders themselves, because Lilian uses what thin buffers of energy she can rebuild on trying to capitalize, timing her efforts to strike alongside the Divine Weapons with sufficient force and precision to make real headway; something that requires an absurdly fine handle on the tempo and habits of every single Wielder individually. Lilian didn't have it twelve hours ago, but she has been steadily getting better. Her overriding objective is to cause bleeding wounds in at least one of Iðunn's front legs, though only Rutger is fast enough for the meagre openings Lilian can still help create. 'That it bleeds' is essential. Anyone can guess by now why attempting to attack vital points is a fool's errand. She isn't cagey about explaining why, but breaching those scales at all is such a critical issue that Lilian hardly expects she'll need to. The most hopeful realistic scenario she can give is that they slow Iðunn long enough to evacuate the capital, then immobilize her there long enough for supplementary military units to arrive and form a perimeter that can bottle the war dragons. After that, either the Binding Blade might be salvaged, Iðunn might finally run out of energy, or a better-rested strike team might be assembled the day after to try something crazy. That's the firm line she sets as 'this should be possible, so there's no excuse to fail'.
Marigold	"It's gotta be the joints," says Dieck, participating in Nobunaga's gloomy staring from the edge of the latest temporary camp. "Yeah?" says Echidna, resting her weight on Armads despite its chipped edge. "Yeah. Pain doesn't stop her. Haven't seen her bleed yet. So, you've gotta... gum up the mechanisms, you know? Stop her from walking." "Tell you what," she says, unusually sourly. "You wanna take Armads and try to jam it through her ankle, be my guest." "Hey, I didn't mean..." "I don't care what you meant, Dieck." "Alright, alright." - - - - Clarine normally has the energy to be pouty and flouncy and whimsical even in the worst of circumstances. She doesn't now. In her little tent full of mending and dying Etrurian soldiers, off to the side of the little Lycian camp, she looks- for once- grown up. "Sunlight... I can get you close enough, I think. Sure. Let me find out what I have left in me, okay?" She doesn't even question the odd request before pressing a Torch staff to Riku's chest. "... Wonder if this is the growing-up everybody says I ought to be doing. I don't really like it." Hours of work as a battlefield healer haven't left much 'light' in her, but it's a refill all the same. - - - - Flamel's mental blasts seem sometimes to pass straight through the Demon's nonexistent mind, and other times to rattle and reverberate through the mechanistic void. At no point does she really have a soul, or anything like feelings; but sometimes she is almost like a thing with a psychometric history and hollow mind, and other times she's like nothing at all. The no-hits and partials form a loose pattern with the rest of her behavior somehow, but it's hard to tell exactly what until, by coincidence, he blasts her right after she's vomited up another lungful of that horrible dark magic. Just then, when she's emptiest of her emptiness, she staggers half a step; widens her one weeping green eye; and SHRIEKS in indignity before trying to tail-swipe him out of the air. Lugh, working to psychometrically 'decode' one of the fragmentary pieces of the stone on which Iðunn had knelt, doesn't let it pass him by. "Flamel!! Do you think she's-- ack, LOOK OUT!!" - - - - Fae heals up fairly easily, under Lucius and Madeleine's care; he's unfamiliar with how to tend her wounds, because she simply hasn't gotten hurt much before, but Maddie's xeno-veterinary expertise helps a lot. Forensic examination of the wounds can uncover a little. The Demon's talons are hugely overgrown and sharp only at the tip. The wounds she leaves with them lack the corrosive effect of her breath; that sinister magic isn't something perfused throughout her body, but something localized in her lungs, heart, or guts. Fae shifts back to her human form after she's treated, blubberily wipes away her tears, and then almost immediately hides herself under a pile of blankets and takes a two-hour nap with Wildfire. She's finally coaxed out by the forge project that Ace and Neon set up; breathing her white-gold fire in at regular intervals, and then turning back to sit with an exhausted but not-despondent listlessness.
Marigold	There's no more of Maltet left to smelt down, but 'fortunately', Petra's use of Eckesachs has been steadily chipping pieces off of its edge; the same goes for Armads and Durandal to a less dramatic degree. Collecting those shards and assembling them into a Silver-made mold isn't hard; it's the smelting that proves more difficult. Last time you had the fire of the Blade to melt another Weapon; this time, there's only Fae. It's slow work. She leans against Petra's side to catch her breath, when she's available, and shuts her eyes. "... Fae will be really mad, if you make her wait that long," she says to Ace, with childish scolding. So she overheard? "You promised. Please don't... do too much... just because you feel bad. Fae gets it." - - - - In any world with merely modern medicine, Brunnya would likely be dead, even with Roland's valiant help. As it is now, she huddles at the edge of the Lycian camp, a bitter and distant look in her eyes while she covers her bandaged body with what's left of her cloak. Almost everything but half of her face is burned; she clutches the charred remains of her spellbook, murmuring to herself. But she leaves-alone and is left-alone, but for glares both ways. "Now, remember what he said at camp," Merlinus tells Love gently, while still carefully squeezing Roy's hand. "I can't think he'll blame you. He feels bad about trying and failing, but... he feels worse about not being trusted to try at all. I'm sure the fact that he trusted you means a lot." After Odette has carefully treated his throat and removed most of the shrapnel, but some time before she'd really prefer him to, Roy stirs at the Demon's latest scream. He shifts, scrunches his face, and then forces his eyes open groggily. "I... I... what's happened? My... neck..." He tries to move his reattached right arm to touch the wound, finds that it only does so clumsily, and sucks in air through his teeth. "Roy!! Please, just rest..." "Nnnh. I... oh, god. I messed up, didn't I... I'm so sorry..." His chest moves with a difficult little noise that might be a gasp, but probably isn't.
Marigold	- - - - As the snow continues falling- your own little Ending Winter, from the clash of the Demon and the Weapons- the necessary maneuvering becomes harder and harder. The ash and the slush are nearly ankle-deep now; insignificant to her, potentially lethal to you. At least there isn't so much blood slicking the ground, anymore. Rutger is still walking with a limp, and Echidna still moves in a bit of a haze, but they follow on Lilian's instructions. One particular wound on the Demon's inner right foreleg has been carved deeper and deeper into the scales by overlapping strikes from each combatant. Sophia, standing dangerously close with Lucius on watch to warp her out, takes one more stab at Apocalypse-- (If not for you... if not for the people who made you... I could have been normal. I could have been okay. There might have been more people like me. More people who aren't human or dragon. Everywhere could have been Arcadia... I could have had a life bigger than one village. I can't even imagine it, now...) --and with that hollow noise, it fires, as she squeezes her eyes tightly shut. The black hole mutually-annihilates a sliver more off that same spot. With Lilian's follow-up strike, a trickle of corrupt near-purple blood begins to trickle out and down her leg- finally, a cut to the vein. For all that she's displayed so far, the Demon can't seem to heal; at least, not on the timescale of half a day. With enough bleeding wounds-- Iðunn lowers her head as if to lick the cut, sucks in a breath, and retches as violet wells up from the back of her throat. Like she's practiced it a hundred times before, she's moving to cauterize the bleed.
Riku Asakura	'... Wonder if this is the growing-up everybody says I ought to be doing. I don't really like it.' Riku understands what Clarine means. People think he's pretty immature, and to a degree, they are right. "I don't think you should 'grow up' if it means losing who you are now. I don't think anyone would want that from you. So... don't lose that part of yourself, alright?" ----------- Now, Riku knows it'd be time to go here soon. However, seeing the wound actually cause substantial damage to the Demon Dragon, and then now seeing her actually go to stop the bleeding... something tells him this is the moment. He's exhausted, pushed to his limit, barely slept in a few days, and now is getting ready to fight again. Riku pulls the Fusion Riser to his chest, staring up at the Demon Dragon again. He's afraid of that breath, losing part of himself again... but he's also afraid of forcing someone else to fight because he was too afraid or worried about what his actions could cause...he laughs to himself for a moment. He just told Clairne not to lose a part of herself, but here he is ready to put that part on the altar of sacrifice. There is a brilliant light as Ultraman Geed forms into existence once more. The giant of light is taking shape not far from the Demon Dragon. He immediately uses Geed Magnificent form to fight, because this conflict expects nothing less than everything he has. He launches himself into the Demon Dragon immediately. Clashing with her, he aims to twist her jaws away from blowing fire on herself and instead direct those flames away from his allies, but also away from her injuries. This time, before she can lift her head and throw him to the ground, he leaps up with her, wrapping his legs around her neck and attempting to get her into a makeshift sleeper hold. "GO! I'LL HOLD HER HERE AS LONG AS I CAN! MAKE IT COUNT!" Riku shouts at the others, leveraging his size and strength to try and give the others a chance to, hopefully, mortally injure the Demon Dragon.
Odette Raskins	Too many injured, and even twelve hours doesn't feel like enough time to treat them all with Roy already on the operating floor. If he's lucky, there might be a table, but Odette will use whatever she can get at this point. Clarine's presence is a godsend, especially with Lucius working with Madeleine to work with Fae's unfamiliar-enough form. Even a nurse Riku is an extra set of hands that Odette doesn't have herself, and just talking is rough when she barely remembers to drink enough water to replace all the water she's losing through sweat. Ace is a little easier to treat when he's unconscious, at least, and she can only hope Na-Go returns each time she sees the rider in passing while breathing easily once she sees the forge project underway. Each time she considers lying down for another nap besides Fae, she sees one of Flamel's posters in her mind's eye driving her to push it just a little more. A little harder, and she'll be done with another patient. A little longer, and they'll outlast Idunn. She also leaves her sidearm and its spare ammo out. Lilian could make better use of it than herself, anyway. Roland bringing Brunnya in even has the EMT checking up on her, but not nearly to the same degree as... Well. Everyone she actually knows and has had proper conversations with. With the power of post-modern medicine and straight up magic, Odette can rest a little easier without having to worry about the burnt mage too much, but she does stop by every now and then to offer her some medicated bandages and a couple of pills. "Sorry, can't stay. Too... Too much. Not enough hands. For the burns. For the pain." Odette explains in raspy, broken sentences while gesturing at the bandages and pills respectively. She can't even take the time to look wary of Brunnya's presence right now, rushing about as she is. When Love's brought in in dire condition, however, Odette has to stop again as she feels a stab in her gut. The EMT was the one that cleared Roy to get hurt going after Idunn with that blade, after all, so hearing all of that reminds Odette of her own part in that, too. She certainly can't bring herself to blame Love as much as Love does, but that self-loathing gets cut short by the kiss to the cheek. "Grea...? Uh. Got it. She won't... No dying on my watch." She murmurs to the giant of Justice, exhaling heavily before taking out a black medipen to stick herself in the leg with it. "You make sure you and the... Nobody else does, either. It's a lot harder to fix dying than all of this." She adds with her first full sentence in a while, lying to herself a little and trying to lift spirits just a bit. Even though it was so long ago, she still vividly remembers how it felt working on Lucius and Hector, when she barely knew either of them, and when she was far less experienced than she is today. Even then, neither of their lifesaving procedures were as nerve-wracking as what she's doing now. Odette's burning the wick at both ends already, but the injection helps give her a much-needed boost to her energy and ability to keep dosages and procedures straight while juggling triage and treatments for so many people at once.
Odette Raskins	"I... I... what's happened? My... neck..." "It's stable. Injured, but stable." Odette reassures, reflexively moving a hand up to pat Roy's head softly. It's not something she usually does to someone she's been operating on, mostly since they're usually not awake when she's doing that. In this circumstance, though? It's the first thing that comes to mind to try and soothe him, especially after seeing his reaction to the scream. Hopefully, keeping her hand over his head might keep him from seeing her scrunching up, too. "Easy, easy... Don't think of it as messing up. Now we know for sure Idunn's worried enough about you and the Blade that we can grab her attention with..." She almost says 'you showing up', but stops herself before volunteering him to almost die again. "It. Now... You got some pieces of it in there, but they're out." Mostly, she's pretty sure, but she needs him to be mostly calm while gesturing at the fragments she had removed. "Now, Roy. Slow, deep breaths for me." She directs, bringing out a small handheld health scanner and holding the device over Roy's neck and watching the little screen on the front while she scans his neck and head for any egregious irregularities that it might pick up. She knows for sure there's still fragments in there, but she needs to make sure none of them will kill him before she even thinks about letting him back up. "One, two... Did you feel anything weird while you were breathing in our out?"
Angela	"Don't worry about it, Odette, just do your best." Roland tells Odette. "You need not fear for me, tis but a dragon and I am but a knight. We are born to clash with one another." Justice assures Odette, but this isn't exactly a promise that she'll be safe, or anyone else. Roland is too worn out to go back into the fight any time soon. And he needs a break from going back out to look for survivors too, his arms and legs are shaking to say nothing of the rest of him. He looks over to Brunnya--at first he just leaves it alone, but eventually he just sighs to himself and makes her way over to sit himself down next to Brunnya. Anybody who stuck by King Zephiel even after his death is bound to be a pariah for a long time to come, maybe the rest of her life. He sits himself down by the woman. "Hey," He says, offering her a cup of boiled water. "Can I ask you something. If you were so loyal to him, why didn't you just let it happen? It's what he would've wanted." He looks to his book, then to Brunnya. It would seem a little silly to let her keep hold of that thing in any other situation but this. "If you wanna start over somewhere, I cna help with that real quick. I gotta stick around, it's my job and all, but I can get you an instant ticket out." He reaches into his pocket and holds out an invitation--meant for saving him. Meanwhile Love is soothed by Merlinus, though it's not quite as effective as you might think considering she's barely clinging to life. Any moment she could revert to egg and if that happens ... she's terrified she'll lose everything. "He doesn't have to blame me," She says sorrowfully. "I blame me. Angela would say that trusting someone just because they were a friend you wanted to trust--is a way to get them hurt. If they aren't ready, you're hurting them." She rubs at her eyes. "...Maybe it wasn't even trusting him that was the problem. Maybe it was the sword. We pinned so many hopes on it, everybody acted like it was so important, but it's just a sword. The plastic," She says. "Isn't what's really important. It's always been the heart behind the plastic. And then..." She sighs. "I don't know. Maybe I'm just wrong about the world..." She coughs and wretches. "Am I gonna die...?" She asks Merlinus. "Be strong, Love... I must go." Justice kisses Love on the forehead next before looking to Merlinus. "Thank you for being kind to us monsters. I have heard far and wide how special your world is. I will be happy to defend a land where the heart still believes so strongly in true justice." ''I... oh, god. I messed up, didn't I... I'm so sorry...'' "Roy... it's... it's okay to leave things to grownups sometimes. You did your best... We're all proud of you." Love says but can't quite get her head to turn to look at him. Justice rests a hand on the top of Roy's head, and then moves on. Soon... Justice bursts into the winter battlefield with the fury of an angry elder sister, but she carries no blade. Instead, four constellation swords swirl around out from her as an endless black tear drips from Justice's eye. The sowrds would, normally, cut the body but also tear open wounds of the heart to make one weep and lament, but can Idunn lament, can her tears be brought forth to the surface? These aren't concerns of Justice who simply spins the rapidly flying blades into the dragon's hide rapidly, thinly, annoyingly. The blades are as thin and sharp as the constellations. When Idunn tries to repair a wound, a sword moves in to rip it back open again. She's the last tool in Angela's toolbox that she is willing to risk, or perhaps the last tool willing to fight.
Nobunaga	> "It's gotta be the joints." Without moving any other part of her body, Nobunaga's eyes shift sidelong towards Dieck. > "Pain doesn't stop her. Haven't seen her bleed yet. So, you've gotta... gum up the mechanisms." > "You wanna take Armads and try to jam it through her ankle, be my guest." Her eyes slide towards Echidna's sour response. She pauses, eyes snapping off Echidna and back to Iðunn. The faint glimmer of crimson against her dark hide of impenetrable scales. Nobunaga lifts just a bit where she crouches, immediately processing what she's seeing. With sudden gusto, she shoves the rest of the riceball in her mouth, stands up, and leans back balanced on one leg. "Don't mind if I do!" Its not really a kick but more of a shove that pushes Echidna off her feet and right onto the back seat of a Nobbu Tank. Mid-kick she even shifted back into her guise as the Demon King, hopping onto the tank next to the larger warrior woman, "Go! Go! Go!" As the tank digs its treads in a little 'peel out' before taking off at top speed, Nobunaga gets cheek-to-cheek with Echidna just so he can guide her gaze with a point, "There! Do you see it? We finally got through! Now you can show me what Armads can really do!" "MORI!" she shouts, straightening as she gets near, "STOP HER!" On the ground, Nagayoshi Mori glances up. Without waiting, he drops all the spears he's holding and pulls out his personal weapon. Crouching in place, he springs at the dragon's head-- and can't really do anything but hang on while Ultraman Geed wrestles with Iðunn. Only once things get less 'unstable' does he let go of the upraised scales he's hanging on to. Here, he plants his feet on Iðunn's snout, braces his spear with both hands, and rams it directly towards her uninjured eye. "Echidna," Nobunaga shoots a look at her (un?)willing passenger, "You know what to do. We're covering you." With that said, she stands up on the back of the Nobbu Tank and points. The tank's back-mounted guns fire, followed by the smaller rattle of Nobunaga's summoned rifles, all aimed at the dragon's face regardless of Nagayoshi already being there.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	By the time Flamel makes, well... a sort of contact, with a sort of something, provokes enough sensation in Iðunn to be noticeable, Madeleine is 'stalking' the Demon Dragon on foot, near enough to see the monster's reaction to the attempted psychic incursion. The timing of the attack with Iðunn's unlife-breath, combines with what she's been able to glean from examining Fae's wounds, to form an idea. It's the best idea she's had all day, because it's also the first. She clicks her radio on: "I think- there's something inside her, doing this, physically as much as spiritually. We might have to provoke her, into- into using that fire, and really meaning it, to get at the source of it..." Riku transforms, and Geed leaps atop the Demon Dragon to wrestle it away from cauterizing that leg wound. Madeleine decides now is the time, if there ever will be a time, and hustles into the fray herself. As she runs she glances down, at the thick purple ichor mixing with the ash underfoot. Spilled blood is spilled blood, by sword or axe or ritual knife. If there is anything that can be gleaned from a momentary divination - a name, a self-concept that Flamel could pull from Madeleine's head to hurl back at Iðunn - she can't pass up the opportunity to learn it. She pauses, staring down at the trickle of the stuff, knowing she's probably going to pay in blood of her own for this maneuver-- She is, in fact, punted skyward by a thrashing clawed foot. Landing hard, she has to play dead a moment to catch her breath and let her bones reconstitute themselves, then she's up and moving, around to the front of the Demon Dragon where Geed still wrestles with the creature. All that's left is to let Flamel process anything she gleaned from the blood-reading, and to... then what? <Close in. Navigate the fla-a-a-a-ames. Form eye contact. While you hurt-hurt-hurt-hurt as badly as she does, look for your sympathetic connection. Tell me when to fire.> Flamel's telepathic directives are too certain to question, even if there were time to do so. With the psychic agent's prompting, Madeleine knows what must be done. When Iðunn's field of vision is roughly on her, she hurls her spear with all her might - not to harm, but to get the great behemoth's attention, and to get that weapon the hell out of the way of whatever's coming next. If there were anything to say that would get the Demon Dragon's total attention, she would say it, but... right now she stands, out in the open, outside of claws'-reach, and simply braces herself, body and spirit, for the flames.
Desire Stars	You promised. Please don't... do too much... just because you feel bad. "Caught red-handed," Ace manages for Fae, with haggard playfulness. "You're right, I did promise you, and here I was, thinking of breaking it. I'm sorry, Fae." "Have you ever worked with metal before?" he asks conversationally of Fae. He's certain Petra has--she's a roboticist, after all. Pouring the molten metal into the mould is not only time consuming, it's just one part of a process that's even more time consuming. The edge still has to be refined even if the shape is kept, and so even once Fae's melted it enough to pour it, it still has to be worked. He strikes up conversation while he does. "Metal does some really interesting things. The armor that Neon and I wear, sometimes--the one that comes to us, and goes away on its own--" Patient and unerring tink-tink-tink hammer strikes punctuate his pauses. "The metal tubes on that armor, the ones that spit fire, have a rainbow pattern on them. Did you notice?" "That's because when that type of metal gets hot enough, it turns that color, and it stays that way, even when it cools back down. It's because of what that metal is made of, and because of the air touching it. A lot of people think that..." tink-tink-tink. "A metal is only ever what it is when someone first digs it up." Tink-tink. Ace wipes the sweat from his brow with his forearm, then wipes his palm on the tied-together sleeves of his DGP jacket, hanging from his waist. "But that isn't true. The iron in that guy's helmet," he says, gesturing with the hammer, "It's very different from what it was when it was in the ground. Many years ago, when you were just a little baby, I worked with the great-grandmother of this type of forge. It was called a bloomery." He smiles fondly. "People would dig up metal, dirt and all, and I'd put it into the bloomery, and it'd puff up," he says, illustrating with both hands before getting back to hammering. "Almost like a goose-down pillow, but, way too hot to touch. I'd take it out with special tools and hammer it, over and over again, put it back in, take it out, hammer it again..." "Making one sheet might mean hammering it flat as many as fourteen or fifteen times." "That must have been exhausting," Neon says, working a bellows with both hands before stoking the fire with more scrap wood for Fae's flames to cling to. "And this isn't?" Ace smiles at Neon. Neon laughs breathlessly, shaking her head. "I guess I just... didn't ever imagine I'd be doing this. I'm so different now, it's a little scary." "I think it's alright to be scared of changing." "Are you?" "I was." "What... changed?" "I met all of you." Tink-tink-tink. "Yeah... sometimes you'd have to hammer that sheet fourteen or fifteen times to get all of the slag out. But it got out, all right. Just with heat and pressure, and care, that metal became something very different. What do you think about that, Fae?"
Flamel Parsons	"What do you need us to do to help?" Petra Soroka asks. --- The Director picks up the phone, in his chaotic lab. Crashing, smashing, violence still surrounds him. Telepathy gives Petra a call, through her limited bandwidth, back over her radio. "You're offering to help?" He stands, gripping curling cord. "Fine. Then follow my exact directions:" He digs up a folder and opens it, bracing it against a technician's head while they unload a service weapon into an intruding anomaly. "Ready your Silver. It's neuroreactive. Synchronize it to a delta-wave brain activity pattern. Get close during a heavy period of high flame. Plant the weapon in the body near a major central nervous system cluster on the left side of her body, and escalate the waveform up to gamma patterns as the flame reservoir starts its restoration cycle. If you let go, the world ends. If you turn away from the fire, the world ends. If you misalign your patterns, the world ends. All possible outcomes end in her striking you with the fire or with her body lethally, except the one where I achieve an astral link." "You must use your Silver to force her to a state of total awakeness and focus, when her removed-soul is exposed on this side of the real world. An astral link must occur--" --- That's around the time the tail-swipe slams into his body, jostling the Parsons Institute -- and Flamel himself. Lugh's warning was heeded enough to get a barrier such that he didn't die. Not much more he could do besides that, given his obsessive focus. He'll have more to do in a moment, but...
Flamel Parsons	Flamel slams down into the hills near that camp. <Hhhh. Lugh!! Get the timing! Exact seconds between use of the antimemetic fire weapon and the reaction! Notes!!> Not even a thank you, but he's saving those up for him later. He drags himself out of a crater, where splinters of lush wood paneling and chips of concrete mix with the dirt. He shudders, planting a hand over half his face as a rush of fluid from the strain of that shield pours out of his nose. Gasping, struggling... She's cauterizing something. He can hear that. Someone's yelling that she'll get blood samples... His telepathic linking doesn't ask for consent, even when it was gladly given. He just pulls everything Madeleine has unhesitatingly. If there's something there that would be useful in someone's mind, he shoves it to them. He's still not on his feet yet before the process is done, gathering more and more of whatever he can from the information... "Stop the launch." He keeps whispering to himself. "Stop the launch. Stop the launch." He tele-shouts to Lugh, <Get me a timing! And complete anything else you can! We have to finish this! I need to get closer...> He takes off. Levitating, he rushes, building up speed down hills and retaining it in long, arcing leaps towards Iðunn... --- Exhausted, the Director wipes blood from his cane. "There's," He pants heavily. "One moment. Where the dark magic, I think, is pulling her soul back to the surface." He whips the cane against a broad diorama of Iðunn's brain that was set up in the lab earlier. "Left hemisphere. Anterior Cingulate Cortex. A soul accessway is set up, connected to wherever they tore her soul out to, to draw dark magic from. It had enough astral machinery left for a link. If it can be held open long enough the payload can force it wider." "The payload?" One of the few surviving team members barely holds herself up on a chair. But her answer is given wordlessly: The cane points, terribly, towards the half-built recreation of the dragon temple. "We're taking it to the Astral Link. Get everyone who can move in here." The cane slams back onto the ground. "Remember to lift with your knees." --- Flamel winks out of visibility. He's maneuvering to try to get somewhere near the back of her head, where Geed holds it so painfully... If he can get the right spot, he'll plant himself in place, grasping the surfaces around him with a dozen telekinetic hands to brace for the recoil that comes next. When the fire finally abates, he's going to have a precise timing available. A particular segment of seconds where her soul might surge up. If Petra really felt like listening to him, then that dreamless pain the soul is in, when given the chance to exist, will rise all at once to wakefulness. If someone was able to form that sympathetic link, there might be enough spare seconds to project. His head racks back. No-- god. No. His skull unfolds. Shining psionic light mechanically unfolds behind. And in front. Flamel Parsons is going to form a direct connection. --- The people in the control room are screaming. "DIRECTOR?! WHAT ARE YOU-- WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! The director pulls his hand away from a bright red button. "What's necessary. Dragons configured themselves to have the biological ability to draw power from a stone into which artificial selfhood was placed." "BUT WE'RE--" "We have a duty. Stop the launch, whatever it takes." "WE'RE ALL GOING TO--" "Firing." ---
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's body goes limp; the telekinetic structure around the rock that constitutes his brain, a large psionic gun, racks and clicks. And then, fires the payload encased in desperate layers of psionic barrier. The blast has none of the dramatic gravitas of the beams before. It's one cannon among dozens. It is more meaning than could ever be put to words. Flamel Parsons intends to plant his own brain deep into the back of Iðunn's skull. He is, after all, an agent of a vague yet ominous government organization. It only makes sense: A mind-control implant. If it lands deep enough, pierces deep enough and rests deep enough, Flamel's psychic force of absolute, total stop-the-launch impulse, total pacifying peace-seeking, should surge through the astral construct he made, the artificial framework of a mind that her soul could connect to, and stop her from fighting. Hijacking channels of draconic stones, he should bypass all manner of magical defenses. Planting it physically, he should bypass all manner of mental ones.
Lilian Rook	The first gasp of hope, or at least anything that has tasted like it in hours, comes to Lilian the instant that Sofia fires Apocalypse. When she left her with the spell, Lilian had feared that the second time seeing it would be too much for her to face; but as the bodycount rises, the ground turns to ashen sludge, and the sun sets then rises again, she finds herself barely able to remember why she did. Her body is long past the point where she still knows what she can demand of it. Pain, exhaustion, stress, and ever-increasing blood loss; even the names of these meters are barely legible after twelve hours of trying to balance them. Rather, it's been more than thirty-six for her, not of all of which she has been conscious for. The only rest she's had are the fitful chunks she gets when she stops moving and passes out where nobody can see, which she has no means to count and barely any more memory of the fragmented nightmares that always wake her. The significance of the Warpgate warning process has gone with them; she answers the communicator every thirty minutes because at some point, it was relevant to winning. The same as Flamel's insane project. The same as the Binding Blade. In that state, wracking her brains for a silver bullet is pointless, and anxiously hoping for something to change is only a form of immiserating self-harm; so at some point, she stopped doing either. Sparing no consideration for anything but the hard way through, the gruesome prospect of forward progress; minimal, gruelling, and costly; had become akin to sort of ritualistic training-ordeal, focused wholly on the breaking of scales and only the brutal minutiae of a near-impossible task. In that state, Durandal getting two millimeters deeper than last time felt like tide-turning news, causing Lilian to fully reevaluate 'twelve more hours from now' while she was scraping together enough energy to go again. Apocalypse pushes saving the world ahead by an entire inch. A lot of things happen in very quick succession. Lilian is hardly even aware of boiling her words down to 'I have to be there and it has to not be on fire.' before Riku has already gotten the message and staked his life on wrestling with Iðunn's neck. Echidna and Armads coming up behind her feels like hearing a gunshot by her ear. Any thought of what Flamel could possibly be doing, how Madeleine and Petra are involved, is blanked completely from her mind. The only opening Lilian has seen since Sacae is right in front of her. There are three of Tamamo's revitalization talismans left in her possession, and have been for the last seven hours. She has been saving one of them for retreat, and two of them for this, burned the instant she sees blood. Lilian appears at the wound on blind faith, anchoring herself with Night Mist in ruined flesh, even as the familiar heat builds on the back of her neck and the burns of two hours ago scream at her to stop. The black-gold array is cut into the surface of the bleed; the space she has to work is the only way she can thank the Demon Dragon for her massive size.
Lilian Rook	Exsanguination is immediate, catastrophic, and utterly inconsequential. Such a minor bleed won't kill Iðunn any time today even if Lilian had endless remaining magic; but it can't clot on its own like this, and absolute volume is what she is so desperate for as to risk staying there until the very last second it is no longer possible for anyone to restrain Iðunn from immolating her. The second talisman has to be used right after, droppping Lilian where Iðunn's blood overwhelms the shallow snowfall and forms a contiguous pool. Her armour steams where her ankles touch it. The air she coughs up fogs pink with her own, not for supernatural power; fighting in the cold is a mercy on her lungs. The burst of energy she's given herself is already being paid for in her posture, channeling everything she can spare into the singular gathering that casts ripples across the surface from the radiating pressure at her swordpoint. She struggles through the words "--Iníon na Gealaí." for no reason of arcane significance. The moment Flamel needs his 'sympathetic pain' is coincidence, but the moment that the approaching others need not to be torched is an intentional choice. Lilian throws the full weight of the occultic-sympathetic blow across the length of the pool, rendered completely inert after one swing, to drive the singular force completely beneath the scales and straight up-and-across the armbone, from vein to joint.
Petra Soroka	As Eckesachs has been worn down over half a day of exhaustive use, Petra's Silver has gradually encroached to fill its gaps. Morphmetal grips the chipped metal to stay close to the blade, the same way that the Beauty of Ash stays whole after shattering, as all the soldered scars of the reforged weapon slowly give way. When she's forced to in order to replenish the Binding Blade, Petra lets go of the slivers one by one to drop them into the furnace. During the whole process, Petra stays with Fae, Raigh, Ace, and Neon as much as she can. She's not especially skilled at smithing a weapon, something that Ace certainly has some bizarre story of having done sometime in the past thousand years, but she's done a lot of cruder metalworking in her castle. The Silver is a perfect tool, both effortlessly fluid and more enduring against the heat of Fae's flames, and through it Petra can apply force and shape the metal at Ace's direction with an impossibly fine amount of detail. It's circumstance that forces them to use Fae as an engine, after waking her up from her nap to recuperate from being brutally injured. Petra does her best to make it tolerable for her; and by spending time doting on Fae, Petra's own mindstate avoids the nosedive that the hopeless battle might otherwise induce. "You're doing such a good job, Fae. Just a little longer, okay? This is just one last big push before the finish line, and then we can all take a nap." Petra methodically rubs Fae's back when she's small to help ease the tension of using her breath so much, relegating the metalworking to the Silver. Whenever Fae's big, Petra does much the same, but scratching the side of her neck, chattering to fill the time and keep her from being bored. "You've really grown a lot. Do you think so too? When we met, I don't think you would've understood just how serious this all is, and been able to focus and help everyone for this long. And even though it's a little sad to understand, it also means that you've been able to make friends with all of us, rather than just being a kid at home." Petra gives her a kiss on her big feathery neck. "I'm really proud of you. Just make sure that no matter how hard you work, you always remember that the reason to do it is so you can play the next day. Which we will, once the Beauty of Ash is all better." "Please don't... do too much... just because you feel bad. Fae gets it." Teaming up with Fae, Petra points accusingly at Ace. "Yeah; you'd better listen to your elders," said to literally the only person here that's actually older than Fae. . . . "I messed up, didn't I... I'm so sorry..." "Roy!" Once the Binding Blade is set and neither Eckesachs or the Silver are needed anymore, Petra is in camp steeling herself to return to the battlefield when Roy wakes up. She hurries over to check on him, and, slightly delirious from over thirty hours of sustained consciousness, explains, "Yeah, but we stay silly." "The Binding Blade's cooling in its mold; who knows how well it'll work, but that's that. Flamel's got some thing going on. Lilian's drawn blood. So, don't go crying yet." Petra squeezes his hand, the one that wasn't severed from his body. "We're all still here."
Petra Soroka	. . . "You're offering to help?" "Take it or leave it, dude." Petra drawls into her radio, unslinging Eckesachs from her back with her other hand. The bravado is, entirely, for show, but 'for show' doesn't mean nothing. Rather than grimly trudging out away from the camp with nothing but a patchwork Eckesachs to show for it, Petra takes the mantle of the self-assured third act heroine, already certain that Flamel has no better choice than to rely on her. She props the radio up to her ear with her shoulder, while eyeing the Demon Dragon's fight with the others. "If you let go, the world ends. If you turn away from the fire, the world ends." "Okay, but if I pull this off, you have to-- be nice to me." Already distracted by trying to figure out her approach, Petra tries to come up with something smugly coy, and ends up sounding whiny instead. She scoffs, frustrated, and doubles down. "I'm serious! If I can lock in for the end of the world, then so can you! The Eight Heroes weren't getting into radio arguments!" . . . The heat even a kilometer away from the fires that rage intensely even over bare rock is sickening. Petra's been lucky so far to not take a direct hit from Iðunn's flames without any of her mitigating armor; not lucky enough to avoid the same from the war dragons, with red welts that itch from the heat even after treatment. With Eckesachs in hand, she has to either bait her breath by hatred or by grief, and survive the aftermath. Petra is probably, she reasons, more vulnerable than usual to dark magic. Back when she was hit by the Titanomachia's iteration of the Beauty of Ash's cannon, it felt much the same, and she was hospitalized for a week even without any physical damage. The unsteady tower of 'Petra Soroka' was built by fire, and can be destroyed the same way. She'd really rather not find out. This is, after all, Flamel's second opportunity to tell Petra to walk into fire. Cinder took the first, leaving Petra Fourth Match Flame as a token. The Beauty of Ash, despite its namesake, similarly burnt away when Iðunn got to it. Fire, both destructive and creative, has always incidentally crossed Petra's life as a harbinger of its change. . . . Once she's crossed the torched no-mans-land behind Iðunn, Petra's use of Eckesachs escalates recklessly. She abandons the previous tactic of cycling between the Divine Weapon's wielders in short bursts at Lilian's direction, to instead hammer the greatsword at Iðunn by any means necessary. With one wound successfully drawn, Eckesachs sends boom after boom of thunder with each strike, flickering to chase after casts of Apocalypse or doubling with Night Mist in its massive spear form.
Petra Soroka	Blood splatters the ground behind her, her own, from something as incidental as a boulder exploding under the Demon Dragon's stomp. Sparks light up along with surges of lightning when Eckesachs makes a glowing trail on Iðunn's scales, illuminating the glittering pieces of metal chipped off in return. Clipped by the tip of Iðunn's tail, Petra's thigh blossoms into an explosed bloody-purple bruise, skittering away to avoid the followup. Both Petra and Eckesachs near the limits of their durability when her chance finally comes. The Demon Dragon's momentary immobility in Geed's grasp keeps her still enough that Petra can leap up jagged, misaligned scales like rocks jutting out of a cliff wall, Eckesachs trailing behind her and scraping up the length of her massive leg. Planting her feet at the base of Iðunn's forewings, in the gap between her massive scapulae and with her jaw flailing wildly overhead, Petra raises up Eckesachs with both hands. When she brings it down, right at the base of Iðunn's neck where her spinal cord snakes through her body, Eckesachs shatters along its uncountable fault lines. The Silver woven through it yanks every piece back together, and Petra plunges it into her neck again leaning her entire body weight into it, over and over until it sticks and bleeds, with the unified Divine and Silver weapon plugging an antenna into her body. To cauterize, to kill, or to respond to the brutalization of Zephiel's weapon, all Iðunn has to do is twist her head around and vomit all the poison inside of her onto Petra, who stays gripping Eckesachs until she can't anymore. "Flamel!!! Now!!!!"
Marigold	"How about I blow your head off?" are Brunnya's first, unhesitating words to the question of the man who saved her. But she doesn't really move to, though one hand still clutches her spellbook. After a long moment she sighs, shoulders drooped. "Because I hate that woman," she finally says, at last getting it off her chest. "And what she did to him. If she hadn't come along, I could have fixed him. How's that." She takes the invitation in one burned, bandaged hand, but then thinks better of it, and pushes it back. She staggers to her feet. "Thanks," Brunnya says, moving as if she means to return to the front, "But I'm not sure I want to live. I just want to kill that bitch." - - - - "Mmm! Fae's doing such a good job," Fae says preeningly (and only somewhat tiredly), wiggling her little wings whenever Petra pets between them. "Petra's doing such a good job, too! Are you sure your big self is gonna be okay...?" Wildfire tucked under her armkeeps getting dirtied-up with the all-pervading ashes, but she does a good job keeping them brushed-off. When Petra takes her side against Ace, she plants a balled-up fist on her hip while pointing: "Yeah!!" "Well," Fae says to Ace, a little petulantly but entirely seriously, "Fae forgives you." And then she does in an abrupt about-face, with the gravitas of children, sitting back down and wiggling her little boots. They know what it's like to make mistakes. "Mmm. Fae's only played with metal once or twice! Arcadia doesn't have much..." she says. "Fae does things with glass, though! Fae blows into it like a balloon, and it gets really big." Then she sits contentedly through the rest of the story, even if she does giggle at 'when you were just a little baby'. Prompted, she looks between the three, tapping her lower lip. Being involved in grown-up conversation is reinvigorating her more than the nap did. "Ummm... mhmhm, thanks for letting us care for you. But nobody ever stays the same! Not even Fae. Or Ace. Everybody changes, and you don't stop growing up. So... you have to make it 'good' changing, by making friends! That's what Fae thinks." She toddles over to give Neon a big hug, or as big as she can manage, around the shoulders. Then she spins on her heel, transforms again, and gives the forge another big puff... The Blade is still an ugly piece of work, with how many pieces were missing to start. Even the ruby of the Fire Emblem in its hilt is cracked. But if you're lucky, it might hold for one swing.
Marigold	- - - - "You're not going to die, Love. I promise it," Merlinus says softly. "Now, your Angela seems like a fine young lady. But I'm older than she is, and I'd like to think those years weren't wasted! And so, for what it's worth... I think he was ready. Sometimes-- sometimes it just doesn't work, and it doesn't mean you made the wrong choice." Roy's neck sizzles a little as he moves it, with the sandlike microshrapnel of the Blade coming into contact with new flesh; then he grimaces, but it's already stopped. Just like how it burned his hands when he first gripped it; he's adjusted to it despite being a quarter-dragon, or maybe it's adjusted to him. "Thank you, Odette. I... I feel fine," he lies, testing his reattached arm. It's still visibly clumsier than he'd like, and agonizing, by the way he tightens his teeth. The better hand is still the one that Zephiel broke. "Has-- someone else taken the Blade already?" Maybe they should. But Petra reinvigorates him; and maybe Love does too, without meaning to. He turns on the bed, hangs his legs off, and then slouches forward. He gives Petra's hand a careful squeeze. "We're all still here. I... I'll do my best to keep it that way. Haha..." "And Love... we are grown-ups. I don't think anyone has this under control. If we don't stop her, maybe nobody will. Thank you for... for doing your best with me. But I have to try again." He rummages at his belt for a bottle of healing vulnerary- maybe the last one left in the whole army- and drinks half of it. He puts the other half in Love's hands, and apologizes to Odette with his eyes. "I'm going. It's okay if you need to rest. You've given a lot, already. But... I'm going." - - - - "It's, ahhh...! One second after the fire stops! N-no, half a second!" Lugh blurts out, triple-checking his notes with a terrified look on his face. As Flamel rises from the crater, for just a second, Lugh takes his wrist from behind. "Please... Mr. Parsons. Take a deep breath, for me. You can't heal other people if you're messed-up yourself. Okay?" It's said with a soft, forlorn concern. Those are probably words he heard from Lucius. - - - - The Demon paints the sky with that horrid fire as Riku drags her head upwards. Her wing-talons reach up to scrape along his armored back; when that fails to get him off, she rolls across the ground like a dog on grass, twists ponderously to pin his leg down with a claw, and then heaves up her body to bend her neck around in his grip to try to bathe him in that horrid fire again. It's still better than letting her cauterize herself. You'd have to hope. Drogrung bats off the transparent coating of the Demon's red eye, but whatever mindless mind Iðunn still has recognizes Madeleine as a recurring thorn, and she takes the chance to swivel her flames towards her and-- --this was a mistake. 'Pain' is the wrong word, but it is torture. It feels more like dying than dying does. It is going under anesthesia, but the anesthesia isn't right. It is the time you almost drowned in a pool when you were ten years old. Riku at least had armor. Madeleine runs, or she dies.
Marigold	- - - - Iðunn is flicking Nagayoshi off her face and trying to crunch him like a piece of popcorn, and Echidna is swinging for the fences at the Demon's now-blood-gushing wound just as Lilian's getting clear of it, and there's the CRACK of Armads breaking nearly in half as it digs into a tendon joining with Lilian's heavy slice up the inside of the leg-- "AAAA--GRHHAO--OOUUHRRRR--EEEE...!!" --and, finally, more urgently than before, she lowers her head to blowtorch-and-cauterize her own leg with that awful violet breath, just after her attempt to torch Madeleine and Riku. The hideous dark magic flickers, on dregs, but it's still enough to seal the quick bleed. That entails holding her head stationary, at a precise angle, for several seconds. Perfect for Petra- just at Lugh's "NOW!"- to drive in Eckesachs the little bit it'll take. And though it immediately earns Petra being slammed against the ground-- cracking the blade-- driving it deeper-- - - - - The inside of Iðunn's mindless mind, the hollow space where a soul was scooped out, looks exactly like the chamber in the Dragon Temple where you found her. In the center of that dark cathedral-like room, there is a divot worn into the stone by her kneeling there near-motionless for one thousand years. There is something evil about that slight indentation. If you stand there, or better yet kneel there, you can almost hear an echo. A sound from a thousand years ago, or fifteen hundred, reassembles itself from echoes. There is no 'Iðunn', not now, not really; but there is a psychometric echo, like an object, like scar tissue. If she could have said something to Flamel, at the moment that her soul was excised, what would it have been? 'i'm sorry' 'kill me' - - - - While Iðunn is halted, Roy catches up from behind along her vast swathe of desolation. If Love can't carry him, he limps. Her red eye sees him, and she wheels around with an awful shriek, slowed by her lamed leg and the jamming in her head. He grips the sword, tenuously, with both hands. He looks absolutely terrified.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Can you destroy an emptiness? More pertinently, can the Demon Dragon? The black-violet flame washes over Madeleine, and she begins to wonder if this might have been a bad idea. She doesn't notice what it does to her body, which is good, because to dwell on that would be nightmarish. The pain - of becoming less, of being unmade down to the roots - is recognizeable, bitterly nostalgic in its texture. She did something like this to herself, once, and has come to regret that she ever felt it necessary. There's not long to contemplate what's happening, but there doesn't need to be. Perhaps some part of her will always be here, trapped in this moment, burning. Perhaps some part of her always has been here, or was always meant to be. As her blackened bones turn to ash, as the very curse that sustains her immortality chars and disintegrates around her spirit, one last piece of Madeleine Cadrasteia is left, a wisp that's gone to somewhere else in a blink of an eye: Nothing whatsoever remains.
Riku Asakura	Ultraman Geed holds on for dear life against the Demon Dragon. It's enough to hold her there long enough for others to pile on the damage to the dragon herself; it's enough for Petra, Lilian, and Flamel to get what they need to get done... and all Geed has to do is hold onto that neck for as long as his arms can hold. Her claws rake his back, but his armor holds against her, even as sparks rain down. She rolls across the ground, but it is somehow less effective and gives Geed a little more leverage, because he rolls with her and aims to make sure that fire doesn't land where she wants it to...until she points her head down at Geed himself. The fire falls over him. It burns horribly, but never just physically. The pain of that dark magic flame is finally enough to throw off Geed himself, forcing him to appologize to the others as he goes down. Even as his very mind and soul are being torn apart by the effects of that flame. It takes every ounce of his ego to keep himself together. Even then, he can't be sure if enough of him survived to the Ultraman Geed of the current moment. Struggling to stand, and already having lost time on his color-coded timer, which is now flashing red, he pulls himself back and is ready to fight. This time he was going to push farther... and he doesn't know what happens if the timer runs completely red either. He doesn't have Lilian's killer sword techniques, he doesn't have the power of Apocalypse, he doesn't have Petra's Silver, or Flamel's mind powers... but he DOES have enough energy for a powerful shot left. Staring down the Demon Dragon, he runs at her again. He starts by trying to strike at her, trying to get her to rear back. Halfway through it, though, he realizes he won't get a good shot at that, not without overexerting himself. Instead, he tries to prod her into trying to rear forward and pounce him into the ground again. The moment she goes for this, he readies something. Energy coursing through his body as he fails to defend himself properly. The pain is awful, but when she crashes down on him... He moves his body so that his arms are right under that patch of scales that were previously bleeding and very hurt. Electrical power channels from either shoulder spike into his hands as he pulls them apart. He forms the shape of an L with his hands, and a powerful green beam of energy pierces out, aiming to pierce up into that injured part of the Demon Dragon... and Geed pours every last bit of energy he has left into it. He screams as he does so, anything to stop her... even if it's all he has left!
Flamel Parsons	Flamel is here. There. That is, he's in the mindscape. --- His mental image is still his own, even as his physical body lies limp in the dirt, head torn open by psychokinetic impact. And so he walks in, into that empty space where Iðunn ought to be but isn't. He steps forward, kneels into the divot. Closes his eyes. Focuses. Listens. There's nobody here. He takes a deep breath. "Alright." He whispers. He reaches a hand down, brushes fingers against the stone... "If someone's on the outside..." He whispers. "You better do what you're gonna do, right now." But in here, he can make sure Iðunn is halted. Held in place. Kept in daze. There's nobody and nothing else here, of course, which means there's nothing he can do. Still. Good time to talk. Alone. "Hi. I'm Flamel Parsons. Agent of a foolish but worthy human race." He says, to seemingly nobody in particular. "I'm here on behalf of an organized conspiracy -- about one thousand years of little kindnesses, from Hartmut to Guinivere. But, I won't do what you would have asked. I think, a long time ago, you did an awful lot to make sure humankind didn't have to follow your orders. Now... Please, hold still. Just a few moments more." "A little more of that mundane kindness is all it'll take." --- His body lies limp on the ground, the psionic structure of his TK-gun withering away for lack of mental force. His stone brain buzzes in a soft purple flickering light, in an implant site on Iðunn's head. His signal is unresponsive. Please, Roy. Stop the launch.
Angela	Idunn "No...!" Justice says. Failing to protect people is the thing that turns HER monster. SHe extends a hand out to Madeleine, but this far from the Light she can't summon a protective shield. And then, all she sees is nothing being left. "You...!" Now determined to kill, Despair readies her blades once more... "W..wait...!" Love shouts. "We're gonna try again!" Justice doesn't have the heart to say no to Love, but moves between Idunn and Roy and Love all the same. "Steady your hand, young knight. If you show fear that what you desire will not come to pass, she shan't believe it." Justice advises. "Just be you. The you who came here again is enough." Love advises before sinking to the ground in pain. She can certainly not take that flame again.
Marigold	Facing down Roy, the Demon Dragon looks even more wretched than when she first awoke. Her own breath has half-blackened her malformed teeth with soot, and as her breaths heave her sunken ribcage, drool drizzles from her mouth alongside the water from her uncorrupted eye. The thousand scale-deep scratches from Divine Weapons paint her legs and face in a golden glow that almost washes out their color. Every time she's vomited fire, her screams have become rougher. Wretchedness is no longer reassuring as a sign of decline. How much violence can a body withstand? She fought this continent for centuries before the Heroes put her to sleep. Maybe there is no limit. Maybe she could just go on becoming more wretched and gruesome and bloodied forever, until she becomes a churning machine of gristle and blood and fangs; an invulnerable entropic maximum too soulless to kill. It doesn't seem implausible. She wrenches herself free of Riku after two tugs, and advances on Roy with more of a limp than she'd had at the start. Pelting ice from Brunnya slows her advance just a quarter of a pace. Fae catches up from her staggering sprint after him to stand alongside Justice as a shield, even though she trembles in fear while Iðunn looms over them. The Blade is glowing brighter by the second now as Roy tries to muster his will. The Demon is nearly unconcerned. Her lurching, unsteady advance closes on him; the violet flame glows again in the back of her throat; the long shadows of distant wildfires churn with fresh life, reaching long arcing limbs towards him. They will reach in time. "I... I have the blade of Hartmut, the hero, who took pity on y--" "KREE--AUUU----GRAA--AUGHAA--!" "--nd spared you. If you want all of this to end... if something in you still yearns for true peace... then please..." He needs two seconds longer. The limp has bought him one. Just before a half-dozen forms of death wash over him, that one green eye- still like Fae's- widens; and her body contorts with a great shiver, as if suddenly revolted by something; and-- I just want this to be over, and everyone to be okay. The Blade swings, and the world is wrapped in a soft white light that washes away everything else. When the light fades, the stars in the sky are dimming, and the ending springtime snow has been blown away. A warm, pleasant breeze blows through the open blackened field, where Iðunn)] once had stood. She still stands there, an indescribable look on her face, not quite blank. Her with her almost-white hair and her purple robe, and one charred-bloody arm and the other covered in golden scratches. Roy drops to the ground, the Blade shattering out of his grasp. Iðunn crumples too, just a moment later. 'why'
Flamel Parsons	All Parsons Institute manifestation start disappearing. A gleaming stone thuds to the ground, light along its surface still pulsing softly. Look on its surface and you'll see within: --- An all-clear is declared in the Parsons Institute. Code Green. The lockdowns lift, the alarms go quiet, the survivors emerge from under desks and from within emergency shelters. The Director leans back in the chair in his office. The launch was stopped. He stands, and walks towards his office window, stopping to stare out into dim black. --- Stars so dim in the night sky have never been so beautiful.