Scene #6123: The Scouring Rush-2

Owner	Pose
Rurufon	The spore blobs are definitely the kind meant to catch more fragile creatures directly in the face as they desperately try to stay in the few safe spots in the storm of lasers. Zero and Yuuki get that feeling. The sticky greenish tar doesn't so much aim at them as it goes flying through the least laser-ridden sections of space, quite possibly so that they aren't burned out of the air before reaching a target, and if so, with perfect coordination. Being able and willing to tank some of the heat rays and pushing through the roving, sizzling, metal-melting fence of welding beams makes injury a certainty and infection unlikely. Scores of splitting gunshots become their own lattice of energy beams intermingling with the one of angry orange erected by the violently thrashing flesh-metal 'flowers'. They smash into their eyes across the room, hitting something that cracks like thick glass rather than pops like a gooey eyeball, making all sorts of burbling, withering shrieks as the flora drop dead on the spot. Yuuki rips dozens of them out at the roots and the stalks, severing them such that they spray liquid like broken pipes, taking several seconds to peter out, as if drawing blood from a communal 'mains. It seems briefly safe, until half of the 'plants' already killed rise again, spitting out broken eyes, replaced through moving bulges through their stalks like snakes vomiting up a recent meal, and budding entirely new heads from half-length tendrils, resuming the assault. The unlucky spore slaves outside aren't quite that hardy. Their original flesh is still a weakness; they couldn't make it on this Nexus because of the limitations of their bodies before, and this . . . whatever it is, can't make them perfect. They drop dead before the room of 'flowers' does, and htey don't get back up. Arthur begins his flickery MSpaint animated sequence of heat discharge into the metallic trunk of The Scouring Rush as a whole. The thing is so massive and extends up so high that Arthur quickly finds that it's just a fact of thermal conduction that he isn't going to be able to shoot a million kelvins all the way to the top; too much of it diffuses into the entire thing's general mass, glowing white hot at his point of contact, but fading to gold, yellow, orange, then red many hundreds of meters up. It does the trick though. The ground shakes underneath him. The amount of gravel and rust sifting down from above triples, falling like thick, tetanus-ridden snow. After it comes an even thicker dusting of angry bruise-purple powder, like the scales of a venomous butterfly's wings, or the hairs of an aggravated tarantula. It takes all of five seconds to recognize it as the same poison of the area they'd just escaped, concentrated into airborne powder. Something up top is generating it --has been generating it, for a very very long time, falling down and down and seeping through the roots of this place into the exactly where roots should go --a Realm full of water and minerals. Whatever is up there turned the Purity Station into the Violent Poison Area a long time ago. The irony of this is that the toxin is actually less absurdly deadly, since it hasn't built up and stewed in itself for hundreds of years on end. It's still not goo to be in though. Zero can sense the central shaft and its maze of adjoining, interconnected halls lighting up with new predatory signals, some the dim shuffling of infected zombies, some the keener, more diffuse hunger of the local flora. The presence at the very, very top, increases in intensity, despite its strange 'field' of awareness. One slightly different from all the others, closer to what he's used to, he can pinpoint halfway up.
Zero Kiryu	Zero observes the phenomena of the reviving plants calmly. They're not 'reviving' so much as they are being 'replaced'. The smell of burning flesh smells the room from where he simply accepted the danger of being shot over potentially being infected. With the revelation of how the plants will replace themselves locally, he makes the decision to follow-up in a manner similar to the way that Yuuki did just a moment ago. He angles his gun away and focuses on sprouting more vines. They snake out from the already-fantastic volume of metallic, thorned vines and creep downwards to burrow into the blighted earth alongside the freshly-renewed laser plants. After a moment or two of burrowing they twist and begin to wrap themselves around the plant underground, drilling into the earth and constricting it as they go. The hunter is on the precipice of pushing further exploratory digging when alarm bells start going off in his head. Zero turns about in place, his eyes raking the central shaft of the area. << "Arthur. Maaka. Everything in this place just woke up-- and there's something stand-out around..." >> He describes the general locale of the 'different' presence halfway up the central shaft, within reasonable parameters relative to Zero's own position. << "I don't know if you can work with that, but you'll probably get there faster than I can." >>
Arthur Lowell	<< "Oh, WOKE UP? Yeah, that might'a been ME." >> Arthur pipes up brightly, looking up. << "Gotta SHAKE IT UP to know what we gotta MURDER, you get me?" >> He keeps a close ear to what Zero says, which is to say a close eye to the Pesterchum display of the quest marker for what Zero found. Then he flicks his broom out dramatically and mounts it. << "I'll HIT IT in a HOT SECOND, homeboy." >> He says, before coughing heavily. The poison meter is showing up again! "Fuckin' hell, same POSISON METER too?" He waves his arms as if clearing smoke from his face and then blasts off. << "Think we found the POISON SOURCE, dog. Shit, though, this LEGAL? It's some WACK-ASS NOISE letting one REALM'S LORD get up in another REALM. Aren't they supposed to STEP OFF? Do we REPORT THIS up the chain to NUMBER ONE HORNS up at the TOP?" >> Arthur's going to try to crash through the gravel and rust, suffering whatever it does to his HEALTH VIAL, in an effort to reach the spot Zero just marked. "Yeah, what's up SHITHEAD, hear you're not a big fan of my COOKING." Arthur mutters, rubbing his hands together again and building up another rush of black and white. "You feelin' like GETTIN' OUT HERE and hitting the DANCE FLOOR, motherfucker? 'Cause I'm 'boutta drop a fat goddamn beat on your ass and it sounds like THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSS!!" Arthur keeps his position, now standing across the rocket-broom and planting both hands onto the stem to add another session of cooking as close as he can to whatever Zero just said woke up. If this is fungal, the most important part /probably/ isn't at the top, right? Because fungi usually only put their reproductive organs there. And it's probably not at the bottom, because that's where they get the nutrients. So if Zero has ID'd something here, maybe it's the important one...? Well, whatever, the important part is that Zero pointed him at something and thus Arthur is going to immediately make as much of a mess in that direction as possible.
Alexis Maaka	Maaka growls. This really isn't her night. She stores the BCM and magazines in favor of something much, much more destructive; She draws a Vepr-12, an AK-shaped automatic shotgun loaded with a drum magazine, muzzle brake, optic, rail system, and other modifications that turn it into a death-machine firing 12 gauge rounds at either semi or full auto. The shotgun opens fire upon the thralls, spitting out magnum slugs with frightening accuracy. << "Roger that, we're working on making our way through." >> She messages back. << "If anybody can figure something out, it's Arthur." >> All she can do is not die while assisting him all she can, spitting out slug rounds to try and sever limbs. "C'mon, Lowell, let's move it!" She feels poisoning and rust affect her, but she presses through. FIring off her grappling line, Maaka follows Arthur as he zooms away toward the midpoint. She's got det-packs on hand, juuuuuuust in case.
Yuuki Kuran	This whole situation is exactly the sort of thing that Yuuki Kuran had come to expect out of Rurufon's Shadow Tower. It was perfectly encapsulated in this hellish room. A higher strata just exacerbated the issue. But because of the strategy of herself and Zero, they only had to deal with a casually lethal cross-section of laser hell instead of fungal infection blasts. But the room doesn't clear. It's just doubled down on. "I can't bring in any help to keep all these plants--" Yuuki begins, worried, before Zero starts attacking with his vines. Bloody Rose, unlike Yuuki's various shadowy familiars, didn't run the risk of secondary infection. It also killed things Extra Double Dead. "Right." Yuuki breathes, at Zero's back, while he covers the pair of them, bringing up Artemis with a crackle. "I guess we just push forward." With a sweep of her weapon, she sends out earth-shattering waves of force to oppress those foes that Zero doesn't focus on. "We'll push towards the central spire, and I'll watch the back. Your senses are better than mine, so don't worry about threats from the back - I'll take care of them."
Rurufon	Between Artemis and Bloody Rose, the industrial-grotesque garden planted by the thralls is thoroughly suppressed. Where they kill the root network's extrusions, some of them are replaced by fresh organisms, but the number of times it can do so seems to rapidly dwindle. The smashed eyes and severed blooms twitch with the threat of pulling themselves back together, but die, rust, and wither in fast forward instead, largely leaving barrel husks blocking nodes that could otherwise grow back and regenerate. An especially powerful wave from Yuuki scythes down most of the room, even biting deep into the overly thick, pipe-like tendrils of the main column, missing only the flowers growing from the walls. Bloody Rose's metallic tendrils burrowing into the room quickly entwine around a completely separate set of enmeshed metal vines, almost exactly like the underground connections of a fungal colony so frequently compared to. They're finer filaments than the stalks above ground, and torn and twisted apart easily enough, swiftly cutting off the room's -the colony's- access to the exterior source of spare biomass, and killing it off for good. The last few mooks are gunned down easily enough outside, before Arthur goes chasing after the one unique signature Zero had detected. The poison is horrible but manageable, as he has the benefit of flying at high speed through it this time, instead of wading through a 100x concentration stagnant miasma through cramped, wet rooms. Maaka will definitely have to use those detpacks to blast open the iron doors when they arrive, held completely shut by multiple inches of rust and metallic accumulation. Going deeper in, the both of them will have to fight off several ambushes from roving gangs of freshly awakened thralls, quickly becoming mobile hazard blobs that block entire hallways shoulder to shoulder, forcing them to maneuver around them like the world's most awful game of pac-man, or expend valuable ammo and aspect to blast through them. Very close to the target, however, the mobs cease appearing, and the two of them are picking over freshly made corpses instead. What they find might be a little unexpected. In a dingy room with only the one entrance, lit by portable halogen lights, another human being is seated on an iron crate. Dressed in grey and black combat fatigues, wearing a scorched and scratched set of ceramic and kevlar, his face filthy and bloody and without his helmet, he appears to be in the process of laying out a large number of mostly empty magazines, and ejecting the handful of cartridges remaining in each to make for a small number of full magazines. He fiddles with the springs with twitchy hands, and immediately draws his sidearm when the two enter. The spot on his tactical harness where a combat knife would be is torn and broken, replaced instead with the battered and weathered sheath of some rune-engraved sword he picked up elsewhere. "Oh." he says flatly, with dead eyes, slowly lowering his weapon. "That's a surprise. I thought there were no more people left alive on this level. Well. Are you having fun? Mem I'm having the time of my life." he says, as unenthusiastically as a corpse. "Hey, I know this is unbecoming for a stranger to ask, but do you have any Cune on you? I've been saving up for just the ticket that'll get me out of this hole and up to a new floor, but I'm three short. Just three. I don't really have the provisions to keep scrounging around here, and have you seen how much the one with the horns charges for ammo? Five Cune for thirty rounds. Unbelievable. So how about it? Do me a solid, eh? I can return the favour. I can tell you where to find some valuable stuff I can."
Alexis Maaka	Maaka will approach the door, brushing dust and noxious fumes off of herself. It's pretty nasty gunk, she'll need a shower and some potions after this is over and done with to get rid of the status effects. Producing C4, she plants charges and blows the door off its hinges, keeping a safe distance as she bellows 'FIRE IN THE HOLE!' as the explosives...well, explode. She draws her Vepr shotgun again as she enters the room, and sees a man ahead with well battle worn armor. "Yo." She greets almost too casually. "We just got here, honestly. Sorry mate, got nothin' on us at the moment." She says, shrugging as she glances to Arthur. Hopefully he has anything.
Zero Kiryu	"It's fine. Your weapon is suited to this." Zero says to Yuuki, flatly. They're a few paces behind Arthur and Alexis, so they've yet to encounter the poison-- though Zero can smell the difference in the air above, slowly filtering its way down through the... everything, really. He sniffs lightly and rubs at his face a little with his free hand. The problem with being actually healthy is that you have a lot more sense in you to recognize all the things that are rapidly beginning to not be healthy. When a symptom is just one more thing in a long list of bullshit suffering you're going through, it tends to get drowned out. Taking a moment to wreathe himself in a proper layer of armoring, the hunter nods and takes point on following the pair's trail upwards. On the chance that they encounter RESPAWNS, Zero waves Yuuki forward because a bunch of shoulder-to-shoulder nowhere-to-dodge chucklefucks are a /great/ target for a superhuman with a scythe. OTHERWISE, he simply moves through the wake of murder no doubt left behind by Arthur and Alexis -- hastily moving through the descending poison cloud and coming out the other side coughing and rubbing at his eyes as they deteriorate and regenerate -- to finally REJOIN THE PARTY PROPER.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur surges through the ambushes, wielding fusion fire like equal parts flamethrower, gun, and blazing melee enhancement. He is intent on smashing through the hordes as directly as he can as soon as the C4 is blasted, rushing through the smoke before it's even cleared and right into waiting jaws, claws, and maws. He screams the entire time, as if somehow the boy doesn't even need to take a single breath. It lasts a while before he gets to the dingy room and its single entrance, and another few seconds after that as he sort of winds it down. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaoh what up, homeboy?" Arthur rambles, immediately flicking the broom away and heading towards the man. "Gettin' GEARED ON, dog? Think I saw some STUFF from you EARLIER? This BIG-ASS KILLROOM of PURE MURDER, casings fuckin' ANKLE DEEP for real, homie." Arthur gesticulates in a way that's almost as exaggerated as his statements. "Was that YOU? You have a CREW runnin' around here?" He takes a drifting "seat" before he puzzles with his "in-game" windows, flicking through items and inventories. "CUNE, CUNE..." He mutters. "GUNS, LIFEBLOOD, KEYS... CUNE." He stops on the little icon. "Looks like we got EIGHTEEN, bro." He gives a wide grin. "You got a good SOURCE for some TREASURE? Hell yeah, dawg. Is it one'a those places THIN AND TALL HORNS EMPORIUM be keepin' her shit?" Arthur subtly avoids any sign that they might be allied with Rurufon, gently implying that they might have taken from her in other floors. After all, Rurufon said something about another man here, one they need to keep an eye out for... And he wants to get out ahead of the execution issue if he can. He hands off the Cune from their limited stock. "What's that TICKET, bro?" He asks, curiously.
Yuuki Kuran	This is not the first time that Yuuki Kuran and Zero Kiryu had fought shoulder to shoulder or back-to-back against a bunch of fucko threats. Back then, though, Zero was carrying more weight on his shoulders and being blackmailed at the same time, having to pick up Yuuki's slack when she was much 'younger' in her weilding of her powers. Now, with Yuuki having had practice with Artemis as well as losing her need to Be Normal in favor of actually being Her Own Normal. Yuuki's Own Normal involves extreme oppression of things in her way. With their montage leading through the poison (and being incredibly blecked out), potential respawns, or just a bunch of action danger, the pair finally make it through. "I don't think this is the right way to do this..." Yuuki complains, when they finally catch the tail end of Arthur and Maaka's meeting of their Mystery Twitchyboi. Spending a few moments before the portal tactically handling her burnt up and laser-scythed outfit, making a few tactical rips to move from 'full coat/pants/jacket/top' to a more tactical adventure-y outfit with a few knots and a bit of spot patching so she doesn't look like she had been Anime Drama Wounded with her clothes taking 90% of the damage, and instead like she was the sort of big-eyed shoujo that wore distressed jeans and shirts showing a bit of pale belly under her open coat/jacket situation. The jacket being beat up is a lost cause anyway. It was always awkward answering questions like 'hey why didn't you take any laser damage' - she did, and she was getting exponentially more hungry with every traded hit, but unlike Arthur didn't have some gel-based healthbar. She just had a stamina bar, and everything drew off of it. Attack, defense, injury. It just made her progressively more hungry. "Oh, um, hello!" She adds, uselessly (or perhaps Uselessly) to Arthur's SICK MURDERTOWER SKILLPLOMACY. He's the expert at that.
Rurufon	"Nothing on you." the mystery man repeats, equally as dead-faced and hollow-eyed as before, yet in a way that feels like he doesn't believe her for a second. His eyes are clearly on the huge pile of guns'n'bullshit she has strapped to her. "It's not easy to find, right? Not like human money. It's like a fallback I think. Credit to trade. Stingy credit. Just in case you don't quite have the thing you need. I don't think you're meant to be able to get rich." His eyes keep twitching to her weapons and ammo. Then Arthur actually has some on him. This results in a titchy, relieved laugh that is more of a cackle from the armed man; it's the laugh of someone who has been pushed up to the edge for a really long time and only just had something go his way now, unable to deal with it any other way than the universal pressure relief of creepy laughter. "Thank you kindly, friend. With this, I'll finally be able to get the hell out of here." He begins loading back up again, slotting all his stuff into its proper place, and taking his empty mags along with him, apparently hoping to be able to fill them again later. He has a fistful of dog tags too. "There were. All of them dead but me though. Went into a diffferent world on this level first. We won, but lost everyone but five guys. Last four died in here. Monsters got 'em. The freaky frog men at the bottom tell me they'll be back eventually, but I plan to be long gone by then. Like hell I'm spending years here to wait for 'em." He scratches at his nearly-bald shave, having apparently been here long enough to start growing back. "That one keeps stashes all over this place. Don't know what she possibly needs them for. I've seen her down here. Poison won't touch her. Minions won't come near her. The Lords bend over or get blown to pieces. The hell does she need with any of this junk?" He gets up and moves over to the wall behind him, and then slams twice on a nondescript patch of rust with the butt of his rifle. The section of wall discharges a thin layer of corroded metal shavings, and then slowly grinds open; a door is buried under so much caked on blood and rust that it had become secret. "This one's my stash though. Tactical fallback point. Supply depot. I've had to come back a few times, so all the provisions and ammo are cleared out, but I found some quality pieces lying around. Noticed how you haven't found any gear from dead men yet? That's because I've been stripping it all and stockpiling it here. Help yourselves. Can't bring it all with me up the lift anyhow." In the room behind him, there are a handful of heavy military crates visible, some open and empty, but others locked down. "Be seeing you. Hehah. How many floors left to go I wonder?" he says, wandering off the way the party had come. "Oh and by the way, the Lord is- eh I'm sure you already know what it is. Just go up top. My team and I already cracked its shell. Might want to be quick. I don't know how long it takes for these bullshit puzzles to reset. Kill it quick and see if it spits out another key fragment." That's all the help he has to give before he fucks off out the doors.
Zero Kiryu	Once the stinging is done with and his eyes have cleared up, Zero finds himself surveying both himself and then Yuuki. Arthur has the diplomacy well in hand-- it occurs to him briefly that he might have extra ammunition to offer, since his fallback pistol does in fact use real ammo rather than just firing flowery energy bursts. But the likelihood is small that their weapons are compatible anyway, or so he reasons. It's only after ascertaining that his own clothes are substantially more intact than Yuuki's that he removes his overcoat and drops it onto Yuuki's shoulders. She probably swims in the damn thing, because even though he's only modestly tall he's still significantly bigger than she is. This is part of why it's still in good enough shape to be viable for /her/. There is less all-around to cover. He doesn't move to take any equipment from this place. It wasn't his currency that was traded in, as far as he's concerned, but-- Zero does glance towards Yuuki meaningfully. She wanted something out of this place other than a dead man's dagger, didn't she? "We should probably follow his advice." He says, glancing vaguely 'up' in a dreamy and unfocused sort of way that speaks to examining his mental radar.
Alexis Maaka	The way this world works is lost to Maaka, that's for sure. She's thankful that Arthur was able to save things. She listens, eyes narrowed behind her visor. Nodding, she claps the soldier on the arm. "Sorry about your team, mate. Make 'em proud." She says, as he goes and fucks off. She does help herself, busting open a crate and getting ammo with relish as she stores it in her Matter Manipulator. This'll be useful enough. After getting a nice supply, she then pops her neck. "No argument here." She says simply.
Arthur Lowell	"Yo. Dawg." Arthur says, trying to catch the guy on the way out the door. Not especially insisting, but, if he can, he will. "Don't fuck her stuff, okay? Trust me, she'll kill you as soon as look at you if she knows you've been doing it and she's the kinda lady you don't want looking at you in the first place. If you can afford, try sticking some of it back? Just, like," Arthur gestures plaintively. "Trust me. Speaking as someone who runs into her a fair bit, it's a /bad/ idea pissin' her off. You wanna make it to the top, better to do it without fuckin' with bad juju like her. Bad gambles." He lets him leave either way though, if the others do. It just honestly doesn't feel heroic to mug him for whatever Rurufon lost, and it sure as hell doesn't feel heroic to kill the guy when he was offering a reasonable trade at least. He stops by the stash, intent on raiding it for his share of stuff to Alchemize into his own equipment, but intends to quickly move on to the top. That means charging through whatever ambushes yet lie in wait on the way back to the central shaft, and then rocketing up to the top! He intends to face whatever's up there, and he intends to do so with a hefty dose of high-intensity fusion fire, because he's already building up a huge chunk of fusion magic and he's intending to kick things off fast! Because technically it'll make it awkward for Rurufon if she was watching them and intended to step in and scold him or anything like that, and he always feels better about morally complex situations like his recent short law-and-chaos decision.
Yuuki Kuran	>Poison won't touch Rurufon. "I wish that was true about us..." Yuuki grimaces hard, remembering the Violent Poison Area. "Would have made things a lot more pleasant." As That Weirdo speaks of Rurufon's ability to just move, though, Yuuki's brain begins to free-associate because she has useless cycles to go while Genuinely Smarter (At This) people handle the pointmanning. Rurufon. That Weirdo reminds her of Rurufon, and so her freely-associating mind pulls up her memories of the horned woman. And her... Yuuki quietly disengages Artemis, collapsing the scythe back into a baton and clipping it to her side, since they're not fighting anyone, right now. No reason. But with things more or less resolved, and That Weirdo being warned in parting by Arthur, they're left with what their few currency items bought. Supplies! Supplies. Wonderful supplies, though little of value. She steps forward, and immediately is drowning in coat, which she then has to fumble around inside. "Zero, this isn't helping... But you're right. I don't want a dead man's knife, even if it was useful. It was just replacing something I found a long time ago. Something I never gave you, because I forgot until now." Sentimentality is hard when you're kinda dumb. She draws the COLT PISTOL (loaded with Maaka's spare FUTURE magazine that she ejects) and rotates it on her finger, to offer it handle-out to Zero. "I got this a while ago. First floor, actually. I wanted to give it to you, so you had something to draw you here. Now, I guess, it didn't matter, because we're both here. Maaka offered ammo for it, too." Pawing over the supplies, Yuuki shoves most of her portion to Arthur, who has INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS to handle it, and armcarrying multiple crates, while possible, would be extra annoying. Plus, there's no food or ammunition in the boxes, just empty guns and such. It's the sort of treasure that you interact with a pile of riches and find a few useful baubles. Treasure, when money is no object. "I'm glad we could help someone though." She looks back out the path, and, looted from the MILITARY CACHE, heaves a breath. "We better go bust the floor boss before it resets. I don't want to be here any more. And, even if it reset... I'm sure we can crush it quickly. I'm sure Arthur has a magic blender broom to match That Weirdo's--" It's his canon name now. "magic sword."
Rurufon	Even Arthur's stern warnings can't elicit a non-shellshocked thousand yard stare from the dude he's warning. Up close, he definitely looks like he hasn't slept in days, exacerbating his already severe features. "I'm just going to be selling most of it off anyways. She can buy it all back. Does she even have to buy it? I don't know." He shrugs off Arthur's hand. "If you're telling me she found out, I'll keep that in mind. The whole idea is supposed to be no rules, isn't it? Use every edge? Figured it was worth doing while I could get away from it." He leaves shortly thereafter. Entering the room proper, the narrow hallway opens into a perfectly squared room about the size of a highschool gym supply closet. The door grinds shut behind them immediately. There are half a dozen caches littered around that are still closed, along with pre-existing lockers that have melded to the floor after centuries of dust had calcified there. There are also bodies. Four bodies. Four bodies of men in identical grey and black combat fatigues. They're scattered across the room, up against the walls, stripped of all useful supplies, such that the only things to recover are various durability grades of TYPEIII KEVLARx4, TACTICAL PADSx4, BALLISTIC HELMETx4, and empty M16x4. The second the first box is opened, there is a resounding click, and then a massive explosion. The crate blows with several pounds of plastic explosives packed into it, the room too small to fully handle the blast wave, causing it to bounce off the walls and back in on the Elites in exactly the way artillery kills people in bunkers. The smoke clears without even denting the iron floor beneath, but having blown all the dust away for several meters. One of those uncanny red death-messages, written long ago enough to have since been covered, reads "Don't listen to him. He's gone mad. Don't let him out of your sight." All of the boxes are filled with explosives. The strange, laughing bald man left them nothing but traps for their 'treasure'. Aside from damaged military gear, their sole consolation is a sword similar to what the man himself had, broken in half down the middle. It looks vaguely Norse, short, broad, and expertly pattern welded, with ancient runes engraved down the middle. It still has a lingering aura of magic, but it'd take serious repair to be actually usable again. Apparently the guy didn't feel like sacrificing some of his life bar to the sketchy purple altar outside to fix it, preferring his guns instead.
Rurufon	Rather than being better armed, the group is now just some level of more injured and three Cune poorer for climbing the rest of the way. Such is the lesson to be learnt here. Where one man selflessly aided them, another took them for everything they're worth, and likely won't be back until it comes time to strip their presumed corpses for trinkets as well. He'll be disappointed, but likely difficult or impossible to find by then, since Zero can no longer locate him on his mental radar once they leave; he may have exited out to the Nexus, being a privilege that indefinite residents have. More shooting. More blasting. More scything. More getting shot and stabbed at. The whole colony is on alert, but is necessarily slow and sessile, and hasn't yet properly located the Elites. Going all the way to the top at least proves that the nameless stranger hadn't lied about one thing; a small blessing. Just as the bottom had opened up, so too does the top, giving the highly vertical Realm the feeling of an ancient silo, though whether storage or missile-type is unclear, and likely forever will be. They emerge into a colossal dome, ringed only by a spiral of rusty, mostly broken stairs, with no further hallways on its level. The top is impossible to see out of, for being covered with some kind of massive blast shield, raised forever ago and never opened since. Raised catwalks surround a flat, circular field of grey dust dunes, hazardous jagged metal, and the broken skeletons of what look to have once been consoles. The entire area bristles with those horrid flowers, and their thralls shuffling between them, tending them with chemical sprayers, watering them with puffs of- that better not be blood. It totally looks like blood. The center of the room previously had some kind of tremendous, hemispherical white shell in the literal sense, like the petrified carapace of an insect or mollusc spun from metal and bone, over ten feet thick, but concentrated efforts seem to have carved out a door-sized portion slightly off the ground; a crack in the armour through which the tremendous mass of an ugly purple eyeball as big as a car. The singularly visible eye twitches back and forth, almost nervously, peering tensely out through the spot where it is exposed. The nearest patch of flowers and thralls appear to be in the process of repairing it, the latter feeding the former piles of scrap metal and the corpses of their own fallen, which the flowers chew up and then spit out as a semi-metallic paste, like weaver ants.
Zero Kiryu	Zero makes a questioning noise at Yuuki's verbalized line of thinking, which only makes sense when she offers him a gun. He seems to have trouble figuring out what to do in this situation, and in the end simply takes the gun with a slightly funny look. He examines it with detached interest, and after a moment secures it at the small of his back. Truth is he doesn't need it, and if Yuuki didn't give it to him he'd just get rid of it. He looks down at Yuuki, that peculiar expression lingering on his face. "No need." He says. Then, "There was no need, to draw me here." As he SPECIFICALLY ISN'T INTERESTED IN THE TREASURE and doesn't follow Yuuki in to do any looting, Zero only realizes anything is wrong when the door shuts behind her. Now, this isn't a problem for /her/ specifically. Even the distinctive click of some improvised mechanism being triggered doesn't register as a Problem until the actual mechanism triggers. The explosion is contained in too small a space. This, too, is not a problem-- Yuuki Kuran cannot be killed in this way. Might Arthur or Alexis? He doesn't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. Zero flicks his wrist, extending his claws and easing them through the seam in the door. He doesn't have the /sheer/ physical strength necessary to simply rip the door out of the wall, so he carefully positions his claws to act as a lever, and creakily forces it open against the pressure of the mechanisms within-- then retracts his claws again. At first he's disinclined to go in. Then-- Then it occurs to him that Yuuki might be getting hungry, and that's bad news. He pushes into the corridor and peers down into the blasted cache room, both to see if anybody is dead and to see if Yuuki is in the middle of flipping the fuck out.
Alexis Maaka	The explosives seem to go off just as Maaka was about to make her way into the room. Her armor leaves her a little banged up and cooked, but otherwise alive. The cyborg just growls in anger, as she sees the red signage. "...great timing, guys." She growls as she enters the room post-bombing. Prying some shrapnel from a gap in her armor, Maaka winces but otherwise deals with the pain, blood trickling down her arm for a brief moment before she seals the wound with some kind of suture-gel. Toting her auto-shotgun, takes this as a reminder of trust, as the gang carries onward. There's a shitload of shooting and cutting, as the team advances to the top. Maaka swaps magazines, storing her drum mag in favor of a pair of box-magazines taped together with double-aught buck loaded. Eventually, they find their target. Whatever it is, it looks like a mix between a computer and a plant monster. Either way it's obviously the thing they gotta kill. She swaps one last time, this time producing a grenade launcher. The GLM fires off explosive rounds one by one as Maaka reloads deftly and takes shot after shot.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur is the first one through the doors, and the first one to see the corpses. Man, if that guy was laying a trap for Arthur, he sure knew how to set it. The corpses are the thing that get Arthur shuddering, stumbling, and staggering, even propping himself up against one wall. "Oh. Oh. Uh. Uuurgh." He mutters, looking a little green around the gills. Someone else can handle opening the crates with their own interest in things, if they don't want to take the nearly a full minute it takes for Arthur Lowell to muster his own willpower to focus on the crates. This means he has basically no ASPECT on-call when it comes time for the explosion. Alexis is a reinforced cyborg. Yuuki is a high-level vampire. Arthur is a moderately enhanced human -- or close enough, anyway. He's a Mage-classed Hero and thus doesn't have really much of any response to the situation. When the blast is done, what is left behind by the process is Arthur Lowell's corpse, having experienced a process not unlike cooking and crushing both at once, turned a chilling black and bent in ways his bones are not meant to bend. It's almost humorous when his HEALTH VIAL drops to zero, plunking the little healthbar out of the gel UI section and shattering on the ground next to him. There's a conspicuous noise of ticking somewhere, and Arthur's body flickers with each tick. It takes about a minute for Arthur's body to flood with an unusual rainbow light in various shades, and another full minute for his body to lift off the ground, and return to his feet. "Fuck." He declares tensely. "God /damn/ it." He pinches the bridge of his nose, and focuses on heading out. Whatever just happened in there, he's not going to keep focused on it, or even /explain/ it of his own volition apparently. Instead, he's going to head for the fighting, and get into the swing of the violent encounters on the way up, trying to revitalize his aggression to strike out at new foes with larger blasts than before. By the time he reaches the dome, he's a white-hot sun in the shape of a human, working up as much fire as his Aspect can hold -- the corpses are off his mind because of the attempt to murder him -- and he's intent on plunging headfirst into the eye on a rocket-powered burn-tackle meant to detonate all that fusion heat right on what seems to be the closest thing he can find to a core.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki has been a big, emotional softie, and as far as people who are a little messed up, a little damaged, or a little monstrous (or a lot, really, monstrous prettyboys were basically her specialty) she had a soft spot. Or, more realistically, a giant weak point. Her whole reason for being in the Shadow Tower originally was adventure, and adventure meant treasure. The actual treasure wasn't important - she was, like Zero, interested in things because of their meanings and connections. She knew he'd come because she was there. Arthur came because of his lust for death towers^H^H^H^H adventuring spirit. Maaka game because of her ... Yuuki had no idea why Maaka came, but it was nice having someone with large guns around, if only to seem mundane next to. Yuuki, of all things, enjoyed the feeling of mundanity. It ill-suited her, but she liked it. So when she's caught in the blast by opening the chest, she looks at the bundle of explosives in slow-blinking bewilderment. Wait, that's not right. She helped the person, adn then she got the treasure. When you opened the chest, glimmering riches tumbled out, or a shine. As a Totally Normal Girl with a Totally Normal Ancestral Pseudoeuropean Mansion, Yuuki Kuran literally had wooden chests of fucking riches. And a dungeon. She remembered them when she was very, very little. Opening the shimmering lights, gold coins lit by firelight remained her favorite bright, glimmering light after regaining her full memories and heritage (as Totally Normal). This was a bright, glimmering light of fucking annihilatory fire. The awful thing about fire, especially since she opened the boxes and got the face-full of kinetic burst and incendiary heat. Blown back, Yuuki's pale frame is seared black past the meat to the bone in a few places, even with her absurdly resilient body. And so, when Zero bursts in through the door, Yuuki turns her face away, shielding with her blackened front and ruined jacket, her top two layers of clothing primarily vaporized. By the time Arthur is revived and finding his feet, Yuuki finally pulls her head out of her 'turtle hiding', eyes almost burning red like crimson headlights. "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine." She repeats a few times, as she sniffs the air. But the balding man is beyond her nose, gone with her loot, having shown her such a mindsearing amount of pain that her 'second Yuuki' presence had taken over to shield herself. Her shoulders are tense, as she shifts up to her feet with a slow and rough set of motions. "Let's go. I'm fine." She repeats. She's fine because Maaka was a cyborg, and largely fine, and Arthur didn't BLEED before he died. ONE MONTAGE LATER 'Other' Yuuki, shoulders hunched and eyes narrowed, looks up at the obvious core with the eye looking out, with the 'please don't kill me in my weak spot, I need that weak spot for activities' look. Then she grunts tiredly, exhaling a beat. "Too tired to kill it. You two -" She mutters at Zero and Maaka, before dismissively waving at the core (and Arthur as he goes Sick Fires on). "Shoot it already, wipe it out."
Zero Kiryu	There goes that overcoat, and a little more besides. Zero pulls off the jacket that he was wearing and tosses it to Yuuki, which brings him down to layer two of four. His underarm holster and harness is visible now, and Bloody Rose in it. ONE MONTAGE LATER... Before Zero draws Bloody Rose again, he raises a finger to his wrist and literally splays open the vein as casually as opening an envelop. "You are not fine." He says to Yuuki, extending that arm to the side -- out of the way, permitting him to retain access to the gun tucked underneath. With his uninjured hand, Zero draws Bloody Rose and fires several shots from the hip, taking advantage of the Big Exposed Weak Spot. /Today/ he has the energy to do that and it isn't even half-hearted.
Rurufon	It turns out, getting screwed by (Patches?) is neither Heroic nor Just. It's an inevitability. The sun rises and sets. The tide comes in and out. Cackling sketchy bald men lure in adventurers with promises of treasure and bail after dumping them into a deadly trap. Universal constants. Yuuki does not seem to have the blood and/or Blood remaining to be spending on anything else, so it's largely up to the other three to push through. That poison bar begins building again, but so long as they stick to the side passages, the tick is only obnoxious enough to slow down regeneration, or tick down the health bar by degrees too small to turn red for those without it. Roving thralls are harder to avoid but easier to kill, flower gardens are harder to kill but easier to avoid. With regenerative powers for 3/4ths of the party and immunity to airborne infection from 4/4ths of the party, the going isn't as hard as it could be. There is opportunity to get the combo multiplier up. For how strangely diffuse and inhuman this 'Lord' is, without true subjects or rule, simply being the entirety of the Realm, joined from who knows where, which used to be who knows what before it took over, the tiny crack of that visible eye seems to act with entirely recognizable panic. Fear, even. The bizarre cross pupil contracts to a tiny point, and the whole gelatinous sphere quivers as Arthur dives in, the flesh seeming to retract as far back as it can inside its shell, which isn't enough. It falls to its many extrusions and pawns to get in the way. Arthur is quickly neck deep in all the thralls that can reach him in time, not even so much trying to fight as bury him in flesh and tools. The flowers that are actually in position are necessarily limited, but all aim their lasers his way, focusing him at the center of a nexus of beams that'd surely melt anyone to the bone with their combined heat discharge, were he not already a star going supernova. This doesn't meaningfully change until Zero and Maaka begin firing. Several shots from Bloody Rose punch into the exposed eye, causing it to spasm wildly and spit clear, viscous fluid from the holes. Whatever the thing inside the shell however, it has no mouth with which to scream, and no limbs with which to thrash save the extensions of its roots all around the facility. Lasers turn on those two as well, a few managing to burn grenades out of the air before they explode all around the damaged shell, revealing strange, fleshy petals buried inside, quickly becoming so much shrapnel slamming into the exposed weakpoint as well. It's only then that the dunes of dust shift and stir, and figures that are little more than ancient, fossilized skeletons, filled in with so much spongy plant material and coiling tendrils of metal, rise from their long-buried positions. Whether or not they were human is impossible to tell, as they have no skulls remaining, only similar, smaller blobs of blooms and purple eyeballs, but they were, at some ancient point of history, armed. Though they are no longer even thralls, literally rooted to the ground through trailing tendrils from their spines, they have guns. Decrepit as those guns are, they manage to spit still-functional explosives into Zero, Maaka, and Yuuki, though many of them simply blow up and fall to pieces after a few rounds.
Alexis Maaka	Grenade rounds are shot out of the air, and Maaka dives for cover as she reloads yet another shell. She sees spongy material and figures out some weak spots. That said, she gets fired upon by explosive thralls, cursing as she gets tagged and knocked off her feet. Ears ringing, vision blurry and glitchy, this is definitely one of those days where it's 'nade spam for days. She forces herself to stand, and the cyborg fires off another round, this time focusing at fleshy bits she spotted. Really, shooting at the thralls would've been redundant given how they decompose rather quickly by themselves.
Zero Kiryu	There is a problem with what Zero decides to do, and it's that he really needs to hold still unless Yuuki decides she's not interested. On account of the fact that she just blew the up, he's pretty certain she's going to have a hard time resisting, especially since he's going to be bleeding until his regeneration seals that up. It'll be a lot of blood anyway, because as it happens he knows how to maximize blood loss in this specific way. This is made substantially worse when some of the 'thralls' come out with guns and explosive rounds. Tendrils slither out from Bloody Rose and protect Zero's head and chest neatly, but the scattering of projectile fragments chews him up pretty good. Blood peppers the ground behind him and skin is seared off both by explosives and lasers. The skin on his gun arm is a blistered, sloughing atrocity that is only able to hold on because the weapon has literally burrowed its tendrils into his skin, winding its way up his arm nearly to his neck. Now he's hungry. "Bloody Rose." He's talking to his gun. And yet... There is a sense of acknowledgement. "Burrow into it." The thorny tendrils spill out, rapidly growing into vines the size of trees that snake along the ground and push into the opening that exposes the eye. They push and push-- and grow and grow. Although they must obey physics, they do not have the physical limitations of an ordinary, living thing. Heedless of impossibility they will worm their way in, forcing themselves -- violently, revoltingly -- into and through the organic matter of... Of whatever the Lord is. They are very clearly in the process of invading the entire body of this thing so they can chew it up from the inside out, if their thorns so happen not to tear it to pieces along the way.
Yuuki Kuran	Yuuki repeats herself, like a mantra. 'I'm fine. I'm fine.' She tugs Zero's jacket around her shoulders by crossing her arms inside the lapels, rather than through the arms. It's a very closed off, harried look. But when, before opening fire, Zero decides to offer her some of the red elixir, Yuuki can't help herself. Well, she can, but unlike blood spilled by circumstance, blood spilled by offerance has a different character, a rosy, floral twist to the sanguine bouquet. She doesn't bite, but she does sup at Zero's wrist, burying her face in his bleeding arm for the long moments it takes for his regeneration to kick in. It's long enough for all the thralls to start engaging them with their laserbeams and muskets and stuff. It stings, but worse, it burns and renders pierced Zero's inner jacket, and most damning... It makes Yuuki yet more hungry. Like insistently prodding of a just-fresh wound, the nerves afire in sympathetic heat and sensitive state. One of Yuuki's two eyes comes up, glowing clearly through a mop of hair and her other hiding behind Zero's arm. The eye hatefully glares at the thralls, and while Zero uses Bloody Rose to burrow into the ground, Yuuki's kinetic power lashes out like two sweeping, crushing vectors, lathing walls of force to wipe out the vegetation zombies like a rampaging god. Or a tantruming child. When his wound closes, she drops his arm, hunching back up and sending dismissive obliterative blasts towards and remaining thralls with a hateful, unsatisfied glance.
Arthur Lowell	"COME OOOOON!" Arthur screams. "GET AROUND ME! /SURROUND ME/, MOTHERFUCKER! YOU HIT ME FROM ALL ANGLES, THAT JUST MEANS I CAN KICK ASS IN THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY DEGREES OF VIEW AND A MILLION GODDAMN DEGREES OF HEAT YOU TOXIC FUCKING ATHLETE'S FOOT MOTHERFUCKER, EAT IIIIIT!!" He may not be the greatest at resisting explosions, but lasers and their laser-light? A little easier. He's a Space guy, and so lasers are a point of marginally stronger resistance for him, though they still blast chunks out of his refreshed HEALTH VIAL. He turns on the roaring, spinning blender blades. If this thing wants to retreat as far as it can, Arthur's going to DIG IN. With a brutal cascade of rattling metal, Arthur grits his teeth and plunges a mess of starfire and flesh-churning metal blades as deep as he can into the core and heats it to levels that scientists try to recreate in labs to study what happens in the cores of stars. Really, this is mostly to get his mind off of corpses -- one of which is his own -- and is a little excessive for his emotional state, but the geyser of heat and light should play to the weaknesses of this particularly unusual Lord and the thralls that surround Arthur himself.
Rurufon	Just as much as they can attack Arthur from so many angles, or perhaps even moreso, the many fingers of the thing that had taken this place are easily attacked all at once by the Mage of Space himself. Already well established that this place cannot deal with fire, the infested puppets crumble to ash they closer they get to him, stumbling into their own cremating furnace. Whirling blades and blasts of fire destroy more and more of the shell, added to by the grenades sailing overhead, blasting superheated and softened portions. Yuuki's Extreme Unhappiness with the situation is about as close to 'if looks could kill' if it gets, and the horde piling on Arthur is not at all ready for the invisible wall of flensing death from nowhere. The flowering growths are ripped from their bases, their roots shredded to pieces, stems spewing vital fluids. Infected thralls lumbering over to Arthur are scythed down in scores, crawling forward on half their limbs until they're pulverized again. The crack blasted in the Lord's primary defense is so wide now that Zero can shove a tree trunk of silver vines into the opening, and that's exactly what he does. It might be a blessing that the majority of the dome is still intact, because even without any ability to dramatically scream, the tearing, crunching, squishing, slashing, twisting and splattering noises from inside are vivid enough to make the imagination real. The main cortex of this thing has nowhere to run to. Soon it becomes nails-on-a-chalkboard metallic screeching of thorns against skeleton within. The surviving extrusions and puppets still active in the room die out in quick sequence. As more and more brain damage is violently dealt to the terrified thing in the shell, more of them spasm and seize and slump to the floor, starting with the thralls, moving on to the flowers, and then finally ending with the ancient skeletons of another world's former inhabitants, until nothing is left moving, and Bloody Rose's vines withdraw, drenched in blood, and with the black cage of a key, sans its gem, hooked on their thorns.