Scene #7435: Endling Fight!

Owner	Pose
Strawberry Princess	PANAMA, NEAR CHITRE, 17:02 LOCAL TIME The coordinates given lead to a scruffy, low kind of forest maybe a mile away from the nearest warpgate- the soil's too sandy and loose to support anything taller than ten or fifteen feet. The plants are of the sort that'll grow on a beach when anything grows on a beach at all, but the water's just barely visible on the horizon far out to the right. The air's hot and sticky; the sky overhead is clear and blue. Behind- perhaps a couple dozen miles away- the skyline begrudgingly reveals the tops of tall buildings, too, hinting at comfortably distant civilization. The most prominent sign that you've gotten to the right place is the enormous shimmering 'wobble' in space, like how air distorts above a candle or the landscape ripples above a hot road. There is an ugly, crude spatial distortion here; a roughly spherical three-dimensional 'chunk' of the air, starting a few feet off the ground and extending to thirty feet across, has been twisted and 'pinched off'. A keen intuition might be able to infer that the pinched-off space must go somewhere- there's some stolen space on the other side, if it can be disentangled. Director Velt herself, of course, isn't physically here. But someone else is- a girl in a cardinal-red magical girl outfit, made of scalloped and flowing plates that almost-but-not-quite resemble armor as much as they do petals. She looks to be sixteen or seventeen, a relative veteran, and stands a very healthy distance away from the spatial distortion with the full-body tension of someone asked to babysit a time bomb. "Orchid Crimson, from Carenero," she introduces herself. Her demeanor is taut, wary, and fairly grim. "I can't do much without coven support, but I was the fastest, so they have me on chrysalis breach for you. The Endling's already survived one purification, so it'll know to be ready for us as soon as we key that thing open. Intel is minimal. The Holiday coven were twelve, but this shouldn't have been a problem for them in the early stage. Given their powersets: intuition says something 'undodgeable'. They had good wings, bad Shimmer tone." Lilian, Arthur, and Go seem well within her aesthetic comfort zone; the gentle approval in her gaze is palpable. It's Nanoha, oddly, who gets the raised eyebrow, though Orchid soon shakes it off and moves to set up for the 'breach'. "Do whatever prep you need to," she says, taking flight above the trees and sighting down her wand at the center of the distortion from a good fifty feet away. "Remember we don't have a cold open. When I pop it, it's gonna be mad."
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Take on the ENDLING ALERT Arthur's combination of gates and high-speed broom flight get him here in a conspicuous but rather fast way. By the time he rushes out of the Gate that pops open near the chrysalis, he's already reversed his broom and been retro-rocketing for a while. "If the PURIFIER went and HARDENED THE BITCH UP," He declares, cracking his knuckles. "Then we just gotta keep it MIXED UP for real, yo. I ain't 'boutta PURIFY anything with these RADS, HOMIE! I'll keep it VARIED, dawg." He switches, with visible and audible cues, from SIDESADDLE STYLE(!) to ASTRIDE STYLE(!), revving his broom like a racer. Several distinct bars of mysteryious function fill up to indicate his readiness. Gates flicker about as he prepares them to blunt something impossible to dodge. "BREAK IT when you GOT IT, homie." He says, eyes locked on the spatial warp.
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha rockets through the sky, a streak of pink trailing behind her. She looks ahead, squinting a little as she notices the air looking a little strange, "Is that-" The staff in Nanoha's hand chimes affirmatively, <"Confirmed. Spatial distortion ahead.> Nanoha frowns a little, "Can you see what's inside it?" Raising Heart chimes a little less enthusiastically, <It is hidden.> Nanoha ponders for a few moments, "I suppose we're not getting a look inside without breaching it." Her eyes then focus on someone on the ground near the distortion, "Ah, that must be our guide!" Nanoha curves over in her flight, slowing down as she gets close to the ground. Finally she touches down softly, the aura of pink around her fading. As her combat dress settles, she walks up the rest of the way to greet Orchid, "Hello! Nice to meet you. Captain Nanoha Takamachi with the Time-Space Administrative Bureau." Nanoha listens to the initial briefing, taking note of the apparent undodgeable nature of whatever they might be facing. Nanoha's not sure how they team that went in measures up to her own abilities, but it's probably better to be cautious and keep her magic guard up. As Arthur arrives and gives his own unique signal to begin, Nanoha nods along in agreement and raises her staff towards the distortion in preparation, "Right! We're ready." Her staff chimes along.
Go Shijima	The Ride Macher isn't a dirt bike. It's clearly something designed for tracking down targets in urban environments, and looks like it's the kind of thing you'd use in a street race. Arriving here involves taking the roads where he can--but Go isn't at all afraid to take the bike offroad. His posture, his choice of pathways, his handling of the bike, his discretion in the accelerator--they're all nothing less than masterful. He arrives in time and suited up. Externally, the suit appears fine. Internally, hidden behind it, Go is very much Not. His skin is pale, dried blood beneath the nose, a number of injuries--both from pushing himself too hard to increase the suit's effective time, and from a fight earlier this very day against the Roidmude known as Chase. "Kamen Rider Mach," says Go, stepping off of the motorcycle to greet Orchid, Arthur, Lilian, Nanoha and BB. Strawberry, having fought alongside him before, is the only one who might be clued in that he fought beforehand--that wheel on his shoulder isn't in the 'base' form--the Signal Bike in his belt, and the hubcap of that wheel, both resemble a 'danger ahead' road sign in yellow and black. "Mixed up, huh?" asks Go in response to Arthur. "I have something for that." He flips the chamber on the belt upwards and removes DANGER. Another Shift Bike is inserted. This one's insignia is blue, a road sign signaling a split ahead. SIGNAL BIKE//Signal Change! SPLIT The hubcap of that tire on his shoulder changes accordingly. He nods in agreement with Nanoha. "I'm ready, too!"
Brooklynn Bailey	"Hmm..." says a voice in response to the briefing, such as it was. The knowledge they have is that they don't have much knowledge. Well, that was Brooklynn's life through most encounters in her world. Every Taboo or Cardinal could be different, and no two were the same. "Brooklynn Bailey by the way," She says with a wave to the group. Brooklynn was dressed in what might be a military officer uniform patched together with pieces of makeshift armor. Definitely a vibe of a mad-max style world. She carried no weapons, but as they started to prepare, she held out a hand and fire gathered in it. It formed into a spear made out of fire that she gripped with the hand. "Well, undodgeable? I think I have something that /might/ help," she says, and with a focused look on her face for a moment, her flames seem to reach out and wrap around the group. It does not hurt, but it DOES help spread her power to them. They would feel much tougher when it came to taking damage.
Lilian Rook	Lilian arrives more or less in her element. Though she'd wished Strawberry would be here, she can settle for Arthur for now, having enough of a dubious semi-professional familiarity with him by now that she chooses to vaguely inhabit the area around him. Because she does not have a magical henshin costume, her choice of attire is fairly predictable, up-armoured in that modular way, which should normally constitute a slight loss of mobility. She has not brought any kind of conventional weapon case with her at all, only having a black and silver scabbard fixed to one hip and a hardcase to the other. "Lilian Rook, Arx Zenith." she introduces herself back, leaving off titles for a certain sake. "Though I doubt I need to tell you, I'd like you to stay on third row support, Miss Orchid. There's no point in dragging you in with us like this." She takes a slow, shallow breath, then asks, in a way that implies 'dares to' before, "Twelve in number, or twelve years old?" She doesn't reserve that tone for anyone else. Despite the fact there are a couple of people clearly older than her, she takes front position at the chrysalis, and says, with the expectation of being obeyed, "If any of the Holiday Coven are still in there, I expect that to be your number one priority, overriding other directives. I won't hear any 'what about's with the Endling itself; I'll have it in hand. Otherwise, we're addressing an Extinguisher-type threat; the difference in your relative strengths is less relevant than you might be used to, but this happens to be a match in my favour. Hit your transmission light twice if you're in immediate peril you don't think you can deal with; don't waste time trying to describe it. I'm taking first row vanguard. Lowell and Miss Takamachi, I'd like you on second row. Shijima, first or second. You, third, if support is your main option here." She draws the sword. It makes a sound like a blood-slicked knife being sharpened on hot stone; the mental association is specific and vivid. The edges of the glossed magnetite seem to twitch, even vibrate, almost imperceptibly near the twist in space. "Breach on three, if you would, Miss Orchid. One. Two."
Strawberry Princess	Orchid Crimson seems remarkably unperturbed by the beneficial flames, despite her general vigilance. Glancing over to check out Arthur's Sweet Ride, she replies: "Right. Endlings can't develop a resistance to Purifier Beams directly, but they often find... other countermeasures. It's likely to be somewhat tailored against the 'flying magical artillery' profile by now. Diversity's important. As Lilian addresses her, she swoops back down to comfortable conversational range. "Twelve years old, four of them," she says. Her tone tries to be matter-of-fact, but a queasy grimace creeps into it anyway. "Given Endlings'... behavioral proclivities, it's unlikely that they're still alive. But if they are..." She tapers off into an appreciative but clammy half-smile. Hoping for the best, but knowing better. "Third row suits me fine. On your count, then." Orchid Crimson soars back up above the trees, and the blue-green crystal at the tip of her wand starts to glow- not nearly as painfully bright and harsh as Strawberry's, but something gentler, more natural, less scouring. As Lilian starts to count 'one', 'two', she says quietly: "Okay. Orchid Bissotwo to Carenero control, ingress now. Prepping for-" They don't get to three. A dozen angular black spikes the size of telephone poles erupt from the spatial distortion in a fusillade, slicing through trees and embedding deep into the sand within their cone of fire. A second later, their surfaces erupt into whickering limbs that scythe and swipe at anyone nearby, turning near-misses into horrible hazards; long multi-jointed spiderlike things that taper to razor-sharp edges and vertices. Crimson does a sharp aerobatic dodge of one seemingly aimed at her, but gets caught by airbursting claws and yelps before freeing herself with a magical blast. Enormous black multi-jointed stilt-legs follow a moment later, extruding themselves forward through the spatial distortion and fumbling for the ground. They sink into the soil like pylons under the weight of the body that heaves itself through after them; a misshapen tangle of vaguely metallic black 'stuff' in angular brambles serving as the armature around two dozen enormous blue-green crystals of varying shapes and size. Its long, swaying, articulated 'neck' is the last part of it to come through, bending backwards at a broken angle before straightening out. It curves and twists like the body of a snake, and enormous flat scissor-like 'jaws' serve as the head's only features. Shaped vaguely like a building-sized heron, its four towering legs complement four fibrous whip-like 'arms', each of which is thorned with more of those telephone-sized spike projectiles. The spatial distortion of the chrysalis abruptly untangles behind it, vomiting out its otherworldly contents. Huge plates and structures of black-and-blue metallic-crystalline material spill out to crunch and pile up against the ground, a whole environment disassembled and disgorged. It looks like it would've once been halfway between a nest and leftover undifferentiated material of the Endling's body itself. Half-buried in the rubble pile is a girl in white, bleeding heavily from gouges and claw-marks all across her body. She's unconscious with her eyes wide open, but still breathing.
Brooklynn Bailey	Brooklynn joins the front lines and gives Lilian a look over. "Nice to finally meet you face to face," she says with a tip of her helmet before pulling the faceplate down. "Anyway, we can table the small talk until the endling is in the ground," She says with a confident tone. Once the spikes erupt early, the slashes tear through Brooklynn. She does not even try and move, instead of taking the shots head-on and walking through. She does move defensively, but not in a way that is trying to avoid the impact area, but rather weave through it and take as little damage doing so. Blood trickles down her sides, but already the wounds show signs of closing. She starts breaking into a run towards the legs of the fish, aiming to try and get underneath it before aiming a powerful STRIKE with the spear. Aiming not to only pierce it and sear the wound open, but to put enough force behind it to try and knock it from its footing and onto the ground. She then flies up to get right in its face and spits on it. "Hey, freak. Why don't you pick on something one one-hundredth your size," she says. There is a quality to her voice, a DEMANDING that she tries to draw its attention to her.
Go Shijima	"I'll take second," says Mach, holding up two fingers when Lilian prompts. "...but if I see any of the Coven," he says after a hesitant pause, "I'm going to get them out of harm's way first, like you said." It sounds as though he had some difficulty coming to that conclusion. Strawberry isn't here... so why do I care so much about proving her wrong? Even if she's right... is it so bad to feel small and want to change it? His fist clenches, and he looks away, when he hears how old the Coven is. That they're probably not alive. An angry question burns in his mind, but the countdown is happening. It doesn't get to three. Go had meant to have the element of surprise on his side, rather than have it turned against him. As those black spikes violently jut from the distortion, he is nevertheless quick on his feet. There's a sound like the revving of a superbike's engine as he darts from spot to spot. Bending below one. Making a somersault over another. Finding sturdy ground to mount a counterattack is perilous enough. When he attempts to vault over a third spike, mere seconds later, things only get worse. His face, pale and gaunt with exhaustion in the light of the helmet's HUD, contorts into a mix of shock, fear and disgust as those spindly legs grow from the spike. What a frightening style of attack... I can't account for all of them! He attempts to parry and deflect one of those legs, but another sprouts up behind him like the defense mechanism of some frightening deep sea creature, knocking him from his perch with a cry of pain and a shower of sparks. He hits the ground hard, but forces himself back to his feet despite the spots appearing in his vision. When it finally emerges, that fear burns away, replaced by anger at the sight of the some two dozen crystals. Go is impatient, but he isn't stupid. He knows what that means. But he has a choice, just like earlier, with Chase. He can act on that feeling of helplessness... or... <J-IC-Scene> Nanoha Takamachi says, "Shijima, go for the survivor. I'll cover you." "Got it!" Again, that burst of speed, his form becoming a white and red blur. He races over to the rubble, leaping, somersaulting, baseball sliding, rolling under and around the Endling's attacking limbs however is necessary to get to her and begin clearing that rubble away. A combination of speed and strength are here employed to lift the heavy rock off of her--but even with the suit helping, it's tough. He staggers in place, going lightheaded from the toll it's taking on his body. If he can just get her free... He'll scoop her up, fire a parting shot with the Zenrin Shooter's Split ability, causing a rain of blue energy bolts to rise upwards from a spot he designated beneath the emerging creature, and set her down as clear from danger as he can, propped up against a tree for good measure.
Arthur Lowell	>==> Arthur's still in conversation with Orchid for a bit. "Yeah, fuck me, that's HALF MY SHTICK! Alright, I'll FIGURE SOMETHIN'." He slaps his broom with the palm of his hand and takes off into a broad circle. A holding pattern as things get unleashed. It holds for only a half-second longer than it truly ought to. >Arthur: Abjure When the pylons come out, he howls, "SHIT!" And is forced into tough, intense maneuvers to evade both the pylons and their airbursting scything arms. He gets away with fibers torn out of his over-long hood, but he gets away. Holy shit! >Arthur: Assail No time to think and fuck around. He can see thaat white, and his eyes widen -- but he'd be the worst one to go for her. At least, he'd be the worst right now. "Fuck, fuck. Alright, eyes on!" He calls out. Clenching a fist, he draws six fresh ROCKET BROOMS from his Strife Deck. If this thing has resistance to the flying artillery, he's gotta make sure to take advantage of it! He launches all six guided rocket-brooms at the strange... bird-like beast? The effort is to get them to embed and detonate deeper, to push through and lodge into and defensive measures meant to divert or evade beams. The core of the brooms carry with them Arthur's analytical enchantments. He's gotta map the flow of magical energies inside this damn beast, and especially get the others knowing any dangerous spikes that could interrupt Go's rescue! Besides the, you know, literal spikes. This is a destructive analysis though. If it's resistant against artillery, then maybe a bunker-buster style attack like he's doing now will work in lieu! And he fully intends to test and analyze it with mostly the searing eye of solar fire, not anything more like a microscope. >Arthur: Give the insight to the others! Arthur can't do that yet! But if he manages to land any shots, he's going to immediately give as much of that tactical knowledge as he can to the others, through tac-feeds and other suchlike.
Nanoha Takamachi	A fire washes over Nanoha. Realizing the beneficial nature of the magic, Nanoha gives Brooklyn a smile and a nod in thanks. This should certainly help! Turning to Lilian, Nanoha nods in understanding and also appreciation as Lilian proceeds to organize the group. She has no objections to her role and placement. It's where she usually ends up and it's nice to see that Lilian recognises that. Though when the conversation drifts over to the status of those magical girls that went in earlier... Twelve years old. And probably dead. Nanoha grimaces. She recalls her own life back at that age. It was actually around that time that she... Nanoha shakes her head, clearing those thoughts and trying to remain focused on the here and now. They can only hope that the girls are still alive. In which case this group will do everything they can to save them. The count starts. One... Nanoha tightens the grip on her staff. Two... Nanoha digs her feet into the ground a little as she lowers her stance. Th-Nope! Large spikes burst out of the distortion. One heads straight towards Nanoha. She instinctively releases a hand from her staff, raising it towards the incoming projectile. A pink barrier forms moments before the spike hits. The barrier shatters on impact, but Nanoha is pushed away by the force, the spike just scraping past and ripping through a part of her Barrier Jacket before hitting the ground behind her. Nanoha stumbles a few steps but recovers, looking down at the damage. Not a great start. She quickly takes to the air, rising up and beginning to circle around the emerging creature. It's a strange sight, to be sure. But not wholely unusual for Nanoha. As she flies, she's dropping small pink orbs behind her. The remote probes taking up positions in the air around the battlefield, Raising Heart taking up the task of monitoring them and watching for anything worth reporting. Her findings come quickly, as a holoscreen appears in the air near Nanoha, showing the view of a girl buried in debris. Nanoha's eyes go a little wide at the sight... They have to help! Nanoha radios, "Shijima, go for the survivor. I'll cover you." She raises her staff in the air, a dozen orbs of pink flashing into existence around her. Nanoha swings her staff down to point towards the Endling while calling out, "Axel Shooter! Fire!" Half of the orbs rush off towards the Endling to explode across its body at several points. The other half remain behind, ready to intercept any attacks or movements sent in Go's direction to help reduce the pressure so the Rider can rescue the girl.
Lilian Rook	<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "With any luck, this is an instance of responders tripping over the enemy's ability with a bad matchup." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I'd like Takamachi gathering as much intelligence about the enemy's movements and triggers as possible from a distance, and Lowell doing the same by tracking its energy flow if at all possible. Both of them are high mobility aerial fighters with significant long-ranged firepower. Ideally they should be able to cover you and Shijima. Lowell is best suited for switching out if one of you has to trade and recover your strength." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I haven't operated with Shijima before, but his profile looks best disposed towards a flanking position from which he can engage high speed offensives of his choice. I'd recommend he not commit to any position once we're inside. If Bailey is able to hold the Endling's attention from him, so much the better." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "From what I know, the longer we're fighting in there, the more used to us it's going to get. Don't play your trump cards unless you're sure you can hit the core, or guarantee someone else will be able to." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Consider yourself lucky if it is little." It is not little. Even worse, it's confident enough in its shape to emerge. A little early, perhaps, judging by the sheer amount of sprue that is vomited out into the sandy dirt, but Lilian already knows what it means if the Endling has both recovered from the first assault, and brought itself out into daylight on its own terms. Lilian reacts to the outspewing of volleyed spines almost as if she'd known they were coming, though she clearly hadn't only a second ago. Magical energy is already circulating throughout her body and mirrored in her suit, leaving her primed to act within a fractional sliver of a human reflex response. Light on her feet, low to the ground, she takes short, shallow, almost horizontal leaps backward from each flying spike, skipping back from each potential impalement and zigzagging forth each time she makes contact with the ground in rapid succession, clearing ground zero without turning away. Red glow runs bright and vivid up the uncanny semi-floral etchings of her sword, and paints whirling ribbons of after-light in the wake of each rotating flick and counter-rotation of the blade, defensively slicing through flurries of scything sub-limbs along the whole path of her retreat, leaving the gound littered with them like mown grass. She spots the Holiday girl immediately upon reaching her readjusted vanguard distance. "One of you get in there." Lilian commands. "I have this for the moment." The response comes in positive. "Orchid unit, back off to three hundred meters. The angle of that multi-stage attack exceeds your minimum turning radius; you can't get caught between two limbs at a time."
Lilian Rook	/The initial stage of the attack is a straight line. The second stage has to begin from a perpendicular direction. I don't have the raw aerial mobility to stay ahead of that. Furthermore, it has an all-directional reach and no joints on its attacking appendages that can limit its arc./ Lilian surges forward again when the aerial fire comes from Nanoha and Arthur, moving under the screen of their barrages. She crosses at an opposite direction from Go, timing her pass to take her under the Endling shortly after he exits. Her sword clicks as she brings it low and flat with the ground, trailing the side of her sprinting posture. /Keeping my feet on the ground as much as possible is the only way I can change directions quickly enough and maintain a stable attacking stance. That means I have to bring the core lower as well./ Lilian swerves sharply outward from the Endling's center mass, towards the set of legs Brooklyn can't reach. The ground suddenly explodes under one of her pounding footsteps, and she accelerates to triple speed. Her sword briefly becomes invisible, but a wide, flat, razor thin arc of black smoke and red light cleaves through one leg, then twists, inverts, and lashes out to another, marking the spiral fan of rapid-fire cuts she draws through each appendage. /Its center of gravity is high and uneven. Its weight is distributed across a large number of supports. It should have a difficult time correcting its possible if I can target several of them at close enough to the same time./ Exiting the Endling's shadow from the other side, Lilian churns earth under a wide and stable spin, drawing to a three-point stop, and then accelerates back towards its center. "Start scanning for its core location! Second and third row, burn away as much of its body mass as you can! First row, monopolize those attack limbs for ten seconds!" Her sword flicks up again, then is brought forward into a high-speed piercing stance. It might be missed that, at the site of each of her slashes, the Endling-matter doesn't appear 'split by a sharp object', but looks as if it's been torn by immense heat and resonant, shearing violence. The quivering of the edge of Lilian's fey blade isn't imagined; it actively resonates with proximity to the Endling, and meets its carapace with flashes of some kind of instantaneous distortion.
Strawberry Princess	Brook's spear cracks the Endling's leg on impact, and then gouges all the way through, sending blueish fluid trickling down from the puncture-wound. It's just too big to conveniently dismember, though- let alone topple, despite its top-heavy nature! The super-strong shove sends it staggering back a couple of steps, but it quickly finds its footing on the other three legs. Before it can heed her taunt, those three remaining legs are nicely mangled by Lilian's sword. The legs ought to be too thick for the sword's length to cut through in one stroke regardless of its sharpness, but the unnatural violence of its magical shearing force. Its stagger turns into a teeter as the limbs are cut out from under it, and it collapses back onto its side in a thunderous crash, shaking the ground with its weight. Nanoha's volley of magical shots 'splash' in a series of explosions along its main body as it falls, cracking the metal carapace and dimming the blue-green 'false cores' on impact. As she'd predicted, one of its four thorny tentacles whips out at Go as he approaches- the shots she'd held in reserve for just such an eventuality now cause it to recoil as if in pain, letting him go undisturbed. The white-clad magical girl is still breathing and bleeding when Go reaches her- both good signs; heart pumping, lungs working. Her skin is cool and sweaty with shock. She's limp when he picks her up, her wounds smearing his white outfit red. Her leg feels broken where the rubble pressed down on her, but a quick assessment shows no obvious damage to vital organs. As he lays her against a safely distant tree, her eyes manage to scrunch shut and the first rudiments of a sluggish grimace cross her face. When she opens them again, blinking through the fog filling her brain, she reaches out to gently grab Go's arm. Her unfocused eyes stare into his helmet. "Where am I," Winter murmurs quietly, squeezing his wrist. "... Summer?" In the background, Go's energy bolts and Arthur's explosive brooms slam into the Endling's prone body from below and above, causing it to shriek the shriek of bending metal. The bunker-buster brooms don't hit anything immediately lethal despite the deep damage inflicted- there's only one organ that matters to an Endling- but they do reveal its location. Arthur's analysis shows that the flow of magic within the Endling is discontinuous, routed impossibly across four dimensions- but the true core is there nonetheless, buried under multiple feet of black metal and blue crystal near the base of its 'neck'.
Strawberry Princess	Unfortunately, it doesn't stay there for long. The Endling shrinks, compacting down in repeated geometrical folds with a clang of heavy metal until it's compressed itself into an angular pylon just like any of the others. For a brief second, the battlefield is still- and then it unfolds itself from a different pylon, erupting in its horrible complexity from the simple shape right between the 'first' and 'second lines. Its jaws open wide, parting the nearly two-dimensional scissor-blades, and it whips its head in a tilted circular arc calculated to intersect each combatant. Trees are abruptly leveled by the jaws' swing, turning the forest into a circular clearing for a hundred feet around. "Egress to three hundred," Orchid Crimson obediently repeats, and swerves backwards at high speed- counting her distance now not from the Endling itself, but from its most far-flung spikes. She's catching on to the gimmick. "OOR for the Endling, but asset denial..." Her wand fires slow-moving balls of energy; at that distance, no way to get a hit on the creature itself. But she busies herself with burning down its pylons one by one, especially those that are closer to the city in the distance. When the Endling finds its footing again- this time standing on two half-legs and two tentacles- it's much lower to the ground, making its main body more vulnerable to the grounded combatants! Even so, its bloodthirst seems undimmed.
Go Shijima	She can talk. That's good, but... There's a moment, in the dim light of his helmet, where her wounded, bloodied form fades out of focus. Reflected on the inside of the visor are tired eyes, the bags under them and the pale skin around them. He blinks it away. Think about that later. "You're safe. Stay here... and do your best to save your energy. Please." He gently removes her hand from his wrist, and, unsure of what else to do, he makes an awkward 'please stay here' gesture with both palms outwards. He speeds back to the battle, leaping over gnarled roots, springing off of trees, flipping from branch to branch. "Please be okay," he mutters, unaware for a moment that his mic was on. <J-IC-Scene> Brooklynn Bailey says, "If she can survive the battle I can do something." He wouldn't be pushing himself this hard, were it not for the anger he felt at being forced to accept that Evehime was so much stronger than him. Forced to accept that she could hurt as many people as she wanted, and he'd never be able to stop her in a direct fight. That even people like Tomari and Edward might not be able to get them clear of her power. "'What good is a Kamen Rider that can't protect people'. So it's still about you." "...of course it's about me. How can I see all of that death, and not feel a responsibility to keep it from happening again? How can I not be angry that I tried and couldn't? Not just couldn't... Didn't even come close." Please... let me save just one person. He returns in time to see the jaws of those scissors coming for him, following one of the trees he'd used as a foothold promptly being split like butter. 'Undodgeable,' they'd called it--so he won't dodge. He'll meet its blows and roll with the creature's greater strength, using it to turn himself away from the brunt of it. Mach lets out a battle cry as he meets the point of that nearly two-dimensional cutting surface with the Zenrin Shooter's wheel. It spins up rapidly, and carries him up the blade, but not without the opposite blade cutting a gouge through his arm on the way up. He nearly loses his purchase, falling to the ground--but with a nimble, thruster-assisted flip to the opposite blade, he makes his attack: ZENRIN Go's form is a blur as he's carried all the way up the length of those scissors, the tire of the pistol squealing. His speed climbs as he does, and he even fires those blue-tinted thrusters to gain yet more, until at last he crashes into the Endling's center of mass. The wheel turns into a fulcrum at that point, causing him to tumble into a high-velocity axe kick delivered with superhuman strength.
Brooklynn Bailey	It seems to come out of pylons. Maybe the cool kid is right and it's going in and out of dimensions, maybe she is right and it is using them to teleport. The reality of the situation is that all of those things are everywhere, and the fewer of the doors it had, the fewer options for movement it would have to screw them. Slashes come at her from impossible angles. Once more she can't dodge, and it's not like she is even trying to. She can mitigate the damage, and heal what she can't mitigate. She closes her eyes, they have a plan, and right now she has to focus on everything. Everything that she is... It's one thing to draw upon her powers casually. This has gotten easier ever since she was reborn. However, to dig deep like this, to dig into the deepest parts of her body to try and touch that concept buried in her soul. It wasn't natural to her, but she had embraced it. She was taken in because of it, she had built herself around this very concept. There is a moment, and her eyes open. They /glow/ with what might be called a /heavenly/ light. Some part of the goodness within every person, their very compassion can be felt as she channels this. Fires burn around her as she rises up, parts of her taking on various angelic features. Then she comes down, aiming to hit earth as what follows is fire. Holy fire burns in all directions, aiming to try and consume pylons. Aiming to burn them away from the earth. Other things would catch fire as well, spreading out with her at the center. It would even overtake the ending, aiming to try and consume and burn it away as well. "I am /Charity/, enemy of humanity. Focus all of your hate on me, and feel the futility of your blades. I can not be broken, nor can the human spirit!" She says, booming another command towards the creature. DARING it to strike her down.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Accede! Arthur celebrates his success in finding the core. But it looks like success is to be short-lived. He rockets forward, intending something -- who knows what -- when the blade comes scything over to slice him in half. He can't afford to dodge, or perhaps he simply doesn't want to, but either case ends the same way: The blade slams into his broom, carving a deep notch and battering the boy brutally. HEALTH VIAL drains as he's smashed by the beak. >Arthur: Holy shit, parry it! Too late, the gravity barrier almost drained completely just blunting that. >Arthur: Okay, well get off the 2D surface! It's angling and arcing the swing, Arthur can't! >Arthur: Alright. Take it on the jaw, and just try to wrestle the fucker. Arthur's hands gleam with a black energy as his will surges. The broom vanishes, leaving him exposed! But instead of slicing in half, two bleeding hands summon esoteric geometries to clap around the 2D surface using multidimensional gripping barriers. "Alright, motherfucker, enough POKIN' IN." He mutters through gritted teeth. Arthur can't tell what's afoot geometrically with this, but the folding and unfolding of pylons make Arthur get the impression that it's outside of space, peeking in at various points. In order to weaken many points of connection in a construct, grab the largest mass and exert massive force. To weaken the other pylons, it stands to reason, Arthur must "pull" in the nearward direction along the spatial axis expressed by the pylons. He must do so by attempting a big, twisty, multidimensional Frankensteiner. No, not really, but that's Arthur, one supposes.
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha watches as the survivor of the previous magical girl team is successfully retrieved from the debris. Apparently still alive and thanks to some healer later, able to recover. Nanoha breathes a sigh of relief. It's not the whole team... But she's glad that they were able to save someone from this monster. Speaking of, Nanoha turns her attention back towards the Endling. Now that she no longer needs to provide fire support for Shijima's rescues efforts, she can focus on ripping apart this monster's body to find the so-called core. Which clearly is the key to defeating it. Arthur seems to have an idea. Though the Endling is still putting up a hell of a fight. Particularly as it reveals it is capable of transferring itself from one pylon to another! Nanoha should have realized it when Raising Heart informed her of the spatial distortion. If this thing is capable of manipulating dimensions, of course it can transfer! The Endling's snapping jaws bring those blades in towards the group, Nanoha included. She doesn't stay still though, quickly bursting away to try and avoid the strike. She manages to avoid a direct hit, but one of the blade edges still manages to slice into her arm, sharp and strong enough to cut through her magical defenses, her Barrier Jacket, and into flesh. Nanoha winces as a light spray of blood goes flying from the wound. But the Aerial Mage doesn't let the wound slow her down as she weaves her way around those blades, spiraling as she tries to close in on the Endling's head. With the core being its one weakness, taking out the head might not do much. But it might keep those blades from being a problem for the team! And also make it easier to reveal the core. Either way, Nanoha has to try something! The Mage swings her staff out to the side as she flies, a large pink orb forming at the tip. Just as Nanoha gets in close to the head she swings her staff, calling out, "Sacred Cluster!" The pink orb is launched from the staff, flying towards the Endling's head, aimed for its open jaws where the blades connect. At which point the orb bursts, unleashing a barrage of explosive magical shrapnel in all directions. Hopefully within that mouth.
Lilian Rook	Winter is out of the way. The corridor is clear. Lilian closes in. Faster. Lower. Aerodynamic. Body tension wound behind the long level of her blade, aligned with a point that seems almost gyroscopic in its unerring stability. Two hundred meters. One fifty. One hundred. Fifty. She knows where the core is now, flashing Arthur the confirmation light. But it's changing shape again. Folding up. Compacting. /It's still displaying polymorphic attributes after emerging? Is its physical form still partially undecided? Or is this a designed system? It looks like a defensive formation. Sheer surfaces. Angled against ground attack. Solid carapace material; no weak points. There's no way of knowing what it's doing inside, but it isn't retreating. It's relying on the pylon surface to protect it against at least low-level Purifier attack, so I'll need an attack with high sectional density penetration and high angular precision, or else the slope will deflect it upwards./ Forty five. Forty. Thirty five. Thirty. Twenty five. "Cleasa." Lilian's head-on sprinting posture coils, lunges, and then 'scatters', extending into a linear column of charcoal afterimages, skipping the remaining distance to close. A gleaming star of blood red light winks into existence at a single point on the side of the pylon, then flares bright and hot. It exists at the very point of her sword, where it has met the solid wall in the space of blinking. Her whole body is perfectly aligned behind the extended blade, itself perfectly straight and level with that point of contact. It cracks. A sound like shattered glass splashing at the end of a waterfall. The opposite side of the pylon explosively tears free, smashed to pieces and ejected at high velocity by the force of a fiery plume of concentrated crimson energy that erupts from within. The rest of the construct crumbles from the shock and follows suit, blowing away in hundreds of fragments along the wake. The Endling then emerges, unharmed, from a completely different pylon, well out of reach. /Forget it; that wasn't a defensive arrangement at all. If that attack did nothing, then it left the battlefield completely. It must still be still maintaining some kind of extradimensional space besides the chrysalis. Are those pylons like entrances? It's not like we can make use of them. The best thing we can do right now is limit how many it can use./ Lilian keys her hot radio again. "Architect-Extinguisher type confirmed. Orchid unit is redirecting asset denial, so keep it occupied. The more we can shrink its radius of influence, the more we can prevent it adapting." The order to Orchid is completely superfluous, as the veteran magical girl has intuited the same thing as Lilian a hair faster, and already begun dealing with the problem. Suggestions for alternative maneuvers come through. "Go for it. Neutralizing its mobility is a high priority now." she says.
Lilian Rook	Lilian has plenty to worry about before that, though. The Endling comes out of its translocated position already swinging. The scissor blades will reach her in milliseconds. The forest between them doesn't matter in the slightest. /That ability --there's no lag between translocating and attacking. Furthermore, it's shifting its shape along the way. The landscape is totally useless here; nothing is providing cover against that. The mass of its head is probably too much to stop from anywhere but directly in front. Those jaws are too thin to block with anything but Night Mist, and if I get in the way of one, it'll just snap them shut and cut me in half from behind. Nothing for it. I have two and a half seconds loaded. I'll spare one third, and prime another half-second extra while Arthur holds it./ -----[stop]----- Silence. Lilian takes two steps backwards from the two-dimensional surface six inches in front of her. Previously a lethal weapon, less than an indivisible unit of time ago, the motionless appendage is now a broad, flat, and thin ledge, as her mind's eye recategorizes it. She leaps from the dirt, standing on its flat side, then hops again from there, not engaging her flight magic. She grips the limb of a floating tree, tilted dangerously in its half-completed fall to earth, then swings from it up to its highest boughs. Hollow clack-clack-clacks ring out in the void between seconds, lost to time, as she runs along the frontmost-facing branch, then vaults high over the hazy wall of sand, suspended in the air like a hologram, so that no single grain is disturbed. She touches down at the base of its neck, bounce-turns, slides on both feet down the back of its body, then winds back her sword again. Eerie, soundless black flames erupt down its length. -----[start]----- "Cleasa." Lilian whirls the burning sword thrice through the air --a triskelion orbit of fire-- and plunges it into the back of the Endling with a double-handed power grip. One of its false cores. The roiling flame twists and surges down its length, discharging into the monster like a bolt of lightning, disappears completely, and then re-manifests as a sequence of red-hot explosions from within the geometric center of the matching cores, using magical resonance between its organs to cause a cook-off like a ship's magazine. Inky black mist billows around Lilian like vented waste heat. "We still haven't seen its trump card. Switchin to a defensive pattern." she radios. "It's hemorrhaging mass. It'll start getting desperate soon, and we've displayed several of our attack patterns. Keep thirty meters from one another, and maintain two or less combatants in each of its arcs. If it's non-directional attack, it'll lose some effectiveness from having to spread out."
Strawberry Princess	Lilian's blade finds the monster's back perfectly, sinking through the false core's crystalline surface as if it were jelly and extinguishing the light within. The magical forces discharged through the invading steel ricochet through its internal architecture, visible from outside as gemstones fracturing without obvious cause or wisps of smoke trailing from its other injuries, but it fades away quicker than might be expected- the spatial folds of the Endling's interior serve to dissipate the energy as if it were much larger than its actual size. Weirdly, the Endling's materials don't burn away or melt under heat, no matter how intense- but they do eventually crack and shatter, and that's good enough. Thinning out the pylons doesn't just restrict the Endling's movement; it seems to cause the monster 'pain' as well, eliciting a similarly irate response as a direct injury. As its full body catches fire, however, it has an unusual defense mechanism- it turns itself 'inside-out' in a churning, twisting, space-distorting way, smothering the flames inside its own body and exposing the coruscating damage that Lilian dealt to it a moment earlier. Steam hisses from its joints and cracks before it everts again, resuming its prior configuration- albeit with new char-marks and stress fractures on its 'outside'. It takes Go for a serious threat, as well- though lacking obvious eyes, the Endling does everything in its power to stop him from pulling off his over-the-top axe-kick stunt. One of its free tendril-arms tries to coil around and grapple him as he plunges towards it, but fails to. He connects with its main body with a vibrating, resonating CLANG. A second later, as if in delayed reaction, a huge singular crack forms across its body and a chunk of its metal exterior sloughs off, revealing blue-glowing crystalline fractal innards through which its magic flows. Arthur's elaborate gravitational wrestling move has an exotic effect. At first it resists the forced movement, anchored by invisible forces to its spot in space- but under the irresistible force of his sick moves, that anchor starts to give way. As its four-dimensional connections strain and tear, the very air starts to drip blue liquid from unseen extraspatial wounds. Finally, he rips it free of its moorings entirely, swings it around, and slams it back down into the ground, shuddering and twitching from its impossible exsanguination. Hopefully he'll have gotten away from its head by the time Nanoha launches her own attack. It's likewise brutally effective- her magical beams may not be the Endlings' specific anathema, but the raw power of her magic suffices nonetheless. The Endling's "head" is blown apart by the magical explosion, sending its huge blade-jaws tumbling down to embed in the dirt below and mangling the upper half of its neck. As she'd predicted, it's not an instant kill, but the creature's been deprived of one of its deadlier weapons.
Strawberry Princess	By this point, the Endling's body is nearly unrecognizable from when it started- entire limbs are missing, its main body is charred and gouged deeply by sustained attacks, and its blue fluids are forming ankle-deep puddles on the ground. It's compromised to the point that it can barely shield its core. But... <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "We still haven't seen its trump card. Switching to a defensive pattern." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "It's hemorrhaging mass. It'll start getting desperate soon, and we've displayed several of our attack patterns." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Keep thirty meters from one another, and maintain two or less combatants in each of its arcs. If it's non-directional attack, it'll lose some effectiveness from having to spread out." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "HELLA. I been keepin' the BARRIER up for JUST THAT SHIT. Motherfucker 'boutta PULL HIS ACE for real, though..." Collapsing onto its side, the Endling raises all four of its tendril-arms to the sky. The pylons that still thorn its limbs start to geometrically fold themselves down, dividing fractally into halves again and again and again. Thousands of geometrical pylons the size of your arm, then hundreds of thousands the size of a finger, then... Once they've reached microscopic size, they start to disperse, filling the area with a billowing fuzzy black smoke that expands in all directions. The Endling folds itself away again, but now appears anywhere within the billowing cloud, materializing itself piecemeal as lashing limbs or whipping claws or constricting tendrils to be wielded against anything in reach of the unnatural smoke before disappearing an instant later. Though the cloud's expanding, it doesn't seem to be growing any thinner. Arthur can discern- and relay- that the Endling's core is still inside, but now it's both hidden from view and moving erratically, keenly conscious that it now lacks the protective bulk of its earlier form. Destroying it will still be a dire challenge.
Brooklynn Bailey	Ok, that was a trump card and a half, and out of everything Brooklynn could come to expect, that wasn't on the list. The fractal pylons were now everywhere, and so was the creature. Like a cloud of smoke that was everywhere. Tearing across her body as she tried to fight the pain. She couldn't even hope to brace this, it was beyond her training and it was unexpected. She heard the call not to breathe in. That was the last thing she wanted to do right now, but with the ping from Arthur, and his usual silence...she realized that it wasn't just her. More than that, people who needed to get a clear shot, or get close to it wouldn't be able to... At that point, she forces all of the air out of her lungs. She saw this in a somewhat preserved comic once. The guy with superpowers like hers could do this...so why not? She could heal from the internal injuries, better still if the creature was killed before it could do too much damage. So after emptying her lungs, she used her strength to try and suck in as much of the cloud as she could. She couldn't hope to /suck it all in/ but she could at least suck in enough to make the core visible to the others and diffuse the cloud enough to make it possible.
Go Shijima	These things learn. Quickly. The ascent up to the Endling's body is harrowing, seeing the destruction its unnatural means of attack can wreak even unintentionally. The ease with which it fells entire trees isn't lost on Go. But he can't hesitate for a second. Under normal circumstances he'd see all of those glowing, exposed innards and stay the course--but as adaptable as this opponent is, he can't risk using the same trick too many times. Springing from his spot with a handspring following that axe kick, he takes to the air as the creature's legs begin to rise. <J-IC-Scene> Orchid Crimson says, "Oh- don't breathe, DON'T BREATHE." There is one interminably long second, following Go's initial confusion at that command, when he realizes, with paralyzing fear, that he has breathed, following the sudden cloud of dark smoke in the air. Immediately, his free hand moves for the faceplate. It's lifted up. Ordinarily this vents excess energy from the suit in the form of steam, allowing the rider to safely exit the suit. But it has a second, rarely used function: purging inhaled toxins. Out from that black plate behind the white adjustable faceplate vents both steam and a mixture of that inky blackness, as Go exhales. The trump card... this is what they meant by undodgeable...! Despite the suit's countermeasure, Go still suffers for his mistake, as a claw materializes from one of those particles, inches from his face. He manages to keep it from being lethal by virtue of a lightning-fast flip-kick, but even this just means that it rakes across his back, and hard enough to knock him flat on his back. There is precious little time to act. Don't breathe. SIGNAL BIKE//Signal Change! STOP The signal on the hubcap of that shoulder changes to a red stop sign, the word STOP enclosed within a triangle. Holding his breath, Go gets back to his feet and takes off, reaching his top speed in seconds. It's agony. His muscles ache, but for the finisher, he needs as much kinetic energy as he can get. He's a white and red blur, tracing rapid circles around the Endling's prone form as red lightning builds up around his person in increasingly frequent bursts. It's ready. His head is starting to get light. He cuts an abrupt right turn, pivots on his heel, and drives his foot into the massive entity, using a spinning back kick to abruptly STOP and transfer that stored energy into it, as an emblem of a giant STOP sign appears over it. It won't take effect immediately--because the secondary effect of that finisher is holding the entity in greatly slowed time dilation and applying the force of every subsequent strike at once, after normal time resumes. Go has just enough ttime to get clear and collapse against a tree.
Nanoha Takamachi	They're making progress, even if they haven't managed a direct shot at the core yet. So of course all the warning of its trump card will j8nx them and cause it to bring it out! As the 'gas' quickly forms, Nanoha takes in a deep breath, having no intention of letting the mini bits of Endling get inside her. But within that smoke it soon becomes clear that it's not the only threat lurking. Nanoha holds in a cry as a claw swipes across her back, cutting through her Barrier Jacket and into skin. How is she going to fight against something she can't see, that can attack from any direction!? ... Wait. Nanoha looks at her staff. Through their mental connection, Raising Heart knows what Nankha intends and chimes in response, <It's not ready, Master.> Nanoha gives her Device a determined look. Raising heart chimes, <Very well. making final preparations.> Raising Heart's gem flashes in rapid succession for a few moments before she chimes one final time, <TODO: Come up with spell name.> Pink orbs begin to appear in the air around Nanoha, more and more of them spreading out from her position. Soon the air in her location is flooded with pink. And as the Endling manifests a claw to swipe at Nanoha once more, it gets close to some of those orbs and they explode, blasting it away from her! This continues somewhat with furth attempts. Some of the orbs explode, others simply fizzle out, giving the Endling an opening to strike Nanoha.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Hold that breath! Arthur's technically asphyxiation-proof! He is not, however, proofed against a million, billion tiny fractal needles and needle-arms assaulting all the vulnerable membranes and tissues of his human form, nor against many claws that menace his flesh. It is decidedly something he cannot deal with -- and even his gravity barrier almost instantly fizzles out on contact with the hostile cloud. His eyes go wide (which lets them bleed even more) when he realizes how this pseudo-chemical-weapon killed the children. This... this is not something Arthur can deal with. >Arthur: The enemy's core is the only thing that matters You're right. That's all he needs to focus on. Maybe the others can do something about the cloud, maybe the others can do something about the movement, but Arthur fills his chest with resolve -- not, as some might, with fractal hell-splinters -- and dives in. He shuts both eyes against the barrage of lashing claws, claps both hands together, and unleashes a miniature black hole in front of him. A void meant to drill through the cloud, to whirl through the fractal hell, and then just fucking dunk violently into the core of the creature. Hopefully, it's remaining immobile with Go's time-stopping efforts. "Leave or come inside, but close the fucking door you fractal fucking child murderer." He manages to whisper through gritted teeth with the last of his clear air. This attack is meant to decisively and violently pull it as hard as possible into this space, and then spaghettify it straight into hell.
Lilian Rook	Lilian flips gracefully from the Endling's back when it inverts itself for the sake of damage control, turning once over backwards from the strength she uses to get herself back to thirty meters clear, and crunches lightly on the churned and gouged earth again. She flicks her sword to the side, and it casts off molten embers just like droplets of blood, painting the ground with spatters of liquid fire. /It isn't still tethered to the chrysalis, nor is it bringing any of that space along with it somehow. It must be accessing additional space already present. That body might be half-finished especially so that it can flatten and fold its dimensions as necessary to move in and out. There appears to be a limit to how much it can extrude at once, so unless it--/ Danger. Extreme danger. A deadly warning in the spike of abruptly terminated never-timelines, like a ringing in her ears. Lilian finally takes off the ground, severs gravity, and races ahead of the explosively expanding cloud, teleporting through groves of trees and mounds of wreckage to keep at its edge. Out of the stormbank wall behind her, tendrils burst from the fog, to slash at her ankles and whip at her back. Sparks fly from gouges torn into the fixed armour plates, individually deforming from the savage impacts. Lilian's flight pattern wavers, then straightens. Wobbles, then stabilizes. She turns just in time to intercept a heavy vertical stab from above, but the impact across the flat of her blade drives her ankle deep into the earth. Rooted against the spreading miasma. It'll bowl over her in the blink of an eye. /I see. It's circumvented its mass limit by increasing its surface to volume ratio to nearly even. How many cubic meters is that? It'll spread ten times as wide if it splashes itself against the ground. But, most of that is empty space. That means most of that darkness is the microdebris blocking out sunlight./ A deep breath, in the last moment she can take on. A shift of her stance to twelve and four. A tilt of her sword, extended to the full length of her arms, finely balanced level between only a fingertip on each hand. "Cleasa o'Skye - Bás Scáthanna" The sword's bloody light flows all at once into its edges and then runs down to its point, the red patterns extinguished for an instant and concentrated in one spot. Lilian thrusts into the cloud, at something only she can see; a point that would seem completely, uselessly random to anyone else. She twists, her wrists, reverses the hold, and then tears the sword up and across and through a massive overhead arc, though she cuts only dust and shadow.
Strawberry Princess	Brooklynn, against all logic and warning, attempts to inhale the Endling. This does not measurably decrease the Endling's mass, because it is a very big cloud and human lungs are rather small. It does, however, end with Brooklynn having two lungs full of horrible black fractal menace, which promptly begin shredding through her soft tissues like someone figured out how to aerosolize a Cuisinart. Throughout history, many civilizations have believed that drowning is the worst way to die. Brook has discovered something worse. It sucks. While blendering Brook from inside, it finds enough time and limbs to lash out against Nanoha, too. Each defensive orb is an explosion, and each explosion wrecks one of its appendages, but it piles on the pressure. Eventually the black smoke starts to seep inside her spherical barrier through the holes left by prior attacks, attempting to fish for her with sweeping strikes- but if she can dodge those well enough, they'll hit the inside of her barrier and be destroyed anyway. As Go approaches the Endling's prone body through the blinding smoke, the core itself- a perfectly octahedral blue-green crystal glowing through the black fog- wrenches itself free of the wreckage of its shell and hovers in the air. It starts to twist and fold itself away, hoping to escape to somewhere else in the cloud- but just as its form distorts into impossible shapes, his foot connects with it, and it's frozen in time. That's how Arthur finds it. His black hole offensive is predictably effective at unraveling all this four-dimensional nonsense. The smoke seems to be infinite, billowing ever outwards and never growing any thinner, but he slices a temporary swathe right through to the center, past the carving claws and whickering limbs that try to scrabble at him from the very edge of their reach. In the center is that impossible folding crystal, and he slams the black hole home, one spatial anomaly ramming headfirst into another. Something squeals like a dying animal as the two are locked together in distorted time, sparking with the light of matter-to-energy conversion. Lilian's impossible cut finds the Endling's core as well, tracing a sparking line vertically across the crystal's surface that resolves in extreme slow motion. Spiderweb cracks spread out from either side of the gradually-deepening fissure as the light inside starts to go out.
Strawberry Princess	Then Go's time-stopping power ends. The singularity punches a perfectly cylindrical hole straight through the core and out the other side. It flickers a little still, and is then instantly extinguished by Night Mist's bisection. There is a crack like thunder, and then the cloud instantly collapses, its aerosol becoming heavier-than-air and falling to the ground as fine, inert black sand. Bits and pieces of the Endling are scattered all around, abruptly dissected when their fourth dimensional connections collapsed. Blue liquid pours down from invisible spatial wounds in the air, creating tidal pools of cyan on the new black beach. (And the onslaught in Brook's lungs, mercifully, stops- though now she's just choking on sand instead.) It's over, according to Orchid Crimson's expert eye- she feels comfortable with swooping in and landing to assess the party's injuries. She's hovering to keep the weight off her gashed left leg from the opening salvo, but it doesn't look serious; she exercises a professional's discipline in ignoring the pain. "Jesus," she says dully, surveying the unearthly carnage and still-flickering fires. "Well. One Holiday retrieved. No deaths on sortie. We didn't have to nuke the site. And it didn't get to Chitré." A brief pause as she visualizes the implications of that last part. "God, that would've been a shitshow." She straightens up, trying to adopt a more official voice. "What I'm trying to say is: on behalf of the Carenero Group and the inhabitants of Panama, thank- oh." Winter Holiday emerges from the woods, leaning on her wand like a crutch to take the weight off of her broken leg. She's more alert now, but still bleeding, and it looks like she's been crying too. Her eyes sweep over the assembled group, recognizing only Go and (dimly) Orchid. "I wanna help," she says quietly, too dazed to process that it's all already over. "Let me- I can help. I can do it."
Brooklynn Bailey	That goes as well as it could for someone without a good degree of knowledge of physics, the human anatomy, and the occasional fiction book of how heroes should act. It does not go well for /her/, as she starts coughing horrifically sounding before blood starts coming out. This basically floors her. Until, thankfully, the creature is killed. Now only /sand/ and blood come out. It takes her a bit to get over this, however, when she notices the magical girl that was pulled out from the wreckage, she lets the fire flow from out from her, recalling the fire from the others and sharing her natural regeneration with her. Her own lungs are currently reconstructing themselves. She wheezes for a long time trying to recover some sort of control over breathing, also feeling light-headed. Drowning really is the worst way to go.
Lilian Rook	Lilian breathes out only as the fractal dust begins raining out of the air as sand. A long, slow, exhalation, releasing both physical tension and a flicker of nebulously 'expended' magical substrate. The tip of Night Mist gradually lowers to the sand, sliding over the fulcrum of her grip, dark and still. It is then abruptly flipped and snapped home into the scabbard. When Lilian turns to face Orchid, swirling patterns of black flowers-that-aren't-flowers physically flow backwards from the edges of her face and disappear from her skin. A red light dims and is extinguished in her eyes. "How many were there?" she asks. "I'd like to know." If there aren't even bodies, then . . . She sucks in a short, sharp breath at the sound of Winter Holiday's voice. Departing from Orchid, she moves over to the much younger magical girl, and without brooking complaint, lifts her up off the ground so that she stops limping on that leg, holding her with exactly the ease one would carry a child. "You've already won, Miss Winter. You did it. Now you need to stop wandering around and rest. We're going back." If it weren't for the resonance of the supernatural in her voice --the storybook authenticity and authority of the fairy queen-- then one might wonder what emotion they would otherwise hear.
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha takes a few hits within the cloud of Endling, but manages to blow parts of it away and hold it off long enough for its core to finally be destroyed. As the cloud collapses, turning to sand, Nanoha finally lets out the breath she had been holding, taking in a few more in quick succession. Raising Heart does similar after having deployed the large magical minefield, cooling gasses blasting out of vents within the head of the staff. With the Endling defeated, Nanoha heads back down towards the ground to join the rest of the team. On the way she notices Winter Holiday emerging. Nanoha softly floats down towards the young magical girl, gently touching down on solid ground once more nearby. There's a barely perceptible hint of pain in her expression, likely from the wounds on her body that are a little red with blood. But it's nothing major. Nanoha makes her way over to Winter, joining Lilian. As Lilian picks Winter up, Nanoha gives the magical girl a comforting smile and says, "That's right, you've already helped." She puts a hand on the girl's shoulder, "Good job delaying and softening it up. Thank you."
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Descend gracefully Arthur cannot descend gracefully because Arthur is too busy crashing into the fucking dirt. But he does his best, pulls his weird twisty maneuver into a sputtering stumble, and trips over his own feet onto his hands and knees, panting and bleeding. "Holy fuck." He mutters, before he starts struggling to his feet, proppinh himself up on his broom. "On behalf of space: 'Ow'. Also, you're welcome." He starts, before he gets a good look at White Holiday. He blinks a few times. >Arthur: You gotta find a way for her to help Arthur can't do that! He can't see a way to help here. >Arthur: Talk to her about something that can help Arthur can't see something that can help to talk about! >Arthur: Talk to her about what happened. Walk through it from a rescue perspective or something. "Holy shit!" He finally seems to realize something. "You're almost okay! Here, hey, here!" He pulls out his phone, scrambling to get a map of this area. "Here, siddown with me. Talk me through the battle y'all had and tell me where everyone got incapacitated, so I can know where to run my rocket, yo." He looks up to Orchid and makes a sort of "do it do it do it" gesture, pleading for help, because recovering corpses himself would be a fucking awful experience for him. Then he's back to waving White Holiday over, trying to get her to settle down and sit, and doing all he can to find out about exact locations. It's to keep her occupied, to let her help, and to indulge the tiny, fragile hope that there might be another survivor, somewhere, waiting.
Go Shijima	Go's legs give out, and he tumbles across the ground as inert black sand begins to fall back to earth. He comes to a stop just a few feet shy of Orchid Crimson. After such torturous moment of holding his breath, his lungs greedily try and suck in air one step ahead of his conscious decision to do so. Clumsily, his hands fumble for the Signal Bike, flipping the chamber up, removing it. His armor disappears, and the AI calls out: Good Work! ...over the sound of him gutturally coughing, on his hands and knees. A belt like the Drive Driver--like Shinnosuke's, with an intelligence inside it that can think and reason and feel--is a belt that can tell its user 'no.' The Mach Driver's onboard AI has no such ability. His muscles ache. There's involuntary shaking. His clothes are soaked through in places with sweat, and his skin has an unhealthily pallid tone. There is a red stripe which decidedly doesn't belong on his white hoodie, jagged and diagonal. I can't stop. Not until... He forces himself back to his feet, wiping blood from his mouth with a sleeve. Go stumbles over towards Lilian, Nanoha and Winter, nearly losing his footing when his foot catches on a fallen tree. He stops, when he sees Lilian scoop her up. It's the right move--she shouldn't be walking right now. Really, he shouldn't, either. But at least she was able to, in however limited a fashion. Thank you. Go collapses onto the fallen tree, sitting down with his head in his hands, breathing heavily.
Strawberry Princess	Orchid Crimson holds lingering eye contact with Winter Holiday, a series of complex emotions washing over her face in rapid succession. She'd restrained them before for the sake of some perverse professionalism, but can't now. "Four," she manages to say to Lilian, before wrangling herself into finally looking away as Winter's scooped up. There are, indeed, three bodies hidden somewhere in that pile of rubble and sprue. Winter's directions aren't much service to Arthur, given that the entire architecture of the chrysalis got upheaved and spat out in a pile, but he can still find them by the traces of their magical signatures. There's maybe enough for someone like Edward, but they're well and truly dead. They look about like you'd expect. Brook's healing flames stop Winter's bleeding, at least, and set her leg a little more at ease- she's no longer in any danger of expiring. She leans against Lilian and allows her eyes to close, managing a shaky fake smile as Nanoha lays a hand on her too. "Okay," she says, her voice a little above a whisper. "I... that's good. I'm glad we did it." And then her too-light body relaxes into rest. Orchid Crimson floats over to the tree where Go is laying, leans against it, and eases herself down into a sitting position. Her wand is laid across her lap, and she stares up at the sky. In the distance is a jet- the Carenero retrieval team. "Yeah," she says quietly, in response to nothing in particular. There's a dazed look on her face. "Me too."