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Tamamo     For some, this is a return to the town of Ocna. For a few others, it will be their first sight of it. The smooth, straight, road slopes downward from the forest, merging with the only wide and straight street between the buildings this side of the river. The original bridge to cross that deceptively deep and fast-flowing body of water was destroyed some time ago, but someone has since used magic to regrow a narrow crossing from its remains.

    The opposite side has the other, taller half of town, up to four stories rather than two. In some places, it's as if buildings were built on top of each other, with plenty of raised pathways between them, and only enough wide streets to handle getting carriages from the wide marketplace down to the dug-out docks area. No such cargo is getting easily across the river, right now.

    The most built-up areas are the walled-off, palatial villa at the far side of town, and the tall business quarters bordering the forum. Time has not, however, been kind to anything here. Worse than decay, or the neglect of the place being entirely abandoned by its former inhabitants, organic growths bulge from gutters or hang from eaves, dull and gray and round, like wasp nests. They're only just visible from this far a distance, but to be identifiable at all from this vantage, they may belong to beasts of unusual size.

    Those who had called for aid are led, once again, by Emilian of the house Darie, a paladin of the inquisition of the Holy Kingdom of Valcea, to which the surrounding territory belongs. He's dressed in gleaming plate armor, long since mended, waiting at the forest's edge for everyone to gather up. At his side stands Petre, an older man in traveling clothes and few signs of being a priest, along with many of the others who had last visited this place, and their horses. The inquisitors are, in terms of equipment, a varied lot, both in armor and weapons. If there's one point of uniformity, it's the extra pouches of gear and strapped-on backup weapons. Only a few, Emilian included, wear full, heavy suits of armor, as well.

    Of those new faces, it's easy to guess a trio of them, all men with scraggly beards who look like they get a lot more caffeine than sleep, are wizards. That's the vibe the near-total lack of armor, the jeweled canes, spectacles, and academic outfit flair give. They're arguing with each other while looking down at the town from here, one repeatedly checking an unfurled scroll like either its contents or the sights will change if he looks hard enough.
Tamamo     "You return! Excellent." Emilian has a high default volume. One might think he spends a lot of time in loud environments. The request came, to be technically accurate, from him, personally, even if it was on behalf of other organizations. The inquisition needs a demonic cult dealt with, and the house Darie is doing their duty in funding some multiversal aid, to make sure it gets done.

    "We have with us pyromancers of the college," Emilian makes a sweeping gesture to include the trio of (still arguing) old men, "and very good that we do, for it seems the whole town is filling with nests. From cellar to roof, most like."

    "An unfortunate state of affairs," Petre says, "that we should have taken this long to bring fire to bear. We have received requests from surviving relatives for their family belongings, but there likely won't be much left." He leaves hanging the implied question of 'What else can we do?'
Cantio The trio of bearded men aren't the only new faces here. Cantio's here as well, following the calls for aid from Emilian, her white and pastel purple color scheme probably making it a little too obvious that she's not from around here. Just as well, though, since she's unfamiliar enough with the area that her head is already swimming with all sorts of questions that, thankfully, are largely answered by the initial plan of using fire against the (presumably) giant wasp nests.

"Do you have a list of what they're looking to retrieve? I might be able to do something about that before your pyromancers get to work." Predicting a confused response or questions about what she means, she holds her arm out to the side (making sure nobody's standing there), then pantomimes tapping invisible buttons as the air around said arm starts to shimmer with pixelated light. Her hand disappears momentarily as she reaches into that space, then pulls out a sword, a folding chair, and weird purple cube.

"If I can get inside, I can just throw everything in, then find my way out so long as someone has a portrait or a phone or... Something. Will that work"?

Otherwise, she seems fine with burning it all.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      A flight of birds is disturbed by the sound of an antigrav engine and a thruster. A massive green hoverbike with thick armor plating pulls out from the treeline. Its rider is no less heavily armored. As he dismounts, a cloak of rye grass and hyacinths billows out behind him. The Green Knight's expressionless horned helmet bears a reflection, in its black t-visor, of Emilian and the necromancers. He silently stares at them.

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Petre: We have received requests from surviving relatives for their family belongings, but there likely won't be much left.

    "I am cleped Bercilak of the High Wasteland. So als the Green Knight," says the armored figure, seven and a half feet tall. His armor is a black bodysuit, over which there are thick, woven in plates, some with vents; all clearly computer-designed and machined rather than struck by a smith. As if those plates weren't thick enough, there is also a massive breastplate-harness over his chest, which includes two rounded pauldrons.

    "Yeve unto her thy list," he says, jerking a thumb towards Cantio. "I shalt journei thither," he says, pointing into town. "And hondle ani winged dores which her inseking might maken wrothli."
Xion Ocna is a place that had remained at the front of Xion's quest list for a few weeks now. Despite the earlier concern she had paid to Emilian and the strange state of 'there was a call for aid but Emilian acted confused when Xion asked him about it' and 'nobody seemed willing to pay'.

These had become lesser concerns when the revelation that the town was infested in what Xion understood as the local, malicious flavor of Antegent-like insectoid mutants had set in to make stuff Awful.

And nobody disagreed the area was awful.

NOW:

Xion arrives as simply as the first time, a portal of darkness yawning open vertically to disgorge Xion and hang open for her Plus One. She's the same as usual, wearing a black collared jacket over casual grey shirt and shorts, her star-toothed keyblade already slung over her shoulder.

"It would be awful if they got out of the town, right? Let's work together to make sure it stays contained and all the corruption gets handled."

She looks to Emilian first, then Petre: "Is there any way to... de-bug them? A person defragmenter?"
Hibiki Tachibana     Of course, Hibiki is here again. After what they saw and experienced last time, not coming back to deal with what's become of Ocna would be unthinkable - though nobody could be faulted for thinking otherwise, since that kind of resolve isn't really obvious on her. Her entrance (with her already clad in the anachrostically mechanical armor of Gungnir, quite opposed to the knightly sorts about) is mostly silent, with tensed shoulders and clenched fists. Emilian does get a small, chest-height wave in return greeting, and the arguing old men get a glance as they have their back and forth.

    'Pyromancers' doesn't leave much room for doubt for what they're here for, not that there was much of that in the first place. She moves to stand at the edge of the treeline, staring down at the town from afar. "...There's nobody out on the streets. They must have gone back indoors. Or..." Her attention flits between a few of the largest nests that have formed, and something extremely awful she'd rather not put into words comes to mind. But no doubt, they must be where all of those insects from before - or much worse now - make their home.

    "Stop holding back. They're well beyond saving."

    It was simple enough, and it was /true/, but she can't get those words out of her head now that she's back here. With a shake of her head, she turns back to the others as the subject of actually doing something with those requests comes up. "If we can bring them what they're asking for, we should," she says with a nod to Cantio and Bercilak both. "They deserve that much." That's easy enough to agree to.

    Her staring goes back down to the buildings in the distance after, with a frown. "...I asked Petre before," Hibiki replies back off to Xion, without turning around. "...and he said no. Unless one of us might have a way..." She sounds like she's hoping someone might speak up on that end. "...Whatever's responsible for all of this. Where do you think it'd be?" She adds on after a brief pause, towards Emilian.
Roxas Roxas... is a part of Xion's party today! He emerges after her, from the same swirl of darkness. He's already a little more ready for a fight than usual, with his silver-and-black keyblade resting loosely against his shoulder. It's not exactly a combat stance, but it's more ready than 'not there'.

He catches sight of Bercilak and waves towards him genially, before turning his attention towards the people that he assumes called Xion here in the first place.

He glances sidelong at Hibiki, who also gets a smile and a friendly nod, before he addresses the subject that has people vexed.

"We might be able to do it, depending. I mean... we don't have the stuff for all the hypothetical steps, but Xion or I could loose the Heart if it's still there," he suggests, tilting his keyblade forward illustratively before bringing it back to a rest.

"If they're basically just dead and used for parts, though, that won't work."
Lilian Rook     "Well, it's hardly as if I could just leave this the way I found it." Lilian says to Emilian. "I appreciate that you've found the necessary support so swiftly. I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of going from building, dousing oil and throwing torches, and hoping for the best. At best, the strategy I'd settled on in lieu of specialists was to be multiple small hit and run operations to burn it away district by district."

    "For the same reason, I'll unfortunately have to decline going home to home and scrounging for people's personal knicknacks. The less exposure to those things possible, the better." She makes a face at Cantio. "Plus we won't even know if those things are safe to retrieve anyways. I wouldn't bother risking something like that in the name of thank yous from random people for collecting their heirloom pots and pans or whatever. Anything refugees would actually *need* wouldn't be something to scrape from assorted kitchens and bedrooms."

    Preempting Roxas, Lilian states quite confidently "Assure you, nobody is home. That was the first thing I checked." It seems believable, given that she has very obviously come dressed for war this time. The somewhat futuristic tilt of her combat suit can't really be helped, though she's made the effort to find, but she's tracked down and donned something roughly similar to a tabard, marked with that elaborate solar cross-sword and its halo of individual runes. On top of that though, she's also come bearing a backpack that looks like it would keep an appropriately sized soldier going for a few weeks in the bush, though anyone can expect that there aren't any snack bars in there.

    "What's the range of your pyromancers? How close do we have to get?"
Tamamo     When asked, Petre steps over to one of the horses, and removes a bundle of letters from the saddlebag. "If you can do so, they would be grateful, but..." Thumbing through, he selects one, then a feathered pen from the same bag, and begins adding notes while glancing through the rest of the stack. "Our first duty here is to cleanse the land, and the latest word from the seers was not filled with glad omens. The Enemy may not make this easy for us. Just... do as you can. Be clear on what's important."

    Petre offers the list to Cantio. It's a lot of street addresses, names and items, scattered over the whole town. Some of it's jewelry, rings, mirrors, simple keepsakes, whole closets, books, journals, shop tools, and even furniture. Plenty of it looks wholly impractical to carry out of a warzone. She can only guess how much of it is motivated by sentimentality versus finance. A few things that stand out toward the former side are: A child's doll, a daughter-in-law's wedding band, and a brother's work journal. They're all near that open marketplace.

    The Green Knight cuts an imposing figure, and his armor gets interest out of the less-occupied agents, a few of whom leave their horses to wander for a better view. Emilian is the one who responds directly. "Well met, sir Bercilak! I know not this High Wasteland you hail from, but I look forward to seeing your strength on the field." Seems he has no problem with the plan.

    Petre shakes his head at Xion's question. "Once the corruption has taken hold, they are beyond all saving. Demons remold the mind, leaving their work invisible in those thought cured." He sounds sad but resigned about it. "A few scholars have claimed otherwise, but their work left all their patients... well, to destroy that much of the mind isn't much different from death, I think. It's no kinder."

    At Roxas' addition, he blinks. "'Loose the Heart'? I'm afraid I don't quite follow, but they're certainly alive. They were last we were here, at least, and demons tend to keep them that way. We hadn't spotted any necromancers." He rubs his chin. "Young men who try to touch the heart of cultists tend to... let's say, experience can be a strict teacher, and I've never seen the same man try twice." Again, that note of resignation. He's certain that it's hopeless, and this isn't the first time he's discussed it.

    "It's not a question of whether we can hit it from here," one of the pyromancers speaks up, in answer to Lilian's question. "It's whether we can control the blaze precisely enough to burn down to the roots, even across the river, and then stop it from torching all the way to the forest. Feeding the flame is easy enough. Stopping it, now..."
    His fellow, even balder than the first, adds, "It's not like summing numbers together, or even loosing a bolt. Too little, and nothing is left high enough that'll burn hot enough to get what's below. Too much, with a town this size? It'll rage all on its own, and won't stop there."
    The third summarizes, "What they mean is, the closer, the better. It's not like this place was built thinking we'd need to burn it down again."
    "Isn't that what I said?"
    "No, you old goat."
    "Well, I was going to."
Lilian Rook     "Unfortunate, but not unexpected." Lilian replies, on the subject of pyromancy. "Ordinarily, I'd suggest that each of you split up with an assigned personal guard and choose equidistant points around the town. No, perhaps one to the villas, one to the business quarter, and one to the residential area, aligned to be able to fire into the adjacent area. It's up to you whether you think you have the manpower for it, however . . ."

    Only a moment's thoughtful noises pass before she continues. "Beginning from the outside and spreading the blaze inward would be ideal. We don't want to drive the creatures out of their nests in the center first, because they'll all come flooding out of town. Attacking the least defended areas first, and hemming them in with fire at the same time, should be our starting approach. The thicker you can spread the band of fire inwards, the less you should have to worry about anything making it to you."

    "From there, I'd like us to advance ahead of the flames, intercept any swarms that attempt to make it over, and drive the remainder that obviously flee towards the center, where we can compress them into a dense point. At that point, the application of heavy firepower should effectively wipe them out, and the pyromancers can advance inwards to spread the fire to the middle and clean up. Roxas and Xion should be able to provide easy transport to those lacking the ability themselves, so we shouldn't need to worry about coordinating the fire curtain. Just don't fall behind."

    "Does that sound agreeable, Sir Paladin?" she notedly only really asks him. It's a rank and class thing. Plus she just kind of assumes Xion and Roxas aren't the type to suddenly voice tactical objections, and they're sort of the only ones she's willing to seriously hear.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants Hibiki: If we can bring them what they're asking for, we should.
Hibiki: They deserve that much.
Reminder 'Hibiki's Mettle' added.
Xion:Is there any way to... de-bug them? A person defragmenter?
Hibiki: I asked Petre before ...and he said no.
Hibiki: Unless one of us might have a way...

    Bercilak first reaches out and gently pats Xion's head. Then Hibiki's. "Not I," he says gently. He can heal wounds, certainly, and purge hostile influences, but undoing a transformation of that nature is beyond him. "But I shalt not halt ani-bodi which insekes to hele theim that chaunged were," he offers, intending to ease their minds. That Roxas seems to believe he and Xion might have a shot draws a wan smile to his face, softly illuminated by the glow of his helmet, outwardly invisible to anyone else.

    The gentle pat on the head which Roxas gets, following Lilian's apparent refutation of his theory, is not invisible, however.

Lilian: Anything refugees would actually *need* wouldn't be something to scrape from assorted kitchens and bedrooms.
Petre: Be clear on what's important.

     "Lif is mo thanne just what-sum-ever a wight may *nede.* What ivel shalt be iwakiened bi oure inseking, let the Green Knight bere, and what we might sikerli attourn to theim that lif, let us do swich."

    Naturally, he looks over Cantio's shoulder as the letters are distributed. There is a rumble of interest from him, but he does not attempt to influence her decision. It's more interesting to see what she wants to prioritize, as the grim outlook of this mission becomes more evident in Petre and Emilian's briefing.

Lilian:Beginning from the outside and spreading the blaze inward would be ideal.

    "Wel afin," he says. "But the lifsom shalt hath thire yeveth," he says, tapping the letters in Cantio's hand. "Flames or ne."
Cantio It's that beefy knight from the dim sum place! Hibiki, too, and she's not getting punched by her! Cantio chuckles lightly when they back her up on that plan, breathing a small sigh of relief at the fact that she's not the only one thinking that it could actually work out. "Thanks! It should be pretty easy to get their things out once we're in there, so it's just the... Getting in there part."

As Lilian speaks, though she rubs her neck, looking considerably less confident than before. "That's true, but..." It takes her a few moments to collect her thoughts and muster up enough willpower, but she eventually responds to Lilian directly. "Even if these things might not be worth anything to us, they're still important enough that those people asked us for help getting them. Those random thank yous do have meaning, if it means they believe in us."

Cantio sounds like she's saying that quite literally, and she takes the list with a bit more confidence than before. She's still mildly terrified looking, but she's forcing herself to not back down as she looks that list over. Indeed, there's a lot of stuff there, and there's going to be some judgment calls down the line.

She'll worry about the specifics after getting there and finding those things first, although she does tap on the more sentimental looking items considerably more often than just 'the expensive shit'. What has her worried, though, is when the third pyromancer speaks. "'Again'? So this has happened before?"

She starts putting a few pieces together with the answer that was given to Xion and Roxas as well as the concerns raised by Lilian. Cantio also takes a tablet out of her shimmering stuff-space, propping it up against a nearby tree. "Do you know where this infestation came from? Was it from past attempts to reuse this location, or... Is it possible that the people that turned didn't believe they could be saved from this?"

That, or it could just be a physical force thing. Still, it doesn't hurt to get some clarification while she mulls over the tactical approach to this whole thing. "I can shoot down anything that tries to escape, although fire magic is a little bit outside of my expertise."
Lilian Rook     "Pretty words from a man who needs nothing." Lilian says to Bercilak. She doesn't look away from Petre from Emilian to say it. "If she wants to go running in and out of houses, fleeing flames, dodging demon bugs, being assaulted by mutants, to rummage through drawers for whatever sentimental items she can carry, I won't bother to stop her."

    "Absurd as it is, if she has so little estimation of her own worth that a few displaced townspeople being happier is an even stake to gamble, then I have no reason to disagree. If she sprouts mandibles, I'll cut her down with the rest."
Roxas "That's... not even consistent within worlds, much less across worlds. There are a lot of things where Xion and I come from that don't need a complex physical body to host a coherent complex mind at all," Roxas replies to Lilian's talk on the radio. "Of course, a lot of those things tend to stop being people, but not all of them."

He blinks at Bercilak's headpatting, reacting with a faint smile. "Well... our way would cause other complications, if it worked, but since there's a secondary spiritual core involved I'm not sure it's a good idea to try. Also... if it did work, we'd end up with a bit of a weird situation."

"Ah, sorry--" he turns towards Petre and jabs his Keyblade broadly in his direction. "I can unlock the part of a person's spirit that can feel emotions and separate it out. Theoretically it can resolve something like this, but the immediate effect would probably just make things worse anyway... and there's no guarantee the person being subjected to it has the fortitude to make themselves keep existing after."

Re-shouldering his Keyblade, Roxas nods towards Lilian, in acknowledgment of her intended plan. He asides to Bercilak, "She's right that Xion and I can keep people from getting caught up in things, so it is best if we stick with the group that's moving in. You guys should get your clearing done and try to push in ahead of us."

Towards Lilian, he adds, "She probably just has an ability that lets her not worry as much about the details."
Tamamo     "The last time was... when was it? Not Ocna, it was..." The same pyromancer starts answering Cantio, only to be interrupted by Emilian.
    "Ah! A misunderstanding. This is not an infestation, but the result of heresy. A demon has been summoned within the town, of that there's no doubt. Lurking still, beneath the cellars, most like. As to why, I can hardly guess. Those of vulnerable mind are oft driven by desperation, but we shan't likely know the details. That's the way of it."

    The old collegiate trio look at the town again, bickering in low tones for several moments before nodding. Emilian watches before he, too, nods to Lilian. "A sound plan. Let's be about it."
Xion Xion had been through this hellish mandiblescape once before. What had struck her was not the grotesqueries of their flesh -- she was used to seeing people for their inner hearts, inner thoughts, the auras of their countenance.

While Roxas explains the ability of the Keyblade to Petre, Xion clasps thumb and forefinger around the end of her chin, holding up a half-crossed arm with the opposite hand under the raised-arm's elbow. "I didn't feel any hearts when we were there. Maybe the wasps ate them. It's why I called them Waspless. Like the demons got in there, like they said, and creeped over them like mold."

She heard 'mould' wrong.

Bercilak's joviality is balanced out by the harsh retort of Lilian, the childish game feeling wrong. Too wrong.

"Lilian, I think... We can still all work together. Moving into the town while the Pyromancers secure the outskirts, we can make sure that there are no hives or other basement-bases that would survive being burned. If there's any storm cellars or tornado basements, a storm, fire or otherwise, would be weathered. So we can make sure, you know? And if there's some big boss or whatever, beat them up too. I don't want to give up on anyone, you know?"
Roxas Roxas shrugs lightly, tipping his Keyblade towards Xion in a momentary gesture. "If Lilian says she doesn't feel anything at home upstairs, I'm inclined to believe her anyway. Besides, if we did what I just suggested we'd have a Heartless problem instead of a... wasp? Problem. Kinda trading one conversion problem for another one."
Xion "Wouldn't even be trading them. We'd just have a recursive awfulness loop until they conglomerated into a giant Heartwaspless Tornado. At that point the second stage of it is just a giant hateful crab."

Xion laughs. "Which is saying 'crab' or 'hate' twice."
Hibiki Tachibana     Roxas and Xion both get another of her waves when they show up out of their Not Antagonist Portals of Darkness, with the former getting a softening of her expression as she returns his greeting. Their abilities /do/ make for a pretty interesting way to maybe solving this problem, but the responses from Lilian and Petre don't leave a straight shot towards hope on that front. Her frown beneath her scarf returns as she tilts her head down in thought.

    Well, until Bercilak pats her head, which seems to openly surprise her - her reaction is a little akin to a cat startled that you pet it all of a sudden only to get used to it, and some of the tension bleeds out from her body. Even if he's not able to do something himself, the gesture and the show of support means quite a bit to her. "...Thanks. If there's something I can do, I want to do it.

    Cantio gets it too, which Hibiki appreciates enough that she honestly glosses right over any Definitely Not Ulterior Motives she might have. Her putting herself forward to go out on the retrieval counts for a lot, terrified-looking or no. Rather than punching her this time, she wants to punch /with/ her. It's better for everybody!

    And it makes her turn towards Lilian at what she says come all the faster. "--Cantio is stronger than that. And she'll be fine." Her attention goes from Bercilak, to back. "It'll be fine. And it's not absurd at all." She catches herself before she says any more, closing her eyes and exhaling into her scarf as she straightens herself up. The plan is coming together, so she needs to get herself together too.

    "...If the demon behind all of this is still around somewhere," Hibiki brings up after Xion's talk of a big boss (no not that one). "Then he probably /would/ be far enough that just burning things down normally wouldn't reach. I don't know if stopping it will do anything about what's already been done, but I want to try. Even if not..." She breathes in. "...It won't get away with doing this."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants Lilian: Pretty words from a man who needs nothing.

     They'll have words about it later, but for now... Bercilak's helmet transmits the sound of a raspberry.

Reminder 'Lilian's Mettle' added.
Xion: We can still all work together.

     "Verily, sib," he says, giving her a thumbs-up.
Tamamo     The plan calls for splitting up, and Emilian moves his own subordinates to keep guard over each of the pyromancers. The eldest of the trio stays at this camp, and the other two head upriver and downriver to cross over. Lacking flight of their own, that requires aid from others, and will take awhile, but the strengthening blessings of the inquisition's clerics are at least good enough to leap narrow rivers while burdened.

    Once in position, and everyone is ready, and the ritual circles are prepped and filled with magical power, the flames come down. The town is already split by the river, but still forms a (very roughly) circular space, centered a little past the far shore. The first gouts of flame are massive pillars, sweeping across the designated areas like precisely walked artillery. This repeats, but only enough to begin closing the full circle, forming an entrapping wall. Pushing the flames in toward the center will happen more slowly.

    But that doesn't happen at all, just yet. While moving outside the town brought no reaction, the flames do. Buzzing swarms, agitated, vulnerable, but no safer staying put, fly up out of the general proximity of the pyromancy. Some of them, resolving into shapes more like huge beetles than wasps, do fly toward the three surrounding squads, only to be shot down, smashed, or stabbed. Most, though, the vast majority, fly the opposite direction, either moving toward the center of the town, toward the larger buildings, or distributing themselves into nearly every building along the way, crawling in through ceiling gaps and disappearing.
Tamamo     Moving quickly is presumed. Matters will progress even without any who tarry.

    Completing the circle of flames doesn't appear to be an issue. Only that first, half-hearted attempt, like testing defenses, tried to target the pyromancers straight off, and Emilian's subordinates are nothing if not prepared and competent.

    Moving further into town, or waiting for any length of time, reveals the next obstacle. This one will largely be familiar to most here, merely being 'that, but worse.' Doors are not 'opened' so much as 'broken,' windows likewise, for high-velocity ambushes. The figures are only mostly humanoid, their transformation further progressed. They still wear the remains of whatever clothing they'd been taken in, ordinary folk of all ages, without discrimination, now sporting chitinous additions of claws, limbs, mandibles, and venomous, hooked stingers. Most of them have kept their faces, but show no expression. Their eyes are open, but not tracking.

    Every appearance is timed and deliberate, aimed to catch someone unawares or before they can react, unless someone decides to break into a building, first. It shows immediate, obvious intelligence and perception of everyone's position on the battlefield, immediately willing and able to surround or attack from blind corners. The individual opponents are not exceptionally tough but neither are they unskilled. They fight, to the extent this could apply to their monstrous forms, as well as soldiers trained without self-preservation.
Cantio EARLIER

He's supporting her, right? She's pretty sure he's supporting her. It sounds Like that's what Bercilak is doing, at least, but Cantio can't just admit she can barely understand him, and she certainly can't back down after what Lilian's saying! She'll just learn it as she goes.

Hibiki's response to Lilian even manages to get her fired up a little more. "It's not like getting those things will be hard for people like us." Cantio follows up with an almost irreverent tone, keeping a straight face as she curses at herself internally. Why'd she have to go and say it like that?! Now she /has/ to succeed big time, or she'll look like an asshole!

Well, more of an asshole. There is some small bolstering of her spirits when the cause is revealed to be demon summoning from the inside rather than an infestation from the outside, though, and that desperation mentioned by Emilian gives the young-ish leader more ideas.

Good ideas, to be sure.

NOW

With the circle of flames starting, it's do or die time. Cantio takes a moment to psyche herself up for what's to come, eventually turning back to Bercilak and Hibiki while she draws a blade from her ethereal stuffspace.

"Just to make sure... Um. Anything we find that's on the list or looks easy enough to grab, we can toss into my storage easily enough. We should keep an eye out for the..." She takes a moment to review the list. "... Toys, wedding bands, journals. The more sentimental looking, the better. We'll leave the heavy furniture for when..."

A beat. "... If there's an excess of time. And if there's anything stuck somewhere too dangerous or that looks like it's a one-way trip?" She takes a deep breath, then forces a confident smile. "Leave that to me. Just make sure to keep your phones on."

And then she's off! With the fires ever encroaching and Emilian's people and the pyromancers as an audience, Cantio goes in loud and hard. She gets to work slashing apart whoever's in her way and throwing healing spells about to weather those sneak attacks catching herself and anyone else nearby off-guard, but never quite stops to try and catch her breath. She needs to show that the Elites here have this situation handled without hesitation, after all!
Lilian Rook     "Granted." Lilian says to Roxas. "But I'd like you to think of how many of them were originally human. Of those, how many are still people. Of those, if anyone, how many suffered similar forceful conversion."

    "Human beings, especially perfectly ordinary, unremarkable, garden variety ones, don't fare well when altered like these one have been. The mind, heart, soul, those sorts of things, are often remarkably adept at transforming themselves to remain functional after deadly trauma done to them. But those things do, at some point, depend on the body that housed them since birth. It's an essentially universal reaction that those things quickly detach once the brain itself is turned to mush."

    Shifting the obnoxiously heavy backpack into a better position on her shoulders, Lilian says "Various types of corruption and derangement are something I'm familiar with. The first step when encountering human enemies of this nature is pretty much always to check. I couldn't tell you with complete and absolute certainty, but I can without reasonable doubt say that I didn't find a fragment of their original desires, thoughts, or individuality." Despite the sheer grimness of that, Xion, as is her way, manages to briefly catch a raised eyebrow and hesitantly questioning tone. "I know about the tornadoes now. But crabs?"

    She grimaces, only slightly, when the matter of the demon is brought up. "I'd thought about that, but I'd hoped the scarabs, or whatever they are, were simply a very large number of extremely low level demons. Convergence types are the ones I like the least." It still doesn't take her long to consider the rest.

    "That all said, checking every single basement along the way is going to be grossly impractical. The most extensively developed will be near the center of town, with the villas and largest shops, which is where we're headed anyways. We might as well hope for the best, and that we'll find a central body to take down which will deactivate the rest of the swarm --which we're also most likely to find in the middle. We also may as well prepare for the worst, and plan for every spare, dark corner having its own nest, that will take systematic purging to rout the holdouts later."

    Bercilak blowing a raspberry doesn't get her attention, but Hibiki suddenly acquiring an emotional pair at such an arbitrary time does. "Huh? I couldn't care less if she's fine. It's my advice to her not to bother, but if she screws up, it doesn't really have any effect on the rest of us. I know you're new at this, but people losing their precious odds and ends shouldn't register on the same scale as what we're here to do, what we have to stop, or what could happen to you the moment you slip. The survivors have their lives. That's more than could be said for most right now. So don't get caught up in her arrogance."
Lilian Rook     When it come time to Operate, however, in multiple senses of the word, Lilian has more important things to do than try to disabuse the newbies of sentimentality. Owing to its general success last time, she takes to the air, gaining more considerable height on this occasion for not needing to provide such close support to a fighting retreat. From up there, she can also keep track of the individual groups, and call out if any of them are about to be surrounded, are falling behind, or headed the wrong way. From there, she can also land anywhere needed, and contribute to an aerial containment screen.

    Using the radio to coordinate once the bombardment starts, and Emilian's men appear to be holding their own, Lilian first addresses "There's no way to tell which houses are occupied by what; especially not from up here. It's impossible to selectively preempt attacks, so you'll have to just presume that any portal or blind corner might lead to an attack, and stay on guard. The flames aren't advancing extremely quickly, so you have the time to move cautiously. Make sure each of you is facing a different direction, though you won't have to worry as much about your rear. The enemy doesn't like letting us pass by, and the fire will be at your back."

    /They're behaving pretty much as expected. They don't appear to be all that clever individually. But that first attack was much too half-assed if it was simply their fight or flight reflex in action; they should have all chosen one or the other. It smelled like a sacrificial wave. Were they hoping to keep us at bay with that level of force, or stall? Or scouting the pyromancer groups out? Now that I know there's a core demon, it's harder to rule anything out./

    /The swarm is certainly coordinating within itself, but in a diffuse way. Optimizing the actions of an individual, like a shoal or hive, but I don't see any signs of a strategic plan yet. The plan doesn't change yet; conserve as much magic as possible for when they've centralized, and utilize any remaining explosives on the structure they fall back to last. It's practically inevitable the last place they'll run to is wherever the original demon may be. Until then, I should have enough ammunition to deal with this while saving magical energy./

    Though Lilian isn't a specialized sniper, her ability is more than adequate to interrupt attacks from the air. She retrieves the hefty gunmetal pieces of a powerful marksman rifle from her bag and fastened them together, summoning up the literal holo sights, and relying on one eye for situational awareness and the other for double checking that the computer says her shots will land where she thinks they will. With her aerial vantage, she begins scanning the streets, looking for where the mutated humans necessarily have to amass and move as a group to present more than scattered ambush threats.

    When she finds them, rapid strings of shots that sound like high-pitched lightning strikes descend from out of the air and gut the demonic 'infantry' out in the open, putting down squads with quick bursts, and attempting to make larger concentrations break rank or take cover by ceaselessly pumping rounds into their general mass. While scanning, she takes quick shots of opportunity at any individuals she finds crawling outdoors, into buildings, or lurking around corners, to thin the way for the ground teams. Once she's exhausted one angle, she flies a wide quarter circle around town, and begins scoping in from the next angle.
Roxas "Yeah... you're right," Roxas cedes to Xion. He probably hadn't considered it deeply enough for that to enter into his thinking. He seems more concerned about her lament about choices, which gets a glance and a thoughtful hum out of him.

"#-1 INVALID ANSI DEFINITION: xterm290 We DO have a choice. But it's not a very nice one. We could make the choice to... try to find a way to fix these people. But that cascades down, even if we do find a way. In the meantime, at the very least, we have to spend things to contain these guys. Probably other lives."

"And if the answer is that they need to be revived wholesale, basically..." He gives her a gentle bump against the shoulder. "It sucks, but this is the choice."

To Lilian's thoughts on body-and-minds, he says, "Honestly, it's mostly Faeries. You can end up being one of them by accident. If you kill the wrong one and you're compatible with its identity, for instance. Whether they stay human after... well, usually they can become human again if something can get the mantle off, I think. But the higher up the totem pole you go, the less likely it is. Supposedly the Queens used to be human."

He lets Xion explain the evils of CRAB, if she wants to. Then, the operations start.

Roxas advances along the "right" side of the spreading column of flame. Since Lilian went to the skies, he assumes that Xion will take the opposite side and they'll coordinate who needs what from there.

An ambush only works on him once. He goes tumbling away from a JUMPSCARE THAT'S ACTUALLY DANGEROUS with a shout of alarm, bringing his Keyblade about in a partial parry. Immediately afterwards his body was encased in a protective armor, which flaked away at the point of contact, leaving behind a partial suit of armor.

A retaliatory blast of fire from the tip of his Keyblade follows immediately after.

After that, he moves from streets to rooftops and starts helping advance the wall of flames with his own Fire magic. It doesn't have the ritualistic scale of what's being done; but, he can still produce boss template-sized blasts that buildings are not good at coping with.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      So they have a plan. Bercilak hops back astride that massive hoverbike, giving a nod to Emilian, the knights, and the pyromancers.

Cantio: If there's anything stuck somewhere too dangerous or that looks like it's a one-way trip?
Cantio: Leave that to me.

     "Verily," says Bercilak. It'll be interesting to see how closely she holds herself to that, and he's not the sort to deny someone the chance to make that sort of statement.

     Bercilak moves into Ocna alongside Hibiki and Cantio, one hand on the handlebar of his hoverbike, the other hand on an enormous greataxe which materializes from empty air, in a tide of blue light.

     As the flames advance,Cantio finds that her own wounds heal passively simply by being near Bercilak. What's more, there's the matter of that covenant Hibiki made. But as he said, he'd handle whatever ire was aroused by the flames, and by his party's searching.

     He can't affect minds or compel hostility any more than the next person--but his considerable bulk and surprising speed, even when armored, means that he can easily place himself between them. Moreover, shouting and threatening body language are employed, to make himself as big and obvious a target as possible. It's mostly profanity and insults, not that it matters.

     Cantio and Hibiki can handle the retrieval. He'll keep whatever's disturbed off of them, and keep them both in fighting shape.
Hibiki Tachibana     "It's not--" Hibiki starts, in response to Lilian, but tapers off before she finishes to turn her head to the side. It most definitely isn't the time to get up in arms, but she can't stop herself from doing so anyway, even if the words to shoot back don't come to her right away. It's not arrogance...is it? "...If it's something we can do, we have to try. It's about more than just doing what we came here to do." She murmurs quietly, recalling what Bercilak said some moments before. "If those people are counting on us to do what they can't..." She goes quiet again, and remains so as it's time to depart.

    IN THE MIDST OF DEMON BUG HELL:

    A quick glance at the list herself has Hibiki zeroing in on the stand-out things that seem important to the people who want them, which isn't a surprise at all who knows her - leading to an agreeing nod with Cantio. She still seems a little off, but now that the fires are up and things are starting in earnest, she's steadied herself. More or less. "Right. This ability of yours is pretty useful, Cantio." The fact that they're all relatively close together is a good thing, and means getting them in one quick swoop should be more than doable. "You do what you do best. And we'll watch your back." She gives a glance and a nod (up) to Bercilak. She's never seen him fight before, but she has reason enough to be sure that between the three of them, things will be fine.

    Time to go. Just as she thought, the townspeople-turned-monsters retreated back inside the cover of buildings while they were gone, but they're not going to take her by surprise this time. Though the Green Knight has put himself forward and will probably have very few issues handling defense and attention-grabbing himself from what she's experienced of these things, Hibiki has no issues forcing aside any who draw too close herself. Heavy blows that send them flying back through the doorways they erupted out of, using them as springboards to kick off of and keep moving--she's less restrained with her strength than before, but she's also not going out of her way to try and destroy them either.

    The healing factor granted from her deal /hopefully/ won't have to come into play, and she won't drop her guard any more than normal because of its existence either. "We didn't go into these buildings last time, so if anything we need is in there...be careful," she mentions as they move and keep an eye out for what they're looking for.
Xion "It sucks, a lot, but the plan from the start was always to burn it to the roots." Xion answers Hibiki. "If there's someone or something behind this, Lilian, myself, and Roxas will get to the bottom of it."

Xion pauses. "Lilian, Roxas, and I? Is that how that sentence works? How do I put an us in this... Oh! Crabs? Like Roxas said, they're basically the worst. They're like hate got a shell. They taste good to eat because it's the satisfaction of removing evil from the world.""

She drops the sword off her shoulder as she follows Lilian into the city a few paces. The silence becomes a sussuration of the scarabs the eerie silence of the townsfolk with their buzzy chitin changes. "I guess it's just jumping in with a 'we'. Lilian, I know you've got a great feeling for the best place to go, so I think Roxas and I will make sure you get there!" Xion decides, feeling very smart as... Lilian flies into the air.

"Oh. I CAN'T FLY!" She shouts, as a bunch of scuttling horrors converge in competent offense. Converting her forward movement into a spinning offense, Xion spins on her heels and slides forward down the street, going 'round and 'round for a few rotations before her sweep ends with a dizzying (to Xion) silver-edged slash that carries forward in a wave.

As she pivots to a stop, her right hand continues to hold her keyblade, while her left holds a shuriken-like keychain in black and white.

Holding the LEFT side of the advance down, only to immediately get JUMPSCARED from behind, claw-spines raking across her back and causing her to call out in frustration and danger before Lilian blasts apart the interceptor from the air.

"Thanks, Lilian!" She calls, already glowing with green-white curative energy.

If the bugpeople will harass her to no end on the street, she tosses the shuriken-keychain towards the rooftops. In a flash of white light, her entire body becomes a lightningbolt flash of washed-out light that carries her up towards the sky and away from the ground ambush.

She drops back onto the upper levels now dual-wielding Starlight and an angel-wing motif'ed keyblade - Oathkeeper, one of Roxas'.
Tamamo     The skies are notably less safe than before, as Lilian soon finds. There hadn't been a single case, in that last fight, of the demon scarabs coming for her. This time, a lesser number of them have broken off from the swarm and flown high. If they're close enough to the pyromancers, they're taken out immediately, but keeping the sky fully clear would be ammo-expensive. Where Lilian is, they charge like they're trying to just bash her in the face, zipping about in an evasive pattern that might still strike her as poorly built for the role, compared to the optimized death machines she's used to fighting.

    Not particularly dangerous to her on their own, the scarabs coming from high vectors may still serve as an effective distraction from the sudden organic fusillade heading her way from down below. Most of it's in the form of venomous thorns, detatched stingers almost silently launched at respectable ballistic velocity, from former townsfolk with new, specialized limbs, fired through broken gaps in roofs.

    While that's a danger for anyone taking to the skies, Xion's and Roxas' roof hopping presents a smaller, and more difficult target. They don't get full firing squads, but individual ambushers, crawling up onto the path behind to chase after them, making the same big leaps and menacing, primarily, with claws that (intend to) catch. Being caught would be bad, but this still gives a much bigger parry window than being on the street did, as well as a more direct route. Those streets are narrow and winding, as a rule.

    The roughest fighting, even with close air support, is for those closest to the ground. It's a long way from the edge of town to the market area, surrounding which are many of the targets on Cantio's lists. Few of them are in the same building, but absolutely no one said it'd be easy. Every step of the way is hounded by ambush, trying to either find and stab a weak point in Bercilak's armor to poison him (this would be notably worse than 'makes you sick'), aiming claws at Hibiki's eyes, or clutching at Cantio's ankles. If one of them gets a hold of anyone, half a dozen more can take advantage of the opening. They don't seem easily influenced by Bercilak's taunting, though neither do they avoid him in favor of softer targets. Clearly, they equally desire the deaths of every person there.
Tamamo     The scarabs had scattered, but not randomly, in those first moments. A few charged, in apparent futility, at the pyromancers. Some flew high up into the sky, as if just making themselves difficult to entirely clear out, while also presenting a dangerous nuisance. Many flew into buildings throughout town, and there disappeared, not showing up again. A large portion skipped over everything else, and flew toward the larger buildings near the center, that villa with the broken gate, and the high-stacked neighbors to the (now empty) market. The total number is, for those able to count, far above what had shown up, last time.

    In the strictest sense, the market isn't truly empty. There's still the collapsed wreckage of stalls, a mess no one returned to clean. There are no carriages, and no animals. Apart from anything hiding beneath fallen tarpaulins, there's less chance of short-range ambush while crossing this space.

    That won't truly help Cantio's scavenger hunt, since she still has to enter the buildings to find anything on her list. An apartment on the second story, another on a different fourth story, and a workshop on the ground floor, to name a few. Though the circle of flame is only slowly advancing in toward this place, the town is still, definitely, burning. A meticulous search presents a lot of danger, given that the enemies she's facing won't all just sit and wait.

    And they don't. Around the time the slower elites reach the town's center, the ground begins to crack, and the air tastes like copper.
Roxas Roxas turns himself into a profoundly obnoxious foe for ambushers. Realizing that he's forcing them to come to him, he's very precise with how he uses the seemingly ablative armor around him. The second that comes after him causes a little more to flake away; this one he allows to get in closer before delivering a light-chased counterattack. The third wears the armor almost entirely away, before being met with a boss template engulfing the roof of the building.

The fourth breaks the armor only to be met with two weapons instead of the one that Roxas appeared to be carrying, checked with one while the other comes in for the pushback.

The fifth is faced with seemingly an attack-of-opportunity, the armor down for the count. But just when it seems the initial ambushing blow will be cleanly landed the armor flickers back into being.

In short-- Roxas is using his 'your first hit gets reduced to chip damage' shield to twist ambushes to be entirely on his terms. He seems to need to refresh it every four clean hits.

Eventually he starts to mix straightforward rooftop acrobatics with irregularly-placed line-of-sight teleportation instead. On the upshot for his pursuers however, the harassment IS stopping him from deliberately accelerating the flames along the way. He's got to pay attention to too narrow a target to be spewing fire all over.

<< "Are you two doing okay?" >> He asks Xion and Lilian over his earpiece, wiping some sweat from his brow as he clears a gap. << "They're really annoyed with me." >>
Cantio Lilian still seems unconvinced, Bercilak gives her a vote of confidence, and Hibiki's still working with her instead of punching her. So far, a good day! Mostly.

"I usually just use it to hold things, but I never thought I'd be able to really... /Use/ it, you know?" Cantio responds to Hibiki, keeping her sword arm ready to carve through the initial waves as they progress through the town. With Hibiki and Bercilak focusing on defending her while Xion, Roxas, and Lilian handle things above, it's considerably easier for her to focus all of her attention on acquiring THE STUFF.

Relatively, anyway. There's far too many things to handle all at the same time, and Cantio soon has her hands full once the targets of the letters start showing up alongside everything trying to kill the shit out of the group. She's pretty good about moving lightly on her feet, but thatnoly goes so far with the sheer number of ambushes on the way. She aids Bercilak in his healing efforts for a while to keep her ankles generally functioning, but eventually has to focus on finding their their main targets along the way to try and get there before the fire claims everything. She's not going to ignore whatever's easily grabbable, though!

Books? Definitely. Tools? Sometimes. Jewelry? Why not. She's never actually tested the limits of her storage before, but she can't really worry about that now while she's busy grabbing the easy stuff from the streets and tossing it into her storage.

Entering the buildings is an unfortunate, yet necessary risk to get the job done. With so many different buildings to go around, though, she opts to transform ahead of time into her flight-capable, but energy guzzling form. "I'll head for the highest one first! It might buy us some time if the possessed split up to chase me upstairs. Watch yourselves!"

Indeed, Cantio goes for that fourth floor target first, smashing her sword into anything that comes near to try and find this building's target as quickly as possible. If she can get a hold of it, it gets tossed right into the storage before she dives out the nearest window.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      The devilish insects find holes in his armor easily enough--the synthetic fiber upon which his plates are affixed. The issue is striking true--for while that fiber isn't tough enough to stop their stingers, no one is more aware of this than the Green Knight himself.

     As his bike dematerializes, he uses the haft of his axe as a plane to keep stingers, mandibles and the like from his skin, as unnatural chitinous anatomy tears the fiber and scrapes gouges into the metal of his armor. The fiber slowly mends itself after each strike--and the armor plating seems to 'respond' to their attacks based on the nature, speed, and direction of each, altering its hardness and even adopting elasticity to protect him.

Warnings and damage indicators are ignored, in favor of the health of his teammates. That, he can't guarantee--because these things want everyone dead equally. So what about a plan to subdue them? The only thing he can think of is as dangerous for his allies as it is for the bugs, but...

[Local Broadband] Bercilak: I couldst enclose this place in verdaunce, that we might smorther theim.
[Local Broadband] Bercilak: But to do swich wouldst also smorther *us.*
[Local Broadband] Bercilak: Art thou abled to endure?

     He isn't idle, while he waits for a response.

     Hibiki and Cantio both receive a 'notification,' a visible message that isn't really there.

Running friendly nanoprogram 'Barrier of the Righteous...'

     A yellow field of energy, buzzing with the static of billions of nanites, envelops Cantio and Hibiki both. The insects will have to penetrate that barrier, before they can wound and poison his allies. If he can't hold their attention, then he can at least make his allies more difficult targets.

     Sparks fly from the haft of his axe as a strike narrowly misses his armored fingers. The cracking of the ground throws him off-balance, and several foes working in tandem manage to pry that massive harness from him--it disappears in a surge of blue light, revealing the plates beneath. Bercilak's armor thrusters engage to muscle him through the hostiles, and he crashes through the walls of Cantio's building to keep up with her.
Hibiki Tachibana     Nobody said it would be easy, and she's not expecting it to be. Last time, the entire group had to move as a unit to avoid risking getting overwhelmed, and resistance seems even bigger this time around. Hibiki is alert for surprise attacks as they go, reasonably familiar with their methods of funneling themselves out of doors and windows, and shadowed places like alleyways are given wide berths to avoid getting attacked without reaction, or at least as wide as possible as the streets will allow, which isn't saying much.

    She's focused on protecting her unarmored extremities ,though through the magic of mahou shoujo, she's a lot more durable /everywhere/ than appearances let on - all the more with the shimmering barrier taking form over her and Cantio as they go. Bercilak is a man of many skills! Battering beasts out of the path while weaving beneath and around insectoid appendages, the marketplace they're looking for comes into view. The scarabs high overhead going into some of the nearby buildings will be a potential problem, but there's not much for it but to take things one step at a time. The relative safety of the more open space compared to the trip here gives her an actual moment to stop and get her breath back, even though they very much have to keep fighting on.

    "...We might /have/ to split up if we want to get them all in time," she nods to Cantio as she transforms and jets off, with some worry on her face fighting with trusting her to get it done. The shuddering of the earth and the foul taste in the air only adds more impact to the time limit they have. She glances to Bercilak, to finally respond to his question. "I'll manage. If we can take them all out like that, it'll be worth it!" A nod, and she moves another way as he splits off to follow Cantio.

    Fighting these things on their terms isn't a good idea. If the roads were back, indoors will be even worse. Rather than going for the door, Hibiki takes a page out of the knight's book herself and launches into the air, activating her Symphogear's thrusters at the peak - to propel herself into a kick that'll have her busting straight through a wall into the second floor apartment. A dramatic and sudden entrance to have /her/ being the one surprising anything lying in wait, to swiftly take out, find what she's looking for, and leave just as quickly as she came.
Xion Normally, when you run across routes, the enemies just sort of teleport out of where you're trying to go -- not where you came from. That'd be a running away or moving screen problem, like a cave of gold turning into lava, or a slow-moving tidal wave of darkness unleashed through the keys of a sewer that must be avoided via platforming and turbo tunneling.

These are all things that Xion and Roxas have had to deal with, because these are things that are TOTALLY NORMAL.

So when the expected thing doesn't happen, Xion leaps across a set of buildings and gets speared right through the torso from behind, cast down from a higher building to a lower one and crashing through a roof into a second-story residence. Scrambling through the area while the quarter-chunk of her life ring emptied and began to slowly refill, Xion twists and curls through the air, leaping towards a window and slipping sideways through space.

The assassin after her outright smashes into the window she was going for, laid out across the sill scrabbling towards where Xion reappears, rolling across the target rooftop and swinging her blade to intercept the next one in perfect synch with Roxas.

She has his sword! It's easy to match up to someone when you use their weapon. At the market, she pauses, looking left and right, and extending her heart-senses out. "There's a... scent? Like blood, but not? And the ground's opening. Um, I'm okay, but what's going on? Is it more waspless???"
Lilian Rook     The scarabs themselves are little issue to Lilian. Though they'd be annoying to take out constantly, and definitely distract her from doing exactly what she's trying to do, she has a few means of efficiently dealing with them.

    Taking the rifle to them is essentially out of the question, though she does occasionally draw and blast several with a burst from an automatic sidearm with her non-trigger hand. Mostly, she flies small, fast orbits around her zone of attack, remaining focused enough on the ground battle to continue providing support, while incidentally avoiding the buzzes at her. When enough have clumped together from chasing her, a snap-whoosh of fire magic bursts from her fingers for a moment to quickly incinerate the bulk of them. By this manner, she keeps them manageable.

    /The number of these little bastards has multiplied. Not that it's surprising from those things that look like nests, but the rate is concerning. I can't tell if they've been consuming the townspeople, or something else. If they're sacrificing some of their own foot soldiers to spawn more, then that means they're at a late stage of their life cycle where they're ready to spread to other cities. We really are going to have to scrub the ruins after./

    The shooting is new. This is something that requires considerably more agile aerobatics to avoid. While Lilian is quick enough to be up to the task of avoiding 'respectably fast' projectiles without much difficulty at this range, and with this height, the lack of flash or sound from them being fired, and the dark corners and cluttered rooftops they're fired from, makes it impossible to handle them all reactively.

    /They didn't have that ability before. Did we just not run into them? Does it take a longer period of mutation to create those? Or did they come up with them specifically to deal with flight? It doesn't look like many of the locals have the ability. It's difficult to see the barbs until they've flown a distance already. They're not large or fast enough to be threatening to Emilian's men, so I can only assume they're infectious; or at least poisonous. No trading shots. I don't exactly have a whole lot of experience with massed ground fire, but dropping to the street means nobody else is being covered. I'd really appreciate having Strawberry Princess here right about now./

    Assuming that silent stingers are just going to be poisoned as a matter of course, Lilian ascends further to gain some more range --and thus time to spot and avoid projectiles slowed by gravity-- from the shooters. High-zoom optics and sharpened senses make it easy enough to pick out the ranged attackers *after* they've fired, and *her* bullets are both much faster and have gravity working with them. Focusing partly on evasion, and thanking her foresight when a couple of stray darts dent and embed in some of the extra armour plates, Lilian systematically ventilates each spot she's attacked from until the bugs give up that strategy too, dropping floor-piercing slugs from on high, whether or not that means one-armed and upside down in the midst of coralling scarabs. She isn't about to abandon her overwatch at this point.
Lilian Rook     "Nothing I can't manage just yet." Lilian replies to Roxas. "They've developed ranged attacks in the meantime. I can't tell if they're meant to be anti-air attacks, or just preparing for a battlefield scenario, but as long as I'm up here, they seem to not be using them on you." This follows a thin, fiery streak blasting apart the head of a gunner bug on the rooftops between Roxas and Xion. "I don't dare hope that they aren't filled with demonic disease or something. Considering the way they've multiplied, and the new weapons, it's likely they're just about to catalyze and spread." The majority of her covering fire is on those two. Rationally, they present the only means most of the group has of leaving. Irrationally, the others all second guessed her, so they get a pittance of aid.

    On the wider band, she says "Look. They're starting to fall back to the villa. The tops of the buildings across the street too. That should give us a fairly precise bead on where they've come from. Potentially their largest nest, too." Lilian bisects and stores the near-empty rifle, detaching a long, extendable, two-pronged tube of sorts, and training it on the tall, adjoining district. "I'm going to squeeze that down even further."

    Lilian fires what is pretty plainly an RPG, where the R stands for rail instead of rocket. It should be more than sufficient to punch through a few floors of medieval wooden construction and blow out lower support pillars. It won't exactly annihilate a four storey building, but it should easily cause one to partially or fully collapse. The flash and noise is considerable, without leaving a smoke trail. "Mind your heads. If the pyromancers have the range, I'd like them to drop more of those lovely fire pillars on where that just landed." Cycling a sort of three-part revolver mechanism, Lilian drops another on the closest building, then one more, attempting to fill the street with rubble, and spook the bugs out into the villa instead; the better to concentrate them.
Tamamo     Overall, the rooftops have proven the safest route, mixing 'fewer firing lines' with 'slower ambushes.' With every enemy struck down, the next that jumps at Roxas seems to learn, but not quickly. Not fast enough to keep up with him. They do act like they always know where he is, even as he teleports, but they aren't crowding the roofs ahead of him, so he can get through just fine as long he keeps fighting like that and keeps moving. As Xion finds, this is more of an 'enemies behind you' scenario. Even the enemies that do get in front of them tend to act like they'd rather be behind them.

    While damnably hard to surprise, Cantio and Hibiki got the same, immediate advantage of running face to face with what would have been a ranged ambush, a preparation for making that market a killbox, firing from all the upper stories those envenomed stingers. The launchers prove to be, as a general rule, smaller individuals. No more than teenagers, before this happened. More easily punched or sliced than the larger examples. Very dangerous, on the other hand, if one took long enough that they had the chance to shift aim.

    Cantio also gets a skeleton. Not an animated one, just the weeks-old, thoroughly eaten corpse kind. The hair is still on it, and a little flesh, and a lot of bloodstains. That's the first 'actually just a corpse' anyone's spotted, slumped against a wall. There's a cloth doll nearby, on the floor, the kind with buttons for eyes. Nothing stands out about the toy at all.

    While in the right place, Hibiki has few obvious clues where to look, once she clears out any lurking enemies, and it'd still be a good idea to pound feet before something gets up or down those stairs. The cupboards? The bed? The closet space? She can't even be completely sure that the ring is still here, just that it was before things went south. There is an obnoxious amount of buzzing in the air. (It's in a small box under the bed.)

    No such advantage is afforded Bercilak, entering at the ground floor. He is, at least, where the workshop was supposed to be. Men turned, cut, and carved wood here. The tools for it are everywhere. Half-finished chairs, table legs with complex curves, slats and poles, and in one corner, a collection of wooden baubles on necklace strings. Someone had been carving a stylized eye into a palm-sized disk, before leaving for the last time. Everything is half-done. There's a worn journal somewhere in this mess. Perhaps it's obscured by the merely approximately human-shaped forms of his many opponents, some still wearing their working aprons, but ignoring their chisels to try to reach him with needle-like spines and bizarrely jointed claws, instead. Even with their original arms, the movement beneath the skin looks off. Not just 'not human,' but 'wrong.'

    There, as everywhere about the market square, the metallic taste in the air only strengthens. The ground has cracked, and it cracks again. Light shifts greenward, despite the slowly approaching walls of flame, smoke rising in great clouds as Ocna is burned.

    Lilian's rockets hit, and the buildings react just as they'd be expected to. If anything, their new residents have since weakened the supports, allowing the old construction a long, loud collapse, that looks graceful only from far away. This definitely won't make searching for keepsakes any easier. It does produce a lot of dead bugs. It covers up some of the cracks in the square.
Cantio Carving through what used to be teenagers and probably children has Cantio shaking. There's equal parts anguish and anger swirling around in her mind, and few places to productively direct that beyond self-defense and finding the target on this fourth floor. When she sees the skeleton, it takes her longer than she'd like to finally tear her gaze away, and not just because of the more obvious horrors implied by everything surrounding the corpse.

She also gets shot by one of those stingers, adding physical pain to the mix. After firing a laser through the assailant in return, she picks up the doll gingerly before depositing it in that pixellated storage zone of hers, taking care not to just hurl it in.

<<"I... I've recovered one of the targets. Some of theese ch... These people were eaten.">> She mutters through her radio quietly, taking a slow breath to steady herself as she feels her movements slowing down, lights and colors appearing where they shouldn't be, and noises coming from where the skeleton was. She jerks backwards on instinct and only narrowly avoids getting shot with another stinger, then sweeps a sword-laser through the child-sized ambusher before taking a running leap through a window. Her landing isn't particularly graceful as her reflexes are still shot, and she has to take a moment just to pump some healing magic into her more immediate wounds before worrying about whatever was in that stinger.

There's still plenty of targets to find, too, and that metallic taste just keeps getting worse. <<"There might be poison or.. Something in the air. Definitely in the stingers... If you have a mask, it might not hurt to get it ready.">> She issues a more general warning to her allies, then gets right back to work looking for more designated things to grab while jerking herself around erratically, as if avoiding things that don't actually exist.

If nothing else, she can at least bring the survivors some sense of closure by the end of the day.
Roxas << "They might just be general harassment, with flight making it easier to make that happen," >> Roxas replies to Lilian. He's a little more clipped than usual because he keeps having to deal with ambushers.

He splits his Keyblades abruptly on catching sight of Xion, rearing back with the black one and sending it whistling past her into the demon that she left scrabbling after her on a windowsill.

It IS a perfect synchronization, but perhaps not in the direction that might've been anticipated at first glance. The black Keyblade doesn't return on this particular occasion, but does vanish from where it landed in short order.

Roxas moves in shoulder-to-shoulder with Xion and faces the other direction, the white Keyblade raised and at the ready.

"Yeah. Not liking the blood smell. In places like this, it's never a bunch of copper. It's always a gore pit," he says to Xion.

BOOM.

His head turns to follow the sound of the rail-propelled-grenade hitting the Villa... and the ominous sound that it makes a moment later. Roxas taps Xion on the shoulder and points back the way they came, "To the left!"

With a gesture of his hand he sends a pattern of white columns of light skating back that way-- one turns left down the alley he's indicating to Xion, as much to signal its position as to wipe out the INEVITABLE jumpscare that's waiting for somebody right there.

He darts for the alley and takes cover from the debris of the crashing building, putting his back to one wall of the alley and lightly bracing his feet against the other.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Without that harness, the reactive properties of Bercilak's armor are greatly diminished. It is, at present, merely durable as opposed to actively resistant. Ordinarily, the sight of a room full of enemies would delight him--but this isn't a hunt, it's a mercy killing.

     His axe is tapped against the ground, as claws and spines are brought to bear against him. Sparks fly from those plates as score are cut into them, some opponents strong enough to cut deep gouges into them.

     His nanite field attempts to repair it, but the rate at which this happens is a good deal slower than flesh wounds are healed. It's fortunate, then, that rows of alien trees rapidly burst from the floor, striking his opponents from below and scooping them up in boughs with strange, stringy leaves.

     Capitalizing on this, he hunkers down, gets behind his pauldrons, and plows through any left standing, his verdant cape torn by vicious, grasping claws. The thrusters on his armor carry him to each corner of the workshop.

     His axe seems to whirl around him, and though his hand is firmly upon it, one might almost think it had a life of its own for the ease with which its deadly green edge seeks necks and limbs. Hopefully, that shiting beneath their skin doesn't mean what he think it means...

You received Wooden Baubles.

You received Strange Charm.

     "Where-awei lies the cronicle?" Both of those items are digitized and stored in his nanite cloud's memory--but where's the journal? There's nothing to do but cut these things down, search for it, and hope that the shifting beneath their skin isn't a sign that something even more quarrelsome waits to burst from each one. His axe crashes into the wall, and from it, there springs a row of carnivorous flytrap like plants to cover him while he searches.
Hibiki Tachibana     It's a good thing she decided to go in hard and fast, because trying to fight these things if they got the drop on her would very likely have ended in some serious trouble. Or worse. Up close, a fistfighter like her can take them out swiftly, without needing to weave through a barrage of stingers. It's not all that difficult, even with their nevertheless dangerous claws that rake along Bercilak's barrier, risking piercing skin regardless of whether they'll be healed after. But her teeth clench, and her fists tighten even as they batter one in the chest and back out the way she came hard enough to leave it inches in the ground when it hits it.

    "Damnit..." She mutters quietly, turning back away to begin hunting through the place. Is that humming coming from further upstairs, where the scarabs seem to wait? And she knows more of the transformed villagers are above and below. She can't afford to slow down. "Women...teenagers...children!"

    There are a few places she can imagine a ring might be, even with half of her thoughts on just how awful all of this really is, in this moment she's on her own. The closet and any spaces above it is the first place. There's another /creature/ in there, and she's forced to respond with an elbow to blow it back and a shoulder-strike to send it clean through. The more noise she makes, the quicker she has to go. Any place beside the bed is the next--and under it.

    That's where she finds it, letting out her breath and holding the box close. Her expression is tense as she listens to Cantio over communications, heading back to the hole in the building's side she made.

    Giving her a good view of how things are getting even worse. But not from the fire. The cracks in the earth, the shift in the light, her lips pursing in a failed attempt to keep out the smell and taste in the air. <<"...I'll hold my breath. But I think...something's coming.">> Her eyes narrow. If the demon was waiting underneath Ocna...
Lilian Rook     "Confirming all three hits on downtown targets." Lilian radios. The fact is pretty obvious; collapsing buildings are hard to miss. Keeping people constantly updated, even on the obvious, however, is something she knows the value of. It reduces mental load, decreases tension, increases object focus, enables quicker communication at a higher rate, and makes your contributions and positions clear and kept in mind. "That shound prevent reinforcements from easily surrounding us when we enter the villa for the surgical strike."

    She collapses and stows the RPG next, doing so while pirouetting through the air from a sheet of poison darts, bouncing one from a bracer, snap firing her sidearm over her forearm until it dries out, then slapping it back to the magnetic hardpoint, and withdrawing the fourth piece of the operation. It is clearly a much larger version of one of the typical assault rifles she's occasionally brought to heavy lifting ops, like aboard the Cryptarks, fitted with an enormous elongated drum and two parallel barrels.

    Clack-clack. Click. Whiiiine. "Clear!" Lilian swoops down closer to rooftop level where they've just recently been cleared from the ground, aligns her whole body with the recoil axis of the weapon, tucks her close in to her shoulder and inner arm, and strafes the perpendicular street with the sound like bottled thunder and lightning falling down stairs.

    She doesn't particularly need to aim. Getting a thirty degree angle on the roads is enough. Hundreds of AP slugs will chew up survivors, or attackers, in the streets without fail. She strafes the full perimeter of the square, turning sideways on her flight vector to blast ragged lines through the upper and lower storeys of adjoining buildings like a fiery blur. Gaining altitude again in a slowly tightening corkscrew, she begins pinging the others for their radio position, and then fractionally emptying out the remainder of the drum on completely showering their area with fire.

    At ground zero, one experiences hundreds of gaping holes explosively popping into existence in walls and ceilings, spreading a thick fog of dust sawdust pierced by countless narrow beams of sunlight indoors, and turning outdoor streets into small, bloody moonscapes. Even though that vicious electric motor sound is fairly distant, the racket of splitting wood, cracking stone, fracturing and ricocheting metal, and disintegrating furniture, is a good enough cover in of itself --alongside the dust and debris-- to simply make a break for it. Being close to that kind of suppressive fire isn't fun either way.

    Lilian disengages and drops the empty drum. It's still heavy enough to crack the pavement where it lands, from that height. Though many parts of the square are now covered up, other parts have suffered enough damage that weight of bullets may have opened those cracks up into green potholes. "Rude. Noisy. Heavy. Still not bad." she sighs. "Still twenty kilos off my back." She hits the radio again. "Any of you who have pursuers, hurry up to the villa square. Drag them with you. Once they're all in one place, we can hit them with the saturation attack as planned."
Xion The city center is just as bad as everywhere else in Ocna. It's worse, really, in terms of forboding atmosphere, but when you're running towards the monster closets after a few paces every step is just towards more danger. The rooftops seem to be the best way to go, with the circling enemies reminding her of simple heartless amped up and replacing all the dark bits with bug bits. Each approach works out the same way - making a frontal approach from the rooftops one of high speed.

As comfortable working with Roxas as Xion is, their tandem tactics render their shared dead angles into kill zones of another sort. Lilian above and Roxas at her flank, Xion moves to aggressively flush out the rooftop enemies and send spinning shots of sugar-stars orbited by fanciful diamonds at range, or close in for more silver-limned strings of melee attacks.

Others, she baits into going for her back, just for Roxas to carve into with his own Oathkeeper.

It's not totally random -- each time Xion flushes out an area with bright star-shot, it's highlighting a place for Lilian to rain down aerial destruction as she snipes down with her high-velocity rail-shots.

As Xion leaps clear of a collapsing building, she grimaces, drawing up ner collar over her nose poutingly. It doesn't help, but she feels better.

"Yeah. It's going to be a gore nest or something. The ground's cracked--it's good that we didn't burn the whole place out. Lilian! There's going to be a big concentration of... meat and stuff down here. It's coming out from under ground!"

Roxas calls out a command, and Xion nods, flinging Starlight along the path without looking.

As it spirals along the path of Roxas' Definitely Not Boss Templates, pulses of implosive gravity rip up the area in half-meter steps, so that each beam has a inward motion towards their epicenter.

Listening to Lilian's callout, Xion pauses to turn to Roxas, her keyblade still participating in tandem templates. "Let's go fight the gore crab then." She sighs, before smiling lightly at Roxas and pointing up. "Watch your head. I don't think those pyromancers are good shots at this range. Just a guess."