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Angela	There once was a child with hair like fire. She had no mother. She had no father. She didn't even have a found family, as far back as she could remember. Nobody took her in as a child of the backstreets and not only that--but she was a child of the most dangerous part of the backstreets--District 23 where cannibalism was openly and commonly practiced and during the worst time to be an orphan of the backstreets--during a height of Syndicate turf wars. You would be forgiven for presuming she would have a short and brutal life, ending her existence before she could be born as you might say, Dame Commander...Her father The City, her mother Her Hunger. But instead of dying or being broken, the child simply grew stronger and stronger with every passing day but that wasn't the amazing part, Dame Commander! She became a Fixer late in life--at the age of 20 and that isn't the amazing part either. Some Fixers start late, some people just refuse to get broken by the City. No, the amazing part is that she ''really'' wasn't broken! You see, the child was particular with the work she took on. She only took on jobs for the sake of others.. Why would she do that? You already know the story about how she was taken advantage of by the neighbors who looked after her as a child, the people she had thought ''were'' her found family. That they wanted to steal the money she brought in to escape the Backstreets. It's a shame, but wealth can turn people who might otherwise be good people into beasts. Some people are good but can't resist the temptation of a peaceful life. When that happened, the child let herself kill them all. It wasn't because they stole the money, Lilian. She would have let them have it if they had just asked. No, it was because they were the first people to hurt her all without drawing an ounce of blood. That's where the vulnerability is in some people, at least until the wound scars over and they feel nothing after. Maybe that's why the child and I were drawn to each other. I had so much love I had to give it to anyone and she needed it like a desert needs rain.
Angela	Last time on LC1 Chesed had his meltdown and Melting Love was released from containment, making use of Woz's foresight to try and minimize the harm Melting Love could do. Others spoke with Chesed, trying to get at the heart of his reason for his meltdown and ultimately convinced Chesed that the best way to support Gebura would not be to help her on her path of self destruction but rather to show that she did not have to fight alone. The gas Chesed released to augment the physical abilities of everyone in the facility, empowering Abnormalities beyond their usual strength, is no longer present. Sukuna was able to delay but not stop Gebura by messing with the facility's systems and she retaliated by wreckings the elevators shortly before her battle with Lilian began and appearing in Control where she WRECKED the Rabbit Team on her own. Talking to one another about what it is like to bear the weight of the world on one's shoulders, discussing what is necessary to be able to protect others, the two warriors battled one another while Tamamo threw traps to stymie the Red Mist further. In the end, The Dame Commander was able to significantly fracture the Red Mist's EGO armor and drive her through Control's floor and back down into the Training Department. ''The first time I really protected anyone was after knowing they loved me.'' But Gebura wasn't defeated, merely knocked down. When Lilian lowered her guard, Gebura swung out once more towards Lilian's midsection, pulling herself back up to her feet. ''Who is it that loves me here? The ones I loved all had bigger aspirations.'' ''I don't know ... Believe me, please, you can't fight for everyone for forever if no one will take care of you. You can love yourself to fight only for a few, or you can fucking break spending all of yourself for nothing. Ask Xion, or Rita, or Tachibana; even Petra.'' And in response Gebrua shared a story of a man none of you have met--oh but you met that which was drawn and extracted from him and his family.
Angela	"And that's why... Even as I'm breaking... I won't drop this sword, even as I turn to dust." Gebura says. "I see now the difference. You had love but it slipped through my fingers. Let it all turn to dust with me." Crimson smoke--maybe tears?--drift out of her mask's singular red eye and the red lines sprouting out from it, trailing upward along with her blazing hair. In one hand she wields Mimicry, the other an EGO that the facility hasn't seen before... this loop. Lilian recognizes it as Twilight, one of the most dangerous EGO Weapons, a long feathered blade covered in eyes with a blood red mouth as a hilt that strikes physically, mentally, at one's lifeforce, and at one's spirit simultaneously. Mimicry, meanwhile, heals Gebura's wounds with every strike. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBYU9W1ezL0 "Buy the Dame Commander time!" Shajo's voice rings throughout the horror as a bloody red axe flies through the air and impacts against The Red Mist's forehead. Bullets from Tweed fly in from a distance, the Red Mist defending herself by swinging Mimicry which just eats them in midair. Nonon dives in last, sending a singular Gold Rush punch into Gebura's gut, pushing her back. "Ga ha ha!! Been wanting to do that for ages!" Nonon grins. "You got this, Dame Commander! Can't let Ceri show us up!" "Greater Split: Horizontal." Gebura says. A swirl of crimson rips through the Disciplinary Team, sending sprays of blood flying and bodies falling. Only Nonon isn't on the floor--but even she is kneeling down, clutching the biggest wound in chest. Nonon throws herself forward and grabs hold of Gebura's legs, trying to buy just one second, two seconds more for the Dame Commander to recover--or make use of as she pleases. "Shit...Shit..." Chesed says, distracted by what he sees of the battle between Lilian and Kali on the monitor. "Gebura, wake up. Wake up! Come on, you're going the wrong way...!" Meanwhile, Tennant is watching Rita drink Melting Love, employees are still infected, the Manager is at a loss, and this would be a real bad time for another Aleph Abnormality to escape!
Petra Soroka	The sulfur-sweet slime of Melting Love is splattered on the walls, floors, even ceilings and vents, of practically every department, mingling with the everpresent bleach and old and new blood to be suffocating. Melting Love itself is suppressed, returned to its cell in Welfare, where Chesed is no longer causing problems. The infection stays even after that, pink fever still threatening to spread from those most exposed and progress to its end-stage of total minion conversion.     Hibiki and Kukuru are intensely infected, bleary-eyed and coughing slime; Rita's tentacles are slick with it too, but after devouring the essence of Melting Love, she has the ability to dimly sense the approximate presence of the slime corroding Hibiki and Kukuru, as well as the handful of Information employees that escaped Kukuru's execution bullets. She can't reverse the disease, even with her control over the slime, but she can at least command the flooded excess of it to slide over to more convenient locations and clear paths.     The others are all at least somewhat sick, but just in the early stages, only feeling fuzzily warm and a little sticky. The Abnormality alarms blaring slowly taper off, at least comparatively to how they were while Chesed's Meltdown was active, while the agents get the imprisoned Abnormalities under control once the red fog fades away.     There's still some Abnormalities out, but most of them are set up as environmental hazards for the cleared out routes for the duel between Lilian and Gebura. Past the hallway where the two are fighting, Schadenfreude crouches on its mechanical spider legs, keyhole eye saccading around shiftily, ready to draw buzzsaws on anyone who meets its gaze. Hopefully that'll be Gebura, but as Lilian requested, that might mean her too-- and once it's actively roaming around, anyone who accidentally glances at it will become a new target.     Woz's prediction was that there would be *two* ALEPHs breaching, though. There's only a short gap of breathing room after Melting Love and Chesed stop thrashing the facility-- breathing room for everyone besides Lilian, at least-- enough to stand back up, grit your teeth, and get ready to do it all over again. The Manager sends out a warning that, with the Ordeals of Dawn and Noon already complete, the upcoming ones will be even harder.     Sarracenia, down in Extraction after suppressing the Red Riding Hooded Mercenary with several hits of her hammer, is the first to notice when crumpling steel announces the Mountain of Smiling Bodies' breach. The ALEPH alarms, only just tapered off, pick back up again, as the massive, dark, blisteringly fast and strong shape of the Abnormality crashes out of its cell and into the hallway, barreling past her to reach the elevator headed up. It tears the elevator door out of its frame, cramming itself into the shaft and squeezing its way upwards shockingly quickly with a dozen oozing, blackened legs.     Mountain of Smiling Bodies is a pile of rotten flesh half the height of the hallways of the facility, crusted with keratinized growths and the sloughing remains of bled-out faces, rot-black lips contorted into grins. An enormous mouth takes up the entirety of what could be considers its own 'face', lined with bloodstained and unsettingly humanlike teeth the size of someone's head, gaping open to crush, tear, or simply devour anything in its way. Petra's EGO weapon, a black glass spear shot through with veins of color, is embedded in the mound right above its mouth, and the girl herself is scrambling shortly behind, already bloody and exhausted from reining it in this long.
Petra Soroka	The Mountain of Smiling Bodies is currently pinned inside the elevator shaft going upwards to the middle level departments, where most of the Elites-- and Gebura and Lilian-- are gathered. Melting Love's infection is still enough of a threat that those who are heavily infected could spread the slime to others, or potentially have their own disease progressed to the point that they dissolve-- though at least Rita would control them, then. Other infected employees are panicking and trying to flee anywhere they can, risking spreading the slime all throughout Control department, with one clerk grabbing and coughing onto Cinder.     Most of the dead from earlier in the meltdown were executed and left no corpses for the Mountain to consume, but the handful still laying around are what draw the Abnormality up into Central Command. Petra beats it there by simply taking the other elevator that it's not crammed inside, a morphmetal clone of Pillar of Creation forming in her hands. "Okay! Remember! Our goal is to try to keep this thing from fucking with Lilian and Gebura-- and, uh, not let all my coworkers die, but I think that's just a given."
Ivy Carrow	With a mountain on a rampage and the Golden Fracture and the Red Mist locked into a terrible clash, what kind of maniac would willingly come into Lobcorp in the midst of this crisis?     It wasn't through the warpgate--A red distortion carved through the air, a bloody wound in reality. The shape that first coalesed, stepping through the gate, resolved into Ivy's shape. A collection of a half-dozen warprunners, followered her through, and at the front of them was "Luz".     Her expression looking about the chaos around her was grim--but the Luz's expression was always grim. She already knew what she was going to do; "We're setting up a triage ward." She reached out her hand, the smooth walls of the corporation twisting and rearranging into moss-covered bricks, and an arch--but, there should have been a containment cell on the other side of that wall. But that wasn't what lay beyond.     Instead, there was now a large room, lined with beds, a dismal treatment ward, for sure. "Get the wounded." Luz growled, and warprunners began to slip through their own portals, across the facility.     Ivy didn't seem involved in a leadership capacity, today. "Well well, what a travesty this is..." She said, theatrically, as the mountain tore through the facility. Her grin froze, momentarily, at the suprise visit of the horror. Experimentally, she drew her sidearm and let it bark a few rounds into the mountain.     It had about as much effect as any bullet would. "What an unfair little monster you have."
Kukuru	Becoming violently ill is something Kukuru hasn't experienced in a while, and she's having a truly tough time dealing with the effects of Melting Love's infection. She's coughing, she's gagging, and she's having trouble just dragging herself along the hallways. Part of her wonders if it'd be better to just teleport somewhere isolated and wait out the infection, but that'd just be leaving everything to everyone else instead of proactively doing anything else to ensure that battle between Lilian and Gebura goes without a hitch. She also knows that just teleporting willy-nilly would be an even greater risk to everyone than staying in place, and that she doesn't have the tactical decision-making to actually figure out where her abilities and the risk could best be balanced. Thus, she raises a hand to one of her horns, sloughs off some of that infected slime off her head, then hack-coughs out a glob onto the side of the hallway while steadily making her way towards the elevator shaft where the Mountain of Smiling Bodies awaits. Her nanites can help her hold it together for the time being, but she knows it's just a matter of time before even those are overcome. Anything past that, she'd rather not think about too hard. What surprises her, then, is being directed to actually slow down the infections rather than support those battling the Mountain. She's never been led astray by his or anyone else's guidance before, though, and she only has to take a moment to reorient herself (and wipe off some more goop off her arm in the same corner) before turning her teleportation towards Luz's mossy triage zone. Not directly in the center, though, since she knows just how infectious she probably is in this state. Kukuru's dealt with sick children before, after all, and she turns many of those same safety precautions on herself this time: shoving herself into a corner and wrapping an extra jacket around her nose and mouth as a stopgap barrier to her sneezing and leaking Melting Love juice all over the place. That doesn't stop her nanites from starting to flow out to those brought into the triage zone, however, as they work double-duty today: 1. Slowing down the dissolving. Even if someone's falling apart, that doesn't mean they can't be kept held together for a while longer, or at least to keep them from noticing it right away. 2. Purging the infection. Her nanites don't really work against anything particularly natural or supernatural, but if it's just a physical thing? There might be hope yet.
UFO Gang	SO WHAT HAVE THOSE BUDDHIST NERDS BEEN DOING? Well, it's depended on a lot of different factors. Just at the moment this crisis broke, good ol' Minamitsu happened to be topside, checking up on the ship that flies miraculously through the heavens. So she will not be appearing in this film. Where is Nazrin? Don't ask. Where is Shou Toramaru? Somewhere -- likely attempting to ease the hearts and anguish of the full-time employees. Which may perhaps be part of why they had not played much of a role in the struggle currently wracking this strange and hopeful underground corporation. And yet... "Got it!" says a young woman to Petra as she manifests a clone of her weapon. Other than a new-looking and mildly snazzy blazer on top, this young woman would be taken no doubt for some kind of nun or perhaps a fantasy Cleric or Healer or Goodwoman or something similar. She, herself, is nothing in particular. Except that she is backshadowed by a cloud of pink mist. A cloud? It's been there before in a relatively moderate form, but right now the pink cloud has expanded outwards; though diaphanous, this enormous cloud of faintly-translucent mist (politely hanging in large part near the ceiling in order to avoid obscuring people's lines of sight to the Mountain) is now perhaps the size of one of the respectably intermediate-sized sorts of whale. This woman, ICHIRIN KUMOI, seems... cheerful? Perhaps it's just the shape of her face or the habit of her voice. Even so there is some gravity. She messes with an ear-bud and mutters to herself, "They're on borrowed time... I hope we can buy them enough. Nobody deserves this kind of an ending, even if disease is something -- no, durp, bah!" Ichirin bonkles herself on either side of the head with her own knuckles, and then takes a somewhat more martial stance facing towards the Mountain. "A 'Mountain of Smiling Bodies'..." Ichirin muses. "Everyone's been struggling. But for the sake of my old sister and the Welfare Division-- I guess we'll be your opponent now. Unzan!" Ichirin declares, which might sound like a battle cry. IT IS NOT A BATTLE CRY: IT IS AN INSTRUCTION. That pink cloud bank suddenly resolves into something. It resolves into a fist and a majestic muscular forearm as it smashes downwards and to the right with fierce velocity and -- despite being made of a strange but clearly cloudlike material -- enormous amounts of strength to simply and directly smash the vast thing head on.
Tamamo	Tamamo is listening to the fight through her prepared scrying items and the facility's own surveillance. She had a good idea of where the fight would go, if not exactly how it would get there, but there's only so much she can do about the noise and debris. While she's working on that, she talks to Lilian.     'They shine too brightly and fit too poorly.'     "Mn," an uneasy, wordless sound, as uncharacteristic as it is to really be lost for words, even for a long moment. "When put like this, it is far more difficult to argue that she is anything but 'like us.'" It doesn't sound like a very good place to be, when she says it.     'When you can't live with the way things are any longer, and you can't find your own way out, sometimes scary and uncertain things become intoxicating.'     "You were the very picture of a young knight, in my eyes. Projecting confidence beyond that which you ought, while fearing something distant and yet unknown. I was, I suppose, more difficult to view myself as something so unknown."     'When you're strong enough to make things feel fake, perhaps only dangerous things feel real?'     "I feel this may be insightful toward understanding one or two divinities of strength. Perhaps it is true for some others, as well."     She hears Gebura, too.     'So they sent in his wife. They sent in his child.'     The speakers pick up Tamamo's hoarse whisper, "That is horrible." They can't pick up how she shudders.     'I couldn't protect the Disciplinary Team because I couldn't leave this place.'     'I don't expect anybody to remember their names but me.'     'Ga ha ha!! Been wanting to do that for ages!'     'Greater Split: Horizontal.'     "You are striking that team you could not protect, even now, Ms. Gebura. You cannot take them with you, if you turn to dust like this. Not truly. Was that what you wanted?"
Timespace Riders	Zi-O had sped over to the cell for the Girl in the Mirror to do Attachment work, armored in the red-white racing-themed Drive armor, mantled on the knightly form of the Zi-O II base. He'd promised that all of this was so that everyone could continue to see her, and in a way, it is. He'd also promised that he'd be back in a week with 'something for her to work on,' a promise he'll be keeping even if he has to time travel to keep it.     With those assurances and promises made, he excuses himself, zipping back out of the cell. His armor makes a tenor supercar growl as it races down the hallway in Extraction to rendezvous with Woz in Welfare. That, unfortunately, means taking an elevator.     His ankle-tires squeal as he drifts to a halt in front of the nearest working elevator, impatiently pressing the button. The pleasant sound of the doors finally opening does little to soothe his anxious mind, and thus... he procures a candy-apple-red laser pistol with a charging bolt that looks like a supercar's suicide door.     The elevator shaft is briefly awash in red light, and just-as-briefly filled with the echoing 'nyooom' of a performance engine. Zi-O runs along the walls of the shaft, prying open the doors to Welfare and stumbling through.     "Beware, sire," cautions Woz, still attempting to corral the invisible force on this floor with numerous tables hild in his four, golden robotic manipulator arms. "The force here strikes swiftly and without warning."     "That's why I'm here!" Zi-O confidently asserts. He flicks one of the speedometer needle antennae overtop his headlight-lenses. "You do the containing and I'll do the... warning!" By that, he means he'll act as bait for the force in this department, using his power of imminent precognition to avoid it and thus give its position away to Woz.
Sarracenia	Sarracenia is still in her rubber overalls and rain poncho along with the gas mask she was originally given. It's her best attempt at containing her own pink goo from spreading.      It doesn't help much against a giant pile of bodies. But, Mountain of Smiling Bodies is the Abnormality that Sarracenia figured she would be facing in the first place. It's the one you can just hit and it should be okay. At least, that was her understanding of things. Hit it, don't let it eat bodies.      After getting back to her feet Sarra charges after it. "H-how is something that large that fast?!" she exclaims as she gives chase. She gets into the elevator shaft beneath it and reaches into her purse to pull out a bob-omb. Slime might be everywhere, but in a confined space like an elevator shaft it should be fine...right? "Hey! Do not ignore me!!" she shouts upward at MoSB as she throws bob-omb after bob-omb.      The nearly immobilizing fear she was feeling not too long ago has given way to anger born of survival instinct and general disgust at this whole situation. She fully understands now why everyone seems to hate this place. "Just go back to your room! The sooner you do that the sooner I can get out of here!"
Rita Ma	Melting Love is not, in fact, returned to its cell, because it hasn't been suppressed very much at all, because the minute Rita's drunk enough of it to bring it effectively under her control she kneels over it and pours a gentle white glow out of her hands to mend its wounds.      "Please don't be scared, Agent Tennant," she says with a watery edge, and then turns to see them already gone, and smiles bittersweetly. Maybe that's for the best. <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, slightly burbling, "Mr. Manager. Where is Mr. Chesed now from where I am? It's important." <J-IC-Scene> The Manager hesitates before answering Rita. <J-IC-Scene> The Manager says. "Third floor western side." <J-IC-Scene> The Manager says, "Next to Central." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says wetly, "Mr. Manager?" <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Thank you."      . . .      Chesed's security-camera fight voyeurism is interrupted by someone ripping open his door like it's tinfoil. Light from the hallway spills around- and through, at the edges- Rita, who's gotten herself in a thoroughly drippy state. It's hard to read feeling from her red-white eyes.      "Hi, Mr. Chesed," she says after just a second of staring at his giant-orb, fixed-to-the-wall state. "I have good news. You're going to be helping a lot today. Ms. Gebura's going to save your life. Alright?" An enormous swell of ooze looms behind her, and a dreadfully bloody-clawed wolf and bandage-faced lanky bird peer around the shredded door's edges too.      She smiles like an angel, and doesn't take no for an answer.      . . .      Chesed's entire spherical body is thrown upwards through the ceiling into the Safety department, on the same floor as Gebura. Even if he doesn't call out for help, she can't possibly miss the din- or whatever alarms are set off by Melting Love, Judgement Bird, and Big and Will be Bad Wolf scrabbling up after him.      Ms. Gebura never got to protect her friends and be thanked for it. Mr. Chesed never got to be brave and make his friends happy. I just have to hope they won't hate me afterwards. But if they did, it'd still be worth helping him, wouldn't it?
Shinmyoumaru Sukuna	Shinmyoumaru knew perfectly well that her attempts to slow Gebura down weren't going to last forever, and at this point there's not much more she can do to help Lilian and Tamamo out, unless they happen to lead her into one of the tsukumogami she asked to help out. So she's not worrying about it! It is now well and truly out of her hands. She has instead been worrying about herself, because she's a little pinky-warm, and about everyone else. Chesed, even, after she spoke to him last - Shinmyoumaru is a little vague about how exactly Meltdowns *end*, or what happens afterwards. Not that she can worry about that now. Because it hasn't, ultimately. Gebura is still out there. But where *is* Shinmyoumaru? The thing with Shinmyoumaru is that she's damn easy to overlook when she isn't drawing attention to herself, and while she's got a tendency to self-aggrandize, it's not like she has to literally every minute of every day. She's been using her floating bowl to skip from place to place in her smaller size, taking side paths and hanging up high or off to the side. So she doesn't literally come out of nowhere when Petra speaks, but she may as well; going from a mere inch or two high in her boat to her more accustomed size of four feet standing, slightly flushed too pink but still well-armed with her needle. Shinmyoumaru has also used enough power that she's generated what looks like a magic circle around her, a ring of arrows that sweep around from behind her that shine through an entire rainbow of colours. The two sides' arrows point at each other, and where they meet there's a secondary circle with a cycle, spinning gently. "It got big by eating corpses," Shinmyoumaru says, seriously, to Sarracenia. "It'll eat yours too if you don't pay attention!" Turning toward the Mountain, Shinmyoumaru draws her needle back and thrusts, so fast her arm blurs. She's too far away to actually hit it with the needle itself, but with every thrust a spike-like pulse of energy trailing a thinner thread behind it. There's no real way to tangle up the entire Mountain of Smiling Bodies, but Shinmyoumaru's needle-and-thread bolts start to form a net. Will it stop it from going up and out? No, not really - but it might slow it down, at least for a few moments.
Lilian Rook	Pacing through the wreckage of the training department ceiling, Lilian has to split her attention between watching out for Gebura's counterattack from the rubble, maintaining the delicate momentum of the dangerous ideological exchange that has to be a primary object, and preserving the tenuous state of raw emotional sincerity that enables it, while every better instinct screams at her to shut up, focus, and press her brief advantage for all it's worth. She can barely force herself to breathe, under the circumstances. The literal red mist displaces the ash and dust from her mouth, at least.     §I'm thankful to my past self for finally making that last, big change towards the sword. The atmospheric stimulants here are a nearly equal advantage to both of us. Chesed, in his own way, is helping me too. If it were rated for attack and defense, I'd come out a little behind.§     'It's not Night Mist or magic that makes you strong, it's that eye of yours that can ''see''. Your power just lets you use your eye to its utmost.'     Lilian evinces something like dark, careful laughter into the smog. "Surely you don't just mean my eye for other people." she says, scanning this way and that. "You're the second person to see through me like that. The first as a warrior. There's not a single person in this facility right now who'd know what you mean but me."     §Haha. This is awful. I can't predict what direction she's going to attack from. Does that mean that, right now, my heart is more set on talking to her than protecting myself? I'm an idiot.§     Her mind is still racing. What to say, and what not to; who is listening, and then to filter them out; whether Gebura should know about 'those eyes', or whether she already does. Milliseconds lost in the handful it takes for Gebura's favoured weapon to reach her. She looks towards the first loud noise, sees the sword and not its owner a room away, glances down its length to try and find her after Gebura's last diversion, and is struck by flying debris from the cloven wall.     Most of it bluntly sparks away from her armour. One hits her just below the throat, where Gebura's arm bar had broken the plate. Lilian feels stabbing pain in her collarbone where she coughs up her air. She locks eyes with Mimicry instead of it's wielder.     Middle cut from the right high line. So fundamental she could respond to it while unconscious. Quarter step outside, guard dropped from her waist to her hip; instinct screams to brace the blade with her left forearm and right shoulder at her head.     It averts a standing concussion, at the moment of impact. The force of the blow is so enormous that Lilian feels armour crack at her shoulder in the instant between being carried off her feet by the momentum and hurled into--
Lilian Rook	-----[stop]-----     Lilian tumbles over the Training department floor, and then rights herself by blind reflex, just before the opposite wall. She forces breath back into her lungs and winces. "Not broken." she says to herself, rubbing her collarbone gingerly. As long as she doesn't 'do anything', all the cost will have been up-front. "Hah . . . That's not good." The sparks where she'd been struck, along with motes of defensive magic, still hang on the blade. Lilian claps broken fragments of armour off her shoulder like dust. They hang before hitting the floor. "That one scared me enough it happened automatically. I think my wrist flexors were going to give out if I didn't."     Lilian flexes her fingers. They work fine. She rolls her shoulder. Hurts, but has mobility. Left vambrace can still absorb damage. "Well, I didn't expect this to be easy." she says to herself. She stops, looks back, and squints at her left hand. The hazy distortion she notices takes a moment to register as the atmospheric fog being disturbed by-- "She says. While shaking. Haha . . ." Lilian directs at herself. "If I move here, it'll just give me away, so--" She takes a deep breath.                 -----[start]-----     'I'll break if I keep fighting like this.'     "So that's why we have to fight 'like this', instead." Lilian says, fifty feet away in the midst of a swirling cloud of red. Mimicry breezes past her; churning the wall, splitting sparks, cleaving empty air, and ruffling her hair in the backwake. "As long as it's here, now, with me, that breaking wouldn't feel so bad." It should sound tutelary, perhaps leading or encouraging, if Lilian were doing this properly by any sane evalution. "After a long enough time, the fear of failing, the strain of not breaking, is almost as bad as the real thing. Soon you stop being afraid of it, and then even attracted to it. That's what 'self-destruction' really is, for perfect, invincible people."     §If only she were sloppy enough for me to pretend I took no damage there. She's not being aggressive or complex with her attack patterns, but one fuck-up is all it'll take. The fact she's starting to get cool with her anger is very bad. And exactly what we want.§     "That's my middle name." Lilian blurts out of nowhere. A trifling irrelevance, while she takes her stance again. "Isabelle." The story is for Tamamo, but Lilian looks at Mimicry anyways. "So your were born with a blade in your hand as well. Just like Xion and I." Lilian's mind races with angles of attack; this comes out automatically. "Starlight, Night Mist, Mimicry . . . Friends we've clung to for a long time." A sharp, anticipatory breath. Lilian crouches. "Literally. Not figurative."     'I won't drop this sword, even as I turn to dust.'     "Yeah. Don't let go of him. He entrusted himself to you with love, didn't he? That's why he's the only thing still by your side."
Lilian Rook	The sound of the axe is a gunshot start. Lilian times her sprint by the bullets. She's always leading the Agents that are sent to her in the field, but when Nonon pushes up, Lilian seamlessly waves around her; not from experience, but from the feeling of cool fingertips brushing her heart and knowing. Gold Rush strikes Gebura's gut, and Lilian leaps, lands atop Nonon's fist with black static, slams her left hand into Gebura's flaming hair, and drives her armoured knee into the mask with a sound like a canon.     Turning her wrist, and another black pulse, sends Lilian tumbling over Gebura's head to land behind her. A three point slide, then two points, as Lilian squeezes both hands around the hilt and winds up. Her sword gleams with the energy pouring into it; a blade like the amalgamation of every tensed muscle and held breath in her body.     'Greater Split: Horizontal.'     §Huh? She didn't aim it at me? Why would she do that? She's wide open.§ "Dóiteáin Fiáin Bhí Seilg"     Spiderweb cracks flicker through the floor around Lilian. Hot ash leaps from the floor. She collides into Gebura from behind, while Nonon holds her down-- and intentionally kicks Nonon aside at the instant her heavily telegraphed move connects. Night Mist ignites; chemical mist and rubble-dust catch fire and leave toxic embers in its wake; and strikes Gebura where her lower ribs would be from behind, carrying up into her body against her own mass. Where it should bite in and stop, twists and flicks out along a slick of molten metal and steaming blood, and flashes back from the other side. Again and again and again andagain andagainand againandagainandagainandagain     The payoff for a setup is a non-stop barrage of constantly accelerating cross-strokes and rebound slashes that cyclically boost their own momentum. The concept of a dempsey roll applied to swordsmanship and catalyzed with magic. Lilian is using Nonon's desperate grapple to push Gebura out of Training and drive her into the next checkpoint under sheer weight of blows. Each one faster, harder, hotter than the last, racking up damage until either Gebura breaks free, or Lilian herself can no longer withstand the accumulated heat.     Or, rather, until Lilian pushes Gebura through several of Tamamo's traps and into an Abnormality Point pre-arranged by the group, just off from one of her resupplies, in another Department.
Hibiki Tachibana	Last time, Tachibana Hibiki was doomed to suffer hideous amounts of infection by virtue of Melting Love's trickery, while trying to stop employees from throwing each other into the Singing Machine. If she knew what became of all of them in Kukuru's care after she left to rescue one, she'd probably be wondering what the point of saving them at all was-- but she's still ignorant of that, so don't worry about it! It's herself she should be more concerned about right now, anyway.     Given she's collapsed against a hallway bulkhead, hacking up pink gunk and having exactly how sick she's gotten finally hit her, without the adrenaline of an immediate battle to stave it off. Unable to stay focused, feverish and sticky all over, and figuring she'd be more of a liability than anything else if she ended up around others during the suppression... she had reluctantly relented to staying put unless she was really needed, even asking the Manager to keep agents and clerks away from the slime-splattered hallway she's doubled over in.     Then the ALEPH alarm goes off, and the Mountain of Smiling Bodies breaks containment.     ...     As the massive mound of rotting flesh tries to clamber its way up into Central Command, one of the several things working to keep it back is in fact a metal boot coming in at very high speeds, and a whole lot of force, aimed squarely for Petra's Pillar of Creation lodged in its body to slam it in deeper. This puts the owner of said boot standing right on top of the Mountain's lumbering frame after.     "As if... I could sit around and let this thing get anywhere close." Hibiki barks into her scarf, yanked up so that any excessive coughing doesn't spill pink slime anywhere. Even doing that, though, she knows very well how much of an infection vector she is if she stays close to anyone for too long. That's why she looks back over her shoulder towards Petra. "...Can't fight next to you, though. But I can still give this thing a meal it can't keep down...!"     What she even means by that becomes apparent when she kicks off the Abnormality's body and-- dives into its huge gaping maw, bootfirst.     To beat it up. From the inside. Can't infect anyone if there's several layers of keratinous decayed flesh between her and everybody else, and it probably won't appreciate downing something as slimy and punch-happy as her instead of a corpse.     It's incredibly dumb, and also something only someone as stupidly durable (and overall stupid) as her could have a chance of somehow managing. Probably.
Angela	When Cinder gets coughed on by a sick employee who even went so far as to grab her, her eyes bug out at him with an expression like 'Seriously? What the fuck!'. She doesn't bother talking TO the employee, though, instead lifting up her EGO Weapon and bashing him upside the head until he is knocked out. "I'm probably infected!" She shouts. "So I'm falling back! Uh. Good luck!" She aims to drag this fallen employee and herself out of the immediate area so she can worry about turning into a slime girl without leaking slime on anyone else. Yeah, Tennant absconded. They love horror movie shit but they have genuine concerns about getting turning into slime. No thanks for that! Rita approaches Chesed and explains what's going to happen. "Oh, that's a relief--" He begins. "--Wait, what exactly is your plan..?" There is a gilligan cut of Chesed getting thrown through a ceiling and into the increasingly inaccurate Safety Department. Fortunately there is an Agent there already ready to protect Chesed. That's right, Baba--Captain of the Safety Department-- --is already snoozing on the floor snuggled up against the unconcious Netzach. "Well," Chesed says. "I-if it works..." But Gebura has other stuff going on right now that might slow her ability to get to Chesed--indeed, for a moment she doesn't seem to quite realize that Chesed's under threat. She can hear Tamamo, she almost certainly has to be able to hear Tamamo right now but she's in such a state that any form of attack results in automatic violence. Tamamo pulls Gebura back long enough for her to recognize Nonon still clinging to her and says, "Potential." and-- --She doesn't have a good answer for Tamamo's words beyond that. Tamamo is a wise fox and it takes her a moment to add a, "Yeah." It is horrible. That's easier to answer than her aimless wrath which she has lost her grip on.-- ''That's what self-destruction really is, for perfect, invincible people.'' "...Not just your eye for other people." Gebura admits. "Who was the other?" She's at the point where talking takes more effort than swinging her blades. She is still, nonetheless, listening and communicating. She can't help but be herself, that's the other problem perfect invincible people have. They can only be themselves.
Angela	''That's my middle name.'' Gebura isn't the type to slow her roll because of a coincidence like this. She's not directed by Zack Snyder but she does have laugh at the ridiculous coincidence. Isabelle could have never been Lilian even if she had lived but it is the sort of trifling irrelevence that builds that bridge a little further. Know enough trifling irrelevencies about someone and swinging a sword is harder than if a thousand weights had been placed on your arms. (Nonon had whistled in amazement as Lilian leapt atop her fist. She whispered the words 'Badass' and forgot her fear for a moment. She's kicked aside before Gebura can return to her berserk state and mulch her head). Lilian takes full advantage of Gebura leaving herself open as a knee slams viciously into her mask and cracks a large enough chunk of it off that Gebura's right eye can be seen, a dried streak underneath her eye. That EGO armor is as much Gebura as it is armor and she lets out a wild pained gasp as she stumbles back and-- --Even if this isn't enough to finish Gebura off, it's the best way for Lilian to close that power gap and turn the tide of battle into her favor rather than mantaining the brutal stalement that was leaning towards Gebura. Her back has not taken a lot of damage so far but Lilian slices again and again into over her, propelling her across the Training Department and into Information. Any remaining Info Department Agents scatter out of the way. There's nobody else to help Lilian now except the traps, Rita, and Tamamo--each in their own way. Any other Agents but the Disciplinary team would only help Gebura by forcing Lilian to protect them. The armor is flaking off her body as Gebura finally recovers enough to roll away from the combo, scrambling back and into the Safety Department as Sarracenia's explosive traps burst and detonate around both Lilian and Gebura, mostly activating while Lilian was dempsey rolling Gebura in the back. Gebura faces Lilian and then stumbles back into a crouch, keeping herself propped up by her blade. She's tiring. She CAN be beaten. Her endurance isn't ACTUALLY infinite. Of course, the most dangerous opponent is a cornered one. "Ah--Gebura! Sorry about this, but can you lend a hand?" "I'm busy!" Gebura shouts back. "Yes yes, very busy, but I'm about to get torn to pieces by Big and Will Be Bad Wolf and, ah, my Sephirah shell can only last so long!" Gebura isn't lowering her guard against Lilian again as she throws Twilight back and behind her into the Big and Will Be BAd Wolf's hide with enough force that he immediately dissolves into his egg form and hefting up the Chesed Orb into her freed up hand-- "I'm going to kill you." She tells Chesed. "Yes I know. Please toss me away from Judgement Bird?" --She chucks him past Lilian to open up some space between him and Judgement Bird while swinging Mimicry towards Lilian once more in a flurry of strikes that seem to be going after every extremity at once--and it might as well be with the way the blade shifts and twists itself around as if trying to help Gebura win the fight on its own. It's as she said. ''Yeah. Don't let go of him. He entrusted himself to you with love, didn't he? That's why he's the only thing still by your side.'' "..." Gebura is quiet. Her armor, normally mostly black is still red hot from Lilian's repeated strikes against her back. Her grip on Mimicry tightens. It blinks at Lilian.
Petra Soroka	"What an unfair little monster you have."     Not willing to jump into the elevator shaft and jam her morphmetal spear into the Mountain of Smiling Bodies, Petra joins Ivy in drawing her revolver with her offhand, habitually twisting her torso to the side to line her shoulders up with the incoming recoil. Between the pair's loud retorts, she says, "Sure. You just need to know the rules, though."     After emptying out the cylinder she switches out her normal revolver for a different gun, red and black and drawn out of a foam lined box before the grip is flipped around and offered to Ivy. "Kill your guys with this if they're going to die anyways, or the Mountain will eat them. Also do it if they're going to turn into slime."     Petra's confusing and contradictory emotions about 'people coming to help' are hard to lay out, especially in the extremely stressful moment, so they mostly come out as mildly spiteful. Obviously, it's a good thing for more people to be here to help Angela, even if they just end up dying, but Petra can't help but be huffily resentful of Ivy and her crew in the moment anyways. It just seems *careless*, to warp in and start piling in bodies so recklessly, and as a seasoned agent and Elite Petra feels entirely justified in being vaguely dismissive and haughty about that. Also, she has the uncomfortable premonition that at least some of those Warprunners are going to die, since they're even less trained for this than an unarmed clerk is.     For once, with the bomb-ombs, gunshots, stabs and punches, the Mountain of Smiling Bodies is one of the rare Abnormalities that *is* particularly vulnerable to just being hit until it dies. When landing attacks in the spongey flesh between keratinized plates, rotten chunks tear and ichor leaks out, barely any tougher than the split skin of a corpse. The problem is how much *mass* it has, rendering each attack comparatively miniscule, and larger scale blows like Unzan's fist aren't precise enough to not be blunted by its toenail-like armor.     The extradimensional triage ward rapidly fills up with wounded, most of whom are critically slime-sick. Warping around the facility to grab them means a significant portion of Ivy's warprunners are exposed to it too, even as prying them away from Control means that another spreader event is prevented from breaking out. There's very little the Warprunners can do to control the disease besides physically relocating its targets, but they can at least patch up the mundane wounds the employees received besides that. Who knows, after all, how many of them would even make it long enough for the disease treatment to be settled?     Kukuru has more success curing them. The source of the mental effect of the slime is rooted in the physical goop itself, so as her nanites chew away at it, the afflicted employees do make total recovery. The process is slow, though, and made slower by the fact that some of the patients on the sickbed are far enough along to leak slime in *gouts*, splattering the entire extradimensional room at irregular intervals. One is on the brink of outright corroding into the slime husk Petra showed in her video.
Petra Soroka	"It got big by eating corpses,"     "Mhm." Petra nods at Shinmyoumaru, not even taking the opportunity to express some easy dig about how it might be at least worth trying to feed the Mountain Sarracenia's corpse, just to see if it's artifial and poisonous enough to actually hurt the Abnormality. The Mountain of Smiling Bodies keeps laboriously scrabbling its way up the elevator shaft, echoing horrific noises of scraping and groaning metal along with guttural grunts and gnashing teeth. A boom echoes out on top of that, as Unzan's fist slams into its face and drives it half a floor back down until it regains its grip on the walls.     "And it'll get way bigger if it eats more, so basically whatever you do, *don't* get eaten by--" "...Can't fight next to you, though. But I can still give this thing a meal it can't keep down...!"     "*Hibiki*--!" The Mountain of Smiling Bodies heaves itself upwards into view of the broken elevator door, snapping its massive jaws shut around Hibiki, inertia carrying it the rest of the way into the Central Command chamber proper with a mixture of squelches and rasps. It lurches into a charge directly at the cluster of Elites, bounding towards them like a runaway truck and crashing through the gold and marble wall beyond.     Rolling to the side and lashing out with an arc of razor quicksilver from the end of her spear, Petra shouts to the others, "Try not to attack so deep that you kill Hibiki! Not to protect her, just because she'll instantly get digested and then we'll have a whole other problem." After a beat, she adds, "Also so she doesn't die."     The Mountain of Smiling Bodies' charge continues in a brutish straight line, barreling through facility structures in the direction of Welfare, so fast that it's impossible to keep up with merely on foot. When it arrives in an explosion of concrete dust and rebar, Dimensional Refraction Variant is finally suppressed by Woz and Sougo, since the hardest part of fighting it is knowing where the outskirts of its effect are. There are, however, still dismembered corpses strewn around the department, and all the ones that aren't ashed are perfect for the Mountain of Smiling Bodies to devour.
Ivy Carrow	Luz was already slipping on a facemask and gloves, as Kukuru teleported in. She stared, momentarily taken aback by the state of Kukuru's decay. The room began to twist and turn, another wall and door. Infected one room, normal wounded another. No cross-contamination.     "You'll handle the worst cases. I'll handle normal injuries." If Kukuru couldn't help the the worst cases, Luz grimly decided, then nobody could without becoming infected themselves. She could, at least, see them off peacefully--If Kukuru survived at all. And if she didn't, Luz could lock the door and see to it that those too far gone were ushered after her. "Don't you dare let us down." She growled, the weight of a key she prayed she wouldn't have to use heavy in her pocket...And heavier still, as more warprunners returned...infected.     "We're not here to fight." She reminds, into her transmitter. "That's the Captain's damage."     It was fitting, that shooting this thing had just about as much effect that shooting an actual mountain might. Ivy's eyes locked onto Petra's for a moment, as the gun was handed to her. "They won't be here with us out here, anyway." Nevertheless, she takes it, tucks it away in her belt.     "Guns are boring anyway." Ivy slid her pistol back into its holster and drew out her blade, letting her metal 'claw' rest upon the blade on its way out. Blood trickled out of the edge of her claws fingers, propelled by some invisible mechanism, until it drip-dripped from the blade onto the ground. To magical senses, the weight of the curse bound up in her blood burned like white phosphor.     But in the meantime, they couldn't let it reach any of the bodies, could they? Ivy raised her hand, and around them all, the walls began to shift and stretch, lined with stone. Impossibly, the hallway stretched, extending in a way that defied spatial logic. "Do you think it can move faster than I can work?"
Rita Ma	Tentacles grab the ragged edges of the hole Chesed's ascent made, but they're barely recognizable as Rita's. Twelve have been glommed together into four, and each looks like a splattery pseudopod of mostly-magenta goo, barely holding together under surface tension.      The body they haul up into Safety behind Gebura doesn't look much like Rita's, either. Her hair is a waterfall-veil of slime, her clothes are eaten-through with it, and her body glistens and sheds light in a way that makes it hard to tell whether she's just goo-slathered or converted. Those eyes hint it's at least a little bit the latter. She looks a lot like Melting Love's smaller form.      She locks eyes with Lilian, and her lips open in a premonition of a "Ms. Rook!!", but then she shuts her mouth.      "Ms. Rook? Can you hear me?" she telepathically calls out. A foggily-distant rendition of her voice, echoey, undercut by distant sloshing like waves on a beach. "I shouldn't talk. It's better if Ms. Gebura sees me as a monster. But I have an idea to help her feel better, and I can give you a little rest."      Her wolf friend has been neatly dispatched, but Judgement Bird doesn't seem to notice Gebura at all, and patiently stalks forward towards Chesed's new position while raising its weighing-scales menacingly. Melting Love itself slurps into the vents and re-emerges on Chesed's other side (as if an immobile orb needed flanking), raising its arms to crush him.      Rita herself moves alarmingly fast for looking half-liquid: she swishes past Lilian and Gebura along the ceiling, physically smear-framed out, and lands at a third angle to Chesed too, thoroughly hemming him in. Her tentacles all rear back and sharpen their tips to drippy spearpoints, then strike like vipers...      I really hope Ms. Gebura's fast enough.
Sarracenia	'It got big by eating corpses, It'll eat yours too if you don't pay attention!'      "Exactly why I want it to come back this way and go back to its room!" Sarracenia yells in annoyance at Shinmyoumaru. "I do pay attention, you know! There are a lot more bodies that direction than down here! And I have no plans to be eaten or melted today!"      It is pretty hard to see from below the creature, but... "Did Hibiki just...leap into its mouth?!" Sarracenia exclaims, horrified. That's something Sarracenia is unsure she could ever do. Feed herself to a monster. Of course, she isn't super durable so that would probably not end well at all.      It did not come back down, so Sarra wall kicks her way up to the floor MoSB stopped on. She isn't fast enough to run it down, so...she pulls out a Bullet Bill. This one is a little different, though. She squeezes it and is engulfed in an explosion.      And from that explosion a Bullet Bill the size of a small car is fired like a cannon shot. But, Sarracenia does not emerge from the smoke cloud left behind. The Bullet Bill races rapidly toward the Mountain, and when it hits it explodes against the monster.      Sarracenia emerges from this explosion and leaps to try and land on MoSB. If she can't keep up, going for a ride is the next best thing! "Captain Carrow!" she exclaims in surprise when she finally sees her. Her eyes widen as the hallway seems to stretch. "...wait, you brought more people with you?!" Even Sarracenia did not bring her soldiers. It just seemed like a bad idea with things like Melting Love and Mountain of Smiling Bodies running around!
Kukuru	There's a silver lining to having so many people crammed into the Warprunners' triage ward instead of Control: Not having to worry about tracking them down or infecting the rest of the facility further. Kukuru can at least tell at a glance who she should really focus on first (the ones leaking the most), but she runs into more problems the longer she works and the more the infection is allowed to progress for both herself and the patients. "Oh, this is-blrrgh.  This one's just like Petra's video..." Wiping her face off with her sleeve, Kukuru snags a spare blanket to wrap her face up even more, squinting past all of it to get a better look at the one that's just about to corrode entirely. "Ugh... Manager? Petra? It looks like we can get this stuff purged, but... It's real slow. And everything still feels gross. Where should I put it all?" Indeed, Kukuru's just trying to keep her own sneezing and leaking to a single spot in the corner of the triage area, little that it might help with the bursts of infected goop continuing to spread. She can't even spare much in the way of nanites to treat her own infection at this point, using just enough to keep herself from falling apart entirely while the rest are distributed through the triage area to try and stall the infections that haven't progressed nearly so much. She doesn't notice that one of her horns has already melted partway through, either, although anyone looking at her can easily see it happening. The rest of her nanites, meanwhile, are focused on this particularly troublesome patient. She tries to focus her funky eyesight to try and figure out where the densest concentrations of the goop might be, largely guessing at first based on whether it's being sneezed out or leaked out, or even just bursting out of specific areas. She even experiments with making an incision in a gushier-looking section of the employee's body to see if she can scoop some of the stuff out to speed up the curing process that way.
UFO Gang	As that crushing massive youkai cloud fist storms towards the Mountain, Ichirin looks upwards as Hibiki leaps into battle. (Ichirin has thus far not yet been Infected. It's one of those things that might be iffy, though youkai surely aren't comprehensively immune. Unzan is also a cloud, though. And Muramasa's dead! She can't -- augh this stress is getting to me, thinks Ichirin, her eyes snapping back forwards.) A craggy old man's face appears in the clouds as both Unzan and Ichirin stare at the powerful Tachibana assault directly into the mouth of the creature. Their shock is somewhat broken by the shift of things. Petra speaks of The Rules. Unzan looks towards her -- he seems to have lost his shyness, or perhaps the heat of battle makes such matters more opaque. He stilld oesn't say anything. Fortunately, Petra brings them back to awareness. "Right!!" Ichirin says, with a fist held up in determination. "If we kill Miss Hibiki, she'll get digested! We'd have to deal with our responsibility twofold!" Unzan nods once, firmly. And nevertheless, the charge continues forwards. Ichirin kicks off the ground and just decides to fly the rest of the way. Unzan, being a cloud, just sort of -- comes along, although his embiggened mass means it's sort of like he comes out of the other side of his mass and follows her. "Do you think you can get those remains before the Mountain does?!" Unzan lets out an (audible) grunt. Sounds like a no. Ichirin makes a little mrgmrmrgmrgm noise in the back of her throat. Her eyes flick momentarily towards Shinmyoumaru, who seemed to pop out of nowhere (because Ichirin didn't spot her when she was still just a wee little Shinmyoumaru). "Yes!" Ichirin tells Sarracenia. Then, "Wait --!" "This is bad," Ichirin observes as the gigantic Bullet Bill flies forwards. It looks like a self-destructive attack to HER. Unzan grunts again, affirmatively. Ichirin looks at him. Unzan looks back. They nod. The cloud rolls ahead of Ichirin, though not that far. It doesn't have to go that far. Just to get ahead of the Mountain. Rolling forwards like a fogbank reversed to roll along the ceiling, Unzan's form clumps and stacks and heaps up and then his face appears in front of the Mountain. He looks as though he disapproves. But the only sound he makes is a low grumbling. Something like distant thunder... Against the peak of the mountain. Both of his hands slam outwards again, the great cloudy palms held open instead of forming fists. They slam together but they also seek to grasp; to place spiritual strength against that immense oncoming momentum. That thunderous rumble rises upwards as Unzan bares teeth made of fog and spirit alone. It isn't a blow, exactly: it is an effort to PUSH BACK.
Shinmyoumaru Sukuna	"Right! So no letting it eat bodies! Just kind of... keep it away from them while it moves around, I guess?" Can they steer it? Shinmyoumaru doesn't think her strings are tough enough to do *that*. She eyes Unzan suspiciously, looking from the ghostly mist to the pinkish flush on her hand and back as if comparing the two. Eventually she decides they are different enough that they're probably unrelated, but she's still a little suspicious of Unzan and by extension Ichirin. Shinmyoumaru jabs at the Mountain of Smiling Bodies... without much success, if she's being honest. A needle is not the best weapon to use against something with that kind of size. Even if she sneaks a stab in past the crusty shell of horn-like armour (and she's just going to think of it as horn, it's easier for her), what's it going to do to a Mountain? And it's gross. It is *so* gross. She privately thinks it's worse than Melting Love (though possibly not much worse than the results of Melting Love). It certainly smells worse. Shinmyoumaru tugs a length of cloth up around her nose and mouth in an attempt to keep the smell out just as Hibiki goes right past her. "Ah - !" She couldn't have meant to do that. She just got eaten! She - Shinmyoumaru doesn't get much of a chance to think about it as the energy string she's using abruptly gets pulled taut by the Mountain of Smiling Bodies rushing off. It might be faster than she can run, but she's dragged along pell-mell in her floating bowl - whether she wants to be or not! "Aaaaah!" She didn't mean to actually scream out loud. She ducks down in her bowl and pulls her hat-lid on top after her, becoming slightly more aerodynamic and also sheltering her from being randomly slammed into the wall if it decides to turn fast. It also lets her prepare to unleash another bit of magic, though she's already used more than enough. As Shinmyoumaru pops back out, her magic circle blazes brighter, the colours unnaturally intense - almost unreal compared to the washed-out colours of the facility itself. But now she's got the Mallet, and she swings it in a hard strike. "Be little!" Wishing hammer or not, Shinmyoumaru has no hope of affecting the *entirety* of the Mountain of Smiling Bodies and making it as small as she's imagining for long; the smaller she tries to make it, the harder things resist. The Mallet gets dangerously warm in her hands when she tries, threatening to extract a price that Shinmyoumaru isn't able to pay right now. But for a few moments, Shinmyoumaru can constrict it, slowing it down, weakening its armour, reducing its bulk, and - well, it might end up being a lot tighter fit for Hibiki in there, possibly even pushing her right back the way she came if it gets small enough like a spat-out watermelon seed!
Timespace Riders	The Mountain bursts through the wall just as Woz and Zi-O finish handling Dimensional Refraction Variant. Zi-O's speedometer-needles spin rapidly forwards, leaving little red afterimages. Visions with hazy rose-quartz fog at the edges play out, of flying mortar and impaling rebar. The Demon King threads the needle through it all with a superspeed powerslide, low-profiling under the debris as he switches out the Drive watch on his belt for another.     "Woz! Keep the Mountain busy for a second!"     Woz's four golden manipulator arms whir and whine as he turns them to the Mountain, powerful vise claws clanking as they snap. Maintaining a steady backwards pace, he piston-pummels the Abnormality, carefully keeping *just* out of reach.     Zi-O, meanwhile...                      ARMOR TIME! Fire? Flight? Ether! MIA!                           ...transforms, shifting the racing motif to that of a purple dragon. The knightly Zi-O II frame now sports roaring dragons on the bracers, with the clawed gloves resembling teeth. The katakana lenses spelling 'RIDER' shift to amethyst in hue, while the symmetrical watch hands above them resemble slender, white-hot flames. Two metal wings in imitation of a dragon's leathery span sprout from his back just in time to lift him from his slide and carry him into the air.     If I remember that this is all someone's fault--that it won't be this way forever--it doesn't hurt as much to see. As much. A good king doesn't look away from ugly things.     After a moment's hesitation, Zi-O holds both his palms out. Concentrated streams of burning plasma streak from his hands, the rider intending to incinerate what remains he can with the narrow seconds he has to do it.
Hibiki Tachibana	*Hibiki*--!     Mountain of Smiling Bodies' maw snaps shut, and with it, Hibiki vanishes from sight. She gives what seems to be the faintest of nods to Petra before she's gone.     To this day, she continues proving Lilian Rook's mention of 'always fighting like she wants to die' correct.     It's sure not a heroic sacrifice, though that might be preferable to be trapped inside the Abnormality's innards; the first thing Hibiki has to do is not get crushed by its jaws on the spot, and that means slamming both palms up against the roof of its mouth while her legs brace against the opposite end. Holding it back makes every single bone in her body ache as its halted, and the general sickness running through her doesn't help out there.     "Okay... I really hate being in here, so let's get this over with...!" She's not sure how this stacks up next to slowly devolving into a slime monster, but if she has it her way, neither of them will be how she dies today.     One big advantage of coming along for the ride is that she doesn't have to race to keep up with the Mountain as it breaks into Welfare, but the muffled sound of debris and destruction is enough to let her know that it isn't going to be slowing down in its hunt for corpses. Taking in a strained breath, she eases up her grip and plunges into the monster's lightless guts--     Where she balls up a fist and /pummels/ it into the walls of its stomach with a vicious uppercut, hard enough for the sound of the impact to be heard by anyone close enough to the thing outside. Clenching her other hand tight, she twists her frame into a second upwards blow close to where the first one landed, just for a third one to be right behind it. And fourth, fifth, sixth...     Shinmyoumaru trying to temporarily de-size the Abnormality might be more of a boon than anything else for her, as while it'll sure mean the already disgusting and cramped space will become even more constricting, it'll make each blow she's sending out start laying in hard enough that the punches layered over top one of another might very well become fist-shaped deformations beating themselves out from its body for a split second before the next barrage of blows comes.     You'd think crippling illness would make her weaker, and while it technically does, it evens out by being infinitely more reckless and being able to leverage her ridiculous strength without holding anything back. That might be the one good thing about fighting Abnormalities, for her.
Lilian Rook	'Who was the other?'     Lilian takes a deep breath.     'You were the very picture of a young knight, in my eyes. Projecting confidence beyond that which you ought, while fearing something distant and yet unknown. I was, I suppose, more difficult to view myself as something so unknown.'     "Who else?" says Lilian, smiling.     ---     'Ah--Gebura! Sorry about this, but can you lend a hand?'     'I'm busy!'     Lilian stalls out just after Gebura breaks free. Her sword sizzles through empty air, and the floor plating liquiefies just under the tip without touching. She reorients her body on the fly, getting behind her weapon and tumbling away from Gebura with something approximating grace, but comes to rest on one knee. Night Mist is so hot that the air shimmers above it, bits of airborne particulate hissing and popping like fireworks where they drift past. Lilian's breath fogs as if it were cold, each ragged gasp coming out as tattered steam. She watches Gebura too closely to blink.     §I can cut from this stance. Gebura knows that; she isn't an idiot who thinks I'd need a katana. Night Mist is too hot, though. She can't know what its limits are, but I do, and I'm not breaking it, even for her. So I'm bluffing. I don't have time to spare to cool it like that, so . . . Then how about--§     Lilian draws Winter Crow on Gebura. Sighting down her arm rather than the irons, she swivels her aim and-- fires a shot right by Baba's sleeping head. "Get up! Do your job and escort Chesed out!" Lilian yells. "I didn't give you permission to sleep, and I don't give you permission to die!"     §How is he here? Is that-- Rita?! She-- No, no, that's perfect timing.§     Big And Will Be Bad Wolf explodes into a million little pieces on impact, and falls into sessile slumber. Lilian tries not to think about being hit like that. She's come this far. "Well?" she calls out to Gebura, still holding her gun while Night Mist smoulders at the ready. "I'm right. Aren't I." A determined huff pushes Lilian slowly back up to her feet. "Christopher. I'd wondered what was going through you head when we spoke of Rita; it clearly wasn't your usual self."     'You are striking that team you could not protect, even now, Ms. Gebura. You cannot take them with you, if you turn to dust like this. Not truly. Was that what you wanted?'     "Come to think of it, 'back then', didn't you demand that Angela let you leave the facility so that you could protect her? To Protect me." Lilian says. "Who you're willing to turn to dust, and who you'll hold tight even when you don't plan to live; it seems clear enough to me, Gebura. This is the loudest your true self has ever been, Gebura."     'I'm going to kill you.'     'Yes I know. Please toss me away from Judgement Bird?'     "Like him. Because he loves you enough right now to help you. I don't know if you even care about him at all, but I don't see 'Great Split'."     Gebura throws Chesed. Lilian turns herself aside, leaning away from his orb form hurtling past her. Her arm comes up, and the gun swings up at Gebura. Alchemical pins snap into the firing mechanism. The entire elemental stack collapses into a single rod. All twelve keys fire, and the black-gold magical circle that flares at the muzzle expands so violently that the cameras catch its individual layers.
Lilian Rook	A column of incandescent energy thicker than Gebura's arm; a brilliant lance of prima materia vented from the process of violently perfected chrysopoeia; blazes just past her shoulder through the other side Punishing Bird. The Abnormality is turned to ash instead of Gebura's armour, and the miss wasn't all that close. The stack pin ejects from the mechanism with a metallic ping. Lilian flicks her wrist and the break action gushes glittering aether. "You threw away Twilight." Lilian says. Her meaning is fully implicit.     '...'     Gebura lunges towards her, Lilian lets Winter Crow fall from her hand, and advances with her right foot to meet her. Night Mist, in her right hand, comes out from behind her body, where she'd turned to avoid Chesed's flight, and the blade swarms with black-gold motes of distortion, held closely to the metal.     She stomps. Twists her step. Hand to pommel. Blade splitting air. A dull boom, crack, gunshot slap, and whistling shriek, and Mimicry crashes against Night Mist with a flash and bang like lightning and thunder; and Night Mist holds, cold and unyielding black-red. All its heat has been wicked away into the air already, by the time acceleration magic Lilian had kept going behind her back.     "You're not going to kill him. Or me. And you're not going to die." Lilian says through grit teeth, able to hold the clash for only a moment. "When it comes to protecting people, you're only so-so. The one thing you could be called good at is holding on to the people who care about you." The two swords are forced away. Lilian reels back, but quickly finds her footing. "Until the very moment you know that they don't. Even if you're tied up. And it drives you insane that no one notices."     §Mimicry again. No other weapons. She's realized that I've studied them all; she won't get me with versatility and surprise, so she's committing to the one she knows best. That's good; it means she's wounded enough to have to stop taking risks. That's also bad; it means she's keeping nothing in reserve. I don't have a better option but to lay into her as well; I'll get crushed if I play it safe.§
Lilian Rook	Lilian steps directly into the clash, and the floor scorches under her footwork. "Ar Luas Lasrach Roinnte!". The air reeks of ozone. Lilian slips through the first few strikes so quickly that the air buzzes like the near miss of a bullet, too. The afterimages of her sword seem to parry as much as the actual blade, darting between each blow with blinding flashes like arcs of electricity. Mimicry warps around one counter, and curves organically around her sword. The metallic edge skates down Lilian's gauntlet and goes straight to her head. She mirrors her grip just before it clears her arm.     "Céad Chogadh Bláthanna!" Lilian strikes the flat of Mimicry with her elbow, and pulls Night Mist under it, sparking edge to edge as they pass over one another. Holding the fulcrum of her weapon to her center of gravity, Lilian flourishes the blade around herself with a sudden drop in her stance, too quickly to see, and six-- thirty-- two hundred overlapping red-magenta arcs fractalize into the air around her, repulsing a dozen of Mimicry's unpredictable slashes through sheer weight of coverage.     Gebura's grip tightens, and the full weight of one of her blows bashes through. Lilian parries it without moving, then another and another as Gebura adjusts, blinking between fighting postures without so much as twitching muscles before. Pieces of armour fall away from stress fractures in her right arm. Lilian guides one blow just loosely enough to clip her leg on the way down; her knee twitches, but Mimicry passes free, towards her lead ankle and--     "Seascann Ceilte dá Coiscéim!" Lilian steps on the flat of Gebura's twisting sword with perfectly synchronized speed. She leaps, another step, up the vastly larger weapon, and her footwork flows along the contours of the organic weapon like heavy-settling mist. Two more, and she lunges past Gebura's head, Night Mist flashing out to her side, across her mask, leaving Lilian's left hand empty as she soars past her. She twists in mid-air, parries a followup with both hands straining against the blade, her feet braced to a console wall, and then skips free into the air, allowing Mimicry to destroy the machinery instead.     "Taoide Fáinne Fí!" Lilian throws her entire body into a retrograde aerial whirl that strikes Gebura thirty-odd times before she's even begun to fall. Particles of gravity magic mingle with red mist and sword sparks into a spiralling whirlpool around her. The weight of each successive blow is heavier and heavier; blocking is like being dragged down under them. Lilian strikes the ground as she lands, and the molten floor splashes away from her, sloughing away in concentric ripples. Something in her ankle cracks. She hopes that it's armour.     "Tormáil in Aghaidh na Haille!" Lilian lunges upward. The second uppercut of the fight blinds Gebura with liquid metal instead of sparks, but the flashing reversal is the same, cleaving the ceiling, floor, and corridor behind her with a clean line faster than its own percussive shockwave. Gebura has seen it before, so Lilian only uses the time to- "Stailc Gearradh Sgàil!" -thrust Night Mist into Mimicry's shadow, damaging and briefly halting her weapon to stall her assault.     'Ms. Rook? Can you hear me?'     §Yes. Okay. I'm trusting you. Moving. She is.§     As Rita surges over to Chesed, Lilian ceases fighting Gebura's strength, letting her break free immediately stead of a tenth of a second later by force. Using her low stance, she transitions smoothly into a deadly, tighly-wound crouch. "Dóiteáin Fiáin Bhí Seilg!"
Lilian Rook	§I just used this one. You know what it does; you took a lot of damage from it before. So you know its weakness is its long wind-up. What a 'miscalculation' on my part. You have just enough time to rush past me and save Chesed.§     Lilian is banking on Rita being right. Her angle of attack is lined up to take her right into the Safety level dead drop and hurriedly recharge what little of her energy and health she has time for. She'll have to burn more precious power to dodge from this position if she isn't.          §Talk to me, Kali. I've figured you out. All you have to do is go a little further, and I can tell you what you've wanted so badly to hear since the very first loop.§
Petra Soroka	Inside the triage ward, Kukuru grapples with the stress of being a pre-penicillin field doctor. She focuses as much of her attention as she can on this one patient, leeching goo where it swells out to start consuming the employee's flesh, chipping away at the overgrown infection inside of them, but the longer she spends keeping this particular person back from the brink, the worse the condition of the others she's neglecting get. What *is* she supposed to do about wounds that get worse when she turns her attention away? It'd be easier to just execute this person to guarantee that the rest don't die, wouldn't it?     ... Lobotomy Corporation *sucks*. Maybe she could manage both if she overextended the capabilities of her nanites, risking her own health and exhausting herself, but who knows how much longer she'll have to keep this going?     A dual Meltdown, farther into the Tree of Light than the facility has ever gotten, while Abnormalities run rampant and agents desperately work to keep them in line, causes the Enkephalin levels of the facility to fluctuate wildly. The raw energy being output, manipulated, disturbed, and spent over the course of the workday causes increasingly unpredictable aberrations of Ordeals to crop up and cause havoc. Knowing this means that the Manager can categorize the thing that appears in the largest room in the facility, the lower level of Central Command, just behind where the Mountain of Smiling Bodies was, as The Ordeal of Green Midnight', but not actually explain what it does.     The domed matte-black metal machine that thrusts its way out of the ground is patterned with hexagons and slick with amniotic green fluid. The two halves of the dome crack open, grinding slowly apart to reveal an extending bifuricated pillar, studded with glowing green vials and charging up an intense light that hurts your teeth to be near. It's probably bad, if it's allowed to fire, but it charges slowly.     Meanwhile, the Mountain of Smiling Bodies is bounding its way forwards through ever-extending hallways, legs scraping on the floor and gouging lines in the gothic stone that Ivy wills into existence. It presses its face mindlessly into Unzan's hands, gnashing its massive teeth against it like a chained dog, trying to crush Hibiki inside of it at the same time. Eventually, tearing through the net, the hands, bowling over Woz, and getting enough momentum to lurch into the Welfare chamber that was only seconds away until the Elites' efforts dragged it out to minutes, it rushes to slobber up the uncharred mangled limbs left by Dimensional Refraction Variant, blood leaking between its chipped teeth like drool.     Hibiki, inside, is covered in blood, and only some of it is her own. Not only is there no armor inside of the Mountain of Smiling Bodies' mouth, so that she can tear freely through pound after pound of pulpy flesh, but her presence and thrashing prey-violence traps whatever... 'tongue' the Mountain would be using to scoop corpses up to swallow. Like a cat failing to lick up a treat from the floor, the Mountain of Smiling Bodies pounces after limb after limb, only to have most of them incinerated by Sougo before it can properly swallow them.
Petra Soroka	There's too many scraps of bodies, scattered too widely, to keep *all* of them out of its reach though, especially when Sougo and the rest have to deal with dodging its bulk as it crashes around, and Hibiki has to take the occasional break from punching to tighten her grip and resist being swallowed. Eventually, then, it manages to slurp up enough to pause and tremble in place, meat-mass warping and writhing around on its surface, before it suddenly swells in size.     Becoming taller, much more than the amount of material that it actually consumed, is only half of what the Mountain of Smiling Bodies adds when phase-changing. Extruding out of the opposite side of its amorphous body from its mouth comes a second tumorous extension of the Abnormality, attached like an ant's thorax, complete with more rotting faces and gnashing mouths. It's that *second* half that Shinmyoumaru slams with her hammer, and Sarracenia explodes and leaps onto, and within moments of appearing the equivalently-threatening phase two segment has shrunken down to half the size of the first one, with Sarracenia riding on top. There's only a short time until it resists the magic and regrows, but until then, the new mouth is only as threatening as an Abnormality tiers lower in danger capacity.     After finishing feeding and growing, Mountain of Smiling Bodies turns its attention upwards, to the hole in the ceiling that Rita made by throwing Chesed. Right around where Gebura and Lilian are still dueling. Charging through the Elites battering it, the colossal mound of flesh and hard organic plate leaps with shocking strength upwards, latching on to the edge of the hole with its teeth and tearing it wider and wider open. Its dozens-- far more than before-- of legs scrabble up into Safety department, pulling it up to where it could cause a massive disruption to the Meltdown plan if the Elites don't stop it.     Petra follows it up, climbing a series of morphmetal stairs that form in the instant her feet need to land on them, and jumps onto its back. The blade of her spear flattens into a razor sharp shovel, digging into the space where Pillar of Creation was buried and carving open a hole for her to reach in and tear it out, soaked end to end with ichor. She's about to jump into Safety to help keep the Mountain of Smiling Bodies from successfully interfering, but then she catches peripheral sight of not one, but two gooey pink girls, and gets an instinctual bad feeling.     "I'll-- I'll go deal with Green Midnight; I'm not sure if I can do it alone." She does sever a cluster of legs with her morphmetal as she dives down, because she'd feel bad about not helping if she didn't.
Angela	''Who else?'' Gebura chuckles. It's wistful this time. ''Get up! Do your job and escort Chesed out!'' Baba startles awake and grabs the Chesed orb and stuffs him against the pillow they've been carrying. "I told Mikey to wake me up for the Meltdown!!" They complain (he tried and Baba just fell back eep). "Uggh my ear's ringing like crazy..." ''I'd wondered what was going through your head when we spoke of Rita.'' "...I figured at first she must be like Nothing There. Just pretending. Thought you were delusional. Was worried. ... Then I talked to her and I started feeling delusional myself." ''Didn't you demand that Angela let you leave the facility so that you could protect her? To protect me?'' ''Because he loves you enough right now to h4elp you.'' "..I..." Gebura doesn't have an answer to this either. She struggles to reject the claims and cannot. Lilian catches her with a full salvo from Winter Crow in the process, cracks spreading across the armor. But the battle can still go on even with Gebura put on the backfoot. One mistake at the wrong time from Lilian could spell her doom, but Gebura's movements are becoming easier to predict. It's been a long time since she's fought an enemy like Lilian so no matter the difference between their strength and power, the Dame Commander is not rusted. There is something to Myo's angry insistence that she didn't like seeing Gebura like this. To see her at her peak... But that peak wasn't sustainable, this isn't her true body, and even her abnormal strength is starting to fail her. ''You threw away Twilight.'' "Don't resonate as well with it." Gebura says. "Too fast, holding me back." This isn't entirely wrong but it isn't entirely right either. If Mimicry is what remains of a stranger that loved her, she wants to fight with that. Twilight is just a cudgel. And she has noticed. Lilian's seen through those weapons. Mimicry is the one Each straining motion to keep up with Lilian's speed results in sparking clashes of gold fractures and red mist dancing through the sky, black wisps about them highlighting the brightness. That's right, Gebura thinks as she makes contact against Night Mist again. She defeated the Purple Tear not by breaking through her guard but by hitting that guard repeatedly with enough strength that DAMAGE reverberated through the guard and punished her anyway. Perfect parries don't protect you if your arm breaks in the act of it. ''When it comes to protecting people, you're only so-so.'' "Tch!" A milisecond slower, Lilian is able to get back. ''Until the one thing you could be called good at is holding on to the people who care about you. Until the moment you know that they don't. ... It drives you insane that nobody notices.'' Gebura screams furiously as Lilian strikes her emotional weak spot harder than Night Mist can cut--and Night Mist is very very good at cutting. Each strike from Gebura moves faster--she isn't amateurish enough to go wild by more than milimeters, but the speed and force between each strike is faster. Their armors are falling apart, but Lilian is winning the exchanges. Twenty aerial whirls punch through Gebura's defenses and a blindning uppercut catches Gebura in one eye. It's fine, it's my bad eye. Gebura thinks as the flashing blade catches her there. And then Nihgt Mist attacks--the shadow--and Gebura's blade halts for a moment. This gives time for Lilian to have some mental chatter with Rita.
Angela	Then Lilian makes a foolish move. She drops into THAT move. Like she's going to fall for it again. She'll get hit by anything once, but the second time's going to be significantly-- Wait. Her eyes turn towards the Abnormalities swarming Baba who is holding Chesed for dear life and they have no way to escape. The Abnormalities are acting strangely. It isn't that they wouldn't go after a Sephirah if given the chance, but Abnormalities don't usually work together like this unless they are resonating with one another--and while any two of them might have been explained, three is far too strange. Gebura realizes, then, that Lilian wasn't being foolish--of course she wasn't, it would have been a trap if nothing else--but this isn't a trap either. She's letting her... Hold on to something. Gebura moves away from Lilian. There is scarcely any reluctance. Judgement Bird is the weakest so she darts forward, throwing a kick at its enlongated it neck--that's two Abnormalities down as head is shorn from the rest of its body and the scales tumble off its neck to the floor. It too reverts to egg form. One-- Tentacles! Two left. Gebura lashes out with her foot to kick the Chesed orb behind her. Despite being berserk, Gebura doesn't seem to have forgotten her protective instincts towards Chesed despite everything she's saying. She is about to strike Melting Love but jumps back as a cloud of pink bursts out from Melting Love--like she could just sense when it was coming, actually leaping moments BEFORE that cloud erupted. She darts in, digging Mimicry into the creature's chest a moment later and going for a bisecting move. Tough to tell with Melting Love but that should do it. One left. The tentacles are moving in. ''Rita casts a shaky look back over her shoulder at her allies. Her smile is rueful. "There were a lot of things I meant to say before now," She says. "I wanted to be honest, with everyone. I wanted to say sorry. I lied to you. And it's going to be ugly. But even if you hate me, please don't look away. Soon there's going to be no going back." No she's not... It's Rita. Stop, stop, stop yourself. Even Gebura isn't strong enough to just casually deflect that many tentacles and she's too worn down from her battle with Lilian to catch them all in an ideal way. It's as Tamamo warned, she can't fight for the world--or fight the world--forever and ever without blunting her edge without someone to care for her. She's able to handle three but the last tentacle goes right through her arm and tearing it off. Gebura's wounds are starting to look a little bit like in that video with her battle against Binah. "...Rita..." Gebura says softly. "...You gonna apologize for lying again? You asked me to not look away...You think I'm gonna start just cause I'm like this...?" The rest of her helmet shatters away, revealing Gebura's good eye looking right into Rita's.
Angela	''Rita Ma says, 'I'm so sorry Ms. Gebura, you're just...' A contented sigh follows. 'You're kind of sweet, aren't you?'' ''Rita Ma says, ''I'd thought so, but it's nice to find out for sure.'' Gebura just looks at Rita. She doesn't strike at anything. The fight seems to be rapidly draining from her, already pushed to the limit thanks to Lilian Rook slowly dismantling her. If it hadn't been for her, who knows how Gebura would've reacted? Maybe tried to pick the fight with Rita instead. But that doesn't happen. Instead Gebura swallows. "...You're kind of sweet, aren't you?" Gebura says slowly, pushed to her limit that she has to focus on her words to get them exactly right--and she has to get them exactly right, today, or she'll never forgive herself. "...I thought so, but it's nice to find out for sure." She turns her head to Lilian. "You too. You intentionally left that opening..." ''I can tell you what you've wanted so badly to hear since the very first loop.'' She doesn't drop Mimicry. She'll hold onto it until she's dust. But she lowers her weapon, surrounded by tentacles. "...All of you... Yeah... I..." The Mountain of Smiling Bodies clambers up into Safety and Kali looks to it. She's so beat up, can she help, in the moment? "...Let's end this." She says, turning towards the Mountain.
Ivy Carrow	There's too may patients, too fast. Even the other warprunners are becoming infected enough that Luz can't help but worry about them. "Enough!" She spat, taking the time to structure another room. "Everyone, back. No more putting yourselves at risk..."     The treatment ward was already too full, and they couldn't just keep piling more infected in. Kukuru was overworked as it was--Luz diverted, spending her town time trying to treat the less infectious, to prevent them from getting worse. But, all she had was based triage tools and blood magic, better suited for keeping one from bleeding out than...     "Kukuru, we need to start amputating infected limbs." Luz hissed. It was like being back home again, and she hated it. "There's no point fixing the corruption if it takes this long. Rip out and destroy what's sick, if you can, and fix what's left..." Her eyes grew flint-sharp, and she drew out a bone-saw, while her assistant squeaked, ready to seek anesthetic. "Kill the cancer. Save the patient."     Meanwhile, Ivy's smile faded, as the mountain breached through the ceiling. In spite of everything, it was breaching through welfare, through so much. It'd nearly interrupted Gebura and Lilian. Just a little further, and she'd have...No, they'd have all failed the Dame Commander.     "...No."     Ivy breathed, in and out. For a moment, she was still. A drop of her blood fell from the sword, into a pool of gore at her feet.     Then, she was gone.     There were portals! At least, there had to be, those flashes of light, that blur of movement--too fast, too abrupt to be seen as anything more than a flicker of motion. A cut breached through one side of the smiling bodies, and then the other, it by it's centipede-like legs. A brief flicker of something flew over its top.     Ivy was there; flickering back into view just in front of it, just behind it, assessing, planning her next plan of attack--then flowing through it again and again and again.     And when the blood on her blade breached its 'skin,' its flesh itself erupted in red, spilling over in a writhing mass, decomposed muscles spasmed and seized. With each slice, a seething, angry curse leeched deeper into the mountain, forcing it to fight not Ivy, not lobotomy corporation, but its own grisly, implacable mass.
Kukuru	Spreading herself thin isn't working. Kukuru was expecting to have more time to get this one treated before the others' conditions could worsen, but even a token effort spread to the others proves to hamper her and Luz's progress on both fronts more than she'd like. Indeed, it would be easy to just cut this one loose and fix up all the others, and it's not like she hasn't already executed plenty of employees already in following Petra's earlier directions to prevent the infection from spreading. She even eyes her claws as she slices and scoops out another wad of that goo, feeling the tug in her chest to just push the claw in deeper for one quick second and move on to the next person. Unlike before, however, Melting Love's infection has already spread everywhere. Trying to execute all the infected employees at this point would just be a massive blow to morale without actually helping anyone or fixing anything. Besides, the Manager's trusting her with the task of treating all these members of the Lobotomy Corporation and, by extension, Concord family. Also, Luz raises a rather good point that reminds Kukuru that there is, in fact, an alternative to the all-or-nothing options that would be equally disastrous in different ways. "Amputating...? Oh yeah. We caaan do that, huh...? We can always stick them back on later." Humming softly as she rolls that idea around in her head, Kukuru nods at Luz lightly with an almost carefree look on her partially-melted face. "You're so smart~ Yeah, this should work way better than the old plan." Despite Kukuru's optimistic outlook with Luz's plan, she still can't hold back the growing pained expression on her face as the infection continues to spread. While she's slicing off infected limbs, she's simultaneously pouring even more of those nanites into the employees, pushing the rest of the healing juice out of her own body to make sure she can get them stabilized. It's certainly not looking good for her, and it's unlikely she'll even last much longer herself if the melting goop from wiping off her wrapped-up face is any indication.
Sarracenia	"Keep it away? How?!" Sarracenia says as she hangs on for dear life. Which is a bad thing when your ride is bashing you into walls and ceilings and going through phase changes.      'I'm not sure if I can do it alone.'      Sarracenia is surprised to hear Petra say such a thing. And somewhat worried. "...if...if you would like assistance..." she starts, but hesitates and does not finish the sentence. Petra would not want her help, anyway.      Then, Sarra realizes they are /in the room/ with Lilian and Gebura. Her fists tighten around her hammer. "Hibiki! If you can hear me, you better get somewhere safe in there!"      Sarra climbs up to the head of the beast even as a prismatic glow starts to form around the head of her hammer. "Go! We will ensure Lilian's battle is not...interrupted?"      The hammer's magic is already flowing, but Sarracenia stares a bit as Gebura or Kali or whoever they are turn toward MoSB. The prismatic glow flows down the giant hammer's handle and slowly over Sarracenia. With her makeshift hazard suit her clothes and hair can't do the usual slightly floaty thing, but soon the shimmering can be seen coming from her eyes beneath the gas mask. "Yes! Let us end this!" she agrees just before she starts swinging.      Like some kind of demonic possession she starts hammering away, and she can't quite contain a bit of maniacal laughter. Just letting it all go on such a disgusting creature after the day she has had feels good, and that's in addition to the general joy the princess gets out of smashing things with her DK Hammer. And she tries to hammer it back down the hole that Rita left in the floor. Perhaps all the way back down to Extraction if the floors can't handle all that mass and that magically overpowered hammering.
Timespace Riders	Something in one of Woz's mechanical arms gives out, and a jet of acrid smoke spews from a connecting joint. The momentary give is enough for the Mountain to get past him and knock him over. Sent hurtling by the impact, he skips twice across the floor, each one causing his unyielding metal armor plates to dig scores into the floor of the Welfare department, each one striking up sparks.     Zi-O swoops down and scoops him up, moments before he impacts with the wall. The two of them disappear through the hole in the ceiling, giving chase to the Mountain... I'll-- I'll go deal with Green Midnight; I'm not sure if I can do it alone.     "You won't have to," says a second (!) Zi-O from behind Petra, before jumping down to join her. His voice sounds breathy and winded, and his movements seem sluggish, but his spirit is as strong as ever. Where she fights with her morphmetal, he supports, burning the Ordeal just as he had the would-be sustenance for the Mountain.     Present!Zi-O and Woz, meanwhile...     FINISH TIME! BEYOND THE TIME!     Both prepare finishing strikes, intending to solve the issue of the Mountain by just knocking it back down the hole it crawled through. Even cats will eventually take the path of least resistance...     Zi-O's wings beat, carrying him into the air, and the air before his gauntlets begins to shimmer in a visible heat mirage. Purple sparks flicker and billow into lantern-like orbs.     A hiss like a lit torch permeates the hallway in the same instant a pillar of blinding purple light bleeds out from his outstretched hands.     Woz, at that same time, fires two heavy-duty winch hooks from his app-icon pauldrons, which rocket past the Mountain and Zi-O's plasma both, embedding themselves in the wall at the opposite end of the room.     The winch in his armor fires up and pulls him towards the Abnormality, through Zi-O's plasma such that his form is wreathed in burning purple energy. His extended foot is the center of a brief but brilliant new star, drawing the pillar into the point of impact for a spectacular explosion.                                    ETHER TIME BREAK!                                                                 KIKAI EXPLOSION!                                     The violent explosion sends both Riders sailing backwards, Woz regaining his balance with his three functioning manipulators and Zi-O finding his with a steadily timed beat of his wings. But will it be enough to gain even an inch back against the single-mindedly voracious Abnormality?
Rita Ma	Melting Love stays down. Judgement Bird crumples. And Rita can't hide her look of soft, heartbroken shock when Gebura speaks. Her once-vacuous eyes tinge bittersweet and water, and her shoulders draw in while her goo-tentacles shrink back. She looks to Lilian for approval- is this really okay? Is that enough catharsis?      "Ms. Gebura..." she murmurs, with a little tremble in her voice. "Aren't you going to defeat me? I thought you'd like getting to protect the ones you care about."      Her smile turns uneasily shy. It's an expression that doesn't belong on that gooey face. "Or is it that I'm one of the people you want to protect, too? ... Thank you." A robot probably can't be hurt by the goo, so Rita steps forward just as the Mountain appears, shamelessly wraps her arms around Gebura before adding in her tentacles, and suffuses her with a white healing glow. It's not perfect, but it'll give her the strength to fight the Mountain of Smiling Bodies.      "I believe in you, Ms. Gebura. And I'm glad you're here to look out for my friends." After pat-patting Chesed with a tentacle for his good work, Rita peels herself away drippily, takes two steps down the corridor, and then looks back.      "Max. Jenna. Sammy. Will. We have their names on the island's memorial, Ms. Gebura. Do you know their family names? I'll carve those, too." And then she's off...      ... to kneel by Nonon's side, lay a hand somewhere that isn't bare skin, and pulse healing energy into her too. Maybe not enough to get her back on her feet, but enough to keep her stable. "It's still me, Ms. Nonon. You'll be okay," she murmurs, in case she's still conscious.
Shinmyoumaru Sukuna	Shinmyoumaru has never had the Miracle Mallet react quite like that before and she's not eager to repeat it. It's still humming; she can feel it when she holds it, a vibration that runs up her arm, and her magic circle is beginning to spin faster, the secondary circle also picking up speed. She tucks the Mallet back up her sleeve, but the circle remains as active as ever. She can feel it pulling at her... she needs more practice. The Mallet was said to be able to do anything, after all... Seija told her it might take her a while to get it right, and Seija wouldn't lie to her. But she at least managed to keep the threat level down, a little, by keeping one of the... nodules? Segments? of the Mountain of Smiling Bodies small. She'll take credit for *that* at least. "Hit here!" she calls, her voice raised as it tries to pull itself up. It's hardly even aiming at her, but it hardly even needs to. The sheer mass of swinging lower body of the Mountain clips the side of Shinmyoumaru's bowl; it rattles her even if it doesn't knock her out of it, and she reflexively slams the 'lid' down, hiding completely within it. The bowl floats, still, for several seconds. The Mountain pulls ahead. And then Shinmyoumaru peeks back out. It's chasing - "Do you want my help?" Shinmyoumaru calls to Petra. She's gooey too, but not nearly so much; she's menacing with fewer spikes of ooze and more slightly flushed and she is trying not to think about her sweat, which is being extra gross right now. She starts to follow Petra, but doesn't get all the way there before the Mountain of Smiling Bodies is just in the way. Rather than shrink herself - she doesn't want to use the Mallet right now - Shinmyoumaru instead pauses, focusing on her danmaku. She has the thing...! Shinmyoumaru sweeps her needle, releasing a ring of little bullets all the way around her. But as they move a little gap in them begins to open; a bullet that moves differently, drifting in a sweeping movement to cover a different angle, but leaves a gap where an enterprising shrine maiden or someone of equivalent size could fit right between and avoid the rest of the packed arc. Barely. If they timed it right. She's aimed the gap right where Ichirin is; spherical balls of energy pass past her on the left and right without - quite - touching her. Then another wave, at a different angle. This one is broken to avoid Zi-O's impact point, raining down alongside but not into him. A third wave, this one gapped for Sarracenia (though this one is particularly tight, and one pellet hits her hammer, bursting harmlessly). And another wave, and another, and another, coming faster as it accelerates. It's a spellcard; designed for artistry as well as effectiveness, but it can't be impossible. Well, it can't be impossible for a person. Shinmyoumaru has chosen it because there is no way under heaven and earth that the massive Mountain of Smiling Bodies can possibly even come close to fitting through the tiny gaps. Only then does she prepare to follow Petra, unless told not to. She'll have to hustle to catch up, though - but she is flying, so she has an advantage there.
Hibiki Tachibana	Being soaked in blood isn't a terribly uncommon occurrence for Hibiki, so much so that she's more or less inured to it given her usual lack of self-care; being soaked in blood that isn't hers is way more unpleasant, but at least it's from laying punishment into the ALEPH's body more than anything else. At first, anyway. One benefit of doing this is that if she's the one trying to get eaten, it can't effectively get at anyone else.     But she still can only do so much to stop it from gathering up limbs and remains as time drags on, and it's when she's once again putting her back into not getting crushed between its powerful jaws that she can feel more than see - given her current situation - the Mountain's body beginning to shudder and and shift. "What the hell--" She starts, before her eyes go wide and she doubles over in another fit of wet, slimy hacking that nearly makes her lose her grip completely.     Which would be awful, with the even more massive Abnormality now clambering its way up into Safety. Even fighting an entirely different sort of battle than everyone on the outside, she doesn't need to know or see anything else to have an idea it can't be going anywhere but to cause even more trouble. Heaving for air and hanging on for her life, she swallows down the next batch of pink gunk that tries to force its way out, and grits her teeth.     "Fine... if that's how it is..." Hibiki's right arm might be half-goop by now, but it's still able to tense up while straining against the Abnormality's biting, while her other hand shifts over to grip onto the half-cylinder of her gauntlet. The machinery gets physically pried back up to the elbow, and then further still-- the metal audibly agonizing over being stressed past its normal limits.     She can vaguely hear Sarracenia's warning, out there. She can hear other voices too. Despite how obscenely unwise doing this in the first place looked, she never had any intention of not making it back out there with them.     "...You're not getting... any farther than this--!"     Her right arm pulls away, just for a heavy wind-up before she belts it up into the roof of the Abnormality's mouth with all of her weight behind it, smashing into the unprotected flesh hard enough that she'll threaten to make its front half jolt up meters off the floor when it connects. That'd be enough to give anything pause for a moment...     ...but as ever, the real danger is when the piston of her gauntlet /slams/ in immediately after the impact, delivering a second one focused on the same point - an upwards eruption of raw kinetic energy that'll blast through the Abnormality's body, visibly rip out the other side in a shockwave, and an instant after--     All the force carries through in an all-but-literally explosive effort to punch a gigantic exit out of the Mountain's body, and obliterate a considerable portion of its mass in the process.
UFO Gang	Maybe they should have gone after the limbs after all. But speaking of limbs - Unzan's thunderous rumble grows louder and firmer as the Mountain struggles, but the strength of stormwinds and fierce motion can only prevail so much. Perhaps wind could bring storm or erode mountains but this one is made of flesh - it lives - it SEETHES. And it's getting bigger. That's the really awful thing, or so Ichirin might think if she was narrating her feelings aloud. There's too many dead people here already. Too many corpses, even if her disciplines means the sight of the dead can only be a surprise, not a trauma. Too much fuel for the thing. At least it didn't eat Hibiki, thinks Ichirin even as Unzan's strength fails him, at least for a moment - even though Shinmyoumaru shrank PART of the great creature, all it means is that its growth is arithemtical, not -- the other kind of growth that's way worse. (Ichirin doesn't know what an exponent is.) Guilt. Doubt. Hesitance, perhaps. Unzan swirls backwards, the pink cloud thickening around Ichirin. Guard and be guarded; but what good is it to watch one another's backs alone? What will happen if this great monster reaches the center? They've alluded to some kind of starting over. Rebirth, it seems. And to do it all again. It feels hopeless. Ichirin's head hangs, slightly. Perhaps it is hopeless. And yet:             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9bOkzkiuV4 Ichirin sucks in a deep breath as she makes a fist around the metal ring she's been waving around in her hand, as if it was assisting with guiding Unzan. (Maybe it's just a prop. Or something useful to bonk people with if she needs to.) There is a great detonation, casting bright light into the pink cloud. "She wouldn't have given up either," Ichirin resolves to herself. "C'mon!" And so, wrapped in pink fog so dense it seems like cotton-candy more than -- well - fog -- Ichirin flits forwards, after others. She sweeps to the side. Unzan is grazed by one of Shinmyoumaru's bullets but seems unharmed, unfurling to reveal the priestess-cargo within and expanding himself. He seems darker. Maybe he's getting the infection himself. It's a good question how that'd infect him. "Oh, so you do that too, huh?" Ichirin muses. "You're the first one outside of the group I've seen do that -- did you pick it up in 'that place' as well?" It's a little forced, but the question to the mallet of magicians (and shrine maidens) (that means Shinmyoumaru, it's METAPHOR) is a deliberate effort to lighten the mood. And considerately, she waits for Shinmyoumaru to complete her danmaku, clasping her hands before herself. "Good luck," she tells the smaller youkai, before her eyes turn back to the Mountain. Unzan thunders. (That does not usually happen.) "Okay-- my turn!" And Ichirin raises up that metal ring and tosses it lightly into the air. That's when the lightning strikes. Descending from Unzan's heavy cumulo-nimbus flurry, they are, in a sense, slow - you can see them streaking outwards, like the legends of Zeus himself throwing thunderbolts, and they do not behave as does lightning in a clear sky. That said, this space is not vast (though it's a little bigger than a hallway, that's for sure) and the Mountain is not exactly a petite little guy. Ichirin catches the ring and twists it around, a fanlike wave of luminous bullets streaking down as Unzan growls and glowers and brings his rage out for a second pass - a third - and a fourth, each of that supplemented with another burst of that barrage, the nyuudou(s?) raising upwards and back as they go. -- then a fifth one for encore! Ichirin seems to be sweating afterwards, muttering as she does, "Come on--"
Lilian Rook	'...You're kind of sweet, aren't you?'     '...I thought so, but it's nice to find out for sure.'     'You too. You intentionally left that opening...'     "How upsetting. I keep trying to anticipate you, then elevating my estimation on purpose, but you're always slightly smarter thank I think."     Rita's gamble pays off beyond Lilian's wildest expectations. Even she (returning with talisman in hand, sidearm loaded) looks more than slightly shocked at such an act of lucidity. "I'm too used to rating people lowly. It's hard to look you in the eye precisely." she says. She glances away from Gebura's shattered mask, then slowly to her eyes again. "Perfect, invincible people know that the most certain way to lose a fight is to lose your spirit. And I could tell from the start that you weren't fighting for all or nothing. You were fighting to be seen."     '...All of you... Yeah... I...'     Lilian plants Night Mist point down in the facility floor, and allows herself to lean against it. Her armour is cracked and crumbling way from the sheer amount of force it's been forced to channel away from Lilian, prioritizing the preservation of every bit of her fighting shape over her long term endurance.     Beside her waist, left shoulder and thigh, and her hands and feet, there's little of it actually left, either broken down to the bare second skin beneath, or rendered down to fragments. Even the relatively intact armour is still spiderwebbed with cracks; the golden insides of the layered metal create the illusion of already being filled in. Blood is dried to her forehead, right shoulder, and collarbone. The part of the head-guarding antler circuit clipped off previously has somehow already regrown, leaving only a fine gold seam.     She could keep fighting, without protection, for a little bit longer, but it's a sorry state in which to hold a serious talk. And still, wiping sweat from her face and flicking the droplets to vapourize on the floor, Lilian feels the grave need to say it. "I'd know. I've done it once before myself."     In the few moments of calm they have, Lilian gazes up through the hole from which they'd came; and the hole beyond that, to where she imagines Pluto might be in the sky; or perhaps where the sun is. "It was Persephone. That was my 'Meltdown'. That girl no one could be shitty enough to hate but me." Lilian says. "That was when I decided to end everything. Blow it all up, let it turn to dust, give up on protecting what little I'd scraped together and finally, finally, force everyone to look me in the eye and suffer the consequences. She didn't even do anything to me. It was her existence, all by itself, that made me realize I'd failed to protect anything. My friends, my life, myself, all of the changes that mattered."     Steadily catching her breath, Lilian yanks her sword out from the floor again. The sign that she's ready to continue. "For a little while, I really tried to kill her; to ruin her 'Carmen's' dream, too. I lost, of course; you've met her. And it was because I was looking for an 'out' since the start. I was desperately hoping I was wrong, about everything, and my spirit failed when I was finally given one." Lilian says, deep in the flow of reminiscence.
Lilian Rook	"You pulled yourself back from the brink better than I did. Lessy messy. You really are older than I am, hah. So, I hope you can understand this." Even with the rumbles of Mountain of Smiling Bodies starting to approach, Lilian looks over her shoulder. "I resented most of the things I was 'protecting'. Persephone lifted the veil from them; that they didn't want me, and I didn't want them. The part that hurt was that I was losing the things that mattered, and the people who cared about me, from trying to protect they and those that didn't. So. Does that help you figure it out?"     "You don't want a body that can fight forever, Kali. You shouldn't hate yourself having limits, either. This entire time, you've been screaming as loud as you can, that you don't want to protect a world that only uses you. What you want more than anything is to hold what little warmth you can find in this godforsaken City as close and tight as you can, and never let anything happen to it. This Meltdown is the only way you could think to rebel against the duties you hate and to do something for yourself, isn't it? The last time, you didn't, and it broke your heart."     "Rita cares about you. I care about you. I think even Angela cares about you. Some of Disciplinary, too; not the ones who look at you like Myo does. Tamamo cares, Persephone cares-- why would Xion waste her time on Binah? And Chesed, too. How many of the other Sefirah? What about Christopher?"     "And more than anything else, Carmen still cares about you! She talks about you! Stop trying to be fucking perfect, and stop lying to yourself, and being so impossible about what you want, and spend that strength on the people who love you enough to deserve it! You have them! Deal with it!"     '...Let's end this.'     Lilian huffs off the tail end of yelling. She hadn't noticed when she raised her voice. Yelling at herself by proxy a little felt good. Saying something that sappy to Gebura, after working so hard to break down her guard, feels just as heartening.     She looks like she wants to keep going, but the Mountain won't wait. Forcing her wearing muscles to work, Lilian turns to face it beside the others. "If you have any love for me at all, then let me protect you too. I know I'll need yours, when it comes time to take on The City. You know even better than I." she says.     A luminous green saccade streaks towards Mountain of Smiling Bodies. Lilian spreads her footing wide, tracing a full half circle with her toe as she orients her aim and gathers up power. The dust around her swells up from the floor, mist and blood and melted metal suspended in a sudden absence of gravity. Her sword settles perfectly horizontal, delineating the upper two thirds of Mountain from the bottom in her vision, and the intricate etchings along the length suddenly flood with gold.
Lilian Rook	Loose rubble is slowly pulled towards her. The ambient temperature spikes, coming off her in waves. Lilian waits for Mountain of Smiling Bodies to approach, hacked and battered and assailed from all sides. A razor thin ray of sunlight, defines a metaphysical horizon around her, drawn along every wall, piller, and inch of Abnormality around her. Night Mist crackles white-gold and the electronic instruments nearby fuzz out. There. Lilian breathes in sharply, then out, and the air that leaves through her teeth catches fire.     "Cleasanna Lilí Dubha!" Lilian rockets towards Mountain of Smiling bodies. The debris to either side of her flash melts. A scorching line is drawn across the department central. The band of light surrounding her doesn't lift or fall a millimeter, even as she winds her sword back to its limit. "Fáinne Gréine Óir!"     The followthrough is nigh-instantaneous; the sound is an earth-shaking roar of fire and air and shuddering metal that lasts longer than the strike itself. A tremendous, incandescent halo of cleaving solar fire, unfoldings from looping triplicate and erupts across the entire length of the Safety department, carving deep into every surface along the entire illuminated band. Mountain of Smiling Bodies, at point blank, receives the full force of all three blows, recursively layered through its flesh, and shocking its entire body with unfathomable flash-ignited heat.     Lilian weightlessly spirals away over the breach, landing on the other side with a flourish of swirling embers, surrounded by the rainbow-hued corona of direct sunlight. One more practiced exhalation lets out whistling flame, and dies back down into nothing.
Petra Soroka	"...if...if you would like assistance..."     Petra comes to a stop on the ruined floor of Welfare, hand frozen on her hip midmotion when she was moving. She waits for a second, for Sarracenia to finish her sentence, and then rolls her eyes and loudly clicks her tongue when she doesn't. "Figures." She unsticks, briskly walking towards the shattered entrance in the direction of Central command, completing the motion of drawing her transteam gun and clicking her Silver bottle into it. "Vaporize."     Glittering black mist pours out and covers her, announcing the transformation with a deep, gritty voice and an explosion of fireworks. The effect is immediately undercut by being jumpscared by timelooped Sougo and making a decidedly not-villainous 'wahh'. "Yeah-- yeah. Let's go. Thanks, Sougo."     The space around Green Midnight is oddly empty, after being cleared out for Lilian's duel. With most of the Abnormalities in the facility already suppressed, there's the awkwardly absent feeling of knowing there's meant to be more threat to this than there is, as Petra and Sougo tear mechanical chunks of varying technological significance out of the Ordeal. The problem is that two people, both exhausted and spent, can't damage race fast enough to avert Green Midnight's charged up beam.     There's also Schadenfreude, who got passed over in the duel, but the motion of running around the dome and tearing it apart means that Petra can't help glancing at the robot and bringing it to evil, violent life. Buzzsaws swing through the air, mechanical spider legs jab at them, but the two of them manage just fine against that. It's still just Green Midnight demanding their attention, and after a short time, Petra pieces together what its function is and nervously explains to Sougo. "Er, this one-- green's always mechanical of some kind, you know? So this one is a death laser, and it's-- just going to kill everyone in the facility, so we have to keep going.     The light shining from the cannon is searing radiation now, prickling on eyes and skin, by the time Shinmyoumaru shows up to help them. Metal parts strewn around disintegrate into alien ash once they're disconnected for a short time, rather than being eternally suppressed like Abnormalities are. Petra does something she's practically never had the chance, as Shinmyoumaru and Sougo keep chipping away at the machine, and winds up for a running start. Carried into the air by the propulsors on her calves, Petra-in-armor straightens her leg out, aligning the extended transteam rifle with it, and crashes into the machine tower with a kick and an explosion of STEAM BREAK!, finishing it off and clearing away the other facility-wiping threat.
Petra Soroka	The Mountain of Smiling Bodies, once Shinmyoumaru's wish wears off and both halves of it return to full (enhanced) size, is a proper ALEPH tier threat even after being beaten for so long. If anything, unlike the rest of you, it seems to get stronger over time, as blood and bodies are digested and converted into mass and brute rage. It fights its way wildly up and out of the hole, pushing with sheer strength to force the hole Rita made wider, snapping at Elites who try to hinder it with terrifying strength.     Danmaku and Rider Kicks knock it down again, but it keeps gripping on to the edges of the pit with its legs, and the wider scale danmaku can't aim for the exact weak points between keratinized plating and spiky growths. Hammering it feels practically unsatisfying, with how her berserk strikes aren't controlled enough to not occasionally slam against an armor plate and send numbing shockwaves up Sarracenia's arms, and the pillowlike squelch of hitting pure meat is hardly better. It's not that it's ineffective; it's that it more than doubled its mass when evolving, so the emotional impact of feeling like you're struggling to make progress, that you're comparatively smaller, is especially acute right now.     Ivy's blood curse is strong enough to sway the smaller grinding, gaping mouths all over each segment of Mountain of Smiling bodies. In addition to muscle twitches making it lose hard-fought traction in its climb, the mouths try to gnaw of Mountain of Smiling bodies' own limbschewing ceaselessly even if what they catch is theoretically part of the same body.     Gebura shifting her stance to face towards the Mountain rather than towards Lilian is as good a sign as any to let its breaching instincts slip, near to the end their rope as the Elites already are. Mountain of Smiling bodies absolutely looms over her, and Lilian too, head and shoulders and even a full body taller than her, now that it's grown in size. Its attention is pointed towards Information, charging through Safety to get to the corpses left behind and snowball even further into bloodlust. Unfortunately, standing united between the Mountain of Smiling Bodies and Information department, is Lilian, the Red Mist, and Rita.     There's almost no Abnormality that can hope to overcome the Red Mist on her own, and though a ramped up Mountain of Smiling Bodies might be one, it certainly can't manage against the Red Mist and allies. Hibiki punches her way through the skin to emerge in the spray of gore just before the two sword users cleave the weakened Abnormality in half, sending it back to its cell in egg form, finally, at the end of the meltdown.
Angela	''Aren't you going to defeat me? I thought you'd like getting to protect the ones you care about.'' "...Yeah, doesn't mean I need to swing a sword at you does it?" Gebura says, refusing to look Rita in the eye. ''Or is it that I'm one of the people you want to protect too?'' "Hardly need it, but yeah." Gebura refuses to look Rita in the eye EVEN MORE. "You got me. You're the one who told me to look so... I can't help what I see. Don't pout or anything--" She's not looking NOW for reasons a lot stupider than not wanting to see spooky tentacles. But she eventually manages to look back to Rita as she recounts the name. That's too important to be stupid about. She remembers them all, Gebura thinks, a tear welling up there. She actually does care for her people. "Folks here usually only have one name." Gebura manages. Nonon is pretty badly beat up along with the rest of her team--Shajo's hurt too, but he can be treated as can anyone else Rita cares to look out for. Gebura didn't murder them she just stopped short of murder and Nonon is even better off. "Oh hey, Rita." Nonon says dizzily. "Was thinkin'...When our work here's over, Shajo wanted to get married and we thought that lovely island if that'd be okay..." "God, you're a sight for sore eyes..." Shajo manages. "If you're here that means we won right?" Did everyone win? Can this be called a victory? It's not really over yet even as the fighting seems to be dying down. There's a TON of infected people who are going to need some serious care--but for all intents and purposes the MELTDOWN portion of the day is over and the fighting will shortly be too. The Facility itself is slow to understand that victory has been claimed over the most impossible scenario the facility has ever faced in every other loop.
Angela	''You're always slightly smarter than I think.'' "...You too." Gebura admits. "And stronger. I ain't trying to underestimate you..." ''You were fighting to be seen...'' Gebura makes an uncomfortable noise in the back of her throat. She was fighting to be seen, but it's still strange and unreal to BE seen. Could Gebura keep fighting? Certainly, but she can't talk any more than this. It's as Lilian said--she's defeated in the spirit and if she fights any more she really will have to be ground to dust before she stops. The fight was important, but the understanding was even more important. The real reason it had to be Lilian, had to be Rita--it is simple. They understood. And they saw. And yes, they were strong enough too but strength wasn't enough. ''It was Persephone. That was my 'Meltdown' "...You've been there... Hah... aHah... We think our pain is so special but it's always been paved before by someone. If we're lucky enough we get to meet 'em. Or unlucky enough, I don't even know..." Her body shakes and creaks. A memory of Rita's warmth, that little gesture of care that she was told that she couldn't keep sharp without, gives her the strength to step forward, approaching Lilian. Is the fight over? Is it going to continue? They're just talking right now. A conversation like adults might have. A frank discussion reasonable people might have. "Yeah... Against something like that, people like us just don't stand a chance." Another small laugh, wracked with pain. And relief. ''You really are older than I am.'' "You pulled yourself out faster. To think something like this could stop everything for so long... Yeah, I started to resent everyone here. The facility. Everything and then..." She trails off and Lilian fills the gap. ''The last time, you didn't, and it broke your heart.'' "...Yeah. I acted as a perfect Fixer oughta and lost everything again and again... I've been such a fool." Lilian is able to list the people who care about Gebura before she can, even the people who care about BINAH before she can and it's kind of a relief. If someone as shitty as Binah can be cared about, really-- "If someone can care about Binah, anybody can be loved..." Gebura says, like this is a sage realization. ''Carmen still cares about you!'' Gebura looks to Lilian. She still...cares? You can't hear this, Kali, but I always have. I hope one day you can, you big nut. ... Also you have a nice ass. Gebura doesn't hear that. But she does hear what Lilian what she yells at herself by proxy. ''You have them! Deal with it!'' "...Yeah. Let's get out of this loop and see what the future looks like." Gebura manages a crooked smile. SHe knows this form won't last forever but it will last until the day is done. She rests a hand briefly on Chesed who, for once, elects to not tease his friend. The Mountain won't wait. Gebura still only has one arm. She gives one nod to Lilian's request. "...Yeah let's fight together. Between the two of us and those who care for us... heh, I really feel like we could take on the whole City like that." "Onrush." Gebura says. Her attack names are simple things. She surges forward, Mimicry lashing out at the Mountain in simple but fierce and quick strikes across its body as he body pushes on pass, ending behind the creature, the remains of her destroyed arm hanging by her side as she moves on. It is simple, but don't take that to be unskilled--the surging crimson lashing out at the Abnormality is in perfect sync with Lilian's own tremendous and brilliant assault--almost like it was made to.
Angela	Gradually, a rising cheer fills Lobotomy Corp in spite of the infected Agents and Clerks, in spite of the bodies, in spite of the fact that the Mountain of Smiling Bodies hasn't quite fallen yet. There will still be people to treat in the Welfare department to cure them of their Melting Love infections--and plenty of people who just need old fashioned healing... But the long and impossible battle is ending. Gebura, for the first time in nearly a hundred thousand loops, is stepping into the future. Thanks to Lilian. Thanks to Rita. And thanks to everyone who kept the facility in one piece. Everyone had to play their part for this to not end in unacceptable tragedy. And they did. The facility is in shambles, there's more holes in it than there are in swiss cheese. Most of the agents are at least a LITTLE wounded and plenty more are badly hurt or infected. It's going to be a long time before the facility is working at full capacity again--fortunately the Enkephalin boost between two Alephs should help tremendously, but EVERYBODY's beat up, sore, tired, and EMOTIONALLY exhausted. And triumphant. Something has changed within the facility that despite how difficult every Meltdown has been up to now, despite how difficult THIS meltdown has been... A new feeling rises up within the Agents and the Sephirah--a hope that Angela has been nursing and feeding ever since her first meeting with the Dame Commander Lilian Rook. Hope. ... ... ...However... Imperceptibly, a small device carefully loaded into Angela's computer some time ago (not Angela) shorts itself out and evaporates. Elsewhere... "Well, that Yuri did her job." The words come from a woman with long black hair, strange purple eyes, and a little smug smile. She is looking at a pad herself, not unlike the ones that the Sephirah keep popping up on. But on her pad is a clear view of Gebura being embraced by a tentacle monster (Rita) and healed just a little (but still definitely missing that limb). She rewinds back to watch Lilian's tricks and strikes as they clash against Gebura's EGO Weapons and Gebura herself. "And it paid off better than I expected..." The woman tells herself. "I suppose I owe her one. Hm hm hm..." She scrolls back forward, getting a nice view of that golden flood Lilian unleashed. "Well, I'm glad she has style. Having a consistent color scheme makes things easier." She sets down the pad and thinks to herself for a moment. Once she uploads this, it looks like she'll be able to turn her attention to the Desire Grand Prix. There's two paths that she sees that MAY lead her to the world that she wants. The world she has been searching for all this time. And if not... "Well if not..." The strange woman says to herself. "How was it put exactly? Oh right--" All the space in the world is mine.
Sarracenia	'Figures.'      Sarracenia bristles. Hard. "Figures?! That I would hesitate to offer help again to someone who clearly would not want help from me and is likely to throw the offer back in my face?! Like you did last time?! Why would I make that mistake twice?!"      The princess is enraged enough to shout that even while she is hammering away, even as Petra likely runs off to deal with the other threat. And between that and the effort of the hammering Sarracenia is battered badly by Mountain of Smiling Bodies before Lilian and Gebura finish it off.      The princess lands hard having been atop the creature, and just lies there trembling in both pain and rage. Fists and teeth clenched. Eyes closed tightly. She just lies there. She doesn't know what else to do, and doing anything risks her having her own enrage phase. She's tired, battered, dripping bits of pink goo, and now feeling very unappreciated. Not to mention she's dressed in perhaps the worst outfit she has ever worn.      Eventually she does get back to her feet. They won, it seems. She just stands there, probably looking like some kind of clean up worker in her gas mask and yellow rain poncho and green rubber overalls. She just stands there for a long time, trying to keep people from hearing or seeing the trickling tears and occasional sniffle beneath her mask.      She needs a hero, or even just a friend, but...she has none. Not here, and perhaps not anywhere at this point. She hears some of what Lilian and Gebura are talking about, but it's all hazy in her current state. Eventually, she wanders in the general direction of the warp gate, dragging her hammer behind her with the sounds of metal scraping on flooring.      Only to come to a slow stop again as she realizes she is still somewhat gooey and has to wait until that is cleared up unless she wants to endanger everyone some more. This leads to more quiet standing and staring at nothing. Eventually she starts helping with clean up where she can, but it's all robotic and silent helping.
Rita Ma	"Hey, Ms. Nonon," Rita mumbles with a smile, sinking from her knees onto her hip and then laying down onto her side. Now that the worst is over and her worries are assuaged she's realizing her head is swimming. Her body aches, and the aroma of blood should make her ravenous but she's stuffed from Melting Love so it's just intoxicating instead, and her body aches from exertion...      "Yeah. That'd be wonderful, Ms. Nonon. The flowers are blooming, and everyone would love to see you again, and..."      She curls up almost like a cat between Nonon and Shajo, gooey tentacles wrapped around herself. "... yeah. Everything's okay, Mr. Shajo. Ms. Gebura seemed really happy. Thank you for being so brave..."      Rita yawns. Her body glows faintly from within, and the goo drips off her bit-by-bit, but that only wears her out more. "And, and..."      Whatever else she meant to say, it's swallowed up by a contented sigh, and then her eyes drift shut.      "Thank you for helping my friend, Ms. Rook. You really are perfect," she thinks at Lilian. Almost like the Queen, but so much gentler in ways that aren't just sleepiness. And to Gebura: "I'm glad I could help you be okay, Ms. Gebura. You caring about me... it makes me feel like I could be a good person."      Zzz...
Hibiki Tachibana	Hibiki, thankfully, is not part of the gorepile that the Mountain of Smiling Bodies becomes before its re-eggening, especially after Lilian and Gebura get their hands on it. She's just covered in a whole lot of it after her destructive exit, so that when she comes down on unsteady feet down in Safety, she's kind of a mess. A mess that's half-melting pink slime, coated in decaying flesh, and barely able to stay on her feet after expending so much energy doing that dumb shit.     So she doesn't. All it really takes is a glance back over her shoulder, at the sight of Gebura standing alongside the others, at Rita there, at Lilian winding down from her strike, at everyone else still around... and she goes from slumping against the wall to collapsing down onto the floor, her mahou shoujo transformation vanishing in a flash of light.     Not quite a literal puddle just yet, even if she's getting there. But with the Meltdowns finally ended, Melting Love's infection can be taken care of properly. So she'll be fine. Probably. Might take a while to forget how crappy it feels to vomit slime. Or get out the smell of corpse.     Not that that's on her mind right now anyway, as much as the washing wave of relief that they've gotten over another of these overwhelming ordeals. "...'M glad..." She murmurs to nobody but herself, letting out a burbling exhale while closing her eyes. "...Made it... you pulled through too, Chesed..."     Please exercise great care when hauling her off to the triage room.
Timespace Riders	Er, this one-- green's always mechanical of some kind, you know? So this one is a death laser, and it's-- just going to kill everyone in the facility, so we have to keep going.     "Got it," says Zi-O. "I think I've got enough left in the tank for a marathon." Not a sprint--but with Petra here, he doesn't have to run one any more than she would. His sturdy metal wings fold and spread out seemingly just in time to keep himself and her safe from Schadenfreude, all the while taking potshots with his plasma blasts until she can do her finisher.     The present!Zi-O and his retainer are used to struggling to make progress, especially where the company is concerend. The Jester of Nihil wasn't long ago at all.     But both of them know the emotional truth behind what the future!Zi-O told Petra moments ago--thanks in large part to the counsel of the woman fighting Gebura, although not thanks to her alone.     Progress is a marathon, too--a grueling thing that feels like it's going to go on forever. No matter how many times your feet bounce down the road, your surroundings never seem to change but for the up-down, and the burn in your calves and chest never seems any easier to bear. Like a kind of meditation, you focus only on what's in front of you, only on the next step and the step after that, and not on the maddening sprawl of how many more might await you or how many runners are ahead of you or how hopelessly far ahead they are. All that matters is that next step, and getting a few inches closer--     If a few inches means one more Clerk makes it... A few inches towards a more meaningful, less wasted tomorrow is...     The two of them give chase, as the Abnormality changes tracks--Zi-O, carrying Woz via flight, for the latter's present form and its emphasison strength and hardiness over speed. The retainer is gently deposited--for urgency is no longer quite as needed when they arrive. Their arrival, as it happens, is just in time to see the 'killing' blow struck, but more than that. It's in time, too, to see the fruits of all of that hard work. Of all the bruises suffered today and the planning done before, of all the reasoning and pleading.      Gebura, her weapon turned not towards Lilian, but the Mountain.     ...worth it.     "As always," says Woz, arriving with his Demon King in time to see the Mountain sent back to its cell, "It was an honor to fight alongside you, my Demon King."     "Thanks, Woz. We did good, didn't we? Everything is... well, not *over,* but calming down. I need to go back and help Petra really quick," says Zi-O, one hand on Woz's shoulder. "I'll catch up with you in a second."     The retainer's wrench-adorned helmet dips in acknowledgment. "Of course, sire." The retainer places a hand over his machined metal breastplate, indulging in a bow at the waist. "I shall begin assisting in cleanup posthaste."     As Zi-O disappears in a column of pink, traveling into the recent past to assist Petra, Woz changes forms to the purple ninja-themed Shinobi armor, strikes a hand-seal, and disappears himself, in a little puff of smoke. There's still work to be done, but for today, at least, it's downhill from here.