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Marigold      CITY OF JUTEAUX, CAPITAL OF THE WESTERN ISLES
     A safe distance from Lord Arcard's manor.

     Per the plan to smash Etrurian control of the Isles once and for all, Roy's army and Echidna's rallied rebels lay low until you've opened up Lord Arcard's manor. That gives you a couple of hours to filter in and sightsee or do legwork until nightfall. Your reputation hasn't reached here yet, and so aside from whatever gawking or prodding questions from passersby your individual appearances might provoke, you can roam in peace.

     It's a pretty nice city! Juteaux had walls once, perhaps a marker of an earlier colonial period. Now the city has spilled past them, and the old walls lay mossy and crumbling as little more than a landmark between traditional masonry-and-thatch Fibernian construction and near-modern Etrurian architecture.

     That also marks the point where the markets' offerings go from potatoes to grapes, from cottons to silks, and from 'locally-made rough goods' to 'pricier, piracy-thinned imports'. But despite the cultural and economic mismatch, the local Fibernians don't seem particularly anxious or cowed. Whatever's happening to their countrymen, it isn't happening here, where it could ruin the nobles' countryside view.

     Tagging along with you are Fir, her father, and (as requested) Sue. All three are armed, which only gets a few stares, and the latter is leading her pony by the reins down the cobblestone streets.

     Fir's father- his name, you find out, is Bartre- looks more like a laborer or perhaps a bodybuilder than a warrior, but he's self-professedly glad to have her in arm's reach to "look out for her" (Fir rolls her eyes). He's the one who knows the city best, and takes the party's lead.

     But Fir, now that the heartfelt reunion period is over, would rather talk to her peer. As the group walks by a fountain-decorated plaza:
     "So, I bet you're wondering how I learned Sacaen sword-arts!"
     ". . ."
     "Well, it all goes back to my mother. There's a famous sword that was passed down in her family! And her brother Karel wanted it, so he dueled all his--"
     "Karla was your mother?"
     "Oh!! You've heard of her?!"
     "And a fine woman she was! You've got to hear how we met. It was--"
     "Fatherrrr!"
     "Go on."
     "No! Don't go on! I'm making friends and you're embarrassing me!"
Marigold      Finally the group comes to Lord Arcard's manor around eveningtime. It's an elegant smooth-masonry-and-gabled-shingle building on a gentle grassy hill, surrounded by waist-height bushes and flowers that crowd gainst its walls; three stories high, with ample windows. That's it. The only tumor you have to cut out to put an end to the Isles' torment.

     Dysnomia peeping from above- once night falls, it'll be hard to see her against the dark sky- can see there's only a pair of spear-carrying guards who circle the mansion at fifteen-minute intervals together. It's enough to deter a burglar, but not an uprising. They must be confident.

     If Alucard uses his keen senses to peek through the windows, he can find a certain Etrurian nobleman talking with an unfamiliar mustached military commander talking over candlelight in a third-story room, but with many of the staff still awake he can't slip in without being detected.

     The most menacing member of that 'staff' is Ain, the empty-eyed 'un-man' you'd been warned about by Larum's intelligence network. He lives up to his creepy reputation. Gnarled with age, he still doesn't move stiffly, patrolling the first floor with a candle-holder in his hand to peer out through the windows. It's as if he's on patrol too.

     Magic oozes from him, but with one hand tucked inside his robe, it's impossible to tell whether he has a tome.

     When the stars are out and the legwork is done, it's as good a time to attack as any!
Alucard It is a shame, Alucard thinks, to bring war to this town. It reminds him, honestly, of Gresit before his father's war began. Before demonic creatures slinked through the town, murdering and eating people and turning it into a charnel house.

Are they going to turn Juteaux into an abattoir tonight?

The half-vampire slips along the hedges, using the darkness and the shadows to stay out of view as best he can. He is, sadly, not much for sneaking. He is far, far better at hitting people with lengths of metal to make their blood fall out.

He crouches as out of sight as he can, focusing on the window where Arcard is talking to The 'Stache. Here, he waits for the assault to begin, because he's going to do something stupid, probably.
Dysnomia     It took about a day for Dysnomia to get her intel--and it wasn't much. It grated on her like nothing else, that she didn't know what was through the gates of the mansion, that she didn't know the faces within the mansion, that she couldn't get a feel for this un-man.

    Her vision cut perfectly through the night air, masked against the dark sky. She could see so much.

    She could see so little that mattered.

<J-IC-Scene> Dysnomia's tone is businesslike and proper, "Guard is light. Two spearmen on patrol. Every fifteen minutes."
<J-IC-Scene> Dysnomia says, "Suggests they are unconcerned."
<J-IC-Scene> Dysnomia says, "...When you're in position, I'll signal when the patrol passes by."
<J-IC-Scene> Dysnomia says, "Proceed under the assumption that Ain is formidable enough that they feel safe."

    Flying above the manor, Dysnomia was a thin streak of smoke, somewhere between forms, concealed by the darkness, even the thin thread of Durandel's wound lost to the background of a starry expanse. Gradually, she took a wider sweep as the party approached the manor, angling to join them from an oblique angle when their assault began.

    
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Madeleine is, for all her experience as an assassin, most suited for infiltrating the palaces of gods, not men; and what's more, her preferred tactic is to lure a target away from their position of strength. Assaulting a mansion is not her specialty.

    Hiding behind a bush below one of the windows, she waits for the silhouette of Ain to pass by. Once the magician is decidedly finished checking that particular window Madeleine scurries back and pounces, knocking the window in with Drogrung's spear-butt just before her body would make contact and counting on her momentum to carry her forward onto Ain himself. She's trying to get in close, too close for him to safely or accurately apply his magic.
Echolalia Echolalia is really not subtle but she can, at the very least, get a pretty solid idea of the movements going on outside of the manor but inside's tougher. If Dysnomia's right--and why wouldn't she be? She's fucking amazing!--then there's like two guards with spears and like maybe some kind of super mage.

'Yooooooooooooooo!' Echolalia thinks. 'My undercover buddies of an arboreal persuasion! Let's make a show of it!'

That's when the trees and bushes start to rise up, roots and all, turning towards Arcard's manor and marching in on it, the branches growing more enlongated and wild as they close in and work on busting down walls and knocking out windows. Echolalia, sitting in one of those very trees, is eating an orange--skin and all, as she lays amongst the branches. When you don't really know the capabilities of whom you are dealing with, the best thing to do is go big before they can warm up and you have to find out.

This sort of chicanery takes Echolalia's attention to the point that she isn't really trying much else, but as the tree she's in punches through a window, Echolalia slides down the branch like she's Tarzan, aiming to make her way through that very same window to get inside. She doesn't know where Dysnomia intends to pop in through but she'll adjust if she ends up needing a hand.

'Hey Mia!' Echolalia telepathically transmits in her general direction. 'Iiiiii'm in! I'll do my best to help your new buddies out~.'
Petra Soroka     It's hard for Petra to convince herself to feel the upcoming danger of the battle, walking around Juteaux. It's one of the most normal cities the band's been to so far, at the moment-- pretty much everywhere else was consumed by the fires of war before they even got there!-- and the atmosphere of Elibe is as intoxicating as ever. Tense expressions from the others, and the occasional hushed tactical discussions keep her from *relaxing*, but between another faintly-slutty ren-faire outfit and her comfort in ambling around the shopping district, she'd plausibly blend in even if their lore *had* reached the city.

"Oh!! You've heard of her?!"

    So it's easy for Petra to get caught up in the small-talk too. She drifts near the girls, popping grapes into her mouth. "Oh, cool. Your mom's famous?"

<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "How's the vibes of the fucked up dark wizard looking?"
<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Like, you know, if we grab Arcard, does he look like he'd go "noooo, don't kill my boss" or would he cackle evilly and say this is the perfect time to kill both and take power for himself."
<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "You know. Tactically."
. . .
<J-IC-Scene> Alucard says, "I shall interrupt the meeting, I believe."
<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Mhm, I'll join what's-his-name doing that."
<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Since Arcard's separate from Ain, it's a good opportunity, I think."

    Shockingly, Petra *did* mean 'tactically'. She figures it's a win-win, on whether Ain is the hundredth person to pull a dramatic betrayal so far in this campaign, and either way, she'd want to have Arcard captive for it. If Ain pussies out and fumbles the hostage situation (She learned so much from the hostage situation recently! It's different, when it's to the bad guys.), then boom, that's a blow to the morale of their biggest threat. If not, and Arcard hears his scheming 'nyeh-heh-heh' that he'll *totally* do, then he might command the guards to attack his own wizard! Assuming that everyone (evil) in this world, as with every other, is an unprincipled cowardly shithead, allows Petra to plan for it.

    Outside the manor, Petra slides her Silver FullBottle out of her gun and shakes it up, releasing the blob of morphmetal in a coiling arc around herself. The smooth metal helix-shape stretches and angles itself towards the third floor window, forming curved stairs for Petra to start racing up, and when she reaches the top, the spring collapses upwards into her, catapulting her right through the window with a crash. She rolls to her feet, shakes her head like a dog to get the glass shards out of it, and then holds her transteam gun up for the Silver to snap back inside its cartridge.

    "Vaporize!"

    Once she's clad in the black and hexcomb-yellow armor of Sting Silver, and when Arcard *surely* demands to know who they are, Petra is ready to deliver the response that she came up with while walking through the city and has been smirking to herself about ever since:

    "We're *pirates*."
Khosa Khosa took the opportunity to investigate, as one does.

She actually disguised herself, though it's not much of a disguise; she's clearly identifiable as her, but she switched toward more local clothes. She dressed like a laborer, with sturdy dark trousers, the same kind of folded-over boot that Bartre has, a short-sleeved shirt, and - critically - a cloak with a hood. It goes a long way toward making her look less mostly-bald and hiding her pointed ears; she could pass for human if you don't look too carefully, though she's still too dark to be local and too big to not stand out anyway.

It also covers some of her gear. Khosa didn't bring weapons, but she did bring some additional equipment; a couple warding talismans, tucked out of sight against her skin, and a little flask of something in her pocket. Most importantly to her, she has cords bearing rough-cut crystals - quartz maybe? nothing especially valuable - which she's currently got wound around both wrists like peasant's jewelry, something between a bangle and a bracelet.

It's all the kind of thing she brings to handle defilers and dark mages. Khosa is here for Ain. She promised Echidna she wasn't going to back out and this is the job she was trained to do; of *course* she's here for it.

The town seems fine enough despite everything. Khosa is surprised, but not that surprised; she'd probably find something different if she want to the poorer areas, she thinks. At one point she buys an apple, more for the novelty than anything else, as Khosa is not especially familiar with fruit that comes from a tree that needs a lot of water to establish itself.

"I never learned much in the way of sword arts," she joins in the conversation, "but I've always found them interesting. I stick to hand to hand, maybe some big things to swing. Totally different style. When we have time, you'll have to show me some of yours!" She doesn't let Bartre embarrass Fir. (Too much. But she grins at Bartre over her head when she thinks Fir isn't looking.)
Khosa By the time evening falls, Khosa is ready. She's heard from the scouts, she knows more or less where she's going, and she has a target. She's trusting other people to handle Arcard and his guest because that's not her task.

She's done something to her eyes. They are shaped differently, the pupil larger, the colour more gold than the oxidized-copper green they normally are - almost birdlike. She doesn't need to get so close to watch Ain, and once she knows he's on the first floor she watches him from window to window. Khosa checks for psychic impressions - has anyone actively used psychic powers here lately? - and if the answer is no, she probes, at least enough to keep a mental 'eye' on Ain and whether he's alert or not. Maybe she can disorient him from here -

But then shit breaks loose. Khosa approaches the building proper at a run. 'A run' for her means as fast as a horse; if Sue is joining in the attack she'd actually have to push to keep up. She had been going to dig her way in, but if Echolalia is going to move the trees, she'd be stupid to not use them as a distraction.

A few seconds after Maddie breaks through the window, Khosa throws herself through it in a ball, tucking in. It's a good thing Madeleine already broke the glass because that means Khosa hits less of it, though mostly it doesn't cut her anyway as she manages to land in a skidding scrape; it does make a mess all across the floor as Khosa rears up, her eyes shining bright.

She simply dumps visual garbage into his mind, trying to overload his sense of vision with colours and lights and fractal patterns that cover up what he's actually seeing - enough that a tome would be unreadable and he might have trouble seeing the invaders clearly anyway. It's mostly a distraction, and won't last long against someone trained to focus their mind - which is why Khose steps forward and goes for a grab, simply trying to get one arm around his neck and choke, the quartz-ish crystals bound around her wrist glittering with more than just ambient light.

It's not the method she would have chosen for approach, entirely, but it doesn't need to be; Khosa can improvise, and it's not like she doesn't *like* direct action...
Odette Raskins "Sword-arts? A-ctually, kind of! Ah, if she was a famous swordfighter... Eh?! W-wait, what happened between her and her brother? Was it a cool duel? What happened to the sword?"

Tagging along for today's mission is Odette, space EMT with the dinky little half-cape in white with a little blue cross-ish motif on it. She's hanging onto Fir's story for the little bit that she's able to even talk about it, but Odette's attention drifts every which way between being interested in the story itself and also trying not to gawk at Bartre too much. As always, she's wearing her usual uniform with the jacket, skirt, cap, and big ass duffel bag. She's also carrying a gnarled wooden practice staff with her that doesn't really mesh with her more spacey-future aesthetic at all.

After spending the early hours scoping the area out for likely guard posts that are sure to swarm the Arcard's manor and the last hour looking for local snacks to sample (along with packing away a few to bring back for Lucius, the kid, and the mounted knights), it's time to get to work! Odette doesn't have much in the way of direct attacks to really work with, but what she does have is a healthy apprehension for clowns. After hearing about the existence of a certain clown over the radio, Odette's been reminded of more practical applications of some of her legally acquired chemicals.

Once Dysnomia signals that the patrols are out of the way, Odette moves for the front door. She immediately does a 180 and hides behind a convenient crate across the street when trees start messing with the walls and windows. Her fear reflex is strong, but she soon realizes that the moving foliage is... Friendly? Sure, why not. Still mildly jittery after that sight, she pops open several bottles of a clear, shiny fluid that's slippery as all hell and waits for her allies to filter inside.

"Psst.. Watch your step. This stuff's real slippery, so use the windows or the side entrances if we need to run." She warns, then starts spilling that stuff all over the ground outside the manor's front door.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's already in town, of course, having gotten just enough local clothing to pass for a local and having gotten just enough psychic work to take on the local minds. He's worked through the local garrison, and now it's time for the manor. Which is why he's making his way around one of the outer courtards. "See, the Psychonauts draw a really important distinction." He's explaining something to Lilian as things start up. "There's a-- hup!" A noise of physical effort. "A boundary between a person's identity and the actions they're currently taking. Intentions can't be changed ethically, not through any action besides healing. But *actions can*, and that's what we do. If a person's intention is to violently oppress, I can't just waltz into their brain and flip the switch to benevolence -- the consequences sprawl out. But I *am* allowed to flip the switch on their allegiance, and make them at least temporarily focus on violently-oppressing on our side. Or, to alter their perception temporarily, so that violently-oppressing means laying down their weapons and not lighting signal fires or yelling for help."

    Lilian, who he suggested come along for his effort to sneakily control key minds of the garrison and manor, has more than likely not asked any questions about this. Flamel is, emphatically, just rambling this crap unprompted. "Anyway, as long as we respect that regulatory boundary, we're pretty much in the clear. Most modern mind control secret societies respect it, or at least pretend to respect it. So that's why it's actually fine for us to change that guy's language processing."

    He wags one finger emphatically. "The knock-out neck-chop part doesn't count as mind control. That counts as assault and battery. We don't really regulate that a lot, and I'm sure he'll be fine." He can't keep wagging his finger -- he needs both arms to hoist the limp unconscious body of one of the guards and stuff him into a crate. He's doing this regardless of Lilian even having come along physically for this part. "HUUUP!" He heaves the man into the crate and closes it just enough to hide the shape. He briefly asides to one of the mind-controlled guards, "Hey, you get him out of this when we're done at the manor, okay?"

    He vanishes into invisibility again. With backup-calls negated, it's time to head inside and take on the un-human. He may be joining with the others on their chosen courses of entry, or may not -- the invisibility makes it hard to tell!
Blemishine     Well, it'd be in rather poor taste to appreciate any of the local architecture of Juteaux too much, on the day they're launching an attack. Assuming it'll all remain standing - and she hopes it will - she'll just have to save her thoughts on the mixture of Fibernian and Etrurian construction side-by-side like this for later.

    One would say that's so Maria could be /entirely/ mission focused, but that isn't quite true, at least when they're still on the lead-up period and waiting for nightfall. She's also readied for later herself, in her usual armor, with sword and shield at her side; while walking armed with the others doesn't draw too many eyes, trotting out in the open with the imposing mass of steel that is Durandal would be a little /too/ attention-grabbing.

    Besides, in this case, better in the hands of one of the swordsmen in Roy's retinue for when it's time to do their end of things. Leave it to the ones that may have to actually deal with wyverns in the sky, not their precision strike group at Arcard's manor.

    "Oh? It sounds like 'Karla' really was a woman of some renown! I didn't know - or maybe I should've, given your skills, ahaha." She chipperly intones to both Fir and Bartre when it comes up. It's not like the burly axeman would have taught that! "I'd very much like to hear that story later. Ooh, and about that famous sword too, please!?"

    Definitely not entirely mission focused.

    ...

    That'll change by the time the sun has set, and scouting has begun. Two spearmen. No active guard. Impossible to tell how many are prepared and ready on the inside, but it's reasonable to assume coming ahead of the news worked in their favor. Blemishine is much more concerned about Ain, the 'un-man' - with a description like the one they've been given, she can only assume he's enough of a dark mage to easily make up for a lack of conventional manpower.

    In other words, assume they'll still have trouble, surprise attack or no. With that in mind, she waits in low and obscured position behind some of the greenery, having been keeping track of the outside guards' routine herself...

    ...so that when some of the others get loud, she's in the perfect spot to intercept the both of them as they pass by; faster than an ordinary person could blink, a bash of her shield to the back of one helmeted head, followed by a sweep to knock the other one off of his feet - followed by a drop to a knee and a pommel strike with her blade to relieve him of the burden of being conscious.

    That should cut the possibility of either of them running off to get reinforcements once it becomes obvious the manor is under assault - and also spare Dysnomia from having to deal with them herself. The longer they have before help comes, the better.

    After that, she can hurry along towards the sounds of the rest making some very loud entrances, slipping in before Odette traps the front doors.
Desire Stars      Ace and Neon don't have the option of applying direct pressure to the situation--the moment either of them put their most prominent strengths forward, any element of stealth would necessarily be up in smoke. That doesn't mean neither of them can be subtle, however. While they're both still recognizably "Ace Ukiyo" and "Neon Kurama," they've each foregone their usual outfits in favor of more local clothes with Bartre's guidance.

     Neon in particular seems to light up when Fir mentions the story of how he and Karla met--but she does withdraw her agreement with Sue if Fir's protests continue.

     When the evening comes, the two of them wait with their backs against the exterior wall of the manor, Desire Drivers in hand and waiting.

     "Ace... do you think you could cover me when it starts?"

     Ace nods. "Yeah," he says.

     Neon fidgets nervously. "Good. I have an idea... but it might be dangerous. Thanks."
Lilian Rook     Lilian spends some time admiring the town, deeply contemplating the fascinating sight of the ancient wall, ruminating on its implications for the structure of the city, dissociating, not thinking about the implications, and then being as completely captivated by Bartre and Fir's father daughter duo act as she is leakily uncomfortable about it. She walks the streets a full half-person of distance more than she needs to from them, and idly hangs on every word, drinking in the banally normal interaction with a kind of faintly queasy awe.

    Deep into the walk around town, Lilian idly thinks to herself how great it is that she can just walk around anywhere like this, and not ever have to worry about standing out and being noticed, because of being seven feet tall or covered in fur or having glowing eyes. The more instinctive layer of her consciousness slaps her awake with the irrational and reflexive reminder to not be so comfortable in an assumption like that, and then she notices that she's standing right outside the manor.

    "I really don't like this. It's far too . . . simple." says Lilian Rook, patron saint of nothing can ever just be easy. "I understand that the man might be a fool, and overwhelmingly confident that the mechanisms of justice in his country will protect him from the consequences of his actions, and even that his enemies are too weak to pose a threat, as far as he knows, but . . ."

    She can't quite put the words to metaphorical pen. Lilian struggles through to saying "If it were me, I'd still do better than this." out loud, and then lapses into quietly frustrated silence not being able to articulate why she finds Arcard's lack of casual paranoia disturbing.

    Could it be that the way she was brought up wasn't actually--
    "He must be supremely confident in that dark mage. Take care."

    There's no need for her to creep through the bushes and bust through a window to lie in wait. If she needs to be there, she 'will'. Lilian remains concealed outside instead, comfortable in the dark night garden and able to watch carefully through the lit windows; and more importantly, feel 'Ain's' location by his approximate magic. It's been a while since she's brought a conventional firearm anywhere, but suspecting that a skilled mage would be able to sense her using Winter Crow, she's borrowed a carbine from work to provide overwatch in the probable case someone fucks everything up tremendously. Her attention is split between the Elites crashing into the meeting room and those on Ain below, but . . .
Marigold      "Oh, I'd love to show you, Khosa! Rutger's no fun, Roy's way behind me, Dieck and Echidna are just too different... nobody around here knows enough for me to impress them!"
     "You're cool," Sue objects, feeding her pony some grapes while they hide in an alleyway just out of the hilltop manor's sight.
     "Huh? You really think so?"
     "Karla taught you, so it's expected."
     "Hey...! Well, yeah, but I'm my own person..."

     "She trained all across the continent," Bartre says to Odette after winking to Khosa, "preparing for the day her brother would hunt her down for the family blade. That's how I met her! But in the end, even though she'd become the greatest swordswoman alive-" "Daaaad..." "It's true! But she talked him down, instead of fighting. It's that pure heart I loved the most."

     Where did the sword go? Bartre looks meaningfully at Fir, and smiles. Her exotic straight-backed single-edged blade is quite different from the ones Rutger carries.

     - - - -
Marigold      The two men talking business by candlelight on the manor's third story jolt, almost guiltily, when they hear breaking glass below. "What in the world?" "Arcard, your security is--"

     Then a small white girl and big green girl bust in. The lightly-armored commander staggers backward and fumbles to draw the saber at his hip while Arcard is too stunned to move. "Who dares?!" the noble demands, and when he's told 'pirates', he makes a venomously-spitting noise. "Well, Flaer? Kill them!" "Lord Arcard, you should--"

     Downstairs, Ain turns on Madeleine and Khosa almost lackadaisically. He doesn't look afraid. Actually, every muscle in his face is eerily slack- the man's like a zombie, in mind and soul as well as body. He's too slow to flinch away. Too slow to do anything but draw a gleaming fist-sized crystal from his robe.

     "Die," he breathes as Khosa's hand closes around his throat, and then--

     There's a fiery thunderclap. What windows are left intact explode outwards. Half the mansion is annihilated in an instant.

     A pillar of flames scrapes the sky, splits in half, and then spreads as wings. Screams ring through the town below.

     As the cloud of black smoke thins, a grisly red-scaled shape emerges from the mansion's carcass, two stories high at the shoulder.

     'Dragon, dragon, dragon'. That's what they're screaming, so far away, as shingles and masonry-bricks rain back down. Fire is its spine, and its wings, and its eyes, and foams in its mouth like rabid froth, as if the beast were fire, only resentfully wearing flesh.

     'Flaer' and Lord Arcard scramble backwards from the hole in the manor, barely spared from the violent transformation, and both immediately try to flee deeper into the building.


                              GRRAAAAUUUUUUUH!!!                              


     The roar, prickling skin and reverberating in bones like whalesong, is all the warning you get before it torches the manor's surroundings with a dense gout of fire from its lungs.

     "What's going on?! Is that a real dragon?! I have to--" "No, Fir! Stay down! Let them handle it!" Sue peeks the corner of the stone building they're behind, fires off an arrow at the beast's eye, misses by a quarter inch, and ducks back to safety after seeing it glance off steel-hard scales.

     https://youtu.be/y8-P9myfnFU
Dysnomia     Dysnomia saw Echolalia leap through the leap, with her...Swarm of trees come to life. Does she not know what 'infiltration' means? She complained to herself, as she absently, thoughtlessly, turned her flight path, minutely, to line up with Echo's breach.

    Later, she would tell herself it was an unhappy concidence with her flight's prior path. And she'd believe it, too--

    --Then, there was a blossoming fire. A cascade of fiery sharpnel carved through the air, briefly slashing through one of Mia's wings as it curved through the air. Momentarily, Dysnomia lagged, skirting sideways through the sky--

    Them, her body trembled. The air around her trembled, as though caught in a momentary heat wave. Mist congealed around her body--

    And she fell. Not like a piece of masonry, not like a plummeting archer, not even like boiling oil, but like a star, trailing light in a vivid afterimage behind her before she slammed, full force, into the side of the dragon-that-had-been-Ain with enough force to blow open the mansion a second time.

    "I thought we'd run into something like you..."

    When she fell amidst the scattered remains of the once grand home of Arcard, Dysnomia had half-dissolved. Her hair trailed behind her in long, wispy tangles. Her hands? gleamed with violet light near blinding, and mist roiled around her like a living thing, even as she landed in a three-point stance, not quite congealing into another shape. "Echolalia." She looked back at the other dragon. "You're with me."
Alucard One moment, Alucard is lurking behind some bushes, biding his time to turn into a giant bat and burst through the window. As Petra bodies herself through the glass, the dhampir rises, his body shimmering as he changes his shape. One mighty flap sends him skywards, and a rush of magic sends him -rocketing- towards the window after Petra.

This is all rudely interrupted by Ain transforming into a giant dragon, spewing fire everywhere. Luckily the magic keeps him rocketing through the air, so he doesn't get brutally roasted, but instead only receives a light toasting. It's still quite unpleasant. Still smoking from the fire blast, he rockets through the wrecked window, his body shifting back to humanoid. His boots hit the floor and skid as he bleeds momentum, his sword just seeming to bloom in his hand.

An ironic turn of phrase given the animate trees and plants outside.

"I am with you, Miss Petra. They must not escape."

He says that and, of course, tears off after Arcard and his 'pal'. He rounds the corner into the hallway, catching sight of them as they're running. Two knives appear in his free hand, and he throws them with speed and precision. If he doesn't miss, they'll really know they're being chased, but that just makes the hunt more exciting.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's invisible approach doesn't help when the encounter is so explosive. When things get bad, all anyone gets to see is him flickering out of invisibility abruptly, shouting, "HOLY--!!" Before, maybe, a fraction of a second of a spherical barrier, encasing him and maybe the nearest random staff-member, guard or not.

    Masonry falls heavily to one side. His eyes are wide, fearful. "No. No way..." Arms fall to his sides limply as he looks up. "An Eliberian dragon...?" He'd only heard about that in the legends, seen it in the ancient memories. Oh god, those old memories. He shoves masonry aside telekinetically, and breaks into a levitating dash to evade fire. Skimming on open ruin, he rushes the dragon. Holy shit, this HEAT! It's too much! He flickers invisible, drifts his telekinetic bracing out through something that used to be a door, and tries to flank to one of the less superheated parts of the dragon's facing.

    "Stop! STOP!!" He shouts, flashing into visibility again. Two hands are planted on his temples, and a dozen translucent hands of light rush to grab, wrestle, strike, even claw and chop, all in spite of the searing heat that would burn them away. "What are you doing?! Where did you-- how are you even here?! The last dragon was killed in Bern, a thousand years ago!! What *are* you?! And-- and you have to stop! Who knows how many innocent people are here!" Flamel's own brand of heroposting is perhaps the least-developed, given how little he takes the role. It's just desperate shouting. Did dragons ever make any distinctions between combatants and noncombatants? It's likely not.
Odette Raskins So far, so good. Everyone's gotten in safely enough, the door's secured against any guards trying to rush in from the outside, and all that's left is the matter of Arcard. Odette breathes a light sigh of relief, then takes a deep breath to calm herself and prepare for what's to come seconds before the windows all explode and the mansion turns into a pyre.

"D-d-duh... Dragon!" The EMT screams out along with those screaming further outside, staring in abject terror at something she's never seen so close before. As the debris starts falling and the flames come, she snaps out of it soon enough and starts rushing in the opposite direction, leaping off one of the wrecked doors to get over her own trap to get to where Fir, Bartre, and Sue are waiting. She hisses painfully as the heat of the flames starts to wash past her, then yelps when a mighty gust from the wings takes her right off her her feet and sends her sliding across the ground.

"S-s-st... Stay... Stay here! Gotta..." Rolling along the ground, Odette clutches the staff against herself tightly like it's some kind of precious thing, then shakily gets back up on her feet while looking around to survey the damage. "How're we supposed to fight that thing?! St.. Stun. R... Oh geez." With visibly shaking knees and audibly chattering teeth, Odette sees what Sue's trying to do via eyeshots, then scurries over with her hand already reaching into the duffel bag.

"Try the... H-here! Dip!" She pops the cork off a bottle of a highly toxic goop, then hands it to Sue while gesturing at Fir and Bartre to follow suit. "Don't get it on your hands! Just... A-aim high. Gotta get it into the eyes or mouth or somewhere in!" With that poison offered, Odette takes another shaky breath before going against her better instincts and running towards the remains of the manor. She's still not sure what she can actually do in a direct fight like that, but there's bound to be someone that needs healing! Allies from outside this world that need their wounds smothered in salve, locals that might need someone to cram painkillers directly into their bloodstreams, or...

She truly has no clue yet. Part of her is inwardly praying to find some kind of hidden weapon in there, too.
Echolalia Echolalia isn't expecting there to be a dragon around but, well, she isn't too surprised by one taking humanoid form for some reason.

Flame engulfs Echolalia and she is flung right back out the manor as the concussive force of the blast actually protects her somewhat by not leaving her within the inferno, leaving her to rapidly immolate. A bush at the rear runs around like a little goof before positioning itself right where Echolalia ends up landng, cushioning her fall.

She hears cries of dragon and, in pain, her eyes narrow into slits and her hands start to transform in glowing green claws when Dysnomia...

...Tells her to fight the dragon without revealing that she's an etherwyrm. Echolalia growls in frustration but the claws fade and she blinks until her eyes return to 'normal', then she reaches into her bag and draws out a large jug with the word STRYCHINE on it and, also, a big white skull and crossbones underneath that. She pops the cork off and takes one very long swig of it before depositing it back in her moderately scorched pack. Okay, she's feeling calmer. She wobbles a little but she's feeling calmer. Throwing more lumber on the fire would be silly so she just goes ahead and makes her back towards the dragon. She really doesn't want to hurt a dragon if she can help it but her love of all things draconic doesn't really extend to letting said dragons go around burning a town down. That would be very Paladin of her at all!

She thinks. She is actually not really sure what members of the Paladins are actually like yet aside from Calvin but he DID definitely indicate what the priorities ought to be.

As Echolalia gets closer, there's a brief bulge in her throat before she jerks her head back and pushes it forward, breathing out a huge swath of green flame and associated fumes towards the large fire dragon--though in this case, she's actually spitting fire at this dragon for the toxic fumes rather than in an attempt to actually fight fire with fire, trying to swell the air passage in his throat to make it more difficult to fling more fire everywhere else.

'Why are you doing this? These aren't bad people who wish you harm.' Echolalia reaches out because she has to give it a shot.
Madeleine Cadrasteia     'On top of the dragon' is not a good place to be when the dragon reveals that it is in fact a dragon. Whatever dark magic Madeleine was expecting, it wasn't this. A blast of heat and flame tosses her free of the mansion like a ragdoll, hurling her from the creature's rising back into a building across the way. Smouldering she rises from the shattered brickwork, bracing herself momentarily with Drogrung's haft. "You won't get me that easily!" she calls, though her words may be lost in the dragon's rampage. "You're JUST another monster!"

    Madeleine takes a running start through the shattered building and leaps across the street and over the manor's yard, thrusting her spear forward as she lands again on Ain's flank. Drogrung is more than an ordinary steel-tipped implement - hopefully the teeth of one dragon can pierce the hide of another...
Khosa "Might be interesting to get some practice in against that kind of swordfighting, if you're willing," Khosa said, thoughtfully, back then. "I can keep up. Just not with a sword."

But that was then, and this is now.

Khosa gets a hand on Ain and realizes he's up to something. She has no idea *what* he's up to, but there's no startle reaction when she pushes her telepathy, there's no flinch when she gets her hands on him. He *feels* like he should be the kind of scrawny old man Khosa wouldn't even need to work hard to overpower.

Which means she's immediately suspicious. She expects dark magic, especially when he tells her, right to her face, to die. Khosa pulls him with her when she moves to brace, as much a mental focus as a physical one -

But it's against the wrong kind of power.

Fire explodes outward, and Khosa, at ground zero, is lost in it. She can feel the heat as her cloak burns away in an instant, flash and flare and it's gone; her clothes aren't much better, nor is her flesh.

When fire and smoke clears, or at least thins, Khosa is still there. Her clothes have largely burned away except for tatters but it doesn't matter, because her entire body is covered in organic armour; rigid overlapping plates across her shoulders and down her back, while her front is more brown and red and black scales with the occasional plate-like node. Her legs and arms are covered too, though the plates are lighter there, some on the outside of her arms and upper legs but just scales further down. Her hands are clawed, though they still have the crystals wrapped around them like bracelets.

Khosa looks up at the dragon through a reptilian face. She's rarely had to shift so extensively, so quickly; there's extreme danger here and she just walked into it. Her expression is hard to read, but for a moment there's terror as Khosa thinks of the only dragon she's ever known - and then determination. Just to be here hurts, but she's used to pain. And this isn't the Dragon of the Tablelands no matter how much he wants to present himself as that kind of power.

She doesn't know Elibian mythology or history. She wasn't here for everything that came before. But she can damn well stop this mage before he burns the rest of the town she'd explored and liked, whether he's trying to do that or not.

"Okay," she half-says, half-growls, before throwing herself at the great dragon's back legs. Her hands shift bigger, the claws thickening along with the fingers as she dives forward and down, toward the back legs. Not to tear but to grip - and then her feet plant in the ruins of the castle, claws digging in, as Khosa tries to literally drag Ain back and hold him down in case he tries to fly.
Desire Stars      Broken glass rains from the mansion's shattered windows, clinking against the other side of the wall like rain after the initial thunderclap of the explosion.

     "That's my cue!"

                                  DESIRE DRIVER!                                

                                   Set! BEAT!                                  

                                  Set! MAGNUM!                                  

"Henshin."
"Heeen-shin!"

    Kamen Rider Na-Go, in the electric pink-blue Beat armor, runs up the wall and clears it, brandishing the flying-v guitar-axe just in time to see--"A dragon?!" Her sprinting advance halts, for just a moment. "It doesn't matter... we're here for Arcard!"

    She dashes forward as Kamen Rider Geats, in the white-red Magnum Armor, takes up a spot on the wall. Na-Go is lit up by the fire, her armor spraying sparks in every direction as she makes a dive to clear the flames, tucking and rolling after a strangled shout of pain escapes her.

    She vaults the remnants of the bushes and breaches the hole in the mansion wall with forward momentum, sliding across the floor and striking it with the Beat Axe once her momentum stops, propelling herself into the air and back onto her feet to try and pursue Flaer and Lord Arcard further in.

    As he'd promised to do, Geats covers her, his attention fixed on the most pressing threat here--that dragon.

                                     RIFLE!                                    

    Just as Sue had tried, Geats goes for a shot at the eye--but he pulls the weapon's red charging bolt backwards, starting an energy buildup at the muzzle. When his tracking puts the eye in the crosshairs of the scope, Geats pulls the trigger. A streak of red pierces the evening sky, promising to grab attention even if it fails to penetrate those thick scales. The roiling heat carries not only a tangible impact as it threatens to pierce, but an explosive aftershock.

                             MAGNUM TACTICAL SHOOT!                            
Petra Soroka > She figures it's a win-win,

    There was a third option, that Petra hadn't considered.

    For a moment, Petra's biggest problem was that the way her suit appeared on her, it trapped a little shard of glass she hadn't managed to dislodge in an awkward position, and she was worried that moving suddenly would make it cut into her skin. Looking at Mister Subpar-Moustache and Lord Arcard, giggling a little internally about how mad he gets about her super smart line, Petra has her back to front of the manor where Ain is, raising her armored hand as morphmetal drips down her fingers to form a lash that'll wrap around Arcard. A moment later, she's sprawled on all fours, vision clouded with ash that stains the back of her suit, scrambling to get her bearings as the flaming third floor creaks and crackles with strain.

    Droplets of scattered quicksilver sit like pristine stars among the scorched manor, sprayed away when Petra was thrown by the explosion. At her telekinetic command, they all start rising into the air, and several of them dart over to bean Arcard in the head like BB pellets, throwing him off while he tries to run. Petra pushes to her feet when Alucard flies into the room from one of the now-many holes punched through it, shouting to be heard over the sound of the dragon.

    "Yup! Fuck that other guy, though! We're past caring about losers in armor and shit! I'm gonna grab Arcard and shake him around until he spits up answers--!"

    Petra tears down the hallway after Arcard, the rest of her morphmetal finally catching up to magnetically accumulate around her fist. Her pursuit can't be as direct as she'd like, with any shortcut-creating application of force on the walls causing a groaning in the crumbling structure that sends a spike of fear up her spine, but with Alucard's help her pounding footsteps quickly catch up to him anyways. With a lunge, and an extension from the morphmetal around her hand, she grabs Arcard by the bicep and wrenches him backwards, throwing him to the floor and holding him down with a heavy sabaton.

    "Hey, jerkass! What the fuck is up with the dragon?! Did you make some kind of fucked-up deal with Zephiel?! Did you even *know* about this, or was your fucking pet wizard doing some weird apocalyptic scheming behind your dumb fucking back!"
Blemishine     Barely does Blemishine make it in, before a majority of the mansion goes up in flames and smoke.

    "Miss Odette--!" So close to her already, the first thing that she does is move to bodily defend for the field medic and help give her the chance to slip off towards Fir, Sue, and Barte - although that has limited effectiveness when she has to strive just to protect /herself/ from such a violent, sudden attack. The impact buckles into her shield hard enough to make her arm hurt. The heat washes over the rest of her body. Feet leave the ground, just to hurtle her back into a now-crumbling hard stone surface.

    Gritting her teeth as she staggers back to her feet, she's just in time to look at what's responsible - the looming, red-wreathed monster rising up, torching and scouring away at the formerly-green surroundings now being scorched black. and ashen. "A... dragon...? Ain was... a dragon...? How..."

    The 'un-man' wasn't called such for being too steeped in the dark arts... he was never a man in the first place. Is this another case of a 'false' dragon, like the thing that they found during Araphen? Or is this actually...

    It's too hot and heavy to pour over the details. After looking down at the blade in her hand, Blemishine grimaces and tightens her hold. There's no time to linger on how bringing a massive dragonslaying blade to a stealth operation would've actually been the correct call, but no point lingering on it. Lips pursed tight, she brings her hand up to her radio.

    "Lord Roy! How quickly could you have Shanna make the flight to deliver Durandal here?"
    "She could have it there in a minute! Hold on!!"
    "Thank you! Then, until then...!"

    They hold out. With a deep breath inward, Blemishine raises her shield aloft, and brings it to bear in front of her to shield her charge forward. With enough momentum gathered, knees buckle and she kicks off of the rubble-strewn flooring of what remains of this half of the manor, before buckling down and leaping up onto a shattered remnant of what used to be a wall.

    The extra verticality is needed when confronting something this gigantic, as it gives her the height needed to gain speed once again - and then jump once more, in open air.

    Wings, which would normally be a weak point, are simply masses of flame she can't near. These dragon scales are equally going to be hard to rend through. However, she might stand a chance of piercing through by rearing her blade backwards, the steel enveloped in glinting radiance...!

    ...and coming down with a two-handed, penetrating stab to dig her weapon into the side of the dragon, the magical hardlight acting as a searing edge to help embed itself into a gap between scales, before gravity kicks in and pulls her down its body to leave a long gash in its hide!
Lilian Rook     'Die'

    The sight of the crystal is reason enough for Lilian to bring her weapon to her shoulder; in lieu of a tome, it's the best target. The single word is reason enough for her pulse to spike, every fine hair to stand on end, and her finger to pull the trigger faster than conscious thought will tell her why. 'Khosa will live if I hit her' hasn't entered her mind by the time the whine-crack of the muzzle report reaches her ears; the wave of magical pressure reaches her first.

    The bullet reaches Ain second. Lilian doesn't see it vapourize in the hellish pyre. It's too bright to see something as trivial as that, and too hot to expose herself besides. She dives into cover just before the shockwave rolls overhead, and smoking, broken masonry begins landing all around her.

<J-IC-Scene> Madeleine Cadrasteia says, "He had some kind of - gem, that let him do this..."
<J-IC-Scene> Odette Raskins says, "How're we supposed to fight that thing?! St.. Stun. R... Oh geez."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Well I don't see it on him!"
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Maximum use of force is how! Christ I knew Durandal should have gone to--"
<J-IC-Scene> Blemishine firmly, "Lord Roy! How quickly could you have Shanna make the flight to deliver Durandal here?"
<J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Roy says, "She could have it there in a minute! Hold on!!"

    Yelling into her radio over the roar of the fire, Lilian tosses her rifle into the blaze and scrambles down the length of the garden ditch away from the gates, crouched nearly to the ground to keep herself just out of sight in the shadows cast by the hedges. She throws herself down again at the feeling of the roar hitting her in the ribs, instinct mistaking it for an explosion.

    'I thought we'd run into something like you...'
'What *are* you?! And-- and you have to stop! Who knows how many innocent people are here!'
'Why are you doing this? These aren't bad people who wish you harm.'

    The chaotic mingle of things that Lilian can pick out in the panic, by ear and by diffuse thought, tells her of more than enough to know that this situation; the one she'd never even thought to coach anyone for; is beyond her control. She doesn't even need to look up to know what moves around in the flaming ruins of the manor; its shadow is burned in behind her eyes, repeated over and over in the wave of terror rising from hundreds upon hundreds of onlookers.

    Dragon. Dragon. Dragon.

    The blast of fire comes next, and greenery is no cover at all. Concealment doesn't matter. The rolling terrain only shapes it. Lilian is in no position to leap from her prone position and vault over the wall; she vanishes on the very same spinal reflex as flinching away from burning hot metal just as the flames catch her.
Lilian Rook     Smoking armour clatters against stone. Lilian tumbles onto the street just away from the manor hill, breathing in only when she feels the cobblestones under her fingers. Her fingers are wrapped around her sword, but she hasn't even drawn it. Her eyes are focused wholly on the dragon's shadow stretched out before her.

    §It's too hot to get close. Even if I stop everything. Is that the power of a dragon? Or am I unable to imagine it not burning me? The heat and smoke are already interfering with my breathing; my lungs could rupture if try something stupid. I can guess how strong it must be from the battle signs along the trails in Lycia. How did the heroes kill it?§

    Lilian's thoughts are on something else completely as she performs the arcane manipulations necessary to convert her magic into a combat grade death ray completely by muscle memory. Blasting the fire dragon in center mass with the greater portion of her magical ability, her thoughts keep wandering even as her fingers stay busy.

    §Oh. I guess they didn't kill this one. Is this the reason why?§
Marigold      Alucard and Petra both shoot their shots. When the chase comes to a long hallway on the second floor, they have a clear chance. One knife bounces off Flaer's armor and the other sticks in Arcard's back as his head is pelted, who yelps and stumbles; the armored commander wheels around to protect the aristocrat with trembling blade. "Back! Back, I say!" His eyes dart between Petra, Alucard, and Neon anxiously. If it comes to further blows, he'll lose.

     "A show of power to keep you Fibernian whelps in line," Arcard hisses at Petra with pain-trembling voice, when she asks the dragon's purpose. "I see you're too stupid to take Zephiel's hint."

     Fortunately for Flaer's matchup odds, just then, a careless whip of the dragon's flaming tail carves through the manor and threatens to do the same to anyone inside. The tattered remains of its ceiling start to collapse.

     'Ain'- was that ever really his name? It feels obscene to put a human name on something like this. The dragon wades heedlessly into the group of Elites in the aftermath of that blistering inferno, slicing with claws like shortswords and angling its head like a viper to threaten stone-cracking bites.

     It's like a cat presented with a dozen mice.

     When someone proves too agile for its liking, it lashes out with the deflagration of its wings to force them back, like a cloak of roiling energy that could cook a person right through.

     Even when you do get hits in, past the whickering natural blades that batter dismissively and the sheets of skull-popping heat, the scales are like tesselated armor. Steel would rather bend than penetrate, and it's huge enough you'd have to dig through feet of flesh before hitting anything vital, and if you do gouge deeply its blood is fire too, splattering out in petty revenge.

     'Destruction given form', one of the Heroes had called them, in Durandal's memory. No wonder why.

     Grappling with it and poisoning it both seem more appealing, but they both face the issue of scale. This is double-digit tons of coiled muscle. Khosa and Flamel grappling slow it down, but it strains and lumbers against them for however long they dare to hold on, creeping towards the building where Sue, Fir, and Bartre are hiding.

     Down in the city, roof-fires are catching from embers or sheer convection. Panicked evacuees form human rivers in the streets to stream away from the manor-center, drowning out whatever fighting Roy and Echidna are locked in at the outskirts.

     "Got it," Sue tells Odette with breathless urgency, and glances up while pouring the poison all over a handful of arrows. "Sue!! Don't stick your head out there again! I think it saw us last ti--"

     One stomp with a fore-claw crushes most of their building in, and it looms above them. Bartre struggles to shield them from a huge piece of masonry rubble. Despite Fir's objections, she dashes up to spiral around its foreleg and then kick off, but her sword's dragging impact only amounts to sparks against scales; with the time the grapplers have bought her Sue takes aim at the dragon's open mouth with a terrible steadiness while her pony horse-shrieks in panic and puts three poisoned arrows into the roof of its mouth, but with unclear effect.
Marigold      Just as the crimson glow builds in its chest and Sue exhales what she expects to be her last breath, it's battered from several directions at once. Lilian's death-ray, Blemishine's plunging strike, and Ace's eye-shot batter it at the last instant, and it chokes back the flames. Instead it rounds on the greater threat again, prowling back towards the Elites sullenly. Flaming blood trickles down its legs and the side of its face, but it hasn't given the satisfaction of even a pained hiss, nor does it show a blind-spot.

     Psychic contact finds something, even if puddle-shallow and totally recalcitrant to pleas for mercy: 'The world belongs to my master. To cleanse it of vermin is my purpose. I know nothing else. I need nothing else. Burn.' Unless dragons are really as soulless as the Heroes said, it must be artificial.

     Most cover has been scoured away by now (oh, is this why they called it that?). The red flames that glow through its chest and boil up its throat, promising another regurgitated inferno, will be harder to dodge. One little spot of hope falls from the sky: Shanna, not daring to approach lower than a few hundred feet, hurls Durandal down towards Blemishine. It clatters to rest on a nearby rooftop. Her arm needs work.
Dysnomia     It's so hot. The burning rage of the dragon roiled over Mia, and she felt her whole body shimmer in the heat, as she fell to one knee, left in the burning husk of the manor. She hissed, the scent of ozone rising in the air, twining with the soot and ash from the flame, as mist roiled up around her, masking her from sight.

    She sent Echolalia a short message.

    The fog seized at the dragon, like a thousand intangible hands.
    The burning, incadescent flame of the dragon boiled it away--but but behind it was more. The mist shaped itself into hands--claws?--seizing at the dragon's incendiary scales. If the sheer scale of it was what made grappling so difficult, then maybe Dysnomia could tip the odds--

    --For those who knew her nature, the vague shapes gnashing in the clouds had its own meaning. A long trail of mist--a tail?--struggled to curl around the dragon, while a misty shape with two eyes a head? Seized at the things neck.

    But with every moment, the fire was burning away at Mia. Her body screamed at her--against tooth and arrow and claw, her body could just close the wound back up behind the wound. But this was absolute--the heat of it spread through her misty body, threatening to bleed her away into nothing through the pain of it all she held onto the image of Marcus in her head--of Echolalia--of Rita--as she made a deep, mournful noise in the depths of her body that could have been crying, if she'd had the tears to do so.

    She struggled to wrench the dragon, forcefully, away from Echolalia--away from Blemishine. Dysnomia knew, she couldn't hold this thing for long. It would burn her away to stardust, in moments. But if she could hold it back, for a momoment longer, a precious moment...!
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Hacking through the dragon's thick scales and flesh would take minutes, time Madeleine doesn't have. The heat forces her away, back onto the street level, and she decides to change up her approach. Drogrung curves and shifts into a bow and the huntress takes aim at the dragon's legs.

    As a bow, Drogrung does not have a draw weight so much as it has a strength of its own. This allows for a veritable stream of arrows as Madeleine draws and fires as quickly as she can, hoping to lodge enough projectiles in the enemy dragon's ankle to hinder its movements.
Echolalia ''The world belongs to my master. To cleanse it of vermin is my purpose. I know nothing else. I need nothing else. Burn.''

"Eh?" Echolalia asks. She has no reason to actually believe dragons are souless which would be a problem if they actually turned out to be because, boy, it's not like she knows the history.

She DOES know about the dragon-killing sword, though, because even Echolalia pays attention to things that are labeled 'Will Kill You Specifically'.

Fire is burning away Echolalia's options AND Mia still seems danged insistent she not 'reveal herself'. And at this point, even Echolalia isn't sure it'd be a good idea or not. The counterpoint, of course, to 'being careless' is that if she doesn't transform she might literally just die here. Echolalia can't take the kind of punishment Dysnomia has.

Covered in flame, her physical form rapidly drying out and deteriorating to the heat, Echolalia is racking her mind for options that isn't Get Big and Start Clawing And Biting In A Desperate Attempt To Not Burn To Ash.

She rolls on the floor to try and put out the flames but she's really struggling.

Dysnomia tells her to get the sword. Sword? WHat sword?

She catches sight of a little glimmer through the smoke and pain-filled haze.

She doesn't have plants to control except for the ones on her. And her focus ain't good enough like this to just make it work anyway. Fortunately, in this, she doesn't need anything more than what's on her body. Coughing and wheezing. She throws out her hand and vine whips out of her arm, curling around the handle of Durandal and snaps back sharply, swinging back towards Blemishine at high speeds. Echolalia is assuming Blemishine can do a cool maneuver to avoid getting sliced in the process of snagging the sword.

"Heads up hot horse lady!" Echolalia shouts before turning and seeing Dysnomia going in there to tank the dragon herself.

"Hypocrite...!" Echolalia complains before running towards the dragon, her arm enlongating in such a way it doesn't feel RIHT on her body, wrapped tightly in vines to protect it from the flames as a a draconic claw patterned in the colors of an aurora borealis aims to carve into the draconic visage of Ain--or whatever he really is. Or was.

Maybe nobody.

"This isn't what we're for..." She mutters under her breath as she starts to topple over due to matters of truly wild weight distribution.
Khosa Lilian is correct: Khosa could have taken that bullet. And almost did, except Lilian's aim is on point and it doesn't hit her; whether it hits Ain or not is beyond Khosa's knowledge.

(Khosa is still thinking of the dragon as Ain because it's easier than the alternative for her. If she convinces herself she isn't fighting a natural disaster - if she's fighting some*one*, and not some*thing* too big for a name - she can put her fear aside until later. Dragon. Dragon - and all the dragons she knows of are terrors.)

But him - it - *is* big. Khosa struggles, her clawed feet digging in to try to stop her from being pulled along by Ain, but she's forced to take a step now and again or simply be dragged along. She's leaving furrows behind her.

She's strong enough to lift this much, but it's a question of leverage and scale. Grappling the way she is is not going to succeed; he's so big that he can just drag himself along with his other three limbs and there's not a lot she can do about it no matter *how* strong she is.

And it hurts to even try; she feels a sizzle on her claws that is certainly either burning or melting, and she's holding her hands together by sheer willpower, rebuilding them as fast as they burn. She can handle the heat but it was never meant for anything like this.

The others are depending on her, though. She said she'd handle Ain. She'd told Echidna that directly. She promised. She *promised* - and to Khosa, a promise is a sacred bond. She knows the dragon is lashing out at the others; worse, it's going to destroy the town whether it means to or not. She might be willing to sacrifice the others in the manor; probably nobody would mind of Alcard died. The people who live here, not so much.

Gritting her teeth, Khosa does something she rarely does - she turns off her own sense of pain. The sudden clarity is a boon, because it helps her focus, but a bane, because she can no longer tell quite how hurt she's getting doing it. She has ways to tell, but she'd have to think about them.

"Oh no - you - don't," Khosa growls to herself, flooding her muscles with psychic power. It makes no visible change from the outside, but she's pushing herself about as far as she can go; whenever she moves, she has to be careful not to break her own bones or wrench them out of place, or splinter her carapace.

Khosa grunts with effort -

And the next time Ain takes a step, she lets him lift the leg she's holding onto. Once it's off the ground, *she* has the leverage, and she twists, every fiber of her body straining as she does it with a roar, attempting to half-lift and half-drag the rest of the dragon with her movement and using his own momentum against him; to tip the entire dragon up, onto its side, supporting the weight on her burning shoulders for an instant, the carapace scorched black already.

All of the weight.

Tons and tons of it; she won't let herself think about how hard it is, how much her hands and back are burning as she finishes the pivot, angling to slam Ain down on the dragon's side in the rubble of the walls (*not* the rest of the building) and hope a shard of stone or splintered mess of a tree does what she cannot - or at least stuns the dragon enough for everyone else to act.
Odette Raskins "M.. Miss Blemishine?!" Odette yelps as she gets shielded bodily by the same named knight, cowering behind her for several moments before remembering to do her job. That's right... Allies. Someone to heal. Someone to focus on. That's exactly what she needs right now, since trying to figure out what she could even personally do to the dragon is an exercise in futility until/unless she finds something miraculously convenient to fight with.

"If Ain was a... W-wait, wouldn't someone have noticed this whole time?!" She asks with a dumbfounded look on her face, then sighs lightly once things connect. "Of course... Not human, but for real!" Cursing silently at her own lack of foresight there, she digs a roll of medicated gauze out of her bag and nudges Blemishine's shoulder to uncork it. "This'll be cold, but it should help with the.. Uh. Surface burns!"

It really does feel chilly on contact, too, when Odette slaps that sticky square onto any exposed part of Blemishine she can find. "J-just don't go doing anything too crazy!" She warns, knowing full well that's not possible in this situation. She's one to speak, too, considering she's headed right back towards that building on the verge of collapse.

Or actual collapse, as the dragon's tail smashes right through it the moment Odette gets back over that fallen door. In a panic, she tries to flatten herself against the ground when she sees and hears the tail sweeping through, but that doesn't do her much good with the size difference. She screams silently as the impact and shockwave alone take her the ground, then sucks in another pained breath at actually hitting the ground some dozen feet away.

She doesn't get up right away after that, just taking the moment to catch her breath and fumble arund in her bagblindly. Feeling the carefully arranged labels and caps on each thing in there, she digs out an injector jabs it into her leg with barely a wince. The medical cocktail in there is enough to dull the physical pain and get her back on her feet, at least, but the destruction she's seeing is disheartening to say the least.

One thing at a time. There's injured to tend to. She can't help anyone make a full recovery, but she can give them the extra push that might mean the difference between life and death. She sees Geats and Na-Go, and she rushes over with more of those injector pens she had used on herself. "Adrenaline! Burn meds! A-and some other good stuff!"

It really is good stuff, too, and carefully balanced to not cause horrible overdoses. "And.. Guh. Commander Rook! Left hand up! Catch!" After calling that out without elaborating, she flings another injector over towards Lilian packed with energy-boosting meds and a lower concentration of that same pain dulling formula.

As for the dragon... What can Odette do to something that large? Trying to poison it with a dosage of anything is questionable at best, but what if instead... She threw in something to arrest the flames at the source? There's only one way to find out, and she digs out something that looks more like a brick than a grenade.

"Come oooon, don't blow up until it gets in there...!" Taking aim at the dragon, she scurries about like a field mouse in front of a cat as she tries to find a good angle to get it into the giant's mouth. When she thinks she does, she winds up briefly before baseball-hurling it up and forwards in the hopes of getting the dragon to swallow it. The payload: a rapidly expanding and rapidly hardening foam used for temporarily sealing hull-breaches.
Alucard Petra engages in grappling of Arcard. This leaves his 'friend' for Alucard to handle. In the baleful orange glow of the roaring flames, his sword gleams. The dhampir takes a step forward, golden eyes seeming to glow as the hot winds from the fires blows his long hair around like some sort of wicked halo.

"It ends here. You both will be coming with us as pri--"

The dragon lashes with its tail, wrecking the hallway and separating the son of Dracula from both Petra and the two men. He winces from the surge of heat, his clothes and skin starting to singe, loose wisps of his hair igniting and extinguishing. He moves to cross the new gap as the Kamen Rider arrives. He looks between Neo, Petra and the two wicked men. "I will leave them to you. It sounds like the dragon is being ... tiresome."

He hefts his blade in a brief salute, then turns, barreling through wrecked and weakened walls, running towards the grand melee. He releases his sword and it shoots out of a blasted window, hovering in midair. Alucard leaps after it, landing as deftly as the platonic ideal of a cat upon the flat of the enchanted blade.

His eyes glitter a copper color in the firelight as he starts to chant. He'd love to hit this thing with his sword, but even he cannot stand the flames directly. He reaches into his coat and pulls out .... a pocket watch? Magic swirls around him for a moment, and he focuses it into the watch. His thumb shifts, and he clicks it.

TOKI WO TOMARE

In a wave eminating from himself, time itself seems to freeze. At the very least, for beings strong of will and of mystical Weight, it certainly -slows-. Another benefit is that, at least for him while the bubble lasts, the fire seems to lose a little intensity. At worst, the dragon will slow enough that he should be able to draw a bead on a vulnerable area. He leaps from his floating sword, commanding it to come to his hand. The hilt slaps into his gloved palm as he hits the ground, and he literally races the clock.

The dhampir blurs as he approaches the dragon, leaping impossibly high as the power of the watch wanes. Time resumes in the bubble as Alucard lunges in midair, thrusting his blade at the beast's eye.

TOKI WA UGOKIDESU

This means as he falls, he is fully within chomping or barbeque range.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel struggles with the monster, telekinesis that could crush cars being no real match for a creature exerting many tons of force. It takes him off his telekinetic levitation, and eventually throws his grasp off completely. Then, Flamel has to evade becoming Enflamed. Unfortunately, inevitability strikes, engulfing him in a violent maelstrom of heat and pressure that consumes his entire body. Even after he gets a barrier up around his body and deprives his fire of flesh to burn, his physical shape has just been badly crisped with all kinds of damage.

    As the heat starts to disperse a little, the man, sweating and singed and grunting with pain, clenches his fists. "I'm getting nothing on this mind that I could hold onto right now! Barely *any* mind in there! Artificial, maybe? This *can't* be a true Eliberian dragon, but-- crap, this *heat!!*" Panting, sweating, he tries to get some distance, launching and drifting through the air to a nearby ruin. "Confusion grenades are a no-go, too few moving parts. Can't do spycraft to this. Can't telekinetically wrestle, too tough to blast apart. His mind is so *carved down* that I can't get inside..."

    He looks at the sword clattering down. His eyes go wide.

    No. There's one solution.

    "Get Durandal lodged in there, good and firm! I've got *one* idea to fix this!" He shouts, activating his levitation and invisibility, and levi-skiing at unbelievable speeds toward the titanic foe. "HEY!" He's shouting. "I've got vermin for you to go after! Some big, bright lights of humanity for you to extinguish for your master!"

    He ascends. A high arc, where gravity affects him less and less, until he's drifitng down onto the dragon from above and trying to clamp big telekinetic hands onto Ain's temples, coordinating a little with Dysnomia's wrestling. Another telekinetic hand holds... the psychoportal? Tuned to a deep-layer projection, the kind that's risky for the astral projectors in question. But Flamel can't get inside the un-human's mind, there's nothing to get into. What could he *possibly* be doing with it? Well, for now at least, he's focused on levitating just above the head of the beast and holding on, trying to wrench the skull around to redirect the flame-breath away from at-risk folks and to keep out of Khosa's impact zone. His plan will be tested plenty, soon.
Desire Stars Back! Back, I say!

    Na-Go lifts the Beat Axe, a promise to use it in the tightening of her grip and in the forward shift of her boot. Whatever she'd planned to say, whatever accusation or promise she'd planned to hurl at Arcard, is drowned out by the crash of mortar and replaced by a pained shriek. The tailwhip strikes the unsuspecting Rider dead in center-mass, lifting her off her feet and hurling her to the side.

    She manages to stick out the Beat Axe and hook the crumbling wall to keep her from getting flung all the way out of the estate, but still slides down and hits the floor stomach-first, groaning as a heavy piece of mortar strikes between the shoulder blades. Her HUD flashes warning about armor integrity, but the clink of the Beat Axe's sharp beard defiantly cracks the marred floor of the hallway, serving as a crutch to get her back on her feet.

    Stifling a cough, Na-Go rolls her fingers across the keys and flicks her thumb against the turntable of the Beat Buckle plugged into her Desire Driver. Flipping the Beat Axe around to hold it like a guitar, she strums a quick power chord--

                                    ROCK ICE                                    

    With the head of the guitar aimed at the armored commander and the lord of the manor. The ground beneath the two of them frosts over inside of a second, the air dropping to a deathly chill and pushing the two of them together in some kind of pressure differential. The moment they make contact with one another, there's an icy eruption, with fist-sized chunks of hail exploding to pummel the both of them into submission.

    Outside, Geats has little places to run to for cover. His shot landed true--but all it seemed to do was annoy.

    "Well, one good turn deserves another."

    *If I can manage more than that--something like genuine anger, maybe...* Geats hops off of the wall and quickscopes a shot at the nostrils on the way down. *Maybe I can get this thing to wear itself out fighting stupid.* His feet hit the ground, he compresses the rifle back into a HANDGUN and breaks into a sprint.

    *Lilian's getting the sword the rest of the way to Blemishine, so this might not need to be a retreat. If it does, let it be one we get something out of. The longer I keep it fighting, the more we learn about -how- to fight it.*

    Geats is in constant motion. There may not be much cover to speak of, but he makes the wreckage work for him, vaulting over piles of rubble, sliding on ground contact to extend his momentum, firing from behind flaming heaps of slag to conceal his angle of attack until it's already made. And fire he does--every time the dragon takes its attention off of him, there are more pinpoint blasts from his handcannon, patiently attempting to pick apart the dragon's overwhelming defense. *Water makes pebbles out of even the largest mountain, with enough time.*

    When it opens its mouth--blatblatblat--white-hot bullets from the Magnum Shooter and from Geats' wrist-mounted articulated cannons come zipping by to test themselves against its teeth or fill its field of vision up with obnoxious white laser bullshit. When it makes a stomp--blatblatblat--the Rider baseball slides to harass the undersides of its feet or the space between its claws. Blemishine is the one with the dragon-killing weapon, and Geats intends to do everything he can to ensure the dragon doesn't realize that until it's too late.
Lilian Rook     Lilian backpedals through the streets as Ain-- the Dragon-- advances. The magic seethes in her hands, strain creeping into the continuous beam before she can catalyze its next level of firepower, causing unsteady ripples to flick down its length as its intricate spatial distortions slip and misalign.

    §That's all it did? I barely cut into it at all. If it I'd been more conservative, it might have just ignored me and killed Sue. God it's like trying to saw through tool steel; what kind of magic resistance do they have? I could try a stationary array and bringing down full force, but . . .§

    Lilian, despite her background, has never fought a dragon before, and had never looked forward to trying. Her comprehension of the word is fundamentally formed by its meaning in her own world; the class of nemesis named for them, and the reputation of the handful of originals that remain. A brief brush with one dragon of her homeland years ago had left her with no particular illusions about heroically striking one down. Elibe's regard for the thing in front of her as little less than a mythical demon resonates in tune with the thread of doubt in her heart at seeing it.

    §It's barely bothering to fight back, but the sheer ferocity of its attack is unbelievable! Isn't this is the worst possible scenario? Our group only does well overwhelming enemy generals through numbers, but this is the kind of wide area enemy that can overwhelm all of them at once. That breath is costly to dodge, and I haven't figured out how close it's safe to stop evading. I can't visualize the heat, and I've already got first degree burns through my armour, so I can't feel it well. I'd like to hit its throat, but it tenses up all its muscles to ready an attack, and it only extends its neck enough to leave vulnerable gaps when biting at something at the very edge of its reach§

    Lilian leaps well back from a slash from the dragon's claws. Her magic circle lingers for a moment, then fragments and spins itself apart. Scanning both sides of an alley in an instant, she evades vertically over a lunging bite, and quickly grabs the wall to her side to vault over the roof before it hits her in mid air. She skids down the adjacent street, rights herself on three points and pushes off into a sprint, and slides under a side-swipe of its tale, carrying on towards its back.

    §No chance. It bleeds fire. If I catch it at the moment it bites, empty my breath into the strike at just the right moment, and hit right between the scales, I'll only burn myself to death for hitting the artery; and that's even assuming it is where I expect it to be. Fir got in and out without harm, but she had to be too hasty to deal real damage, and she's physically faster than me in the first place.§

    The lack of any apparent blindspot draws out a hiss of frustration. Lilian blinks away from claws aimed for someone else, and weaves quickly out from under its legs, turning to face it from directly behind by planting her sword in the paving stones. Lilian takes the lowest stance she has to stay below the smoke, tensing her muscles and gathering her energy for the opening. Her stare remains fixed on those claws.

    §I'll have to hamstring it. Attack the tendons at the back of the legs, avoid arterial spray, remove its mobility, and then create a blind spot behind itself where it can't aim its flames. There's no cover left, so I can only guarantee that its own body will be able to shield me. We can take our time pounding it from beyond its range once--§
Lilian Rook     A wingbeat doesn't occur to Lilian as a threat, and thus fails to penetrate her focus. Zoned in on where she expects to cut in just an instant, Lilian is close enough to be hit with nearly the full force of cast-off aerial combustion. Her stance breaks to shield her face. Her breath escapes as a shocked-quiet scream at the heat. Her position vanishes as the wave of flame launches her away, and her trail through the air, off a stone wall, and back across the ground, is painted by smoke and embers

    §Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck that hurts. They say that burns are the most painful type of injury to receive, but-- fuck can I see? My vision-- okay, that isn't damaged. I can see. I can breathe. My arms and legs work. My body ward is gone; did it take most of the blast? It depleted it all in one flick of its wings? Are you kidding?§

    Coughing violently, Lilian grabs a piece of flaming rubble with her gauntleted hand and drags herself upright, blinking the smoke from her eyes and stumbling back into a sprint. She throws a scatter of magical bolts at the dragon's face; a simple saturation attack to delay it for a moment.

    §Once Durandal is in play, that's when I'll capitalize. We went through all that effort to secure the dragon-slaying sword; it's fine to make sure it's put to use. That's efficient just use of resources. Better Blemishine than me. Then I can take it down.§

    §I hate this. Ash was right.§
Blemishine     Even blood made of flame. In the middle of her falling slash, Blemishine learns just how much of a pain that is to deal with when she's greeted with heated blasts escaping in place of the expected liquid, forcing her to brace and weather the scalding splatters that mark themselves along her armor and exposed face. Still, the important thing is that she was in time to help save Fir, Bartre, and Sue...!

    The resulting buck and whirl that comes from the behemoth of a dragon sends her flying though, the hilting of her sword into its hide not enough to prevent her from getting launched away and slamming into the groun hard, tumbling head-over-heels for a dozen meters until she pounds the bottom of her shield into the dirt, using it to both right herself and slow her momentum to a stop.

    Where she needs a second to bite back her wince and push back to a stand, the sight of the city beginning to catch alight burned into her peripheral vision. "Ah... hah..." ... That power is insane... 'destruction given form'... 'the end of humanity'... things 'uglier than death' that you had no other choice against... I can see it with my own eyes now, Roland. What you and the others had to contend with...

    Right as she's bracing for more, her head turns up - and catches the pegasus overhead, and the glint coming down. "Shanna...!" It's here! But still too far...!

    ...if it weren't for Dysnomia and Echolalia working together, to send the legendary weapon flying her way. She has only the briefest blink of surprise at the former going so far, and the latter's way of referring to her - before her expression tightens up and she leaves both sword and shield behind in a dead sprint ahead, arm outstretched.

    A blur of motion going for a whirl of steel, golden eyes tracking the arc of the blade as she intercepts it, and it comes a hair's breadth from swinging into her neck--

    --where she ducks and slides low, then reaches up to seize onto the hilt and keep going, the strength it bestows to its wielder letting her abruptly wrench it back behind her--

    --and then in her crouched low position, still skimming across the scorched earth, her other hand comes around to grasp onto it for a two-handed grip, aligning the white-hot edge of Roland's armament forward. All of her legpower is put into a sudden lunge ahead that leaves dust in her wake.

    With Khosa and Dysnomia doing their utmost to keep their foe still, Durandal itself unerringly guides her right to what it was divinely built to kill - with her target being the same fire-bleeding wound she gouged into its side before, taking advantage of the opening to slam Durandal's massive blade into the bleeding wound, tip gravitating towards the nearest of its vitals entirely on its own.

    The sudden impact comes so hard, her own body slams up against its scales as her arms go numb - but her feet dig down deep as she pushes forward, intent on lodging it in impossibly even deeper for the sake of Flamel's plan.
Petra Soroka "I will leave them to you. It sounds like the dragon is being ... tiresome."

    The angular mask of Sting Silver turns to stare blankly at Alucard in the midst of the confrontation with Arcard. Somehow, its expression conveys disbelieving scorn-- or, rather, maybe that's something Alucard can project on the mask because of Petra's voice emanating from within it.

    "Tire--? It's being a fucking *dragon*!"

"I see you're too stupid to take Zephiel's hint."

    "I see the fucking *hint*, fuckface!" Petra groans, squeezing her morphmetal lasso hard enough that she crushes its surface tension, melting it back into a formless blob around her hand. This guy is absolutely useless. Pride-obsessed noble fucking freak who acts like everything's in control and Petra's just a stupid fucking *girl*, while obviously quaking in his boots and moments from shitting himself in fear of her. At least, it'd *better* be in fear of her, and not his own fucking dragon-- that thought makes her mad enough to want to kill the dragon twice over.

    "What about your hint? Your fucking *house* is gone, idiot! You're running like a scared little rat! Whose power do you think is being *shown*, you--?!"

    Petra's aggravated ranting spares Arcard long enough that she doesn't brush by Flaer's sword to grab him before the dragon's tail comes through the building. Sparks fly off her armor both from the collision and the flaming debris sent flying through the collapsing manor, and in a moment of clumsy desperation, she catches the tail strike on her forearms, shoved along with the arc of the thick cord of scale and muscle rather than being flung away. Being smashed backwards through the rest of the manor at dizzying whipcrack-speed brings her outside in an instant, and when the dragon's tail flicks back the other way, Petra disengages from it, kicking off of it like it's solid ground to propulsor flip to the ground.

    Wood from the former manor crumbles to white-hot ash beneath Petra's staggering step, her suit coated with more of the same. Even as the heat warps the air around her, though, inside the armor, she's only just starting to feel the encroaching threat of being boiled as the Silver's warmly equalizing presence shelters her from the rest. She spends just a moment to wonder how healthy it is for her to be forming positive connotations of safety with the same sensation that Dimo emits, before being jarred out of her thoughts by having a dragon claw land just meters away.

    What the fuck is she supposed to *do* at this scale? What do heroes do when fighting dragons? It's always something like conveniently hitting some weak spot, like... cutting open its neck, or stabbing its belly, or jaw, or inside its mouth, but glancing around through the heat and haze, she can't look at *anywhere* on this thing and think 'weak'. It feels like she could plunge her gunblade in up to her shoulder and still be a toothpick compared to the dragon.
Petra Soroka     Dehumanization is one benefit of the difference in scale, as Petra said to someone else in a completely different context recently. Even thinking of it as an 'animal' is difficult, much less as if it was a person at some point-- when she only comes up to its ankle, and the claws lashing out at her spread wider than her height and reach as long as her sword, it feels more like standing on a highway and trying to fight oncoming traffic, with every part of its body a different truck.

    Thinking on that piecemeal scale, Petra focuses just on the claw in front of her, as if its a discrete enemy from the rest of the dragon. A blast from the propulsors on her calf catches her up in a long leap to what the dragon took in one step, putting her in reach of the tendons of its heel if she can penetrate the scales protecting them. Morphmetal runs down from her shoulder into her hand, accumulating larger and larger until it lances out at an angle, an inches-thick pillar of metal with a razor point on the end to pierce through the thinnest part of its foot.
Marigold      Glass from the manor is trickling down in red-hot rivers in the gaps between the cobblestones. Everything that was green is black in the manor's clearing, the air wobbles with heat mirages and stings to breathe, and the stars are gone, hidden by smoke.

     This is probably what the end of the world looked like, a thousand years ago. But there isn't time to dwell on that.

     "Well, clearly you wouldn't have been deterred by anything less, you little cur!" Arcard snarls at Petra. "Lord Arcard. Stop talking. We're in hot water." "You think just because you're Bernish you can tell me what to do?! Silence, Flaer!" "Khhh."

     Flaer looks relieved for a moment when two of his opponents back off. Then un-relieved, when he realizes that means they're sure Na-Go could take him. He tries to lunge at her; then her ice trick glues him and Arcard together- "Unhand me, Flaer!" "I'm not--"- and then, in desperation, Flaer rushes her while dragging Arcard behind and tries to shoulder-check her over the edge of the damaged floor and into the inferno below. That's about all he's got left in him.

     Overhead, a second pegasus rider (?!) joins Shanna. They wheel around each other warily at first, but then drift together, apparently talking out of earshot.

     Khosa strains and twists at the dragon's leg, and it digs its shortsword-like claws into the cobblestones, holding out. Its head twists around to glare at her, new most irritating prey. Fire froths behind its teeth, threatening to spill over and--

     No, someone else is the most irritating prey now. Mia slams into it and wrestles, adding to its teetering off-balanced state. Of course she's giving away too much in front of too many eyes. Sue stares in sharp horror, and Fir gasps from a rooftop perch with both hands over her mouth.

     The dragon seems startled too. It looks... surprised? Betrayed? 'You,' it thinks, staring into those orange ghostly eyes, and then is struck in the face by Echolalia and topples backwards under Khosa and Mia's combined effort, slamming spine-first into a pile of stone rubble.

     Its wings, jetting against the ground, scorch the cobbles black and heat-shimmer the air. Its tail lashes across the battlefield like a whip, its claws tear at Mia and Khosa, it cranes its neck to vent its breath at the etherwyrms and at the other Elites beyond them, but it can't cover as many angles as before; in this awkward position it's no less deadly but easier to dodge.

     Mia can hold it down for as long as she can bear the assault. That might not be very long. But hopefully long enough.

     Alucard's blade strikes one eye, though he finds it hard to force it deeper- lizards have armoring even there, transparent membranes over the cornea enlarged here like bulletproof glass over the inner flame. Kamen Rider Geats blasts the other, clouding its vision in time with Lilian's peppering, while Flamel helps slow its head's squirming. Odette's foam-grenade halts its fire-breath for just a moment, but that moment is the crucial one.

     When Durandal slides into its side by Blemishine's hand, carving a bright-glowing wound towards the heart up to the hilt, its muscles aren't even braced against the impact. For once it screams in pain.


                              KRRRREEEAAAAAAHHH?!                              
Marigold      The way it thrashes then, life-and-death writhing and gnashing, tears free of its restraints and lets it scramble back to its feet. Durandal, perhaps drawn by the same strange gravity that guided Blemishine's hands, stays stuck in the wound; an eruption of blazing blood follows as the dragon moves, and then an unsustainable gushing. Ain pants like a dog about to vomit, stepping forward on Petra- and Madeleine-wounded claws.

     In the lull, if it can even be called that, Lucius blinks in with the warp staff he took from Oro, takes one good look at the dragon, and then appears by Lilian's side to help steady her like the rubble does. "Dame Commander," he breathes, out of breath from some faraway escapade. A touch of his staff helps ease the pain, and then he busies himself with anyone else who might urgently need it.

     At the edges Ain is deliquescing into black goo, rotting back into shadows while alive; nothing but a puppet of flame and darkness after all. But it is still alive.

     It beats its wings in a great swelling inferno, struggles to rise forty or fifty feet in the air, and then swoops back down into the bulk of the group, hindclaws outstretched like a seizing raptor. Then grinding to a stop after gouging deep furrows into the ground, it pivots for one last sweep of its breath across the group, white-hot at the blowtorch core and billowing red at the edges, to try and catch anyone flushed into the open.

     Sue, Fir, and Bartre qualify. Fir desperately flits rooftop-to-rooftop as the sweeping flame pursues her; Sue jerks Bartre onto her horse and gallops through the now-deserted central streets to outrun it while firing poisoned arrows backwards.

     Even dying, it's heedless enough of pain to have the aggressive momentum. A ballista-like golden bolt to the neck from seemingly nowhere doesn't leave lasting impact, but gives another second of relief as it whirls around looking for the source.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel is tossed free from the head of the beast, slams into the ground, and skids in levitating. He's focused. Eyes are narrowed. Teeth are grit. He knows what to do next. This dragon might be dying, but it needs one last push to get it gone.

    He takes a deep breath.

    The dragon swoops, slamming into the group. The bulk of the body impacts him hard, but he sticks to the body of the beast, holding on even as he's scraped against the terrain. There's a loud, crunchy CLICK that comes from somewhere. And he doesn't let himself get thrown free enough to wind up in the fire, though he has to endure the heat as he does. He's holding on, both telekinetically and with a fistful of scales.

    "Alright. Let's go get you those guys you wanted to fight." He says, in that perpetual friendly, upbeat tone. He's always just doing his best to help, and he'll even do that with a single-purpose artificially-constructed being. Solidarity, of a sort? He plants two fingers on the temples of Ain's head. He grips the dragon's astral form.

    The psycho-portal, mounted on the hilt, of Durandal opens.
Madeleine Cadrasteia     Madeleine scrambles for cover behind a building when the dragon rises into the air, expecting it to coat the ground in flame from above. Instead it rakes the earth with its claws and only turns to breath fire after its landing, and Madeleine is caught in the open from its new position. She covers her face with her arms, bracing against the blast of searing heat, barely able to resist being bowled over from the force of it. As she recovers her stance she sees the ichor dripping from the monster's periphery, and realizes that if this is going to end, it has to be now.

    Rushing forward, she flicks her wrist to snap Drogrung into its spear form and lunges for the wounded creature's neck. Drogrung's jaws manifest, their ghostly-green shape barely visible among the smoke and floating ash, and strike for the dragon's neck. When it finds purchase it bites, hard, its foot-and-a-half-long fangs releasing venom to sap the dragon's strength and quell its death throes.
Flamel Parsons     When Flamel astrally breaks into the deep layers of the pseudo-astral soul-encoding plane within the sword, he's still holding onto Ain's astral form. Luckily, such a simplified, reduced astral shape is easy to hold onto when bringing it in. The final battlefield of the Scouring, full of all eight legendary heroes, should hopefully have Ain's entire body suddenly slam into it.

    "Just one last one, please!" He calls out, to any ears that will listen. And then he dives back the way he came, desperate to avoid the lasers, the earth-shattering axeblades, and all other manner of peak-performance anti-dragon superweapon mental-image -- especially given he's deliberately made sure that the astral projection went so deep that astral damage should turn into heavy mental damage.

    This tactic might be one-use, for a variety of reasons. But when it's used like this, it should purge every last ounce of mental and spiritual substance associated with this creature before he's kicked out into the real world -- and it won't even interrupt the assault in the physical plane, natch!
Khosa Slamming a dragon into the ruins of a stone wall is the kind of thing Khosa can do exactly once.

At the moment she is hoping once is enough, because with her pain sense turned off, she's getting some unpleasant sensations from her arms and back; tingling, numbness, shooting lines of ice. Many of her scales are black and burned; some of the larger ones have cracked from the heat as she staggers away from the dying Ain as he begins to rot in a way that is somehow *familiar* to her -

Oh, she's never seen it here. But she's seen things raised before, and now she doesn't need to be told that the dragons were brought back.

That only explains one dragon, though, and not - She can ask questions later.

Right now, Khosa lurches back, away from the terrible dying dead dragon, the flame washing over her one more time. She does not scream, because right now it doesn't hurt, though she'll pay for it later. She can't bear to get close to it again, which limits her options -

That's when Blemishine strikes. "YES!" Khosa yells, finally seeing some chance of victory. Whatever victory looks like when you've got an entire burning town, but it means *they* might survive and that means she's not responsible for getting people killed under her watch.

Somewhat revitalized if still badly hurt and intensely fatigued, Khosa leaps backwards, keeping her strength for just one moment to leap higher and further as she lands on the shattered remnants of the manor itself. The place where she landed is unstable, and wobbles, threatening to collapse, but Khosa balances, hooking her feet in place like a perching bird more than a reptile. The wall still slowly begins to shift.

She raises her arm and *reaches*. Reaches for the memory of Sin; how his body moved on a moving unsteady surface - for him it was a horse, but she can approximate. Her arm shifts as she makes a fist at arm's length, the sides of her hand sprouting lengths of carapace that extend out to her full armspan in length -

Khosa has grown an entire bow out of her hand. Complete with a sinewy string, and a moment later her other hand ejects a fistful of arrows; long sliver of bones, their own sharpness as their points, fletched with feathers that are grown rather than attached.

As the wall finally collapses, Khosa rides it to earth, balancing on the flattest largest piece of roofing slate as she surfs down the side of the collapsing building. She fires the arrows, one after another, at the fading form of Ain as she tries to pepper it with shots -

And then Khosa hits the ground and lands badly, rolling. The chitin bow shatters as she lands, but she was out of arrows anyway, and she can fix the broken fingers that that will mean she now has. It's probably the least grevious injury she's had in the last while anyway.
Dysnomia     'You,'

    Dysnomia isn't prepared for the sudden wash of guilt, creeping through the whole of her. That strange-familiar, sickening, lightless feeling nearly breaking her hold her own resolve enough to extinquish her. "Don't you dare," she thought back at it, a venomous, defensive hiss. "As though you stand for anything, as though you're anything! You're not--"

    What he wasn't, her thoughts never had a chance to articulate, before Echo came in and broke their eye contact. Dysnomia reeled back, her body dissolving into mist, once solid, no longer, scattered under the weight of the heat.

    And when it scattered, Dysnomia was there, in humanoid guise, half-solid, misty blood spilling from her fingers, dissolving before it could ever touch the ground, she took one leap, two, jumps ethereally light, as a violet whip spun together in her hand.

    Something like frustration? Reluctance? Resentment? Flicked over her face. There one minute, gone the next, replaced with a face too stone to be natural.

    Her whip cracked with a thunderclap flash, struggling to burn through the dissolving dragon's neck.
Alucard Well. That didn't quite work as well as he had hoped. It could have gone vastly worse. The beast thrashes, spewing flame and burning death. Alucard is flung away, crashing into the burning remains of a tree, blasting it to jagged chunks of wood, his sword skittering away from him in the wasted grass. Snapped bones reknit audibly, his flesh rebuilding itself from the burns.

It still doesn't feel great.

He forces himself to his feet, taking a deep breath as he watches what's happening. Watching the others strike and another Weird Portal open on the Durandal. He's not going anywhere near it. He reaches in his coat and pulls a small bottle full of a blue liquid sealed with golden wax. He pops the wax and drains the concoction, hurling the glass bottle into the fires to be consumed. He seems to breathe a little easier, get some focus back.

He thinks quickly, considering what to do. What he wouldn't give to know some of Sypha's ice magic at this moment. He has to make do with what he's got, though. So he begins to chant, gesturing with his fingers as his sword rises off the ground and floats at his shoulder. Sweat beads on his forehead as he reaches deep into his already depleted magical reserves. The air above his head starts to ripple, and four orbs of raw spirit energy manifest.

Alucard points at the dying dragon as he falls to one knee, spent. The summoned spirits spiral through the air, battering into the melting creature, exerting some level of Spiritual Force against it. They orbit and spiral and impact, and then they're gone.

Hopefully it's enough to help end this. He has nothing left. Exhaustion threatens.
Blemishine     On the mark. As if delivering mortal wounds was a natural function of the world. Or maybe an unnatural one.

    Durandal, anathema to dragonkind, embedding itself into Ain's body with intent to kill is exactly as effective, and exactly as terrible as she might've expected, for the permanent gash it left on Dysnomia's own body. The scream wrenches against her ears and makes her head spin, aching and deafening enough that it's akin to a splitting ache in her skull.

    Nothing compared to what their foe is feeling, however, which is part of why she manages to retain her grip on Durandal's hilt only just barely still sticking out from the red-scaled hide when the massive creatures begins rampaging and thrashing. With the divine armament lodged in there both physically and supernaturally firmly, it's less her keeping it secured and more /it/ keeping /her/ in place and not tossed away.

    "Not... yet...!" Battered and swung around while the decaying dragon continues its assault, Blemishine eventually hauls herself around to plant her boots onto its hide, standing horizontally on its hulking frame with Durandal as her support.

    Residual heat from just existing near this has long set her to boiling inside of her armor, to say nothing of the backblast of all the flames being released in gouts-- but she simply refuses to pull away until the job is done. If there's the slightest chance that Durandal might be forced free before Flamel finishes his plan, or that the rage-filled frenzy will cause more damage than it already has...

    --Were all of the dragons back in the Scouring like this...? Each and every one? But just like below Araphen, Ain's body is...

    ...still more than a genuine enough dragon for Durandal to slay. Gritting her teeth in half-pain and half-determination, she bolsters her grip on the Blazing Blade, twisting it in the gnashing injury it's dug out.

    And drives it in deeper still, past its guard, leaving only barely just enough hilt for Flamel while she lances it further into the heart.
Odette Raskins Yelping as that burning blood sizzles the ground next to her, Odette continues to scamper about trying not to get burnt unnecessarily just being in the same general area as the dragon. She still really wants to keep her eyes glued to it, though, since taking her eyes off any of it could be the difference between walking home or being carried home in a box.

Plus, seeing the way everyone fights it despite the clear size difference is like something out of her shows, and she couldn't possibly turn her eyes away from that. She stares at Blemishine and the Durandal in particular, too, leaning from side to side when she sees the weapon embedded in there looking like something out of one of those old books back home. If not for all the burning arterial spray and what happened the last time she came too close to it, she'd even have half... No, a quarter? A tenth of a mind to pull it out after the battle herself.

Casting that momentary distraction away, Odette gets her mind back on track as the dragon still manages to rise back up into the air. "Guh.. I-incoming!" She calls out in a too-late warning, shrieking again as she once again has to scramble to not get immolated. The aid coming from their newy arrived allies, especially the healing from Lucius, help keep Odette in fighting shape even as she dives to the ground when the flames sweep over her, barely able to even get behind/knock herself over with what used to be a wagon for the slightest amount of cover in time.

Even with the cover, the burns are bad. There's not enough time to extract that material out of her arms, but she does have more of that medicated gauze and those injectors in her bag. She opts for the former, just unpacking and wrapping a roll of the cooling fabric over her arms in her now-sleeveless jacket, then tenses up as she feels a sudden sharp pain in the same arm. Once again, Odette takes a moment to catch her breath while she's still on the floor, then peeks out at the dragon from around the side of the singular piece of wood that's left of the wagon.

Everyone's still going out there. Everyone's still fighting hard. She can't afford to keep lying down like this now! The only thing she can really do, though, is...  Can she get the dragon's attention without dying? Or help pin it down long enough for the decisive blow to be struck, whether it's with the Durandal or whatever it is Flamel's doing that she can't quite comprehend at a glance?

Odette can't quite fire lasers like Lucius can, but she can set something up to help ramp up the potency of his next shot. Yanking out several more bottles, the EMT puts them all into a little pouch and ties it to the practice staff, then lets out a little terrified scream as she wills herself into running after the dragon once more. "F.. Father Lucius! Shoot through the thing!"

The thing, in this case, is the pouch as she catapults it towards the dragon. Rather than trying to actually bounce them off the dragon's face harmlessly, however, she's hurling the bag of bottles so they arc up right in front of its face, providing an easy target for Lucius (or anyone, really) to shoot through. When those bottles break and their contents mix together...

Predictably, they explode spectacularly. Everything in there is flammable, after all, being a mix of highly flammable fuel, high proof alcohol, and the ingredients for a flash bomb. All it needs is a spark to (ideally) stall the dragon enough to finish it off!
Echolalia Echolalia is burning, struggling, and then the dragon gives Mia a look of betrayal, like she betrayed this guy who has done nothing but try to set Dysnomia on fire this whole time. And Echolalia's anger and fury reaches a kind of peak, here, when Dysnomia's expression becomes ... frustrated. Reluctant. Resentful. Echolalia breathes out green flame from her nose like a cartoon bull and she pushes herself up one last time, thrusts herself forward.

And she seizes that violet whip before it can dig too far into Ain's throat. He's already dying but that's not really relevant. She doesn't look directly at Dysnomia before twisting ever so slightly and snapkicking towards the center of Dysnomia's body to shove her away from the dying artificial dragon.

"No, Mia. You can't kill dragons anymore. I won't let you." She says out loud. Echolalia is a bit of an idiot, and definitely very silly--but one thing she also is--is totally uncompromising when she's settled on something important. What armies think of her haven't been relevant to her back home, so the one here has even less of a chance, but she hopes that they can undersand why she can't let Dysnomia participate in this killing any more.

''I won't let you do that to yourself anymore.'' Echolalia thinks right at her. ''This is why I came here.''

And she raises her hand. Roots pull out of her skin first, then bark, then height and width as an oak tree erupts out of her hand, growing rapidly and in real time to a near full height of a hundred feet.

And then she swings it down like a club, smoky tears in her eyes because it's even worse, to her, that this dragon may have never actually been a person.

It doesn't really matter in the end if the dragons here are fundamentally different as it turns out. It turns out she can't actually intellectualize herself out of caring.
Dysnomia     Echolalia's intercept leaves Dysnomia flabbergasted, her grim determination left floundering, robbed of its awful exclamation. Her mouth opens, then closes, momentarily lost for words--

    --When Echo's kick sends her back, skipping like a stone three times over the scorched ground, until she's on her back, staring at the sky overhead. The feeling her swelling in her chest was desolation, regret, and...

    ...If she held her hands over her face, no one could see the relief.
Desire Stars      In the manor, Na-Go feels her body move without conscious thought; Flaer charges, and her grip on the Beat Axe shifts. She shecks his weapon with the v-shaped beard, but doesn't try to match strength with strength. If asked, right now, she couldn't say why--it's pure, adrenaline fueled instinct, but she instead lets the impact come.

    Being shoulder-checked by someone in much heavier armor than hers doesn't feel great, but rolling with it...

    "We didn't come this far to lose!"

                                  REVOLVE ON!                                  

    Na-Go's body cartwheels along a circular hardlight track appearing behind her, swinging the Beat Axe upwards just as her feet leave the ground. The colorful Beat armor shifts from her upper body to her legs. Hanging in the air, spread eagle, all that lies between her and the inferno below is her armor. Her fingers mash out a three-note flourish on the Beat Buckle's keyboard.

    The subwoofers in her greaves thump, a visible disturbance rippling in the burning air as she's forced into a midair frontlip. Her legs wrap around Flaer's neck, and she blasts again with the subwoofers on her armor as her upper body shifts and bends backwards into a somersault-headscissor takedown, throwing him to his back and clear of the inferno.

    Another flourish on the Beat Buckle and a flick of its turntable sets those subwoofers bouncing to a vibrant techno beat, the music visible as polychromatic notation spun onto ledger lines in real time. Na-Go catches her breath, her chest heaving with exertion, then steels herself, standing straight up, lifting one leg high and bringing it crashing down onto the floor of the crumbling mansion.

                                 BEAT VICTORY!                                  

    The music picks up--literally, racing across the floor as a tile-cracking shockwave that wraps around Flaer's armored form like loose twine, before tightening all at once, glowing white-hot and exploding in spectacular fashion.
Desire Stars      Outside, Geats' harassment campaign has worked better than he might have feared. All of that movement is wearing into *his* energy, and between himself and a dragon, one is much more dangerous when exhausted.

    His evasive action is more haggard than graceful here, the Magnum Shooter's weight never felt more clearly than now, pumping up and down in his hand as he sprints with fire in his lungs--the better to keep the dying dragon's very literal fire from swallowing him up. As it flies low, he dives to the side, wrist-mounted laser cannons blasting not at the dragon but at the ground, to push him clear of its talons and the gout of fire.

    Still cliped by its tail as the dragon passes, Geats is flung from the ground and skipped across the burning estate, coming to a stop only by the grace of his curious wealth of experience seemingly applying to getting his ass beat as much as it does to winning. He articulates the cannons outwards like brakes, digging furrows into the ground. The golden bolt is reflected in his red visor, and his helmet tips upwards as he musters the strength to rise to one knee.

    "Hoh? An apology letter? Interesting."

    Geats pulls the charging handle on the Magnum Shooter, then spins the cylinder on the Buckle slotted into his Desire Driver, pulling the trigger.

    A giant hardlight cylinder appears before him, much as it had during the raid on the mountain camp. But this time, Geats shoots at the 'filled' chamber rather than kicking it, feathering the trigger on the Magnum Shooter as the wrist-mounted laser cannons spit constant streams of light at it. Every projectile hangs in the air, frozen, in front of that 'full' chamber, each one pulled as if by gravity into a shape. After about three seconds of continuous fire, the myriad projectiles have been forced into the shape of a singular, brightly glowing bullet roughly the size of Geat's upper body.

    He makes a standing roundhouse, setting the big cylinder spinning, then a jumping back kick. With his foot as the 'hammer,' the giant bullet is fired at the dragon, on a collision course for the head. Geats twirls the Magnum Shooter around his finger, his red lenses flaring as the bullet impacts and explodes.

                                 MAGNUM VICTORY                                
Petra Soroka     In Petra's battle with the claw, doing her best to hamper its movements by penetrating through thin portions and dodging the retaliatory spurts of flaming blood and swipes of sword-length claws, it's Blemishine's strike with Durandal that interrupts her rhythm. When the monster flinches and roars, the different tone of its screech might have passed through Petra's ears as nothing more than an added layer to the deafening cacophany of battle, a blaring siren at the end of the world, if not for its timing being simultaneous with the abrupt tightening of muscles and reflexive movement in its foot.

    Suddenly, for a moment, it's a single cohesive creature again to Petra. Her morphmetal armblade *shwinks* out of the flesh it was buried in, instinctively pulling away before the dragon's pained kick would send her flying. Steaming blood rolls down the blade and onto her arm; she flings her arm to the side to shake it off, and the tracks of white-heat it left in her armor glow for seconds longer after.

    She looks up, tracing the flinch motion through the leg and into the sword buried in its heart, and the decaying edges of the dying creature. Whether she can conceptualize it as 'Ain' is still a long ways away-- but when it's hurt, when its outline is rotting away, is when it's clearest to her, which makes her dizzy all over again. As it flaps its wings, Petra shields herself from the downdraft of flame with a disc of morphmetal grafted onto her forearm. Blistering runoff of superheated metal drips off the sides, hissing when it touches the ground, and then darts back into the air to cyclically rejoin the heatshield until it's safe for Petra to drop it and reuse its component metal for a spray of quicksilver flechettes.

    Once it goes down, and the wreckage of charcoal and glowing-hot stone raked by massive claws is what's left of the wealthy district of the city, Petra takes a few staggering steps backwards and tries to plant her gauntlet on a low wall to recuperate. It disintegrates at her touch, guttering into dying flames and a spurt of smoke, and Petra stares down at it for a solid few seconds before her suit vanishes in a flash. She grimaces, exposed to the elements with her face streaked with ash and eyes watering up from the heat and smoke, and then looks out at the city in ruin and panic.

    "You know, I... might've actually... been right about Zephiel's hint not being for us."
Lilian Rook     §I know it's not real. Not really. It can't be. But just for that second it looked at the other dragon that way . . . I think if a monster like that felt anything in particular, it would be that.§

    Durandal sees 'Ain' as enough of a dragon to count. Lilian sees the butchery firsthand this time, and the feeling of relief, hope, encouragement, freezes solid at the spout. The divine rejection of the dragon's being, cleaving through everything that she and everyone else had struggled with and turning that terrifying thing-- that living, breathing holocaust incarnate-- into a writhing, dying animal, chills her more than it reassures her. Her grip squeezes hard on Night Mist, just to feel it. As if it would realize how little she's accomplished and leave her, if she let it.

    'Dame Commander'

    Lilian startles, but only faintly. Lucius warping right up to her doesn't scrape her nerves nearly as much as him attempting to hug her had. She can't help but let her relief at the touch of healing magic be heard; she hadn't braced to stoically hold it in, and too much was already on her mind. Lilian cuts the exhale off with a sharp click of her teeth, subtly curls in upon herself, and then straightens up with a little self-resenting sigh.

    "Please don't tell anyone." Lilian murmurs back. "I know I keep talking big and slipping up, but please. I can at least do better than this." she says. "If nothing else, I'm supposed to be able to hate that thing, and kill it. At least something like that."

    Lucius disappears at the same moment Lilian does.

    Back two streets as the dragon takes wing. Back one more. Another, as it unleashes its breath. Skip from cobble to roof to fence to hill to roof again, without losing focus. Lilian finds her vantage on the dragon, then blinks across the road as its swooping lunge taks it too close. Her figure darts over the ruined landscape again, and then disappears once more from the return pass. Staring down the building flame head on, Lilian lunges aside, blurs, and disappears ahead of the fiery surge, ceding ground over and over, weaving through its frenzied undulations without pausing to attack; without chancing a second close encounter at all. An egregious waste of motion, energy, time, that she'd never give to a reasonable defensive; but the dragon doesn't know that.

    It's something slightly more certain than instinct that tells her to flatten her stance, press her heels into the charred shingles beneath her, and tense her body for the motion she'd aborted before, just the moment before a gleaming golden arrow skewers the dragon through the the neck, and it extends its head to turn and look for the archer.
Lilian Rook             -----[stop]-----
    A blast of charred wood and broken shingles rockets skyward and freezes halfway, hanging on the glassy fring of the shockwave. The fracturing stone beneath, fault line stitched together with frozen dust, sounds like a gunshot. Tattered smoke deforms with the profile of a bullet wound. Suspended embers are sucked into the vacuum, and pause in a helical spiral, limned with black static.

    The distance is extreme. Wildly overkill for any use of the sword, even if only for how simple it would be to see coming. It's exactly as much as it takes for Lilian to accelerate to her highest continuous speed; first by physical propulsion, then by antigravitic magic, until the smog and ash no longer notices her passing through.

    The straight, clumsy, predictable, outrageously high-speed line; something she has coached her own opponents never to do; directly intersects with the gleaming bolt lodged through the dragon's neck, practically glowing in the dark. A minute adjustment of Night Mist times the very last fraction of an instant before--
                -----[start]-----

    Lilian appears at the dragon's run-through throat, and in the sparks and flame and magmatic blood being sprayed, is already an afterimage before the arterial spray can scorch her. The swordswoman herself is even higher than that, correcting her flight from the impact and veering deflection in time to arc herself back down and land.
Marigold      Flaer- still glued to Lord Arcard, a limp hackeysack- widens his eyes in lopsided disbelief when Na-Go stylishly floats. "Not fair," he hisses, as if he weren't just allied to a dragon- and then, bound and battered, he drops into a groaning heap.

     Arcard is prevented from running by the fact that he's not strong enough to lug Flaer around, and after realizing that, changes tactics: "P-please, wait! Bern will pay my ransom! I swear it! Just-- get me out of here before the place collapses!"

     - - - -

     "It's okay," hangs in the air, in the instant before Lilian and Lucius both vanish.
     "I can't hate it either."

     But Father Lucius does take the shot, and then continues taking it for several seconds after Odette's satchel explodes.

     The dragon looks more and more shadow-rotted with every blow it takes. It's a wet, wilting rot. Blows that might have sparked off its scales cut in, now, and leave its head barely hanging on. Durandal drives deeper, deeper still, and by the wisdom of Roland's design 'to the hilt' is just enough.

     Its flames are guttering, discoloring, forgetting to be red, when Flamel draws its pared-down astral self into Durandal's memory-space. He lingers just long enough to see Elimine manifest, that look on her face, and raise her hand towards what passes the shadow dragon's soul.

     Outside, Durandal crunch-sparks, and then all the fire escapes from Ain at once- skyward, where Shanna and the other flier have to dodge it- with one last scream, and it collapses onto its side, slowly slopping down into a whale's worth of black oozing nothingness.

     "Oh, thank goodness," says Lucius, now by Odette's side. He sighs when he puts his hands on her shoulders. What, exactly, relieves him, he doesn't say.

     Sue and Bartre circle back on their terrified pony, both too exhausted to seem triumphant. Fir staggers into the clearing with a badly burnt arm, but there are people here who can fix that. More importantly...

     Shanna and Mercenary Captain Thea swoop down into the clearing together, pegasus hooves clacking lightly against scorched cobbles. And Klein, your one-time adversary, reveals himself from the rooftop where he'd taken his own potshot at the dragon.

     There's something besides exhaustion in all of their eyes, when they look at Echo and where Mia's gone. Klein especially. They all saw that display of power and what form it took. But that isn't the first order of business, just yet, and he knows it.

     "So they're real," the Provisional Archer-General of Etruria breathes, hopping down from the gables onto a shop-stall roof, and from there to the street. ". . . I owe you a lot of things. An apology most of all. . . . Roy and Echidna cleaned up well. But-- my God."

     That's about all it's possible to say.
Desire Stars P-please, wait! Bern will pay my ransom! I swear it! Just-- get me out of here before the place collapses!

    "I--"

    Na-Go falters. She wasn't going to let the two of them be buried or burned to death--but why does she feel a burning in her throat and a drop in her stomach? No--she knows why, and swallows it.

    "Just shut up," she spits. "I'm not going to leave you." A swing of the Beat Axe separates the layer of rime between them. She hefts Arcard over her shoulder.

    "Ace, can you help me with these two?"

    Her request is crystal clear across the armor's integrated comms, even above the crackling flames and tumbling mortar.

---

    Arcard and Flaer are both delivered to Roy--although Na-Go and Geats had to get creative to safely get the armored bodyguard clear of the building.

. . . I owe you a lot of things. An apology most of all. . . . Roy and Echidna cleaned up well. But-- my God.

    Geats and Na-Go both remove their respective Buckles, once again Ace and Neon.

    "You owe Shanna and her sister an apology too," says Neon, striding up to him and putting a finger into his chest. "You could have hit her when you shot at me."

    Ace smiles at Neon, then turns his attention to Klein.

    "I'm afraid 'they're' very real. This goes deeper than you're probably aware of," says Ace. "Maybe you'd care to discuss the finer details over tea."
Flamel Parsons     Flamel catches a glimpse of the woman again. Is it blasphemous to use a forked instance of the soul-copy of the messiah to get rid of a giant monster? If you could, right now, summon baby jesus to personally fight and kill someone trying to hurt you, would that be heretical behaviours? Frankly, I don't know, but Flamel decides that it would be a good idea to not let Lucius know how he finished that awful dragon off, or why he is *so burnt*.

"But-- my God."
    "Yeah, she helped a lot at the end there." He accidentally slips to Klein, as he approaches the man's rooftop. "Er-- anyway-- thanks for taking your shot there. We don't have a lot of ways to convey the gravity of the situation, so I'm glad Bern did it on their own." But he shifts his posture, his energy. "I've got a bad feeling, though, about why you're taking this angle. And psychics getting bad feelings is never a good sign. But still!" A firm handshake is offered, and a positive, beaming grin. "Apology's accepted on my part of things, even though I didn't bear most of it! Let's get to work on making everything right."