Io was rapidly growing annoyed.
There was a giant, bipedal goat in the room with her; yes. It had climbed out of a portal, right in front of her eyes. It didn't frighten her. Probably wouldn't have either way, since she'd heard Mab order it not to hurt her. It was just, under the circumstances…
There was a giant, bipedal goat. Check.
It was chasing footsteps all around the room… Check.
The footsteps were, pretty clearly, fictional. She could tell, even if the goat couldn't. The alternative was that someone was just fast enough to stay out of sight of the goat, while being just slow enough not to lose it, and that didn't seem likely. Also, the footsteps weren't bothering to stay out of her sight, and there was nobody there.
After nearly a minute of running, the goat had managed to "corner" its target in a, well, corner. This time the footsteps just sort of faded out of existence, leaving it scratching its head and smashing at the wooden branches sticking out of the "wall" until they started up again, now in a completely different location. The goat roared something no doubt unfit for young ears, smashed a random branch into tiny pieces, then ran off after them.
In short, the goat was an absolute idiot, and this was turning into something more akin to a comedy sketch than a fight.
The reason she was growing annoyed was that she itched to go after it. She had magic; she wanted to burn its fur off; she wanted to smell the bacon cooking. She had a sword; she wanted to stick it in its eyes. And she wanted to be herself, and not want either of those things.
The reason she hadn't in fact flown off, apart from a suspicion that if she actually attacked it it'd smash her apart like an insect, was that although her wings were fluttering impatiently and threatening to lift her up, she was in fact standing on her own chest.
Too much had been happening to think it over, but—
She wasn't afraid. The fear she should be feeling, that she'd turned into one of those very things she wanted so much to hate, was completely absent. In its place, she felt… excitement? Anger? Not really either one of those emotions. She didn't recognise it, and couldn't place it, except that it made her want to bounce off the walls, and possibly crack some heads. Metaphorically speaking.
She didn't feel very much like "Io".
But she didn't dare to move. Not just because she didn't want the goat's attention, but also because she wasn't sure what would happen if she moved too far from her own body—which was still breathing, for now, and she didn't know what would happen if she left.
Waiting it out felt like her best option. Afterwards, she thought she would ask some very pointed questions. Because the people leading the goat on a wild goose chase almost had to be Amu and Takeba, and…
A chunk of wood flew past her, smashing into the goat's knees. It stumbled, and brayed in pain, but when its eyes fixed on whoever had thrown it—Io couldn't see, they were behind a corner—an arrow hit it in its arm, which had snapped up at the very last moment to intercept it. Then the arrow exploded.
Io grinned. This was more like it.
Then her eyebrows narrowed. So, why did she also feel annoyed at being left out?
— — —
While Yukari played hide-and-seek, Amu was slowly making her way towards the portal.
The undergrowth made this an interesting experience. She didn't know what she'd expected the floor to be made of, but tree-roots surely weren't it, and while she hadn't seen a single leaf yet there were more than enough branches and bristles to make up for that, not to mention rocks. It took a lot of her concentration to avoid making noise, leaving her grateful that Yukari was distracting the goat.
Although the floor curved sharply upwards at the sides to form something approaching a wall, all in all, it looked a lot like she'd walked into a hollow cave underneath some enormous tree. She trailed her fingers lightly over the side of one of those walls, feeling the gritty touch of bark as well as a painful, penetrating cold. The room was freezing over. It was well below zero, and if that didn't bother her as much as she thought it should have, she still was definitely not dressed for this.
Yukari had almost gotten into position, which would be her cue to start acting. The goat—the roars were a language, part of her noted, and was forcibly shouted down—was smashing roots out of frustration. Big, tough-looking roots that went all the way between the ground and roof, and they were turning into little more than frozen shrapnel. It looked dangerous. She couldn't decide if she was happy that it was focused on Yukari, or not.
Her breath was coming out as white little puffs. She had to fight not to start shivering.
Yukari had stopped moving, hiding from the goat behind a woody outcropping. She held up four fingers.
Walking a little faster, Amu nodded, and held up three.
Two.
Her left hand found a loose piece of wood. She didn't stop to wonder when she'd turned ambidextrous.
One.
She'd never tried this before, but—
Zero.
She charged the chunk of wood just so, reusing a pattern of essence that she'd last used against Samael. Logically, reasonably, it would have been smartest of her to leave all the fighting to Yukari and focus on the portal, but she couldn't make herself do that. She wasn't very good at fighting, though. She hoped that the goat would still focus on the other girl.
Her improvised projectile flew, in a nearly flat arc, towards the back of the goat.
Yukari stepped out from her hiding spot, a vaguely glowing arrow already on her bow. It made an audible twang as it fired.
Amu scrambled, half walking and half crawling the last meter over to the portal. Throwing herself flat on the ground so she wouldn't be as visible, her heart pounded in fear at the scraping sound that her skin made against the roots. She'd thrown herself fast enough to skin her knees, but the bark was what was losing, and—it sounded as loud as a gunshot!
She needn't have worried.
The goat brayed in pain as her projectile hit its knees, and beneath the roar she thought she heard a crack. Then, much louder, and as much anger as pain—
She squinted at it, already knowing what was coming. Yukari's arrow exploded, night turned to day, and pain turned to absolute anguish as the goat lost an arm. The bloody scene burnt itself into her eyes, but…
She had a job to do, and the goat was already stumbling towards Yukari, who should easily be able to keep out of its way.
She had a portal to close.
She only wished she knew how.
Deep breaths.
First things first. The most obvious possible weakness would be if it couldn't survive Kagutsuchi's physics, or her own variant on it. That was easy to check.
Chaos-repelling pattern rippled outwards, surrounding it, and in fact it did waver slightly—but only slightly, the repellent scene beyond turning hazy for a second before snapping back into place. Although… she could sort of feel it, the same way she'd felt the frost before getting here, and it felt more distant now than it had before she'd done that.
Amu spotted a snowflake drifting through the portal, coming to rest on her side of it. So it was still passable in that direction, but she wondered if…
She flicked a grain of sand of towards it, and the grain flew through the portal like it wasn't there, coming to rest in a fold of wood out of her sight. So the portal was now one-way, but she didn't actually know that it hadn't always been like that.
Well, in that case, there were still a few other things she could try.
— — —
Io fluttered impatiently, her eyes tracking the demon around the room.
After the first, critical strike, Takeba had failed to land any serious hits again. Hurt knees or not, the goat was fast, and after one hit from her explosive arrows it had made sure never to get too close to one again. It was strong, too; strong enough to rip an entire root out of the floor to use for parrying, and she realised that, yes, if it managed to land a hit on her she'd be toast.
That didn't scare her the way it should have, partly because she didn't think it could. It was fast, but she was faster.
Probably.
Her feet were bouncing on her sweater. Each time she (her body) breathed in, she got thrown centimetres into the air. Each time it breathed out—she stuck there, mid-air, only slowly falling back down. She wanted to join in!
The goat wasn't falling, but neither was it catching Takeba. The room was like an obstacle course to someone their size, one she navigated like a master parkour artist. Gravity barely seemed to have a hold on her. At times she'd jump high into the air, but if the demon had any hope that she'd therefore be predictable, those hopes were quickly dashed. Io had seen her dodge a thrown rock by grabbing on to a vertical branch and swinging her body horizontally, then run across the side of one of the larger boulders.
Her stomach felt like a bottomless hole, trepidation of what would happen if she moved warring with a rapidly growing desire to do something. Takeba thought she could move? She hadn't seen anything yet!
Oh, screw it—
It was a moment's impulse, but as her wings buzzed into action and she shot across the room, she knew she'd made the right decision. Her heart soared along with a body; flying was wonderful! Less than a second was all it took for her to get there, and she circled the goat demon's head in the time it took to focus its eyes. Everyone but her was moving in slow motion.
She grinned, a smile with far too many teeth.
And on her next orbit, before it could even begin to react, a shard of ice shot through with cracks of star-bright flame pierced one of its eyes.
Its screams were like music to her ears.
— — —
In the corner of her eye, Amu saw what appeared to be a bolt of lightning strike the goat from behind. Yukari hadn't mentioned that! It screamed, and she clenched her teeth, but…
The fight was going well. That's all she had to know.
Her attempts at closing the portal were… not. While she did have a few ideas, none of the subtler ones had panned out. As it stood, she only had two… no, three options, and one of them was stupid.
[ ] Help Yukari defeat the goat, then leave. The portal can stay.
[ ] Overwhelm the problem with essence. Sufficient excellency would let her know what to do, but that would ruin every hope of stealth.
[ ] (33%) Walk through the portal. Try to close it from the other side. Dropping CRP will likely make it passable.
[ ] Write-in