Well, of the three times I remember him nearly getting cooked, only one time had someone come at him with a knife to kill him before cooking him. The others were both "me hungy, no time to kill, only cook!"
Reminder, his crush on Akane was based on the fact that she was the first person who didn't try to eat him in pig form and instead adopted him as a pet.
The thoughts keep coming. Michiru's not sure how to stop thinking them, hearing them, something in between.
Hello there. I had a name I was attached to quite recently. Very silly. Today… <Call me 'Stanenge'>
This… this isn't like any of her other battles. All of this is horribly new. The total compulsion to attend. The horror of a mental intrusion unlike any other. The instinctive drive to maintain constant, vigilant resistance. The flickering memories telling her she should have an arsenal of ways to protect herself when she can't even remember their names right now.
The inability to move against the monst- against Stanenge- with her simpler, her reliable, physical strength and magic.
At least until she can force h- Stanenge- out of her mind. Out of her damn mind!
And that thought fills her with a sudden wrath, and the feeling of intrusion retreats a little. A little.
Ah! Interesting! You must be sensitive. Perhaps instinctively so, in light of my earlier speculations. Perhaps that's for the best. At least you'll understand what's happening to you. Otherwise, in light of your inexperience…
She has no idea whether all this is happening in milliseconds or hours; time seems to have no meaning. Is this what 'the speed of thought' means? She… she can win this!
I doubt it. No one, even the fiercest youma I've ever met, has defended their mind against me in this form yet, not alone, save only for a millennia-old sorcerer. Somehow, I don't think you have his schooling. Also, <KNEEL>
No… she… won't… GAH! All the world falls away. Its sights and sounds splinter apart and flutter away. All experience narrows down to just the diamond-shaped stone hovering at the peak of Stanenge's being and the round hole through its center. That baleful eye bores into her mind. Her muscles cramp and sting, burning with the conflict between her wish to stand and need to fall. She refuses. She won't. There's no room for anything else at that single moment. All her focus and will clamps down.
Her knees do NOT buckle.
Then the pressure shifts. She remembers surf crashing, the warm Mediterranean sun beating down against her back, the suddenly lovely figures playing in the waves. Why is she thinking of Saint-Tropez? That… that was four years ago! And this mons- Stanenge- certainly wasn't there!
Or was h- Stanenge? She suddenly remembers the way that her father oiled the dem- Stanenge's- stones against the salt spray. Light glimmered off the ocean waves-
But she isn't at the beach. She's a little girl, sitting at the table with her parents and her- tutor?. She frowns in quiet concentration, battling the numbers on the page in front of her. She scratches down the numbers with a pencil, remembering, recording, displacing, summing. Something else displaces. Her tutor blurs strangely, and separates and changes. Father praises her when she does well, and mother kneels at the master's feet. Stanenge leans across the table, and somehow Stanenge's facelessness appears pleased as she explains back to him how to move the numbers and what they mean.
Light glimmers through the window at the edge of the room an-
And everything is larger, very large, gigantically so. She lays down among the warm and the safe. Mama is there, leaning from so high above, with a bright smile on her face. But there's a mon- Stanenge - towering over everything, even Mama. Mama covers her eyes, making everything disappear, but then in a flash she realizes that Stanenge is still there, still hovering over her. Things don't go away when you can't see them!
The thin hands reach down towards her, and two creaking fingers with the texture of stone rest at her temples. Mama's hands are gone, and the light shines down from her favorite toy- a crinkly doll with a shiny silver tummy- and-
Hm. Your abstractions are slippery. Surprisingly resilient. Illogically laid out, of course. Now, let's see, underneath all of that… Here we are. The deepest layers of your self. Of course, most of your strength is wasted; your instincts threw it to telling you you needed to stay standing. Thus distracted, as you are, you cannot fight me. Disappointing, if useful. Too easy. In any event, <you obey Stanenge now. Slaughter all your former allies, beginning with the weakest that you see, in my name.>
And Stanenge pushes past that last thin layer of overburden and less-than-essentials.
1d100 = 75
[¿Something‽ ¿Happened‽]
Underneath all things, Michiru Kaioh is readily taken in hand, superficially simple from some angles until you look into her depths properly. Tawny, elegant, brazen curvature frames a layer of lucid adamant that shelters a smooth impermeable, geometrically perfect backing. She will give to you what you bring to her, sometimes reversed, only occasionally unchanged.
Hm. That's odd…
Like a ghastly searchlight, probing for a path to victory over her, Stanenge's command pierces Michiru's consciousness, reaching her uttermost limits. And she rejects it- but not by struggling against it, or by pushing against it, or by absorbing or breaking it. No, she- intuition sings to her in a tongue the common run of men has no name for. She rotates slightly. With effort, she twists, inverting, distorting, and importantly [■■■■■■■■■■] that horrible, unbearable, unthinkable command.
No.
No, <you obey me now. Subdue all your former allies, beginning with the strongest that you see, in my name.>
What? How are you- What- Damn it!
Sailor Neptune takes a shuddering breath as the strain dissipates. Her eyes are still locked on Stanenge, but the terrible weight of the compulsions lightens, fades, dissolves. She still thinks of nothing beyond the clash of wills, but she can feel Stan- no- him struggling in his own mind. Half-formed images, imaginations perhaps, spill into the shadows around the towering youma. With all his might, he struggles to resist the returned echo of his own brutal, domineering assault.
She feels a tug at the corner of her mouth, an impulse born of wrath, hinting at the playful cruelty storm-tossed sailors might imagine in the ocean's waves. She herself doesn't entirely understand what just happened, though she can feel the outlines of its effects now that it has happened. But she doesn't really need to understand in order to be wickedly certain that she knows what she wants to do next.
「Allocating Guest User Partition - Designating Restrictions - Open Command Link: Dish 1-3b. Loading - Total Information Playback at 10^9 Compression Ratio. Warning - Probable Guest User Cognitive Overload. Warning Dismissed. Dismissing Command Link: Dish 1-3b. Priming. Loading Guest User. Initiate.」
Wha- Suddenly, her sense of mental communication from the monster ceases. She hears a mass of wild, overlapping sensations. Computation, observation, recording, erasure, creation, destruction, tiny things, vast things, speculative patterns, certainties, whirling tangles of cosmic dust that would span entire solar systems if one could pass through without destroying them, tiny knots of crystallized etheric power that warp all natural law about themselves, volcanoes that erupt with a dreadful heat far beyond the boiling point of nitrogen, torrid masses of hellishly sun-baked stone on which seas of molten water slosh about, dissolving and corroding nearly all simple and ordinary things, giving rise to complexity, stones, seas, beasts, birds, fish, fungi, plants, patterns of force and energy, the elegance of the aurora, the crudity of the avalanche, careful assemblies, random overflows, a seemingly limitless sea of tiny facts and meaningless coordinates. A vast typhoon of things, things of seething, unguessable significance and insignificance.
Michiru's eye twitches. That firehouse flow of unprocessed information, or one indistinguishable from it, left her reeling and nearly senseless the first time that she opened it unawares. Even now it still hurts when that starkly unimaginable mass tries to exist inside of her head all at once. But at least it has come to limit its intrusions upon her thoughts without prompting. The seething chaotic storm of fractured, corrupted data is, for lack of a better term, obedient.
Somehow, she doubts it'll treat a youma so courteously.
She might have considered feeling sorry for him over this, before the moment he intruded on that sunny memory of Saint-Tropez. She won't, now.
With a clatter, the levitating pattern of stones and petrified branches that make up Stanenge's form begin to whirl, breaking from their loosely humanoid arrangement, spasming, clattering against each other, spinning round and round.
She can perceive, somehow, the state of her returned-distorted command to the youma. He threw a terrible bolt into her mind, backed with all the willpower, magic, and malice he had .And now he strives to resist that same bolt, repelling the power he himself threw, with his defenses so very, very compromised.
And it does not stop. She could look away now, if she wished, but after what he tried to do, she takes the strange channel connecting the mind of a monster to whatever resistance he struck and recoiled from within her. And she pushes.
And to her considerable surprise, the mental command ruptures the youma's defense… and cores out his volition like a melon in the process, much as he had hoped to do to her. The sense of a demon's anguish, confusion, and terror abruptly vanishes, leaving behind nothingness. Still, quiet nothingness.
The collapsed pile of stones begins to reassemble itself into a rough semblance of the structure it had before. There are a few words, spoken in a dreadful, soft, hollow voice that seems to pierce the crashing noises of the battle and the Amazons' war-cries. A ghost in the waking world.
"i obey Neptune."
There's a tremendous crash of thunder from outside. Lightning strikes- close.
Moments earlier, two stores away, another of the greater youma gathered his crew tight around him. Keeping the storefronts superficially similar to the way they were before has limited options for renovations. Hellcabbie, even with his short wheelbase, even with the rest of the chairs and tables pushed out of the way on short notice, finds the space rather cramped.
But the Sisters are in charge, and he isn't the type to let his bosses down if he can help it. "Keep an eye on this part of the marketplace," Drella said. 'Marketplace,' she called it. She has a little trouble with modern words. Hellcabbie's a new youma. He gets these things. He was raised in them, shaped by them, after all. But the old-country youma get a little turned around sometimes, even after they absorb Japanese.
Right now, Hellcabbie's imagining himself rolling up to Drella, or even to her sister, and saying "I told you so."
Not that he actually would. He wouldn't have the nitrous for it. Cendrellion'd scrap him for it. Drella- probably the same. But he's had a bad feeling all afternoon. An itch in his wheel wells. Things he's heard on his radio. There isn't a youma in all of Asia more connected to the street than him, and even if he wasn't touching it, the street felt… off. Especially the road closure of the highway in front of the strip mall. That set him on edge. It was offputting, wrong, like an automatic transmission stuttering between gears.
And then the emergency broadcasts started up. Hellcabbie couldn't prove a damned thing, but he had the feeling that the emergency was gassing up, getting ready to happen to him.
But Drella and Cendrellion, they're from the old country, maybe the older one. He's a little hazy on that stuff. He tried to explain his worries to Cendrellion and she just did that little twitch she can do without much crunching and ground glass and told him to talk to Drella because she was busy. Fair, fair. The boss has a big show tonight, some kind of fancy high magic. Drella was a bit more practical about it, he has to admit. She made sure the troops here upstairs had a plan and all that. New orders. She put Stanenge in charge here up topside. Sure, Stanenge is a creep, but he's not stupid, he makes pretty good plans, and doesn't lose his head under pressure.
Well, not metaphorically, anyway.
But even with all of that, Hellcabbie feels like Drella wasn't really taking him seriously.
Sometimes it makes a guy want to honk. It really does.
And now it's all starting to go into the pot metal. That golden flash was probably one of the Sailor Senshi. And while his guy may not have gotten the best look through the dirty window out front, he was sure the 'purdy lady' leading the troops that just charged into the Shimamura was a Senshi, too.
He's seen the wreckage that two Senshi made out of one of his garages last week. It was enough to make a fellow's timing belt wobble.
Which probably explains all the crashing and screaming. Except those poor bastards were supposed to be the backup. The reserve troops. If any of the other stores were attacked, it was supposed to be their job to handle it. For Manikin and her creepy dancer-things to gang up on the attackers while Kintaro and Stanenge busted some heads, outside-in or inside-out in keeping with their styles. That was supposed to be the backup, in case anything came after Typeface or Zhelezon or Hellcabbie himself with too much muscle.
But now it sounds like they're the ones in trouble!
And then there's a tremendous crash of thunder and a flash of lightning under the sunset-darkened sky. Hellcabbie spins in place and shouts, waving one arm and calling to his crew:
"TO HELL WITH IT! LET'S ROLL, BOYS!"
Endymion, Prince of Earth, who recognizes the lapse in his title better than anyone, grimaces as he reels back. He raises his left hand, clasping at his jaw and what is undoubtedly going to become a livid bruise on his cheek. But his right hand is free and his sword is on guard. Keeping his wits through a sharp knock on the head was the first trick he mastered in this life, after all- mastered far too well for Mamoru's sake.
Thankfully, the Amazon girl seemed to understand him, at least, even though he used the old ancestor to modern Chinese. He doesn't speak the modern form of the language, but the drift in basic vocabulary isn't entirely hopeless. With a pulse of intent he can usually get basic ideas across.
The creature he's taken for a dance partner practically vibrates with foul, stolen energy- probably feeding on stray life force released by whatever went wrong when the girl struck it. Endymion judges his limits, holding back while his head clears partway. And, inconveniently, while the youma replaces its disabled arm.
Damn it all.
Sword forms are as much muscle memory as anything else, though. A man with a sore head can manage, if not quite so well as he might wish. As the thing rotates its shoulder, he lunges. The eerie sourceless hum the mannequin-youma's uses for a voice rises to a malicious and confident crescendo. Buzzing with awful energy, it moves to catch the tip of the blade with its fingertips.
This proves to be a mistake. Whatever may be said about the shape he's in, Caliburn is a weapon fit to carve its name into legends. The supply of incorporated, stolen magic fueling the youma to surpass itself flares and bursts as Endymion's sword carves through the demonic power in a roaring detonation, and splits the replacement arm cleanly down the middle, clear to the elbow with a sharp crack.
Wrenching the blade loose, Endymion slices at the warbling, spasming thing. And again, and again, and again, calmly dismembering the youma and rupturing its hollow interior. A last thrust skewers its forehead. He wrenches the blade to the right, pulling it free and leaving what's left of the youma to collapse to the floor, dead.
Endymion whirls, first- momentarily- to check on the Amazon girl, who appears to be… crushing up a small bundle of leaves with her free hand? Presumably she knows what she's about. Then, with more trepidation, he tries to extend other senses, to a fight that to the unaided eye looks like nothing more than a staring match.
The fringes of a telepathic attack against Sailor Neptune were far too much to miss, for someone with any sensitivity at all. He nearly joined in there, instead of here. But he stayed his mind and unleashed his hand instead, which was certainly for the best for the Amazon girl- he's got to learn her name.
He made that decision because the sidescatter carried enough to let him know that Sailor Neptune was fighting back. And because he remembers, even now, the feeling of the elder Neptune looking at him and through him at that first meeting, so few and so many years ago, during the drafting of his futile pre-nuptials with Arianna.
Endymion shivers, distracted for a moment by the recalled chill of depths that seemed fit to swallow up worlds. That some whispered had done so. He remembers those terrible, glorious psychic seas pouring through his self in their entirety, searching and then relenting as the unguessably powerful and utterly controlled tide receded from his mind.
No man who had experienced that could imagine that Lady Tethys, in any incarnation, however diminished or however undertrained, would fall quickly in a contest of mental force.
His belief was not misguided. Before his eyes and his wary mind, the assault ends. The stone youma collapses into a pile of rubble. It starts to stir and reform, but that's not something that he has to worry about. Maybe the demon is dead, but reanimated by Teth- by Michiru's will. Perhaps its mind has been hollowed out and replaced with commands from Neptune. Perhaps its thoughts are simply chained and subjugated. None of those possibilities trouble him in the slightest.
Thunder assaults the ears- a lightning strike, close by, followed by a roaring crash of wreckage to their left. Then a shout of alarm from the right. Then more, worse, and wilder.
Endymion takes a moment to apply a quick side-spell to his dizzy head and get a sense for the battle, ready to dive in again- and to take in what's changed. Because as he sees what the others are doing, he becomes all the more certain that someone is going to need his help soon enough.
With what glimpses and attention she can spare from taking apart the demon in front of her, Liuli sees Nuo smash a mace into the hip of the fire-blinded greater youma who's been directing them. For a split second, her immediate opponent spasms. She takes advantage of the opening, of course, but her own strike doesn't seem to break anything important, and the youma recovers too fast. She could have landed a flurry, but those blows wouldn't have been powerful enough to matter. Pressure point strikes are tricky against these things because no two of them have quite the same anatomy.
Still, she's in control of the situation and can keep this thing anchored while sparing a few glances for the rest of the fight. Ling-Ling and Lung-Lung fell behind to take on that downed youma. If they're in trouble, there should be someone to see and lend a hand, and she doubts they will be. Shampoo's handling herself well enough. Though the girl seems to have accidentally left her daggers jammed through the torso of her own mannequin-youma, and is back down to unarmed strikes. Careless, but she'll improvise something.
Dandan and her girls are doing wonderfully, of course. Lanfay- Liuli glances briefly to the left as she knocks the youma back hard enough to stagger it- oh dear.
Lanfay's doing all right against a youma whose stance Liuli can't take time to size up because she has to block a kick; her counterpunch to her own opponent's knee doesn't quite take and it slips out of her grasp. Damnit. It hops back a bit, wriggling its leg, and she can spare a quarter-second for another look. Tùzǐ's sprinkling freshly crushed Total Paralysis Poison Dust on her mangled left hand. Probably to lock it entirely in place; the girl must have a mess of compound fractures in there. One for the specialists. The strange man in the mask is carrying quite the sword, though; that particular offending youma's faltering and he's taking it apart.
She kicks her youma backwards into a rack of clothes, which won't hold it for more than a moment, but… oh dear. Zhi is not doing well. She looks like she has the upper hand wrestling that particular demon, but her aura is a mess. She's not going to be able to keep the thing at bay much longer.
Damn it.
She's about to do something she'd rather not. And she draws breath to shout an order at Shampoo, but-
*BOOM*
A thunderbolt crashes down somewhere close by and Liuli flinches in spite of herself. Loud, powerful. Wood ki, lots of it, mostly yin-aligned. Not one of her girls' techniques. Very extravagant. Probably one of the Sailor Senshi, fighting elsewhere. It's loud, close by, but not an immediate problem. Still, it distracts her for a second. The next second sees her fending off eight well-coordinated strikes from the mannequin in front of her, the next likewise, and in the next-
"LOOK OUT ON THE RIGHT!"
Chun's voice pierces the general tones of crashing, growls, and other confusing noises of so many warriors fighting beyond mortal limits in such an enclosed space. She'd told Chun to try and hang back to keep an eye on the flanks if she could, before this even started, and that's paid off now. Because Liuli's head whips briefly to the right as she forces her youma to hop back to keep its legs from being swept out from under it. And… more of them, coming through the wall!
Was the wall itself some kind of illusion technique? Or part of it? Hardly matters. Whatever they thought was separating this place from the next store and the one beyond it, there's plenty of room for four more demons to come through.
Chun's sprinting over there already. Huiying wrenches her favorite axe out of the youma she's been cutting to ribbons. Dandan's already shifting her meteor hammer, now burning, having disentangled it from the greater youma's head. Nuo stays behind to keep pounding on the youma leader and make sure it- she?- doesn't get back up. A faint approving smile flickers across Liuli's face as she fends off a few more strikes.
Three against four. Five- a rock-monster catches her eye, lumbering across the floor, and it looks tough. Even if it's not lashing out at any of her girls, it's a rock-monster. Not good, she'll have to-
Liuli doesn't hear a technique wind up behind her. She feels it. It's powerful. She finishes catching her youma's arm, pins it, yanks loose a dagger to jab with her free hand, and plunges it into the arm. That ought to distract the thing-
「⍜⋏☊⍜⋔⟟⋏☌ ⌿⍀⟒⌇⌇⎍⍀⟒ ⍙⏃⎐⟒!」
Liuli risks a glance behind her- she was right, that's Sailor Neptune, not a monster winding up for something even more ominous than she's seen before. The Senshi unleashes a massive wave of spiritual energy, heavy enough that it almost feels like physical water roaring through the store. There's a sense of rippling instability, of deliberate unfocus, as the technique somehow bends and weaves to flow around the Amazons. It crashes hard against its targets, knocking the four newly arrived youma off balance. Three of them stagger, falling to their hands and knees. The leading monster, a creature that looks like a hunched, angry little man in a compact motorcart, seems made of slightly sterner stuff. But even he's knocked to one side, wobbling back and forth like a drunken top.
Having felt that, Liuli knows she was right earlier- that thunderbolt must have been thrown by one of the other Senshi. And Sailor Neptune's technique is just as profligate with spiritual energy, leaving the room flooded with it in such quantities that anyone with even half-trained senses couldn't possibly miss it. Water ki, lots of it, and even more yin-aligned than what she felt from the thunderbolt. Liuli can only imagine that the technique is very deliberately not conjuring up water out of nothingness, because spiritually it feels as though she's wading in the ocean itself.
Perfect.
This sort of thing is usually impractical, but in a room this temporarily and suitably rich in the appropriate ki-
"Shampoo! Go right! I'll take these two!"
"But-"
"Fool girl! Go!"
Liuli tosses another dagger, one worked with Boiler Explosion Filigree, at the three-legged mannequin youma that was fighting Shampoo. Unfortunately, the blade doesn't penetrate, so the unfurling slashes of metallic wire and gouts of steam don't do any great harm either. But at least it distracts the thing.
"FINE!" Shampoo huffs and whirls to leap into the new fight on the flank.
And her mother watches both youma close on her, and grins evilly, as her eyes shift back and forth between their featureless faces.
There is so much yin-water ki floating around.
Liuli seems to fall back into a suboptimal guard position. With a discordant plastic clacking that might pass for laughter, the pair of youma close in on her, though they no longer move with quite the same synchrony and precision she remembers from the first moments of the battle. She's sure they're expecting to hit her from both sides and pound her into jelly, especially with a weak guard stance.
Manikin Defeated!
Mannequin-youma teamwork coefficient falls from 0.375 to standard 0.25!
AMAZON TRIPLE SUCCESS!
DollLíng destroyed! DollYī now at 1 of 3 hits remaining!
But this isn't a guard position. This is the start of one of her channeling kata. Sidestepping a lunge, Liuli calls upon the stray energy that surrounds her.
This water ki wants to be conjured up into something useful. It wants to wrap itself around Liuli's hands, to twist in narrow streams running up her arms, to cross her shoulders. It takes hardly a thought, hardly any focusing intent, to begin the process. She only has to mingle the tiniest bit of her own energy with what she's drawing from out of the air, too. It's as if it was just waiting for someone to ask it to take a shape. Maybe Sailor Neptune has a technique of her own, something loosely like what Liuli has in mind, something that even her scattered, expended ki remembers.
Liuli glances at one of the mannequin-youma. Before she even starts to move a muscle, the water shifts and flows. At first, only a network of thin rivulets runs up her arms and across her shoulders to connect the masses forming around her hands. But then they thicken, as she begins to exercise some control, urging the technique on. Two twisting tendrils of water lash out through the air, twisting searchingly like the tentacles of an octopus. But instead of the gripping suckers of an octopus, they end in blade-thin edges of cruel, unthinkably fast currents.
Cutting edges.
One of the water-tendrils touches magically charged plastic, and snicks a youma's arm off in the blink of an eye.
The other tendril snaps out, slashing down at the youma's left shoulder. Liuli expected to chop into its torso, but the water-cutter carves all the way down across the youma's body to exit through its right hip.
Quick as thought, the tendrils begin stabbing out, with nearly the speed of the Chestnut-Salvaging Fist. Dozens of pinprick holes and cracks appear in the youma's front, and the resilient material finally gives way, beginning to crack into smaller pieces even before it can hit the ground.
The tendrils go slack.
She glances at the other youma. The conjured water warps and bends about Liuli again. This time, the technique is partly exhausted. As she raises her hand against her second opponent, the water doesn't form cutting edges. Quite the opposite, in fact. The sudden geyser nearly knocks Liuli herself backwards. The youma, weakened by the pair of daggers Shampoo left in its chest, caves in. Its torso crackles as the water wraps around it in a gravity-defying mass. With a final intuitive flourish- a gesture not taught to her, but one that just makes sense- Liuli uses the last of the sudden rush of ki to fling the youma into the air and slam it back down to the floor.
Racks of clothing jump and topple. The floor shakes a little.
The tide of power recedes. The water gathered around her arms wicks away into nothingness, as if it was never there to begin with. The only sign of its passing is the odd pale lines of sea salt left along her arms, seeming almost ingrained into the skin, rippling and twisting like crashing waves.
Liuli doesn't have the time to try and understand what just happened. She has business to finish. The waterlogged monster she knocked down is lurching to its feet. Taking a moment to return to a more typical combat stance, Liuli laughs harshly and moves in to finish the job.
That cry of warning drew its share of attention. Such Amazons as can do so pile in against the new arrivals. A blast of Sailor Neptune's magic knocks the youma reeling in the first moments as they orient themselves, and that buys the needed time.
Some find themselves unlucky in their matchups, of course.
Huiying whips her axe out of the remains of a mannequin-youma and charges, only to be met by flickering, hypnotic static that draws all her attention. One of the new attackers has screens like glowing eyes, many of them, dotting its entire upper body. Shaking her head and snarling, Huiying charges, but the monster, despite its clumsy appearance, easily deflects her strikes with cabled arms. She can feel her mind whirling, reeling, her reflexes slowing, making her more vulnerable. The static starts to flow out from those glassy portals, wrapping her in a buzzing cloud like a swarm of stinging flies…
Zhi, Lanfay's best friend, is in still more desperate straits. She couldn't even think about doing anything to deal with the attack from the right. She's wrestling a four-armed mannequin-demon, one of the few left effective and losing. She's burning through ki like fast-flaring tinder to keep it from securing a hold firm enough, and a strength advantage great enough, to let the thing start plucking her apart like a farm girl butchering a cooked chicken, and it won't last-
And rather than give herself a chance to learn whether anyone else will come to save her, she snarls desperately, stops trying to fend off the youma's lower left arm, and lashes out with bladed fingertips to crush the delicate little treasure in her pocket. The Flexible Form Talisman, lifesaving in a moment like this, flares with stored spiritual power. There's a sudden spike of terrible pain as her organs and skeleton turn to soft tissue, and then she flows and slithers desperately out of the youma's grasp in a final surge of inhuman speed.
The mannequin-youma, perplexed, leaps to its feet. There are no shortage of other dangers here and now.
Chun, who first shouted the warning, is either luckier or more judicious in her choice of opponents. The forging technique that went into her swords proves the equal of the youma's lashing tentacles. She slips between the strikes and knocks it back with a kick to the faceplate. Something cracks and starts trailing a spray of electric sparks, but the youma goes on fighting, clearly unbroken.
Much like the warband's leader, Dandan senses the rising spiritual energy of Sailor Neptune's attack. Unsure what to expect, she rolls low, trying to avoid it- but it flows around her and her comrades and slams into the youma, staggering and shocking them, taking away their momentum just before they fling themselves into the Amazons' flank. But unlike her chief, Dandan doesn't have the time and attention to spare on outside energy. The watery ki scattered by Sailor Neptune's overwhelming wave of magical force dissipates before she can do much of anything with it.
Fortunately, she has different ideas about how to take advantage of the time and effort she's spent on the Amazons' external ki techniques, given the nature of the youma she has her eye on.
Perhaps not realizing that the woman who's chosen to be his opponent sees him as a target inexplicably carrying a gigantic battery on his head, the water tank youma bellows steely anger and leaps to his feet, eager to bring down one of these intruders.
Dandan smirks, twirling her meteor hammer lightly as she sizes up her opponent. She's not a child anymore, but she's only reached a level where the elders considered her ready to begin practicing direct manipulation of water ki in the last few years. Still, even that's enough that she knows exactly what she wants to do.
All she needs now is to get her hands on this thing's head.
It was moments earlier that Hellcabbie realized that things were very wrong. First, he got an eyeful of Sailor Senshi magic. It knocked him wobbling, sent his crew to their knees. The magic swirls around him, chaotic, confused…
Hellcabbie doesn't have knees!
Then swirling confused magical chaos is joined by the regular kind of chaos. Three Amazons tackle his crew- word from the Chinese youma is that they're serious business, and this is definitely them. He raises his hand to cast Yellow Light, but- exhaust, that's Stanenge and something's wrong about the way he's moving. Plus, he's not smashing up any Amazons… oh, exhaust.
"Hey, Stanenge, knock it off! What are you doing?"
"i obey Neptune."
"You what the what? Hey… don't come any closer!"
"i obey Neptune."
"Damn it, what's wrong with you?"
"i obey Neptune."
Stanenege is looming now, and Hellcabbie knows damn well how strong the spooky bastard is, even when he isn't getting inside your head.
"RED LIGHT!" Hellcabbie extends his hand and magic forged from life energy twists around him- in, appropriately, the form of red light. It wraps around Stanenge, not quite pinning him, but slowing him greatly. "Drella left you in charge here! What the hell's going on? What's gotten into you?"
"i obey Neptune."
Stanenge lumbers on. Hellcabbie snarls and snaps a tire iron into his hand to block the descending weight of one of those savagely powerful petrified-wood arms. His eyes dart around- no help from his crew- wait a minute…
"Zhàng'ài shì wèile shālù!"
Ha-HAH! One of the Amazons is attacking Stanenge instead of him! YES! The human girl crashes into Stanenge's back with a flying kick, and even though the big weirdo's made out of rocks, he wobbles, almost toppling forward onto Hellcabbie.
Hellcabbie is too exultant to sense the way that the energies around him are growing even more accursed and bizarre than they were before.
And Stanenge doesn't do a damn thing to defend himself. He just lets her let fly with a few barehanded jabs that chip his back. Then she pats him on the back? and leaps away and wait that's a burning fuse, is that thing glued to him-
*boom*
Hellcabbie lowers his arm from his eyes; Stanenge, loose connection of magically bound stones that he is, looks… dislocated. Weirdly, sickeningly so. And he still doesn't do a damn thing to defend himself from the Amazon. Hellcabbie's starting to worry even though the bastard just tried to smash his head down into his fuselage. With a wrench, the Amazon leaps up, wraps herself around one of Stanenge's arms, plants her feet on his stony torso, and heaves; the magical force tethering limb to body parts with a crackling snap.
Shampoo attacks Hellcabbie!
5+24 = 29
vs
1+28 = 29
Roll d4: 1
Fumble Again!
AMAZON DOUBLE SUCCESS!
And then Hellcabbie realizes he messed up bad, real bad, by doing nothing for a little while there and just watching the human lay into Stanenge's weird, creepy, traitorous self. Because the screaming maniac girl that tore off Stanenge's arm starts beating Hellcabbie with it.
"OW! OW! GET OFF ME!"
"Shampoo not that kind of woman!"
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO?"
"Shampoo fine! World crazy, husband no good! SHAMPOO! FINE!"
"i obey Neptune"
Why is Stanenge still hitting him? While saying that over and over? Why can't the Amazon make up her damn mind who she wants to beat on, preferably not on him? Hellcabbie's taking dents. The bludgeoning is starting to hurt. He's pretty sure he's cracked a radiator already.
And then one of the other Amazons rips Tordel Qua's head open, because either the gods themselves have decided they hate Hellcabbie, or some horrible ancient curse is unfolding misery against him and his. Or both.
"AUUGH!"
A wave of heavily enchanted water splashes across all the combatants, and for a moment Hellcabbie is blinded by spray-
There is.
There is a cat.
Its paws are wrapped around Stanenge's fallen limb, surrounded by a tangle of clothing.
The cat bristles angrily, hissing at both of them. Where the hell did the Amazon go?
Stanenge no longer has enough volition to worry about such questions. Stanenge no longer has opinions. Stanenge obeys Neptune.
Now, Neptune did not specifically command Stanenge to scoop up his own detached arm. Nor to, before reconnecting it, shake the angry cat loose, launching her straight at Hellcabbie's eyes.
The will of Neptune could not reasonably have foreseen this exact sequence of events, or Stanenge reacting to events in that exact way.
But that is what Stanenge does.
"AAAAH WHAT THE HOWWW?"
Hellcabbie screams in distress, of course. A typical cat would be lucky to do more than lightly fray the wrappings covering that no-longer-human face. But a typical cat hasn't spent the last three months inventing Outraged Molly Style, the first truly high martial art to be developed for housecats in several thousand years, and then honing the style into a homicidal whirlwind of ki-enhanced claw slashes.
Even as Stanenge continues to pound dents into his former comrade's frame, the taxi-youma flails wildly at the fierce, tiny, utterly berserk thing clawing at him. Unfortunately, instead of knocking it away with his powerful mostly-mechanical arms, he knocks it down.
Right past his vestigial steering wheel.
"AUUUGGH!"
Stanenge keeps pounding away for a while. The will of Neptune very specifically commands that he subdue his former allies in her name. But soon enough, Hellcabbie is tipped over entirely, making strange wheezing hissing mechanical noises. He leaks a mix of water, two kinds of oil, and other, less identifiable things, some of which emit odd smokes and steams.
Stanenge does not form independent opinions.
However, Hellcabbie appears subdued.
Stanenge turns, and continues to obey Neptune.
"So we found a way out of there," said the ogre to the fox.
Natsuo looks sharply at the matched red-blue pair of grinning ogres. His ears twitch suspiciously. He's maybe a bit out of place here, magic or no magic, and he suspects they're winding him up. Men and spirits all crouch by an auto repair shop, and the yokai speak in low voices while mortal humans who knew them only as legends three months ago watch and listen. Some easily. Some uneasily.
Let them.
He can feel his ear twitch skeptically. "So you mean to tell me you two have been away for fifty years?"
"Yeah, give or take a little." Zomm scratches his belly. "I'm not much of a big brain, but after the rebellions started to go south, it seemed like a good idea to get out of town. To the other side of the world, in fact. Britain."
Zegg chimes in. "We came back just now because we got word things were getting exciting back in the old country!"
The twin-tailed cat-woman sprawled across the hood of a parked car sits up and grins as she hears Zegg's words. "Betcha that whoever told you that didn't know the half of it. But… Britain. Huh. That is on the other side of the world, ain't it? And what, they just let you in?"
The blue oni gives a quick thumbs-up, grinning with teeth that could chew up planks. "Oh, yeah, of course they did! We did fight with the Circle Table Gang, after all!"
Moriko's eyes narrow, in a way that Natsuo can immediately tell is suspicion, at least as much as curiosity. "The Circle Table Gang. Do tell." She tilts her head, and that enormous shock of blonde hair tilts crazily.
Zomm waves airily, seeming not to notice the change in Moriko's posture. "Oh, it was one of those temporary warbands, you know, here one season, gone the next. But anyway, we tracked down some old enemies of the British, and they were pretty grateful."
Natsuo's curiosity is well and truly sparked now. Who?"
Zegg lets out a low, grisly chuckle. "Well, now. Ever hear of the Silver Lightning boys?"
Natsuo stares blankly, unsure what to say. Because he doesn't think there's a single yokai in Japan who would joke about the Silver Lightning Gang, the bands of foreign mercenaries who fought for the Imperial Ministry during the rebellions. And he certainly wouldn't, after what happened to Aunt Atsuko and her two kits.
But these two… he doesn't know. It'd be nice to think someone was hunting Silver Lightning. But he never heard anything about that at the time, and… well, the idea that someone might lie about it, to make themselves sound tough, makes him angry. Very angry.
Aunt Atsuko. Night and fog, and never seen again. Not even mentioned, not even in gloating, or as hostages.
But then Zomm gives a smile that's big and cruel and vicious and satisfied, the kind of smile that fits the face of even an easygoing oni so very well. "Yeah, them. Ever notice how you don't hear about them any more?"
Moriko's laugh is deep and throaty and backed by a purr that rumbles like a diesel engine, and Natsuo realizes she still hasn't said much about her own background. "Wow, does that bring me back… back then I was still just a kitten like Maomao over there-"
The odd-eyed bakeneko girl stands up sharply, and her own, somewhat less pronounced shock of more typical black hair quite literally bristles in a huff. "Don't call me Maomao! And I'm not a kitten anymore! I'm twenty-five!"
Moriko bounces lithely off the car, leaping four meters to ruffle her sister's hair. "Awwh, twenty-five's not much. And you know me. Even when I'm old and gray, you'll still be my little kitten sister, Torakuro."
Tora grumbles, but there is a hint of a smile on her face all the same.
Moriko's face goes flat, though. "Besides, this is serious." She looks back at the two oni.
"So, boys. Tell me about Osaka. The winter after the war, right?"
Zomm shakes his head. "Naw, winter after that. We'd hardly got started the first winter after the war. Rebellions were on, but our little gang was still new. Anyway, huh, Osaka. Yeah, I remember. The wizard, uh-" he glances at the human soldiers- "he got ahold of a bunch of guns, passed them to… wait. Shit, girl, were you one of that bunch? You've got the ears for it, heheh!"
Moriko smiles. "Was I there? It depends." She looks to Zegg. "You talked about books on the way over, big boy. Ever read Fanon?"
Zegg grunts. "Never heard of him. Should I?"
The blonde's smile is downright enigmatic now. "Maybe so, maybe so. He talked a lot about rebellions, and muscles."
Zomm raises a fist. "Hah! Sounds like my kind of guy."
Moriko laughs, more gently this time. "Maybe, maybe. Be nice to talk it over with another old fighter. So, the wizard passed the grease guns to the kittycats, you said? Heh."
"Oh yeah, And then they hit the Onogoro castle with those and, uh, the thing that went boom, what'd he call them…"
"The rifle grenades couldn't hit crap."
"You were probably holding them wrong or something." Moriko snorts, but says nothing. Zegg continues the story.
"Anyway, there was a little bunch from the Silver Lightning Gang in town, so we figured they'd come piling in if her lot made a lot of noise!"
Moriko grins at her sister. "It's like I say, girl. Best kind of sneaking. If there's no survivors, there's no one left to raise the alarm!"
Zomm nods. "And when the Silver Lightning boys came running to jump you..."
"You did jump them… wait, I think I remember you two, yeah! So your bunch kept on the fuckers after that, too?"
"Until we and the rest of the crew ran out of ones to kill after Nagasaki, I guess." Zegg shrugs.
Natsuo's eyes goggle as he looks from one of the other yokai to another, to another. You mean to say…"
"Yep!"
"Killed 'em all!"
"Hey, here you go, buddy, I keep one of the trophies as a good luck piece!" Zomm fishes around in the pouch slung around his waist. His fingers are like sausages, so it takes a moment. "This, no… oh, right!" It's getting dark, but not so dark that the white insignia stitched onto the crudely torn swatch of black fabric don't show. He puts it away. "Yeah, the trouble is, a bit of cloth doesn't make a great trophy, but…"
Zegg shrugs. "When we were hunting them, I thought a few times about collecting the tattoos, but those were practically on the armpit, so that's just no good, you know?"
Moriko blinks, sounding surprised. "Wait, Silver Lightning had special tattoos?"
Zegg stops, looking confused for a moment. "Huh? Oh, yeah. Some of 'em, anyway. I was pretty drunk when the human wizard explained it to me, but if I got it right, then I think the tattoos were supposed to let them heal by drinking the blood of their enemies."
Zomm nods slowly. "Yeah, humans can't do that. Well, not normally. Must be why the snakes needed the tattoo. Except I'm pretty sure you're getting it wrong, Zegg. Never saw the tattoo work like that for them, you see. Of course…" he gives that nasty, satisfied smile again. "I don't know if they really could heal by drinking the blood of their enemies or not, but even if you can, it doesn't do you much good when someone grabs you by the legs and bounces you off of walls until they come off."
With a certain sick fascination, and in the full knowledge that it couldn't have happened to more deserving souls either way, Natsuo gulps, realizing he has to ask. "I have to ask. Do you mean the walls, or the legs?"
Zomm winks. "Eh, depends."
Moriko laughs, but Zegg elbows him in the side. "Yeah, idiot! That's why we only got one skull to share between the two of us! You kept breaking 'em!"
Natsuo's eyes widen once again. Wait, you took a Silver Lightning man's skull? And… there was a human wizard with your gang? What did he have to say about that? Humans don't normally like that kind of thing."
Zomm grunts. "Welllll… there was this one wizard, yeah. We promised not to tell anybody his name when he wasn't around, mind you-"
Moriko interrupts- "I didn't, but the bastard never told me."
"See, of course he didn't, you never promised. But aaaanyway, he was there. And what he said about the skull? HA! Good fellow. Has the right sense of humor. All he said was that the idiot bastard had it coming, what else? Our guy, he'd been fighting those boys longer than anybody else. Surprised he wasn't already using their guts for sandal straps."
Zegg rolls his eyes and calps Zomm alongside the head. Probably not hard enough to fell a grown man. "He didn't wear sandals, remember?"
Zomm nods sagely. "Ohhh, right, and I bet guts make lousy sandal straps anyway. Too stretchy."
Moriko looks a bit more thoughtful now. "Huh. Is this wizard still alive? Since the rebellions, that's been… what, four hundred and fifty in human years, right?"
Zomm shrugs. "He was alive the last time I saw him. That was, uh, about a month ago. With old humans you never can tell, but he seems pretty spry. Anyway. The skull. I'm sorry I can't show it to you, but it's back where we're staying. We didn't bring it with us out here, because it might get broken in the fight, see?"
Zegg's brow furrows. "Hey, that reminds me." He turns to speak more directly to the human soldiers. "Watch out. The youma are pretty strong."
The soldiers eye him… nervously.
Natsuo, remembering the note left behind with silver-lightning slashes, once upon a time, smiles slightly. Let them.
And if Natsuo smiles, Zomm positively leers. "Oh yeah, and remember not to let them get you by the legs, like I said. Because see, these new 'sailing kami' have some really good healing magic, seen it done. But the only one I'm sure ever cured 'dead' is the goddess Kanzeon, and she doesn't make a lot of house calls, if you know what I mean. So you be careful, you hear?"
The silence only lasts a few moments before one of the soldiers speaks up, in a commendable deadpan.
"Oh, don't worry. I'm sure she takes our insurance policy."
Natsuo stares.
Moriko stares.
Some of the other humans stare.
But Zomm breaks down, doubling over in laughter. Laughter so powerful, so earthy, that Natsuo can feel the illusory veil he threw up straining to contain it.
Zegg hefts his club and thumps it down, gouging the pavement with the spikes. "Hah! You're all right, kid!"
And then the redheaded human, Kazanari, calls from across the lot. "Of course he is! He's here, isn't he? Everyone quiet down, though. They're about to start."
Zomm grunts. "Fine, fine…"
Zegg stage-whispers to Natsuo. "He's a good war chief. Sure, he lost the drinking contest and the belching contest, but he won the punching contest and the pun fight. Gotta respect that."
Zomm elbows him in the side. "Sure, but shaddup, I wanna watch."
Many of the others peer into the distance, as a streak of golden fire slashes across the highway and crashes into one of the storefronts. As a dozen martial artists- some kind of Chinese renegade- charge after the golden flash, led by another one of the new Sailor kami.
As sounds of roars, crashing, and banging sound in the distance.
A bolt of lightning arcs from the five-story building across the way from the long, linear strip of stores, sweeping up and crashing down into one of their roofs.
Genjuro's gauntlets clash. "That's it! No more waiting on the perimeter. Fix bayonets if you have 'em, crew! We're going in!"
Zomm gives Genjuro a hearty backslap that really ought to have knocked him down, and does not. "Right on!"
Genjuro gives him a slap right back. "That's the spirit!"
"Oof!" The red oni wobbles a little.
His friend grins, not at Genjuro, but at the quiet, blue-haired sword girl who accompanies him, the one in the funny magic armor. She reminds Natsuo of… something. She's very different from an Onogoro samurai, but similar in ways. And… somehow, something he senses from her feels like home. Though he doesn't have any idea what that means.
But Zegg seems unabashed. "Stick with us, kid. We'll teach this bunch of idiot freaks what the word 'monster' really means!" He turns to Genjuro. "You know, your girl, I think she's a little bit like us. You try and find her a good red to pair off with, eh? It'll do her good."
Genjuro Kazanari gives that no more than a shrug and a smile's worth of dignity, before he waves the team into motion.
...WELL! I think we can all agree that we didn't see Neptune straight up lobotomizing Stanenge coming. That's... I'm not gonna lie, that's terrifying.
However, at least things are going...not great, considering some if the Amazons have had to retreat, but good in terms of the battle. Both sides have taken some losses, the major leaders of the Youma appear to be either weakened, no longer in a position to fight or...Neptune'd. The mooks certainly won't go down easily, but with the leaders out of the fight, things will be harder for the Youma.
Neptune is scary. I'm going to just leave aside the ethics of brainwashing evil minions, though if Stanenge makes it out of the fight an appointment with Naru might be called for.
Shampoo inventing a cat-based martial art makes me kinda want to throw Luna and Artemis at her for an action just to see how they critique it...
Also, Zegg and Zomm's perspective was especially fun to read. Getting their outsider take on things is just a joy.
Hm, considering that Stanenge was trying to turn Neptune into his lobotomized, faithful slave, one shall feel no pity for his blow backfiring on him to render his fate that which he intended for Neptune.
As for Hellcabbie, ah, the dice do seem to have a grudge against him. So many critical failures...
Guys, is this the first time Endymion's actually won a fight? The only other thing I can think of was against Jadeite, and that really didn't feel like a win.
Maybe the remnants of Tethys are helping direct this new puppet. I mean there are bits of Serenity floating around in Usagi's head, why wouldn't the same be true for the other Senshi and their past lives?
What would be funny is that Stanenge can still say other stuff, it's just that everything he's been asked up to this point can just be answered with "i obey Neptune".
Hellcabbie screams in distress, of course. A typical cat would be lucky to do more than lightly fray the wrappings covering that no-longer-human face. But a typical cat hasn't spent the last three months inventing Outraged Molly Style, the first truly high martial art to be developed for housecats in several thousand years, and then honing the style into a homicidal whirlwind of ki-enhanced claw slashes.
Huh. That makes sense that she would be well trained in mental combat, if she was directly tied psychically to a sensor array large enough to cover the solar system. Also fits a lot of other abilities she has.
I love Hellcabbie. He's a real working class joe, you know what I'm saying? Shame he's on Team Evil, but maybe he fumbled badly enough that they don't double tap him before he can surrender.
Also the entire Shampoo battle was peak Ranma style silliness. I couldn't approve more.
Yeah. As advantageous as lobotomizing her opponent has been in the moment, I'm all for calling on some way to revert Stanenge to human and restore his mind during the after action.
Overall though we seem to be doing fairly well, barring seeing how Uranus is doing against the big rock guy.
Yeah. As advantageous as lobotomizing her opponent has been in the moment, I'm all for calling on some way to revert Stanenge to human and restore his mind during the after action.
Uh, do you mean "without Michiru helping to beat up that specific youma" or do you mean "without the +20% Prowess she gets from being in Michiru's general vicinity?"
Because Haruka's at Prowess 44 with the latter and the big rock-youma is at Prowess 41.
And, well...
Rock Bling Guy did win the first round of the combat. He got lucky on the dice, but he wouldn't need nearly as much good luck to beat Sailor Uranus in a straightforward duel as the amount of bad luck Hellcabbie just experienced with that double fumble.
Especially not with one win against Haruka already in the bag.
Edit: quite frankly, Stanage got lucky the Silver Millennium thought it was excessive to monitor that volume of space to a subatomic resolution. Or the quantum interference was just not worth the hassle.
