Chapter 154: Restraining Bolts and Twin Tornadoes
Pip’s warning whistle barely escapes his locked audio-ports before violet chains erupt straight up out of the churned earth around him, thick as ship’s rope and crackling with barely restrained fury. They lash around all three soldiers that are trying to restrain Pip before they even register the threat.
The chains wrench them viciously off Pip’s body, snap them together in midair with a sickening crunch of armor and bone, before hurling their limp, twitching bodies into the dirt in one brutal, unbroken motion, leaving three crumpled forms gouged into the earth where they land.
"SERA!" Veena yells out, residual magic still sparking at her finger tips as the magical chains fade away from her hands.
Sera skids in a heartbeat later, slicing apart an approaching group of smoke-soldiers along the way, boots tearing twin trenches through the mud as she heaves her greatsword, swinging in a wide, precise arc that tear through smoke and flesh alike.
Vuvi runs up to Pip, already pulling a magni-wrench from her belt. She digs in into the device and rips it off Pip’s chest without so much as scratching the plating beneath it. It clatters away, sparking and smoking, spinning to a stop in a puddle of someone’s spilled blood.
Pip’s eyes flare back to gold instantly, his whole frame unlocking all at once with an audible, grateful hiss of released pressure, and a shuddering string of relieved beeps, chest still faintly smoking where the device had latched into his plating.
"Are you okay?" Vuvi shouts, pulling her Boombuster back from over her shoulder.
Pip nods, still catching his bearings, and Vuvi crouches to snatch up the device lying beside him, turning it over in her fingers, teeth gritted with anger.
"Restraining bolts." she says, grim. "They’re trying to cap him. We keep these things off him, no matter what." she says to Veena and Sera.
"Most of the soldiers seem to be illusions," Veena calls over, a blade dripping in her hand, "but we can’t tell which ones aren’t until it’s too late."
"Yeah," Vuvi snaps back, already reloading, "So we just keep blowing them up until your mother decides to show up."
"Good plan." Veena scoffs.
Sera crouches beside the wrecked crate of shattered potion bottles, hauling Penelo upright by both shoulders. "You good, bunny?"
Penelo winces, shaking glass and glowing residue out of her hair and fur. "I’m okay." she groans, "What about Pip?"
"He’s fine. And better off if you stay right there!" Sera orders, already turning back toward the fighting. "Away from all of... this."
Pip gives a firm, worried beep of agreement as he waves at Penelo to let her know he’s fine.
"Ugh, ok, fine!" Penelo whines, crawling behind the nearest overturned crate and pulling her knees to her chest, ears pinned flat as another explosion rattles the ground somewhere off to her left. "Just don’t forget about me!"
Ahead of them, Xenara and Maribelle tear through the enemy line like a matched pair of tornadoes let loose in a china shop built entirely of smoke and flesh.
Xenara a blur of eight bladed limbs spinning through three ranks at once, arachnid grace turning every strike into a small, contained massacre of ash and blood, while Maribelle carves alongside her with brutal, economical precision, her sword trailing streaks of black-and-white lightning that scorch the air with every swing.
Between them they leave a corridor of smoke and scattered limbs stretching to the treelines, neither one slowing for a second to catch her breath, moving with the easy, terrifying rhythm of two women who have clearly done this exact dance more than once in their lives.
"You’re keeping up!" Maribelle calls over, barely winded as she sends a group of soldiers flying across a field.
"Try not to sound so surprised!" Xenara shoots back, decapitating two illusions in the same fluid motion while impaling a third.
"I’m not. I’m impressed!"
"Same here."
High above it all, Syraleth hovers on wide, restless wings, the wind billowing off them stirring smoke and dust into slow, lazy spirals below her high-heeled feet, surveying the chaos unfolding below with a deepening frown that doesn’t suit her face at all.
Her gaze keeps sliding, again and again, searching the churned up farm land, toward the roads and horizon, looking for her real enemy. The one that actually matters. Who should have already appeared.
But she finds nothing instead. Just the sight of her army of illusions being torn apart by piece by piece.
"Where are you, Vexena!?" She mutters to herself, her jaw tightening.
She folds her wings and drops out of the sky like a tossed stone, landing hard between the two kitsune twins with a thud that cracks the earth beneath her heels, and sends both women stumbling half a step back.
"We’re running out of time." Syraleth groans, "Switch to Plan B, immediately. I’ll handle it from her." she says, sharp and clipped.
"That was not the plan!" The first twin says, voice rough from constant chanting of incantations, she glances warily at the chaos across the battlefield. "Distract and delay only." she sneers before muttering magical under her breath again, summoning another legion of shadow soldiers.
"The Queen isn’t even here yet," the second adds. "If we reveal the strategy now, we risk—"
Syraleth snarls at them both, eyes flaring molten red, wings snapping half-open in a burst of restless, crackling shadow.
"I am the plan," she snaps, her voice filled with fury, each word sharp at the edges. "I have always been the plan. Every contingency, every fallback, every single one of you standing here right now... all of it because I made it happen. So when I say we move to Plan B, you don’t ask where Vexena is. You do what I tell you to! Understand!?"
The twins exchange a glance, a silent, wordless conversation passing between their eyes in the space of a single breath.
"As you wish, my lady." the first murmurs, bowing her head.
"Executing Plan B." the second echoes, quieter, already altering the shape of her incantations.
Syraleth’s lips curl back into something openly malicious. Fangs beared, hunger burning in her eyes. The expression of a woman who has stopped enjoying the game and started actually playing to win.