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The fight began. This was Tauga's third.

Nimble had drawn the first Destroyer to her camp, back on that last day before Tauga died. Evidently a Bludgeon exerted the same effect, and while the former was helpless pickings, the shining white moths came to her as to a wildfire. They were quickly becoming scarce, though. Maybe they were learning to keep away from what wasn't good for them. She doubted it.

Charging face-on as she had in her first hunt had, by luck, turned out to be the safest way to initiate. As long as a Destroyer was using its streams of moonlit fire to propel itself forwards, it couldn't use that same magic to blast at what was right before its eyeslits. [i][colour=antiquewhite]Count to three. One. And two. And-[/colour][/i]

Tauga twisted violently in the air, flinging the gargantuan Bludgeon into a spin as the tendrils of her upper body released their grip on its cord and she entered freefall.

End over end the spheres flipped, plumes streaming behind them, cords screaming like violin strings, and the Realta was unprepared for the abrupt leap in speed. Executing an agile hairpin turn did not save it from the magnetic turbulence and its wings spat rivers of shining fire in every direction as it repositioned.

Barely breathing, Tauga held out her tendrils as she fell, and they snatched back at the returning cord, an unblinking trapeze artist. As the elastic tentacles eased her fall she held close to the nearer sphere, holding still as she raised the distant sphere and slashed it back down on its orbit, down like an axe at the recovering Realta as it swooped closer, easily evading the sphere- unable to see the cord.

Tauga missed. The Destroyer survived.

The distant sphere was still descending and Tauga used its groundwards arc to toss her end of the cord upwards. She let go and was flung into the sky. The Destroyer knew how to identify a vulnerable target.

From above, Tauga could see the metal mask of Arcon's wrath as it rose to meet her, blotting out the world below with the all-purging whiteness of its wings. She could see the long iron fingers stretched out to impale.

It rose to meet her, and did not look down. The Bludgeon was faster.

A wave of heat was all that remained as the Destroyer's dissolving plasma body passed Tauga and faded into the distance. In the moment before the cord that sliced it apart reached her, Tauga could see the fragments of its silver shell scatter in the air around her. 

[i][colour=antiquewhite]Like twisted mirrors on the wind.[/colour][/i]

Tauga closed her eyes and fell with them.

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