Virtual mana veins fired up within Amulak’s body again, shearing away only a small portion of the reservoir that now made up his mana pool. Directing it upwards, he crafted a spear of arcane energies above the centipede woman’s midsection and dropped it down. The earth itself cracked from the force of the magical attack, the feedback of that sensation of ‘release’ sending shivers up the mage’s arms. He could see clearly as those same energies seeped through the centipede woman’s exoskeleton and into her own veins, working to paralyze her body. But her body was long, and her feet were many. Even as six of them twitched, unmoved, ninety-four of them still propelled her towards Raime.

The ranger was not her meal for tonight though. Muscular, stocky men had stringy, tough flesh; from experience, the centipede women knew that it was Immortal women, their bodies sculpted to perfection within the Upper Realms, who held the tastiest flesh.

Raime’s reflexes and speed, a single step faster than the monstrous woman before him, afforded him the ability to narrowly avoid getting gored by her over-sized teeth. Half his body collided with her boulder-hard cheekbone instead, and his physical resilience was unable to withstand such tremendous force. Launched ten meters, he crashed into the branches of a thorny bramble, chest heaving but lungs painfully unable to draw in air as his health dropped by [b]another 57 HP.[/b]

And Ari, for all her speed, found herself arrested all of a sudden by something warm, something wet. The centipede woman’s split tongue wrapped itself around her arm, her blackened eyes narrowed into sadistic slits as her mouth opened wider and wider. There were teeth inside too. Lining the roof of her mouth, the throat, the uvula, the esophagus. Pinkish flesh, pulsating in anticipation.

With a [i]shlurp[/i], the tongue retracted, and the cat girl was pulled towards that gaping maw.
[sub][@Psyker Landshark][@Cu Chulainn][@Searat][@GreenGoat][/sub][hr]
Certainly, it was a bold move, stepping out to the open and breaking out into dance. At the very least though, Magpie didn’t dance poorly. Her accelerated sense of time hadn’t yet kicked in, but her control over her body was on point as her forearms flicked in and out, as her body gyrated like a blender, as her feet went fast against the ground.

Throughout her entire dance, the three oni watched, their expressions unreadable to a human. But as she settled down, the blue one rose up. He slapped his belly once, drained the last of whatever noxious alcohol was in his flask, and then spewed it out into a fine mist above him. Raising his hands upwards, he allowed himself to be purified in the spirits, before raising one leg straight up. Skywards.

[i]BOOM.[/i]

His foot struck the ground like lightning, a shockwave that blew Magpie’s hair back. Behind the tree, Ames had to cover his own ankle bell, lest they chime in the wake of thunder. The two red oni beside him bared their teeth, still bloodied from the meal they partook in, as the blue one’s hands clenched into fists that could shatter mountains.

Silence suffused the space.

His fists swung out to one side. His arms and shoulders began to rotate.

His fists swung out to the other side. His arms and shoulders rotated even faster.

He raised them upwards again, sliding sideways as both booty and belly jiggled in a blur of movement.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7eQbKWw_CI]Was this…also a dance?[/url]
[sub][@Yankee][@OwO][/sub][hr]
He had escaped. With a chop of his cleaver, Klein was free!

But, like any horror movie, it was always the buff ones who professed that they had no fear of the monster that chased them. The ones who took the fight to the monster. The ones who died, if not first, then certainly second. Perhaps the mountain man had drowned himself in his fears so much that he had missed out on that particular trope.

Regardless, in deciding to press the attack, he had lost his opportunity to escape.

[i]You make crafting this nightmare so easy…[/i]

The giggling of children sounded in the boughs of the blooming tree as the Brutal Cleaver drove itself deep into the tree’s trunk, a force that shook some of the petals loose. They fell down, the kiss of their forms against his skin gentle and warm, before dissolving soon after. The sap that seeped out from the tree was a dark green, while the crick-crackling of the roots behind him alerted Klein to the fact that a fence of thick roots now enclosed him in close combat with the tree.

A tree that continued to bloom and shed these pink petals.

His health had yet to fall, but something else did in its place.
[sub][@Shovel][/sub]