[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/6W7bqko.png[/img]
[h2][color=FD0000]The Koopa Troop[/color][/h2]
[b][color=FD0000]wordcount:[/color][/b] 2,318 (3+) (+6)
[b][color=FD0000]Bowser: Level 13 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=FD0000]//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color] (182/130)
[b][color=SpringGreen]Bowser Jr: Level 13 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=SpringGreen]//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color]//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (70/130)
[b][color=DeepSkyBlue]Kamek: Level 12 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=DeepSkyBlue]//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color] (179/120)
[b][color=Aqua]Rika: Level 8 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=Aqua]/////////////////////////////////[/color]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (33/90)
[b][color=FD0000]Location:[/color][/b] The Under - Termite Kingdom Ruins
[hider=warp locations]
[s]
Central hub: Smash City Alcamoth
Accessible locations:
Peach’s castle
Limsa Lominscuttle Town
Lumbridge
Twilight Town
Kosm’s Beach
[/s]
[/hider]
[/center]

As the darkness grew, the Troop took part in helping light up the way. First and foremost, Kamek created a few wisps, the glowing blobs of mana fanning out and trying to act as little floating lamps. This, unfortunately, only worked somewhat, only really offering the ability to see what was right around them. Bowser’s first contribution had the same problem, as the king first set fire to a load of worm grass and then bathed in their light, drinking it in and cursing the tentacruel domes on his shell to glow with inner light.

They had a second problem, which was that while they lit up the cavern a little, they lit themselves up a lot, making for ever so easy targets for the things which lurked in the dark. Both Bowser and the wisps thus ended up being priority targets for the spitters, something that came to a head when the troop entered into a cavern via a narrow passageway while a touch ahead of the rest of the party. 

Immediately upon entering, they were ambushed by a spread out collection of spitters, which nailed most of the wisps in quick succession, and then focused in on the glowing king himself.

[color=FD0000]”Gahhh!”[/color] he roared in pain as the acid ate through his vine armor, before he tried to fight back with his turret guns, firing wildly into the dark at where he thought he was being shot at.

This had little impact on the bugs hiding above, nor did Rika’s own firing when she joined in. Jr meanwhile was less concerned about the ceiling bugs and more about the swarm coming towards them. 

The prince opened up by splashing a crescent of ink in front of himself, before hucking a fireball at the first grunt, creating a flaming patch on its location, which added a bit of light. Then he hefted the javelin he’d formed while spitting and hurled at the next, nailing it in the jaw with his olympian strength and skill. Another fireball, another javelin formed while fireballing, but this one did not find its target, as Kamek ended up crushing it with a magic fist while Jr was tossing.

[color=SpringGreen]”Hey! I had that one”[/color] Jr complained

[color=DeepSkyBlue]”My apologies, it is difficult to see what you are aiming for in this gloom”[/color] the mage replied as he launched a fireball at another grunt.

The prince grumbled, and then happened to see how a Glyphid guard was forced to pick its way around the javelin that had embedded itself in the ground, giving him an idea for later.

Behind them, Bowser and Rika needed ideas for right now, as the spitters continued to target the king, which had caused the pair to burn through both of their healing strikers already in order to keep his vine armor up. 

[color=Aqua]”Oh! My shock swarm, maybe they can go find them!”[/color] Rika realized as she came up with a plan, before popping open her gauntlet hangers and unleashing a swarm of electric insects from them. 

The swarm spread out, and in doing so unintentionally outlined the terrain with their light glows as they sought out the targets. Then, when one came across one, it attracted the rest, and soon enough a spitter was zapped into oblivion. 

That was good, but there were still several more spitters, but fortunately, Rika had a second idea based on the first. She launched a cheap distracting swarm, and then another, and another, flooding the cavern with the electric motes whose whole purpose was to create flashing lights. With just a little tweaking, she’d made them instead produce a steady glow, filling the air with dozens of firefly like motes and softly lighting the walls as they did so.

It was more than enough to make the bright red spitters visible and target-able. Cannons boomed and gunfire cracked as they took down the rest of the spitters, with the final one finding itself faced with a giant slow moving fireball floating towards it.

A giant slow moving fireball that acted as a giant flare, lighting up the whole room.

[color=FD0000]”Oh… Uh… Yeah I was just, uh, letting you all flex your creativity, I always knew that would work”[/color] Bowser said after a long pause after the discovery of the fact that he could just use mega fireballs to light up large rooms.

Admittedly, Rika’s own innovation still came in handy, with the princess sending her swarms forwards through the smaller tunnels, because in the particularly twisty turny ones the fireballs would only provide a brief amount of light till they hit/went through the walls.

They ended up providing both light sources when the brother longlegs snatched up the remaining wisps, a great fireball bringing a brief dawn to the cavern while Rika’s electroflies made for handy distractions that the strange monsters tried and failed to grab.

Once they had the lighting situation all set up, the smallish groups of two dozen or so bugs they came across were a manageable matter. Which naturally meant that it wasn’t long till the universe decided to toss a fresh complication at them, one heralded by a big inverted triangle and a handful of dwarven miners.

[color=FD0000]”Bet if you just make me massive I could smash that shield”[/color] Bowser insisted, but his advisor, well, he advised against that

[color=DeepSkyBlue]”For all we know it would be another flame clock situation, not to mention you might cause a cave in in the process”[/color] Kamek warned, before starting to say that [color=DeepSkyBlue]”So I’d rather save my mana for any new bug threats,”[/color] only for the scrambling of claws to creep in mid sentence, causing him to sigh and conclude that he had been talking about ones [color=DeepSkyBlue]”Like that”[/color] 

Having been inspired by his missed spear toss earlier, as the swarm started to dig into the cavern Jr jogged out in front of the group, tossing up a pokeball and bringing Mimi into the fray as he did so.

[color=SpringGreen]”Copy me!”[/color] he commanded his pokemon, before he crouched down and pressed his iron tattooed hand to the ground. Up from it sprouted a few long spikes, and as the prince quickly moved to one side, more and more formed, creating a freestanding spearwall that would deter the smaller glyphids from trying to get past. His pokemon copied him, and created her own wall of spears, forming a nice little defensive perimeter on their part of the battlefield. 

To add to it, the prince flicked his paintbrush, coating both the spears and the ground in-front of them with burning goop, further deterring the ground crawlers, and funneling them to either side of it.

As for what to put behind it? Well, Rika covered part of that by screaming out in pain and summoning her the white whale that had belonged to the pacific princess, who’s to mounted turrets swiveled to the side and started blasting, while it used its mighty jaws to bring the pain to foes that came past the barrier.

Bowser ended up holding the other side of said barrier, burning and blasting glyphids that came round, and raining his shell spikes up and over the spear wall, and down to any clumps of glyphids trying to get past.

Unfortunately, that was just the smallfry handled, and as Jr worked to patch his sister back up, the two potential major complications to his plan arrived.

A trio of hulking praetorians stomped forwards amidst their lesser kin, and it was quite clear that the spiky barrier would be no barrier to their acid sprays. Similarly, the buzzing [url=https://i.imgur.com/0xuInNw.png]Mactera Spawn[/url] hovering through the air were able to simply huck their horrid projectiles down at the defenders, bypassing their barrier entirely. 

With Jr’s clowncar still needing repairs, and the tunnels having not been considered suitable for flying steeds, that left Kamek as the troop’s only available air force. Still, he wasn’t alone, as the mage naturally had more hims, and a little extra help in the form of Mimi who had elected to ride on the tip of the mage’s broomstick. All of his broomsticks actually, as the copycatting specter had mimicked the mage’s clone spell, equipping all the doppelgangers with a familiar of their own.

He’d opted to make red clones only, and those clones made great use of their passengers, recklessly charging forwards and getting up in the mandabled faces of the enemy fliers, at which point the Mimis could scratch away at the bugs with their claws.

As his doppelgangers tied up many of the fliers Kamek prime swooped forwards between them, both he and Mimi delivering drive-by blasts as they did, before they cleared the flying swarm and soared over to the praetorians.

[color=DeepSkyBlue]”Time to say, bombs away, and bid these bugs good day”[/color] Kamek chanted in a sing-song tone as both he and Mimi began dropping dark energy mines ontop of them. The magical mines spiked down into the earth, pulsed once, and then as long as there was something beneath them, immediately exploded upwards again in pillars of dark energy, hammering the unarmored undersides of the glypids, as well as the exposed green rear of the praetorians.

Things were going wonderfully until a quartet of Centiwings crawled their way into the room via tunnels in the ceiling, and then dropped down into the air and commenced their unnerving spiraling flight. They’d encountered them alone on their way here, but the number of them combined with the surrounding hostels spiked them way up in the mage’s threat assessment. He did not want to find out what they could do if they got ahold of him with their many legs, that was for sure

As he could not simply teleport away due to his passenger, he started falling back via flight, but low to the ground as he had ended up while bombing, he could not swoop for extra speed without getting attacked by ground bugs. Even if he made it past them, he might very well ram into Jr’s spikewall, so it was a dangerously slow hover he committed while backing away from the flying bugs. 

As the mage and Mimi blasted at the rapidly approaching Centiwings there came a call of [color=Aqua]”I’m coming to help!”[/color] from Rika. The freshly healed shipgirl had been tossed over the spikewall by her brother on her request, and then grappled to one of the remaining Mactera spawn, before kicking off of it for more distance. Now close enough to aim without risking friendly fire, she blasted one of Kamek’s pursuers with her rigging guns, finishing it off, and then called out [color=Aqua]”Crimson Queen!”[/color] as she summoned that striker.

The Vespikan queen appeared beside her, and then immediately charged forwards, her humongous cleaver held overhead, before it slammed it down upon one of the Centiwings, slicing it clean in half in a single stroke. Then she thrust her stinger forwards, impaling another, before her spirit returned to Rika. 

With that touch of breathing room, Kamek and Mimi managed to blast the fourth and final centiwing with spells and electroballs. As its spirit fell, the mage turned to thank Rika for her assistance, only to see the girl slowly floating down to the ground, lacking as she was in any grapple points due to his clones having taken down all the Mactera while they had all been dealing with the centiwings.

[color=DeepSkyBlue]”Oh no! Rika!”[/color] he cried out in alarm when he looked down below her and saw a swarm of glyphids preparing to claw at her when she landed, before quickly coming up with a plan and casting [color=DeepSkyBlue]”sphere of protection”[/color] upon her.

[color=Aqua]”Thanks Kamek!”[/color] the princess called up, before she, now surrounded in a shimmering amber barrier, cut her antigravity and feather fall effects and dropped down into the mass of bugs.

Claws slashed and jaws bit, but the barrier reduced the damage to a mere ⅕ of what it could have been. It still hurt, and she was still at risk of being cut down, but it meant that rather than being torn apart in moments she was able to fight back. Her spear jumped into her gauntlet’s jaws, and then was driven into a sclicer’s head. Her hull claws slashed at a grunt, and her disruption cannons blindly unloaded their globby payloads into foes behind her, all of which allowed her to strike several foes at once.

She wasn’t unsupported either, as Kamek floated low, bouncing fireballs down into the bugs trying to still reach her, while Mimi’s shadow appeared at Rika’s feet and slashed at more of them with its spectral claws.

Finally, Jr threw some support her way, sending his own Vespikan strikers into the fray, the four large wasp woman rapidly closing the distance between their shelter and the out of position princess, and delivered swift death with their four-handed cleavers.

With all this support, the bloody princess broke out of the mass that had greeted her on landing, and sprinted towards cover. After clearing some ground, and building up momentum, she leapt up with her featherfall rune, sailing forwards landing upon Bowser’s Trowlon striker that he’d sent floating her way. It moved her a bit closer, and then before it timed out she leapt again, clearing more ground and then launching her grapple and latching onto Bowser. The winch reeled her in quickly, into the awaiting hand of her papa, who caught her just before she ran body first into Jr’s spike wall.

[color=FD0000]”I gotcha”[/color] he told her reassuringly as he lifted her back into the relative safety of their defensive position, and handed her to Jr’s care, the prince only lightly complaining about how much he was having to heal her as Kamek returned as well.

Reunited behind their spiky defenses, the Troop were well placed to hold off the remaining smaller crawlers, and ready to face whatever fresh horrors of chitin came their way.