[center][h3]Deep Ground - the Cornice[/h3]
Level 6 Goldlewis (156/60) Level 5 Sandalphon (82/50)
Blazermate, Susie, and Roland’s [@Archmage MC], Midna’s [@DracoLunaris], Geralt and Zenkichi’s [@Multi_Media_Man], Sakura and Karin’s [@Zoey Boey], Pit’s [@Yankee], Roxas’ [@Double], Giovanna
[b]Word Count:[/b] 1238[/center]

Even if Sandalphon hadn’t pointed it out, Goldlewis had already gotten a grip on the situation now confronting his team. Nothing about the near-featureless, mathematical void that stretched out infinitely around him clued him in, necessarily, and certainly no prior experience shed any light on present circumstances in even the vaguest terms, but when all else failed his ever-dependable gut told him what he needed to know: that this was it. Do or die. This state of quasi-existence was the closest that the individual known as Goldlewis Dickinson had ever been to annihilation, not just his material body, but his immortal soul. His right to exist as an individual was staked on this battle, and as such, he held nothing back.

Bellowing like a raging bull, the Secretary of Absolute Defense attacked. He threw caution to the wind and bore down on the Moebius core to deliver a withering bombardment of punches, kicks, elbows, tackles, and smashes. His coffin became a battering ram of destruction, wielded in every manner conceivable, and the UMA within -perhaps fearing for its own existence- gave its partner everything it had. Thunderbird grenades appeared with mechanical regularity to detonate against the polyhedron’s glassy, amorphous bulk. The core struck back with relentless brutality, but without apparent intelligence or strategic cohesion. If it focused everything it had on one opponent, it might be able to overwhelm that assailant beyond any hope of recovery, but instead fought on many fronts at once. It churned out an abundance of projectiles, lancelike projections, and subservient wireframes, but that was all it could do. When Goldlewis confirmed his suspicions that his enemy couldn’t combo him, he didn’t need to know anything else. He just needed to tough out the punishment that came his way, sustained by the intermittent pulses of Sandalphon’s healing miracles. His furious assault really began to snowball when Roland ‘s Rake came into play. The core’s purple skewers represented its clearest and most present danger, thanks to their high damage and hard-to-react-to speed, and with that attack sealed the close-quarters specialists like Goldlewis, Sakura, and Karin could really shine.

Attacking from behind, the wireframes tried to take Goldlewis and the others down, but beyond shrugging them back and pushing them off the veteran barely needed to do anything. Everyone pitched in to clear out the fodder, but Midna and Zenkichi went among them like wolves among sheep. Though the princess and the detective couldn’t have been more different, some strange core conceit connected them across space and time, giving them a pronounced upper hand against hordes. Together the two shut down the wireframe offensive, shattering them as quickly as they appeared. Meanwhile, Sandalphon kept calm and did her job. Though able to take potshots here and there, and punish overeager wireframes with far deadlier wires that sliced right through their constituent lines, she focused on evasion and healing so the others could keep the pain train rolling.

Working together, the Seekers were gaining ground. Cracks created by the falling house and walloping coffin deepened where the missiles, bow blades, quake rounds, and karate techniques collected. Everyone was motivated to pull out all the stops in this fight for survival, but for one hero, this fight was personal. Hayato and his Sword Legion moved and fought in perfect sync, not just attacking in tandem but pulling off flashy sync attacks with a one hundred percent success rate. Together they piled on the damage, but when the core struck back Hayato diverged from the formidable Goldlewis approach. For him, the core’s attacks weren’t hindrances, but opportunities to unleash a counter strike or Perfect Call and turn the tables with an empowered blow. “Give her back!” he howled, breaking his characteristic silence. “This! Is for! AKIRA!”

Hayato whipped his Sword Legion around, and time seemed to slow down as he lined up the perfect slice. A moment later, his partner shot out, a blue-and-white blur whose blade parted -and subtly shifted- reality itself. After a brief pause the displaced halves slammed back together, but the rift didn’t quite mend. With the wireframes gone, the Seekers whaled on the break. The cracks spread, and the next second, the core ruptured. A wave of force pushed its attackers back as the core crumpled in, collapsing into a smaller, spiky shape like a split-open geode. Cubic purple cores rained down slowly across the geometric plane as it settled, and on touching the ground the corrupted data began to assume the roughly humanoid forms of those Y had absorbed.

Then some of the data began to coalesce. With a noise almost like crackling timber it amassed into a murky, purple-black figure. It was Y–or more accurately, the man beneath the Moebius mask, Yoseph Calvert. Though of course, it wasn’t truly him. In his endeavor to transcend everything he was or had become, Yoseph had made himself something entirely different.

Hayato rose and struck him in a rage, only for his baton to pass right through. “It’s useless,” Yoseph intoned, a strange feedback inherent to his voice. “I’m part of the Astral Plane now. I’m endless.” He held his hands up. “I transcend mere dimensionality.” Ignoring him, Hayato turned and attacked again as the others approached, but again his weapon phased through Yoseph’s body. “Please stop. Come, now. It’s time for you all to join me.” 

Then a baton slammed through his back, actually piercing his heart. It belonged to Akira, now no more than a phantom of the Astral Plane, like Yoseph himself. Gasping in shock, Yoseph sank to his knees. Behind him, rays of darkness began to bleed through the core. “I am…endless!”

When the core ruptured, everything went dark and hazy. When the Seekers opened their eyes, they picked themselves up from the bridge leading toward the mako reactor’s central structure. No sign of the Soul of Ambition could be seen. A moment passed before Goldlewis dared to clear his throat. “We did it. Or…[i]she[/i] did it, I guess I oughta say. Poetic justice.” He let out a deep breath. “I reckon we-”

A flare of purple light got his attention, and he turned his gaze down the bridge, toward the towering structure. There he saw a [url=https://i.imgur.com/wSQGQWe.png]masked purple figure[/url] alight with power. Tentacles streamed upward from his head, and in his chest glimmered a true [url=https://i.imgur.com/PszGpMq.png]Moebius core[/url]. Yet his manner seemed strangely defeated, and when he spoke, his demonic tone sounded bizarrely morose. [b]”So this as far as I can go,”[/b] Y murmured, practically hanging his head. [b]”All that legionic fusion, the Astral Plane itself, and yet-! Moebius, after all. We are all slaves…”[/b] Raising his head, he adopted a side-facing stance and extended his index finger forward. A light appeared in front of it, and a moment later, a huge purple laser burst forth to scream across the bridge. It scattered the Seekers and struck Goldlewis, sending him flying. He hit the bridge again near the edge that had been snapped off and tumbled toward the brink, unable to stop his momentum. 

[b]”I no longer care who lives or dies,”[/b] Moebius Y announced, his voice imperial. [b]”But I may as well destroy you if I can. So show me, Seekers of Light. Who will bring a stop to this: you, or I.”[/b]

[center][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D9kZQZpSEQ[/youtube][/center]

[center][h3]The Under - the Chasm[/h3]
Level 13 Ms Fortune (87/130)
The Koopa Troop’s [@DracoLunaris], Primrose and Therion’s [@Yankee], Sectonia’s [@Archmage MC], Ganondorf’s [@Double], Jesse’s [@Zoey Boey]
[b]Word Count:[/b] 2433[/center]

To some of her teammates, Nadia’s question invited an easy answer. Many of them had means of neutralizing the danger inherent to the Chasm’s preternaturally long fall, different in form but similarly effective. Primrose, Jesse, and Rika possessed arcane methods of slowing their falls, turning a lethal plummet into a slow, almost whimsical drift. Kamek could soar down into the nigh-illimitable pit with the help of his broomstick, and Sectonia’s majestic insect wings allowed her to achieve still greater aerial movability. Of the two magicians, though, only the Magikoopa could lend wings to others through the conjuration of additional beasts of burden. Even Ganondorf, someone Nadia would have expected to be hopelessly terrestrial in terms of locomotion, had apparently obtained a familiar that would allow him to parachute down alongside the others. It was a ghastly creature, reminiscent of the ocean’s stingrays or manta rays, but woven from fully exposed, blood-red sinew and serrated lengths of bone. The sight of Ganondorf’s phantom, together with the voluminous beat of its tarpaulin wings and its hideously raspy intonations, made Nadia shiver, but she couldn’t deny that she felt a little sting of jealousy. With everyone accounted for, only three of the Seekers lacked a reliable means of traversing the Chasm, and the cat burglar was one of them.

Once the final preparations concluded and everyone could put off the inevitable no longer, they began their reluctant trek down toward that terrible rift in the earth where they would once again entomb themselves in that subterrene kingdom of continual nightmare. The closer she got to the pit, trudging over rugged yellow grasses and through spiraling stone channels, the more Nadia loathed her newfound sense of duty that obliged her to leave the enlivening breezes, wholesome creatures, and liberating sky behind. In addition to the way it reminded her of a yawning maw, poised to snap shut on her for good now that it had gotten a taste, Nadia dreaded the possibility of revisiting the various horrors she’d already experienced down there in the last few sunless days. The Womb for example, and everything in the Basement leading up to it, had been plenty nasty in their own right, but the surreal encounters she’d suffered through in Mercy Dreams had been the worst of all. It was frustrating; Nadia had been doing her best to leave her past behind her and embrace this farcical hero’s journey, but her past seemed to be pursuing her doggedly, and she was tired of it snapping at her heels. Hopefully Robin had been the one responsible for bringing her shadows into the light, and with him out of the picture, Nadia could focus on looking forward.

Coming to the edge of the Chasm, Nadia steeled herself and peered down into the depths. On the way she’d tried to drum up some of her trademark great ideas, but nothing that came to mind really tickled her fancy. While she knew that Charge could be used to change her momentum, relying on that to stop her fall would demand such exact timing that Nadia felt really doubtful. Between miscalculation, accident, and good old-fashioned impetuousness, she’d almost splattered herself several times already, and this involved even greater risk. Her other ideas pleased her even less, like scaling the Chasm walls manually with her claws, or being carried by Sectonia like an infant. However, the World of Light was nothing if not full of surprises, and not always in a bad way. Other people, with more tools and time on their hands, had already taken a shot at solving the problem that confronted them. One solution, belonging to a very polygonal woman named Makena, seemed almost laughably simple. In clear and alarming violation of the laws of physics, she’d placed an endless waterfall that acted more like a column of water. Nadia ended up smiling at the delightful and convenient impossibility. “Well, it sure wouldn’t be the first time I soaked myself to the bone on this trip. And hey, at least there’ll be a little sunlight to warm me up at the bottom, so…don’t mind if I do.”

Ready for the shock of cold water, she took a running jump and leaped right into the vertical stream. She entered it with a splash. While she knew that it flowed much, much slower than a normal waterfall just by looking at it, Nadia didn’t expect the pillar to slow her down as much as it did. “Oh, jeez,” she muttered, sticking her head out of the water and into the air. “This is gonna take fur-ever…”

At that very moment, she heard another, much louder splash, and swiveled her head upward to look. With incredible comedic timing, Bowser fell on her the next instant. Something about the big guy caused him to sink like a rock, slower than freefall but still appreciable fast, and as he plummeted through the water column his weight drove Nadia beneath him. She plowed through the water like a fallen water skier dragged by an oblivious boat, spread-eagled and sputtering. “Whubbbububbububububbububbub!” Fighting to orient herself, she ejected her head from the waterfall on a corded ‘neck’ of muscle fiber. She craned it upward to look at Bowser in bafflement. “Water you doing!?” Once she realized what was happening, Nadia quickly did the only thing she could: unleash jets of blood to blast herself clean out of the waterfall and into the open air of the Chasm. Once Bowser passed her by, she airdashed back into the pillar of safety, where she hung for a moment in comparative peace. With friends like these, even the simplest tasks were never boring.

If nothing else, the mishap gave Nadia an idea for speeding up her progress. Nadia began to swim out of the waterfall on purpose, fall for a few moments, then jet back into the liquid elevator before reaching terminal velocity. This literal rinse-and-repeat strategy allowed her to make relatively good time. Still, the Chasm was monstrously, absurdly deep, so much so that even a freefall could have taken minutes. No matter who made the descent, or how, it proved to be a painstaking and drawn-out procedure.

After what felt like ages, Nadia finally reached the floor, not too long after the others. “Whew! Made it!” she panted. “Finally getting to the bottom of things, eh?” She said this, of course, knowing full well that the Under went down much, much farther. Down through the Basement and the visceral waterways of the Womb, down through the Kingdom’s Edge, down into the Hive…she dreaded to think just how far down it went. Instead, she stared upward for the second time, noting just how far away that vital pinprick of sunlight seemed to be. Only now did it occur to her just how bad it would have been if someone obstructed the waterfall mid-descent. Someone had shown up to ruin their day last time, after all. Come to think of it…where was F? Considering where the Seekers were going, she felt grimly certain that the Consul would make an appearance. At the bottom of the Chasm, that shaft of light shown on a bed of ruined yellow flowers, systematically severed and scattered with an ill-tempered haphazardness. If Kamek’s guess about who did it was on the money, maybe F was already here and lying in wait somewhere up ahead. For Nadia, though, that notion didn’t hold much menace. “Isn’t this a little…” she gestured around at the flowers. “Petal-ful? No way he seriously thought he’d nip us in the bud like that.” The feral shrugged. “Well, we’ve already pruned one Consul. If F shows up, he’ll find himself pushing up daisies.”

No vicious and varied monsters sprang from the dark corners of the vaulted cave in ambush, so the Seekers began the next leg of their journey after a warning (as well as heads-up about a Flame Clock) from Ganondorf. He, better than anyone, knew that their objective lay close at hand. When the team put aside ruminations on the Clocks and began to push through the ruined crossroads, however, they found it very, very different from how they left it. Before, this region had been rather plain, its corridors and pathways well-trodden by the subterranean denizens who dwelled within comfortable distance of the light of day, positively hospitable by the Under’s standards. During the days of the Seekers’ absence, however, the crossroads had undergone a profound and disturbing change. The stately roads of stone and shell, fringed with unremarkable vegetation, had been completely overtaken by a frightfully virulent corruption. Now, the blue-black backdrop festered with a kind of immense mold that gave off a vibrant, unnatural orange phosphorescence. Slimy threads connected clusters of gelatinous cysts or boils, and within those abominable buboes that quivered and pulsed in sync as if united by a single unfathomable heartbeat squirmed countless grotesque dark smudges, hideously suggestive of things to come. The contagion had spread into everything that once lived in this place, either changing them from within or filling up the hollows their deaths left behind. Vile sounds filled the cross roads, throbbing, squelching, slopping, and a foul stench pervaded the place. Not the miasma of rot or death, but the stench of new life, irreparably at odds with every facet of the ‘old life’ it had come to supplant wholesale. The Infection was here.

[center]https://i.imgur.com/38dTS6H.png[/center]

Boxcutters in hand to avoid close contact, Nadia fought through it alongside her teammates. The infected bugs on the road to the Temple of the Black Egg were aberrant, the mere sight of them making Nadia’s skin crawl, but they were hardly difficult to dispatch. They moved predictably, and in short bursts. The Seekers could outmaneuver and outrange them, and not one took more than a few strikes before it fell apart. As they made progress, Nadia couldn’t help but feel like this was just the beginning. This region was doomed, no doubt about it, but the plague had not yet surged forth to flood through the Under like a toxic tide. It was still…incubating. Nadia shivered, but kept moving. She’d heard about the Infection, but she got the impression that it had been under control. Was this connected to the Guardian, somehow? If so, there was no time to waste.

Within half an hour, the Seekers arrived at the [url=https://i.imgur.com/qNgUW4K.png]Temple of the Black Egg[/url]. The closer they got, the thicker the Infection became, and now it gleamed through the temple’s windows like the eyes of some primeval monstrosity. The pustules clustered thickly here, bloated with disease. Having not actually come here before, Nadia wasn’t taking point for once. Instead she cast her gaze around with her eyes narrowed, clearly expecting something. She wasn’t disappointed.

A dark silhouette cut through the orange glare of the temple’s front door. Floating above the ground, it quickly grew larger, and though Nadia could tell what she was looking at for a moment, she quickly puzzled it out. This shadow belonged to a hand, hovering horizontally with its palm up, and atop it stood a small, squat silhouette made strange by a flowing cape. After another moment, Master Hand came into view, then lowered its fingers like a ramp so that the figure of Consul F atop it could step onto the ground.

F stayed where he was, however. Though he stood firm with his arms crossed, an almost imperceptible nervous energy animated him, causing him to fidget. Nevertheless, the malice in his eyes was very real. “A little early, don’t you think?” he sneered at the Seekers. “There’s no way you have enough fragments, duplicates or not. You didn’t even touch the Under’s north side, or the real depths. Are you stupid?”

Nadia averted her gaze, chuckling evasively. “Aheheh, well uh…”

The Consul’s eyes narrowed. “You know, I really didn’t think you little freaks would actually beat Robin. Finding out that he’s not real did a real number on him, huh? Giving in’s not so bad, you know. It’s liberating. Empowering. Of course, he went and trapped folks in dreams so they’d never have to suffer like he did. If you dopes had half a brain, you would’ve taken his mercy. Still, it’s fun watching you struggle.”

Nadia extended her blade toward him. “Better watch close then, little man, ‘cause we’re about to roll over your Guardian. Or are you gonna quit standin’ on the sidelines and actually try to stop us this time?”

Y chuckled darkly. “Hehehe. Funny you should say that, actually. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging some entertainment for us. Mostly for me, I’ll admit, but maybe you’ll get a kick out of it.” Finally F stepped off of Master Hand, who disappeared as the ground began to shake slightly. “See, I’ve been watching you. All of you. Did you have a nice sleep up in Dirtmouth? Ever stop and think about all the friends you left behind?” Around the Seekers, the infected eggs began to quiver with renewed intensity. “Well, I did. Poor souls, alone and shivering in the dark. Even though you’ve been terrible friendsI went and found ‘em for you so you can see ‘em again. But after I brought ‘em here, the funniest thing happened. Turns out, friends have a short shelf life. They all sorta…went bad.”

Suddenly, the sacs burst open. From within, terrible shapes lurched, sprawled, and finally rose. Some were very large, and others very small. They were little more than husks, practically unrecognizable. Puppets given life by an awful, insatiable light. They were grotesque, spine-chilling parodies, foul regurgitations of an eldritch force as pragmatic as it was cruel. Nadia’s heart thudded in her chest; her gorge threatened to rise. Why hadn’t the Seekers paid them more attention…how could they have let them go? Of course the lurking viper who dared not strike at the pack would single out those that strayed, one at a time…

For these were the infected corpses of the Adventurer, Omori, Ichiban, Undyne, Rubick, Nocturne, Teemo, and Artorias.

“So much for a tearful reunion, I guess,” F remarked offhandedly, his tone mocking. “All you can really do now is put them out of their misery. You’ve slaughtered so many after all. What’s a few more corpses on the pile?” 

Nadia bared her teeth scornfully as she got ready to fight. After a brief moment of weakness, her heart was hardened. Whoever these people had been, they were already dead. “The worst kind of boss,” she hissed. “When we’re done disinfecting, you’re next.”