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King's incandescently brilliant form cooled like a dying star, glimmering rays of residual light dancing over the scattered particulate matter still hanging in the air within proximity as the hard-light figure swiveled around to track after the lone surviving husk. The crawling agglomeration had been spared the full blunt of King's eruption by dint of his first impacts neatly searing through its hips and spine and sending it toppling to ground-level while the rest of its gaggle had been shredded and blasted from existence, but the creature had no capacity to meaningfully evade another strike.

[color=5FADAD][i]'Hang in there friend, I believe in you. You can make it if you just try.'[/i][/color] King dryly subvocalized, their shimmering photo-curtain flickering momentarily as they drifted by and above the crawling puppet before casually trailing one lazy holographic finger above the clutching figure and firing a smaller, crumb-sized bead of electromagnetically guided plasma directly into its center-of-mass to rudely splatter and then blacken its remains across the deck plating. 

King then cast his gaze back to Kleo and Alice as they were menaced by three of the remaining puppets. He began to hurriedly drift back across the spatially distorted area, his mere presence seeming to visually warp the atmosphere as the illusory influence of the dying hulk clashed with the illumination he cast.

[color=5FADAD][i]'...and good grief, I try to keep one pack off you and you just get jumped by another. Is that why you are actually here? Are you live horror bait or something?'[/i][/color] King bit out acridly at Kleo as he raised his hands. More coruscating spirals of light danced down his arms, the brilliant rays overwhelming the opaque texture of his photo-curtain and eerily mimicking the effect of ethereal light shining through actual flesh and fabric. Eight precision-lasers connected the span between King and the two unshielded puppets, each beam cutting directly through the space around Alice's head, the closest one only scant centimeters away from her. Each ray lacked any of the ablative or explosive power demonstrated by his previous attacks, their impact instead seeming to produce a barely-discernible crack of electrical impulse intended to produce a kinetic shock that would hopefully assist Alice's efforts to etherically repulse her attackers. None of his lashing streams of light made contact with the shielded husk at all, which the hard-light combatant simply did not have a clean line of fire on.

Counting on the rest of the team to hopefully eliminate the shielded husk, King drifted behind Alice as she stumbled and placed a single hand on her back to help keep her upright. [color=5FADAD][i]'Steady there, wispy.'[/i][/color] He cautioned dismissively as he reached out with his other hand, poised to strike past her and at the shielded husk. The touch of his hand, even through Alice's armor, was unlike any living thing - it was not like a solid mass, but instead the insinuation of formless, continuous pressure. As if a massive gale had been compressed to the size and dimensions of a fist, and its immovably insistent edge suspended at the surface of her back. King's hand was deceptively cool to the touch, verging on frigid.

Then there was his Ether presence - or the lack thereof. It was like a looming void had suddenly sprung up behind her, a wall of inert antipathy almost more chilling than King's surface temperature. This was some manner of abhorrent, unnatural vacuum, and if the physical touch of his hand was not quite enough to make an ethereally-sensitive being want to physically recoil from him then his Oneiric [i]shadow[/i] was bound to cause it to happen anyway.