Camelot
Camelot’s heart was in her throat, as the paired explosions died down, the heat of uncomfortably hot flames crackling in time with the clattering shower of shards of ruptured pavement that followed Dynasty’s Queen’s assassination strike.
She hesitated to relinquish her grip on Midnight Tsubasa, and luckily, the senior Magical Girl seemed in no hurry to alter that state of affairs, despite the somewhat humiliating nature of the, frankly, “princess” carry Camelot had abruptly swept her up in. A moment’s consideration, however, had her lower Tsubasa’s feet to the ground while keeping one arm firmly around her waist, ready to hoist her away once more if her out-of-line theoretical subordinate decided to try a followup attack. After all, this time around, Dynasty Queen would be expecting her interference and could adjust for it. If Camelot didn’t preemptively have hold of Tsubasa, she might not have time to evacuate her again while warding off the strike.
Ruyi Jingu Bang was just that bullshit a weapon. Excalibur was legendary for sure, had never failed to claim victory -even if a pyrrhic one at the end of Arthur’s tale, but it had never been put to the test the same way the ocean-measuring divine staff had, never challenged the entirety of the heavens with its master and only been truly halted by the Overgod, Buddha, himself. Camelot had never had the opportunity to test it, but she quite suspected that Excalibur’s “cut anything” property would struggle -or even fail outright- when it came to the Monkey King’s weapon. That wasn’t a battle she wanted to fight… or was even sure she could win.
Movement. Camelot’s eyes flicked to the Attendants, who were suddenly behind Dynasty Queen and looking understandably far less friendly. Honestly, she was half-way inclined to let them have their way with the little shit, but perhaps fortunately, Midnight Tsubasa’s verbal interference stayed the hands and limbs that now crackled with elemental power. Dynasty Queen seemed to have noticed the -frankly, undeserved- stay of hostilities too, because her reflexive defensive attack halted halfway.
A droplet of water splattering against her pauldron briefly drew Camelot’s attention upwards, and she grimaced at the noticeable morphing of the sky into a dark, rumbling overcast.
Camelot startled, as the Pageless, which had already been acting oddly to begin with, suddenly started to
flee from her fellow Magical Girls.
That… that just didn’t happen, especially not in these days of enhanced aggression! She tensed, reaching for Excalibur with her free hand, as the remaining Pageless charged towards herself and Midnight Tsubasa only to-! To…
What?The Pageless did not raise their claws in aggression. Instead they scrambled with all due haste, parting around Camelot and Tsubasa like water, as they attempted to hide behind the latter and put her between themselves and their aggressors. Given that Camelot was still supporting the rabbit-eared Magical Girl with one arm, they ended up directly behind her too, as she shivered in confusion and… intrigue. They didn’t attack her, and ultimately, given her Scabbard’s ability to heal, she wasn’t all too worried about that aside from how annoyingly painful it would be. This was… the first time she’d ever managed to be in close quarters with these beings without hostilities, and perhaps against all regular standards of better judgment, she found that to be…
fascinating.
Perhaps one core facet of Camelot’s obsessive drive to train and improve was, well…
magic itself! As a bit of a munchkin and avid reader of fanfics, she’d always been someone with a fascination for the technicalities of
how exactly a given system of magic worked. When she explored a fantasy story, she was always taken in by any section that actually bothered to explore the mechanics of how and why magic did what it did. As a result, when she’d gotten her powers, her training had been as much about personal interest and entertainment as it was survival.
That was why she could train so long and hard. It all came down to the idea that you would never work a day in your life if you enjoyed what you did… and Camelot enjoyed exploring powers and magic very,
very much. As a personal hobby, she obtained humongous amounts of gratification from obtaining an understanding, especially of stuff others did not.
And these Pageless… Their behavior… Perhaps she might have been more skeptical of the situation a day or two prior… were it not that she had already met a perfectly nice Magical Girl with a power that could pacify Pageless. And now, Dynasty Queen was going on and on about things being black and white, like she could somehow dictate that one particular reaction or another determined who Tsubasa was without question? She wanted to say that the ability to pacify and draw Pageless to oneself was an inherent sign of evil? She would throw away -without a second thought- something this useful?
Absurd.A power like this was one that needed to be studied and understood! Camelot knew there were universal abilities Magical Girls shared, magic sensing chief among them. If there was even the
slightest chance that this ability wasn’t unique to Tsubasa -that it was something that could be
taught, then its value was genuinely incalculable! This was the key, abilities like these! The Pageless were a foe that had been preying on humanity since ancient times, the war they provoked unending!
This rotten system that bred naive, foolish girls. This life-and-death battle that they were expected to participate in for eternity till the Reaper took them? A Ministry with a mysterious monopoly on magical power? All of that could be torn down if the Pageless threat could be handled… permanently.
Camelot’s expression was one of shock and realization, as she looked at Tsubasa and the submissive Pageless with a sense of conflicted wonder in her eyes. A resolve had crystalized in her chest.
This was it, a real genuine lead on
actually doing something meaningful. Tsubasa might just be the key to a final, true victory. She could be the key to overturning this stagnant system and deadlocked war. Camelot… could not, under any circumstances, in good consciousness allow harm to come to her. She
needed to know if her suspicions were correct, needed to
know what someone that could get so close to Pageless could tell her about their nature, a nature none had been able to properly study… This was nothing less than the first step to saving humanity and the entire world for good.
The rain was coming down properly now, the sky well and truly blackened with the power of an Apex Pageless, but that distant fight was almost inconsequential in importance now.
Dynasty Queen was saying empty things, her callousness clear. Words were clearly meaningless to someone like her.
Lilac Shimmer continued to act without thinking, blathering on and
on and not fucking
listening while leading the new girl around by the nose! They were going to kill the harmless Pageless, and if Dynasty Queen got into their little black and white heads, they’d try to kill Tsubasa too!
Camelot’s expression darkened thunderously.
For the first time since its rebirth, Excalibur was drawn against the forces of light.
Despite perhaps popular belief, Excalibur’s light was not something that struck solely at the darkness. No, in truth, it was the weapon of a King, of a victor. In the end, it had no time for such paltry things as “good” or “evil”, merely defeating the enemy. It was only associated as holy in
Le Morte d'Arthur because Arthur and his knights were -at least ostensibly- of the Christian faith. The reality, however, was that it was a weapon given to him by the Lady of the Lake. God had nothing to do with it. Excalibur was a weapon intended for domination, intended to do what the righteous sword, Caliburn could not allow, the dishonorable deeds that would ensure victory. That was the truth.
That was ultimately why she had refused to draw it before now.
To draw it while her heart was conflicted was to invite disaster to both sides.
The light would blind those she currently considered to be her enemy.
And for once, that wasn’t the Pageless.
A flash-bang of light erupted from Camelot’s position, searing into the retinas of all but Moonlight Tsubasa and the Pageless she currently held to be under her aegis. For once, the golden light of Excalibur was nothing less than
oppressive and almost white-hot to Dynasty Queen and Lilac Shimmer, even looking in Camelot’s direction like looking directly, unerringly into the sun. Burning Heart was hit less badly, the flash more akin to a low-level flashlight to the eyes, as the Knight’s ire was not truly with her.
The sides of the blade’s golden hilt spit fire furiously in constant tiny spurts as if mirroring the resolved anger in Camelot’s heart, as she ramped up her perceptions, turned towards a midair Lilac Shimmer, and made to
swat her back the way she came. Two blazingly fast blows under the cover of blinding light: one to deflect her sword upwards away from the Pageless and the other with the flat of the blade lightly pressed against her now open ribs, not a true strike so much as a very hard shove. Nonlethal. But maybe bruising. Camelot was a little fucking pissed, after all. Her gaze briefly met the not entirely blinded fox-girl’s, the warning clear. She would not visit the same reprimand upon her as well unless she chose to continue foolishly following Lilac’s lead.
“I’m genuinely disappointed, you know,” Camelot’s voice stated almost conversationally through the oppressive light, a heretofore unheard tone of barely-restrained menace present where there was once congeniality.
“At first, I had seriously wondered why I was made the leader of this team instead of someone supposedly more experienced.” Who she was referring to was blatantly clear to all but perhaps Burning Heart.
“Well... now I know. So, given that you should be too blind to see through whatever rosy fucking glasses you’ve been wearing this whole time, perhaps it’s about time you sat down and finally listened.” The rumble of thunder rolled overhead as if in punctuation, as the cold downpour of rain continued to intensify.
Turning to Dynasty Queen, her gaze was frigid, not that the brunette could likely see it through the light. Her voice carried an echo to it, a genuine
fury that surpassed the merely almost chastising annoyance she’d directed towards Lilac Shimmer.
“Your concerns have been heard, and they have been deemed fallacious and without credence. This is not a black and white situation. You cannot summarily determine that simply because she defends herself reflexively -and coincidentally happens to defend an enemy- that she is somehow on the side of evil. You cannot determine that the only factor by which she may exonerate herself from some imagined crime is through dodging a surprise attack!” she all but spat.
“I’ve never heard such absurdity before! You leveled an entirely lethal blow against a Magical Girl who you should have every logical reason to believe is a support type! It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether she could dodge or endure or not, only that you didn’t know for sure and did it anyway!” she seethed out.
“There is nothing simple about the insanity you are spewing.”Straightening up, Camelot exhaled deeply, regaining some level of composure.
“Recently, I met the sweetest Magical Girl, who had a passive ability that let her pacify Pageless hostility. In the face of that, there is not even the slightest chance in the bottomless depths of hell that you can convince me to act with prejudice against -to not protect- a Magical Girl whose ability lets her do just a little bit more than that. You want to say that’s evil, that such an ability can’t be used for good? You couldn’t possibly be more closed-minded,” she ground out.
“You don’t even know how it works, if it’s passive or not, and yet, you would dare presume malice for the offense of having an ability that she may very well have no control over?” Exhaling again, she sheathed Excalibur with a whisper, dousing its light, and spread her arms, gesturing at the complete lack of life other than the magical in nature.
“Look around you! Where are the victims of the Pageless?! Look at how the beasts of darkness tremble and cower helplessly, refusing to even fight back! You want to call an ability that does that, that draws them here and away from anyone else, evil?”She closed her eyes and exhaled once more, before reopening them, a cold resolve filling her.
“Here are the facts: every step of the way, you have seemingly done your level best to be a socially corrosive disruption for entirely irrelevant reasons, and you unapologetically attacked an innocent person out of either spite, an imagined crime or both.” She leveled a single armored finger at the Monkey King’s successor.
“So, allow me to put this in a simple way that even you can understand. You are out of line, Tesni. Go home. Or go fight that Apex Pageless I’m sure we can both sense; maybe you’ll even get there in time to matter. I don’t give a shit. But us? Filter it through whatever lens you like, but I don’t have the time to deal with your bullshit. I’ve got actual good to do and a new Magical Girl to train. We’re done here.”And as the rain thundered down around them, she meant that in every sense of the phrase.
By this point, Camelot's mind was made up. There was no feasible way she could handle Tesni long term. The girl would sabotage and question her every effort while bullying the rest of the team. The moment she got back to Marrywell, she was going to have Tesni removed from her team. She didn't care where the brash girl went. She didn't care if she got a replacement. In fact, she'd rather take a disadvantageously smaller tight-knit team any day over the pit of toxicity that was any team with Tesni on it. Ultimately, they were both horrifically incompatible as teammates, especially with either of them subordinated to the other. In the end, team cohesion would always suffer, and resentment would be bred amongst all parties.
Camelot refused to grit her teeth and bear it, to support that kind of environment while the rest of her team suffered for it. Perhaps it was an inevitable result, that having two strong-willed Kings on the same team would not end well, but this was what was best for everyone. No matter how this confrontation or the rest of the patrol played out, she was decided, and she wouldn't be taking "no" for an answer.
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