Knight Sylvestre
Location: Oldtown
With the resonant [i]clangs]/i] of metal against metal as his guide, Cyril strode toward the workshop of the man who Doctor Bill had assured could replace what the knight's morose passenger had lost. The sound led him to an inn of antiquated construction, the second of its two floors half against as long as the first and supported by reinforced logs. It was beneath this protuberance that the vanguard and the martial artist found the smith. With a countenance almost as dour as Cyril and Junipers', he had been working out the shape of a bit of steel that might, Cyril judged, become the elaborate crossguard of a winged spear. At first it seemed as though the metalworker might be too intent on his labor to notice the newcomers, but after using a pair of tongs to return his current project to the furnace, he rounded on them and crossed his arms. He wore curious garb, including a jacket of teal cloth with a zipper, a hood, and shimmering wave designs all across its surface. His guarded eyes betrayed a hint of curiosity as he surveyed the strange pair before him. “What do you want?”
His standoffishness took Cyril aback for a moment, but he reined himself in swiftly. “We were told that you can make magical equipment—specifically, replacement limbs. My...uh, friend here needs new legs. Can you do it?”
Feeling awkward, he turned to the side so that the smith could see for himself his former opponent's lack of lower legs. All the while, Juniper's face remained as stony as a gorgon's collection.
The man shook his head. “I've got some miracles and some metal, but nothing that complicated is coming out of this shop without souls.”
“We have some.”
“Oh, really?” Eyebrows up, the smith allowed his eyes to linger on the phylactery around Cyril's neck. “...Monster souls? I don't do people.”
Cyril hesitated, but only for a split second. He hadn't really thought about the morality of turning a person's soul into a piece of equipment, but there was no alternative if he was going to make up for the wrong he'd done to Juniper. “Yes.”
Still frowning, their new acquaintance took the phylactery when offered. “If you say so. I'll be able to tell when I try to transpose them.”
Panic seized Cyril's heart, but instead of doing anything without thinking, he froze up. He and Juniper could only watch, wide-eyed, as the smith took two jarlike objects, put them on top of a table, and inserted the phylactery into the top of one after the other. Two motes of energy -one crimson and one pale blue- eked through the rubber heart's needle, leaving the phylactery with only the bright and dark green lights remaining. “Huh, works with the soul shells.” Next, the smith sauntered over to a plain, clearly unfinished suit of armor sitting on another table and removed the greaves. “You're crazy lucky that I happened to make a suit of armor one of my works. I was gonna try to enchant it with air to get across the chasm, but it looks like that's gonna have to wait.”
With practiced hands he introduced the two filled soul shells to the greaves, one for each, and before the competitors' eyes the colored energy from each one surged from the shells to wash over the armor. The glow grew stronger and stronger only to die down just before it became blinding. Fascinated, Cyril stared at the results of the transposition: a knee-high greave of silver with circuit lines of pale blue, and a second, far more fantastical, of burgundy with spiky black ornamentation and inlaid rubies.
A few words were exchanged, and Juniper was laid on the ground. One by one each grave was put on, the stubs of her legs plugging in like shafts into spearheads, and when the martial artist moved she found them responsive. It was with no small amount of shock that she held onto Cyril's offered arm and stood, shakily, to her feet. “Its...” she murmured, breathless. “Like they're still there. I can feel my feet! And something else...some kind of energy.”
The smith nodded, a pleased smile on his face. “Yep, that'll be the magic. I expect each one has some sort of power based on the monster the soul came from. Souls plus weapons equals a lot of crazy stuff. There was a guy named Rodin who could conjure up all sorts of ridiculous weapons from a demon soul and a handle shell alone. My personal inspiration...” He held out his hand. “I'm Hyobanshi Souta, by the way. Now that business's over, we can afford to act like normal people, right?”
“Cyril Boniface,” the vanguard replied, taking the hand. He wrangled a smile out of his tired features, but what he thought was,
My first opponent's soul was person. Why didn't this guy notice?His former enemy, still getting used to the bizarre feeling in her lower legs, took a moment to realize and shake as well. “Juniper.” She gave the vanguard a look as he clapped a celebratory hand on her shoulder, which he immediately withdrew before shifting his attention and speaking.
“So, Hyobanshi...”
The smith held up his hand, interjecting. “'Souta' is my first name.”
“Ah, forgive me,” Cyril said, a little confused. “Souta, is there any chance you could repair my armor as well?” Something else clicked in his mind. “Er, also...what do I owe you?”
Souta shrugged. “Sure, but it'll take time, unless you're willing to part with anymore souls. As for payment, I don't know if money's any use around here, and I got all the food I need in the frozen section of the store across the plaza. I guess I'm looking for answers as to why we're here in this place, or if there's any way to go back to my world.”
After a moment of thought, Cyril had pieced together a reply, but he could barely open his mouth before a new and unfamiliar voice assailed him from behind. “Hey!”
He and Juniper whirled around to face the source, the latter a little unsteady. About two hundred feet away, there stood a cynical, sunken-looking man with a graying beard alongside an ordinary-looking woman with auburn hair. Their normalcy set off alarm bells in Cyril's mind.
The man called out again, his voice cool as ice. “The Crucible is over. Hand over your phylacteries and nobody gets hurt.”
Without a second's delay, both Juniper and Cyril answered as one. “No.”
The corners of the old man's mouth twisted upward into a dark smile. “I thought you might say that.” He raised his voice. “Journey!”
For a moment, there was nothing. Then, out of nowhere, a weight came crashing down on the competitors from above. “Guhh!” As he was crushed, the vanguard craned his neck to look upward, but he saw nothing. Whatever was bearing down upon him with such brutal force was invisible to him, and when he tried to push upward on it with his hands, they went straight through where it should have been. Beside him, Juniper had also been struck. The next moment it relented, but Cyril, gritting his teeth through the pain, dove to the side. His unwilling ally did the same, and the next instant, the force came down again in the same spot, crunching the stone beneath it.
Scrambling to his feet, Cyril hastily looked back to try and see what attacked him, but only saw an imprint in the ground of a giant, bizarrely-shaped foot. Juniper, meanwhile, had raised her arm to project a magic javelin at the man. He flinched, but the woman beside him called out, “Humbling River!” and around her a torrent of water erupted from nothing. It swirled around the two in a protective vortex, and the Javelin was tossed aside like a toothpick.
“What in God's name...?”
Cyril forced himself to run, narrowly avoiding another impact. Juniper ran the other way, her face sharing the same bafflement. Meanwhile, Souta had elected to leap over the counter. “I'll back you up!” The wave designs on his hoodie lit up in aquamarine, and from a spurt of rushing water he summoned a black warhammer. He charged down the center, straight for the two intruders, while the others ran around the side.
The Lady in White
Location: Governance Hub – Echoed Tower
@LazoTen minutes passed by, but at that period's end, no drone appeared to Pithy in order to guide her to her next opponent. Not even a spark stirred the mangled carcass of the flying machine the Lady in White had, hours ago, trashed on the doorstep to Nero's tower. Evidently, the Crucible's announcer was out of drones.
In the intervening hours between his confrontation with the icy sorceress and now, when shadows were growing longer and the sun drooping toward the horizon, Nero had slipped away and not returned. Between the two of them, Dew and Pithy kept up a good guard, but after an entire afternoon of numbingly boring inactivity their stakeout had grown less keen and, in combination with Nero's tracking of Pithy, permitted him to hightail it through the front door and down the block. His announcement, left behind as an automated message to precede the switching-over of his drone system to guidance mode, suggested that he did not intend to return either.
The Fungal Knight
Location: the Big Top
@BananaThe speed of Bonesword's jump out of the holding tank dislodged the egg timer -which he'd looted from Saria's corpse earlier that day- from his arsenal and sent it flying to clatter against the wall, but by the time he might have noticed the skeleton had already landed and issued his ultimatum to the clown.
For his part, the freaky creature did appear comically surprised that Bonesword managed to escape, but his ridiculous features did not convey undue distress. While the skeleton stood before him, the clown reached into a polka-dotted pocket and pulled out something bright red and rubbery. In fact, he continued to pull it out—he drew it like a sword, revealing it to be much longer than could have possibly fit into the pocket. After a moment, the head of the clown's giant squeaky mallet popped out, and he grasped the handle in both hands for a brutal overhead swing.
Inari
Location: what lies beneath
@KapuchuTen minutes passed, uneventful and even peaceful in the soft dark and wide-open space of the yawning cavern, before one of Oren's drones descended through the hole to keep Lily and Brucie company. Once locked in around the two competitors, it reoriented itself so that its back faced toward the forest of stone and fungi that carpeted the cave's floor. Its position confirmed that the pair need not alter their planned path; their opponent awaited them somewhere in that luminescent tangle. As though the Crucible's circumstances couldn't get more bizarre, the fox and the shark now found themselves having to contend with this practically alien landscape.
The pair's trek hadn't extended past the first oversized mushroom, though, before they found something interesting. One landmark stood out in the otherwise bare and stony road toward the strange garden: the decimated subway train in which Captain Teller and the demon Smiley had allegedly entered this place. Before getting there Lily could guess by the drone's orientation that her next opponent was there no longer. A search of the wreckage would turn up nothing, save a black, sticky trail leading away from the mangle of steel and broken glass in the direction of the mushroom forest.
In the course of following the trail, other tidbits turned up. Intermittently lying in the goop, the pair could discover teeth, scraps of skin, pieces of fabric, and even a bit of the soldier's gear. Scraps of Teller's highly advanced armor dotted the landscape, some clearly tossed around rather than just dropped. If Lily and her semiaquatic ally reached the edge of the garden, however, they could stumble on something decisive: one mushroom's cap sported a messy black handprint, hinting that it had served for a moment as support for a weary or desperate hand.
Though the courageous Captain made for quite the spectacle as he posed, ready for battle, it wasn't until a few minutes later that a whirring noise announced the return of Oren's drone. It took up a cinematic angle, looking down toward the trio, before sidling seventy a hundred and twenty degrees to the right. There, in the direction that Crue would remember indicating Oldtown Plaza, it came to a steady hover. Between Runch's makeshift crew and there new destination lay a sizable tract of flooded terrain, including areas in which Crue and Erina had faced off against an unknown, tentacled threat.
When the trio approached the water, its resident vampire began to become aware of something entirely different. In the distance, and in multiple directions, he could spot a split-second disturbance akin to static in a television. They occurred too far away to make out anything definitive, but before long the disturbances started happening closer. Each one occupied a singular spot in the air, roughly the shape of a person, for so brief a fraction of a second that it was easy to believe he simply imagined it. When several happened in quick succession less than fifty feet away, however, Motley couldn't ignore the vague, shadowy figure of a person each static blip left behind. At that point, the spiritually-inclined non-user Erina also began to get a hint of what was going on.
The entities didn't move, instead standing wherever they appeared, but their silhouettes made it clear that they were looking at Motley, Erina, and Runch. Those that appeared in the water did not disrupt its surface whatsoever, instead existing in the same space as the liquid as though the entities were incorporeal. More continued to appear, dozens and dozens, until they populated the entire area. Their spectral forms remained indistinct, but they began to move once enough were around, walking with a slow stride toward the trio. They came to a stop at an uncomfortably close distance, just far enough to make sure that they weren't touched.
All of this Motley could witness clear as day, and Erina could get a good grasp of, yet Runch could see or feel a single thing. As the three moved, the shadow people skirted out of the way to let them pass without any obstruction. So too was the pirate oblivious to the strange objects flying up from across the floodwaters until they hit the pavement and exploded perilously close by, so near as to send shards of cement and clods of dirt flying in every direction. After the ringing died down, two voices rang out from a good distance away, completing eachother's sentences.
“Bartholomew K. Runch and Motley Crue!”
“Under the authority of the Inquisitional College, we deem you threats to the safety of this world!”
“And do sentence you to death!”
Across the water, two people could now be seen by everyone present, having just emerged from the interior of an old-fashioned inn's second floor to stand on the balcony. At first glance, Davian and Aralynn Thule looked almost identical, but to Motley's eyes alone something intriguingly distinct surrounded them. Davian's body gave off a fiery shine, like the ignited jets of a gas stove, but in an odd gray-black hue. His sister bore the same corona, but in yellow. Most tellingly, a few of the shadow figures stood around the pair like a president's bodyguards, staring in silence at the competitors.
To Runch nothing about Aralynn changed, but Motley could watch the top of her outstretched arm open up like a panel in a machine and a missile launcher pop out to fire off another rocket toward his comrades. Her arm then closed up, nothing wrong with it at all; next, the front of her shoulders became panels and opened up to reveal twin missile pods that fired three miniature payloads each.
All seven rockets sped toward their targets, the first far faster than the other half-dozen, and all of them invisible and silent for the brave Cereal Killer.
For Jin, his accompanying drone's new subroutine meant even more walking. It pointed him across the lake toward the destroyed amphitheater, though thankfully the ruin was not straight across the way, but at about a forty-degree angle from his current position near the waterfall.
A few minutes later, the assassin was well on his way down the slope from the waterfall cliff toward the plain on which the amphitheater sat. The sky was just beginning to take on shades of peach and orange. Around him, the green trees of summer stood in silent reverence for the amazing view this vantage point afforded them. From here, Jin could see across the entire Grassy Expanse, and into the Residential District. Further still were the myriad roofs of the Historical District, split between squat buildings from antiquity and various places of worship from all cultures. Beyond them both he could glimpse the skyscrapers of Downtown, though the giant black bird that he'd seen soar that direction was nowhere to be found.
The sight of a tree taking on the oranges, yellows, and reds of fall in less than ten seconds brought his attention back to his immediate surroundings. As he watched, the leaves changed color en masse, then start to shake as though gripped by a sudden and particular wind. A moment later every single leaf plummeted from the branches, falling across their progenitor's roots like a colorful carpet. In the tree's crown sat a man, six and a half feet tall and highly fashionable but sporting no nose.
“Jin Sunrise...you're fast and you can take a lot of punishment. You're also an unrepentant asshole, so full of yourself it's a wonder you don't burst, just because you've been lucky enough to not run into anyone who can put you in your place.”
The leaves began to rise, swirling as they did in a cyclone around the tree. A sharp eye could see that their veins were pulsing with bright orange fluid, which also ran along their razor-sharp edges. In the middle of the storm, the man got to his feet.
“I've reviewed every second of footage I can find,” he continued. “The others are moving in groups of two, but I am confident that the only help I need to take out the trash is my Weird Autumn. You've had a good run, Jin, but this party's over.”
Fifty thousand leaves shot forward, swirling into a seeking tornado of a thousand venomous blades that bore down on Jin like a natural disaster.
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