┊» ｏｕｔ ｐｏｓｔ●
Magdalena had lingered among the despairing soldiers for a few moments longer, inquiring towards their collective experiences of the entire assault and commenting vaguely upon what they had seen and bore witness to. Their testimonies weren’t much to glean from, but their fears and worries inflicted her empathetic shadow with precision and the obscurity wavered from it all, clinging to her spine and shoulders, slinking across her form as if unable to grasp purchase on her body. It was distracting, like a constant hum behind her, but she refused to acknowledge it should those own crippling worries and fear assuage her conviction. The troops noticed, that she wasn’t surprised by, their stares were bidden with admiration and a misplaced awe that was only characteristic by circulated stories and rumours. When one reached out, tentative and curious, she jerked back with a well worn grimace and a thinly veiled glower, the soldier yelped his alarm and only then did she realize that her shadow had, quite literally, vanished all together. There was no cast darkness of a silhouette and she felt the slow glide and slither of something beneath her skin and across her spine. Magdalena shuddered, bunched her shoulders and immediately retreated, drawing back and finding something else occupy her - distract her successfully.
She wove thin arms around his middle, her direction unknown and thus she did not care, but she did not make it far. Brief alarm flashed across his face, burdened in her eyes and heavy on her shoulders that were crushed suddenly by the weight of shadow and pain. Magdalena parted her lips to protest, but memory and many circumstances reminded her that there was no refusing Olivia, the woman had often dragged Magdalena from her room to attend whichever affairs were deemed memorable. And this was no different when she guided her and bid her to sit, and so she did, reclining to her posterior uneasily and watching silently as she prepared the syringe.
Magdalena had no words, for what could she say? If she denied would it be refusing her Captain, or her friend?
She diverted her eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to meet Olivia’s gaze searching and flickering over her bruised and battered self. It was only by a chance, a cursory flicker of her eyes when blue caught together in a stare down, and she flinched at it — meeting the eyes of her friends: she felt inflicted and drawn, tempered and yet disturbed by anything and everything she saw in their gazes. Magdalena struggled under those eyes and her shadow, having shrunken away, bloomed suddenly across her shoulders in waving apparitions of her unease and Olivia’s stubbornness to see her better.
She had no answer, nothing concrete and bearing sense to why Magdalena had allowed her wounds and blemishes to remain. She never had given spoken reason to these nuances of hers, such abrasions were commonplace when it came to the petite blonde and her figure, but here, in the open gates of War she couldn’t have, and apparently afford, her usual luxuries of distracting pain and anguish.
“I know you would have, I was just hoping you would leave it be,” she muttered, her arm tabled across her thigh.
Foolish. . .
Her warning was subtle, almost friendly in its advisement, a consciousness reminder that this was her, a friend, a kinder soul that wasn’t trying to hurt her. It was like comforting the habits of a frigid and often troubled animal. The potion coursing through her was a cooling sensation, burned and assaulted by the natural heat of her skin and things within, it made her lips thin in a tight lipped grimace despite the alleviation of her wounds. Bruises shimmered from the palour of her skin and lesions finally began to seal closed, forming scars, though not every single laceration and anguish was spared from her body. Magdalena’s internal injuries though would take something more potent than one syringe of Potion, but it was enough, for the moment. The blonde flexed her arm, curling fingers into her palm when Olivia applied pressure with the cotton and met her gaze once again, this time without flinching.
“I know I should thank you,” she began, drawing her limb back to cradle it against her chest. “But you could have saved it for someone else, I would have been okay, I always am.” Magdalena sighed, a soft sound of exhalation that was edged in something else when she stood up and began her aforementioned retreat once again — searching in near vain for her distraction. She knew that her sudden departure was perhaps a little disrespectful and dismissive and that a proper thanks of gratitude had been preferable but Magdalena couldn’t bring the words affront, for some unknown reason of designated emotion.
The shadow inflicted individual as she was made her way to the farthest corner she could manage and found Emily already affix in the position and twined deep into sleep. She envied her for the ability to succumb so easily despite the situation and felt the gnawing edge against her soul that was uneasy in a empathetic deluge from the gathered wounded. Magdalena worried the pout of her lip with the sliver of her teeth and plopped down next to Emily, the two had not spoken since their departure from the Academy, but then she had hardly spoken to any one when they left, barring Kim and Aaron of course and the brief conversations passed over their sea side consumption. But to initiate such talk? That wasn’t precisely characteristic of her, she didn’t really know how to, anyways. So she buried her face in the crook of her arm, enjoying her silent company for the moment before her own lethargic qualms took over. In her dwindling consciousness had reclined back and settled against Emily; nestling against her shoulder in a rare moment of submission of her usual chaotic mind and heart.
┊» ｉｎｔｏ ｔｈｅ ｄａｒｋ●
Within the sewers, Magdalena seemed to fair better than her taller companions, another perk of being as small as she was. She never had to duck or move aside to avoid chaffing brick that oozed and teemed with various and ill favouring gunk. Her foot falls were precise in the dark, guided by the wavering form of her shadow that slid and attached its self often and intermittently to other depressions of shadows and obscurities. The expansion of it swelled and diminished the further they descended into the gloom and she was vaguely reminded of particular nightmares and hallucinating visions that would assault her unconscious thought and reflection.
But when her shadow suddenly froze in its usual whirl and dance, and her spirits receded, Magdalena’s brow fell over her blue eyes and cast a glance towards Kimberly. She looked to him, to gauge his reactions, to observe whether or not there was something he could hear here in the despairing, pestilent waters. Her lips fell into a frown and slight concern creased upon her visage when no one seemed to be alarmed by any potential threat encroaching upon their descendant. The battle warring on above was all she could hear and she could only assume that was what her shadow had been responding to so suddenly. Magdalena thus remained as her usual self of subdued elegance and indifference even when they finally came upon the intersection.
Magdalena remained back, observing when Olivia once again bid that they take a short break. Her lips pursed at that in a slight visual of thought, remembering on the last time she had delegated that they rest, which she once again prepared to advice again and then her shadow began to tremble. It was a quaking darkness that snaked across the waters and slid up the walls, pooling wide in startling action and she became perplexed by it, scanning her stare wide above where the ceiling domed and peaked. Her spirits responded just so, pulsing with their ruby cores, waving in interchanges of various shades of grey and black, washing over her. Magdalena’s eyes widened in alarm, her mouth open to reveal some kind of inquiry and voice of concern. But all of that was for not when waves parted and from the depths emerged a creature Magdalena herself could not fathom in that moment.
┊» ｂｏｓｓ ｂａｔｔｌｅ Ｉ●
She did not have time to reflect, to think, to calculate a plan of attack or even probe Olivia for one. The small frame she had once considered lucky in the tunnels now was thrown back with incredibly force, Magdalena crashed into one of the boxes and gasped around the pain of it and the harsh lash of the Xenomorph’s gargantuan tail. Her reaction was slow and biding as she shucked sodden tresses from her eyes narrowed with her grimace of disgust of the water now drenching her in unimaginable filth and stench.
Blue eyes, now beginning to darken with ebony and an orange ring, honed in on the tagger illuminating the figure in calculated numbers and data. Weak to fire, that, she could work with. Her darkness warped and thrummed with their cores that nearly matched the increasing tempo of her heart now coursing with a building and cresting adrenaline. Like the others, she prepared for battle, her arm swinging back to grasp her chakram and she swung it around her wrist before lowering into a crouch to assemble some sort of hypothesized plan. Kimberly had grasped hold of the beast’s tail, committing it to place as then Aaron launched up across its spine and lashing in chaotic whirls of his dual blades. She ground her teeth, a gale of wind wasn’t was she was expecting, but it seemed to blind the creature at best. Magdalena took that into her figuring and with a sharp inhale, permitted magma to pool within her mouth in a hellacious heat and thickness. It came around her, steam coiling and rising with the hissing emitted from the busted pipes as trickles of lava fell in boiling spheres.
The water was a slight hindrance in that, but Magdalena did not let it stop her as the monster roared in the most horrendous denotation that tore through her blood and bones. In a charge of hazed intentions, surrendering to the wills of battle, she used Kimberly as a temporary foundation, bracing against his shoulders and sending a slight glance his way as she pivoted off from his body in a launch that sent her across the Xenomorph’s thick back. She landed with a scream that followed with the harsh impale of her chakram as she sliced it down in a deadly spin, the ring circling around her wrist and embedding deep with the force of her momentum. In that, she used her chakram as a base, allowing it to sink deep into the beast’s hide as she drew in a near bestial snarl and spewed her withheld lava down across the assumed cranium. The writhing tendrils of aquatic life similarity boiled with her attack, festering deep into the skin and the enemy screeched aloud with a terrible wail that made her teeth clench against the resonating bellow.
Now it was threatened, the invasion of fire alerted the Xenomorph’s reserved tactics when Magdalena continued to build the magma within her body, skin aglow with it, waving and gleaming beneath the pale complexion. Her shadows conformed across herself, preparing and building with their own attack when the fiend began a sudden inhale. It was a sharp whistle of ominous sound that she didn’t know but the altering smell that accompanied did not bode well for any of them. Magdalena winced and drew her chakram from deep within its flesh and could barely dodge the report of one thick, scaly arm that had risen to strike her. She braced her chakram in front of her, vulnerable in her descent and screamed around the force that launched her aside and back into the disgusting, churning waters.
She coughed and sputtered, gagging the liquid from her throat and blinked through the sudden steam summoned around her body. Magdalena barely managed to find her voice as she felt around for her weapon and winced sharply around the pain invading her senses and flaring her nerves alive.
“Its spirit!” She warned in a agonized yell, once again burdened by a bought of coughing that was accompanied by her own blood and the colours of vermilion.
“It’s going to attack!”
* Mags is knocked back into a box [ouch]
* She uses Kimberly as a launch pad, basically, to put herself up high on the creature
* She attacks with her chakram, slicing deep into the hide before using it as a sort of foundation to stand on with it being embedded
* She uses Dragon Tongue, a more potent version of it, to attack the Xenomorph with her form of Fire
* It prepares its spiritual attack [?] and she tries to get away, only to be knocked hard by one of its thick arms
* She sustain injury from the knock back
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