strangetrip | Inn-world Combat: The Dread Reign

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Inn-world Combat: The Dread Reign

At the crest of the mountain, Coc'zac sat atop Nazu's head looking through a glass that Hotor held to his eye. Vokva sat beside them, little more than a pile of bones atop a pile of rocks, and Hafur paced behind them, holding the troops in check. They milled in the pre-dawn gloom, skeletons, wights, zombies, wraiths, and all manner of undead creatures. Periodically, Nazu swept the space behind them with their tail bowling over anyone who'd gotten too close.

The first pinpoint of light had Coc'zac's teeth chattering with excitement in his disembodied head. Today was the day he'd been planning for. Soon, soon the Inn and its occupants would be his. Nazu unleashed a heavy sigh tinged with poison and necrosis. Fortunately the troops were all dead already, and Coc'zac didn't have anything in the way of arms to hit them with.

It fell to Hafur to gesture the troops forward as punctuation to Coc'zac's 'rousing' speech, and together they crept through the portal, avoiding its fizzing and popping edges demarcated in what would be neon blue, if they could still see in color. They couldn't properly hear either, but they were aware of the noise and the danger it marked.

Once they were all through, the advance scouts, four bands of skeleton archers swept quietly as they could through the shadows to take up position around the main buildings, prepared to pick off anyone who exited--for example for a pre-sun jog. And once they'd settled into wary, silent waiting, occasionally interrupted by the pop of a joint or the clatter of toe bones on stone, the next wave rolled in finding shadows to hide in until the residents emerged with the wights taking point.The bone naga and three flameskulls slipped through the lobby doors and stealthed toward the offices, assuming to find the command center there.

It wasn't long before the invaders caught the notice of the residents, and then shouts began to echo through the grey light and journals filled with messages and reminders of siege plans. Several strongly worded messages urged the kids and those without weapons or fighting skills to head for the Temple where the Hallow spell would protect them from unholy undead things.

And so the battle for the Madonna Inn began...

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"If anyone's got some helpful tips on Jolly Roger up there I'd love to hear it." Iron Man wasted no time striding past the group and right into the soon-to-be line of fire to meet it. "If not, let's stress test it real good."

Tony had no plans to get any closer to the thing than he had to, so Thor's directives suited him just fine. It was fast, it was mean, it was ugly as all sin and it's origins seemed to veer on the side of 'gothic supernatural horror.' Magic and techological dichotomy aside, there were few threats that Tony wasn't willing to negotiate with a gleeful missile strike.

The Three Stooges up ahead might be trying to get the lion's share of the action, but Carlos was not going to let them have all the fun. Make way for one handsome heroic wizard, not as flashy as the others, dressed in a band t-shirt, cargo pants and wielding a staff and a silver sword danging from his hip, but everything screamed 'I know what I am doing'.

He placed himself as far away from the man flying above them as possible, just in case something happened when the inevitable magic started flying about. Well this would be interesting, wouldn't it?

Clarice looked around at the others that were staring at the flying skull. Seriously? A flying skull? This place was beyond weird, but it was her 'home' and she'd be damned if she wouldn't do something to stop it. While the others look loaded for bear, she looked like she just happened upon the scene, that was until her hands spread apart and a hole in space appeared in front of her and in the sky closer to Thor. She'd picked his location because she knew him and she knew he understood what the pink rimmed holes were.

"Anyone for basketball?"

Coc'zac rolled in the air, somehow laughing to himself as he finished the last words of his spell and the sky opened up above his challengers. How brave! How foolish!

How dead. Sickening green-white light slammed to the ground in a wide column, burning and rotting anything not fast enough to get away.

Not one to let grass grow under nonexistent feet, Coc'zac sped around to evaluate and oh, yes. The one with the staff, was he still on his disgusting fleshy feet? A staff meant a wizard, perhaps. The skull's teeth began to chatter out another spell that, when complete, would fling a hail of glowing force missiles at the wizard.

What the hell were those? Portals? Fuck, that was interesting. He had no time to really take it in and work out the implications before hell was literally raining down on them. Carlos easily skipped to one side out of the track of the beam that came down. It was almost a speculative attempt and it was easy for him to move past it for now. But then the skull moved to look at all of them, and looked directly at hi.

It didn't take a genius to work out why he was a target, but he was ready. He'd been a combat wizard for far too long now, and was still alive to be caught unawares. "Protegere," he muttered, his barrier flicking into life in time to absorb the impact of the missiles, making sure that they didn't go bouncing off in some random direction. He was uncomfortably hot for a moment, but at least they had no impact on him. The worrying thing was the sheer power just in those two spells.

Edited 2018-08-27 20:28 (UTC)

Clarice watched in awe when Carlos obviously did something because none of the hits penetrated. She filed that away to be examined later, but right now, she had to avoid being hit by whatever the hell that was.

Tue portal by Thor disappeared in an instant, but reappeared in an area further away from everyone. All the strikes that were heading toward Clarice's area disappeared only to reappear out the other side doing damage to the landscape but not people.

Thor's eyes light up with instant recognition at the sight of one of Clarice's portals, though it quickly snaps away and reforms elsewhere.

"Clarice!" he shouts, clearly delighted. "That was... amazing!"

Still, there's no time to ruminate over Clarice's sudden clever use of her abilities or the wizard (was he a wizard?) who was presently under assault, and there was no better opportunity to lay waste to an enemy than when it is distracted with someone else.

Thor leaps into the air, Stormbreaker held tight within his hands, and launches himself at the back of the creature's skull. He knocks it backwards (or was that forwards? Thor isn't really sure), and the creature turns to face him.

"It has the eyebrow thing going on!" Thor exclaims. "Like Sutur. Loki, look! The little eyebrow thing!"

Thor tosses Stormbreaker back up at the creature, then turns to face Loki with a smile, as if waiting for a reaction. The axe-hammer meets its target, and then races towards the open, waiting hand of Thor a half-second after Thor heard the crack of metal against bone.

"A little smaller, brother!" Loki called back, throwing a couple more blurring spells on the new arrivals. No sense leaving them easy to target! But it was a good point; Surtur's crown plus the Eternal Flame would resurrect him for Ragnarok. If this thing had something similar, perhaps it had a similar resurrection planned? "Less decorative!"

He didn't stop moving or casting just because he was thinking, though. To give Stark time to get mobile (and incidentally keep Thor's component atoms together), Loki wrapped the skull in silence just as it started to chatter again. The silence would break one spell, but by then it would hopefully be too late to catch everyone on the ground anymore.

Conjured barriers? Portals popping in and out of existence like virtual particles? Yep. Hogwarts shit. Expelliarmus it up, comrades. The other two who had joined the fray were keeping the home front protected, and that was all Tony needed to know.

Following his fellow Avenger's ascent, Iron Man took off into the sky like a rocket. Each appendage was ablaze with his repulsors firing off, and he hugged them in close to sharpen the aerodynamics of his swift descent upon the airborne skull. He kept his vision locked on the thing, giving F.R.I.D.A.Y. just enough time to put a target on it. It liked missiles? Oh, it was going to get them.

"Thor, micro-missile chaser headed your way!" A slew of projectiles emerged from Iron Man's back, streaking brightly across the sky directly for their target following Thor's attack. He pulled an abrupt arc away from the inn to escape the blast radius, and the roar of missile-on-bone filled the air.

"Eye-holes over here, Skeletor! There's more where that came from, so open wide!"

At least the man in the technology was going away from Carlos. It meant he could unleash everything. The distractions provided were good - it meant that hopefully skull boy's attention was divided.

Most wizards had a school of magic they preferred - Carlos' was water magic based, with a touch of entropy, but for sheer outright damage in a fight? Nothing beat a blast of fire to the face - or in this case, up the nose-holes of the skull above him. The flying fighters were going to go for the larger distraction, but that was fine, it just gave him openings to try something else. There was a time and a place for a smart-ass comment, but without Harry or his other Warden friends there, he just had to wait for the right opening.

Clarice couldn't help the laugh at Thor's comments. It was so very much him, but her attention was on the magic user. Her mind began to work how to use what he was doing with her portals. She glanced at Thor and his hammer and a thought began to take shape.

"Hey, Carlos." She'd heard his name being used though they hadn't talked before. "If I create a portal opening in front of us, can you put a barrier up strong enough flying skull can't get through?"

If he could, she'd tell Thor to hit the son of a bitch right into it on one of his hammer swings.

Carlos swore to himself as his fireball went wide - damn, that thing was fast - but he took a quick swing of his staff as the skull came close. No more than a glancing blow, but he'd take it.

He glanced over at the woman - Clarice, he seemed to recall, though he didn't actually know her, before turning his attention back to the skull. "Impermeable barrier? Not exactly a specialty, but give me a moment to prepare it, and I can do it. Got an idea?" He tended to work with laws of thermodynamics - namely that the energy was absorbed by the barrier, and whatever was going through the barrier was slowed down. Extending it so that it effectively slowed it to a stop would be challenging - but he could do it.

"Yeah I'm thinking Thor smashes skull through a portal that I create and it bounces off your barrier back to Thor to smash, and skull ping pong begins." She shot him a quick smile. "Get ready."

Then she shifted her weight to open a portal by Thor again. It also helped in conversations because she could talk through it and didn't have to yell. "Hey, got an idea. Me and wizard boy will set up portals and a barrier. You think you can hit that thing through the portal and into the barrier? It should and I mean should, bounce back at you and you can hit it again. If it doesn't work I want a big ass wake with lots of alcohol for my funeral okay? And tie a cherry stem in my honor."

"Much smaller!" he shouts back to his brother.

Thor had only half-heard the conversation between Carlos and Claire. It was growing increasingly more difficult to hear everyhihng over the din of spells and missiles and the crack of lightning. Even as they talked, he had been unleashing his own flurry of blows against the undead beast -- some of which had missed their mark. The creature was fast, and instead of wearing him down, their assault seemed to have galvanized the creature, and it moved even faster than it had from start.

"I can do that," he says. "Not the cherry stem thing, though -- I'm still no good at it -- so if you want it, you will have to save dying for some other time."

He gives Clarice a smile, then launches himself skyward to continue his assault until he has the signal that Clarice is ready.

All he needed to do for now was keep the creature away from the others.

Edited 2018-08-29 01:25 (UTC)

For once, Loki didn't join the conversation. It wasn't that he didn't have anything to say, that hardly ever happened. It was more that his attention was entirely taken up with maintaining and casting more spells, defensive and otherwise, than he generally did. In most combats, he looked after himself and backstabbed at the edges of the fight. It had always worked well, before.

It wouldn't work here. There was no 'edge' to combat, and he was more likely to interfere than not if he tried his usual tactics.

Fortunately, a combination of illusions, deflections, and dispels (all more obvious with flashing green light than he really liked to be) served to keep a fair amount of the thing's rotting and burning attacks away from the ones who actually were fighting it. As a matter of efficiency, he'd mostly stopped including himself in his defenses: four were easier to track than five, and as the only one not overtly attacking, he didn't appear to be high-priority for the thing.

All of Tony's attention went to weaving through counter-strikes and carpet bombing (or trying to) the uppity chunk of calcium phosphate whenever he got the chance. Even so, he couldn't help but keep one eye on the ones on ground. Loki, duplicitous bugger that he was, was doing his damndest to make life easier for him and everyone else through whatever mystical tricks he had up his sleeve.

The other two--identified Clarice and Carlos (Alliteration! Nice) with some help from F.R.I.D.A.Y.S.'s internal database--were huddling up with Thor in some manner before the latter went skyward-bound once more. A wizard, a casual spacetime manipulator, and the God of Thunder. Now wasn't that a treat. Whatever they were up to, they seemed to have it on lock down. Part of him wanted in on the action, but most of him wanted to preserve his armor and his flesh and watch the show.

A sudden glancing blow from one of the missile strikes was a painful reminder to keep focused on doing just that. The nanoparticles that composed his suit were swift to repair the damage, preventing any from making it to his skin.

"Keep the flying suit well away from me when I do this," Carlos cried out suddenly in the middle of preparation. " I will not be responsible for anything that goes wrong with it." Ah the joys of magic up against technology - the more futuristic, the more likely Carlos was to fry it. He was no Dresden in terms of strength, but this was a bit of an unknown quantity, and as such his magic was a little less controlled than normal.

He gritted his teeth, set himself and then a green barrier appeared around, more solid than normal, distorting his features. "Whatever you are doing, do it now," he called out to Clarice.

While Carlos was preparing his barrier, Clarice had to center herself. She knew that this would take a lot out of her and the only time she'd made a large portal was after her head had been screwed with. Her feet spread apart and her hands separated.

The portal in front of her and Carlos grew large where it looked like they disappeared with the other portal directly in Thor's sight line and hopefully where the skull would fly so that Thor could hit it. At the very least the fire shots from the skull would pass through to hopefully bounce off the barrier.

"Hit that home run!"

"Got it!"

Thor launches himself towards the demilich, and it turns to face him, teeth chattering; it sends a spray of fire at Thor that singes his skin and hair, but Thor continues to barrel towards him and strikes him so hard with Stormbreaker that there's an audible crack.

It flies through the portal so quickly that when it bounces against Carlos' barrier, it snaps back towards him so fast that it almost strikes him. He manages to clip it with the edge of Stormbreaker, sending it towards the barrier slower than he did before, making it an easier target for any teammembers hoping to get a spell or a shot off on it before it strikes Carlos' barrier a second time.

Whether or not someone wanted to get a spell off proved to be immaterial, as Coc’zac took matters into his own nonexistent hands.

This was humiliating. It was unacceptable. With a scream of rage and a few syllables, after the big one’s hammer struck again to send him hurtling back at the tear in space, Coc’zac threw black beams of not light but only darkness at the wizard. Several, to make sure.

The beams would tear and blast his flesh, yes! And the life they consumed would restore the demilich. Why, it would be as if this humiliation had never occurred!

But they were proving to be difficult, and even after erasing the humiliation, Coc’zac was... uncertain. Perhaps it was time for a final statement and withdrawal? He spun up higher into the air, to ponder and also conduct more distances strikes.

The skull bouncing against the barrier was jarring - he felt it through ever fibre of his being. He wasn't sure how many more strikes he could take, but he could certainly take a couple more.

Carlos may be a good fighter, but part of the reason he'd survived so long was knowing when the attention was turning to you. Those black beams that followed the scream looked far more dangerous than the light ones earlier, and as much as the plan was working, he did not want to be caught in their path - nor did he want them to bounce off an impermeable barrier and hit someone else. He was shouting at Clarice to shut off the barrier, but in the mean time he had changed his barrier to normal to try and negate the effects of the beam around him and Clarice, while he made it mostly out of the way, not all the beams missed, two catching minor glancing blows, enough to make him scream out with pain.

It always took a lot out of Clarice to keep her portals going and she could feel it fading. At Carlos' shout, she let the portal close. "Sorry, guys that's as much as I can do." She raised her voice and hoped the others could hear her over the din of battle.

Clarice fell to her knees as she tried to catch her breath. Her head shot up when she heard Carlos yell in pain, but all she could do was watch helplessly. She tried to open another portal to help the others but all that happened were little crackles of light but no portal reappeared. "Well hell."

That was the last statement before a beam barely caught her on the shoulder as she ducked into a ball trying to become as small a target as she could.

The pinpointed target on his scanner's shot up into the sky, and Tony sensed its game immediately.

"Need help finding your spine, Skellington!?" Tony's voice projected through his face plate, turning on a dime to make a beeline straight for the thing.

Clarice and Carlos were getting hit hard, and he simply couldn't abide the nerve on the skull to simply turn tail after all that. The ping-pong tactic was the most fun Tony had spectating in a long time, especially with the sheer joy it brought his old teammate. Tony made a mental note to treat them all to a drink afterward, if they'd have it. Shawarma, even, if one of the cooks knew how to make it. Ah, nostalgia.

'Food later, explosives now.' Upon Iron Man's upper back re-emerged his micro-missiles. He waited until the moment he was within 50 meters--the closest he had gotten thus far--before unleashing a relentless barrage. His shoulder-mounted missile-launchers were quick to join the fun while he was closing in, lighting up the night sky.

The flying knight was too irritating! Coc'zac dodged most of the missiles themselves, though the damage from their explosions was not something he could dodge easily, and a few judicious teleports handled the larger things. It didn't seem fair, somehow, heavy armor and explosions!

Coc'zac the Conqueror would teach him about fair. By being as unfair as possible.

Rather than run away or fly away to gain distance for attacks, as he'd been doing, Coc'zac dove through a few portals of his own making, zig-zagging closer and closer, half-second by half-second, listening for the patterns of the knight's explosions. Once he was satisfied that he'd land either between or immediately before another strike (thus possibly inflicting the knight's own missiles upon him), he charged.

Physically.

He rarely attacked physically; he was just a skull, and he had Vokva and Hotor and even Nazu for sheer physical power. But in this case it seemed appropriate: Coc'zac head-butted the knight directly in the light on his chest, and in that same second released a few other spells he'd been stacking up.

A vicious lightning bolt - lightning wasn't his choice, but lightning and metal got along so very, very well - directly to that light, to carry across all the armor. And a blast of pure dark force to send the knight slamming away and to the ground.

Where heavy armor belonged. "Know your place, insect!" Coc'zac screamed, teeth beginning to chatter on more spells, then release them. More ways to press his new advantage.

Tony swore--F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s scanning feature could barely keep up with all the wormhole whack-a-mole going on. Through the smoke and flash bangs, Tony didn't see the skull coming right at him. It was a good thing, too, as that would have been the last thing he'd have seen.

The sudden impact to his chest wasn't enough to break the inertia of his flight. The sudden jolt of lightning and magical onslaught, however, were.

With each successive blow that hit his body like a wrecking ball, his armor should have been more than able to withstand it. The nanoparticles failed to respond accordingly to the damage feedback--leaving more than a few parts of Tony's body vulnerable. A blow to his arm, his ribs, and then to his head and everything went black before the pain or confusion could process. Iron Man was a meteorite falling to earth.

Inn-world Combat: The Dread Reign

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