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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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.

The wretched thing had too much magic, and mitigation wasn't mitigating as much as Loki actually wanted it to. Much earlier in the battle, he'd dropped his own defenses in favor of strengthening the others', and now with the thing throwing out fire and dark energy seemingly at random, he stopped paying attention to anything else.

He didn't learn that was a mistake until Iron Man hit him with all the force of... he didn't even have time to work out how much force it was before he was smashed into the ground by a metaphorical ton of metal and they both went bouncing and ragdolling across the desert floor, tangled together at high speed.

Loki felt more than heard the cracks - his ribs definitely, skull possibly. Hips? Back? There was too much generalized pain to be sure of any one thing. Somewhere along the way, something had sliced open his scalp in at least one place, blood kept trying to get in his eyes.

It was too much pain to comprehend or deal with. So he didn't. Oddly, this meant that he was able to think and process quickly, undistracted; the pain was there, but it was wallpaper in a room or water to a fish, and that let something else occur to the god of mischief. If it was this for him, how bad was it for the mortal in the armor doing all of this damage?

Worse, much worse.

Loki didn't let himself think about it, there wasn't time. Instead he managed to wipe the curtain of blood away from his eyes, then press his now-bloody hand to Stark's faceplate. Just do something! Thor had said, waving the cut on his arm. Loki just did something: he shoved every bit of magical energy he had left (and why not, whatever converted life the blood on his hand could offer; blood magic, why not?) at Stark, willing nothing more than get up from this.

The shoved hand-to-faceplate and bright flash of green separated them, but Stark's limpness caught Loki's arm on the way, adding a new dimension of pain to the ocean: dislocated shoulder. Once separated, Loki's lighter weight brought him to a stop fairly quickly, but between injuries and having just spent more energy than he had, he was limp and unconscious when he did.

"Fuck." Carlos was already in agony, but on seeing the fire and dark energy coming round about him and Clarice, he hauled himself up, though he couldn't help but cry out again as he put weight on an injured leg, and headed over, trying to pull Clarice out of the way.

What was left of his barrier flickered and failed, and he was caught by some of the fire, flattening him to the ground and knocking him unconscious.

Thor should have done this from the get-go. It might have ended things immediately. But turning it on wasn't as simple as flipping a lightswitch. Maybe his father had no problems tapping into the Odinforce without difficulty, but Thor could count the number of times he actively utilized the power on one hand.

The first time on Sakaar, when the Hulk was thrashing him.
On Asgard, during the final battle against Hela and her undead army.
On the Statesman against Thanos and his children, where he was somehow able to figure out how to consciously stop it.
On Earth, when he fought against Thanos and his army right before the snap.

And then, now.

The only common thread between each of those moments was that he had been protecting something, even if what he wanted to protect was himself.

Sparks of lightning arc across his fingers with an audible electrical sizzle. He looks over at Loki and Tony's limp and prone forms, and then sets eyes on the third. He didn't even know the man, and yet he still fought alongside them, setting up barriers that protected them and aided them in the battle.

And when he looks at the three of them, the the sizzling in his fingers shoot up his arms; it draws itself across the entirety of his body in a nearly an instant, his mismatched eyes lighting up with electric white-blue light.

"Clarice," he somehow manages, a half-second before lightning races across Stormbreaker. "I need a portal as far as you can take me!"

This wasn't close quarters like the Statesman, but Thor wanted to be as far away from them as he possibly could be. When he fought Hela and her undead army, he had been a safe distance away from the Asgardians. He didn't want to risk hurting anyone that was already down.

Clarice gritted her teeth, you learned to put shit behind you and do the job. Unfortunately her portal making was tied to her strength and that was crap right now. That didn't stop her from trying though. "I got it!" She gritted out and pulled herself up by sheer determination. Her hands spread and the purplish lights began to flicker between her hands. It grew to make a portal but sadly, the portal was only as big as Thor's torso. He would either have to go through head first or just throw the hammer or lightening through and hope to hell it hit.

And he needed to do it pretty damn quick before she and the portal went to hell.

Thor couldn't risk smacking the skull through the portal and not getting a shot off on it. Thor has confidence plenty in his abilities, but he knows himself well enough to know he has limitations. He had screwed up when it mattered before, and he couldn't afford to again.

"Clarice, look after them!" He knows that there's not much that she's going to be able to do, so he needs to end this as quickly as he can manage.

Lightning crashes overhead as Thor barrels towards the demilich and smashes it skyward with a slam of his hammer; he raises Stormbreaker up and is carried up so quickly that he very nearly keeps pace with it.

One smash, two smash, a third -- and then the skull's teeth start chattering, and he can feel it try and pull something out of him.

And when it starts to, he smashes it again. This time, when Stormbreaker makes its mark, a net of lightning holds it in place. Thor keeps striking it -- over and over and over again, with a savageness that might have seemed inhumane if the creature weren't so obviously an abomination.

And with each strike, the eye sockets of the skull light up blue-white, mirroring Thor's eyes now. Even as he strikes the creature, he can feel it reaching out, trying to pull whatever life it can from inside of him. Fissures begin to form at the back of the skull, and the blue-white light seeps out of them with every strike until --

CRACK!

With one last thunderous smack, the skull breaks apart and falls to the Earth below.

Thor takes a breath.

And then another.

He watches as it hits the ground. He waits, but nothing moves.

It is dead.

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Inn-world Combat: The Dread Reign

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