The raging sounds of battle echoed below and above. The cold sensation of the wire was felt in her hands with each heartbeat.
Asha was frozen in fear midway through her climb, still clinging to some precarious wires.
For a reason she could not explain, the fear she felt was exacerbated. Like a wound that had been reopened under stress. She felt herself waning, even though she had been filled with determination minutes ago.
She hadn't noticed, but the light of her gem was glowing with a dull light. Her body felt heavy. Her mind lethargic. As if an insidious force was slowly taking away her grasp on reality.
"Please, h-help I, stay with they, they c-can't win, don't leave... Asha?"
Her name?...
A voice called for her name.
A faint beacon of light shining with an unknown blaze amidst the darkness that enshrouded her vision and mind.
"Mustn't... give up..." Asha muttered to herself.
Asha attempts to muster enough fortitude to fight off her fear and heavy body. Where she to succeed, her priority would be to fend off close range attackers from Tooru with knockbacking attacks on would be assailants.
In the event everything would fail and a girl's life would be in danger, she would burn the energy of her Soul Gem to increase her abilities <Mobility and Close Combat> to join up the fight.
[Joy]
You shake yourself out of your fear-induced paralysis upon hearing your name, and start climbing upward as fast as you can manage. For the first time in this horrible place, you've entirely forgotten your fear of heights, and you climb without worry. You can't just let yourself be ruled by fear while others are in danger! You can't just run away and hide anymore, not if there's anything you can do to protect the others.
It seems like only a couple seconds pass before you're high enough to find Tooru--but she's already retreating, jumping out of the nets, away from you and into a four-story fall. Between the two of you is a blonde girl--the same blonde girl that had kidnapped her before, though this time she's far more obviously fake, walking along the wires at an impossible angle. She turns her head to look at you, her slight smile mocking you for being too slow. You growl, filled with anger as you continue to climb up to meet the monster.
[Bravery]Once you're on an equal level with the fake girl, you
charge towards her, lowering your shoulder and your gaze to look for footholds as you run. The girl crumbles around your shoulder when your shoulder collides with her, and you realize that she was practically hollow. Your heart leaps into your throat as your momentum carries you forward without anything to block you, and you go flying out into the open chamber that Tooru already leapt into, though you can't see her anywhere. Something in the back of your mind is happy that you don't see her broken body on the stone floor four stories below, but it's a small part of your mind. The rest is concerned with screaming as loud as you can, because in a moment it will be
your broken body down there.
Crap! Now I'm the one with no leverage. Gotta think fast..
Pull on the wire below me to get closer to the monster and gain a little slack in the wire. Then use that moment to create a loop of now-slack wire, spin around, and shove the slack wire loop into the monster's mouth. If that frees me, grab the wire in my club-hand, and attack the monster's eyes as if the wire was an enormous whip. Cutting the wire on something else, like the chainsaw-arms, is also okay.
Mina recovers from the failed strike, and moves to assist again - come on, come on, Alida's in trouble!
Rush to assist Alida. Try to free her from the wires, or failing that, interrupt the monster's attack (preferably without myself getting mulched).
[Bravery] &
[Bravery]Alida, undaunted by the monster's aggression, pulls herself into a ball and reaches down to grab the cable entangling her legs. Simultaneously, the spider lifts one of its chainsaw-tipped limbs high, before bringing it down in an overhead chop aimed at the girl's neck. Reacting instantly, she yanks on the cable with both hands, pulling herself out of the bladed machine's path moments before it can decapitate her. The giant spider has
two arms, however, and the second one is already prepring to stab in from Alida's other side, low enough that she can't just yank herself out of its path again.
Alida still tries to avoid the attack, quickly pulling herself down the cable hand-over-hand, but before the chainsaw can reach her, Mina's halberd is embedded into the ground in front of it, hard enough to crack the stone. As the whirring chainsaw smashes into the weapon, the green girl herself lands nimbly, just in front of the crippled monster's angry maw. Her hands are still on the haft of her halberd, and she rips it free of the ground, jumping backwards onto the top of the monster in the same movement. She crouches there, ready to parry the next attack, but neither chainsaw has recovered yet.
Alida's already run out of space between her and the monster now, her feet directly pressing against the brass below its mouth, but she's given herself quite a lot of slack cable to work with. From her position, laying on the ground in front of the creature, she doesn't have to do more than gather it all in a lump and then kick the mass into the wildly spinning gears inside the clockwork spider. The bound girl is rewarded with a horrible grinding sound as the brass gears slow, struggling to crush the knot of cable, but they quickly speed up again, the gray metal rope being drawn past the gears. Alida screams as her legs starts being pulled forward again, this time directly into the monstrosity's maw; she tries to grab onto something and crawl away, but her fingers find no purchase on the stony ground.
Mina reacts almost instantly, flipping her halberd around so that the bladed end is pointing down, and then driving the polearm into the spider's mouth with all the force she can muster. A hellish sound of screeching and shattering metal follows, but the gears somehow
still refuse to stop, drawing Mina's halberd into the brass monster. Mina abandons her weapon immediately, jumping down and grabbing onto Alida, desperately pulling her away from the screaming metal trap. The cable holding Alida--already damaged by both the gears and halberd--still manages to hold for a second, before snapping, throwing Alida and Mina backwards to land in a heap.
Feeling returns to Alida's legs.Both girls lie there, Mina mostly trapped as Alida quickly struggles free of the now-inanimate wires wrapping her legs. Panicking, the green girl tries to point out the two chainsaw-tipped arms preparing to attack again, but neither girl is in a position to dodge. A trio of loud explosions sound out from the spider's back, and then the two arms stop freeze in place, as its seven eyes suddenly scatter wildly across its face, having entirely stopped watching Alida for the first time since the clockwork monstrosity appeared. Neither girl waits to see if it will wake up again, Alida rolling off of Mina, and the green girl dragging her away by the collar.
Both girls hear a scream from above, and look up to see two girls falling from high above. One of them looks just like Alida, and the other is the ashen-haired girl that had been climbing through the wires earlier.
Tooru wasted no time, leaping away from the "girl" with a squeak of fright. The sudden motion didn't play well with the feeling rising in her gut, but she was more concerned with putting distance between her and her likely assailant than trying to keep down her lunch. She also had to worry about the witch below - and the other girls. She didn't want to even try making a blast like that again, and she wouldn't want to regardless; they were too close, always too close for her to stop worrying about hurting them. Maybe, though, she could try something more precise.
As I jump away from the "girl," try to get talismans into the cracks (and by extension the innards of the monster), using as reasonable of a power level as I can manage.
((Just for reference, you can specify how powerful manabolts should be with either the explicit cost (cheap, minor, moderate, etc), or by how powerful you want them to be (hand grenade/rocket launcher/firecracker, etc). If you don't do either, you rely on my best guess of what you want.))[Joy]
You leap backwards away from the clearly fake girl... and as you leave the net of wires, you remember that you were just at the edge of the large open chamber, just below the net of wires which makes a sort of ceiling. You spin in midair, screaming and flailing around for
something to catch and stop yourself from falling down four stories onto hard stone--and by sheer chance, you
do catch something. Your right hand finds a hanging wire, the other end unattached to anything, and you immediately latch onto it and cling for your life. This doesn't stop your momentum, though; you end up swinging in a long arc, and at the height of your swing find the ceiling-net of wires to be
just within reach. You desperately grab for it, and then clamber up into the thick tangle.
Once you're up far enough to stand, you pause for a moment to collect yourself. That was
way too much of a surprise, and
way too close to death. While taking a deep breath, you quickly scan your surroundings; they're surprisingly open, the wires are thick enough below to almost act as a floor, as are most of the wires around you, but you're in the center of a hollow tunnel of sorts that's about six feet wide. It extends a fair distance above you, lit by the ubiquitous golden lamps, but you stop your inspection once you're sure there's no immediate danger. A scream from below just adds to your stress as you try to find a large enough gap in the wire floor to throw talismans through.
[Joy]
Finding such a gap, you drop into a prone position and look through it. Far below, the blonde and green-haired girls are struggling with the heavily-damaged spider's face--apparently it's dragging the blonde into its mouth!
Acting quickly, you throw all three of your talismans down at the monster's cracked back, panic making you launch all three in record time. You're not sure precisely where the third hit, but the first two definitely went directly into the largest crack. All three give satisfyingly loud bangs, though they're far quieter than the previous detonation.
You watch the spider carefully, unsure whether you need to summon more talismans, or if it's finally dead. It isn't moving anymore, but it paused for a short time after your big attack...
You hear another scream, and then two shapes fall into into view from the area you had jumped from. One of them is the fake-girl that you had fled from, but the other--the other's Asha! She's way too high up, she's going to die if she isn't stopped from hitting the ground!
Soul Gem: Glowing with a
dull light.
Age: 14
Hair Color: Salt-stained blonde.
Health: She has deep slashes along her forearms, a throbbing headache, and she's starting to feel a bit faint. Also, a bunch of wires are still half-entangled with her legs.
Inventory: A club.
Shoe status: Worn and entangled, but relieved that they weren't eaten by a spider.
Totem: A fishing club.
Stats:
Bravery: Talented~ Joy: Skilled! Innocence: Amateur...
Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Skilled! Creativity: Cursed ;-;
Love: Cursed ;-;
Abilities:
Mobility Lvl2
Close Combat Lvl2+1
Totem Manipulation Lvl1
Berzerker Lvl2 - Active; Bloodied!
Painless Lvl2
Effigy Lvl1Soul Gem: Glowing with a
dull light.
Age: 13
Hair color:
Ashen Health: She's only a little banged up, though that will probably change greatly in a couple seconds~
Inventory: Nothing of use.
Totem: A Ribbon. The one her late sister wore.
Stats:
Bravery: Skilled! Joy: Cursed ;-;
Innocence: Cursed ;-;
Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Talented~ Creativity: Amateur...
Love: Skilled!Abilities:
Mobility: Level 2
Close Combat: Level 2
Totem Manipulation: Level 0 (+1)
Heal and Steel: Level 2 (Active: Mercy++)
Soothe: Level 2
Flagellation: Level 2 Soul Gem: Glowing with a
vibrant light.
Age: 14.
Hair Color: Bright green.
Health: She's never been wounded,
somehow, though she's got a lot of Alida's blood on her.
Inventory: No more halberd.
Totem: A halberd.
Stats:
Bravery: Amateur...
Joy: Skilled! Innocence: Amateur...
Purity: Skilled! Mercy: Cursed ;-;
Creativity: Talented~ Love: Cursed ;-;
Abilities:
Mobility: Level 1
Close-Combat: Level 1 (+1)
Regeneration: Level 2
Sixth Sense: Level 2
Semblance: Level 2
Projection: Level 2Soul Gem: Glowing with a
dull light.
Age: 13
Hair Color: Bright scarlet.
Health: Fine, if rattled!
Inventory:
No talismans!
Totem: Ofuda talismans, primarily thrown as manabolts.
Stats:
Bravery: Cursed ;-;
Joy: Talented~ Innocence: Skilled! Purity: Amateur...
Mercy: Cursed ;-;
Creativity: Amateur...
Love: Skilled! Abilities:
Mobility II
Mana Bolt II (+I)
Regeneration I
Gourmand I
Outburst II
Duet with Reality II