Save Point: Tactical Demolition

The World Of Sethuramandraki

Terrowne throws himself in front of Cleo and shifts as fast as he can as the grenade goes off, turning its outer shell into a spray of shrapnel that tears up dirt from the ground and sets it spinning in a series of small vortices. His scales reach some sort of minimum rating and interlock just as the pieces reach him, but the force is enormous and knocks him on his back at her feet.

The weapon seems top have been souped up with some sort of induced electromagnetic pulse to increase its general purpose damage, but the Dragon has eaten most of it, and with arm braced over muzzle, has even avoided overloading the sensor pits inscribed beneath either eye, although the higher order array formed by its ears is hopelessly jangled and throwing off stray sparks like some sort of primitive arc generator. Hearing is briefly flat-lined and vision is strangely blurred.

Protected from most of the hit, Cleo is barely stunned and has only been lightly clipped. A spray of blood spinning off the edge of one arm, she hurls herself forward and the only sounds he can make out seem to be a sort of terrible crunching. It looks like she has finally gotten aggrieved enough to pull out her sword and forcibly integrate it with some third parties.

He rolls from side to side a couple of times to build up calibration and momentum before finally making it onto his knees and starting to get up. If Dragons had error messages, they'd be all over the place. "Looks like the sons-of-bitches finally got serious," he says, speaking loudly but almost muted to his own damaged ears as he begins to shift back.

"You actually would catch a grenade for me, wouldn't you?" sighs Cleo in mock dismay. The side-slice out of her arm is already healing, and she tries to scrub away the blood from her armor as it dries, get as much of it as possible back onto the skin for re-absorption. "Most guys would just mean it figuratively and stuff."

"Did you manage to capture any of them?" asks Terrowne, popping one of his ears by slapping himself in the side of the head. "The grenades, that is, not the sons-of-bitches. Which is now their official title, like they're some sort of militia group. That thing really stung."

Cleo tosses one to him as his hearing finally starts to return properly. It has the generic honey-combed shape of a shrapnel weapon, with one of the hexes protruding quite conspicuously to give orientation and a manual trigger, but the Dragon can see something nasty involving compressible circuitry woven through the explosive core. "This thing is kinda interesting. It almost looks like the pommel on your sword - you know, the shielded spherical bit I can't quite manage to see into. It's like this, but the opposite way around, if that makes any sense."

"It looks like they've tried to combine every main type into a single weapon," says Cleo, looking at her own example in a very different way that says trained military eye. "I'd bet you can tune this thing all the way up from a simple flash-bang, through several categories of shrapnel, to some sort of demolitions charge. Unfortunately I have no idea how and it probably wouldn't let me."

"This is why high-tech weapons suck," complains Terrowne, who is still miffed over having been blasted flat. "You can't switch off a hidden blade, which is why it always works."

"You and your knives, honestly... oh well, I guess I can always still chuck 'em at the sons-of-bitches to get 'em to run away," notes Cleo happily, clipping as many as she can find to to the various clips and strapping on her armor. "I can probably make them sort of explode generically, although the results aren't going to be very reliable."

"See? The name just sort of applies itself. It totally sticks," says Terrowne proudly, having noticed her adoption of their new epithet for the Free Sethura Nation (aka The Sons Of Bitches).

"I feel an obligation to smack my more wayward sons into line," notes Cleo, finishing her weapons scavenge with a flourish.

~*~

"Shit! It's literally paper-thin and has edges!" snarls Cleo in desperation.

"Well keep away from them or you'll be getting worse than a paper-cut!" yells Terrowne.

The creature swirls, lighter than a feather, looking for all the world like a Japanese floral makami as it rides the breeze with fatal intent, swooping and coiling, adaptive camouflage dappling and trying to keep up. If someone cut a predatory lizard snake out of a roll of wall-paper, then folded the front up using origami to make a head, it would look like this.

Terrowne sprouts a Dragon rip-claw out of one of his wrists and tries to snag the thing as it goes past. He is beyond amazement when the rip-claw catches briefly, then is cut through, leaving a ripped trailing edge and a knife-size length of blackened bone falling to the dirt.

"This thing has better materials technology than I do!" he warns her, retreating. "Or more like stupider, quicker and more to the point."

He rolls and then catches up his severed rip-claw, in case he can use the broken piece as a free weapon whilst the original regrows. "I apologise for my earlier comment about knives!" he howls, trying to clean stab the thing as it goes past. "This thing is a knife! It's all knife! I'm not sure it even has more than two dimensions!"

Cleo is concentrating, trying to use her pyrokinesis to ignite the thing as it keeps sweeping and moving, but between its oscillations and her increasingly desperate evasions, it's hard to get a lock on. If she could just get one point on it... its fabric is infinitely thin, a little energy would go a long way...

The local equivalent of a tree is slashed straight through, timber shrieking as it begins to fall. They both retreat in haste, trying to predict the fall. A large, free-standing decorative lantern at the base of the tree is crushed under roots and soil. Both of them deliberately call the wrong direction, sliding under the falling mass of branches at the last second and winding up on the other side from the swirling paper-dragon.

(Paper-dragon? Didn't we see one of those before? Wasn't it of vellum? Isn't all this happening, all over again?)

Cleo shakes her head and tries to clear her focus as Terrowne grabs one of her over-powered Desert Eagle hand-cannons and tries to nail the thing over available cover on general principles. He succeeds quite adeptly at blowing two holes in it, which has no effect because the surface area of the thing is enormous. It seems likely that grenades and conventional weapons are out. He's not even sure what sort of physics it's using, because it's just too thin to get a decent return. If he had maybe a couple of minutes to wind up for something really destructive...

It's clearly time for some suicidal audacity. His right rip-claw has nearly regrown, so he springs both of them, sprints up a branch and throws himself onto the creature.

The edges are deadly, but he's thrown himself up flat against the linear surface of its back, hanging on by punching the rip-claws through it and then pulling them out before before it can cut through. The creature tries to fold in on itself like a mobius strip, spinning about itself to cut him to ribbons, but he rams the other rip-claw into the approaching segment, holding them apart to create a pocket with which he can use the creature as a shield against itself.

She'd better hurry, the rip-claws are getting ragged and full of cuts...

As the creature is forced to coil itself into a single position about its attacker, converging on a central location, Cleo _concentrates_in a strange way she's never had to before and manages to get lock on its topography. For a second, she knows where every part of it is, and as it swirls into a globe that is just so utterly predictable, she can tell where every part of it is going.

She blinks at it with a self-surprising disgust at its predictability and then sets it on fire.

The damaged portions ignite first, like flash-paper burning slowly from the edges in. The portion Terrowne is hanging onto goes fast, but as it burns the creature turns into a crumpled ribbon of falling cloth, deprived of whatever organizing dynamics drove its lethal motion. By the time he's hit the ground, rip-claws all tangled and tattered, the creature has split apart into burning spinning flakes like flaming ash which drift in all directions.

"Scissors beats paper, you bitch!" he shouts in triumph, shaking his fist at the remains. This time the left rip-claw falls off and he stares at it for a second, then picks it up and pockets it with the other one. Flaming ash drifts off and sets parts of the fallen tree on fire.

"I just hope they don't have any more of those," says Cleo, staggering slightly and clutching at her head. "I haven't had to use my powers this much and this often ever before. I feel... I feel like something is going to happen... and I don't know what it is..."

Terrowne steadies her and supports her head. "Just take a few deep breaths... there... you always get like this when you use your fire, ever since the first time.. are you okay?"

"Yeah.. I'm okay... you know, actually I should probably be bleeding from the nose or something, but I'm not... I feel.. okay, actually. I feel kinda... normal."

"Well. That's actually kind of disturbing, in its own way. It's not like either of us have ever really been that normal. Tried to be normal, yeah, but it never really worked."

"If we were normal, we'd be ten thousand years dead," pants Cleo angrily. She's obviously pulling herself back together at a faster rate than normal. "You need to use _your_powers more. Today is too damn dangerous for us to pull punches and try not to break the rules. I can't keep on doing this without giving myself an aneurysm or.... I don't know. Something worse."

"The next one is on me. Don't worry."

"I've never asked you to keep me safe. Ever. You always knew that you could trust me to come back in one piece by my own efforts. But please don't make me use my powers any more."

"You might have to," he points out.

"Don't remind me," she sighs.

"I'll try my best not to go mad if you promise to try your best not to... whatever." He hugs her and comes up against the resistance of her armoured breastplates and a slew of grenades and other small weapons she's snagged off the fallen. "Throw some of these at them instead. It's not like we didn't work for 'em."

"I'm saving them for a special occasion."

"This is the special occasion."

"We shouldn't squabble." She kisses him and it is warm and full, just the way it always was. "But we need to get going. The longer we can go without fighting something, the more I can recover. Then it won't be an issue."

As a reconciliatory gesture, he retrieves her Desert Eagle from beside the burning tree, which is working itself up into quite a nice bonfire that will probably give away their position soon, and then watches in surprise as Cleo doesn't just warm herself near the fire to recover her energy, or walk through it to bathe in the heat, but somehow pulls all the energy out of the fire all at once, leaving the remains of the tree cold and ashen and brittle without even any further smoke.

"Well, that's new," exclaims Cleo, looking in surprise at her own extended palms.