Baa-Ram-Ewe!

by Darkonshadows

417. Naga May Die Pt. 2.

-Moon Cell realm, Midgar, underground, outside the mysterious facility, Canard-
‘
The three Zealot Riders on Skein Flyers blasted the incoming Shriekers, blowing them into chunks or shooting their wings out while they were over water. The Shriekers had very weak wings, but the rest of them was purely dangerous and somewhat tough to make up for it, they’d probably be more dangerous on land rather than appearing over water.

“How’s the progress on the skiff Sami?” I looked up and was watching the energy blades slowly progressing their way through the doors of the facility. I could see where Pom had come from, but not where she was going. These visors weren’t like the mask of Drake Ducaine, but they were fairly good gear.

“It’s coming along and I can’t go any faster Canard, at least we know Pom’s alive and they are working on their exit strategy. We’re the finish line, so I need to keep working on getting this thing airborne again.” Sami had the two halves at least back together, even if it was ugly with how it looked, we just needed it working. She was currently working on the damaged front right engine. “What do you think caused that massive explosion earlier?”

“Nothing good for our enemies hopefully and that was likely Pom, things tend to get weird around her.” There was a trickle of strange glowing liquid coming out of facility and was dripping into the water further down from us, my instincts were screaming to never touch that stuff. “If you see a bluish green liquid, don’t touch it, there’s some over there and it doesn’t look good.”

“Can you get a scan of it Canard? It might be important to know what that stuff is for later.” Nodding to Jeanne, I made my way over to the stuff leaking from the building and started to scan it with the Digivice.

-Somewhere inside the facility, Pom-

I fired several Thousand Spears from my right leg and the jets blew the flying drones out of the air as Dolly dealt with the crawlers on the walls and floor, none were thankfully on the ceiling at the moment.

As I was about to claw apart a crawler with my right hoof, I froze when one of the walls suddenly cracked destructively.

Dodging a blast of lightning from the crawler I was going to attack, I quickly leapt up to grab Dolly out of the air and kicked off the wall and entered a quick Dancing Flame state to just start running and jumping away from the drones and crawlers, while avoiding them entirely.

The wall behind us was blown open by a roaring Behemoth that tore into the crawling robots we left behind with its horns. I was quickly getting us out of sight and heading towards part of the facility that weren’t on the visors map until we got close enough to spot anyone else wearing a visor.

“Do you think those things ever stop being destructive?” Dolly asked that and she had seen what the junkyard we ended up in looked like.

Obviously there was more to the place where the Behemoths had been contained, as in they sent sweepers in to fight the behemoths for testing or had thrown unruly prisoners to them considering the proximity to the prison cells. This realm was representing a world that had existed at one point and horrible things definitely went down in Midgar, especially if such a place like this existed.

-Continue battle, Shanty’s Irregulars vs. Triple Threat Naga Cruel, Crazy and Elise the Coward-

Shanty had figured out early on that they had to destroy the knives as much as the snakes as a snake could suddenly become a knife or a knife could become a snake at any time. There was also the fact that the three naga were annoyingly fast when it came to slithering along bars and poles that their bodies practically hugged in an oddly affectionate way, it was hard to attack them because if you could climb up to them they could immediately get far way before you could hit them close up.

So Shanty was focusing primarily on slicing the knives and snakes up wherever they were, she was not leaving any of the unusual knives on the ground to surprise them later.

Among those present, Krosserdog, Snake and Shine were the ones that were able to throw or shoot projectiles. Shanty and Peppercat were out of luck in dealing with the naga directly unless they tried to come down after them personally.

Shanty didn’t feel particularly safe getting encased in stone that high up, it’s already happened once and she didn’t know how long it would take her to get out if she was encased again. There was not nearly enough time for her to do so in the air falling from high up, so she was sticking to wiping out the hundreds of transforming knives all three naga could throw out in such a short amount of time.

Peppercat ran to one of the poles that one of the Naga was on with an electrified claw.

Elise simply, uncoiled and stretched her snaking arm out and pulled herself away to a different pole to wrap around, one that was fairly far away from the one Peppercat just electrified before the bot could even hurt her.

Elise launched knives at Snake upon spotting him, an imaginary red exclamation mark appeared above her head before she did so. Snake quickly leapt backwards and chucked enough exploding darts to destroy the incoming knives and Elise slithered higher up the pole she was on and was trying to avoid a direct confrontation.

Crazy stayed up and out of the way on a horizontal bar trying to gorgon gaze Shine while giggling like a maniac when she saw the shadowy gourd scurrying away from her cones light that her sharp gaze created in the dark room. Crazy was also still randomly flailing knives and snakes like no tomorrow in a chaotic mess, she wasn’t afraid of getting in an up close confrontation, her real passion was making chaos.

Cruel was the most focused one of the three naga and was actively trying to take out at least Krosserdog as a major threat to the three of the naga attacking the intruders. She was having problems doing any damage to Krosserdog with Shanty’s and Peppercat’s timely interference.

Running to the side to avoid redirected knives while shooting them out of the air, Krosserdog wasn’t having any problems with his aim. His eyes could track all three naga as they flipped, grappled and shifted about up, down and across the structures all around the room.

The problem was that Krosserdog just couldn’t actually hit any of the naga while trying to fire as often as his weapons could cycle more ammunition. As soon as Krosserdog fired a shot that would hit one of the three naga they would always do something avoid taking a hit. Crazy would somehow preternaturally block his shots by randomly freezing a knife or a snake in the air in the path of the given shot as he fires it or get lucky with throwing knives into the path of them when the shots are aimed at the other two. Cruel would somehow deflect Krosserdog's shots off a knife towards her enemies or away from her allies before throwing the freshly summoned weapon. As for Elise the Coward… she simply dodged or moved often enough that hitting her was a problem as the most mobile of the three, whereas Crazy was currently staying mostly in one place yet adding the most chaos to the battle.

“Ah?!” The light cone of a gorgon gaze attack from Crazy caught Shanty unaware and she and her cane scythe were engulfed in stone after having just taken down a Search Snake leaping for her fangs ready to bite down, she had been unfortunate be even vaguely facing in the general direction of the naga.

All the naga started attacking the stone statue with a focused barrage of knives, forcing Pepper and Krosser to defend Shanty together.

“Agh… this is nuts, how long can they actually keep this up for?!” Peppercat right arm just got damaged by a Search Snake biting down on it, even if she promptly shocked it off, the damage had already been done.

“How much ammo do I have?” A nearly infinite amount as long as Krosserdog could cycle it, if his arm parts were damage or destroyed then he’d have almost zero ammo.

The stoned over Shanty was shaking the stone encasement enough to have broken it off her muzzle enough to actually breathe in the claustrophobic stone shell and she’d soon be free of the thin layer of rock preventing her from moving.

Shine and Snake hadn’t been idle, but Shine was trying to figure out how to catch the naga by surprise and Snake was trying to get a read on how capable in battle they were when not just throwing stuff around.

Snake had seen several clues of the nagas true capabilities, like the ability to block things with their telekinetically controlled shifting weapons, they were fast enough to react to deflecting shots from Krosserdog and they were also quick enough to dodge the shots. Snake led a really weird life before this when he could honestly say that these were things he’s already seen and dealt with before in a prior life, just not all at once like this...

“Can’t we just leave?” Shine asked. The gourd Pokémon could slide through the shadows easily enough, but the problem was actually getting up to the naga as she couldn’t fit into shadows with a smaller profile than her very well. Basically if a pole was shadowed over she wouldn’t be able to swim through the shadows to get up at them snaking around in the forest of metal bars and poles. Maybe the metal beams criss crossing randomly throughout the room, but getting to those would require her exposing herself to attacks.

“Can’t, already checked, they got us trapped in here with them and I think I’m losing concentration on making sure my butt cheeks don’t make clapping noises while I’m sneaking around.” A knife slammed into a cardboard box the voice came from, but it was another false alarm as the box, flipped over revealing to not have Snake in it and just the Search Snake that was thrown in the form of a knife.

“How does he keep…” Cruel was about to ask when Crazy took a powerful kick to the face from Snake swinging down at her from above on a rope dart. “That makes even less sense, I definitely heard his voice from below us a second ago!”

Crazy didn’t tumble to the floor instead her tail lashed out and grappled onto a pole and swung around it expertly, before she flung herself directly at Snake trying to keep his momentum to swing away and toss out another rope dart.

“Die-die-die-die-die!” Crazy shouted while pulling out two knives as she shot towards snake with a wild grin on her face.

Snake pulled out a single knife and started to deflect her flurry of blows one handed as he tossed out another rope dart to swing even further away before Crazy could ride him into the ground while he was falling.

Crazy wasn’t letting him go that easily and threw a knife that tore through the rope with her left hand, then extended that arm to grapple a pole and swing at him while attacking even more ferociously with a knife in her right.

“While the berserker is busy with rabbit season, I’ll show you how dangerous we really are!” With back flip showing off her long serpent body and tail, Cruel landed on the floor and then pulled two knives much like Crazy did, but instead of wielding them with wild abandon she shot towards Peppercat and Krosserdog while deflecting every shot Krosserdog fired at her. She was wielding the knives like more refined instruments and incredible expertise. “Coward you better not get into trouble without me for the next minute or so, because so help me!”

“I won’t…” Whimpered Elise who shied away from the implied threat that would never be enacted on her and continued to throw out knives and Search Snakes. This was in support of either Crazy who was making sure to not lose sight of her target with a rabid aggression or Cruel who was a better more meticulous forward fighter, while Elise herself made sure to be on the lookout for Shine.

Closing in on Peppercat with a wicked grin, Cruel started to zigzag as she slithered forward with incredible speed while deflecting or dodging shots from Krosserdog.

Peppercat lunged forward with a right hook covered in energy and missed as a smiling Cruel interposed Peppercat between her and Krosserdog, the red cat digital robot followed with a leftward uppercut and a blast of electricity.

Cruel popped backwards in the air and her left arm extended upwards, then swung downwards to jam a knife into the top of Peppercats left knee and quickly released it before the shocking plug cat could tag her with an electrical reprisal.

“Yearrhghggh!” Peppercat at least let off a blast of electricity to destroy the knife, but she was not happy with the damage she just took.

“How delectable, the robot can feel pain.” Cruel stated softly with a smile as she swiftly dodged and deflected several shots at her from Krosserdog who moved off to the side to not accidentally hit Peppercat.

Cruel seemed to sway back and forth almost randomly, it was far more precise movement than one would expect because of the initial impression anyone would get from knowing Crazy for thirty seconds.

Cruel tried to stretch her right arm out to slash the knife held in her right claw for Peppercat’s chest.

The cat robot flopped backwards due to the knee injury and fired a short range blast of electricity from her left claw that was swiftly avoided by the naga’s retracting limb.

Continuing to deflect shots from Krosserdog with the knife in her right claw, Cruel suddenly changed target from attacking the prone Peppercat to going after Shanty was almost free of her stone imprisonment.

The rest of the cracked stone across Shanty’s body shattered as Cruel got close and Shanty had to lean back to avoid taking a knife through the side of her ribs.

Shanty returned the favor with a horizontal scythe swing at Cruel, forcing the naga to slither backwards while continuing to deflect shots from Krosserdog that kept at least one of her arms busy.

Looking like she was about to lunge, Cruel then launched her left arm for Peppercat forcing her to roll out of the way and then she whipped it forward for Shanty.

Deflecting the blow upward Shanty charged forward under the arm, only for Cruel to shift her hips harshly, this made Shanty take a harsh slap across the right side of her chest by the naga’s tail whipping into her with a decent crushing force.

It certainly cracked a few bones in Shanty’s chest making it slightly hard to breathe as the goat was knocked down. Shanty was about to get up when she turned her head away from a third Gorgon Gaze that intended to immediately immobilize her again, after that last injury it would take longer to get free and this fight had not started off well for the goat.

Luckily she had avoided seeing or looking in the general direction of the cone of light produced by Cruel this time.

Peppercat launched at Cruel from behind silently or as silently as she could after moving into position on all four limbs, her knee apparently being too damaged to even actually walk upright.

Turning to block the next two shots from Krosserdog with her left knife, she swung out and cut a rent into Peppercat’s chest.

Peppercat managed to tag Cruel with her electrical claw blast before she was knocked away.

“Gah, you little… at least it felt nostalgic, exactly like I was being struck by lightning from-AGH!” Cruel was a bit more shocked than actually seriously hurt, but the stunning effect did last long enough to let a shot from Krosserdog go through left side of Cruel’s hood at an angle puncturing a hole in her flesh before she could fully evade the shot.

The next shot didn’t touch her as Cruel just got even more focused on what she was doing and that was making these three feel some glorious pain.

Shanty followed up by letting loose a series of slashes that Cruel was hard pressed to deflect as cutting arcs came flying at her from the cane scythe in Shanty’s left hoof and her right hoof was slashing out as well as she continued to press Cruel.

Seeing a shift in Cruel’s hips, Shanty dodge the whipping tail, only she wasn’t the main target of the attack as the tail extended as it continued its swing. Krosserdog didn’t see the extending body part that struck with a painful whip like crack to the chest that sent him flying into a wall of the room.

Cruel locked a knife with Shanty’s scythe and threw a Search Snake directly at the face of a leaping Peppercat, almost without looking, knocking Pepper down with a snake biting her left shoulder.

Peppercat quickly electrified her whole body to wipe the Search Snake from existence and she rolled onto her claws and good leg while her tail whipped about angrily, one could hear an angry feline growl coming from the red robot.

“Something just be feeling entirely off about this entire fight… where be the powerful abilities that servants are being known for?” So far it was just thrown knives that can transform into snakes on a whim, stone encasing, stretching arms and a good level of brawling ability, yet none of those seemed particularly special to Shanty for the servant they were fighting.

There were three identical servants with different expressions on their faces, Shanty was trying to puzzle out what was up with their being three of them as she clashed with the one that seemed to like the evil team leader of the group.

The first servant they faced was Rider Totsugeki, she could summon sea creatures and huge serpent monster and she was classed rider. Shanty didn’t know how she ended up with ability to summon her own dolphin, but she thanked the servant for apparently putting some wind in her sails with a gift like that.

The second servant had a sword that cut through most material like it was hot melted butter or didn’t exist in the first place, was a cyborg and had a canine companion mind to support his own, he had insane amounts of strength and high resilience to most attacks… for as long as he had a sword and he was classed Saber so it made plenty of sense that most of his power was in his sword and weapons.

Those two were fairly unique in how dangerous they had been outright, Pom couldn't face the second one on one and survive without some planning involved.

This third one was puzzling Shanty fiercely, as their abilities were all over the place and the servant obviously had three identical bodies that weren’t cheap magical clones that she could produce at a major cost of her becoming dehydrated or using a lot of water. Injuring one didn’t injure another so they didn’t share feelings of pain.

Shanty would say berserker for at least the body with a crazy giggle or assassin for the one she was fighting, but the one staying out of the action didn’t seem to have much of a classification.

The Search Snakes and part time summoned knives were easily destroyed even if they could be redirected after being thrown to go anywhere as if a unicorn was around. To avoid the gorgon gaze you just don’t look into the cone of light which was a problem for Shanty’s wide bar eyes and she recognized the issues of being unable to fight or breathe after the first two times. The stretching limbs was unusual, but again it didn’t seem to be the most special thing about the grab bag of abilities Shanty and the others were fighting against. All of that was part of the overall issue Shanty was having with this fight, this servant seemed like they were in three places at once and they were all effectively fighting at different levels of aggression, so controlling three bodies wasn’t this servant’s special ability. They all had the same capabilities yet wielded them in completely different ways at times.

The naga Shanty was fighting for example seemed particularly skilled in combat and knew how to deal with multiple opponents, even made a comment about enjoying the suffering of others. The naga after Snake was wild, crazy, frenzied even in how she sought to take down the friendly servant hidden as one of the Assassin Caerbannog, she seemed to care very little if she was injured and seems to enjoy personal pain as much as causing pain to others.

The odd one out was the third one, who was supporting the other two and not trying to fight as much, but she was the fastest and staying well away while focusing on Shine and keeping her distracted from being unable to help. Yes, she was helping the other two, but something seemed off about her, her movements were free flowing and her personality was an odd form of constantly upset.

Peppercat was fighting on spite more than anything at this point as she took another damaging knife strike across her forehead while managing to zap the naga sapping her of her strength further. Krosserdog continued to try and help from a bit further away in range, but the naga had more time to deflect the shots in a direction she wanted, which was generally in the direction of her enemies.

The naga the digi-bots and Shanty were fighting was really quite good at keeping up with three of them at once. If they were all capable of such feats, then why were the other naga facing only one opponent each?

“Are you even paying attention?” Asked Cruel as she swiped at Shanty with a leftwards knife swing, after deflecting a shot that grazes the goat’s right cheek with her right knife.

Shanty narrowed her eyes and shot forward, her right hoof lashed out twice deflecting the knives aimed for her jugular and kidney, then slashed the scythe across Cruel’s throat.

Choking on her injury Cruel flopped over grinning as she died, much to Shanty’s confusion that the soul didn’t immediately exit the body or eject upon the servants defeat.

“Come back to life… resurrection!” It was still a part of Elise’s soul and she couldn’t resist the need to resurrect that part of herself, even if it was still going to be fully under Moon Cell’s control when she did so as she couldn’t separate Moon Cell’s hold on Cruel or partial hold on Crazy.

Cruel and Crazy had silently worked together to separate Elise’s primary personality from Moon Cell’s complete hold, but they still couldn’t free the rest of their single solitary soul any further from Moon Cell's machinations.

Given Crazy was busy, Elise the main personality of the three was forced to resurrect Cruel and she couldn’t even resist doing this even if she sorely wanted to.

Shanty took a glancing slice across her right shoulder as Cruel immediately popped back to life from where she fell. When the goat retaliated it was mostly just turned into deflecting several knife slices and summoned snake attacks from her opponent as she backed off and took another glancing blow in cutting into her left side.

That’s when Shanty fully realized what the real and true problem of this servant was going to be. A servant that wouldn’t easily just die like that and could fend them off endlessly to wear them all down. That and Cruel likely took the neck blow on purpose just to give Shanty a bleeding injury with a surprise attack.

“I should be kicking this up a notch then.” Shanty stated as she pulled out a canteen and wrapped a bubble of water around herself to create a bounding bubble, which was good as Cruel almost knocked Peppercat into the path of one of Krosserdog’s shots and then turned to use her gorgon gaze ability.

The cone of light struck the bubble and then the light veered entirely around Shanty without touching her or encasing her in stone. Shanty smirked at Cruel who narrowed her eyes and frowned.

“Crazy stop playing around and being an idiot, Coward get the lead out of your tail and start spewing as many Search Snakes or knives as you can. I’m not losing to these guys just because you two nimrods couldn’t step up and actually put up a fight!” Cruel called out and both the other naga responded. "We all have the same general capabilities, so we should be trouncing their asses!"

Crazy responded by speeding up and becoming a bit more ravenous in chasing after Snake who was constantly using rope darts, exploding knives and holy hand grenades to keep Crazy off of himself... this was at least up to the point he was even caught in one of the holy hand grenade blasts when Crazy caught it with a stretching snaking arm and then rushed him down while holding onto it with a bright insane smile. She went up in a bright flash and the sound of a chorus going 'hallelujah' and it hit Snake as well.

“Come back to pain and suffering, resurrection!” Cruel stated as she sent Search Snake into the water bubble Shanty formed and they were immediately crushed in the water before they could even reach Shanty.

“Keeheehee~!” Crazy quickly reappeared smiling as insanely as ever her body reforming out the air despite having been completely obliterated in a holy blast of flames a second ago.

Shanty bounded forward and created a huge slashing blade shaped out of the water to swipe at the naga. Cruel retreated by stretching an arm out and grappling her way up to a horizontal bar high up above herself, she swiftly swirled around it quickly and scrutinized Shanty.

Crazy started throwing out Search Snakes and knives randomly that went everywhere, nothing new there, but they seemed more targeted to ambush attacks now. While the Search Snakes were easily dealt with, they were using up time and energy, both which favored the naga who could seemingly throw out an infinite amount of them.

The naga did in fact have a hard limit of just how many Search Snake they could summon t once, but they couldn't reach it fast enough to matter with how quickly they were being wiped out.

Snake easily took the worst of the kamikaze attack Crazy did against him and was now trying to weakly get up after being caught in the blast of his own explosives.

Coward does exactly as Cruel wanted by flailing knives and snakes everywhere from above as she slithered across the vertical and horizontal poles and beams of metal, while trying to track or find Shine using the light the searching snakes started generating from their foreheads and eyes.

Shine couldn’t really use pain split on digi-bots or the allied servant Snake could she? She quickly retreated from dealing with the one called Coward by diving into the shadows and towards Shanty to help her with the bleeding shoulder as the bubble started to disturbingly turn slightly red.

It was technically five to three, not counting the Search Snakes, but Shanty and her friends were still losing this quite badly.

Shine popped up next to Shanty and tossed a Sitrus Berry into the bubble before quickly diving back down into the shadows to avoid being attacked by a purple glowing knife that dug itself into metal up to halfway up the hilt.

Shanty swiftly drew the berry into her mouth using the surrounding water and used it to heal her recent injuries as she fended off the Search Snakes that dove into her bubble to attack her. She bounded up in the air and lashed out at Cruel who dodged and threw a knife charged with energy that deeply pierced into the bubble of water at such a high speed that Shanty barely avoided it actually hitting her.

Several tendrils of water reached out and grabbed the various surrounding poles, Shanty quickly started to give chase to Cruel and tried to figure out how to deal with all three of the naga if they could just revive themselves endlessly. It obviously required taking them all out at the same time, but to even do that they needed to be gathered up… a change in opponent was in order.

Shanty instead of chasing the retreating form of Cruel who continued to throw charged knives that she could barely deflect or push away from hitting her even with the water bubble’s protection, she instead chose to target the one called Coward.

Upon doing that Cruel changed targets as well and while lunging to the side to avoid shots from Krosserdog, she flung a high speed charged knife at Peppercat who barely defended herself with her left claw blasting it out of the air with a quick pulse of lightning. She ignored Shanty going after Coward entirely and focused on Peppercat while deflecting another shot from Krosserdog.

“This isn’t working!” Krosserdog shouted and blasted a charge knife out of the air as it came for him. It had been within something like a millimeter of hitting the barrel of his right rifle, but he managed to shoot it in time.

“You think!” Peppercat stated as she tried to crawl back on three limbs as she blasted the Search Snakes that came at her with her left claw. “My damage is getting really severe here, to think I recently just fully healed from battle!”

“Even if I could take her down or get another shot on her, the others will just revive her!” Krosserdog stated as he made his way over to Peppercat and helped lift the red cat robot up while backing away from the numerous snakes now coming at them while firing his left arm rifle into the swarm, Peppercat assisted with blasts from her left claw and some from her damaged right.

Speaking of snakes, Snake was roughed up by the explosion and fending off the Search Snakes really was eating into time they could be using to deal with the naga themselves. They were all dangerous, even the one that seemed to be upset that she was in this situation of having to help the other two naga in battle.

Snake just fell back on some good old close quarters combat to deal with the number of incoming snakes as Crazy was now focusing on tracking Shine after having injured Snake badly enough that he wasn’t as much to worry about.

It was a little insulting, but Snake needed some time and possibly a Search Snake to eat to get some strength back into him… there was just too many Search Snakes slithering about to single one out for some good eating at the moment.

Coward, or Elise to those who knew her, was fleeing from Shanty, quite successfully too as the goat tried to continuously attack her with the bubble of water and failed to get close. The charged knives that Elise threw had gotten dangerously close to hitting Shanty in the side of her neck or one her hind legs, but they weren't being aimed lethally surprisingly enough concerning Cruel's attempt to take out one of Shanty's eyes.

Just because Elise was afraid didn’t mean she wasn’t as capable as the other two and Shanty recognized that the other two didn’t seem to be worried about Elise in the slightest in her attempts to get them to clump up together was not going to work. So she changed targets to Crazy who seemed to be the most aggressive and chaotic of the three deadly naga.

The three naga had worn down Snake, Peppercat and Krosserdog somewhat. Shine was having problems finding moments to help out offensively as the Search Snakes were tracking her movements remarkably well for someone who can phase through walls and move in shadows. While Shine could escape, she wouldn't know how to find help soon enough to make a difference and was sticking by her friends to the end.

“Its days like this that made me a hero…” Snake grumbled to himself as he summoned two rope darts to his fuzzy hands and faced off against multiple Search Snakes with a slight crouch. These three naga reminded Snake of a knife wielding vampire lunatic, a psychic powered psychotic mantis and a constantly crying wolf. The naga had most of those abilities combined and it was a little beyond what Snake could handle personally, so sacrificing himself wouldn’t help with the given situation given the naga just might revive him on their side if they were capable of such a thing.

So it was just time for Snake to just survive like old times and figure out the lynchpin or solution to fighting these three as Shanty’s method to gather them together by attacking the fearful one wasn’t going over to well. They could kill all three of them in quick succession, but they needed people in positions to do that at basically the same time and they were already faltering... ‘badly’.

Making up his mind, Snake started to work his way towards Krosserdog and Peppercat. Shanty was seen bounding around above him battling with a berserk Crazy who was shouting ‘die’ a lot and throwing charged knives with extreme force that seemed to be even worse than what Cruel or Coward could, given that they turned on dime instantly to try and hit Shanty at a variety of uncomfortable angles while still moving at high speeds.

Shanty continued to battle with Crazy in the air, Crazy in particular seemed at home moving erratically and attacking the goat at ridiculous angles with wonky limb movements that have them wrapping around poles before stabbing forward or bending at odd angles like there were no bones in the stretching arms at all.

Crazy even once threatened to get herself crushed in Shanty’s water bubble in an attempt to stab the goats heart out while whispering terrifying words as if trying to perform a strange ritual, something about a kali-ma. This really spooked Shanty somewhat as personally being in pain didn't stop Crazy at all, it was actually a fairly respectable trait of the sanity challenged one.

As the four friends with Shanty gathered to present a defensives front, they really needed some help to turn things around.

They were being completely overwhelmed by the constant Search Snakes and telekinetically redirected knives going everywhere. Killing the naga at this point seemed to be a moot point if you couldn’t take all three out at once in quick succession or at the same time and that was a tough prospect for those who were currently available in the fight. The injuries were mounting for Peppercat, Snake and even Krosserdog who just got bit in the left leg by a Search Snaked that he quickly stomped on with his other right metal foot and kept gunning down incoming projectiles or snakes rapidly slithering in on them from all angles.

Krosser silently thought that Metabee would have been far better suited for this given situation with his higher firing rate.

Peppercat and Snake still had the worst injuries overall, but between them Snake still seemed the more used to being on the back foot or fighting while hurt as he didn’t slow down in tearing apart Search Snakes.

Snake even found a moment to stuff the body of one of the attacking snakes into his mouth after tearing its head off with his sharp, very much not like a rabbits, teeth while it was still flailing away at him on one of his knives.

“I haven’t seen this much spam since I visited my old friend at the farm in Valora.” Shine was supportive at the very least and hadn’t been scratched much in all of the fighting since she had various ways to avoid personal injury, she also hadn’t been too helpful in causing injuries to their opponents either. At least Shanty was still relatively healthy after eating a Sitrus Berry and taking on the arguably worst of the naga by herself, it was highly unfortunate that she couldn’t be in three places at once.

Not that Shanty could change the entire course of the fight, it had been going poorly since they found out about the servants ability to basically endlessly ‘resurrect’. That was a fairly major morale killer for them.

-Somewhere nearby in the strange facility, Pom-

Okay lost that Behemoth now… hold on… telemetry data… Shanty is… huh… okay!

“Dolly… I think we found them!” I shouted happily, only to see Dolly breaking a crawler apart with the stone bone, then my mood dipped by quite a lot. “Also, I think they’re fighting Elise…”

“Ugh, finally! Let’s go help them before any more of those horned things from my brother Dante’s nightmares find us again.” Dolly grunted as she pulled the stone bone free, stowed it away in her skateboard strap and ran up to me. “I’m still wondering how we could have run into all four of the remaining ones in the last ten or so minutes… are you… are you ready to do that plan? Mentally I mean.”

“I’ll have to be… since it might help Elise…” I’m putting all my hopes on a ‘maybe’ here, but I wanted my friends to survive even more than that. So I had to swallow my concerns, rescue Shanty and the others… then I had to kill Elise after immediately dealing with her other personalities of 'Cruel' and 'Crazy'.

All the pressure... once again, with feeling!

“How are we getting there Pom and what direction do we need to go?” Dolly asked and in answer I quickly pried up a nearby vent cover using my wool and motioned for her to follow me in. "Right, let's do this thing, Bow-Whacka-Wow!"

Author's Note:

Next: ???

Let's see four behemoths, two nasty naga, one sweet forlorn naga, five battered heroes and Pom with Dolly added to the mix...

Comments

[Booster Spice]

Four Behemoth verses 3 Naga and the Heros sounds more like Poms style, especially if Canards leak gets bad enough?

[talontitanbane]

Let's see four behemoths, two nasty naga, one sweet forlorn naga, five battered heroes and Pom with Dolly added to the mix...

I know it's not the right time of year but I gotta say it

and a partridge in a pear tree!