-Jade-
I dove to the side as it went into the ground nearly crushing me, its tail lashed out in my direction. I leapt out of the way again only to be blown down and away by the air blasting out from it.
After tumbling, I noticed the ground shifting towards and then eventually beneath me. I jumped straight up as it erupted underneath me, its glowing bright core came up to meet my palm glowing with energy.
I slapped my glowing left hand down on it and the resulting point blank magic missile blast cracked its red glowing core slightly and sent it off course.
I landed on the still moving rock snakes body and rolled down it to the ground, where I stopped my momentum with a sliding skid. I quickly turned to fire another round into its core that was aiming in my direction with my right hand.
It reeled back and the crack widened a bit. Starting to look angry it circled around and then lashed at me with its tail like a whip, I jumped back and the ground cratered before me with the force of the blow shaking the whole arena.
As I stumbled away and started running away, it swung its tail back and then disconnected several boulders sending them right for me. The five boulders coming at me were all too close together to dodge very well. Except… if I were to…
I turned, leapt and grabbed onto the central boulder just after it bounced and clung to it tightly hoping I didn’t get crushed. I let go when the boulder next hit the ground and rolled off the momentum with it leaving me behind standing on all fours.
The snake golem launched forward and started slithering towards me, I fired a magic missile and it jerked its core to the side only getting scraped by my shot that took a chunk out of the boulder behind the head.
It brought its entire body around in a long sweeping arc.
I jumped and was only half way to making it above the tail, I concentrated and kicked off the air again and felt the whoosh of something moving below me. It hit my feet and sent me spiraling to the floor.
Switching to knife, switching to knife! Holding my arms forward and performed a hand spring, I lashed out a left handed shot for the core that was staring in my direction even as the rest of its body continued the sweep.
The core took the shot and reeled back, the cracks were clearly more visible than ever. Its tail lifted up in the air from its swing and slapped down on where I had been as I started circling to the left.
It dragged its tail after me and I smiled, I turned and jumped onto the slow moving tail of the golem. After having climbed onto it, I started running towards the front of the body to get a closer shot.
The tail quickly detached from the main body and separated into parts that to started hovering around me, I stopped on the boulder that was still on the ground as multiple boulders hovered around me at an equal distance.
I realized what it was about to do and crouched, multiple rocks slammed into the boulder I was on in an attempt to squish and or entomb me.
A gout of dust shot into the air from the force of the attack.
-Fizzle-
“Jade?” It looked like she got crushed, but when the rocks moved away Jade was no longer present.
A shot came from the right of the rocks and blasted the golem in the eye damaging it further. It turned only to get blasted in the eye from the left.
There were two Jade’s now, so she used that particular item to escape getting crushed.
-Jade?-
“I’ll give you the opening you need.” The hovering rocks came shooting towards me, I prepared to dodge.
“Worry about yourself, you know how this effect works!” The other Jade said as she fired a shot the Quake Maker’s eye avoided. The Quake Maker turned to the other Jade and the rocks coming at me veered and started heading for her. “Don’t tire us out too fast, if you can get a kill shot. Go for it.”
I fired a shot and nailed it in the eye, it was almost busted given the amount of damage we were doing to it.
We couldn’t do this for very long, but we wouldn’t have to. We’ve almost beaten it.
-Jade-
Damn it, I thought it would stick to her… I rolled under a boulder that came bounding at me and rolled to the side around another and prepared to fire a shot, but it had already taken another hit from the other me.
We’re so close to defeating it on our own.
-Hollow Heart-
“Now this is interesting… a sun priest that can actually hold their own in a fight.” He smirked and watched as the twin sun priests moved to dodge the halves of the snake the core was getting confused about which was the real target. “Reminds me of the old days when I was stuck in a Minotaur gladiatorial arena. Do you know how she created a copy of herself?”
“No, I wonder how she did that.” It looked like Screaming figured something out, I was waiting for him to make his move. It seemed he was too distracted from the fight to carry out his plan to stab me in the back, it’s what I kept him around for after all.
If the imbecile was too distracted, then I can at least enjoy the show he’s putting on for me in peace. At least he always kept me on the tip of my hooves to remind me not to grow soft or weak. Prime was becoming a bit uppity, I’d have to deal with that sooner or later.
-Jade?-
“Come on you overgrown pile of stones, come get me and leave her alone!” We were less graceful without the knife sustain, but this sustain made up for it by giving us more room to breathe and we were definitely confusing the core.
It reconnected its body together and came towards me. It quickly encircled me and before I knew it, I was wrapped in a bunch of stones.
It started tightening its grip and I gasped in pain.
-Jade-
It felt like my ribs were caving in, but I couldn’t drop her yet. I was still getting a good angle on the core with my right hand.
“Drop… me!” Grunted out the other me as Quake Maker squeezed her. I grit my teeth in pain as it felt like my body was going to implode, the fact that it had the other me in a bind was bad. I fired my magic missile and then collapsed the other me.
The other Jade in the golems grip shattered into motes of harmless light and then the magic missile impaled and went straight the core. It exploded violently in a shower of red energy that lit up the whole arena.
All the boulders that made up the golems body started falling to the floor lifelessly. I fell to my butt and gasped in air, I had a smile on my face even if it had almost crushed me to death. Had I been a little slower in releasing myself I would have been dead.
I struggled to stand and made my way over to Sugar and a worried Fizzle who started fussing over me.
“So, you think that’s it? That thing was made by our ancient ancestors to dig out our current home, a utility golem at best.” Screaming started off with a chuckle, he looked a bit surprised that I took down the rock snake by myself. ”Release the Centaurion, this is the one that was made for a real battle!”
Centaur and centurion put together? Well that wasn’t a very unique… oh holy fudge, it’s huge! Bigger than Quake Maker at least.
A large stone centaur started to stomped its way into the arena through a doorway on four large hooves, it was pretty quick too. Its large blue core seemed to glare down at us from the head.
Once it got close enough its upper half spread out its two arms, it swung them both towards us in a clapping motion.
Seriously doubting that I could stop this thing, and that Fizzle wanted to fight it alone or could even take it on. It was time to let our special friend show us her real power.
“Sugar, in the immortal words of a duck with the super power of insanity. It’s playtime!” I closed my eyes and cowered against Fizzle who held me tight, I heard a screeching noise and opened my eyes. Fizzle opened hers, after she looked into mine in some surprise, we looked at the shadow standing over us.
Sugar was using her paws to push both the large stone arms back.
The hands stopped a foot from crushing us on either side, because standing over both me and Fizzle was a rapidly growing Sugar. The large demonic looking fanged rabbit growled.
She was three fourths of the way to reaching Ursa Minor size before she stopped growing and her eyes were starting to glow blood red. She gave a gentle shove to both the large stone hands that tried to crush us and they flung outwards and back into the Centaurion’s lower body damaging it.
Said damage was negligible because seconds later it’s stony hide reformed and I saw the blue core appear in its left side near its butt before it closed and disappeared. Well that was going to be hard to deal with, it had a moving core unlike the Quake Maker.
Well mom, what did you have to say about Sugar now?
-Kuril-
“Huh… Sugar is still super cute at that size.” Why was I getting such an incredulous look from Jacky?
Sugar would still be my adorable little familiar at the end of all this, even if she was as dangerous as Jade says she was.
-Fizzle-
“Pick us up Sugar!” Sugar’s two paws swept us up at Jade’s words and we were placed upon her head, afterwards Sugar let loose a deafening roar. I bet half the crowd wished they could hear after that. “Show this hunk of stone who’s boss Sugar, tackle!”
We were picked up by Sugar… correction we were picked up by a ‘big’ Sugar. Jade did say Al-mi’raj could do this, I just hadn’t considered how big or dangerous she could actually get. This… this was an eye opener into exactly how much knowledge Jade had about various creatures.
Sugar rammed into the stone colossus horn first, it quickly tried to swing for us and take advantage of the possibly trapped horn it was impaled on.
“Show us some agility Sugar and dodge it like a wrench!” After that odd statement from Jade, Sugar pulled her horn free while backing out of the way of the golem’s seemingly clumsy movement. It tried to gallop forward to ram us. Only for Sugar to bounce over it and across the arena. “Double team it with you illusions and get in close to grab it!”
With a surprisingly amount of speed that almost made me fall off of Sugar, she started to zigzag across the arena leaving multiple copies of all three of us sitting around the golem that charged into them and started to attack each image.
The Centaurion tried hitting every illusion close to it with its massive stone hands spinning three hundred and sixty degrees as it walked. Unfortunately for it, it wasn’t even coming close to tagging Sugar moving at such an absurd speed for something this large. Why wasn’t square cube law affecting Sugar? This is horrifying beyond belief!
Sugar rammed into the Centaurion gripped it around the upper torso.
“Jump and give it a Seismic Toss!” How did Jade expect Sugar to lift that…? “Fizzy, you might want to hold on, this is going to be a huge impact.”
Sugar kicked off the ground with her powerful hind legs and we went soaring straight towards the grotto’s ceiling, I felt weightless for a moment and I realized two things that were quite messed up about this situation.
One, Sugar was still holding the massive golem in her paws. Two, she defying all kinds of gravity by clinging to the stalactite riddled ceiling with her rear paws. She was dangling the golem beneath her, leaving me to wonder how much it weighed in comparison to Sugar who was doing all this on muscle at the moment.
“Jade, this is nuts and I’m completely terrified of Sugar now.” I said calmly while gripping onto her and Sugar’s fur for dear life, I could feel her scrunching up and getting ready to push off the ceiling.
“Welcome to my world Fizzy. You think this is bad, she can still do illusions to make herself completely invisible at this size.” Well now, that brought on a new fresh coat of horror to my mind Jade. Thank you for telling me that, no seriously, thank you. I certainly needed to know that such things as giant invisible doom rabbits existed. “Be prepared to use your horn, you might need to break the core while Sugar recovers from our landing. I’ve hardly got any fight left in me to do it myself.”
Yeah that copy thing and all those magic missile shots took a lot out of Jade. If I see the core, then I was undoubtedly going to take my shot and destroy it. I wanted to feel like I actually participated in this fight. Also, like Jade, I had seen the core change positions. That was bound to be annoying if we didn’t deal with it fast enough.
I had barely blinked and a thunderous crashed, my entire world shook violently and there was lots of screaming form the crowd. The sweeping force of wind and dust threatened to send me flying and I clung tightly to Jade and the demon rabbit.
How exactly fast had we been moving when Sugar plowed the golem into the floor? I coughed as a massive amount of dust filled the air in the arena and the stands.
The dust started clearing and I saw what had become of the golem, its entire body had been decimated and the arena’s floor was now one giant crater.
The large blue core was heavily cracked and shifting about a bit as if in destress, some stone started to form up and slide towards it. Sugar was groaning a bit and Jade seemed to have blacked out, well time to prove my worth.
I charged my horn and prepared to unleash a hyper fast beam of destructive magic!
Sure my control was horrible and this practically drained my full magic reserve in one go, but I swiftly tore that golem core into nothing.
“Now that’s a Nigh Indestructible Destructively Overwhelming Queen of monsters!” Jade said deliriously as she came to. “Too bad Sugar won’t be able to grow this large again for at least a week when her size ability wears off. The time it takes to do this again is proportionate to how big she gets and for how long.”
-Daring-
I said… that I could take that on.
Holy, flapping… yeah no, I rescind my statement about the rabbit immediately!