Over the course of several square miles of rolling, yellow-orange sand, countless souls went to meet their various makers.
There was no real way to describe with any clarity the events that unfolded across that patch of desert. Fortunately, the metaphorical fil crews at Syntech would try and do their best anyway!
Snake Lady, her alien physique giving her an edge over the swaths of Hell Divers who rushed to her with dreams of their graves dancing in their eyes, led a magnificent and sweeping dance of death across the right wing of the sprawling assortment of enemy armies. The ultralisk, up until it eventually collapsed, broke the entire are wide open, but even as the unmade rushed in, they
still found themselves confronted by a persistent woman and her unlikely tag team partner.
Twisting her lithe physique, the queen of the zerg sneered as she evaded the sword strike, but the ronin was still quick on her toes. The lashing of her bladed wings met only empty air as Musashi rolled backwards.
“Persistent,” the alien muttered as she crouched. Before she could pounce, the area was raked by a burst of small arms fire, and Snake Lady found herself executing her own backwards gymnastics to avoid the rush of Hell Diver infantry as they swarmed to defend their fellow soldier. “Still not enough.” The psionic zerg whispered as she flashed a toothy grin at the collection of toy soldiers.
Before she could crush the assortment of rabble, a shadow fellow over her, and she craned her neck to see the smiling edifice of the Great One. “You.”
“Do you smell it yet?”
“I will smell
your corpse!” Kerrigan seethed as she twisted around lunged.
***
The Kamehameha wave would have ruined the rest of Caboose’s afternoon, if not for a giant pink mass of rubbery flesh knocking him to safety at the last moment.
Caboose, for all intents and purposes, had succeeded at neither getting himself killed or inexplicably injuring the wrong soldiers. Now, partnered with the great intellectual ally that was Majin Buu, the marine fell back slowly as he peppered the blue majin with bursts of automatic fire.
Graw advanced slowly and meticulously, even with the chubbier rubber warrior—his body mangled and discolored from staving off the energy attack—throwing an assortment of stout haymakers into her face and chest. “You’re not that fast, are you?” She asked before smacking both her hands into Buu’s oversized gut and propelling him backwards into the sand with a pair of sparkling ki blasts.
“No, Buu!” Caboose shouted as he lowered his rifle and raced to his companion. He made it about halfway to his destination with a rubbering leg shot out in front of him and tripped him into the dunes. His visor immediately went dark, and he felt sand sprinkling its way through every imperfection rendered unto his armor over the last few weeks of fights and marches. “This will never come out,” Caboose lamented before a hand closed around his left ankle and hoisted him up out of the sand.
“Is that you, Buu?” Caboose asked sheepishly as he tried to shake the sand off of his helmet.
“Nah.” The female response was followed by a blue fist smashing through the visor and crashing into Michael’s nose and forehead.
Recoiling her arm from the inside of the metal soldier’s helmet, Graw took a moment to shake out the pieces of yellow glass from her rubbery arm. As she reeled back to see how much further into his face she could punch, she was abruptly tackled by a whole lotta Buu.
An angry assortment of pink fists crashed into Graw’s face, each impact sending a
whoosh of sand outward as the smaller majin was driven further into the ocean of sand that was the Eisenstadt Desert.
“Enough!” Graw growled as her legs snaked up and twisted around Majin Buu’s chubby neck. Before the furious pink construct could react, he was being thrown head-over-heels back into the sand. “This isn’t fun anymore,” Graw remarked as she turned to Caboose, who had made it back to his feet and drawn his weapon.
“Does this help?” He asked before pulling the trigger and firing the rocket-propelled grenade at his adversary. From this range, the spartan got the drop on the wilier adversary, but he also had himself squarely with the radius of the blast, which once again sent him crashing into the sand as a smoldering heap of steel and skin.
For a few brief moments, a stillness fell over that small slice of the greater battlefield. Despite all of his assumptions to the contrary fifteen seconds ago, it was Caboose who found himself on his feet first. “Hey, Buu? Pal? I think I blew up that angry blue thing.”
A quivering blue arm erupted up from the sand at the soldier’s feet, and a beat later, the air was already being choked out of Caboose body. From the sand, roughly forty percent of Graw sat up like some kind of undead monster back for more violence. Her one eye seething, the portions of the majin’s physique that had been blown away by the blast seem to sizzle and pop as her magical body tried to will itself back together.
“Bye-bye,” she whispered as she tightened her grip, but before darkness fell over Caboose, a beam of energy crashed into Graw’s back. The majin’s eyes went wide as she immediately relinquished her grip on the spartan and attempted to turn back to confront her other attacker. Before she got off another step, she was suddenly gone in a
poof of white smoke.
“Where’d she go?” Caboose muttered after catching his breath and glancing up to see an approaching Buu. The pudgy majin crouched down and plucked up a piece of blue liqorice from the sand.
“Buu share candy?”
“I *love* candy!”
“Yay!!”
***
Luck Voltia had fought since the very start, and he had done so with enthusiasm and countless energy. As the last encounters, he had rushed head-long into the carnage, with only the bravest of soldiers willing to follow their peer up into the belly of the beast. Up ahead, his Commander continued a duel with the enemy general that felt as if it had unfolded over the course of days. A puff of plasma was punctuated by the angry bark of a shotgun, and that particular exchange had likely been repeated on more than on occasion.
“We must help the Commander!” Luck screamed as he spied the assortment of Carnaval Legionnaires—sleek, monstrous aliens from someone’s twisted realm of nightmares—attempting to swarm the living manifestation of rage and violence that led the Hell Divers.
Bullets and other assorted projectiles whizzed in the air around Luck as he squeezed back on the trigger of the chaingun in his hands. Foot soldiers that looked more like skeletons than people either scattered or erupted into dusty clumps of desiccated debris. The young man, eyes wide, screamed as he led the charge to relieve their leader.
Ridley saw the attempted breakthrough at a distance and paid it no heed. Another foolish young thing rushing into a buzzsaw of death.
But when the breakthrough started to take the beginnings of a spearhead threatening the center of his formation, the space pirate broke away from the iron sights of the Doom Slayer. Xenomorphs rushed to fill the void, putting the marine once more on the defensive.
Luck, a few yards ahead of the rest of the charge, saw the dragon as it came bowling through a battered collection of Hell Divers and barreled down on his position. “I’m not scared of you!” He growled as he found the trigger of the chaingun and spewed hot death at the beast.
“Naïve,” Ridley sneered as a quick flap of his wings sent him up over the human’s line of fire. Landing with striking range, the dragon’s tail came down sharply, severing both of Luck’s hands just below the wrist. Before that pain could register, Luck had his head bitten from his shoulders.
As the youth’s body collapsed, his head—still sputtering blood into the air from severed blood vessels—was spit backwards into the dead man’s charging squadmates.
“Nothing makes human taste appetizing,” Ridley remarked before scattering the pale-faced soldiers with a sweeping burst of flames.
***
“Ohohohoh,” Untotto danced across the corpses of the dead as the Hell Divers tried to blast the tarutaru to bits. Hot on his tail, a jagged blur of yellow pursued, a sword inscribed with ‘Destroy Demons’ leading the way as Zenitsu pursued the intolerable little monster.
“Come one, come all!” Untotto intoned. “Tis the setup before the
fall!” At that, the imp smacked her staff into the ground, and while quick, even the lightning breathing techniques weren’t enough to let Zenitsu wholly evade the upward deluge of sand, stone, and corpse that swallowed him momentarily.
“Too easy.” The lieutenant pranced away to rejoin the proper action. “The site of little Untotto makes even the hardiest go… queasy?” The magical little monster paused to ponder the phrase, and in that time, a sword crashed into the ground just ahead of them. With a yelp, the tarutaru spun, her staff crackling with lightning as a lunging Zenitsu slammed into her.
“Off, foul knave!” Untotto rasped as she jammed the staff into the teen’s side and sent rippling bursts of lightning running up and down the lengths of his spine.
Teeth clenched to save from biting his own tongue off, a jittering Zenitsu fought through the agony to reach out and grab his nearby sword. A beat later, he drove the blade into the foul little monster’s face. With a grin, Zenitsu slumped forward onto the corpse and lost consciousness.
***
“Rise,” the lich’s disembodied voice echoed even amongst the chaos of battle as the deceased urban mage planted his staff into the sand, sending of bolts of green, eldritch energy coursing through the ground. With a shudder, a dozen of the nearest corpses sat back up off the desert floor and groaned as their burned and bloodied hands recollected the weapons they had wielded before their untimely deaths. “Fulfill your pact to the Fallen Arbiter!”
A rubber fist slammed into the side of the reanimated wizard’s face. That fist, still expanded, was joined by the rest of its body just seconds later, as Stretch Pirate tackled his adversary into the ground. “Hi, old friend.”
“Join us,” the Urban Lich rasped as he closed a skeletal set of fingers around the rubber man’s throat.
“I’ll pass.” But before the pirate could make any more threats, he had a horde of shambling corpses jittering at him. Shoving off from the lich, the straw hat man started throwing eight-foot swings at everything around him. Arms flailing like whips, he broke the encroaching circle of corpses and felt a growing confidence that ebbed momentarily when he a cold vice closed around one of his ankles. “I didn’t forget about you!” He remarked as he laced his fingers and swung down at his unmade compatriot’s face.
Instead of absorbing the blow and re-dying like a good monster, the Urban Lich seemed to melt into the sand and vanish. Stretch Pirate’s attack savaged the sand but found no purchase against any flesh or bones. With a scowl, the Hell Diver lieutenant turned his focus away from the ground and readied himself as the heart of the battle started to push back toward him. Just fifty yards north of his position, the core of their formation seemed to be giving way.
“We can’t be losing,” the strawman muttered before steeling himself to the coming struggles. “To the death.”
“Don’t speak so quickly,” a partially disembodied voice whispered as hands once again fell on the pirate’s shoulders.
Twisting his body before the chill could set in, Stretch Pirate swung around one of his rubbery limbs, but the response of his foe was to simply move in closer. Skeletal fingers wrapped around his chest as the man in the strawhat became acutely away of the fact that the ground was started to rumble underneath him.
“Embrace death,” the Urban Lich rasped as rubber arms laced around his own, eliciting a ghostly wheeze from the corpse.
“You and me both, then!” Stretch Pirate shouted just as the shuddering earth beneath them was replaced by the maw of an unmade monster.
Rather than die yet again, the Urban Lich merely tore away from his own impacted arms and floated backwards as the momentarily reanimated sand wyrm consumed the fool pirate.
***
Altanis scowled as the prancing idiot and his mangled hair and tattered remnants of a suit. “Time to die.”
Karl, collecting gun, stared daggers at the lady horse. “If you insist,” he replied as he shoved the Desert Eagle into his thigh holster and extended an eager and open hand out to his left. As his fingers twirled, his eyes never left Altanis, who in this moment felt a genuine twinge of intrigue toward whatever chicanery this pompous fool had left to play.
A response came within a few seconds, as Altantis’ eyes and ears turned to her right to see an assortment of Hell Diver soldiers screaming and diving for cover. As the mass of green melted down to the ground, the demon saw the object now roaring over their heads and into the waiting hand of the unmade producer.
Without losing his devil’s gaze on the four-legged demon, Karl casually caught the hammer in his outstretched hand and leered at the enemy general. “Like my prop?” He spoke. “It’s from Dante’s Abyss VI.”
Rushing forward, Altanis swung the trident in a long, sweeping arch as Karl UnJak cartwheeled back out of range. Before the demon general could press the attack, the producer started spinning the hammer using a leather strap that dangled from the end of its handle. Less the act of twirling the weapon and more the droning yet almost harmonious sound was what momentarily pulled the attention of Altantis, who didn’t expect the knave to swing forward with the hammer.
Karl UnJak left the ground as he crashed, hammer-first, into his adversary’s chest. Despite an impact that would have crushed ribs (had the monster that was the Hell Diver general come equipped with anything nearing a traditional anatomy), Altanis reacted with a quick, retaliatory stab of the trident that nearly caught her still nimble adversary in the gut. Instead, Karl was rolling back and throwing out his right hand.
“No more of this!” Altanis bellowed as she grabbed a telekinetic fistful of her own living soldiers and sent them flailing and screaming through the air at Karl UnJak.
Under any other circumstances, Karl UnJak would have one hundred percent
adored the notion of using his own mindless cronies as projectiles, and while he’d certainly file that idea away under ‘wonderful applications of mind powers,’ he found himself once more forced to dance and twist away from a literal mass of shrieking flesh. Hammer swinging in one arm, he kept the other outstretched until the rocket-propelled glove came jetting out of the forest and slipped down over his fingers. Swinging the active Iron Man hand forward, Karl UnJak released a rapid succession of repuslor bursts in what he had to assume was the direction of Altanis.
A scream—more rage than pain—accompanied the collapse of the remaining soldiers, who dropped to the ground and made no efforts to move as their brains throbbed within their skulls. Ten yards away, Altanis stood with one less horn on her head.
“Hey!” Karl UnJak shouted. “We’re even now! Ta-ta!” He giggled before hammer-throwing himself backwards into the sea of humanity.
***
Snake Lady flipped forward, her wings decapitating a quartet of Hell Diver soldiers before they could truly realize the futility of their efforts.
Landing smoothly, the zerg queen pivoted sharply and ‘grabbed’ the oncoming katana with her telekinesis. “Unrelenting.” She seethed through grit teeth as she prevented the samurai’s blade from coming within a foot of her face. “I can’t wait to watch you die.”
Musashi, despite the fresh beads of sweat that clung around her hairline, smiled softly even as she continued to struggle against the oppressive psychic force of the monstrous woman. “You can’t win. You’re outmatched.”
Snake Lady glanced over at the half-conscious Rock, who had been stunned by a few haymakers and a swift kick to the family jewels. “Your oversized friend is useless, and he’ll watch you die.”
The ronin shook her head. “I meant
him,” she gestured in the opposite direction with her head, and when the zerg queen craned her own neck to investigate, she saw the wild-eyed lunatic running straight for her.
Malloki crashed down onto the zerg queen and hugged her. “Great to meet’cha! I can’t wait to kill ya!” He chuckled as two hands grabbed the back of his clothes and proceeded to slam him down to the ground. While she felt a flutter in her back and chest, Kerrigan shrugged of off as she planted a boot down onto the man’s chest.
“Any last words?” Kerrigan rasped.
The madman giggled. “Marry me? I don’t bite too much!” He pantomimed a few chomps before Kerrigan drove one of her wing spikes down into Malloki’s chest. Even as his flesh failed and blood started to geyser up from around the appendage, the man merely grabbed on and let out a holler. “Awwwwww,
what a rush!” He said in an over-exaggerated growl as Kerrigan, who had been momentarily dazed by what felt like a knife wound right through her chest, shook her head, and wrenched her wing free. A beat later, she swung the other one down and made sure she sent Malloki’s now impaled heart erupting out the backside of his chest and a foot or so down into the sand.
Even as the sputtering fool, grin on his face to the end, settled silently into a pool of bloody sand, Kerrigan felt a thunderbolt of pain erupt all throughout her chest. Even with no one around her, she felt a crushing, oxygen-depriving weight seem to wrap around her insides like a vice. A knee buckled as she looked down and saw that her chest was bleeding profusely despite the lack of any visible wounds. “W-what is this sorcery?” She sputtered as she felt blood bubble down her chin.
A shadow fell over the humbled zerg, who could barely find the strength to lift her head and snarl at the inevitable.
“It’s the end, Queen.”
Musashi’s blade didn’t miss this time.
***
The Doom Slayer stumbled, his boots momentarily losing purchase against the moist, blood-soaked sand. He hoisted his shotgun a beat too slowly, and the rampaging xenomorph got the drop on him. Crashing down with a puff of sand that resulted in a distinct
snap from on his his legs, Doomguy jerked his head to the side as a bladed tail slashed ribbons into the ground next to it. Clawed talons dug into the soldier’s armor, drawing blood in fresh places as the monster’s hot breath fell over his visage.
With his gun a few feet removed, he resorted to what he had at his disposal, and that included grabbing the monster by its throat with one hand and punching it in the side of its elongated face with the other.
On the fourth punch, the dazed monster lost enough of its ferocity that he was able to get his legs up under it and kick it up and away from him. While it recovered quickly, adrenaline and rage made him quicker to his gun, despite his wounds, and there was one freshly dead xenomorph a heartbeat later.
“You’re starting to look a little ragged, Commander,” Ridley taunted before releasing another searing blast.
Throwing himself to the ground, Doomguy rolled away just as the plasma crashed into the ground, its heat enough to turn the bloodstained sand into a nearly liquid mush.
Once back onto his feet, the Slayer reached for his waist and retrieved a simple handle.
“Doesn’t seem like your style,” the dragon taunted as the collar around the marine’s neck blinked a few times in rapid succession before going dead. By the time the charging Doomguy was within range of Ridley, the hilt was a sword, and its blade effortlessly sawed a grievous, gaping laceration up the dragon’s abdomen and chest.
A clawed hand clasping over its gut lest his entrails be lost, Ridley screamed a torrent of plasma that forced the Slayer to backpedal. The flames faded, leaving Doomguy to see that the space pirate had withdrawn. The Commander took a step forward, and the shattered leg finally buckled, as nearby soldiers rushed to his defense and assistance.
Despite that, it seemed that the entire line of Carnaval soldiers was now breaking for the edges of the desert. Whether they were retreating or recollecting around their own wounded leader, the Hell Divers could not tell.
***
Battle Update
After a few weeks of back-alley treachery, tiny sieges, cannons hittin’ people, and ‘battles’ more akin to rampages, this whole thread was one large, frenetic treat for me to read over the last few days.
That said, momentum has shifted into the favor of the Hell Divers. Before you let it go to your head, I just want to say that without the glut of enemy PCs, Focus effects, and whatnot, I could have easily been content with a UC rofflestomp, so Weiss is 100% the MVP of this thread, even if, numerically, things didn’t go in their favor.
The UC can recommit or retreat at this juncture – just PM me a decision as quickly as possible. The HDs can likewise remain in position, withdraw, or attempt to pursue.
Causality Reports
Unmade Carnaval:
“The Apex Predators” suffer 1500 losses, which can be spread across the collected units as the General deems fit.
All survivors get the following achievement/effect – ‘Boon of the Marauders’.
Ridley gains ‘Boon of the Predator’
Snake Lady is dead.
Untotto is dead.
Graw is … uh, gone.
Urban Lich suffered an Insane Injury (dude has no arms but can just channel shit through his eyeballs bc unmade-ness overrides whatever canonical limitations he prolly had)
Ridley has a Major Injury
Karl UnJak suffers a Minor Injury and 12 Story Injuries (he’s very vain, even by Karl standards)
Hell Divers:
The Hell Divers suffer 1002 losses, which can be spread across the collected units as the Commander deems fit.
Malloki is dead.
Luck Voltia is dead.
Stretch Pirate is dead.
Majin Buu suffers a Major Injury.
Doomguy suffers a Major Injury.
Musashi suffers a Minor Injury.
Zenitsu suffers a Major Injury.
Caboose suffers a pair of Minor Injuries.
Altanis suffers a Minor Injury and a Story Injury (busted horn)
The Rock suffers Minor Injury.
Majin Buu was pressed into one application of Focus (evading worser injury) – Civic reached out to me and told me he’s been sick for the last week or so
Doomguy was pressed into one application of Focus (Relic – Witstealer Sword)
