~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Lilim]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A familiar scent wafted in his nose the moment his blade made contact - a smell from hardly a second ago when he had attempted to strike the Demon Queen down. It was the acrid stench of his masterfully constructed blade making contact with the armor made by the Demons in Hell; the elements were so reactive against each other that smoke started to rise in the space where the two metals touched.
“...Wouldn’t you rather dance with me?” She flashed a hedonistic grin as she pushed his blade away, and for a moment, Darion was sure that Lilim was releasing an absolutely unholy number of pheromones into the air. He nearly choked from the overwhelming scent clogging his nostrils. It distracted him so much that he didn’t take the time to recognize she was gearing up for another attack. While still hacking up whatever those unnatural fumes were, a shimmering ruby light took over all aspects of his vision.
The smell faded almost instantly, and it gave Darion the ability to focus and see why - he had been trapped inside some kind of weird ruby encasing... and was rising into the sky! He tried to raise his sword, but through the narrow enclosure, he didn’t have the ability to swing it around freely - and the enclosure itself was too powerful for him to break it with a simple sword swing. He began to grow frustrated, but before he bottomed out and began yelling aimlessly into the abyss the casing suddenly dropped.
The Horseman of War was being treated like a bouncy ball. It was absolutely ridiculous, the things he was being put through in this battle. Clearly, the Demon Queen was taking advantage of being able to toy with a Celestial of such great import as himself, but these attacks could not go unpunished. As the ball hit the ground, he felt an explosion of kinetic energy surge around him. The effort of it didn’t make him bleed, but he felt sore all over his joints, and it took a moment before the Horseman could get back to his feet.
He muttered dark curses under his breath as he rose.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Dr Ghast]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He straightened to his full height... and immediately felt his abdomen cave in slightly. That was strange. Why was he bending over like this... as though he had a stomachache. Did he have a stomachache? No... He could smell fresh Ki on his person. Someone had gotten attacks off on him - not particularly dangerous attacks, but fast enough that his eyes hadn’t even detected it. This clearly was a foe he should be wary of... if the creature was capable of stronger attacks - and it likely was - that could pose a problem.
His eyes began to dart around the area, briefly blocking out everyone who had been attacking him up until this point. He was looking to single out anybody who was focused on him... anybody that he hadn’t taken significant notice of before. His eyes kept rolling back to a masked man some ways away. He had glanced at him briefly at the beginning of the conflict; the man had been doing something to some dead Celestials. Perhaps... reviving them?
No, that seemed unlikely. Only a Celestial could revive the recently dead, to his understanding. Still, he couldn’t take his eyes off the fellow, so he chose to watch him through the eye slits in his helmet. He had raised his arms and was clearly using them for something. Was he charging another blast? Darion couldn’t keep his full focus on only one person in the heat of battle, so he made a split-second decision: he didn’t sense any Ki near the stranger’s hands, and so decided that if a Ki attack was being charged, it clearly needed time to come to fruition.
He turned to the side, wanting to take another look at the ‘Wench of War’ or whatever other childish name Kurodo had given to herself. However, the act of looking her way made him immediately wonder if he had taken more damage from the fall than he’d realized - he was seeing doubles... no, triples. Had he suffered some kind of head injury?
The Horseman started to lift his free hand to his forehead (though for what was unclear, seeing as he had a helmet keeping his hand from being able to make contact with his forehead). Allowing his focus to shift away from the masked newcomer had proven a wrong move, as he felt two beams slam into his sides, causing Darion to misstep and nearly lose his balance. This was... this was becoming a farce! They looked at him as some sort of plaything to walk through!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Tomoko]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jolly quips, unnecessarily weak attacks, disturbing the drama of the scene... It was as though he was in a battle with a group of the most powerful toddlers in the galaxy. Darion could feel his blood pressure rise, and knew that soon he would snap. He still wanted to have his moment of beheading the Blue-Haired Bitch, Sariel, which was the only thing at this point stopping him from just blowing up the entire planet and killing them all in the process.
His need to see their final conflict through was saving them from immediately becoming space dust, but Darion’s patience ran thin. His eyes flashed a darker red as he turned once more to face Tomoko, steadying himself briefly.
“Childish tricks,” he muttered as he raised his gaze. There were still three of them, but he became even more sure of himself that he was damaged in the head. It was indeed still three of them, but it was more than that. They had... changed. They were smaller. They were blue. They radiated deep, chaotic energy.
However, if there was one thing that Darion would swear by more than his eyes, it was his ability to recognize the energy sources of those he engaged in combat with. All three of the small girls passed his test - the energy was identical to the pale skinned, taller, single Kuroda. As though his focus on them had drawn their attention, the three immediately made a beeline for him, sword extended. Darion entered a defensive stance, ready to block the sword strikes; however, that wasn’t their plan.
At least not at first.
The girls circled him, closing in tighter and tighter; the auras around the three children glowed differing colors with increasing rapidity, creating a kind of cyclone rainbow that Darion was stuck inside. It was so cute he very nearly was sick just at the sight of it. Just as he had accused this group of being child-like, they doubled down on the insult and chose to use actual toddlers as their focal point of attack.
They giggled, high in pitch and intensity both. He heard a voice, though it sounded like it came from all of them at once, surrounding his body with an eerie, ghostly taunt:
“Bet you can’t find us before we find you!” They were sorely mistaken if they truly thought that. The Horseman took a deep breath and prepared himself before reaching out to rip their irritating heads from their bodies.
The girls - only then - began to attack with their blades. The strikes felt weaker than when the single, adult Tomoko was swinging a weapon at him, but every little slice stung. A phrase flashed through his mind, though he couldn’t recall where it had come from:
death by a thousand cuts. He reached his hands out wildly to try and grab them or block the sword strikes, but he could not focus on any individual child long enough to ensure an accurate hit - the effect they were creating with color and light was leaving him consistently averting his eyes towards his boots.
It felt like they had struck him a dozen times with their various swords, and there was no end in sight. He pondered on creating another electrical shockwave with his body to send the little girls flying back and give him space to recenter himself. He needn’t have even bothered with the consideration. Before the Horseman could truly start charging up the attack, he felt a strangely squishy sound, as though someone had squeezed a handful of putty, or knocked the wind out of a small child.
Instantly, the rainbow of lights ended, and Darion could see three small girls all crumpled on the ground to the left of him, grumbling and groaning. He thought about stepping on them, but even he couldn’t bring himself to crush the bodies of children under his boot. War was harsh, but there were rules of war. Children and cruelty... neither really belonged on the battlefield. He simply stepped - gently - over their bodies and reentered the fray while choosing to allow them to gather their wits before attacking them again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Riki]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Even above the sounds of people begging for their lives; running, stomping, and flying every which way; and various screams as people let out waves of energy at their foes; Darion could hear it. A crackling that rent the air apart, somewhere in front of him. He leaned down and noticed a girl. Another child? Sariel must be cackling to herself wherever she was for bringing so many literal younglings to her last stand over the fate of Toffit. This wasn’t how things were meant to go.
He started to reach a handout in a ‘stop’ motion, to try and get at least one of the children away from such a deadly warzone. She ignored his gesture and simply said,
“I’m right here, silly.” As the words left her lips, she had already vanished from view - so quick, that Darion blinked, thinking he had simply missed her.
In fact, her speed was that fast - in the time it took him to blink in confusion about her disappearing act, she had appeared again. He didn’t notice, but the small girl was above him, inches from his head, and something struck him at the crown of his skull, with enough force to send Darion two inches into the ground without moving him. His ears rang, and his head throbbed with the same feeling as when he’d last had a migraine. A dribble of water slipped down his cheek.
Water with the scent of iron...
“Not again!” the girl wailed, though Darion didn’t even bother to be concerned with what she was whining about. He was much more distracted by the scent of metal on his cheek. That couldn’t be what he thought it was, right?
Blood?
Had he been injured? The Celestial looked up to find the girl. The frail, innocent looking child. There was no way a prepubescent human girl had hit him with enough force to spill his blood. This was clearly some sort of illusion. He was afforded no time to try and riddle out what the trick was, though; all he had managed to take in during that moment he was allowed to look at the little girl was to recognize that her sword had changed color and nearly doubled in size... and that it was already headed for him yet again.
Instinctively, Darion leapt back, intended to simply jump out of the blade’s reach, but even as he jumped back, the blade seemingly continued to grow longer. Even as he created a gap between them, this new energy sword closed that same gap. It seared into his armor, cutting through it with
some effort, but considerably less effort than should have been required seeing the stature of the person wielding it. He felt a burning in his chest but didn’t even bother to look.
So he’d been pierced twice. Clearly, the person in front of him was dangerous. He tried to lock in on her energy signature, wanting to get a feel for what her true power looked like in comparison to his, and froze in his tracks. This was the power he’d sensed before! Suddenly, the sentence from seconds before came back to him, only with the new context included:
I’m right here, silly!So she was.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Sariel]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Fire!”Darion’s head moved as though on a swivel, locking in on Life. She was staring intently at the Citadel, and so for a moment his eyes followed hers. Balls of white-hot flame flew directly at the Fortress, engulfing the parts of it that were hit. The Horseman of War groaned in pain at the sight. A beat later, a second volley of those flaming spheres went flying across the once-pristine plains upon where they stood.
So, all pretense was gone, it seemed. Sariel was unequivocally taking the role of attacker, colonizer, gentrifier. She had come to ruin all that had been built up over the last years and he would not let her. As though she could read his mind - and there was a time he could have believed that - she turned to face him, her hair flying wildly through the air by the suddenness of her action. With the same fluidity of movement he had displayed earlier, she floated towards him, her weapon of war raised high in the air.
The Celestial’s chest puffed out in response to this, more than ready to meet her in open combat. However, to his detriment, a massive ball of flame flew past, close enough to distract him, and her initial strike was a complete success. She sliced through his armor as though it were butter. It made sense this time, though - before, his armor had been injured by a regular blade, but this was a handcrafted weapon of Toffit. His armor stood no chance.
Wait, did she have a second blade? The shadow of a second sword appeared right behind the Horseman of Life, and Darion ducked to avoid its swing. No swing followed, but he heard her once more scream
“Fire!” He chanced a glance into the sky once he was sure he was safe from her second blade, and dozens of glittering diamonds rushed at him. The Celestial tried to avoid their strikes, but they were small and wicked fast, coming from all sides.
He had nowhere to go to evade the dozens of sharp pains that struck all over his body. He could feel himself bleeding in more spots, but didn’t bother to look at his injuries. They couldn’t see his blood, and they would never live to find out. It seemed, though, that Sariel wished to make him appear mortal.
“Rend the armor from his body!”Before anyone could react, the Horseman of War backed away from this wave of conflict, looking to regain his dominance in the fight. He would not fight naked, and he would not tolerate the tricks of a woman desperate to cling to her imaginary power. The might of Toffit was absolute, and that would be proven this day by any means necessary.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[All]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So these were the tactics of the rogue Celestials? Children, cheap tricks, and buffoonery? He would not be made a fool of. The Horseman of War was still holding back, and it seemed that the idea of building into a dramatic climax was lost on the youths. They didn’t understand that he had been labeled
the understanding of War for good reason.
They wanted a show? He would give them a show.
Darion held both his arms out to his sides and began shooting Ki blasts at random, spinning slowly in a circle as he did so. It looked as though he was attempting to hit everyone with these weak balls of energy, but he wasn’t; with precision honed from years of experience, the Horseman made sure that every single blast missed every possible target. If anyone was watching, they would see that the attacks were fizzling out after a certain distance. Perhaps they would even buy this, since they seemed to think of him as some sort of lower life form.
What he was actually doing was setting up a powerful trap for every powerhouse he had been forced to stand in front of thus far in the conflict. While, admittedly, he hadn’t been training the way he could have, Darion refused to accept a reality where he was not the dominant force of this battle, and his next technique would do a lot to prove how futile their efforts were.
After he had spun in a full circle two or three times, he allowed his hands to droop and his shoulders to hang limply. He even managed to get out a ragged breath or two, to better sell the act of him wearing himself down from the fight with the enemy. Before allowing the pause to last too long (at the risk of them jumping into the fight once again and distracting him from unleashing his attack) Darion closed his open palms into tightly clenched fists, and glanced up, grinning.
In front of the five most deadly threats on the battlefield, a wall of Ki - much stronger than any minor blast he had been firing previously - appeared. It felt like there was a long pause to allow them to register what was in front of them, but Darion didn’t actually wait at all, choosing substance over style for this attack. They immediately rushed forward, ready to ram into every person. An orchestra of explosions followed, and the Celestial’s smile grew wider, his cheeks hurting from how hard his muscles were working.
He even considered taking the helmet off so they could see how gleeful he was... but there was still work to be done, so he didn’t allow himself to be distracted with what was possibly a single victory. An idea had been toying with him in his mind for nearly a minute now, and he decided to stop deliberating on it. Just as the demon, Tomoko, had done, Darion felt that having more of himself could only be a positive in the short term - at least until he could get rid of the annoying gnats swatting at him for attention. Once they were handled, he could reunite his focus, and then finally take down Sariel.
A strange pulling sensation could be felt along multiple key spots in his body - the edges of both of his rotator cuffs, and the small of his body. The feeling of pulling became more prominent extremely quickly, and before it could really begin to dig in and start to burn, The Horseman of War had ripped himself into three identical copies of himself. Thankfully, he hadn’t visibly shrunk in age or size, though he could feel his pieces becoming almost... comparable with the Battle Power of the people in front of him.
He didn’t allow himself to get worried yet, but he may have shot himself in the foot by doing this. The Horseman of War may have overestimated just how many leagues above the rabble he actually was.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Lilim]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One of Darion’s forms immediately rounded upon the Demon Queen; despite his repeated attempts to put her down, she still cheerily bumbled around, almost pretending as though they were in the midst of some sort of... flirtatious engagement. Her absolute lack of self respect and insistence on treating this battle as some sort of relaxing afternoon enjoying Toffit’s glow was... as the Celestial stomped towards her, all he could think of was wiping that incessant smirk off her face.
“Lilim!” he barked once she was close enough to hear him speaking in a slightly raised voice.
“Let’s dance.” As he approached her, his fist began to glow. The glow was a thick evergreen color typically, but when Darion glanced down at it, he saw flecks of black and purple intermingled with the typically uniform aura. He brushed it off as a sign of his growing frustration - or maybe even a negative side effect to so many demons being in his presence - and continued to allow his fist to grow brighter and brighter.
When finally he was within range, the Horseman picked up speed and leapt into the air, attempting a flying attack. He aimed his punch right for Lilim’s smug face, hoping to knock some teeth loose... or at least make her appear serious for once.
Make her fear him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Dr Ghast]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The middle form of Darion was the one who kept his blade, and the silver glint of the cool metal looked intimidating even to the wielder at that moment. He looked up at the other copies of himself to see that one was approaching the leader of the demon hordes and the other had gone straight for the Horseman of Life. That left one man and three other fighters. He groaned inwardly - they had clearly decided that the one who kept the sword would have the larger responsibility in combat.
So be it.
Once more, Darion dragged the blade behind him as he approached the masked man who had been playing with the fallen Celestials earlier. He barely knew this person in comparison to the other powerhouses - not to mention, the mask and his lack of dialogue while in earshot made him impossible to recognize - but if anything, his attacks had been the most irritating. Little blasts to his stomach to make him double over, and beams to his sides that made his kidneys ache and nearly made him keel over - it was as though the Horseman of War was being treated as some kind of experiment, rather than the boogeyman that all should be wary to confront.
He sped forward as the more he thought about it, the more his blood started to boil. In an instant, he was standing before the slim warrior and raised his blade high to try and strike down this interloper’s neutral facade. He swung the blade against the stranger’s left shoulder with all his might, and using his free hand, he opened a small portal behind him.
Darion took one step back before vanishing, but got out a quick comment before he disappeared from view:
“Remember that I am not the plaything of your sick machinations.”~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Tomoko]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One more step later, and he had reappeared in the world, standing back to back against the three little girls. His eye darted to the side and noticed that the other child was also incredibly close by. A cruel smile touched Darion’s lips. The sword was still finishing its downswing from when it attacked the man in the mask, so rather than slow its momentum, he simply angled the sword differently so that it could slash down at the nearest Tomoko youngling.
“Looks like I was the first to find you,” he said, his voice cold as ice. He had given the girls the time to gather their breath, but no more than that. After all, they had entered the battlefield willingly, and while he attempted to avoid attacking children, the ones standing in front of him were as powerful as any man or woman Darion had crossed blades with in the past - holding back could be the difference between victory and defeat.
Hopefully he would make contact with one of those loud-mouthed brats, but he turned away the second the sword made contact with something and immediately turned towards the final child.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Riki]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I’m right here, silly!”And I am right here, he thought to himself as he approached. The Horseman could feel the silver blade vibrating as it began to collect energy. The clean, powerful energy of Light was sucked into the powerful silver weapon, causing it to shine even brighter than it had before, and even causing it to pulse with an almost living heartbeat of its own.
Darion glanced down at the sword, admiring the look of it as it absorbed the pure Light energy, but was disturbed to see that once again his own emotions were tainting the purity of his energy. There were definitely blobs all along his weapon shimmering with a white-gold that indicated Light in the blade, but obsidian streaks along the length of it indicated that large amounts of Darkness had slipped inside. This was troubling; as the Horseman of War, he had allowed himself to become lost in the heat of battle on many occasions, but his very energy was now becoming dark and toxic? Never before.
He would need to speak to someone about this after the battle; surely something had taken hold in his heart as a response to Sariel’s treachery, and he would need to work out his own personal demons to cleanse his soul once more. There was no more time to think about it, though - he was within striking distance of the girl. The Horseman of War lifted into the air, and his speed and strength accelerated destructively as he circled the girl, lashing with attacks from the blade’s edge over and over, until he could feel that he had drained the sword of the power he’d charged it with, and allowed his feet to touch the ground again.
“Where... have they found such powerful children as you?” Darion asked, taking a second to catch his breath. Even as he fought for the supremacy of his people on Toffit, he still couldn’t help but appreciate the raw power being displayed by the rebels. It was their attitude and snark that he despised in this fight, not them or their innate abilities.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~[Sariel]~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There she stood.
The Blue Haired Bitch. The Horseman of Life.
The leader of this ragtag squad from around the galaxy. The bane of his afternoon.
Darion had no fancy techniques to show her in that moment, or any intense dialogue to throw at her. She had inadvertently caused him to bleed, and directly forced him to strain himself in ways he hadn’t needed to in years. For her, in this moment, he didn’t even intend on a grand attack to end her - he knew that this attack wouldn’t.
He just wanted to cave her face in to blow off some steam.
He ran full tilt at the Celestial, creating an actual sonic boom from how fast he ran towards her. As he got closer, he didn’t even slow down, but rather leapt into the air to be able to reach her, fists held as tight as they could be. He threw punch after punch after punch, as though Sariel was a speed bag and he was trying to hit a world record for how many punches he could land on it. There was no strategy, no hidden secrets. He barely even focused enough on what he was doing to acknowledge whether his fists were hitting anything at all.
She was his friend, his confidante, his equal. And at that moment, he felt that he hated her. He kept punching until his arms got sore from throwing them around so many times, and still threw a few more punches after just to be sure, before leaping back and resting about ten feet away from her, panting. It wasn’t good enough, but he had control of himself again. He was able to think, to plot... he looked around at the shadow creatures fighting and saw that many were gone. Those who still stood continued to fight, but he doubted they would hold up in the conflict much longer.
Darion would have to rely on the lesser Celestials to clean up this mess.
Actions:
- Take All Attacks [Free]
- Mesmeric Pulse
- Energy Doubler [1% Ki]
- AOE Static Flicker [15% Ki] [DR 10]
- Tri Form [9% Ki]
- Energy Doubler [1% Ki]
- Smite [0% Ki] [Double Damage] [DR 5] @ Lilim
- Dimensional Strike [Sword Strikes] [1% Ki] @ Dr Ghast; @ Tomoko
- Eclipse Assault [4% Ki] [DR 4] @ Riki
- IST + Champion’s Rush [40 Quick Attacks] @ Sariel
- Reserves [Not RP’d] [+20% Ki] [Free]
Ki Used: 54%
Ki Remaining: 66%
Since I’m the one not keeping up with time limits anymore, I’ll just work on replying immediately once everybody else has replied. It’s Christmas week, after all - you guys deserve much, much faster replies. Three days late is unacceptable, and it won’t happen again. I apologize. For anyone curious, I did take the Hokaku Kon Dan, but I’m treating the missing action as a stun action and so I won’t be counting it. It’s a tiny bit of a reach, but I do need to generally have enough actions to make this entertaining for you all, so I hope that doesn’t bother anyone who notices. Also: let me know also in the FE Mission section of the Discord if you like having the post split into sections so everyone knows what parts are necessary for them to read and which parts are optional. It’s my attempt at having a sort-of TL;DR in my battle posts going forward.