The Grand Battle S2G1! [Round Six: Eddelin City]

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

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Spoilerblarg took too long and ultimately unsatisfying but let's get this moving again

Xadrez frowned, trailing after Jen with a look of gloweringly sad confusion. Then everything kind of flickered green, green which tickled of Jen’s green but somehow wasn’t, and Hydresther slowed down with a painfully insistent sense of being needed somewhere else.

This felt familiar. And unpleasant. He couldn’t feel his board, couldn’t sense his pieces, and his peripheral vision was telling the tactician his knife was a beam of shoulder-impaling light, which he reached for-

“Restrain him.”

Bottle green lashed its way up Xadrez’ arms, only allowing him to drop them harmlessly to his sides. An experimental clawing of his hands prompted the green to entwine round his fingers.

Summoners. With vastly more sophisticated arcannula to anything Xadrez had been subjected to. The room he was in was doing a decent job at being seemingly dimensionless, but it didn’t fool the spirit. He glared levelly at the speaker, a venerable old fir-treant. Dressed in finest needly regalia, he just observed the tactician for a tense minute or so, awaiting some kind of prompt.

Xadrez said nothing. “General Xadrez-“

you are mistaken

Her royal highness divested me of that title some time ago

The treant, who had taken at least some offense at the tactician’s interruption, uttered a rattly kind of sigh. “Yes, we got that. Do you recall her exact wording?”

if you are at liberty to go picking through casual conversations between her majesty and myself why do you not drag her across time and space to play twe-

“Do not. Be flippant with us. General.” The fir motioned to someone in the shadows, and the green lines lost their scorch as they receded from Xadrez’ chest. The tactician made a noise like someone sighing through gritted teeth, and unclenched his fists.

this is not the place-

“No. An avenue. A grey area. What were her exact words?”

I allegedly showed poor risk assessment skills and an inability to make rational decisions in a life-or-death situation

under that pretext I was quote dishonourably discharged from my position as general of the armed forces of the place unquote


Now may I leave

“Did this dismissal anger you? Stir resentment toward her majesty?”

Do you really think i have any motivation to see her highness dead

the current only source of my anger is this outlandish detainment by her majesty’s court of zealotssssgggghg

There was a certain amount of agitation – recklessness - in Xadrez. Tethers replaced with shackles. No more unbreakable, but far less implacable. Concrete. Clear. Something to sink your teeth or a knife into without it coming out muddied with repercussions. It really wasn’t working out for him.

This time, the neon refused to shift off his chest, a single, fleur-de-lys tip snaking up and burning a tiny hole right between Xadrez’ eyes.

You know she died

you know she dismissed me

how hard is it for you to discern who killed her

and is it that much of a stretch to ascertain my lack of awareness of said appointment and extrapolate how little motivation I have to enact any form of revenge


Then again

in case you her majestys servants were not aware her royal highness is doing most well for one declared dead

So perhaps I would be giving you too much credit if you had determined I have no quarrel with her highness

The fir tree had been about to demand Xadrez elaborate, but was interrupted by the tactician’s currently insatiable need to insult his captors. Sneering his hardest behind all the needles, he signalled for the restraints to jab the spirit once sharply between the eyes before he barked, “Explain yourself.”

Xadrez ignored him. I can only assume her majestys death is the source of your misguided consternation assuming her forced abdication at such a time

i mean it even convinced the observer

all of us present there the boy and his wyrm severed by debris but before that her highness was devoured by a dragon the ovoids dragon

maxwells death was what kracht wanted but the network it means things have changed kracht had no idea

The ovoid could destroy kracht in an instant if it wished so why does it

it

it still required the anomaly requires the anomaly for something


Kracht

kracht

kracht did not intend to bind her majesty and the second wyrm

her royal highness spoke to the anomaly prior alone her weaponry is ineffectual if it were what kracht required in this round then and there it would have taken mere moments

And now we the battlers march for hydresther and

and yes

yes you have dragged me and burnt me across dimensions you could not perceive but in hydresther I remain indelible save the baying of her majesty’s hounds in my ears and arkal arkal is under the ovoids protection and scouts mercy this ambience is raucous


You know what

ive convinced me

ill help you reclaim her highness throne

shes far more use to us all this way

and rest assured if you are the best contender for the place's throne recoronating jennifer is by far the best hope for your kingdom

Xadrez flicked his fingers irritably as the green receded, still trapped in the cloying, still, magic-saturated air in the summoning circle. The treant's expression was unreadable, but needless to say he found the situation about as aristocratically tasteful as hiring an assassin to protect him from other assassins. While Xadrez pretended to restore circulation to his bloodless limbs, he instead tried to tune into the faint, but still-recognisable spectral map of his chess pieces. Everything seemed to be underwater, overlaid with the aural tones of an extremely obnoxious sloppily set up pocket dimension.

Xadrez resolved to set up some quantifiable goal he could be dismissed to complete for these idiots before things got worse. He also fancied expounding upon Jen the innumerable flaws of her contingency team. He'd start with that infernal fir, and at least make a day out of that.