Re: Intense Struggle Season 2! (Round 3: Castle Suterrea)
02-28-2011, 03:02 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Drakenforge.
Karen had managed to keep her façade, knowing that Lloyd and Marcus were watching her flight from the hunterbot and the explosives that were attached to it.
She couldn’t appear weak in front of them, especially Lloyd. He would have used that as ammo against her. Sarika on the other hand would at least try to understand, and would at least keep that fact to herself. So as Karen’s instincts told her that Charlie would explode, she grabbed onto the feathery woman as the Monitor’s immobilising hold took them from the scene of an exploding train, to leave them an instant later standing in a dark stone corridor. Leaving them with a brief, yet vague explanation of what kind of place the castle was, Karen could feel her body being returned to her own control.
Her first action was rather involuntary, as her body reminded her of every hurt or overused muscle in her body all at once, causing her to gasp and lose her balance.
Sarika tried her best to bear Karen’s light weight, but ultimately ended up falling underneath her and toppling to the floor in an embarrassing show of her strength.
She was going to ask Karen what was wrong, but it was instantly apparent why she was no longer able to stand. The girl’s whole body was shivering, and not due to the temperature. Her brow was sweaty, and Sarika could feel her pulse from Karen’s chest, beating at an irregularly high speed, faster than should probably have been conceivably possible. Not only that, Karen’s face was completely out of character of what Sarika had seen so far, twisted in reaction to the pain she must be experiencing.
Her teeth were clenched tight, her breathing was ragged, and Sarika could do nothing to help.
“Karen, I think it would be a really good idea for you to rest.”
She tried to lift the witch off, but her mechanical arms were unable to list Karen’s weight on their own. She thought of asking Karen to move herself, but that seemed insensitive, and she wasn’t all that heavy really, she wasn’t hurt by having the girl lying on her. So she lay there, waiting for Karen to recover from her fit, contempt with her fate as a temporary mattress. It took several minutes, but Karen’s body began to calm down. She managed to push herself up and lie on her back next to Sarika.
“Sorry.” Was all she could manage.
“It’s fine, really, I don’t mind, but what the heck happened to you? You seemed fine before we left the train.”
Karen took a few more deep breaths before she replied.
“Marcus and Lloyd were watching. I didn’t want to look weak. It was tough. Fighting Charlie. My arms feel like lead filled with burning ants. Same with the rest of my body. He hit really hard, and I just wasn’t strong enough to keep myself alive while fighting him. So I used magic to make myself stronger. Turns out that has repercussion in reality. You don’t speed up your pulse that fast and get away with it.”
“That’s right, when I first barged into the car, I could have sworn you skin had a red tint. And you talked a lot faster when we were running.”
Karen nodded, and tried to move her arm. Doing so caused her to cringe, so she tried to remain as still as possible.
“Haste: A spell that quickens my thoughts and body. Probably did the damage to my heart and veins.
Striking: Lets me deal more damage. Probably put too much effort on my arm and leg muscles, probably the one’s in my torso too. “
She paused momentarily before listing the last spell.
“Berserk: A spell that even in the safety of my game I used sparingly. It is what hurt my lungs, and everything else. It concentrates the levels of oxygen in my blood, and to do that I need to take in a lot more. But my blood needs to travel faster too, and that’s what gave me that colour in my skin. But it affects my mind too. I take more risks, think less of my own safety, and focus only on destroying the opponent in front of me. You can call me reckless, but it was necessary. I knew what I was getting myself into, and I would have died without it.”
Sarika sat upright and looked Karen over. Tears were slowly seeping out from under the single eye Sarika could make out under the girl’s hair, falling down the side of her face.
“You really aren’t as tough as you look, are you?”
Karen looked away without opening her eyes, probably hiding the shame she was unable to keep locked away.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I think I meant like, you’re just a regular girl deep down, right? You might have been the tough role in your game, but real danger is scary! I’m surprised you managed to do this much! You should feel proud! I mean look at me I couldn’t have lasted five seconds against that machine on my own. You’ve probably saved our lives by getting rid of him.”
“…Thank you.” She added, as an afterthought.
If Karen had reacted to her speech, she didn’t show it. She just lay there for a few more minutes, slowly getting her breath back. Eventually, she managed to move her arm enough to get into her left pocket, and soon withdrew another vial containing the healing red liquid that Sarika had drank before. Karen’s hand twitched and the vial slipped from her hand. It fell to the floor and rolled towards Sarika, who promptly picked it up in her claws, removed the stopper and pressed it against Karen’s lips.
She drank the whole dose in one large gulp, and Sarika noticed that Karen hadn’t opened her eyes this whole time.
“Karen, is there some reason you aren’t opening your eyes?”
“They feel weird. Kinda itchy, but I can’t rub them because my arms hurt. The potion should bring me back to working order, and I’ll just magic the rest away.”
“No more life threatening spells please. ”
Karen nodded in agreement, and tried to sit up. Sarika gave her as much help as she could in lifting her into a sitting position. Karen managed to rub at her eyes for a few seconds, and finally opened them to look at Sarika.
The first thing she saw was a look of surprise in Sarika’s face. She almost dropped Karen back onto the floor.
“Hey, be careful. What’s gotten into you? You look like you saw a monster.”
Sarika was lost for words. Karen’s once dark eye was now filled with a bright red tint in her iris.
“Your eyes are red!” She eventually managed to spurt out, completely devoid of tact or consideration.
Karen actually gave a mix between a sigh and a chuckle. To think an old game mechanic like that had followed into her mix between fiction and reality.
Well, she had technically killed Charlie, who was a player in this ‘game’, and red eyes were the sign that one player had recently killed another in Legends of Fate.
“Ah, that makes sense after all. I killed a player, Sarika. And this is what happens as a result, back in the game. They’ll go back to normal soon, probably a few hours. No wonder they felt weird.”
Karen was feeling better, at any rate. She was sitting up unassisted now, and her body didn’t hurt half as bad. She spent a large portion of her magic on a regeneration spell that would increase the rate her body healed by itself. She would regain the lost magic with time, but she needed her body to be able to fight first and foremost. The Monitor had told of monsters, and even in her state Karen had heard that howl.
“I see.” Sarika added, attempting to distract Karen with conversation. “What do you think made Marcus make such a cheesy speech?”
“Who knows? A mans pride is a strange thing and will cause them to do stuff that doesn’t really make sense at the time. Maybe he just wanted us to trust him. Or maybe he wants us all to know that he won’t shoot anymore of us, unless extreme circumstances force him to. It was a good speech from a man probably unused to saying such things.”
Karen started stretching her legs from her sitting position, slowly pressing her hands over the muscles to make sure nothing would hurt so much that it would cause her leg to spasm if she put weight on it. Satisfied, she tried to stand up, Sarika quickly rushing to her side to help her up.
“I’ve been wondering,” She said as she tried to balance on her own feet more then the seer helping her, “Why are you helping me so much?”
Sarika didn’t especially like Karen, or dislike her. She had felt neutral to her most of the time as they had used each others powers for their own benefit. But Sarika had felt guilty for feeling Karen could do everything just because she had been used to monsters that were not able to kill her. She may have the strength, but she was still just a girl.
“You needed my help, and I need yours. To keep Lillian safe, to keep us all safe!” She blurted out, rushing back to the comforting thought of mutual gain
“I see.”
Karen knew that Lillian was a large factor in the game for them both. Someone that young being associated with so much death and fighting angered Karen. She thought of how best to save Lillian, when she remembered the message she had received from Vandrel. She wondered just what she had that would allow her to help this mysterious stranger. She was learning how to better control her magic, the spells the game had given her now looked more like guidelines or examples. She wanted to test out several theories she was having, increasing the size of the spells, mix them with others and even make some of her own from scratch. It wasn’t the games’ spells anymore; they were hers and hers alone.
“We’ve wasted enough time. Lillian will probably be alone, and I doubt this dungeon is very safe.”
She was wary of her wounds, but after a few steps Karen decided that she would last without having to resort to any more spells for the moment. It had taken a large portion for that last spell, so she didn’t have a large amount to fall back on right now. She planned ahead; there would be many fights in this round, against monsters that she assumed would be top-tier. Either she risked injury and death fighting them off, or she used up every drop of magic fighting her way around. Sneaking wasn’t an option, not with Sarika by her side. She’d come in handy in case Karen didn’t notice a trap, which she noticed as she skirted a loose stone on the floor, all too conspicuous on the flat walkway.
“What happened to your small sword anyway? I thought you had it when we were running away.”
Taking the staff from her back, Karen gripped the far end and pulled, revealing the bright blade that seemed to flow out of the wood as if it was a cloud.
“Magic is really, really useful.”
She shut the sword back into the staff, which floated out of her hand and positioned itself on her back again. Sarika had wondered just how Karen did that, and Karen answered her untold thoughts by saying “That’s how the sword stayed there. Staff is like a broomstick, but more sensible to look at. Of course, it was a lot heavier so it could only grip onto my back and not fly. That is also how I could swing it so easily, without the staff I would have been far too slow to fight anything.”
“…that is useful.” Sarika admitted.
She was getting more used to not looking into what Karen was going to say before she had actually said anything. She had her mind on the floors and walls anyway, and if Karen had said anything to her in her visions she just held back the impulse to respond. Her visions told her that Karen was about to go stiff and stop walking, and she brought her eyes back to the present. When she did stop, Sarika could feel something wrong. It was as if the air had gone thicker, or if the gravity had somehow gotten stronger.
“That’s a boss, and a strong one even by my standards. I’d say that it was a dragon if this was my game, but it could be anything here. And dragons were the toughest, deadliest and most ruthless of all bosses.”
Karen could feel the power of the boss, but couldn’t tell where it was. But its presence was clearly broadcasted by its strength. Karen didn’t want to fight that thing. She wouldn’t have fought it even had she been in the game. It would overpower her easily, if she was alone. That kind of boss would need around ten seasoned players to beat. And even that would be stretching it. And she had this bad feeling that this wasn’t even the strongest monster in the castle.
A growl emanated from the behind the edge of a turn in the dungeon walls. Karen drew her sword with a quick motion, ready to fight. A black shape walked into view, dog-like in nature. Red eyes glowed from behind a dripping black visage. Karen tried to gauge its strength, but the beast, or perhaps it was some sort of demon, attacked. It sealed the distance between herself and it in a single bound, and she had to leap backwards to allow herself enough distance to swing her sword. Sarika had moved away, thankfully, and Karen brought her sword up underneath the monsters chest, carving a large gash up towards the neck. The monster slowed, allowing Karen to slip beside it and slice her way along its ribcage. She took another step and turned, expecting to see the dog lying in a pool of blood. Instead, it was turning to look her way. Sarika quickly skirted around several loose panels and hid behind the wall it had came from. Karen shot a fireball, connecting with the monsters face. Its whole body lit up, yet the red eyes didn’t even seem phased. She sighed. The Monitor couldn’t even let monsters have the good nature to die when they receive a lot of damage. So she took a different stance, her blade’s edge facing upwards, balanced at the same height as her eyes. The dog pounced, and her feet kicked her body forwards. She brought the sword down and through the hide and bone of its body, leaving out the other side. A few wisps of wind followed through and dispersed onto the floor in front of her. Weaker than before, her Steel Hurricane was still enough to carve through a lot, but she wouldn’t be able to use it on something massive like last time. But it was different. Sharper and more precise now that she was using a sharp blade. Before it was just brute strength and size. Karen turned once more, keeping her blade steady, but the monster had bean cleanly carved into two haves and was beginning to fade away. She swung her sword, forcing all the gore to strike into the wall as she made her way past the now vanished corpse. Sarika was waiting for her, but Karen raised her finger to indicate Sarika shouldn’t speak.
“That was just the advance scout.” She told her, readying her sword for more fighting.
Karen had managed to keep her façade, knowing that Lloyd and Marcus were watching her flight from the hunterbot and the explosives that were attached to it.
She couldn’t appear weak in front of them, especially Lloyd. He would have used that as ammo against her. Sarika on the other hand would at least try to understand, and would at least keep that fact to herself. So as Karen’s instincts told her that Charlie would explode, she grabbed onto the feathery woman as the Monitor’s immobilising hold took them from the scene of an exploding train, to leave them an instant later standing in a dark stone corridor. Leaving them with a brief, yet vague explanation of what kind of place the castle was, Karen could feel her body being returned to her own control.
Her first action was rather involuntary, as her body reminded her of every hurt or overused muscle in her body all at once, causing her to gasp and lose her balance.
Sarika tried her best to bear Karen’s light weight, but ultimately ended up falling underneath her and toppling to the floor in an embarrassing show of her strength.
She was going to ask Karen what was wrong, but it was instantly apparent why she was no longer able to stand. The girl’s whole body was shivering, and not due to the temperature. Her brow was sweaty, and Sarika could feel her pulse from Karen’s chest, beating at an irregularly high speed, faster than should probably have been conceivably possible. Not only that, Karen’s face was completely out of character of what Sarika had seen so far, twisted in reaction to the pain she must be experiencing.
Her teeth were clenched tight, her breathing was ragged, and Sarika could do nothing to help.
“Karen, I think it would be a really good idea for you to rest.”
She tried to lift the witch off, but her mechanical arms were unable to list Karen’s weight on their own. She thought of asking Karen to move herself, but that seemed insensitive, and she wasn’t all that heavy really, she wasn’t hurt by having the girl lying on her. So she lay there, waiting for Karen to recover from her fit, contempt with her fate as a temporary mattress. It took several minutes, but Karen’s body began to calm down. She managed to push herself up and lie on her back next to Sarika.
“Sorry.” Was all she could manage.
“It’s fine, really, I don’t mind, but what the heck happened to you? You seemed fine before we left the train.”
Karen took a few more deep breaths before she replied.
“Marcus and Lloyd were watching. I didn’t want to look weak. It was tough. Fighting Charlie. My arms feel like lead filled with burning ants. Same with the rest of my body. He hit really hard, and I just wasn’t strong enough to keep myself alive while fighting him. So I used magic to make myself stronger. Turns out that has repercussion in reality. You don’t speed up your pulse that fast and get away with it.”
“That’s right, when I first barged into the car, I could have sworn you skin had a red tint. And you talked a lot faster when we were running.”
Karen nodded, and tried to move her arm. Doing so caused her to cringe, so she tried to remain as still as possible.
“Haste: A spell that quickens my thoughts and body. Probably did the damage to my heart and veins.
Striking: Lets me deal more damage. Probably put too much effort on my arm and leg muscles, probably the one’s in my torso too. “
She paused momentarily before listing the last spell.
“Berserk: A spell that even in the safety of my game I used sparingly. It is what hurt my lungs, and everything else. It concentrates the levels of oxygen in my blood, and to do that I need to take in a lot more. But my blood needs to travel faster too, and that’s what gave me that colour in my skin. But it affects my mind too. I take more risks, think less of my own safety, and focus only on destroying the opponent in front of me. You can call me reckless, but it was necessary. I knew what I was getting myself into, and I would have died without it.”
Sarika sat upright and looked Karen over. Tears were slowly seeping out from under the single eye Sarika could make out under the girl’s hair, falling down the side of her face.
“You really aren’t as tough as you look, are you?”
Karen looked away without opening her eyes, probably hiding the shame she was unable to keep locked away.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I think I meant like, you’re just a regular girl deep down, right? You might have been the tough role in your game, but real danger is scary! I’m surprised you managed to do this much! You should feel proud! I mean look at me I couldn’t have lasted five seconds against that machine on my own. You’ve probably saved our lives by getting rid of him.”
“…Thank you.” She added, as an afterthought.
If Karen had reacted to her speech, she didn’t show it. She just lay there for a few more minutes, slowly getting her breath back. Eventually, she managed to move her arm enough to get into her left pocket, and soon withdrew another vial containing the healing red liquid that Sarika had drank before. Karen’s hand twitched and the vial slipped from her hand. It fell to the floor and rolled towards Sarika, who promptly picked it up in her claws, removed the stopper and pressed it against Karen’s lips.
She drank the whole dose in one large gulp, and Sarika noticed that Karen hadn’t opened her eyes this whole time.
“Karen, is there some reason you aren’t opening your eyes?”
“They feel weird. Kinda itchy, but I can’t rub them because my arms hurt. The potion should bring me back to working order, and I’ll just magic the rest away.”
“No more life threatening spells please. ”
Karen nodded in agreement, and tried to sit up. Sarika gave her as much help as she could in lifting her into a sitting position. Karen managed to rub at her eyes for a few seconds, and finally opened them to look at Sarika.
The first thing she saw was a look of surprise in Sarika’s face. She almost dropped Karen back onto the floor.
“Hey, be careful. What’s gotten into you? You look like you saw a monster.”
Sarika was lost for words. Karen’s once dark eye was now filled with a bright red tint in her iris.
“Your eyes are red!” She eventually managed to spurt out, completely devoid of tact or consideration.
Karen actually gave a mix between a sigh and a chuckle. To think an old game mechanic like that had followed into her mix between fiction and reality.
Well, she had technically killed Charlie, who was a player in this ‘game’, and red eyes were the sign that one player had recently killed another in Legends of Fate.
“Ah, that makes sense after all. I killed a player, Sarika. And this is what happens as a result, back in the game. They’ll go back to normal soon, probably a few hours. No wonder they felt weird.”
Karen was feeling better, at any rate. She was sitting up unassisted now, and her body didn’t hurt half as bad. She spent a large portion of her magic on a regeneration spell that would increase the rate her body healed by itself. She would regain the lost magic with time, but she needed her body to be able to fight first and foremost. The Monitor had told of monsters, and even in her state Karen had heard that howl.
“I see.” Sarika added, attempting to distract Karen with conversation. “What do you think made Marcus make such a cheesy speech?”
“Who knows? A mans pride is a strange thing and will cause them to do stuff that doesn’t really make sense at the time. Maybe he just wanted us to trust him. Or maybe he wants us all to know that he won’t shoot anymore of us, unless extreme circumstances force him to. It was a good speech from a man probably unused to saying such things.”
Karen started stretching her legs from her sitting position, slowly pressing her hands over the muscles to make sure nothing would hurt so much that it would cause her leg to spasm if she put weight on it. Satisfied, she tried to stand up, Sarika quickly rushing to her side to help her up.
“I’ve been wondering,” She said as she tried to balance on her own feet more then the seer helping her, “Why are you helping me so much?”
Sarika didn’t especially like Karen, or dislike her. She had felt neutral to her most of the time as they had used each others powers for their own benefit. But Sarika had felt guilty for feeling Karen could do everything just because she had been used to monsters that were not able to kill her. She may have the strength, but she was still just a girl.
“You needed my help, and I need yours. To keep Lillian safe, to keep us all safe!” She blurted out, rushing back to the comforting thought of mutual gain
“I see.”
Karen knew that Lillian was a large factor in the game for them both. Someone that young being associated with so much death and fighting angered Karen. She thought of how best to save Lillian, when she remembered the message she had received from Vandrel. She wondered just what she had that would allow her to help this mysterious stranger. She was learning how to better control her magic, the spells the game had given her now looked more like guidelines or examples. She wanted to test out several theories she was having, increasing the size of the spells, mix them with others and even make some of her own from scratch. It wasn’t the games’ spells anymore; they were hers and hers alone.
“We’ve wasted enough time. Lillian will probably be alone, and I doubt this dungeon is very safe.”
She was wary of her wounds, but after a few steps Karen decided that she would last without having to resort to any more spells for the moment. It had taken a large portion for that last spell, so she didn’t have a large amount to fall back on right now. She planned ahead; there would be many fights in this round, against monsters that she assumed would be top-tier. Either she risked injury and death fighting them off, or she used up every drop of magic fighting her way around. Sneaking wasn’t an option, not with Sarika by her side. She’d come in handy in case Karen didn’t notice a trap, which she noticed as she skirted a loose stone on the floor, all too conspicuous on the flat walkway.
“What happened to your small sword anyway? I thought you had it when we were running away.”
Taking the staff from her back, Karen gripped the far end and pulled, revealing the bright blade that seemed to flow out of the wood as if it was a cloud.
“Magic is really, really useful.”
She shut the sword back into the staff, which floated out of her hand and positioned itself on her back again. Sarika had wondered just how Karen did that, and Karen answered her untold thoughts by saying “That’s how the sword stayed there. Staff is like a broomstick, but more sensible to look at. Of course, it was a lot heavier so it could only grip onto my back and not fly. That is also how I could swing it so easily, without the staff I would have been far too slow to fight anything.”
“…that is useful.” Sarika admitted.
She was getting more used to not looking into what Karen was going to say before she had actually said anything. She had her mind on the floors and walls anyway, and if Karen had said anything to her in her visions she just held back the impulse to respond. Her visions told her that Karen was about to go stiff and stop walking, and she brought her eyes back to the present. When she did stop, Sarika could feel something wrong. It was as if the air had gone thicker, or if the gravity had somehow gotten stronger.
“That’s a boss, and a strong one even by my standards. I’d say that it was a dragon if this was my game, but it could be anything here. And dragons were the toughest, deadliest and most ruthless of all bosses.”
Karen could feel the power of the boss, but couldn’t tell where it was. But its presence was clearly broadcasted by its strength. Karen didn’t want to fight that thing. She wouldn’t have fought it even had she been in the game. It would overpower her easily, if she was alone. That kind of boss would need around ten seasoned players to beat. And even that would be stretching it. And she had this bad feeling that this wasn’t even the strongest monster in the castle.
A growl emanated from the behind the edge of a turn in the dungeon walls. Karen drew her sword with a quick motion, ready to fight. A black shape walked into view, dog-like in nature. Red eyes glowed from behind a dripping black visage. Karen tried to gauge its strength, but the beast, or perhaps it was some sort of demon, attacked. It sealed the distance between herself and it in a single bound, and she had to leap backwards to allow herself enough distance to swing her sword. Sarika had moved away, thankfully, and Karen brought her sword up underneath the monsters chest, carving a large gash up towards the neck. The monster slowed, allowing Karen to slip beside it and slice her way along its ribcage. She took another step and turned, expecting to see the dog lying in a pool of blood. Instead, it was turning to look her way. Sarika quickly skirted around several loose panels and hid behind the wall it had came from. Karen shot a fireball, connecting with the monsters face. Its whole body lit up, yet the red eyes didn’t even seem phased. She sighed. The Monitor couldn’t even let monsters have the good nature to die when they receive a lot of damage. So she took a different stance, her blade’s edge facing upwards, balanced at the same height as her eyes. The dog pounced, and her feet kicked her body forwards. She brought the sword down and through the hide and bone of its body, leaving out the other side. A few wisps of wind followed through and dispersed onto the floor in front of her. Weaker than before, her Steel Hurricane was still enough to carve through a lot, but she wouldn’t be able to use it on something massive like last time. But it was different. Sharper and more precise now that she was using a sharp blade. Before it was just brute strength and size. Karen turned once more, keeping her blade steady, but the monster had bean cleanly carved into two haves and was beginning to fade away. She swung her sword, forcing all the gore to strike into the wall as she made her way past the now vanished corpse. Sarika was waiting for her, but Karen raised her finger to indicate Sarika shouldn’t speak.
“That was just the advance scout.” She told her, readying her sword for more fighting.