The Grand Battle II! [Happy End!]

Originally posted on MSPA by Schazer.

---

Vyrm'n's trajectory as it crashed into Samuel was near-perfect, and would've been at a bone-crushingly high velocity if not for the execution of a 180-degree turn in order to pull it off. As it were, Samuel's bones were left unbroken as the Faceless seized the arm he had instinctively thrown in front of his face and dragged him through the painting/portal/window.

As the quayside accelerated towards Vyrm'n and the Karmist from below, to his unconscious surprise Samuel's focus was more fixated upon his entrapped arm. The Karmic energies, sensing the proximity of their target, felt like they were going to rend his arm to tattered shreds in an attempt to escape.

Not yet, Samuel thought to himself, teeth gritted in concentration.The golem is too much of an unkno- It took all of Samuel's willpower to halt Karma's inexorable current, and was quite a sterling effort that he managed to maintain such focus, even as Faceless and Karmist crashed onto a flat-topped roof.

Samuel managed to touch down with his feet and take a few staggering steps, reducing the crushing forces which would've manifest had he been stuck within the impact of Faceless and stone; his barely elegant stride was broken by his arm being pulled ahead by a far more massive and momentous Vyrm'n, making the Karmist fall flat on his face and leaving him scrabbling to pick himself up as the Faceless finally released him after dragging Samuel a good couple of metres.

Samuel floated back to a standing position with as much grace as he could muster, drifting to the far edge of the building from the swiftly pillarizing Faceless. The grit sprung off his now-scratched suit. It might've been his imagination, but Samuel fancied he saw the Faceless twitch a little as the dust responded to his will, the schrotgolem's power. He recalled the way Gestalt and Vyrm'n had fought in the Labyrinth Field, and shot the grains in the Faceless' direction.

Vyrm'n, in response, leapt clear of the dust well before it reached its side of the building, and terminated its upward leap by jackknifing towards Samuel. Acting more on survival instinct than common sense, the Karmist leapt backwards; risking his neck were it not for the forces of Gestalt keeping him suspended in the air. The Faceless had little appreciation of this defiance of physics, and swiftly changed trajectories again to ram into Samuel from below. Not as maneuverable without something to push off, the Karmist was bodily smacked by the shadow in its ascent.

Samuel tried to take a page from Vyrm'n's book, kill his flight and use gravity to his tactical advantage, but the Faceless swirled around his ankles before its elegant, black-comet shape seemed to liquify and fall to earth, dragging Samuel down in overbearing defiance of his concerted attempts to stay airborne.

The two crash-landed in an alley, though like the rest of this world it was devoid of the usual signs of habitation - there was no stinking dumpster for the pair to comically plummet into, no signs of moss or damp on the shady stones. The only sign of any mortal having trespassed here was the crater-like dent imprinted in the ground, from which Vyrm'n swiftly slithered to loom over Samuel's battered form. Shards of shattered flagstone rose and cocooned the Karmist in a swirl of sharp rocks. Vyrm'n shuffled back, giving it a wide berth, consciousness extending out to the rest of the painting, searching for the rest of Gestalt. To its alarm, the schrotgolem was all around, detritus peering down from roofs, perching at windows, and skipping up either end of the alley.

A piercing mental screech resonated across the region the schrotgolem inhabited. Both Karmist and Faceless looked upward, to the rapidly disintegrating form of the stained-glass eagle. The prismatic swarm came streaking down towards the Faceless and the rubble shield, several pieces shifting into formation to form the screaming head of a savage raptor that tore mercilessly into the shadow.

Vyrm'n made valiant and highly acrobatic efforts to avoid Gestalt's assault, but for every colour in the golem's rainbow arsenal the Faceless reluctantly seized and tucked away into the darkness (reluctantly, knowing each piece was a psychic link to this abomination), a pane of glass could be heard being torn from its stone frame and plummeting to the street below before its shards joined the fray.

Meanwhile, the Karmist tried to catch his breath, moving slowly while he checked for broken bones. Irritably parting the shield of rock to better watch the fight, Samuel wondered why his Karmic perception had failed him this time. The Faceless was no different, and his powers had not been diminished by his meld with Gestalt, so why had he been incapable of anticipating its attacks? Scrutinising the shadow (which contemptuously spat out a pall of pale pink dust as Samuel watched; the viciously eroded remnants of Gestalt's red glass shards), he realised something had changed in it, nothing morphological, but more a subtle shift in perception, which with Samuel's powers of detection gleaned so much more from.

All through this skirmish, for reasons Samuel could not fathom, Vyrm'n's intent was not to kill. Incapacitate, injure, perhaps, but not to strike the final blow. Samuel had his suspicions as to the origins of this, but in his present condition it would have to merely suffice as an interesting development, to be expanded on later.