Re: The Grand Battle II! [Round 5: Value City Mall!]
05-24-2010, 01:57 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by SleepingOrange.
A pile of boxes clattered and rolled across the stage, tumbled down the stairs to the floor, and slid out the door so recently used by the faceless. Hours (days? weeks? who could even tell through this sort of dimension-hopping?) of existentialism and planning and thought and emotion and mind-invasion had left Gestalt inwardly weary, and it had decided to settle back into the comfortable rhythm of near-mindless reaction. Under the simple and violent surface, deeper parts of the golem that it hadn't even been aware of until recently were clicking away, but the time for consciously mulling everything over was past; it would almost certainly come again, but for now there were new things to find and new things to kill.
The boxes formed a semicircle immediately outside the door labeled Observer Theater; lids snapped back in unison with the mechanical precision that had been somewhat absent as the battle had dragged on, and a whirlwind of blades sprang out. Putrescent flesh fell before the metallic onslaught; erstwhile shoppers were cut down, then their still-twitching limbs shredded. The pattern of attack was precise, repetitive, and uncreative, but mindless fleshy automata posed little challenge that mindless steel attacks couldn't overcome.
An observer might note that Vyrm'n's exit from the theater had stirred up the hungry dead, but the schrotgolem had no way of know that the swarming corpses were anything but the norm; its progress was slow but methodical, slicing through the revenants and reducing them to immobile heaps of tattered flesh and sundered bone. Ordinarily, it might not even have left the theater, but the word mall had piqued Gestalt's interest; shopping meant new and exciting things to find and explore, and if that meant mowing through these mindless things, so be it.
At a conscious level, Gestalt was thinking little save noting the direction and number of attacking zombies, and paying little attention to much beyond the closest bodies; this is probably why its cloud of bladed sundries was blindsided by a column of moldering starch swung through the air. Much of the golem's current arsenal was enveloped by rot; it panned its awareness towards the assaulter: a trunk-thick tendril of mold and what was probably once pasta was withdrawing towards a stand advertising itself as Ted's Tacos. Heaving itself over Ted's counter was... It was hard to tell past the maggots and dripping, festering fat, but it appeared to be a vaguely-spherical mass of meat, with writhing, over-boiled-pasta tentacles. It pulled itself over the counter and landed with a loud splat, then turned a desiccated, punctured and obviously-blind eye towards the Gestalt.
The golem fell back, consolidating its boxes and remaining weapons, wary of this new threat and unsure of how to kill i, but determined to do so.
A pile of boxes clattered and rolled across the stage, tumbled down the stairs to the floor, and slid out the door so recently used by the faceless. Hours (days? weeks? who could even tell through this sort of dimension-hopping?) of existentialism and planning and thought and emotion and mind-invasion had left Gestalt inwardly weary, and it had decided to settle back into the comfortable rhythm of near-mindless reaction. Under the simple and violent surface, deeper parts of the golem that it hadn't even been aware of until recently were clicking away, but the time for consciously mulling everything over was past; it would almost certainly come again, but for now there were new things to find and new things to kill.
The boxes formed a semicircle immediately outside the door labeled Observer Theater; lids snapped back in unison with the mechanical precision that had been somewhat absent as the battle had dragged on, and a whirlwind of blades sprang out. Putrescent flesh fell before the metallic onslaught; erstwhile shoppers were cut down, then their still-twitching limbs shredded. The pattern of attack was precise, repetitive, and uncreative, but mindless fleshy automata posed little challenge that mindless steel attacks couldn't overcome.
An observer might note that Vyrm'n's exit from the theater had stirred up the hungry dead, but the schrotgolem had no way of know that the swarming corpses were anything but the norm; its progress was slow but methodical, slicing through the revenants and reducing them to immobile heaps of tattered flesh and sundered bone. Ordinarily, it might not even have left the theater, but the word mall had piqued Gestalt's interest; shopping meant new and exciting things to find and explore, and if that meant mowing through these mindless things, so be it.
At a conscious level, Gestalt was thinking little save noting the direction and number of attacking zombies, and paying little attention to much beyond the closest bodies; this is probably why its cloud of bladed sundries was blindsided by a column of moldering starch swung through the air. Much of the golem's current arsenal was enveloped by rot; it panned its awareness towards the assaulter: a trunk-thick tendril of mold and what was probably once pasta was withdrawing towards a stand advertising itself as Ted's Tacos. Heaving itself over Ted's counter was... It was hard to tell past the maggots and dripping, festering fat, but it appeared to be a vaguely-spherical mass of meat, with writhing, over-boiled-pasta tentacles. It pulled itself over the counter and landed with a loud splat, then turned a desiccated, punctured and obviously-blind eye towards the Gestalt.
The golem fell back, consolidating its boxes and remaining weapons, wary of this new threat and unsure of how to kill i, but determined to do so.