witch's cape, not hat

[characterquarry]

Grendyne groans and starts pulling on her boots when the alarm goes off. Again. She quick-marches to the broom hangar, sits on her machine and is handed a plethora of loaded weapons by attentive corporals.

"Two flyers in one day? They're getting way too common."

"It's worse," the commander informs them, "South Karlsland got hit with three at once. We're taking Lytee's express and sleeping there. You can sit out if you absolutely need to, but Freya's still recovering so we could use you as a comms relay."

"No, I'll come. I just reserve the right to complain about it."

The 42nd United Forces Witch Wing takes off and assembles into a perfect synchronized formation as Lytee charges her teleport power.



...This is not South Karlsland wilderness.

[note: halfway through this thread I created a unique account for Grendyne. Do not be alarmed by the change in account. -Rockeye]

Comments

[neuroihive]

Humans on this world were weak. We are- (Something. Lonely?) -so we want them to not be weak. We want them to take their place in the stars. But humans are not (another untranslatable word) they would destroy themselves as they are. But you are different. Where were you hiding?

[whole_new_can]

"I was never hiding.
Why humans? If you want people to join you in the stars, there must be any number of entities you could have chosen, with or without starting a war."

[neuroihive]

We have never found life other than our home planet, long destroyed, and this one. We are not what you think we are. Do you know more aliens? We would like to meet them.

That's not a lie, but that thinker power tells him they're hiding something about themselves. And also: Stalling.

[whole_new_can]

One of the benefits of communication powers: not all communication is intentional. The stalling isn't a problem, but he knows better than to trust them.

"And what are you, if not what you look like?
No aliens, and given Earth's track record with meeting them so far I'm not sure it would be advisable to introduce you if I had met any."

[neuroihive]

We do not fully understand humans. You live and die in moments compared to us. We are aiming for the benefit of the species. We wish to ensure the universe does not grow cold and empty. There will be no person to find the key to the universe and reverse entropy if there is no life.

A long pause. We are dying. That's what they were hiding. It is slow, but it is inevitable. The most intelligent of us can only produce lesser creatures, drones without true intelligence. This body is one such drone. Humans must grow as a species if they are to replace us.

[whole_new_can]

That is eerily close to what Contessa said their enemy's goal was. But when his kind come to a planet and start wars in the name of finding out how to avoid the end of the universe, it isn't with human flourishing in mind.

"Then stop killing them. We could grow more as allies than as your enemies. But if you were going to come in peace, you already would have, and I wouldn't be here now to stop you."

[neuroihive]

Conflict breeds strength. Peace would never lead to strength in our own species. Perhaps humans are different. But it is too late to change, none would trust us, the Twelve would trust none. Sadness/regret. Imminent threat.

[whole_new_can]

No surprise there. He is here to fight, and he did tell them that.

"Who are the Twelve?" he asks, before the language power fades in favor of a more relevant one.

[neuroihive]

Thousands of small Neuroi ascend from the ground and descend from the clouds...

[neuroihive]

...And a few dozen larger ones approach from all sides...

[neuroihive]

...And one massive Neuroi charges straight toward him at at least Mach 4, straight from the heart of the hurricane...

[neuroihive]

...And they all fire at once.

[whole_new_can]

He was legitimately hoping for an answer to that. Oh well.

Eidolon switches from stationary in the air to matching the massive Neuroi in speed, seemingly not bothering to accelerate in between. He stays away from any part of it that looks like a weapon, but flies right into a few lucky blasts from other ones. It barely harms him, feels like an impact knocking him slightly off-course. But he's down to two useful abilities at the moment.

An invisible beam drills toward the nearest large Neuroi that Eidolon and the giant are racing toward. No time to guess and aim for the core, just firing to get it out of the way.

[neuroihive]

The Neuroi beams aren't lasers, they don't travel at the speed of light. Nonetheless, some combination of still being damn fast and leading the target and sheer volume of fire means that more and more small blows and a few large ones start landing on him.

The large Neuroi attempts a dodge, fails, and goes flying with a good third of its body dissolving into glowing white particulate. It starts regenerating immediately.

The massive Neuroi is apparently not very maneuverable- it streams straight past him, firing as it goes, and disappears into cloud cover.

[whole_new_can]

The blows are more inconvenient than anything else, at least until they switch up what weapons they're using. But they are very good at being inconvenient.

Eidolon races after the massive one, spiraling to avoid fire and telekinetically clearing up the cloud in front of him. He leaves a sonic boom, even if it didn't; there's nothing here he doesn't want damaged. After catching up, he starts blasting away at it, this time trying to find the core.

[neuroihive]

The core is not in evidence after the first few blasts. Or the next twenty. It'll run out of body to hide the core in soon, though. Suddenly about half of the beams stop being red. The new attacks are white, purple, green, even black. These have effects varying from 'extreme cold' to 'space-warping' to 'gamma radiation'.

At the same time a few of the smaller Neuroi seem to teleport into his path and explode into a tangle of black fibers. If he doesn't stop in time to avoid them, they explode again into smaller fibers that are also extremely sticky. And corrosive.

[whole_new_can]

Cold, not a problem; radiation, not an immediate problem; space-warping, confusing. His current defense is pretty comprehensive. But he's still ignoring the smaller Neuroi, and doesn't have time to handle the entire net. It slows him down and his armor corrodes. Some of it hurts.

His third power speeds up and finishes charging. A kind of clairvoyance, to finds the points to attack and reverse-engineer the results for more general information. Eidolon only needs it for that first bit. He spends a valuable few seconds concentrating fire at where he now thinks the giant Neuroi's core is, then reluctantly turns to deal with the smaller ones.

[neuroihive]

The giant Neuroi's core - a red vaguely sphere like polygon the size of a car - seems to have something like Endbringer toughness going on. His first few attacks leave a visible crack. The giant stops regenerating and runs for the center of the storm as fast as it possibly can, but he can destroy it completely before it can manage to escape. The giant explodes into a shower of glowing white dust.

The large Neuroi have picked up on how the space-warping is confusing him and are using it liberally to make his attacks miss, create space between him and his target, and bring Neuroi ready to attack into good positions. The clairvoyance can mostly get through this hindrance, with some effort.

A few of the small Neuroi have blade-arms, and one of these, space-warped adjacent to him, stabs him in the leg with something that partially negates his invulnerability. Another Neuroi is spitting fire in every direction. If his clarivoyancepower can tell why, it's to deprive the area of oxygen and suffocate him.

[whole_new_can]

The clairvoyance may be able to get through, but knowing where the cores are does little if he can't hit them. He doesn't scream, when the blade pierces his leg, at least not audibly.

It's working. He's fighting for his life, unconcerned with allies or collateral damage, against opponents that can challenge him even if he doesn't hold back. He feels closer to his old power level than ever before.
Eidolon drops from the sky, his combination flight and weapon power replacing itself in seconds rather than minutes. Painful seconds, as he's mostly defenseless against anything that can get past his durability, but then he's back up and smashing at the nearest Neuroi in a sphere around him, pulling each one in every direction except closer. And then he starts replacing the durability with another, one with a different set of weaknesses and a healing component.

[neuroihive]

Hundreds of little Neuroi die, shells torn to shreds and cores shattered. Some medium-zide and one large Neuroi falls to this attack as well. Though more reinforcements are arriving steadily, he's thinning them out.

The storm has been getting stronger and stronger over the last two minutes. Now, lightning starts striking Eidolon whenever no Neuroi are near enough to also be fried by it. A storm this big contains more energy than several weapons of mass destruction, and this lightning seems to be sending a sizable piece of a percentage point of it at him. The air around Eidolon glows with electrical plasma, and the air nearest to him is no longer breathable - all the oxygen molecules have been split into free atoms.

Meanwhile, four of the remaining large Neuroi are reshaping themselves, though what exactly they're aiming for with the change isn't clear yet.

[whole_new_can]

Electricity isn't a problem, but he does currently need to breathe. He rams himself to a different part of the battlefield, nearer the changing four, and starts tearing at them with more gravity.

[neuroihive]

This is exactly what the Neuroi wanted. The changing four are apparently now very tough and less mobile. Tentacle-like appendages whip around and extend blades that have the same invulnerability-nullifying properties as the little ones. Space-warping makes another appearance, hindering his efforts to dodge, and one of them stabs his arm, digging in with incredibly fine barbs that will probably hurt like hell to remove.

[whole_new_can]

Eidolon did change out his defensive power for exactly that reason. But apparently he's still incompletely immune to that. Rather than remove the barb on the spot, he applies gravity. A sufficiently strong jerk against one part of the tentacle with an equally sudden grip pulling the other way, only a fraction of an inch apart, ought to snap more or less anything in two. He can remove it later.

If he were only fighting to win, he could leave and clean up the swarm of smaller targets first. He's also fighting to fight, and this is clearly the target. Eidolon has a lot of force to play with. The nearest large Neuroi gets squished inward from every direction except front and back, where the opposite happens. For good measure, he adds in some literal spaghettification. See how well it can defend itself while time-dilated.

[neuroihive]

The Neuroi that is suffering his wrath explodes. The other three deploy some kind of energy shield that... Looks kind of familiar.

It's Copycat's shield. Well, technically, a Witch shield since they can all do it. Where did the Neuroi learn that? At any rate, his gravity power is significantly less effective against anything behind them.

The Neuroi try cold again. The air around him liquefies.

[whole_new_can]

Liquid air is a problem. He stops breathing at all; he'd rather have that air's return to normal take place outside his lungs.

He drops the clairvoyance power, looking for something to make him completely self-contained and resistant to harm. A breaker power, that would do. He turns into what looks to be diamond, and feels it growing even more durable. As soon as it seems powered up enough to protect him from what he's up against, he drops the other defense. Gravity for flight and wide-area destruction of the Neuroi that aren't using Witch shields, ability to hopefully take any hits he can't dodge, and a better weapon for the three main targets as soon as it's ready.