The first into the fray after Muur's Void-enhanced thaumaturgic display transmuted a score of Voidsent to ash was, amusingly, not Thancred. For all that he was ready to dive back into the thick of it, the dashing rogue proved to be no match for the bestial rage that still gripped Kofle. Jumping straight into the crowd of Imps and gargoyle-like Voidsents that had been at the Sultantree, she swung her blade down with all of the strength she could muster.
One particularly unlucky Imp was sliced in half from brow to groin by the move, but that's not where it ended. The swing had been delivered with such abandon that the red-black aether that now trailed behind Kolfe, and threatened to swallow her at every moment, exploded outward in a cone of devastation that, in a word, pulped a few unlucky residents of the Void.
“Today really is ‘bring your politically problematic powers to work’ day, isn’t it?” Muur sighed wryly, trying to use banter and some gluttony as more gleaming feathers and bloody lightning scythed through the battlefield to cover up how terrifyingly attractive she thought Kofle was right now. At least the Void-shell wrapped around her was so in line with those desires that both magic and metal went well out of their way to avoid disturbing her girlfriend’s bloody work.
Thancred wasn’t far behind her first volley, cursing the whole time. Unlike Kofle’s screams of rage, he fell on the horde with a mumbled “Fucking Adventurers, I swear!” Only with a slightly more polite wording. Not that Muur was really afforded the chance to listen to him, not when her new apparel came with a multitude of new sensations.
She could feel her will fill the hollowness yearning for it, how her wants to scythe through the cluster of imps about to enter Kofle’s blind side caused half a dozen of feathers to detach from her cape before flying into their skulls with a whisper of Void Wind and a crackle of Thunder that turned their targets into charred corpses…
The hunger from it was the clearest she could feel, it wanted to feed, to devour all aether around and within her. It was doing quite the job of it too, with every heartbeat that passed with it attached to her back, she could feel a part of her aether drain away into the emptiness-given-shape resting its head on her shoulder. For some reason though, she didn’t feel worried in the slightest. Rather than the power she used to cast spells and live, it seemed to feed on… something else? Like it was drinking from the great turmoil of emotions she’d experienced today, all of the lows– A man, gritting his teeth as his closest friend chopped off his arm to save his life – and the highs –Kofle shouting victoriously as she drives her broken sword into the gaps between the queen’s armoured chitin–, pooled together into an aether-rich slurry that threatened to overwhelm her like it had no doubt overwhelmed her girlfriend.
But, by the grace of a gentle tug on her tail, a memory bubbled back to her, “Emotions have power kid.” Her master once told her after obliterating a Garlean warmachine in a single blow, “They can damn you, just as well as they can elevate you. Comes a time that you’ll feel yourself slippin’ ‘cause of them. Maybe it’ll be euphoria, maybe it’ll be despair, or maybe it’ll be like today: anger at seeing something precious to you being threatened. Hells, it might be all of them at once. Most people don’t know how to handle it, they can’t find a grip and they’re swallowed by it all. But for some? For people like me? We know that this is the time to grasp with both of your hands, don’t matter what. Only that with these hands you manifest whatever the hells you’ve put your paws on and shout to everyone and the world: ‘This far, and no further’!”
So grasp she did, adjusting her grip on the staff turned scythe and swinging, the feathers clustered around it peeling off to form a flensing vortex of black Wind and red Thunder.
The carnage she unleashed with that single spell (if what she'd done could still be called such) opened the way to the deformed flesh of the merchant, now a bizarre hovering maw of discoloured flesh and bones. Without hesitation her two companions used the small reprieve the deluge of steel and Lightning afforded them to push into the last line of defense still shielding the Atomos, although in very different manners
Thancred’s method was to be expected. Where he saw a path, a weak spot to be exploited, he moved and slipped past the Voidsent. Kofle… merely swung her sword. Clearly some measure of sense had returned to her as her slashes became less wild and more measured, one might even say proper, but at the end of the day, she was still ‘just’ bullying her way past the monsters in her way.
Magnificently violent as her girlfriend's display remained, Muur didn't have the luxury of just sitting there watching her. Not, when amidst all of this, a pull on her tail caught her attention. It was the same as the one that had dredged up her errant memories, but more importantly it pulled against the wind.
Trusting it like she had during her nightly dives into the Void, she twirled to see a few errant Voidsent, then kept going as the scythe blade on her staff reformed and happily sliced them to ribbons. Some were beyond the nominal reach of the edge, but flensing floes of black and violet aether ripped the flesh from their bones all the same, even as the invisible tugs helped her shift her stance and keep her balance to properly use her new weapon.
Thankfully, there wasn’t much to correct, given she already was well-used to smashing skulls with her staff and this was just added reach and some different swing angles. Nor was there much of a risk in taking the time to learn given the Void small fries she was chopping through here.
She still committed it all to memory, Muur had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time she had to summon the hollow fragment of Himiko trapped in her amulet.
Between the toll she was reaping, and her two companions not just reaching the Atomos and stemming the tide, but tearing it apart, the fight quickly became a question of ‘when’ the curtains would fall on the Lambs of Dalamud's plans, rather than ‘if’.
Or so it seemed.
While the last act written by the amoral playwright was well on its way to end as an epic, rather than the tragedy they had penned. No one had noticed how another hand had dipped their claw into the ink and begun to write a new act meant to lead into their desired ending…
“The abomination won't trouble us for much longer!” Thancred's relief was palpable as he swung his daggers and sliced yet another strip of Void–flesh off of the warped corpse. “Once it is dealt with, removing the rest of the Voidsent should be no troub–” At that precise moment, the unseen writer sealed their takeover of the unfolding story by adding one last period to the new script. The gate to the Void that sat in the Atomos’ gapping maw flickered, almost like a channel had been changed on a TV and a shape burst out of it faster than either frontliners could react. “What in Thal's name!?”
Neither Thancred, nor Kofle were injured by the newest arrival. But its sudden entrance forced them to step away from the Atomos— just long enough for it to vomit out a new batch of Voidsent, forcing them to deal with them before they could think of dealing with the source. Thankfully, Muur easily recognised the thing that was now flying through the remaining Voidsents that had been antagonising her. It seemed Himiko herself had come to say hi after all.
Muur sighed, cracking her neck side to side even as violet lightning ran from her horns to her tail tip, “Right, let’s pick up where we left off.”
It looked like Himiko agreed, given the furious caw with which she lunged at her.