Muur grunted, rolling with the impact and discharging as much Void Thunder as she could the moment those claws touched her staff. Intellectually, she knew that Static Ice would work better, being a near-perfect counter to Voidsent. But much like before, a tug on her tail and a feeling in her gut said this wasn’t how this whole thing ought to go down, this wasn’t about countering so much as overcoming.
Still didn’t do a lot for how there was a silver beak inches from her neck and an angry bird from an aether-warped hellscape clawing at her, but a heave of her cloak of knives and another burst of lightning bought her some breathing room by forcefully shoving Himiko away.
The bird tried to resist, of course. But getting punched in the face by an arm that wasn't there a second ago would make anyone take a step back. Speaking of, Muur found herself the proud owner of a third arm– of sorts. In response to her desire to get the feathery menace to flock-off, another doll-like arm had uncoiled itself from the nothingness held within the fragment at her back. With its reason of being fulfilled, it gripped her makeshift scythe right below her own hand, giving her a tiny bit more control over the weapon.
Himiko, or rather the envoy she'd sent this time, took offence to Muur's brazen defiance and selfish refusal to die as its better demanded. In response, it too grew an arm. And legs. And far more than that. Its form twitched and snapped as the corpse of every voidsent slain by the trio of adventurers turned into purple mist and flooded the corvid's body. Dark, sickly purple overtook its pristine silver colour as it grew and grew, becoming more and more twisted with every growth-spurt and accompanying sound of bones cracking.
Before long, the thing standing opposite to Muur had almost comically little in common with what it once was. Its talons changed the least, only growing into larger and thicker legs in order to support a body that grew as wide as an adult chocobo’s. But where the legs remained the same, its wings changed the most.
Their feathers wove themselves together into a silver scaffold, with blackened flesh growing around and over the metal. The result was two mutated, yet fully functional arms. Something similar took place with its torso, here too feathers turned into a guide for flesh to overtake. But unlike the wings, enough of them remained that they formed a feathery blanket over its upper body and neck. Everywhere else though, its flesh grotesquely bulged over the silver veins that were once its plumage.
Finally, its head remained avian. But with a crack its beak opened wide, leaving Muur face to face with a dozen squirming eyes that swam around a sea of pure darkness.
“Sloppy. I thought you were a neater eater, now I’m never treating you to anything with sauce.” Muur drawled with a shrug of her three shoulders, subtly acclimating to the additional appendage and her new hold on her weapon. She could work with this.
Her taunt elicited a response. Not at the hands of the beast, busy as they were tearing out two of its feathers so it could wield them as swords while it roared. In its place, it was Thancred and Kofle that called out to her.
The Rogue, perhaps unsurprisingly, told her the most, “There's too many of the devils! We can't– hold for as long as you can!”
Her girlfriend on the other hand– “IF YOU BASTARDS SO MUCH AS NICK ONE OF HER HORNS I WILL TURN YOU–”
Well, she gave Muur feelings that should wait for after they were done fighting for their lives. For now those emotions were just more fuel to the fire, eerie violet cinders floating around her as she leveraged the sheer potency and volatility of her aether to instantly congeal a trio of Void Fire charges. Unstable and sloppy, they wouldn’t last long.
She didn’t need them to last long. Not as she funneled them into her silverine wings and injected them with Void-tainted Lightning aether, catalyzing them into a jet of plasma that truly deserved the name she’d given to her debut spell at the Ossuary, the faux solar prominence turning her into a bottle rocket from hell as she hurtled forward with her scythe poised to take the sliver’s arms and head in the same stroke.
Of course, she didn’t expect it to be that easy, an enemy rarely cooperates with one’s battle plans. Just the fact that she managed to slice most of the way into the crude limbs was a pleasant surprise!
Her attack stopping at a complete standstill a moment later was something of a disappointment, though. Concerning, too. Her weapon hadn’t been able to even nick the lattice of silver lacing the bric-a-brac Voidsent’s body despite the sheer unholy momentum she’d packed into her strike.
All she had left to do was discharge a load of lightning from both the jeweled heart of her scythe and her mouth, which made the eyes writhe in pain and caused a few of them to vanish with what she could only describe as a burst of static. But even with these losses, there were still plenty left to stare her down with bloodthirsty glee.
Then it was the sliver’s turn, powering through the convulsions of the Lightning aether still arcing around its metallic components just to dart in with its swords—and without any care for what happened to the flesh of the arms holding them—in a straight shot to impale her guts faster than Muur could maneuver her weapon or magic. All she could do was brace herself and pray her armor was up to the task of saving her life.
As it turned out, yes, yes it was. It just wasn’t the armor she had bought, but rather the cloak of knives gnawing on her aether and emotions rushing out in response to her split-second panic to intercept the strike, leaving her to skid back with a resounding clang that drove the wind out of her sails and what may turn out to be a nasty set of bruises once the adrenaline wore off.
Before she could get her breath back, a flash of red was all the warning she was given before a lance of aether tore itself out of the Voidsent's face and slammed into hers. It wasn’t strong enough to cause damage beyond some dribble of blood from her nose, but it bought juuust enough time for the sliver to keep the initiative by forcing her to block a downward stroke of both its blades with her scythe.
Upside, she was very used to pain, so she had kept her wits enough to catch with the blade of her weapon. The very same blade that was made of magnetized metal feathers. They clamped down like teeth on the swords while leaving her staff free to pivot and flow around, and Muur with it, even going as far as to detach and new feathers to form into an improvised dagger-axe she happily swung for the envoy’s head at the same time she literally spat a Scathe at the monster.
With its own feather-blades entangled in Muur’s, the Voidsent had to choose between the point of Muur’s newest weapon screaming towards its face, or a glob of pure aether.
A last second jerk of its head saved it from the improvised war-pick, instead of burying itself in the eye-filled darkness. It drew sparks as its point slid across the cowl of feathers on the monster’s head, but where her physical assault had missed, Muur’s magical attack struck true. The mass of unaspected aether of the Scathe splashed against the Voidsent’s shoulder like water, and like a sponge the silver feathers drank deep of it— not in the way they should have though.
They didn’t absorb it to empower the Voidsent, or heal it. No. The feathers turned deep, necrotised black instead, like they’d just up and died. But before Muur would ponder what that meant, the answer provided itself. The rotten silver crumbled away, revealing tumorous void-flesh that twisted into anguished faces as if the Voidsent the sliver had devoured now struggled and fought against their container.
Muur full on cackled, the raw aether of Scathe boiling off her body in an eyesearing aura of unaspected destruction before she let her staff do its job and act like a lightning rod. Perhaps a fire hose would be a better comparison, the way it blasted a torrent of aether with no aspectation other than an intent to hurt, precision thrown to the wind in favor of just soaking the Voidsent head to toe.
Whatever the sliver actually was to Himiko, it clearly lacked intellect. Instead of trying to dodge, or counter, Muur’s deluge of a spell, it stood its ground. Folding its arms across its chest as a means to form a rudimentary guard against the unaspected aether, its eye-filled mouth cracked itself even wider with the sound of shearing metal and breaking bones. And yet, rather than fire another blast of aether at its prey, it chose to do the only thing a Voidsent desires the most: it drank.
Through some odd trick, the majority of Muur’s spell was sucked into the monster’s maw and disappeared without obvious consequences. That wasn’t to say her attack had been useless, her foe was a sloppy eater and numerous wisps of unaspected aether still splashed against its front, corroding its defences away.
Which was why Muur took the chance to slam the feather-covered head of her staff into the bird’s chin, momentarily shutting its mouth before she unleashed another flare of raw aether.
Ghostly eyes, darkness and aether spewed from the Voidsent’s beak as it was struck. But as each of these elements dissolved into the ambient air, it took action. Muur’s blow had put her danger close to the damn thing. The Thaumaturge barely had time to react before its arms uncoiled from its chest, deft footwork saw her dodge one of the blades, but the other raked her across the chest.
Good news, her guts didn’t get splayed on the ground, her chainmail doing its work. Bad news, there was a queasy crack on the side of her head that rippled nauseatingly into the rest of her skull as she got thrown to the ground and all her weight turned the stone floor into a sledgehammer against one of her secondary horns. A fourth arm added itself to her ensemble, helping her get up even as it brushed by the snapped off chunk of horn, quietly palming it.
Hopefully Kofle hadn’t noticed that–
Chancing a quick glance at her girlfriend told her that no, she hadn't. At this time, her attention was still fully on the fight she was embroiled in, not that she and Thancred were fighting the Atomos anymore. That particular creature was laying dead on the floor, killed as much by the dozens of wounds oozing black blood, as the slowly fading aetheric copy of Kofle’s shield buried in the merchant's skull. No, instead the duo were mopping up the stragglers. Mainly imps and some kind of scale-covered ogre monster that was trying its damndest to vomit flames at Kofle and gore Thancred with a pair of wickedly sharp horns.
Pushing that side of the battlefield out of her mind, Muur looked over at her own foe and saw that for all of that it broke off half of her horn, it had come out of all this far worse. Its entire front was ruined and covered in boils and mutations that sloughed off its frame. It was, in the most literal way, falling apart at the seams.
Only three eyes remained in its maw, and every one of them stared directly at Muur as the Voidsent stabbed its blades into the floor. Aether quickly began to envelop them as the creature pumped every bit of power that it could into them. With a heavy step it tore its weapons out of the ground, making its intent to end the fight on the next stroke one way or the other clear as day
Muur answered it in kind, going for an all-or-nothing swing of her staff, freshly reformed into a scythe by a new mass of silverine feathers. The sliver was quicker on the draw, exploiting the slight wobble from her screwed up balance to block her sweep with one blade even as it made to riposte with the other.
Exactly like she’d baited it to.
She twirled in a blur of steel quills, letting go of her scythe in favor of grabbing the monster’s blade and wrist with her construct and flesh hands respectively, yanking it closer to jab forward.
Her snapped off horn, kept hidden in the grasp of the hand that had grabbed it, punctured the Voidsent’s chest like a stake through a vampire.