The scream had the two girls scramble back into their hiding spot, meaning no dealing with headstrong little hornling convinced they can help in the middle of a raid.
Without that particular worry out of the way, Muur charged deeper into the building. Just as she reached a large, tiled courtyard in the middle of it, a black projectile crashed down into a potted shrub.
“Huuuuuh…” It turned out to be Umbrage, beaten bloody and with a brand new reason to wear her eyepatch..
“Less talking, more chugging.” Muur barked, grabbing a potion from her deephold bag with healing intent. It was this or using ice to stall the damage.
The wounded reached out with a wince, but rather than take the potion, she pointed at something behind Muur, “From behind!” Her last eye widened as she shouted.
She'd been almost too late in warning the lizard, so much that the only thing that saved Muur’s precious neck was a phantom tug on her tail, pulling her out of the path of a sword slash that would have slit caved-in her throat through the chainmail at best, outright lopped her head off at worst.
Its wielder didn't so much as blink as it threw a flurry of blows her way, each unerringly precise and merciless.
Muur was not a masterful duelist who could parry, counter and riposte as the rain of blows came. She was the kind of Thaumaturge who went ‘that’s pansy shit’ and threw a hunk of angry ice the size of a sixteenwheeler at whatever the problem was. White-gold frost exploded from all around her, expanding as an inexorable tide that was as close to antimatter for a Voidsent as she could realistically conjure.
Against any of the other Voidsent she'd faced before, her nova of frost would have worked flawlessly. But this one? As the blossoming rime exploded in its direction, it lifted a large shield. Black as a starless night, it pulsed with the blood-red energies of the Void and annulled the ice reaching for it.
On the surface level, the monster was some kind of angelic warrior. It wore a beautiful suit of armour decorated in grandiose filigree, and its sword and shield were of the same breathtaking quality. Its two wings were grand and majestic, and kept him aloft with slow, deliberate beats that had no right to make a man fly.
That was where the superficial look ended though. Everything else about it screamed ‘VOIDSENT!’. Its armour and weapons were as dark as the void between stars, and the filigree? It was neither gold nor silver but rather blood that filled these embellishments. Similarly, while they were feathered, its wings were as dark as a crow's, except for their tip, which was coloured a dark burgundy red.
Sealing the deal of its unholy origins was the helm. It looked… human, too human. Like it wasn't a helmet, so much as a head made to look like one. There was an uncanniness to it all, one that couldn't be easily placed.
“Alright, you want to play it like that, we can play.” Muur growled, a crocodilian bellow rumbling the whole of her ribcage as she forcefully inverted her polarity to Dynamic, baleful red light seeping into the crystal focus of her staff as her amulet thrummed against her chest like a second heart. Clawed fingers tapped the staff without fear, feeling the bite of Void Lightning as it crackled like chirping crows, swiping outwards and forwards to draw out a lance of ravenous aether.
Sometimes, you really had to fight fire with fire.
Compared to her show of force, Muur’s foe was much more subdued. In that it just raised its shield a second time, clearly intent on repeating the same trick as before.
Raising its shield anew it flew towards Muur, a single beat of its wings carrying it nearly across the whole way. But where it obviously expected its defenses to turn aside the lighting, it was startled—one may even say shocked—to experience something entirely different.
Sparks of red danced all over its body in blood-red arcs that resembled great spurts of blood, but despite allowing its ‘helm’ to twist in a rictus of pain (and handily exposing what felt so wrong about it), it plowed through the spell and pulled its arm back with the intent to slay Muur where she stood.
However, just as its blade closed in on Muur’s still healing horn electricity wreathed its form once again, paralysing it just long enough that– “Havok!” The Thaumaturge cried, clamping her protective amulet with her offhand and letting it drink deep of her raging aether, two massive prongs of sanguine Lightning flaring out like a hungry beak to clamp down on the offending limb.
For a moment, everything seemed perfect. Her attack would bite into the Voidsent's unflesh and slice it to ribbons. But yet another tug on her tail by an unseen force caused her assault to veer off course, raking its chest and leaving deep gouges in the ‘armour’ instead of taking off its arm.
Muur let out a displeased noise more reptilian than human in the back of her throat, but trusted the invisible ribbon wrapped around her tail. Trust that was rewarded when the eye-slit of the Voidsent's ‘helm' opened in an instant.
Hidden behind what had actually been a ginormous set of eyelids sat an equally massive eyeball. Calling it disgusting from its sheer size alone wouldn't be far fetched, but it would ignore how its surface was covered in glistening veins, engorged with blood. Or how the pupil was misshapen in headache inducing Rorschach patterns.
As befitting of an ocular abomination more at home in an horror game, as soon as Muur finished taking in its repulsive looks, Aether flowed into it. Without the assistance of whatever that ribbon was, the beam that spilled out moments later would have pierced her shoulder. Now though, most of it sailed past the thaumaturgic lizard– albeit not without drawing a cut across one of her cheek.
“I’m taking your wings for that one.” Muur promised, crimson plasma blooming into a roaring scythe ‘blade’ at the head of her staff. Fuel wasn’t a concern, not with how deep her aetheric reserves ran and how they kept bubbling up thanks to her Dynamic polarization.
Neither was damage. Its last trick spent, the knightly Voidsent attempted to defend itself, but Muur's affinity for lightning made itself known one last time by freezing the monster’s body at a key moment.
Red lightning entwined with silvery sparks slipped right past its shield and lopped the monster’s head right off, before delivering on that promise by keeping on going as the body slumped, wings sliced off and rapidly swallowed by the roiling plasma. Soon, the same applied to the rest of the corpse, Muur’s amulet thrumming happily against her chest as it gorged on the outpouring of aether.