Götzendämmerung [Act IV]

Between his cleaving strike and the supporting fire of his new comrade, Alastair was pleased to see the beast falter if only for a moment. It’s behemoth-like form rocked as the ball above burst into an acrid rain that poured down upon all from on high. He was not fool enough to desire to be caught entirely exposed by this wave of caustic devastation, but there was scant cover so close to the source that he was forced to simply dive into the creature and use its own body as his shield.

Spared from the worst of the downpour, Alastair’s outer clothing was still left somewhat ruined by the patches that had splashed onto him. Between the armour he wore beneath and the Blut that protected his skin, though, he emerged relatively unharmed beyond the quite putrid stench left in its wake. His strategy for defence had, however, left him vulnerable to a counterattack from the Hollow by merit of his newfound proximity. That gigantic frame flew forwards at a remarkable pace given the relative bulk, and propelled the Quincy away in a manner similar to that which one might flick away an annoying fly. Tumbling through the air, it was fortunate that the open terrain afforded him an impressive amount of air time in which to gather his senses and then deploy Wolke to control his fall before he made impact with the terrain and left an impressive crater in his wake.

With a single beat of his orange wings, the Sternritter defiantly bounced back into the air without hardly a moment’s pause. It was as if he wanted to taunt the Hollow for its inability to finish him off, but his body warned him that a few more of those would certainly be far more damage than he could hope to mitigate. He could taste the blood upon his lips even as his Vollstandig worked to seal up those wounds, the ringing in his head from the collision adding an extra reverberation to the choir of noise. But his blade could cut it, so they were not without hope. The belly of the beast was durable but far from unbreakable, so they would burn it all to ashes if that was what it took.

“Make me an opening, blind it for a moment if you can. We will have to carve this beast up piece by piece.”

He cried out to his surroundings, a stern bellow that came from deep within his chest. If the monster cared to listen then let it do so, but Alastair believed that it would not. What mattered was that his ally heard it, or that he took the initiative to support him again, as he spared not a moment more before soaring forwards with blade in hand. Unyielding in the face of destruction, he braved the melee once again with sword aflame as Alastair poured more and more ambient reishi into the weapon so that it might act akin to a hot knife against butter.

Unlike his quincy ally, Klein was not so quick, nor so defensively capable, that he could mitigate much of the acid rain pouring down upon him, especially as he'd already been keeping himself higher up. The green poison burned through his unimpressive frame with such speed that it nearly looked as if it were simply shooting through him like bullets, and more than a few lines cut their way across his face to reveal bone beneath. He didn't like it, but another of his wings burned away in blue flame, forcing his body to regenerate far faster than it normally might have as flesh tied itself together in agonizingly few moments.

Blind it, huh? He could do that. It looked like it was letting the feathers stay in place, too, so things were going well for Klein, cowardice and all. Despite his injuries, he grinned to himself as he once again unleashed a barrage of knife-like feathers toward the tremendous hollow, intent on filling the creature with them until he had more than enough to work with.

At the same time, though, he tore off his tattered cloak, flinging it upward as golden coins scattered through the air. Raising his hand upward, all of the coins began to glow, energy converging in his hands as the coins turned to soul-synthesized gold. When all was said and done, the burning sphere was several times larger than Klein himself, but hardly large enough to dwarf Uroboros. Even so, it was bright, nearly enough to turn even the darkest night into nearly daylight.

Flinging it toward her, the fireball burst, brightly enough that Klein's own eyes were scorched to blindness just so he could watch and ensure it hit the mark. That was fine. He could repair those, and could operate with pesquisa in the meanwhile.

They kept rising, they kept resisting, and the impatient beast grabbed at its own face like it was bewildered. It was a moment of absolute stillness as the dust settled into Alastair encroaching upon its gigantic presence to hold its enmity. It did not matter about the other creature that was conjuring an attack against it.

At least that's how it was until the scale of the attack increased dramatically and drew its attention towards the immense brightness in the sky that made it impossible to discern the shape or soul of the caster above. Uroboros instinctively opened its mouth to fire off a cero towards the threat but the attempt dispersed under the weight of the bomb that effortlessly connected with the massive target below and forced it to directly deal with the attack.

A massive cloud of debris and dust arose, and a crater large enough to easily fit the entire hollow inside at the centre. It was in terrible shape with its entire upper body being obliterated in places or large chunks of its torso missing. It had instinctively protected the floating ornament behind it by sacrificing as much of its upper body as was required to grab hold of it - as if the hollow had tried to throw it away using its strength before the body couldn't endure the golden light from the heavens above.

Missing an arm, its head, and charred all over. The hollow had a moment of stillness as if trying to recover its bearings, the damage was already being rapidly regenerated and would be healed in no time but the amount of energy it took to be using all these attacks and now contend with its wounds began to take a toll. It needed to eat as soon as possible. It needed them.

Klein's fireball arced overhead, blazing a trail across the sky that Alastair raced to follow. Illuminated, even in the middle of the day, he could not help but bask in that glow as it shot like a golden bolt straight into the heart of their foe. It was perhaps even too brilliant, too bright, for he could feel his irises ache from the prolonged exposure, but that setback was only temporary. Closing one eye he pressed on undeterred, enduring the agonising sensation of the other burning the image of Uroboros reeling from the attack into his mind whilst it was itself blinded. He told himself that it could be healed in time, adjusting his grip upon his sword to account for shifting in balance and angle of approach. There was one part of the creature that had resisted the immolation, he could see it in those final precious glimpses of his eye before it faded into white nothingness.

There was a moment when he stopped at the base of the creature, just long enough to gather his bearings, before he launched upwards towards that fragment of the creature that had persisted where all else had faltered. Its body was beginning to knit itself back together once more, but Alastair would not be so easily dissuaded. His blade not so swiftly turned. With a flash, he cut through the last of the distance with a Hirenkyaku, rising up to be on a level with the ornament.

The Carrington blade came swinging down in a vicious overhead slash, all of his current might poured into landing this single telling blow. Wreathed in orange reishi, aflame to the point of scalding the skin even beneath his gloved hands - though far from the degree that Klein had been able to muster with his supercondensed golden arrows, it was a strike made with utter conviction. Yet even still, no sooner had the blow landed or been deflected than it was turning to return for a second attempt. This fire would not be smothered by one failure, if nothing stopped him then he would carve a brand upon it or turn it to ash before he relented.

Klein knew that this was the defining moment of this battle. He'd already given it so much; more than he would ever normally want to give. Maybe it was because of how much he hated this snake, or because of what she'd done to his woman. It didn't really matter. He didn't care about introspective little moments like that. Even blind, reliant only on pesquisa to see what was happening, Klein's expression shifted to one overwhelmingly cruel in his amusement, a smirk that could only ever show the most vile disdain.

He snapped his fingers, a gesture purely for his own dramatic effect, as one more wing burned away. The myriad feathers he had buried into the creature before him began to flow, as each of them began their synthesis into gold. Unlike before, he didn't need to aim. He didn't need his eyes at all, for the energy of every synthesized feather simply burned outward from the feather itself. If the creature wanted to defend, he had no intention of letting it do so. He wouldn't let it heal, wouldn't let its body repair itself.

Violating this snake was what had carried Klein this far, and now he would do it again. He reckoned things were coming close to their end, which worked out well for him. He flew down to the earth below, making himself a smaller target even as he slipped toward the creature's tail. He'd need to touch her soon if he was going to absorb something like this.

The charred black skeleton steadily regrew muscles over the bones. It did not have eyes but it could sense the environment through its reikaku and the intact flesh of its tail to determine the subtle changes of environment and souls. It writhed and twisted like it was trying to avoid the pest that was flying around its body and targetting its core but its arms did not have enough muscles regenerated to lift the heavy weight of its skeleton to swat at him. The whole processes was additionally slowed down by the feathers which had previously embedded inside of it turning into a prison to make it harder to twist and move.

Attacks could not be avoided and so a critical blow came from the assault on the mask which created another shriek of agony in from the blackened skull. Its head turned with eyes alit with sickly green flames of reiatsu in place of eyes.

The one advantage to the hollow's body being so damaged is that the turning of its head twisted in nightmarish ways so that it had spun all the way around to try and capture the red-headed gnat within the jaws to crush him in a last ditch effort to get rid of it before it faded away from his attacks turning into a fatal blow.

There was a point where Alastair wondered if the creature was able to die, but that was less a concern and more a matter of curiosity. If that was the case then he would have to impair it to the point where death might have been preferable to those that had any care for their physical wellbeing. Still, they both persisted in their efforts to end this creature's deplorable existence. Klein may have had reasons beyond that which he had shared with Alastair, but they were far from his concern. In this moment, all that mattered was triumphing over this beast of mindless destruction.

His hellish blade raked across the ornament that seemed to act as this creature's core, revealed only by the destruction of most all else that it called a body, leaving terrible blackened scars in its wake. But simply charring the creature was not enough, as he felt the sudden burst of heat from all of Klein's feathers alighting in a second wave of molten destruction. Pulling his weapon back, his grip shifted as he turned the point of the blade toward the creature and thrust forward to embed it as deep as possible. Then, with nothing else to hold back, he began to pour every last bit of energy that he could muster into his final attack. First went the white haze that had shielded his functional eye, then the halo atop his head, stripped away as piece by piece it was absorbed by the pommel of his sword and discharged from the tip. The feathers of his wings went next, petal after petal of energy flowing out of him to fuel the fire until the only thing keeping him mounted on the creature was the force with which he was gripping the hilt of his sword.

There was a finality as it all detonated. A deafening burst of infernal destruction that marked the apex of everything that the Quincy could muster. But the skeleton did not crumble to dust quite so fast, there was an un-deathly perseverance to it, as its monstrous head came twisting around at a ghastly angle as it chomped down upon him. The energy of his Vollstandig was expended, the power that had been holding his beaten body together faltering now, but nor was Alastair going to yield this close to victory. He always had something more to give.

With a cry of exertion, rare for the man even in the direst of circumstances, he willed his body to bear the shock as he twisted himself away from that gaping maw and drove the Carrington blade in just a little bit further. There was a sickening crunch as teeth pierced flesh and shattered bone, painting Alastair's face and upper body a brilliant shade of crimson as his left arm was brutally amputated just below the shoulder, and then one final explosion as he turned that lifeblood into energy and forced his sword to burst once more.

Whether that was enough or not, his vicelike grip faltered then as a weary numbness set in. Like the fabled Icarus, he plummeted back to Earth bereft of his wings and bathed in gore.

All as planned. Klein didn't care about the well-being of his companion here, and certainly didn't care about the snake's. There was only one person he cared about on this battlefield right now. As Alastair offered one final assault, Klein moved, one more wing burning away to empower his sonido. He was running low, but he wasn't out yet. His hand stretched out, gripping the charred remnants of the mask, and with a wide grin he began to draw in that power.

It was simply disembodied power, after all; it was no true hollow. Even if it had been, it was profoundly weakened, in its final moments. His Siegfried began to break down the dying hollow into its raw power, pulling it in before it could dissolve into pure reiryoku, or be eaten by some other creature. He would have loved to study this in more detail before he returned it, but he knew that bitch was probably already keeping an eye on this little bout of his.

There wasn't much else to do, after this was done. Should he help that Quincy? He didn't really care much about that, but... Well, it was always good to make friends. He'd think about that when he was finished drawing in this serpent.