Frozen Fractals Team 1

[Vyx'aria]

Szesh crashed beside her. Blood pooled and shimmered across his scales in nets of crimson, glinting against the frost-rimed floor. Vyx’aria’s vision swam, pain still screaming from her frozen arm, her skull pounding from the wall impact. But she saw him, truly saw him. Not as a beast or brute. Not now.

As a weapon. Or perhaps... an ally.

The glimmer of magic yet radiated from his chest, a furnace not quite extinguished. And she had seen the flame, the wrath he could call forth, the fire that could sear through this eternal cold.

Vyx’aria rose, slow but deliberate. Her ruined arm hung limp, blue from frostbite, but her good hand clenched the hilt of her emerald-forged blade, its grip fashioned from the shed scales of Neha.

She turned to Szesh. "Lend me your fire."

Her voice cut through the wind, low and serrated, a command, not a request. She held the blade out, angled toward him.

If he listened, her weapon would ignite, not with mortal fire, but something honed, ancient, and hungry. Flame would chase along the emerald veins, the draconic core within the sword roaring awake. The air would shimmer with the strength of true dragonfire.

With a twist of her body, Vyx’aria launched.

She became shadow and blaze, a spiral of silken motion and sudden, lethal strikes. The Queen had just torn the conjured beast in half with a final pulse of magic but too late. The creature collapsed in a heap of frozen sinew, its prize clutched in one claw, the navel crystal, torn from the Queen's body.

Vyx’aria was already moving.

She slashed low, the fire-imbued blade carving clean through the Queen’s right arm, leaving a cauterized stump of ancient, blackened bone. A deafening screech shattered the air. The Queen turned, and her staff began to rise for a retaliatory strike but too slow.

Vyx’aria whirled, ducked, pivoted on her heel, and her fire blade cleaved through the Queen’s left arm, the one clutching the scepter. Severed just below the shoulder, the limb flew skyward, spiraling end-over-end.

Time slowed. Bloodless, crystalline ichor glimmered in the air like falling snow.

And with a snarl of effort, Vyx’aria raised her boot, whirled around and kicked.

The arm and scepter launched like a javelin across the throne room straight at the mage knight for him to snatch out of the air.

"FINISH IT!" she roared, voice ragged, bloody, triumphant.

The Queen shrieked, blind and burning, twisting in agony, her heart crystal, the most important one, now exposed.

Szesh
Vaezhasar Drakspae

 

[Szesh]

((Excuse the quick out of order but just so we're clear))

Szesh obliged Vyx'aria's request. Something in him recognized the scales of that hilt, but he could not consciously remember how or where, nor did he have the energy to try. With a painful inhale, and a forceful exhale, he washed the drow-queen's sabre in fire.

It would have to be enough, as his reserves were running low. The same processes that generated that fire were trying desperately to warm his body against this unnatural cold.

 

[Vaezhasar Drakspae]

Szesh
Vyx'aria

Vaezhasar seized the severed arm, still clutching the scepter, out of the air.

This was, in his current state, miraculous. Not in the theological sense, though there were probably several deities who would have found the situation bemusing enough to lend a hand, no pun intended. More in the sense of "how is someone with more holes than mother nature designed them to have catching airborne...anything, with any level of precision."

He had good reflexes, certainly. The suit aided him, absolutely. But he'd thought himself far too ventilated to commit to such a pinpoint maneuver. Turns out: not so much. The body has a remarkable capacity for ignoring its own damage reports when survival is on the agenda, and survival was currently having a board meeting with all stakeholders present.

He wrenched the scepter from the arm's grip, the fingers putting up a decent fight, and threw it down. Then he stomped on the severed limb.

There was a satisfying crunch.

All the while, the creature he'd summoned, now severed at the waist, which really should have been fatal but had elected not to be, did not die.

Its upper half moved forward, propelled by its powerful arms in a baffling parody of locomotion.

And chomped clean through it.
It wasn't the sort of flesh-tearing bite one would expect from a predatory animal; none of the shaking or dramatic flesh-tearing occured. It was something more akin to a cookie cutter meeting gelatine. More than half of the Queen's knee simply... disappeared, replaced by a U-shaped absence. Negative space where positive anatomy had been making rather important structural contributions just moments before.

The knee also bent. Inwards.

The Queen toppled sideways, her damaged leg folding at an angle that no joint should fold at unless it had abandoned all pretense of ever again functioning. The creature immediately mounted her like a rabid chimpanzee, laying her flat on her back with its not-inconsiderable bulk.

It grasped her face on either side and began to slam the back of her head into the floor.

Hard.

Hard enough to leave spiderweb cracks radiating outward from each impact point, the ice protesting this treatment with small musical tinkles that would have been quite pretty in any other context.


Vaezhasar sneaked up on them.


Well. As much as an injured man wearing enough armor to outfit a small cavalry unit could "sneak." It was less sneaking and more "shambling with intent." But the Queen was rather preoccupied with having her skull used as a percussion instrument, so tactical subtlety became somewhat relative.

When the Queen raised an arm, her remaining functional arm, quantities of functional limbs being a rapidly diminishing resource, to try and pry the creature off herself, Vaezhasar raised the scepter and smote her across the wrist.

It broke with a deafening crack, and more than just her wrist. The upper portion of her forearm went limp, like a slinky.


The creature, noticing this development with a sprinkle of so-called tactical awareness, repositioned itself.

It released the woman's head, which had by now acquired several new dents and was looking decidedly non-regulation, and placed its disembodied upper portion a side mount position.

Then it bit down on her other arm.

Crunch-Munch.

Vaezhasar lifted the scepter again.

With great effort, that'd have his musculature filing formal complaints with management later, he drove its icicle-shaped head downward and through the Queen's belly.

She shrieked.

Which was unexpected. He hadn't thought her capable of feeling a damned thing. Her body appeared too... artificial to facilitate anything approaching mammalian nerves. Too crystalline. Too sculptural.

Yet wail she did.

Annoyingly. Unceremoniously. Without any of the dignity one might expect from an ancient monarch facing her demise. She thrashed like an animal. Flailed. Bucked. Looked less like a sovereign and more like an angry, cornered degenerate baffled by the fact that she was receiving just comeuppance, and not particularly graciously either.

There was something almost disappointing about it. Vaezhasar never quite liked sore losers.

Vaezhasar dropped to one knee.

He drove both hands into the Queen's exposed chest cavity, fingers spreading wide, like a seasoned swimmer preparing to break the surface of water. Like someone reaching into a pond to retrieve something valuable that had been foolishly dropped.

He got a good grip on her "heart."
It was crystalline. Blue. Roughly the size of a bowling ball.

He heaved.

He pulled.

He stood up, planting his feet flat on the ground, engaging his legs, his back, his core, all the muscle groups that fitness instructors are always going on about. The sort of full-body exertion typically reserved for moving furniture or uprooting trees and not extracting vital organs from giant sorceresses.

Slowly, but surely, the big blue crystal began to come loose from the colossal woman's chest.

She tried to grab him. Her hands came up, weakly, grasping. But he saw it in the way she moved, the sluggishness, the lack of coordination, that her strength was rapidly departing. Taking its leave. Clocking out early.

With one final tug, a real teeth-gritting, tendon-straining effort that would probably result in several days of regrettable back pain, he ripped the heart out of her.

It came free with a wet, sucking sound.

Vaezhasar held it triumphantly over his head, the crystalline heart catching what little light remained, and exclaimed:"Viiiiiiictory!"