Kevin the Bored
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47 FIGHT ON! SHOUNEN!!! 2 ELECTRIC BOOGALOO!!!!
🕑 Added 2024-09-25 22:59:49 +0000 UTCApril 27th
20:19
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Another flurry of explosions fill the street, a dozen fireballs bursting into being across the night sky as Kleus destroys yet more of Rune's projectiles before they can become a hindrance.
Pausing briefly to take a swig of her flask, Kleus turns her gaze down from the roof she stands on just in time to watch her boss inflate like a balloon.
"Gross," she mutters to herself before sighing as she has to deflect yet another slew of projectiles.
"This is so annoying," she sighs again, casually stepping to the side to avoid a ball of plasma and then leaning to avoid another, not feeling all that threatened.
"Why didn't we just kill them all when we got here again?" She asks herself as she watches a bolt of lightning leave her boss' side straight for Rune's platform. "Oh right, cuz that idiot wanted to flirt instead of work. No wonder his pay is shit. Fuckin' lazy romantic."
Seeing that Alphonse has the flying artillery handled, she leaves them to him and turns to the others.
Across the street, she notices I-Frame approaching a window, gun in hand and with his lower face covered in blood. Looks like he's good over there, she thinks to herself.
I-Frame waves to get her attention and makes some quick hand signs to tell her that Leech has dealt with the Nazi that came for him, to which she nods her head in thanks. It's not like she can see through walls after all, and Leech is right below her.
She saw the Nazi guy approach of course, but it's not like Leech of all people would need her help in a fight, so she ignored it.
Turning back to the sky, she notices a giant metal platform with a man on top has risen to meet Rune's platform, which itself is down a person.
So, Alphonse attacked, got rid of one of the artillery before Krieg? Was thrown up by Kaiser. She clicks her tongue at that. Alph doesn't interact well with energy manipulators, so he probably can't get too close to Krieg safely. That's annoying.
Guess she can't just sit and watch after all. Moving forward to the edge of the building, Kleus only makes it four steps before she barely manages to hear the sound of crunching gravel behind her.
Listening to her well trained instincts, Kleus spins around and forms a knife of blood in her hand, rising it in an upward swing before she can even see what she's swinging at.
Her blade manages to dig into the girl's bone by the time her brain processes her appearance.
Dressed in many layers of loose, almost ratty clothing is a girl on the cusp of adulthood, wearing a mask designed to look like a mouse with short curly brown hair covering her head.
Kleus looks down at where her blade has dug halfway through the girl's forearm. Then she trails her eyes over that arm and up to the girl's hand, that is itself touching her own forearm.
The girl who, as I-Frame described on the way over, is a hyper lethal Striker, is touching her.
Fu-
The world freezes.
Mentally, she blinks at the abrupt and sudden silence, almost absolute save for her own beating heart and rushing blood.
Physically, she tries to blink, but she cannot move. All she can do is stare at the girl Kleinoch, she recalls.
Why can't she move? She doesn't know.
Minutes pass and nothing changes, time doesn't move, her eyes do not blink, yet thankfully they do not start to burn.
She doesn't freak out quite yet, mostly just curious and confused. Seeing the world completely frozen like someone pressed pause is certainly an interesting experience if nothing else.
However, being able to observe absolutely everything within her field of view gets boring pretty quickly, so she goes back to trying to figure the situation out.
Behind Kleinoch, she can see what looks like a handprint melted into the lip of the roof, making her think that the girl simply used her power to burn her own handholds into the building in order to climb.
But that brings her back to the obvious question of why the fuck she is frozen in time?
Kleinoch's power is reported to turn anyone she touches into charcoal. The assumption is that she flash burns her victims. There was never anything said about time manipulation, just instant death.
On one hand, she doesn't want instant death, but on the other, she's not fond of the idea of being Greyboyed.
Is it getting hotter? The errant thought comes unbidden, and just as she is about to brush it away, she realises that yes, it is getting hotter.
Wait a minute... She thinks to herself as the temperature continues to increase. You have got to be absolutely fucking with me right now.
She's figured it out, Kleinoch's power.
It doesn't just burn you to death in an instant. Instead, it seems to freeze you in time and effectively turn your own body into an oven, slowly heating you over time that does not pass, until you are nothing but charred meat before releasing the stasis.
That is such fucking bullshit. She doesn't want to be cooked alive.
At least the name makes more sense, Kleinoch translating to 'Little Cook'. It's not much of a comfort to have figured this out.
It's not like she can even rely on her allies helping her, since from there perspective this is all just going to last a fucking second.
God it's getting too fucking hot.
She may poke fun at him a lot and generally treat him like trash, but she knows for a fact that if there was anything he could do, then her boss would save her.
Once again, this does not offer her any comfort, especially as the heat passes the threshold of 'incredibly hot weather' to 'holding you hand on a too hot radiator'.
Except it's not just her hand burning, it's her fucking everything and she can't pull away, no matter how much her brain yells at her to.
God this fucking sucks. If she somehow doesn't die, she's asking- no, demanding a raise.
It's so fucking hot. Her skin is starting to blister.
She's pretty sure her medical degree is just making this worse, because she knows exactly how bad everything happening is.
Ah fuck, she's going to die of heatstroke before anything else can kill her. Her head's already getting woozy, and she doesn't fancy getting brain damage.
She can barely think straight, it hurts so much, too much. It hurts more than her trigger.
The thought of her trigger brings her mind back to memories she'd prefer to forget.
She used to be a cancer researcher, because she herself had cancer. There wasn't a cure at the time, at least, nothing a nobody like her could have gotten a hold of, but she wasn't ready to just die, so she studied to figure it out herself.
She even made some okay progress, she felt some hope.
The the building came crumbling around her.
There's still apparently no answer to what happened, whether it was an accident or a Villain or just a plain terrorist.
the why never really mattered to her though. What mattered to her was how the skyscraper she was working in collapsed around her.
What mattered to her was being buried under rubble for hours, knowing that she was not going to survive. That all the work she put into curing her cancer has gone to waste.
Her research all destroyed, and what did it even matter? She spent her entire life living in the shadow of an incurable disease slowly killing her, and in the end, it's even the cancer that was going to be her end.
Instead she was going to die of either blood loss or dehydration, stuck, unable to move in a cage of rubble.
A whimper tries to leave her burning throat, but still she can't move. Can't to anything except for feel her skin burn and burst around her.
Why? She thinks to herself. Why does it always have to be so slow?
Her brain feels like it's melting out of her ears, she can barely think.
Consciousness comes and goes, but the white hot pain filling her every nerve never falls away.
Without even being able to think, working only on instinct, her delirious mind starts using her power.
She doesn't know why. Her power has always been external, she can't use it on herself except to heal superficial wounds.
Her power lets her control her own blood, but more than that, she can 'infect' living cells with her own living cells and gain control over them. It's how she heals, just bathe them in her blood and wait for the infection to spread until she has full control of all their cells, then she can just pull them back together again.
If she could have used it on herself, she would have by now.
But her brain ignores her and pulls on her power anyway.
The pain doesn't stop, the heat doesn't go away, but slowly, ever so slowly, her mind starts coming back to her, delirium fading away.
She has no idea how long it has been, but her focus is drawn inwards as she feels every cell in her body light up like a christmas tree, her brain suddenly flooded with knowledge on how she can manipulate her own body, how she can repair the damage.
Without thinking about it, she doesn't hesitate to do so, pushing past the blinding pain to focus everything she can on her internal organs.
Eventually, the pain disappears, and she realises that it's because her nerves have all been burned or melted off of her body that is little more than muscle and bones.
It takes her a moment to even realise that her eyes have melted out of their sockets. She has no idea when that happened, but she tries to ignore it, focusing everything she has on staying alive.
Belatedly, a corner of her mind recognises that she must have Second Triggered. Something she would be more thankful if not for all the pain that would have made her cry if she had any eyes to cry with.
She just wants it to stop.
And then, it does.
Like a switch flipped, like a video unpaused. Light, sound, touch. All of it slams back into her like a gunshot.
She barely feels herself stumble back as cold wind digs into her skinless flesh like a million tiny knives, but she embraces the pain, feeling a smile stretch her burnt face as euphoric joy fills her bosom.
I'm alive~.
///
20:20
///
Peaking her head over the roof, Kleinoch notices the woman she was told to deal with.
Her target, Kleus, can manipulate blood, and more importantly, she is their enemies healer. Kaiser stressed to her the importance of dealing with the enemy's healer, and she understands why.
Losing Othala to the Wards left them as the only group without a healer. Which means they are at a disadvantage in a drawn out conflict. Hence her job.
She doesn't really mind having to kill, because Kleus is some kind of Arab or something, she doesn't know.
She's never been particularly fond of her power, just because it's kind of gross touching people and watching them flicker into charred piles of flesh.
That said, she can't deny that she felt it was a fitting fate for the scum and lessers she dealt with back in Germany. All she's doing is finishing God's work. Because clearly he left the filth in the oven for too long, so she just puts them back in and fixes God's mistake of ever letting them out in the first place to dirty the good people's streets.
Her power, when activated, traps whatever she was touching in a time lock 'oven', and when she activates it she can choose for how long they burn and how hot it gets.
For this Gypsy, she decides on an even five hundred Celsius for thirteen days.
However, right when she is about to lay her hand on the woman's back, she abruptly spins around and attacks.
Kleinoch lurches at the sudden movement and bites down a cry when she feels a knife dig into her arm before she can activate her power.
"Fuck!" Kleinoch yells as she looks at the knife of blood digging into her arm.
Then, Kleus flickers.
The knife melts back into blood and splatters on the floor, and Kleinoch's eyes are drawn back to Kleus, expecting to see a lump of charcoal collapsing into a pile of dust.
Instead, she recoils in disgust when what greets her is a figure straight out of a horror movie. Her skin is entirely missing and her finger's are burnt to half their length.
The familiar scent of burning flesh doesn't faze her, but when the hairless, skinless imitation of a woman lets out a sharp, ragged gasp, Kleinoch nearly stumbles back onto her butt.
This.. This is impossible. She can't believe it. No one can survive that, it's just not possible.
As if to mock her thoughts, the figure turns it's too many hollow eye sockets in her direction, each a void staring into her soul.
And then it smiles. What little muscle that remains on it's skull stretching too wide, showing every tooth as it grins at her like Death incarnate.
"Hehehehehahahahaha!" It starts to laugh, the sound haunting her ears.
Just as she is deciding between attacking again or running, the decision is taken away from her when her injury pulses.
Looking down at where she is pressing her free hand into her wound, she feels the cut push. She doesn't have any time to make sense of it before a tingling sensation starts to spread up her arm, numbing everything it touches.
"W-what is happening!" She screams out, terror filling her as her arm starts to twist.
Kleinoch screams as her body disobeys her. Flesh cracks open by itself, spilling out rivulets of blood that race over her body with a mind of it's own.
Rapid, panicked breaths are all she can muster as a her entire body falls out of her control when she feels a slick, disgusting finger touch her chin.
Her head is raised and twin voids match her stare, filling her with a dread like she has never felt before.
"Thank you," the monster whispers as her blood and flesh start tearing off of her bones and crawling up her body and over the monster's finger.
Her blood and flesh flows down the monster's form like a liquid coating, and she only feels more terror when it's skin starts to return, starting with her toes and working it's way up.
"Thank you," it repeats as she feels her life painfully fading away, tears leaving tracks down her cheeks, "For saving me."
She doesn't even manage to scream before her face too, melts away, leaving only a pile of bones to fall before Kleus.
Standing back to her full height and stretching, Kleus feels her grin doesn't absolutely nothing to fade away. She almost laughs again, but an explosion catches her eye.
Right.. She was in the middle of something.
Glancing down at the pile of bones next to her, Kleus happily notes that the clothing is undamaged and quickly gets to work stripping it down and covering herself.
She doesn't want to be walking around in the nude after all, that would just be weird.
Speaking of weird, once she is done redressing, she reaches a hand up to her face, staring at it with her right eye. Her right eye that she lost a long time ago, returned to her.
She has no idea how long she was burning, and she wants nothing more right now that to go home and sleep and watch TV and listen to music and eat and fuck and kill someone and punch a wall until her hands shatter-
But she is a professional. So she does what she can to push aside all her frantic desires and turns back to the street.
She'll just put some effort in and help this all come to a close as quickly as possible first.
She's still going to be demanding that raise. Straight from the big boss herself is she has to.
///
20:21
///
Lighting flashes and is met by a glowing double helix to explode in the air and Alphonse glares at the group in front of him.
Huddled together on Rune's floating platform, is Rune herself, Grenadier, Purity and Krieg.
Alphonse only managed to kick Blitzel off before Krieg arrived, and he hasn't been able to do much since.
Rune by herself is no threat, but with Grenadier she becomes annoying. The exploding projectiles aren't enough to seriously damage him, but they do drain him, which means that he has to keep moving, which also drains him.
Then there's Purity. Once again, not a threat by herself. He's basically her perfect counter, as any attack she sends his way will just give him more energy to work with.
But she's realised that, and now she's only using her power to counter his instead of attacking herself, and once again, attacking from range drains him.
Then there's Krieg, the biggest threat to him, who can directly pull him apart if he gets too close.
So, he can't get close, and he can't do anything from range.
It's annoying, but he can't really deal with them in a timely manner.
Accepting that, he changes tracks. Instead of trying to knock them out of the fight, he will just stall them. Because it's still four against one regardless. So he will just keep them busy so his friends don't have to deal with any unfriendly artillery. Then, once they're done, they can help him.
I-Frame will probably notice his plight soon enough and put a bullet through Krieg's skull, so he just has to wait for that.
///
20:22
///
X blocks a paw full of rotating hooks and blades with a forearm, ignoring the light pain of his skin being torn, and slams his other fist home into Hookwolf's snout, sending his beastly form stumbling back a step.
As he moves to push further, Night leaps at him with a knife in hand, and he simply bats her aside with enough force to shatter all her bones. Unfortunately, her power heals her every time she turns back into a human, and she's only human when she is being observed.
Meaning that once Leech blinks again, she's going to turn into a monster briefly and then back into a healthy human with no self preservation instincts.
He'd really prefer if his subordinate choose to help instead of just watching, but he understands regardless.
Hookwolf charges him again, and X prepares to block and counter yet again. However, right before they clash, Hookwolf suddenly erupts with metal. Every hook and blade and chain making up his wolf-like form abruptly shoot out giant spears of pure metal in every direction, puncturing through the ground and his body all at once.
Welp, there's Kaiser.
As if he was waiting for this signal, because he was, Leech's head snaps tot he side and he moves, becoming little more than a blur as he shoots off towards Kaiser.
Wonderful. Now he just has to actually deal with this annoying fucking mutt.
A heavy weight of slimy, sharp limbs smashes into his back and pushes him further into the storm of blades Hookwolf has become, and he turns around enough to see Night standing behind him.
Right. Her too.
And now Leech is gone, so no one is keeping an eye on her.
Is what he thinks right before a thin line of red shoots down from above and cleaves Night in half from her head to her groin.
Continuing to ignore the numerous blades digging about his insides, X turns his gaze up to meet Kleus' eyes.
He raises a brow at her changed clothes that are definitely too small for her, as well as the fact she apparently got her eye back, but now isn't really the time to be questioning it so he turns his attention back to Hookwolf just as he seems to realise that this two on one just got reversed.
A thousand spears of metal rise from every inch of the street around them, but they both ignore it as they briefly separate just to smash back into each other, Hookwolf actually growling like his motif.
A line of red blurs around them and a second later hundreds of the newly risen spears are sliced clean in half before the line of red comes down once more onto Hookwolf's back.
Unfortunately, it only digs about halfway through before bending, and Hookwolf lets out a roar as he redoubles his efforts, becoming a tornado of blades and blood, all while X and Kleus do their best to tear him apart.
A strange buzzing sound attracts his attention, and at first he ignores it. But then it starts to get louder and louder until it is almost deafening, drowning out the sounds of battle and continuing to get louder.
Even Hookwolf gets curious, and they both break off to figure out its source. It doesn't take long.
They just have to turn to the side and look down another, somewhat untouched street to see the cause.
A giant, biblical cloud of insects filling the street and sky like a thick smog charging right at them.
"The fuck?" Hookwolf asks, mirroring X's thoughts exactly.
At the front of the rapidly approaching swarm, X can make out two fairly bright lights hidden just out of sight under the cloud if insects.
But as it gets closer, he can make the shape out better and better until it becomes clear that he's looking at a car.
A van with two passengers in the front, a blonde in the driver's seat staring meeting his eyes with her own blown wide.
A horrible screech fills the street as she hits the breaks, but it's already too late.
Fuck me-
The van slams right into X and sends him tumbling down the street until he collides with a half destroyed wall on the other side.
In immediate retaliation, a whip of blood slices through the van down the middle, causing each side to fall apart.
Hookwolf refrains from attacking right away, thinking they might be allies, and takes a few steps back, just in case they aren't.
"I'm sorry!" The blonde yells out as she climbs out of her half of the van, barely visible under the swarm. "Our teammates have been lied to and they're chasing us we didn't mean to hit you please ignore us!"
The two meet up in the middle of the remains of the van only long enough to start running the same way they were driving, ignoring everything around them.
Hookwolf is frankly too bemused and confused to even do anything to stop them, when a sudden weight slams into his side and pushes him to the ground.
Groaning to himself once he hears the growling, he realises where he recognised those girls from. They're part of The Undersiders. And if they're being chased by their teammates, then they're being chased by Bitch, the dog loving cunt who keeps interfering with his businesses.
Pushing back against the mutt, Hookwolf heaves and throws it away, back into the thinning swarm.
Getting back to his feet, he observes the new battlefield.
On one side, X is climbing back to his feet with Kleus on the opposite side of the street. To his left is Tattletale and Cavatica? He thinks that's the bug girl's name anyway, who have both been stopped by I-Frame, who is standing before them with his gun raised while the cloud of bugs floats menacingly above them.
To his right is the rest of The Undersiders. Regent, the shitty Master, Grue, the darkness generator, and Bitch with her three giant fucking lizard dogs, the one he threw off the only one that isn't mounted.
Behind him somewhere is Kaiser and Leech, and in the sky is Rune's lot and Alphonse, while Night is dead and Cricket, Kleinoch, Blitzel and Jäger he doesn't know and Fog is still in X's lungs.
Wait, where did Hornet go? Did she just drive off? Really?
A wall behind him explodes out from the upper floor of a still standing building and Leech comes flying out, sword drawn and blocking a thick spear of metal.
He falls to land right behind Hookwolf and the battlefield enters a moment of silence as Kaiser walks up to the building's newly made hole and looks down on them all.
Briefly, Hookwolf thinks about how complex the battlefield is, before realising that it's really just him that's out of position and surrounded. Other than him, The Empire is on one side, Red Heart is on the other, and The Undersiders have rammed their internal drama right down the centre.
He feels himself grinning at the rapidly rising tension so thick he can almost feel it.
Honestly, he's having a blast. This, more than any of the pussyfooting bullshit Kaiser usually has them stick to for petty PR reasons, is exactly the kind of shit he lives for.
A true battle of life and death.
His claws flex and stretch and X cracks his neck across from him. Everyone else does some manner of the same, shaking or cracking their hands, stretching lightly. All of them know the fight is not anywhere near over, and they have only this moment to take advantage and take a breather.
Then the tension gets too high, and on some unspoken signal, everyone tenses and prepares to launch themselves right into battle, only for the tension to shatter as a deep, earth shaking roar washes over them all.
Two dozen heads snap to the same direction just in time for the building behind I-Frame to explode outwards and a blur to charge through and slam into I-Frame, kicking up a cloud of dust.
The two Undersiders girls slowly start backing away as the dust settles and reveals a true monster.
At first, Hookwolf and many others simply prepare themselves for yet another combatant to be added to the fight, but all thoughts of fighting leave them all once the dust settles enough to reveal a pair of heterochromic eyes.
One shines a dull blue.
While other causes everyone who sees them to freeze as they stare in shock at a glowing eye of baleful red.
///
A/N: He~llo! Dear readers!
Another rushed chapter cuz it's 23:53 rn ;-;
This chap prolly isn't as good as the last cuz it's so fucking chaotic and difficult to keep track of. So much shit is going on and I keep trying to solve this problem by adding more shit cuz I'm a retard apparently.
Anyway yeah, idk if I'm going to bother with the next map, I know they're fun but so much shit is overlapping that it'd just end up being a page full of squiggles even more indecipherable than last time.
So yeah, lots of stuff is happening, we're hitting that point in the fic where we're slamming on the gas and going full speed ahead. :)
Hopefully my mind doesn't shatter trying to keep this shit up lol
