A dance with devils. (Robyn)

Whatever spell the 'boys from the gym' had cast took effect in an instant. Before she could even do anything, Robyn had been pulled from the middle of the street and then reappeared within one of the nearby buildings in the same instant. A horizon of smoke and ash surrounded the barrier's town on all sides. What little sunlight could get through the massive plumes of fire and darkness seemed almost muddied in the way the light struggled to be seen. There were no plants, no reserves of wildlife left to be found in the area. The collapsed version of Springfield was just barren and lost.

In the distance, in one of the many other skyscrapers around Robyn, she could see small flashes of familiar light, one golden and unmistakably holy while the other was blue and made her shiver just from looking at it. The sounds of battle could already be heard from across the gaps the streets made between the buildings, but even with the sound of ice crunching in her ears and metal clanging together, Robyn still couldn't do anything to help her allies. By the time she got down and out of her own building, chances were that her allies would have already been dead or captured.

Cassandra, especially, was in danger. Robyn had watched as the Breath of the Frozen Flame had lost her primary weapon before she, too, was taken away. With the sword gone, more than half of her power and offensive capabilities had been lost. Based on what Robyn knew, the only equipment that Cassandra had left was a lightly enchanted backup blade... and a pistol.

It meant Robyn's ally may as well have been effectively disarmed. She needed backup. She needed R-

"You seem a little distracted..." His voice made the hair on the back of her neck stand on its ends. She wasn't sure where exactly the source of the voice came from, but she definitely heard it. At first, it seemed like the stranger had stood right next to her when he spoke, as if he was teasing her with the knowledge that she couldn't see him by speaking directly into her ear. She even spun to try and face the source of his voice when he spoke, and the sharp, hideous giggle that followed made Robyn pull her favorite coat tighter around her toned body. "That's not good, you know. You should really pay attention. Something else requires you to focus!"

Robyn spun on her heel, whipping her gaze from side to side as he spoke. She didn't see anything, unfortunately. Nothing, not even a stray bird, disturbed the wrecked rooms of the skyscraper that Robyn had been locked into. Hell, there was barely even a breeze to be felt within the confines of the office floor she had been dropped into. The broken, sooty windows in the area had remained merely cracked and weakened in her building. What few holes had been made in the side of the building weren't even big enough to the let the wind in. There were no signs of movement, or hints that could have given Robyn an idea of where the stranger was. The most she had at her disposal to identify him were the remnants of a bunch of broken down, rotting, wooden desks and tricks that the shadows played on her eyes. Long, silent moments passed as Robyn watched while the lines of darkness within the room seemed to abruptly shift and stretch randomly. Shadows hiding within the farthest corners of the building seemed to reach out at nothing, with no discernible pattern to use to her advantage, while she searched and searched before finally...

...another giggle echoed from somewhere behind her.

Robyn spun around again, her gun at the ready, despite how useless the weapon was without a target and weak it might have been against a member of the Abyss. She put her back to one of the nearby windows, and when she went to search again, she felt him. He touched her, his hand trailing along the smooth ridges of muscles at her waist for a quick, gentle moment... and then his claws ripped into her.

Sharp, piercing red lines cut across the width of Robyn's abdomen, and as she watched, her heart nearly skipped a beat. Her whole body blanched and stiffened at the touch of his giant, invisible talons, and she nearly choked on her own surprise when she felt his razor-like fingers start to lift her off her feet. He practically crushed her within his impossibly massive grasp, making her gasp and struggle against his grip for a fresh breath of air before he threw her back across the room. He separated her from the safe spot against the window and giggled once more when her body slammed and crashed through one of the many wooden desks in the room.

His laugh echoed in her ears; even when his giggle had long since finished, it just repeated and played again in her mind like the sick effect of some kind of spell. She tried to end the spell, she did, but there was only so much that Robyn could do while she was **** for a fresh breath on the ground and she wasn't exactly a mage. Her gut burned, not just from the lack of air, but also from the fresh wounds he had put there. She squeaked weakly and felt her body start to shake. Her arm refused to move again, but now it was supposed to be metal. It was supposed to obey. A part of her understood why they had been separated, it was her job to understand that. It was strategy. Each and every one of them had been separated into different groups with enemies that were chosen specifically to counter them.

Of course, Robyn's enemy had been selected to try and **** her to relive her dismemberment. She wasn't sure how exactly they had learned about what had happened, but it didn't matter. Hearing it- him laugh as he gradually walked back over to her and scraped his talons on the floor behind him was more than enough to draw a whimper out of her. She tried to claw at her weapons, though only one hand actually moved for her in her agitated state, and felt her cheeks begin to glisten and drip as his touch reached her ankles.

He grabbed her, again, and flipped her over before she could grasp her hammer once more, separating the fighter from her primary weapon. A familiar scream echoed throughout the skyscraper's open space, and Robyn tried to kick back. She felt his cutting touch long before she realized that it was her voice crying out in the building, his fingers threatening the state of one of her knees for a moment before she heard it go off.

Her gun fired four times before she even realized she was holding it again.

Three windows on the opposite side of the room shattered before her, while the fourth shot simply disappeared in the thin air before her. The stranger's voice shrieked suddenly, swearing and snapping as something large and heavy fell back away from Robyn. The ground tore and screeched noisily as the two fighters hurriedly kicked and shoved away from one another, and the invisible man retreated back into hiding.

The windows...

The first time she thought about it, it was done almost unconsciously. She recognized that the thought was there, that the windows could be important in some way... but retreated back still into her own shaking grasp regardless. Her metal limb, after a brief look, seemed fine and healthy. There was no reason for it to malfunction based on the small amount of damage it had received, and yet, it still wasn't functioning.

The windows?

The second time she thought about it, the thought came to her much more firmly. It was an active question in her mind at that point, something that she repeated on her own when she tried trusting in the sharper parts of her mind. Even with her own instincts struggling to assist her, it still took Robyn a little while to catch back up. Every now and then, a nearby desk would shift, or she might catch a couple droplets of blood appearing on the ground before she realized that she had to do something.

She couldn't just surrender. This wasn't some ghost, poltergeist, or invincible monster that she knew nothing about. Even if it had been, she wasn't defenseless anymore. This one was a person, a living, breathing person.

He may as well have just been invisible. A nearby pile of shards crackled and shifted under the pressure of a heavy footstep, and Robyn winced.

The windows!

She didn't have to see him, she could hear him! His body may have been gone visually, but he was still there physically. Robyn's metal arm twitched at her side. She lifted her firearm, and the altered sound of a creature growling echoed throughout the room. She still had eleven shots. It wasn't enough to fill the whole room with shards of glass, but it was enough to create a general safe zone for her to stand in.

More than that, the sounds he kept making even disappeared for a moment when she started firing at the windows. She earned herself a moment to catch her breath again, and when she had, she realized she could move her other arm back up to help steady her aim again. The windows weren't all that hard to break. A single shot was usually enough to finish their already weakened state. Once her gun was empty a small corner of the room had even been covered with a dozen showers of sharp, crystalline, crackling shards when the gun caused the windows to break and shatter in place, and then quickly fell to the ground in a thousand different pieces. She retreated to the corner where she could hide within the small amounts of fallen glass and heard the stranger rumble when he realized what she had done.

The hardest part was trying to lift her hammer back up. The pistol had been easy to use; she had grown used to guns. The hammer felt like something that her dad would have enjoyed in one of the shows that he used to watch. The hammer was-

"I'm surprised you came back from that." The air shimmered on the edge of Robyn's circle. She shuddered and watched as one of Michel's allies slowly reappeared in front of her, but she didn't keep shaking for very long.

It was the only other person who had spoken in Michel's group. The pale, shirtless Cabalist with long, ratty, straight, black hair actually giggled at her again when he revealed himself. His lanky, hairless form flexed as Robyn struggled to keep some kind of barrier between them. The most she had to work with were a few weak desks, but they were better than nothing, and they didn't obscure her line of sight to her enemy for even a moment. She got to watch as his jet black eyes slowly changed back to a normal brown hue, and a part of her visibly relaxed when the giant blood-stained claws on his hands reverted as well. He shrunk right in front her, sighing with each inch that was taken from his overall height, but more than that, he seemed almost sullen when they both watched as one of the tattoos on his chest burned away in front of her.

Sigil after sigil lifted from his skin like floating embers until, finally, the spot was left raw and bare, scarred, but the scar didn't worry him. It wasn't like he didn't have the resources to fix it later.

"You're an artificer, too..." Robyn whispered, and the grip she had on her hammer tightened.

"Guiltyyy!" he giggled again, and Robyn grit her teeth. "Although, granted most 'artificers' focus on enchanting items, my stuff feels a little more... pious, right? Like what better way is there to use a connection to mana or... 'Gaia' than by making it a part of you?!" Robyn watched as he slowly lifted his hands to one of the other tattoos on his body as he spoke. The image of a gargoyle shifted and rumbled beneath his finger as he touched it. His skin pulled with the gargoyle's activation, tugging and moving in horrifying directions for a couple of long seconds before the spell finished. The runes hidden in his tattoo flashed... and then his body began to darken. The artificer became stony and grey. His skin hardened and solidified in most spots as he stepped out onto the glass covered ground... and listened to the shards break beneath his statuesque feet. His shoulders widened and spread as two thick, bony wings spread out and beat once in the air from his back, catching the wind like a pair of sturdy boat sails. He was only on his second tattoo, but there still had to be a dozen more available.

At the very least though, he was no longer a nightmare. He had dropped the form that had tormented Robyn.

She could fight back now.