Clash of Retinues

Gil charged towards Rosa, Ron held aloft in front of him and Mary strapped to his arm. Rosa was high class, but she was also a mage; most of that type was a lot worse in close quarters than at range. She even had a dedicated bodyguard in the form of Jessica, based on Rose’s reports. There was a small but real chance that if he closed in on her with sufficient speed and violence, he could finish this immediately.

He was halfway across the deck of the ship when Rosa threw up first one hand and then the other, and rushed him in turn. She moved with unnaturally jerky speed, effortlessly dodging his first thrust and responding with a sweeping strike with her staff to his leg. Somehow her blow, aimed at his knee, ended up hitting his hardier thigh and getting mostly absorbed by his bikini armor.

Her follow up was almost instant, though Gil just barely managed to bring the holy shield down to block. Gil finally realized what was happening and took proper countermeasures, focusing on Lancelot’s ring. The slowing magic upon him shattered, and suddenly Rosa was moving much closer to his own speed. Ron turned easily in his hands, its head sweeping downward towards her shoulder. It connected with a crunch, eliciting a grunt of pain from Rosa.

Her clothing was unmarked, and Gil suspected it was every bit as enchanted as his bikini armor, but her arm hung loose for a moment before a swirl of green sparks fixed it up in a flash. Then she darted away to open some space between the two of them. She was still faster than him, in the jerky fast forward way that told him that time magic was still at play. His best guess was that she’d layered some kind of acceleration effect upon herself at the same time as the slow on him, and the ring only removed the hostile effect.

There was only so far Rosa could go in any given direction, as going more than 100 feet from the edge of the ship would mean quitting the field and forfeiting the battle. That was, of course, another method of beating Gil that had a real chance of working if she had any particular way to move him around. He decided to err towards staying near the ship to avoid any surprise telekinesis, but giving her space proved to be something of a predictable mistake.

If she’d wanted him dead as much as she should, she’d have probably obliterated him with a pillar of light, the same way she did Balin. Instead, Gil felt his entire body freeze up. Thankfully, Lancelot’s ring cleared up the paralysis completely by the time she finished healing her arm. She largely shrugged off the bolt of lightning he shot at her, a scowl spreading across her pretty face.

She didn’t waste time talking to him, instead narrowing her eyes and chanting under her breath. A floating holographic targeting reticule appeared around Gil, and he darted behind the ship to break line of sight. He distantly heard her say the first two proper words of the battle.

“Ah. I see.”

Well that was ominous. Gil decided to cut his losses and activated the ring of invisibility.

••••••••••

The glorious charge towards the castle of King Anguish was not interrupted by petty things like “their target quitting the field and closing the gates.” Against most, it might have. The gates were quite impressive and reinforced with an iron portcullis. However, Gil had sent along his dragon Echidna and she was armed with a mighty blade which could carve through nearly any material. The gates themselves were easy enough to destroy, the iron bars shattering like wood, and the underlying wood was as easy to carve as a smoked ham.

Of course, it did delay them for precious moments, so by the time that the gate lay open the hall that the gate led into was ready to welcome them. Jaheira had turned the moment that she realized their plan, commanding the soldiers who had submitted to Kusai’s authority to take up positions where they could strike through the murder holes to either side of the hallway.

In the hallway itself, the attackers were faced with nearly a dozen bears and dire wolves, backed by a duo of unearthly beautiful elven women.

Lucan strode forward with his shield up, forming a wall with his fellow knights that pushed forward. For all the strength of wild beasts, they are after all only beasts. If they could be held back for but a moment, then swords would meet their vulnerable guts or spears from the second row would strike their shoulders. The beasts fell easily enough, though the knights advance was stalled for none wished to take the fatal step forward to open their flanks up to archers. It felt reasonable, given that the foe was only too happy to throw themselves upon the knight’s blades.

Echidna sought to correct this mismatch in the most direct way possible: by hacking her way through the wall itself. The astral sword, swung with more vigor than skill, cleft through the very stones like so much oak. The men within were safe for a time, but a dragon sought their heads and a hole that would allow them to be flanked formed one sword stroke at a time. Perhaps not large enough for the dragon herself, but Lucan’s bandits would welcome the opportunity to do battle with mere yeomen with bows given the alternatives.

The battle was going quite well until the strange nymphs began weaving their magic. First they cast balls of glowing blue light which reinvigorated the bears, closing rather critical wounds, and then they began flinging golden spheres with far more concerning effects. Sir Gareth froze in mid strike, as if he’d turned into a statue, and it was only the quick reaction of sir Tristan that saved him from having his head struck clean off.

Hellawes, though quite new to the battlefield, recognized them as a threat and attempted to freeze the blood in their veins with her Blizzard Materia. Her first spell was strong enough to hurt but not kill, and as it turned out they could see and target her with Hold Person every bit as easily as she could target them with blizzard. Her body froze, wrapped in golden light.

Gawain and Lancelot both decided to break ranks and strike deep, abandoning caution to strike down their foes and push forward past the beasts, trusting their armor to protect them. It mostly did, though frantic sword work was every bit as responsible for their survival against an entire pack of massive wolves as their maille was.

Unfortunately, they faltered at the last. Well, one did. Gawain made a note to pray for forgiveness before knocking the head off of one of the spellcasting nymphs, but Lancelot sought instead to subdue his nonlethally. A mercy which served well enough against Ginny, who could be disarmed, was a fair bit less effective against a nymph whose magic was entirely internal. However, he let his guard down for only a moment when he gazed upon her angelic countenance at the tip of his blade, and so was open to Mental Domination.

In normal circumstances, his ring would have aided him in this moment, allowing him to shatter the enchantment, but he had spent precious little of his life without that failsafe and thus came to depend on it overmuch. He froze, and then heard her soft spoken request to protect her. Though it would wound his heart, he could not allow his friend to harm this perfect woman. He could not allow any of them to come near her. He hardly even noticed the pack of wild dogs running past him from behind as he took up his position in the doorway.

••••••••••

Aurora waited patiently until Kusai was alone with one of his slaves before she made her move. Marion moaned with faintly disingenuous pleasure as he took her to his bed, with much of his retinue clustered near the gates in case the knights made it past the summoned wolves.

As far as she could tell, Kusai intended to let his army-in-a-box Jaheira manage the knights until Rosa finished off Gil. She was his trump card after all, and Gil was technically a T2. In normal conditions, there was minimal chance that a T6 combatant would face the slightest difficulty destroying a T2 of any description in moments. Gil was, of course, cheating, but that was to give Rose exactly the opportunities that Kusai intended to just wait out.

Aurora managed to gather up a half dozen knives and daggers from among the dead and in the kitchens. They weren’t as good as darts for her purposes, but they would certainly do. She made sure to avoid anyone who might see her, thus alerting the enemy to her presence. Stealth would be quite the lost cause if every one in Kusai’s retinue could see her through the walls.

She took a deep breath when she was right around the corner towards the master bedroom, formerly the king’s. Marion’s breathless gasps and Kusai’s gurgling grunts combined to mask her sound, but unfortunately they had left a guard at the door: Jessica Rabbit.

Supposedly she was quite impossible to kill. Lily had heard that before, of creatures a fair bit more impressive than this medieval tart. A single moderately Sting empowered dagger went flashing down the hallway in the moment she stepped out, and struck directly through Jessica’s throat. There was no blood, and the dagger didn’t lodge into her. It passed through and thudded into the stone wall up to the hilt.

The spot where Jessica had been struck crumpled away and burned, leaving a brown and black as if her skin burned and melted away. Within was nothing but brilliant white light. She clutched at her throat in sheer shock and fell to her knees, feeling true pain for the first time. A scent of burning plastic filled the air.

Aurora had no time to watch in sick fascination. She charged down the hallway, throwing the door open and tossing every one of her remaining daggers into Kusai’s heaving, exposed back. Lily’s precision and Rose’s anatomical knowledge combined, allowing her to strike the heart, brain, spine, and two major arteries within seconds of one another.

Kusai was dead, but his retinue didn’t vanish. There was someone in his retinue capable of raising him from the dead. Rosa, of course, and perhaps others.

“It’s possible that while she’s in the duel, she doesn’t count as being in his retinue, but I’ll be honest; that was probably patched out at some point.” Gil had told her. “So either I’ll need to win, or you’re going to need to get his body in a state where she can’t resurrect him, or possibly just get the body as far away from the battlefield as possible so they can’t find him. As long as he dies before me or Lucan and doesn’t get resurrected, we win.”

Rose turned around and locked the door, barely even registering the panicked shrieks of the red skinned woman pinned beneath him. Given that physical removal was quite out of the question at the moment, poor Marion would likely be quite a bit more distressed before Rose was done. She didn’t know exactly how to render him impossible to resurrect, but mutilation seemed an adequate first step.