97 Chapter Ninety-Seven – Dance Dance Dance (1/2)

The Fanatics all had one of their arms converted to a razor-sharp pincer, and were all oiled and glowing with muscle, totally ignoring the thorns nailed into them, as if they were ribbons or other garnishes to their perfection.

They didn't ignore it when Briggs smashed right into them and out the other side, mangled bodies flying in every direction. I heard the touch of Thunder as Estemar Smote his first target, thirty seconds until he could do it again, and finished the Fanatic with a crushing shield slam to the throat.

Their charge broken by this sudden appearance, the Fanatics naturally began to converge on this interesting new development.

Endure thrummed, burning flames red as blood and white as his soul, and Endure began to test the limits of their tolerances with relentless power.

The Spinners were sweeping forward on the flank. Mutated one-breasted succubi, with overly long legs that carried them with great speed, two arms, two pincers, dancing forwards with inhuman grace.

Behind them loomed the Vile Dancer, six-armed, snake-like lower torso, hands, pincers, bird-like talons, and an insectile stinger, along with dozens of whipping, poly-colored tentacles undulating up and down the length of her like macabre feathers. The human hands, arms trailing tentacles like grotesque ribbons that all bore bells and were tinkling all wrongly, wielded two massive Jotun-sized sabers as daintily as knives, shining Abyssal silver and forming scenes of madness as they spun about her lazily.

Both of them had hazy purple-pink auras around them, fascination effects that could stun a watcher and render them helpless to fight back with a combination of desire and overwhelming appreciation of their alien, inhuman beauty.

Ran into my Null and did nothing, of course.

Twenty of the Spinners. They saw me coming, and whirling, began to converge to meet me.

I Inspired, and moved the Essence from Hasty Soul to Expert Soul, crashing into them at merely forty mph.

I drew an arc of motion through them. Their slender blades shattered and went flying, their tittering song dissolved into painful, ecstatic screams somewhere between horror and orgasm… no, they definitely dropped into horror as vivic flames blew through them with the banefire.

I crashed through their dance, broke the wild frenzy of it, and parts of Spinner demons went in all directions as Tremble wrecked their singing with a thundering condemnation in Celestial backed by Stand's pounding dreambeat stamping order and rhythm onto their wild dance. They lost their Demon Dance bonuses, and I reaped them with Cleaves and Attacks of Opportunity as they were stupid enough to try to snip at me with their pincers, and Sword Beats Fist generated more attacks.

My feet were moving too fast to see as I ducked, dodged, and danced through the swirl of attacks they were aiming at me, totally ignoring a good chunk of them as they slid along my skin uselessly, and then hacking through others as I slammed through their bodies with crushing force. They slammed into one another, disrupting the dance further, or were crushed underfoot as I came moving and punched my heels into their faces and chests.

It took six seconds to rip a path through them, the fires of Tremble drawing crescent arcs right and left like blooming flowers as they died explosively, ending up at the center of a blossoming moonflower of banefire when I was done.

The Dancer paused for just a beat, despite herself, to appreciate the sight. It was QL 40, after all.

Tremble dipped, and the Painted Rose Pattern etched into the air by the edge of a +VIII Blade followed the Banestar that spiraled up her length and shot toward the Dancer.

She definitely wasn't prepared for a banefire-and-vivus cocktail made up of her little over-sexed subordinates, and instinctively crossed her weapons to parry the attack.

Black banefire roses splashed white vivus petals over the front of her, and her corpse-white flesh was cut and burned, peeling away to reveal the rot beneath. Skin was flayed from postulant muscle and weeping bone, and suddenly the bitch wasn't beautiful at all, as vivus chased away the erotic aura hungrily.

She shrieked, her arms came away to glare at me with a promise of exquisite, torturous revenge-

'Damn, girl, don't you know that when you cross your weapons in front of your face to avoid a Banestar, True Vision don't do shit for you?'

As she brought her sabers and limbs down, Tremble was literally less then a foot away from her face. 'Oh, hey, didn't notice that third eye there, girl, thanks for the target.'

Naturally, she had no time to evade. Tremble was at +X with Bane of Legends, and all of my weight and speed was on that One Strike as I hit her.

Spirited Charge, Valorous. A x4 Charge to the face, with a x4 crit on top of it, for x7 damage, and a One Strike on top of it all.

Tremble went in all the way to the hilt, and as she was smashed backwards, I was already rolling over her, and turning the thrust into a rolling slash.

Her skull split like a melon – damn, her hair was tentacles, too – and her spine and upper body decided to join the effort, even as they were driven backwards into the writhing mass of her scaled, serpentine lower body. She had been swishing and swaying with that lack of legs, and now she was just spasming out.

Vivus erupted richly as it tore through the unstable matrix of the ectoplasm that made up her body. A total sensate, I could hear her scream as it devoured her more absolutely then she probably thought possible. Nope, not reforming herself back in the Warp in failure. Her eternity was at an end, and –

With an explosion of vivus, the misty Jaws of the Land came up to feast, streaming up past me like a breaching whale, and then slowly withdrew, sending a wave of heavy unwhite out past and around me, winding and writhing in the direction of the burning Spinners, and driving down on them like feeding eels.