Chapter 460 - Far Future Ch. 170 – The Fish are Frying (1/2)
”Look at that one's face. He must be constipated.”
”She obviously hasn't had sex in ages.”
”Yeah, he's about to lose it. Ten credits he goes barmy.”
”You're on! How about that one? He still thinks wearing blood is stylish, and he has an ear fetish.”
”Nowhere near as stylish as an insignia fetish, I agree.” We patted our hair with at least fifteen adornments all around.
”Arrogant pricks and are still afraid to come over here. I wonder why.”
”They can't play with the big girls, that's why, and they never will.”
We had just the right amount of Hag in all our words, and they cut really, really deep, shrill and harsh and making them wince as they had no choice but to listen to them. Start messing with subsonics and ki, and taunts can really, really grind on you.
Especially when you are emotionally unstable emovore emo demon-wannabes with sanity issues. La!
One coven of bladewitches couldn't taken it and came over screaming for us. A minute or two later we fed their corpses to the shoggoth, one to the treemother, and one to the Kundi Queen.
Finally having time to watch us personally, the scattered drow gladiators were a bit shocked at the way we manhandled them... and were more than competent enough to realize just how bloody dangerous we were.
Of course, group fights weren't nearly as fun as one on one duels, but that wasn't required until the last thousand. They were fully capable of working together, but, oh, there was a problem with Stupid.
Trying to out-teamwork a bunch of Ranthas in melee combat was an exercise in frustration.
Four carapace-armored Warlocks came trundling up with their Dire Finessed versions of sane weaponry, moving with the confidence and cooperation of having fought together (and one another) for maybe centuries.
It still wasn't the same as literally starting out as the same person, with the same Stats, same original personality, same understanding... and most importantly, the same absolute trust.
The resulting fight looked like a choreographed sketch of WTF Is This. Jensa deciphered all their weak points, Keva hyperanalyzed their style, Celestia scared them despite themselves, and I went right into the middle of them and took them all on at once, generating myself about twelve AoO's in the bargain.
None of us killed the ones we were facing. Shattered fractal blades went flying, carapace armor protested to uncaring adamant, and Chill took off the head of Keva's opponent, Flair spit Jensa's opponent through the throat, Hawk went and plunged through the armpit of my facing opponent and tickled his heart; and I reached over, grabbed the head of Celestia's opponent, and twisted my hand. His head turned 270 degrees, and then I did a nice spin around, knocked all the stunned dead Warlocks off their feet with his corpse, and dropped him down.
”No style.”
”Trash footwork.”
”You see how yours was ready to stab the other one if you dodged! Mwahahaha!”
”Ohhhhh, such glorious armor. It really helped them a lot.”
More insignias went into our hair, and the drow grit their teeth. This time the ones who were looking a little barmy were coming for us, so we sort of drifted together, while the other drow woke up and decided that killing the other survivors was something a bit more viable.
To their immense consternation, since we were getting chased and they were coming at us to keep us busy, we felt obligated to go wander over and kill off the ones that were trying to avoid us in their trepidation... which the surviving contestants somehow didn't mind at all.
The mothers kind of wandered around us. The Kundi Queen was just a lethal mass occupying a lot of real estate; the treemother's lethal root field was like a walking mine zone, and she covered even more area with her psi-enhanced thorned limbs; and the shoggoth was eating things and spitting out new oozes. It was rather entertaining when a few hundred pounds of omnivorous goo landed on a drow that wasn't paying attention and began to digest them.
Being the hardest to hurt and maybe-probably having a more aggressive mindset with my Exemplar Lite status, I took the lead in butchering the drow trying to butcher survivors, while the queens kind of funneled the drow in our direction. The girls played with the ones coming in to challenge us, and watched very carefully for a Master trying to slip into the mix and surprise us, not that they were going to escape Jensa or our Rantha eyes.
One did try, using optical camouflage and some very sophisticated stealth tech that even thwarted tremblesense. However, Devasight makes one immune to light-bending, and his advanced holography was just that. He was real surprised when Jensa saw him coming the whole way, and to the immense intellectual appreciation of that Eleven, he got to find out what it was like to attempt a 42 or so Death save, and failed utterly with Hawk in his ear as he moved to cut at Keva.
Too bad, so sad. Happily, he wasn't surprised for too long.
The girls took them down murderously, moving with a harmony and absolute trust and confidence that the drow simply couldn't emulate, setting one another's kill-strikes up, analyzing one another's opponents, not even needing to be looking at a drow gladiator to kill them. Throats opened, hearts were poked, skulls were cloven, heads and limbs went flying, and twice they kicked drow right into flying oozes, to their great discomfort.