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Panther1945 continuing from Chapter 4 . Old enemies meet again while their captives try to escape from their merciless grasps.
(Note: The entire 9,900+-word chapter would not fit in the text block below, so what's posted there is but a preview. Please download the PDF above to enjoy the whole piece.
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT --->
Warp War 2019: Part Five: Duel
By: DankeDonuts
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dankedonuts/
With imperious tread, Zeramere Ainlessar Kryiel Oasuhn Irrodilor, Duchess of Gharalon Celvaeun, made her way past several rooms in the Human ‘museum.’ Each with another diorama, another miniature city, built into the floor. Each with its own name; Seattle, London, Shanghai, and so on. Translated to her through a helm display whose computers had assimilated the local language. None of these were relevant to her search. None of them this ‘Paris France’ she had been informed of.
Her cape, white with a golden icon of a twin-tailed scorpion, trailed behind her. Her staff, long and capped with a yellow-gold crystal, cut down any obstacle in her path, any hanging dross or that dared to impede the movement of her head. She could be a very patient woman; a noble-blood trained from birth in the arts of war and courtly intrigue. In battle, as precise as she was ruthless. In politics, capable of crafting schemes that took decades, even centuries to unfurl. But today, there was no time for patience.
The young Human, trapped within the miniature command sled secured to her side, was feeling less and less worthy of the effort it took to move his miniscule weight about. “The moments of your life are numbered, boy.”
Her captive’s mewlings of innocence, carried to her ear and translated by her helm’s subsystems, were cut short by a nearby rumbling. Explosions? Footfalls? Impossible! ‘My drones haven’t altered me to any other presences!’
Zeramere marched double-speed across the corridors. Fully aware of how conspicuous her attire -- white and gold armor, with its prodigiously pointed shoulders, along with a helm-screen of glowing yellow -- made her among the walls of dark grey and floors patterned after black marble. Design motifs selected to make the various signs and advertisements more eye-catching. She twirled her staff in a defensive pattern if she could not sneak up upon her enemies, she would intercept their attacks!
She ignored the sensory data provided by her helm’s computerized systems. Her ears were all she needed to follow the most unsubtle sounds of destruction. Sounds which suddenly stopped as the approached the open-door labeled ‘Paris, France, WWII: Scenes From The Liberation’. Stilling her weapon, she set its tip ahead of her as she crept inside.
She could barely believe what she saw. Before her, to one side of yet another miniature city in a wide pit, stood one of the Xol'Orimi! Heretics of old, bent on the glorification of insane and very false ‘gods’ that the Duchess’ primitive forebears had been tormented by and rebelled against in ages past. The nature of this waste of skin, this desecration of all it meant to be Vel’Adrini, was plain to see in the exposure of so much skin on a world tainted with alien life. Let alone the profane runes scared into it amid wounds fresh and old. The heretic was drawing something to her mouth, her head and chest and arms framed by the panes of a wide window behind the far end of the diorama.
Zeramere had just enough time to decide that in face she did believe what she saw -- ‘Of course one of those falsehood-fetishizing fools would be here, in a place where what is real is thrown into so much doubt!’ -- before the Xol'Orimi turned to her and hissed an invective.
It wasn’t just any Xol’Orimi, as was plain to see the moment Zeramere could see her face. Particularly the thin scar across her chin. A mark that Zeramere that she herself had put there. “Nanenys. How-”
“I won’t be denied the truth of this place!” The other woman threw her morsel to the ground, discarded and forgotten. She charged, drawing twin knives along the way. “Least of all by you!”
Letolth resumed her defensive spear-twirl, and stepped into the room while it was still safe to do so. Denying her foe the moral victory of having run her out of the chamber. “The truth will always wash away from those who bathe in lies.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before a knife struck her spear, matched its motion, and added its own momentum in the same direction. Speeding up the spear’s follow-through, and distorting its path just enough to let the other one slip through her defenses. The knife darted dangerously close to her right cheek, forcing her to take a hand off the spear to deflect it. The enemy twisted the knife in their other hand, and would have succeeded in disarming her if not for a well-placed kick that sent her stumbling back and away towards the nearby corner of the diorama.
The boy, by that time, has started to shout. “What was that? What’s happening!”
“Silence!” Zeramere ordered, the iron in her voice leaving no room for disobedience. She cut off the communication channel all the same. How could the Duchess even begin to explain the ill will that existed between herself and the mad priestess? The cosmic tapestry of their battles? The losses each had down brought upon the other? And by what right would the boy, her prisoner, claim such knowledge?
“I don’t have time for you and this mystery, Nanenys,” she declared, marching forward to the adversary she knew and understood and could very much forge a stratagem against. “So, I’ll just have to get you out of my way once and for all.” She twirled her spear up and brought its head down upon the enemy.
Nanenys recovered her head and somersaulted under the attack. Landing within this room's diorama, a notably larger one than ‘New York.’ The whole of the chamber was taller than New York’s as well, for reasons that had yet to be unveiled. With a repulsor-assisted leap, she escaped Zeramere’s next strike. To take up a place in the center of the map. Amid a ruin of shattered pyramids and green-yellow slime.
“Coward! Face me!” Zeramere sent a signal to her hover-wings, and launched herself into the air high as the room would allow her to go. She brought her spears head down, directed at her old foe’s heart. Driving it towards its target with more than momentum. With hatred!
The enemy took a step back and crossed her blades to intercept the spear. They did so, but the weight of Zeramere’s determination drove her down to a knee. Ready for the coup-de-grace, she landed on the floor--
Ka-krik! Ka-krik! Al too late, Zeramere realized Nanenys had used her own body in flight to mask the dropping of impact charges, which Zeramere had just landed upon. The Duchess leapt backwards. But not in time to avoid the full brunt of -- Wa-boom! – the explosion that sent her slamming back toward the corner she’d leapt over. Relative miles of homes, parks, military command posts, and more were more than flattened by her body; they were compounded into craters. Culminating with the destruction of a wide, flat palatial structure.
Her staff, thrown from her grip, moved down even more of the false land. Spinning two and a half rotations along the forward share of the not-Paris. Throwing up an immeasurable amount of dust, debris, and almost imperceptibly small corpses along the way. The burning wreckage of a curved black tower landed atop it. Followed by Nanenys’ foot.
“I have shown you my face, coward. Where’s yours?” A long, lavender tongue licked the scar produced by that very spear many decades prior. “Do you fear to wear this mark’s sister?”
. . .
The miniature command sled mag-clipped to Lady Zeramere’s waist could be likened to a blue donut with a central hole that was wider around and filled in at the bottom. It had chairs on the inside. And weapons sticking out of various parts of the outside. And an energy screen that had been turned on to keep the insides from getting out. It had been made for beings about as gigantic to Alex as Zeramere had been to them. Making him exponentially tiny compared to her.
While the forcefield had been programmed to keep him inside, there was nothing keeping him from being thrown from one end of his enclosure to the other when someone got the best of his captor so fully as to knock her flat on her but with explosions.
Alex picked himself up from the forward seat, the driver’s station, and checked himself over for broken bones. Of which there were surprisingly none.
“Hello?”
Alex yelped, “Donnie?!” and yanked his cell phone free of its belt-clip. “Donnie? Is that you?”
“Alex! Oh, thank goodness! I tried to call the cops, but--”
“Let me guess…” Alex moaned. “You’ve been miniaturized?” It was the only explanation for receiving his signal. Miniaturized, and nearby!
“Yeah! I’m in the Paris display. Or I was, but--”
“Paris! Shit!” Alex had conned Zeramere’s crazy ass into coming straight to his friend! ‘She’ll kill him! What do I do?’ He looked up and down and around his sideways prison ward, desperate for something he could use and expecting nothing at all.
That was when he noticed that the forcefield was stuttering. Lines of static dancing across the translucent glow at regular intervals.
. . .
“There is nothing you can do that I could fear.” Zeramere began to rise. Knowing that preventing her from doing so would mean Nanenys relinquishing her control over the weapon. “You, or the false gods you grovel before.”
But that wasn’t her enemy’s aim. Nanenys stomped her foot, and through some application of the anti-grav units in her boot, the staff came up with it. Perpendicular to the floor, and right into range of her hand. For an instant, there was hope that she would be fool enough to touch it. But no; her fingers wrapped around the hilt but did not quite touch. The work of anti-gravs near her hands. One-handed, she lauded the weapon hilt-first at Zeramere’s head.
Zeramere leaned back and caught the weapon with both hands, killing its momentum. But she did not catch the splicer-drone that had Nanenys launched from a pauldron at the moment she let the staff go. It course-corrected in mid-air and landed on her helm. Digging in deep with crystalline feelers. Zeramere barely had time to curse her foolishness for falling for the same trick twice before the world went blindingly white: The drone had carved a way into her helm control and set her vidplate to overload.
“Jaaaik!” Zeramere had sense enough to arc the staff behind herself to still her fall, but not to compensate for the difference in height between the pit she was standing on and the nearby floor of the room proper. Off-balance and blinded, she was easy prey for the series of blows that Nanenys sent her way. With the blades of her knives first. When those could not penetrate her armor, she switched to striking with the pommels. Blunt force that kept Zeramere moving too much to get her staff into a proper defensive posture.
Then the kicks started coming. After the second, she felt the pit lip strike her shin. The third sent her careening over it. She slapped into the floor unevenly, thanks to her flight wings. Barely managing to keep hold of her weapon as she sprawled out prone across the tile. And still the light was there, battering her eyes as much as it could through her slammed-shit lids.
The light, and the sound of her nemesis leaping into the air.
--FOR MORE, DOWNLOAD THE PDF ABOVE--
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT
Panther1945 continuing from Chapter 4 . Old enemies meet again while their captives try to escape from their merciless grasps.(Note: The entire 9,900+-word chapter would not fit in the text block below, so what's posted there is but a preview. Please download the PDF above to enjoy the whole piece.
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT --->
Warp War 2019: Part Five: Duel
By: DankeDonuts
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/dankedonuts/
With imperious tread, Zeramere Ainlessar Kryiel Oasuhn Irrodilor, Duchess of Gharalon Celvaeun, made her way past several rooms in the Human ‘museum.’ Each with another diorama, another miniature city, built into the floor. Each with its own name; Seattle, London, Shanghai, and so on. Translated to her through a helm display whose computers had assimilated the local language. None of these were relevant to her search. None of them this ‘Paris France’ she had been informed of.
Her cape, white with a golden icon of a twin-tailed scorpion, trailed behind her. Her staff, long and capped with a yellow-gold crystal, cut down any obstacle in her path, any hanging dross or that dared to impede the movement of her head. She could be a very patient woman; a noble-blood trained from birth in the arts of war and courtly intrigue. In battle, as precise as she was ruthless. In politics, capable of crafting schemes that took decades, even centuries to unfurl. But today, there was no time for patience.
The young Human, trapped within the miniature command sled secured to her side, was feeling less and less worthy of the effort it took to move his miniscule weight about. “The moments of your life are numbered, boy.”
Her captive’s mewlings of innocence, carried to her ear and translated by her helm’s subsystems, were cut short by a nearby rumbling. Explosions? Footfalls? Impossible! ‘My drones haven’t altered me to any other presences!’
Zeramere marched double-speed across the corridors. Fully aware of how conspicuous her attire -- white and gold armor, with its prodigiously pointed shoulders, along with a helm-screen of glowing yellow -- made her among the walls of dark grey and floors patterned after black marble. Design motifs selected to make the various signs and advertisements more eye-catching. She twirled her staff in a defensive pattern if she could not sneak up upon her enemies, she would intercept their attacks!
She ignored the sensory data provided by her helm’s computerized systems. Her ears were all she needed to follow the most unsubtle sounds of destruction. Sounds which suddenly stopped as the approached the open-door labeled ‘Paris, France, WWII: Scenes From The Liberation’. Stilling her weapon, she set its tip ahead of her as she crept inside.
She could barely believe what she saw. Before her, to one side of yet another miniature city in a wide pit, stood one of the Xol'Orimi! Heretics of old, bent on the glorification of insane and very false ‘gods’ that the Duchess’ primitive forebears had been tormented by and rebelled against in ages past. The nature of this waste of skin, this desecration of all it meant to be Vel’Adrini, was plain to see in the exposure of so much skin on a world tainted with alien life. Let alone the profane runes scared into it amid wounds fresh and old. The heretic was drawing something to her mouth, her head and chest and arms framed by the panes of a wide window behind the far end of the diorama.
Zeramere had just enough time to decide that in face she did believe what she saw -- ‘Of course one of those falsehood-fetishizing fools would be here, in a place where what is real is thrown into so much doubt!’ -- before the Xol'Orimi turned to her and hissed an invective.
It wasn’t just any Xol’Orimi, as was plain to see the moment Zeramere could see her face. Particularly the thin scar across her chin. A mark that Zeramere that she herself had put there. “Nanenys. How-”
“I won’t be denied the truth of this place!” The other woman threw her morsel to the ground, discarded and forgotten. She charged, drawing twin knives along the way. “Least of all by you!”
Letolth resumed her defensive spear-twirl, and stepped into the room while it was still safe to do so. Denying her foe the moral victory of having run her out of the chamber. “The truth will always wash away from those who bathe in lies.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before a knife struck her spear, matched its motion, and added its own momentum in the same direction. Speeding up the spear’s follow-through, and distorting its path just enough to let the other one slip through her defenses. The knife darted dangerously close to her right cheek, forcing her to take a hand off the spear to deflect it. The enemy twisted the knife in their other hand, and would have succeeded in disarming her if not for a well-placed kick that sent her stumbling back and away towards the nearby corner of the diorama.
The boy, by that time, has started to shout. “What was that? What’s happening!”
“Silence!” Zeramere ordered, the iron in her voice leaving no room for disobedience. She cut off the communication channel all the same. How could the Duchess even begin to explain the ill will that existed between herself and the mad priestess? The cosmic tapestry of their battles? The losses each had down brought upon the other? And by what right would the boy, her prisoner, claim such knowledge?
“I don’t have time for you and this mystery, Nanenys,” she declared, marching forward to the adversary she knew and understood and could very much forge a stratagem against. “So, I’ll just have to get you out of my way once and for all.” She twirled her spear up and brought its head down upon the enemy.
Nanenys recovered her head and somersaulted under the attack. Landing within this room's diorama, a notably larger one than ‘New York.’ The whole of the chamber was taller than New York’s as well, for reasons that had yet to be unveiled. With a repulsor-assisted leap, she escaped Zeramere’s next strike. To take up a place in the center of the map. Amid a ruin of shattered pyramids and green-yellow slime.
“Coward! Face me!” Zeramere sent a signal to her hover-wings, and launched herself into the air high as the room would allow her to go. She brought her spears head down, directed at her old foe’s heart. Driving it towards its target with more than momentum. With hatred!
The enemy took a step back and crossed her blades to intercept the spear. They did so, but the weight of Zeramere’s determination drove her down to a knee. Ready for the coup-de-grace, she landed on the floor--
Ka-krik! Ka-krik! Al too late, Zeramere realized Nanenys had used her own body in flight to mask the dropping of impact charges, which Zeramere had just landed upon. The Duchess leapt backwards. But not in time to avoid the full brunt of -- Wa-boom! – the explosion that sent her slamming back toward the corner she’d leapt over. Relative miles of homes, parks, military command posts, and more were more than flattened by her body; they were compounded into craters. Culminating with the destruction of a wide, flat palatial structure.
Her staff, thrown from her grip, moved down even more of the false land. Spinning two and a half rotations along the forward share of the not-Paris. Throwing up an immeasurable amount of dust, debris, and almost imperceptibly small corpses along the way. The burning wreckage of a curved black tower landed atop it. Followed by Nanenys’ foot.
“I have shown you my face, coward. Where’s yours?” A long, lavender tongue licked the scar produced by that very spear many decades prior. “Do you fear to wear this mark’s sister?”
. . .
The miniature command sled mag-clipped to Lady Zeramere’s waist could be likened to a blue donut with a central hole that was wider around and filled in at the bottom. It had chairs on the inside. And weapons sticking out of various parts of the outside. And an energy screen that had been turned on to keep the insides from getting out. It had been made for beings about as gigantic to Alex as Zeramere had been to them. Making him exponentially tiny compared to her.
While the forcefield had been programmed to keep him inside, there was nothing keeping him from being thrown from one end of his enclosure to the other when someone got the best of his captor so fully as to knock her flat on her but with explosions.
Alex picked himself up from the forward seat, the driver’s station, and checked himself over for broken bones. Of which there were surprisingly none.
“Hello?”
Alex yelped, “Donnie?!” and yanked his cell phone free of its belt-clip. “Donnie? Is that you?”
“Alex! Oh, thank goodness! I tried to call the cops, but--”
“Let me guess…” Alex moaned. “You’ve been miniaturized?” It was the only explanation for receiving his signal. Miniaturized, and nearby!
“Yeah! I’m in the Paris display. Or I was, but--”
“Paris! Shit!” Alex had conned Zeramere’s crazy ass into coming straight to his friend! ‘She’ll kill him! What do I do?’ He looked up and down and around his sideways prison ward, desperate for something he could use and expecting nothing at all.
That was when he noticed that the forcefield was stuttering. Lines of static dancing across the translucent glow at regular intervals.
. . .
“There is nothing you can do that I could fear.” Zeramere began to rise. Knowing that preventing her from doing so would mean Nanenys relinquishing her control over the weapon. “You, or the false gods you grovel before.”
But that wasn’t her enemy’s aim. Nanenys stomped her foot, and through some application of the anti-grav units in her boot, the staff came up with it. Perpendicular to the floor, and right into range of her hand. For an instant, there was hope that she would be fool enough to touch it. But no; her fingers wrapped around the hilt but did not quite touch. The work of anti-gravs near her hands. One-handed, she lauded the weapon hilt-first at Zeramere’s head.
Zeramere leaned back and caught the weapon with both hands, killing its momentum. But she did not catch the splicer-drone that had Nanenys launched from a pauldron at the moment she let the staff go. It course-corrected in mid-air and landed on her helm. Digging in deep with crystalline feelers. Zeramere barely had time to curse her foolishness for falling for the same trick twice before the world went blindingly white: The drone had carved a way into her helm control and set her vidplate to overload.
“Jaaaik!” Zeramere had sense enough to arc the staff behind herself to still her fall, but not to compensate for the difference in height between the pit she was standing on and the nearby floor of the room proper. Off-balance and blinded, she was easy prey for the series of blows that Nanenys sent her way. With the blades of her knives first. When those could not penetrate her armor, she switched to striking with the pommels. Blunt force that kept Zeramere moving too much to get her staff into a proper defensive posture.
Then the kicks started coming. After the second, she felt the pit lip strike her shin. The third sent her careening over it. She slapped into the floor unevenly, thanks to her flight wings. Barely managing to keep hold of her weapon as she sprawled out prone across the tile. And still the light was there, battering her eyes as much as it could through her slammed-shit lids.
The light, and the sound of her nemesis leaping into the air.
--FOR MORE, DOWNLOAD THE PDF ABOVE--
<-- PREV | INDEX | NEXT
Category Story / All
Species Alien (Other)
Size 120 x 120px
File Size 201 kB
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