A/N Hi everyone, I hope you all had a good week. This chapter is where the fighting begins. I was quite happy with how it turned out but I'll talk more about that later. I hope you enjoy it.
Tsuchimikado was an esper, meaning he was he couldn't use magic. If he tried, his body would be destroyed as soon as he tried to refine mana. Normally, this would kill him but thanks to his level 0 ability, auto-rebirth, he was capable of surviving this process a few times, although it still caused him a great deal of pain.
He had taken out a magical communication device from the sled Hamazura had been dragging and now stood inside the building, preparing himself to start using it. He took a deep breath.
"I'm about to start. Wish me luck, nyah?"
"I hope it kills you." Mugino retorted.
Tsuchimikado chuckled at that before he started refining mana and using it to activate the device. Clearly straining to keep the device active he started talking into it.
"Yo, 'Zaki. Mind contacting Accelerator and tell him to pick us up? We're at the outpost he told us to investigate and now the transmission tower is dow-." He started coughing up blood.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. Just contact Accelerator, will you? He'll know where we are. Tell him the outpost is clear and that we need Index to analyse some of the magic here. I don't recognise any of it." His voice was starting to get more and more strained as he struggled to keep using magic.
"Well, you can tell Stiyl that he doesn't get a say in the matter. If Index is needed here, then she's needed here. I've gotta go 'Zaki, I can't hold the spell any longer, see ya, nyah."
Immediately after saying goodbye, Tsuchimikado crumbled to the ground. Large spots of blood were starting to soak through his shirt as the effects of using magic showed on his body more and more.
Mugino, who was next to him and hadn't bothered to catch him, picked him up and dumped him onto a nearby chair as if he were just trash.
"Please, be more careful, nyah? I'm injured here." protested Tsuchimikado. Mugino ignored him and took the first aid kid Hamazura was holding and started treating him. They were wary that Tsuchimikado might have to use magic and had stuffed the first aid kit into the sled with plenty of bandages to reduce his blood loss as much as possible.
After giving Mugino the first aid kit, or rather, having it snatched off him, Hamazura started going through the data on the computers. The group had no idea what the outpost was researching, Accelerator hadn't known either, so he intended to find out. He quickly scanned through the file names to try to find anything that stuck out. People a lot smarter than him could go through all the files and have a much more in-depth investigation into all these files, he just needed to get an idea of what was going on. He did, however, notice that all the file names were in English, which struck Hamazura as odd. Wasn't this meant to be an Academy City outpost? If so, shouldn't these be in Japanese?
He then came across a file name that even Hamazura could tell definitely wasn't English. It said 'Daemonium Virgam'. What did it mean? Was it a code of some sorts? A name maybe?
"Hey, Mugino? Can I get some help here?"
"Tch. What is it?" she asked, angrily.
Judging by the way she asked that, Hamazura was fairly sure she was still pissed at him. So, at the risk of getting a meltdown beam to the face, he continued with his request.
"Any idea what this means?"
She walked over to him, leaving the bandaged Tsuchimikado to sit quietly on his chair, and looked at the screen and immediately answered.
"Daemonium Virgam" she read aloud. "It's Latin. It means 'Demon Staff'. Huh. You might've actually found something useful, Hamazura. Never knew you could do that." Hamazura didn't feel the insults were particularly necessary.
"You ever heard of this? Tsuchimikado?" asked Mugino, looking over to the injured boy nearby. The blonde boy was about to say something but wasn't able to due to Kinuhata coming crashing through the doors. Her small body flew across the room and hit the back wall with a heavy impact, creating large cracks stemming from the point where she hit it. All three of the people already inside the room could only stare at Kinuhata and then out the doors that she had come crashing through.
Standing there was a pale girl who looked about seventeen or eighteen years old, with short, blonde hair and looked quite short for her age. She was wearing a bright, red t-shirt with a light grey zipper hoodie over the top. Below that she wore a short, red skirt and black leggings underneath. And, because she apparently wasn't wearing enough red, she was wearing a pair of red trainers as well.
In her right hand, she held a long, gold staff about two meters long with an intricate design that resembled flames carved around its length. At the top of the staff, it merged into a thin, gold ring about twenty centimetres in diameter with the gold about five centimetres wide. In the middle was some sort of red gem that took the shape of a flame and glowed bright red and orange, adding to the flame effect.
"Hmph. That's disappointing. I was hoping that damned heretic would be here. Then I could kill him and rescue the Demoness." she said in English, her shoulders slumping as he looked around the room.
Hamazura was up immediately and went straight for his rifle, whilst Tsuchimikado scrambled for cover. Mugino wasted no time and fired a green bream at the new girl. She had already attacked Kinuhata, there was no way she was friendly.
The girl simply side-stepped the attack Mugino had thrown at her, looking bored, as if it was nothing for her.
"Wow, not even a 'who are you?' That's just rude."
Hamazura, who had managed to get a hold of his rifle, had gotten behind one of the desks and flipped it over. It wouldn't do much, but it was better than nothing, even if only slightly.
"Where the hell did she come from?! I thought we checked the entire outpost?!" shouted Hamazura, peaking out of his cover to look for the enemy, who had stepped outside and out of their line of fire.
"We did!" responded Tsuchimikado. "She must have just arrived!"
"Wrong!" surprisingly, the comment came from their attacker hiding behind the wall of the building. "I've been here for a while now. I was just getting ready to leave when I saw your friend there and thought this could be fun. So far, it's been pretty boring, though. Are you guys seriously this weak?"
"Why you little shit?" Mugino fired four beams at the girl, breaking through the wall she was hiding behind. However, after the beams had finished tearing through the wall and destroying it, Mugino found that no one was there.
"Damn, that little brat is fast."
She started chasing her out of the building whilst Hamazura went to check on Kinuhata. She hadn't gotten back up during the fight, so Hamazura had begun to worry. He found her at the back wall, where she had fallen, sitting up trying to catch her breath, the impact must have been massive. However, thanks to her ability, she was mostly unharmed, just a little winded.
"You okay, Kinuhata?" he asked.
"Urrrrgggghh. That one super hurt. Be careful, Hamazura. That one is, like, super strong." she warned as Hamazura helped her to her feet.
"Where's Mugino?" she asked once she was up. Her answer came in the form of an explosion coming from outside followed by the manic scream of "DIE BRAT!"
"Nevermind." she sprinted outside to try to aid her leader.
After watching her sprint out to join the fight, Hamazura then walked over to Tsuchimikado who was sitting behind the overturned desk that Hamazura had been using for cover. His legs were crossed, his fingers were pinching his chin and he appeared to be deep in thought.
"Hey, we could use your help here. Whatever that thing is, it looked like some sort of magical object."
"What was that staff?" Tsuchimikado muttered. "I've never seen anything like it before."
"Could it be this 'Daemonium Virgam'? You never got to answer earlier."
"More questions I don't have answers to."
"WILL YOU TWO GET YOUR LAZY ASSES OUT HERE AND FIGHT!" came the scream of the fourth-ranked level 5 that was leading the mission.
"We should go before she starts attacking us." Hamazura suggested.
"You go on ahead, I need to check something and set a few things up before I join you." replied Tsuchimikado.
Hamazura nodded and exited the building, where he was greeted to an already half-destroyed outpost and Mugino seemed hellbent on changing that from half-destroyed to destroyed. The two buildings on Hamazura's left were just one wall each and even then, you'd struggle to define those as walls with the number of holes in them. The building to his right was in fairly good shape, all things considered, with only a few large holes that stopped after the first wall.
Kinuhata had her pistol up and firing whenever she got a glimpse, whilst slowly making her way over to the rubble that was the remains of the building Mugino and Hamazura had checked first, most likely so she could throw the rubble at her.
The girl was sprinting from cover to cover with incredible speed, much too fast for Mugino's meltdowner which was steadily destroying more of that cover each second.
"Stop moving you little brat! Let me hit you!" Mugino's frustration was growing with each beam she fired.
Seeing her sprint behind the last remaining small building, Mugino decided to change tactics. She signalled to Kinuhata to follow the girl round whilst she attempted to cut her off from the other side. However, before she could reach the side of the building, an explosion of snow went off where the girl was lowering visibility dramatically. Mugino continued round, and used her ability to clear the snow, but when it was cleared, she found no-one there, only Kinuhata who had followed the girl round.
"Where the hell-?"
Before she could finish her question, Hamazura tackled her, pushing her down into the snow just as an arrow made of fire shot through the empty space she had just been. She traced the arrow back to the top of the large building that housed all of the computers. There, on top of the building stood the blonde-haired girl with a grin splitting her face.
Hamazura wasting no time, brought up his gun and started firing. However, the girl was already gone. Her speed was ridiculous, there was no way a normal human could achieve that on their own.
The three espers heard a loud yawn coming from the centre of the outpost and rounded the small building again to find the blonde girl standing in front of the transmission tower.
"Come on. You guys are so slow. I figured that bastard would at least send someone like me, but now I've just got this disappointment." she said, sounding bored, pointing her hands towards the group.
Mugino fired another beam at her but, once again using her inhuman speed, she easily evaded it.
"I'm not sure we can spare any 'people like you'. After all, there are less than twenty of your kind in the world." Tsuchimikado appeared out of the large building as if he had just woken up from a nap, Hamazura wasn't sure if that was entirely inaccurate.
He ignored that for now though and concentrated on what he had just said. 'less than twenty of your kind in the world'. There was only one thing that Hamazura could think of that fit that description and it explained how she was able to move so fast.
The young, eighteen-year-old girl was a saint.
A/N And there we have it. What worked? What didn't? Any and all constructive criticism is fully appreciated. For the fight, this is very much just the opening stages of the fight so there's nothing too crazy yet, I've got some stuff for the next few chapters lined up that I really liked so I hope you guys will as well. For this chapter though, I tried to hint towards what the enemy was with her speed. Was that enough or should I have added a few more hints? Anyway, for now, onto the comments.
Stryper88: I do plan on finishing it. I know how it's going to end, minus one bit where I've been going back and forth, but I'll reach a decision on that when I get there. So provided nothing happens that forces me to stop, I should finish this story.
GG Vegito: Sorry to disappoint, but as can be seen in this chapter, it's not Marian. For reasons that will be explained in later arcs, I wanted a new villain and this arc is meant to introduce them, so I hope you'll like them.
Blanklow: I will talk about the horned face in a later chapter, but yes, if everything goes to plan, this should be a fairly long fic, so I hope I can make it as enjoyable as possible.
And that's everything. I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter and I hope you all have a good week and I'll have a new chapter up next week. Bye.