A/N:
Thank u prince of egypt for being the Actual Good Movie they showed on church movie nights like a decade+ ago. The Plagues still is Good
To really get ahold of the way Lio and the promare interact here, I recommend reading Awakening, a previous Promare fic I posted. It's not necessary, but still would shed some light on how the promare perceive the world and how they interact with the burnish, which is a plot point for this fic. It's only ~700 words, so it ain't even a long read. If you aren't up for it, the short version is that it was the promare that broke Lio out of the icecube jail in Mt. Fennel, and the Lio-dragon we see is a combination of Lio and an absolute ton of promare kinda mutually possessing each other. (i'm very sorry i have so many thoughts on the promare its like 90% of my promare posts on my tumblr)
Biar's day was going just as she meticulously planned, and it was such a gratifying feeling, after the unsurety of some of their operations. Parnassus had just risen from the ground, nearly all passengers accounted for and fuel sufficiently gathered. Dr. Ardebit had shown some resistance, as her sister was still missing, so as a concession Governor Foresight had stalled the warp drive activation until the last second.
The low hum of the hovering ark below her was reassuring, as the now-warmed engines could send them soaring onto the new planet in a matter of minutes.
The skies were clear, for now, and the rumbling of a dissatisfied core had not yet breached the surface. Humanity would survive, and Earth's legacy would be evident in Omega Centauri's success.
As the energy level siphoned from the engine slowly increased, something bright and hot in the distance exploded.
—
If there was one thing Galo had plenty of time for, it was thinking.
Not that there was much else to do, trapped in a windowless cell for a week.
The ache of Kray's betrayal never left, but it faded some, after he'd had time to come to terms with it. A part of him, shameful and cowardly, still rebelled at the idea of the same hands that carried him out of a burning building orchestrated cruel experiments and drawn-out deaths. Yet his revulsion was stronger, after seeing Kray reduce Marco's existence down to fuel, down to a thing.
Heris delivered his last meal to him some three hours ago, so the Parnassus must be ready to take off and all the selected citizens boarded, whether they were aware of their fate or not. She had informed him of that much, apparently the least she could do before leaving him to die. Galo wondered if Lio was resigned to that fate and something in his heart constricted, thinking of such a bright presence extinguished like a candle-flame.
Galo startled when the metal he was sitting on began to gently vibrate. The Parnassus must be taking off, leaving Galo and everyone else to their fates. Well, maybe not Aina, if Heris had managed to wrestle her onto that ship. Not that Galo expected her to go willingly, not with Aina's sense of justice giving her a burning soul of her own.
The vibrations increased, sending his empty plate skittering off to the side and his teeth rattling in his skull.
And then the wall next to him exploded.
Galo pressed himself against the far wall of his cell and focused on breathing because holy shit. He swore he could feel the ends of his hair smoldering from the comet that nearly obliterated the cell and him with it. Galo peeked out of his cracked-open cell and was assaulted by a forest of riotous neon flames, bright and writhing and angry.
A gale-force roar drew his attention upwards, to the biggest Burnish flare Galo had seen in his life, by a measure of hundreds. Riding in the center, pulsing and black was…
Lio?
"Is he… crying?" Galo asked aloud, already knowing the answer from the mournful howls trailing behind the flare.
The answering howls of a fire siren echoed back, and Galo, emboldened, leapt out of the wreckage and pelted towards it.
He had to find his squad.
As Galo kept a careful eye on the massive dragon soaring across Promepolis's skyline, Lio didn't seem concerned with the Freeze Force at all, their projectiles as effective as spitting on a bonfire. After the last agent went flying into a building, the dragon continued along his path, leaving a wake of ashes and melted glass.
Galo followed where the dragon's snout was pointing, and saw Foresight Tower rising like a beacon.
Oh, he really had to find his squad.
Urgency lit a fire under his ass and he drove himself harder, ignoring the jarring of his bones and the heat pressing into him from all sides.
Thankfully the Rescuemobile was impossible to miss, allowing Galo to sidle up to Ignis and breathlessly pant out "Fire! Really big fire! The tower!"
Ignis was just as stoic as always, dryly pointing out the literal fire under his ass, but Lucia inside the Rescuemobile was more receptive.
"Lucia you gotta listen, Kray has been using Burnish as fuel to migrate to a different planet because Earth is gonna explode!"
"Oi, mind slowing that down?" Lucia demanded, kicking an empty bucket of coolant out of her way to resume shooting high-caliber freezing rounds at the worst of the fire.
"That's Lio up there and he's so pissed because Kray is sucking out Burnish life to make that thing up there fly!"
"What thing- oh holy fuck." Lucia realized, hastily zooming her drone's camera onto the rising form of the Parnassus.
"Yes that thing! Launch me at it!"
"Why?!"
"Because that flare up there is Lio and I gotta stop him from killing somebody! A lot of somebodies!" Galo shouted, already cramming himself into the launch chute.
"Fine! The Matoi is fixed anyways, just sit tight until we get close enough to launch you!"
The intercom in the Matoi crackled to life, staticky and nearly overwhelmed by the roaring fire. "Lucia, where the fuck are you going?!" Remi's voice demanded.
"Taking a detour, you're on your own for a little bit!" Lucia hollered back, and hung up before she could hear Remi's sputtering objections.
Galo flew through the pre-launch inventory and maintenance checks in record speed while the Rescuemobile skidded into a sharp right turn and floored it towards Lio and the Parnassus.
—
Subtly, Biar's fingernails scraped across the plastic of her tablet as she tensed, eyes locked on the flare approaching them like an aurora crawling across the sky. The fires that broke out beneath its coils were of no consequence, but it was easy to see what the monster's goal was.
From this distance, the freeze-missiles looked like snowflakes in the face of the living magma vein. Moments later, Governor Foresight received confirmation from Vulcan. Fotia's presumed death at the end of a chain-freezing bullet had come back to bite them, with fangs longer than Biar was tall.
When the flare approached close enough to see the black silhouette in sun-bright eyes, even the impeccably trained bridge crew started to mutter and fidget in anxiety. Biar grappled with her fear and put it down like an animal, patiently glancing at the Governor for confirmation.
So subtle it would seem like nothing, Kray nodded his assent to her.
Biar raised her hand straight up, drawing the attention of the room. "All coolant-beams, aim and hold!"
The furious sounds of keyboards clicking and levers being pulled was mimicked by the groans of canon-sized coolant-guns lining up towards the flare approaching them.
Anticipation was heavy in the air as Biar kept her arm raised, resisting the urge to bring it down as the dragon clawed onto the Parnassus's deck, rising to its full height and flaring the comet-shard spines along its back.
Biar clenched her hand into a tight fist. "Fire."
As one, streams of freezing solution drilled into the dragon's face, eliciting a scream of pain.
The frozen visage of the dragon shattered, revealing a snarling maw gaping so wide it split at the neck.
"K̸̛R̶∆ Y͡ ̷̢͢FO͘R̕͏E̡҉S͘I̛G̷̕HT!" It bellowed, backed by smoke and wildfire and sending a painful migraine spike through Biar's skull.
"Ballistics!" She called, only the barest edge of panic in her voice.
Every round deployed at once, and detonated inside Fotia's throat. It recoiled, swinging its frozen head back and forth and belching out flames from mouths that opened along its body's length. Frustrated, the flare snarled and braced its claws along the deck, melting great furrows into the steel hull. A battering ram of fire-breath bore into the ship's surface, blazing with every color imaginable instead of Fotia's own cyan-magenta.
Kray's brow was creased, showing the anger bubbling to the surface. "Biar, take over from the secondary bridge. I'll take care of this."
"Of course, sir." She replied, already typing out orders to the engine room while Kray booted up the terraforming apparatus.
Soon the dark underbelly of the secondary bridge was thrown into harsh relief by the screen showing the top of the deck. While the crew re-coordinated, Biar kept a close eye on the ensuing fight.
The terraformer, though smaller than than the flare, cut a massive frame against the harsh light of Burnish fire. Kray immediately went on the offensive, and the creature shrieked in indignation when the majority of its long torso froze solid.
Governor Kray failed to cut the head off the snake.
Though there was no audio from the video feed, Biar could still hear the lightning-screech of victory reverberate from above her head as Fotia crushed the terraformer between its jaws, thousands of tons of pressure reducing the armored mech to a flat, mangled mess.
All the fireproofing in the world couldn't save a fragile human from concussive force.
The terraformer melted inside the dragon's jaws, leaking out from between its teeth like macabre drool. Uncaring of the metal remains, the flare turned its superheated breath to its own body, slowly unfreezing its coils.
Biar did as she always did. She took a moment, she mourned.
She got to work.
"Initiate the warp gate."
—
The heat was intense even before Galo's Matoi struck the eye of Lio's Burnish flare, flooding his vision with shimmering heat-haze and bright yellow flames. Galo still could see the backlit form of an enraged Lio hunched in the center, body spiking and fizzing as if formed with malleable flame and not solid human flesh.
"This… this isn't hot at all!" Galo declared, moreso to convince himself than anything.
Galo saw the flaming whites of Lio's eyes escaping the confines of their sockets and only had time to think 'Uh-oh' before black-clawed hands gripped the fizzling armor of his Matoi.
"St∆y out of our w∆y, Thymos." Lio said, voice interwoven with the crescendoing hiss of lava.
"Nope! Your spiteful flames are nothing compared to me!" Galo shouted over the roar of flames, pulling the release valve and spraying Lio with every charge of freezing ammunition at once.
Between the boiling steam and razored ice shards, Galo could hardly see anything in front of him, only able to perceive the eye-searing colors of Burnish fire evaporating into the air.
And then the world began to drop out from beneath him, and Galo could only hang onto his mostly-melted mech and grapple with a Lio who was no longer encased in dragonfire as they both plummeted to the ground. The massive breach melted into the ship's surface seemed to swallow the pair, transporting them from the magenta smoke-stained sky to a peaceful urban venue, empty skyscrapers reflecting a false blue sky.
The abused frame of his Matoi mech shattered beneath the strain of landing, sending Galo sprawling inside the con-pod. Still, Galo muttered apologies to his beloved robot and forced it to tackle Lio from the ground, tearing the Burnish from the crater he was melting into the ground.
"Look, I can understand your anger!" Galo ground out. "But I can't let you hurt the people in here!"
Galo could smell singed hair as Lio bucked beneath the weight of the mech, but still he held on. Ten thousand passengers, he reminded himself. Thousands of Burnish. He had to save them all.
"They are just as g∇ilty as the Extinguisher!" Lio snapped, struggling to unpin his arms from Galo's grip. Frustrated, he rammed his head into the Matoi's front hood, white-hot horns tearing gouges into the already-exposed machinery.
Galo frantically yanked on the handgrip that connected to the mech arm, swearing when it was stiff and unresponsive. The world went upside-down as he was thrown off, Matoi finally reduced to scrap from all the abuse it had taken.
"Hey! I thought Burnish didn't kill!" Galo shouted, scrambling out of the defunct con-pod and grabbing at Lio's arms, only to be thrown into the ground.
Human-shaped flames so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air loomed over Galo. He only saw spark-sharp teeth above him and felt razor-hot claws digging into his ribs when a hundredfold welded voices burned through his ears.
"I-we ∆re not just B∇rnish, not just Lio." The fire hissed, and Galo realized the 'we' in Lio's speech was entirely literal.
He could feel a sun-hot heat rising inside him, fear and failure equally reverberating through his lungs, so intense it almost made the oppressive fire around him less scorching.
Galo was going to die.
Something bright and hot exploded, pouring out from his mouth and behind his eyes.
A/N: fun thought process on why Lio was so, uh, intense during his tumble with Galo. The promare most often connected to humans feeling frustration, or anger, or helplessness, or fear, probably out of a desire to make things better for their synchronized humans in the way they know how to: arson. Lio was immersed in all these emotions, and with hundreds of promare latching onto him, instead of just one? Angry Lio + Promare seeing the source of distress = the conclusion to burn the source of distress to ash. (Remember folks! Promare are sentient and very obviously don't have human-aligned morals, really.)