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CHAPTER 35:
HOPE'S CATARACT
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Author's Notes: The music for this Chapter is, in order of scene: 'Proto Merkabah,' from the XENOSAGA Episode One Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and then 'Dragon's Blood,' from the BREATH OF FIRE IV Original Soundtrack, Disc Two; and then 'Hauser Hazard,' from the WILD ARMS 4 Original Score, Disc Four; and then 'The Impure,' from the FINAL FANTASY TACTICS Original Soundtrack, Disc Two. The first and third pieces can be found on KINGDOM HEARTS Insider, and the second and fourth Tracks can be found on Zophar's Domain.
Mare was sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the bed almost before she was aware she was awake, and her eyes were open.
"Now what?" Lea queried in concerned fear.
But Mare barely registered he'd even said anything through the utter, total starkly acute terror warping everything within her so strangling even the thousands upon thousands of selfish self preservation impulses she'd assimilated from the data Heartless couldn't tell her whether or not she still held the ability to breathe.
"If you don't want to lose Roxas to something far worse than you did the first time, shut up and stay out of my way!" Mare snarled with practically hysterical, vicious savagery as she strode as fast as she could, while still ensuring Lea was within earshot.
Lea became more ghostly than decaying bleached skeletal death.
Mare ripped open the curtain leading into the Usual Spot, not paying any further attention to see if he, and perhaps Isa, were following.
She sprinted past Marshmallow, still standing guard but now partially paying attention to the location Mare knew Elsa had previously been sitting before Xion had taken them into Ven's now rapidly degrading Station of Awakening, a worried frown on his face.
Mare didn't even bother to call a Keyblade for the first time.
She merely raised her foot and morphed it into a spiked mace, though one she kept the peach color of human skin, and kicked it into the door leading into the storage room where Mare could perceive and smell Namine was still asleep.
Namine's eyes were open and bleary by the time the wood of the doorway cleared out of the way, and the familiar blinding, all incinerating hate rose at the sight of the girl who had created her to live a life of nothing but torment and despair.
But, for the first time, asphyxiating terror smothered and drowned away even her feelings for the person she hated incommunicably indefinably more than anyone or anything else in all current, possible, not potential, and unimaginable existence.
That didn't stop Mare from striding right over to Namine, picking her up roughly by the shoulders, and slamming the now frightened and perplexed Nobody backwards against the wall behind her hard enough to crack the boards behind her and send red trickling down from the back of Namine's head and the backs of her shoulders.
"You can find out what just happened faster if you trace Roxas' chain of memories," Mare hissed viciously.
"So I'm not going to waste time explaining it to you.
"But once you know, you are going to do precisely what I tell you to fix this, and you are going to give your all to do it.
"If you take Roxas, and Xion, from me, too; you don't want to know what I'll do to you."
Elsa's face was as transparent as ice as clear as glass.
It was all falling apart once again.
Just as it had the night she'd argued with Elsa during the dance after the coronation.
"Anna, what do you know about true love?"
"More than you. All you know is how to shut people out."
Surging dark gray cloudy wisps erupted outward from Roxas in an expanding spiraling volcanic vortex shaped like a rough discus, that roared in a counterclockwise tornado as though he had created a whirlpool reversing all of its processes with greater wrath than the fiercest tsunami.
"What? Elsa, no, no! Wait."
"Give me my glove!"
And the prophecies were all beginning to come true.
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"Elsa, please, please.
"I can't live like this anymore!"
"Then leave."
The discus dispersed to reveal a humanoid figure, still grasping Oathkeeper and Oblivion in both hands, consisting of nothing but the same dark gray cloudy wisps the same shape as Roxas; yet without any features except for two pallid yellow phantasms of eyes without pupils or corneas fulsome with such infernal pallid death they appeared to vaporize all concepts of both absolute zero ice and incinerating flame, a partially open mouth eternally limitlessly more crimson than the most immolating blood, amorphous shifting pulses of onyx night that appeared to devour even obsidian pulsating in a haphazard grotesque maelstrom inside his body and over its surface, and black just as ebony rising in madly cavorting tongues of swarms of pitch soot and ash from every single portion of what had once been clothes and flesh.
"What did I ever do to you?"
"Enough, Anna."
Xion shrieked with such unbridled despair and hatred, of herself and Maleficent, it must be tearing her throat raw, and she leveled both of her Keyblades and sprinted at Maleficent.
Elsa recoiled a good deal.
At the same time the Thundaza Frame holding Elsa, Kristoff, and Olaf prisoner at last dispersed.
But the thing that had once been Roxas didn't move.
It didn't need to.
It just shifted forwards a fraction, blinked out of reality, the space between the figure and Maleficent appeared to fold and bend starkly inwards as though it were a concave wrinkling transparent substance, and then the creature appeared while moving slightly forward once more to drive the tips of both Keyblades like daggers directly at Maleficent's neck.
"No, why? Why do you shut me out? Why do you shut the world out? What are you so afraid of?"
"I said, enough!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"You kind of set off an eternal winter… everywhere. Well, it's okay. You can just unfreeze it."
"I can't!"
"Y"
Anna barely pushed the reminiscence away in time to comprehend Maleficent had used one clawed hand to stab with the tip of her stave between the two Keyblades much quicker than they could close to ram it into the stomach of the thing and curve it to smash Roxas down onto the paned glass floor of Ven's Station of Awakening.
A shallow inside out cone of inwardly rippling concentric rings of glaring pallid green gathered in Maleficent's right palm to then rush forwards and outwards in an expanding funnel and geyser around Xion; the edges of the inferno colliding with the Keyblade of Hearts, her Kingdom Key, and the outside of her body to send her tumbling uncontrollably backwards through the air and smashing at an askew angle onto her left shoulder hard enough for Anna to hear the sound of her shoulder bones audibly fragmenting and dislodging.
Elsa was already on her feet and hurling a swarm of countless horizontal snowflakes, each gleaming in ways that said they were all as sharp as razors and knife points, at the witch; but she was too slow.
Maleficent then intoned two words to the thing that should to be Roxas.
"Zetta Graviton."
Reality itself anywhere about and above what used to be Roxas, towering up out of sight into the dark blue above in a titanic column with a circumference that appeared to be a perfect circle, the proof of a genius artist, itself appeared to become motes of pitch onyx ash.
At the same time as Anna determinedly swept her feelings to the side, as forcefully and as distant as she could, each snowflake was yanked into the column and disappeared.
Then Anna registered that it felt as though the floor beneath her had upended ninety degrees and she was standing on a wall, and though she staggered for purchase she could find none and she saw herself flying towards the column, even as the totality of her body inexplicably told her she was falling while it ached like fire everywhere as though every single shred of it was being crushed and suffocated under a range of mammoth mountains.
A thick sheet of ice rose before her, but it physically felt as though she was landing on one rather than colliding with it, and around her she saw similar sheets catch a number of the others who had been standing too close to the incantation.
And now that she was closer to the enchantment, it felt as though something heavier than all the planets within her planetary system itself were endeavoring to grind her into a paste against the ice.
Anna realized Maleficent had catastrophically altered gravity itself.
Rather than futilely attempt to wield her ice within laws of physics she had no concept of the arrangement of, Elsa stepped down with one foot and sent out a feet wide sheet of ice with a dagger sharp front edge to slice into the floor of the Station of Awakening below them all, and then rise up on the other side of what should have been Roxas, no doubt intending to tilt that section of the floor up so the thing had a chance at sliding out from under it.
But before it could do anything, the spell ended, and Anna slid to sit on the restored floor.
The air itself was shifting so violently over where the creature that was supposed to be Roxas had been that none of them could see what had happened to him; but Riku and Terra had barely regained something to stand on before they were leaping to their feet and running at Maleficent from two different sides, Terra using a close, tight arc and Riku a distant, wide one.
Goofy charged directly at her, while Donald was holding onto the back of his shield with his wand up to fire something.
Even though she was now free, Aqua still didn't move, and her face didn't alter.
Maleficent once more pronounced two words, and this time her tone was plainspoken and dismissive.
"Char Flare."
The space extending for a wide circumference around all five of them became white without warning, and then massive pillars at various diagonal angles roared out of that white, one after another from different points of origin and at different speeds, into the two Keyblade wielders, the knight, and the wizard.
As soon as both the white and the night faded, all four fell forwards.
"Thanks for the extra ammunition," Vanitas then said from above Maleficent as he manifested out of the air to swing down at the witch with Void Gear in both hands.
As he did, Braveheart and Earthshaker disappeared from Riku's and Terra's holds in swirling multi colored light, to appear in the same colored whirls with their handles at the two wrists of Sora's black haired duplicate and the points in the air, spinning around his wrists counterclockwise at one hundred eighty degree angles from one another.
Maleficent raised her staff with slight amusement–
–And Braveheart and Earthshaker snapped shut around it, holding it in place as a conflagration of blue-white appeared around Vanitas and he spun as though he were a tornado, casting comets of the same screaming light blue in a focused storm at the tip of the rod.
To Anna's surprise, Maleficent clearly exerted a great deal of her heightened physical prowess to jerk the staff out of Earthshaker and Braveheart, and backwards and away from the strike.
Elsa's eyes opened a small bit wider as she realized what this meant.
For all her newfound skill and might, Maleficent still couldn't cast spells without a conduit to do it with, such as a stave.
And Elsa had no need for a relic to channel her own magic.
The next second, she shifted both hands and both feet slightly, and lassos of frost lashed out from all ten of her fingers and the front of her shoes before every single toe to whirl around Maleficent's rod, the majority of them concentrated low where the force Maleficent could exert with her grip was weakest.
They wrenched it from her grip and pulled it back towards Elsa.
Kairi then curved in from where she'd been sliding along the water at the edge of the Station of Awakening while encased in the magenta of a Flowmotion, swinging a precise, two-handed, roughly horizontal chop from over her shoulder at Maleficent's neck.
A volcano of green flames seared into the air around Maleficent, obscuring her and expanding outwards, and Kairi's eyes flew wide in terror and despair, obviously knowing something that they didn't.
She curled forward into a somersault and sprang back into a defensive position.
Xion's left fingers were now motionless over the Keyblade of Hearts; but her Kingdom Key vanished in coiling gold and silver and the Keyblade of Hearts transferred over to that hand in a double rush of black and red, the replica almost certainly intending to take them out of Ven's heart and give them a chance to escape from whatever Maleficent had just done.
Xion must know they had had little chance of escape before, or she would have already done this; but whatever enchantment Maleficent had just cast, it must be so terrible she was desperate now.
But before she could do anything, a very long, scaly black tail as thick as a tree trunk lashed out from inside the conflagration of green and cracked down over her right wrist, and Anna heard the bones in it snap.
Anna knew she was in no condition to do this, but whatever Maleficent had just done to herself, it was obvious she had no other option than to take the risk.
She called up the light blue around her to Formchange into Valkyrie in Knight of the Swan.
But before she could, reality folded inwards between the settling air where the thing that had been Roxas had been ravaged by the Zetta Graviton and the monsoon of near emerald, and then a colossal black dragon staggered backwards on four claws out of the cyclone, Oathkeeper and Oblivion jammed into her nostrils, obviously attempting to push the bone in it into the brain of the dragon Maleficent had become and kill the wyrm.
Xion opened her mouth to cry something.
But before sound could emit, twin geysers of light green flared out of both of Maleficent's nostrils and hurled the creature, and his Keyblades, backwards through the air.
The thing somersaulted backward and landed in a balanced position, Oathkeeper raised in a high horizontal block and Oathkeeper in a low vertical one.
Vanitas, now standing on his own two feet behind Maleficent, and to her left; had Void Gear in a midway stance, and he no longer possessed Braveheart and Earthshaker, though Riku and Terra still didn't have them back.
"It'll take more than pulling an upside down Tigger out of your hat to take down a Heartreaver," Sora's black haired duplicate informed her.
Xion turned her face to the thing that had been Roxas with her face in weak pain.
Elsa was currently slicing Maleficent's rod into shards with knife-edged filaments of ice, but she altered her visage so she was including Vanitas in her field of vision; as well as what had once been Roxas, and Xion.
"So it appears," Maleficent acknowledged.
"Can you say the same for my Dragon semblance?"
"Before we find out one way or the other," a different kind of terror appeared on Xion's face, and Elsa thinned her lips, "Are you sure you want to defeat Roxas now?
"Roxas is a bigger risk, but if I've figured out enough of the cantrips to your plot; you have no reason to bother with the other Sora's Oblivion now, or Roxas' Oathkeeper, or a good amount of your other implements.
"You've partially pulled off what Xehanort wants, even though this was most likely one of the roles my dear creator inscribed for you."
Maleficent bristled violently, and then her obsidian maw scowled blackly.
"Forged from the darkness Xion sowed within him, you have one of the most grotesque antitheses of existence and the natural cosmos possible.
"A living hollow rift, and one that can remain stable because it assumes nothing but darkness; because even though the darkness that waterfalls into it brings light along with it, it specifically lets darkness in, thus gorging itself on merely minute traces of light."
Xion looked like she might have retched violently if she wasn't as horribly wounded as she was.
Elsa's blood drained from her face, and an expression of empathy and sympathy Anna recognized measurelessly past containment more than any tapestry of emotion and feeling she'd seen on her own visage in her life appeared on her older sister's face.
Something gave inside Anna, and tears emerged in her eyes for a different reason.
Attempting to set Elsa and Roxas up had been as low and idiotic as Roxas had admonished her for it being; but regardless of whether it did more harm than good, or successfully gave her sister a good friend she could relate to with at least a small chance of a different kind of bond; she'd apparently succeeded in giving Elsa two good friends she could relate to.
Very few people could understand Elsa as well as Xion could, with what her energy siphoning ability brought about, could under.
And vice versa.
"Do not say a single word that causes me to believe you're about to try to shut anyone out another time, or that you're concealing your own heart," Elsa told Xion, her tone knowing and understanding, but kindly and gently sternly reproving.
"I won't let you end up in a position where you need to run away this time."
Xion must have seen something in Elsa's eyes even Anna couldn't recognize; for tears of a begging and imploring and pleading and hope departed and forsaken abandoned despairing and inexpressibly and absent of a lacuna of definition young and minute and flickering spun glass fragile desperation Anna had only seen in Elsa's visage a single time, when she'd given up and lay there to let Hans murder her; rose in Xion's own eyes and fell free.
"I've been where you are," Elsa said, giving Xion a gentle, assuring, anguished but hopeful, soothing smile Anna had never seen Elsa give anyone but their parents and her in all of her life.
The next thing that Anna knew, she was slumping back as though she was a boneless marionette whose strings had all been sliced to ribbons; but then someone short and cold was pushing against her back to keep her up, and two large, warm hands were holding up the backs of her shoulders.
A dam wrenched free inside her at the recognition the small figure was Olaf and the warm hands were Kristoff's; but her tears didn't just blind her vision, but her hearing as well, so she couldn't tell if she was crying with close to hysteria or laughing with giddy euphoria.
But even after everything that had gone wrong since they'd landed on Toy Box, Anna realized she felt lighter than she had at any time before in her life.
As many mistakes as she'd made since Lauriam and Elrena had informed Elsa and her of their scripts, Anna could at last be assured, at last, finally, finally, finally, finally, at last, at last, at last, at last, at last, at last, at last, finally, at last, alwaysanywhereeverywhenforever, she had done something right.
She wasn't helpless.
She wasn't powerless.
She wasn't still an oblivious whimsical child.
She had still found hope.
For the first time in her life, Elsa had two true friends.
"And this time you did it all by yourself," Olaf said, clearly knowing from how she was holding herself what she was feeling. "You didn't need a pep talk in front of a cozy hearth with a carrot to nibble on, as opposed to biscuits.
"It only took the castle and the town and the fjord and the mountain getting wrecked again, but you know what they say about having a second chance to do things correctly."
Anna didn't realize she was grinning until she became aware her face hurt from exhaustion and injury.
"And you didn't have a wet blanket raining on your parade this time, either," Kristoff added, a mixture of humor, loving approval, pain, and self recrimination in his tone.
Much of the lightness dissolved.
And then new terror and horror smothered her heart in a constricting vise and warped it until she couldn't even tell the difference between breathing and gasping futilely for oxygen as she drowned.
Because Anna knew very well what one of Elsa's greatest weaknesses was, and what Maleficent could say to Kristoff to gain the edge that might decide the battle.
But her success at giving Elsa two true friends gave her a reassuring energy that washed away an amount of the pain.
Even with what Kairi and Riku had said, maybe this wouldn't cause a disaster; for Sora, or Kristoff, or anyone else.
She could still do this.
Refusing to even locate where Kairi currently was, Anna turned her head to look back at Kristoff.
But as soon as he saw the look on her face; the knifing, sick pain and self hating guilt she'd hoped she'd never see on him was in his own eyes and semblance, as well; and she knew he must have figured it out as soon as Elsa heard Ira out.
Almost all Anna's newfound joy and delight departed.
Even remembering how terribly it had backfired when she'd been too pushy with Elsa barely convinced Anna she could justify not pulling Kristoff close and kissing him.
"I was the one who told you you might not be able to end the winter as easily as you believed," Kristoff said.
"Of course I figured it out."
Protective fury ripped up through her to brim over.
"Then why didn't you tell me?" she at least remembered not to talk in a loud voice this time, as she had during the disastrous coronation when she'd almost destroyed Elsa's life beyond any reconstruction.
Then she realized, and the protective fury became sick and frigid icy and drawn strangling.
"You kind of set off a"
Her awareness was too keen now to forget she shouldn't raise her voice.
"Giving up on me when I was engaged was one thing, but this is overdoing it," Anna knew she wasn't shrieking in safeguarding fury and despairing torture, but it sounded as though she was to her own ears.
"How could you not have learned anything from Elsa?
"Nobody wants to live a life alone, without love or warmth."
When Kristoff answered, he tried to keep his voice kind, but he couldn't hide the emotionless deadness behind his voice entirely.
"That's precisely why I'm so determined to stay out of the way.
"Do you really want to live for the rest of your life just giving love to others, and not receiving any, after how alone you've been for most of your life?"
Anna wanted with everything she could take in and couldn't be aware of to tell Kristoff there was no one to stay out of the way from; but she practically couldn't register what wanting, and not being aware of, and taking in, were through the absence removing everything.
Because she had no way to answer that question without not just injuring Kristoff indefinably past containing more at a time he needed to be wounded the least; Elsa was within earshot, and Anna knew how she'd take it, as well, if Anna wasn't completely honest with her answer.
Then the sound of a storm of flames cascading against something, and the sensation of heat rippling and washing over her, caused existence to return.
She whirled in the direction of the sounds and heat to see an incredibly thick wall of ice with an inward bending top was in front of the three of them, shaking and trembling and shuddering like it was about to fall to pieces at any fraction of a second but holding firm, keeping an avalanche of light green fire in the shape of a vast comet back.
Maleficent must have believed an Anna who had almost totally dropped her guard was an even better target than a Kristoff who had, and ended the stalemate.
The air bent once more, and the Heartreaver was cutting sharply and precisely with both of his Keyblades at the jugular of Maleficent's draconian shape; but before even one of the swings could connect, two more torpedoes of green in the shape of comets, the same size as the one Elsa was still keeping back, impacted into the creature.
The first one tossed him to the floor.
The Heartreaver spun both of his Keyblades like windmills, without doubt using an ethereal ability to try to disperse the fire, but it didn't decompose at all and crashed into him, sending him skidding backwards and forcing him to move one foot back and almost kneel to keep from being sent onto his back.
A little bit of lightness returned.
The Heartreaver had specifically reacted to Maleficent trying to incinerate Kristoff, Olaf, and her.
Shards of Roxas were still aware of what was going on around him.
Xion clearly understood the same thing.
"You know how to regain your humanity!" she shouted.
"Elsa will protect us!
"Just look at the light, return to who you are, and believe in her!"
Anna started as Roxas replied, in his own voice.
"I can't remember much about who I used to be, or comprehend much about what's going on around me; but I haven't once forgotten your light, and Axel's!
"But I refuse to pay any attention to it, and I'm not going to reverse that decision!
"What I remember the most is what I did to you, and him!
"And how I won't let that happen to either of you another time, no matter what I need to cast into the darkness to do it!"
Anna felt Kristoff's hands tense against the backs of her shoulders.
She could tell what breathing was, and that she was forgetting how to do it, but she couldn't remember the way.
"Did you hear a word I just said to Anna?" he shouted to Roxas
and he was Roxas his effort to guard Kristoff and Olaf and her had proven that beyond the most gossamer shade of a misgiving even before he'd spoken
Roxas just ignored him, however, and the space between him and Maleficent bent inwards yet again.
However, this time it contorted inwards in a similar concave shape along a lengthy rippling and curving line that took him onto the back of Maleficent's neck, just behind her spinal cord; where, if the structure of her neck and head was any evidence, it was the best combination of thin and supporting weight, and it was thus the most relatively fragile.
Maleficent must have been attacked tis way by someone at least once before, though, perhaps Sora; because as soon as Roxas reappeared on the rear of her neck, she brought the front inside edges of both of her wings inwards with a different kind of dismissiveness and thrust the two talon shaped protrusions at those ends into Roxas' sides.
Before Roxas could extricate himself, she brought the impaled Heartreaver upwards and over her maw as she tilted it back above him, and then she opened it.
This time it wasn't a comet Maleficent spewed.
It was a cataclysm of flame so much more indescribably effulgent than the most blindingly brilliant star all of the glass surface of Ven's Station of Awakening around her cascaded into black glass sand; and even as far away from Maleficent as she was, the wall of ice in front of them converted into steam so scalding Anna braced to Formchange if she felt the tiniest shift in Olaf's structure behind her.
Before the fire could tsunami over Roxas, a large snowflake the same size as the one Elsa had drawn her eternal winter into before dispelling it, and that Anna was certain held all of its rage condensed together within it; rocketed out of her hands, spinning like a disc at the end of a reasonably thick cord of ice between Roxas and the tidal rapids.
As soon as it connected, the heat lowered to just a bit hotter than warm in Anna's vicinity, but Elsa staggered back, and the gigantic snowflake started to be forced back towards Roxas by fire that burgeoned and redoubled again and once more in its wrath.
Elsa clenched her teeth and concentrated, but the snowflake continued to slowly descend towards Roxas inexorably, and her arms looked like they were about to snap violently enough for the bones inside them to tear into a large number of shreds as though they were the branches of trees.
Anna felt her jaw drop in a horrified awe she'd never experienced before, even after everything she'd heard about what the Note Blade, the Kye-Blade, and the Keyblade of Hearts could do.
Elsa had focused the whole potency of the eternal winter she'd spread over an entire average sized town and castle; the surrounding sea and fjord; and a region of the countryside larger than, and including, a sizeable mountain.
And, even though she was just one person and not a colossal Heartless collective such as the Demon Tide that had defeated Elsa, and even though she was using a substance that was inferior to ice more often than not, Maleficent was forcing it back without showing any evidence of exertion.
"How can you honestly believe I went to all the trouble of luring Luxu into a snare, partially so the Foretellers would be crippled and we could pick up where we left off in Arendelle, to allow myself to be hindered by a circus spectacle no more impressive than a common house fan?"
Maleficent's draconian voice was a reverberating roar, but still female, and as smugly self assured as her ordinary tone.
Roxas shifted, attempting to rip himself off Maleficent's fang extensions, but she just began digging them in deeper.
Xion moved, trying to get up, but her body didn't respond.
"Let him go!" Kairi shouted, darting at Maleficent and breaking into a Flowmotion as she reached the circumference of the black glass sand, arcing along its edges to position herself for what would almost certainly be an attack at the wings.
Maleficent swung her tail around, slamming it into the side of Kairi's head, and she was sent soaring through the air like a wild pinwheel to crash in an unceremonious heap far past Elsa, and behind her.
"I have no use for a darkness that will not heed my strictures," Maleficent continued, forcing the snowflake further and further down.
"It's quite a disappointment Sora isn't here to witness the time of my long awaited triumph, and that Aqua refuses to fight back, but I should save two things for when I've mastered Yen Sid's proficiency at magic."
"I'm one of the last people to brag, but Mickey told me he genuinely isn't sure which of the two of us is the better archmagus," Elsa returned through tightly clenched teeth.
Then the snowflake rippled itself, altering into a large one sided arcane reinforced magnifying glass of clear ice capable of withstanding the volcano for a short period of time.
Maleficent stopped spewing them as her own inferno was reflected back in her face by magical properties that gave the ice the same abilities as a real magnifying glass, and she recoiled her neck back like a curling whip, screeching in agony.
Roxas twisted himself free of the grasp of Maleficent's wings and fell backwards, flipping to his rear to land on unsteady legs. The space behind him then bent without curving, and he reappeared far back, standing in front of Xion with Oathkeeper and Oblivion up defensively.
With Roxas safe for now, Elsa stopped resisting the conflagration as determinedly and shifted the ice at the front of the magnifying glass into a sickle with a thin point at the edge facing Maleficent's neck, and then swung it in the direction of her jugular.
Maleficent brought her wings up beneath it and in front of it to catch it on its underside.
Then she brought her tail back to the right of her maw, and vented out another torrent of phantasmic green, albeit not in the direction of the sickle.
As soon as it was out, she swung her tail once with enough force that Anna felt the air push against her this far away.
She must have displaced the air, because her newest cyclone rushed in the direction of Elsa, who was overextended and in no position to block.
Vanitas was the one to vanish then, to return out of the air at her side and hurl himself into her, throwing them both out of the way of the almost emerald geyser.
But then, before Maleficent could fully halt the momentum of her own tail, Roxas threw Oblivion, and then Oathkeeper after it along the same path, in the whirls of a double Strike Raid Goofy had described to her.
He bent the space around it as they rocketed while curling it along its pathway and they collided with Maleficent's tail, it used her own indescribable inertia against her to drag her forward, sending her off balance and causing her to lose coordination, and causing the edge of the sickle to begin digging into Maleficent's wings.
But, as opposed to what Goofy had told her about how Strike Raid worked, the two Keyblades continued to gouge into Maleficent's tail and yank her forwards, bringing her wings, and her neck behind it, closer and closer to the sickle.
Maleficent dug her clawed feet into the black glass sand around her, and even with a purchase as unsteady as that, she began slowing her motion.
It sped up seconds later, but then it slowed once more, and then it picked up its rate and became more gradual, and then it increased its speed and lessened it, and then it picked up its pace and slowed another time.
The tug of war went on, and the magnifying glass remained behind the sickle in front of Maleficent's face, now trickling in thick rivulets as it melted into slush. It was hot enough Elsa couldn't reshape it, but still cold enough her spell was in effect and would remain so until it was fully undone; and with the magnifying glass in her way and still enchanted to be able to reflect fire, she couldn't emanate another maelstrom that would make that much of a difference.
After several seconds, Anna started as Vanitas' eyes widened.
For the first time, Anna heard honest, deathly protective horror and terror for someone in his voice.
"Roxas, you're bringing out too much darkness!" he yelled.
"The Keyblade of Hearts kept us from being thrown out of Ven's Station of Awakening when he died and was sent to another world, but that doesn't mean it's not still vulnerable to darkness in the same way any heart is!
"Keep this up and he'll be exorcised to The Final World; and even if he can be returned to life now, if he's removed from space and time while he's dead, even if he's able to hold on in The Final World, it will be too late then!"
For the first time, Aqua moved, rising to her feet quickly.
Terra shifted slightly, but he was still too hurt and winded to get up.
Without any prior warning, Axel, Mare, Namine, Isa, and Marshmallow appeared behind where Xion was lying.
Maleficent's snout lost a significant deal of its calmness, and her eyes narrowed to slits of hatred at the sight of Mare; clearly able to tell she was the Data-Heartless who had humiliated her much more drastically than any of her other major enemies had even one time.
"Roxas!" Axel shouted.
"Cut it out!
"Namine, get moving!"
.
"No! The restraints that regulated its shape are gone! Unable to analyze!"-First Lieutenant Maya Ibuki
"The Eva has broken free of its confines. It's reclaiming its rightful shape. Breaking free of its humanity, it's transcending its physical form to become a divine being. Weaving together the heavens, the Earth, and everything under creation, it's transforming into a condensation of pure energy. Purely to grant the wish of a single human."-Doctor Ritsuko Akagi
EVANGELION 2.22:
YOU CAN (NOT) ADVANCE