Icon made the first move, rushing forward taking the woman the neck, flinging the two of them out into the distance before slamming her into the ground with enough force to send tremors throughout the area.
This left Max standing in front of the young man who had just moments ago stood at the epicenter of a blast that had reduced a building and its occupants to nothing more than ash. Max couldn't help but notice that both the guy and the splinter that he was working with both dressed as if they were pulled out of a JRPG.
"Don't suppose we can settle this with a game of rock-paper-scissors?" Max tried to put on a brave face, but the odds were heavily against him.
Ever since Max had escaped from the research facility last night he had been biking for his life to try and outrun the agents they had sent after him. That didn't even get into how he was already injured from Icon introducing his face to the floor just an hour ago.
And to top it off he had been eating nothing but meal bars for the last few months, always enough nutrients to survive. This was meant as a specific safeguard against some of the esoteric threats the facility held, but that also meant he had no excess energy for a fight.
The man across from Max said something in Japanese that he couldn't parse. He only knew a few scattered words from Uzi on movie nights, so long ago at this point it seemed like a dream.
"Sorry, I have no idea what you are saying." Max seemed a bit embarrassed for the man. After all the guy had seemed to really have been putting his all into whatever evil speech he was giving.
That seemed to knock the wind from the stranger's sails. With a wave of a hand a purple pentagram appeared over his throat and then shattered into dust. "I'm surprised the witch who managed to bind the Origin wouldn't have a spell for translation."
Max laughed again, nervously. "Yeah I'm not a witch, or a left hand, just an engineer."
That seemed to actually give the man pause, a blank stare aimed in Max's direction followed by a mocking laugh. "One of the most powerful beings in the world in the hands of an unworthy, truly this world is equal parts comedy and tragedy." the man summoned more of the floating pentagrams around himself. "Then let me introduce myself again, I am Krow. I would have more to say, but for you, my name is enough." Beams of light shot forth from the pentagrams, each zeroed in on Max's chest.
Max quickly leapt out of the way and only received a graze from one of the beams on his arm, drawing a thin line of blood. He tumbled, ungracefully, into the rubble that the dinner had been reduced to. Lacking any other obvious means of attack he picked up a broken bit of the building and chucked it at Krow with as much force as his lanky body could produce.
Krow simply slapped it aside with a look of contempt on his face. "This is humiliating, I came here today prepared to fight a witch capable of controlling the origin, instead I have to deal with…this."
"Max!" Icon turned and tried to make a move to help him, only to be blindsided by her own foe tackling her from behind with a mad grin on her face, pinning Icon to the ground.
"Don't get distracted now, big sis!" the woman howled manically as she converted her hands into claws, digging into her back.
"Well I suppose it doesn't matter now, I will kill you and my sister will devour the origin, and thus evolve to even greater heights." Krow summoned three more pentagrams and aimed them at Max. "Goodbye, unworthy."
Three lancing beams of light fired from them straight toward Max, a scream of fury escaping from Icon as she struggled against the weight atop her.
But before the beams could so much as touch Max they shattered. In their wake was nothing but sparkling, tiny lights, no bigger than a firefly. Krow stared at the downed young man with a look of confusion.
"Catch," Max tossed something at Krow, who grabbed it out of the air on reflex..
"What?" he opened his palm, feeling the object he had caught was hot to the touch. Said object was a smooth and flat rock which had a glowing carving at its center that was pulsing.
Before Krow could discard It however the stone detonated in his open palm, a high pitch scream escaping him as the stone shattered into shrapnel that peppered him across his body, opening up numerous lacerations. But the worst of the damage was on the hand that had held the stone, reduced to a mess of burnt skin and open wounds, the blast having even taken a few fingers with it.
Max winced. "Oh wow, I uh, that was a bit more than I expected."
"You…how…fuck!" Krow leveled a hateful glare toward Max as his now ruined hand trembled with unimaginable agony.
"Oni-chan!" The woman with him attempted to reach his side, but Icon quickly grabbed her leg and slammed her to the ground.
"What was that about not getting distracted again?" Icon's mouth split itself into a maniacal grin, the claw marks on her back splitting open to reveal scythe-like bone growths.
They were quickly thrust down into her attackers arms and legs. "I guess a copy can't be expected to follow its own advice!" Icon's voice rang out with murderous glee as she dug the blade sin deep
The woman let out a string of curses before slapping the ground with a hand, a purple pentagram growing to cover the area beneath them before the very earth beneath them began to spit out spears of rock. The sheer force knocked Icon backward.
As the two women resumed their battle Max picked himself off of the ground and dusted himself off. "You probably want to get that hand wrapped up."
"How?" Krow hissed, pain distorting his ability to speak.
"How did I cancel out your 'magic'?" Max pulled another smooth stone from his jacket and tossed it into the air. "Containment runes, I discovered them when researching one day. It contains chaotic matter produced by reality warping events. Whether it's a special fluid that turns someone's blood into a bomb or your lasers, it all gets contained."
"Witch-hunter runes? Producing even one successful one can take years," for the first time Krow's voice didn't contain an ounce of arrogance or pain, instead there was nothing but fear. "How?"
"Sleepless nights, coffee, and an evil research organization's highly precise laser cutter."
The sheer shock of such a priceless weapon against the supernatural being reduced to such a convenient explanation actually got a laugh from Krow. "Well, I suppose we will test just how good they are. Sister, I summon you to me!" Krow thrust an arm to the sky, the weather shifting and lightning striking in the air.
The 'sister' looked up at Icon and smirked, her body withdrawing into itself until all that was left was a floating cube which zipped back to Krow's raised hand. "Let's show them our power, now manifesting the Icon Crown."
The world around the two shuddered again for a moment, as if the very nature of reality was being torn asunder by their connection. The ground cracked open and the sky roared out like a wounded beast as hundreds of purple pentagrams appeared to surround them, and above it all was a blood red arrow topped by a circle with an X at its center.
"With this we cast the world into nothingness, Collapsing Star!" Krow and his sister's voices rang out as one, mixed and fused together by the weight of their power. With their voices, the power hit a crescendo, nearly knocking Max and Icon off their feet. The magic pooled together into a ball of dazzling purple hues. . As the ball formed, Krow and the cube moved behind it, the cube now digging itself into Krow's skin. The tendrils of the cube ripple just underneath the man's skin.
And then all at once the pressure was released, the orb becoming a large beam aimed directly at Max, its width large enough that no amount of movement would have gotten him to safety before it struck
Icon, faster than a human could see, dashed in front of the beam before Max could blink. She stood so her back faced the beam, and arms stretched wide, crashing into her a moment before it would have swallowed Max whole. The sheer intensity of the strike caused a scream to rip itself from Icon's manufactured vocal cords.
Max could only look at Icon with a sense of awe and horror, his hand reaching out to her. Logically he knew what she was, the lives that her existence had allowed to be taken. But at this moment he could see nothing but a young woman who put the weight of an attack that would have erased him onto her back without a second's hesitation.
She noticed his hand, reaching for her, and despite her sheer agony, she returned the gesture in kind.
Max wanted to say something given that their chances of survival seemed slim to none, but all he could summon was her name. "Icon."
The moment their hands touched a crimson light began to form around the two, It swallowed them entirely, and suddenly Krow's attack no longer reached them. . Rather the red glow seemed to drink in the attack from around them swallowing the beam with a voracious speed, until after a few moments there was nothing left but clear skies, and the two of them standing in a now ruined area.
"Wow," Icon looked down at where their hands had met, their fingers interlocked. "That was…Max…" she turned to look at him, only to notice he was looking away from her, his entire face a uniform red. "What's wrong?"
It took a moment for Max to find his voice, still doing his best to look anywhere but directly at her. "The clothing you synthesized got damaged, and you're a bit more…anatomically correct then before."
Icon looked down and felt heat rise to her synthetic cheeks before quickly pushing Max to the ground and reforming her outfit. She tried to talk, but was unable in a fight between embarrassment and fury. Thankfully before she became too engrossed by the murderous thoughts the sound of a body hitting the ground pulled her attention back to their opponents.
Both Krow and the cube he called sister were on the ground, looking utterly exhausted from their fallen position, struggling to move even an inch.
"Well, too bad for you. Guess the original is always better than a copy." Icon moved over and slammed her foot down on the cube before it could attempt to reform, pressing down with a sadistic smile. Her fury over the incident was now aimed toward a more acceptable target. "Later, second place." she fully pressed her foot down and the cube shattered into hundreds of smaller copies, Krow screaming out as he witnessed it.
The smaller cubes slid toward Icon, crawling toward her and integrating with her form until not a trace of Krow's so-called sister was left. "Too bad, you lose." she kicked Krow onto his back before turning back to Max, who was dusting himself off. "So what do we do with the weeb?"
Before Max could answer a voice would ring out from behind her. "Oh you don't need to worry about him," Icon would turn back only to find that Krow wasn't speaking, but rather, a strange rabbit sock puppet that had appeared on his hand
Krow's body rose the puppet arm pulling up the rest of the body like a puppet on strings. . Its blank face stared at the pair. "To the victors of the spoils, you are hereby formally invited to Walpurgisnacht," the puppet's arms spread wide as the destruction around them began to repair itself. Burns disappeared, cracks in the ground refilled, and soon enough rather than standing in the ruins of a diner they sat at a booth with a cup of warm coffee and a plate of eggs and bacon set in a facsimile of a smiling face looking back at them. Across from Icon and Max sat, not the puppeted body of Krow, but an empty rabbit puppet body.
"What, who doesn't like eggs and bacon?" the puppet questioned with a laugh.
"Of course the role of witches in the Hundred Years War can't be fully discounted due to the potential conflict with the local population of spirits. they couldn't quite tilt the scales, outside of the obvious exception of Joan of Arc, but because her abilities were awakened by divine mandate and not naturally born with the ability to use magic she would be considered an atypical rather than a witch proper." N finished the last note on the smart board before tossing up the air and catching it.
The classroom was absolutely silent for a moment before one of the students got up and began to clap, only for a glare from the teacher to send him back to his seat in silence.
For her part Uzi was trying not to cringe herself into a puddle on the floor. N had been relatively normal throughout most of the classes throughout the day, but during history he had been sighing and groaning at each of the facts the teacher tried to present, until he had finally gotten up and decided to teach the 'proper' way of what had happened. This apparently included cabals of supernatural creatures moving in the background of every major historical event the teacher mentioned..
"Well," the teacher shuffled some of his papers from his desk before spotting N's name. "N, since you felt it was prudent to waste the class's time you can join me in detention after school today."
A few chuckles went throughout the class and one of the girls a few seats away from Uzi laughed and whispered under her breath. "What an utter ret-"
Before she could finish her thought Uzi casually flung her pen directly into the side of the girl's head, an act which caught the attention of the teacher. "Yeah yeah, detention for me too." Uzi sat back in her chair and rolled her eyes, but given herself a little smirk of shutting the other student up.
Sure N had been weird for the entire class, but she wasn't going to let someone drop a slur on her new friend/familiar. When the final bell rang, , and the two of them were told to stay in their seats for another thirty minutes before the teacher dipped out of the classroom himself with a quick warning that he would be back.
Uzi disregarded the teacher's order immediately and went to sit next to N, who was happily doodling pictures of dogs on a piece of paper before looking up at Uzi. "What's up buddy?"
Uzi, unsure how to respond, started to reach out for a moment before stopping." I was wondering why you, y'know, freaked out and took over the class."
N paused his doodles for a moment and tapped the pen against his cheeks a few times. "Well, I told you I've had my memory erased a few times right?"
It took Uzi a few moments to think back to him dropping that piece of information, only now finding it odd due to the hundreds of other bombshells that had been dropped on her over the past few days. "Yeah?"
"So I don't really remember much about who I am, history is one of the few things I can really use to pin down how the world is without having my memories. Even if I can't remember who I am or how I was born I can at least know when things happened and why. It's not much, but it works." N didn't sound exactly sad, more wistful.
Uzi couldn't think of anything to say, to that. How was someone like her supposed to grapple with the concept of losing her whole identity?
Sure, she didn't have the happiest memories in the world, but that didn't mean she would want them all to suddenly disappear. Instead of a reply she put a hand on his shoulder and offered an uncertain smile, her small way of saying 'you aren't alone', even if the words themselves were a bit too embarrassing for her to say.
N put an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into a side hug. "Bestest buddies."
"Ugh, bite me," she struggled half heartedly against N's hug, but even she couldn't hide the smile on her face.
Before anything more could be said the door to the classroom opened, Uzi sighed, half expecting the teacher to have returned, but there was… no one. Nothing on the other side but an empty hallway. The two looked at each other before slowly rising up to their feet and peaking outside, an unsettling feeling running down their spines.
A knife flew from the hallway, aimed directly at Uzi's forehead, blade gleaming under the fluorescents of the school's lighting, but just before it could hit her N put out his hand, catching the blade through his palm and splashing Uzi's face with his warm blood.
"Heh, ow." N flexed his hand and the knife shattered, his skin stitching itself back together until there was no trace of the wound left. "C'mon, you had to know that wasn't going to work, you should always put your best foot forward in these kinds of situations you know?"
Uzi was still trying to process the sudden attack as two familiar figures entered the room, Lizzy and Julie. They quickly moved to block the only exit to the room. Lizzy wore a predatory smile and seemed calm, but Julie was the exact opposite, her eyes locked on N as if he were a beast waiting to pounce on them.
"Sup freak?" Lizzy kept her eyes on Uzi, her hand clenching and unclenching in anticipation. A halo of knives spread out from behind her back, dancing in the air before straightening themselves and aiming directly at N and Uzi. "Do me a favor and die quickly, would you?"
Icon didn't hesitate for a moment, her fingers turning to claws and reaching forward to rip the rabbit puppet into shreds. But before she could get close the air seemed to ripple, and she was suddenly missing her arm up to the elbow. "Huh, well that's my idea." Icon reformed her missing arm and looked down at her food, poking it idly with her finger.
Max took a sip of the coffee that had miraculously appeared before him, spying the waitress that he was fairly certain had been vaporized when Krow had turned the building into a ruin. She seemed… fine, and was doing a crossword puzzle to the side of her work.
He knew from a theoretical standpoint that a witch with enough power could technically do anything they wanted, play reality like an instrument and change natural laws, but from all his research into supernatural phenomena there was always some sort of limit to the abilities of any creature. But to rewind time, to bring someone back from the dead, that was a power that he couldn't imagine anything in the world having.
Luckily he had gotten really used to not showing his emotions on his face when dealing with things that could leave him a smear on the ground. "So, Walpurgisnacht, what do you mean we're invited to it?"
The rabbit puppet cocked its head to the side. "Oh you are in much deeper trouble than I would have thought. That's hilarious," the laugh that came from the thing before them was inhuman, like the cackle of a beast. "Well let's start from the beginning, my name is Ponder, one of the three judges for the event you now find yourselves involved in. As for what it is, you can say it's the selection process to decide on who should take the mantle of the Supreme Witch. The one who stands above all others will take the place of the former one, and thus will be given access to the full power that the title bestows, including the right to decide how the supernaturals will interact with the world of mortals." Despite having no eyes Max could feel Ponder's gaze fully upon him. "Including the right to fully eliminate all of that from this world."
Max gripped his coffee cup in order to prevent his hand from shaking, using the warmth from it to keep him steady. There had been so many lives around him ruined by powers they couldn't hope to contend with. To have the chance to prevent that damage and save further lives? That was a prize that he couldn't bring himself to pass up. His eyes turned to Icon, who had shoveled the food on her plate into her mouth, leaving traces of it all over her face.
She seemed to notice his look and shrugged her shoulders. "You're my administrator, if you want to beat up a bunch of weirdos for a rabbit puppet I'm not going to say no."
Max looked down at the table, seeing his own damaged face looking back from the reflection of the all too clean table before finally giving a deep sigh. "What do I need to do?"
N moved first, putting an arm around Uzi and making a single movement that pushed the pair of them between the two girls and out into the hallway. The moment they were free his eyes flashed yellow, his school outfit shifting back to the heavy jacket he had worn when he was first summoned. " Invoke: Destruction ." he threw up his hand, a ball of chaotic purple energy flying into the room and exploding with enough force to make the windows in the back shatter.
Before the dust in the room had time to settle, more knives flew out of the room at the two of them, N pushing his body in front of Uzi and allowing them to pierce his body. "A witch, a spirit, and a god node, not exactly an easy first day." he turned back to look at Uzi, who despite seeming shocked about everything that was going on was still managing to stay on her feet.
"N, what the hell is going on?" Uzi gripped his arm, While the skin reformed quickly, she couldn't get the images of the knives pierced into his skin out of her mind.
"It looks like the witch we ran into earlier really doesn't like us," N's tone remained cheerful even as Lizzy and Julie exited the room, not a spot of dust on them despite the utter destruction he'd hurled at them. . "You should probably run."
Uzi fought to keep her panic down, of all the times, now was NOT the time to panic. . "I can't just leave you here by yourself! We promised not to abandon each other."
"I'll be fine," he turned back to look at her, only to receive a knife through the side of his head that buried itself to the hilt. "After all," the knife pushed itself out of his head, clattering to the floor as his eyes were replaced with yellow x's. "I also promised you would never be alone, didn't I?"
His hands began to shift and change, being replaced with long metal claws that dug rivers into the ground beneath him. "After this we'll go over some combat magic, that way we can fight together!"
"I'm holding you to that," she tightened her bag to her back and turned around. "Kick their asses N." And she dashed, as fast as her legs could carry her.
"Well you heard her,' N rushed forward, closing the gap between them with inhuman speed and grace. "Time to sleep."
Julie grit her teeth as the same unfamiliar terror from the hallway clutched her heart, driving her to push her hands up and summon a wall of flames that reached a temperature strong enough to melt the metal lockers near the classroom door. . But rather than stopping N swung his hands and obliterated the flame with a single movement.
In response, the lockers all along the hallway burst open , revealing knives hidden in each that fired like missiles into his body, striking him again and again.
"Go kill that loser!" Lizzy ordered, a twisted smile plastered over her face. Julie simply nodded and sprinted past the cocoon of knives that currently made up N's form, pushing her body to the limit until she was out of sight.
Just as Julie disappeared, N rose, the knives being shed off him as his body regenerated. "Well now I can't take my time, I'm going to have to do this quickly."
"Just try it," Lizzy laughed and held up a hand, her fingers snapping. "Doll, manifest and let's properly kill this thing."
The air behind Lizzy began to warp and distort like a broken television screen, static noise dancing in the air. From the distorsion a ghostly woman pulled her way through, long purple hair covering one eye and a ragged dress clinging to her body.
She replied in Russian, a language that N was able to parse fairly easily, "Understood.' She raised a hand and more knives appeared in the air around her, each of them gleaming under the now flickering lights above them.
Meanwhile, Uzi was severely regretting having skipped gym class so many times as she sprinted through the hallway, her mind too frazzled to properly guide her down the fastest path to the exit to the building. A wrong turn led her to a dead end, and soon Julie had managed to catch up with her, barely out of breath despite the chase she had been led on. "You really thought you could outrun a cheerleader as part of the 'I'm too emo for gym' club?" she let out a low and predatory laugh, summoning flames around her as she stalked toward Uzi.
Uzi couldn't say anything in reply, simply staring down the cheerleader She forced herself not to tremble. Not to show fear. .Instead she suddenly hurled her backpack at Julie's face.
Julie gasped in surprise. The bag struck her full in the face, a sickening 'crack' coming from the place of impact. . "What the fuck?!" she stumbled for a moment as the flames around her disappeared, clutching at her clearly broken nose, feeling the blood that was running out of it. "What the fuck did you do?!"
Uzi rushed forward, grabbing her bag from the floor and pushing past the cheerleader. . But before she could get far a spear of flames flew past her shoulder and turned a row of lockers into slag. When she turned and saw Julie snapping her nose back into place without blinking.
"I was already going to enjoy this next part, but now I'm really going to cherish the memory of your burnt corpse.'' The fury in her eyes was far beyond anything Uzi had ever seen in her tormentor before, and she knew now more than ever that there was no chance she would be able to escape.
Before Julie could make another move, a chain suddenly shot out from behind her and wrapped around her wrist. She looked at it for a moment and was on the verge of speaking before she was suddenly yanked into the air and slammed into the ceiling, and then directly down into the floor, leaving a spider web of cracks in the linoleum
The chain around her wrist burned bright for a moment before falling to pieces, Julie pushing herself up and looking at the two figures who had come from behind. "You have to be kidding me!"
John leveled a glare at Julie while Kali watched her cautiously, retracting a chain back under her sleeve.
"John?" Uzi looked over toward her friend.
"Uzi?" he asked in return.
"Bitch." Julie leveled to Kali.
"Insult noted." Kali's body shuddered as more chains began to slither out from around her body, hanging in the air around her.
For a moment the four simply looked around at each other, knowing that any small movement would bring chaos.
"What is even today!" Uzi shouted up at the ceiling, signaling the second round of the after school brawl to commence.