Chapter 18: We're the Danger
A few minutes earlier.
It probably isn't as obvious for the others since they don't really know the girl, but Ddraig only has to take one good look skyward to know that his partner is positively livid.
Hence why he doesn't really argue with her when she asks him to make it, let's say memorable when he deals with the biggest, toughest crow he can find.
Reflexively chaining [BOOST]s, the Welsh Dragon cuts through the air. While his current diminutive form certainly isn't as powerful as his old, it definitely has it beat in speed and maneuverability.
Which probably explains why he's barely at twenty-five when he flips around to land hind legs first against the leader of this whole kerfuffle.
Always easy to determine who's in charge with the dove and the crows. You just have to count the wings.
His draconic acuity takes in the surprised looks on his foe's face as his stomach caves under the impact, cutting him mid-rant while he's monologuing like a two-bit villain, before getting thrown away by the basicest of physic laws.
… What is he supposed to say in those moments, again? The girl had a rather amusing idea she told him a week ago.
Ah, yes, Ddraig remembers now.
"Dynamic entry!" He roars - not squeaks, never squeaks - as the winds lash around him and in the wake of the punted crow-in-lead, the thunderclap-like sound of the impact punctuating his words almost perfectly.
Eh, his partner was right, it is amusing.
Instantly, a lull falls on the battle as the Welsh Dragons feel hundreds of pairs of eyes snapping in his direction, followed by a chorus of swears and gasps from those who at least got the beginning of a clue as to who he is.
The Dragon of Domination can't help the grin that instantly blossoms on his muzzle.
Even if the circumstances could arguably be better, he still got it!
"Y-You!" The crow-in-lead addresses him while nursing his stomach and clutching a light spear in a death grip, his flight just a tad wobbly, prompting Ddraig to turn his attention back toward him, "How?! He sealed you!"
The Dragon of Domination's grin widens.
"I suppose the old codger started to lose his touch in his late years." He gives an infuriating non-answer, taking a page from his partner, "Why, it's almost as if his little trinket couldn't fully contain a draconid as handsome as me!"
Ddraig has to refrain himself from guffawing at the looks he gets after spouting that steaming pile of ox dung.
If looks could kill, he's almost certain he would already be dead, what with all the crows throwing him death glares.
It always amused him, how much the old codger's failures were still ready to defend him at the smallest slight perceived. Truly his little toy soldiers until the end, even with darkened wings and shame in their hearts.
"Heaven's System has truly fallen, then." The crow-in-lead scowls.
Ddraig tilts his head to the side, eyes locked with his interlocutor, paying no mind to the other crows whispering between themselves fearfully or the two dove-fanatics limping next to each other down below.
"Oh?" The dragon hums, taking another page out of his partner's book as he pretends to follow while actually not really getting the crow-in-lead's point.
His innocent tone makes his interlocutor chuckle, then laughs, a laugh that gets progressively more unhinged as seconds go by.
When it finally comes to a stop a solid ten seconds later, just enough time for Ddraig to ask himself if he shouldn't just off the fool and be done with, the hand plastered across the crow-in-lead's face slides off his face as he stares heavenward, a disturbing - for a mammal - grin carved on his face.
"Ironic, isn't it?" The pointy eared crow starts with, gesturing in the Dragon of Domination's direction, "God bites it at the end of the Great War, yet you're still here, and now you're even free to roam as you please!"
The Welsh Dragon doesn't really pay much attention to the choked gasps and cries of dismay echoing all around from the few not in the known.
"I have it on good authority that it's something that tends to happen when one makes too many enemies." He points out mildly, "Eventually, too many of them band together to bring you down like a mad dog. And the old codger certainly made a number of those while pillaging through the various pantheons, so sure of himself he was that he'll never face the consequences of his actions."
Ddraig's own grin turns a little savage.
"Yet, here we are." The dragon spreads his fore limbs apart in an all encompassing gesture, "'The One True God' killed by his own, wayward son and his creations in a three-way conflict that solely lays on his shoulders, and nobody helped him because he pissed off everyone else. A well deserved end if I've ever heard of one."
A dark chuckle is all the answer he gets at first.
"So you get it!" The crow-in-lead ends up saying, his grip around the haft of his light spear turning white-knuckled, "Yes, you get it! We should have won this insipid conflict! We shouldn't have to sue for peace, getting robbed of our just victory by Azazel's cowardice when both Heaven and the Underworld's hierarchy were in tatters."
"Oi, I'm gonna stop you right there!" Ddraig drawls, a paw extended forward, clawed digits splayed open, "I don't give a broken eggshell about your hang ups. I'm just here to beat you to a pulp before taking a nap."
A pause.
"... Why even talk, then?" The crow-in-lead spits.
"Simple, really." The Dragon of Domination grins, "Hero, villain, it doesn't matter-"
Ddraig suddenly blurs forward, catching everyone off-guard as his lithe and diminutive form closes the distance between the crow-in-lead and him in less time than it takes a mammal to blink, his tail winding up.
And, as he crosses path with the pointy eared one, his tail slash downard, colliding with the top of his opponent's head and sending him carening away.
"-as long as you got the presentation!" The dragon roars - and not squeaks! - to the world at large, before blurring back into the fray.
"Ma… Ma…" My hand slowly slides off my face just as my laugh dies, the deathly silence of the momentarily quiet battlefield only getting interrupted by the rumbles and groans of the sky above us, thick, black clouds pooling together in the beginning of something that looks like a tornado, but which definitely isn't.
The bright, red electric arcs flashing through said clouds is, after all, a pretty big tell of my emotional state.
I'm. Beyond. Fucking. Pissed. Off!
And I can't help but find some irony in the fact that the architect of this shitshow got no sold in two minutes flat by a fucking plushie of all things!
Granted, it is the world's deadliest plushie we're speaking off, but still.
Just as quickly as it appeared on my face, the unhinged smile I had on my face for the past ten seconds melts off, leaving only a thin-lipped frown on my face.
"Alright, playtime's over." I declare flatly, and the nearby Devils - those who still stand on their feet, mind - flinch at the coldness of my tone, "Senketsu."
I mechanically crack my neck to the right, then to the left as the customary lightshow runs its course, the pinpricks on my skin almost grounding in a way.
It reminds me why I'm mad.
It reminds me of the ugly gash cutting through Kuoh High's building, at least three classrooms wide, with all the consequences that entails because I could only shield one of those by myself.
And, above all else, it reminds me-
"La liberté des uns s'arrêtent là où commence celle des autres."One's freedom stops when another starts. I mumble under my breath, yet everyone hears it, almost as if I've just happened to pitch my voice just right.
Or like the world itself wants me to get heard.
I pop Joyeuse's handle in my right hand, before thumbing her switch.
"Once more, into the breach!" Comes the happy reply.
I don't acknowledge it.
"Joyeuse, burn." I tell my blade curtly.
Apparently, that's all the clue she needs to get that something serious is happening, and she instantly complies, her bright white center surrounded by black lightning gaining a flaming edge.
Good. I'm not in the mood for banter anymore.
Preparation made, I take the time to slowly roam my eyes on the Fallen Angels still bloating the sky and the two exorcists wearing shell-shocked expressions, the yellow teint in the background a pretty big hint that some kind of ward is in place and stopping everyone from leaving and/or joining.
I suppose the White could brute-force his entry, but I'm past waiting for Azazel's attack dog's intervention.
I take a breath.
"I'm going to say this once, and only once." I start coldly, pitching my voice just so, the very powerful set of lungs I inherited from Big Mom pulling their weight as everyone who wasn't already instantly looks at me, humans and supernatural alike.
"In front of a Queen, numbers do not matter." I warn, mentally gathering myself to execute the most powerful Soul Pocus I've done so far.
"So choose,
"Bend the knee,
"Or your life." I declare.
And the world follows my will, a powerful, earth-shattering rumble roaring from above, as a wave of raw, unfiltered willpower washes over the surroundings.
The results are instantaneous.
Devils and Fallen Angels alike faint, foaming at the mouth, the former going slack in crumpled heaps next to me while the others start falling in droves from their flights, landing with the sickening sounds of crushed bones in a horror-inducing parody of a raindrops.
Two-Winged, Four-Winged, Six-Winged; it doesn't matter, they fall all the same.
One instant, so mighty, the next, so frail.
In the corner of my eyes, I catch the two heiresses slamming against the ground, ironically on their knees, as well as Sona's Queen, the three of them instantly throwing fearful looks.
I pay it no mind, even if it hurts a little.
I almost want to scoff as I register the two broads on which most of the blame for the current tragedy lays on passed out amid a rain of black feathers and unconscious bodies.
Yet, not every foe is passed out from my display of Conqueror. At a quick glance, thirty-ish Six-Winged and the ten Eight-Winged Fallen Angels Kokabiel brought with him endured, even if their brows are matted with sweats, their hands shaky and their eyes look like pinpricks.
I take that in, before sighing softly.
"Something the matter, partner?" Ddraig asks from his perch on my shoulders, a sentiment echoed by Senketsu if the swiveling of his chameleon-looking eyes is anything to go by.
"They did not bend the knee." I answer back.
"So they die."
"So they die."
I feel him jump off my shoulders.
"I'll guard the whelps, go wild." The Red Plushie Emperor tells me before beelining toward Rias and Asia's position.
"Much appreciated." I answer, my grip tightening around Joyeuse's pommel.
"Much appreciated." The girl answers, before blurring away with a rafale of 'pop-pop-pop-pop' sounds, her 'Razor' technique still as mind-bogglingly nonsensical as when Ddraig saw it for the first time, her not-flight absurdly erratic.
The Welsh Dragon shakes his head, right in time to plop himself on the shoulder of the frozen redhead bat, his wings flapping a couple of times to correct his position.
Coincidentally, it's all the time needed for his partner to start her own carnage, appearing right in the middle of the still able crows.
"Is- Is she flying?" The glasses wearing bat mumbles aloud, her voice shaky and reeking of fear.
Ddraig finds it odd that the two are so shaken from being exposed to his partner's will. It's not like they grew up in the company of their admittedly quite scary siblings, after all.
The Dragon of Domination snorts - not squeaks! - dismissively.
"No, she's kicking the air." He drawls, his eyes locked on the girl as she starts 'playing tags' with her severely outmatched opposition, each time pulling out their life-force and souls out of their bodies in the exchange, accumulating an ever bigger and wider gaseous, pink cape at her back while dodging with contemptuous ease the panicked attacks of her opponents.
Uh, the cape trick is new. Quite convenient, too, she'll have her two fore claws free during her fights that way.
"W-What?" His current interlocutor blurts out, heads snapping in his direction.
"It makes just as little sense to me as it does to you, trust me on this." The Welsh Dragon scowls, "Girl has a talent to pull the most outrageous ox dung there is and somehow make it work!"
"You're serious…" The bat voices aloud, eyes going back on the scene, the 'pop-pop-pop-pop' still echoing in the courtyard, "Lucifer, you're serious!"
"Most fun I've ever had in the last seven centuries, by the way." Ddraig grins to no-one in particular, just as his partner winds up her sword arm.
"Curtain Call!" His partner bellows, something that can only looks like nonsense to anyone but him-
-as the dullest sword to ever sword lets out a positively gigantic wave of fire in front of her, happily laughing as she's won't to do, coincidentally masking the girl's position from her assailant's eyes.
The crows, who had apparently started to somewhat rally despite their dwindling numbers, are of course taken completely off-guard, the blaze throwing a wrench in their counter attack - props to them for getting back in the game despite facing certain death.
That, of course, does jack shit to block his partner's own rhythm, because she knows exactly where each of them are, a fact she proves when one of her hands surges out of the inferno to clamp around a Eight-Winged crow's throat to unceremoniously drain him.
Ddraig's grin, though, turns a little sour when his eyes land on his partner's empty expression.
… He may have to do something nice for her when all of this is done and over with, it's not an expression that suits her.
"H-How can she do that?" The redhead's bat wrenches him out of his musings, prompting him to throw a distracted eye her way.
"What?" He asks back.
"T-Throwing herself into danger like that, without a care!" The bat answers, gesturing at the battlefield.
Ddraig pauses, before laughing.
"Oh, that's easy." He grins, "It's because we're the danger, and not anyone else."
[AN: Marie angy. UwU
Everyone else shocked.
Hope you enjoy, xoxo!]
