Noah's boots were thundering down the alleways of Port Natalia. Bile rose to his stomach at the thought of having to siphon the lifeforce that had spilled out of children to cast his spell, but he needed to catch up, and he wasn't hurting them, just making use of the magic in the air… but he also hadn't stopped to help despite being able to undo some of the damage that the people inside received, once he'd noted that no one was risking death.
And somehow, Lazarus was keeping ahead of him. His speed enhanced and his physique sprier, he was definitely faster- but Lazarus clearly knew these streets better, had planned his escape route well, and always seemed to get lucky at the worst possible timing, leading Noah to stumble and lose him at the worst possible moments.
As Noah chased him inside of a seedy bar, however, he was grabbed and pressed to a wall with a blade to his throat. His hat fell over his eyes, and his heartbeat quickened.
"You're quick, I'll give you that, but you're a fool if you thought chasing me alone was going to get you anywhere." The deep, raspy voice that sent a shiver down Noah's spine drawled. "Now you've got a choice before you, lad. Turn around, stop bothering me, and we'll go on our merry ways, or we'll get to find out if you can take a blade as well as a mermaid can take an explosive charge."
"...damn." Noah looked around, and instead of staring at Lazarus, his eyes settled on a table in the corner of the room. "Out of all shitty reunion places, you chose this?"
"Wha-" At that, Lazarus bit onto the side of his hat and yanked it away with his teeth. "Brat? The fuck are you doing back here in this dump?"
"I should be saying that, since I didn't find you after winding up in Gold. Got told you were out and about doing who knows what- though apparently, that is blowing up children."
"Monsters. They are monsters, doesn't matter their age, it just means that they're weak enough to be decent targets."
"Are you hearing yourself?!" Noah shouted back, taking a step forward. "I get fighting when they're outside the city literally hunting people down like animals, but what the fuck did these mermaids do to you?"
"Hah! It all begins this way. Do you not think that our ancestors had to fight, to claim back Gold from the Dragons? What do you think happens to this city once all the men have been taken by mermaids and the next generation barely sees any human?"
"That there'll be fucking monsters who haven't attacked anyone yet. Once they do, then it's fair to actually pick a fight-"
"You! You're the men who attacked the Mermaid School!" Noah's blood freezes as he hears a woman's yell, and he turns around to stare at the newcomer. Purple hair, blue fish tail, red eyes, completely naked... a mermaid like many others. Unlike those others, however, she seemed to have little trouble moving around on land.
A shiver ran down his spine as Lazarus turned to glare at him for a moment, before meeting her gaze. "You must have the wrong guy. I was just having an argument with this here kid." he lies smoothly.
"What he means by that was that he's a criminal and I'm taking him in to the authorities to stand trial." Noah replies with a glare.
"Fat chance! The only two guys I saw running in this direction were you two, fleeing from the school!" As Noah opens his mouth to reply, her eyes turn as lustful as they are filled with hatred. "I'm gonna leave you both gasping on the ground, completely drained, and then we're gonna use you to teach the children how to mate with a man! That should be punishment enough for the likes of you mermaid-haters!"
What little compassion Noah held for this mermaid died a quick and painful death. Slowly, he unsheathed his sword.
"Well, I did not expect this. But then again, she shares her general body shape with Undine, which means that her head's probably full of water." Salamander comments unhelpfully. "Still, you're still sped up, and you can probably just get away quickly."
Water starts swirling around the woman's palms dangerously, as she licks her lips. "I think I'll start with the young one... you can wait for your judgment in a bit, cripple." she mocks Lazarus, who looks remarkably composed at the idea.
As Noah takes stock of the layout of the room, figuring out potential spots from which to try and outmaneuver her, the mermaid surprises him by beginning to float menacingly in the air. As he inwardly curses, he can hear Salamander click her tongue. "A yoma as well as a mermaid. This will be your toughest challenge yet, since you seem intent on fighting. Look out for her magic."
After a moment's thought, Noah freezes as he remembers something. As the mermaid stands there tauntingly, slowly approaching as she waits for him to move, he chuckles and sheathes his sword. "I guess there's no point in this. I can't beat a mermaid."
"No, you cannot..." she agrees with him after a moment, grinning. "It's nice to have a man admit they have no chance. I'll even let you choose how I fuck you. Lips? Tits? Hair? Or perhaps you want to feel the water magic only a powerful mermaid can use?" she smiles lecherously.
"All very tempting, but first, I have a gift for you to maybe tide you over into going a little easier on me..." he smiles. "It's not a knife, I swear. Besides, I can't imagine that if a mermaid child can survive that, then I could do anything to an adult."
Staring at him curiously, he can see that she's truly as dumb as Salamander thinks. As Lazarus' stare seems to burn a hole in his back, Noah reaches out inside his coat, before grabbing a cylindrical object. "This little box is something from my home. See, you pull the pin to open it, and after a second or two..." he says as he pulls the pin, counting in his head. One, two, three-
The smile on his face blooms as he lets the object go, arms wrapping around his own face to try and shield himself.
A moment later, light, heat and sound rip through the air with a vengeance. He falls to the ground as the flashbang's power is much more intense than he'd bargained for, and though his arm is thick enough wrapped around his face for him to not suffer damage to the eyes, the same can't be said for his ears.
He's getting dangerously accustomed to his eardrums being blown out.
Pain splits his head, his ears feel like they're set on fire, and he can't seem to stand up at all as he scrambles away from the mermaid who looks like she's screaming, clawing at her own face. Looks like, because all he can hear is the ringing in his head from the concussion and ruptured eardrums he's given himself on purpose.
His vision swims for a moment as his head falls to the ground.
A moment later, he's not exactly sure how, he's standing, sort of, in a completely different situation. Leaning against Lazarus for support, the two of them are hobbling away as fast as they can down an underground tunnel. "What happened?" he tries to ask, but can't even hear himself speak. Lazarus seemingly can, however, as he turns to give a glare at Noah as he shouts something back at him.
"He's telling you to stop shouting." Salamander informs him.
'You can read lips?' he internally wonders.
"I don't need to in order to understand what he's saying. Still, we need to have a talk about what classifies as acceptable damage to do to yourself in a battle."
'Her song...' he thinks back, the whole reason that he did that.
"The least dangerous to you part of her arsenal? Have you considered, I don't know, shoving a bit of cloth in your ears?"
'No time.'
"Well, fine! At least don't do something so fucking idiotic as to completely blast apart your sense of balance and your ability to fight with it then! Anything is better than what you pulled!" She shouts back, and he can't help but think of the fact that her voice is the only thing he can hear right now. "And why aren't you healing yourself?"
"...right, I can do that." he thinks aloud to himself, and as Lazarus turns to him again, he raises his hand and struggles out of his grip. A moment later, he's unceremoniously dropped on his feet, and with that, he promptly collapses.
"Tranquil winds of life, restore my wounded body." He clutches at his head, watching his own hands glow green with power as he feels himself sag slightly from the fatigue.
A moment later, his ears pop and he can hear again.
"Goddess fucking damn it, this sucks..." he curses to himself- since when did he begin cursing in Ilias' name?
"That technique..." Lazarus murmurs. "I thought you'd said you were studying Merlin's tomes?"
"I'm something of a multitalented individual." Noah snarked back. "Holy magic's been coming to me pretty well. The mermaid?" he asked, pulling himself up against the wall. He looked around. No torches anywhere, and they were underground... where was this red light covering everything coming from?
"You're welcome." Salamander pipes up.
"Left the damned thing behind when you hit her with the grenade... was that one of my prototypes, by the way?" Lazarus asks.
"I don't exactly know where to get white phosphorus from myself."
"White what?" At Lazarus' confusion, Noah snorts. Right. Of course the guy would somehow make a flashbang without knowing what went in it. "Never mind that. Let's keep going. She won't be down for long."
"NO I WON'T!" Something roars from down the tunnel, and a blue and purple missile rocketing from behind strikes Lazarus straight into the gut. As Noah pulls him back onto his feet, his sense of balance restored, he looks at the mermaid rise back from the tackle, water spraying everywhere from having jettisoned herself across the tunnel. "You..." she turns with a growl to stare at Noah. "No more Ms. Nice Mermaid. I'm going to shove so much water up your ass, you're going to to be spraying just as much of it out your mouth as semen out of your dick!"
"...that's graphic." he found himself murmuring morbidly. As Lazarus tries to stand up with a groan, a water-wrapped tail smacks him back into the ground.
"You gonna fight her for real this time? Or do the sensible thing and run away?" Salamander asks, and silently, he finds himself nodding. Lazarus is prone on the ground, groaning and seemingly out of the fight. Reaching into his pouch, he sighs as he retrieves something he sorely wished to not have to use.
With no real magic of his own except a seeming blessing for holy magic of which he only knew buffs and healing, and he didn't wish to push it in the first place with the light side of things with the threat of holy erosion looming, he had to get creative.
The mermaid looked at him with contempt. "Freeze to your very bones! Blizzard!"
"Sorry little guy." he murmured to himself, squeezing hard and crushing the life of the small lizard in his hand. "Raging flames, show them your power. Fire!" he shouted back, hand thrust forward as he concentrated the lifeforce of the lizard, burning it to a crisp in his hand. A torrent of flames shot out, running counter and melting through the frigid shards of ice that threatened to impale him.
Still, he wasn't going to sit on his ass. Dashing forward as he used the steam smokescreen produced by the meeting of fire and ice, he ripped the sword out of his sheath as he jumped at her neck. "Take this! Demon Decapitation!"
It wasn't that he didn't know, logically, that it wouldn't work. But the logic in his brain told him that if he swung a sword hard enough at someone's neck, it would decapitate them- that was the whole point of the skill Salamander had trained him in, after all. Furthermore, while he'd kicked repeatedly a mermaid in the face to little effect and the same went for his attempts at punching Salamander, that had been him being unarmed.
So in a way, it was as mesmerizing as it was horrifying to watch the mermaid flex her neck's muscles, and the blade stop about an inch into her flesh. As she thrust her hand at him to knock him away, he rolled with the momentum, sliding his blade out.
She was bleeding- pretty profusely, even, but that didn't look fatal. If anything, she looked pissed as she reached up to put a hand up on her neck.
"Ow. That hurt." She slowly massaged it, and after a moment, the bleeding stopped, even as Noah began swirling his arms, the mana-rich mist finding its place into his upcoming casting. She glared at him. "Take this, then. Water Bullet!"
"Ilias' lightning, rain down and punish the wicked! Mega Thunder!" he cried back, and the mermaid shouted in surprise as she dipped low to dodge and suddenly, the whole of her side of the tunnel was engulfed by a storm of lightning that lit the whole area up. For a moment, her night vision, borne of a long, long time spent in the depths of the ocean got messed up, and by the time she recovered, she was leaning against the wall, twitching. Her everything hurt... but more importantly, she could hear the dashing footsteps quickly getting away.
"No chance I'm letting those bastards get away with attacking my daughter..." she murmured to herself. "Come on, Maine, once more." Taking a deep breath, she frowned as she still felt her twitching muscles, but slowly, "FOR THE MERMAID SCHOOL! SCREW TAIL!" she shouted, her twitching tail bringing her body into a rotating motion that, together with her water, propelled her forward like a bullet.
"Shit!" Noah cursed, diving to the ground at the side as he heard her tear through the air right where he was. The mermaid landed in a heap of dust, slowly peeling herself off the floor. As she stood, she watched a small cylinder roll in between her arms, and she dropped back to the ground, closing her eyes and covering her ears.
That, in turn, left her wholly unprepared when the explosion resulted in a burning liquid soaking her in an inferno of liquid flames. She screamed herself raw, covering her body with water, but the damage was done. By now, she was covered in burns, and the slash on her neck had resumed bleeding. "I have been zapped... burnt... bombed... humiliated... no more!" She screamed. "You think I haven't wizened up to your tricks, mage? Your magic depends on me doing something first. Let's see how you react to something that you can't block, then! Let's see your little flames do anything when I soak this whole tunnel. Source of surging water, drown them in a devastating flood! Mega Water!"
Noah raised an eyebrow. He could block that. "I have a bad feeling about this... but you've got no other choice." "Raging flames, scatter them like a maelstrom! Mega Fire!" Salamander thought as Noah cast his countering spell, resulting in a scalding burst of steam generating from where the water and fire met in the middle.
He did feel his fire begin to wean as he was completely dampened as the steam had nowhere to go, but he still successfully managed to block the attack. Dashing through the steam, he jumped where he saw the outline of his opponent, trying again to finish her off by slamming his sword, this time wrapped in flames. "Burn! Flaming Decapitation!" he roared, bringing the sword down on her awaiting neck.
"Come, Grandine!" However, with a movement so perfect that you would not be at fault for believing that she saw right through him, she moved along the flow of the sword, head tilting and her body twisting around the blade as a water-soaked palm clamped around his hands.
"What?!" Salamander shouted.
It felt more like a thick, gelatinous liquid that soon engulfed his entire arms, wrenching the blade and throwing it to the side as he stared up in surprise at the mermaid before in one swift motion it wrapped around his neck. "I really should not have done this in front of a human, as the queen explicitly told me to only train this power and never use it until ordered... but you know what? Since you were so kind to lead me to such a secluded area, I believe I just might drain you and your little friend to death to make up for the inconvenience."
A ghostly, ethereal image appeared behind her. It was a harrowing mix of monster and machine; the chimeric spirit, seeming to take elements from plant, slime and beast monsters alike, appeared for a brief moment with an ethereal giggle behind her, bolstering the mermaid.
"Let's try this again, together this time." The mermaid giggles, as Noah thrashes around in her grasp. "Water Bullet." she almost gently places her hand on Noah's chest.
The resulting kickback that throws him a good fifty feet further back down the tunnel does remarkably feel like he just got blasted with a shotgun. As he struggles to pick himself back up, he glances to the side as he can hear the mermaid's contented humming slowly approaching down the tunnel.
"Any more bright ideas, kid?" Lazarus asks, breathing heavy and leaning against the wall. "Pretty sure she cracked my ribs when she hit me."
"...not much we can do." Noah coughs wetly, feeling blood pool in his lungs. "I think, while I try to keep her away... pray and hope that someone is still watching."
Noah really needs to choose better company for himself. Not the smartest choice to protect the terrorist from an angry mother.
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