"Ivy, wait!"
"She just needed a good bonk."
"I don't think-."
Sonera spun around, tilting her head with curiosity. She took a moment to ponder her situation before releasing a slight nod in Ivy's direction. Evidently, a simple bonk was enough to get her attention.
"See?" Ivy huffed. "Simple. Thank me later."
Lunae cradled Sonera's cold face, trying her best to ascertain what had happened.
"I...I am sorry." Sonera looked down at the floor, ignoring Lunae.
"Don't." Ivy shrugged. "You did your job, let's just focus up now."
Lunae interjected. "What?!"
"Omizen isn't going to kill himself. Lila is just buying us time. We need a plan when she brings him back here."
"We lost her!"
"She's back."
Ivy placed a hand on her hip, narrowing her gaze with unusual petulance. For what seemed like the first time, her sass and vitriol seemed completely detached from her sense of pride and ego. All she really cared about was the fight ahead of them.
For Lila.
Sonera nodded once more, her hatred for the Consortium reigniting. "What do you have in mind?"
"Wait wait-." Lunae floundered. "We need to talk about what happened!"
Ivy shrugged. From her point of view, nothing was particularly amiss. Sonera was a crazed lunatic; her own mind was fractured from Lila, and Lunae was as fragile as ever. Things were right where they needed to be for another well-earned victory.
"This is different!" Lunae insisted after reading Ivy's thoughts on the matter. "We lost her!"
"I'm crazy. She's crazy. We're all broken. Move on." Ivy muttered.
Sonera silently agreed. For the first time, she found herself resonating with Ivy over Lunae. All that mattered was killing the enemy of the women they felt so oddly attatched to. And on that front, the heiress and the assassin were one and the same.
"I really can't beleive you two sometimes." Lunae sighed. "I couldn't feel either of you back there."
"Well, none of us can ever read what's going on with you." The heiress shrugged once again. "Welcome to our world."
"But I'm not-."
"You are. When I can see you." Sonera added.
"That's not-."
"Therapy later." Sonera and Ivy spoke as one.
The plan was a rather simple one, so as to avoid failure when complications inevitably arose. But without Lila, a key was missing, that being the sheer absurdity of it all. It was important to remain unpredictable with the Earthling alongside them.
"She's coming back around." Ivy squinted, using her growing connection with Lila to spot her beyond the horizon. "Say...Lunae."
"Yes?" Lunae peeped.
"When this is over. I promise I'll ask Yrix what is happening to us."
"Oh." She smiled. "Thank you."
Ivy's development was not lost on Sonera or Lunae. A few days ago, she would have refused to keep the conversation away from her own struggles and insecurities. Yet now she was focused on what others wanted and needed. It was a small step, of course, seeing as she still maintained her general rudeness.
But it was progress.
The fact that Ivy even bothered to take care of Rena, despite what had gone down between them, spoke volumes. She had begun to evolve just like the other students. And Yrix would have it no other way.
"Oh look," Yrix bobbed up and down as she observed from a distance. "Here they come."
The trees on the horizon began to rustle and quake as two glowing figures descended the farthest hilltop. It wasn't long then till their speed brought them bearing down upon the girls.
"Oh shit, oh shit." Lila stumbled into the crater Omizen had created earlier. "Heads up!"
The shipmaster followed closely behind, weilding another jolting glaive. Upon seeing the girls, newly reunited as a team of four, he began to seethe with anticipation.
Omizen wasted no time at all, casting a bolt of lightning towards Ivy with the intention of luring Lila into a trap. But it was Lunae who intercepted, using her Psionic talent to reflect the bolt back at its sender after allowing it to course through her body. Both Psionic warriors seemed adept in that particular art, at least when it came to energy-based attacks.
"She's not human." Omizen thought to himself after a brief recollection of the species's biology. "Unless she's simply that talented. Typically, her kind are terrible conductors."
The shipmaster feinted a charge at Lunae, only to redirect his more physical assault towards the girl behind him, knocking Sonera to the ground with a bicycle kick. It was all too easy for a warrior such as himself. Using his keen senses, Omizen spun around just in time and caught a baton tossed at his face with bullet-like velocity.
"Really?" He chided, remembering Lila's plan that so bluntly surfaced on the fringes of her kind. "That's your big weapon? You think a stick can hel-."
Suddenly, the baton exploded into a mess of sulfur and ash. Omizen stumbled backwards, mildly agitated at best. He wound up for another assault on the heiress, yet in a sudden change of strategy, used his voltage on the ground beneath her. The ensuing explosion that erupted fourth was placed directly beneath Lunae, knocking her up into the air.
Omizen blinked towards her, intercepting Lunae's path with a charged fist. Yet the moment he struck her down, a staff came whirling towards him at an unavoidable speed.
Fortunately, he had yet to dispense the static field that had been built up around his Psionic ambience, allowing Omizen to release a current of energy with an outstretched hand, locking Ivy's staff in place.
The ensuing voltage began to crackle and dissipate in random directions, with one bolt striking Ivy in the heart as she tried to push her staff forward with a Psionic grasp.
"Ack!" Ivy coughed, falling to her knees as her heart began to fail.
Omizen took complete hold of the staff, flinging it towards Sonera with a casual wave of his hand. The staff had found its new mark, giving him total satisfaction. Yet he knew something was amiss the moment he could feel a total lack of frustration in Sonera's mind.
"Suprise mothafuka!" Lila grunted in the deepest cadence she could manage, grabbing onto Omizen's shoulder with her tiny hands.
Unbeknownst to the shipmaster, a conversation had occurred between the girls, disguised by their vain and blunt assault. It had been deduced by the heiress that two Psionic ambiences of the more nimble variety could perhaps intercede and cancel each other out, if only for a brief moment.
And after Lunae shared such a fact with Lila within her own mindscape, the plan was fully hatched.
"What?!" Omizen gasped, realizing he couldn't blink away.
He shook off Lila with relative ease, dislocating her shoulder as she fell to the ground with a crunch. But they were both equally vulnerable. Now was the time to strike.
"Sonera now!" Lunae called out, picking herself off the floor with an outstretched hand.
Sonera unveiled a radiant whip, wrapping it around Omizen's left leg with a fiery snap. Lunae duplicated the effort as a second whip held tightly to the right leg. They both held on as hard as they could, restraining the larger Psion.
"Hah!" Ivy struggled, realizing she could no longer breathe.
But she could still reach.
Using the last of her strength, she called back her staff with a Psionic grasp, and after lunging towards Omizen with her injured legs, winded up the largest swing she had ever imagined. Her back arched backwards, and her hands tightened their grip around the staff as she prepared to strike.
"But that's not all!" Lila appeared behind the heiress, using the last of her own strength.
She blinked. Again and again.
Sending Ivy backwards, all the while maintaining her momentum, Lila began to create a looping tunnel of sorts. And after building up enough falling speed to disturb the air around them, she finally released the heiress, sending her screaming towards Omizen with ten times the force.
What came next was a deafening crunch.
Ivy's staff was shattered.
So was Omizen.
The shipmaster had dissapeared into a red mist, with nothing but a crumpled heiress and some tiny shards of metal to remember him by. The second trial was complete. But unlike the first, there was no time for celebration, for their victory came at a cost.
The girls were exhausted and broken, their wounds uncountable. Ivy had taken easily the worst of it. But all in all, they needed medical attention badly. If not, they would perish from something as pathetic as infection.
Yrix wouldn't have it. The trial was over. Now is the time for rest.
The Arch-Flayer practially beamed herself into existence a few inches from the crater.
"Well done." She mused with a hastened voice, pulling Lila in before snapping her arm back into place. "Good job."
Yrix turned her attention to Ivy, blinking towards her before striking her heart with a flick of her slender finger. The heiress contorted before breathing in deeply, her heart having been restarted by the well-placed strike.
"Haah!"
Ivy didn't even have enough time to complain before a transparent plastic rebreather was placed onto her face, its design appearing human in origin.
"Your lungs are exhausted." Yrix chimed in with a tinge of motherly sass, unfolding a metal cylinder filled with oxygen and a connecting tube seemingly from nowhere. "Stay still."
Yrix then unfolded a pack of white bandages sealed togethor by a plastic binding containing the symbol of a red cross.
She had medical equipment from Earth.
With speed that dwarfed both Lila and Omizen, Yrix got busy wrapping Ivy up, covering the wounds on her nape and leg with an especially prudent touch. She had hardly even finished before she dissapeared in a flash, reappearing in front of Sonera as she began to bandage her bloodied hands.
"Get off me-." Sonera growled.
"They'll get infected." Yrix hissed, restraining Sonera with an invisible grasp. "You got someone else's blood all over your little cuts."
Amidst the blinding chaos of Yrix's treatment, Lila became dazed and numb. She wanted to feel happy that they had emerged victorious. But amidst her worries for the heiress, a feeling of dread crept into her soul.
When did Yrix visit Sol? Was she there before the rest of the Consortium?
How long has she been with us?