Justice League: The New Wave (IC)

[ChasNicollette]

Beastly. (tags Gar)

He snapped at one of the hybrids, not killing it, but stepped to the side and with a seemingly clumsy stumble twisted his body. His tail whipping out at another hybrid and whipping his head around, he tossed the one in his mouth at the nearest wall.

The tail's whip nearly broke that snake-monster in half, and-- while they were still some distance from the stadium wall-- throwing the other one broke its neck in a sickening crunch. Both down.

By sheer luck this move brought him face-to-face with the third hybrid and he ROARed loud enough to shudder the ground, rattle windows and topple any nearby object not secured to the ground.

The roar blew out the windows of a nearby Taurus, took down a light pole that had been dislodged by the ongoing violence, and almost pitched the remaining hybrid off its feet...

...but it dug in with the claws of all four limbs and whipped its sprouting tail for balance even as the concussion and percussion of that roar drove it backwards. Its claws carved furrows in the tarmac, its skull and bones rang with the agony of it all-- but it stayed conscious, stayed upright...

...and when the roar faded to echoes, it lunged forwards, aiming to gash a clawed, venomous strike along the Spinosaurus' flank, splitting its skin lengthwise the way that that iceberg had opened The Titanic...

 

[ChasNicollette]

Dark Side of the Moonday. (tags Arrow, Kiz)

Deciding it would be beneficial to keep his own blood from boiling, Connor charged towards Kaldur. Not being stupid he did not call out or shout any battlecry. Instead he simply knocked arrow after arrow and let fly at the bloodmages surrounding him. If he was lucky they would not hear him coming and his arrows would strike true. Well at least the ones that he was approaching from behind should.

Even as Connor sprinted on approach, he would see The Bestowed upping the pressure on Kaldur-- they could taste the Atlantean's vulnerability on the air. Blood-boiling was their quickest, most lethal method for killing. Snake-charming their insides took longer, and attuning the powers in metahuman blood was unpredictable. If they restored that avenue of attack, this could be over in moments.

Kaldur needed to keep them at range, and his ranged attacks were limited with The Trident focused on stemming blood-tides-- his waterbearers were effective at firing quick-burst spurts of water like projectiles, as lethal as cannonballs, but he was quickly running out of water in his armor's pack. The Trident could summon water from the air-- hell, Kaldur could bring down the whole Missouri River on this complex and drown it-- but The Trident was busy.

Happily, whether Connor realized it or not, Clockwork was there at the edge of the parking lot forcibly nullifying The Bestowed's ability to distort spacetime around themselves. And so his arrows flew true-- he was Oliver Jonas Queen's son by nature and by autodidactic nurture.

Arrows thudded into hearts through robed backs and six Bestowed dropped dead from their levitations in less time than it took to read about it.

The ones who saw Connor coming, however, still had access to their ability to teleport-- and they proved more elusive. Flickering in and out of reality with no discernible pattern, they blinked here, blinked there, arrows narrowly missing them or hitting them to wound rather than the killshot he'd aimed for.

But there was back-up for this back-up.

Shanker disappeared into Kiz's shadow, reappearing in the congealed pool of shadow around Kaldur and the Bestowed. With the same casualness shown by a bored student when they yawn in class, Shanker emerged from the shadows and sunk her teeth into the Achilles heel of a Bestowed and then dove back into the shadows only to emerge again in another Bestowed's shadows and again pump a lethal dose of its God killing venom. Venom that was as reduced at she was in her present form, but even still as watered down and diluted as it was, the venom of Śeṣanāga was ridiculous. And it was potent not only in its own right, but it was also a reminder and a warning that Ravana was sure -- despite all its boasting -- would feel as both Childe and Aspect of the Kali Yuga. The rememberance would not be kind upon the Bestowed who served now not only as vessel of an aspect portion of Ravana, but now also as a vessel of what that God killing venom could do...to gods and their fallen siblings.

Even as Kaldur nodded a grateful nod to Arrow, sweat beading on his brow from strain and effort and will...

...another presence registered in his mind now that it had exited the radius of Kiz' self-obfuscation, a legendary Leviathan if... inexplicably diminutive. The very level of sea-serpent that slithered sinuously off the edge of superstitious nautical maps. HERE THERE BE MONSTERS. A darksome ferocious presence in Kaldur's mind...

...but then it bit a Bestowed, and he died faster than blowfish neurotoxin, and again, another, just... gone.

Strengthened in his resolve by the support of his allies, Kaldur beamed gratitude to the mind of the leviathan-serpent even as he moved closer to Connor to take full advantage of the archer's support-- he could bolster Connor's covering-fire with a few well-placed bursts of water.

But even as Shanker and Green Arrow were defending Kaldur's aquamantic debuff, the reverberations and repercussions of Shanker's bites were indeed felt through the vestiges of Ravana that dwelt within The Bestowed.

One Bestowed in particular, the direct descendant of Homo Magi that had remained behind when many had left Earth's history for the sanctuary of Zerox and Gemworld, more acute in his sensitivities than his brothers and sisters... he hovered high above the battlefield and narrowed his eyes.

They were... diminishing. The earliest victims of these (perhaps admirably) bloodthirsty warriors-- the first Bestowed to have died-- it had been the space of seven moments. Their fragment fractions of Ravana should have burrowed into new hosts, cherry-picked from the teeming squalor nearby in the stadiums.

And yet those fragments were... departing? Slipping away like balloons on swelling wind.

Vanishing into a... blurred... imperceptible place on the edge of the battlefield. There was something there, something dangerous. He could see the effect of it without seeing it.

Gritting his teeth, this Bestowed willed himself to pierce that veil... drew upon all his considerable power to see the face of Ravana's great enemy. And once he could see that enemy... he could attack.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Mind Matters. (tags Nightwing)

"I hate magic." he thought to himself. Nightwing wasn't going to give this individual the time to recover. He knew that skill wise he had a much greater advantage. Not just that but he knew that he could be disoriented. So he began to do just that. His blows were designed to disorient, he went after his eyes by raking at them (he had seen in that in wrestling shows and always wanted to try it), he went at his nose and throat. After he landed his blows he'd follow up with a shock from the escirma sticks. His movements were crisp and short as to not waist energy on this person. In the mean time he observed to see if he could see any sign of weakness.

Nightwing's attacks were effective, efficient, a perfect economy of movement with ratio to amplitude.

But because he had departed the company of his allies before Kiz had given his assessment of the rules of engagement, because he hadn't heard Kaldur's speech about living with regret to save the souls of mankind... Nightwing's attacks were non-lethal.

He bludgeoned that Bestowed into utter concussed unconsciousness.

Presumably, he would still heal from injury-- but it could no longer be a focused, concerted effort.

And his unconscious, dreaming mind still had a fragment of Ravana hidden away in him, one now not forced to escape because its host still breathed.

Fortunately, though commlinks were barely operable in the spaciotemporal clusterfuck that was The Gem Cities...

...there were other ways to reach your allies.

Even as Velocity and Glider raced about far below so fast that even a fully powered Martian would be hard pressed to follow their movements, Rose hovered far above, above the crowds, hurriedly but methodically linking their minds to break The Bestowed's grip on them.

And as she did this, she... spotted... Nightwing's mind far below on the edge of the nexus of agonized, dreaming minds.

<Nightwing!> she called to him, mind-to-mind, grateful for the presence of a trained, bad-ass professional. <Oh, there you are. I don't know how much you know of what's going on, but-- but Aquaman and Kiz said we have to kill them to release the demon-chunks inside them, so Kiz can round them up and keep them from possessing anyone else. It's-- it's not a good scene, I don't know if-- I'm trying to be brave-- I don't know if I can kill anyone. ...can... can you?>

...but even as she expressed these doubts, her hesitations and guttering ideals...

...two Bestowed teleported on either side of her.

...and with scowling faces they accessed the power of her blood, attuned to the Martian genetics slowly subconsciously seeping into Rose's human biology.

...and in moments, they transformed into pale, scaly beasts out of the nightmares of another planet, like white and twisted negative-zone versions of Martian Manhunter's true Martian form.

They transformed into Pale Martians.

And without a second's hesitation, they immediately accessed powers that Rose hadn't even dreamed of yet. They used their telekinetic Martian vision to furiously accelerate the temperature of the air around Rose... igniting it.

Rose was instantly plunged into flame and she screamed, throwing her arms up uselessly in front of her face.

"AAAAAAH! NIGHTWING, HELP!"

 

[ChasNicollette]

Shock to the System. (tags Static)

Virgil's mind went blank, even as he calmly walked forward and stepped onto his flight disc. His mind was blank even as he flew wordlessly towards the bestowed. His mind was blank, even as he began to launch bolts of energy and chunks of metallic rubble at the bestowed. He was calm and focused, oblivious to all around him. Working in an eerie silence as he began his surgical assault. He aimed speeding rubble at heads and crackling energy at hearts. All the while his mind was blank, he was calm, and the world seemed silent.

As formidable as Virgil Hawkins was when his mind was racing...

...he now showed how positively frightening he could be when that mind wasn't grounded by the gold that sat in his heart.

He laid waste to Bestowed around him, here, there, five, ten, fifteen...

...but then a buzzsawing car door spun to a stop in the air before it struck its target.

A Bestowed levitated before Static, blood-red lightning crackling around him.

He had attuned to the metagenetic powers in Virgil unlocked by The Big Bang, mirroring his electromagnetic powers.

Though he lacked Static's creativity and experience with the powers, this Bestowed perhaps made up for this by living in the moment... being fully engaged with the prospect and the execution of mass mass murder.

To his credit, though, he didn't bother reciting any of the mantric zealotry that The Bestowed, Ajagar, and Blackadders had been spouting all day.

Not a word escaped his lips. He saw in Static's face, his eyes, that this was no time for talking.

He simply attacked, unleashing a thunder-cluster of ball-lightning straight for Virgil's stony-blank face.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Ravening. (tags to Karan, Raven, Ghost Rider)

The Wonder felt the impact of fist and arm driving her to the ground. She heard the wind screaming past fists as they pounded her flesh. She had a feeling the Bestowed would use her powers against her. But were they ready for the full brunt of her powers?

Ducking low she inhaled as deep as she could, and then screamed. Not the scream of an adult man bellowing in rage. No this was as high pitched as she could get, and that was an admirable pitch. This had to work, or she was well and truly fucked.

The Bestowed had managed to copy Wonder Girl's Kryptonian abilities, but unlike Rose they hadn't unlocked the full diversity of that power, the full potential of it. They didn't have her full invulnerability yet.

And so-- subjected to sonic frequencies unimaginable even to the legendary Black Canary of The Justice League, perhaps even approaching those of the sonic flash wielded by Angels of The Eagle Host of The Presence --that Bestowed's head simply burst as Karan's cry turned their skull into a resonance chamber that instantly cracked under the pressure. Mind blown.

The strength of twenty tons slammed into Xarothos’ armor, driving the creature of Hell into the hard packed stone and concrete. And this was it had been waiting for….

Grabbing it’s attacker as it’s helm opened up the Divine Word spoke. “Vengeance is MINE!! So Sayeth The LORD!!!”

Eyes flared as Hellfire poured forth.

With her attackers focused more on stopping her powers, and less on attacking her, Raven unleashed her own spell even as she relocated next to The Rider. As the spell released she sent it cascading through the Rider, augmenting and funneling her power through the Rider. The Rider simply had to hold out for a few minutes at the most.

The magic that bound the Bestowed together would – if all went well – be a conduit to royally thrash them to Hell.

“GUILTY!” it stated, pronouncing judgment as no other creature of Earth could.

Combining two vastly different kinds of magical energy could, if not very properly controlled, be like pouring gasoline on fire. And in this metaphor, Ghost Rider was most definitely fire.

While the Bestowed did not ordinarily possess a collective consciousness, they were linked on a spiritual level by their shared bond with the fragments of Ravana. And they were linked on a psychic level by their shared torture of millions of souls-- they were individually responsible for untold agonies visited upon the innocence of two entire cities' worth of people.

Xarathos' Penance Stare took all the pain that a person had ever inflicted upon the innocent and forced a guilty being to experience it all. At. Once.

The pain of millions was far far too too much for one being or body to contain. Even without the bond shared by The Bestowed this close to the power nexus. Even without the spell that Raven had cast to extrapolate and propagate The Penance Stare. The Rider's horrifying, Hellish gaze would have unleashed a psychospiritual backdraft that would have ignited any guilty mind in range, running over like a goblet of chimeric napalm.

And so it went-- a chain reaction-- storming out from the center of the fire, where The Rider locked electric eye sockets with the sizzling eyes of that Bestowed, Kryptonian powers be damned--

--dozens of other Bestowed fell like burning leaves in a forest fire--

--the pain went viral--

--but with a roar of effort and agony, the remaining Bestowed who still channeled Raven's magics reached out with that telekinetic force and blew the heart out of the one to whom The Ghost Rider subjected her Penance Stare. He killed the centerpiece of the spreading effect, and thereby severed the link.

Dozens of Bestowed had still died, but at least it could no longer scorch the minds of anyone else.

But that bloodmage with Raven's powers wasn't finished yet.

"Bestowed! Mystics of Kobra! Faithful to Kali Yuga! Use your blood magics to seal shut your eyes, craft your flesh that the burning skull may not gaze into your soul, and use your scrying powers to see your way through battle!"

Even as he proclaimed this, called out his wisdom to his peers, he reached out with what he still possessed of Raven's full empathic powers...

...and harnessed the pain and agony of the Gem City millions inside the stadiums in a whole new way. Harnessed the raw, unfiltered sadness and nightmares, empathically channeling them through himself...

...and then blasting all of that power all at once towards The Rider.

If Xarathos could try to kill The Bestowed with the pain of millions, well, this Bestowed would try his damnedest to play at that game, bombard The Rider with the agonies of millions of innocents, see how she liked it!

"NO GOD BUT GOD."

 

[kizkiz]

The Ambush (tag Bestowed)

Seventy-Six Bestowed killed within the first seven moments. Although he'd told the others he needed to expose himself to collect the fragments of Ravana, that had been only one of the ways he could gather those fragments. It was the easiest way.

While the Bestowed were not a collective, distributed entity, they were linked on a spiritual level by their shared bond with the fragments of Ravana. And Kiz had a fragment of Ravana, one that he had boosted through new oaths and his own vast powers. There were those amongst the 333 who were powerful, no doubt of the Atlantean derivative. Still they weren't able to exploit Ravana in the same ways Kiz had been able. There were many reasons, but the principal one was that Kiz didn't need Ravana. The Bestowed were desperate. Without Ravana they would be child playing with rocks and sticks instead of wolves slaughtering with fang and claw. That had provided a great deal of leverage when negotiating. While Kiz didn't want blood magic and didn't he need help with distorting spacetime, all he'd wanted was the equivalent of the Bestowed's rolodex. If a typical Bestowed got the equivalent of a powerful wizard's repertoire of blood and spacetime magics, Kiz had taken resonance and attunement. A Key Blade opened things. A convenient form to embody those things.

The Key Dagger accelerated on an orbit, veering now with non-linear dynamics making a path through the spiritual realm with such speed that it was starting to look more spherical than radial. Kiz continued to augment the result with Void script, nurturing the etching of unknowable truths and forgotten lies upon the face of Creation. The result was more a tangled ball of yarn that looked like a black ball on the outside, but represented a Labyrinth in the spiritual realm.

The Key Dagger absorbed fragments as the Bestowed died. Those fragments flew along the natural ebbs and tides of the spiritual harmonic. In their movements they would seek and find new hosts, except the paths they took now all required passage through where the Key Dagger spun. If they could find there way out of the Labyrinth, untangle the knotted path with its own ever increasing gravity, then they could continue on as they should have. However, if they got lost and stuck in the layers of Void being woven by Kiz through the Key Dagger, well then they were not getting free for a Year and a Day.

The subtly required to catch a soul was like trying to grab a bubble without letting it pop. The fragment of Ravana, a faster and more potent fragment than what comprised a human's, was even more difficult. But that was Kiz's job. It's what he did. He was a soul catcher. The Void was finer than a butterfly's breath, and it did not let go.

Ravana had agreed to Kiz's terms, because it wanted to be released eventually assuming Kiz was able to catch it's fragments. Ravana had no desire to be Void Bound. And as Kiz proved to Ravana that he could catch the fleeting, flickering traces whipping past like a man proving to a star that he could catch starlight, Ravana resisted the inevitable that much less. It grow easier and easier to snatch the next fragment and the next. The first three had gotten past, but Kiz had caught the other Seventy-Three. It was an acceptable failure rate for keeping Kiz from over exposing himself. Plunging the Key Dagger into the heart of a dying Bestowed would have been much, much easier, but Kiz never did easy.

With holding the full scope of his plans may have caused some to harbor dark thoughts, but neither were they able to leak those same plans. If the Bestowed had expected this, catching those first few bubbles would have been impossible.

When they did realize what was happening, they still held a super majority but Kiz had already taken a huge chunk. He felt the pressure as one of the Bestowed pressed upon his veil. If Tanha was present, she could have woven something subtler and stronger. Hiding was not in Kiz's modus operandi, but he did like ambushes. He let the veil slip for a moment, opening a hole for them to come. He retreated within and along the Ley Line, but he was not propelled to Englewood like the others would. Rather he narrowed the approach the Bestowed could take down to one choke point. Let them come.

 

[TertiusHuman]

How do we handle things that cut and slice?

The pain were immense, the flank opened and blood gushed from the wound. That alone would be enough ammunition for the Bestowed to gain powers from as it seemed to be more a blueprint to the them than anything else. Garfield knew in that dinosaur brain that the time for brute strength had ended since there were just the magic floaters and not any of the bruisers around. He had to change tactics. The Spinosaurus vanished, leaving in his wake a small pool of blood and a strange, green cloud.

This cloud moved and headed straight for the hybrid, as it drew close, it could actually make out what this buzzing cloud was. Giant Asian Wasps. Vespa mandarinia in a green hue. Literally eighty of them descended onto the hybrid and proceeded to sink their stingers into any of the unprotected flesh still available. The stinger of the Asian giant hornet is about 6 mm (0.24 in) long and injects an especially potent venom that can damage tissue by stimulating phospholipase action. The venom contains a neurotoxin called mandaratoxin, which can be lethal even to people who are not allergic if the dose is sufficient. And in this case the dose was massive.

In fact massive enough that a normal person would have skin hemorrhaging and necrosis while anaphylactic shock or even cardiac arrest would follow shortly after the first multiple stings started to penetrate the skin and inject large doses of the venom.

 

[Wyldfire]

Wildcat stayed low and close to Cold and Heatwave, letting the two Rogues do what they did best. Thea had to admire how these two men worked like a well oiled machine. Cold was obviously the leader, but Mick was the work horse. She knew these two were trouble. But trouble had it's own appeal. Thea was no Angel and she knew it. Her first outing as a "hero" had been bloody. The Russian family that killed Grand was no more. Thea had killed them all. So how could she judge anyone? She had taken on Grand's side business as a sort of penance for what she had done. And now here she was, covered in blood and part of her reveled in it.

She kept out of the men's field of fire, staying close, covering them. Anything not on their side that got too close were greeted by claw backed Krav maga fury.

Thea let herself go, just as her teachers had shown her. Her mind was at peace and her body flowed like water as she protected "her" rogues......

 

[Aussie_Wolf]

Velocity was finally letting herself go. Now she had a job to do she had forgotten all about her limits and fears and just concentrated on getting the people to safety. Sometime back she had blown passed the speed of sound, then mach2 and then 3. She was not even sure anyone heard the booms as something else had made a hell of a racket at the same time.

Now she was in a zone of her own and everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. In fact the only thing that seemed to be moving with any speed was Glider. The both of them were just doing their job ferrying the people into the tunnel. It seemed never ending but slowly and surely the complex was emptying out. They had managed to clear out the entrance and now she was going right while glider went left.

Then she heard Glider's voice. Her idea to use her as some sort of tow rope was a good one. If she could round up a bunch of people, Velocity could get them to and from the gateway in microseconds.

Soon the crowds began to thin at a much increased rate. Anyone observing would only see vast sections begin to disappear before their eyes as the two of them began to work together.

As she continued to race back and forth she scanned what she could see of the battlefield. At the moment things looked pretty even and she only hoped it stayed that way. If she or Glider had to join the fight, then their blood traits could make things go south very quickly, bad pun intended.

 

[Varshanka]

Renegade

Instead she tried to turn Renegade's guts into snakes and make them crawl out through Renegade's esophagus.

Flashy. But it usually did the trick.

Oh, Magic, what a wonderful friend you were. Unless you were the victim of magic. Then it sucked.

Renegade felt the pressure wave as air dispersed next nearby. A teleport if there ever was one. Rolling onto her back she looked up as little miss spellcaster wriggled her fingers and blabbed on about GOD. She felt the worst case of indigestion ever, kinda like eating 12 gorditas from Paco Hell with diablo sauce. Or getting gored by a woolly Mammoth, and she’d done both over the years.

“God’s dead, ain’t you heard?” she asked as her back up weapon, something she always carried for situation when up things got close and personal, a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda with a midlength barrel barked twice in quick succession. Once was usually far more than enough for anything in the human range. But with these assholes.. double tap.

Rolling back over she scoped in on something she’d seen on the field. A Magi that wasn’t getting involved, more like a counterpart to Aquaman, a leader.

Tap tap.

Looking over at her new rooftop friend she smiled.

 

[Varshanka]

False God!

...and harnessed the pain and agony of the Gem City millions inside the stadiums in a whole new way. Harnessed the raw, unfiltered sadness and nightmares, empathically channeling them through himself...

...and then blasting all of that power all at once towards The Rider.

If Xarathos could try to kill The Bestowed with the pain of millions, well, this Bestowed would try his damnedest to play at that game, bombard The Rider with the agonies of millions of innocents, see how she liked it!

"NO GOD BUT GOD."

Bright perfect silver and gold armour slagged, turning to a molten and charred black as Xarathos staggered back under the psychic onslaught.

And. The. Shit. Hit. The. Fan.

The demon skipped the field of battle like an iceskater, jigging from flaming barrel to flaming rubble, to the husk of a smoking car. Teleporting in micro bounces from flame to flame.Psychotic. Erratic. No rhyme or reason to it’s methodology. And with each bounce it was bigger. The flames writhing across it’s shape bigger, brighter, and darker. Angrier.

Bounce. And it threw it’s flaming hellgun into the air, tossing it away as a useless thing.

The molten shield and blade came to the fore as it bounced. The blade and shield lashed out and slashed with each appearance.

And then with a bounce it was gone.

And reappeared with at the Hellgun as the last of it’s flames flickered. Directly above the Arch-Magi. The Gun Barked. The blade screamed in molten white fury. “False God!” Xarathos yelled as it sought to drive the defiler of Truth into the ground as a sticky red paste.

 

[ChasNicollette]

What's in The Buzz Bin? (tags Beast Boy)

This cloud moved and headed straight for the hybrid, as it drew close, it could actually make out what this buzzing cloud was. Giant Asian Wasps. Vespa mandarinia in a green hue. Literally eighty of them descended onto the hybrid and proceeded to sink their stingers into any of the unprotected flesh still available. The stinger of the Asian giant hornet is about 6 mm (0.24 in) long and injects an especially potent venom that can damage tissue by stimulating phospholipase action. The venom contains a neurotoxin called mandaratoxin, which can be lethal even to people who are not allergic if the dose is sufficient. And in this case the dose was massive.

In fact massive enough that a normal person would have skin hemorrhaging and necrosis while anaphylactic shock or even cardiac arrest would follow shortly after the first multiple stings started to penetrate the skin and inject large doses of the venom.

The trouble with messing with evolution, rewinding it and accelerating it and hopping on tributaries that never actually occurred in nature-- is you tend to neglect the actual process of evolution. It's not a straight line, it's not directed, there's lots of stops and starts and misfires and punctuated equilibrium.

And on the way, each species gets naturally selected based on its strengths-- an individual's ability to survive threats and hazards in its environment would be passed on genetically, whereas those without those necessary traits would die out, unable to breed to the next generation.

Of course, haphazard and meandering as this process is, sometimes traits that would help a species survive a drastic alteration in environmental factors later on down the line are unintentionally left behind. Take the dinosaurs, for example. Powerful creatures, they dominated the face of The Earth until some rock took a tumble from the wild blue yonder and plunged the planet into a rather unexpected ashen winter.

Now, cherrypicking traits from your favorite scaly organisms and creating a Frankensteinian evolutionary megamix means you also jump into the middle of a whole bunch of different level-up skill trees without necessarily picking up the prerequisites.

For instance, this particular hybridized lifeform, through sheer fortuitous happenstance, blind stupid stinking irony, and/or The Red's immune system kicking in against Gar's powers being bastardized-- no-one would immediately know for sure --well, it hadn't evolved any kind of defense against mandaratoxin.

Its biology might as well be attempting to fend off The Eighth Plague of Exodus with a fly swatter.

It was dead after the third sting.

Four more nearby bloodmages saw their brother practically dissolving in a puddle of blood and fluids.

And they attempted to learn from their dead brother's mistake-- to harness Beast Boy's blood and transform into a more resistant species, or at least something with thicker armor-plates...

But they immediately discovered that that ship had sailed. In taking insect swarm form, Gar no longer had blood. His manifold manifestations used hemolymph for their circulatory system.

They had no defense against him-- against all of him.

One's eyes widened. "Run!"

They hurried to teleport away from him as quickly as they could.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Ghost of a Chance. (tags Velocity)

As she continued to race back and forth she scanned what she could see of the battlefield. At the moment things looked pretty even and she only hoped it stayed that way. If she or Glider had to join the fight, then their blood traits could make things go south very quickly, bad pun intended.

Fortunately for Glider, rather like Garfield Logan, Clockwork, and The Ghost Rider, her present physical state did not include a sufficiently analogous form of blood for The Bestowed to access.

Velocity was presently moving too fast for The Bestowed to harness the ridiculous energy crackling in her bloodstream, infusing every cell in her body. But if she wearied, if she slowed... that would change in one of her heartbeats. And Carin's heartbeats were very, very fast.

However.

Up until now, Glider and Velocity had been whittling away at the psychic supply of power that The Bestowed were using for their ritual-- the collateral in their bargain with Ravana. They had retrieved what amounted to a few grains of sand on a mile-long beach.

But now, with this change of tactics, they were at last making headway. Now they were clearing away the beach with the super-speed equivalent of a steam shovel.

The caveat was that Velocity needed to maintain her head of steam.

And Glider...

"Green... guh-- Green. I'm... I'm stretched too thin..."

"Dunno if I can... keep it to... to... to...gether...?"

...Glider was quickly running out of steam.

 

[ChasNicollette]

All Hail the Outlaws. (tags Renegade)

“God’s dead, ain’t you heard?” she asked as her back up weapon, something she always carried for situation when up things got close and personal, a .44 Magnum Colt Anaconda with a midlength barrel barked twice in quick succession. Once was usually far more than enough for anything in the human range. But with these assholes.. double tap.

The bloodmage could not deflect or redirect the projectiles as she might have before Clockwork had inhibited their spacetime distortion magics. And teleporting was no longer as easy as breathing.

And as those bullets ripped through her, breathing became a whole lot harder.

She managed to cling onto life. Bending her own blood to healing, struggling to adapt the natural shapeshifting autorepair abilities that Renegade possessed as a "meteor freak," a metahuman activated by prehistoric Kryptonite.

She was barely keeping herself alive, much less repairing her injury.

She crumpled to the rooftop, all of her senses darkening. Except her scrying.

Rolling back over she scoped in on something she’d seen on the field. A Magi that wasn’t getting involved, more like a counterpart to Aquaman, a leader.

Tap tap.

Looking over at her new rooftop friend she smiled.

Just as Renegade fired, she would feel another pressure wave. Not enough to throw off her aim, but-- palpable.

When she looked back at her "friend," she would find a pool of blood and nothing more.

And over there, by the upper-level mystic with his scrying senses trained on Kiz, that's where Renegade would find the corpse of the bestowed that had tried to turn her innards into a bunch of hydra-heads.

She had, with the very last gasp of her existence, teleported into Renegade's line of fire and gave her life to protect her superior, taking another two bullets for him. She had, apparently, been the breed of religious zealot who did not fear death, and was willing to die to advance her cause.

And then that leader-magus vanished in a teleport of his own, disappearing from Renegade's scope.

But on the bright side, the battlefield was already littered with corpses she'd left behind.

And it was still a target-rich environment, both tangos and allies alike, whatever floated her capricious boat.

 

[ChasNicollette]

From the Pinnacle to The Pit. (tags Ghost Rider)

And. The. Shit. Hit. The. Fan.

The demon skipped the field of battle like an iceskater, jigging from flaming barrel to flaming rubble, to the husk of a smoking car. Teleporting in micro bounces from flame to flame.Psychotic. Erratic. No rhyme or reason to it’s methodology. And with each bounce it was bigger. The flames writhing across it’s shape bigger, brighter, and darker. Angrier.

Bounce. And it threw it’s flaming hellgun into the air, tossing it away as a useless thing.

The molten shield and blade came to the fore as it bounced. The blade and shield lashed out and slashed with each appearance.

And then with a bounce it was gone.

And reappeared with at the Hellgun as the last of it’s flames flickered. Directly above the Arch-Magi. The Gun Barked. The blade screamed in molten white fury. “False God!” Xarathos yelled as it sought to drive the defiler of Truth into the ground as a sticky red paste.

It was perhaps ironic that these servants of Kobra had devoted their lives and their afterlives to the worship of a figure bent on wreaking chaos across the face of the firmament, the deep, and all seven continents. Because as The Ghost Rider made like a pyrokinetic pyrotechnic pyromaniac pinball throughout the battlefield, chaos is exactly what she unleashed.

In particular, blowing through a number of the 333 fiery barrels lining the stadiums' outer wall. That was a problem.

Kiz had already learned in conversation with the fragment of Ravana from which he had derived The Key Dagger that establishing a perimeter of ceremonial candles was both unnecessary and outmoded. But as exhaustively well-educated as Kiz was in the ways of mystical ritual (boy howdy), he hadn't known that. And compared to him, though their sensibilities were more modern, the bloodmages were kindergarteners-- kindergarteners of mass destruction, but still kindergarteners.

Ergo, since a measure of magic is governed and propelled by intention, and since seeing their painstakingly arranged burning barrels get knocked all helter-skelter and off-kilter sent a wave of dismay and bewilderment through a number of the lower-ranking Bestowed...

...their power levels took a hit, the needle wavered on the gauge.

Just enough to make them a little more vulnerable, collectively, until the furor of their convictions again emboldened them.

Furor of his convictions would not be enough to save the bloodmage channeling Raven's powers, however. And neither would Raven's powers.

As solid as the forcefield was that he instinctively slammed together over his head, channeling the collective heartache of double-digit millions of tortured souls had taken its toll on him.

And Ghost Rider had all the righteous indignation of a divine mandate and all the raw power of an archdemon.

The bloodmage's forcefield shattered like sugar glass and his body blew to white ash before it could even occur to him to draw breath to scream.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Magus? I 'ardly know us! (tags Kiz)

When they did realize what was happening, they still held a super majority but Kiz had already taken a huge chunk. He felt the pressure as one of the Bestowed pressed upon his veil. If Tanha was present, she could have woven something subtler and stronger. Hiding was not in Kiz's modus operandi, but he did like ambushes. He let the veil slip for a moment, opening a hole for them to come. He retreated within and along the Ley Line, but he was not propelled to Englewood like the others would. Rather he narrowed the approach the Bestowed could take down to one choke point. Let them come.

The Homo Magi Bestowed who had followed the bouncing ball to Kiz' approximate location was so focused on his task that he scarcely noticed when one of his less-pedigreed sisters teleported in next to him, took two sniper rounds to center mass and dropped in a heap.

No matter the cannon-fodder dying around the battlefield, under bullets, under arrows, under fists and blasts and stings...

...no, no, he had business elsewhere.

He saw that bottleneck open.

And sure, he could have sent more cannon-fodder to their deaths.

But this was interesting.

He had to see it for himself.

He teleported.

Materialized before Kiz.

Narrowed his eyes at the surprisingly impressive physical specimen before him; usually spellcasters were... nerdier. Not always, but stereotypically.

"We should talk."

 

[ChasNicollette]

Cat Scratch Fever. (tags Wildcat)

She kept out of the men's field of fire, staying close, covering them. Anything not on their side that got too close were greeted by claw backed Krav maga fury.

Thea let herself go, just as her teachers had shown her. Her mind was at peace and her body flowed like water as she protected "her" rogues......

Velocity and The Glider were eating into The Bestowed's power supply, which Rose had already been souring with her telepathic efforts.

Ghost Rider had just played merry hob with their fiery accoutrements and put a serious dent into their ritual routine.

These on top of the potent debuffs presently enacted by Aquaman and Clockwork, and the fact that The Bestowed's arguably most powerful and scholastic member was... distracted...

...mopping up the rank and file members of this mystical sect still wasn't a walk in the park, it was still a jog through Omaha Beach...

...but it gave Wildcat and The Rogues a fighting chance.

And fighting was what they did for a living.

Blood and fire and ice.

They might even win this.

 

[TertiusHuman]

The danger of turning into an animal should be that you become as smart or dumb in human terms as that animal. But even in insect form, Garfield stayed as intelligent as normal. He dispersed, as weird as that sounds and started scouring the area. Any of the floating guys or girls he came across received an attack. It was then that he saw Aquaman and the Arrow guy.

He also saw the fire and ice guys along with a cat lady.

Of all these sights, it appeared that his help would have been better directed to help the two guys and lady.

The air filled with an irritating buzz as the wasps formed up and Garfield led a charge at the flank of the Bestowed harassing the trio.

 

[kizkiz]

Talking shit with the enemy (tag Chas)

But this was interesting. He had to see it for himself. He teleported and materialized before Kiz. His eyes narrowed at the unsterotypical physicality before him. Spellcasters were usually... nerdier.

"We should talk."

Kiz dealt with entities that couldn't be killed. Eternal, deathless, archetypal forces that were anomalies risking a plague upon creation. As a result, Kiz was accustom to wading through filth and betrayal, shifting and cajoling to achieve his aims. He was unwavering in his integrity, but the ethos that drove him was twisted and alien to most. It required higher order considerations along a timeline that only a handful in creation operated on. Can ants appreciate the destruction of their colony to enable the construction of a hospital that would treat many humans but never aid a single ant? Were humans justified in destroying a community that had pre-dated their interests in an unbroken line for hundreds of years? If a child steps on an ant, does its parent disown or kill the child? These were considerations and analogous that humans found unpalatable when they found themselves the ants. And what happened to the ant who was replaced molecular by molecular until one day it was a man? A man trying to save not just his old colony but as many colonies as he could while also dealing with the politics of mankind?

Above his head the Key Dagger spun its threads, weaving an ever more confused knot along which the wayward fragments of Ravana found themselves traveling. Kiz frowned. He thumped the shield strapped to his left hand. The resonant sound that reverberated was quintessential dissonance. He only struck it two more times in rapid succession. Paused. Three more. Paused. Three more. The discord tore at all magics but it was more like a needle being dragged across a playing record. It was annoying but didn't alter the song itself.

"If you seek formal parlay, invoke it as such and bind yourself as such. If you seek subterfuge, you will not be the first. Neither will you be the most skilled." He twirled his finger, as if to say, 'Get on with it already.'

A successful negotiation resulted in both parties getting some of what they wanted in exchange for not losing everything. Often unpalatable to both parties like bolting vile things to your soul to shield humanity from nightmares that humanity would never thank you for, but the nightmares still got their daily walks outside to be themselves. He walked a path between, behind, and around where everyone and everything dwelt. Sacrifice was in the job description, and usually both he and all parties came out feeling like they'd chased a mouthful of shit with a glass full of piss.

His eyes leaked the Void as if black holes could drip pieces of their nothingness to run in all directions. He watched the Atlantean's soul. If a martial artist was best served watching his opponents hips, as they never lied about the choices made by the body. Well, Kiz had found an entities soul never lied. He could watch the resonance of Ravana's fragment as it interacted with the Atlantean's soul and read the present moment in startling detail. He was a gunslinger in his own way and had the reactions to match.

 

[Wyldfire]

Queen of all she surveys...... (Tag Rogues)

When it came to magic Thea would be the first to tell you she was as dumb as a bag of hammers. So when the magical wind shifted she had no idea what was happening, but her fighter's instinct felt the shift. She felt it when the fight shifted from a defensive stance to an aggressive stance. She stopped sitting back in the defensive posture of protecting her men and began to reach out.

Wildcat lashed out and snagged a mage with her claws and threw him into the co-joined beams of Cold and Mick's weapons. This worked as she had hoped and she moved outwards to the next mage. This time she kept the mouse for herself. Striking and slashing at it. And back to the defensive as another tried to get in too close to her men. This one she was going to make pay for that.

Thea knew something had changed in herself after the last death. She had felt it the first two times too, but those had been physical changes. Getting more agile. Getting quicker and more resilient. This time felt more like a change in her head. It had felt like a kind of shift in her personality. A change in her morality. She knew as a person that killing these mages was wrong, but at the moment she also knew she didn't care. All she knew was that these monsters had threatened hers and they were going to pay. They would suffer for attacking her people.

 

[Aussie_Wolf]

The Bodyguard (Tag Aquaman)

Connor was in the zone. All his training had come to the fore and it was like he no longer had to even see his opponents to know where they were. His master had once told him about this state but he had never thought he would achieve it. He had called it 'being one with the universe'.

Connor could almost believe him. He was simply pulling an arrow out of his quiver and shooting without aiming or looking half the time. He would swivel his body, dragging an arrow out and let fly, before turning 180 degrees and shooting again. Sometimes he would swear he had shot at empty sky only to see an arrow thud home in flesh.

Of course he did not always hit. Against these opponents that was impossible, but it seemed like his shots were getting better. The more he fired the less he missed and that helped Kaldur out. The less he had to defend himself, the more energy he could put into doing whatever it was he was doing with the trident, and that Connor knew was more important.

He was also glad for the backup from whatever that shadowy serpent was. That thing killed Bloodmages faster than he did and he and Kaldur would probably be in serious trouble if it hadn't shown up. He would have to thank whichever mage had sent it after the fight, on the condition they survived of course.

 

[WiredIn]

Buckshot. (Tags Chas)

Static calmly stepped off his flying disc and grounded the shots of arcing energy. His expression remained cold as he continued to walk forward his disc hovering along behind him. He closed his eyes for a moment and focused, lifting his hand and with it came as many small shards of metal as he could manage.

In a single motion he launched all of the shards towards the bestowed. They rocket towards him, coming at him from multiple different angles. At the same moment he launched several bolts of energy towards the bestowed before stepping back on his disc. Distraction would prove his best ally. He could only focus on so much.

Virgil floated a long piece of rebar alongside him as he continued to slowly drift forward. Still staring at the bestowed he was facing.

 

[LuckyVic]

And without a second's hesitation, they immediately accessed powers that Rose hadn't even dreamed of yet. They used their telekinetic Martian vision to furiously accelerate the temperature of the air around Rose... igniting it.

Rose was instantly plunged into flame and she screamed, throwing her arms up uselessly in front of her face.

"AAAAAAH! NIGHTWING, HELP!"

It had taken Damian years to get put aside what he was taught by both his grandfather and mother. Years of training by his father and Dick. He knew he could kill if he had to, but he now considered that the cowards way out. Plus if he was to live up to Dick's legacy... Nightwing would never kill.

Though the pain that Rose was going through almost made him consider it as he began to fight his way to where he thought she was. His ruthlessness was ratched up to another level. He still wasn't killing anyone... but for sure when they finally woke up they'd wish he had killed them. His mind, will, and body worked as one as he made his way through anyone that got in his way.

 

[Aussie_Wolf]

"Green... guh-- Green. I'm... I'm stretched too thin..."

"Dunno if I can... keep it to... to... to...gether...?"

...Glider was quickly running out of steam.

Velocity heard Glider and indeed she could feel her start to spread out. They wouldn't be able to keep this up much longer or the girl would simply separate into particles and who knew if she would be able to recombine herself. Of course for each fraction of a second she could hold herself together they were rescuing more people.

It was a catch twenty two situation. They were communicating in near nano seconds, so literally almost no time had passed since she had informed her of her dilemma. Velocity had to make the choice and it was a split second choice.

"Pull back Glider, you've done enough for now. I will take it from here," Carin told her as she smiled and let go of her hand.

She knew Glider would be able to slow down on her own and take a breather, but she was out of this game for now. Still they had managed to clear maybe half of the people out of the stadium and she was going to finish the job no matter what.

Returning to her original plan she began to remove them one by one again, only now realizing just how many Glider had been carrying. Damn if only she had something like those tendrils of hers, some rope, ribbon, hell even some cloth.

As she continued to run back and forth though she realized the futility of that plan. Glider had been able to control her tendrils, that was why the people hadn't been dragged across the ground or smacked into walls. She wouldn't be able to do that. What good would getting them out of the stadium do if they just ended up dead or horribly mutilated through the portal? No she needed some other way now, and she could only hope it presented itself.

 

[ChasNicollette]

Outsourcing. (tags Beast Boy)

The danger of turning into an animal should be that you become as smart or dumb in human terms as that animal. But even in insect form, Garfield stayed as intelligent as normal. He dispersed, as weird as that sounds and started scouring the area. Any of the floating guys or girls he came across received an attack. It was then that he saw Aquaman and the Arrow guy.

He also saw the fire and ice guys along with a cat lady.

Of all these sights, it appeared that his help would have been better directed to help the two guys and lady.

The air filled with an irritating buzz as the wasps formed up and Garfield led a charge at the flank of the Bestowed harassing the trio.

As Garfield's swarm swept the battlefield, many Bestowed stumbled and fell and slapped at necks and wrists-- stung before they could teleport to safety, their blood instantly compromised by this killer-bee neurotoxin.

But not all the Bestowed were dullards so single-point focused that they could not recognize a threat and adapt to deal with it.

One in particular saw that swarm forming up, saw it billowing towards Wildcat and The Rogues, and hissed in fury.

He vanished.

And when he rematerialized, high above the parking lot battlefield, he had one of those injectors used by the Blackadders that turned themselves into Ajagar. And with a hiss of another kind, he jet-injected himself with that genetic cocktail, catalyzing a transformation.

Now, the catalyst wasn't specifically tuned to his genetic structure, but he was able to internalize his blood-magics to make it work juuuuuuust enough.

And thus, he became.

Became a brute-force snarling beast-man in answer to the subtle stinging swarm of Beast Boy.

And dropped like a rock to land before the swarm, armored with skin too thick to sting... and clapped his hands together with massive force, unleashing a concussive shockwave meant to disperse or splatter those bugs on the wind.