Official Action

Even for a woman with as much defensive power as herself, it was highly unlikely that she would be able to withstand the amount of firepower that was about to be coming her way from the Pergrande officers that were bearing down on her location. Even if she was confident she could tank all that damage, she wouldn’t never have risked it. Getting overly confident in one’s own power was a sure way to get caught at the business end of a lethal surprise, and Serilda simply wasn’t that type of soldier. But she was a commander, and not just of the Rune Knights. Serilda had an entirely separate army at her beck and call, one that most people did not know about. While it was tempting to call the Bloodletters in to clean up the field and make quick work of the remaining stragglers, it would be a bit overkill -- and would result in far too many questions. But, that didn’t mean she couldn’t call in some assistance.

“Zoelle.”

A woman in white and gold armor bearing a rifle appeared before her. She radiated with a holy aura, and anyone nearby who could sense such things would know that the dark skinned woman was actually an angel. Zoelle saluted Serilda crisply, though it was not the same salute that the Knights used to acknowledge their superiors. “Commander.”

“Do what you can to thin the enemy lines.”

The woman nodded and took off without question, hurrying into the treeline where she could find a bit of cover. Serilda was vaguely aware of the broader details of what was happening with her people around her as various spells were cast. There was lightning, fire, even donuts… which may have caught Serilda off guard if she hadn’t already been aware of Scully’s particular brand of magic. The twins were geared up in one of their battle suits, and Serilda was so accustomed to Mythal’s magic by this point that she could practically feel it even without any kind of magic sensory. Trusting them to do their part, she focused on the soldiers that were currently rushing her.

A vicious black wind snapped to life around her just in time to deflect a spray of bullets. Narrowing her gaze, she shot forward and got up close and personal to the combatants, subjecting them to the cutting force of the protective barrier around her. They shrank back, their armor unable to withstand the magic surrounding the marshal as the Pergrande soldiers closest to her were ripped off their feet and tossed several meters back. The rest backed up quickly, trying to keep distance between themselves and her to keep from meeting the same fate. They continued to fire round after round at her, the bullets unable to penetrate the wind to make contact with the woman at its center.

Focusing a steady thread of magic into her defensive abilities to keep herself safe, she swapped to a ranged strategy. Another funnel of black wind formed, this one at the tip of her unholy sword. The vortex was thin and long, forming a whip that stemmed from the blade out. Aiming for the nearest soldier, she reared back and snapped the attack forward, the cracking sound ringing across the battlefield and joining the cacophony of every other blast and explosion rippling through the area. The soldier stumbled back and she used the opening to strike again and again until they went down unconscious. Having noticed that the attention on her was now split, she looked over in time to see that several of the Pergrandiens that had been focused on her were now aiming toward the treeline where Zoelle was hidden. Occasionally, a blast of high powered light would streak from the trees and snipe at an enemy near Serilda, the magic power ripping through their armor and dropping them like flies, though she could see that the angel was merely aiming to subdue and not to kill.

Tapping into her Voidwalking, Serilda took a moment to focus on the world around her, particularly the officers nearest to her and the armor they wore. She could feel every particle of empty space between the atoms that made up their gear. Taking control of that void space, she forced it to expand. The result was several officers scrambling in shock and horror as their protective gear crumbled to dust right off their bodies, leaving them exposed. With nothing to aid their defenses, Serilda wasted no time in pressing the assault. Her whip cracked again and again in one hand even as she reached out with the Void to take hold of one soldier at a time, hurling them across the battlefield and into any hard surface nearby such as trees and boulders, swiftly knocking them out. By the time she was done, there were ten Pergrande officers on the ground around her, felled between her and Zoelle’s attacks. They appeared to be passed out cold, but Serilda wasn’t going to take any chances. Adjusting the Void space in the immediate area, she gently lowered their bodies halfway into the ground and locked them in place so that they would be stuck but not unable to breathe.

Using the temporary reprieve to get another update on her own comrades, she saw that a few changes had indeed happened in the last couple of minutes. Nohres and Tor seemed to have paired off with one another and were busy rescuing some mages and subduing a number of Pergrande soldiers. Mythal had managed to get closer to the girls and was fighting alongside them. Unfortunately, Serilda looked over just in time to watch as the mech suit that Grappa and Jellisha were piloting veered off course momentarily before refocusing fire on the enemy. Noting how odd this was, Serilda focused her senses inside the unit only to have a chill sent down her spine at what she found: blood. One of the girls had been hurt. Her instinct was to rush toward them, but something halted her in her tracks: A small squad of four officers bearing down on Scully.

In a split second, she made a decision that went against every notion of motherhood that screamed inside of her and darted toward the private instead. The girls appeared young, but they were more than capable of taking care of themselves. They had been promoted to generals for a reason, after all. Plus, Mythal was right there beside them and chances were he was going to have just as strong of an opinion about what had just transpired. She would have to trust the three of them to handle the situation themselves. Private Scully, however… he had been with the Knights since even before Serilda had been handed the reins to the army, but she knew that he had never been caught up in a battle like this before. He needed her help more than the girls did, as much as it tore her heart in two not to leap to their sides.

Doing her best not to let her fury control her, she stepped through a Void portal and out the other side, planting herself squarely between the four officers that were starting to rain bullets down upon the larger man. The ground rocked beneath her feet as she tapped into the Void space between the molecules of the earth and pressed upon them, triggering a small but violent earthquake that didn’t throw them off balance as much as she would have liked but did catch them by surprise enough to distract them from firing upon her subordinate. Encasing her swords in a sheath of her black ice, she hurled them one after the other at two of the soldiers, using her magic to direct the weapons again and again until she managed to sunder their armor and run them through, the soldiers dropping to the ground. Of the remaining two, one was currently being used as a chew toy by Xiuhcoatl, who had managed to catch up to Serilda in time to tackle one of the soliders to the ground and take several bites from their limbs, while the other was dropped by another precise shot from Zoelle.

“Status report, private,” Serilda instructed Scully as she returned the swords to her hand. Using the Void to rip the helmet off the man that Xiuh was tearing apart, she cracked the pommel of one of her swords into the man’s face. He stopped fighting and laid still, even as she waited for Private Wiggles to update her on his injuries, if any, as well as his magic reserves and anything else of import.

Wiggles was badly injured. He took time to heal himself after she dispatched of the Pergrande soldiers that had been attacking him, but she elected to help speed the recovery along, just to be extra sure. A film of black mist drifted into existence around him and a cool, soothing sensation would wash over his body as her magic aided his own, boosting it and giving it an extra push of strength to ensure that he was able to at least move around without impediment. He reported that they had defeated a number of officers from Pergrande and also secured a couple prisoners, which would certainly prove to be beneficial. He thanked her for her timely intervention, stating his belief that he thought himself a goner. “We all have to have one another’s backs. No one can fight an army alone, not even me,” Serilda reassured him.

She turned then to survey the others that were with him. Most of them she did not recognize aside from the attire they wore, which was clearly from Bellum, though a couple of them seemed… off? She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something about the way they stood apart from the others and kept glancing at Scully as if to ask for help while looking at her with apprehension told a story that she couldn’t quite guess at the moment. Still, Scully spoke up and claimed them as Bellum soldiers like the others, stating that they had discovered Pergrande soldiers passing themselves off as Bellum ones, and had done their part in teaching those interlopers the error of their ways. After a brief stare at them, Serilda gave a simple nod in acceptance. “Excellent work, all of you.” Whatever the story was there, now was not the time to get the details. While the battle was winding down, it wasn’t quite over just yet. “Private Wiggles, escort these men back to regroup with the others. Organize treatment for the wounded and assign a task force to process the prisoners.”

Once Serilda was sure they would be fine on their own, she once more waded out into the battlefield to take stock of everything. Mythal seemed to have done enough to heal Grappa, who appeared to be the one that had gotten injured. The Voidwaler wanted nothing more than to rush to their side and see what had happened and how they were faring, but she forced herself to turn away and focus on the battle at hand, trusting her fiance to have things in hand. Most of the Pergrande forces seemed to be caving beneath the combined might of Bellum and the Rune Knights, but not all of them were. In fact, there were two Pergrandian soldiers that seemed to be causing quite a bit of issue, easily overpowering the mages that were attempting to fight them, wielding weapons psychokinetically and engaging in hand to hand combat. Unlike many of their peers, they seemed unfazed by their opposing force, undaunted and unstoppable. That was not surprising. It only took her a moment of study to recognize the armor: Paladins.

Steeling herself for a hefty battle, she elected to meet the Paladins in kind, hurling her swords across the battlefield once more, one toward each of the two soldiers. They reacted quickly, using their psychic abilities to whirl their own blades around to meet hers, the two pairs of swords locked at an impasse with one another in the air while everyone else gathered looked on. “Move,” she instructed her allies, her tone kind but unbending as she instructed them to get out of the way. There was very little hesitance as they did just that, knowing that the ensuing battle was not something they were going to want to get mixed up in, particularly after the beatings they had been receiving a moment ago.

The paladins stared her down as all three of them pulled back their swords temporarily. “Surrender and you will be treated fairly as prisoners of war under the custody of the Rune Knights. I will only ask once.”

Both of her opponents regarded her with unamused sobriety, taking up battle stances. “You do not scare us ’Goddess’ Sinclair,”[/color] one of the men informed her calmly, revealing that they had done more than enough research to recognize her -- and probably Mythal, too. “You are a fool to challenge us both. Just one of us is more than a match for any mage… and we would never admit defeat to evil like yours.”

Serilda sighed softly. No one ever surrendered, and this would be no different. Furthermore, she really couldn’t blame them for it, nor be offended by the lack of respect nor the name calling. As far as Pergrande was concerned, she was evil… she was an extremely powerful mage and her titles as a goddess and the leader of the Rune Knights made her a high priority threat in their eyes. She couldn’t even blame them for feeling that way. After all, there were plenty of dark mages in the world that did a great deal to give merit to Pergrande’s prejudices. It was simply their culture, and there was nothing wrong with hating mages.

But there was something wrong with trying to start a war simply because they existed. Serilda dug into her magic to boost up her defensive abilities, knowing that these highly trained soldiers were going to come at her hard, fast, and up close and personal. Everything she understood about Paladins lended to the knowledge that her offensive magic wouldn’t do much to them… but at the very least, she could try to use her defensive spells to keep herself -- and her unborn children -- alive. They shot toward her and Serilda stepped through one Void space and out through another to dodge the attacks, bringing her swords around telekinetically to block the strikes that their own swords were driving toward her.

As the swords danced through the air as if hosting their own battle, Serilda continued to engage in quick come and go strikes between herself and the two male soldiers. Their armor was intense, and it felt like she was barely doing them any damage at all, but on the plus side, they were doing equally as little damage to her. This was not going to be a battle of strength, but rather one of wits and patience. She needed to conserve her strength and bide her time for the right opening to strike a critical blow. Tapping into the Void, she realigned the molecules of her hands to increase their density so she could strike harder with her fists, targeting weak spots in their armor in an attempt to wear it down and create some openings. The three were never squared off for more than a split second at a time, each of them seeming to zip in and out of reality as they teleported around the battlefield in a game of cat and mouse. Or rather, the paladins moved so quickly they might as well have been teleporting. They certainly weren’t having difficulty keeping up with her portals.

They exchanged quick blows as they came together before retreating again, only to slam back into the fray split seconds later once more. The Paladins did their best to gang up on her and keep her flanked, but thanks to her Void sense she was able to detect their locations and movements at any given time, which helped tremendously in keeping her alive. Eventually, one of them managed to disengage their sword from one of hers, the weapon streaking through the air to attack her. Praying the timing was right, she waited until the last second before using her Void magic to simple drop into the ground. The man in front of her barely had enough time to open his eyes wider in shock before his partner’s blade punctured him straight through.

“No!!” the remaining paladin shrieked as his comrade dropped to his knees and then slumped to the ground. He came at Serilda when she came back out of the ground with renewed vigor and she met him in kind, despite the aches and bruises and cuts along her body where the pair had managed to slip a few hand to hand strikes past her defenses. He had reclaimed his sword and also taken control of his fallen partner’s the duo now engaged not just in martial combat, but also duel telekinetic combat with their swords. It was something the Pergrandian was clearly much more experienced with. Serilda could remotely fight with her weapons with ease, but she didn’t have the hand to hand combat experience that Mythal did and it was starting to show. She needed to come up with something, and fast. She couldn’t use her magic directly against him, and she couldn’t do anything but keep his swords at bay with her own…

...but she could use her magic on her surroundings.

Utilizing her slayer powers, Serilda bought herself a critical moment with a furious roar, black wind exploding violently from her person. It didn’t do much to harm the Pergrande paladin, but it did serve to push him back a few feet to give herself a little bit of distance. Then, she reached deep into the earth with the Void and shifted the molecules of the ground. The dirt and snow pitched violently at their feet, shaking the entire area for miles as a ravine carved its way into the dirt and split open. The paladin’s control over his swords faltered for the briefest of moments as he focused all his attention into his psychic abilities to try and boost his speed enough to outrace the width of the crack, and Serilda used that time to disengage her swords from him and send them hurling toward the man to get in his way and prevent him from doing just that. Thrown off his trajectory, he could only scream in defiance as he plummeted hundreds of meters toward his death.

But not without one final push to try and take her down with him. Her senses screamed at the last second as she felt his blades shrieking toward her where she hovered in the air, the man still able to control them even as he fell. Out of pure instinct, she triggered the ability of the pig shaped ring on her finger, a pink bubble of protection popping up around her and completely blocking the first sword, which careened into the barrier without effect and dropped to the ground. However, her ace in the hole item could only pull that trick against one attack, and it disappeared before it could do anything to stop the second sword. Rippling hot pain shot through her body as it pierced through her right shoulder, protruding through the other side. Serilda cut off her own scream, fighting back the agony and focusing on the matter at hand. WIth intense focus, she reverted the molecules of the earth, snapping the land back together and swallowing the paladin whole.

Then, she carefully drifted back down to the ground, using her control over blood to keep the crimson plasma inside of her body as she carefully used the void to remove the weapon from her torso, counting her blessings that hadn’t hit her stomach or her heart.