Adela
dodged left, bubbling and hissing acid passing her face so closely she
could smell the foulness from it. The magical blast of corrosive ichor
splashed against the wall behind her, eating away at stonework almost
immediately. She was already sprinting forward through the dimly lit
crypt, her sword gleaming in the flickering torchlight. Before her the
lich that had conjured the spell sneered at her with half decayed lips,
raising hands as cold as ice up to prepare another spell. A battlecry
escaped her lips as she lunged forward.
The lich
was cut off from its spell mid cast, a scream of pain echoing out as
her blade impaled through the undead creature and blazed with holy
light. A savage grin curled upon Adelas lips as the lich vainly tried to
grope at her, its hands death to flesh but little use against her
armor. The fumbled spell however still had motes of arcane power
lingering in the air and the air started to warp around Adela.
“Wha-?”
The
air flashed a brilliant white and then it felt like everything the
young warrior woman was turned inside out. A scream of pain escaped her
lips as she felt like she was being pulled and stretched and torn by a
current of pure arcane energies. The lights around her were pulsing a
brilliant splash of rainbow colors, a dizzying blur of sight and
sensation. She felt like she was falling for ages.
And
then all at once it stopped and the next thing Adela knew was she fell
flat on her back upon a hard floor with a grunt. A groan of pain escaped
the woman as she laid sprawled out, incapacitated for a few moments,
squeezing her eyes shut as her head was throbbing. Nausea was overtaking
her in a wave before subsiding. It resembled the first time she had
used teleportation as a form of travel.
Then she
sat bolt upright, her hand reaching and groping around for her sword
only to find it wasn’t there. The blonde looked around and found… there
was no lich either. In fact she didn’t appear to be in the crypt
anymore. The space around was rather well lit by contrast and… open was
the only way she could describe it. Like an endless plane of some kind.
She gazed up and the sky was above her with what seemed to be a sun but
it was… different. A brown sky far above and not a single cloud and the
sun was shaped oddly. Adela squinted her blue eyes, the pale northerner
wincing and looking away from the bright light after a moment.
There
was also another issue. She wasn’t just unarmed… she was unarmored as
well. Completely naked as the day she was born, exposing a number of
blue tattoos across her rather toned and defined form. She let out a
snort. Of course the damn spell would have not only flung her to gods
only knew where but also strip her of everything. When she got her hands
on that bag of mystic bones she was going to powderize him.
“Not
your first time on another plane.” She reminded herself. Her companions
in the crypt were probably already working out a way to find her and
get her back. She just had to stay calm.
The
warrior woman started walking and taking further note of her
surroundings. There were… structures. Vast towering structures. And the
floor was rough, not like ground but almost like it was artificial. Made
of something. It was hard to make out much in the distance as well,
almost blurry from the sheer distance between her and everything. Adela
was trying to piece out *where* exactly she was when she felt
something.
It started faint, almost something
that could be dismissed as a trick of the mind. Then it grew more and
more intense. A shaking, the ground moving as though a grand quake was
rolling through the land. Adela wobbled and waved her arms around as she
was just struggling to keep her balance while the shaking grew worse
and worse. It was stronger than any marching army and soon enough came
with a loud series of booming and loud thumping noises. Each one was
more intense than the last and eventually the mighty warrior found
herself falling over onto her rear.
“What is… o-oh… oh gods *what* is that?”
Adela
went from bewildered to white as a sheet as the cause of these quakes
became very apparent quickly. Emerging through a vast enormous doorway
from somewhere beyond Adela’s sight was a towering, monolithic woman.
She was dressed in red and white, silky dark hair pulled into a tight
ponytail behind her head. There was an exotic quality about her that
Adela had never seen before. Her scale was just… everything. Adela was
an ant compared to her, perhaps even less than that.
White
fabric clad feet thumped along the floors of what was easy to deduce
now as essentially an incredibly large building, the woman moving with
purpose. Her steps came closer and closer to Adela but it was clear her
path wouldn’t see her trample her. Air kicked up from the impact of her
steps though was a hurricane gust of wind as a wall of white fabric
smashed down ahead of where Adela was standing, the warrior sent
tumbling back by the sheer force of the air produced by her steps.
The
woman hummed to herself as she approached one of the structures that
had towered over Adela, running a cloth over clear glass. Display cases?
Seemed like it. Was this woman a servant of some kind? Whatever she was
Adela needed to get her attention and not get caught in her idly
movements. The blonde was a mighty warrior certainly. But at the scale
difference, dragons would have been naught but beetles for this godlike
woman to squash.
“Hey! HEY! Down here!” The
blonde screamed. There was no way she could have heard her. She waved
her hands as she tried to run closer.
The human
eye was far more perceptive to movement than most would have expected.
While Adela couldn’t be heard necessarily, her movements were clearly
glimpsed out of the corner of the monolithic woman’s eye. Her head
turned in the heavens above and she was clearly looking right at Adela
running across the floor nearby. A sharp eye to be certain, definitely
some kind of a servant.
“Thank the Gods, l-look I dunno who you are but I ended up teleported here and-”
A
loud thundering noise from on high bid Adela let out a hiss of pain and
clamp her hands over her ears. It took a moment for her to realize that
the thunder was the woman speaking. Her lips moved and foreign words
fell like booming thunder that rattled Adela to her bones. She winced as
she realized that it was possible this woman literally didn’t speak her
language. That was… tricky to say the least.
She
gazed skyward again and when she did her blood almost turned to ice.
The look she was getting from the woman was… not friendly to say the
least. In fact there was vague disgust in her eyes as she looked at
Adela below. There… there was no way she could mistake her for a bug
right? Definitely not, she looked human, even from that distance she’d
be able to recognize that. So why the look?
“Uhhh,
okay look I dunno who you are but I’m harmless! Totally harmless! What
am I gonna do, punch your socks?” Adela held up her hands and showed she
was totally unarmed.
More thunderous words from
on high, these ones sounding rather… annoyed? That tone definitely
sounded annoyed. Not good. Adela opened her mouth to try and explain
herself again and then her mouth went dry and her heart felt like it
would stop. Slowly, with a whisper of fabric from her red skirt, the
woman lifted her foot up. A tabi clad foot soared overhead, swallowing
up most of the view Adela had of the ceiling. A dense inescapable shadow
fell over her.
Then she saw them. They wouldn’t
have been possible to make out before but now that the foot of the
woman was poised above she could see them. Pinned and compressed to the
bottom of her foot and tangled in fabric were two very human forms that
were absolutely the same scale as Adela. Dead, without question there.
Soft as the fabric probably was, there was no surviving long being
trampled by a living mountain.
Adela took off
stumbling into a run as her animal instincts took over, screaming her
head off as the servant looked down at her with vague disdain. Like she
was some irksome fly she had found in her soup. It wasn’t hatred, that
was reserved for equals, it was disgust. Disgust that saw her foot smash
down atop Adela without a single moment of hesitation.
In
an instant the blonde found herself smashed firmly under the mountain
of the woman’s sock clad foot. Unfortunately for her, death wasn’t
instant, though her bones absolutely shattered on the impact. She had
moments to enjoy the pain of being compressed bit by bit. Seconds felt
like agonizing minutes as her broken body was tangled up in fabric just
like the others that were adhered to the bottom of the tabi. Death was
not fast enough for Adela.
__________________________________________________
Raika
frowned as she firmly pressed down upon the little creature underfoot,
making extra certain she had exterminated the pest. There wasn’t an
ounce of mercy in her eyes as she did it, only vague irritation that
this was the *third* one today. The third one. She let out a sigh as she
ran her fingers through her hair and looked up at the ceiling. The Miko
was pretty sure the shrine had befallen some minor curse.
“Little
demons appearing from thin air, what kind of a curse is that? An
irksome one.” Still, many minor demons could become bigger demons. This
was well known, so it was important to exterminate any demons no matter
how small.
The woman tucked some of her bangs
behind her ear and stepped out of the room to inform the head priestess
of this next run in. As she stepped away the form of Adela could be
glimpsed from below, little more than dirt clinging to pure white
fabric. Fated to fall away and be trampled or buried in the dirt outside
the shrine. An ignoble end for a warrior such as her, and one that the
Miko didn’t even pay mind to as she carried about her duties for the
day.