xp_topaz: (Dark Dimension)
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The rescue team arrives in the Dark Dimension. The world is unkind.



It was moderately terrifying that even when Miles did not pull his punches, these hulking brutes stayed in their feet. On a good day, Miles could almost punch a hole through a truck. How did these guys still stand?

His opponent swung at him, but Miles somersaulted out of range and shot a web at it, pulling it towards him so he could land another barely effective blow that succeeded in staggering it, but it stayed in its feet.

"This is some hot garbage, guys."

"And then some," Amanda agreed. She hadn't seen the younger mutant in action before and was relieved to see he was more than capable of defending himself. Even against these things - they reminded her of the "flesh golems" they'd encountered in an early X-Force mission, in another universe. She hated the feel of the magical energy in this place - kind of oily and fetid, like something rotting in the dark - but at least it counted as a city as far as her mutation went. She cast a shielding spell around one of the creatures and then squeezed the shadowed bubble closed, crushing the creature within until it was a shapeless mass of goo.

"Like, I would like to just say, I'm getting too old for this shit,". Jubilee said, lighting up another of the creatures with a series of large plasmoids.

Miles leap-frogged from the titan he was punching to foot-slam Jubilee's weakened target, slaying it outright. A klaxon suddenly blared in his head to warn him to move as quickly as possible, but having nearly punched through the Mindless One's torso, he found his mobility hampered. Another monster came up behind him and swatted him away like a bug. He landed in a heap several yards away and failed to get back to his feet, his vision too blurry and his ears ringing too loudly to keep his balance.

"Fuck!" Amanda caught sight of the downed Miles and recast her shielding spell to around him, deflecting another blow from the advancing creature. With her other hand she flung a blot of dark-edged lightning, which staggered the monster but didn't destroy it. "Jubes! Clean up in aisle one!" she yelled, blinking away the black edges to her vision. Using this place for magic was really going to mess with her personal energies.

Jubilee quickly turned her powers to the staggered monster, taking its head off in a burst of light.

She followed up the attack with a forward roll and twist into a crouch that let her take the legs out of the Mindless One at her back.

"You alright?" she called out to Miles.

Wiping the blood from his nose, Miles finally regained his footing. He took stock of the battle, and counted it as a good thing that he had been the one to get hit, not the others. Not only because he could take it (although he questioned if he could survive a second full-on blow), but also his ego would have been forever injured if he had let two women be harmed. Not that he would let them know he even thought that.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." He hoped they bought it, because he picked right back up and charged into the melee, landing on the back of one of the monsters near Amanda and discharging a venom blast with horse-stunning voltage. He kicked himself off, stumbling a bit when he landed. His fingers still sparked with bioelectricity. The Mindless One took a couple steps forward and then froze as the delayed blast went off, and then it collapsed as if short-circuited.

Miles might have recovered, slightly, but they couldn't keep this up without someone getting seriously hurt. Looking around in between blasts, Amanda caught sight of a semi-ruined castle a hundred yards away. It was old and damaged, sure, but it looked more sturdy than the rest of the ruins here. "Make for the castle!" she yelled above the sounds of battle. "We need to regroup!"

"Don't have to tell me twice." Jubilee replied, starting to lay down a surpressing fire of plasmoids between her companions and their attackers as she took off.

"Yes, the creepy demon castle. That will totally be better than unbeatable rock monsters." That snark was all the fight Miles put up, though, and was hot on Jubilee's tail to get the heck out of there and find a real plan to save their friends.





Stephen clicked his fingers, waving his hand forward and down, using the motion as a focus for his magic a coruscating aura gathering around his fist as the energy flashed out towards the nearest of the lumbering enemies that beset them on all sides, wrapping around the creature like vines of ivy before they started glowing brighter and brighter. An almost electric aura sparked out, wrapping around the Mindless One leaving it just a smoking corpse as the young mage span around, his dark eyes searching out another opponent. "See the first time I visited a new place, I really thought that I'd be able to relax without the natives going on a murderous rampage, do we really look that terrifying?"

"The thing, is..." Pixie's Souldagger appeared in her hand, the ethereal blade glowing softly pink. She felt her dust rise to the surface of her skin, but she knew from experience that her dust did little to beings from other dimensions. She zipped around the shapeless, slow-moving enemies, striking them where she saw an opening. "...You kidnap our friends, you invite us too. And every one of you will get twatted until. we. get. them. back!" Her final blow sank directly into the glowing core of one. She staggered back as it exploded.

This was the sort of fighting Artie was worst at because they weren't human enough for distraction and misdirection work. He gave a resigned sigh as they engaged, ignoring the wise cracking from Simon and Clea and just watched for a second. The creatures had joints. They moved fast. Knife in one hand, titanium baton in the other, Artie moved in, cracked the baton down into joints twice - knee and elbow. He tried to bring his knife around and the creature's other arm crashed into him. He went flying.

Marie-Ange's expression had gone cold - what little of it could be seen behind a hooded cloak that had spun itself around her as a pair of long curved knives appeared in her hands from one of her cards. She did not go for fragile joints - or non-lethal injuries. Whatever these things were, they were not human, and even if they had been, she did not care. Every target she encountered - mostly the ones Pixie and Stephen had left injured were sliced open at neck and leg to bleed out.

Stephen was happy to stand, well situated, at the back of the group, his hands pointing in one direction and then another as he dug through his repertoire, tossing combat spells out one after another. Ice followed fire followed lightning followed earth as the young mage stood there, a cold dispassionate look on his face as he left broken bodies wherever he pointed. Yet, like the heads of a hydra, for each monster left a broken wreck, 2 more took its place. An unending horde that seemed to flow without end leaving Stephen to wonder, which would run out first, the supply of enemies, or their energy.

Artie pulled himself to his feet. Slowly. Gasping. His shoulders, his back, his knee hurt like burning but he hadn't dropped his knife or baton. He quickly put it away and pulled out his gun. Bullets had been too risky before and he only had so many but Stephen was doing ameture pyrotechnics so clearly stealth was less of a concern than surviving. It took three bullets neatly clustered between the eyes before the Mindless One fell.

This Logan could do. He could focus on destroying the oddly solid black forms coming at them. A roaring swipe of the claws here and another there, neatly slicing one figure after another into pieces. He grunted when one of their blows connected. Too damn strong for what essentially looked like shadows brought to life but even as one fell two, three, more took its place. The horde was endless.

"We are not enough and there are too many." Artie was going to run out of bullets eventually. Miles would run out of his webs. The rest would be out of energy long before Logan would fall, and even his healing factor could be over-taxed, and Marie-Ange could not see any way forward out of this before the endless mass of enemies would crush them. "Wolverine, cover us. Facade, take point on anything that gets past Logan. We need to move quickly, to anywhere but here." The hood
and cloak dissolved away as she spoke. "Whoever flies, get us a escape route. Go up, and find us somewhere to run. The rest of us keep them safe."

Marie-Ange's voice sounded distant, but Pixie forced herself to focus on the words. The words made sense and this battle was ultimately pointless. She took to the air. Below, the bleak landscape stretched out in all directions, largely featureless. She scanned it methodically, noticing a rock formation in the distance that looked a bit more like architecture than nature, or whatever had shaped this world. "I see a fortress!" She announced upon landing, pointing in the direction of the castle.

"Good." Marie-Ange glanced across the group. "We move quickly, through whatever path Wolverine cuts through for us, and stay close. Grab anyone who stumbles." She made a few quick handsigns at her team-mates too far away to yell too - Amanda, Doug - they would understand what she meant quickly. "Do not hesitate to cut down anything that gets close, those are things, not people." Not that it mattered to her, but it mattered to the others. Some of them.





What the fuck are these things?" Sharon growled as she ducked a punch and continued down to sweep the feet out from under it. "Now stay down." She told it before lashing out with another kick to the next creatures.

Jean stared at the monsters, beings made of seemingly solid shadow with glowing eyes. Her jaw set, and her eyes narrowed as she wordlessly lashed out with a wave of telekinesis like a battering ram, smashing three of them into a wall. As three more came her way, she charged at them, her feet swift against the ground. A chunk of stone split, and both sides immediately slammed into the creatures with a ferocity not really seen by her before. She bared her teeth, chest heaving, and waited for another wave, the air shimmering and hot.

Not far from Jean's rampage, Julian tried to maintain concentration as he floated a few feet above the ground. His teammate was sending out a telekinetic maelstrom as she pulverized the attackers, which was having the unintended consequence of making it more difficult for him to focus his own power into a focal point. He thought about asking her to take it easy, but more of the things were coming at them every second, and she was much better than he was at blasting things apart with her mind. "To hell with it," he cursed under his breath, turning his intention from broad, sweeping blasts of telekinetic force, to focused jabs. He reached out to try to find the throat of one of the beasts who was now towering over him.

It felt...wrong. Like he was touching something liquid, but solid at the same time. Revulsion set in, and he attempted to retract his hand- but the sensation remained, even after being withdrawn. He looked down at his mechanical hands, kicking himself for having tagged along on another mission- only his second since the accident. With a deep breath he disconnected his hands from their sockets and let them float free. He wasn't having any luck with heavy hits, and focusing on them one at a time wasn't going to help...it was time to try something new. With a careful, calculated push, he sent a metal fist flying at the nearest enemy, and kept is moving as it punched through the creature, which crumpled to the ground. Julian closed his eyes and focused on letting his telekinetic-propelled fists ramp up and hit target, after target.

Sharon flipped back, her eye caught by what seemed to be a long stick. Picking it up, she hefted it for a quick moment and smiled, satisfied. She firmly took it in two hands and jumped forward, whacking three of the shadowy creatures in quick succession. She could send the creatures flying in this way just fine.

A dramatic contrast to this display of violence was the blonde of the group -- not for lack of trying, mind, but everything that could go wrong for Arthur was, in fact, starting to slowly spiral out of control. His plan was to stay near the supplies -- hastily abandoned as the attack commenced -- and defend them, but loose telekinetic blasts and tossed away enemies that would usually mean little was starting to pile up in the middle.

Knife held defensively, Arthur lunged to try and hold his ground while looking for a place to cover for his... well, horribly violent friends.

Any thoughts or quips about this were lost, however, as more Mindless Ones appeared.

As the next wave hit, Jean used the stone from before, still dripping with liquid shadow, and slammed two of the creatures into a nearby wall before they got too close. But then three more did, using her distraction to ambush her from above and knock her off her feet. The creatures overwhelmed her, a tangled mass of shadow and red hair.

Suddenly Jean let out a cry of frustration as a flare of fire ripped through the three Mindless ones, propelling them backwards and disintegrating any that came too close. The fire blinked out as quickly as it came, however, and Jean pulled herself to her feet, smoke curling around her, trying to catch her breath. Her eyes narrowed as she surveyed the area, looking like she almost wanted more to come.

Whatever had happened to Jean hit Julian like an eighteen-wheeler, knocking him to the ground as a force shock-wave rolled across the area like an nuclear bomb had just exploded. There was a slight ringing in his ears as he propped himself up, looking toward Jean who was now free of the creatures. "Okay, file that one for further investigation," he muttered, as several more of the beasts converged on him. "This isn't working!" he shouted, slamming two of them away haphazardly. "We should fall back!"

With twirl Sharon dumped another creature on it's ass, following up with a hit to his head for good measure. "Seconding that." She called out agreeing with the assessment. The hairs on the back of her neck tingled and whacking over her shoulder, she was rewarded with a grunt as another figure sunk to it's knees. "Seems like there is some kind of building over there... might be a place to hide!" She called out as her eye caught a faint grey outline.

"Yes! How about an alternative to ultra-violence!" Arthur had abandoned his quest to protect the gear, and now was just trying to dodge effectively. This was hard, however, as each leap and flip seemed to land him in a disadvantageous position. He was going to be bruised to hell and back after this. "I vote for hiding!"

There was a sharp wind, then, that cleared some of the ominous fog that has been obscuring Sharon's "building" to reveal the structure was actually much, much larger and majestic that she had given it credit for.

Arthur pointed towards the wonder of dark dimensionesque architecture, helpfully, as a stumble and a trip landed him closer to Sharon's kung-fu exhibition. He was breathless, and his tone indicated that he was on the end of his rope with these shenanigans. "More search and rescue, less terrifying demonstration of mental powers!"

Jean turned toward where Sharon and Arthur were pointing. She relaxed her battle stance, drawing in a breath as her narrowed eyebrows turned into a look of confusion, concern and soon, a hint of guilt. She nodded.

"Good idea. Everyone start heading that way. Dust, Scion, please provide whatever cover you can," she said, throwing up a forcefield as if to punctuate her statement. The mindless ones heading toward her slammed into it, and began beating on it, trying to find a way in.

They were in for a long journey, but anywhere was better than out in the open.

Hopefully there weren't other dangers awaiting them inside. ">

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