Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

Madhukar couldn't see it. Cackling whips, beasts of legend, breaking from their chains and mauling the world, lacerating as Madhukar was being lacerated, demolishing as she was being demolished. The ultimate teacher of empathy: pain. She spread it like a disease, the course of lightning like an infection that rippled through veins. It did more than burn. It inhibited, it collapsed, it caused the machinery of life to malfunction.

Was it really true? That wherever life was, she could never be? All those times she had thought herself helpful, her magic kind rather than cruel, for once-- IT DOESN'T MATTER YOU IDIOT, IT DOESN'T MATTER, IT DOESN'T MATTER, IT DOESN'T, IT DOESN'T, BE QUIET--

Madhukar let the shattering of her bones speak for her. Fragmented bits of soul, falling from her chest like rain. Nothing felt real anymore.

Chunks on the ground, mud and broken bones... something foreign making its way through her own body, seizing it up, just as her electricity was doing to the beast... and finally it all ceased to matter. Finally it was almost done...

Shame, shame, shame, and a few more seconds left. She could feel each one slipping down the drain, draining her of blood, draining her, draining her, goodbye.

Her eyes, wherever they managed to land, locked. Seize, halt -- she felt her body realize that there was no point in this fight anymore. But she couldn't be sure, could she? No, she couldn't be sure. She couldn't be-- please don't do this-- she couldn't be sure. Was that the monster, the one holding her in its jaws, the one breaking her? She could barely see it, she couldn't be sure.

One thing: Pain was not enough.

And another: The weather in this cave was perfect...

Think "Speak"

Round: 4/≥5
Attempt: Rain down just one good bolt before she can't hold on anymore
Defense: Haha no
Injuries: Absolutely destroyed back legs, currently being crushed by a kaiju, paralytic venom running through her

@Orthoclase-Alpha

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

(con't.)

Its consciousness pinholed into a night sky with glittering stars. Alpha stared into the blackness between them and wondered when was the last time it'd breathed. The intercostals responsible for that couldn't stop seizing and constricting tighter and tighter in either direction. Ribs felt too weak, lungs too flimsy. Heart was kicking for freedom it could never have; like this lightning-ridden piece of flesh in its jaws. Any Lesser would have stopped its fight, now.

Any Lesser would not have the capacity to keep it here, keep it unable to move as it burned and at last buckled down to its side with a convulsion. The red-stained mud was not cool enough to keep its flesh from splitting as another storm bore down. Layers and layers of hide curled and peeled away into a putrid purple mass. Capillaries burst and sent up their fine little mist. Toxic eyes blew wide.

Magic swung far—it hogtied the kaiju and threw it a good seven or so feet into the air. It fell onto the shelf of rock it'd perched on just minutes before and felt bones split... not that that was even close to topping any overwhelming pain that clouded its mind right now.

Round: 4/≥5
Attempt: WHATEVER'S ON THE MENU
Defenses: ...
Injuries: Right side of face burst open, Litchenberg figures down the torso, cracked ribs, cardiac arrest, beginnings of respiratory failure

@Madhukar

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

death

etc. etc. etc.

Are you sated? Huh?

Are you sated? ...Are you? I don't--

You've eaten and eaten -- you've glutted yourself with me, you've taken it all. You've found every reason, you've twisted every knife, you've probably got more hiding somewhere but I am empty now. Your prey is empty now. There is no more left in me. So I ask you again: are you sated?

There's more in you. I can smell it. You're hiding it. I can smell it. I can taste it, I can reach--

There was no sight, or sound. The feline dangled limp in the jaws of the predator, and she had never before felt so bare. Boiled down to nothing but her essentials-- less than that, even. She felt so open that it wasn't even a feeling anymore, kind of like how something so hot eventually just felt cold. And the thing was, she wasn't alone. This could be the end of her, of them both really, if only the laws of this world would allow it. What could she-- they be, if only they were allowed...?

Now was not the time for wondering. Now was the time for life's final act: the act of somehow, some way, carrying on. When you are your own predator, where do you run? Where do you hide? In the only thing that will take you, I suppose. It's either love, or it's death.

Vision flashed. Her one last fraction of a second. She would try to use it well. She would try to give all that was left of her, even if there was little left to give. Let her be purged, rung clean. Let her have mercy.

Frail. Small. Insignificant.

All that was left, when life was boiled down to its single, swirling, and cyclical form. A desire to live... simply to live. Let it be shattered with the rest of the world, so that it can... regrow.

Regrow. Regrow. Regrow. Regrow.

Think "Speak"

Round: 5/5
Attempt: Give the last of her health to Alpha
Defense: :D
Injuries: Brb Chrysalization Time

- exit via chrysalis -

@Orthoclase-Alpha

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

gore

death

(mentioned)

So... so small. A broken little carcass—half viscera, half creature. Hide and chunks of flesh still clung to its teeth. The first, pathetic little thought to flood back into its mind was of that Deli. That idiotic dog had been impaled twice over and had not looked nearly so bad. It had not seen every little organ of theirs. All there'd been was blood. Blood. Blood.

When had it let go? When had its own flesh and sinew started to sew itself back together at—no, not its expense, it was not doing that. Was it? Chaos still ebbed and flowed from its gem, but it was chased away by... something; a peculiar something that worked at the same pace as gemstone creeping over a still body.

Alpha blinked. The darkness in the night sky swallowed it whole.

---

Breathe, uttered the subconscious, and it jerked awake with a single convulsion. A gasping wheeze sputtered out of its lungs. Every muscle violently seized once, and snapped back like the release of a rubber band—or, perhaps, the string of a bow. Mud squelched beneath it where it lay. Dull eyes fixed on it and found the same shade of putrid lime staring back at it. Black clots dotted it, lined the trails, dribbled down its mouth with a coppery note. Hooked claws reached out. Every facet was cold.

They then found the edges of its own stone: intact, hidden amid a forest of quills.

I shouldn't be alive, it noted.

Lightning—raw fire—had run its course, broken its way through its face, down its body. The orthoclase lifted a hand to it, barely grazing it. Only the raw throb of a fresh scab greeted the contact. It shifted its weight onto an elbow. Every limb felt like it was on the verge of collapse, and standing was out of the question for now; no matter how long it'd spent blinking just once. A wet thud! punctuated its attempts to move.

It was left, then, to gaze at the chrysalis and ask her again, "why?"
exit orthoclase-alpha

This was the farthest he’d ever been from Home, Home being a dark hole rife with the chaotic magic of what was very much a god.

And like many who wandered into with its winding river and flowering meadows and verdant forests, Doug was simply delighted. He chased after each lesser that he happened to notice, his attention flitting from thing to thing like a butterfly flutters from flower to flower.

However, something managed to catch his attention and keep it for more than a few moments.

In the distance, lightning, a viscous storm lighting up the fields. Not close enough to see who or what was causing it, but curious, and perhaps stupid enough, to find out.

By the time he got there, all that remained was lightning-scorched earth, bloody splatters of crimson and nuclear green and in the middle of it all...

A cat-sized chunk of chrysoberyl.

Doug, though one wouldn’t be able to tell by his actions, wasn’t dumb. He was chaotic, and reckless, acting much like one would expect a child to act at a birthday party. But he wasn’t dumb.

He’d seen the beads of green gemstone glistening upon his friend’s paw, like drops of dew. He knew that everyone was made from a chunk of rock, and had heard that with enough harm, one would return to that rock.

It didn’t take long for him to connect the dots.

And the signs were everywhere, so even still he felt he’d been slow to figure it out. The lightning, gigantic claw marks in the ground, blood, and the neon green blood of something alien. Images of warrior monsters in the corners of his vision shifted into the same monsters tearing her apart, and then each other, and then her, and then each other, and then-

He ̶w̷o̸u̷l̴d̸ ̴̨̉t̷̨́e̵̜͂a̵͎͗ȑ̶̨ ̵͉̅t̵̡̬̑̕h̴̨̦͒e̸̥͐̕͜ṁ̸̧̞̚ ̴̺̫͘ǎ̵͈̻̺̪̃̽p̷̗͈̻̒̂̒͝ͅǎ̵̪̮̺͔͐r̸̜̂͐͗t̷̰͝.

Magic sunk into the earth like water into sun-parched soil. But this was new, this was different. He wasn’t trying to make it disappear, he was trying to make it change.

and it did.

Magic sunk into the ground, into the surrounding grass and wildflowers. Twisting them into snarled black-violet-green things covered in thorns.

Protection.

And then, he settled down next to the chrysalis, mostly hidden by the newly-corrupted plants.

Protection.

Exit Thread!
totally didn't procrastinate on this until the last possible second, ehehehe....