2024-11-08 - The Labyrinth Revolutions 2

The Labyrinth Revolutions 2
Summary: Pretty Cure and friends defeat Northa, releasing the unfathomably ancient Queen of Belka from the prison of her grief and despair. But they aren't the only outsiders in Labyrinth today...
Who: Lera Camry, Setsuna Higashi, Endo Naoki, Inori Yamabuki, Mikoto Minagi, Nori Ankou, Kyouka Okazaki, Nagisa Misumi, Honoka Yukishiro, Miki Aono, Northa, Fate Testarossa, Jail Scaglietti GM: Pink Moon Stick
Where: Dark Realms
OOC - IC Date: 11/8/2024 - 6/17/16

*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+ Dark Realms +*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
  Light cannot exist without darkness, nor darkness without the light, or so    
  some claim. Whether the Dark Realms are simply the Fairy Realms through a     
  mirror darkly is difficult to ascertain, but it's undeniable that some        
  realms in either domain lack an obvious counterpart in the other. Certainly   
  the ceaseless war between bright virtue and dark evil gives little heed to    
  the notion that ultimate victory is impossible.                               
                                                                                
  Indeed, a given realm of darkness will often commit itself solely to          
  extinguishing the light forever. With names like Minor Land, Labyrinth and    
  Dark Kingdom, perhaps that isn't all that surprising. Endless plains beneath  
  a midnight sky lit only by bolts of violet lightning harbor armies of         
  strange creatures, or yet stranger war machines. If there is water, it is     
  brackish, tainted. The air itself stabs lungs like a superheated knife. Some  
  denizens of the Dark Realms claim that they're trying to transform the        
  entire universe into worlds like their own, but colonizing more pleasant      
  environments might be sufficient motivation alone.                            
                                                                                
  Black, too, has shades; there are many dark wastelands, but also dark         
  cities, dark oceans, dark forests, dark deserts, dark skies. Some are even    
  possessed of a loveliness all their own; as beautiful as it is deadly, with   
  shadowy landscapes that mesmerize before they surprise. No matter how         
  populous, all are pervaded by a sense of emptiness, of absence, masked at     
  times by swirling rage or despair, but never erased.                          

COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Inori Yamabuki!
COMBAT: Inori Yamabuki transforms into Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Lera Camry transforms into Barrier Jacket Dynamic!
COMBAT: Lera Camry has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki transforms into Barrier Jacket Fang!
COMBAT: Cure Passion transforms into Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Cure Passion has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Cure Pine has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki transforms into Barrier Jacket Zerstörer!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki has loaded his saved combat state! He is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Nori Ankou transforms into La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into HiME Mikoto!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has loaded her saved combat state! She is now ready to take on 1 opponent!
COMBAT: Nagisa Misumi transforms into Cure Black!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Three more Pretty Cure burst onto the scenes in explosions of light and, well, freshness. It is in hindsight a little bit surprising that Northa didn't try harder to keep this from happening. A quick twitch of those roots across the neck could have executed all three of them faster than they might have been saved, no matter the heroics of Cures Passion, Black, and White. Or, for that matter, she could have finished them off at any time while they were at her mercy... or even simply stored them in some other closet.

For someone who has played four-dimensional chess for ten thousand years, that seems like a pretty big oversight.

What could she be thinking?

Whatever her greater plans, right now some part of her must feel regret, because the Fresh Pretty Cure immediately set about the business of handing Northa her ass. For a few precious seconds at least, they really change the momentum.

Cure Berry, the Pretty Cure of Hope, perfectly descends upon the verdant matriarch from above while Cure Pine, the Pretty Cure of Faith, ardently drives straight in from the front and starts punching straight to her abdomen. In a second wave, Cure Peach, the Pretty Cure of Love, gets her happiness alongside Cure Passion, the Pretty Cure of Joy. Their strike rings with the finality of the clock, a massive pair of kicks straight for center mass.

Some magical girls summon radiance as their strikes -- the typical Device-wielder among them. Others trail sparkles, elemental or otherwise, behind each of their blows.

Reunited, the Fresh Pretty Cure punch and kick so hard that space itself simply struggles to keep up. It's not that they shed light. It's just that the intense greens and grays of this cruelly forested Labyrinth ripple with the shockwaves of each decisive motion, and that shattering vibration picks up a little of Peach's pretty pink and Berry's gorgeous blue and Pine's sunny yellow and Passion's vibrant red.

Three feet and two fists connect audibly with massive THWACKs. If Northa were a human those hits would have been softer yet deadlier. She would have been reduced to a smear of pink, blue, yellow and red internal organs by Berry's kick alone. But her skin is not skin and her flesh is not flesh and no one is surprised that they feel very little give, and that afterwards -- though they have, assuredly, left a mark -- she's still standing.

Of course, Pretty Cure do not fight alone. Lera leaps in even as the Pretty Cure rebound off the force of their connection, exploding arterial starstuff off a slash from Soaring Sky. From the other side, Mikoto descends with a howl, Miroku-first, and Northa prefers the former to the latter, forced to roll into it to avoid that demon sword, but oh, the plasma singing her tendrils makes the whole room stink with the smell of incipient wildfire.

And it feels like she is beginning to be overwhelmed. Already La Sirene is pouring unlight into the steaming jungle hell, which throws its finest details, the smallest of its vines, into stark relief. It is less frightening when it is less dark, but more disturbing. Leaves have eyes and roots have fingernails. Branches form lips and limbs alike. The jungle feels not like one body but like many... an army from every direction; the girls always surrounded.

But Northa, too, is surrounded. She sidesteps the dead plant thrown at her by Cure Black, but fails to notice Kyouka's closing until the last possible second. A second wave of light -- nothing 'un' about it this time -- chases the first, showering the chamber in violet-white. It renders Northa's features in exquisite and awful detail. How the pores on her skin are each tiny waxy cuticles, like that of a leaf. How the strands of her pale blue hair are roots themselves, soft and fractal and strange. It's a huge hit. And it is equally huge that Northa withstands it. Kyouka gets the feeling that what saved her, maybe, is what she herself said, bringing up her daughter.

"No matter how many times you throw us down, we'll get right back up!" said Passion.

Northa grins ear to ear, which when literal rather than metaphorical is really not a good look; it is profoundly disquieting and inhuman; a warped memory of what a smile is supposed to look like, rather than what a smile is. Also, there are way too many teeth.

"Truly we are the same, my daughter," she rasps through the breath stolen from her solar plexus by Pine's punches; and though she is replying to Passion there is a sense that she responds to Kyouka also, in her way. "Unrelenting. Inexorable. You make me -- proud."

She glances over at Mikoto, her lip curling. "I don't know that your family would feel the same," she adds backhandedly, shrugging cruelty back over her shoulders like a cloak. "The only saving grace is that you were an ineffective servant... which makes you a pitiful traitor now. But not the most pitiful."

Alight with hatred, her golden eyes swing towards the chrysalis containing Endo and Stern. They have been defended by their friends but not without cost. Cure White has overextended and Northa is assuredly not always one to give up advantage. Faster than anyone can intervene, she snaps vines with teeth to White's shoulders -- to her spine -- and to the back of her pretty little neck. They GULP, audibly, as they latch on like leeches and seem to SUCK something from her. Something more puissant than blood. Cure White's back is to the group, putting her expression out of reach, but everyone can see the way her silhouette sways. In spite of (because of?) how small each vine is, she is somehow so devastated by their grasp that it is obvious even from behind.

<MY FAILURE WAS OF UNDERSTANDING.>

"Your failure is of fealty!" Northa roars. "And for what? For whom? For this human child, this hapless son of a barbarian world?"

The soles of her feet are lifted from the ground. Truthfully they were lifted repeatedly by the impact of heroic strikes against her, but this last one, Kyouko's, she resists no longer. Strike Wolf's wielder gains the satisfaction of seeing Northa tumble head over heels.

But when she rights herself in midair and lands at sufficient distance from everyone to prevent what comes next... that is cause for concern.

"But I have not failed. And I will not fail now. I will not fail the people of these worlds! MY people! Though they are children too ungrateful to know that this is for their own protection, I will be their mother all the same. And... I will be their monster too, if that is what it takes--!"

From a long and trailing sleeve, Northa produces a seed of sorrow. And no ordinary seed. Pretty Cure and friends have watched Soular and Westar throw these like bombs, instantly creating massive and terrible Sorewatase foes, but they've never seen anything like this -- the way that it is too dark to see, despite all the light they bring to this place -- despite how it is held openly in the palm of her hand. It sheds a blackness that has nothing to do with the more wholesome void Cure Black stands for. It empties the world of light.

Northa lifts the seed to her mouth... and SWALLOWS.

The darkness expands from her in every direction! It overwhelms the various torchlike radiances around the magical girls so completely that they seem extinguished; forget Northa, no one can see the palms of their own hands, now, even held directly in front of their face. But they can smell, and they can feel. And they smell growth. And they feel it, too.

It is not only dark because Northa has grown strong with sorrow.

It is dark because every leaf and twig and root and vine and trunk has grown strong with her. And she with them. Her power is denser. Her jungle is hotter. Her air is wetter, and it is wet with tears...

Her voice comes from every direction. This is a trick they've seen before but it is no longer a trick. Not that they could find her body in this darkness, but there is a keen sense that there is no body to find. The jungle is Northa and Northa the jungle.

"In the end... everyone must stand alone. That is what it is to be alive."

She engulfs everyone; Endo twice, with a whole second layer of crawling roots and cutting leaves and strangling vines and brutalizing branches. There are no more individual Venus fly-traps per se. Northa is the whole world and her world is a black maw; a tight space; heat and damp and dark and sharp, chewing, straining to pick them up, to separate them...

...and consume them so completely that there will be nothing left to spit out.

COMBAT: Northa transforms into Northa, Jungle of Sorrow!
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Cure White.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Cure Pine decisively counters 42 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 14 Fatigue damage!  Cure Pine's
Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine's counterattack, Pineapple Reverse, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: Cure Passion perfectly dodges 50 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Dodge!
Cure Passion's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Northa has used Massive Threat on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Lera Camry perfectly counters 58 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Counter!
Lera Camry's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Lera Camry's counterattack, Mantle Heart, interrupts, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: Cure White cleanly braces 45 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 8 Fatigue damage!  
COMBAT: Cure Black decisively counters 48 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 16 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!
Cure Black's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Cure Black's counterattack, Sen no Sen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi decisively counters 42 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 14 Fatigue damage!  Mikoto
Minagi's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant dodges 42 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 28 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  
COMBAT: Endo Naoki decisively counters 42 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 14 Fatigue damage!  Endo Naoki's
Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki's counterattack, Asteroid Eilen, fails to get through, doing 0 Fatigue damage to Northa!  

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera's eyes narrow as Northa speaks of how proud she is of Setsuna. "Don't... don't call her that! You were never any mother to her!"

But her eyes widen as she sees Northa, after so many retorts, swallow a seed of sorrow instead of use it on something else. Darkness billows past her; her eyes are open, but all is lightless. She feels the jungle around her, hot and sticky, and she realizes. "Ground!"

<Mantle Heart!>

Interlocking hexagons of golden light, as a dome, appear around her -- and push back the darkness. It pushes back the jungle. She sucks a breath in. "Ground," she says. "We have to change all of the mana in the barrier--"

<As soon as it's down. I know.> If he could exhale, he would. Lera does it for him. The barrier cracks -- then it collapses. The jungle comes inward, vines and branches and heat -- and the motes of light of the shattered barrier all grow into bright golden beads of light.

The explode outward, criss-crossing and ripping through countless plants and vines, trying to drive them back with overwhelming numbers.

<Bombadier Cascade!>

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Bombadier Cascade on Northa.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 58!

COMBAT: Northa braces 26 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Bombadier Cascade, taking 11 Fatigue damage!  Northa's Block and Parry
abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

That horrid, awful, terrible grin of Northa's is like a vine wrapping around Cure Passion's heart in the moment. The things she says--the pride she seesm to feel--

"You're not my mother!" Passion cries with all the ardency of her namesake, even as Lera calls out in defiance. "Maybe you made me. Maybe you shaped my life. But the Momozonos taught me that a parent is MORE than that!"

Love nods sharply. "No matter where she came from... she's ours, now!"

They continue to strike and strike until they're forced to pull back, and that hatred in Northa is so terrible, that--

"Cure White!" Peach calls in dismay, and Passion looks at White in worry. There is something terrible there. And Northa roars, but rights herself--

"A Sorewatase seed...?" Passion wonders, staring. They are called ungrateful children, but still Northa proclaims herself mother, and Cure Passion stands in defiance. But the darkness expands--

Passion and Peach lose sight of each other once again. The darkness is all-encompassing. And that voice comes from all directions. The heat and the wet and the himid nearly suffocate her, but Passion, even alone, doesn't give up.

"NO!" Passion cries to her answeer, and jumps up. Brutalizing branches, crawling roots, cutting leaves--they break into Cure Passion's space.

But she is not there.

With a brilliant flash of red, she POPS out of existence and into existence higher above, sailing back down towards the ground soon after--

POP! She moves again. POP! Again. Over and over, the terrible consumption of Northa comes for her, and Cure Passion simply exists elswhere. Lera's support buoys her--she can't see her anymore, but Lera knows what Northa wasn't to Passion.

But Passion falls, and falls from the sky. There is a blur of crimson--

She blasts into the jungle floor, and if her strike is true, will make a shockwave of power.

...Of course, it might if it isn't true, too...

At the same time, Cure Peach is in the dark, punching and striking and kicking away every plant that comes near her. "We're not alone!" she cries. "Even if they're out of sight, the memories we've made stay with us! I'll never forget my friends!"

"And together--"

Peach slams her fist down, and Passion from a distance calls, "Breathing's not enough--To LIVE is to live with others!"

COMBAT: Cure Passion has used Crimson Flash on Northa.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 92!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo's purple flame is engulfed entirely by the darkness, the light that had been leaking through the cocoon of branches smothered by the blanket of Northa's transformation. Endo resists still, cutting, hewing, sawing with renewed strength even as more vines grip and choke.

The brief surge of offense that came with the release of the Cures is stifled, but he's not finished. A few more heaves and Endo breaks through the most immediate net of branches, only to find that the absence of light was not merely due to the mass of vines.

"Passion! Mikoto!" He calls into the darkness, meeting only more thorny vines. His blade lashes out, attempting to cut a path forward. To where, he's not sure-but standing still seems a worse decision.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Blauverschiebung on Northa.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 50!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

There's a moment where the worn smile becomes a radiant one for Black, "Me too. But, I had faith that you'd make it." But then the transformation occurs, and the battle is on.

Cure Pine and Cure Berry move in twisting tandem to back each other up, where one goes high, the other low. The four are united and Pine leaps once to let Passion through, before pressing back on the assault herself. It becomes a deadly dance from the would be successors to Trinity as they keep moving amidst the Mages and Pretty Cure to try and press Northa back.

"You were never a mother to her! Not even once." Pine says back, with a heat that seems out of place for someone as ordinarily gentle as herself, as Berry snaps back several aerial kicks, "You sent her out to die for you! Again and again! Don't say you're proud of her for surviving being expendable to you."

But even united, Northa is still the deadliest threat they've ever faced, and as she speaks to Mikoto, to Endo and Stern, Pine learns just truly how twisted she's become by her state as she produces a seed, and both of them land, taking a wary stance as she...

"She swallowed it?" Pine blinks, before Berry grabs her to pull her back, "Get back!" As the darkness detonates in an all encompassing presence within the awful jungle.

Abruptly the world is against them, and Pine is swallowed by it, but in the same moment, the vines that are around her twist, and buckle and stretch, as her her limbs stretch out, and her arms begin to wrap the vines she's ahold of end over end, before leaping out.

Leaving the vines and branches a knotted mess that she's tied together, grabbing them on her way out, and pulling, and tearing, "Haaa-AHHHH-!" And with one last twisting motion, tries to tear the tree out from it's roots, trying to hurl it with an awful throw to clear the path forward, in the distance - to make a clearing, a path forward...

"Didn't we show you before? You can try to tear us apart... but we'll always find each other."

And Berry in another part of the jungle flickers a kick against another massive tree, before bounding off, to drive herself bodily through another, like a perfect dart. "You don't even believe that yourself." She retorts to Northa's point, "Did you really get this far on your own? Even someone at the top needs people to support them!"

COMBAT: Cure Pine has used Pineapple Twist on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

"She's not," Mikoto scowls, when Northa calls Passion her daughter, just the same as her. But her sullen defiance is shaken, deep scowl carving up into a shocked display, when Northa turns her gaze on her.

"I'm not!" She insists, more thinly, now. An echo of the words she found, the parts shifted to fit; the context is similar, but is that how it sounds? She wants to say that she never wanted to betray her family, that it is her Lord Brother gone astray; that she is not like them, and that is no treachery.

She doesn't say anything nearly as eloquent. She has but two words. And then, as Northa gobbles Cure White up, another: "White!" And another, when she produces her seed: "Don't!" Mikoto cries, as Northa swallows her sorrows. What would have happened if Westar had ever really --

Well, she doesn't have to wonder, does she.

"Endo?" Mikoto calls, as her face turns, blindly. "Passion? Pine? Lera? La Sirene?" Name after name with no reply, and the rest die in her throat, as her nostrils flare, instead. She can see not a thing, but she can smell her, the overwhelming totality of Northa, and she swings her sword out in a wide arc. "RRrrrrrrghhh---!!" She growls, as she lifts Miroku up, and SLAMS it down, blade-first on the nearest staring foliage she can sniff out.

Violence must be the answer. It's the only one she has.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 28!

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness on Northa.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 66!
DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d8+0 and gets 4!

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.
<SoundTracker> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk-8XTyfFp8 - Siouxsie - Into a Swan

La Sirene lands on her feet, and she glows. It's not a warm light, but it is a light, even if it only changes the character of the horrors that surround her. Even so, changing that character can in some cases be enough. Huffing for breath, she looks towards Northa.

She sees the Seed of Sorrow.

"Don't!" she calls -- maybe something from the heart, or the back of her mind, or the back of her spine. She can remember those Sorewatase. To swallow that much at once... what would that do to someone? But then it's too late.

Northa has committed herself, and perhaps all of them.

'In the end... everyone must stand alone.'

La Sirene's heart skips a beat. It is, perhaps, at her deepest core, the thing-that-she-fears-most. To be, ultimately, alone. Truly alone, not simply not in company at any given time. The world engulfs around them, dark and humid and encompassing everything she can see. That glow that she cast dims. She staggers back a step.

It feels like leaving the world.

Everything. All the years of joy and sorrow and anxiety and happiness and pleasure and suffering are already out there, their proofs only there in memory and their impression upon herself. The world drained and made grey, not the grey of gentle light filtered heavily but the grey of simple, flat absorption.

She can feel her heart sinking. Sinking like a breached ship, ripped in two, wrecked and ruined. Raging down into the deep, those memories a momentary glittering trail --

-- until she hits something, her entire body jerking, and *bounces* --

If they're really all gone - I'm the Queen now.

I might be the queen of nothing.

Her fingers curl into tight fists. She can feel the wet streaks on her cheeks.

No. It's not all gone. Even if I am all that is left.

La Sirene de Diamant leans her head forwards and stomps forward--

I'll build it all over. OR GO DOWN TRYING

She stomps forwards and reaches out with her left hand to grasp the darkness and with a gritting of her teeth and a twist of her back PULL SOMETHING LOOSE - what was it? Only a shadow? She doesn't know, but the Pharos at her hip sputters and sparkles and the luminous aura around her comes back. It grows. It grows back quite quickly, and she keeps going forwards.

Soon enough, the grasping and the tearing of her hands becomes something else - more like blades, glittering blades to chop through the darkness. She was facing towards Northa. She has no better direction.

The blades become, soon enough, rays -- and perhaps they are reckless, because in her driven focus she is not, exactly, looking for those distant flashes of color.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used The Queen of Myself on Northa.
COMBAT: Cure Pine has cancelled their attack on Northa. If there are more attacks that need to be +cancelled, please hold all
+attacks until the process is complete.
COMBAT: Cure Pine has used Pineapple Twist on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Cure Black dodges 5 Fatigue damage from Cure Pine's Pineapple Twist, taking 8 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Cure Pine is
Psyched!

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 1!
DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d8+0 and gets 1!

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki counters 34 Fatigue damage from Northa's Massive Threat, taking 34 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Kyouka
Okazaki's Reverse ability activates!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki's counterattack, Against the Tide, partially gets through, doing 16 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi covers Northa for La Sirene de Diamant's attack, The Queen of Myself, taking it upon herself instead!
COMBAT: Northa dodges 13 Fatigue damage from Mikoto Minagi's Obsidian Blade: Dauntlessness, taking 20 Fatigue damage!  Mikoto
Minagi is Psyched!
COMBAT: Northa perfectly braces 38 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Blauverschiebung, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Brace!
Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Northa partially dodges 9 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion's Crimson Flash, taking 36 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi fails to brace La Sirene de Diamant's The Queen of Myself, taking 21 Fatigue damage!  

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Kyouka and Strike Wolf have come a long way, since Kyouka first picked up him, both having gone their own journies as their partnership has evolved. In tandem, hoping to push back the tide of darkness and despair that thretens to consume everything, they strike--

And Northa withstands the blow, treating Kyouka to a horrifically close, detailed look at the Belkan Queen in sharp relief, highlighted by the light of her attack.

It's almost enough to make her shudder, to see just how like and unlike a living person she is.

The reply, even meant for Passion, does make her shudder. She grits her teeth, even as she motion runs through ehr body, straining to keep her attack on track. But she does take satisfaction in seeing Northa thrown back, withdawing her first to get ready for her next assault.

"What in the world--" Northa brings out a seed and swallows, and then-- Darkness. Everywhere, and the jungle grows more intent with it. Reflexively she holds out her hand, tries to summon light to counteract it but it doesn't help. To be alive...

"Is that why you keep trying to do everything yourself? Because you think standing alone is your only choice?"

Vines and thorns and leaves and everything in between comes for them. She can't move, because she can't see, but to stand still is to be trapped and ensnared. "Let's fight back!"

<Acknowledged.>

Together they summon energy and Kyouka strikes back, her gauntlets and boots shining with violet energy as she lashes out against everything threatening to consume her with energy-charged punches and kicks. Even as more and more reaches claws at her barrier jacket, rendering her defensses lower and lower, for every cut she deals an explosive blast in return, giving as good as she gets.

"As soon as you can get me a target lock--" she huffs out as she fights.

<Target locked acquired.>

"Good!" She kicks away one more thorny vine to try and give herself space to attack. A bright violet circle foms at her hand as she draws it back, gathering more and more energy. "Blaaaaast FANG!" She punches forward, releasing the energy in a beam that tries to cut through the dense jungle to hopefully strike at something meaningful.

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Blast Fang on Northa.

DICE: Pink Moon Stick rolls 1d100+0 and gets 64!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

"Blech," Cure Black says, shaking her hands of plant ichor, as the fly trap head she tossed crunches to the ground much further from her than one would think such an ungainly item could sail. She's forced to wipe them on her skirt; there's nothing else significantly cleaner than her hands are nearby, other than Cure White. And there is nothing in the world Cure Black wants to keep clean more than Cure White.

Instead, she has to watch the awful plant mouths latch onto her partner's back and... imbibe something from her. Her lips curl back from her teeth, and two of her finest characteristics, will and hope, reach out instantly, utterly uselessly, to try and dislodge this attack from her partner through wishing alone. Her body, fast and strong as it is, is agonizingly too slow. Every moment of harm to Cure White is intolerable.

"Get... off of her!" Cure Black shouts, her weight shifting onto her back foot. It all feels so slow, as her body shifts to face Cure White, as her knee bends to rush in that direction. But she should have appreciated just how fast her reaction almost was. She was almost there in a flash.

Instead a rush of teeming roots, thorns, and vines pours towards her like an ocean wave. Different tendrils rebound off each other, knocking their trajectories up or down or side to side, but with malice they always careen forward. Cure Black, with one foot off the ground and her weight off-balance, has to decide whether this attack caught her at the best or worst possible time. Because she could be on one leg to change direction and go to Cure White. Or she could be on one leg to throw one hell of a haymaker.

Cure Black throws the haymaker. She's not happy about it. The plants she hits can tell.

A single punch should not have been enough to clear the deck the way it does. But Cure Black has been equipped with the upper body strength it takes to fight several story-high Zakenna, and the eager cluster of roots that tried to bowl her over suddenly finds out that it's made of wet pulp. The impact backs up, making a concavity in the rushing jungle, until the vines and leaves cannot compact anymore and violently rupture as well. This small shockwave travels back through them, though it leaves the runoff below intact, and Cure Black's boots are abraded and ground around inside the passing, shin-high plant swarm. Exhaling, Black does not even glance at the tatters of her lower legwarmers, or the deep scrapes on her boots. She turns again to go to Cure White...

...and Cure White is gone.

"Huwaito!" Cure Black calls. Squinting at the sudden darkness, Black gives no thought to finding the dark queen that is its source, though Futari Wa Pretty Cure normally knows to keep their offense going even when one of them is hurt. But she has to find her partner, now, she has to help. Rushing forward, she slams her wounded shoulder (torn inside the fly trap) into a tree, and hisses, drawing back her fist to smash it aside. But she leaves that fist hanging for a moment, before letting it down. "She was right here," she whispers. She can't risk knocking a tree on top of her.

Then a tree hits Cure Black from behind. The leaves save her; they hit first, and Cure Black twists away instinctively. It feels like falling down through the branches of a tree she climbed, with the benefit that she does not also have to hit the ground when she's done. Besides mitigating the impact, the other notable thing Cure Black does when the tree hits her is shout "OW!" This ends up being the sound that Cure Pine hears a second or two after she threw the tree, from the direction in which she threw the tree, roughly as far away from her as she might have expected the tree to fly.

But hey. It might be unrelated?

Instead of attacking the copse before her, Cure Black roughly drives herself through it, wriggling where she has to, hopping where she can. Her feet reliably find the shape of places to step, even in this dark jungle, even with her legs and shoulder torn up. Panting, she throws her amber eyes back and forth in the dark. It will be easier for her to find Cure White than it would be for Cure White to find her; what little light is present will reflect readily off pale raiment and paler skin. Lodging her body between trees, Cure Black finally catches sight of her partner. "Huwaito!" she cries urgently, and rams herself through the narrow gap, catching her balance only after several careening steps. All that matters to her is that those steps are forward.

Cure Black collides with Cure White in her haste to reach her, and grapples on to hold both of them up. "Hang on, hang on," she pleads, patting around Cure White's back, terrified that the vines might still be there, even though she knows Cure White's grappling ability is well-suited for dislodging things like...

Cure Black's palm touches the slippery stem of a vine as it ripples with whatever it is draining.

"Arien--" Black doesn't even have time to finish her catchphrase. Wrapping her hand around the back of Cure White's head, she pushes White's face into Black's intact shoulderpad. The first reason for this is to hold her stable and give her some frilly fabric to chomp if this is about to hurt, and she finds out if that was necessary soon enough, as she throttles the vine in her hand so hard it can't swallow its current throatful, and twists it off like a bottlecap. The others attached to her back follow in short order, twist, pop, twist, pop, until Cure Black reaches the second reason she pushed Cure White's head down: she needs access to the one on the back of her neck. This final vine, she grabs close to its mouth and pulls directly back, the way you are supposed to with a leech. It might have been a mistake not to treat the others the same way, but this one is why: she was hurrying through them to get up to the one on Cure White's neck.

"Huwaito!" Black gasps. "Are you all right? I'm here. I'm right here."

COMBAT: Northa cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Blast Fang, taking 5 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!
Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Points of light surge within the all-encompassing darkness of the jungle. They illuminate the magical girls and their enemy both; and, ultimately, each other. There is hope to be found in the golden radiance of Lera's bombardier cascade, for example. But also despair, to be sure, for the massive Midchildan might she invokes does not do NEARLY the kind of jungle-leveling that it would ordinarily. That is the flip side of the coin that Northa has tossed. She is but jungle now...

...but all the jungle is Northa. And Northa is incredibly strong.

And so it is that Lera shreds leaves but the vines seem to take in her light and not be weakened for the donation. That Cure Berry kicks a tree and the tree seems to bend with the motion, then swing back, knocking her head over heels; she eats dirt, which is not perfect at all. That Endo, resplendent in the power of his conviction, brings down Fallen Stern with enormous strength and finds that the verdant walls that surround him grow faster than he can cut, keeping him isolated, hemmed in, alone.

Every root is prehensile. Every trunk, a body and a finger all at once. They sway mockingly out of Mikoto's reach; though Cure Peach punches and kicks everything in sight, too often her fists and feet find only air. Kyouka levels a huge corridor, but run down it though she might, more is always there for her to blast, again and again and again.

And Cure Pine and La Sirene, in their desperate struggle to find and help the others, accidently put those others in harm's way.

The whole jungle seems to chuckle at this, wordlessly ruminating on the futility of unity, the inevitability of even the best of intentions causing one another pain. Until Cure Passion's downward strike opens up an enormous shockwave, one that ripples beneath her faster than the vines can retreat, catching many of them in a great void of punch-collapsed ground that opens up with a hemispherical POP!

"Listen to yourselves!" the jungle rages from a million mouths. "Standing alone is my only choice! Everyone abandons everyone else! The only one who has never abandoned anyone... is ME!"

It echoes, an agonized bawl, through the space opened up by the group's efforts. They have found one another once again.

And she has lost herself entirely.

"All of you," Northa raves -- if she had spittle to froth, it would be everywhere -- instead bloodlike sap beads and wells from every twig and branch and leaf, a thousand wounds from betrayal a thousand years past and more. "My daughter. Her knights -- MY knights. The ungrateful children of the worlds under threat. Breathing is not enough? Try NOT breathing, then! See what you make of it! And when you've had enough, I will bring it back -- I will SAVE YOU! SAVE YOU ALL!"

The bloodsap sublimates into the air; like and unlike pollen; like and unlike tear gas; everyone sees red (literally, the color seeping onto every surface as well as into every set of lungs) and also the fading, co-mingling black and white sparkles of oxygen deprivation.

This can't go on...

COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Lera Camry.
COMBAT: Northa has used Blossom With Despair on Cure White.
COMBAT: Cure White perfectly dodges 14 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!
Critical Dodge!  Cure White's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi perfectly dodges 17 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical
Hit!  Critical Dodge!  Mikoto Minagi's Fade and Flash abilities activate!
COMBAT: Lera Camry fails to dodge Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 15 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Exhausted applied to
Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki perfectly braces 11 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical
Brace!  Endo Naoki's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine partially dodges 2 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 9 Fatigue damage!  Cure Pine's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!  Exhausted applied to Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure Black braces 9 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 7 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Cure
Black's Block and Parry abilities activate!  Blind, Cripple, Diversion, Exhausted, and Stun applied to Cure Black!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 9 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 4 Fatigue damage!  La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki dodges 5 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 7 Fatigue damage!  Kyouka Okazaki's Fade
and Flash abilities activate!  Blind, Diversion, and Stun applied to Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Cure Passion braces 6 Fatigue damage from Northa's Blossom With Despair, taking 5 Fatigue damage!  Cure Passion's Block
and Parry abilities activate!  Blind and Diversion applied to Cure Passion!

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera can only hear her friends, at first. She does, though; calling each other's names; reminding her that she doesn't face this alone.

"We're here, Mikoto!" Lera calls out to her, even if she can't see her.

The trees and leaves and vines are all far too much. They are Northa; they are much too strong. "You abandoned Westar and Soular!" she shouts back at Northa. "You haven't listened to a word we've said!"

It's like the air is being sapped from her. Like the life and light are; her breaths are ragged, her thoughts are growing desperate. She grits her teeth -- then she swings out Sky. The plasma around the blade ignites into a white-gold field, as she swings and chops through the plant matter nearby.

<Radiant Saber!>

"Passion!" she calls out. "Where are you!?"

COMBAT: Lera Camry has used Radiant Saber on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Cure White [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

Cure White does not cry out at Cure Black's separation nor at her arrival. Her eyes are half-lidded and, beneath that, terribly vague; impossibly distant. As though she is no longer here at all. Another jungle has her now.

But Cure Black has her too.

With desperate haste and, at the end, greater precision, she rips those vines off of her like so many leeches. But they come away as easily as lips. The marks left behind are not bloody but black; black with bruising; black with despair, which they incited and then ever so eagerly consumed. For an instant, Cure White was a perpetual motion machine of pure fuko. A star can burn itself out, but a black hole is denied even that final mercy. That is how it was.

She collapses against Nagisa's shoulder for a long moment. She had stopped breathing, and at first they shudder through her uncontrollably, an avalanche. Then they slow. And then they stop a second time -- but this time, because that is what she chose.

She doesn't have to say anything. Her blue eyes say everything; they shine in the terrible hot wet blackness of this space with not just gratitude, not just love, but with... conviction. With commitment.

Through the gas, Cure White reaches out for Cure Black's hand, and leads her to the others.

They rejoin them fists first. And feet first. They let go again and again, and come together again and again; they come at the jungle from every direction and none. They cover each other's weaknesses and reveal each other's strengths. As two who are one -- they descend through the heart of this darkness -- and come out the other side -- together.

COMBAT: Cure White has started a combo targeting Northa!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Passion and Peach can't find each other at first, but they know that they're together still--and Berry, and Pine, and everyone else. Passion keeps fighting, and that jungle opens up a huge shockwave. Pop!

The jungle rages but, "You didn't just abandon me!" Passion cries. "You did worse! And you've hurt everyone in Labyrinth! Everyone all over!"

But Peach teps up next to Passion, and nods sharply.

Try not breathing, kNOrtha says. And Passion calls out, "Lera! Lera, I'm here!"

She has to find her. But the gas--the red, awful gas--gets to her, and while she can hold out for a little while...

She coughs, despite herself. But Peach has a hand on her back, soothingly, as she tries to hold her breath, too. But it's worth it to say one thing--"Pine! Berry!"

"Everyone! Pretty Cure--"

They work as one, rising up into the air, and knowing that Pine and Berry both will be with them in the next moment--

To strike one point, with all their might!

COMBAT: Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Northa!
COMBAT: Cure Black has joined the combo started by Cure White!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure White and Cure Black have used Taijitu Taijutsu on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge Lera Camry's Radiant Saber, taking 47 Fatigue damage!  
COMBAT: Northa braces 44 Fatigue damage from Cure White and Cure Black's Combo: Taijitu Taijutsu, taking 36 Fatigue damage!  Cure
White and Cure Black are Psyched!  Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

'OW!'

"Black!?" Pine calls out, as she bounds through the gap a moment later, "Are you alrig-" Her bootheels click down to scrape away bark, and there's a moment of-

???

"You sounded like you were under attack just a second ago." Pine says with a mystified tone, seeming not quite to understand the cause and effect here. "Let's get back into the fight."

As if the fight were not everywhere, right now. The jungle surrounds them, it's chuckling at these moments of harm that others were put in. And she yells, no froths, as if time, the ages, relentless sorrow had taken it's toll out of her most of all in her inhumanity.

"I don't want to be saved if it means..." Pine says this with an air of sincerity, "... I can't hug Lucky again."

Lucky!?

Well they're an adorable Golden Retriever she takes care of sometimes. The one she awakened to save, the one that brought her into this life.

The stakes she cites may seem small in the grand scheme of things. However, speaking cost her, as she takes a coughing breath of the pollen before it makes it nearly impossible.

And as she covers her mouth and leaps forward in the crimson cloud, she leaps on high. "Maybe you can survive alone - but you can only get your happiness... one way!"

Together.

It's what Peach always says at least, as Berry and Pine join her and Passion on high, "-KICK!" Aligned, all four heels come down on a singular point, with the strength of four Pretty Cure.

COMBAT: Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Pretty Cure Fresh Kick on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa dodges 35 Fatigue damage from Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Combo: Pretty Cure Fresh Kick, taking 52 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Amdist the dark other lights twinkle, and Endo joins the burgeoning cluster of magical girls after a harrowing trip through vicious roots and trees.

In the face of Northa's claims he fires back: "This isn't how you save people!"

There is not much more he can shout though, with the red haze permeating the forest. Cheeks puff out as the boy sucks in a breath, turning his blade on the nearest foliage once again. He swings in a wide arcthere's no center mass to their foe, so he only hopes to ward off the encroaching forest for his allies for now.

COMBAT: Endo Naoki has used Blauverschiebung on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa cleanly braces 28 Fatigue damage from Endo Naoki's Blauverschiebung, taking 5 Fatigue damage!  Northa's Block and
Parry abilities activate!  Stagger applied to Northa!

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Everyone is separated, and even doing her best to clear a path, to reach out for others and regroup... still more vines and branches and runks reach out to block her path. "Dammit-- how-- many-- of-- these--" Each word is punctuated by another punch or kick, until Northa speaks again.

The only one who has never abandoned her, is her. "That's because you keep pushing everyone away! You're so determined to do everything your way, you keep grasping tighter and tighter until you destroy the things you're trying to protect!"

Breathing is not enough. "There's more to life than just existing!" And all of a sudden she gets the extremely gut feeling that the threat isn't just metaphorical.

She does her best to draw in air as the tearsap sublimates into a red gas. The air was already so thick and humid with the jungle's moisture that it's not the freshest lungful of air she's ever taken-- and she's not fast enough to avoid the gas, too. It burns as it festers in her lungs, and she can't help but couch while simultaneously trying not to exhale.

Kyouka staggers, pitching to lean against the side of her makeshift tunnel as her vision starts to swim, tears filling her eyes. Dammit. She's willing to do anything to herself to get her way, and with us all split up...

<Kyouka. You are not alone.>

Her vision clears, for a moment, and she looks to her device on the back of the gauntlet. There's a firm nod. Strike Wolf is with her. The others are still fighting. Together...

She pushes herself up getting ready as she slowly sets her stance. Purple energy flows into her gauntlets and boots as she launches herself forward. There's not as much explosive impact, but still she looks to smash through anything standing in her way.

... they can still win this!

COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki has used Fangbreaker on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa perfectly dodges 14 Fatigue damage from Kyouka Okazaki's Fangbreaker, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Dodge!  

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

They're... here?

"Yrrraaaahhhh!" Mikoto cries, because she can't SEE them, she can't SMELL them, she can't FIND them. Something impacts her, from the back -- she staggers forward, strangely reminded of her friends. (Thankfully, she doesn't counter Nori's assault, today.) She can't find them, but that was Lera's voice, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

No -- there, with the light -- there she is. There she is!

Mikoto tries to fight through the jungle, to those lights -- but Northa insists that abandonment is key. She slices at the foliage, only to hear her words, coming in-through-amongst it all. "Rrrraaahhhh--", she growls --

only for her last "rrrr," to die into an "rghuh,"

Mikoto keeps trying to find that light, running through the foliage, but everything is red, red, red.

"End--dhhh--", she gasps, voice guttering, as she worries for the boy who has earned so much more of Northa's spite than the others. It's not... fair...

... he's been through so much.

(Too much of it at her own hands.)

COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi has used Foundation on Endo Naoki.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Roots gnaw and grasp. Vines whip and bend. Trees creak and bend but do not break. Is it because la Sirene isn't angry enough? Or is it because of the sheer power behind them?

"Agh! Mikoto--" la Sirene babbles for a moment as she weaves away. She hit her! Did she hit her badly? She doesn't seem -- but would she -- oh, it's too dark here -- that momentary swirl, at least, affirms that she is-who-she-is, and has not become something worse.

She can, at least, see the lights. And hear Northa, of course. "... Don't hurt people, just so you can satisfy yourself," la Sirene huffs, without her usual round of deep resonant projection.

It was probably good that she saved her breath. The bleeding sap, or saplike blood, becomes an aerosol; her eyes narrow as the world shades red, even in the dim lighting from the flickers of the others, like the last stars in the threshold of the stars' end --

Her hands come up and clasp over her head as her eyes close. She's seeing stars, and she wants to reach for them, but -- they aren't --

Between her hands there is a momentary gleam of something. It is, of course, not-quite-light, although it shares many of those characteristics. La Sirene's head rolls back as she struggles not to breathe out - the pressure in her is building - and wills the light to shine, to shine, to shine on all the brighter.

To push back - to displace things - to pour like the water that's surged in solution since time immemorial upon these damnable things. To draw sorrow from sorrow. Perhaps sorrow shared or mingled is lessened.

If nothing else, perhaps it will guide the others -- that same stark relief she'd worked for before.

COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant has used Shine On Through The Night on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa cleanly braces 23 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Shine On Through The Night, taking 4 Fatigue damage!
La Sirene de Diamant is Psyched!  Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!  Diversion applied to Northa!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki accepts Mikoto Minagi's Foundation, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Endo Naoki is Cheered!  

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

The bruise on the back of Cure White's neck is not exposed for long; with no more vines to tear off, Cure Black clamps her palm down over it protectively and holds Cure White in a tight hug. Her strong arms hold Cure White's trembles down, containing them, not letting the jungle around them absorb any of them. It has had more than enough of Cure White's despair, as far as she is concerned.

"I've got you," she says. "I've got you."

Cure Pine touches down, and Black nods to her, gratefully, not self-conscious about cradling her partner like this, especially not around a close friend. She casts Pine a grateful smile. "We'll be there in a sec," she says on Cure White's behalf. But her brain begins to tick away at what Pine said about Black being 'under attack.' The only attack she was under recently was...

"Hey, wait..."

But Pine is already gone. Sighing, Cure Black wraps Cure White a little closer to her.

When she feels White's shivers begin to still, she pulls back, enough that their hands can touch, palm to palm. Cure Black is standing on torn ankles, her shoulder slumped from an unseen injury beneath her shoulderpad.

"You got me, too?" she asks, softly. And she can see from the conviction shining in Cure White's eyes that she does.

Most of the girls in the room had the instinct to take a final breath before they were engulfed by the seething red gas flooding the room. But most of the girls had the advantage that they were not looking into Cure White's enchanting blue eyes when it reached them. Cure Black only indulged in a few moments of dreamy admiration, but it was a few too many, as she is forced to just arrest her breathing right where it happened to be. With her heart rate up and her lungs already laboring before this started (mostly from battle, partly from holding hands with Cure White), Cure Black is instantly struggling to avoid taking a breath, and her free hand gesticulates her discomfort.

"Hmm!" White cries out through her sealed mouth, at the cost of a tiny bit of air from her nostrils, her stormy brows tightening. She covers Black's mouth with her hand, as if moral support could help the lack of oxygen, and to both of their credit, it seems to actually work, with Black calming herself, stilling her arm and trying to focus on holding her breath. Her blue eyes cast about the battlefield, hoping to see her allies have a swift answer, while keeping her palm closely atop Cure Black's mouth. But as the other Cures and magical girls struggle, too, with suffocation, Cure White sees two things at once: that help is not coming fast enough for her partner, and that while breathing seems dangerous, it is not immediately lethal.

"Thunder," she tells Cure Black, at the cost of a little more of her own oxygen. She has much more than Black right now, but her own lungs are beginning to burn. Cure Black's face is red already, her body trembling; she shakes her head. She cannot do it. She cannot speak even one word unless she breathes.

Sliding her hand off Black's mouth, White nods to her, mournful, yet with all her faith. She gives Black permission to surrender.

With a gasp, Cure Black sucks in a deep, torturous lungful of the pollen. Nausea and weakness chop through, almost dropping her to her knees. An acrid taste of poison curdles on her tongue, her blood rushing with it. Her vision doubles, and her suffocation continues, choking sparkles into her eyesight. But there was more air in that damn poison than there had been left in her lungs, and so briefly, temporarily, she can speak. Cure White squeezes her hand tightly, imploring her to do so.

"Blach..." Cure Black coughs, and nothing answers that retching sound. But her eyes are on Cure White's beautiful face, even as her eyes sting from the gas. She sucks in another breath of it, powerfully, unhesitantly. She lets her lungs writhe in it. It's the only way to truly reunite with the girl who is holding her hand. Her voice rises, powerful even as it frays.

"BLACK... THUNDER!"

Instantly, almost cutting her off at the end to shorten her suffering, White's silverine voice joins in. "WHITE THUNDER!"

And twin bolts of lighting rocket down towards their upraised palms, blasting away the bloodsap gas with gale-force winds. Both girls gasp for air, White eagerly, Black somewhat wretchedly at first. But Cure Black's back straightens, and her chest begins to rise and fall smoothly, as clean air washes away tainted. The ground at their feet crackles with unspeakable power, barely contained, as their bodies begin to glow with rainbow force. This is the moment their enemies have learned to fear most of all.

COMBAT: Cure Black has started a combo targeting Northa!
COMBAT: Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! Cure Black and Cure White have used Black Thunder!! White Thunder!! on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa fails to dodge Cure Black and Cure White's Combo: Black Thunder!! White Thunder!!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!
Critical Hit!  Cure Black and Cure White are Psyched!  Bind Break! All of Cure Black's debuffs are cleared!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

So often misunderstandings cause cruelty and suffering. But for once, a misunderstanding has caused only darkness -- has shadowed... success.

Northa is the jungle and the jungle is Northa.

The sacrifice of her last hints of humanity in the name of strength -- are also now her weakness.

Endo cannot find center mass for the same reason that one cannot see the forest for the trees. It is ALL her. Every vine ripped, every root smashed, every trunk tossed; one leaf at a time they shred her; one shattered branch at a time they literally tear her limb from limb.

And tearing her they are. Fallen Stern comes away from each swing time and time again wet with bleeding sap; Miroku almost seems to ingest it; Northa is not the only one who can grow strong with sorrow.

Fresh Pretty Cure smash through a huge tangle of vine and come away coated head to toe in ichor they've instantly rendered, the massive shockwave of their titanic kick faster than those plant parts can slither away, especially since they were seeking to avoid Kyouka's shepherd-like fists at the same moment.

Amply lit by La Sirene's lantern, a little light that isn't either, Lera sets her on fire with every chop, every swing, of Soaring Sky, and her accusation about Westar and Soular strikes home even harder, perhaps -- because Northa is pushed beyond speech now -- she has no reply but growling, from a thousand leafy throats.

And she grows and regrows but all that energy has to come from somewhere. It is possible once again to see the curvature of the outer wall of the massive tower, up there on the ceiling like a giant chimney -- and to see its circuitry, because the tendrils that traced those conduits have necessarily been drawn back to reinforce the battle.

And it is also now possible to see the wall where they first confronted Northa, the wall she stood in front of -- the center of the center of this grand chasm. At the beginning of the fight, it was solid wood; it looked like a single mighty trunk, inconceivably huge. But whole layers have been stripped away, not by any direct hits but by simple attrition. It looks like it has been eaten by worms, with distinct tracks and trails; but this is not so. The fractal way that these grooves fork tell the truth of it; parts of the trunk have fallen away not like vines but as vines, NEW vines, fresh growth, emergency support.

But older vines remain. The wall is still opaque -- woven without gaps -- vines holding onto one another as tightly as the Queen of Belka has clung to her chosen purpose for millennia. There are layers on layers of them, too. It is still a trunk.

But it is also a target.

Because behind -- beneath -- within that barrier, ever so faintly -- so much so that it is only the barest suggestion -- cast more in the color of the vines' shadow than as any sort of escaped motes of light -- one can just make out a desperately familiar cyan energy.

In computers one speaks of neural networks, and whatever Northa has become might represent its mind similarly; she has no synapses as the jungle, information passes through her in a more statistical way -- metaphorical, even. So perhaps it is not such a surprise that she is going berserk. They are breaking her down bit by bit, with the power of their weapons and their words.

It is almost a kindness, for her to be able only to snarl an unrecognizably black, even inhuman rage. In the recesses of this ultimate madness, it is possible -- just possible -- that she can no longer feel the only other thing left to her after the destruction of her civilization; the destruction of her world; the destruction of her daughter.

The only thing she had left.

She grew so strong upon her sorrow.

But she is not weak in her fury. Mikoto of all people knows well the danger of that, as does everyone who faced and befriended her. Pretty Cure may not mourn the loss of the strategist who tortured them so, but they also know better than to not fear her.

As rank after rank of roots, sharpened to spearpoints, thrust out at them in all directions like a phalanx, Northa is eager, desperate, hungry to sink deeply -- to draw suffering -- and to drain strength.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"

COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Cure Black.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on La Sirene de Diamant.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Mikoto Minagi.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Kyouka Okazaki.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Cure Pine.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Cure Passion.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Cure White.
COMBAT: Northa has used Roots of Darkness! on Lera Camry.

<Pose Tracker> Northa [None] has posed.

And more of them -- more than any -- seek to skewer Endo Naoki.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Northa has used Fuko Fury on Endo Naoki.
COMBAT: Lera Camry cleanly braces 34 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 6 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!
Lera Camry's Block and Parry abilities activate!  Northa drains 2 fatigue from Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Cure Black perfectly braces 35 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 0 Fatigue damage!  Critical Brace!
Cure Black's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Pine cleanly braces 45 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 8 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Cure
Pine's Block and Parry abilities activate!  Northa drains 3 fatigue from Cure Pine!
COMBAT: Cure White decisively counters 24 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 8 Fatigue damage!  Cure White's
Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!  Northa drains 3 fatigue from Cure White!
COMBAT: Cure White's counterattack, Heaven and Earth Throw, partially gets through, doing 40 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi counters 9 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 27 Fatigue damage!  Mikoto Minagi's
Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!  Northa drains 11 fatigue from Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi's counterattack, Obsidian Blade: Dynamo, partially gets through, doing 12 Fatigue damage to Northa!  
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant braces 23 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 10 Fatigue damage!  La Sirene de
Diamant's Block and Parry abilities activate!  Northa drains 4 fatigue from La Sirene de Diamant!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki cleanly braces 119 Fatigue damage from Northa's Finisher, Fuko Fury, taking 21 Fatigue damage!  Endo Naoki's
Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Cure Passion counters 11 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 32 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  Cure
Passion's Reverse and Tactician abilities activate!  Northa drains 13 fatigue from Cure Passion!
COMBAT: Cure Passion's counterattack, Crashing Surf, partially gets through, doing 6 Fatigue damage to Northa!  

<Pose Tracker> Lera Camry [Infinity Institute (11)] has posed.

Lera looks up -- at Northa, through Northa as a jungle -- and she sees the glowing of cyan light. It dawns on her, then, what is happening. In her despair, she is being broken down. Like the thing she made...

...but like Lord Moebius, that is a system that cannot be allowed to remain.

She sees her fury, too -- raising up a barrier of light before her. <Protection!> Broken Ground chimes, as the vines -- so sharp -- burst around it. Her amber eyes widen. "Endo-san!"

She shakes her head. They have to move fast. "Ground!" she calls out. "Now!"

Several spinning Midchildan magical circles swirl into existence above that wall. Then, several spectral golden rocks form before them -- and come crashing down.

<Gaia Cataclysm!>

COMBAT: FINISHER! Lera Camry has used Gaia Cataclysm on Northa.
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki partially dodges 8 Fatigue damage from Northa's Roots of Darkness!, taking 31 Fatigue damage!  Critical
Hit!  Kyouka Okazaki's Fade and Flash abilities activate!  Northa drains 12 fatigue from Kyouka Okazaki!

<Pose Tracker> Cure Passion [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

They are here. They are doing all that they can. She hears Mikoto calling for them; she hears the others. And Endo...

"That's right!" Love calls about saving people. "You save people by listening to what they NEED! Not just deciding what their happiness looks like!"

Passion and Peach land in perfect time together alongside Berry and Pine. And Passion says, "...We'll fight for Lucky too, Pine."

She no longer feels only guilt, when thinking about him. She has something better to think about.

But Northa is the jungle, and Passion throws off some of the ichor on her as she narrows her eyes at her growling opponent. She has nothing else to say, it would seem. The energy must come... And there, the chasm--the trunk. And the fractcals...

The familiar cyan energy is there--

"CHIFFON!" Peach calls.

Passion nods sharply. But Northa is so, so strong yet. ...No, Passion does not mourn the loss of Northa, the being who was never really her mother.

But they almost have to mourn each other. Passion moves into the spearpoints, trying to actively get them--but she's hit, hard, drained by Northa's magic like she was once before. "Gh--"

The thing that saves her, of course, is Love. ...Cure Peach grabs Passion and pulls her away from the spearpoint trees, and kicks one back out of the way!

"Not so fast!"

"Peach, I--" Passion is hurt. Badly hurt. But she has to go on. "I'll--I'll do my very best."

"Passion..."

"Is Endo-kun--" Passion is pained, looking over. She knows Lera is still fighting. Still up. But Endo...

Suddenly, in the midst of the gloom and despair, something appears in Peach's hands--a lovely little music box, held by a silver four leaf clover.

"...Is this...?"

There is a little help yet, to be offered.

"...Right!"

Cure Peach lifts it to the air, and beautiful music continues.

The Fresh Cures step into place, as if in a relay--and when they're all ready--

"GO!"

"Happiness leaf!" Passion calls, making the first of them as she runs like she hasn't run since a certain General threw her off the track field. She holds it, a brilliant red leaf, which she hands over to, "Pine!"

Light shines as Pine is next.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Passion has started a combo targeting Northa!

<Pose Tracker> Mikoto Minagi [Ohtori Academy (11)] has posed.

Mikoto coughs, as she regains oxygen for her lungs. She does not, in a sense, stop seeing red; metaphorically, she always is. Fate has tried to work with her to help her think through a fight, but...

(But she always ends up back here. If only recovery were a steady upwards slope; if only hope were that easy.)

Being lost in one's rage is a supremely powerful state. Mikoto knows -- and Mikoto meets her fury with her own, equally wordless. "RRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH--!!" It might be a more honest conversation than they've ever had before; certainly it is louder.

She meets those spearpoints with her own blade, and Miroku eats as much as its owner, hungry, hungry, HUNGRY. Spearpoint after spearpoint, they lance against her, brushing her shoulder, slamming in at the small of her back, forcing her to jerk to the side; countless and further still, they reach out, grasping.

It's too much; one hunger must overcome another.

One circle, carved into the forest-floor of her, spinning once, twice, three times; impossibly, the roots spark, as a sick darkness swirls in the earth. Mikoto plunges Miroku into it, as white lightning dances across the field, illuminating her shadows -- both of them -- in stark, white light.

"MIROKU!!"

And each of those roots will shortly find themselves skewered on their own spear-point, carved in black obsidian, each sharp as a knife and none, miraculously, seeking the girls (or boy!) who fight against Northa now. Mikoto will hold Northa's hunger at bay with her own, just as her empty stomach once consumed countless, countless noodles.

Perhaps it's necessary.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Mikoto Minagi has used MIROKU!! on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Pine [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

Passion elicits a smile out of her, "And I'll fight for you." The last of her humanity, it brings such incredible strength, Northa is the jungle. But - as they catch a hint of cyan light, Pine cries out, "Chiffon..."

But at that moment, the spearpoints come, and for a time Berry and Pine fight back to back, as Pine's fist shatters several, as does Berry's kick. Hands and feet a blur as they work to keep it away. Wounds appear, but they keep battling against the press of spears that try to leech away their everything.

Passion is however, hurt, and Berry cocks her head, "Go!" And Pine barrels through the rush, to slam a spearpoint tree out of the way. "Peach! Is she...!?" Pine can't turn around, because her fist keeps shatter spearpoint after spearpoint, as if she were a shield to break them upon.

Maybe she's not the strongest, or the fastest of them, but sometimes she can keep going for a little longer.

"Eh!?" Pine says at the shine of the box, turning to look at it, "Is that...?" But then 'Go!' and they're all off, like runners on the track. Pine runs a little awkwardly, with her hands held high, but perhaps that's only because as the brilliant red leaf comes her way, she catches it between both hands, like a grasped blade.

"Plus one! Prayer Leaf!" Her Linkrun shimmers, and a yellow leaf appears, affixing to another point, as she flings it almost frisbee like, the two leaf clover spiraling like a comet, as Berry catches it without even looking, with perfect aplomb.

"Plus one! Espoir Leaf!" With another shimmer, a blue leaf appears, turning the two-leaf clover into three, and with an expert flick of her wrist, she sends it flying towards Peach, a now trifold comet trailing bright light.

Peach is in the midst of running, when she leaps abruptly, to catch it, as if it might soar off through the jungle canopy without her active intervention, to catch it. "Plus one! Lovely leaf!" And a pink affixes.

The four stand in diamond like formation, as Peach throws it, and it expands, creating a place where they each take their space, diving out of the sky to land upon the color they added to the mix, in a pose as if they were waiting.

The descent happens slowly, each one showering the world with the light of their respective hearts, their feelings in the moment, as they raise their hands and saying in unison.

"LUCKY CLOVER! GRAND FINALE!"

All the light refracts prismatically into the center, a multi-faceted gem that conjoins into cascading light multi-colored at first before brightening whiter, and whiter, enough to flood the jungle entire.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Pine has joined the combo started by Cure Passion!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Passion and Cure Pine have used Combo: Lucky Clover GRAND FINALE, composed of Pretty Cure Happiness
Hurricane and Pretty Cure Healing Prayer Fresh!, on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Kyouka Okazaki [Juuban Public School (10)] has posed.

Slowly, inexorably, they break through the vines enough to see... circuit-like vines falling away from the impossibly high walls around them, weaknesses forming in the wall, a cyan glow from within...

And rage, and sorrow. So much rage and sorrow. Far more than any one person should have to bear.

And every little bit more of the vines and branches and everything else they break through, they break through a little bit more of Northa, but... she chose this, and they don't have the luxury of stopping now.

Vines sharpened like spear points come for her, and without thinking Kyouka leaps straight up into the air, letting out a gasp as she finally reaches fresh air and takes stock of her surroundings.

The wall is weakened, and behind it... a cyan energy. There.

She reaches the peak of her arc, and she hovers in mid-air for an infinitesimally small fraction of time. She takes in everything, how the vines come for her from above and below, how things are breaking down, how Northa is losing herself to rage...

She pitches forward, and a vibrant shockwave explodes behind her as she surges headfirst into those oncoming vines. She twists in mid-air to let let several graze past her stomach, grunting as she feels her energy drained. Another she grabs to swing and redirect herself, more she kicks off to zig zag through. Cut after cut after cut...

She breaks through, flipping forward into a crouch as she touches down. Her barrier jacket is shredded and torn, the bright violet tunic a patchwork of barely-held-together magical cloth. Her arms and legs and stomach are scratched up where the vines penetrated, and pieces of her gauntlets and boots have fallen off. She is panting, gasping for breath... but her gaze is still determined.

She stands, leans perilously off-kilter for a moment before she fixes her footing, and holds her right hand out, bracing it with her other hand. A magical circle springs to life beneath her feet, and a ball of bright violet-white energy starts to gather at her palm. It grows, faster and faster, until Kyouka grabs it in her palm, and suddenly that energy flows into her as she shifts her stance. Energy continues to build, her gauntlet blazing bright, winds whipping around her as she waits for it to build to a peak.

Strike Wolf helpfully announces, <Moonlight Buster.>

With a shout, she springs forward, blinking into existence right in front of the trunk already in mid-swing, aiming to release everything at once in a giant point-blank explosion of violet-white energy.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Kyouka Okazaki has used Moonlight Buster on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> La Sirene de Diamant [Ohtori Academy (10)] has posed.

SHE IS NOT ALONE

It cannot be argued. It is not a matter of simply seeing a few distant lights. It is not even the fact that she bumped (cruelly! one thousand years punishment!) into Mikoto - it could just as easily be only them, the two of them, as anything else.

But it is more than that. Endo, Pretty Cure, Lera in the air. And beyond them -- a wall?

A tree?

A gleam of light?

Something still shines beyond.

The little light between her hands brightens. It intensifies. She shifts herself around, turning her arms to change the angle of how she holds her hands. Instead of one facing the other, side to side, there is now her right hand on top and her left on bottom - now before her. Not above.

La Sirene feels her heart beat even as other glows flitter. She breathes in. She has not had much to say - what can you say in the face of something like this? - but now, at least, she does:

"Release your sorrow to me," she says as she raises the glittering mote of unlight, floating a couple of inches above the palm of her hand. She moves as if it weighs ten kilograms. Maybe it does.

La Sirene's left eye opens as she brings the light level with her face. Her right hand comes up and - after a couple of short, abortive swings - slaps the back of that dark starlette.

It bursts. It is silent but it is bright(?) as it floods forwards. The best analogy might be to a hose, or a pressure cannon; there is real weight to the light as it slams forwards. The blast comes as the roots snake back, as they reach her. There are gaps in her uniform - it is not armor, not as such - but even as they bite into her, she grins, just a little, without joy. One leg snaps up as she holds the aperture forwards, until the raybeamstream strikes against that far-off wall.

COMBAT: FINISHER! La Sirene de Diamant has used The Light That Never Warms on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Cure Black [Juuban Public School (11)] has posed.

In a place far from here, there is a castle. A beautiful little princess was born there, carnation pink, and given the name Mipple. A young, brash fairy named Mepple fell in love with her, in and outside these walls. The stone doors to this castle are vast and thick, but they have almost never been closed, not since they were created at the dawn of history. Today, they are sealed.

Outside the castle, the fairies of this realm are gone. Oh, their bodies are around. But the state of those innocent creatures does not bear examination. Only one remains standing... kneeling, within a six-pointed mystical sigil. His body has been withered for centuries, but it was never so frail.

"Qu-een," the fairy sage rasps. "I do not... sense the warriors."

"The warriors stand."

Despair gnaws at the edges of the sigil, turning it to ash around the old man. His cane supports him. "Then it is my spirit that fails."

"Only your vision. Rest your eyes, and be at peace."

"Queen," the old sage gazes at his failing sigil. The edges are as thin as a hair in places. "I have failed you..."

From a great distance, a shout arises, one that vibrates in the air of the throne room. Not in words. But loudly enough that even the fading sage can hear it. "Do you hear?" Queen asks placidly.

A smile touches the old man's lips. "They call," he whispers. And he falls over on his side, limp, insensate, before the surging glow of Queen's throne. Her lips do not move when she speaks, but the entire chamber resonates with it, as though from the keys of an unseen organ.

"I answer."

-=-=-

OST - SHINING STAR - - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evXLkllK968

With a thundercrack, black lightning pours through the body of Nagisa Misumi, and white lightning through the body of Honoka Yukishiro. In their black and white raiment, they are the Warriors of Light. But they are also its messengers, and this is the message: Creation, in its most raw and destructive form. It does not merely lance through them, but continues pouring, crackling, a tethered bolt of energy that fills and fills them. Their bodies had shimmered with a rainbow glow before, but they begin to burn with golden energy, incandescing.

"Our beautiful souls..." Cure White announces, the silver flute of her voice cracking with righteous strain, her long black hair thrashing in the wind whipped up by the increasingly uncontainable energies in her body.

There had been an opportunity to stop what is happening here, but that opportunity is past. Cure Black and Cure White, with their fingers entwined, coruscate violently with energy, tongues of it lancing out into the ground. When the roots lance out, lethal even to the empowered bodies of Pretty Cure, Cure Black steels herself, counting down the milliseconds.

"Shall crush your evil heart!" Cure Black shouts, her voice ragged from the bloodsap, her body torn from thorn and barb. She does not flinch. When the devastating attack finally arrives, it drives itself into an unseen wall that disintegrates it as fast as the root can follow, peeling it away, sandblasting the plant matter to nothing inches from Cure Black's chest.

Queen understood long ago that no amount of prowess would be enough to set the scales of the universe level again. There are beings of darkness so powerful they can only be called gods. There are battles no mortal body was built to withstand. No one vessel could ever hold the power it would take to protect that which is beautiful in the universe. Nor can you divide such power. The answer to the paradox stands here today, hand in hand.

"PRETTY CURE!!"

They are two. They are one. This attack is not about exerting as much force out towards the enemy as possible. It is about two hearts holding together as hard as they can. The more Nagisa loves Honoka, the more Honoka loves Nagisa, the greater that attractive force, the more strength they have to contain what should not be containable. Alone, they would not have half of this power; they would have none. Together?

The eardrums feel the pressure, just from these two girls lowering their palms towards Northa. When their voices split the air as one, the blast of oppositely-colored light from each of their palms causes their bootheels to skid back, their hair to lash flat behind them, their powerful arms to tremble under the force they are unleashing.

"MAAARBLE SCREEEW!!!"

Churning like a drill made of twirling sunspots, the power of Creation blasts out from two palms, which brace against its impossible force. But the important palms are those that press tenderly together, between two very different girls who dare anyone to hate anything more than they love each other.

COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure Black has started a combo targeting Northa!
COMBAT: FINISHER! Cure White has joined the combo started by Cure Black!
COMBAT: COMBO! FINISHER! Cure Black and Cure White have used Marble Screw on Northa.

<Pose Tracker> Endo Naoki [Juuban Public School (12)] has posed.

Endo is close enough to hear Mikoto's call. As the forestas Northalashes out and the rest mist closes in, as the boy's head starts to swim from lack of oxygen and his body starts to give from a myriad of slashes and bruises, it's her voice that draws him forward. For a moment, in the dim light cast by defiant magic, he's cutting his way in that direction.

Then the forest that is Northa surges again.

Endo's eyes split from his allies as jagged vines carve a new line between them. His gaze goes up, up, to the forest's central point. Then down, to the emerging spears that the enraged queen deploys. Trying to fit them all within his gaze is like trying to count the stars: a hopeless task.

It is a similarly doomed effort to avoid their points. He tries, bracing for the impact, summoning a dome of protective spells. The first wave breaks on the hard shell of Fallen Stern's magic.

There are many more waves after that.

The barrier falls, and then the barrier jacket underneath is left to pick up the slack. Vicious points scout and piece, drinking deep. His body shakes with the impacts, and though his legs give out he has no option to find a merciful resting place on the ground; there's no room between the roots.

It seems, for a moment, very easy to just let all the red blue into black.

But there's music in the air. A sound both sweet and fresh.

And Mikoto was calling. And others are too. Lera, Pretty Cures, other friends.

So. He should answer.

<KNIGHT.>

"I'm here."

Purple-black light flares skyward. In Tokyo, on Earth, it would be a pillar to light the night sky. Here it is a defiant needle, a defiant line that joins the flood of lights that spring up. Vines burn away, enough to give a glimpse of the knight raising his weapon high overhead.

It's a weapon made in the name of the woman it is now turned against, wielded in her name to cut across constellations. A weapon sustained for thousands of years by a purity of purpose not unlike Northa's own: I will destroy my enemies.

But the hands that lift it now don't do so to raze worlds.

<YOUR MAJESTY.> Fallen Stern warbles. <IT IS TIME TO LET GO.> For both of them, perhaps.

In accordance with the words, Endo and Fallen Stern move with one will. The slash of light arcs toward the cyan heart of Belka's former leader, aiming to bring a forcible end to her plansand her suffering by adding to the tremendous strength already assailing her.

<STERN BRECHER.>

COMBAT: FINISHER! Endo Naoki has used Stern Brecher on Northa.
COMBAT: Northa braces 81 Fatigue damage from Lera Camry's Finisher, Gaia Cataclysm, taking 54 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!
Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Mikoto Minagi's Finisher, MIROKU!!, taking 168 Fatigue damage!  Critical Hit!  
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Kyouka Okazaki's Finisher, Moonlight Buster, taking 105 Fatigue damage!  
COMBAT: Northa braces 73 Fatigue damage from La Sirene de Diamant's Finisher, The Light That Never Warms, taking 109 Fatigue
damage!  Critical Hit!  Northa is unable to keep fighting!  Northa's Block and Parry abilities activate!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Cure Black and Cure White's Finisher, Combo: Marble Screw, taking 424 Fatigue damage!  Northa is
unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Cure Passion and Cure Pine's Finisher, Combo: Lucky Clover GRAND FINALE, taking 345 Fatigue damage!
Northa is unable to keep fighting!
COMBAT: Northa fails to brace Endo Naoki's Finisher, Stern Brecher, taking 232 Fatigue damage!  Northa is unable to keep fighting!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Lera is a child of the stars, by Earthly perspectives, but well has she internalized one lesson of her adopted home: that though roots can break rock -- rocks can also break plants. No matter how mighty, the vine cannot withstand the landslide. And she summons one, aureate and shimmering, to crash against the first layer of vines, to bury it. They fade back into the motes of magic from whence they came, but the damage does not.

Mikoto is next; adopted also, but not by Earth; Lera's perfect opposite, in some sense. And now literally, in their perfectly complementary approaches; where the Midchildan bludgeons broadly, the HiME pierces precisely; shocking, really, compared to how Miroku is normally wielded, normally seen. She targets not the wall itself but the response from it, as Northa seeks to mount a final defense through offense.

It will take Pretty Cure a long time to summon their full strength, and any single one of those vines might have laid a legendary warrior low. But none of the lush, jagged, and deadly appendages make contact -- not even one -- with anything but obsidian.

Kyouka materializes beyond that clash of titans, mid-swing, directly in front of the trunk. The explosion before her is so bright that she casts such a long shadow behind her; though her body is tiny in comparison to the immense column of power busting (bustering) forth from her fist, that just means she is power compressed, power made dense, power called forth. She feels the next layer of vines disintegrate on contact -- and a satisfying recoil, as she is propelled backwards, back amongst her friends, by the sustained impact of her moonlit magic.

La Sirene de Diamant has many missions. Some she was assigned and others she volunteered for. Some she bears resentfully, and others eagerly, but all of them dutifully. But one and only one has the distinction of being first; the first she was given, if not always the first in her heart. In seeking to claim Northa's sorrow, by right and by conquest, she is also seeking to REclaim the sorrow of everyone Northa harvested. So, so many people, across time, across space. And she can feel, as the starlette bursts against her hand, and streams into the wall, into the fallen Queen, that as she reduces each molecule of plant stuff into barest atoms she is also separating from Northa's engorged form, all Sirene's functions. And not only functions, not only sorrow in general, but... sorrow in particular. Northa has hurt Nori Ankou more than once, and dearly. Some of the sorrow she reclaims now is her own, cruelly stolen.

Six Pretty Cure, and one Knight, remain.

Marble Screw is a known quantity and an absolutely notoriously destructive grim reaper, ironic indeed for the channeling of the cosmic profundity of Creation itself. What is a mystery about it is how every time it appears, it is even greater than the last. How, through their darkest adventures and their softest normal lives, day after day, two girls become closer. Two girls fall more profoundly for one another. Two girls rise, hand in hand.

The Lucky Clover is a new miracle; one never before seen on this or any world. Perhaps, from the other side of the wall, Chiffon is helping her guardians help her. Or perhaps not. Fairies are not the only birthplace of miracles. And that which dwells not only within but more crucially flowers between Peach, Berry, Pine and Passion is assuredly as puissant a love as exists. Not every love is romance (nor every romance love, as some are unlucky enough to know). But the lack of romance here is no lack of love. The four girls know that deepest and most profound of magics: love is something that when you give it away, you end up having more. Their friendship has saved Eas' world. Their friendship has saved their own world, more than once.

And now their friendship will save every world.

The primal truth normally kept in the Garden of Light joins with the wondrous, musical finale born in the Garden of Rainbows, and with one other thing--

--the biggest needle in the world, held in the hands of the bravest boy. Endo Naoki, so like and so unrecognizably unlike the Umbral Knight; Fallen Stern, who forgot much of his old master and all of his old liege, perhaps as much in self-defense as in brokenness. Theirs is different than Fresh friendship; theirs is partnership, but different too from Honoka and Nagisa. They are together but they are not one. Stern is from the past and Endo represents the presence, but for the first time maybe ever, what they are forging together is not destruction; is not violence--

--it is the future.

Stern pierces the center (a center! at last!) of where the Grand Finale and Marble Screw roar against the last and toughest and oldest of the vines -- against a suffering more ancient and more desolate than anyone's -- and Endo PUSHES --

--and as the final wall is breached by his thrust, allowing the magic of Pretty Cure to surge through and then balloon outward, whiting out every last vine, every last leaf, everything --

--the future, it seems, is mercy.

One could not call the end of the Belkan Queen's sorrow anything but that.

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.
<SoundTracker> Chiffon Awakens - Fresh OST - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG9b9pN7t8g

And, of course, there behind it all -- exposed at last -- is the first and final victim of Northa's kidnapping plot. Midchildans might call the contents of that vault the Linker Cores of both the ancient worlds stolen by the Knights of Belka, and of every modern world Labyrinth could reach -- which is to say all of them. Others might turn to the metaphor of the heart, and no one could be wrong to do so. To deny a world its magic is to deny a world its essence; a vital fragment of its very soul.

The Queen of Belka hid it so thoroughly that it took even the Pericosmic Array, the ultimate time-space observatory, thousands of years to find.

Hid her.

Not that the Queen ever shrank from the possibility of storing a Pillar -- a person -- for their own safety, but there's a sense that perhaps the Royal Vault was not always a baby lamb. That Infiniti became soft and cuddly and, for that matter, meaningfully sentient, because of what the Queen forced it to capture. To contain. You are what you eat... and Infiniti consumed the very essence of Shining Carousel of Talasta, and Dzhamura, and Valdamere, and Wirral-au-main, and the Demense of Jagged Waters, and Mor Cynddeiriog, and Old Phoria; those worlds that weren't reduced to dust at the hands of conquering Knights instead suffering a longer, slower execution as absent any warmth they became colder, and stranger, and worse than dead, before death finally claimed them.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats the being that was, for a time, called Chiffon in the arms of her Pretty Cure. Who was changed by the warmth within her, and then, much more, by the warmth that they surrounded her with. Who was, in a way, born -- at the very least, reborn -- raised, cared for, for the very first time.

And who, now, as Labyrinth's energy source -- as Moebius' -- and as Northa's -- is once again nothing but a tool, with eyes empty blank black holes, radiating not love and not joy and not even sorrow but nothing -- nothing but power.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," the cosmic being repeats, dully; though now also forced to digest all magic from the Garden of Light to the Garden of Rainbows, she -- forced once again to be an it -- is beyond transformation, beyond ascension. Beyond reach...?

Not beyond everyone's reach.

"Come here," says You, coaxingly, with the gentle body of an innocent and the silken voice of a criminal.

From the sidelines, from the shadows, she walked through the wall of vines as quickly as the magical girls brought it down; step by step matched their layer by layer.

Her arms are thrust into the column of cyan light suspending Chiffon -- radiating from Infiniti -- and she isn't wearing a Barrier Jacket, she has no Device and no ability to transform, she's just a girl -- she's just a puppet. The sleeves of her robe disintegrate instantly; and the smell of fast-burning skin fills the air, stinking beneath the fading verdancy of what once was Northa. This body cannot possibly withstand the force of Infiniti, but it only has to for a moment longer, just a single heartbeat until she touches Infiniti, until she claims it for his own --

<Pose Tracker> Fate Testarossa [Infinity Institute (5)] has posed.

Invisible Heat (Acoustic ver.) - Nana Mizuki - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txf_64xFAp0

Sometimes you just aren't fast enough, you fly to catch up to everyone, but instead you find yourself... her. With that man's voice - reaching - reaching for...

Their precious charge

It's like looking into the Future tsaP

And at the sight the jungle warps and buckles as she races forward, arcing lightning spilling off of her like a brightly lit coil.

You look at yourself Reaching for Chiffon rehtoM ruoy gniyebO

There's not enough time, and time is one thing you can't make more of. Your barrier jacket detonates, all the metal shattering as it flies off of her and dissipating into light, wings so like Nanoha's appearing on her feet and wrist. Because as fast as she can be, she can still go faster.

Fractions of a second away and a life ends in Teal Light gninthgiL teloiV

The air screams around her as she hurtles towards it dangerously, even less protected now. Misjudging this even slightly will harm her too, maybe even end her life.

A life can Begin dnE in moments like these, did you know?

I know

Only you're not a mirror

You're not me

You're you

I want to see

Want to know

Who You Will Become

She can smell flesh burning, already from that light, unprotected as it is. Any longer, and it might cause her worse harm. It is the worst kind of puppetry, to take away even her own sense of self-preservation, to sublimate it entirely to infinite desire.

Make a small wish, hope that you can do it. That you can grasp her with your smaller hands, and hold her tight.

And in that moment, hands encircle her waist, as she barrels into her, to carry her away, out of that light momentarily searing her far too thin barrier jacket, as Fate cries only, "YOU CAN'T!"

It's unclear if she's talking to her, or to Jail, or even both.

She expects her motion to stop at any moment if he has active the Momentum Eater spell he used before. But she's so fast... maybe maybe... all she needs is one.

Just one.

Let it be enough.

COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Barrier Jacket Sonic!

<Pose Tracker> Pink Moon Stick [Admin] has posed.

Fate slams through the cyan pillar and comes out the other side with her arms full of You -- full of her. Her other self. Not just a clone of a clone, not to Fate. And certainly not a mere puppet. This is a sister. This is her big little sister.

And they are both still alive.

You blinks up at her through an unmistakably soft, cherry-red pair of eyes that have nothing of the coldness of her creator.

"I am Infiniti... the infinite memory-ory," bleats what was formerly known as Chiffon, yet again.

"Close," croons the criminal, from a new direction; a direction only lately occupied via a swift dimensional transfer. "You are infinite... and you are MINE."

The pillar of cyan radiance flicks off like a switch. But the darkness that plunges the vast subterranean cavern into is not, cannot be complete. Because the lingering energies of the magical girls are present like so many pretty candles, each a part greater than their rainbow sum. So specific and so beautiful, the violet born of Strike Wolf's contract with Kyouka's spirit, which is not at all like that of Endo and Fallen Stern; and in their differences, their distinctions, each is rendered more gorgeous still. So fiery and fierce, Sky and Ground in unison with Lera; so passionate and joyful, the ruddy crimson of Setsuna's heart. Very differently from one another, Nori's unlight and Mikoto's shadow span the spectrum well beyond mere roygibiv, but for all that Northa reminded Mikoto of her beginnings, and for all that Nori often feels different and apart, neither is dark as the Dark Realms are dark; both are very much themselves, girls shaped by sorrow but no longer defined by sorrow alone. Love is as lovely in pink as Miki is perfect in blue and Buki faithful in yellow, the yellow of the crocus, that brave first blossom amid the winter's snow, which is not at all the sunshine gold shining forth from the hair, and the heart, of Fate. Bracketing them all, the black and white of Nagisa and Honoka respectively represent the incredible void that awaits every color, and all hues at once, radiant beyond distinction; and they are pretty and they are pure, so long as they are together.

Together. Everyone is together, and everyone is a light.

And everyone's lights are swirling...

...streaming from them...

...draining away...

...into the four-leaf clover crest that adorns Chiffon's brow.

No. Not into her.

Through her.

Lord Moebius was as much a puppet as You, created to be the Lord of All Worlds.

But this man is self-made, at least in every way that matters to him.

Cyan light is weeping from behind his eyes, and drooling from the corners of his mouth, as he tosses his purple hair back and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, forced by Fate to finally be present in the flesh among them for the very first time:

"I AM JAIL SCAGLIETTI... THE LORD OF ALL MAGIC!"

He tosses what was in his arms at the feet of the girls and boy below him. It's as ordinary a thing, as mundane, as they suddenly are, have forcibly become.

A stuffed animal shaped like a lamb flops over, lifeless and dumb.

TO BE CONTINUED

COMBAT: Cure White transforms into Honoka Yukishiro!
COMBAT: Cure Passion transforms into Setsuna Higashi!
COMBAT: Lera Camry transforms into Lera Camry!
COMBAT: Cure Pine transforms into Inori Yamabuki!
COMBAT: La Sirene de Diamant transforms into Nori Ankou!
COMBAT: Endo Naoki transforms into Endo Naoki!
COMBAT: Fate Testarossa transforms into Fate Testarossa!
COMBAT: Mikoto Minagi transforms into Mikoto Minagi!
COMBAT: Kyouka Okazaki transforms into Kyouka Okazaki!
COMBAT: Cure Black transforms into Nagisa Misumi!