The Norkari Mountains

"That they can't hear us in the other compartments..." Skarlet feels Francesco's hand on her leg. "Y-you wanna do it? Here?"

Skarlet looks over at the lock on the door, making sure it was indeed locked so nobody would barge in. "Okay, how do you want to do this?"

"In my uniform? Okay." Skarlet sucks face with Francesco, starting to get excited as he moves his hand along her leg. She starts laying back on the bench and moves her own hand down to move the crotch area of her outfit aside and begins tearing at the pantyhose with her fingers.

Artemis braces herself with one arm as the carriage hurtles down the path, the other steadies Naoki and Kate. Her gem twinkles as she immerses a part of her consciousness into the telepathic net, parsing pieces of information and feeding the relevant ones to Naoki. She keeps a ready mental eye on the constantly-updating map, alert for any potential increase in danger to the carriage and its occupants.

That cursed shield was making things so much more difficult for Maelik, the resisting force putting in a long day's work at deflecting whatever the demon could come up with. His body went flying as the godly creature's sheer bulk outmatched his own brute strength and matters only worsened for him when the massive meaty claw of the massive meaty dragon sought to clobber him.

At that point everything seemed to slow to a crawl for the demon, each second seemed a minute and during that time there were many thoughts rushing through his head. How was he going to beat this thing? What was he going to do about it? When was he going to get him some romantic bumping? But the one thought that stood out above all the others was...

"Oh shit-" and then the claw slammed into him. To Maelik's credit between his building ire, his own immense strength and a great deal of determination he was able to deflect the blow but the force of it still sent him flying back. That is to say waaaaaaay back.

Maelik soared through the sky and went sailing past Lum, his own bulk just barely missing her before landing with a crater creating crash a short ways off of her.

The demonic dragon let out a gasp of air followed by a short groan before slowly raising a claw from the impact zone.

"Honey... I'm home..."

Marduk drops his cross, and walks away. He knows when he's outclassed.

The dragon roars out once more in the skies, unknowing where Syros went, head moving about slowly to try and find his position as the dragon flew. Nevertheless, he looked down to the demon and the angel, landing upon the top of the mountain, cracking off the peek as with his bottom legs he now began to fly towards them.

Fireballs were sent towards the random ones that joined in with this battle, and as the dragon soared downwards, it lifted its path back upwards, releasing the massive rock to attempt to crush the two of them. As he was at that height, however, he circled around the strange symbol, lighting it with both of his forms of fire. From there, he took knowledge that it had no physical structure, merely a symbol created from light as his flames went completely through it, roaring in aggrivation as he then began to glide back towards the angel.

Maelik crawled out of the crater and shook himself free of whatever stubborn debris still clinging to him, looking up at their foe with squinted eyes.

"Hmmm, I hope that whatever you're doing over there is bombastic Lum, distracting him is starting to get dangerous..."

With vehement force the demonic dragon flapped his wings and took to the skies once more. It was apparent that without time to amass his own power that he would be unable to pierce the beast's defenses, so any purely offensive action was simply out of the question. But without proper preparation he wasn't left with many options other than to simply throw himself at the creature and hope that Lum's plan worked.

And so with some internal seeking the demon found his core and embraced his rage, allowing it to take control whilst keeping one thing in mind. The enemy was the big one, not the small one.

Strength flowed into him, his limbs bulged and surged with hateful energy and his aura condensed into a light eating shroud. Then, like a weighty guided missile he rocket away once more. There was little thought behind his actions, he simply felt the need, no it was more of a compulsion, to rip and tear and kill something. The huge rock that had Lum's name on it may have indeed been... well... large... but Maelik had faced down things far worse than mere boulders. He cracked open his maw and a gout of black flames shot out in a line, meeting the stone with it's fiery roar as the sheer heat of the hellfire started to melt away at the rock. By the time the demon and rock collided it was soft enough for the demon to easily smash through, shattering the hefty super pebble into multitudes of shards and scattering them with a flare of his wings to send them flying off course.

He flew to intercept the godly dragon, his wings taking him once more to charging speed. At first it would seem that the demon was just brainlessly going to run into Rag'Novok's face (where there happened to be plenty of sharp pointy teeth) but in actuality in a turn of bestial cunning he suddenly dip down. Like an erratic fly Maelik would keep turning at sharp and quite random directions, trying to keep the larger beast guessing until he could find an opportunity to get under him once more. It wasn't so bad to be beneath the beast once it was flying after all, and if his eyes weren't lying before there were others around that could make use of the distraction.

Should he be able to get under there he'd do a strafing run down the monster's length with his particular soul sapping/spirit scorching demon fire and while follow up with claw rake, his muscles fighting hard to keep his claws from bouncing away.

The dragon swooped around the symbol, roaring in confusion and caution as the sigil began to activate. Now, indeed, the dragon was worried. Such a spell created by the Arc-Angel was formed, and now humming with power, the dragon flew in to the air higher and higher, soon meeting slightly above such a symbol, lighting it with light fire as it was being activated. Nothing was working! He attempted to fly through it- Even use the strange, pink fire! The air and space around it, the light, appeared to condense and bend until the fire dissipated, but yet the symbol remained.

And so from there, the beam connected with him. The dragon roared mightily, limbs outstretched, wings mightily raised outwards and his head thrown to the sky, roaring in pain with widened eyes, the massive, pink shield faltering and shattering from the magic once more. At this time, the dragon began to shrivel and curl into a ball, kicking and squirming in hundreds of positions before the blinding light would soon blind all that were even capable of viewing such a mountain range.

Luckily for one like Syros, who remained upon his back, the shell exploded, sending hundreds of large, and small, pieces towards the ground. As this occurred, however, so did something else strange. Pink, blinding, and insignificant compared to the massive dragon beforehand, a comet crashed towards the ground with what entailed to be a skeletal, tormented figure surrounding it. From there, the dragon was seen, a pulsing, glowing rock formed at the center of the chest.

And from that rock hummed a strong, dense sound, a heart beat heard for a few seconds, before the dragon's back arched, single, shattered wing outstretched. His tail was half gone, yet it flailed around as it could, legs standing mightily tall as far out as possible. During this time, now, gravity changed, the physics upon this small, chaotic battle shifting. The pull started off weak, simply bringing forth the dust nearby, but with each pulse heard from the crystal, the denser the pull became, soon lifting up smaller rocks as well as the minor boulders in the area.

Then came the larger rocks, and at this point, sucking in warriors from where they stood. It would now be time to take afoot, to run from this sudden pulling as the dragon continued to try to stabilize itself, stone crashing into its chest that made it stagger and fall back and forth, but soon was absorbed. Eventually, the hills and walls of the mountains nearby began to crackle and falter, soon pulling even larger masses towards itself as it attempted to perform some strange ritual.

As the gravitational pull intensified, even the vessel Klur was in was beginning to slightly move and stagger, but not for long. Lum now without her wings would sense the sudden grasp towards her, and in her own eyes, where no one else could see, the dragon's phantom, massive fist reaching outwards towards her, clasping around her as it began to pull her in more than the others. However, this was only an illusion made by the crystal, where anyone who wished to act upon her intensified pull could easily stop it, making her illusion irrelevant to the scene it emitted. Maelik would feel his chest pulled downwards suddenly towards the dragon's core, but would soon be capable of returning his strength to his hand as his wings would flap. With a massive piece of himself colliding into the ground and crashing forward, the dragon was launched backwards, the gravity ceasing to be and The Shattered seen skidding backwards and falling off of the cliffside, silent.



And then, within only a few seconds, it'd be seen, crashing into the air with a sudden, powerful, mighty!- Limping body, falling against a mountain as the pathetic dragon was now seen. It could've been no larger than a few meters long, a wingspan large, but made entirely of the magic from its core. "Thu'uz Nav'ok!! Ahhh!!! It Burns!!!" The dragon shouted out, clasping against its own chest as the wings were now seen to be deformed, the missing pieces of them replaced with a phantom wing, made entirely from pink energy and left a small, fading trail of the same color. "I will show you agony!!" It roared violently in pain, though obviously in absolutely no condition to enact upon this threat. Staggering in the air, nearly falling a hundred times already, the dragon began to fly away. Should any rock so much as touch the pink energy that drifted away from Rag'Novok's body, it would disappear, shriveling up and condensing itself to an insignificant size, as well as any being who'd wish to chase after it and touch such an energy.

And with that, the poor, pathetic cries of the dragon remained echoing gently through the skies, eventually escaping the ears of such warriors. It was done, then. The dragon existed still, but was mightily defeated thanks to that of Lum'Valia, Maelik the Spellblade, and Syros... whose mission might remain unfinished at this point in time.

Despite Artemis' warnings, Madame Naoki insists on heading up to watch the final events of the battle unfold through the carriage's top hatch, leaving the forward compartment to ascend the small ladder in the primary area. Even as the carriage continues to rumble along the rough mountain roads, a pair of feline ears precede the rest of Naoki's head out the metal hatch. The blowing wind of the carriage's motion blows her hair forward, to whip around her face. To remedy this, she takes from her wrist a small bit of string, and ties her hair back in a quick and dirty bun.

Raising a borrowed spyglass, Naoki gazes backward at the battle, framed as it is from her perspective between two peaks. She watches through the magnifying lens as Lum's spell reaches completion and is momentarily blinded by the bright flash of holy light.

As her sight recovers, she catches a brief glimpse of the now-diminutive dragon feebly flapping away  before it disappears behind a mountain.

Hah. That's what you get for messing with my vacation. Idiot.

Judging the battle to be complete, she orders the carriage be stopped, recalls her messengers, and calls off the rest of the inbound reinforcements.

She sends a message to Maelik and Lum telepathically, "Excellent work, it has been defeated. Were either of you injured? Should we come back to pick you up?"

As the strange green dragon begins to work its magic over the landscape, Naoki retreats back inside the carriage, and shutting and locking the hatch behind her with a slight grimace. Too many damn dragons, she thinks. Even if that green, earth looking one doesn't mean any harm, there isn't enough room to swing a dead cat without bumping into one of those things.

Naoki holds no particular animosity for dragons as a species, and indeed, some of them are quite nice, but she internally laments how damn many of them there are, and how powerful they all are. If only they- and all the other celestial and godly beings- could just sod off, and leave her to her business, and not rip up her mountains, scatter magic everywhere without asking, or meddle in her affairs.