Chapter 224: Shove

Chapter 224: Shove

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Shove

I managed to react at the last second, bringing up my arms in defense. His hand crashed against them with enough force that I felt the bones shatter, ground to dust in an instant, and it barely slowed down his claws. They bit into my forehead and dragged down through my eyes, one of them catching my nose on the way. I felt them split my lips, shatter my upper and lower jaw, and nearly tear the latter free of my face entirely. I felt it as the claws continued down, snapping ribs like twigs and shredding my entrails.

On pretty much anyone else, it would have been a fatal wound.

On me, it just hurt like a bitch. Not physicallytruth be told, getting stabbed in the brain honestly didn't hurt much and I was so accustomed to pain that I just brushed off everything elsebut in the damage it did. Thanks to my recently improved Vitality, I'd limited that greatly, but still, it hurt.

But it bought enough time for my other self to evade the blow, stepping backwards as I took the hit and dancing out of the way. He extended a hand toward me and Gilgamesh both, snapping his fingers at once.

There was a sudden cracking sound, but attack outpaced itin part because the trap had already been set. Gilgamesh had walked into the bounds of our Vajra, the invisible markings laid upon the ground around us, and it was just a matter of letting them loose. We could set them up to react when they were tripped, but with an opponent like Gilgameshno. Even if he couldn't dodge the attack itself, there was a moment before the process completed where he could escape. Better to pin him down, first.

So we did. I took the hit. My other stared at him with Gorgon activated, other hand flinging a quick Bind his way, and for a moment he wasn't free to simply leap out of the way.

In that moment, lightning struck. Not once or twice, but the better part of a dozen times, Vajra altering the conditions to be ideal. I felt it when Gilgamesh was hit, in part because of the transfer of shocks, but mainly because his claws convulsed in my guts. Even so, I was shielded from the worst of it by my natural defenses, and as Gilgamesh flung himself away, I only stumbled slightly.

My other was at my side in an instant, attention focused as mine was as Gilgamesh hit the ground and landed on his feet, armor already rippling again. Insulating himself, perhaps? Reducing the conductivity of his armor, almost certainly. Given such control over his own structure, he'd be able to reduce the damage greatly, mitigating it entirely if it fell into the bounds of his version of Kavacha. Even now, he was more surprised than hurt, and I'd bought myself only moments to act.

Best to use them wisely.

I didn't have to glance at my other self to know we were thinking the same thing, and we shed our Elemental Embodiments as once, unleashing both Metal and Fire. Our Elementals gathered around us as spiritual presences, pressing close as they focused on our enemy before unraveling and coming back together.

Gilgamesh released an odd, almost mechanical sound as he watched us.

"You still have more tricks, I see," He said, though he shouldn't have been able to see my Elementalsor, at least, no one else had ever been able to, when they weren't manifested. His eyes were good, then, no doubt boosted by his new suit. Unfortunately, that probably meant that my plan to confuse and disorient him with Delusions and Fantasies was probably doomed to failure, though it could still have value if I played my cards right.

"I came to play, after all," I told him as I felt my counterpart making his move. He didn't hide himself, as such, so much as project an image of himself over his bodya trick both of us were more than accustomed to, which made it easy to follow his lead. This was a risky move in its own way, especially against an opponent like this, which was why I'd refrained from using it until now, butwe were obviously going to need all the help we could get. Combined with what we were preparing to do next, this move would cost us greatly. It was enough to make me consider just going all out right now, but

No. I couldn't allow myself to be frightened and break from the plan. I still had my fair share of cards to play, the things I was setting up and keeping hidden. I'd need to use them soon to get the most use out of them, but things like Keter and the Arcana would cost me even worse than what I was planning now. I had to use them wisely and make them count.

Besides. Those tactics had risks of their own, aside from their price tags. I'd be taking chances with them no matter how I used them, which was all the more reason not to let myself be shaken.

It was something I embraced, here and now.

Gilgamesh lifted his left arm to block my coming strike, the limb bulging slightly and taking on a more armored appearance just before my claws connected. I felt my talons crack and break against his hide, sometimes pulling up the flesh around them in the processbut none of that showed and my claws raked his carving swallow marks into his forearm. I let the products of Venenum spill from the venom sacks in my knuckles as I struck, spraying the wound with something corrosivemy failure to create the alchemical legend that was the Universal Solvent, still potent enough to liquefy organic matter.

The Grimm hardly twitched as the edges of the wounds began to shimmer slightly, welling with dissolved skin that was quickly replaced. Instead, he raised both of his arms, hands flashing out like lightning bolts as he clasped his hands on my arms with a grip that powdered bone. His shoulders bulged then, inflating until it seemed almost as if they'd been replaced with rough spheresand then several ports opened along its surface, spewing worth what at first seemed like smoke.

I knew better, especially as it flowed over and engulfed me. The 'cloud' was actually just a swarm of tiny, tiny Grimm-thingslike the magical nanites I'd mentioned before, only taken more literally. They even looked technological at a glance, tiny machines made of tiny pieces of Grimm-bone. They covered me, gathering to attack cells and bury themselves in my skin as they tried to tear me apart piece by piece.

It didn't work. Even on that scale, my skills were still active, hardening my skin to an absurd degree and pushing back their invasion. Beyond that, Kavacha was still at work, and though it seemed to recognize the swarm as a single attack, it still blunted most of their efforts, providing me ample time to counterattack.

Seeing as imitation was the sincerest way to tell someone to go fuck themselves, I gave Gilgamesh's newest trick my own twist, sending a wave of alteration across my skin. On a level invisible to the normal human eye, cells began to convulse, pulsate, and then warped violently, turned into membranous 'shells' for my creations. The tiny creatures that came forth were repurposed parts of my own body, and they crawled over my skin, surrounding and attacking their Grimm counterparts. On the micro-scale, the difference between technology and biologyespecially magical technology and biologywas limited, and our microscopic forces might have seemed evenly matched had someone been able to see them fight.

They weren't. We both had our advantages and limitations that were shifting the battle this way and that. Gilgamesh's main edge was his ability to produce and surround me in a devouring cloud of his creations, thick enough that had someone else wandered into it, there wouldn't have been the slightest trace left behind. I, on the other hand, was more limited, being forced to keep my miniature minions close at hand; they were machines obeying commands or even something I could issue orders to with a thought, just something I created and controlled with my power and limited to my close proximity. While I probably could exceed those limits, it would mean adjusting my connection to them and I wasn't sure how much command I'd retain as they distanced themselves from me and became something truly independent; sadly, I was guessing not much. And seeing as the skill I was using had been something I received from Conquest

No. Biological warfare was a bitch to control and contain at the best of times. Magical biological warfare stolen from one of my greatest enemies and still touched by his power? Probably wasn't something I should play with in the middle of an already delicate situation.

Besides, I had advantages of my own. Unlike Gilgamesh, I was just as capable of fighting under a microscope as I was on the battlefield and I guided my forces accordingly, aiding them when necessary with careful applications of Psychokinesis when necessary. It was enough to push Gilgamesh's forces back, thanks to my protection from their attacks; he undoubtedly noticed what I was up to and commanded his creations to attack mine, but they didn't fight with the mind of a strategist behind them. Mine did and overcame his forces, if only temporarily. He'd swarm me again in a matter of moments, but not before I had time to act.

It was enough to make Gilgamesh let go of me as my minions turned on his claws, a legion of them swarming to chew at his bladed hands. It only lasted a moment before there was a sudden flash from his claws that slew most of our creations and the smoke from his shoulders changed, becoming a mix of airborne poisons, including nerve gases and worsegaseous contact poisons, prion infestations, and more.

I advanced into the light mist, trusting my defensive skills to see me through the danger as I followed Gilgamesh back. He lifted a hand, another of those odd spheres forming between the claws of his hand, and I saw power gathering even as he aimed it at me. I didn't so much as hesitate, reaching out to grasp the orb tightly in one hand, a series of Lux Aeterna's gathering around my hand.

We looked at each other, both our masks eyeless and yet still conveying what we wanted to sayand as one, we both fired.

There was a strange crackling sound, as if a lightning bolt were somehow breaking. Colors played across my vision and throughout the spectrum, standing out oddly to my senses and then simply collapsing into the point of intersection, where Lux Aeterna clashed with the matter he'd summoned. Light and darkness played across the sphere, balancing for a moment and then breaking down just as fast. Power collapsed into a tiny point and then burst forth.

As I was flung away, I felt as though my arm had been blown away just beneath the elbow and I was sent careening through the air, before hitting and sliding across the ground while it shattered around me. I regained myself after a brief moment of disorientation, turning my slide into a horizontal flip and turning myself Psychokinetically to land on my feet. A hand came down to grasp the ground, my speed pulling it through fifty more meters of dirt before I managed to stop myselfand I saw an opening.

Abruptly, distance became meaningless and I was beside Gilgamesh in a heartbeat. He'd done much the same thing I had, slowing himself with the claws of his left handprobably because the claws of his right were simply gone, erased just beneath the knuckle by whatever interaction of forces we'd caused. Somehow, he didn't seem surprised to see me and rose to meet my assault. As my fist collided with his own, it was visibly crushed, collapsing until my wrist was near my elbow and revealing the trick I'd hidden within my forearm. As my flesh fell slack, warped by the use of my power instead of the damage, half a dozen red tendrils burst forth, whipping towards Gilgamesh's head, neck, and chest, sinking lightly into his skin. My other hand came up, held just before him, and then I shifted the arrangement of my existence, parts of my other self rising even as bits of me sank.

Wings spread out from my back, feathers black but marked by red colored eyes reminiscent of the Panoptes. My arm changed, too, eyes opening down its length and something like a mouth appearing at the center of my palmand as space shifted and warped, Dust crystals fluttered from my Inventory, rotating around the limb in three circles. Power gathered around and inside me, flowing into some hollow segment of my arm that had been set aside for the task, glowing through my skin.

I fired.