Welcome to Gaia! ::

Kayla rose and followed Takeshi to the training room, still arguing with Vassily as she went.


Her voice was sneering. She was abviously a bit miffed about something.







<...fine.> She still sounded terse, but the argument had resolved itself, both because it had run its course and because they needed to be a team today, no exceptions.

As they arrived in the training room, Legion snapped his fingers. Undead poured from the two other doors (of which only one had existed an hour ago).

"We're practicing on zombies today. They're no good for bringing to public places, in general, and they make good targets. And just a warning - they won't stop if you can't kill them. The first two will not react. You can get an idea of how much damage they can take. The others... ah... will not stop if they can continue. This includes dragging themselves across the floor. Their bites or scratches won't turn you into a zombie, but you'll probably need magic healing to clean a wound from these little bastards. Line up in a row across the room."

He snapped his fingers again. Two undead remained for each warlock, and the others disappeared. He flicked his fingers at the far wall, and a door for each warlock materialized and swung open, and the insidious malevolence that characterized Legion's magic began to pour from each one. Beyond the threshold was pure darkness.

"Begin," he commanded, and sank through the floor.

~~

Saying he had began to cure the insanity was actually too generous of a thing to say, Samuel considered. It was more of "convinced to pretend sanity with a thinly veiled civility he usually lacked and to quit suggesting he burn things every five seconds. As for what Gurul had taught him?

Fire.
Fire arcs. Fireballs. Fire blasts. Fire from the ground and fire from the sky (though that was generally just another arc of the fire).

That wasn't to say he had taught him well - the only things he had well were fireballs and the somewhat more precise fire blasts, which were basically the equivalent of a shaped-charged version of a fireball detonating from his hand. Or his mouth, a trick Gurul had been determined to make him learn.

The plane's lack of delays, of course, was arranged by certain lesser powers related to weather and the like, who were cowed by Legion's raw strength.

~~

Takeshi took aim with his USP and fired a single shot into a zombie's head as a test. It fell to the ground, probably because he had shot a fireball in the bullet's wake, detonating the zombie's insides. He delivered a blast of fire that removed his other zombie's head with its concussive force. The zombie remained standing. He shoved it, seeing what would happen. It stumbled but remained standing.

He blasted it with a fireball to a torso and turned it to giblets.

He then sat cross-legged, elbows on his knees and chin on his hands, spitting (physically spitting) small red spheres that did the same to each zombie who emerged from his door.

Samuel woke with a start as Gurul began to berate him for falling asleep during the review session he was so graciously acting sane in.



Samuel focused out the window of the plane, looking at a point in the distance.
will it into being. Manipulate your energy to fit your purpose!>

Samuel closed his eyes, and an image of a large fireball below and to the side of the plane surfaced in his mind. Focusing on it, he pushed power into the image, an opened his eyes. A fireball had exploded below the wing. Smaller than intended, but not much. Probably distance, more than anything.


His mental sneer was overpowering.




Samuel leaned back in his seat and sighed as the seatbelt signs flashed on and the plane began to descend. It was hardly relaxing to know that he was best sided with a demonic entity, rather than the human Hunters. He looked out the window and gazed on the lights of LA. Morning was well underway and the city was illuminated by the morning sunlight. Today was the beginning of a new episode of his life, he knew now.

She went for it, falling quickly into the trance with the aid of prayer beads. the transformation this time was more subtle: for a moment, a ripple passed through her skin. In its wake, her flesh tone became a few degrees paler, but other than that nothing much seemed to happen. When she opened her eyes though, they were like twin fires. She could feel Oscurfillius in the back of her mind, a quiet mass of darkness. He was always a bit disconcerting, but also more inclined to understand humans than many other demons. His transformation afforded her short periods of intangibility, shord ranged shadow walking, and some shadow control. Her spiritual vision was also improved, which didn't really help much against zombies, but did have its uses.

She stepped forwards silently, and made her hands and forearms intangible. Her warch dropped clean through her wrist, and she made a mental note to pick it up before they left. She slipped her hands into the rotting foreheads of her first two zombies, and then allowed them to return to full physicality. She felt the goop and pressure of their brains, and then the full weight of two corpses as the zombies went limp. She made her hands intangible again, and let the zombies fall to the ground.

Turning to the side, she saw two more zombies coming towards her. She stepped to the side, into Siber's shadow, and fell into it. She popped up a split second later just behind one of the zombies and, as soon as her feet were on the ground, stuck an intangible hand in the back of its head. She let it become tangible again, and turned to do the same to her other assailant. She forgot to remove her hand from the skull it was currently stuck in, and ended up punching the zombie in the face with the back of his comrade's head. The skull around her hand shattered, leaving her covered in brains and bone. She almost threw up right then, and actually gave a dry heave before she could step into a shadow and come up again in the shadow of one of Takeshi's zombies. She waited for it to light on fire, casting her shadow much farther than normal, until it connected with that of her flesh-eating friend. She reached out a hand, still covered in bits of corpse, and let her perception shift to her shadow. She felt the flatness and quiet of herself, and where she conneted to the floor and the other shadows around her. She flexed her hand, then made a fist. Her zombie's head crumpled like paper. She was hit with a sudden pang of exhaustion, as though she'd just sprinted 200 meters.


<...Thanks for the heads up, gramps. Any other kernels of wisdom for the new generation?>


She let her hand become intangible, and the goop dropped through to the floor.

Seconds later, Siber's summonings reached their breaking point. He was hit so violently with the energy backlash that he was physically thrown against a wall. Firage and Leo were nowhere to be seen. Takeshi glanced over and moved to protect him.

"Jesus ******** Christ, man, what did you do? You could summon fine yesterday! What just happened?" Takeshi asked as he dropped zombies with mundane punches, protecting the vulnerable Siber. He swung his hand in an arc and launched the tide of zombies back with a wave of wind.

"You're lucky I drained some energy from that," he heard Sindhlot whisper. "It would've been much worse otherwise. Siber certainly wouldn't have wanted to feel that, because right now his whole body felt like it was burning on the inside. "The problem now is that I sank so much energy, I can't safely transport you from the room. The test is almost up, though, so Takeshi's defense should be enough. Just be ready to cast again by the next test." Sindhlot's voice faded away.

A zombie had gone for a dive at Siber's leg. Before he could react, Takeshi body-slammed it to the ground.

"Pull it together!" he yelled to Siber. He glanced up. "Erik, watch your back!" Two zombies had flanked Erik, but Takeshi was too busy keeping the zombies away from Siber to assist him any better than that.

He felt like a dumbass more than he ever had. The pain burning his insides took second place to that.
He actually sounded genuinely afraid.

<... I've never seen someone censor their thoughts.>
"Thank you, Sindhlot. And Takeshi. Though I doubt it means much to either of you, I owe you one." His ears burning, he got up.
The second most powerful part of controlling his emotions, and by far the most dangerous to himself and his surroundings, as he had learned before, was summoning up not real dæmons, but vestiges of anger he had packed down into a core for precisely this purpose. Doing this now, he watched Kayla's method of killing for just a moment and seized control of a zombie's shadow. Summoning, of course, was out of the question. The shadow rose, paper-thin, from the ground, molded into a disk, and flipped back and forth through the creature like a meat-slicer. Thin disks of zombie slid messily to the ground. Grim-faced, Siber turned to another. At least they were slowing down- he could last for as long as needed on emotion alone, but the longer that was, the more he would regret it when he was done.

Kayla bent down over a fallen zombie and reached an intangible hand into its thigh. She closed her eyes, and for a few seonds just spoke with Oscurfilius. Well, not really spoke. During the transformation, they were too closely bonded to need words. Concentrating, she pumped energy through her hand and into the zombie's leg, streading the firld of intangibility through the humerus. She cut the field short just before the kneeap, and then gently lifted the intangible bone out of the rotting leg. When it materialized, she basically had a baseball bat with one pointy end, the jagged tip above the knecap. She quickly set it to use battering zombies, aiming for the now-visible sigils. Occasionally she would step into a shadow and pop up somewhere unexpeted, constantly redirecting the group of undead. After a few minutes of this, she had managed to herd them into a tight knot of stinking corpse in the middle of the room. She stepped into a zombie's shadow one more time and resufaced again next to Takeshi, panting and sweating like she'd run a marathon.
"Finish it." She seemed less inclined to speak while carrying Oscurfillius inside her.

Kayla responded to this news by sitting down on the floor, exactly where she was, and lowering herself halfway into a trance. She opened a pathway to Hell and let Oscurfillius return while also pulling loose demonic energy through to bolster her endurance. She stayed in this state until whatever was about to happen did.





She became dully aware of a sense of coldness, and realized that it was coming out of Hell. After a moment of confusion, she felt another chill, this one from her own body: Hielith was watching her now. Suddendly the pressure was far greater. It was worse than protecting a 1-0 lead in soccer, this was much more stressful than that. At the same time, Kayla's reaction to that stress was what had made her a great goalkeeper. Still, soccer was one thing. A heartless ice demon was another entirely.