Magical Lotus - Mahou Shoujou Byakuren - Episode 3, Part 6 [COMPLETED]

[Oldmansour]

>Did the Titan seem affected at all by the blasts which struck it?

>It doesn't visibly react, but it also doesn't immediately attack after being struck, which you take as a good sign. However, half a dozen flakes of the things skin, for want of a better term, flake off from the impact sites and transmogrify into the same kind of bugs the tree produced after they hit the ground. These new arrivals charge the temple door and the mikos standing there.

>Reinforce the shield again; we can't let it fall!
>"Lily, do you think you can do it?"

>"Yeah. Yeah, I can." she breathes as she joins you in pouring more energy into the shield. You sincerely hope the titan doesn't attack you many more times before you and Lily can strike back, this constant reinforcement of the Bulwark is starting to be a real drain on your resources. "My power's not like yours, but that thing's different. It's gotta go."
>As she speaks, however, the air above you glows a bloody red. "Incoming!" White Rose roars. From the titan's eyes blast forth a quartet of black and red beams of power. The blasts explode against the top of your shield, sending shockwaves of energy radiating out. Although your Bulwark absorbs the blasts, the force from the attack and the subsequent explosions manages to pierce your defenses, staggering you and your fellow magical girls. It also leaves your Bulwark visibly scarred and cracked.

[DracoOmega]

>Try to patch those holes! If we need to contract the bulwark inward to make up the lost space quickly, do it.
>"Then hurry! I don't think we have much more time to lose."

[Oldmansour]

>Try to patch those holes! If we need to contract the bulwark inward to make up the lost space quickly, do it.
>"Then hurry! I don't think we have much more time to lose."

>Lily straightens up, glaring at the monstrous creature towering over you as you and White Rose, her attention now free of the bugs which seem to have been disintegrated by their creator's own attack, reinforce your Bulwark yet again, as much as you can. "Vernal Morning Light." the blonde breathes, thrusting her arms out to her side. Purple power gathers in her palms, a vastly different sort of power than you've felt from her before. It feels somehow off. Lily was right, her power wasn't meant to be used like yours or White Roses', and it shows. But it is still power, it is still gathering, and from the look on her face, it will be effective. At least you both hope so.
>Her right eye flicks over to you, and she nods. She is ready.

[DracoOmega]

>Then let's do this!
>Weave our Violet Lotus into Lily's attack at the proper moment, as strong as we can manage. This titan is a dire threat to everything and everyone we love and care about. No matter what it takes, we cannot allow it to continue.

[Oldmansour]

>Then let's do this!
>Weave our Violet Lotus into Lily's attack at the proper moment, as strong as we can manage. This titan is a dire threat to everything and everyone we love and care about. No matter what it takes, we cannot allow it to continue.

>Magical Lily weaves her hands before her in an oddly stiff gesture then stabs her arms out forward and yells "Vernal Morning Light!"
>Magical White Rose joins her hands together, two fingers pointed up, and yells, "White Retainer's Flame!"
>To their voices you join yours, pointing your scepter at the monster above and intoning, "Violet Lotus: Realization of the Wanderings!"

>Lily's attack takes the form of a tree trunk sized column of purple energy interwoven with white, yellow and green lights, the color of new grass bathed in the morning sun. Around this cannonblast of power wraps your own soothing violet light and Rin's torrent of flame. The threefold power slams into the titan's chest, and the hulking monstrosity jerks backwards under the impact. It actually takes a step back as you pour your power into it. "It's working!" White Rose roars. "Keep it up!" The Empowered Light burrows into the titan's body and spreads out from the impact zone, eating away the thing's bruise-black form.

>And then the titan roars. Its head seems to split in the middle, and from this seam there emerges a second face. Lily screams at the sight. This face is a sick grey, the color of a corpse, and has only one eye, the giant orb glaring a malevolent green light. This face does have a mouth, which opens to reveal a nightmarish maw full of terrible teeth, sharp as needles, white as bone, thicker than a body, longer than a grown man. It is not the teeth, though, from which the titan's answer comes. Its throat glows for only a moment before unleashing a massive blast of energy at you and your comrades.
>Your Bulwark explodes under the impact, and the blast scatters you and your fellow Heroes, sending each of you flying. You yourself are blasted clear back into the treeline, striking one of the withered trees which turns to grey dust when you hit and fails to slow you more than a little, leaving you to roll violently another couple of feet before lodging against a live tree.

[DracoOmega]

>Grit our teeth and pick ourselves up again
>Quickly scan about for our companions. Do they seem alright? Well, relatively-speaking.
>What about the titan? Does our last attack still seem to be eating away at it, or has this ceased? What does its physical condition appear to be, as best we can quickly assess?

[Oldmansour]

>Grit our teeth and pick ourselves up again
>Quickly scan about for our companions. Do they seem alright? Well, relatively-speaking.
>What about the titan? Does our last attack still seem to be eating away at it, or has this ceased? What does its physical condition appear to be, as best we can quickly assess?

>With some effort, you haul yourself back to your feet. The drain of maintaining your Bulwark for as long as you did combined with taking that hit and the impacts that came after it leaves you feeling sore all over, in addition to being down on power.
>Lily was thrown back towards the temple. She is now lying face-down several feet from where she was, near the veranda of the temple, one hand pressed against the small of her back. White Rose seems to have landed in the sandbox in the playground of the temple. She is holding the side of her head but is on her feet and seems alert and aware.
>The titan now sports a gaping hole in its upper torso and the impact spot is smoking a little, but the damage appears to have stopped there. There is no further sign of your power at work, but at least for the moment, the thing isn't attacking any one, nor has it spawned more of those insectile creatures. Like you, it appears to be collecting itself after sustaining a hefty impact.

[DracoOmega]

>Is that a hole all the way through the titan's form, or just a 'crater', as it were?
>Does Lily seem to at least be conscious, even if she's not yet upright?
>What are the assemblage of mikos doing currently?

[Oldmansour]

>Is that a hole all the way through the titan's form, or just a 'crater', as it were?
>Does Lily seem to at least be conscious, even if she's not yet upright?
>What are the assemblage of mikos doing currently?

>More the latter. A fair sized scoop has been carved out of the thing's chest.
>Yes. You think you can hear her faint groaning.
>The blast that shattered your Bulwark appears to have done some damage to the temple as well, cracking the wood and tearing the paper walls around the entrance and beneath, and the donation box is in pieces. The shrine maidens were likely hurled away from the entrance just as you were. Only one of them is in view, the black-haired miko with the horse's ears and tail, Koko as you recall, bleeding from a cut on her hand and carrying a fairly heavy-looking iron mace. She seems to be heading in Lily's direction.

[DracoOmega]

>Let's move over to Lily also. That last blast hurt it. If we can recover before the titan can, perhaps we can do it again.

[Oldmansour]

>Let's move over to Lily also. That last blast hurt it. If we can recover before the titan can, perhaps we can do it again.

>As quickly you can manage, you make your way over to Lily, keeping your eyes on the looming titan all the way in the event it moves. The horse youkai has reached her first, and is helping her back to her feet. "Are you okay?" you hear her ask your fellow magical girl.
>"Back's killing me..." Lily complains, fanning her wings as she arches her back, slowly.
>While she works the kinks out, Koko turns her attention to you. "How 'bout you, you all right?"

>"Heads up!" one of the mikos yells from the door. The titan, which is back down to one face, has stretched its arm out once more, and launches another warped tree into the ground, ten feet or so removed from the first one, closer to the stairs. As before, this one releases a black wave of withering power upon impact.

[DracoOmega]

>Let's hit the titan with another Amber Lotus and try to dissipate the wave before it can reach anyone

[Oldmansour]

>Let's hit the titan with another Amber Lotus and try to dissipate the wave before it can reach anyone

>With a quick twirl of your scepter, you turn your Amber light loose once more upon the titan, and once more the tree it launched loses it glow and starts to bleed, for want of a better term, this time before any buds can grow to produce more bugs.
>Unfortunately, this does not have the effect of dissipating the wave. In effect, you have disabled the gun, but not before it discharged a round.

>"Spring Lily Leaf Shield!" Lily yells, evoking her barrier as the ring approaches, while you find yourself being tackled to the ground by Koko, the horse youkai bellowing a very short "Down!" before impact. As the lethal ring is about a foot and a half off the ground, it passes over you and the miko, but the sensation when it does is physically sickening. Simple proximity to that power draws the life from the living.

[DracoOmega]

>Once it feels like the wave has passed us by, get back up again and quickly assess the situation. Please, let no one else have gotten caught in that....

[Oldmansour]

>Once it feels like the wave has passed us by, get back up again and quickly assess the situation. Please, let no one else have gotten caught in that....

>You find Lily has, once again, been thrown back against the veranda, but this time she's still on her feet and seems unharmed. There is no sign of her shield, which probably means that the wave, unlike other forces which served to charge her shield, simply dissolved it. Turning to where White Rose had been standing, you find her no longer there, but several feet in the air, riding on one of her stepping discs. She must have gone over the wave while you went under it.
>Koko is trying to get to her feet, but seems to be struggling to do so. When she tackled you, she landed slightly on top of you, so she was closer to the wave than you were. And you sense no magical aura about her, so you gather that lethal energy affected her far worse than it did you.
>For a moment there is no sign of the other shrine maidens, until Kiku leaps out the front of the building and hurls a paper charm up at the titan's head. The charm is enveloped by a massive hunk of iron at a command word spoken by Kiku, the size of a wrecking ball. The projectile blasts it way through the titan's head and carries on, leaving the black appendage to regenerate almost instantly. Insects rain from the sky, the results of the bits of 'skin' Kiku's attack knocked loose.

>And you have another problem. The sky over the stairs leading to the temple grounds is burning bright orange, and a quick look in that direction makes your stomach churn with dread. Wrapped in a massive flame, The Champion of Fire has arrived.

[DracoOmega]

>Do we think there is anything we can do for Koko? Any way to heal her? Is there any corruption in her that we can touch or is there just... less of her?
>And the titan regenerated immediately from Kiku's attack, but did not regenerate from the combo attack we did earlier?
>Does Fire seem to be doing anything other than observing, for the moment?

[Oldmansour]

>Do we think there is anything we can do for Koko? Any way to heal her? Is there any corruption in her that we can touch or is there just... less of her?
>And the titan regenerated immediately from Kiku's attack, but did not regenerate from the combo attack we did earlier?
>Does Fire seem to be doing anything other than observing, for the moment?

>It is as though her vital energy has been sapped. In a way, it isn't too dissimilar to what you witnessed in the drained victims of the Chamption's youmas, though somehow more... profound.
>Correct. The two attacks used by the shrine maiden's magic do not appear to have left lingering physical damage upon the Death Titan, while the power you employed with your fellow magical girls did.
>Difficult to say. The flames around the Champion are so bright, you can't make out too many details about the fox. At the moment it's just hovering there, but the intensity of the power around it warns you that, in all likelihood, he is about to attack. But since you can't tell what it's looking at, you can't tell for certain what, or whom, is its target.

[DracoOmega]

>Is that a 'we don't know anything we can do for her right now', then?
>If so, let's quickly make our way over to Lily's position, but don't take our eyes off Fire. Be ready to react at a moment's notice if she attacks.
>Assuming we make it to Lily without further problem: "Do you think you can do that again? We hurt it with that one."

[Oldmansour]

>Is that a 'we don't know anything we can do for her right now', then?

>Not in terms of healing her, you don't think. The best you can do for her at the moment is getting out of the titan's direct line of sight.

[DracoOmega]

>If she still cannot seem to get herself mobile, and there's somewhere nearby where she can be shielded by terrain from the titan, quickly help her over there
>Otherwise, proceed with the previous commands (and keep on eye on Fire either way)

[Oldmansour]

>If she still cannot seem to get herself mobile, and there's somewhere nearby where she can be shielded by terrain from the titan, quickly help her over there
>Otherwise, proceed with the previous commands (and keep on eye on Fire either way)

>If so, let's quickly make our way over to Lily's position, but don't take our eyes off Fire. Be ready to react at a moment's notice if she attacks.
>Assuming we make it to Lily without further problem: "Do you think you can do that again? We hurt it with that one."

>While she does seem conscious and would be mobile eventually, she plainly isn't going anywhere any time soon. So you stoop to pull her to her feet. The miko groans but otherwise lets you be the dominant one. But as she reaches her feet, the blaze around the Fire Champion swirls and swells. Quickly you place yourself in front of the drained Koko and ready your scepter, preparing to employ a Sapphire Lotus. As you do that, Rin, still in the air on her flying wheel, places herself in front of the both you, ready to use her tool intercept the flames, which the Champion launches with a ferocious sound, like the roar of a furious jet engine.

>The incendiary storm flies well past White Rose, well past yourself, far over the heads of anyone on the ground. The Champion's fiery assault burns some of the insects in the air to ash before striking the titan's head and neck and explodes with tremendous force. The force of the eruption of fire even jostles you slightly, and the Death Titan is rocked backwards under the force of the blow, minus its head and most of its upper torso.
>"It's.... on OUR side!" Lily cries, smiling joyously. But her joy doesn't last long before Satori's face and chest emerges from the Titan's body, this time out of the thing's upper right thigh, her eyes glowing with power. The Champion of Fire screams in agony as it contorts in pain, dropping from the sky as the Titan starts to regenerate, albeit much more slowly than it did before.

[DracoOmega]

>Quickly, aim a Violet Lotus at Satori. Maybe a direct impact on her can disrupt their link?

[Oldmansour]

>Quickly, aim a Violet Lotus at Satori. Maybe a direct impact on her can disrupt their link?

>Taking advantage of the opportunity presented to you by the unexpected aid of the Fire demon, you point your scepter at Satori and once more unleash your Violet light upon the shrine maiden. Under this attack, her eyes lose the black energy that had suffused them, and the woman's purple eyes turn in your direction, the horrified eyes of someone witnessing something truly terrible.
>And then a white light radiates out from behind Satori's body, enveloping the world around you and the titan, and you feel a peculiar lurching sensation. The sounds of the world around you fade in a rush of windy noise, and the world dissolves into a white, featureless plain, devoid of the titan, your allies, or anything else at all.
>As you take in this abrupt change in the situation, a column of wispy blackness rises out of the plain five feet in front of you, coalescing into a cowled figure, its entire body concealed beneath a robe that isn't so much black as it seems to reject light. From somewhere within that form comes a hollow reedy voice, "Why do you persist? I already know you won't kill me." Is sounds something like Satori, but lacking any life, any emotion.

[DracoOmega]

>"I persist because there is suffering I can prevent. Suffering I can heal."
>Do we get a sense that this is truly part of Satori's consciousness, and not some part of the titan? Can we even tell?

[Oldmansour]

>"I persist because there is suffering I can prevent. Suffering I can heal."
>Do we get a sense that this is truly part of Satori's consciousness, and not some part of the titan? Can we even tell?

>"Then you will have to kill my root." the figure states. "And I have felt your power. You will not do that."
>The field around you generates a kind of interferences with your extra senses, so you're not certain. But it doesn't feel exactly like either Satori or the Titan. It feels like a mixture of both, somehow.

[DracoOmega]

>"I do not accept that anyone must die here. Even those who have been consumed by rage and fear and violence and misery are not beyond redemption - and I have seen it happen. I have seen those fallen beyond what the world believed could love and be loved again, and yet they were. Satori, I know you do not want to be a party to this kind of murder; Mayoiga has seen enough death upon its soil for a hundred generations - you, more than anyone else, know this. There does not need to be any more of it tonight."

[Oldmansour]

>"I do not accept that anyone must die here. Even those who have been consumed by rage and fear and violence and misery are not beyond redemption - and I have seen it happen. I have seen those fallen beyond what the world believed could love and be loved again, and yet they were. Satori, I know you do not want to be a party to this kind of murder; Mayoiga has seen enough death upon its soil for a hundred generations - you, more than anyone else, know this. There does not need to be any more of it tonight."

>"It was that murder that created me." the figure retorts. "The day a city embraced death was when I took root in this woman. Observe."

>The figure vanishes, leaving only a handful of withered leaves, and beyond it you see a sight that was there before. You see a car, parked alongside of a highway guardrail, and two women standing a bit away from the automobile. Satori and Koishi Komeji. The moment you realize who they are, there is a distant explosion. Time seems to slow as the two woman react, Koishi falling down in seeming panic while Satori flinches back, throwing her arms up in front of her face. And you see a black thorn, the same splinter you saw in her third eye, fly through the air and imbed itself into that appendage. Satori stops in mid motion, her eyes widening in a horrified anguish, and she screams, the sound rending your heart as she psychically experiences the death of over a million people.

>"Since that day, I have grown." the voice returns, taking shape once more five feet to your right. "There were others like me, damaged and thrown from the whole, but they all died, withered and wasted away. I found a root, soil to grow in. For a lifetime of man have I grown, wound around her heart, spread throughout her body. From her have I grown, asleep but nurtured. And now I have flowered and bloomed. You could destroy me, but not without destroying all of me. And you will not do this, or you would already have done it."

[DracoOmega]

>"What is it that you want?"

[Oldmansour]

>"What is it that you want?"

>"I want to give you a chance."

[DracoOmega]

>"What do you mean?"