Aram & Melody: Tendrils of... Desire?

TAGS: F/Omnidicked Tentacle Beast, noncon-to-kinda-sorta-con, excessive amounts of exotic semen-equivalents, clothing destruction, coiling/binding, deep-throating, facefucking, anal sex, vaginal sex, getting fucked in all the holes at once, choking/airflow interruption, getting dangled upside down & every which way while being plowed, exotic dick-analogue attributes, temperature play (coldness), magical girl combat, brawling, cruel interruption of peaceful dreams, bickering like an old couple, post-violation comforting & support.

If you don't care about the non-smutty parts, just skip down to the part titled "AND NOW THE TENTACLES APPEAR!". It's about 60% of the way down. Really. It's okay. I won't judge you for it. I promise.

***

* Sensibly, most people stayed away from the Old Harbour at night. Long since eclipsed by the expanded New Harbour and several decades into their long decline, the mostly-abandoned dockyards and loading warehouses were commonly used for illicit activities, eerie at best, and downright dangerous at worst. Once the few remaining street lights sputtered on, it was a no-man's land, neglected by all but the avaricious dreams of waterfront condo developers - certainly no decent folk.

Nobody ever accused Arcane Warlocks of being decent folk.

Right beside a cracked and leaking surge wall, the fell flicker of hastily-carved malefic runes added to the industrial wasteland's eerie mood. The unnaturally-twisted geometrical patterns sprawled across concrete and brick, meandering along crumbling roadway and up half-broken walls alike. Here they twisted back in upon themselves, there they spiralled madly, all individual threads becoming lost into the joint chaos of the blighted binding. The air hummed softly in an off-key tune: the kind of place that set teeth on edge and hairs on end.

Right off to the edge of the blue-black sorcerous sigil sat its creator - black-armoured, crowned in horns and thorns, a baroque juggernaught of dark magic and eternal damnation. One might've expected such a sinister figure to stare proudly out upon his handiwork, or cackle in a truly hackneyed fashion. Less likely was Aram resting his head against some old rusted-out railing, high helm askew as he dozed lightly. His mouth hung slightly open as a thin trickle of saliva dangled from the corner of his lips, quivering with his faint snoring. By his feet sat a small egg timer, ticking away innocently.

Asleep on the job.

* Melody expanded outwards tonight, away from her relatively quiet suburb and, again, towards the outskirts of town. Her first stop was the old cinema, perpetually 'closed for renovations'. The place had looked serviceable before she had knocked a hole into the roof; now it looked like a disaster area. The damaged cars had been towed, and nothing was left of the ritual or her battle but cracked asphalt.

Nothing here. It didn't hurt to check. Melody departed, sighing under her breath.

Along the edge of town she went, skipping past truck stops and over highways, passing through newer suburbs, and no one seemed to notice the high schooler out on a 'jog' where each step took her hundreds of meters. At the apex of one leap, a flash of colored light in her peripheral drew her attention; another magical girl fought an aberration in the distance, having lured it into the countryside. Probably doesn't need my help. The next time she hit the ground, Melody bounced right off again, this time sailing towards the Harbour District.

She didn't intend to stop. This was someone else's territory - multiple someone elses. Lots of girls patrolled the harbours, though Melody wasn't sure if they took it in turns or divided the territory up like slices of a cake. It was waiting for her once she touched down on the boardwalk: her shapeless fluffball of a mascot. The sight of it made her stop dead mid-crouch, and she came to rest on one knee, frowning expectantly.

The harbour is dangerous tonight, it told her simply. Frowning, Melody asked, "How?"
Based on my observations thus far, you are unlikely to succeed.
"What do you mean?"
Proceed with caution.
"You're never any help."

Melody took off again, towards the Old Harbour - street to roof to roof to docks. This close, she could sense it - it was hard to mistake the sickening clench of her stomach and the prickle of her skin for anything but proximity to evil. Someone or something was in the harbor, she figured, and for whatever reason a patrol hadn't swept it up yet.

It might as well be her that did it. Steeling herself, Melody made her way down a disused, poorly-lit side street. The closer she drew, the more precise her reading: it was in front of her... to the left... just around the corner of that decrepit old warehouse. She slowed down, peeked out, and saw it - and him. "Aram," she murmured to herself. How could she forget that silhouette? After a few moments of scrutiny, she stepped back out of sight and stooped down, glancing this way and that, furtive and embarrassed. "Hey," she said under her breath. "Um... fluffy thing... Fluffy?"

It appeared, looking up at her with shining, unblinking round eyes. A summoning gate, it supplied for her. Nothing has come through it yet. I cannot ascertain what may appear, or when.

"What do you--" Melody caught herself, contained her temper, and lowered her voice. "What do you mean you can't tell?"

It tended to ignore sufficiently pointless questions.

"Great." Melody swallowed and stole another peek around the corner, adjusting her glasses. Unlikely to succeed. Whatever. This wouldn't be a repeat of their last meeting; Melody had some new tricks up her sleeve, just for him...

* Mere yards away from tangled feelings and dreams of revenge, Aram Ardzaruni enjoyed his brief nap. After managing maybe six hours of sleep over the last three days, the part-time maleficar had lunged at the chance for some shuteye - he'd carved out the binding circle, prepped it with some of Chrysamere's profane energies, popped out the timer he had brought along for exactly this reason, set it, and promptly proceeded to pass out on the spot. The rite was best completed at midnight, anyway. Alarm would wake him up a few minutes early, he'd drag himself up, use some blood to finalize the pact, and conjure whatever damned beast the Bitch-Queen wanted summoned. Odds were about even he'd end up having to put down whatever popped out of the gate. That's how it always went. She had never explained the finer points of summoning.

Whatever. He'd wrap this up then go home to his nice, cozy bed. Or, more likely, the small mountains of course reading he had fallen desperately behind on, despite his best efforts. That was how life went.

Asleep like this, Mystical Melody's nemesis looked... disarmingly gentle, if one could get past the hideously over-ornamented harness of shadowed steel. The firm, well-defined lines of his face were softened in repose, and the constant nagging exhaustion that lurked around his eyes was smoothed out in peaceful tranquility. A small snort interrupted his dangling bead of sleep-drool, causing it to drop down upon a greave before he settled back into his usual rhythm of breathing. His long shock of black hair spilled over his hunched back and across the pavement below, uncaring of the muck and grime of the neglected streets. A tiny smile tugged at his mouth, spurred on by some fond dream unknown to all but the dreamer himself.

What kind of merciless monster would interrupt a man in such a happy state?

* Melody had to remind herself that the person she saw was not Aram Ardzaruni, unfortunate victim of an evil pact that was ruining his life. She stepped back, leaned against the outside of the warehouse, and drew a deep breath. It didn't matter whether he wanted to, whether he had a choice - whatever scheme the Arcane Warlock had enacted this time was wrong. If the alternative was to die, then he ought to, for the sake of the city - for all of mankind. All indications pointed towards actual death being the unlikeliest of scenarios, though; there was no swifter way to end this invisible, eternal war than to remove too many of the major players.

She didn't want to kill him in the first place, but she was obligated to stop whatever he was planning tonight. "I'm going in, Fluffy," Melody muttered, casting one last glance at the critter by her feet. "You're going to have to cope with that decision."

Very well. It was gone in the blink of an eye. Melody drew herself upright with a deep breath, let it out in a reluctant sigh, and stepped out into the open, approaching the warlock, the wall, and the chaos creeping out of his infernal circle. A handful of paces away from both, she stopped short, stamping her shoe on the concrete crumbling underneath and throwing one arm straight up into the air.

"Sun!" This time she shouted at the top of her lungs, announcing her presence, and a shaft of golden light materialized, falling upon her from the left. "Moon!" From stage right, a silvery beam illuminated her, turning one strong shadow into two faint silhouettes stretching behind her. "Stars!" And those, too, were obliterated as a whiteness that glittered like snow backlit her. "Grant me your light, so that I may eradicate the darkness!" They did, providing enough wasteful illumination that she became a mere outline to the human eye - one whose clothes disintegrated within moments.

Melody brought her hand low and swept it to the side, and in a glittering burst, her shield appeared on her arm. Raising the other hand summoned her sword into her grip. She brandished the latter in a downward cut and raised the former into a ready position, and the lights dimmed enough for details to come into view: pearlescent nudity sheathed in stockings, gloves, and a tunic, all gradually reinforced by plates of armor. The strobe and cacophony were all, apparently, part of the contract, and together they were quite possibly enough to wake the dead.

"Magic Myrmidon ♥ Mystical Melody issues a challenge! Prepare yourself!"

And then, contrary to all internal logic, Melody forced herself to stand still rather than charging forward. She simply stared past the rim of her shield, waiting, a bead of sweat trickling down one cheek. Her face was uncovered this time; a sapphire glittered in a choker around her neck rather than at the peak of a circlet on a helmet that may as well be ornamental.

* The dark champion's tranquil rest was shattered in a single cruel moment by that bellowing invocation - all his relaxation and ease, dissipated irrevocably. Shuttered eyes flickered open, squinting hard in an attempt to focus... only to be overwhelmed by that ridiculous radiance. "Gah!" he sputteringly slurred, sharply yanking his head to the side in an attempt to retreat from the brightness; the sudden motion caused his ill-fitting helmet to skew and shift on his head, its cheek-plates obscuring most of his face. An attempt at a snappy counter-motion to set the helm aright resulted in it bouncing off the railing with a resounding KLANG, the reverberations ringing like a bell inside Aram's uniquely poorly-designed headgear.

Well, so much for his nap.

After several moments of grumbling and grousing, the warlock firmly grasped his iron crown and twisted it straight once more, fixing his bleary gaze on the source of the interruption... just in time to catch the final stages of her transformation. Aram blinked once, twice; a faint dusting of pink settled on his cheeks, and he coughed quietly. No matter how many times he watched, magical girl transformations were always a uniquely... distracting experience. Wait, though-- this wasn't some tiny little preteen just beginning her dangerous blossoming into maidenhood. No, those were curves, youthful and fresh. A surprisingly generous bust and a shapely waist, long legs and flowing hair... wait.

Recognition had just begun to twig in the sleepy arcanist's head as that booming challenge rang out, and his flush suddenly turned a shade darker - even as her modesty was now assured by her solid protective gear. There she was, Mystical Melody in her full panoply, ready for anything... and there he was, half-sprawled out and still struggling to focus his gritty, sleep-deprived eyes.

"Oh, mmf, hey, Melod--" he began with a surprisingly bashful mumble, only for his voice to trail off as sluggish thoughts finally fell into place. She was geared up. He was geared up. It was late at night. She was doing the full transformation and challenge thing. Right, then. There was only one thing that meant.

"...Ah, fuck," Chrysamere's reluctant champion grumbled as he slowly pulled himself to his feet.

* Aram hadn't waited for her to get ready the night they had met. Why, then, was Melody standing there, watching him falter, then stumble awkwardly to his feet, rather than taking advantage of the opening? Because it was sporting, she supposed, and Good People were not Good if they refused to be Fair. This was the script by which the two of them were meant to operate: start or interrupt some foul scheme until an equal showed their face, then trade introductions and begin a duel.

It would be so easy to take the initiative... that's how it seemed, that's what made sense if you lived in a sane and rational world, and it was a mistake Melody was consciously aware of struggling to prevent. The tip of her sword wavered in the air and the light playing off of her shield's mirror shine shifted as she flexed her wrists.

Hey, Melody. It wasn't a dark utterance, more like... more like what he might say if she woke up next to him in bed. Her own pale face lit up more quickly and comprehensively than Aram could have ever managed himself. Now wasn't the time to think about that!

A moment later, the maleficar swore, and it was the most eloquent four-letter word that had ever touched Melody's ears and made her flinch. The more she learned about the man beneath the armor, the harder it became to think of him as her nemesis. She felt a pang of regret for showing up in the middle of a nap he probably needed; they were both losing sleep and letting their grades slip just to represent opposing forces on a supernatural battlefield.

"Are..." Frustration and uncertainty crinkled Melody's brow, yet she did not direct her piercing stare away. "Are you all right?" A pause. "Was that too much?" she wondered aloud.

* Yes, that was goddamn well too much, the bedraggled warlock wanted to shout out, but the sincerity of the query checked his frustration. Instead he raised a gauntleted hand to his face, firmly rubbing his temples and brow in an attempt to banish the lingering sleepiness. His head still rang, yes, and exhaustion still fogged his mind, but... well, at least it was Melody. That made it better, somehow - more awkward, certainly, but seeing her as the first thing after waking up wasn't the worst fate in the world.

That thought got a quick, self-directed smack delivered squarely upon one rugged cheek. Just to wake himself up, obviously.

"Nnnh, it was... hff, pretty good for the formal thing, Melody. Looked good. I mean, you always look good, but--" A pause; a visible twitch of one eye. He inhaled again. "Just--" The armour rattled and creaked from its wearer's slothful movements, and as he forced himself upright, Aram braced himself upon the railing. Another shake of the head to banish complicated thoughts. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just really damned tired, s'all. Don't suppose you could've just, y'know, done your Magical Girl thing and let me keep sleeping?" A thin, ragged smile crawled its way across his features - a smile just for her, joking and painfully sincere all at once.

The sophomore-turned-sorceror tapped at his over-tall helmet again, preempting its ungainly tottering. Compared to her composed majesty, he really did look in shambles: stance all over the place, visibly run-down, and radiating about as much threat and menace as a wet puppy. One pauldron-covered shoulder rolled, then the other; both his hands slipped behind his back to stretch, jutting his broad, cuirassed chest forward. "Y'know I really don't want to do this with you, right?" slipped out of Aram in an unguarded moment, his mouth snapping shut a moment too late. For a moment, he thought about trying to explain that way... but no, it was the truth. There was no need to varnish it.

* Melody shook her head in a slow, even movement. "Of course, but you have to." Her eyes flicked towards the ground between them, and she relaxed her stance, lowering her shield. "And I have to. This is the way it has to be." Locking eyes with him, she planted a hand on her hip and tapped the flat of her sword against one of her silvery greaves. "I have to drive you away in order to stop this... you have to not be here. I could have tried to move you away... I could have tried to erase whatever you're building, but would you have slept through any of that, either? And if you run away... won't you be punished?"

And then, abruptly, her expression hardened, and a smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth. "Besides..." Raising her sword, she slapped it against the rim of her shield close to the cross guard, then scraped the length of it down along the shield's forward edge, flinging a cascade of brilliant white sparks across the concrete. "I owe you for what happened last time." Was there really something to all the pageantry of a flashy introduction? Melody felt confident this time, sure on her feet, her thoughts free of lingering doubt.

*  Everything she said was right, of course. He would've loved to have argued against it, told her exactly how she was wrong and why they could all just go home and ignore this damned fool children's crusade they were all roped up into... but they both knew how hollow any of those protestations would've been. "Yeah," the pactbound champion conceded slowly, shaking his head with clear regret as he did. "Yeah. But..." Those granite eyes of his, so hard and sharp beneath the brow of his helmet - and so unlike the deep, earnest blueness that had trailed over her with such desire not even a week ago in the darkened corner of their shared gym - met her gaze steadily. There was no flinching or retreat here.

"Doesn't mean I have to like it, though."

He didn't want to fight this invisible war. And, even more than that, Aram Ardzaruni did not want to fight her.

Those earnest feelings of his, however, were not openly reciprocated. No, she was all cool bravado and earnest steel, flashy and firm: yeah, he had to admit, she cut a hell of a figure like this. Admiration plucked at heart-chords for a moment, only to be drowned out in the memory of just what she was talking about: the battle, yes, but also what had followed. The warlock swallowed hard again, then visibly deflated as he let out a sigh. "Look, if this is about what happened last week..." he queried, not completing the question: they both knew what he meant.

Still, it didn't keep him from jutting one fist out to his side, clenching it in the warm evening air. The flat, two-dimensional outline of a massive warhammer hazily flickered into existence in his grip, small wisps of shadow and mist whirling about the outstretched arm. A faint sound of crackling - a spring thaw shearing icicles from the roof gutters, perhaps - plucked at the edge of hearing, and then he was armed, all unadorned black iron and blunt power that rested easily in his gauntlet.

* "Last week," she echoed, and her voice took on an edge. "Or today... take your pick. Regardless of... um..." She flustered for a moment, and her face glowed pink. "...what happened, I can't agree with your methods. And if you're obligated to stay..." Melody cut the air, and her blade sang an audible note, resounding with the magic that had erupted from within and flowed out through her fingertips. "I'm obligated to fight you. We don't have to like it, but we have to do it."

There was a familiar chilling coalescence of dark energy as Aram prepared his hammer - with enough figurative flash to match Melody's literal lambency. Melody raised her shield as it crackled into existence, high enough to hide her smile.

He probably wasn't going to like what would happen when he hit her this time.

"So... you're going to stand your ground and defend your claim, then?"

* Yeah, this was totally about last week.

"Melody, listen, we both agreed that it was a ba--" he began beseechingly before thinking better of himself. For not the first time tonight, his teeth clicked audibly as they clamped down; the tension in his jaw was plainly visible, drawing its chiselled lines taut. His eyes met hers again for a moment before glancing aside, colour still glowing beneath his golden tan. "...We'll talk about it later, okay?" Later sounded a lot better than going over it all again right now. The university student had already dissected those long-lingering kisses and roaming caresses a thousand times over in his thoughts, and raising the issue now smacked awkwardly of a lover's spat.

Aram Ardzaruni absolutely did not want to think of this as a lover's spat.

The weighty warhammer whisked through the air with uncanny ease, its massive head coming to a stop in front of the warlock - raised between the two of them, a bulwark and a threat in equal measure. "But yeah. You'd never respect me if I backed down, right?" A quick wink - an attempt at defraying his own uneasy thoughts. "And... you know I'm not gonna go easy on you, right Melody?"

The sophomore may have hated the game, but if he had to play, then damn it all, he was going to play to win.

*  Battling for control over the fate of humanity had never felt more absurd. It couldn't be just a game - dark rituals like the one Aram had been waiting to finish unleashed horrors upon the world, misery and shadow and illness. Didn't they? Trying to arrange what little she knew about the situation into some sort of rational, coherent order gave Melody migraines. He represented a driving force behind the evils plaguing mankind. She had been gifted the ability to oppose him.

But they weren't supposed to battle to the death. Were they both just wasting their time, then?

"Of course not." Melody's eyes glittered like the crystal in her circlet as she tracked his movements. "Am I supposed to take you seriously if you surrender or throw the fight? Do you think I'm in this for my ego?" She sidestepped as she spoke, perhaps hoping the distraction would keep Aram from noticing as she approached the outer fringes of his arcane circle, her light fading its lines. "I'm serious. If you think you are, too, then..." Melody lowered her shield and brandished her sword again, pointing it straight towards Aram's chiseled face with the kind of motion that implied she was looking to carve a few extra lines in it. "Come at me."

* "What I'm serious about, Melody, is wrapping this stupid thing up, going home, and finishing my nap. So, yeah, cute as you are..." There was the rasp of metal upon metal as Aram shifted his grip on his weapon, gauntlet sliding along the steel haft. "...And don't get me wrong, you're really cute, but... I also really wanna get some shuteye." One step forward, solleret scraping across the dust and sedgegrass-cracked pavement. Narrowing the gap between the antipodes, closing the distance between them. Two loops inexorably drawn ever-closer. "So. Guess that's how it goes."

There was something ludicrous about threatening to beat a gorgeous woman that he was terribly fond of half-to-death for the sake of an extra few hours of shuteye. The warlock had long since come to accept that everything about this obscene shadow-war was ludicrous, however. The cause of a warm bed and a fluffed pillow was a hell of a lot more appealing than "eternal darkness" or whatever tripe the Bitch-Queen spouted.

The distance between the two of them was a few meters - well outside the range of Ardzaruni's warhammer, never mind her sword. There was a confidence in the way she carried herself that was lacking the last time: the girl was dangerous. The prickle up and down the back of his neck told the maleficar that. He had bested her before, however - and he could do it again. Rolling his fingers within their plated prison, Aram drew his lips straight, brow furrowed in focus. A click of the tongue, and the air temperature around him tangibly plunged, tiny sparkles of crystallized moisture dancing amidst the dust and gloom; a thin patina of frost crept across the concrete where he strode, crunching beneath his every step.

When he lunged forward with a hard push-off from his left leg, the sound was like sheet-ice shattering on a river.

* Reality had been peeled back for Melody, parts of its indecipherable clockworks revealed to her eyes. This early in her career, when she was still trying to find her feet, she struggled to make sense of the new rules. Deviance from the expected did not sit well with her. New experiences were difficult to handle.

This would not be a new experience. She had Aram's number, and that was enough for her to concoct a plan of attack. In the absence of uncertainty, there was nothing but conviction.

"Huh." A scoff, somehow dismissively bashful. His compliments (almost) bounced right off of her, as if they carried the same weight as the whispers she sometimes overheard at school - classmates discussing her figure and attitude. "I'll help you along, then." Not a death threat, but it could have been taken as one. Banter was something Melody had to work on, too, apparently.

Her stance shifted further. No longer cautious and defensive, Melody waited with her shield held at her side, blade held aloft like a pure, white torch. In the light, it was easy to see subtler differences in wardrobe: lighter armor all around, hints of skin here and there, her hands gloved instead of plated. Between that, the smoothness, and the polished gleam, she struck even more of a contrast to the thorned mountain of a man facing her down.

Aram telegraphed his first strike. Melody had begun to understand that this was How Things Worked, that the risk of alerting her was worth the unfathomable power it granted his hammer. She had also begun to understand the value of valiant posturing. When he moved, she waited and watched with hard, unblinking eyes.

A moment before impact, she smirked and huffed out a foggy breath. Lifting one foot out of that clinging frost, she spun in place and brought it down behind her with crushing force, cracking ice and pavement, making for herself a patch of ground where she could keep her footing rather than lose it. In the same motion, she brought her shield right back to bear, ready to field his opening shot. This time, she would not yield.

* Yes, she was braced. Yes, it was another stupid, reckless, headlong charge. Yes, her shield was raised, and her footing was solid. In just a few moments, the armoured magical girl had managed to stack up a healthy set of advantages in her favour - and here he was, plowing straight into her trap.

Didn't matter.

Aram's hammer bounced and skipped along the ground behind him as he surged forward, each bob of the black-iron nightmare tearing another chunk out of the neglected road as it came down. Mentally, he tallied the steps being taken, sizing up the strike zone: just like a hockey play. Know how long the stick is; know the goalie's reach. Always know your position on the ice. Iron jangling and adrenaline surging, he knew that he was within reach of her. Another step more, though - just a little bit more. Still oh-so-slightly out of her sword's reach, especially with her bracing like that.

Letting his weapon deflect up into the air from its latest hit on the terrain, Aram cinched up his grip on the weapon and, twisting his torso, brought it around hard: not at her weapon side, but squarely at her shield. With the shortened grip, the haft jutted out long before him, a bind and barrier to limit the angles her sword could maneuver.

Commit to the hit. His coach's words rang in his ear.

* There was no way around it: from what he had shown Melody so far, Aram seemed like kind of a meathead. To leave it at that was to ignore the fact many people were a bit thick compared to Miss Student Council Honor Student, of course - or that he hadn't been getting enough sleep lately, or any the other general detrimental effects of being forced to live the Evil Life. Whatever the case and whatever the cause, Aram's first strike was approximately as clever and creative as Melody's opening stance. She baited a hit and got what she wanted.

Aram might have thought he was safe with his big two-handed hammer, still outranging her even with his grip choked up higher on the haft. That would seem awfully cute in just a few moments.

Iron met chrome with a resounding crash. The moon-etched circle on Melody's left arm rang from the force of the blow. An incredible vibration rattled through her bones and into the ground. She gritted her teeth through the initial shock, then spoke in a strained whisper.

"Invertia."

Aram's follow-through disappeared; the recoil was as if he had bopped a firm surface with a squeaky hammer, and Melody bounced back, biting down on a yelp of surprise. The hit gave her enough air to clear the circle carved in concrete and land on the other side, skidding, half-kneeling, catching herself with her shield hand on the ground. After a moment spent gathering herself, Melody looked up at him, not a single straight, neat hair out of place.

Now?
No, not now.

"Disappointing." Melody stood and slapped the front of her still-humming shield with the flat of her blade. It was best, she had gleaned, to put a little showmanship into these things. "Not half as impressive as last time. Do you really think you'll win this time if you're phoning it in?"

* That deafening bell-ring of absolute offense versus formidable defense made Aram light up in a toothy grin. The reverberation of the blow rattled his forearms and shoulders, but he could take it: he'd expected that. The hit had done its job in binding Melody in place, and all he had to do was follow thr--

The plan fell apart in moments as the sudden collapse of resistance made the heavily-armoured warlock pitch forward perilously, stumbling across the broken ground she had kicked up behind her. He had leaned into the attack so hard, anticipating harsh recoil and a firm counter-point to pivot around, that the magical girl's sudden bounce-back - like nothing so much as a beachball gently swatted - left him utterly off-balance, straining hard to pull himself back upright. "Son of a bitch," the sophomore spat out, shoving his hammer forward as a hard brace to keep on his feet. The ground shattered from the savage impact, throwing up asphalt all around him... and there she was, all prim and proper.

"Yeah, cute," deadpanned out Melody's opponent as he regained some semblance of footing. Luckily, the distance put between the two of them kept her own options for retaliation down. Without skipping another beat, he shrugged and clenched his left fist, dark mist gathering about it. With a lob up in front him, a... dark-hued snowball? rose up into the air cheerfully, like nothing so much as a tennis ball about to be served. "Shatterfrost!" barked out Aram as he brought his weapon up to smash into the ice-ball as it arced back down - and immediately a burst of jagged black ice blasted forth like indiscriminate buckshot before him, frigid daggers carving furious furrows in steel and stone alike.

* Cute? Aram wasn't going to catch Melody off-guard, not while she still felt the impact buzzing in her grip and against her forearm. The ring of metal from their first collision did not fully fade away - it became a subtle tone that underscored the silence between their words and movements.

Launching into battle seemed to invigorate Aram, and he launched another offensive with hardly any delay. Melody stood smug and ready, tracking his movements with more than her eyes, reading the flows of his magic, trying to intuit his next move. Calling out attacks made the last part too easy. The moment he spoke, Melody understood, and by the time a storm of black icicles began to shred the air, she was already on one knee again, shield hefted to let daggers that would have otherwise scored a hit glance off of her armor and stick in the ground.

From behind her handheld cover, Melody glanced left, then right, frowning to herself. Magical battles had none of the chaos of a mundane melee - they moved in grand, orchestrated steps. The concept confused her, but the individual movements did not. Is this really how things are done? Shard after shard pierced the concrete around her, turning her immediate surroundings into a forest of blackened spikes. Were Melody a normal person, she would have to watch her step. As she was now, she could hop right out of that mess and ignore it.

That wouldn't be any fun.

Melody stood, casting another mildly irritated glance around at the mess Aram had made. The distance between them gave her time to act. Let's see if this works. She pulled back her shield and raised her sword aloft, as if about to call to the heavens expecting an answer... then spun it around and thrust downward, towards her other arm. Blade and barrier met with a click, former slotted inside the latter.

"Selene Shield..." Her identity was still a work in progress. "Show me more than a reflection of your power!" The residual hum cut out, overwhelmed by a blast of fire; the magical girl ripped her sword free, slashing in a horizontal arc that she allowed to carry her around in a full pirouette. A blaze encircled her, gradually widening; fragments of ice stuck in the ground and her shield melted away in its wake. "Solar Sword!" The atmosphere of soul-sucking frigidity was blasted away by blistering heat; the fiery circle expanded with a quickness, splashing against walls, lighting the brush sticking up through cracks in the concrete, and roaring straight towards her opponent.

Best of all, or perhaps worst: Melody's weapon was no longer that cute little gladius but a familiar white-hot greatsword, one that she hefted in one hand and wielded with a powerful partner.

* Fucking fire mages.

The thought, not for the first time, prickled in the back of Aram's armoured head as a wave of breath-stealing heat washed over his face, boiling away the trace frost residual clinging to his black plate. Of course the Bitch-Queen gave all of her poor little puppets powers of shadow and ice. And, of course, every damned other petticoated princess he got into a block-levelling brawl with ended up either having command of fire or light. The mismatch did him no favours - by the rules, he was right and properly piked.

Fuck the rules. It was either that... or using "that".

"If you were a magical boy, I'd say you're compensating for something," the warlock grunted as he twirled his hammer like a band baton, dancing its gargantuan heft between fingers and across knuckles. Each swoop and swirl of its blunt head cut a heavy whoosh, tiny snowflakes glittering in the guttering lamplight before winking out from Melody's radiant blast-wave. "And yes, they're a thing. Confusing as hell, but a thing." Flinty eyes focused, he made his way over the broken terrain between the two of them, each splash of his sabatons into the small puddles left by rapidly-melted ice-shards momentarily re-freezing the liquid. Right. Big weapon. Shield. The reach advantage was no longer on Aram Ardzaruni's side - and the defensive advantage was firmly hers. This was not a situation he was used to... but time on the ice gave him some ideas.

Stabbing the butt of his hafted weapon down into the ground, the arcanist grit his teeth as Pact-fuelled power shattered pavement and ripped through asphalt, tearing the ground asunder in a ferocious display of unholy strength. With the same impossible ease he had demonstrated earlier, he whipped the blunt implement about again, bringing its flat face right along the ground... and launching a shower of broken concrete in the armoured mahou shoujou's direction. Right behind it was him, weapon to the fore with every intention to close the gap.

* Did they really have to talk this much?

Melody had ended her spin in a wide stance, fiery sword held out at her side to flaunt its sheer length - completely open. Aram's exposition gave her the chance to straighten up and ready herself for another attack, one way or the other. Without any loyalties to a particular fandom, Melody had no bias against the concept of a 'magical boy', and so the revelation struck her with enough shocking force to make her blink impassively. Wasn't she staring straight towards one of those? True, most of the admittedly-few shoulders she had rubbed against while on the job belonged to other girls, but it was stupid - even sexist - to assume only women were capable of throwing around magic tricks and fighting (or supporting) evil.

"Okay..." Her uncomfortable reply broke the silence but not the tension, and each sweep of his heavy hammer through the air only wound it tighter. This configuration made sense to her: light against darkness, heat against cold, with both offensive and defensive advantage. Maybe. All she was 'compensating' for was weakness.

Melody couldn't dwell on it for long. Aram planted his weapon against the ground and conjured an attempt to bypass those newfound obstacles. There was something rote about the onrushing shower of pavement and the man hurtling towards her just behind it, and she knew how to react as if she had seen him do it a handful of times.

A forward lunge, an upward backhand sweep, a declaration: "Prominence!" It was like Melody had sliced a seam in reality leading to some fiery dimension; what debris wasn't immediately cleft apart by Melody's blade caught against the brilliant line of plasma she had carved into the air, then totally exploded into a hundred harmless pieces, flying wide and clattering harmlessly against enchanted armor.

That left Aram. The air moistened, then cooled as he barreled towards her, hammer first, as always. Melody took a second step and twisted her body into a forward thrust of her shield, smashing it straight into his oncoming hammer.

Another ear-splitting gong shattered the air. It took all Melody had to stand her ground after that hit, and yet she did without flinching or looking away from her opponent.

* All Hell opened up in front of the unwilling Dark Champion as he plunged forward, and still he forged on. The chunks of roadway detonated into shrapnel before his eyes, but that meant that damnable wall of fire wasn't directed at him. Purpose served, then. Sweat boiled off his brow and his lips cracked from the ambient blast-furnace heat, but he just had to close the gap. Magic took too long; magic was too mismatched. She'd learned from their last dance, and, for all his talk of not holding back, he really did not want to break out the big guns here.

He didn't know if he could call what he was doing a plan, but it was better than just swapping ill-timed quips.

The tip of his hammer - not the flat, but the top of its head - collided with Melody's shield with all the force of a lance's charge, but still she did not buckle or yield. That was fine. More than fine, even: if she'd recoiled, it would have thrown off the timing. Grin wild, the warlock... let go of his weapon. He didn't want to deal with his own side of the recoil, after all. Immediately it bounced away, smashing through a nearby wreck of a brick wall. No worries. It wouldn't do him any good at this point.

This close, even the mage's pyre-spells could not fully banish the skin-prickling chill of the maleficar's channeled arcana. One gauntleted hand grabbed the edge of the shieldbearer's pavise, twisting in a mighty effort to wrench it aside - and the other came up short and sharp from below, directing a powerful blow towards her midriff as he kept hurtling forward, outright throwing himself at his foe.

Footing didn't matter, now. Aram Ardzaruni wanted a brawl.

* The hammer bounced off, clipped her shield with one of its striking surfaces, then went spinning off to one side to spontaneously remodel one of the disused buildings around them. Not quite what Melody was expecting, but it worked for her purposes. Holding on to her defense wasn't going to kill her hand this time, too, which was a plus.

It wouldn't cause him any discomfort, either, which Melody realized in an instant when he grabbed hold of her battered shield's rim and pulled it aside. The powers-that-were hadn't chosen Melody as their champion out of desperation - she had some measure of killer instinct - so, partly out of impulse and partly mimicking what Aram had done, Melody relaxed her grip and let him claim that brilliant disk for himself. If he wanted it, he could have it... for the few seconds it existed away from its owner before it dissolved into glitter.

That just left the rest of her armor. And the greatsword she still held, glowing with the heat of a furnace, a literal representation of the magical girl's passionate convictions. Warmth glowed without and within; the chill creeping up her spine had no power over her. Rather than freezing up, she tensed, bracing herself.

For the first time, Aram scored a clean hit... and with nothing keeping them tethered together, Melody wasn't forced to tank the entire blow or surrender any leverage. It sent her flying, sparks of fire and motes of light dancing in the air behind her as she flew back... back... and into a faraway wall. The awesome force of impact buckled the concrete around her and caused enough of a tremor to be felt underfoot, even at a distance. Melody stuck in place for a few seconds, long enough for the cloud of rock dust to start to disperse, all the broken chips to finish tinkling to the earth, all the magical-girly particle effects to fade... then fell forward and landed lightly on her feet, swaying but remaining upright.

That hurt.

Head bowed, Melody began to advance on her foe again with slow, measured steps. Both hands were free to clutch her Solar Sword, and so she did; its tip struck fountains of sparks with each stride and left a shallow, scorched trench in the ancient asphalt as she dragged it behind her.

* According to the lamentations of several people he'd shared the hockey rink with in the past, Aram Ardzaruni had a solid punch. With his knuckles wrapped in hooked iron and his already-formidable frame infused with all the profane power of his Dark Pact, his strikes could sunder stone, buckle steel, and shatter bones. Precisely one of those strikes caught Melody in her lower ribcage, just below her sternum: even through her armour, he could feel the crunch of impact.

And yet, it was not what he had planned for.

The objective had been to tackle Melody, smash her to the ground, and - in simple terms - beat her to a bloody pulp in a straight-up grappling match. He could win that: he had the size and strength advantage over her, and this close, neither side would have the chance to invoke arcana. Just raw blunt trauma applied to magicka-infused bodies, and that was a match-up he had confidence in. The objective had been foiled, perversely, by the sheer amount of force he had put into his strike - instead of bringing her to the ground, it had sent her sailing away like a slapshot, slamming her into an old warehouse wall. For a moment, as the dust obscured his vision, he hoped that it would be enough.

She was stubborn, though. He knew that about her. And, sure enough, her stubbornness carried the day.

Reaching out into the night air, Aram once again made a clasping motion, and his weapon of choice reappeared in his fist: its outline fading into solidity, all brute force and raw power. As she advanced, he did too; he rested the hammer upon one ungainly pauldron, his other hand swinging freely at his side. The gap between them closed, and the Pactbound champion scarcely paused as he grabbed an abandoned old parking meter, wrenching it out of its moorings to join him as a second weapon. There were no need for quips, now. Determination poured off Melody like the flickering flames of her weapon, and he couldn't help but grit his teeth and tighten his jaw in response. The fight was on.

* "For someone who wasn't very interested in fighting... nnh, you sure put a lot into that punch."

Melody hesitated to cover a cough and wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand, staining her glove with blood. Aram paused to arm himself with something improvised; watching him reminded her, and the ache in her gut inspired her to follow suit with a spell she had rehearsed.

Without breaking stride, Melody held her free hand out to the side and closed her fingers around a piece of nothing that became something: the rim of her shield. Step by step she drew closer, both to Aram and to the outer ring of his summoning circle, and wherever her boots came down upon blackened tendrils, they smoked and boiled away. The flames limning her blade glowed brighter but did not blaze - rather, they concentrated until the fire disappeared, leaving her holding a white-hot length of metal. Hoping it would bend under the stress of impact was likely wishful thinking.

Not that she planned to swing it at him like this.

"That must mean I have permission to go all-out." Melody moved, flicking her shield up into the air overhead, and at this angle - or perhaps the universe moved to suit her purposes - it hung at the apex of its arc directly in front of the moon. She caught it there with an upward thrust of her sword, not-so-neatly stopping its spin - there was a shriek of metal, and sparks showered around her. The two fastened together with a click - there was a hiss as the core temperature visibly changed, crawling up and out of sight - a metallic groan as the crossguard re-oriented and the shield's rim sharpened - and with a word, the transformation was complete.

"Eclipse."

Darkness fell, almost absolute save for the corona that burst into existence around the circular head of her axe. Its light did not even gleam off of her armor - all that could be seen of Mystical Melody at first were her eyes, two points of light glowing like those of a hunter lurking in deep shadow.

She advanced a step, and the earth shook as if she hefted the moon itself in her hands. Another, and asphalt buckled beneath her. Her boot touched the outer ring, and she advanced beyond that boundary without hesitation. Melody knew she could stand up to Aram, so what reason did she have to fear anything that came out of his little gate?

Wrapping her other hand around her weapon, Melody brought it low, readying for a swing. With her unblinking eyes locked on Aram, she gathered the blood collecting in her mouth and casually, disdainfully spat towards the center of his infernal diagram. Another challenge, less noble and more menacing than her first.

Come at me.

* "Cute trick."

The deadpan snark concealed a twinge of uncertainty in the advancing warlock: he knew how she worked with a sword and a shield, but... an axe? That was new. That was different. In this line of work, different tended to mean unpleasant surprises, and Aram had put up with enough of those tonight. Still, there was no backing down now. His sabatons crunched the runic binding rings underfoot, their existence forgotten; there was only the foe before him, the clash... and his own boiling blood, screaming out to go for the win. He had some cute tricks of his own, after all.

Lazily tossing and catching the co-opted length of steel and coin-operated machinery in his left hand, Aram pointed it directly at the advancing Magical Melody, eyes narrowing at her contemptuous challenge. "Still got a few cute tricks of my own, though. Black Ice Bulwark, Mark Two!"

Yeah, so the name was a work in progress. And he was never good at the entire "naming" schtick anyway.

Obsidian-hued frost congealed around the parking meter, glittering crystals blossoming all across the rusty metal. The glossy black ice spread over the surface, layering the humble improvised weapon in thick slabs of glacial darkness. Jagged spines jutted out here and there, building upon itself extensively; in short order, the meter had become a spiked club of infernal chill, small frost-flakes shearing off it and tinkling against the ground beneath. It'd hold up better to heavenly fire-axes than mere mortal steel, if nothing else.

Momentarily, the two paused, staring hard at each other. The maleficar tested the weights of his respective weapons, shifting his grip on both experimentally. He didn't even notice the faint hum in the asphalt below, nor the sudden pulse in the air, like some obscene heart pumping for the first time. He spat to his side once in acknowledgment of the dark-haired mystical maiden... and then he was on the attack, bringing ice-club and hammer alike about in a savage scissoring strike.

* Two weapons were not automatically twice as good as one.

Melody's axe was a fusion of two weapons in the first place: her holy aegis and her burning avenger. A pair of fully-powered magical armaments, up against Aram's lone hammer and the improvised bludgeon of jagged ice.

It was easy to get too swept up in the thrill of battle; the tension building in the air felt natural and the sudden pulse blended in with the pounding of Melody's heart. With an expression frostier than either of her opponent's weapons, Melody spun her axe, pointed its head towards the ground, and buried it half a foot into the pavement in front of her, planting its shaft in the path of both weapons arcing towards her from either side.

Two impacts rang out, almost simultaneously. This time, neither Melody nor her weapon went flying - her weapon stopped both of his cold, and she held firm against the vibration beneath her hands without flinching.

"Cremation." She spoke the word without preamble; a mystic circle appeared beneath her in a flash, centered on the head of her axe, and heat abruptly boiled upwards, wreathing them in fire. A quick invocation lacked the punch of a full performance, but it would certainly heat his armor and soften his, uh, parking meter, wouldn't it? It bought her space (maybe,) warded off that damned chill... and lit her up. Her expression was impassive, imposing, and the breeze whirling about her stirred her unbound hair.

The more Aram seemed to enjoy his work, the less sympathy Melody felt for him.

* Melody's defensive maneuver was about as perfect as her heavily-armoured foe could have hoped for. Her defensive maneuver had stopped the initial strike, yes, but she had left herself wide open in the process. With a feral grin lighting up his craggy features beneath his (slightly askew) helmet, he took one more step forward, shoulders straining as he prepared to shove forward with hammer and club alike: with her axe buried in the ground, all he had to do was slide along its haft and crush her cuirass beneath raw, blunt force. The distance between them narrowed as his gauntleted fists clamped down on his implements of destruction...

...And then the world was heat.

Black ice sputtered and spat as a thick cloud of steam rose up between the two of them, and Aram instead used his momentum to kick off her half-buried axe, putting several feet back towards them. His own aura of hellish chill had, mercifully, kept him from being boiled alive in his own armour... but still it singed damnably on his skin, leaving his face red-flushed like a lobster. "Ow ow ow!" he hissed, shaking out his left hand; chunks of half-melted frost sloughed off the now-misshapen pole, falling to the ground with wet splashes. No doubt he'd look like he'd fallen asleep on a beach for the next few days... but, more than that, something about the entire exchange - as small and stupid as it was - rankled the sophomore.

"Fuck it," Aram declared. A quick rearward bound put another few meters between them, the ground beneath them crisscrossed with faintly-glowing binding marks. The sallow light radiating from them flickered and guttered erratically, parts of the runework shining as others plunged into darkness, crisscrossed by cracks and jagged marks from their clashes - but the responsible arcanist was too busy tossing his half-molten improvised weapon at his feet, instead shifting both hands to grasp his warhammer. "Ebony..." he declared in a booming voice that echoed out across the bay, and with that, his weapon seemed to fizzle and fade in his hands, dissolving into... an outline, a shadow, a monstrous void grasped between those gauntlets. The edges of his armour grew hazy around the edges, small threads trailing off the magicka-invoked apparel, as the inky blackness he held twisted and squirmed, the darkness a living thing.

Aram's eyes levelled squarely on Melody. "Told you I'm not gonna go easy on you." It was a stage whisper, but loud enough to be heard over the fray. "TWILIGHT!" The flattened sketch suddenly snapped into place in the vague fascimile of a hammer's shape, an open wound in reality that showed only utter emptiness. The air crackled again, as if reality was just another sheet of ice being punched through by a pick-strike.

So focused was the warlock on his invocation that he didn't even notice the motion behind him... or the slick rasping against concrete.

* Stopping those attacks had not budged Melody's axe, and so neither did Aram when he kicked off of that unyielding haft. She stood straight-backed, dignified and serene, watching him with that same haughty, serious expression... until he retreated again. A smirk cracked the fiery maiden's metaphorical ice. Did I win already?

Best not to celebrate too early. Aram wasn't out of the fight yet. He discarded his makeshift weapon - perhaps thinking in hindsight that trying to reinforce with frost against a pyromancer hadn't been a good plan - and wrought some fell invocation upon his own signature bludgeon - perhaps hoping that his own empowerment would make it an equal to her Eclipse.

She had not even used it yet.

"You think I fear darkness?" Melody spat again, trying to rid herself of the distracting taste of her own blood. Her mail still glowed faintly, enough to dispel the shade beneath her feet and between the plates of her armor. She had learned, and that left him with nothing but the direct approach. Melody plucked up that axe in one hand, gave it a deft half-spin as if it weighed as much a walking cane, and rested its haft against one shoulder, the fiery orb at its end hovering above and behind the other. "There is no darkness strong enough to resist the light of even a single candle." As she spoke, the flame ringing her axe's circular head flared, licking higher, and the metal began to shine a dull red as its internal heat grew too intense to contain.

"Prominence!" What sounded like smack talk actually functioned as the incantation for a much stronger spell. Melody used her own body as a fulcrum to swing her axe in a broad, sweeping arc, striking nothing but flinging out a wave of plasma bright enough to dye their battleground a hellish red. One small mercy: it definitely did not travel at the speed of light, though the heat grew blistering well before it made contact.

** AND NOW THE TENTACLES APPEAR! **

* There was a darkness beyond darkness, an event horizon where even rays of light were trapped and left to die. The very surroundings about Aram's invocation seemed to grow washed-out and faded as colour drowned in the inky blackness he held to his side. The spell devoured ambient glow, swallowed up the flicker of the street lights, and even gorged itself on the flickering fire of Melody's pyromancy: there was only the void, gluttonous and absolute. The warlock shifted his footing slightly, jaw tense and lips drawn tight; bits of his armour unravelled before the magical girl's eyes, the magicka used to sustain their conjuration being devoured by that dark pit he focused and sharpened in his fists.

The varsity athlete could feel the second heartbeat hammering in his chest, off-tempo from his own. He could feel the heat in his veins going cold, chilling his blood as it coursed through his frame. His breath came out frosty, crystallizing the moment it hit the air; rime gathered on his skin, adding a skiff of faint paleness to his otherwise-boiled flesh. Those close-set lips curled back, bared teeth, opened: "STRIKE!" he roared, twisting his entire body about in a wide, side-sweeping swipe. The fact that there was a gap between them meant nothing. The Obsidian Twilight Strike was his weapon of last resort, and it cared little for such paltry distances.

The sharp tear in existence whipped about with frightening haste, leaving behind a jagged ripple in the air: this reality coming unthreaded momentarily, ripped open by Aram Ardzaruni's attack. Stretching out to consume all before it, railings simply ceased to exist, streetlights suddenly came crashing down as chest-sized chunks of them dissipated in the air, and remaining fragments of brick walls collapsed to the ground, their support unmade. Melody's Prominence sparked brightly as the black hole collided with it, its furious radiance struggling against the void... before even it guttered out and died, drowned in nonexistence.

There was nothing left between the fell attack and the magical girl.

...Nothing, it would seem, except the Obsidian Twilight Strike suddenly dissipating into so much mist and shadow, a cold fog that parted immediately.

A deafening crunch followed the spontaneous collapse of the spell. The source of the sound was none other than Aram himself... dangling awkwardly in the air, held aloft by some glistening tendril of shimmering quicksilver that had wrapped itself around his head. His armoured bulk swayed like a severed marionette as the hulking tentacle whipped him about again, slamming his entire body into a tangled mess of rebar and brick nearby; its iron crown bent and twisted, his helmet bounced away from the crushing impact, rolling and skipping across the pavement to land near Melody's feet. With a dismissive flick, the warlock's bulk was flung away like so much trash: a broken toy discarded.

Flesh spilled out from the binding circle in waves, squamous and gleaming, a wave of writhing platinum that surged forth with ravenous intensity. And with the nearest prey out of the equation, the constantly-multiplying mountain of appendages slithered and squirmed towards the next target: Magical Melody.

* This was what they called an 'ultimate attack', wasn't it? Melody had attempted to disrupt its casting but hadn't quite been timely enough. The last word rent a hole in physical space, opening it to the void, recklessly challenging the very physical existence of their surroundings... and that wave of unbeing bore down upon her.

Huh... Melody froze in place, staring, hung up on trying to comprehend the logistics of the existential glitch rushing towards her, threatening to swallow her up. I thought he wasn't trying to kill me.

Whether or not he was, he didn't. Before it made contact, Melody regained her senses and took a step back, giving her axe a twirl as she restored her two-handed grip upon it. She should probably move, right? An unaided leap would be more than enough to clear its immediately-apparent danger zone, though she had unlocked access to so much more power now that it would be a waste not to make it flashy and ensure her safety.

"Surrender to purifying flame!" The earlier invocation had been short, yet almost as powerful as the first time Melody had used it in Aram's presence. Devoting a 'cast time' to this familiar spell powered it up in an instant. "Last Rite..." The cracked asphalt around Melody's boots gleamed with a silvery light. "Cre--"

What?

Aram's Dusk Ebony Whatever collapsed before Melody could finish her invocation. The air cleared before her and the light that had fled returned, glowing all the brighter in the sudden absence of ravenous darkness. No need? The final syllables rested on her tongue, ready to be spat forth if Aram was at his usual follow-up antics again...

Melody watched, bemused, as a gleaming tendril lifted her nemesis by his ridiculous helmet and ended the fight for her in a single anticlimactic blow. Well... that was--

They were beneath her. The ground boiled with flesh as the gate opened directly under her feet. Melody windmilled one arm as her balance wavered and seemed to forget for a moment that she clutched a very sturdy walking assistant in her other hand. Nonplussed and just barely beginning to panic, Melody took her eyes off of Aram and glanced down.

* Some keening wail, just far enough above the range of hearing to leave only a profound sense of unease, ripped through the night sky as the neglected and battle-scarred binding circle gave profane birth. Arcana fizzled and crackled along the sundered runes, bright blue-white sparks leaving the air heavy with the scent of ozone. With the geometries shattered and the potential master of the summoning out of the equation, there was nothing left to bind the alien will of the atrocity that ripped its way into existence. Concrete buckled and burst as more tendrils and tentacles surged up from the ground, streaks of silver squirming and arching in the evening air; like some foul cancer, the wall of shining meat multiplied upon itself relentlessly, appendage upon appendage seemingly springing from themselves.

Moments ago, there was nothing. Now there was a sea of shimmering steel, writhing with unholy life.

Lightly-tapered lengths lunged towards Melody in relentless waves: some were like tiny ropes and fingers in their slender shapes, others solid wrists and pipes in girth. All flowed and shifted like molten metal, small burrs and scales forming at random intervals upon some of them. Wherever they brushed against her flesh, they left a sensation of profound stickiness alongside a nerve-prickling tingle, metallic-sheened ooze clutching to the skin greedily. From all angles they poured in, aiming for wrists and ankles, calves and forearms, and even her elegant length of hair: yearning to coil and bind, clutch and grasp. Many glanced and bounced off her, dragging across sturdy armour and exposed patches of skin alike in their clumsy enthusiasm, leaving only their messy slime...

...But there were so many, and not all went so astray.

* Melody saw it. She heard it. She felt it. She did not understand it. The silvery substance beneath her writhed and boiled like a cancerous growth of metallic flesh in time-lapse, growing new shapes and shifting and refining old ones before her eyes in the space of a blink. What was happening? She needed to move, but what was happening?

That hesitation cost her. The sea of tendrils found motive and purpose, moving out of sync yet as one, spiraling inwards. Towards Melody. She was their prey, and she realized it too late. "Cre--" The magical girl restarted her aborted incantation and didn't make any more progress than the last time before the word was stolen from her lips. Shock and revulsion filtered through her as slimy somethings twined around her arms, her legs, her middle, her hair - how dare they! Flexing her arms, clenching her core, Melody twisted and tried to bring her axe to bear.

One of the limbs snaking around her curled around the shaft once, twice, half a dozen times, and it popped out of her grasp.

"Ah--" Melody's mouth dropped open in panic. Another shudder wracked her as oily ooze soaked into her underclothes and seeped beneath her armor. Distracted and disgusted, Melody forgot all about her more efficient means and began to physically struggle, pulling at the snare that was swiftly gaining control of her entire body, starting to pick apart her defenses and wriggle its way into any available openings...

* Before the overwhelmed magical girl could find her bearings - before she could muster that apocalyptic hellfire she commanded - a heavy-hanging tendril smacked its rounded tip against her cheek, leaving a welt from the stinging impact - and another smear of its filth. Writhing and thrashing against her, it squirmed on the spot, flailing like a fish out of water... right until the end of that unnatural appendage found her shocked mouth and promptly plunged inside, forcing itself past her open lips with furious intensity. The savage intrusion forced her jaw to hinge wider, stretching her mouth wide open as it slammed against her tonsils bluntly, coating her tongue and palate with the coppery tang of its taste; the smooth, rubbery densensess of its rippling texture. Greedily the tentacle coiled upon itself right before her eyes, drawing back slightly before driving forward again, bludgeoning the back of her throat with all the force of a hammer-blow...

...Or a particularly insistent lover.

Smaller, thinner tendrils slipped beneath armour and clothing alike, coiling around clasps and straps, squeezing them tightly and jerking at the bindings with something approaching awareness. Working their way into every nook and cranny available, they slid between outfit and skin, leaving glistening paths across collarbones and flanks, thighs and stomach. Here one of her greaves fell to the ground, only to be subsumed utterly by the ever-multiplying swarm of silver; here one of her leggings ripped around a pulsating tendril, its coils writhing furiously against her skin amidst the shredded hosiery. A sharp yank at one of Melody's ankles lifted her aloft effortlessly, leaving her dangling head-down as the tentacle lodged in her throat continued to pummel and pound at her gullet, prying her throat open by degrees. More sodden chunks of fabric and steel alike fell down about her, ripped off one piece at a time...

* One of those tentacles immediately endeavored to let Melody know what a horrible idea it had been to leave her jaw slack. A slap wasn't enough to rouse her and clue her in before it squirmed closer, found its access, and greedily pushed inside. Her stomach heaved; she gagged instantly. The insistent thing demanded entrance past a barrier objects so intact and so large were not allowed. Melody's emphatic denial did not deter it; it shoved in again. Her throat clenched, and her eyes began to water. The flavor of this mysterious aggressor was not half as strange as its flexible rigidity, or its... friendliness. Once again, Melody found herself at a loss to explain what was happening in the aftermath of a clash with her opposite. Prior theorycrafting about situations like this had her suffering an ignoble fate, being torn to pieces or corrupted, not... molested.

A muffled clank and a breath of air against scantily-clad skin let Melody know that whatever creature Aram had summoned was, indeed, stripping her - peeling away her protection to get at the soft, sweet schoolgirl center. A lapse in vigilance had led to complete entrapment, and it settled on taking advantage rather than truly capitalizing. (Would she ever understand how Evil worked?) Already disarmed and half-naked, Melody gave one last fruitless tug against the tentacles holding her aloft and was immediately repaid by a swift and disorienting shift in position: legs off the ground, blood rushing to her head and making her consciousness swim. She struggled to breathe, inhaled through her nose, coughed into the vaguely phallic appendage smearing its slickness against her lips and the inside of her mouth.

That cough was the last hint of resistance Mystical Melody could muster. The next strike forced both throat and eyes wide open; she squealed in alarm and arched her back, thrashing anew and making mere inches of swiftly-reclaimed headway against that tentacled mass...

* As the perversely-minded tendrils stripped the nubile schoolgirl of her uniform, its quicksilver meat replaced fabric and metal: flesh left bare and trembling in the humid air was bound and encoiled by a web of tendrils, cinching and coiling about her lush curves. An erratic quiver ran through the entire creature as it embraced Melody in its unholy graps, winding and coiling around her midriff and beneath her bust; with a snap, one bra-strap was ripped apart by a particularly sharp jerk from one of the smaller tentacles, leaving her impressive breasts to be looped around by new invaders. The appendages slid and ground against each other and her flesh alike, a mix of slippery slickness, the squelching gooeyness of their ooze... and the occasional rasp and grate of the odd scale or barb upon some errant limb. Tiny little extensions wound tightly around her nipples, tugging them upward sharply - enough to raise her considerable chest up from bouncing against her collarbones from the awkward position.

All across the magical girl was sensation: writhing, shifting, sliding, rubbing. Scarcely a bare patch of skin went unmolested by the unwelcome attentions for long. Ankles and toes were teased, the backs of her knees were flickered across... more and more slid down betwixt her thighs, winding around her legs like ivy in their inexorable advance towards her sodden silvery panties. The dangle of her single-limb hold was reinforced by a whiplike bind around her shapely hips; the end of that particular tendril looped itself around the waistband of her sole remaining piece of modesty, shredding it with a sharp lurch. Immediately the mixed sensations of countless tentacles slid against her exposed mound, dragged down between the cleft of her rear cheeks: slipping and shimmying against her vulnerable loins, prying her legs further apart as she dangled.

The tentacle in her mouth took advantage of Melody's growing surrender to inch and squirm further into its target. It pressed tongue and uvula flat against the inside of her mouth, jabbing and battering its way past her tonsils... and then it began to bore out her throat with corkscrewing twists, sliding deeper into her esophagus. The schoolgirl's throat visibly bulged from the invasion as more of that tangy ooze seeped out of the invader, painting her oral cavity with silver before overflowing and spilling out over the edges of her O-stretched lips. And still it kept moving, wanting more, demanding more!

* Was Melody growing jaded so quickly? Her modesty lay in as many tatters as her armor and clothing, a pile that grew the further Aram's creature advanced its lascivious plans. Tears collected in her eyes, broke and ran up towards her bangs rather than down her cheeks. It was uncomfortable, not to mention supremely embarrassing, to feel creeping violation caress every inch of skin, leaving behind warm, glossy trails and faint pink marks where less-smooth graspers had dragged and scratched. She didn't want this... what girl in her right mind would?

That was what Melody Parker told herself, and a moment (and a throat-deep thrust) later, she found herself having to really convince herself: no, she didn't secretly envy some of the victims starring in her favorite secret shames, didn't harbor a shameful curiosity of what it might be like to have a heartless, inhuman dominant shove into her mouth without asking and subject her to its unique lusts. She didn't want one of those caressing or creeping or biting tendrils to tear her panties away, exposing a sex that wasn't getting just a tiny bit wet at all and promptly smearing some foul lubricant all over her in preparation for...

"Gmmph!" Another throat-stretching thrust shattered Melody's reverie. This was no dream, no hallucination - a bona-fide tentacle monster had erupted from Aram's infernal gate, and a handful of its feelers were investigating her nethers, judging each subtle, anxious twitch drawn out by a caress here, a pinch and a tug elsewhere. Melody flexed her arms once more, then gave up that pointless struggle; better to pay more attention to timing her breathing around the oral invader, lest she actually suffocate...

This wasn't quite the same as being dominated and mounted by Aram - by a person. It was a monster, not mindless, not exactly unintelligent, definitely curious... it had complete control, yet it was disposed towards a performance that pleased - even served - more than it harmed. Seconds ticked by; a situation that had already spiraled out of control kept escalating, accelerating. Melody's nipples had already begun to ache and tingle before unsettling slimy ropes gripped and pinched at her breasts, and this aberration hadn't toyed with her labia for more than a minute before Melody finally went slack, half-closing her eyes. It wanted in... and she let her free leg relax, bending at the knee, drawing it down and to the side to splay her thighs invitingly wide.

* Did the abomination somehow acknowledge the bound and helpless maiden's surrender, or had it simply satisfied its animalistic cunning with its sinuous explorations? Raising her a little higher, the beast left Melody to sway in its grasp, her relaxed leg dipping down all the more as its windings about her waist squirmed and shuffled. Most of the girl was now coated in a thin sheen of sticky slime, making her shine like polished silver; skin twitched and jangled underneath the muck, spurring on a heat that radiated outward the longer the ooze clung to her. Tendril-tips - thick and thin, rough and smooth - prodded at her labia, slightly parting those lips of hers as they squirmed back and forth...

...Behind, the tentacles showed less patience.

Winding tendrils grasped her glutes possessively, prying them apart for the hard rock and writhe of a particularly girthy - and bumpy - length of sinister silver against the tender valley between her rear cheeks. The uneven texture rasped against her pucker with each wriggle and squirm of the creature, its roughness caked beneath layers of its own goo. Its sloped end caught against that ring of hers in its wanderings and thrashed at the sudden pause in progress... but then it drew away from her skin slightly, reorienting itself for this tempting target. Wrapped around the inside of her thigh where leg met crotch, the outstretched tip prsesed itself down forcefully against the cleft of her derriere, sliding, slipping... right until it caught her thoroughly-coated anus. A wind, a thrash, a push - and it was prying open that shameful entrance of hers relentlessly, forcing her to take the thick-set and swollen invader against that smallest and snuggest of holes. Other, smaller tips battered against her outstretched ring, massaging its hard-pressed boundaries in an attempt to feed yet more into her.

And still it merely teased her from the front - although the squelch and slurp of that aggressive throatfucking it subjected the schoolgirl to was hardly "a tease." By inches it drilled out her gullet, withdrawing slightly before plunging back forward. The pressure through the roof of her mouth against her sinuses was considerable, but nothing compared to the way it ravaged her airway, leaving it a sloppy mess coated in its tingling, gummy gunk.

*  Melody's pulse began to pound dangerously in her head, and her face glowed pink. Didn't this stupid critter understand how circulation worked? She was liable to pass out if it kept this up! Though her vision began to swim, Melody wasn't actually feeling any ill effects from a compromised airway... was this beast merely toeing the line, being just considerate enough, or was there some magic at work keeping her from choking? Her throat certainly welcomed the flexible phallus pushing deep inside without much of a problem after that initial probe...

The inside of her mouth felt a little off, a little funny. The silvery goo rubbing off against her lips and tongue felt warm, even faintly sweet, as if it were slowly filling her head with honey. Her neck flexed around that noisy, energetic tentacle fucking her without remorse as if taking it was all in a day's work. Bit by bit, thrust by thrust, letting this thing enjoy her mouth was flipping Melody's switch...

The poor girl didn't get much back. A limb or two caressed her flush mound, bathing it over and over again in slippery goo, yet the monster's interests lie solely in filling her where it was least proper. The tap at her backdoor was much less a tease than a demand - a few slippery grinds against her plush backside, then a twist and a shove straight inside. The magical girl jerked, looked alive, even fought back for just a moment or two, stricken by a flash of very real panic. No - not there! No matter how fastidious Melody's habits, it would always be a dirty place...

And within moments it was being reamed with the same lack of effort and regard for propriety as her throat. Coughing, choking, uselessly bucking her hips, the once-dignified magical girl floundered, trying with all her might to find some way to display herself so that her bestial lover would slip into where it was needed. Melody was too far gone by now to mind whether that meant turning an already vigorous double into a triple... or something even more comprehensive.

* The swarm of tendrils twisted their hapless plaything this way and that, roughly reorienting her upon a living tide of rubbery, unnatural flesh. Her upside-down dangling form was wrenched sideways before being propped vaguely upright, the shift in her positioning punctuated by a particularly strenuous bounce inside of her penetrated ass. The girthy tentacle tangibly coiled within her before springing inward, aided by gravity as it roughly slid deep into her rectum; the knobbly, ooze-slicked appendage scraped and dragged demandingly every single inch of the way, rasping hard against her most shameful passage... and stretching it far more than any youthful experimentations of hers ever had. Thickly-woven tentacles wrapped around her ankles and thighs stretched her legs further apart, each thrashing thrust into her gut causing her pelvis to buck furiously before the bindings on her limbs wrenched her right back into place.

Everywhere around the magical girl's limited field of vision, there was more. More of those quicksilver tentacles drooling their addling slime, more pumping at her overstuffed throat, more winding and curling about her nubile body so that every single second was a riot of profane caresses. Beneath her, tiny pseudotendrils wormed their way around the edge of the savage appendage drilling into her rear, joining the main assailant in sliding past her obscenely overstretched anus as it bounced her around strenuously. Compared to the main trunk, they were just tiny little things, but still they squiggled and lashed just against the inside ring of her tender entrance, forcing her just that little bit wider.

To the front, the abomination seemed to finally weary of its toying game. Several swollen tips wrapped around each other as they battered and nudged at Melody's already-spread labia, drowning themselves in their heat... right before they found a spot even more yielding. With another wild piston-pump that sent her entire bound frame a-bobble, her sex was finally defiled in turn, the wildly-corkscrewing mass thrashing and flailing as it sunk into her. Front and back assailants ground against each other through the thin membrane separating the passages, tossing the schoolgirl about like flotsam upon a silvery wave.

* Something like this had already happened once before - 'like this' in a way that followed a similar thematic arc, even if the mechanics wildly differed. Taken aback, overpowered, stripped, seduced, taken. Melody didn't know how to feel about any of it - or she wouldn't have if she had been able to think clearly. The silvery slime spattering her skin made it simple to shove into small spaces, and something about it lubricated her mind, as well. She couldn't hold on to the idea that she had fumbled on yet another patrol, that she was paying for it by allowing this tentacled horror to take advantage of her... and as late arrivals wound about her limbs and tickled at her already-occupied orifices, Melody began to lose her grip on the notion that she had any real reason to be out this late.

Oh, god. Two familiar words that came readily to the magical girl's lips whenever she was sitting on a toy; at the moment, they were occupied, so all Melody could manage was a groan of uncomfortable pleasure. This cursed, mindless fucking machine couldn't have known that she had grown wistful for something more substantial than the dildo she had worked up the courage to buy not long ago - and it had taken all she could muster just to buy something so standard! And yet there was nothing she could buy, no one she could rent, who could come close to emulating the gleaming appendage vigorously stretching her anus. Was she weird for enjoying this? Enjoying anal sex at all? At her age, at any age? Melody lacked the mental wherewithal to entertain any of those questions, especially with so many reasons to be flustered already coiling around and thrusting inside of her...

The world whirled; the ground placed itself where it belonged. Melody blinked, and her vision cleared within moments. So many... A forest of fronds in dozens of different sizes and shapes surrounded her, far more than the uncountable number already focusing on her... there had to be hundreds of them. Why were they here? Why were they doing this to her? Why--

A gentle tapping down below derailed that train of thought, and Melody jerked, eyes going wide with panic. Not like fingers - nothing like fingers - touch after slimy touch prodded against her inner thighs, then her bare, dripping sex, dozens of them in all. In the moment before they took her, she went rigid, as if under the delusion she could fight, and the sound of her softly whining for mercy was lost in the symphony of flesh surrounding her, filling her.

Then it pressed inside.

Once Melody had fingered herself or ridden a toy long enough, all it really took was a gentle touch. 'Gentle' this was not. A strangled cry escaped her occupied mouth as she was finally, entirely penetrated, and her body lurched, trying to fight its bindings and bend itself over backwards as she was rocked by climax.

* A more considerate lover may have gently ridden out Melody's body-jarring orgasm: coaxing it on with steady sensation, dragging it out for as long as possible before gently guiding her down from those dizzying heights. The extradimensional monstrosity freely violating her was not a 'considerate lover', however. It showed no sign of acknowledging her climax or having any intention of doing anything differently - it simply plundered her every hole, her own gushing arousal merely more wetness to squelch and slurp messily amidst the undulating wave of stomach-bulging, throat-straining thrusting. Outside the melee, barely any of her bare flesh could be seen beneath the wall of writhing silver; inside, there was just unending motion coiling and curling around her. Nipples and wrists, ankles and napes, necks and palms and clitoris: all of it was fair game to be dragged against, slathered, and despoiled.

The beast bent its plaything this way and that, forcing her to bend and arch and stretch as per the incomprehensible whims of the writhing atrocity. Each passing moment more of that slippery slime sloughed off invading appendages to remain inside her, slickly clinging to inner walls to further ease the pressure and passage of yet more ferocious assaults. Some of the tendrils nested inside her cunt withdrew with audible pops, only to be quickly replaced by more; the entire bundle constantly pounded and plowed her pretty little pussy, stretching it obscenely with an endless rhythm of winding and unwinding, coiling and thrashing, and plunging a dozen different directions inside her. It felt like every single free inch inside her sex was stuffed... and that may very well have been true.

The overfullness from the front bore down all the harder upon her back passage, squeezing its own invading swarm all the more, yet it still sodomized her relentlessly, wantonly using her gut for its own perverse purposes. Every single knob, bump, ridge, and spur from each of the tentacles invading her ass could be felt as they bounced her about relentlessly, battering her inner walls with rubbery pressure. The assailant of her throat wrenched itself out of her airway roughly, leaving her utterly raw and ravaged - right before it pumped right back in again, surging straight path her tonsils and burying itself deep in her gullet.

Would it ever end?

* Melody was punished for her feedback in the same instant that she gave it. Once her body twisted with enough force to move some of those tendrils in a way they had not chosen, they pressed in with redoubled strength, yanking her back into their favored position. Though the pleasure brought by Melody's seemingly unpleasant circumstance did not fade immediately - not by any means - her desire to resist rapidly faded, and with it went all the tension in her muscles. There was no point to struggling. There would be no escape. There would be no end.

Did she want it to end? The human body wasn't meant to accommodate so much - Melody always felt it after sticking anything bigger than her finger back there, and now she was being stretched to the absolute limit, and it still felt amazing. Though her head still swam, lightened by foggy heat and tingling sparks of ecstasy, she could swear she felt a distinct sensation: the tentacles splitting her open starting to meld into one coherent shape. Even though they weren't thrusting in time with each other. 'Coherency' took on a new meaning a few minutes into a vigorous tentacle assault.

That was the last thing on which Melody could really focus. The creature toying with her lacked either empathy or mercy - probably both. It didn't care that she had seized up with pleasure within moments of vaginal penetration and would be best served by slowing down and allowing her to relax. Whatever it wanted, it hadn't gotten yet, and so it continued defiling every inch of her in its search. Slowly, the sweet numbness that kept the agony Melody should have felt from her muscles seeped into her thoughts and made her eyelids heavy.

It wasn't going to end soon, but it could still, effectively, end. Melody had already gone limp with surrender, submitting and allowing her aggressor to envelop and occupy her. As her consciousness wavered, a more complete slackness loosened every joint and muscle. It was all too much... she was going to faint. From lack of oxygen... or from overwhelming ecstasy; either one, possibly both.

* The nubile young maiden was a feast for her attacker, and it glutted itself shamelessly upon her. The more she slackened, went limp, collapsed, the more it availed itself of her prizes: more to stuff her beyond full, more to swell and thrash and flail within her, more to subject her to inhuman pleasures that plunged far beyond the line of pain to something incomprehensible and mind-shattering. Every hard-pounding heartbeat from Melody was accompanied by some new indignity, some new thrust into some corner of hers hitherto-unspoilt... and still it kept pouring into her, overflowing fluids from the tendrils gushing out of her abused orifices whenever some partial withdrawal broke off the impossibly tight seals caused by the obscene penetrations.

Quicksilver coated her. Quicksilver squelched and slurped and sloshed within her, churned up by the constant fucking. An entire world of shimmering steely liquid to float along in, to swim in, to be engulfed in, to drown in...

From some far shore of that shining ocean, a far too ragged voice boomed out, roaring even above the din of slurping flesh.

"FIMBULWINTER!"

The heat of constant contact - of wriggling friction against every conceivable inch within and upon her - was suddenly replaced by a biting chill that seeped into the alien ooze itself. It raked against the nerves, stole the breath, crystallized air in the lungs: a sudden plunge from the sauna right into the frigid heart of the Arctic itself. Some keening wail reverberated through the entire hellbeast, beyond hearing but palpable through its appendages; a thin sheen of ice swept across the schoolgirl herself, momentarily encasing her in her own thick layers of frozen slime.

Then began the cracking sound as the frozen river of silvery monster-flesh begin to shatter all around Mystical Melody.

* Melody was blank and mindless, conscious yet not, floating in a squirmy, slippery void. The tentacled monstrosity had obscured every single sense besides touch; she could no longer taste or smell the unique character of the monster that had so thoroughly overpowered her. Every last neuron had been devoted to processing that one method of interpreting stimuli... and it was still too much for Melody to take. Her world was pleasure: grotesque, writhing, strangely decadent, and warm...

Until it was not. The shout did not touch her ears; the sight did not catch her half-open eyes, but the cold shocked her system back into order, bit by bit, as if she had risen from a hot spring during a frigid winter's night. Tentacles that had bathed her bare skin with their obscene and dripping caresses abruptly froze, stilled, then began to crack, fogging the warm evening air.

And it all came crashing down. Frost nipped at her skin, spreading into the appendages penetrating her every orifice, soothing weary flesh even as the change in temperature made her discomfort rather known. Shocked into wakefulness, Melody struggled, and this time her own magically-enhanced strength snapped off the multitude that had clung to her arms, allowing her freedom of movement. First things first: she curled both hands into fists and began to beat upon the limb(s) still shoved between her lips, cracking both the thin sheen of ice covering her joints and the trunk of that suffocating tentacle.

* For a brief moment, the vista of flash-frozen tendrils was almost beautiful. Their metallic hue glittered through the sheen of rimefrost clinging to them, creating a brilliant display of coolly shimmering hues and refractive luminosity. It was a sight unknown in all the world, something rare and incomparable: a delicate display of brittle perfection that stole the breath away.

That was before the fissures ran through the entire edifice scarcely slower than the initial wave of arcane ice.

Chunks and slabs of tentacle-beast sheared and fractured off from the whole, raining down all around Melody. The explosive echoing of their synchronized shattering - of countless chunks of that slippery alien flesh, frozen unyieldingly solid raining down upon the sundered pavement - drowned out even the crackling and snapping as new pieces joined the detrius. The pieces within Melody broke off in place, lodged awkwardly inside her; deprived of the sustaining influence of the greater whole, however, they began to bubble and hiss, melting away into a platinum slurry that seeped out of her obscenely overused holes... or, in the case of the appendage wedged into her airway, dribbling down into the pit of her stomach, heavy-feeling and slick.

There was a rhythm of destruction outside of the broader tempo, however. Crunches broke up the crystalline cacophony, each one followed by a new flurry of high-pitched shattering. One after another, louder each time... until, finally, some of the petrified tendrils near Melody's face exploded into tiny fragments that melted away almost instantaneously, leaving behind only a hunk of battered black iron.

A few minutes ago (or was it longer? Who could tell?), that very same hammer had been trying to kill her.

*  Melody was a little too preoccupied to admire the unlikely vista surrounding her. She was nude, or near enough, and stuffed full of something - somethings that had already been uncomfortable and only grew moreso when they stopped moving, robbing her of friction's distraction. The latter problem became a self-rectifying one, as the beast began to dissolve after its demise. Rigid flesh melted away and quickly ran from within, pouring from both orifices below in a steady, perhaps erotic, perhaps slightly disgusting stream.

More importantly, one or more of the limbs had begun to liquefy inside her throat - and it had reached nearly to her stomach. That made Melody panic and thrash, shedding more of her frigid covering as the seconds ticked by until, at last, she could lean forward, find a pair of places to brace her hands, and heave. Pure quicksilver poured from her mouth, once, then twice before she could even draw enough breath to cough. Emptying herself left her feeling dizzy and insensate; she didn't hear the approaching thunder until the wall directly in front of her was smashed to pieces by...

A heavy black hammer. A full-body flinch pushed Melody as far away from the weapon as she could manage, and she groaned with displeasure, a sound that was cut off midway through by another productive cough. Once again, a fight with Aram saw her nude, splayed, and over-full of questionable fluids - and she couldn't bring herself to do anything about her particular lack of modesty. Most of Melody's armor had been pried away; her top had been torn off long ago, leaving exposed the bounce of her full breasts as she fought for breath and the pertness of her nipples. This time, she hadn't been wearing much of a skirt, and there was not a trace of it to be found anywhere near her shapely hips, let alone concealing the gaping orifices she could not close her legs to hide.

* The warlock's attention was not immediately upon the utterly ravished sight of Melody. No, that grim weapon of his withdrew before going on the attack again, pulverizing another cluster of tentacle-icicles into so much glittering dust. For his own part, Aram looked worse-for-wear as well: a gash on his forehead saw a steady stream of blood pouring down one side of his face, messily smeared this way and that in an attempt to clear his vision. Bruises and welts were already rising along his cheek and jaw, and a particularly ugly series of blue-black batterings spread from one shoulder across his... bared torso?

Most of the maleficar's armour had dissipated away, leaving ragged, unravelled edges that frayed and danced in invisible breezes. For all its steel and iron, the remaining lower half of his cuirass and badly-dented cuisses looked like nothing so much as shredded fabric as it phased out into little wisps of shadowy mist that trailed behind him as he moved. Blood had matted some of his black hair, other bits of it soaked with silvery slime and melted beast-blood; his hard-chiselled jaw was clenched tight, lips curled back in a furious snarl as those corded arms of his brought his hammer to bear yet again, swinging it downward in a sledgehammer drive that burst straight through a wall of frozen flesh to buckle the concrete below.

"Melody," he barked, glancing quickly over one shoulder towards her. "You alri--" Blink, blink. Those grey eyes fluttered momentarily before his head snapped right back to her, double-taking. Hard. His weapon rested momentarily as he took in the violated sight of her, dragging over her soiled, breath-shuddering breasts and bruised throat, her gaping holes and obscenely-outstretched thighs... his head shook hard, sending his mane whipping to and fro. "Jesus," the sophomore muttered, screwing his eyes shut before kicking angrily at another bit of solid-frozen abomination. "Just... hell. Are you okay?"

He sounded... angry. A little flustered too, yes, but even more angry.

* In the absence of an unasked-for yet sublime feeling of sexual fulfillment, Melody felt a strange haze of sedation. This was beyond the kind of event that would cause a normal girl to go into hysterics; it was hard for her to believe, right now, sitting in a puddle of tentacle monster fluids, naked and sore and completely wrung out, that any of it had actually happened. The reaction to a hammer-blow had been all instinct, no thought - she had been taught to fear that dark implement on the battlefield, even if its wielder was...

Aram. Not the Arcane Warlock Aram, but Aram Ardzaruni stood before her, clad in only a few scraps of his alternate identity, as was Melody. It was far from the first time the two had been in a compromising position together; it may well not be the last. Her gut reaction took precedence here, too, and it told her that this man, without his foreboding fortress-like trappings identifying him as a servant of evil, was one her body did not mind accepting. The flow from each hole slowed, rendering her sheen of dispatched demon-spawn thin enough to pick out intimate details, and yet she did not for an instant think of her own modesty.

"I..." Making sounds was easy. Arranging those sounds into words was not. Still disoriented, Melody lolled her head this way, then that, rolling her neck, coughing again, then again, dribbling metallic stuff down her chin and into her cleavage. "Haah... wha..." Another cough, one that tightened her stomach and hunched her shoulders and made her spine curl forward. "...what," she demanded in a feeble, hoarse voice, "were you doing..."

* "I blacked right, hff, out after this son-of-a-bitch swung me around like a ragdoll," snarled the arcanist as he cleared the area around the two of them yet more, the silvery, shivering dust clinging to his warhammer and tanned skin alike. "My head's still ringing like a church-bell on Easter, but... hell, Melody. Let me just do something about this and... uh, I'll try to get you cleaned up?"

Ah, there was a new tenor in his tone, now: guilt. This was his fault, after all. He'd been the one to summon this monstrosity, and - okay, they both shared the blame for destroying the binding circles during their brawl. But he'd set things in motion, and now his enemy (how could she be his enemy?) had been assaulted, raped, and utterly violated in ways impossible for a mere human. The thought drew the clench of his jaw yet tighter as he stomped away from her furiously, free-swinging sweeps crushing yet more before him, seeking out a spot near the shoreline, now largely-covered by an impossibly dense spill-out of atrocity. Each heavy footfall crunched like a march over glaciers until Aram finally came to a pause, raised his hafted weapon skyward, and roared out "PENUMBRAL PUMMEL!" before it arced downward.

There was nothing fancy about the maneuver. No pyrotechnics, no dance of glittering frost-motes. The iron rose and fell, plain as day... and when it struck the ground beneath him, the ensuing small earthquake caused battered bricks all around the area to tumble to the ground. Glimpses of glowing runes crisscrossing the concrete blinked out, a quiet pop could be heard in the air - and then, all around them, the remains of the beast immediately melted into a thick, knee-high sea of silvery slurry.

"...What a fucking mess," sighed the warlock before rubbing the back of his hand against his dusty, blood-soaked brow.

* Melody's stomach still felt unpleasantly like it was greased with vegetable oil, and the abuse her body had endured would not so easily fade. Once her airway was clear, however, she sat staring goggle-eyed, more like she had just watched Aram sprout a second head next to the first than as if she was suffering some kind of trauma. Life had already become irreversibly weird; she almost wanted to laugh about having been caught in the kind of pornographic situation few people were brave enough to so much as picture in their mind's eye. She couldn't actually manage, but that was perhaps for the best. Instead, she watched, wondering, glistening, leaking.

Aram turned away, made for the shore, and lifted his hammer. The ground-pound that followed was enough to rattle the walls of the disused buildings around her, shift the broken pavement beneath, and jolt her an inch into the air. She plopped back down into the monster's gooey corpse with a soft splat, and that was enough to awaken her.

"Ow!" Her ass hurt like hell! Wincing, hissing, pressing her thighs tightly together, Melody sat upright to take her weight off of it and leaned forward, pressing down on her knees with both hands. "Eclipse!" She commanded, and her weapon obeyed, flinging itself up into the air, re-orienting, and smashing its head into the ground in front of her more like a javelin than a battleaxe. A short bar formed perpendicular to the half partway up, and she grabbed onto it with both hands to start pulling herself upright.

* "Easy, easy--" called out Melody's 'foe' as he sloshed and waded his way through the shining mess. The giant, semi-viscous puddle of aetherial remnant was slowly bleeding out into the water and trailing a long mercury trail along the waves, but in the meanwhile it clung to Aram's greaves as he made his way back to her. As soon as he was in reach, an arm of his stretched out to wind around her, slipping underneath her own arms to help the magical girl upright - and stay upright.

For once, the fact that this involved clutching her close to his broad, bruised chest was genuinely incidental.

"Just take it easy." Dropping his hammer into the slime, he brought up his free hand to wipe around her mouth, thumb and outstretched fingers scraping away thick layers of shimmering froth. "Eugh," he mutted as he shook his hand out after one particularly copious sweep, thick gobs of the stuff joining the slow-draining puddle below. Her shoulder was given another little squeeze, more encouraging than anything, while he moved along to her cheeks, leaving sticky smears of the stuff all along her silky skin. "That was... uh. I mean, I've seen something like that happen before, but... it, um, really did a number on you." A faint flush at the admission. "We need to get you out of here, Melody. You're gonna freeze to death like this."

* Standing took some doing. There was nothing wrong with Melody's arms and legs, as their struggles had not been particularly violent and the tentacles had not been so keen to misuse any part of her they couldn't penetrate. Her balance, however, remained imperiled, and she still felt distinctly sick in a sense more physical than anything else. After an encounter like that, as strange as it would have been to admit, Melody didn't feel all that awful.

She didn't need Aram's help, but wound up appreciating it anyway. Once he wrapped an arm around her to steady her, she let go of her weapon and fell forward against him, turning her head to one side and pressing her temple against his chest. Human. Warm, firm, with a recognizable heartbeat. Much preferable to a nameless eldritch monstrosity with inscrutable motives and strangely crude desires. His grooming, at first, was not well-received; Melody whined, raised a hand to swat at his, and instead slapped it against his middle.

"It wouldn't be so cold," she pointed out, "if you hadn't frozen everything." Bowing her head, closing her eyes, Melody clung around his waist and leaned her comparatively insubstantial weight against his burly frame. "Does this happen often, then? Not the first time you--" She paused to cough, and a string of silver decorated skin Aram had just wiped clean. "--you attacked the city with a tentacle monster?"

Really, what had he been expecting?

* "...Listen, I just take orders from the Bitch Queen, okay?" He sounded defensive about it. "I think it's a stupid idea, too. The damned things never listen to instructions and inevitably go off rampaging, which means somebody needs to unsummon them again. Usually me." He sighed as a hacking sputter brought up more opalescent lubrication, and, disregarding her fidgeting and writhing, wiped it off her once again. "And not all of us get to set things on fire without jerry-cans of gas and a lighter, Melody." Not that he hadn't wished for some more versatility in his arsenal at times. It would have made things much easier.

Ah, well. Bigger concerns.

Aram held the magical girl effortlessly, her weight easily managed against his solid, well-trained frame. His attempts at cleaning spread down to her shoulders and throat, more of that goopy mess being cast aside in between ad-hoc massages to her twisted and torqued shoulders that had been forced every which way in that impossible embrace. "Anyway. Um. We need to do something about you." His place? Shower? God, the pipes'd never recover. He'd have to get her wiped down first - the towels would be an irredeemable write-off. Well, whatever. Acceptable risks. This was kind of his fault, after all.

"...My place? You can wipe yourself down and shower. I promise. Nothing silly. You, um... you've had enough tonight." That much was true. Yes, she cut a deeply erotic figure in that sullied beauty way, but... no, no! Another small shake of the head. "Just the shower. And some coffee?"

He owed her that much, at least. Plus maybe some pizza.

* Again, he fussed, and again, she fussed, trying to squirm away from the thumb that made to wipe away the whatever that was still clinging to most of her insides. There was something uncomfortably pleasant about how it kept everything slick and oily - it felt smooth rather than raw.

"Cry me a river, Freon boy," she shot back, lifting her head and cracking a tiny smile. "I can use it to wash off." Her voice wasn't the strongest, but she had begun to recover it, and her presence of mind was starting to return, settling back into place a bit more off-kilter from the norm than it had been before tonight. The same as that first night. The whole Luminosity War nonsense was starting to drive her a special kind of crazy.

"Your place." Melody let that scrap of humor slip away with a sigh, one that ended in another heave and one last dribble of silvery whatsit down her chin. "Ugh. I don't want to try and sneak home on my own... and mother won't let me have coffee," she added, an undercurrent of resentment audible in the rasp of her voice.

* Freon boy?

That was... new.

The warlock scrunched his battered brow at the appelation, mouth opening slightly, before he simply sighed and shook his head. "Think you'd need more than just my tears to get this all off," he chuckled lightly, continuing to cheerfully ignore her squriming and avoidance. "Douse you in a bunch of CLR and hope Magical Girl Mojo protects against chemical burns, maybe." It was clearly not a serious suggestion, and Aram accompanied it with a light pat of her cheek. His thumb brushed gently around her eye as the touch lingered, his eyes meeting hers - and then he shook his head once more.

"So yeah. My place. I needed the excuse for new towels, anyway." Matter-of-factly, and without the slightest sign of hesitation or acknowledgment for her own wishes, the maleficar shifted his position about her: kneeling down alongside her to bring that shoulder-grip down to just behind her knees. Yes, his hair dragged through her thick, viscous coating in the process - he hardly cared. His other arm replaced the first, clamping down securely upon her shoulder - and then, with a light huff, he hefted her up into the air in a picture-perfect (albeit messy) princess carry that left her feet dangling over his solid, steady forearms.

"Everybody needs coffee in times like these," he declared as even-keeled steps took the two through the muck and away from the entire shattered scene. Slimy footprints followed in his wake, punctuated by little dribbles and excess runoff from Melody. He barely even noticed the way it kept dribbling out of her savaged loins onto his chest.

Barely.

* Before she could answer, Melody found herself being manhandled again. She squealed, flailed, sought a more convenient place to settle her arms, and wound up looping them around his neck, paying no mind to how much of her mess wound up on him in the process. That he didn't seem to care was... hard to explain, but it was nice. Melody fixed her eyes on his, slightly flustered, not quite as pink in the face as before. Once she was settled, she gave it another shot.

"I don't think this qualifies as something CLR is meant for." Melody cast one last look towards her abandoned axe, which still stood embedded in the slime-strewn ground, gleaming and pristine. They were leaving it behind... but it would probably just disappear on its own, only to obey her call and return the next time they met.

"Aram..." Melody heaved a sigh. "Does it always turn out like this?"

* His own nameless hammer rested in the mire besides Melody's Eclipse, forgotten and neglected. After all, Aram's hands were filled with a much more important prize: her. To his credit, the dark champion's hands stayed largely in place and focused on their task of holding her tightly rather than roaming. There were no wayward caresses, no lingering brushes, no suggestive touches. Just sturdiness and stability, those rough, rugged hands of his utterly reliable in the way they worked with her own arm-loop to keep her steady and aloft as he marched the two of them away into the alleyways beyond.

He'd need to scour himself clean with a wire brush afterward, but he'd gotten off lucky in comparison.

"Not always." It did take the sophomore a while to answer that, and his mouth twisted slightly as he spoke, as if unsure of how truthful his own words were. "I mean, most of the time it's just a lot of buildings blown up and maybe some suggestive clothes-tearing and a lot of bruises the morning after. Things always get... um, intense with you." Another lightweight blush danced across that craggy-featured face of his. "So. Er. Yeah. You're special?"

If only she knew the half of it.

* Melody couldn't hold it back - and her mostly-clean face had been specially prepared to betray just how brightly Aram's words made her blush. For a long moment that was awkward from at least one perspective, she looked away, silent. Then, as they finally stepped far enough away for her weapon to evaporate in a pyre of starfire:

"You're the first person who's ever said that to me... like that." Her weary arms tightened around his neck, and she lay her head against his chest, closing her eyes and going silent. How strange that those words came from the person who was supposed to be her enemy.

Mystical Melody was starting to get used to 'strange'.