other eles

Cover me, I thought. I need a little while longer.

At once, there was a flash and Gilgamesh aborted his approach, staggering slightly in the wake of the lightning strike. Vulturnus flickered around me, recoiling slightly at whatever resistance he’d felt, but it was a brief thing, not as bad as whatever had struck Xihai. Already, my Water Elemental was returning to her physical form, reconstructing it in the wake of whatever had disrupted it, and I didn’t stop there. The earth buckled and the wind raged, groaning and howling even as the smoke filled air churned and a storm began to brew above us. I drew back as four of my Elementals rose, keeping only Suryasta and Crocea Mors close at hand, and waited.

I’d known from the beginning that something like this would be hard to pull off in the middle of combat, but…I trusted my friends. If it was just this, I’d be safe even in the middle of this battlefield.

Somewhere deep in my soul, my Hidden Heart started beating.

Levant took the form of a towering woman, though tiny compared to Xihai’s massive form—only about three and a half meters tall or so. She’d changed at once the most and the least amongst my Elementals, with her features being much the same, if perhaps a touch older; a woman, now, instead of a teenager. What was different was…pretty much everything else. She’d traded her gown for what could briefly be mistaken for a white dress, until one noticed the feathers and realized she had wings. They were thin and sprouted from seemingly every joint and vertebrae, varying greatly in both width and length as they conformed to her body in layers, covering everything but her face; there were even wings growing from her wrists and knuckles, covering her hands with gloves. On the whole, very few of her wings were actually outstretched; the only real exceptions where a pair of wings that stretched backwards from each ankle and the ones behind her ears, which seemed to catch her hair between them. Otherwise, they did nothing but flutter vaguely as she wielded her power.

And wield it she did. Storms struck out at the battlefield, churning the smoke into dark vortexes. She kept me safe from her power and prevented it from spilling over onto my friends, but Grimm around us had to brace themselves to keep from being drawn towards than as the wind speeds climbed further and further into the hundreds. Gilgamesh didn’t resist, however, instead stepping forward, piecing cleanly through the first storm like a bullet, using his own speed to keep him safe. Vulturnus trailed after her, his form unraveling into a thousand streamers, reaching out towards the rushing Grimm and striking the moment their paths crossed.

Unlikely last time, however, Gilgamesh wasn’t caught by surprise and he didn’t so much as flinch, simply taking the hit and hit and moving to counterattack. His sword flicked out the moment Vulturnus struck him, taking advantage of the brief period between one lightning strike and the next, and sheered through the Lightning Elemental’s almost shapeless mass with a bizarre sound somewhere between a hiss of a cat and the tearing of paper. Vulturnus exploded into sparks, ironically stunned, and Gilgamesh turned his attention to his next opponent.

Ereb promptly hit him with a boulder the size of a small house, bringing it down upon him in a massive fist. Ereb was perhaps the most changed, rising from the ground as a titan of earth and stone. Traces of his human form’s features were still apparent, but they were tined by earthen ridges and his skin was the color of weathered rock. His proportions were all wrong, too, with his arms and legs far thicker than they would have been on a human, and hackles on his back that looked like a mountain range. He was enormous, too, with Xihai perhaps being longer from head to tail but barely coming up to his waist as she was. His warped hands, now changed to look like brutal stone claws, melded with the boulder as he tried to hammer Gilgamesh into the ground like a nail. For a moment, it almost looked like he’d succeeded.

A moment later, however, the stone trembled and shook, cracks spreading across its length as Gilgamesh pushed back, overwhelming Ereb with simple main strength and knocking him back. My Earth Elemental fell until the back of his head nearly touched the ground, before stopping oddly, his body held parallel to the ground by his bent knees. His remaining hand grasped at the earth as if clawing for something, and then his body flung itself back upright, pulling a jagged stone sword from the dirt. From pommel to hilt, it was half-again Ereb’s size and looked as rough as a cliff side, but he swung it through the air with casual ease and brought it down with enough force to shatter the ground for fifty meters. Gilgamesh raised his own sword to catch it, but the smaller blade simply cut deeply into Ereb’s, leaving it to crash down on his shoulder and stagger him slightly. He flicked his wrist once, the gesture somehow seeming chagrined, and the stone sword was cut cleanly in two, along with most of Ereb’s upper body.

Ereb seemed to sway as his remaining arm fell to the ground with a tumultuous thud, though the fact that his head had been split from his right temple to the left corner of his forehead seemed like the more serious wound. Unlike Xihai and Vulturnus, however, his form was not dispelled, despite how disorienting the meaningless wound seemed; a benefit of his solidity, perhaps? Whatever the reason, it seemed like he’d have an easier time recovering, given a moment to recover.

Needless to say, Gilgamesh didn’t allow him that chance; he leapt into the air to strike him in the chest, sending cracks rippling outwards before twisting once to shatter him like a statue. Gilgamesh landed calmly, shaking away the dust and dirt, before focusing on Levant.

There was a flash, a flicker, and he pierced through both a wall of wind and Levant’s chest, crashing to the ground right in front of me. I didn’t flinch as he rose, meeting his eyes without fear.