fights three drunken angels

You’re among them instantly, your sword finds a throat and the blood flows around you, over you, splattering your dress. No need to hold back, not here, you’re using the Dance of Wind and Rain. You should have plenty of stamina.

[...]

She’ll need a bit of time before she can cast. Not too much, about fifteen seconds was her best guess. Blair is behind you, her spear impaling an angel trying to circle to your left. Arrows of bone, bullets and spikes of ice are striking the angels trying to circle to your right, which means you can focus on killing what’s in front of you, dancing around drunken swings, flipping over or ducking under the swipes of misshapen wings.

[...]

You pull the blood in tight around you, using it to shred and tear any hand or wing that gets close to your body as you dive deeper into the mass of flailing flesh, your sword dancing towards eyes and throats and legs and arms, a bloody butchery turned beautiful by Perform, as ruby droplets dance through the air, flickering brilliantly in the light of the gathering flames.

[...]

The table that had been sitting in the center of the room, beyond the wall of force, is mostly embers by this point. It looks like less treacherous footing than the ice-encrusted floor, and you have nice thick boots, so you charge across it.

Maybe you kick one of the still-smoldering embers into some alcohol being thawed by the residual heat left in the stone floor? Maybe Perform just wants you to have a dramatic backdrop? Either way the curtain of flame splitting the room re-ignites, lighting the ice-draped room a flickering yellow-gold and red.

The heat isn’t as oppressive as before, the fire struggling to gain ground over the frozen stone and through the chilled air, but it is enough to split you from your teammates.

No matter, you have the stamina to finish this, so long as you’re careful.

Your breath steams as you close with the first angel, his arm already drawn back and holding a bottle. The rag in the bottle is unlit, but the angels seem able to light those rags simply with their minds, so you’re not trusting that. You burn Beauty and cut almost effortlessly through the arm holding the bottle, then twist your sword to impale the second angel, deliciously warm blood from the severed arm splashing across your chilled face, not quite obscuring your vision. The third sees an opportunity to attack you while your weapon is trapped inside a ribcage, and you leap out of the way of its lurching series of punches and grabs, one hand still on your sword, pulling the second angel's dying body around as you push off the floor, then the wall, to get your lower body out of the way, trailing your nails across the third angel's face as your momentum carries you out of danger.

The ice crunches under your boots as you land, and five nails draw five thin lines of blood, which you condense into a small ribbon and then splatter across the third angel's eyes with a quick wave of your hand, blinding it. You yank your sword from the corpse of the second angel, drawing out a thick ribbon to splatter onto your dress, swipe the third angel's head from its shoulders as it tries to scrub away the blood, and smile as you realize you’ve won.

Then you feel pain in your left arm and you’re tumbling, rolling across the ice. There’s a moment of shock, a moment of pain, and then you see the first angel, the one that had been about to throw the bottle. It’s clutching the stump of its arm, and its swaying isn’t so much drunken as dying, but it’s there, on its feet, one wing extended in the blow that just knocked you over.

You try to rise, only for your left arm to bend at a horrible angle as you try to force it into position on the ice. Broken. Dammit, you had the Dance of Wind and Rain active, you’d been using Predict Opponent, you should have dodged, why?

You can’t stand. It hurts. You’re alone. Scared. You try to push the fear away. Focus, use Kink to hotwire the pain into… only there isn’t anything to hotwire.

“Looks like we’re both down an arm then,” you mutter, stabbing your sword into the ice and struggling to get your feet back under you as the final angel lurches towards your prone body. You’re right-handed, you should still be able to fight, just for one last kill, then you can sit down and wait for Brian to heal you.

Then Blair charges through the fire and stabs the last angel in the throat, and you let yourself fall instead, wincing as the adrenaline starts to fade and the pain in your arm returns, new pain filling the odd absence you'd been experiencing.

15: a sin of fire