>>6086809
“The four of you will come with me,” you declare. “We’ll be the first. Alexa, Nessa, Jenna, be ready to mount a rescue if any of us fall on our way. Valentina, Aurora, in that eventuality I want the two of you to cover for the three of them.”

“Laura,” you conclude, turning to the eldest non-awakened warrior present.

“Yeah?”

“I’ll leave you in charge of everyone else here,” you decide. “Salem, you’re her lieutenant this time.”

“That so?” the awakened being muses with a slight frown.

“I’ve got the experience as a leader,” Laura sighs wearily. “That’s what you’re thinking, yeah?”

You nod. “Any disagreements, now’s your time.”

“Then let’s move quickly,” you declare after hearing no disagreements, staring down the open ground which is now your enemy. “I don’t want any of us out there any longer than necessary.”

For the first few moments, it feels as if your enemy doesn’t realize that you’re actually trying to do something – perhaps being too concerned with the asarakam which by now they must know is on its way. But that doesn’t last forever. They quickly assign some of their remaining soldiers to hold to what this time yesterday was their front line even while most of their men shift to fire on the asarakam as it approaches from the water.
>2/3

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>>6086810
By and large there’s not much coordination, since there doesn’t have to be. Your mother rushes forward with complete disregard for her own safety, which for her part is totally justified – even if your enemy managed to hit her directly with a cannon shell her regenerative abilities are so ridiculous that you doubt she’d even notice. Helen’s approach is more preventative, having partially-awakened her legs to make continuous use of her Echo Sword technique through her footwork and forcing anyone trying to fire at her to simply make an uneducated guess as to where she’s going to be from moment to moment.

Justina and Serana however, the two quietest among your number, do seem to be working together. Serana is the faster of the duo, but her main technique here basically amounts to raising a ‘smoke-screen’ of dust every so often. Justina is fairly slow by your shared standards, but she has good instincts and particularly when half-awakened her regeneration is practically instantaneous. She can still be killed however if not enough of her head and spine are left, so she sticks to the clouds of dust Serana raises with her Earthbreaker technique, the duo splitting the fire between them as they work their way forward across the open ground.

Which leaves your own approach.

>You rely purely on the speed and mobility of your partially-awakened limbs – you do after all come the closest of your number to full awakening.
>Of all your number your predictive abilities are the most-practices, so it’s easiest for you to advance carefully while countering incoming bullets and shells.
>You too were once mostly defensive-oriented, meaning that you only really need to protect your pretty face while you’re advancing like this.
>Other?

>>6086813
>>Of all your number your predictive abilities are the most-practices, so it’s easiest for you to advance carefully while countering incoming bullets and shells.

>>6086813
>>Of all your number your predictive abilities are the most-practices, so it’s easiest for you to advance carefully while countering incoming bullets and shells.

>>6086813
>>Of all your number your predictive abilities are the most-practices, so it’s easiest for you to advance carefully while countering incoming bullets and shells.

>>6086813
>3d10 best of three

Rolled 7, 10, 8 = 25 (3d10)

>>6087602

Rolled 10, 1, 5 = 16 (3d10)

>>6087602

Rolled 8, 9, 2 = 19 (3d10)

>>6087602

>>6087602
You, however, fall into a somewhat different camp. While your regenerative abilities have always been much better than the average set by more offensive warriors, they’re nowhere close to those shown by Justina and by Sabela. Your signature offensive technique also has zero application to this situation, unlike Helen or Serana. On paper at least you could simply rush forward in a straight line, but that would still leave you open to a lucky gunshot or artillery strike from which it could be difficult to recover.

So instead you elect to take a somewhat slower pace.

For every few steps forward you take you’re obliged to slash a cannon shell out of the air, or deflect a bullet with the broad sides of your sword. Luckily for you there are multiple targets, otherwise the shooters who are presently trying their damnedest to kill you would be able to focus their fire more. Perhaps that might have been enough.

Eventually your cohort draws close to the front lines – you can sense the asarakam fighting beyond, on the other end of the town. You can even hear it from this distance as it attacks the other ships in the harbor.

…

Wounds are fairly light by the time you reach the enemy lines, and the artillery can no longer hit you. The soldiers you’ve approached train their weapons on you nervously, but for the moment they seem to be holding their fire – probably because they’ve already seen that shooting at you hasn’t really accomplished anything.

Sensing an opening, perhaps even a willingness to listen, you plant your sword dramatically in front of you and hold your hands up.

>Demand that the soldiers stand aside, make it clear your business is not with them.
>Inform them that you were literally created for this battle, and ask for their assistance.
>Demand to speak with their commanding officer.
>Other?

>>6091392
>>Inform them that you were literally created for this battle, and ask for their assistance.

>>6091392
>>Inform them that you were literally created for this battle, and ask for their assistance.

>>6091392
>>Demand to speak with their commanding officer.

>>6091392
>>Inform them that you were literally created for this battle, and ask for their assistance.
>Inform them that you were literally created for this battle, and ask for their assistance.

>>6091392
>3d10 best of three

Rolled 7, 3, 5 = 15 (3d10)

>>6092463

Rolled 9, 3, 9 = 21 (3d10)

>>6092463

Rolled 5, 6, 4 = 15 (3d10)

>>6092463

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>>6092463
“You’re dealing with an awakened dragonkin,” you declare loudly, “an asarakam. My kind were created by your own superiors for this specific battle – so either help us or get out of our way, the choice is yours. But just try to remember that if we succeed many of you will survive, but that if we die all of you will die too.”

With that declaration, you pry your sword free and rest it against your shoulder. Then, you take the first few steps towards the enemy line – practically daring them to go back to firing on you. It comes as something of a surprise that none of them do. Instead, one of the nearby officers begins shouting orders as your company passes through their line.

“I want mortars and machine guns to move and provide covering fire for the scary ladies!” he demands. “Cannons stay here, and I want riflemen running ammo! Get to it!”

…

Once you have a column of ‘enemy’ soldiers charging through the town carrying their heavy weapons and light artillery with them, it makes it hard for any other soldiers who run across you to immediately fire on you. When you start getting closer to where the asarakam has come ashore the officer who made the decision to redeploy to support you issues more orders, crisp and efficient.

“I want mortars in the courtyards east and west of this street!” he barks. “Spotting teams, top floors of the apartments north of those positions! Machine gun crews, corner apartments! Overlap your fields of fire northbound and cover the street up the middle! Infantry, secure access to the courtyards! Radiomen, run lines up the stairs to the spotting teams!”

“Move like you got a purpose dammit!”

He then turns to you. “We’ll have fire support for you inside five minutes, we’ll do what we can not to hit you by mistake… but no guarantees on the mortars.”

“Can you give us fifteen-second firing intervals?” you ask.

He nods once. “We can slow it down that much, yeah. At that rate we have four and a half minutes of ammo with each crew without replenishment.”

“Please do it,” you insist.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You heard the man,” you tell your comrades. “Let’s make those fifteen-second windows count.”

[What’s your strategy?] Serana asks with a frown.

>Rotate through our team, give each other time to rest. Play to our advantage of numbers.
>All-out attack. Overwhelm whatever regenerative abilities it may have then bring it down.
>I’ll hit it repeatedly in the head while the three of you look for weak spots elsewhere.
>Other?

>>6094827
>>Rotate through our team, give each other time to rest. Play to our advantage of numbers.

>>6094827
>Rotate through our team, give each other time to rest. Play to our advantage of numbers.

>>6094827
>>Rotate through our team, give each other time to rest. Play to our advantage of numbers.

>>6094827
>3d10 best of three

Rolled 1, 7, 3 = 11 (3d10)

>>6095632

Rolled 6, 6, 8 = 20 (3d10)

>>6095632

Rolled 4, 6, 8 = 18 (3d10)

>>6095632

>>6094827
“Play to our only real advantage,” you decide. “Numbers.”

“You want to rotate,” Sabela guesses your mind.

Your response comes with a curt nod. “I’ll go first.”

In your mind, this moment calls for the maximum possible effort. That’s why you start off by awakening as much of your body as far as you can while maintaining control – which for you is significant. Even the continental troops who have promised to back you up from behind must understand on some level that the warping your body undergoes represents near-monomaniacal focus on the battle in front of you – to their credit, they even manage to concentrate their fire on the asarakam instead of hitting you along with it.

That must take some effort, given how you look when you’re like this. Your limbs aren’t much more than vaguely human, although at very least your knees still face the same way unlike some awakened beings, and proportionally speaking nothing is quite ‘right’. In fact to the untrained eye you must appear to be closer to the asarakam you’ve attacked than to the humans who are lobbing explosives towards it.

“How are you holding out?” your mother asks you as you pass each other – not to be left out, your companions quickly take to darting in for opportunistic strikes that help keep some of the asarakam’s attention divided.

“Fine,” you reply, straining slightly for the speed you need to evade a massive counterblow aimed at you. “If I don’t get hit I can go a little longer!”

That’s easier said than done. You may be something of a natural when it comes to using yōki, but this level of physical transformation is still alien to you. While you can twist your body out of the way of the asarakam’s attacks, even using its own fist and arm at times as a springboard to do so, that sort of behavior puts a noticeable strain on you the more you have to rely on it. And while your attacks are capable of cutting behind the hardened, iron-like shells common to awakened beings and dragon-kin alike the simple difference in size renders it somewhat less effective in this case than you’d like.

Which is to say that for the effort, you don’t feel like you’re making nearly as much headway against the asarakam as you should before you feel the effects of your straining yourself starting to accumulate. Your body begins to feel slightly more sluggish, your strikes grow less crisp and precise, and you find yourself scrambling to avoid blows you could have dodged before with confidence.

“Time!?” you shout.

“Almost four and a half!” Helen calls back.

“Mother, switch!” you decide.
>1/2

>>6098507
Your mother goes a step further than you do – she fully awakens on the spot before rushing past you, far smaller than the asarakam but no less monstrous in her appearance. In fact, you’d hazard a guess that the similarity in size to a normal human would almost lead them to focus on how truly inhuman Sabela is in this form. Aside from her face, which preserves some of her features despite the fact that her skin is now no more than a smooth, armored mask, hardly anything is recognizable.

She simply takes many of the hits that you’d work hard to dodge. Mere physical abuse is hardly enough to even bother Sabela, and every attack on her person is met with instant violence. Her blade-like hair and the wicked edges lining her arms visibly tear into the asarakam with every clash, before both combatants’ regenerative abilities erase any obvious results.

>Focus on resting and recovering, You want to be prepared to take your next turn in about ten to fifteen minutes.
>Help your mother out by targeting the asarakam’s head and face whenever you can. This should keep it disoriented.
>Just rely on your awakened legs to make darting attack runs. Strike a bit of a balanced approach to your ‘out’ time.
>Other?

>>6098510
>Focus on resting and recovering, You want to be prepared to take your next turn in about ten to fifteen minutes.

>>6098510
>>Focus on resting and recovering, You want to be prepared to take your next turn in about ten to fifteen minutes.

>>6098510

>Focus on resting and recovering, You want to be prepared to take your next turn in about ten to fifteen minutes.

>>6098510
Sabela hangs in the fight for an impressive amount of time, trading blows with the asarakam in a way you’d consider somewhat un-sophisticated. But you’re aware of the strategy – your mother is great at shruging off punishment, and so her goal is to give as good as she gets for as long as she can. If she can even keep pace with the asarakam that means both that she’ll have pushed your opponent’s regenerative capacities and that she’ll have absorbed much more offensive output than any of your other companions could. She’s pushing the asarakam closer to the point of failure both offensively and defensively at the same time.

After what feels like much more than just five minutes, which is about how long you know their meeting lasts, Sabela disengages from the asarakam and lets Helen jump in to take her place. Immediately half-awakened, the former single-digit begins to show the true absurdity of what her Echo Sword is capable of. When used in three dimensions, the abrupt and unpredictable changes in direction allow for both tricky evasive maneuvers as well as momentum-enhanced attacks between which she can snap in an instant, without warning and without ever having to return to the ground.

>3d10, best of three

Rolled 3, 5, 7 = 15 (3d10)

>>6100197

Rolled 1, 9, 2 = 12 (3d10)

>>6100197

Rolled 9, 10, 9 = 28 (3d10)

>>6100197

>>6100197
There’s a certain tempo to this, which you notice as it unfolds.

Sabela’s full effort gives you the chance to recover, but Helen, Justina, and Serana were all fighting alongside you just the same as your mom was. And now, while Sabela is sitting out and Helen is facing down the asarakam, Justina and Serana are still helping in their own way.

As much as you’d be fine continuing to rest, that’s not what you should be doing right now – and there’s an obvious opportunity to help push your shared opponent while Helen is facing it down more directly.

A certain number of your supporting troops’ mortars fall off-target, that’s simply in the nature of trying to hit a moving target with a slow projectile based solely on secondhand information. But with a little ‘help’ from yourself, you can make sure that those missed projectiles each get a second chance at hitting their target. For the investment of just a small burst of yōki you’re able to snag some of these mortar shells out of the air by their tails and sling them forcefully at the asarakam. Sometimes you hit it in the shoulders or upper arms, which does little in the way of appreciable damage. But just as often you manage to get a clean shot in at the asarakam’s face.

“How’s that!?” you shout. “May not kill you with these, but I bet they’re a real nuisance!”

In response the asarakam lashes out with its spiny tail, just barely missing your body. The only thing separating you from losing an arm to that attack is a fraction of a second of reaction time. But the impact of some mortars hitting the asarakam in the face from a lower angle is actually appreciable – its attention is now split between Helen’s confounding angles of attack at close ranges, Justina and Serana’s distracting hit-and-run tactics, the mortars falling on it from above, and the mortars that keep hitting it in the mouth.

When you sense a gap in the mortar team’s firing pattern, you take a moment to flash a message to your mother. [Can it not grasp our strategy?]

She seems thoughtful for a moment before replying. [Perhaps. Having never met an un-awakened A S A R A K A M we can’t know.] The word ‘asarakam’ doesn’t exist in the monastic sign language of course, so she’s forced to take the time to spell it out.
>1/2

>>6101770
After a few minutes Helen dodges out of the way and Justina steps in.

Justina’s partially-awakened form is rather serpentine, and while she’s not especially fast or strong she does have a fantastic way of just barely slithering out of danger with a smooth, albeit unnatural, turn of her hips or shoulders at exactly the right instant. Her attacks don’t seem to be aimed at cutting through, but rather digging in with the initial contact before pulling against the target to slice and sever.

Those cuts are totally ineffective when they hit hardened chitin, but when they find a softer and more flexible joint they do manage to leave noticeable wounds that bubble and steam as they heal.

Helen takes the time to rest, while Sabela rotates back in at a more conservative pace.

>Ramp up your own efforts to partly compensate for Justina’s less-offensive skillset.
>Continue using near-miss mortars as a distraction against the asarakam.
>Other?

>>6102315
>Ramp up your own efforts to partly compensate for Justina’s less-offensive skillset.

>>6102315
>>Ramp up your own efforts to partly compensate for Justina’s less-offensive skillset.
Thanks for the update notification.

>>6102315
>3d10 best of three

Rolled 3, 6, 7 = 16 (3d10)

>>6102916

Rolled 1, 9, 8 = 18 (3d10)

>>6102916

Rolled 8, 3, 9 = 20 (3d10)

>>6102916