36

Chapter Text

The world spun for only a moment before she burst into smoke, killing her momentum, then turned invisible, grouping herself up high in the sky to whirl around and look for her adversary.

Said adversary was floating in place, spinning and looking for her, just twenty feet down.

It was the way she was flying, the way she held her hands, that made something click in her head.

It was a practised pose, the only real way to fly without looking goofy or strange, one knee half-bent and foot pointed down.

The squared shoulders, the tilt of her elbow, that odd but appealing way she held her fists out just a little, bending her wrists down a couple degrees to seem both ready and alert but not tense, she'd seen those before. 

All she needed to add to the image was a cape and a silver helmet.

That vague, tiny hint of familiarity in the back of her mind joined the information, and it all clicked together in an image she never would have imagined in a hundred years.

Alexandria? She blurted out in the woman's mind, flabbergasted, and the woman whirled, checking her surroundings.

It fit, but it also didn't.

Why the fuck would a member of the… Triumvirate…

Through the physical and mental pain, she felt some small, fundamental foundation of her worldview shift.

It made sense. Too much sense.

She dashed away, and solidified.

She couldn't kill fucking Alexandria.

As much as she now hated the fucking bitch, the world needed her. She was one of the few symbols of hope their part of the world had left. The lives she saved during Endbringer attacks were far too many.

She had no idea how hard Smite would hit her. It might do next to nothing, it might cut her in half. She just didn't know.

She didn't need to kill her, thankfully. In fact, if she was alive, that would serve her better.

There was a chance she was making false conclusions here, but that fact did not change. She wanted the woman alive.

She materialised midair in the middle of her mad dash, coming out into a spinning flip a hundred feet away.

A brief moment of sight was all she needed, the woman rushing for her like a bullet. 

She reached for a different summoner spell, and cast it, immediately burst into smoke again right as… who she thought was Alexandria rushed through her, scattering her in the wind.

That felt almost as horrible as getting gut-punched by a human freight train.

The woman screamed a high-pitched scream as she burst into flames, flailing limply through the air for a panicked moment before her flight reactivated and she bashed herself into the dirt, trying to put the fires out in vain, carving rends into the grassland like a plough through sand in wide, sweeping curves.

'Ignite' burned one's lifeforce and soul as well as their flesh.

If the flesh couldn't be harmed, the other two would suffice.

There were many Legends who could do the same and worse.

She positioned herself mentally, changing positions around the woman as she destroyed her suit and forced choking sounds of agony through her mask.

All she needed was to get that stupid fucking mask off her face. Everything else was just to stall for time, to find some way to end this, and end this fast.

A portal opened to the side, and her eyes jerked to it as the first sign of reinforcements came, a row of agents decked out in full Tinkertech gear, sprinting out and quickly scattering in a circular formation, not helping Alexandria, but simply looking for her.

To the left another one opened, a single man walking through, covered in Tinkertech armour, hands limp at his side.

She swapped Runes.

A tide of information came to her from Cosmic Insight, and she kept moving in wide circles as Alexandria tried to put the fire out in vein, rapidly losing her suit and being left in a bodysleeve.

Her eyes went to the man who arrived alone, and she felt half her options evaporate before her very eyes.

Can kill someone with a single gaze.

Considering how powers worked, that was a purely biology-focused power.

She needed a battlefield for just herself and Alexandria. She couldn't afford to fight all of Cauldron here.

A single Legend came to mind, and with an internal, self-directed cuss, she resigned herself to having her brain bleed out of her ears by the time this was over with.

Why hadn't she expected reinforcements? They were incompetent and overconfident, not blind.

Unbound Spellbook waited for her, and she reached for another cast of Ignite as the fires abruptly winked out.

She materialised in the air just long enough to cast it on the furious human shaped comet, her momentum as the mist carrying her to the woman.

Alexandria likewise rushed her, ignoring the pain.

She burst into smoke once more, then went invisible and flew up as Alexandria audibly snarled in fury and pain.

She reached for Mordekaiser, The Iron Revenant.

Thirteen feet of metal flickered into existence above Alexandria as she bashed herself into the ground, and she dropped like a stone towards the woman, her right hand throwing the mace's head out towards Alexandria as bullets and lasers and grenades battered her unyielding form, none of them forcing her to move any more than an inch.

Through a fleshless visage of metal, eyes that were not eyes glared at her adversary through metal sockets, and she reached for the woman's soul with her mace, a formless line forming between one vessel to another.

She threw her left hand out behind her to grasp a distant realm, something familiar and silent.

Eerie green light reached Alexandria right as she twisted enough to see her from within the ground she was churning through, and the world twisted around them as Taylor's clawed gauntlet grasped the realm of the undead and pulled a small piece of it to the waking world with a sound like a rusty churchbell rasping to a lifeless sky.

Alexandria rushed at her with a yell.

The world around them warped, sound distorting for a moment as if underwater.

A wave of green-black mist formed around them like a second skin clawing at the sunlight all around them.

Her iron boots broke the ground as she fell.

The mist exploded outwards from their bodies, obstructing her vision for only a moment as it rushed away from them in a near-instantaneous wave, replacing one world with another for a sphere of space barely a thousand feet wide.

A pale gray expanse of lifeless, broken soil, surrounded by an impenetrable bubble of mist, spinning and softly wailing, an arena for just the two of them in a realm as close to Hell as she could get.

She cast Exhaust right as Alexandria slammed into her chestplate and sent her to the ground, grunting in annoyance as she felt her soul rattle in its vessel, soulfire bursting out of every seam and joint of her armour.

She made a grasping motion in the air with her left gauntlet as Alexandria zipped back up above her and dashed down. She yanked her hand to the side.

A spectral gauntlet of green soulfire formed out of nothing and plucked Alexandria out of the air, its glow mixing with the orange-yellow sways of the Exhaust spell, and wrenched to the side, letting go and dissipating at the height of its momentum as Taylor directed it.

The woman blurred towards the wall of mist.

Fingers and faces formed before she hit it as if to welcome her in, twisting around her as she impacted it, mouths screaming and fingers grappling for what little scraps remained of her immaculate suit.

Then she bounced off as if the mist was made of steel, scraps of her soul lingering on the fingernails of the damned as Taylor lifted her own bulk with another gauntlet, yanking herself up, adjusting her grip on Nightfall.

The souls took their bounty, and retreated into the maelstrom.

She slammed her left fist into her own chestplate, soulfire flaring around her with a crisp clang of metal, coating her.

She thrust her chest out with a deep, booming snarl, metal untwisting and screeching back into place, soulfire rushing back into the gaps of her chest, done with its task as she thundered forward.

Alexandria rushed her, feet first, still alit with Ignite's dying embers.

In a normal person, having so much of their soul burned and clawed away would have left them a gibbering husk, barely able to stand from weakness, their body graying and decaying.

Besides some branch-like flesh she could see beneath some of the flames however, Alexandria did not appear affected. 

Another summoner spell roared to life around Taylor, Barrier wreathing her in pale, magical wards, runes twisting at the edge of her vision as she swerved on her heel, showing Alexandria her back, raising the mace above her head to seemingly slam into the ground, double-handing it.

The hero didn't see the trap for what it was, somehow.

Nor the gamble that it was on Taylor's end, that this was really Alexandria and not someone else, because she doubted anyone else would survive this kind of strike.

Two feet slammed into the middle of Taylor's back, the barrier absorbing the majority of the impact and shattering with a whisper like cracked glass.

What was left of the impact, she used to her advantage, twisting snarls of metal within her hollow body to move the force into her arms.

Soulfire wailed as she pushed it forth, spewing out of the empty spaces of her mace like a jet turbine, and with speed that looked impossible on a titan of her size, she slammed it down in a blur.

She switched to the Rune of Sorcery, picking Arcane Comet. In the same instant, mid-swing, she grasped Flash, and cast it behind her, teleporting several feet back, behind the agent.

The woman didn't have a millisecond to react as the mace burst into existence above her face in a spew of sparks, mere inches away, her eyes still trained on where she'd just hit Taylor in the back.

The mace slammed into the barren earth and through it with a deafening sound that echoed and bounced within their bubble of space, digging the puppet into the earth, jagged teeth of stone exploding around them, dust billowing and obscuring both their sights.

The comet orbiting her waist shot up faster than her sight could follow, through the mists and out of sight, then a mere second later, fell down, the size of half a human and so fast that Taylor only caught a flash of indigo before it hit her mace and nearly ripped it out of her hands with how hard it stomped it through the earth, making her stumble forward.

The earth cracked like dry, layered ceramics beneath them, and she dropped to her knees to keep upright, unable to keep up with the aftershock and the impact itself as it decimated their arena, star dust flickering in the air and molten rock clinging to her greaves as she used her left hand to form a thousand grasping hands to stabilize the earth around her feet like nails and wires.

For a moment, the only sound was the soft moaning wails of the undead souls around them, distant and weak, and the reverberations of a hundred feet of earth being turned to smoking gravel and dust.

She couldn't even see anything past a foot or two away, and for a moment, she worried that she'd killed Alexandria. Worried that maybe that person wasn't actually Alexandria, and she just lost her only bargaining chip.

She was proven wrong by the overwhelming force that shoved her mace up through half a dozen feet of broken stone, almost launching it out of her hands, only a couple gauntleted fingers keeping Nightfall from being thrown to the mists.

A spike of agony twisting between her temples registered through the chaos to let her know she was running out of time and resources.

Before she could toss the mace down again, a blur shot out of the crater, turned abruptly in a ninety degree angle, and rushed to her head.

She switched to the Rune of Resolve, picking Grasp of the Undying, green energy swirling around her gauntlets.

She didn't get to hit anything, as knees dug into her shoulders and fingers dove into the Y-shaped slip of her helmet, wrenching it apart.

She jerked to the side, and through the rush of dust that motion cleared, she caught a clear look at the woman she was fighting.

She could recognize those eyes, even if instead of silver metal framing them, it was the thick remnants of a cracked black mask.

One real, one not.

She'd be the second to put a scar on this woman, then.

The helmet creaked as the iron began to peel apart, a snarl of fury on Alexandria's face.

She tossed her mace aside, and brought a fist to Alexandria's back, jerking her upper body forward for more force.

Neither of them were expecting Alexandria's arms to keel, nor a short wheeze to leave her before she straightened her arms again and kept pulling.

That wasn't why she hit her, however.

Grasp of the Undying latched onto whatever lifeforce Alexandria had left, and yanked out whatever it could, green energy full of life rushing over Taylor's knuckles and sinking into the summon core, rejuvenating what it could. The Second Wind effect combined with Rejuvenate, each bouncing off each other to push back, just slightly, that maddening agony shredding her brain apart.

The monstrous force trying to peel her helm apart withered even further, turning to nothing more than a strong annoyance.

Molecular stasis kept the woman tough.

But something about the woman's strength or stasis didn't seem to work right with lifeforce, or a severe lack of it.

She won.

She'd just fought Alexandria, and she won.

She burst into roaring, booming laughter, the sound like a halting funeral bell, dropping her hands and spreading them in challenge, the two green orbs of light that she called eyes looking into Alexandria's with a wide, unerring gaze full of triumph and delirious agony, not bothering to pull her off.

She won.

In the deep murk of her helm, the woman could not see the metal shards that formed her grin.

Alexandria growled, and wrenched a hand back, snapping it forward.

She switched back to Evelynn, swapping to the Rune of Domination simply for the physical boost, and burst into smoke.

The fist flew through her, and she twined around it, pulling herself in a half dozen directions. She materialised again, tentacles of bone and branches made of spines twisting around Alexandria to keep her still if only for a moment, and finally, her head formed in the blink of an eye above Alexandria's, golden eyes staring into one.

Her eyes flashed gold, and she pushed pure fuzz into her mind, just as Alexandria bucked and tore half of her tentacles apart.

Then she stilled, dropping like a rock.

They crashed into the broken earth, roiling dust clouds twining and pushing like snakes around them, and Taylor grit her teeth as she straightened, fixing her form to something more human, alien features turning to pink smoke.

She leaned down, and grasped the woman's chin, jerking it forward, empty eyes meeting her own.

She remembered as a child, hearing Alexandria explain that she was utterly immune to Master powers. In the PRT's files, they explained that it was because Alexandria's brain could not be altered.

Wouldn't it be oh so funny, if Cauldron believed the same?

As far as they knew, all she had were mere powers like theirs.

Her eyes flashed gold once more.

The valley was silent, even as more and more people poured out of the portals, agents and some of the few loyal Case 53's they had spreading out in a wide circle around the two strange, ghostly orbs dashing and flickering about where Summoner and Alexandria used to be.

Shamrock didn't know what she could realistically do here, but the reinforcement order went from yellow to an orange in a matter of seconds, so when the portal appeared in her room, she had little choice.

She was ready anyways.

She always was.

Her handler wasn't here, but she was told the flying man was the one in charge.

She sat amongst the general agents, one knee down, aiming down the scope of her plasma rifle at the central site, while ten feet down on either side of her, at least a dozen other agents were using the odd furrows dug into the earth as trenches.

The orbs eventually stopped, nestled close to the ground, then shifted again, one swinging lazily, the other rising in the air.

A sound like a whisper registered, and it began to ramp up rapidly over a few seconds.

Everyone tensed, ready.

Heartstopper moved closer at the edge of her peripheral vision, his handler keeping a tight grip on his shoulder to stop him. He obeyed after a moment of mindlessly moving forward, his armour whirring down.

With a sound like a gasp reversed through a hollow tube, a strange, dark, gray-green mist formed from the orbs, bursting like a pox ball, outwards and washing over them.

It smelled like a graveyard and tasted like the air of a tomb.

Utter silence reigned for a moment as the sun outlined a monstrous silhouette, taller than any people in the valley combined, thirteen feet tall and as wide as six or seven men at the shoulders.

In one hand, a blocky, gnarled thing hung.

In the other, a human shape did the same.

"Hold fire!" The flying man boomed, flying up, fists shaking as the mist cleared in the morning breeze.

Her eyes widened even further at the form it revealed.

Spikes and chains and metal plates curling in and out of eachother, backlit by green light and something eerie and foreign, all mixing with a form that looked like it could eat everything they threw at it and laugh at them.

She pulled her head back a little, giving a quick, dubious glance at her rifle.

It felt like holding a water pistol up to a polar bear.

She swallowed, and ducked her head down to the scope again, hoping her handler hadn't seen that momentary distraction.

Not a single word was spoken.

The metal construct groaned in the way only something made of metal could, slowly raising its left arm, its monstrous fist wrapped tight around a limp woman's head.

She couldn't tell if the woman was alive.

Half of her wore a scorched, torn and flaking bodysuit of some kind, while the other half revealed strange lines of gnarled, branch-like flesh, the marks shaped like fingertips and the outline of human teeth.

The flying man took a deep breath.

"Is she alive?" He asked, voice cold and filtered through the odd, half-done helmet he wore.

The metal titan shifted, its movements stilted.

" For now. " It rumbled, with a voice that she could literally feel in her chest, vibrating her ribs like a xylophone. " You heard our demands. Return our bounty and scatter, weaklings. Or else… " It rumbled, its voice somewhere between a growl of contempt and a purr full of sadism.

The gauntlet tightened, strange green flames that made her guts churn with unease flickering out between the plates of its glove.

"Will you uphold your end of this deal?" The flying man's mechanical voice asked, shouting across the open space.

Slowly, too slowly to be comfortable with, the giant nodded, a motion so small she couldn't have noticed it without the two massive spikes coming out of its helm making it so much more obvious.

"Alright! One moment! Don't harm her!" The flying man hollered, then raised a hand to his helmet.

A tense moment followed, followed by another, everyone but the giant essentially fidgeting.

Even she.

Then, three different portals opened, and through them walked three different people, pushed through by black-clad hands.

She allowed herself to briefly glance at them, feeling all the more confused.

A teenage girl, a man in a cape costume, and a middle aged man that looked terrified out of his mind, glancing around like he was tweaking.

The portals closed, and two more portals opened, one significantly larger than the other.

The giant turned its head to the gawking blonde and the dejected man in the suit, and jerked its head to the large portal.

The girl and the man in the suit gave a hesitant glance at the two or three dozen rifles pointed their way, then quickly made their way to the portals, walking through into what looked like... a well-lit tunnel?

The giant turned its head to the middle aged man who was eyeing the smaller portal.

" Go. " It growled, and the man jumped like a rabbit, nodded rapidly, and sprinted through it.

The giant lowered its hand, and with a flick of its wrist, like throwing away trash, tossed the woman aside to the closest row of agents as if she was a limp ragdoll, put the gigantic mace on its shoulder, and turned, walking to the giant portal with unconcerned, confident steps.

The portal closed behind it, and the flying man rushed to the woman the agents were trying to put on a gurney, grabbing her and zipping through another portal.

"Well done. Await return." Her handler's voice buzzed through the device in her ear, and she replied back with the words she was told to, quickly moving to the closest squad commander to follow them back whenever the portal maker could service them, folding her weapons away.

In the meantime, she looked out at the mostly pristine valley and the mountains around it, knowing this would not be a sight she would see often.

She might even try to smuggle back a flower into her room.

All in all, it was a good day for Shamrock.

Notes:

hope i did this well, and hope you guys enjoyed Alex being taken down a peg :D

Or twenty