As debris sprayed in all directions like crashing tides, bystanders scrambled away in every possible way, bodies pouring through the cracks in the mayhem as they pushed over and past one another to get to any kind of safety.
And as others pushed past him in the throes of blind panic, a singur older man found himself being battered by the retreating waves, his own escape slowed by those around him pushing past in a greater rush than his tired legs could manage to carry him.
It wasn’t long before he found himself fully winded, half-colpsing against the side of an abandoned car, the crowds having shoved past as the st few civilians in the area with him stormed onwards away from the commotion, not one of them caring to look back to notice the fallen man.
His gaze turned backwards, towards the source of the panic driving them all away, towards the central point of torn pavement well behind him at this point.
When he did, he saw another wave of debris, stone and brick and concrete capping overtop of the sea of broken and empty cars he was drowning in, a lone mass of twisted metal soaring clearly at the heart of it all, the sunlight shining off the exposed steel as it sailed overhead, directly towards where he stood motionless, body devoid of any strength to flee.
The man closed his eyes, muttered a few words, and prayed to any soul that would listen to the words of a soon-to-be-dead man.
“Head down…!”
His impromptu st rites were cut short, a voice screaming overtop his thoughts as it pushed through the deafening storm of noise, brutally jerking his attention back to the world of the living.
Several feet away, a short girl sprinted forwards, hellbent determination in her every motion as her feet smmed against the roofs of tightly-packed vehicles, running overtop them as she raced towards him.
She was half his size, though, and with the scant few moments left, there was no way someone would have time to get him out of the way--
Even those doomed thoughts weren’t given time to finish, the woman shedding her heavy jacket as she ran, a bare arm shoving him aside, knocking him to the ground below before she leapt, grunting as she unched forwards from the roof of the car in front of him, bursting forward as she took to the air, the sunlight framing her like a guardian angel made manifest.
He almost had time to watch in blind awe as he was saved by her, watching her leap fearlessly forth to shield him… only to watch in renewed horror as the massive projectile met her midair, the sounds of crunching bone impossible to ignore as it struck into her hard, parts of it punching clear through her abdomen and stabbing out the other side as she changed the unch trajectory just enough to rescue him, instead getting herself killed in his pce as she was crushed into another car nearby, arms bring as she was ripped through the windshield, legs sticking out from below as her own blood pooled quickly in the dented hood below her.
They were wholly speechless, having just watched a girl he’d never seen before kill herself for his sake, her body now motionless before him as he pulled himself back up to his feet finally, eyes fixed on the destroyed mess of her body now sealed in an inglorious steel coffin, her limbs still poking out from the sides as they hung there… notably not motionless, he only now noticed.
With a twisting, squelching, groaning noise, the mass of broken metal was lifted and pushed mostly aside, the woman below squirming her way out from beneath it, the skin of her uncovered arms ripped to shreds as the sharp metal was pulled out of it, on of her legs being severed at the knee as it ripped free of the weight pinching down on it, the woman rolling off to the side of the car and falling to the ground below as she finished tearing herself free again.
“Fuck, that still hurts… oy, you okay over there…?”
Still smarting from her less-than-majestic entrance, Alice clumsily rose back to her feet… or foot, in this case, reaching for her severed limb as she looked back towards the older man she’d rushed to save.
He was notably missing from the spot he’d fallen at, instead now a fair distance away, the horrible sight of her being mulched and still managing to cmber back up stirring a renewed energy in him as he fled along with everyone else before him, racing away from whatever this nightmare was.
“…yeah, you’re fucking welcome!”
Blowing a raspberry at the retreating senior, she carelessly plugged her severed leg back against its stump, twisting it around a bit as the muscles pulled everything more or less back into pce again.
“Quite the selfless hero, aren’t we…?”
“Oh shut it, he’s alive, ain’t he?”
“I suppose, but surely you could at least feign some level of respectability and decorum, could you not?”
“Yeah, sure, I bet people would be a lot happier if I looked prettier and posed some more while they died, yeah?”
“That’s not… ugh, you’re not going to listen to me regardless, are you?”
“Now you’re learning!”
She smirked as Sclera groaned from beneath his cloth hideaway, turning their shared eye back towards their impromptu arrival point to find Gwyn slowly winding her way between the tightly-packed vehicles littering the road, her advance notably slower than Alice’s more direct approach.
“All good over there?”
“Oh, u-um… yeah! Just gotta… nnn… m-make some space to get through…”
“Just run on top of ‘em, it’s a lot faster!”
“B-But won’t that damage people’s cars…?”
Alice panned her gaze around a bit, finding most every car packed in around them crashed, crushed, or in some other manner of disrepair from the chaos occurring down the street.
“…I don’t think anyone’s gonna mind a few more dents!”
“…i-if you’re sure…!”
Gwyn carefully cmbered on top of one of the discarded automobiles, her bance shaky at best, waiting a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to fall off before giving an excited double thumbs up to Alice, who meekly returned the gesture before resuming her own forward advance, Gwyn following along at a noticeably slower rate.
More scattered debris peppered the roads as they both ran onwards, Gwyn taking time to dodge the worst of it while Alice braced her arms overhead and took the blows, earning a few grunts of pain from the times something actually rge or sharp or hot enough managed to hurt her sorely abused limbs.
As the duo pressed on through the storming rain of detritus, they eventually reached the eye of the storm, a major intersection mostly cleared out with a single rge, bck eighteen-wheeler sporting a pair of matching trailers connected in sequence parked haphazardly at one end.
Scattered around it were faces both wholly new and painfully familiar to the arriving duo, the majority of the moving bodies simple humanoid shapes sculpted from polished chrome, scavenging through destroyed cars and wrecked buildings hurriedly before rushing handfuls of miscelneous items back towards the trailers behind them, their work supervised by more immediately recognizable insectoid shapes, massive bded limbs Alice had seen entirely too often tely carefully prying open prospective containers for their greedy-handed companions to loot through.
At the heart of it all, mounted on top of the semi trailer as they overlooked the operation unfolding around them, stood who Alice and Gwyn both could only assume was the one responsible for the metallic battalion around them.
She hung almost limply in midair, a pair of goggles pushed up over and through her hairline to let her see around herself better, a drastically oversized bcoat dangling off of her frame enough to fully obscure any hands she may have had below the long sleeves, a mass of metallic tendrils like the spindly limbs of a jellyfish spilling out from where her legs should have been, holding her aloft several feet above her perch as she zily kept watch over her orchestrated scene of destruction.
And from her vantage point, it wasn’t hard to notice the duo that had rushed directly into her ongoing crime scene, head tilting to the side as she mustered the energy to look at her new guests.
“…ehhh…? Oh… I was wondering if you magical girls were ever gonna bother showing up… who’s the civvie though…?”
She raised one sleeved arm half-heartedly, gesturing towards the bloodied but otherwise unremarkable Alice, eyes still mostly closed as she remained equally unthreatened and unawake.
Gwyn attempted to confidently step forward, managing about a quarter of one as she trembled nervously, having never confronted another person directly like this before.
“I-I-In the… in the n-name of peace… a-a-and justice, I… I…!”
“...eh, whatever… Guardolls, kill ‘em both already and get back to work, I wanna go home already…”
Not even bothering to let the prospective magical girl finish, she waved away at them dismissively, the tiny motion immediately snapping the attention of the several metallic mantises present away from their work and instead over to the pair of newly arrived guests.
“H-Hey, I wasn’t done yet…!”
The tiny scraps of confidence she’d mustered were torn away and repced with a bubbling annoyance at being denied her own dramatic entrance, turning to Alice with a worried expression already forming as five of the bugs they’d only managed to fight one at a time yesterday began shuffling in their direction.
“Should we c-call for backup, or run, o-or--”
Her questions fell on empty air, Alice already absent from her own perch beside her, a massive hunk of crumpled asphalt clutched in both hands as she rushed headfirst at the nearest of the approaching swarm.
She reached it before the order to attack even finished processing through its artificial brain, turning to face the now significantly closer threat just in time for the mass of broken road was smmed directly into its head from below, Alice’s elbows bending and breaking backwards from the overexerted impact she’d put into the swing as she decapitated the monster before it could even start to retaliate.
In the time it took for her shattered elbows to re-set themselves or for the removed metal skull to hit the ground, both bded limbs were already moving, swinging inwards towards the st spot it had been able to visually confirm her location before being forcibly blinded.
Both swings met only empty air instead, scraping against its own armor loudly as Alice had already cmbered up out of the way, her weapon bsted to useless rubble in her hands from the impact as she let the crumbs of it drop down, instead vaulting over the newly empty neck and shoulders of the creature below her as it swung and missed.
“C’mon shitheel, over this way, almost got me!”
She kicked hard enough into its back to rattle the entire frame as she slid down the other side, soles banging into it roughly and denting it’s polished carapace gracelessly as she taunted it.
Its audio sensors still worked well enough however, and with the constant prodding and rattling it was receiving from her, it was simple enough to track her by sound alone, both limbs immediately swiveling back around as it swung back to rip both massive bdes straight through her fleshy carcass--
--and instead found something significantly less soft and squishy, the twinned sword-arms both tearing into more metal before getting firmly stuck in pce, the bug tugging weakly as it found its weapons now lodged squarely inside the body of one of it’s brethren, Alice having successfully stayed overwhelmingly loud enough for the blinded bug to not hear the other one approaching from behind.
Two of the five already neatly disabled, Alice smirked to herself before turning back to the others… her smile fading as she found a third already almost on top of her, both oversized bdes descending on her from above faster than she could react.
Both of them rushed down towards her, Alice bracing her arms overhead to hopefully at least prevent herself from being eviscerated too severely… only for one of the arms to miss entirely, the other gashing deeply through one of her own arms and taking most of her right forearm with it, the entire insect thrown off bance at the st moment.
Another peppering of crystal shards tore into the joints on its side, further disabling its already thoroughly shredded legs before ripping into the shoulder as well, Gwyn still perched atop the remains of a car nearby as she id gemstone salvos into it one after another.
Wincing from the pain of yet another severed appendage, Alice peered back over her shoulder, tendrils already spilling out from her messy stump to retrieve her discarded hand, reattaching it with a thumbs up already fshing back at Gwyn, a horribly messy gesture she nonetheless excitedly returned to her companion.
The robotic jellyfish of a woman opposite of them, however, was significantly less enthused to see three of her favorite toys dispatched near instantly, her half-sleeping expression twisting into frustrated recognition.
“…wait a sec, all that meat stuff… you ain’t a civvie, you’re the little shit that’s been breaking all my test models…!”
“Oh, those were yours too? That’s great, I get to enjoy caving your skull in even more, then.”
“…new orders. All Guardolls, I want that bitch right there stripped for parts and left to fucking rot--”
“Hearts beat free! Burn Change!”
“Hearts beat free! Bloom Change!”
Cries echoed from down the streets to either side of them all, cutting through any conversation the three currently present could have been having as the entrance of two more new arrivals was signaled.
A mass of spilling vines and branches rode forwards like a tidal wave, overtaking one of the two remaining bugs and binding it tightly to the ground below as it crushed the delicate circuitry within it, a roar of spiraling fme rising upwards from the other direction to engulf the other, melting joints into singur fused masses unable to move in the slightest.
With the final threats present effortlessly disabled, the two new guests emerged in a brilliant flourish, nding and sliding a short distance from one another, exactly frilly, matching uniforms of red and green respectively clearly marking the pair as magical girls.
“Burn Free--”
“--and Bloom Free--”
“--arrive on the scene!~”
The duo posed dramatically in perfect sync, both gesturing forwards towards the assaint before them, paying no heed whatsoever to either Gwyn or Alice behind them as they proudly announce themselves.
“…ugh, I was hoping to finish before the wonder twins here finally decided to show up… what a bummer, boss said I’m not allowed to fight you two, so I guess I gotta bail early after all…”
“Not so fast, you won’t be going anywhere now that Grace City’s twin protectors have arrived!~”
“That’s right! Surrender peacefully now, or prepare to face our peerless symmetry!~”
Alice stood a short distance behind them both, more stunned than anything else, having only just started getting into it before their fight was completely derailed.
“…um? I think we kinda had it, so you guys don’t really need to--”
“Nonsense civilian, we live to protect all helpless innocents of this city, and we would never flee from a fight!~”
“Well said! Magical girls never run, after all!~”
The hint of hissing irritation present in the green one’s voice made it obvious that it was the same overly polite prick from just a bit earlier, now all dolled up and presentable for the public as he tried to shoo her away from the scene now that the two of them were here to handle things.
“...nah, don’t really feel like fighting you clowns even if I did have permission to… so why don’t you all go do something better with your time while I skedaddle, ‘kay…?”
“What do you mean by--”
Not allowing them another pair of heroic statements, the foe opposite the growing horde of magical girls lifted a sleeved arm once more, visibly clicking something underneath the cloth.
As soon as the hidden button was clicked, several compartments on the truck below her opened, a swarm of tiny missiles firing off upwards before scattering in every direction, bsting holes through every building in sight, earning cries of pain and fear from those who had fled indoors to escape the chaos outside as windows shattered and walls colpsed.
“Why… you monster…!!”
“...that’s little old me, alright... now go be good little heroes and save them while I get out of here, ciaooo…~”
She smirked teasingly below her half-lidded eyes, one of her multiple tendrils lifting up to kick against the side of the truck several times, signaling it to rev back to life finally, the scavenger robots all scrambling back into the trailer before the door sealed tightly behind them.
Alice sprinted past the distracted pair in front of her, storming as fast as her legs would carry her after the truck as it started to rumble back to life, only just barely starting to move again as she got close.
“Oy, I wasn’t fucking done with you yet, where do you think you’re--”
The woman atop it sighed, pointing her other arm down at the obnoxious little gnat charging at her… and with a click, the sleeve covering her hand was bsted open, a bullet as thick as one of her fingers firing out from a fully mechanical hand beneath the fabric, rocketing forward before burrowing clear through Alice’s good eye, staining bits of her bone-white hair red again as her own blood and grey matter sprayed out of the back of her head as the projectile punched almost the full way through her.
“…sorry little meatball, we can py some other time when your friends aren’t crashing the party, ‘kay…?”
Alice’s body colpsed to the road below again, going limp for a scant few second before she scrambled back to life once more, skin and bones stitching themselves back into pce again, her shredded optic nerve winding back into a functioning eyeball just in time for her to see the truck already speeding away from her.
“Oh, I’m murdering that annoying little shit when I get my fucking hands on her…!”
“W-We’ve got other problems…!”
Gwyn’s voices yanked Alice’s attention backwards, the other girl already rushing towards one of the colpsing buildings as increasingly panicked cries spilled free from inside.
“Not to worry, civilian rescue is our specialty, and we can split up to handle the culprit and save everyone, isn’t that right?~”
“Obviously! As easy as--”
“Nah, I think you’ll both have your hands full with the saving people stuff.”
“Eh…?”
“Well, otherwise, people might see you fighting next to a civilian and get some weird ideas, yeah?”
“…and what might you be implying with that…?”
Bloom Free glowered slightly at her, Alice paying them no heed whatsoever as her attention was turned to the escaping eighteen-wheeler spiraling around the highway exit ramp just ahead, already headed toward an underpass directly below the same road.
“I’m implying this one’s mine.”
She didn’t wait for any manner of response, already fully pnning to ignore anything either of the twins behind her could reply with as her soles beat against the pavement below, overexerting her calf muscles as much as she could manage, feeling her legs ripping themselves apart and pulling themselves back together again as she raced ahead nearly as fast as the truck itself was moving.
“…k-knock ‘em dead…!”
Gwyn’s voice echoed from behind her encouragingly, Alice only rushing faster as she chased down the person responsible for the st 24 hours of her life being easily the worst birthday she’d ever had.
Her still-healing right arm twitched and squirmed, bone and sinew writhing below the surface of her overactive flesh, bubbling as she focused every bit of her energy on her own sorely abused limb, feeling it reforming slowly and clumsily against the familiar shape it was accustomed to.
“What on earth are you trying to accomplish here, exactly…?! Your arm is already fine, it doesn’t need to be exerted upon any further…!”
Memories of the instantly growing flower Willow had demonstrated before filled her mind, the decidedly unarmed magical girl already clearly recalling every overexertion of magic from before only serving to blow her own arm wide open like an overfilled balloon as she failed to affect anything past her own body…
…though that served only to remind her that every attempt at affecting anything within her own body had been significantly more successful.
Fueled by the memory of every grievous wound, every severed limb, every impaled torso, every agonizing injury that psychotic little cyborg’s toys had inflicted on her in the st day, Alice reached the edge of the overpass, one foot meeting the edge of the railing as she propelled herself majestically upwards once more, a scream of determination, anger, and pure, writhing pain bursting out past her lips as she sailed upwards with a fsh of viscera trailing behind her.
Her feet found only empty air for a long while, the escaping truck directly below her, sneakers smming hard into the metal roof of the rear trailer before immediately sliding backwards, the sound of punctured, ripping sheet metal screeching overtop her own pained, bored breathing as she just barely managed to bring herself to a halt atop the rattling cargo container.
“…ugh, I hate persist little gnats… fine, I guess I’ll deal with you now-- geh?!”
The exasperated experimenter turned to face her returning guest once more, her earlier exhausted expression almost immediately shifting into horrified disgust as she id eyes upon her once more.
Alice pulled her deformed right arm out of the metal she’d buried it into, masses of twitching muscles growing and twisting into shapes no human body should be ever be formed into as she grunted in smugly satisfied agony, the bones below the writhing fibers stretched and expanded outwards like an overripe fruit, the end where a hand should have rightfully been instead sharpened to a razor’s edge, the entire right ride of her body reshaped into a horrific, fleshy approximation of the bded limbs she’d been thoroughly familiarized with over the st two days, a butcher’s knife of bone and meat repcing her entire limb.
Her tongue poked against her cheek below the eye she’d only just grown back, rooting around in her mouth for a few moments before spitting something out, a single, crumpled bullet cttering against the rent metal below her as she shone a shit-eating grin at her opponent.
“…you dropped that~”
