User blog:Promestein/Starcross - Going Critical

All it took to end up here was one miscalculation. The most minute error in Alice’s thought process, and now, she feels blood running down from her scalp, from a glancing attack that had still broken through her skull. Her eyes flutter, but she doesn’t dare drag them away from Kyarne, who circles her like a predator, glaring back with glowing eyes. Still, she can appraise the damage. There’s bits of bone in her brain, on her left, penetrating into the cerebral cortex. Specifically, they’re digging into her motor cortex. Her right hand twitches, fingers spasming. Thankfully, Alice can still move it, but it’s not the same. There’s a moment of lag, of wrongness.

This is bad.

It’s a lot harder to ignore brain damage than a broken bone, and even if Alice can do it, it’s risky business. A single fuckup could push her over the edge and cause the fight to come to an end, all at once. She can still clench her fist and throw a punch, but if her brain acts up and she doesn’t shut it down in time, Kyarne might be able to score a punch straight through her chest. Alice can see it already, as the billions of ways the next nanosecond could play out run through her mind. ''Can’t let her get on my right. 64.36543523% chance that I’ll take another hit to the skull. Can’t risk it. She’s surprised me enough already.''

Kyarne obviously has this on her mind. She’s seeking out her right side as she circles, holding herself low to the ground, where it’ll be harder for Alice to hit her when she’s as tall as she is. Alice turns with her, never letting her slip out of sight. The two of them are moving more slowly than they had in a long time, but, for Alice, it’s much worse than the rapid-fire exchange of attacks, which had kept her thoughts from slowing down and stagnating. The Solar Drive feels as if it’s going to simply fall through her chest, as if weighed down by some extraordinary force, and, somehow, it hurts. Her mouth is dry, and her fingers tremble ever so slightly. And, though she tries not to, Alice hyperventilates, gulping in deep breaths of freezing nothing.

''Move already. Attack me. Get it over with.''

But there’s no move to attack, not even a tiny twitch of Kyarne’s muscles. She’s making her wait for it, allowing her to overthink it. Still, her mind races, adding more and more possibilities to process and account for. Most are nonsense, like combing through a beach looking for a seashell and having only the grains slip through between your fingers. One by one, until you’ve exhausted a trillion bits of the stuff, only to find a single abalone. And then, again, just to find another one, just to add one more feasible, important pattern to your thoughts.

.000000001 seconds have passed.

Dammit, she’s letting Kyarne control the pace of the fight. Alice had panicked, thanks to the debris in her brain, and went onto the defensive, but she had no control in this position. It’s agonizing. She had given up all her agency to this bitch just because she got lucky and caved in her skull a bit. But that doesn’t matter, not in the long run. Even if Alice’s right hand isn’t responding properly, she’s still thinking, still rational. Three hundred years ago, she’d have been incapable of moving her arm without significant effort, and she’d be in tears over it.

But today, she’s still breathing.

Alice thinks for another moment, running over another few trillion possibilities, before gritting her teeth. Better this than nothing. Fortune favors the bold, after all! She twitches her right index finger intentionally, just a bit, a movement far from unusual thanks to the damage her brain’s taken. A single twitch, and all the dust they’ve kicked up around them undergoes a rapid physical reaction, breaking down into fissile materials. Kyarne suddenly pauses and blinks, realizing what’s happened a moment too late. Each and every mote of the stuff surrounding them blooms into a nuclear explosion, a hundred of them, a thousand, a million, all at once. The asteroid their fight had come to is caught in the reactions and joins suit, and then the next asteroid over, too, and the next, and the next, spreading out across the asteroid belt. All the explosions form a splendid ring of radiation and heat, one visible from across the galaxy.

But none of this is meant to hit Kyarne. Simply trying to brute force a hit on her won’t work. Alice can guess that, the moment the explosions began, the space between her and Kyarne grew lightyears while remaining compressed to merely seem like a few meters. While her nuclear reaction will take its sweet time crossing that distance, Alice can break through it in just the blink of an eye, and she does so, kicking herself forward. Blowing past a thousand lightyears of altered space, Alice rears her left fist back, sensing Kyarne’s position and throwing the punch only when she’s played Kyarne’s reactions over in her head a few thousand times.

As expected, Kyarne, the moment she comes into view from behind the explosions, hops out of the way, spinning around and launching a kick. Turning to face her with her right, Alice lifts her arm and catches the hit on her forearm. Radius dislocated, fractured. Then, she pushes Kyarne’s leg up, noting that her other is nearing the ground. Crouching, fast as she can, Alice lashes a sweep out with her rear leg, just barely catching Kyarne’s foot as it touches the still unbroken part of the meteor, past all that altered space.

Knocked away from balance before she could even get it, Kyarne falls backwards, and Alice digs her sweeping into the ground as it comes back, using it to propel herself forwards. Before Kyarne can react, Alice throws out a right cross, straight into her chest. Bloody spittle splashes against Alice’s cheek, right before Kyarne is sent flying into the field of explosions, across the thousand lightyears Alice had just ventured. Allowing herself only a sliver of satisfaction at the thought of Kyarne’s innards turning to goo, Alice raises her arm and fires a beam of radiation a couple of astronomical units wide after her. A distortion in space causes it to veer off target, however, and it ends up vaporizing Saturn and its rings instead of Kyarne.

That’s fine, though. With one more step, Alice kicks herself into motion and pursuit, through her own hail of explosions, quickly catching up to Kyarne halfway across the solar system, far off from the light show that used to be the asteroid belt. Kyarne’s already regenerated, what used to be a hole in her chest now filled in with plasma in the guise of flesh and blood. Alice doesn’t care that much. No, that’s just more reason to beat her harder. Until she can’t heal. Until she’s just mush. Already seeing the impacts play out, in the near future, closer and closer, Alice’s head pulses with each one, a wave of animosity washing over her. ''Just you fucking wait, Kyarne. I’ll make you regret ever spending a second of your life with my woman.''

Kyarne’s done moving, now just floating in space across from her, at the ready. Without pause, Alice flicks her wrist, and a laser slices through the distance between them. Unsurprisingly, it misses when Kyarne ducks under it, and she pushes off some invisible force behind her to throw herself right back at Alice. Fine by me. Alice lets the first laser dissipate, simply angles her hand down, and taps into all the excess energy leaking out of the Solar Drive and oozing from the wounds in her chest. A couple ten thousand foe crackle at her fingertips, and, a grin spreading across her face, Alice fires the largest blast she can, a beam of radiation spreading to cover more than just a couple AU this time. I hope you enjoy Hell, you fucking homewrecking whore -

But then, a sudden, tremendous gravitational force tugs her arm backwards, and the attack goes straight above her, not anywhere near Kyarne. “WHAT THE FUCK!?” Alice screams, before she senses it, behind her. All the radiation released by the explosions she had caused earlier had suddenly condensed into a single mass of energy, and then, in sync with a pulse of gravity released by Kyarne, it exerted ridiculous force on her all at once.

Alice doesn’t have the chance to swear again, as, suddenly in front of her, Kyarne slams a fist into the left side of her skull. This isn’t a glancing hit, like the one that had ripped into her motor cortex. This one hits its target dead-on, and Alice feels her skull give way. ''Parietal bone fractured. Sphenoid and temporal bones destroyed. Pterion completely obliterated. Bone in brain, left hemisphere. Severe damage.''

Floundering, Alice tries to make distance, but no such luck. Not when Kyarne is this fast and this close. Her mind barely responds to her desperate attempts to move, to think, only offering Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh no fuck shit no fuck dammit fuck shit no fuck please God oh fuck Jesus and a disorienting tapestry of her immediate future, which isn’t so promising. For some godforsaken reason, Alice focuses on this, and sees just what’s waiting for her, as Kyarne pulls back her arm in what appears to be slow motion.

Ah, fuck.

The SOLSTICE part of Alice’s mind processes what’s happening faster than her brain or body can. The pain doesn’t even reach her properly, so it takes a moment for Alice to realize just how much she had been hit in that fraction of a nanosecond. A single mistake, and -

Impact to abdomen, true ribs broken, false ribs broken, floating ribs broken, punctured lungs.

Impact to abdomen, ruptured spleen.

Impact to abdomen, left kidney crushed.

Impact to abdomen, right kidney crushed.

Impact to abdomen, ruptured liver.

Impact to chest, sternum broken, sternum piercing Solar Drive - oh shit, oh no oh god ohhhhh why is this happening to me -

Impact to skull -

Impact to skull -

Impact to skull -

Impact to chest -

Impact to abdomen -

Impact to -

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The feeling of her sternum scraping against the Solar Drive is enough to snap Alice away from the future, which is beginning to become the present. Her body is already in tatters. Bits of skull are floating around her, caught in her hair, along with clumps of blood and brain and scalp. A broken rib has stabbed through her lung and pokes through her back. Her kidneys may as well not exist anymore, and her spleen and liver are almost just as fucked. Blood and bile are already rising up her throat, and she faintly remembers puking in the future she just saw. ‘Remembers’, that is.

Suddenly aware again, Alice recalls another thing. A tiny opening, as Kyarne lost herself in beating the shit out of her. Now, as she rears back, palm open, to rip the Solar Drive out from her chest, screeching something illegible - an opportunity. Alice doesn’t even bother checking how it’ll go, instead pouring all the energy she can into speed, and kicking straight upwards, ignoring the fact that her brain is mostly mush and she shouldn’t be able to move at all.

Her foot passes straight through Kyarne’s skull, obliterating her head entirely and splattering the void of space with plasmatic gore. Kyarne recoils and pulls back, and her claws, having just scraped against the Solar Drive, are dragged back with her. Acting more on instinct than anything rational, Alice floats up a short distance, pulling her leg back, and then rams her fist straight into Kyarne’s neck cavity from above. Her spinal cord stabs into her palm, but buckles under the force.

Alice fires, another build up of energy that explodes into her system even faster and greater than the last, and she finds it in herself to feel raw glee as Kyarne’s body simply ceases to exist, each atom splitting apart and cracking until there’s nothing left. Not a single particle. Offering no resistance to the blowback of her own attack, Alice is sent flying backwards the moment it’s released, spiraling through space until she collides with Titan, feeling rocks jab into her exposed brain.

Then, she pukes, all over herself.

“Auuhgahahhahghhhgh,” Alice groans, vomiting a second, and then a third time, turning over and immediately falling on her face. For a moment, raw emotion had allowed her to move beyond her limits, but now, further from danger, it’s all catching up with her. Her body is fucked. Suddenly, it’s impossible to think straight, it’s impossible to sort out her surroundings, because she’s covered in blood and puke and brains, and her eyes are fluttering, and she’s barely alive.

Animal panic sets in.

I’m gonna die oh no shit EQUINOX help Venus help someone help please God I’m sorry I don’t wanna die please oh no oh shit this isn’t fair please someone mommy please don’t I can’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t -

“I WON’T FUCKING DIE!” The scream sends her thoughts into a frenzy for a moment, but then, slowly, they order themselves, and Alice tries to move her leg. It doesn’t obey at first, but slowly, Alice wills it. She wills herself to her feet, even though she’s covered in her own gore, which boils against her skin. She staggers, right off the bat, almost collapsing again, but she doesn’t.

Not long ago, she’d have died the instant something like this happened to her.

Alice looks at her hand. Well, ‘looks’ isn’t the right word. Her eyes aren’t working, so really, she just remembers that her hand exists and dumbly holds it out in front of her, feeling it. She’s flesh and blood, is the point. Her magic, revolving around the, uh… um… the, uh, mattery forces…? She can’t remember, and it’s up in the air whether that’s the brain damage or just regular stupidity at play. It’s about controlling matter, though, that’s what she means. Matter, elements, atoms, molecules.

What’s a human made up of again…?

As she asks herself this, she feels Kyarne not too far away, a skeleton pulling itself together from stardust, and then filling in with vestigial organs and flesh. Closing her eyes, Alice takes a deep breath of nitrogen, manages to not vomit a fourth time, and asks herself another, much more difficult question.

Why the fuck is this shit always happening to me?

She’ll probably never know, and that frustrates her beyond belief.