Hexus: Neo

>30< Extent

[2:12 PM, January 19, UTC +08:00]

PAULA groaned as white noise rang in her ears. Her heartbeat throbbed in her skull, barely overshadowed by a headache. Her right shoulder was also aching, but a quick check showed the joint was not dislocated. She struggled to breathe, but thankfully none of her ribs were broken. She coughed and turned to spit out a mix of blood and saliva. The ground was covered in broken concrete and glass, and as she tried to move her leg away from a sharp-looking shard, a blinding pain shot up her ankle. She hissed as she squeezed her eyes shut, and took in deep breaths to calm herself.

This is so not how I saw my weekend going.

She exhaled as she carefully rolled over and looked around. Everything was bathed in grey, despite the fact that it was supposed to be afternoon, and her vision swam as she struggled to make sense of her location. Moira was not within her field of vision, but she could feel the magical energy pulsing behind her. She was about to turn around, but then she saw a dark expanding pool of blood and followed it to where it was coming from.

No.

No. No. No. No. No.

She ignored the pain in her ankle and the wetness of the liquid soaking through her dress as she crawled towards the unconscious creature that had collapsed in a sitting position beneath the crater on the wall. She reached up to touch its sleek scaly face and slapped it lightly beside its narrow nostril.

"Dami!"

Her own voice sounded like a watery gurgle due to the ringing in her ears. Damilare gave no sign of a reaction, and she slapped him a few more times as she looked over his large reptilian body. One of his wings was broken, the bone jutting out as it bled actively, and her breath hitched when she saw that his chest was not moving. She panicked, and she went from slapping him to hitting every part of his body she could reach and to pounding against his rib cage, ignoring the small cuts his scales were making in her fists. He fell limply on his side and she crawled on top of him and shook his shoulders as she felt her eyes start to prickle.

"No!" she screamed. "You can't do this to me! Wake up you bastard!"

She raised her hand to smack his face again and his eyes flew open. She stopped in shock, but before she could say anything, he grabbed her and flipped over, pinning her to the ground. She screamed silently as he pressed into her wounded shoulder and sprained ankle, but then heat flushed over her face, and she opened her eyes and peered over his shoulder. Kojiro was standing in the middle of the room, deflecting energy shots from Moira with his bare hands. He seemed completely unmoved by the attacks, and Paula could tell that the intensity and amount of magic poured into those shots should have disintegrated him on contact. Considering that the check-in till a few feet away was now a melting red blob of metal and plastic, one of the deflected blasts had hit really close to them, which Damilare had tried to protect her from. He had gone unconscious again, but his barely noticeable breathing and slow steady heartbeat were reassuring.

"I must have underestimated you," Moira said. The confidence in her tone was gone, replaced by thinly-veiled uncertainty.

"How encouraging," Kojiro said, "but I cannot humour you with conversation. Time is something I really do not have at the moment."

He waved his hand, and Paula could feel the fabric of space rupture as a gargantuan portal appeared above him. Water poured through, like an ocean wave splashing towards Moira and she shot another energy blast at him. Most of the water burst out in a steam explosion as it evaporated instantaneously, and Paula tucked her face against Damilare's shoulder as the blast rushed to meet them. Moira vanished, and a split-second later, appeared beside Kojiro, but his hand was already outstretched towards her direction. A resounding boom shook the ground as a ring-shaped blast of energy shot her out of the building, taking fifteen-foot wide circle of the wall with her. Paula's eyes widened.