"G. W. Y. N! Do you know what that spells?! GWYN!" Alpha cheered, doing a few jumping jacks with outstretched fists. She seemed to be roused by the death of King Theodore and she was certainly celebrating it; her hands carried imaginary pompoms finished with green sparkles of magical light. Right after her first routine, she deliberately jumped high and landed with a remarkable split (which she definitely couldn't pull off in real life) and spread her arms out wide on either side. "A-S-T-O-R-E-A! Do you know what that spells? VICTORY!" she grinned, doing a few more acrobatic moves. Incidentally, she managed to step on a few corpses belonging to her friends before she positioned herself for the next phrase. "First comes Arachna! Next comes Azog! Now it's Theo!" As she enunciated every word, she dropped down to Gwyn's still body and gave it a wink. "We're gonna survive! S-U-R-V-I-V-E! I'm gonna live no matter what you do to me! I'm immortal~ You are not! You failed so bad, it's making me sad!" she taunted over at where Theo once stood before she focused herself back onto Gwyn's state. The archer had been fatally injured by the king's last attack and it was obviously that she needed Alphabet Chocolate's help. "Go, go, go, go, go, go Alpha Squad! Yeah! Woot! Hooray!" she finished triumphantly with an arrogant crow. Despite her boiling frustrations that threatened to implode from the pit of her stomach, she still felt some sort of malicious glee at Theo's fall. She reached up into the sky with an exaggerated motion and mimed pulling down Gwyn's soul from above. "Death is nothing against me!" Alpha bragged to no one in particular. "That's right guys! The guys up there in the sky listening! Soon, everything's gonna be free and awesome and you can't do anything about it! I'm—we're—just too awesome to contain! A-L-P-H-A-B-E-T C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E!" @Gwyn ap Herne
As Astor took his place before the fallen king, the words of the madman sounded so very far off. He said his piece to some diety as she moved away to give the other space. She wanted no part in the feast of half-starved flames or the cold certainty of ice creeping through veins. She'd let the kingling have his end and Gwyn would be done with all of this. And then it simply stopped. Frozen and not at all like what she might have expected from Astor's hydromancy leaking into an AOE. She couldn't see what it was, the king's fallen form at the very edge of her vision as she had turned away. There was only a darkness, a falling away of her sight that she knew should have still been within the range of her peripheral vision. Everything was painfully quiet and still, her clever blue eyes only able to catch motes of dust still in the air to prove it wasn't just her. Well, those and the two figures, beyond Theo's half-frame, still within her range. It felt like an age had passed in the nothing-silence before the figure appeared. It skipped into view. It turned the other archer. It strung the bow and she knew it did more. Pranced off elsewhere and there were odd words that her sensitive ears caught. They battered away at her and maybe she'd have felt blood run down the column of her throat had it not be stuck, displaced in time, too. She didn't look away from the arrow that consumed all the light, devoured it whole and willed it away. It was going to hit her. She couldn't move, couldn't dodge, couldn't roll, and it was going to hit her. She wasn't stupid. She could see the arch in her mind's eye. It was easy to work backwards to figure out the aim, as skilled as she was at pointing her own ammunition where it was needing to nest. And then everything stopped... stopping. It all came alive in the blind panic of her mind. Gwyn had enough time to straighten to face it, caught the sound of bodies hitting the floor and the cast spell lighting them up. Lightning had skated across her skin in a blinding blaze of sensation that took a step past pain. It was as if every nerve was overloaded in the moment and unable to describe what had assailed them. It left her breathless and reeling and as she went to inhale, what little breath left was stolen. The shock of the bolt through her chest forced out what wisp of life her lungs had left to give. The hole in the world left a hole in her chest. She'd felt it go black before, but not so dark as this. She came back to the fading echo of fucking @Alphabet Chocolate doing exactly as she always did. Fucking around. It was comforting in a way, but she was immediately busy clutching at her armor over her heart and wheezing violently from the force of being stuck, dead, and pulled back to the land of the living. Fuck. The ranger rolled to her side and struggled to calm the wild beating of her heart. The sound of it pulsing in her ears made her sick to her stomach. She restrained the impulsive snarl that tried to fight its way up her throat as the Princess spoke over her father's fallen body. A second passed where she could see perfectly him being brought back to finish the job out of misguided love. Gwyn was happy to be wrong and sighed shakily as the other moves, more people joined, people spoke. A hand was held out to Krait as the serpent snuck from the shadows where it had waited for her call. She didn't speak a 'well done' aloud. The fledgling bond was a wash of here, fine, safe, leave back and forth until the lines blurred. "If we're well and done here..." She muttered, but cut herself off. What was there even left to say at this point? God, she needed a drink. Or nine. "You lot got a cellar with enough alcohol to forget all this?" She didn't necessarily expect an answer, but she wouldn't turn down a helping tankard. Gwyn did pause to cast the talkative Duke's back a withering look. What kind of selfish asshole went preaching to a distraught daughter who just helped kill their own father? Fucking idiot. Her teeth ground and the sound made her wince. Like thunder. No lightning spells this time, though. "And Kurumo, or whatever, you ever consider leaving well enough alone? You're giving me a headache. Let her deal." She waved the rest off. No more anything now.
