"So who will be who? I don't know if I can be a good distraction…" Yin worries, assuming that because of her striking appearance, she might end up being chosen to keep Esther busy. Compared to Ren's black hair and dark eyes, Yin's unnatural purple hair, pale complexion and white eyes stood out quite a bit, especially if you consider that they are currently within a rather dark environment in this abandoned mall.
"That's ok, I'll be the distraction, and you'll sneak in." Ren consoles Yin, "But first I need to find something to use as a weapon…"
Looking around, Ren notices that there is a partially open door nearby. Running over quickly she looks in, inside this room on the floor there is a rusty metal pipe
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[Rusty metal pipe]
(Description: an old plumbing pipe that has not been used in a very long time. If one were to use it now, they would have more chances of getting diseases than getting running water.
Can be used as an effective weapon.
Grants user:
+10 attack
-5 speed
+3% chance of infecting opponents with tetanus)
Abilities: [Swing], [Parry], [Arc]
(tap to see details)
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Simply grabbing the metal pipe, Ren does not see the system notification with its description. She turns around and leaves the room, heading back to Yin.
Passing by Yin, she quickly says "wait 25 seconds, and then sneak in through this vent."
Nodding her head in understanding, Yin rushes over and crouches next to the vent, slowly counting down.
25…
24…
23…
Looking up towards the tracker that brought them here, Yin saw that there were only 3 minutes left.
Feeling a jolt of panic, she speeds up counting slightly.
17…
16…
14…
POV: Ren
Inhaling deeply, Ren steadied her breathing. Counting to 10, trying to calm her nerves, she adjusted her grip on the rusty metal pipe. It was smooth, and the slight sweat on her hands was making it a bit harder to hold on.
Reaching 0 in her counting, she took one last breath and reached for the door, preparing herself for the quick reaction from Esther. With adrenaline coursing through her veins, she swung the door open and braced herself.
Immediately, as if waiting for the door to open, Esther sprung into action, and swung the hammer towards the door. Ren, acting quickly, ducks down and swings the rusty metal pipe towards Esther's knees, trying to cripple Esther's movement a bit. The swing collides with her right knee, and causes Esther to stumble back a bit. Taking advantage of the moment, Ren quickly ducks into the room, and starts to take up a spot between some of the showers, figuring that the swings of Esther's hammer wouldn't be able to get much force if there were walls in the way.
Unfortunately, Esther seemed to recover quite quickly from the blow, and just before Ren managed to get to the showers, the hammer that Esther had was heading directly towards her neck.
Out of the corner of her eyes, Ren notices the hammer coming towards her face, and instinctively raises her forearm to block it. A split second later, the hammer collides on her arm and Ren feels the jolt go straight through her body. Fortunately, the effort of the swing seemed to have also affected Esther, her hand seemed to loosen its grip on her hammer, implying that her arm had gone slightly numb. This gives Ren a little more time to react.
While shaking her arm slightly to get rid of the numbness and slight pain, Rens other hand grips the rusty metal pipe a bit harder, and in one swift motion, she turns around and with as much force as she can muster, she slams the metal pipe straight into Esther's abdomen. Esther falls to her knees. The metal pipe continued its momentum and flew out of Ren's hand, clanging against the wall. Ren, still feeling the momentum, continued her motion, and made another spin, raising her leg that wasn't injured and continuing the motion straight at Esther's head.
Not wasting a second while Esther was stunned, Ren quickly hopped over her collapsed opponent and headed straight towards the metal pipe. Reaching it, she quickly ducked down and picked it up, turning around to see that Esther had already recovered. Ren notices now that there seems to be some fluctuating speeds in recovery time, but she realizes that she doesn't have time to dwell on it.
'Damn, that's odd' she thought to herself in shock before quickly refocusing on the fight at hand.
Seeing that the offensive wasn't working very well, Ren decides to switch up her strategy, opting to try and use her surroundings and avoid attacks instead of trying to actually fight Esther head on. Her forearm has started to ache more but her adrenaline levels are still preventing most of the pain.
Ren, still slightly ducked down, gets into a defensive position and waits. Esther stumbles to her feet, and begins to swing her hammer straight towards Ren. Instead of blocking it like she did before, Ren waits until the last second before ducking out of the way, rolling on the ground for a second before stabilizing herself. She hears a 'bang!' coming from behind her. Looking back she saw that Esther's hammer was actually embedded deeply into the wall behind her, roughly at the spot that she was just a couple seconds ago.
Instead of trying to get the hammer out of the wall, Esther turns around, and pounces towards Ren, who was still on the ground. Ren, being caught off guard, is slammed into the opposite wall by Esther, stunning her for a second.
POV: Yin
Yin, after reaching zero, crawls through the vent, and joins her friends in the room. Taking a quick look over at Ren, she sees that Ren is really struggling against Esther, and she resolves herself to free Zoe as soon as possible.
Running over to the odd red machine, she quickly scans the control panel, looking for a way to free her friend. Spotting a giant green button that says "FREE", she doesn't hesitate and quickly slams her hand into the button, with enough force that the machine jams for a second.
Then, with a 'crrrrshh' and then a 'clink' the red glass door opens slowly. Some of the red fog seeped out of the machine and fell onto the floor, along with Zoe, who is no longer held up by the mysterious restraints of the machine. Slowly she opens her eyes and begins to start getting up.
Ding!
Player:Zoe has been freed from the corruption chamber
Corruption percent before release: 65.9%
"urrrgg… my head… ouchies" zone groans, while trying to stand up.
"No time! We gotta get out of here now come on. Hurry!" Said Yin, in a hushed and very hurried tone. rushing Zoe through the vent.
While Yin and Zoe's focus was on escaping, Esther had seen that her captive had been freed, and took her attention off of Ren and focused on getting the two trying to escape through the vent.
Yin, after successfully getting the groggy and disoriented Zoe through the vent, begins to slide in herself, however, she feels a hand grabbing her ankle, and a sudden force pulling her back through the vent.
Her head bumps slightly against the side of the vent as she's pulled through, and a small sharp piece of metal cuts against the side of her cheek. A searing pain blurs Yins vision slightly, but before she can focus on that she feels the weight of a kick straight into her abdomen. Esther had kicked her over.
Struggling to get a footing, and blinking her eyes rapidly, Yin sees the blurry outline of a hammer coming straight towards her. Swinging it in an arc, Esther had aimed directly towards Yin's head, but due to an unfortunate miscalculation, ended up being just short.
Yin was able to feel the couple strands in front of her face sway in the wind that was created from the close call with the hammer. Adrenaline floods her body and her mind clears, the pain on her cheek and side fade away. Without thinking she reaches towards the hammer, holding it down so that Esther can not move it. It now became a battle of attrition, and strength.
Ren, meanwhile, had been trying to get the focus back on her, and off of Yin. Ren was confident in her ability to escape relatively unharmed, due to her richer combat experience. However, Ren was pretty sure Yin had never had any experience in combat. If noodle, her pet dragon were here, then it might be a different story, hell if they had anything from their inventories then they would be in an infinitely better situation than right now.
Unfortunately, the system was acting odd, and there seemed to be nothing that they could do about it. Looking around the room, Ren spotted a piece of debris, a part of the wall that had fallen off earlier when Esther's hammer got stuck in it. Quickly heading over to it, Ren grabbed the cold stone and hurled it at Esther, praying that it'll knock her out, and hoping that it would at least distract Esther so that Yin could escape.
Watching hesitantly, through one eye, Ren sees that the rock flies in a perfect arc straight towards Esther's head. If it had been any normal human being, they would have received serious damage, but Esther seemed possessed and supernatural at the moment. What the rock did do was anger her.
slowly turning around Esther fixes her gaze onto Ren, completely ignoring Yin. Her eyes filled with a primal rage, she steps slowly and deliberately towards Ren, then without warning, swings the hammer with inhuman strength.
Ren, reacting quickly enough, just barely manages to dodge the first swing, by shifting to the right. Unfortunately, Ester reacted quicker. She changed the trajectory of her swing more to the right, swinging it towards Ren's left arm. Ren feels a sudden jolt of pain as the hammer collides directly with her upper arm. Feeling the unbearable amount of pain coming from her arm now, she blinked back tears. The battle wasn't over yet, and things weren't looking good for her right now.
After completely taking out Ren's left arm, Esther starts to swing again, this time aimed towards the head, it looked like she had completely forgotten about catching Ren and was now solely focused on killing her. Ren notices this motion and barely manages to twist around to catch the hammer, stopping it from hitting her.
Yin, still slightly out of it due to the pain and the fear, sees that Ren is now on the losing side between her and Esther, feeling a wave of helplessness and anger wash over her, she starts to stumble to her feet.
'is this really how this ends? Can I really just let one of my friends die like this?… no, there must be something I can do, I have to save her.. I have to at least try' Yin couldn't help but think, as she had made up her mind. Seeing Ren's arm shake as she tries desperately to hold the hammer away from her face sends another wave of anger through Yin. Then, the glitching begins again, Esther seems to pause for a moment, the hammer drops from her hands, and she seems to have gained a moment of clarity.
Esther and Ren make eye contact, only this time, Esther's eyes are the regular light brown color, as opposed to the black that she had been sporting recently. Esther's eyes were filled with confusion, and panic. Then, they return back to that black color, black and blue and green squares of different sizes appear around her, and parts of the surrounding area seem to be disappearing. Then, a split second later, both Esther and the hammer are gone. Leaving Ren and Yin alone in the bathroom, the remnants of their fight scattered around, and an eerily silence encompassing the place.