"Good." Nodoka nodded, and everyone relaxed.
Soon everyone was arranged, Nodoka in the center of a wide magic circle and the others standing in smaller rings at the ends of a six-pointed star surrounding her. She raised her wand and the three sets of seven nearly identical weapons floated into place, poised in rings to strike at the suspended serpent. "Spears to the heart, swords to the throat, knives to the gut," Nodoka directed the weapons, which flew into patterns around their selected targets. "Slay Evil Swiftly!"
As she spoke those last three words identical inscriptions glowed on those blades, and at the final syllable they plunged in a single motion into Nagini, who perished instantly. A huge pulse of power swept out as they did so, striking Nodoka first, then radiating echoes out to the other participants who all glowed and rose several inches from off the ground, electrical arcs playing across their forms for a brief second before all was over and they fell sprawling back down to the ground, a slight spark here or there on someone's clothes the only sign left that anything had happened, other than ash where the white chalk dust of the inscriptions had burned like flame through the split-second event.
"Nice motto." Ranko grunted from where she could barely move upon the floor. Cologne was out. Three hundred years of close personal acquaintance with her own personal power flows had left this a sudden shock difficult to cope with. Ukyo and the Patils were faring the best of all, being able to move before any of the chi-adepts. Shampoo was next, then Ranko and her mother. Cologne was still frozen in the depths of self-realization when Ms. Malfoy tiredly waved her wand to clean up, erasing any physical traces of that ceremony aside from the cluster of still hovering weapons.
It was close to twenty minutes after the fact that Nodoka replied to her daughter's comment. "Yes, thank you. It was actually the least restricting of the Oaths of Activation for those sorts of weapons I could find, and we needed a holy bent to counteract some of the evil that still may have tainted the ceremony. But we did not pledge to fight constantly, serve anyone, or protect anything (which is always a full time job), only to finish our fights quickly as an ideal where possible. Basically we've promised not to dawdle finishing off what we've chosen to be fights to the death, which is a rule we should be adhering to anyway."
"There is another element," Cologne stirred at last, shaking herself and rising up to her hands and knees, hair falling down to form a curtain around her face. "You chosen oath inherently suggests we may choose to fight evil more frequently than we might otherwise be inclined, and we'll find it more difficult, I am sure, to let certain people alone."
"So long as it doesn't make us idiots," Nodoka quipped, banishing the weapons back to racks upon their walls.
"No, I'm sure it won't do that. A trifle bloodthirsty perhaps, but not idiots." Cologne chuckled softly in her throat. "You've chosen well, daughter."
"What happens now?" Ukyo asked, taking deep breaths and trying to to think about thin layers of sweat like she'd been exerting heavily or was lightly sick.
Ranko crawled over to a table and reached out for a very special Dark Arts Detector, pulling it down with her to puddle on the floor, checking the reading from somewhere within a pool of limbs. "No sign of personality contamination. Looks like Brain Burning the thing worked out right."
Nodoka lurched over to a counter, finding her balance on the way. "Well dears, our bodies and our spirits have a great deal of adjusting to do, but our minds are not going to be overly busy for I'd say roughly two nights and a day. So I'd thought of something beforehand we could be doing to enhance our chances in this war."
"Such as?" Ukyo queried, thinking that maybe Nodoka was right, as this adjusting thing had left her mind remarkably clear even while her body felt like a lead weight. She could still move, but didn't much want to.
Nodoka's devious smile glittered in spite of leaden limbs. "Something that ought to perturb Voldemort almost as much as losing his familiar."
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(Posted Sat, 06 Aug 2005 01:45)
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