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319. Puppets Puppets Everywhere
🕑 Added 2025-03-01 15:00:06 +0000 UTCThey charged the puppets, and the puppets charged them.
Instantly, it was chaos. Limbs flew everywhere as Ike smashed and hacked with the Hungry Sword. Whenever a puppet tried to strike him, he blocked, and the Hungry Sword quickly gobbled up their weapon. This time, he didn’t fight to injure, but to kill. Every blow either aimed at the puppets’ cores, or hacked off a limb on the way to a puppet’s core. Wisp spat venom that corroded the doll’s bodies. Her thread tangled them, and when they fell, she punished them with heavy blows to their cores. Mag raked the puppets with his claws and slashed them with a sword that had come from who knew where. Ike hadn’t expected much, but Mag’s swordsmanship was surprisingly capable—in fact, on pure swordsmanship alone, Mag might have had the upper hand over him. The bird-boy hopped back and threw his hand out, and a magpie projection burst forth and took to the wing, repeatedly swooping the puppets from above.
“Nothing too flashy, Mag!” Ike shouted.
“It’s not that flashy,” Mag grumbled.
“That one’s fine, but nothing bigger,” Ike clarified. Not if they wanted the plan to work.
Mag huffed. “So picky.”
As they fought, Ike worked his way toward a nearby house. “Over here!”
“What, in there?” Wisp asked.
Mag frowned. “I just got outside.”
Ike rolled his eyes. “Trust me. Come on!”
He leaped inside, shattering a window on his way in. The other two gave each other looks for a moment, and then, with a sigh, Wisp followed him in. Mag shook his head and transformed, flying through the broken window.
The puppets surged. They poured into the house. The flow of the battle changed. Before, the three of them had been handling it. Now, they were battered up against the wall, barely holding on against endless waves of puppets.
“So what’s this great idea of yours? Corner yourself and die?” Wisp asked.
“There’s too many puppets. We’ll get stalled here for too long if we fight them all, especially when Brightbriar can choose to pay attention at any moment and crush us all. Remember the robes?”
“Remember the…” Wisp trailed off. She nodded. “Got it.”
“Got what?” Mag asked, lost.
“Just follow me,” she said, rather than explain it in front of the enemy.
A puppet leaped at Ike, arms and legs bared. Ike smashed its torso in two, then caught it by the hair and beat its head in. He looked at the bit of head hanging in his hand, hair still attached, then released it with a sigh. I thought they might be wearing wigs, but the hair is linked into the porcelain, isn’t it. It might just be glued on securely, but I don’t have the time to undo magical glue right now. They’d have to make do with their own hair.
He shrugged. It’d taken a more human puppet to notice that their hair was wrong. The plan could still work.
“Wait ‘til the room fills, then back up to the next room,” Ike instructed the other two.
“Blockade them with their own bodies? Grisly,” Wisp said, but she nodded in approval.
Ike hacked and slashed. Not all the puppets died; sometimes he missed their core, or sometimes he simply didn’t have time to react and aim for the core. The puppets conglomerated into a seething, throbbing pile, twitching left and right but never finding any real motive force in one direction. Eyes glared. Hands reached. Feet kicked at the floor. Whenever they struck, Ike struck them down, and slowly, the pile grew.
At last, it began to scrape the ceiling. Ike nodded at Wisp and Mag. “Now’s the time. Retreat.”
“And you?” Wisp asked.
“I’ll hold the line until you two are ready to go,” Ike replied.
She nodded. Grabbing Mag by the arm, she dragged him into the next room.
Without the two of them, it actually grew a little hard to beat the puppets back. If it wasn’t for the fact that they had to crawl in the narrow space between the top of the pile and the ceiling, he might have actually struggled. As it was, he simply stood in front of the door and beat back any puppet who tried to get past him. They came in quick, dropping down from the pile and racing at him left and right, but Ike was fast, even without Storm Clad. He smacked them down, one after another, and tossed their bodies back on the pile.
Crazy how easy they are to kill, now. Not that long ago, he struggled to break open a single puppet. Now, he could smash them left and right. He’d gotten stronger. Much, much stronger.
But I’m still not strong enough.
A few squawks of protest echoed from the back. They quieted, and Wisp poked her head back in. “Good to go.”
Ike glanced back. As he’d hoped, she was wearing white robes and the automaton’s mask. He nodded. Turning around, he backed up, then charged the puppets and hammered the pile with a Shockwave Punch. The puppets tumbled backwards, locking up the entryway and the door.
Ike jogged into the next room and quickly changed, joining Mag and Wisp in puppet clothes. The next room had no windows or doors, but it did have a staircase that wound upward. He led the charge. At the top, a heavily reinforced door blocked the roof. Desperate scratching sounded from the far side of the door, mixed in with some hammering, as if someone, or some puppet were trying to get in.
“Remember. We’re puppets,” Ike said, looking at Mag and Wisp over his shoulder.
Wisp gave him a thumbs up. Mag nodded.
Ike undid the bracing bar from the inside and opened it.
A group of puppets stared at him. He stared back.
Time to find out how dumb these guys really are.
