Rainbows and Cupcakes
To their alarm, the Shadow Jumper wasn't doing as much damage as they had hoped it would.
Cait managed to score dozens of hits with each pass, but the surrounding stone would quickly flow over the wounds as if they were never there. At the same time, she was forced to bob and weave through punch after punch; the golem was relentless in its pursuit of their deaths.
A pulse rippled outward from the golem, and they found the ship frozen in place as a mountain-size fist careened toward them. The air resistance was so great that they could see the ripples in the air as the wind was forcefully pushed aside.
The hit landed, rattling the ship and causing several alarms to blare out. A hasty glance at the control panel confirmed Fate's fears: the shields were down.
"Next hit that thing throws won't be met by rainbows and cupcakes!" he shouted over the alarms.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?!" Cait yelled in frustration.
"It means shields are down! We can't get hit again if we want to live. We gotta last at a full minute so they can recharge!"
"I don't think it wants to give us that chance!" Garrett yelled, pointing forward.
Another fist was flying toward them, the stony knuckles curled at their human-limb joints. A singular eye was on each knuckle, viewing the approaching ship with alien indifference.
"Divine Reach! NOW!" Fate yelled.
As one, the trio threw everything they had at the fist, Cait providing a much-appreciated boost to everyone's strength with her desire domain. But the fist was too heavy; It slowed considerably, approaching at a snail's pace, but still continued its deadly course. Fate frowned, rushing to the door at the back of the ship and slamming the button to open it.
The door snapped up, and Fate snatched Stratosphere off a rack and stepped back as far as he could go, jumping upward. He caught the lip of the ship's roof and pulled himself up, his brows scrunched in concentration as he continued to assist Cait and Garrett.
He ran along the ship's top, crossing eighty feet from one end to the other in less than three seconds and jumping off. He flew through the air, activating his Stratosphere to keep his descent to a gentle curve as he crossed the four hundred feet left between the ship and the hand.
He alighted on the back of the hand with no problems, deactivating the Stratosphere and clipping it to his belt as he took his Miao Dao out. Bending down, he started hacking vigorously at the arms and legs tangled together to make the wrist joint.
It was slow going, especially when taking into account the fact that the hand was easily three times the size of the Shadow Jumper, but Fate managed to chop enough for the hand to slacken, snapping at the wrist as the few arms and legs remaining tore in half.
He jumped off, using the massive hand as a springboard, and activated his Stratosphere, sailing higher than he should have and landing on the top of the ship with a bending of the knees. He turned around, finding the wrist having stopped its trajectory.
The eyes all over the golem looked at the stump blankly, then at the falling hand. The latter hit the ground with a loud THUMP, shaking the ground and sending vibrations through the palace.
The construct stared at its stump for quite a while before it let out another screech, the outer layer of the stone that made up its body turning liquid. It flowed down the joints, forming large plates of armor that jutted over them that both restricted movement somewhat and eliminated the possibility of Fate's strategy working again.
Then more stone flowed, forming stone lids over the thing's many eyes that covered the edges of them and crisscrossed the rest of each eye with several stone bars, narrowing the gaps as much as possible without reducing eyesight too terribly.
'Ah, fuck. It can learn.' Fate cursed to himself, jogging back to the back of the ship as he stowed his sword, swinging back into the still-open door and hurrying to the cockpit.
When he was back inside and closed the door behind him, the ship zoomed off, away from the creature. They had been freed from the Divine Reach of whoever had been holding them in place.
"Good idea," Cait said, voice tinged with stress. The alarms had stopped by now, the shields having recharged to half capacity. "But by the looks of it, we may need another thirty ideas like that if we want to take him down."
"Garrett, can't your Manifest Power stick it in a time loop?" Fate asked.
"Not on something that big," the old man said. "I need the full thing in range of my aura, which this has no way of fitting into."
"Any other ideas?" Cait said uneasily.
"None at the moment," Fate replied with a frown. "Just wishing we had stocked up on some nukes."
"Wait, nukes?" Cait said, eyes lighting as she made a U-turn and aimed the ship at the golem once more. "The backup generator! It'll be expensive as hell to replace, but we can overload it and dump it out of the door!"
"That might work! I'll need some help, though. That thing's heavy."
"I'll help. Just show me where it is," Garrett said, following Fate through the ship to a metal panel set in the wall, about as tall as Garrett was.
Fate pressed a button on the side of the panel, and it slid open, revealing a squat cylinder four feet tall and two feet wide, with a console of buttons and switches, along with a digital display.
He went to work flicking switches and pressing buttons, the digital display of the backup generator flashing red with warning signs as it reminded him that this wasn't the machine's intended purpose. Fate ignored them, continuing his task.