(Skyseas of Gensokyo) Nazrin Quest (Part 4)

[Oldmansour]

Knee to the gut/groin, definately.
But I still reccomend trying to drive our torch into her face, if it's physically possible to do so. I just don't see a strong knee being enough on its own. And even if it is, consider the torch hedging our bets. At this point, we need all the hedging we can get.

[Kilgamayan]

I'd be up for facetorching once we're in a position where we feel better about it working.

[Oldmansour]

Yknow, I probably should have just done this sooner, but...

>From the position we're in now, is it physically possible to bring our torch up into her face?

[DracoOmega]

>From the position we're in now, is it physically possible to bring our torch up into her face?

>You're partially lying on your tail as a result of your earlier dodge roll. You don't know that you have the leverage at the moment to actually jab it into her face without hoisting yourself or rolling back, but you can certainly bring it close enough to be threatening and possibly obscure her sight.

[Oldmansour]

Well, shit.
Alright, fine, if that's all we got, then it's all we got. Start praying, men.

>Try to bring our torch up and drive it into her face. Or at least as nearly as we can get to it, given the circumstances.
>Bring a knee up into her groin or gut, whichever one is more feasable from our position.
>Wriggle and squirm for as much room and leverage as we can manage.
>Do try our best to get our arm out of the way of that claw.

[DracoOmega]

>Try to bring our torch up and drive it into her face. Or at least as nearly as we can get to it, given the circumstances.
>Bring a knee up into her groin or gut, whichever one is more feasable from our position.
>Wriggle and squirm for as much room and leverage as we can manage.
>Do try our best to get our arm out of the way of that claw.

>You swing the torch up and thrust it towards the youkai's face while simultaneously trying to drive your knee into her. Her position on top of you gives you little leverage for the latter, and you're not certain she even notices it, but the torch draws an immediate reaction. She draws her head back quickly, shielding her eyes with her left hand.
>You take the moment's pause to wriggle fiercely beneath her and try to pull your arm away. You gain perhaps a little leverage out from underneath her, but the movement of your arm is countered fiercely a moment after you start to struggle.
>Beneath the light of the torch, you see her slash at your tail with the arachnid limbs on the left of her body while angling another trust towards your right arm.
>You are getting very, very short of breath; running and struggling uses up air like nobody's business. Even if you can manage to suppress your instinct to breathe, you expect you'll be getting light-headed very shortly.

[Hello Purvis]

>We have our left hand free?
>Fan our our left hand, and gouge her right in the eyes with the force of a dozen angry stooges.
>Drag the torch more toward her torso right afterward. If she wants to wave those legs at us, let's make her pay for it.

[Oldmansour]

>Try to move our right arm out of the way of that incoming claw. Especially if we can do so and cut her at the same time.
>Or cut the tether. Whichever works.
>Hey, wait, we're a mouse. Bite her in the stomach, or the arm, whichever we can reach.

[Hello Purvis]

>Hey, wait, we're a mouse. Bite her in the stomach, or the arm, whichever we can reach.

>Don't do these just yet. Let's resolve things a step at a time.

[DracoOmega]

>We have our left hand free?

>You do.

>Fan our our left hand, and gouge her right in the eyes with the force of a dozen angry stooges.
>Drag the torch more toward her torso right afterward. If she wants to wave those legs at us, let's make her pay for it.

>Try to move our right arm out of the way of that incoming claw. Especially if we can do so and cut her at the same time.
>Or cut the tether. Whichever works.

>You fan your left arm and drive your fingers forcefully towards the youkai's eyes while moving the torch aside, both to evade the slashes aimed at your tail and to avoid having to jab your fingers through the flame. At the same time, you try to wrestle your right arm free and pivot your wrist to bring the blade to bear against something useful.
>With the youkai's hand already screening her face from the torch's flame, your attempt to jab her eyes proves futile. She simply brings her arm more fully in front and absorbs the attack with less sensitive flesh. You do manage to keep your tail away from the pair of claws swooping towards it and bring the torch closer to her torso, though less close than it had been against her face. Still, she twists that side of her body away from the flame.
>The tether on your arm is positioned so that you would need to twist your wrist very awkwardly in order to reach it. The youkai jerking against it prevents you from moving precisely enough to accomplish this. You do manage to tilt the blade closer to the incoming arm, but not deftly enough to prevent her from easily evading it. However, whether through this maneuver or some combination of other distractions, you manage to turn a solid stab into a glancing blow. You feel her claw cut a sharp and painful gash from a few inches up the side of your arm down to your elbow. Some of what little breath you still have hisses out between tightly pressed lips. Your lungs feel like they're staring to burst from your chest. You need air!

[Hello Purvis]

>Keep driving the torch toward her, and see if we can grab some hair with that free hand and latch onto it.
>Does she seem to have any respiratory issues at the moment?

Biting isn't a bad idea, but we're not in a good position for it right now. Also, I'll leave this breathing thing to you.

[Oldmansour]

Whaddya mean, 'we're not in a good position for it right now?' Our position is 'Holy shit, this crazy bitch is about to tear my throat out!", that's a perfect to time to bite, scratch, kick, anything and everything. Which gives me another idea.

>Spit in her eyes.
>Inhale for no more than half a second.
>Bite at her stomach, her arm, whatever's closest to us.
>Keep trying to work the sword enough to cut her, even a nick at this point would be more than anything else we've done to her.

[Hello Purvis]

More along the lines of biting her now is largely just going to put is in a position where she has even more power over us than before. We have to time these things.

>Before doing that, where is her stomach in relation to us?

[Oldmansour]

You may have a point.

>Forget the biting.

[DracoOmega]

>Keep driving the torch toward her, and see if we can grab some hair with that free hand and latch onto it.
>Does she seem to have any respiratory issues at the moment?

>Though you have little focus to observe this among all the other thing happening in the melee, her breathing does not seem obviously impaired.

>Before doing that, where is her stomach in relation to us?

>Over your lower torso, and partially bent to one side away from you.

>Keep driving the torch toward her, and see if we can grab some hair with that free hand and latch onto it.

>Spit in her eyes.
>Inhale for no more than half a second.
>Keep trying to work the sword enough to cut her, even a nick at this point would be more than anything else we've done to her.

>You try to stretch the torch closer towards her, but with you partially pinning your own tail, you think this is about as far as you can reach. The youkai pulls the part of her body you jab it towards out of range, though you imagine it's close enough to be uncomfortably hot.
>At the same time, you spit at the youkai's eyes and draw a quick breath afterwards. Even this short gulp of air tastes foul and sickly on your tongue; you can feel it settle heavily in your lungs, almost oily. Still, it seems to relieve a little of your body's desperate need for oxygen. The youkai was starting to withdraw her arm from her face when you spit, but quickly replaces it as soon as you do. You suspect a little may have caught her before she did, but you can't be sure.
>You follow the saliva projectile in with your left arm, pulling your torso up a little and grasping at her hair. You clutch a handful of the blond strands tightly, but the youkai immediately responds by shifting her own hand, already by her face, and grabbing firmly onto yours just below the wrist. An arachnid claw sweeps up at it from below.
>All the while, you wrestle for your right arm as she tries to impale it again. While you have little success in actually controlling it, you manage to flail enough with the blade to force the claw to retreat for a moment before scooping in from the side and scoring another smaller gash across your upper arm. Blood begins to well from the new one to match the trickle starting to run down your arm from the first. She pulls her arm back quickly from this strike, ending it prematurely before the blade even threatens to come close again; as focused as she seems to be on impaling you, she is giving the blade an obviously wide berth.

[Hello Purvis]

>Grip that hair tight as hell; get it between our fingers so that the squeezing itself becomes a pain-inducer.
>What is she trying to do in regards to our left hand: hold it in place, force it away?

[Kilgamayan]

How disappointing. If she wasn't out of kissing range before, she certainly is now.

[Kilgamayan]

> How close is her head to ours?

[DracoOmega]

>Grip that hair tight as hell; get it between our fingers so that the squeezing itself becomes a pain-inducer.
>What is she trying to do in regards to our left hand: hold it in place, force it away?

>You grip and twist her hair as tightly as you can manage. She grimaces a little, but otherwise seems to take little notice of it. Her expression is wild and strangely vacant, reminding you somehow of a cornered animal.
>She seems to be trying to lower it towards the incoming claw. You manage to twist aside just enough to avoid the worst of the strike, though it still gouges a chunk out of the side of your arm. You cry out in pain, reflexively taking in another gulp of the foul air afterwards. You almost want to gag from it.
>The other arachnid limb sweeps in towards that arm from the side. In the corner of your eye, you see her drive another stab at your sword arm, trying to swoop around to the other side of the blade.

> How close is her head to ours?

>About a foot and a half away, although her arm is still partially obscuring it.

[Kilgamayan]

Proposal: Use our grip on her hair to yank her head forward and smash the crown of our head into her face, or whatever other part of her head we can reach.

[Oldmansour]

Better than anything I can come up with. And if it stuns her at all, I suggest we draw a knife and stab her in the gut. Everything we've done to get her off so far hasn't worked, so it's time for something more drastic.
Also, I suggest using the torch to ward off the claw she's sending at our arm. She might hate the sword and the arm it's in, but she won't stab through fire, I hope.

[Kilgamayan]

> On which side of our body is our tail currently holding the torch?

[DracoOmega]

> On which side of our body is our tail currently holding the torch?

>On your left.

[Kilgamayan]

That complicates things slightly, because we'll be potentially swinging the torch through the desired point of cranial contact.

Let me think about how to make this work for a moment.

[Kilgamayan]

Actually, if we're going to yank her head forward, I'm not sure we need to drive the torch at the right-side claw, because I think a combination of further wiggling on our part and yanking her head around will cause a temporary inability to aim properly. It might help for us to pull forward with our right arm at the same time, both to move it around and to generate further pull toward us.

[Hello Purvis]

Another thing we can do: Yank our left hand against her thumb. That's the weak point of one's grip, and it works on people drastically stronger than yourself.

[Kilgamayan]

welp

> Yank forward with both arms. The right arm should only be a generic forward yank, to put some forward pressure on her. With the left arm yank, however, try to pull her head straight toward ours.
> At the same time (and using the force of our pulling as much as possible), swing our head and however much of our torso is necessary up, so that we are thrusting our head toward her face, which the left arm should be pulling toward our head. Lower the angle of our head while pulling and swinging forward so that the crowd of our head is pointed toward her face.

Fake edit: nvm

Isn't our left hand currently full of hair? How are we going to yank against a thumb?

[Hello Purvis]

The fun way.

Or rather, this is presuming hand freedom is better than yanking around by the hair and we let go.

[Kilgamayan]

If we're just going to let go without doing anything, why did we grab in the first place? o_O

[Hello Purvis]

In hopes that a shock to the head would distract her focus a bit. I kinda didn't think she would also be a crazy trance where she's pretty much pain immune.