(Skyseas of Gensokyo) Nazrin Quest (Part 4)

[Oldmansour]

>If physics will not allow us to transfer the sword to our hand, then try to cut the tether on our arm.

[DracoOmega]

>Allow it a little give, then savagely jerk our hand back with the desperate strength of someone in a drowning panic situation and get that sword. Rock our whole body into the motion to give it extra strength.

>You let your arm go slack for a moment and then put every ounce of strength you can muster into forcing your hand back down, putting your whole body behind the motion. You stretch your tail as high as it will go with it coiled around the hilt and try to twist yourself towards it. Another few inches...
>The force against you suddenly increases noticeably and you surge up through the water, breaking the surface and continuing to climb. You can hear the sound of something scraping against rock overhead as you ascend. And the sound of something else falling....
>"No..." comes the youkai's voice. "No!"

>If physics will not allow us to transfer the sword to our hand, then try to cut the tether on our arm.

>You definitely can't bring them close enough together at the moment. A few inches might as well be a few miles for all the difference 'almost' makes at the moment. Instead, you twist your tail to the side and swipe the blade across where you suspect the tether must be. It's not the most precise attack, but it seems to do the job. You feel the moment's feeble resistance and then you're falling again.
>As the tether breaks, you hear a cluster of soft, sharp whistling sounds as something parts the air between you and where the youkai's voice just issued from.

[Hello Purvis]

>Get a new breath before we hit the water, then drag ourself closer to the web to avoid whatever is coming, and transfer the sword.
>Assuming nothing has gone wrong yet, cut that damn web.

[DracoOmega]

>Get a new breath before we hit the water, then drag ourself closer to the web to avoid whatever is coming, and transfer the sword.
>Assuming nothing has gone wrong yet, cut that damn web.

>You take a quick breath as you fall, your feet breaking the water's surface a moment later. You hear a frustrated cry from the youkai as something whips through the air above you, then your ears plunge beneath the river as well.
>You quickly reach back and carefully transfer the sword from your tail to your hand, then slash at the web. You feel your left hand come loose!

[Hello Purvis]

>Swim the hell out of there!

[DracoOmega]

>Swim the hell out of there!

>In which direction? And above or below the surface of the water?

[Hello Purvis]

>Stay low, and go with the current.

[DracoOmega]

>Stay low, and go with the current.

>You dive deep and move with the current and.... almost immediately catch your head against webbing, feeling it spring against you as you swim into it. You can only assume that the web you caught your hand on must extend well below the water's surface.

[Hello Purvis]

>Cut it up.
>Dream grimly of when we're going to cut those spinnerets out and feed them to her.

[DracoOmega]

>Cut it up.
>Dream grimly of when we're going to cut those spinnerets out and feed them to her.

>You slash back and forth across the space in front of your head. Your head comes loose quickly enough, though you can still feel the mesh adhered to your hair. Probably complements the partial cocoon across your face nicely... You throw in a few more slashes across the area in hopes of clearing a wide enough path to travel through without getting something else stuck.
>You indulge in a few vengeful thoughts while you shred the webbing. You are hurting from more different places than you care to inventory at the moment and an awful lot of them are her doing...

[Hello Purvis]

>Proceed downriver until such a time as our breath starts to give.

[Oldmansour]

>Keep our ears above water to track her movements and attacks, if any.

[Hello Purvis]

May not be a good idea, recall that Yamame is a nigh perfect shot; catching an ear is not hard. And she's demonstrated she can hit us under shallow water.

[Oldmansour]

I considered that. But since she's demonstrated the ability to hit us while we're underwater anyway, staying totally underwater and cutting off our awareness of her might be counterproductive. If she's can hit us anyway, then we'd be better served by being aware of the incoming shot.

[Hello Purvis]

I'm thinking our awareness has little if anything to do with her hitting us. But our depth does. Not to mention being near the surface makes us easier to see, as she's demonstrated. I expect the main reason she hit us underwater was because she knew where the web was. Otherwise she would have gotten us sooner; being a perfect shot and all.

[DracoOmega]

>Proceed downriver until such a time as our breath starts to give.

>Keep our ears above water to track her movements and attacks, if any.

>You continue downriver, passing through the web without further incident. After you're through, you surface just enough to poke your ears a little out of the water and listen for sounds of motion or incoming attacks.
>The youkai seems to be following you from somewhere above. You can hear light impacts against rock and the occasional clatter of a fallen pebble. For the moment, you hear no signs of attack, but she seems to be keeping pace pretty well. When your lungs start to strain, you rise a little higher and take another deep breath before partially submerging again. You think you're gaining on her.
>You hear a scraping noise, followed by something heavy shooting through the air towards you.

[Oldmansour]

>Dive and angle away to starboard.

[DracoOmega]

>Dive and angle away to starboard.

>You dive and angle to the side. A moment later, you hear a forceful splash behind you and the churning of water as something large rapidly sinks. Ripples from its impact slap against you.

[Hello Purvis]

>Continue as before.

[DracoOmega]

>Continue as before.

>You rise back up and continue racing down the river, the gap between the youkai and yourself slowly widening. You are forced to evade several more of what you assume are probably rocks being knocked towards you from overhead. One of them bumps into your leg, but causes no real injury with its fleeting contact. Eventually these attacks stop altogether as the youkai falls further and further behind. You keep up the pace, since it doesn't sound like she has slowed hers at all.
>You are growing increasingly fatigued from the exertion, on top of your injuries. You ache from a half-dozen places, your head is sill throbbing incessantly, and the chill of the water feels like it has seeped nearly into your bones. You've lost track of how far you've swam by this point, but you have to imagine it's a considerable distance. You very much wish that you could rest.
>At this point, you hear the walls around you retreat rapidly as the river opens onto what sounds like a large chamber. The river itself seems to widen somewhat, though not nearly enough to fill the whole space, by the sounds of it.

[Hello Purvis]

>Surface for a moment and see if there's anything like light.

[DracoOmega]

>Surface for a moment and see if there's anything like light.

>You raise your eyes above the waterline and look around. Unfortunately, this place seems just as utterly black as everything else so far.

[Oldmansour]

>Drift out to starboard a ways, try to find a bank to beach ourselves for a minute.
>No, wait, first try to determine how far ahead we are of her, THEN, if we think we've put a fair distance between us, drift starboard to find a place to hole up for a minute.

[DracoOmega]

>Drift out to starboard a ways, try to find a bank to beach ourselves for a minute.
>No, wait, first try to determine how far ahead we are of her, THEN, if we think we've put a fair distance between us, drift starboard to find a place to hole up for a minute.

>While you'd struggle to peg a specific distance on how far the youkai has fallen behind, by this point you can hear her pursuit only distantly. You angle off to the right a little and search for dry ground again. A few dozen feet later, you feel your foot kick against rock. You pull yourself upright and take a few steps forward. Your limbs feel surprisingly leaden without the water to buoy them up again; you'd rather grown accustomed to that by this point. A few steps further and the water falls below your ankles, then retreats entirely. You believe you have found solid ground. In the distance, you can hear the youkai still chasing after you.

[Hello Purvis]

>Back into the water. We cannot deal with her on land and in the dark.

[Oldmansour]

>No. This might be the only chance we get without running into something else, be it another spider, another rockfall trap, something.
>And we can fix the dark now, hopefully. Once we're on land, produce torch and light it quickly.
>Status check.

[Hello Purvis]

>Back into the water, it is not our time to die.



Assuming our torch didn't get drenched due to video game logic, all that's going to happen is that she's going to take it, because it is an equalizing factor. And we can't fight her in the dark and on land, she simply has almost all the advantages. We need to get out and find a source of light she can't do anything about. And given that we have to swim with the current to outpace her at all, we probably can't do it on land unless we see light right now.

I want to take her down to, but for now we need to continue a tactical retreat if we don't intend to hand her victory.

Also how would you expect to light that torch if it could light? A bit of quartz and steel takes a a goodly amount of time.

[Oldmansour]

>Get on dry land, and light that torch if possible before she catches up to us. If not, then by all means, continue hiding in the river.
>Status check.

Why are you so convinced we can't win? I'm not about to swim from here to timbuctu while having to cut our way past god knows what. We'll exaust before she will, and probably before much longer. That was parser posted. Or we could run into something else we can't handle while stumbling around in the dark, like we've been doing. We MAY lose if we try to confront her now. We WILL lose if we keep running the way we are.
Let's say you're right, let's say she hits the torch with a strand. We've proven we can cut them in short order. She hits torch, we slice it, and bob's your uncle. Or we can cut it out of midair, since we can see it coming as opposed to just hearing it. Besides, we might illuminate a path out of where we are, find some terrian that's more adventageous.

[Kilgamayan]

Assuming our torch didn't get drenched due to video game logic

Okay, disagreements aside, there's no need for this.

[Hello Purvis]

>Do not leave the water. Press onward.

You have that backwards, actually.

We WILL lose is we fight her now. There is no question. She can chill out on walls. We cannot. She can see. We cannot. She is a perfect shot. We are not a perfect dodger. She is way stronger than us. We can be in as top of a status as you please, there is literally no way we can beat her right now.  This situation, as it stands, is completely hopeless. We need to retreat and nullify some of her situational advantages. This isn't Type Moon, where you pick the worst possible choice and get lucky due to plot fiat, we have to fight smart, or we're dead. The only hope we have is getting outside.

And actually, when she hits the torch, she just has to jerk it out of our grasp before we can do a thing. And you've still not proposed how we're going to light up a sodden torch, or an unsodden torch, before she's webbing us up. And how are we supposed to slice stands out of midair when we're only barely competent with a sword?