As night falls over MR City on December 26th, 2017, all is quiet. Street lights hum to life in the early darkness. Strings of colored Christmas lights and garlands hang from storefronts and rooftops. Soft Christmas melodies play on street speakers, and a gentle snow begins to fall. All is quiet, and all is at peace.
This is where our story begins. Hush now children, and listen to our tale.
The night was quiet and at peace, because no Raider with half a brain would be caught outside after sundown on December 26th, for this is the night of The Great After Christmas Panty Raid: an annual MangaRaiders tradition in which Raiders navigate the city-turned-booby-trapped-death-maze in order to 'raid’ a symbolic set of panties. To anyone who can complete this task, the reward is a night spent with the Ecchi Twin of their choice. It is, of course, the job of the Twins to stop the Raiders at all costs. There was no room for compassion on either side. One team would stand victorious come morning, and since the raid’s conception, that team had been the Twins, without fail.
This night, another team of Raiders set out to change that.
“I'm getting a little feedback on the conversation matrix again. Raising power to compensate. Increase frequency just a tad,” said Coryn, who sat hovering in the center of a large shield bubble.
“Realigning now,” replied Mahlua, sitting on the inside wall of said bubble, slowly orbiting Coryn as they conversed.
Unlike Coryn's regular bubbles, magical symbols snaked around the surface, courtesy of Mahlua. Coryn looked past them, and then past the eleven other bubbles that enclosed the bubble he and Mahlua occupied. Between each bubble layer were sandwiched smaller bubbles, each of which contained a member of the Raider’s team, for a total of twenty-seven. And then at the very top, Coryn perceived Lego, whose legs were firmly held in place by two special cells of Coryn's hexagonal shield pattern.
Atop the outermost shield, Lego pulled his coat in tightly to fight off the chill of the night. Despite locating their launch site at ground level, by the time the final bubble had been constructed, Lego had found himself easily five stories in the air.
He gazed off at MR Tower and tugged gently at his legs. In addition to being held by the bubble, Mahlua's magics were clinging to his legs. They reminded him of veins. Or spider webs. Purple, softly glowing spider webs. Lego let fly a shiver unrelated to the cold, and flicked on the radio in his ear. “Are you sure about this Coryn? Last time I tried this I set the atmosphere on fire…” He gave it another moment’s thought. “And then I killed you! Remember that time I killed you?”
Coryn's voice came in with a heavy static, no doubt the effect of the multiple shields. “Hard to forget. Just keep it to about ten percent power.”
“Roger that. Ready and waiting.”
Coryn finished the last of his calculations. The mad pulsing of his eyes returned to standard pace, and he switched over to an open broadcast. “Okay Raiders, we are approximately t-minus five minutes. Let's run through the plan one last time, with feeling!
“Thanks to last year's raid, we have finally determined the specific room within the tower where the finish line is located. Now, last year's strategy of divide and conquer went understandably poorly, so this year we are taking the exact opposite approach. Our target is in sight, and we will be taking the most direct attack.
“By combining Mahlua's ability to store magical energy with my force fields, we have created a positive feedback loop of power. This allows me to create a stronger shield, and is why you are staring at a kaleidoscope of hieroglyphs right now. This excess energy is also being fed to Lego up top... say hello Lego.”
“Hello~!”
“Thank you Lego. The excess energy is being fed to Lego up top in order to power his Himmlisch Uzustand transformation, while simultaneously conserving his own power. He will be providing our offensive capabilities, while my shields will provide the defense. We are calling this construct the ‘Magic Bullet’--which brings me to your part.
“Should the outer shell fail, Lego will be brought down to the next level via the special tether cells at his feet. However, your own personal bubbles are being powered by the potential between the shield layer above you, and the one below you. If you're outer shell goes down, you will have approximately three seconds before your personal bubble breaks as well. Use this time to prepare yourself. Once your bubble is gone, it becomes your job to distract and delay the twins for as long as possible. This will only be effective as long as both Twins are engaged. They will surely realize our plan quickly. If one of them is free to attack us, we will not make it. This is why there are two of you in between each shell. Once again, I apologize to those of you who drew the short straw, and ended up towards the outside of the Bullet.
“To whomever makes it to the treasure room itself: make sure to claim the prize at the same time as those around you. We don't know if they will allow for multiple victors, (seeing as how there have been no victors at all), so our best bet is to aim for simultaneous victory.
“Finally, to all of you I say: Good luck, and Godspeed. May your sacrifices not be in vain.”
The Bullet fell silent. All within waited with bated breath for the signal to begin.
---
Across town, past the mechanized horrors, the hidden traps, the pitfalls, the winding roads and chilling winter wind, waited the twins.
The pair wore their usual sexy Santa get-ups, seemingly unaffected by the chill. Ecchi-tan surveyed the horizon, wooden sword in hand. She scrunched her nose up, discontentment spreading on her face. “It doesn't make any sense Lewd, it's like they're just missing. Do you think we scared them off?”
Lewd-tan leaned against a structural support, a piece of ribbon candy rolling around on her tongue. “They'll be old and gray before they give up.”
“Then how come I can't feel them?” pouted Ecchi.
Lewd smiled back at her, hard candy clenched between her molars. “It's not that they ain't there Sis. It's that they AIN'T there.”
“Huh?”
“If they weren't playin’ tonight, we'd still be able to sense 'em. But they're missing entirely. There's a hole where they should be.”
A look of understanding dawned on Ecchi-tan's face. “Ooh! I get it! They're hiding from us on purpose! But won't we figure it out once they set off the traps?”
Lewd-tan crunched through the rest of her candy and approached the roof’s edge. “Let's find out.” She raised her arm, and swiped it across to her left. The air parted, a vacuum formed, and as it collapsed back in on itself, a sonic boom was sent racing across the city, officially announcing the start of the games.
---
The participants knew the game had started long before the shock wave had blasted a wave of snow that hit them. At one mile off, Mahlua maximized her power output. At five-hundred yards, Coryn reinforced the exterior shields. At ten feet, Lego set the world on fire.
“HIMMLISH UZUSTAND!”
The initial wave of heat melted the snow to water. The second, coming in only a fraction of a fraction of a second later, vaporized that water to gas. By the time the third wave was past, the gaseous atoms had long since ceased to be, and only existed as a smattering of sub-atomic particles dancing wild through the ether.
Coryn waited for his shields to break, but they never did. Even without squinting he could see Lego now: golden clothes, afro a great flaming mass, and a long blade of fiery darkness. His radio wouldn’t have survived, so a few prearranged seconds after the signal, Coryn initiated the warp effect of his shields, and sent the Bullet screaming into the night.
Lego knew the course well. He had run it every year since its inception after all. The first obstacles were the living bindings. Ropes, leather straps, chains, all flew against his might. They never stood a chance. He didn’t even lift his sword. Next came the spring and other mechanically driven traps. Lego directed his will against them, and they too crumbled. Still, his sword remained at rest.
Mahlua reforged her sigils to meet their opposition. The shields needed new sigils at a mind-boggling rate. The makeup of Coryn’s shields were changing constantly. Lego’s meager weight shifts above caused reality to shiver. Amazingly, they were already three quarters of the way to the tower. The magic detected that Lego was finally swinging his blade. They were encountering missiles and moving landscape by now. The Twins were almost certainly getting ready for them. You can’t send something like what they had constructed blasting on a straight line through the city without raising attention. It was now that the plan would tell. Make or break time, and Mahlua had to prepare the grand finale. So far she had been concentrating on just a single concept: “Forward”. It was time to change tact.
---
It had been hard for the Twins to get a grasp on what exactly they were looking at. Still unable to feel any energy signatures, they could only guess what the flaming comet heading their way actually was. It wasn’t until too late that Lewd-tan finally recognized the flaming figure glued to the front of the thing.
“WHAT THE F---?!”
She was cut off as the Bullet abruptly changed direction and smashed right into her. Lewd impacted on the bubble itself, but the outer shell was glowing red with the heat, and her pristine fur collar came away from it looking more black bear than polar.
“Sis, language!” shouted Ecchi-tan.
“Not now!” yelled Lewd. “We gotta stop that thing!”
But the Bullet had become insanely aggressive. It had been obvious to everyone that if Lewd or Ecchi were left standing by the time the team were inside the tower, then they would almost certainly destroy the Raiders. They could have rushed the treasure room directly, but the prized garments would disappear in Lego’s fire before they could have broken through the wall and disassembled the Bullet. There was then, only one possible course of action. Team Raider was going to take the Twins to battle then and there.
The Bullet looped around in the air and struck at Ecchi-tan. She and her fire were without a doubt the greatest combat threat, but Lego wasn’t feeling very scared of being burned at the moment. As for her physical strength, he suspected he was about to give her a run for her money.
The two collided. Lego was surprised that her wooden sword didn’t turn to charcoal before him, but that was a Tan’s weapon for you. He was more than satisfied when Ecchi failed to stop their advance, and they collectively sent her into the ground.
Lewd-tan watched her sister disappear into the earth, quickly followed by a giant flaming orb. She knew her twin was strong enough to take the abuse, but even she had to question how long it would before she would get back up after a hit like that. But Lewd wasn’t about to sit on her hands and wait for them to come back up. She immediately set to work gathering snow. It came to her call both from the drifts on the streets below and from the sky above where it still fell. Above her a great and inverted spire formed--a spike of ice infused with Tan energy and amassed to the size of a small skyscraper. If this didn’t stop them, she wasn’t sure anything she could summon up would.
She briefly considered that she may actually have to swallow her pride that night, but she was cut off when the Bullet burst from the ground below her. Lego was at the front of it, but to her great surprise, Lewd realized that Ecchi was still engaged with the flaming force. For a moment she despaired. It wasn’t in her nature to sacrifice others; however, in this case, she believed that history would vindicate her actions.
“Sorry Sis! But you’re gonna have to get out of the way pretty damn quick!” Lewd-tan lashed out with her whip and encircled the spike, and with the kind of resolve only achieved when one’s back is firmly against a wall, launched the frosty projectile right at her beloved twin sister’s back.
Lego of course, could see the spear coming. This left him with a conundrum. He could either, A: Let Ecchi-tan take the brunt of the hit, and give the team their greatest chance at victory. Or he could take Option B: Throw Ecchi-tan out of the way like the true gentlemen he knew himself in his heart-of-hearts to be, saving her, but most definitely blowing a hit to their possibility of success.
To Lego, there was no question at all.
“Goodbye, my sweet banana!”
“My sweet what?” replied Ecchi-tan. She was going to follow up on the inquiry, but Lego grabbed her by the collar and sent her flying into a nearby rooftop. She groaned and shook herself out of the crater, glaring in the direction of the Bullet. She then understood the scope of her peril only moments before, and made a silent vow to thank Lego for it later.
Meanwhile, Lego raised his dark blade, and drew out every last bit of energy he could from Mahlua’s magic. “Let’s go! Bankai!”
He fell upon the tip of the spear. It shattered before him, giving way to his magnificent heat.
To an outside observer, perhaps an observer who had seen too much anime, this would have looked like the climactic event from the big final battle. The attack is broken, the heroes emerge victorious. Everyone goes home happy. This is because this outside observer would have seen too many people walk away from the epicenters of massive explosions without so much as a scratch, and indeed, if the hero is hurt in any way, it’s nothing a few bandages won’t fix.
Unfortunately for our heroes, steam explosions are no laughing matter. Especially when that steam was just until moments before, a Tan magic infused block of ice the size of a ten story building.
The outermost bubble failed almost instantly, much to the chagrin of those Raiders in the farthest orbit. Equally annoyed were those in the next six levels down. It goes without saying that their personal bubbles failed to survive until their hypothesized three seconds of residual power ran out. On the upside, Coryn’s tether cells held up under the stress, in no small part thanks to Mahlua’s magic running through them, and Lego found himself replanted on the much diminished Bullet.
Lego scanned the sky to see if he could spot either of the Twins, but they were out of sight, along with several of the buildings that usually surrounded MR Tower. Not wasting any time, Coryn redirected the Bullet towards where they knew the treasure room to be. Lego reverted his transformation, using the last of its strength to smash through the wall. The remaining Bullet finished the DIY entry, and once fully inside, Coryn broke the whole system apart, depositing himself, Lego, Mahula, Forlorn Serpent, Devola, Eukocar, and three other Raiders within the gilded space.
Before them lay their metaphorical prizes. A pair of panties hung neatly on a line, each representing one of the Twins. Whichever they grasped, would be the twin that they would spend the night in the loving embrace of.
To be honest, no one standing in the room that night really believed they would make it. A lesser team would break into anarchy at this point, but they were no amateurs. They had drilled day-in and day-out for this moment. As one they split into two teams, sorted by the prize they sought. Coryn and Mahlua headed up Team Lewd, four other raiders in tow. Lego headed Team Ecchi, with his own pair of comrades. Together they reached the far end of the room, reached out their hands, and with one final, terrified look over their shoulders, took firm hold of their destinies.
This children, is the part of the tale where I would like to tell you that all nine of those Raiders went on to enjoy a night of licentious bliss with a beautiful woman. I wish I could tell you of how they all went away from those nights, fully satisfied in every sense of the word.
I wish I could tell you that story children, but alas, I cannot. Because none of those Raiders had succeeded in that moment. Oh yes, they really did reach that treasure room, and they really did touch those sacred and silky delicates. But that is not the end of our story. No, dear children, our story is only beginning.
---
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