Flowing Escalation

With every additional tear, the tree she leaned on was cut into further to attain a closer orbit to their originator.

The blood that still flowed out of her chest was slowly diluting in a small puddle of water seeping out of the ground around her.

All three of us inched closer, deliberately avoiding to startle her in her current state, knowing the consequences of a non-lethal attack full well.

Still, Takako formed multiple razor-sharp sheets around herself, just in case.

Just before we reached her, Ōhara snapped his finger, probably out of reflex.

The girl was immediately startled and jumped up from behind the now falling tree. The puddle of bloodstained water below her quickly formed into spears of sorts, which she hurled toward us immediately, before starting to run, pulling enough water out of the soil to form an entire wall of water behind her.

Takako’s sheets cut through the wall, disappearing behind it like the girl.

A faint scream sounded out moments later, just as Takako formed a bridge above the water. Before we could utilize it, however, the wall collapsed in on itself.

I quickly rushed to the mysterious girl, seeing as her Achilles Tendons were clearly severed by Takako’s blades, blood slowly flowing out above her heels. I could practically see the pain searing through her legs at that moment.

Still, she pushed herself forward with her arms, slowly crawling away in what was most likely to be immense fear.

“Please. I didn’t mean to. Not really. Please let me live!” she whimpered, as Takako slowly approached behind me, Ōhara in her tow. Both were ready to end it here and there, but I still wanted to speak to her, regardless of how much she had done to my body before.

Had I not been able to at least partially control Kälte yet, she would have been dead immediately after she fell down.

Shortly before I could reach her, she turned towards us, gesturing wildly with her hands. I felt the blood still faintly flowing from my wounds crawling up toward my head. Then, it entered my mouth, gradually filling it out and just floating around, two strands flowing up inside my nose.

I couldn’t breathe anymore, and was fully unprepared. No matter how much I shook around, there was nothing I could do, except freeze the liquid slowly encasing my entire head.

Before my vision was flooded by the blood, I could see both Takako and Ōhara suffering the same fate from their wounds.

Will I die here, just like that? In such an anticlimactic way? Not even in a fight?

I always believed any kind of death would do fine, but this one out of all of them, really? Drowning in my own water-diluted blood?

That girl got more terrifying and capable the longer we fought. In a few minutes, she would have probably been able to force our pores to absorb all the water they could, before making us burst apart from within, if her trail of thought allowed it.

My still existing survival instincts kicked in, freezing the liquid around my head in an instant, while the heat slowly rising in my head gradually melted it off my head.

To prevent any further foul play, my outer body temperature fell to below zero again, the ice simply bursting away from my head, some shards hitting the girl. It seemed like she still hadn’t reformed her protective veil of water around her body, due to the wound she had gotten impairing the clear view she had previously gotten.

The fluid quickly flowed out of both of the others, the girl seemingly always losing grasp of her powers when a wound was inflicted upon her. She did only first awaken after me, after all, even though her grasp reached far beyond mine already.

The girl now being completely helpless, all three of us slowly approached her again, still trying to communicate with her.

The intensifying bleeding from her body began fully encasing her inside a sphere of red fluid.

The sphere began levitating, as if it indicated a new stage of a video game boss fight.

No matter how many attacks any of us threw at it, none had managed to hit.

Takako encased the sphere inside a second sphere of dirt, trying to pull it back down.

The pressurized movement of the sphere cut through it with ease, still ascending further into the sky.

Now multiple larger spheres of water had formed around it, even pulling the water from the ground to fill them further.

Her power had reached a level almost rivaling Takako’s, maybe even surpassing it.

Incredibly small spikes began shooting out of the ground below us, as the larger spheres began rotating around their mistress.

With our feet now properly perforated, Ōhara simply blasted himself into the sky, before getting hit by beams of water from all sides. He quickly fell back down to the ground, being encased by the slowly rising water level around us.

Takako tried raising herself up, but everything she formed out of the wet ground immediately collapsed into mud, which dropped to the ground to join the liquid below us slowly gnawing on her feet. The area around me froze, of course, but it didn’t reach to her yet.

Intensifying my output any further would have probably caused me to completely lose control again, after what I’ve already done during the fight.

Takako jumped toward me with the water dragging her down, but still managed to reach my platform. Her bare feet weren’t the best choice of footwork for today though, seeing her jumping up and down to keep her feet from getting too cold.

Shivering from the cold in her limited wardrobe, she used the few specks of dry earth to form small platforms below her feet.

That didn’t save us from the impending barrage of water, though. And Ōhara was still actively drowning in front of us, being continuously forced on the ground below him.

His head briefly reached out of the water, gasping for air.

Using a small piece of the ground reaching more than 100 meters deep, Takako quickly compressed the earth so tightly that it formed a small, impenetrable layer of matter to block the incoming beams. The only question was how dense the water approaching would be.

The first impacts occurred, without even slight cracks forming. Her versatility impressed me a lot, before I felt a piercing pain in my stomach. A single beam had been redirected to go below the sheet of impenetrable mass.

In response, Takako quickly drew the entire ground below us out of the earth, forming a small box around both of us and Ōhara. At least now, we could strategize for a moment.

I quickly froze the remaining liquid within the box, layering it over the walls.