Serious Plots 9: Srsr and srsr

[5a Violista]

[A Cold Day]

All Zophiel really can do is buy time.
With this many creatures, he can't hold them off forever. Eventually, one will slip past both him and Anchor.
All he can do is buy enough time for her to get out.
That's why hearing Sekhmet arguing in stereo is concerning. No progress means eventually one will get through.

He leans out of the cave and takes the risk to look upwards to see what's happening up there. Anchor...well, so far, she's been more effective than Zophiel at stopping them, he thinks. And she looks busy preparing something, so she probably won't be able to interfere.
Holding his single sword tight, the paladin jumps out of the cave and starts flying again, flying upwards as fast as he can. If those two keep on fighting, one of them is going to fall and the other is going to still be stuck, and then they'll fail. So, in his mind, stopping them from fighting like that is the only way they can all get out of this safely.

Given how far down he dove (to set the front line down as far as possible), it takes him a few long moments to get up.

Once the paladin finally reaches the Sekhmets, he says, "Hey," to draw attention to himself, and then thrusts the sword into the icewall above and to the side of the Sekhmets.

He still holds on to the sword so that he can hang there without having to fly or interfere with Sekhmet's flight.
With his other arm, and with the goal of holding the frozen Sekhmet and calming her down and stopping the fighting and also to apologize to her, he tries to grab her upper body into a one-armed hug. "Don't worry, you're going to be okay now," he says. "I shouldn't have left you alone in that church; I'm sorry, you're in this mess because of me."

Unfortunately, wrapping an arm around the frozen Sekhmet would mean that arm is too close to the flying Sekhmet's ice-melting flames.
While ordinarily you'd assume someone would need three arms to hold the sword, Zophiel can manage fine with just one. So it's not a huge loss if one gets burned by Sekhmet's flames.



[VF]

Yup. Zophiel gets to know Caramel.
And paladins definitely do have their own unique taste. Probably. Well, maybe not all paladins.