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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Dec 10, 2014 17:53:22 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers blinked, his eyes attempting to quickly adjust to use the cool, dim light of the moon to see in a space that was otherwise shrouded in darkness. As the emerald light of Es’ energy, which had been used to unceremoniously dump him in some unknown spot, began to dissipate, Viers began to take quick note of his surroundings. The ground was rocky and jagged, but flat where he was standing – somewhere ten or fifteen feet to his back was a sheer rock face that glimmered like crystal in the reflected moonlight. Viers was in the mountains.
As his eyes adjusted, Viers began to see the landscape in earnest: there was a deep pack of snow on the ground that rose nearly to the man’s knees, the reflective quality of which surrounding what could now clearly be seen as a flat, wide mountain overlook in a light blue-white glow. There were a few sparse, dead trees within the 100-foot diameter of the flat space, each wispy and wired, like vines that had overgrown into something more hearty over time, crawling toward the light of the sky like corpse fingers. One such tree seemed to be growing directly on the edge of the cliff that was a little more than fifty feet to Viers’ front, the drop distance from which was impossible to see from where the man was standing. Viers could see the bright, immense, glittering sea of star-like lights of the city of Vascxious Sigma in the distance past that cliff, and after a quick calculation the man realized that Es had moved him at least thirty miles outside the city when she forcibly relocated him.
Viers would have cursed if he had time, but instead the man chose to focus his attention on the other male figure having been transported out of the city limits. Whatever the new Arc decided he was going to do to ‘make him talk’, Viers wasn’t about to be overwhelmingly cooperative.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Dec 23, 2014 18:06:44 GMT -5
The effect of Es's method of transportation for the pair was less jarring the second time around, and even then, exponentially less stomach-turning than Achreios's traditional means. Simply put, Dragos was ready when his boots hit the ground, so to speak. He'd been ready several minutes ago, and he'd known precisely what for. Es had chosen to change their approach, and if he had stopped to give the woman any consideration at all after the fact, he would have approved. He didn't stop, though. Very few things mattered, in a very short, and very prioritized list. The female Mage-woman had made it clear that incapacitating their target, while not her initial approach, was far from out of line. By her own order, she had thus placed it in Dragos's charge to handle the matter as he saw fit, her only instruction running along a similar tone of the threat she'd given Viers. Finally, they were out of the city, and he trusted Achreios enough--ironically--to believe his form-shifted envoy had some inkling of reason in her actions. They were out of the city, and from the most brief of observations of distant city lights in the night sky, by quite a good deal.
Booted feet submerged almost to the knee in luminescent snow, his posture of predatory preparedness held, muscles coiled with very little subtlety in their ability, and even likelihood, to simply pounce the man before him. While the other male took his time in pinpointing their exact, or estimated located in relation to the city, Dragos took a far simpler survey. The snow beneath them, the amount of open space around them, and the rock face directly before him, with Viers in between. His response was almost entirely automatic upon that very realization, perhaps saving him the few fractions of a second that Viers spent deciding he wanted to do anything but the right move.
Their proximity, loosely the span of Es's arms, meant that Dragos, given his almost severe advantage in height only had to take one step, and one far from a large one at that. His left and forward-most boot dug into the snow beneath him as the powerful muscles of his leg acted on the leverage his low center of gravity provided him, spring-boarding him forward with a startling burst of momentum. The aforementioned step occurred in this frontal assault, his right foot instantly compensating for the acceleration and counteracting the lowermost inertia he’d fired off, digging into the cold, hard-packed snow with a solid stomp. It was his torso and the rest of his upper body that burst at the male then with a startling speed aided by this feint. The distance between them easily less than his own arms’ length now, his wildly flaring cloak parted its folds all too late to reveal his arms as they surged forth like the cannons that they effectively were, eager anticipation second only to their previously contracted and Arcanum-assisted thrusting power as a fuel source. One slightly above the other, with tightly clenched and plated fists turning at the wrist to provide an exceptional amount of torque at the moment of impact, they sought the center of the man’s torso--his sternum and upper abdomen--light tightly-packed marksman shots. The distance between the two was still important here, however; even if Viers had responded quickly enough to try to halt or divert the momentum of the attack, Dragos’s arms were still in the process of fully extending, revealing his true intention: the assault was as much, if not more a savage push as it was a pair of strikes, with the sole intention of hurtling Viers backwards toward that rock face with every bit as much momentum as a train.
His environment worked for him; just as savage as his assault was, the collision--should it happen--would do every bit as much work in damaging his quarry as his own body, what with its unrelenting, rigid surface. The average human likely would have perished from the collision itself, or from the massive internal damage of either Dragos’s fist or said collision; Dragos was willing to gamble that Achreios hadn’t sent the three of them deep into enemy territory to fetch an average human, or even an Olympic variant. Even as Viers hurtled through the air, however, he was already moving again, digging into the snow beneath him with muscle and bone far removed from the previously described standard. The kick-up of snow from his long strides was minimal what with his controlled pacing and traction, minimizing any instability the movement might have given him, but the air itself almost seemed to ripple as it struggled to make way fast enough for his massive form. Both hands sprang into action, his left reaching up to the front of his cloak and wrapping around it, tearing the heavy, warmth-retaining fabric from his armored body like it were paper. The other reached fluidly behind him, wrapping digits around the grip of the nightstick-reminiscent weapon he’d been tinkering with in the Cache, pulling it from its harness at his back. Just over a foot and a half in length and comprised of a dull, but especially solid and heavy metal, he lifted it to chest height at his side in reflexive preparation.
He was on Viers in what felt like a fraction of a second, the kicked-up powder of his movement still far from settling in his burst of speed. If things had gone according to this? He slowed his momentum with a controlled slide, lowering himself a full foot to maintain his center of gravity as he shifted, turned, and kicked out at Viers with his left boot, given that he was either at least in a lowered or crumpled position against the rock face. His boot sought the other man’s abdomen with an impact far removed from the brutal force he’d used to propel the man here, but no less likely to completely empty his lungs of air. Seeking to pin him there, crouched to maintain his center should the man resist him, and with either arm raised in preparedness for such a rebuke, he gazed down with a steely expression every bit as cold and immovable as the frozen rock behind his quarry. The sharp contrast of eyes whose irises and pupils were fully engulfed by a brightly golden glow was volcanic by comparison.
“What is your connection to Achreios?” The question was barely more than a thunderous rumbling growl from his throat, and more demand than request. If Viers could breathe, it would be best he answer; Dragos’s only restraint was the order that he prepare the man to talk, and rather than ask for information that he lacked any context of, he would start with baby steps in Viers’ complete submission to him. He had better rethink his angle on cooperation with that oily quick wit, or he would be made to learn.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 6, 2015 15:16:30 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers felt the strikes in the center of his chest before he actually saw them, the blunt force of Dragos assault striking the Arc dead-center with enough force to turn a standard human skeleton into a thousand-count jigsaw puzzle. Had Viers not already luckily been in the process of exhaling his breath, the entirety of the air trapped in his lungs would have erupted like a gale into the frigid mountain air – as it was, the beginning of his rapid trip backwards would be punctuated by a puff of steam, as if the strike had been halfway-drawn from a Sunday cartoon strip in one of the Vascxious Sigma newspapers. The Arc didn’t even have any time to negate even a small portion of the impact strength, so he didn’t bother to try – Viers’ momentum picked him up off his feet and sent him hurtling backwards with the speed of a bullet train, his hands flying over his head in an instinctual balancing reaction common to being struck mid-mass by a flying cannonball.
While Viers body language might have been similar to what would happen to an ordinary man put in his situation, the difference came in with regard to his thought process. Ordinarily, the nervous shock from that kind of trauma wouldn’t leave any time for clear thinking, but in the beginning microseconds of the Arc’s impact-aided travel across the snowy field, Viers capitalized on his own lack of reaction. Unlike Achréiøs, who kept his energy consistently in a solidified form of Arcanum until it was ready to be used, Viers personal energy, namely his Arcanum stores, were constantly in flux, with roughly half of his personal strength existing in an energetic state at any given time while the other half was more ‘solid’ in nature. That meant that reactionary uses of energy were much easier for him considering that he lacked the need to convert or harvest the energy from another form or source, and therefore as the man’s hands few over his head, he used the arc-like motion of his body language to effectively toss a bright, gleaming white burst of raw energetic force back over his head. The energy moved far faster than the Arc’s body could, and rather than traveling in a straight line as unguided photons were oft to do, the energy instead arced back in a mimic of the motion of Viers’ arms, impacting against the sheer rock face of the cliff at his back in half the time it took Viers’ body to arrive.
Striking approximately ten feet above where his body would eventually impact, the energy sunk into the rock face without immediate fanfare – to the observer, the Arc might have just accidentally thrown a weird, arcing light ball over his head as a reflex, as though he had been preparing to hurl the energy forward, directly at Dragos, but was thrown off balance by the strike so much that it more or less flew out of his hands uselessly. Yet, far from accidental, the energy sunk some ten feet into the rock face and then suddenly stopped, waiting for the exact second in which Viers’ back created an Arc-shaped indent in the incredibly-dense rock of the cliff’s bottom portion before its purpose was revealed.
As Dragos followed his strike and rushed forward without delay, reading his weapon for a powerful display of abject intimidation, he would find he suddenly had a lot more environmental hazards to contend with. The energy, having sunk into the rock ephemerally, was so basic that it only really had one function – combustion. But, rather than acting as some kind of omnidirectional concussive force, as if Viers had thrown a trans-physical grenade through a rock wall, the explosive power of the energy was highly directional. The bomb went off in concert with the Arc’s sudden cease in momentum, and its directional force was angled so precisely that the inner-surface explosion, equivalent to the blast magnitude of several grenades combined, would send giant chunks of the rock face exploding outward directly into Dragos’ path, meaning to forcefully bury him under tons of accelerated rock, as though the man had inadvertently charged right into the path of an incoming asteroid. With a combination of tiny, cutting shrapnel shards and giant, nearly-Dragos-sized boulders flying at him faster than he could personally hope to accelerate, Dragos would be in a bit of a bind, considering that his momentum wouldn’t allow for a change in direction rapid enough to avoid the blast radius, and therefore there was a high likelihood that the striking dragon would, at least temporarily, be buried under what amounted to a cannon-loaded avalanche.
The angle of the strike left Viers out of the way of the hurtling rock by as little as a foot, though he didn’t make any attempt to press himself away from the body-form of solid rock at his back. Instead, his violet eyes glowed with a white light as he shifted more of his energy outward and threw his hands up, collecting the force at the tips of his palms and channeling it into anther concussive force. With any luck, the sudden rock fall would at least slow Dragos’ approach by a second or two, and if so, it would give Viers time to unleash a second blast of directional explosive force, this time directly at Dragos from the front side. The impact of both blasts would carry the same concussive weight, and assuming that Dragos was somehow still standing within his same line of approach or, somehow, still advancing at speed, the force of the heat and kinetic energy riushing at him would likely simultaneously char the outer layer of his skin, assuming it was somewhere within human parameters, and simultaneously reverse his momentum and hurl him back with twice the force of his initial blow, possibly launching him off the nearby at his back.
Assuming everything went to plan, Viers knew he would only have a few seconds to breath before the larger problem came – the explosion on the mountain had first caused an avalanche of rock, but that fall would quickly be followed by an actual avalanche of snow, ice, and loose stone unsettled by the sudden concussive force. Whether Dragos was hit or not, in less than a minute they would both likely be buried beneath a new mountain’s worth of snow and debris, meaning that Viers had to think fast if he wanted to get out of the huge nature-based mess he had just brought on himself.
At least if they both got buried Dragos would have a few minutes to cool off before they were forced to interact with each other again.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Jan 6, 2015 19:29:12 GMT -5
There was a definite, id-driven satisfaction to the sensation of his fists impacting the other man's torso, so much so that he'd be forced to--at a time much less prioritized by his capture and interrogation of the Arc--reckon with why it had brought a grin to his otherwise stony features. What he knew without so much effort as an actual realization was that inflicting pain felt good, especially after the conflict-rich events of the past...well. He'd really lost track of the time. Then again, he wasn't exactly sparing the mental faculty at the moment to do so, given that his only intentions rested solely on his target; the man whom he now made to charge after as he hurtled through the air.
Even at Dragos's speed, he wasn't oblivious to, or shocked by, a reaction beyond what tradition would demand; a man's cranium exploding into goop tends to rock the boat on what standards to expect. Tapped into his own energetic senses now that he no longer had to maintain a lower level of subtlety, he felt the energy buildup as much as he saw it. Still, given the speed and momentum of his own charge, he was in no position to so drastically change or avert it with enough success to avoid to any grand degree of what was to come. Already glowing eyes were the only indicator of his prepared Magi, and though he was still bound toward Viers like a rushing bull, he prioritized his reaction in tandem with his physical one. As much as he could, booted heels dug into the snow, more to lower his center of balance and brace himself than to stop as quickly as possible, as the Magi within him moved out--rather than projected--into the frozen flakes immediately beneath him. The implementation of his design for the flowing Magi moved at reactionary speeds, solidifying the snow and giving him a platform that his forward motion was less able to pull by momentum alone and, given that he wouldn't topple over after bracing himself, greater reduce his forward advance than he could have ever done on a solely physical level.
His eyes locked upon the last visible position of the energy before it sank seamlessly into the rock-face even as he advanced, albeit at a greatly reduced pace, and he knew he had barely microseconds to speculate at the design of the energy. After all, Achreios had sent them after this man, his gut instincts told him not to trust that someone of the Mage's company would do anything entirely by accident. Monitoring as best he could on the energetic level by the Magi within the rock-face himself, his instincts were confirmed as the sudden surge of the energy announced an imminent threat with less time remaining than before, even as Dragos was still slowing.
In relation to where he would have be had he not altered his pace, he was off by approximately five feet, farther away from Viers given that he'd chosen to slow down rather than speed up. This location, however, was made no safer by such a minimal variation. The sudden explosion ripped out of the frozen rock, and Dragos's lowered form lifted his arms in front of his head as if in primal reflex to the oncoming disaster. It was not so. Active Magi already having channeled into the snow beneath him spread like a wildfire to encompass a circle of a few feet around him in all directions before, as it imposed itself on the static Magi present in the white powder already, the mass of flakes around him exploded into action in a visible mirror to the oncoming, rocky threat. Flying up to not only surround and encompass his form in a spherical layer, the miniscule particles of ice build upon one another with unnaturally rapid succession, rippling in high-speed phase-shifting as flake upon flake congealed together to form a solid mass that built itself layer by layer at rapid speeds.
The smallest of the earthen shrapnel was the most greatly accelerated, and simply too fast for the sphere of ice to adequately protect its maker from. Hurling through portions of the sphere that had not yet formed, or ripping through thinner portions of it, small flecks and pebbles pelted Dragos with bullet-like velocity. Several pinged off the protective plates of armor he wore, while others cut shallow gashes across his skin in glancing blows. He had the benefit that his physical movement accelerated the outward flowing Magi's design in that his arms actually did protect his face and head to a reasonable degree, though a few shards cut paths across his cheeks and one ear, the majority either collided harmlessly with his armored arms or buried into his forearms, which was highly preferred to burying themselves in his head. With only instants to spare, however, more and more of the rocks were shut out by the quickly compacting sphere of ice, and by the time the larger portions of the torn asunder rock-face were imminently upon him, it had significant staying power. One after another, man-sized or larger boulders collided against the sphere with sharp cracks, weakening the structural integrity of the whole only for a fraction of a second before the continual draw of the almost unlimited snow and ice around them provided sufficient material to render the sphere anew again and again, even as more and more of the original rock-face piled atop and buried him, forming what one would think to be another protective layer.
The sphere blocked off Dragos from seeing Viers now, but it didn't matter. Even as the last remnants of falling rock still piled upon what should have been a several tombstone graveyard for but one man, the Son felt that rising energy again. The majority of his currently acting Magi present in the Sphere around him finalizing its structural integrity against the initial threat, he almost cursed with his inability to react instantaneously to the new one. The sudden explosive force likely ripped through rock or pushed it aside with its intensity, and when it met the wall of solid ice even that wasn't strong enough to block it out entirely. Dragos was fortunate that he'd chosen a sphere in design; the rounded surface averted the head-on directed impact to spread out and, when a deep gash of the rounded ice did give way, it was to his right side. Unable to rapidly switch between the control of the ice and the reaction of his own physical form to heat, he grit his teeth with the pain as the foot-wide, three-foot long gash along the sphere’s form allowed hot, rushing air lessened by its initial impact against the sphere to mostly engulf his arm, charring cloth and metal, and blackening flesh both exposed and not. Pain was nothing new, however, and he’d suffered far worse. From far better.-
The pain causing his storming anger to reflexively raise its hackles, he focused the response as his free arm lifted within the cramped space of the sphere, toward Viers’ last known location; where he could sense the source of the last combustive force. Fingers curled as stores of active Magi projected forth toward the location, condensing upon a single focal point, just to the left of the Arc’s center of gravity. Even as Viers might lower his hands from the latest exertion or look upon the result to decide upon his next action, the air beside him collected inward, forming yet another sphere. Dragos had the benefit that the high altitude and latitude of their location made the air nothing short of absolutely frigid; air molecules were already especially dense compared to more temperate regions. By his will, the acting Magi projected onto the static made to both collect the oxygen within and cool it even further, and at such a rapid pace that Viers would likely notice the sudden, stabbing cold engulfing his right hand, side, and thigh before he noted the energetic signal. Becoming so cool and dense that it appeared as a mist rather than invisibly, the oxygen would soak into the fabric of his clothing and coat the surface of his skin beneath it in less than three seconds’ time, and so much so that trying to pull away would only draw the quickly congealing mass with him.
He’d used combustive energetic techniques thus far; whether or not he could do anything else had yet to be seen. Going on the evidence he had, however, Dragos sought to force the man into a situation that he couldn’t blast himself out of without also causing his own destruction.
Until the miniscule, pea-sized pop at the sphere’s coagulating center announced that Dragos had done it for him.-
Dense oxygen exploded outward through the sphere, igniting every liquefied particle in a chain reaction that, like the ice sphere, built upon itself though in combustive force rather than structural integrity. The basketball-sized mass ripped outward with enough force to easily blow apart the lower portions of the man’s extremity, and into the thick meat of his thigh, not to mention hurl him away from its center and, finally, set aflame all that it did not instantly blow apart with its touch. With how well he’d taken to being nearly half-buried in the rock-face initially from the Son’s blow, Dragos took the chance that Viers could make it, albeit painfully and crippled. He didn’t bother himself with such concerns, however; he was already working on the next stage of his approach. Closing his eyes within the cracked and partially shattered sphere, his focus dove into his reserves of active Magi as they pressed outward to meet the static, fusing to it rather than projecting itself unto it. Beyond even an energetic level, fusion was occurring over the span of a few seconds, which Dragos had hopefully bought enough time for by his sharp retort to his opponent’s second assault.
The connection and transition of states were sudden, ripping through the space around them with an explosion of synchronicity that nobody was likely to hear or feel. When the Son opened his eyes again, they were encompassed entirely by golden light. He could only hope he’d had the time to achieve this balance, even as he pressed out with the Sphere of Influence to encompass the entire area devastated by the Arc’s rocky assault, just short of encompassing Viers himself, writhing in pain on the ground or not.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 6, 2015 20:11:50 GMT -5
Viers watched what was happening fairly impassively, considering that giant shards or rock were flying about every which way, bouncing off Dragos super-reinforced ice-barrier and what have you. Enough larger stones would have fallen to bury the snow-globed Dragos under a pile of rock, had of course the Arc not decided to do him a favor by exploding a good amount of it off him and sending a spray of overlarge rock shards hurtling off the cliff behind them with his second energy spike. The force of the explosion hadn’t broken through the barrier, but the heat wash had, and since Dragos hadn’t bothered to patch the hole before starting on something else, Viers quickly honed in on the sudden weakness in the dragon-man’s created defenses.
However, before Viers could release the next batch of explosive energy he was already cooking up, he felt the extreme temperature drop at his side, and a quick glance told him all he needed to know about what was going on. Viers may not have been a person who was extensively versed in various forms of magic, but what he did happen to know was the mechanics of explosive forces and fuels, and super-cooled oxygen, which returned to its liquid form, was a powerful accelerant that could be used to great effect in certain circumstances. Dragos was about to take a page out of his own book – fight fire with fire as they say. The Arc might have laughed if he had the time to do so.
In his dealings with various naturally-found combustive agents, Viers had discovered a weird little fact about liquid oxygen: it was magnetic. Therefore, as the substance began to coalesce and form at the Arc’s left side, Viers shifted his energy to emit not as a combustive force but instead a more precise form of electromagnetic radiation. Holding his left hand out, a spherical magnetic field was created underneath his inverted palm, and the force of the magnetic attraction caused the liquid oxygen to form into a nearly perfect sphere, suspended in space instead of soaking into Viers clothing, or anything else currently on his person. Judging by the fact that Dragos had missed Viers center mass with his current creation, the Arc guessed that Dragos couldn’t see exactly where he was in space with his vision obstructed, and since he knew what the next step of the formation would likely be, Veirs would pass the gathered sphere from his left to his right hand, crossing it to the other side of his body and away from the potential combustion point before he super-condensed the magnetic field, pressing the liquid oxygen into the smallest space in which it could be accommodated, a sphere the size of a golf ball.
Viers didn’t hesitate to chuck the thing the second it became condensed, which coincidentally was within the same second that Dragos struck the match at the spot where the LO previously was. Judging the distance carefully, Viers angled his body to the right and twisted his arm as if he were throwing curveballs in the major leagues, hurling the magnetically-contained ball of oxygen at Dragos’ ice sphere at such an angle that it would pass through the created gash in his ice-barrier, the one through which his side had been burned and he had thus far neglected to reseal. The orb would travel rapidly, and the second it passed through the icy barrier the magnetic energy containing it would change in character and mimic the combustive spark that Dragos had been attempting to use only seconds before. That meant that Dragos would suddenly be in an extremely enclosed space with his own bomb, which in its condensed form could easily shatter the ice barrier with expanding concussive force at the same time it painted the snowflakes with Dragos’ entrails.
Viers wasn’t expecting the dragon to turn into a splatter-box, but it would have been a nice outcome. In the meantime, as soon as he hurled the ball of liquid oxygen, the Arc pressed his hands together in front of him and channeled more of his own energy through them, rapidly unfolding an energetic field that would sweep around his body into a spherical shape. Its purpose could be guessed at, but for now, Viers mostly care to ensure that he wasn’t about to be pelted with dragon-gut-flavored ice crystals.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Jan 6, 2015 22:32:31 GMT -5
The Son felt, in his manipulation of the static Magi by projecting his own, a sudden interference in his control over the molecules. As asinine as it may seem, however, it did not change his plans entirely; instead, it advanced them to the next step. This sentiment was all the more supported by, beyond the lack of being able to manipulate the Magi, he felt the pull of the molecules away from the space they had been occupying, quite literally removing them from the map of his senses. Instead, readjusting his energetic senses, he felt the manipulation of a field of some sort, though of what type was difficult to gauge in his rush of attaining the fusion of active and static Magi. Things had changed, and not to his liking.
That he’d lost both control and track of a highly explosive ball of liquid oxygen was made all the more discomforting by his opponent’s exhibited use of combustive techniques. If he were capable of more than that, and had somehow hijacked the manipulation intended to explode at his side, Dragos had little doubt of the flow of events, especially with the gaping wound in his spherical shield of ice. He weighed the option for only a fraction of a second; the amount of combustible material was easily enough to punch through the shield even at its strongest point, but the opening at its side was the most likely target. His only coherent thought capable of being expressed in words was something of a curse at what was about to unfold, even as he dropped as low as he possibly could. Attaining fusion was more important than anything now, and so he focused on it to the point of failing even to be infuriated by this change in the flow of events. His body, however, knew what to do. His limbs drew in toward him as the heavy clank of his metal rod landing on the shield’s bottom resounded louder than it should in the mostly enclosed space, and he rolled away from the opening.
He felt the explosive force of Magi both active and passive synchronizing together, but knew he didn’t have time for to expand it into a sphere. Instead, closing his eyes, he silently voiced the only command that he could, with all the willpower that he could muster: Protect me. In the final second before that golf-ball sized sphere of liquid oxygen contained by a magnetic field entered the melted away portion of his shield, the Arcanum in his veins rushed out with a speed that caused the normal burning sensation of its activity to be a dull heat by comparison. He felt it flow to the blood vessels of his skin, darkening his pigment to a wholly unnatural gray as a by product and, as he became aware of the liquid oxygen entering his opened shield, harden.
The resulting explosion was made more potent by occurring within an enclosed space, and when it happened, it ripped the shield asunder like it was made of glass. An explosion of ice crystals filled the air with frozen shards, mist, and powder, which given the proximity to such and his position to the omni-directional explosion, Viers would need to protect himself from. Oddly enough, none of these crystals were splattered and painted by the Son’s blood and gore. He allowed himself only a momentary check; the throbbing pulse in his head made it feel as if the explosion might as well have happened there instead, made much worse by the deafening ringing in both his ears. At least one rip was broken, and his left arm had a numb sensation that he was less than comfortable with. All the same, he pulled on his aching muscles to stand amid the cloud of icy mist, and when he did, everything around him lit up in response.
He had left it up to the Arcanum to protect him; he gave the command, and just like it healed his wounds when their direness threatened his life, he expected it to act on behalf of what he expected. That he had already achieved a level of control high enough to harden his skin as such made the process easier by means of a sort of muscle memory, if you will. Why he would chance it and leave this command to the interaction of his subconscious mind and the Arcanum’s own action to carry out the intent was solely for the sake of maintaining his connection to the fused state of Magi. The danger, after all, had two threats to it. The concussive force had played out as described, and barring any unforeseen circumstances, he’d survived it reasonably well. If he had focused solely on surviving that, however, he would have been done in by the wash of heat the explosion was made to contain, by implementation of his own design, no less. Even if his skin hadn’t burned, his lungs would have instantly burned into ash.
No, instead, his mind commanded the welcoming of this heat as Magi acted to absorb it both into around him, fluctuating between either as if they were one in the same. Heat, flame, and light rolled over him in a sustained environment as the Magi without and without altered his body to accommodate it. Glowing flesh set portions of his attire already made ragged by the explosion aflame, and light crept out between darkened blood vessels to create a cracked, molten rock appearance. Amid even this, golden eyes of the achieved fusion state looked only upon where Viers was, making his location despite the icy mist all too apparent by his manipulation of some kind of field. Dragos stiffened in his standing; was it a preventative technique for what he expected to come next, or was he trying to escape?
The potential for the latter changed the game yet again, though this time on the level of priorities. Above all else was to survive, of course, but the latter two commands had been to ensure his capture and coercing him to talk. He would not talk if he had escaped, and the balancing scale between those to points suddenly shifted dangerously against him. Whether or not it was his intention, he had made an already violent Dragos solely focused on incapacitating him entirely, risking even his death, over letting him escape.
The next act was simple: Dragos lifted his hand, which had balled into a fist of burning light, and opened it. Magi that had been made to create a homeostasis of all too unnaturally burning nature now repurposed to funnel into Dragos’ palm and out, directly solely at Viers’ energetically target-panted location. Containing all the fire and heat of the explosion intended to occur at Viers’ side and more given his own substantial additions, the white-hot beam was just that, and rushed at speeds only energetic effects could achieve. For all intents and purposes, it was a death laser nearly four inches--the size of Dragos’ palm from which the beam originated--in diameter, seeking to lance through Viers’ abdomen, liking punching through it and burning against the rock-face behind him. Its duration lasted several seconds, until most of the heat had been drained from Dragos’s form, leaving only a radiating glow of orange.
Without waiting on the results, Dragos bent at the knees and leapt with Arcanum-enhanced muscles out of the crater left by the explosion, filled by both mist and steam. Even before he landed, his mind sought to push out, and as he did, the conversation of fused Magi expanding to the static around him reached out to encompass a field twenty feet in diameter in all directions. The Sphere of Influence was established, and with it, his sole focus on -not- letting Viers escape. The only question rested in this energy field that he’d painted himself red with...if it hadn’t been done away by the potential lancing through his gut by a white-hot heat beam.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 8, 2015 12:34:20 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers waited and watched carefully as Dragos dealt with the backlash of his own bomb, all the while pumping energy into the semi-kinetic barrier he had energetically erected in front of his outstretched palms, a translucent, oddly octagonal structure that glowed dimly with an orange sheen. He hadn’t really figured that the dragon-boy would just give up after getting pretty efficiently exploded, but the Arc could still hope Dragos would grow some sense and back the fuck off. Viers, oddly, wasn’t usually the one who started fights, but he did have a nasty habit of finishing them rather quickly.
The fact was, he would have to finish things off as rapidly as possible, given the fact that a rushing onslaught of snow and rock was roughly thirty seconds away from peaking past the cliff over their heads and burying them in a nice, frosty grave, if not necessarily a permanent one. Viers needed to get a better angle on things, and therefore as Dragos began to raise his hand, telegraphing an incoming something, the Arc moved far faster and maneuvered his body in an unexpected fashion: he hopped into the air, tucked his legs up under his crouched torso, and swung his arms downward, bringing the barrier he had created under him to act as an energetic platform. The second the barrier was in position, with Viers still roughly three feet off the ground, he converted the thinnest outer lay of the barrier’s energy into combustive force, and suddenly a downward oriented explosion struck out against the ground on which he had been standing. Due to the kinetic nature of his created barrier, the semi-solid energetic apparatus acted like a steel plate and absorbed the kinetic force of the explosion and its backwash, converting it into momentum and sending Viers flying straight up into the air like he had a rocket strapped to his ass.
Ten feet, twenty, thirty – it would take less than a second for Viers to ascend high in the air, and as he ascended, Viers rotated his body again to place the barrier between him and the cliff face, his face and torso now pointed toward the ground. Another explosion would sound as he reached approximately 35 feet in the air to change his directional momentum, this time sending him rocketing over Dragos’ head. Swinging his arms up to extend the barrier parallel to his torso as he passed rapidly over the Dragon’s head, Viers let loose some more of his barrier-bound energy in the form of two pinpoint orbs that would fly directly downward as he passed over the dragon-man, one landing on each side of Dragos’ feet. Upon impact, the bright-white orbs would create inward-directional explosions on a fairly weak magnitude, but with their explosive force meeting in the middle, the heat and concussive force of the twin blasts would be enough to crush the majority of a human skeletal torso, and would kick up enough smoke and debris to obscure the dragon from sight momentarily.
Considering that Viers was already in the air as the heat beam passed under him, and given his rocket-like rate of motion, it would be impossible even for Dragos’ Arcanum-enhanced musculature to follow his path fast enough to catch him with the heat beam. Considering that he would most likely be interrupted by the twin explosions at his either side, Viers judged that he had time to continue to rotate in midair some thirty-forty feet on the other side of his opponent, bringing his feet down and his arms up to use a final blast to send him rocketing (with less momentum) directly downward. Viers’ crouched into the ground as he landed, his body absorbing the impact with its Arcanum-enhanced structure as he spun to bring his barrier between him and Dragos. Still crouched, Viers wouldn’t hesitate to condense the remainder of his barrier’s power directly into an energetically-combustible state, and with a flash of blinding, white light, the energy would be unleashed in a wave of concussive energy that was primarily devoid of heat. Similar to a straight sound wave with immense kinetic force mixed in, the average human body would suffer intense blood vessel rupture as it was hurled backwards by the force of the blast, sending it rocketing into the cliff-face with at least twice the momentum that Dragos had used to greet Viers. The objective seemingly was to throw Dragos back and disorient him enough that he would not be able to readily do anything about the giant avalanche wave that was just then beginning to crest the cliff-top. Viers, now positioned a little farther away, kept his hands up, already pumping more energy through them to re-establish his barrier and prepare to escape the snow-flood, likely by rocketing himself right off the cliff behind him. Dragos would just have to chill for a few, until Es showed up – Viers wasn’t about to continue to monkey around with the guy if he could help it.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Jan 8, 2015 17:32:23 GMT -5
That Viers was already considering the confrontation's conclusion was a brash and very stupid move. Granted, a single choice could tip the scales in either direction in an instant, but to anticipate it already distracted from the larger picture, even if the fullest extent of that escaped Dragos momentarily in regards to their environment. To that note, Viers was quick to react to Dragos's elevated hand even amid the swirling mist and steam that might have otherwise blocked his vision, and before the Son could unleash that heat ray that would surely have otherwise lanced straight through the target, Viers was taking explosive measures for the purpose of evasion. The very instant that the Arc quite literally blasted off, Dragos realized that he had lost the chance to properly strike him with the ray. Not that the assault's direction was determined by the exact gesturing and placement of his hand, but he severely doubted his ability to properly track an object hurtling so fast that his eyes could scarcely keep up, despite how much they saw beyond just the physical plane.
It was in that upward glance, and instant of reprieve, that the Son became aware of the external threat posed by the partially collapsed rock-face behind the Arc's previous location; both in sight beyond seeing, and in minor vibrations of the fused state of Magi around him, he felt the oncoming avalanche with exact timing, and realized that it would be necessary to adapt. As Viers made to launch himself forward at speeds faster than Dragos could track with the movement of his neck and head, he nonetheless announced his exact location and, to the particularly observant in the manipulations of his energy, his trajectory in at least a loose sense. Forward. Another spike, and Dragos could feel the energetic signature of the orbs that now dropped in search of the ground at either side of his feet. Even as they passed through the Sphere of Influence's currently passive membrane, he made no move to stop them, but instead, from Viers's perspective, allowed them to detonate, momentarily clouding Dragos's exact positioning in a wash of heat and combustive force.
The very instant before Viers touched down upon the ground, fully intent on unleashing his next assault, a rough stone column, nearly twice the Arc's total mass and oblong in shape, burst forth from the ground in a rapid ascension at the command of fused Magi. Even as it did so, silhouetted by the explosions of Viers' first attack, it suddenly rushed forth as if magnetized to his very presence, and moving at speeds that no fleshly form could without snapping several bones. When it did so, however, the flames and wash of combustion behind it simply disappeared. In all actuality, and as the Arc could likely suspect, Dragos had not allowed those orbs to detonate to the fullest intent of their creator's aggression. Instead, fused Magi had moved into action at a pace more rapid than the acts committed before the Sphere's construction, and responded with an encompassing field of a deadened zone of kinetic energy. Acting as a sponge, the large portion of this mass had absorbed both heat and force, redirecting it lower to join high levels of pure heat redirected from Dragos's palm. At the launch of his earthy assault, he allowed the explosive force to resume, albeit redirected and with a solid mass of deadened energy between it and Dragos's hardened feet.
The resulting act was almost an exact mirror of what Viers had done; the Son's feet left the stone beneath them, and the deadened mass of energy, solid and neutralizing to any harmful effects of combustion, acted as a buffer for the directed explosion that now continued, launching the Son toward Viers at a speed slightly slower than his own moments prior, in a path directly behind that of the flying rock. That is, it would have been slower, had Dragos not funneled both the previously collected energy for the intended heat ray and the residual heat from the two explosions he now maneuvered to serve his own purpose down and out of his feet, quite literally shooting out gouts of flame and heat to further accelerate him, forcing him to rely on his enhanced musculature and skeletal structure to resist a whiplash that would have snapped the neck of a normal man.
As for the Arc's second onslaught? It would be met with that more-than-man-sized pillar of rock and, if the original force was not enough to completely dismember the average human's body, leave the energetic assault almost completely neutralized, save for slowing the rock's speed, albeit less than teen feet from his current location, moving like a freight train toward a crouched target that should find it difficult to find the leverage to reposition himself to any great enough degree to escape it. That is, until less than three feet in front of him, it shattered, scattering baseball to golf ball-sized rocks to pelt the Arc with their shrapnel, some sharper than others. Amid them, however, was a much larger mass, and hurtling toward the man at a much higher speed. Like a predator emerging from its hiding place, Dragos burst through the rocks in just as effectual a pounce, with arms spread wide and fingers hooked. Angled to intercept the man's midsection, the Son sought an impact all the more forceful than the one to his torso that had started this conversation, and was sure to knock any trace of air from his lungs, if not shatter his rips and severely bruise internal organs. And at the very second of impact? Those spread arms would wrap around the target with enough force to second the notion of crushing any air from him, cracking ribs, and allow digits to dig into what flesh they could find, hardened as they were.
It might have seemed a foolish gambit, seeing as with Viers' proximity to the cliff, the force was easily enough to propel both of them from the cliff's edge, with the avalanche crashing at the rock-face beyond them already, but it was pursued nonetheless. In fact, after that initial moment of impact, the Son angled his spin and legs so that the gouts of flame, now at the halfway points of their reserves of collected energy, angled the two of them upwards, adding the direct opposition of increased gravitational pull to any thrashing or struggle that Viers might have put forth. Like a rocket seeking the upper atmosphere, Dragos propelled them both upward and, Viers should be very careful to note, above the wash of snow and ice that surely would bury, if not crush, them entirely.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 12, 2015 11:49:33 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers knew he had miscalculated somehow – the problem was that the Arc had no idea why. Obviously, Viers wasn’t operating on the assumption that Dragos solely used Arcanum as a magickal power source, like most Arcs Viers was familiar with: his limited experience with Fureya had demonstrated that this new breed of Arc that the Mage was creating lately had a propensity for being more diverse than what Viers himself was familiar with, so he kept an open mind when it came to judging Dragos combat abilities. However, the fact that his magic seemed to have no discernable energetic precursor was highly concerning – it meant that Viers, a being more sensitive to energetic fluctuations than most seasoned mages could ever hope to be, was unable to accurately predict when and where Dragos was about to attack, and that fact alone was enough to disorient the Arc significantly enough to cause a miscalculation. But it was bigger than that – something was happening with regard to Dragos’ control of the world around him, a fact that became abundantly clear when the column of rock rocketed out of the smoke-filled space Dragos currently occupied straight toward the Arc with incredible speed. The dragon-man should have been at least disoriented enough to slow his reaction time, even if he shrugged off the explosive damage of Viers attack using Arcanum defenses, but instead the energetic force of the blasts was greatly diminished, something Viers could sense immediately, meaning that Dragos somehow was able to actually manipulate Viers energetic attack. That shouldn’t have been possible.
Internally, Viers growled, and in his crouched position, with the stone column rocketing toward him almost faster than he could react, he only had one choice –the energy he was preparing to release in a concussive, directional blast was rapidly separated and unleashed prematurely, with the largest portion of the energy exploding in a now omni-directional concussive wave, simultaneously throwing Viers backwards suddenly as well as striking against the stone construct with enough force to fracture and derail its progress, dependent on the amount of raw magic being used to hold it together. The explosion hit Viers crouched, semi-braced form like a truck and sent him flying back in the same way he had intended pushing Dragos away, catapulting his body into the air, only to be followed within the same second by a similar, though single-directional push aimed at the center of Viers’ own chest, a blow that sent Viers flying backward off the cliff at his rear like a projectile of war.
Even flying in midair and rocked by twin concussive blows, Viers was thinking faster than most normal biological minds could hope to process. As the inches ticked by and his body soared into the open air, arcing upwards towards the apex of his momentum, the Arc;s already-dark skin began to darken substantially more, the deep brown of his flesh rapidly shifting in hue to jet black and acquiring a slight shine, the kind of reflective property that was more common in glass or metal than standard biological matter. The black crept over his flesh in less than a second, and in that same second, Viers himself would entirely disappear from Dragos energetic senses, as if all of his energetic essence were sucked away to nothing in a single instant.
The Arc’s wide eyes shifted also, dropping their standard pigment as Viers enacted his best Fureya impression, the entirety of his eyes transitioning to a single, empty state, though Viers sported shock white optics rather than the metallic silver that were the Assassin’s calling card. Suddenly, Viers could see in a much more unconventional way – a variant of the Mage’s black eyes spell, Viers had learned to tune his vision to a very broad spectrum of energies and forces, a sight that, to most, would be chaotic and confusing, but due to Viers’ experience was highly useful and very translatable.
As Viers’ momentum began to decrease and the man entered free-fall, his body soaring well over the cliff range and descending the thousands of feet between the cliff and the steep, craggy hillsides below, the Arc could really see Dragos, who had already launched himself after Viers. More importantly though, Viers could see the spatial distortion surrounding Dragos, a shifting in reality’s makeup that moved with him as he changed location. The lines of Dragos’ influence were tapped into reality in a way that Viers had never seen before, but the Arc’s earlier miscalculation suddenly clicked into focus. Whatever Dragos was doing, the Arc had no effective way to score any more hits against the man using his normal method of combat: Dragos’ actions made somehow gave him the potential to manipulate energy and matter within a set space around him, which meant that energetic attacks were now worthless.
Viers grinned – fine, whatever the dragon-boy was, he would now be sure he had the upper hand, especially as he rocketed towards Viers under his own power while the Arc fell towards an inevitably-painful crash landing on the rocks below. The white-eyed Arc tensed his body for the inevitable impact, no matter if his assailant or the ground won the race to smash him in some hateful way – either would be fine. Whatever Dragos was, the dragon had raw power on his side. What Viers had, however, was experience, and if he played his cards right, all the power in the world wouldn’t give Dragos the strength to dispatch his foe. Viers was a survivor – maybe Dragos would get the opportunity to see why.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Jan 18, 2015 18:35:18 GMT -5
Dragos was intent enough upon tracking the man's energy signature that the deviation in the flow of events from the expected was not wholly unprepared for; when the stone column split apart by his own design and he did not find Viers there to be air-pounced, he was not wholly surprised, but aware of the man's blasted-away location. That the Arc was so quick on the draw could have proven to be a frustration, but it wasn't; it was another factor to take into account in the next few seconds and larger whole of the conflict. Later, he might note his surprise at a significant lack of building anger and frustration in response to the man's antics to allude him, but that was later. Now he only had a goal, and his anger's only place was to fuel him toward that end.
That the man's blastoff sent him rocketing backward and eventually down as gravity fought against his lateral momentum, and bought him a few moments at most, given that his acceleration was sudden, but not a momentary constant as the heat and flame shooting from Dragos's booted feet, venting out by design of active Magi. Still every bit as intent on physically capturing the man as he was before, he was all the same keen to note the sudden visible and, more importantly, energetic shift enacting before him. The sudden darkening of the skin and a complete lack of energetic presence brought forth some observation on the Son's part, if only because he didn't have time for a great deal of speculation. The shift in pigment was similar to his own when he had used the Arcanum in his veins to harden his skin, and if he had any assumption to make of Viers's ocular change, it was a suspicion that he was trying to get a read on Dragos, specifically because he'd likely never encountered Magi before. After all, he had seen the Mage's eyes turn to black toward that end, and he himself had enacted it as well. Even now, the light completely encompassing his own eyes allowed him to see beyond the physical. Lastly, the complete vanishing of any energetic presence from the man was, among several things, severely problematic.
If the man left both the Son's Sphere and line of site, like in the instance of an avalanche only seconds away from enveloping them, Dragos would be reduced to trying to monitor for causal effects of the man's presence, and given that Dragos was operating under the suspicion that he could simply relocate himself--though how he could do so without resorting to energetic means was questionable--that would turn the situation of cutting off his escape extremely dismal. Fortunately, this observation and speculation took little time; like Viers, he was capable of processing a high level of information in a short amount of time. It was a good thing, too, because the man's sudden shift had him changing tactics, but their compared momentums would make such a thing difficult.
Simply put, given that it should be obvious that Dragos followed the man out and down rather than arching up as he had intended, the combination of his momentum and propulsion would have him slamming into Viers in only a moment; something he was hesitant to due, given the last solid impact he'd tried to inflict upon an Arcanum-user before this conflict started. Acting on the thought as it occurred to him, and later realizing that he was pulling one of the tricks from Viers's own hat, the remaining heat and energy he'd been using to propel himself were drawn into his form once more, as if propelled through it, and expelled from the other side. In effect, a superheated concussive blast of air was launched forth at the Arc when they were only feet apart, and while it should accelerate his momentum to make his impending collision with the ground all the more potent, the expelling of the hot air slowed Dragos enough to further alter the difference in their momentums by slowing him down. With a simple thought, the air around him began to rotate around him, further slowing his descent just enough for him to land a moment after the Arc's impact.
Seven feet at most from the pact site, whether or not Viers was standing left the man fully enveloped by Dragos's Sphere of Influence, which was second in Dragos's list of maintaining to ensure the man's lack of escape, behind physical contact such as in Es's earlier method of transporting he and Fureya, and later he and Viers. Aware of having only seconds before the wash of ice and snow would come roaring over the cliff above them, hungry to swallow them up, Dragos stepped forward to, whether or not Viers was standing, just out of arms' and legs' length, keeping his attention present only on the man until he was forced to deal with the downward rushing snow and ice. Whatever this change was, he was forced to admit that he needed to address the possibility of the unknown, and not rush in. Fine. The anger that served its purpose by fueling him would be allowed to build, so that the man would be sorry he'd forced Dragos to wait. Dragos was confident he wouldn't have to wait long; the change was either to address him, the avalanche, or both. The most he could do was maintain a constant state of readiness, with his mind addressing nothing beyond those variables.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 22, 2015 9:59:48 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers flexed his fingers as Dragos rocketed toward him, his teeth gritted and bared in anticipation of an impact that never came. Instead, the dragon-boy stopped short by unleashing a wash of concussive force and heat energy, no doubt intended to barbeque the already-blackened Arc and send him colliding unceremoniously with the ground. Viers’ grin didn’t waver in the least: Dragos was using one of his own tricks, but the Arc was wholly unconcerned with dealing with it. He let the blow strike him, the flame washing over his body and obscuring him from sight for a split second, undoubtedly as it crisped his skin rapidly toward trauma-victim status.
However, while Dragos was busy slowing himself down so he could land a touch more softly, orienting himself appropriately to continue dealing with Viers, the Arc managed to do his own repositioning. Even as his body was awash in flames, his descent accelerated by the kinetic energy of the blast, Viers managed to rotate his form in midair, using the kinetic force of the attack to spin his form so that when he did impact the ground, finally, it was feet-first. His knees bent as the earth cracked beneath him, but the Arc stayed upright, managing to somehow absorb an impact force that could have powdered his bones into his body as if he had simply jumped from a height of ten feet.
Viers coat was awash in patches of flames, and seemingly, his shirt had burned enough to leave giant gashes in the fabric that was still rapidly unraveling, baring his torso to the cold mountain air, but other than the damage to his clothing, Viers seemed entirely unaffected by the heat energy that had been thrown at him, and the Arc was so not put-off by the attack that as his knees sank down towards the ground under his feet, displacing some of the impact from his mightily fall, the man’s legs rapidly reversed course and flexed upward, sending the man flying into the air in a low, backwards arc that would send his body leaping straight behind his current position by at least twenty feet, placing him well outside the radius of the ever-present special distortion that the Arc now knew surrounded Dragos. Viers’ legs bent again as he landed from his leap, one hand touching down on the snowy ground beneath his feet to place himself into a three-point stance over the snow-and-ice-covered, rocky ground.
Dragos might be wondering as to just how Viers had managed to escape his fiery attack unphased, but nothing about the man gave off any kind of energetic notification as to exactly why the heat energy had mostly just disappeared as it struck him. The answer undoubtedly lay in the mechanics of whatever small transformation Viers had undergone, the nature of which could only be guessed at, though not directly understood for sure. The truth was, while Dragos had diversity of power on his side, the man was unschooled when it came to Arcanum in comparison to the much, much more seasoned Arc, and since Dragos had already guessed that Viers sudden lack of energetic output was directly related to his shift to pure Arcanum usage, the dragon-man would surely realize that Viers was no longer messing around with him. Unlike Dragos, Viers could manipulate his Arcanum directly and consciously, and had a great deal of practice doing so: the former’s focus of maintaining his Magi relegated him to hoping the Arcanum would act on its own, and even without the Magi drawing his attention, Viers suspected Dragos had never been taught to use Arcanum as a primary force in combat.
The Arc didn’t move from his three-pint stance: he just stayed still and stared, ready to move on a millisecond’s notice dependent on what Dragos chose to do next. However, considering that a giant wall of snow, ice, and rock was rushing at Dragos’ back and would overtake him in a matter of seconds, the dragon-had multiple concerns to react to at once, with Viers possibly taking the less-immediate spot amongst them. Since Dragos was closer to the snow-wall, Viers would wait patiently to see what he did before taking care of his own response to the natural disaster: he was more than happy to see how things shook out before deciding on a new course of action.
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Jan 25, 2015 8:17:16 GMT -5
Whether or not Viers was through 'messing around' with Dragos was irrelevant beyond his immediate change in tactics. If he'd failed to regard the matter seriously, it was his own fault, and wouldn't insult the Son in the least if voiced. The pride felt at being respected by his opponent was a frivolous notion that he’d disregarded alongside several others, including those that had earned the ire of his closest compatriots. How was this relevant? Dragos was focused on the matter at hand, and despite his opponents greater experience in both linear time and Arcanum usage, he wouldn’t be sidetracked by matters equal to the importance of the number of hairs on a fly’s back.
Carefully monitoring his opponent even as he slowed his own descent, his observations continued to formulate at a rapid pace, equal nearly in time to the sequence of events as they played out. There was no great disappointment that the wash of flame and heat had apparently failed to inflict any serious damage; the tactic had been primarily oriented to adjusting his momentum and preventing the immediate physical contact with an opponent that had made a very physical augmentation. This, along with the Son’s complete inability to track or read Viers on an energetic scale, was further supported by the man’s equal immunity to impact, and the speed with which he recovered and rebounded to a distance he found more comfortable. Dragos could only speculate, as he had theorized before, that his opponent had shifted his Arcanum to the more physical side of the spectrum, and while subjective opinions on the matter were worthless, it did make things problematic.
It was unknown how much of his opponent’s composition was now physically-based Arcanum; given that he’d had some energetic signature whilst throwing around explosive manipulations, Dragos estimated that he likely wasn’t entirely comprised of Arcanum, but the degree was significant enough to at least shrug off the damage or lack thereof of intense heat. He now faced an issue that he had before, and still had no real answer to: how to significantly damage a primarily Arcanum-based opponent was still an unknown to him. Though he felt some pang of frustration on the matter, he realized that the better strategy now would be restraining his opponent over incapacitating him. That in itself was also a difficulty; his most recent incursion with an Arcanum-based opponent had left him wary of any physical contact with one which, upon that very realization, gave Dragos some pause. While he could not immediately presume that his opponent was now incapable of ranged energetic attacks, he thought it a higher chance than not to be true. If that were the case, then putting himself at range with an opponent like Dragos, whom had exhibited an almost purely ranged offensive, seemed incredibly disadvantageous. Either the speculation of losing range was inaccurate, or...those eyes.
The pace of Dragos’s thoughts was so rapid that narrowing his eyes would have suffered a three-topic delay, but it happened anyway. He’d noticed the shift before, and even speculated at a similarity to his own ocular enhancement, or the Mage’s, but he hadn’t speculated further as to what that might mean. If, and it was a big if, the man was aware of the Sphere of fused active and static Magi that now surrounded Dragos, he’d most likely be wary of it. Beyond that, the only difference had been the efficiency of Dragos’s tactics, and his responses. He’d absorbed the man’s kinetic blasts and retooled the energy, and done so with a greater response time than his previous assaults; was that enough to theorize at the fused state of Magi? The point was dropped beyond that in the mind of the Son; all that mattered was that his opponent might be aware of the Sphere, and would be wary to allow being engulfed in it. Any more assumptions and the Son left himself open to a ranged attack that he would otherwise didn’t believe to be possible.
That, of course, and there was the issue of time. Even with his rapid pace of thought, he had a limited time window in which to make observations and speculations; he didn’t exactly need to look up as to see why. By the time Viers was lowering into a three-point stance Dragos was, if the Arc cared to look, also lowering; his back arched as his legs coiled beneath him and either hand anchored into the snow before him. To say that Viers was any lower on his list of priorities was false; he was still more concerned with that directive than any other, but the falling ice and snow that now shot over the cliff above them with a great roar was something that had to be accounted for. Beyond physically keeping sight of his opponent and being aware of his remaining time, Dragos’s every thought now poured into the fused Magi around him, and it responded to his command like his own body. The beginnings of a vortex formed before him, and in the matter of only a second, went from spinning molecules to a shimmer in the air as it twisted with such severity that it kicked up the snow before his lowered form. The flakes of snow, however, showed what was happening better than any other tool. The vortex moved to encase Dragos in an oblong shape, spinning the air before him with enough potency to seriously maim and mangle a stray limb that might wander there, before flowing backwards in its circularly rotating path to a point behind Dragos. Even as snow, ice, and bits of rock now rushed down at him, the flurry of wind and snow around Dragos became its own tempest, and it was only when those falling bits of danger had -just- begun to enshroud him in their destructive mist that the next sequence kicked into effect.
Dragos kicked off with all the efficiency of a professional athlete with Arcanum-enhanced muscles that he could only will his free-floating Arcanum to further amplify, resulting in a blur of motion that the normal human eye might have found difficult to track in its sudden contrast of stationary to forward movement. To that end, he didn’t even spare a thought to instead purposing the Arcanum within him to protecting his innards from the sudden jolt of acceleration, but instead relied on dense muscle and the positioning of his bone structure to prevent, say, the snapping of his own neck; he could heal any internal damage later. The result, however, was not a mad dash forward that necessitated laughably long strides; even his muscles would never be able to keep up with a pace that would have catastrophic results in contacting the ground. Instead, that vortex came to life, encasing him in a bullet of rapidly spinning air made dense purely by the speed of its rotation, sucking away the resistance of headwind and funneling it backward to--as the second stage of the manipulation enacted--be drawn in at the rear once more to be funneled into the vortex again, creating a layering, recycling effect. That said, the increase of momentum was compounded by every instant of time that passed, so much so that to say that Dragos was mimicking being blasted from a cannon was horribly understating the result.
Though it took only seconds to put into effect--given that the primary function was most effective after Dragos had launched himself forward--the Son had no doubt that Viers could see it coming. The only thing that Dragos could do, and arguably the only thing he needed to do, was angle his launch correctly, because the further minute control of such a manipulation was practically impossible in the span of time it would take for the now air-bullet-encased Dragos to reach his opponent. Even with the Arc’s enhanced body, he’d be significantly more than hard pressed to respond in time. When Dragos hit him....well. The truth is, he didn’t hit him. Amid observing the nature of his manipulation and being momentarily shrouded by the first bits of falling snow, it might be difficult to determine the exact orientation of Dragos’s launch, but the truth was that the Son was angled to actually pass by his opponent, with at least seven feet worth of breathing room. If--and it was another big if--Viers had the time to wonder at Dragos’s aim, it would be further to his detriment: What followed was far more pressing.
Though the air that was effectively a jet engine that both minimized air resistance and provided propulsion for Dragos was powered by drawing in its own exhaust, doing so created an elongating effect as the air struggled hopelessly to keep up with the intentionally flawed design. A vacuum formed at its lattermost portion, and behind that, the air rushing forth to keep up generated a tailwind that was rivaled in its potency only by the rotation of the air around Dragos and his effective speed. The near instant that Dragos passed by Viers, given that he was within a range of approximately fifteen feet, his opponent would be drawn into that vacuum with such ferocity that he was at a severe risk of injuring his muscle and bone structure, depending on the nature of his Arcanum-enhanced body, and if he weren’t, he would be as his limbs were wildly thrashed about, likely also bombarded by chunks of rapidly moving ice and snow from either Dragos’s launch or the path he had traveled to that point.
Dragos, and hopefully his towed passenger, would only accelerated from that point onward, gaining lift in a slight angle that quickly lifted them from the ground given the amount of distance they traversed in even a short time. In seconds the air whitened and exploded outward with a sonic boom as they broke the sound barrier, putting the danger of the avalanche and the its resulting run off behind them. Now, amid the storm of swirling air should all have gone as such, brightly glowing eyes of gold searched for a place to land, and estimated on how to do so without causing yet another avalanche.
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Post by Rosencrance Viers on Jan 26, 2015 13:14:10 GMT -5
Rosencrance Viers had played his cards just well enough in the past few seconds of the battle that he had been set up with a strong hand. As Dragos wondered whether the Arc could make out the specifics of his fused Magi state, Viers was busy trying to decipher the exact mechanics of the clear spatial distortion he could see due to his Arcanum-based sight augmentation. The force itself was some kind of base-level, pre-energy state, non-matter phenomenon that Dragos was tapping into and manipulating, that much Viers could tell. However, though the Arc was not by any means an unintelligent man, his ability to understand magic and the cosmic forces that gave birth to it was rudimentary enough that his comprehension of the dragon-man’s powers stopped dead at that initial estimation. He really had no idea as to the specific mechanics of how the man was able to accomplish what he was doing, nor was Viers likely to discover anything more helpful than what he already knew without outside assistance. Viers did know that stepping within the boundaries of that spatial distortion would be bad, bad news, however, and so just as Dragos guessed, the Arc resolved himself to stay well clear of the sphere in order to facilitate higher odds of survival.
That decision created a unique issue, however: given that energy-based attacks could apparently be easily redirected or dealt with due to Dragos’ abilities, and considering that getting close would be potentially hazardous, it left Viers with only one real concrete option: running away. It was a tried-and-true strategy that even Achréiøs was known to use from time to time, so the Arc held no personal honor issue that would keep him from turning tail and getting the fuck out of there, but accomplishing that was going to be tricky at best, especially considering the giant avalanche that was rushing toward them like a huge, white-and-grey freight train. Plus, Dragos was already gearing up again, so its not like Viers could take his fucking time to formulate a strategy.
Briefly, the Arc thought back to a major problem he hadn’t considered until that second: he had dropped the artifact he had been carrying at the cliff-top when Dragos had struck him the first time, meaning that his blade, useless as it was at the moment, was currently being buried under a mountain of rock and snow. For the moment, it was too late to do a damn thing about it, but Viers cursed inwardly: it was a huge setback to lose the artifact. He would have to find some way to get it back, but now he couldn’t worry about it, especially as the vortex of air began swirling around Dragos’ body.
The Arc did have one more ace up his sleeve, however, given the shift he had made prior to landing. The extra-dark mocha of Viers skin was, on his upper body at least, primarily bare to the elements, considering that he had lost his coat and most of his shirt to Dragos’ earlier flamethrower attack. Because of the broad wave spectrum of his vision, Viers could see exactly what it was that Dragos was creating even as it had just begun, and while the man didn’t know fuck-all about magic mechanics, the Arc did have avery solid understanding of physics, and could therefore see that the air would not only exponentially increase Dragos’ speed, but create a backwash vacuum that would work in a fairly decent-sized area. The Arc only had a few seconds to act, therefore it was a good thing all of his Arcanum-enhanced thought had been moving far beyond anything his normal mind would have been capable of. With his judgment made, as the particles around Dragos began whipping themselves into a froth, Viers took advantage of his lack of upper body clothing barriers and unceremoniously slammed both of his clawed hands, extended like spades, directly at and into the center of his chest, the clawed ends of his fingers ripping into the flesh of his body (a fact allowed by specific Arcanum manipulation at that point) just below his manubrium, peeling back the flesh as if he were about to autopsy himself in a motion that was almost too fast to track.
The result, naturally, was a great-ole spray of blood leaping from the center of his chest, but instead of spraying across the white snow like a geyser, as it might have done normally, the blood instead congealed and floated in midair, immediately forming into a sphere roughly the size of an average softball, though the size was somewhat misleading considering that the amount of Arcanum present was small enough that the sphere was hollow at its center. By this point, Dragos was less than a second from takeoff, and Viers had little time to enact his last-ditch plan to begin his escape, therefore he didn’t even bother messing with hand motions of dramatic gesturing to control the floating sphere of Arcanum; instead, the Arc pulled his fingers far enough out of his chest that the flesh could almost immediately scab over, and then, oddly, he jumped straight up in the air, a small hop that would only raise his body approximately four-to-five feet into the air. As he did, however, Viers made a point to tuck his knees into his chest, essentially rolling his body into an aerial ball, a sphere completed as he tucked his chin to his wounded chest and drew his shoulders forward.
As Viers jumped, however, the ball of floating Arcanum stayed put for a split second: Dragos launched in his flight, and as he did, the orb did so as well flying forward, in Dragos’ general direction, for about ten feet, moving at a top speed well under that of a speeding bullet. This combination of movements created an interesting physics problem, however. Dragos, off-center though he was by his seven-foot margin, was hurtling towards the general vicinity of Viers at an extreme pace, so fast that he would cross Viers at the side before the Arc’s upward jump momentum even reversed. However, even as slow as it was moving in relation to Dragos, the orb would be crossing Dragos’ path (not head on, due to his skewed angle, which Viers couldn’t account for) just shy of seven feet in front of the intersection point with Viers, who, even with his head down in midair, was watching all this take place through his arms via his enhanced energetic-tuned vision.
However, Dragos wouldn’t make it to an even, passing intersection point with the orb before its purpose would become clear. With Dragos diagonally related to the orb on its right side (at this point you could nearly draw a straight line from Viers, through the orb, to Dragos), the mass of Arcanum detonated, and detonated intensely. In comparative terms, the detonation force of the blood bomb Viers had thrown was an increase over the earlier liquid-oxygen explosion by more than a factor of 10 due to the immense amount of energy contained within even such a small amount of Arcanum. The result would be a shockwave and incinerating wash of heat far, far more potent than anything released from the pair in their battle thus far, with a destructive capacity to essentially vaporize everything physically present within a radius of approximately 25 feet. With Dragos and Viers both within seven to ten feet of the blast point respectively, this created a problem for both men, and each of their survival was partially up to the resolution of the dire physics problem Viers had created.
Considering the air buffering and the force of Dragos velocity, he would have a chance to be somewhat protected from the explosions force, which would be hitting him from his right hand side at a diagonal angle. The air would likely do little to block the vaporizing energy of the heat released from the explosion, but in kinetic energy terms, the most likely outcome of the diagonal blast against Dragos immense forward momentum would be to drastically alter the angle of his trajectory (while simultaneously decreasing his overall speed), meaning that he would likely go flying well off-target toward his left at a steep angle, most probably in a very bone-crushingly-jarring and completely-unguided manner. Throwing him that far off course would place him farther from the oncoming avalanche, but he would not likely land in any condition to get up and continue dodging the huge snow-wave – even with kinetic impact redirection, there was a clear possibility that the vaporizing force of the blast would be able to get rid of the right side of Dragos’ body entirely, assuming he couldn’t mitigate it in any way.
Viers, however, was in the same damn boat from the opposite direction, except without the directional force of movement to help him out. All balled up in midair as he was, the diagonal force of the explosion would hit Viers dead-center and send him rocketing diagonally to Dragos’ right for a very long distance, flying through the air like a human-sized cannonball. Viers wouldn’t land for hundreds of feet, and as he came down his body crashed through and splintered at least two trees, sending wood chips and branches flying into the air before his fetal-position form would be anchored hard in the snowy ground, the entire outer surface of his front side etched in jet-black carbon scoring. Once he hit ground, Viers didn’t move – he waited the three-four seconds it took for the avalanche to reach his position, and was summarily buried beneath one and a half stories worth of snow and rubble. Considering that the man still gave off literally no energy signature by which he could be tracked, the chances of Dragos being able to locate the Arc after her was snowed in were extremely small – he’d have just as easy a time locating the artifact that Viers had dropped on the cliffs above.
Despite being extraordinarily banged up and buried under 25-plus feet of snow, Viers was far from dead: the outer covering of Arcanum laced into his skin had immediately absorbed and converted more than half the heat and impact energy of the blast, and his Arcanum-enhanced physical structure was able to weather the remainder of the damage with some serious injury, such as exposed bone and muscle where his outer layer of protection had been burned off, such as on the crown of his skull and the tips of his elbows, but Viers hadn’t suffered anything that, in his Arcanum-built state, would be considered life-threatening. As he lay in his snow cocoon, Viers would allow the Arcanum to regrow flesh over the small patch of exposed skull and some of his exposed arm-bones, putting himself back together quickly and quietly in preparation for his next move. Viers knew he didn’t have long to wait, but he would take a minute or two to patch the few serious injuries he had sustained before moving on. With any luck, it would take Dragos some time to figure himself out, giving the Arc more than enough opportunity to escape the fucked-up situation he had gotten himself into . . . through absolutely no fault of his own.
Really, how did he keep getting into these situations?
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Post by Dragos Syrkhan on Feb 26, 2015 16:21:27 GMT -5
Dragos cursed inwardly, but amid the rippling air and flurry of snow created by the gearing up of his air-bullet encasing him, he grimaced as well. While the beginnings of his opponent's newest movements weren't wholly indicative of what the final result would be, that he was acting created the potential seizing of a somewhat vulnerable point for the Son. Both of the men had to account for each other and the avalanche that descended them like a roaring beast, but in the final tally of the moment, Dragos's manipulation would prove to be the slower, no matter how dynamic the effect. With both the need to escape his current location and the time and energy already invested in his current manipulation, he watched without blanching as Viers ripped open his own chest and...there it was.
Dragos knew little to nothing about the man before their engagement, but as he guessed Viers to be much older than himself, the Son held the disadvantage in terms of experience. Pair this with the higher level of control over his Arcanum, to which Dragos was nearly a cripple by comparison, and the versatility between the two fighters was on a much more even playing field than one might first presume, Magi or not. Dragos had a second at best to only guess what that quickly-forming orb might do, and less time to react. The matter of a ranged attack was now answered, but to what end? What could, or would, this orb do? It was a scenario that Dragos would spend some time cursing himself over later, if there was indeed such a later. What followed was a gambit aided by one thing alone, and was a very loosely educated guess at that.
As Dragos left the ground, encased by the air-bullet and accelerating quickly enough to feel the sudden, jarring effect of his increase in momentum, golden-hued eyes watched his opponent jump and...form a ball. The following guess didn't even form in sentences and before Viers had finished, Dragos was in the beginnings of doing the same. His opponent assumed the mid-air fetal position for protection in what appeared to be direct relation to the floating orb literally ripped from his own chest, and Dragos gambled that if it did only one thing, it would explode. It was, then, a further detriment that his own Magi was already so highly tooled to its current manipulation; the best he could do to focus on dealing with the orb was to sever his connection to the Magi creating the air manipulation, and draw upon his most direct pool of active Magi to put up some--any--defense. What followed was close enough to Dragos's lucky prediction, but far from fortunate.
With all of his conscious thought, and every ounce of his will, he unleashed a wash of active Magi in as close to its purest state as it could possibly be with any degree of functionality, and directly from his core at that. It projected out, escaping the confines of his body by only inches before detonation occurred, creating yet another collision of forces in an already catastrophic event. The concussive force of the blast alone might have been enough to kill Dragos, but his indirect trajectory was one of two factors preventing such an event, instead meeting the blast wave sidelong rather than head-on. The second was the nature of his air manipulation and, due to its recycling effect, the transition period between releasing its control and the time it needed to wind down; the indirect application of force was met with condensed, rapidly spinning air, and the kinetic energy was enough to both jarringly alter Dragos's trajectory even more drastically away, but reduce the harm done to him by concussive force to be relatively minor.
This was not the case with the heat of the blast. The heat itself would not be buffeted by the rapidly spinning air, and it was thanks only to Dragos's rapid thinking in severing his connection to the old manipulation and projecting a new one that saved his life in this instance. While in the Sphere, he had retooled his opponents blasts to work for him rather than against, yet he didn't have that sort of time now. The process to him was learned, but just as much an instinctual expression of bonding to the Magi, so that it might have been difficult for him to explain beyond that the Magi's initial interaction with the subject of choice was to break down and decompose the manipulation or energy into its basest form, which was raw Magi. To then use that Magi to their own end was ideal for a Magi user, for the prolonging of their ability to fight on the metaphysical level. Again, Dragos didn't have that much time. Instead, all he could do was project the Magi from his body to meet the heat and, by its own natural function and without any complicated manipulation, break down the energy. It should be no surprise, however, that it was too little, too late to save him from any extensive amount of damage.
The explosion shook air and stone around them, and both fighters were rocketed away by its concussive force, easily at a distance more than problematic for any immediate continuation of hostilities, pending avalanche notwithstanding. Given the complexity of the manipulation he'd formed upon his initial takeoff, the air-bullet encasement was slow to dissolve entirely, and it created a small lengthening to the amount of distance he traveled by at least another fifty feet. In its final, dying seconds, he hit the ground like a stray cannon ball, the compressed air between him and the snow and ice like brick at his speed, protecting him from the worst of impacts, though not without a distinct pop from somewhere within his body reaching his ears. Doing his best to maintain a balled position, the his body bounced a small number of times before finally skidding to a stop, digging a trench in the snow where he landed. For a moment he didn't move, his body heavy and limp from both the explosion and more recent impact.
When he rose, it was sudden. Face down in the snow, he was fortunate enough that its packing was solid enough for him to press down against to lift his torso, pausing when he noticed he could only do so with his right arm and hand; closer inspection by means of a glance informed him that his left shoulder had been dislocated, most likely in his initial impact. The dull throb of what could be distant pain told him that his clavicle was most likely broken as well. The cuts and abrasions littering his form were minor compared to what they could have been, and he realized that his Arcanum had acted out of reflex once more, hardening to a lesser efficiency that it would by properly-devoted command, but still at least saving his skin--quite literally--from being sheered off by snow and ice. The same could not be said for internal damage, given that when he made to stand, another dull throb announced what was possibly a pair of broken ribs. It seemed the pain hadn't caught up to him yet, but it would. More concerning was the smell of burnt meat and ash; glancing down at the hand he'd used to support himself, he saw skin that was more black than not, cracking open in a multitude of locations from the moisture within his flesh evaporating and, where it was thinnest, exposed bone. He blinked. Half of his right pant-leg was practically ash, and portions of the metal plating of his armor still glowed a dull red from the heat; all but the leather they protected between him and his flesh was simply missing on his right arm. He forced himself not to spare a thought of the rest of the damage upon his body, completely unaware of the large patches of exposed, burn muscle upon the right side of his back, his upper arm, and the blackened right side of his face, including the large, visible section of his skull on its right side. It wasn't the pain that made him grimace and hiss with a sharp intake of air between his teeth, then. He was focused on something else.
He'd lost his target, and he knew it. If Dragos was correct in presuming that Viers was capable of shifting his Arcanum between energetic and physical states, then in the current condition leaning toward the physical end of the spectrum, Dragos was entirely incapable of tracking him beyond the corporeal senses. The amount of distance that either opponent had been flung was problematic enough, not to mention the reorientation that was necessary to determine his position relative to where he had been, but that, to his best guess, Viers had landed somewhere in a forested patch of the mountain, obscuring him from view. Whereas Viers would have to transition his Arcanum to an energetic state to escape the location unless he planned to hike it out of here, it still wouldn't give the Son enough time to locate him before he was gone. This was it; Dragos had failed, and he knew that now. His right fist clenched so tightly that the dried, burnt flesh cracked open almost to the bone in several locations around his knuckles, and shook with the intensity of the anger finally rising without a check to counter it. He lost, and now he had nothing to focus that rage upon. The roar rising in volume as the seconds passed by ever so slowly corrected him in that, and golden eyes looked up and to his right side to look upon the oncoming avalanche.
His brow furrowed and his partially burnt lip curled in disgust. Even has he began to wallow in his defeat and its despair, his mind picked the scab concerning matters from earlier, like being caught off guard by Fureya, and the pain that followed, inflicted by the Mage, when he'd been forced to surrender his pride if only to live. Even as the throb of distant pain came nearer and nearer, filling his body with an acidic burn of torment dominating the right side of his body, it was only drawn into that that anger growing within the core of his chest as he glared upon the oncoming wave of snow and ice, shoulders rising and falling with deeper breaths as hot steam rolled into the air. That the active Magi within him began to rise wasn't something he was entirely sure he did by active intent or reflex, but it welled within him the same as his anger, with every bit as much intensity, moving to focus itself in his right, and burnt, arm. As the thundering rock, snow, and ice closed to a hundred feet, eighty, sixty, Dragos drew in a deep breath and lifted his arm high, strong jaw parting to let loose a roar of fury and pain loud enough to shake the air around him before he slammed that fist into the snow beneath him, perhaps surprisingly making it visibly quake beneath the impact. Beneath the layer of snow and ice, the frozen soil and rock were touched by the Magi he pressed forth from his own core, and responded in kind. Glaring at the avalanche with all of the hatred that he reserved for Achreios and all his ilk at this moment, clinched digits loosened slightly to form claws, and pulled up and pressed forward, as if physically pulling the strings of Magi that he'd injected into the ground in a hot torrent. By response, the ground stretching out for thirty feet in a line before him suddenly shook and ruptured, parting as if a maw threatened to devour the oncoming snow. Instead, a lance of solid stone pierced up and forward, every bit as sharp as its manmade likeness, though easily dozens the times its size. Rising high into the air and surging forth toward the avalanche, its form radiated red with a heat approaching molten so that when the encroaching snow did finally reach hit, a great hiss sounded as if the avalanche were a beast that had harpooned itself upon the lance. Ice turned to liquid and then to gas as steam expanded outward, only to be cooled again by the snow behind it, reverting back to liquid and then ice once more. It's path, however, followed the edge of either side of the obstruction, forming walls of ice to either side that further widened the zone protected from the destruction, literally cutting a path in its advance.
With the greater manipulation finished, Dragos panted, falling to his knees once more as snow and ice roared past him on either side. Using a larger single concentration of Magi than he had in his fight with Viers, not to mention the violence it inflicted upon the avalanche, was just enough to burn away the breaching points of his anger, but not nearly enough to cool him. It still rolled through him like heat, but now also not so potently as to completely override the pain that his body was now beginning to process. By reflex or not, even the Arcanum could not completely interfere with the chemical communicators that let him know just how much damage had been done to his body. Grimacing and audibly growling in his growing pain, his right hand dug into and clenched the snow beneath him for focus as he tried to command the Arcanum with only one word. Heal. He had to heal, or the pain itself would send him into shock. Not that staying conscious would do him much good; he'd already lost his target, and proven as pointless in his coming along as Fureya. His jaw clenched, and he split his focus only between the Arcanum and his anger, the latter finding good purchase on that last note.
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Post by Es Kauvrian on Mar 8, 2015 11:55:49 GMT -5
Es Kauvrian had expected her first step into the Jiv'Undus mountains to be onto hard-packed snow - the kind that had sat underneath the sun, melting slightly each day and re-freezing each night, creating a solid, slippery surface that, perhaps, would be covered by an inch or more of white powder to provide traction. Instead, the Arc's arrival, announced by a flash of green energy that would bounce for miles off the reflective surface of the snow, saw her deposited in a bank of powder that was chest-deep: Es immediately knew something was wrong - not only was she certain she hadn't miscalculated her jump, but while she could still sense Dragos and Viers nearby, neither men were on the cliff. The Arc made haste to pack the snow in front of her down with her arms, creating a surface with enough leverage that she could pull herself out of the drift; however, the snow was having none of it. The Arc's body was too dense and heavy for the powder to support, and therefore the snow continued to collapse and crumble beneath the pressure of her limbs, meaning that Es was carving out the beginnings of a trench rather than creating a platform. Eventually, the Arc's frustrated arm motions would have dug a path to the cliff's edge, but Es didn't get that far - after only a few seconds of work, the woman was briefly able to pull herself upward enough to see down over the nearby edge into the valley below, where she caught sight of the wave of snow responsible for her current situation rapidly fleeing into the distance.
It was an avalanche.
Kauvrian cursed. It didn't take long for Es to put together what had happened in her absence: Avalanche meant explosion - explosion meant Viers had immediately become less than cooperative without the older Arc to hold his leash. Es could sense both of the men's Arcanum - both were still nearby, in the valley below, but they were separated, and she could feel Viers' life force much more acutely than she had been able to earlier. Es let her own Arcanum press outward from her core, surrounding her body in a green light as energy collected beneath her feet. The female Arc knew that Viers would be aware of her arrival - it was a windfall that he had not managed to escape already: Kauvrian didn't intend to give him any more chances.
The energy Es collected under her boots pressed down on the earth, lifting her body out of the snow drift in a smooth, controlled motion. Momentarily, the woman floated like she had conquered gravity entirely, her arms rising from her sides as if she had been allowing herself to float toward the surface of a deep pool of water. Floating there, the female Arc used her improved view of the valley below to quickly pick out where Viers must have been buried beneath the snow – off to the side, Es could see Dragos in the aftermath of battling the avalanche, even from such a great distance, and she knew that the Dragon wouldn’t be able to pinpoint Viers without the smaller man showing himself; which, undoubtedly, had been the male Arc’s point. Viers was hiding, and therefore preparing his escape: Es’ eyes narrowed as she picked out the exact point where the man had buried himself, collecting more energy in the space directly in front of her chest as she did so.
What the Arc was doing, fighting the force of gravity with raw energy, was extremely inefficient: Es was aware of the mechanics of how the world’s forces worked whether or not she cold put a name to any of them, and so in order to make up for her wastefulness in gaining altitude, she would have to be extra-efficient with her forward momentum. The energy collected in front of Es body was an outward extension of her own energy energetic self, and therefore remained attachd in a very direct way to her physical body, meaning that when the small, emerald-like orb of shimmering energy began to rapidly accelerate, it pulled Es along behind it by the center mass of her body as if the two were connected by a steel cable. Though the extension began its propulsion solely through use of Es’ own energy, as it began to accelerate, the energetic function moved quickly toward being self-sustaining by using the generated kinetic energy of the wind passage to reinforce its own speed, accelerate the female Arc’s body from a standstill to a blur in the matter of a scant few seconds.
Es’ body disappeared into a green flash that streaked across the sky directly at Viers, and with a booming roar of impact would strike the male Arc’s exact position, the force of the impact sending the snow that had buried the man flying in all directions away from his body position. The impact was a false one in one respect, however: the energetic ‘lead’ had been the tip of Es’ striking arrow, and its force was dispelled into the ground around Viers (and the Arc himself), while Es herself used a bit more energy to buffer her own body and slow herself to a stop, allowing her green-shrouded form to drop from the sky, boots first, directly on the center of a still-healing Viers’ back, crushing his body down to the earth beneath the small woman’s substantial weight, assuming he had not been able to escape her approach before she could do so.
Es made sure to add some downward energetic force to quickly double, then triple her body mass, crushing Viers down into the earth while she planned her next move. The Arc’s expression was unreadable, but Viers would be unlikely, given his assumed position, to even be able to see it. When she spoke, Es’ voice was calm and controlled, but the male Arc undoubtedly knew her well enough to tell that she was highly frustrated.
”You’ve lived as long as you have, Viers, by being smart – why would you risk everything by being so stupid now?”
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