Daemon wandered into the arena through the gap in the ten meter walls best referred to as the "entrance" to the round arena. It being the entrance and all. The tail of the large Technocrat's trench flitted about in the unexplainable wind as he made his way towards the ring. All three of the tones of his attire clashed drastically with with the whole arena save the only part that would matter, the ring itself. In that marble circle the black, gray, and white of Lt. Reakaris' uniform would be right at home. Sadly. the same couldn't be said of the good Lieutenant. He'd trained extensively since he'd came to the multiverse, but he'd had very little in the way of experience in the field. Hell. Taking on a zergling with a yield sign was probably the high point of his career.

Daemon was beginning to strongly question why the hell he had thought this was a good idea, why he didn't get the hell out of here before he actually had to fight someone, and (most importantly) why in the name of god didn't he have more to drink when he had the chance. Sure. A lot of the fighter's in the lobby had looked a bit less than what the Lieutenant would call "formidable", but with his luck he was bound to end up fighting a top seed or something in the first round. He just hoped they wouldn't reassign his gear after he was dead. Half of it did have chunks of Daemon's soul in it after all. Could he even rest peacefully if somebody was still toting a part of him off to war?

The lieutenant sighed in a manner most frustrated as he reached the ring. He just stared across the expanse of white marble for a good couple of minutes. Taking in each detail of the white marble before him. Daemon felt the emotions of the crowd on all sides, his awareness expanding outward of it's own accord during his introspection. They were a myriad lot, this arena full of tourney goers. A lot were at least humanoid,but a sizable chunk of the personage was quite xenomorphic. Yet there was one thing the rang true throughout the whole crowd. Excitement. Thousands of people just happy to see the ring Daemon found so foreboding. "What hell am I so worried about anyways?" the large man pondered aloud as stepped up onto the ring, his stature making it's height of little concern.

He felt his confidence steadily build with the elation of the crowd as he walked towards the center of the ring. Daemon's awareness dwindled back to himself as he neared the center of the ring, the roar of the crowd rushing over him in waves. The hacker looked about the screaming crowd and felt an inexplicable grin begin to creep across his face. Then suddenly, he knew. He knew that this was why he had entered the tournament. This simple feeling of joy from giving so many people something to be happy about. Daemon had to laugh at the shear stupidity of it all as he ran his right hand over his auburn buzz cut. Yet as stupid as it was he couldn't deny any of its truth. Content in his realization the Technocrat turned his grinning face towards the entrance and waited for his opponent.

”Oh damnit,” Ichi-gou mentally grumbled, still having not stepped into the arena, preferring to hang back in the darkened passageway leading to the open floor, lean against a wall, and mentally kick himself a few times. ”An arena. Damnit. Damnit damnit, I hate that kind of crap.”

Ichi-gou hadn’t really expected to be suddenly teleported from the tournament reception lobby and dropped off in position to make a dramatic and grand macho-man walk up to the dais. He sure as hell hadn’t expected this tournament to be nothing more than a cartoony budokai with a bunch of spectators jeering away at the contestants. If he had he sure as hell wouldn’t have taken the assignment, cause god-damnit, he was an android that liked a measure of anonymity.

Yeah, you heard right. Ichi-gou didn’t dig it with big crowds and everyone knowing his face. He was a black-ops agent for crying out loud. Not a fucking luchador. He did urban warfare, or orbital warfare, or jungle warfare, or….You know…fucking warfare. Not showcasing. Why was something like this crap being utilized to have the who’s who of the metaverse show their skills when they had to hold themselves back to keep from annihilating a bunch of beer swilling spectators? What kind of sense was there in that? Would it be that much harder for the omnipotent orchestrators of this deal to have some kinda remote viewing over somewhere just a tiny bit more dynamic and blow-upable than this stupid place? Really? Would it? Hell, you could make more money that way by charging people to tune in to their anticipated fights.

Hell, who the fuck was expecting to see him fight? He was, as already said, a black-ops agent. By all rights these people should know his code-name, if even that (and if they found it out in advance of him putting it down on the paperwork somehow, there was gonna be some kneecap busting back at Ouroborus HQ). They shouldn’t know what he looked like. They shouldn’t know what his capabilities are. Every person in those grandstands should be scratching their head wondering who the hell this ‘Talisman’ guy is and why they’re watching him fight instead of one of the local gods. They should be booing, and calling for their money or gemstones or GP or whatever else back.

Ichi had been pissing and moaning and thumping his head on the marble wall at his back in this way for about five minutes, during which time apparently someone who he was supposed to fight had stepping up to the plate (and his head had put a dent in the marble). Really, he did not want to do this.

Buuuuuuut…

”Alright…Alright…I signed up for it. They’ve got my name down on paper somewhere back at HQ and that means I can’t just back out of it now. Shaddam would do something dickish, like dock my pay or station me on a rogue comet to do surveys. And….The General’s here. He and I have fought on the same side before a few times now…But…Really, I just don’t like his ass. And this here is…Well, it’s permission to beat the crap out of him for the sake of moving on and hopefully encountering someone who really does pose a threat to the Technocracy. And he was ticking me off enough with how he was treating that Trish girl that he probably deserves to take a good whuppin’…So…Ugh, fine. Metaverse Gladiators it is.”

So, poker face, and one foot infront of the other. No macho-macho walk and no waving to the fans, cause as said before, the android didn’t care about them and would rather be elsewhere. Just straight and simple, he stepped out of the shadows , looked about as people started whooping and hollering like he was someone they knew and liked, and he sized up his foe as he approached the ring.

Then he stopped, and his poker-face fell away to disbelief. Cause he was looking at the guy he’d just been having drinks with, and as far as he knew didn’t have much grievance with at all.

But ya know what?

Ichi-gou promptly smiled right after that. He broke into a nice and cocky grin, leapt through the air, landed in the ring across from Daemon, and even went so far as to let his eye glow with a real bright and real nasty looking red tint.

Alright, yeah, he didn’t have a grudge against Daemon. The Lieutenant struck him as a good enough guy and they were both on the same team. And yes, it did kinda suck that for him to do his job he was gonna have to wail on one of his comrades.

But ya know what?

Daemon was kinda reputed to be a tough son of a bitch. He was supposed to be a kind of slick and clever ninja-ish type style fighter when it came to dealing with all the various nasties that cropped up around the Multiverse. And to be frank…Hell…Ichi testing himself against Daemon might just be good for a few kicks. It’d be a nice warm-up for whenever he got around to brawling with the General, who he knew good and well wouldn’t be a pussy when it came to trading bullets.

“Hey hey!” Alright, maybe this wasn’t so bad. Granted he didn’t particularly care for the set-up in terms of action or common sense, but Ichi-gou got a kick out of just who he was getting paired up with for the warm-up act.

“Fucked up as this is bub…Just letting you know now that I got a job to do here. You’re a nice guy and all…But since I gotta work through the ladder in this as far as I can, I’m gonna have to knock you down here. No hard feelings,” Ichi’s hand slid down, and undid the latch on the tactical holster strapped to his leg, exposing Sprawlz for use. “Right?”

The grin on Daemon's face faltered as he saw his opponent approach. He hated when he was right about his terrible luck. Honestly. It was like Lady Luck made a hobby out of giving him the finger as often as she could. Of all the people to fight he had to end up in the first round with a renowned, or as renowned as they get anyways, Ouroborus operative. Daemon hadn't recognized him in the bar , but further perusing of the Technocrat databanks in between conversation had found the name "Talisman" attached to several high end operations. And now he had to fight the guy. He should've been pissing himself as this sunk in, but Daemon felt the grin coming back with gusto.

"Y'know Talisman," the Lieutenant started as he locked eyes with his opponent, a chuckle making its way past his lopsided grin. "You've done some pretty hardcore shit in your career and as little sense as it's making to me I'm actually looking forward to this little brawl of ours," Daemon continued as he reached his right hand into his trench coat and fished around for something near the collar. His eyes never left Ichi-gou's as his grin widened when his hand came back into view with its index finger through a metal ring attached to a thick wire. "What do ya say we get this started?" the larger technocrat queried as he gave ring a quick tug from the wrist and elbow; pulling the sizable length of wire from his coat in a single jerk. The commotion around said coat shortly thereafter made the intent of this pull obvious as the piece of cloth covering his left arm fell away and three large pieces of metal flew from underneath the garment at high speed.

The three objects came to a stop a foot above Daemon's head and left no doubt as to what they were as the light glinted happily down each of their barrels, giving a bright shine to the normally dull metal of each of the large caliber pistol. All three of them orbited around the lieutenant at three foot increments, an idle action ingrained into the weapons' very being, and kept their aim on the man in coveralls before him. Daemon raised his freshly revealed left arm after the guns took position, drawing attention to its chromatic silver gauntlet that was starting to glow with a dim white light. The air around the glowing armament seemed to dim relatively to the glove's shine as it began to absorb photons from the air.

Daemon tilted his head to the right, the man's gaze never leaving Ichi-gou's, as his eyes began to visibly change. The pupils steadily faded out of existence as the yellow fleck and spots of his iris began to move in and take their place. The remain aquamarine coloration of the ocular orbs then split into three different swirls of color in each eye which began to circle around the yellow with equal spacing as the Cognitive Blur settled fully into place. "Your move," Daemon said to his fellow technocrat.

So Daemon didn’t have just one gun in his arsenal. That just goes to show Ichi-gou really didn’t know much in the way of two shits worth of what he really should have known about how Daemon operated, and that if he did anything unnecessarily stupid the big Lieutenant would put some big foot to his ass.

But…Gotta admit, that was a cool way to make the revelation. Looked kinda like a puppet-master breaking out their little custom toys to attack with. There should have been some sort of slow and quiet music build-up to it. Something Japanese-like, with either a gong or a long and drawn out (and really deep) C-note when the weapons took up position over the agent’s head and leveled their barrels at Ichi-gou.

“Alright, credit where credit’s due…That was slick.”

Ichi’s eyes panned across the assemblage of firepower aimed his way, just confirming that he didn’t have any advance data on the specifics of what each gun could do, or even if they were of varying models. And he didn’t, so he was operating blind for the moment.

But you didn’t hint at stuff like that. You just couldn’t let it slip what you knew or didn’t know. You lost that way. And when losing involved high-powered weaponry putting holes in your body (with your handy regenerative abilities disabled) you really, really, really didn’t want to be the one losing. That could wreck your whole week.

If there was any low and quiet music playing in anyone’s mind to build up tension, then at the moment it probably got a little bit faster paced right as Ichi spoke up again, narrowed his eyes, and kept right on grinning as he looked Daemon dead in the sunglasses. “But alright, my move ehh?” His chin tucked in, just a tiny bit. “Lemme see if I can keep up the sense of style.”

The blast of plasma Ichi-gou fired from his eyes didn’t come close to hitting his temporary opponent. The pulse of red light darted from his glowing retinas and touched off a thunderclap of an explosion dead center in the middle of the stone arena, burst into a gout of flame, shattered rock and sent pulverized debris into the air thick enough to obscure vision around the whole of the platform, and nicely covered Ichi’s leap into the air, out of the gun’s current firing line.

Maybe Daemon could track him. He was some kinda telekinetic and empathic after all. They were tricky like that. Ichi’s body was immune to most forms of detection and when he wasn’t broadcasting his control fields he didn’t give off any signature for someone to pick-up on…But…Meh, psions were a bitch to fool for long, so he made the leap unpowered and with no flight-assistance.

As he came down from roughly one-hundred feet in the air though, you bet your ass he was watching Daemon damn carefully. He was scanning the signature of those little toys of his, seeing which way they were pointed, and keeping an even damn closer watch on just what kind of psionic emissions Daemon was giving off, just to make sure he had a few extra milliseconds to react to whatever came his way next.

He also had Sprawlz drawn, aimed at Daemon’s center mass, and cued the weapon to belch a slug of iron and lead at several thousand feet-per-second, and hopefully drill a hole clean through the officer’s torso.

Daemon had thought of a few ways that the match would start. An explosion and his opponent launching out of the debris wasn't one of them. He could follow to a degree where Ichi-gou was via the Blur, but he couldn't tell what he was doing with the limiting physics of this metaverse restricting his foresight. Thankfully, it doesn't take a genius or a psychic to know not to stay still when the enemy knew where you were and you didn't know what he was doing. Daemon, being both, knew good and damn well to move his ass before something bad happened. With a leap to the right the Lieutenant made a handful of quick tethers to launch himself onwards from where he should of been and begin to circle-strafe his coveralled foe. While the strands of telekinetic force pulled him along at almost dangerous speeds Daemon heard the distinctive pop and thump and of a gauss weapon firing and connecting with a solid surface. Namely the part of the ring he'd been standing on shortly ago. Apparently the Ouroborus agent wasn't intending to pussyfoot around. Daemon could get behind that.

The larger technocrat raised his gauntleted left hand as a nebula of luminescence appeared across the ring from him and began to contract into a tight ball of light as the chromatic weapon took control of the photons in the air. While the light condensed into the orb Daemon fished a glass tube out of his trench coat and tossed it left and high out of the smoke screen. The sunlight played blindingly white across the glass phial as it cleared the dust. The two hundred deuranium sewing needles behind the glass glinted malevolently as the hacker stitched an intricate string of telekinetic tethers between each needle and his still airborne adversary. The condensing ball of light keeping position across the ring from the Lieutenant finally reached the desired density and shot of a swift beam of searing light up at Ichi-gou through the dust as the phial shattered and released its deluge of needles in a shining shower of pain.

The bottle went one way, easily detectable through the haze of drifting particles in the air, Daemon went the other, and a compact mass (though that’s a ridiculously inappropriate term) of photons began forming itself across the ring.

Ichi-gou, if he was the type to only think maybe one or two seconds into the future, might have been a bit concerned about having made himself into a hanging target above the arena floor.

Fortunately, surprise surprise, Ichi-gou wasn’t a dipshit, and at the very least he expected Daemon to dodge his shot and retaliate. The dude wouldn’t have been worth his paygrade as a lieutenant if he got plugged that easily. So…Step two.

“DON’T THINK SO!”

Ichi’s voice all but barked the exclamation out after watching the teeny-tiny vial hit the ground through the cloud of debris he’d created. And he made the cloud of dust and smoke and broken marble worse when he looked at the spray of needles headed towards his body, and aimed his empty palm at the brightly glowing blob of condensed light, and unleashed pulses of energy at both simultaneously.

The needles were vaporized in a fraction of an instant, and a chunk blown out of the arena floor. The blast was likely enough to leave the ears of the spectators ringing, and Ichi-gou seriously hoped that he didn’t get disqualified early on if someone went and let their eardrums pop (though, hell, they really should have signed a waiver for shit like that. This was a big hoorah with gods and such. You had to expect a lot of loud noises). The pulse of plasma and compacted mass of light intersected in mid-air, and being roughly lower-scale in terms of what Ichi-gou could dish out when he needed to they annihilated eachother among the dust and smoke in a fractal display of charged electrons that got conducted and dispersed through the smoke-cloud on their way to Earth.

Ichi-gou himself landed with a heavy and rock-breakingly abrupt CRUNCH on the arena surface, crouched, holstered Sprawlz once again, drew his baton with his left hand, and settled his right against the floor.

“CLOSE QUARTERS TIME MI AMIGO!” Ichi crowed into the smoke the covered Daemon from physical sight, but not electronic probing. “COVER YOUR NUTS!”

BOOM!

Ichi’s palm to the floor fired a blast at point blank, blew that part of the arena to utter scrap and broken shards, and sent him at a truly prodigious speed headlong towards his fellow agent. The baton was snapped out to full extension in an instant, held back behind his body, and hidden in the smoke as he was and moving at a speed and with a level of force that would likely slam a freight train to a halt, Ichi-gou appeared to fully intend to bring it over his head and crashing onto Daemon’s skull or break whichever limb Daemon cared to thrust in the way of the club.

"Well that idea failed miserably," the Lieutenant thought as the unnecessary display of fire power nullified both of his attacks. He hadn't really expected that attempt to really do much to Ichi-gou, but he had at least been hoping for something. All he'd ended up with was a wasted phial of needles and ringing ears from the two thunderclaps of plasma. Now Daemon had to get another idea under way before his fellow technocrat made his move or he'd be fucked proper. 'Course Ichi-gou wasn't going to make that easy for him as he dropped to the arena with the obvious intent of making this battle a melee affair. He only had time to get an inkling of what was about to happen from his glasses warning him of another plasma build up from his foe before an explosion sounded from the android's impact crater and every instinct and alarm in the larger technocrat's possession went off in a resounding cry about a target approaching at high speed that sounded quite similar to Daemon's own of, "Oh shit!"

Now any normal person would've been a fine paste by the end of that last syllable were they in the Lieutenant's shoes, but thankfully that sudden expletive hadn't been his only reflex action. The gauntlet on his still raised left arm had erupted into a violent light when the last explosion occurred. Three rings of light on the back of his hand were especially blinding as the concealed trifecta of microreactors went into overdrive and the air six inches in front of Daemon seemed to explode into brilliance. The sudden appearance of the ten feet by ten feet wall and the movement of that many photons blew a sizable circle of the of the airborne debris clear from Daemon as Talisman hurtled towards the nigh immovable Photon Wall.

The large hacker realized that the wall definitely would not hold off Ichi-gou for long after the initial impact and worked as fast as he could to be ready. The sleeves of both his double-breasted jacket and the white shirt underneath were violently blown to atoms of their base materials as Daemon focused indiscriminate energies of disconnection down that arm. He'd never quite understood why said energies didn't affect himself, but he preferred not to stress over it. As the Lieutenant clenched his right fist the shear disconnective power began to concentrate and arc across the arm in various shades of black, blue, and purple that caused cause the air around them to hiss and contort as they tore molecules of various adjacent gases back into single atoms. The attack wouldn't be ready immediately, but Daemon would be ready when Ichi-gou got to him.

OOC: 2 posts of preparation prior, and this post added on. I really wanted to try and stretch it to about 5 or so, but don’t want to lose my advantage there.

IC:

”Well,” Ichi-gou mused, trying to break to a halt, and failing. ”If you’re gonna guard your balls with something,” Ichi-gou chose to guard his face with his forearms as best he could. ”Then I guess a wall’s about as thorough a protection as you can get.”

THUNK

The wall of interlaced light that Ichi-gou was barely able to slow-down before whacking into didn’t make much noise (since it had no real mass to vibrate), and didn’t budge more than a micron or two when he flattened against it. But resounding through his skull and extra-tough ear drums the impact was plenty loud and plenty comical sounding to the Synth. He noted, once the neurons in his brain resumed firing and he could form coherent thought once again, he actually ended up plastered to the damn thing like a cartoon character.

The he vaulted off it with a neat and stylish back-flip, before Daemon could do something sneaky and underhand, like have it try to morph around him and crush him. He was a durable as fuck specimen when it came to taking a beating, that’s what a close-in brawling type like his model specialized at. Freight-training his way into a wall he could shrug off even without his nano-machine assistance if you gave him the time to do so, and he wasn’t inclined to let Daemon do more to him, or (as he spied with his high tech eyes through the photon-wall) let the good lieutenant build-up any kind of nastier attacks to mar his face with.

”Alright, that, naw, not happening. Sorry bub, but…Step three. See ya.”

Ichi’s hands stopped over his head a bare foot from one another, the android smiled, and between them leapt a scintillating and brilliantly hot-white bolt of raw electrical power. The stream of ionized energy was easily several thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and in the debris choked air that Ichi’s prior explosions had created all that heat spread to the dust in the air in a microsecond. In that dust smoked air and extending out to just shy of the front row of the audience was spread Ichi’s EDDCS field, ensuring that what he wanted to burn, what he didn’t want to burn, what he wanted to radiate heat, and what he didn’t want to radiate heat would all do not do just that. At the moment of his triggering ignition, Ichi-gou’s only concern was ensuring none of the crowd got singed. He knew he himself would just be peachy-keen and cool as a cucumber in the coming seconds, and that he very much wanted Daemon to not be.

There wasn’t much of a thunderclap or any such, but there was one Hell of a WHOOSH when the airborne particulate he’d busily stirred up caught light and (with Ichi-gou boosting the reactivity of the particles) flared up even faster than coal-dust in a mine exposed to a lantern’s flame.

This meant that following the WHOOSH, the area was promptly flooded with a lower-level of Hell or two’s worth of pure and unadultered fire. It filled the air as pervasively as the light from the sun just had been. It was an unbreathable halo of super-heated gases, burning cinders and whirling tongues of fire, dancing and swirling before the eyes of the spectators who were (for the moment, unless Daemon did something regrettable, like try to cause Ichi harm) safe from its searing effects.

Daemon was not. And Ichi really hoped the bastard just called it quits here before he had to do anything else following this that was actually in the area of being nasty.

((OOC: Two rounds of preparation. The photon intake from the air in my second post and the erection of the photon wall in the previous post.

"Well that was amusing," Daemon thought as Ichi-gou peeled himself off the wall of photons. The Lieutenant was half surprised that had actually worked, but had been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth. The disconnective energy in his right arm had reached the point where it would be a viable option when the android came past the wall after him, but the pyromaniac seemed to have other things in mind. As soon as the coveralled man began his banter and the preliminary warning on his glasses pinged in about yet another energy build up Daemon got his big ass in gear. He quickly lunged forward the short distance he needed to and plunged his left hand into the still standing wall of interlocked light; the chromatic gauntlet parting the "compacted" photons like water as all hell broke loose around him. Seriously. Who opened the gate to the abyss? The Lieutenant had never got around to testing the heat resistance of his "new" body, but the flashes of pain across his body led him to believe it was best not to figure that out now.

Daemon clenched his left hand inside the wall of light and grunted through the pain as he willed the photons into motion. The wall lost most of its consistency and wrapped around the large technocrat in a brilliantly shining cloak of light before taking to the heavens with him like a bottle rocket. He struggled though the pain of his burnt body and brought himself and his swirling mass of photons to a stop fifty feet above the arena and set a scheme that could very well be construed as harebrained into motion. Daemon drew deep on the photons stored in his gauntlet from the very first of the fight. It's best to keep an emergency supply you know. He added even more material to mix by drawing still more stray photons in from the air around arena. The entire place dark as sundown save the Lieutenant's ever swirling cloud of light and the raging inferno beneath him. With his materials at hand the pseudo-chimera set to shaping the raw light before him into the defensive lattice he'd become so familiar with since he started using his gauntlet.

The errant photons spiraled in from every direction and take swiftly expanding form. A vast surface of blinding light stretched out over the ring below and continued outward still until it reached a diameter of forty-eight meters and probably few centimeters of change. Now as far as the 'Crat in the trench knew normal photon walls were stationary defenses, but his photon walls weren't created or maintained in a manner that can even be considered "normal". With the massive disc's positioning it would come down more or less flush when Daemon fired the thing off. Which he was quite ready to do. "Catch ASSHOLE!" the Lieutenant cried with uncharacteristic rage as he launched the massive Photon Wall disc at the fastest speed he dared within an atmosphere with civilians around. But that was still a whopping seventy million meters a second(less than twenty-five percent the speed of light in a vacuum). A deep, bass BOOM sounded through the arena with enough force to shake the arena from the displaced air as the disk rocketed towards the android below and the Burnt man above struggle to catch his breath after the exertion. The disc probably wouldn't do much damage to Ichi-gou, but knocking your foe through the bottom of the arena would most likely be the most creative "ring-out" of the round.

”Aww damnit…” Ichi-gou grumbled in his mind, watching through the corona of fire filling the air between himself and Daemon as the lieutenant evaded most of the cloud’s potential and took to the air. ”Now it’s gonna be harder to take him down without scarring him for life.”

When Daemon halted his assent and collected his condensed photons, Ichi-gou took a cue from his opponent and decided to make himself scarce ASAP. While the fire and smoke sill concealed him from at least physical view (he couldn’t be sure if Daemon was doing something with his natural psionic talents to track him, but it’d be smart to bet at least a few credits that he’d figured out how to manage something of the like) he bolted through the blaze and zipped out over the heads of the audience.

Ichi could have sworn (seriously, fucking sworn) that he felt the very edge of Daemon’s crushing disk clip the soles of his boots on its way down. But fast as Ichi’s mind could perceive and process the world around it he wasn’t anywhere near fast enough to actually notice a delay between the lightning fast contact with his footwear and the stone platform he’d just been standing on being obliterated in its totality with a rending crash and a pulverizing of rock. The shockwave of it was almost enough to upend the android midflight, and he barely managed to break to a halt before careening into a rather portly gentleman holding a tray of nachos near the middle ranks of the elevated seats.

When the dust had cleared just enough for Ichi to be visible to Daemon again it also cleared up just enough for him and everyone else to survey the new situation.

The ridiculous amount of dust, shattered stone, and kicked up dirt did of course not simply ‘vanish’. The field of light had taken only the tiniest fractions of a millisecond to careen through the air and demolish the arena, and that was far too short a time to extinguish the air-borne blaze Ichi-gou had touched off. It more accurately simply shoved it out of the way on the way down by punching a hole through the fire, breaking the restraining field Ichi-gou and scattering the particles (be it white-hot, smoldering, or freshly released by the ring being stamped out of existence) over the crowd. The platform no longer existed, the grass and glassed soil over the rest of the ring’s border had been compacted down several inches, and the entrances both Ichi and Daemon had walked through had suffered their doors being torn completely free of their hinges and hurled down their respective passageways.

Ichi-gou did the decent thing, spread his arms, and blanketed the arrayed audience around the arena in a thermally protective screen that kept them from dying some miserable deaths. He couldn’t do much to keep them from breathing all the crap in the air or getting all teary-eyed when the grit found its way into their eyes, but that’s just the kind of shit they got when they went to see a fight involving someone who liked to set stuff on fire. They wouldn’t die from it. They could thank him for stripping any tiny bits of it they ingested of residual heat before it landed on them.

As for Daemon…

Ichi-gou looked up at the lieutenant high over-head, then waved a hand out over the audience…And the remains of the ring…And the even greater amount of airborne particulate that now choked most of the closed in arena. Then he waggled the finger back and forth, just a teeny-tiny tad, and hopefully just enough to make Daemon’s gut sink enough to ensure the point was really clear.

Then the android smiled held a second finger up, giving the man an almost farewell-styled peace sign (or a V for victory, if you wanted to be presumptuous), and let a spark of electricity flare between the two digits as the field spread invisibly over the audience intensified.

If anyone in the seats, from front-row to the back, wasn’t busy blinking tears out of their peepers or coughing their lungs clear of bits of charred carbon probably would have shit their pants at the firestorm that rolled bare inches over their heads without singing so much as a single of their hairs (unless they did something really jack-assy, like stand up). From Ichi’s position and radiating outward a prodigiously hot carpet of rolling red and black flame spread like a blanket, raged across the entire assemblage of guests, pooled and filled the former arena floor, and then, just a second or two later, did something really nasty.

Heat rises. Didja know that? And when there’s a lot of debris or other burnable material above a super-hot source of warmth, you know what happens? It’ll flash-fire. Then the material above that’ll flash-fire even faster. And then the material above that’ll flash-fire even faster than the first couple layers did, and do it a lot hotter as more and more sparks up, and the temperature above the rest gets higher and higher faster and faster. Fire-fighters really hate that kind of occurrence, cause if they’re on a hill or any sort of elevated position it means they can get overwhelmed in less time than it takes to blink.

Given that Daemon had knocked even more debris into the air than Ichi had managed to, and given that he was right up at the peak of the arena where all that heat was headed and where all that dust was combusting, he probably thought those kind of physics sucked too.

"Well fuck," the Lieutenant said in an exhaustedly exasperated tone as the dust cleared to show the unharmed android above the crowd. Ichi was damn spry. Daemon had to give him that. He'd expected him to be buried under what used to be the ring after that attack. Sure as hell not lazily floating over the audience like nothing had happened. The fact he was pointing out the debris Daemon'd already realized he'd just stirred up really wasn't helping matters. It would take a moron to not know what was about to happen as the agent floating amongst the stands arced the bolt between his fingers. The Lieutenant then had a a bit of an epiphany. One that had been a longtime coming throughout the fight. Fire is FUCKING HOT. That and the fact that Talisman was very fond of the stuff. Thankfully the guy's salary is probably enough to order every damn meal he has Flambe. Sure. That's probably a terrible idea, but it would probably seem logical to a fire bug.

Speaking of fire. There was a lot if. Pretty much everywhere too. Meaning Daemon was very much not enjoying the scenery; not to mention the climate. And while barbecued chimera was probably some weird ass delicacy somewhere he didn't intend to be a menu option as the disconnective energy focused in his right arm flared back to life. The problem with this attack is its terribly short range. With all the crap in the air Daemon knew good and well that it wouldn't get halfway to the flamer before it dispersed. The Lieutenant had a plan for that though. He'd been working on a theory for being able to book it when he needed to and now seemed like a damn good time to move his ass. He thrust his left hand forward. The gauntlet remained dim and lifeless as the large technocrat made a Tether between his left hand the world directly behind Ichi-gou and immediately disconnected himself from everything else. Probably surprising anybody who was paying attention when he disappeared in a blue-white flash.

Daemon had thought this technique through quite a bit, but had never got around to testing it. He was sorely regretting that decision. His ears were filled with an inexplicable roaring in that hilariously improbable void in the middle of everything as he was buffeted around by an impossible force. Not wanting to stay in this phase state any longer than he had to, Daemon raised the pull on the tether as high as he dared and rocketed unseen, and probably undetectable, towards the android above the crowd. Passing straight through him without problem on the way to his destination. Another two-hued flashed announced the Lieutenant's exit from the phase as he spun to deliver a deliver a blow with his dangerously charged fist; twisting his whole body for extra momentum on the lethal- CRUNCH!

Daemon jumped at the unexpected noise and the cry from the Audience member behind him that followed shortly thereafter. His fist stopped a good inch from where Ichi's right kidney should be as the energy dancing over its knuckles fizzled out. the Lieutenant hadn't noticed it happen, but could now tell that his foot was lodged in something warm and gooey and the whimpering of the man behind him didn't bode well. Daemon didn't want to look, but knew he'd have to eventually so with great apprehension he slowly turned to see the damage he'd done. Then had to restrain himself from strangling the little fat guy as he continued whimper and began gibbering something along the lines of, "My poor nachos," as the exasperated technocrat extricated his foot from the decimated snack food and plopped down in the empty spot next to the whiny bastard. Daemon sighed and shook his head at the cheese and chips on his boot before looking up at Ichi-gou and saying with an annoyed grin, "Worst. Ring-out. Ever."