Thundergod1020 vs Lobos vs Shadereen

[Thundergod1020]

Darius groaned as he strolled through what USED to be a center of human activity, jumping over rubble and hopping across chasms in the asphalt. This city had been decimated years ago by some form of weapon, and he had yet to see it's ilk since. Whatever is was, it had left the land here a shadow of what it used to be, with plant life, animal life, nor even the rogue spirits thinking about coming around here. Of course, that was why he had come here. Two beings with malevolent actions against the spirit world were in this god-forsaken land, one harboring a rogue soul named Kyurem or something similar, the host went by the name of Jegun Lobos. Darius couldn't have said more about the pair if he'd tried, considering that was all the info he'd gotten out of anyone... It was like the host made himself invisible to those who saw him, or rather, they were too terrified to think him anything else but harmless for fear of the truth. However, they all seemed to point him directly to this city to find him.

The second target was even more confusing, as Darius didn't even have a name to go off of. All he knew was that the guy's magic was done by sucking spirit energy out of the surrounding area, which seemed harmless enough, but Darius knew what energy leeching did to the spirit world, and didn't want to have to deal with more spirits getting through. However, he'd felt the loss of spirit in the world around him also ending up in this barren wasteland, so the target was obviously near-

What was this?

Darius smiled for the first time in what felt like a century. He sensed someone else's spirit energy a quarter-mile away... And the rogue elemental layered underneath. He could almost taste it's power, like an icicle hanging from a fir in the woods in the deep of winter. This one wouldn't go down without a fight, but, as Darius ducked into one of the few non-destoyed buildings and summoned his tonfa with a flash, he figured he might as well try to get this fight over quickly. After all, knowing his luck, the other one would come in mid fight and try to take out either him or Lobos. Not wasting time, Darius judged the distance between him and Lobos, charged a concussive shot, and fired it from the tip of his tonfa, using the shockwave to rocket jump across the destroyed buildings and upended cars and fly towards the Host. His means of conveyance was... Loud, to say the least, and the sound echoed through the empty streets.

[Lobos]

Despite what some may have thought of the once mercenary, Jegun was just passing through, a bandana wrapped around the lower half of his face against the wind, the traveler's cloak that covered his armor billowing behind him. He'd of course sensed the others in the derelict city with him, Kyriel's keen senses blending with his own in a synchronized fusion that was a greater whole. Under his left shoulder was slung his magnum, a folding sword of adamantine clipped to his belt on his right hip. Across his back, under his cloak, were the twin cutlasses he carried, one handle over his right shoulder, the other jutting past the back of his left hip. The binding straps held them in place, but threaded so with a draw they would slip free as if not there.

For the moment, he was unconcerned about the others. Until the sound of a thundering shot, drawing his head around with the speed of a viper, lambent azure eyes glaring at the figure sailing towards him. Around him, twinkles of faint light began to appear and vanish, the swirling particles of ice that formed as his chill aura began to rise leaving trails of mist in their wake. A smooth move slung free the folding blade and magnum, gun in right hand, the still short blade of the sword in his left.

"So one finally makes a move."
A nuisance at best.

The mental dialogue between man and soulbound elemental progressed even as Jegun reached out, finding locations of water that still remained intact within the hollow ruins around him. These he marked mentally, the training he'd received while in Imprimus creating the map in his mind's eye that his logical thinking mind could nearly see as shifted around, setting his feet to present a slimmer, sideways silhouette to his approaching foe, blade held in an intentionally relaxed arm, magnum held with its barrel skyward, ready to be brought to bear. Quickly his eyes darted across the field, marking more terrain around his position.

Muttering quietly under his breath, he merely resigned to the impending violence. "Let's get this over with, shall we?"

[Thundergod1020]

Darius came in hard and fast, having charged another concussive burst during his airtime to release before impact. As he was about to touch down on the ground, he released the second shot down and toward his landing zone, causing the already cracked asphalt to shatter in a large crater and slow Darius' landing with the force as a result. He then tilted his head, sniffed, and turned to face Lobos. The distinct drop in temperature told him that Lobos was probably a really ice guy, and he groaned internally in disgust. Granted, the cold wasn't exactly his biggest concern right now, but the simple robes Darius wore were never really meant for temperatures below 30 degrees, and this was going to be enough of a headache without the chill.
"Jegun Lobos, I am here on the grounds of your harboring a rogue soul. You can choose to relinquish the spirit known as Kyrie now, or I can exorcise it with force. The choice is yours." As he spoke, he channeled his spirit energy into his core, preparing to cause a spirit burst if necessary. At the same time, his eyes flicked over the terrain, marking down areas that would provide cover, distractions, and ambushes in his mind. His two millennia of combat experience had taught him that the environment was more often than not what gave him his victories, and this place would be no different. He then also prayed that, if the host DID intend to fight back, that the water mains had been burst in the destruction the rest of this land had faced.

[Lobos]

Lobos's only verbal answer was a snort at the mention that Kyriel was in any way a rogue. When Darius flicked his eyes from him is when the man struck, his magnum shifting from ready to aimed and firing with completely inhuman speed. In the span of a blink of an eye, Jegun leveled the gun and fired the first shot, aim unerringly on the other's chest. As the weapon bucked in his hand, he leaned forward and sprang, reaching to the building wall that was there and rebounding into the air, snapping off a second shot down to his foe as he snapped open the admantine blade to its full length.

Ramming it into the surface of the building opposite the one he'd rebounded from, he didn't even paused as he coalesced ice on the other edge of the wall around his blade, running along the side of the ruined shell as he fired the remaining cylinders at Darius with a master marksman's aim, slamming the gun back in its holster when it was spent. Completing his series of maneuvers was the wrenching of sword from wall, and the reshaping of the ice block that had kept it embedded into his most common and effective technique, the Fang.

As the ex-merc leaped backwards off the front, facing Darius, he scythed across the sword, sending the attack flying at what was the man's back when he'd begun. The Fang was more complex than the seething blade of ice it appeared to be, for a twin current ran through it. A mass of ice shards and freezing water, it flowed in spirals throughout the edge, reversing the spiral flow at each peak to run parallel to the other, acting as two chainsaws rending in opposing directions. Extremely difficult to block, given the flexible nature of the Fang, and harder to erect a field against, giving the shredding ability the technique possessed.

Jegun himself turned in the air as he fell, rolling on contact with the ground and springing to his feet, having swapped the sword from left to right hand as he did so.

[shadereen]

For some time now, a human-like creature with multiple flaming tails had been tracking him, blaming him for the appearance of spirits from another realm. For harvesting spiritual energy in the area, he was accused of releasing evil spirits into the world he was currently on. But he did not. What he harvested was only residue of spiritual energy which would harm nothing and no one. For that, he was misunderstood.

He was sick of it. He was sick of the Inari creature from hunting him down and forcing him to flee every time, denying him of peace, but not today. Today, Eredh, a creature born from a fruit, was going for the offense and hunting down the Inari instead.

Eredh had been waiting patiently by the window, inside one of many tall buildings lucky enough to survive the past destruction that had struck the once inhabited city. On that day, he knew the Inari would pass by the boulevard, for the Inari was always tracking Eredh down. He waited and waited, silently and patiently, hidden in the building with a concrete coloured cloak as camouflage.

Late that day, his target arrived.

Unlike Eredh who was keeping his location a secret, he saw and heard the Inari created a shockwave, hurling himself to another person.

another person?

The presence of another man was unexpected by Eredh. He watched as the Inari jetted through the air towards the other man. Eredh thought the Inari would impact to the ground, but instead, he landed softly by shooting what seemed to be spiritual energy forward, using the force of the shot to decrease his speed, as well as creating a large hole in the asphalt. The act impressed Eredh, and it also showed how powerful the Inari’s attack was. Still, Eredh wondered whether the Inari used his own internal energy or the surrounding spiritual energies.

Eredh watched as the Inari said something to the other person, but couldn’t make out any words as they were too far away.

Then, the other man started shooting at the Inari with a gun as well as jumping up to one of the building’s wall and rebounding to another building. They were certainly not friends. Atleast not friends as Eredh and Lineth was.

For the moment, Eredh decided to just wait and watch.

[Thundergod1020]

The fact his eyes had left Lobos had in no way meant he'd left himself flat-footed, and he heard the rustle of movement as soon as it happened. Darius was already gone from his spot by the time the bullet had left the barrel, and standing ten feet to the right of where he had been, frowning.
"So, you're using for-" and was interrupted as a second shot rang out, this one still aimed where he had been. "Yup, definitely a rowdy one." he grumbled, and realigned his spiritual energy, the tonfa glinting and pulsing in his hands as he did so. He then took a deep breath, and let his other senses add to the fight as his opponent went 3-D.

Lobos was giving his position away with his use of ice magic, which made it easy to track him. The bullets were easy enough to stop by seeing where the barrel of the gun was pointed, and he responded to them by punching each bullet with the tip of his tonfa, pushing each shot aside without so much as a chip on his own weapons.

The frozen slash was faster than Darius had expected, but still lacked the speed of a bullet, and only had it's size as a saving grace. Darius responded by simply moving away from his current spot again.

Upon dodging the chilled blast, Darius' ears twitched, and he held up a hand in the universal symbol for stop, and focused on the spirits in the area. He could sense his, the overlapping pair of Lobos and SlushPuppy... and one more he'd never sensed before. His other target, perhaps? Well, it was time to see if this
"We're being watched, and quite frankly, I'm not too keen on either of us winning, then getting ambushed immediately after while still exhausted. Reload, your lifeless gun might be more effective on them rather than me." As he spoke, he charged his concussive shot once more, holding onto its power and increasing it in case Lobos thought he could backshoot him.

[Lobos]

Landing and subsequently rolling to his feet, the distance between the two was well out of range for either to strike directly with arms, and at Darius's words, the soulbound quirked a slight smirk. Leaving the magnum right were it was, he fluidly snapped closed his sword, clipping it in place once more as he reached for different weapons entirely.

Two cutlasses smoothly slid free of their sheathes, baring blades of ice as he swept one into a low guard, the other into angled readiness. Azure eyes gleamed brighter under the hood of his cloak as Kan'ya Kiba and Hyouga Tsume came into play, adding to the chill radiance that surrounded Jegun's body. A flexing of will, and long stagnant water in pipes froze, expanding to crack the corrroded surfaces, then melted, flowing out into the earth, rising up to join the surrounding particles of ice. He smiled.

"Let him watch." Without warning, Jegun flashed into motion. With the speed of a cobra, he snapped across Hyouga, then Kan'ya, then back with Hyuoga, sending three more Fangs flashing across the distance between the pair of them. However, things weren't entirely as they seemed. Hyouga Tsume's Fangs, in the spiral currents, contained an anomalous feedback loop in the middle, while Kan'ya's was a pure Fang technique. Additionally, As Hyouga and Kan'ya trades off swipes, it masked the slight gesture Jegun used the throw down a sheet of ice that would slide under the feet of Darius as the Fangs advanced at rapid speed.

As soon as Jegun had finished launching the multi-axis attack, he himself leaped even farther back from Darius, snapping Kan'ya into low guard and Hyouga into lifted readiness.

[shadereen]

To see both man fighting so well awed Eredh. Their feat were at a higher level than he is and he probably couldn't win over them in a fair fight. For that, he decided to flee the site as stealthily as he could, to train himself, to fight another day.

[Thundergod1020]

Darius wasn't surprised that the Host had decided to continue fighting, and the sense of ice magic forming once more had already been met with a charged concussive blast from the tip of Darius' right tonfa, which connected with the first Fang just as the final one was fired. The resulting blast burst through the first Fang and exploded on the second, with the resulting shockwave clearing out the third and pushing Darius up into the air, where he maneuvered so he would land on the side of a building feet-first. The window he hit was not pleased with this idea, and shattered underneath him, causing him to roll into what apparently had been an office space. He was taken by surprise at this, but flipped again in the air so that his tonfa hit the ground first, then he pushed off from there to flip into the deeper parts of the room, away from the broken shards of glass on the floor. His feet, having been walking unshod on everything since he was but a kit, were thick enough for the glass to not be able to cut deeply enough to matter, but Darius felt it best to make Jegun think it a weakness.

As his eyes flicked through the office space within the time it took to land, his tails providing just enough light to see by, he got an idea, ducking under one of the cubicles still upright and once again focusing his spirit to his core, his tails dimmed to darkness with the energy flowing to his core. He could still sense the magic flowing off of those weapons, and didn't feel like touching them, given his condition. However, it left him the opportunity to try and ambush within an enclosed space, where he had the advantage. The other advantage, of course, was that it left the other opponent blind to what he was about to do.

[Lobos]

The destruction the Fangs was nothing more than a hindrance, setting the mercenary reacting to Darius's sudden entrance to one of the derelict buildings that lined the street. If the other thought he was stupid enough to enter a likely condemned structure behind him, he had another thing coming.

Gesturing with the tip of a blade, he flung the shards of two of the destroyed Fangs into the earth, burrowing them into the foundations of the structure, where he set them about freezing, expanding, then melting, contracting, in the earth around the anchoring ground, weakening its base significantly. As this was occurring, he channeled some of his remaining ice into a new Fang, a new of the initial row of the techniques. Once again the flaw in the current was there, but he built the power resonating in the Fang to a new level.

Knight Backlash Fang.

So the technique was called, as he hurtled the far larger crescent of ice into the lower floor of the building, charging away from the structure. For a moment, all the shifting scythe did was chew into the lower floor, wrecking a few of the primary supports in the process, but not enough to trigger anything more than a shake. That was, until he was no longer in front of the building with the fool most obviously waiting as a trap.

Then he triggered the Backlash. The feedback current promptly ripped apart the flowstream, reversing the energy that it generated with explosive force. A literal shrapnel barrage tore apart the lower floor of the building, tearing into the basement level and further destroying the ruined integrity, triggering a collapse of the upper floors starting at the floor level. The chain reaction would drop the entire building into the basement level, then collapse all upper levels down into a pile of mangled rubble. And if Darius didn't exit the building with panicked speed, he'd find himself in an impromptu grave of stone, glass, and twisted metal.

While Jegun watched the ruins collapse, he called out to the street. "Alright, whoever you are. I know you're out here, and you really don't want me hunting your ass down."

"Come out of hiding. Now."

[Thundergod1020]

Darius smiled as Lobos continued to use magic indirectly as an attempt to flush him out. That was cute. He realigned his spirit energy into his limbs once more, and came out of the same window he'd entered as he felt a wave of magic run under the building. Thankfully, the Host was busy trying to tear apart the building he'd already left, so he took advantage of the situation by ducking behind some rubble and waiting, charging another concussive blast. As soon as he heard the host call out to the other man, he took advantage of the minor distraction and released the concussive burst, charged long enough to make blocking a VERY bad idea... But then again, Lobos didn't know the way Darius' abilities worked. After all, the blast looked exactly the same, save speed, perhaps it simply needed two more minor Fangs? As he chased behind his blast, using the dust it kicked up in its wake as cover, he let his senses extend further into the supernatural, now seeing the form of the soul attached to Lobos. As he'd discovered from travelers who had heard tales of the mercenary, and could now confirm, it was a large wolf. He giggled internally at the thought that this was basically a spat between long lost cousins, an ice wolf fighting a fox spirit, and got ready to follow up the blast with some CQC, prepping his spirit burst once more.

[Lobos]

Jegun had no intention of dodging the blast, noticing it the moment it discharged. In fact charging towards it and sliding underneath to let it flash by overhead. He had also noticed that Darius was coming in behind it through the dust. Obliging his choice to meet him in close quarters, the man charged into the teeth of the beast...

And when Darius would next see him, the swordsman whirled his blades in a complex weave before him, the style accentuated by the unusual feature in his eyes. Where they remained azure, they had darkened in hue, a trio of brilliant line running away from his pupil, a gleaming circle connecting them through the center. Ice swirled around Lobos like a veil, but arcs of electricity crackled through the chill field around him as well. There was time for an uncertain glimpse, and then the mercenary was on him.

From the weaving of sabres came a flurry of blows, the elegance of the demonstration of swordsmanship at its finest masking a brutal strength, that were it used against metal, would slice through with nary resistance. Horizontal neck, left elbow, right knee, torso diagonal, right shoulder jab. The targeted strokes came in with the speed of a machine gun, slamming home while the opposing blade still whirled a defense of edge and ice that was as complete as it was changeable, offense to defense, defense to offense.

Of the two, it would take time to evaluate which sword was the more dangerous, and with the flickering speed of his exchanges, Darius would find it hard to tell the pair apart. Kan'ya's edge bit deep and brutally, the lightning enhancement of its forging keening its edge, while it repaired the damage to itself it inflicted for the sake of power from the hanging ice around Jegun. Hyouga Tsume was nigh invulnerable to damage, sliding attacks off its curved edge with not a scratch, yet it held the better balance, flowing more smoothly than its darting twin. Yet together, the dance of swords was as beautiful as it would be deadly should Darius err in fending.

Jegun pressed forward relentlessly, pushing his momentum onward to test and see when Darius would break against the brutal enfilade of strokes, parries, ripostes, and balance shifts.

[Thundergod1020]

As the blast went past, it rocketed into another building, with the resultant shockwave leaving the entire first floor gone. He grinned as Lobos prepared to go into an incredibly intricate dance of moves. The waltz of blades would have been flashy... If Darius didn't just take the sensible approach and move in close past the blades as Jegun was starting by interrupting the first left hand slash with his right-hand weapon, forged from magic and his own spirit, and every bit as unwavering, to slam the tip of the tonfa in his left hand into the soft flesh right under Lobos' right shoulder. With his belief that Darius would either try to completely block or dodge(as ones who's blades have no equal tend to believe), and the fact that a sword in motion tends to be hard to stop for the wielder, the strike was fast, quick, weak, and would hurt like a demon thanks to both bruising and general location. With the first shot in, Darius sprung back out of range and waited, this time not charging any spell, but simply waiting to see what Lobos would do. If his powers remained after the Dimensional Anchor took effect, then this was going to be a LONG fight.

[Lobos]

These assumptions might have been correct, if Jegun hadn't driven home that unlike a mere swordsman, the ability to react to unexpected tricks by a change of style was well within the capabilities of an earned rank of swordmaster. His eyes picked out the strike before it fully began, and rather than shunt it aside, the mercenary would play the game of trades.

Albeit at much less risk of his own, given the target of Darius' choosing was not unarmored. The studded leather there would ward off the majority of the light tap, even as he twisted Hyouga against the block, flipping Kan'ya in his right to a reversed grip and trading the tap under his right shoulder for a sweep at the same moment of the icy blade into Darius's left upper arm. Given the size of his weapons against the tonfa of his foes, unless the cutlass failed to sever all the way through with its exceedingly keen edge, Jegun would trade a tap for removing a whole limb off his foe.

Disregarding what possible damage he might have done in the trading of blows, the soulbound wasn't about to let Darius simply spring away, drawing on the lesser known abilities of his Stormrider heritage. Jegun lunged forward and snapped a jab into the air at his opponent's disengagement, the crackling boom of thunder blowing apart still intact windows on the street as he issued a powerful burst of natural strength lightning across the very short gap between the pair, it's speed that of true elemental electricity.

[Thundergod1020]

Darius responded to the swing of the blade by simply letting the blade go its natural path. As it swung past he was already using the force from his punch against Lobos to act as a spring backwards, and he held up the tonfa as he went backwards, the two weapons scraping on one another, but neither any worse for the wear. His opponent wasn't so easily stopped, however, and had decided to use lightning magic, which Darius could see filling the air with its path before it had even been launched. To this end, Darius used a simple trick called crouching, which used lightning's natural traits against it, mainly, the fact that nothing he was wearing conducted electricity, whereas the entire street block had aluminum cars everywhere, which make great conductors of electricity, the fact that due to the cold, his own body, skin dry from the cold weather, would be an even WORSE conductor for electricity, yet raise the conductivity of every car around him, and the fact that he was the closest thing to the ground here, leaving him the least targetable thing in the area. Needless to say, the arcing of the electricity was pretty, but all-around harmle-

Then a stray arc came off of a car and hit his leg. It would have been a minor shock, but Darius' weakness to magic kicked in, and made it the equivalent of a Taser. He tensed up and felt electricity arc through him, glad that his own titanly durability and natural tankiness allowed for him to take a lot more than the feedback from a spell before any actual weakness would show. Of course, Lobos would have no idea what the actual results were, based on the very, very short span of time the entire process took which Darius could only comprehend thanks to his senses leading him through it, along with the lack of knowledge that his own spell had been diverted by nature's own rules, and thus was weakened severely by the time it had hit Darius. He began to charge another concussive blast, using his crouching position to leap with bullet-passing speed to the wall of a nearby brownstone, his near-instantaneous reaction time keeping him from splattering against anything.

"Nice try!" he yelled, springing from one building to another until he was at the rooftops, "But magic is near-worthless against me!" Not ENTIRELY true(Light and dark magics only), but the Host would have no idea of its validity, and could only think it true from the recent events. "Try to keep with the current!" He withheld from unleashing his shot, awaiting Lobos' reaction and letting it continue to charge as he did so, once again not revealing anything more from it than what anyone who could sense soul energy would describe as an increase in his spirit.

[Lobos]

The shoulder impact rocked Jegun, but not so much that his bolt entirely missed. Unknown to Darius, however, Jegun was perfectly cognizant of the end result, for not one set of eyes watched. But two.

Pathetic worm, if that's the best he had.
"Oh, Kyriel?"
Locking us both on our native plane.
"Fool,"

The inner dialogue took such an infinitesimally small instance that Jegun didn't pause, regaining his balance far more quickly than one might expect. At Darius' words, however, he crooked a smile, the frozen aura drawing in closer to him. No more holding back anymore, and he'd wasted enough time on a fool mission that was simply incorrect to begin with. Kyriel was no rogue soul, but an ice elemental, and he was no thief of souls. Just a deliverer.

To the afterlife.

Synchronization.

To an outside observer, one would note that the mercenary's hair seemed to be growing, of his bared teeth, canines lengthened into fangs. Chill mist began to radiate from his very flesh as it cooled further, but most radical was the flesh of his forearms and hands seemed to harden, then become translucent, becoming talons of pure ice. Even to magical sight, it was a terrifying sight to behold, as the souls of elemental and man seemed to push together, altering the whole into something else entirely. Azure eyes gleamed brightly, the curious design on his eyes glowing like stars, as the man was not just a man, but a Stormrider descendant. Embracing that side just as much as the other wrapped about his soul, Lobos had just become far, far more dangerous.

And then he slammed Kan'ya's tip into the hilt of Hyouga, then through it.

Inordinate power simply ripped around him, buffeting the air as he unveiled the truth behind the cutlasses, which was in fact, they were sum parts of a whole. Arcs of electricity spat from the sword's glowing radiance, icy mist shrouding the mysterious weapon for a few moments before these guises too sundered from it. A blade of nearly six feet, slightly curving, the crossguard that of a wolf howling, the pale, subtly sapphire hued blade flickering with internal light sprouting through its jaws. The hilt he held in both hands, spanned for three, an unusual size. A weapon that had no others like it, unique, elegant, beautiful even. But given the wielder...

Rayo Congelada Guadaña was not just deadly. It was an instrument, its song one of slaying.

Worse for Darius, however, was the time it took to complete the alterations. A scant three seconds. The lightest shift of balance, nigh imperceptible, and Jegun's new form shot right and up, smoothly catching himself on the tip of his sword and levering against the building, almost not touching the tips of his feet to it before rocketing across the avenue even faster than he'd perceived Darius's own high speed motion. This time simply striking and kicking off with that same awing speed, he loosed a dozen more bolts of lightning within the span it took to reach the other wall again, this time with focus directing them with his will alone to guide them to the target.

These bolts appeared as though natural lightning, yet would bend to track Darius as he attempted to evade, and as Jegun had launched each at a slightly different vector, the odds of scoring a direct hit were far higher than a stray bolt launched as he was being forced off balance. On completion of this latest maneuver, the man used a spied and utilized flagpole to launch to the rooftops himself, catching the wall with a talon and dragging furrows along it to flip over the edge onto his feet with agile grace. Boots hitting the rooftop in time with the thunderclaps of his lightning, Jegun paused for only a moment to check the end result, baring a grim smile.

[Thundergod1020]

Three seconds.
They say time is relative, and for the man who had speed and reaction times to match, these three seconds passed in days rather than moments.
Darius felt the magic in the air drop like a stone, and knew this was when he'd have to take off the kiddie gloves. His proof came in the form of several lightning bolts, which Darius could tell wouldn't be so easy to dodge. Well... If dodging was impossible... He'd just have to make it hit something else. He flickered in the air, reappearing on another rooftop as the first bolt went off at his former location, then flickered again to another rooftop as the next bolt struck. His true speed, combined with his sense of magic, allowed him to effectively flash-step to avoid the homing lightning each time, until the final bolt, at which he aimed his tonfa and blocked, the nonconductive nature of something made entirely of magic grounding him against the bolt's force. He felt the magic wafting off of Lobos, and saw the fusion of man and beast before him. It kind of reminded him of a bad incident he'd had with a furry stripper. He instantly dashed in, faster than even his own mind could perceive, and just as it looked like he was about to throw another punch like before, he flickered out of sight again and was in the air behind the Super Saiyan Mode, swinging the long part of his left tonfa at Lobos' temple and aiming to daze by, at this point, swinging at full force with faith that the large creature wouldn't die... Maybe.

[Lobos]

Tch.

That was the sound that Jegun made as he watched, perfectly capable of tracking the motions of Darius as he seemed to be able to outrun lightning at such short ranges, disregarding that this close, you would see the bolt and hear the thunder long enough after the bolt had already struck home that it wouldn't matter anymore. The Inari might as well have been keeping to normal motion, the skills of the long experienced Kyriel and the nature of the fastest element, lightning, allowing the man to keep tabs on the fool.

So when Darius darted in, Jegun called the initial feint, not needing to turn to know by instinct where the next attack was coming from. Too bad.

For the fool.

There wasn't a subtle hint, no advanced warning of building magic. Jegun simply erupted with electrical energies, the chill mist of his form converted into a carrier of the massive electrical current that poured from his body like a torrent of water, forming a lightning field that Darius had already placed himself inside of. At the same time, with equally no warning, fast as Darius struck, Jegun was even faster, pivoting on one foot as he shifted his head out of the tonfa's path and slamming out one boot at the inari's knees, the blade of Rayo cutting with speed that rent the air with a thunderous sonic boom as it cleared Mach 2 snapping around for, and aimed through, his foe's stomach. The blade itself seemed light, fragile, yet was harder even that admantium, all but unbreakable, the flickering lights within the lightning frozen within. While within the effects of the lightning field, simply having that strike be blocked would sent arcs of lightning jolting outward, and caught in the air as Darius was, and caught within the confines of one of the most basic traps in existence, he was a perfect target.

Nonetheless, Jegun's double pointed strike had also shifted his balance slightly away from the inari, and close hung the particles of ice, shining now as electricity coursed through them. Almost unconsciously did Jegun's mind reach out, pinging for a new source to fuel a potential ender to this game should the combination of attacks launched with synchronized perfection fail to render the enemy silent.

[Thundergod1020]

Darius was moving before the electricity even had a chance to arc. Kyriel was moving in slow motion to Darius, and no matter how sudden it appeared to be, all non-spiritually based magic telegraphed itself to Darius. He was gone from the range of the electric field before it had even started, and he still had his Light Burst charging in his soul. He wagered that the amount of time it had been charging would give it the power to put a dent in anything, but decided against firing it, for lack of need, and fear that Wolf-boy would try to show daddy he was fast again.

Deciding he needed cover that was flimsy enough to make a fake trap that would lead to a real trap, Darius stomped on the roof as he took a fighting stance, which ended up breaking the concrete below him and dropping down with it as it all gave way to the bottom floor(surprised look on the face included), the fall not even fazing him, nor the rubble that fell on top of him, but not moving upon landing, even his heartbeat stilled by practice. He wanted to make his fall look real, and have the soulbond drop his guard as he checked the body, so he also dissipated the Light-With-No-Shadow, to add to the act of his death. It would seem anticlimatic, but then again, that was the point. Death came in any form it chose, why not an accident caused by a fault in the building they had been standing on that had itself stood through things to make warriors weep? Even so, he kept his senses open to the magic coursing around Lobos, and his Light Burst at the ready, his tonfa not even a thought away for firing.

[Lobos]

Jegun barely gave the ruse a thought, for magical emanations, even dormant, could be sensed. Instead, he turned and vaulted from the rooftop, going from building to building across the roofs with astonishing speed, crossing a majority of the city in under a minute. As he moved, the draconian words to a particular spell began to issue from his mouth. His goal seemed rather a forlorn hope, the water treatment plants, but in his earlier question, he'd found what he'd thought he might find. It followed general principle, that a secondary water source might be present, and he'd found it.

Aquifers. Large ones.

So, the man had abstained continued attack to alter the battleground, already stretching his powers deep, chilling the waters deep below as he moved. One might think this a fool's move, expending energy like thus, but when the power coalesced in icy chunks that began to flow, churning the cooling water with him, it was not so. It was simply and investment, and even as he landed amidst the ruins of the plants, from broken pipes began issuing the underground reserves. He split his attention, readily done as Kyriel focused on drawing the water upwards, Jegun catching the issuing liquid, converting it to ice, and bringing it to bear. There wouldn't be a way to miss the energy being cast around, the size and scope of the magic involved simply huge. And with it, Jegun began to weave.

First, an icy dome, a simple enough spell enhanced by the ice woven into it. Measuring nearly 50ft in diameter, its walls formed into two foot thick, dense barriers of ice. Next, came the seeding of ice into the earth, thousands of small sunken chunks that formed a veritable underground minefield around and under the dome, sheeting a subterranean floor that the walls sunk to meet. Then, as the amounts of ice to manipulate grew with Kyriel's efforts, Jegun began to replace the inner surfaces of his defenses with more from the outside, filling the dome with the signature particles of his ice field, to which his lightning field chained and energized, a crackling miasma of electrical energy that simply built as he stood there in the epicenter. Maintaining an awareness through Kyriel, the man continued to speak the words to his spell, the draconian syllables punctuated with words of power, creating pauses and contingencies, spells within the spell, defenses on defenses, offensives on yet more offensives. The fool shouldn't had given Jegun the opportunity of mobile freedom, a temporary disengagement.

For though he was not ready in the pinnacle of his casting, should it be interrupted thus far...

He was ready enough.