Difference between revisions of "2881/WMAT CQ1 Arthur Lowell vs Krezentia Einjager"
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Revision as of 05:27, 25 August 2015
WMAT CQ1 Arthur Lowell vs Krezentia Einjager | |
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Date of Scene: | 22 August 2015 |
Location: | WMAT Arena - Gizard Wasteland |
Synopsis: | It's SPACE GOD COOL KID versus POWER COPYING ROBOT MAGI in this qualifier round of the C bracket. |
Cast of Characters: | Arthur Lowell, 758 |
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
As with every single other day of the year, the Gizard Wasteland is a rocky canyon of orange stone with tall rocky pillars jutting out of the ground here and there, and wildlife such as dinosaurs and giant birds. Given both opponents can fly or at least don't risk falling to the ground after the first hit, the START LOCATION is actually atop two of the stone pillars, one fighter per, no railings, no security. Crowds watch from floating platforms far above the canyon, hopefully far enough given those two, but also from assorted flying devices and cameras that aim to monitor the fight.
It is atop her pillar that KREZENTIA EINJAGER stands, patched up from her fight with Samar; some of her skin looks a bit lighter or darker in places, the replacement not quite fixed yet. But since she expects to get her face wrecked today too, she didn't stick the extra hours in Iris' lab it would take to get her back up to 100% looks.
Her fairy is not with her today, though.
And thank god she has a hundred spare sets of the same black pants, jacket and purple shirt. And baseball cap. Can't go without that. She adjusts it, sliding it backwards.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
"God I'm fuckin' SICK of GIANT STONE TOWERS."
"thip thip thip they kinda look cool to me!!"
"yeah we can carve some frogs in 'em!!"
"JESUS SHITTY CHRIST, just go man the FIREWORKS."
Arthur, of course, makes every entry a show. This time, he descends from above. An old Prospitan war-airship, refitted with projectors and spotlights and fireworks and the biggest smoke machine ever seen in this world by man or beast. It breaks through the cloud layer playing music aggressively, putting on a dramatic laser lightshow, spinning spotlights about, and spewing a deluge of elaborate space-magic fireworks. Eight emitters give off a particularly bright display of whirling white fireworks as ARTHUR LOWELL drops from above, slamming into the pillar opposite Krezentia Einjager.
He slams into the top of the pillar dramatically in an iron-man-esque three-point landing, stands in a sweeping motion, cracks his knuckles and his neck, and grins wide, all framed by the explosive light of the fireworks that impact the pillar around him, then he raises both arms at his sides, in a challenging motion. "ALRIGHT, Brave Lil' Toaster, let's see what you're MADE OF. I'm gonna be HELLA DISAPPOINTED if I don't walk outta here with some HOLES SHOT THROUGH ME, so COME ON!" He pounds his fist into the opposite palm. "I'll get you BACK IN THE SHOP before you KNOW WHAT HIT YOU."
And then he takes a ready stance, summoning his BATTLE BROOM with a flourish and revving the blender end aggressively, grinning madly. He seems eager to go, waiting for the round to start and for Krezentia to make the first move!
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
Now THAT is someone who knows how to make an entrance. The (fake) Magi considers why she didn't have Iris prep up some fireworks herself, or maybe at least a squad of goons to do this stuff. Hell she'd settle for a Zorne Doll chucking bombs in the sky. Too late now! She can only stare slash admire Arthur's handiwork, and his dedication to driving this event home. It's definitely impressive.
But boy does he start strong.
A brow lifts in confusion as Krezentia kind of stares at Arthur, before she frowns, and not in the desperate or sad way, more of a prelude to anger. "You know, you could try saving some for halfway through the fight. Or after. Wouldn't want you to swallow your tongue before it's actual proper time to scream. Toaster, though? Aren't you overconfident for something made of meat. Better a toaster than whatever you are. A god, I hear? Last time I heard someone brag they were a god it was some loud immature manchild. Two for two."
She cracks her knuckles.
A LAKITU hovers down from above. It lowers a fishing pole with a traffic light at the end. It goes, from top to bottom: BOOP. BOOP. BEEP. And then the Lakitu gets the hell out of the way.
Krezentia raises her left hand, sparks of green and purple energy forming into larger orbs and spheres. "Falschesgewehr!" And... pew pew pew. It's just a bunch of harmless energy and plasma orbs. Well, maybe not harmless, you wouldn't want to take one on the nose, but the fist-sized pellets aren't going to punch holes through Arthur either.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
Arthur blasts off his feet. The pinging impacts of the orbs bruise without heavy damage, but Krez is probably not expecting someone to take it head on. Which, you know, is Arthur's style. He takes everything right on the jaw if he can survive it. "HAHAHAHA!" He laughs loud and brashly. "What, you think I'mma BRAG about the whole SPACE GOD thing? FUCK THAT." He declares with a particular aggression. "That ain't how I do shit AT ALL." A spray of bruises on his body is nothing to the mage. Immediately, he gets to more aggressive work, returning fire with blasts of his own and darting off to strafe around.
"That 'PUNY HUMAN, I AM ETERNAL' shit's for the BIRDS, yo! I'm a HUMAN before I'm EVER anything like THAT!" He shouts out. His shots are more magical plasma as well, rapid-constructed fusion bolts that shine with a brilliant white fire. "Gods ain't SHIT, HEROES is where it's AT! But you BET YOUR ASS I'm a goddamn IMMATURE MANCHILD, how the hell do you think I have SO MUCH FUN!?"
He does seem to be laughing and having rather a lot of fun jetting around on that rocket broom, so there's that point there.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
"Feh, heroes. A thousand rules for half the payment and thanks. If you want fun, the real fun's on the other side. The one without rules or morals or all that guiding principle shit," Krezentia answers, firing another volley to intercept Arthur's. Shots collide in blinding flashes of exploding energy, but a few get through anyway, one blasting the Magi on the shoulder, the other the opposite ribs. Clothes are scorched, skin underneath too, but she's a bit more durable than your average guy, or that might melt clean through. Unless Arthur has absurd control on the lethality of his fusion, anyway!
"Dunkelflugel Zwei!"
A beam of light teleports in from the sky, forming into a black and gold hoverboard kept afloat by fancy purple magical wings at the rear. Rather than let Arthur have the speed advantage, the Magi opts to follow him with her own rocket to ride around on. She trails him-- she can't go AS fast, but she doesn't need to catch up. A bright purple wormhole opens to her left, static to her location despite the hoverboarding.
She fires numerous larger, charged shots into it. The hole appears in front of Arthur, and lets loose one of the shots! It disappears, reappearing to his upper right, delivering another shot, disappearing, reappearing to his lower left-- you get the idea.
Being able to shoot stuff, and being able to make portals, makes for a lot of creativity.
"'least you're honest about being a child. Kind of refreshing to insult someone and have them bloody agree for once."
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
Arthur isn't a Seer, so he can't see that head-on wormhole attack coming ahead of time, but he sure can tell what it is when it slams into his face. A laser blasts into him, blistering flesh, but he can already see the signal through the brutal wave of magical beam. "Auuuuhuhuhuhu, this is a FANTASTIC MATCHUP, SHIT YEAH!" Arthur calls out, eagerly, immediately locking onto one of those portals and trying to force it to stay in place with his own Gate magic. The shots that come through it impact him even more than the others. "You wanna talk GATES, I'm the PORTAL GUY! Shit YESSSSS, this is a LUCKY MATCHUP!"
Blasting through the hijacked Gate, Arthur intends to come in for a quick melee strike to up the stakes. He dismounts from his broom as the charges through, but the rocket doesn't stop. It's not got power to the blender properly yet, but the rocket-powered overhead heavy swing he takes at Krezentia's body, intended to slap her into one of those nearby pillars, should be enough for now!
"TOO MANY RULES? Hah! That's what makes it FUN! What, don'tcha play GAMES? That's ALL THEY ARE, just RULES! Shit, that's what makes it WORTH IT!" He says, jabbing a finger at Krez. "You PICK YOUR GAME and you PLAY IT. It's HOW IT WORKS!" Or your game picks you in an atemporal closed time loop, sometimes.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
That is the first time that happens. Seeing Arthur blast through one of her portals, it doesn't take long for her to figure out he's going to come out the one right next to her-- or rather, is ALREADY coming out that. She jerks herself back, Arthur only managing to catch the tip of her nose (painful as that bloody is, though)-- this means she falls off her hoverboard, but catches the edge with one arm, grinning. Now she's not riding the thing so much as hanging on to it, but that's fine too.
"Yeah, you PICK your game. Rules of being a hero suck, so I don't pick that game. Being a loose cannon only has one rule, and that rule's to have fun with it. Compared to all the rabble about behaving yourself and not blowing up people who annoy you, I'll take it any time."
A pink and brown spell circle overlaps Krezentia, and her hair and shirt turn brown, while her eyes turn bright pink. The one hand that isn't holding onto her hoverpoint aims at Arthur, and suddenly booms out thunder, as a bolt of bright yellow and blue lightning bursts out towards the cool god. "Zonde!"
She'll use the occasion to flip herself back onto her board if she can help it, hopefully Arthur doesn't intend to interfere with that lightning-fast.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
"YEEEEEAAAAARRRRH!" Arthur shouts in something that probably started coherent but very rapidly got not coherent. The brilliant bolt of lightning is... Caught in Arthur's teeth?! It rattles him, but not too badly. How in the world he still keeps that arcing magic between his teeth is a fucking mystery, but one suspects Arthur himself might not know any real practical answer for that question either. He then spits it out, aggressively, but of course, the process of deftly catching lightning took enough of his focus that Krezentia was able to get back onto her board.
This leaves Arthur still in melee range though! And this time he goes in with much more brutality. "HA HA HA HA! Well WHATEVER then! YOU do YOU, I do ME," And then in comes that broom again. "And we TRADE THE BEATINGS for it!" This time, though, he fakes another swing for Krezentia... only to suddenly twist, falling as he loses momentum, and locking it around his hoverboard! He is trying to get the handle locked around the nose of the thing, and then he attempts to apply an intense gravity field around them both and suplex the hoverboard -- and Krezentia possibly still riding it, if she doesn't react fast enough!! -- into a nearby column of stone, shattering it.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
Gravity suplex! Arthur's maneuver quickly overpowers the hoverboard, sending the Magi and her ride crashing into a stone column. That's definitely not pleasant for her, and her ride doesn't surprise-- it's actually pretty brittle, it looks like. Not designed to take the slightest hit. In the hole created by the impact, the now dusty, bruised Magi rotates her right shoulder in its socket, as though cracking it back into place. A surge of magic flares to one hand, and she-- summons a brand new hoverboard.
She hops onto it and charges back up, straight for Arthur.
"Fair enough. You're wrong and hamstringing your own fun, but who'm I to tell someone they can't choose to be wrong? Best to beat sense into people like you, ha!" Not that this is a match with very many stakes. No, it's for fun, all the way.
Rather than change colors again, the Magi just extends a hand up, and a long, rattling chain appears held in both of her hands. At one end, held in her right hand, is a sickle, while in her left she just holds the near-end of the chain, spinning it.
The magical kusarigama is swung towards Arthur and his broom-- the chain, that is. It extends, to absurd lengths, speeding towards the god to try and catch him, and his broom. If it can do so, it'll squeeze, hard, and the chain's length will start shrinking, in an attempt by the Magi to close the gap between their speeds by... well, lassoing Arthur and then magically reducing the lasso's length.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
"HAHAHAHAHA!" Arthur shouts, darting out of the dusty blastwave of his suplex, clearly loving this despite some flesh blistering there. "SHIT YES, that's the WAY to DO IT! No GRUDGE, no getting WORKED UP about MY WAY OR NO WAY, just FIGHTING IT OUT and seeing WHO COMES OUT ON TOP!" Flipping around his broom dramatically, with the intent to dash in for more melee, gets interrupted! The chain lashes out, and the sickle sinks into his flesh, evoking a spray of red.
"SHIT ON A BUN, that fuckin' HURTS, GOD DAMN." He declares, vulgarly, before there's another fleshy crack as the chain squeezes around an arm and his torso. "Oh, lookin' to CATCH UP, huh? Lookin' to REEL IN? Well SHIT! Let's DO THIS!!" And he blasts off once again, holding the broom with one hand. Unlike Arthur, Krezentia probably won't have protection against that G-FORCE, and only her hoverboard's maneuvering to protect her from getting slammed brutally through multiple rock formations.
Arthur demonstrates intuitive and complete knowledge of kinematics here, always knowing the exact right angle to boost if he wants to smash Krez through one of the stone formations, or bounce her against the canyon's ground. Machine-like precision, in fact!
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
Hooking onto Arthur seemed like a good plan. As he accelerates and starts doing mad G-turns, it seems less and less like it was a good plan. A flicker of magic, and Krezentia's hair and shirt turn rust-colored, and her eyes bronze. "Clicking Junk!" A large quantity of bladed, sharp metallic objects-- trash, computer parts, sectioned walls and pipes, pretty much all manners of jagged, rusty metal junk-- suddenly form a rotating shield around the Magi and her hoverboard.
There are many, many impacts, as Arthur tries to drive her through those stone columns. And each one makes the quantity of trash orbiting the Magi diminish, while her wounds (mostly bruises, sections of cloth going missing, occasional streaks of red oil or blood, it'd be hard to tell keep piling on.
Rather than keep holding on, she pulls the chain back, and it magically unwraps itself from the god, shrinking back to a manageable size to hold in one hand. Her other points forward, and the shield around her rattles, the entire pile of scrap launching for Arthur.
Sawblades, medical equipment, torn metal plates, if it's metallic junk, and it's even remotely sharp and deadly, it's in the incoming mass somewhere. On the other hand, attacking with it lowered what was left of the shield completely, since it's gone now.
"You are WAY too much into this. I LOVE it!"
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
Arthur whips around and dismounts in one fluid, flipping motion, coming to a flying stop harshly mid-air. "YEAH!" He says, eagerly, shouting. "You fuckin' KNOW IT!" He revs his broom, not trying to dodge away from this attack. "THIS is how you LIVE! You let yourself stop FEELING THE FIGHT, you let yourself lose the goddamn HUMANITY of it!"
He swings his broom at the hulk of junk, dispersing it around him just enough to not be crushed but not enough to avoid coming out of the dispersal heavily lacerated all over his body. It is, after all, a broom! It's meant for cleaning up messes. And a metal broom can clean up metal messes. No, really, most of the matter involved in Clicking Junk has disappeared before it gets to the ground. He doesn't seem to mind the wounds. "I need RED on me! You BLEED WHAT I MEAN?!" He laughs, wiping blood away from his eyes with a deft, stylish flick. "MY TURN." His turn for what?
His turn to use his own Gates, apparently! He immediately dives down, and demonstrates his own specialty. RAPID GATES. Where Krez's gates might be more mobile and aligned with her, Arthur's are more static in position, fixed in place but precisely and swiftly placed to let him move regardless. His intent is to begin striking from many angles at once, rocket-ramming Krezentia while encasing his body in a brilliantly black glow of a gravity barrier. He moves to strike from one, then another pair of gates open and he moves to strike from the next, and then the next, and the next, hoping to overwhelm Krezentia's ability to track the direction he can approach from.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
"Boy you're getting ME fired up now. Are you always like this? Doesn't that EVER get exhausting?" Evidently not, if his typical presence on the broadband is any indication. Exhausting for other people, Krezentia wagers, but this guy obviously has the energy reserves to never tone it down. It's kind of incredible, she can't even picture herself being that 'into it' all the time. She has her moments like everyone, she loves a good fight, but this is more... involved? Not the right word, but she'll take it.
A network of Gates for Arthur to just come and go from will do the trick-- he'll ram her a few times, cracking or breaking something no doubt, probably dibs unless he's aiming for nastier damage-- though the Magi does her damned best to remain on her hoverboard. Her feet clamp down, and rather than let Arthur get one more strike in, she manages to pop open one of her own wormholes straight ahead, diving into it and closing it immediatly.
She'll pop back up overhead, taking a moment to shake her head, regain her balance, and then hope Arthur hasn't already begun his ascent for her. Hair and shirt turning silver-white, and her eyes a cold icy blue, she aims both hands down, black and ice blue magic gathering up around them.
"Let's cool you off a bit. Lich Bolt!"
A volley of necrotic, icy projectiles rain down for Arthur (and his broom). If they struck a normal person and killed them, they'd make a shitty zombie for a short while, but against Arthur it's just dark and ice magic rolled into one.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
"Hah!!" Arthur shouts, as if Krezentia just said the most ridiculous thing in the world. "OF COURSE I'm gettin' you FIRED UP! I'm so SICK I had to JUKE QUARANTINE just to GET HERE! I've got NO SETTING but ELEVEN OUT OF FIVE! I'm TOO BUSY to get TIRED! And it's WAY TOO MUCH FUN!" He comes around for another ram at Krezentia, rising as quick as he can, but not before there's another attack! Arthur is struck head-on. Ice lances into his body and provokes a spray of sickly gray-blue mist, and a grim crackling of flesh suffering the effects of corruptive magic alongside a spray of blood. Some fall out, some stay impaled through him.
"Are you KIDDING? I am the COOLEST! I'm SO COOL you could KEEP A SIDE OF BEEF in me! I'm SO HIP I can't SEE OVER MY PELVIS! You think you'll COOL ME DOWN with THIS?" And then he... Flexes. A little gunshow there, for a moment, it's kinda weird.
The ice spikes pop out of his body. There is no explanation.
Wounds are still there, though, plus the sickly discoloration of dark magic, but Arthur seems to not be bothered by that even a little bit. "You wanna COOL ME OFF, you better KNOCK ME OUT! Only way I TAKE IT EASY is if you MAKE ME!" This time, he activates the BLENDER! When he rushes in, it's with tremendous lancing waves of solar fire for mid-range strikes, following in theatrical, heavy arcs out from his broom, but also with spinning blades if he can get in close! This time, he's going for a bigger series of intense sweeping blows, lashing out rapidly in rocket-powered succession, mixing overhand with underhand while attacking Krezentia from below.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
Well, credit to Arthur. Boy's exactly as tough as he's loud. The Magi'd expected the ice and death magic to at least give him pause, make him slow down. He's pretty much flexing it off! He got skewered, sure, and that can't have been pleasant, but even so!
And in he comes with a blender broom.
Krezentia's hair and shirt turn caramel-red-hair brown, and her eyes a slightly lighter shade of that, between brown and amber. Kanshou and Bakuya, the twin curved blades of a certain Servant and inexperienced hero, appear in her hands, and she takes the blender on blow for blow. Each parry, each block, each slice to push Arthur back shatters a sword, and she makes a new one to replace it. Until she finds her window and suddenly rocks her hoverboard to the left, flying past Arthur-- but unfortunately, allowing the blender to shred a chunk of her shoulder and arm off. It's again odd to tell if it's blood or oil, but it's obvious she's designed to LOOK human. The fake muscles and all might still be enough to offput Arthur.
As she spins her ride back around, she throws two swords towards the god, and then two more, and then two more. They spin in wide arcs, coming at him from different but symmetrical angles, in pairs-- one black and one white per assault. They'll shatter if impacted even slightly too hard, and won't return to Krezentia either way.
"Cool or not, you're going to hit your limit sooner or later, same as everyone else. So why don't you tell me, how much of that YELLING is compensating for frustrations and fears, huh? What's underneath the screaming cool kid mask?"
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
There's a palpable change in demeanor. Before, it seemed, they agreed on much. Now Krezentia is getting into anaylzing past Arthur Lowell's false facade of trumped-up energy and confidence, moving into ranges of conversation that he's not comfortable with talking about. Two blades plant deep into his chest, partially snapping off, while another plants in his arm, one in the thigh, and another pair grazing with a heavy gash along his side. This time he doesn't bother flexing them out. Those blades stick in him like he's a pincushion.
"Oh, and HERE I thought you were COOL for a moment." Arthur spits, his tone taking a bit more of an aggressive posture. "I don't have to give HALF an UNFLUSHED SHIT what you think about COMPENSATION or MASKS. You don't know ME, or WHO I AM, or my LIMITS." He rips one of the blades out of his arm, lacerating his hand as he does and working the impaled limb in circles to restore motion as he discards the shattered hunk of blade. Through all that, though, he's not taking his eyes of Krezentia. "I'm made of MANGRIT, I'm powered by ROCKETS, and it won't matter a DAMN BIT what 'MASK' or 'COMPENSATION' or whatever you think you see in this if I send you back to the SCRAPYARD. Bitch, I get to DECIDE who I am, not YOU." He punctuates those words with several dramatic flips of the broom, ending with it pointing aggressively with that broom at Krezentia.
None of that forced grinning there, just some gritted teeth. This time he just wants Krezentia to stop talking about what she's talking about, and he does his best to make that happen immediately. Lashing one hand forward, he creates an intense gravitational force at Krezentia's approximate location. It will be strong enough to attract rocks, large boulders... As it grows, it will begin sending entire tremendous columns of stone at her, tripping them out of the canyon's formation itself!
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
"Oh, don't I? But maybe I do know! You know, I knew a girl once, and she was insecure as hell. Just a dumb clone made for a job, right? Nobody special. And then she met special people, and they were all so POWERFUL. And she met her original, and she HATED her. She had friends, and success, and POWER. Why'd she have that and not the copy?"
As fake blades dissipate into magic particles once discarded or broken, Krezentia's color palette swaps a few times-- brightly colored spell circles appear around her, forming a rainbow as they overlap. She stands still, even as gravity racks up. Boulders, scrap from earlier, columns of stone crash in-- past a point one can't see the Magi anymore, and her hoverboard explodes.
Purple light forms overhead as a wormhole opens, and Krezentia floats out, on a new hoverboard. She's banged up alright, because Arthur's fury was effective. An arm looks broken outright, the other still maimed from the trip in the blender. She's down on one knee on the board, but still smiling.
"So, you know what she did? She stacked up twenty, thirty powers. She collected shit bigger than her head and ate it. And now you know where all the insecurity is? It's behind the million layers of firepower and the smug-ass behavior."
Another series of wormholes open up-- twenty, at a guess, surrounding Arthur, the openings all 'pointed' at him. A single one opens before Krezentia too, and she extends her one good arm out. Her color palette rapidly shifts again, and she fires a stream of-- well, everything into the one.
"WORM SMASHER!"
The dozen or so weapons come out of wormholes at random, from every direction-- an Atomic Burn lance of plasma, a Zonde lightning bolt, a pair of Unlimited Blade Works swords, energy shots from her own Falschesgewehr, sharp icicles from the Freudenstachel, orange, fiery wind blades from the Lustatem, the bright red Neuroi Laser, and even a clump of acidic, corrosive Quecksilberschwarm nanites.
It's a grab-bag! Pick your poison(s).
And while you can't see Krezentia's WEAPON ENERGY screen, rest assured more than half of the meters just took a huge hit from green or yellow into red.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
Arthur isn't much of a tank. But he does have some experience, not unlike Krezentia... Or the 'girl she once knew'. He sees the wormholes surrounding him, and knows he probably can't reliably dodge here, not without disorienting himself due to the spatial distortions enough to open himself up to an even more severe attack. And this is stuff on a scale that could instantly wipe him out! If he's going to survive it, he'd better come up with something comparable.
So while Krezentia fires all those shots, he rushes forward, letting the wormholes come with him and form around him. And as he does, he reaches much deeper into his STRIFE DECK. One of his organic-looking frost-rocket brooms sings out of the deck, slamming into the atomic burn and negating it utterly. A smaller, rocky broom with bristles like a magical geode's interior slams into the Zonde bolt and disperses bluntly through Arthur, a pair of heavily crystal-plated shield-bristled brooms blunt the intense impact of several swords, out goes the frosty broom again to disrupt the plasma magic before it washes over his body in dispersed blistering heat waves, his normal King Broom tries to slam into the icicles and makes them damaging but not impaling fragments, the all-light Firewall Mop slams into the beams and deflects them into viciously grazing attacks, and then disrupts the nanites halfway through their consumption of the flesh on one of Arthur's arms...
Krezentia has a vastly superior variety to her arsenal, of course, but Arthur has, at least, a reasonable amount of variety to compensate, and to keep him going while he shouts and grunts and does his rising battlecry, intending to chase down Krezentia and get in close. "Well then that MIGHT AS WELL be WHAT SHE IS! What you 'REALLY ARE' doesn't matter, only thing that goddamn EVER MATTERS is what you CHOOSE TO BE, and how much it takes you to STOP CHOOSING!" He probably understands what Krezentia's insinuating, but he also makes sure to go along with how she does it when he makes his refutations. These wounds are wearing on him, though. Corrosive, blunt trauma, lacerating, and mostly burning damage creates a tremendous spray of wounds all over his body.
As he closes in, he resumes his first assault: One bloody hand out, he projects a gush of brilliant white energy, and tries to slam Krezentia back through more pillars of stone in the wasteland, brutally shotgunning a constant stream of impactful fusion bolts.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
That is a lot of brooms. And Arthur does seem experienced at using the right broom for the right job! It's actually insanely entertaining, watching the cool kid come up with a counter for each weapon. No sweat, almost no effort, he just rolls from one to the other like he's done that his whole life. Is that kid as young as he looks?
"Yeah, I guess you're not totally wrong. But there's a line you can cross where you just turn into a liar, godling! I hate talking about myself, but I don't deny it. You're so wrapped up in what you SAY you are I'm wondering what it takes to draw the real you out. Is that even possible?"
Something she'll have to muse after she's done getting slammed through a dozen stone columns. Arthur's blast doesn't miss, and it knocks the Magi right off her hoverboard and... well, hello, stone pillars. Lucky for her, she's tougher than a normal human. Unlucky for her, not so tough the trip doesn't shatter bone every other impact. Metallic bones, anyway. Less shatter and more bend and break.
The final column stops her cold, and she falls into the half-crater the impact dug, breathing heavily. That, that sucked. She does not want to do that again. With a flick of the only good wrist she has left, a wormhole pops open in front of her, and four around Arthur-- front, sides, rear. She can't have him hijack the one she plans to use, so she's going to switch which is connected to which at the last second-- but against a Space God, that's still a huge gamble.
Fiery red are her eyes, hair and what's left of her shirt under that black jacket, as a large two-handed hammer made of lava and fire appears in her hand. "Sulfuras!" She bolts into the purple portal and-- HOPEFULLY-- comes out the one to Arthur's left, without anything to keep her airborne but her leap of faith. She's aiming to smash the teenager with the hammer, complete with fireball on impact.
"EINS!"
And then land on a black, purple and gold platform only large enough for one person to stand on, that just sort of appears and stays there. She's out of Item 2 hoverboards, so Item 1 static platforms will have to do.
Either way she is NOT picking herself back up, whether she lands on her platform or Arthur manages to game her wormholes and make it worse. This is as last leg as it gets.
- Arthur Lowell has posed:
Arthur's refute comes with a bit of a delay. He's struck by the hammer hard. There's a heavy, wet crack, and the crunchy noises of burning flesh, exploding on impact with the ground. He comes out of the impact spread-eagled, charred from the strike. He struggles to get to his feet, and clearly isn't going anywhere, but god damnnation, despite all the pain he's in, and the fact that he really ought to be unconscious right now, he's still clearly trying to push himself up.
As he does, he responds. "Truth is whatever illusion is believed by the most people, whether they're following people who see through it more or people who say it better or the people who can show off a little bit of how reality hits back. Only thing it can be. Authenticity is a joke. Truth is what we choose for it to be." He says, slipping, briefly, into a more well-spoken scholarly tone. He chuckles, briefly. "Haaaaah. I'm the realest son of a bitch you'll ever see. And don't you fuckin' forget it."
He keeps trying to push himself back onto his feet until several seconds after Krezentia's declared the victor of the fight! After which he'll just sorta fall back into his crater in the wastes, panting and laughing. "Ha ha ha ha, yeah, that's the shit. That's what I wanted to feel, yeeeaaaaah." He doesn't really seem all that down, for having lost.
- Krezentia Einjager (758) has posed:
Krezentia isn't getting back up either; with effort she'll rise to one knee, on that platform overhead, but she's not going to be standing straight. She smirks at Arthur's comment, glaring down. "Failing that, truth is just what people remember. If nobody's around to remember what disproves your truth, then it doesn't matter, huh? But I keep being warned sooner or later the lies come back to bite you in the ass, usually by your own fault. Probably some truth to that too."
Her color palette switches back to blonde hair, red eyes and a purple shirt, Sulfuras (the hammer) fading away from her grip. "You're real alright. Earned yourself the right to call yourself a god for sure. Not bad at all. I knew coming out of retirement would be worth it."
Her crippled, maimed arm extends up, and suddenly starts siphoning ambient energy in the air. Leftovers of the forces Arthur put in motion (to devastating results at that), producing a DARK GREEN and BLACK spell circle, which washes over the Magi. In its wake, it leaves her hair and shirt black, matching Arthur's Space outfit, and her eyes turn from red to green. Unfortunately, she lacks any ability to test her new GRAVITY WAVE, but that's probably for the better. The crowd (and herself) are probably still in awe of Arthur's demonstration, and so there's no way Krezentia could match that.
"Well, thank for that. Now who do we scream at for a medic?"