3178/Scion (1-2)

Scion (1-2)
Date of Scene:	09 October 2015
Location:	Brockton Bay
Synopsis:	The finale of the Brockton Bay plot.
Cast of Characters:	Maya, 20, Staren, 73, 106, 151, 162, Theo Morrison, 368, Reina Kinney, 554, 707, 842

---

Defiant (554) has posed:
    STAGING AREA

    It's a non-descript point on Defiant's world, analysed by Dragon and Teacher's cult of Thinkers to be beneath Scion's influence. It's a gathering point for capes and Elites, anyone who is stepping up to try and find some way of stopping Scion. There's around eighty capes there, and most of the major players - Legend, Chevalier, Defiant, Dragon - and many others who people may know - like Clockblocker and Tattletale - and others still who are unknowns, former Birdcage inmates and so on. Many of the capes are combining their powers. There's at least one where they're just trying to layer their invulnerability and invincibility-type powers over each other, to grant an edge. If there's any to be granted, that is.

    They all seem to be ready to give it their all, with the quiet resignation of people who aren't expecting to come back. Defiant, for his part, has holed up inside one of his dragoncraft and is making ready to analyse whatever information can be gained from the running engagement. Other capes, probably tinkers, walk past people and hand out equipment - shields, devices, other things that might help against Scion. With might being the operative word.

     Chevalier is talking: "It's time! This is our staging ground. We're not going to get close. We /can't/, not just because of the danger it poses, but because many of our capes can't create portals or teleport within a certain range of Scion."

    "This is a test run," he continues. "Trying one trick, it won't work. We'll get obliterated. So we hit him with things in a series, from multiple directions, and we see what sticks. Once you think you've done all you can, you turn around and you run like hell. But we've seen how fast Scion can move, how hard he can hit. Everyone here knows that our chances of coming back alive are low. But we're capes, we're heroes, and if Scion wants to destroy our world then he'll have to go through us. This is the last chance for anyone to back out. Ingenue!"

     A portal opens to Chevalier's left and the armored cape, cannonblade slung across his back, steps through.

    Now's the time.

    THE BATTLEFIELD

    Through the portal, Scion waits. The golden man simply floats above a grassland, as if waiting. His expression isn't sad anymore, more completely neutral, and he radiates golden light, his long golden hair floating in a breeze that only he can feel.

    Chevalier, his cannonblade growing to two... three... /ten/ times its normal size, takes aim. Larger still, that even he cannot lift it, as the cape he's with - Ingenue - adds her power to his. When Chevalier fires, the recoil and detonation is deafening.

    And it strikes Scion, smashing him aside, tearing a great gouge in the earth. The golden man blinks back to where he had been floating just moments before, and raises his hand.

    A great beam of golden light spears forth, and the battle is joined as more capes pour through the portal. Clockblocker, a Chuckles clone, Legend, others...

     It's now or never.

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
"HIGH SPEED XIAOMU!!!!"

Of *course* the sage-fox from Shinra is here; she activates her lightcycle on her way through the portal - no trail-wall this time, it'd get in her allies' way and there's only one enemy to pin down - and pours on the velocity at ridiculous, arguably even suicidal, amounts.

She's not looking to get in her allies' lines of fire, mind you; Chevalier's cannonblade blast is not only extremely impressive, but more intimidating than Scion himself in some ways. Instead, Xiaomu picks her approach and twists the throttle, hairtails flapping in the headwind.

It looks for a few seconds like maybe she's not actually going to *attack* other than trying to run Scion over - but the second reason for picking this particular route quickly becomes obvious: ramping her lightcycle into a jump - possibly using a side of the gouge from Chevalier's opening attack - and actually dropping a couple of fire-elemental grenades on either side of Scion on the way over his head.

Assuming she gets that far and doesn't get blown away, she continues pouring on the speed as her lightcycle hits the ground again, zooming away to clear the area immediately around tonight's target.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Not being close to the opponent you're going to fight is a different way of doing things, that's for certain. And it looks like Toph Beifong does not like that idea too much where she stands along with the capes and other Elites where they are gathered, her arms crossed over her torso as she listens patiently to the instructions. There is a reason why they can't get close to him, and that makes it even harder to do something effective against him too. But this guy can fly and stuff, right? Which means that she will have to get somebody else to act as her eyes during all of this.

    "How close are the portals to where Scion is?" she asks with a serious look on her face, all while she 'looks' around the area for a familiar shape, listening for a familiar voice. If she is going into this literally blind, she'd rather have somebody she really trusts to watch her back and give her directions on where to unleash her bending.

Reina Kinney has posed:
    A light appears in the middle of the battlefield, in the shape of a young woman. OK, so it's a woman, but how do you know it's a young woman?

    Because when the light turns into an actual human, it's revealed to be Reina Kinney herself, having beamed in from her shuttle. She arrives not too far from where the other Elites are, and immediately runs over to join them, not one to waste time with slow travel if it's possible. Once she gets there, she looks to the others but doesn't say anything just yet. Instead, she takes a good look at everything and surveys the situation.

Zephyr Windstar (162) has posed:
    High above the battlefield, high above Scion and the Capes now fighting him, a spell seal appears. It's pure white, round and filled with mathematical formulae. Atop this seal, appears Zephyr, standing on it as if it were solid. "Limiter Release. Confirmed." she says to herself.

    "You sure about this Dee? This thing's bigger than any of us. He could shatter you in a single hit."

    <I UNDERSTAND. STANDBY. READY.>

    Zephyr chuckles. "You claim to be the level headed one, but you're just as eager to fight as I am... alright, lets do this. SET UP!"

    <DRIVE IGNITION. MISTRAL FORM, SET. BARRIER JACKET, BREEZE MODE. MISTRAL SQUALL. DIFFUSION MODE.>

    As she transforms, the spell circle fades, and the mage begins to freefall. "Allied forces. I am coming in from directly above. Clear a 100m zone around Scion... It's time to drop the hammer." she transmits over radio, hoping Scion can't intercept the call.

    "Gear Second." she intones, about half way down. The pin point of Scion begins to grow, and she can begin making out the others already fighting. <GEAR SECOND. MISTRAL STORM. STRIKE MODE.> Three Bits attach to the back side of her axe, spinning up as she readies her strike. "Limit Break. DRIVE MAX!"

    An explosion of power occurs above Scion, a great purple plume of raw magic, as Zephyr suddenly breaks the sound barrier and careers up to a suicidal speed. <MAXIMUM DRIVE. MISTRAL TEMPEST. STRIKE MODE. BARRIER JACKET SET. TEMPEST MODE.>

    Zephyr aims to slam her axe right into the Golden Man, and even try to slam him into the ground beneath, if she's able. <TEMPEST OBLITERATION!>

    To those who are keeping tabs. Zephyr's readout gains a Timer. As soon as she hits Tempest Mode, it begins to count down. 5 minutes. ()

Ainsley (151) has posed:
    Sitting with Defiant in the dragoncraft is Ainsley, the lizard woman having put on a black military-like suit that won't get caught on anything if she has to move quickly. She's got her own screen to look at, a small tablet device that she's focusing on with her arcane vision so she can properly analyze what's coming through and process it faster than if she were to read it manually. The lizard woman, despite being one of the most fragile creatures here, does not seem fearful. She does not shiver or frown. While she has acknowledged she could die here, it is simply a part of who she is to put herself in a situation like this... and so she feels at peace.

    "I feel like now would be a good time for a quote from religious texts," she murmurs, simply thinking aloud.

Frederica (73) has posed:
    Frederica is here in her costume as FireFox. Well, not all of her costume. She's without the mask. For those of Brockton Bay she's still rather recognizable as a figure who fought against Lung and against the Undersiders, and who appeared on a news show in the same costume only with the fox-faced mask in place. There's no point in hiding her identity, she seems to say. Whether this is because she's here at the death of a world or because she believes things will change in some other profound way isn't clear. Then again, whichever she believes is probably not as important as what the masked capes might take from it.

    She steps through the portal, raising her hand to direct her focus at Scion and his beam weapon. She could definitely hit the golden man... or at least, she could certainly reach and strike the area he currently floats in. What this might do to any of her allies, well, that's another matter entirely. She's not prepared to take that risk. Still, she's got another plan in mind. As Scion lances out with that golden beam from his hand, she lances out with her own fire. Psychic Jiu-jutsu. She aims her strike to intercept his at a close point, at a point where she can react properly before he can shift his aim to render her defense ineffective. Her power, fire and force and psychic energy laced together, might just be able to interfere with that beam. She might lack the strength to block it entirely, but perhaps she can force it off-course or weaken it. This, she intends to find out. If she can't defend people by striking Scion's golden lances with her fiery ones, she has other plans she intends to try... but for now she prefers to try to aid others rather than strike her own offensive blow.

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
"Once there was a maiden...
... who spent her life in shackles.
One day her masters offered to remove her chains, if she would behave.
With silent eyes she nodded, and her chains were removed.
When their backs were turned, she beat them with her undone shackles.
She stood over their bodies, covered in blood, and she whispered:
'Defiance knows no wait. Vengeance knows no duration.'"
~Scripture of the Rebellious Maiden~

    For better or for worse for the fate of this world, Yuri Stinson has been beckoned. There were some who said his power would not work against Scion, but there were others who had requested he arrive specifically for such a battle. Even in the staging area, it would have been both hard and easy to spot his presence. A being with an utter quietness about him that always seems just one moment away from exploding violently. A murderous aura that seems to permeate and seep from every pore of his existence. And beyond that, a simple sense of wrongness once gets from his existence.

    And yet, he says nothing as they are all briefed. Instead, once the portal appears, he simply walks into it and through it, appearing on the other side to see his target. He narrowed his eyes faintly and took a slow breath. This was, if nothing else, to be a field test. If he could bloody Scion, then he could bloody Malfeas. And he was one step closer to his goal if he could do that. He was in his conceptual wheelhouse, albeit in a world where his concept was foreign and alien.

    "Scion..." He says, his voice an almost emotionless monotone, only a hint of fervorous violence seeping in the edges, "I invite you to join my rebellion. We shall have a bloody dance, and at the crescendo, we shall see whose concept holds strong."

    Yuri slowly steps towards the golden man. And as he does so, he seems to conceptually exhale. A forceful release, as if he had been holding back for days, weeks... perhaps months. A wave of conceptual force that seems to strike violence and fear into the hearts of all around him. Reality begins to buckle and warp around Yuri as he steps forward, watching Scion as he slowly takes off his cloak and releases it away from himself.

    Within all but the most detached hearts of mankind, there exists embers or perhaps a flicking flame. The flame of want, of desire, of jealousy. A flame of hatred for those who exist at a place higher than them and a burning loathing of those who would hold them back for it. It is when this flame erupts and consumes the man that the true monster of rebellion is revealed. This ability... Yuri's own Shintai... reflects such a state.

~Monster in Men's Hearts Shintai~

    Yuri's form seems to warp, reality itself buckling and forming around him. The man on the ground slowly vanishes as piece after piece of reality slams into him, slowly beginning to form a new existence from out of nothingness. It expands to a monstrous size and form, a goliath titan made of stone, flesh, and hatred. A beast with snarling jaws and eyes that roar with fire. The earth itself, the land of the people, is its armor on its hips and shoulders, forming its gauntlets and claws. Their flames of passion are its eyes and voice, and Yuri's own loathing of tyrants is its body.

    When it finally finishes, the monster is the size of a massive building. It lets out a furious roar.

    "THE REBELLION MARCHES ANEW."

Testament (842) has posed:
This is one of the few times Testament doesn't have his raven with him. If this is going to be a fight to the death, he'd prefer his raven not be in it if at all possible. While it's true she'd die if he died, he'd rather her not die as a result of trauma to herself. Not only because it would cause trauma to him either. But because he really doesn't want her to die.

    He is in the battlefield, of course, blood-scythe already formed. And as the others set to work fighting Scion, Testament joins in. He extends his hand as if offering something, but in the palm appears a skull with a glowing black-orange aura.

    The skull leaps from his hand and begins to fly toward Scion, snapping its teeth. Should the magical skull construct hit, it is infused with toxic magical power that will try to curse him with a poisonous curse.

Maya has posed:
The hovering form of the Septerran Warship the Marduk was here but it was not to here to fight it was here to aid in getting people clear or should they need it's mamamoth magitech weapons for the fight. Maya was here clad in her normal battle gear. She was more than ready but she also had a cloak on. She listens for a moment good and bad the capes had come. IT was enough Maya would soon deploy to a mssive battle it was not her world but much like another moment on her own.

Maya deployed later from the transport and looks out at the Golden Man. Hr green eyes narrow for a long moment as she watches the others go, she then stops holding back there's a flare up of magic about her she's not holding back not today.

"Scion..."

Maya seems to be making ready at htis point as those move in to strike magical power weapons of all sorts but maya watis as she starts to channel magic and blue fire seems to cover her body as she does so.

"How many ... worlds before this one have you devoured?"

Tesla Armadia (368) has posed:
    STAGING AREA

    'Former Birdcage inmates' would include one Stratos, whom despite being a criminal jerk didn't really want to see her world reduced to ash and ruin. The sphere of her powers was pretty specialized, but she was still a Tinker at the core. She had been helping Teacher's men work, though right now she was helping others prepare for battle. Like using her lightning gun to try and supercharge an Electricity themed cape (who instinctively flinched at being 'shot' by a known villain, even if she was trying to help). One of her weather drones was creating a small frost storm to keep an Ice power cape from overheating before he takes to the field, while the other was raining on one that required large amounts of water to charge up their powers.

    Who knew if any of it would be effective, but it was making the effort that counted, right? Right? At least she didn't decide to just ditch and run simply because she had already established herself outside this world, that has got to give some sort of credit.

    BATTLEFIELD

    For various reasons Tesla had not been at the staging ground in person. Mostly because her presence might of been a bit unsettling to the other sides involved, after everything she had done before the End Times had started. But Dragon has kept the Confederate in on the loop, you could say, so she knew when and where the big movement was going to take place.

    And it's to that location that her heavy duty terrestrial machine comes chugging up, to the edges of the designated combat zone. Though the Mad Maxizer did not have it's combat arms deployed yet, so it just looked like a big cyberpunk truck parked in the field right now. Tesla knew where her strengths were, and charging headlong into a fight without analysis or preperation was not one of them. "The chessboard is being set up," What would be the main console of the vehicle is bare, since Tesla only had to put her hands upon that surface to operate it with her technopathic powers. "Time to move our own pieces into place."

    At her mental command the side panels of the Maxizer angle open, and several small drones are launched into the air. They're basically delta wings with a multifunctional tactical sensor housing in the center, moving to circle around the beginning battle and focusing their arrays on Scion. In the cab multiple holographic screens flash into being around Tesla, already beginning the process of datastreams passing across them as Chevalier opens fire. "Now we shall find out what makes you tick properly..."

    "I'm kind of surprised you're still investing so much effort into this, Master," Saiga comments idly from where the shinki sits on Tesla's shoulder, holding her own small display module in her larger utility arms. "I think most people would of deemed it a lost cause now."

    "I did not go this far just to turn and walk away now," the scientist replies. "No enemy is undefeatable. Just as no obstacle is insurmountable." She made a few mental adjustments, trying to get the drones to key in on whatever energy it is Scion uses. If he has to draw it from a source, then there has to be a way to cut it off, even if just temporarily.

    "As far as I am concerned, this is just another obstacle. Another to be removed from the board."

    Saiga tilted her head a little. "And you, Master?"

    "Some hand needs to be moving the pieces into place."

Defiant (554) has posed:
    STAGING AREA

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    "The portals can't get closer than approximately five miles," Defiant replies, not moving his eyes from the monitors. "We tried. Once."

    As Toph feels around, there's a tall man wearing a metal mask, whose skin appears to be growing more metallic by the second. It's Lung, his power to meet any opponent on an equal footing apparently supercharging him to take on Scion. Of course, there's also Miss Militia who seems like she's about to go through the portal too.

    "And, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil..."

    Dragon's voice buzzes from one of the speakers in the dragoncraft. "...for thou art with me."

    THE BATTLEFIELD

    Xiaomu is one of the first there, ramping off the great gouge in the earth to close the gap to Scion. He burns in the fire of the grenades, but it doesn't seem to effect him. Every molecule that combusts he replaces, burning eternally, golden 'dust' flowing off his form as he replaces the spent matter. He turns, and blasts out with a beam of light - and this one /follows/ Xioamu, homing in on her in a very un-laserlike fashion!

    Zephyr falls on Scion, and her axe...

     ...bites deep. In fact, it meets the top of his head and slices off about half of it. It's only for a moment, but Scion flickers and his head and shoulder is restored to pristine condition. But, for just that second, Zephyr is sure that she saw the golden man /bleed/. The ground shatters around him, but Scion keeps his feet as he is driven down into the ground. And then the golden man raises his hand, and opens fire with a golden beam - thin, precise, aiming at piercing Zephyr's heart!

    Frederica lashes out to stop Scion's beam. Her psychic fire intecepts it and, just like that, Scion's beam /splits/ at the impact point. While about half the energy is deflected elsewhere, much of it continues on to strike Chevalier. He's pouring power into his cannon blade though, so, it appears to be left with a bit of melted slag on one side. He's already preparing to fire again.

    Testament's skull nails Scion right in the chest, sinking its teeth into his golden pectorals. Scion doesn't appear to pay it any mind, and simply reaches down to crush the thing in his grip. It's a poisonous curse, and magic is completely unknown to the golden man, but who knows whether it'll have an effect. Or, perhaps, the curse will feed back down the link to Scion's 'well'...

    As Yuri steps up to him, Scion turns to look at him. His face betrays no expression, gives no hint of what he's feeling - if anything at all. He stares, perhaps trying to figure out this odd power. Because Scion is a tyrant, a cosmic one, one who has established an order that benefits him, putting all of the pieces in place so he can't be challenged - at least by those who he has had influence over. Turning that beam off Chevalier, Scion simply points his palm at Yuri and opens fire, pouring out his golden energy to try and simply vaporise great swathes of Yuri's new form, like he would an Endbringer.

    To Tesla and Maya and Reina, the battle isn't going too well. When capes step up to Scion, he thrashes them in /seconds/. A cape with a glowing hammer and an invulnerability power is caught by Scion and utterly annihilated. Legend hammers Scion with a glittering beam, and then doubles down with a second, and Scion doesn't appear to be any worse for wear. He barely manages to catch a flying cape with a strike from his hand, and they hit the ground like they'd been struck by a comet. Many of them, he doesn't kill.

    He's toying with them.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    Clockblocker's group has already been mostly destroyed. The Chuckles clone closes the gap and Scion puts his fist /through/ the former Slaughterhouse villain, and then rips him in two. "He wasn't even aiming at us," the cape calls over the radio, "And he still took out everyone! Fuck!"

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
Shooting at her from behind? Xiaomu sort of expected that; as soon as she notices the extra light behind her, she swerves.

Homing in on her?

"IS THAT EVEN FAIR?!" the sage fox squawks, hunkering down even tighter, pushing her lightcycle right up against its limits to squeeze out every possible milligram of speed - and activating the trail-wall function as she starts zig-zagging. Unless that beam can swerve up or down in a manner that ISN'T tracking Xiaomu, it should wind up slamming into a force-field wall somewhere behind her.

She's going to be busy with this for just a little while, it seems; she's not going to launch more offense until she has a better idea of what to try next. Most of her good attacks depend on having one or both hands free, and the lightcycle tends to need both hands for best results - especially at this kind of speed.

Zephyr Windstar (162) has posed:
    Zephyr's too close. But a thankful thing, even if it leaves her open to another follow up, is the backblast from her spell. Not the physical blast... the magical recoil on her linker core. It makes her shift, and that beam punches through her. In, through, and out again, barely missing that fatal strike. Granting, an inch wide hole burned right through someone isn't going to be /pleasant/ but she's alive, and backing off to ready up another attack.

    The timer takes a sudden plunge in 'active time'. Every spell eats into how long she can support Tempest Mode.

    "Ragios, Razgris, Lethim." begins Zephyr, as the bits supporting her melee strike detatch and begin to circle around the gemstone head. "Parijium, Gralith, Horaph. Bring unto me a Maelstrom." Zephyr takes a knee, aiming at Scion with her Device as one might a cannon. <STANDBY. MISTRAL TEMPEST, FOCUS MODE. MAELSTROM BREAKER.> The Bits form a five-point 'star' and project a series of 'hoops' that narrow down, forming a barrel of sorts for the building energy flux.

    Divine Wind's single blade splits neatly in half, turning double-bladed once more, though each is much more flimsy than Windshear Form's battleax blades. These are more akin to 'vanes' that focus magical power. They pulse with purple energy, and with a simple command: "FIRE!" the energy caught within those vanes, the gem, and the surrounding sphere of coalesced power, bursts forth in a torrent of destruction.

    The 'barrel' focusses this outwelling of raw power into a coherant beam of doom, which causes yet another sudden drop in the timer. Someone might need to extract her if she doesn't break off herself.

Tesla Armadia (368) has posed:
    The tactical drones continue to circle the battle, occasionally altering course to avoid attackers but not engaging directly themselves. They're only observing and gathering data to relay back to Tesla and Dragon.

    One drone does break free of the pattern though, and after a quick trip to the portal comes to hover by Toph, beeping at her. A moment later and it syncs into her communications gear. She'll be able to 'see' it guide her since it is made of metal, and it can give simple warnings at possible attacks. Hopefully. That Scion is likely fighting dirty may make that less effective, but it's still help, right.

    "I almost hate to say it," Tesla comments, though it's likely only Saiga, and Dragon via comm-conferencing, that can hear her, "but this is entirely what I expected. He's just -too- well suited for fighting anyone else from this world, he's barely using his powers yet." One drone's screen zooms in on Zephyr's attack, catching the seemingly instantaneous restoration of Scion's head afterwards. "Almost as if he's 'cheating' reality."

"So what do we do now, Master."

    Tesla merely shifted one hand, and a set of controls activated out of the otherwise blank console. She grips the controller, and with a mechanical rumble the Maxizer rolls to life once more, this time actually advancing towards the battlefield.

    "We cheat harder." A faint smirk curls a side of Tesla's mouth, mainly because she just enjoys a challenge. "Hell, us -being- here is pretty much cheating. It's a perk of being a certified villain."

    She gives a command, and as the machine rolls closer the arrays mounted just above the cab fire, hurtling multiple projectiles into the air, the conical shapes spinning so fast they become like high velocity drills. They actually spread out... only to all change a sharp angle instantly and home in on Scion from multiple directions.

    "I can do it whenever I damn well please."

Frederica (73) has posed:
    "Heya Lung!" FireFox greets the former Birdcage inmate cheerily. The guy she helped SEND to the Birdcage. She really wishes she were just fighting him instead of Scion. He's not so bad really. And besides, he's helping out. That's a good thing right? Maybe they can be friends... or maybe at least they can help each other. "Let me know if you need more fire. Or... hm. Perhaps I could even accelerate your power, if it relies on fire!" she suggests.

    After she partly blocks Scion's attack, Frederica is heartened by outcome. Possibly she's just saved Chevalier. If that beam had hit him head-on, well, so much for the Cape. Still there's room for improvement. Scion can fire stronger attacks. He destroyed the British Isles with one of those beams, and the attack she'd partially deflected just wasn't anywhere near that power.

    Gritting her teeth, Frederica brings up her hands, readying her active defense. "Anyone who can fight from range and is not mobile, stay close to me!" she calls into her communicator. Those who can dodge are probably better-off doing so, but those with limited mobility might be best-off trusting to the FireFox's anti-artillery powers. She's not of this world, after all. Her powers aren't something Scion can easily counter, and she's not about to stand back and let people die here if there's something she can do about it!

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Well, this is an interesting pair of eyes to call it that. As the drone comes her way Toph arches an eyebrow as she wonders just how it will work. And then Defiant speaks about his range, making the blind girl sigh. Just... great. Bending works better up close, as it will require a lot of power to even hurl something across that distance, and by the time it has made it across that way... it will have lost too much power to be effective.

    "Come on, Pointy," she says to the drone with a slight huff, then heads towards the portal. Perhaps she's overthinking it, and that's not how an earthbender does things.

    On the other side of the portal Toph instantly becomes aware as the drone extends a hand towards the threat, and distance is spoken into her ear over her com. Okay, this ought to make things slightly less impossible. The earthbending master cracks her knuckles, then kicks the ground as a tunnel digs its way down into the ground. "Let's see how this works... and let's hope you can keep up." Why yes, she's speaking to the drone still. After all, Toph is used to most of the electronic stuff and robots having a personality. Even if they're not Jarvis. Speed will be an issue here, so... let's go. Even if the drone decides to stay above ground it might not get targeted by Scion, and well... perhaps it's not speedy enough to keep up with her underground. Then again, who knows? Tesla probably knows what she's doing.

    Toph leaps into the hole she just opened up, and once she's underground she extends her arms, focusing on the earth in front of her. Going in a straight line is bad, so let's just follow the earth here, go from soft spot to soft spot, avoid the rocky parts. As she begins bending, she will have enough to deal with. The earth in front is pushed aside and down under the floor of the tunnel, and then shifted to send herself forward, rushing through the ground, all while she does her best to sense the drone and where it's pointing. For now Toph isn't going to get too close to Scion, let's test this out with a hit and run. At around two hundred meters away from Scion the blind girl stops bringing herself forward and instead throws her arms forward quickly against the earth in front of her several times, building up power in several strikes.

    The response? A series of large earthen spikes shoot up from the ground just a few meters away from Scion.

    Underground, Toph is already tunnelling her away back towards the portal, all while waiting for a reaction to her attack and hoping she won't find herself suddenly blown up.

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
    The Monster in Men's Hearts Shintai is an interesting transformation. At its conceptual level, it seeks to empower Yuri and generate a form in response to every person that his foe or target has oppressed. In a situation like Scion, a cosmic tyrant, it is equatable to its reaction against someone like Malfeas: It puts Yuri into an insane power threshhold.

    That said, Yuri is not an Endbringer. He is different and he is more, he is also less in some ways and nothing like them. There are similarities, conceptual monsters meant to prey on the weaker, but Yuri is a focused beast and a monster with a purpose. He has long accepted what he is, and without FIA to tie back his hand with humanity at this moment, he has no hesitation to do what it takes to bring his prey to ground.

    As he lunges forward, the beam catches him cleanly, his massive form not as adept at evasion as the machine or the man that sit at its core. He sacrifices many of his charms to use this form, and it is as powerful as his machine, albeit more powerful in other ways. The huge beam carves massive chunks out of him, the wounded beast's parts falling to the ground and shattering to dust.

    But for someone like Yuri, who long since found the ability to feel pain to be an inconvenience that he removed, the damage is an inconvenience at best. He lunges forward with claw and roar, the sliced away parts already starting to reform from ground and dust. He was injured, but he felt no pain and pressed onward in a blind rage.

    As the beast closes on on Scion, it opens its mouth and lets out a massive roar. Green Sun Wasting exits its mouth in a massive roar of flame and rage. The flames of Malfeas scorch the ground and wash over Scion, carrying a terrible conceptual disease with them. They eat away and erode at the existence of anything organic they touch, trying to infect it with a terrible illness as its core level.

    Yuri has removed all restraint and is laying waste to the landscape around Scion in an attempt to bring him pain.

Testament (842) has posed:
    Testament's not unaware of hubris. Perhaps that's what's keeping Scion from really making much of a reaction to his poison curse. Or maybe he doesn't realize it. At worst it's ineffective. But what he's heard of this beforehand, that's exactly what they're trying to do-- find out what hurts this thing. There are no failures, only further experimentation needed.

    And since that didn't seem to have any visible effect, Testament grips the scythe in hand, and suddenly a momentary wind wind ruffles his kilt and hair. Toph may be able to 'see' it forming (though those with magic may sense it)-- a seed forms underground, aimed underneath Scion, and then suddenly a large tree bursts to life where it forms. Though 'to life' might be a misnomer, because the tree is dead and has a scary face on it. the tree only stays around long enough to either deliver its hit or miss; after this it rots away to nothing, as if it were never there.

Maya has posed:
Maya was thinking about going on the attack but that's not the wiest action given all the capes who are going ripped apart. She holds back now and starts to channel a spell, there's a lot of people hurt already she's going to just do what she can Maya focuses her magic into a pair of cards and a strange pluse of pink energy will wash over the battle site those who are alive will find their wounds starting to heal even those who might be down enough to get up and move again. Maya's not done yet she's going cast a second spell after that she's going to get those local and those from the multivers who will allow it a barrier spell which will reduce the amoutn of damage that they will take from attacks. It's not perfect but it's might just save some people. She also tries to not recouil at Yuri's power. She knows exactly why he's using it but it still none the less unsettling to her and the barrier spell is also cast.

Reina Kinney has posed:
    This is not looking good at all. Reina is watching the Scion with widened eyes and shaking her head in disbelief. Those poor Capes are getting whupped more and more by the moment. Reina gulps a little, but then remembers she's with GUARDIANS and isn't supposed to back down unless there's truly no other option whatsoever. She snaps her fingers, and her rifle appears in her hands.

    "Ain't much," She comments, "But it's better than going bare-handed against it!" She aims at the Scion and opens fire with her rifle, in hopes of drawing its attention away from the Capes so that they can get some breathing room.

Staren has posed:
    One day, ONE DAY, Staren will get to live the dream of attempting to lay the technological smack down on one of the Multiverse's problems by purging it with thermonuclear fire.

    Today is not that day.

    Which isn't to say that Staren isn't bringing technological might. Staren has taken this long because his weapon is too big to fit through a portal. The transforming war machine, currently diving through the upper atmosphere at several times the speed of sound, stops far more abruptly than any flesh-and-blood pilot should be able to handle. Metal creaks and strains around Staren, but he's just fine keeping his distance from Scion for now. He's still in the same machine body used to tirelessly hunt the Slaughterhouse Nine's clones. It has no risk of blacking out from too many Gs, short of forces strong enough to physically tear it to pieces.

    Staren's opening salvo is three missiles launched from miles away, packed with 25th century high explosives. Scion's not the only one with homing weapons. Staren wonders: Will he dodge? Demonstrate some resistance to force? Manifest some kind of forcefield? Every reaction, every attack that doesn't work, brings him closer to finding the one that will...

Theo Morrison has posed:
Theo's presence at the Staging Area is incongruous at best and downright odd at worst. To the passerby, he looks a lot like a random civilian standing around playing a game when they're fighting for their lives. To the informed cape, he's instead quite clearly one of "them," if in plainclothes and from another world entirely. The Deckmaster has his own tricks, and he has to do them in a very precise kind of way...

For a while, Theo was standing around and waiting for something to happen. Queries about why he hadn't setup in advance or gotten ready for the onslaught were met with cryptic responses, all the way up until the last minute, where he instead defaulted to an irritated, 'It doesn't work that way.' All he's got is a deck of cards, a play space, a trio of metal signets from Ravnican guilds, and a bird-robot that's doing a lot of staring off into space.

Then Scion did his thing, and Theo put his plan into motion.

It's been a few turns by his reckoning. Theo's got a row of Plains cards (full art, of course; Psyber pays him well enough for the indulgence) laid out in front of him, and had just played a creature: a Mesa Enchantress, a dark-skinned woman in a white garment somewhere between a fancy robe and an unadorned dress. She wields a gnarled, crooked staff, and stands on the far side of the portal, staring off into the distance at the battlefield.

The turn cycles. Theo takes a breath. He hasn't done things form this kind of range before. Is this the real strength of his abilities? He plays another land, this one with an image of an icy wall on the card. "Glacial Fortress!"

The ground changes. The battlefield with Scion at the center suddenly erupts with growing, spreading cold, an enormous, towering wall made of glacial ice rising up from nowhere. A glacier carved into the shape of a medieval fortress forms out of the ice, with a sheer wall pockmarked with archery slits from the interior facing the godlike monster. (The /hostile/ one, he reminds himself. He's got a good view of Yuri from here.)

He taps a Plains, flicking it sideways with a thoughtless motion. Aether is summoned from the space beyond space, and mana fills the vessel he creates. "Nyxborn Shieldmate." A figure wrought of bronze and with a shadow of a starry sky stands atop the battlements with the Enchantress. He wields a spear and a round shield, a hoplite who seems to blend with the icy walls as if he were a carving within them rather than a defender.

"Enchantress triggers," Theo mutters. He draws a card, glances at it and rearranges his hand. He plays. "Kor Spiritdancer." Another creature is formed, manifesting on the walls: what looks like an albino woman, wearing far less of her brown leathers than is advisable on a glacier. She looks to the others, and then, with a nod, leads them towards the colossal gates.

I'm going to need a bigger fortress, Theo thinks, watching the battle.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    THE BATTLEFIELD

    It's really not fair. The golden beam hits a force-field and breaks through, then another, and another - until it eventually stops. It either lost too much energy or Scion turned his attention elsewhere. Either way, Xiaomu might have a few moments to plan.

    Zephyr's beam catches Scion straight on - perhaps the Golden Man doesn't understand the idea of needing to dodge. He will now because the purple torrent eclipses him beneath waves of power. Golden dust or smoke billows around the beam as Scion loses layer after layer after layer of his avatar.

    And then a great golden pointed blade rips free from the beam, and Scion aims to cut Zephyr in half! For a brief moment /anger/ can be felt, radiating off where the golden man should be in that beam.

    Freeing himself from the beam with a brief teleport, Scion finds himself attacked by drills. They meet his flesh and drill into him, churning down to some level where they simply can't turn anymore. Perhaps like an Endbringer, he's harder to hurt the deeper one gets. He alights with golden fire and the metal drills melt out of the holes they had made. He pays the advancing machine no mind, because Yuri lunges at him.

    Yuri's claws strike Scion, ripping through him. His arm comes off at the elbow and Scion /blinks/. It only takes him a moment to restore it, but it's clear that the sudden strength and ferocity caught him off guard. After all, what had withstood his Endbringer beams before? Nothing.

    The Green Sun Wasting technique catches Scion just as he appears to be figuring out his efforts. The landscape around Scion is gone instantly and Scion's body, organic in some level, vanishes with it. There's a sudden clap of thunder and Scion is gone.

    No, not gone. He's just /sidestepped/. Scion emerges, still alight with green fire, and how he's radiating /anger/. Scion aims to hit Yuri with a one-two strike. First, he distorts space-time around the transformed avatar of rebellion, to slow and stumble him, and then, while that may catch him off guard, Scion blasts at him with a beam that whirls around itself like a double-helix.

    He doesn't get much time to hold the beam on Yuri though, because a great /tree/ impales Scion from below. The golden man flickers and teleports to the left of it, leaving golden... blood? mass? behind on the branches. Scion immediately returns his attention to Yuri, but Toph is there and large earthen spikes rip free from the earth and tear through his golden form. Scion turns, extending his senses outward, and lashes out a series of blasts in the general direction of Toph and Testament. /Aggrevation/.

    Even deep below the earth, Toph can feel the ground shake with every blast from Scion.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    Frederica gets a good view of Lung essentially shedding his human form and becoming something... else. A great big dragon of a person, white fire already burning from around his fangs. "I am always looking for more fire," he manages to growl out, stalking towards the battlefield. "I am ready for the fight."

    Reina's rifle doesn't seem to be much against a godlike being, but maybe something so small can do the job. The bullets seem to hit him, but whether they slow him or not... Either way, it draws some kind of reaction from Scion, and he fires of a quick volley of explosive golden bolts towards Reina.

    He doesn't get to project any more than that because Staren's missiles intercept him. The first two detonate, throwing Scion back. The third, Scion /catches/. So, he's got some ability to adapt to new things. He crushes the missle in his grip and funnels the explosive energy elsewhere, sucking it away into a vortex.

    And then, all of a sudden, thanks to Theo... the battlefield suddenly seems to get very cold. When one cape stops to gape at the new ice fortress, Scion catches them. Scion radiates /amusement/ as he immolates the superhero. Like a child pulling the wings off a fly.

Zephyr Windstar (162) has posed:
    Zephyr squawks, and leaps back, a moment too late.

    The sword catches her, cutting deep into her right shoulder, before Divine Wind can react. <REACTOR PURGE!> The entire Jacket explodes, pushing the blade away and leaving the Mage in her TSAB uniform. She bounces across the ground, landing in an awkward pile of pain and misery.

    Zephyr's readout on Dragon's system switches from a timer to "Incapacitated." immediately.

Staren has posed:
    In the cockpit, to noone in particular, Staren curses when Scion /stores an explosion/. "****ing vector traps! I thought I was /done/ dealing with that nonsense!"

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
    Yuri lets out a snarl that sounds less like a man and more like an uncaged beast. As he shoots past Scion with the blast of fire, he digs his claws into the ground to pull himself to a stop. This is a lucky move for him, since he finds himself slammed with a one-two strike from the cosmic being. He lets out a howl of rage, which is promptly slurred as the impact of a fist tears off the lower jaw of the monster.

    Claws cut through dirt (and eventually ice) as Yuri seeks to pull himself to a stop on the battlefield after being hit like that. He scrabbles against the terrain and the momentum generated by his larger form before he pushes back into a standing position. At its core, the man that services as the point of origin for the massive beast formed around him focuses in. He was pushing, but not hard enough. Never hard enough.

    Scion was a tyrant. Scion was no different than Malfeas. No different than the Golden Sun. Someone with the power to fix everything, protect everyone, and still they did nothing. He could feel the rage boiling inside of him at the injustice of such an existence, at such a being that stands anathema to everything he has come to stand for.

    "SCION."

    The beast cries out before lunging forward again, through the beam as it takes off the head of his body, only for it to move forward, the voice coming from its throat instead of its mouth after that. He's taking pieces off of it, but Yuri is pushing with every piece of conceptual weight he has.

    "A BEING THAT WOULD IMPOSE HIS WILL ON A PLANET IS NO SAVIOR."

    One of the massive monster's claws glows red, as if superheating. He pushes forward and lunges towards Scion a moment later.

    "NO SAVIOR AT ALL. IT IS A MONSTER. AND I AM THE MONSTER THAT DEVOURS SUCH THINGS IN KIND. THE CHECK TO YOUR BALANCE."

    He thrusts the claw forward towards Scion. If it hits, it doesn't attack his body. It seeks to put a white-hot brand across his very concept. A wound that no healing will erase and no man can undo. The claw strike itself judges him for his actions and, if it finds him a tyrant as Yuri himself does, it carves a brand into his entire existence.

    It's painful and, more importantly, it will empower Yuri in his fight against the monster going forward.

Tesla Armadia (368) has posed:
    "So this is what a 'god' looks like angry." There's still a hint of levity in Tesla's voice, but it's no more than the surface. This was business.

    Scion was being hurt. He was restoring himself just as quickly, but he was being hurt and some point in time and that is important right now. He was also trying to adapt to the new threats presented to him, even taking the TSAB mage down, but it was not instantaneous. Likely he was trying to decide who was the biggest threat and focus on taking them out. A pragmatic approach, but not always the most effective with so many targets to opponents to deal with.

    Passively Tesla mentally instructs her drones to narrow their parameters, still trying to find a signature for the energy Scion is drawing off of.

    But the Mad Maxizer is unaccousted as of yet, and Tesla moves her machine into position to take advantage of it. "Saiga, could you? I'm busy with the drones and driving." A panel flips open on the console to reveal a few levers.

    "Of course Master!" The shinki hopped off her shoulder and onto the panel, grabbing the levers with her exo-frame arms. She pulls one, and then the other.

    Outside a roar emits from the machine as the massive turbine that sits in front of it's monsterous engine starts to spin up even faster, to the point that it's causing almost visible air disruptions around it, until it finally 'blasts' forth into a curning windtunnel like vortex aimed at Scion. It wasn't Stratos' technology per say, but something Tesla constructed based on it. With her own twist, so to speak, as when the second lever is pulled, several clusters of shrapnel are ejected into the vortex, turning it into a whirling stream of serrated edges hurtling towards Scion. Like a hurricane made of hundreds of daggers.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Oh yeah, it hit! Despite the fact that she's heading away from Scion at the moment Toph can't help but allow herself some sense of accomplishment that her powers work on this guy too. But she is on her now relatively cold toes as she feels the blasts tear through the earth, compromising the general stability of the ground around her as she lets out a yelp and stumbles slightly, gritting her teeth as she slams her hands into the walls of her tunnel as she focuses on making sure it doesn't fall down all around her. "Oh puckernuts...!" This guy kicks like a ostrich horse! If one of those blasts hit her head on with full force, then...

    Better not think about it.

    But it seems like he can't tell exactly where she is.

    Well, the drone is still doing his thing and pointing at Scion, so Toph begins making her way around the area where Scion is. The other Elites on the ground are easily sensed and avoided as several pillars suddenly start shooting up from the ground around Scion, one after another. Then, with seemingly no order at all, parts of the pillars break off only to fly directly towards Scion in rapid succession. Hopefully this will make it harder for Scion to imagine just where the instigator behind the attacks can be.

Frederica (73) has posed:
    Frederica moves forward, keeping pace with Lung at least at first; while the villain is still humanish. This is going to be an unusual use of her power, so she needs to keep close to minimize the energy and the strain. Once Lung goes full-dragon there's no chance the little pyrokinetic can keep up and she'll have to cancel her little trick... but when Lung goes full-dragon, there's no further need for it. "You want fire? Fine. You got fire." she says, focussing her will to form a bright burning ball of the stuff. She floats the ball over to Lung, letting it sit near him. From reports she knows he's essentially immune to it, but she's not about to forcibly engulf him... just in case. She just holds it close enough that he can draw on the heat, or inhale it into his gullet if he so desires.

    Frederica's also maintaining some awareness of Scion. If he points their way, if she sees golden beams coming, she'll redirect her little ball of sunshine in an attempt to deflect it.

Reina Kinney has posed:
    Golden bolts? Aimed right at Reina? Say it isn't so.

    OK, so it is so.

    Regardless, Reina is reminded of all the fights she's had with the infamous aquatic creature known as the De Rol Le (which also serves as a personal curse word when she's angry,) and realizes that she'd best move... and fast! With a yell, Reina takes a couple of running steps, then does a forwards dive, rolling out of the way as she hits the ground. She rolls a couple of times before landing in a crouched position. "Holy Falz, that thing is insane!" She comments as she halts her fire for the time being, watching to consider an alternate course of action.

Testament (842) has posed:
    And THAT is why Testament left his raven out of this. Because he had a feeling this was going to be far too dangerous for her. And he's not wrong, either! Seeing the beams fired at Xiaomu seem to disappear, Testament gets an idea. He suddenly thrusts the bladeof his scythe into the ground, and the blasts aimed in his and Toph's directions are met with wall after wall of blood, raising up from the ground like hands to grasp at the blasts, only to be incinerated instantly.

    But he isn't as powerful as Scion by a long shot, so even though he raises several such walls of blood to try and block, a blast still gets through to him. And even after using so much energy incinerating every single quite literally bloody wall he could raise between himself and it, the blast still hits him hard enough to force the air out of his lungs with a loud grunt and throw him far, far back.

    He doesn't immediately get up, but when he does, he starts to laugh. Even as he too begins to regenerate the damage-- the bones of his ribs can be seen through his skin normally anyway, and now they can be seen re-orienting themselves-- he laughs. And then he presses the blade of that scythe into the ground again, and more hands of blood rise up. This time they're not aimed to block. They're aimed to smack at Scion, flailing at him wildly.

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
Only when she is no longer being pursued by a massive beam of 'F*** YOU' does Xiaomu finally glance over her shoulder, cut the trail-wall, and slow her lightcycle to something less likely to instantaneously kill her if it should hit an obstacle she can't avoid by going left, right, or over. She seriously needs to catch her breath, and NOT figuratively; a lightcycle on the Grid can draw ambient power from the System to activate the trail-wall, but out in the analog world, Xiaomu has to channel her own chi into it, and sustaining the wall long enough to tank all of Scion's pursuing beam took a lot out of her.

IT also gives her time to survey the battle (as well as she can at this distance, even turning onto a circular course with Scion at its center) and try to evaluate her options. Fire-elemental grenades are her biggest regular attack; they made Scion start regenerating. Other heroes - capets and Elites alike - are dishing out attacks that far outweigh most of her other offensive options. She's got two handguns (which can be loaded with normal or anti-spirit rounds; she's got the latter loaded as a matter of course), a third handgun which fires ice-element blasts, her staff-sword Suiren (also ice-elemental), some magic tricks ...

Hmm. Maybe one of those is worth a try, and it'd make up for lost energy rather nicely - *IF* it works. The problem is getting close enough.

The sage fox eyes the center of the battle a little longer, then turns a bit further inwards, beginning a closing spiral towards Scion.

Theo Morrison has posed:
"Plains." Another land goes down. Theo has a nice collection, now. Nothing about the battlefield changes; he's already wrought the alterations he needed. He taps everything, fishing a card out of his hand. "Sigil of the Empty Throne."

In the middle of the fortress at the top of the keep, a throne appears. White and gold, the seat is backed by a flat representation of upswept wings, making something like a vertically-pointed arrowhead behind the actual seat. It stands on a pedestal, with strips of golden cloth fluttering from it in the wind, and with moss and ivy having crawled partway up the chair-back and the bottoms of the 'wings'; a sign of clear disuse.

The defenders of the fortress haven't moved from the gate. They seem to be waiting, or holding a line that they can't hope to defend against someone like Scion.

Theo, meanwhile, draws a card and waits.

Staren has posed:
    Okay. Missiles don't work. At least Staren discovered that /before/ firing his 100+ full complement of missiles at the guy. And the explosions knocked him around. Scion's projection has mass, unlike Siberian. Interesting. Also, Scion didn't retaliate. Could he have limited range of senses, or is it just because there are so many closer opponents right now. Staren considers weapons to test next. There are two other long-range weapons he wants to try, and the more powerful of them he really wants to see what will happen.

    The Star Hawk changes form, arms and legs unfolding beneath the plane. One of the shoulder packs (on the top-rear-right of the fuselage, in this configuration) opens and extends into what looks like a massive sniper rifle longer than the mecha itself. Staren waits for the capacitors to charge. He has plenty of time while the others keep it busy, and it doesn't take /that/ long.

    Staren waits until it looks liks Scion's busy. Most importantly, focused on something else and not looking up. The whole machine reconfigures into a humanoid in a blur of tiny moving parts. Jump jets and auxiliary rocket thrusters in the packs kick on, allowing it to hover for a time even when it can't use the main engines in this configuration.

    Staren aims the 'rifle' /down/. Several stabilizer struts open from the back of the rifle, dotted with thrusters. When he fires, a whole lot of things happen as massive amounts of stored energy change form.

    Thrusters on the mecha and the weapon fire to offset the recoil. Capacitors in the base of the weapon dump gigajoules of energy into rails inside the barrel, creating a magnetic field that hurls the shell inside downward at several times the speed of sound. Beyond the physical realm, enchantments layed upon the machine imbue the departing projectile with magic power to further enhance the destruction about to ensue.

    At shorter range the round's travel time would be nigh-instantaneous -- at this range, it's a couple of seconds as the projectile speeds through the air /so fast/ that the air ignites, making it look as if it's riding down on the end of a pillar of fire.

    Whatever it hits -- Scion, a forcefield, the ground, has a very bad fraction of a second as tremendous, magic-enhanced kinetic energy is dumped into it all at once, and then the device /inside/ the shell triggers, opposing elemental energies allowed to combine and blow apart the shell in a very short-lived but forceful tempest of eldritch fire, water, and steam!

    At least the allies down below are almost guarunteed a hell of a firework!

Defiant (554) has posed:
    THE BATTLEFIELD

    Zephyr falls but Scion can't finish her off, too busy he is with other opponents. Clockblocker grabs her and begins hauling her towards the portal. "Healer?" he calls out.

    Scion stares without expression at Yuri. Still, one can feel the powerful simple feelings radiating off his avatar. Contempt, amusement, anger. He holds his position, floating just a foot off the ground, and watches. A variety of cape attacks hammer his body as he does so, but Scion doesn't seem to care. Yuri appears to be the one he's most concerned about now.

    Yuri's claw bites deep into Scion's chest. It's hard to judge Scion. In a way, he's doing little more than trying to continue his life cycle. Terribly destructive, sure, but also natural for the Entity behind the avatar. Of course, the cycle has been broken, his mate is gone, presumed killed by Cauldron. So why does he persist? It's gone past the natural state of affairs, now, and has become something dark and terrible, a tyrannical dimensional being enacting a plan that is thoroughly pointless and results in nothing but pain and death.

    The brand is carved into Scion's avatar, but that's only a shadow. It goes deeper and carves into the greater being of Scion's well.

    Scion appears to be aware of it. The /rage/ that infuses him is almost palpable. He doesn't so much as move to grab Yuri as he suddenly has his arms holding that limb that hurt him so. And Scion grabs, his hands alight with golden fire, twists - and goes to simply pull the arm /off/.

    But he's still in the fight. He still thinks he can win.

    Tesla's shrapnel vortex cannon whirls into life and the hurricane strikes Scion. It's only for a moment because, as the knives rend his flesh and spill more golden matter onto the field, Scion claps his hand and /stills/ everything in the local radius in a burst of golden light. The knives drop from the sky, the energy leeched from them. Capes caught in the radius flat out die as electrical impulses cease jumping between neurons. Whatever the golden light hits, goes still. As close to Scion as he is, there's no telling what kind of effect it might have on Yuri, someone who might rebel against the very idea of being forcibly stopped!

Defiant (554) has posed:
    How much energy had that cost him?

    And then Toph's pillars of rock hammer him down, Scion swats one aside with his hand, shatters it. He stills the ground as Toph attempts to summon up more, preventing anything further from moving. It's only a brief moment and Toph should be able to resume her attack but it's clear that Scion is lashing out now. And luckily for Toph, imagination is not an ability the Entity has.

    Boosted by Frederica's fire, Lung opens his maw and unleashes white-hot fury, yanking more fire from Frederica's orb. It catches Scion's legs and the ground ignites and melts, sinking Scion down. Scion raises his hand and blasts at Lung, cutting him open like a fish. The golden light burns at the edge of the wound, preventing Lung from regenerating. The sudden morass holds Scion fast as Testament's bloody hands hammer at him, sending off puffs of golden dust. Every little bit counts, especially when it comes to Testament blocking blasts from Scion that could mutilate, cripple of kill those trying to stop him.

    Staren's railgun flattens Scion into the ground, leaving a crater that the golden man stands at the bottome of. The blow sheared off his arm, and much of his torso, but Scion simply calls on that well and restores his form. And then he's suddenly /there/ in front of Staren, and he unleashes a beam that splits once, and then into four, and then sixteen, and then- There's so many golden beams, each one looking to drill through the vehicle and find the pilot inside!

    Scion returns to the ground level. Is he... breathing heavily?

    By now, there aren't many capes left. They're fleeing for the portal. Those that can, at any rate. Even Chevalier has left his cannonblade behind. There are many other capes who seem to be in need of assistance.

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
So there's one other trick Xiaomu can try, apart from the trump card that she's saving for tomorrow - and once it's established that it might be worth trying, she no longer has a particular reason to hold back.

Once again, the lightcycle-riding sage fox barrels into the fray - but this time, she lays the lightcycle down on approach, derezzing it back into baton form and stashing the baton inside her vest while she rolls across the ground. She comes to a halt rather too close to Scion's chosen ground zero for comfort, but she doesn't plan to be here long; Xiaomu bounces to her feet, planting her staff next to her with her left hand, her right hand upraised in front of her.

"DAKKI NO KATA!!!"

In a way, this is her most dangerous technique - to *herself*. Twice in the Multiverse she's tried to leech energy away from an opponent only to discover that the vital forces she was siphoning away were giving her a metaphysical version of indigestion; both times, she had to finagle ways to expel the 'tainted' life-energy from her system again before the damage became too severe for her to survive.

Xiaomu has little to no idea what kind of 'energy' Scion's projection-body utilizes - but she's in the process of finding out, for better or for worse ... and she can only hope that this will help weaken Scion further.

Maya has posed:
Maya is going to hang back and support others from the looks of things for the moment that's fine for her she knows there's a lot of thing to deal with and a lot ofthe elites here are very good at fighting but how many people can keep others going to keep the body count down. That's what she's going to try to do for the moment she contiunes working her magic on those who can still fight or even keep people up so they can flee.

She does not hold back she starts to summon now a massive portal of energy forms, she's not moving to fight she's moving to keep people who are alive to either keep fighting or to be able to flee.

The portal opens a moment later and maya vanishes from visable sight as ah angel who looks oddly a lot like Maya but not quite exits she's covered in body tatoos and her wings flare out causing a powerful surge of healing for those fighting or attempting to flee Scion. However with the status of the local capes Maya's about to step in hardcore at this point.

Tesla Armadia (368) has posed:
    The event of halting motion entirely, be it the kinetic motion of the blade hurricane or the neurological pulses in the bodies of dozens of capes. Tch. Death was a nature of war, but even Tesla disliked it when the deaths were pointless. So many lives wiped out for little more than a tantrum. It was a waste even in her eyes.

    "All that power, all that potential, and it acts no more than a child breaking his toys just so no one else can have them." The Mad Maxizer rolls to a stop, the monster truck positioning itself between where Scion hit the ground, and the portal. The capes fleeing back to the staging ground have at least one very large obstruction to take shelter behind, and the back end opens up to dispense several droids to assist those needing help getting back to safety.

    One of the extendable tendrils reachs out to pick up the cannonblade and reel it back to the vehicle. Chevalier is probably going to want that back. Later she'll brush it off as just making sure her potential future opposition is up to an appropriate challenge. It's perfectly logical from an evil mastermind's point of view.

    At Tesla's command the drones that haven't been wiped in the crossfire all focus on Scion, analyzing position and vectors, and datastreaming the information back to Teacher's team to target their device. She left a reciever on the same network with Stratos for this specific reasons.

Reina Kinney has posed:
    The more the battle rages on, the more Reina's patience begins to dwindle. She knows something has to give in sooner or later, and it's not going to be her. She wants to help those capes as best as she can, but her weapons seem to have little effect on the Scion. It's then that she decides to try assisting the capes in need of help, since part of being a member of GUARDIANS is about helping those around you, no matter the risk.

    Reina gathers those who are injured as close to her as she can, before chanting the Technic of Resta, healing those who are hurt. It won't fix their injuries, but it will make them feel a bit better for the time being.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Okay, that's the best way to piss off an earthbender.

    At first Toph blinks in surprise when she feels something blocking the earth from obeying her. Really?! If there's something Toph is, it's prideful of her skills as an earthbender, constantly pointing it out. So this of course does not sit well with her at all as she lets out a small frustrated sound and punches the wall in her tunnel extra hard, as if trying to force the rocks to shoot out from the pillars like they should do! It's not fair that this guy is awesome at everything, that's cheating! Especially when earth is /her/ forte, Toph concludes.

    Even as the other attacks from the other Elites strike, melting him, shooting him down, cutting him and blasting him and whatnot, Toph stops in her tunnel, taking a deep breath as she sinks into a wide stance and moves her arms at her sides, clenching her hands into fists before she exhales. Smaller attacks don't seem to do much, even if it sounds like and feels like he's breathing heavily. It's easier to tell when he's actually touching the ground! But while the other Elites attack perhaps she can take some seconds to work up an attack. It's worth the shot. Her focus turns to the ground directly underneath Scion, and slowly Toph moves her arms out from her body and upwards, all while the ground in the area begins to shake and quiver. It's pretty much impossible to work on an attack of this scale without unsettling the earth as it shifts and moves according to her will. Rocks up on the surface clatter, cracks form here and there, though it's all focused towards the centre of it all.

    Toph holds her breath, her expression deadly serious as she lets the power build up a few seconds more. Patience and stubbornness is the key. And then she throws her arms upwards.

    Most of the time when Toph causes the earth to erupt, it's not with enough force to kill. But then again, Scion is no ordinary enemy. With all that bending focused in one place, it's not pleasant when the earth literally explodes underneath his feet unless he's quick to move away. But still, can he avoid all that mass of earth that is thrown skywards? And well, what comes up must come down, so unless he manages to crush all the earth that shoots up he will have to think about it raining down on him again.

Testament (842) has posed:
    Scion is not the only one who's radiating emotions. Those who can sense them in some way can feel rage and insanity. Yeah, Testament's not the most stable of the fighters here. But he hasn't lost control of himself. He recognizes that there are people retreating, and people down. He's no healer, but he can definitely play tank, for a little while, at least. Distract Scion while others help the downed.

    Testament raises a hand over his head, and a portal appears before him, marked with magical symbols. Then he draws his hand down, bending at the waist a little to curl himself up.

    "NIGHTMARE CIRCULAR!"

    The portal opens and the symbols disappear. And then from the open portal, a massive skull and claws, all made of poisonous, rancorous blood that just smells horribly foul, erupts from the portal, seeking to bite, to scratch, to harm the avatar of the Entity. This too, seeks to poison the Scion, as deeply as it may be able to manage. If at all.

    Once this is done, Testament heads for the largest concentration of downed capes. Again he thrusts the blade of his scythe into the groud, raising wall after wall of bloody, grasping, reaching hands, trying to block any shots that may be aimed at them.

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
    "BRANDED. MAY YOU CARRY THE SCAR FOR THE REST OF YOUR REMAINING EXISTENCE."

    Yuri's arm is torn clean off his body, and still he lets out no sound of pain. The wound bleeds an ichorous green fire and molten brass, the signs of his remaining Malfean Influences as he is 'disarmed', so to speak. And the arm itself is not growing back, a very major wound to the form of the monster.

    "NOW I HAVE ONE FINAL GIFT FOR YOU."

    The massive beast-monster that Yuri's form has become, towering as it is, has one more trick up its sleeve. And this one does not attack Scion. Yuri is fully aware that, with the damage he has taken, he will not be able to fight tomorrow. He will be, in all likelihood, bleeding out in a cave and waiting for his injuries to heal. So he will play a petty card just once. To test for his inevitable fight against Malfeas.

    REBELLIOUS BESTIAL ROAR

    The massive beast falls back onto its haunches, sitting down on the ground. Its remaining arm braces, claw digging into the dirt as its headless throat curls back. Skyward, it lets out a deafening roar. For a moment, it seems to stay localized in that single battlefield, but then it ripples out over the area surrounding Yuri like a tidal wave.

    It circles out from him, carrying his defiant howl across the entirety of the world and to every corner of the globe. A rolling, rebellious roar that wafts across all of the land in a slow roll.

    From the apex of the howl and down into its fading moments, the body of the Shintai that Yuri was using begins to crumble and fade away. Reality subdues and shrinks, beginning to buckle in around him. When all is said and done, there is no monster by the time the howl stops. Instead, there is simply the man known as Yuri Stinson.

    He stands amidst rubble on a frozen wasteland. His right arm is missing and there are pieces carved out of his body in the exact spots where Scion hit his Shintai. Still, his face shows no sign of pain and he merely stares.

Staren has posed:
    And then Scion is /there/, right in front of Staren. Well, in front of his mecha, at least. Staren's not sure if it even matters. In the time it takes to react, Scion has already fired and teleported away. Beams hit the Star Hawk. In an instant, they've penetrated, Staren's machine peppered with little smoking holes to either side of the cockpit block, edges glowing red. The cockpit armor is a bit more resistant. Glowing red circles turn to streaks as Staren takes evasive action, the mecha twisting out of the way and starting to spiral out of control, trailing smoke, as communications between pilot and machine are disrupted by damage. They shut off about a second later, and the war machine begins to fall.

    After several seconds of freefall, the little parts that make up the machine finish slight configuration adjustments. Power and communications are restored. Still trailing smoke, the machine transforms, the plane-with-arms-and-legs righting itself. The massive railgun sprays a plume of coolant vapor, then collapses back into its compact form.

    Inside the cockpit, Staren looks up through the canopy at the still-glowing streaks in the armor where the beams nearly burned through. He'd sweat if his body were capable of it.

    The arms and legs fold in and the plane dives. The battle is getting desperate as some allies run out of options. He still has something he wants to try, and Scion needs to be kept off of the retreating heroes. Staren briefly wonders how hard escaping will be. How do you outrun a teleporter, even in a machine as fast as the Star Hawk? But Scion's powers clearly aren't limitless, or he'd just be teleporting into elites' bedrooms and blasting them in their sleep. If Scion decides to chase him, they'll probably learn something. In the worst case, well, technically, they'll still learn something. Staren pushes that thought out of his mind. He's closing in, he can't back off now!

    The Star Hawk transforms and slows down as it comes in for a landing by the end of the fortress wall. Faster than a human pilot could, perhaps, but not violently so -- Staren might be about to take a whole lot of damage, so he doesn't want to stress the machine unduly. The left shoulder pack opens, and a massive revolver is ejected. Staren's machine reaches up and grabs it. "You heard Yuri. You're an abomination! To protect the people of this world..."

    Staren doesn't finish the sentence. He aims and starts firing. This weapon is less about extreme technological force -- perhaps ironically, its strength is more mystical -- though it too was created by someone who wanted to use technological skill to /protect/. With each pull of the trigger, the mad science of Morc McGee imbues two mech-scale bullets with power to harm the supernatuiral threats that prey on humanity and sends them speeding downrange, one ahead of the other. This, too, worked well on Emrakul. Staren hopes the results against Scion are as positive.

Theo Morrison has posed:
Theo could get used to this sort of armchair general behavior. He wishes he had an armchair.

Another land goes down. Scion's starting to actually have to work for it, Theo notes. They're giving him a good fight. Yuri in particular... Theo is pretty sure that guy's going to be pummelling the golden man until the sun burns out or one of them is utterly destroyed. He's a little awestruck by it, and simultaneously spooked.

Working as intended, he supposes.

Theo taps everything. He looks at the card that he's holding, then at Scion on the displays he's got handy. This ought to be good.

"Bruna, Light of Alabaster!"

A figure fades into sight next to the throne. She seems to be stepping out of the backdrop and into the forefront, her black hair trailing behind her between her enormous white-feathered wings. A beautiful winged woman stands atop the battlements, wielding either a staff topped with a stylized 'U' or a very strange-looking spear. She overlooks the battlefield, seeming to brighten the fortress by her very presence.

Theo feels something turn over in his head. He reaches for his deck -- and is stopped for a mere moment by the sudden roar, wincing even as far from it as he is.

The Angel does not stir. She waits, eternally vigilant, for her opportunity.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    THE BATTLEFIELD

    

    Xiaomu opens herself up to Scion, becoming another part of the conduit between golden avatar and dimensional entity. The sheer amount of power that flows into her - every kind of energy: kinetic, heat, sound, light - is overwhelming in its intensity. She can /feel/ the thing behind Scion, the great entity that would destroy the world as part of its life cycle, a great semi-organic /worm/ of crystalline shards. It's smaller than it once was, but there's still enough energy there to give Scion his edge.

    But she's leeching from it, like opening up the floodgate. Scion seems to realise, and he whirls to face Xiaomu.

    Perhaps luckily for her, Toph decides to make her presence known and show Scion what mastery of the ground really looks like. The ground /shatters/ into a thousand pieces, and Scion is launched into the air, hammered by boulders and great shards of rock. One catches him in the face and, just for a moment, someone might see that his skull comes to pieces, golden blood spraying.

     but that passes too and Scion teleports back to the ground - until the rocks rain down on him again. These ones though bounce off a golden hemisphere he constructs around his top half.

    Scion comes face to face with a massive skull, courtesy of Testament. The claws grab for him, the skull sinks its teeth into him, biting off great hunks of golden flesh. The magical poison flows through the avatar and into the well 'behind' him. Scion, enraged, turns his golden beams on the skull, aiming to remove that impediment.

    And then he turns back to Xi-

    Staren shoots him in the face. Scion's head snaps back, the golden avatar slamming into the ground. The golden man /ripples/ and, after a longer moment than normal, snaps back to his feet. It's just in time for the second bullet to strike him, punching through his golden form, leaving a hole that takes up almost all of his torso. Golden light infuses the wounds and Scion restores himself.

    But there's something different about him now. Scion turns-

    And then Yuri is there. And Yuri /roars/. Scion's face has no expression but one can feel that sense of realisation, of /worry/. The connection to the shards has been altered, maybe even broken. The cycle... might not be able to continue. There's /despair/ radiating off him now - and then...

    ...fear?

    Scion steps back from Yuri and Scion locks his eyes on Yuri. For the second time ever, Scion /speaks/, a gambit to ensure that he can get away.

     "WHAT WOULD FIA SAY ABOUT HOW YOU'RE ACTING?"

     And then, seizing his chance to escape before Yuri can pull another trick like that, something which could be /worse/, Scion is gone, teleporting elsewhere with a clap of thunder.

    It gives Reina, Maya and anyone else who is running aid more than enough time to see to the wounded capes. And there's many of them. Maya's healing aura surge flares outward, reknitting wounds and refilling resolve. Unfortunately, Reina is the one to find Clockblocker - caught by a glancing blow from Scion, dead, having used his power to save Zephyr.

     Before now, victory against Scion had said to have been impossible.

    But not anymore.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    STAGING AREA

    There's a thunderclap, high above. Scion, barely more than a golden speck. Even at that distance, anyone at the staging point can feel the sensation of /bloodlust/. Not anger, because anger is too civilised. This is primal, it's hateful, it's sadistic. It's the emotion of a being who has been grievously wounded and can't accept it - and will make everyone suffer for it. A base, primal urge to /murder/.

    "He's here," Defiant says, "We need an escape, now."

    Scion raises is hand and the golden glow begins to ebb and flow, becoming a second sun. And then Scion rains fire down in an indiscriminate storm of golden hail. Over and over again, firing blind.

    One beam strikes the Pendragon.

    Defiant acts, hurling Ainsley out and leaping clear. Where the golden light hits his armor, it chews through it like acid. Defiant begins ejecting armor plates and sprinting for the nearest portal. But without cover, it's clear that no one will be getting out of here alive.

     Theo's been playing his hand, and, with his vigilant angel, might be the one to have that opportunity.

Frederica (73) has posed:
    There's not a lot Frederica can do against power of that level, but she'll certainly try. Running for the portal, she flings a bar of solidified fire at the golden destruction raining down from Scion. And then another, and another. She can't block every shot, but perhaps she can stop a small fraction of them, give some people a chance where they otherwise wouldn't have one. That it might also save herself... well, it's a bonus, but it's not the prime reason she's doing it.

Ainsley (151) has posed:
    When Ainsley is thrown out of the dragoncraft, her device abruptly flies out of her hand and gets obliterated in a ray of golden light. The lizard woman gasps in surprise, and turns her arcane sight away from the blinding power of Rebellion that flooded her inexperienced vision. Blood actually drips from her nose and the corner of her eye when she begins retreating, feeling the oppressive wave of hatred and seeing it pointed down at them. But she tries to keep an eye on Scion's intents, his 'body language,' and she tries to dodge the bombardment on her way to their escape. She moves quickly as the corners of her vision begin to burn inward until it's nothing but a garbled arcane mess that she can't focus on.

    "WARRIOR!" she emits in a haphazard spell toward Scion, a pulse of Blue light coming from the area around her, "STOP!" Pleading... but not in terror. Pleading for him to stop, because her feelings are strange compared to the rest. Because she knows he's a creature that just wanted to complete it's life cycle, and that it's a tragedy that this could never end peacefully. That it will waste its life destroying everything

    Ainsley won't be able to escape without help, either way. She can't even see where she's going.

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
    Yuri, injured as he is and with everything but his body disabled and left in rubble around him, is still preparing to launch forward. The cloak he normally wears is shredded off of him and reveals the chains he wears wrapped around his upper body and trailing off his arms. Arm, singular, at this moment. There's a trail of molten brass behind him, something that serves as his form of bleeding.

    It's only when Scion shouts at him that his foot comes down and Yuri pauses. His face finally shows the first emotion of the night, twisting into a frown. He stops to think about it, having not been considering that before. He implicitly believes FIA will understand his concept, but there had been times when she objected.

    He's left standing there for a long moment, mulling over all the aspects of FIA and who she is. Or who he understands her to be. It definitely halts him up for a long few moments while he stands there going over the multitude of interactions he's had with her over the past several years and trying to figure out if she would approve of how he's acted tonight.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Her pride is somewhat restored when Toph feels the attack hit Scion, hurling him up into the air along with all the earth and rock. And hey, even if he manages to shield himself on the way down, she will still count it as a successful attack. But she doesn't immediately strike again, lest she risk harming the other Elites. Even the Feds are allies today, even if she can't say she's too fond of Tesla after what she has done in this world. But it's no time to hold grudges when there's something more important at stake.

    When Scion teleports however, Toph is slightly confused. At least until Defiant speaks up on the radio and she feels the colour drain from her face.

    Well, shit.

    There are lots of people there, including Defiant, who will need evacuation. Rather than staying underground now, Toph kicks into the ground as she moves her arms, opening the ground as she launches herself up and forward towards the portal, crashing into the ground as she races onwards on an earthen wave.

    Perhaps if she can hurry on back to the staging ground, perhaps she can craft escape tunnels underground for them. But how well would it work with Scion seemingly pissed off?

Theo Morrison has posed:
The ringing in Theo's ears stop. He isn't sure what the point of that one was, but he's certain that it did /something/. Maybe he's better off not knowing, at least right now. But then --

Scion shows up. Theo raises his head. His eyes widen.

Think later. Act now.

"Light From Within!" Another card played. The Throne begins to glow. Each of the men and women within the Glacial Fortress glow the same, a crest at their brow matching the Throne itself. They draw themselves up; they seem empowered, somehow.

A figure rises from the Throne. Another winged woman; another Angel, armed with light and sword. She takes her post at the gate, and looks to Bruna, who nods in recognition. Theo fumbles for a card at the same time. Kickotron grabs signets, hopping to each one, ready to flee. Scion is here, and he's going to kill them all.

Theo yells something, the words drowned out by the sounds of devastation. The raven-haired angel within the glacier raises her staff and beats her wings once, twice --

The battle above the Staging Ground is joined. Bruna, Light of Alabaster, appears in a clap of thunder. She flies at Scion, raising her staff as a ball of light gathers above the emblem atop it. It grows into a brilliant pinprick of holy energy, one she waves almost leisurely at the godlike creature in a golden man's shape.

There's a rumble of thunder. Wind grows. It blows towards the angel, up towards the pinprick -- ball, now -- of purest white. She is unmoved by the gale. She levels the short staff, bowing her head. The wind gives way to a tugging sensation, a strange, not-quite-physical pressure.

Bruna inhales. He raises her staff, images of the golden man and those he has made flickering in the luminescence, and then closes her hand on the light. She exhales, a second breath accompanied by golden light.

/Scion's/ golden light.

The Light of Alabaster rushes into battle, bringing with her beams of killing energy that were, moments ago, in the hands of the godlike entity himself -- and behind her, silhouettes of men and women with countless different abilities spread out into the winds and follow in her wake, turning themselves to the singular purpose of Scion's destruction.

Reina Kinney has posed:
    Discretion is the better part of valor, and even the best member of GUARDIANS knows when it's time to beat a hasty retreat. Including Reina, who's done all she can for now, and takes off towards the portal as fast as she can. Her boots somehow give her extra traction as she pushes her feet and legs beyond the limits that she's used to in general, trying to get to that portal before whatever's gonna happen does happen.

Tesla Armadia (368) has posed:
When that wash of pure unadultered primal DESTRUCTION ripples over the staging area, there's only one way to really sum it up.

"Oh, fuck."

Stratos just ditchs the reciever relay she had for transmitting from Tesla's drones to Teacher's operation. "This is one storm even I don't want to chase!"

He's gone? Where did he g--no, of course, there is only one place he WOULD go at this point. That's all the thought process it takes. Tesla disengages the drone controls so she can focus fully on one task, revs up the Mad Maxizer once more... and puts it into -reverse-. The monsterous truck actually manages considerable speed backwards, only screeching to a stop as the back end pushes through the staging portal, and drops open its hatchway.

    "DON'T ASK JUST GET IN" Stratos and whoever else she can get together in the chaos get in, while the manipulators quickly grabbing some of the wounded that were brought back. Better to be a bit roughhandled by the machine than dead, right?

    Several golden blasts land near the portal, the explosion rattling across the machine's frame of golden energy. It leaves a massive smoking hole and many smaller blast damages in the machine, but by sheer fortune of Tesla's design incorperating ablative armor -meant- to be destroyed to devert damage and redundancy in important components, the Maxizer still has the go left in it to pull back out of the portal and get it's rescuees to safety.

    If that had been a -direct- hit, it might of been a different story.

    Tesla doesn't intend to stick around and find out.

Testament (842) has posed:
    More trouble?! Testament's got the radio frequency now, and once he hears that there's more trouble in the staging area, he heads for the portal himself. He seems to fly over the ground, scythe in hand, hair and kilt trailing in the breeze created by a much faster than normal passage. He still misses the initial volley though.

    But he quickly sets himself up in a place where there is dirt underfoot and kneels. He quickly bites into a fingertip, hard enough to make it bleed, and begins to draw upon the dirt, murmuring under his breath. They're spell-words; yes, he's casting a spell. Still kneeling on the ground when the circle is completed, he draws his scythe before him, still murmuring. The spell-circle begins to glow.

    And then he arches back, the blade of his scythe glowing as he draws it back. Then, with a cry, the slams the blade into the ground again. More walls of blood begin to rise, this time all over the former staging area! Hopefully this should provide widespread, if momentary, cover for those escaping.

    And there's a trickle of sweat from Testament's brow. This is a lot of energy he's using up so quickly...

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
'Scion'. It *can* mean 'guardian,' but more often it means a descenant (particularly a first-generation descendant), or the heir to a throne. It can also, if you're discussing botany, refer to a detached shoot or twig from a larger plant. And as Xiaomu lies flat on her back, gazing at a relatively empty sky, she wonders just how many of those meanings were at work when Scion picked out his 'hero' name ... because all fo them EXCEPT the apparent one seem to apply, as far as she can make out from the 'aftertaste' of Scion's energies.

No time for a digestive nap, though, or it'll be everyone EXCEPT Scion getting digested. The sage fox uses her staff to leverage herself back to her feet, dimly aware of what she thinks are sparks of raw gold energy slithering around her body. She's never drained enough energy from someone to overflow like this; she never WANTS to drain that much. But once she got her figurative teeth into Scion, she HAD to keep draining as much for self-preservation as anything. If it hadn't been for her allies distracting his aggro away from her over and over again, she'd probably be a scorched crater, one way or the other.

Swallowing hard, Xiaomu starts hobbling towards the portal, her staff basically serving as a third leg at first. "Haah .... owww ... ah, screw this -"

Gold-hued light and smoke flare out around her, and out of the cloud runs a five-tailed blonde-furred vulpine, rings jangling behind her as Xiaomu's abandoned staff drops to the ground. She can go faster on four legs than on three, and she doesn't have time to care about vanity. As long as she can recover Suiren - or somebody grabs it for her - it's all good, but she heard Scion attacking their staging area over the radio and there's no real way to stop him from here. Maybe not from anywhere, but she has to try anything she can.

STAGING AREA:

The first thing some people might think when a five-tailed fox crackling with golden light and power comes charging out of the portal is that Scion had an attack fox. Another fast shapeshift restores Xiaomu to her 'human' form, devoid of both coherent clothing and any particular need for such thanks to the aura of increasingly-uncontrolled energies that cling to her form. "Everyone," she gasps, "he's - he's not --"

She shudders, staggers, falls to one knee ... and forces herself back up, groaning against the strain of energy-drain indigestion. She has to get rid of it.

She has one productive way to *try* and hope it's not just giving back what she took in a form Scion'll be able to use against, literally, *everybody*.

"SHINKUUUUU ... BYAKKOHOU!!!!!!!!!"

Xiaomu's normal Byakkohou attack is a focused blast of positive chi energy. This makes it look like a candle in the fog, re-channeling as much as she can of the power she drained off of Scion, converting it like she would other sorcerous powers, and funneling all of it at Scion, or at least in his general direction.

It had *better*, when combined with everyone else's current efforts, be enough to drive him off - or Scion's certain to make a washcloth out of her pelt as soon as he can aim at Xiaomu again.

Maya has posed:
Maya is soing what she can to rescue whom she can, she knows it's about over for now and she's working to now help the woudned she's got other healing methods on her slower but sometimes powerful but for now she's got to do what she can to help those who are fallen at this point. She's focused on seekign as many people as possible are able to see tommrow but she's wary she's been channeling alot while she far from out of magic the amount she's challening can tax her greatly.

Staren has posed:
    Scion takes some kind of emotional shot at Yuri and then /leaves/. They... they made Scion /run/?! Staren lets out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding -- the robot body /can/ do that, part of maintaining a human appearance -- and takes a moment to relax.

    Then the warning comes over the radio, and Staren gasps. He considers ways to attack Scion. His /first/ thought is the missiles. But with Scion raining down destruction, it seems too likely they'd just get shot down, rather than force him away.

    Option 2 is getting there directly. It looks like Staren's allies had the same idea. The Star Hawk kneels, putting away its weapons, holding its left hand under the cockpit area as a sort of step, and holding its right index finger just above, which opens to reveal some kind of human-scale rifle has been wired in. The cockpit opens and Staren hops out. He's in his flight oversuit, the white-and-orange outfit minus the helmet and undersuit, since his robot body doesn't need vacuum sealing. He reaches over, grabs the RAISER rifle, leaps down, and starts /running/ towards the portal. Steel and circuits are stronger and faster then flesh and don't get tired. Approaching a a hundred miles per hour, this body could zip past cars on the highway... So when he sees Toph rushing to get there on an earthen wave, he heads that way. "Don'tworryTophit'sme!" is the brief explanation she gets as he zips alongside her, picks her up, and runs to the portal.

STAGING AREA:

    Staren looks up at Scion, then around. He's fighting an angel and has stopped firing. Good, Staren doesn't have a good way to set shields up, though maybe Toph does. Can people still be saved? The damage is done... "Toph! If you can mark who's still alive, we can retrieve them without wasting time!" He looks over at her... oh, right.

    Staren sets Toph down.

Defiant (554) has posed:
    STAGING AREA

     It's bad. Scion's wrath rains down indiscriminately. Capes burn, capes die. Scion experiments, making the rain thin as needles and sets to piercing hearts and arteries. He makes his rain into fireballs that shear off limbs and immolate people. He doesn't stop, because whatever power it was that let him slow Yuri also led him here, one step closer to his victory. He'll guarentee that he can escape, for now, by giving everyone else other things to focus on - saving lives.

     Frederica's fire intercepts the golden beams. The smaller ones blink out as they touch it, the larger ones crash right through. Luckily, Testament's blood walls serve to stop the larger blasts. Beams might have sheared right through, but many of the gathered capes survive now that reinforcements have arrived.

     Chevalier makes it to Tesla's vehicle, along with many other capes, and the leader of the Protectorate is reunited with his cannonblade. He's carrying Ingenue in his armored arms, and she is badly burnt.

     Ainsley calls to Scion. They'd communicated somehow, briefly, months ago, but now it's clear that he can't stop or won't stop. The cycle is broken and he has no purpose. And if he can't have a purpose, why should anyone else? The only purpose he can fulfill is that of the Warrior. His body language is nothing but an insane rage, beyond anything that's ever bled off him before.

% She can feel the mixture of rage and anger as the Light of Alabaster enters the field with dozens of shard abilities, including Scion's own golden beam, and those abilities - so powerless to harm him only minutes ago - affect him now. Scion turns his rage from the ground below to the Alabaster angel, and the battle above is joined. The angel clashes with the golden man, trading blows and beams and blasts and powers. Scion's tricks might be powerful but they're few in number - and he's not smart enough to be creative with them. His chief advantage, the ability to negate shard powers, is lost to him. He lashes out at the Angel with all of his power, bright golden beams scything here and there, a dazzling display in the sky. It's possible that he could win, maybe, if he could just hit her directly... but as Xiaomu adds her stolen power to the onslaught facing him...

     ...Scion leaves in another clap of thunder. He's on the run. Not defeated, but he's not continuing the fight.

     He'll be all the more dangerous when cornered, when bereft of any purpose or pre-arranged advantage... but he's been bloodied, and that's a powerful symbol.

Xiaomu (707) has posed:
Once again, Xiaomu is flat on her back. The good news is that she managed to vent the indigestion-inducing overload without blowing herself out of existence.

The bad news is that she knows what a tripped circuit breaker feels like - on the order of the main breaker at the substation, not one of those little things in your house's breaker box. Although it makes her FEEL like one of the little ones.

More than the metaphysical overload of raw energy, though, her mind is reeling as she tries to account for what she *sensed* behind all that energy. She's not even technically a 'mortal' and that left her overwhelmed. She can't imagine what Ainsley is trying to process.

How to fight something like THAT ... ?

She doesn't really know any more, but if she's capable of standing and fighting within the next day or so, she knows she's going to have to come up with something. And, listening vaguely to the radio, she knows she's one of the lucky ones from this throwdown.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    Damnit, this is taking forever! The distance back seems even longer now that she actually needs to hurry. What if Ainsley gets hurt, or if Scion focuses on Colin or all the others are...

    Toph is abruptly brought out of her less than happy train of thought as she hears something next to her. Oh right, Staren was running towards the portal too and... then she suddenly finds herself yanked up from the ground. Of course when this happens the earthen wave dies down, but quick as he is Staren will probably have no problems avoiding stumbling. Toph however prefer having her feet of the ground, and while she might be small for her age she is not fond of being picked up. At all. Surprised as she is, she can't help but let out an indignant shriek of protest, briefly flailing her arms and legs. "Aaah!" But luckily for Staren she quickly realizes /why/ he is doing this, and even if she doesn't like not being able to see, that discomfort is pushed aside for now as she swallows nervously, doing her best to not slow Staren down as he carries her.

    When he sets her down however, she can't help but feel some relief. At least until she realizes just how many lifeless bodies are lying around thanks to Scion's destruction. Her eyes widen in horror, and she immediately enters an earthbending stance. Even as the beams fire when Frederica's fire isn't enough to block them, while Testament raises blood walls, Toph uses her seismic sense to its full potential. Bodies that have no life in them, no heartbeat, well... there is little she can do for them. The others however? Around some of the people around on the field the earth shifts, earthen plates crashing up to lock them in, all before they are yanked down into the ground. One by one they are yanked down, though Ainsley will be the very first who gets to experience the earth suddenly shifting around her.

    Luckily Scion flees, and the blind earthbender lets out a sigh of relief before she hurries onwards to the field to get the people she previously pulled underground back up, and she heads over to Ainsley first, slightly out of breath. "Are you okay?!" She even offers an arm. Hey, Toph might be blind, but at least she can still navigate and help Ainsley if she needs it.

Ainsley (151) has posed:
    Ainsley accepts Toph's help. The shivering lizard girl carefully grabs ahold of one of Toph's arms and clings to it. Unlike Toph, Ainsley is not used to being blinded, even temporarily, and doesn't have a way to overcome the handicap. She didn't seem to panic when pulled down into the earth, strangely, and the only indication of stress is the apparent pain and the rush of adrenaline that comes with a dangerous situation like this. She speaks in a gentle tone of voice to Toph...

    "Thank you."

Yuri Stinson (106) has posed:
    As he stands there milling over whether FIA would approve of his actions or not, there is a massive molten pool of blood, mixed with molten brass, forming at his feet underneath him. With all the benefits of not being able to feel pain, this is one of the downsides, as he has long lost touch with the emotional connection to his own injuries.

    He lifts his head and seems to finally answer, "Going over the nearly three years of our relationship, I have reason to believe she would approve," He finally says aloud, looking around the empty battlefield and frowning. It had worked too well in distracting him.

    He takes a step forward, the pooled blood and viscera at his feet sloshing from the motion of doing so before he seems to wobble in a step. He frowns again and looks down, "I see. I have sustained immense injuries in my Shintai in addition to the loss of an arm. Vexing."

    He internally probes his remaining Essence pool. It's almost non-existent after his final act of spiteful rebellion. He shuts his eyes and takes a slow breath. There's a faint ripple of wind around him and then he vanishes. The brief trail of blood he leaves makes it clear it's not teleportation so much as immensely fast movement taking him away from the field of battle.

Toph Beifong (20) has posed:
    At least Ainsley is back above ground once Scion has left, and Toph doesn't stop the lizard girl from clinging onto her arm. "He's gone now," she reassures the other girl in the calmest voice she can manage despite being mostly out of breath at this point. Perhaps it's better that Ainsley can't see what the battleground looks like right now. Heck, this is most likely grim even to those who are used to this sort of thing. "Where do you want me to take you?" she asks next. "Njorun, or...?"

Staren has posed:
    Scion is gone.

    Staren looks around. "Hey, Theo. Hey, Ainsley." The deckmaster and the lizard-girl get a casual wave as Staren walks by briskly and doesn't see any severe injuries. Staren doesn't seem to realize that Ainsley can't see. Or notice that /Toph/ is leading her around. He's distracted. He saw how many shields Toph made, and how many more bodies she /didn't/ cover, and knows what that means. Toph did what he asked her to -- now he will make sure the information is used to the best effect possible. After radioing Dragon to pass it on, he shoulders the RAISER rifle and begins administering what first aid he can to the survivors.

Testament (842) has posed:
    Everything seems over now, at least for the present. Scion hasn't been defeated, but he's been forced to retreat. Something that's never happened before, if he'd heard the radio chatter correctly.

    He remains where he is, kneeling on the ground in his now burnt-out blood magic circle, thinking. He raises his scythe to rest the haft on his shoulder, gaze on the ground below him.

    Anger, hatred, pure primal rage... those words struck a chord in him. Scion was destroying things because... why? Because he wanted to? Because he could?

    ...Or because he could do nothing else?

    It wasn't so long ago that Testament himself was in that position. Under the control of the slumbering command Gear 'Justice', he had been killing humans, using their blood to resurrect her so she could destroy the world of humans. Gave her his OWN blood, even, when he couldn't defeat the winner of his tournament. It had taken his father's death at Justice's hands to shake him free of her control.

    that primal rage, the lashing out just because he couldn't NOT bleed his own pain out to the rest of the world... it was familiar. Testament actually saw just the tiniest bit of himself in Scion's course of action...

    And it bothered him.