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Evehime Gevurah     STILL ON THE SAME MOUNTAIN:

    The set of coordinates, brazenly broadcast on an open channel, lead deep into the heart of winter; indeed, near enough to an exceptionally tall and jagged mountain range, permanently cloaked in frost and ice year-round. Apparently, the sender has, recently, gone right back up somewhere into unbreathable heights, overlooking a deep, spacious, and very dark valley, where the sun is blocked by the sheer scale of the peaks at every time except midday. Most of it is filled with an ocean of immense evergreen trees, thick and dark and old, creating a realm of shadow beneath them.

    Other parts are open snowfields, untouched by even the footprints of animals, and in the middle, a vast lake, frozen almost completely solid for the severe cold. Recently, it seems as if something very, very heavy had struck the center of that lake at high speed, the surface of the exposed water having just barely frozen over again, and then gone off at an acute angled off into the woods and the side of a different mountain. There is also a weird little prefab cobblestone tower with a glass dome top just left out there like garbage.
Utsuho Reiuji Once upon a time, Utsuho declared that she was going to find Evehime and...

Do what? Well, it was never clear. Possibly challenge her. Possibly prove that she wasn't as weak as she thought, even just to herself. But it all hinged on *going*, and so she went.

Or that was the idea; what had actually happened is that she'd taken a while to do it, because Utsuho is not what you'd call good at planning or time management. She does things 'now' or 'later', and if it's 'later' sometimes it ends up being 'later' than she'd first intended it to be.

But, eventually, it turns into 'now'. Utsuho's approach is by air because she's a goddamned bird, she doesn't have to walk if she doesn't want to. Surprisingly it is *not* by thruster, because she's taking it slower and deciding not to light up the sky.

Utsuho dips down toward the lake for a moment before lifting up again and starting to follow the line of the path. She has sharp eyes, she can tell if there's someone in that direction, or near the obviously fallen tower if they're outside -

But more, Utsuho knows how to spot the spiritually strong. She figures that will point her in exactly the right direction.
Evehime Gevurah     Examining the lake proves even to Utsuho that something is wrong with this picture. For something heavy to have landed on it at the speed the destruction of the ice suggests, it definitely would have gone all the way through and sunk, not deflected. The line that goes into the tree is so flat that it's almost parallel. It looks like a huge number of them were simply ploughed through in sequence, by something relatively narrow. Beyond that, a grove that has all neatly fallen over in a wide arc, as if cut down by something impossibly sharp. There are numerous impact craters. A piece of the mountainside is peppered in many small, deep holes. One of the craters is human-shaped, opposite the lake.

    <Q-Conversation> Evehime Gevurah says, "Close. But you're looking the wrong way, raven creature."

    There's just a split second of deliberate warning, before something from literally miles away is about to hit Utsuho in the back. It isn't subtle or sneaky; the fact is that even a solid tungsten arrow the size of fence post will still be just about silent if it's going faster than the sound behind it.
Utsuho Reiuji Utsuho isn't -

All right. She is, by some standards, stupid. She's certainly never really been educated, she's forgetful, and she doesn't think hard about things - she is a birdbrain. But she's also seen a whole lot of dead bodies in her time as part of her job and she knows, intuitively, that something is wrong.

Also, Evehime warned her, which didn't hurt.

Even the split second of warning is enough. Utsuho whirls, sweeping her cape and summoning something that looks like a white-hot wall of light in front of her. The tungsten arrow hits it and isn't deflected so much as partially vaporized; the sudden blast of energy rips the front of the arrow into pieces and scatters the rest of them in a rough cone behind it. One of the pieces hits Utsuho hard enough to cause her to land.

Evehime might think she got a fast kill, for about a half second before the sun-like light starts back up. Utsuho pulls it down from a hemispherical bubble to a thin point of light balanced on the end of her rod, all the prongs 'holding' it in place.

"If you want to fight, come down here!" Utsuho hells, raising her voice to carry as she takes off again, kicking up snow as she accelerates. Toward Evehime, not away. And then, a moment later, she releases the sphere.

Just because Utsuho doesn't like to fight at such ranges doesn't mean she can't. The front part of the sphere vanishes and the rest of the energy stabs out in a lance of light, directly at where she thinks the arrow came from.
Evehime Gevurah     <Q-Conversation> Evehime Gevurah still over the radio due to physical distance, says "You were the one who wished to fight. I told you to approach this mountain."

    That seems to be Evehime's reasoning from just shooting Utsuho from . . . really, really, really far away, according to the direction of the arrow and Utsuho's senses. Her reason for actually warning the hell raven instead of putting one right through her spine and moving with her day (whatever that is) might still be in question, but it seems certain that Utsuho won't get the fight she wants until she gets there.

    It at least seems she was roughly accurate with that beam. Ordinarily it's the kind of thing that incinerates someone for just being close. She can tell because, when several tons of mountain snow explode into several tons of rapidly freezing steam, she sees the tip of the lance curve off around the side, rather than leave its molten hole to track by. If she closes at maximum speed, she can get there without being shoot *too* much. Probably. She'll at least be pointing the right way to see them coming.

    And more do come. It's hardly anything like danmaku, given that the only way to even track them seems to be the glint of the sun on the solid metal shafts, making it appear like she's about to run into flickering stars. The first couple come straight at her, being a test of reflexes, followed by their percussive *thump*, echoing mistily around the mountains, several full seconds later. After that, there are two at a time --one in the direction she's dodged the most, spaced out to catch her when evading by blind reflex. And then there are three, fanned out to catch both directions. It'll probably keep going like this.
Utsuho Reiuji Utsuho does get the impression Evehime is not actually going to come to her.

Which is fine. It just means Utsuho drops all pretense of subtlety (not that she had very much after that blast) and accelerates. She spreads her wings, and from under her cloak fires backwards - sustained blasts like thrusters, only about five feet long, but they're certainly enough to rocket her forward like...

Well, like a rocket.

At top speed, Utsuho's maneuverability is mostly a function of those thrusters. She tweaks the angle to send herself through a roll, straightens up, banks up slightly... the arrows aren't danmaku but she's got a sense of them anyway. And either her blind reflexes are better than Evehime guessed, or worse, because she doesn't fly herself into one. The closest she comes is when she has to make an extremely sudden bank by swinging her thrusters to the side, showering herself with shrapnel from another half-vaporized arrow.

Utsuho dives afterwards. This time she doesn't actually speak out loud; she just pulls up at the last moment before she hits the rocks, spreading her arms wide as a tiny sun forms above her head. By sun standards it's tiny, but it's bright enough to send stark shadows and clearly illuminate the area as she throws it downward.

Not quite at Evehime, but at the ground near where she thinks she is - which erupts upward in a blast of heat, light, steam, and flying rocks, an enormous plume to try to catch her no matter where she dodges.

"Come on out!" she calls, afterwards. "I'm ready to play! You said you wanted to find strong people, right? Well, that's me!"
Evehime Gevurah     Closing the distance faster means that there's less time to keep being shot at --and Utsuho should be beginning to get the idea that turning around and running away would get her shot at too-- but it does mean that sooner or later, she starts running out of time to react to those immense arrows. Half the distance is half the time, and so on, are the inconvenient prerogative of math.

    Diving down again is probably a solid strategy. Better than flying in a straight line at top speed all the way to point blank and potentially being shot in the face. At the range she chooses, she couldn't possibly miss with an explosion of that size anyways. A significant portion of the mountainside, from which she's seen those little glinting stars launched from, disappears. The cloud is nothing short of volcanic, so much snow and ice making for ten times the plume that just the rock would create, flash melting and vapourizing for a mile in all directions. Even with all that haze obscuring her sight of the blast crater, she hadn't seen anyone moving from it, so escape was probably impossible.

    Her spirit sense gets just an instant to tingle, before one more arrow finds her. This one comes *directly through* the mountain cover she herself has. Shrouded in a dense spiral of colourless light, it carves effortlessly through multiple tons of rock while barely losing speed. It at least has the decency to spray a shotgun blast of stone shrapnel at her as it exits, the pieces themselves smouldering hot like embers, from sheer kinetic energy transfer.

    Only after it then flies off into the next mountain far away, does she hear the hefty crunch of something either very heavy, very fast, or both, landing above her. A twelve foot tall bow, of some black metal shot through with geometric diamonds of gold, with a broken steel string, falls through her field of view. Tossed down from above. The giant of a woman, hundreds of pounds of nothing less than transcendental heroic sculpture, stands on an outcropping above, looking down. Utsuho can spy her own nuclear flames orbiting around her, forming a constant haze of rippling heat, orbs of fire swirling around her as if in zero gravity. The tips of her hair are all the colour of forge steel, but somehow haven't caught fire.

"You have firepower, I will give you that." she replies, finally in verbal range. The sound of her voice feels like having been crushed under a snowy avalance just now. "Enough to have my attention. But do you have any other quality of strength?"
Utsuho Reiuji Utusho does not like math and she has not yet found any reason to change her opinion.

Utsuho has also learned not to assume that escape is impossible. Escape is never impossible, or at least survival. She can survive more than anyone expects; why not Evehime? Especially if what she's heard is true...

But it still feels pretty good to wreck something like that. If she's being honest with herself.

The last arrow, though - shooting through the rock was *not* something Utsuho was expecting. Her only defense is that shield, once again; a wall of light and energy vaguely similar to Evehime's own, but sustained by active effort rather than collecting the energy around her.

The arrow hits it, grinding like a drill as Utsuho pumps more and more power into the wall - and eventually it, and the rock shards caught along with it, detonate. The backblast kicks Utsuho up several yards before she catches herself, having put more energy into it than she really meant to. She doesn't want to draw that hard on her energies *yet*...

The bow falls. Utsuho dodges as if it was an attack. Maybe it is. She turns to look up at... Evehime is not what she expected, and she beats her wings, once, when she speaks. It's almost defensive. That voice is something.

"You want to know? Nobody's really asked before," Utsuho says, after a very surprised moment. "I used to be weak. I made myself strong because I didn't want to be anymore. I ate a god! I worked! Because I didn't want my friends to have to take care of me all the time. Now *I* get to do what I want, *I* get to protect them, and I'll never be weak again..."

"...and I wasn't going to let you call me weak or useless or anything else! I don't care if you think you're the best warrior!" Utsuho accelerates again, flying - directly toward Evehime, as if she was going to ram her. That's because she is, in fact, going to ram her - going supersonic with a sudden scream of thrusters, she is simply going to try to shoulder-check her, fly past, return and come down feet-first. The aura doesn't scare her - it's all her flames, and Utsuho has never been afraid of flames, especially her own.

"I'm going to claim the world so that they can't all tell us to stay in the Underworld! Or... do something!" She hasn't entirely decided. The other Utsuho failed at that... "And if nobody can stop me that's their problem! I don't know what other kind of strength you mean, but at least I have that!" Pause. "Also I can run the furnaces of Hell, if that counts as a power." She adds that almost conversationally.
Evehime Gevurah     "Nobody has asked you because none of them know what strength is." The Gevurah's conclusion appears to be the complete opposite of what could be assumed from almost anyone. 'Because nobody cares', 'Because you aren't worth asking', 'Because you don't have any power', or those sorts of ideas seem to be beneath even her consideration. "But fearing weakness is not the same thing as seeking strength."

    Utsuho collides directly with her opponent. Evehime doesn't try to stop her. Though her own flames have no place burning her, Utsuho can see the way that that diffuse aura of hellfire suddenly contracts into one spot as she makes contact, curving around her and concentrating into a blazing friction point. The fire she used earlier now shields *Evehime* from nuclear burn. It doesn't seem like a conscious effort on her part either; there's no special controlling technique being executed it; it's as if the flames have simply decided to obey the Last Warrior of their own volition.

    Like most would, when wrapped up so closely in that oppressive aura of primal human perfection.

    "If no one can order you, will that make you content? Will you consider your strength complete? Would it be 'enough'?" Utsuho's shoulder check is met dead on with Evehime's own shoulder. On her side, the stone rapidly begins melting from extended exposure. On her opponent's side, it breaks and flattens from the shockwave. She can feel her enormous momentum, building up with her thrusters, pressing deeply into something immensely 'heavy', in an indescribable sense. Something that doesn't want to move. Like she's slowly pushing back a mountain, concentrated into the suggestion, the 'feeling' of one, without any of its mass and weight.

    Gradually, they actually touch, shoulder to shoulder, and she can hear something sizzling, right before Evehime says "You will have to do much, much better than eating the table scraps of godhood if you wish to claim the world as your own." For an instant, an edge of amusement creeps into her voice. A lukewarm breeze in an ice cold room. The creaking shift of enormous architecture at night. "You are amusing, at least. I know you mean it seriously."

    Still refusing to give, anchored to the ground with strength beyond strength, Evehime breaks the struggle by suddenly turning aside, so that Utsuho would shoot past by surprise, and then bringing up her opposite knee into a gut-crushing strike; one that hits hard enough to redefine the idea of 'force', while she remains perfectly balanced on one leg, holding the loose martial arts pose for a moment longer. From there, a two-handed hammer blow comes swinging at the back of Utsuho's head to drive her down into the valley at immense speed, using her own thruster power as well. Even then, the woman leaps from the mountaintop, pursuing the hell raven well beyond fatal velocity for a human, so she can crush her with a two-legged stomp. Her voice raises to such tremendous resonance that surely it could have carried to her without the radio before.

    "Though most in the Multiverse seem to desperately lack power like yours, they lack other things just as much. The same things you have no sight of. A clear goal to pursue with strong conviction. A method and design to achieve greater strength day after day. A mind free of fear and doubt and lesser desires. A heart that goes on when it cannot depend on others. Training. Fortitude. Worthy foes. Senses that soak in wisdom and make it your own. Boldness not simply born from ignorance or embitterance. Do you think you can come to possess these things? Or will you depend on the embers of a god to carry you forever?"
Utsuho Reiuji The aura of human perfection is something Utsuho can detect. It's not doing *nothing* to her. But she is used to feeling weak in the face of stronger foes, and she hates it - she hates it enough that she can break through.

But that her flames obey it - *that* hurts. Not literally; the trapped solar flames don't burn Utsuho enough for her to feel pain. But that they burn and protect someone who isn't her is a shock.

Utsuho grinds her shoulder further into the barrier, thrusters shrieking, as Eve asks questions that... Utsuho has never considered before. Would it be enough? *Would* she be happy? "I don't know." She has to raise her voice to make it audible at all, over the clashing forces. "I'll let you know when I get there."

When Evehime breaks the clash by turning, Utsuho is slightly unprepared. She is not nearly as skilled in melee combat - she's never had training, and mostly she uses her own strength and power. Actual martial arts counter that pretty well, and the impact to the gut is more powerful than any blow except one that she's ever taken before. She turns just slightly so that it doesn't hit the third eye. The follow-up would be worse.

Thrown into the mountain by the hammerblow, Utsuho impacts - and *keeps going*, melting a path through the mountain itself, a glowing-edged tunnel of stone. At first she tumbles uncontrollably; it takes her time to regain control, time to figure out which way is up, time to fly back out. The mountain itself saves her from the stomp simply because she's underground, which is good, because two blows was enough even with her body wrapped in Lord Yatagarasu's power.

Utsuho doesn't fly back up the same path she took down. She makes a loop deep beneath the earth, leaving a very confused tunnel to confuse later explorers (once it cools down and solidifies and stops having half-molten edges). Evehime may not be able to see her for a few moments longer.

But she sure can when Utsuho erupts from the ground itself on a vertical pillar of magma. She's tried to come up underneath Evehime but aiming when you're underground, as it turns out, is hard. Scattering sprays of lava hit the ground and begin to melt into it, turning snow to steam and pitting stone with lingering points of white-hot rock, only beginning to cool.

"If that's what power is," Utsuho yells, "then I'm going to get it! I'm going to take it! It's going to be mine! A heart that goes on, a plan to get better, being brave... I won't ask Lord Yatagarasu for more - I'll just GET IT MYSELF!"
Evehime Gevurah     Evehime lands at the edge of Utsuho's crater --no, it's more like an entry wound into the earth-- with a crunch so enormous the hell raven can still feel it deep underground. Even with her weight and the speed of her fall, it shouldn't quite shake the solid bedrock around her to that extent. When the Last Warrior approaches that molten hole, though, the pursuit stops for the moment.

    Though the raw feeling of inescapability --that she is impossible to challenge at *anything*-- which radiates from her certainly can't help but conjure to mind thoughts of her sprinting along that tunnel after Utsuho anyways, she seems to favour caution this time, scanning her surroundings with too-intense eyes, filtering out all the noise of nature, and even stopping her own breathing so she can pick up the instant Utsuho is about to resurface.

    Or perhaps waiting there had been part of the plan. Evehime glances down just a split second before Utsuho explodes out from beneath her, perhaps feeling the reverberation in the ground, or perhaps through sheer instinct, and simultaneous with the explosive pillar of molten lava, she brings back one hand clenched over her fist, builds such an unfathomable amount of energy into it that the air quakes around it, igniting wisps of pale flame, and swings straight down into the ground. "HAA-!"

    The force of the singular blow rips the earth in half, the seismic shock momentarily flattening the molten eruption into a spherical wave around her. The ground tears and upheaves to either side of her, creating rent walls of what used to be ground, which the lava crashes against, and then rushes back down on top of her, draining away back into the hole. Her aura steams and crackles with the energy of the superheated earth slowly flowing down its surface, seething with thermal energy that turns into a bright, incandescent halo. Smoke trickles from her clothes, but the human flesh beneath rejects the act of destruction, now wreathed by the faint suggestion of ten discrete rings.

    Utsuho flies right past her. Still visually tracked. "That is exactly what power is." she calls after. "I know the nature of strength, and I have never once spoken untruth in my entire more." The tone that carries in the Gevurah's voice makes that unquestionably true. "And you will indeed never get there so long as you beg the gods for their favour. Maybe you have some conception --some inkling-- of what it means to face a true God. More than the arrogant children who play with beasts and think themselves heroes. If you do, let that be the measure against which you climb. Start with becoming something that your Yatagarasu envies. And then become something that has no use for even him. And then become something even more."

    "And if that defies your comprehension, I will show you more."

    A square kilometer of snow disappears, an acre of brush on all sides turns to ash and blows away, and the frozen lake collapses and steams. A flash of fire that doesn't belong to Utsuho blasts up from below and crashes down from on high at the same time, the smell of sulfur and incense mixing together as they implode on Evehime as the single point beneath them. Black-red and white-gold flames are drawn up into a single blurring orbit, churning together into solid ribbons of energy that spin together like an old viking maypole, and becomes solid.
Evehime Gevurah     The Last Warrior's right arm becomes fully clad in red hot plates of half-forged armour, black and wickedly clawed at its fingers, silvery white chain visible in the seams, but it tapers off into still unformed flame, rather than continuing to cover any more of her body. The bulk of it spirals together in the form of a sword too large to even be called gargantuan. Something vaguely reminiscent of a zweihander, but so big it even dwarfs Evehime. The handle is as long as she is, the blade five times so, broader than a boat and heavier than a building. It rests over one shoulder, piercing into the sky, shrouded in raging flames, with the ease of a sporting bat, so long as Evehime has one arm draped over the guard, reminiscent of massive, black iron antlers, belonging to some pagan idol.

    The Gevurah leaps into the air one more time, at tenfold the speed of before, practically shooting herself like a bullet to intercept where Utsuho will be before she has time to react and maneuver. The sword comes 'round as a matter of course, clad in the chaotic roar of a sustained thunderstorm from the sheer amount of air being simultaneously displaced by its mass and consumed by its heat. She swings it mid-air in a massive, cleaving moon slash, covering so much space that avoiding it in any meaningful way seems physically possible.

    "Look, and remember it well! This is-!"
    "-Haevateyr-!"

    The weight, speed, and strength behind it, however sharp it might be, are essentially irrelevant for a target smaller than a skyscraper, because the instant it touches solid matter, the transfer of energy is so much that whatever it touches almost assuredly explodes. Utsuho's extreme resilience to heat and fire, and even the fusion of the air here, should allow her to survive, but even then, the force would be enough to put her right back in the ground much harder than Evehime had thrown her.
Utsuho Reiuji Utsuho does not expect to be followed into the gap in the earth. Not because Evehime can't, but because there's no point; Utsuho either comes out or she runs away. If she erupts - as she did - why chase her? And if she doesn't, well, then she's run away, and won't be worth Evehime's time.

Not that Utsuho thinks it through quite that deliberately, or even consciously. She just *knows* that Evehime will be there when she comes out. And, in this, she is correct.

The sheer impact of the blow deforms the eruption and tears the rock apart, leaving Utsuho to rocket upward through what is abruptly empty space with the lava following her. She spreads her wings as she clears the subterranean tunnel, her wings or her cloak catching the air with a *bang* that decelerates her rather abruptly. She's not stopping, but she's definitely trying to slow down, probably so she has better air control.

There's still a lot of speed to bleed, and Utsuho does it in a long banking curve. She can still hear Evehime. It's hard not to. And perhaps contrary to what people assume from her, she listens, or at least she doesn't immediately discard what she's heard. Whether she'll forget it on the flight home, nobody knows. But Utsuho tends to act on even the things she *doesn't* consciously remember.

"Then show it to me!" she calls back, just before Evehime does. "And I'll show you!"

Utsuho can feel the flames called. They're hot, and while she can (and has) happily sat in lava she can still feel *these*. The first wash of heat as the blade and armor form may not have hurt her, but it sure does get her attention. She stalls in midair, hovering, eyes wide. All three of them. The one set in her breastbone is moving, a sluggish shift of pupil from left to right as it too focuses on Evehime.

That is one big sword, is about all Utsuho has time to think before it - and Evehime - come at her. She shouldn't have stopped. Stopping was a mistake.

Haevateyr does not touch Utsuho, at first. It hits - nothing, as Utsuho forms another one of those solid walls of light. There's nothing physical there; she is even burning the air itself away as she forms the white-hot wall. It glows brighter, and brighter yet, almost something brighter than white but still somehow tinged with golden sunlight. Plasma, maybe.

The sound is incredible. Utsuho wants to put her fingers in her ears but she can't move. She can't do anything but press against the inside of the 'wall' with her hand and rod and she's still not really holding it off. Evehime can feel it cutting through the barrier, slowly carving through as blooms of fire and nuclear energy tear off it in random directions.

The blade cuts through, as the barrier shatters into a hundred thousand fragments of non-solid splinters of light, like a broken mirror.

The explosion Evehime was waiting for occurs.

It is unclear where Utsuho *is* after that, because she certainly isn't here. The sharp-eyed might see where she hit the ground - but with her flames shattered for an instant, she didn't go through deeply, but apparently hit, bounced, and launched back up into the air after carving a trench. The *very* sharp-eyed may see a tiny speck in the distance as Utsuho tumbles, not really able to control her flight from a combination of speed, semi-consciousness after her landing, and dizziness from spinning at an ungodly rate.

A few seconds later, and there is a explosion in the distance as whatever was left of Utsuho's heat contacted a different frozen lake. The last person may have just hit his, but Utsuho's is now a cloud of steam with her cratered inside it.

She isn't coming back from that right now, Yatagarasu or not.