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Evehime Gevurah     The city of Omaha in the year 2080, once strictly American, is a very different place, now that it is part of the neo-nation of United American and Canadian States. A metropolis of almost two million people now, its urban sprawl has spread around even more of the many lakes surrounding it, and crossed over the entire hairpin of the Missouri and Platte River.

    Blocks of towering buildings, new and old, that once glittered a rainbow of colours at night, reflected on the water, have grown fivefold in height and tenfold in breadth since the quaint days of the 2000s. The downtown of the city is no less than a blazing mountain of light. A tower of babel painted in glowing windows of long, late shifts, and pulsing beacons of swarming communications and cloud computing traffic. Bridges swarm end to end with solid, luminous streams of vehicle head and tail lights, roads made into ribbons of red and white in the dark. Even at this hour, the air traffic caused by countless helicopters and planes is a constant hum, just behind the blare of neon billboard storefront calls, holographic advertisements, glowing news screen announcements, and the dull roar of the streets.

    Too much of one. The night life has gone from merely the hustle of countless round-the-clock corporate drones and tromping street police to the impression that almost *everyone* in the city is outside, all at once. The roads are jammed bumper to bumper for miles. The streets swarm with people almost shoulder to shoulder. Oddly, most people are carrying bags and backpacks of personnel possessions with them. More oddly, the usually ubiquitous corporate and municipal police are nowhere to be seen. Not a one.

    Something is very, very wrong. That much is for certain. Not only does the traffic of a million people all flow from every corner of the city to one, central location, the people in it are like men and women possessed. Even from afar, one can glimpse a brightly burning intensity in their eyes, and hear the feverish emphasis in their chatter. In the monotony of their daily lives, working endless hours until the dead of night to go home to their sponsored apartment cells and drink soy-based coffee, something so dramatically life-changing has happened to all of them that they look like the crowd one would imagine gathering for the moment of interstellar first contact --if one prefers drama, the second coming. There is an incandescent excitement in their hurried yet harmonious steps. Terrible anxiety in their gaze, wedded by ecstatic anticipation.

    They are on pilgrimage. Bringing their possessions, their cars, their spouses, their children, to the place they must go to. The stretch of the city around the western bank of the Missouri River. The many square miles where the towering supercorp sprawl has gone dark. The tip of a massive wedge-shape of blackness, visible from above, carved from the east to the west, stopping just across the river at the seat of the city government, raised into the lofty penthouses of towering skyscrapers where historic brick and mortar once stood.
Evehime Gevurah     Even without entering the dark zone, it isn't hard to spot the thick haze of smoke that billows into the air from across its many miles of length, nor spot the hellish lights of thousands of smouldering fires, painting orange streets between the jagged remains of millions of credits of architecture crushed like a glade of trees after a violent storm. Deep craters consume ragged tracts of earth comparable to a scorched moonscape, sparkling with broken steel and glass in the dull firelight. Pulverized roads gleam with rivers of brass in their cracks like kintsugi art.

    At the very western edge, right before the administrative district, the earth has been riven in two, forming an abyssal moat across the river, and from below, it has heaved up a small mountain, a hundred storeys tall, its peak just high enough to step from the summit to the roof of the highest government building in the city. Water streams down its sides in winding spirals, without apparent source, small caps of snow nestled in its crags. The great multitudes that come from all around, congregate at its base, even beginning to encamp at its foot, while long processions take turns scaling what appear to be thousands of punishingly steep stairs carved into the rock, curling around and around. The great flow of traffic, meanwhile, passes by towards the massive fissure. Upon each arrival, the drivers and passengers exit, and work together slide the vehicle straight down into the abyss. Cars. Trucks. Armoured vans. Transport tankers. Even what look to be military jeeps. Backpacks of possessions are likewise turned out and emptied into the seemingly bottomless hole with nothing less than cheers of ecstatic joy from the crowd, the empty-handed pilgrims then welcomed into the waiting throng at the base of the mountain.

    Something at the very top catches the light. A glimmering shine, almost too small to see from the ground. Alluring. Chilling. Frightening. Thrilling. Hard to look away.
Shining Tiger There was an alluring call. Someone needed help, protection from others. Someone was coming. A person. Someone to fight? Perhaps. Maybe Shining Tiger could do a good thing and get some training out of it. Or he could just visit Omaha, and eat some steaks, because that's what he's heard it is good for.

He can't miss the smoke and the mountain, so Tiger heads for that, pushing across the pilgrimage. He makes some radio calls to contacts who may have heard what's going on, in the process. He has two questions for them, about this: Who is the strongest person here, and are they seeking a fight?

Though, as Tiger hitches along in the back of a truck with a bag of goodies to ostensibly donate (but actually it's his stuff), he feels he might have found his answer. He sees that vague glimmering shine. What the hell is that?

Hopefully, as he gets his information and moves to start actually taking steps up, he can find out something good.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak does not give away his possessions or his vehicle. He keeps them, wearing his armor, riding his bike over the crowd. He is not the sort who seeks to prove his own worth to others--he is the sort who judges the mettle of others. Audible above the din of air traffic, above the throngs of supplicants, is the roar of chemical thrusters, as his bike flies over them.

     Tiger will certainly notice him, as well--he's a hard man to miss. It looks as though he's got the same goal in mind, ascending to the very top of that mountain. That mountain, which rises from the earth where once there was only decades of sprawl and of technological advancement, he will not scale as the others do. If there is no resistance, no attacks hurled his way, he'll fly the bike all the way to the shrine. And this, he will attempt, *especially* if someone takes umbrage.

     He likes a challenge, and he likes to issue them.
The Kid     It's not often that Pyth speaks directly to the Kid. Even less often does he give commands. But tonight is an exception.

    The young man walks atop cars, leaping from vehicle to vehicle to best navigate the choked pathways leading to the vast hole, the new mountain, and the terrifying light. He considers the spreading liquid brass with a hint of concern. The dense urban sprawl had made him entirely uncomfortable, but this... this is a touch of home. The warm bronze color decorates something in every square foot of Caelondia.

    He arrives at the base, and sees people shoving a vehicle into the pit, followed by worldly possessions. It doesn't sit right with him. A man of faith he, from a City without much of it. But this is excess. This is fervour, dangerous and mad. He glances at a machine gun-mounted military jeep and considers briefly taking it for whatever waits at the top. But interrupting this... offering session might turn the crowd on him. No, he'll have to make do with what he has.

    And so he begins to climb, jogging up the steps with brisk pace of a military man. As he ascends, Pyth's command drums in his mind.

         ASCEND THE NEWBORN MOUNTAIN. CONFRONT WHAT AWAITS AT THE TOP.          
Lory Thumper      The little bunny cop known as Lory Thumper had a few ideas in mind when she stepped through the gate to this world. None of them were this. It sounded like this city was under seige, but now it looks like everyone has just chosen en masse to journey to this fissure. With traffic practically gridlocked, she looks for better ways to get closer to that mountain.

     And a passing sky bike carrying a giant of a man provides her one. She pulls out her grapple gun and with a quick shot latches on before pulling herself upward. She swings and then flips upward to land on an open area of the bike, then gives a salute. "Bercilak! Good to see you again! I hope you don't mind a passenger. I may have lots of tools, but a flying bike isn't among them."

     Lory looks ahead as they move, then down at the gathered masses. "So...what do you think is going on here? Mass hypnosis of some kind?" she asks as she scans the skyline for signs of signal broadcasting towers or dishes.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's spy-jet pulls in slowly, its central psitanium core shimmering a soft purple in its otherwise lightless form. The agent of a vague yet menacing government agency steps out the back and begins to drift on a psychic parachute, heading for the objective. His own body flashes bright, for a moment, then is rendered totally invisible.

    He starts scanning through the crowd, a slow, persisting ping to invade their minds en-masse and try to get a read on what's going on. His clairvoyance pings the area around, to get a measure of the shape and intensity of any mental and psychic effects. And he drifts towards that objective, the mountain. Specifically he's going for the mountain, intent on gliding to whichever is the highest point he can get to, and proceeding upwards using his levitation and invisibility.
Tina Natsumi There's enough things wrong with this entire region and the procession of people hurling their stuff into the massive hole that it all ends up seeming weirdly tame for Tina. She's not going to throw her own stuff into the hole, of course, but she doesn't waste the opportunity to stream it all live for her fans back home.

"Yeah, I got nothin'. This is some majorly weird stuff we got goin' on, and my money's on aliens or cult. We got our giant hole over there, the mountain crew over there, and a freaky light slash UFO up over yonder."

Nothing else to do but ascend those steps. She gives the crowds a wide berth to try and avoid getting her stuff stolen, recording her movements and what's in front of her all the while. "And we're walkin'. We're walkin'. We're walkin'.  Gonna be walkin' for a mighty long time, so how's the rest of your days's been?"

Should one of the Elites heading up decide to answer, she'll gladly give them some screen time.
Shining Tiger Tina gets a reply from Tiger as they walk up the mountain. "Oh, a streamer, cool! My day's doing pretty good. Last night I made a new friend - a big and strong oni, she could punch so hard it was great! I learned a new technique from her, too. Shining Tiger's the name, martial arts is the game!"
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "I iminde not," says Bercilak to Lory cheerfully. "Be thou wel at ese 'pon mine stede."

>What do you think is going on here?

     "It seme a peregrinage," says the Green Knight honestly. "A holi journei to the peke of yonder mounthe," with a nod towards the approaching mountain. "Al be that... ne'er hath I espied a peregrinage of such gretenesse--one which bewicches the hertes of ifolke so wholli." Gesturing in a circular motion while guiding the bike towards the shrine, "It biseme al-sum the citi wendes for the mounthe."
Evehime Gevurah     Shining Tiger's ability to contact the local scene is disturbing. What they tell him is bad enough, but the fact that there are so few physical adepts and street samurai kinds still around to talk is worrying.

    When the Kid walks the broken streets, up close, he can see that the brass filling in the cracks, practically glowing in the radiant light of the revolting-smelling rubber and fuel fires, is no liquid. Ammo casings. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. A river of them spilled on every major intersection and roadway, having since rolled into the spiderweb of broken concrete and asphalt, and filled them up like glittering repair artwork. Even jumping across the roofs of cars (though he could practically walk hood to trunk if he wanted), what he gets from the mass exodus of excited 'pilgrims' is nothing but fascination; pointing, whispering, oohs and ahhs, and raised pitch of frenetic murmuring.

    Pushing to the front of the crowd at the bottom of the mountain is tedious, but easy. Most of them are camped out, patiently waiting their turn, or having already come back down, only some with basics of chairs and blankets and water, sharing them out as needed. The air is perversely laid back. Harmonious, even. The base of the mountain greets him, and Tina, with stairs that might as well be two-at-a-time, with ice cold water coursing down streams to each side, over endless tiers of small waterfalls and shallow pools, easily blending in with a decorative garden.

    Flamel probing the crowd's minds meets no resistance. If anything, they're far less guarded than a regular person ought to be; even for a beaten down wage drone. What he finds isn't an active exertion of psychic power --no psychic control waves or subliminal radio signals of the sort-- but a tremendous memetic idea in their heads, bright and terrible and consuming. Something they've seen has just blown open their worldview and pulled the floor out from under what they understand, and the vast majority seem to have responded with both a deep sense of liberation and a sense of something close to a fear of the unknown. Some are far more afraid than excited, others are blazingly motivated.

    All of them share a common thought, with slight permutations based on the individual. 'I know a perfect person exists. I want to follow. I want to listen. Being around them feels Right. Everything is going to be as it should have always been. I didn't know this was even a feeling I could have, but it's so exciting'. It doesn't seem to have much of a power for infectious spread, other than powerful, curious allure. It seems like something that they've personally witnessed, and then have eagerly brought other people along to see, unable to help themselves, thus physically increasing the exposure. Those taking their things to the hole have an additional sort of idea, approximate to guilt, but also approximate to relief. 'These things are bad. They are to blame for what is wrong in my life. By getting rid of them, I can follow the right instructions, and be Fixed.'

    Lory is absolutely spoiled for choice in terms of broadcasting equipment; the whole city is wired to the nines with transmission equipment for cloud computing that covers every single inch of the place. Everything is connected to a single matrix of information. Everything is updating constantly. There are probably a slew of cyberpunk vulnerabilities involved. She will likely have to trace the transmission herself through the matrix. Cyber forensics work. That said, it definitely has to be somewhere out of the way. High up and far off.
Evehime Gevurah     But scaling the mountain will not be so simple, it seems. Though there are plenty of ordinary people making their way up, one at a time, in a procession that will take days to sort through, there are many places of ill-omen along the way. Splotches of blood stained into the stone. Bullet holes and spent casings. Cracked rocks and drenched plateaus. Bodies, too. The stairs even out in many places to widened gathering spots, where people are resting, drinking from the streams, and maneuvering around each other to go back down, or even just soaking in the scenery before them. In these places, corpses are pinned to walls, thrown down on lower rock shelves, or even stacked three high.

    Most of them are wearing variants of advanced tactical armour. Special forces badges and elite PMC pins. A minority are wearing fanciful robes, shawls, and tunics of Sioux, Jamaican, and East Indian designs. Some aren't even human, either subtly indicated by pointed ears or short, squat frames, but others are horned, fanged, or rough-skinned heaps on the ground.The pilgrims whisper and widen their eyes, but don't react to them with anything approaching the psychological mechanisms that they ought to.

    The source of them is fairly obvious. Tina, the Kid, and Shining Tiger are stopped at each landing by what could only really be described as 'crazies'. Hulking topless men still in their military fatigue trousers and combat boots, muscles painted with crude designs, mania in their eyes, and clutching ornate swords, spears, axes, knives, and other such weapons, notably without a gun or grenade to be seen.

    They're the physical cream of the crop --especially hulking troll and orc types-- and are zealously, suicidally aggressive, lost in some kind of addictive battle lust by Tiger's or Flamel's reckoning, but few of them are extremely skilled with their weapons. The occasional guardian, or small squad of them, is able to put up a stiff resistance from some former commando training, or time on the street using a rare corporate-issue tech sword or mystically enhanced martial arts, but they don't do much more than serve to make the climb laborious, tiring, and perilous. Bystanders watch with a sort of bizarrely thrilled apathy.

    Bercilak taking to the skies over the path is a different story. People take exception to that. The crowd points and murmurs at his flying bike in anxious and hostile tones. Approaching the mountain, he comes under fire from a small number of what appear to be ATGMs, fired from those landings whether the grounded trio haven't gone, mixed with --oddly-- arrows and bolts from on high. Parsons, however, is left completely unmolested, as nobody present has any means to notice him through his psychic invisibility.

    At the top of the peak, they can both spot what appears to be a throne-shaped formation of glittering white quartz, upon which a single, large figure, half-clad in black, is reclined. Their posture somehow reads as disinterested, even from afar. Those who reach the top take turns offering some personal affect on a growing pile, prostrating themselves, and then hurrying back down. The light seems to radiate from the figure in a subtle, invisible way, like ultraviolet blurring the very edge of the visible spectrum. Mostly, the gleam is an artifact of it diffusing through the smoky crystal throne. Gazing upon the figure, even so indistinct from a distance, is enough to immediately send an exquisitely unique pang of pulse-quickening fascination, perspective, anticipation, even awe. Something like what Niel Armstrong must have felt, looking back at Earth, knowing himself the first man in history to ever see the true face of the planet. Or one could imagine.
The Kid     The corpses are concerning. Especially the spent brass around them, of which Kid realises is the same color as that spreading bronze. Picking one up, he considers it before being confronted by one of the massive, hulking battle maniacs. The look in their eyes is similar to the throng below, but the twitching pupils and evident veins betray a certain level of frenzy beyond even them.

    He considers briefly stating that he is on a mission from the Pantheon, but strongly believes they won't care. And even if they did, they are an obstacle, a challenge. Something to be overcome. Kid is starting to understand why he was sent here now. For indeed, as he ascends this mountain and looks down at the world below, phantom flashes of another world far below echo through his mind. His home, engulfed in flames, swallowed by the earth.

    He fights. And unfortunately for these guardians, he is very proficient in fighting on dangerous footing high above the ground. While these men dwarf him, Kid inevitably manages to stab or shoot their legs out then rush in and knock them from the mountain, sending them tumbling down..

    Eventually, he reaches the top, and beholds the quartz throne and the bored figure upon it. The worshippers deliver offerings before scurrying down the mountain. Kid waits in line like a good boy before offering one of the ornate swords of the mountain guardians, stained faintly in their blood.

    "I have been sent by Pyth, the Bull, god of Order and Commotion. Tell me, who are you that He would send me to your mountain?"
Lory Thumper      As she sees the plethora of choices in broadcast points, Lory's long ears droop. "...well, this could take a while..." she mutters to herself, then they perk up again as Bercilak speaks up. "Thanks." she says to his welcoming words. After listening to his observation she nods lightly. "Yeah, it does seem like some sort of pilgrimage, doesn't it." she agrees.

     As they pass one of the rooftops she hops down and rolls with the landing before approaching one of those comm towers. "Thanks for the ride, Bercilak! I'm gonna try to find those people who called for help. Not sure how much help I'd be anyway against whatever is up-"

     Then she dives for cover as AA fire starts lighting up the sky. "Sweet peas and carrots!" she exclaims. She checks to see if Bercilak is alright, then approaches the closest network access point and plugs in. "Alright...route me to that signal..." she says as she starts hacking in.
Tina Natsumi "A martial artist, eh? Lookin' forward to seeing your moves in action. I'll make sure to get some good shots of you and that new move o' yours!" Tina laughs as Shining Tiger shares her enthusiasm, even going as far as getting a wide-angled shot of him.

The hike up the mountain, thankfully, does't seem particularly treacherous. Long, but she's not getting accosted by rolling boulders or anything yet. The sight of the streams even gives her some nicer-looking footage to work with, although that doesn't last long once she starts running into the bullet holes, the casings, the wounds, the dead.

All things considered, this scenery actually sucks. A lot. The armor is definitely something worth looking into as well, but the sight of those hulking swole guys is certainly cause for worry. "This could get messy folks. Might even be dangerous for you viewers at home to see, so I'm afraid I'm gonna have to cut this one short. Make sure to follow the channel and subscribe, and I'll catch y'alls next time."

The stream is turned off so Tina doesn't get demonetized, and then she snaps a picture of herself with the phone. A robotic hulk of her own materializes behind her, covered head to toe in red, white, and blue coloration and stars. "Easy or hard, guys. Don't make us go with hard."

Alas, they'll probably make her go with hard. Tina's Persona opens its bulky arms up to release a pair of SMGs, and it focuses its fire on their legs first in an attempt to avoid adding to the body count, only moving further up the body if they're truly that persistent. She also makes sure to follow the Kid's league in snatching up a weapon as well.

Upon reaching the top, however, Tina stares at the strange figure awestruck while her Persona disappears. "The heck is that...?" She had come here to stop... Something, right? But is there really anything to stop? She offers the sword once it's her turn, then steps off to the side while glancing around. "What's... All of this, anyway? It's..."

She doesn't finish that thought, but she sounds rather calm about all of it.
Shining Tiger Shining Tiger sees the battle fury instantly. As they come at him, begin stabbing and slashing and bludgeoning, he draws a spear from his back and starts fighting back. Kicks to the legs, and then a spear to the shoulder to make them unable to use their weapon. Rapid thrusts, fast-paced footwork, and actually kicking one guy off the mountain, he joins The Kid if he gets to the top, not even a little exhausted, but covered in blood as well. He moves to offer a bottle of booze from his bag, before he even gets a chance to look at the person in the throne...

"I am Shining Tiger, practitioner of the Radiant Heart Style. If you are the person who's been changing this place and bringing everyone to their knees, which I bet you are..."

A stance, at which point he actually moves to make eye contact. They're...well, they're impressive. Extremely. He's in awe once he looks at them, and has to bring his eyes away from their eyes. "I-I challenge you to a fight!" He manages to get out, in his awestruck state.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "Begrip on tightli," says Bercilak with excitement, as the guided missiles approach.

     Ordinarily he'd laugh in the face of this danger--but he has a passenger. If necessary, he'll reach forward and grab her by the back of her tactical vest while she hacks, so she isn't thrown off by the sudden increase in speed when he guns it. But gun it he does, and, after, he points to the left and right sides of the vehicle, where there are running boards she can use to take cover behind his bulk and the bike's, if need be.

     One strikes the front of the bike dead-on, the stubborn, thick armor plating of his bike boasting a scar after being blown off-course. The shorn metal flies backwards and strikes his helmet with an impactful and alarming clank--and what sounds like a more grisly noise. He corrects his course, as his injury and his armor are mended, with ease. The pucker-shaped hole in his bike mends itself, too, albeit more slowly. That's just the one--there are others. Pulling into a tight barrel roll, he kills the engines for a moment to confuse the tracking of the remaining missles. The haft of his axe is used, one-handed, as he loops and turns, to swat another off course, the peak growing steadily closer. If any should still remain, his next maneuver is as deft as it is spiteful, racing towards the sheer surface of the mountain only to pull up at the last second and force the missile to crash into the site of the pilgrimmage.

     The death-defying ride finally comes to an end when Bercilak comes in for a landing besides the Kid. He dismounts, hefting his enormous axe over one shoulder. He does not wait in line like a good boy. "Thy folouers art wrothli, that I shouldst not knele bifore thee," calls Bercilak to the same figure the Kid is speaking to. "Yet thou'rt dulled, clerli." That figure looks bored. Despite having the worship of an entire city.

     Tiger is here. Good, good. Then that means he'll have a kindred spirit. "Per happes we might skente thee, where thy peticioners cannst not." Tina asks what 'all this' is, and he answers. "Peregrinage, of cours. And here is mine offeringe." His axe crashes into the hard stone of the peak, the Green Knight attempting to drive a fissure through it--and send the offerings clattering down to the earth below.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel is a spy: He disrupts only where it's least noticable, and otherwise moves on to focus on gathering information. This particular great memory... If he can identify its source, and gather enough information about it, he can surely surely engineer a counter-meme and inject it into the population. But the source itself? Why, it must surely be up there, past the guardians that his parachuting landed beneath. Invisible, he creeps up in a steady levitation until he reaches the peak, and sees the form of the source.

    All his senses focus. His perspective narrows and closes in on the form. Fascination is a particular vulnerability for them; their urging, addictive drive for information makes the only thing they can do, right now, the simple act of approaching and scanning. Scanning the form, psychometrically, psychically... and, of course, turning the full force of his mind on scanning the brain, a sustained effort to parse out the memories and thinking in the body. All while creeping towards, maybe even right up next to the throne, invisibly, with little fascinated gasps being the only sound.
Evehime Gevurah     Lory's crack into the matrix is successful. It's too successful, even. Though she trips many security programs in the attempt, nobody is monitoring them at all. Most of the keys are left on the metaphorical desk, and there are nothing but automatic counter intrusion methods to try and prevent her access. In broad part, people haven't even locked their computers before wandering out into the street. If she really wanted to, she could probably surf half the entire city's data, given months to actually do so.

    It isn't hard from there to identify the origin of the transmission hitting the Sector Zero broadband channel of happenstance, crudely done as it is. The near-top of an office building at the opposite end of the administrative district. An entertainment and news media hypercorp. Getting up to those highly secured offices, where news is manufactured and carefully curated to the masses, would normally be extremely difficult, even with a Paladins badge, but nobody even stops her on the way in. Security cameras automatically swivel to follow her, but the front desk is empty, and the elevators take her right up, after cracking their keycard scanners, given that she lacks a fob.

    Behind a door to a soundproofed room that has been locked for likely no reason other than the feeling of security, Lory is hurriedly greeted by a frazzled, exhausted, and wild-eyed woman in charcoal grey and heels who looks to possibly be some sort of assistant, not generically attractive enough to be an anchor or host. She turns back to the darkened room behind her, and its glowing screen, and waves an all-clear. Behind her, Lory can find thirty some other members of the staff, without much of a pattern. A fat, terrified janitor in his coveralls. A thin, greying, profusely sweating man in an executive suit. A young lady still wearing a logo-stamped barista apron from some cafeteria.

    Also, a number of security guards. Only one of them is dressed in a collared shirt and belt; the others are all armoured for hot combat, wearing insignia of major private military companies. Some are wearing UCAS flags and division patches, denoting them as part of the national army. All of those people are wounded, covered in bandages and gauze compresses straight from workplace first aid kits, as well as some more advanced gel stanchers and hyposprays, looking to be in varying states of painkiller-induced lethargy.

    "Are you the one?" the assistant asks, nervously. "Did they only send one? Did anyone else get it? Please *please* tell me you have a way out. I don't know what'll happen if we go outside. We need out of the city and to a hospital somewhere, *stat*." She anxiously brushes back her hair when noticing her choice of phrase. "This whole city is screwed. We've got to go now; while that . . . *thing* isn't moving!"
Evehime Gevurah     Each landing is populated by men possessed. The skilled, the tough, the fortunate. Few of them could really be called Elites, however. Most of them that could are random low-level adepts and specialists with mostly raids, skirmishes, and gang wars under their belt. They fight like the storied berserkers of antiquity, though rather than foaming at the mouth and biting their shields, they fight as if the act itself were inherently sublime beyond comprehension. Violence while lost in reverie. They die with smiles on their faces.

    Arriving --even by hard landing-- at the peak, the newcomers find themselves standing amidst inches of snow, though the air itself isn't quite chilly enough to warrant it. Shallow drifts and formations of glittering ice seem to exist here simply because they should, pristine and beautiful. Close attention reveals that it is impossible to leave treads in the snow. Bare paths of hexagonal stones, glinting with a paper thin coating of frost, provide the best passage, though the whole peak is no larger than is necessary to play two simultaneous football games, and the throne itself sits atop a ziggurat of natural steps that take up only a monument's worth of space.

    Most of it is used up by ranks of prostrated civilians, still wearing their shift clothes, or even some random ensemble they threw together from the closet over their sleepwear. They kneel and pray in broad circular ranks around the whole perimeter of the mountaintop, as if worshipping the Kaaba, only kept back by the steadily growing heap of offerings, and split where the stairs reach the top.

    The figure on the throne, though . . . The figure is a woman, who must be at least seven feet tall. One of indeterminate, prime of life age, and indeterminate ethnicity, with bronzed-amber fair skin. Long black hair spills over both shoulders and to the rear of the throne's seat, professionally straight-cut despite it. Her unusual clothing displays a physique like an Olympic fighter; a roman statuesque hero in the female form; her wear consisting of loose black pants reminiscent of western trousers and eastern hakama, cinched into dark, metal-shod boots wrapped in gold cord, and held with a similar waist sash. A scarf-shawl is loosely thrown over one shoulder and tied together at the bottom, exposing white chest wrappings and resulting in a long trail of cloth that lays across the armrest and displays a strange ten-point geometric symbol and something like a crest of arms, likewise making the outfit impossible to culturally place.

    Her head rests against her curled fingers, supported by an utterly apathetic arm on the immaculate quartz throne. When she finally glances at the interlopers now arriving at the peak, her eyes are bright blue in a way that reflects too much light, and marked with bright red accents at their outer corners, matching three horizontal slashes of colour under each eye, resembling no specific tattoos at all, but perhaps some combination of Celtic Warrior and Geisha.
Evehime Gevurah     More important than the physical details, however, is the indescribable, yet viscerally recognizable 'presence' about her. Like an optical illusion, many very simple factors come together in an extremely specific way that hits the brain head on. Rather than deceiving the visual cortex however, those minute, interlocking details come together in a sensation that is utterly overwhelming. Something from the oldest, deepest recesses of the subconscious mind, dredged up in a way it never would be otherwise. Dizzy. Intoxicating. Enough to drown in.

    Some ancient, primitive part of the brain puts all those little details together, and ultimately recognizes what it's seeing. The part that tells people apart, reads expressions in animals, and sees human faces and forms in random patterns. It lights up like a bonfire, metaphorically screaming with ringing bells and blazing chorus into the thinking part of the brain that it is looking at something of unfathomable importance. Something worthy of all the attention there is to give. Something that makes everything *make sense*. Feel *right*.

    A perfect human being. A figure that exudes such divine 'humanity' that the tribal reflex to identify and follow a strong and attractive leader goes into apocalyptic overdrive. Like staring at the Earth from the Moon, the sense is of having such an incredible view as to fit the entire concept of humanity into one's field of vision and see all of its aspects and all of its flaws. And just like being on the Moon, there is that innate, mild terror of coming loose and floating away into the void forever. It's so strong that even one who is only 'humanoid' feels the enormity of the adjacent idea. The halo of light around them may even be purely within the mind's eye. It's obvious now, why a tired, passive, bored and beaten worker would have no chance at anything but throwing themselves at the feet of a being like this.

    That's what they're doing alright. The heap of junk growing on the peak seems to be of dubious material value, but purely sentimental. People casting their most meaningful items at the figure's feet, likely symbolically giving up on their own lives, to buy themselves precious seconds in that perfect presence, overcome with a super-religious fervour. A moment of coming to God. The Kid can step right over the rows of their bent backs without them even noticing. Only the figure on the throne spares a slow glance sideways at the sword he tosses. Glance isn't right. A normal human eye flicks. It saccades to something, skipping the middle and updating the image at the end. There's the feeling that her gaze glides in such a way that takes in everything. It glides back to take in his face. It slides from him, to Tina, to Bercilak, to Shining tiger, like a swift, clean cut, leaving a narrow trail of light. Hopefully, her gaze doesn't reach Flamel due to him being invisible, and thus her unaware.

    Then Bercilak smashes the offerings into a rift in the mountaintop, violent and deep enough to entrench fully a third of the circle, causing the rest to topple and slide from their piles from the quaking impact. The lone figure still seems unmoved. Though, finally, she begins to speak to him. A voice that radiates the very picture of 'strength'. A sound that conjures to mind someone who has never conceived of lying in their life, for having never once fallen short of any measure. Just the texture and shape of the words feels like being baptized.
Evehime Gevurah     "Call them followers if you like. All they are is zealots. Men who broke to fight rather than flight. Now they seek the path that they might have walked, before they sold their souls to their masters. But none of them have even a fraction of the mettle." Those are her words to Bercilak. Low. Slow. Only the least bit interested. She gestures with the least amount of energy possible, with her free hand, in the direction of the crowd. "These ones no longer have even that reflex; to fight or to flee. They are so broken and tamed that all they can think is to beg to be healed. I have no high hopes for them."

    Flamel, staying to the side, can sense the general shape of that person's mind. Even mentally, the scope of their mindscape feels utterly enormous. A pillar of thought and experience that'd take him ages to fully explore. The contours of it are so unfamiliar that, were he not looking right at them, he might not even guess that mind to belong to a human. The most recent memories, still faintly swirling about, are flashes of fire and blood, thunder and bombs, magic and missiles, all the way up to the adjacent building --the seat of power-- and raising a literal seat of *true* power.

    Yet all he reads is excruciatingly hollow disappointment. Frigid, emotional numbness. Only when speaking to the other Elites does he sense a tiny, flickering spark of attention, that mind otherwise wholly inwardly drawn and focused, introspecting on old things. It elevates a little when the Kid introduces himself, and sparks a little bit more at Shining Tiger's challenge.

    "So there are gods in other worlds." she replies to the Kid. "I was beginning to wonder. Surely, commotion would seem a smooth fit. But I'll decide for myself how true that god of yours is." Lowering her arm, the woman straightens up in her throne, laying one arm in her shawl and the other across her lap.

    "I am Evehime, the Gevurah of the People of Light. The Last Warrior. I am in search of war. I have not found it."

    The ghost of dry amusement upturns the corner of her lips at Shining Tiger. "Is that truly what you want? Is it bravery that compels you? Foolishness? Or are you, too, merely lost in the realization of your incompleteness. You seem less crippled than the rest, but still so small and so thin."
Lory Thumper      Lory notes that the only ones who seem to be injured are those that were equipped for combat, then looks up at the assistant. "Others got it, but they went to confront whoever did this. Hopefully they can subdue him or her and we can get everything cleared up here. As for getting out of here, I didn't encounter any resistance at all on the way here even though I'm fully armed and armored. So, I am pretty sure as long as we don't take any aggressive action and keep our weapons either out of sight or holstered we can make it to the warp gate. We could try grabbing some vehicles, but the roads are pretty much gridlocked."

     Lory looks a bit apologetic as she realizes how suicidal that might sound to a group of refugees locked in a tower. "So...I guess your choices are try to make your way there or wait here until we can secure the area. An aerial evac doesn't seem like a good idea. They fired on the only person who had an aircraft using anti-air weapons. And if we do run into trouble on the walk back, I am fully qualified as a Paladin to handle any abnormal threats."

     She blinks, then salutes the group. "Sorry, forgot to introduce myself. Officer Lory Thumper, of the MPD and the Paladins." She then looks to the injured guards and troopers. "Anyone in critical condition?"
Shining Tiger Tiger finally gets a gaze of Evehime. She's...so perfect. So radiant. Her very essence is intoxicating, and he drinks it in, clearly like he's having trouble breathing for a second, before he calms his ki. He straightens up, trying to look at her eye-to-eye, but having trouble doing so.

"Of course that's what I want...I'm a warrior. It is my job - no, my calling to fight. And you're...perfect, absolutely. The Last Warrior...a worthy opponent, I've finally found one at last." He's having trouble keeping his words straight, but he can keep his *goals* straight.

He doesn't fall to battle lust or zealotry. This is really what he wants - to fight her, even if he's in utter awe. He keeps his stance.

"So, once again. I challenge you to a fight!"
Evehime Gevurah     The assistant shakes her head to lory at the question of critical condition casualties. "I don't think so, but we don't have any doctors in the room. All the wounded we have here, we dragged off the street. Hit by debris. Trampled. Stray bullets. Shrapnel. Burns." She swallows hard. "None of the personnel who went to the river are still alive. I doubt you'll even find their bodies."

    She turns back to the room and relays Lory's options to the crowd, gathering around for a short while to discuss the situation in nervous, harried tones. She comes back two minutes later, after the initial, reflexively panicked objections have subsided. "If you're *sure* --and I mean absolutely *sure*-- there's no one patrolling the streets for survivors, we'll haul ass to the Warpgate." Her lower lip trembles, open-mouthed, as she tries to think of what to say next for several, grasping seconds. "I . . . I think you should leave too. Come with us. If you go to the river, you'll die. Someone like you doesn't deserve --shouldn't get herself killed for no reason."
Tina Natsumi The opening of the rift and the subsequent noise is what snaps Tina out of her haze. There's a moment where she lets out a few incoherent noises, then steps back once as the figure speaks. Ther'es an uncanny sensation to hearing what she says, and Tina can't quite wrap her head around what part of it is bothering her so much.

It's not even the words, weirdly enough. There's just something about her presence that's throwing the streamer off, and Tina seems to be erring on side of caution as she keeps her distance. "Evehime, huh? Name's Fr-wait. Right, that's off." Breathing a sigh of relief, Tina tips her hat forward briefly before speaking up again, her usual stereotypical Texan drawl gone in favor of actually speaking normally.

"Tina Natsumi. Paladin, entertainer. If you're looking for war, why look for it here? Like this, even?" She gestures at the throng of followers, stepping around one and giving them the gentlest of nudges with her foot. "There's no way of finding a real fight from people like this, is there?"

There's a pause as she mulls over how to ask her next question. "... Or are you looking for a good fight instead of an all out war? A challenge rater than just making it about the numbers?"
The Kid     Kid is an impassive sort. His default expression tends to be a 'light frown.' Like he's ruminating on something. As this figure, this 'Evehime,' casts doubt on the existence of Pyth, that frown deepens.

    A gun manifests in his hand. A repeater, of which the hammer is fanned, firing a barrage of rounds that impact all around the throne and it's occupant. "Well, war is nothin' but a big commotion," he mutters, his voice still somehow carrying across the mountain. "I figure I know why he sent me now. Wanted a new ardent. I guess I'm the wanderin' priest now."

    The gun vanishes, and is replaced by a massive hammer of wood and brass. It slams against the floor with a weight that extends beyond its size and mass. "I'll give you your war. C'mon."
Lory Thumper      Lory nods to the assistant. "I'm sure. If a bunny cop didn't get stopped, pretty sure a bunch of average citizens of this world will get by without drawing attention. I'll go with you as far as the warp gate, but then I'll be heading to that mountain. Get everyone together. I'll lead the way. And if on the very remote chance we do run into anything, I'll hold them off while you and the others get to safety."

     Once they are ready, Lory leads the group back to the warp gate. Assuming nothing goes wrong, she radios for Paladin medics to meet them there, then heads back toward the mountain. She has no air bike this time, but being pretty agile and fast she should be able to make pretty good time running across car roofs and up the mountain. Hopefully she can make it before any fireworks start!
Flamel Parsons     Parsons doesn't have a ton to say here, since he's so, so focused on extracting knowledge. With so little attention going on, though, it's as though the entire mindscape is saturated in deep night. If his mental spy satellite is going to pick anything decent up -- for the anti-meme, as well as for Parson's own deep information hunger -- he's gotta make the sun come up.

    That's why he creeps a bit to one side, watching the challenges and charging up his own energy. It's like a flywheel spinning up in his head, ready to act suddenly. The soft orange glow is nearly impossible to see, and it's the only sign of the huge burst of psychic energy that Parsons intends to contribute to the opening shots when this starts.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      There are ancient and primitive parts of Bercilak's brain, meddled with though it has been by Morgana's 'clerkly craft,' as he would call it. Though no one else here would see it, for the visored, horned helmet upon his head, he grins widely. It is not the presence of those primitive parts of his brain which is in question. It is in which parts were meddled with. He recognizes, instinctively, that this figure is the apex of humanity. The thing which, countless thousands of years ago, in the jumbled mess of his Earth's surviving history, a cadre of scientists aspired to, cloistered away in bunkers while the homo sapiens outside died of manufactured plague and war and unrest. A small few of them came close, and in their rule over the unevolved masses, brought ruin upon themselves. This being might be the very goal those people sought, the end of the path they set foot on.

     But he feels no instinct to follow her. His instincts are not wholly human, any longer, standing as he does between the world of man and the untamed wild. Everything does make sense around her. Everything does feel right around her. But not because he can be 'fixed.' There's nothing *to* fix. He is already perfect; a perfect tester of the mettle of others. And if everything about her presence cries 'perfection,' it means nothing other than this:

     There may not be *anything* about her which needs testing. Certainly, she has passed the first--she is not the hierarch he imagined would be sitting atop this peak. She has no greed for the treasure of others, no lust for their admiration. She said exactly what she was looking for--no pretense. And the presence which she commands, sat upon her throne, speaks to her desire, puts the truth to it better than any test could.

     But he is Bercilak, the Green Knight, who loves sport even when there is no judgment to be made. He must see that perfection in action, then, see in motion the rare creature which inspires awe in him at first glance.

     He doesn't bother with words. The knight, clad in green plated armor, strides closer to her. His cloak, a wintry thing of interwoven helleria grass and hellebore flowers, billows out behind him in his clanking approach. He is every bit as tall as her. Beneath the massive, high-tech breastplate and the plates which lie beneath it, the others here might imagine a boar of a man, thickly made from his head to his feet, his physique an intimidating study in pure, brutish brawn.

     But the motion with which he brings the axe towards her is artful, elegant, practiced in a way that belies both the enormous bearded thing and the brutish wielder. Swift and strong in equal measure, he wordlessly attempts to drive the edge into Eve's chest, his grip changing effortlessly after that strike to slip the haft behind her head and force her from the throne.
Evehime Gevurah     'Eve' responds to Tina with a tone like spitting. Words like frozen darts. "I had been told." she begins, pausing as her vague disgust takes shape. "That these 'triple A corps' were invincible. That nobody could hope to resist them." Her lip curls at one edge, exposing a glimpse of even beyond-perfect teeth --an incisor for the act of shredding meat, rather than glittery smiles. "Three thousand five hundred and twenty one men. Five minutes. Worthless. Is this truly what the people of other worlds believe is 'invincible'?"

    Making a shooing motion with her hand, somehow the silent motion rouses the pilgrims from their intoxicated veneration, causing them to shuffle back and file backwards down the stairs in cowed awe. "Obviously." she says. "If there were no warriors in this world, I had hoped an army to make up the difference, but it seems that was not destined to be."

    Then Flamel can feel, in his psychoanalysis deep in that titanic mindscape, a glowing ember of amusement, faded and disused as the emotion is. It's at the Kid. Specifically him sassily casting himself as a priest. "I see. That too, isn't an inaccurate idea of war." she says, a laugh more implied under her cadence rather than expressed. "Sadly, I stopped praising God two centuries ago. Still, I hope he will impress me. I'm so terribly tired of this."

    Flamel also doesn't feel the slightest flicker of fear at the shooting. More of the woman's attention is drawn outwards, to focus on her surroundings, that way. He can feel that she'd followed exactly where he was aiming, and judged that none of the bullets were going aimed at her, and still hadn't experienced even a vestigial thrill. He senses it turning, just slightly, cold and sour towards Shining Tiger, the minute he uses the word 'warrior'. "No." proclaims Evehime. "You aren't. I am the last. Perhaps you may prove to me that you might become one, eventually. Or die. The choice is yours."

    Bercilak strides up to the throne, and then his axe comes down. It's similar but different. Bercilak doesn't need to be psychic like Flamel to catch what's behind the bright blue stare that swivels on him, reflecting his blade. It's the look of someone who has seen an axe swung at them a hundred times before. A thousand. Ten thousand. She stands from her seat in a single, fluid motion that is so quick and graceful that it *almost* seems like she'd avoided the blow purely by blind accident, whilst he takes the entire top half of the throne off completely with a single, mighty hew, as intended.

    "Very well." she says, striding forward, the scarf-shawl billowing out behind her as she does and flying its geometric insignia. "If you've come here seeking to prove yourselves, then I will judge you." She arrives at the edge of the peak, her tread heavy and sharp, then turns to the group. "I will consider whatever it is you want, *if* . . . You can draw a single drop of my blood."

    From there, she jumps, ever so lightly, a hundred feet from the side of the mountain, and plummets all the way down to the other side of the river, landed in the blasted, ruined wedge of the dark, burning city, with a crunch so heavy it echoes back up to the top. Certainly a battlefield less likely to hit a random civilian, though Flamel can already tell that she only cares in as far as she expects it'll cause the group to hold back.

    She gestures. A universal sign. 'Come at me.'
Shining Tiger Tiger frowns as he's called not a warrior, but he's not going to argue. Instead, he just nods. "Fine. I'll show you I'm worthy."

As Evehime moves to leap, jumps off the mountain, and clears it all the way on the other side of the river, Tiger considers doing the same, but can't jump *that* far. What he does do, however is...

He takes a run off the peak, slides down it, and then leaps with a ki-boosted jump, moving to soar over to the nearest side of the river, and land in a crouch. There's no sign he took any damage from the fall at all, as a silver aura begins to bloom over him. He slams the spear into the ground, holding his stuff, and continues his unarmed stance, before leaping over the river and towards the crater, and then...

Moving to ram in and try to slam his fist straight into Evehime's stomach, as an introductory blow. The ki magnifies his power, making him superhuman, and making his blows powerful, as he moves for an accurate strike, and then another.

But, are they powerful enough to draw a drop of blood from a woman he has no idea the strength of? Perhaps not in two hits.
Tina Natsumi "... Really? Damn, you've got some good chops there. Fits the title." Tina actually manages a chuckle, although it's an awkwardly forced one as she looks around  again at all the... Everything. It's clear she's in over her head here, but there might still be something else up her sleeve to work with.

"But... No, armies are just a numbers game. Sure, an army might whittle down a real warrior over time with enough numbers, but then it's just a numbers game instead of a real... Contest. And when the numbers game does't work, that's where people like us come in."

She's getting in over her head here, but there's a thrill lying beneath that anxiety. She even finds herself grinning a little as Evehime states her intent to challenge God, to give Shining Tiger a chance to prove his worth, at weaving past Bercilak's swing, and just flinging herself right off the mountain with that challenge.

Tina will notice Flamel sooner or later, probably once he does let loose with his initial volley. For now, however, she's busy staring off at that massive distance the strange figure just cleared. "... Guess that makes the fighting part of our job easier."

One less thing to worry about. Despite that, however, Tina still sighs an annoyed sigh. "But did it really have to be /that/ far? Come on, let's not keep her waiting too long."

EVENTUALLY, Tina gets to chosen battlefield. Uncle Sam is already looming behind her as she steps forward with both hands on her revolver. "Just one blood, right? Don't blame us if we take more than that!"

With her grammatically questionable boast out of the way, Tina gets to it. Uncle Sam's shoulder opens to drop a rifle into its hands, firing it in a steady rhythm at Evehime while Tina fills in the gaps between those shots with those from her own revolver, providing a steady-ish stream of bullets to get her started.
The Kid     The challenge is accepted. Evehime speaks of having stopped praising the gods centuries ago. That would make her ancient. Where has she been, he wonders. Recently unified? Sealed away? But that's a question for the likes of Flamel to ponder. Kid is only muscle. He's here to fight. For the Concord, for Pyth.

    She leaps from the mountain, and Kid looks over the edge with some trepidation. It's a long fall. But not the furthest he's ever gone. Backing up a bit, he takes a running leap from the mountain, fishing out a bottle from his hyperspace storage on the way. As he plummets, he rips the cork out with his teeth and downs it. Whatever strange brew is contained in the wide bottle decorated with Squirts, it immediately makes the wind favor him. He throws his arms and legs wide, slowing his fall to just below terminal and drifting closer to the chosen battlefield.

    When he lands, it is face-first, and with a deep enough thud that it might seem like the impact killed him. But he rises, and takes a deep breath. No longer on-high, he seems a little more centred, focussed. It's almost like he didn't just down a whole bottle of liquor.

    Out comes the hammer again, and he rushes Evehime, following up on Tiger's barrage. Kid leaps into the air, planting his foot on the martial artist's shoulder to go even higher, before bringing his great mallet around and down, a perfectly engineered arc for bringing as much force down on something as possible. A technique designed for driving stones aimed at the paragon's head.
Edward Blackwell      Medevac call.

     There are a lot of things Edward Blackwell isn't serious about. He's sarcastic, sardonic, and sassy to a fault. He's an asshole and an unrepentant one, and he knows it. There's a lot of things Edward Blackwell doesn't take seriously, but hell if he hasn't always taken his job seriously.

     And hell if he hasn't always taken human life seriously.

     The minute the MedEvac call comes in, Edward discards his gloves into a box and goes running, scissors in hand stuffed hurriedly into his labcoat pocket, a jar of tongue depressers slammed into his pants pocket, and a wallet from Lost & Found crammed into the other pants pocket. Someone else will have to deal with the rest of the Aegis Astray E.R. - he's a first responder and damned proud of it. He grabs a cup of coffee literally stolen out of the hands of a white mage coming in for their shift, a lolipop out of a bowl by the door, and a carton of cigarettes from the hands of an attending. The lolipop goes in his mouth. His coat whips around him as he goes. His shoes thump-thump-thump against the floor, lanky legs running as fast as they can carry him - which as it turns out is pretty damn fast.

     All he needs is the coordinates - which he grabs from an agent on the way past with a muffled 'thank you' as he charges to the warp gate.

     Edward slides through the warp gate-

     -and into a scene out of Hell.

     The coffee hits the pavement and splatters on his socks.

     Horrifying. Horrifying! Horrifying! Every part of Edward's brain is screaming at once. No, no, no, no, no.

     The bodies. The bodies. There's so many bodies. There's so many corpses. So much death. So much death. Pinned to walls. Stacked three high. Battlefield and chaos. Bodies, bodies, bodies.

     The loss of life is enormous.

     The loss of life is incalculable.

     Edward's eyes roll back into his head.

     He was about to say something on Paladins' radio, but no longer.

     Edward Blackwell isn't home right now.

     Edward Blackwell is also not OK right now.

     Slowly, he starts walking. He's walking directly towards the piles of bodies. His walk becomes a stride. His stride becomes a run. His run becomes a tireless dash.

     He shreds through cars on the way. Metal and glass splinter in the wake of the scissors. Bits of it stick to him as he runs. Pieces of rebar stab through his feet, and he gives them no pause. Pieces of metal cram their way into his shoulder, and he gives them no pause. He runs, directly into the maddened fray, knocking aside living humans. They almost assuredly all end up with injuries, though not life-threatening ones.

     The madness of ARCHETYPE MEDICINE cannot possibly kill a person.

     But it sure doesn't have to keep them safe on the way to its priorities.

     Edward reaches the first set of corpses.

     The lolipop comes out of his mouth. He jams it straight into the jaw of the first corpse. Sugar. Restart the heart. Automatic thought. A foot comes down to knock it straight through the corpse's jaw and down the other two, the lollipop shattering as it passes through skulls. A hand grabs the hair of the third corpse and yanks it back upwards. Living tissue. Sealant. Solve the body. Fix the body.

     He stomps on the stomach. Breathe.

     Next corpse.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's charging remains active, even while he charges and then BLASTS a massive leap from his levitation abilities. Arcing high in the air, he drifts above...

    The shot has built up for long enough that it's forming visuals, figments of shimmering translucent light. The insubstantial imagery of cold-war-era artillery blooms from nowhere clear at all far above, blossoming and blasting. The shot is mostly kinetic, partially psychic, a heavy attack against the body and mind both at once. Even just being near where it lands is enough to feel the disorientation and mental-gut-punch sensations that are acute and vicious at the point of impact.

    He lands heavily, buffered by his levitation and drained of some energy, but not too much. He flickers back into some invisibility, wordlessly, almost immediately trying to invade the mind again and extract more information under the light of greater attention. He doesn't keep track of the information he finds, he'll decode it later due to sheer size -- if at all.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      The Green Knight is not cowed by the recognition in her eyes, though he recognizes it all the time. "I shalt here thy judgment not," says Bercilak, microthrusters upon his armor firing as he gives chase, first to the spot where she'd evaded. Another expert swing, another miss. If he swings and misses a thousand times, ten thousand, he will not tire of the chase. This she can tell purely by his body language, by the way he changes track the moment she leaps away. There is a reason his metal steed bears depictions of hounds in chase. He enjoys the hunt.

     She doesn't have to make the gesture. He's already on his way. "I seke only thy blod--and I shalt not quit my hunte until thou ileve, or until I hath hit." It isn't boasting. It's promise.

     Rushing past Uncle Sam, weaving around the Kid and Tiger carried by his thrusters, he rises, up into the air. His bike follows after him, rushing beneath him. Now astride on the hoverbike, he cuts a gash into the ground below. Thick vines rise up from the hard earth to grasp at Evehime, attempting to hold her in place for a drive-by attack. The axe held high, he swipes low just as he passes, attempting to hook her ankle and drag her across the ground, towards the others.
Evehime Gevurah     The mountain is bad enough. Edward only has to glimpse at it to see how these men died. He can read their fatal injuries like tea leaves. They came together. Old teams. Special forces. PMC elites. Runner groups. Mob enforcers. A motley coalition of men of violence. They fought their way to the top with everything they could. They fought men who might once have been their allies. For every five they gunned down, they lost two of their own; despite the tremendous mismatch in gear, fighting in suicidal battle-bliss seems to have done most of the work for men who trained their whole lives with firearms only to just now pick up the sword. No cadaver has been killed by a single wound. All of them struggled to the last.

    They also only got two thirds up the mountain. Less than two-hundred bodies total. They're neatly lined up at least. None of them are beyond saving; the combatants lacked the obscene power necessary to actually put each other beyond the reach of the Archetype of Medicine; not even close. With his muscles and lungs constantly replenishing themselves, the haul-ass isn't so bad. Those he drags screaming back to life with his grisly procedures rouse themselves in brief fits of terror, as if awakening from a terrible nightmare.

    Those men who threw away their former lives and took up the spear and the sword come back shaking as if having been pulled back from the brink of asphyxiating in the cold void; the previous psychological allusion to tumbling forever through space. They aren't, at least, resurrected as the maddened zealots they were before, but the psychological mark is considerable and lasting. They look like addicts suffering heinous withdrawal symptoms. Heroine junkies descending into the cold, aching, hallucinating, stress-vomiting spiral back to something approaching normalcy, scarred for the experience. It sure isn't PTSD; that he can tell from his brain-reading intuition. The traces of the 'memetic' threat left deep imprints.

    The carnage --the dark zone beyond the mountain-- however, is so much worse. So vast. So total. It'll be difficult for him to even *find* bodies by dull firelight and with so much wreckage. At least they'll all be army.
Lory Thumper      Lory's trip up the mountain is luckily barely starting when that thud echoes through the area. She diverolls into cover before looking at the source of the sound. She quietly comes out of cover and heads toward Evehime, then watches the others follow her down and launch their various attacks. Once she is closer, the positively perfect appearance of Evehime makes her pause and her ears lay back. Despite not being human Lory still finds herself awed for a few moments. But, one of the incoming attacks shakes her out of it.

     The bunny cop mmphs, then pulls her dual pistols. "So, you're the one that caused all this destruction, I take it? I'm sure I missed some big speech about your motives, but your motives don't matter in the slightest. This is unforgivable, and if I have my way you'll be locked up for the rest of your days!" she says.

     Then, she starts firing. A flurry of shots that probably don't compare to the power and ferocity of the other's attacks. But, they are still railgun shots accelerated to hypersonic speeds. They might at least sting a little.
Evehime Gevurah     "Good." says Eve as Shining Tiger is the first into the fray. "Aggressive. Straight to the point. No hesitation. But it isn't difficult to act without hesitation when you know nothing of the scale of your foe." He rockets forward. His ki rushes through his fists. He connects with a thunderclap of power.

    His fist is captured soundly in the woman's fist. There'd been no opportunity to see it move. He'd felt his knuckles contact something unfathomably hard, for just a fraction of an instant, only half-short of breaking his bones, before it'd even fallen into her hand. "Half-baked. Is that supposed to be your qi?" An invisible force gathers around her, coalescing and condensing in a fraction of an instant. Tiger can't see it, can't hear it, but he, as a martial artist, instinctively knows what it is.

    'Pressure'. 'Bloodlust'. 'Fighting spirit'. 'Kiai'. The raw essence of the human capacity for combat. So thick, so strong, so unfathomably, mountainously powerful, that it becomes a tangible thing. Nothing but raw force of martial *will* strikes him back, with the barest flash, like the fire caught the edge of a glass whorl for a moment, and launches him away. "What weak conviction."

    Tina opens up with her guns, as does Lory, both of which arrive neatly before anyone else can close into physical proximity due to the velocity involved in bullets in general. It feels like they might as well be pointing fingers and yelling bang. The half-clad woman in black is everywhere the bullets are not. Glints of light flow from her eyes as she traces every one in flight, shifting like lightning with the barest motions of her feet. Where the odd bullet looks like it's about to hit, it veers away, skipping from something bright and shiny.

    "You speak of numbers as if you know of their worthlessness, yet number of rounds is all you have to bring to bear against me?" the woman says. She's looking straight at Tina. She takes one step towards Tina. She is an inch away from Tina, the blast of wind slamming the Persona-user second. "Give up." A flash of her back hand comes blurring from the corner of her vision. The air explodes with the sound of a cannon.

    And then Lory, in the same breath. "And 'locked up'? Are you speaking from pure foolishness or merely fear? You came to the battlefield with a will so weak? An intent not to fight, not to kill, not to die, but hoping to keep your hands clean? You have no place here." One of the slugs zips within millimeters of Eve's face. She catches it. Examining it between her fingers briefly, she flicks it --with her fingers-- back at Lory, at twice the velocity, glowing hot with its friction with the air.

    Being blasted from the side by Parsons is finally something that lands roughly 'on her'; it's confirmed that she can't see right through his invisibility. He can feel her attention shift in her direction with something like shifting gears. The complex machinery of her mind starts to spin, more mental space dedicated to combat routines than ten people even have brainpower put together. 'Invisibility' is recognized, and vast, elaborate mechanisms fold out of it. "Ah? There was another one of you. Was that your trump card?" He can see it now. The faint shine of the light of his psychic attack, diffused in a circle around here. A fresnel corona of distortion, like a halo surroudning her person. He'd hit close, but *something* is shutting him out, not just physically hard, but immensely, psychically hard.

    In fact, trying to track her by psychic means, it feels like her mind --her will-- is occupying the space all around her, like an explosion. "Try again." She sweeps her leg. The ground floor of a destroyed building, now nothing but rubble, splinters into a thousand fragments and blasts in his direction on a wave of dust and a supersonic bang.
Evehime Gevurah     Finally, Bercilak drives straight past her. The vines catch her. She stops to *look at them*. He blitzes by at high velocity on the jet exhaust of his hoverbike. He feels his axe strike a clean, solid blow. A solid hit.

    The shock is enough to break a man's arm in five places. That Halo gleams all around her again. It feels like he'd slapped the surface of a lake at the speed of sound. The only thing to show for his efforts are what looks like tiny fragments of prismatic glass flaking off into the air.

    "Better. But what are you supposed to be? You're dressed like a knight, but the aura you give off; that of a manhunter." Casually, she tears the vines by flexing her muscles, pulling several lengths taut between her hands, and then lashes them outwards at his bike. The vines catch fire, then explode, before they can even make contact, flinging thorns, pressure, and intense heat into him.

    Between the sequence of attacks, as intended the Kid gets a clean leaping stroke on top of her, bringing his hammer down with similar, boulder-cracking force. The flash of the Halo is even more visible this time, briefly encircling the head of the Caelondian Breaker hammer. Fragments of glass. Bone-shuddering reverb up his arms. In one motion, she whirls a complete 180 and swings a backwards arm bar at his midsection, while he's still in the air. "Harder." she says, irritability creeping into her voice. "Strike me as your God would."
Edward Blackwell      There is no stopping to check if they are okay. They are alive. They will be traumatized. In pain. Suffering. But they are alive. They will not die from their wounds. That is all that the ARCHETYPE cares about. It does not have time to care about fixing all their wounds. There's too much. Too many. Bodies, ripped off the wall and stomped back to life with a single foot and a jolt to the nervous system, an alien theory of medicine that makes no sense outside itself and only distantly resembles the truth. Bodies, cauterized by the lighter and hammered in a nerve to wake them. Bodies. Bodies. So many bodies.

     Over the mountain.

     Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. There's too much shadow to safely see by. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't really mean anything. Lighter. Cigarette. Unconscious motion. Just to see through the smoke haze. Bodies lit up in empty eyes like a video game. See there, the bodies. See there, the corpses. See there their deaths hanging in the air. Gunshot. Gunshot. Gunshot. Stab. Stab. Stab. Helmet broke on the face, glass through the eyes. Impaled. So much death. Too much. The brain shuts down again. It reboots again. New theories go flicking through the mind as Edward's starts moving again.

     He goes into the combat.

     The thunderclap of Shining Tiger's fist against the woman's ripples his coat and his hair as he ducks under them to grab a body and *fling* it out of the way. The ARCHETYPE's own reflexes carry it, and the body, to another group of bodies, where the thing-that-is-Edward-Blackwell kneels only long enough to cut his own wrist and pour blood down its mouth. Exsanguination. Solved. He smashes his fist into another body, squeezes the heart, and then just rips his hand back out, spitting cigarette ash onto the open wound to close it.

     Stand.

     Back into the fray. He runs straight through the hail of bullets. He rolls only long enough to knock the corpses below out of the way. Impact. Jump-start the heart with impact. Wake up. Next body.

     The shockwave from the axe hits just as he's ducking under it. He goes flying. The thing-that-is-Edward hits the ground below the woman's feet.

     His arm has been broken in three places from the force of just being that close.

     It does not matter.

     The thing-that-is-Edward pulls itself back to its feet and goes marching back into the combat zone for yet another go.
The Kid     With a resounding impact, Evehime's arm slams against a great tower shield. The Hammer had vanished in and instant to be replaced by it, the Bull God's angry visage staring down at the champion for the instant before Kid is flung away. Tumbling head over rear across the crater, he comes a stop in the distance before kipping himself up. Clenched between his teeth is the rim of a bottle, the contents depleted. Even amidst that long roll, he found time to drink.

    "Ma'am, you're askin' a lot there. In this time, I've never done that once," he says, shaking his arms to soothe them after the bone-rattling clash. 'In this time?' No clarification is given. Rather, Kid produces a mortar and slams it down, choking the barrel with multiple shells and firing them all at once. Such a haphazard attack probably shouldn't have such a beautiful arc, every single explosive maintaining their cohesive arc as they come down on Evehime, their fuses burning down in synch to explode in the air above her head.

    So perfect, that one would believe that was Kid's true intent. But suddenly, in the moment before they land and explode, something whizzes by her. A simple machete, the blade jagged and vicious, aimed at tearing open her side in passing. Kid is probing. If she channels that Halo, does it weaken in other areas? Can he draw blood this way?
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Evehime's question draws what can only be described as an inarticulate bellow of delight. Or perhaps it's her attack, which blackens his armor, sets his cloak ablaze, and pierces the armor of his bike, in one efficient stroke. In other words, she gets it! "Unk bothe is Bercilak," says the Green Knight. The bike comes around for another pass.

     As he approaches, those flames are put out as if some unseen force simply willed it so, the helleria grasses and helleborn flowers growing and blooming once more behind him. Thorns are spat out from the bike, from his armor too, the metal mending itself as surely as the scorchmarks also vanish. "Mannish and savage," he cries, raising his axe up for another blow. "Meteful and wilde," he continues.

     That blow doesn't come at the most obvious time. Why insult Evehime that way? He's conserving his strength, preparing for a more strong attack, but he needn't conserve his strength in a boring way. Speeding past her, he pulls the bike into a hard flip. "IN MESURE CO-EQUAL!" Inverted above her, he deftly twirls the axe, making an inverted reverse strike to try and clip her shoulder from above and behind at-speed.

     That is, should Tiger be listening, the most succinct description of Bercilak he is like to hear. One foot in the wilderness, one foot in the king's court--and which is where when, seems to be a matter of great joy for him. He loves to fight, he loves to take the mettle of others, and only he can truly know what code he lives by.
Evehime Gevurah     When Edward makes the grimly unfortunate decision --no, it was never a decision for him, was it?-- to head down into the battlefield proper, so many clear divides become blindingly, upsettingly obvious to him. The carnage unfolds before his eyes and maps itself out as only one used to, and obsessed with, the word 'triage' could ever see it.

    Fully two thirds of these men have been killed incidentally. Almost *accidentally*. They're dead from being crushed under buildings that fell, or broken by debris that flew into them. They've been eviscerated by random shards of high-velocity glass and steel, spraying from impacts many blocks away. They've burned to death from falling into the flames, or their innards have cooked from half-proximity to intense, flash heat. They've ruptured organs and broken bones from toppling from felled skyscrapers, and being launched into the air by the blast waves of other impacts. Some have died from smoke inhalation, trapped under rubble or inside their vehicles. Some have been shot or torn in half by explosions from sheer, panicked friendly fire. They're dead because the Last Warrior was here.

    The others --well, he has yet to see them. He'd have to go deeper. On the edges, it looks like the woman had just stopped trying. Having grown bored, she'd all but walked through the remaining defenders and somehow built her mountain.

    And, with his higher reasoning turned off, dominated by the Archetype, feeling out the slightest of brainwaves to locate the 'merely dying', he can feel it in her too. The residue of vague hopes and the bitterness of numb disappointment. A misguided search, come bearing solitude stained into the mental stones. Violence of this scale that hadn't even slightly roused her heart. No, she doesn't even think of the corpses as *people*. It seems like she barely thinks of the Elites as better, though they're holding some guttering candle of her interest for now.

    He can feel a hauntingly familiar resonance.

    The deep, hollow, consuming echo of reaching the peak, and having nothing.

    He tumbles in front of her for sparse moments. She barely notices. When he darts back away, her spare thoughts, audible to Flamel as well, are 'What was that creature? Can it fight?'.
Tina Natsumi It is almost time to regret everything. There's barely enough time to register what's going on as Tina just sees Evehime suddenly there in front of her. The only thing that saves her is her reflexes, bringing both her own arm and Uncle Sam's up around her side to keep herself covered by the sudden explosion next to her. She and the Persona go hurtling into a pile of debris, the user tucking herself into a ball to go with the roll instead of fighting against it and risking a broken everything.

Once she has her head back on straight, Tina pulls herself out of the rubble, letting a whooping noise almost immediately. "Still alive!" She cheers for herself, although the grimace on her face likely reveals what's going on in her head: She really should not be shit-talking one bit right now.

"Alright, if you want something bigger, then... How about this?" She can't help it. Even with that anxiety plastered on her face, there's still the traces of a laugh coming out of Tina while Uncle Sam's arms merge into a long cannon-like formation. Lights and tiny stars sparkle in front of the cannon as it begins to charge, but Tina catches something from the corner of her eye just before she's about to actually fire it.

She sees Edward ducking and scurrying across the battlefield. "What the hell...? Stay down!" She warns with a hasty readjustment of Uncle Sam's aim, firing it off early to reduce the risk of clipping Edward in thep rocess. The cannon launches a considerably large, but not excessively massive beam of light at Eve before it can reach its full power and size.
Shining Tiger Tiger's fist is turned aside. Caught. He's thrown back by her field, skidding backwards as his hand now hurts and his body is damaged. He coughs, as he realizes that this foe is probably one of the most powerful people he's ever fought, just by sensing her kiai.

"You're incredible. I'll ramp up my ki, then, and show you what I'm made of!" The silver flare builds. And builds. It swallows Tiger, as he hears Bercilak. He watches Bercilak closely. As the flames of ki build around Tiger, an aura, he shouts. "I see your heart, Bercilak!"

The silver ki around his hands starts stretching out. A silver-and-black axe, with green 'tech lines', making it appear like a digital energy axe. He dashes forward again, and slides. If Bercilak's striking over on her shoulder, Tiger will strike under at her ribs on the other side, trying to crack that barrier the best he can. Heat washes off the axe, adding an extra boost to his power, and hopefully searing through the barrier for lingering damage.

"Take this! The Beastman Axe!"
Lory Thumper      Lory may not have godly strength or durability, but she does have one thing. Very fast reactions and movements. And as Evehime fires that bullet back at her, Lory diverolls to the side in the blink of an eye.

     But, even that wasn't fast enough. Despite not being directly hit, there is still a scorch mark through her sleeve and into the fur and flesh beneath. She yelps at the burn and winces a bit, then mmphs and glares at Evehime. "Forgive me for having some respect for life. And anyway, which is harder do you think? Killing someone, or subduing them without killing them while they are trying to kill you? In my experience at least, it is far FAR easier to just kill someone than it is to take them in alive if they don't want to be taken. But, you're right. I didn't come here to dirty my hands. I came here to help people in need. And right now, they need you gone. I won't kill you unless I absolutely have to, but don't mistake that for me being weak!"

     Lory pulls three small yellow discs from her belt, then starts to throw them...only to pause and blink as Edward comes diving through the carnage, saving people as he goes. "E-edward?!" she exclaims in disbelief.

     She shakes her head a bit, then throws those discs. Like shuriken they go sailing through the air, and when the hit something they explode. But, rathern than a simple explosion, they release a thick and quick hardening foam meant to slow a suspect to make them easier to catch. She follows this up with more shots from her mag pistols.
Flamel Parsons     "'Trump card' is a bit much!" Flamel calls out, telepathically. "Think of me more like... A hail mary! You know, the shot you take out of hope!" There's flickers of a translucent shield-construct as a building explodes into him, but he continues to surge and dart invisibly, not losing a step. "I'm here to stop, contain, and *study* that psychic effect of yours. But you're... gosh, wow, you're armored like a tank aren't you? I can't get in there at all. There's so much introspection, even now, huh?"

    "But, if you're after war, it's a good thing I'm here! I was made to stop war, you know, just like it looks like you were made to fight!" He darts and drifts, looking for an opening, and quickly rushing as fast as he can. The others seek big damage, but Flamel Parsons seeks a sneakier sabotage. He dives, sliding under The Kid's machete and heading for the side Bercilak is catching, just after he and Shining Tiger have done their work. He waits until right when Tina Natsumi's beam might be *right about to catch* before he moves in for the strike: There's a sound of a clatter like a soviet-era factory stamp slamming down, and a big sickly-yellow-green ? pops up near the head of the suddenly-visible man. He hoists the dangerous punctuation, unhooks the top of the question mark like a grenade pin, and lashes out with the hand towards her head like it's ad-hoc brass knuckles before darting backwards and letting the thing go off, a grenade cooked to perfect timing.

    He's trying to detonate raw, brain-rending CONFUSION right in her face. Even if he can't *invade* her mind, he can at least try the simpler psychic weapons of that sort! "I hope I wasn't made worse than you were!"
Flamel Parsons     "And no," Flamel calls out telepathically as he darts back. "It *shouldn't* fight. That's a medic to save the civilians, the good rules say we don't hurt that!"

    He forgets to refer to Edward's current state with the pronouns of a human. He is likely not incorrect.
Edward Blackwell      There is only a brief moment of acknowledgment. Only a momentary glance. Those empty, rolled-backwards eyes tilt in the woman's direction as the ARCHETYPE passes. There is a brief burst of recognition - or of something like it - that radiates outwards. It's like a radar ping from the mind. A scanning ping. Almost a child passing notes in class - ARE YOU LIKE ME? CHECK ONE - YES? NO?

     And then it's gone, because the thing-that-is-Edward is lost in a madness that is core to its existence. He runs straight through Uncle Sam's blast, the beam clipping his shoulder. It tears through a chunk of him on the way to the woman. He snags one of the capture foam discs out of the air almost incidentally and slams it into the open wound of a corpse, then punches it in the head and shoves it out of the battlefield by the jaw.

     The mortars come down. The thing-that-is-Edward is unhappily close. The remains of that arm is blown off, and the thing-that-is-Edward goes tumbling to the side, rolling to a stop next to dead woman impaled on a hunk of metal. The ARCHETYPE grabs the hunk and drags itself up one-handed. The scissors snap outwards and cleave through the metal above and below. The smoke pours out of its mouth, the first breath it's taken, and melts the metal into the body. Closed wounds. Iron in the blood. A kick to start the heart. Turn back.

     Back into the fray. He runs straight between Bercilak and Tiger's thunderous blades, grabs another body, and jumps straight up and over the woman.

     The ARCHETYPE lands on the other side. The lighter comes out. The ARCHETYPE rips something out of the corpse's head, throws it sideways, and crouches. Flick, flick. Fire over the scissors. Scissors jammed into the chest, into the heart. Cauterization. Cauterize the heart. Cauterize the wound. Cauterize. Cauterize. Smoke into the mouth. Breath. Kick. Breathing. Move on.

     Back into the fray.
Evehime Gevurah     Not only does Evehime not respond to Lory's attack, she doesn't appear to even recognize it as one. One glimpse at the flying disc, and she effortlessly catches it. It explodes into foam shortly thereafter. Perhaps that's what one would cause not sensing any bloodlust in an attack.

    But the bullets that follow after; the foam means they at least hit, but it's like she's pumping rounds into the sky. Head on now, where the slugs strike, the fractal flash appears in miniature, and after they penetrate a short ways, the rounds crush, deform, and shatter, as their own force destroys them --tears them apart-- within that mysterious Halo. With a shrug, Eve cracks the hardened foam, and strides out of the crumbling remains.

    "Killing." she answers without the slightest hesitation. "A famous general says you must be willing to give up three men for each one you have to capture. You are not a general. You've come to the battlefield yourself, walking on the scorched and bloody earth, to do what eases your conscious. That which doesn't disturb you. Something that makes you feel righteous, not something that will bring you victory."

    Something is wrong now. Those bits of bullets haven't fallen to the ground. They're floating. Drifting slowly around Evehime. Bits of smoking metal now filling some of the space around her. She brushes one with a fingertip, sending it tumbling as if through microgravity. "Those weapons compensate for your weak arms. They compensate for your weak spirit. Let me say this plainly. You couldn't hope to capture me if there were ten thousand of you. Train your body, train your resolve . . . No, I doubt you could make anything out of that frame if you tried."

    Bercilak ramps the hell over her. Flamel and Edward both feel the moment of irritation. In that brief period, she is annoyed with Lory, and so responds unthinkingly by batting away Bercilak's axe completely, still not removing one of her arms from her sash. It's considerably faster than before; an automatic motion borne of muscle memory, fit to send him sailing away. "At least this one acknowledges his base instincts." Her eyes follow him for a moment longer. "And he may be durable enough to worth hitting. Hm."

    The sequence of mortars detonates over her head. She glimpses around for a moment, then upon noticing that there isn't a clear route to dodge, settles for staring straight at the Kid just before the smoke goes up, focusing her attention. Fire and thunder lands and detonates on that impervious field around her, breaking away a fine powder of intangible dust, but the machete disappears into the cloud, and the smoke clears with her holding it between two fingers. "Crafty." she says. "Is that what a God of Commotion is? You're walking a fine line between sewing and reaping chaos, and tricks and misdirection. An effort, nonetheless."

    Tina's cannon blasts her from the side while she's still talking. She pivots on the spot, reaches out, and palms it in her hands. The beam splits between her fingers and washes over like a high pressure hose, melting crazy and erratic, molten trenches in the ground around her. She clenches her fingers and the last part of the beam vanishes in a puff of smoke. She even checks her hand, finding it uninjured, but that part of her field is still shimmering from the aftereffect. She makes a noncommittal sound. "Better. Use that instead of those worthless weapons. Come on."
Evehime Gevurah     The 'something wrong' is becoming increasingly obvious. The flickering embers of the Kid's mortal strike haven't faded. Blots of liquid fire stream around her, weaving into metal shards and broken bullets. Much of the energy of Tina's beam is laced into it as well, starting to ripple with heat on the surface. When Shining Tiger comes in for another strike, he not only feels the axe scorching in his hands from contact, but bits of metal fragments and fire flick into him from the mere act of striking.

    Worse, he feels the energy of the blow draining away, like trying to swing underwater. Disappearing into the field. It envelops him. Prickles his skin. Makes his blood run cold. His better impression is that he hadn't just been hit by a burst of kiai, but the field surrounding her *is* that kiai. A fighting spirit so vast and powerful that it cannot be contained mentally, spiritually, or even in her body, flowing out into a dense ocean of raw, murderous pressure all around her that *physically* prevents them from harming her. They're hacking and shooting away at, quite literally, her excess of overwhelming willpower, trying to whittle it down until they can breach through.

    He sees the heat wave from the axe pulse further than its stopped blade, but it still dissipates before it reaches the woman, now adding a heat shimmer to the haze around her. "Ah? You can understand what it is?" she replies to him, now with more genuine interest. "Then where is yours." The Halo explodes again, but this time it hits him with all the mixed dregs of the previous attacks, kinetic, heat, and energy.

    Flamel, however, is layers of trickery ahead. Unaware, due to his many psychic abilities, that many of the previous attacks were setup, the woman takes the blast of his psychic 'grenade' at almost point blank, swatting the strange object in the air at the last second, which blows up on contact. Though it apparently deals no physical damage, the fact that Flamel can literally *feel* himself enveloped in her willpower tells him that the bright shine he sees limming the area around him indicates that the mental assault is boiling some of it off. He feels the sheer density reduced in size somewhat.

    "Please don't insult me by comparing me to those useless machines." she replies, though oddly without malice. "Psychic? I'm slightly familiar. What about any of this is psychic, though? They recognize their misshapen selves innately. Naturally. They've seen the gap between them and a true human being, and only now have the perspective to realize what they are. Weak. Deformed. Crippled."

    Again, her aura explodes outwards, slamming Flamel now with jagged metal, scorching heat, streamers of energy, and even captured kinetic energy. Without even thinking, she snags Edward nearby as the habitually 'closest object' and hurls him at sufficient speed to break someone's spine, aiming to take Bercilak straight off his bike with a much sturdier object.

    She hurls the machete back at the Kid, straining the limits of its construction. She turns in the same motion and strikes a blurring roundhouse kick in Tina's direction, the sheer force creating a crushing pressure wave with several times the strength of her previous attack. Pulling her leg up and bent, she then stomps down on the ground, and a huge chunk of earth --easily the size of a pickup truck-- bursts up into the air in front of her, which she casually spins Lory's way at such speed that it breaks apart into a hailstorm of five pound pieces.

    "Are you starting to get the picture? How badly outmatched you are. I am the Last Warrior. There are no warriors after me. I need not even my Regalia for your kind. Retreat. Send a hundred more. Bring me your finest; not such haphazard strangers."
Edward Blackwell      Edward is lifted.

     He is in the middle of an operation when he is lifted. It is a simple operation - a cigarette falling down the throat - but he is in the process of making sure it goes correctly, hurriedly as it is.

     So he slams his feet into the ground to try and hold his place.

     And he does not.

     He is torn, bodily, in half. The corpse he was working on wakes up to a pair of legs falling backwards in front of it.

     Edward's torso (and singular arm) is hurled at Bercilak.

     One way or the other, by the time the thing-that-is-Edward lands, it is already dragging itself towards the nearest corpse with its sole remaining limb, dragging itself along, a trail of blood and bone fragments in its wake.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak's axe is swatted aside with such force that it rips him from the seat of his bike, struck backwards. Holding onto the throttle, the sheer impact of Evehime's blow fighting against the thrust of the bike finds the point of least resistance: the throttle. It is torn off, the bike rocketing off into the horizon. Bercilak himself hits the ground with enough weight as to cause a small crater around himself.

     He is winded, but only for a moment, billions of nanites forcing cooperation from his lungs. A massive dent in his armor from the residual force of her blow slowly mends itself with a pop. Yes--he just might be worth hitting after all, especially for the throaty chuckle which arises from him as he approaches.

     "'Tis a rare adversaunt which might dismount me," he says, impressed, twirling the axe. His style changes, swings more suited to ground fighting, as he closes in. Masterful use of space, unconcerned about her barrier's retribution against him. The glowing green edge of the axe is brought, left to right, downwards. The eye is swung upwards in a pre-emptive blunt parry. Not once does he twist his arms, or turn his back to her. Every part of the axe is used in his precise yet savage onslaught, from the very tip of the edge, to the eye, using the haft to block her reprisals by choking up on the grip, countering by attempting to leverage her movement with it. This weapon is his sole choice of focus, and she can tell.

     Five strikes he makes, as rapid as they are vicious, as precise as they are strong, not a single move wasted.
The Kid     Kid clenches his teeth when he sees his ruse was easily predicted, his true attack caught. "I ain't Pyth," he calls back, his frown deepening again. "I ain't even his messenger. The Pantheon saw fit to give me a challenge, in the form of you. I don't think I can overcome you by playin' the same game as you. You'll clearly wi-"

    He pauses, and not from the returned weapon. He actually stops just before then, considering his own words, when it is launched at him. Perhaps his machete is no 'Regalia' or other legendary weapon, but it is quality Caelondian construction on an Uran classic, and so holds together as it buries itself into Kid's shield up to the hilt. He is knocked sliding back once more, the projectile jarring his bruising arms once more, but this time he retains his footing.

    When the shield comes down, he has another empty bottle in his mouth. The machete is pulled free with some effort and put away, replaced now by a massive set of bellows and a pike. "I get it now. 's not enough to beat you. I gotta do it by playing your game. Order and Commotion vs. Order and Commotion. That's why Pyth sent me."

    There's nothing evident as to whether or not Kid has solved this divine mystery, but that glint in his eyes may not be entirely owed to the three full bottles of spirits he's downed in the past few minutes. He charges, planting the pike into the ground, the shaft flexing incredibly before snapping back into place, launching him skyward. He pirouettes as he soars, pumping the bellows to spew flame all about, aimed primarily at Evehime and the ground about her.

    When he lands, a sharp pull of a rope pulls the pike back into his hands as he stands amongst the fire to slash and stab at the champion, ever swirling the weapon to kick up the air, fanning the flames to greater and greater heights. The tip of the spear grows hotter and hotter as he stabs, thrusts, swipes jabs shoves drives lashes, over and over.
Shining Tiger As the axe swings into Evehime, and the fire and metal fragments flick into him, as the energy drains away, his eyes widen. "Impressive...!" And then, she asks him where's his.

"My master never taught me how to summon one before she...! But, once we make you bleed, I'll have you teach me!"

And then, Tiger remembers the technique he learned last night. Even as the halo explodes and hits him with the dregs, knocking him backwards, he holds the axe tight, and comes in for another blow, sideways swing. But the blow on the barrier is just a distraction, willing to take the kiai counter-attack to get in his next blow.

He shouts, really loud. It might just sound like a scream, to those who don't know martial arts. But Evehime will instantly recognize it as a traditional kiai, and one that has an actual power backed behind it, because...

Formed out of ki, a giant fist floats into the air, and moves to just bulldoze into her barrier and body, trying to batter it. He knows that force will be absorbed if it doesn't work.

He's hoping that Bercilak will take the hit, but honestly, he's willing to take it if he has to.
Lory Thumper      Lory blinks at what Evehime is saying, then...laughs. "What? Seriously? I didn't come here looking for a fight in the first place! I'm not a warrior! I am a defender! I came here hoping to help people! Taking you down will help people, whether that is by getting justice for them or by keeping you from needlessly killing anyone else! I couldn't care less about your selfish quest to find some sort of worthy opponent!"

     That piece of earth is hurled her way, and Lory leaps...right into it. She spirals gracefully through the debris, kicking off of passing debris at just the right time to keep her from hitting other pieces and ends up right next to Evehime. She holsters her pistols and takes a proper martial arts stance. "And don't you dare question my resolve or my abilities! I trained hard to be able to take on any opponent, even someone like you! And I won't let some smug psychopath look down on me just because I'm a small bunny!"

     And then, the bunny finally throws an actual punch. Then a kick. Then, in steadily and rapidly quickening strikes she starts circling and pounding on that aura trying to get in, trying to prove that she has what it takes even against some stupidly powerful opponent like this one. And as she circles and strikes the bunny is letting out a steadily increasing yell of effort and frustration.

     Which is probably a very bad idea. A tiny bunny getting in melee with this being of perfect body and mind and overwhelming power.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's barrier is thin, small, low; he dove prone, allowing most of that explosion to rush above him while he took cover under his shield. Gonna be hard to take advantage of that flicker as he rolls and darts off though. "I don't mean *made by craftsmen*, I mean *made by circumstance.*" He shouts over the brainwaves. "And wars may be *fought* by the warriors, but they're *won* by the spies!" Which makes it awfully foolish, doesn't it, that Flamel Parsons has chosen to do mostly fighting here.

    So he shifts some strategies. Lighter touch, better applied. He strafes hard, trying to keep some distance and catch his breath while unloading a barrage of smaller shots over and over into Evehime. Surrounding his invisible form are translucent M16s and Kalashnikovs, all constantly focusing shots straight for Evehime's eyes. It's not that they're intended to be killshots, it's that they're meant to blind -- specifically, to cut down on any advantages she's building up in focus, while giving Parsons room to build up his own.

    "It's psychic because the effect is mental. It's *psychohazardous*. You know need to have psionic powers to affect minds way too much, you just have to have some way of affecting a mind! And you sure do have a big effect. The human parts of my brain have a really strong reaction, and I'm *trained* for it! I really need to study what makes you like this!"
Tina Natsumi Seeing Uncle Sam's cannon make a sort-of dent in Evehime's field seems to be getting Tina's spirits u. She even cracks a grin that's slightly less terrified than the ones from earlier as she finds her footing again. "So that's how it works, huh...? ALright, then. Bring it on!"

She really needs to stop talking before she gets herself in trouble. Alas, the fire's been lit, and Tina's already getting too far into things to let sensibility stop her now. After seeing Evehime's first sudden appearance nearby, she's already bringing her robotic Persona back to take up a defensive stance nearby. Its mechanical legs clamp into the ground at its sides not unlike a tornado-proofing setup on one of those specialized vans as it takes the full impact of that roundhouse kick head on.

Trying to avoid it would have been a fool's errand, anyway. The Persona stands firm against the mighty kick that shears off an entire  layer of armor, the vague material it's made of vanishing into ether moments later while Tina remains hunkered down behind it. It's not without risks, however, as she coughs out painfully as though she herself had been kicked square in the chest despite the lack of direct impact.

"What the hell...? Are your feet made outta lead or something?" As those stakes release from the ground, the rest of the Persona's body starts to reshape itself. "but you asked for bigger, so... Let's see how big this gets ya!"

She normally doesn't flub her lines this badly. Shaking her head, Tina crouches to lift the reforming Uncle Sam, hoisting/bracing herself under the oversized cannon it has become. All things considered, she probably doesn't need to actually aim it the way she is, but...

Hell with it. It looks better in Tina's mind to do it this way than to just stand behind it awkwardly. Once she finds her target square at Evehime's chest, the American-themed firearm fires off a massive single shot right at the Last Warrior, aimed specifically to punch through with as much power as Tina can muster instead of spreading it out through a sustained beam.

The cost of burning through so much energy at once, however, is the Persona already starting to dematerialize. She'll just have to hope this is enough before she gets her head caved in.
Evehime Gevurah     When Edward pings Evehime's mind, his question is met with confusion.

    She doesn't know what he is.

    She knows he's not human, that's for certain. Not like this at least.

    Where he ends up though, is where the limits of his Archetype-frayed psyche are tested. The eastern edge. Where the battle first started. Where the Last Warrior had first fought with her hands.

    The dead there are . . . gone. Mist. Greasy red dustings on walls, like morning dew. Blackened marks on shattered asphalt, save for two clear boot prints. Carbonized skeletons half-buried in the cooling slag of tanks melted with the sheer kinetic friction of a strike. The 'incidentally' dead are scattered around like leaves, often in only small pieces, but in the first minute of the battle here, there remain nothing but ghosts.

    Mortal men cannot even pray to stand against this.

    It's no wonder the men on the mountain cracked. What does someone do, other than bend the knee, or receive divine inspiration, from what this kind of perfection looked like in person?

    But there are still men to save. Hundreds of them. Everywhere.
Edward Blackwell      No rest for the wicked, and the righteous need none.

     Edward just...keeps...going. He's crumpled. He's missing his legs. Missing his arm. Missing most of his torso. There is nothing that should be allowed to move the way he is, nothing that should continue dragging, scraping, across the blasted landscape. The thing-that-is-Edward grabs carbonized skeletons and drags himself forward. The skeleton crumbles.

     He keeps going.

     On, and on, and on. Through the black marks. Past the tanks. His fist digs into asphalt when he can find no more handholds. Greasy blood scrapes across the remnants of a shirt that once read PARTY GIRL, now blackened by human remnants.

     Onwards. Onwards. Onwards. Onwards.

     He's slowing down, but not stopping. He grabs another tank and flops himself forward like a fish. He grinds along the asphalt.

     Another corpse. At the edge of the field. One, lucky, mostly-intact human.

     The wallet comes out of his coat pocket.

     Magnetic strip, pressed against the chest. Scissors, driven through the card into the heart. Rip a rib out of Edward's own stomach. Jam it into the body next to the scissors. Tear off a piece of the coat. Start moving it as fast as he can. Static. Static. Static. Static.

     Clear.

     A little jolt, but enough. The scissors and credit card are torn out. The cigarette in his mouth is driven into the wound to close it with smoke and fire.

     He crawls over the coughing corpse.

     Onwards.

     A mountain of dead.
Evehime Gevurah     Flamel is fighting a two-front war against physical danger and against the sheer psychic fortitude of the entity he *needs* his cure from. He can pick up what she's thinking, but even the slightest attempt to touch, move, fiddle with any of it, is utterly impossible; as hard as the immovable force that shrouds her. He depends on his allies to maintain her attention. Keep some wheels spinning. Move her mind from contemplation of ancient things and bitter nostalgia to the present, where he can get a better idea of what makes her presence tick.

    Like shadows on a wall. Dim impressions of impossible training. Insurmountable battles. Invincible foes. A society of radiant titans. A culture that has almost no culture to any idea he has ever seen. A thirst for perfection. An obsession with the peak. To push even further beyond. The utmost realization of human potential engraved onto every aspect of her frame, and then overflowing and spilling out from it. It's almost a hack. A vulnerability in the human psyche. The machinery meant to identify the fittest mates and the strongest leaders and the most dangerous enemies, overflowing into infinite numbers, and creating the irresistible urge to flee in terror, to submit in thrall, or to chase that image of perfection in glorious battle.

    "Their minds are just weak." she replies to him. He senses a dull, bitter numbness in it. "Yours is stronger. But you aren't a warrior. There are similarities, but they're coincidental, aren't they?" When he begins shooting at her, she closes her eyes. Technically, that means blind, for all it's worth. He's set up for someone else. However, the psychic bullets themselves are neatly absorbed by the field, adding to the increasingly hazardous Halo around her as they are dominated and subverted by the greater Battle Spirit. "Don't insult me with even the image of those pitiful weapons. What you did before was creative. I liked it better."

    She reaches out and grasps hold of the largest piece of wreckage near her --the bottom six floors of a skyscraper that snapped off at the seventh in the violence.

    She pulls it out of the ground. She should only be ripping out a chunk of it, but somehow, the whole thing holds together. A thousand times her size and mass, lifted in her hand like a brick.

    She swings it at him. The rush of air ahead of it is already enough to flatten someone. An improvised weapon this large . . . she doesn't need her eyes open to hit him. She'll probably open them once she's felt the impact, and thus knows his flash gunning is over.
Evehime Gevurah     In that short time though, Bercilak, Tina, and the Kid are all able to take advantage of it together, from sheer suicidal bravery, dumb teen pluck, and trained survivor's instincts respectively. The roaring tide of Tina's super cannon strikes first, momentarily engulfing the Last Warrior completely in the energy of the attack. Layers of tangible willpower can be seen, finally, ablating away like a sheen of cracked ice. The flame billows all around her before she can even be revealed from the aftermath of the beam, followed by the pike. The Kid can feel it plunge deeper. The impassable hardness is smaller now. Closer to her skin. Centimeters closer each time, like trying to cut down a tree by stabbing it. Bercilak fills the gap just as the mounting heat captured in the field becomes too much, the captured waste energy of Uncle Sam's cannon now at severe risk of causing deadly burns to the Kid just from being near. Even with her eyes closed, she somehow senses the axe. The right arm she's been using the whole time comes up, and for the first time she manually parries it. A dense, impervious sheath of battle pressure condenses around her hand and arm, shocking him each time the edge crashes into what should be bare skin.

    It comes so close. But just being so close will burn and flay him alive. Each blow sends the cutting energy of his axe into a spiral throughout the Halo. Every shot and blow and blast is now swirling to slash and burn and puncture him like it does the Kid's shield. "An axeman. Uncommon." she contemplates, between each thunderous blow of mythical axe to limitless hand and will. "If you survive tonight, train your very hardest. Come back to me, with that axe strengthened tenfold and that arm a hundred. Then I will show you the purest form of the axe. The God-Shattering Blows of Dawn. I will show you Nemarrigan.
Evehime Gevurah     That appears to be as much as she'll take with her eyes closed. They flash back open. That insane kinetic vision is back up and running. Her knee comes up in something finally resembling an actual martial arts attack, if half-heartedly, rather than the casual body blows she's used so far. The sound could burst Bercilak's eardrums. The force would make a battleship tilt backwards in the water. Her Halo flares brightly again and blasts the Kid with beam and fire and bullet and shrapnel and blast and cut and blow. Clearing space. Her gaze snaps towards Shining Tiger. It is filled with roused focus. He can feel in his gut what Flamel can read with his clairvoyance; that she's starting to zone in now.

    "Sheer strength will avail you not. Not borrowed might. I should like to meet whoever it is that half-taught you this technique, but in the hands of an unblooded child . . ." She arrests the giant fist with her own hand. The force is still sufficient to drive her backwards a hundred paces, gouging the ground until the shallow downwards angle causes her to come to a complete halt. He can see her muscles actually tensing against this one to hold it back. A stiff joint pops. The thin skin of condensed barrier fractures. If he'd come at her with it from the start, maybe she'd have been less serious about blocking it. Unfortunately, he's fed a gigantic amount of kinetic energy into that Halo of Conviction now. With a slash of her hand, she condenses it into a solid plane, and brings it about in an obliterating wave from his left side, turning it all back on him.

    Lory is least fortunate. Her temper inflamed, her complex jabbed right in its sorest spot, she's committed to an all out assault in hand to hand combat, and that is the worst place she could possibly be. For an instant, the seven foot something woman looks down at her with cold, vacant, nothingness. She talks while handling Lory. Standing fast. One arm. A single hand flying outwards so fast, with such power, that it intercepts every single one of her strikes and stops them dead cold. The sheer force makes the *air itself* block Lory's punches and kicks before they can even reach Evehime's palm. "I could tell without looking that you aren't a warrior; you needn't even say it. But a defender? How could this level of strength defend anyone from anything? This ill-discipline. This raw and soft psyche. Who are you helping with this? These people have given in. Did they not warn you that you cannot hope to defeat me?"

    "There is no question. Your resolve is only to protect your bleeding pride. Your abilities are . . ." the last blow goes wide. "Unimpressive." A pause. "This blow is simple enough. Once you can repeat it ten thousand times, tell me about your abilities." Her own fist flies out. It's too fast to see. So fast the air bursts into flames around it. The distance between them explodes. The knuckles don't even strike her; it's as if an artillery shell landed right in front of her.
The Kid     Not that Evehime would know, but in this instant, Kid is refining the Caelondia school of combat. The Cinders and the Brushers had little reason to co-operate. One guild worked exclusively within the City, the other without. But the Kid, one whom inherited the skills, the burden of carrying on all of Caelondia's martial knowledge in another life, is now devising new Secret Skills on the fly, marrying techniques that were never utilized in the same place.

    However, while it might have done its part to scrape away the martial pinnacle's Halo, the explosion of shrapnel lifts him completely off his feet. His shield may have manifested in the last second, but he is launched to land among the rubble of the swung-about skyscraper.

    It's several moments before he emerges, but something is off. His eyes-half-lidded this whole time, are wide and frenzied. His hair, dishevelled and off-white from the dust and grime is drifting upwards. Has he succumbed to Evehime's influence? Nay. She had asked him to strike with all the might of Pyth. And it seems that the god has stepped down into this crater to grant her just that. The clamour of parties, the roar of war, the bustle of the marketplace press against the field of perfection the Last Warrior issues as Kid's mouth flaps, issuing the words of a God."Strike true, Son of Cael. This is your last chance."

    Kid reaches into the rubble, and produces something huge and gleaming. The metal antenna that would have adorned the top of this skyscraper is now slung over his shoulders like a great caber. Gripping it with both hands so fingers sink into the metal, he swings it like a golf club. Chunks of building are sent flying at Evehime, packed tightly to slam against her. This is followed by the spire itself, hurled like a javelin to drive against her perfect frame. Upon impact, Kid is behind it, slamming his fist into its base to press it even harder against her until either she or the metal gives way.
Shining Tiger Unblooded, huh? Tiger doesn't care. As the big blast of feedback comes in, though, he definitely cares, as he puts all his ki up in front to mitigate it, trying to maneuver under it with a slide. He doesn't succeed, entirely.

The ki, for sure, prevents the worst of it from splattering Tiger or hurting him grieviously or whatever. But the sheer force pushes him into the ground, deepening the crater and covering him with cuts and bruises, superficial battle damage that does hurt. As he stands back up, he cracks his knuckles.

"Well, then, you want to see my fully-learned technique? It's the greatest move I have. See..." His stance straightens up, as he turns his hands into claws.

His ki changes, entirely, as he begins breathing. He decides to mold the Vehemence's bunker buster into this move, but otherwise, it does what it needs to do, as the ki aura turns into a prismatic aura of color. A certifiable rainbow of energy, as he moves to rush in. It's another forceful attack. But it might just do it, because of what it does.

RADIANT CLAW OVER HEAVEN

Tiger moves to do a claw strike straight into Evehime. The prismatic energy forms from his body into the strike, and moves to hit. While it's a hard hit in general, there's a special effect it has. When it hits something, it does big, tangible damage, and either causes something to dislocate, or causes an explosion, or both. In this case, he's hoping to cause the barrier to explode open, even if it's a hole, so the others can cut her.
Lory Thumper      As each of her attacks is countered without so much as a dent in that aura Lory's frustration grows. Her hits become sloppier despite their speed, and when that last hit goes wide she is left panting from the exertion. She can't do much but listen to Evehime's words with clenched teeth and angry tears in the corners of her eyes. Is she really worthless when it comes to this sort of thing?

     She doesn't have much time to consider it though. That hand flicks and the air explodes. Lory is fast enough to leap back and curl up behind the riot shield she keeps on her back...but that hardly helps when you are sent flying through the air by an explosion of that power. In a split second the bunny is shot like one of her bullets into some of the rubble nearby. She smashes through the wall she hits and goes tumbling through office space, smashing through a number of cubicles before finally coming to a stop.

     The bunny cop is no super being, and so it takes her a bit to fight through the pain of that. She doesn't know how badly she might have been hurt, but with not only her pride but potentially the lives of Evehime's next victims on the line, she forces herself to stand and stumbles her way back out the way she came in.

     She coughs when she emerges, a bit of red landing on the ground in front of her. Her kevlar is frayed and singed, her ears are similarly frayed. "S-so...y-you're a warrior, huh? You know how I know you are full of it, one way or the other? Because a warrior seeking a challenge issues that challenge and then fights only those that answer that challenge. A warrior has honor of some kind, something that sets them apart from a mindless berserker or a murderous warlord. You aren't a warrior either, if you ask me. You're just a powerful bully looking for a way to stroke her own ego."

     She settles into her martial arts ready stance again and takes several deep breaths to steady herself. "And if beating on me keeps you from beating on someone else...then I've done my job as defender!" she exclaims, then rushes in again with a flying jump kick. Probably not even noticable amongst the other attacks coming Evehime's way.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Suicidal bravery is among the highest of pursuits in Bercilak's eccentric court. Nothing will kill him--until something does. But why hold back? Why live one's life in fear of something one cannot predict? Behind the expressionless visor of his horned helmet, Bercilak grins wildly, a mad hunter having picked prey more deadly than he could have imagined.

     Every strike he makes is paid back to him, and every strike his fellows make, too. It all swirls through that Halo, cutting gouges in his armor. Melting his skin beneath it. Striking his chest, his face, his arms, with force enough to break bones. Determination, however, is another virtue he holds in high regard. His eardrums do indeed burst, blood trickling down his cheeks, pooling briefly at his shoulders. It's not a fun time inside that armor, even as his absurdly dense nanite cloud does its work. Body first, armor second. He had made an oath, after all. That he wouldn't stop his hunt until Eve left, or until he had spilled her blood.

     She makes a counter offer. Survive, and she'll teach him a new technique. He's largely been self taught, barring rudimentary skillsofts Morgana installed in his brain all that time ago. Lose, and learn from your mistakes. Win, and realize what works. This process has repeated, over and over, and over, across an embattled planet, full of engineered life, mechanical marauders and cutthroat inhabitants. Across the shattered ghost of that same planet, fraught with the materialized memories of ancient terrors, of awesome and terrible beasts of long-gone legends, of ghostly lords and ladies, knights and court sorcerers still carrying out multi-millennium-spanning grudges.

     It is no great shame for him to fail. It is no great shame for anyone to fail, if they but pick up their axe and try again. Laughing wildly, Bercilak's upper-right body is burned into ash by the strength of all those attacks coming back upon him. But still, he stands, his headless body continuing the assault one-armed. Without eyes to see the axe, the control is impossibly masterful. The grip chokes up all the way to the beard, the headless knight using the weapon as a punching tool to strike through her Halo.

     The right portion of a torso, a lung, half a ribcage, a shoulder, an arm, grow within seconds. The haft of the weapon is shoved behind her leg, the headless knight shoulderchecking her to try and force her off balance with the haft as leverage. After, the grip is again changed--the key to fighting with an axe is to always keep your hands in motion along the haft. As a skull rises up from the stump and eyes form within it, Bercilak aims a strike with the butt of the haft at her center of mass. Then, the weapon's head is switched fluidly to the opposite side of his body, and he drives home his final strike.

     Stepping backwards, as the skin and hair return to his head, he brings the very edge of the head upwards in a diagonal motion from her hip to her shoulder. He really wants that drop of blood.
Flamel Parsons     WHOOSH. The tailwind and the massive flow of concrete and glass nearly bowl Flamel Parsons over. But luckily, with significant misdirection and a little bit of exploiting the floatier powers of levitation, he managed to not even be on the ground, or anywhere near where Evehime swung; he was a ways up, and doing his god damndest to track the tiny sliver of safe space behind her. It wasn't much. The stone and airflow knock him around, leaving him tumbling and his personal barrier sizzling.

    "Oh, absolutely! Average mind is incredibly weak. Also incredibly strong! It all really just depends on the context. Strength is a function of *environment* as much as it is of identity."

    "Huh, the flavor? Sorry, it comes with who I am. I was *originally* made to end war -- the Big One, the last war, you know? Not much compared to the Last Warrior, but there's something poetic there." He twitches. His piercing efforts are breaking just a little. He just needs to sample a little of that perfection, and if he can get a slice, a signature, he can negative-associate it, poison it, and induce a Censor response at least long enough for this thing to pass.

    "I think you know a bit about society-ending efforts like that, though, huh? Alright, if you don't want the Big One's images, I'll draw my kind of blood, and you'll do something for me in return." And then there's silence from him. Nothing. The others are striking, The Kid's massive, heavy projectiles, Shining Tiger's claws... Flamel is absence, silence. And then: The sound of a door. A knob turning, a lock straining. An ethereal Astral Projection, forced into combat strength from nowhere clear, trying to slam into Evehime's brain. The sound grows louder and more impactful; wood straining, metal wrenching and screaming, multiplying into a deafening chorus of the sound of breaching. "I need in. I need a sample." The Astral Projection attempts to pierce with such tremendous impact it provokes blastwaves of psychic force -- from near Evehime, and from near Flamel's near-invisible, faded form, some distance away.

    That's the blood Flamel intends to draw, it seems!
Evehime Gevurah     Lory charging back into the fray is met with the same result. The flying jump kick, after taking that beating, is below the threshold of doing anything. Her heel glances straight off. A worse angle would break her ankle. "Do you imagine this army was simply standing around the river, waiting for someone to arrive, or that they would swarm out the minute their city was declared mine? --Worthless as it is." There is a briefly thoughtful pause. "There is one truth that I hear. That a battle between a warrior and creatures so powerless shouldn't be considered battle at all. It certainly didn't meet my expectations of one. So then what good is a code of honour in that situation?"

    "A warrior isn't a sportsman. Not a court duelist. Warrior derives from war. A warrior is one who wars. Conquers. Who dies or who emerges victorious." There is absolute, unquestioning, unshakeable conviction in her eyes. In her voice. Yet there is also a frightening, abyssal hollowness. A brief glimpse into a pit so deep that it induces terrible mental vertigo. "The things I've seen. The battles I've fought. The foes I've faced. The campaigns across worlds. Time. The heavens. I need no affirmation of my prowess. I am Gevurah. Would I find any who could challenge me . . . I would like nothing more."

    "Reconsider your life. You're so weak that I can't even laugh. What can you possibly hope to defend as you are? What use do you think you are to anyone? Who is safe because you are there?" One last beat. "If I were to walk straight into your country, I would raze it to the ground, and you wouldn't be able to do a thing to stop me." She steps forward. Her form blurs. She glides frictionlessly across the ground. A forward leap with a hairsbreadth of clearance from the ground. Her arm cocks back. The afterimage of her is still standing in the original spot. "Die miserably." A true one-inch punch. It isn't just an explosion this time. The air fractures from the blow. Jagged shards of 'sky' spray from the massive vacuum wave. A column of ash, embers, debris, and hurricane force winds explodes horizontally down fifteen blocks and explode down its side alleys.

    The fact that Shining Tiger is caught in this blast in the midst of his super move may have been accidental, or it may have been perfectly tactically planned. The interruptive potential of it is enormous. Most of the Radiant Claw's power is used up shattering and combusting tangible pieces of 'air space'. The tips are what scrape the bounds of the Halo before he is blown away from it. Even then, its dislocating power is absorbed by the thick wall of 'attacks' she has absorbed, making her even harder to damage as the battle goes on. He hears a sound like cracking glass, and an eggshell piece of Raw Conviction comes breaking off, spirals through the air like a throwing dagger, and plunges straight for his chest.
Evehime Gevurah     But she pays attention to the Kid. The words that come out of his mouth aren't his own. A genuine ember --the smallest, faintest spark-- of intrigue appears in her eyes. She raises her arm to shield herself from the volley of entire pieces of building, each explosively shattering on her guard, driving her sliding back through the scorched earth. The pole itself lands next, focusing all of its force even further into a straight and narrow line. She leans forward. Digs in her heels. Tenses her muscles. The light that catches in that circle around her is now permanently aglow, gradually shrinking as he throws his might into the attack. He pushes. He heaves. He strains and labours. The massive communications antenna is gradually crumpling like a can under the stress, fraying into squashed and jagged pieces.

    Then Bercilak comes from the side, and the only arm she's using is occupied. She doesn't block. Each strike lands squarely and stolidly, fit to hew the heads of ten men from their necks. She can change her posture, shift her footing, just enough to prevent him from attacking her root and unsettling her balanced; and she does so with such extreme fluidity and precision that it seems automatic, and well understood to be incredibly important in battle; but his fervid hacking is taking him, gradually, closer and closer to his goal, until he can smell the faint whiff of blood mist and some faint fragrant incense.

    It all comes crashing down when Flamel fucks about and finds out. His goal isn't to prove his worth as a warrior. He came here with his own mission in mind. The public safety. The cognitohazard. The integrity of the collective consciousness. All agent, all psychonaut, all business. The door slams straight into a wave of Conviction right before her head. It sends colourless sparks flying in every direction, screaming like a diamond saw biting against a hardened steel anvil. The door itself clatters wildly in its frame, as if disturbed by a violently offended ghost, banging outwards and against its frame. Bits of shining light briefly emerge through the cracks.

    Then for a split second, it slips open just a hair, then slams shut again and shatters. In that moment, Flamel is hit with tremendous psychic backlash, but also is able to clutch a single, glowing, geometric design similar in size and delicacy to a snowflake, floating on the etheric current. It's the same as the symbol on Eve's scarf.

    What also spills out is a spattering of weapons. Half a dozen swords, axes, and spears spew onto the ground, no two quite the same, some looking to have been made by very strange hands indeed. "I have seen the end of war." Evehime somehow says over the terrifying hurricane roar all around her. "I fought the Last War, and I won. I am the Gevurah of the People of Light. And I know how it begun, and how it ended."

    "Enough." Evehime shouts. The sonic peal is enough to throw people back on its own merits. Her left arm slips from its resting place in the scarf-shawl, and picks up one of the heavy axes embedded in the ground beside her. A ghostly shadow briefly flickers over her. A wolf's visage. A crow's wings. Gone. Shadowy mist. Now armed with a weapon, the Last Warrior, pivots a grunting turn to finally cast the smashed antenna aside, and then spins one, geometrically perfect, three hundred and sixty degree slash around her. An impossible perfect circle is painted in one simultaneous flash of light, from the orbit of the blade. The earth cracks asunder beneath the cutting wave, and then continues to split, racing outwards in three expanding spirals, and then turning back in on itself, the perfectly focused cleaving force swirling around and carving something that'd look like a design from the air.
Evehime Gevurah     The axe, as well as the remainder of the weapons, fizzle away, disappearing into wherever they came from. "I see your intent. You don't intend to challenge me. You've come to drug these people back into their blissful ignorance, haven't you?" She reaches out with her hand, and delicately catches a bloodstained radio. Specifically, the one that came off Bercilak's severed head, and flown a mile up into the air. She shakes it off, examining it with some amount of neutral curiosity. "You think that would be better for them? The remainder of their lives content to be nothing, rather than finding peace and purpose, in raising the next generation to be stronger than they were?" She shakes her head slowly.

    "Well, what worth is it arguing? I am a warrior. Not someone who sways hearts with words or magic. If your battle is done, then this city --these people-- are worthless to me." She slips the radio into her sash, then, finally, begins walking.

    "That last effort. Train until that is your baseline. Fight until you can conjure that strength without thinking. Until then, bring me your gods. Your monsters. Your champions. Your armies. I will conquer them all. If this universe is truly infinite as I have heard, somewhere out there, there must be something . . . something that can bring back those days."
Shining Tiger Radiant Claw gets deflected into shattering the air. Evehime's halo blows Tiger back, and then that raw conviction blade comes flying forth, to pierce through Tiger's aura and hit his heart. It'd kill him...

If he wasn't more canny than that. Right as it's about to hit his chest, he moves to literally take his glowing, weakened hand, grab the tangible blade, and force it downwards, even as it cuts into his hands. It carves a gash into his side, bleeding red, which begins to heal slowly but visibly. It'll take time to completely heal up, but he's not dead.

The sonic peal sends him flying back into a crouch, hands bloodied. As Evehime cracks the earth, and tells them 'their intent', he's about to protest, but sees better of it. When she tells him to train until this is his baseline, he thinks about it. If Tiger could perform the Radiant Claw at any time, without draining his ki into it...yeah. He needs to do that. He doesn't move to hassle her.

Instead, he moves over to Bercilak's bike, leaning against it. When Bercilak moves to leave, he gestures towards him. "Hey...mind giving me a ride? Kind of fucked up, here."
Lory Thumper      Lory bounces off that shield and lands with a roll that ends with her on her hands and knees, teeth and eyes both clenched. She is nearing that precipice that the people of this city faced. With all that has been said, and how soundly much of it has been proven, she just sits there. What can she defend? She helped those few people in the city, but she didn't defend them. Edward came in to help with the fallen, and she didn't defend him.

     She couldn't even defend herself...

     She looks over finally, though doesn't get up. Broken, but not quite in the same way as the people of this city. The punch comes. Her instincts try to move her, but...she disappears in the blast. There's no telling where she ended up after. The destructive blast may have gone 15 blocks, but a light thing like her could have bounce much farther down the road, or off down one of the alleys. Hopefully the incoming backup medivac team will be able to find her and Edward.
Shining Tiger In the end, Tiger takes that invisible shard that cut him open with him. He can use it as a martial arts weapon and to fuel a supernatural technique. He saw Evehime's heart, there - a warrior, seeking that great battle she had in the past, where nothing measures up anymore. She said as much, at least.

It'll make a great shield.
The Kid     It would be a mistake to presume that Kid is not exerting effort, that Pyth is doing all the work here. It's more like Kid is the vessel, and Pyth is the pressure washer filling it past its brim. Right now, the survivor is overflowing, his body straining to hold together as he wields the power of a God.

    When he drives his body against the antenna, against Evehime, his bones creak. When it crumples under their combined might, they start crunching. And when she unleashes the full force of her might, they finally give way entirely. Kid goes flying back, Pyth's power leaving him wholly human once more, a vessel sporting holes and cracks through which his own vital force is seeping.

    But he's still standing. Leaning up against that blasted shield again, having been used to brace his fall, having slid against the dirt until it piled enough up against it that it stood upright. And its owner now points a carbine at Evehime's departing back.

    "Where're you goin'?" Kid demands, spitting blood from his mouth. "Pyth's gone, but I'm still here. Stick around, if we raise some Commotion, he might c'mon down again." He's delirious. Having a God fill you never leaves one thinking right. But that is rooted in devotion to his Pyth-given mission. Or at least, his understanding of it.
Flamel Parsons     Something leaks through, just for a moment. Honesty, in telepathy.

    "It's true. I am an agent of a vague yet menacing government agency! The things I do, the identity I have, is to delegitimize what you do. It's to undermine war, and in turn, disconnect warriors from cause and effect. I can't really claim a more noble goal, or pretend like I'm somehow a greater warrior by doing that. If you do this again, I'll come here, lose the same fight just as badly, and still do what I'm doing. For a paragon of the archetype moreso than probably anyone else I think!"

    "I hope you understand. I care for these humans and mental freedoms the way you care for your battles and the blood that can be shed in them. I can't really match the sort of power you have, but... I hope you understand why I have to do what I do, and why I can't change. And I hope it brings you a little less boredom when I do."

    Flamel is caught up violently, slammed hard by the swipe, torn up badly by the impact and flung back. His personal psionic barrier sparks, fizzles, and then violently explodes, leaving his physical form to slam back hard into a chunk of rubble. He winds up desperately propping himself up on one side wincing as he puts everything into rendering himself invisible again, starting to crawl a bit... and then spread his mind out, to inject that counter-agent, the anti-meme of strongly inverted geometries and warped negative associations, like a hundred years worth of aversion to the symbol, to make one bury the memory and purge its induced devotion.

    "Hhh. Hey," He mutters near The Kid. "Let her go on this one. Gotta get everyone's mind mended. maybe... maybe you too. Maybe body mended, kinda sounds like." Parsons' own brain is sparking a little, showing plenty of overloads.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Still, he persists. He continues to beat upon that forcefield, and have his blows rained back down upon him. Gouges are cut in the armor. Blood spills out from places where her retribution strikes true. The massive breastplate is cracked, dented, finally split into pieces.

     Again and again, he's burned, beaten, maimed--but he just doesn't give up until he's forced to.

> Enough.

     Thrown through the air, melted thruster modules fail to stabilize him. He hits the ground with an audible and grisly crack, rising up, his back sagging gruesomely before the nanites mend it with an equally unsettling noise. His helmet remains off, revealing his wide grin.

     Pulling up a stump of an arm, watching as it regrows, and as a mangled leg does the same, he chuckles. "Wel! That was sportli. Bahaha." His thumb presses a button on the axe, a faint green light upon the weapon's cheek blinking slowly. The bike comes roaring back his way.

     The Phasefront Wraith is a massive thing even for a normally sized person. One built to accomodate a rider of Bercilak's girth is certainly large enough for Shining Tiger to hitch a ride. As naturally as breathing, Bercilak is sat astride the bike before it even comes to a stop. The running boards on either side will be large enough for Tiger to stand upon.