The fight was difficult to describe as a fight, because that would imply a degree of certainty that didn’t exist. Magni could take in countless streams of data, an overwhelming volley of information that would usually allow him to act with nothing less than a full understanding of how his foe was going to strike and where his fists were going to impact. In this battle that concept was turned on its head by the frankly ridiculous psychic technique of his foe, it became impossible to discern truth from lie when your own senses and memory were turned against you. There was only one thing he could trust…
With a wild spinning kick he attacked the area which his mind was screaming was surely not his target, and as had been the case perhaps 60% of the time he felt the disconcerting aftershocks of hitting something where nothing should have been. It was by no means a perfect technique, oftentimes he would hit nothing at all in his flailings and with every successful attack he inflicted on his foe a dozen bruises and cuts would appear seemingly from nowhere on him.
Doubtless he looked the part of a clown to the gathered crowd, it was hard to look dignified when you were dancing at the edge of being burned by gusts of flame while fumbling to hit an invisible foe like some circus act. This must have been one of the more subtle ways Roan’s mutation tore down his opponents, for who could fight with pride when by the very nature of the conflict they were forced to act the role of a fool.
Unfortunately for the Wolf Creek boy, Magni was very proficient at acting the role of a fool.
He saw the dissonant strands of confusion in the crowd bleed into the almost pink colour of amusement as he made an act of stumbling in the middle of the circle, only to throw himself the other way as a particularly powerful jet of flame which he had foreseen based on the flow of the gas around the arena walls singed the edges of his white hair an ashy grey. His invisible opponent that had attempted to capitalise on the false opening was surely hit by the flame judging by how it had bloomed as though slamming into something solid rather than air, he could not see what the flame hit but he could sure enough see how the rest of the flame acted. With purposefully exaggerated movements he ignored the throbbing pains in his joints and myriad of lacerations and scraped a handful of ashy sand off the floor.
“Behold one and all! My most fearsome technique!” He loudly declared before throwing his two handfuls of sand at his best estimate of his foe’s location.
Most of it landed unceremoniously to the floor, some going over the edge and being swallowed by the flame, but a tiny fraction at the very edge of the area he threw the sand at was caught apparently disappearing into thin air by his side eyes. Now he was no expert, but even a street rat could tell you that things don’t tend to simply disappear like that.
Propelling himself with a kick he made a gamble and headbutted his best guess at Roan’s position. By the grace of the Great Spirit he felt himself hitting something of flesh rather than of stone.
For the briefest of moments the illusion cracked, and he could see the blurry, indistinct outline of a ragged Roan. It was probably less than a second, and even with his countless eyes he was in hardly the right position to see it in full on account of the somewhat awkward position the headbutt had put him in he would never forget the certainty of frustration engraved into the winded silhouette. Taking this opportunity he grabbed onto thin air and utilised the ancient martial technique known as a “suplex”, he of course didn’t register any of the usual weight or feeling that would come with grabbing someone but for times like this prayers were all he could count on. He actually had the gall to be a bit disappointed as he felt his back simply slam into the ground, pushing the air from his lungs with a loud cough. Uncertain who he was addressing exactly he put on his most winning smile and fought the growing nausea as his field of view fractured over and over from the disruption to his focus and said. “Don’t worry folks, I assure you, all according to plan!”
The crowd was speechless for most of this, then somewhere in it he heard a child laugh, likely one of that brat John’s Rat buddies. It spread like a wildfire amidst the rest of the crowd, at first among the younger members only, but then a cacophony that spread among all of the mortals and most of those beneath Core Disciple rank. In that moment something must have clearly affected his foe, as the illusion flickered once more, and allowed him to roll out of the way of a particularly angry stab.
“How pathetic you are, acting out, so desperate to be seen!” Roan’s quiet voice hissed, the man apparently no longer caring about the fact this surely removed his main advantage. “Why won’t you take me seriously! You who are barely holding himself together yet still acting a fool! For what purpose?”
Stumbling to his feet, swaying at the vertigo of both the unfiltered stream of raw information assaulting his consciousness and sheer blood loss as well as several likely concussions he nonetheless smiled even wider. He could punish Roan straight away for his hasty, spiteful declaration of course. But as his eyes flickered to the hazy outlines of something every intuition screamed should have been full of deep purple energy he smiled and instead answered with soul rending honesty.
“It seems to me you are getting a lot more personally involved than you should be.” He spat with a mouth full of venom. “I may not be able to see you clearly, and your little tricks stop me from reading your mind, but I don’t need either to taste the jealousy!”
Roan disappeared once more and he felt a hateful stab pierce his back before he could react, the strange innate formation Carrion used must have been flooded with power right now. It wasn’t that the same inherent flaw that let him somewhat track him last time didn’t exist anymore, but the entire arena had been filled with that hazy nothingness that made him feel like he had two eyes again for the first time in many months, not since he had nearly been torn to shreds in that dark sealed chamber by the thing that tore its way out of John. He was completely unable to track his opponents movements, and any movement would likely be punished by him getting thrown into the flames.
He was never good at sitting still.
Betting it all on a desperate gamble he allowed himself to be hit with a myriad of blows, cuts and stabs, not quite an act given how he had no way of tracking Roan’s movements anymore. With most of his vision artificially scrubbed from his mind and memory his mind was clearer than ever as he traced careful shapes with stumbling feet and dripping blood. The formation he saw was indistinct, unclear, he could never hope to truly replicate it for himself with what little he knew. But he didn’t need perfect knowledge to break something.
Feeling himself getting awfully close to the licking flames he fell face first onto the unforgiving floor, with the imprint his fallen body made in the sand as well as the channels he had already made… the invisible footprints left by his opponent was something he couldn’t readily account for but it shouldn’t matter for this at least. With less than seconds left before a loss he pulled off his greatest act.
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“Endless Encores!”
Roan’s mutation inscribed within his very flesh a formation that manipulated information on a fundamental level, it was something he could never hope to truly replicate on his own, especially on such short notice. However, his mutation also influenced how information entered the mind, a process he had been forced to become intimately aware with. Psychic power, more than some strange expression of Si, was a power inherently tied to the mind, even the simplest of animals or automatons with a semblance of false intelligence would have the characteristic threads of purple emanating from their skulls. It was practically insultingly simple once he realised how the thing he had been so scared of all this time was simply Roan’s mutation flooding the air with threads of psychic power which ate anything in its path.
He couldn’t do that of course, but he didn’t need to when he could do the opposite.
He poured enough power into his formation to momentarily black out, consciousness failing him as nearly everything he could spare was drained from his Si stores and funnelled into psychic power. When consciousness returned he could neither see the audience nor the flames, in fact he could barely see the floor in front of him, so thick and dense the threads of meaningless psychic information he had generated were. He could see something attempting to eat away at them, severing countless threads like a farmer through chaff. It wasn’t enough, more than enough had reached their target, and Roan lay shuddering and vomiting in a helpless pile right in front of him, bone dagger extended dangerously close to his throat.
Doubtless Roan’s mutation granted him some degree of resistance to this, that combined with the shoddy construction of the formation had probably kept him conscious, not that it really mattered of course given he was too overwhelmed to even stand. He looked Roan in his hateful twitching eyes and couldn’t help but almost pity the man. In the end he could understand what it felt like to never be seen.
Magni slowly hauled himself off the ground and blinked away the purple haze consuming his vision. Unceremoniously he kicked Roan over the side and into the fire. With a final gust of heat the fires ceased and a loud announcement declared him the winner.
With a heroic effort of a battered and slashed body he gave a deep performers bow to the crowd.
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Cobalt wasn’t sure exactly what happened during Magni’s fight, honestly most of it was him acting like a clown while sporting concerning amounts of injuries. It might be her growing connection with the boy who tended to grow on her like lichen on stone talking, but she was proud of him, she saw how genuinely nervous he was at the prospect of facing a natural counter to his abilities and despite her deriding him for that very same thing it was shocking to see all that apprehension apparently bleed away when it really mattered. It got her blood pumping for the prospect of her own battle, something to take the edge off a month of many many revelations and troubling emotions.
“Back in ya own little world are ya?” Moss, her soon to be opponent, jeered. Though clearly without meaning to offend, honestly what was it about her that attracted people with the decorum of a dung guardian beetle?
“What do you want this time?” She sighed.
“I was just curious, shapeshifting, a potent warp spasm, extendable claws and a form of heat generation. Powerful mutations, befitting someone on the Fifth Step of the Mutant Realm but not really anything unique and crucially only four. I heard however that truebred cultivators tend to inherit a bloodline mutation as well, but I don’t think I have seen it on your file or demonstrated in combat. Call it dumb curiosity, but I want to find out more about my opponent before I face her.” He explained casually even as her blood froze in her veins.
She remembered her earliest kill, at least the earliest she could remember. Her father had beaten a spirit beast of some kind, it was honestly too bloodied to tell what it was originally even if she had truly been paying attention at the time, and threw it before her. Instinct took over in that instant, before she knew it she was tearing at its abdomen seeking its core, uncaring about how the thing pathetically squealed in pain. Her guts were fortified, even compared to a regular cultivators, intense acid, heat, cold or radiation would not phase her when ingested in quantities that would debilitate a cultivator of her level. This however was simply a side effect, her birthright was simple. To devour the living and take their power for her own with frightful efficiency.
But she had always known, some nagging instinct clawing at the back of her mind, that using it on mere Spirit Beasts wasn’t the true purpose of her bloodline’s gift. It was people, it was always people, that would be the best fuel for her fire. A persistent urge nibbled in the back of her mind, never enough to overpower her will and good sense, to tear into the flesh of her foes and take their power for her own. Of course to succumb to those base instincts was unthinkable, she was not her brute of a father.
But in the darkest of hours, when she was alone in the dark, she would confront the thing inside her blood and fear the day the monster overcomes the woman.
“Shut up.” She hissed, surprising even herself with the venom in her tone.
The threads making up Moss briefly came undone with surprise, his very skin and flesh unravelling to reveal pale yellow bone beneath as he recoiled. “What did I do?”
Nothing really she knew. He couldn’t have known, and the whole cannibalism thing was not something that would be divulged to outsiders. It was a profane act that was only justified in the toppling of tyrants and the dark days of famine and ash, not to devour the weak and steal their power. She was overreacting, and honestly she probably could have found a thousand polite ways to refuse. She was just a bit past caring at the present moment.
“Just shut up. See you when the match starts.” She hissed, turning her head sharply and walking off. Never daring to look back.
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Gangren awoke with a gasp, gagging violently. For some reason he felt cold all over, like the winter wind had gripped his spine and was choking it with all its might. Except it wasn’t winter, in fact last he checked it was approaching summer wasn’t it? He looked back and saw the rest of the group coming to awakeness, each looking lost and disoriented. He counted heads quickly, all were present and accounted for, at least as far as he could tell.
Why did he feel like something was strange?
He tried to remember recent events. The village was attacked by a host of great mechanical beasts, barbarians who had burned down every farmstead and tried to round them up. He had managed to get who he could on a cart, an idea shared by a few of his neighbours, and miraculously they were free. However what happened before then… it was a blur and it made his head hurt just to remember.
“Daddy what happened?” His son, Maiz groggily asked. He was looking pale and clammy, grey skin glistening with sweat.
“I think… nothing to worry about son…” He reassured, despite not believing a single word of it. His spine itched and his head hurt, it would simply not do to stay here much longer, they needed to go north, to safety.
“Daddy… I think I am scared of spiders…” His boy whimpered, gripping his sleeve tightly.
“It’s alright, did you have a nightmare?” He asked. He could sympathise, he was terrified of the kracking eight legged menaces too. Was he always so scared of them?
Bomb it all his head really hurt. Did they come across a nasty psychic beast last night? Quite possibly, best not to think too hard about it, everyone was alive and he needed to keep it that way.
“Where are we going?” His son asked.
“The Lead Cave, they are strong, they will keep us safe.” He said with more confidence than anything since he woke up.
With a renewed sense of purpose Gangren ushered the rest of the camp to get up and began their movement north with almost feverish eagerness. Absent mindedly he scratched the base of his skull and soon enough forgot all about the strange illness he had that morning.