So maybe yelling stop when half the people he needed to get out of the way knew him and would focus on him was not the best idea. Still, the lamp post did its job. Kind of. Tristan had never practiced throwing anything before, well he had skipped stones, but the concept was different.

The goal was to stop the man from shooting Eve. Tristan intended to accomplish this by hitting the would be assassin with Vulcan. He actually accomplished it by hitting Eve instead. The lamp post hit her in the chest, knocking her over, a hiss of air went off right where Eve’s head used to be.

“Detain him!” Kerri yelled, “I want him alive!”

Unfortunately, the four guards on Tristan's side could not hear the hiss of air over Kerri’s yelling. Tristan pointed at the fake temple acolyte, when no one responded he ran at the man himself. The acolyte panicked, and his bracelet started blinking, taking the hand cannon with it. Tristan was not the first to arrive, one of the healers around Eve tried to stop him.

The attempted tackle was at a bad angle, mostly because she believed that Tristan was aiming for Eve. He was not and outweighed her by nearly a hundred fifty pounds. She bounced off looking a little shocked. The acolyte panicked and scrambled away, but Tristan was on him. He used the architect's force to rapidly create a simple knife and stabbed it into the man's chest. As he had survived a destroyed heart, Tristan tried to go for the throat next.

One of the men with an earth kern reached him and swung a golden fist at his face. Tristan caught his fist with one hand, spinning with the charge and tripping him. The next was Janis himself, he was holding the golden sword, and he could not use his hand cannon with Eve and Kerri in the background.

“Call them off Kerri,” Tristan yelled.

“Do not listen to this man, he is a killer,” Kerri said. None of it a lie, as Tristan had just killed a man, but misleading.

Shrugging Tristan looked at Janis, “Sorry about this, you seem like a decent guy.”

Janis looked confused until Tristan summoned Vulcan. The lamppost popped out of existence beside Eve and then back into Tristan's waiting hand.

“If you get blood on me, make sure to wash it off. I hate that sticky feeling,” Vulcan said.

Tristan had intended to use him like a quarterstaff with a flaming mace at one end. It had not occurred to him that he would be a person hitting another person with a person. An odd thought that did not stop him from clobbering Janis. He tried to block, but the advantage of pole weapons was their ability to hit hard at a range, due to simple physics.

Janis staggered back under the force but managed to push the flames up and away. Tristan turned that motion into a spin, bringing the but of the lamp post into Janis’s groin. They were wearing armor and cups, so it was not an incapacitating strike. Still, a man's first reaction is to guard their family jewels, so when the flaming head came back around it met no resistance. Janis went down, Tristan would have been worried about the flames and blunt force trauma if healers weren’t present.

“Tier four, to your left.” Vulcan warned, “Laser incoming.”

What’s a laser? Tristan did not know, but he rolled to his right. A beam of white light lanced through where Tristan had been standing. So thats a laser, it seemed to be a more fire related application of light. Looking up he saw the tier four make a weird construct of water and light. It was a bowl with many small faces on the inside, it only lasted a split second. That seemed to be enough to launch the light in whatever direction the bowl was facing.

Tristan could not be sure of the power of a laser, but he was sure of one thing. It was light and it could bounce. He made a smaller, yet identical lens with his artifact force. He had noticed that as soon as the construct was formed, there was a white dot where it would strike. He simply had to place the mirror where the beam would arrive.

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Another construct was built and another beam fired. Tristan intercepted it, he made two miscalculations. First, he could not aim a lamp post, what made him think he could bounce light with any accuracy. He ended up lighting Kerri’s horse on fire. It bucked and threw Kerri to the ground while it tried to put the flames out.

Second, lasers are hot, really hot. In a second the bowl Tristan had made went from room temperature to scalding. He threw it at the next guy, he caught it, not reacting at all to the hot metal. Oh yeah, that one has a fire kern. Tristan had to take care of the tier four, though there was something off with the man. Dual kerns could clash in very unhelpful ways, but water and light did not seem like a bad pairing.

Tristan quickly approached, and the man pulled out two daggers that shone with reflected light. It was similar to seeing the sun’s reflection off of glass, only from every angle. The golden armor also started shining, so Tristan stopped using his eyes. His opponent was using metal weapons while wearing metal armor, His metal sense could pick it up.

The tier four rushed in. Knives were terrible weapons in a real fight. They lacked the leverage to stop a pole arm, and the raw kinetic force to both kill and push an enemy back. Most of those issues were sidestepped if you could blind your enemy.

Tristan swung, it was a heavy horizontal blow. It should have hit him right in the chest. Unfortunately, the tier four was still a tier four, he had the speed and flexibility to slide under the strike. He came up inside Tristan's guard and thrust a dagger into his stomach. Instinctively, he reinforced his body, the combination of essence and mythical leather made for a stupendous defense. Hadrid had struggled to kill Kerri through this leather as well, so what hope did this man have?

Tristan did not try to make distance, as his opponent's speed was greater than his. As a stab to the gut was ineffective, the man decided that one to the face would be better. That exchange was fine, He tilted his head forward to take the thrust on his forehead instead of to the eye. Grunting, the tier four stabbed with the second knife, a stab that never landed because Tristan hugged the man.

Three hundred pounds of Tristan and a hundred extra pounds of gear was a lot of extra weight, even for a tier four. The man staggered and failed to stop Tristan from grabbing him by the chin. It was not a point that he had leverage from, but it was contact, and contact was all it took for him to smear some grey viscous metal across the man’s jaw.

This one force, the force of decay was why Tristan believed that the force of Alloy was so powerful. This was a diluted version of it, so what would a pure decay force do? Tristan hoped to never meet someone like that.

The tier four let out a scream of agony as parts of his face sloughed off. Tristan felt bad for the guy, but there were healers here, so he should not lose anything too important.

A wave of fire rolled over Tristan. It was a huge amount of essence, and it punched straight through his natural defenses. He managed to protect his eyes, but that was about it. The guard with the fire kern seemed shocked that Tristan was still standing albeit on the crispy side. Patches of skin were red, and other areas had cracked, leaking his silver tinted blood.

“What are you?” The guard said as he watched the injuries lessen at a visible speed.

The pulses of healing had been able to fix organ damage, so burns were well within its capabilities. It would still take more than Tristan's whole kern to heal completely, but he only needed to get back into fighting shape. A single pulse of healing alloy was enough to heal the skin enough to not crack every time he moved.

“I’m a guard who’s being attacked because other guards aren’t using common sense,” Tristan said, then he pointed at the dead acolyte, “He has a hand cannon.”

“No he doesn’t,” Janis said, “I searched him.”

The healers had worked fast, getting him back on his feet. That was a good sign for all the other people and animals that had been injured today. The other healer was beside Eve, slowly getting her back upright. She looked groggy, her eyes unfocused. Maybe he had thrown Vulcan a bit too hard.

“You, mr earth kern,” Tristan pointed to one of the tier twos who thought he was being sneaky, “Check the body, inside of the left arm. The hand cannon is still there, alongside an earth artifact that was formerly a light one.”

When the item was found Janis glanced back at Tristan, “How did you know it was there?”

The question caught Tristan off guard, “I used my metal sense, don’t you have something similar for air?”

It turned out that most people did, but because their elements were everywhere it was substantially less useful. It seemed pretty foolish, as people always had air in their lungs, so why not work to sense that?

Kerri managed to get back to his feet, he inspected the carnage and pointed at Tristan, “What are you doing, subdue him, he tried to harm Lady Eve.”

“Grow a pair and do it yourself,” Eve muttered as she got to her feet, “Help Herod before the rot gets to his eyes.”

The healer nodded and left her with a hand braced against her horse.