The report of the huge, heavy revolver struck with almost as much force as the bullet, a hammer-on-anvil sound that reverberated with finality. The back of Jiann's skull exploded outwards, shattering fragile decorations and curios behind him, and his body tumbled back to crash against the floor bonelessly. Cameron stepped over him, sniffed, and holstered his iron; guess wizards can't talk bullets out of hittin' 'em all the time. He glanced around the room, then began searching for clues as to the current state of affairs. He had a lot of questions, among them the quandary of how old Nej was still alive (well, un-alive) and suddenly an expatriate to the United Kingdom, as well as an accomplice in whatever the Agency was up to this time. With any luck, he'd finally find some answers, or at least the next set of breadcrumbs towards them. Noticing a particularly promising-looking chest of drawers, he crossed the cottage and began searching it for traps.
As a particular sort of man steeped in a particular sort of culture, Cameron was possessed of certain notions about the fundamental nature of the world. He knew, with a conviction deep in his bones, that what goes up must come down, that the government was not to be trusted, and that a bullet to the brain was the most reliable method for destroying any enemy. And so he could quite comfortably be forgiven for a moment's distraction, however brief, when he turned around and saw Jiann rising and shaking the dust out of his skull.
"Damn, if that ain't rude," grumbled the old sorcerer as he fixed his glowing eye-sockets on the intruder's form. Reaching into a pocket, he withdrew his curved ritual dagger and made a quick sign over it, lengthening the blade into a fiery vermillion saber. "Mister Texas, I don't think I like you no more."
Cameron blinked exactly once, then drew both his revolvers at speed; however, Jiann was already in motion, rattling off a lightning-fast chant for an entropic shield and hurling a handful of seeds in his direction. Cameron dodged, rolling across the floor and firing, as the seeds struck the desk he'd been searching with a thump and began eating into it like acid. His bullets, as he'd been expecting, flew wide, missing Nej by the merest of margins in every direction as they were turned aside by whatever mojo the old zombie was slinging around. He grunted in dissatisfaction as he holstered one of his guns; this was not going according to plan.
The two of them circled each other warily for a few seconds; Jiann was loath to give up the advantage of his shielding charm by closing to melee, but most of his strongest long-range attacks were too damaging to be used inside a house that was spiritually convergent with his own essence; an errant lightning bolt, for example, might miss Cameron but fry a particular object or plant he was using to store something important, like his ability to see in color or control his left knee. Similarly, Cameron knew that his pistols would be more effective at point-blank range, but was understandably reluctant to charge right into his opponent's obviously-highly-enchanted flaming sword. This fight wasn't going to be quick.
Cameron produced a massive Bowie knife from his coat and flung it at Jiann, who batted it away with his own blade; Jiann gestured at the carpet beneath them and commanded it to rise up and trip Cameron, who nimbly leaped over it. Cameron surreptitiously pulled the pin on a grenade behind his back and cooked it an exceedingly careful 3.25 seconds, then hurled it towards Jiann; Jiann directed the carpet to envelop and smother it, robbing the fuse of the precious oxygen needed for combustion a split-second before the detonation. The two were evenly matched.
Hoping for a high-ground advantage, Cameron vaulted onto the back of a large stuffed wingback chair, which Jiann, in his first major miscalculation, animated with a gesture. He expected it to throw the other man off almost immediately, but instead he was confronted with the deeply impossible sight of Cameron riding the bucking chair with impeccable rodeo technique, which cost him a crucial half-second of stunned amusement. Cameron, who could do (and, in fact, had done) this in his sleep, did not waste the opening.
Pulling a squat metal cylinder from his pocket, he expertly twisted a dial, pressed a button, and aimed it at his opponent's face. Jiann, naturally, brought up his blade in a guard stance to deflect whatever projectile would ensue, but was instead struck by a pulsating, disorienting pattern of light from what was merely a highly-compact tactical flashlight. Though visual information made its way into Jiann's mind through byzantine and highly unorthodox methods (involving sixty individual leaves, four climbing ivies, and a small creek), the fundamental methods by which such stimuli was processed were still modeled on his original brain, and as a result he was in fact highly vulnerable to such an attack. Shaking his head, he blinked and staggered momentarily, and Cameron dove in for the kill.
Kicking off the chair with enough force to launch it backwards and splinter it against a load-bearing beam, he rocketed forwards into Jiann's body with a brutal shoulder tackle as his free hand grappled with the old sorcerer's wrist for control of his seething blade. Jiann, caught rather seriously off-guard, windmilled and tried for a qi-infused high kick to his opponent's head, but Cameron dodged with the natural ease of long military training and threw his weight along the orthogonal axis of Jiann's kick, breaking his balance. With a twist and a snap, he jerked the blade away, reversed it with a precise flip of his wrist, and plunged it directly through Jiann's heart.
Had the blade been enchanted by any other mage or been using any number of other reified properties, Jiann would have been instantly destroyed; as it was, he was merely stunned and crippled rather severely for a number of seconds. Cameron kicked him savagely to the ground, then shot him a few more times in his head, chest, stomach, and groin, but these were more annoyances than anything else compared to the brutal violation of his personal eidoletic paradigm. He felt his essence and carefully-arranged bio-spiritual correspondences fraying; his scattering thoughts reeled as he desperately searched for a way to save himself.
Fortunately, the fact that he had been impaled with his own blade worked in his favor; the magicks actualizing it were of his own construction and drawn from his own spiritual essence, so it was merely the work of a few frenzied, desperate acts of metaconation to incorporate it into his self-concept (where it took over the endpoint functions of vital regulation in much the same capacity as his previous heart-analogue; he'd have to be careful it wasn't removed, now). Additionally, the blade had been infused with the essence of the svadhisthana chakra -- which represented (among other things) the unconscious mind and the reproductive organs -- and thus allowed for a significant amount of leeway in transubstantiating its energies. As he rebound its abstractions, channeling it through his entire body's system of meridians and pathways, a lash of scarlet power erupted from him and tossed Cameron away like a bundle of rags.
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If he'd been a foot to either side, Cameron would have smashed against the solid oak and granite walls and likely injured his spine rather badly, but instead he was blasted through a large and picturesque window and launched a goodly distance into Jiann's garden with only a few lacerations and contusions to show for it. He skidded, rolled, and came up shooting as Jiann whiplashed to his feet, but Cameron's bullets were once again deflected away by Jiann's aura. He lowered his revolvers, scowling, as his opponent glared through the broken window-frame at him.
"You hillbilly fuck," hissed Jiann, luminous ichor dripping from his fleshless jaws. "I cain't believe you shot me in the balls." With great menace, he clambered through the broken window as the huge sword impaling his chest shrank back into a dagger and disappeared into his rapidly-regenerating ribcage. Cameron winced. This dang zombie ain't easy to put down, he grumbled to himself.
The two of them faced each other for a moment across the dew-wet greenery. Jiann looked like some kind of unholy evil god, his undead form draped in an ominous carmine glow that radiated outwards with concentric rings and halos of visible power; Cameron, in contrast, looked like a southern banker who had gotten lost on his way home from an axe-throwing contest in one of the more upscale sorts of indie brewery. It would have been both unsurprising and deeply sensible for him to retreat, negotiate, or perform any number of similar actions, but the man named Cameron did not even count such terms in his vocabulary, let alone his strategic repertoire. He holstered his guns, shook a little water out of his magnificent beard, and cracked his knuckles meaningfully. "You shoulda been impressed I could find 'em."
With an appreciative cackle, Jiann launched himself across the distance between the two; Cameron darted forwards to meet him in an unhesitating rush. Rising high into the air, Jiann dropped a descending axe kick into Cameron's head, but Cameron shifted slightly to his right and took the impact on his shoulder as he caught Jiann's throat in an iron grip. The two tumbled to the ground in a ball of violence as each kicked, elbowed, and bit at the other; Cameron was clearly the stronger, but Jiann was tenacious and had the advantage of complete immunity to pain. Jiann twisted in a grip-breaker as Cameron bashed him in the jaw with a fist like a bony cudgel, but only got free long enough for a flurry of jabs that cracked a few of Cameron's ribs before being pulled into another grapple. He drove a knee into Cameron's nose, accepted a stomp that fractured his ankle, and raked a bony claw across the other man's eyes; Cameron ducked to take the gouges on his well-scarred forehead, launched a haymaker into Jiann's ribs with enough force to rattle his teeth, and reached up to grab his opponent's throat with both hands. Jiann, at first amused that his foe would try to strangle a dead man, abruptly realized the depth of his miscalculation when Cameron's muscles bulged with sudden exertion.
With a triumphant shout, Cameron tore Jiann's head clean off; the sound of Jiann's vertebrae separating with a wet snap was immediately drowned out by Cameron's shriek of pain as Jiann's dismembered skull (in no way whatsoever inconvenienced by this event) sank its teeth viciously into the meat of his palm. Cameron grappled for a grip on the skull, trying to dislodge it, but Jiann's headless body executed a mighty double-fisted rising hammer punch into his undefended torso; Cameron was flipped a full three hundred and sixty degrees in the air as he was blasted up by the mystic force of the blow, and he landed hard enough to knock the wind out of him entirely as Jiann's headless body loomed over him. The skull rolled comically over to the corpse's feet as the body bent down to pick it up, then reattached it only slightly fussily atop its spinal column.
"Ngh," muttered Jiann as he twisted his head back into place. He clacked his jaws experimentally, twisted his neck back and forth in a gesture of unmitigated hostility, then glared down at his gasping and injured adversary. "Any last words, you cow-humpin' sonofabitch?"
"Yeah," wheezed Cameron, "what the fuck are you now, some kinda devil corpse, or somethin'? I figure a man should know what kills him."
Jiann nodded. "Close enough, I reckon, even if it's racist as hell. Indian mysticism ain't the devil, but a dumb hick like you ain't never gonna understand the difference." He bent down to grab Cameron's collar, lifting him up with ease as he prepared for the killing blow.
Cameron choked out a chuckle. "Yeah, ain't nobody ever accused me o' bein' overeducated. But I do know that when you got you a devil glowin' with red light, a bit o' avengin' white fire might tip the scales a lil'." His hand emerged from his coat, holding a white phosphorous grenade with its pin rather ominously missing.
Jiann's glowing eye-sockets widened with shock; the imminent explosion of white-hot metal, half the temperature of the surface of the sun, would incinerate his carefully-tended garden in minutes and wreak corresponding devastation upon his existence. In desperation, he grabbed Cameron's hand and crushed it into the sides of the canister with his own, but Cameron headbutted him with titanic force at the exact instant his attention lapsed. Cramming the grenade directly into Jiann's gaping maw, Cameron rammed a powerful mule-like kick into his foe's chest with the intent to launch him back into the cottage, but Jiann's garden came alive in response to this impending threat to its survival with a force he could have never anticipated. Plants lashed out from the ground to encoil Cameron's wrists and ankles, and a tidal wave of dirt sprang up to cradle Jiann in a gentle swell of support and slow his backwards momentum before reversing direction and carrying him swiftly back into Cameron's face. In another instant, it would have crashed over both men in an earthen tsunami, smothering the explosion and crushing Cameron under a half-ton of dirt, but that was an instant neither man would have. The violence of the grenade's incandescent detonation took everyone by surprise.
When the authorities arrived several hours later, there was no expectation of survivors. The entire cottage and all of its environs had burned furiously despite the typical soggy weather, and there was barely a blade of grass or beam of wood left standing. There was some discussion of searching for remains, but a cursory check of the property records indicated that it had been uninhabited anyhow; the constable shrugged, gestured helplessly to the fire chief, and the two of them departed to go have a drop at the pub before sorting out whatever paperwork might ensue. The sullen cloud of smoke which hung over the property revealed no secrets.