An hour has passed and the 3m tall suit of armour with an even taller polearm stands on the edge of a canyon, waiting for the go. Adrenaline pumping for both anxiety and excitement. This is her most dangerous mission to date. They always used to send her on scouting or political missions hoping that she wouldn’t get in trouble. They were overprotective of her and rightfully so, but this is her chance to finally prove herself.
“Breach in 12!” the familiar voice of Tensha echoes in her head.
She assumes a lunging position and aims the top heavy weapon at the flower in the distance.
She breathes in… and breaths out.
Her right calf tenses as well as her right arm.
She empties her head of all thought.
8 seconds have passed.
A sudden thump can be heard from kilometres away as Asire launches towards her target.
No fooling around this time. Straight to her target she goes.
The metal meteorite punches through walls of vines set to slow her down but to no avail. She goes through them like running through a paper wall.
Doesn’t take her long before she reaches the wall-sized petals surrounding the core.
She keeps a hold of her polearm as she empties all her kinetic energy into the protective layer. And just like last time, the petal disintegrates leaving the pulsating blue glassy surface behind it exposed.
The shockwave of the petals falling apart sends the polearm backwards. She doesn’t stop it, instead she lets her top half swing backwards as her bottom half swings back up without touching the floor, finishing up with a drop kick right through the glassey core with seemingly unchanged momentum from her thrust only to land at the other side onto the red dirt ground.
That move is both illegal and physically impossible under most circumstances. But this is Asire, laws of physics are suggestions as far as she’s concerned, that is as long as she’s not aware that it’s actually impossible, then she loses her ability to do so.
The flower wiggles letting out a great beam of yellow energy into the sky from the crystal frame in it’s head.
A moment of nothing before a sudden change in the sky’s colour occurs. She looks up to see yellow streaks in the morning sky, like an aurora overlaying the now darkened sky.
The glossy core doesn’t grow again, and neither do the destroyed petals.
The pulsating vein-like yellow energy dissipates from the flower’s stem.
Now the real challenge begins.
She has no idea what’s going to happen next, this is the first time they cut the energy flow between the flowers. Theoretically they can’t heal now but she doesn’t know what that means for its vulnerability.
She stands there in silence before she gets a message from a shouting Tensha.
“JUMP BACK NOW!”
Without thinking twice, the giant armour leaps backwards anticipating something, but the flower responds only in static. It does not move, it does not react. This is the part where she expected to have an all out fight for her life, but nothing seems to happen.
Was… was something supposed to happen?
She’s very confused as she watches carefully everything around her. There aren’t any vibrations from below ground either.
“Did something happen your side?”
There’s no response from the other side.
She waits for a few before the anxiety gets too strong.
Her flower’s static but theirs clearly isn’t.
The giant armour takes off from the ground with force towards where the other flower should be, but not nearly as powerful as her usual.
It’s not because her strength is slowly getting sapped by the flower. She’s not exactly the most stable of people when it comes to ability control. She needs extreme focus and precision when it comes to her powers, but now she’s worried about Tensha and Alistair.
Not seconds after she departed, a vine catches up to her mid-air and wraps itself around her leg to throw her with extreme force back towards the flower.
Now it decides to be active? What is up with this flower?
She lands ready to swing her polearm to cut any attacking vines, but to her surprise yet again, nothing.
Luckily for her, she’s very easily distracted and the jolt forcing her back was enough to get her mind to where she is.
She turns back to see nothing at all. Just dry ground as far as the eye can see.
The flower isn’t fighting back, nor is it letting her leave.
Well, the original plan was to cut it down, so maybe that’s what she should do?
Each loud thump taken towards the flower has careful focus over what she steps on, expecting the ground to burst forth and take her by surprise.
Still confused as to why nothing happened yet, she decides to take this opportunity to strike.
Maybe it’s having the plant version of a stroke.
She leaps straight up to land on the now open pedestal composed of giant flower petals.
She raises the giant weapon and brings down the sharp axe-like side striking the crystalline frame at the centre with enough force to cut through 84cm of reinforced steel.
But all that force is all for naught.
A sudden burst of wind flows pushing Asire back a few steps.
She falls down to a knee holding herself up with her polearm.
What just happened?
She’s in shock staring at the core trying to understand what it is that happened.
Her knees, nay, her entire body is shaking. Her thoughts are all over the place and her body feels numb, disconnected from the rest of her.
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Are her muscles tense? Is she in pain? She’s not quite sure… it all feels so new.
Her body has never experienced recoil before, let alone a recoil this strong.
It’s only natural for energy to backfire, afterall, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, but she never had to worry about that. She never really looked into how and why, it’s just a thing she’s apparently immune to even with her weak body, and this reaction was so strong, it even bypassed the (relatively) large buffer of ‘air’ between her and the armour surrounding her causing her mind to go blank for a few… minutes?
She’s not quite sure how long she’s been out for. The sky is dark but that’s not because it’s night but the Field around her. The yellow aurora streaks should give her peace but there’s a feeling welling up inside her.
Has her strength failed her? This had never happened before.
She forces herself to stand up against all her primal instincts that demand collapsing, raise her arms up, and drop the polearm yet again at the same spot.
Another, bigger wave of energy is released, causing all dust to clear out from a large area around the flower.
Her body takes the brute force of it entirely.
This time instead of passing out, she persists and starts moving not only her armour, but her entire body as well.
Her muscles are currently out of order and some fairly important organs are struggling to keep her going. The only thing moving her is her sheer focus, and panic.
How has it come to this? All it took was 3 seconds for her to go from alright to complete mental breakdown, all because her ability is failing her. It’s the only thing she had for certain since birth.
Gathering herself enough to not accidentally throw herself away is taking more effort than it usually takes to precisely crumble a block of cement.
It’s not just that her attacks aren’t damaging the crystal, it’s also the fact that such a basic feature of her powers are suddenly not working.
The armour swings down yet again, and gets rejected back only to step forward again with another blow.
She’s not even aiming anymore. She’s desperate to get a clean hit. She swings like a mad lumberjack just trying to relieve stress rather than actually cut down a tree.
But the shockwaves are too strong for her body to take. Even with the empty space between her and the actual vibrating metal, it’s too much to bear, especially with a frail body like hers.
One… more… swing….
The crystalline frame isn’t even scratched from all this hitting that’s causing a wind current to form in the area.
A normal person would have blacked out by now, but one of her abilities is unfortunately keeping her awake. She runs the danger of killing her body by her own actions. As long as she wills it, she’ll be able to move and stay awake. One of her kidneys had already given up and the second one is next on the list.
Her focus is all but gone, now running only on primal feelings of despair.
It has to break through.
All her power. All her energy.
She has to do this.
Just a scratch, she wants to see just a simple scratch.
Something to reassure her that she’s still useful.
“I keep telling you, you need to stop and think more!” she hears an unfamiliar voice, yet, a voice that tore her heart apart in a second. Well, the voice, and the black dagger sticking out of her neck inside the armour space.
The last thing she sees as she’s collapsing on the platform petal is the shape of a shirtless man.
Eyes? Is her last thought before blacking out.
She wakes up to the sort-of soft cushion inside her armour before all the locking mechanisms open and the back half of it flips open like a book.
She gets out of the armour that’s nearly twice her size and steps forwards to the crystalline frame triple her height.
Her mind is clear. That nap did her a world of good.
Her body aches in pain but she asks for just a little longer before she can give in to collapse.
She puts her hand over the frame and closes her teary eyes that she hasn’t noticed.
It feels like it’s pushing her away. Not just touching but, it’s like constant wind current between her and the surface she’s touching but without the current being there.
It takes more and more energy to keep her hand on it before she’s finally repelled.
She focuses on whatever it is that’s happening as she has her hand over it before it finally hits her.
Her perspective isn’t necessarily the truth.
All movement going in is not only rejected but also being reflected back to her, an easy solution to this would be to…
She focuses on the inside of the crystalline frame and concentrates all her energy to a pull force from within.
The crystalline frame starts to crack, and with that, Asire cracks an ecstatic smile of triumph bringing her spirit back from her massive crash earlier.
Suddenly, the frame collapses in on itself imploding to disappear leaving only a crack on the surrounding flower stem.
The crack starts to spread over the petals before Asire and her armour start to fall down the 58 storey height.
She’s not worried whatsoever, if anything she falls in bliss alongside the crack spreading downwards throughout the flower with her, leaking yellow light and energy under the dark sky.
She falls flat on the ground below with a thump but without a scratch on her whatsoever.
Before she knew it, the flower was no more and the yellow aurora followed to disappear minutes afterwards.
It was a happy day for her.
She feels like she forgot a very important detail as she slips back into unconsciousness.