Persian-blue waters reflected sunlight like sparkling diamonds, shimmering stars tracing the light from a bright yellow sun that hovered over the horizon. Corban counted three chained islands in total since he was spit out of space and time onto the outermost beach the day before.

Each landmass bore similar resumes: Many trees, several caves, and various man-made structures, such as bridges connecting them, yet bore no other life than the fish. If looked at from a bird's eye view, the landmasses also formed a geometrically perfect isoceles triangle, something the doctor-mage wasn't entirely sure was a coincidence. Regardless, he appeared thoroughly out of place in the summer water-world. Or perhaps it would be more fitting to say 'it'? It may have been the wide-brimmed pointed hat that it wore upon its head, or the unmatching(yet same-colored) black lab coat, but in this line of work, uniquely dressed characters were a dime a dozen.

The true wow-factor came in his execution of form. 'Corvana' as he affectionately called this body sat with her butt upon a thoroughly bent tree trunk, whom's length extended past the man-made high-rise and over several feet of crystal-blue water. She was physically perfect insofar as Corban was concerned, bearing a form, waist-size, and bust that could only be thought up by a man. Beside her, leaning against her crooked tree was Ishtalle, platinum hair drooping like misting clouds over her form.

"Interesting...." S(he) began. Her fingers curled and flexed, the sand several feet away and below her earthen pedastal beginning to rise and coalesce in similar motions. "I never thought it would drag me in, but now that we've been here a while, I think im beginning to understand."

<Understand what, exactly?>

"This things nature. It bears a unique faculty for the alteration of space, time, and relative dimensions. Each one seems separate from the last. Im also not convinced we're being teleported across a single landmass."

<The atmospheric differences are too exact.Keen eye.>

"This is engineered. It's like a living non-biological entity formed of reality marbles!"

<So its similar to me in some regards, then. We'll have to keep that in mind as the contest plays out.>

"I learn best on the fly, anyways."

The rising sands were clumped and forced together as they were silently transmuted into about a dozen rhinestones of every shape and color, yet never larger than a small rock. They flitted and spun like tops across the sandy shore, kicking up water and quartz in their stride back to their masters. Majority of them were willed into her various pockets, while three -diamond, sapphire, and ruby- were caught between her fingers before she began juggling them.

"Hmm. Do you think this place has Paopu fruit, Ishtalle?"

Meteor had not been pleased when she'd learned what her excursion to Happyland had been all about.

Apparently Enki had set up three of his comrades for some sort of fighting event, one which had pulled Meteor into place against her better judgment. The 'Emerald Knight' was sporting one hell of a shiner right about then, though at least all three of the Knights were advancing the rounds. In Meteor's case...mostly because her opponent had accidentally hit a sinkhole in Happyland, falling down into a rubble-strewn pit and knocking himself out less than twenty seconds after she'd started trying to put him down. Fortuitous...if extremely unsatisfying.

Now, of course, came 'Round 2'. This time, she had the benefit of a proper intelligence brief on her foe. Like all proper intelligence briefs, it was woefully inadequate and contained virtually no information - merely that her enemy was a man named 'Corban', who fought within a suit of bulky, heavy power armor, and that he had fatally injured his previous foe with some sort of energy weapon. What sort of energy weapon that had been, what his abilities were, the capabilities of his armor, or anything else useful were details the intelligence team Enki had pulled in (after Meteor'd had a little chat with the man concerning manners and his lack of them) had been unable to turn up.

Of course. Because why would anyone at the Company be capable of doing their jobs? Why, that just went against the natural order of things!

At least she'd be better prepared for the next battle; she couldn't count on her enemy downing himself again. In addition to her Executive Power Suit and her usual smallsword, Meteor had brought a pouch each of the hardened steel ball bearings and slim, equally hardened steel darts she often brought into combat. No guns, no armor, and no materia - she couldn't use the last at all, and her abilities rendered the former two largely moot. Ever since she'd started feeling the pull again, Meteor had been ready to fight - and growing more irritated by the second. It was with no small sense of relief for everyone around her when the portal finally opened and Meteor stepped through...into sunny, tropical paradise.

Blinking a few times as her shoes crunched into the sort of pristine sand travel agencies back home used as samples when selling people overpriced vacations, Meteor rested a hand on her sword as the portal closed behind her, immediately bringing her Mind's Eye to bear on this new cage she was to fight in. An island...no, three islands. Relatively small, though still far larger than Happyland had been, each sitting at the points of a perfect triangle. Water made for snorkling, spearfishing, and any other aquatic cavorting one wished to name surrounded the area for as far as Meteor's Eye could comfortably reach; the islands and the ocean were it.

Well, that and a woman on the other side of the island, sitting on a dock near what Meteor was fairly certain was a sheathed sword. Strange - there were no other natives anywhere Meteor could sense, no other life at all beyond the plants and the fish. The woman was doing something with the sand around herself, demonstrating some level of supernatural ability, which was enough to put Meteor on guard. Armored man with energy weapon turns out to be buxom woman with blade...it would not actually have been the first time in Meteor's experience that Intelligence managed to screw the pooch that thoroughly, though that would hardly stop her from giving them what-for when she returned from this little excursion. Still...better safe than homicide charges, she supposed. It could simply be that she'd gotten here first, and the woman had nothing to do with the tournament at all.

[Are you here to fight?] Meteor said - and by 'said', she projected the words telepathically, spanging them off the surface of the woman's mind as Meteor herself summoned up her protective nimbus of telekinetic power, drifting into the air and displacing a bit of sand beneath her. Unlike most telepaths, who Meteor tended to see as intrusive, obnoxious boors, she didn't attempt to force the question into the woman's mind. She simply sent it along, and if it found its intended recipient open to communication, excellent. If not...well, there was an entire small island between Meteor and this woman for her to use to try and ascertain the woman's intent.

Watching her prospective enemy while keeping a mental eye on the rest of the little islet, Shin-Ra's most powerful mentalist waited to see if she'd identified the woman correctly. All the while wondering if perhaps she should give Enki another black eye when she got back...or maybe even convince Satori to do it instead.

Beyond the fact that Corvana wielded no visible weapon anywhere on her body, it wasn't every day that you saw a 'sheathed blade' with hair like platinum in ways besides color. Much less an accompanying head, limbs, and torso! Yet there she was, violet eyes peering over the waters. However, she was only half-wrong. Ishtalle took on many forms in the past, swords among the more numerous. Though today, as she floated there listlessly she appeared more tinker bell than Excalibur, yet sharper still. As if to complete the cosplay, her blade-wings even gave off an effervescent glowing dust as they beat the wind behind her.

There was a splash as Corvana and familiar leapt from their high-rise and into the shallows of the shore. Her shiny wizard eyes could ascertain several things about the newcomer. First, she was using barrier magic or a close derivative. She could work with that. Secondly, she either had powerful divination magic or psionic ability, the latter more probable, given scrying and divination spells were all but useless against the doctor-mage. With an idea of her opponents disposition, she resolved herself to her decision.

"We are here to do whatever it takes to leave this place. Exits only present themselves when a single warrior remains standing. So..."

She didn't feel like using Ishtalle, but she wouldn't need to. With some creativity the very earth and air became a weapon in the hands of a genius. Her hand swirled and popping cyan was spat into the environment as an aerogel mold twice her size conglomerated before her, stabbed unceremoniously into the shallow waterbed. It was absolutely huge! So huge, in fact, there would be no way her dainty hands could possibly grasp it, yet she was determined regardless. As her hand reached for what would eventually be a sashed hilt, excess material and imperfections were melted away and scattered into a mist of nitrates and salts. What was left behind from the metamorphosis was a steaming, glorious lovechild between a javelin, screw, and blade encircled by the remains of a diamond shell. Its six-foot rainbow lance bore winding rivets, the base expanding outward around the hilt to protect hands.

As she grasped it the diamond circlet collapsed onto the sea floor, and she snapped her elbow forward as she rested it on her shoulder.

"I'm ready."

Well. If the words weren’t enough, conjuring up some sort of massive, diamondite lance-thing was certainly an indication of hostile intent. All right then – game on.

Tracking her foe(s) with her Mind’s Eye, Meteor’s perusal of the island turned up the usual profusion of improvised armaments ready to hand. With the bulk of the island between her and her new foe, Meteor was free to strike with relative impunity – though she was not nearly so naïve as to expect that to last. Nevertheless…the first blow was hers.

On the curve of beach facing Not-Quite-Corban, a dozen coconuts fell from a dozen palm trees in a wide arc, over two hundred meters from end to end. The fruit descended barely a meter from their trees before accelerating at NQCorban with sharp crack!s of violently displaced air. Hardened by Meteor’s will, the tropical cannonballs would hit like actual cannonballs, striking in a pair of six-shot salvos timed and physically spaced out such that no single motion or position of the diamondite lance would catch all of the projectiles in either salvo. One way or another, the woman was going to be struck if she didn’t put up a hefty defense indeed. Invested with the mentalist’s will, the projectiles were under her direct control the entire time, moving as easily as she moved her arms or legs – no last-second hairline dodges would suffice to clear the path of these coconut spurts. When they landed, it was gonna hurt.

Meteor herself drifted along her own beach, never staying still, as she focused on directing her attack and keeping track of her foe. Her senses brushed over the whole of the island, searching for tricks or hidden traps while cannonuts bombarded her foe. A simple opening salvo, more a probing of NQCorban’s defenses than anything else…though it wouldn’t stop any cannonuts that struck home from pulverizing flesh and shattering bone. Nothing immediately fatal, yet…but certainly enough to cripple and end the contest then and there, should NQCorban prove sloppy.

This rehash of Destiny isle may have been void of its signature paopu fruit, but it was teeming with coconuts, apparently! A shame. Corvana could have used that milk to make delicious ice cream! Instead, it was dumped like a guyser into crystal blue waters, swirling milky patches of color floating within as they were impaled on quartz lances. Hefty defenses weren't required when you had precise ones.

Like many others, this one would attempt to circle-strafe the Guardian, perfectly content poking at him with the logic that she could not be surprised by something she could see coming. She was watching him. But Corban was watching, too.

~She's staying outside of my range and using a barrier as a safeguard in the likelihood I also attack from range. She plays by the book.~

<That also means she's predictable. Subvert her.>

~Guess I'll have to go off the script, again.~

<Be ready to fan.>

Lances and coconuts fell to the water together as the javelins, their juices spent, were reverted to granular silica when Corvana had a wonderful idea! Coconuts were some of the best carbon water filters, now that she thought about it. Isolating the carbon and extracting it, she could burn it as a short-lived, but powerful propulsion system. Co-opt the burning fuel with a barrier-railgun chain, and you had a supersonic magical girl death-lance! The she-man's experience with such shy opponents caused him-her to err on the side of caution, and with so much raw material around, caging the psionic bird, barrier included, would be of no issue. Meteor wasnt the only one with an island full of weapons.

Weather sand or water, the process would be the same. The sudden rising of several layers of polymorphous crystallizing(or icing if water) matter converging at the point above her head. Flexing her barrier outward could stress, but not shatter the sphere. Such were dynamic barriers formed of multiple layers instead of a static surface, which made it more diffusive like sand while retaining its rigidity.

Guided by her railgunned drill-blade, it would literally drill with a twist of the wrist through ice, barrier, and the space between her breasts alike as a channeled abjurative disjunction. In terms of abjuration, his core amplitudes could be extended with ingenuity, and instead of simply short-circuiting the barrier, would do quite the opposite. Like an electrical overload, the principle applied two-fold here. In true banker-buster fashion the barrier was fused with the abjurative disjunction, causing high current flow. Most high energy flows in electrical wiring can simply be dissipated in open air and space, but within an enclosed, insulated area --like a crystal--, even these wires can easily overload. The result would be a localized, but powerful explosion via pyrolysis, using her barrier as the fuel!

Crystal shrapnel arced around her as the barrier exploded and the kinetic back-kick launched her backward thirty feet, boots creating irrigation canals in the sand. Her milky crimson eyes scanned settling dust and spires of newborn crystals created from the rapid rise in heat and pressure. Her non-screwblade wielding hand compressed the three jewels into them, an invisible spark of lightning hidden within the fist compressing them together.

Alas, poor Not-Quite-Corban. Such potential, wasted. She might’ve gone quite far in the ranks of the Company, had she not met Meteor that day.

The cannonuts had been invested with Meteor’s will – possessed by fragments of her mind and transformed, however briefly, into extensions of her body and vessels for her power – and she had not relinquished that control at any point during the fruits’ maiden flight. The flurry of carbonated javelins flew out and struck the dozen-strong salvo of cannonuts…to little practical effect. The cannonuts, actively hardened by Meteor’s continuous focus and will, were also held together by that same hardening will. The javelins drilled neat little holes through the cannonuts before flying on into the waters behind the still-quite-dangerous telekinetically-directed cannonuts they had been meant to stop.

They did not explode into harmless splurts of coconut milk and shattered rinds, nor was their progress towards collision with NQCorban’s general self abated for more than a few heartbeats. The sheer kinetic impact of the darts ripping through the cannonuts slowed them for a beat or two, caused a few wobbles in their path, but it was nothing Meteor hadn’t encountered multitudes of times before and learned to correct for damn near instinctively. If the ‘nuts had been thrown and abandoned, the defense would probably have worked just fine…but for ammunition Meteor was continuously manipulating up until the point of impact and beyond, it was a bit like trying to stop a car by throwing a rock at it. However much one slowed the car down, it still had an engine and would speed right back up.

All of which meant that NQCorban was not at all safe from the cannonuts’ impacts. She was, in fact, in just as much danger as she had been a second ago – except this time she had no time to realize her defense had been inadequate to the strike she faced, or to raise a second one. As she closed her barrier over Meteor, hoping to charge in and begin the exchange of sweat and bruises and mighty-thewed tomfoolery so common to the multiverse, she would instead find her diamondite lance smashed out of line by cannonuts she had thought were nothing more than broken fuel cannisters. As well as her legs, her ribs, and her arms – all crushed by brutal cannonut impacts which had been taken without so much as a defensive stance. The only mercy was that her head had been left uncrushed – she would live, provided the paradisiacal trap she and Meteor had found themselves in spat her out somewhere she could get prompt medical attention for the profusion of shattered bones, pulped muscle, and burst organs she would be experiencing.

While NQCorban was learning of her folly, Meteor was bursting her way free of the oddly floofy barrier she had been ‘trapped’ in. The stretchy flexicrystal was singularly resistant to being burst through main force – she couldn’t simply explode her way free of it with an omnidirectional blast of telekinetic power. Fortunately, such wasteful hijinks weren’t Meteor’s first answer to being trapped inside a bubble in the first place; why blast when she could pop. Drawing her blade, Meteor turned the motion into a swift, vicious slash, casting a razor-edged slicing spiral-arc of telekinetic power at the flexi-crystal bubble. Built to withstand expanding, explosive force rather than cutting strength, the spiraling cut sheared through the bubble as easily as a box-cutter might shear through impact-resistant packaging – when struck by a razor attack at a single point at once, the barrier’s stretchiness did it no good at all, and a stretchy barrier was not a stiff, cut-resistant one.

Meteor blasted skyward then, hurling the severed upper half of the barrier away from her with a swift fist of telekinetic force. Should NQCorban somehow still be able to find the fuel for her rocket charge whilst being brutalized with less-stopped-than-she-thought cannonuts, she would find her target a hundred feet above the treeline, her nimbus intact and able to freely maneuver. And intercept her assailant. As Meteor had punted herself up skyward, she’d drawn forth four of the hardened steel bearings she’d brought to this particular engagement. Roughly the size of an old-fashioned musket ball, the bearings had nonetheless been forged and treated in such a way as to give them the same toughness and consistency as the Company’s medium-grade vehicle armor. They were Meteor’s preferred ammunition for gunfights, and there were Company snipers who envied the mentalist’s accuracy with them. There were also Company heavy gunners who envied the raw force Meteor could pack into the bearings.

With a long-practiced combination of brief mental-construct ‘barrel’ and an explosive burst of directed-force, Meteor flicked the bearings out and accelerated them to velocities favorably comparable to high-powered antimaterial rifle shells, targeting NQCorban’s diamondite lance and the area of her legs with two, while discharging the other two at the pixie-like being accompanying her target. Fired via Meteor’s patented telekinetic-rifle technique, the bearings lacked the continuous impetus and fine control of the earlier cannonut shells, but were moving tremendously faster than the cannonuts had been to compensate. The bearings were, in point of fact, moving quickly enough that the mere shockwave from a near miss would be enough to deal considerable damage to soft tissues caught within a few feet of their path. For anything struck directly…

Well. There wouldn’t be much left of anything one of the antimaterial bearings struck directly.

Having struck her foe with heavy firearm-level telekinetic impacts potentially fourteen times, depending on how one counted the impacts against the lance, Meteor cruised around the perimeter of the island in the sky, her blade held at ready guard, maintaining her mental vigil against further counterattacks. However unlikely they were starting to look.