[IC] [TZDL2017] Darth vs Drifting Pollen - Preliminaries

[Mobius]

DUEL TOURNAMENT

Wheat Field[/SIZE]

Information
Time: 4:44PM
Location: Wisconsin
Date August, 29th.
Weather: Slightly humid and clear skies
Temperature: 70°F[/align]

Posting format:
After both fighters have posted, the initial poster will be allowed to make the first strike in their second post.

Format of the fight:
A battle shall end only when one or both fighters lives have expired; however, if their fight last longer than need be their bout will continue whilst everyone else progresses to round two. This way both fighters may play out their feud without seriously inhibiting the tournament’s progression.

Rules:

• Players must be at either side of the road.
• There's no field limit.
• Everything can be manipulated and/or destructible.
• You can not attack in your initial post
• Layout is here
• You are disallowed to edit your post without permission from Mobius and authorized personnel. Once your opponent has posted, the previous post YOU make shall remain untouched unless authorized. I will immediately disqualify you if you edit post after your opponent post (with some exceptions)

---

Flavor Text[/SIZE]

Enter a farm: broken and abandoned, it teetered upon the edge of Wisconsin in rusted red coating. An unassuming fixture forever frozen in a tableau of glistening chartreuse, and infinite expanse rich with naught beyond the scenery offered by wheat fields and green pastures. Picturesque if not for a loose aggregate of dilapidated machinery crumbling beneath the weight of age and rainfall, once proud tools of economic progress they have since then been relegated to a sideshow existence. Added to this graveyard of motionless machinery on the west, a barn, while traditional in its dimensions and appearance, elemental influence has reduced its lustrous red coat to a dull hue. Barn doors no longer stood as protectors of the overgrown shed, but as remnants of savage vandalism, leaving them torn and divorced from their charge exposing its hay filled insides. A farmhouse was the final attraction, complete with broken windows and worn surface, an echo of the decay that surrounded it.

It was a simplistic arena, but more than adequate for a wise fighter who knew how to exploit his/her environment. Humble terrain provided each warrior with a plethora of tactics to be implemented at leisure. Whether it was to simply charge recklessly into battle without fear of compromised equilibrium, thanks to dry terrain, or to hide behind one of many rotting tractors in preparation for an ambush. To each his own appeared to be a major focus of this bland battlefield as the opportunities it offered suggested. Malleability to situational variables was another key essence it gave to both fighters.

Poised at the forefront of a dirt road ambiguous in its length, they stood as one of few markers for a site that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. An unlucky victim of poor location attracting only monthly visits from whatever greyhound bus happen to be passing by or even rarer, a drifter. Even then it was a rarity for anyone outside of those few spectators who knew where to look to even acknowledge its presence. Though an unwise place to live, it was ideal for a fated battle set to take place shortly. Two contestants entered, but only one would emerge whilst the other found them self cast into the maw of oblivion.

Choice of transportation was optional, be it by boat, plane, or some metaphysical form of travel, conceived through supernatural means. Drawn by bravery, valor, or something else entirely, it was here they flocked for a prize to be announced only at the tournament’s end. Until such a time came blood sport was the central premise of this game as implied by its purpose and overall scheme. Of course why anyone would want to take up this challenge and traverse the globe simply to fight was another story. The reward for survival this round, however; would be little more than satisfaction one received from tearing asunder their unworthy foe. They would manifest their courage on an elongated path tar from one horizon to the next, cutting a black scar between the barn and limitless wheat. ~Credit to Doll Maker - 2007 Tournament preliminaries

BEGIN

[Drifting Pollen]

For three days, she walked. Three days before she either died or killed again. Given what awaited her, Lyra had felt a need to relax a little, to make her journey on foot and spend some time at large in this new landscape.

Soil shifted under each step, grinding between her naked toes as she pushed her way through the endless fields, moving slowly and carefully enough that the long yellow stalks were barely disturbed by her passage. Gentle winds blew down around her from time to time, and the wheat swayed in response, back and forth, with a kind of quiet harmony. She saw crickets, beetles, ants, but nothing so large as to trouble her. It was a strange kind of wilderness: flat, unassuming, serene.

The middle of nowhere. Nothing to do, nothing exceptional to attract anyone from abroad, yet at the same time that lack of distraction held its own allure. She strode across the land, drinking in the golden seas with her eyes and gently caressing the tips of passing stalks, her Shroud dancing around her like a tiny black snake. Amidst it all, she let her worries slip away, and lost herself in meditation.

Night fell, and she sprawled out on her back, squashing a small rectangle of wheat that scratched against her skin in protest. Nary a cloud had crossed the sky during the day, and once the myriad hues of the setting sun faded away past the horizon, the stars gleamed crisp and clear, tiny eyes watching from the heavens. Beneath their gaze, Lyra drifted away into stillness, dead as a stone embedded in the great wide plain.

On the second day, she pulled out some yarn from her light little pouch and wove herself a dress, with threads of gold and green. Vertical patterns, like the armies of swaying wheat, arranged such that each one flowed into the next, a living thing rather than a harshly divided mandala. Over the course of a morning it took shape: two wide strips coming down from her shoulders and crossing over her chest, stitched into a loose horizontal wrapping around her waist and hips, which continued down to a ragged end a few inches above her knees. Comfortable, as if the land had reached up and embraced her in its earthy arms. She stood, cast aside her former garment, and tied back her soft brown hair in a thin tail, then carried on her way, always staring out at her surroundings with the innocence and wonder of a child.

Then, sometime in the afternoon of the third day, she came to a sudden stop.

It would be close, now. No more time for experience and contemplation, not when the peace of this land was so soon to be shattered. She gripped her spear, and called the Shroud to her. It came eagerly, flooding outwards from its previous form and swallowing Lyra and her surroundings in the blink of an eye, plunging them into a cold, smooth darkness. Her eyes and ears shut off, and she let the cloud take over her senses, the world opening up around her. It had been surreal, the first few times, seeing up and down and left and right and every other side all at once through what seemed like a thousand eyes, but really it was not so different- just more, forcing her to push her mind a little harder to keep up. Time to be sharp, now.

From there on, she crept forwards with a dreadful purpose, the Shroud flowing across the field before her like a wave. For now it held a rough, rounded shape, seven feet tall and seven feet wide and ten feet deep, more or less. Not merely dark, but sucking up all the light that touched it, like a black hole come to life.

It drew itself to a halt near an earthen road, resting in place, its outer edges slowly churning and shifting. Lyra waited within, crouching low and holding her spear diagonally in her right hand so that no part of it protruded beyond her Shroud. She breathed in, her heart pumping in a steady beat, but the sounds were masked by the black cloud, and its borders gave no clue as to what might be occurring within. No sign of her presence on the electromagnetic spectrum, nor in any vibrations of the air. Other clues, Lyra could erase personally, through stillness, focus, and careful control of her own thoughts.

On the far side of the road, near a dilapidated farmhouse, something else had come. Another oddity, another wanderer far from home, and now one whose life lay on the balance opposite hers.

This journey, at last, had reached its hard and bitter end.

[Darth]

[Poop post incoming.]

A beam of incandescent light burst to life beside the barn, momentarily blanketing the structure in stark illumination. After the brief flash, the farm returned to normal, save for the smell of ozone and the slow, creaking opening of the barn doors as a man-shaped figure strode out of the structure.

Caius ignored the lurch in his gut that accompanied every displacement. Having one's mass scattered, ferried, and re-coalesced through a beam of light did not, the psion found, feel especially good. Still, it beat traditional forms of atmospheric entry, which were slow, bumpy, and inaccurate. Landing an orbit-to-surface shuttle on the farmland probably would have demolished the barn and any other structure in the immediate area. All the same, he'd need to correct his ship's AI on its spatial placement; it very nearly displaced him into the same position as a tractor.

Black body armor covered him like a chitinous shell of matte-colored ceramite, each piece molded and fitted together smoothly. Silvery slivers of metal decorated the armor here and there, running up and down the length of his torso, counter-point to the glowing nodes that were set into the black ceramic material at regular intervals. He wore his helmet, although he doubted the necessity of its air-filtration system: he was on some variation of Old Earth, where the atmosphere was perfectly safe. Still, better safe than sorry where any potential foes were concerned.

Pistols clung to his hips, mag-locked in place to his armor. His hands rested easily on the weapons, fingers curled around the grips molded to for his hands. The Psi-HUD read off his ammunition count: twelve rounds in each weapon. As far as outward appearances were concerned, those were his only weapons.

Ahead of him loomed something black and gloamy, like a concentrated shadow that resisted the sun's obliterating illumination. In his dynamokinetic perception, he saw the way it deadened the local electromagnetic field, although he couldn't guess as to how. Absorption, perhaps, or simply some underlying diffusion of force and energy? The multiverse held a myriad of mysteries just like the Shroud.
More importantly, Caius sensed the presence of a mind inside, or part of, the Shroud. It stood out in contrast to the rest of the farmland. A sapient mind had weight to it, a sort of density that simpler minds -- like those of the various field mice and birds in the area -- lacked. He didn't try to read it; just being aware of its presence was enough.

Caius couldn't discern whether or not his enemy was within the Shroud, or was the Shroud. Not that it mattered. He hadn't been hired to study his opponents, he had been hired to fight and to win. Frankly, what purpose his employer saw in having the multiversal mercenary partake in something like a tournament was beyond Caius's pay-grade. All that mattered was that there was a pay-grade to be had; he didn't earn his keep by asking why he pointed his guns at something, he did so by pulling the triggers.

Caius's autonomous psionic shield reflexively triggered into existence in response to sensing another sapient mind in the area. A bubble of psychic energy warped around him. It was vaguely visible, iridescent like oil reflecting sunlight in water. The pistols unlocked from his hips and the weight of each weapon settled into his hands.

He stopped just in front of the barn, having only taken a few steps, still a good fifty-odd feet away from the dark phenomena of the Shroud.

"Well then?" he asked, as if he expected to answer.

Maybe he did.

[Drifting Pollen]

To the woman surrounded by darkness, it seemed appropriate that her opponent should arrive in a glorious blaze of light. The Shroud eagerly drank up every photon that reached it, instantly relaying the information to Lyra and saving her the trouble of having to cover her eyes against the flash. As the gleam disappeared, she and her cloud kept on watching, waiting to see if the cause of that strange illumination would show itself.

It came out of the barn a moment later. Hard and black and plated, wearing the skin of an insect but moving like a man. That carapace had to be armor, then, laden with silver and small lights, weapons at the hip ready to spit iron arrows at the twitch of a finger. Strange devices, crafted by smiths hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than Lyra's own people, to adorn this man- who, for all she knew, could be some ticking, sparking creation of an engineer himself. She'd find out soon enough.

Reaching out with her left hand, she brushed her fingers gently through the tips of the wheat next to her, sensing them by feel rather than sight. They froze at her touch, dying in a split second as their stalks locked in place, cold and hard as polar ice.

The insect man spoke. Quiet, and still some distance away, but the Shroud caught it. A challenge, perhaps? She could meet that.

As Caius finished his last syllable, the Shroud exploded outwards, swelling to monstrous proportions with terrifying speed. It didn't move any closer to him, but rather spread upwards and to either side, replacing the golden fields before him with a lightless, gaping maw. Where it had been a room-sized lump, it now loomed fifty feet tall, a hundred feet from one end to the other, dwarfing the tiny man before it.

Or at least, that was how it looked from his side.

In reality, the Shroud had not grown, only changed its shape. The rough clump that Lyra crouched inside still existed, just a foot shorter than it had been: she'd moved one-seventh of its mass forwards and spread it into a layer only a sixth of an inch thick. A slightly curved screen between her and the enemy, a facade that made her cloud appear far greater than it really was. Its concentration remained the same, however. The individual particles clustered together and devoured light and sound as effectively as before, and the thin layer remained as completely, crushingly black as ever.

At the same time as her Shroud flared up, Lyra began moving rightward, treading especially lightly so as to minimize disturbances in the wheat and vibrations in the earth around her.

That, however, she could do practically by instinct. The center of her focus was on the frozen stalks of wheat, six of which she plucked from their places and ushered into the air, moving them up about twenty feet and slightly to the left behind the cover of the Shroud.

Once in position, they shot out from behind it, flying like arrows straight towards the armored insect-man and his oily power. She'd reshaped them slightly, drawing out water from within the stems to create vicious spikes at the ends, so the comparison was especially apt- though a common bowman would be hard-pressed to match the speed and striking power of even one of these projectiles, let alone six at once.

If and when they struck, they would do so almost simultaneously, and the Shroud's expanded form let Lyra watch the action from a huge range of angles all at once. When the moment came she'd observe carefully, while also keeping her eyes (or rather, her towering cloud of shadows) peeled for any kind of response.

[Darth]

The Shroud expanded outward, like a ship's sail filled by an unseen wind. Caius watched the expanding plane of darkness encroach on the horizon; although he remained outwardly calm, the sudden display sparked his enhanced syanpses into forcing a psionic reaction, picked out from the myriad of combat routines and techniques encoded directly into the multiversal mercenary's mind. The psychic energy of his spherical shield thickened, both like and unlike the Shroud: it grew, but rather than shifting outward, it began to churn and whorl, rotating in a vortex centered around Caius's armored form. The increased presence of psychic energy made the shield more visible than prior; a fata morgana mirage whipped and whirled around Caius, marking the expanded border of his barrier at approximately two meters from its center.

Behind the featureless casque of his helmet, Caius was impressed by what he saw -- at least, he was certainly impressed by the Shroud's ability to manifest in a large area with a certain sort of celerity. Both the micro-computer fused into the back of his skull and Caius's mind began to spool information together from the Shroud's outward behaviors and properties -- both those evident to his sight, and those that came to him from his preternatural senses. He began to form a dim picture of the Shroud in his mind:

First, it absorbed certain ambient energies; Caius's dynamic senses saw the way that it leached the local heat and light from its immediate area.

Second, and more importantly, the Shroud was not his enemy. Rather, it was a tool his opponent manipulated: when the Shroud expanded, the sapient mind he sensed did not expand with it, and more, it moved within the expanded phenomena. A definite target, then.

Of course Caius knew full well that he could be entirely wrong, and the thin inkling of understanding he possessed regarding the Shroud could be entirely false. It required due experimentation, then, to see whether or not his suppositions rang true or false.

Caius mirrored Lyra's movements, moving to his left as she moved to her right, keeping their paths parallel and maintaining the fifty-feet distance between them. Out came the six-fold burst of polar-iced projectiles, but Caius's newly-upgraded reflex shield dealt with them well enough: the rotating bubble of psionic energy acted as a vector field that rotated clock-wise around the psion. The vector of the rotation grew stronger the closer to Caius it was, so that the psionic energy worked ever-more strongly on projectiles that sought to mark him as their target.

Lyra's grain stalks, aimed squarely at Caius, came into the vector-field head-on and had their paths shifted aside, seeming to veer around the man in his stygian-black armor. Particulates of psionic energy, sheared and shredded by the redirection of the missiles, created iridescent motes around Caius; a miniscule cost considering the fact that redirection proved more energy-efficient than laying down a redoubt of psychic-energy armor for Caius.

Unflinching and unceasing in his matching-movements, Caius drew up his right-hand pistol, the Orochi seventy-five caliber pistol keyed to his telekinetic signature. A smooth feathering of the trigger with his index finger hurtled a hypersonic round towards his target: not Lyra, but the Shroud. Indeed, Caius specifically avoided aiming for the weight of sapience he felt in the Shroud, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that he was aware of her position. The entire sequence -- striding leftward, raising and discharging his pistol -- was a series of autonomous actions, dictated by the combat protocols encoded into his synapses.

Meanwhile, Caius's thought processes split apart into two strands: one reactive and combat oriented, the other fixed solely on the composing and enacting of complex psionic phenomena. He needn't utilize the technique to pursue both paths, but he found it much easier to do so, as the competing needs of each pursuit could be met without crowding over one another to get his conscious or subsconscious attentions.

The combative strand of Caius's thoughts and actions fixed itself on the interactions between he, his weapons, and his foe -- namely, how the Shroud would respond to being shot by a munition that could easily blow off a man's limb. The psionic-focused strand of his mind began to pool energy into one of the nodes on his armor, shaping and molding it to his whims in the way that a man might create a sculpture.. or a machine.

And so, outwardly, Caius's actions were simple: striding and shooting, seemingly casting aside his foe's attack with an unseen force. Inwardly, however, Caius's mind was a-churn with a multitude of mental maneuvers, a psionic engine running on all cylinders.

Errata

Telekinetic Magazine: 11/12
Hyperkinetic Magazine: 12/12
Tulpas: 0
Barriers: 1

[Drifting Pollen]

The armored figure darted to one side, stepping in time with Lyra. Not the most elegant of dance partners, but obviously an attentive one, given that he'd followed the shifting of the Shroud even while it expanded. She took note of that. Added another point to the picture of him in her mind, a wispy outline that might one day grow to be as vast and beautiful as the golden landscape around them.

Only it never would. She'd never know this man. Today might be the last day anyone saw him alive.

Six sharp stings shot straight towards the dark knight and his guns, six sharp stings slung sideways as soon as they slipped in close. Their hungry spikes would never meet flesh, nor even armor, thanks to a deft deflection on the part of a wary target. Good thing, then, that those pretty points had been little more than an attempt at theatrics on Lyra's part. Easy to see a spear and assume a simple assault, when in fact their true purpose was somewhat more insidious.

Those stalks had never been an attack.

They were an infection vector.

If Caius had been sharp enough to detect the chill at the edges of the Shroud, he'd likely notice as the temperature near him shot down, or catch the slight distortion in light from the thousands of minuscule ice crystals forming in the air.

Physically, Lyra's frozen arrows had been little more than solidified water and some residual organic matter. However, like the nodes on Caius's own armor, they carried power within them. A quiet passenger, it had ridden along, reached its destination, and then jumped from there into the surrounding water vapor. And jumped. And jumped and jumped and jumped, every scrap of humidity in the air crystallizing into a tiny frozen shard. Neither liquid nor vapor would escape her: she seized all that came in range, wrapping it in the cold embrace of her mind.

The individual crystals could still be shifted by Caius's vector field, whirling around him in a growing blizzard, but the infection continued unimpeded: entering from six places at once, it moved outwards from its origins, not only bearing down on Caius but also seeking to flank him, surround him.

Worse, his supposed defense had only worked in Lyra's favor. She'd spread power from her stalks, but had not relinquished them, and as his field carried her weapons around in an arc she nudged them inwards, so that they'd orbit around him rather than fly off under their own momentum. If he'd gone with a conventional shield, the sudden freezing phenomenon would have spread only from the area the stalks had struck, but now he'd be dealing with an incoming tide of cold from his entire left flank and behind him as well, with the six projectiles moving fast to complete the circle. If the problem wasn't dealt with quickly, he'd soon find himself blanketed in crystals from all sides.

Under such circumstances it would take a will of iron to carry on with an attack, but perhaps he'd try and shoot regardless. Quick on the draw he as might have been, Lyra was just as quick in her reaction, which came almost by reflex. If an armored finger did squeeze a trigger, the large thin layer that made up the front of her Shroud would bulge outwards slightly, its top and sides spreading as a large gap appeared in Caius's line of fire, a hole in the dark wall for the bullet to speed through unimpeded. Once the shot had passed by, the Shroud would snap closed, returning to its previous shape.

Interesting, that he'd followed the Shroud's center but hadn't aimed there. Another mote to remember him by, locked away in Lyra's thoughts.

She could only hope he'd do the same for her.

[Darth]

Unfortunately for Lyra, she gave up another piece of information in the continued manifestation of her offense: that she shared the dubious honor with Caius of being, like he, a being of psionic power -- and one of no small means, it seemed. Caius not only registered the abrupt drop in temperature, but he also sensed the presence of another mind behind the downward shift as it expanded the cold outward from the stalks of grain. The same mind, it turned out, that he registered within the dark depths of the Shroud.

Caius understood, in theory, a great many things. He understood weapons, languages, the multitudes of myriad species and races that abounded the multiverse, the various forms of sorcery and esoteric energy manifestations. These he understood, on some level. But being a psychic, exerting one's mind to project their will onto reality; that Caius knew, inside and out. He knew it as he knew his own hands, and it was easier to kill a kindred spirit than a foreign one thanks to that intrinsic, fundamental familiarity.

As soon as she nudged her missiles in to avoid having them cast aside like chaff, Caius reacted. A portion of the outermost vectors of the swirling psionic energy collapsed inward, sealing the grains and their growing frost crystals within an encasement of energy. While some crystals did form, the amorphous nature of the psionic energy simply enveloped them with preternatural swiftness, like an amoeba grasping and surrounding a meal with its psuedopod. While Lyra could freeze all of the water vapor that might have been trapped with the grain-stalks and ice crystals, there wouldn't be enough expansion to matter -- she was apparently a manipulator, but not a generator, and so she could only work with what Mother Nature, in her capricious and fickle nature, saw fit to provide. Even if Lyra could flash-freeze an enormous breadth of the space around her, Caius's sphere of psychic energy and influence could simply expand as needed to encapsulate and isolate.

Each encasement peeled off of the vector field and collapsed once more in a bright, momenary flash of localized heat that evaporated any water or ice and left the grain-stalks as little more than ash. While Lyra's attack did little to trouble Caius, it did slow down the strand of his thoughts dedicated to psionic pursuits, as he was forced momentarily to deal with her trap. In another time and another place, Caius would have given a fellow psion high praise for that sort of inventiveness. However, that farmland was neither the proper time nor place, and Caius had no praise to offer.

The splitting of Caius's mind allowed him to deal with the defense while still projecting his own offense in the form of the discharged bullet. Caius's martially-minded strange of thought triggered the telekinetic energy sheathing the munition and with a secondary crack of gunfire, the seventy-five caliber round shattered into a dozen shards, flechetting the Shroud's surface, rather than flying through the hole spread open for its passing. What that would do to the Shroud was a question only Lyra could answer for Caius's curiosity.

Having dealt with the momentary surge of frost that Lyra tried to manifest, Caius's other strand of thought quickly returned to manipulating and manifesting a tulpa in one of the ten nodes on his armor. The tulpa's programming was relatively simple: draw ambient energy from the environment and from incoming attacks -- kinetic energy, heat, light, the like -- and translate that energy into psionic energy to fuel Caius's shield. The tulpa acted as little more than a simple circuit, a conduit through which energy passed, parsed, and was re-purposed. A simple thing, but useful.

Assuming Lyra hadn't acted once more, Caius would discharge another round from his Telekinetically-keyed Orochi -- this time, squarely at Lyra.

"Errata"

Telekinetic Rounds: 10/12
Hyperkinetic Rounds: 12/12
Barriers: 1
Tulpas: 1

[Drifting Pollen]

As one might expect from a warrior daring to fight for his life in a duel such as this, Caius was strong. He'd need more than raw force and intelligence against Lyra, however. As he'd soon come to discover, she could be a thorn in the side of even the mightiest beings.

A bullet detonated mid-flight, one projectile becoming a volley of buckshot to pepper a wide area. Good thing, then, that Lyra had thought to make the hole in her Shroud-wall large, big enough for the distortion to be visible even across the wide edges of its stretched-out shape. She'd left far more space than she'd needed for the bullet to pass through, and each individual shard of the shot would retain its forward velocity after the explosion, meaning they could only spread so far from their original trajectory before passing through their target. One bullet or ten, she'd made the gap big enough for it not to matter.

If one or two of them did somehow travel far enough to clear the edge of the gap and hit the Shroud proper, or if Caius managed to pull some other trick out of them in the tiny interval before they flew by- well, they'd still miss, because Lyra was being meticulous. Making the hole had shifted the edges of the Shroud-wall itself, a deliberately inefficient movement that involved adjusting the entire layer slightly. However, the fact that she'd even twisted part of her cloud into such a disproportionate shape in the first place demonstrated her fine control over it. If the hole wasn't quite large enough, she'd simply fold its edges back, widening it further as necessary before snapping it closed as planned. Less time to do so, to be sure, but she'd be moving far less mass than she had in creating the original opening.

To Caius, it would barely look any different than it might have if he'd just fired off the bullet and forgotten it. A hole in the Shroud, nothing behind it, there one moment and gone the next without so much as grazing what had passed through. Forethought to counter forethought, contingencies to counter contingencies. She had more, if he tested her further.

As he'd be finding out that very moment, in his own little center of power.

For one thing, he'd been too slow to respond. His defense- strange fields reminiscent of the most primitive forms of life -came only after she'd nudged her traveling stalks inward, and she'd only had to do so to keep them from flying away. They'd already been moving around Caius as a result of his own defense, and she'd unleashed her power from them as soon as they'd first entered his field. By the time her opponent had even reacted, she had a hold in his domain, all the water within her initial reach frozen and that same reach constantly spreading.

When a response did come, Lyra smiled a little, finding that she liked it in a way. An elegant use of power, both interesting and delightfully ironic.

His energy behaved like a predatory cell. Hers behaved like a virus.

Isolating the sources of infection made for a solid idea in principle, but with this method Caius would find it as frustrating as trying to snatch a swarm of wasps out of the air with his bare hands. Every crystal she'd infected could be maneuvered, controlled, and as bulky fields moved to enclose them they'd flow out and around, moving with or even fighting against the surrounding vector field to escape the oncoming prisons. Many would be captured, and yet even one loose fragment of ice could simply propagate anew, forming another cloud to be dealt with.

Therein lay the other problem for Caius. The infection with the stalks hadn't been a one-off trick, other than the fact she'd framed them as a physical attack. Her power over ice simply functioned that way: that which she froze she could control, and that which she controlled could be used to freeze. Lyra's range was quite short- two feet - but she could project that range from any piece of ice she controlled. Thus, when she froze indiscriminately, as she did now, her effective range could expand and expand and expand with the growing spread of ice, and Caius's psychic bubbles would be forced to do the same to keep up- which they couldn't for long without encompassing the man's own defense and letting her little pieces of ice where she wanted them regardless. Anything he vaporized, she could freeze again just as quickly, so long as she still had crystals nearby.

Given how slow his reaction had been and how ineffective his defense, she'd have more than enough around to work with.

She'd started her assault with a swift volley of six arrow-like stalks. A good number, but not all of those she'd first frozen behind the Shroud had been used. Even as Caius tried and failed to counter her growing clouds, she'd pluck out a second wave and send them flying off towards him, not bothering to adorn them with spiked points this time. Nor did she make any pretense that these were mere projectiles: their paths curved as they flew, so that each one would move in on Caius from a different angle, maximizing the spread of her power and reinforcing any areas where his encasements- improbable as it seemed -might have made a little progress. One would come in from directly above him, simply to test Lyra's curiosity as to how his clockwise vector field would affect something approaching perpendicular to the clock.

In a sense, he'd let Lyra into his house, and she wasn't leaving any time soon. If he chose to fire again amidst the mayhem he'd find a swarm of crystals shifting, intercepting his bullet and smashing themselves against it, deflecting its course towards the ground. What happened to her individual ice crystals mattered little to Lyra, she simply needed to spread her power around him, all over him, until that black armor was coated with frost.

Given that he'd barely slowed her down so far, he'd have very little time left to stop her.

[Mobius]

Ruling

• Darth has announced his forfeiture

Verdict Drifting Pollen advances to Qaurterfinals to face Decoy. Good luck to Darth in his career pursuits. I hope you are successful.