Brucenorris007

A Hero Tale {Complete}

'No time.'

Gideon flickered from behind cover, circling Zelraka's back while his fused opponent turned.

'No tests. No practice.'

The discharge he emitted to dispel the sandstorm wasn't powerful enough to cause lasting damage. If anything, Gideon turned it to his advantage.

He could still make 'leaps' between earthen material, after all.

He crossed the first stretch between a foothold and the mass of sand that flew outward.

'Just give everything,'

Gideon created a vacuum between the remaining distance to Zelraka's back. He skirted around it. Air shot out from his feet and was sucked into the vacuum he'd created, propelling him forward faster, all but flying toward his target.

'And reservenothing.'

Gideon's gauntlet blade erupted out from the device, and he stabbed that for Zelraka's back. He intended to give the fused 'God's barrier some stress. A long stave shot out from his knuckles on his other hand. He drove that higher, attacking where the giant's neck met his shoulder blades.

Gideon only needed one to penetrate the giant's barrier for him to leave a gaping wound behind with his next motion.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Gideon wore a calm little smile. Zelraka would clearly be more than a fight about limits or who's attack was stronger like Rajaka or Nexus.

Yet the fused Sage wasn't patient either, and so made a play even a second before Zelraka had finished postulating on his abilities. He flickered an inch forward on the platform he stood on, slashed it and flickered backward again, letting the half behind him gravitate and be pushed back on its own by the chaos all around.

Gideon solidified an exact replica of his body out of sand a quarter of an inch in front of him. He fell backward into the space between the bisected platform, leaving the material clone behind and swooping back up over the rising battlefield, navigating around the space without air.

"Five thousand blades"

The granules that made up the clone sharpened into razors, ready to shred and tear their way into Zelraka's barrier, flesh and bones upon contact. Gideon produced a single foothold's worth of an air-based platform and kicked off back down to another section of what was once the tower. He pivoted on the ball of his foot once he landed, gauntlet forged blade already out again.

Did he know for certain how Zelraka had approached to strike? No.

Was it a pretty damn good guess that he'd been direct?

'Does Rajaka have a complex about his muscles?'

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Gideon made a quick assessment of Zios' predicament. His fused ally would survive at least, and Zelraka's interest had clearly shifted away from him.

That suited him just fine. One less thing to worry about in a situation that had reached clusterfuck status a while ago.

No time for speeches and drawn out introductions. No reason to dwell on the obstacles. Impossibility?

'Irrelevant.'

Gideon held out one hand, palm up, fingers splayed out. He curled in his pointer and ring finger, manipulating the air in a bubble around Zelraka's head. He clenched his fingers to make the bubble a psychical entity.

Then he bent his thumb inward, draining the air out of it and creating a vacuum.

"Air lock."

The two gauntlets that had once armored Jeff's hands had changed in the process of the transformation. A metallic armor coated his left arm and made a new, distinct gauntlet for the fused Gideon.

With a flick of his other wrist, two rapid vertical blades of wind imbued with Gideon's unique Ki and edged with sand at their razors, shot out of the gauntlet for Zelraka's shoulders.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce's concentrated frown deepened, seeing Zios' effort nullified and turned against him.

He heard Jeff's suggestion. The Wild Card had a point. There wasn't time to leave anything in reserve. That wasn't how heroes, as they called themselves, worked.

"Oh, nothing much." Bruce said in answer to Zelraka's comment.

A semi-inebriated Luke blocked Bruce and Jeff's path to the training chamber. Bruce could empathize with the desire to drink, but the amount of alcohol required to get him drunk had reached a quantity more expensive than the experience was worth years ago.

"Luke," Bruce said. "We need to pass."

"Do you guys know what makes you heroes?" Luke asked, leaning on a wall for a bit of support. "Why you are the ones who will fight the Order and save the world?"

Bruce blinked and glanced at Jeff. The machinist Wind Sage shrugged without an answer. Bruce sighed.

"Because we have the ability-"

"NO!" Luke shouted, pounding on the wall with such force that Bruce angled his body back a bit at the outburst. "Your powers make you the ideal choices, not champions!"

Luke took a deep breath and gripped Bruce's shoulder.

"I don't know jack about magic next to Mikey, or Ross, or any of you, but I know how heroes are made, and it's the work that you put in to get back up even when you fall down that sets you apart!"

Luke thumped his chest with his other hand.

"Because when you strip away all the fancy stuff- the Ki, the magic, the superhuman talent, what's left is your training! Your effort to hone and take command of your souls is ingrained in your bones, in your very BLOOD!"

Luke grabbed Jeff by the shoulder and pulled him closer, chuckling a little and swaying back.

"And, heh, my son- My son is right, the fact that you're a team- the culmination of that same effort in each of you, focused into one against those arrogant sons'a bitches- you're in sync, on the same wavelength, down to that blood that's gonna take you down the path of doing the impossible."

Luke stared at both of them intensely before he clapped their shoulders and shoved past them, muttering about getting ready for his next session of instruction.

"I suppose he's right," Bruce said. "Still, I hope he can collect himself soon."

Jeff had gone silent, his gaze faraway and looking at something not present in the guild halls.

"What are you thinking?" Bruce asked.

Jeff slowly turned his head toward him with a cautious, yet determined smile. The kind he got right before announcing his latest successful creation.

"Just... everything.

Bruce rescinded his Sage state again, calling up a jagged, sharp-edged rock on his platform. He pressed his palm on it, and ripped it across the stone, cutting himself just enough to draw blood.

"A simple exchange, of the foundational material of our beings, and it won't matter if our elements are as different as Earth and Sky or our Ki as opposite as 'Evil' and 'Heroic'."

Bruce still had the knot in his soul to contend with. But he'd fix it, repair the flow, regain his fullest strength in the time it took for his blood, which he calcified with his magic and sent through the toward Jeff, to make the trade. Not because it was possible.

Because he had to.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce flipped while he was airborne, agoniki burning his body while partial paralysis kept him from forming a new platform for himself.

By sheer luck his left arm struck another floating piece of the tower, and he forced his hand into a hook to latch on. The general pain throughout his limbs was like blaring white noise, an obstacle to his focus more than debilitating damage since the attack had been secondhand.

He somehow hauled himself onto solid ground, taking a knee.

'DO NOT LET HIM SEE YOUR BACK.'

Bruce grit his teeth, and manipulating his stone form, re-broke his arm, forcing the pain into a focal point that sharpened his concentration and forced him to his feet. He swiveled around to face Zelraka. He mended the self-imposed damage to his right arm. In actuality, it might have been beneficial to make the break complete and clean. It almost felt natural once he'd asserted his Sage state fully again.

"Two minutes," he murmured, guessing the rough time that had elapsed since he made his initial estimate. That left eight at least, if he understood how Nexus had damaged him as well as he believed. 'That means I've got four.'

Bruce watched Zios throw himself straight back into the fight. He listened to the pulse of the earth he felt, discerning it apart from the agoniki and the paralysis that was steadily leaving.

'Make it two and a half.'

"Terran Colossus"

Bruce brought a massive amount of the sand he'd spread earlier to himself, shifting it into a huge, hulking form with hands as big as Zelraka. A mouth came up from the platform Bruce had stood on and closed around him, stone hardening between the crack that had been an opening until it was gone. Without any base, the creature couldn't stand, but its reach let it bring one hand up beneath the fusion of the two Order members, the other arcing down to meet it from above.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce grimaced, catching one of the orbs' lack of response to Jeff's assault out of the corner of his eye.

'No,' he admonished himself. 'He's just another opponent. Learn, adapt, overcome.'

Zelraka's swift dismantling of Bruce's barrier didn't surprise him. The sudden failure in Ki output from Zios, though, was another matter. Zelraka's attack, with Zios in such a state- Bruce didn't know his durability, but even that would be tested to the point of significant damage if he took that directly.

Doing the one thing he could think of without throwing himself into Zelraka's immediate path of destruction, Bruce shot out a boulder to strike Zios outside of the point of impact. Ideally he'd have elected a more gentle method, but without Ki or any magic output, Zios was less fit to fight than Bruce. He trusted that Jeff would take care of moving their fellow further out of harm's way.

An offshoot of earthen material split from the boulder, aimed to attach to Zelraka's leg as rapidly hardening and thickening mud that connected to a different hovering platform. The fused giant's momentum would likely break it quickly, but it could still set him off balance.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce didn't bother with pretenses or bravado.

"It's temporary, but yes," he conceded. "I'd be hard pressed to imagine worse timing. Thankfully my arcane abilities don't seem to be affected. That didn't help much against Zelriane prior to fusion, but at the very least I can play a supporting role."

Having said so aloud, Bruce chose that moment to leap toward the nearest platform that had originally been part of the tower- while he could still manipulate Earth at present, Nexus might have done more damage that he'd initially surmised.

Bruce caught the beginning of Zelraka's... display out of the corner of his eye. He frowned at the lack of an apparent payoff.

'There is no way in hell.' Bruce thought flatly, immediately dismissing the idea that just because he couldn't see or sense the result, Zelraka hadn't done something.

Recalling how he'd treated his encounter with Shaidra in the pocket dimension, Bruce formed several stone walls between Zelraka and himself. They did need information. That didn't necessarily mean they had to offer up their bodies as test subjects.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce threw out one arm for a new length of chain. Links came flying from under his sleeve and-
He cringed. A fracture, no more than a hairline, in the flow sent pain upward from his toes to his skull. The knot had been pulled, tugged the wrong way, and something burned his soul.

Coaxing it free would take more time, and his Ki would be only intermittently reliable. Five, ten, maybe twenty minutes.
The thought chilled him.

Bruce trained his gaze back on Zelraka, using the arcane energy of his element to form and dissolve platforms to move. He knew better than to present a stationary target, at least against Zelriane. But evidence had been mounting that things weren't as simple as just the culmination of two powers and abilities.

'His personality isn't quite what I would have expected either,' Bruce thought. 'Like an entirely new person, not just the thoughts of two in one body. What does that mean for his powers?'

Bruce felt, rather than saw, Jeff snatch Zios out of harm's way. He cleared his head. Zelraka might be more interested in experimentation with his new powers now, but his good mood couldn't last forever. They needed information.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce knelt into a crouch and sprang from his platform moments before the flying attack struck. He anchored himself to an elevated section of rubble with his chains, reeling his body in.

All the while he continued coaxing the knot out of his Ki.

He brought out a hefty dose of earthen material from Jenso's bag, melding portions of it to the pieces of the tower that continued skyward. Others became formless, dissolving and thinning until only trails of the substance lay scattered across all axes of the battlefield Zelraka had formed. Much like Bruce's network of interlinking chains, they served no immediate purpose except cursory preparation. If either of his companions required a projectile or an impromptu platform, he'd be ready.

A Hero Tale {Complete}

Bruce studied the phenomenon of the tower coming apart and careening upward, revealing the tears and fractures in the sky, thunder booming and lightning cracking.

'The perfect storm.'

Bruce called on his Ki, spreading out his chains in a zig zagging, spiderweb pattern between the free falling footholds, centered on his position rather than Zelraka's. The fused being doubtless could banish most of his standard chains in a single motion. All the while he felt for the disruption Nexus had felt, twisting the internal flow like knotted ropes. Corrections would take a little time, but, he determined, not outside the realm of possibility.

"Any one of us will tell you, Zelraka," Bruce said, drawing his sword out, the full weight of his own soul focused in the blade. "The bigger the wall you put in our path, the higher we'll jump."