Drifting Pollen

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to midnight PT on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Other days are a maybe.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to midnight PT on Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. Other days are a maybe.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

The man in white moved with incredible swiftness to escape his gruesome fate, a natural response for one threatened by such a voracious attack. Unfortunately for him, Lyra's follow-up came faster still.

Anyone with working eyes and a basic understanding of physics could deduce that her Shroud absorbed light. All black objects did, in some manner, so why should this one be any different? The answer to that lay in what happened with all that energy it gathered. The strange cloud didn't just devour light, it stored it with great efficiency, and had been doing so since Lyra had entered the tomb. The location wasn't particularly bright, but the man in white had quickly made up for that with his blinding flash of lightning and similarly incandescent defenses. The Shroud drank up every photon that reached it, along with much of the sound from the lightning bolt and gunshots, and gathered it all, waiting for the moment Lyra decided to unleash it.

She did so now, hitting Mazono right at the end of his sudden movement.

No strike was guaranteed to land against an opponent of unknown capabilities, but Lyra felt confident that if her current enemy were capable of moving at the speed of light, he'd have finished her off already. A tightly concentrated beam speared out from her Shroud, sweeping across her opponent's eyes, there and gone in an instant. To an outside observer, it would appear as a blazing line in the air, made visible by the small portion of photons deflected from their intended course by Rayleigh scattering. To its target, it would appear as simple, overwhelming brilliance.

Lyra assumed that the man in white had eyesight good enough to avoid being blinded by his own attacks and defenses, and perhaps even packing every flash of the fight so far into a single instant wouldn't have been enough to rid him of vision for long. The Shroud's laser, however, was far, far more dangerous than that. When Lyra had spread out her cloud's front face, she had done so for more than mere obfuscation: the widened shape had hugely increased the effective surface area with which the Shroud could absorb light. Its front surface alone was hundreds of thousands of times larger than the area of a fully expanded human pupil, and all of it could suck up photons with incredible efficiency.

Thus, what actually hit the man's eyes at that moment would be orders of magnitude brighter than anything he'd experience in normal combat, a sudden injection of energy powerful enough to leave him with severe retinal burns. Even discounting those, the sheer intensity of the light would almost certainly activate every single photoreceptor cell in his eyes at once, leaving him blind for several seconds and plagued by constant afterimages for a good while after that.

The shattering burst of sound that followed would be somewhat more dispersed, but still enough to wreak similar havoc as it exploded into his ears, hitting the source of his hearing and balance alike. An unnaturally concentrated cacophony, the noise aimed and channeled towards his head rather than widely spread as any other sound would have been.

He might still be able to make his shot if he chose to attempt it, though he'd likely find it far more difficult to properly aim. Nevertheless, the expanded face of the Shroud wasn't a difficult target, and if he managed to keep enough composure to fire immediately, he stood a decent chance of hitting it with his new projectile.

Should he do so, the dark cloud would seemingly split in two as the round slammed into it- part of the black fog darting away to the right to form a tall, tower-like shape, while the other part remained hanging in midair, curling around into a shape that looked roughly like an eight-foot wide hemisphere.

What actually transpired in the instant the cannon shot hit the Shroud was even more complex than it appeared. Rather than the shot itself, the first thing to impact against the black cloud would be the protective field surrounding it, which behaved similarly to a solid barrier against objects unable to penetrate it. The Shroud, bearing little kinetic energy or piercing power of its own, could not do so, but it could resist the movement of energy just as easily as it did with matter. Thus, it immediately began to slow down the field, drawing more of itself towards the area of impact to resist the foreign incursion.

Lyra, however, wasn't having that. Based on the pattern of her opponent's attacks so far, he seemed to be aiming at the Shroud rather than her, and the impact of this strange new weapon wouldn't be close enough to threaten her personally. The sheer size and speed of the projectile's field, however, meant that the Shroud would pull significant quantities of its mass aside to oppose the foreign movement. A waste of her defense, and one she could not allow. Thus, the moment the field hit, she began to pull the bulk of the Shroud away, moving rightwards and bringing most of the cloud with her. She couldn't simply order the Shroud to stop self-concentrating around a source of movement, but she could drag most of it aside, keeping it from concentrating too much of itself together to oppose an attack that didn't threaten her. By the end, she'd be left with the main clump of her Shroud and about a third of the thin facade she'd erected at its front, with the rest of the front layer having been gathered to oppose the man's attack.

As for the attack itself, it consisted of more than just the field. The cannon shell would soon slam into the Shroud as well, and, quite unexpectedly, punch through.

It would emerge somewhat slower. The Shroud wasn't simply going to let it pass, after all. However, even while being decelerated, it was still quick enough to make it through such a thin layer of Shroud before it could be brought to a near-halt. Normally the alien cloud would have self-concentrated to prevent this, and indeed it tried to do so. In this case, though, its ongoing opposition of the protective field and Lyra's withdrawal of its main source of reinforcement left this part of the Shroud unable to gather enough to fully slow the projectile before it passed through. Most of the blueish field would remain behind, slowly passing through the thin black cloud, though some fragments of it would likely be pulled through the weakened edges of the Shroud fragment. As for the shell itself, it would likely end up slamming into the southern wall of the chamber a moment later, hitting somewhere near the entrance.

No doubt Lyra's opponent would have been watching these strange goings-on with interest, but in this case she doubted he'd have much left to watch with. Hard to study something that actively resisted studying.

Of course, she wasn't going to give the man any time to recover or adapt after her initial moves. The bombs she'd released just a moment ago hadn't detonated just yet, one now hitting the ramp between the two opponents and the other flying high over the man in white's head, but she could be very efficient with her gas when she needed to.

Left on its own, the bursts of heat from her enemy's defensive field would have eventually dispersed the cloud her first bomb had released. Lyra, however, put an end to this with a single thought. Her mind called out, to the old and dusty air trapped in this forgotten chamber for countless years, reminding it of what it was and what it could be, giving it the strength it needed to burst from stillness into renewed life, a hurricane-force gust bursting to life and funneling the gas towards the man in white, pushing the cloud to envelop him once more. At only ten feet away, he'd have less than a tenth of a second to do anything before the corrosive gas slammed into him and surrounded him entirely, quickly eating him away to nothing.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to midnight PT on Friday and Saturday. Possibly Wednesday and Sunday as well, but can't guarantee.
My schedule is pretty unpredictable at the moment, but should settle down next week.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to midnight PT on Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday.
Wednesday and Thursday evenings may be open too if I'm not too busy.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to 11:00 PM PT on Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00 PM to midnight PT on Friday.
Monday and Wednesday evenings may be open too if I'm not too busy.

Arena Chat Thread

Don't worry guys. It's not a loss at all if he leaves. The guy doesn't know how to play outside his comfort zone and prefers to degrade people if he is getting thoroughly trounced.

@Geraven

Thanks for voicing what so many of us were thinking. Don't let the haters get you down!

Reporting violation

While arguments happen and they're normally not worth calling in admins over, I believe this post crosses the line.

The first fundamental rule of the guild is "Don't be an A-hole." I believe that user Zyamasiel's post is both excessive flaming and contains discriminatory language. Would it be possible to have this post hidden and/or the user warned off such behavior in the future?

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

This week:

8:00 to 11:00 PM PT on Tuesday, 8:00 PM to midnight PT on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Monday and Wednesday evenings may be open too if I'm not too busy.

[TZDL2017] Drifting Pollen vs Decoy - Quarterfinals

The moment Lyra's bloody spike flew into the faintly distorted region near the man in white, a series of thunderous flashes erupted around it, almost blotting out the red blur with their furious light. A spectacular show of power, glorious in its excess. The Shroud drank it up, while within the quiet dark Lyra focused on the flying red shard, waiting for the key moment she'd been planning for since she'd first entered the tomb.

The electrical barrage slammed into the makeshift arrow with relentless ferocity, each strike melting and shattering frozen blood where it hit. No ordinary shard of ice would have survived even the earliest strikes, and this one only made it so far as it did thanks to Lyra physically holding it together with her psychic power, freezing its outer surface almost as fast as her enemy's defenses could melt it. Even so, by the time it reached the black wall that rose to block its path, only a ragged and battered remnant remained of the original projectile, hardly enough to even dent the obstruction. Rather than let it smash itself against the metal barrier, Lyra simply stopped sustaining it. Just a few inches away from that last obstacle, the spike could shatter, breaking apart into a shower of bloody, half-molten fragments.

At last, in its very last moment, that which lay within the frozen construct was revealed.

As one might expect from a warrior cloaked in darkness, Lyra favored deception and tactics over raw force. Back in the wheat fields she'd fought like a plague, striking and then infecting, making a seemingly simple attack that soon revealed itself to be a lethal trap. Here, her goal remained the same. In a dry and dusty tomb, however, she didn't have so much water available to turn into ice, and though with every passing second more and more tiny ice crystals joined the swarm forming around her within the Shroud, she hadn't yet gathered enough for what she wanted. So, faced with a drier environment, she'd adapted. First by using her own blood to form the infection vector, and then by using something else entirely as the infection.

She'd frozen the blood-spike in the palm of her right hand, letting it rest there just a moment before setting it on its course. Why?

Location, of course. Her right hand, at the very beginning of the fight, had dipped into the pouch at her side, where she kept her bombs. So that when the blood dripping down that very same arm froze into a weapon, it froze around a small egg-shaped stone primed for detonation. Thus, when the red spike shot into her enemy's defenses, it carried within it a nasty surprise, ready to be unleashed once it had moved in close to its target.

The frozen blood shattered and melted away harmlessly- and from where it had been, a thick green gas exploded outwards, devouring everything it touched.

Electrical bolts could melt or vaporize solid projectiles, but neither would hinder an attack in the form of a vapor. If the man in white's defensive field reacted to this new threat, the same bolts that had ruined that red arrow would only aid the insatiable green cloud, the heat from each strike exciting its particles and speeding up its devastating spread. As things stood, it had already detonated dangerously close to the man in white, and he'd be hard-pressed to escape the initial reach of the explosion.

This wasn't some mere poison, either. The man, his clothing, his weapons: the moment any of them so much as brushed against the edges of the emerald vapor it would tear away at them like a pack of piranhas, its ravenous appetite barely hindered by physical hardness or durability. Not that any solid obstruction would slow it much- a metal barrier worked well against a spike, but a cloud could just spread around it in an instant. Not to mention, if the strange black sand was a solid then it, too, would be rapidly devoured.

The man in white moved fast, fast enough to get his shots off just before Lyra's trap broke loose. He'd have a hard time seeing what happened, though, for the verdant cloud would soon be obscuring his view of the midnight one.

Unlike the lightning, Lyra could see the shots coming, to some extent. The widened front of her Shroud gave her a huge field of view, and she had good enough reflexes to catch her enemy's movements as he turned and fired. Instinctively, she commanded her Shroud to respond. The path her initial attack had taken meant that he hadn't aimed his counter at her directly, so she parted the shadowy folds in the gun's path, opening a wide hole that the first shot zipped through without so much as touching her cloud.

She hadn't, however, expected the second shot, and the sheer speed of these bullets caught her somewhat off-guard, eliciting a brief grimace as she realized what he'd done. Though she'd foiled one shell, the other would strike the front surface of the Shroud, and be immediately enveloped by the black mist.

That last was intentional on Lyra's part. She'd aimed to keep his weapons from hitting the Shroud entirely and leave him guessing, but failing that, she'd quickly move to obfuscate and misdirect. If she'd simply let the shot land, the front portion of it would have been slowed first, leaving it momentarily hanging halfway into the darkness and giving her opponent a clear view of what had happened while its back side gradually slid into the black wall. Rather than let this occur, Lyra had the Shroud around the impact surge forwards the instant she felt the bullet make contact, swallowing it in a smothering void.

The front of the cloud dropped and buckled above the site of impact, as if collapsing from the force of the hit. In reality, this was just the thin layer at the front of the Shroud gathering to help oppose the source of motion, but she took care to exaggerate,using her own control of the smoky substance to supplement its natural motion. Where the Shroud had appeared as a massive, unbroken wall, a section about a foot in width had now shrank and twisted in on itself, appearing to be somehow wounded by the bullet.

Of course, the shot hadn't struck anywhere near her, and was slowed to the point of effective harmlessness as soon as it entered the reach of those eldritch particles. Why give that impression, however? Better to tell a story through each action, lead the attacker astray. Behold, O crackling man: I am the Shroud, and your little stings can hurt me.

Let him chew on that, if he could still see, while she focused on killing him.

Now that her trap had been sprung, Lyra had little need to conceal her weapons. Holding her dagger close to her chest, she used the dregs of blood still running out of her arm to form two small rings, each one surrounding a bomb primed for detonation and carrying them away to her left. One would then zip out through the front of the Shroud, heading roughly towards the man in white, while the other would shoot upwards, lifting its lethal cargo to the higher reaches of the chamber. Three bombs remained untouched in her pouch, not yet needed for this assault.

These small maneuvers she made entirely by feel, while the Shroud fed her sensory information based on the light coming into contact with its outer edges. If her enemy fell to her first ambush, she'd have no choice but to watch as the gas tore him down to a ragged pile of flesh and bone, and then to nothing at all.

If he survived, she'd have no choice but to respond, and try to snatch his life away yet again.