With the Saber drawing ever closer, the horned Kiara continued to retreat, sending wave after wave of hands and projectiles to slow her opponent's progress. Given the extent to which the enma was closing the gap between them, though, the range advantage that she had been given was nowhere near enough to safely continue this plan of action.
And barely,
just barely, had the last strike—aimed at her neck—missed. A single, shallow cut was more that enough for her to tell, and the slightest of reactions was visible upon her face as she drew back.
"Ah, that..."
With those words, she fell towards the ground, sinking into the darkness with a grin on her face.
"Close, but your impatience will cost you."
Despite his and Hakuno's initial efforts, Jason found that he could not pure the severed hand of their enemy off of his leg—at least, not with any show of physical strength. Though he had internally resigned himself to death at the start of the fight, the haste with which he had attempted to deny his own demise even now showed that though his mind had decided as much, his heart had not.
The gandrs from the CCF officer, however, seemed to do enough to loosen the grip of the disembodied hand; they had both landed on the thumb, blowing it off outright (along with a small bit of Jason's skin and the flesh underneath), which means that the grip would not hold. Without any hesitation, the young man tore the offending object off and held it at arm's length, knowing full well that it could strike out at them again.
"Th-thanks," he said, nodding his head before noticing the shadow bubbling beneath the hand. There was a moment of hesitation before the realization of what was happening, and in his haste the young man threw the hand into the air. Immediately, the hand had dissolved into darkness before the horned Kiara appeared in its place, the fresh cut from the Saber's blade slowly closing itself as she stepped towards her downed counterpart.
"What a shame; she went so far in pursuing me, but forgot about what she must protect," she remarked, the same cold smile on her face as she drew her arm back.
All it would take was a single touch and it would be—
Despite the growth of the humanoid mana construct, its speed had not by any means increased; rather, the increased surface area only served to make itself an easier target to the Saber who had been opposing it, and the hand that had been lopped off was an obvious indication of that. The figure simply stared at the stump—through which a distinct torrent of whirling black mana could be seen—before the hand began to reform. The barrier above wavered, if only for a moment, and a few spells that had been fired had broken through elsewhere in the region, but once the hand had returned, so too did its stability.
The small spells that Arturia's Master had been firing were, of course, returning more than enough information about the structure of their enemy. All of the mana seemed to by cycling in and out of the same area—its center—which meant that there was a nexus at which all of this was. The recovery, too, consumed resources from its maintenance of the barrier, which was more than enough of a sign that its primary focus was to maintain that.
The damage from the Master was insignificant enough to the construct, though, that its focus remained upon Lancelot; despite its larger size having more problems with the Saber, though, it continued to grow. This time, however, it attempted to used the same ability that it had used to crush the area of land at the start of the fight; with a larger area in its line of sight to collapse, it only made logical sense to attempt that with larger hands.
The temporary lapse in the barrier had a singular effect, one that had saved the normal Kiara from certain doom. A single spell had managed to sklip through and, by some miracle or another, landed directly upon the Beast's back. This, in turn, was just a small enough opening for Jason to clumsily move forward and throw himself between the two Kiaras; the attack that the horned one had begun had been stalled mere seconds, but those seconds had been enough to let him move the other one out of the way.
His upper left shoulder, now dripping in blood from the hand running through it, had seen better days.
"Hakuno! Command Seal and get Saber back here!" he shouted, staring at the horned Kiara with equal parts fear and determination. "If you don't want me to die, then whatever, but above all else, letting the Kiara we know die would be even worse than that!"
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