Anders Nazret Vs. Tanya von Degurechaff

[Anders Nazret]

Overhead the beginnings of a thunderstorm brewed. Slate gray clouds congealed into a swirling mess of barely-contained rain. The ruins would provide little shelter from the oncoming storm, but that was fine. There were more important things to worry about. The heavy echo of my boots resounded throughout the stone structure. The relic sat heavy in my palm, it was a near perfect sphere save for the arcane inscriptions along its body. That was what she was after. What a joke. A child couldn’t hope to understand such a beautiful expression of magic. Hopeless as it was however, that blonde-haired imp was certain of her right to it. I had no qualms dissuading her of that notion.

“You can stop hiding now,” I shouted, “Stand before me and quit embarrassing the both of us.”

Only the wind answered. A crack of thunder tore through the ruins and a soft drizzling of rain accompanied it. Had she left? It wouldn’t have been unsurprising. Cowards, after all, had spread across Erde Nona like a plague of locusts. It was foolish to assume that a child would have any semblance of a backbone.

My foot crossed an invisible line and there was a flash of movement. Tanya emerged from her hiding space atop a partially-collapsed archway. Without a word, without a wasted movement she opened fire. Before I could even react her first bullet had already torn through the meat of my arm, with the second finding a home in my gut. By the time she fired her third, however, I was already in motion. Instinctual self-preservation dictated that I run and hide, but trained discipline forced me to advance. Her advantage was in the range of her weaponry, so closing the distance was priority. Up close she was little more than a child with a pop-gun.

Using the length of my sword as a brace I slammed into the bottom of her perch. Stone snapped and split apart from the sudden impact and the entire archway shuddered. Had it been in anything less than disrepair I would have done nothing beyond bruising my shoulder. As it stood, however, the structure fell out from beneath her feet. She gasped sharply as she slipped and fell. That moment of surprise was all I needed, I cast aside the relic and readied my blade. Her flight enchantment silently activated and she twisted her body in a practiced motion, hoping to jet off at some obtuse angle. But, it was too late. I reached up and grabbed her ankle, yanking her from the air and spiking her against the ground. The intricate patterns of her thaumaturgical shield appeared briefly, sparing her from the impact.

“Cute tricks, wasted on a fragile body,” I muttered.

Before she could recover I raised my sword and brought it down upon her. Sparks sloughed off her shield as my sword chewed into the kaleidoscopic patterns, spurred on by its own weight. There was a moment of panic in her eyes, animalistic desperation, as her shield barely managed to redirect my sword from her head. What a wonderful sense of satisfaction to see a pathetic excuse for a magician brought so low. Again I brought my sword down upon her, and again her pernicious enchantment kept her alive. She scrambled away, scrabbling backwards across fallen debris.

“Revolting,” I said, stomping after her, “Your thaumaturgical shield is finely crafted, but your body is so clearly underdeveloped. It’s like a dazzling necklace draped lovingly atop a pile of rats.”

“Shut up already,” Tanya responded, producing a pistol from her hip, “Wasting words instead of finishing the job.”

She unloaded, trying desperately to create space and succeeding. I dove away, but not before another round tore open a hole in my side. Like a vulture she pounced upon the opportunity, lurching forward to scoop the relic up from the ground. She took to the skies, discarding an empty magazine and reloading her firearm as she did. Another series of shots slammed into the stone partition I had managed to crawl behind, each of them coming from a more advantageous angle than their predecessor.

What an absolute farce. I was reduced to crawling about in the dark like some sort of vermin, while that blonde-haired imp was free to strike with impunity. What a disgrace. Were the true heir alive to see me reduced to such a state I would have been executed out of mercy.

The storm finally opened up, vomiting a torrent of frigid rain. Lightning crackled overhead, followed by the call of thunder. This was an opportunity. It wasn’t much, but there was cover to be found in the curtain of the storm. Quickly I moved, rushing through what remained of this ancient structure. Bullets pinged wildly off stone, chasing me as I moved up a flight of crumbling stairs. Verticality was where I’d find my edge. Violence of action was my only hope of bringing an end to this joke. I reached the top level of the structure. Before she could register my plan I leaped over the edge towards her. Again there was a flicker of surprise in her eyes as I came tumbling towards her through the air. How do you strike a bird from the sky? You hit it with something heavy and unyielding.

 

[Aster]

"Kh...!"

As the comparative goliath of a man hurled himself through the air, Tanya's world briefly took on a slow motion cast. The thick curtains of rain seemed to stall to a point she could see the individual drops. The stark near-monochrome the world was thrown into with a sudden flash of lightning, only for a split-second, seemed to stretch on for nearly ten in her head.

"Who does this idiot think he is, anyway?! Charging someone with a gun while he's only got a sword?! This isn't some damn fantasy novel! He doesn't even have any kind of shields!"

Her eyes frantically darted about, looking for anything that might spell a quick or easy way out of this predicament. She'd been lucky the first time he got in close, but her shield had only barely held up against that damn sword then! If he got ahold of her to land any more serious blows like that, it was as good as done for — and, much as she hated to admit it, she probably wouldn't be too far behind. If this went the way he wanted it to, then she was pretty much a goner.

She was already on the backpedal, the airborne equivalent of hurling herself into a backward dive away from Anders as he came tumbling down toward her. Unless she wanted to lose control completely, or leave herself a sitting duck to let him hit her like a living artillery shell, there was really only one thing she could do...

"No easy way out of this one...guess I gotta let him have his way, for a second...!"

She grit her teeth together, and resolved to do something stupid. Stupid and, she hoped, completely unexpected.

That single second of drawn-out slow motion immediately lurched back into full force and speed. With a manic gleam in her eyes, and a trembling grin from ear to ear, Tanya not only let herself keep sailing backward and down, but urged herself on. The same propulsion that normally gave her flight now sent her rocketing back toward the ground.

She hit the drenched ground with a wet, echoing crash and bounced up from it. The impact was jarring, and enough to leave her seeing stars and momentarily turn her vision white from the knock to her head. Were it not for her shield and combat uniform, she probably wouldn't walk away from a landing like that at all.

But she didn't need to walk away at all.

Ignoring that all the wind had been knocked out of her sails as well as her lungs, she kicked her legs out against the ground and pushed off. She sent herself hurtling near perpendicular to the ground, skimming along mere inches above the rain-slicked and drenched ground, narrowly avoiding the thunderous impact of the ferocious swordmage.

She threw herself back into a flip in the air, righting herself and heaving several ragged breaths. "You're crazy, old man..." she managed after sucking in a deep breath. "But you're not half-bad."

"Save your backhanded compliments for someone who cares," the mage growled as he righted himself, hefting that obnoxiously huge and heavy sword he favored. "The words of a child, much less such a physically inept one, are meaningless." He thundered forward in a brazen charge, his sword held at the ready.

"Tch...not even one to spare time talking, huh?" Tanya grimaced at that.

"So much for that plan...keeping him talking for even a few seconds would've been enough to catch my breath!"

Without even thinking about how she might find them later, the child blindly threw the relic and her pistol aside, hurling elsewhere into the ruins before leaning forward and similarly throwing herself right at her charging foe. Out of ammo and without a second to spare reloading, there was only time for another crazy tactic.

Thunder crashed overhead, as Tanya and Anders Nazret rushed at each other...and his sword came crashing down to bite into her shield again.

This time, her shield didn't hold.

Like glass, it shattered and splintered under the blade as the sheer weight of it crashed through, cleaving down in a devastating arc just as the combat mage crashed into the swordmage with everything she had thrown into something between a headbutt and a shoulder tackle.

The impact was jarring, and Tanya felt it all the way down to her bones, right along with the bone-deep gash that the sword opened up in one of her legs — the sudden rush of burning warmth cutting through the chill of the rain told her all she needed to know, even without actually seeing it.

In spite of the aching and throbbing in her head, and the jarring ache echoing through every bone in her body, though, she knew that the unexpected blow had hit true. It might be nothing more than the equivalent of knocking the breath out of him, but that would suffice for now.

With a wheezing grunt of exertion, she flipped around and about, into something between a flip and a cartwheel and planted both of her boots into Anders' chin with a fierce kick. Her diminutive size left the blow as little more than enough to stagger the man in his already unbalanced state, but he did provide the perfect springboard to let her bound away from the melee engagement.

Airborne and out of harm's reach, she spared a brief moment to try and catch her bearings and quickly look around.

"Come on...where'd it go?!"

Her rifle. It would serve her better here than her bare hands. She had dropped it when that archway came down, she was sure of it...

"There!"

Biting down on a fresh wave of pain lancing through her body, she bolted forward with a mad dash to snatch it from the rubble, just as a sword-bearing form loomed into the fray again.

 

[Anders Nazret]

A surprise, there was some force behind her strikes after all. I massaged my jaw as she flitted away into the air. The anesthetic effect of adrenaline had begun to wear off. Bullet wounds throbbed and stung as if I had been run through by red-hot lances. Pain, as irritating as it was, served a vital purpose -- it allowed one to recognize mortality. As a master swordsman could be killed by a drunkard with a rock, I too carried such a vulnerability. Despite her amateurish incantations and skill-less weaponry a lucky shot would still leave me dead. So, this needed to end, and end it would.

However, the artifact needed to be secured first, without it all of this would have been pointless. I moved towards the discarded orb and picked it up. Despite the rain it was still pleasantly warm. Such a magnificent construction, allowing it to be lost to a child would be unforgivable. Another bolt of lightning cracked overhead and I noticed a glint of metal. Her pistol sat abandoned in a crevice. While it wasn’t quite my style of weapon, I could not deny its effectiveness. I grabbed the firearm and slipped it into my belt.

Another crack overhead, but this was not the peel of lightning, instead it was the bark of a rifle. The shot landed wide, sparking off the cobblestone floor. That pernicious imp hovered in the air above the ruin. She fired another shot and this one did not miss. My leg gave out from underneath me as the impact tore into the connective tissue of my thigh. I cried out and crawled for cover as my limb spasmed uselessly. Another round struck after me, barely missing my head and showering me in shattered stone. I found shelter in a pile of debris, held aloft by the lower half of a statue.

“You’re hiding now?” Tanya laughed wildly, “What happened to your pride, coward?”

Absolutely infuriating. How could she dare to call me a coward when she relied so heavily on flight? Death would be too kind for her.

The meat of my leg cramped violently, squeezing tight against the foreign object embedded into it. The lack of excessive blood was a welcome sight, but whatever her bullet had severed was vital. Even worse was that my hiding spot had reduced my vision of the battlefield severely and with the rain I couldn’t even listen for her approach. Carefully I shifted, trying to move my injured leg beneath me. It shuddered in response and despite its pain-ridden protests I was able to move it. It hurt like hell, but pain was endurable, failure was not. Her pistol clinked against the stone, slipping from my belt. In the heat of escape I had nearly forgotten about it.

“I’ll just wait for you to bleed out, you know that right?” Tanya shouted from some hidden angle, “You might as well come out and save yourself some suffering.”

Again, with the infantile goading. How… irritatingly effective.

“You’ll die from hypothermia before I die from blood loss child,” I answered, “You think a true Arcadian swordmage wouldn’t have practiced restorative incantations?”

This, naturally, was a bluff. While swordmages generally practiced at least some form of healing magics, I had no such spells. I didn’t need them, all I needed was the threat of them to draw her close. My sword had tasted her blood, and she would be pressured to end this before she succumbed to blood loss herself. It was possible she had such magic herself, but I doubted it. Conjuring a rudimentary shield or propelling oneself through the air was relatively simple to learn; knitting together tattered flesh required expertise that a novice such as her could never hope to acquire.

Quietly I shifted in my hiding space, pulling my ruined leg into a crouch. It trembled and shuddered in protest, but reluctantly obeyed. I readied her pistol, aiming it out towards the small window of the battlefield I could see. Surprise was my advantage and patience was my impetus. Raindrops filtered in through the cracks in my shelter splattering me with obnoxious droplets. Wind howled through the ruins, thunder echoed overhead, and I waited. I waited long enough for my injured leg to grow numb and cease trembling. I’d wait long enough for her to grow impatient and expose herself.

My patience would not pay off. Something heavy and hard slammed into the roof of my shelter. The entire structure shuddered as another chunk of stone was dropped on it. That devious imp intended to crush me alive. I sprang from my bunker just as another stone crashed through it. Above Tanya sat on a walkway, along with several stones she had collected. As I emerged she lowered her rifle, but as she did I raised her pistol. A flash of shock rushed across her pale face as I fired at her. The bullets clashed against her shield, ricocheting off at weird angles. She scrambled away from the hail of gunfire, but not before taking a glancing blow to the ribs.

Her pistol clicked uselessly in my hand as it ran dry on ammunition. Such unreliable weaponry. With a huff I tossed it aside. Certainly it had given me some breathing room, but this fight would not be won with thievery. I raised my sword and moved through the ruins towards where she had scampered off too. Nor would this battle be won through cowardice. No, it would be won through conviction and the strength of one’s body. These were things a proper swordmage had in abundance.

 

[Aster]

Tanya crashed to the ground heavily, her face torn between settling into a grimace of pain or a scowl of frustration. The resulting expression was...distorted and ugly, to say the least, when compounded by her escalating rage at not being able to finish off some idiot with a sword already.

"The entire reason swords fell out of use was because guns were so effective, wasn't it? So why is this freak managing to put up such a good fight, now?!"

She pushed herself up, onto the knee of her uninjured leg and pressed one hand into the bullet hole in her suit. It was warm with blood, but thankfully it hadn't been a truly grievous hit. Her combat uniform had been intended only to absorb and ward off the most minor of shrapnel and blows from anything that got through her shield, so the fact it did anything at all against a direct hit from even a sidearm was....impressive, and shed its protective value in a new light.

A new light she wasn't exactly keen to keep standing under.

Pain stabbed through her leg, lancing up and racing through the fresh bullet wound as it sent a tingling ache through her...everything, really. Even with her training and conditioning, and the best she could manage with a magical boost, her body was still only a child's. It wasn't meant to handle injuries or pain even to this extent very well, and without a medical mage or a more powerful computation orb handy...

She swallowed down a fresh wave of bile rising in her throat.

Tick. Tock.

"To hell with that..."

Baring her teeth in a snarl, she reached up her bloodstained hand to push her soggy hair up out of her face. "If anyone's gonna die here, it isn't going to be me... I've got too much riding on this..."

"I have to make it through this...pull a success off somehow. Get back to turn in that relic. Increase my value to my superiors...and stick it to Being X when I get put right where I wanna be."

The thought brought a grin to her face, as she used her rifle as a crutch to regain her feet again. "Just gotta..." A fresh wave of agony went racing up her leg as she tried to take a step, and she was forced to awkwardly hop and stumble with her other one before taking flight again.

Just in time for the swordmage to come barreling through the silvery curtains of rain, sword held high. His expression was grim and assured, fighting through the pain of his own mounting injuries far more easily than the child soldier was able to, and that fact alone cracked her newly restored confidence.

She whirled around to aim her rifle at her foe, but his charge from such a sudden and close appearance range already had him too close. He brandished his blade down and about in a smooth pattern, swatting aside the rifle like another sword as he stepped in close. A rough strike of one elbow caught the pint-sized mage in the forehead, sending her reeling back and left open for a decisive blow. The great, heavy blade swept back up in a vicious arc, threatening to tear the girl nearly in two with the force behind it.

She panicked, and for an instant pure terror and despair flickered in her eyes. Lightning flashed, painting the scene in eerie monochrome once again...and she did the only thing she could.

She brought her free arm down across her body, just as the blade struck.

There was a sound like shattering glass, a blade cleaving through meat and bone. A pained yelping scream of pure agony, and a surprised grunting yell of pain.

Bright red spattered in a wide arc, quickly running and melting away in the rain, as Tanya was sent tumbling and spinning through the air from the force of the blow. She hit a chunk of ruined wall, bounced off of it with a choked gasp and fell down to the ground with a wet thwop.

Groaning and whining, desperately biting down on her urge to scream and cry in pain, the young mage clenched her teeth so hard she was sure they would crack. Fire raced up her arm, and across her chest, and it felt as if had cracked or broken somewhere. She was no doctor, but in her professional medical analysis?

"I'm...fucked..."

She was fucked.

It felt like it took everything she had just to stagger back up to stand. Her left arm hung limp and weak at her side, blood running and pouring down it. The sleeve had been virtually in two, leaving the pal and slashed open flesh visible — rent open easily to the bone, and across her bicep and much of her forearm. It wasn't completely useless, in a situation this desperate, but even trying to move it hurt, and she knew it would be a major risk to try and keep using it. She needed medical treatment now, but first...

Ignoring the pain in her chest where the blade had ripped through her combat uniform, she awkwardly levered up her rifle and braced it against her side, taking aim at the slowly approaching form of Anders Nazret, her breathing heavy and labored.

"I'm surprised that didn't kill you on the spot," the swordmage growled. He was bleeding from a fresh, deep stab wound in his calf, the injury slowing him even further than before. As he saw the matching blade on Tanya's bayonet, his eyes narrowed. "Even in that situation you managed to counter attack? Impressive." He tightened his grip on his sword. "But not enough to change the outcome of this."

"Don't be so sure of that, old man," the pint-sized soldier snarled.

Thunder rumbled. Anders lunged forward. Tanya fired wildly.

 

[Anders Nazret]

Blood mixed with rain until the two became indistinguishable from one another. Thunder and gunshots melded into a terrible cacophony. Muscle, blood, and bone surged against one another to form a wonderful expression of battle. This was where I had cultivated my existence, here in the heat of conflict. The child was more than she seemed to be, and for that I was grateful. Despite her inexperience in thaumaturgical matters she provided a reasonable struggle - a struggle that was futile, but one that at least made the effort worth it.

I stepped into her, using my weight to crash through her guard. My sword caught the bayonet of her rifle and with a spray of sparks was shoved aside. With a practiced movement I followed through, clapping my hand around the back of her neck and spiking her to the ground. Her momentum suddenly shifted, no longer bound by the laws of gravity. Her flight incantation activated and she froze near-horizontal to the ground. Then, violently, she wrenched around, twisting and swinging her rifle like a club. Lightning flashed inside my skull and the world pitched backwards. Such a pernicious gremlin.

Blind and half-concussed I struck out, swinging my sword to cleave her in half. My strike found nothing but air. Sloppy, too sloppy. But by the time I had recovered she was already gone. Rain continued to rush down, giving her a curtain of camouflage. Her strike had left my vision blurred and my balance shaken. Dumbly I stumbled forward, forcing my body to move. A bullet cut through the air, finding purchase in my back. Air rushed from my lungs and I sputtered violently. It was as if someone had filled my chest with glass. My sword clattered to the ground and I followed soon after it.

There was no respite for the weak. Another gunshot called out, opening up my shoulder to the storm. This was unacceptable. I had to move. Another gunshot. Lead poured from the heavens and blood poured from my body.

“Enough,” I rasped, erupting to my feet.

“Stay down,” Tanya responded, delivering a gunshot to the back of my knee.

“Petulant child!”

“Stubborn old man!”

With what strength I could must I dove behind a slab of stone. It was not a graceful maneuver and I collapsed once again. My chest burned and I struggled to suck in enough air. I tried to pull my legs underneath me, but they refused to cooperate. She had done a good job of maiming me. I couldn’t deny her intelligence, ruining my body was her only hope at victory. This was the contemporary magician’s downfall. Their lack of physical prowess forced them to act as vultures, striking only injured prey. However, injured prey could still strike back given the opportunity.

Arcane energies coalesced around my arm, wreathing it in pale green vapors. This was the swordmage’s ace in the hole - a necromantic application of thaumaturgical principles. To the mundane it provided no threat, but to the magically inclined it was deadly. I emerged from my hiding place, limping and surrounded by negatively-charged energy. She fired again, but anything less than a killing blow meant nothing. She hovered above the battlefield, blood draining from open wounds.

“You are an abhorrent creature,” I boomed, weathering another strike, “You lack proper reverence for the power that you wield, magic belongs to those that are worthy, and you are nothing but a mockery.”

With that I reached out towards her, stretching my incantation to its limits. Sustaining such volatile magic at range was a difficult proposition, but I was not some rote amateur playing with powers beyond his ken. I was an Arcadian swordmage. I was the master of both my body and my magic and it would obey my whims. The tendril of pale-green energy snaked through the air, rushing towards my enemy. It coiled around her, seeking to siphon every last bit of magical potential from her pathetic body. Without the gift of magic she was just an infant with a gun, pathetic and only worthy of pity.

Using 1 application of focus on "Magic is for the Worthy" to increase its effectiveness, namely increasing its range.

 

[Aster]

Tanya felt a sudden weakness take hold of her. Not the general fatigue and pain and stress from this fight suddenly catching up, but something else entirely. The kind of deep-seated, unnatural exhaustion and drained feeling that only accompanied something supernatural at work. That pervasive, all-encompassing weight and tiredness that came along when you survived something harrowing, or had your sleep interrupted by horrible nightmares.

It made her sputter and cough, her flight formula going entirely out of control. She plummeted like a lead weight, only managing to arrest her momentum to manage a stumbling landing rather than a complete crash.

Her rifle struck the ground, used as a crutch just to keep herself standing, as she tried to wrap her mind around what the fuck had just happened. Her vision was blurred and unsteady, and the way she was shaking felt like she'd just run several marathons back to back after being mauled by a professional boxer for an hour. A bone-deep, unsettling leadness in her limbs and a cloudy fogginess in her head making it hard to even function.

What was worse, her mana reserves seemed to have been suddenly depleted. The normally bright green glow of the computation equipment on her suit had died down to the most faint luminescence, dimmer and more ghostly than even distant emergency lights. If it were gasoline...it would be running on fumes, if even that.

"Did this guy....just drain my mana?"

The realization hit Tanya all at once, almost at the same time as Anders hit her physically. The swordmage was still in poor shape, but the worst of his wounds had seemed to begin slowly mending and healing, and he had caught something of a second wind.

"That kind of thing should be impossible! Even I know you can't use magic to do something you don't understand, no matter how powerful a computation orb or arcane focuses and symbols you have... So unless this guy is like the Einstein of magic, then there's something wrong here."

Staggering back, Tanya grit her teeth and set her gaze. Weak, wheezing gasps hissed out as she tried to focus her vision. Even with everything being so blurry, she could still make out the lumbering, comparatively huge form of Anders Nazret. While he might not have been a true giant compared to normal men...the pint-sized soldier was far from normal.

For a fleeting moment, the image of David and Goliath came to her mind, and she couldn't help but crack a grin as it gave her an idea.

Drawing up the last of her remaining mana, Tanya threw herself into motion. In spite of the protests of her torn open arm and legs, she rushed forward, swinging her rifle up into both hands. She couldn't manage proper flight anymore, but she still took off from the ground into a high leap, raising the weapon overhead like a sword and brought it down in a vicious arc.

It was a clumsy, obviously telegraphed strike and predictably it was sidestepped. With his own skill at swordplay, reading such an obvious tactic was trivial for the swordmage. He retaliated, punishing the missed attack with a heavy kick to launch the child upward, and then raised both hands overhead to strike downward with a brutal hammer blow that drove her back into the earth.

She hit the rain-slick ground and bounced off of it. Nary a sound escaped her, all the breath driven from her lungs out already by the preceding strikes. She was certain that she had felt, more than heard, the devastating crack and snap somewhere in her chest and back, but it didn't matter.

This was exactly what she wanted.

As she rebounded from the ground, she twisted around. Breathlessly, and with her entire body shaking from the exertion, she laughed. Silently, no sound coming out at all, but the mirth was still evident.

Her vision was fuzzy and clouded, black and white spots dancing through it. Blackness dimmed and ringed the edges of her sight as she rolled over so her back was to the ground. She hung there, suspended in midair. And with the last reserves of her magical energy, she struck out again with her rifle one-handed. The weapon blurred, sweeping up in a wide arc trailing a flickering green light from residual magic, and the bayonet bit into the arm of her foe as he tried to sweep the weapon aside.

"Stubborn brat," he growled. "Your persistence has long since grown wearisome!"

Tanya's lips moved, only the faintest whispering of sound coming out. "Too...bad...old...man..."

Lightning flashed, glinting off the barrel of her gun, now aimed directly at Anders' face and steadied by the knife lodged in his own arm. Tanya's grin grew wider and more manic yet. Thunder crashed overhead, and she pulled the trigger.