Waterstrider

8th District, Tseludia Station, Pantheonic Territory, Thirdmonth, 1634 PTS

At first, Ria Hadal was exhilarated. Hadal territory had been uncontested for far too long, and she found duels and training far less fulfilling than a true life and death battle. She and her allies placing their lives on the line to bring down their enemy. There was no feeling in the world quite like it.

She was confident that with three geniuses like them working together, even an enforcer would swiftly fall.

Before her, Taek and the enforcer charged at one another. Gunfire tore into his flesh, but he disregarded the wounds as his body continued to grow in both size and density. Taek’s heart and muscle techniques worked in unison, allowing him to supercharge his body for extreme physical power for a time. Such great power came at a price, but he would be able to push it off until later.

Thirty feet away, the Riverfiend moved with extreme speed in a hazy, flowing pattern that was difficult to follow. It seemed as if he was simply always in a different position from the bullet paths when they passed, despite making only concise movements. His sword gleamed as he steadily moved close and closer to the enforcer’s body.

Wishing to perform her role, Ría unleashed her miasma, causing a fine yellow mist to drift invisibly through air that was dirtied with iron. Illusionary replicas of Riverfiend suddenly appeared around the man, obscuring him for a moment before dashing out towards the enforcer along various paths.

She summoned copies of herself as well, each one wielding a scimitar seemingly composed of a pale glassy material. With another stream of miasma the swords gained substance, now able to deflect some of the bullets flying towards them.

She casted some of her extant miasma onto Taek, and his form shimmered, seeming to shift between different sizes and locations as he continued his charge. The impact would not be high because he used quite predictable footwork, but in the heat of battle even slight advantages compounded.

A slug pierced right through Taek’s spine, but the man ignored it, heedlessly continuing his run. He only paused when he neared the enforcer enough for it to deliver an overhead blow with tremendous force. He lifted up his blade, bracing it with both hands to block.

Despite his great mass and size, Taek’s knees nearly buckled under the force of the blow. His guts took a great deal of additional fire, and had Ria’s illusions not thrown off the enforcer’s aim, he might have died near instantaneously. His size shrank by an entire half foot as he fought to regain control over his miasma.

“Brother!” she called out in shock and horror, the words echoing from the mouths of her clones as well.

While the enforcer was distracted by dealing with her brother, Ria maintained her control of the illusions. While several broke under the hail of bullets, others pressed forth, along with Riverfiend.

The man had taken advantage of the momentary opportunity, rapidly closing the distance until he was finally within range of the machine. The enforcer shifted in response, trying its best to use its swords to block the many clones attacking it, but it was unable to discern which was the correct one.

The blades of Ria’s own doubles glanced off the armor, unable to deal any meaningful damage. Riverfiend, however, had landed a bevy of powerful slashes into the sturdy metal frame. There were more scratches than gouges, but each had been precisely lined up into the exact same hold, appearing to be one single deep scratch in the armor.

Orange mist gushed out of small vents under the plates, filling the immediate surroundings with a smoky haze of flickering miasma. All of Ria’s doubles dissipated, her clouds of extant miasma unable to fool reality when assaulted by the chaotic force. Even the Riverfiend faltered, she could see his motions slow for a moment as the force of the smoke impacted him. As it pushed further out, it impacted herself, and the cloud of miasma surrounding her partially dispersed, causing her invisibility to falter as well.

With her veil lifted, one of the enforcer’s guns turned to fire upon her. While she managed to avoid most of the bullets, one of them tore through her shoulder, embedding itself into her bone. She grunted in pain, shocked and distressed by the turn of events.

Even three geniuses against one enemy, the gap in power was difficult to bridge. Ria had known from the family’s information pavilion the estimated combat power of an enforcer- roughly equivalent to a martial artist midway through their spirit refinement. She had anticipated difficulty, but this… the gap felt insurmountable.

It was clear now that her initial confidence had been nothing but pride and arrogance. It had been too long since there had been a true conflict between the Heirs of Ottrien and the Hadal Clan. Long enough that Ria herself had never had to experience this feeling of emptiness. She stood dumbly, watching the enforcer continue to explode with power.

She glanced over to where her brother shakily stood, bleeding out of multiple gunshot wounds. Behind her, Ria’s juniors killed and died in equal measure, and if things went bad for her uncle as well… Ria’s lip quivered, and she felt a seed of resentment threaten to grow itself within her heart dantian. This was all the fault of the Riverfiend. If it were not for him… she shivered in rage, feeling the resentment begin digging its roots in.

The enforcer’s pilot called out, the sound booming from speakers in the machine’s chassis.

“This is your last chance, Seiyal. I was told to try and take you in alive, but your corpse will be a worthy trophy as well.”

Ria watched as the Riverfiend laughed uproariously, not ceasing to relentlessly attack the enforcer despite the blades swing down around him. His attacks were only causing slight damage, but he almost seemed crazed as he tore into the mechanical armor’s surface.

“I told you already. There will be no surrender. Not for me, and not for you. One of us will die today, I swear on my soul.”

Ria could feel a pulse of energy emerge from Riverfiend. His skin grew slick with moisture, as if miasma had condensed upon him, and he rapidly grew in speed while his strikes seemed to hit harder on the iron skin of the armor’s frame.

Her anger at the man waned somewhat after hearing his words. His face was a mask of rage, himself like a dervish as he dodged and wove his way between the large swings of the enforcer’s many swords and the constant gunfire it sent at him.

The man’s perseverance brought Ria back to her senses, and she could guess that he was using some sort of enhancement skill, meaning he would only be able to keep it up for a limited amount of time. Once again, she needed to perform her role. As Riverfiend had said, either they or the enforcer would survive the battle. She channeled miasma through her meridians, preparing to cast more illusions upon the battlefield. A slight smile lit up her face again as she made her way back into a proper headspace, her form fading back out into invisibility.

Her illusions coalesced onto the battlefield once more, causing Riverfiend to split into six spectral copies of himself as his fusillade continued. They joined in on the attack. In theory, Ria’s illusions had physicality, but she simply was not able to make them hit as hard as Riverfiend could. Still, they would distract the enforcer more, protecting them all for just a little more time. In a perfect world, that time would be enough to destroy it.

Suddenly, the enforcer’s hulking frame rocked with an impact as Taek crashed into it at full speed, tipping it off of its legs. One of its swords slashed down, but with the odd angle it was unable to provide full force, and he was able to hold it off with his own.

Neither Ria nor the Riverfiend were foolish enough to let the opportunity pass, so they scoured its surface for weak points, aiming their weapons to take advantage of them.

Riverfiend managed to pierce his blade through a chink in the armor plating, stabbing deep into the machine’s internals. Due to the weaker strength of her illusions, Ria’s doubles managed to somewhat wedge their own blades in before the enforcer slammed a pair of its palms into the ground in order to shove itself up with dramatic force, causing one of the doubles whose blade became caught to be twisted in a brutal fashion, popping like a bubble as it turned to a haze of yellow smoke.

The orange glow of the enforcer’s miasma was now slightly darker than before, which Ria took as a positive sign of damage.

Taek grunted as he blocked another sword, eyes locked in intense focus on the enforcer. Another bullet impacted his leg, but as he parried a sword, he slid his blade further in towards the chassis, slamming it down with extreme force. Unlike Ria’s weak stabbing or Riverfiend’s high-speed slashes, Taek simply bore down with a single, heavy blow using the enhanced strength his technique had granted him.

The blow impacted close to one of the seams in the metal plates, and tore through, crunching metal debris. He had let down his guard in order to land the hit, and one of the enforcer’s swords had slammed into him, carving its own gouge into his side. Ria sincerely hoped that his dantians had not been hit by any of the bullets or scatter.

This wave of damage had not quite destroyed the enforcer, but Ria could see that the arms were still twitching and twirling , while orange smoke still continued to leak from within. As if heedless of the danger, Riverfiend stepped up to the side of the canopy where the hatch was located.

Using one end of the tear that Taek had created, Riverfiend ripped open the rest of the cockpit with a bare hand, eyes blazing with an emotion that Ria could not quite identify, as if he was feeling multiple things at the same time. He reached in and pulled out with some effort the pilot, a husky Jobu man. He leaned in close to the alien’s face, his face a grin that almost but not quite seemed genuine. The man sputtered, as if he were trying to place the man before him, but simply found him to be odd..

“As I was telling you before,” spoke the Riverfiend, ”One of us will die here today.”

Ria watched in shock as, with a casual motion, he snapped the pilot’s neck, tossing him back down onto the ground.

The grin had fled his face, and he stared in silence at the surrounding battles, which had spread to encompass a great deal of the space within the celan barrier. While one of the enforcers was down, the battle was not over yet. Taek toppled onto the heavily damaged enforcer, and Ria cried out again as she rushed to his side.

Suddenly, a noise like the sound of a large waterfall echoed across the space.

Carefully crossing the barriers was another enforcer and two squadrons of the Heir’s private army, and they had just watched their ally fall.

“Shit!” said Ria. The Riverfiend just sighed in exhaustion.

Extant Miasma: [The nature of the extant is simple. It is that which exists, defined by its opposition, that which does not. In a domain created by the presence of extant miasma, existence becomes a spectrum rather than a binary, and that which is real can become false while that which is not, becomes. Extant miasma manifests with yellow coloration.]