Despair! The Ironclad Nightmare

Despair! The Ironclad Nightmare
Date of Scene:	15 December 2012
Location:	Mullonde
Synopsis:	Mullonde becomes ground zero in a battle between Garland, the incarnation of Chaos, and Kaze, the Unlimited Man of the Magun.
Cast of Characters:	Kaze, Garland

---

Garland has posed:
Mullonde. The Holy City. Here, the misguided Faithful of Glabados put their pride on the line, working day and night for the holy purpose of the Glabados faith. Here, they build, they work, they live, the little ants kneeling in supplication to a force they do not even truly comprehend, a force of ancient darkness masquerading as the brightest light. Here is the center of Glabados; here is the center of the greatest confidence trick ever played upon mortal men, the lie that unfolds across continent after continent as blood and death and betrayal are spilled in a grand cataclysm, all for the sake of awakening one so old and so dark that it almost dwarfs even the mightiest of the shadows. The gleaming temples, the towering buildings, the great and shining city of Mullonde is no more than the dress, the mask, planted across the rotten faith; a dancing girl's clothes for a dried-up corpse. How well it masks their corpse god; how well it dresses up the lie, the shadows that lurk within those supposedly-hallowed walls. There is no holiness here, no light, no true shining faith that burns away the darkness and pierces the hearts of the nightmares that live in this world; there is only darkness at the top of these glittering towers, only shadows dancing in these glistening halls. This place is a place where the phantom of faith calls men astray, and nothing more.

Through the city of Mullonde he walks, not a sound from his iron skin. The Ironclad Nightmare, the Champion Of Darkness, the Nascent Chaos, he strides through the streets of Mullonde as though he owns it, a blackness deeper than the most starless night roiling off him in almost palpable waves. Those who are strong in their faith avoid him unconsciously, fear creeping down their necks; those who are weak of heart and light seem drawn to him, glancing his way as if to catch his eye. Though Garland feels no great truth, no glorious justice, no kindness beyond kindness nor love beyond love, and certainly no light beyond light, there is power in this place; power walks the halls of Mullonde, a familiar, ancient power that calls out to Garland in the same way that Garland himself calls out to the darkness. That in and of itself is...worrisome, Garland reflects as he paces under one of the sweeping arches of Mullonde; that there is anything in this or any world strong enough to interest him so meant that there was something he may be able to neither manipulate nor control directly. Little drew his attention in such a manner these days, after all, especially in the World of Ruin; since its fall, it had seemed so hollow, so pointless, so lacking in the life that Garland so eagerly smothered. It was, indeed, a World of Ruin.

He would have to remember to thank the rat later. Perhaps he would become the Burmecians' hero; grant them strength, lend them his power, and they would be an unstoppable force against Queen Brahne. And the Mist that would spill out would be...pleasing.

Garland turns right down the street; he makes his way silently through the crowds, the people parting in his wake with little hints of fear in their eyes. The market street was a peaceful place, full of people who were neither truly soldiers nor paladins, simply simple folk who came to feed and buy and provide for their families. These, then, were the stuff of life; the cells of society, the individual meaningless creatures who together made up something greater. Remove a few, and society came tumbling down under the pressure of fear and worry and terror; encourage more, and it crumbled under its own bloated weight. Garland had so many ways to destroy.

Perhaps he would have to get the attention of the Ajorans and find out *exactly* why he was so drawn to them...

Kaze has posed:
Mullonde, the Holy City.

Holy. Hnh.

The word doesn't mean much to him anymore. Any sense of the divine was lost in that day years ago. Any faith he may have had he has forgotten, either cast aside or left to drift in the sea of despair and slow-building rage. He didn't need to have faith that some supposedly omnipotent God would protect him in the end; he could do that himself. These people, the ones who relied on that to go on with their lives, their comfortable little lives...

It made him sick. It made his heart ache. He missed that ignorance, sometimes. He couldn't even say if he ever had it.

Ignorance. Hnh.

The people here are just as ignorant as he is, but in different ways. They have no idea why he's here, or who he is; they assume he's a beggar, a peasant, a starving man whose presence stains their otherwise beautific city. He sits in the only patch of shadows he's yet seen on this market street, sprawled out with one leg curled somewhat beneath him. He watches the crowd flow to and fro, watches the merchants hawk their wares, the citizenry chat amongst themselves as the world passes them by. They pass him with barely more than a glance, pitying or disgusted. The ones who don't see him still give him a wide berth. Something about him...

Something seems wrong. Not just about him, but here, in this place. He can't put his finger on it. He slides his right arm back behind him as a shadow crosses his vision, the low grinding of metal sliding across the paving stones lost in the crowd. An armored figure, imposing and powerful and --

-- what? What is it? What /is/ it?

Kaze rises to his feet, guiding himself up the side of the little alcove with his left hand, his right arm concealed beneath his long poncho. He steps into the street suddenly, startling a pair of young women and sending them hurrying away. He scans the crowd, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. His one visible eye is sharp and alert, looking, looking --

There. The man. The source. Kaze takes a step, setting his shoulders and planting his feet on the stones of the street. The hustle and bustle of the market quiets somewhat near him, onlookers suddenly concerned for no reason they can determine. His left hand is visible, hanging at his side almost casually in a way most here would have no idea the significance of. Mullonde is not the place one would expect to see firearms, nor one ready to use one.

Kaze stares across the rapidly-emptying distance between himself and the armored figure. He stares and stares and stares, as if willing him to make sense to him. There is a familiarity here that he cannot shake, and a feeling of impending violence he isn't sure he wants to.

The space between Kaze and Garland gradually empties of people. Kaze hasn't made any motion to make them leave; they just do, and then don't fill the space again. He waits patiently for the figure to be within earshot, without shouting over the noise of the market street. He speaks, and his voice is tense and coiled like a spring, impatient and demanding.

"Who are you?"

Garland has posed:
Kaze's existence is not ignored. As Garland glides through the crowd noiselessly - he has been alive for far too long, living inside this shell of steel and sorcery for ages upon ages, to still make clumsy noises when he walks like a rank amateur; the grinding of the heavily armored soldiers of Glabados is an annoyance he understands well, recalling his early days - he cannot help but notice that feeling. It starts quietly, like something tapping at the back of his neck; he turns down the street and walks, and as he walks, it grows stronger and stronger, from a tapping to a drumming to a full-fledged roar. It echoes in Garland's mind, some hidden, forbidden thing in this so-called holy ground; it calls to him, a challenge he cannot ignore. In a way, this is even more troubling than the things lurking in the city; those are creatures of darkness he identifies with, shadows tugging at shadows. This...this is something else. He knows this feeling, but does not know why he knows it.

He passes by the man in the poncho, as silent as a cloud. In the back of his mind, he can feel the power, the screaming thing that forces his acknowledgement despite not being of the darkness, of the shadow, of the nightmares that dwell on the edge of reality. He passes by that man, and carries on his way...and the man stands behind him. Even in this crowded environment, Garland is well-accustomed to fighting; his situational awareness is without peer, honed over ten thousand years like everything else about his ancient self. He can sense the man's motions, as he senses the chattle that wander through this place, dead to the world but for the faith they believe protects them.

The Ironclad Nightmare ceases motion as the street begins to empty. The horror that hangs in the air is palpable; now that attention has been called on him, his subtle little trick is broken, and the filter over the minds of the people is broken. They scatter, backing away like frightening animals from the Nascent Chaos; they murmur whispers of 'Ajora help me!'. Men tremble and stand before their families, false bravado filling their hearts; women clutch their sobbing children to their chests and move away; adventurers and knights alike unconsciously grip their swords hard enough to turn their knuckles white. Now that attention has been called to him, they are suddenly quite firmly aware - the Devil has come to Mullonde, and defiles their city with his unholy presence. And yet...

And yet none are willing to step up and face him. Garland does not turn around, as the little mortals flee to safer places, as they back out of the street between Kaze and himself; Kaze speaks to his back, to the billowing cloak and the shadow of the horned helmet that stands beneath the low-hanging arch. The Champion Of Darkness gives no acknolwedgement that he heard the man; no subtle inclination of his head, no nod of awareness, not even a tilt over his shoulder. But somehow, Kaze would know, deep in his soul, that this man cannot ignore him, no more than he can ignore the man, if a man the iron creature even still is. Massive metal claws tense against massive metal gauntlets; they hold no weapon, and no weapon is sheathed upon that armored form, but Kaze still gets the impression that this man could punch through a building without much trouble if he sought.

Finally, Garland lowers his head, just a bit. Though the helmet blocks Kaze's vision into it, the impression is all too clear - powerful, sweeping, world-consuming darkness stares out at him, stares through him, the guilt and the terror and the nightmares in the shadows, the hidden secrets and hidden shames, the Abyss given flesh beneath that iron form.

"I am Garland." His voice is as black as his gaze, as deep as the silence that settles in around it. Not a crying child weeps aloud; not a breath is drawn from the terrified crowd. Garland turns, the full weight of his armor meaningless to him, that same eerie silence as armor that must weigh tons making absolutely no noise as massive metal boots land atop the stone.

"Who are you, who dares to demand me so?"

Kaze has posed:
Silence reigns, utter and impenetrable. The populace is terrified, showing it or not, and the collected breath of those all around is held as tightly as it can. Fear taints the air with its distinct scent.

"No."

The silence is broken, because the man who dared confront this Champion of Darkness deemed it so. Where they feel fear, he feels nothing of the sort. There is a sort of assurance he has that this is the right one, a compulsion to do something about the armored figure's presence that throbs beneath the surface of his skin.

"That name isn't who you are." The words slip out of Kaze's mouth before he can think about it or stop himself. "Is it."

Some might think his course is unwise, speaking thusly to a man of Garland's obvious strength and stature. They would be correct. Were it anyone else, they would be smashed into pieces before they could get much further; someone like him would surely not take any insult or impudence likely. The strength and concentrated power he wields demands such.

Were it anyone else...

"Kaze," he finally says, "is what I'm called." With those markings on his face, those clothes... and, when he moves, is that a glimmer of gold beneath his poncho? The man is no new arrival to the world stage; The Black Wind is known far and wide, though only spoken of in rumor and fearful whispers. Kaze's presence here is almost as dire as Garland's; perhaps moreso, in some ways. Where he goes, they say, worlds crumble and die. Garland may subjugate men and shatter souls, but when the Black Wind blows, whole world simply scatter into pieces like grains of sand on the breeze.

Kaze's stance shifts slightly. His poncho very slightly falls away from his right arm; the golden object there is slightly revealed, lifted just so, as if he's balling his fist beneath it. Does he have an arm that isn't now some contraption?

"You're like /him/." That feels right. Kaze doesn't know why. He thinks he's speaking of the White Swordsman, of the White Cloud fleeing before the Black Wind's furious howl. His left hand twitches slightly, fingers itching for a trigger. His voice is rough and low, a growl bubbling in his throat as he speaks.

"What are you?"

Garland has posed:
'No.'

The word carries through the marketplace, bouncing from wall to wall, echoing with defiance. It is a simple word, but a perceptive one; no one in a very long time had denied Garland's name to be the truth, no one in a very long time had acknowledged that it was merely a title, a mask, an affectation for something far deeper and darker and more monstrous than a man named for a silly decorative wreath. Kaze speaks, and that clinches it; Garland knows this is not some ordinary man, some would-be hero who witnessed his actions in Cornelia, nor some ally or acquaintance or mewling little friend of the little boy and his team who had come to rescue the Pince. No, this was the man who had his mind roaring, who had the back of his skull screaming in rage and anger and fear, the voice that he never heard demanding action, demanding motion. It has been a long time since Garland has feared, a long time indeed; he could not remember the last time its sweet kiss permeated his blackened soul, the last time adrenaline coursed through those withered and ancient dust-filled veins. How much of Garland was even still alive...only Garland truly knew that. But biological responses had long since ceased to be part of him, so to hear this, this fight-or-flight screaming in his ears at the presence of this man who knows the Truth of his identity...

Garland begins to laugh.

It is a dark, horrible laugh; the men who sheltered their families turn to hug them and huddle down as though they were in the middle of a great quake, the women tightening their grip on their children as though a flood were about to sweep through and claim them all. That laugh is dark and terrible and colder, darker than the depths of the deepest oceans and colder than the void of space itself; that laugh rings with Oblivion in its wake, with the nightmares of little boys and girls who have done no wrong and yet are tormented by terrible dreams, with the terrors of good folk who see the world breaking down around them and fear for their families. It carries plague, and poison, and destruction and death; it carries horror and sorrow and all the darkness of the world as it bounds about in response to Kaze's declaration that his name is not the truth, and there is no mirth in it, no light, no joy; those emotions have long-since been killed inside him, long since put to the metaphorical sword for the sake of power overwhelming.

"The Black Wind." Garland has heard of him, of course; the words of terror that redouble through the crowd confirm what his agents already knew. A man who invites destruction, who wields a weapon that can crumble the world around him; a bringer of despair, a devil clad in a black poncho. The worlds feared these two men, these titans of destruction; Garland had crumbled societies, invoked wars, broken worlds, his silent, mysterious hand behind more events than Kaze could or likely would wish to know. Kaze had brought ruin in his wake, the power he wielded meant for nothing but destruction.

"Am I?" Garland inquires, in a tone that would be airy if not for the sheer plutonian darkness of the voice that it carries; he sounds almost like he's mocking the Black Wind with those words, as though he's daring Kaze to figure it out himself. Indeed, he is - Garland is not a man who talks overmuch, who spills his secrets and his plans at the drop of a hat like some sort of rank amateur plotter and planner.

"Darkness."

Kaze has posed:
Garland laughs. The noise is terrible, a din that the sudden quiet carries far and wide. It seemed dry and unused, to Kaze's ears; something that wasn't exercised very often, and for good reason.

Men and women quake in fear at the mere sound of Garland's laugh; Kaze simply looks past it, watching the figure it comes from rather than focusing on the unnerving qualities of it. The sound resonates with something within him, something old and forgotten. Memories stir, unbidden and unwelcome, to the surface of his mind.

"You --"

MANY YEARS AGO
A WORLD NAMED...???

The roar of the monster was mocking, like the laughter of a cruel god.

Kaze can't see anything around him. Dust filled his vision, his mouth and his nose clogged with the stuff. His stomach turns at the thought of what it could be, after the devastation It had wrought. The soil itself was now a layer of soot and ash, streaked with strange colors and hues like a mad artist had slashed open his veins and bled the colors of his works into the dying ground. He raised his left arm to his face, trying to wipe away some of the horrid debris that dried his mouth and blinded him in the sudden, hot wind.

His eyes, blurry and bleary, couldn't focus on what was ahead and above. The shape was colossal, incomprehensible; it crammed itself into a shape in order to better facilitate the destruction of all, but not for a mind to properly latch onto. It was chaotic, insanity given shape, fury and power and hatred and that mocking, laughing cry. He turned away, looking for anything, anything --

The man in white. A sword of the same color, hovering near his hand. His hai wild, his face masked, his eyes intent. Did he stand with the monster? He must have. It was the only way. The only explaination. What else could it be?

A grim sort of calm crept over him. Acceptance made it easier. He knew what he was looking at, now.

This was the end of the world.

NOW

"-- monster."

Kaze doesn't remember his weapon entering his hand. He doesn't remember his arm moving with a sudden swiftness that is beyond the ken of mortal man. He doesn't remember the shotgun-like weapon in bright red being levelled at the man in armor of pitch, or the thoughts that made him pick his targets. He does it, and by the time the trigger is pulled, he determines it was right.

The shells scream with a metallic pitch atop the deafening crack of the firearm in the terribly quiet air of the afternoon; they spin and hurtle at the man, slight twitches in an arm easily bracing the killing weapon shifting their targets with precision. His aim puts them at joints in Garland's arms, his legs, minute gaps between his helm and his breastplate where the gorget does not quite cover against a man of Kaze's skill. He fires from the hip, the element of surprise surrendered to the necessity of a few simple questions with the implication of an equally simple fact.

The wind does not bend to the fall of night, no matter how deep the darkness may be.

Garland has posed:
Kaze calls him a monster. Garland does not really react to that at all; he's been called a monster at least four times in the past two days, and at least a billion times in the past ten thousand years. It's kind of like spitting into the ocean; it's not really how one raises the water level, so to speak.

But then Kaze moves. He moves fluidly, perfectly; his motions are inhumanly accurate, pointing directly at the joints in Garland's arms, the kneecaps of his boots. He manages to aim and fire his shotgun without even changing his stance, without even properly drawing the weapon; one of the bullets even comes screaming towards Garland's neck, as though it could break through the gap between his head and his chest. Kaze is a fearsome opponent.

So is Garland.

The blade is drawn out of the shadows in a single, smooth motion; bullets are caught on its massive edge, shattering - not sliced, but broken by the sheer overwhelming weight, the sheer almighty power of the sword - on impact. Those few bullets that do not shatter pling off Garland's armor, ricocheting off into the buildings. None of them reach their target - there is no spray of blood, no cry of pain. The Monster called Garland seems only superficially injured, if even that; it's rather hard to tell under that massive iron armor.

"Amusing," Garland's dark voice intones. It wasn't, actually; it wasn't funny at all. If he'd been even an instant slower, had had even one brief microcosmically small delay thinking about his action, he could have been seriously wounded. How long had it been since he had fought someone like this? How long since the cycle of battle had blessed him so, with something he could truly enjoy. Indeed, this almost made up for the little children yesterday.

Garland does not wait for Kaze to reload, nor to fire again. He comes in swinging, like a force of nature; the massive blade comes swinging round, demolishing one of the many stalls in its wake, sending wood splattering and splintering all across the sky as the blade literally shifts in mid-motion from a straight sword to an axe. Kaze is fairly sure that, had that stand been made of stone, it would have still been cleanly annihilated; the people in the area can feel the wind of Garland's swing.

And then, mid motion, he changes it entirely. It is a seamless, flowing motion from a violent, wild-looking slash into a brutal stab; the stab spins, the sword whirling, its segmented nature revealed once and for all as Garland goes right for the throat of the matter, right to break his opponent directly. It does not seem to be a magical sword, either, nor any mechanical trick; Garland is simply so old and so skilled at wielding it that the sword obeys him as though it were alive, twisting and turning at the mere motion of his hand like a well-trained dog.

Then, as the whirling stab nears its conclusion, the sword lunges outwards, extending into a massive chain-link of destruction. It is fully likely that it could knock Kaze through a building with that kind of force behind it; it is also fully likely that Garland does not even remotely care.

Does Kaze?

Kaze has posed:
Bullets ricochet off into the buildings nearby, shrapnel-like fragments scouring the sides of solid wooden walls and stone edifices alike. Even the shattering parry doesn't rob them of all their force. The huge iron armor is more solid than it looks, surviving hits from that weapon... though perhaps Garland hasn't yet seen why.

And as soon as all that, the screams have started.

People start fleeing as soon as Garland's blade comes out. They run in all directions, scattering like sensible townsfolk. In normal circumstances, Kaze wouldn't; he would just stand still as a statue and gun down the charging swordsman before he could reach him. These are far from normal circumstances. Instinct screams at Kaze to get out of the way, not to stand and take it but to put as much distance between himself and Garland as he can.

Kaze's feet leave the ground as soon as the stand to his left is reduced to splinters and fragments. He springs backwards, the blade narrowly missing him, the tip cutting across his midsection at such proximity that individual strands on his poncho are neatly parted and frayed by the edge's passing. When it turns into an axe, Kaze's visible eye widens fractionally; he dives again, dropping into a roll that leaves a short but deep nick on his brow and a trickle of blood down his face when it should have instead taken the top of his head clean off. Close, very close, too close.

Then things get hairy.

The whirling stabs are something Kaze is prepared to deal with; the fighting chain that it seems to morph into is not. The object slams into his chest and carries him to the opposite side of the street, slamming the man's body into the wood-framed glass window of a jeweler's shop and carrying him clear through it. He hits the back wall and shatters it with his bent back, flying towards the door on the opposite end of the structure. The chain cracks the frame and snaps the door in half at the middle, folding it over it like a piece of paper and finally coming to a rest embedded in the solid stone wall opposite it in the alley it opens to.

Kaze is not beneath the chain.

The Black Wind's shotgun fires again from within the jeweler's, the screech of the firearm and its payload ripping the rest of the front display window out into the street and showering Garland with glass and lead both. Tar-covered shingles on the rooftop burst outward in a plume of dust and debris less than a second after, and Kaze jumps clear onto it from the ground floor, still raining death down into the street. It isn't as aimed as the first volley was; the volume of fire is there to keep Garland at reach, not to take off his head with a well-placed blow.

Kaze's stance isn't as straight as it was a moment ago. If he's hunched slightly for his balance or from broken ribs, it's hard to say. Curious, though; that head wound isn't bleeding nearly as much as it should be.

Garland has posed:
Townsfolk flee at the sight of his blade; that was good. Not that Garland had literally any problem using people as cover, or mowing through them to get to where he sought, or any of those things that evil people generally didn't have a problem with; Garland is not a noble demon, not an honorable beast. He has zero problem making Red Mist to get to a hero (or villain foolish enough to use a person as a shield).

However...Garland had designs for the Ajorans. He had to investigate them; appearing at least somewhat heroic did a great deal towards gaining their interest. And if he caused some bloodshed along the way, maybe some property damage, and possibly splattered this creature called Kaze into one of their buildings...well, that was unavoidable in battle.

If the presence he sensed was accurate, though, they might even thank him for splattering some humans...

Kaze goes flying away from him, carried by the power of the chain through glass and wood and stone; Garland follows the chain with unholy strength, leaping up the building and inside as if it were nothing. With little more than a snap of his mighty wrist, the chain comes sliding backwards, reforming and relocking into a single massive blade. Garland begins moving forward -

- and immediately flings himself backwards as the jewelers' shop erupts into chaos. Bullets of that same unusual nature go flying towards him; he leaps backwards, landing silently against the ground. Even the dirt is not displaced by his landing, so completely has he mastered moving in this armor. Unfortunately, dirt is not the biggest of his problems right now; those bullets splash across the marble road, cracking pieces of Glabadosan handiwork and sending chunks spiralling away. Glass falls; wood and lead come crashing down upon Garland's head, and he bats away the lead with all the expertise of a master swordsman. Still, volume can easily beat even the most skillful shield; several bullets find their marks, and once again, Garland finds himself wondering how his armor can even BE dented by this modern weapon, let alone how HE could be hurt by it, could feel the impact beneath the shell of armor he wears as a constant effect. Garland brings the blade up above his head, shielding himself from the wort of the shingles and the lead as he follows Kaze from the ground. His opponent had the high ground, but he was injured - though not as injured as Garland would have liked. The nature of the head wound is equally curious, but no time to ponder that now.

Garland leaps. It is a spectacular motion; armor so big and so bulky goes flying into the sky at a moment's notice, an impossible act from an impossible man. At the same time, his blade shifts, elongating just a bit and expanding outwards from the sheer force of him. He begins to fall, directly at Kaze, far faster than a falling object should; it is then that Kaze would be aware that that lance, combined with Garland's weight, will easily be enough to tear through the building they are standing on.

Nevermind what will come afterwards, as the lance begins to spin, and the Mist begins to gather at the tip of it, forming into an Earth spell by sheer brute force rather than any magical efficiency. It is as though Garland is simply bullying Magic itself to do as he wills - and succeeding.

That can't bode well.

Kaze has posed:
Collateral damage and civilian casualties are not something Kaze is unfamiliar with. This fact is probably what lets him spray bullets into the street with near impunity and without batting an eye. If he'd hit someone... well, that's too bad. One more casualty to add to the list started the day he began on his bloody crusade.

Kaze's fusillade cannot continue forever, though. Garland's defense is, to use a particularly apt turn of phrase, iron-clad; a master swordsman he may be, but it takes better than a master to parry bullets nearly flawlessly. He's something supernatural, something beyond human -- just as Kaze is. His weapon is strange, the product of a world turned to ash and darkness, and in his hands, even something like the Darkness in the shape of a man is vulnerable.

There was never any indication otherwise, after all. Kaze had no reason to believe Garland was invulnerable; why would he? Nothing is, to him.

Garland takes to the air. Kaze doesn't spend any time marvelling at it. He doesn't retreat up the slope of the building's roof, but fires downward, indenting the undamaged portion he's standing on and giving him better ground. He won't be able to move fast enough to evade Garland completely, not with that kind of speed, but the next best thing -- that he can do.

The monstrously powerful swordsman connects with Kaze. There is a shower of sparks as the lance slams into something metallic and buries itself in the rooftop, cleaving through the shingles and rafters like they were so much gossamer. Garland's weight hits the roof next, forcing Kaze beneath him, and the entire thing buckles and falls. The building shakes and collapses down around them, dropping the rooftop into the insides and pushing the outer walls outward, bowing inward the structures on either side, causing them to creak dangerously. The sound of breaking glass and twisting metal and splintering wood is deafening as the building comes down from the combination of the shock and the intense quake immediately after, and a cloud of dirt and dust billows up around them.

For a moment, Garland can somewhat clearly see what parried his weapon: a golden cylinder, rounded at the end, covering Kaze's right arm from his elbow all the way down. The lance is pressed against it, the tip barely missing the spot where Kaze's foot is planted on the shingles that now occupy the space the jeweler's shop used to be. Most curiously -- perhaps alarmingly -- is that the cylinder appears to be undamaged from the effort.

"Hmph." Kaze's left hand dips; he swings it down to his belt and knocks something loose, sending shells into the air. His gun passes through the space for a second, split open, and then snaps closed in the span of a blink around them. The gunshot that follows is louder than before and fired /downward/, turning the space around the lance into powder, blasting it into the next best thing to nothingness in place of a real explosion. Kaze steps back slightly, swings the gun upwards, and fires another shot directly into Garland's chest, relying on the sudden change in footing to knock him off balance even slightly.

Kaze suddenly drops into a crouch. He fires upwards this time, the third and fourth shells aimed under his arms, the intense force pushing the cloud of dust into the street and clearing the space the two men fight in of the fog as he abruptly tries to make Garland airborne, fully intent on catapulting him into another building across the street and well away from him.

Then, finally, the Mist catches Kaze's eye. His visible eye flicks to the object encasing his right arm, spying a strange glimmer from the glassy stone set into its otherwise unremarkable surface. Did it...

Garland has posed:
That cylinder piques Garland's interest more than anything else. Whatever that golden thing was, it had the power to parry *his* almighty strength, the strength to tear through armies with his bare hands; he had already known well that this man was not normal, but at the sight of that cylinder, as they go crashing and smashing and slamming down through the building, as the Earth shakes and the building quakes and spikes come roaring out of the Earth where Kaze was all of a moment ago, spiking upwards around Garland like pillars of destruction, the fear and urgency racing through Garland's mind redoubles. He roars, a roar of challenge, as Kaze looses his shells; he goes plowing forward, seeing his chance, his moment, his instant to strike through the defense of this mysterious gunman.

He sees wrong, and it shocks him. The bullets smash against his chest, the not-at-all-iron chestplate bending backwards with a shriek of metal and collapsing in upon itself; it does not break, not fully, but it is more damage than Garland has had inflicted upon him in an age's age, and that is enough to worry him even more than the screaming of his instincts. So as Kaze moves to push him upwards, Garland reacts; his blade comes whirling around, smashing through one of the support structures of the building to bring the pillar down between himself and the Black Wind. The bullets smash through it effortlessly; stone and wood is torn apart and shredded as Garland takes the strike and skids backwards, forced backwards - forced backwards into the street, physically moved by a will not his own! - for the first time in more years than he could personally count. Garland releases a breath he did not realize he had held, and begins to laugh once again. What power! What a blessing! The cycle of Battle had rewarded him after so long, had come back to him to allow him to exercise the awesome power he so wielded, and it did not disappoint, as ever! So much strength in this man's arms, so much force in this man's strange weapon - and that mysterious golden thing that Garland would have to rip off him and investigate when he lay dead in a ditch! Truly, the Darkness rewarded its followers!

Still laughing, Garland comes charging in again. Very well! If he cannot break Kaze's metal defense, then he would bypass it! His massive sword splits along the center; Garland rips the smaller sword free, the blade transforming into two massive weapons each about the size of a standard greatsword. And yet he wields them and moves as swiftly as a man wielding two smaller, lighter blades; he swings them around ferociously, viciously moving to cut through Kaze's defense without pause, to force Kaze into the defensive and keep him on his toes as they fight down the streets towards the Glabadosian chapel. Already, the sounds of alarms echo through the city; Garland ignores them. This is far too much fun. Far too much fun.

How long had it been since he had *fun*?

Kaze has posed:
Garland's strength: mighty, yes, but not unbeatable, not unblockable. He is nearly an unstoppable force, but there always has to be an immovable object. Equals and opposites. Where there is one that is mighty, there is another that can counter it. Has Garland finally met his match in this Black Wind, or has he just found someone he can truly /fight/?

The next structure starts to come apart as Garland uses it as a shield. The pillar tears free of its moorings and actually rises off the ground for an instant from the gunfire before shattering into pieces, exploding like a grenade and sending shards of masonry zipping in every direction. One chunk flies past Kaze's head, the angular piece narrowly missing his ear and burying two inches into the wooden corner brace of the next building over. He doesn't even blink.

That laugh. Kaze doesn't feel entertained, or amused; he feels irritated, mildly annoyed that the creature calling itself Garland seems so intent on laughing at him in the middle of their battle. None of it shows on his face; his odd poncho's high collar conceals his features enough that it is nearly impossible to tell what he's thinking or feeling. His interest in the reaction of the object on his arm to the Mist, and to Garland, is not quite apparent... but it may soon be, if this goes on much longer. He feels a tingling sensation run up his right arm, almost electrical; a pulse of power, begging to be released.

Not yet.

Garland rushes in. Kaze rolls out of the building and into the street, parrying Garland's first greatsword sweep with the cylinder, the object ringing with a dull chime and the shock rolling up his arm. He throws himself backwards in another roll, two more strikes smashing the cobblestones into gravel and almost giving him a haircut at the same instant. He follows his movements with the eye of someone not quite human, someone with the same kind of speed and grace but without the physical strength to match it. Thrice more he's forced to use the golden rod as a shield, barely turning aside killing strokes. It's close, but not because he's unskilled; rather, he only uses precisely the force he needs to redirect it, never stopping a blow fully.

Their path to the temple is rapidly becoming more obvious. The ground is rent and cracked where Garland has swung and Kaze has stepped. Each time he had to block it, the shock of the strike travelling to the ground pulverized another piece of the road. Each time Garland's swords almost connect and taste the Earth instead, Kaze is another step back, another handspan out of reach. He's elusive, fighting a defensive game all the way to the tall steps to the cathedral itself.

Kaze launches himself off the ground, landing with both feet perched on top of a white stone statue of a holy man in full armor brandishing a sword of marble and gilded in gold. He stands almost like a bird, both feet on the statue's sword-blade, standing on the toes of his boots and staring down at Garland with a look that could (and might) kill. He fully extends his left arm this time, sweeping his right behind him for balance, firing a pair of resounding shots into Garland's shoulders and stepping back along the statue on the way. He backs up onto the crest of the helm and fires again, this one aimed for the top of the Warrior of Darkness' helm, followed immediately by another three rapid-fire shots into his dented chestplate.

What Garland didn't see was the very slight wince, concealed entirely by his collar. It is equally unlikely he heard his right arm pop back into its socket after he dislocated it blocking those swords and very intentionally swung it behind him to fix. Kaze can feel the pain almost immediately dull and begin to lessen; a small, but significant, blessing.

Garland has posed:
Hm.

Yes. Every unstoppable force must have an immovable object; Garland had been both for far too long. He had been the nightmare striding across the land, the invulnerable once-and-future god assured in his own strength and power, apart from the world, for longer than he could remember. He had not been wounded - had not felt his own wounds, had not been *hurt* - in far too long. Oh, certainly, here and there he had been struck, by brave ones or would-be suicidal saviors, who found their efforts meaningless and ultimately folly...but nothing like this. Nothing at all like this; nothing like this man who dances, who turns aside his blades with nothing but a golden cylinder, who parries him so perfectly and so flawlessly that no motion is lost and nothing is wasted. Garland is impressed, and he has not been impressed in an eternity either; the Black Wind was a fearsome foe. Someone he might even call his equal...perhaps.

The palpable power welling up in that cylinder was of more interest to him than Kaze himself, however. That power rolled up Kaze's arm, and Garland was immediately aware of it; as his blade is parried by that cylinder, he can almost feel the power himself, the brief touch enough to communicate exactly how much strength was building. A frightening amount, to be sure. Garland's blade smashes into the ground, blowing apart chunks of marble; he ignores it, continuing to press his advantage.

It is the man's speed that impresses him most; as he darts and dances up the stairs of the Ajoran cathedral, Garland is forced to admit the man's sheer tenacity as well as his skill. Garland cleaves through step after step as Kaze swings backwards; the scars in the ground tell the story of their fight better than anything else.

Then Kaze leaps, and Garland is forced to hold for the moment, considering. Were his foe an ordinary man, Garland would have simply charged up the statue and broken him; had he done that, however, he would have left himself terribly open, and suffered the consequences thoroughly. Instead, as he stands there on the steps of the Cathedral, Garland brings up his fist, releasing his grip on his sword; his backhand comes swinging upwards, smashing aside the first bullet and sending it flying into the glass below, the dent on his armor an acceptable sacrifice. In doing so, he's changed his position - not much, but enough, enough that Kaze doesn't strike him dead in the dented chest, but instead on the shoulderpad and the left arm, the force of his motion carrying him just enough to keep him out of more potentially-lethal harm's way.

Not that it doesn't hurt. It hurts, quite a bit, in fact; it is frightening power, frighteningly powerful, with a strength Garland could not deny. Kaze is a ferocious warrior, a ferocious opponent; that he could inflict this much damage on Garland spoke volumes about him, volumes more than any in-battle chatter or discussion ever could've revealed. It was giving Garland considerable ideas.

Garland throws out his hand towards Kaze. He closes it into a fist, tightly crushing his palm; the noise of metal against metal is loud enough for anyone in the vicinity to hear, even over the ringing alarms. Power gathers there, palpable, destructive power; Garland gathers that power in his right hand with all the brute force of the blade hhad wielded earlier. Light flares in his palm; fearsome, ferocious light, burning nuclear light well-recognizeable to anyone who knows the magic of the world.

He throws out his hand.

NUKE

The force of the NUKE erupts with the force of a bomb. Fire washes over the cathedral; the windows shatter, flames pouring across the ceiling as Garland unleashes one of the mightiest spells ever designed by spellcasters, the sheer magical force gathered erupting in a truly glorious display of mystic might. It is a simple spell - power, power, and more power, released at exactly the right time - but an effective one, if one that requires a great deal of training to perform, and a great deal of strength to cast.

Garland appears to have both, and have lost none of his strength.

Kaze has posed:
Actually, Kaze was counting on Garland to continue using his blend of magic and swordplay -- it was what he'd been doing the whole battle, and he had no reason to believe he would suddenly shift to one or the other. The approach to the cathedral and the statue before it is an excellent kill zone, one that Kaze's well-honed instincts called out to him to use without even thinking about it. His weapon was still readied, still loaded with enough ammunition to put down the Darkness-made man coming at him every step of the way.

The unpredictability of Garland's maneuver isn't what throws him off, though; at least, not entirely. The pain is beginning to catch up with him. The pain of cracked ribs, a formerly-dislocated arm, of cuts and bruises and lacerations and gouges and all manner of minor injury that adds up, little by little. He isn't an armored titan like Garland is, and he can't avoid every spray of debris, every heavy-handed slash. He's slowed imperceptibly.

Kaze senses the build-up of magical power, but only because the object on his arm reacts. Kaze's eyes flick to the gem inset into the cylinder as an inner glow flickers to life, drawn out by the sudden immense power brought to bear. He looks back to Garland, seeing his hand move. It does it in slow motion, to him -- he sees the hand move, and the terrible power at Garland's fingertips races forward, outward, upward. Kaze lifts his left hand, dragging his shotgun through something like molasses in comparison, the air itself seeming too heavy to outrace. He brings the barrel to bear on the outstretched hand --

-- an instant too late.

The cathedral's windows, all stained glass and rendered with loving detail and brilliant artistry by the people of the city, are instantly vaporized. The heavy wooden double doors that keep them out buckle and bend inward, heavy iron hinges melting down instantaneously. The blast is more than enough to make the doors catapult into the rows of pews within, turning elaborately-carved, polished and cared-for furniture into kindling as the doors land and skip across the interior of the place of worship. The remains of the pews and massive doors turn into a roiling tide of splinters, erupting into a wave of fire that rolls across the interior floor. An organ screeches its death scream as the intense heat is forced up through its pipes and then melts them down. A raised platform for delivering sermons cracks and collapses, pulverized by the following shockwave.

As one might expect, Kaze is in a similarly dire shape. The blackened, horrifically-burned form of the man who fought Garland this long lies crumpled on the wrecked altar at the far end of the room, sitting up only by virtue of a solid iron Glabadosian cross stopping his momentum and warping around him in the process. He's doubled over in front of it, limp and boneless, arms sprawled out at his sides. His red shotgun is miraculously intact, having fallen out of his loose fingers and come to a rest behind the altar, against the wall.

And then he moves.

Kaze's clothing and accessories are, perhaps inexplicably still in more or less one piece. His dark red hair is wild; his skin is charred beyond the point of blistering. He twitches spasmodically, his left arm jerking like a marionette without strings for a moment. His head lolls, coming to a rest with his chin against his chest. But Garland won't be interested in that; the object on his right arm, with a gem shining with a white-blue light like an aurora, most certainly catches his interest.

Kaze slowly lifts his head. He looks down the scorched and ruined carpet, spotting Garland in the distance. His head slowly, agonizingly, turns the bare inches it has to in order to regard the thing on his arm. It remains pristine, but glowing with heat and light. Did it absorb part of the spell? Is that why he's alive at all? Or is it --

"It moved," Kaze says, his voice a dry rasp.

The man pulls his legs underneath him. They shouldn't even work. He forces himself off the ground, a dry cracking, creaking, tearing sound coming from him as he moves. The horrible burned skin all over him peels as he rises, sloughing off him like a snake shedding its skin. It falls like ash, leaving new, unburned flesh visible beneath it. Every second that passes brings him closer and closer to what he was before he was struck by the force of NUKE.

Kaze lifts his right arm, crossing it in front of his chest. His eyes grow wide and wild. He inhales, his voice no longer a rasp and his breath no longer a death rattle.

"Soil! My strength!"

A golden object on his outer arm retracts into the cylinder. Another one replaces it, a short object like a drill portruding from the side of the device. The air darkens, currents of Mist, violet and red, becoming visible. A flash of bluish light like a corona of sparks fills the space directly in front of him, replaced a second later by a four-bladed fan, or shuriken, or something of the sort, black as pitch and spinning up like a rotor. The Mist spins, whirling into a vortex that surrounds the strange object.

Kaze extends his arm into the vortex, the blades vanishing. Six indentations open hissing, three on either side of the device, the white Mist of magic suddenly drawn inward through the openings. The entire thing glows, growing in size and then coming apart, turning into a storm of golden fragments that circle his bare arm, wreathed in cyan light and encircled by a helix of the darker power surrounding him. He gently closes his hand, the handle of a weapon forming inside it, and a cuff affixed to braces and intricate piping attaches to his wrist. The weapon -- for that is all it could be -- grows forward, a long barrel like a hexagon exaggerated into something near a triangle extending forward, all wrought in the same gold as the cylinder he wore.

The details fill itself in a second later. Three openings appear in the end of the barrel. Grooves run from the openings down the sides of the weapon, disappearing into the pipes and maybe wires of the elaborate cannon. A glass enclosure appears, pitch blackness resting inside the globe-like thing nested inside the tubes atop the weapon -- and then the darkness beats. Once, twice, it beats, a heart in black with veins of red manifesting, beating away near the back of this weapon. The drill-tip spins up on the side again, portruding towards the right, and it gleams brightly as it seems to solidify into something /real/.

Something deadly.

"The Magun... has thawed."

Garland has posed:
It was not merely Garland's armor, nor his ungodly strength, nor his impossible mastery over spell and sword alike that made him so fearsome. It was not his intellect, honed over the ages, nor his grasp of tactics equalling or surpassing some generals. No, what made Garland truly fearsome was that unpredictability; his ability to adapt, to shift between the swordsman and the mage and the combination thereof as seamlessly as necessary. That he had mastered all styles of combat he wielded was less frightening than his ability to simply jump between them and control the flow of the battle, for one could adapt to one style, or two, or even three - but the ability to read the battle, to change with such reaction, where most people had barely mastered one or two such styles? That was his true power.

Garland's fingers trace along the devastation as his massive clawed gauntlet comes to a close, lowering to his side. Indeed, the action had not tired him at all, nor did he particularly care about the destructive force he had brought to bear. That he was afraid of this thing - this person called Kaze and his strange golden arm - was enough to bother him, enough to retract his general rule of subtlety and instead wield all of the world-breaking power he held in his grasp. That he was willing to do so without even thinking about it...to unleash the NUKE here, in such a place...it would draw attention. People would come and investigate him. He would have to deal with that.

He hated that he would have to deal with that.

Such was the price of crushing this creature he so feared, for no reason he truly understood.

Garland strides forward. He knows that the man is not dead; as the windows are vaporized, literally turning from artistic, beautiful glass into artistic, beautiful gas from the sheer overwhelming heat of the attack, as the doors cave inwards and fly across the vaulted room and destroy hand-crafted and ancient pews, he walks slowly, inexorably, menacingly forward. The devastation means nothing to him; he walks through the melted organ, calmly making his way towards the shattered pedestal and the iron cross that bears the man upon it, his cape brushing across the floor of the church the only noise besides the smoldering of the burned wood and the echoing sound of the NUKE being unleashed. And yet, again, Garland knows well that the man is not dead; he knows all too well that the man has not perished, for he can feel it deep in his black and terrible heart, feel the power that radiates from the man hanging on that cross. It is electrifying, terrifying; it is exciting. When he had last been excited? Again, the question springs to mind; he dismisses it, for it is wholly unimportant to the current situation. As it stands, the shotgun wielder lives; that much he knows, likely even before the man himself knows.

'It moved'.

Garland's attention is indeed focused wholly on that object, on that strange cyliner upon his arm. The aurora that shines forth from that gem is one that he knows he knows, though he knows not how he knows; it, then, must be the source of the primordial fear, the primordial terror screaming for him to run and hide or strike now and kill the creature dead. As Kaze moves, as he pulls himself to his feet, Garland does not waste time contemplating the sheer impossibility of this action; instead, he throws out his own hand, as the golden arm retracts and transforms into its elaborate cannon form. He brings it down, close to his chest, and begins to gather power. He does not know what is coming - only that he fears it, and that anything that he fears is something that he must take care not to expose himself to.

Garland stands there, in the center of the burning church, as the Magun thaws; he stands there, his blade in one hand, a neutral position, ready to counter whatever strange attack the man could possibly throw at him. He dares not go on the offensive. To go on the offensive is to lose his life - that much he knows.

"Interesting."

Kaze has posed:
Kaze lifts his left hand, empty of shotgun for the first time in this entire battle. He points it directly at Garland, finger and thumb extended, glove only covering those two digits. His face is uncovered by the high collar of his poncho with the motion, expression of disdain clearly visible. He does not seem impressed, nor intimidated.

"I have chosen the Soil for the likes of you!"

Kaze keeps the Magun extended, tilted downwards and to the side. His left hand crosses his belt, pulling a cartridge from the rows of them cleverly worked into his clothing. The tip and back of the bullet are the same gold as the Magun, but the interior is different. Held in a cylinder of what looks like glass is grains of something -- sand, maybe? Dirt? He called it Soil; could it really be that simple? He holds it up by the bottom as if examining it and staring downrange at Garland at the same time. The stuff inside is a brilliant silver, metallic and bright.

"The light that dictates the time of eternity," Kaze states. "Luminous Silver!"

He rolls the shell between his fingers and over his thumb, then flicks it into the air, turning his hand over, palm up. It rings like a clear chime, flipping end over end and seeming to hang in the air around him. At the same time, the back of the Magun opens, three slots letting out a pneumatic hiss and covers sliding outward and flipping over to let the chambers lie open. The shell falls down to it, sliding smoothly inside, and the top left chamber closes with another hiss of Mist.

The Black Wind reaches to his belt, drawing another shell. He holds it in front of him vertically between his thumb and forefinger, practically looking through it. The glassy wall around it gleams in the firelight. The contents are black as coal, black as the night sky, black as Garland's sorcerous blade, yet still they seem... strange.

"The darkness that dictates the time of destruction," Kaze announces. "Demolition Black!"

He lowers his hand, releasing the charge. It slides smoothly into the Magun, the second chamber, next to the first, closing and sealing up with another tiny puff of Mist and a quiet hiss. His hand continues downward, swatting the row of shells at his best, clasping his hand over most and letting one in particular fly upwards, tumbling in the air in front of him. It passes before his gaze, and again he speaks.

"The moment that dictates the time of extinction. Steel Grey!"

The charge falls again with the same rich ring as the others. It slides without resistance into the chamber, slowing as it reaches the end and clicking into place with a slight jerk. The last and bottom cover closes over it, lifting up and sliding into place with one final hiss.

The air suddenly grows heavier with the presence of the darker-colored Mist. The heart trapped within the glass atop the Magun begins to beat wildly, the thumping of the organ echoing in the cathedral's cavernous space. The drill-bit on the right side spins up, speed matching the thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump of the black and red heart. The white Mist swirls in small amounts around the head of the drill, flickering in and out of sight for a brief instant. The three holes at the end of the barrel flare with violet light, blazing like a blowtorch with a white core, the sound of the rush of power joining the desperately pounding heart.

Suddenly, the room grows dark. The light seems to dim from everywhere; sunlight doesn't penetrate the windowless holes in the walls, and the firelight doesn't reach the two of them. Kaze's outline is dimly visible in the darkness, illuminated by a faint trail of golden light drawn in the air from the tip of the Magun's barrel gracefully sweeping upwards into line with Garland. His eyes go wide, pupils seeming to shrink to pinpricks against the whites of his eyes.

"Pierce through!" he cries. His voice echoes in the suddenly silent cathedral, filling the walls. "I summon you --"

"ODIN!"

The Magun fires. A titanic plume of smoke accompanies the sound of the deep, booming gunshot. The smoke cloud is easily three times longer than he is tall, at the least, spreading into a half-dozen smaller tines that drift up and down. It hangs there for a moment, and for a time, it seems that nothing has happened at all. Then, just as suddenly, the smoke is disturbed, rippling forward like the wake of a ship in the water, freezing and warping as something breaks out and through with a sound rising in pitch like a slightly distorted engine.

Three tines of light break free of the smoke, one in each of the colors loaded into the Magun. They leave a trail of the same in their wake, twirling lazily around one another as they spiral outward towards Garland for a second or two. Then, suddenly, they speed up, merging into one column of energy, twisting into a spear of cyan light that grows, and grows, and grows, closing in on the force of Darkness before it.

The cyan light suddenly blooms, bursting into a shape: a man, armored from head to toe in steel grey and luminous silver, riding a six-legged horse clad in the same. He wields a two-headed lance comprised of solid white and cyan light, with a shield bearing an ancient red crest of an empty eye bisected by a vertical line lashed to his left arm. His helmet is crested with a forward-sweeping crescent of the same sort of bright light.

Odin lowers his lance and /charges/. He's of a stature greater than Garland's, riding a charger of the same. His lance seems infinitely long and infinitely sharp, and he does not have any intention of slowing down for the force of Darkness standing before him. His shield covers him as well as his lance leads, bearing the power to strike apart any form of counterattack and render it to light and dust.

Garland may learn this the hard way.

The moment that Odin's lance impacts, it throws off a colossal shockwave of light and force. Stone cracks and yields; whats left of the wooden and glass things in the cathedral won't survive. If there are any windows or glassware within at least a few blocks that are intact afterwards, or if the roof doesn't need to be completely rebuilt, or if Garland can even /stand/, it will be a miracle.

But then, this /is/ a place of God, is it not?

Garland has posed:
This ritual is strange and alien to Garland; Kaze's magical gun is something unknown to the Ironclad Nightmare, except in the pit of his black and terrible heart as something to be feared for reasons, already stated, unknown to him. Again, though he knows he could interrupt at any time, he dare not; he dare not leave this position, rooted as he is to the ground, lest he be broken by some unknown attack, left incapable of defending himself against this creature that had so deftly proved to be his equal. Kaze's hand sweeps into the belt, drawing forth the Soil, and again, Garland is forced to wonder. Soil? Of what nature was this Soil? What sort of power did it contain, that could make his black heart tremble so? Again, the excitement welled up within him; a battle he had wished for for so long, a battle of true challenge and true might, a true test of the power of the once-and-future god of darkness! This was no training session with Angantyr, no battle against children - this was war, war against an unknown force that sought his obliteration from this world, and he welcomed it with open arms and open eyes. Glorious battle! Glorious warfare! Glorious bloodshed and destruction and violence! All this, Chaos did love most!

All for Chaos! All for Garland!

The light that dictates the time of eternity enters the Magun; Garland's hand grips against his blade as he watches the gun chamber. He suspected that this would not be a simple bullet, nor a simple three-chambered bullet; the sheer power of that weapon told him that. But...as the darkness that dictates the time of destruction falls into the chamber, as it slides together with that terrible hiss, Garland begins to actually worry. Truly worry, not simply fear. He would get one chance at this - and only one - to survive. He would need to read the attack, to identify its nature, and to break it all in one single swift motion.

Then, the moment that dictates the time of extinction is slotted in. The heart begins beating, its ominous thump-thump, thump-thump echoing through the building, seeming to come from all around; the darkness spreads, the Mist rolling through the cracked and broken pews, out the vaporized cathedral walls, spilling into the empty streets as the people cower in their homes in terror.

The room goes black, and Garland tenses, coiling. What sort of attack...?

Kaze names it ODIN. The smoke plume bursts forth, erupting from the end of the Magun; the god of blades emerges on his massive horse, the thump-thump thump-thump thump-thump of his six-legged horse against the marble of the floor replacing the beating of the heartbeat ringing in Garland's ears. Odin charges, and Garland knows immediately that there is no counterattack to this, not to strike at Kaze; Kaze was perfectly defended. Even Odin...even against Odin, a counterattack was impossible, for that lance would purge it. Gungnir would simply destroy the attack immediately upon impact. All he could do was stand there, and...

...no.

"No," Garland declares, the first words he's spoken in quite some time. As Odin thunders towards him, he makes the declaration, and the single word echoes through the cathedral, strong and defiant despite the pounding of the horse's steps. It is not impossible, says that word - it is not impossible. Difficult; unbearably, unimagineably difficult...but not impossible.

Garland has posed:
Garland drops his blade; it vanishes into the darkness immediately, disappearing in an instant. He lowers himself, hunching over, his clawed fingers spread wide against the oncoming assault. He lets out an almost feral roar, all sense of dignity and mastery gone in favor of raw, brutal strength; there is no parrying the perfect swordsman, no countering the perfect warrior, no fighting the god of battle on his own terms. There is only one option.

Garland's roar pierces through Mullonde's sudden burst of artificial night, and he charges to meet Odin head-on.

The lance collides with him; it smashes against his hands as he slams his feet into the Glabadosian temple, forced backwards by the sheer might of the summons, forced back and back and back some more by the god of battle's almighty horse; his heavy boots dig into the temple floor, a pair of trails making their way through Ajora's holy place as Garland struggles against an unbelievable force, holding it just away from his chest, just an inch, just a centimeter, just a millimeter away from his own body. And then...

Deadlock.

Garland stands there, locked in an immortal wrestling match with the massive summons. Odin is mighty - Odin is powerful, Odin is pure and total destructive force. But so too is Garland. The darkness that pours from his body is not a simple shadow, not the simple darkness of the Heartless; it is deep and absolue, a darkness that flares outwards not as a shadow of the light but as its equal, as its opposite, pouring out of Garland like tendrils and wrapping around Odin's lance as Sleipneir pushes against him. Around them, the cathedral quakes under the weight of the titan of light and darkness; the iron cross falls, landing explosively on the ground. Every inch of Garland's metal body screams with stress and pain and suffering and he suffers, unimagineable, unendurable agony as he fights against Odin with all of his nigh-immortal-but-no-longer-godly might; he summons it all, and bets it all, not in a counterattack, but in something far more risky.

Garland roars, and drives the spear backwards, piercing directly through Odin's head. The shockwave explodes around them both; the pews are flung outwards, the walls shake, the ceiling simply begins to fall; massive chunks of it come pouring downwards, obscuring all vision. All the glass and china and ceramics within several blocks simply gives up on life as the backlash of Odin's destruction comes through, roaring a wave of devastation through the district.

Ground zero is a massive hole in the ground; the explosion of the summons, the shockwave of light and pain and suffering, has left more than its mark upon the Cathedral and the city. But what of Garland? What of Garland himself?

Garland has posed:
After a moment, a moment that stretches onwards like eternity, the rubble stirs. A chunk of it is hurled to the side; Garland rises one more, his cape utterly destroyed, his helmet's right horn shattered, his armor cracked all the way along it. The crumpled chest-piece has caved in nearly completely; his gauntlets are just gone, literally gone, vaporized by the effort they just expended. So too are his armguards; all the way up to his shoulder, there is no armor, no protection. The tattered remnants of his cloak fall about him as he rises from the crater, darkness bleeding from the sockets where his gauntlets once covered; the shadows conceal his true nature completely as he makes his way towards Kaze, inexorably slowly, knocking aside falling hunks of rock as the temple continue to undergo its structural crisis.

"Very impressive," he declares, his voice somehow managing to dwarf even the darkness pouring from his body, imperious and powerful despite his wounds - his copious wounds, wounds he well knows he has received, wounds he is uncertain he could take again, "Man of the Magun."

"But Garland does not fall so easily!"

Then the darkness redoubles. Shadows pour out of every crevice; they pour into Garland, rolling up his arms and off his shoulders and off his head, transfiguring him from an iron devil to a shadowed demon. Then he moves, so fast, so fast; he moves, and he reaches out towards Kaze, and the darkness sweeps over him, complete and all-consuming, ready to devour him even as Garland's left hand fills with flame and destruction; as the right hand pours shadow into his heart, the left hand moves to grab at Kaze's face and detonate another NUKE inside his skull, to make him FEEL Garland's displeasure, Garland's anger, Garland's raw, unbridled hatred. For Garland has not merely been injured - he has been wounded. It will take him some time to recover from this; time to mend his armor, time to mend the damage to his ancient and broken body, time that he will not have to use on his infinite plots and plans.

As Garland moves to introduce Kaze to both the darkness and the light of Chaos in a very personal fashion, he cannot help but tremble.

What if his gamble had failed?

Kaze has posed:
The Magun has fired.

Odin charges. Gungnir, an unstoppable force in its own right, lunges forward. The creature of Darkness rises to meet it, and the shockwave is enough to make any man turn away for fear of losing their sight or their mind. The cathedral shakes and cracks, beginning to truly come apart under the incredible duress the two opposing forces put on it. Then, the roof falls inward, opening the darkened space to sky and burying Garland beneath tons of masonry.

Kaze looks up to the rider, staring at him with a once more passive gaze. Sleipnir trots in a circle, regaining his footing, and Odin raises Gungnir in salute to the Black Wind. Kaze inclines his head very, very slightly, and the rider wheels his mount around, charging out a window and vanishing into shards of cyan light tinged with black, grey and silver images of their passing.

All this, and yet Kaze is fully aware that Garland still lives.

This is perhaps the first time the Magun has not immediately dispatched whoever Kaze was faced with. Even if they survived, even if they were merely diminished by the effect, they were driven back. Not so with Garland, the Ironclad Nightmare. Kaze stands at the eye of the hurricane, the roiling Mist and power that boils blood and slays men and their homes with equal ease surrounding him in a corona of black and violet. The artificial nightfall fades, glimmers of the afternoon's light peeking in the gaping wounds in the cathedral's walls like the sun was rising for the first time this day.

Garland rises and speaks. Kaze lowers the Magun, the still-smoking barrel's inner light gradually fading. The golden glow that surrounds it intensifies for a brief moment, and the Magun comes apart in a flurry of its component parts, transmuting into the cylinder that encompasses the red-haired man's right arm. It shines with the light of the sun or the heart of the Earth for a brief, glorious moment... and then it dulls, the power fading away.

Garland strikes.

The darkness itself moves at Garland's command. Kaze is overwhelmed by the immediacy of it, sliding one foot back behind him and bracing himself for the shadowed demon's onslaught. Garland's speed is not overwhelming, though, not for one of Kaze's caliber; his left hand, empty, grapples with whats left of the creature's armor, and his right, encased in the shell that would become the Magun, swats at the fire-filled left ineffectually. The NUKE goes off point-blank, and the solid stone beneath his feet craters and buckles from the directed force. Kaze is swept off his feet, launched into the air and hurtled backwards again, hammering against the stone wall above where the symbols of Glabadosian faith once rested. His impact spiderwebs the stone like cheap glass, and the darkness surges forward, all-consuming, intent on annihilating him.

It doesn't touch him.

It ravages his body with killing cold and horrible, nightmarish pain, exquisite agony brought upon the Man of the Magun -- but it doesn't touch his heart, his soul. It cannot find purchase, it simply /cannot/. Something unbreakable and impossibly bright rests at the core of this man's heart. Not goodness and light, not faith or holy power, but simply power unending. Power indescribable. Power...

...Unlimited.

Kaze falls from the wall, limp again. His wounds aren't so severe as they were before; its like the suffering he inflicts just refuses to stick, shrugged off like a slap on the wrist or the scratch of a thorn over the course of a lazy day. He hits the ground behind the altar stone, disappearing from sight for the span of a second. There's a slight scraping noise of metal on stone, very quiet; he might have bounced.

Suddenly, the gunfire starts again. Kaze brings his arm up over the altar and begins unloading into Garland's wounded form, the bright red shotgun of his retrieved from where it was launched after the first NUKE. The shells echo deafeningly in the gradually more-ruined cathedral, the cavernous space making it seem as though he's attacking from every angle at once while he continues to focus on picking apart the Ironclad Nightmare and driving hot lead into what passes for his cold, black heart.

His expression is still locked in one of perpetual distaste and disinterest, though at his heart, he knows this man, this creature of Darkness, is one of the /things/ that he /must/ destroy, no matter the cost.

'No matter the cost'...? Something seems... wrong. But...

Garland has posed:
UNLIMITED

The word flashes in his mind, echoes of something he does not know, as Kaze deflects his NUKE off into the area just beside them; he roars again, the well-spoken gentleman in iron vanished, subsumed into the sea of power and obliteration that is Garland's true self. For this is his true self, the truest self that Garland can possess; it is for this that he murdered his own heart, for this that he sold himself the Darkness, this power and rage and overwhelming might. It was for Sarah that he sold himself, for the power to claim her as his own, and that power has done nothing but grow in ten thousand years, maturing into the Garland Kaze now faces. Ten thousand years ago, when he was little more than an infuriated knight with the powers of darkness, Kaze would have overwhelmed him. Now, Kaze stands as his equal, as one who can evade his speed and parry away his NUKE and, even more stunning, survive his terrible and all-consuming darkness. Garland feels it, there; he knows what it is that Kaze is, even if Kaze himself does not know. He knows what Kaze is as prey recognizes a predator, though in this case it is certainly he that is the predator; what Kaze has the potential to be, what Kaze has the potential to do, though...it is UNLIMITED.

But even as he feels the indescribable, unending power, so too would Kaze know the name of his tormenter. So too would Kaze know the name of the nightmare, of the one who glides through the tortured dreams of sinners, of the one who is darkness bound in iron by ages long and ancient. As Garland acknowledges the name of his opponent, so too did the power he wielded have a name, a name as ancient and black as the Darkness itself.

C-H-A-O-S

Kaze still lives. This fact alone is a miracle. That he is still in fighting shape is even more unbelievable; as Kaze moves his arm and fires, Garland hisses, a primal, furious hiss of displeasure. He smashes his foot down on the already-shattered cathedral; massive chunks of once-beautiful stone, once polished till they shined like the light Ajora supposedly represented, come swinging upwards, the bullets ripping the rocks to shreds instantly. Each bullet punches through the rock, boring away until they can bore no more, until sheer inertia demands they cease their assault. They crumble to pieces under the omnidirectional assault; Garland resumes his advance upon Kaze, no longer moving with eerie silence, no longer having the grace to do so. Each footstep echoes through the ringing, crumbling building; each motion shakes the floor as the full weight of that armor makes itself entirely known.

"Valiant," Garland intones, his voice ripping through the crumbling cathedral despite the sounds of its collapse, "To fight against me to your dying breath. To face me as an equal, to hold your own against Garland. I commend you, Man of the Magun - few others have stood where you have, have pushed me to this point. In all of history, none have ever done so alone."

Garland's hands come upwards; slowly, he begins to clap. Each clap rings outwards through the empty streets, through the shattered glass of homes and shops; it is slow and purposeful, taunting, filled with black amusement.

"And there is reason for that, Man of the Magun" Garland continues as his sword suddenly extends from his shadowed hand, manifesting out of the darkness that surrounds and roars like the very physical force that it is. "I am without compare, without equal. You are the Black Wind that blows through the worlds, a trail of destruction, but I am the mountain of shadow and destruction, the volcano that burns black at its heart."

The massive sword comes upwards, swinging onto Garland's shoulder. How will he attack? How will he strike?

"HOWL, BLACK WIND!" Garland roars suddenly, lunging forward; his blade comes swinging, digging through the stone as effortlessly as though it were water, sending chunks of rock flying across the cathedral, to rip through the altar Kaze is using as a shield and send both it and the Man of the Magun flying into the sky.

"HOWL, AND BE SWALLOWED BY THE ASHES OF THIS WORLD AS IT BURNS IN MY FURY! HOWL, MAN OF THE MAGUN - FOR YOU HOWL INTO THE EVERLASTING, ALL-CONSUMING DARKNESS ITSELF!" Garland brings the sword down, hard, the blade extending outwards as suddenly as it had swung upwards, to catch Kaze and drive him face-first into the broken cathedral floor, to bring the twin chunks of the altar down upon the man who had challenged him so and let it be broken upon his back, and know that wherever Unlimited stood, so too would Chaos.

The Cycle of Battle continues.

Kaze has posed:
C-H-A-O-S

The word rings through Kaze like a gong being struck. It reverberates in his mind and his heart, the power of his soul seeming to acknowledge the existence and awful power of such a being. Acknowledge, yes; It is apropos. It does not bend knee to it, nor cower in fear. It stands resolute, shielding the man who wields it with the intangible armor of a heart that cannot fall prey to the machinations of the infectious, crushing darkness... or of the Enemy.

Garland speaks; Kaze hears, but does not listen. The certainty of purpose redoubles within him, the fires of his broken memory and his empowered spirit drowniung out anything Garland can possibly say. Nothing he could say could change this. They have to fight, and Kaze must win. He has to. There are so many people counting on him --

-- wait.

Kaze feels suddenly out of place. The entire world swims, and an abrupt feeling of disconnection overcomes him. He hears a voice in the back of his head, his ears ringing with a constant hum, a buzz that has no source but his own fogged memory. He hears the voice of a young woman, speaking to him quietly, yet her words are so loud he can barely make them out. They drown out the falling stones and the advance of Garland; they drown out his own thoughts, his own feelings, replacing them with ones of terrible remorse. Something she says matches what Garland said, but... not... quite.

The red-haired man lifts his head from the altar stone as Garland rushes him again. That massive blade hews through the worked stone of the Cathedral floor, flinging rubble at the stone. Kaze acts without thinking, flinging himself backwards into a roll and firing his shotgun apparently wildly in front of him and then, against all sense, straight down.

The stones disintegrate in mid-air, blasted apart into pieces no finer than grains of sand -- when they can be found. The altar shatters where Kaze fired downward, cracking down the middle and falling apart as a hollow beneath is revealed -- likely a place of refuge, or a hidden cache, but it doesn't matter. Kaze himself takes to the air, flung upwards on his own power as Garland's blade comes down. He tumbles like a rag-doll, spinning apparently out of control, though it couldn't be further from the truth.

Kaze's feet touch the cracked and pitted stone wall behind him. The bottoms of his boots squeak against the stone, and he twists both feet, his whole body rotating as he thrusts his left hand forward. Garland's blade misses him by a hair, the breeze of its passing blowing his hair and poncho back as it slashes downward through the back wall, passing through the worked masonry like a hot knife through butter. Kaze's eyes never leave Garland's 'face,' even as he trains the shotgun on him once again.

Garland falls before Kaze can fire. Kaze follows. The altar folds inward on his landing, and Kaze catches the top of the chunk to his left, vaulting over it and dropping into a short somersault on the other side. He springs to his feet behind Garland, turning one-hundred-and-eighty degrees in mid-jump and sliding to a stop with his shotgun outstretched and sighted on the Ironclad Nightmare.

"Someone once told me," Kaze intones nearly flatly, almost offhandedly, "that the darkness always fades way, but that the wind will always blow."

The deafening cry of the red shotgun fills the rapidly-collapsing Cathedral. He fires upwards at the remaining supports for the rooftop directly above Garland, the thick wooden beams splintering and shattering. Huge chunks of stone and massive timbers fall, the entire upper portion of the place coming down around the hole they already punched in it. Kaze weaves between the falling debris like the wind in the shape of a man, firing from different positions every time, bullets flying between gaps barely big enough for their passage and striking at Garland from every which way. The hollow beneath the altar fills with rubble as the floor starts to give way, and Kaze's shells detonate huge pieces of the once-beautiful floors and send shockwaves upwards at irregular intervals.

The Black Wind blows through Mullonde, its howl scouring away signs of The Enemy wherever they may be. Not even their holiest places are sacrosanct in a crusade against something greater than the darkness they already know.

Garland has posed:
Accursed boy.

Kaze narrowly evades the strike of the massive blade; the stones Garland sent flying after him disintegrate under the onslaught of that strange shotgun that is almost assuredly not what it seems. The Man of the Magun goes flying; Garland gives chase, abandoning caution. He can only be so cautious and still control the flow of battle, only tread so lightly before he gives up all command over the destructive ebb. Kaze touches down ont he wall; Garland's blade comes swinging upwards, narrowly missing the man as the other man springs over him. It was a critical mistake, but not yet a battle-ending one.

The Man of the Magun speaks his valiant words. The sound Garland hears is not that man; it is of four others, long ago, four heroes who once stood with the power of Light and declared that the dawn would ever break the night. It had taken the four of them, so long ago, to defeat him at his height; their words still rang in his ears, still deafened him to the world when even the barest reminder of their one-time existence raged in his black and twisted heart.

The shotgun discharges; it screams out its declaration, redoubing the words of the Man of the Magun, firing into the ceiling of the cathedral. Each shell discharges, crashing against the wood; the sheer weight of the stone it was supporting does the rest of his work, bringing the ceiling falling like a hammer. Kaze darts away on his swift black wind, dancing between the falling rocks as though they were no more dangerous than raindrops; Garland gives chase, smashing through them, his overwhelming strength sending him through falling stone after falling stone. It shatters against him; the rocks fall and break and do not bar him as he gives chase, just ahead of the floor that falls behind him. Shockwaves rock outwards; Garland leaps after Kaze, like a lion pouncing, so very close to bringing him down...

And narrowly fails. He misjudged it by a fraction, a fraction of an inch; he collides with the ground, and redoubles its swift fall, sending him tumbling down into the pit below. Above him, the rubble comes down; the cathedral caves in upon itself and upon Garland, and as Kaze escapes, he is clear to do so.

Silence.

Rubble begins to settle; dust pouring outwards from the collapse coats the streets, a gentle layer over the ruined marble of the street and broken glass of numerous shattered buildings. It is almost peaceful, as the dust settles, as though the world is sighing in relief that these two titans are done with their clash, that the Black Wind has scoured Chaos from this world.

Then the shaking starts. It is subtle at first, noticeable only through the shivering of the dust; a quiet tremor that runs through the earth. Slowly, it begins to increase; it builds in intensity, until nearby buildings already thick with damage find themselves swaying like reeds in the wind, what ruined remnants from the shockwave of Odin being countered lay within shaking out into the streets. Beneath Kaze's feet, and all around him, the world shudders.

It is not Garland that emerges from that shaking. It is fire and earth, the marble suddenly blasting upwards in a ring of decidedly sharp and deadly spikes, as the center explodes with flame and pressure and destruction. It spills outwards, smog filling the area, smoke choking off the light of the sun and the sky and the world around them as fire continues to pour out of the hole in the world. Garland rises through that flames, the cracks in his armor spider-webbed across it, the bleeding black shadows that hide his physical form somehow persisting even as he pulls himself forth from the flames, his sword dragged along the ground behind him, gleaming with the light of magic.

"And yet the darkness always returns," is all Garland says, and somehow the roaring of the impromptu magical volcano does not swallow his voice, nor does the shaking and the rumbling of the streets. The volcano begins to die; Garland hopes that with it dies the Black Wind.

Kaze has posed:
Kaze turns, regarding the devastation.

The formerly beautific cathedral has all but fallen. The rooftop has totally collapsed, poured into the interior structure to crush the inhabitants. The great double doors are gone, torn free and sundered within. The windows are all completely destroyed, with the uppermost portions of the stone and metal frames shattered and caved in with the ceiling, a latticework of cracks running up and down the walls. The back wall is crumbling as he watches it, settling into the place of worship turned into a burial ground for this portion of The Enemy.

Silence reigns. Briefly it is broken by the fluttering of wings. Kaze looks up, spying their only audience, the only witnesses to the carnage and destruction. The crows wait to feast, beady eyes focused downward en masse from the rows of black-feathered scavengers.

Kaze starts to turn away -- and then stops, turning back. The dust quivers in the streets. The ground shakes. The Earth itself howls in protest, and Kaze slides one foot back, slowly widening his stance. He ejects spent cartridges from the odd shotgun, sliding in more ammunition from somewhere in his poncho. He's ready for the reemergence of the Ironclad Nightmare.

That isn't what happens, though. That isn't what happens at all.

The ground explodes into shards of sharp stone and a pillar of fire. The blast-wave from the eruption of heat hits him first, and then the flames itself outpour. The ground underneath Kaze shatters and pours into the crater, dragging him towards the center -- and then it goes upwards into the conical shape of a magic-made volcano, spewing fire and smoke into the air in a seemingly endless stream.

For a second, it seems like Kaze is finally done for. The conflagration engulfs him, washing over the comparatively tiny shape of the man who challenged darkness and chaos. The blaze is blindingly bright beneath the haze of smog, shedding light that never escapes into the city. There is no way a mere man could survive that... but then, there is no way a mere man could have fared quite so well against someone like Garland, either.

The Black Wind blows once more, emerging from the fire and ash like a phoenix rising from the heart of the Earth. He ascends into the air, his gun flashing as he uses it to propel himself upwards that little bit he needs to get out. The hem of his poncho is ablaze, trailing smoke and making him resemble a primordial warrior with a cloak of fire surrounding him. He lands on the fragmented remains of the eastern wall of the cathedral, bracing himself near the corner. A strong wind blows, sending his poncho billowing and extinguishing the worst of the flames.

Kaze is a man of few words. "Not today," he says.

The now-familiar report of the red gun firing spreads into the streets, no longer contained. The smoke parts around the projectiles, driven back by the gale-force winds the shots seem to carry with them. Holes appear in the smog, the outermost portions illuminated by the sunlight as it seeks to reclaim the space it once shined down upon. He peppers the shadow-wreathed shape of Garland with gunfire once again, his precision aiming hindered by the smog. He relies on volume of fire again, hammering the living darkness until he's finally figured out where, precisely, Garland is.

The shots stop for a brief second. He lets Garland move, tracking him through the now-patchy smoke -- and then fires twice more, at the arm he could have sworn he took off, the one clinging shadow enfolds. Kaze's theory is that the armor is less filled than he expects. Let's see what happens when he wedges a pair of high-explosive shells inside the breastplate.

Garland has posed:
Garland grows tired of this. He has been fighting this accursed Man of the Magun for longer than he had fought anyone in recent memory; the boy's strange Magun, the Soil, the weapons being wielded, and his unbelievable tendancy to simply stay alive had caused Garland no end of irritation. True, honest anger, in fact - anger that he had not felt since the Light Warriors' time. Garland was a man who was used to being in control of everything; every little detail, the flow of every fight, went the way that Garland wanted, perhaps ironic for an avatar and incarnation of Chaos. Nothing happened in the world that he had not seen, nothing happened that he could not prepare for.

Kaze is both of those things. His weapon, his power; unique only to this Man of the Magun. The Black Wind that blows through Mullonde, that howls with its scourging might, is an entity unlike anything Garland had ever faced, an entity uniquely and diametrically opposed to his very existence in a way that even the Princess of Heart was not. As Kaze erupts from the fire and the ash and disappears into the smoke, Garland gives chase; his blade smashes aside the shotgun shells, knocking them off and away even as he clears through the smoke with the sheer wind from that massive sword's swing, the strength of him and the inertia of the blade more than enough to cleave a path through towards his foe. Kaze goes upwards, pouring sunlight down upon him; Garland takes all of an instant in the back of his mind to reflect the irony of clearing a path through his own smoke. The self-destructive irony of Chaos is most amusing, isn't it? But he was...different. Contained. Controlled. Guided.

Kaze ceases firing, and Garland loses the trail. He is a sitting duck for the moment, a sitting duck that can do nothing but wait; against a gunsman this is a most fearsome situation indeed, especially one of Kaze's skill. So Garland goes silent; he simply listens, straining out the sounds of his makeshift volcano, straining out the sounds of screams and footsteps and people fleeing even the homes that have proven not to be shelter enough. He strains out the noise of the world, and listens.

There.

Garland whirls, like lightning; his blade is flung out of his hand, shifting into an axe in an instant. It spins, end over end, cleaving through the explosive shells; they ripple outwards, the shockwave clearing the remaining smog from between Kaze and Garland even as the sword continues to fly. Garland leaps after it; he snags the sword out of the sky, closing it back into his palm and snapping it back into its sword formation just long enough to split it into its lance form. He comes charging at Kaze, a massive metal man with a massive metal lance, looking to do nothing so much as pin him to the side of a building by the sheer force of the blow; the blade splits into two midway through, and Garland shifts his charge, aiming now not for Kaze's chest but for his shoulders, to pin him by his body and let him bleed and scream and die.

"I told you, boy - I am the volcano. Be consumed within my flames."

Kaze has posed:
Garland fights through the swarm of stinging shots with the brute force and fury of an angered demigod. Kaze's patience, his careful attack, is turned against him. The explosions ripple through the air, parting the hazy veil between the two combatants, revealing the mangled armor of the Iron Nightmare and the tattered garments of the Black Wind.

The axe spins. Garland chases it, snatching it before it reaches Kaze. He ascends, coming at him the axe. The edge cleaves the wall he's standing on, breaking the chunks he's using as footing and throwing him down onto the ground before it. He lands on his feet, catching one leg in a crevice and twisting it sharply on impact. There's a popping noise, and he lets out a grunt of exhalation as his breath escapes him.

That's the opening Garland really needed.

Kaze slams into the wall, the force of the blow propelling him /through/ the remaining wall of the cathedral and hammering him into the side of a mausoleum in the graveyard beyond. Garland continues forward in a shower of fire and stone, the lance turning to swords. Both slam into his shoulders -- but not quite, the man jerking slightly and catching the blades with the meat of his upper arms, the keen edge scraping and cracking bone. He spasms, letting out another short exhalation of pain during the (for Garland, entirely too) brief moment of writhing, and then goes suddenly still. His head droops, hair shadowing his face.

Blood begins to pool, running down Kaze's arms, soaking his poncho and covering his chest, dripping onto the torn and burned earth beneath him. It is dark and red, the same as any other man's; he bleeds all the same, though mortal he may not be. He doesn't move, pinned like a butterfly to a board by the two swords. It is entirely likely he is unconscious -- too bad, too, if Garland's intention was to make him suffer.

Then, as if on cue, he moves /again/.

The Magun suddenly jerks forward, the heavy weight hammering into Garland's mangled breastplate. It feels like someone just hit him with a pneumatic hammer, the piston-like motion imparting far more force than he might expect from it. Flesh tears, the sword-blade coming free from his right arm in a shower of blood, flecking the wall and ground with a growing red stain. He exhales another grunt that turns into a growl, his head rising and his eyes flashing dangerously, and his gun goes off and fires a shot directly into the blade of the second sword... which splits on the impossibly keen edge, sending shards scattering into Garland's visor like bits of sand thrown at hundreds of feet per second right at the eye-slits. The force of the shot itself sends the sword high, cutting its way out of his shoulder with another gout of dark blood, a splash of the vital fluid spilling into the almost muddy ground.

Kaze throws himself to the left. He tumbles on his mangled arms to the corner of the mausoleum, then falls backwards, disappearing out of sight.

When Garland rounds the building, he won't find hide nor hair of him... though the shadows of this structure do seem peculiarly dark.

Garland has posed:
They crash throgh the building; Kaze writhes for all of an instant, an instant Garland finds thoroughly unsatisfying. It is a brief, all-too-brief, moment of thrashing, and then stillness, and Garland shakes his head. He was not an honorable man; he did not believe in honor, not for a very long time, and the passing of a worthy opponent meant literally nothing to him, no more than the knife in a man's back nor the endless manipulations he engaged in in every world he had access to. Garland raises his massive fist, preparing to smash it down through Kaze's skull and truly, thoroughly end the man's life - to make sure that he /did not/ and /would not/ and /could not/ come back. The removal of his head would surely be enough; a fist driven through his skull was practically overkill.

Then the man moves. The Magun jerks forward, and smashes into his chest; Garland stumbles, taken off-guard by the sheer impossibility of it. He snags the sword-blade out of the man's shlder before it falls to the ground; he brings the second sword around, meeting Kaze's bullet exactly as Kaze expected. The blade scatters, a cloud of dust obscuring his vision; Garland immediately fuses his swords into one, bringing the huge blade upwards like a wall to protect himself from any further attack. Any further attack would, of course, be suicide, but a suicide attack could take him out as easily as anything else.

Garland roars, shadows exploding out of him from every angle; they slowly form back into somthing approximating real armor, sending the dust that had dug into his helmet spiralling away, and Garland takes a moment to survey the area. The alarms of the Ajorans continue; upon noticing that Kaze is gone, Garland simply leaps out of the building, landing silently on the ground. His blade vanishes; a moment later, so too does he, leaving the scattered and broken grounds, the fire still pouring out of the ground, the smog still filling the air. The Black Wind may still howl, but the darkness had won this round.

Small comfort, and small balm, to Garland's all-consuming rage.