portal block

She stepped forward, leaping into a portal with all the speed she could muster—and as she was now, that was more than enough to set the air aflame and worse around her. She didn’t move in a straight line, either, flashing between points and moving from one portal to the next; a shadow that appeared briefly and skipped to another position in space. She could feel the attention on her with her Aura, keep track of when and where Malkuth lost sight of her, but knew that Jaune would be able to sense her through their connection and figure out what she was doing. Could Malkuth? She’d arranged it so that there were thousands upon thousands of possible paths for her to take, countless ways to approach him, and portals opened and closed with every second. One second she was far away, the next at mid-range, then far, close, near, far, and close again. To her, it was no different than moving in a straight line, but could he understand the route she was taking? Could he react to it?

Only one way to be sure.

In a step, she went from mid-range to right behind Malkuth’s back, and he was looking in entirely the wrong direction. His gaze flickered to the upper left, towards the entrance to a pathway she’d switched from at the last moment, and found nothing. Whatever he was doing to track her, it wasn’t perfect.

To his credit, however, he reacted fast, whirling around the instant she began drawing her blade. When it came to Iaido, she was one of the best, and with her current enhancements she could draw her sword at an absurd speed, but he still managed to turn half-way around and lift a glowing hand towards her face before firing what looked like a blood red lightning bolt at her.

But before he did, before he even moved to attack, something trembled in her like the vibration of a spider’s web. A warning of what to expect, what was to come, and at the same time a reminder that whatever physical enhancements Jaune called forth, they were but a shadow of the mental ones. A portal opened in front of her, swallowing the blast and releasing it from on positioned behind her, skipping the space she occupied. It was an almost unconscious reflex, a nearly instinctive defense for all that she’d never practiced it, and instead of striking her, the blast careened to strike a patch of ground that she briefly cleared of portals.

The earth erupted in a sudden explosion that expanded to about the size of a person and then froze for an instant. Then, the explosion seemed to reverse, sucked towards the center by some force, dust and smoke gathering into a piece of extremely dense matter no larger than a marble. It began to fall the second it form, dropping towards the perfectly smooth crater that the blast had created.