Portal types

 his outstretched arm, energy gathering to help put on a sudden burst of speed as she did. The moment the blade struck his flesh, the spacial Dust activated, creating a kind of sticking effect—instead of ‘cutting’ his arm off, which she assumed would be exceedingly difficult, she separated them, an altered portal clinging to either stump. They didn’t bleed as they came apart, but the hand fell to the ground, caught in gravity’s hold, and she positioned a portal such that it ended up a fair distance away. Not a wound, technically speaking, but removing the limb all the same. Against a regenerating opponent, it tended to have more effect regardless.

Unfortunately, Malkuth seemed familiar with such effects, because instead of wasting even a moment waiting for it to grow back, he made the limb glow an off-yellow color. A moment later, it simply evaporated, coming apart into a chemical cloud that she didn’t recognize but which was probably meant to do horrible things to her. She swept her sword through it, leveraging the same blade to a different effect, and what looked like a glass lens briefly formed in midair before banishing the toxic gas, switching it with a similarly-sized patch of air elsewhere. Still a portal, but meant to replace instead of move. Just in case, she moved it somewhere near enough for Jaune to deal with it and focused again on stabbing Malkuth in the face.

***

In many ways, that had been the case for her. She’d first learned how to use Dust by observation, peaking into classes and watching practices while she was just a little girl. Like most talents, Dust was something that took time and effect to master—and even more time and effort to remain a master of. Once she’d figured that out, it had become simple to find unknowing teachers and, with her power, easy to find opportunities to practice. Many of them had ended explosively, in one way or another, but in time she’d gotten a feel for it and explored the possibilities. Due to the nature of her Semblance, spacial Dust had been one of the first she’d put serious effort into learning to use and she’d found a variety of ways to do so. A ‘sticky’ portal that seemed to separate things she cut through. A sharp portal that she could use to intersect things, dividing them in truth. Portals of different sizes that could cause temporary alterations to any who moved through them, briefly turning pebbles into boulders and monsters into kittens. She’d even figured out a way to make a portal within a portal, such that anything that tried to pass through appeared to be reflected.