[h1][center][color=00aeef]Corban[/color][/center][/h1]
[hider=Visual][center][img]https://www.baka-tsuki.org/forums/download/file.php?avatar=9580_1344348745.jpg[/img][/center][/hider]

[center][@Thewizardguy][/center]
[hr]

It was rare, as experience would tell, that Corban was ever wrong. From the looks of It, it seemed the castress was more than eager to continue his streak on two fronts. The first was the dichotomy between sigils and free energy. Using free magic is arguably, on a magical scale almost always more potent than all but the most mathematically perfect sigils by virtue of their nature. This also means that using free magic was like firing guns -one may not outright be able to find the source of the bullet, but they'd know that a gunman was there, and even if he had a silencer, a talented mathematician could locate him via entry wound-trajectory- Sigil's however, were the equivalent of a blade's sheathe. The blade is contained within and never seen on the outside. Corban's choice of 'sheathe' (the aphotic blade) would all but leave her ignorant of the sigil's etched along the spine. What she would instead see is light being siphoned into the blade as a whole as opposed to fixed points along the edge. If she wanted  to find out what was up with his fancy sword, she'd have to see it up close.

Secondly, as he had thought, she was a spell-blaster, and like he assumed earlier, she'd rely on the speed of her draw. But gun dueling was more a matter of foresight and aim than raw speed. Well, speed helps, but not much against Corban. 

As the bolts of hard-shadow neared him, he recalled several other encounters he had with a group of necromancers just a few years prior. It may have been a while, but he distinctly remembered them employing similar tactics. The old 'shadow behind the back' trick was as common as the 'Control one's own shadow' among practitioners of shadow-magic. He wasn't sure how polymorphic her use of the darkness was, but that could be discovered a la trial by fire. With the hard part over, all that was left to do was decide how to deal with it!

[i]Dynamic - Move: A simple enough solution. Avoid damage zones entirely instead of rushing through them or standing directly against them. At least when the properties of a spell are not properly gleaned. However, this left room for counter-attacks like rapid-directionally-shifting flechettes. Mages had a bad knack of doing that.

Static - Stand: Rather than give up defensive positioning for speed, this suggests sacrificing mobility for defense. However, against loaded weapons, this could be turned against one who isnt careful. Luckily Corban was the epitome of 'careful'.

???: There was still the option of doing neither.[/i]

He may not have been the fastest, but he didn't need to be. Fortresses rarely moved anyway, but when they they did.... They'd move like.... Well. Moving fortresses. Why choose one when he could use both? 

"Dispel."

He said for no particular reason just as the  flying shadows would gorge upon him. A shock emanated out from what [i]seemed[/i] to be him as the epicenter, unraveling the shadows coherency as they passed through. Simultaneously, his skin Flinched as a coating of organic metal covered his body. The components came together quite nicely into a triple-chain railgun-flare-slidestep that would close the distance between them like a cheetah closes distance with a turtle.... Thats about twenty feet away.

A series of magical flares and feints were discharged that wouldn't so much take away preternatural sight as it would make having it a hindrance. In the mundane world, not a single thing changed. However, in the steeps of the arcane, it registered as a flash of light easily topping at over 20k lumens. Luckily for him, Corban didn't need to see to do what he needed.

If she could see at all after that sudden blast of light, Corban would be nowhere in front of her any longer. Between his zone of silence and the magical super-flare, he'd be positioned several feet behind her silently. Two-hands gripped hilt as he furls out of a lowering spin that would bring his edge to cross her from the top of her right rib to the bottom of her left rib, carrying the full diamond dusted force of the wind behind his strike for greater impact and cutting force. As his hands swung, bubbling metal began to drip from his left hand.

He wondered, how would she fit the fancy power-suit if she were literally cut down to size?