Hidden 7 yrs ago 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce frowned a little, his eyes flicking upward to see the little blue critter nested in his hair. He shrugged, a fresh smile taking root on his face as Ross brought forth his weapon.
"Fair enough. I can handle that." Bruce said. His blade shone into existence at his side within his sheath- he'd discovered an ideal rhythm, and the blade resonated with a musical Ki flow that made it both weightier and stronger.
'Just to confuse matters, though.' Bruce thought, charging in toward Ross with one hand on the hilt of his sword. It wasn't his typical style, or at least, not what his companions would know him for, but if he wanted to improve, Bruce would have to shake off the rust from his forceful mode of combat.
"Iai."
Bruce drew out his blade and slashed crosswise from Ross' hip to his shoulder in one motion, aiming to test the blade Ross so proudly touted and see how much his Ki control had improved. At the same time, while his left arm flew between the two of them, his right hand skirted on the ground, familiarizing him with the ground beneath him.
Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by tex
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Ross slammed the tip of his broadsword into the ground between Bruce's blade and his broad abdomen. The resulting noise resounded through the hall, but no harm befell the Gaian Giant. The point where Bruce's blade struck felt the pressure, where a slight discoloration noted a small amount of damage getting through its first layer of green steel. But the injury repaired itself, as Ki-based weapons would often do if they sustained any damage. Ross himself, didn't budge.

"That was a pretty strong swing, but Jenso's punch was a lot tougher!" Ross commented, "Come to think of it, I probably shouldn't have let him just hit me back then... Ah, well. I react a little differently to blades." Ross hefted his great sword forwards with a bump of his left knee, pushing the massive blade towards Bruce in an upward swatting motion, while also tearing up a patch of earth as its tip dug out of the ground.
Hidden 7 yrs ago 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce whistled at the small response his slash had achieved. His own blade, back out of its sheath, sparkled as though the ki were attempting to shift form before reverting to its familiar shape.
'Not yet, huh?'
Bruce couldn't help but be impressed- Ross' high confidence in the blade was clearly not misplaced. He momentarily thought to back off and regress to the style he'd self-taught, but he caught himself.
"Sorry if I disappoint," Bruce said. He lowered his sword down horizontally at waist level, poising one foot to brace the blade against the imminent clash with Ross's sword. With his other hand, he called upon his huge mace, it's form also pulsing with a beat, though different from the flow in his blade. In Bruce's mind, powerful rhythmic drums dictated the form of the mace, growing in volume and frequency as he heaved it around toward Ross' side.
"I am not Jenso."
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Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by tex
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Ross immediately struck the tip of his titanic blade two feet into the ground at Bruce's feet, grinding it against the breadth of his opponent's blade and releasing the handle as it dug deep below. Shards of rock kept it in place, and Ross pivoted his body to face the incoming mace. With his bare hands, he clutched the mace, and stopped it mid-swing, allowing the force to shoot down his legs and push him slightly, but as the momentum stopped, one of his hands darted towards the handle of the mace, and grasped it firmly, while his opposite, the left, pressed against the length of his sword. The earth below Bruce's right foot shifted upwards quickly, and Ross's blade disappeared, at which point, he pulled Bruce's mace away from him, and heaved his left arm towards the man's neck, open-palm, fully prepared to take his sword strike to the gut if he chose to follow through after Ross' sword disappeared. Ross was never one for fancy gimmicks, or clear cut strategy. But he was no idiot. If he was leaving his guard open, then a single strike wasn't going to do much. The question was, how much punishment could Bruce deal and receive? When would it be worth striking him if he could exchange blows at close range with his overbearing stature?
Hidden 7 yrs ago 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce considered for a moment how Ross would react to having a blade jammed into his side- but then he recalled the lesson Ross himself had given them that Ki was an extension of the soul. If Ross' soul, his blade, could take Bruce's strike with minimal damage, it stood to reason Ross would be fine.
'He's practically inviting me to attack,' Bruce thought. He slid his sword out from under his foot, planting it down on the ground for optimal leverage, and redirected the flow of the rhythm in his blade. The song didn't change, but it crescendoed into a piercing climax of focused flow toward the blade's tip, which he thrust toward Ross' gut.
At the same time, Bruce changed his mace entirely into the familiar form of his chains, the tune of his Ki coursing seamlessly from the heavy drums of the mace to a thrumming bass that resonated from each individual link in the chain, strongest where each link met another. The mace that Ross had held transformed and wrapped itself around his right hand and forearm, another extension of it shooting toward Ross' extending left hand to restrain the movements of his arms.
'It would be rude to refuse the hospitality.'
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Ross clutched Bruce's neck tightly as his blade flew through his abdomen. The skin around where Bruce's blade struck cracked and crumbled, and Ross lifted the Swordsman right off the ground by his throat before the chains could stop it. Although both his arms were now somewhat restrained, Ross's vastly superior raw strength made it borderline impossible to keep him from moving freely. His Stone-skin technique didn't make it any easier on Bruce, either. Ross smiled and shifted his left foot slightly, causing the earth below Bruce to rise and safely holy him. "Pause," Ross spat, dropping Bruce and backing away, with one hand clutching his wound. "Gimme a second.."
Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce felt his airway tighten under Ross' grip. He coughed once, loud and hard, once Ross dropped him back to the ground. He sucked in a gulp of air and briefly assessed Ross' state. A second was at least longer than it had taken for his own sword to recover from a hit from Bruce's blade. Not by long, though.
Still, the fact that Ross had requested any length of time as a time out in the middle of a test meant he'd achieved something. He opened his mouth to apologize for the wound, but thought better of it- he had a feeling it might offend Ross somehow. Instead, Bruce sheathed his blade, keeping one hand on the hilt, and closed his eyes, expanding his presence through the floor. Ross might have superior control over the material, certainly when Bruce wasn't using his sage powers, but Bruce's sense of the earth couldn't be cut off. He waited, keen on sensing when Ross chose to 'un-pause' the test rather than watch for it.
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Ross released his side, and the wound crumbled over. Although it didn't heal, Bruce's sword missed his vital organs, thankfully. Ross stretched upwards, cringing in pain. "Do you think I uh... Was it a good idea to follow through while I was so close to you? My stature is a tad overbearing, and my physical strength is..." Ross flexed his arm a couple times and shook his head, "Well, I'm not exactly fast, but my arms pack a wallop. How much effort would it take me to crush a windpipe?"
Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce blinked and straightened. He hadn't expected an analysis of his performance mere minutes after they'd started.
"Well," he rasped, clearing his throat again, harboring the distinct feeling he was about to be readily instructed. "It takes eleven pounds of pressure to collapse a windpipe."
Ross had been exerting an excess of perhaps fifty with just one hand- thinking about it, Bruce was fortunate Ross hadn't held him for any longer than an instant, or he'd have very likely blacked out.
Bruce thought hard to explain his decisions- the instincts he'd repressed had returned to him more quickly than he'd anticipated, and the more natural something was, the harder it became to explain.
"I'll confess that there wasn't a lot of conscious thought beforehand, but I figured that changing the scope of the battle from in-fighting to middle range would only hinder any attempt to actually hit you. I've improved my control over the earth, but your sword could easily negate any projectiles I might have struck with, and even if I connected us via my chains, I only imagine we'd end up in close quarters again."
Bruce paused, careful to avoid exaggerating what might have really spun through his mind or simply justifying his actions.
"Instincts brought forth a bad result this time, I suppose. I should adjust my tendency to accept being struck to score an attack myself. I probably should have been light on my feet and tried to trip you up with my chains rather than being so straightforward, right?" Bruce asked, a slightly self-deprecating smile flashing across his face. A moment later it disappeared as his brows furrowed.
"Or maybe I could have just stabbed him in the hand?" he muttered. There was no malicious intent in his voice, just hypothetical curiosity.
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Ross Shrugged and with a light smile. "Heh, a lot o' things coulda' worked. I'm not too agile myself. If I don't rely on reaction, I'm not too good at hitting much of anything, really," Ross admitted, "'Course, you haven't seen me fight before, have you? I think you may need to read the field a bit more before making rash decisions. That's what we're here for, though! Me an' the other boys might not be as strong as you guys overall, but our battle experience spans quite a damn bit! And that Mikey kid's a fuckin' genius, makes me- Ah, well whatever..." Ross twisted his torso a couple of times and sighed. "Alright, you've died once. If you die again, I'm calling it for today. There's only so much damage I can take with Alvios out of commission, wooo..." Ross backed away slightly and rose his fists. "You've learned a little more about me. If there's anyone I'm most like, it's likely to be that big yellow dude, uh.. Ray'jo'ku?" The earth around Ross began to rumble, and several small spires of stone rose up, surrounding him. With 6 crystal-like shards, all roughly the same size of his sword, surrounding him, Ross swapped up his style a little more and waited for Bruce to approach him. "I'm gonna try and keep things fresh, so that you can get some better practice in."
Hidden 7 yrs ago Post by Brucenorris007
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Bruce watched the spire rise out of the ground, recalling everything he could about Rajaka from the briefing on him a couple days earlier. He took a deep breath, recalling the errant Ki lingering around Ross that had dissolved during their exchange. Once more, he closed his eyes. The earthly restraints around his feet had sunk back down. He reached out for the planet's pulse, willing his own to match it.
He found it. Maybe it was a consequence of his training, or the removal of the restraints he'd once put on himself, but the pulse felt stronger. He smiled.
Bruce's eyes snapped open, and a wall of stone and concrete shot up between him and Ross. His mace made a second appearance and smashed the wall into jagged rocks that flew toward Ross and sent debris into the air. Bruce bent his knees and jumped in sync with a column that erupted from under him, angled slightly in Ross' direction. He went sailing over Ross' head, and, using his new vantage point, he erected another two walls on either side of the huge Gaian. These he made to roll across the floor toward Ross, growing larger as they gathered up more material from the ground.
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Ross' spire shield rotated quickly, picking up a surprising amount of speed to deflect the incoming shards like a stone-crafted hollow turbine. Ross, within, glanced at the walls on either side of him, left and right. His arms reached up, and summoned the Earth-render great sword once more, pushing it into the ground below with a great deal of force. Two walls sprung from the ground on either side of him, matching Bruce's own walls head-on, and smashing against them until the masses of stone and concrete were ground together into two singular mounds of compact rubble. The spires around him slowed down, and Ross rose his sword overheard, pointing it towards Bruce. Three of his six spires propelled themselves towards him, getting slower as they left Ross' immediate domain, but maintaining enough speed to inflict damage on Bruce if they hit. Of course, they were angled to collide with Bruce if he maintained his current trajectory. Ross, as per his usual core strategy, did not move from where he stood. He had an iron clad rule for battle that disregarded his most glaring weakness.

Don't move unless absolutely necessary.

After all, if someone had the brute strength to uproot him, or K.O. him to begin with, and happened to also possess a severe speed advantage, he just wouldn't be able to win if they knew what they were doing! Not unless he was able to protect his Alamo stance with both his elemental affinity, and titanic strength.
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'So that's what they're for.' Bruce thought, not surprised that both of his attacks were unsuccessful. He'd suspected that Ross had an advantage in earth manipulation already.
The next question seemed to revolve around Ross' sword- was it the primary source of his superior affinity, or did having it simply enhance his abilities? Regardless of the answer, the problem presented was the same. If Bruce wanted to strike another hit without getting killed, he'd either have to first separate the blade from Ross, or Ross from the earth.

Storing away his thoughts for the moment, Bruce summoned his chains again, shooting two lengths out from beneath each of his robe's sleeves. Each one wrapped around one of the three spires spiraling toward him. By retracting the chains rapidly and dispelling them once he had changed trajectory, he slipped between two of the spires and angled himself back toward the floor.
On his way down, he erected three pillars that rose up to at least three times Ross' height, and another chain shot out that wrapped around the one nearest him. Without touching the floor, he swung around by the chain, and a ring of sand erupted from the ground inside the triangle formed by the pillars, which angled downward after reaching an apex and converging toward Ross. Bruce's intent was to momentarily blind Ross to his position while he catapulted himself toward the Gaian after dispelling his chain again, another length hidden beneath his robe sleeve. His other hand held his blade as he flew just barely at a level that would clear Ross' head, ready to react if his instructor took a swing at him.
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Ross followed Bruce's movements, pulling his sword from the ground. Sand? Good move against an immobile target, but the spires near Ross began to spin once again. The resulting wind pushed away a fair amount of sand the rose from the ground, and Ross hardened his current position by turning the ground beneath him into a solid form of granite, raising him half a foot higher and preventing Bruce from directly tapping into the ground beneath him with his own flux of arcane energy. Ross pulled his sword to one side and scanned his surroundings, waiting for Bruce to show himself again. When he did, the massive man released his left hand from the hilt of his blade, and rose the entirety of his massive weapon into a large swing, aimed to collide with Bruce as he passed overhead. His left hand sook to call upon more defensive measures if Bruce tried using those chains of his again. The Gaian giant was confident that he could break those chains if he dedicated enough strength to the task, but if they were numerous enough, it may have been a different story.
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Bruce felt, rather than saw, the spires move again. He cursed the fact that he'd disregarded them in his, admittedly threadbare, plan. Not only that, but it was harder to sense Ross' impact on the earth now that he'd made the distinction between the material under his control and everything else.
Although part of him encouraged reckless abandon all over again, Bruce knew better than to expect that he could strike Ross with his sword before the Gaian got him. If he wanted to make any progress, though, at least one of Ross' hands would need to be preoccupied.
An idea popped into his mind, and Bruce created more lengths of chain that wrapped around one of each of the three pillars he'd erected. Timing the release as best he could, each length shot out toward an adjacent pillar, the path they took leading them straight into the turbine-like formation of spires that spun around Ross. Just one chain making it between a spinning spire and Ross would mean that the Ki-based weapon would surround the Gaian. Bruce allowed the length of chains to extend naturally at the pace of the whirling spires. He had little doubt that between his pillars and the spires, if the chain went taut, the pillars would break first.
That done, Bruce was already through the veneer of sand that remained between his flying body and Ross' position, and he angled his blade so that it was perpendicular to how Ross attacked. He shifted the flow of Ki in the blade, trying to mimic Mikey's defensive Ki structure as best as possible- rather than concentrating the song's rhythm toward the sharp end of the sword, he reversed it so that it made multiple crescendoes as it flowed toward the back side of it, culminating in a thick wave that would, hopefully, withstand at least one slash from Ross. At the same time, he stretched his consciousness to make a layer of dirt and stone crawl up the wall of the arena, planning ahead for his next move on the chance that he 'survived'.
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Ross' blade and Bruce's collided head on, leaving Ross to come out on top with the assistance of his grounded stance. But Bruce's blade was not shattered or thrown away, it was merely knocked aside, forcing Ross' right arm to reach leftwards across his own chest with the momentumn of the swing, and upsetting Bruce's midair balance with the sheer impact behind his blow. With his free hand, Ross aimed beneath his right arm, towards Bruce, and fired a single spine of crystal towards him quickly, like a small bullet, while he re-oriented his stance and pulled his massive blade back into a defensive position. The spire around him began to converge on Bruce's location as well, aiming to surround him as quickly as they could manage.
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Bruce felt a small sense of achievement at the fact that his blade didn't outright shatter against Ross', but he had no time to revel. The impact of the blow had upset his orientation in midair- thankfully, his connection to the earth made it nearly impossible to completely throw off his sense of direction.
Almost unconsciously, just outside of Ross' ring of granite, two thin poles of stone shot up out of the ground. The transition wasn't as seamless as earlier, but Bruce's blade nonetheless changed into his chains again, flying to intercept the poles and yank him up and away from Ross' crystal projectile and the spires. The poles crumbled forward toward Ross as soon as any sort of tension was placed on them. Bruce had managed to avoid a second death, though, and he left some length of chain behind near Ross' granite platform before he rolled onto the dirt and back onto his feet.
The chains that had aimed to snare themselves around Ross' spinning spires had narrowly missed their mark when Ross redirected their aim, and instead just connected Bruce's pillars to one another.
Bruce took in a deep breath, and exhaled.
"Terran Colossus."
From the side of the arena opposite Bruce, a horned beast a bit bulkier than the Gaian emerged from the floor, rearing its head before charging toward the granite platform and Ross.
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Ross stepped forwards, allowing Bruce's pillars to smash against him harmlessly. The Gaian's stone-skin made blunt-force attacks that didn't pack a whallop relatively useless, heck, it made most physical assault in general useless. Of course, Jenso and his friends weren't exactly normal. Ross adjusted his blade and began charging towards Bruce, disregarding Bruce's newly summoned ally and wielding his weapon aggressively. Now, he went for a swing, allowing his spires from earlier to dissolve into dust. Suddenly his speed seemed to spike, and his skin lightened slightly. Had he lied about being slow? This style of attack was completely unlike the bulky bruiser! As he landed on his right foot, the same step that aligned with his sword strike, the earth beneath Bruce bent towards Ross at an angle, attempting to offset Bruce's footing and force him to slide into Ross's blade.
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Bruce barely had time to register surprise at Ross' apparent drastic shift in tactics before he had to make a move. Rather than attempt to regain his balance, Bruce made the floor immediately beneath him cave entirely so that he fell downward and outside of the blade's reach. That done, he caught himself from falling deeper by jamming his sheath between the walls of the hole, and redoubled the efforts of his earthborn ally.
Bruce pondered what the sudden shift meant. And he'd noticed how Ross' skin had changed somehow. Did his spike in speed mean he'd shed his stone skin completely, or did he change the material? The latter seemed more likely. Bruce couldn't help but smile a bit despite the intensity of the fight- Ross was keeping his word to give Bruce as much variety as possible.
Thinking done, Bruce carved out a chute in the side of the wall that led back up to the surface behind Ross, and swung his body on his sheath to launch himself up through it, collapsing the material down behind him. Once he was up, his colossus had torn past Ross' granite platform, and Bruce set about adding a spike to the chain left around its base on the side opposite Ross. To avoid becoming predictable with only dodging, and since he didn't know Ross' full speed yet, Bruce also called his sword back from its sheath, settling himself to observe.
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Ross's blade sailed through the air, and he shifted his left foot with its momentum, quickly spinning to face the oncoming golem. With a single motion, Ross tossed his blade through the air, allowing it to crash into Bruce's colossus, with enough force to shatter it into several pieces on impact. Straight afterwards, Bruce popped up nearby, and Ross set himself into a direct sprint towards the man with his right hand held low, ready to fling out at a moment's notice. Ross' blade however, upon losing its speed and striking the ground, disappeared, and left behind a spiny burst of rocks, shaped like an exaggerated thistle ball. Ross opened his next assault with a left hook, or that's what it may have appeared as, as first. His agility in close combat, already somewhat formidable, had increased further. Ross halted his left fist and dug his right foot into the ground, once again pushing the ground beneath Bruce towards his right foot, which was now flying at him from below.
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