Welcome to Gaia! ::

A corrupt Senshi's energy signature was hard to miss, which meant that Alkaid didn't get to track others very often, especially not super senshi that had a reputation for kicking a**. Truthfully, she hadn't been perched in the tree very long but the senshi she was stalking should have at least noticed her by that point. If Nemesis wasn't going to come to her, then she supposed she would just have to go down there and meet her.

Alkaid jumped down from the tree, landing in a crouch that she quickly sprung up from. Nemesis should have noticed her by now - all that pale hair was hard to miss, even if her new fuku blended into the background of the night. The face was blank, void of any emotion, and completely unreadable. She didn't honestly know what she was doing here, following one of the most dangerous senshi she'd heard of, but she was always drawn to the girl - again and again.

"You let your guard down," she called out from where she stood, now centered in the path and directly blocking Nemesis. "That's a mistake that can get you killed, or worse." She wasn't threatening, not yet, she was just watching the senshi of decay with a startlingly cold demeanor.

Alkaid knew what lay between them. She had sacrificed herself for Nemesis, she had saved the senshi of decay with her own demise. What Alkaid was, everything that she had become since that night a few weeks ago, was all on Nemesis' shoulders. The senshi of decay would have had to have been heartless not to feel something for it and, despite the rumors about how cold she could be, Alkaid didn't think that she was heartless.

"Because I still believe people can change." She brought her hands up, spread wide out from her, and stared at Nemesis long and hard. "Do you want this, do you want to lose everything before you can see?" The truth was that she didn't really want to hurt Nemesis, she didn't really want to hurt any of them. She just wanted them to understand what they were doing. She needed her plight to mean something, for her sacrifices to matter. Why couldn't these Senshi just understand?

She brought her spread arms back up and crossed them over her chest, mirroring Nemesis' stance from where she stood facing her. The blank expression on her face had faded around the edges and there were sparks of other emotions flickering behind that mask - hurt, worry, anger. Her life revolved around that single idea, the knowledge that she had and needed to share. There was no way to sum all of that up with one emotion, with one word.

The roulette of emotions finally stopped, settling on anger that bloomed over Alkaid's face without a chance for her to squash it. It was a silent fury that made her press her lips into a thin line and sparked fire in her amber eyes. It was just like a Senshi to jump to the defense of their cause without a thought as to why. It was just like them to degrade the Negaverse and their goals, to try and destroy her loyalty to the only family that would claim her in this world.

"I see a world that has been invaded by intruders," despite the fury in her eyes, the voice that spoke was low and calm, but treading closer to a venomous bite every second. "I am fighting to remind you all that this is not our home, it does not belong to us!" The words gained volume, not quite to a yell, but there was real emotion behind them. It was obvious that Alkaid felt strongly about the subject, that the emotions that caused her chest to constrict was real. If it was brainwashing or something else, it didn't matter, because she would die to make them all see through her eyes.

"What are you fighting for, Nemesis?" She countered, her arms uncrossing and a finger pointing at the senshi of decay. She had seen her moving, ever closer, but still Alkaid could not back down. If she could just make one of them see, if she could just make Nemesis see. "You are fighting for a queen that has been dead longer than you have been alive, you are fighting for a princess that will never come back to guide you!" She could feel the emotions swelling and there was no hiding it now, there was no way to get her facade back.

"Earth is not our home, and yet here we are, waging war on it while our true homes rot!" The finger pointed at Nemesis flung upwards to the open sky overhead, framed by dozens and dozens of dark branches. She felt the familiar feeling of tears, painful pricks in the corners of her eyes that threatened to overwhelm her, but she refused. Nemesis would not see her cry, not tonight, not even if she was lost beyond reason.

In her many days since corruption, Tanzanite had come to know Destiny City park like the back of her hand. Well, the back of one of her hands, as the other was still a bit new. She'd first come here with Nova, again with Charonite, and then over and over in various battles, meetings, and more or less chance encounters. She knew the trails that stretched out into what wilderness was left, the various playgrounds and sidewalks, all the way out to where she stood at the outer edge of the park, staring down at a browish-red stain on the pavement.

It was all that was left of that night.

The broken bench had been replaced, the snapped trees and cracked asphalt taken care of by the city. Only that stain, left behind after Kunzite had hacked off her arm like an out of place twig, remained to remind her of what had happened. The sight of it still made Tanzanite's stomach knot. It made her hands shake and her heart leap up into her throat. It was such an innocuous thing; a streak of color on an old, dirty sidewalk.

Yet somehow, it made Tanzanite afraid.

She might have stayed there all night, as she had done dozens of times before, staring at that reminder of what she was fighting for. What she had lost so far in this war. She would have spent hours more, were it not for the distant voices that interrupted her. A pair of girls screaming at one another, and upon further inspection, a pair of girls she knew screaming at each other. One she had recently left with a pair of corpses in an alley, the other had only days before accompanied her on a trip to visit Elysion's Priestess.

Both looked like they were about to rip one another's faces off.

Which was awesome.

“Correction,” the General began as she stepped out of the shadowy alcove between the trees where her teleportation had carried her, “We take human lives, human energy, because it is the only way we are able to fight. Because without them, we would have no way to keep your kind from controlling every man, woman, and child on this planet. Every human on this planet. When your kind is gone, or,” she stepped forward, and lifted one of Alkaid's pale dreadlocks. She rolled it between her thumb and forefinger, smiling faintly, “When you all finally see the truth, the killing stops.

All of those murders?

All of those bodies?”

Tanzanite sighed as she dropped the hair. She stood just behind Alkaid, black claws pulling a curtain of dreadlocks aside as she leaned in to whisper in the corrupted senshi's ear.

“They're all her fault.”

Her eyes flashed towards Tanzanite, and she felt her blood boiling underneath her skin. Nemesis did not understand why the general hadn't killed her, but she was determined to never let such an opportunity arise for Tanzanite again. Her life would not be so easily offered, though with Tanzanite's arrival it looked like the odds were in her favor. If the need arose, she could paralyze Tanzanite and outrun Alkaid. Alkaid was nothing - Nemesis was confident that she could defeat her if she had to. "If you were true defenders of this planet, you would use the power you were born with, instead of stealing it from the planet itself," she hissed. Hell, any senshi could be killed with a well-aimed gunshot. There were better ways to fight this war than to take the lives of the people they claimed to be fighting for.

Whatever Tanzanite said to Alkaid was sure to be poison, just as the woman had messed with her own mind. Nemesis couldn't help but lay some of the blame for her current behavior on what had occurred between Tanzanite and herself that night in the alleyway. Right now, as long as Tanzanite stayed out of the fight, Nemesis had a good chance of winning. Despite Alkaid's threats to kill her, Nemesis was confident that it was the last thing that would happen.

Huh, she felt almost as if she were getting back into her groove. She smirked, a short laugh bubbling from her lips. "You, kill me? I was witness to your Awakening, I've seen your power, and you in no way have the strength to harm, let alone kill me." Her confidence was shining through, that characteristic cockiness. "Don't delude yourself, Alkaid." It had come down to it, then. There was no other path for them but one that led to the battlefield. The guilt Nemesis felt over Alkaid's corruption would have to be pushed aside. Alkaid would do nothing but fight her, and anyone who thought Nemesis would not defend herself was a fool.

It was unsurprising that once the declaration of battle was made, that Nemesis made the first move. If Alkaid had any delusions about Nemesis' reluctance to fight, they were surely dismissed the moment Nemesis charged Alkaid. Alkaid, from what Nemesis recalled of the girl, was nowhere near the scrapper that she was. Swiftly, she aimed a kick for Alkaid's head - she had seen the girl battle, but had never fought her herself. There was always a time for firsts.

Two things happened at once: 1, Tanzanite retreated to the darkness with some of the most inspiring words Alkaid had ever heard short of the "I Have a Dream" speech and 2, Nemesis was barreling towards her with a foot aimed right at her head.

Fortunately, Alkaid had seen the shift in Nemesis' body nearly as soon as she decided to surge forward - that was the problem with being the first to attack, there wasn't really any surprise in it. She had a few brief moments before Nemesis reached her, standing still and simply watching as the senshi of decay moved fluidly into her first attack. She was quicker than Alkaid expected and, as the corrupt senshi tried to dodge to the side, her heel scraped down the side of her face and struck her in the ear. Although it wasn't a particularly important piece of anatomy, it still stung like a b***h, and the swaying dreads of her blond hair came away stained with a smear of blood from torn tissue.

It was a good thing Alkaid was never one to be shocked.

Even as Nemesis' foot soared past Alkaid's head and promised to give her the headache of a lifetime once the adrenaline wore off, Alkaid's balled fist swung up and aimed right for Nemesis' exposed midsection. She would have liked to use her power, to catch Nemesis off guard for even a moment, but she was sure she wasn't going to get a second of downtime for that. She'd just have to beat the s**t out of Nemesis fair and square.

Alkaid had no time to enjoy the satisfaction of a successful connection to Nemesis' abdomen. The senshi was a scrapper, Alkaid knew, and she wasn't surprised when she rebounded quickly and sent a fist flying in the direction of her face. Unfortunately, it was just a little harder to dodge your opponent when they were already in an arm's distance.

The fist connected with Alkaid's face, grating the flesh inside her mouth against sharp teeth, and blood was already pooling as her head whipped back from the lash. She stumbled a few steps to regain her balance, backing away from Nemesis. Despite her reservations against spitting in public, Alkaid made an exception just this once so she could dispel some of the coppery taste from her mouth. She glanced back at Nemesis with that same fury in her eyes, pausing only long enough to wipe the back of her hand against a small trickle of blood at the corner of her lips. It came away with a red streak, small but a stark enough contrast against her pale flesh to make it startling.

"All that matters is that something will be left," she retorted, turning her body back as if she was going to launch another attack. Then, at the last second, she smiled - dark and devious.

"Misguiding Light, Magnified!" A burst of light sprung up from her hands as she tossed them in the air, and then an orb formed, hanging in the air directly between Alkaid and Nemesis. She had no worries over Tanzanite, a general was much too strong to fall victim, but Nemesis.. she'd have to fight to break the spell.