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Actually, the golem would take a lot of damage to its constructed form - to the tune of its entire torso getting blown to smithereens, and the rest of its form subliming into steam. The steam Isilien would naturally be able to control, but the rest, the bits which had been blown apart, was simply... gone. It seemed there was nothing there to control any more.

"... yeah, 'useless' would about sum it up," Kojirou noted grimly. "You chaps should run. Musashi and I can handle this guy - just about."

"I disagree," the voice from before boomed again... and now, out of the rift, had come a body to substantiate it.

It was the shape of a man, though a staggering nine feet tall. The shape of man, though - it was impossible to tell was this creature, nay, being actually was, for it was clad head-to-toe in black armour. It wasn't smooth - instead, silver-tipped ridges ran all along it, giving it a an awful, jagged appearance, save for the breast plate, which had smoother, gold-tipped ridges, one running from each corner, if one imagined it as a simple rectangle, in towards the centre, where gilt runes surrounded what looked like a blood-red ruby, though it seemed to exude a more malevolent aura. In the smooth spaces between the ridges on the breast-plate, various arcane designs of silver seemed to slither round, almost literally - there was something very disquieting about looking right at them, and when on the corners of one's vision they seemed liquid and unfixed. Behind this armoured figure fluttered, in a way which didn't quite match the actual wind, a long cape of crimson outside and various shifting colours - reds, blues, purples, greens, but all of them dark - on the inside. Upwards- and outwards-sloping pauldrons like black cliffs marked the points where this cloak attached to the rest of the armour and framed, as an altar does sacred relic, the individual's elaborate helmet. Black as obsidian like the rest of the suit, it entirely covered his head, spiked metal plating extending down to conceal the neck as well. The most striking detail was a raised section on the front, its elevation only slight but immediately apparent due to a strange, unnatural sheen it seemed to produce in contrast to the coal blackness of the rest of the armour; this raised section was in the shape of the top half off a human skull, though the lower part of this was significantly elongated to fit the proportions of the large helmet. The eyes took the form of twin lights of crimson in the two recesses for the eyes on this pattern. Meanwhile, from the jowls of the helmet extended curved spikes, like tusks; the helmet's crown was homed to a variety of tiny, sparking gems studded in a ring in between a circlet of equally small spikes.

This person took another step forward with his grimly armoured feet and their sharp spurs. His sword, a savage thing over four feet long, thin but broad with a deadly-sharp outer edge and a waved inside edge, possessing no guard and with a hilt situated in a mere indent on the inner edge of the blade, the strange metal a sleek black with a hungry blood-red luminescence to the edges, flicked out threateningly by his side.* "None of you," the villain's voice declared in the same deep tone as before, "Singularly or all together, has the power to stop me!"

*Yes that sentence is way too long. Bite me, I'm not rewriting it.

"What?! Seriously, another villain? sigh Fine, come play boy and we shall teach you and your friends to dance properly." Kal was quiet annoyed with this. He cared not for whom this man-thing was, and truth be told Kal couldn't care less. The Necromancer just sighed, lifted his staff, and looked at this man with a cold intensity. "And maybe you two knuckleheads who just got here should just shut up. Even if we do not survive, we fight the good fight. So turning tail and running now would be even more pointless than staying here and fighting."

"'Pointless' is dying for nothing," Kojirou argued frantically at Kal. "Now seriously, get-" But he was interrupted. For armoured man, moving faster than the human, or even the avian, eye could follow, had suddenly appeared in front of him and was now striking downwards with that great sword with punishing ferocity. "s**t!" Kojirou exclaimed, only just managing to bring his longer sword up to parry with just in time. Even so, the force of the blow was palpable, even from a distance, and Kojirou was sent flying backwards with a cry, his armour flapping at an unnatural angle by his side.

The armoured man meanwhile turned quite calmly to Lilium. "You have an item of my property," the deep voice informed her with deceptive calm. "Desiring it back is neither stupid nor inane."

As this was going on, Alcharius suddenly whispered in Jinx's ear. "Er, Jinx," he spoke to her quietly but with his alarm evident. "I really do think we should leave." A pause. "Now."

Lilium blinked and looked a bit alarmed. The entire party had just broken the rules of time. Weeirrd. Meanwhile Ini was simply sitting around a fire, rambling on about various types of cheeses. An avian messanger ran up to the party, handed a finely gilded letter to Ini, and then flew off. "Huh?" The childish imp read the 'from' segment of the letter, his eyes now wide open and alert.

"My dearest Ini,





The paper fell to the floor with Ini simply in a catatonic state.

"Oh my, a male member of the guard knows how it feels to get ******** up the arse. This ought' to be an interesting tale." Lilium said, poking the fire with a stick occasionally, along with playing with it. She then sat up and turned to Konishi with a slight snicker on her face.

"Hey now, you were the one bitching about 'arse pains', not I. No need to share." She smiled calmly, "I'm a bit surprised you havent been kicked off the guard with that kind of temper."

"Boa, correct?" Lilium said, laying back down onto the ground. "That's delightful and all, but I could care less for paladins and all that. They tend to be awfully pushy."

Boa's smile faded, "I--I just wanted to have a pleasant conversation," she sighed heavily, "And just how are all paladins 'pushy'?" she turned to Konishi, "And as for you, mister..guard person, you don' have to be so rude."