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"I can be violent when I need to be," replied Cutter, a grin replacing the smirk as the lich worked at fixing his limb, "But you are right, Jones, we do have a game to play."
He backed up slightly, leaving adequate room between himself and his opponent, and steadied his feet in the rich gravesoil.
"Shall we?"

Cutter wheighed all the possibilities of attack, his eyes unconciously drawn to the flag still poking out of the lich's robes. He gathered that he need not destroy or even incapacitate the ancient skeletal man, only distract him long enough to grab the flag and attatched key, and then it would be a game of evasion and misdirection.

"Open strong, close strong." he whispered the old saying to himself, it was meant for a comedy show, but applied to most things in life.
He crouched slightly and his hand brushed against a plume of mist of the kind that seemed to always be present at these locations, he inhaled yet another puff of his dwindling cigar as he activated a part of his mind that few people were even aware of. His mind opened to his surroundings as an all-seeing third eye, it projected into the mist, enhancing it and making it grow.
He waved his hand in front of himself and the mist exploded violently, engulfing everything in a ten-metre radius in a thick fog.

He skipped back, drawing a switchblade from an unseen pocket and flicking it open. His experience with it assured that he needn't even look as he flipped it over, grabbing by the blade and flinging it in one fluid motion at Jones' skeletal head.

He then exhaled the lungful of smoke.

Cutter was still touching the fog, and thus was aware of all that transpired within it. As such he was aware of Jones' change in location.
"Hmm, the magic makes an appearance..."

He then heard the lich call out to him, making any prior information the boy had to his opponent's whereabouts useless.

Try harder? Cutter though. Oh, I'll try harder.

He took the last lungful of smoke from the cigar, leaving it a worn nub. He then held it in the palm of his right hand.

Cutter closed his eyes and crushed the still-lit cigar butt, releasing a hail of sparks. He let his mind flow into those dying embers, and ignited them into an inferno.
He held a meter-wide ball of flame in his hand now, he basked in the intense heat for a moment before launching it at Jones.
The ball screamed as it acquired its target, residual psychic energy guiding it.

He exhaled the acrid smoke, catching it in his other hand. He enhanced its toxic attributes, doing much the same as he had to the sparks to make the ball of fire.
He now held a ball of toxic corrosiveness which he similarly launched at Jones.

Cutter then ran behind a tombstone and began to navigate a path toward that accursed man and his flag.

Cutter kept his power choked off for the time being, not wanting to tip the mage off to his location. He could sense his environment passively, and as such he didn't trip as he silently sped amongst gravestones toward where he expected Jones was. He was going much faster than the average man could hope to, and reacted to obstacles equally quickly.
He aimed to show the lich that he was a worthy opponent.

He saw that his attack had been marginally effective as he got closer to Jones, the lich was picking himself up from the results and began to weave his sorcery.
Cutter dropped behind a tall gravestone and hid from sight as the fog began to dissipate.

Cutter crouched behind the tombstone and began to curse Baron for putting him in this predicament to begin with.
The loa had come in the Baron Samedi aspect, a joking skeleton in a violet suit, tails and tophat proposing a game.
Of course, it wasn't a proposition so much as it was a command.

He flinched as the angel-golem's foot hit the ground hard.
"His own damn fault for dodging..." he muttered bitterly.

He briefly considered burying the construct with a psionically-induced earthquake, but thought better of it out of respect for the dead.
If he could just get close enough he could take apart the statue on a molecular level, or even simply undo the enchantments on it.

As he exhaled, Cutter noticed how he could see his breath. The adrenaline pumping through him had made it so he couldn't feel the chill of this place creeping up on him.

He exhaled again and caught the vapour in his hands, feeling again the quake as the angel-golem took more steps. He enhanced the water concentration until he held a pure ball of the stuff.
This wouldn't destroy the thing, he thought, but it would at least distract it.

He manipulated it again, rearranging the molecular structure of it, forming it into the latticelike structure of ice. Not just any ice, this was the kind of glacier-quality ice that could stop a bullet, and he now held a long icicle of the stuff.
He imprinted it with the power of motion, and threw it at the golem.

And then he ran like the dickens.

((Holy s**t, I'm sorry I haven't posted in so long. gonk ))

Cutter skidded to a stop and stared, wide-eyed, at the stone arm hurtling toward him.
He had been elbowed in the face before, but never quite like this.

He had no time and no ressources, but remembered a primary lesson he'd learned in fighting: If you have nothing to work with, then you must work with nothing.

He brought up his right hand, palm up, and reached through it with his mind. He drew in air from around him into his palm until it was compressed into an almost-liquid ball of air.
The effort of doing this made Cutter's arm shake from exertion, but he wasn't done yet.

With his left hand, he quickly plucked the ball from his right, maintaining its integrity with his psionic energy.
His left hand now contained the ball of ultracompressed air, while his right contained nothing. Where the air once was there was a complete vacuum maintained by the same psionic energy channeled through that arm.

Now both arms trembled as Cutter held his weapons made of nothing and something.

The arm was upon him, and he had but one chance. Any opportunity to dodge was gone by now.
He lifted his right palm, the one containing the void, and, bracing his legs, slammed it into the approaching stone arm's elbow.

The term "hard vacuum", was more than just an expression. The sudden change in pressure caused all the molecules in the elbow to decompress violently. The sound, if it was audible, would be that of an explosion, but the vacuum carried not a noise.
The psionic field did the rest of the damage, blowing both halves of the arm and the shrapnel from the explosion away from Cutter, though some shards still scratched his face and right arm.

Panting hard now, Cutter whipped his left arm around and hurled the ball of compressed air at the angel-golem's torso and promptly fell to his knees, trying to catch his breath.

Cutter snatched the bottle from his opponent's bony grip and straightened himself. He took his time unscrewing the cap and took a small sip, looking directly into Jones' eyesockets.
"You know, you shouldn't have given me this bottle," he said, screwing the cap back on with exagerrated slowness, "It's made of plastic, you see, which is made of petrolium."
The bottle began to warp in his hand, the plastic undulating.

"Also, the water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen burns and oxygen feeds the combustion."
The bottle was now the shape of a ball, the water inside had begun to bubble.

"So, in effect," he said, grinning maliciously. The water was now almost completetly gaseous, and the bottle was turning black as oil. "What you so foolishly gave me wasn't a bottle of water at all."

The entire thing erupted into roiling liquid flame in Johnny's palm. His grin turned into more of a snarl.
"It was a fireball!" he yelled, throwing it hard at Jones and darting for the flag in one smooth motion.