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 Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 11:18 pm
One of the first strategic pre-meditative measures that Shan had managed to pull off this whole fight: Keeping his guard up while invisible. Yuki had to give him points for the thought, even though the manner in which he blocked her kick seemed rather awkward, she supposed it was better than getting your head knocked off your shoulder....Again. She was severely disappointed with the amount of damage she inflicted, however. Having used a great deal of Shan's own momentum against him, on top of her own power behind the rotation, he was still able to do a flip ON THE ARM SHE STRUCK. This man certainly was a monster, able to take damage like a sponge, if he ever got hit, and manipulate reality itself to his whims. Yuki would be more scared of him, if he could execute a decent attack.
She watched him tumble away, and let him this time, she had been chasing him around the ring with numerous attacks so far and he had been able to escape nearly every one. She was doing better with waiting, like a crocodile waiting with open maw for the dumber fish to swim in.
The flash of light and a spike in his reiatsu let her know that he had finally decided to jump to the next level: Shikai. This made her smirk, a feeling of victory flashing across her heart. If he was doing poorly enough to think he needed shikai against an opponent who had yet to draw her blade, he must really be on the run. She rolled her shoulders a little, as he shouted his attack out at the ground.
"Earth Reaching the Heavens."
If it wasn't for the slow rolling sound of an earthquake headed towards her she might have missed what the attack was entirely. She looked to her sides, where the sound was coming from, to see the slow moving pincer attack, and relaxed her fighting stance. This was it? This was all he could come up with?! She stood up, not bothering with any pretense of defending herself against so slow and easily dodged attack. It took a good 15 or 20 seconds before the pillars of earth made their way across the vast distance of the ring. When Yuki thought about it, this attack probably wasn't the best one he could have chosen from, especially when she was nearly standing in the middle of a ring that was literally a mile across.
Only when they got within spitting distance did she make her move.
She leaped straight up into the air, and over the pillars as they came smashing together beneath her. Using some reiatsu pumped through her legs in a variation of shumpo to launch herself upwards she flew well over the horizontal logs of earth, and smiled down at Shan smugly for a moment as she slowly fell.
Before she hit the ring again, she shunpoed once more. Using her own reiatsu to create a small surface in the air for less than a second she rushed towards her opponent on the outside of the ring. The move wasn't a challenge for Yuki, she had been doing it for ages, and it allowed her to cross the vast surface of the ring in a fraction of the time it had taken for Shan's earth to traverse the same distance.
She appeared less than a foot in front of the captain, standing there with her hands at her side. Clearly she was not intimidated by his shikai or the knowledge that she was so close to his element and he was more powerful here. Yuki looked him directly in the eye as she addressed him. Her own filled with anger and disappointment.
"Is this the best you can do?"
She asked more a demand than a question, as if she wanted more from him, like he wasn't holding up his end of the bargain. Yuki had signed up for this tournament to get the crap beat out of her, and to return the favor ten fold. Just like she did back in her prime, back when Fefnir would come over to her squad every day to fight with her, to make her feel alive again. If this was all this tournament had to offer her, she was sorely disappointed with how far downhill the place had gone in her absence.
[7]
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Posted: Mon Aug 23, 2010 6:55 pm
Strategy wasn't something you just rushed. Even if you had to take a few hits and make yourself look like a fool, as long as the end result is what you wanted, that's all anyone can ask for. The greatest battles engraved in the annals of history rarely went according to plan, but the resulting victory was, more often than not, achieved. Losing the battle but winning the war, as it were. Shan's slow nature was a disgraceful lie, a facade, a trick. As were the speeds of any of his attacks that he so lovingly doled out. Yes, he wasn't the fastest one in the Seireitei, but that didn't mean much when one is constantly surrounded by men and women alike breaking the speed of sound and disappearing from vision itself. Shan could keep up, yes, but that didn't mean he had to. Running fast didn't mean much when you ran straight into an attack, thinking that you are safe, or that you can counteract it. Even the fastest people, living or spirit, can't run over a pitfall.
When the pillars were in motion, still heading towards Yukimaru, he turned around to watch the results. He may be able to pull away from an attack with as minimal damage as possible, but even he couldn't dodge an attack that he couldn't see coming to begin with. He watched the earth spread across the arena. He was surprised that the girl would even bother to wait for it to come towards her, but to each their own. After all, it wasn't his plan to have that earth cause damage. No, no no. It was easily seen, easily avoided. Shan didn't deal with those kind of attacks. Not often.
As she headed into the air, Shan hopped onto the earth, letting its sensations flow into him just as easily as he let his reiatsu flow into it; a communal relationship between element and wielder. Shan took no time in flowing every last expendable ounce of his spiritual energy into the earth, saturating the area with his reiryoku. As she fell, he watched once more, looking every part like he did the entire previous part of the match, lazy, overly calm, and unready for a strike. He took every attack with a grain of salt, just to draw this lady into one of those adorable false senses of security. When one believes that they have the advantage, when they abandon all thought of whether they should check for spiritual levels because they believe they are superior, that is the perfect time to strike. And strike he would.
He let her touch down, because from the brief experience with her he realized that she would taunt him first. If she wanted to strike, she wouldn't have taken the showy approach of sailing up and down, then across. He knew she was going to stand there and so something akin to the 'attack me' show of before. And she didn't disappoint. He felt her presence long before he saw her, standing before him, ready to do nothing more than taunt him into action. He waited a second, letting her feel like he was just going to stand there like he had before, and didn't even bother moving, when the attack came.
Before she could even say 'best', at the middle of the sentence she was planning on unveiling, something violent happened. A multitude of spikes from the earth shot up from beneath and all around her, so much faster than the giant columns that one could swear they came from two completely different sources. But Shan wasn't holding back anymore, like he said. It was a do or die situation for him at this point, he could feel time dragging on for far too long without considerable input from him. He planned on changing that. The jutting spikes seemed to reach up at the same time, but the outside layer shot up faster than the rest, boxing her in a cone-like structure. The spikes meant for attack weren't far behind, launching up from the earthen material, heading straight towards the roof of the structure that had appeared out of nowhere and closed Shan's opponent off from the rest of the world.
As if that weren't enough, the structure would simultaneously collapse on itself, strengthened by reiryoku and dragged down by Shan's will, shrinking in on itself the second it was erected, making moving room difficult and the rock even denser than before. The creation of the rocky prison took little more than a second, and it's intensifying collapse soon after that, one could akin the whole event to a venus fly trap. There was a reason Shan was the master of earth. There was a reason he was dangerous. Earth was everywhere, and it was unavoidable. And when strengthened with his own spiritual pressure, moving faster than earth naturally should, he was a force to be reckoned with. He just wasn't big on sword play. Or any shows of bravado with muscle and sweat.
But Shan was sweating, you better believe it. You could tell that relieving himself of that much of his own power, and using almost all of it to create that elaborate and deadly little trap, wasn't easy. He could recall the power if he desired, but that sick and tired feeling would remain. He could feel the injuries he suffered now; the blow to the head, the damage from the electricity, his arm. Everything hurt, and he didn't have enough reiatsu left in his body for it to protect him from it all. He groaned, and leaned forward a little, putting his hands on his knees.
He could feel if she had died or not, or if she had escaped, he'd know. The earth let him know everything that transpired within that little structure, the one still piling in on itself, crushing and grinding anything caught within it to oblivion and dust. He had never done something like that before, but he would make sure to do it again. It was elegant and deadly. He liked it when those two things coincided. He believed his opponent could be elegant and deadly, but the elegance disappeared when she acted like a brute suffering from a bad dose of roid rage.
Shan didn't feel like saying anything, not even anything witty to the possible burial he had just given his opponent. He just groaned, and made a final motion. The earth stopped moving, and his reiatsu left the earth. He didn't need to know where she was now, if she moved he knew. In the last remaining seconds he thought he had, a small pocket of earth around him rose up and formed a thick layer of earth around his body; armor formed by the very element itself. He lost the ability to manipulate earth further, but he wanted to be ready. Ten seconds was enough for him to act, so he wanted to be ready in case something else happened afterwards.
"Broken Stone Armor." He sighed as it completed; watching and listening for any action. He felt the energy return to him, but he still felt like he needed a nap. A thought that made him think of Krin, and he smiled. If he made it through this, then he'd have to see about heckling Krin less for napping more.
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