Welcome to Gaia! ::

((I was away, busy with IRL stuff. As I posted in the OOC thread. rolleyes Still am, technically, real life picked a damn good time to slam me with everything at once and the possibility of another Gaialess period is very real.))

"Because this is fun~!"

As Raine's energy is pushed away by the purification, Kyetino's own energy leaks into the ground through the staff, creating a thin slowly-spreading "film" of energy just under the surface.

Just underneath the surface of the stone, and hidden from sight because of this, the film of energy spreading across the stadium begins to coalesce and take the shapes of arcane symbols; if anyone could see it, they would think it to be an unpredictable and nonsensical amalgam of magic circles and runes of power.

Kyetino, lifting her staff, begins to carefully engrave symbols of an ancient language on the inside of her hidey-hole, her staff carving the letters into the stone as easily as a knife carves in Jello, except more permanent.

((30-50 feet, spreading quickly.))

As Kyetino finishes scrawling the symbols, she taps the wall and then the stone; the wall doubles in height, and the top half (the part which had been exposed prior to this part and been carved in) falls, sinking into the ground but leaving the runes, which meld smoothly into the ground and vanish. The ground beneath Airiza is briefly and suddenly surrounded by mana as the spell executes, before the ground beneath her very feet suddenly begins to recede, sinking or more accurately "falling" into the ground as if the things holding it up had suddenly been removed and dominion over it given to gravity. The edges of the sinking island are four feet from Airiza at the closest to her, and she will need to cover at least that distance (plus any upward movement to compensate for the falling) to once more reach stable ground.

The expanding spell continues to grow, with no regard to these events.

((Basically, what Kyetino did here is fake you the hell out. The earth shell was very magic-resistant, so the dark energy wouldn't really have done anything, but she faked it to draw you in. The sound of sand shifting after the taps was the swift assembly of a shoddy body double (detailed enough to trick Raine, who is unfamiliar with her appearance and can see very little of her body through the holes which were also engineered by Kyetino) which would convince Raine that Kyetino was unable to move or react, as well as helping to block the real Kyetino from being seen through those holes. During and after the explosions, Kyetino crumbled the side Raine couldn't see and escaped out that side, retreating only a few feet and not standing at her full height (thus ensuring that Raine wouldn't see her), and dropped the ground where she'd been, leaving only a brittle fake floor with the brittle fake Kyetino on it. The rest is a bit of fairly simple earth magic used in small amounts to great effect.))

As the energy splatters across the rock, three taps can be audibly heard from within the shell as well as the sound of sand shifting; after it explodes, accompanied by a rumbling sound, the shell appears to be badly damaged. There is some degree of collapse on the side facing away from Raine, although how much is almost impossible to tell from this angle. As for the side facing Raine, it appears to have been brought almost to the brink of crumbling, and looks like a good push would be more than enough to finish the job; the rock on Kyetino's left and right seems pretty stable, but it's difficult to tell for sure from Raine's current vantage point. However, her first objective has been fulfilled - there are a couple of holes in the side facing Raine, and a surprised-looking Kyetino seems frozen in shock for the split-second it takes for Raine to charge.

Raine's sword and hand go effortlessly through the almost perfectly-sized hole and right into Kyetino's abdomen, causing her to apparently crumble into dust. Oh, and suddenly there isn't any space around Raine's arm anymore, the hole closed on her as soon as she solidly pierced Kyetino's body. Oh, and the wall, which incidentally seems extremely heavy for its size and feels like a big old car stuck to Raine's forearm and also appears to be magic-resistant (as she'll find if she attempts to destroy it with her dark energy), is now falling. The central section of the shell on that side, which Raine is trapped in, breaks from the rest and begins to fall on where Kyetino had been standing...and keeps on going, right through the ground, into...another pitfall of indeterminate depth but which is obviously more than ten feet.

As the massive weight now stuck to Raine's arm (and making her sword nearly useless) yanks her down and forward into the pit within the former bounds of the decimated barrier, she might catch glimpses of three things. First, the other side of the shell, the one which was opposite from her from the beginning, is almost completely gone. Second, Kyetino is about five feet past the pit on the side away from Raine, squatting down with one hand on the ground and the other grasping her staff. Third, the remaining areas of the shell (now on the left and right only of the pit from her perspective) seem to be wiggling or squiggling.

The spell expansion halts momentarily.

When Kyetino sees Raine stop herself, she activates the spell that'd been spreading across the arena - with some minor modifications. A large-scale earth creation/shaping spell, it was originally intended to turn the entire arena into a semirandom enclosed cave with extremely difficult terrain - however, reshaping the entire arena is no longer necessary, leaving her to find a new purpose for a spell able to create enough stone to fill the majority of the arena. And it's pretty obvious to her what she wants to do with it.

Suddenly, there's a giant stone mushroom towering above Kyetino, looks like it's at least 100 feet tall and with a rather small mushroom-tip at the top (not much thicker than the main "stem"); additionally, all surfaces seem perfectly smooth, and (while this isn't visible to the naked eye) it's very dense and is slightly resistant to magic. The whole thing looks more like a stake or nail than a mushroom, actually. For it to stand straight up indicates supernaturally-precise workmanship, though there is a slight helper...the very bottom of the "stem" is not resting on flat ground, but rather was created at the very top of the pit, sealing the exit and letting gravity do the rest. As the structure is very large and very heavy, its central column will follow the power of gravity very quickly and very strongly. It prevented Raine's escape from the very moment of its creation, and unless she thinks up some way out of this mess she'll be facing imminent crushing.

By means of a forfeit Kyetino is out of the tournament. Raine wins and advances!