Duel:Kanna v Orikahn, Match 9 of the 2018 Frostmaw Tournament

Duelists: Kanna vs Orikahn
Duel: Traditional 3 rounds with final defense, 15 minute posting limit.
Stakes: Auto-hit to the winner.
Judges: Celaeno, Alvina and Zedidiah.

Destroyed Shrine

16:07:02
Leone said, "Welcome to the third round of the (seventh) Titans of Winter Tournament! Here we gather at the Destroyed Shrine where a mysterious power seeps from the cracked and crumbled stone of the mutilated altar. A ball of bright white energy floats within the pile of rocks, arms of argent power lashing out every now and again. It seems to be much like Aramoth's gifts - only twisted. Each arm is a conniving version of his endowment: strength turns to weakness, courage to fear, and hale to hollow. As the whiplike arms veins lash out, should they not find purchase on a contestant, they will smack into walls, obstacles, and the floor; the contact causing a six foot area of the same embued effect to radiate outward. Good luck to both Kanna and Orikahn."

16:18:28
Kanna is full of determination. She knows perfectly well who stands before her; as she had been trying to find the elusive feline to talk about the fight and let him know she had no intentions of harming him. Now the opportunity has passed, and all that can be done is to fight. As she stands on the long disused stones and stares at the floating light from within the shrine, she reminds herself of why she fights. A thick layer of leather covers her body underneath the warmth of her white snowcoat and thick, woolen skirt. It is clear that there is another instrument in the pockets of the coat, but for now, she relies on her trusted shamisen. Before she can strum the first note, the white arms lash out from the temple, each smacking themselves onto the floor just feet away from the duelers. Kanna gives a sharp whistle, and the branches of the frozen trees nearby reach out and wrap around her midsection, quickly pulling her away from the radiating energy before it reaches. Opting to stay at a distance whenever possible, running around trees and the shrine if she has to, she plays not a song of war, but what sounds more like a lullaby. "All my life, so many times, I had dreams that I could fly." A soft green light pulses from the strings in a ring around the bardess and outwards over the field, though the effect dims with further distance. With each successful touch of the energy, surely her opponent would find himself growing quickly fatigued and his limbs growing ever heavier.

16:38:25
Orikahn hasn't come to parley, he's here for a fight. Well-groomed, claws sharpened, and dressed for battle in thick, fluffy wolfskins, Kahn prowls the edges of the demolished shrine with obvious predatory intent. Kanna's magics are strange to him, and he cannot help but feel a little awed when the trees themselves carry her out of harm's way. Ho! The cat has to duck a swinging tendril of blazing light. The surprise is just as well--it yanks him back to the present. Gathering his focus, he tries to put himself safely in a vantage point to pick off the bard from afar. He draws his bow with a yawn. What's this? The wolfskins are cozier than he remembers. Drawing his bow, he lines up a shot through heavy lids, sighting down the arrow shaft with a growing sense of collected calm. Sure and serene, the bow pluck, the arrow whistles, a gleaming broadhead at one end, colorful fletching at the other, a lethal flicker through the air that streaks unapologetically for Kanna's heart.

16:56:12
Kanna turns just slightly to look for her opponent when a force strikes hard enough to send the bardess stumbling back. A few rapid hearbeats, then a burst of pain is erupting in her left shoulder. The arrow has snapped just past her shoulder, taking a shred of wyvern-hatchling feathers and leather with it. The frost bites, and she turns to face, nothing. The predator cannot be seen from this distance by her feeble human eyes, and she knows not if her song of rest has affected him. With a sharp breath to keep her composure, she thinks of the new alliances she has made, and how they likely wait for her return at the tavern she has called home for the better part of the winter. Despite it putting her at risk, the center of the field gives her the widest range for her attacks. The lullaby picks up again, radiating pulses of the fatiguing magic out towards the trees, "Like a bird so light and free, to fly when the world is fast asleep--" Her fingers change positions on the chord bar and the melody quickly changes to something far more malicious. "But you took my heart, deceived me right from the start! You showed me dreams, I wished they could have been real!" Blasts of sonic energy burst forth with each strum of the three-stringed lute, radiating in whatever direction she faces to stop any more physical projectiles in its tracks. Further away, the blasts reverberate the closer they get to any object, slamming sound magic indiscriminately with the force of a kick from a centaur.

17:13:29
Orikahn is really getting downright drowsy. This will not do. Wrinkling his nose in self-disgust ("How so tired? Am I getting old? Is the love of death and blood leaving me at last?"), Kahn fishes around in his medicine bag for some of this, some of that, a few herbal stalks, a smudge of ointment, some old mushrooms, dried flower petals. A nearby blast tell him that there's no time to be especially discriminate. He tosses the handfull down the hatch, munches it to a quick, coarse pulp and chokes it down with a swallow of grog. There's another blast, this one close enough to spray Kahn with gravel. Time to go! Breaking from cover, Kahn stows his bow and sprints his way up through the middle of the ancient rubble, skidding out of another blazing tendril's reach with a duck, a roll (a stumble!?), and a sure return to his feet. No one saw that. Kahn's ear's prick at the beat of lute strings, and burst of sheer feline precognizance, twisting his trunk just in time for brutal wave of sonic force to whip past, close enough to set his whiskers quivering in its wake. "Stop that!" Orikahn rebukes her forcefully, his pride wounded by the very, very near miss. It doesn't help that his concoction is starting to give him a headache. Why are these lights so bright anyway? In a burst of pain and anger, Kahn breaks forward in a sprint, galloping up and around to close in on Kanna's heels, kicking moss and snow and rubble as he runs. Razor claws swipe and great fangs gnash with increasingly fevered ferocity. Were it up to him, Kahn would trip her and rip her to bits!

17:34:49
Kanna jumps in alarm when she has driven her opponent from the treelines. Dear Daedria, she forgets how fast his kind can move. In the moment of pause, she is caught by the opposite reaching whip and thrown to the ground. The air is knocked from her vocal chords, and she gasps, forcing herself up to her feet. Despite her poor shamisen's tendency to shatter and spend a week or so at The Last Note being repaired in duels, only the strings are cut. The thing is little more than decorative wood now. "Stop that!" The thundering voice jostles her and she can't help but blurt out a panicked apology. "I'm sorry!" It tumbles out before she can stop it. When the gears in her brain begin to turn to try to understand the irrational outburst, the feline is suddenly approaching at an alarming pace. The gears are thrown out into wherever lost marches of thought descend. The bardess gives an involuntary shriek, and frozen bits of tree roots rise between the two. Her own boots slip and leave easily discernible tracks when she flees. The roots are certainly not high enough to protect her, but it is surely enough to cause the feline to snag his claws and lose his balance on them should he not be careful. Kanna gives a whistle, a lower pitch than the one used before to allow her escape from the tendrils, and the branches reach out to catch her again. The moment she has taken hold of an extended branch, the human shrieks at the painful sensation of snow-tipped claws digging into the back of her calves. The nature magic pulls her high above ground, and Kanna continues to scream in pain, her nails digging into the bark. This perhaps would be distracting enough, if only for a moment, for the surrounding tree roots to shoot up and form a thickly layered dome around the feline. "That hurt!" Kanna screams. The dome's size is reduced, and reduced again. Should he have escaped it, it would continue to pressurize until the dome bursts, sending wood out like shrapnel out in every direction.

17:55:41
Orikahn bursts through the first root snare like a bull through a wicker footstool, though it earns him a nice bright red gash across the nose that immediately begins bleeding down his fangs and adds a startling, gruesome element to a face that was terrible and fearsome enough already to begin with. "GRAH!" Predatory snarling and flecks of scarlet, that's all Kanna's apology will earn her. Lucky for the bard, her next root snare catches the cat in the nick of time, and he stumbles, rolling head over heels to buy her a brief respite. Mind, it is a very brief respite. Orikahn is a creature of natural alacrity and quickly closes whatever ground he's lost. At last! Is pawlike hand lands a blow, and just as he savoring the familiar glide of claws through warm flesh, just as he's relishing her pained screams, the roots return to foil him. Beyond comprehensible expression, Kahn roars at the encircling wooded tendrils and draws his tomahawk, hacking hurriedly and scrambling with all his guile and mettle, for his very life, to pry his way out of the dome one major joint at a time. Desperately, he squeezes and thrashes through, eyes wide as it's *his* turn to panic, panic, panic, until he pops free, scrambling on all fours to dash across the ground, up a trunk, and into the boughs of a nearby tree. From here, the moment he spots Kanna, his legs wind, and he jumps, leaping wide in a do-or-die pounce, arms and jaws spreading wide to snare her if he can.

18:09:51
Kanna lets out a fearful sound when the feline escapes, and another when he is aboveground with her in the trees. With her legs of no use, especially while the thick crimson spills below onto the snow, she has no where to run. It is with a primal fear of being caught by the beast that she does something she would otherwise vehemently advise against: She presses against the branch's embrace and allows herself to freefall. The second she is off the branch, she withdraws the hidden instrument from her coat, a simple set of polished pipes, and she sends a single high-pitched note to the ground. With any luck, the force of the soundwaves hitting the icy, blood-stained ground would bounce back up against her to slow her fall and prevent some broken bones. In the distance, the arms of the energetic amalgation are now lurching forward, eager to grasp what life it can find. Kanna shuts her eyes tight.

Winner: Orikahn