Current Energy: 10
Current Training: Onmyodo (7/10)
Friday, January 21st, 2011
PRT Headquarters, Brockton Bay
It was a Khopesh.
Slightly shorter than her Katana had been, and bearing a distinct black and gold blade, as though it had been worked from obsidian instead of metal, her Zanpakuto had changed in shape enough that, in any other circumstances, she would have felt slightly put off by the change. She hadn't been trained to use a Khopesh - a one handed sword. She had been trained to use a long blade using both hands in order to achieve maximum effect. Still, there was something about the way the blade curved starting in the middle, and the finely engraved handle, that caught the eye.
Regardless, she didn't have time to fret over that right now. She was in the middle of a fight.
It wasn't until much later that she would learn that she had not, in fact, learned a standard sword style from Kenpachi Zaraki - but instead the art of Zanjutsu. Which was explicitly the use of a Zanpakuto - a sword that could be anything.
The physical changes, were not the only ones that her sword had been through though. If the extent of a Shikai was merely the changing of a swords type, then it would not be considered among the primary powers of a Shinigami. No, her blade had taken on another capability, one that was a power all it's own.
Her Spiritual Pressure now had options to it. It had, for lack of a better way to describe it, a Trump effect. And with that effect, came control. She no longer had to restrain herself, to hold her thumb eternally over the shaken soda cans opening in order to stop from crushing everyone around her. Now, her blade performed that function. Nemesis - as she had so recently learned the name of - had taken the reins of her power, and was now carefully managing it for her, allowing her to perform feats with it she wouldn't otherwise have considered possible.
Like, for instance, taking away or reducing the Brute rating of everyone in the room. Except for Aspirant at least, whom she purposely excluded. Her aura, the now tremendous fluctuating spider, flickered slightly, seeming to extend a limb towards each of her enemies, before returning to it's resting position, the hourglass at its center slowly rotating.
The effects were nearly instantaneous, as her smaller team member lashed out at Hookwolf with a bladed elbow that sheered a section of iron from the writhing mass of metal smothering him, and then kicked the monster in it's center mass, launching it across the prison and into another cell.
Taylor didn't have as much time to be proud of that move as she might have liked, however, as she was still being attacked by everyone else in the room.
With a blinding fast motion, Taylor once more leapt towards Purity, trusting in her new power to have made it at least possible to hurt the woman. She need not have worried. Within moments of reaching her, she felt her aura react on its own, smothering her and causing the white light surrounding her to dim as though disconnected from a light socket. Taylor impacted her with all the force of a runaway truck, this time, bouncing her off the rear wall of the prison and catching her before she could land on the ground, very much unconscious.
She considered for a second what she had just done. She couldn't negate powers, she didn't... think. But her Aura seemed to have an almost automatic defence set into it now. Powers used against her reduced in effectiveness within her range, Brute ratings were lowered, and - if the completely normal speeds Victor was now moving at were anything to go by - her enemy's speeds seemed reduced as well. She hadn't even noticed that happening, though now that she was thinking about it, she did find that she could do all of those things if she wanted to.
Returning to full attention, she dropped the unconscious Purity atop the walkway she had landed on and sprung into motion once more, narrowly evading a bolt from Victor's firearm and appearing next to Stormtiger in time to kick him in the chest, stopping him from potentially launching another attack. At the same time, she swung with her uninjured arm, bisecting the upper walkway between Victor and Othala, and preventing the pair from reuniting, no doubt so Othala could pass along a different power to the man.
Beneath her, she could just make out Aspirant flowing through a number of stances as he battered away Hookwolf's attempts to re-engage him in a grapple. It was obvious that this had been the villains plan from the beginning - making use of his ever-shifting state of being to deny his enemy any advantage they might have in martial combat. It struck Taylor at the moment as odd how much the Empire seemed to know about her capabilities. True, her Spiritual Pressure was a known factor, but to have come up with such a perfect series of countermeasures against her on such short notice seemed... strangely effective. As far as she could tell the Empire didn't have any Thinkers on hand, so she couldn't quite grasp how they had managed to come this far.
Regardless, with Purity off the board, and Stormtiger otherwise unable to distract her, she allowed her Aura to lash out one final time. Strangely, she no longer possessed the normal ability of her Aura to merely pressure everything around her. That ability seemed to have been broken up into separate pieces with a much higher degree of control. She could, however, force the air in a given area to stop moving, and therefore, being breathable.
Again, there was the disjointed unfurling of a spiders limbs towards each of her enemies, a blink you'd miss it motion that even she was having a hard time noticing, and all of them became stock still, frozen in place by the gas that surrounded them becoming solid, and gagging on nothing as they became no longer capable of breathing.
She got the impression that the number of people she could do this at once too was somewhat limited, at least compared to the indiscriminate nature of her Aura in its natural state, but she was thankful, at least, for the easy ability to target things that it gave her.
She held them all in place like that for a while - leaving Aspirant to handle Hookwolf since the villain was rapidly beginning to look like a small harmless ball of flesh with spikes sticking out of it - and allowed her power to recede only when her victims stopped moving. Fog was still drifting about haplessly, no doubt unable to respond to tell what he should do since his breaker state was the only thing protecting him from her, but otherwise, the fight was just about over.
She found it somehow amusing that Empire's second in command - Krieg - was nigh useless against her. Unable to reach or attack her in any meaningful way, he had mostly just stayed near Othala, ostensibly to protect the lynchpin of their defence from her.
With a quick glance down to Aspirant, who was tearing the last of Hookwolf's well... hooks... out, she jumped over to Purity, he sword flaring to life and returning to its natural state as she did so. Then she set about healing the idiot woman.
She also realized, quite unfortunately, that using her Shikai was tiring. She felt more exhausted from that short stretch of combat than she had doing nearly anything else in life since gaining her powers. If she didn't have more to do still, she might have collapsed right then and there.
Annoyed with herself, Taylor began healing Purity, while fervently wishing she could heal herself as well. Her shoulder was beginning to hurt mightily.
A/N: Just a short one for today folks. Some stuff came up so the back half of this will pop up either tonight or tommorow, as per usual.
On the topic of Shikai, I guess I should never underestimate a Space Battler. I was cribbing a lot of rules from the Bleach d20 Game, wherein you choose two power types to comprise your Shikai, in addition to what kind of weapon it becomes when released. You can find the list of options that existed Here, but what I found the most interesting (re:terrifying) was that you guys not only chose the Oppression type powerset (Spiritual Pressure Manipulation basically) but that you somehow decided to double specialize in it, making it your only powerset. Mind you, I limited what you could choose as a secondary power because I still have to write it, and I needed things to be thematic past a certain point. But just... wow.
If anyone is curious the other two options would have been a Kido type (Taylor could have cast 'touch attack' range spells through her aura, like the Wuxi Finger Hold) and Poison type (Taylor's Aura would have become mildly corrosive). There are some powers you only get by specializing though, which is where the 'effortless targeting' comes from. I took some creative liberty with some of the effects at play, but yeah.
Anyway, here you go. Have fun with it.