Tam Tenderpaw vs. Raynare - A Battle of Grace and Wind

Tam’s blunted tonfa tig dug into Raynare’s midsection in an abrupt stoppage of her momentum. For a brief moment, she was suspended in the air from her contact with the fallen angel, feeling the impact traveling through her into the other woman. She let out a scream as the runes flickered across her foci. With a soft mechanical click, the tonfa snapped forward, extending out past her wrist into Raynare.

The sound was thunderous, the awed audience was stunned into silence as the angel fell for a second time like a meteorite crashing into Gaia. Tam had sprung back a bit, propelled upward again from the separation but would begin to drop again. She could have made a platform to step to or a bubble to slow her descent, but she wanted to use this. She shifted herself in the air, swishing her tail to position her body to another dive. There was no clear target in the debris, but that was fine. For what she was planning it wasn't necessary.

Tam squinted against the air rushing past her, watering her eyes as she zoomed down toward the crater. She chanted low and quiet, the runes on her foci not just lighting up, but burning with ethereal flames as she drew forth as much energy as she could muster. The metal creaked like the strained shell of a submarine under the crushing depth of the ocean as she greedily drew as much as she could as fast as she could. Cocking back an arm, the tonfa clicked and released into her hand where she gripped it tightly. She shot through the cloud of dust, parting it with an intense burst of air as she neared its epicenter.

“Try to dodge this one!” she snapped her arm around, thrusting a punch into the empty air. Vibrant and volatile sparks of blue and green shooting from the burning ruins like stray fireworks, as she released all that stored-up energy forward. From a pinprick of pink light, in an instant, it expanded out to a massive abjuration fist large enough to engulf the entire ring within the closed arena.


It made landfall with an earth-rending crack, one that quaked the entire surrounding park as it sank into the ground, upheaving the terrain and imprinting a massive fist-shaped crater into the ground that overtook the one she had buried Raynare in. There was no real way to know if her opponent had been in there or not, the massive glowing pink fist had obstructed her view from where she remained, suspended at where the wrist of it tapered off into the air.

She forced it down for as long as she could when her hold over the massive barrier she constructed shattered. It was too much to hold for long and the backlash of energy exploded in her face as one of her tonfa bucked violently and shot from her hand, vanishing from sight somewhere within the warding. As the fist broke apart into pink frackle light, it left Tam in a tumbled freefall as she slipped into the dust cloud as well and hit the ground hard, the soft soil and grass now compressed to have the density of concrete.

Tam lay in the settling dust on her back, right fingers twitching as latent sparks of mana sprang from her fingertips where she had clutched her foci. She had pushed harder than she ever had and could feel the lack of responsiveness in her whole body. There was a reason people used devices like her tonfa to help focus magic, using the body as a conduit, especially someone without formal mastery such as her, was a recipe to burn out. Not figuratively either, literally ignite herself from within. She had heard plenty of stories, it was some of the first things she was cautioned about when she started her studies into magic.


“Huh…No, I’m… f-fine.” Tam strained, trying to sit up but partway through the motion her body just flopped to the side, her tail plopping against the dirt to kick up another fresh cloud of dust. From this position though she could see the distant official neat a crater. They weren’t talking about her.

Her ears twitched, swiveling slightly to catch the rising cries of her name from all around. They were cheering her name. She had done it. She actually won. With a groan, she forced her unsteady hand to the ground and shook the other out until the tonfa unlatched and toppled off her wristband. Pushing herself up she sat forward and used her tail to rest her back against. Raynare was being carted off. She did that. Her eyes looked down at her hands and then back to the scampering felines as they left.

“Oh…” She remarked when she was informed the damage wasn’t fatal. She hadn’t even considered that she could have potentially killed someone. She had just been lost in the moment and… went feral. Was that what it was like to be the hunter, to just untether oneself from morality and unleash it all? Her brow furried and she made a face, nodding to the official. “Thanks.” She looked to the cheering crowd and through the pain, lifted up a fist to celebrate along with all of them.