A jolt of true fear—not just surprise-triggered adrenaline—shocked Evariste's knowledge of the limits of reality. Disbelief mingled with concern and doubt about his continued well-being made Ev's stomach lurch a little. What was happening in front of him was not at all what he had expected when he set off on this prolonged and now hideously mutated walker clean-up mission. Naturally, in wandering around the city, and especially in brushing so close to the territory of the rival hegemon to the Saber, he was assuming some risk; he knew that. Apparently, though, he'd taken a big risk and lost.
So now he was faced with a person holding—no, hurling towards Evariste's head—a giant mallet he'd spontaneously molded out of some mysterious black ooze which had previously been a whip and a rock that was only part of the situation because Ev had included it himself. And now it was being used against him. He could feel hysterics eating around the edges of his consciousness as he fought the simultaneous urges to laugh and cry.
But not for long. Though a waffler, Evariste was not one to wallow in an emotional response. A fraction of a second revealed his next course of action, a complicated one that involved focusing on several different things at once.
The first, reflexively-coordinated order of business was just to get away from that ferocious hammer. Lessened gravity was, once again, Evariste's aid as he skipped quickly back out of the path of the hammer. Given the strangeness of the events up until now, Evariste did not at all trust the hammer to continue on its trajectory once he was out of the way of it. He thought it seemed to speed up on its own beyond the norms of nature as it whooshed through the area where his head should have been, but it was moving so fast he didn't trust his observation. It didn't really matter if it was—in fact, it was better for him—but it would have been nice to know what his opponent was doing.
As he was hopping out of the way of the hammer, Evariste also bent much of his attention on rapidly cooling the stone that formed the head of the mallet. He wasn't sure how cold he could get it in such a short time, but he just kept forcing the temperature down and down as the hammer continued to fall. He tweaked gravity in the back of his mind, accelerating the downward motion and unconsciously bracing for the inevitably formidable impact.
It did not disappoint.
The rock head of the hammer ruptured the ground as it hit, carving a sizeable crater and shaking the debris. Ev thought it—or rather, the tremendous noise it made—may have also ruptured his eardrums, but he discarded that thought since he could hear the responsive crashes coming from within the buildings surrounding him. The shock of the blow to the earth was more than enough to destroy whatever fragile construction remained.
A veritable cloud of debris and dust bounced away from the point of collision, including the shards of the rock itself. Evariste was gratified to see his plan had worked, but lost no time congratulating himself as he telekinetically directed the concrete and stone shrapnel to zoom roughly in the shape of a body towards the person standing on the other side of the crater. A quick adjustment of gravity dropped the rubble moving towards him. He would have liked to deflect it, too, towards his attacker, but it just required too much effort and coordination. More than enough detritus was already flying at the other figure. Evariste just hoped some of it would hit and perhaps damage his opponent (it was moving fast enough to cause, at the least, flesh wounds), but he knew it was too much to expect at this point. |