Courtyard Kamar-Taj
Observer POV
A slow breeze came through the courtyard and brushed the leaves across the ground.
The sun was about to set, and its golden rays fell on the floor while casting elongated shadows.
As they elongated further and further, one of them suddenly vanished and reappeared in another spot.
It was the Tenno's,who dodged one of Master Kaecilius's attacks via Void sling.
"You truly adapt fast, young one,"
he said with a smile.
"But not fast enough,"
he continued as he restarted his onslaught, destroying one of the Tenno's Eldritch construct swords by slicing it in half with one of his daggers.
The Tenno smirked and waved his hands while constructing something new and retorted,
"I was always better in ranged combat anyway,"
as new Eldritch constructs appeared in his hands in the form of two handguns.
Kaecilius scoffed and began to slowly walk toward him, spinning his daggers in his hands while slicing through the air, creating an ear-piercing scream.
The Tenno, however, not intimidated in the slightest, just raised his guns and began to fire at the Master of the Mystic Arts, while walking backwards at the same speed he was approaching.
Blue bullets sprayed out of the constructs in all directions, seemingly missing their target, like the pistols of old, where you were safest if you stood right in front of the nozzle because of the curved paths the spinning cannonballs would take due to the Magnus effect.
Kaecilius just watched with a bored expression, dodging the one or two exceptions that would actually hit him, following the bullets trajectory with the corner of his eye as they zoomed past him.
Eventually, he slightly raised his eyebrow and turned his head as he realized what was happening. The bullets changed their paths behind his back, taking a sharp turn until their flight path eventually lined up with his position again, like seeker missiles.
"Nice trick you have there, but that won't work against enemies that pay attention to their surroundings," he said as he figured out the idea behind the attack, feeling a little disappointed by its simplicity. He continued spinning his scythes, wielding them like shields against the oncoming barrage as he turned away, not even glancing at the incoming bullets.
As Kaecilius blocked them with the flat side of his scythes, he began to smile as he realized something noteworthy. As he blocked the bullets, they began to bounce off his scythes, flying in unpredictable directions, then taking sharp turns and realigning their trajectory with his new position.
"I must say, I'm impressed that you forced me to use my connection to the Nova Force, but enough is enough," he said as he jumped out of their trajectory, dodging the incoming ones while forming two small eldritch constructs from the Nova core's energy around his fists, which he then used to block the incoming bullets.
"Are you sure about that?" Tenno replied, constantly firing more and more bullets at him, which began to look like a swarm of angry bees, chasing the Master around.
But this time, contact with the shields made the bullets disintegrate, placing a satisfying smirk on Kaecilius's face until he noticed that the bullets had taken down a good chunk of the shields' durability.
This forced him to create the shield again and again in the oncoming barrages, while simultaneously dodging the ones he couldn't block, giving him no time for a counterattack.
As the Master was seemingly distracted for at least a little while, Tenno used the moment to reach forward and create a portal in Kaecilius's blind spot, aiming his pistols at the opening while pulling the trigger.
Kaecilius just grinned as a rune on his necklace began to glow, destabilizing the portal and forcing Tenno to void jump across the stage, as the place he had stood on earlier was encased in a ball of eldritch flames.
"You are not the first to come up with that kind of tactic; did you really think a dirty trick like that would work against a Master?" he asked rhetorically while strolling toward him, with every bullet dispersed around him.
"I guess that was foolish of me. I will just stick to what worked until now and amp it up a level," he retorted, grinning while using the opportunity to channel his powers into one big shot, pressing his two guns together to create a giant railgun that faced directly at Kaecilius.
Kaecilius looked slightly shocked as he sensed the amount of power in the oncoming attack, so he instinctively countered with the mirror dimension, which he sent Tenno's way, swallowing him whole as he was unable to dodge, being trapped in place by his own attack.
Now in the mirror dimension, with Kaecilius nowhere to be seen, Tenno had no other choice but to fire the shot into the air while searching around for the Master, ready for a surprise attack. But Kaecilius just stepped into the dimension from the other side of the training yard, leaving a lot of space between the two of them.
"Don't look so confused, against someone of your level, I don't need any underhand tactics," he said with a smug grin on his face as he held out his daggers to both sides of his body, which began to glow with an orange light while simultaneously growing in size.
"Now it's my turn to have some fun," he declared while smiling, slowly lifting his arms, the continuously growing blades sliced at their adversary while creating a bone-chilling scream as they sliced through the air.
Tenno looked at the attack in surprise, shell-shocked for a second, before crafting a construct and pushing it into the ground, which sent ripples through space, disabling the gravity around him.
At the same instant, he jumped upward, dodging the blades by a hair's breadth as they instead carved into the ground, splitting the stage into multiple parts.
Continuing his ascent, Tenno formed another construct, taking control of their surroundings, shaping the dimension and forming walls around Kaecilius while simultaneously pulling the ground he was standing on downward .
He smirked confidently and swung his scythes, cutting through the walls like butter, creating a bunch of cube-shaped debris around himself, which lost their intent to crush him and began to float around.
He scanned his surroundings, trying to find Tenno amid the debris, but the only thing he caught a glimpse of a second later was his annoying bullets, flying his way through the gaps between the floating debris.
He pushed himself off the ground while creating a multilayered shield around himself, which constantly regenerated as the bullets crashed into it.
He smiled smugly and started to create a spell of his own when suddenly a bullet got through his defense and crashed into his side, stopping his chanting and throwing him against a wall.
He squinted his eyes and focused on the bullets as he noticed that some now had a slight orange hue around their blue cores.
Figuring that these were the ones that could punch through his shields, he brought his daggers up to block them again, but they simply reflected, circled around some debris, and came back at him from another angle.
"These ones are truly annoying, good job," he said through gritted teeth, slowly gaining quite the bad mood, while simultaneously being impressed by his progress.
He started to take the fight at least somewhat seriously and began to slice at the bullets instead of just deflecting them with the side of his blade, for which he cursed himself just a moment later.
The bullets that he destroyed just exploded in his face, disorienting him with their brightness and high-frequency sounds, allowing for more of the piercing bullets to punch through his defenses, while leaving holes for other bullets to follow through.
He cursed as he constantly got blinded and his ears kept ringing, while more and more bullets punched into his body, leaving bruises all over.
But the worst was still to happen, as suddenly his amulet began to vibrate, drawing his attention to the big portal a few meters above him, out of his amulet's reach, that slowly began to form.
While Kaecilius adapted to his new tactics, the Tenno had constructed a massive one-way portal spell, connected to the sun's outer surface, facing downwards, which began to suck everything into its vacuum while simultaneously disintegrating everything in its path with its white, radiating solar rays.
Kaecilius begrudgingly used his breastplate and activated a battle armor around himself, made of eldritch energy.
He jumped, escaping the vacuum of the portal, completely blinded by the immense brightness, while the solar rays that tried to melt his body got absorbed by his armor.
He flew past the already collapsing portal and finally, there he was, Tenno, just above the portal , working on some new spell.
"Finally, I got you! I will teach you a lesson for throwing the sun at my face!"
Kaecilius said with an evil grin, standing midair as he charged his attack before flying fist-first at him.
Just in time, Tenno finished the spell he had been working on for the last months, just as Kaecilius's fist was about to touch his face.
Tenno grinned triumphantly as he opened his palms, as something akin to a liquid mirror spread out of his hands, forming a silver surface that grew to the size of a sling portal.
Kaecilius didn't know this spell, but the absorbed energy of the sun and his own were already on their way and probably enough to crush every defense spell Tenno could come up with either way.
So he just smiled at his own mirror image in mild confusion, intrigued by the confidence of the young sorcerer, as his fist punched against the surface of whatever this was.
But instead of what he thought would happen, like hitting a wall or gliding through a portal leading somewhere else, it felt as if he punched against an eldritch construct of the same caliber as his own.
His armor released the accumulated damage and energy he sent into it, facing the construct, but to his own confusion, it didn't seem to budge even a bit.
As the energy rushed into its target, it somehow got repelled back into his own attack, negating its effect completely, while every bone and muscle in his arms felt like they were piercing and breaking.
"Arrrgh! " was the only sound that came out of his mouth, as the shockwave flying through his body took his breath away shortly after.
The backlash was as great as two of his attacks combined, the only thing keeping his arm together being his glowing armor.
Simultaneously, the emergency runes on his belt activated, forcefully pulling him out of the mirror dimension.
Then it slowly dawned on Tenno.
He had won.
In a real spar against a master of the mystic arts.