[Nin`]

A feral smile crossed the dark warriors face, his eyes narrowing, as he swung Ka’tallasith before him in an idle, fierce gesture; almost beckoning the Pillar’s assault hither.

Scores of serrated spikes, like great icy incisors, shrieked aloud with a howling crescendo cutting swiftly through the open air, and towards him like a wailing blizzard.

Nin’s gaze held steady and clear, and for a moment he stood in complete observation, his views reflecting flawlessly in the speculum of his masked face - save for his eyes, which only seemed to absorb everything beyond them.

Then, in a rising thermal agitation, Nin’s eyes suddenly ignited into a luminous vibrato, and the world began to slow; the flow of space-time distorted all around him, degenerating into a torpid remiss, as he willed his mind into a transitory state of accelerated consciousness.

Caught in the permutation of time, the expance of ice loomed over Nin with predatory advance, like huge flying daggers caught in slow motion.

He smiled to himself reassuringly as Ka'tallasith, gripped firmly in hand, shon out from his right side like an ardent flame, hungry for battle. Without hesitation, Nin launched himself into the air, somersaulting, just before the first shards reached him.

He moved with an unnatural velocity, avoiding the first two ice shards with astonishing ease whilst swinging his blade impetuously around him and into a synchronised wave of gyratory slashes.

Lunging and twisting in midair, Nin aligned and realigned his offensive, counterattacking time after time with inhuman speed. To an average mind observing him he would have seemed only like an array of caliginousness blurs between movements - followed abruptly by a rending discharge of concentrated ice.

Again and again, with devastating effect, Ka'tallasith struck relentlessly with unequalled careen - meeting each target with shattering boom while veering swiftly apace throughout every dimension with obscure motion. The blade itself was very strange, not appearing at all completely natural, as it seemed to defy the very laws of physics – almost as if it were not of this universe.

In what would have seemed like an instant in real time, Nin descended between the plethora’s of shattered ice, medially in midair, before touching down only seconds after his feet had left he ground. His eyes slowly faded, reverting back to their normal colour, the momentary lapse of accelerated consciousness fading quickly, once again restoring the flow of space-time around him; the ice shards swiftly followed - smashing loudly to the ground around him.

Then, in a flash of instance and as if from nowhere, an ice shard, much smaller, silently shot out of the changing environment. Without a second thought, Nin threw his blade into the air, extending his right arm and stretching out his palm towards it.

The icy spike struck his hand perfectly; piercing it all the way through with dagger-like laceration while he revealed his left hand from the darkness of his cloak, clad in what appeared to be a fierce metallic claw, before clasping Ka'tallasith at its hilt. His movements were sinuously swift, as if they had already been predetermined and orchestrated with wondrous intent.

But Nin’s demeanour betrayed nothing.

“Childs play,” he uttered with avowal.

“I hope for your sake that you can do better then that…” he directed to Kraai, “because if this is all you’ve got you’d better start running,” Nin vaunted, his tone confident and disdainful.

He took a moment to take in his new surroundings, observing them with a tactical curiosity: the skies were sanguine, stained and running with blood as if a thousand heads had been smashed against it. The air grew colder and denser with what would have perhaps been a deathly chill to most mortal men. And the trees, abstractly, continued to wizen, disfiguring in a way that might have been the gloom of death itself. But what had caught his interests for a moment longer were the eyes that bulged out from their bark. All around him they seemed to stare with something monstrous in their gaze, an innate affinity to which he could deeply relate. Honing his mind, he consciously tuned the psycho-electronic frequencies of his visual cortex in with the trees eyes own visionary senses almost instantly granting him the vision of a multitude of eyes throughout various positions. He watched Lucid, silently anew, with a gathering scorn.

"You obviously don't know the meaning of fear..." Kraai had earlier retorted - his words playing through Nin’s mind.

Looking back down to his bloody impaled hand, Nin conceded his point with the slightest of nods. The vertical spike shimmering, like a rapier that had only just drawn blood.

"I wouldn’t know the meaning of fear, no – at least not anymore…" he looked up staring back to Kraai. "I tore out my amygdale a long time ago, eradicating such primitive and innate traits entirely from my genetic being, before regenerating and evolving them anew to my design..." He voice rang with a dark tone.

Quietly, Nin ignited his psychokinetic abilities, manipulating the surroundings to his will. The incision to his hand flowed red in a surge of effluence, but not a drop had spilt unto the pristine white of diamond-like ice shards beneath him. Instead, the gouts of blood coursed up his palm, skyward, to the tips of his fingers, ebbing away from the ground and up into the above.

"… At first it removed the idea of pain from me, and I thought I felt no pain at all," Nin continued, "but then I came to realize that I just didn’t care about it." He mused to himself, watching his blood rise up above him, as he clenched his hand into a fist, shattering the spike of ice into a million twinkleing parts. The flow of blood stopped, and the small opening in his hand gradually began to close.

"The propensities of fear are not something I have in mind – quite literally."

A pool of blood amassed above him in complete suspension, stretching and coagulating into an elongated shape resembling a red tentacle. The billions of fragmented ice pieces were quick to join it, as they to were pulled into air in rapid motion. Piece by piece the ice was absorbed into the bioplasm of the tentacle, becoming an intricate part of it as the matter was broken down and assimilated, increasing its size threescore.

Without hesitation, and with spiralling momentum, the bioplasmic arm advanced upon the Pillar of Mind with ferocious agility. The tip, no longer blunt, begun to open, dividing into multiple red fingers that were themselves growing and coiling, writhing their way through the air, with the intent of binding Lucid’s upper body in strangulation.

In the same instant, Nin clasped Ka’tallasith in both hands to his right side, the blade upright and towering vertically above him. He rushed at Kraai; expeditiously with inhuman speed and completely silent, save for the reaping howl of his blades edge.

As the bifurcating blood arms descended upon the Pillar, Nin thrust his blade forward in an effort to cleave his opponents legs from under him whilst striking from multiple horizontal directions; the blade slashing diagonally from both left and right angles as its quantum abilities were activated.

The blade roared with a primordial scream, and its howl, against the wind, resounded like a hunter’s challenge to its prey.