aron was about to learn a hard lesson about combat. A lesson named, "Momentum". This is because Sol did not cease his assault and politely wait for his target to martial a defense. The mysterious assailant, with motives that were as simple as his assault was brutal, did not hesitate to press the advantage of his surprise attack. He had Aaron on his heels, and he was not about to waste the opportunity. Keeping pressure on an enemy was one of the quickest paths to victory, as with enough applied, even the hardiest foes would reach their limit and be crushed. For a man whose mightiest weapon was to harness the strength of sudden increases in ambient pressure, Sol was justifiably skilled at this particular tactic.

As he had wound up for the uppercut, Sol's powerful legs had collected beneath the center of his mass, and like twin pistons they drove him upward into his victim with the force of charging beast. The impact rattled down the length of the synthetic bones of his arm, transmitting a sensation of indecent pleasure into the cyclops' thorax, and the strength of his leap continued to propel him upwards even as his unfortunate prey was slammed aside. With a flowing grace wreathed in the might of primal muscle, beheld with a suggestion of the writhing mighty of a python or another great serpent, Sol climb to a height of nearly a dozen feet before the last of his momentum failed. He continued to rotate as he ascended like a leaping cobra, carrying still the centrifugal propulsion of his previous combination strike, though it was muted somewhat by the acceleration it had lost with the two landed blows. By the time he reached the peak of his lunge, he had further spun another one hundred and eighty degrees.

Sol's body collected beneath him again, contracting like the spring that his sudden flight had imitated, and he held out his right arm straight completing an imaginary line that stretched from  the distant sky through his open palm, then his chest and legs, and finally ended in the center of Aaron's mass.

The backpedaling warrior's armor had just finished collecting itself as an ear splitting report of fire, sound and force, erupted from the smoking shade's right palm, painting the night sky with an inverted teardrop of angry red flame. At the precise moment that gravity began to demand that he return to the earth, Sol unleashed a focused jet of flame from his right palm, turning his body into the fuselage of a ballistic missile, and his boot into a steel capped warhead. The one eyed aggressor streaked down towards, Aaron, adding the acceleration of literal jet propulsion to the urging tug of gravity, and bridging the gap between them in a single glorious instant.

At some point between when his jet fired, and his boot impacted Aaron's form, a trio of bright lights sprang to brilliant light around the pair. Unfortunately, seeing as they did not present an actual physical obstacle to his advance, and how they were aiming at a position he'd recently vacated,  Sol's strike was not inconvenienced in the slightest. His trajectory was already set by the time the sudden flashes would have made any difference, and their appearance had as much effect on the ballistic warrior as a flashlight would upon a bullet.

The only positive effect of the illumination was to reveal that Sol was not actually armed, at least not with what Aaron had previously taken to be a blade. The shape that extruded from Sol's left arm was revealed to be the inverted sheath of a katana, firmly fixed to a bracer that encircled the warrior's wrist, and running parallel to his forearm. The hilt of the sword, still within the vessel even as Sol wielded the extent like a club, was currently pointed towards the warrior's elbow.

Sol crashed down like a falling star, a blur of  shrieking steel and fluttering fabric.  As sudden as a gunshot, and leaving behind a streak like a tracer round, Sol slammed down with both feet, unloading his coiled legs at the instant of connection and transferring all the stored energy of his body and his flight into the arena floor. The pad of set stones and mortar emitted a tortured roar of surprise and igneous anguish. Assuming that Aaron actually had time to realize who it was that was currently making an attempt of his health and safety, he would not have had time to utter a single syllable before the earth at the point of impact was reduced to a crater of shattered cobbles and evicted earth. If Aaron was lucky, he would not be between the collapsing star's heels and the pavement when he landed.

Still, a single sound rose above the clamor, and this sound was a voice, so broken with gravel and wrath that it might have come from the explosive blow itself.

"HELLFIRE METEOR!"

Sol spun into a crouch as he landed, throwing out his left arm and using the inertia of his weapon's scabbard to carry himself into a spin as he opened the vent in the palm of his right hand to its' greatest extent. The aperture parted and the propelling jet that had slammed him down into the floor swelled from a short teardrop of blinding heat, to a fifteen foot long cone that was four feet wide at it's end. As if a mad god had suddenly slashed the world with a rough brush of angry crimson, Sol painted a circle of red thirty feet across upon the area that surrounded him. Then as he completed the three hundred and sixty degree spin, quickly enough that most of it still hung in the air, he allowed his own aura to rise from the turmoil of his savage soul.

A field of crawling red tongues of eldritch flame surged out from between his lips, and covered his head and much of his chest beneath a lashing layer of silent fire. The air immediately ahead of his lips seemed to distort, though anyone who had been close enough to witness this effect would have not the time to properly regret it. A spike of condensed aura lanced out into the ring of lingering fire that his hand had left hanging in the air.

The chemical makeup of the suspended flame was a compound of slow burning fire dust. This was important to note because the moment that the spear of Sol's semblance impacted the floating motes of flame, it caused the chemical reaction to complete in a mere fraction of the time it would have taken to burn through the fuel naturally. This resulted in a chain reaction for which few descriptors would do justice, save "explosive", as the ring of fire, fifteen feet thick, went up like a powder keg.

Somewhere in the distant town of Vytal proper, hundreds of people would remember the explosion that jarred them out of restful slumber in the dead of that autumn night, but closer to the point of impact, one would only hear a high pitched whine if one's ears were still intact at all. A wall of force, harder than steel and thinner than a hair, slammed outwards like a shaped charge with Sol at it's epicenter, shredding the stones of the training yard like a thresher through dry wheat. Rocks, pebbles, and even individual grains of sand that had been thrown up by his initial impact were first super-heated, and then propelled outwards by the pressure wave, transformed into a deadly cloud of uninterrupted shrapnel. The nearest interior wall of the yard took the worst of the blast, and buckled visibly beneath the force as mortar was shunted out of its seams in fountains of pulverized dust, right before the intact stones reflected a fraction of the blast wave back towards the center of the arena.

tag(s): @someone ━ words: 000 ━ notes: please keep it short