Courtyard Kamar-Taj
Observer POV
A slow breeze flew through the courtyard and brushed the leaves across the ground.
The sun was about to set, and its golden rays fell onto the floor, casting elongated shadows.
While they elongated further and further, one of them suddenly vanished, and then reappeared in another spot.
It was the Tenno's, who dodged one of Master Kaecilius's attacks with a Void sling.
"You truly adapt fast, young one," he said with a smile, while dodging all of the incoming attacks with ease, not even using his weapons. „But not fast enough," he eventually 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, let the sword vanish, and waved his hands as he began to construct something new, while taking on a different battle stance. „I was always better in ranged combat anyway," he boasted as new Eldritch constructs appeared in his hands in the form of two handguns.
Kaecilius scoffed and slowly walked toward him, spinning his daggers in his hands as they sliced through the air, while creating ear-piercing screams.
Tenno, though, was not intimidated in the slightest and just raised his guns as he began to fire at the Master of the Mystic Arts, walking backwards at the same speed he was approaching.
Blue bullets sprayed out of the constructs in all directions, seemingly missing their target, while Kaecilius just watched on in boredom, dodging the one or two exceptions that would have actually hit him, while following the bullets' trajectory in his peripheral vision, as they zoomed past him.
Eventually, he slightly raised his eyebrow in surprise, turning his head around as he realized what was going on. The bullets had begun to change course behind his back, taking a sharp turn until their trajectories eventually lined up with his position again, similar to seeker missiles.
"Nice trick you have there, but that won't work against enemies that pay attention to their surroundings," he lectured as he figured out the idea behind the attack, feeling a little disappointed by its simplicity. He continued to spin his scythes, wielding them like shields against the oncoming barrage while turning away, not even glancing at the incoming bullets anymore.
As Kaecilius blocked them with the flat sides of his scythes, he suddenly smiled, realizing something noteworthy. Every blocked bullet had bounced off his scythes' edge, flown an unpredictable path, and then once again, taken a sharp turn till it once more had realigned its 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 the bullets' path, while forming two small eldritch constructs from the Nova core's energy around his fists, which he then used to block the incoming bullets, still on his trail.
"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.
They forced him to create the shields again and again in the oncoming barrages, while he simultaneously had to dodge 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, and aimed his pistols at the opening before 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, while the position he had taken 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 towards him, every bullet already dispersed.
"I guess that was foolish of me. I will just stick to what worked until now and amp it up a level," Tenno retorted, grinning, while using the opportunity to channel his powers into one big shot, pressing his two guns together to create one big railgun, which faced directly at Kaecilius.
Kaecilius, in turn, looked slightly shocked as he sensed the amount of power funneled into the oncoming attack. He instinctively countered with the mirror dimension and sent it Tenno's way, who immediately got swallowed up whole by it, unable to dodge while he was charging up 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 letting his eyes wander around the area, searching for the Master, always 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 underhanded tactics," he said with a smug grin on his face, holding out his daggers to both sides of him, which then began to glow with an orange light, while simultaneously growing in size.
"Now it's my turn to have some fun," he declared with a smile, slowly lifting his arms above his head, leading to the continuously growing blades to slice at their adversary, while once again creating a bone-chilling scream.
Tenno looked at the attack in surprise, shell-shocked for a second, before crafting a construct, which he then pushed into the ground, sending out ripples through space, while 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 and split the stage into multiple parts.
Continuing his ascent, Tenno formed another construct to take control over his surroundings. It shaped and turned the dimension around him in strange geometric patterns, which he then used to form walls around Kaecilius while simultaneously destabilizing the ground he was standing on.
Kaecilius, in turn, just smirked confidently and swung his scythes, the orange-glowing blades cutting through the walls like butter while creating a bunch of harmless cube-shaped debris around him.
He scanned his surroundings, trying to find Tenno amid the debris, but the only thing he caught a glimpse of a second later, were his annoying bullets, which flew directly his way through the gaps he made between the floating debris.
Pushing himself off the ground, he created 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 in its tracks, and throwing him against a wall.
He squinted, noticing that some bullets had a slight orange hue around their blue cores, and figured that these were the ones that could punch through his shields. He brought his daggers up to block them, but they simply reflected, circled around some debris, and came back at him from another angle.
"These ones are truly annoying, good job Tenno," he said through gritted teeth with a toothy grin, slowly slipping into quite a bad mood, while simultaneously getting impressed by the young sorcerer's 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 the next second.
The bullets that he destroyed exploded in his face, successfully disorienting him with their brightness and high-frequency sounds, which allowed more of the piercing bullets to punch through his defenses, which then left holes for other bullets to follow through.
He cursed as he constantly got blinded and his ears were overwhelmed, while simultaneously more and more bullets punched into his body, leaving bruises and burmarks wherever they hit.
But the worst part was still to come, as his amulet suddenly began to vibrate, drawing his attention to the gigantic portal a few meters above him, which slowly began to take form.
While Kaecilius adapted to his new tactics, Tenno had constructed a massive one-way portal, connected to the sun's outer surface, and its opening faced downwards, directly at his position. As it connected, it instantly began to suck everything into its vacuum, while simultaneously melting all Matter in its path.
Kaecilius begrudgingly used his breastplate and activated his battle armor made of eldritch energy, able to absorb and redirect attacks heading his way.
He jumped out of the portal's path just in time, escaping its suction force by a hair's breadth, but still got completely blinded in his right eye by the immense brightness of the attack.
He flew past the already collapsing portal, and finally, there he was, Tenno, just above the portal and already working on some new spell.
"Finally, I got you! I will teach you a lesson for throwing the sun at my face!" Kaecilius yelled, visibly agitated, floating midair as he charged up his attack, before flying fist-first at Tenno with incredible speed.
Just in time, Tenno finished casting the spell he had been working on for the last couple of months, right before Kaecilius's fist was about to touch his face.
Tenno grinned triumphantly as he opened his palms, something akin to a liquid mirror spreading from his hands, and a silver surface forming right between them, growing to the size of a sling portal.
Kaecilius didn't know the spell, but the absorbed energy of the sun and his own were already channeled into his attack 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, before his fist punched against the strange surface.
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 into the spell, but to his own confusion, it didn't seem to budge even a little.
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 still keeping his arm together being his Eldridge armor.
Simultaneously, the emergency runes on his belt activated, forcefully pulling him out of the mirror dimension.
As the spell faded and the Mirror Dimension began to repair itself, Tenno gradually realized something.
He had won.
In a real spar against a master of the mystic arts.