@supreme_chancellor:
Albert Esotrix was over one hundred and fifty years old. Psychic power was bred into his very bones. It dripped from his voice when he spoke and thundered across this life and the next when he shouted. When he struck his burning spear of psychic might left a scar across the fabric of reality itself.
He had crossed wills with Spiller, the Omega level powerhouse who had shocked the world with his displays of unmitigated power. The Triumvirate, the three Omegas bound together in one will who had served Alexandera Steele's HellFire Club. Even ID, the Daemon of Silence himself, a being of pure psychic might whose atherial form had stalked the astral plane for an eon.
The Alpha level Arcani had tasted their might. He had endured the godlike blows of their wills, survived the blazing swords of etheric power and stood firm against the tsunamis of unfettered might that had seen the gods retreat from the world.
It was nothing like this.
Nothing.
The original Arcani had been mutant time travelers from a distant dystopian future who traveled back to the beginning of human history to begin again. They had passed on thousand generations of wisdom and the occult secrets of a hundred thousand wars. Runes and sigils and forbidden rites were carved into Albert's mind at the quantum level. The shields he wrapped around Ivana and her parties minds could make a mockery of a god and hurl back a pantheon. They were adamatine.
They blew apart like tissue paper.
Albert screamed into the astral void in agony as he tried to redirect the Chancellor's power, to slow it, to delay it. Anything. He tried a thousand techniques in the space of a thought. Anything! He cried into the abyss.
The psychic blowback stopped his heart.
His life support chair slammed into action with the merciless reflexes of the machine, forcing the abomination of life back into his body in half a heartbeat.
On pure instinct he hurled his astral form between the party and the attack. He called upon terrible pacts and invoked the monstrous principalities of the between space. He unleashed a reservoir of psychic power stored for three quarters of a million years. So much raw power poured into his second desperate layer of shields they burned a mark into the barrier between dimensions for all eternity.
They failed.
Albert's mind was simply erased from the universe.
The entire titanic struggle took less than one one-hundredth of a second.
Energy, pure psychic energy detonated inside Ivana's mind like an atom bomb. The twenty first century samurai had inherited the zythium retrovirus from her mother, a virus that allowed her to adapt to metaphysical phenomena the same way a human's immune system adapted to invading bacteria. She had survived the Omega level assault from the psychic Spiller and even endured a strike from Valerie Huntington so godlike the psychic backlash had melted the psychic defenses built into her old suit, destroying it.
Her mind was a fortress, crafted with arcane secrets passed down from Strigidae to Strigidae since the dawn of humanity. Layer upon layer of psy shielding had been built into her mind since infancy. Deep within black tombs she had stolen the secrets of mental defense from grandmasters who had taken their secrets to the grave. Inside hidden jungle temples she had studied the mysteries of the mind with long forgotten orders of monks and faced the alien wielders of esoteric power upon the highest mountains. Her thoughts were a labyrinth.
The Chancellor's attack annihilated her elaborate defenses in an instant.
Every cell inside her body was built with a zythium cytoskeleton. Cytoskeletons are the structures inside cells that give them their shape. Zythium was the material that armored Kratesis across a thousand universes, a million years and a billion cosmic wars. Though it was not as durable as vibrainium or adamantine it possessed greater resistance to metaphysical energies.
It burned.
The twenty third Strigidae fell to one knee as both of her eyeballs flash-boiled. They bubbled out of her eye sockets and ran down her face in a mess of sizzling fluid.
The tide of red Orochi behind her simply immolated. They became a hundred pillars of fire as every cell in their bodies ignited as psychic energy blew through their minds and washed over into the physical plane, utterly obliterating their bodies. Red robes blazed in the sun, spewing black ash into the wind as a legion of some of the greatest martial artists in a generation were annihilated.
Raw, white hot agony ripped through Ivana as every cell in her body was wracked by the sheer agony of burning zythium while her mind was pulverized by a psychic assault so mighty there were no words to describe it.
It was the pain that saved her.
Ivana's mutant power was the ability to sense and control tachyon particles. Tachyons were negative mass particles, which means the traveled backward in time, rather than forward like positive mass particles. Because of this she could receive sensory input from the future, simply by 'reading' the tachyon emissions of her own nervous system. In the base of the human spine there is a bundle of nerves that receive sensory input and react to it before it reaches the brain. For example if you touch a hot stove you will yank your hand away before your mind experiences pain.
When her zythium burned she experienced pain. A lot of pain.
An involuntary command flickered out from the nerve bundle inside her dorsal horn to her brain and a command flashed from her brain to her body a fraction of a second before her eyes melted like butter and she collapsed to one knee, the titanic strength of her mind and will overwhelmed by the unimaginable power of the Chancellors psychic strike.
It was a command that carried the martial knowledge of perhaps the greatest martial artist to ever walk the face of the earth. For though blinded, her Orochi army destroyed and her psychic ally dead she was still Ivana Strigidae.
One of the many arts she had mastered was the one art that Ivana had developed: Oceptratron. Put simply Oceptratron was the art of instant acceleration. Rather than a motion acceleration from stationary to its maximum speed Oceptratron allowed those who mastered it to accelerate to maximum speed instantly.
A second art was known as Abuskhau; the ability to 'push' her kinesthetic sense out beyond the borders of her body. This allowed her to perform impossible feats of accuracy, unleashing projectiles at distant targets with the ease and accuracy that she could touch her finger to her nose in the dark, because for Ivana both tasks used the same sense; the kinesthetic sense.
Her mutant power allowed her to read others nerve impulses through tachyon connections, allowing her to know when, where and how much they moved by 'experiencing' the phantom image of their body overlapped on hers inside her own mind. That included the Saccadic movements, tiny and involuntary movements of the human eye. Because the human eye can only see about one or two degrees of its field of vision in high resolution it makes thousands of tiny adjustments every second to 'scan' its field of vision and create a complete picture. Without this humans would see a tiny silver of clarity amid a vast, fuzzy background.
It also involves something known as SSID, or saccadic suppression of image displacement. This is when the brain blocks out sensory input that arrives during saccadic movement. If it did not then the new 'fuzzy' input would over-ride the old 'sharp' input and the brain would again see a tiny silver of sharp focus bouncing all over their fuzzy field of vision.
In an instinctive, intuitive movement constructed of pristine martial grandmastery Ivana's armored right gauntlet flickered into motion, Oceptratron accelerating her hand to post-human velocities without even a quantum delay. Her fist closed around the hilt of a tanto sheathed on her boot. Tachyons infused the blade with a negative mass singularity, capable of slicing through anything short of true adamantium. A flash of a matte black gauntlet and Abuskhau sent the blade whirling through the air between them, targeting the Chancellor's skull as accurately as if Ivana had reached out to touch him on the forehead.. though she was utterly and totally blind.
Impossibly precise timing born of a lifetime of grandmastery and a precision reading of the Chancellor's nerve commands meant the entire motion, from the first movement of her glove to the arrival of the two hundred mile an hour knife, would occur during a the fraction of a fraction of a second where his brain rejected 'fuzzy' input due to SSID, meaning that if she were successful his brain would never register that she moved at all.
In essence the knife throw of the self proclaimed greatest warrior alive was, unless he had some defense, completely invisible and instantly lethal.
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