[ Step by step, he stumbles his way along the path, hearing nothing, seeing nothing except the packed ground before him, the gentle twists and turns. Someone must have walked this way before, many times to create this path — history that would normally have him theorizing and studying, his curiosity alight. Nothing lights in him now; nothing breaks through the dull shell of shock that's gathered around him. He feels cold. His skin is stiff where blood is drying. And still he presses stubbornly onward, barely registering anything around him, not even the Nevron sat at rest a few short strides ahead when he makes his way around a curve in the path.
For a long moment, they simply look at each other, and his mind empties again into one long scream. Blasts of chroma, massive clubs half the size of the ship they took to get here, too many hands and arms and glowing lamps —
But this Nevron isn't like those. It's solitary, smaller. As it gets up with a clanking noise and squares to him, Gustave blinks, uncertain. He'd frozen up on the beach, terror like nothing he'd ever known before gripping him, but he's trained for years for a moment like this. With barely any input or thought from his conscious mind, he flicks his right wrist and fills his hand with the familiar grip of his sword as his left hand lifts, chroma spinning into the shape of his pistol. He doesn't... he doesn't know what else to do, but he can still fight.
And he does, training and muscle memory taking over, smoothing his stuttered steps and stiff movements of earlier into lethal grace with every step, power and precision in each lunge, each sweep of his blade, each shot from the pistol. He fights with economy, sideslipping a thrust of the enormous lance with light steps nothing like the stumbling ones he'd been taking earlier. There's a disconnect, still, but it doesn't slow him down, simply allows him to lose himself in the back and forth, parry and dodge and attack, of the fight.
And when he can, when the opening is there, he reaches his left hand to the sky, calling down the lightning that crackles around his fingers, his arm before he redirects it to strike at the Nevron from above, a cascade of crimson bolts shattering the air around it, breaking its armor and sending the thing collapsing, dead, to the ground. ]
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For a long moment, they simply look at each other, and his mind empties again into one long scream. Blasts of chroma, massive clubs half the size of the ship they took to get here, too many hands and arms and glowing lamps —
But this Nevron isn't like those. It's solitary, smaller. As it gets up with a clanking noise and squares to him, Gustave blinks, uncertain. He'd frozen up on the beach, terror like nothing he'd ever known before gripping him, but he's trained for years for a moment like this. With barely any input or thought from his conscious mind, he flicks his right wrist and fills his hand with the familiar grip of his sword as his left hand lifts, chroma spinning into the shape of his pistol. He doesn't... he doesn't know what else to do, but he can still fight.
And he does, training and muscle memory taking over, smoothing his stuttered steps and stiff movements of earlier into lethal grace with every step, power and precision in each lunge, each sweep of his blade, each shot from the pistol. He fights with economy, sideslipping a thrust of the enormous lance with light steps nothing like the stumbling ones he'd been taking earlier. There's a disconnect, still, but it doesn't slow him down, simply allows him to lose himself in the back and forth, parry and dodge and attack, of the fight.
And when he can, when the opening is there, he reaches his left hand to the sky, calling down the lightning that crackles around his fingers, his arm before he redirects it to strike at the Nevron from above, a cascade of crimson bolts shattering the air around it, breaking its armor and sending the thing collapsing, dead, to the ground. ]