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A glowing cage materialized around Zeff in midair. He immediately felt the radiation degrading his body, slowing his movement, and he knew that it would spell the end for him if he stayed inside it for more than a few seconds. His water drill punched through, and Zeff fell toward the ground again.

Jaws of radium leapt up to meet him, and Zeff responded by filling the open maw with a sudden geyser. The water shot up with enough force to carry Zeff with it, removing him from danger. He caught himself with a twisting slope of ice, allowing him to create a path that brought him right back down to both feet again.

But Lawrence was there now--a figure of blue heat, looming directly in front of Zeff--and the radiation was at its most potent, destroying the Rainlord’s muscles and numbing each of his physical senses.

A platinum wrecking ball slammed into the General, but not before he grabbed Zeff’s arm. Rather than be taken along with Lawrence, however, the limb tore free, spewing blood and melted flesh from the gaping wound.

Even with pan-forma, Zeff needed a few extra moments to recover. The effects of soul-empowered radiation lingered still, and he could see his own skin forming a puddle of slop around his hands and knees. Lawrence, on the other hand, would be requiring no such time.

The Lady Socorro Garza picked up the slack. She hadn’t stopped attacking once, materializing boulder after boulder, pinballing the Vanguardian General around in an effort to keep him off balance. He seemed to have had enough of that, however, and punted the next boulder right back at her. It dematerialized before reaching her, and she started creating multiple boulders at once, all gunning for Lawrence from different directions. Lawrence met each of them with soaring blue lances, sparing one for Socorro as well. She barely managed to sidestep it, but a horizontal blade jumped out of its shaft at the last moment and slashed her neck and arm, very nearly decapitating her.

Then an earthquake interrupted, halting both attackers as they had to stop and steady themselves.

To Zeff’s amazement, the Madame Redwater had not yet fallen. She’d been holding off the Gargoyle for a solid minute without assistance, keeping the endless streams of rock at bay before they could smother and crush her.

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Spikes of radium jumped out of Lawrence’s shell, and Zeff met them with a pair of pressurized water drills. Previously, he’d only been able to make them the size of his thumb, but now, the drills were bigger than each hand. So when Zeff pushed them into the spikes, they carved the radium down and left cracking holes in the wall, allowing the Rainlord to do the rest of the work with brute strength alone.

He punched through, and Lawrence was there, right in his face, having caught Zeff’s fist with his own radium-coated palm.

With both men wielding super strength, a brief hand-to-hand struggle occurred, and for a moment, they were able to look each other in the eye.

“I’m sorry for what I am about to do, Zeff.”

“Don’t apologize for dying, Lawrence.”

Zeff coated himself in spikes of his own, aiming to skewer the old man with them, but Lawrence released him and used a sudden block of radium to knock Zeff and his spikes back.

Zeff toppled back, bouncing atop a row of spires. A hail of platinum shards bought him time to find his footing again.

But the General did not press his attack yet, Zeff saw. Instead, Lawrence’s body flashed pristinely white as pan-rozum transformed him into pure radium. And his body did not tarnish with air exposure like normal radium did. Rather, it began to glow fiercely blue, even in this bright daylight.

And Zeff knew what that meant. Lawrence was pushing the radiation to absurd levels with the power of his soul. Already, Zeff could feel its debilitating effects, attacking his flesh on a cellular level, weakening muscles and hindering regeneration. This skill was the reason Lawrence was called the Blue Bear.

But Zeff was not in the mood to be intimidated. He lobbed another tsunami and followed in its wake, preparing to materialize another drill. A rapid series of platinum javelins came flying to his aid as well, providing extra support.

Lawrence’s glowing body pressed through the water, hissing inside a billowing cloud of steam, and the man launched a wall of radium spikes toward Zeff, each one glowing blue as well.

Zeff propelled himself out of their path with a vertical platform and pulled out his two-finger hand guns. Icy bullets burst forth as Zeff sailed through the air.

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Before Zeff could press his attack any further, however, a tornado swirled down from the sky and whipped him and the other Rainlords into the air. Zeff coated himself in ice, but the oncoming blades of wind chiseled through it in rapid succession and slashed his flailing body from a hundred different angles.

Then he was free again, left to fall back down to the ground in peace. It was Rayen’s doing, he saw. She and Parson were both practically invisible, but their souls could be seen in direct conflict. A beam of ultraviolet light had gored a swirling vortex through its center, but somehow, the vortex was preventing that same light from escaping. A series of booms rang out as they struggled there in the sky, but Zeff had already turned away from their fight in order to focus on his own.

Evangelina and Santos had gone off to support Octavia, and so it was only Zeff and Socorro now, perched on a field of half-broken spires as they readied to face Xavier Lawrence.

After going up against Sanko and Parson, Lawrence almost seemed like an easy fight. But that was wrong, Zeff knew, and he reminded himself that this was not a man to be underestimated.

A radium dome arrived first, trying to bathe the two Rainlords in soul-enhanced radiation, but Zeff was ready with four enormous pillars of ice--more enormous than he had even intended them to be, in fact--and they knocked the dome away before it could do any damage.

Then came a bed of radium, instead, and Socorro and Zeff both platformed themselves away. Zeff’s platform, however, didn’t let up. It grew upward and sideways and then back down toward Lawrence with increasing speed. It was almost too fast, like flying on a rocket made of ice, and Zeff barely managed to maintain control.

But his reliance on only ice was limiting him, he realized. The decreased temperature made it more difficult to produce. So this time, he reached for water, as much of it as he could create.

And a tsunami appeared.

It reached nearly as high as the Gargoyle’s head and came crashing down on Lawrence, who merely shielded himself with a radium shelter. The water hissed angrily against the white metal, making it jostle from the sheer force of the wave, but the radium held strong nonetheless.

But Zeff already knew what he wanted to do next.