The Black Apostle thrust an open hand toward Erica, a dark purple light emanating from within the silver ring in his palm. Another portal opened behind her as The Black Apostle raked the air next to him with the other hand, forming another portal. Erica dove away from the one behind her as he lunged through the second portal to the first, blade fingers reaching for her. Her side on fire, Erica attempted to stem the bleeding by clotting the blood with shaping. She couldn't focus on the task since The Black Apostle was steadily advancing on her, long legs propelling his looming frame closer as she backed away. Another pair of portals were made, this time above Erica and below him. She had to scramble forth to avoid the heavy mechan landing on her as he dropped through the floor and appeared above. Cracking flagstones with his landing, The Black Apostle gave the cackle of a confident mechan as he went for another stab. Erica swung her saber with all the force she could muster, smashing into his bladed fingers and knocking them aside. When he came in with the other hand, she was forced to jump back. Erica pointed her saber at The Black Apostle and hit him with a small bolt of lightning. He didn't even stagger from the hit, and as she looked on Erica noticed that runes etched into his exterior were glowing red near the impact.

"I am warded against your maiga sorcery, Altean pet," The mechan priest gloated, "What will you do now? Though I am impressed with how much heft your sword swings have. Where does such strength come from...?"

"None of your damned business," Erica sneered, pain straining her voice. She took the opportunity of him musing his questions to keep her wounds from bleeding further. Daring a glance toward Damon, she saw the Altean general was doing his best to keep the cultists away, erecting walls of flame to deter them. 

Erica felt the portal form next to her before she saw it, and a bladed hand was reaching through it at her as she turned to it. She ducked under it and scuttled past the growing portal as The Black Apostle emerged from it. The portal dissipating behind him, he languidly turned to face her again.

"Yes, keep running. It makes this hunt all the more entertaining." The Black Apostle clearly felt that he was in full control of the situation. Erica was wounded and on the back foot, reacting to him rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, it was proven that low level maiga attacks had no effect on him.

Erica's mind was racing. What could she do against this monstrosity? Even her heftiest swings with her saber weren't doing anything to his hands, and she hadn't been able to get close enough to try on the rest of him. Shaping looked like it wouldn't be an option, so what then? She couldn't just rush to Damon for help, he was already busy trying to keep the horde of cultists at bay. The Black Apostle was her problem to solve, so it seemed. 

The mechan sprung at her, claws outstretched in an attempt to catch her. Erica darted backward, lighting trailing off her feet as she used maiga to propel herself out of harm's way. The Black Apostle followed up, swiping with his left, then his right, then left again. Erica dodged backward again and again, mindful to pivot to keep away from the cultist mob. She focused a large amount of maiga around her blade as she flicked it at The Black Apostle, a thunderous bolt lancing from the tip of her sword at the black-clad mechan. He took a step back with the impact, but runes glowed angrily where he'd been struck. That last attack seemed to have passed some sort of limit within Erica, as maiga was starting to flow freely within her. Small arcs of electricity danced across her form as she attempted to rein in her power.

"Enough." The Black Apostle, now sounding annoyed, aimed a palm at Erica's feet, the other directly above him. Before she could react, Erica was falling through the ground and found herself above The Apostle, a handful of talons held to a point aimed at her. In a fraction of a moment, she would be impaled. Without thinking, she leaned into the fall and held her right arm across her body to block the impact. Steel blades met altanite armour, and Erica scraped past the raised hand of the Diezen, shredding her jacket's sleeve in the process. Using the impact to right herself again, she landed on her feet and dove forward to get out of The Black Apostle's reach. Glancing at her arm, she could see no damage to the metal exterior through the tears in the sleeve. Thank the gods for that. No, not them, Erica thought defiantly, thank Damon.

The Black Apostle looked at his similarly undamaged talons, then back at her, seemingly perplexed. "How did you do that...? Your arm. Now that I look at it more closely, I see that it and your hand are not flesh and blood. Fascinating..."

"It's not like I wanted this thing bolted to me!" Erica snapped back as maiga was running more and more freely from her body, agitated with every movement of her artificial arm. 

"No? Then you must have lost the original. A younger woman wielding lightning, missing a right arm, with long brown hair... Wait." The Apostle stopped tapping a finger against his lower jaw, "You're the whelp from Copperwood, aren't you?"

"How would you-"

"No denial. Then it's true, you've been taken in by Damon and will be turned against us time and again if we let you. Do you know how many casualties we took in that raid because you came out of nowhere, blasting Diezens left and right, mechan and flesh?"

Erica's blood spiked to a boil, "You have no right to complain about losses after what you did!"

"So while you are opposed to our murdering, that done by your hand is permissible? Hypocrisy aside, you are a threat we cannot abide by. Angor will disapprove not having the opportunity to do this himself, but I must end you here and now!" The Black Apostle rent the air in front of him, spawning a new portal and throwing another one behind Erica. As she instinctively moved away from the second portal, The Apostle stepped around the first one with the intent to cleave her in twain with his bladed fingers.

Realizing she fell for a trap, Erica had no time to redirect herself away from the large mechan bearing down on her. The maiga around her nearly acted for her, telling her how to direct it rather than her deciding the best course of action would be to swing her left fist at him. A pillar of stone and earth erupted from the ground, slugging the Diezen in the face and knocking him back. As he was reeling from the blow, the pillar broke apart as Erica now focused on another pillar, this time punching up with her right hand. A mixture of stone and earth came forth from in front of The Black Apostle and impacted him in the center of his torso, lifting him off the ground as it continued its skyward growth. The Apostle went up, up, up as the pillar continued its rise. The Apostle managed to roll free of the pillar and was now in free fall dozens of meters in the air. A portal appeared a distance in front of Erica and below him, and as The Black Apostle fell through the first portal, he came rushing out of the ground-based portal backwards, digging his claws into the ground to slow himself.

As the skyward pillar started to crumble without Erica's input, the maiga within and around her started to reach out, looking for larger objects in the environment. Not finding what it wanted, it began pulling blocks of stone out of the nearby buildings, adding them to a spinning orbit around Erica, tendrils of lightning binding them and keeping them off the ground. Erica, still wary of how much maiga was flowing freely from and through her, decided to make the most of it and ran towards The Black Apostle, the house nearest to her collapsing from the stolen materials. Flicking her sword at the Diezen, one of the orbiting blocks flung itself at him with the force of a cannon, thunderously shattering after impacting his chest. The Black Apostle was sent staggering back as Erica flung block after block into him, the act going from near effortless to invigorating as stone after stone smashed into the black-clad frame of The Apostle. Red runes flared after every impact, growing angrier and angrier, but their protest did not have Erica relent. The Black Apostle was sent into the wall of a building on the street's other side, and unceremoniously knocked clean through it with the next impact. Erica stopped her advance, watching for movement in the darkness of the building's interior as the remaining orbiting stones whistled past her. 

After a moment, a swirling purple portal manifested in front of Erica, behind her defensive ring of stone, and before The Black Apostle could appear through it, she slashed it apart with her maiga-wreathed sword. Pointing it at the spot she could see baleful red eyes glowering at her from the building's shadows, Erica had a passing thought that it would be nice to bury the mechan in rubble and be done with it. Dark clouds had been forming without her notice, and with the sound of true thunder, lightning struck from the heavens, piercing the upper levels of the building, hammering The Black Apostle and bringing the remaining structure of the building crashing down on him.

Temporarily blinded and deafened, Erica felt rather than otherwise notice the sickly maiga of The Apostle's portals manifest in series, heading southward. As vision and hearing returned, Erica confirmed that the Diezen was nowhere to be seen and had taken off. Calming down, Erica's adrenaline turned to worry as her shaping was doing the opposite. Flagstones and bits of ruined, and in some cases burning, building were now circling around her in a growing semi-sphere. Pain exploded from her side as with the fading of the adrenaline came the return of pain from her abused injuries. She buckled to one knee as she put her left hand over her wounds in an attempt to ease the pain. The wind was picking up as the clouds above darkened and started to imitate the swirl of the debris around her. 

"Erica!" The voice sounded somewhat muffled as her hearing wasn't quite back to normal, but past the whirring of flying debris and whistling of wind Erica could make out that Damon was trying to get her attention. Turning her head to the walls of flame keeping the cultists and her separated, she saw him rushing toward her, concern plastered over his features. "What are you doing?!"

"I'm not doing it, it's gone off on its own!" Erica, shouting to be heard, was doing everything in her power to keep the maiga from lashing out at Damon. "I can't control it anymore!"

"Then you need to purge the excess energy! Do you remember what I told you to never use outside of emergencies?"

Realization dawned on Erica as what he was suggesting became clear to her, "I can't! It'll destroy everything!"

"Aim it skyward! And hurry, I can't get the cultists away from here before the worst of this overload occurs!"

Attempting to ignore the pain in her side, Erica shakily stood back on both feet, rising as yet more buildings were torn apart by her rampant maiga taking more material for the swirling debris field. She took a deep breath to steady her racing mind. Placing both hands on her saber's grip, she raised the blade above her head so that its point was aimed at the twisting clouds above. Attempting to corral the energy and phenomena around her, she drew in the maiga so that it was focused around her blade. The swirling mass of debris started to shrink in on her as she was pulling away its maiga. Then, as the power above her hands felt like it was about to explode, Erica screamed the forbidden incantation.

"GIGATAS!"

Thunderous didn't begin to describe the sound that followed. A cataclysmic eruption of noise accompanied the massive beam of raw maiga that pierced the heavens. It parted the clouds in a wide ring of open sky that revealed the sun beaming brightly down on what had been overcast skies. Windows shattered and the closest doors that were previously still standing were smashed in. The debris that wasn't annihilated by the beam crashed to the ground around Erica or was flung far away depending on its weight. The maiga that made up the beam then dissipated as motes of light fading into the air. Erica's mechanical right arm dropped to her side suddenly as she lost control of it, the mass of it and her saber dragging her to the ground. She felt... empty, like a part of her that should be there was now gone. She couldn't feel the flow of maiga anymore. No, that wasn't quite true. She could faintly feel the maiga around her as the air was now supercharged. She had lost the ability to shape, however. Despite her best attempts, her arm would not respond to her commands.

Damon ran over and knelt next to her, looking her over, "Are you alright? That was far too close!"

"I'm fi-" Erica was cut off by a cry of pain as she attempted to stand, hand shooting to her side.

"No, not fine. Let me look. Here, lie down..." Damon instructed her to lie on her back, his eyes drawn to the blood staining her shirt and smeared on the inside of her coat. "He impaled you. I'm sorry, I should have-"

"Doesn't matter now, I would have been swarmed with cultists if you didn't do what you did," Erica said through gritted teeth, trying not to breathe too deeply.

"I see you've stopped the worst of the bleeding, but it hasn't stopped entirely. Let me fix that," Damon placed a hand gently over Erica's wounds, watching for any signs of further discomfort. Erica felt maiga flowing into her wounds, staunching the bleeding and closing the wounds slightly.

"I thought you couldn't shape people?" Erica said before she coughed, the sensation of being healed somehow causing a tickle in the back of her throat.

"You can close wounds, but can't just shape an injury into a person internally. One would need some other form of shaping to be used to cause damage." Damon explained as he removed his hand and stood, "Are you able to stand now?"

Before attempting what Damon asked of her, Erica tried getting some motion out of her arm. She focused hard on the maiga in the air, willing it into the servos of her prosthetic. She got a slow raising of her forearm, saber still in hand, and decided that would be good enough for now. With further concentrated effort, she sheathed her weapon and made to stand up. She suddenly felt very tired as she managed to get her feet under her.

"I could really use a nap or something..." She muttered to herself as she looked to the walls of flame Damon had raised earlier. They were no longer there, revealing a crowd of robed figures with limbs forced together with stone cuffs and braces. They were all looking at her, with those with lowered hoods wearing expressions of awe and fear.

"She bested The Apostle...?" "Impossible!" "But where is he then...?" "Are we safe?" "Is she going to do that to us next?" "I don't want to be exploded..."

Erica could overhear the cultists' babbling. She supposed it was only fair they regard her as some sort of bomb given what she just did. The sky was still a hole of sunlight surrounded by angry clouds. It started raining now too, thunder rumbling from within the clouds above. 

"You need to be more careful," Damon said in a low tone so as to not be overheard, "We can't have you doing that in every encounter with a significant Diezen."

"You're the one who had me fuel the Invictus half of the way here, then left me to handle that apostle on my own! You could have warned me about the portals at least. I'm not sure I won't have nightmares of him chasing me now..." She was flexing the joints in her mechanical arm, slowly gaining standard responsiveness as she could better feel the flow of maiga.

"How are you for power now? I'm honestly surprised you can move, gigatas has injured and even killed unprepared users before."

Erica raised her hands in front of her chest, palms facing each other about a foot apart, fingers forming a cage around the space. With a concerted effort, she managed to manifest a ball of crackling lightning in between her palms. She heard some of the cultists panic, so let the maiga fade. "I can't do much now, but I'm getting back to normal. Whatever that means."

Ignoring the comment, Damon brought his matrix maigum to his lips and began issuing orders for Altean trucks to come and collect the cultists here while walking around them to ensure they were secure. 

"No rest for the wicked," Erica mused to herself as the rain started to reach her. The hole in the clouds was closing an with the increased cloud coverage came the gentle shower. Testing her side, she found that while it was still sore, she could move more or less freely. That was when Damon signaled for her to follow as they continued their southward march.