[VS] Crouching Cat, Hidden Phoenix

[BlacKitten]

The purest of air, filled with the scent of pollen and earthly soil, soothed her mind. The morning sun casted its gentle warm light over the jungle. Towering trees shielding her sight from what could be beyond. Bushes and ferns layered below, shadowing the grass.

A waterfall roared with its continuous stream of pristine, transparent water that flowed down the meandering river with boulders and rocks scattered in its way.

Sitting on one of the rocks was a grey kitten with snow-white paws and underbelly. She casted her large yellow eyes down at the water, staring at her own reflection. She waited patiently as a slender silhouette drifted past her underwater, and in that split second, her right paw reflexively swiped against the current with raking claws, knocking a small silver fish into the air.

SPLASH!

Landing on the bank, the fish flopped and flailed helplessly as it bled from the scratch marks made by the feline. With a single leap, the kitten covered a few meters of distance to reach her prey. Lowering her head, she bit the fish with her white carnivorous fangs and held it off the ground before treading away behind a bush to stay out of sight from any potential competitor who wished to steal her catch.

The slippery, finned, breakfast was suddenly set ablaze by a mystic blue flare that emitted from the feline’s mouth. Gradually, its life had expired; but the freshness of its meat remained. It wasn’t long until the feline feasted on the freshly cooked fish, gnawing on it with a savoring purr.

Her name was Koneko Miu, a proud feline who loved to catch, cook, and eat all sorts of seafood.

[Laskt]

On the far side of the beautiful clearing, if one looked really closely, oen might see a slight rustling in the treetops as something delicately moved through them. Leafy branches were carefully nudged aside, pushed the minimum amount to allow the figure through, but not enough where it would become noticeable.

This mysterious figure was, of course, Idoc Zaitli, or ‘Suzaku’ as he had been dubbed in recent days. In a stop-over at an insignificant island, the spearman had overheard some talk of a feline-like figure being sighted in the wilderness, belching fire and death among many a fisherman’s catch. The humble village on the cost had reached the breaking point, and so the spearman had offered to resolve the problem, for a price of course. It also didn’t hurt that the figure described had a striking resemblance with a 140 million beri bounty that Idoc had noticed just a few days earlier…..

With utmost care, Idoc gently unsheathed a pair of throwing daggers from his belt, before throwing them underhand at the hopefully unsuspecting kitty! This wasn’t all either, as Idoc would leap headlong from the tree, unleashing the Silver Beak technique with both of his spears, following up his knife throws with a pair of lightning fast long range stabs!

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SPOILER: Click to show

{Silver Beak}
The user grips onto one end of an object(most commonly a spear), and rapidly elongates and sharpens the end of the object. This results in a powerful piercing attack that is most powerful when using an actual weapon, as the user can focus on sharpening the end rather than creating an end in the first place. The main danger of this technique is it's raw speed, as the elongation is extremely rapid.

[BlacKitten]

Miu - 2

When lingering in nature for so long, breathing the purest of air, and smelling the gentlest of fragrance, the scent of the impurities became that much more pronounced. Like many cats, the fish-eating kitten’s sense of smell was fourteen times better than that of humans. When a cat confronts another creature, their first instinct would be to capture their scent. An unfamiliar scent triggered warning signals into their territorial minds.

And of course, the little pawed hunter had been sensing an unfamiliar scent in this jungle. However, she wasn’t the type to be alarmed by the unknown; on the contrary, she was the curious and adventurous type. She wanted to know more about this unfamiliar scent. She knew that this scent didn’t belong to another cat. In fact, it didn’t belong to any native creature in this jungle; it was foreign.

It smelled… human.

Whoosh!

Her ears twitched, causing her head to quickly jerk around while holding the freshly baked half-eaten fish in her mouth. Her large yellow eyes caught sight of two swift blades darting straight for her.

A fish thief!?

Was someone trying to take her fish!?

With cat-like reflexes -well actually, she is a cat-, she made a small leap back as two daggers pierced the soil, but what immediately came after was a humanoid silhouette wielding two elongating spears like no other weapon she had ever seen in her life.

A split-second the respond, the cat’s monstrous reflexes led her body to move before she can consciously form a cohesive thought or opinion on the situation.
A heartbeat later, the spears had pierced the ground, and the feline was standing on top of steeply slanted wooden shafts of the spears on her hind paws, balancing on two legs like a human would.

Gnawing on the fish that had been completely consumed within her little mouth, her cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk as she chewed the tender flesh with an innocent, nonchalant gaze at the human himself.

Within the next second, her feline eyes captured the vague details of a tall, athletic young, dark-haired man, but she decided to make her counter.

Springing off the wooden shafts, the kitten gained distance and unleashed six flaming ribs from her mouth at the man. During her chewing of the fish, she was simultaneously separating the meat from the bones. Pointed whisker-like bones, covered in mystic blue flames, had shot through the air, aimed to target the man’s torso.

Who is this guy?

The kitten stood on all four paws, just a couple meters away from where her original spot.

[Laskt]

Idoc’s mouth twisted into a grimace at the strange cat-like creature almost nonchalantly dodged his opening move with a grace and speed that seemed almost unnatural. This bounty might be a little bit harder to take than he was initially expecting, especially if the cat was as fast in combat as it’s reflexes promised. Suzaku wasn’t exactly happy about his carefully laid ambush being so easily foiled, but there was nothing for it!

The wind howled in the spearman’s ears as he plummeted headlong towards his target, his elongated spears lashing down towards the feline like a pair of giant fangs. Once again, however, the cat neatly dodged out of the way, twisting out of the way before planting it’s back legs on the shafts themselves, the spearheads having sunk deep into the trunk itself. With a grunt, Idoc would retract his spears, hopefully disturbing the feline’s footing as his weapons returned to their normal proportions.

It’s definitely a quick one, long range attacks are most likely a hopeless strategy. I’ll have to get closer if I want to give myself the optimum chances of hitting.

Idoc contorted his form as the cat launched it’s rejoinder, just barely managing to dodge the majority of the flaming projectiles, with the closest one tearing a gash in his teal jumpsuit that narrowly missed his skin. The Red Phoenix landed hard on the massive branch, rolling to absorb the force of the impact before he sprinted after the retreating feline.

It possesses a devil fruit power. Don’t have enough information to determine type, need to bait out more attacks.

The twin spears spun in Idoc’s long fingers as he attempted to rapidly close the distance between the pair, opening up with a flurry of hard stabs and sweeping slashes that blurred before the naked eye. The spearman hoped to keep the feline on the back foot, and perhaps force her to exert more of her powers to escape!

[BlacKitten]

Miu - 3

The tall, brown-haired man contorted his body to evade the barrage of flaming fish ribs with one tearing his teal jumpsuit. As the scent of blood wasn’t lingering in the air, the adorable tabby figured that no damage was inflicted to the flesh.

After retreating onto a massive branch, the dual-wielding spearman leaped forth back towards the ground, sprinting towards the feline with his spears spinning in each hand. He engaged up close with a rapid series of stabs and slashes, all mercilessly aimed to harm the little feline.

Bouncing happily to the side, the excited kitten evaded the first stab that brushed past her. Her eyes watched the man with a playfully observant demeanor. Ducking low towards the ground, she evaded a spear which swung over her head. Due to the sheer difference in size, her opponent was forced to aim his strikes downwards with very little areas to attack given the small target.

Amid the onslaught, the feline suddenly vanished right as the long spear swung to the side. A heartbeat later, the kitten was hanging upside down like a bat, utilizing her little tail to wrap around the shaft with her little forepaws curled up in front of her like a squirrel. Facing towards the spearman, the kitten suddenly charged up a ball of blue light from her gaping mouth. The scorching hot orb of grew larger and hotter in front of her mouth before she fired off a basketball-sized sphere at the man’s torso.

As her tail wrapped around the shaft, she could feel the density of wood beneath the pale-violet cloth. Therefore, both of this man’s weapons should be quite flammable. If they were to continue their playtime together, her affinity to fire would not be good for these two polearm weapons.

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SPOILER: Click to show

{Fireball}
- The user summons blue fireballs from parts of their body (Fingertips, palms, out of their mouth, tips of their tails) and through pyrokinesis, they control the trajectory of these fireballs or have them levitate; such control requires gestures. These blue flames are known as Ghost Fire, and they have the property of slipping through obstacles as long as they are not creatures. When intangible, these flames cannot burn.

[Laskt]

Idoc was an experienced solider. He had held onto life with bleeding fingertips since he was fifteen, and had seen many sights that would send your normal villager scrambling for a bucket to vent their guts in.

But he had never seen anything quite like this.

The feline bobbed and weaved through his storm of thrusts and swipes with an almost nonchalant air, almost seeming pleased as it bounced out of the way of a thrust, then rolled under a swipe and the accompanying riposte. Its small size did make striking it more difficult, but, at the same time, a mere animal should not be moving with the smooth, fluid grace that this cat was achieving. Something was most definitely off.

This vague feeling of unease intensified tenfold when the kitten caught one of his spears with its tail, hanging off it like a monkey on a tree branch. Idoc growled, flicking his wrist, causing several small spikes to emerge from the wood beneath the cat’s tail, aiming to impale the appendage in several places. In addition, the spear would suddenly lengthen, sending the feline careening into a tree several meters away with bone-crushing force if it did not move quickly!

Unfortunately, this offensive came at the cost of defense, as Idoc desperately tried to dodge the fireball about to slam into his torso. The blast clipped him in the side, eliciting a gasp of pain and a curse from the stoic spearman. He backpedaled furiously, seeking to gain some distance while he examined his injury.

Flame Parmecia? No explosions or grand-scale manipulations. Likely fairly new to fruit or hasn’t practiced extensively. Need more data.

[BlacKitten]

Miu - 4

A sharp pain pierced the kitten’s tail, causing her golden eyes to widen as her rear appendage reflexively unwrapped itself from the shaft. Right after she had fired off her fireball, the feline plummeted towards the ground, landing on her hind legs while grabbing her tail with her forepaws, kneading it with care and love, “Ouchy!”
She didn’t see it, but it felt like small wooden spikes had grew right out of the polearm where her had tail clung to. Thank goodness the spikes weren’t made of metal as they might have hurt even more.

Her head quickly swiveled around as the longer of the two spears had suddenly elongated beyond its original length. She had never seen a wooden spear that could do all that before.

The blue orb of fire she had shot out of her mouth had clipped the spearman’s side, likely leading to a burn. The sphere had quickly perished after a few meters passing its target, dying out during its trajectory.

Still standing on her hindlegs like a human, the bipedal tabby kept rubbing her tail while glaring at the brown-haired mouse with caution. “I underestimated you, little mouse,” she uttered with a scrutinizing glare while revealing her ability to fluently speak the human tongue in a cutesy and childish tone.

This was no ordinary mouse; this was a mouse who possessed some unusual weapons. For now, she would assume that both of those spears had the ability to elongate beyond their original reach as well as producing spikes around the shaft.

A key question for her to consider was just how long can those spears extend to?

“Humph!” The feline smirked as she released her tail from her paws. Suddenly, a flare of blue enveloped her tail, jetting past the tip like a blow torch. “Since you’re using two spears, I’ll use two tails!” said the tabby confidently as her tail suddenly forked into two identical appendages, each functioning like a torch.

Simultaneously, her tails swung from opposite sides as the jetting flames extended out as a fiery streamer that curved about, granting her an extended reach. Like a pair of scissors, both strands of flames whipped through the air to target the man. One targeted his legs from his right, the other targeted his torso from the left.

Having learned her lesson about those spears, the two-tailed tabby had resorted to a technique that provided a longer range. By extending her flames past her tails, she can utilize a pair of fiery whips.

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SPOILER: Click to show

{Tail Torch}
The user set their tails ablaze with blue flames extending past the tails' tip like a blowtorch. By swinging the tails, the extended flames become like a pair of whips, burning any flammable entity that comes in contact. Through pyrokinesis, the user can cause the extending flames to meander, bend, and coil.