[i]"That makes two people in this same contest that just didn't really pay attention to me pretty fucking obviously having four damn arms,"[/i] Ichi-gou mentally grumbled.

So apparently the guy he was up against was a speedy fellow, in addition to being a user of some sort of magic.  Ichi-gou saw him blur to the side just a tiny bit before his claws would have gone through his adam's apple.

So alright, he was quick.  Ichi could deal with that.  

He was looking straight ahead though, so it catching sight of the weapon headed at his neck prompted a quick response of his own.  Ichi's lower arm snatched it from the air with a vice-grip around the sheath, and an opposite arm grabbed the handle tight enough that his claws dug rents into the thing, and a flicker of light from his hands.  However quick the prick was when it came to dodging someone going for his throat, he apparently wasn't the quick witted sort.  And if he was really dependent on his weapon, then however stupid he was you could double that when it came to how unlucky he was.  Maybe he could sense Ichi-gou's presence somehow, Ichi couldn't tell that for sure yet, but he must not have the slightest clue that his opponent was [i]designed[/i] to take advantage of or destroy magical artifacts.  He'd just thrown one hell of a powerful one right into Ichi's clawed finger-tips.  If it was as strong as Ichi-gou detected then there was no way in hell he'd be stupid enough to let something like it remain in play.

Ichi-gou kept right on going, sword tightly in his grip, blasting across the Grand Tournament's grand foyer like a red and black rocket.  Since he was up against someone who could, as far as he'd seen, move just as fast as he could he wasn't about to slow down after his initial move.  He kicked up the power of his thrust another couple notches, and cracked mach-3 as he ripped straight across the floor.  A tremendous shock-wave ripped through the enclosed space as he reached the hall's perimeter and promptly blasted straight up at a vertical angle towards the roof, flipped, and slammed home on the domed rock high over Vincent's head feet first.

There was a brief moment where Ichi-gou looked down from high above, and the echoes of the sonic-boom finished smashing any pieces of glass that had been restored in the hall's reconstruction.  

When sound settled again, Ichi-gou punctuated the moment with the twang and crunch of the blade and its sheath being snapped in two.  Ichi-gou held half the sheath in one hand, splintered and broken and with a gleaming stub of mithril protruding from it, and the handle of the [i]previously[/i] magical weapon in the other.

The tiny flash of light that had come from Ichi's claws when he'd snatched the blade from the air hadn't been releases of plasma, or even use of his Earth or Void capabilities.  It had been the siphoning of the blade's entire magical essence being sucked clean out of the thing and stored away in Ichi-gou's Trait Sphere.  
The magi-tech device ordinarily [i]wasn't[/i] designed for such a feat.  The blade held a huge amount of power, and simply shunting all of that into one part of the crystalline containment device hadn't been possible.  Ichi-gou had to dump it into a full [i]eight layers[/i] of the sphere, leaving out only the two layers of storage crystal he'd already stored different capabilities in.

Then he'd promptly disposed of the newly locked away magic immediately after it was out of the sword.  His system had detected a presence within the magic he'd sucked in that he didn't want to leave in his body, or risk his opponent being in connection with.  So he'd triggered the sphere to do what it was supposed to do when he had filled it to capacity, and had it negate the slots he no longer wanted.

Ichi-gou couldn't smile in quite the same way someone with an actual mouth could, but when his mandibles parted way over Vincent's head in a parody of the expression he figured the speedy guy could pick out the tendrils of smoke trickling from his jaws.  Destroying so much magical energy had taken a toll on the device he'd used to do it.  The layers of crystal in his gut had been fried to cinders, rather than simply vacating themselves.  

Ichi-gou smiled from up above Vincent anyway though.  He still had his other Aspects preserved, and now he had an edge over the guy down below when it came to equipment.  He was fine with sacrificing the ability to add more capabilities to his arsenal if it meant taking away one of his opponent's pieces of gear.

He smiled for another reason too.  High up, his sensors draw his attention to bits of debris he hadn't been paying attention to after the guy had started talking about this being the final round of the tournament.  

The glass the magic fellow had floated through the air and shattered, Ichi-gou had thought that had been for show, just as a touch of drama.  But the locations the fragments had landed at, he hadn't paid it any mind.  Way up where he was, he saw there were scattered bits of glass still, but the shock-wave his body had created with its acceleration had smashed and strewn them about in streaks of glimmering dust.  You could look at the starts of their trails of remains, however, and see that just before they'd been destroyed they'd been arranged in a circle.

[i]"Now what was that little bastard planning to do, I wonder?"[/i]  Ichi-gou mused, pursing his lips, and blowing the last of the smoke from his mouth.  [i]"Is he some kinda alchemist that uses magic too?  Or was he setting up some sort of pentagram to bring some sort of demon into this mix?  Or is he some sort of glyph user, like Caine?"[/i]

Ichi-gou rather doubted the latter possibility.  Caine had been a repeated foe of the Technocracy, and only a part-time help to Ichi's old faction.  He'd demonstrated on numerous occasions the ability to cast extremely powerful glyph-based magic spells, or summon exceptionally powerful assistance into battles he joined or started.  Ichi didn't recall him ever needing to do anything as elaborate as scatter bits of rubble around to form any sort of metaphysical traps.  So whatever sort of technique he was up against he'd have to learn a bit more about before he could really press any offensive efforts on the former swordsman.

Ichi-gou flashed from the stone roof to the stone floor in an instant, cratering the ground a dozen feet to Vincent's side with the force of his landing.  He landed, and stood back up to his full seven-foot height, well away from the dusty remnants of whatever it was that Vincent had been trying to set-up, twenty-feet or so to Vincent's side.

"Guess we got the bang out of the way," Ichi-gou's jaws quipped.  "So lemme introduce myself, Zippy.   My name's Talisman."  Ichi's claws flashed a searing and intense bright blue, almost violet, and twin surges of plasma annihilated the remnants of the blade that had been thrown at his neck.  Strong as the mithril was, it wasn't up to withstanding a few million degrees of concentrated heat.  He finished speaking as tendrils of smoke drifted from his claws.  "Wanna tell me who you are, and whether or not you've really got good reason for working through a contest where there's a really, really high likely-hood of you losing stuff a lot more important to you than that little pigsticker there?"