After what felt like hours, but really could have only been seconds, the beam of green lightning finally cut off and Ke'Zuc's gaping maw snapped shut, tentacles slithering back over the gap they had made to the core. 

The tentacles on the bottom portion of Ke'Zuc's strange body began to writhe and twist, faster and faster until little spurts of electrical green static flickered out from them. 

In a few moments the writhing mass of snake-like tentacles had started floating up into the air, elevated on a bed of whirling static power. They had managed to leverage the electricity from above into some kind of rudimentary levitation, hovering just above the surface of the rock. 

Throughout all of that, Kathura had not been idle. 

They had emerged from the ocean portion of their side of the arena and had started to cast their water into a series of runic patterns. 

I was surprised. Up until this point I hadn't actually seen anyone cast their own tunes with a medium like that, the runes had just kind of spontaneously appeared. 

<This is elemental runework,> BB said, catching onto my confusion. <It's a type of complicated rune smithing, the kind that not many people would be able to perform. But in return for that difficulty level the end result is immensely powerful.>

Kathura completed their rune work and it blazed with a bright blue energy. The water from the ocean began to move as if it were liquid metal being pulled in by a magnet. 

The water coalesced around the alien in a similar way to the thin layer of water armour that they had displayed in their first fight. While I had missed the first part of that fight, there was no way that this level of manual rune work would go into making such a small and basic set of water armour.

My assertion was proven correct in no time at all. More and more water flooded toward Kathura, pushing them up until arms began to unfold, as well as legs. This was water armour on another level. Water armour on a similar level to Akash's battle form, but maybe even more impressive than that. 

By the end of the process, Kathura's water armour stood at least 20 feet tall, dwarfing the already small ball of tentacles. 

That fact didnt seem to concern Ke'Zuc. 

The lovecraftian entity lashed out with a bolt of sickly green electricity that burst through the wall they had previously constructed, causing it to crumble into rubble. The bolt travelled on, Kathura at the center of the water construct was its target. 

Kathura sent out a colossal beam of water in response, siphoning even more liquid from the ocean to power tha blast into a torrent of water that even a tsunami would have been proud of. 

The bolt of green electrical energy and the blast of water collided in a colossal explosion. The flash of light was the bright that it bloomed out and consumed the entire battlefield, rattling the glass in its casing so powerfully that it started to crack at the edges. 

As the light from the attack subsided, both of the aliens were still standing, seemingly unharmed. Their attacks had been equally matched. They had cancelled one another out completely. 

Kathura wasted no time. They surged forward, blasting twin beams of water from their arms, one from the right and one from the left, with the bulk of its water armour body surging forward. Ke'Zuc was able to dodge the attack from the right, which gouged a canyon into the so called manna resistant floor, and matched the second hit with another lightning blast, which once again whited out the entire battlefield. 

When the light faded it was clear that Kathura hadn't stopped moving this time. They had swept their water armour into Ke'Zuc, hoping to drown the life out of them in the same way that they had drowned the life out of their previous opponent. 

Kathura ditched the giant water construction and forged it into a giant floating ball, just as they had previously. Though this time the ball was titanic in size, and it seemed as if Kathura was struggling to control it. 

Ke'Zuc, still supercharged on electricity, wasnt willing to go out so silently. They splayed all of their tentacles, all of them unclasping from the strange glowing orb in the center, and unleashed an ungodly howl. 

The screech was accompanied by a massive outpouring of power, one that shook the stadium to it's very foundations. The window blasted out with the display of power and, just to be safe, I pushed BB down into our Synchro mode so I'd have access to our Corona Shield. Even through that I was rattled to my bones. 

The outpouring of energy was over just as quickly as it had started. 

When the light cleared, Ke'Zuc was on the floor. Their tentacles curled back in on themselves, the orb inside glowing much more faintly than before. Unmoving. 

Kathura was no where to be seen, and for a moment I was worried that the alien had been disintegrated by the outpouring of energy.

But no. 

There was a ripple in the water, followed by a bat-like head poking out from the waves. Kathura had done it. Somehow, they'd scraped out a win. 

"Well that," I said, "Was absolutely awesome."

"I do believe that I concur," Yr'arl added on. 

"A display of power from the both of them like that?I was not expecting it at all," Akash said. 

We had all been astounded by the display, then. Either way I was finally beginning to understand what BB meant when he said that I wouldn't hold a candle to someone like Lara. I was strong, yes, but beings like this were seriously something else.

Would I really be able to make it to the finals?

Would I actually be able to hold my own against Lara as a distraction at all? 

I shook my head to rid it of the doubts. It wasnt a matter of would I or could I. 

I had to.