The Torchlight Hunt, Death at Dusk [Ignacio, Mizu]

His breathing was ragged, Ignacio's mind racing as he focused on the incoming attack and how to survive it. There was little to work with in this crater of their own making, so he would do what he could without it. Tigre Garra rose to meet the incoming lightning bolt head-on, but any attempt at deflection was denied as it burst suddenly into a chain and made to encase him. His instincts screamed at him to struggle against it, to bend and twist, but his instincts had already failed him at every turn when it came to this vexing woman. So he allowed the chain to bind his upper body for now, locking down his arms close to his chest, and applied enough force to them that they might not simply crush him.

What he had to accept was that there was no angle with which he could progress in this fight, a humbling irritation but an accurate one all the same. His body was spent, battered and bloody, so if he attempted to push into her then she would likely rip him apart before he made it. Her mastery of spellcraft had kept him at bay, and his flames simply burned away any cover with which he might have better used against it. This was a defeat, and so it became a simple question of survival.

More energy was being summoned to bind him, and furthermore, the fragments were likely going to return to finish him off once he had no chance to evade, so he could not afford to lose that final bit of mobility. The tiger spirit upon his back, unrestrained by those chains, smothered around him like a mother trying to protect her child, before Ignacio stomped into the ground with a resounding thud. After the first came a second hefty stomp as the Arrancar raged against the sundered earth. Kicking up a storm of dust and debris was only going to do so much good when the attack was coming from all around him at once, but perhaps the hampered visibility would in some way mitigate the efficacy of this weapon. A few cuts and slices more could be taken, a few hundred a little less so, but he felt the spheres of energy forming around him and that forced his hand.

Every other direction seemed to spell disaster, so he had to retreat. Raising the heat around him up until it was so hot that the air itself steamed, like a superheated bullet he launched himself into the air and free from the cloud with a Sonido and then propelled himself away from Mizu with another. Doing so was not an easy process, though, and he still had to force his way through several of those crystals before he could make his bid for freedom. The first few were mostly mitigated by his Hierro, others glanced off him, but several cut a lot deeper. One cut deep along his face, another blasted a chunk out of one of his bound shoulders, and a third mulched an area of his midriff that had already suffered injury in the earlier battle.

Ignacio was not so fast that she could not give chase either, his pace reduced by the countless maimings he had suffered, but he was heading out of the Seireitei and into new terrain. His hunt was certainly over for the day.