Well- that's unexpected.

The Rift catches Lazus midstep while pacing. He manages to keep his balance despite the floor shifting beneath his feet and he stops as soon as he notices the change. The walls of his cell are gone, instead, overgrown ruins surround him.

(He wonders, for a moment, how much time must have passed for a city to have crumbled while he was captured and controlled. How long he was kept as a tool. But there was continuity to his movement and thoughts and he doesn't think he's missing any memories, it's just that everything changed around him in an instant.)

So... he's been teleported somewhere else? Ambient magic does do unusual things sometimes, even if he would have usually expected to notice it building up. He can't say he's mad about it, given everything. Although he wouldn't have minded a warning. But maybe then he'd have had to resist so, really, it's better this way.

Now that he lets himself think about it, he can feel the absent weight of where the magically enforced orders were. He'd feared he'd never be free of them again. He'd never dreaded immortality before that. 

Anyway, he doesn't recognise this place, not that he has ever made a habit of identifying destroyed cities. He doesn't think there are any near him though? He might not be the most informed person but that's the kind of thing that makes the front page on newspapers, he would have heard something. It could have happened too recently for that but this place doesn't look recently destroyed. It looks old. Really old. Old enough that the building style feels incongruous, buildings like that haven't been a thing for long enough to have experienced ?centuries? of decay.

And there's something about the air that feels different in a way he can't place, oh, and the birds. Those sure look like some murderous birds.

Well, it's not a thought Lazus would have expected to have a few months ago, but evil birds seem like a much easier problem to handle than everything else. Yeah, he can deal with them if they're heading towards him. (He won't attack them first, they might just be weird-looking! Experience says he's no good at judging things based on appearance anyway.) The rest of the weird... everything– can wait some more.

Yeah no they're totally going to split apart and surround him and then start raining down bolts of caustic black energy, shed like arrows from their wings. Their screeching seems to be stirring up more monsters- He can see black forms all but swarming out of the ruined terminal, if he spares the attention to look. And fewer but still some from the jungle, too. They're still a ways away but there sure are a lot of them. A cacophony of aggression echoes ominously.

So the birds are obviously both magic and attacking him. Sometimes you just really need a straightforward problem, so, evil birds are a great problem to have right now!

The first bolt or two that hit him sizzle on his skin but his healing power suppresses the pain from any others and makes quick work of the burns. At the same time, Lazus tugs at the rest of his magic. His fire was one of the first things they had bound away and, despite how new his abilities are to him, he’d missed it. Because of this, there’s a small smile on his face as blue flames cover his body and extend outwards to form a whip.

He’ll just try to scare the creatures away to start with but he’s not particularly opposed to killing them if necessary. They’d be pretty dangerous for a typical human and he doesn’t know yet if this area is as uninhabited as it looks.

The birds are vulnerable enough to fire to back way off and circle from a greater distance. Their attacks lose accuracy.

More evil birds are flapping his way, disturbed from their next in a ruined concrete tower by the noise.

They’re not far enough for Lazus to lose much accuracy but he’ll switch to fireballs if the whip is impractical.

By now he has the spare attention to notice the swarm near the ruined terminal and, after a moment of thought, he decides to head towards it. This place is so weird, animals don’t get powers in groups back at home, magic usually shows up as one-offs.

Not all of these swarmers are animal-shaped; Some of them almost seem like twisted robots, some more like eldritch sea creatures. At least some of them are slug-like, or just blobs. None of them seem especially smart. They're acting like mobs in a bottom-basement RPG, mostly mindlessly attacking, dodging where it's simple, but not being very intelligent bout it. Perhaps one in fifty is a big one, a bear or a car rather than a wolf or giant hawk. 

When the attacking birds are burned up by fireballs, they expire into pale grey ash and smoke that swiftly dissipates into the air.

Possibly a completely magical phenomenon, then? He doesn’t think normal birds burn like that but the main reason he suspects this is the weird darkness theme all the creatures (monsters?) have in common. The robot-like ones are specially confusing (although they do fit the post-apocalyptic city vibe).

If they’re sufficiently dumb or slow, he’ll try to surround most of them with a flaming circle before extending the fire inwards. Otherwise he’ll attack the ones that come closest to him.

The chaff has no particular defense against a ring of fire creeping inwards. Many of them burn, still trying to reach him as they do.

There's a fox coming from the old terminals where most of the monsters emerged from, darting around the plain of concrete landing pads in a direction that's generally towards him, tearing into critters as they turn and mill in confusion. It's fast, powers fast, and every motion seems to lead into or recover from a bite, claw, lunge, or crushing blow. Even the large, nimble fox tail seems to hit like a big club rather than a piece of fluff. The black and red coloration also feels different. It's the same color scheme, but it lacks the aura of fuck-you that the rest of the critters have.

"Hey hot stuff," it shouts in Noten, which is Mysteriously Understandable, "Fancy meeting someone way out here! Feel free to blast away, I've got good fire resist!"

Oh, yay, there are still people :). (A sentient magic fox counts as a person, he thinks.)

He’s going to put the mystery of language comprehension into the same mental box as ‘how the hell did I get here’ and ‘why is the person a fox’ and place it back into a relatively unobtrusive corner of his mind until some later time.

"Hi!" he shouts back (in the same language if that’s an available option). “I didn’t know if there’d be anyone nearby.”

And he’ll keep setting the creatures on fire since the local hasn’t objected and it? (they?) presumably has more information than him on whether this is the right choice.

Leap claw dodge club claw-

"You're deep in cursed lands, boyo! Not much reason to be out here unless you like treasure hunting! Call out if you see anything that there's only one of!"

Cursed lands does sound like a pretty apt name for this place.

Treasure hunting? Well, he can keep an eye out for particularly unusual looking objects but they might need to be very obvious for him to notice.

"Will do!"

And fireball, fire arch, don’t bother dodging that claw because it’s faster to just heal himself after, more fire…

Fox had been angling to get closer to him, to protect him in melee, but upon seeing the healing factor she - boggles a bit actually, surprised, and takes a shadow bolt from one of the birds for it before laughing out loud in the joy of motion and fighting and getting back to the rampage.

"Healing factor! That's rare, hot stuff, rare! You're not a kitsune like me, are you?"

Lazus doesn’t —quite— flinch at the comment but he does briefly stop moving. His smile is back up by the next fireball he throws.

"It makes the answer pretty obvious that I have to ask you what that is, doesn’t it?”

With a whoosh of fire, the fox is now a human! 

-Humanoid! She still has a tail and fox ears. She's wearing sensible chainmail and even a helmet, with cutouts for the ears. A shiny glaive appears from somewhere. Her fighting style is different, more power, less grace. 

"Kitsunes are foxy ladies incarnated by our very own goddess of chaos and foxness, Tamamo, with eclectic and various powers! Most are just lovers, not fighters too, though~"

They're thinning out the attackers pretty good, well mostly Lazus and his wide-area fire, and the streams of new monsters joining the fight are slowing. There are no bodies, all the darkness creatures disappear without a trace.

Huh, cool. The only part of that that has any resemblance to the magic he’s used to are the eclectic powers. "Gods are a thing here?" Which is yet another point towards the 'another world' hypothesis (even if he’s barely acknowledging it yet.) "They aren’t just stories?" he adds, for the sake of clarification.

Nooooo, it’s probably a good thing that the monsters don’t actually come in infinite amounts.

Lazus is much less appropriately dressed for the circumstances. He’s wearing grey sweatpants, a matching T-shirt and no shoes or socks (it’s not his fault, he didn’t get any choice on the matter :< ), although it might be a bit hard to see that through the flames.

"Oh yeah, the gods are real. I'm not entirely positive on 'em, but they're trying to do good things, mostly kinda sorta, and are, mostly kinda sorta."

Lazy slash and spear. She seems bored now, and is letting him finish off the rest.

"Nothing unique? Good. Unique ones are the dangerous ones, that have like half a dozen powers and are actually smart. This chaff isn't even animal-smart. But they'll respawn, and plenty more will spawn if you go poking about, killing 'em sort of disorders the curse energy for a while, but near a cursed city the stuff's thick as mud."