[Erdawn Il Deus]

OoC -- This is gonna be a long one, I need to cover the five battles in this post alone. Only this time, though. We’ll be replying to the individual battles on an… individual basis? And this post is broken up for the sake of action and pacing. Drown in it! -OoC

“This is… interesting.” Fury said. His arms were crossed over his broad chest, and sea-green eyes stared down Erdawn as much as observed his immediate vicinity. “Like it was built for us to fight in.”

“Your clown-friend’s doing?” The cimmeran asked. He, too, was taking an interest in their place of battle.

“I doubt it.” Erdawn snorted.

“I doubt either of you are very close friends, either.” Fury shrugged, eyeing him almost with disinterest.

“I could say the same about half your group.”

“You and yours are our enemy, moreso than we are each other… at the moment, anyway. But,” Erdawn replied. “We didn’t come here to talk.” He rolled back his shoulders, and his arms, stretching and cracking his back, whipping his head side-to-side, crackling his knuckles, warming up. He reached behind him and hurled his fur mantle to the side quickly, strapping his steel rifle across his back on a leather strap. Fury nodded, gave his own neck a pop, and lowered his hands to the pommels of his sickles.

“I was about to say…”

Faint light filtered downwards through rolling layers of cool, tropical mists, dampening the brightness of the valley around them. This place had an almost.. mystical, totemic quality to it. The ferns and grasses and plants grew short but soft, willowy and thick, sparkling with dew. They brushed through Erdawn’s knee-high sandals, he felt them with his toes. An earthy place.

All the same, majestic. Row on row on row stood humongous Corinthian pillars, sculpted from smooth, sanded, sawed-down charcoal basalt stone, little more than a foot in diameter and so tall they disappeared upwards into the high rolling fogs. Each monolith was something like forty yards apart and lined up perfectly at four angles, indistinguishable from each other save for the crawling, leafy vines that wormed up through the more ornate stone-work, fat and pregnant with budding flowers like brush-strokes of pretty, almost musical colours. A forest of stone columns, etched and carved from basalt, making perfect hallways and roads and courtyards on a basis of four 90-degree angles.

“My opponent would be... Fury?” Erdawn asked, a knuckled hand clutching the leather pommel to his sheathed sword. His own eyes, grey colder than ice, met Fury’s and they blazed. The juggernaut nodded.

“And you?”

“I… am the Terror that flaps in the night!”

“Funny.”

“Not really,” the cimmeran answered, scratching his beard. “Erdawn of Cimmera, of Galilee.” Fury nodded again, but this time his sickles came up with a ring, and were set at his sides.

“Very well, Erdawn of Cimmera,” he thundered, teeth barred. “I have come here for blood -- yours. And after I’ve gone through you I will kill every one of the friends that tagged alongside, alone if need be.”

Erdawn smiled this time, did not grin, but the smile was hot, not warm, sharp, not soft.

“Khuutra bone,” he spoke in an almost hushed tone. Fury heard him perfectly. “Tough as iron. I’m going to look down on your corpse, Fury, and honour your strength by cutting the proud skeleton from your dead flesh and wearing the pieces as armour. Your rib-cage, properly fitted, would make a fine cuirass.”

"If such is honour to you, I promise this - when you die, I will give you to my baby brother as nourishment."

“I have to die first, Fury --“ The cimmeran cocked his head. “I have to die, first.”

“Then come at me, and live.”

The birds were chirping, and the soft, lush breeze was cool, inviting, sighing and whistling. It was a reprieve, a brief comfort. But all sound was drowned and dominated by the scraping ring of drawn steel, and there was blood, and glory.

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Insanity lifted his great hammer, but instead of answering, Yuri flipped his war-weapon downwards and let it slam into whatever “ground” they thread upon, causing no harm to the roses. His powerful arms moved gracefully and with machine-like speed and efficiency, moving about the straps of his cumbersome, humongous suit of armour like fingers over a keyboard. With a creak, groan, and finally and ear-splitting crash, the entire thing broke off and fell off his back and chest, the red plates and the pelts -- cut from bears too huge to be of earth -- so heavy the impact shook Insanity to his bones.

Boom.

Taught muscles rippled, sweating, pulling and stretching beneath his bronzed skin. He was bare-chested save for a mantle of silky tiger furs around his bare neck. He flexed, more to stretch than to show off, glad to be free of the dead weight.

“This was the armour of my mentor, Kaja-Rang the Red.” He said. It was a bit disconcerting, considering the suit’s weight and sheer size, which was large even on Yuri. “When there is grey in my hair, and I have lost count of the ages over my head, and have forgotten the mountains and the plains, I shall wear this, and meet my student in combat, as my teacher did me. And then I shall die, and he shall take my place.” He spoke with solemn weight, almost melancholy. But his eyes, his icy blue-white eyes sparked with entombed furies.

“Things have a tendency not to work out as well as we’d like” Insanity said.

“Regardless, I shall fight tooth and nail until that day, even if I have to leave you broken in the dust of this world -- these worlds, this place -- to do so.” His eyes narrowed, and his mouth slit into a grin. “I will kill you, and then, the rest of yours.”

“You can try, Yuri of Middle-World. He couldn’t help but smile.

Yuri’s massive paw fell on the hilt of his war-hammer -- a perfectly awesome thing, not as large as Insanity’s but every bit as lethal, on a shaft the length of his arm and tipped with a weighed hammer that could shatter iron and stone. And Yuri was smiling, because this place… the Dark Tower…

Calloused feet thundered and pounded the earth, the hunter of Middle-World, jungle-king, was on the move, and his weapon trailed behind him, held tight by steel muscles.

He swung the war-hammer, and it bellowed whump, the sound alone enough to destroy. Insnanity leapt straight up in the air and came down, his humongous weapon blocking swallowing the sky around him through Yuri’s eyes, bearing down like a titan. The hunter threw himself into a roll and the weight crashed into the rose-field. The earth quaked, and the sound was like mountains shattering in unison. Yuri spun his hammer in a kind of circle, faster and faster until its momentum was a whirlwind of iron steel, he paced backwards, keeping his distance. Blue eyes looked up from a crouch.

“Huuuuuuu -- AH!” The hunter roared, and let the weapon go, sending it on a beeline for the ancient khuutra’s skull. Insanity dropped lower than it should have been possible for something of his size to go, but well enough, and the spinning head missed him wide, nearly tearing off his jaw and nose and crushing his teeth into enamel splinters. He whipped his head around, bending upwards from his prone position and starting to swing his hammer overhead to make Yuri into neat pancake--

Except for the part where Yuri’s should have been weaponless, and yet was swinging horizontally with the war-hammer he’d just thrown.

Wham.

The head smashed into Insanity’s skull like a train-wreck of its own, hurling the juggernaut off his feet and ten full strides before he dropped like a stone on his back, limbs splayed wishy-wash in a graceless tumble of fur and sinew. Yuri watched him fall, and raised the weapon over his head.

“I call, and it answers.” he said. “This is a weapon of the Old World, bonded to the user always.” He felt a bit silly. He wasn’t sure Insanity could hear him. Yuri was something like two feet shorter than Insanity, much smaller, even for a human of his goliath size… but suddenly he looked a whole lot bigger.

Working up a tornado again, Yuri let the weapon loose, and it spun head over haft towards his adversary’s prone form with deadly-accuracy…

-- whup-whup-whup-whup-whup…

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The guitarist Ice Hendrix and the psychic mage Wyborn were a mismatched pair, and planted squarely down the middle of a would-be bustling boulevard… except for the part where there wasn’t a single person in sight. Buildings and shops faced them in parallel lines of mix-n-more architecture, from Ye Olde Antiquita with gothic masonry and Live Nudes! XXX! with its winking fluorescents and featureless bricks. Dolloramas, Muffineries, Mac’s, Joe’s, All American-Italian Crapstravaganzas, all staring down the combatants with distinct personality, stereotypical characters cut from a simple imagination.

Abandoned cars lined the roads, of all shapes and sizes. They seemed oddly alien in a world with no people. It was sunrise, a time of long shadows. The scene was eerie, spaghetti-western. Ice Hendrix faced Wyborn with a cigarette to his mouth and a calm suavity to his gait, his guitar loosely hanging by his side, his opponent reflected in a crimson mirror of his own sunglasses. Dust blew down the paved, dew-slicked road. The dark globes of streetlights hung overhead like emptied dreams.

It might as well have been high-noon, both of them facing each other with .45s holstered un-clipped by their sides. And hell, Wyborn probably had a pair after all.

“Woah. Damn Apostrifi,” the mage coughed. He pointed at Hendrix, who had thrown down his smoke and was crushing it to powder under the flashing steel of his shiny heel. “Alright, bub… let’s get this over with.” The guitarist stared back with mute cool, plucking the strings of his guitar, which shone like a chunk of water crystal as it always did at first.

White lines of tinsel-electricity ran up and down the strings. The instrument was practically vibrating of its own accord.

“You speak, buddy?” the mage called. Hendrix said nothing, but began to play. Wyborn snorted. “Course I get stuck with the--“ The music hit him like a tank, and he couldn’t move. This guy’s like Kanti… aaah ****… The world spun out from under him and he couldn’t make jack-**** of anything for a brief second.. before either the sound wave or the shock-wave or something threw him backwards so forcefully he smashed clean through a silvery-purple Desoto, its shattered frame closing around him like a glove even after it was knocked backwards onto its side. Shattering glass rained over his forehead. He was vaguely aware that he was upside down… and that there was a car wrapped around him… and that the alarm was shrieking.

It was almost funny, come to think of it.

“Ow…”

bweebweebweebweebweebweebweebwee!--

Hendrix blew him a mock-kiss, and strummed the guitar. He was, as such, much less experienced than Wyborn. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to lay a smack-down on him like he couldn’t dream of. And if he thought for a moment that concussive manipulation of sound-waves was even the least of what he could do…

He began laying into some nice riffs, and the solidbody flared with blinding white in its blues, if for a moment. At the same time the glass windows from the shop across Wyborn exploded outwards in a shattering rain, and chunks of concrete were knocked and blasted clean off the buildings, raining down on the mage like… well… chunks of concrete. What the hell else do you want?

Bweebweebweebweebweebweebweebwee!--“

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He’s a right big bastard, and heavy as a freight. If I remember what Yuri taught me about Khuutra bone, it’s as dense as iron, or close enough, protecting his organs from any significant damage. But all that bone makes for a mighty weight-class. He’s built for it, but I bet his knees could still give just like any other’s, maybe even more so. His skull may be impenetrable, but that won’t prevent the mildest concussion if I crack him one hard enough. And there’s always the throat, remember that -- femoral artery, pressure-points, he seems human enough…

The Cimmeran’s mind raced like an engine, pistons pumping and wheels spinning, electricity crackling and firing up like juiced lightning. He was running a mile a minute and something inside was thumping, scratching, pounding for release. The nerve-network of his Id was screaming for control and rationality was hopping in for the ride.

He could feel the muscle in his arm seize up with a bolt of unseen power as his fingers tightened around his weapon, a sleek blade like the Greek xiphos and a little like a gladius. The steel was sea-green -- not quite the same as Fury’s eyes but with the same ambient quality, more electric. It flashed and twinkled. It was not his first, or his last sword -- but for now, it would do well.

Sssshhhhhk-ing!

He was running before it was halfway from the scabbard, his face twisted with intensity and his hair blown back from his brown in clean, blue curls. Fury waited, and as the gulf between them closed the Cimmeran put out with every ounce of strength he could, speed and power, and the giant’s eyes almost widened in protest.

Almost.

Clang.

His sharp blade smashed into the curve of Fury’s sickles, held over each other in an X, and Fury’s arms bent under the strength, holding the strike back. Sparks lit off scraped steel.

“Pfft,” Without much effort, Fury pulled back and his sickles ripped Erdawn’s weapon from his hands. It spun off, a spinning, glinting jade beacon, and landed a ways away. Erdawn wasn’t slowed in the least, and his naked fist came up and slammed clean into Fury’s nose, snapping the goliath’s head back like a cork. Again, crack, again-again! Fury spat blood and backhanded the Galileean backwards, off his feet. His heels ripped through grass and dirt but he steadied into a sliding crouch, digging small trenches along the earth. He grit his teeth, and came forward again like a torpedo on legs. The ground pounded, his legs pistoned. Fury took a step back and crossed his arms, whipping them forward to bisect the man thoroughly from four trigonometric angles, lickety-split. The Cimmeran dived and the hooked weapons whizzed over his head, he hit dirt between Fury’s legs and rolled into the fall, with a mighty surge kicking back and smashing his heel into the back of the wolverine-like beast’s thigh. Fury grunted and stumbled forward, almost going to one knee, even as Erdawn kept going, back-flipping himself high over Fury’s head, dropping a kick like a guillotine in what he hoped would smash the top portion of Fury’s skull down on his brain like a garbage compressor.

Not seeing precisely, more like getting a winkle from a corner of his vision so peripheral it was practically a sixth-sense of its own, Fury whipped the sickle from his left hand with a flick of his wrist for the sake of manoeuvrability, reaching up and grabbing Erdawn’s sandaled leg like a vice.

“Sonof--!” With a heave of his shoulders, he hurled the Galileean forward so fast and so hard and so straight he thought he’d catch fire even as the world around him blurred to a streak and the wind roared so loud in his ears it was like he’d given birth to a nest full of raging dragons.

Kr-Boom--

Erdawn hit pay-dirt like an artillery shell on crack, so hard he felt every bone in his body quiver in shock and thought his lungs would just give up and decompress, even as he blasted a trench in the ground, spraying earthy clods and rock and torn grass and upheaved dust upwards in clouds, rolling with the momentum and bouncing off and coming down again and again until he’d pockmarked the earth for something like ten whole yards. He felt his stop before he was aware of it, because the world was still spinning over itself like the wheels of a bus, round and round and round and round.

He coughed up blood and bit the insides of his mouth to draw blood until he’d flopped back to his sense. He was dimly aware of the earth still shaking, and knew Fury was coming after him on a warpath that would leave him a pretty smear covering the width of a football field if he didn’t move fast. Aching like a swollen thunderhead, he rolled himself back over and sure enough there was Fury, on the way over like a train, an impossible stampede on two legs of anthropoid muscle. Right, ****, right, without second thought (not like the first was very productive) his hand blurred to his looping belts, and he seemed to be holding more small knives (kunai? Not kunai, close, but not kunai exactly) between his fingers than should have been physically possible for any human with twice the amount of fingers and thrice the amount if arms. But that didn’t matter because the locust of tightly-packed steel death was whipped through the air at a velocity usually reserved for bullets and other firearm projectiles, set in a pattern that would either take Fury’s legs off at the knees or at least eviscerate the tissue and muscle so much they slid off his bones like tattered parchment.

Fury’s charged ended for the sake of jumping straight up into the air, passing in front of the sun like a low-flying zeppelin as the foliage where-he-might-have-been was torn and sliced and shredded. Erdawn almost pumped his fist -- victory! ever so small -- before he crouched mightily and then shot himself upwards in a perfectionist’s imitation of Billy or Jimmy Lee, his knee rising up and slamming

(WHUMP)

into Fury’s midriff like a rocket-powered-battering ram. Fury actually bent double over the blow and his mouth opened silently, blood spiting from his teeth, his pupils shrunken to points of nothing, the ferocity of the assault jarring his sickle from his hands. The Cimmeran kept pushing, grabbing Fury’s face with a handful of knuckled hand and just pushing, by God, heaving with every sacred once of power in his arms, tipping the goliath over himself and aiming his skull at the ground. Erdawn held him, tightening, forcing him into position -- (with any luck when we hit the ground it’ll smash his skull into his chest, or even snap his neck unlikely or at the least put enough strain on those muscles to leave them spazming like fish out of water). But the ground decided it for them.

Boom.

And dirt flew up around them.

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This land was harshest -- physically, no Rl’yeh. Baked plains of cracked, broken rock lay scorched and opened by uneven gulfs and canyons in the stone, the only sign of vegetation stunted and crippled -- half-dead gnarled trees and thorny bushes either burnt black by the heat and fires or stripped bare by the monstrous beasts that might call the land home. The air was thick and set apart by a kind of yellow fog, streams and lines of hot gases and sulphur shooting up between the cracks in the earth, hissing like monstrous incorporeal serpents, blistering the air and rock around them. Far down between some of these larger cracks came a dangerous, lively glow.

Canyons walls rose up around them to their east, and in the west the skyline was broken by a twisted and dark fortress winking with electronic lights and disturbed by a massive pillar of black smoke. This was once the fortress of a madman called the Campaigner.

Sunday’s feet left black scorch marks on the blasted land. That in itself was subject of curiosity, but we’ll pretend its not happening for now and concentrate on what matters.

The pelts, albino baboon abominations of fur, had disappeared from his body sometime during the teleportation -- whether by his own hand or Apostrifi’s, it didn’t matter. Standing before Despair, now Corruption was a tall black man, skinny almost to the point of malnourishment but ribbed with muscle woven so tight it looked like tied coils of rope. He was largely naked, his unmentionables gracelessly hidden from view by a ragged loin-cloth, his only other ornamenting beads and necklaces and chains made up of old, old bones -- ancient to the point of blackening and hardening, like unearthed fossils. These rattled ever so subtly, hauntingly, in the flaying gusts of baking winds.

He was tattooed across his chest and right arm and right leg with small, slithering squiggles -- blood-red and making sharp contrast to his skin. These will be spared from further description for the sake of their unspeakable hideousness, because in the coiling masses of red there were images best not described or scrutinised for too long. His only other feature was his apparent lack of a face -- where it should have been was an ebony-wood mask smoothed and polished so much it reflected its alentours like a dark glass mirror, twisting said reflection into the subtle impression of a face. This was disturbing. Very.

He was holding a weapon of most barbaric cruelty -- a large mace made entirely of interlocking bone spines, spiked with broken splinters and ribs and fangs and enamel and crowned with a human skull. He held it down his waist, in the dust. His faceless-face smiled, a twisted curve of distorted colour and blurred imagery.

”What a place,” he said, and his voice was deep and scabrous and tinted with a small joy that was more horrible than all the rest. ”Place of death, of the bone, a scorched Golgotha. How suiting! How perfect! So close to the lifeblood of the planet and such a blunt metaphor for death!” He chuckled, a sonorous, droning sound as unstable as piano wire.

Corruption did not even look around, expressionless, almost lifeless, a withered goliath clutching an abdominal cane of spines.

”What glory this shall be, hm? Blood and ashes and death… I will bury you here, make a throne from your bones, perhaps.”

Corruption chuckled.

“What importance you put on this encounter!” he said. “What emphasis. It is almost inspiring.” Sunday cocked his faceless head to one side and snickered darkly.

”Sucks to importance!” Sunday cackled, and the his demeanour calmed, settled like boiling water. ”Hm, hm, hm, in tradition of the Old Ones of the Ven plains, I shall give you the first attack. I’ve always played on the defensive.”

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“Okay paisan,” Richter said, not really snarling or grinning but kind of sneering meanly... all the same, he didn’t seem all too angry. Which was probably worst. “Bad ‘nuff you actually dragged me into this ****ing toilet of a city, but you’re telling me you and C were…” He kind of tapered off. “Ah, forget it. I -- AUGH!” Richter leapt to the side, bending his foot up and staring at the heel. ”I think I stepped in something NOT QUITE SANE! DAMMIT to hell WHY HERE???” Still fuming, the lunatic began stomping the ground in a kind of jib, as Apostrifi giggled.

”Hate hate hate HATE hate this goddamn place--“ With a single movement, he tore the cumbersome fox-fur coat from his shoulders, and it disappeared with a pop!. Underneath he was wearing a plain satin vest over a silky-black shirt, buttoned up with silver, giving him a very fashionably aristocratic appearance, contrasting to the tight leather pants and hat. ”But WHATEVAH, schweethart! You wanna die, in style or godforsaken, that’s your descision. So let’s get this crap over with.”

He looked around.

“God it smells.”

Shivered.

“…oily…wormy… ****…”

Shaking himself back to reality, he turned to Apostrifi.

“Alright you silly painted curb prostitute,” His grin widened with Apostrifi’s eyes. But before he could continue-- the clownish lunatic snapped his fingers twice, in a circle.

“At least I know how to cover-up, *****!” Richter’s jaw dropped.

“You did not just say that!”

“Oh,” Apostrifi replied. “I did, and loved it.” Richter fumed.

”GO HAVE SEX WITH YOUR DAMN OUTER-GOD!”

Smack.

The imprint from Apostrifi’s hand was still forming when Richter’d realised he’d been slapped. Hard. (the fact that Apostrifi had been ways away and now right in front of him notwithstanding)

“You *****!” Apostrifi screeched.

“SLAPPED ME?”

“You--!”

“How--!”

“Rude--!”

“Wretched--!”

“That is it,” Richter muttered. “Open wide, you little ****tart, because you father and boytoy-buddy Cthulhu never gave you a ****ing like I’m about to in the next eight-point-three seconds.” He rolled up his sleeves.

“Girl, you goan wish that’s what you’re getting from me after I’m through with your uncivilised--“

And words ended. As one of the two most terrifying figures across the multiverse ran at each other, threw-down, and started probably one of the most destructive *****-slapping contests ever to have seen the light of day. They weren’t even hitting each other, just kind of cringing away and slapping the other’s slaps, and it looked silly as hell, but somewhere there were earthquakes and riots and floods and volcanic eruptions. And let us not speak of that.

It went on like that for a while, at one point Richter teleporting and covering Apostrifi’s eyes, at one point Apostrifi ramming Richter’s fist into his own face to the jeers of ”Stop hitting yourself!”, at one point Richter shoving Apostrifi so he tripped over Richter (don’t ask), fighting like school-children in a sandbox, all the while emitting a sense of dread and horror so profound it seemed to warp event he twisted air of this blasted city.

And then the two of them stared at each other, panting.

“Show you… what…”

“Price was… wrong… *****…”

“What’s… what… gave you…”

“…yo momma… so fat…”

“Pool… with da planets…”

Suddenly, the air changed, the fighting changed, and all mockeries aside they began to fight. The ground quaked and warped and like two invisible giants the air moved against itself, and there was heard gnashing of teeth and gobbling, garbled screaming, and blinking and slobbering, even though Richter and Apostrifi weren’t moving. Everything was slowly taking on the quality of an image seen through cloudy glass, or through a house of mirrors -- maybe both. The air trembled.

Something was heard -- like the shattering of glass, and Richter shrieked with laughter. Amidst all this, he was humming, and doing a small step dance, even as reality around them slowly melted and ebbed and slowed into a kind of physiological madness. And then he was singing, and doing a fairly good Bob Dylan impression, and the battle began.

”Da-domp, domp, domp, da-dum dum, da-dum dum,
Un ah don’t know why I came here tonight,
Uh got the feelin that som’t’n ain’t right,
Ah’m so scared ah’m goan fall off mah chair,
Un ah don’t know how I’ll get down thuh stairs,
Cloooowns to the left of me, joo-oookers to the right here I am -- stuck in the middle with you
Yes ah’m stuck in the middle with you,
Un ah'm wundrin what it is ah should do,
So hard to keep dis smile from mah face,

[ March 31, 2005, 10:08 PM: Message edited by: Erdawn Rockin Like A Hurricane ]