DOOM.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Ladies, gentlemen, those between, this is it. Doom. The doom. The signal flare to me and Cam's hiatus from VGF and hopefully the spark that will ignite your attentions and supercharge some spirit back into the 'fields. This topic is about nothing but pure carnage on both sides. We will walk away one at a time. And by "one at a time" I mean the other or both evac'ed by a funeral chopper. Spectators are welcome, but any kind of interference with the battle will end in the beating, booting, and killing of you character, and no, I'm not kidding.

Anyways, I'm already stretching this and eating up some space for what really matters.

They will tell stories, and bards will sing songs, and the children will remember and the old ones will speak in reverence of this fight.

Or maybe it'll just be saved to various hardrives. Whatever the case, the beginning of the end begins now. Erdawn versus Wyborn in a bout that will hopefully burn one's name into the stone of the Gunjin and light the hearth of a new age for the battlefields.

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Weeds swayed with softest grace in the cooling eastern breeze. The sky was overcast with clouds the quality of a bruise, cracking, tearing with spurts of rolling thunder that grew fat across the horizon and voiced a throat full of stones and gods. It was the beginning of a storm, a great and terrible storm that would shake the earth in its fury and echo across the memories of those who witnessed it for times and times in history. A sky pregnant with rain gave nothing but haphazard sweeps of droplets, almost bursting with a downpour but holding back. The field might well have been endless -- it stretched horizon to horizon for what might have been parsecs in every direction, a baked land of yellowed grass overgrown and lecherously tangling amidst the bleached bones of dead beasts. Small tufts of dust caught in the wind and wafted across the expanse, as if to survey a grim handiwork.

Five people stood in the field. Their eyes held a different quality, but the same weight in sombre anticipation. They had been called here, by something deeper than words and more ancient than the rock would remember. Thunder cracked and growled deep from an Olympian belly.

Erdawn stood with a noble patience that befitted a king of more than one world. Pale blue locks of hair fluttered in the breeze, a crown of tangled spikes braided behind his ear with segmented metal beads, braided again into a small ponytail behind his skull. Behind his ear was stuck two falcon feathers. He wore a beard cut short, trim and elegant, fitting sharply angular cheekbones. He was armoured with a tight cuirass of boiled leather fitted under segmented steel plates sewn into the material, covering his chest and abdomen in almost neatly-cut squares and rectangles. He was clearly fitted for war -- bare arms striped with slithering tattoos etched up and down cords of muscle. Similar sigils curled and curved around and from his eye socket and down his nose, giving him a feral, savage-like appearance worthy of Ares. He was decked out with weaponry and armour of interweaving ages and technology. Leather belts criss-crossed across his waist and crotch, looping arrays of small throwing blades and ammunition cartridges, laden with an assorted of small arms and a sleek Romanesque sword, sheathed in sweated leather. Slung over the snow-grey wolf-pelt mantle on his back was a metallic, alien rifle, shining bluntly in the faint storm lights. He was chewing on a blade of grass.

Yuri stood taller than all of them. He was dressed almost ceremonially, for war and battle. Bleached blonde hair grew coarsely from his head in a mane, his face was shaven, revealing the smoothed network of crafted angles and jagged abruptness than made up his cheeks and face. Red and white and black paint covered the left side in symbolic designs and pictures, brutal and blunt, drawn by a finger of anger. The hunter was laden in what must have made a ton of iron armour, red as blood and heralded by heavy, coarse bear pelts between the plates, taken from the hide of the largest beasts in Centerearth. Blood pumped rivers through his veins, and his every sense was tuned, supercharged to an ambient frequency in the air. His body tingled. He could smell the blood before it was even spilt, and his heart beat a drum of glory and blood in his chest. Eyes like splintered, electric ice gleamed. This would be a day remembered across all the ages. Perhaps his death and the death of every man here… but it was so right. Calloused, knuckled fists tightened on the pommel of his crushing and enchanted war-hammer -- the weapon of his teacher, Kaja-Rang the Red. This would be a day of glory. The other hand clutched a chain necklace of small, stone-carved figurines.

In the center of the group stood a strange and disturbing man. His was grinning with alien broadness, thin, scimitar-like with a rapacious quality that was unearthly and inhuman. His face was a knife-blade of pale, almost white skin scissored between shoulder-length hair black as pitch that had a dead quality about it, ornamented by a pair of wire glasses gleaming of ruby lenses reflecting circles of bloody light. He seemed an image of eccentricism, crowned with an impossibly large and floppy leather hat as red as his circular glasses, and wearing a large, white coat of silky, snow-white fox-furs, sparkling and glittering with cut beads and buttons and shards of brimstone. He was giggling silently, tittering to a point that past the leylines of man's sanity, and as he did his shadow danced behind him. Its shape was oblique and immense… and monstrous, but why could not be pinpointed. This was Richter, Richter Arkham, Richter Delacroix, Richter the Hatter.

The fourth warrior was shrouded in heavy, thick baboon pelts. They were perfectly hideously -- all the same charcoal grey and even bleached, radiated white to the point of a poisonous, wretched quality. The pile bulged in places where there shouldn't have been any swelling, and the character beneath them gave no sign of breathing, or even life. His face was hooded and shadowed completely by the cloak of furs, and he stood still and immovable. This was Sunday, kin to Saturday, Amari Adom-Rah of the Ven wastes.

The final of the five that had come did not look like much of a warrior at all. He was sitting in the grasses and leaning on a beautiful crafted solidbody electric guitar that looked to have been carved and chiselled from ice crystal itself, glowing vibrantly and surreally, as if lit from within by pale blue lantern lights. He was thin, practically gaunt -- and looked like a heroine addict if not for the sparking intelligence that flared behind his eyes. His face was unshaven, his hair curled tightly against his brow, his skin like new leather. Heavy, calloused hands coveted the instrument with love. He was wearing a suit for all the purpose not suggested for the wearing of a suit. White shirt un-tucked and loose, a wrinkled tie flopping lackadaisically down his chest, sleek black shoes built with steel heels to tap, like a dancer. He was smoking a cigarette. This was Ice Hendrix, the Cursed Guitarist.

They made a motley crew, by seemed powerful in their own right.

"Time, yet?" said Erdawn, pacing, hands stuck in his pockets.

"Patience," boomed Yuri. "They'll come. This is too important. Destinies hang on a spindle. We will fight, we will win, or we will die. There is no more, and no less." Erdawn nodded. Hendrix merely smoked, putting on a pair of crystalline ruby sunglasses.

Richter laughed, and strode around the field, moving energetically.

"This will be fun, paisans. Stop looking so down. Turn your frowns, upside-down!" He halted, tapping his chin. "Now speaking of the devils, where in Hell's pajamas are they? It's gonna rain soon! This will ruin my faaaaahb-ulous coat!" He snickered. "Weeheehee!"

The cloaked figure chuckled darkly from within the folds of his robes, and dismissed them. They were coming. He could see the switchblade grin on that bastard Hunter's face as he crossed his arms over his chest. They were coming, and doom was coming with them.

[Asnabel]

Wyborn probably won't be able to post for a few days, he just had surgery on his hand.

[Scripture]

Sheeyat, it better not be for carpal tunnel!

And the card reads: Get Well Soon =D

[Erdawn Il Deus]

... 8O

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Originally posted by Wyborn:
ooC: Don't be so serious, it's bad for yoru heart.

We's us going to fight, but it will be fun before it will be serious, and that lots and lots and lots. Not to say this won't be earth-shattering or doomish, but it'll speak for itself. That said...

Serious? Pfft. I'd a give a Braveheart Freedom Speech to my sneakers if you'd let me.

Now let's doom it up quickly like. The longer you make me thirst the worst you're making it on yourself.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

OoC -- Coming, coming. This is a long bastard. The highlight's going to be Fury vs Erdawn without question.

And I distinctly remember when people would pop in in-character to watch a fight. Guess dem days or gone. It's sad to see the times.

[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 ]

[The Joker]

By powers of shadow and darkness, the vampire lord of the Gunjin raises this battle to the top of the threads. His evil eyes beam with interest as he watches the battle unfold......

[Erdawn Il Deus]

As you know, tournament's going to slow me down inconsiderably. Will post when I get the chance, and when I do you'll wish I hadn't ( ).

[Erdawn Il Deus]

OoC - God I apologise for the time this took me. I have no excuses. -_- I only hope we can speed this up now that summer's here. Anyways, not the best writing in some parts, but it's all action and I'm sure that's what we're really here for.-OoC

And how it had started. Burning lenses twinkled and Richter stood half-amused despite unearthly woundings, making an almost waifish hand-gesture with haphazard care.

“You know, Scooter - I like your style. We should have coffee sometime.” Apostrifi twittered in mock-delight.

“Coffee? With moi? Is our homophobic little Hatter asking me out on a date? How delightfully skippy!” Richter threw backwards and honked.

“Mes excuses, but by ‘have’ I meant drown you in.”

“Oh poo. You’re just saying that because I embarrassed you.”

“Not as badly as I’m about to embarrass you in front of your twink friend Cthulhu. Because…” And he smiled, and for a brief moment it was that horrible, and this place knew a darkness of different colour, and the amorphous bleeding towers turned away because it was like looking into a bright room after a lifetime of unblinkingly closed eyes (for a moment, only a moment because eyes adjust, you see).

Richter stood in a red, opened jacket done with Indian beads and tight leather pants. His thinly slice of face wore black hair in a bushy moustache and a square of beard under his bottom lip. The glasses shone on. He pumped his arm like to load a shotgun one-handed, and drew out of thin air a magnificently ornate guitar of red and black and pine wood, the body curved like a cobra’s hood.

“’Oh no’,” Apostrifi quoted as Richter swooped the solidbody down and started ringing the strings into an all too familiar jazzy rock tune.

”Ooooooh AH’M a little pimp with mah hair gassed back,
Pair of khaki pants and my shoes shined black,” Richter hawked out brutishly as the guitar screeched on, shaking his head and hair, while the air around him bent into coven unrealities out of mind and space.


”‘Got a little lady and she walks that street,
Tellin all the boys that she can’t be beat,” The thrash notes lay down and rolled flat and Richter pointed to Apostrifi with his free hand. Smoke billowed from nowhere, everywhere, gases and fumes from some ungodly pocket of nethereal space, and Apostrifi raced forward - he didn’t move at all, really just thought forward, and was surpised to find himself in the same standing position. Illogic dictated he should have been setting upon the Zappa-lovin lunatic like a monstrous, Lovecraftean lion, but instead the air before him split open like some puerile, vaginal womb, spilling brackish viscera outwards in an almost jet stream of pungent water. Richter leaned forward rapaciously, beckoning with his hand.

”Twenhy dolla bill ah can set you straight, Meet me onna cornah boy and don’t be late,”

“Oh **** you you’re not…” Apostrifi murmured uncharacteristically, skipping away, the gross liquid staining his coloured clothing (oh and he was fuming, redness was darkening even the white make-up on his cheeks). Out from the tear erupted something tentacled and corpulent, sluggish, and all Apostrifi could make out without having to double and triple and disentagrate his own vision was a reproachfully feminine quality and an almost hilarious assortment of lipsticked-red lips. Richter raised and ticked a single finger, pouting in a half-grin under those featureless spectacles.

”Maaan in a suit with a bow-tie neck, try an buy some ***** with a thir’ party check!” He ticked off the cordes. ”Stan’nin onna porch o’ thuh ‘lido hotel, floozies inna lobby love the waaay ah sell!” His grin grew to a skeletal quality, as blank and monstrous as a bleached cow-skull grinning eternally at uneasy desrt tourists; a grin large and moony and overflowing with sharp narrow teeth as uncountable as the stars in the night sky, almost bulging in their sheer quanitity.

”Hot meats!”

The lecherous whore-thing lurched forward slopping and smacking off walls of air (made more disturbing by the obvious impossibility of that sentence), kind of floating and crawling at the same time, except without ground. Lipsticked mouths opened revealing curved, gum-sticky teeth, and other holes pulled open and Apostrifi almost retched at the implied activities this presented.

”Hot rats!”

Suddenly it moved forward, and with ethereal quickness unzipped all matter in front of it, spilling waves of colourless empty towards the clown-like psychopath like bubbles underwater. Apostrifi grit his teeth and slashed with his hands and ravaged and tore and bit and pulled the emptiness apart, leaving his cartoony gloves in frayed tatters and his knuckles in broken lumps.

”Hot cats!”

He spat, and eyes opened all over the writhing surface of the thing’s inconsistent fleshes, fat and white like hatched eggs, and the mouths bloated and opened and more holes yawned into deep wet chasms, ready to swallow him in ways better left nondescript. More brackish liquids spurted from its ever porous openings. Apostrifi growled as it spattered his clothing. And then he grinned.

”Hot tits!” The guitar ended and Apostrifi reached to close the gulfs of inches miles parsecs and suddenly the alien thing squealed from every - every - orifice and spilled open and burned and burst and shrunk and closed in on itself and all pocketed space folded and collapsed with a echoing crumpling thwhump that resonated like thunder across the unearthliness of the city for miles or forever, whichever came at all. For a second there was nothing.

And then there was Richter - as he had been, coatless and vested and looking almost as distinguished as a murdering anarchistic maniac could look, his hair spilling from his brow in almost European locks. His hand reached over and around Apostrifi’s smiling face - it hadn’t even registered surprised yet - and clenched. Bones fractured and the air around his face bloated and thickened as it bent away, fused, tore down shrieking channels of inter-dimensional potholes and mutated into its own sentience is some now-doomed part of an opposing galaxy. Blood spilled from the brutish, bony rubble of a powdered nose and gushed across the air in beady red droplets. Richter bent the head backwards and snapped his neck forward and sank his multitude of teeth into the soft flesh beneath the clown’s chin. Raw meat opened and tore and the hatter whipped his jaws backwards, peeling a longish chunk of bloody flesh from a splashing crimson wound like, like, like that scene from The Edge with the grizzly bear. Arterial and carotid sprays coloured the ground and air, and with his eyes - imagine this - Richter smashed and compressed and blasted Apostrifi backwards as far as he could sail.

The clown smashed into one of the porous flesh-pillars, the stone bending supply in places, cracking in other, bleeding green ooze everywhere else.

Richter tittered, and spat the blood and meat (which was now stinging his mouth) from his jaws with enough force to propel every droplet from his mouth. It misted and disappeared.

He grinned, as if this was a new occurrence to him.

”Welcome to my night-mare, woah-woah oh! Welcome to Jurassic Park and welcome to your hell!” And suddenly, his smile dampened. It didn’t change into a frown or disappear - he was still clearly smiling. It just dampened, and there is no other way to put it.

“I am going to kill you. And I am going to rip apart your body and hurl them into the most distant and observable locations of cosmic space, and when your pieces burn and orbit whatever rocks are floating around up there, I will make them spell out your name, so even your god will see your grave wherever he looks. This… I promise.”

And then his smile brightened.

“Now let’s get it on the road, hoss! This box-social won’t start itself!” And he smiled.

-------------------------------------------------

Erdawn managed to roll. The rock pressed down on him with unseemly weight, but the pillar hadn’t been thick enough to collapse and bury him appropriately, instead breaking off and scattering about. He gave a lurch, and pushed a few heavy slabs of marble from his shoulders, emerging from the rubble, his plate armour cracked and battered, leather cuirass torn and frayed, skin scraped, bloody and panting.

He couldn’t have looked better.

-Time to be slightly more tactical. I can’t expect to go toe-to-toe with this guy and endure long enough to bring him down. I have to be smart.- He reached behind his neck, to the back of a black, rawhide thong. His hands found a peculiar ocular device, and he affixed it deftly to the side of his head. With a whirr, triple-lenses slid over his right eye, giving it a Sam Fischer-look that was menacing and almost alien. Another click and it slid back neatly.

It was time for the cimmeran to use some more efficient forms of weaponry. He un-strapped two objects from behind his flanks, small and metallic and curved slightly, like a pair of sawed-off boomerangs. He had taken these from a Longhunter he killed in combat during the revolution of the Venean government, on the Battle of the Ven plains. He slipped a tight-fitting gauntlet over his left wrist that winked with the starry cold lights of electronic diodes, and unlatched the crystalline ammunition cartridges weighing down his belts.

The dust and rubble cleared. Fury was first seen as a silhouette, before he took shape and became a furry juggernaut. Both combatants were already torn, but the battle had not even begun. Erdawn clicked his scanner. It fell over his eye, and the world took on a shade of grey, and numbers and words flashed across his vision as Fury glowed and was highlighted.

Target: Fury
Classified -- Adversary
Sex: Male
Special: Khuutra
Height: 9'3"
Weight: 3120lbs
Estimated Physical Capacity: 2500-2700 stradd
Current Physical Output: 580-610 stradd
Estimated Metaphysical capacity: unknown
Current Metaphysical Output: n/a
Estimated Arcanic/Magick Capacity: 1200 stradd
Current Arcanic/Magick Capacity: 20 stradd
Status: wounded
>>>injuries: multiple lacerations to arms and torso, moderate head trauma, broken ribs resulting in major shock to internal organs
Situational analysis:
>>> dangerous, apparently probing for some weakness in enemy's technique before striking for the kill

Description: Bone density is so great that the effort used to break them would outweigh the benefit of crippling him; metaphysical capacity seems largely toned towards increasing physical output, making the earlier readings somewhat tenuous. Magick capacity not yet demonstrated, estimation based on ability to manipulate terra firma

He clicked off the device.

Erdawn moved first, breaking into a low run, leaping over heaps of cracked marble and weaving through thickets of grass and damp mists, his every step a calculated movement. Without breaking stride, he swung both his arms forward and whipped out the Longhunter boomerangs. They didn’t get three feet before bursting into pinwheels of hot orange-red light and superheated gas, cycling towards Fury on two sides at a curb, like buzzsaws made entirely of laser beams. Fury grunted and bulled forward, his strides thundering out over the ground, running towards the deadly energy blades even as the air caught fire around them.

Erdawn unslung his metallic rifle, pulled back the slide, cocking it, and slammed one of the bright, crystalline cartridges into its belly. It snapped into place.

Fury pivoted with his head tucked into his chest, and felt the heat as one of the energen boomerangs incinerated the fur off his shoulders, as he bent his legs and leapt upwards with acrobatic adeptness ridiculous for his size and weight, the other blade missing him by a space best measured in hairs. For a moment, he floated - his body perpendicular to the rich soil, and time was almost slow. His eyes shrank to pinpoints in his skull. It was his turn to be baited. Erdawn stood yards away, the rifle aimed with lethal accuracy and shining a triangle of red dots over Fury’s heart.

It could have ended in a single second.

But Fury would not die trapped.

He turned - somehow managing to twist in mid-flight - as firecrackers scattered across the air and three cold lines of white fire no wider than a pencil each connected the two from muzzle to Fury’s left shoulder. The superheated plasmic rounds crunched into the bone and blasted open craters in his fur and flesh. Blood spattered up and down as his fleece caught fire and his flesh cooked around the wounds, the sheer force of impact knocking him over on his side, parallel to the earth, before he hit it like a derailed freight train.

Thump.

The ground shuddered and the massive Khuutra broke into a dogged roll, white-fire drawing lines across the air and blasting sprays of soil and debris up from the ground all around him.

The rifle beat back and forth in Erdawn’s hands, every round jettisoning blinding white fumes in crackling, liquid spats from the ejecting chamber along with the hot steel of empty shell casings. Targeting lasers drew across the ground and Fury and the ground again in a kind of demented calligraphy. Blood and dirt spattered. Finally, there was an empty whine and crack and the magazine slid from the weapon’s gut into the dewey grass. Fury’s eyes flashed, registering his chance, and he took a second to hop up before charging across the marble forest like a football player - if werewolves had been allowed to play Varsity, that is. Erdawn swore, his hand almost moving for another clip before he thought better of it and pressed something on his gauntleted arm.

Fury drew his fist back and clenched, turning it into a furry cannonball of muscle and sinew, before driving it forward hard enough to smash Erdawn’s skull into paste all over the battlefield. Instead, his knuckles thumped and bounced off something translucent so powerfully the noise echoed across the valley,

Crack.

Generated from Erdawn’s gauntlet was what looked like a shield made up of light - plasma generated through conduits into a bending grid latitude-longitude, deflecting Fury’s fist like a softball off Plexiglas. As the knuckles hit, the image flickered, and Erdawn was lifted clean off his feet back two yards or so, digging trenches in the dirt before sliding to a stop. He flicked off the shield, and slapped another clip into his rifle - it had bought him time, but not enough. Fury was already on him, both his arms reaching to be brought ‘round in a hug that would give Fury leverage enough to crush his opponent’s spine. Erdawn thought fast.

He raced forward.

Furred hands swept past his body and the stock of his rifle came up like a rocket, cracking Fury’s clean upside his forehead and snapping back his head like the cork off a champagne bottle. The goliath took a step back, spitting blood and trying to stay focused. Not slowed, the immense beast reached forward with almost effeminate swiftness and used both hands to grab Erdawn by the hip and the thorax, respetively, lifting him up high and rudely slapping him upside down, grabbing him again bringing him head-first downwards, ready to pile-drive the cimmeran so far through the earth’s crust he could manage his own bar at the center of the earth. Erdawn whipped the gun upwards despite the awkwardness of his position, set the muzzle somewhere on the side of Fury’s rippling abdomen, and squeezed the trigger.

K-k-crack-crump!

The gun firecracker’d again, this time the hollow reports joined by the wet smacking of punctured flesh and splattering liquid. The flashes were blinding and the juggernaut’s flesh punched inwards into three ragged holes, white lines flickering in beams as the erupted from his back, burning more fur and ripping up meat like divots on a golf course. Fury’s body jigged and he fell backwards, shuddering and hurled by the force of the gunfire. Erdawn slammed into the ground on his shoulders, and his body accordioned and his muscles screamed at the forced contortions, dirt upheaved at his landing, blood choked from his lips. He collapsed on his side, in his own crater, coughing.

Despite the agonies, they pushed themselves up, standing, Fury bent and clenching the blown holes in his flank, which bled copiously, and Erdawn staggering slightly, his fist tight around the pain up his bruised back and sides.

No pause.

The cimmeran raised his rifle and took aim and Fury reached out with speed that belied his wounds, snatching it up by the barrel and brought it down in one fell swoop, bringing it crashing off Erdawn’s skull, up and to the side, and crash again across his face. Blood flew and the cimmeran was knocked clean off his feet, hitting dirt. He spit out more blood, and a broken tooth, but all the same - he grinned. Fury raised the weapon again, this time intending to squeeze out his brains through his ears and nose, and wondered why he would grin. There was a whickering hum behind him, and the crisp smell of burnt ozone.

”R-RAAAAURGH!” The juggernaut roared as the energen ‘rangs returned, slicing through the backs of his thighs and leaving deep trenches of fused tissues, burned fur and vaporized blood. He hit the ground on his knees, strength giving out, shuddering. Erdawn did not spare a second - catching and disengaging the aerial weapons and sheathing them at his back, lifting a single arm and balling his fist.

There was suddenly a weight to the air, and the sunlight seemed less oppressive, less present even, as beads of dying red light crept from the muscle fibres down Erdawn’s arms and pooled around the knuckles. They rippled and frothed and were unstable in glaring redshift, and the air around his hand cooked and balled like a red giant star. He drew it back.

The Dragon Palm.

It slammed bomb and fist up into Fury’s diaphragm with a thunderclap, blowing a tremor up and down his iron skeleton and making his muscle quiver like gelatine. His fur was consumed in yellow tongues of flame and oppressive red light exploded from the impact like a broken light bulb. The earth was rent apart into strips around his body, which was felled like an oak and thumped backwards, smouldering and paralysed in shock, to the dirt, Erdawn’s fist still shaking where it had struck his opponent. Fury groaned, trying to get up, his senses still scattered.

“Check.”

He dipped his fingers in the soil, and even as he did his mind became… open to the every sense of this distant earth. Aerial moisture converged and chained and became one with the dirt and oxygen was drawn from the skies and pooled together, and the hard ground became bubbling mud with a density half-between water and air. The substance spread across the ground and suddenly Fury was sucked down, the thin liquid gushing upwards to accost him and dousing the flames up and down his fur. In a torrent of bubbles, the goliath sank, down down and down, spinning endlessly down a dark, thirsty oblivion.

-------------------------------------------------

Hendrix coughed, raising a sullied hand to his mouth, and sat up. He looked at his knuckles. The dark skin was spattered with blood. Probably not a very good sign, but ice only looked at his hands with detached amusement, as if they held some significance he failed to grasp. Grunting, he stood up, torn clothing billowing in rags around his skinny frame, and turned to his opponent.

-You can’t hear me.- The guitarist’s eyes said. -You think for a moment you can’t hear me?- The guitarist’s eyes said.

Wyborn grinned, flexing his hands. Inwardly, he wondered how far he could hurl this skinny little rag with one push from his mind. And in his world of silence, his own voice spoke loudest. Ice rotated his knuckles and started to play - his fingers sliding up and down the neck-strings and his other working the body with a kind of angelic delicacy. The notes were very rhythmic - the tempo was fast but the notes themselves very slow. Almost sad - observing the world. If Wyborn had to, he would have said it was something like the Oz-man’s NIB and the opening strings to Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper, different all the same, enchanting all the same.

Then of course, his smile faded, because he could hear the music, and that just didn’t make sense at all. It didn’t surprise him, precisely - Wyborn lived in a universe where every other guy was a freak of nature in some twisted way, but it still didn’t make sense. So he growled, his eyes flashed, and summoning deep reserves of power from the darkest depths of his will, he pushed forwards.

The asphalt groaned for just a second, and then it peeled off in broken chunks and rolled backwards like a stone carpet, screaming towards the unmindful guitarist like a tidal wave of living concrete, steamrolling everything in its path and casting a shadow over Hendrix as he played. A rumble built its way through the ground - Wyborn thought it was his own landscaping, until he realised it was moving towards him and up his knees.

The silence was deafened with a sound unlike anything Wyborn had ever heard before - and he realised it was the man’s voice. His lips weren’t moving, but it was his voice all the same and it thundered loud enough in his head he couldn’t think he couldn’t see, humming so sweet and musical, like a blue-grass hymn of angels, just melodious humming.

The asphalt carpet slowed, stopped, and managed to roll backwards about a foot before it was shattered into a million or so pieces and blown backwards in a rolling cloud of dust and debris. A particularly nastily immense chunk slammed into the psychic mage’s gut and double him over, wheezing and stumbling backwards, his armour cracked over his abdomen. More pieces clattered and rolled down the street, small pebbles and rock splinters bouncing off Wyborn’s face and stinging his eyes and hands. He could still hear Hendrix sing, and suddenly he felt the sound - he felt it in a way as intimate as an embrace, and it struck his legs and weaved in between the muscles and nerves and resonated and then they quivered like sacs of dropped gelatine.

Blood vessels ruptured up and down his limbs, the sound moved up like a jelly-beast and rolled into his gut, knotting his intestines and he couldn’t even force it out because he was now deafened, all there was, was humming.

It billowed up through his stomach like liquid, purposeful fingers and found the organ and stroked it, touched it, strangled it - hot jets of bile and vomit rose up through his oesophagus and it his mouth, puking between his teeth down his chin as the sound rattled his ribcage and staggered his heart (but even that power could not pierce the aura around that organ, and the heart only fluttered). Trembling and writhing on his feet, Wyborn felt the sound flow in a surge, and he was lifted up, turning and tossing and spinning haphazardly, carried on gale choir-winds down the boulervard, the world streaking around him in a grey blur and the presence of the wind roaring in his ears still no match for the guitarist’s humming. Like a ragdoll in a hurricane, he flew - and all around him everything was moving like shapes in a hallucinogenic drug euphoria, so that it wasn’t even odd when windows blasted outwards in glittering clouds and cut his face and exposed skin, when one precisely immense office building leaned over - leaned like a monolith of glossy windows reflecting the sky, and slammed into his body, crunching bones like clay pottery, leaving two discs like broken egg-shells, blood spurting from his nose and mouth. His course changed with the impact, and he veered towards the pavement, hitting it like a dump-truck and compressing it with his own weight. Rock broke and dust billowed, pavement spilled upwards in pebbles, he rolled with the impact like a scarecrow and slammed into a random fire-hydrant, ripping it clean up and letting loose an upwards spray of water that drenched the mage instantly.

He slogged to a rolling stop some feet away, on his back, coughing in spasms that wracked his body. His own armour had saved him from internal damage, but this was now bent inwards and stabbing into his flesh. Lying in a slippy pool of red viscera and sewer-waters, he managed to get up, dripping in streams. Spitting water from his mouth and looking reproachfully at its red colour, he staggered forwards, eyes glowing.

-Oh you mad son of a ***** lookit you now.- He growled. He couldn’t hear the humming anymore - certainly not the squelching of his boots and clothes, or anything. And for that, he was thankful. But it was time for payback, and he broke into a run, holding his massive broadsword up like an iron spike. When he found Hendrix, he would impale him. Yes, that seemed suitable. And then maybe -

If Wyborn had been able to hear, he might have noticed the metal shards earlier. Instead, he only caught the various glints in the air, as every - every - piece of his discarded armour whickered across the deserted city towards him, burying themselves propelled by sound in every break and opening in his armour - falling into the right places like a deranged jigsaw puzzle, although Wyborn failed to notice the miraculous re-piecing of his plate-mail. Blood spattered in rivulets from every buried wound. Wyborn was knocked backwards off his feet, water shaken from his rattling armour. He thumped still on the ground, gritting his teeth and groaning bitterly at the shrapnel stuck through his body.

Down the street, Hendrix walked, slowly, stoically, his guitar glinting and resonating in the breeze. He didn’t appreciate the destruction left in the wake of Wyborn’s horrible passage - the massive chunk ripped out of the skyscraper, for one, or the scattered support beams and concrete debris - and only looked around, detached, peering through the red mirrors of his glasses, which hid perhaps the most terrible song of all.

-------------------------------------------------

Crack.

The vertebral staff glanced a blow off the acrid earth, as at the same hollow note Sunday bent himself off the broken tree like a serpent, his frame bending like rubber to accost him into standing position. The featureless ebony mask glossed and gleamed and said nothing, but there came a deep and insistent chuckle from its recesses that captured Corruption’s attention down to the marrow of his bones. The laughter was mad - mad, no doubt, but calculating. It trickled like water from a sieve.

”Hm, hm, hm… very impressive. No more games. We are witch-men just the same. Let us palaver in the Old Way.” Sunday flexed, corded, wiry muscle pulling and almost ripping at the seams, black skin stretching like taught, oiled leather, and the polished wood of his face emotionless.

”The moths… I still hear them. Are they your totem beasts? Long since have I grown past the need for such… but I retain mine, like a mark upon my soul. Watch. They have changed with me.” Sunday whip-lashed his body upwards, his limbs stretching outwards like broken sticks, every part of him bent at an angle so extreme they defied the conventional viewpoints of the human skeleton. He lowered his arm, and cracked his lurid weapon off the cooked stone. It rang out with all the expected sound of clattering bone.

Moving with effete grace, he cracked the mace off the ground perpendicular to his first tap, sliding his feet across the hot dirt, moving again, crack, and again, crack, finally raising the mace straight up into the air.

The harsh, jungle-drenched sunlight seemed to cast a baked glow off the bleached bone, and it stood with unnatural stillness as sweat glistened of the witch-man’s body.

”Flesh, I invoke thee.” And then he began to chant - words that weren’t really words at all, just gobbling sounds birthed from a throat long since vestigial, a vocal pulse that resonated off the backdoor of Corruption’s knowledge - alien to him, but ritually familiar. Sunday drew his knuckles fingers up and down the smooth surface of his mask, pressing hard, and withdrew his hand.

Buzzing exploded in Corruption’s ears.

The sound came from everywhere and nowhere, a droning, maddening buzz - the multiplied chaos of a million pairs of insectile wings beating faster than the eye could trace. And then they were upon him, and he only thought he saw them burst from that hideously smooth mask, like it had opened up in pores and sweat loose this poison locust.

Bees.

Honeybees and bumblebees, all repulsively fat and disgustingly white, drained of all colour and left as hideous caricatures of the once humble insects. They converged upon Corruption like a blanket, smothering him from all sides so that he drank them and inhaled them and tasted only swollen abdomens and stingers dripping with viscous poisons, felt-softness pattering off his face and hands and buzzing wings everywhere, everywhere. Matches lit up and down his skin and he was stung too many times to count, and over and over - he felt venom pumped into his networking veins, felt burning throughout his body and deeper, like the toxins were seeping into his brain and eating away at his very being. He cried out, in humbled rage and maddening agony, thrashing against the onslaught.

All at once the papery beating of wings rose in volume and soon fought the drone of the swarm. And all at once bees collided with fat, furry moths and both sides tore at each other, diseased bees and alien moths. Corruption’s robes fell about him, actually torn from the stings, and he cracked his staff off the ground.

The flickering darkness parted, and carpets and walls of the battling creatures peeled away, leaving an empty gulf down across between Corruption and Sunday. Slowly, the bulging swarms began to fade, translucent, so that one could see through them, like some adobe photo-shopped after-image. They vanished completely, but off to the sides the bees still hummed and the moths still fluttered their wings, the sounds trickling from some invisible prison between angular space, out of sight, out of mind.

Corruption grit his teeth. Where he had been stung his flesh swelled grotesquely in lumps like cancerous egg sacs. Steam actually rose off cooking, bubbling flesh where the poison had trickled, and he could still feel it sloshing about inside him. He would have to do something about that - he could feel it burning.

”Let me show you a world of abysmal darkness.” Sunday rasped gutturally.

“And I invite you to mine, naïve.” The withered sorcerer replied. Sunday again whip-lashed his upper-torso, backwards, spreading his arms and bringing his entire frame down as if to kneel and praise some unknowable baal. His hands slapped the bleached rock of the canyon, and as they did, his slithering red tattoos moved, jerkingly at first, and then smooth, like a carpet of blood sliding across the field. The curved images boiled and frothed, and the earth blackened where they touched, opening and closing and showing images of most disturbing horror - the hungry eyes of innocent children, emptied playgrounds, scenes of madness decorated with scenes reserved more often for peace and comeliness, which incidentally made them all the more horrifying.

The red pictures bubbled over to the hems of Corruption’s dark robes. He sneered, and brought down his staff, muttering something guttural under his breath. The air cracked, split open, opening a space that shouldn’t have existed between him and the flood of crimson. It poured in and around and was diverted, like hot magma moved around a mountain.

Whipping out his skeletal hand, fishing-lines of yellow Light, raw power, tore across the void, burning oxygen into gaseous clouds of plasma and shrieking towards the dark witch like dragon fire. Sunday chuckled, and hopped forward, into the red flood. He fell through it as it wasn’t there - as if nothing was there, and it gushed upwards in tongues and licked the air. Corruption’s magick slammed into burnt canyon walls and tore chunks from the surface, cutting pentagonal shapes into the stone and melting it in places.

Sunday melted from the crimson drawings with wraith-like agility, not a foot from Corruption, filling his vision in a most unexpected way. That barbaric bone mace whickered through the air and met the sorcerer upside the skull. There was a crack, blood drew rivulets across the air, Corruption’s head lolled around on his shoulders. Sunday brought the weapon to the side and around again, it flickered horizontally and met solid matter at the side of Corruption’s head with the sound of a splintering baseball bat. Blood flecked across Corruption’s face as his head snapped sideways like a tether ball, and he was knocked clean off his feet. He stumbled to the ground and hit pay dirt with his right shoulder, and as he brushed the ground the crimson flood of images raced two-dimensionally across the canyon-belly and poured over him. Corruption roared. Where the red touched him there were flames, and more than that - his nerve endings screamed at him, and the poison in his blood activated, swelling in volume and filling his arterial canals like floodwater, eating away at the sides. He threw himself upwards, throwing air, space, whatever it took underneath him to lift himself from the acidic crimson pool - but to no avail. He left the ground and the red roped upwards after him, clawed to his body and pulling back like hideous tree branches, present in two and three dimensions inconsistently.

Corruption’s body stretched and he screamed as the red tightened, like rooted moss, slowly crushing him, and the poison worked, and he burned. Somewhere in nowhere, the sound of the bees grew louder, and Sunday only looked on impassively, the surface of his ebony wood mask a heap of twisted reflections to caricature a human smile.

-------------------------------------------------

Yuri retched a mouthful of blood, grit his teeth, and flipped up to a stand. His knuckles wightened around the grip of his own hammer and an idea struck him as Insanity bore down upon him with the slow determination of one sure of his victory. He flipped his hammer around his body like a solid piece of nunchaku - not for the sake of showmanship, but to build up momentum - Insanity saw this and acknowledged the purpose.

The mountain of a man surged forward of muscular legs, his furs torn behind him with his sheer velocity, and his feet were like thunder upon the field - there was no need for stealth among these two. Still cycling his hammer from hand to hand around him, he gave one overpowering swing and let it loose, still running, the weapon spinning haft over head like a windmill of weighed steel, so fast the recognized whup-WHUP became only a heavy whirring.

Insanity broke his stoic walk into a sprint and ducked low, and then they were three feet apart and Insanity was raising his monstrous hammer as Yuri was bringing his own down with at least a whole second advantage. -Ah, a trick.- Insanity would not remember thinking this.

Whack.

The head fell on the Old one’s forehead like all the thunder in the skies bottled up, and his vision starred and blackened as his skull rang out and the grey matter of his brain bounced heavily off the iron-hard ceiling and blood gushed from his nose and his jaw was crushed into his clavicle. His hammer left his hand like an arrow - if that arrow was also a ballista bolt tied to a mountain - and rang off the bushy ground with a boom and he stumbled down and Yuri whipped his hips in a circle and came around full circle with his left leg, driving his heel into the goliath’s forehead and snapping his head backwards at the neck like the head of a Pez Dispenser, pushing his entire body off his heels and dropping him to the field like a falling tank.

Insanity spat out a stream of hot blood (enough so that instead of spitting neatly it gushed out his lips), lifted his left leg up so the fleece off his knee brushed his chest, and pistoned it forward with all the power his muscles could muster. Yuri, who had long ago lost any concept of mercy in heated combat, was still coming with his hammer poised over his head to drop Insanity’s ribcage on his heart like a garbage compressor, and the ancient hero’s foot drove into his gut with enough force to whiplash the longhunter’s body double over the appendage and launch him backwards like a cannonball of muscle and flesh and animal skins.

He rumbled off the field like a ragdoll, tearing unearthly soils from the rose field in spattering clouds, and tearing up roses alike, which never really tore up at all. He finally landed splayed backwards, cracking his head off the ground, tangled up in rose bushes and almost vanished from eye-sight, coughing blood, his abdominal muscles bruised and making him retch.

Groaning, Yuri turned over, and pushed himself up with his arms, still holding his belly, grinding his teeth. Insanity was standing yards that seemed like miles away, one paw-like hand to his bashed head.

“How old are you, Insanity?” Yuri asked, more rhetorically than anything. “Old enough to have forgotten any other life that the one we live now, a life of killing? Old enough to fear that one day those memory lapses you have - the ones that aren’t your trained instincts and physical memories, but your morals, your ideals - will wind you facing your own students - your son - in combat from the opposing side?” The longhunter scratched his rough cheeks, and neck, panting.

“Old enough to doubt your sanity?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, Yuri bent down and scooped up Insanity’s own hammer, the massive thing cumbersome, but not impossible to wield one-handed in his arms. Insanity narrowed his cold eyes. That this man could wield such a thing told a great deal about his strength - it didn’t match his body, despite the imposing musculature. Yuri balanced the ungodly weapon for a second or two, heliographing the sun behind him, his tanned skin shining, his golden-greyed mane of hair wreathed in light, standing like some Nordic deity, magnificent.

He trotted forwards at a jog, his lips pulled back to bare spit-shining rows of teeth, snarling.

The distance between them closed like a shut door and when Yuri was within striking range, he wheeled his body with all the muscle power he could, whipping the pair of deific weapons around horizontally. Insanity’s great thing swung around hard enough that it lifted Yuri off his feet, and the momentum built around him like a foundation layed in brick.

Whooooo-whoop-whooo-oosh!

The great hammer swept in front of Insanity missing by inches, and the grey goliath hopskipped backwards out of range. Yuri’s swings were lifting him off his feet, so that he was spinning like a slow dredle, both weapons circling around and making it impossible for Insanity to attack, not dodge. Whoosh! Insanity stepped backwards again, whup, he skipped, Yuri still lifted by the momentum and following at a brutal pace. His muscles stood out in rigid cords, his arms were almost being pulled off by the sheer weight of the thing, but if he could only get closer.

Every hop landing him gradually closer, Yuri finally brought the largest hammer around in one terrible swing, and as his opponent leap back to avoid its crushing head, he let go, launching the monstrosity at Insanity and bowling him over head over heels as it sank into his chest. He landed on his back and Yuri, still spinning, twisted his body and brought his momentum-charged hammer down with all the power he could. Insanity’s eyes widened, and he clenched the muscles over his abdomen like mad, and the hammer head sunk into them like a terrible barbell. It did not rip through and crush Insanity’s intestines, pancreas and liver, instead bounced off by the beast’s impressive musculature, but it still bent Insanity in two and pumped everything so that he puked up bile and spat it from his face.

Roaring, Yuri pressed on, but Insanity would not have it, and with a surge of Light through his shoulder and forearm and out his splayed palm, he tore Yuri from his feet, smoking his flesh, and launching him backwards, again.

-This is getting repetitive,- the juggernaut smirked, still straining over his smashed belly, getting to his feet.

This time Yuri managed to land on his feet, bending his knees and springing back up, his skin baked where Insanity’s Light had flowed. His nose bled.

They stood on equal ground. And this would be an interesting battle.

“BEAR! SNAKE AND WHALE, BIRD AND WOLF AND RAM, ELEPHANT AND LION!” Yuri bellowed, dropping his stances and pushing his arms downwards. He brought them up, and pushed out, with slow strength that spoke of something like Shaolin and Kung-Fu discipline. “By the skin of this earth and all others,” he said, solemn. “Imbue me the fuel of your flesh.”

Insanity’s sixth or seventh or whatever sensitivity flared.

“Oh grass it,” he swore, and crossed his massive arms over his chest, burying his face into his forearms, taking on a defensive posture.

Yuri’s muscles coiled, power leaked from the pores in his body in white-gold threads like coloured steam, rising about him in a burning nimbus. His frame shuddered as primal forces rippled through his veins and Life-conduits, making him bulge with contained energy.

”Answer me, Old One! How many ages do we share!?”

The release came like a firestorm of power and light and heat, and in a flash it had swallowed the rose field and drowned out all sight, like a single sun had birthed itself from the earth and soil. After the light came the sound, and it was deafening. The air ignited and thickened and all around the cosmos wheeled and roared like a chained beast. Yuri bellowed at the epicentre of the blast, pumping the summoned Lights and Energies from his totem deities from his body in a flood of relief, until his skin caught fire and sizzled and his muscles bled, and only then, he stopped.

Dust and smoke of deep, bluish colour rolled across the field, and the roses fluttered row on row, undamaged and perhaps even more beautiful.

[ June 14, 2005, 09:59 PM: Message edited by: Erdawn Rockin Like A Hurricane ]

[Erdawn Il Deus]

POOO-OOOOSTED BI-TCHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!