Negi!

[Erdawn Il Deus]

OoC: Strikes me I'd forgotten I want a piece of you. //

For some, the war never ended. Conflict it seemed was as addictive as the junk pushed through the undercurrent circulatory system of the larger, more central city-worlds. As addictive, as ruinous… as it was attractive. He’d left on his own for that purpose, fleeing the shadow the war’s sundered aftermath had left stretched out across the galaxy, its terminal line always at his heels, and always, as today, catching up to him.

It was an abandoned moon, one of the many which had been terra-morphed in an attempt to make full use of raw, untapped resources, and one of the many which had run dry, only an empty husk of a planet left to drift upon the Elysium orbit of space. Beneath a sky perpetually dark through the window of its atmosphere the colosse shapes of neighboring worlds hung, immense and mysterious. The earth beneath them was harsh – naked of vegetation, only a landscape of mineral formation and grandfather calcium deposits so established in time they reached skywards like the fingers of fomorian giants. The skeletal remnants of creek-beds cut gutted, flat trenches through coloured rock, opening into humongous chasms and the thunderous maws of coulee formations which echoed under the silence of life’s permeating absence.

Their voices, thus, were those of great actors or gods on the wind of the world’s acoustics. And their actions louder still.

”Your masters sent you here to die,” he spoke, softly despite the inevitable amplification. ”But I am not an executioner. I will tell you once to leave.”

“We will not leave, Huma uss Con La. The head of one of the greatest war criminals of the Rim Confederacy will bring a fine enough price handed over to the Imperium.” The man who spoke was immense and uncouth, wild, oriental facial hair pouring manicured from a heavily ridged face set atop a muscular body draped in miscellaneous armour and ragged clothing. He was flanked by three others, another of his warmongering species of less standing judging by his formidable lack of moustache and blue flesh, another bulky three-armed humanoid whose countenance brought to mind images of a lobster carapace set over thick, rubbery hide, and a more humane, silent creature who fit the silhouette of a man save for the silvery pink hue of his skin and shifting, unearthly quality of his hair.

He is the leader, Huma recognized in silence. The other is simply loud. Unlike his pursuers, he was human, although unique among the genetic caste of his fellows. He was an albino, so that his hair hung long and feathery around the crown of his skull like fallen snow, and the flesh of his body was pallid like finely sculpted bone. He was fair, and slender in countenance despite impressive muscle-mass scabbarded in a body that seemed finely trimmed of fat, over-nourishment, any kind of excess, which lent to him a ragged, unhealthy appearance. His irises glimmered like droplets of blood, standing vividly from the whiteness of his skin.

He did not answer, did not shrug, simply closed his eyes, emptied himself of the meandering of his mind and allowed only the focus of sudden purpose to consume him. He wore still his past-regalia, open silk-whites sashed and bound in leather and bearing ancient, scale-armour of crafted alien metals about his shoulders and chest and hips. Leather gauntleted hands fell smoothly onto a smooth, iron pommel, like the ancient cradle of a an estoc inspired by the horse-killing bidenhander. At his touch the make-up grafted to his skin and came to life with a hum winking with electronic blinks.

“Bulrag, Zarda, shoot this dumb bastard,” the larged one growled. “He thinks is kaudr-homme, street samurai, make him dead.” His brethren merc and the lobster-one drew arms – the former a bulbousy, metallic rifle the rectangular to fire ballistics and the uglier one two hand-held machine-pistols leaving his third arm free and unnacounted for. Their aim and rate of fire was excellent and merciless, cyclically burying their quarry, the rifle unleashing ray-fire like brush-strokes of solid red light with the staccato sound of crashing circuit-panels, the handheld gauss-repeaters chattering like super-charged tin and filling the air with magnetic small-arms fire.

Rock heated, burst apart, thumping loudly, geysers of soil ripping upwards in a bee-line behind from where Huma stood unimpressed, and the fact that he was no longer there, had in fact moved between both angles of fire with such speed and grace his absence wasn’t even recorded by the would-be assassins until the crimson jewels of his eyes looked coldly at them from a killing distance of inches, froze them with terror and the crippling knowledge that they were men dead.

“BRAG-MAH-” Zarda blew through inhuman throats, turning himself to face this ghost which fell upon him like a wolf. Human was colder than death. The killing intent of his enemy swept over him, but he had long ago embraced the mu, emerged there from the path of demons, and the intent echoed into oblivion and was only stale arrogance. His arm swept up and came down, palm first, reaching into the atomic fabric which made up all things, and his muscle-structure became swollen with power and his palm hummed like a turbine. It cut an perfect arc and came down against the carapace of Zarda’s head and light flickered between his fingers and the skull structure crumpled beneath the power of the blow like a house of cards, bone splintering apart and bursting through the flesh of his face in a red blur of violence. He spun away even as the body fell to the dust, armour rattling, the same arm sweeping upwards and around again like a python wrapped in human flesh, striking horizontally into the gut of the large one. Armour shuddered and broke apart into jig-saw puzzle pieces around his fist, a piston, and he bent double-over and vomited bile between his lips and blacked out standing, hand limp on the pommel of a sinister-looking combat weapon.

Bulrag howled, backing away, bringing the alien weapon to fire and firing indiscriminately, stray bolts ravaging Zarda’s twitching carcass into the meat-soaked vapour trails of disintegrated flesh and armour. His fear, too, echoed into oblivion. Huma brought up the pommel, the esteemed beam-sabre weapon, recycling generated light into a field of power effectively fabricating a blade of solid light. He flowed, one with himself, the blinding tip puncturing the rifle barrel with an explosion of sparks and slag and steel shards, flicking back and forward again carried on his wrist and thrust into the alien’s belly. Armour flared, hot as branding iron, blood smoking into red steam as the bounty-hunter’s body thrashed like a carp around a severed spinal column. The blade ripped free and he fell dead, his guts boiled to liquid inside the wound and cauterized to streams of red smoke bowled over in the dust. Still moving, the tip fell to the ground and Huma’s free arm pointed, fingers splayed, across his navel, almost touching the large one even as he sank to his knees.

There was a crumpling, like distant thunder, and the muscles of Huma’s arm shuddered against the prison of his alabaster flesh, straining upwards to quivering finger-tips and roiling outwards in a napalm stream of molten white light. The speaker remained nameless in death, his body thrashed with movement as armour blasted apart under a concussive wave of channelled energy, vaporised craters leaving ragged holes through his thorax still smoking with the red fumes of superheated blood and matter.

There was one more. He had fled immediately, was fifty yards away or more, recognising the threat for what it was, recognising a practitioner of the Zen-warrior creed of the Ta bushido. Huma was merciless. The creed called for ultimate peace. He forsook the theatrics of multiple footsteps, moving forward in bold leaps of motion, channelling power into his legs so that he seemed a glowing silhouette. He closed the gulf of distance between them in a handful of seconds, closed in and leapt upwards, his body angled. The blade came down, even as the leader turned and screamed hoarsely through a doomed throat. It passed through him from the clavicle downwards with a hiss, the flesh around it quivering like bacon fat on a skillet, the force of the thrust pushing the bounty-hunter downwards on the blade until he was pinned against the rock, which fractured in concentric circles around the movement and lifted dust into the air. Huma’s momentum carried him passed his enemy, whose screams of agony became footprints of red smoke and a mist of blood through mouth and nasal canal, and the second movement tore him savagely in half.

Blood rained across the stones and Huma landed and the light-edge of his sword whickered out, and he stood straight. A silence settled across the landscape, radically disturbed by the amplified acoustics of blood and death and carnage which the wanderer had left in his wake.

The peace came over him, and he released the embraced nothingness, and stood straighter. It was time to leave this place; else the shadow meet him again.

[Trickster-kun]

((Oh yes, I was very aware of that for a while. :/ Apologies that the post on my part never came... blame battling against a college + work schedule. -.- But since I have emerged somewhat victorious, let our dance commence without further ado.))

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...

The substance of blood is almost never one that the mere human can simply gaze at plain sight without it causing some sort of negative reaction within the frame of the system... but then again, human, it seemed, was a very wrong kind of word that could be used to describe the beings that so violently provided this dance of blood, one where, it seemed, grace and death were to be wed with each other, and this child of a scene would be but a glimpse of what their honeymoon would hold certain likeness to. And yet, the bodies fell, and as the faint smell of death began to strengthen and walk on its own two feet, from behind one of the massive calcium fingers moved a figure, though the very nature of this figure was one bathed in silence and embraced by the secrecy that seemed to pour from every hole of the small body... a presence that was, in a sense, as harmless as it was imposing, a very contradiction of statements and states that were embodied within one, yet were rarely shared by anyone.

As a rule, or so has humanity claimed across the ages, the mind can only perceive things, environments and other living beings in one of two general terms: either it is harmless, or is it harmful. Does it possess the very ability to do harm? A simple question with a simple answer, and one that has constantly sufficed to quench that sudden thirst for knowledge that invades the brain at a moment where the unknown becomes known... not unlike turning on a light in a darkened room or opening a book. However, when the very ability to do harm lies in the very fact of being harmless. how would, then, the individual react under such situation? Some might flee. Some might suffer from a cat moment and be curious about it. Yet others might want to crack the shell of the mysterious by force, convincing themselves of whatever truth or lie holds the secret that is revealed before them.

What a fitting term. Shell.

The girl, if such a being could be considered one, stood at just a little more than half the height of the sole remaining figure amidst the spilled corpse shake he had so swiftly created, and very likely weighed oh so much less than him. Oceanic green orbs for eyes gazed at the scene before her, and she blinked. Showing no reaction nor emotion in the face of such bloodshed, this would certainly make one think: is this girl not human? Because it's pretty much for certain that one would expect a girl like this, of such young and underdeveloped appearance, to have at least some sort of reaction in the face of such gratuitous amount of alien gore, a scene that was given an even more bizarre atmosphere thanks to the chilly silence and the desolated grounds of this far moon's semi-grayed surface. I say semi-grayed, because in the moment the ground had lost its original color, but was now blending in with the spilled life fluids to form an indescribable -and very likely to be tasteless- crimson cocktail on the rocks. However the cocktail was shaken, not stirred, as the girl walked the dried surface as if she was merely taking a midnight stroll on the beach, her bare feet caressing the hardness of the sandy moon, and in her wake -just a feet or so in front of her- the blood was misplaced and moved, creating a perfect semi-circle where she stood, silent and watching.

She spoke, and in her words was a calm that was as alluring as her eyes, and and as wavy as her short green hair. Addressed was the stranger, and zero intention hid in her speech as she merely asked:

-"Are you... being followed as well?"