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Welcome back to the Second Tournament of the Red Lions. This is Volume 3: Calamity Before the Storm. We're down to the Final Four just in time for March Madness. Again, to Repster with the rules:

[quote="repster]Let's start with one simple thing that should be mentioned. Wyborn. He came up with it"]

This round we only have two matches:

4. Repster vs. 11. Erdawn
13. Wyborn vs. 12. Scripture

This round will end on Monday, April 2 at 12:00 AM. Once again, that means that all fighting must be done by Sunday night. Not that you should be up that late since you have classes or work the next day, anyways.

There was a wet sound as the man's spine was torn from his back. The now liberated bone cracked, and shuddered as it was formed into the semblance of a blade. They're was a great uproar as she turn and cleaved off the head of the lion about to sink it's fangs into her neck. That was the last of them for now and the crowd roared and applauded with merriment.

It was a beautiful day to be bathed in blood as thousands watched her. She was not really one to fight for entertainment, but this was survival. The great Colosseum's of Rome was the only place her freedom would be granted, and those annoying soldier would no longer chase her. The bones protruding from her back where as bloody as her make shift weapon. Her armor was dented, and shone with it's thick coat of already drying blood. Greaves and gauntlets held brain matter mixed in. She flexed the skeletal remains of her wings and adjusted her waste length braid. Bone white should of been it's color, but as the rest of her, the only real color to be seen was that of a coat of gore.

They would send the last now, they're best. If they had hoped to tire her first, they were sadly mistaken. It had only served as a warm up The last of these gladiators, mercenaries, and warriors. So it was freedom or death for the woman the dubbed Red Bone. Far from original, yet she cared little. A name was a name. She hefted her spine blade and walked towards the opening gates.

I'll get on this once I climb out from under the mountain of schoolwork I'm under. From one mountain to another, I suppose. Not in a very gunjinning mood, either. I do enjoy vacations.

I just realized Rep and I need to beat one of you to prevent a repeat of last tournament. Better...do something about that.

I just realized Rep and I need to beat one of you to prevent a repeat of last tournament.

Unlikely. If I and Cam win, I will make a throne out of Cameron's bones and line it with the skulls of everyone I've killed and sit on it like the Crimson King himself.
/OoC

The man staring down Red Bone or whatever she fancied herself did not so much look fit for combat as he did for the morgue. Where one might have been expected to attire themselves in the classic cuirass, shield, sword, breast-plate, mail, he was instead wearing only an old, very dark wool robe over his body, which was wrapped from head to toe in bandages of varying degrees of age - from old and yellowed and stained like rolls of rotted parchment, to fresh white rollers leopard-spotted with clots of blood and other unwholesome things. He was a very tall and very thin man, with a pointed chin and nose, acceptably muscular but otherwise very sallow - his skin sunken tight to the bone and sallowed of colour, revealing his teeth like the ghost image of his skull over his face. When he smiled, it was not a gesture conductive to tranquility.

His torn wool robes brushed the ground. His hands, criss-crossed with ghostly white dressings that fluttered ominously about the skeletal playthings of his fingers, were open and empty of objects. He seemed almost a priest. His exposed skin, however, marked him differently. He bled. Not subtley, either. The cartography of skin skin seemed darkened by continents of of rot or rash, where the skin had bubbled, curled, peeled away in layers to an ugly and dark and infected red colours, bleeding from the pores aux alentoures in rivulets. His lips were torn and frayed and rotted upwards to his nose, which had broken away to reveal the craterous half of his nasal canal like an open cavern. A kind of crimson leprosy of the flesh. Gently, he looped some stray dressings around his horrid visage, and beckoned his opponent. His entire figure radiated a deep and unsettling sense of contagion, infection, and revulsion. The prospect of touching him... was disturbing.

"I... am Fever. We have never met." Beneath the bandages, it seemed liekly he had begun to smile. It was an offensive thought. "We will never meet again. 'Je suis la mort rouge, qui passe.'" He chuckled. "And you?"

I have a battlefield in mind, and just need to write it. Tomorrow at the lastest, unless Cam manages to swipe a post in before me. Inundated.

By the way, Erdawn: **Points to challenge topic** Post, damn you.

I'll wait on you, Scrip.

[QUOTE=Bomby DeNiro]
4. Repster vs. 11. Erdawn
13. Wyborn vs. 12. Scripture[/QUOTE]

OH SHI--

"I have no name, no true purpose. Refer to me as you wish."
She then punched him in the face. There was nothing fancy about it, just one quick powerful jab that crushed whatever nasal cavity Fever had. The spine blade came next, or rather the flat side across his head as she rotated her entire body putting her weight into it. She continued her rotation until she face the man, she gave a powerful heave of her wings and lifted he legs slightly. One wing smacked into Fever knocking him back, and the force of the motion pushed Red Bone back. Much as it would have with feathered wings. No wind ruffled the walking plague.

Grey eyes watched him warily. She set her feet solidly once again, blade held defensibly. The small heavy spiked weight on her braid swaying slightly.

He looked out and saw Mount Washington.

“This is, I think,” he said, “a good distance.”

He had set out with a full pack of food and other hiking utensils stuffed into his pack, but now his load was light, as he had eaten all the food and drank all the water in his passing of stragglers who could not handle the terrain with its jutting rocks and treacherous paths. Trickling tributaries ran down the mountain from the remaining snow pack – enough to feed them but not enough to ski on – and he had used the ones he knew were clean to refill his canteen before replacing it in his pack. The hike was winding and tacing, indeed, but he had seemed to flow up the mountain all the while, his legs holding steady like a mountain goat’s, as if he had grown up living in the town below before it had ever been a town, just looking up and sometimes to the distance.

He looked at the sun with eyes that spoke of late twenties.

“And still some time to take in the scene.”

But there was something behind those eyes that was unsettling. As he stared into the distance, he might’ve been a statue.

Fever did not rub his jaw - he could not properly wipe his face of blood with the bandages and dressings in the way, and he was bleeding from every pore either fashion - merely cocked his head as he straightened.

"I will refer to you only as the casualty you are doomed to become." He chuckled evilly - and I say evilly foregoing on the dramatics and scripture-intonations of the word, because the noise that gurgled from behind the stained mask of bandages could only be described as such. It was a black sound. He rotated his hands palms facing outwards and Red Bone, or whatever, was given a moment to appreciate the markings there - black, branded symbols on each hand.

In aesthetic they seemed to be a diagram - an eight-point star fashioned much like a wheel. But focus as she might, and despite the clearly equatorial distances between them, she could not symmetrically line up any of the arrows through some optic illusion. It was a disturbing picture. She might have recognised it as belonging to the worshippers of Chaos. It didn't really matter. But chaos, at least, chaos as defined by through chaos mathematics and chaos theory, to be blunt - the inevitable emmerging of flaws and eventual collapse of ordered/organised systems - happened then in a pretty big way. Ian Malcom might of been proud.

The wing that Red Bone had struck Fever with cracked. Fractured, more like - break-lines running up and down its structure like dark spider-webs. Hard knobs had seemingly formed from nowhere. The pain was intense - rippling through the her shoulder-blade and tingling in her ribs like her opponent's namesake. At a glance it seemed an accelerated form of Metabolic Bone Disease, like essential minerals had dried from the very marrow and left only a hollow shell like dried clay pottery. A kind of necrosis had set into the bone and marrow, tearing it apart at the seams. The pair of knuckles she's stricken Fever with at the jaw were now running rivulent with pustulant juices from widely opened sores that grew, burst, and decayed like the spreading of rot on an oak. It was a deep, acid burn.

She hissed.

"Careful darling," Her opponent hissed through his veil of bandages. And then, with all the unholy speed of a ghost - forsaking the savagery of singular leaps for a repetition of small steps that covered the distance between them at a disturbing, unbelievable speed. And in his immense, scabrous palm he had grasped her by the cheek-bone and was squeezing with horrible power. Her arms shot to his and fought to push him off.

His breath fell on her face, a noxious, warm ejection. It smelled like dead things. It smelled like... overripe fruit... sweet in a way that turned her guts.

"I'm contagious."

OoC: Had little to work with. Can post tommorrow night. And then I can't. will elaborate then.

She ignored the pain and sickness that filled her, she ignored the revolting urge to vomit have this walking plague's hand on her face. Strength wasn't working to remove his death grip about to crush her cheek bone, so she went with something a little more... blunt. She dropped the spine blade as she felt the infection seek into her face. Behind her back, from lord knows where, she brought her mace, and it met with Fevers arm with a very loud CRACK!, as most of the bones beneath the flesh in it's way snapped. There was a strange light to that mace, a light that seemed to feed off the vileness exuding from Fever. It was enough to allow her to escape his freakishly powerful grip.

The pain the mace dealt went deeper then flesh. Which was one reason the plague bearer stepped back from the rapidly dropping heavy mace. Unfortunately for him, while that step back saved his skull from a crushing, he should have taken another. The mace crushed every bones in his foot into a fine power, mixed with the messy goo that was now the rest of the now club foot.

The one winged woman's already bleeding fist, covered in it's own ichor, and struck him in the chest, forcing him back as she rose. She grimaced in pain as her face began rotting away much like her hand already was, the blood and rot soaking threw her gauntlet. It mattered little to her though. Pain was a fleeting thing, and the joy of destroying one such as Fever balanced it out. That had been, was, and would ever be a part of her nature.

"And still some time to take in the scene."

Well, not so much.

"HRAAAAH"

The hiker did not even have time to look up as the massive figure slammed into him, fists colliding with his head so forcefully that he would have been sent to the ground even without his attacker's knees digging into his ribs, cracking them on impact and again when he was driven into the ground. They slid on the rocks, the fists of the attacker coming down again, smashing his brow and momentarily blinding him.

The hiker tried to fight as his attacker rose, but a sandalled foot colliding with his face shattered his teeth and sent him onto his back. His vision cleared in time to see his attacker, but only for a moment.

He's a ghost, he thought, and he was not far off.

The man before him - and man he was - was as white as bone, he would have called him an albino if not for the black patch of beard on his chin and the burning hazel of his eyes, and his body was covered in tattoos that looked like splashes of blood all over his Herculean form. He was nearly naked, save for the sandals on his feet and the tattered red skirt about his waist. Chains wrapped around his forearms, seared into the very flesh, and terminated at the ends into hilts, to which were attached blades radically too wide for their length but wielded with such force that they could cleave through bone and flesh as if it were grass.

The man who looked like a ghost reared back, the blades on the ends of the chains trailing fire as he roared, and when he brought them down over his head they hit the hiker with an eruption that shook the very face of the mountain.

OoC: Not much, but I didn't exactly have much to work with. The brutality here will fit the character. Do I really have to say who it is? -OoC

I want to say something philosophical about you not giving yourself enough to work with, but I'll work on a post a bit later. Didn't anticipate you using Kratos against my little hiker. For God's sake.

OoC: It's Wyborn man. He would use a Dinosaur against a jackrussel. /

Fever stumbled slightly, looking down at the mess of his foot with a kind of asbent curisosity. Ignoring it, he reached up and snapped his forearm into place, wincing slightly, but not at the flesh - no. At whatever lingering ghost of anguish had been infected there by that curious weapon of hers. His forearm was still crooked and obviously broken but he turned to Red Bone.

"I have long since grown unacustomed to the feeling of my own body, as you might tell by looking at me." His bandages moved again, tipped, and it was clear he might be smiling beneath the frayed shrouded. "You will soon know that feeling, or lack thereof."

Of course, Red Bone did feel something. It was a stinging around her lips. She associated it with combat, but he hadn't actually struck her there - so when she felt around with her tongue, she was suprised and revolted at the pain and swolleness of it. Her lips had burst open up her cheek in a bubbling cluster of mouth ulcers, yellow and pustulant and craterously driven into the meat of her flesh like invisible nails, some of the earlier ones turned black in the centre of striking bone, haloed in the dead grey of exhumed cells. Here tongue in fact, was not so much swollen as bigger in size by force of there mass - they were appearing in such volume and speed they were actually growing overtop one another, opening channels deeper into the root of her body. Thick, viscous fluids popped into the air with such frequency they were like a grossly coloured mist.

They were degenerating into gangrene - or more specifically, Noma, or canrum oris, a facial necrosis and tissue-destruction. She was practically choking on the liquefied cells and pus discharge inside her cheeks and was spitting in out in repulsive gouts as she tried to gain a bead on her enemy again - kill him through this pain and hope by his death hers would end, or she would die, something conclusive.

She did catch sight of him.

He had used her temporary distraction to charge - with his mangled foot, as numb an extension of his body as it was, he was unable to close the distances between them with any kind of speed. In the time the ulceration of her face had made itself readily apparent, however, he was now on top of her, and jabbed his good arm forward in an open-hand strike (spearing his index and major finger) and punching straight through the cage of her thorax into her solar-plex. Her mouth gaped open slightly, reflexively, her arm shot up and grabbed him by his throat and crushed. Blood squeezed through his fingers.

"FOOL!" He hoarsely rasped through his constricted throat-channel. And then he spit blood across her eyes. The knowledge of her opponent gained through this single battle made her not only closed her eyelids reflexively, but back the hell away and claw at them. It was one thing to lose a hand (which was less a hand now than a shapeless lump of reds and blacks and bone), her eyes, however...

"I spit at thee!" Fever said chuckling, breathing shallowly through a bruised windpipe. "'The darkness shall be eternal!'" And he laughed.

OoC: Alright. Basic Training time. I am gone from now til Sunday and officially requesting an extension so me and Repster can finish this, til Tuesday at the latest. One of the reasons I was so pissed at the judges is because I have Basic training every two weeks and had they posted faster they'd be judging while I was soldiering. But not everything works out. So unless you think this is a long enough fight, and considering me and Repster's punctuality I tend to disagree, it'd be cool if we could go on a little longer. Not like Scripture and Wyborn have much in the terms of a battle yet anyway.

The hiker rolled out of the way of the earthquake-inducing blow, and managed to get to his feet despite the sound of his shifting ribs…and the cling-clang of metal?

The real hiker, Wendell, was still a half hour off the top. The hiker currently being assaulted by the Herculean ghost could pass as a hiker, surely, but was in no way interested in the activity. He stood and his body shimmered like a heat-wave, and he began to laugh but only the crackling of a dead radio came out, ebbing up and down like laughter but still a poor imitation.

The image fell away entirely, and Eidolon stood taller than his guise had ever been, able to look the ghost straight in the eye with his own red one. His body was black, armored in what looked like polished obsidian but was in fact some hybrid-alloy meant for durability and quickness of movement. Most noticeable, however, were the thick butcher’s blades for hands – claws – that were set off his palm, and the hudraulic pistons set into his calves and biceps, and the various weapons clinging together like pottery that hung from magnetic hooks on his elbows and around his waist in a mockery of a Roman battle-skirt. At the end of where his spine might’ve been, three segmented tails trailed floatingly behind.

“I am called Eidolon,” said the machine, and then, despite the denting of its brow (just above that precious, crimson eye), its chin, and its torso, it charged forward like a steed, cutlery and other devices of torture jingling. Kratos – for let us not put up pretenses of not knowing his name – brought up one of his massive blades to cleave the black thing’s head from its black body, but at the same time (Ex) Eidolon grabbed his chained arm with a clawed hand and turned it away, clanging up against the chains and biting into flesh where they didn’t cover. Kratos roared that war-cry of his and brought his other arm around in a haymaker that could kill tens of men, but (Square) Eidolon snaked forward and bashed his mouth with a head-butt, driving him off balance as his other hand shot into his abdomen, past the tattoos and hardened muscle and into his guts. A dry gulping noise rose from Kratos’s mouth as Eidolon pulled the hand out and plunged it back in over and over again, eventually finding intestines and yanking a considerable length them outward in a shower of gore betwixt his bladed digits.

Eidolon worked quickly and efficiently (Square), using his loose arm to grab Kratos’s apprehended one and pivot behind him, yanking it behind him and up (letting blood all the while with those edges), filling the shoulder-joint with heated pain as it dislocated with a pop. Eidolon then magnetized a select weapon from his torso onto his finger, a blade with spheres down its length, and (Triangle) rammed it through the meat of his opponent’s arm, through his flesh and bones and veins and chains and out the other side, having passed through a lung on the way.

Eidolon shoved him away, avoiding what might’ve been a sandaled retort, and with a final tap of the controller (Ex), the blade’s spherical explosives detonated, and Kratos went up in a tower of flame as his black opponent expelled fumes from vents on his shoulders and sides, filling the air with toxic incense.

OoC: I would be game for extending this until Tuesday, myself. Tuesday night being the end - I do have a Latin date on Tuesday, but I still believe I might be able to post at the time. /OoC

OoC: Nah Scrip, I don't think you and I should get an extension. We've chiefly just been slow, and maybe lazy. We will deal with what we get. Post to come today. -OoC

Realization dawned on her and she did the only thing that seemed sensible at the time. She ignored the agony in her eyes. Her mace was transfered to her bleeding stump, and there was a click as chains wrapped around the handle. use or not of her hand, the small chains would keep her mace locked where it was. She was blind, or would be soon, so she would get used to it.

She took a step forward and swung. Aiming for where she saw him last. He easily dodged the lop handed attack. His awkward step thought was far from quiet. Red Bone moved in. Dodge, move in. Each swing got closer, every attack glowing with that strange light. She could feel that light, feel it's hunger for Fever, feel where it was from the strength of the pulse as it swiped close to his head, arms, legs, etc. As the fifth or so strike went wide ever so slightly her good hand, the winged warrior could already feel the infection seep in, said hand lashed out. She grasped his robe, and hauled him closer with one powerful yank. At the same moment she put her shoulder forward and let them bones of hers do what they did best. They tore threw flesh.

With her eyesight gone it was far less of a wound that she would have liked, but the walking plague was still very neatly impaled. She gave a powerful jerk of her wing as her mace swung again and crushed Fever's shoulder. The sudden pain, and his vocal expression of it, as the heavy blunt weapon destroyed his shoulder was almost soothing to the woman's ears. It went numb once again soon after, but the memory, the memory of what that weapon could do had him franticly forcing himself away as the mace came for his face.

The air was filled with fire, a torrent of poisonous gas and flames that burned at flesh and seared at steel...and then there was somethign else. A boom. A roar.

"RAAAAAAAH"

The air expanded, pushed, and the gas and flames were shoved past Eidolon. Kratos was in the air, feet angling beneath him, and lightning raged all aorund him in a screaming, burning torrent. Eidolon was struck by it, his vision failed him and collapsed into darkness as the air around him was ionized and the sheer heat cut long, red-hot gashes in his frame, lifting him into the air. He might have screamed over the sound, but with every moment Kratos' roar became greater and the force of thel ightning became more and more intense. It lasted al of five seconds, but it felt like hours, and when Eidolon finally hit the ground it was in a smoking heap.

He pushed himself to his hands and knees, and the bloodied god stood before him, a ball of light, of thunder, in his hand. He did not small, did not laugh, did not speak - he threw it, and the solid bolt of energy and power burned thorugh the socket of Eidolon's left optic sensor, temporarily fryign the systems in his head and meriting a high-pitched squealing from his vocabulator. He could not see - for a moment he could not coordinate his actions with any of his senses.

The blades shoved themselves into Eidolon's chest, and he was lifted up by them. Dozens of motion sensors in all of his limbs felt himself swung through the air on the end of the chains, at hundreds of miles per hour - and then he struck the Earth, shattering the casing of his chest where the blades had sunk in, where the fires that engufled then even now burned away everything they touched. He did not hear the pop of Kratos' arm being shoved back into its socket, but he was made suddenly aware as a massive rock came down on the back of the casing of his head, cracking it - another blow of that force would be sufficient to crush it like a coke can.

Kratos' hand wrapped around his neck and lifted him into the air, and with his wounded arm he answered his own wound with one to match; the chaos blades clove through Eidolon's shoulder, letting it hit the ground with a sickening clatter a the blade came around again, burying itself in his chest and twisting.

OoC: Again, not much, but at least we won't have to wait long for a judgment. -OoC

Damn, I want to respond to that and tear Sir Testosterone apart, but since you posted seconds after midnight you've left me no time to spare =P