NG, you rang

[Erdawn Il Deus]

He was large in frame, his features silhouetted beneath a sun-hat of braided straw and corrugated tin, knotted with a coiled cabling of wire-iron muscle wrung taut beneath flesh that had burnt and tanned and finally bronzed so dark as to be foreign against the smouldering blue coins of his eyes. He was naked above the waist, and his starved flesh rippled slickly over his abdominals as he kept to his stoic, endless pace. Where his skin lay in plain sight of the sun it was slashed and rippled and bled with tans, olive drabs, seppias, flat blacks, and the earth tones of camouflage faded and sweated into a jungle of patternless shapes dark around his eye-pits. He chewed absently on a braid of straw as he walked, in the pretense that it occupied his attention.

Slung over the back of his shoulders was the silhouette of a long, complex rifle, its scope an eye of dull dark glass. It had been tightened and held together, smelling of leather and oils. Tight against his right hip was his muramasa, his sword, scabbarded deep into leather and wood and painted in the same earth tones as his body. And with these two, whatever else might be concealed about his person. They made no sound as he moved through the bush - they were taped down with ritualistic professionalism, even his dog tags broken apart and tucked into his magnum combat boots. The canteens at his hips were almost full - he was used to watching his body starve dry of water with detachment. He was thirsty, but not pressingly so. Either way, thirst was itself an enemy of peace and must be overcome. He would allow himself to drink only when he himself was as still and serene as water in a pond - but something tugged at his awareness and for that he would not drink.

He came to a stop. Before him was as behind him, a unrolling jungle-field of bogged overgrowth that had wilted and rotted and died, turned scarecrow colours by whatever sickness had consumed them, their fruits splintered wetly open by the force of their own weight and the weakness of their flesh. The earth was arid, fractured craig, spidery with cracks and alive with low-flying wisps of insect-life that had come and thrived on the morbid fate of these lands. Where it was tangled with undergrowth, the skeletons of long-exhumed beasts unrolled into the open gory with split creeper-vines and sheets of rotting moss. The air was humid and misty on his tongue, and overhead that sky was feverish with the pulse and light and heat of an avaricious sun that hung over the land like an mizerous infection.

He had reached a long-stagnated pool of water, brackish, dark but without colour. Mosquitoes and other parasites hummed above its still surface in wisps and low-flying clouds, propagating their larvae in clusters on the scummy of its corrugated waters. Tempted, tentative, as mosquitoes and their kind are want to do, they sought him out and more importantly sought out his flesh. But these he eyed with a calm suspiscion, and closed his eyes. He stood for a long time, and the insects settled on his warm flesh drawn to the pound of blood behind its walls, and one by one, they fell, dead, like dark drops of rain to the bush below and burst open on landing as he sought within him that inner flame of calmness which permeated his body like smoke.

There was a great rushing of motion, like an immense inhalation of breath, and steel so blued it was black and sharper than the wind hummed up, over and into a thrust and the gasp of pain was like the gurgling of a creek. The pool of water was faded from sight, there but not there, its conjurer drenched with mud and foul water and his own feverish blood - a human of undistinguishable sex and of annorexic thinness wearing dark rags without colour and clutching spasmodically at the haft of the weapon which had spiked him like grub. The weapon twisted and the ninja's guts left him and his head snapped back and as he died bugs burst from the folds in his clothing like fumes, floated, and fell dead like rain around him. Dog withdrew his blade - his movements were sweeping and powerful and the assassin was left almost in half as his blood smoked from him, and kneeled, and brought it back around and said:

"Your masters sent you only to die," even as they came at him. They moved like ghosts in the overgrowth, slipping from the mist, rising from mud or acrid water deep as a man's thumb, the air thick with the mosquitoes which carried their poisons and their chakra. The aiffe, the Rain, one of the five secret armies of the Red Queen, dark assassins twisted beyond humanity. They came in water. Their killing intent hummed from them like venom, a black aura fat with mindless, poison karma, but they broke against him like the tide. He was a stone, a cliff, a mountain, and their toxin could not crack it. He did not fight them. He hewed them down like yew reeds.

The muramasa hummed a song of death, and each strike left only a corpse, forsaking any sparring theatric. He cut down their weapons from them in bold strokes, the sword in his hands like a brush in the hands of a painter, seperating limbs from their voiceless bodies and opening them wide with the lip of the blade. If his sword was in one hand, then in the other he guarded himself with a Fairbairne-Sykes commando dagger and thrust it into throats and between ribs and found kidney and liver and heart and all which brought death. With the pointed butt of the hilt he broke skulls and left dead and senseless those who feared only the muramasa's ruthless edge. He used their numbers against them, when they attacked from more than one side he retreated and bunched them up and cut them down. Their tricks were smothered beneath his calm, and he left cut open those who rose treacherously from the bogs at his back. His mastery of the sword and its bushido was god-like - they worshipped him with blood and death and paid that tribute even as they brought to bear their knives and yari and killing ropes. He brought his sword around in a sweeping cut from the hip with such inhuman speed that mosquitos fell cut to pieces from the line of its arc and the man he beheaded took three paces towards his now-unprotected back before his neck opened up. Finally the last assassin fell, his arms cut from him and his body split apart from shoulder to navel and his blood vapour in the air in two movements, and for a full three seconds blood pattered against the leaves like rain before everything fell silent. The carnage lay strewn around him, even cadavers vanishing into the water and bog which was their element, and the air was picked clean of their herald insects which died with them.

Dog said nothing, only breathed out the calm. He took from his brow a frayed cloth wrapped in a long headband, and wiped clean the dark iron of his sword before wrapping it again beneath his sun-hat. The werelocke had left this trap for him as he fled across the waste, as he had others. Their attack had allowed him to strike a descisive - perhaps mortal blow - against that secret army of the Red Queen. He had already obliterated the Grass, and soon every one of them would be erased like smoke from a battlefield.

"At my heels they nip,
The greatest of hunting hounds,
But I am the wolf."

[Erdawn Il Deus]

Bump.

[NintendoGod]

I hate introductions.

As he sheathed the muramasa and started to continue his trek through the abysmal bog, he felt the presence of another behind him. Whether it was the sound of a limb bending out of tune with the soft wind rolling through the brambles, the hint of a shadow rolling smoothly across the spots of light left untouched between the chaotic overgrowth, or simply the inkling of that innate sixth sense that all veteran warriors seem to obtain from the forges of battle, it caused him to pause with a hand to his sword. Before he could draw it in preparation of defense, his quarry broke the relative silence. "I take it from that impressive display that you're the one they're so desperate to eliminate?"

He took a quick glance over his shoulder to the dark form of apparently average build resting nimbly on one of the lower boughs of a desiccated tree, a few feet above the ground and masked in what remained of it's yellowed leaves. He had apparently been near enough to witness the ambush, yet neither party had noticed him. Dog didn't bother to reply, instead turning around to squarely face the newcomer, hands resting casually in reach of his weaponry.

The simple comment left unanswered, the form perched on the low branch gave an equally simple shrug. This action heralded a rustle of branches as the newcomer dropped, landing silently on a patch of dry dirt abutting one of the deep bogs from which the assassins had laid their ambush. He was dressed far differently than Dog's latest victims; A combat vest comprised of a seemingly metal-based fabric covered the whole of his torso, which bent and flexed as he rose from his crouch. The whole of it was matte black with a oddly blue hue, festooned with various pockets and pouches. It also held his only apparent weaponry, two pairs of combat knives, one holstered underneath each shoulder pad along his biceps and one sheathed at each hip. His pants and boots were made of a similar material, though the latter were far less flexible in that regard. Almost none of his skin was visible, the whole of the seemingly paramilitary garb completed with a pair of matched gloves. However, this ensemble was not what drew the eye, bland and dark enough to blend in with the deep woods around him. First, a navy blue scarf hung down behind him, wrapped around his neck almost as an afterthought and contrasting sharply with the tight and rigid body armor coating him head to toe. Beyond that scarf, his skin was abnormally pale, a tan-white that made him appear to be a victim of major blood loss and brought out the dark stubble that coated his chin and cheeks. In addition, his eyes had an odd, subtle glow behind them, making their deep blue appear icily bright next to his raven black hair, left relatively short and shaggy. As he straightened, a roguish smile crossed his face.

"You're a rather difficult person to find. Simply put, I'm in need of a job and you're in need of an ally, seeing as how even you would be hard pressed to take them all down by yourself."

Dog almost snorted, giving a subtle glance to the remaining corpses dissolving into the muck; a silent attestant to how much help he felt he needed. "I have no offerings nor use for mercenaries. Especially ones that I have no reason to trust." The newcomer gave a knowing nod. "Perhaps not." As he continued, he leaned back casually against the tree behind him, the dry bark crackling at the touch. "But war brings it's own spoils. Assume I could prove to you that I have skills you could use. Would your opinion change? And I'm sure we can assume that if I were to betray you, you could leave me behind like you've left these guys."

"Perhaps I should just kill you now and get it over with." Dog replied simply. The mercenary again shrugged and rose from his casual position. "Only one way to find out, eh? Allow me to show you what I can do." And with that said, he squared off against his opponent in a simple combat stance. With another grin and a calling gesture, Cerris Grayson awaited his opponent.

OoC: Apologies again for the delay. The first attack is yours.