Anybody. Give me a challenge worth facing.

[Galefore]

I desperately need a veteran or two to smack me into my senses. I recently started to run into writer's block, and I need to work it out through a good, well-played battle. The rules are the usual... I'll allow transformations, I'll allow minor healing, but no OHKO's, and you should know the rest. I want a fighter with a high skill level... thus, pretty much any veteran is welcome, or just an abnormally good member. The only people I don't want to accept are:

SephirothKirby - I have another challenge in the works for you.
Tes - I plan to either continue or start over with a new character.
T3hDarkness - We already have a battle going on.
Or, any newbie. Sorry, but I want a challenge.

Meh. I'll use Galefore, probably. Otherwise, it doesn't matter who intros first, and you can decide on who has battlefield-choice.

[Wyborn]

Well, let's see....I'm busy with the tourney too, and I have exams until the end of next Tuesday, but I should have time for this still.

Up for it?

[Galefore]

Yep. I am indeed up for it... As I've said, it has been a long time coming. Last time we fought, I used a sucky character, a sucky battlefield, and little effort. Now, I must redeem myself.

As was stated in the opening post, you can decide who goes first. I neve am good at picking battlefields, but you can decide whether or not to pick it. I will gladly do it if you don't want to.

I'll use my mainstay, Galefore, for this match.

[Wyborn]

You go first; my last exam is tomorrow morning and I will not be able to post until Wednesday.

[Galefore]

OoC: The battlefield and all of the trimmings are here. I'm not going to use Galefore, as was originally planned; I have a new guy itching to see some action.

They spoke of death, those wandering prophets who bore no hatred yet bore the acidic slither of the deadliest of snakes. Through their forked tongues they formed breath and sound and horrible remorse for a fool who listened. They said, “Death is not forever, for to come is another life. Death is forever near, or far, but forever it draws near. On a lingering moment a flash of time could take away what joy was given and ratify regrets. Such innocence can wash away for eternity. Such corrupt nature could slip away from the hand as a sword from the hands of a corpse. All shall die. None shall live. And this, my friend, is the regrettable prophecy.”

And they spoke the truth, they spoke the truth with elegance, they spoke it as a trifle… They knew the future. They revealed a key fact. Everybody knows the future. Nobody can deny such an irrelevant but horrid fact, that all can and will fall and it is as obvious as was possible and will always be. But the mood shifts when that truth is reiterated in the frozen comedy of life. It will always be so. It will never differ. Always exactly as it always would be.
Yet, some deny death. Some prophets deny death and life, they deny existence. They can see nothing. They are the lost and the frozen, those with an evil distaste for all and selfish greed that inherits the earth without work. These are men of foolishness and all the wiser for it in every way. They let loose the metaphor and control the mood, but they deny any possibility of infallibility while all the while falling in their deep seats.

Gurth was no prophet. Nor was he a fool’s wise-man. Gurth was blind, and mute. His tongue, which he himself removed from his mouth through naught but his thumb and index finger, hung at his side on a chain, and this chain pierced his right wrist. His left arm was torn in half by something unspeakable, held together by an enormous screw that delicately protruded from the back of his arm as an enormous testament to his carelessness. His ears were folded over, the tips touching the lobes in a melted-together fashion, stitched over and again by one thousand stitches, overlapping, showing hideous scar tissue. His eyes remained open always, and they were not whited over; nor were they filled with black, or blue. His cataracts were of a different sort: perforated orbs of chrome-silver. They rolled continuously as a chameleon’s eyes, searching in vain as its owner produced a repeating guttural gurgle that formed a macabre melody.

His face was a mess of well-carved scars that seemed to form patterns in the sea of flesh. His mouth was covered by a beard that crawled over his body and gut down to his feet, curling and poking in an ever-flowing array of directions. A set of pikes jutted from a shabby and rusted strip of metal on his back, their shined and polished appearance contrasting against the rust of the dead, as a newborn lying on a rotting man’s vessel. His nose, twisted from being broken innumerable times, crawled over an inch of his beard, a testament to his alien appearance. His hair was a scraggly mess of threads and tufts adorning a nearly bald head. The entirety of what of this substance he had was blackened red color, and he was seven feet tall to complement his fearsome countenance. He wore assorted scraps of rusted mail over his body, with various silver spikes as the ones worn on his back poking out in unusual ways over his knees and his shoulders.

Gurth was no man to look at with scorn, as he could sense every cold stare and hated everyone for it. He was notorious for… Nobody but those who were victimized by their prejudice knew. They were dead. Gurth was always the first suspect, and always the last. No sane man would want to try to accuse him of witchcraft. The blind man always smirked at this.

Now he was no longer listening to prophets. He was in the center of a boulder. This boulder, as round as the moon and perfectly flat, spanned a length of one-hundred yards. It was of unknown origin, as it was not possibly man-made. This was painfully obvious by the location: on the bottom of an enormous stone bridge carved to cross a river twelve-hundred years earlier. It was shining and humming, making noises to ward the sane away and attract those with no sanity. It was a magnet. This was the devil’s playground, for it attracted only those with the souls of a demon. Gurth had been sucked in. He now stood, and did not move. His hair and beard defied gravity, pulled toward the magnet just as he was. He hung upside down, but did not care. In this enormous country and above a river, on this night, another would come.

He could sense it.

And he would fulfill the regrettable prophecies.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

ooc: awesome.

[Galefore]

I'm bumping this for novelty's sake. Do you plan to continue this at any point, Wyborn?

[Wyborn]

Would you believe I was heading in here to bump this?

Yeah. I'm posting tomorrow.

[Wyborn]

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

Gurth had not been aware of the man's arrival, but there he was, as if he had been deposited by the wind: bent and ancient, eyes deep-set in a sea of wrinkles and the thin wisps of a well-trimmed white beard trailing from his mouth. He looked like he smiled a lot. The hair on his head was gone, his hand were covered in liver spots, he was bent and he was so very, very old, but one could not really look away from his carefully appraising eyes.

"The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things."

He made gentle gestures with his hands, barely tossed his head so his beard fluttered in the sudden wind, and anyone who could see it would have been amazed at the way the wind changed and whirled all around him, flowing down and about and everywhere all at once. The seriousness of Gurth's expression ceased to have importance as leaves blew across the massive boulder, from no where at all, and he heard a gentle whispered mantra flowing from the old man's cracked lips.

"Uu mo gwei gwei fai di zhao..."

His tone was soft, his motions beyond gentle. He swayed and chanted and closed his eyes, moving his hands gently, and the winds whistled all around him. They blew down - down, down, down, down.

The boulder ground and screamed and crumbled, not shifting the two men who were standing on it as it became powder and the wind flowed into it and it changed, growing richer and darker and more moist and soft until it was earth beneath their feet. Gurth smelled it, the dampness of it, the richness of having passed through the belly of a thousand earthworms, and then he felt the earthworms beneath him, flying through the earth like birds through the air. the earth turned green and sprouted, blades of grass pushed themselves up under his feet and between the old man's sandals and all over, until the boulder had become a field of green.

Shoots rose up from the grass, thick and healthy and large, rising and thickening and darkening in silence. They split at the top, spreading out into a massive network of branches, and when they reached out far enough the branches grew leaves and blossoms that showered that dreary place in a natural radiance that some men dreamed of like they dreamed of an untouchable virgin, too good and pure to be spoiled by anything. All around the two of them rose the new orchard, and the man swayed and chanted...and then he stopped, and everything was silent as he stood before the blind man who sought to fulfill old prophecies.

"You wish me harm," the old man said, and he kept smiling. He said nothing else.

OoC: So, now we have our battleground - sorry to change it up on you, but it felt appropriate at the time.

How do you feel about having Selene judge this? -OoC

[Galefore]

Sounds good. Oh, and the BF change is really appreciated. I didn't really like the one I made, which is a shameful admission.

But yeah, post pending soon enough.

[Galefore]

OoC: Gurth isn't going all out yet, too boring to use his full potential early. So here's something weak to chew on as a sort of warm-up.

Nrgh.

A sound breaking the peace. Serenity… It flowed like a river. And why not? The old one, an air of wisdom surrounding him, was not the kind of person to hope for chaos. He was a wise sage. And he had chosen to pick a man whose soul was embroiled in conflict to appear before.

His appearance… some sort of significance had to abound here, but even through this question, it was apparent that Gurth was only here to kill. His magnet, shriveled and dead and replaced by the life and peace he hated, had not attracted his corrupt prey. It had attracted a peacemaker. A peacemaker whose goals were unknown. He had come and interrupted anger and fury, unhealthy emotions Gurth held so highly in regard.

Gurth was pissed.

NRGH.

His false eyes, orbs of deformed silver, moved in random patterns around his eye-sockets. They searched… Searched for something to destroy.And as suddenly as the old man had appeared, Gurth’s eyes focused. Directly on the man. The smell off wet earth and putrid life came wafting again into his jagged nose, but deep inside all he wanted to smell was blood. All around him, lukewarm sunlight approached his being and tried to seep into his cold person… But he would have none of it.

He looked at then old sage, his wise words still forming on his tongue and coming forth, and he roared.He roared as a trapped beast, as a demon falling from grace, as a creature approaching its prey.

And he jumped towards his enemy, his speed astonishing for such a large being, and clumsily threw his arm at his opponent. The screw in his left arm glistened in the sun for a moment as it exited the under-bridge shade, and came towards the sage, impaling his stomach.

Squirrkshhhhh

As the blood splashed from him and fell up, towards the river below, Gurth turned the chain attached to his other arm towards his opponent and whipped it across his face. He launched his baseless fury in a way so foolish it would seem his move was a mistake. But the old man...

Oddly, the old one refused to react.

Gurth stared blankly, or as blankly as possible from a blind man lacking eyes, throwing a punch at the man before him’s face and hearing a loud, machine-gun-esque series of pops.

He reveled in the old man. His peaceful ways would have him killed. In a flash, he threw another punch.

And another.

And another.

And another.

The old man simply smiled. He had been smiling the whole time. Even through a freshly bleeding mouth and teeth being knocked down his throat, he felt no pain, as it seemed. His old bones were strong. He seemed to be much more than his emmaciated and aged body could tell, and he would soon prove it as well as said old bones would allow.

Gurth reared back. This time he wanted to end it, a hideous half-grin appearing on his deformed face. He brought his screw-impaled arm down towards the old sage’s head, and waited for the hit…

[Wyborn]

The last punch failed to connect; it failed to do much of anything to the old man.

The gnarled, ancient palm caught the bloody fist of the old man's attacker, and Gurth was suddenly aware of his being robbed of force. Had he the eyes for it he would have seen the energy of his assault transmitting through the ancient's forearm, sliding along his shoulders and through his other arm, finding its end in the man's other hand. This last was open, pressed flat against Gurth's chest.

There was a tremendous crack of shattering ribs and a sternum that had shivered into pieces, and Gurth stumbled backwards, breathless and agape.

The old man moved, every sinew in his body perfectly attuned to the environment around it, drawing latent energies from the elements and using his body as a focus for them. That was the gist of what he was doing, but the words did not communicte the spirit of the action; his body affected the flows of earth and water, plant and fire, metal and earth again, weaving a tapestry of magic that Gurth was aware of despite the fact that he had no organs which could possibly sense them.

He was thus unsurprised when the old man drew his hands up beside his face and puffed out his leathery cheeks and blew out a stream of radiant fire. The wind howled as the fire engulfed Gurth, whipping the flames into a frenzy and increasing their intensity until they were white. Gurth howled, but the howl itself was burned away.

The old man moved with a fluid motion, leaning forward and stomping with his right foot while pushing with his still-splayed hands. The fire ceased to flow and the wind ceased to howl, but the earth lurched from just in front of the old man's foot and heaved Gurth through the air, depositing him unceremoniously on his back.

The old man did not speak through his bloody mouth, did not smile with his shattered teeth, did not look through his crushed left eye. But that sense of serenity never left him.

The trees had been untouched by the flames, and if Gurth was aware of them he got the impression that they were watching.