Round 3: Relt Peltfelter Vs Chosen of the Gods

[Silence Sei]

You have 2 weeks to complete this battle. May the best man win!

[Relt PeltFelter]

The air which hovers over the middle of the ocean is very different than its salty cousin on the coast. It is air unsullied by the fires of the city and the cow flatus of the country, air freer and cleaner than it has ever been. It is therefore air that has done nothing to deserve being dragged into the smoky, green-tinted hippie van of Relt Peltfelter's lungs as she stood at the bow of a ship and took in deep, cheerful lung-fulls.

The boat was not her next combat arena, apparently, though the tournament organizers were keeping mum on the specifics. There had been some hierarchical shifting after the chaos of round 2; between the ghosts of unborn monsters, the intrusion of an evil swamp hag, and the continual mysterious disappearance of approximately half the entrants, the Serenti Invitational was in an odd place. The experiment of live spectators had ended, at the urging of the previously lesser of two internal factions, and a sense of purity seemed to have returned to at least some portion of the event.

"Right, well, here we are, miss," a voice said from the edge of the boat. The captain hefted a metal vest out of a crate and held it out towards Relt. She stared at it like a billionaire at a Waffle House.

"The fuck," she managed.

"Them bigwigs said to make you wear this and jump in the ocean. It's magical, or somesuch nonsense,"

"Oh hooray, more magic junk," Relt said, eyes rolling at a fashionable speed, "Prob'ly makes it so I can breath underwater or some garbage, I bet,"

"Something to that effect, yes," the captain said as she shuffled into the vest. It glowed red for a moment, in the most underwhelming possible way. Relt was always slightly disappointed to find out that actual magic seemed to have less in common with a bearded wizard firing lightning bolts from a mountain top and more in common with a man who would wear a t-shirt depicting that.

"Mind giving me a push over the side, bro?" Relt asked, "This thing is heavy as shit. Is it supposed to be heavy as shit?"

"Probably," the man said as he shoved her over the side. The splash was extremely satisfying to a man who had spent six hours sailing his tiny boat into the middle of nowhere with a very loud girl.

- - -

The vest really was magic, Relt realized as she sank gently to the bottom of the sea. She was breathing like normal, and didn't even feel wet. The trade-off, however, seemed to be a pervasive smell of burning tin and squashed ants.

It didn't take much sinking for the ocean to turn black; only the feeble red glow of her vest illuminated anything. Relt dimly knew that she was passing into the aphotic zone, all full of weird-ass glowy creatures and whale bones and shit. It was not a huge surprise to her, then, when her feet touched ground. She could hear the wet crunching of the cold sand beneath her feet. "Holy shit," she murmured, startling a passing eel. Her voice sounded as clear as if she had been standing on a beach, albeit a Norwegian beach in the middle of the winter solstice.

The flat sand was tinted a dull red by the magical glowing vest for only a few feet around Relt's position. It was featureless, lifeless save for the occasional drifting jellyfish or passing sea urchin. It was a surprise, therefore, when the girl found a sign sticking out of the sand. It read

"Hello, competitor RELT POLEFEELER!

If you are reading this, then your enchanted vest has successfully activated. This means you are still alive! Congratulations! Due to recent unexplained disappearances and unintended dangers, you may be wondering why your Serenti Invitational® staff members have chosen for this round to take place in such a remote location."

Relt had indeed been wondering that. Being lost underwater and alone in the pitch blackness this round didn't seem much better than being lost underground with a pervert in the pitch blackness last round.

"Luckily, we have thought this through. As evidenced by your ability to read this sign, you were dropped successfully into exactly the right area without being drowned or crushed into a disc. This area has been carefully examined by tournament officials and our long-standing financial partners, the Kingdom of the Shark People-"

"Shark people," Relt murmured, "That sounds boss as shit, actually,"

"-and has been determined to be totally free of supernatural interferences or particularly large or dangerous predators! Indeed, large creatures, unprotected at this depth, would collapse in on themselves like a pig's bladder under a blacksmith's hammer-"

"Hooraaaay," Relt, a large creature, said weakly.

"However!" the sign cautioned, in extra-large waterproof type, "That does not mean we have consigned this match to a boring arena! This area is filled with what the shark people call 'Hellish Chimneys', great smoking vents surrounded by peculiar creatures, from which issues water hot enough to melt a man's face off of his skull. Use this arena well, competitor RELT POPOVER, and you will find victory! Use it poorly, and you will be waking up in an infirmary with terrible burns, and the worst burn of all - the burn of defeat!

-Sincerely,
Sir Goldpantle Reginax Holdthrust
Serenti Organizational Committee Manager"

Relt kicked the sign over and went to explore further, guided in her aimless wanderings by only the dull fluorescence of the one thing keeping her from being compressed into a tiny, drowned cube.

This was not a thought likely to spur one on to committing feats of martial daring.

[Chosen of the Gods]

“Where am I going?” Ahk’Ran had asked the sailor next to him, his chains still wrapped tightly around his wrists. The sea air had pilfered into his nose and tingled it, making him sneeze several times as the Corone Naval Guard sat at a table laughing at their prisoner. The Fallien native, whom grew up living on desert sand, was not used to boats or being on the sea. This duality of experiences made him weesy at best and outright sick at worse.

“Well, your little stunt sir had really impressed the masses back in the giant arena!” A portly man replied, his face full of joviality. He wore a simple suit, striped diagonally with a pink tie. The tie itself made him look like a pig, but the warrior thought it better not to voice that. “Chopping off the head of Jeffery Winston, Captain of the Port Guard was a bold move, even in the Citadel! I got clients who can really get behind that.”

“This has not even begun to explain where I am going,” Ahk’Ran muttered angrily, his stomach doing a flip and making him start moving towards the railing of the tiny yacht. The man smiled, widely as his fat fingers rolled one over the other like little sausages. A ruby gemmed ring sat on his pinky, probably the only digit thin enough to house it, which indicated he was a lord of Corone.

“We’re going to get you to a Serenti fight! The winner of the last round has just taken the dive towards her destiny, and you will be her next fighter! Doesn’t that sound interesting, Ahk, my buddy?” The piggish noble actually snorted as he laughed.

“No, it really does not seem all that interesting!” To emphasize his growing irritation with people forcing him into fights he would rather not been part of, he stamped his sandal covered foot. The guards on the boat gave him a passing glance. With a heavy sigh he looked out to sea and saw the other boat, and with narrow eyes he realized he had already arrived at his location.

“Come now, Ahk, my buddy! I paid a heavy fee for you. Tearing through Corone’s royal port all to fight Teric the famous mercenary and then ripping through the bastard Jeff and chopping off his head! These things are not cheap to pardon you know!” To show how giddy the thoughts made him the rather rotund noble jumped, a feat of no small nature, and landed with his sausage fingers over his throat making inappropriate noises. “Just like that!” He smiled, which the honorable warrior did not return.

“Can I perhaps scrub this deck, or do something other than fight?” Ahk’Ran suggested his voice heavy with irritation and desperation. The man gave him a coy look, his tiny eyes glaring upon him. It seemed the man used all his will power to make himself look threatening and only managed to look like a constipated farm animal. Then he smiled again, nodding his head as he turned to the guards and motioned for them to hand him something. Within moments the noble was holding a rather heavy looking vest.

“If you will not fight, then I suppose I cannot force you. Please, wear this vest now.” He moved forwards opening the fabric.

“What? Why?” Though he asked the questions, he received no answers. The guards stood when the man let out a shrill whistle, and they forced the garment onto him. He protested, but being bound in chains was hard to fight, no matter how fantasy stories may have claimed otherwise. Now he was dressed in a puffy vest that made his shoulders sag, sword being attached at the side where his satchel was.

“In case you should fall in the water, I would hate for you to not swim back to safety.” The man then lifted up his pudgy fingers, and pushed the desert warrior into the waters. Ahk’Ran’s back hit the rail, and two guards charged him, lifting up on his legs. He dangled upside down, screaming as the noble nodded once and motioned with one finger forwards. The man did as he was ordered, lifting up a small key and placing it in the padlock. With a soft word of power, the magic within the braces unlocked all the bindings and the warrior fell into the waters plummeting below.

“Now, let’s see him fight!” The noble said sitting on a lounge chair and lifting up a small fruity drink with a tiny umbrella.

What nobody would ever know, becacuse nobody ever had asked, was that the desert warrior did not know how to swim. The sinking feeling made his body react violently, and screaming loudly in the water made water seep into his lungs. With a few hazy blinks, a bit more protesting, the Bronze Warrior sunk to the bottom of the ocean, dead.

((The moral of the story is, I withdraw. Best of luck to you Relt, sorry man, but I just don't got it in me.))

[Relt PeltFelter]

No hard feelings, champ. Just posting here for crazy-ass personal story-time purposes.

Compared to the dripping bottoms of the earth, the flooded bottoms of the sea were actually kind of relaxing to Relt. Her claustrophobia hadn't kicked in because, essentially, there was no claus to phobia; no ceiling, no walls, nothing but greasy grey dust in all directions. At least, there had been, before Relt found the garden.

Actually, garden isn't quite the right word. Gardens are tended, and usually involve things like cheerful little gnomes and those, what do you call them, the spinny things that look like birds or bees, and maybe like those signs which look like the backside of a fat woman who has bent double to tend to a bit of weeding. Garden didn't do this sight justice.

Mouth agape, Relt wandered between towering hydrothermal vents, festooned with squirming tube worms and pale, phantasmal crabs. The wreckage of a ship had come down around a spire, rotting wood clearly charred where the super-boiling water had brushed it. The thing was heavily colonised with twisting hagfish, red-tufted wormy things, and even a couple of massive sharks.

Relt took a moment to herself to just stare in wonder. She didn't get to do this often, and hell, how many other people had even ever seen something like this? It was amazing. If not for the planned pugilism, the girl would have been happy to just sit down here alone for hours, watching the strange secret world below the sea.

It is understandable, then, that it took so long for Relt to notice the forlorn little heap which lay, crumpled, under a curtain of hungry crustaceans and bizarre, jawless fish. She squinted at it, then broke into a run, the sand of centuries kicked up by her magically dry flip-flops. She shooed away the scavengers, creatures unused to the idea of being slapped around, and looked at the sad evidence.

The thing had been a man, not too long ago. Relt figured it was probably her opponent, but now, at this depth and this pressure, it looked like a mummy had been thrown overboard, all crushed in on itself and waterlogged. She crouched down, gingerly touching the body (Relt never having been much of a forensic genius). Where her fingers touched, the magic of her protective vest extended, and she felt the fabric of her late fellow combatant's clothes. A month ago Relt would have been far too squeamish to prod the flattened carcass of a would-be foe, but her largely corpse-centric conflicts thus far had hardened her stomach and girded her loins (though she still wasn't sure if girding was a good thing).

The dead man wore a vest which superficially resembled Relt's own, but instead of heavy steel was just a sort of silvery fabric. The top button glowed a sickly yellow, and Relt realised that while the body's other clothes and compressed, cheese-straw limbs were flailing whenever the water shifted, the vest sat resolutely immobile in the frigid soil.

Relt whistled through her teeth. "Sorry, bud," she managed, her voice barely catching in her throat, "Looks like someone gave you the wrong vest," Her eyes roamed over the exquisite grove of smoking vents as she thought. "But I don't think this was an accident," she said after a long while. Fighters disappearing like smoke, dangerous arenas filled with lobster ghosts and swamp hags, and now...an honest to fuck murder.

Someone was trying to destroy the Serenti Invitational.

- - -

"You were not followed," a thin, dry voice in the shadows said. It wasn't a question; the person it was speaking to would be dead if he had been followed.

"No," the visitor responded. There was no honorific in his address; he knew the potency of his leader, there was no need to acknowledge it with such a thing as a "sir", "madam", or "my lord".

"It is a pity that Oggtemple has 'chosen' to retire," the dry voice said. There was the suggestion, the barest suggestion, of subtle movement in the thick, cloying shadows that hid the voice's owner, and the tinkling of spirits making a journey from bottle to glass.

"He was a useful idiot," the visitor said. He sounded just slightly out of breath, as if he was still recovering from a long walk, "Easily led. But his departure will not harm the central goal. There are many more fools besides,"

"Nevertheless, he is a loose end. See to it that his retirement is filled with brief incident and, to follow, a very long respite," There was a pause. "Make it look natural; an accident, perhaps, or a medicinal disruption. He cannot simply disappear," There was another tinkling, as if a glass were being refilled.

"Of course. And as for the following round?"

"Our designs continue apace. Accelerate the unlikely, ensure that any difficulties are dealt with, and that any inconvenient individuals are found wanting. Or rather not found, for want of being," the dry voice gave a chuckle like two rattlesnakes brushing against one another as it poured itself another glass.

"As you say," The visitor stepped back from the shadows. The head clerk of the offices of the Serenti Invitational raised an arm in salute. "In His name, act,"

"For His needs must," the dry voice said back. The clerk stepped out through the low doorway, cloak wrapped tightly around his shoulders.

The owner of the creaky, papery voice seemed to lean back in the shadows. The sound of liquid pouring was heard again.

It is fortunate that the clerk was not more observant, or he may have noticed that, while his mysterious commander poured frequently, at no point was he heard to drink.

[Silence Sei]

Relt Peltfelter advances to the Quarter Finals!