Finals: League of Nightmares vs. Chivalry and Savagery

[Abomination]

It was getting hard to see what was happening. Charred cloth and melted rock made the air thick and humid, leaving a thin mist of heat that warped the vision of those still remaining. The ceiling started to crack, the supports of the building itself being engulfed in the growing inferno, raining down bits of stone and dust. Profuse plumes of smoke rose up from the flames, guaranteeing that one way or another this fight was going to end. Sweat poured down Draug's face and his body felt hot, the organs inside twisting and crying as his blood boiled.

The knight stood in his way, a brief reminder of honor and tradition as the flames reflected off his bright form. No matter where the Homunculus looked, there was a piece of armor on Jehan's body. He doubted he could wedge a blade in the slit of the knight's barbute or piece through the rings of the gorget. The destroyed table that he kicked towards them seemed to have no effect, and the diseased blood he was letting loose was of no avail either. If anything, these two were resilient, but Draug felt that they could not match up to him. He was a creature that exemplified the best qualities of each race, indeed he was a new race of his own, more akin to a devil than a man. Unfortunately, even with his strength, there were limits to what a simple steel sword could accomplish. Instead of thinking that he wasn't strong enough, he realized that his approach to fighting armored opponents was wrong until this point. Why was he playing on their terms? He was just copying the fighting styles of his opponents, emulating their penchant for blades and ignoring the advantages that his form provides. He thought that a fighter with four arms was twice as strong due to the capacity for weapons, but he was proven wrong time and time again. His approach had to change, and it started now.

Right before reaching the knight, Draug released his blades. He would allow his opponent to pierce through him just like before, except this time it would have even more force due to the momentum. He was a being whose own life was expendable, who through alchemical sorcery broke the limits of humanoid anatomy. As soon as the knight pierced through him, he would let him feel the force of his recoil, and see just how much the knight enjoyed his own attack. Aware that with the armor Jehan's mobility was likely limited, the Homunculus would use his original arms and upper arms to attempt to grab the knight's forearms, with the lower arms going for the shins. If he was successful, he would attempt to rip the knight apart four ways using both his original strength and the small amount added by assimilating the orc.

All the while, the pain his head would not cease. The thought of his mistake still perverted his thoughts, and he wondered why it mattered to him so much. He wasn't his usual expressionless, emotionless self. Concern, confusion, and regret filled his mind. Today, he was feeling.

[Glories of Myrmidion]

The shadows burnt. The haze smouldered. His head thundered like some raging god with every furious heartbeat. And above the crackling hunger of the flames roared a different sound… the sound of the Hall of the Grand Council falling apart.

Blindly the abomination charged onto the waiting blade. Suppurating flesh tore like so much soggy vellum as the body-length of tempered steel carved effortlessly through muscle and organ alike. Deeper and deeper it buried, until Jehan felt its flanges catch on the abomination’s stomach and its tip emerge from the far side. Sickly torrents of blood spilt in rivers down the hilt, dribbling through his gauntlets, burning like caustic acid on his fingers before spilling like treacly waterfalls to the floor.

Briefly its ill-favoured pupils dilated, the pain registering even on its abnormal constitution. Shortswords clattered to the melting floor, so much discarded scrap.

Then the agony. The searing inferno as something unseen clawed into Jehan’s belly and wrought havoc upon his insides. The racing chill up his spine as he realised what had downed Throm.

Magic. Foul dastardly sorcery. He had been so focused on the abomination’s physical wretchedness that he’d failed to consider…

Powerful hands grabbed at his shoulders and his shins. They scrabbled for purchase upon his armour, tarnishing it with screeching claws. They found it as he reeled from the explosion in his abdomen. Castle-forged steel warped beneath their grip, then wailed in protest under forces not meant to be applied to it. Like a condemned man upon the rack Jehan’s body convulsed, spasmed.

The abomination’s faceless grin, a daemonic visage shrouded in hateful triumph, floated mockingly in his eyes. It laughed at him, his trials, his tribulations…

… his failures, his defeats, the men he had lost under his command, the country he had failed so many times before, the ideals he had been forced to betray to live…

Memory gave him strength, that final rush of adrenaline to overcome impending doom. Heedless of the growing ice in the pit of his stomach, heedless of the flesh and blood boiling away at its edges, he wrenched his longsword upwards and away.

The abomination’s sheer bulk made it nigh impossible. But Jehan was a strong man, and desperation spurred him to even greater effort. The twist of his shoulders bought him a second’s worth of time as the hands planted there fought to readjust, and he utilised the leverage well. His blade, already impaled through flesh like a nail through wood, responded like a long lost friend.

The abomination’s shoulder split from its chest, sheared away by the longsword’s passage like so much carved fowl-breast. Dark blood fountained like water from a burst aqueduct pipe, dowsing the unlucky flames caught in its bath, dying the air with copper and iron, painting the ceiling in artistic splatters. Something bulky and fleshy hit the carpet with an ailing squelch.

Jehan’s grip failed on the follow-through, and his sword spun away through the air. Wheeling and gleaming it caught the flames, until momentum buried it blade-first in the distant floor. It hummed there for the briefest of eternities before the roiling smoke once again swallowed it whole.

Empty sea-green eyes fixated on the blackness that now clouded its defiant last stand, feeling the loss. Slowly he exhaled of life, and inhaled instead of acrid death. Choking on the heat and the dust, his vision dimmed in agonising slowness to a pinprick. His legs and lower torso had turned to so much mush, that he could no longer even feel the abomination’s grip upon his shins. With a cacophonous symphony of metallic clatters he slumped in the grip of the abomination's rage.

Maybe it was best, then, that the hall would not last much longer.

What a glorious tomb it would make for us all.

Darkness beckoned. Soothing, calming, eternal darkness…

Throm. I hope that blasted grunter…

Darkness.

[Abomination]

And there he was.

Cleaved like a slab of meat, Draug's entire shoulder was missing, the arms that were attached to it still holding onto the knight's arm, but within moments of being separated from their host they melted away and evaporated. Smoke almost completely obscured his vision with dark, dirty plumes that coalesced in the room, unable to find a way out in time. The pain was indescribable, his entire body crying out, with Draug choking on his spit. The knight, now partially free of its bindings, instead craned forward like a ragdoll. The Homunculus recognized that Jehan was unconscious and let him go, although he may have had no choice due to the strength that was leaving his body at an alarming rate. His remaining arms all pressed against his body to plug up the torrent of blood, but maintaining them was costing him blood as well, so aside from his original non-chopped arm, he let the rest of them slough off as if a snake had shed its skin.

The bleeding stopped after a few seconds, but Draug grew pale. Skin grew over the wounds like a fast-growing moss, bubbling and populating in thick chunks. He could barely see the knight's form beneath him, and the cracking of the ceiling above had a rhythmic sequence. His organs reconstructed themselves slowly, and his breathing resumed, but he didn't have enough blood to regrow his missing arm, or any subsequent ones for that matter. Tumors grew in the space where his shoulder once was, but that was all that could be done. He took a step backwards and felt a squish, not because of anything he stepped on, as the sound came from within. He sneered, frustrated that the knight had that much strength. The orc was nowhere to be found. Was he lurking in the darkness, waiting to attack? Did he escape? Or maybe he asphyxiated. Draug was getting close to that point himself.

He squinted, trying to make sense of his surroundings, each breath letting out a burst of crimson from his mouth as the blood from his destroyed stomach came back up to be expelled. The first thing he spotted was one of the columns, which looked close to collapsing as cracks grew across its length. He wound up his remaining fist and ripped through the stone with it. He then placed his hand on the top part and dug his fingers into the rock, shaking and pulling until a long chunk of the column broke off. The piece he grabbed came crashing down to the ground, giving him a makeshift lance as tall as he was. He would like to see the orc try to block it with his shield. As Draug attempted a faint smile, he noticed something behind him and turned around quick, brandishing the stone lance with his one arm, but all he saw was smoke and darkness.

A figure emerged from the smoke, but it was not the orc. It was the knight. Draug raised a brow and looked behind him to see where the corpse had gone, but he couldn't see anything else anymore. The darkness was familiar to him, he remembered it from when the orc was assimilated. That's right, he must have assimilated the knight as soon as the other one ended. This was a mere fabrication of his mind. He was too focused to notice the fragments of memories.

"What will she think when you return?" asked the knight with a pensive hand on his barbute.

"What?!" Draug shot back. For some reason, he knew exactly what this fake Jehan was talking about.

"Twice now you have failed to see her desires. Maybe this was your last chance, and now she will reclaim your essence and start anew."

Draug snickered, "If mother wishes to destroy me, I welcome it. I will do anything she tells me."

"Do you, now?" came a voice from behind. Draug turned around and saw Throm, another fabrication of his mind. "You offered me power if I joined you, if I submitted to the true freedom of the Cult, able to pursue my desires no matter what they are. It always strikes me as odd that you would be assigned to recruit anyone, given that you're a walking contradiction."

"What?"

Fake Throm slammed his orcish sword down, "You have no freedom. You are a slave. None of the Cult's virtues are wasted on you, it seems."

"I serve mother, so that others can have their desires. I am the embodiment of the Cult's favor."

Another voice came from his right, "Do you speak?" Draug faced it and the figure that emerged shared his hair color, his clothes, and had the same stitches all over his body.

Draug took a step back, "You... I am already part of the Cult. My desire is to serve mother."

"Do you want to live?" asked the fabricated Draug.

And there it was.

The question that had been bubbling in his mind. As much as he wanted to ignore it, the pain kept it at the forefront of his mind, lashing away at his thoughts. He wanted to serve, he was written to be the perfect servant with unquestioning loyalty, but that was at his creation. Since then, he assimilated countless people, all with convictions, individuality, and the instinct for survival. Each one of them took its toll on his psyche, giving him the notion of limitless potential.

Draug didn't answer, but the fake Draug already knew, "What is your desire?"

The Homunculus spent so much time doting on his mother, emulating her thoughts, worshiping every word, that he was getting the same idea she was. If it was at all possible... to break the barrier between man and god, to craft the ultimate body, to reach the final stage of evolution... ascension.

[Tusk]

Thrommesh out-of-Skogul braced himself for the inevitable, prepared to once again weather death’s advance and pray that his wiser companion would see them through – his guide in the hostile and unknown world, as always. How many times now had they faced down would-be murderers, one resolute and proud, the other unrelenting and savage? Always Jehan could depend on Throm to plow into a fray like an unleashed dog of war, and always Throm could depend upon Jehan to guide him, to lumber in his wake with grace, performing the deadliest surgery with his gargantuan blade – berserkers both, but complimentary.

So when Jehan thrust himself forward to stop the abomination’s single-minded advance upon the orc, armor gleaming and steaming in the firelight, Throm’s jaw dropped. His surroundings were thrown into sudden and razor-clear relief, slowed by a surge of adrenaline and fear: they were in an inferno, facing down the devil himself. Jehan charged boldly, fearless, heedless, refusing to leave his sword-brother to an ugly fate even if it gave him an opening for personal victory.

It was glorious. It was glorious and, Throm realized with a growing dread, pointless. He saw the opulent structure collapsing around them, the walls buckling, the floor sagging, flaming debris raining down all around them. The noise was deafening, the heat crushing, the smoke blinding. If the abomination killed them, it would never tell tales of their bravery, or speak fondly of this event – it would move on, mindless, thoughtless, uncaring, and it would forget them immediately. If they managed to fell this thing, the house would collapse upon them, and the day would be won only with incredible injury.

For the first time, Throm saw war for what it was.

“Jehan,” he said, warning, but it was too late.

The monster had him, and his tremendous sword went sailing through the air, displacing smoke and gleaming red. Throm’s blood went cold and he felt his shoulders slump. Impossible.

Impossible.

The rage boiled up in him, more hate and anger than he had ever felt, even after a hundred fights, a thousand slights, ten thousand failures, and a million disappointments. Some sound erupted like thunder in the house, something remarkable and deafening and otherworldly, and he had no idea it was his own voice, a primal roar like the birth-cries of a planet. He tensed, wanting to smash and rend and crush and bite, wanting for all the world to struggle until he died, covered in blood and gore.

But he didn’t.

Instead he slipped back, he retreated – he hid. He watched the monster peer into the flames, searching no doubt for the orc, and yet it seemed to find something beyond sight. Throm didn’t care what it was, but he saw his moment. He grunted, surging out of the smoke and grabbing hold of the back of Jehan’s breast plate.

He turned and ran, yanking Jehan’s limp and armored body after him. After a heartbeat he turned, desperate, and threw his sword end-over-end at the abomination’s silhouette – was it talking to someone? - hoping against all hope that the attack would slow or distract it long enough. With no more plays to make, he switched hands, gripping Jehan’s breastplate with his now-free hand, and holding his shield just overhead as he retreated through the fire.

The roof was steadily collapsing, support beams cracking like bones, burning nails and chips and splinters raining down upon his shield, nicking his head and his hands and his arms. He didn’t feel any of it. He didn’t feel anything except fear and desperation and distant, longing hope, staring blindly at a point just beyond the next wall of flames. Jehan only seemed to get heavier, as if his armor were melting into the floor and fusing with it. He pulled harder, growling, panting, wheezing.

A dead end. A wooden wall, sagging, bathed in liquid flame, but between the beams and through the smoke he glimpsed moonlight. Throm summoned up a surge of anger, of strength, and he bent down and lifted his companion onto his shoulder with a furious cry, and then he charged that failing wall, running with all the speed and might he could muster.

The wall exploded outward, relinquishing the pair in a burst of flame and black steam, and Throm went on running until his momentum was spent and he collapsed and dropped the First Knight of his order, and he choked and coughed and struggled to breathe. He pulled off his bracers and his leathers, shoved aside his shield, and pulled his chainmail off overhead and tossed it aside. He breathed in through his nose and out past his tusks, and wiped sweat from his brow and shook it from his naked arms.

And then, bare from the waist up, blackened by soot and smoke, drenched in sweat and blood, Throm stepped between the burning manor and the fallen form of his ally, and stared into the blaze.

He could run no farther, and he knew if the abomination emerged the fight would be bloody and short, but he would not give in. He heard shouts and whistles in the near distance, and the stamp of many feet. He heard skraeling women scream, and skraeling men searching, and the rattling of sabers. Gods help him, Throm of Berevar would keep his friend safe for as long as his body held breath and beyond, until these horrid island-folk found them.

He didn’t know how many of them it would take to bring down the abomination, or if any number of men even could. But if he was going to die, if he was going to fail his brother, it was going to be the beginning and end of something glorious.

[Dissinger]

Round over judgement commencing.

[Max Dirks]

I've been asked by Dissinger to step in and judge your thread.

I must say, I'm somewhat disappointed by this battle. Between the rampant powergaming & metagaming, I don't think this title bout lived up to the hype. I've commented individually below.

Judgment

League of Nightmares
Homunculus | Ciato Orlouge

Story - 5 | 0 (Some highlights some lowlights. The visions Draug saw near the end appeared to be a real point grab)
Setting - 4 | 0 (Your introduction was excellent, but you did little else to develop the setting)
Pacing - 5 | 0 (You did better here, but/for your conclusion post)
Communication - 5 | 0 (Little was said, but little needed to be said)
Action - 3 | 0 (Homunculus powergamed or bunnied almost every post. Despite the terms of Draug's assimilate, it is still up to the opposing player to determine if their ability is pilfered. Moreover, it is unacceptable to have multiple attacks and an alternative attack in a single post)
Persona - 4 | 0 (The attempt to add last minute character development into the story had nothing to do with the overall story arc. It was a clear attempt to grab last minute points)
Mechanics - 6 | 0 (Solid writing. I noticed a few errant sentences and misspelled words from Homunculus)
Clarity - 6 | 0 (Easy to follow writing. You sometimes use run-on sentences. Remember that short sentences can be used to alter the pace of the battle)
Technique - 5 | 0 (Don't take shots at other players in your prose)
Wildcard - 7 | 0 (Kudos to Homunculus for sticking with it while a man down)
Total: 50 | 0
Team Average: 25


Chivalry and Savagery
Tusk // Glories of Myrmidion

Story - 4 | 5 (Tusk's decision to run made no sense.
Setting - 4 | 4 (Interesting setting, though the backstory confused me).
Pacing - 5 | 3 (Glories, I feel that your descriptive writing style actually takes away from the pacing of your writing. Most of the time I had to reread your posts twice, sometimes three times, to figure out exactly what Jehan was doing. Tusk, I could not score you better here because Throm disappeared for the meat of battle)
Communication - 4 | 4
Action - 5 | 4 (I believe that Glories missed an attack by Homunculus. Otherwise, nothing too special here.
Persona - 4 | 4 (You did not do a good job of developing your characters. I did not read your other threads, so it was difficult to ascertain the dynamic of their relationship).
Mechanics - 7 | 6 (Tusk takes home the award for the best writing. Glories, your overly descriptive writing style reduced your score here)
Clarity - 6 | 4 (Glories, sentences such as "Longsword rose to his fore in the stance of the Lion, daring the foe to advance into its reach" make me cringe. Longsword is not a proper noun. You did this multiple times in the thread)
Technique - 6 | 4 (Tusk used a few advanced writing techniques (metaphors & similes). I considered Glories bizarre writing style as technique. That said, the technique confused me multiple times)
Wildcard - 0 | 4 (Time penalties result in a loss of 6 total points)
Total: 45 | 42
Team Average: 43.5

Winner: Chivalry and Savagery

Homunculus receives 300 EXP (battle) + 300 EXP (Ciato's EXP) + Chicken and the Egg Reward + 500 GP
Ciato Orlouge receives 0 EXP (battle) + Chicken and the Egg Reward + 0 GP

Tusk earns 1425 EXP (battle) + Immovable Object & Unstoppable Force Reward + 1000 GP
Glories of Myrmidion receives 1425 EXP (battle) + Immovable Object & Unstoppable Force Reward + 1000 GP

[Max Dirks]

EXP and GP added!

You cannot use your item rewards until they are approved by the Realm of Greeting.