Newcomer (Semi?) Finals: Tobias Stalt Vs Kroom

[Silence Sei]

The rematch we've all been waiting for! Matches begin tonight at Midnight CST, and last two weeks!

May the Best Man win!

[Kroom]

Dreams have an odd way of playing with reality. The way that they warp perception and bend time, letting the dreamer swim through dirt and breath water. From instant to instant the world changes, and never the question: 'why?' Never a hesitation, never a doubt, only the dreamer's complete acceptance of the world he inhabits. A threat presents and the mind quakes in fear, some fantasy is fulfilled and a smearing smile slathers itself across the dreamer's face - and should a partner appear, lust blooms naturally, without inhibition or restraint. The dreamer has no need of travel, no need of transportation or sustenance or anything that convinces the mind of the brutal reality of reality. It is this very brutality that convinces a man of his own reality, perhaps because nobody believes that the world is kind or interested. The pain of a rock in the shoe gives an agonizing comfort, a soft caress of acid on flesh that whispers the truth of the world.

Yet when this brutality lacks in a dream, for some reason there is no question. A hand strokes the face without a slap, and mortals believe it to be true, only realizing the dream's absurdity when they wake. Perhaps dreams are also a sort of comfort, a perverse teasing of impossibility to give momentary reprieve from the harsh embrace of life.

With a blink, Jak found himself standing with unremarkable stone under his feet. The world was gray, lightless yet perfectly illuminated. He turned and looked to his back, and was instantly convinced that he had come out from the featureless stone pillar that towered at his back. There were several pillars like it, arranged in a circle around a perfectly smooth and seamless tableau of gray stone. Jak counted them. A full dozen, each pillar evenly spaced from the others, worn with time and smoothed in age. Beyond them was nothing: an empty gray void that was not even a mist, simply a nothingness. He could not have walked towards it if he tried; there was no desire to test it and answers the questions that suddenly clamored in his brain. Would it really swallow him alive and extinguish his consciousness? Or would it spit him back into the circle? Or maybe it would spit him out somewhere else?

Stupid and irrelevant questions. It was there, and Jak was not in it, and that was the way it ought to be. The smith turned away and looked across the ring. His gear clinked and creaked, leather and scale mail providing the first sounds he had heard since arriving here.

He found himself shaking, though with rage or mirth he was unsure. Knowing that it would be there, the smith reached for his bow and set an arrow to the string - that same motion that had become so natural he sometimes didn't even realize he had made it. It simply appeared in his hands, ready to kill at a cold distance with unapologetic ease. Jak hated getting philosophical about the nature of his killing work, but every now and then a profound thought crawled across his conscience. Just so now, it occurred to him that the bow was the weapon of an honorless man, a man who cared about killing efficiently and without glory. That thought set easily with him.

The smith still shook, and now as his mouth cracked open and begin quarrying laughter from his chest, he realized why. Across the ring, perhaps a dozen yards away, stood Tobias.

Tobias Stalt. Jak was hard-pressed to call him a friend, though the young man certainly was no enemy. The tomb had shaped an unusual bond between them, and he'd already dreamt of encountering the thief again. Odd, though, that Jak kept finding him grown. No longer a spiteful and mistrusting thief, nor an awkward recruit in ill-fitting trappings, he seemed more seasoned, more able, and more ready to kill.

"And more ready to die," Jak mumbled, using the words to spite the oppressive stillness that surrounded them. There was no sound, not even a whisper of air. There was no light, and yet no shadows squatted at his feet. The realm was thoroughly halfway.

The bow creaked in his gloved hands, complaining about its new place of tension, half-drawn and lowered. Jak had no need to wing feathered threat towards Tobias, not yet; though he was sure that both and he and Tobias were here to kill each other. That was just the way of things; calm surety embraced his mind, as steady as the scent of cool stone and dust that filled his nostrils. No need for words or challenges; just a sense that he needed to wait a moment longer.

So Jak silently waited.

[Tobias Stalt]

The world was dead. Bland tones muddled together into dreary slate, and like two ill placed pieces on a chessboard, Tobias quietly faced his opponent. Disjointed illumination revealed the mocking shape of Jak's face, all too familiar from the soldier's nightmares. "Should have stayed in the past," Tobias murmured unintelligibly. This man was an unwelcome omen; when demons came back to haunt, they rarely brought glad tidings.

A world with no coherent structure seemed fitting for finding finality. Tobias could not say he wanted to cross paths with the man again. Not after Salvar, with the terrible things that had transpired. Like a hunter fixated on prey, Jak held his bow at half ready, and Tobias clicked his tongue with disapproval. Always over fond of the bow, he sighed, rolling a black blade deftly between his fingers. The menacing dagger gleamed like a devil's tooth, matching the boy's sinister smile.

Monoliths were the only remarkable terrain, and even those seemed nondescript. Tobias assumed that the structures had been their point of origin in this world, but he had no desire to learn more. It was magic, and to Tobias, magic was meaningless.

Twenty paces, maybe less, stood between the two men and close combat. Tobias felt solid ground under his feet, and it seemed to go on forever. Blurred shadows, light, and darkness culminated a facade of nothingness that threatened to play tricks on his mind. His ragged, ratty cloak tossed in the weak wind, assuring Tobias that the world was real enough, and that would suffice.

Instead of taunting, Tobias elected to force march across the distance. He could weather a storm of arrows. He could, with all the skills and experience he had gained in the Magus Cup and during the war in Eiskalt, topple the titan that Jak had been to him a year before. The difference between them had been a gulf. Now, Tobias was sure that he was more than a match for his old colleague.

Quick footfalls echoed through the oblivion that had swallowed them. Jak had been fleet of foot, but Tobias was far faster now than he had been then. He spun the tiny blade into a reversed grip, and he tore across the planar nothingness like a wraith.

In their last battle, Jak would have been content to pick him apart from afar. Words had been his only ally then, and Tobias had since learned a hard truth. Words were not weapons suited to single combat. This time, Tobias would counteract Jak with a much more monstrous mastery.

[Kroom]

The world seemed to draw breath, shrinking back from the battle circle with a slow and silent gasp. A tension settled over the ring, muffling any sound that could have opposed it. This hazy and neutral world suddenly seemed charged with a waiting thunder, a fierce and delighted longing that needed only the smallest trigger to unleash a hurricane.

As soon as Tobias' feet slid across the polished stone, Jak raised and aimed his arrow, drawing the bow to its full as the soldier advanced. His eyes narrowed and Jak began to strafe sideways, still aiming and assessing. Tobias had gotten quicker, added skills to back up the claims his attitude had always made. No fucking around, then, no taking chances - the smith had to kill him quickly, brutally, and efficiently. He was good at that, and he got better with every new kill.

Something hummed, nervous under the current of the smith's uncharacteristic serenity, and he ignored it. For once, there would be a straightforward fight - no drama, no subtext, no questions or problems to be resolved, no reservations.

Jak released the bowstring with a melodic thrum, calmly assuring himself that nothing was wrong, because it simply wasn't. The fletching whistled in the air, winging a death-threat towards the soldier. Tobias would eat that arrow, right in his teeth, and he would be dead, and that was the way it should be. The smith would kill the soldier.

…that's the way it should be? No reservations, no questions? A smith killing a soldier?

The worry bloomed, roaring to the surface as Jak watched the arrow. Something was very wrong with this halfway-plane. Cold sweat rained, and he was the certain the arrow would… would what?

He wasn't certain of anything now.

[Tobias Stalt]

It was a brutal denial. As if to answer Jak's moral dilemma with a curt "no," the world echoed with a pitiful crack. Tobias swatted the shaft of wood aside, split in uneven segments by the blunt force of a deliberately aimed, swatting blow. It was not to be, Tobias lamented, an easy battle. He had noticed something unnerving, however, which made him doubt whether he would have mapped the trajectory of that arrow had it come only a moment sooner: Jak had hesitated.

He knew his opponent had strayed from the notion of ending his life. It was an immensely sobering sensation, but Tobias knew it would not happen twice. Miracles- divine or attributed to human error- seldom repeated themselves. The world around them diminished and the air was thick with malice. Dull infinity threatened to swallow both men whole as Tobias punched his answer to Jak's declaration of war toward the Smith's sweaty throat.

"Odd, ain't it," Tobi called in an even voice between swings. "The way the world works? Here we are again, two old... what are we Jak? What are we doing?" The slice came up short of its intended target, and Tobias grunted as he twisted the blade in air, tugging it back toward himself. He had to remember that Jak was a seasoned Warrior in his own right. Forgetting that could cost him his life.

Tobias ripped the second blade from his waist, both long knives lacking luster in the absence of true light. They seemed to be almost bored by the dreary dreamscape. While brutally efficient, Tobias could not help but feel the ache of compassion for a former comrade. It had been his undoing so many times now, and he had finally swallowed the hard lesson that sometimes, you can't save anyone. That wouldn't stop him from trying.

"Is this my dream," he asked across the few feet left between them, "or yours?" Or was it a dream at all? The world felt strange, foreign, and sickeningly real. He disliked not knowing, and with Jak having reservations, he decided that the other man did not like it much either. "What do you think?"

[Kroom]

Jak flinched at the sound of deflection. His arrow not only missed - Tobias blocked it. The smith had seen only a handful of fighters fast enough to block arrows. He himself was quick enough to dodge an arrow on occasion, if he saw it coming at a great enough distance. To block an arrow, though? Maybe on his best of days.

The soldier came on quickly, attacking with his knives. He moved swiftly, skillfully, with danger and savvy in his lines. Jak almost ran backwards. Engaging would be, in his estimation, suicide. The smith had fought quick ones before, and he had fought knife-fighters before. Beating them at their own game was damnably hard. The best defense was to run before the wind, to wait, to evade.

It was an odd spectacle, watching the two men fight. Jak, brawny and powerful, dodging away from the lithe little Tobias. He dodged back, circling and keeping away from Tobias' knives. The smith was caught between two threats: the first and most obvious were the two slivers of steel flickering towards him, but the second were the mysterious powers of the void beyond the stone ring. Neither man knew what would happen to whatever fell into that emptiness, and Jak refused to be the first to find out.

"Odd, ain't it, the way the world works? Here we are again, two old... what are we Jak? What are we doing?"

Jak skipped away and evaded a knife darting towards his neck, trying to ignore Tobias' words as readily as he was avoiding the steel. With a practiced move, he put himself out of the soldier's ready range and hurled one of his throwing knives at his gut. The weapon flew wide from a shaking hand.

The smith spat and moved backwards again, his sword flying into his hand with a mind of its own. He coiled back, hovering his free hand over his second throwing knife and preparing to counterattack. Tobias was scary fast, and Jak was refusing to admit that he was scared. Something was very wrong. Tobias could never be this quick, not even in his wildest -

"Is this my dream, or yours?"

Jak froze, breath hissing between his teeth.

"The fuck is that supposed to mean," he snarled, even as the pieces fell into place. He had no idea whence he'd come, nor how he'd gotten here. This nowhere-land could never exist anywhere mundane, and Tobias was on the other side of the world. Jak was terrified - he'd only felt that kind of fear once before. The whole fucked-up dreamscape made no sense, unless it was exactly that.

[Tobias Stalt]

"Just that," Tobias replied evenly. Jak was resilient, he granted the man that. Dancing away from deadly designs, the blacksmith showed his terror to the world. "None of this makes sense. I know it, and I know you do, too. Tell me you know how we ended up here and I'll call you a liar."

He slid the long knives into their sheathes with a single, fluid motion, and reached for his pipe. "Care for a drag?" The match lit with a hiss, stoked the herb, then fizzled out pathetically. Tobias tossed it aside. "You're not convinced. I'm not, either," Tobias admitted. "You were a world away the last time I saw you. Now, in this place, you and I run at each other with bared teeth. Are we so inhuman?"

Tobias blew out a plume of smoke. If he died with a bolt in his chest, it would serve him right for disarming. Still, he didn't want Jak to die like that. They were partners on a venture once. Jak and he had lost the same comrades. They saw the same evil magic at work, and they repressed the same memories. "I want to fight you like the man who was my friend. I don't want to throw all that away on some turgid dream world."

He leaned against one of the pillars and drew another breath of smoke. "You were never afraid before," Tobias said quietly, "certainly not of me." His golden gaze flickered up to Jak. "I looked up to you. I admired you for that. You looked the world in the face and you spat. Gods below, I made it this far acting like I was you."

Maybe he was talking too much. Jak was probably going to say so. Tobias pulled the pipe from his mouth and offered it to his old friend. He owed the man at least that.

[Kroom]

"Fuck you, Stalt," Jak spat, offering the words as a desperate effort to maintain a crumbling illusion. The smith shook, trying to hold his ready pose, but the strength was sapped from his limbs. Only a moment past, the smith had been comfortably numb, safe from the usual worries and undercurrents of doubt that rumbled in his waking life. The clamor of everyday life was gone, and for the first time in years he had been able to draw blades without a bitter taste in his mouth. Now all that was cracked, broken and irretrievable.

All at once, Jak found himself sitting on the stone slab with a pain in his ass. He realized he'd fallen back and sat down hard, and that there was a dampness on his face. The clatter of steel on stone was ringing in his ears, and his blades lay beside him. Something was breaking, and he didn't know how to answer it. Out of an indefinable haze of agitation, Jak dared to draw only one emotion: fury. He was furious that some magic had dragged him into this dreamworld. It had to be magic; ordinary dreams never looked like this. Magic was the domain of heroes and wizards and kings and all those up-jumped bastards who made life difficult for those below them. They can have it, the cocks. I'm a smith, by hells -

His head lifted, looking at Tobias with wondering eyes. He'd heard the soldier's remarks, and they sounded like whispers in wind; discarded illusions of the mind, as real as the non-existent voices that sometimes call a name. Green eyes like caverns stared at Tobias, stared into him, through him, and past him.

A smith. For a smith, you've been doing a lot of killing, boy. Not Jak's voice, not his own thoughts. Somewhere out of the depths of his memory came his father's face, old and creased and keen. Tom Roth Rute had given Jak those green eyes, and his dark hair. It was a preserved image: the last time Jak had ever seen his father, as a boy, leaving his village with Teiran Half-Elf. Jak had looked back, one last poetic time, and had seen his father's back. Tom had turned away, shoulders hunched forward, but he had also looked back. It had all been very poetic, in truth - Tom's eyes full of tears and fatherly love and pain, Jak's full of tears and youth and naiveté, and neither wanting to leave the other.

Now the memory was stained with something Jak was afraid to name. This ain't what I taught you, Jakka. This ain't what I wanted you to be. Still staring and sitting stupidly, the smith began to shake, keeling forward and staring with wide eyes into the stone.

For a smith, he'd done very little smithing in recent memory.

This was too much, more than he had wanted to ever confront. Thinking this much was for people in high towers, people who made life difficult for those below, not for a smith.

For a smith, he was doing a lot of thinking.

Jak's eyes twisted shut and squeezed out a few more teardrops. The fact that he was crying made him angry. Jak hated crying. This was all too much, this undertowing maelstrom of epiphany, and he couldn't hide from it or put it away with a few swings of whatever tool was in his hand. There was no 'business at hand' to tend to, no excuse to forget the looming truth. It was all too much, too real in this un-place.

"Gods below," he groaned, "I hope this is a dream I won't remember." He looked up at Tobias slowly, the soldier's words finally reaching a place where Jak could process them and respond. "You're right," he said after a moment's silence. "You're right, y'hear me? It's a fucking dream, maybe yours, maybe mine, I don't care. I don't fucking care, dammit!... I want out of it, out of this." Words fell from his mouth like pus from an excised abscess. "I don't want all this shit in my head, I don't want explanations... just stop it."

He pounded a calloused fist against the stone, relishing the pain. It gave some release, as physical pain often does to mental turmoil. Desperation in his eyes, Jak looked up to Tobias and slowly stood. He felt very small. The smith had a rough handspan of height and a few stones of muscle over the soldier, and he felt very small. He timidly took the offered pipe and stared at it, not yet daring to drag from it.

"What's happening, Tobias?"

[Tobias Stalt]

It was an odd feeling. Tobias watched the pipe slip from his fingers into Jak's hand, but he barely felt it. In his mind, he struggled with the entire concept of grief. What had brought them together and torn them apart, ultimately, was the fleeting notion of survival. Jak made his living peddling what skills he had for a modest amount of coin, and Tobias did whatever he could to keep his head above water. In reality, he had always been awash in the great sea of uncertainty. That was why he had envied Jak, but now, he watched the man suffer as much helplessness as he did.

It was immensely sobering. "I don't know," Tobias admitted. He blew a stream of gray from pursed lips, mixing his own defiant smog into the haze that surrounded them on all sides. "Fuck me, indeed."

The weight of every world, not just the one he knew, sagged on Tobias' shoulders. There were so many things he did not know, so far beyond his reach. For all that unknown, he still felt the overwhelming pressure to face it all with stoic decorum. It was like some nameless god had charged him with the daunting position of intrepid leader. Yet even with that divine commission, Tobias fell woefully short. "I'm just marching to whatever tune keeps me alive." It was a tragic, painful admission, but the youth had long since come to terms with it.

Here he stood, in the midst of some field that stretched out forever, and he was with the one man he never thought he would see again. It had to be a dream. "It's good to see you again, at least," he said, hoping to squeeze something positive from the situation.

"Don't fight your tears. Don't deny your pain. They're all I've had for so long, now." It was a soft statement, one that only reached Jak because of how close they stood. It was true; in the times when Tobias was alone, he wept. The scars from his past transgressions had been deep wounds, once. Beyond that, he longed for the familiarity of home, and a life that had been simpler. He remembered once, in the face of a campfire, how he had told Jak he had been a fool. There was a mirth in his smile at that thought.

I'd like to fight you, but not like this, Tobias thought sadly. He longed to test his mettle against this man, but neither of them was at their best. This place, these conditions, none of it was equal to the occasion. "A lot happened after..." He stopped himself. His golden eyes moved away from Jak. "After."

There wasn't a need to delve into those memories. Some things were better left unsaid. "I grew up," Tobias said without pride. "I soldiered. I slaughtered. I deserted." He patted the hilt of the weapon wrapped at his back. "I survived. That's a succinct summary."

When his eyes moved back to Jak, Tobias' lips had thinned into a flat line. "If you're inclined to fight me, still, I'll not decline. If it's all the same to you, though, I'd rather wait." Tobias folded his arms. "I'd like to wait until we meet again, on the other side. Then, I'll be able to see if I've really grown at all."

[Kroom]

"I don't know. I'm just marching to whatever tune keeps me alive."

Ain't we all, Tob. Tobias had joined the mercenary fraternity, then; the bastard brotherhood of dust and mist. In some ways they were their own race and realm, and small pieces of glittery metal were the monarch. Jak smiled absently. He'd heard mercenaries once called 'wave-men,' and that image had stuck with him: men without direction, without purpose, traveling as luck decreed. They weren't the only wanderers, of course, but in some ways they were perhaps the most glamorous. Wisdom was never popular, and wiser heads found a trade that didn't involve killing, and practiced it faithfully.

His thoughts were inescapably running to the realization that he, a tradesman, had neglected his safe trade for the killing trade. Before it arrived, Jak frowned and quickly focused on drawing the pipe.

Tobacco was a rare flavor for him. Their paths had crossed before, but never as more than a chance encounter, a sort of midnight tryst and daybreak departure. Despite his adventurous lifestyle, and the traits that came with the turf, Jak had never acquired any pet vices. He'd bought whores and drinks along with the rest of them, but never felt a need to throw himself into debauchery. The faint aroma from the pipe, however, wafting up to his nose and beckoning him to partake, was enough to make him reconsider. Perhaps it was time to acquire a vice. He puffed slowly, pensively, tentatively. Tobias had selected an aromatic blend, with notes of spice and wood. It left a slight burn in his mouth, an aftertaste of coals.

"I'm tired," Jak mumbled. There was a hollow thumping in his chest that might have been a heartbeat. "Good smoke." Another puff, and the pipe lifted back towards Tobias. Something hurt, and as much as he didn't want to deal with it, Jak couldn't escape the hurt.

"It's good to see you, at least."

Jak snorted, though without derision. Derision would have been trite, and dishonest as well. The illusion was shattered, and Tobias was no longer an enemy. He could afford to enjoy the sight of a familiar face, even if it hid shadows of memories better left un-remembered.

The smith turned slowly and began to collect his weapons. They hung in his hands like dead branches.

"I don't want to fight you, Tob." The knife slid home. "I don't really want to fight anybody right now." With a dull complaint, the sword was put away. "I want to wake up."