William charged after Lorenor, his molten blood hammering in his ears. But even with his battle lust raging, William was remembered that the labyrinth itself was also their opponent this day and he slowed in the doorway to the next chamber. He didn’t pause long, only long enough to check that Lorenor’s entry hadn’t triggered another of the maze’s traps, and then resumed his charge.
Brief as the pause was however, it was long enough for the mutant to get his feet back under him. Lorenor met William’s second charge with unflinching calm, summoning his holy light a second time and thundering upwards at him in a two-fisted strike that would be enough to take William’s head clean off if it connected. There weren’t many warriors of Lorenor’s type left in the Citadel, men who chose to gamble everything on a single strike when facing a superior foe rather than fleeing and attempting to maneuver something else to their advantage. William had always been of that sort himself, and he’d always respected that fighting spirit. But then, he thought, any wounds inflicted on him would be healed by his regenerative ability. Perhaps there was a reason he was one of the last stand-and-fight types.
As experienced as William was, he knew that there were half a dozen ways he could block or dodge Lorenor’s attack and retaliate with a mortal or crippling blow. But the crimson rage was boiling inside him now, the old berserker’s joy of slaughter. A hint of the old William was beginning to spill through the gaps of his control and he was interested to see just how much of it his old enemy could draw out.
Instead of striking out with a killing blow to end the fight early, William instead relied on a flash of insight from the training he’d gone through with one of his mentors. The mystic giant, Steppenwolf Orlouge, had possessed an eccentric demeanor and a ridiculous fighting style, but the man had also been a master strategist and had been one of the few who really understood just what William had been capable of. One of the ridiculous moves that he’d taught William had been a move called Snapping Turtle Bites The Gracious Hand That Feeds It, a name that William always suspected was more a dig at him than a proper name for the maneuver. William remembered Snapping Turtle, as he much more sanely called it, but never found himself in a situation in which it would be useful. Surprisingly, this was exactly that.
William executed Snapping Turtle, which consisted of clamping down on the floor as hard as he could with the claws on his feet to anchor himself while at the same time twisting his hips one way and his shoulders the other. All of this while bending his knees as sharply as he could. This had the effect of completely annihilating any sort of balance or control that William had over his own motion, but it also whipped him into a low horizontal position that maintained most of the momentum of his charge.
Snapping Turtle did as intended and turned William from a charging man into a low flying missile weapon. The advantage of Snapping Turtle over simply performing a leaping tackle was that the maneuver dropped his body instantly rather than arcing forwards slowly. The downside was that it put him so low that the only place he would be able to physically strike Lorenor to any effect would be the knees. Still it was better than taking an explosive uppercut to the jaw.
He punched out the instant he dropped under the level of Lorenor’s devastating punch in a two-fisted strike of his own. William balled his clawed hands into tight fists, coming in at Lorenor’s knees like a freely swinging battering ram. It was only at this point that William noticed the looming darkness immediately behind Lorenor. William closed his eyes and gritted his teeth with the knowledge that he was about to take another unprepared dive down another fifteen foot drop, regardless of whether he struck Lorenor or not. He could only hope that he managed to take Lorenor with him.
