The Ella Chamber

[Silence Sei]

In this Chamber, we shall see the following people fight:

Reine
Tourneymant
Breaker
Roht Mirage
blackshadow
Warpath
hoytti
Dead & Walking

Start killing each other Monday, September 30th, at 12:01AM Central Standard Time.

The Wheel Of Fate Is Turning! Rebel One, Action!

[Silence Sei]

He stood in his tower, an orange and blue throne made especially for him on this day. His blue orbs pierced the soon to be blood soaked battlefield with the precision of a hawk. This was ‘Silence’ Sei Orlouge’s first time hosting The Cell, a tournament he did not care for in, yet participated in several times. He knew somewhere out in one of these three chambers, there would be a single warrior who would rise above it all. Eight people would enter the arena, yet only the three best amongst them would advance. The Cell was bloody, inhumane, and morbid to no end. Yet, The Cell was a staple in Corone, and since the Ixian Knights had seized the country, Sei had been advised to let the people continue as if there had been no Ixian War. It was ironic; a bloody battle simply laid the groundwork for a bloody tournament.

The Ella Chamber was the smallest of the three arenas, named after the smallest of Sei’s four children. The arena was much smaller compared to the others, estimated at a diameter of one hundred yards. Due to the other two arenas taking up so much room, Sei had made a clearing a half a mile outside of Ixian Castle to make way for the fights in the Ella Chamber. Tree stumps and splintered wood dotted the mix of brown dirt and green grass on the ground. Sei’s microscopic vision could easily still make out the area, even from large gap between him and the invisible dome.

The Dragon of Drantrak had enlisted the help of several Mystics from the home town of the race. They combined their powers to make a seemingly invisible dome, though to one with a penchant for seeing spells would recognize the swirls of white and black that dotted the barrier. The massive shade provided by the surrounding trees of Concordia Forest helped make this arena the coolest of the three, though there were beams of sunlight slipping through the foliage, hinting at the heat the sun provided. Dozens of people, mostly Imperial loyalists who wished to not enter Ixian Castle, dotted the outside area of the Chamber. Without the Ixian Knights to police them, several illegal activities were happening in the area. The strategist could easily make out drug abuse and illegal gambling amongst the people, deplorable acts that would on any other day have them visit the inside of a jail cell.

Sei broke his vision off from the arena itself to look down at his clip board. A list of fighters had been meticulously written in a pretty cursive style by his daughter Anita. The biggest name on the list, and the one receiving the most bets to win this Chamber, was Joshua Cronen. Sei had fought this man in last years Cell, and the mute had learned first-hand what a powerful beast he was. It was why the mute pooled his resources to invite the man to head up the Ixian Knights Investigations Division. Surely, Joshua would be the one to beat amongst these warriors.

Roht Mirage was name Sei had not heard of until this morning, when Anita delivered to him a report about last night’s festivities. This woman was single handedly responsible for causing a massive bar brawl before the Ixian Knights had to come in and separate everyone. There was no serious injury; the worst damage was somebody taking a wooden chair to the back of the head, but it was more of a message to the Mystic than anything else. Roht Mirage was dangerous, and however she did it, she could turn people against one another. Her manipulating techniques would surely do her well here.

Reine was a femme fatale with sticky fingers. Rumor had it that she had a pair of shoes that helped her accomplish a lot more than any normal person could alone. It was said that she could turn on the charm just as quickly as she could pull out a weapon. It would be interesting to see who could play the warriors against each other better, Reine or Roht. An alliance between those two would definitely spell disaster for the combatants.

Barnabas Tourneymant was a strange fellow. He had come from a long line of people whose only notable endeavors were entering tournaments. The man was said to be not only invisible, but seven feet tall. Considering the arena was only twenty-five feet high, this would give Barnabas the ability to cover the field quickly. However, he was still not the tallest person in this chamber.

Sorish Mon Larsh registered at a whopping eleven feet tall, almost half the height of the Ella Chamber. Sei had never encountered his race, ‘Coral Man’, before, but if the race was also an apt description, then Sorish would at least have the advantage of a sturdy defense. Perhaps he would wait out his opponents and then come and sweep up any stragglers. Sei could not wait to see this man’s strategy.

Somehow, a zombie had also managed to get his name registered onto the list. Regardless of whether this was a trick by one of the various Ixian Knight enemies, or a legitimate bid for the crown, Sei was unsure how good the walking dead’s chances were in advancing. While he had the advantage of eternal unlife, he also had the disadvantage of rotting skin. Of course, Sei had few encounters with zombies, so he would have to see Grond prove himself.

Black Shadow was an archer, something that would prove nearly useless unless the man found a strong ally to cover his back. He had been a prince now excommunicated from his country, and now sought the warriors path. If he were to be successful here today, he would have his name inked among the greats. He would truly be a giant killer.

Flint Skovik was a criminal, through and through. That was not to say he did not have a reason for commiting crimes; had Sei been in the warriors shoes, he probably would have done the same things. This showed thanks to Flint’s compassion for a certain girl, one whom he didn’t do such heinous things around. He was a shining example of what a man could accomplish, what chains he could sever both literally and figuratively when put to the right motivation. He would most likely be Joshua’s biggest opponent, unless the two formed an alliance. In that case, the rest of the Chamber was probably screwed.

“Welcome, warriors of the Ella Chamber,” Sei ‘spoke’ in his soft mannered, calm ‘tone’, which was actually a psychic message inside the minds of the competitors. “The fight is about to begin, if you will all please step into the designated clearing, so we may get the tournament underway, it would be appreciated. At high noon, the battle shall commence.”

“Good luck, ladies and gentlemen, and remember that the wheel of fate is turning! To the victor go the spoils!”

[Roht Mirage]

For months, she had been a ghost, flitting through the lives of Coronians with nary a ripple. She was the simple Fallien girl they saw in the bazaar, the quiet spice fields daughter they shared a single meal with at an inn; meek, bland, and utterly unmemorable as one foreigner in a land that saw so many. She had grown to feel safe, having seen neither shadow nor blade of the Kar'Roh. Perhaps, by the mercy of a more hospitable god, she was out of Roh's reach.

Unfortunately, when one is running from a pack of wolves, it is easy to overlook the smaller predators.

“Desert rat's hiding in the garbage,” sneered a hairy brute at the mouth of the alley.

Astarelle pawed at the rickety wall blocking her way. Mismatched boards rose higher than her head on crossbeams that seemed securely mounted to the opposing brick buildings. Through the knotholes, she could see the alley that someone had claimed as their back yard, unaware that they might be enabler to a murder.

She heaved her shoulder at the boards, producing an aged creak, but lost her footing in the piled, stinking refuse and fell to one knee. With her staff, she kept herself from crumpling lower into papers, rags, and wetter mysteries. If I could vault it, she reasoned in a hopeful frenzy as she gripped her staff and pulled herself up.

And up. And up. The monster of a man, breath as stale as his clothing, hoisted her by her throat. Her staff clattered to the ground behind him and rolled into the shadows of evening, for in the alley night had already fallen. “Maybe he'll give me a few minutes with you if I charge him half the finder's fee,” he laughed sourly.

“Go sting yourself,” Astarelle hissed with her remaining air as her face began to... shift. The facade of a sun-browned Fallien commoner puffed away in a cloud of sand. What lay beneath was the softer tone of one who escaped the worst of the desert sun, and an intricate mark of black and white set starkly over the brow. The beautiful, exotic lines of her face were twisted by fear, but her steel-grey eyes burned indignantly.

The brute blinked once in surprise, then again, with a curse, as the airborne sand rushed into his face. He snapped back a hand to scrub at his eyes, and Astarelle's toes touched the ground. Only her toes. With one hand, he still held her throat in a serpent's embrace. The coming of night hastened even more as she choked and twitched, one hand straining toward the shadows.

With a heavy clatter, her staff lunged from the darkness, catching the monster mid-cough in the back of both knees. He finally let go to scrape dirty nails down the brickwork as he fell. Astarelle followed, purposefully bracing one foot in his groin. He grunted. She twisted on her toes, ripping from him a howl, as she performed a dancer's spin that pounded her other foot upon the meat of his chest. Her newly-returned staff rode the momentum, sweeping high over her head.

The beast, his eyes bulging, let out a pleading wheeze. She answered with a scream as she swung. The reed of her staff bit a chunk from the far wall, then cracked across his face as heavily as an iron bar. Teeth and blood jetted across the alley.

Astarelle stumbled off him and flattened her back to the bricks. A moan came from the shattered ruin of his jaw, low and pathetic. She was breathing haggardly and her eyes ran with moisture. “I should kill you,” she growled, though she didn't move.

The brute rolled away, curling into himself. His breath rattled with the blood and teeth floating in his throat. “I should,” she tried again, but her knees betrayed her, dropping her heavily to the ground. Shoulders to the wall, she pressed her face into the soiled material over her knees, begging for breath to return to her from the long chase, and begging her eyes to stop watering.

“This will save me some coin,” someone said near her in a banal tone. She looked up just in time to see a heavy boot come to rest on the wheezing man's skull. As surely as a vice, as wetly as a butcher's maul, it pressed the whimpers into an eternal silence.

“Who are-,” Astarelle began, her voice flat with incomprehension. The new arrival interrupted her with a swift step forward. She threw up a hand defensively, but be caught her wrist in a grip akin to being thirty paces under the desert floor.

“That was decent, but you have so much untapped potential.”

A gloved hand was thrust before her eyes -finger and thumb snapped together- and the blackest of nights fell all at once.

~

In a flash of black and white sparks, a long dream ended, its events already slipping from her mind. Astarelle blinked sluggishly and tried to stifle a yawn, though none came. Her body was wide awake.. and constricted. She felt the tension of a braid pulling her hair back. “Too tight, Lisere,” she mumbled into the soft forest floor as she tried to return to sleep, only to have a blade of grass rudely shove itself up her nose. With a snort and a burst of waking adrenaline, she roused herself to her hands and knees. Dappled sunlight played over the backs of her hands and glimmered off a pair of bracers.

When did...

The braid tumbled over her shoulder and swung fitfully at the side of her vision. Her eyes went wide. It was the braid from her childhood; a thick red ribbon woven down the length of it as if Lisere had done it herself. She's still in Faroh, Astarelle remembered, feeling a pang for how immense that distance now seemed. Regardless, it was a braid she couldn't have done herself.

With a shake to send the hair behind her shoulders, she slid one knee forward, then blinked in surprise. Her knee was bare as it emerged from a skirt she had never seen before; long, sleek, and black as night. There was a slit up the front -the front!- that drew back from her leg like a playhouse curtain opening.

Her breath caught as she fumbled for some reaction other than the hard blush she felt blooming. The slit, thankfully, stopped high on her thigh, though the skirt still framed her tautly-muscled leg indecently. There were also leggings below it, but not even low enough to touch the knee. At least I'm not dressed completely like a trakap, she thought with disjointed amusement.

A comfortable breeze tickled her shoulders, her collarbone, her cleav- Bury me, I am!

With all the grace of a spooked rabbit, she bounded to her feet and flattened her back against what felt like a wall. Her eyes almost rolled down her new, shapely figure as she stared. A corset! It was higher than that of a tavern wench, dark enough to whisper of more dominant fetishes, and thick enough to almost -but just barely- function as a stand-alone top. If only her slight cleavage wasn't bordered by the sinuous, enhancing line of a tattoo.

She blinked dumbly. A tattoo?

Her bare skin was a mural dedicated to the desert. Lines in every gradient from rich oasis brown to bone white slithered over her in an abstract rendition of wind-blown dunes. Abstract, not due to the artist's lack of skill, but in the service of accenting her body. Never before had she thought of her shoulders as attractive, but the way the dunes lay over them was amazing, and the way they framed her pouting bosom was... enticing, if not utterly embarrassing. The tattoo even swept up her neck and over her cheekbones. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it... because...

Her grey eyes flew as wide as possible. My sand, she realized, When did- For years, the sand had disguised her as a Fallien commoner. This... this was a spectacle, and only her own will could have shaped it so. With a thought, she could have forced the sand into a less grandiose form, but her concentration faltered as, all at once, her situation became clear.

The wall she leaned against, though it felt more solid than stone, was invisible. Spectators lounged among the trees beyond it like cats. She could feel the palpable anticipation, the thrill of blood sport. Was it an Ai'Brone game? Were they abducting contestants, now? Dressing them, even? She did not move from the magical wall as, with her bewilderment wearing thin, she whispered, “Only in Corone.”

Other characters would have seen Astarelle (“Roht Mirage” to the previous night's revellers) swagger through the barrier, immediately collapse, then rouse herself in the scene above.

[Dead & Walking]

Grond limped slowly through the barrier of The Cell into the clearing full of tree stumps, wood chips, and grass. He had signed up because this would be a great opportunity to show that he was more then just a zombie. He was a tactician and a master of hand to hand combat. He would not loose to a bunch of muscle heads or a trickster. He would be the one tricking them.

I will lure them in with my dumb zombie routine. Then when they get close I'll use my super human strength and mastery of hand-to-hand combat to bring down my opponent. Yes that will do it, he thought as he continued to trudge deeper into clearing as he waited for the first sucker to fall for his trap. Man I wish I could run

[hoytti]

Sorish walked towards his cell. It was nestled deep in a forest. Now Sorish knew he was probably going to be the tallest of all the contestants in the cell. His 11'7 frame was really hard for any creature to beat. Sorish wore his normal Blue & Green Coralian Battle Armor covered in his Hardened White Fish Scale Robe. His Coral Beard was now down to about his chest. Sorish also held a Blue Coralian Short Sword in his right hand as the coral like weapon glistened in the sunlight. He also held a Blue Coralian Shield that also glistened as the sun shone on it.

Next to Sorish walked his girlfriend Korra, his sister Sanderia, and Korra's brother Ethen.

Korra stood about 13'5, she had on a beautiful rainbow fish dress that Sorish swore made her even curvier then she already was. Her green skin shimmered due to the slime that covered her body.

Sanderia stood at 5'8, She wore a cute little white sundress. She had the same colored skin as Korra. A sword sat in it's sheath on her left hip.

While the the other three coralians looked at least humble. Ethen looked regal. He wore a sailfish robe that his father made him. He also had a cape bade out of the sailfish's dorsal fin. His pure blue skin plus dashing looks would make any woman fall over in shock. Sorish believed that this was the reason for Sanderia crush on him.

As they approached the cell. Sorish noticed that just inside the clearing, a lady was fainted. One he recognized. Roht, the woman who tried to harass him the other night at the bar. Sorish charged forward to slam Roht and maybe even dismember her. "You will pay for forcing yourself on me!" he yelled as he passed through the barrier and was locked in the cell.

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas crept slowly through the forest. He wasn't going to be stupid this time. Last fight he was forced to retreat because of his partner not only left him, but because he had just upped and attacked the men. This time he was ready. He would not broadcast his position, instead he would us stealth and just last. As he made it to the barrier he heard a yell and looked to the left, there was a giant coral man run by, headed towards a woman who was in the barrier. Barnabas shook his head as he stepped into the barrier himself. After a second look, he noticed that the woman was Roht, a woman that he bumped into as she left a tavern the other day.

FLASHBACK

Barnabas had just left the inn he was staying at when Roht left a tavern in a full sprint and ran right into him. He was thrown back into a wall on the other side of the street as she continued to run. She didn't even look back to see what she hit. Now Barnabas would of normal ignored being hit considering he was one, weightless, and two, invisible, people ran into him all the time, but usually they would look to see, who or what they hit, especially when they hear a thunk. But this girl did nothing at all. She just continued on her way. The next thing I know, the tavern was swarmed by Ixian Knights.

Barnabas walked up to a man in the back and asked, "Excuse me sir, care to explain what's going on?" The knight didn't turn to me but said, "A bar brawl happened because of a woman who goes by Roht Mirage." He started to turn as he continued to say, "If you seen anything please tell use." He then looked confused when he looked right at me, a reaction I've seen many times. But then a look of realization appeared on his face and he smiled. "You must be Barnabas Casmir Tourneymant. So as I've said, mind helping us with this case?"

Barnabas smiled, not that the knight could tell. "Of course, I happened to have been sent flying into that wall behind me by a woman who ran out of that tower. She didn't even look back as she ran down the street in that direction." He pointed in the direction the woman ran. "It was probably Roht."

The knight nodded then thanked Barnabas before the knight returned to duty.

END FLASHBACK

Barnabas really hoped Roht survived long enough for him to kill her. However, it looked like that man of coral would get first dibs. He continued to walk till he spotted a zombie. Seriously who lets a zombie in a tournament? he thought. Then again, this wasn't the strangest creature that was let into a tournament. He once had to fight a burrow worm. Not fun.

FLASHBACK

It was years ago, he had entered his first tournament. It was a Battle Royal. They would fight to the death, no revival, and you keep the head of your opponents as a trophy each head you hack off gets added to the trophy stand. Barnabas walked into the tournament and looked as his opponents. Most of them were his brothers and sisters as was tradition. However there were a few none Invisible men.

There was a Gorogonog, A humanoid that had MRI abilities that was so powerful that it could be miles away and still see you. His body was was the normal humanoid however, where his eyes were, there was just Mesh like substance. It was actually quite disturbing.

Another Creature that was around was a Drogno, A creature that looked like a dragon, but didn't shoot fire. Instead it used it's tail as a whip and it's claws as swords. It also had a much harder hide then a regular dragon.

Finally there was the burrow worm. Just as the name suggests, it burrowed underground and when it found it's pray, it would jump up out of the ground and snap it's jaws shut.

Barnabas looked up at the tournament roster as it randomly choose their opponents. And just his luck, he got the Burrow Worm.

END FLASHBACK

It took him an hour, but Barnabas finally took that beast down and won that tournament, he also wiped out his species in the process. Hey at least he will be spitting up eggs for the next generation in a next year.

Barnabas returned to the barrier and leaned against it as he watched the other contestants.

[Reine]

"Ella Chamber, huh?["/I]

Faelynn Thiadore's eyes scanned across the barrier that was supposed to contain them. She couldn't see it overly well, but having some skill in the form of magic manipulation, she could see a faint outline, a trick of the light if she turned her head to the side and glanced at it at just the right angle as the sun pierced through the foliage. It kind of shimmered, or perhaps a more apt description would be that it wavered, distorted the world seen through it slightly. The trees on the other side of the chamber looked less real, like a painting that had been smudged by a carelss artist. Even the castle off in the distance looked blurred when seen through the bubble of power meant to trap all of them within.

Idly, she wondered what kind of strength it would take to break that powerful field. Or, what kind of person could make such a thing.

Milling around her intended cage were crowds of people; large and small. They huddle amongst each other, their voices a cadence like cicadas that carried on the hot summer breeze and filled her ears with the constant drone. Just background noise, she told herself. Nothing to focus on, she had enough to worry about when it came to this crazy endeavour.

[I]"Out with it..." Jared said, his grey eyes looking at her pointedly.

"I joined The Cell!" Faelynn blurted out.

He practically choked on the piece of bread he was eating, quickly washing it down with half a glass of water before he looked at her incredulously. His entire face portraying both his surprise, shock and disbelief, crushing any hope that he'd support her right then and there."You're kidding right? That place is a glorified death trap!"

She flinched, the smile on her face vaishing in an instant. "I thought you would be excited for me...and support me"

The expression on his face would have been priceless, quite theatrical really. He opened ad closed his mouth several times as he tried to find something to say to her.

"I do support you." He said, reaching out and cupping her cheek with a warm hand. "I've just seen people walk away from that tournament with scars, and not the kind you can see."

She could still hear Jared's words echoing around inside of her skull. Fae had been so excited when news of the tournament had reached her ears. Finally, a chance for her to test her skills in the ultimate arena against some of the best that Althanas could throw at her. Growing up in Underwood and living in Radasanth, she'd spent plenty of time in The Citadel, but the thief had never entered a tournament before, never dreamed of it really. She preferred not to fight at all. The tricks she had up her sleeve were designed to distract so she could slip away without a blow ever being struck or a drop of blood shed. But all the recent training with Jared Cesarino and Seth Dahlios made her wonder, and that wandering thought had led her to believe she had a chance, and a good one at that.

Until Jared so blatantly called her out on it and crushed most of her excitement in under thirty seconds flat.

At least in the end, her red headed thief had decided to accompany her back to Corone. In fact, he should be here somewhere, cheering her on in that large crowd of people. Or perhaps her Lavinian kept himself to the forest. Her eyes roamed that way, towards the tall trees that bathed as much of the arena in shade as they could. Fae couldn't see him, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. He said he would be. She had no reason to doubt him. Could really only hope not to disappoint him somehow in all of this.

Turning her eyes from the spectators, the young thief started dissecting the other participants as best she could. In all honesty, she was far better at judging how to break into a place than how someone could kill her, but one of the fighters she already recognized. In fact, she watched in surprise as the woman from last night came waltzing into the arena--still wearing that slinky black dress too--and then promptly fell face first into the grass.

Okay...

That, Fae assumed, had to hurt, or at least be slightly uncomfortable.

Wondering if she was down for the count, the thief found herself surprised when Roht Mirage promptly jolted up into a sitting position and took stalk of her surroundings like she had no idea where she was.

This chick has some serious issues.

Of course, she had been all over some freaky looking half demon last night, so Faelynn knew she should not be surprised. She went for him after she'd blatantly been all over Jared. Honestly, Fae left the man alone for five minutes to visit the washroom and came back to find some busty vixen all up and practically on her man. Needless to say, she'd had the last laugh though, when Jared turned her down and Fae got her own revenge.

A smirk touched her lips as she felt the weight of her newly procured items resting against her wrists, and at this point, hidden under the black and purple sleeves of her jacket. The thief didn't normally pickpocket off individuals, but no one touched her man like that and got away with it. Jared Cesarino belonged to her and no one else. She'd left a couple marks on him last night just to drive the point home, you know, in case he forgot and all.

The other contestants, so far, seemed to be a zombie--gross--and a freakishly tall giant. And by freakishly tall, she meant it. The guy literally stood at over twice her height. But, at that point she knew it would be a disadvantage to him. She'd be able to sneak right through his legs and come up on his back before he even knew what hit him. He paid no mind to her though, as he charged Roht Mirage, heedless of the fact that the match had yet to even begin.

Pushing up the sleeves of her jacket--damn that sun was getting hot--Faelynn drew in a deep and calming breath. Well, it was supposed to be deep and calming, but it did nothing to assuage the butterflies that danced in her stomach or the nervous twitch of her fingers as they sought some kind of action. Adrenaline already leaked into her body, slowly, making her nerves tingle and her senses sharpen. She took that first step towards the cage a nervous wreck inside, but a confident warrior on the out. Amalia rested on her back, The Iron Shackles on her feet, what more could she ask for?

Victory.

Head held high, wind blowing stray strands of hair about her face and her feet crushing down on grass and wildflowers alike, Faelynn 'Reine' Thiadore strode through that magical barrier like she owned it; no, like she made it. It swept over her, causing goosepimples to break out across her skin, most notable along her thighs where her shorts didn't quite reach down far enough to cover her, and her boots didn't come up high enough. The sensation felt similar to a caress, but once inside the barrier she reached back and found a solid and mostly invisible wall that felt as cool as stone. Apparently, The Cell took it's name rather seriously.

Stepping away from the curved wall of her cage, Fae weaved between the tree stumps and found an area of shade, the tall branch of an oak tree protecting her from the bright sunlight. There she stood and waited for the toll of noon to begin and the fight to start.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle absently toed at the reed staff laying before her feet.

“Can the Ai'Brone control my sand?” she mused aloud, more unnerved by that idea than the zombie that stood among the severed tree stumps. They hadn't bothered to cover the mark on her forehead, but she had bared it in a Citadel arena before without the Kar'Roh tracking her down. Yet, there was an unusual amount of sand on her face, more than the tattoos warranted. She lifted a hand to touch the concealed flesh, and it drew a wince from her. “I have a black eye?” she gasped, then looked skyward, “What in the depths!”

A sudden bellow from her left side ended the brooding, and her bruised eye twinged as her face dropped in shock once more. A giant?! It was the only word that sprang to mind. She quickly glanced at the zombie, then back to the giant. Yeah... forcing themselves on others is what they-

He means me! The giant closed with sword raised and face twisted in a horrible rage.

Ai'Brone trick or not, Astarelle ran, her skirt flaring behind her like a sleek storm cloud. The ground shook with the force of the giant's attack. Reflexively, she did a quick two-step skip to ride out the loss of balance, then planted one heavy shoe on a severed trunk and vaulted to the next stump. There, she turned in a crouch. “How did I force-” she began, but her voice sputtered out as the giant reared up. The anger in its eyes wasn't that of a beast or illusion. It was personal and all too real.

“What's wrong?” came a muffled voice. Astarelle snapped her head to the side. Ten paces away, a woman no younger than herself pressed her hands to the outside of the invisible wall. She would have been recognizable regardless, with her forehead discolored by an old burn scar that swallowed part of her hair line, but Astarelle actually knew her... somehow.

“You. You tied my braid!” she shouted as the barest sliver of a memory returned.

The young woman tilted her ear to the barrier as if she had misheard. “Uh... yeah?” she called back with a look of utter confusion contorting the soft face below her scar. “What's wrong?” she asked again.

“Bury me if I know,” Astarelle cursed as she turned away. Whatever was happening, it was real; her scandalous outfit, the familiar stranger, and most real of all, the giant. She nervously locked eyes with it again, then raised a hand to summon her staff. It popped weakly from the torn earth beside the giant's feet, toppled end over end, and wedged itself against a stump halfway between them.

Today was full of surprises; horrible, awful surprises.

[Breaker]

The doorway materialised between a stunted yew and a broken oak that marked Concordia's final fringe. Aside from its sudden appearance in the forest sidelining Corone's bloodiest tournament, there was nothing remarkable about the door. But when its brass knob turned a truly remarkable man stepped through.

Black metal boots crunched loam and dead twigs alike as Breaker paced a safe distance from the portal and pivoted, shielding his eyes against the rays lancing through Concordia's foliage. The sleeve of his immaculate white denim kimono jacket fluttered in a pleasant breeze. The same wind stirred the cuffs of his matching gi pants and the ends of the red belt knotted about his waist. The symmetrical maul of a massive sledgehammer peeked over his right shoulder, and the plain pommel of a bastard sword balanced it on the left. The dull dehlar of both weapons shone in midday light, but failed to match the proud glow in the warrior's eyes as he watched his friends file through from the door's twin in Underwood.

Anastacia Alliendra stepped daintily over the threshold and strode to his side, green and brown skirts swishing about her knees. Strawberry hair streaked with gold framed her face as she lifted the heels of soft boots long enough to stretch up and kiss him on the cheek. Her lips left a moist rouge impression over the infamous Y-shaped scar that marred his dimples, and she slid a palm up his stubbly jaw and through his close-cropped hair.

"You will win," she told him with overflowing confidence, blue eyes that would haunt the dreams of most men locked into his hazel ones, "the warrior who taught me to wield steel and smile can overcome all this tourny may offer." She squeezed his muscled arm, petite fingers barely able to wrap halfway around the biceps, and then pressed both hands to her belly and breathed slowly. It was a trick for calming nerves she'd mastered during her forsaken career as a golden call girl. Although Stacia had enjoyed most aspects of the work she'd been reared for since infancy - the elegant clothing and costly makeup, the sense of secrecy and anticipation, the control she held over any man who fell between her thighs. But when civil war gripped Corone she'd abandoned her silky gowns and feather beds for practical woolens and begun combat training with the Underwood Watch.

"Yore lookin' dandy, Sheriff," came the gruff voice of Terech Bodorson as he sidled through the doorway. For once the old dwarf wore no weapons on his back nor combat rings in his beard. "I still don't see 'ow garbin' yoreself like some poncey Akashiman prince 'eaded to a royal ball will help yeh in the Cell. But yeh don't be needin' help in any case." A simple belted woolen tabard billowed around short legs and bulky shoulders as he stepped to Josh's other side, wild red and grey hair waving in the wind. The Master of Ravenheart Academy reached out a thick hand, scarred and burned from a lifetime of fighting and working the forge. The Headmaster and the former Sheriff of Underwood clasped forearms and nodded sagely to one another. "This bloody contest better bring us enough fame to find a decent flaming replacement," Bodorson muttered darkly. Since Joshua's recent semi-retirement from the position of Sheriff, demands on the dwarf's time and attention had tripled.

"I'm sure someone will step forward," Breaker said, gesturing casually at the battleground behind him, "the fields are ripe with legends-to-be this Autumn." The dwarf snorted louder than a warhorse. Over of his matted nest of hair Josh saw the doorway fade and vanish as the final member of their party landed on the forest floor.

"Really Josh?" Jake Narmolanya joked, strutting up to his friend and mentor with a spring in his step, "I thought you'd have killed them all by the time I got through." The cheeky half-elf stowed the enchanted quill he'd used to maintain the doorway beneath his brown leather jacket. He clasped forearms with Josh in an exaggerated version of Bodorson's ritual, pounding the taller warrior on the back. Perhaps a bit harder than necessary, after he noticed the shape of Stacia's lips on Josh's cheek. "Is it time?" Jake asked as they separated.

Breaker smiled and stood tall, rolling his shoulders and feeling the weight of his weapons - those on his back and those concealed beneath his clothing - shift and settle like snuggling lovers. Of all the beings on Althanas from the demons crawling in her depths to the deities decorating her night sky, the three standing before him represented his most trusted companions. Stacia, who would place tiny hands on slim hips and tell him he was being a woolbrain, even when the entire Town Council supported his idealistic notions. Jake, who gladly worked to exhaustion day after day helping him train with weapons or empty hands. Bodorson, who had shared age-old secrets of swordplay and spent the previous night putting a razor's edge to all of Breaker's blades.

"Yes... I think it's time," he told Jake, feeling adrenaline trickle into his bloodstream as if through a grudging valve.

The half-elf crowed like a rooster and raced past his friends. He cartwheeled over the first low bushes blocking his path and flowed into a chain of back-handsprings that continued 'till he stood a mere pace from the battleground, faced toward his friends and the growing crowd.

"My lords and ladies!" Jake roared in his best ring-announcer's voice. He cast one splayed hand straight up in the air and pointed with the other at his three comrades, who followed in his wake at a normal pace. "My demons and direlings!" The half elf added as he noted more of the multi-ethnic spectators paying him mind. "My mystics and minions!" Jake built steam like an accelerating Aleraran engine as eyes all around the Ella Chamber fell to him.

"Preeeee-senting! The Master of Dajas Pagoda! The spoiler of the Ai'Brone Citadel! The veteran of the Cell! The Dodger of bullets and the Breaker of his Maker.... Josh-oo-waaa Crow-nen!"

Joshua's face flushed as he came to rest a pace from the Mystics' barrier, a smattering of applause and catcalls washing over him.

"Thanks for keeping that modest," he said flatly.

"I could have called you Uncrowned King of the Tiered Mountain," Jake grinned, coming to stand beside Stacia and rubbing her back familiarly, "but I'd hate to make a braggart of you."

"'Twas a fine speech, skinnybritches," Bodorson chuckled, making no effort to hide the smile he'd worn since Jake addressed the audience.

"Can all of you see it?" Josh asked. He stepped close to the translucent shield. To his eyes it appeared as a filmy layer of solidified air, sparking every so often as light and dark magic coursed through it.

"Aye," Bodorson replied, "Mystics do make pretty things."

"It winks in and out," Jake added, "but I know it's there."

"I can't," Stacia said, frustration weighting her tone. "What am I supposed to see?" She stomped the grass with the last word.

"Keep watching," Josh told her as he turned away, "your senses are getting stronger." He gave his friends a final nod and then turned and plunged into the arena.

The mana shield washed over him like a light summer shower, and he left all concerns for the outcome of the battle outside. The Cell's Grandmaster, Sei Orlouge, had invited him to compete alongside a request for his services as Chief Investigator of the Ixian Knights. For years Cronen had avoided affiliation with any of the clans and corporations that fought for precedence in Corone. And suddenly in the space of a few weeks, he found himself involved with two. Shortly after Sei's letter arrived a fledgling group called Chronicle established their headquarters in Underwood. His meeting with the co-founder Luned Bleddyn had been brief but meaningful. Chronicle sought balance, the Ixian Knights order. Two influential groups with harmonious goals akin to his own, and the leaders of both hinted it might increase membership if the Champion of the Cell came from their ranks. Cronen was all for teamwork and synergy, but the final force that pushed him to enroll in the famous tournament had come from no mortal.

As the sun crept to its zenith Josh pulled a long blue satin kerchief from inside his kimono jacket and knotted it tight about his neck. It was a token of his Lady's favor. A calming reminder of her colors. The kerchief waved like a lazy ocean tide as the breeze sprang up again.

The battle began.

Josh scanned his opponents with a glance, recognizing some but fixating on the tallest. The strangely armored man was the first to show aggression, charging one of the chamber's smaller competitors with a roar of rage. The woman turned and fled - she looked familiar for a moment - but then hopped atop a tree stump and faced away. The enraged behemoth bore down on her like a beast out of children's nightmares.

Breaker knew nothing of the coral-encrusted warrior, except that his massive reach would make him more dangerous as the battle wore on. Quickness and strength counted for little if your adversary lopped off your head from four paces away. And at that moment the beast was commited to his attack on the crouching woman.

Cronen cupped both hands in front of his face and and conjured water vapour from the earth and air. Power as potent as that sustaining the arena's shield poured through his veins, opening the floodgates so adrenaline flowed freely. The warmth and vitality that spread from scalp to toes felt better than sinking into a soothing hot spring.

The vapour suspended before him froze into a dozen tiny darts, each strong as steel and sharp as a needle. He arched his wrists and flexed callused fingers and thrust both palms forward.

Ice flechette shot over the woman on the treestump toward the Coralian swordsman. Grouped in tight formation, their frigid points sought to sever that long neck.


I have permission to reference Sei and Luned throughout this thread for storyline purposes, Jake and Stacia are my characters, and Bodorson is an Underwood NPC usable by anyone. Used ice manipulation/craft to attack Hoytti.

[hoytti]

Sorish saw the daggers fly over the head of Roht and raised his shield to protect himself. The needles shattered as they struck his shield, he then lowered it and growled out, "Do not interfere for this woman had repeatedly tried to kiss me as well as activate my mating session last night. If it wasn't for the fact that I grabbed her arm before she rubbed my crown, my girlfriend and I would of had to complete the ritual and produce a shunned child! I will kill her if it's the last thing I do!" He then continue his charge, shield at the ready just in case the man tried anything.

[Dead & Walking]

Grond continued to look like the typical Zombie. Come on someone, take the bait, he thought as he continued to trudge slowly towards the other competitors.

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas just stood there and watched the group of warriors. There was a giant coral man who seemed to have been molested by the girl he had attacked, an apparent veteran to the games known as Cronen, an zombie who seemed to be doing normal zombie stuff, you know, chasing after mortals for their brains, and then there was that woman that snuck into the tree's he didn't know what she had planned but it didn't really matter. All that mattered was for him to survive, and if the meant he would have to stay over out of the way, so be it. However, he felt that he was missing something like there should have been more fighters. Oh well, I'll just wait and see.

[Reine]

I]"Stay out of sight as long as possible."[/I] Seth's advice echoed inside her head.

That didn't seem to be a problem.

Faelynn looked around the arena and realized that she'd disappeared from everyone's minds. She'd gone to stand in the shade merely to keep the sun off her head, but her dark clothing allowed her to disappear in a rather pleasant way. Any other person may look at this as an opportunity for a sneak attack, but Fae was a thief, not a warrior at heart. Thieves were better defensive fighters, and preferred to use stealth to their advantage, not walk up behind someone and stab them in the back while they were engaging scantily clad women and throwing ice darts at freakishly tall man yelling about mating sessions and weird things that well, she'd just rather not know about. Like...ew.

Then she took a closer look at the latest addition to their battle arena and felt her heart practically cease inside her chest before kicking itself into hyperactivity.

Yeah, she'd ignored the guy yelling at the top of his lungs—honestly, who does that anyway, was he five?—but the face, now that rang a couple bells for a thief and none of them were good.

Holy shit... it's Joshua Cronen, the freaking Sheriff of Underwood! Oh I am so dead! So very, very, very dead!

She could feel a small bubble of panic beginning to bloom in her chest before she squashed it like the little bug it was. He hadn't seen her yet, heck, he probably wouldn't even recognize her anymore. She wasn't some lanky little teenage girl, she was 18 now and, for the most part, all grown up and with the curves to show for it. Not to mention, Fae never had a personal run in with the Sheriff of her hometown except to say hi and bye and answer his questions on how her father's blacksmith shop was going. He'd never caught her stealing. Hell, none of the guards in Underwood had caught her stealing. So she should be just fine. As long as he sucked at remembering faces.

If he did recognize her, she could only hope that the Sheriff would not tell her mom and dad about this. Oh god, they'd have kittens in the corner and then Ferynn would beat the crap out of her and Connaire, eek, she didn't even want to think about what Connaire would do. Tease her to no end if she lost? Praise her into infinity if she won? Throw her in the lake? Bury her up to her neck next to a fire ant colony? The list went on and on!

Knowing she needed to focus on the present and not the current turmoil going on inside of her brain, Fae cautiously shifted her position through the shade of the trees. With the sun at it's zenith above her, there weren't too many shadows for her to hide in. Mainly just along the outskirts of the bubble, as close to the creeping branches of Concordia as she could physically get without actually leaving her cage, which she assumed to be impossible until the end of the match.

Keeping an eye on the charging giant and the now strangely meek Roht Mirage—honestly, she'd been a heck of a lot more gutsy the night before—Fae shifted around to try and get into an advantageous position secluded in the tree stumps and large, splintered pieces of wood debris, that allowed her to see all the contestants and eliminate any one of them from sneaking up on her cute little ass, tightly snugged into her black and purple shorts.

"Let them pick each other off one-by-one, it'll give you less to deal with."

So far, they didn't need any encouragement in that department.

[black shadow]

minor bunnies allowed by Hoytti, and accounts.

Black Shadow heard about this tournament, "The Cell". Fight to your death, win money, simple as that. Money, He needed money. So enter the tourney, he did. He now stood out side the dome, watching the others fight each other. He then noticed someone familiar. Sorish Mon Larsh, the corilian who had helped him save a friend. An ally of his, going berserk at a woman. Well I guess this tournament brings out the worst in people, eh? Black Shadow thought to himself as he tried to step into the barrier. As he tried to enter though, something got in his way. What the heck? He thought as he looked around. He then pushed harder and stumbled forward as he entered. Well that was strange.

Black Shadow then pulled out his bow, readied an arrow, and shot at Sorish's sword. The arrow clashed with his sword, causing Sorish's steel gaze to shift to Shadow. Black Shadow then waved his hand, and motioned him to come over.

[Tourneymant]

One minute Barnabas was up against the wall and the next thing he new he was was bumped into and sent about half way to the other combatants. Once he steadied himself he turned around to see a man dressed in black stumble through the barrier. Barnabas held in a laugh but then ducked as an arrow shot over his head and hit the coral mans sword. Barnabas looked over his shoulder and saw the coral man look towards them. Barnabas looked back at the man in black and saw him motion a come here, he quietly snuck behind the man and leaned up against the wall where he had stood before to continue his observation, though he also contemplated on whether or not to play fight maker.

[hoytti]

Sorish was surprised when he saw the arrow hit his sword. He then turned toward the perpetrator. I can't believe it, it's Black Shadow, he thought as Shadow waved him over. He was split, he really wanted to kill Roht but he also knew that shadow would be a great ally. After a second of thought he finally turned towards Roht.

"This isn't over," Sorish said as he then walked over to Shadow with an eye on the man who had shot ice at him.

[Dead & Walking]

Grond was frustrated, he was almost to the group but still, no one took his bait, but he wouldn't give up, oh no, he would walk right up to one of them if he had to. He would get his hand-to-hand battle if it was the last thing he did. So Grond continued to trudge forward, as his feet stumbled over tree trunks that were left over from the clearing of the forest.

[Warpath]

The air was warm and the sky blue – clear. It was a day for beaches and picnics, open windows and spontaneous games of kick-ball in the cobblestone streets. Instead, the people of Radasanth gathered to watch men and women savage one another.

The crowds were growing restless as high noon drew nearer. A boy – some called him a young man – dodged and weaved with the practiced agility of a playful youth. From the other side of the Ixian Castle, he heard unintelligible chanting, and then a fierce cry. So it had started there, too.

The wind was sun-warmed and gentle, and sent the trees a-sway, and the leaves all made a sound like a regiment of ethereal librarians, hushing the crowd in unison. The throng was as oblivious to noise-averse ghosts as it was to the boy, who twisted and danced, and sometimes struggled when two bodies closed in on him and would not part for his flailing. Somebody cursed at him, but he kept running.

He was the son of a mystic, that boy, and what he wanted most in the world was to be a monster hunter, tough and world-wise, and one day he swore Sei Orlouge would count him a friend and heed his council. Even pretty Emma Orlouge would smile at him and say how brave he was, and good. Today he ran errands though, because even monster hunters start somewhere.

He ran right up to a tent erected some distance from the ring from whence he came, and though he still had plenty of breath he hesitated. The tent was striped red and white and it was faded, and as its material rippled in the breeze it reminded him of old bloody bandages. The trees were sparser here, cleared wide enough that there was room for the tent, and so the sun was bright enough to prevent the boy from seeing anything within. He could hear a sound, though, and it made his skin prickle despite the pleasant warmth.

The sound came in three parts. First a metallic, ringing clang, and then a long grinding scrape, and then, worst of all, silence. He listened for what felt like a long time, and the sound had a rhythm, and it was always the same. Soon he could not wait anymore, and he reminded himself of the Orlouges and his ambitions, and then he stepped forward and entered the tent. Slowly.

There was only one person in the tent, shadowy, as the only light came in from behind the boy. It was a man, crouched in front of a tall stool. There was a small round mirror perched on the stool, but the boy could not see the man’s face in it, and did not think to look anyway. His eyes were locked on the large knife in the man’s hand. Its silvery blade was smeared with some kind of pitch, which the man wiped off on the edge of a bucket beside him.

Then he raised the knife and dragged the blade across his scalp slowly, taking the pitch and the hair off of his skin in a long, practiced stroke from back to front. The knife came down again with a harsh clang, and then it scraped along the edge of the bucket and left a glob of amber-brown tar, pierced a thousand times by minuscule spears of black hair.

“Speak,” the man said without turning around. The knife came up again. The boy realized he could hear the edge scraping the stubble from the skin, like sandpaper.

“Uh…well.”

The man’s back was huge. He was naked from the waist up, clad in leather from the over-sized broad belt down, except for his forearms which were armored in bulky metal. His spine was somehow harsher than any other, framed by massive, hard lines of muscle. The boy felt that his whole body was hardly the size of one shoulder, and this guy’s neck reminded him keenly of oxen. Angry ones.

And he was scraping all the hair off his head with a bowie knife.

“It’s just…well, Mister Skovik, you said not to pester you until the fighting started and, well, see, the fighting started.”

Skovik finished dragging the knife over his dome one last time, and then unceremoniously dropped the whole thing into the bucket with a tremendous clatter. He exhaled as he stood, shoulders flexing like there were nautical ropes being pulled tight under his skin, and as he turned to face the boy he lifted a filthy rag and began wiping the excess pitch from his skin.

“Show me.”

The boy stood staring for a long moment, for a number of reasons. Flint Skovik was one of the strangest human beings the boy had ever seen. He was muscular in the way of beasts; wide instead of tall, full-bearded, angry-eyed, and the young mystic never knew anybody to shave all the hair off his head with an oversized knife.That was reason enough to give pause, but the brute also had an accent. The aspiring monster hunter had never heard a Salvar-raised tongue before. It was as if the words themselves were heavy in the air, like they were fifty pounds each and the man was effortlessly lifting them out of his body and dropping them into one’s ear to bludgeon.

But the boy let all that go, and focused instead on the most obvious cause for concern: “Um…forgive me sir, but shouldn’t you like to bring your things?”

Flint stared at the boy utterly without expression.

“That is…weapons, sir. Or perhaps armor, other than those bits on your arms there, I mean. Or a shirt. Perhaps.”

Flint went on staring for a long minute. “No,” he said finally, and then he tossed the rag aside and walked past the boy and out into the sun.

The boy jogged after him, and when he caught up he kept stride beside the brute, staring up at his face, never looking away even as they began passing through the crowd. Flint did not need to dodge or dance. People moved aside for him, and those that didn’t he shouldered through. The drunk ones cursed until they saw him, and then they muttered instead. The throng got thicker, but that didn’t matter. Flint never slowed.

“There’s a giant in there,” the boy blurted out.

Flint said nothing.

“And a ninja. And a walking dead guy. And a huge scary guy in a dress.”

“They are nothing,” Flint said. ‘Nothing’ was an eighty-pound word and the boy felt like he had to carry it across his shoulder like an Atlas in miniature.

He stopped walking.




Flint balled his fists so that his forearms flexed against the insides of his vambraces. There were needles there, shifting inside his flesh, some that drank his blood and some that spit it back into him. The pain was constant, an ache that was becoming sweetly familiar – so consistent that it was beginning to feel ordinary. During the first few weeks he wanted nothing more than to rip the needles out and make the pain stop, but now…now his veins would lament their absence as keenly as he’d miss a severed finger.

He embraced the pain, and let it stir the anger in his belly.

And then he stepped through the invisible barrier, and looked for a body to break.

[Breaker]

"This is not the Cell," Jake Narmolanya said abruptly. He glanced from Terech to Stacia, getting a distant harumph from the dwarf and barely a glance from the lady before she resumed studying the arena. "I mean it. Did either of you see the last one?"

"Every tournament is different from the last, lad," Bodorson said stoically, though he seemed bored as well, rummaging in his tabard's deep pockets for pipe and tobacco.

"What happened last time?" Stacia asked, wide eyes watching Cronen's hail shatter on the Coralian's shield.

"What didn't happen last time?" Jake crowed. "I sneaked in with some friends just as the fighting started. There were bullets flying everywhere, explosions, lava coming up from the earth. There were lions, Stacia." Jake shook his head, marveling at the memories that had driven him to seek the Breaker out in Underwood and study as his student.

"The poor lions! I hope they didn't get hurt." the petite woman said, keeping her eyes on the battlefield to hide their sly expression.

Jake opened his mouth to respond with a remark about monks healing lions, too, when the crustacean-armored giant facing Josh bellowed a deafening string of what sounded like orders.

The crowd let out a deep vowel of displeasure as the sparse fighting in the Ella Chamber ground to a halt. Booooooooooooo.

"Did that giant seaman just tell Josh what to do?" Jake joked.

Stacia giggled and then sealed her mouth with both hands.

Bodorson stood. "Don't let that big bully push you around, Breaker!" The dwarf bellowed, and then chuckled and lit his pipe. "There y'are children," he said as smoke spilled from his lips. "Be satisfied."




Cronen was doubled over, laughing uncontrollably. He'd dueled mages, berserkers, wizards and warriors of all kind from Radasanth to Scara Brae. He'd fought in two civil wars and faced a roster of legends in the previous Cell. He had swum the deepest waters the world of violence offered and become a shark.

But never before had an adversary berated him for interfering with retribution of a nearly-activated mating ritual. He wiped a tear of mirth from his cheek with the corner of the blue kerchief as he straightened, careful not to smear the rosebud left by Stacia's lips. As he recovered from the ridiculous tirade he noticed the distinct lack of movement in the Ella Chamber. Aside from the laboriously limping zombie, they all seemed to be standing still.

Josh glanced at Sei Orlouge, distant atop his tower. Dirks would have started shooting people by now, he thought, remembering the last tournament Grandmaster. Max Dirks had a taste for death and illicit dealings he would never share, but the criminal's attitude had proven effective in finishing the Cell. None of us are getting out of here 'till these poor people are dead, he reminded himself.

Bodorson's baritone provided the final push. Cronen took off like an arrow from a bow.

He raced toward the Coralian through a short arc, boots beating the earth faster than a drumroll, body a white blur with a red stripe. His first three strides carried him past the ever-advancing zombie. He grasped the hilt of his bastard sword with the first step, unsheathed it and slashed at the corpse's chest in one smooth motion on the second, and rammed the blade back into its scabbard on the third. Like brushing your teeth.

Dirt churned and broken branches flew as Breaker navigated the stump-spotted field. He swept past the woman who'd fled the Coralian, failing to see her face but again finding something familiar in her form and garb. She seemed so powerless, and yet he'd glimpsed complex threads of power woven about her like a spider's shawl. One hand flared behind him, fingers flexed and vibrating like divining rods. They found moisture in the browning grass, water still stored in the roots of felled trees, thirsty even in death. The earth issued a blast of steam at the Fallien woman's feet and ankles, steam that froze into a mound of ice as swiftly as it had appeared, attempting to ensnare her from boots to knees.

As Josh neared his target he unslung the hammer from its bondage on his back. It was a single dense lump of dehlar, the handle wrapped in leather for grip. A big brutal ugly weapon.

A giant impact for a giant problem.

Josh made no effort to mask his intentions. He charged the scaly swordsman and swung his hammer beside him, blunt maul aimed to pulverize the creature's hips. Breaker's unstoppable momentum guaranteed his mad dash would continue even if he missed - straight at the immovable Mystic wall.


Roht approved my description of his character's latent magic.

[Roht Mirage]

“Take your time,” Astarelle squeaked to the giant's back with a numb, limp wave. If not for the needles and that last distracting arrow, she might have been pounded into sludge while she struggled to piece together layer upon layer of nonsense.

Tried to... 'activate' a mating session? Tried to rub his 'crown'? Please let the crown be the thing on his head and not- Her face, her neck, and even her chest turned dark under the sinuous tattoo. I- I don't remember that. But, I don't remember not doing it either.

A gaggle of muted voices pulled her eyes to the barrier again. That girl with the burn scar had been joined by at least ten others, some were boys and girls barely out of childhood. They all gesticulated wildly to each other, mouths working like a flock of hungry sea birds, but she couldn't make out their conversation over the sound of booming laughter behind her. At least someone's having a good time.

She almost turned to find her laughing needle-thrower, but stopped. Memories flipped like cards in a sleight-of-hand trick as her gaze played over the young faces. One, a scrappy-haired boy, made her feel a moment of comfort. A taller teenager behind him, face lanky and drawn, caused a bitterness to well up in her throat. He barely spoke to the others. His eyes were fixed on her, disdainful and... smug?

A tall, greying man stepped solidly into the midst of them. His skin was the coppery brown of a Fallien tribesman, and his hair was pulled back in a long tail that looked almost comical behind his decimated hairline. With only a few words, he calmed the youth into silence –though many still had worry lines as they glanced her way- and gestured for the group to move away from the barrier.

“Wait! Master Kotra!” Astarelle called, giving voice to a name that seemed to fall from the sky.

He turned to her with a worried face that she felt she had seen a hundred times. But, there was a glimmer of unfamiliar hope. His dark, heavy eyes, so recognizable she could read them, seemed to say, “In due time, child.” Then, a glance into the arena. “Go.”

The ground suddenly thundered behind Astarelle, and a strange moisture enveloped her feet. The sand of her faux-tattoo convulsed in terror. Don't mix, she thought as crudely as an animal. Acting on pure, hackle-rising instinct, she jumped from the stump and spun, expecting the giant to pulverize her and reclaim his apparently-tarnished decency, only to have a white robe blur past. The whisper of sword uniting with sheath, shick, felt almost physical against her face. She landed, gasping, and was hit with a sudden recognition. It wasn't his face. She saw nothing but his short hair. His body, though clearly powerful, wouldn't separate him from a crowd. What she saw -and instantly knew- was the calloused fist that wrenched a massive hammer from his back. The crystalline formation of ice on the stump escaped her notice. So, she had no context for the screamed -and muted- warning from the scarred woman, and she paid it no mind. That glimmer of familiarity itched at her fiercely.

“When the only water is a single drop,” she grumbled as she ran after him, or tried to. This was a man who could make oasis steeds snort his dust. “Is this some Ai'Brone game?” she asked as loudly as she could. It was almost a shriek, but she was too far beyond embarrassment to care.

A bit of reed caught her eye, and she veered from the hopeless pursuit to where her staff sat stubbornly against the knots of a stump. She held her open hand out, willed the staff to return home, and almost tripped as it trundled toward her feet instead. An exasperated scream cut from her lips while she skidded to a halt, tearing a shallow trough through the grass. The staff dinged off the toe of her shoe as if it hit a metal plate, then thunked woodenly against the woven anklet that stuck oh-so-scandalously from the long slit of her skirt.

Astarelle paled until she was almost Coronian. No. No. No. She felt over the cuffs of the bracers, strapped as tightly as a second skin; barely room for sweat underneath, let alone the thick weaves of lataro reed. Bury me...

A good Farohtian only removes their lataro adornments for two reasons: bathing, and... activating mating sessions.

The blood returned to her face all at once; filled her cheeks, puffed her chest, and topped up her eyes with an unholy fury. This joke is not blasted funny, anymore! The raging priestess kicked her staff skyward and caught it in a white-knuckled grip, then howled to the warrior in white. “Doorman!” Why call him a 'doorman'? Why bloody not?! “Tell me there's Ai'Brone magic here, because I'm about to kick someone's loo out the top of their sand-brained skull!”

She heard a shambling movement past the corner of her eye and spun. Her skirt flared high, baring the sleek, muscled legs of a dancer. The stance she took, though, was anything but graceful. “You volunteering?” she spat, leveling her staff toward whatever remained of the zombie after the doorman's charge.

Sand welled from the porous reed's accusing end like a sliver of bottled sandstorm and hardened in an instant, granting the staff a thick, wickedly-serrated spear point.

[hoytti]

Sorish was on the defense the moment that the icicle thrower charged him with a hammer. Of course, attack the big guy with a big weapon, Sorish thought in irritation as he fully turned toward the man and braced himself with his shield in front of him. The giant hammer had great force behind it, but nothing his shield couldn't take even though it did feel like it had more force behind it then was expected.

Sorish then pushed the hammer up and swung his sword ready to slash anything that got in it's path as he was prepaired to slash a second time and whack his assailant with his shield on the the return swing. He also started to chant in his own language, "Water Bubble, may you come, I need you, oh Water Bubble." As he chanted his voice started to echo and a water bubble started to from behind him ready to be used. Perfect, Sorish thought as the bubble grew to two cubic meters. He then stopped his chant ready to use his next ability, something he should of done earlier. "Water shall dance and the rain shall fall," Sorish chanted as his bubble morphed into the shape of a small humanoid and dance around him.

Sorish was now protected from projectiles as well as fire for three seconds, but that wasn't the reason he did it, oh no, it was for the after effect. Once the bubble returned to just a bubble, it would rain, and his sea creature ability would kick in, any injury he received would heal at one mm per second as long as the rain fell. That was his intention.

[Dead & Walking]

Sand? Grond thought as the the rod turned to a sand spear. He then stopped his fake limp and pulled himself together. The cat was out of the bag when he dodged that attack. He now just needed to get closer. He walked forward at a normal human pace, his back still bent, prepared to grab that staff turned spear and throw it away so he could engage her in hand to hand combat. He couldn't wait to fight.

[Silence Sei]

Sei’s eyes followed Breaker and Sorish as they attacked one another, as well as other competitors. The action in the Ella Chamber was quite underwhelming. Between the shuffling zombie, Roht getting sick, and people trying to stop the action just to talk, there seemed to be very little going on. The crowd seemed to be getting impatient, several people moving onto other chambers while some even fell asleep watching the action.

“Let’s make things a little more interestin’, boss,” a voice came up from behind Sei. The mute did not have to turn around to recognize the thick southern drawl. The voice belonged to Oreo Jones, a member of the Ixian Knights Mercenary Team and known throughout Althanas as ‘The Heartbeat Kid’ due to his innate ability to hear heartbeats. Sei nodded casually as the man walked up beside him, withdrawing a pair of six shooters from beneath his dirty trenchcoat and aiming out the window.

Four shots were fired, two from each gun. One bullet aimed for the feet of Black Shadow, one just past Reine’s head, one between the legs of Baranabas Tourneymant, and a final one aimed just past Flint Slovik’s arm. None of these blows were going to hit their intended targets, but try to motivate them to stop standing around. “That oughta put some fuel in their tank,” Jones said with a smirk.

While normally nothing would be able to penetrate the shield, the Mystics under Sei’s command opened up a small enough hole to allow the projectiles to travel past, before quickly closing the barrier once more.

Sei nodded, locking his fingers together as he watched and awaited the results of Oreo Jones’ labors.

((No eliminations last night, but Oreo Jones, Ella Chamber’s Enforcer, has just fired upon Tourneymant, Reine, blackshadow and Warpath, in hopes to actually get them involved in the action))

[black shadow]

Black Shadow drew another arrow, only to have a bullet barely miss his foot. What?! He though to himself as he saw another bullet fly into the trees. He looked closely, seeing movement within, and readied an arrow. They want me to fight? Then so be it. He thought to himself as he aimed, and saw a woman. There you are. He thought as he released an arrow. Trying to hide... Well, not anymore.

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas jumped when the bullet passed between his leg. No one inside the arena has a gun, so where did that shot come from. He looked at the angle in which the bullet had entered the ground then followed what would have been it's path. So, they want me to fight. Fine but don't expect anything flashy. Barnabas then pulled one of his thirty knives he brought with him and threw it at the only other contender that wasn't in a fight, just as a bullet zipped past the man's arm. His aim dead set and the spin was perfect, however, It would hit the mans shoulder, not his heart, an attention grabber really, and the man wouldn't know who threw it.

(Well Warpath, I guess it's just you and me.)

[Breaker]

Josh ducked beneath the Coralian's attacks casually as line-dancing at a harvest festival. He flashed past the lanky swordsman, forearms vibrating as the sledgehammer scraped up and over the shield. But the Coralian's impossibly long reach served him well - the final stroke of his sinuous sword grazed Cronen's back just below the shoulder, drawing a seeping red line on his immaculate jacket.

He maintained his motion as he met the Mystic barrier. His right foot struck the energy wall and clung, enchantments woven deep into his metal boots coming to life. His abdominals and quadriceps burned with the effort, his shoulder stung where the Coralian blade drew first blood, but he ran up the inside of the dome like an insect trapped beneath an overturned bowl. The shield crackled and sparked with each gravity-defying step but held true as Breaker raced toward the sun.


The distinct pop of small arms rang across the clearing; four shots for four targets.


"Am'aleh drown me!" Jake Narmolanya cursed from his position between Stacia and Terech. "Master Bodorson, they're shooting into the arena!"

"Aye lad," the dwarf agreed, tapping his pipe and spilling ashes to the ground, "yeh've got the flyin' bullets yeh wanted." Terech waved the wooden pipe towards the Grandmaster's tower. "Never fret for Cronen though. They target only those who fail to compete." The dwarf clicked his teeth, seemingly lost in memories from days long past.

"Look!" Stacia exclaimed, removing a hand from her mouth to point at the tallest competitor. A sprite of pure water was dancing about the man like a guardian, its translucent form flashing in the warming sun. "It's so pretty..."

"It won't be for long," Jake muttered, watching the Coralian angrily, "Do you know how seldom Josh needs to hit someone twice?" The half elf crossed his arms, fighting the nagging feeling that someone inside the arena might make a better training partner for the Breaker than he.



Josh planted both feet on the inside of the dome and launched earthward. He activated another enchantment, flipping upright as the weight of each boot increased to a hundred pounds. Legs together, hammer gripped overhead in a streamlined position, he plummeted like a malicious meteorite.

At the last moment Breaker's right boot lashed out at the darkly dressed archer's skull. His left swung to destroy the water spirit as it waltzed around its summoner. And with both hands he brought the hammer down, a vicious blow meant to flatten the Coralian's crown and knock those long legs into the earth like nails.


Sei approved my use of the dome. Note to all participants: Regardless of the success of his attacks, Josh will be striking the ground weighing close to 500lbs with boots and weapons combined, which means a whole lot of kinetic energy. Feel free to express your characters noticing the impact, though I won't write it from his perspective until after Hoytti responds.

[hoytti]

Sorish dived out of the way of the hammer as it went through his dancing water spirit and slammed hard into the ground which shook the who arena and mad some pieces of rock hit Sorish in the back. If I hadn't gotten out of the way, I would have been dead, Sorish thought as rain began to fall and the spirit that had been smashed through reformed into a bubble. He then started to chant again. "Water gun, straight and true. Send him away, thank you." Suddenly the water shot forward straight for the man as he stood up from his attack. This attack could be held for six seconds and if it hit it felt like a ton of really strong punches hit him one after another. Sorish really hopped this would at least give him distance.

[Reine]

Frustration began to well inside her.

Watching the others fight and taking not a single part in it grated on her pride, and many other things. Seth had been explicit in remaining hidden if she could. He said to let them fight each other and step in only when a good opportunity arose, he said to hold back and fight the battles she had to and not willingly and unnecessarily throw herself into the fray just to get killed.

Yeah well, her mentor said a lot of things and Fae didn't necessarily listen to all of them.

She watched the 'fight', or whatever it was, between the giant and succubus whore from last night. The woman seemed quite confused and distraught over everything that was going on around her, not to mention her skin kept changing rapidly from tan, to pale to red and every shade in-between. In all honesty, she reminded her nothing of the woman she'd met last night, the woman she'd distracted quite easily and slipped these lovely reed bracelets right from her wrist, while batting her eyelashes and sliding her free hand up the side of her exposed leg.

Josh Cronen, on the other hand, seemed content to beat everything into a bloody pulp, like usual.

Yeah, I am so not jumping into the fray with him there!

That would lead her into an untimely grave.

However, as she watched, her fingers itching for the familiar feel of her spear Amalia, her legs feeling cramped from not being used, a new comer entered the arena. Like her, he was farther away from the main battle and all the others. Unlike her, he was naked from the waist up and had no hair on his freaking head. Plus, a full beard dominating the hard planes of his face, metal wrapped around arms as thick as her head and his neck—holy hell—it practically blended in with his shoulders it was so bloody thick. Fae didn't think she could wrap both of her hands around it and touch her finger tips together!

"If you get an opportunity to fight someone away from the main brawl, do it."

Her mentor had said that. The man was away from the main attraction and if she didn't start doing something soon she'd explode from inactivity and any other number of ridiculous things!

Rolling her shoulders, Faelynn reached behind her and wrapped her fingers around Amalia. She pulled the Delyn spear from it's sheath upon her back and twisted the rings in the centre of the enchanted weapon. Giving it a quick spin, she watched it unfold to it's full length at just over five feet. The weight a familiar feeling, comforting really. During her training with Oberon this spear had become a third hand, or more aptly, an extension of her hands.

Still keeping to the shadows, Fae slipped along the logs and the stumps, the grass and the splinters. Strangely, this close to Concordia, she could hear the birds and the cicadas louder than she could the grunts and screams of battle and the roar of the crowd.

Coming up along his flank, Faelynn paused.

"Never hesitate to stab someone in the back. This isn't some honour bound battle, Faelynn, it's The Cell. They won't think twice about doing it to you."

She grimaced.

While the thief understood Seth's words, doing it was something else entirely. And Jared was watching her somewhere in that crowd. But she couldn't get at the man's back anyway, he was too close to the wall. She'd have to settle for his side.

Don't get mad at me, Jared. She prayed in her head.

Keeping to that shifting shade, that wove and changed as the wind blew through the area, Fae found herself only feet away from Baldie. Taking a deep breath, she quietly stepped closer to him, her boots squashing the grass with barely a sound, or perhaps it was the sound of her steady breathing overriding anything else. As she got closer to him, the sound of gunfire cracked through the air and Faelynn felt her heart go up into her throat somewhere.

Someone in here had a gun?

Just as the thought passed through her mind, a whizzing went over her head, sound almost too close to her ears for comfort.

Dammit!

She hadn't seen any of the contestants fire it, perhaps someone from the outside? Mayhap they didn't like the idea of so many of the fighters just standing around doing nothing. Straightening from the shot, the thief noticed the archer wearing nothing but black having locked on to her position.

Ah, crap!

He loosed an arrow right at her. Ducking, Fae hear it whizz above her head and then slam into the barrier behind her, the wooden shaft shattering into a hundred splinters.

Hmm, anyone need a toothpick?

Realizing her stalking game had come to an end, and not with her reaching her intended target, Fae decided it was time to join the fight. She needed to get up close and person to the archer to destroy his advantage.

Kicking her speed into overdrive, the thief pushed off the soft earth and left the sanctuary of the shade. The sunlight blinded her for a moment, but her eyes quickly recovered as she spanned the distance between her and the man in black in less than five seconds. With her grip on Amalia firm, but her muscles relaxed, Fae pivoted on her left foot, then brought Amalia forward in a sweeping arch towards the archer's torso, the Delyn of the weapon glinting dully in the light of the sun. It was only at that moment she saw Josh Cronen lash out with a booted foot to the man's head.

[Breaker]

Stacia realized all eight of her fingers had hidden in her mouth as Josh struck at his prey like a diving eagle. She felt the impact from nearly fifty yards away, losing sight of her hero as shattered stone, wood, and earth exploded around him. She forced salty fingers to her waist and wiped them on her pleated skirts, peering into the dust cloud for any sign of Breaker.

"He missed!" Jake gasped, gripping her shoulder gently in surprise. "That big guy moves like a snake."

"See lad? Not half so bad as yeh thought, is it?" Terech mused, happily pinching tobacco from his pouch and re-packing his pipe. Although he feigned indifference, the dwarf watched the combat closely from the corners of wise eyes.

But Stacia was not enjoying herself. She noticed a thin trail of blood down Breaker's back as he straightened, and an instant later a river of water slammed into his chest.

She broke out of Jake's friendly grasp, lifting skirts and dashing toward Josh without thinking. That creature was hurting her teacher, her mentor, her friend, her... scarlet blossomed in her cheeks and behind her ears as she remembered all the things Josh had been to her, once upon a time. Mortification and pain fueled her wrath as her outstretched knuckles struck the unseen wall. Wringing her wrists, she screamed the first thing that came to mind at the coral-man.

"Leave him alone pole-legs, or I'll... I'll cut your throat and play cradle with your vocal chords!" Unused to threatening people, she didn't realize how childish it sounded 'till a harsh laugh struck her from behind. She whirled to find a fat Coronian man bearing down on her.

"Ol' musclebritches Breaker's as good as finished," he told her, alcoholic breath as offensive as his laugh. "Haven't yeh heard of the mighty Coralians?"

"Stay away from her, pigbelly." Jake's voice sliced between them sharp as a knife, followed by the half elf himself. The top of his dirty blond mop barely tickled the spectator's nose, but Jake confronted him toe-to-toe just the same.

"What'd you call our brother?" Growled a second man nearly identical to the first, who was backed by a broken-nosed third.

"Flaming Haidians on Harvest Day," Bodorson cursed, setting his pipe aside for later.




Josh left the hammer where it was embedded maul-first up to the leather grip. He'd barely considered the clouds gathering in the Ella Chamber before a torrent of water slammed into him. He threw an arm up to shield his nose and mouth. A puddle grew int the craters around his boots and swiftly rising, stirring muck around the hammer's handle. The water was frigid, unrelenting, forceful as a barrage of punches from a strong man. Breaker had only one experience in his lifetime that compared. It felt like...

Mmm, Raiaeran Massage. Josh pivoted carefully to avoid slipping in the squelching mud, letting the attack cleanse his wound and pound the tension from his shoulders. They'd ached from the impact of hammering earth so forcefully, but the torrent numbed the pain and reminded him of the hour he'd spent with the famous elven masseuse Telallase Surion*. She visited Radasanth to see clients every so many years, and had soothed his worries after his first loss in the Citadel.

Breaker reached up and drew his bastard sword, but numb fingers dropped it in the deluge. Water pressure swept the dehlar weapon out of the crater where it wound up lodged between two tree roots, blade pointed skyward and braced against the stump.

Never was one for swordplay...

Josh spread his arms and splayed his fingers, sensing the Coralian's presence, listening for life signs and movement, envisioning his adversary's position. With water splashing off his back and spraying over his arms, there was no need to waste time conjuring. The Coralian's strange incantation swam in his memory.

Water gun, straight and true. Send him away, thank you.

"No pal, thank you," he muttered through the falls on his face.

The droplets cascading from Cronen's fingertips froze into spikes, each the length and strength of a steel dirk. They darted behind him in patterned pairs. Josh had no need to see his target. He could smell the Coralian's position if he needed to. He had underestimated this enemy's finesse, but it would not happen again.

Two icy spikes flew under the stream of water that had sired them, aiming to pin those long feet to the ground beneath. The other four swooped around the current like angry bees that stabbed their stingers at the swordsman's thighs and sides.

As the frigid projectiles sought coral flesh Josh bent his knees and leaped, backflipping with a lazy twist that hauled his left boot through two hundred and seventy degrees on a collision course with the Coralian's lofty pate.

Josh exited the kick with a roll, winded by the cyper stumps that bruised his shoulders and hips as much as the chain of attacks. He ended up sprawled against the Mystic barrier, only then realizing his white gi was covered in mud. Rain fell within the arena, and clouds boiled as if beckoning a storm.


*Telallasse Surion translates loosely to Joyful Finish. Employed Josh's perception to detect hoytti's position.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle grimaced. The warrior of a doorman hadn't answered her. Am I supposed to ask the zombie? she fumed. The sliver of familiarity still taunted her like a gnat dancing before her eyes, gone the moment she tried to clap it between her hands.

With the sandy spear point still trained on the zombie, she turned to shoot the man one last spiteful look, and was struck dumb as literally as one could be without a blow to the head. This is insane, she analyzed hollowly as he ascended -no, ran- into the sky. At any other moment, she might have reasoned that, by his trajectory, the invisible cage was a dome, or that calling him a doorman was like confusing the sand-blasted harpy queen with sparrow. She didn't have time to dwell on either as her staff suddenly jumped out of her hands for a change.

She turned, her mouth just writhing with ready curses, but swallowed them all as a wave of undead stench hit her face. The zombie's eyes twitched in their decaying sockets, analyzing for a moment the weapon clutched awkwardly in its undead hands. The spear point had already begun to shrink back into the staff's core. Then, in a calculated gesture that made Astarelle shiver involuntarily, it tossed the staff aside and closed on her.

Astarelle took a frantic step back. “Even the zombies are surprising me today,” she almost cackled as she tried to shake off the chills running down her spine. Nothing could be so dead and so sentient at the same time. Yet, the zombie's manner was purely that of a warrior -a former warrior?- not the shambling, grasping caricatures of scary stories and Ai'Brone illusions.

The tattoos over her chest and right arm suddenly rippled and wilted, running down to her fingers like lights playing over still water. She raised her hand as the sand encased it in a blade no longer than the staff's temporary point, and she chopped at an approaching undead fist so forcefully that she spun. Then, she bolted along her new heading like death itself was on her heels, because it was.

Her sand returned to its tattoo state as, again, she veered toward her fallen staff, and again, she kicked it into the air. She was reaching for it when the ground shook with a blast that was far louder than any sound the giant could have made. The staff bounced off her fingers one, two, three times before she hugged it to her chest. You're not good with your hands, so learn to kick like a horse and hope they're behind you, came the whisper of an old memory. A real memory. Akashere had said it with good humor and more love than she had known at the time. Yet, without her lataro bracelets to aid her, it was the truth.

With most of her rage either scared away or shaken loose, she looked toward the source of the sound. The absolutely-not-a-doorman had his feet on the ground again... in a depression that he must have created. “This is nonsense,” Astarelle mouthed even before she realized that he was enjoying the torrent of water the giant was summoning. She laughed. It wasn't powerful or loud like the bizarre man's own, yet it took her by surprise and almost drew forth tears. Better him than me.

The darkening of the battlefield didn't break her from the precious moment of delight amid the chaos, nor did the unexplainable scent of a coming storm. It took a few raindrops on the head to do that, then the immediate burst of a downpour to wash the moment clear away. “You're joking,” she grumbled as her expression dropped. The entirety of her beautiful new tattoo tried to outrun the rain by rolling down her body and hiding within her skirt. It secreted itself just below her waist, clinging like a child during, naturally, a storm.

With her staff still clutched in both hands, she ran toward the impossible man in white.

Scared Fallien girl incoming with no tattoos and a sizable black eye now visible.

[Warpath]

Iron eyes scanned the magically-demarcated arena in search of something impressive, and came away wanting. Flint had been promised a giant, and instead suffered the presence of a misshapen, long-limbed sea-thing, lanky and frail. The kimono-clad man fighting it was of some interest, but the brute opted not to be rude. Once the coral-man was reduced to multicolored grains, he would test himself.

And that’s what this was, in the end – a test. It had been months since he first imbibed the Swaysong, months since it made him into something capable of drowning a leviathan in its own blood with his bare hands. Flint was not what he had been that day, but he was infinitely more than he’d been before it: baptized in blood and saltwater. In his mind, there was little doubt that he had stepped beyond humanity and into something new. Thus, what could the arenas of man produce to strike fear into him?

He was fear.

The brute was content to watch the pitiable flailing of children until the very greatest among them were made apparent. He gripped his belt and considered the possibilities – gods help him, there was even a shambler loose on the field, aimlessly earning its name. Flint was entertaining the notion of pulling the thing’s head off when shots rang out.

He turned his head to one side to consider where the bullet meant for him ended up and then deduced the most likely line of fire. The curator of this supposed madhouse was one Sei Orlouge, an eccentric wizard, but they all were. Perhaps disappointed by the distinct lack of chaos, he was apparently now shooting ineffectually into the arenas. Flint was not impressed, and thought to express as much by calmly raising his middle finger, but then the shots had the desired effect. Chaos broke loose.

A glinting flash of steel announced the eminent arrival of a knife buried shallowly in Flint’s shoulder, which he regarded with a growl. He was so displeased by this unforeseen treachery that he did not give himself time to consider the growing moisture in the air. He was intent, scanning the arena for a suicidal knife-thrower, and yet his search bore false fruit only.

First was the black-clad archer across the way, which was immediately discounted because he had fired an arrow shortly after the knife had been thrown, and if a man has arrows he does not throw knives. Next was the curvy footpad who had nearly taken the arrow in Flint's stead. She seemed the most likely culprit at first rub, but now she was running at the archer as if she’d forgotten about Flint, which precluded her. Besides, why throw when she was close enough to stab?

No, the real aggressor was nowhere to be seen, though his existence was undeniable. Process of elimination brought Flint to his least favorite conclusion: another gods-damn craven wizard. This would not be the first time some robed sniveler had thought to lob potshots at the brute from behind a veil of magic, but he figured if he hurt this one bad enough the next one might think twice before trying it.

It was time to make somebody a cautionary tale.

Flint began marching in the rough direction the knife had come from. At the same time he reached up and took hold of the hilt with his left hand, and pulled the blade free of his flesh. Blood rolled from the shallow wound in a thin rivulet, but it was not a cause for concern. Flint was built to take punishment, and he resolved to return every slight twinge of pain with interest. He dropped the knife to the grass and growled.

“For your sake, Insect,” Flint said to his unseen opponent, “I pray you can bite harder than that.”

Of course, the wizard did not reply, and the taunt did not immediately goad him into action. Flint scanned the grass for unexplained shadows, tracks, or indentations, but the wizard was either levitating or a light foot. The search may have yielded no fruit but more knives if not for the ever-increasing levels of bedlam in the arena. Now, despite the previously clear skies and pleasant warmth, rain was beginning to fall.

But only inside the arena.

Flint may have questioned this madness, or railed against further wizardry, but then he noticed a peculiarity in the rain – a disturbance where it should have been falling, but wasn’t. It was an outline, in human shape, tall and thin like the best sticks for breaking. At that moment, the tournament ghost learned that there were worse things to see on Flint’s face than anger.

One was a smile.

The brute’s boots were pummeling the ground, muscular legs firing like overdriven pistons, kicking up arcs of water, torn grass, and mud in his wake. One might expect his bulk to preclude such impressive speed, but preconceived notions be damned, Flint could move. He crossed half the distance between himself and the invisible man in the beat of a thrilled heart, and then he left the grass in a single athletic bound. His boot met a tree trunk risen some two feet off the ground, and then he leapt again, and he was airborne.

Time stretched, and Flint relished weightlessness. He was graceful in the air in ways he couldn’t be on the ground, twisting through sheets of rain with lissome ease. In that moment, Cronen met the grass in a literally earth-shaking impact, but the brute was oblivious. If the tournament ghost was left unbalanced, so much the better, but Flint Skovik felt nothing five feet skyward.

In any case, the moment came to act, and Flint did so. His body shifted and he brought his knees up to his chest and then, with a bestial roar, he shoved both boots outward toward the knife-slinger’s transparent chest. In all his years as a gladiator Flint had never dropkicked a man’s ribcage out through his back, but everything is worth trying once.

[black shadow]

Black Shadow watched as his arrow collided with the barrier, causing it to shatter. He then grabbed another arrow, but soon realized that his new opponent was fast.. Very fast. Withing but a few seconds, a spear was aimed towards his chest. He threw ripped out his steel shaft arrow, hitting the tip away from him. He felt a sharp pain as the spear grazed his shoulder, causing blood to trickle down his arm. He grabbed the sword at his side and unsheathed it, dodge rolling to the side. He pulled his sword up, ready for his opponent to attack again. Bring it on.

[Reine]

Somehow, Cronen's booted foot seemed to miss the head of the archer, but the tip of her spear found some form of skin. He swatted it away with his arrow, amazingly not losing a finger or two in the process, and sent the sharpened tip—made with love and care by her brother Ferynn—tearing through the fabric of his shirt and slicing open his shoulder. Blood flowed. Thick and dark and rich against the pale of his flesh around it. But she saw it only for an instant.

Just as the man unsheathed his sword, the ground rumbled. The solid footing Fae'd possessed mere moments ago disappeared as the ground literally shifted beneath her feet. Even her rather remarkable balance didn't stand much of a chance. Like a tidal wave it washed over the area. Her knees buckled. Her ankles twisted and turned in an attempt to keep her upright. The butt end of her spear slammed itself into the grass and dirt as a cloud of dust overcame her, blinding her to anything in the immediate area. She breathed it in and coughed, a coating of dirt covering the inside of her mouth and nose. Gross.

Realizing she was about to go down, Faelynn pushed herself off the ground using The Iron Shackles. The boots propelled her up and away from the earthquake that had taken over the immediate vicinity, the rumble of which was just now beginning to fade from her deafened ears.

Damn that Cronen is one crazy guy.

Using her boots, the thief pushed herself up even more. Her toes stretching out and touching off the air to propel her ever higher into the sky, just as thick clouds formed above her head and rain began to fall. Torrents of it, cold and piercing to her sensitive skin. They cut through the material of her clothes, soaking her within seconds. Her hair quickly plastered itself to her head But at least it washed away all of the dust.

As she began to descend, Fae looked down and saw the archer having rolled himself slightly away from her and holding a shiny sword in a defensive position in front of him. Typical archers, not knowing how to swing the damn things and actually attack. They just waited to lure you in so they could try and put the pointy end into your gut.

At least things are finally starting to get interesting.

Touching off the air once more, Faelynn redirected her fall and came down onto the ground with a splash behind the dark clothed archer. The grass was drenched, no water appeared to be escaping the arena and none fell outside of it. In fact, she could still see the sun brightly blinding the spectators who now cheered and roared at the quick turn of events. Their hands slammed into the invisible dome, creating the sound of thunder as they hit it over and over again, yelling the name of their favourite contestant, or the one they wanted to die the most.

Falling into a crouch to soften the impact on her knees and ankles, Fae pushed off the sodden ground, glad she had some major treads on these things, and shot towards the man. At three feet, she used the water to her advantage. Pulling her legs up, she dropped down into a slide and headed straight for the opening between his legs. As she came up on him, Amalia shot out towards his exposed groin.

[hoytti]

Sorish felt pain as an two icicles pierced his feet. This made him loose his concentration and stopped his Water Gun. Sorish knew that he had a plan to pierce him with other icicles since his feet were pinned. With a quick motion he pulled up his shield as two icicles hit it. but two more made it around his shield and hit his armor, and just barely pierced his coral skin. He bled a little around the sickles.

He kneeled down to take out the ice from his feet so he could move again, before he moved on to the icicles in his sides. The wounds to his sides took seconds to heal, but the ones in his feet would probably be there for a few minutes. They would hinder him greatly, slow him down and maybe even make him stumble every once in a while.

After he thought this he noticed that the water was already at his knees, which meant that it was probably at the other's thighs. He smiled, he wasn't the only one hindered. As a sea creature he could move just as well in water as he could on land, if not better. He grinned then looked at the man he had battled so far. The man had seemed to have rolled out of his torrent when it was still active and it seemed that he was exhausted. to tell the truth, so was Sorish, he had never fought an opponent this difficult who hadn't angered him to the point where he entered The Red Death. A disease where he would go berserk when angered to a point and any in the area would be in grave danger.

Sorish lowered his stance and so that he was closer to the ground. His heels were of the ground to make him seem lighter and his shield was out in front of him and his sword to the side of his shield. This was his official stance he had created specifically for sword fights. It had a high defense but also a high maneuverability. He then rushed forward, ready to bash the man with his shield and then stab him through. As he ran forward, the water continued to rise now about Sorish's mid calf. There was no way a water creature would loose in his own element.

[Dead & Walking]

Grond pulled back his hand at the last second and avoided the sword. That distraction gave her enough time to reach her spear. Afterwards she ran after the man who created that crater.

No way am I letting you get away from me," Grond thought as he walked an intercept course. "I'm here to fight dang it! Grond readied a punch that would surly hurt if not kill the woman.

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas cursed the rain, it was the one thing that always revealed him. He jumped out of the way of the brute who had tried to dropkick him.

I had to get stuck with the big guy, Barnabas thought as he pulled out a butcher knife. Why couldn't it have been the zombie? he then slashed with all his might which the man skillfully dodged. Suddenly, Barnabas noticed that he was on top of the water, while all the others were slightly submerged.

Of course, he thought with a smile I'm so much lighter then water that I float even when I stand up! He then charged the man he attacked earlier as he walked on the water that had rose since he pulled the knife. He noticed the man of coral seemed to also go unhindered by the water, but that was expected since he piratically lived in it. Barnabas ran at the brute as the water continued to rise, his knife ready to chop off any limb that got in it's way.

[Silence Sei]

Are you freaking kiddin’ me?!” Oreo Jones shouted and snarled at the events of the Ella Chamber. The blind gunslinger was getting a mental play-by-play from Sei himself, and the Heartbeat Kid did not like what he was being told. The coral man had filled the Cell with rain clouds, nearly flooding out the contestants, and the invisible guy walked atop the surface of the water like some kind of messiah. Jones snarled, aiming his gun outside the window once more. “Permission to fire, sir?”

Sei blinked, confused at the question. “Fire at wh—”

“PERMISSION TO FIRE, SIR!?” Jones’ tone had become much more menacing now. While Sei had no idea what had enraged his enforcer so badly, he did have faith in the blind sniper, and nodded, a gesture the super-hearing Jones would easily be able to understand.

Four shots were fired again, two of the projectiles flew, and while one easily hit the water behind Barnabas Tourneymant, the other nailed the competitor square in the leg, causing a yelp of pain from the entity. The other two bullets were aimed towards Sorish’s right hand, the bullets finding homes in the giant’s right palm.

Jones holstered his guns, turning towards his employer and tipping his cowboy hat. “Much obliged sir. With all due respect, neither me nor them people down there came to watch a buncha warriors die from drownin’”

Sei blinked for a moment, the confusion still apparent on his features. “I could only assume that was why you hit Sorish, but why Tourneymant?”

“Oh that?” Jones smirked a little, tipping his hat once more, “Just wanted to see if I could go on and hit an invisible man.”

((hoytti, you are being warned for powergaming in this thread. If it happens again, you will be disqualified. Thank you. No eliminations tonight, good job folks! The water is at thigh level as of right now and will rise 8 inches every day, making for roughly 2 feet every 3 days.))

[Breaker]

Josh spat out mud and wiped water from his eyes. He set his boots deep in the loosening soil and walked his shoulder blades up the mana wall, swaying upright like a coiled viper. He repeated the wiping and spitting ritual then swore and forced his will upon the gusting wind, solidifying the air above him into a large transparent umbrella. He took a moment to assess the bumps and scrapes he'd accrued from his wild tumble across the ground, but once again his body proved stronger than the elements that battered it. Pain in his spine and bruises down his back - those were problems for another day.

Rain to make farmers weep fell in the Cell. The sound of it blotted out all but the loudest battlecries. A thin liquid film covered the mud and floated smaller bits of wood about. The crater left by Breaker's thunderous strike was a small pond, the leather-wrapped hilt of his dehlar sledgehammer lost from sight. Figures fought and struggled behind a veil of droplets and mist. A woman with well-toned gluteals rose above the rest, the storming air her springboard, silhouetting her posterior against the sun so far above.

I've seen that ass before, Cronen realized with a shock. He kept a penthouse apartment atop the Peaceful Promenade in Underwood, and often spent nights smoking his pipe alone on the roof. His night vision was good, and on more than one occasion he felt certain he'd seen that very same rear sneaking through upper windows of upper-class abodes. Such mild - and mildly arousing - crimes fell far below his jurisdiction as Sheriff. He'd been hired to protect the town from assassins, spies, demonspawn - any force the Empire had afforded to throw at the Rangers' last stronghold during the civil war. And he befriended thieves, often as not.

Jake was the best horsethief in Corone up 'till a few years ago. He probably still is. Breaker only made trouble for thieves who murdered to cover their tracks or claim extra coin.

But murder was alone on the Ella Chamber's menu. Josh took two squelching steps toward where he'd last seen the high-flying burglar - water filling his boots - and stopped when an even more familiar woman charged out of the downpour.

"Roht!" He spat, recalling her name. The shiner she wore like a purple monocle retrieved a memory from the sea of faces in his subconscious.

Josh had met thousands of young women at the Flesh Failures, a premier Radasanth nightclub where he'd bounced drunks for years, earning a living as he honed his skills in the Citadel. As head of the establishment's security he'd worked the door many a night, often insisting that his entire team be referred to as doormen, because bouncers suggested they were brainless brutes. It turned out many of the thickly-muscled toughs enjoyed and encouraged the stereotype, and the moniker had become Breaker's second nickname.

Although he no longer worked at the Flesh Failures, Josh rarely visited Radasanth without calling on his friends - Angeline, the willowy manager, her father who owned the establishment, and a few members of the serving staff still hanging onto their old ways from the old days. When he'd accompanied Jake and Stacia to the capital the previous night he'd instinctively invited them to his old stomping ground. But they had barely ordered a round of drinks when Angeline appeared at his shoulder, all apologies and flowing blonde hair, asking if he might assist with a persistent problem.

Roht. She'd disrupted the night for several patrons with aggressive behavior while naming herself noisily, and the first bouncer who tried to escort her to the door got a broken arm for his trouble. Josh had crept up behind the petite woman and placed her forearm in a grip that could bend iron. She'd slipped his hold like a ghost, but proven herself flesh and blood when she countered with a wristlock of her own. The reversed technique caught Cronen so completely by surprise he'd socked the poor girl in the eye. She'd stumbled the last few steps out the club's open doors and run off into the night.

Rain sheeted off the roof of air above him.

Cronen examined the young woman as she approached his shelter. There was no rage left in those frightened grey eyes, no menace in her meek stride. Nothing of the self-worshiping Roht remained except her outward appearance, down to the bruise he'd raised on her face.

"How did one so young as you find time to master Bandesh?" He asked, naming the Fallien combat art of joint locks and throws, "and how did you forget a lifetime of skill overnight?" What little he'd glimpsed of her efforts in the Cell could scarcely be called combat.

He missed any possible response as the Coralian charged out of the mist with the zombie in its wake. The sea-beast stepped high, seemingly made more powerful by its natural element. Seeing its ease of movement reminded Josh to be wary of the water rising up around his thighs.

"Down!" He snapped, habituated to working with warriors who would follow the order on instinct. He hoped Roht would obey - he felt he owed her one for the sucker punch, and whatever strange story she had to tell intrigued him mightily. But she would decide her own fate.

The Coralian's shield struck his upraised forearms, driving him back a full pace as the transparent umbrella dissipated. He kept moving until he hit the Mystic wall, reading the roll of the creature's strange shoulders and avoiding its long thrust easily. He reached one boot up out of the water behind him and stuck it to the wall, then jumped the other boot up to join it. A selfish sucking sound emanated as the water failed to keep him captive.

Breaker leaped horizontally off the wall, diving headfirst between the zombie and the seaman with all his might. His arms outstretched like the wings of a soaring dragon as he angled to smash the necks of both brutes in a deadly double clothesline.


I had permission for the minor bunnies to Roht and Reine. Amidst the noise and confusion, Josh did not notice Jones' gunshots. Employed air affinity for the umbrella.

[black shadow]

Black Shadow took the cut to the groin. The pain was unbearable. Falling to one knee, he gripped his word tighter. That little son of gun. Man if I could scream, they would all be deft. He refused to show any sign of weakness though. He used his sword to get back up, trying to divert his concentration back towards his enemy. Okay, that's it, you are done. He thought to himself. Though shaky, he then tried to stab the woman with his sword.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle caught just a distortion of the man's first word. It sounded like “Roh”.

She almost tripped on a submerged tree stump and had to plant her staff to keep from falling forward. The mud gripped it hungrily. He couldn't have said that, she assured herself almost pleadingly as she came to a halt with the skyward end of the staff braced harshly below her breasts. The unusually strong corset flexed and dissipated the force.

“What?” she cried into the storm that still washed down her face, for she had slushed to a halt beyond the invisible umbrella. His next words weren't an answer, but they were clearer and no less shocking. Her mind stumbled as her mouth seemed to answer of its own accord. “Akashere taught me a bit when we were-,” she shouted conversationally, then croaked and blurted out, “What in the depths are you talking about?”

The giant suddenly charged from her side, shield-bashing him away from her in a shower of froth and fury. She gripped her staff to yank it out of the mud and follow, but another motion caught her eye. She cracked her head to the side, only registering that the zombie was nearly upon her and its fist was already swinging. In a panic, she put her weight on the staff and jumped, barely clearing the water line, then tried to send a kick toward the zombie's head. She wasn't about to get “down”, as per his suggestion, and risk her head going under the water.

She should have, though. The fist connected with her hip before her foot was even close. There had been a sliver of an instant where she managed to move some of the sand hiding in her skirt to buffer the impact, but not nearly enough time to harden it into armor. With a disturbingly wet, fleshy sound, she flew. Tremors of pain shot down her leg and up to her ribs while a scream ripped from her. Two paces away, she splashed down like a poorly-chosen skipping stone.

Water, that torrential devourer of ships and men, filled her nose in an instant. She flailed and gagged, splaying her legs wide to try to find the bottom. Babies drown in puddles, her stupid mind rambled. Tree stumps and floating debris brushed against her limbs, deceiving her into pushing the wrong way over and over until, after what felt like minutes and a chest-worth of inhaled water, she touched the ground and forced herself through the surface.

She hacked like a choking bird, reaching out for anything to balance on. Her staff, still standing in the mud, leaned toward her, and she latched on as the violent expulsion of water reminded her of the numerous times that sand had been forced into her airways. Somehow, the water was worse.

Blinking, she tried to establish how long she had been under. It must have been only seconds. The man in white was launching himself airborne again. Horizontally, this time? She couldn't make out much through the blur of dripping eyelids and the glare of the sun as it thrust its light under the edge of the storm cloud. That churning surface was resplendent with the glow, so much like Nirrakal, the glass fields of Fallien.

She had seen them during the day, once... only for a moment. The mirrored surface of the ground made the place a solar oven. They said that men with nothing left to live for would walk into the crackling Blight at high noon, though there were all manner of ways to die in Fallien, suicide or not. Death was far-and-away easier to find than life in that land, and it was never -never!- a game.

How dare the Coronians play with it like this...

Without thinking, she ripped her staff from the mud and thrust its blunt, sludgy end toward the zombie's midsection. She realized only in the midst of it that she was trying to force the creature against the doorman's descending attack.

And why do I play along?

[Reine]

The thrust to the groin connected. She felt that sick sensation of the tip piercing through the flimsy cloth of his pants and into the soft skin it hid beneath, parting the flesh as if it were made of the water that surrounded them. Faelynn expected a scream, a yell--something!--but her attack was met with silence in the end. Not even a grunt of discomfort passed from the lips of the man in black.

That archer must have the pain resistance of a eunuch, I just attacked his twig and barries!

Even Seth Dahlios, with his immense pain tolerance, would be crouched over in severe agony, or at least checking to make sure he still had all his parts intact. Jared was probably cringing in fear right now. She doubted her boyfriend would let her near his twig and berries for the next week after she pulled a move like that. Well, if he could resist touching her for that long, which judging by his apetite, would not happen.

Fae began to think that somehow the attack had missed, but blood glinted on the end of Amalia a mere second before the torrential downpour washed it from metal.

When the thief stopped sliding, she found herself about two feet behind his back and quickly realized that the water level in their arena was rising and rapidly at that. She was practically swimming in her horizontal state!

Activating another of the enchantments on her boots with just a simple thought--thank you symbiotic relationship of awesome--Faelynn turned only to find the dull sheen of steel coming right for her. Green-gold eyes went wide. Instinct alone saved her from the brunt of the attack. She jerked her head back and the sharp tip, thrust hard toward her, slashed over her left cheek. Pain exploded down the side of her face as the blood spurted and flowed freely from the deep wound. A cry of alarm escaped her parted lips, but was swallowed by the ferocity of the storm.

Water slashed down her face, making it hard to see. She brushed it back and her hand came away pink and then quickly cleared as the rain washed it away.

"You'll pay for that." She growled loud enough for him to hear.

The soft planes of her face hardened, her eyes, normally dancing with light and amusement, turned dark with her anger and the throbbing pain that laced across her face.

Jumping up from the silty ground their arena floor had turned into, Fae tucked her legs up, then pushed down and came to rest on top of the thigh high water, well, more like hip high to her. She was on the shorter side. And it was still rising. Without the river slowing her down, she knew her opponent would have no chance. He couldn't dodge her thigh deep while she had the advantage of speed.

"When you do engage someone, don't toy with them." She once again heard Seth's words of advice. "Kill them as quickly as possible, you'll need all of your strength to survive."

Running across the top of the water, Faelynn whirled Amalia through the air and the rain. The curtain of water parted as she thrust the weapon down towards his chest. At the last second, she slammed her left hand into the butt of the spear and changed the thrust into an arch right for his throat, hoping to end him.

[Warpath]

He had come to see The Cell as a test, and the results were thus far conclusive. For one, Flint now knew that while he could jump far and high, he could not jump so far and high as to escape the pull of gravity. He came down fast, adjusting the angle of his legs as soon as his boots failed to meet anything solid. He had expected to slide along wet grass, but instead he glided into a deep pool of cold, murky water. This had been a lightly forested area not long ago, and so it was not at a uniform level – the ground was just slightly lower here, so the water was deeper. When Flint regained his feet, he found himself submerged nearly to the thigh.

This was a troubling development, the consideration of which was postponed for an instant when the ghost lashed out with another blade. Somehow acting on instinct, Skovik dodged away and waded into deeper water. At first he feared that his opponent was growing taller, but no, he simply wasn’t submerged in the water. Levitation then, Flint decided, but a closer look suggested that those transparent feet were in contact with the surface.

There was a moment’s pause where it seemed that Flint might not react to his foe’s charge, and then shots rang out. Flint tensed, expecting to feel the burning punch of bullets piercing his rain-slick flesh. Instead the invisible man faltered, and the brute capitalized.

He raised both thick-thewed arms overhead, bent slightly at the elbow with fists clenched, and with a roar he brought both arms down again – not on the invisible man, but into the water. His strength was such that a great dent appeared in the surface, the edges surging outward before the center rose up again to fill the displaced gallons. Flint repeated this assault on the pool furiously, over and over, which for all the world looked like a childish hissy-fit, until the dips and rises and ripples in the water reached his barely-visible foe.

Flint knew how difficult it was to stand in a canoe rocking on gently rolling water. It would take a being of incredible balance to keep his feet standing directly on choppy waters, rising and falling chaotically as these soon were. The brute needed only unbalance the lanky ghost, shake him off his feet. Once the shade was rendered helpless by his treacherous foothold, the brute could advance on his prone body and pummel the wizard to oblivion.

Flint wondered if the skulk’s blood and bones were invisible too, or just hidden behind a veil. It was a nigh time to find out.

[Dead & Walking]

Grond was hit by the staff which sent him into the path of the brute who took off his head and sent it flying.

Great, now I'm stuck like this till somebody sews my head back on. he thought as his head landed in the water and his belly fell backwards.

"A little help!" he called out, but no one could understand him. Just perfect.

(Grond is now unable to battle unless someone decides to pick up his head and reattach it to his body. Thus, he is figuratively dead. Though he will continue to groan for help the rest of the thread.)

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas wobbled on the surface of the water as the big brute in front of him splashed. This just isn't my tournament, he thought as he fell on his back, his body barely a paper thin amount of his skin covered in water.

[hoytti]

Sorish dropped his sword as a gun shot his hand that held it. He his hand would heal soon though, but as he thought about this he noticed that his enemy was about to try to take his head off with his arm. No way that is going to happen, Sorish thought as he raised his shield which took the blunt of the blow. However it also cracked under the pressure, which shocked Sorish. If he had hit my head I would have been finished! Sorish thought as he was flung back. He hit the ground hard and his shield flew out of his hand. He was disoriented and shook his head as he got up.

Sorish looked at his hand and noticed that it was nearly healed. He grabbed his knife. He would dodge then stab the man if and when the man where to attack him again. He then noticed that the water was choppy. Not that it really mattered. He could deal with that. It's still just water. His opponents however, probably might have a problem.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle knew by now that this “doorman” could not be overestimated. So, it was only with a tired grunt of confirmation that she watched the zombie lose its head and the giant recoil. “Breaker!” she suddenly cried like the memory had force. It was a name she had heard in Radasanth -back when lapses of memory were due to plain old boredom, not this madness- but had never met the man. Yet, the sliver of a memory insisted that that name and the man splashing down strongly before her, threatening to wash her over, were one and the same. The old white scar on his cheek teased the memory further. It was almost excruciating.

Breaker, she thought with a snort, recalling the crater, Of course that's his name.

The zombie's head splooshed a few paces from her like one of those obnoxious white birds at the Radasanth dock, mouth snapping for fish that, in this case, were nowhere to be found. She gave an unthinking sigh of relief when the sentient eyes disappeared into the water, and just as quickly, a short shriek when they resurfaced. Still alive?!

She raised her staff to bash the bobbing noggin as its eyes leered straight at her. The light rebounding off the rain-torn surface still rendered a convincing recreation of the glass fields, shining over the dislodged head as if it were all that remained of one man's successful noonday walk. “Like a sand-blasted Coronian,” she muttered, the staff frozen above her head. She swept it forward, slowly, and shepherded the head closer to her. The smell of rain washed away the smell of death, but her stomach still heaved as she placed tentative fingers against the dome of exposed skull and pushed it to the bottom. She was up to her chin in the turgid water when the creaking jaw finally met the muddy earth in a sticky, decrepit kiss. “Return to the mother from whence you came,” she said in the rapid staccato of her own language. It was as close to a Roht prayer as she dared while the goddess still hunted her.

She swished her hand through the water as she rose, and looked up at the imposing man. “Breaker,” she said loudly through the rain, “I- I remember someone pointing you out, saying your name. I don't remember where...”

Bury me, she sighed, pressing a dripping hand to her forehead as she used her staff to take weight off her throbbing hip. I must be a sight. Her shoulders hung low, like the relentless pounding of rain was taking its toll. Her artificially-propped figure had all the sensuality of sodden driftwood. A pool of filthy water rolled in the pert crevasse of her cleavage. And it looks like I messed myself... All around the limp skirt, a darkness spread. The sand had not survived her splashdown, not in a way to still be called sand. Yet, it wanted to return to the tattoo state enough to fight for buoyancy. It takes days to fix the sand in a new rest location. When did I have time to form the tattoos and make them so... permanent?

Astarelle shook her head. There were so many questions she needed to ask, and many more she was afraid to. Did I try to mate with you, too? came to mind. Blushing faintly, she picked the most pertinent ones and let them fly from dripping lips.

“Four things,” she said while actually holding up the same number of fingers. “One: What is this,” she gestured around as she tried to find a word, reluctantly settling on, “event?”

“Two.” She counted it down on her fingers. “How many people can see us?” The Ai'Brone had assured her that her identity would be a secret within their arenas. She couldn't hide the Roht mark upon her forehead, anyway, with her sand drifting around her in a slick.

“Three: Are the Ai'Brone going to revive us after, or are you all just lunatics who already dug your own graves?” The last part wasn't necessary. She blushed harder, but continued to her final point... meekly.

“Four: I can't swim.”

The zombie skull is "buried" in the mud beside her feet. Rest in peace.

[black shadow]

Black Shadow saw the spear, and slashed his sword down at it, trying to block the attack from entering his skull. The sword connected with the spear, causing it to fall lower than the intended target... Right through his heart. Black Shadow fell limp to the floor, and his body began to float. Blood spewed out the wound, and colored the water red. Black Shadow had lost his battle.

[Breaker]

Bodorson had spent the previous night putting a keen edge to Joshua's blades. He'd offered to do so in a moment of good will and remembered glory, when Cronen had broken news of his invitation to the fabled tournament. Unfortunately he had not remembered how many blades the retired Sheriff owned. Terech had toiled over his grindstone while Jacob jumped Stacia and their mentor to Radasanth for a night of fun and friends. Terech found whetting weapons far more enjoyable than social misadventures, but he had a crick in his neck from the long night's work. And when it came time to leave, Cronen had left half his bloody arsenal behind!

Suffice to say, Bodorson had experienced better days in his considerable lifetime. He loved his comrades though, and would never watch them come to harm. And so he climbed warily to his feet and ambled over to stop Jake from starting another brawl.

Stacia beat him to it. The petite woman pulled the half elf away a short distance and returned to the oafish men, smiling and simpering, touching their baggy bellies and marveling as if muscle lurked beneath.

Terech clapped Jake heartily on the back, chuckling at the lad's muffled rage.

He wants the lass too strongly for his own good, Bodorson mused as he returned to his pipe and struck a sulfurous match. Chip off of the Breaker, that one.



Cronen's left arm cleaved the zombie's head from its shoulders - clean as any guillotine. The shattering impact on the coral shield spun him and he corkscrewed over the fallen combatants and into the drink. He struck with such force the surface retched and heaved, and his right wrist snared in a split rywan stump. Even with his head underwater and bubbles bursting all around, he heard the untimely pop.

Fuming and fountaining, he stood up in the shallows. He'd wrenched his wrist free without trouble, but the hand was bent back at an angle. A nasty dislocation.

Even with unbreakable bones, sometimes something gave.

Josh tucked the spasming hand under his sodden denim-clad armpit, listening to Roht's questions. She knows my name? But how? Although he had a following amongst warriors of a certain cut, Cronen was not a name known across the south sea. Did someone send her after me last night? They couldn't have picked a more conspicuous assassin... but what if she's a spy?

He sucked his right elbow and shoulder back and set the wrist with grinding crunch. He roared without words, lungs emptying with such power the sound echoed off Ixian Castle in the distance.

The Coralian titan rose from the mire like a summoned Kraken. The serpentine sword was gone, the stalwart shield sundered at last, but the long-limbed warrior wielded a dagger as if inviting attack. Beyond its rain-beaten coral form, only the tightly-panted thief was visible, flitting above the waves like a shadow.

The rest of the combatants were fish in a barrel.

But Roht had piqued his interest. If she is a spy, I need to know who sent her... Cronen's resources in Corone were plentiful as they were private. He held influence at Ixian Castle, Chronicle Headquarters and Underwood Town Hall. If she's after something, I won't see what 'till she's close enough to take it.

"One," he hissed through the driven rain, "this event is no place for you. Two," he croaked as he crafted an ice poultice around his throbbing wrist, "there's more spectators out there than you could sling sand at. Three," he stepped behind her and spanned slim hips with broad hands. "You'll get to make more poor choices no matter how you die today." She squeaked as he compressed her abdomen between both palms, forcing his tortured wrist to work.

"Four... Jump!"

Roht responded far better than she had to the previous command, bending her knees and leaping as he flung her from the water's grasp. She arced through the downpour toward the deepest part of the Ella Pond - the crater marked at its depth by a leather-wrapped handle.

Cronen saw his next move as clearly as a premonition. The power had built in him throughout the battle, each black-booted step driving up the voltage. He'd seen it coming since the rainwater filled his boots.

Muck churned as he charged the Coralian, swinging a left hook that could level an anvil.

True to its sinuous style, the towering seaman slithered aside and stabbed a response.

"Gotcha," Josh gasped as the blade bit his ribcage.

Lethal electricity discharged from Breaker's body. It lanced through the mineral-rich water like chain lightning, seeking to strike anything living. It shocked Cronen even as he conducted it, shaking his muscles and sending his head back, mouth open wide to the gale.

The current died as quickly as it sprung to life, and Cronen's laughter rocked the dome.


Bunnying approved by Roht and Hoytti. Josh discharged a current capable of killing a being twice as hearty as the average human into nutrient rich (highly conductive) water ('Lighting Rod').

[Reine]

Well...that was surprising.

Fae thought as she felt the tip of her spear slide into the archer's chest. The thief had expected to slice open his throat, only the man had seen right through her first feint and batted aside her second attack, only to redirect it at his own chest.

Perhaps Oberon could teach him a thing or two about fighting.

At least during all their spars she had never once redirected any of his attacks back onto her body. Oh, she'd blocked quite a few of them rather poorly and made a few silly decisions of her own--like launching herself at him and ending up thrown onto some wooden crates--but this one took the cake and ate it too. Or, he ate the tip of her spear anyway.

Fae had never killed anyone outside The Citadel, and even in those hollow walls the sensation of her weapon rending flesh left her queasy. Thieving was her thing, her high, her sex. Ending another being's life was something she could only hope and pray to never have to do outside of these sanctioned battles.

Seeing the light fade from his black eyes, the weight of his body slipping into the muddy water, Fae shifted and placed both her hands on Amalia, ready to twist the weapon from it's sheath of flesh. At that moment, lightning danced through the water, a wave, a pulse of it. She gasped as it arched up the archer's body, through the dense metal of her spear and into her hands.

Fae watched as Seth removed the greaves from his arms, revealing a sick display of tortured, scarred skin underneath. The river of scar turning her stomach slightly, while also fascinating her at the same time.

"I held on to those daggers for too long once, guy electrified me."

She expected pain. No, pain would be pleasant, she expected pure agony. All she felt was a tingle, a not unpleasant caress really, as the electricity raced through her body and then out the bottom of her boots, dissipating into the water.

Releasing the breath she'd been holding, lungs beginning to scream, Fae wrenched her spear tip from the now very dead and slightly smoking corpse of the archer.

Just then, an ungodly scream pierced the roar of the arena. Fae looked up just in time to see a body coming right at her.

Oh for the love of--

She never even got to finish the sentence as flesh met flesh with a bone jarring impact. Something slammed into her solar plexus, knee elbow, head, she didn't know. Air whooshed out of her lungs and Faelynn, and who the hell just jumped her, went right into the water. Silt filled her eyes, stinging them. She clamped them shut and felt hands roving all over her, scrambling, nails biting, fighting in no effort to attack her, almost in a blind panic. Fingers touched her arms, her face, hell, the questing hands even grabbed one of her breasts in desperation. She pshed and scrambled in an effort to ward her would be killer off, because if she didn't get whoever this was away from her, she'd drown for sure!

Hitting the bottom, the thief touched her boots off the soil and pushed up with all her strength. She rocketed out of the water in a rush, her ascent stopping some four feet above the still growing water level before she came back down to land once more on top of it. Apparently, she'd pulled her assailant out too, a sputtering Roht Mirage who looked like a drowned rat with a black eye. The woman seemed to be quite uncomfortable in the growing pond and Fae wondered if she could swim. Her accent spoke of Fallien and Fae knew from experience most locals there could not. What she didn't know, was what the heck to do now.

"What the hell are you doing?" Fae yelled at her in Fallien. Or at least that's what she hoped she yelled. Her Fallien was passage at best, for all she knew, she may have just asked where the bathroom is.

Realizing the comforting weight of Amalia no longer rested in her hand, Fae frantically began scanning the depths of the murky water for her spear. She must have dropped it when psycho here fell out of the sky on her. After a second, her eyes caught the familiar shape of it lying in the mud and silt, right at her assailant's feet.

Just fantastic.

She narrowed green-gold eyes on the woman, contemplating her options.

[hoytti]

The knife hit the target perfectly but was electrified on contact. It may not have been as conductive as metals but the amount of energy in the mans body was enough to send the shock through the knife anyway which in turn, sent it into Sorish which then transferred it to the water which reversed it back on the man as well as sent it towards all other combatants in the water. Sorish shook uncontrollably as the amount of energy ran through his body, is brain functions shut down in seconds and his body still held the knife, the water continued to be electrified as he died. It would kill anyone who was in it or touched it probably for a long time. The rain continued to pour as the last of the energy sputtered out of the man and Sorish released his knife and sun to the bottom of the lake his rain created by accident.

(Sorish is dead and the water electrified. Rain will continue to fall till you say that the hour is up Sei. Good luck everyone.)

[Warpath]

The solid silhouette went down in a confusing blur of flailing limbs and displaced water. Droplets of rainwater were thrown in every direction, and when the skulk impacted the surface he sank with a quiet plunk, and then bobbed and bounced to the surface again. Flint allowed himself a small, predatory smile and quickly went to circle the prone ghost. He decided he would grab the unbalanced wizard by the ankles and flip him over to negate the danger of whatever bladed things he still had in his possession, which would allow him to pummel his foe with impunity.

Unfortunately, that was the moment Flint Skovik was to acquire a completely new life experience.

He felt a tingling buzz from his legs, which quickly, alarmingly, and inexplicably became something improbable: a sort of pain he hadn’t experienced before. The muscles of his legs tensed involuntarily, and the effect traveled up his body, weakening by degrees as it went. It was a whole-body charley horse, but worse, stealing from the brute what was most precious to him and turning it against him – his physical might. There was suction in his intestines, his heart itself ached, and his vision blurred even as it turned red at the edges.

And then, as suddenly as the attack had come, it faded again. Flint swayed on his feet, let out a short, low, grumbly moan, and then he promptly fell face-first into the water.




A week before he was nearly electrocuted and drowned, Flint had been somewhere a great deal warmer, dryer, and safer. Unlike certain other combatants, he was not one to visit the drinking dens and the houses of ill repute, nor did he gamble or carouse. Though he would certainly tell the opposite, it had been quite some time since Flint had awoken in the morning surrounded by unexplained corpses or next to satisfied young ladies he did not recognize.

In fact, until today he’d been waking up next to a scribe, after spending the previous day reading beside an unending cup of tea. He hadn’t felt bones break beneath his knuckles since returning from Salvar. Indeed, of late he was more accustomed to caresses and sighs than beatings and battle cries. He had so determinedly shifted favor from violence to voracious lovemaking that he was beginning to distract Luned Bleddyn from her newfound duties in the library and abroad, since she’d helped found the organization called Chronicle.

It had been her suggestion that he join The Cell. It suited him, after all, and it was a much-needed outlet for his passions. He had heard of it, of course, but a man having been raised on manmade battlefields has little use for yet another one, much less one in a foreign land. What better place to test the thing he had become?

“I’m not good at athletic competitions,” he’d told her. “I kill people.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Luned said. “It’s a fight to the death. It’s really your kind of thing; people have been calling for a ban for years.”

“Your country openly sponsors death matches?”

“You don’t stay dead. The monks from The Citadel are affiliated with it, I think?”

“Wizards,” Flint said with a frown.

“Flint,” she said, “you’re in bed with a wizard right now.”

The brute widened his eyes and searched the sheets, but there was only Luned there. She raised an eyebrow and gave him a wry grin.

“It seems you are mistaken,” the brute said, satisfied that his search bore no bearded skulks. “We are alone.”

“I’m being serious,” Luned said, and she gave his shoulder a little shove. Her smile said otherwise.

“There is a wizard in the bed?”

“About the tournament. I feel bad for neglecting you and keeping you from Fet and…”

“I do not feel neglected,” Flint said. “But I concede your point. It has been too long since I’ve…plied my trade. Tell me more of this well.”

“Cell.”

“Whatever.”

“It’s pretty simple. A bunch of people enter the competition and are divided out into big groups, and each group is locked inside some kind of arena, usually with some sort of magic.”

Flint made a face.

“I know. Anyway, it’s a death match. Once it starts, nothing and no one is allowed in or out of the arena until there’s only one person left alive.”




The brute opened his eyes and exhaled a cloud of bubbles into the murky water. Nothing could leave the arena, he realized – not the water, and not him, even if the water continued filling the invisible dome. The ground was already saturated, how long could this enchanted rain continue to fall? Forever? Flint remembered being dragged into the infinite depths by a dying leviathan. He remembered the horrors suffered by Muir during the search for Carcosa. He would not die by drowning.

Flint regained his feet and surged up out of the water with a roar, right beside the ghost’s still-prone, half-electrocuted body. He raised one fist and brought it viciously down toward the transparent head, intending to snap the wizard’s neck or crush his trachea. This was no longer a test of his strength and abilities; he knew he was capable of drowning. This was now a fight for survival, and every one of these people stood between him and a dwindling supply of air.

They all had to die.

Just a note here. I did some research on lightning striking bodies of water and electrocution (thanks Numbers, now I know what electrical burns look like and I can never un-know it). The rough consensus is that if lightning were to strike a body of water, it would dissipate over like 20 feet. I imagine Flint as being well over twenty feet away from Josh, but the discharge was also described as being like chain lightning. I basically wrote my post with the assumption that the discharge DID travel better than your typical bolt of lightning, but was much diminished before it reached Flint. He suffered a low to moderate brief electric shock, and then overreacted to it like a sissy because he'd never experienced it before. Fucking wizards.

[Tourneymant]

Barnabas felt the electricity but it was just enough to make him unable to move for maybe three seconds. Barnabas was about to rise again when the brute he was fighting earlier exploded from the water and sent him high into the air. Barnabas used this momentum to get to his feet and flipped upward. he then softly landed on the ground. "Thanks for the help up big guy," he said then pulled another two knives out and charged the brute. He would finish this as he ran across the water, his feet barely sunk beneath the surface. "Now why don't you do us all a favor and DIE!" he yelled as he threw knife after knife till ten knives of different sizes were all headed towards his opponent. He also was ready to stab him if he somehow avoided all the other knives

[Roht Mirage]

Not the hero I expected, Astarelle thought while airborne. She was hugging her staff to her chest, partly to keep it with her, but mostly because the pain of her bruised -and now squeezed- hip made her just want to curl into a ball. With eyes clamped shut, she waited for the next splashdown. She'd handle it better this time, surely.

The first obstacle she met, though, was not water. It was flesh, and it hit her like a zombie punch against her... everything. The air was squeezed out of her lungs just in time for water to take up residence, and she did not handle it any better than the first time. Worse, perhaps. There was something -a body?- solid enough to keep track of, yet soft enough to grip, and by the love of Roh herself did she grip! And claw, and climb.

As she broke the surface, she heard the body's hungry gasps mirror her own. She savored the solidarity of two people just trying to go about the act of breathing. Then, she lurched shakily away, fists grinding water from her eyes, and choked out words with an undercurrent of tired, weary mirth. “At least you're not another zombie.”

“Where in the depths did you tie the horse?” her human cushion belted out in the most atrocious pseudo-Fallien accent that Astarelle had heard aside from the good-natured attempts of Outlander's Post dwarves. She spun, aching all over as she forced her body through water that was almost at her waist. “Horse?” she asked in Fallien. How strange it felt after so long. With a sigh, she raised her hands in submission. “Please, just... just use your own language,” she said in Coronian tradespeak.

Another piece of a memory bounced across her mind like a fragment of shattering porcelain. The woman had used a barely Fallien line on her before, seductively, in a place that flashed with bright lights and stank of alcohol and perfume. There had been some leg shown, creamy Corone white, then a brush against her wrists and a whispered, “You remind me of sunset over an oasis.” Actually, it had been, “You capture me a sunburn on an oasis,” but she had deciphered it easily, almost hungrily, as her skin pimpled.

What is wrong with me?!

Astarelle sloshed a step back from the woman as her eyes locked on the bracelets. Her bracelets. If she would ever, in the most unlikely of scenarios, give them to someone, it would be temporary and it would be a man. A man with a sand-blasted loo!

“Thief!” she howled, because either the woman had stolen her bracelets, or her dignity. With fingers curling like wrathful claws, she looked around in the hope that she could introduce her staff to something actually worth hitting. A long shape wobbled under the surface right in front of her, and she willed it to float toward her trembling hands.

It did not.

Craning forward, she awkwardly pulled the shape from the water. It was a spear; a real spear. Her staff, she realized with a grudging glance about, was lost somewhere in the maelstrom of the rain-torn lake. She looked back at the spear with wide eyes. This is the Coronians' hell. Astarelle could think of only a single phrase to herald the final, dam-bursting pound of madness, a phrase courtesy of one Relt Peltfelter during a very different rainy day.

“Son of a motherfucking horker!” she howled as she slashed at the water, sending spray everywhere. “I just!” She slashed again, spraying the other side like she might be able to dig her way out of the lake. “Want to!” She jumped up, spear pointing earthward, and tried to ride it to the arena's heart. “Go home!”

The spear squelched to a stop in the mud, its haft pressed against her cheek. Tears ran down, mingling with the sheen of rain before joining the lake that she knelt in up to her chin. “I just want this to stop...”

Slowly, she stood, sagging as if each drop of water was a solid chunk of granite. She didn't feel better, or even relieved. She just felt empty. Wiltingly, she looked up at the woman's slack, speechless, absolutely incredulous face. “I know the feeling,” she said meekly, then held forth the spear in both hands. “Trade?”

The woman slipped off the bracelets without a sound and offered them in one hand while numbly taking the spear in the other.

“Are- Are you insane?” she finally asked.

Astarelle's mouth quirked up. “I wasn't when I walked in here. Apparently, I was just some flightly trakap with a deathwish.” She slipped the bracelets on like the promise rings of a long lost lover. They felt so familiar, so right, that her blank smile swelled into one of substance. “In the end, I'm no more mad than any of you.”

She spun away as tightly and quickly as the water would allow. Her hands caroused together high above her head like birds in the storm. “Do you want to finish this the Coronian way?” she asked as she spread her palms to the air. Her staff rocketed from the water behind her like a creature that had been chained for years, now blessedly free, and slapped to her palms. With a rippling swivel of her hips, she put her weight back and gripped the staff diagonally before her face.

“It's your choice, because I just don't care anymore.”

[Silence Sei]

“What a shockin’ turn of events,” Jones commented, to the dismay of his employer, “Shut up, -somebody had to say it.”

Apparently, the irony of telling a mute to shut up was lost on the blind sniper.

“Well, seems like Mister Breaker has this all wrapped up in a neat little package,” As Jones spoke, he was busy opening the chambers to his pistols, placing new bullets in the guns, “Guess that means my services aren’t going to be needed for much—oops.”

Jones’ ‘oops’ held such a sarcastic tone that even a deaf man could know that his weapons firing, all six times from each gun, was anything but an accident. Each bullet ran out, a predetermined target in mind. Ten bullets found the ten knives that Barnabas had been wielding, hitting the blades of each with a metallic ‘tink’ sound that brought a smile to Oreo Jones’ face. Some of the blades shattered from the force, others were simply knocked into the watery ground harmlessly. Regardless of the effect, each of the ten knives were subsequentally destroyed.

The eleventh shot found its way into the shoulder of Barnabas Tourneymant, causing the man to let out a shriek of pain. The scream was soon canceled however, as a bullet burst from where the invisible man’s chest was, his heart exposed from the exit wound and lay still as the competitors body slumped to the ground. Jones twirled his pistols, blowing the smoke from out of their barrels once he stopped his display of showmanship.

“Yep,” he said, now unafraid of the consequences of his actions, “I still got it.”

((Tourneymant is disqualified for powergaming. An electric shock that would bring the 5 and a half foot, muscular Flint, into the water, would have no doubt affected you the same, not for ‘three seconds’. Furthermore, your profile makes no mention of the ten blades of varying sizes you seemed to will out of thin air.))

[Reine]

Faelynn immediately felt a sign of relief pass her lips when her fingers wrapped around Amalia once more. Like her boots, the weapon was an instinctive part of her. Without it she felt naked, lost, insecure. Heck, she really only took The Iron Shackles off to sleep or bathe, sometimes Jared even liked the look of her standing naked in them. He'd get this heated look in his steel grey eyes, the kind that spoke of how much he wanted to—but now was so not the time to be thinking about that!

The woman spin away from her, like Fae was some kind of backstabbing bitch, and the thief watched in surprise as Roht raised her hands above her head and summoned a staff. It flew out of the water, the spray from the force lost within the still raining storm of their arena, and found her hands as if guided there by magic.

Or the bracelets I just gave her back. Should have just punched her in the face and be done with it, but noooo, I had to ignore Seth's advice and be nice. Now I have to live with those consequences.

No matter what way she looked at it, the Roht before her was not the same Roht from last night. Not at all the woman she'd slid next to and flirted with in an effort to get close, so her wandering hands could procure some kind of payment for the trespass she had enacted on her boyfriend. Not the woman who had rubbed herself all over every available and good looking male in the establishment and not the woman who had been thrown out of the bar on her ass for being just a little too flirtatious.

"The Coronian way isn't exactly my way," Fae said in response, her fingers slipping down the slick surface of the Delyn metal, "but under the circumstances, I'd say we have few options. Though, if you're interested, I think the two of us would work better as a team than alone."

"If the opportunity to make an alliance comes up, take it." Seth's words, ever present and ever reminding her of the lessons he'd drilled into her thick skull. "It's much easier to survive that insanity with someone at your back than alone, but don't get complacent. The moment they are no use to you, off them, because they'd do the same to you."

She was taking a chance here. Faelynn knew she had the advantage in this fight, heck, she had the advantage against the rest of the opponents. Even Cronen seemed unable to walk on the surface of the water, where she stood now, looking down upon the woman before her.

Lowering the tip of her spear towards the undulating surface of the water, Faelynn held out her hand towards Roht Mirage and hoped she wouldn't lose it in the process.

"Faelynn Thiadore, at your disposal." She said with a wry grin, the deep cut on her cheek tearing open and allowing more blood to freely flow out the wound from the effort.

[Warpath]

Flint’s fist crushed naught but water, and he growled as he drew back again. The lanky ghost was hard to keep track of when he moved, shifting from something man-shaped to a confounding blur and back again. It made it impossible to read his telegraphs and intentions, and harder still to gauge his abilities. So when the giant leapt gracefully up to his feet on the water’s surface again, the brute was put off.

And then the giant filled the air with knives, and Flint felt a twinge of blood-rage. He might be stuck with a hundred knives, bleeding from a thousand wounds, but the brute would not go into death without dragging the craven conjurer down with him. He raised his armored forearms vertically across his torso and shoved himself backward and down into the water, willing the murky pool to rob the knives of their force before they could strike him. He would need to come up from below the phantom, he decided, and trust that the spells that granted him levitation would also prevent him from effectively striking anything below the surface.

And then all Flint’s preparation was rendered moot. Once again shots rang out, this time in rapid succession. Shards of metal rained harmlessly into the murk, and when Flint came back up out of the water he found the ghost prone and still, bobbing in the water like a corpse. Exactly like a corpse.

The brute turned to look over his shoulder and up, wondering. Had they been aiming for him again, and missed? But no, each knife had been intercepted and destroyed in midair with inhuman precision, which was unmistakably to Flint’s benefit. Perhaps Sei had been trying to kill the ghost all along, which made some small amount of sense. Perhaps the skulk had found a way into the arena without its patron’s knowledge. The brute was troubled at the thought – if someone had snuck into The Cell and immediately tried to murder him, was he a target for assassination? It was not outside the realm of possibility, but how would his enemies know to find him in Radasanth?

And why would they try to kill him somewhere he would inevitably be revived?

The water was rising, and there were no answers inside that impenetrable dome. Flint snuffed water from his nose and turned around to take stock of his situation.

[Breaker]

Jake stood on his own, nose pressed against the the Ella Chamber's magical barrier. Stinkin' Stacia and Bodorson Bloodbeard were jawing it proper with the tubby brothers, and more men had joined them, arriving from the crowds surrounding the other arenas. Wish I'd brought my tonfa, the half elf thought, reaching to the hip that felt naked without his liviol dueling stick.

The downpour and clouds in the dome silhouetted the combatants for all but the briefest moments. Jake watched a woman walk on water and skewer an archer while Josh shared swift words with the only other female combatant. I'd steal her a horse any day, Jake thought, eyeing the black-clad Coronian. Slip it right in her stables, I wou-

The roar that nearly knocked him backwards could only have come from the Breaker. Jake tore his eyes away from the toned water-spider woman and for a moment, couldn't find Josh. Waves washed up the inside of the mystical wall, blurring his sight of half the arena. Bloody hell I hate being short, Jake thought as he jumped for a clearer view.

He glimpsed the Fallien woman as she rose against the rain's downward force, clearly not under her own power. Josh must have tossed her, why--

Lightning struck in the dome, followed by hackle-raising laughter from a familiar voice.

"Did Josh get shocked?" Stacia cried from her place with her newfound friends.

"He must have," Jake replied, shooting her a withering glance.

Stacia paled and wobbled as if he'd struck her. Jake was about to apologize but realized he had not caused the reaction. She'd pressed hands to belly, breathing deep.

"Those poor people..." Stacia gasped, gazing into the Ella Chamber.


Twelve shots rang out amidst ten metallic tings, followed by a scream and a breath of silence.


Breaker heard the gunfire and whipped his head toward Orlouge's tower. Can't be Dirks, he's a lousy shot, he thought as knives exploded midair and the invisible man met his end. He squinted at the figure beside Sei. Too bad that bespectacled boyo' isn't in here, we'd have had a proper rumble.

The electrical attack had rebounded on Cronen, and he loved it.

The water no longer felt cold - it was perfect, fucking beautiful. His jacket was falling apart from the Coralian blades though. He tore it off and tied it arond his waist, only remembering the embedded dagger when it slid on his rib. Fresh blood washed by the downpour oozed down to his hip and stained the white denim pants. Oh well, he thought, yanking the coral knife's tip from his abdominals and tucking it behind his belt. Water sluiced over his broad tanned shoulders and rocklike abdomen as the blood flow lessened.

He drank rain like fine wine and slid his gaze lazily around the arena. His eyes lit lustily as he spotted the plotting women, for the way they were positioned - one standing on the water, the other in it at her feet - conjured memories of a night he'd spent in Haidia with two vampiric wenches. The last combatant was disapointing by comparison - the short bulky body that could only belong to Flint Skovik. Luned had mentioned her lover's intent to enter the tourny as an incentive, describing the uniquely muscled man with intimate accuracy. Silly little Luney, he thought with a silent laugh, fat guys are the most fun to bludgeon. But I'd rather have the women right now. Time to follow Sei's sniper's example. Breaker lifted his right boot onto the same rywan stump that nearly snapped his wrist. He bent forward till his kerchief touched the surface and reached awkwardly underwater with his left hand.

Droplets sprayed up against the rain as a massive snake surfaced in his hand. It was all polished steel and bad intentions, and the words Colt Anaconda ran down the butt.

Cronen leveled the oversize revolver at Skovic and pulled the trigger. A grin cleaved his face as he waited to watch his hollow-point slug tear a messy hole in the man.

The gun clicked, and then echoed itself five times as he fanned the hammer. Empty.

"Bodorson you old bastard," Josh mumbled, returning the weapon to its boot-holster. The dwarf had sharpened his blades and oiled his gun and forgotten to reload it. Kicking himself for not checking the cylinder or noting the weight, he drew the Coralian dagger and poured a portion of his boundless energy into it. Explosive energy. He checked the bruiser's position and pitched the knife at Flint. It pinwheeled at a downward angle, aimed to strike the brute in the center of his mass. If that hits him or anything close to him, Luned might need a new man, Cronen thought as he sucked a breath and ducked beneath the surface, I'm not sure the monks can re-assemble ground bully.

He pushed off the split rywan stump and kicked like a dolphin, gliding through the water. His enchanted boots - almost weightless when he willed it - propelled him like fins. The cold crept around the edges of his conscious as stumps and stones scraped his bare torso. He stayed as close to the bottom as he could, opening hazel eyes only as necessary in the silty brew. Something snagged the open wound on his torso and suddenly he was worrying about his injury, thinking he should bind it with ice and air. Who needs that, he told himself as he blinked and sighted Roht's spindly legs, I'll feel fine once I give these girls a good fu-- He burst from the shallows and saw the water-strider's face.

"Faelynn?" He gasped, adrenaline draining from his veins like wine from an unstopped barrel. The round-bottomed thief of Underwood was... the smithy's little girl? Cronen felt ancient and ashamed all at once, swaying slightly as if the water alone held him up.


The electrocution hit Josh like a severe narcotic "high" in keeping with his profile, but the time spent submerged brought him down suddenly. And yes Warpath, that dagger is an impact grenade, sent with love of course. Click "him" in my sig for details, the ability is 'Energy Surplus' at the bottom of the list.

[Roht Mirage]

An alliance? With the woman who could walk the water's surface like a giant scorpion rode the shifting dunes? I'd be sand-brained not to, Astarelle pondered. She felt that she should be angry for the theft, but she had probably deserved it for some other unremembered transgression. Regardless, she couldn't attack those legs, not when they were propped so grandly above the water, and not while the sheets of rain contoured to every line.

Bury me, I don't even like... she chided herself. The embarrassment fell away, though, like rain off an oiled cloak. Her body may have had the good fortune to only be battered and bruised, but her pride had been soundly pounded into dust. There was nothing left to feel the spike of shame.

Astarelle straightened her back as if she were the once again in Farohtian priestess robes and presiding over the day of prayer. With the proper ceremonial flourish, she drew one hand from the mark on her brow, over her heart, and held it toward the woman, palm up, as if offering a piece of herself. She had no shame left to taint the memory, no desire to rethink the whims that had led her to flee that secret place in the desert. The motion made her remember the warmth of home and those few who had actually cared. She bit her lip as nostalgia gripped her heart for a moment before also falling into the numb void.

Faelynn blinked at the hand. I'm confusing the poor thing.

“Astarelle Set'Roh,” she said as she reached up and gripped the woman's hand. She didn't shake it. She just held it for a moment and took a deep breath. How many people will hear that name, now? Will the Kar'Roh? The potential consequences seemed a world away.

Again, Faelynn seemed taken aback. “You were calling yourself Roht Mirage the other night. Loudly.”

What should have been a horrified boggle was, instead, just a quirk of the brow that crinkled her divine mark. Of course I was. Of course.

She slid her hand from Faelynn's wet fingers and held it up to forestall any questions. “If I said that, then I was only using the name to taunt an old enemy. Other me seems the kind of person to shake her rump at a hungry sandwyrm.”

A shape suddenly shot through the air, thin as a blade. “Breaker?” she wondered aloud, looking toward the source, but her assisted flight had so disoriented her that she couldn't be sure which direction was which. At the moment, she couldn't make out anything but froth through layer upon layer of downpour haze.

Suddenly, as if he were as easily summoned as her staff, he burst from the water so close she could almost touch him... or him touch them. The sudden color as he recognized Astarelle's new friend made his intentions seem murky, at best.

She creaked her staff forward, her muscles aching as bruises constricted in the chilly water, and touched the reed's blunt end to Breaker's forehead. “Doop,” she chirped like she was once again playing the childish game with her temple-sister Lisere. Quickly, she pulled her staff back and pointed at her bruised eye. “Your work?” she asked, feeling the wisps of another memory that eluded her.

He nodded, perhaps on the verge of explaining just what debauchery she had unleashed to deserve it, which wouldn't be a pleasant thing to hear. So, with a comfortable stillness in her mind, she allowed herself to go full Coronian.

She spun her staff in a wide, rain-spattering arc and smashed it across his face, almost knocking the impossible man back into the drink.

(Bunny was okayed.)

[Reine]

"Faelynn!?"

Fae heard her name ripped from Josh Cronen's lips and realized, in that very second, that her life as she knew it was over. Yep, gone. Destroyed. Finito.

Colour drained from her face as she stared at the towering hunk of a man, (yeah, she oogled him plenty times before) her expression most likely mirroring his perfectly. Shock, disbelief, coloured with a little bit of embarrassment. Though why he seemed to be embarrassed was beyond her. She was because she knew everyone expected differently from her. Cute, middle class girl. All they ever expected of her was to bat her eyelashes and marry some rich boy so she could watch him grow fat and lazy while she raised his children. No one expected her to grab a spear taller than she was and wield it with the expertise of a man. Or sneak around at night wearing skin tight clothing as she busted into nobles homes on a mission to liberate a few shinies.

It wasn't that Cronen would end her life, persay. Well, he may in this very arena. It was that the man knew her dad and her brother. Hell, he even knew her mom! The Sheriff of Underwood was in their shop quite possibly more often than his own home. Sometimes he came by just to talk shop with her dad and blather on about the different uses for certain metals. Fae had always smiled at him, but besides a little flirt here a there she'd kept her distance. The Sheriff title had scared her away and she'd foolishly hoped he wouldn't recognize her.

Idiot.

If he told any of them she was here right now, Fae would probably be locked in her room for the rest of her life, heck, eternity!

Not that I don't know how to pick a lock...

Opening her mouth to say something, anything, hopefully intelligent, Fae lost her chance when Astarelle interrupted their awkward moment. She watched mutely, as the Fallien native smashed him full in the face with her staff.

That snapped her out of her reverie.

Fae turned back towards her new found ally. "Flank him!" She yelled in Fallien, praying Cronen couldn't speak the language and that she hadn't just commanded her to, well, who knows what to him.

Kicking it into gear, the thief spun the slick shaft of Amalia in her hands, the sharpened tip pointed towards the choppy water as the shaft crossed her body. She should be attacking her. Seth would attack him. He'd beat him into a bloody pulp and make him beg for death. But she wasn't Seth and Fae even knowing she was in a tournament she had a hard time initiating the first blow.

"Please don't tell my parents I'm here, Josh! They'll kill me!" Worse than you're probably about to. She grumbled in her head.

[Breaker]

Josh noted the shift in Roht's posture. He saw her shoulders rolling. Each droplet the staff shattered was a mirror breaking in slow motion. A mirror showing the man he'd become since the last time he entered the Cell. He had kicked the habit. For nearly two years he'd chosen not to raise that metal chalice to the sky, not to ride the lightning's waves of pleasure. And he'd thrown it all away to kill a Coralian in hot blood.

The staff neared his jaw, and he did not know if he wanted to fight.

He thought of Jake, who'd sought him out after Dirks' bloody tourny and all but begged for lessons. He thought of Stacia, who had been the girl of his dreams when they met - what felt like a lifetime ago - but reappeared in Underwood as a refugee during the war. A woman alone, under his protection. How could he have known the youths would fall for one another?

He thought of the trees he had exited Jake's doorway between just shy of noon that day. A twisted bending yew and a shattered oak.

The staff was so close, a broken dropling struck his chin from beneath.

He longed to climb into the bowels of Haida and forget the struggle for balance and benediction.

Can I still be everything everyone needs me to be?

Last he thought of his Lady - She whose token he wore about his neck, the blue kerchief heavy with rainwater. She would laugh when he told her of all this, a sound echoed in the melody of raindrops on water.

Should I fight?

Roht's staff smashed across his face, and the question answered itself.

Yes.

Cronen's reflexes took over and he bent like the yew rather than break like the oak. His head and neck and shoulders snapped back, but the thrill of combat and checkmate of the kill seized him. He never practiced throwing himself across force-fielded arenas or electrocuting Coralians. He trained for adversity - for the moment when all seemed lost and only instinct could save him.

After losing the last Cell, he'd quit lightning for two years... if he won this time, would he make it forever?

Yes!

He straightened with a quiet smile on his lips and cracked his neck as Fae water-danced to his flank. She didn't tell her parents she was coming here? He was accutely aware of the spear she held and understood the intent of her mispronounced Fallien, but felt more threatened by his own stillness. He hated hurting women. Could he finish them now, with the tournament finals on the line?

Yes!

"That," he told Roht, realizing she was no spy but a clever, ambitious girl, "that was your free shot. For the shiner." He would put the two femmes fatale down as painlessly as possible.

Josh touched the storm with his mind.

Raindrops all around the dark haired beauties became ice and flipped off course. The unique plummeting design of the droplets promised an aerodynamic point at one end, and hundreds of the icy biters converged on each woman. Like a swarm of steely mosquitoes they stabbed at faces, throats, necks, anywhere they could find flesh with blood beneath.


Josh froze the raindrops in the air around both chicas and redirected them inward. He's aiming for the most vulnerable places and the drops are equal offensive strength to steel, however because he did not "craft" them they are just raindrop shaped, and he's hoping the natural points will be enough.

[Reine]

You son of a—!

Faelynn never got the finish the curse in her head as a series of tiny raindrops turned into pieces of ice and went hurtling at several areas of her body all at once! She tried to cover herself. Her hands going everywhere and nowhere as she felt them slapping against her skin. Stinging her. Piercing her. Cutting her.

Is he trying to pelt me to death with tiny pieces of annoyance? Because it's only succeeding in pissing me off!

They hit her throat, her neck, her hands, everywhere! Swatting away at the nearly invisible bugs, Fae growled low in her throat as she felt her frustration beginning to rise. She peeked an eye open, just enough to see her new found ally duck under the the surface of the water and to safety. Well, maybe safety. Given how the woman clawed and fought her under the surface before, she wondered if she could swim. Most Fallien natives couldn't! May have been better if she stayed above the surface, even with these damn stinging nettles!

Just as she thought that, one of those damn stinging insects found her eye.

Fae howled in pain as it sliced right into her. Something warm ran down her face as she covered herself with her free hand. A burn, a deep cold, unnatural burn filled her left eye and the other filled with tears. She could still feel the ice inside of her, freezing and numbing her into a strange sense of intense pain and numbness.

Opening both her eyes, Fae realized with a growl of frustration that she couldn't see out of her left anymore. The damn shard had completely embedded itself in there and obliterated her vision.

Oh, that is it!

She narrowed her only good eye at Josh Cronen. She'd been up for playing nice. She hadn't attacked him, hell, she may have even yielded to the man (well, probably not, she'd only ever yielded once in a fight before and it had chaffed her to the very sore of her pride). He was, after all, a friend to her father. But now, there was no chance of that now. Not after that.

Pulling her hand away from the mess of her face, now covered in a deep slash across her cheek and her left eye mangled and destroyed, Faelynn balled her free hand into a tight fist, knuckles turning white, as she ignored the rest of his pathetic barrage.

Don't completely lose it, girl. Last time you did that, Seth almost died.

At any other time she would have listened to her inner voice. But death was only an inconvenience in this battle. Hell, even if she unleashed all that raw magical power on Cronen, she doubted the man would die. That didn't mean she couldn't try and enjoy every second of bringing this brute of a man to his knees before her.

She gathered magic into her hand.

"CRONEN!!!" His name a scream torn from her lips.

As his head turned towards her, she threw her fist out like it contained a knife. Only it didn't. All that gathered magic simply exploded right between them. She closed her eyes just as a blindingly bright flash eclipsed the whole arena. Her hands covered her ears as the bright display of white was followed by a strange, muffling boom.

She pulled her hands down and opened her eyes, well eye since the other one no longer counted, and hoped to the Thayne above that the attack worked. If not, her next move would lead her into an early grave.

Shifting her stance, Fae pushed off the surface of the water, and pulled her right arm back, then thrust Amalia and the sharpened tip of her spear straight towards his chest.

[Roht Mirage]

Astarelle gagged against Neptune's smothering hand. Why don't you attack, sand-brain?! The bitter curse rolled around in her head for the third time, followed by a dose of venom for herself. Don't duck! Don't duck! She hadn't been able to control herself, though, when her vision filled with shrapnel and the skin of her face, shoulders, and chest was harvested off in long streaks. Sandstorm! screamed every natural-born Fallien instinct in her. Her body had assumed the prescribed position, unmindful that it meant subjecting herself to a lungful of water that tasted like dirt and blood.

She couldn't be sure through the pain, but she suspected that the Roht mark on her forehead had been damaged, if not made unrecognizable. Logically, it should have been a relief, perhaps even a tactic she should have attempted the instant she fled the phantom city of Faroh. Yet, the loss raked her to her core. She still wore the mark out of pride. Sand-blasted pride! It wasn't logical -bury her, it was stupid- but it was a sentiment that rose insurmountably on the twin pillars of her Fallien hardiness and her Farohtian heritage.

They fell to him as prey to bluefin, for the Jya's warriors knew not how to swim, went an old saying, a prophecy to some beyond Faroh's veil. Desert people of all tribes knew it, wrote it, recited it, but rarely did they wade into the ocean's salty embrace and try to correct the weakness.

Through the howl of the splattering rain's underbelly, Astarelle heard Faelynn scream something. Then, there was a flash that blazed through the water, through her eyelids, and into the frantic part of her mind that so fervently set her hands and feet flailing. Screaming out the last of her air, she forced the brunt of her Fallien pride against the madness of Coronian bloodsport, just as she forced her body upward through the lowest of the shards that, hungrily, fought the water's resistance.

She broke the surface, mouth gaping like a sandwyrm in its devouring lunge. Her staff bounded from the churning surface and into the upraised hand that she was already rearing behind her head. A spear point bloomed, tightly compressed, then a looser shell around it to fight an arduous and inevitably futile battle against the rain. At least keep the point, she prayed as she turned the blunt end skyward and blindly hurled the spear, backwards, toward the clouds.

Only then did she crack her eyes open against the ice storm, and only enough to make out the shape of her target. She forced herself at him, arms coming up to shield her face, as her right foot sliced through the water to toe the mud between his feet.

“RETURN!” she howled to the sky, her desperation overflowing out of her in the unnecessary command. The anklet between Breaker's legs jolted with the pull of all four lataro pieces, and her sand-spear rocketed earthward with the dusty trail of a comet.

Breaker has Fae's -real- spear coming at his chest, and a sandy-pointed spear/staff falling from the heavens. Enjoy!

[Warpath]

Flint narrowed his eyes from across the flooded battlefield, and wrestled with the sense that he knew that man. The women were ultimately meaningless, unfamiliar and anonymous, but this one…where? And then the man reached down into the water and produced a gun and that, coupled otherwise with the warrior’s surplus of other weapons, brought a memory into sharp relief.

Luned and her compatriots had been discussing potential affiliates in the scribe’s inherited study days ago, and they kept saying one name over and over. Cronen, Cronen…the Breaker. Skovik had inwardly scoffed then, for that had been one of his monikers in Salvar’s underground arenas, and he knew of few others worthy of the sobriquet. When he said as much, Luned and the others insisted. Not Cronen – this was one of the most dangerous men in the known world, half a god in confirmed fact, a hero. Chronicle would benefit immensely from his affiliation.

But now, something in that distant warrior’s body language spoke of unwavering confidence devoid of arrogance. This creature was regularly tested and yet rarely found deficient to a task. The cell was a test for the brute, but a game to this thing, and Flint was too unsteadied by his encounters thus far to push his luck.

So when Cronen produced a knife – why was everybody throwing knives at him today? – Flint did not hesitate. The blade was hardly out of the Breaker’s fingers before Flint was moving with all his unlikely speed, diving headfirst into the water and pushing as far and deep as he could. If a lanky skulking wizard could fill the air with a dozen knives in the space of a heartbeat, Flint did not care to wonder at what somebody with Cronen’s reputation could pull off. Best to assume there were two dozen knives on his tail, best to let the water rob them of their velocity, and, sadly, best not to hope his gun-slinging guardian angel would strike again.

He heard a muffled splash and then the glug of displaced water rushing back in to fill the empty space, and then the world went to a mad place of light and agony. The water was in the air now and so was he, and he could feel but not hear the wind rushing around him as his body twisted and spun, and then the blinding light was violently muted by muddy murk and he felt himself bounce off of supersaturated grass and mud. Surely he was dead.

Actually he's not dead.

[Breaker]

The women screamed wordless rage and pain but refused to fall so easily. Breaker breathed through his nose and smelled the salt of their blood. He touched the blue kerchief on his neck. The rain and sweat rolling over his lips completed the memory of his Lady the first time they'd met. Water swirled and frothed around Cronen's waist, the depths rising with every cloudburst.

Good reflexes, he noted as Roht ducked beneath the surface, and excellent focus as Fae fought through her horrific wound. He felt her pain in his eyes and a bitter lump at the back of his throat. He wanted dearly to send her to the monks. At least I won't have to apologize to her parents, he thought as he recalled her desire for secrecy, can't think how I'd start that conversation.

Breaker saw the power build in the smithy's daughter's hand as if she were gathering rain with a cup. He recognized the form of magic and anticipated its blinding flash, throwing a forearm across swiftly closed eyes.

Blind behind lids and limb, he could not foresee the follow-up.

Bang!

The noise deafened him and rocked the equilibrium he'd so recently regained. He swayed as a high-pitched ringing replaced the patter of rain and panting of battle. Shaking his head, he spotted Roht's soundless spring from the shallows. Felt her staff fly skyward, sensing the enchanted sand's path. His stability returned - he took stone-shattering blows to the head in training and always kept his feet - but he swayed as before, eyes unfocused, head tilted at an angle.

Faelynn shifted her stance and thrust for his chest. He felt the pull of Roht's anklet on the lodestone-sand above him, as if a magnetic field had filled his spine. He'd seen the Fallien native manipulate her staff throughout the battle but this felt stronger, more dertermined. Deadlier.

Green fire glared from Fae's good eye as her thrust extended.

Roht's lataro staff descended like a javelin.

Josh waited 'till the last possible moment.

He displaced the water to his right with a mental shove, opening a split-second airpocket. His left boot pushed off a submerged stump and he pivoted into the pocket. Water surged around his waist to the ringing in his ears as Fae's spearpoint streamed past. His knees bowed and his arms struck, working in lethal harmony.

Cronen's left hand grabbed for Fae's polearm, seeking to grip it below the winged guard. His ice-wrapped right arm chopped at her ankles like a lateral pendulum.

He attempted to spill Fae forwards, to expose the thief's back to the sand-spiked staff and drive her delyn spearpoint at Roht's heart.


Displacing the water allowed Josh to evade faster than otherwise possible. Used 'detect magic' to comprehend the attacks.

[Reine]

Fae's eyes went wide. Her feet were suddenly no longer beneath her but were up in the air somewhere and her body was being pulled forward quite roughly. She never expected Cronen to actually anticipate her attack. No one ever saw that move coming. Her flashbang was one of her greatest creations. She'd used it multiple times to slip away from the guards and to escape an impending imprisonment and possible beheading for being caught stealing from a noble's house. How had the man seen it coming and blocked it so effectively?

With her one good eye, the thief realized exactly what Cronen had planned when she saw Astarelle standing right in front of her.

The damn bastard wanted them to kill each other!

Not if she could stop it.

Using the enchantment on her boots, Fae pushed off the air and twisted her body around. Cronen had an iron grip on her weapon, she couldn't wrench it from his hand completely, but she tried her best to direct it farther away from her ally. Without Astarelle, Fae stood no chance against the brute of a man before her. Hell, even working together they probably stood no chance. This move alone told her that.

Twisting through the air, Fae let go of Amalia, just as a shock and an explosion of pain ripped through her back. Her mouth opened it a silent scream. Eyes wide. The pain was like nothing she had ever experienced before. Tearing, rendering, it struck somewhere in her shoulder blade and came out the other side in an explosion of blood and flesh and sand. Sand of all things. Laced red with her own blood.

She fell into the water.

The spear point washed away into the turning, riling mess of liquid that encompassed her.

Her mouth filled with the disgusting taste of dirt and blood and several things she didn't want to identify. The pain stopped her from moving. She just wanted to curl up into a ball somewhere and make it go away. She wanted Jared to hold her like he always did when Seth pissed her off, when Oberon beat her into a bloody pulp and when Kid said something stupid to her.

Why did I join this tournament?

Why?

The answer was to test herself, to see what kind of metal she was made of. Was this it? Brittle and easily cracked and broken like iron?

No, Faelynn was so much more than this. She was Reine. She was the blacksmith's daughter and the thief of Underwood. She was Jared Cesarino's lover and Seth Dahlios' apprentice. She would not be beaten so easily.

She pushed the pain back as best she could, even as the fetid soup that surrounded her stung all of her wounds. Her eye, her cheek and now her back and shoulder.

I will not fall so easily!

Keeping under the surface of the water, Faelynn used another one of her magic tricks. She focused her magic and summoned her dopplegangers, both of them. They looked exactly like her, right down to the wounds currently covering her skin. Touching her feet off the silty ground once more (this was beginning to feel familiar) Fae pushed up and the two replicas followed her, mirroring her movements.

She burst from the water in a spray of fury, right in front of Cronen. Weaponless, she activited another ability on The Iron Shackles, a series of spikes protruding out from the toes and knees of the boots right as she lashed out with a quick kick to his face. Each one of her replicas did the exact same move, though at slightly different angles to him.

[Roht Mirage]

Breaker, the maddening sand-spit, shifted as if he was the one claiming the name “Mirage”, and Faelynn suddenly appeared in his place. The curse brewing on Astarelle's tongue died, tasting like blood. “No,” she breathed. The same expression weighed on Faelynn's face, but she couldn't foresee the danger from above. Every scrap of logic left in the Farohtian fell into the blank void as she lunged toward the incoming spear. It hissed across the ridges of her left bracer, darted past her eye as fast as a rocksnake, and found a home in her left shoulder. Like a marionette with its strings drawn, she hitched to a stop. Her right hand froze, still straining, in her vain attempt to steer her ally out of harm's way.

The staff punched down like a bolt of lighting. Its point, lucky to have survived the descent, bit in, and the wide-eyed woman was gone in a spray of blood and wet sand. Astarelle felt a sob constrict her throat. Before her, the staff bobbed upright like a grave marker, only to tilt over and splash down a moment later.

Gone, Astarelle wept. Every grain of sand hung dead in the water. Her staff, bereft of its strengthening core, was just a reed lost on the waves. Even her ally, her only ally... felled by her own weapon. As she levelled a burning gaze on the monster called Breaker, her eyes did not need the soup of blood running down them to turn red.

“Riza takla kador,” she swore to him. When the veil of Faroh was breached, her people fought... until the sand is pristine.

She grabbed the reed that would no longer come to her, raised it overhead, and planted it into the lake bed behind her. From her shoulder, the spear haft twitched, its point nearly clear through her. She didn't remove it. She just jumped. Her good hand gripped the top of the reed, which bowed slightly under her weight, as she planted a shoe against the middle of the flexing stalk and sprung forward. One iron-plated heel dove for the impossible man's chest while her right hand, bloodless and tense to the point of near-white, ripped the spear from her left shoulder so forcefully that it nearly cleaved off the dead arm. In a shower of her own blood, sent skyward to defy the rain, she arced the crimson point down toward Breaker's head.

Her last stand.

Three bodies burst from the water below, three blazing eyes among them. The vengeful triplets rose and kicked in unison like the finale of a dance that could move Faroh.

“Now, this is madness,” Astarelle howled with manic laughter.

You have permission to annihilate me.

[Breaker]

Blood blossomed around Fae's prostrate form, dyeing the rain-dappled surface a diluted pink. But not enough to drain her life.

"I'm sorry," Josh breathed, as if her parents were watching.

He smashed his left down at the back of her head - a merciful blow to crush the skull - but she was gone. Waves whispered outward as he struck only water, the damned ringing beginning to fade.

Roht retaliated like a cornered wyrm, finding the energy to pole-vault at him despite her ruined shoulder. She cleared the water still lapping around Breaker's waist and delivered a stunning kick to his chest, swinging the delyn spear at his head.

He allowed the force of the attack to carry him back a full pace as his right arm trapped the iron-bound foot against his breast. He leaned back to avoid the swinging spear but it drew an angry line from cheek to jaw just the same. Heat flowed down the outside of his face - a new Y-shaped scar to match the other perhaps - but Roht had sealed her fate.

He seized her good arm just above the elbow, his grip so sudden her nerveless fingers dropped the spear. He shoved the trapped boot upward and away, elevating Roht's dripping frame almost vertically above him. Both broad callused palms clamped her ribcage as Breaker prepared to sit and drive her skull to the muddy depths.

Faelynn exploded from the water like an immortal crocodile. No, three water-reptiles rose up, iron teeth biting at his skull from different angles. Two were fakes - their blood smelled wrong, their heartbeats dishonest - but they moved and attacked with her same deadly grace.

Breaker bent backwards from the waist, swirling Roht's body - gripped just below the armpits - in a short arc above him. The centrifugal power forced her flailing legs straight as she replaced his buried hammer, her iron boots its maul.

Whether because of his superhuman speed or the thief's blurred depth perception, he swayed easily out of range. Three spiked boots found nothing but air.

Josh swung his human hammer through a full circle, attempting to bash each Fae's face with ironbound boot-heels. He released Roht at the end of the arc, watching her sail through the air for the second time that day. She smashed into the Mystics' barrier and slid down like a gnat on a charging knight's armor.

"Madness?" He laughed as she dropped into the drink, "this is THE CELL my sweet!"

And suddenly he was alone with little Fae and her minions. Slender Fae who towered over him, standing above the water.

He lashed out with both hands, each tough palm seeking to send a doppleganger reeling away. In the same instant he exhaled powerfully, shooting an invisible spike of air at the real thief's navel.

Breaker picked up the discarded spear, admiring the delyn craftsmanship and looking around for any remaining opponents. His wounds had not closed - he was no vampire, regenerating in seconds - but the worst of the bleeding had stopped. He felt energetic and light, as if the vital fluid he had lost merely made him more mobile.

The ringing faded from his ears, replaced by his Lady's joyous laughter.


Had permission to bunny Roht. The air spike is equivalent strength to bronze and fast as an arrow. 'Detect Magic' allowed Josh to differentiate between Fae and dopplegangers.

[Warpath]

Joshua Cronen was on the road to deification. As the years dragged on, the list of things capable of harming or killing the Breaker grew ever-shorter, and what single man could match him blow for blow and hope to see the next day? So of course Cronen heard the heartbeat behind him, heard the water rippling away, smelled blood and charred flesh even through the water. Flint did not try to conceal himself. He emerged from the water slowly so that it relinquished the sight of what he'd become one gruesome inch at a time.

The brute waited for Cronen to turn around and regard his handiwork. Half of Flint’s body had been ravaged by the exploding dagger, broiled and steamed and blistered by the heat generated by sudden and raw concussive force. The left side of his face had been rendered monstrous: partially melted away until the shape of his skull was obvious under muscle cooked rare. The eye on that side was gone, leaving a gaping black socket from which water still ran, and his lips were just strips of meat doing little to conceal bloodied teeth. The skin on the left side of his torso was likewise disfigured, the blast having painted jagged designs on the canvas of his torso using shades of blood, burn, and blister.

And yet he was somehow whole.

An eerie, struggling mechanical whirr was coming from within both of Flint’s vambraces– the sound of two machines repeatedly trying to boot up and failing. Steam rolled off of the metal and swirled in the air, and Flint twitched and shivered and glared at his foe with one good but bloodshot eye. He felt the Swaysong beginning to build in his veins, like an icy, alien presence always kept on the verge of dreams but only just, and now it was stirring. Perhaps it had been his panic, or something had been knocked loose in the explosion, or maybe it had been the injury, but the celestial chemical went to work.

Flint’s natural hardiness had been enhanced twofold, fortified to a grotesque degree so that even now, half-destroyed, he walked and thought and yes, fought.

He lurched forward and waded through the water, raising his arms to reduce the resistance, but still he came on slow, relentless instead of agile. He growled deep inside his chest, and the sound came out wheezing and rattling, but there was no weakness visible in his stance. He was turned slightly to one side now, arms raised appropriately: he expected Breaker to strike first, perhaps with the spear, which he hoped to deflect with the left metal-clad forearm. Then, once Cronen was committed, Flint would throw his right elbow at the taller warrior’s temple, fell him into the water, and then he would push him down and watch him drown.

There were no expectations there, no strategy or foreknowledge or self-awareness. That side of Flint’s psyche was gone, replaced by rage and half a lifetime of combat experience. He was incensed and singularly focused on the object of his wrathful obsession: Joshua Cronen and the need for his painful execution.

[Reine]

Her attack missed.

The iron spikes of The Iron Shackles met nothing but air and rain and threw her deceptively off balance from the force of the blow. Then a scenario that never once crossed the thief's mind occurred. Cronen actually used Astarelle's own body as a weapon. Her booted foot slammed right into the first replica's face and Fae had barely a second of time to react before it came right at her.

She didn't stand a chance.

Stars exploded in her already compromised vision as the hard, brittle metal that lined Astarelle's boot slammed into her jaw and sent her reeling back into the water. Each of the replicas took the blow in turn and each of them went spiraling back into the water with her. A small tidal wave rippling through from the force of the impact.

She opened her mouth to breathe, but water filled it and her lungs. Clawing at murky depths, she kicked and fought until one of her feet slammed into the hidden trunk of a tree. Touching her toes off it, she propelled herself to the surface once more, beginning to feel a strange sense of deja vu over this entire situation overcome her.

I will not bend.

Her body broke the surface, a spray of water filling the already drenched air. Her one good eye focused right on Cronen, his face already intent upon her. None of her replicas emerged. She had stopped commanding the little things. The man saw right through his tactics.

I will not break.

She charged her magic once more, a mist forming around her hands as blood poured from the gaping hole in her shoulder and back. The pain was an ever constant throb that robbed her of much of her strength. But Seth had taught her to persevere through the worst that anyone could throw at her. The man had built her to be as strong as Adamantium and as cold and unforgiving as any metal.

I will never give in!

The water around her turned to ice and formed five, four inch long spikes that glistened around her out stretched hands. As he exhaled, she released them. Two headed for his face, while three were directed at his torso.

Then her world disappeared into pain once more. Before disappearing into a strange sense of nothing.

She saw him make no move towards her, not even a gesture of his hands, but something ripped right through her stomach with the speed and ferocity of an arrow.

Fae fell back into the water, her hands scrambling to keep her on the surface. When she tried to kick her feet, nothing happened. She felt a jarring sensation as they touched the ground, but she couldn't actually feel them on the ground. Nor could she move them.

From the waist down she felt nothing. Even the pain of the attack had dimmed to a strange, cold sensation.

Tears of frustration filled her eyes as her body began to slip under the surface. She didn't want to drown, but her right arm was useless. Everytime she moved it an agony, beyond the likes of which Seth had ever dealt her, left her reeling and her vision blackening. Or perhaps that was the blood loss.

Desperately she looked for Cronen, wondering if he would finish her, give her the mercy of a quick death or leave the water to do the dirty trick for him, but her eyes saw two men instead. One looked to be bald, but she couldn't be sure. The silt in the water blurred her vision.

"Please... don't let me drown." Fae croaked just as her head slipped below the surface.

Jared... I'm sorry I failed you. Please, don't watch.

She closed her eyes against the silt, the soggy green below her, the hidden tree stumps and the floating bodies of the warriors already lost. She wated all of that to go away. Instead, she saw Jared's room at the Thief's Guild in Lavinya. The mess of clothes all over the floor, the random items scattered across the nightstand and him, asleep in his bed. Red hair a mess about his face, twisted and tangled by whatever he dreamed of. Naked from the waist up, she traced her eyes across the broad expanse of his back and reached down, running the tips of her fingers along his spine and following the curve up to his head. When she reached it, his eyes were open, the storm within regarding her with a look of tired hunger.

How she wished she was there right now, not in this cold water, surrounded by death.

Then she felt something tear into her chest. Hard and colder than the water around her. Eyes shot open, mouth filled with water in a silent scream, the last bubbles of her life floating to the surface and shortly followed by her still body.

[Breaker]

Watching Faelynn fold around his invisible arrow brought tears to Cronen's eyes. He waited until she slipped below the surface - until she could not see - to take his right hand off the spear and scatter her spikes with a casual push. He snagged them with his own influence before they could shatter against the Mystic dome and banked them back toward their maker. I would never let you suffer, he thought as he added his steely strength to the spikes, you didn't belong here, or you should have come to me. Who trained you little Fae? He gripped the spear with both hands and hammered all five spikes through the water at the drowning girl's heart. He wished her a short rest and swift recovery as the storm raged on. He heard his Lady in every spattered drop and gust of wind, felt her embrace about his waist. She called to him.

Breaker turned, and thought for a moment Grond the Zombie had recovered his head.

It was Flint.

The boulder of a man raised dripping forearms that clicked and whirred beneath the driven rain. But the damage he'd endured was what Josh noticed. A gruesome half-face held just one black-and-bloodshot eye in that dome of a head. The mouth looked like something carved in a gourd by a child suffering the shaking sickness. But despite burns and scarring to make a field surgeon vomit, the man's mountainous bulk advanced. Luned had spoken of his strength and durability. Another soul to send to the monks.

Josh shifted his hips and brought the spear around his body in a lazy but surgical thrust. The point would punch through Skovic's breastbone and skewer his heart.

Luned had spoken of his strength and durability, but she failed to mention his speed.

The spear pinged off Skovic's bracer and Cronen pulled it back for a reverse-slash, and then realized he was underwater.

He couldn't remember losing the polearm or falling or the horrendous thunk of bone on bone, but he knew a flash knockout when he felt one. Water invaded his mouth and nose. Iron arms crushed him into the mire, stone hands closing around his throat. With desperate strength he grasped impossibly thick wrists and pressed them to his chest, away from his vulnerable windpipe. Bubbles exploded around them as Breaker retched and coughed, fighting for air that was not there. With darkness closing around him an absurd thought ambled through his mind. I'm stronger than he is. But with all of Skovic's muscular frame and monstrous wrath holding Josh beneath gallons of water, he was a child. There was no room for magic, no chance to feel for discarded weapons lost in the deep. Every instant was a struggle for survival, and Josh was losing.

As his thoughts became muddier than the water suffocating him, he found comfort in the first words he'd heard slip from his Lady's glistening lips.

Let go.

He discarded his instincts and let go of Flint's wrists. The killer's hands went back to work at his throat. Josh buried his chin against his chest and reached up with both long, sinewy arms. He latched his hands around the back of Flint's neck and pulled that ruined face underwater.

Skovic did not care. He grinned so broadly a chunk of cheek floated away and kept smashing his enemy's head into the mire, searching for a chance to seize the kerchief on Cronen's neck and strangle him.

Breaker's hips shifted and long legs slid between them like booted eels. He released the tree-trunk neck with his right hand and shoved Flint's left away. With no oxygen left, his instincts swarmed back in. Reflexes honed through a lifetime of training brought his legs up to wrap around Flint's head and shoulder. The leg-choke cinched tight as he pulled on his right shin and ratcheted his left knee around it in a tightening triangle.

Josh could survive without air much longer than most men. In times of great need he could stop his heart for full minutes, using the same simple breathing techniques taught to Ai'Brone novices and Akashiman warriors.

Flint Skovic was not such a man. The bruiser was all muscle, and muscle required oxygen to function. But Flint's lungs were not nearly so strained.

Like a single monstrosity of legend the two men rose from the deep. Skovic found his feet and tottered against the two hundred pounds of Breaker compressing his shoulder into his jugular. The choke put most men to sleep in eight seconds or less, but Flint's dwarf-like bulk kept his arteries from closing completely. And something about the click and whirr of those vambraces seemed to feed him energy.

Josh squeezed for all he was worth and hammered the top of that bald head with relentless elbows. But with his scarred back dragging in the water and Skovic pushing more than carrying him toward something, he had no space to generate power. Blood leaked from that smooth scalp as it split in several places, but the rain washed it away and Skovic seemed indifferent. I could scramble his brains and he wouldn't stop, Cronen realized, where is he--

With a shock Josh recognized the highest point of land in the arena. The pile of splashed dirt and stone surrounding the crater his hammer had opened. And there, peeking up from the shallows, was his dehlar bastard sword.

He remembered losing it in the struggle with Coralian, watching it lodge between the roots like a flagpole and thinking good, I won't have trouble recovering it.

Flint had seen it first. Somehow that single beady eye had spotted it around Cronen's legs, and the bruiser gained strength with every step. As the water level fell from his navel to his thighs he moved faster, carrying his enemy toward the sword point that rose six inches above the water.

Breaker redoubled his efforts, slamming Flint's face with his right hand 'till the ice poultice shattered and yanking on the man's head in attempt to finish the choke.

Flint's eye fogged and he faltered, swaying backwards toward the deep as finally his oxygen-starved brain shut down.

Click, whirrrrrrrrr.

Something more bestial than human blasted the fog away, leaving only hatred and hardcore resolve. Skovic stabilized his feet and lifted Cronen high.

Let go.

Josh released the leg choke and planted both palms on Flint's cinderblock shoulders. He mule-kicked backwards, sinew standing out like steel cables on his back and neck as he pressed into a momentary handstand, rocking Skovic forwards.

His right arm slid down and looped under Flint's chin, trapping the back of that thick neck once more. Breaker pushed off with his left and twisted and dropped beyond the blade with a splash.

Flint came down with a different sound; of displaced organs and internal seeping, broken vertebrae and bloody death.



Had permission to bunny Flint right onto the sword.

[Roht Mirage]

“Roht! Roht!” Raylene screamed as she ran the circumference of the dome. Her eyes snapped back and forth, her brown hair flipping in turns to cover her burn scar like wind-blown curtains. Audience members parted before her. They didn't offer any direction, but the nauseous swell in their faces indicated that her friend lay in the spot they looked away from. “Roht!” she squawked one last time in confirmation, then drew in breath sharpy.

A few running paces behind her, Master Kotra slowed and sighed. “Tabin, keep the others back,” he commanded while turning his head just enough for the lanky teenager to see the morbid cast in his face.

Tabin, glaring over his master's shoulder, caught a glimpse of the submerged body. It bobbed, misshapen and lifeless, like the remains in an untended aquarium. Above it, a splatter of blood ran down the inside of the dome. He could almost make out the shape of her striking it. “Horseshit,” he whispered so quietly that it was lost in the muffled roar of the rain. He had worn a scowl the whole match, straining it tighter and more bitterly every time he had seen Roht falter. Now, his face was slack and unbelieving.

“I want to see,” little round-faced Dahvim shouted as he broke from the remaining students and darted past Tabin. He radiated excitement, his childish enthusiasm so opposed to the Cell's reality that some of the patrons balked and started to move away.

“Brother! He said stop,” Tabin scolded, grabbing his younger sibling just below the shoulder.

“But, she said she'd wi-”

“Sit your ass down!”

A narrow-eyed Akashiman sword-woman stepped away from her entourage among the trees to help him restrain the boy.

Kotra turned back to Raylene. One of her small hands was pressed to the dome, fingers spread, as if the body might kick back into life and reach out for help. “We should go to where they'll be reviving her,” he said with a sternly-measured dose of sympathy as he gripped her wrist and eased it down.

“She's going to be so mad when she wakes up,” Raylene said with a small smile. The humor didn't reach her wet eyes.

The master shook his head. “No, I don't think she will,” he said, his voice hopeful but very hesitant.

One week ago, she had appeared on the doorstep of his school, all fury and bloodlust. She never did say what drew her there. Perhaps the sign, “The Hawk of Zaileya - Martial Arts Training”, had appealed to something; a yearning for Fallien, or just an opportunity to fight. He doubted she was there because of the school's reputation as a collector and protector of strays. Roht Mirage was no stray, not in her own eyes.

What she had been... was dangerous. He knew with absolute certainty that her affliction was the very same he had seen in his youth, when his tribe went to war and “unbound” their strongest -and most dispensable- warriors for the slaughter. Fate, it seemed, had brought her to the one place where the most broken of society's chaff could find a home, and the one man who knew enough to temper the force of a soul so wildly uninhibited. That, he had been willing to take on faith; a chance to, in some measure, right an ancient and irrevocable wrong. He could not bring himself to feel the same joy for her sudden change, which he saw not in the loss of skill, but in the loss of ego. She had appealed for sympathy. She had taken another's aid in combat. She had been cured by... a miracle?

It was too kind of fate, and he had never known a font of kindness that did not have a dark, scheming mechanism at its core.

“Let's go,” he said softly as he placed a hand on Raylene's back. She nodded, patted her cheeks, and turned from the body that, in more ways than one, was no longer Roht Mirage.

End

[Warpath]

There was no pain.

He felt cold all the way through his torso, beginning where the blade entered him and stopping where it left him. He felt the severed muscle, incapable of tightening though he commanded it to. He felt the heat of his life’s blood seeping out of him, swirling and spiraling in the water, adding to its brackish murk. He felt one lung deflate. He felt his body stopping and starting, just like the mechanics in his vambraces, hesitating heartbeats and wheezing attempts to drag in air where there was only water.

But there was no pain, only knowledge and sensation.

Flint Skovik was dying, and all that made the man - all the artificial things he’d built up around himself - was stripped away. In that moment he was just Rauk, devoid of all the stoic bravado and hate. He was just a man, looking back on a storied life and wondering at the point of it all. He found that he regretted nothing, but that he also felt no triumph. He did not wish he’d killed Joshua Cronen, or any of his other enemies. He did not inwardly sigh, and he did not lament the fact that so many he’d hated were still breathing.

He only wished he weren’t alone.

Somewhere, distantly, he knew that this wasn’t really the end. All he had to do was let go and then he’d wake up with some robed greybeard prodding at him. He would still go home, and he could still retreat to a warm bed and friendly faces. His body did not share that certainty, and it flooded him with Swaysong and it refused.

Impossibly his fingers twitched, and curled in the bloody water. His stomach convulsed, struggling to expel the fluid in his lungs. His remaining eye opened, and perceived a warped, quivering world, ringed in red. His veins strained against his skin, threatening to erupt from his neck and his forehead. He reached down – only one arm would obey - and wrapped his fingers around the blade, and pushed. The edge cut into his fingers to saw at the bone, injecting a fresh spurt of red into the water. He slid up along the bloodied sword, quaking with the effort.

The cold spear left him and his impalement ended. He pushed until his body twisted, and then he fell into the water, arms spreading outward to keep him afloat, fingers twitching, curling. He tried to moan but there was no air in him, only water, and the weight of it dragged him downward. The rain fell onto his face until it didn’t anymore, though he could still see it, tapping the surface of the water and spreading a hundred thousand circles stretching outward from one another, crossing and impacting and distorting one another like lives.

The mechanics in his bracers finally hummed to sluggish life, and began slurping a dwindling supply of blood from his wrists again. He continued to sink, and the red light at the edges of his vision closed inward and the color faded. The water and the dark embraced him until there was nothing left to see, so he closed what was left of his eyes. The grass swayed beneath him, caressing his back and comforting him in his loneliness. He left his body behind, and with it his isolation.

He told himself not to forget when he woke up, but knew he would anyway.

[Breaker]

Breaker regained his breath as he watched Skovic slide off the sword and float away. I spent my afternoon teaching the defiant to die. He lifted a boot from sucking muck and stomped on the thick roots trapping his sword's pommel beneath the surface. The blade fell over with a small splash, Flint's blood trailing around it. Cronen untied the tattered and stained jacket from his waist and fashioned a shoulder sling from its remaining stitching. He picked up the bastard sword and slid it home on his back - the scabbard was long lost, but the cool metal hanging between his shoulders felt right.

The storm raged on, seeming to grow stronger. Raindrops fell with such speed and frequency he could spot any shape he sought in their patterns... as if the stars themselves were falling.

She was there.

The form of a woman rose before him, standing atop the water as Fae had, but barefoot. She shone crystalline, translucent as the dome, an opalescent blue emanating from her skin. The rain did not strike her but became her, and as droplets grouped dimples showed in her smiling cheeks, hair as light as air blossomed and trailed between her breasts. She wore no clothing and had no navel, no solidity and no body rooting her in the physical realm. But she had come to him, and she reached out a shimmering hand.

She touched the Y-shaped scar on his cheek and stroked the gash opposite it soothingly, thumb pausing on the contusion left my Flint's elbow. She trapped the ends of the neckerchief between liquid fingers and tugged the sodden blue silk snug. Patience and love radiated from eyes deeper than any ocean. She brushed the bruise on his chest left by Roht's kick and blew her calming breath over the Coralian dagger's handiwork.

Breaker stood still, breathing as if he'd woken from a long nap, not finished a half-dozen combatants. Every grace of her light on his skin left goosebumps and endless hope.

Finally she kissed the tips of those vibrant fingers and pressed them to his lips. Nectar like no other washed over his tongue.

Her taste. Salty but sweet and mysterious at the end. He remembered the first time they had met. Not long after the last Cell he'd been lost, a junkie trailing from rooftop to mountain range with an iron rod and a thirst for lightning. And one day he had decided to end it.

He'd stolen a skiff and sailed into a storm that made the inside of the Ella Chamber seem like drizzle. The boat had been torn to splinters and he sank himself to the crushing depths with hundred pound black boots. As he'd walked along an underwater canyon and considered dropping in, she appeared. Not in her legendary form. That was for the sailors and the seamen who fell overboard or found themselves deserted on spits of land. She'd shown her true self to him, and inspired him to release the weight in his boots and swim skyward with her aid. Let go of the past and all your troubles. Do what you know is right, were the words she'd left him with, but she'd also shared a vision. A vision of Joshua Cronen overcoming the realm of mortals and ascending that celestial ladder... to sit by her side in eternity.

It would start when he won the Cell.

"My Lady," he said, and the words filled him with joy. "Your kiss likes me better than all the lightning in the heavens."

Her laugh lightened the rain, and weak sunlight broke between clouds above. It shone through her, and rainbows swelled beneath her skin.

Let go.

She faded, and the storm blinked and slackened, as if shocked by her sudden departure.

Josh felt no surprise and no loss; she had come to give encouragement and love and left him to make his own decisions. Such was the way with his Lady of the Water.

Clouds compressed within the dome and folded upon themselves like fluffy winter garments. The rain ran out and water sizzled all around as it rose and evaporated without heat. As the storm and all its tears vanished the dome opened from the top down. Sun spilled across a muddy battlefield showing shattered stumps and broken bodies, bits of wood and soggy loam. The corpses faded, following their souls to the Ai'Brone infirmary.

Breaker could not find his hammer. The crater he'd made was gone, filled in by mud and water as the arena flooded and covered over when it dried. That leather wrapped handle was lodged deep beneath the dirt, a memento of the afternoon massacre.

The Mystics who had maintained the shield strode across the battlefield, finding discarded weapons and drying leftover puddles. The might of their combined power astounded Josh. They had reduced the storm to memory in less than a minute.

The crowd had grown considerably larger since he entered the arena, and it broke and took a collective step back as Cronen walked toward the trees.

Stacia and Jake embraced him as one, the petite woman burying her face in his purpling chest, the half elf pounding his back like a drum. They spoke of his deeds as stories that would spread and become legend. He caught a Dwarven word in their rapid-fire recitation of the battle, and halted them with gentle hands on their shoulders.

"Amiroth?" He asked, searching for Aleraran root words in his limitless mind. "That translates to meteor hammer... where's Bodorson?"

"Spreading the news of how Breaker buried Amiroth in the first round of the Cell," Jake smirked, "he intends to make you a God, I think." The half elf chuckled and Stacia laughed along.

Cronen smiled. "And do you have news for me?" He asked.

Jake went red from nose to ears and Stacia swelled with pride.

"Indeed," the young woman answered, "Some Coronian louts who were watching the other chambers joined us when they ended early. They spoke much of the powers shown in Emma and Anita." Stacia's eyes twinkled and a soft breeze lifted her golden-cherry locks. "We know of the winners, and their skills."

"Don't bloody know if it's all true," Jake muttered into the collar of his jacket.

"Well," Josh replied, draping his arms around both pairs of slender shoulders, "let's adjourn to the Castle and discuss what you've heard. I have yet to see my office." Quarters were prepared in Ixian Castle, a sign of respect for the new Chief Investigator. "Tomorrow," Josh told them, "I'd like to introduce you both to one of the Founders of Chronicle. Luned needs help running her library in Radasanth, and she'll teach you things I never could." Four young eyes swam with questions. "You've both graduated from being my pupils, but I would still like to be a friend." He'd been afraid they would protest, but they took it in stride.

"So long as we keep training together," Jake stated, "no one else in Underwood can hit me."

"And you must promise to take proper care of yourself," Stacia added, aglow with thoughts of the Capital city.

"Of course," Josh said, smiling so hard the gash on his cheek stung, "I'd not have it any other way."

They passed the twisted yew and the shattered oak along Concordia's fringe, arms around each other as they strode to the distant castle.

"Now, if Bodorson brings me some bullets," Josh joked, "I'll have everything I need."



Josh may have been hallucinating up until the Mystics brought down the dome. His skill "fractured memory" allows him to comprehend most major Althanas dialects to some extent.

Sei approved my use of the Mystics containing the storm and removing the shield. This is my concluding post.

Ability request: according to the defintion of his ability "Lightning Rod" Cronen can only discharge a shock once per day unless he is subsequently electrocuted. Requesting that since he was severely electrocuted when using the attack, he will still be able to use it once across any following rounds. (The ability does not have a provision for this situation because I never imagined him using it in water).

Canon request: I'm removing the sledgehammer from Cronen's inventory and I'd like to make a wiki entry regarding its placement. Any player may claim it as spoils in a quest so long as they unearth it, to keep the legend of Amiroth alive. It was the first item Josh received in his Chronology on Althanas, as a token for aiding the Rangers.

Enjoy the EXP everyone! It pays to fight the Breaker...

Many thanks to all tournament officials. This was a blast!

[Silence Sei]

Okie dokie. Congratulations on completing the first round of The Cell within a week, guys. Now, because of the large volume of participants, commentary is only given in private, and only via PM. I will say that there was some powergaming, as well as some bunnying that shold not have been allowed. Please note that when someone gives bunnying permissions, this does not mean you're allowed to keep them in the same spot while your character wastes a good 30-45 seconds on dialogue/internal thought/conjuring/whatever. Anyways, onto the scores!




Reine
Tourneymant
Hoytti
Breaker
Roht
Dead
Warpath
blackshadow


Story
6
1
2
7
8
2
8
3



Setting
6
1
4
7
5
1
6
2


Pacing
6
1
2
9
5
1
7
4


Communication
6
1
2
7
7
1
8
4


Action
4
1
1
7
5
1
7
5


Persona
5
1
3
7
5
4
8
3


Mechanics
4
1
1
7
4
1
7
4


Clarity
7
1
1
7
6
5
7
5


Technique
5
2
2
8
6
2
7
4


Wildcard
8
1
1
9
6
3
8
4

Total
Total
57/100
11/100
19/100
75/100
57/100
21/100
73/100
38/100



Breaker, Warpath, Reine, and Roht Mirage all go on to Round 2!

Breaker gains 4000 Exp
Warpath gains 4000 exp
Roht Mirage gains 3500 exp
Reine Gains 3500 exp
Hoytti gains 350 Exp
Blackshadow gains 350 exp
Tourneymant gains 350 exp
Dead & Walking gains 350 exp.

Everyone gets 100 GP

Experience will be calculated shortly. Thank you for your time, and attention!

[Mordelain]

Experience and gold added.