Character #1: @El Toro Bonded: Hajduk, an enchanted lion. Paws can become extremely hot or cold. Magic: n/a Armor: n/a Weapons: n/a Current Health: 7 Current Attack: 13 Current Experience: 18
Character #2: @Amaunet Bonded: n/a Magic: chaos magic Armor: n/a Weapons: n/a Current Health: 8 Current Attack: 12 Current Experience: 18
we were the ploughman and the ploughed, our eyes were red and blind.
When Toro arrives at the arena, he looks like a dead man risen.
Not dead by some opponent’s hand, no, but he wears the canyon-red sand like a skin and old, dry blood crusts his legs and chest like child-high war paint. Hajduk prowls beside him, still snow-white, like he instead is champion.
El Toro is a hungry man with blood-red vision. His men got no answers when he passed through the fighter's entrance, and no healer was permitted to touch him. Whispers precede him.
He is possessing of only a single-minded mission.
The white bull does not enter the colosseum at a canter, looping around to the whoops and hollers of his people. He walks into the center, and he waits.
”El Toro, our very own Champion of Battle…”
She arrives.
”And Amaunet, a demon of the underground...”
Gods, does she look like it.
She would be beautiful - no - he would be allowed to think her beautiful had she not looked as though she was out to castrate him. He’d heard her name before, whispered among his soldiers when they thought he wasn’t listening to their gossip. She was a demon. Perhaps she always looked like one.
The white bull nods to her, should she stand before him. Hajduk’s tail whips to and fro beside him. Toro cannot deny the thrill that dances up his spine; perhaps he cannot sever the horns from another bull’s head, but he most certainly can pull the wings from a fly.
Summary: El Toro and Hajduk arrive at the arena. Toro is still a little bloody and sandy from his run-in with Rey. Hajduk is unmarred and clean. They walk to the center of the arena and Toro nods to Amaunet, if she's in front of him.
A week has settled her no more than a raindrop settles the hunger of a parched desert bloom.
A week has only seen her restlessness grow into a hunger, her violence into a holocaust. The stands are alive with all the dark sins inching down her spine like roots. Each bellow is a drop of rain and each cheer becomes a black cloud keeping the sun from her wings. She is a storm, a hurricane, and an apocalypse by the time her next match is called.
She is..
Oh she is nothing more than magic, hot-blooded and feral.
The old wounds are nothing more than gentle aches (like teeth instead of kisses in the midnight hour). Her missing feathers are forgotten wishes and the scrapes down her neck faded lines of a map leading to the underworld. Amaunet has victory in her eyes when she enters the ring and hell in the violent ache of her galloping heart.
She does not gallop a loop or stand still as a broken statute (and if it's not broken it will be, oh it will be). Like a snow griffin she takes to the skies into a flurry of feathers, sleek sinew, and bared teeth. A glow blooms across her skin as her magic wakes with all the rabid hunger of a bear at the end of winter.
Her flight starts as a lazy circle high above the Colosseum. It is wide and slow enough that he'd have to move to keep a constant watch on her. Slowly (slow enough that the nobles in the crowd protest in classless insults) she gathers speed, and speed, and more speed.
The glow on her skin brightens enough that her teeth shine like stars in the black sneer of her dark lips. She settles her gaze on the lion, picking the more dangerous of the two to focus her attack on (what is a horse to her, but another bit of flesh to conquer?). Her feathers dance and quicken at her side as she dives. Her magic feeds her fury, and eats the ravenous wrath of the crowd, until she's more stone falling than hawk diving towards a hare in the grass.
Amaunet aims for the lion, her legs galloping beneath her form, with the intent to gallop a line of agony across the backs of the earth-bound hares. But if they move towards her, or leap towards her as she falls--
Summary:Amaunet enters the ring calmly before taking flight (her training as a desert warrior coming to her aid). She starts by flying slowly and high enough that it would be impossible to keep in her constant eye sight without moving. She gathers speed slow enough that the crowd grows impatient and starts to grow restless. She uses this and her own natural anger to fuel her magic until her glow grows brighter and her magic turns her attack into one that will carry the force of a horse much larger than her. She aims for the lion, diving towards them both at an angle with her legs running in a gallop. She is aiming to run across their backs (leaving aches and blood in her wake, and possibly throw them off balance). But with her magic fueling her there is always the chance she will go through instead.
She is a weapon. He admires her as she glows. The crowd jeers; she is slow, too slow. El Toro - he could stand here forever, watching her circle, a hawk - not a vulture, as one might call her, no, she is here to kill, not to tear at the carcass of someone else’s hunt. Sweat trickles down his neck. Amaunet gathers speed, inevitable as fate or death; onlookers call out insults as if they cannot see the beauty in her flight, a strategy he will soon witness the fruit of. He knows nothing of her magic, but he sees the sanguine light growing from her like an old, red star. Like if blood were as holy as ichor.
She descends.
He isn’t sure who she’s aiming for, at first. Her speed is greater than it should be, even for a pegasus, dropping from the sky as a comet. Well, he thinks, this is just fine, and then, I won’t be much more than wine and bones when she’s done with me. Hajduk growls and says let me stay, one second longer but it’s not down to seconds anymore. Toro darts to the side first, out of her hooves’ path, if not her wingbeats, and at the very last moment Hajduk springs sideways. Toro lunges for her horns-first, she’s so very very close to him for this less-than-a-blink of time, and he would take her lung if he could. If she were still, he might have gone for the gore, but at this speed she would drag him along with her and more than likely separate his skull from his spine. He aims to slice, to split flesh at its seams and bleed her out.
Summary: Toro watches Amaunet fly around. Toro dodges first, and then Hajduk, who hopes to keep Amaunet aiming for him until the last moment. As Amaunet passes them, Toro aims for her flank (or whatever is nearest) with his horns. He intends to cut her, but not to create a deep wound, lest he be pulled along with her.
For a moment there is only the thrill of flight and the chaos of the crowd. For a moment only those two things matter because she’s free, and wild, and as endless as the horizon. On her tongue there is the taste of salt, sweat, sand, and the lingering taste of dye from where her father’s servants painted warpaint across her nose. She hopes that the stallion can see the smears of red and think of them as blood instead of paint (and think her dangerous instead of beautiful).
There is war, and battle, and brutality. Amaunet only relishes in one like a lion at a watering hole with a feast of foals.
In the back of her mind, the part where she’s almost civilized, she notes the way El Toro dodges and the way his lion lingers. That part of her plots, and plans, and counts steps instead of lighting bolts of pain. She drops her hooves into a jump landing she brushes by the Champion and aims towards the shoulder of his lion.
She revels in the impact to come like a wolf at an ewe’s jugular.
But then she feels the slice of horn across the meaty muscles of her flank and war turns to eradication (her magic leaps at the pain and devours it). She snarls instead of sobs when the blood starts to bloom across the wound.
The wing furthest from him dips instinctually pulling her away from the impact of his attack. Dust billows in clouds around her as she gallops back into flight half across the sands and half across the air. Her wings lift her back into the air with a force that is almost painful enough to distract her from the pulse and sting of her bloody (and now sand coated) wound.
A ewe can only avoid the teeth (or death) for so long. Hunger is a relentless master and it takes no failures.
So Amaunet angles her flight path towards the stallion with a determination bred into her by years of Davke training and harsh desert climates. She is no fragile flower rooted in the city. It’s with a violence learned from the sand wyrms that she lunges back towards him. This time she uses the force of a flight landing to gallop towards him. She keeps a wing angled towards the lion, prepared for any attack he might launch against the furious intent in her form.
But her eyes linger mostly on El Toro as she gallops towards him before turning swiftly to the side of him in order to angle her hindlegs towards him in a double kick. She aims for any of the fragile joints in his hind-end.
War might not be tit-for-tat in the long game.
But Amaunet, at the moment, cannot find it in herself to care.
Summary:Toro's attack lands on the meaty part of her hind-end as she moves past him. She angles her wing to pull her away from him and his lion instead of fully landing. Looping around she uses the force of her new landing to keep up her speed before she angles towards him before adjusting her path so that she might aim at his hind-end in a double barreled kick. She keeps the further wing out to balance herself but also to semi protect from a lion's attack on her off side. (or at least I think that's what she did, I forget already).
He sees her glow, hears the screaming of the crowd, and something of her magic pulls him to enragement (if he was not already - El Rey has already cheated death once, twice, three times; Toro came in wanting to kill). Her wing angles towards Hajduk - and her hooves slam into Toro’s side, only a half-second’s thought given the dodge; he relaxes his muscles and dips down to take the force off of his legs and into the meat of his left thigh. In the same moment, Hajduk leaps for Amaunet’s wing, claws outstretched and paws turned to burning hot coals. He’ll hold on to her, if he can, and scrape down the side of her wing, if he can’t. Hajduk lunges with the whole weight of his body - he aims to hit, hard.
Toro’s leg buckles right after the impact, his thigh a shivering mass of muscle and twinging magic. He grits his teeth, opaline eyes on Amaunet and Hajduk. It takes him a second, but he pushes back to his feet - if he’s allowed the moment - and tries to ignore the burning embarrassment seeping into his rage. El Rey’s escape ebbs as glowing-red jeers call out at him. “This is our Champion?” Someone calls.
Would that he had longer horns.
Summary: Toro takes the hit to his left thigh, his leg buckling immediately after. Hajduk lunges for her outstretched wing, his claws out, and paws hot as burning coals. Toro feels stupid for looking weak.
Due to failure to respond by the deadline, @Amaunet forfeits the fight and @El Toro wins!
This thread will be locked and moved to the Archives shortly. The characters' official experience has been updated to reflect these changes (along with any signos rewards sent), so there's no need to post in the Experience Updates or Signos Redemption threads!
This thread cannot be claimed as a "completed thread" for signos redemption.
EL TORO
Participate in a Battle or Challenge: +1 EXP
Winning a Battle or Challenge: +1 EXP
Winning a Battle or Challenge: 25 Signos TOTAL: +2 EXP, 25 Signos
AMAUNET
No "Participate in a Battle or Challenge" experience is gained if fight is forfeited by lack of response. TOTAL: +0 EXP
