Rumble Adjacent To And/Or In The Jungle

[Ebivoulya]

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Out of character:
Hikari no Tenshi only, thank you.

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The white blend of buildings, arenas, and mostly roman architecture was an obvious contrast to thick forest barely touched with autumn crimsons and oranges, especially atop the massive marble wall that seperated man from beast. Though roaring festivities, smoke, and the smell of ale radiated from below in the city, the woods outside it's wall emenated a cold quiet, but even though autumn was upon those that dwelled here, it was too early in the season for winds this chilly. The night was not young, but far from over, though even some of the night crowd were turning in already. The odd robbery or beating still took place, but it seemed everyone was distracted by the same strange feeling.

A listless twirl of smoke floated from the very pinnacle of the great wall protecting the city, the smoke emenating from a seated figure. His broad shoulders were covered in raven locks which shone in the light of a crescent moon, though they disappeared into the black cloak draped loosely over him to protect from the chilling winds. His jawline was roughly square, but it maintained angled features, and both the cloth vest and pants he wore were too thin to keep out the midnight chill.

He inhaled deeply again, spewing out a massive cloud of smoke. With a smirk, and a snap of his fingers, a single spark of blue lept from his fingertips to the cloud, which then crackled for a moment before condensing into the shape of a six-winged dragon that seemed to flap off into the night, before dissipating into a cloud once more. He took a few more deep lungfuls from his elegant wooden pipe the length of his forearm, coughing rather harshly on the last one.

As his pipe finally extinguished the swordsman, for the blades at his back were noticible despite his cloak, stood atop the mostly flat roof of the city wall and turned his pipe upside down, tapping it on the steel plate on the back of one of his gloves. The roof was slanted slightly to each side to funnel off the water, and the entire width of it was no more than fifteen paces. Each brown tile was several inches thick, and a foot wide. He stood in the middle of it and stared expectantly into the dark woods outside the city, his hands idly reaching into his vest for a another pinch for his bowl, and another match.

[Hikari no Tenshi]

It was supposed to be a city of adventurers, where warriors of all races gather to test their mettle against each other. Luscious lips lifted in a twisted smile at the thought. It had been so long since she had actually been given a challenge that the encroaching form almost believed she was starting to get soft. Not that she would, but the thought was always there, nagging. Long violet hair streamed behind the woman as she ran toward the impossibly tall spire in the distance; there was power there, and she wasn’t going to let anything get in her way of killing whoever held that power.

The path was well-worn, but it was uncomfortable to the intruder’s feet for some reason. She also had the strange suspicion that someone was watching her. No, she knew she was being watched. Skidding to a stop, blind eyes gazed through the permanent enchantment that gave her sight. Now that she stopped to look at the path, she could see why it hurt her so. It was incredibly small and hard to see – she wouldn’t have noticed it without her sight enchantment – but a myriad of caltrop-like magical annoyances littered the pathway and the ground as far as she could sense. She smiled again. So this was how they deterred visitors? They would have to do much better than that! A jungle’s worth of trees flanked each side of the path, and that was more than good enough for her. They were also spaced rather tight compared to most forests, which only made her happier.

It could have been heat rising out of her back, but heat didn’t quite move like the quartet of tendrils did. All it took was remembering that she had six arms and she was moving through the jungle far faster than she had gone on the ground. Four nigh-invisible arms reached from one tree to the next at a breakneck speed, and all the while the woman simply “stood” upright with her physical arms crossed underneath her ample breasts. Oh how she couldn’t wait to get into the city… the last few adventurers who had tried to get in had made it sure enough, but the corpses that only looked like men and women if you used your imagination and replaced key features probably weren’t what they expected to see in the registrar’s office.

The wall was visible through the trees…

Her wait was finally over.

The Reaper of Cities could kill again!

And there was her first victim. Standing so stoically atop the great wall, he was a handsome slab of meat that she wouldn’t have minded bedding for a while under different circumstances. Unfortunately, things like honor and duty typically got in the way of ideas like that. Not her honor or duty, of course. Her duty was to kill as many people as she could before she took up her place in hell. She had seen it once; a terrible place filled with all the unimaginable tortures and torments that she could ever hope for.

Translucent hands found amazingly sturdy grips on the slick, magically-reinforced wall, and she scaled it much like a spider climbing its own web. With a thought, the spare hands retreated into her body once more and the scantily-clad woman leaned toward the mountain of a man before her. A smile and a wink were given only moments before her mouth issued its first string of words in days.

“I don’t suppose we could talk this over in bed; it would be much more enjoyable than any little squabble here. All I’d have to do is level the city first, and then we could have all the fun we wanted. What do you say, Ebivoulya?”

If anything, Viola wasn’t an idiot by any stretch of the imagination. She had done her research on this city months before. It was the most mind-numbing process every time, but it was also necessary to ensure her continued survival. The Triumvirate were the best and strongest fighters in the entire city. Based on the thin trails of magic leading to unseen top of the tower, the intruder could only guess that the other known active member of that elite group was up there. But she wasn’t hiding. Éclair Ryoko, the half-phoenix-half-mermaid spellshaper was going to provide support.

“If you don’t remember – or didn’t get my message, I’m Viola, and I’ll be killing you today.”

[Ebivoulya]

The time passed slowly as the winds died down, but still an endless stream of smoke ushered from the top of the wall where one of the three founders of this city sat enjoying the view. His eyes scanned the forest with distaste, spotting the odd flash of movement as the rustling he'd heard grew closer. Without any wind, his half-elven ears could hear everything for almost half a mile, and he couldn't shake a strange feeling. The sense of urgency he was getting from Eclair annoyed him as well, and he thought she worried too much. He'd told her time and time again that even if it looked as though he would lose, she should just seal up him and the intruder and wait on him to finish the fight; but he knew that wasn't her style.

No, she'd probably be monitoring the whole thing from the Spire with her creepy floating eyeballs waiting for a chance to help. That was more her style. With or without her help, though, it seemed like he could get a bit of fun in before the night was over. The intruder appeared to be alone, and scaled the enchanted wall with ease, landing inbetween him and the outside edge of the wall. The slight bit of uneasiness he'd felt since he noticed her approaching through the woods dissipated as she touched foot on the top of the wall. Her long, violet hair matched both her revealing outfit and her name. She spoke plainly, but before he could respond with a witty comment of his own, she surprised the swordsman; she called him by his name.

"Thanks for the offer, but my wife might kill you and use your soul to restore some of her youth."

He took another deep lungful as she introduced herself; again. Her first introduction a few days prior was gory, but hadn't had the effect she probably intended. Rather than fleeing, most of the citizens wanted to stay and fight. It wasn't that surprising, for a city of heroes, to stand to the challenge. He exhaled the rather large cloud of smoke over his right shoulder, casually snapping his fingers again. Another miniscule bolt of blue lept into the cloud, this time condensing the whole mass into a small, fingernail-sized diamond which dropped into his hand. The excess emissions like carbon dioxide, monoxide, and water were filtered out. Interestingly enough, a cloud of smoke had a much higher carbon content than normal air, and was much easier to condense.

"It was nice of you to take the time to introduce yourself. You look ready, so let's begin."

Before he finished speaking the alchemist tapped his steel-toed boot rather hard on the tiled roof, producing four comparatively large sparks of blue, which split off from his position at right angles to eachother. The one headed for Viola disappeared into the tile sooner than the others, but the effect of each was the same. At each edge of the massive barrier, and fifteen paces to either side of the two, four more walls sprung up to box them in. Each was covered in the same tiles that covered the roof, and stretched ten feet above the already tall bulwark.

Just as they all aligned and solidified, the swordsman stretched out the hand in which he held the diamond, another large bolt of azure leaping from the tiles to his glove. His other glove grasped the still-burning pipe he had been smoking from, and the auburn tiles beneath his other hand seemed to disintegrate, the air above them crackling a bright indigo. The tip of a staff solidified from the chaos, reaching up towards the warrior's hand as it was constructed. Before the shaft had even reached it's full length, the alchemist dropped the diamond into the flickering blue aura. Instantly the chemistry changed.

Though still blue, the glow took on a deeper hue as the shaft was finished, and a two-foot long blade made from the condensed byproducts of the materials within the tile with the greatest tensile strength grew from the shaft. The blade extending from the four-foot long staff was black, with a diamond edge, and it looked like the blade of a scythe with its edge on the inside curve. A thin core of carbon extended throughout the shaft, and the blunt end was slightly larger, with all the heaviest minerals condensed into it. As the shaft reached his hand, the light show stopped, and the two were left in silence, surrounded by tiled walls on top of the perimeter of a city of warriors. Most of them would probably kill to watch this fight, and in the end they might get the chance, but it was his time to enjoy himself now. Spinning the almost perfectly balanced weapon once, he slammed the butt end into the shallow crater in the tile below left by his transmutation. The inconsistencies in the minerals within each tile made the blunt end of his weapon a little too heavy, but he could manage. Some of the walls in the city itself had been thinned to create the four that surrounded them now, but few were probably the wiser.

"Any time."

[Hikari no Tenshi]

The most delicious part of any city escapade was in the choice of fighters. This particular one had so many morsels to decide between that she had almost overlooked the most obvious of choices. It was her policy to kill from the top down; the mental games it played against those weaker than her latest victim were so wonderful to behold. It almost made sense in its own twisted way somewhere in her mind. Whatever the reason, she just knew that it was more fun starting at the strongest and working her way down the ranks. Such beautiful choruses of terror-filled screams filled her ears even as the great man before her boxed their fight in with four giant walls. Her interest reached its peak, however, when he formed a polearm from a gem that condensed from the smoke around his head.

“You know, you could always put a roof on this box and we’d be free to have some fun before this gets too chaotic. But you’re not that kind of man, right? Oh well. Just make sure you watch me really closely.”

Viola smiled, chaos personified, and balled up her right hand. Reaching forward as far as she could, she slammed her fist into her own stomach, punching through the flesh… or at least that’s what it looked like. Only a slight ripple in the space around where her arm met her gut belied the fact that she had just punched through her own body. It was a peculiar phenomenon that she had discovered some time ago on just another in her long line of devastated worlds. Who was she to complain, though? She might as well have been given her own invisible, weightless storage container. What came out of the warped space, though, was much more interesting than the method she used to retrieve it. Two tennis-ball-sized silver orbs orbited her right hand when she removed it from her storage space, unimpressive of their own right until she grasped one in each hand and squeezed. Liquid metal erupted from each sphere, twisting and spiraling around her hands and halfway up her biceps, coating her skin with a bright metallic sheen. Twin rows of four spikes angled back sprouted from the metal along her forearms just as two-inch spikes appeared from each of her large knuckles.

It was almost an afterthought that drew Viola’s eyes to the quartet of crystal spheres now poised around the wall, one at each corner. It seemed that Éclair was taking a real interest in the match now. It didn’t matter, though. Let her watch for all she cared. The violet-clad woman licked her lips in anticipation; this was going to be succulent. The metal on her arms howled for blood in her mind, and it took everything she had to placate its lust. Sentient metals were so pushy! It would have its feast soon enough. Just not yet. It may have looked to be a bad choice to don melee weapons against a long arm, but she knew what she was doing. She was going to have fun.

“After you, lover boy.”

[Ebivoulya]

The sultry Voila continued her futile advances despite his reassurances that her attempts were going nowhere. He had to admire her persisitence. More than that, he had to wonder at how exactly she had managed to not only reach into her own flesh with no bloody repercussions, but also pull from it two strange silver spheres that seemed to communicate and respond to her commands. They completely covered each of her arms, branching off in both directions to make her a dangerous little cocktail to get too close to.

After donning her own unique combination of weapon and armor, the sensuous warrioress assumed a provactive stance, daring the half-elf to attack her both with the tone of her voice, and the utterly confident look in her eye. He disliked overconfident warriors, especially those which tried to use their 'natural traits' to their benefeit.

Her overconfidence would be her downfall, at least if the half-elf had any say in the matter. With a sly grin he tapped his foot once more against the tile upon which he stood. This time no visible flash of light took place, but every wall surrounding them was interlaid with veins of solidified oxygen drawn in through the pores in the stone itself. One little spark and he could send any section of the wall flying into pieces in whichever direction he wished. That probably wouldn't be enough to surprise her, he surmised, so he continued along that same train of thought, only this time turning to the weapon in hand.

Spinning the pole-arm parallel to the ground, he pointed the blunt end of the weapon at the provacative warrior before him. Her smirk was mirrored in his face, though for entirely different reasons. Reaching one hand out to the tip of the shaft, he touched it with one finger, a spark of blue leaping from his glove to the solidified stone weapon. It crackled for a moment before the light dissipated, leaving nothing different but a hole on the top of the shaft he held in his hand. In reality he had just done the same thing to his weapon he had done to the walls, and the single hole was his fuse. The exceptionally heavy elements condensed into the blunt end of the weapon were intersected with intricite veins of solidified oxygen which all led back to the touchhole on the top of the weapon.

"My pleasure."

His other gloved hand still cradled the burning embers which remained in his elegant wooden pipe, and a quick glance down confirmed that they were still lit. He immediately reached up to the touchhole, bracing the shaft of the weapon inbetween his elbow and ribs as he tapped the pipe upside down over the fuse. Immediately an ear-shattering crack filled the area, all of the material in the heavy end of his weapon except for the surrounding material which formed the cannon shaft exploded outward violently, sending jagged shards of dense and heavy minerals and metals towards the insolent attacker. Some of them had even begun to melt from the extreme temperatures reached inside of the shaft itself.

Immediately dropping his pipe to the ground, he gripped the now hollow end of his weapon as the last of the shards left it, the entire shaft becoming eclipsed in a brilliant azure as he turned his weapon from a pole-arm, to a chain-and-blade weapon. The once hollow, blunt end had now become a handle attached to a rather long chain formed from the remaining metals and minerals in the weapon. It sacrificed the integrity of the actual weapon itself, but the reach of the chain was at least ten paces, and the blade attached to it was still diamond-edged.