The Brawl to Rule them All(SE Tournament)

Andrea Volkslieb tread with a light, swift stride across the stone floors of the arena tunnel. Beyond the gentle rapping of her soles against the masonry echoing from wall to wall, the trek through the corridor was one of general silence. It was a silence such that some would have savored it in reverence, returning the peace and quiet with steady observation. Andrea, truthfully, would have treated the silence the same, if not the calamity to which it served as a prelude. While insistent on returning the favor of silence unto the tunnel, her mind was roaring with preparations for the battle looming before her.

Schmerzhafter… her most trusted weapon, slung across her back for the time being, undoubtedly awaiting the inevitability of its glory to be had. Upon her hips, the pistols Bluttenkrallen too, rested in wait of their own chance to shine. Held in firm hands, Todesengel would be the first of her firearms to see conflict. A precursory overview of her ammunition left in her confidence that all three would have leg room to run their paces. Todesengel was the only one loaded: six standard rounds would lead the charge for four impact shells.

And Babenfuast can hope to see a moment or two as well, she thought of her gauntlets.

Over the passing moments, the silence of the corridors lifted in a steady crescendo. The footfalls of Andrea’s boots were joined by the dull roar of an expectant audience. A booming voice, no doubt of some faceless master of ceremonies sounded, incomprehensively, under the noise of cheers and thousands of raised-voice conversations. The commotion peaked at the opening of the tunnel, where a wrought metal gate was beginning to move out of place, allowing Andrea an undisturbed entry into the battleground.

Hit by the wall of sound, Andrea remained calm as the depths of the tunnel; years of combat and hunting had conditioned her to disregard the unnecessary chatter. Her attention fell upon the ring: a massive, open circular space, sectioned into fourths by a walkway-looking arrangement of stone. Each fourth of the circle housed its own gate. A wide gaze around the arena showed the other gates had been opened, and an influx of competitors was imminent. Assuming each gate would yield a combatant unto the battlefield, Andrea prepare, mentally, for a four-way battle.

How to act? She pondered a quick strategy. To maintain distance would be the immediate course; a haste spell could be enacted quickly enough to that end. Focused chiefly on the sector of the battleground directly opposite of her, Andrea shifted Todesengel. Angled down, yet with its barrel held forward. Time to ride…

 

In a glaring contrast to the somber atmosphere of the corridors mere yards behind her, Andrea was now surrounded by the full cacophony of cheering and revelry among the packed stadium. Just as when she had stepped into the arena, the arrival of more competitors prompted the audience to storm with excitement. Screams in support of favored combatants; the billowing of cheap, mock-up war horns. Sounds of all sorts glanced off of the hunter’s ears, accounted for as mere white noise.

Ignoring the energy buzzing about in the seats, Andrea remained focused on the competitors. To her left, she marked the lizardlike creature. A lightly clad individual, adorned by even less armor than herself, bearing but two visible weapons mounted upon its hands. The next one to fill a sector of the field was a fully clad, knight-looking warrior. Human, as surely as Andrea could tell, he was clad in full armor, and brandished a pole-type weapon. Finally, emerging casually from the shadows into the remaining quarter of the arena, came a feminine figure, dressed to a similar effect as Andrea herself, save for the addition of a cloak-like garb, that more than likely hid something more than the clothing underneath.

In the seconds before the battle would be called to a start, the gunslinger ran her list of options. The lizard, it seemed, would be the clear candidate for being quicker on its feet; but its apparent lack of ranged weapons made it less a target in the gunner’s mind; perhaps she could keep her distance and focus on one of the other two first? The knight? She thought more carefully on him, deciding that his armor would be too much a task for her to fire through; at this range, she would have needed armor piercing rounds, which she had foolishly left out of Todesengel’s current load.

The woman? She didn’t know what surprises, weapons or otherwise, the other woman would be hiding, but as the gunslinger considered the three options before her, the more the woman stood out as the clearest target. The foe who could potentially stop her in her tracks in the most unexpected manner was one to be dealt with sooner, rather than later. Hmmm… Let the knight deal with his dragon, she thought.

She prepared to act. With hushed word, she initiated a Haste spell. The lightning-fast impulses of the body expedited beyond their normal limit. In a sense, she felt light, and agile. Her shot could be aligned almost as quickly as she had arrived at her decision. She regretted only that she had not considered to load stun shells into her rifle, though maybe those would be better suited to another opponent. A blaring, bell-like sound tolled, ringing throughout the stadium with a high pitch. The signal was clear: the battle was expected to start.

She raised her rifle, swiftly lining herself with a clear shot at the cloaked woman. It was, by little means, an attempt at a killing shot (if death came from it, that would be icing on the cake). No sooner than lining it properly for a shot to the torso, did Andrea press back the trigger. A standard bullet sped through the air, setting itself hopefully to hit just below its target’s sternum.

 

A dead end…

From her position, Andrea’s view accounted only for only half of the battleground. But half of was all she would need to determine how to proceed.

In the same instant that her shot had left the barrel, the rogue she had targeted had deployed a veil of smoke, which began to spread nearly as quickly as the bullet would have taken to reach her. A cursory glance to the quarter of the arena opposite hers revealed the movement of the lancer towards the rogue. It took less than a second’s thought for Andrea to piece together everyone’s opening actions: The lancer had clearly sought to engage the rogue. The rogue, Andrea determined, would no longer pose an immediate threat; to charge out from the veil would only defeat the purpose of using it in the first place, and the lancer, if he was worth the metal of his armor, would keep her at bay.

The would leave only…

The lizard! Within the frame of another second mindfulness, Andrea’s immediate folly had dawned upon her. Still facing her rifle forward, she spun a one-eighty, pivoting around leading with her left side. By then it was already too late to completely spare herself from damage. She came half-circle only to witness a yellowish, leather connecting with her left shoulder.

Taking the hit being a foregone conclusion, Andrea prepared as best she could to weather and retaliate. Rather than retaining her left hand’s grasp on the rifle, she would release its grip, distancing the arm from her weapon; this would afford her at least a small measure of independence with her right arm.

While her left shoulder would take the brunt of the kick, this would be mitigated by several means working in tandem. Capitalizing on the positioning of the kick’s impact, and what momentum remained from her previous movement, Andrea would shift her torso, leading the motion with her left shoulder. For a brief point in time, this motion would be as if simply allowing it to move with the driving force of the kick before steadily pulling out of its path. As her left side would free itself from the fate of being pressed under the reptilian foot, the haste-imbued arm would find its way back to the back end of the rifle.

Flowing still with the preceding motions, Andrea would reciprocate the offensive. She now held her firearm with switch hand positions, using her right hand as support, while her left hand took hold of the butt of the stock. Now looking to exploit the momentum (and anticipated vulnerability) of lizard’s airborne attack, she would make a swing with the length of her stock serving as a blunt implement (the distance was, by then, too tight to make effective use of the affixed blade). With the amplified force coming in tow with her speed, she would aim her strike for the side of the lizardman’s torso, an effort intending to knock him both to the left and to the ground.

And, if met with success, this move would see her placing two shots into the opponent’s back.

 

The wild exploit of her previous maneuver paid off as much to Andrea's ideal as she would have expected. The stock of her rifle connected, and she proved somewhat able to brunt the opponent's weight. While the influence this had on her opponent was mitigated by the haphazardness of her counter and their own movement, all of this set the marksman in a presumably better place than she had been in.

Now all three of her opponents were in front of her; with the lancer and rogue still hidden behind smoke, keeping the chance of getting visual as the smoke cleared or as one or the other emerged was crucial. Andrea would have enough chance to react to a sudden charge. All that remained after these considerations was the lizard in front of her.

Its next move was likely to exacerbate any further retaliation. Charging forward... towards a warrior wielding a firearm? A foolish matter.

Able to speedily adjust her aim, she set sight to the centre of the fighter's torso. Not a second after, she had fired a shot bounding for where she guessed thw heart was. In rapid, almost gatling-speed succession, she made four more shots: one towards the head, two to either of the shoulders, and a fourth zipping towards the stomach area. Each shot was placed in such seccession that practically no space to evade in one-by-one fashion. Likewise, the formation of and distance between each bullet left little room to contort between each one.

 

In the fractions of a second that spaced the moment she had fired and the instant the bullets would have made contact, Andrea’s teeth gritted. Her eyes, brimming with focus, observed the fruits of her labor. Indeed, she had misjudged the movements of her opponent, resulting in the center bullet of her spread to ricochet harmlessly off of the lizard’s armored gauntlet. Regardless, as she anticipated, at least one shot, specifically the one originally bound towards its head, made its way to its destination; then lined to the opponent’s chest, it broke through.

For yet another fraction of a second, Andrea anticipated that the other shots within the cluster would find their way into some portion of the reptilian hide. It would be in this same fraction of a second that her eyes would meet with her foe’s. Perhaps it was that its glaring eyes were meant to be an intimidation tactic; but the sharp stare down, however, brief, would find the lizard-man’s gaze met with a ferocity, determination, and concentration to match its own before it vanished in the blink of an eye…

“Your-“

A threat of her imminent defeat? A predication of critique? What this word was meant to precede, Andrea had neither the desire nor need to know. All that she wanted and needed from it was the fact that her foe had reappeared behind her, and that, given the volume of its (now, to her best understanding, ‘his’) voice, near enough that a physical strike was not only possible, but bound to be extremely effected.

Soon to recede and lift entirely, the expedition of Andrea’s Haste spell afforded her the narrow edge that she needed. There was practically no question in her mind as to her next maneuver. To have attempted to block would have require precious time to both reorient her stance and place an appendage of one sort or another to intercept an attack that might not have been coming; this would leave her in quarters too close for her rifle to remain effective. She opted, then, to get low.

She crouched, first from the knees, and then into the hips. She sprung forward, entering into a sort of hybrid motion between a tuck-and-roll and a barrel roll across the arena floor. The movement would culminate with her upon a single knee, with the opposite foot firmly set upon the ground. She held her rifle in a widened grip. Her right hand wielded the end of the stock; her left held roughly halfway long the barrel. From her position, and a brief ‘wind up’ pulling the weapon slightly back, she sought to exude that she was prepared to run her opponent through with her blade.

What would come would not be a thrusting motion. Nor would she attempt a cutting attack. Emerging from the end of the rifle’s barrel, there emerged a piercing, luminescent burst of pure magic energy, streaking towards a then more exposed chest of Andrea’s opponent, looking to follow further through on or near the work of the previous bullet. Due to leave an impression if it made any contact, the shot would otherwise prove useful for diverting the foe’s attention.

With the shot on a point-blank course to its mark, Andrea shifted her right-hand position further up the barrel. With a strong swing, she aimed to knock the hard butt of her stock into the warrior’s ankle and sweep him off his feet, and allot herself the opportunity to rise to her own again.

 

An unexpected, downward force pushed Andrea’s weapon to the ground. Though initially dragged to the ground with it, Andrea’s hands were prompt in releasing the weapon with little further resistance. Plausibly, she could have resumed her hold on the barrel after its inevitable clattering against the ground; but it was without a second thought that she determined it a futile effort.

Instead, she brought her fists in to cover her exposed head, bearing a pair of metal gauntlets of her own. Striking out from this position, she proceeded to meet the incoming flurry of punches. With a series sweeping motions she knocked what she could of her enemy’s attacks away; of the initial onslaught, those that she allowed through were minor, knocking against her armor. Channeling her power in succession with the incoming strikes, she steadily supplanted magical energies to fortify her body through a Protect spell.

The final strike, a hard hit, tempered by the fullness of Protect, was dulled to a manageable pain, free of the aftereffect of shock that would have otherwise left her in temporary stillness. This would allow a quick return to form, and an immediate response.

In the aftermath of this defensive, Andrea moved her grounded leg up and in to align with the opposite leg, bringing herself to a low, squatting stance; she made a short, backwards shuffle before balancing herself. The motions that would follow, though absent the speed of the now faded Haste, remained swift to her natural ability. Shifting the weapons still slung to her person, as not to have them disturb her movement, she fell backwards. Rolling smoothly along the arch of her back in a reverse somersault, from which she sprung fully to her feet.

Proceeding almost seamlessly out of this, she raised armored fists up to face level. Visibly, she kept her focus upon the Bangaa’s upper body, as if contemplating a second strike upon either of the wounds she had previously dealt the warrior. In earnest, her periphery fell upon the space around the warrior; low and to the lizard’s right; the space behind him; these stood out and withstood in her mind.

But first, she compelled herself to engage from the front; diverting course was a means to open in the wake of the warrior’s own response.

Maintaining a guard with her left hand, she pulled back her right as she took two short, cautious steps forward. As her right arm reached the apex of a protracted prep, her muscles flexed as the employment of a Sabre enhancement channeled magical potential into raw physical strength. She quickened the pacing of her steps, but kept the stride even with the previous two as she neared towards the Bangaa’s striking range. Reaching this, the culmination of her approach, she cocked her arm back just slightly further back.

Her hand tensed, initiating the mechanisms of Babenfaust, an effect which would surely be felt when her fist met with skin, bone and muscle...