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Post by Event Admin on Aug 9, 2016 16:36:50 GMT
Contenders: Solomon Moon (RLR) vs. F.A.T.E.(RLR)Arena:Unaltered ArenaRules: Each participant has 10 posts each to prove their skills as hunters, less if one participant has no way to escape a certain loss. Stats, HP totals, and MP totals do not exist. Dust is provided. The arena environments are not affected by Semblance. There will be no Godmodding, Metagaming, or Powerplaying, every action made must be reasonably justified. Participants have 24 hours from the time of their opponent's last post to post or themselves or face possible disqualification. DQ can be avoided by alerting either site's staff about a valid reason for one's absence. Final posts (the 10th post for each contender) must be an exit post that includes the bell that ends the match. The match MUST begin by tomorrow, August 10th 2016. For every day the match doesn't start thereafter, both participants will lose one post each.Battle Start!
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Post by Solomon Moon on Aug 10, 2016 2:45:07 GMT
Solomon stood placidly off to one side of the concrete ring that denoted the exact center of the stadium's arena. Though by definition he was facing across the division of the ring, he was not actually looking at anything in particular. His single golden eye, the absent neighbor of which now a vacant socket obscured by a pad of leather on the right side of his face, was unfocused and half lidded in the somewhat glazed expression that some men wore moments before crawling from the trench and marching across no man's land to the chaotic tempo of falling mortars. What thoughts, if any, he may have had at that moment were no more betrayed by the steely indifference of his facade than the true scope of the unsightly void that was the ruin of his right orbital socket was betrayed by the patch strapped over it.
One might intuit, with no great difficulty, the degree of the shame which racked him to be there in that moment, fighting for the dubious (dis)honor of third place in the tournament, when by all rights and expectation he should have been battling for the highest place on the podium, but just as the shadow left behind by some unfortunate soldier, burned upon the landscape, in the wake of an especially volatile and disastrous explosion could only suggest at the suffering that had been inflicted at the pivotal instant, one could only scratch the barest plaque of the surface of how much it galled Solomon Moon to be where he was, reduced to fighting over the scraps.
As far as he was concerned, he had already lost. Who was crowned the least of the runner-ups was a farce, a patronizing insult to an already crippling injury, and a type of torment in and of itself that was both excruciating and humiliating.
The fact was not aided by how he could not, despite having reviewed the tapes innumerable times to the point of obsession, conceive of how he had been defeated. He had thought at the time, and continued to do so, that he had been so clever, and had contrived the ideal circumstances under which he would prevail, and could not think of how or what he might have done differently, or how his strategy had failed in the first place. Worst of all was, above everything else, how his foe had insulted him, and then sealed the admonishments with defeating him, cementing, at least to Sol's profoundly diseased understanding of the world, her argument as correct. Being called down, and then defeated, by a worthless commoner who only won by virtue of abilities that baffled belief even in comparison to the superhuman feats of most hunters, was so mindbogglingly humiliating that it was a wonder that Sol had not collapsed under the weight of his own shame and opened his own veins to escape it. The fact that he had striven his entire life for the practical skills that would set him above the level of the average man, the fact that he had sacrificed so much, an eye, an arm, a father, a childhood, and depending on one's theological beliefs, perhaps even his immortal spirit, and had never lost sight of that single, singular objective, was a shining testament to the kind of tenacity that gave to his stubborn refusal to not simply lay down and die no matter what manner of insult the maniacal sadistic universe cast at him, be it injury, suffering, the loathing of his fellow man, and even the humiliation of defeat, but it was also a chink in his armor through which Amara Reedman had managed to inflict a septic wound that would never fully mend. Because while Sol had dedicated his life to a simple, yet utterly astronomical goal of being so powerful that not even the wicked machinations of a cruel existence could ever harm him, Amara, a nobody from some backward village had judged and sentenced him through the use of power that she had never earned beyond attaining the ability to harness it, and held no apparent goals but a trophy and an opportunity to pass judgement upon a man she'd never met, and could have no possible appreciation for the kind of trials and torments Solomon had suffered in exchange for even the least of his hard earned capabilities, much less the basic difficulties of his station and what the so-called privileges of his life actually demanded of him.
It was unfair, unjust, that some inbred country bumpkin could topple him in such a spectacular fashion, and yet, ironically, by the logic of the only form of justice Sol had learned could be even remotely relied upon from an indifferent universe, that is, the strength to inflict and enforce one's own will and arguments by strength of arms, Amara was in the right in doing as she had, and by extension, had validated her dismal opinions of Sol through the only lens by which Sol himself would accept them as absolute. In declaring him to be, among other things, the ill-gotten bigoted spawn of a ill-gotten bigoted mass murdering mercenary who had in turn received just treatment by being murdered in cold blood by terrorists before the eyes of his own adolescent son, and then going on to defeat Sol, Amara had essentially enforced the narrative, despite objective errors and misconceptions, that she herself had proclaimed, and had in that sense outed Solomon as nothing but the son of a monster and as a monster himself. After all, history was written by the victor, and anyone who claimed otherwise could only enjoy the right to do so as long as they could afford the strength of arms to defend that belief.
The truth, as Sol considered it, of his strength, his heritage, his nobility, and the many grueling struggles that his life necessitated was rendered invalid, and irrelevant the moment he was not strong enough to protect it, and the pain of that was second to only one other that he had experienced in his short life.
That moment, the moment when Sol had been defeated, and each and every moment that succeeded it, was just another cosmic insult inflicted by the arbitrary hand of a malevolent alien intellect that some might call god, and Sol might simply call a bastard. The shame ran into his bones, like oil soaking into parched earth and leaving behind a greasy unwelcome stain that would never wash clean. Within him, in his gaze, one might glimpse the flickering light of the flame of contempt that blazed upon the mount of his being, an internal fire blazing as it drew upon the limitless well of bitterness, pain, and confusion that Sol had accepted as simply byproducts of existence.
It was all this, that his unfocused, half-lidded, lonesome gaze tried and failed to openly communicate.
Misery. He was miserable, to such an extent, and for such a time that stretched back to some of his earliest experiences, that he did not even actively realize that the way he felt was abnormal. Any potential he had to be anything else, anything but miserable, anything but what he was, whatever that might be, still unknown most of all to himself despite how Sol had struggled his whole life to define not just for himself but for everyone else what he was, and had as of his fight with Amara failed spectacularly once more in doing so, had been given away almost immediately upon his birth. Expectation was a sword that cut both ways, as with Sol he had spent his entire existence, short as it was, though it was sometimes easy to forget with those bold and cold features of his that he was, by the legal definition, still but a child, trying to live up to some expectations while defying others. For every person who saw his father as a hero, and considered the work that Sol's family did a vital service to the Honorable State, there was another who saw his house as built upon the graves of the innocents, and considered his business to be that of state sanctioned terrorism. In one case Sol was expected to embody an ideal that was lofty to the point of impossibility, and in the other...
This omnipresent, perpetual, inescapable, pressure was, much like the misery and confusion, to Sol, simply a law of his existence, and he thought little more deeply of it than one might question the need to breath. Again, he was only as aware of it as much as a storm might be aware of the winds that swirled and directed it. The fact that these forces were slowly eroding not just his moral compass, but indeed many of the once laudable attributes he had possessed, was suspected but largely unknown to him, and lost in the swirling obfuscation of a thousand daily torments, that would have broken the back of a man who had not spent every waking moment since his first understanding of the barest scope of his place in the world enduring them. A potential for relief from these things was such a remote concept, at least as much as the omnipresent misery itself, to Sol's mind that it was all but completely non-existent.
He felt now, as he had long ago after regaining consciousness from a wicked infection and finding an empty hole where his right eye should have been, and some time after as he had upon awaking in a field hospital with a wad of bandages where his right arm should have been and nothing but memories where his father should have been. He felt the same way looking upon the crowd that speckled the stands expectant of a flashy battle, as he felt innumerable times before, when he saw people politely divert their gaze from his eye-patch, when he saw people touching something or warming their fingers with a breath, when he saw others enjoying a connection with another person that served more than just convenience or pragmatism. He felt alone, isolated, solitary, and yet even that was such an unrecognized yet omnipresent fact that he did not even realize it as anything more than the occasional pang of ire or jealousy.
To the casual onlooker he might have looked sullen, sulky even, as would be understandable considering the ugly crusty burns that marred half of his face where he'd been singed by the lava following his plummeting head long into a crater at the base of an artificial volcano at the conclusion of his previous battle. He'd refused anything but the most necessary treatment for the injury, and bore it as a reminder of his failure, as another reminder, alongside his eye, arm, and... others, of the high price of failure. However his mood was much less uniform than his exterior might have suggested, but just as one might see how he treated faunus and call him a racist, and how one might witness his many failures and call him weak or flawed, perception was rarely as fittingly complicated as reality, while at the same time being all one could envision given a lack of other context or unstated information.
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Post by F.A.T.E on Aug 11, 2016 4:58:57 GMT
Fate stood opposite Sol, and while he stood gazing darkly at nothing in particular, she stood glowering harshly at Sol himself. Her shoulders were hunched forward, her feet were placed to be ready to fight or run at a moments notice, and her face was a picture of pure hatred. This man, no this monster has been killing her kind his whole life, and Fate knew his exploits well, if through the slightly tinted lens of the White Fang. Of course, she didn't particularly care that she wasn't in the finals, instead she was content to simply fight. Fate also was fine having lost her last match, and was happy that Aegle would be advancing into the finals. Beyond that, she got to show Sol that she wouldn't yield to him, that the faunus were strong, and would fight no matter what. Her claws shot out of her fingers, making a quiet scraping sound as they did so, and she spat at the ground before speaking, words filled with an incredible amount of rage. "Solomon Daton-Moon, I am so glad I am able to fight you." Fate snarled at him, lips curling around her teeth and her green eyes narrowing as she glared daggers through him. The look in her eyes was likely recognizable to him, although not because he'd seen it in other faunus who called him a bigot. It wasn't disdain, it wasn't loathing or simply strong dislike. It was raw hate, and not only that it was killing intent. It was quite clear that, while she fought her hardest in all her fights, she would be quite happy to meet this man outside the arena and fight him there.
"I have heard so much about you. What you do to my kind, how you persecute us, accuse us of being less then human, hunt us down and judge us simply because of what we are. You say the White Fang are brutal monsters who hunt humans just because they are humans, yet their justification is they fight for all of Faunus kind, that the humans are a threat to them. Fate laughed, but not in a humorous way. It was dark, and aggressive, and very clearly laughing at someone instead of with them. Her laugh rapidly died off, being replaced by her strong glower. The words she spoke were not in her standard soft and kind tone, instead they were harsh, loud, and very aggressive. "I wonder if you know that you claim the same thing. You hunt the faunus because you claim them a threat to humanity. You say your fight is justified because you fight for your race, and slaughter countless other, living beings because you think them a threat to you. You may have been named Solomon at birth, but you have earned a far more appropriate name." Fate dropped into a more aggressive stance, hands in front of her as her feet planted solidly on the ground. Overheat turned up, her skin glowing red as her claws began to shimmer white with heat. Then she spoke, a singular word filled with so much malice it may have been a blow itself.
"Butcher."
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Post by Solomon Moon on Aug 12, 2016 1:57:46 GMT
Isolation isn't merely a state of mind. Isolation is a place. Isolation is the space between people in a crowd, it is the wilderness between cities, the hollow in the heart, and the blight in the mind. Isolation is standing in the center of a floating fortress wherein the horizon is limited to the uppermost parapets of grandstands that are not more than a hundred yards between them, where, in the absence of what cannot be perceived, the entire world becomes, in effect, a single concrete platform upon which stands it's only two inhabitants. Isolation is a pair in each others company whose objectives are so similar to yet so different on the most basic fundamental level that no bridge of mortar nor that of compassion can span the gulf between them. Isolation is as wide as the void between stars, and as narrow as the moments of silence between thoughts in the mind.
Isolation is the moment immediately before the first blow, and immediately after the last.
As Fate spoke to Sol, her voice rising above the background hum of spectators, anchoring the one eyed man's attention to her by degrees with each syllable uttered in a tone that stunk like rancid meat with the familiar stench of antipathy, Sol felt the divide between them growing ever the more vast, yet even as distant as the speaker seemed to become, he knew that all he need do to know her was take a good long look in a mirror. It was not an accident that Sol held a healthy disdain for reflections, especially of himself.
It was by this token of thought, as well as a growing awareness of futility borne of the grim familiarity Sol felt for the words and condemnations, that his gaze slid towards the faunus like a cross-hair swinging into place upon the head of a marked target. His golden eye, glazed, as if viewed through a heat haze at a great distance, took note of hers, a verdant pair of green jewels, pupils currently drawn into slits by the sheer force of her contempt for him. Fierce, feral, like a cornered animal's those eyes were, and they commanded at least that much respect. How could anyone look into to eyes like that and not see something dangerous? Sol sometimes wondered if faunus felt that same way looking into the eyes of men, or if perhaps their impressions of men were closer to that of unfortunate beasts caught in a snare and looking upon the hunter.
That golden gaze of his, like liquid venom suspended in wet glass, had lost something since the start of this tournament. It looked tired, resigned, whereas before it had burned with such savage intensity that men had flinched away from the sight of it. It barely seemed to see Fate, much less show any indication of actual vitality. It was the gaze of a corpse that was only clinging to life out of familiarity and stubbornness. His slouching posture, like the toppled frame of a once massive barracks ravage by fire, seemed ill-suited to such a powerful physique, and was a poor imitation, mockery even, of the proud and straight way he had held himself in previous battles, as if a great weight had fallen upon him and bent his spine through great effort. His flesh seemed pallid, almost grey, like that of a corpse, when before it had been healthy and tanned, albeit riddled with scars, and it seemed to exude a suggestion of coldness. One might have slapped him with the full strength of their arm and found that flesh to already be numb. A dark bag had taken up residence beneath his eye, as if he hadn't slept more than a few fitful minutes back to back since his previous fight, and the effect was only enhanced by the crusty yellow-brown scab that dominated the right side of his face just below the scar that peaked out from beneath his eye-patch. He did not react to the words, as he would have before, likely before the second line could be uttered under usual circumstances, but it seemed just as likely that in addition to everything else, he was just as deaf as he was seemingly numb and blind.
It had to be some cosmic joke that all his opponents would be insufferable symbols of the civil activism which Sol resented on a level of basic principle. A human hating bigot, an inbred human social-justice warrior, and now a White Fang crusader. Perhaps Fate wasn't a terrorist or even officially affiliated with the group, but the familiar manner in which she casually referenced them, and the direct comparison she drew between MMC and the Fang, might as well have been her name on one of their registration rosters. Not that Sol cared.
He would have had to expend a great deal of effort to care much about anything. Everything after his loss was just procedure. And Fate might have declared with clear language that she herself was the head of the White Fang itself, and stirred Sol's expression no more than a breeze might stir a mountainside.
Before his resemblance to a massive formation of stone and earth had made him seem powerful, but now, he just seemed indifferent. He didn't care.
His voice cut her off somewhere between the first and second syllable of "Butcher", like a glaive of stone slamming down with the uncaring intolerance of a rock-slide. That word would have drawn a rise out of him, but by this point in the tournament wherein he had tolerated outright bigotry from one contestant, and unrestrained hatred from another, Fate's lash was striking flesh that was rendered numb beneath a thick hide of scar tissue.
"You say this... You say that... Yada-yada, *insufferable moral posturing*, ect. ect." Sol began, affecting a high pitch to his otherwise deep voice, which remained as cold and even as a frozen lake for the duration of his address, in blatant mockery and imitation of the insolent faunus, "You dim-witted moral crusaders all sound the same, you know that? You all say the same idiotic, ignorant rhetoric. I can practically recite it from memory at this point, and I regret to inform you that I've never said anything resembling your claims. I should know, because no one, not one single solitary person has ever asked me what I do, or why. You've heard so much about me eh? Not a single word of it originating from my mouth, I can guarantee it."
He looked down to his sword, which lay strapped at his hip, dutifully awaiting service, the layered red ceramic of the grip like dehydrated blood springing from the vessel of the sheath's firing mechanism, and seeming as if his left hand weighed a hundred pounds, he labored to lay his fingers upon it's pommel, and caress the vaguely sharpened peak of the weapon's stock. There was a sharp sucking click as he drew the sword out underhanded, followed by a low rasping whisper as all four feet of it's blackened steel face slid free and dangled down from where he gripped the pommel.
"Yoshi Yammahatta killed my father with this very sword, and then with his blood still fresh upon it, Yoshi liberated me of my right arm. After I used my remaining hand to pulverize his filthy mongrel visage into a pink mist, I took this sword, to remind me, should I survive my terrible injury, that one should never blame the sword instead of the arm that wields it." He explained, as he dropped the weapon from his grasp, allowing it to tinkle and rattle upon the cement as it tumbled across the ring between them, before placing his hand upon his right arm, just below the shoulder, fingers digging into one of the replaceable ceramic red plates that armored the artificial limb, "Before he died, my father once told me that a lord must rule with both hands. One to create, to support, to aid, and the other to destroy, undermine, and defeat. I guess I don't need to tell you which one Yoshi cut off."
The was a sharp snapping sound, like a crystal flute being crushed as the plate in Sol's finger broke, and came away in pieces in his hand, exposing the inner workings of the mechanical limb as shards of red ceramic fell from the one eyed man's fingers.
"For the sympathy of a single man I would give you peace. I have within me, the capacity for love that you cannot imagine," Sol said, his voice rising to a reverent tone, indicative that he was reciting something from memory, his eye returning to that sharp fiery intensity as he approached Fate and reached into the internal workings of his false arm and began dismantling the system by which it affixed to his stump, ", and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot have one, I will gladly indulge the other."
His right arm fell away with enough suddenness and weight as to make Sol stagger his next step, while the apparatus hit the cement with a sound that was all together wetter and more organic than the limb's mechanical nature might have suggested. Sol was close enough to touch Fate, and quite literally unarmed, save for the fingers of his left hand, cradling the terminated extent of his crippled right, and he shared with her a manic gaze of wild intensity, undercut by an aire of tragic exhaustion.
"So give your friends at the White Fang a message from me, to set the record straight." He sneered, as he drew up as close as he was able, eye locked onto Fate's, (truly he had no proof that she belonged to the White Fang, but the insinuation of such was always his preference when dealing with sympathizers) "'You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a clear conscience, destroy your own creation. Praise be, the eternal justice of man.'"
He spat on her shoes.
"I'm not going to give you the fight you crave, this contest is over. Fighting you is not worth the further insult to my reputation. So I challenge you to do your worst you filthy beast. Give me your best shot. Show me the love you have for every worthless mangy subhuman evolutionary error that I have personally sent screaming into the deepest pits of hell. You want to judge me? THEN JUDGE ME YOU INSOLENT MONGREL!" He bellowed, spittle flying from his lips like that from the frothing maw of a rabid beast, his jaw stretch back in a snarling rictus that gave the faunus a perfect clue of his last meal by the scent of his boiling breath washing across her face with the force of his demand, "Lay your judgement upon me if you have any interest in serving justice. Do you have the back bone for it!"
He opened his one and a quarter arms wide, exposing his chest, which bore no armor but a tailored sleeveless waistcoat.
"I am right here! I am everything you hate! I am after all a butcher, and I swear to you, that the moment I am done with you, I will walk into the nearest village and rape to death the first of your worthless animal brethren that I see. Then I will skin the corpse and decorate my parlor with it. So take your best shot, and strike me down, or allow the blood of every man woman and child that I gleefully slaughter as I pave a road to oblivion with their mangled corpses, to instead stain your grubby paws for your inaction. This tournament means nothing to me. You mean nothing to me. All that matters to me is scrubbing this world clean of your filth, and I swear to you that I will praise your name with an honest to God smile on my face, with every life I take, so that my victims can carry news of your cowardice to the ears of Satan himself, unless you stop me right this instant. SO what will it be? How brave are you really? Are you brave enough to deliver justice, as you see fit, as I have suffered insult and injury to do since I was barely old enough to hold a sword? Or are you just like all the rest? All talk, and not interested in victory, just fighting for the pleasure of it, and lying to yourself that your morals somehow justify the bloodshed when you lack the will to do what must be done to truly end it?"
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Post by F.A.T.E on Aug 12, 2016 15:06:48 GMT
Fate continued glowering at Sol as he advanced on her, not backing down an inch as he got right up next to her. He spat on her bare feet, the saliva sizzling and boiling into steam as it came into contact with her superheated skin. She scoffed at his words, her face showing unparalleled disdain as he roared at her. The moment he finished speaking, there was a single second of complete silence in the arena, the crowd silent around them. Then Fate struck in an instant, one claw gripping around Sol's throat and the other grabbing his remaining hand. Shoving him backwards she slammed him into the floor, pinning his legs underneath her knees as she kept her hand clutched around his neck. Her skin was blistering hot, and the strength she held him with, while attributed to simply aura or physical strength by most, Sol may well recognize. Considering he used it every day, the strength of a mechanism, metal squeezing tightly as she growled deeply at him. "Have you ever wondered, that the reason so many people judge you the same way, tell you the same things, is because they are correct?" She gripped his arm tighter, squeezing more and more without even noticing she was doing it as she lowered her face right up to his. She got so close to his eyes, that he may have been able to see the slightest hint of wires within her irises, a small blinking light in the corner of her corneas.
"I have wanted this moment since the start of the tournament Butcher. No, I have wanted it since I enrolled in Titan Academy. The moment where I can plunge my claws through your chest and tear out your heart!" She began squeezing on his throat, a sadistic smile on her face as she laughed at him. This was a part of Fate that nobody outside the White Fang had seen. The part of her that was willing to go to any means, do anything if it meant protecting her kind. This is what she was made for, to remove any hunter who would stand in the way of the better fate of the faunus. Her hand clenched even harder around Sol's throat, the claws at the ends of her fingertips attempting to dig into his skin as she did so. "Yet with all that desire, I never expected the notorious Butcher to be such a coward!" She spat the words in his face, hissing vehemently at him after saying them. "You say you are better, call us mongrels, say I am a coward. Yet who is the one who is so absorbed in their own defeat that they are too afraid to face the shame, and instead offer themselves up for slaughter?" Fate's feline ears pressed back against her head, rage burning within her eyes as she shouted at him. Her skin glowed brighter as Overheat turned up, the heat waves becoming extremely visible as they rolled off her.
"I thought you would be a worthy opponent, someone to test my skills against. Instead all I get is a sniveling child, who attacked someone and then blames them because they fought back! We are not slaves! We are not worthless creatures who are less then you! We will not stand by as you filthy humans try to exterminate us! You and your father had been attacking the White Fang long before they ambushed you. Yoshi Yammahatta was right to claim your arm, in fact he would have been right to claim far more." She growled again, continuing to squeeze to the point where a normal person would have no longer been able to breathe. His aura, luckily, would likely be able to keep him safe from that threat, at least for a time, as Fate just kept squeezing. It almost looked as if her intent was to squeeze his neck to the point his head popped off his shoulders, and truth be told she would not regret doing so. "Perhaps I should not kill you. Maybe I should let you live, to wallow in your shame and cowardice up until you can not stand the pain anymore. But if I did that, I would not get the opportunity to feel your blood on my hands, I would not be able to tear out your intestines and show them to you before relieving you of your heart. So tell me Butcher, are you planning to fight back? Or do you wish me to end your miserable life here and now." Fate pressed harder down on him, her grip on his throat and arm still tightening more and more. Plastered across her face was a devilish smile, with anger searing in her eyes and no amount of kindness in that curl of her lips.
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Post by Solomon Moon on Aug 13, 2016 2:12:18 GMT
Some distance away, in the nearest row of the grand stands, what might have been called ringside, or a corner in more traditional tournaments of martial arts, sat Sol's personal entourage, looking on in varying states of incredulity as their employer and leader made rabid declarations and frothed with wrath and frustration before a literal killing machine. Three men, seated in order from largest to least. Included among their number, was a massive white eyed giant who might have easily closed his hand around the head of a regular man and still had the last knuckle of each finger to spare, broad enough to take up two and a half seats and tall enough block line of sight of the two rows immediately behind his own, whose dead eyed gaze seemed to stretch far past the center of the ring and into unseen oblivion with blind indifference. He wore a full suit of armor, ballistic plates and steel that further broadened his hulking frame to equal that of a mid sized luxury sedan. Propped up in the seat half occupied by his bulk to his right was a large segmented great-sword that made the largest such blade wielded by an average human seem like a child's toy in comparison, at least ten feet long from point to pommel and seemingly perfectly proportional to it's owner. The the hollow eyed giant's left sat a lean man whose stretch out features would have made him seem taller if not forced by proximity to be compared to the incredible mass of his neighbor. The pair of bright orange triangles that were vulpine ears sprouting from his mop of dark black hair, one of which half concealed beneath a beret, patterned to match his uniform, would have been striking features if not for the eye-jarring nature of his attire. The digital camouflage pattern of his military fatigues, was arranged into blocks of grey and black and white that gave the alternating pattern a semblance of a jester's motley, complete with bells that dangled from the turned up toes of his otherwise conventional combat boots. Bandoleers and belts, sporting knives, torches and grenades of various sizes and style populated the front of his attire, adding blessed division to the startling and bewildering patterns of his camouflage. Finally, and least, at least as far as size went, of the three was a bespectacled man in a uniform of the style and colors of an Atlesian officer, who wore a severe expression that would have fit both a librarian and a drill sergeant, seated to the left of the motleyed grenadier. The intensity of the man's gaze seemed magnified by the lenses of his round smoked glass spectacles, and his fingers, gloved in immaculately tailored gloves of black leather, drummed an agitated beat on the back of a file folder and clipboard that rested in his lap. For weapons the man had a large caliber revolver of positively ludicrous proportion, complete with a scope, secured in a stiff and strangely shaped holster at his right hip, and a short spear leaning against the railing that separated the stands from the arena.
The motleyed faunus, known as Rhett Farrel, plucked a small flask from within the bundle of various implements slung across his body, and tried to ignore the subtle tremors of his fingers as he held the flask out above his lap and gazed sullenly at the display of his employer, one Solomon Moon. Rhett's employment, for reasons ranging from self defense, to work related stress, called for a steady supply of alcohol, which could, in a pinch, be used as a flammable accelerant and as a means of medicating frayed nerves. In the current situation he was deeply considering the latter, as he watched, and more importantly, listened to the crazed tirade of his lord commander, being that the content of the claims and threats directly related to his own species on a frankly dreadful level.
"What the hell does he think he's doing?" Rhett murmured, his voice fine, and holding an accent of education and cynicism that seemed to match his outfit, as he commanded subtly trembling digits to unscrew the cap of the aforementioned flask, "He's not serious is he... You know? All that about exterminating faunus? Because if so, I'm going to insist on a raise."
Kine, the albino giant to his right, gave a grunt that sounded very much as if it might be the extent of his vocabulary, given the gruesome scar that stretched from one side of his tree trunk throat to the other, that managed to convey curiosity in a similar vein via the pitch and tone of the sound, perhaps even agreement with the sentiments of the motley grenadier.
"What he's doing is tempting fate." Came the bespectacled man's reply, Colonel Warren Dallas, Sol's second in command, and unofficial chaperone and adviser, in a tone that matched his no nonsense expression and seemed to aggressively declare that any pun made was completely without intent, "He's taunting her. He's forfeited, and if she attacks him now, she'll be disqualified, and the insufferable little shit knows it. I don't know if he means what he is saying, but if it gets him killed, not only will the three of us be out of work, but I'm sure we can expect this entire incident to see us promptly on our way behind him."
"We should go help him then? If the fight's over, then we should protect him right?" Rhett continued, as he shifted his gaze and stared longingly into the liquid contents of his flask.
"Yes. Eventually we might, but if we leap into the arena right now, we might start off another riot, and do you want to explain to his Lordly Asshat why you decided to interfere before it was absolutely necessary?" Dallas replied in a characteristic manner that would inform even a casual listener of his long suffering familiarity with this sort of behavior from his ward.
"Oh... I see..." Rhett replied clipply, heart sinking audibly, as he activated his semblance and produced a copy of the flask in between each of his fingers. He felt as if he was going to need it.
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Unaware of the moral dilemmas of his entourage, the majority of Sol's breath was forcibly evicted from his lungs as a hand of malicious mechanical might enclosed around his throat as another grabbed his wrist and he was driven bodily to the ground with enough impact to make his ribs creak inside his thorax. His eye bulged as spittle was flung upwards against the face of his assailant, sizzling on contact, as the last dregs of the air in his lungs was trapped in his chest by the vicelike grip of the secret android. He had not activated his aura at any point during his prior tirade, and had taken near enough the full brunt of her assault, and it was only at the scent of his own flesh cooking upon the fingers of his enemy that he thought to do so, just in time to prevent her from completely crushing his windpipe. The insidious strength of the faunus' grasp caused him to absently wonder if he was the only one with a trick up his sleeve, so to speak, but the quickly encroaching darkness that crept into the corners of his vision silenced any debate in that direction with lethal insistence that he find some way to escape before the blackness could swallow the world and with it, his life as well.
Alarmed cries of the basic reptilian portion of his brain wailed desperately in the corners of his mind, before his higher thought processes ruthlessly silenced it with a crack of his will. Sol was not a stranger to the possibility of death, and had been closer than he was now on at least one occasion.
Fate's sneering visage dominated his vision, and the tunnel vision of his rapidly depleting oxygen supply caused his attention to center upon her whether he wanted it or not. Her words seemed to come from a great distance, flowing through the ringing in his ears and warbling against the pounding of blood as his heart desperately tried supply his brain with vital elements by beating faster and harder with every moment. His pale face began turning red, and soon would lapse into a deep violet hue, and finally blue and with it death as well, but he did not allow his gaze to wander from where it lay centered upon the green hue of his killer's murderous leer. He did not struggle, conserving the much needed energy to scrape together as many moments of consciousness as he could squeeze from what remained of the air in his burning lungs. His lips spread into a ghastly grimace of a smile that seemed too broad for his face and showed nearly all of his teeth, as his jaws parted slightly and exposed a purple tongue that was rapidly swelling in the way one might when it's host was choking out his last.
"Do You Know Why They Call Me," He croaked, his voice turned into a mangled mockery of itself by the grinding of the cartilage in his esophagus upon itself, his wild eyed gaze rapidly turning bloodshot as the pressure of his blood caused the tiny capillaries to burst, as similar blotches of bruising spread away from his cyanotic lips, as Fate drew close enough to smell the scent of what might be his dying breath, "One... Eyed... Dragon...?"
With that last word hanging in the air like an artillery flare, Sol's golden eye rolled back into his skull.
The crowd gasped, horrified absurdly by the possibility that this blood-sport that they had so greedily chosen to attend might actually result in the untimely end of one of the contestants, whilst Sol's fellow mercenaries cursed and vaulted over the railing that separated their seats from the arena.
With his final conscious thought, Sol called upon the last trump card his possessed, activating a part of his soul that was less a matter of decision and more that of instinct. The usual guards and mechanisms of self preservation snuffed out one by one like candles burning to the extent of their respective wicks, until only one remained, and with the loss of the others, that last sprite blazed larger and larger until it was a bonfire that ruled every extent of Solomon's quickly extinguishing mind. Had his eye not been bloodshot to the point of being nearly entirely red, and not rolled back into his head, then the pupil would have blazed with that last dying light, but in it's absence there was no warning for what came next than there was before a thunderbolt from the open sky.
A lance of concussive force traveling at many dozen times the speed of sound, speared upwards from Sol's parted lips. The unholy force of the burst turned the air between them into a cloud of invisible hammers that fell upwards with the weight of many thousands of times natural atmospheric pressure, generating air currents severe enough to tear limbs from their sockets and pulverize soft tissue into an unrecognizable smear on the landscape a hundred leagues away. Unleashed at point blank range as it was, at the speed of a high velocity explosive detonation, the use of Sol's semblance provided absolutely no opportunity for escape to an enemy who decided to place her face immediately ahead of his own for the purposes of gloating. The plating of an APC's ablative shielding would have crumpled like an aluminum soda can, whilst the tempered glass would have been pulverized into dust, and even an ursa major would have been thrown bodily off it's feet and cleared a significant distance before once more making land fall, if subjected to that sort of force. The results were not dissimilar to that of filling a cannon to brim full of gunpowder and then using one's head to plug the barrel as it was fired. It was a discharge that rivaled the high ordinance of a tank, and all unleashed with less than a gap of a few inches between source and target.
The detonation bloomed rapidly into a spherical zone of destruction that instantaneously, in a process that would have been impossible to witness without the aid of a high speed camera capturing at thousands of frames per second, tore up a crater in the arena that was twelve feet deep, the resultant shock-wave causing such incredibly friction as it multiplied air pressure to thousands of times it's usual tolerances as to surround the source in an orb of heat and force that was twenty four feet across, that heaved up chunks of cement as if they were cotton balls caught in a breeze.
What he had done was actually easier in a way than the usual manner that Sol employed the physical manifestation of his soul, being that under usual circumstances, he controlled the energy release with the help of his aura and directed it, thus costing himself a portion of his strength for the privilege of unleashing controlled explosive blasts in relative safety, but without that mitigation, the entirety of Solomon's entire store of aura was ignited like gunpowder and channeled into a single devastating blast. Sol's typical discharge was an indistinct shadow by comparison to this explosion that was not greater by order of mere multiple but by that of magnitude, being that it was equal to the strength of more than ten of his regular shots all happening at once, causing the release of force to be exponential in it's superiority.
Sol's own aura was exhausted almost immediately by the earth-shattering impact, absorbing enough of the discharge to make survival possible if unlikely with immediate medical attention on hand, at the cost of critical injury to his entire body, but anything else caught by the blow, such as unfortunate faunas imitating androids, would enjoy no such benefit and suffer the full extent of the wrath of Solomon Moon's semblance.
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Post by F.A.T.E on Aug 15, 2016 1:42:59 GMT
Fate's smile only grew as Sol's eyes rolled back, the start of a mad cackle emanating from her lips. She didn't get to respond to his question, barely even got to begin forming a response. It would likely have been something like, "because you hide behind brute strength and are blind to the suffering of others", but she never even got the chance to make it sound fluid. Because the instant after he roared she found herself on the receiving end of a concussive blow that felt like being hit by a few dozen trains. She would've crumpled if not for her aura, which she barely managed to use to blunt the force of the blast, but only slightly. She felt both her arms pop backwards out of their sockets, her aura straining to keep her neck and head in place, as she went flying upwards. The force sent her so far backwards she ended up slamming into the invisible barrier at the top of the arena. Fate stayed there for a moment, arms each bent at unnatural angles and slammed against what looked like air before beginning her decent. While she plummeted, she spun in the air, a fierce glare and angry frown upon her face, and impacted on both feet. Her knees bent with the impact as the metal floor dented beneath her. She remained there, seeming to just about drop with how heavily her knees were bent for a second before slowly rising and stepping out of her own crater. Her eyes glowered at Sol while her lips curled into a smirk as she slowly advanced on him. "We are stronger." She fully climbed out of the dent she had put in the arena, then with sheer force and determination swung her left arm forward. It popped back into place with a disturbing crack, but Fate didn't even flinch.
In fact, other then her dislocated arms, she didn't seem to have a scratch on her. Her aura was depleted, and her dislocated arm was still quite noticeable, but she didn't sweat, or grimace, or bruise or bleed. Instead she simply continued, seemingly unimpeded, in her slow advance. That wasn't to say it didn't affect her, her systems were straining there hardest to keep her up, and the lack of bruising or bleeding was actually because it had done so much damage, she didn't have the power to falsify them. "We are tougher." Reaching her left arm around her body she gripped her right one, pulling it back into place with the same crack resonating through the arena. Once more, she didn't react, only continuing her advance with that sick grin plastered upon her angular features. "We are smarter, and we are faster." Fate suddenly sprinted, closing the remaining distance between her and Sol in an instant. She planted her foot upon his throat, still superheated, and began pressing the entire weight of her metallic body down upon it. "Tell me butcher, why are we the lesser species? Why are the humans so much better than the faunus, when we can do so, much, more? You are a fool who refuses to admit he is weak, and nothing more. You are no savior, you are no protector of mankind, you are nothing more then a weak willed coward too scared of his own failure to pause and think."
She moved her other foot onto his remaining arm, tossing an amused glance towards the battered and discarded remnants of his mechanical one. "I know well the strength of a machine, yet you would so easily throw away what could be considered your greatest weapon. You are either an egotistical fool who believes his mind strong enough to overcome any challenge, or merely a coward so broken by his defeat he can't stand to fight another day. Perhaps both. Either way, killing you here will be a mercy." Fate stared down at Sol, her face which was before showing nothing but pure anger, now showed only disappointment. She had hoped for a fight, hoped to see this monster who had so casually slaughtered many of her friends and allies. It took her a few moments to realize she didn't use the proper phrasing on her statement, or rather that she did and admitted to being willing to kill Sol, here and now. She didn't care though, this monster deserved no less then a painful death at the hands of her claws. Or feet, as the case may be, either way he fell, and she was the one to fell him. The thought caused Fate to laugh, a short lived laugh but a laugh all the same, before pressing the majority of her weight back down upon his throat, a cold, unfeeling stare glaring into his singular eye.
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Post by Solomon Moon on Aug 16, 2016 4:29:26 GMT
Blessed oxygen flooded the starving nerves of Sol's brain as the forces of his semblance's full powered discharge tossed Fate skyward like so much debris, and the synapses flared back to life just in time to recognize the immediate suffering inflicted by the same forces upon his own body. The blast kicked him off of the cement at the same instant that concussive fury tore a crater out beneath him, as hammers of explosive fury pummeled every inch of him from crown to heel, not once, but twice, first when the initial burst took place and again when the rapidly evicted atmosphere flooded back in to fill the vacuum created by the previously noted event. It was worth noting that the initial burst was not what depleted his aura shield, but the sudden equalization of air pressure that followed. It was not a matter of luck that he had chosen his mouth as the source of ignition, because he knew from experience that delivering the shock from his hand would have caused the blow-back to first collapse and then burst his lungs. Emitting the blast from his mouth had protected his lungs from its wrath by maximizing the limited protection of his aura to create a buffer within his mouth of consistent pressure. However, the inevitable failure of his aura caused the second surge of force in the opposite direction of the first to shunt the buffer of tolerable atmosphere back into his mouth, and it was again, no accident that Sol had expended what little air had been in his lungs prior to discharge, by uttering a question that would be the sum of his future replies to the terrorist's taunts, because had there been anything but the small pocket of air in his mouth or any air at all but the absolute minimum in his lungs, when the wall of force collapsed inward, it would have popped his lungs like overfilled balloons.
Such as it was, he still suffered severe soft tissue damage to his entire body. His skin had immediately taken on a blotchy patchwork of purple spots, spreading away from his mouth where the concentration was so dense that it gave his lips and jar the same hue as scorched wood, when innumerable tiny capillaries that fed vital blood to his flesh had burst under the impact, spilling their contents into his rapidly swelling husk. A high pitched whine of such a volume equaled by nothing Sol had ever heard was not imagined, but rather the struggling of burst ear drums and disrupted nerves to convey the scope of the damage to his brain. Had it not been for how even the light let in through his eyelid had been rendered by a concussion or similar traumatic brain injury, too bright for him to stand, and had he been able to force his eye open, the white would have been painted an oozing red by the burst blood-vessels poring blood into the socket. He could taste and smell nothing but his own vital fluids, the coppery flavors of fresh blood mixed with the salting tang of mucous and the viscous addition of cerebral spinal fluid, all three of which currently also leaking from every orifice across his skull, eye sockets, nose, mouth, ears and even tear ducts. He could still move, but not with anything amounting to strength or expedience, and his mind was so baffled by the alarms of injury that rang from every square inch of his body that he could do nothing for a short while following his unceremonious impact in his own crater, but sob in frustration and agony. Only his lungs and heart, armored within his chest and rib-cage, had fared the impacts in a manner that could be called anything but poorly, but both had taken harm from the sharp rise in ambient blood pressure and were laboring to maintain essential vital functions.
Sol's left hand closed weakly around the empty scabbard on his hip, and feeling as if the hollow vessel of stylized lacquer, light weight titanium, and ceramic, was made of solid lead, he drew it towards his chest, laying the length of along his shattered body, point towards his feet and mouth resting on his sternum and angled towards his head. It was some vain attempt, a token effort on his part, to place something between himself and the foe that was closing in on his position, an outcome he'd known to be inevitable the moment he had felt the unholy mechanical strength of Fate's searing grasp.
And sure enough, at that very moment, sharing more than a handful of unsettling similarities with a certain time traveling cyborg [That was the titular character of a certain action movie series that Sol had never liked due to the manner in which the antagonist so closely mirrored current developments in conventional robotics, not to mention finding the idea of a machine being able to kill without the direct oversight of a human or faunus operator to e such a terrifying prospect that he could not tolerate the films for any length of time due to the utter horror with which they filled him. (Not fear mind you, because horror was a much different entity than simple fear. Fear was a reaction to a hostile environment, whereas horror was an existential dread borne of witnessing the abominable and unnatural. While there were a few things that Sol treated with justifiable caution, there was little if anything that he actually feared, even death, but by that same token, there was a great many things that horrified him.)], Fate had landed and recovered after a fashion from her injuries, and had resumed her inexorable mission to rid the world of one Solomon Moon.
That few moments stretched away into eternity for Sol, waiting for the enemy to reach his broken form and finish the job, and he could do nothing to prepare but cling to the empty sheath in his blood soaked fingers, and steel himself for the embrace of oblivion.
As is common in situations of certain mortal peril, Sol reflected on his life as if seemed to flash across the fading synapses of his swimming brain like a particularly cynical motion picture, and absently Sol silently remarked that he did not like the subject of this expose very much at all. Sol was, by nature, a practical and pragmatic creature, and not easily given to whimsical notions such as optimism or self reflection, and either lacked or utterly disdained anything resembling introspective thought. While very much capable of considering past experience for the purpose of adjusting future behavior to garner more desirable outcomes, he could not, or simply would not, perceive that any choices he could have made would have been made any differently, because the factors that had determined his decisions were just as set in stone as the decisions themselves, and such an expedition into speculation was something he viewed as a pointless endeavor. It was with this same clinical attitude that he considered his own life, such as it was.
In a rare moment, perhaps triggered by the threat of death, or by his head injury impeding some process that usually protected him from such useless and pitiable thoughts, Sol realized that he had always been a prisoner in his own life. He had never made a single decision of any significance throughout the entire course of his brief existence. From the day he had been born he had lived according to the wishes and expectations of others. Long before he had ever been conceived, his family had been a weapon wielded by the Atlesian military, and it was for that exact purpose for which Sol himself even existed in the first place. His every step had been preordained and committed under close supervision with the solitary and singular objective of producing an effective and compliant weapon. Absorbing concepts such as duty and responsibility that were enforced upon him since birth, Sol had learned the language of obedience long before ever speaking his first word. The very framework of his life had been constructed generations before and he was only the most recent example of it's product. How appropriate that he had unwittingly proclaimed himself to embody the virtues of a sword, which in this moment on the cusp of the abyss as he was, their status as virtues at all seemed to be dubious at best, without ever understanding exactly how terribly true it was. He had been subjected to slight shocks and abuses since first drawing breath, and had been tempered, shaped, and honed into what he was, not by mere accident but by clear and explicit intent. The fact that it was an environment of isolation and early acclimation to conflict and hostility that had tempered him instead of a forge, that the shaping had been enrollment in grueling martial training since he could be trusted to walk on his own instead of by a hammer and anvil, and that the honing had been through the slow erosion of his empathy and compassion by slow but certain exposure to the horrors of war first hand as apposed to a grind stone, did not change the fact that he had not grown into what he was, but had been fashioned deliberately, and that any defects he suffered were merely a matter of error in the forging.
Sol saw himself as a sword was placed in his hands by his father, and realized not only had he not had a choice but to accept it, and by extension the enemies of Atlas for which that sword had been fashioned to fight, much like himself actually, but he had lacked the awareness and understanding that would have allowed him to object in the first place. Sol saw himself sneaking onto an armed transport, compelled by a sense of duty and obligation that had always been as much laws to him as breath, and realized that he had been emulating his father, and grandfather, who had done the same in their days, also controlled by the very same shackles of responsibility. Sol saw himself fighting the White Fang, and while the choice of surrender might have occurred to a normal man, perhaps the possibility of peace, Sol had seen an enemy and had understood only that one of them must die. This might have seemed callous to an objective observer, but said observer would have been of the benefit of a world view not constrained by the conscious machinations of a militaristic society and the values thereof, that is to say, not have been subject to the frame of mind, meticulously and precisely constructed by factors far outside of Solomon's control, that governed the young man's world view. In light of this single and absolute truth of being born into the station which he was, one would have understood an utter inability to do anything but what his entire life had been preparing him to do. That being, destroying enemies of the Great State with absolute and unflinching prejudice. It did not matter that they were faunus, that they were terrorists, that they were men, women or children, all that mattered was that they were enemies of Atlas, that they were his enemies, and they had to be destroyed.
It occurred to him, that his frustration, a deeply set bitterness that had formed the backbone of his personality, was not as he had fallaciously believed, a symptom of the resentment he held for the White Fang and by extension all dissident factions that apposed Atlas. It was rather that he, on some level far below the surface of self introspection that he only ever briefly skimmed, was aware of the fact that he was performing a function in which he'd never been given a choice, to such a degree that even should he realize it, he would be powerless to break away from the path upon which he'd been walking his entire life. His resentment and his abrasive nature, what most though reactions to the loss of his father, and his arm, though these were both obvious factors, had began during his first near death experience, when on the verge of death as he was now, he had realized the actual insignificance of his own agency in his own life, and how he himself had grown so accustomed to the weight and pressures of obligations set upon him by family, society and state, that he had assisted in the erection of every bar, bolt, and cobblestone of the prison in which he was now trapped.
Nature versus nurture was philosophical conundrum that had plagued man since his inception, and if one were to use Solomon Moon as an example to settle it once and for all, one would find that the man might have been anything at all, but subject as he was to the exact conditions that had determined the course of his life, Solomon Moon, could never have been anything but what he was, called the One Eyed Dragon by some, and The Butcher by others.
To him, the entire train of thought, which lasted little more than a moment, and seeped away as steadily as the cerebral spinal fluid currently leaking from his ears, threw two current events, and his reactions to said events, into stark and unforgiving relief. It served to soundly punctuate and contextualize exactly why his prior defeat at Amara's hands had been as devastating to his moral as it was. Simply put, he knew on a subconscious level that his failure far surpassed a mundane mistake, and that his defeat actually served as an unwelcome reminder of a similar defeat that had taken two very precious things from him previously. He had not failed to win a fight, he had failed to fulfill a purpose for which was his entire reason for existing. It was a crushing realization, to know that all the suffering he had endured, and all the numerous indignities and slavish devotions he'd taken for granted his entire life, served no purpose. He might have found his enslavement more acceptable if it had meant that he was strong enough to protect himself, but loss of that single hope that had steeled him through the worst of his trials, especially in the light of how he could still not conceive of what or how he might have done to change the outcome, had snuffed out something vital and important in him. In a way he had never left that crater at the foot of an artificial mountain, in the same way that he had never left that distant battlefield where he had watched his father die. It was simply one shock too many, and it had broken him, and had pushed his suspension of disillusion beyond its point of tolerance.
He had not come to this fight, forfeited and invited death for any of the reasons he had first thought motivated him. Disqualifying his foe was a fine plan, but so egregiously out of his character that it beggared belief, and it did not account for his being utterly unprepared for when the whole farce reached it's inevitable conclusion, that being him in another unremarkable crater, awaiting his fate. Likewise, outing his foe as an enemy of the state, or perhaps making a statement to momentarily cast someone else as the villain for a change were handy enough as long as one squinted and didn't look directly at them.
The truth was, Sol realized, that courting death and entering it's embrace was the last and only kind of agency that would ever be available to him. Were he to return to his life with all of the knowledge of this unpleasant injury induced fever dream intact, he would still be as a train fastened to it's track, because the values that had molded his life were still present and as much a part of him as his arm or eye. The war with the White Fang would still be raging, and he and his house would still be tethered to Atlas, and to turn away from either would mean doom for his entire line. He was, and by the same merit his family and business, a cog in the vast machinery that was The Honorable Kingdom of Atlas, with a very specific purpose, and the state was not so inept that if his own objectives did not perfectly align with that ordained purpose as to allow his continued privilege of existence. What life existed for a cog if it could pry itself free from it's place? The answer, nothing, purposelessness, not merely inactivity but inability to work in separation. How could he manage that, when he lacked the strength to beat one farm girl.
More importantly, and immediately, how could he manage that, when he could not even achieve his only available avenue of rebellion? That being, suicide by way of cyborg. Even at the last and fatal moment, as he had all but accepted his fate, his instincts, carved into his mind by the chisel of Atlesian indoctrination, had commanded him to fight in whatever way he could, rendering him incapable of even that token act of defiance for his entrapped existence. He'd even failed to kill himself. Perhaps Fate was right, perhaps he was a coward, though it was more likely that he was simply a slave to an especially cunning master.
Not that it mattered, he would have his wish one way or another, and he knew that, as he felt a heel cut off his air once more, unable to hear the ranting of his murderer through the din of burst ear drums, unable to respond past the weight on his throat, he had no more tricks up his sleeve. He had played his hand, and even if he could remove the pressure from his neck, he knew that the spark of his consciousness would soon fade out for good. He would stop breathing, his heart would stop beating, and he would have a much deserved rest.
As his ability to reason faded, and along with it any ability to appreciate the profound realizations which would have been too late to do any good were he still perfectly healthy, Sol could only think that the he was happy to die, if not for how Fate's heel was spoiling the experience.
It was at this time, that a bullet, fired from the barrel of Colonel Warren Dallas's incredibly large handgun, had nearly completed its delivery to directly between the offending android's eyes. Unlike typical dust rounds, which lacked a solid casing in favor of plasmoid projectiles, Dallas' Zeus 28, utilized an archaic design that employed a mixture of red and white dust set into a shell capped with a 28mm projectile that gave the weapon it's name. The round was accelerated to super sonic velocities as it passed from the chamber down through four feet of barrel and out followed by a muzzle flare of such heat and size that itself would have been a lethal weapon up to three feet away without the presence of a projectile. As it was, the gun was capable, and in fact design for the purpose, of punching through the siding of a military vehicle and retaining enough velocity upon the hardened tungsten bullet to inflict critical damage upon the internal components. The weapon fired without any horizontal recoil, due to an under-slung barrel that aligned with the lower chamber of the revolver's cylinder, complete with a mechanism that triggered a second shot from the lower barrel in time to cancel the climbing recoil of the upper barrel. Of course, this did little to mitigate the incredible recoil of such a shot, as in exchange for preventing the weapon from being kicked upwards, it doubled the rear ward blow black, but this also meant that the aforementioned round currently en-route to a rendezvous with Fate's skull, or whatever passed for a skull in her case, was followed almost immediately by a second, placed slightly lower to take her in the chest. Dallas didn't consider the recoil to be a problem, even as it took his aura concentrated on his arm to prevent his bone snapping like twigs, because he very rarely had to fire the weapon more than once at any given target.
The android had been so focused on finishing the young lord that she had apparently completely missed the fact that three mercenaries had entered the arena to defend their commander. By the time she thought to finish her gloating with a sinister laugh, absorbed in maintaining eye contact with her victim, Dallas had lined up and fired twice at a completely unaware and thoroughly distracted foe, who lacked an aura for protection and was likely damaged past the point of being able to achieve the sort of inhuman, inmachine agility that would save her from two armor piercing rounds. She wouldn't even enjoy the warning of a gunshot, because at the speed the rounds traveled, they would arrive long, relatively speaking, before the sound of their discharge did.
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Post by F.A.T.E on Aug 16, 2016 6:06:02 GMT
Thunk!
Fate didn't even have time to register the pain, her mechanical mind kicking in to prevent her from feeling it. The bullet from Dallas's gun kicked into her head, sparks flying and metal visible in the sudden hole in her skull. The motion likely would've snapped her neck from her torso, had her chest not then been impacted by a bullet of the same force. Fate was blasted off Sol, sparks flying from two new holes in her body, both front and back, as she went sailing away from him. The sparking cat bounced once, twice, three times before stopping and remaining still. She stayed like that for a minute, nothing but sparks and the occasional oil spilling from the wounds suddenly present on her body. One might have believed she was well and truly dead, until she lifted her head. Her left eye was dim, the piercing green completely dulled into something more akin to black, with the iris so wide you could barely see the white. Both her feline ears were plastered backwards, occasionally twitching, and the hole between her eyes, slightly towards the left side, continued sparking. Within it wires and gears were visible, the motors whirring within her brain and then the rest of the arena behind it. The hole in her chest was the same story, though with the slightest bit of oil leaking out. Her skin and claws lost both their glow and heat, her systems barely even able to run at minimum capacity, let alone strong enough to produce excess heat.
Even still, Fate rose. She rose to a singular knee, her left arm completely limp next to her while her left leg was extended and seemingly locked in place. She stared at the man who shot her, and the man she had been about to kill, with an emotionless gaze. No glaring, no anger, no anything, simply looking. It seemed her safeguards kicked in, preventing her from feeling any negative emotion due to the sheer pain of the bullet wounds. She wondered why they didn't activate during her tirade against Sol, as her anger there had clouded her judgement and caused her to get wounded, specifically what the safeguards were there to prevent. Perhaps the White Fang had programmed it so they wouldn't activate when the anger was directed at specific people, their enemies, like Sol. Fate spoke in a tone completely different than the one she had employed before. She spoke without tone at all, her words bland and stale, devoid of any emotion at all. "Hm. Very well, I will accept my victory here. His life will not end this day, so long as he is cared for by your doctors. I myself have to now go see my mechanic." Fate began crawling along the floor, using one arm and one leg to move herself along the arena. The crowd was silent, not surprising considering that one of the contestants looked to be dead or dying, and the other had just been revealed to be cybernetic in nature. As she crawled she tossed one final sentence over her shoulder, just as monotone and unfeeling as her last words. "Fate never gives up a chase, know that I will return to claim his heart."
She continued crawling along the arena, once again pausing as she reached the edge of it. The truth was that she was having issue continuing to move, but she turned her head to look at the man who shot her, speaking as if that were her intention the whole time. "Unless, of course, you are content to murder me here. The Butcher has the capability to survive, so long as you take him to the infirmary now. Or you could spend the time figuring out where exactly to shoot to shut me down for good. You would end with me dead, as well as the boy. Beyond that, no matter what else I am, robot or faunus, I am a student of Titan Academy, a rising huntress. Striking me down would lose you not one, but two of the next generation's protectors. The choice is yours, human." Fate found herself able to drag herself along the floor again, and having said her piece, continued to the exit of the arena. She paused at the exit, waiting for someone to announce her victorious before leaving. It was clear she had won, after all. Sol was down, his aura had gone out before hers, in Fate's mind it was only sensible to give her the victory. Beyond that, if the true determining factor was who left the arena first at this point, Fate could afford to wait. Sol, from what she could tell however, could not afford even an extra second.
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Post by Solomon Moon on Aug 16, 2016 23:43:33 GMT
Dallas swallowed hard as the shock of his pistol's report rattled up his arm and twin sparking holes appeared almost instantly upon the head and chest of his target, the crushing impact plowing Fate from her feet and sending her scattered across the arena like a rag doll. He grimaced to squash the urge he suddenly had to sick up, as the reality of what he'd just done set in, and part of him hated Sol for his part in all this, blaming the insufferable boy forcing him to take the life of a young woman. She'd been trying to kill Sol, but if it had not been for the latter's taunts, then it might not have been that way.
He glanced around before finding Rhett's usually tanned face an ashen grey at the very same understanding that Dallas had just reached, a shocked expression further stretching an already lanky vulpine countenance.
"Get Master Solomon to a medic you idiot!" Dallas snapped, triggering Rhett to gawp for a moment longer as the albino giant that was Kine charged ahead to collect the battered remains of the young lord.
Dallas scoffed as he eased the hammer of his cannon, which had already been primed for a second shot, and continued past the crater that contain his ward, endeavoring to look at anything but the ruin of the young man within. With this objective in mind, he found his gaze settling upon the crumpled shape of the faunus girl, but as he drew nearer he began to doubt her legitimacy as either of those things.
Rhett was collecting Sol's scattered belongings, when the shape of the young lord's assailant stirred, just in time for Dallas, who had been moving in to confirm his kill, to be standing over her.
Dallas was startled enough to nearly leap out of his skin, whilst Rhett uttered an impressively pungent curse, which was actually more of a surprise to the bookish officer than discovering this was one of those rare cases where a single shot from Zeus didn't do the trick. Said curse was so pungent in fact that as Dallas cocked his revolver in anticipation, and favored the lanky faunus with a withering glare, the motley grenadier was forced to wonder who that readied round was meant for.
Dallas scoffed again, sensing the other man's thoughts and finding himself again to be endlessly irked by the jester's lack of professionalism, whilst Rhett in turn muttered something under his breath about the Durin Swamps of Mistral and how no one would ever find the body, before settling his agitated nerves by polishing off a second of his copied alcohol flasks.
Dallas calmly strode beside Fate as she struggled to make her slow, but spirited, escape, his hand stilled from stopping her as much as by curiosity at the sight of her mechanical nature, as well as by the small force of armed security that was responding to reports of the fight having got well out of hand, who were gathering at the very exit to which Fate sought to flee. Dallas was not as surprised as one might expect. Of course he'd been startled at first to find what he justifiably expected to be a dead body, instead leaking transmission fluid and muttering about mechanics, but the truth of her nature, once revealed, did not give him much longer than a moment of pause.
There was enough talk in the Atlesian intelligence agencies that spoke of research into developing military androids, for Dallas to recognize what he was looking at. In fact he was aware that a lack of the science, engineering and development of advanced AIs was not what was keeping the advancement towards automated soldiers back, as these disciplines were already decades ahead of what the public would believe, at least on the Mantelian side of the oceans. Rather what had kept the military scientist from constructing hordes of warrior robots, was the ethical question of allowing drones to persecute military actions without the direct control of a sapient operator. The Atlesian knight, an example of this principle that was already well known to the public was already the subject of much criticism, and the concept of turning such a golem upon anything but grimm bordered on heretical. There were rumors that this quandary was being addressed by the use of prototype androids who had already been seeded into the civilian population in order to study their behavior and intellectual development in secrecy. Dallas himself had never expected to see one, and now that he had, he very much wanted to avoid seeing any more.
Her voice chilled him, it was tinny and hollow, and lacked even the most basic imitations of emotion, especially when she stated in no uncertain terms her interest ton to return and finish the job she'd been foiled from.
When she turned to address him directly, Dallas saw her clearly for the first time, what would have been a perfectly believable and somewhat pretty visage, now twisted somewhere into the valley of the uncanny by the indifference of her dead eyed gaze and the three centimeter hole in her forehead through which he could very the arena floor behind her. Being only a step or two behind her, he was not able to hide the horror on his face, nor the suggestion that what he was witnessing would haunt him for a very long time.
She said her piece, questioning his motives, perhaps stalling. It was delivered in that dreadful mechanical tone, and the experience for Dallas was akin to suddenly finding a snake in his hamper with the intent of politely conversing, and if there was time, killing him slowly, should it not be a bother. The sensation of suggested existential and bodily peril caused him to be suddenly very aware of the weight of his Zeus 28 as it dangled from his right hand at his side, the barrel nearly reaching the ground, it's hammer still cocked and ready to fire.
He swallowed and nodded as his cool grey eyes found her blackened orbs and momentarily shone with an expression of pain and sympathy, and he raised the weapon, pointing it directly at her head.
"I am afraid you are quite mistaken Miss Fate, you have neither won, nor will you be leaving here, nor will you be returning to finish your foul work." He informed her, sounding genuinely to regret the news he must deliver, and affecting a tone which had always made those he spoke to remember wise mentors and their favorite teachers as they delivered a failing grade with heavy heart, "Sol forfeited, and if you were not disqualified for attacking him, you certainly have been for trying to kill him when it was clear that none of his aura remained. Furthermore, as we speak my associates are seeing to the health of my lord commander, and my decision for dealing with you will in no way determine the outcome of Master Moon's fate."
He supported the weapon with his other hand, steadying it as he verified his aim, and made certain to not venture into arm's reach.
"You have attempted to murder a fellow contestant, and you will not simply be permitted to leave. And finally, you will not be returning to kill Sol, because I will not allow you to." He continued, no trace of joy in his voice, his expression as steel strong as his grip on the handgun, "Please understand that I am not murdering you out of revenge. I am not murdering you at all in fact. You are not a person, you are an especially sophisticated machine, and any thoughts you might have of sapience are nothing but the work of an especially cunning programmer. One cannot murder what is not alive, even if it makes a jolly good show of it. What I do, I do because one way or another you are malfunctioning. Either you were created for the purpose for which you just failed or your programming has been tampered with by an external source. In either case, it is my duty, for the safety of all those present, to consider you compromised and take the appropriate measures."
"I'm sorry." He said as he pulled the trigger once, firing two more slugs at the androids head pan near enough point blank as made no appreciable difference, before resetting the revolvers hammer, taking aim and firing again, and then once more, concluding thus with all eight chambers of the revolver's cylinder spent.
Provided that his decision and actions had what one might expect to be the only logical outcome*, as the smoke cleared, and the echoing of the triple report faded away, Dallas turned away, the absolute sincerity of his words plain by the agony of his visage. Recognizing, though perhaps not understanding the elder man's distress, Rhett placed a comforting if quavering hand on Dallas' shoulder.
"Set some thermite and destroy the remains, we cannot risk this tech being availed to one of the other nation." Dallas instructed as he turned towards the stunned faces of the private security force, none of which seeming intent on stopping him.
There were no laws that made decommissioning a rogue homicidal machine akin to murder, and none of them believed that Dallas had committed a crime in what he had done. However they were not aware of the technical specifications of burgeoning AI the way the bookish officer was, and though in the legal sense Dallas had not committed murder, he knew that he'd just snuffed out a thinking and feeling being. The law as it was currently written, without provisions for advanced artificial and synthetic consciousnesses, might have judged him innocent, but his own conscience was heavy with what he'd done, and how he was sure that similar events had precipitated the friction with Faunus once upon a time, when the law then had not accounted for their agency and "humanity". He felt that this by the books reaction mirrored the conduct of his forefathers far too well.
He could not watch as Rhett arranged a thermite satchel on the remains, then activated his semblance and placed several other copies, one for each limb, and then stepped back before triggering the charge. Via heat and chain reaction, soon the each charge was blazing with blinding light, and generating enough heat to pass right through the top of a warship and down through the hull without coiling until long after it hit the water. Some of the structure might remain, but the delicate mechanisms that made up the finer functions of the automaton would be rendered utterly beyond salvage.
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