Duel Galactic Kaggath Round 1: Arris Windrun vs Vagabond

[Mauve]

x

The arena floor rumbled and shook, the entire surface sliding open like a missile silo to reveal… an enormous Wroshyr tree rising up from the lower levels. It towered so high that its upper branches crested the arena and stood nearly eye level with the skybox. It sat upon a grassy, fern littered field. Amid the ferns, shapes prowled. Dangerous predators. Vornskrs. Force hunting beasts.

The boughs of the Wroshyr tree criss-crossed, forming limbs as wide as Coruscanti skywalks that the combatants could duel upon.

Droids hovered in the air around the tree, some with cameras, but many projecting interlinking rayshields so that the duelists could not interfere with the duels of the others. Of course… ray shields could always fail.

If any of the combatants fell to the ground far below, they risked being set upon by the vornskrs.

The announcers’ disembodied voice cut through as the combatants took their places on the boughs of the tree. “Honoring those who fell in the Battle of Kashyyyk between the One Sith and Republic, so many years ago, I give you the FIRST ROUND of the GALACTIC Kaggath!”

“Fighting for BESPIN GAS, it’s the daredevil blonde, the cruisin’ Talusian, it’s. ARRIS WINDRUN!”

“And her opponent, the Swagger from the Devil Moon, the Soldier of Fortune, the VAGAAAABOOOOND.”

“CHALLENGERS! BEGIN!”

Arris Windrun | Vagabond

 

[Arris Windrun]

"If you're not first, you're last!" Arris chanted the company slogan as she was introduced into the ring.

The cyborg took a ready stance. An experienced shockboxer and underground fighter, Arris had her fair share of dueling experience against unconventional opponents. She knew nothing about Vagabond aside from basic stats presented before the duels began.

She entered the ring with the following items: her standard cybernetics, one vibroknife, a whole lot of mystery in those packages strapped to various parts of her torso and jacket, and the cherry on top--a pair of new hands with built-in, overtuned shockmits.

Her legs were built for strength, and it was the first thing she took advantage of when she jumped several times her height and landed on a branch above, near-ish to a corner of the rayshield, but with a portion of the tree to her back. She stripped some bark with one hand, shattered it with the other, and sent the shrapnel at nearly 200kmh towards where she last saw her opponent.

Her medical droid reprogrammed the fighter's biomonitor before the fights began. It was set to react accordingly to a life-or-death fight, and keep her body going even if it meant risking permanent damage to her soft tissue in the long run.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

Garrick Valtren, known to the arena by his mercenary name Vagabond, basked in the attention and adoration of the audience. Billions, if not trillions of eyes watched him in the arena and over the broadcast. He knew they expected a sepctacle, and he intended on giving them something memorable.

He surveyed the arena while he idly thumbed at the lightsaber by his side, an elegant weapon with a sleek aurodium finish. The ground level was a dangerous place to fight, made unpredictable by the many predators prowling for prey. Several of them stalking toward him even now. Those would be a problem. His opponent seemed to reach a similar conclusion about the beasts, and she leapt up into the tree, landing on its branches. Her display defied human capabilities. She didn't seem particularly strong in the Force, nor had he sensed the Force when she'd made that leap.

A cyborg, then. Garrick smirked.

A moment later the hairs on his neck stood on end. His gaze flicked to the nearest vornskr. It had prowled close, but wasn't preparing to pounce just yet. No the danger came from—

Garrick seized the Vornskr with the Force. It roared, but with no way of defending itself against the telekinetic attack it could only thrash about futilely as Garrick pulled it close, lifting its body to interpose it between him and his foe. The vornskr caught the brunt of her attack, but some of the projectiles slipped past on either side of it.

Garrick growled as the spikes grazed his shoulders, leaving bloody trails on his freshly-pressed white dress shirt. A few more of the projectiles, larger chunks of the bark, pierced through the vornskr intact. They didn't have the lethal speed anymore, slowed by the vornskr's body, but still embedded themselves in the part's of Garrick's body unprotected by the armourweave undershirt. Small pools of red formed along his shoulders and arms, staining a two-thousand credit dress shirt.

"You queen," he screamed.

With a thought, Garrick dropped the Vornskr. Its body dropped to the floor, wheezing in its death throes. That primitive fear, the palpable pain as it slowly succumbed to death fed Garrick's spirit like kindling did a flame.

He unholstered his Ambassador in his off-hand, and detached the lightsaber from his belt, clicking its activation switch. The blade thrummed to life with a discordant roar, crackling with red energy. The metal pulsed with power, containing the violent spirit of the kyber crystal within. Garrick leapt onto a branch about equal in height to his foe's. From his position, he attempted to seize the branch on which Arris Windrun stood and break it at its most vulnerable point, to literally rip the ground out from under her. Forcing her to jump made her movements that little bit more predictable. He intended to fire the Ambassador at her, a short volley of two shots, once she moved.

---
Equipment:

• one (1) cool lightsaber
• one (1) cool Tenloss Ambassador
• one (1) very stylish overpriced dress shirt (ruined)
• one (1) armourweave undershirt
• one (1) armourweave pair of trousers
• one (1) instance of the Khurevil crystal as a heart (tl;dr greater durability against injury, i.e. a toughness buff)

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris watched as the bark struck their mark--wait. What?

"Whoa, a Jedi!" She exclaimed. It took her a moment to realize he had grabbed the poor creature with magic and held it aloft to bear the brunt of her attack. The cyborg wondered when she would face a Force user, and was not surprised to see that answer so soon.

She paused a little to see how much damage she had done. It only took a split second for her Athakam eyes to loop the visual data back into her coprocessors. A smirk quickly turned to frustration at the flesh wounds.

"You queen," he screamed.

A complete context reset. "Queen!?" She snorted.

Then, he dropped the beast, and in quick succession held blaster and blade. "Holy chi--"

The branch began to crack underneath her. Her biomonitor and nerve-assist package reacted faster than she could, and already the cyborg had leapt again to avoid falling. He was ready. Two shots. Distinct sound. Her eyes widened as the projectiles flew faster than her stimulants could reach her artificial heart. Even though her eyes knew what was coming, she wasn't fast enough to react entirely.

The first round grazed her cheek, the energy packed around it singed a few hairs. The second slammed into her shoulder, tearing through soft tissue and crunching against the subdermal armor beneath. Superficial, but a display of fearsome lethality.

She jumped again, grabbed onto a branch, and climbed up just out of sight. She imagined a gun that heavy was not easy to use, but she still had to be very careful if it hit her somewhere vital.

Her implanted comlink clicked on. "I'm watching your fight on the feed." A familiar voice, belonging to her Herglic friend, Seeva. Thief, slicer, retired bookmaker. All around a great guy. He was the one who installed the device. Encrypted communication used by intelligence operatives. They used it to fix fights.

"You came," she replied with a thought.

Her attention remained largely on the fight at hand and how her opponent would attack next. She kept moving, climbing higher.

Seeva replied. "Couldn't pass up a moment like this. Besides, I've got credits riding on this one. Thought we could tag-team like the old days. Let me see what I can do with those rayshield droids." Arris heard the excitement in his voice.

"Glad you're with me," she grinned.

Vagabond

 

[Mauve]

The camera and ray shield droids started to buzz around erratically.

“OH MY,” the announcer sounded gleeful.

A hacked camera droid began feeding its link directly to Arris Windrun .

Two rayshield droids dropped low and headed straight for Vagabond , projecting an interlinking rayshield between them.

“Those ray droids are headed right for Vagabond! SHOCKING!”

The rayshield was indeed very shocking. Perhaps even lethally so, if it made direct prolonged contact.

 

[Vagabond]

A rush of anticipation shot through Garrick as he saw the second bullet strike his enemy. Only for that anticipation to quickly melt into frustration. He'd hit, but the shot hadn't been lethal. She hadn't seemed particularly well-armoured from the brief sights he'd managed to catch, but these blasted cyborgs always had some trick up their sleeves.

Garrick let his frustration out with a snarl. His enemy moved so quickly through the branches that he couldn't line up proper shot. Body hits likely wouldn't have worked anyways, but a precision strike to a weak spot might have a chance. He had to slow her down somehow, or get in close to leverage his lightsaber advantage.

Garrick leapt towards a branch in the direction he'd seen Arris Windrun disappear in. He leapt again, setting down with the practice grace of a seasoned combatant, when he caught his name spoken by the announcer. And she wasn't lying, he managed to spot the pair of droids hurtling directly towards his position. A field of crackling energy spanned between them, likely loaded with enough energy to boil his brain straight out of his eye-sockets.

He grimaced, that hadn't been a pleasant sight to imagine.

Garrick reacted on instinct, lining up the Ambassador with one of the droids. He fired a shot—half his ammo now spent—aimed for the lower droid. His aim struck true, the droid was abruptly and violently ripped in the opposite direction, then exploded in a puff of smoke. The second one continued his approach, the half-broken ray shield arcing with electric energy now that it had no tether to bind it. A quick Force Push hurtled it in a direction away from Garrick, and into the tree. The droid crumpled against the bark, sputtering out, and dropped unceremoniously.

"Oh please, you think some droids could pose a threat to me?" Garrick laughed.

He leapt further up the tree, in pursuit of Arris.

"Show me what you can really do!"

 

[Arris Windrun]

The scoundrel had hoped her friend could have wrestled with more than the two droids, but the camera linked into her coprocessor made for a gambit and a half. It was a little annoying that the announcer gave her opponent a heads-up, and she heard the crackshot take out one of the two rogue droids with that swift, killer precision she needed to avoid.

Still, Arris grinned as Seeva optimized the camera droid's telemetry, fed it right into her feed, and let her mini-brain take over. She kept in her opponent's blind spot, feigned an upward leap, only to swing back around when her opponent took a moment to gloat at his victory over the distraction.

He was mid-jump when she suddenly appeared in his blind spot. An outstretched fist, wrapped in lethal levels of electrical output, flew at superhuman speed towards the mercenary's head. In her other hand, the vibroknife aimed in a sly jab at the wrist of his sword arm.

Were it not for the pain dampers and subdermal armor, that shoulder shot might've been disastrous. On top of that, the cyborg's artificial heart had pumped her body full of a stimulant cocktail, and her Neuro-Saav suite kicked into overdrive.

She felt great. This guy was fun.

She didn't slow down. She was faster.

Her eyes weren't afraid. They were insane.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

The branch under Garrick bent under the force with which he leapt toward higher ground. He'd lost track of his enemy through all that foliage, but he could still feel her presence. She had disappeared somewhere into that general direction, he just had to flush her—

Danger. He felt a rush of adrenaline, as though he'd been struck before any blow had actually landed. He sensed a phantom reality before it occurred.

He barely caught a glimpse of his enemy as she sped toward him from an entirely unexpected direction. She was ready to punch, fist crackling with energy, and he could swear there was the glint of metal in her other hand. Mid-air, Garrick had no way to properly maneuver into a dodge. He twisted himself to make his profile narrower and brought up his gun hand to block.

The Ambassador blocked her energized knuckles from finding his face, instead directing all that power into his hand and wrist. Electricity crackled through the gun and coursed right into his hand. The leather of his glove cooked instantly where he touched the gun, fusing with his skin. The bones in his wrist shattered in the attempt to offer resistance, and he failed to keep hold of the gun. It dislodged from his grip and flew off, out of reach.

His efforts deflected the punch enough for him to duck his head out of the way and avoid a lethal blow, but his left hand became effectively unusable.

Garrick bellowed a rage-fuelled scream at the pain that shot through him. A quick release of the emotion he felt to clear his mind, because the assault wasn't quite over.

The jab at his other hand unfolded almost simultaneously. The vibroknife sliced the air, but didn't connect with its target. Garrick had pulled the arm back in twisting himself mid-air, out of reach of a direct attack. Although the knife didn't find its mark, it still posed an unwelcome threat being that close to his vital organs.

Gravity kicked in, pulling them downward again. He could go for distance. Cyborgs tended to have the upper-hand in close-quarters, cybernetics working to disproportionately change the odds in their favour. But a lightsaber worked in much the same way. He was also dangerous up close.

Garrick reached out toward his opponent with his left arm, in spite of his broken hand. Rage and pain fuelled him as he worked through the pain. He made an attempt to twist it around her arm, in such a way as to keep her hand away, but keep them tangled close. With his sword-arm, he pulled back and flicked his wrist upward. A precision cut aimed at the arm she used to wield her knife.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris felt something strange when he screamed. It wasn't just noise in her ear--a sensation of rage fell down her throat like a cold drink on the hottest of days. She shook the feeling, but already it cost her the precise opportunity to dislodge his lightsaber with her knife, and quickly she found her arm dictated by his grip. So, so close, she felt the tip near vital tissue even though she could not see it. An odd sensation, but one she did not linger on.

The two of them spiraled downward in gravity's fall, each desperately trying to leverage an upper hand in the handful of seconds before they would inevitably hit something, if not the ground below.

Two moments intertwined.

The first--his very dangerous lightsaber beginning its motion. The second, a glimpse from the camera linked into her feed, and the sound of destruction as the top half of the colossal tree broke apart and fell with them. Instincts. Impulses. Co-processors. Experience. An orgy of events too impossible to comprehend, and yet the cyborg went into motion.

Her first instinct, 'save the hand,' was overridden by her nerve package, which insisted on 'acceptable cost' as the more likely outcome. Her legs were built for power, and so she wrapped them around his waist and began to crush with hydraulic force. Her arms were cybernetic from shoulder to fingertip, her joints allowed a certain degree of flexibility and dynamics that would otherwise have been impossible for an organic human.

Still, he was quick, his weapon deadly--the blade managed to slice her hand at the wrist before she could slip it free, and cut half her forearm off with it. This left her with a red-hot, pointy piece of metal for an arm below the elbow. Overdose upon overdose of stimulants worked in tandem with her Neuro-Saav package and nerve enhancement system. Her brain got in the way; they took care of that.

Now, fighting Vagabond, was a mockery of nature, a scientifically induced rage to match his own. To keep her fighting when other bodies would have failed. She shoved her red-hot, improvised arm blade up towards where his throat and chin met, with great speed.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

What should have been a quick slice that--quite literally--disarmed her, very quickly turned into a curse. The intended goal of taking away her knife, her close-quarters advantage, had backfired and bestowed her with something even more effective at this distance, despite having sliced away practically half of her arm.

That posed a serious problem to his chances at survival.

Her sword-arm shot up, targeting his jugular. He caught the glint of hot metal at the edge of his peripheral vision. The surprise that her willingness to turn her arm into a weapon triggered in him delayed his reaction to that metal. Even with a warning from beyond the physical, a distinct sensation of danger within the Force, he barely had any time to act.

Moving on instinct, he let go of his lightsaber. His blade was too long and unwieldy to bring to bear at this close a distance, and he didn't intend to make this a mutual death pact by plunging it into her heart at the same moment he got half his head torn off. As the blade retracted, hilt flying from his grasp, he moved to seize her sword-arm, or at the very least divert it.

He managed something in-between. His hand had moved from below, upwards, catching her sword-arm near the bottom. The white-hot blade missed its intended target, slicing through part of his jaw--bone and all--and up through his cheek and brow. The wounds were instantly cauterized, but the burning heat forced another scream from him.

Whether he'd managed to catch and seize her sword-arm was unclear. It had practically blinded him on that side, and through all that burning sensation flooding his mind, he couldn't make sense of sensory input from his hand, he simply tried his best to hold onto whatever he might have seized.

At that moment, they crashed through a branch. It caught him on the hip, flipping him sideways and untangling his other arm from hers. The sudden motion added a sense of disorientation to the searing pain. Another branch caught him in the legs, then near the chest and head.

Pain, frustration, fear, and grief all melded together, into an involuntary reaction. A release of power, manifesting in a scream of hateful anguish, one that rippled outwards with the supernatural power of the Force to cause devastation on the branches and tree, and would bear down on his foe all-the-same.

Above, still, the upper half of the tree came crashing down. It splintered, broke apart, but could nonetheless crush whatever found itself in the well of gravity between it and the ground.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

If only Arris hadn't been consumed by cybernetic rage, or else she might have been horrified by--or perhaps enjoyed?--the sight of his sliced face.

Instead, the coprocessor evaluated failure. She was compromised. He was a threat to her life. He needed to die. Simple, brutal logic, and a perverted misuse of hardware. Hardware ready to correct the mistake.

It wouldn't be--not yet, anyway, as the two smashed right into a branch on their way down. One untangled from the other, separated but not apart. As he took additional damage from the crash, so did she. A gash on the side of her head, a tear in the soft tissue along her neck that revealed subdermal armor, and a broken servo in her already mangled arm, limiting its elbow flexibility.

The upper half of the tree fell all around them in a storm of branches and leaf litter. The arena then quickly filled with smoke and ash as the bottom half was consumed by erratic flames. Something else ( Mercy ) drove all the vornskr in their area mad. The beasts howled and tore at everything: the ground, the combatants, each other. All of it played a grand symphony that drilled deep within her psyche. The sounds, the chaos, the color, the sensations of heat, and the smell of burning death. Add that in with the lethal amounts of adrenaline and stimulant cocktail, Arris wasn't prepared for what came next.

That bloody scream. It struck her, not just physically, but to the core of her very being. It invoked dark thoughts, bad memories. Flashes of life-threatening moments. Betrayal of a lover. Death of a friend. The fear she felt on the run. The fear she felt now.

It sent her flying. Flame engulfed her, and wooden shrapnel carved her. Most of her hair had been singed, her ponytail completely burnt off as she ducked to avoid as much of it as she could. She guarded her face with her hand and armblade, but plenty of the splinters broke through and cut her face and neck.

She stood amidst the chaos as nasty beasts began to close in around them. For a moment, she was present, but she did not have control. A vornskr charged at her, only to be tackled by another. The cyborg stood there like a statue. For some reason, she felt connected to everything at once. Was she high? Well, yes, but she's never felt anything quite like it. She could feel muddled impulses, a stranger's emotions, and most of all: that rage from the scream.

"Innncoming!" Seeva's voice broke through to her comms.

Just as Vagabond recentered himself on the arena floor, the hacked camera drone soared at his blinded flank and detonated its power cells within dangerous proximity.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

His scream rent apart the very air they fell through. Branches splintered, bark shattered. Even the flames that lapped at them from below yielded to his anger. He let go of all he felt. The pain, the misery, the frustration, anger, hatred. All of it poured into one outburst of power. Strength surged through him, drowning out the weakness of his wounds. In this moment, he felt invincible again.

The impact onto the arena floor sounded with a loud thud. Garrick bounced, once, then settled into the sand within a small cloud of dust. The world turned to a blur of orange and red, half of it still plunged in darkness from where the sword-arm had cut into his face. For a few instances, he wasn't aware of the arena, or of the death battle he was engaged in. His mind, too rattled to think straight, fed him scraps of impressions, whispered in impulsive needs.

He was hurt. He was in danger. He needed to move. He was here to kill. He wanted to take revenge. Something deserved his hate at this moment.

Hate.

He seized that emotion. Held onto it like a hot coal so that it could light a fire in his mind again, sweep away the blanket of fog over the entire world.

Steadily, the world around him became sharper. The scent of smoke struck him first. Overwhelming, dangerous. Next, the weight pressing down on him. He was lying flat against--he cautiously swept his fingers along the ground--sand, no, dirt. He got pinned down by--his neck pained as he shifted to get a better view. He was pinned down by a large chunk of wood. That was right, the tree had been splintered and broken, falling down on top of them.

Garrick groaned, placing his hands against the wood. He pushed against it. It budged, barely, but he was making progress.

Then something rammed the wood back down into him. The clicking rumble announced the culprit before his ugly visage poked out from behind the mass of wood. Vornskr. The creature lowered itself, bringing its snout so close to Garrick he could feel the damp exhale of its breaths. Its jaws parted, dagger-like canine teeth and a stench of rot and bile followed.

Garrick didn't hesitate. Lightning fast, he grabbed the Vornskr's face. The beast growled, and made an attempt to get away, but Garrick focused on it. He channeled his anger, allowed the Vornskr to be a catalyst for it. Everything it had would be his. Power, vitality, life. He let envy consume him, and, in turn, allowed it to consume everything the Vornskr had to offer. The beast became paralyzed as its very life essence was drained, transferred to mend the bones and tissue of Garrick's body.

The Vornskr collapsed atop the wood. Garrick breathed in, deep, as vitality returned to him. He pushed against the wood, tore it apart with the Force. It crumbled into pieces, scattered all around him. He stood, discarding the corpse of the Vornskr. Many of his wounds still remained, but he could fight again.

Out of nowhere, an explosion ripped into him from behind. The impact sent him tumbling to the floor, a last-moment Force barrier the only thing that had prevented his spine from being vaporized. He rolled for a few meters, through wood, fire, and ash.

When he stood up, the armourweave on his lower body had caught fire. He stood, burning, in the smoke and ashes at the base of the wroshyr tree's remains. Sulfur eyes sought their target. The cyborg. She stood not far away, seeming distracted.

Garrick doused the flames with a telekinetic wave down his body. His weapons were gone, but new ones could be forged in the crucible of battle. From behind a cloud of ash and smoke, he reached out toward the nearest beasts. He'd never much fancied himself a mentalist. Found powers that aimed to manipulate too subtle and ineffective, when grand displays of power could do so much more. But now, his aim wasn't subtle. He wanted to control, to impose his will upon these beasts, to spread a disease of hatred. Hatred targeting the source of all his pain and suffering.

He commanded the beasts to descend on his foe, however many remained. Every other instinct and desire would become secondary to that singular need to taste her blood.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

The explosion shook Arris from her trance, and the coprocessor kicked into gear yet again. The cyborg marched with purpose across ash and bark as her opponent made shrewd use of his connection to the Force. The vornskrs wrestled with the otherworldly influence, but still, their minds would not contend with an enraged Sith.

She stared down the beasts as they began to circle. One lunged and attacked her leg, only to find armored metal, and she kicked it back into a fellow beast, not without damaging her joint, however. Using the delay as they wrestled between rage and instinct, she moved into action. She unstrapped one of those mystery packages from her torso and tossed it in front of her. Working with one arm would've slowed down an organic, but thankfully, her cybernetics literally had a mind of their own.

Arris grabbed a burning piece of wood, smacked away another attacker, and lit the package on the ground--then kicked it. The package skipped across the ground, erupting into a cloud of smoke and vapor that bounced through the beasts and towards Vagabond. The Vornskrs had no choice but to inhale, especially with how fast their hearts were beating, how fast they breathed while tied to the Sith's rage.

Activation time? 10-15 seconds. Duration? 15 minutes--with a regular dose. This was a street's worth of supply. Very expensive, a waste if Arris had anything to say about it. No, these were meant to be her bribes, her supply, but now she weaponized them to extreme effect. A dumb girl's silly plot turned ruthless. Nerve damage kicked in, then shock, followed by seizures and cardiac arrest.

The cyborg marched again, albeit with a slight limp in one leg. She kept her breathing passages closed; her artificial vitals could take the punishment for a time. Then she felt something hard and heard a clank. She glanced down, saw that damned pistol, and her servos fired on their own.

She dropped the wood, kicked the weapon up into her hand, pointed, and clicked. A killer through the fog of glitterstim.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

Garrick infused all the hatred he felt into his connection with the Vornskr. They were beasts, too simple to comprehend complex thoughts and emotions, but they learned to hate. Their minds forced to obey, beyond their simplest predatory programming. Arris was not a meal to them, she was an enemy. Not a threat to territory, not a rival, but an enemy.

There was nothing in their minds that quite fit the concept of an enemy, but Garrick forged it from their primitive understanding of the world. Their minds were elevated to a way of tribal thinking through the sheer depth of hate that overwhelmed their minds in that moment. The Vornskr took to it. They had to, or their minds might collapse under the pressure Garrick exuded. The first lunged at Arris' leg. Another saw its chance when she tossed something onto the ground, but caught a face full of burning wood instead of a chunk of flesh.

Garrick snarled. He crushed any semblance of hesitation in the Vornskr. They would attack, without regard for their lives, and either tear her apart or bury her with their dead carcasses.

Except they didn't. One by one the connections winked out. The last impressions that reached him were of enlightened bliss. Enlightened bliss?

Garrick had barely noticed the package tumbling across the ground through the chaos of ash and fire raging around them. It had looked like another burning piece of tree bark at first, but the blue sparks dancing in an expanding cloud of something informed him of the error in his judgement. The burning package spun to a halt a few paces ahead of him. The air became thick with a strange aroma.

Garrick's concentration split between the Vornskr and fog ahead of him. He set up a telekinetic barrier, pushing outward from where he stood. Ash and smoke were swept away, and the crackling blue cloud remained at the edge of the sphere he created.

Sensations suddenly flooded his mind. He'd taken a breath of the smoke from Arris' backpack. Sheer excitement at the sight of battle clouded his thoughts. Bloodthirst and the dark, visceral pleasure of vicariously experiencing another being die. The tension twisting the gut at watching someone you were rooting for on the back foot with no way to help them. All sensations were accompanied by a chorus of thoughts and voices. Distracting, fighting to be at the forefront of his attention.

CRACK. The gunshot broke through the noise. Garrick felt the heat before the pain reached him. He'd been struck. The bullet had ripped through his lower right abdomen, armourweave doing little to stop it.

Garrick slumped to one knee. His connection to the Vornskr dropped. He fought through the pain, the discordant chorus, to maintain the telekinetic barrier. He could just barely make out his enemy's form, wielding a bulky sidearm.

He breathed in quick, sharp bursts. He pressed on the wound with one hand to stem some of the bleeding. He was tougher than the ordinary human, not merely because of his connection to the Force. The woud was devastating. He would die, in time. But he held on, for now.

He inhaled, deep. He could hold it for a dozen minutes when drawing on the Force. With the extent of his wounds and his exhaustion, it was likely less than half of that. Then he dropped the barrier. The cloud of ash, smoke, and crackling blue rushed to fill the empty space. Even though he didn't inhale, some of the glitterstim still entered his system simply through exposure to it. But that was inconsequential.

That same moment, Garrick tapped into the Force with everything he had. He reached out to Arris, curling his fingers into a fist. His fist trembled, the leather of his gloves creaking under the pressure. Every fibre of violence left in him was channelled into a telekinetic attack. An attempt to crush the cyborg, concentrated on the cage of bone and muscles around her heart.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

The cyborg felt her body stiffen. Then, her biomonitor screamed in a myriad of warnings. The hydraulics and other mechanics that made up her cybernetics could withstand a lot of pressure, but this was sudden, unexpected, undetected, save for the results. The coprocessor had no tool to measure the Force, but they could measure the risk of serious harm that was about to happen. The number climbed. Fast.

Arris, on the other hand, screamed layers deep behind the glass of her artificial eyes. She was aware but unable to act. Her artificial heart thankfully had far more endurance than an organic one, and her bones and muscles were heavily reinforced. It bought time, but it would be no salvation. She felt fear, immense fear, a fear that transcended her biology, a fear that she emanated in the Force, though she had no control over it, and she had no idea it was happening.

Her thoughts screamed one phrase, over and over again. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill. Shoot to kill. Shoot to--

The co-processor heard it, it was beholden by it, and it could do something. It did not experience her fear. The bolts and reinforcements within her bones and muscles were beginning to crack, at risk of failing. The crushing force felt like her whole body might've folded inward, and so the cyberware took advantage of it.

The tension in her gun arm released, causing her elbow to turn upward in reaction, and the servos fired to stop the movement almost as suddenly as it began. The weapon pointed at her opponent and fired off two shots, the arm absorbing the severe recoil as if it did not exist at all.

Vagabond

 

[Vagabond]

Garrick's Tenloss Ambassador had held three shots at the time it had been knocked free from his hand. One had been fired by Arris moments earlier, piercing his abdomen. The irony of being struck by his own gun wouldn't have been lost on Garrick, though he'd long passed the point at which he would have cared.

He knelt in the ashen dirt, wounded so often his body had nearly gone numb, and with most of the blood that should have been in his guts now soaking the ground beneath him. The only thing still keeping him together was his will. The Sith Code, in the way he understood it, demanded a pure expression of will. That expression, when it clashed with another's, caused conflict. In those moments, the one possessing the stronger would come out on top, their expression of will superior and deserving to persist until it met a will stronger than it.

The second shot in the Ambassador's chamber thundered through the air. Garrick felt the bullet rip past his left temple, taking some hair with it. His expression darkened, and his fist curled even tighter. Through the Force, he imposed his will on the world, and in the current moment he willed Arris' body to implode in on itself. The sight of her struggle satisfied a deep predatory instinct within him. A darkness that called only for blood and murder.

The last shot of the Tenloss Ambassador, a weapon Garrick favoured for the expression of unadulterated power it represented, cracked through the air. Garrick felt the Force scream within him a moment before it happened. There, within the chorus of voices seeking to overwhelm his will, his sense of self-preservation struggled to be heard above everything else. It knew something that Garrick didn't, but its pleading did not reach him.

The shot found its mark. The bullet pierced the armourweave of Garrick's chest, slightly left of centre. It shattered what lay beneath. Not tissue and muscle, but a crystal. It splintered and burst into a hundred pieces within his chest, shattering outward where the bullet exploded from his back. The shards glittered in the fire, reflecting the blue sparks of glitterstim in a brilliant display of morbid beauty.

Garrick felt, in that moment, fear. A mixture of glitterstim and the final moments of his presence on this world provided him with extraordinary clarity. Fear. But not his own. The telepathic properties of glitterstim gave him a glimpse into the true mind of his murderer. Deep beneath all those layers, she was afraid. Truly afraid.

Her will had bested his. Her desire to survive, to cling to life, had been stronger. As his strength slipped from his limbs, he could no longer maintain the Force crushing Arris' body. Sensation faded, and his arm fell limp against his side. He breathed a final breath. His sulfur eyes pierced the ashen cloud, fixing directly on Arris' own.

He resented her for this. Resented her for the strength she held. Resented her with a fury that would put to shame even the violence of a dying star.

Garrick's body collapsed forward, his face buried in the ash and dirt of the arena. He lay there, motionless.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris struggled to stay afoot the moment his grip relinquished. It was like the gravity of Ruusan itself had changed. She didn't even notice that she was still clicking, even as her arm slowly descended and the barrel pointed straight towards the ashen soil.

The Talusian shook as she walked, the battle around her reduced to a blur in her periphery, the sounds were dull, even the violence of the vornskr meant nothing. One snatched the weapon right out of her hand, and she didn't flinch as it bit and scratched at the gun like a morsel. Her body began to rapidly flush cortisol, and she allowed herself a breath of glitterstim to calm down. She came back to reality--was back in control, and yet...

Her head turned, tilted down at the motionless foe. She wanted to laugh. Not because she felt good. Not because she won. Not because she lived. It was irony and timing. "If you're not first..." A mutter and a dry chuckle. "What a stupid karkin' slogan." Anger without an anchor.

Broken but not out, Arris limped on. She would have to hope the time between rounds was enough to take a look at all her damage, because the next fight really might be her last.

Vagabond