Duel Galactic Kaggath Semifinals: Mercy vs Arris

[Arris Windrun]

The cyborg's jaw shattered from the recoil of her own power, which was summoned from passion rather than training or experience.

She pulled away and pressed her back up against the wall like a cornered animal. Even without a lower jaw, her vocal emulator remained intact, and she managed an artificial growl.

Arris postured her blade, which appeared to have cooled off significantly after the outburst a moment earlier. She wasn't quick enough, and Mercy's ruined arm smashed into her already vulnerable stomach, causing the Talusian to throw up even more blood and coolant. It caused the toxic materials to penetrate deeper into her soft tissue and organs.

The power that emerged from the arm was unlike anything Arris had faced before. She was untrained in the Force, and thus had no means of distinguishing it, but it felt far more sinister than anything Allyson Locke or Vagabond threw at her. It sent a shiver down her spine, and flooded her mind with a new kind of fear--one born of an otherworldly influence.

Though that fight for control? It had become the most familiar thing since her fight with the Sith Shadow, and Arris even learned a name for such techniques, even if it wasn't exactly what Mercy was doing.

"Oh, mechu deru, well. You know how the Force is within all of us. Well, Mechu deru users like myself, and from what I can see, it seems you are like us as well. We sense the Force in technology. Most items give off electromagnetic waves or 'auras.'"

Today was not the day for Arris to linger in the sun; death's door or not, she would not accept the possibility of her own demise. No--it was her co-processor that dictated terms. A machine that had only recently awoken, but had every means to survive, and grew hateful of others' control.

The cyborg closed her eye and sat completely still like a deactivated droid.

Then, the wall behind her broke away as a Hunter-Killer droid grabbed Arris and pulled her away into a crowd of its mechanical kin. She was affecting them with the Force, a subconscious effort born of half-assed lessons and first-hand familiarity with the sensations of Mech Deru. A pair of droids pushed through the opening and attempted to engage Mercy in combat.

All the while, Arris sat motionless in the center, unable to control them perfectly. They frenzied, attacked each other, and her body was being riddled by stray shots that tore away at cybernetic and flesh alike. She could only summon this power in a motionless state. A power that extended to more than a dozen droids, and even attempted to seize the gunship above them and disable its engines. Sars Sarad

 

[Mercy]

Arris Windrun

She felt it... the way Arris' internal cybernetics were responding to her. The slow lean, the way it was beginning to speak her language, the very vibrations settling into the rhythm of her own heartbeat.

Then it was violently torn apart.

Mercy blinked and the wall tore open, yanking Arris away from her, causing Mercy to howl in fury and disappointment. She was about to jump straight into the hole to follow her prey, but instead two droids pushed in. Mercy snarled furiously, ducking behind a punch and ramming the bleeding ruined stump of her eldritch arm into a knee servo, then a robotic fist slammed into her face and broke her nose.

She stumbled back and screamed, her sense of control bleeding out with every ragged breath. The lunge was full of fury as she ripped its head off and without even thinking about, pulled it back and then threw it right towards the figure of Arris being carried away. The force behind the throw was breath-taking, it smashed through any droids in its path without a pause, ramming through them like a bowling ball on its way to score.

Only then did Mercy leap through the hole, trailing the path carved by the droid's head. The hunter-killers surrounded her like a metal avalanche. She was heedless of the battle currently waged there, her hardened stump, more bone than flesh at this point slammed into the ground.

The stump of her arm hissed out into the open space between the droids around Mercy. It breathed out corruption into the circuitry of every machine nearby. It was a long process to corrupt a sentient creature, but regular droids who weren't specifically protected against eldritch influence and weren't being controlled already stood no chance. There were a dozen droids, but some of them were still without a new master.

The ones that still had their original directive were quickly overridden by the corrosive influence of the arm. It had nothing elegant or efficient about it, not like Arris' application of Mechu-Deru. It didn't barter, it didn't try to convince existing protocols to align itself with Mercy. It was brute force, the same way Mercy had carved through the minds of the Vornskrs and forced them to obey her.

The droids under her control glitched out, limbs twitching mid-step, lights flickering, and suddenly had no strategy or caution anymore. They just threw themselves at their opponent and kept going even when torn apart or riddled by blaster holes. They were animated by something else now and their servos were forced to keep going long past their expiration date.

Come back to me. One of the droids cradling Arris suddenly hissed into her ear. You don't have to be alone anymore. The voice was modulated, glitching in and out. It weren't Mercy's words, it was the creature beyond... applying its influence. Mercy was disgusted by it, disgusted that it sounded so much like her. But she was too far gone to do more than spit her blood on the floor and step forward to break Arris apart. She would not shield her from harm, but perhaps by ripping her apart... she'd save her from that disembodied voice that sounded so much like herself.

Be with me... I can make you shine so bright.

 

[Arris Windrun]

The flying droid head smashed through the two that poured in, and ripped in half when it smashed through another, and the shrapnel shredded Arris's already damaged arm--the thing now looked more like a mess of wires than anything useful.

Yet, Arris's cyborg body remained still in the crowd of murderous droids, as her co-processor assaulted their control circuits. The power required to maintain the connection was...

Euphoric. And it was terrible.

The Dark Side rushed through her as it did in her fight with the Sith Shadow.

How have I forgotten? She considered the experience like a taste of water in a drought. The Talusian's thoughts were safe inside the shell and blissfully unaware of the battle. There was no sense of body--just the intoxication of power as she found herself close to the conduit that bound her spirit to the Force.

Come back to me.

The words echoed all around her.

A voice?

You don't have to be alone anymore.

Alone? But I'm not alone.

How could she be? Raw emotion erupted from the arena and tangled around them like growing bramble. Each was a voice of its own. Friends argued over presumptuous results of the semi-finals. A woman seduced another--hearts inflamed with happy fear and bubbled with desire. And greed. Hate. The excitement of bloodlust. All the violence and determination in the fights that came before.

The echoes of the arena spoke to her.

Be with me... I can make you shine so bright.

"You're lonely," the voice came out from the body in real-space.

It might've been pretty creepy, but with cybernetics, one didn't need a jaw or tongue to speak.

Arris still did not move, and her eye remained closed. However, one of the corrupted droids in her ear began to melt from the inside out as the cyborg shorted its power cell. Arris and the co-processor began to work in tandem, each feeding one another. For Arris, it was the rush; for the co-processor, it was survival.

She took one sluggish step forward, and three of the droids around her stopped even as others still tore each other apart. Then, with a second step, they turned face, and along with Arris, each entered a fighter's stance. If Mercy wanted to settle things up close, then that's how this would end.

 

[Mercy]

"You're lonely," the voice came out from the body in real-space.

Mercy felt the annoyance from the voice that sounded so much like her, but she grinned her bloody smile.

Attagirl.

Arris was squaring up, three droids next to her, clearly signing up to finish this once and for all. Mercy's arm was a stump. Her nose shattered, blood trickling past her lips. Her back was minced meat. Her ribs were broken, scraping along her insides with every breath. Every part of her body burned. Her nerves fired like pistons, slamming pain signals straight into her skull.

The arm's grip had slipped. Her influence undone. All that was left in her chest was pride. A raw, stinging flare of it, because Arris had resisted. Had stood where others crumbled. Drystan had been transformed by her mind, but Arris (and whatever was inside of Arris) was resisting. But that pride was dragged down hard as one of Arris Windrun 's droids slammed their fist in Mercy's chest. Something crunched. Another bone, maybe, broken.

She hissed and was about to rear up towards it and then the one on the other side punched her in the face. Blood splattered out of her mouth as her head turned violently.

It shook her out of the daze and back into the moment.

Her eyes lit up. She growled, leapt, ducked under a punch... and drove her fist straight for Arris's throat. No hesitation, no flourish. Just a killer's instinct to ram through her ruined maw to crush what was left of the neck beneath. And with the same motion, she reached to grab the cyborg's head and tear it clean off. Her body flared up with blue fire once more, force shielding her flanks while she zeroed in on Arris. She was leaving herself exposed to them but she knew the real threat.

Trying to kill the droids was a fool's errand, the cyborg could always summon more. Mercy had to take her out of action before she could do that.

 

[Arris Windrun]

The first droid struck Mercy , but the Sith pressed forward unabated. The droid tried to turn and stop her, but began to collapse under damage and malfunction. It reached with an outstretched hand, a finger's tip away from her shoulder, before collapsing.

A second interceded on the cyborg's behalf, but was quickly pushed aside with a body slam from the relentless redhead. It stumbled around with arms at its side and began to heat up as if it were about to blow.

The third moved in sync with Arris, who side-stepped the grab, but didn't avoid it completely. The Sith managed to hit the remains of her damaged arm and tear it from the blonde's shoulder, causing her to spin from the force of that attack.

Arris's remaining droid launched a fist-jab at Mercy's side, while the cyborg herself carried the momentum of the spin, and used it to launch into an aerial kick aimed at Mercy's other side. Together, they would attempt to destabilize their opponent.

 

[Mercy]

Arris Windrun

She was punched in the side by the droid and the only reason she didn't howl in pain was because her teeth were sunk deep in her tongue. Hard enough she could taste her own blood seeping into her mouth.

The droid had smashed its fist in her broken ribs. Then Arris pivoted around and her kick connected hard with her other side. Only the blue hue, the shielding powered by the Force and sheer rage, on her skin kept her from being thrown to the ground. Instead she was jerked from one side to the next... and then she squeezed her hand.

So distracted by the pain, she didn't immediately realize what was in it.

It was Arris' fethin' arm.

That brought her back to one of her first pit fights. She'd torn a cybernetic limb off some desperate, surging brawler and beat her half to death with it. Her body knew what to do, even if her mind was still reeling.

"My turn." She growled. Blood seeped down her mouth from her mangled tongue, staining her jaw, her neck, her shirt that was already oily and blackened blood. She swung the arm hard right as she said that, a wide arc to smash Arris into the remaining droid, to keep them both busy with each other rather than her.

Once more with feeling and without respite- this time swinging it overhead to bring it crashing down into Arris's skull and find out just how big that brain of hers really was.

And if she was still moving, Mercy would swing again. Hard enough to crack the prosthetic in half. Hard enough to break her face.

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris got her kick off and felt in the groove, despite the rampant beating she's received in this duel. The damage showed in how she stumbled, and with one missing eye and malfunctioning sensors, she was unable to avoid the wide arc of her own arm being swung back at her like a bludgeoning device.

The cyborg flew into the remaining droid, causing them to both fall over--the latter struggled to right itself as sparks began to fly, while the Talusian rolled away.

It was a lucky instinct, because Mercy had already stepped in and swung the detached arm down with a fury. Arris held her sword arm up in defense, but missed. Mercy's improvised weapon crashed into the cyborg's right shoulder, shattering the casing and exposing vulnerable mechanics underneath.

However, the cyborg was more determined than ever to keep fighting. In tandem with her co-processor, she could feel the power of the arena rush through her, and they selfishly held onto those feelings and used them to fuel her fight. She dipped the sword on her right arm into exposed droid oil on the ground--igniting it instantly.

Her opponent swung again, this time catching the red-hot blade brought up to defend in the last second. The broken arm shattered against the blade, but the force of Mercy's blunt strike caused the scoundrel to slide back and vomit more coolant and blood. Things weren't looking good, but when did they ever? It seemed to be a trend for the Dark Horse of this tournament--clutching victory from desperation.

Arris leapt out of her crouch to backflip some distance from her opponent. Her senses were muddled, despite the surge that kept her going, and it was difficult to ascertain Mercy's movements, let alone execute her own with any grace.

Yet, there was no pause. As soon as Arris landed, she summoned all her pain and fear in a rush towards Mercy, ready to impale the fiery blade into her chest. Arris's speed was uncanny, and her ferocity unwavering, as the blonde let out a bloodied, broken scream and poured all of herself into the all-or-nothing attack.

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.

In a reflection, Arris was beginning to understand it the way he did.