03-04-2018, 12:52 PM
“Ahahaha! This is brilliant!” Lana Augustus yelled ecstatically, leaning over the rickety railing at a downright dangerous angle, to be afforded a better view of what was going on on the walkway one level beneath theirs. She was on the central of the three slender steel platforms bolted onto the wall, whilst the object of her attention was on the lower, having just burst up the steps from the ground floor, savaging any of Lana’s goons who dared get in its way.
The creature was a werewolf… an honest to goodness werewolf. Their gang had a reputation for lycanthropy which they’d earned way back when, after a bunch of brutal murders were grossly misinterpreted by the press. The Jarl had loved that so much that he started calling them ‘the Wolfpack’... but still, she hadn’t known until just now that they’d ever had a real werewolf amongst them.
She had immediately recognised Sarah Watt upon seeing her. The black woman with the mysterious aversion to shoes was a Prime and had been a member of Shotgun Steve’s crew prior to her capture and subsequent betrayal of the Northside Wolfpack… yet Lana had been as shocked as anyone else when the woman transformed. Steve certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about her being able to do that.
Knowing him, he’d probably been planning on using the werewolf as some sort of secret weapon for when he inevitably turned on their master. Not that that had worked out all that well for him, of course. Still, as funny as it was to muse over all of that asshole’s plans coming apart at the seams, no amount of entertainment changed the fact that Sarah had turned traitor, which just wasn’t the sort of thing that Lana could overlook.
As she watched, the massive wolf was charged by a pair of her fanatics, one wielding a chainsaw, whilst the other swung a jackhammer like some sort of battering ram. Like Lana herself, the core of her personal forces frequently made use of power tools as weapons, regardless of the inefficiency of it. It was her personal shtick, in no small part because her father owned this store and was generous enough to giver her pretty much whatever she asked for. Her devotees did it to impress her, she was sure... not that she was about to complain; the more hardware her guys n' gals purchased, the happier (and richer) it made her dad.
Sarah’s head darted past the chainsaw, her maw chomping down on the thug’s skull even as his weapon brushed up against the fur over her left shoulder, barely cutting through the strands which seemed to be strong as steel. Jaws tightening, the man gave a hellish shriek, before his head caved in and he went limp. The chainsaw fell, its blades blunted by her hair, leaving nothing more than a shallow laceration in its wake.
The jackhammer was even less effective. It was batted aside with her right forepaw, which then gutted its wielder, striking him with such force that he was sent flying back into the wall, at the foot of which he landed in a crumpled heap. Still, the others came on, rushing madly to their deaths. Lana laughed some more. Oh hells, how she loved her little maniacs. William’s lot may be more professional, Doreen’s bunch might be much more buff, and Steve’s… well, okay, no, Steve’s crew were pretty shit, actually. Hers were the best by far, though, even if not necessarily the most effective.
Sarah Watt was wonderful, though. The Claw couldn't keep the grin off her face as she watched the great, elegant predator tear through her ranks as if her goons were naught but scraps of paper. All told, the beast that the woman had become couldn't have been much less than twenty feet long and ten feet high. The humans just couldn't do a thing to harm her.
All her stormtrooper squad-mates were dead and gone by this point, and so every available gun was firing on her, for what little that seemed to be worth; the most they were apparently achieving with those was singeing her coat. This was going nowhere fast, and so Lana knew what she must do; it was time she put an end to this herself, whilst she still had minions left to boss around.
Hopping over the railing without a thought for her safety, the young woman swung herself down to the level below, dropping onto the walkway in a crouch before the maddened beast. Sarah hadn’t taken it all that well when her comrades and allies had been gunned down all around her. To say that she had lost all self-control would have been somewhat akin to calling a tsunami 'a little damp'. Strings of blood and drool hanging from her mouth, bulging eyes darting from target to target and every muscle tensed to burst forwards and tear apart any who failed to flee before her, the massive creature was a killing machine made flesh. At the sight of their leader and her absurdity of a weapon – the 'Buzzflail'; a device consisting of a long hilt, nine lengths of chain sprouting from its end, and a buzzsaw welded to the end of each of those – even the most foolhardy of her gangsters took a good few steps back.
Pulling on a cord at the opposite end of the hilt from the point at which the chains connected, Lana brought her mad contraption roaring to life. Immediately, the buzzsaws on the ends began skittering madly around the walkway, their wheel-like blades dragging them around as they spun.
“Come on then!” Lana taunted, throwing her arms wide and yelling to be heard over the racket of her preposterous contraption, “Come at me, bitch!”
Dressed in a white vest, grey skinny jeans and a pair of black trainers, the Claw wasn’t protected in the slightest from the claws and fangs of the beast. Unsurprisingly, Sarah took the bait. As she charged, the gangster laughed and swung her right arm with all the strength she could muster. All nine buzzsaws were yanked off the steel flooring and sent flying forwards. One of them, though, which had whizzed around behind her whilst on the platform, jerked up not quite as high as the others, and so rather than shooting past harmlessly overhead, it struck Lana in the back.
Her laughter transforming into a shriek of pain as the razor-edged disk tore into her flesh just to the right of her spine, only a little way beneath her shoulder blade, the young woman nevertheless maintained her composure, even as the momentum of her arm and the chain fixed to the saw dragged it forwards still, tearing a deep and ragged gash all the way up her back and across her shoulder.
As badly as she had been affected, Lana had only been struck by a single saw. The remaining eight had landed more or less right on target. The enormous wolf became tangled and tripped, the remaining blades digging into her body, albeit with slightly less efficacy, given the great resilience of her hair and her vast bulk. The wolf's momentum carried her forwards in spite of her having lost her footing. Sarah slammed into her, and Lana was borne down beneath the beast. She screamed again as her fresh wound struck the walkway, the torn flesh like a line of fire up her back. Her foe sought to rip her apart, jaws snapping at her and massive fangs aiming to bury themselves in her body, as the werewolf snarled loudly and spattered its victim with a revolting mix of blood and saliva from its mouth. Ugh, its breath stank so bad, though.
Repulsed and in pain as she was, the dark-skinned woman grinned nonetheless. She grabbed each of Sarah’s jaws with one hand and focused all her strength on keeping the huge creature at bay, dropping the hilt of her mechanised flail. For a short time, this worked, even if it was quickly becoming apparent to the gangster that between Sarah's full weight pressing down upon her, pressing and scraping her injured flesh against the steel latticework upon which she lay, and the blood loss she was suffering from that cut as well, she couldn't hope to outlast her opponent.
That all changed – for the worse – when the werewolf raised her head. Not wanting to let go and risk those jaws darting back around her before she could get her hands in place to stop them a second time, Lana simply clung on. She laughed, and had been just about to taunt her foe, making some witty remark or other about how Sarah would never manage to toss her off, no matter how much she shook, when the wolf dashed her against the ground.
Lana screamed, her back arching and lights bursting and flashing before her eyes as that line of agony stretching from her shoulder halfway down her back flared up once more, a searing pain burning like the heart of a star. She would have sworn that the wound must have somehow been cauterised with the heat, had she not still been able to feel the hot blood flowing from it and soaking her clothes.
Sarah brought up her head once again, before slamming the gangster against the walkway once more. Then… rinse, and repeat. Over and over again, until it seemed certain that this fight could only end one way. Fewer men and women were firing upon the wolf now; only those with a good enough vantage point to be sure that they couldn't possibly hit their leader by accident... and it wasn't like their shots had been doing a lot even when they had been going all out.
The chains of that ridiculous Buzzflail had fallen to the ground by now, along with their attached hardware… behind them, though, the buzzsaws had left shallow lacerations on the beast’s flanks. Those wouldn’t be nearly enough to take her down, of course, but when one of the power tools spun towards Lana’s head – its blade screeching horribly as it tore across the steel lattice that was the floor of this gangway – the gangster made a split second decision.
Removing her right hand from its place on the werewolf’s lower jaw, Lana grasped at the incoming armament, narrowly avoiding losing a couple digits as she reached for it, sweat-slicked fingers slipping across its smooth surface for a moment, before she had it in her grasp. And then, giggling hysterically, she swung her newly acquired weapon into Sarah’s mouth. Not the side of her jaw, no; actually within the wolf’s maw. The blade bit down into the soft flesh of the creature’s tongue, shredding the tender meat.
Lana laughed with joy at the pained squeal that came from her mighty adversary’s throat… for a moment, at least. And then those great jaws slammed shut, the fangs brutally rending the flesh of her forearm, and snapping the bone like a twig.
She shrieked, losing her grip on the buzzsaw and relinquishing her hold on Sarah’s upper jaw as she scrabbled and scratched madly at those great teeth in a futile effort at pulling them back and freeing her arm. As it happened, though, she need hardly have bothered. The werewolf swung her head around and opened her maw, sending the Claw tumbling backwards through the air until she crashed down onto the platform's steel surface, jarring her ruined arm and bashing her back.
Despite the abject agony she was enduring, after only a few moments on the ground, breathing heavily and shuddering, Lana pushed herself back up to her feet. Still somehow managing a shaky smile. Her vision was dark around the edges and she felt dizzy. The blood loss? The pain? Whatever the cause, she could barely stand up straight. She wasn’t sure when she had begun crying, but it was only now that she had been given this brief respite from being mauled to death that she had noticed the tears streaming down her cheeks. She laughed.
Her right arm hung useless and limp, the lower half of her forearm hanging on by little more than a few strips of meat, feeling as if she had just dunked it in a vat of Fluoroantimonic acid. Her left, though, Lana threw wide, much like she had done earlier, inviting the monster before her to attack once again.
“Come on if you think you're hard enough!” she roared, and after a moment, Sarah did just that. By this point, the sustained fire of the gunners had actually achieved something, with her hide being covered in spots of charred fur and skin, not to mention the numerous gashes she had received from the Buzzflail. None of these injuries seemed to hinder her in the slightest.
The wolf bore down upon her and the gangster grinned up at it, knowing by now that she was completely and utterly fucked, but not able to even consider backing off. The adrenaline pumped through her veins, as it always did in any decent fight, making her feel more alive than she ever could in calmer times. It was brilliant, amazing, spectacular. Even in spite of the waves of raw agony that wracked her body, the thrill, the high she felt at times like these more than made up for it.
Just as it seemed she was about to meet her end, though, a roar came from behind her, along with the sound of many pairs of feet pounding on the rickety walkway, and suddenly her people were all around her, their items of weaponised hardware swinging madly, more than one of them accidentally hitting an ally rather than the wolf.
For a moment, it seemed Sarah would hold fast against this latest tide of frenzied lunacy; her maw snapped shut on the closest man and she heaved him up into the air, shaking him wildly until he stopped screaming, before tossing the body aside, over the railing.
When she bent her head back down to try that again, though, one young lady jammed a drill into her right eyeball and cried out in triumph as the werewolf shrieked its agony. Stumbling to the side, trying desperately to get away from that horrific pain, Sarah bumped into the flimsy railing on her left, which promptly bent, buckled and broke beneath her weight. She fell, flailing madly to try and find some way of keeping herself from slipping off the platform. She failed in that, but did manage to rake her claws down the face and chest of the drill-woman, who had recklessly darted forwards after her, trying to keep her weapon embedded in the creature’s eye socket for as long as possible.
Sarah slammed into the solid stone surface of the Hardware Outlet’s floor with a sickening crack, whilst her attacker crumpled to the ground, clutching at her face and screaming in anguish. A few foolhardy fellows leapt down from the hole in the railings to confront the beast, but after seeing what became of them – one’s trajectory took him too close to the wolf, which unpurposely disemboweled him with a paw whilst scrambling to get back up; one landed on his feet and promptly collapsed as his leg broke beneath him; whilst the last somehow managed to hit the ground face first, breaking his neck with a snap – the rest of the fanatical psychopaths turned away from the gap and meekly took the stairs.
The creature was a werewolf… an honest to goodness werewolf. Their gang had a reputation for lycanthropy which they’d earned way back when, after a bunch of brutal murders were grossly misinterpreted by the press. The Jarl had loved that so much that he started calling them ‘the Wolfpack’... but still, she hadn’t known until just now that they’d ever had a real werewolf amongst them.
She had immediately recognised Sarah Watt upon seeing her. The black woman with the mysterious aversion to shoes was a Prime and had been a member of Shotgun Steve’s crew prior to her capture and subsequent betrayal of the Northside Wolfpack… yet Lana had been as shocked as anyone else when the woman transformed. Steve certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about her being able to do that.
Knowing him, he’d probably been planning on using the werewolf as some sort of secret weapon for when he inevitably turned on their master. Not that that had worked out all that well for him, of course. Still, as funny as it was to muse over all of that asshole’s plans coming apart at the seams, no amount of entertainment changed the fact that Sarah had turned traitor, which just wasn’t the sort of thing that Lana could overlook.
As she watched, the massive wolf was charged by a pair of her fanatics, one wielding a chainsaw, whilst the other swung a jackhammer like some sort of battering ram. Like Lana herself, the core of her personal forces frequently made use of power tools as weapons, regardless of the inefficiency of it. It was her personal shtick, in no small part because her father owned this store and was generous enough to giver her pretty much whatever she asked for. Her devotees did it to impress her, she was sure... not that she was about to complain; the more hardware her guys n' gals purchased, the happier (and richer) it made her dad.
Sarah’s head darted past the chainsaw, her maw chomping down on the thug’s skull even as his weapon brushed up against the fur over her left shoulder, barely cutting through the strands which seemed to be strong as steel. Jaws tightening, the man gave a hellish shriek, before his head caved in and he went limp. The chainsaw fell, its blades blunted by her hair, leaving nothing more than a shallow laceration in its wake.
The jackhammer was even less effective. It was batted aside with her right forepaw, which then gutted its wielder, striking him with such force that he was sent flying back into the wall, at the foot of which he landed in a crumpled heap. Still, the others came on, rushing madly to their deaths. Lana laughed some more. Oh hells, how she loved her little maniacs. William’s lot may be more professional, Doreen’s bunch might be much more buff, and Steve’s… well, okay, no, Steve’s crew were pretty shit, actually. Hers were the best by far, though, even if not necessarily the most effective.
Sarah Watt was wonderful, though. The Claw couldn't keep the grin off her face as she watched the great, elegant predator tear through her ranks as if her goons were naught but scraps of paper. All told, the beast that the woman had become couldn't have been much less than twenty feet long and ten feet high. The humans just couldn't do a thing to harm her.
All her stormtrooper squad-mates were dead and gone by this point, and so every available gun was firing on her, for what little that seemed to be worth; the most they were apparently achieving with those was singeing her coat. This was going nowhere fast, and so Lana knew what she must do; it was time she put an end to this herself, whilst she still had minions left to boss around.
Hopping over the railing without a thought for her safety, the young woman swung herself down to the level below, dropping onto the walkway in a crouch before the maddened beast. Sarah hadn’t taken it all that well when her comrades and allies had been gunned down all around her. To say that she had lost all self-control would have been somewhat akin to calling a tsunami 'a little damp'. Strings of blood and drool hanging from her mouth, bulging eyes darting from target to target and every muscle tensed to burst forwards and tear apart any who failed to flee before her, the massive creature was a killing machine made flesh. At the sight of their leader and her absurdity of a weapon – the 'Buzzflail'; a device consisting of a long hilt, nine lengths of chain sprouting from its end, and a buzzsaw welded to the end of each of those – even the most foolhardy of her gangsters took a good few steps back.
Pulling on a cord at the opposite end of the hilt from the point at which the chains connected, Lana brought her mad contraption roaring to life. Immediately, the buzzsaws on the ends began skittering madly around the walkway, their wheel-like blades dragging them around as they spun.
“Come on then!” Lana taunted, throwing her arms wide and yelling to be heard over the racket of her preposterous contraption, “Come at me, bitch!”
Dressed in a white vest, grey skinny jeans and a pair of black trainers, the Claw wasn’t protected in the slightest from the claws and fangs of the beast. Unsurprisingly, Sarah took the bait. As she charged, the gangster laughed and swung her right arm with all the strength she could muster. All nine buzzsaws were yanked off the steel flooring and sent flying forwards. One of them, though, which had whizzed around behind her whilst on the platform, jerked up not quite as high as the others, and so rather than shooting past harmlessly overhead, it struck Lana in the back.
Her laughter transforming into a shriek of pain as the razor-edged disk tore into her flesh just to the right of her spine, only a little way beneath her shoulder blade, the young woman nevertheless maintained her composure, even as the momentum of her arm and the chain fixed to the saw dragged it forwards still, tearing a deep and ragged gash all the way up her back and across her shoulder.
As badly as she had been affected, Lana had only been struck by a single saw. The remaining eight had landed more or less right on target. The enormous wolf became tangled and tripped, the remaining blades digging into her body, albeit with slightly less efficacy, given the great resilience of her hair and her vast bulk. The wolf's momentum carried her forwards in spite of her having lost her footing. Sarah slammed into her, and Lana was borne down beneath the beast. She screamed again as her fresh wound struck the walkway, the torn flesh like a line of fire up her back. Her foe sought to rip her apart, jaws snapping at her and massive fangs aiming to bury themselves in her body, as the werewolf snarled loudly and spattered its victim with a revolting mix of blood and saliva from its mouth. Ugh, its breath stank so bad, though.
Repulsed and in pain as she was, the dark-skinned woman grinned nonetheless. She grabbed each of Sarah’s jaws with one hand and focused all her strength on keeping the huge creature at bay, dropping the hilt of her mechanised flail. For a short time, this worked, even if it was quickly becoming apparent to the gangster that between Sarah's full weight pressing down upon her, pressing and scraping her injured flesh against the steel latticework upon which she lay, and the blood loss she was suffering from that cut as well, she couldn't hope to outlast her opponent.
That all changed – for the worse – when the werewolf raised her head. Not wanting to let go and risk those jaws darting back around her before she could get her hands in place to stop them a second time, Lana simply clung on. She laughed, and had been just about to taunt her foe, making some witty remark or other about how Sarah would never manage to toss her off, no matter how much she shook, when the wolf dashed her against the ground.
Lana screamed, her back arching and lights bursting and flashing before her eyes as that line of agony stretching from her shoulder halfway down her back flared up once more, a searing pain burning like the heart of a star. She would have sworn that the wound must have somehow been cauterised with the heat, had she not still been able to feel the hot blood flowing from it and soaking her clothes.
Sarah brought up her head once again, before slamming the gangster against the walkway once more. Then… rinse, and repeat. Over and over again, until it seemed certain that this fight could only end one way. Fewer men and women were firing upon the wolf now; only those with a good enough vantage point to be sure that they couldn't possibly hit their leader by accident... and it wasn't like their shots had been doing a lot even when they had been going all out.
The chains of that ridiculous Buzzflail had fallen to the ground by now, along with their attached hardware… behind them, though, the buzzsaws had left shallow lacerations on the beast’s flanks. Those wouldn’t be nearly enough to take her down, of course, but when one of the power tools spun towards Lana’s head – its blade screeching horribly as it tore across the steel lattice that was the floor of this gangway – the gangster made a split second decision.
Removing her right hand from its place on the werewolf’s lower jaw, Lana grasped at the incoming armament, narrowly avoiding losing a couple digits as she reached for it, sweat-slicked fingers slipping across its smooth surface for a moment, before she had it in her grasp. And then, giggling hysterically, she swung her newly acquired weapon into Sarah’s mouth. Not the side of her jaw, no; actually within the wolf’s maw. The blade bit down into the soft flesh of the creature’s tongue, shredding the tender meat.
Lana laughed with joy at the pained squeal that came from her mighty adversary’s throat… for a moment, at least. And then those great jaws slammed shut, the fangs brutally rending the flesh of her forearm, and snapping the bone like a twig.
She shrieked, losing her grip on the buzzsaw and relinquishing her hold on Sarah’s upper jaw as she scrabbled and scratched madly at those great teeth in a futile effort at pulling them back and freeing her arm. As it happened, though, she need hardly have bothered. The werewolf swung her head around and opened her maw, sending the Claw tumbling backwards through the air until she crashed down onto the platform's steel surface, jarring her ruined arm and bashing her back.
Despite the abject agony she was enduring, after only a few moments on the ground, breathing heavily and shuddering, Lana pushed herself back up to her feet. Still somehow managing a shaky smile. Her vision was dark around the edges and she felt dizzy. The blood loss? The pain? Whatever the cause, she could barely stand up straight. She wasn’t sure when she had begun crying, but it was only now that she had been given this brief respite from being mauled to death that she had noticed the tears streaming down her cheeks. She laughed.
Her right arm hung useless and limp, the lower half of her forearm hanging on by little more than a few strips of meat, feeling as if she had just dunked it in a vat of Fluoroantimonic acid. Her left, though, Lana threw wide, much like she had done earlier, inviting the monster before her to attack once again.
“Come on if you think you're hard enough!” she roared, and after a moment, Sarah did just that. By this point, the sustained fire of the gunners had actually achieved something, with her hide being covered in spots of charred fur and skin, not to mention the numerous gashes she had received from the Buzzflail. None of these injuries seemed to hinder her in the slightest.
The wolf bore down upon her and the gangster grinned up at it, knowing by now that she was completely and utterly fucked, but not able to even consider backing off. The adrenaline pumped through her veins, as it always did in any decent fight, making her feel more alive than she ever could in calmer times. It was brilliant, amazing, spectacular. Even in spite of the waves of raw agony that wracked her body, the thrill, the high she felt at times like these more than made up for it.
Just as it seemed she was about to meet her end, though, a roar came from behind her, along with the sound of many pairs of feet pounding on the rickety walkway, and suddenly her people were all around her, their items of weaponised hardware swinging madly, more than one of them accidentally hitting an ally rather than the wolf.
For a moment, it seemed Sarah would hold fast against this latest tide of frenzied lunacy; her maw snapped shut on the closest man and she heaved him up into the air, shaking him wildly until he stopped screaming, before tossing the body aside, over the railing.
When she bent her head back down to try that again, though, one young lady jammed a drill into her right eyeball and cried out in triumph as the werewolf shrieked its agony. Stumbling to the side, trying desperately to get away from that horrific pain, Sarah bumped into the flimsy railing on her left, which promptly bent, buckled and broke beneath her weight. She fell, flailing madly to try and find some way of keeping herself from slipping off the platform. She failed in that, but did manage to rake her claws down the face and chest of the drill-woman, who had recklessly darted forwards after her, trying to keep her weapon embedded in the creature’s eye socket for as long as possible.
Sarah slammed into the solid stone surface of the Hardware Outlet’s floor with a sickening crack, whilst her attacker crumpled to the ground, clutching at her face and screaming in anguish. A few foolhardy fellows leapt down from the hole in the railings to confront the beast, but after seeing what became of them – one’s trajectory took him too close to the wolf, which unpurposely disemboweled him with a paw whilst scrambling to get back up; one landed on his feet and promptly collapsed as his leg broke beneath him; whilst the last somehow managed to hit the ground face first, breaking his neck with a snap – the rest of the fanatical psychopaths turned away from the gap and meekly took the stairs.
![[Image: Hijiri_Name_Sig.png]](https://image.ibb.co/k1H7Hd/Hijiri_Name_Sig.png)